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How is 90377 Sedna's orbit really an orbit? How is this stable?
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It is counted as a stable orbit because it is gravitationally bound to the sun. It will repeat its motion around the sun indefinitely. Why would it not be stable? The only unstable orbit would be due to a) gravitational interactions which deposit large amounts of momentum into the body and cause it to eject from the system (for example due to a large solar system body like Jupiter) or b) orbits so wide that they are torn from the sun by the influence of other bodies (namely stars).
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[
"The orbital inclination of HD 3167 d is inclined at least 1.3° away from the orbital planes of the other two exoplanets. Its orbit is expected to remain stable for periods longer than 100 million years only if this inclination is less than 40°. It has an orbital period of , placing it in between the other two orbits, and shows a minimum mass of . The true mass is most likely less than Neptune.\n",
"It is not yet possible to determine whether the orbit of the satellite is prograde or retrograde. Based on a prograde orbit model, the satellite orbits the primary at a distance of around and completes one orbit in 25.22 days. The satellite is believed to be tidally locked to the primary. Using the same prograde orbit model, the discovery team estimates that its orbit is inclined to the ecliptic by about 83 degrees. Assuming that the orbit has a low inclination to the primary's equator, this implies that is being viewed at a nearly pole-on configuration.\n",
"’s orbit has a chaotic character, making long-range predictions difficult. Prior to 500 AD, it may have been oscillating about the Lagrangian point (60 degrees behind Earth), before jumping to via . Short-term unstable libration about , and transitions to horseshoe orbits are also possible.\n",
"As the orbital elements are known with a limited precision, the uncertainties may lead to false positives (i.e. classification as resonant of an orbit which is not). A recent approach considers not only the current best-fit orbit but also two additional orbits corresponding to the uncertainties of the observational data. In simple terms, the algorithm determines whether the object would be still classified as resonant if its actual orbit differed from the best fit orbit, as the result of the errors in the observations. The three orbits are numerically integrated over a period of 10 million years. If all three orbits remain resonant (i.e. the argument of the resonance is librating, see formal definition), the classification as a resonant object is considered secure. If only two out of the three orbits are librating the object is classified as \"probably\" in resonance. Finally, if only one orbit passes the test, the \"vicinity\" of the resonance is noted to encourage further observations to improve the data. The two extreme values of the semi-major axis used in the algorithm are determined to correspond to uncertainties of the data of at most 3 standard deviations. Such range of semi-axis values should, with a number of assumptions, reduce the probability that the actual orbit is beyond this range to less than 0.3%. The method is applicable to objects with observations spanning at least 3 oppositions.\n",
"The orbit has been calculated based on spectroscopic observations with the Very Large Telescope. The two components have identical spectral types of WN5h and the spectral lines of each vary every 155 days, indicating projected orbital motions with speeds of and respectively. The similar orbital speeds show that the two components have similar masses; the secondary has amass 92% of the primary, assuming an inclination near . The inclination of best matches the orbital properties of the two stars to their observed properties. The primary is designated A and the secondary B. The orbit is moderately eccentric, with a periastron separation of about .\n",
"Garcia \"et al.\" (2017), using archival observations extending over 31 years, found an orbital period of 27.4 years with a semi-major axis of 3.54 AU. This orbit has an eccentricity of 0.35 and an inclination of 79.5°. The masses of the components were found to be and , respectively, with their mass ratio being about 0.82.\n",
"According to various simulations will remain in this orbit for at least 120,000 years and possibly for more than a million years, which is unusually stable compared to other similar objects. One reason for this stability is its low orbital eccentricity, formula_1.\n"
] |
what happens in america if someone rings 911 for an ambulance and that person is dying, but they do not have health insurance?
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The ambulance comes. They get cared for, taken to the emergency room, get treated.
Then they start getting really large bills that they cannot pay and end up declaring bankruptcy.
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[
"In general, first responders are sent to immediately life-threatening situations such as cardiac arrest. Some ambulance services restrict the type of calls which responders can attend, either through blanket prohibition or by more detailed call screening by the emergency dispatch centre. This is because responders do not necessarily have the levels of training or equipment available to full-time staff, and may arrive on their own, increasing risks. Types of call which responders may not be asked to attend (or be stood down if already en route) include drugs related problems, domestic violence and abusive patients as well as dangerous scenes such as traffic collisions or building sites. In some areas, responders are also not dispatched to paediatric cases, although other areas have this as a main part of their role.\n",
"The Emergency Medical Services division operates with limited manpower. As a result, many calls are handled by the DFD until a unit is available. The availability of Emergency Medical Services units is often compromised due to the number of calls in a city which has a lot of violence, citizens calling 911 for non-emergencies, as well as the breaking down of the Emergency Medical Services rigs due to age, mileage, and lack of proper maintenance.\n",
"Emergency ambulances are highly likely to be involved in hazardous situations, including incidents such as a road traffic collision, as these emergencies create people who are likely to be in need of treatment. They are required to gain access to patients as quickly as possible, and in many countries, are given dispensation from obeying certain traffic laws. For instance, they may be able to treat a red traffic light or stop sign as a yield sign ('give way'), or be permitted to break the speed limit. Generally, the priority of the response to the call will be assigned by the dispatcher, but the priority of the return will be decided by the ambulance crew based on the severity of the patient's illness or injury. Patients in significant danger to life and limb (as determined by triage) require urgent treatment by advanced medical personnel, and because of this need, emergency ambulances are often fitted with passive and active visual and/or audible warnings to alert road users.\n",
"The refusal of medical assistance, or RMA, ensures the continuum of care that ambulance squads have a responsibility towards. In a typical emergency call, the ambulance service will assess and transport the patient to an appropriate facility. The ambulance squad's duty towards the patient begins with patient contact and generally ends with transfer to the emergency department of the receiving hospital. The call can terminate in other ways; for example an ambulance service may cancel their own services if the patient becomes violent (scene safety), if they are canceled by on-scene personnel (such as the police or, in the case of a MICU service, the on-scene BLS EMT), or at the discretion of the dispatcher (if another ambulance is better positioned to take the call).\n",
"A family doctor may also be called to declare a death. In the event of an emergency, the doctor diagnoses an ambulance from the ambulance service. Doctors who have the legal right to declare death cooperate with funeral institutions.\n",
"The Emergency Medical Service system in the United States typically follows the Anglo-American service delivery model (bringing the patient to the hospital), as opposed to the Franco-German model (bringing the hospital to the patient). Apart from a handful of doctors who work on Medevac aircraft or perform training or medical quality assurance, it is extremely uncommon to see a physician deliberately responding to the scene of an emergency.\n",
"At night, or when the helicopters are offline the medical crew, including a paramedic and senior trauma doctor, still respond to emergencies, but travel in a specially equipped rapid response car. They are noticeable from other ambulance vehicles as they are painted in red with high-visibility markings to display their ‘advanced trauma team', status.\n"
] |
How far from the surface of the Earth would a nuclear explosion have to be before it didn't create a mushroom cloud?
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> I assume that mushroom clouds are a result of the explosion moving away from the surface of the earth.
Kind of. They happen when less dense gases form (in this case due to an explosion), and rise rapidly forming a vortex. That's the column. The head of the mushroom comes from the gases reaching an altitude/temperature where they are no longer less dense than the surroundings, and therefore are pushed out rather than up by the still-rising column beneath.
The mushroom cloud is visible because of debris and water vapour. In the absence of either you clearly wouldn't get one: so for example there would be no mushroom cloud if you detonated a nuclear weapon in interplanetary space.
There probably isn't an exact height at which you cease to get a mushroom cloud, you'd find the shape just became less and less distinct as you gained in altitude, before disappearing entirely as you left the atmosphere.
> Also, just for interests sake, do other kinds of bombs "mushroom".
Sure, depending on conditions. Probably the most well known to do this are fuel-air bombs like the so-called Daisy Cutter.
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[
"Aboveground nuclear explosions produce a characteristic mushroom cloud, which moves downwind as it reaches its stabilization height. Dispersion of the radioactive elements causes vertical and lateral cloud movement, spreading radioactive materials over adjacent regions. While the large particles settle nearby the site of the detonation, smaller particles and gases may be dispersed around the world. Additionally, some explosions injected radioactive material into the stratosphere, more than 10 kilometers above ground level, meaning it may float there for years before being subsequently deposited uniformly around the earth. Global fallout is the result, which exposes everything to an elevated level of man-made background radiation. While \"downwinders\" refers to those who live and work closest to the explosion site and are thus most acutely affected, there is a global effect of increased health risks due to ionizing radiation in the atmosphere.\n",
"In the United States National Research Council (NRC) book \"Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear-Weapons Detonations\" published in 1975 it states that a nuclear war involving 4,000 Mt from \"present arsenals\" would probably deposit much less dust in the stratosphere than the Krakatoa eruption, judging that the effect of dust and oxides of nitrogen would probably be slight climatic cooling which \"would probably lie within normal global climatic variability, but the possibility of climatic changes of a more dramatic nature cannot be ruled out\".\n",
"Atmospheric nuclear explosions are associated with mushroom clouds, although mushroom clouds can occur with large chemical explosions. It is possible to have an air-burst nuclear explosion without those clouds. Nuclear explosions produce radiation and radioactive debris.\n",
"A large explosion on October 2012 of 15 million pounds of M6 propellant of the Explo Systems, Inc., site rocketed Camp Minden, shattering windows 4 miles away and created a 7,000-foot mushroom cloud contaminating the area.\n",
"If a nuclear explosion did occur, it occurred within the 3,000-mile-wide (4,800 km diameter) circle covering parts of the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic, the southern tip of Africa, and a small part of Antarctica.\n",
"In large impacts, as well as material displaced and ejected to form the crater, significant volumes of target material may be melted and vaporized together with the original impactor. Some of this impact melt rock may be ejected, but most of it remains within the transient crater, initially forming a layer of impact melt coating the interior of the transient cavity. In contrast, the hot dense vaporized material expands rapidly out of the growing cavity, carrying some solid and molten material within it as it does so. As this hot vapor cloud expands, it rises and cools much like the archetypal mushroom cloud generated by large nuclear explosions. In large impacts, the expanding vapor cloud may rise to many times the scale height of the atmosphere, effectively expanding into free space.\n",
"Detonations significantly below ground level or deep below the water (for instance, nuclear depth charges) also do not produce mushroom clouds, as the explosion causes the vaporization of a huge amount of earth and water in these instances, creating a bubble which then collapses in on itself; in the case of a less deep underground explosion, this produces a subsidence crater. Detonations underwater but near the surface produce a pillar of water, which, in collapsing, forms a cauliflower-like shape, which is easily mistaken for a mushroom cloud (such as in the well-known pictures of the \"Crossroads Baker\" test). Underground detonations at low depth produce a mushroom cloud and a base surge, two different distinct clouds. The amount of radiation vented into the atmosphere decreases rapidly with increasing detonation depth.\n"
] |
i just watched a cop roll through the same stop sign that i got pulled over for rolling through last week. if i were ballsy enough for a citizens arrest, how would that work? if some rando ever tried to arrest me, i’d laugh and ask what their authority was, and then likely walk away.
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As far as I know citizen arrests can only be done if you witness someone committing an indictable offense or a felony. And you can only interfere if you are there when it is happening you can't go get them after
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[
"The police officers who were still on scene, then pulled McGee over. McGee then became combative with the officers, asking \"What are you going to do about it, arrest me?\" McGee's statement says he was then pulled from the car, handcuffed, struck with a closed fist on the side of his head and then had his head slammed against the hood of the squad car.\n",
"Justice Stevens pointed out that pedestrians are free to keep walking when they see a police officer handing out flyers or seeking information while \"motorists who confront a roadblock are required to stop, and to remain stopped for as long as the officers choose to detain them.\" At the same time, the \"likelihood that questioning a random sample of drivers will yield useful information about a hit-and-run incident that occurred a week earlier is speculative at best.\" However, neither of the lower courts had balanced the relative factors weighing in favor of and against finding the seizure reasonable, as the \"per se\" rule of \"Edmond\" dictated the outcome of this case. Consequently, Stevens opined he would remand the case to the Illinois courts to perform the balancing in the first instance.\n",
"Video recordings by two bystanders capturing Gray's arrest showed Gray, screaming, being dragged to a police van by officers, and then stepping up into the van. A bystander with connections to Gray stated that the officers were previously \"folding\" Gray: one officer bent Gray's legs backwards, and another held Gray down by pressing a knee into his neck. Witnesses commented Gray \"couldn't walk\", \"can't use his legs\", and \"his leg look broke and you all dragging him like that\". Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts noted from the video that, \"Gray stood on one leg and climbed into the van on his own.\" \"The Baltimore Sun\" reported that another witness saw Gray being beaten with police batons.\n",
"The officers followed the two individuals for approximately 5 minutes or one mile, and then pulled the men over. They ordered the men out of the car and conducted a pat down search, which turned no weapons or contraband. The officers then seized the driver's keys and handcuffed both men. The officers told them men that they were not under arrest, but were being detained incident to the execution of the search warrant.\n",
"Meanwhile, two officers dressed in plainclothes were patrolling the area in an unmarked car. They were members of the District of Columbia’s Vice Squad and were assigned to the area; they noticed the suspicious vehicle pulled over at a stop sign for about 20 seconds. The passenger was distracting the driver. As the officers approached the vehicle, the vehicle turned at an \"unreasonable\" speed without using their turning signal. For the traffic violation, the officers pulled over Whren and Brown.\n",
"According to police reports, Gaines was stopped for a traffic violation for having a piece of cardboard with writing on it in place of a license plate. The cardboard plate read \"Any government official who compromises this pursuit of happiness and right to travel, will be held criminally responsible and fined, as this is a natural right and freedom.\" During the traffic stop, an officer threatened Gaines with a Taser, after she refused to comply with his request to leave the vehicle. Later, Gaines reportedly posted videos to Instagram and described the incident and subsequent arrest, stating that the arresting officers threatened to break her limbs and that she spent two days in isolation. Gaines was released with charges of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and littering. Gaines' failure to appear in court over the traffic violation resulted in a bench warrant being served to her on the day of her death.\n",
"The driver looked at them in his mirror. \"He asked us both to get up. [Mrs. Hamilton] said she was not going to get up and that she had paid her fare and that she didn't feel like standing,\" recalls Colvin. \"So I told him I was not going to get up either. So he said, 'If you are not going to get up, I will get a policeman.'\" The police arrived and convinced a black man sitting behind the two women to move so that Mrs. Hamilton could move back, but Colvin still refused to move. She was forcibly removed from the bus and arrested by the two policemen, Thomas J. Ward and Paul Headley. This event took place nine months before the NAACP secretary Rosa Parks was famously arrested for the same offense. Claudette Colvin: \"My mother told me to be quiet about what I did. She told me to let Rosa be the one: white people aren't going to bother Rosa, they like her\".\n"
] |
difference between phenomenology and symbolic interactionism
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Phenomenology considers the “subjective conscienciousness”, where and individual’s consciousness creates meaning based on experiences. It concerns understanding of the underlying meaning of “things”, stripping away assumptions based on how we perceive the world, influenced by cultural norms.
Symbolic interactionism, on the other hand, looks more at how people’s actions are aligned to perceptions of how others might act but is also concerned with the meanings that individuals ascribe to things. Symbolic interaction sees this process as something which is constantly in a state of flux.
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[
"The phenomenological lineage can be traced through philosophers Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. This perspective stands in contrast to the positivist reductionist orientation of the scientific psychology. Rather than understanding mind, emotion and consciousness in terms of its constituent parts, existential phenomenology opens perception to the full panorama of human experience and seeks to grasp a sense of meaning.\n",
"A large focus of philosophical anthropology is also interpersonal relationships, as an attempt to unify disparate ways of understanding the behaviour of humans as both creatures of their social environments and creators of their own values. It analyses also the ontology that is in play in human relationships – of which intersubjectivity is a major theme. Intersubjectivity is the study of how two individuals, subjects, whose experiences and interpretations of the world are radically different understand and relate to each other.\n",
"This engagement is situated in a kind of middle ground of relationality, a space that is neither purely objective, because it is reciprocally constituted by a diversity of lived experiences motivating the movements of countless organisms, nor purely subjective, because it is nonetheless a field of material relationships between bodies. It is governed exclusively neither by causality, nor by intentionality. In this space of in-betweenness phenomenology can overcome its inaugural opposition to naturalism.\n",
"Ultimately these two distinct phenomenological projects should be seen as complementary, with the structures of the latter dependent on the structures of the former. That is, valid phenomenological descriptions of the formal structures of the life-world should be wholly consistent with the descriptions of the formal structures of intentional consciousness. It is from the latter that the former derives its validity, verifiability, and truth value. This is in keeping with Husserl's conception of phenomenology as \"First Philosophy\", the foundation, or ground, for both philosophy and all of the sciences.\n",
"Phenomenology is the study of the phenomena of experience. It is a broad philosophical movement founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on, and study of, the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. This phenomenological ontology can be clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis, which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and objects that act and react upon one another.\n",
"Phenomenography is not phenomenology. Phenomenographers, on the other hand, adopt an empirical orientation and they investigate the experiences of others. The focus of interpretive phenomenology is upon the essence of the phenomenon, whereas the focus of phenomenography is upon the essence of the experiences and the subsequent perceptions of the phenomenon.\n",
"Phenomenology is a philosophical method of inquiry of everyday experience. The focus in phenomenology is on the examination of different phenomena (from Greek, \"phainomenon\", \"that which shows itself\") \"as they appear to consciousness\", i.e. in a first-person perspective. Thus, phenomenology is a discipline particularly useful to understand how is it that appearances present themselves to us, and how is it that we attribute meaning to them.\n"
] |
the first lady's role in politics
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Officially, no purpose. The first lady is just the president's wife (and sometimes not even that, Emily Donelson was Andrew Jackson's Niece and served as First Lady because Jackson's wife died).
Unofficially, the first Lady plays a huge role in both the president's public image and are now almost expected to use the position to push for some charitable or public service good (such as Michele Obama's push for healthier food in schools).
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[
"The position of the first lady is not an elected one and carries only ceremonial duties. Nonetheless, first ladies have held a highly visible position in American society. The role of the first lady has evolved over the centuries. She is, first and foremost, the hostess of the White House. She organizes and attends official ceremonies and functions of state either along with, or in place of, the president. Lisa Burns identifies four successive main themes of the first ladyship: as public woman (1900–1929); as political celebrity (1932–1961); as political activist (1964–1977); and as political interloper (1980–2001).\n",
"Since the 1790s, the role of first lady has changed considerably. It has come to include involvement in political campaigns, management of the White House, championship of social causes, and representation of the president at official and ceremonial occasions. Because first ladies now typically publish their memoirs, which are viewed as potential sources of additional information about their husbands' administrations, and because the public is interested in these increasingly independent women in their own right, first ladies frequently remain a focus of attention long after their husbands' terms of office have ended. Additionally, over the years individual first ladies have held influence in a range of sectors, from fashion to public opinion on policy. Historically, should a president be unmarried, or a widower, the president usually asks a relative or friend to act as White House hostess.\n",
"The position of First Lady, which originally consisted of being a good hostess to guests of the president, has become more politicized as women began to receive more rights and more access to power. Martha Washington, who several consider to be the first First Lady, was often referred to as Lady Washington because of her social standing and was known for being a lovely hostess to guests of the White House. Dolley Madison, wife of former president James Madison, was the first woman in this position to use her political power to push for change, thus becoming the basis for the modern day First Lady. Several First Ladies from the late nineteenth century aligned themselves with various political movements, such as temperance and war, but few were known for their active political involvement. It wasn't until 1932, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected into office, that the idea of a politically active First Lady began to form. Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, became an important figure of the Great Depression and the Second World War because of her dedication to her country and her interest in social and political issues. Although there were several First Ladies who actively supported the country, none of them did so with the passion and commitment of Mrs. Roosevelt, who would often appear on the radio and in press conferences and had a friendly and comforting demeanor. Roosevelt is seen as a feminist icon to this day because of her use of political power to drive change.\n",
"She was the first woman to attain a prominent position in Democratic party politics, serving as the national vice chairwoman of the Democratic Party. She was first elected in 1922 and reelected in 1924 and served until 1928. During her tenure, she worked to elect women to public office.\n",
"Since President Correa's inauguration she opted to keep a low public profile and to be completely focused on her duties as a mother and wife. The only public statement of a political nature was during the first weeks of President Correa's term in office, made concerning the perceived duties of the First Lady; she alleged that \"we, women are all equal\" giving reassurances to all people that hold the belief of a self intrinsic value as individuals and not for their spouse's position. It is important to highlight that she received a total unyielding support from her husband in this decision.\n",
"When she was the First Lady (2004–2012), she and her staff coordinate social policies for her husband's administration, generating programs of health and education for children, young people, single mothers and the family, in general, as a key element in society.\n",
"After her husband was deposed in the EDSA Revolution of 2001, she ran as a candidate of the opposition for a seat in Senate. She won, and served in the 12th and the 13th Congress, making her the first First Lady to win a seat in the Senate.\n"
] |
sleep apnea?
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Apnea is "not breathing" sleep apnea is when you have something wrong with you that will make you stop breathing while you sleep.
It happens if your throat is partly paralyzed, swollen for some reason or just a huge fat neck.
It makes it so you never sleep right and are always sleeping and also makes your brain slowly die if it's bad. If it gets very bad it makes your brain quickly die and you just die.
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[
"Sleep apnea may be diagnosed by the evaluation of symptoms, risk factors and observation, (e.g., excessive daytime sleepiness and fatigue) but the gold standard for diagnosis is a formal sleep study (polysomnography, or sometimes a reduced-channels home-based test). A study can establish reliable indices of the disorder, derived from the number and type of event per hour of sleep (Apnea Hypopnea Index (AHI), or Respiratory Disturbance Index (RDI)), associated to a formal threshold, above which a patient is considered as suffering from sleep apnea, and the severity of their sleep apnea can then be quantified. Mild obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) ranges from 5 to 14.9 events per hour, moderate OSA falls in the range of 15–29.9 events per hour, and severe OSA would be a patient having over 30 events per hour.\n",
"BULLET::::- Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder characterized by pauses in breathing during sleep. Each episode, called an apnea, lasts long enough for one or more breaths to be missed; such episodes occur repeatedly throughout the sleep cycle. Undiagnosed sleep apnea may cause or contribute to the severity of depression.\n",
"Central Sleep apnea is caused by a failure of the central nervous system to signal the body to breathe during sleep. Treatments similar to obstructive sleep apnea may be used as well as other treatments such as Adaptive Servo Ventilation and certain medications. Some medications such as opioids may contribute to or cause central sleep apnea.\n",
"Sleep apnea is the second most frequent cause of secondary hypersomnia, affecting up to 4% of middle-aged adults, mostly men. Upper airway resistance syndrome (UARS) is a clinical variant of sleep apnea that can also cause hypersomnia. Just as other sleep disorders (like narcolepsy) can coexist with sleep apnea, the same is true for UARS. There are many cases of UARS in which excessive daytime sleepiness persists after CPAP treatment, indicating an additional cause, or causes, of the hypersomnia and requiring further evaluation.\n",
"Some people with sleep apnea have a combination of both types; its prevalence ranges from 0.56% to 18%. The condition is generally detected when obstructive sleep apnea is treated with CPAP and central sleep apnea emerges. The exact mechanism of the loss of central respiratory drive during sleep in OSA is unknown but is most likely related to incorrect settings of the CPAP treatment and other medical conditions the person has.\n",
"Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder which causes an individual to have short pauses in breathing or very shallow breaths while sleeping. These pauses in breathing can often cause the individual to wake up, snore, choke, or just generally disrupt their sleep. As a result, sufferers of the disease do not get quality sleep during the night and are tired during the daytime. Sleep apnea is very difficult to diagnose because doctors can't exactly tell if a person has sleep apnea in a regular routine visit. Additionally the patient himself may not even realize he has sleep apnea because it occurs during sleep, so a partner or roommate is usually the first to notice symptoms. \n",
"Obstructive sleep apnea is associated with problems in daytime functioning, such as daytime sleepiness, motor vehicle crashes, psychological problems, decreased cognitive functioning, and reduced quality of life. Other associated problems include cerebrovascular diseases (hypertension, coronary artery disease, and stroke) and diabetes. These problems could be, at least in part, caused by risk factors of OSA.\n"
] |
Why didn't sports teams in the US develop like soccer clubs in England?
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In part we can look to the prevalence of collegiate sports programs across the nation as an alternate form.
New York City for instance at one time all had Columbia, Fordham, NYU, St. John's, and just up the river, West Point, fielding teams with Yale, Princeton, and Rutgers just outside the City, attracting young men to play, and everyone else to watch.
To get a sense of just how many schools still today are playing NCAA Football this map shows their location. [And there are a lot across all 3 divisions](_URL_1_)
So we can say that college sports drew much of the early interest, development, and focus of competitive sports, that other nations saw in club sports. Gridiron football was born and nurtured on the campuses of the Ivy League after all.
Though there are a plethora of more independent professional, and semi professional teams across the North East and Mid West. Many of who either couldnt sustain themselves, closed during the Depression, or were left out in the various mergers and consolidations that ensured the early NFL could make a profit.
Its wiki but take a look at the list of defunct NFL teams and their geographic concentration: _URL_0_
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[
"Unlike major team sports in North America, where franchises are awarded to nominated cities, most European teams have grown from small clubs formed by groups of individuals before growing rapidly. Churches, universities and work places have often been the most fertile birthplace of many of Europe's major sports clubs, particularly in Britain, which in latter part of the nineteenth century led the way in organised sports.\n",
"In 1960, William D. Cox, a wealthy U.S. businessman and former owner of the Philadelphia Phillies, a U.S. baseball team, saw a potential market in the United States for top-level soccer. Recognizing that U.S. teams did not play at a sufficiently high level to attract the attention of most fans, he began to consider the possibility of importing European and South American teams during their league off-seasons. Traditionally, tours by European clubs in the northeast United States had drawn well and Cox decided to pursue this approach.\n",
"Professional sports leagues as known today evolved during the decades between the Civil War and World War II, when the railroad was the main means of intercity transportation. As a result, virtually all major league teams were concentrated in the northeastern quarter of the United States, within roughly the radius of a day-long train ride, within the Great Lakes and the Northeast regions. Early professional soccer activity was concentrated almost entirely on an East Coast corridor from Baltimore to Boston, except for the St. Louis metropolitan area.\n",
"The roots of modern sports can be found in the mid-nineteenth century in Great Britain and the United States where first professional sports were organised in mining and industrial towns and cities. Back then, sport competition was conducted mostly on local and national level. First signs of globalization in that matter appeared because of the global hegemonic position that Great Britain had in the nineteenth century. Due to the British influence, popularity of such sports as football, rugby or cricket grew rapidly throughout the world, very often replacing traditional local games.\n",
"Most of the current amateur clubs and leagues in existence have developed since the 1980s, when leagues began to be established in North America, Europe and Asia. The sport developed a cult following in the United States when matches were broadcast on the fledgling ESPN network in the 1980s. As the size of the Australian diaspora has increased, so has the number of clubs outside Australia. This expansion has been further aided by multiculturalism and assisted by exhibition matches as well as exposure generated through players who have converted to and from other football codes. In Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and the United States there are many thousands of players.\n",
"In contrast to baseball's NABBP, the first governing body in English football survived the onset of professionalism, which it formally accepted in 1885. Perhaps the great geographical concentration of population and the corresponding short distances between urban centres was crucial. Certainly it provided the opportunity for more clubs' developing large fan bases without incurring great travel costs. Professional football did not gain acceptance until after the turn of the 20th century in most of Southern England. The earliest league members travelled only through the Midlands and North.\n",
"In spite of the decline in the sport's popularity, in several pockets of the country, primarily the Heartland and New England regions, as well as the New York City and St. Louis metropolitan areas, soccer continued to be extremely popular, especially with ethnic groups and expatriates. The popularity of soccer in these areas reflected on the Challenge Cup during the later Great Depression years, through the World War II years. Most clubs participating were either top amateur teams or semi-professional clubs that hoisted a handful of U.S. internationals, who worked part-time jobs.\n"
] |
Ten years ago, my boyfriend found this buried at the beach. Does anyone know anything about it?
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I think it is a small [shot put](_URL_0_), not a cannonball. Sorry, I know that's not as exciting! However, it's a reasonable size for a shot, and while I can't think of a reason why a cannonball would be labeled by weight, a shot should be.
Edit: drat, beaten to the punch while I looked up a link!
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[
"The next morning, on Tuesday, 12 January, Peter Smith was taking three young nephews for a walk through the Wanda Beach sand-hills. Some distance north of the surf club, he discovered what appeared to be a store mannequin buried face-down in the sand. He brushed away sand from the head and realised that it was a body, and the police were called from the nearby surf club. At this point, Smith believed he had found only one young woman.\n",
"Janette Campbell confirmed that several items recovered from the beach after MacPhail's death – a fleece jacket, jogging bottoms, boxers, a t-shirt, and a kitchen knife – belonged to her son and came from her kitchen. Fibres from the trousers were found on MacPhail's discarded pyjamas, and Forensic scientist Stuart Bailey testified that DNA matching the accused was found on the beach clothing. He further confirmed that a DNA sample taken from MacPhail's neck had a billion-to-one chance of coming from anybody but Campbell. DNA matches were also found on MacPhail's face, 14 parts of her body, and some of her clothing. A cybercrime expert told the court that on 3 July 2018, Campbell used his phone to Google search \"How do police find DNA\", then visited a webpage titled \"Collecting DNA evidence\". A 16-year-old girl testified that hours after MacPhail's body was discovered, Campbell sent a Snapchat video of his upper body, to a group of 25 people, with the words \"Found the guy who has done it.\"\n",
"The site at The Crook Beach, 1 km northeast of Scar, was found in 1985 by John Dearness, a farmer on Sanday. He found bones sticking out of the ground and a small lead object, and thought that he might have discovered the resting place of a dead sailor. Dearness died before the significance of the site was realized.\n",
"A body was found on the beach at Dundee between 9 and 10 am on 13 September 1882, having been left behind by the receding tide. Later in the day the body was identified as Walter Gourlay, \" a caddie belonging to St Andrews\".\n",
"The two bodies that Henley had insisted were still buried on the beach may have been those of Mark Scott and Joseph Lyles. In light of developments relating to the identifications of victims, the body of Scott still lies undiscovered at High Island, while Lyles' remains were only found by chance in 1983. Had the search for bodies continued, both victims would have likely been discovered. Following Hurricane Ike in 2008, the area of High Island Beach where Corll is known to have buried his victims remains submerged, leaving a strong possibility that Scott's body will never be found.\n",
"On 4 August 1996, two local people, Derek Hodgson and Joe Howey reported discovering the remains of a wreck on Seaton Carew beach. The wreck had not been seen before, at least in their lifetimes, but a recent storm, some 3 or 4 days before had stripped sand from the beach and exposed the wreck. They contacted Tees Archaeology, who began a rapid assessment of the wreck with the help of volunteers from the Nautical Archaeology Society.\n",
"In June 1893, the crew of the Scottish whaler \"Aurora\" spotted a wreck on the Carey Islands. They found the \"Ripple\", a man’s body buried under a pile of stones, and Björling's letters. No trace of the other four men, or the small boat, was ever found.\n"
] |
why can't pilots see when a laser hits them?
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Lasers spread out the farther they travel. That "tiny dot of light" isn't so tiny after it travels 1000 feet through the air. If it hits the plexiglas cockpit window, it diffuses out even more. The result looks [something like this](_URL_0_).
You're right that it only flashes for a split second, but that's all it takes. When people say that it blinds pilots, it doesn't mean that the laser is burning out their retina and causing permanent blindness. They're talking about *flash blindness*, the temporary dazzling effect you get when a bright light flashes in your eye. Like when someone uses a camera flash in a dark room, and you have to blink away the aftereffect for a few seconds? Imagine trying to land a plane during that.
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[
"Under certain conditions, laser light or other bright lights (spotlights, searchlights) directed at aircraft can be a hazard. The most likely scenario is when a bright visible laser light causes distraction or temporary flash blindness to a pilot, during a critical phase of flight such as landing or takeoff. It is far less likely, though still possible, that a visible or invisible beam could cause permanent harm to a pilot's eyes. Although laser weapons are under development by armed forces, these are so specialized, expensive and controlled that it is improbable for non-military lasers to cause structural damage to an aircraft.\n",
"BULLET::::- Wavelength of the beam: an infrared or ultraviolet laser beam does not present any visual effect risk to pilots, as they cannot see it. However, at high powers it can present an eye damage risk. In some cases, this hazard may be greater since a pilot would not know they were being illuminated. In general, the eyes of pilots in an illuminated nighttime cockpit are most sensitive to greenish-yellow light (of wavelength around 500–600 nanometers, peaking at 555 nm). A blue or red laser will appear much dimmer—and thus less distracting—than a green or yellow laser of equal power. For example, a 10-watt continuous-wave yttrium aluminium garnet laser at 532 nanometers (green) can appear brighter to the eye than an 18-watt continuous-wave argon-ion laser that outputs 10 watts of 514 nm (green-blue) light plus 8 watts of 488 nm (blue) light.\n",
"Beyond the question of physical injury to the eye from a laser pointer, several other undesirable effects are possible. These include short-lived flash blindness if the beam is encountered in darkened surroundings, as when driving at night. This may result in momentary loss of vehicular control. Lasers pointed at aircraft are a hazard to aviation. A police officer seeing a red dot on his chest may conclude that a sniper is targeting him and take aggressive action. In addition, the startle reflex exhibited by some exposed unexpectedly to laser light of this sort has been reported to have resulted in cases of self-injury or loss of control. For these and similar reasons, the US Food and Drug Administration has advised that laser pointers are not toys and should not be used by minors except under the direct supervision of an adult.\n",
"If aimed at a person's eyes, laser pointers can cause temporary disturbances to vision. There is some evidence of rare minor permanent harm, but low-powered laser pointers are not seriously hazardous to health. They may be a major annoyance in some circumstances. In rare cases a dot of light from a red laser pointer may be thought to be due to a laser gunsight. When pointed at aircraft at night, laser pointers may dazzle and distract pilots, and increasingly strict laws have been passed to ban this.\n",
"In May 2005, NORAD started using a laser warning system to warn pilots that cross into restricted airspace. The bright laser beams, which flash red-red-green, are easily seen, even during daylight. The laser beams can be seen away. Other pilots are unlikely to see the lasers because, when activated, the directional beams are pointed at the aircraft that has crossed into restricted airspace. Multiple lasers could be activated. These lasers do not harm the eyes of aircrew or passengers.\n",
"FAA researchers compiled a database of more than 400 reported incidents occurring between 1990 and 2004 in which pilots have been startled, distracted, temporarily blinded, or disoriented by laser exposure. This information led to an inquiry in the US Congress. Exposure to hand-held laser light under such circumstances may seem trivial given the brevity of exposure, the large distances involved and beam spread of up to several metres. However, laser exposure may create dangerous conditions such as flash blindness. If this occurs during a critical moment in aircraft operation, the aircraft may be endangered. In addition, some 18% to 35% of the population possess the autosomal dominant genetic trait, photic sneeze, that causes the affected individual to experience an involuntary sneezing fit when exposed to a sudden flash of light. \n",
"Laser pointers, with their very long range, are often maliciously shone at people to distract or annoy them, or for fun. This is considered particularly hazardous in the case of aircraft pilots, who may be dazzled or distracted at critical times. According to an MSNBC report there were over 2,836 incidents logged in the US by the FAA in 2010. Illumination by handheld green lasers is particularly serious, as the wavelength (532 nm) is near peak sensitivity of the dark-adapted eye and may appear to be 35 times brighter than a red laser of identical power output.\n"
] |
My town claims to be the originating place of three nursery rhymes; Twinkle Twinkle, Old King Cole and Humpty Dumpty. Do we know the history of other children's rhymes?
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Many nursery rhymes have legendary or unclear history. However, the nursery rhymes you mentioned all originate in England or Britain. The lyrics to Twinkle Twinkle were indeed, as far as we know, written by Jane Taylor. The Wikipedia article shows she was born in London, which is near Colchester. Old King Cole's origins are very obscure and nobody knows who he really was. However, Geoffrey of Monmouth does associate him with Colcester by writing that he may have been King of Britons after the reign of the Romans ~300A.D. -Wikipedia, again. Humpty Dumpty could have been a riddle because the rhyme does not say that he was an egg. Many do believe that 'Humpty Dumpty' was a canon used at St. Mary-at-the-wall by the defending royalists in the Siege of Colchester -1648.
I hope this all helped.
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[
"Colchester is reputed to be the home of three of the best known English nursery rhymes: 'Old King Cole', 'Humpty Dumpty' and 'Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star', although the legitimacy of all three claims is disputed.\n",
"Rhymes for the Nursery is a collection of English poems by sisters Jane and Ann Taylor, published in London in 1806. Probably the best-known poem in it is \"'The Star\" (\"Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star\").\n",
"The earliest record of this rhyme is in a manuscript of around 1805, which contains only the first verse. There are references to a children's game called \"bo-peep\", from the 16th century, including one in Shakespeare's \"King Lear\" (Act I Scene iv), for which \"bo-peep\" is thought to refer to the children's game of peek-a-boo, but there's no evidence that the rhyme existed earlier than the 18th century. The additional verses are first recorded in the earliest printed version in a version of \"Gammer Gurton's Garland or The Nursery Parnassus\" in 1810.\n",
"The nursery rhyme seems to have appealed particularly to the English writer Charles Dickens, who mentions it in three works. The first mention is within an essay on \"A Christmas Tree\" (1850), on which the illustrated nursery books so popular at the time are hung. \"Thin books, in themselves, at first, but many of them, and with deliciously smooth covers of bright red or green. What fat black letters to begin with! 'A was an archer, and shot at a frog.' Of course he was. He was an apple-pie also, and there he is! He was a good many things in his time, was A, and so were most of his friends, except X, who had so little versatility, that I never knew him to get beyond Xerxes or Xantippe.\"\n",
"The term \"nursery rhyme\" emerged in the third decade of the nineteenth century although this type of children's literature previously existed with different names such as \"Tommy Thumb Songs\" and \"Mother Goose Songs\". The very first known book containing a collection of these texts was \"Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book\", which was written by H. Cooper and was published in 1744. The works of several scholars and collectors helped document and preserve these oral traditions as well as their histories. These include Iona and Peter Opie, Joseph Ritson, James Orchard Halliwell, and Sir Walter Scott.\n",
"The term \"nursery rhyme\" is used for \"traditional\" songs for young children in Britain and many English speaking countries; but this usage dates only from the nineteenth century, and in North America the older \"Mother Goose rhyme\" is still often used. The oldest children's songs of which we have records are lullabies, which can be found in every human culture. The Roman nurses' lullaby, \"Lalla, Lalla, Lalla, aut dormi, aut lacte\", may be the oldest to survive. Many medieval English verses associated with the birth of Jesus (including \"Lullay, my liking, my dere son, my sweting\") take the form of a lullabies and may be adaptations of contemporary lullabies.\n",
"Some rhymes collected in the mid-twentieth century can be seen to have origins as early in the eighteenth century. Where sources could be identified, they could often be traced to popular adult songs, including ballads and those in music hall and minstrel shows. They were also studied in 19th century New York. Children also have a tendency to recycle nursery rhymes, children's commercial songs and adult music in satirical versions. A good example is the theme from the mid-1950s Disney film \"Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier\", \"The Ballad of Davy Crockett\", with a tune by George Bruns; its opening lines, \"Born on a mountain top in Tennessee / The greenest state in the land of the free\", were endlessly satirised to make Crockett a spaceman, a parricide and even a Teddy Boy.\n"
] |
why was there no guerilla resistance to the us occupation of japan?
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Japan was under a brutal Imperial rule where civilians were told to kill themselves rather than surrender, with mass horrors committed on Japanese soil. When Japan surrendered, its people were already heavily demoralized after the dropping of the Nuclear weapons and the social conditions that were enforced during the war.
They didn't see the US are conquering oppressors but occupying freedom bringers.
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[
"The Japanese army implemented a scorch earth policy. Filipino and American guerrilla forces fought back during this occupation and American planes bombed both the university and San Agustin church on October 10, 1944. The Japanese were never able to successfully move outside the city for any length of time due to the constant pressure and attacks from the Philippine resistant movement. American and combined Free Philippine forces landed in Cagayan de Oro on May 10, 1945, three years and 7 days after the Japanese occupation.\n",
"Because of their strategic location, the islands was one of the first points occupied by invading Japanese imperial forces at the outbreak of the Pacific War. The morning of December 8, 1941, the Batan Task Force from Taiwan landed on the Batan Islands, which became the first American territory occupied by the Japanese. The purpose of the invasion was to secure the existing small airfield outside Basco, which was accomplished without resistance. Japanese fighters from Basco took part in the raid on Clark Air Base the following day. However, over the next several days, the success of the Japanese bombing of Clark Field rendered a base at Basco unnecessary, and on December 10, 1941, the naval combat force was withdrawn to participate in the invasion of Camiguin.\n",
"Guerrilla tactics were employed in the war in the Pacific as well. When Japanese forces invaded the island of Timor on 20 February 1942, they were resisted by a small, under-equipped force of Allied military personnel— known as Sparrow Force—predominantly from Australia, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands East Indies. Although Portugal was not a combatant, many East Timorese civilians and some Portuguese colonists fought with the Allies as guerrillas (\"criados\"), or provided food, shelter and other assistance. Some Timorese continued a resistance campaign following the Australian withdrawal.\n",
"Japanese occupation of the Philippines was opposed by active and successful underground and guerrilla activity that increased over the years and that eventually covered a large portion of the country. Opposing these guerrillas were a Japanese-formed Bureau of Constabulary (later taking the name of the old Constabulary during the \"Second Republic\"), Kempeitai, and the Makapili. Postwar investigations showed that about 260,000 people were in guerrilla organizations and that members of the anti-Japanese underground were even more numerous. Such was their effectiveness that by the end of the war, Japan controlled only twelve of the forty-eight provinces.\n",
"Guerrilla resistance against the Japanese continued throughout the war. Uncaptured Filipino army units, a communist insurgency and supporting American agents all played a role in the resistance. The people of San Rafael refused to be subjected to Japanese authority and they organized and joined small guerrilla bands and harassed the units of the Japanese army stationed in the town whenever there was a chance to do so. These small, organized guerrillas in San Rafael later became members of BMA (Bulacan Military Area).\n",
"From mid-1942 through mid-1944, the Filipino guerrilla resistance had been supplied and encouraged by U.S. Navy submarines and a few parachute drops, so that the guerrillas could harass the Japanese Army and take control of the rural areas, jungles and mountains— the guerrillas were so effective, the Japanese Empire only controlled 12 out of 48 provinces. While remaining loyal to the United States, many Filipinos hoped and believed that liberation from the Japanese would bring them freedom and their already-promised independence.\n",
"Because of the cruelty of the Japanese Imperial Army, the people of Cabuyao joined secret organizations known as \"guerilla\". The leaders of these groups were former USAFFEs who fought in Bataan and Corregidor. There was the Markings Guerilla, Pres. Manuel L. Quezon’s Own Guerilla (PQOC), Hunters ROTC, Straught Fil-American Troops, III Army Corps, FAIT, Ansay Suicide Regiment and La Fabella Regiment.\n"
] |
Confederacy fetishists often point to Lincoln not being on the ballot in 1860 as the "principal" cause of the Civil War, but *why* wasn't he on the ballot in southern states? Did they just refuse to put him on there, or was there some complications w/r/t the newly formed party and the dem split?
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It's absurd to say that Lincoln not being on the ballot in 1860 is the principal cause of the Civil War. The only way that even makes minimal sense as a southern grievance is if southern state governments and a large portion of the white populace in the slave states wanted Lincoln on the ballot. They didn't and *that was the whole point.* The simple threat of an antislavery president was enough to trigger an existential crisis for the section. One actually winning pushed the most enslaving states over the edge because they believed he was coming for their human property, whether directly or indirectly. That's the cause of the Civil War and everything else that gets tossed up either as secondary causes or as a distraction, to the degree they have any historical basis at all, flows from it.
But you asked about the why and that requires going into how elections worked at the time. Today, we go into the booth and there's a ballot paper printed by the state with all the candidates on it that qualify under whatever eligibility requirements the state has. You go into a little booth or otherwise secure your privacy, mark your ballot however your precinct does that, hand it in and go home.
This is not how the middle nineteenth century runs elections at all. Ballots are produced by partisan printers. They will have the full ticket filled in correctly: just the names of the people the printer endorses for each spot. If you want to change that, you've got to scratch out their name and write in the one you prefer. Then you have to actually cast the ballot, which is done in public. Printers usually run off ballots on different colors of paper and/or different sizes too, so everybody around can see who you vote for.
Voting for an "abolitionist" (which Lincoln is not, but white Southerners rarely care for fine distinctions in these things) is a good way to get yourself mobbed in much of the South. Election violence isn't exactly common (though it is more so the further west one goes) but it's regular enough that everyone knows the score. Furthermore, freelance violence against people not deemed sufficiently proslavery is a regular part of southern political life. Simply debating the merits of slavery can risk violence, let alone voting for an antislavery ticket. Even in Kentucky, which is more permissive than most of the South, antislavery speakers can literally get stabbed for the deed.
But that assumes you can get your hands on a GOP ballot, if you even want to. (Most of the white South has been all-in on slavery for decades by the time 1860 rolls around.) Most printers are local, so they're part of and subject to the same community pressures as ordinary voters. Given the expense of a steam press and the ease with which a mob can wreck one, as well as their requirement for the goodwill of the community for their business to continue, they're probably more vulnerable than usual.
It's true that Lincoln isn't on ballots in the South for all those reasons...except that he is in a few slave states. (He loses them.) The thing is that his not being an option for voters is what the South intends from the start. They're not upset that they couldn't vote for him, but rather angry that their proscriptions didn't settle the election in their favor. That suggests to the white South that their regime is unstable to a new degree, particularly as the GOP is keen to expand its reach in the Border South.
There are small Republican parties operating in Maryland and Missouri already. What happens if Lincoln uses the spoils system, as every president did, to seed the rest of the section with antislavery men? They would be the nucleus of new state GOPs that might build the infrastructure that makes slavery debates unavoidable. The two-party system was only tolerable in the slave states so long as both parties competed over who was the most proslavery, which the GOP will not do. Breaking the appearance of white uniformity can underscore its genuine absence (though the GOP was always too optimistic about having hordes of antislavery whites who just needed a vehicle) and will, in the minds of enslavers, embolden the people they enslave. That will, again their estimation, inevitably bring bloody slave revolts which can easily snowball into a genocidal race war. White southerners expect to win that one, because they're white supremacists, but they know it'll be bloody and probably cost them a lot of lives on top of the tremendous profits at stake.
**Sources**
*Liberty & Slavery* by William Cooper
*Road to Disunion* (2 vols) by William Freehling
*The Fiery Trial* by Eric Foner
|
[
"BULLET::::- The South Was a Closed Society: For the 1860 Presidential Election, in 10 of the 11 states that became the Confederate States, Lincoln was not on the ballot, denying him at least the 100,000 votes of those who later went north to join the Union Army, possibly more. Jaffa points out that in the Cooper Union Address, Lincoln concluded that the South would be satisfied only if all anti-slavery sentiment was removed from the state constitutions in the eight free states that had laws preventing free blacks from being kidnapped as slaves. The man accused of being a slave could summon no witnesses, and had no counsel. Jaffa said that \"if the federal commissioner decided he was a slave, he [the commissioner] was paid $10, and if he decided he was a free man, he was paid $5. It's hard to imagine any law passed in either Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia that was more inconsistent with the principles of civil liberty than the Fugitive Slave Act.\"\n",
"In the United States presidential election of 1860 voting was sharply divided, with the south voting for the Southern Democrats and the north for Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party. Lincoln was anti-slavery, did not acknowledge the right to secession, and would not yield federal property in Southern states. Southern secessionists believed Lincoln's election meant long-term doom for their slavery-based agrarian economy and social system.\n",
"Following the splintered 1860 presidential election, it became apparent that much of the South would not abide by the election of Abraham Lincoln. In Missouri, Francis P. Blair, Jr. began consolidating that state's supporters of Lincoln, John Bell, and Stephen A. Douglas into a new political party, the Unconditional Union Party, which would lay aside antebellum partisan interests in favor of a single cause, the preservation of the Union. Blair and his supporters' primary goal was \"to resist the intrigues of the Secessionists, by political action preferably, by force if need were\".\n",
"The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 was an immediate cause of secession of the first 7 Southern states (SC, MS, FL, AL, GA, LA, TX), which formed the Confederacy in February 1861. The statehood of Kansas as a free state and Lincoln's military resistance to the Confederacy led to the secession of 4 more states (VA, NC, TN, AR) after May 1861. Lincoln had been the nominee of the Republican party with an anti-slavery expansion platform, he refused to acknowledge the right to secession, and he would not yield federal property within Southern states. Numerous historians have explored the reasons so many white Southerners adopted secessionism in 1860, after 30 years of disputes between North and South states over protection tariffs, Federal spending, and civil rights of refusing to allow slaves to travel with slaveholder families in some North States. Tariffs had been levied on South imports to protect North industries, taxes were charged on South cotton but not North wool, or 3-to-1 Federal expenditures on North navigation lighthouses versus the South's longer coastline, and a faked slave uprising in Virginia angered many Southerners. Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that secessionists desired independence as necessary for their honor. They could no longer tolerate Northern state attitudes that regarded slave ownership as a great sin and Northern politicians who insisted on stopping the spread of slavery. Avery Craven argues that secessionists believed Lincoln's election meant long-term doom for their vast social system, of thousands of Southerners working with over two million slaves living in private households as nearly half the population of many Southern states in 1860. This situation could not be solved by the democratic process, and it placed \"the great masses of men, North and South, helpless before the drift into war\".\n",
"Following the splintered presidential election of 1860, it became apparent that much of the South would not abide by the election of Abraham Lincoln. In Missouri, Francis P. Blair Jr. began consolidating that state's adherents of Lincoln, John Bell, and Stephen A. Douglas into a new political party, the Unconditional Union Party, which would lay aside antebellum partisan interests in favor of a single cause, the preservation of the Union. Blair and his supporters' primary goal was \"to resist the intrigues of the Secessionists, by political action preferably, by force if need were.\"\n",
"Most Republicans agreed with Lincoln that the North was the aggrieved party, as the Slave Power tightened its grasp on the national government. Throughout the 1850s, Lincoln doubted the prospects of civil war, and his supporters rejected claims that his election would incite secession. Douglas was selected as the candidate of the Northern Democrats. Delegates from eleven slave states walked out of the Democratic convention, disagreeing with Douglas's position on popular sovereignty, and ultimately selected incumbent Vice President John C. Breckinridge as their candidate. A group of former Whigs and Know Nothings formed the Constitutional Union Party and nominated John Bell of Tennessee. Lincoln and Douglas competed for votes in the North, while Bell and Breckinridge primarily found support in the South.\n",
"Following South Carolina's unanimous 1860 secession vote, no other Southern states considered the question until 1861, and when they did none had a unanimous vote. All had residents who cast significant numbers of Unionist votes in either the legislature, conventions, popular referendums, or in all three. Voting to remain in the Union did not necessarily mean that individuals were northern sympathizers. Once hostilities began, many of these who voted to remain in the Union, particularly in the Deep South, accepted the majority decision, and supported the Confederacy.\n"
] |
how does flea medication for pets work?
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The shoulder blade spot-on treatments are absorbed through the skin, go into the blood, and are then ingested by the adult fleas when they bite the animal. The best flea treatments generally have two active ingredients. There is the "adulticide" (e.g., permethrin) which kills the biting adults, and also an insect growth regular (e.g. pyriproxyfen) that suppresses eggs/larvae/pupae. I believe some preparations are meant to be applied to the whole fur, and have a local killing effect.
I have no authority on this matter
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[
"Removing fleas from the pets is not a difficult task considering the advent of products which are designed not only to kill fleas, but also to offer protection from further infestations. Flea-control products are available in once-a-month topicals, dog collars, sprays, dips, powders, shampoos, and injectable and oral products. All these products contain an insecticide as an active ingredient which kills the fleas when coming into contact with them. Fleas absorb the insecticide which either paralyzes them or kills them.\n",
"Contemporary commercial products for the topical treatment of flea infestations on pets contain pesticides such as imidacloprid, permethrin, and (S)-methoprene. All flea-control products are recommended to be used at least half-yearly because the lifecycle of flea and tick can last to up to 6 months, and by using one of the flea and tick control products for so long, the infestation is highly prevented and, in the end, stopped. Although all these products are effective in fighting against flea and tick infestations, they have different active ingredients and, because cats cannot metabolize some of the compounds of the product, care must be taken in their use.\n",
"Flea adults, larvae, or eggs can be controlled with insecticides. Lufenuron is a veterinary preparation (known as Program) that attacks the larval flea's ability to produce chitin, necessary for the adult's hard exoskeleton, but it does not kill fleas. Flea medicines need to be used with care because many of them also affect mammals.\n",
"Flea treatments meant for dogs can be hazardous to cats. Flea and tick ointment is also hazardous to humans; the label of a commercial preparation warns: “First aid: If on skin or clothing, take off contaminated clothing, rinse skin immediately with plenty of water for 15 – 20 minutes; call a poison control center or doctor for treatment advice. . . Although (the product is) applied only between the shoulder blades and at the base of the tail, the dog’s skin and hair oils carry the product over the entire body . . . Wash thoroughly with soap and water after handling . . .”\n",
"Unlike most other flea treatments which are applied topically to the animal's coat, afoxolaner is administered orally in meat-flavoured tablets, and poisons fleas once they start feeding. It is used either alone or as a combination treatment with milbemycin oxime.\n",
"Nitenpyram tablets, brand name Capstar, are used to treat flea infestations in cats and dogs. After oral administration of the tablet the drug is readily and quickly absorbed into the blood. If a flea bites the animal it will ingest with the blood the nitenpyram. The effect of nitenpyram can be observed half an hour after the administration. At this time a high concentration in the plasma can be detected and the first fleas dislodge from the pet host. A study showed that six hours after application the infestation of fleas on decreased by 96.7% for dogs and 95.2% for cats. The adult fleas present on the hosts are severely interrupted, hence, egg production is reduced. Eggs are not directly affected by nitenpyram, only after they come out. Administering nitenpyram might have to be repeated or continued until the pest infestation has subsided. The half life of nitenpyram is around eight hours. Thus, 24 hours after treatment roughly 100% of the adult fleas were killed. Between 24 hours and 48 hours the efficacy is highly decreased and after 72 hours no effect could be shown anymore in studies.\n",
"A very important part of flea prevention is to persist with the same control measures for as long as possible. Though the cleaning process was successful, fleas in incipient stages likely still exist around the house or on the pet. The lifecycle of fleas can take up to six months, so maintaining the prevention measures for as long as half a year is recommended.\n"
] |
how did the gunmen in the slew of mass murders over recent years acquire their guns and would any laws have stopped them?
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Today you can buy guns legally, at a gun store, or illegally, from a criminal in a bad part of town late at night. Changing the laws only impacts the first transaction.
Pot was completely, totally, illegal in all states 20 years ago; and yet we have people running for president that admit they were able to buy it under those strict laws. That's because banning the sale of something only shifts the balance between the two possible types of purchases.
Completely honest, civic minded, law abiding, sane people won't buy a gun from a criminal because they don't want to break the law. None of the people who committed mass murder fit that definition. That's because killing people is also illegal, has been ever since "Thou shalt not kill", it's one law everybody seems to agree on. But some folks just won't obey it.
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[
"As a result of the mass shootings Hungerford massacre in Hungerford, England and Dunblane school massacre in Stirling, Scotland, the United Kingdom enacted tough gun laws and a buyback program to remove specific classes of firearms (The Firearms Amendment Act 1988 limiting rifles and shotguns, and the 1997 Firearms Amendment Acts which restricted or made illegal many handguns) from private ownership. There have been two mass shootings since the laws were restricted, the Cumbria shootings in 2010 which killed 13 people and the Moss Side mass shooting in 2018, in which no-one was killed.\n",
"It is said the cause of the shootings was a single strike worth $93,000 from a particularly rich pocket. After the murders, the mine was covered over and concealed, and the four bodies disappeared without trace.\n",
"Public debate about the killings centred on gun control laws, including public petitions calling for a ban on private ownership of handguns and an official inquiry, which produced the 1996 Cullen Report. In response to this debate, two new Firearms Acts were passed, which outlawed private ownership of most handguns in Great Britain.\n",
"Although the murders took place in close proximity to security forces, they did not arrest anyone nor seize weapons. There was photographic evidence of one of the right-wing terrorists taking part in the shootings, but he was not brought to trial.\n",
"In October 2012, confidential police files on the case were leaked to a French newspaper, showing investigators believed the killings were carried out by \"a lone and psychologically disturbed killer\". One of the reasons given was that the killer used a pre-World War II Luger P06 semi-automatic pistol, a weapon unlikely to be used by a professional assassin.\n",
"The gunman’s first known victims were Marcus and Lance Bullen, a father and son, who were shot dead with a semi-automatic rifle on June 9, while scouting for a fishing location on the banks of the Victoria River. Their burned out vehicle was found after they were reported missing, and their bodies were discovered nearby in poorly disguised shallow graves. Police investigations were unable uncover a motive for the killings, and the killer evaded capture despite roadblocks being set up across the area.\n",
"In explaining the difficulties faced in recovering illegal weapons in the area, Commissioner Ellington noted that many of the thugs who were shooting at members of the security forces were themselves hit from distances of over 300 yards. Thus there would be ample time for some residents to retrieve weapons from the slain gunmen as the members of the security forces themselves would have to proceed with caution before attempting to retrieve those firearms after hitting the gunmen.\n"
] |
During WWII, how did China (and not Japan) end up getting into the Allies?
|
From circa 1925, Japanese political/social culture shifted significantly — away from the democratic experiments of the Taishō era and towards the nationalist, militarist, expansionist and ultimately totalitarian state structure that characterised the Shōwa period.
So, for example: the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 massively reduced personal freedoms and squashed political dissent, and under a series of prime ministers Japanese foreign policy evolves in direct opposition to the Western powers (widely seen as having manipulated, strong-armed and Japan since the end of *[Sakoku](_URL_3_)*.)
By the late 1930s, they had developed the concept of the [Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere](_URL_1_); the idea of a Japanese empire in east Asia as a national right. The idea was that Asia shouldn't be part of a European sphere of influence; they took "Asia for the Asiatics!" as their slogan — and believed that, naturally, Japan should and would be the dominant influence in the region.
The Japanese regime from the late 1920s until 1945 is commonly described as 'fascist', but that's not strictly true. Japanese politics in the post-Meiji era is a case study in syncretism; it simply doesn't fit the conventional Western left/right paradigm. Japanese imperialism is a similar case: it doesn't fit the colonial model of the Western powers, but was undoubtedly influenced by it — it's been described as '[mimetic imperialism](_URL_6_)'.
But fascist or not, Japan identified ideologically more closely with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy because those regimes also saw themselves as natural opponents of and successors to the traditional, liberal-democratic global powers (Britain, France and the United States.) You see that goal explicitly stated in [the text of the Tripartite Pact](_URL_2_) (the 1940 military alliance between Japan, Germany and Italy):
> The governments of Germany, Italy and Japan, considering it as a condition precedent of any lasting peace that all nations of the world be given each its own proper place, have decided to stand by and co-operate with one another in regard to their efforts in greater East Asia and regions of Europe respectively **wherein it is their prime purpose to establish and maintain a new order of things** calculated to promote the mutual prosperity and welfare of the peoples concerned.
>
> [...]
>
> Accordingly, the governments of Germany, Italy and Japan have agreed as follows:
>
> ARTICLE ONE
>
> Japan recognizes and respects the leadership of Germany and Italy in establishment of a new order in Europe.
>
> ARTICLE TWO
>
> Germany and Italy recognize and respect the leadership of Japan in the establishment of a new order in greater East Asia.
In the late 1930s, Japan saw opportunities for expansion in east Asia: they invaded China in 1937 (the [Second Sino-Japanese War](_URL_7_)) — that, incidentally, is in large part why China eventually became one of the Allied powers. Their invasions of Western territories in Asia — Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, French Indochina, and so on — had dual motives: to secure strategic resources (oil and rubber, in particular) and to break Western colonial power in the Far East.
Japan came into conflict with the US ultimately as a result of [a US-led oil embargo](_URL_4_) that cut off almost 90% of Japan's oil imports, leaving them with just three years of petroleum reserves. The attack on Pearl Harbor was in large part an effort to knock out America's strategic influence in the Pacific.
A couple of good overview from the historiography on Shōwa-era Japanese foreign policy and imperialism:
* W. G. Beasley, *[Japanese Imperialism, 1894-1945](_URL_5_)* (1987)
* R. Myers & M. Pettie, eds., *[The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945](_URL_0_)* (1984)
There's plenty more that's worth reading — the historiography on Japan is huge. But those two are a good starting point.
|
[
"In September 1940, Japan decided to cut China's only land line to the outside world by seizing French Indochina, which was controlled at the time by Vichy France. Japanese forces broke their agreement with the Vichy administration and fighting broke out, ending in a Japanese victory. On 27 September Japan signed a military alliance with Germany and Italy, becoming one of the three main Axis Powers. In practice, there was little coordination between Japan and Germany until 1944, by which time the US was deciphering their secret diplomatic correspondence.\n",
"By April 1945, China had already been at war with Japan for more than seven years. Both nations were exhausted by years of battles, bombings and blockades. After Japanese victories in Operation Ichi-Go, Japan was losing the battle in Burma and facing constant attacks from Chinese Nationalist forces and Communist guerrillas in the countryside. The Imperial Japanese Army began preparations for the Battle of West Hunan in March 1945. The Japanese mobilized 34th, 47th, 64th, 68th and 116th Divisions, as well as the 86th Independent Brigade, for a total of 80,000 men to seize Chinese airfields and secure railroads in West Hunan by early April. In response, the Chinese National Military Council dispatched the 4th Front Army and the 10th and 27th Army Groups with He Yingqin as commander-in-chief. At the same time, it airlifted the entire Chinese New 6th Corps, an American-equipped corps and veterans of the Burma Expeditionary Force, from Kunming to Zhijiang. Chinese forces totaled 110,000 men in 20 divisions. They were supported by about 400 aircraft from Chinese and American air forces. Chinese forces achieved a decisive victory and launched a large counterattack in this campaign. Concurrently, the Chinese managed to repel a Japanese offensive in Henan and Hubei. Afterwards, Chinese forces retook Hunan and Hubei provinces in South China. Chinese launched a counter offensive to retake Guangxi which was the last major Japanese stronghold in South China. In August 1945, Chinese forces successfully retook Guangxi.\n",
"Japan had conquered all of Manchuria and most of China by 1939 in the Second Sino-Japanese War, but the Allies refused to recognize the conquests. Japan joined the Axis with Germany, but shared little information. Japan depended on imports from the Allies for 90% of its oil, and the cutoff of oil shipments in mid-1941 left Japan with supplies for only a year or two of serious combat by its warships and warplanes unless it came to terms regarding China, or seized oil fields controlled by Britain and the Netherlands. The latter course meant war, and was urged by army officials who had been bloodied in border conflicts and were reluctant to engage the Soviets. Some admirals and many civilians, including Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro, believed that a war with the U.S. would end in defeat. The alternative was loss of honor and power. Diplomats proposed political compromises in the form of the \"Amau Doctrine\", dubbed the \"Japanese Monroe Doctrine\" which would have given the Japanese free rein with regard to China. These proposals were rejected by the U.S.; the Japanese Army now demanded a military solution.\n",
"In 1931, the Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria and created the puppet state of Manchukuo (1932), which signalled the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War. In 1937, a month after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the Soviet Union established a non-aggression pact with the Republic of China. During the World War II-period, the two countries suffered more losses than any other country, with China (in the Second Sino-Japanese war) losing over 35 million and the Soviet Union 27 million people.\n",
"Japan joined the Allies of the First World War in order to make territorial gains. Together, with the British Empire, it divided up Germany's territories scattered in the Pacific and on the China coast; they did not amount to very much. The other Allies pushed back hard against Japan's efforts to dominate China through the Twenty-One Demands of 1915. Its occupation of Siberia proved unproductive. Japan's wartime diplomacy and limited military action had produced few results, and at the Paris Versailles peace conference. At the end of the war, Japan was frustrated in its ambitions. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, its demands for racial parity, and an increasing diplomatic isolation. The 1902 alliance with Britain was not renewed in 1922 because of heavy pressure on Britain from Canada and the United States. In the 1920s Japanese diplomacy was rooted in an largely liberal democratic political system, and favoured internationalism. By 1930, however, Japan was rapidly reversing itself, rejecting democracy at home, as the Army seized more and more power, and rejecting internationalism and liberalism. By the late 1930s it had joined the Axis military alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.\n",
"During World War II, China was a battlefield with three opposing armies; the government, or Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, the Communists under Mao Zedong, and the Japanese. When Japan surrendered in 1945, over 630,000 Japanese and Korean military personnel and civilians were still in China, and in need of repatriation. Since the Chinese government was not up to the task, President Harry Truman sent over 50,000 United States Marines of the III Amphibious Corps (IIIAC) and the 7th Fleet to northern China with orders to accept the surrender of the Japanese and their Korean former subjects, repatriate them, and help the Nationalists reassert their control over areas previously held by the Japanese. The Marines were not to take sides in the fighting, and were only allowed to engage in combat if fired upon first. Major General Keller E. Rockey, IIIAC, was placed in command of the operation, and Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer was in command of the China Theater.\n",
"By 1939, the Japanese war effort had become a stalemate. The Japanese army had seized most of the vital cities in China, including Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, and Wuhan. The Nationalists and the Communists, however, fought on from Chongqing and Yenan, respectively.\n"
] |
circuit boards
|
You probably mean Printed Circuit Boards (PCB's)? They form a firm structure to hold electric components an replace loose wires by having one or more layers of copper that are removed except from small connecting 'paths' that are actually needed to connect the electric components.
|
[
"A distribution board (also known as panelboard, breaker panel, or electric panel) is a component of an electricity supply system that divides an electrical power feed into subsidiary circuits, while providing a protective fuse or circuit breaker for each circuit in a common enclosure. Normally, a main switch, and in recent boards, one or more residual-current devices (RCD) or residual current breakers with overcurrent protection (RCBO), are also incorporated.\n",
"An electric switchboard is a device that directs electricity from one or more sources of supply to several smaller regions of usage. It is an assembly of one or more panels, each of which contains switches that allow electricity to be redirected. A switchboard is divided into different interconnected sections, generally consisting of a main section and a distribution section. These two sections are sometimes replaced by a combination section, which is a section that can fulfill the roles of both aforementioned sections. Switchboards can also sometimes come with an auxiliary section that is used to house devices that cannot be housed in the same section as other devices. \n",
"The U.S. National Electrical Code (NEC) defines a switchboard as \"a large single panel, frame, or assembly of panels on which are mounted, on the face, back, or both, switches, over-current and other protective devices, buses, and usually instruments\". The role of a switchboard is to allow the division of the current supplied to the switchboard into smaller currents for further distribution and to provide switching, current protection and (possibly) metering for those various currents. In general, switchboards may distribute power to transformers, panelboards, control equipment, and, ultimately, to individual system loads.\n",
"In electronic systems, printed circuit boards are made from epoxy plastic and fibreglass. The nonconductive boards support layers of copper foil conductors. In electronic devices, the tiny and delicate active components are embedded within nonconductive epoxy or phenolic plastics, or within baked glass or ceramic coatings.\n",
"Equivalent circuits can be used to electrically describe and model either a) continuous materials or biological systems in which current does not actually flow in defined circuits, or, b) distributed reactances, such as found in electrical lines or windings, that do not represent actual discrete components. For example, a cell membrane can be modelled as a capacitance (i.e. the lipid bilayer) in parallel with resistance-DC voltage source combinations (i.e. ion channels powered by an ion gradient across the membrane).\n",
"The circuitboard substrates are usually dielectric composite materials. The composites contain a matrix (usually an epoxy resin) and a reinforcement (usually a woven, sometimes nonwoven, glass fibers, sometimes even paper), and in some cases a filler is added to the resin (e.g. ceramics; titanate ceramics can be used to increase the dielectric constant).\n",
"A plugboard, or control panel (the term used depended on the application area), is an array of jacks, or sockets (often called hubs), into which patch cords can be inserted to complete an electrical circuit. Control panels were used to direct the operation of some unit record equipment. Plugboards were used on some s, and some early computers.\n"
] |
why can't we help fight global warming by painting things like cars, roofs, roads, etc. white? wouldn't it reflect sunlight just like the arctic snow does?
|
It [might not](_URL_0_) be as helpful as we'd like to think.
> Painting roofs white has been—like changing lightbulbs—one of the well-cited easy ways out of climate change. By reflecting more light and heat back to the atmosphere, a white roof should act like a natural anti-warming device, while also reducing your energy costs by keeping your house cool in the summer. Turns out, painting your roof white would be simply a massive waste of white paint.
> As it is, Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford and his colleague, research student John Ten Hoeve, found in a new paper in the Journal of Climate that while white surfaces cooled houses, they also reduced cloudiness, allowing more sunlight to reach the ground. That conclusion complements a recent study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research that found that the positive effect of white roofs in the summer would be offset by a negative effect in the winter.
> "There does not seem to be a benefit from investing in white roofs," says Jacobson. "The most important thing is to reduce emissions of the pollutants that contribute to global warming."
> Solar panels are a better idea than white paint, he says. "The better thing to do is to put a solar panel on the roof because that not only cools the house by absorbing the sunlight to make electricity. It also offsets fossil fuel generation at power plants."
|
[
"A 2011 study by researchers at Stanford University suggested that although reflective roofs decrease temperatures in buildings and mitigate the \"urban heat island effect\", they may actually increase global temperature. The study noted that it did not account for the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that results from building energy conservation (annual cooling energy savings less annual heating energy penalty) associated with cool roofs (meaning that one will need to use more energy to heat the living space due to reduction in heat from sunlight in winter.) However, this applies only to those areas with low winter temperatures – not tropical climates. Also, homes in areas receiving snow in winter months are unlikely to receive significantly more heat from darker roofs, as they will be snow-covered most of the winter. A response paper titled \"Cool Roofs and Global Cooling,\" by researchers in the Heat Island Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, raised additional concerns about the validity of these findings, citing the uncertainty acknowledged by the authors, statistically insignificant numerical results, and insufficient granularity in analysis of local contributions to global feedbacks.\n",
"After Energy Secretary Steven Chu recommended painting roofs and roads white in order to reflect sunlight back into space and therefore reduce global warming, AEI's magazine \"The American\" endorsed the idea. It also stated that \"ultimately we need to look more broadly at creative ways of reducing the harmful effects of climate change in the long run.\" \"The American\"'s editor-in-chief and fellow Nick Schulz endorsed a carbon tax over a cap and trade program in the Christian Science Monitor on February 13, 2009. He stated that it \"would create a market price for carbon emissions and lead to emissions reductions or new technologies that cut greenhouse gases.\"\n",
"If all urban, flat roofs in warm climates were whitened, the resulting 10% increase in global reflectivity would offset the warming effect of 24 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, or equivalent to taking 300 million cars off the road for 20 years. This is because a white roof will offset 10 tons of carbon dioxide over its 20-year lifetime. In a real-world 2008 case study of large-scale cooling from increased reflectivity, it was found that the Province of Almeria, Southern Spain, has cooled 1.6 °C over a period of 20 years compared to surrounding regions, as a result of polythene-covered greenhouses being installed over a vast area that was previously open desert. In the summer the farmers whitewash these roofs to cool their plants down.\n",
"Solar reflective cars or cool cars reflect more sunlight than dark cars, reducing the amount of heat that is transmitted into the car’s interior. Therefore, it helps decrease the need for air conditioning, fuel consumption, and emissions of greenhouse gases and urban air pollutants.\n",
"BULLET::::- Warming the Earth by absorbing a high percentage of sunlight due to the low reflectivity of a forest's dark surfaces. This warming effect, or reduced albedo, is large where evergreen forests, which have very low reflectivity, shade snow cover, which is highly reflective.\n",
"Green building programs advocate the use of cool roofing to mitigate the urban heat island effect and the resulting poorer air quality (in the form of smog) the effect causes. By reflecting sunlight, light-colored roofs minimize the temperature rise and reduce cooling energy use and smog formation. A study by LBNL showed that, if strategies to mitigate this effect, including cool roofs, were widely adopted, the Greater Toronto metropolitan area could save more than $11 million annually on energy costs.\n",
"Environmental threats may include, but are not limited to rain, snow, acid rain, and earthquakes as well as fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity. They may also be exposed to excessive amounts of light as well as human intervention. Excessive rain and moisture can also lead to mold growth. Daily exposure to ultraviolet, visible, and infrared (IR) radiation has a detrimental effect on painted sculptures or those with organic or inorganic coatings. Excessive light exposure may cause color alterations and loss as well as structural breakdowns in the paint and coatings.\n"
] |
supply side economics. is it the same as trickle-down? if not, how's it different?
|
trickle down is tax rich people less so they will spend more money on businesses, and thus that money will grow the economy. That works if people like investing more then they like just keeping money.
Supply side is invest in/tax less factories and companies that produce things. The idea being that it will encourage companies to spend more money. To me this makes more sense because they are beholden to their stockholders so growth is their #1 priority.
But ya its giving money to companies to produce things (supply side) vs giving money to rich people to improve companies/businesses.
|
[
"Traditional supply-side economics suggests that when business is less hampered by government controls or high taxation, it produces more economic benefits for the middle class in the form of jobs and cheaper goods. \"Trickle-down economics\" is a pejorative term for a policy of cutting taxes on wealthy in an attempt to stimulate overall economic activity. The extent to which any government has ever made \"trickle-down\" official policy is controversial. Under president Reagan, the US lowered the maximum tax rate, which affected the highest income earners, from 70% to 28%. Between 2001 and 2003, the Bush administration lowered the top marginal tax rate from 39.6% to 35%.\n",
"Economist Thomas Sowell has written extensively on trickle-down economics and loathes its characterization, citing that supply-side economics has never claimed to work in a \"trickle-down\" fashion. Rather, the economic theory of reducing marginal tax rates works in precisely the opposite direction: \"Workers are always paid first and then profits flow upward later – if at all.\"\n",
"Trickle-down economics, also called trickle-down theory, refers to the economic proposition that taxes on businesses and the wealthy in society should be reduced as a means to stimulate business investment in the short term and benefit society at large in the long term. In recent history, the term has been used by critics of supply-side economic policies, such as \"Reaganomics.\" Whereas general supply-side theory favors lowering taxes overall, trickle-down theory more specifically targets taxes on the upper end of the economic spectrum.\n",
"Supply-side economics is a school of macroeconomic thought that argues that overall economic well-being is maximized by lowering the barriers to producing goods and services (the \"Supply Side\" of the economy). By lowering such barriers, consumers are thought to benefit from a greater supply of goods and services at lower prices. Typical supply-side policy would advocate generally lower income tax and capital gains tax rates (to increase the supply of labor and capital), smaller government and a lower regulatory burden on enterprises (to lower costs). Although tax policy is often mentioned in relation to supply-side economics, supply-side economists are concerned with all impediments to the supply of goods and services and not just taxation.\n",
"Supply-side economics is a macroeconomic theory arguing that economic growth can be most effectively created by lowering taxes and decreasing regulation, by which it is directly opposed to demand-side economics. According to supply-side economics, consumers will then benefit from a greater supply of goods and services at lower prices and employment will increase.\n",
"The term \"trickle-down\" originated as a joke by humorist Will Rogers and today is often used to criticize economic policies which favor the wealthy or privileged while being framed as good for the average citizen. David Stockman, who as Ronald Reagan's budget director championed Reagan's tax cuts at first, later became critical of them and told journalist William Greider that \"supply-side economics\" is the trickle-down idea: \n",
"Supply-side economics is a school of macroeconomic thought that argues that economic growth can be most effectively created by lowering barriers for people to produce (supply) goods and services, such as adjusting income tax and capital gains tax rates and by allowing greater flexibility by reducing regulation. Consumers will then benefit from a greater supply of goods and services at lower prices.\n"
] |
What happens physically when crossing the Termination Shock?
|
It's more correct to say that the termination shock is the point where the solar wind velocity slows down to subsonic speeds due to interactions with the interplanetary medium. The interplanetary medium, while extremely sparse, has a constant pressure, whereas the pressure of the solar wind decreases according to inverse-square law. Now, the speed of sound in a medium is dependent on its pressure and density. The speed of sound in the ISM is around 100km/h, whereas the initial solar wind velocity is ~400km/h. However, its pressure decreases, and will continue to decrease until the point where the solar wind cannot maintain a supersonic flow relative to the speed of sound in an ISM, and a shockwave forms.
Yes, there is localized heating and differences in particle flows, but... there's also a shockwave and corresponding fluid flow and heating effects when a supersonic jet airliner exceeds the speed of sound in air. The mechanism is extremely similar, with the exception that the ISM (and the solar wind at the termination shock) is *extremely* sparse. Were you there it would be impossible for you to notice - we need sensitive magnetometers and particle counters to see details in the edge of the heliosphere.
For reference, Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock on December 16th, 2004. Here are some plots from the CRS (Cosmic Ray Subsystem) particle detector, showing changes and increases in detected particle counts at the transition point:
_URL_3_
And some more details showing a linear increase in particle count after crossing the termination shock:
_URL_2_
And more detailed plots of CRS fluxes for the low-energy particle telescope:
_URL_0_
And the same for the low-energy and ion detectors on the LECP (Low Energy Charged Particles) instrument:
_URL_1_
As can be seen, this is a fairly subtle effect. It's even more subtle for the magnetometer data (which I couldn't get plots of... curse you cohoweb! :P) where the solar magnetic field is so weak that we're almost at the detection limits of the Voyager magnetometers. (In theory (and in practise, it turns out! though unlike theory, the galactic magnetic field is not flowing in the opposite direction to the solar one, but rather in the same direction), at the termination shock the solar magnetic field should form "bubbles" and the interstellar magnetic field's interactions with it should be detectable).
|
[
"A break junction is an electronic device which consists of two metal wires separated by a very thin gap, on the order of the inter-atomic spacing (less than a nanometer). This can be done by physically pulling the wires apart or through chemical etching or electromigration. As the wire breaks, the separation between the electrodes can be indirectly controlled by monitoring the electrical resistance of the junction.\n",
"The termination shock is the point in the heliosphere where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed (relative to the Sun) because of interactions with the local interstellar medium. This causes compression, heating, and a change in the magnetic field. In the Solar System, the termination shock is believed to be 75 to 90 astronomical units from the Sun. In 2004, \"Voyager 1\" crossed the Sun's termination shock, followed by \"Voyager 2\" in 2007.\n",
"The twin shocks were separated by less than fifteen minutes with the first event occurring at 19:32 and the second event at 19:43 hours. The initial shock was estimated to measure ( = 5.3) and the second event was rated ( = 5.5).\n",
"The explosive disintegration arises due to multiple crack bifurcation events when the tail is cut – a single crack is accelerated in the tensile residual stress field in the center of the tail and bifurcates after it reaches a critical velocity of . Given these high speeds, the disintegration process due to crack bifurcation can only be inferred by looking into the tail and employing high speed imaging techniques. This is perhaps why this curious property of the drops remained unexplained for centuries.\n",
"\"Broken Steel\" alters the ending of the original \"Fallout 3\" to allow continued play after the end of the main quest line. When the player reaches the final point of the quest \"Take it Back!\", new options are given to allow specific followers to enter the reactor, but the original options still remain viable. Regardless of what is chosen, however, the player will wake up two weeks later at the Citadel (unless they allow the Purifier to explode, which automatically ends the game), having been knocked unconscious by an unknown radiation spike. Sarah Lyons will also be in a coma, unless she activated the purifier in which case she will have died.\n",
"Although electromigration damage ultimately results in failure of the affected IC, the first symptoms are intermittent glitches, and are quite challenging to diagnose. As some interconnects fail before others, the circuit exhibits seemingly random errors, which may be indistinguishable from other failure mechanisms (such as electrostatic discharge damage). In a laboratory setting, electromigration failure is readily imaged with an electron microscope, as interconnect erosion leaves telltale visual markers on the metal layers of the IC.\n",
"BULLET::::- On July 7, 2014, 22 guests were stranded for over two hours after a tree branch fell onto the coaster track. Four of the 22 guests were injured, but none serious enough to require a hospital visit.\n"
] |
why do abuse victims frequently become abusers themselves?
|
> Why do abuse victims frequently become abusers themselves?
They don't BUT many abusers were abused. It is an important distinction. Most abuse victims do not become abusers but many of those who are abusers were abused.
|
[
"Many abusers are able to control their victims in a manipulative manner, utilizing methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the abuser, rather than to force them to do something they do not wish to do. Simon argues that because aggression in abusive relationships can be carried out subtly and covertly through various manipulation and control tactics, victims often don't perceive the true nature of the relationship until conditions worsen considerably.\n",
"Victims of emotional abuse may react by distancing themselves from the abuser, internalizing the abusive words, or fighting back by insulting the abuser. Emotional abuse can result in abnormal or disrupted attachment development, a tendency for victims to blame themselves (self-blame) for the abuse, learned helplessness, and overly passive behavior.\n",
"Victims of manipulation and abuse frequently feel responsible for causing negative feelings in the manipulator/abuser towards them and the resultant anxiety in themselves. This self-blame often becomes a major feature of victim status.\n",
"An abuser's ultimate goal is to make their victim second-guess their every choice and question their sanity, making them more dependent on the abuser. A tactic which further degrades a target's self-esteem is for the abuser to ignore, then attend to, then ignore the victim again, so that the victim lowers their personal bar for what constitutes affection and perceives themselves as less worthy of affection.\n",
"Abusers may aim to avoid household chores or exercise total control of family finances. Abusers can be very manipulative, often recruiting friends, law officers and court officials, even the victim's family to their side, while shifting blame to the victim.\n",
"Meanwhile, victims of relationship abuse share many traits as well, including: physical signs of injury, missing time at work or school, slipping performance at work or school, changes in mood or personality, increased use of drugs or alcohol, and increasing isolation from friends and family. Victims may blame themselves for any abuse that occurs or may minimize the severity of the crime. This often leads to victims choosing to stay in abusive relationships.\n",
"Abusers may aim to avoid household chores or exercise total control of family finances. Abusers can be very manipulative, often recruiting friends, law officers and court officials, and even the victim's family to their side, while shifting blame to the victim.\n"
] |
How rapidly would a flamethrower deplete the oxygen in an enclosed space?
|
3000 cubic feet of air would contain about 1520 moles of oxygen. Wikipedia says that modern flamethrowers use propane.
Propane combusts as follows:
C3H8 + 5 O2 - > 3 CO2 + 4 H2O
So 1520 moles of oxygen could combust 304 moles of propane. 304 moles of propane has a mass of 13.4 kg.
Unfortunately, i'm unable to find out how much fuel a flamethower consumes, so anything beyond this point is speculation.
However, let's assume that the flamethrower uses 500 grams of propane per minute, you'd deplete all the oxygen in the room in about 27 minutes. However you'd die once the carbon dioxide levels reach 10%. Not to mention how hot it'd get from using a flame thrower in such a small space.
tl;dr you'd die long before you'd deplete all the oxygen.
|
[
"The fuel supply to the fire was so rich that some of the combustibles were unable to find oxygen inside the tunnel with which to burn; they were instead ejected from vent shafts 8 and 9 as fuel-rich gases that burst into flame when they encountered oxygen in the air outside. At the height of the fire, pillars of flame approximately high rose from the shaft outlets on the hillside above.\n",
"Adiabatic heating from the sudden release of pressurized oxygen into the hose was another possible source of ignition, but ruled out. Window grease in an oxygen-rich environment was another source of ignition that was investigated, but testing determined that the oxygen level did not impact the flashpoint, which was over 200°F above the maximum theoretical temperature in that part of the cockpit.\n",
"In 2015, researchers from George Mason University announced that high volume sound with low bass frequencies in the 30 to 60 hertz range drives oxygen away from the combustion surface, extinguishing the fire, a principle was previously tested by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). One proposed application is to extinguish fires in outer space, with none of the clean-up required for mass-based systems.\n",
"BULLET::::- Thornton's rule (1917) : Each kilogram of oxygen used in the combustion of common organic materials results in release of 13.1 MJ of energy. This rule states that the amount of heat released during the consumption of a given quantity of oxygen is relatively constant for most combustibles. This means that the heat released per unit of oxygen consumed is about the same for wood or plastic. In a ventilation-controlled fire, where the amount of air entering through openings in a room governs the fire, the heat release rate in the room cannot exceed what the available air supply will support.\n",
"A flame arrester (also called a deflagration arrester) functions by absorbing the heat from a flame front traveling at sub-sonic velocities, thus dropping the burning gas/air mixture below its auto-ignition temperature: consequently, the flame cannot survive. The heat is absorbed through channels (passages) designed into an element. These channels are chosen and measured as the mesg (Maximum Experimental Safe Gap) of the gas for a particular installation.\n",
"With air/fuel torches, since air contains about 21% oxygen, a very large ratio of air to fuel must be used to obtain the maximum flame temperature with air. If the propane does not receive enough oxygen, some of the carbon from the propane is left unburned. An example of incomplete combustion that uses 1 mole of propane for every 4 moles of oxygen:\n",
"Iron pentacarbonyl has been found to be a strong flame speed inhibitor in oxygen based flames. A few hundred ppm of iron pentacarbonyl are known to reduce the flame speed of stoichiometric methane–air flame by almost 50%. However due to its toxic nature it has not been used widely as a flame retardant.\n"
] |
ignoring religious reasons, what benefit does removing birth control and making abortions illegal serve to the usa? i'm struggling in understanding the politics behind it besides catering to "public opinion." (fyi liberal bay area native just trying to understand)
|
Having a "moral" people can be useful in foreign relations with other countries.
I thought for a solid minute. All I could come up with.
|
[
"Shirley Chisholm spoke to the debate from a political perspective in 1970. Chisholm described the decriminalization of abortions as a necessary step toward the safety of women. \"Experience shows that pregnant women who feel that they have compelling reasons for not having a baby, or another baby, will break the law and even worse, risk injury or death if they must get one. Abortions will not be stopped.\"\n",
"Due to the religious views on abortion, society stigmatizes women who receive abortions. Many women account that they are stuck deciding between whether to have an abortion or have a child outside of marriage, both of which cause them to be ostracized from society. Some reasons that lead women to pursue abortions to avoid being ostracized include drug and/or alcohol addicted husbands, poverty, and being single. Due to the constraints that the government places on access to abortions, women must pursue abortion through illegal means to avoid being shunned by their families or punished criminally. The culture in Afghanistan, developed both from the government and religion, makes women believe that it is their job to have children. This social role for women does not take into account that Afghanistan has an extremely high birthrate, ranked 12th in the world, with little access to education on family planning and contraceptive usage.\n",
"c) Women are given the right to choose to get an abortion, and the Education Laws were a way of avoiding this practice by not exposing minors to advertisement of contraceptives which promotes promiscuous sex.\n",
"Accesses to abortion is not only a question of legality, but also an issue of overcoming de \"facto barriers\", such as conscientious objections from medical stuff, high prices, lack of knowledge about the law, lack of access to medical care (especially in rural areas). The \"de facto\" inability of women to access abortion even in countries where it is legal is highly controversial because it results in a situation where women have rights only on paper not in practice; the UN in its 2017 resolution on \"Intensification of efforts to prevent and eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls: domestic violence\" urged states to guarantee access to \"safe abortion where such services are permitted by national law\".\n",
"For the purpose of passing restrictive laws to protect women from unwanted and/or dangerous abortions, it does not matter if people have a pro-life view. The ambivalent majority of people who are willing to tolerate abortion in \"some cases\" are very likely to support informed consent legislation and abortion clinic regulations, for example, because these proposals are consistent with their desire to protect women. In some cases, it is not even necessary to convince people of abortion's dangers. It is sufficient to simply raise enough doubts about abortion that they will refuse to actively oppose the proposed anti-abortion initiative. In other words, if we can convince many of those who do not see abortion to be a \"serious moral evil\" that they should support anti-abortion policies that protect women and reduce abortion rates, that is a sufficiently good end to justify NRS efforts. Converting these people to a pro-life view, where they respect life rather than simply fear abortion, is a second step. The latter is another good goal, but it is not necessary to the accomplishment of other good goals, such as the passage of laws that protect women from dangerous abortions and thereby dramatically reduce abortion rates.\n",
"Today, most abortions happen \"in unsafe and hazardous circumstances\" because the penalties for receiving or giving an abortion can still be quite strict. Common reasons for getting an abortion range from fertility concerns (i. e., already having many children), possible or existing health complications, and socio-economic impediments to pregnancy, such as not being able to support another child. In a nation whose economy depends almost solely on oil, with 50% of revenue coming from those earnings, the distribution of wealth can be strained, and for many families it is not feasible to have many children despite the government's use of oil money to fund statewide welfare systems. With abortion counting for 5% of maternal deaths by some estimates, it is evident that illegal and unsupervised practice of the procedure does occur, and furthermore that it can be quite dangerous to the mother; and with 34% of surveyed pregnant Iranian women in one study reporting their pregnancies as \"unintended\", it has been noted that the danger has not disappeared in the shift from firm illegality and condemnation of abortion in Iran to its place in a current legal limbo.\n",
"Women often pursue abortions through illegal means because of the few cases that allow abortions legally. They believe it is necessary in order to avoid shame from their husbands, families, and society. This leads women to having to fund the abortion themselves, which can be difficult because of the social norm that implies that it is women's job to have children and thus they don't have jobs outside of taking care of the house and the family. Many women would prefer not to have children, but lack knowledge on how to limit the number of children they have outside of abortion. When pursuing abortions, they many times need to use uneducated midwives who don't know how to properly perform the procedure or deal with complications. Another option they have is to use expensive private clinics, which leads to the issue of funding the expenditure. Since women are typically unemployed, rounding up the funds for an abortion can be difficult. The price of an abortion has decreased from 250,000 Afghanis (US$3,500) to 17,500 Afghanis (US$250). This decrease has been seen because of the increasing need of abortions. But the price is still 15,000 Afghani (US$150) higher than the average price of an abortion in the United States, where abortions are legal and generally publicly accepted.\n"
] |
are you able to split a different type of atom in an atomic bomb to have the explosion but without radiation?
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Only a small number of specific types of atoms (isotopes) can be used in an atomic (fission) bomb. This is because they need to have several properties:
* they need to be easily split by the kinds of neutrons that are released with fission (splitting) happens
* they need to release neutrons when they fission (split)
* they need to be producible in large quantities
The first two are important because these work by chain reactions — the splitting of one atom releases neutrons that split two more atoms that release neutrons that split more atoms and so on.
Only three types of atoms hit all three of those points: U-235 (enriched uranium), Pu-239 (plutonium), and U-233 (another type of uranium that can be made in a reactor). There are a few other obscure elements that can do the first two but are hard to produce.
The radioactivity produces is a by-product of the splitting itself. Splitting is a violent act for an atom. It releases a lot of energy and some of that energy comes in the form of immediate gamma rays and neutrons. The two "chunks" of the atom that are left over after splitting are always misshapen and radioactive as well, and these are what are responsible for the contaminating radiation you get from nuclear explosions.
> If you were to use a different atom, the explosion would be a lot smaller. Right?
No. The explosion size mostly has to do with how many of those atoms are split, not what type of atom they are.
|
[
"Atomic bombs are based on the theory of nuclear fission, that when a large atom splits, it releases a massive amount of energy. Thermonuclear weapons, (colloquially known as \"hydrogen bombs\") use the energy from an initial fission explosion to create an even more powerful fusion explosion.\n",
"BULLET::::- Involve low atomic number (\"Z\") nuclei: This is because the electrostatic repulsion that must be overcome before the nuclei are close enough to fuse is directly related to the number of protons it contains - its atomic number.\n",
"There are two parts to a typical hydrogen bomb, a plutonium-based atomic bomb known as the \"primary\", and a cylindrical arrangement of fusion fuels known as the \"secondary\". The primary releases significant amounts of x-rays, which are trapped within the bomb casing and heat and compress the secondary until it undergoes fusion. As a fission device, the primary releases a significant amount of radioactive material, whereas the secondary releases primarily neutrons which are stopped by the ground. Nuckolls began work on weapon designs that minimized the amount of fission and maximized the fusion, in order to reduce the radioactive byproducts of peaceful explosions. It was this work that won him the Lawrence Award.\n",
"Fusion-boosted fission bombs can also be made immune to neutron radiation from nearby nuclear explosions, which can cause other designs to predetonate, blowing themselves apart without achieving a high yield.\n",
"Salted versions of both fission and fusion weapons can be made by surrounding the core of the explosive device with a material containing an element that can be converted to a highly radioactive isotope by neutron bombardment. When the bomb explodes, the element absorbs neutrons released by the nuclear reaction, converting it to its radioactive form. The explosion scatters the resulting radioactive material over a wide area, leaving it uninhabitable far longer than an area affected by typical nuclear weapons. In a salted hydrogen bomb, the radiation case around the fusion fuel, which normally is made of some fissionable element, is replaced with a metallic salting element. Salted fission bombs can be made by replacing the neutron reflector between the fissionable core and the explosive layer with a metallic element. The energy yield from a salted weapon is usually lower than from an ordinary weapon of similar size as a consequence of these changes.\n",
"Only Germany, the US and Russia may research the atomic bomb, and this takes several stages, including controlled reaction and either plutonium production or uranium separation. Success creates a bomb 2-6 turns later, and another every 2 turns thereafter. An atomic bomb may be delivered by bomber, or by rocket or by a German submarine (for either of which a very high research result is needed). An atomic attack on an objective does at least 25 BRPs damage; under some circumstances tactical attacks, where the bomb is deemed to be used on the ground in a battle, may also be made.\n",
"There are two parts to a typical hydrogen bomb, a plutonium-based atomic bomb known as the \"primary\", and a cylindrical arrangement of fusion fuels known as the \"secondary\". The primary releases significant amounts of x-rays, which are trapped within the bomb casing and heat and compress the secondary until it undergoes ignition. The secondary consists of lithium deuteride fuel, which requires an external neutron source to begin the reaction. This is normally in the form of a D-T \"spark plug\" in the center of the fuel. Nuckolls's idea was to explore how small the secondary could be made, and what effects this would have on the energy needed from the primary to cause ignition. The simplest change is to replace the LiD fuel with D-T gas, essentially making the spark plug the entire secondary. At that point there is no theoretical smallest size - as the secondary got smaller, so did the amount of energy needed to reach ignition. At the milligram level, the energy levels started to approach those available through several known devices.\n"
] |
what is the point of places like puerto rico, usvi, etc , being "us territories"?
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They are covered by US federal law, and people born there are considered US citizens (some exceptions in the case of Somoa). Basically, the individuals have most of the same rights as any other citizen in the US, but they have limited power in congress. If they chose to do so, the territories can go through a process to apply for statehood.
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[
"Puerto Rico is an organized unincorporated U.S. territory which has been given internal self-governing powers which are referred to as \"Commonwealth\" status. (The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, located in the western Pacific Ocean, has a similar delegation of self-government powers by the United States.) Puerto Rico has more latitude over its internal affairs than the U.S. territories of Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, or American Samoa.\n",
"Two U.S. territories are also designated as commonwealths: Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. When used in connection with areas under U.S. sovereignty that are not states, the term broadly describes an area that is self-governing under a constitution of its own adoption and whose right of self-government will not be unilaterally withdrawn by the United States Congress.\n",
"The U.S. territories of the Northern Marianas and Puerto Rico are also referred to as commonwealths. This designation does have a legal status different from that of the 50 states. Both of these commonwealths are unincorporated territories of the United States.\n",
"Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are officially territories of the United States, but are sometimes referred to as \"protectorates\" of the United States. They are self governing territories subject to Congress plenary powers over the territories.\n",
"While territories such as Guam, the United States Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa and Puerto Rico remain under U.S. control, the U.S. allowed many of its overseas territories or occupations to gain independence after World War II. Examples include the Philippines (1946), the Panama canal zone (1979), Palau (1981), the Federated States of Micronesia (1986) and the Marshall Islands (1986). Most of them still have U.S. bases within their territories. In the case of Okinawa, which came under U.S. administration after the Battle of Okinawa during the Second World War, this happened despite local popular opinion. In 2003, a Department of Defense distribution found the United States had bases in over 36 countries worldwide, including the Camp Bondsteel base in the disputed territory of Kosovo. Since 1959, Cuba has regarded the U.S. presence in Guantánamo Bay as illegal.\n",
"Although Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States classified as a commonwealth, many Puerto Ricans consider it to be a country in and of itself. In their book on American expansionism titled \"The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion, 1803–1898\", Sanford Levinson and Bartholomew H. Sparrow also determined that \"Most Puerto Ricans consider themselves a distinct national group.\" They also observed that both Americans and Puerto Ricans see themselves as separate cultures—\"even separate nationalities\".\n",
"The U.S. currently has fourteen territories in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Five territories (American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands) are permanently inhabited, unincorporated territories; the other nine are small islands, atolls and reefs with no native (or permanent) population. Of the nine, only one is classified as an incorporated territory (Palmyra Atoll). Two additional territories (Bajo Nuevo Bank and Serranilla Bank) are claimed by the United States but administered by Colombia. Territories were created to administer newly acquired land, and most eventually attained statehood. Others, such as the Philippines, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau, later became independent.\n"
] |
How did knights mount horses in medieval times?
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Artistic evidence says that they could mount a horse, armoured, unassisted, foot in stirrup and hands on saddle (basically similarly to mounting a saddled horse unarmoured). Textual evidence suggests that at least some could leap onto horseback - this appears to mean mounting without using the stirrup, presumably with hand on saddle/horse for assistance, like mounting bareback.
This nice lecture, "How to Mount a Horse in Armor and Other Chivalric Problems", courtesy of the Met Museum,
* _URL_1_
discusses just this question. The main discussion on mounting horses is from about 23:00 to 34:00, and presents multiple pieces of artwork showing armoured knights mounting horses as described above, and finishes (33:30-34:00) with a film clip showing an armoured curator mounting a horse in this fashion.
Modern jousters will often use a mounting block, and old-time knights could have used a stool or a helping hand to make it easier to mount (as discussed in the lecture above).
Well-fitted armour gives sufficient freedom of movement to mount a horse, and to do plenty more. One essential task that requires a certain amount of freedom of movement is fighting, whether with a pollaxe, sword, lance, or wrestling. Equestrian armour need to allow the wearer to ride, and to mount, dismount, etc. Sacrifices in protection are made to achieve this - equestrian armours often leave much of the inside and back of the legs and buttocks exposed, which is a vulnerability if fighting dismounted. Freedom of movement of arms and shoulders means that arm protection has gaps, armpits have gaps (at least in terms of coverage by plate - mail can be used to protect where the plate doesn't).
A couple of video clips showing the kind of motion that is possible in plate armour:
* _URL_0_ (see attempt to jump onto a "horse" at 0:40)
* _URL_2_
Modern re-enactors are often more encumbered by their armour than knights would have been. Often, they wear off-the-shelf armour that isn't fitted to them (and worse, sometimes poorly designed). Their armour often has heavier arms and legs than historical armours (because historical arms and legs often used thin plates that would be badly dented in re-enactment fighting). Re-enactors are often very part-time, and unfit. It's often a safe assumption that if re-enactors can do something in their modern armour, a Medieval knight would have been able to do the same, more easily.
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[
"In the Early Medieval period any well-equipped horseman could be described as a knight, or \"miles\" in Latin. The first knights appeared during the reign of Charlemagne in the 8th century. As the Carolingian Age progressed, the Franks were generally on the attack, and larger numbers of warriors took to their horses to ride with the Emperor in his wide-ranging campaigns of conquest. At about this time the Franks increasingly remained on horseback to fight on the battlefield as true cavalry rather than mounted infantry, with the discovery of the stirrup, and would continue to do so for centuries afterwards. Although in some nations the knight returned to foot combat in the 14th century, the association of the knight with mounted combat with a spear, and later a lance, remained a strong one. The older Carolingian ceremony of presenting a young man with weapons influenced the emergence of knighthood ceremonies, in which a noble would be ritually given weapons and declared to be a knight, usually amid some festivities.These mobile mounted warriors made Charlemagne's far-flung conquests possible, and to secure their service he rewarded them with grants of land called benefices. These were given to the captains directly by the Emperor to reward their efforts in the conquests, and they in turn were to grant benefices to their warrior contingents, who were a mix of free and unfree men. In the century or so following Charlemagne's death, his newly empowered warrior class grew stronger still, and Charles the Bald declared their fiefs to be hereditary. The period of chaos in the 9th and 10th centuries, between the fall of the Carolingian central authority and the rise of separate Western and Eastern Frankish kingdoms (later to become France and Germany respectively) only entrenched this newly landed warrior class. This was because governing power and defense against Viking, Magyar and Saracen attack became an essentially local affair which revolved around these new hereditary local lords and their \"demesnes\".\n",
"Many knights during Medieval battles fought on foot. Attacks would be carried out on horseback only under favorable conditions. If the enemy infantry was equipped with polearms and fought in tight formations it was not possible to charge without heavy losses. A fairly common solution to this was for the men-at-arms to dismount and assault the enemy on foot, such as the way Scottish knights dismounted to stiffen the infantry \"schiltron\" or the English combination of longbowmen with dismounted men-at-arms in the Hundred Years' War. Another possibility was to bluff an attack, but turn around before impact. This tempted many infantrymen to go on the chase, leaving their formation. The heavy cavalry then turned around again in this new situation and rode down the scattered infantry. Such a tactic was deployed in the Battle of Hastings (1066).\n",
"Knights on horseback compete at games, including catching rings on a lance, flag passing, and javelin tossing. Horseback jousts and fights have large nets to protect the audience from the wooden splinters from the lances and flying weapons. The winner is honored as 'Champion' and ;Defender of the Realm' and chooses a lady from the audience to be the 'Queen of Love and Beauty.'\n",
"The most well-known horse of the medieval era of Europe is the destrier, known for carrying knights into war. However, most knights and mounted men-at-arms rode smaller horses known as coursers and rounceys. (A common generic name for medieval war horses was \"charger,\" which was interchangeable with the other terms). In Spain, the jennet was used as a light cavalry horse.\n",
"BULLET::::- Tourney horses are meant to look like a person riding a small horse that is wearing a long cloth coat or caparison (as seen in medieval illustrations of jousting knights at a tourney or tournament). A circular or oval frame is suspended around their waist, or chest, with a skirt draped over it hanging down to the ground. The frame has a carved wooden head, often with snapping jaws (operated by pulling a string) attached to it at one end, and a tail at the other. The \"rider\" may wear a cape or other flowing costume to help cover the frame. In the most elaborate versions, fake legs, meant to be those of the rider, hang down the sides of the skirt, though this seems to be a fairly recent development.\n",
"Riding horses were used by a variety of people during the Middle Ages, and so varied greatly in quality, size and breeding. Knights and nobles kept riding horses in their war-trains, saving their warhorses for the battle. The names of horses referred to a \"type\" of horse, rather than a breed. Many horses were named by the region where they or their immediate ancestors were foaled. For example, in Germany, Hungarian horses were commonly used for riding. Individual horses were often described by their gait ('trotters' or 'amblers'), by their colouring, or by the name of their breeder.\n",
"Saddles were improved upon during the Middle Ages, as knights needed saddles that were stronger and offered more support. The resulting saddle had a higher \"cantle\" and \"pommel\" (to prevent the rider from being unseated in warfare) and was built on a wooden tree that supported more weight from a rider with armor and weapons. This saddle, a predecessor to the modern Western saddle, was originally padded with wool or horsehair and covered in leather or textiles. It was later modified for cattle tending and bullfighting in addition to the continual development for use in war. Other saddles, derived from earlier, treeless designs, sometimes added solid trees to support stirrups, but were kept light for use by messengers and for horse racing.\n"
] |
how jihadism/muslim extremism convinces so many individuals to abandon their lives for its cause?
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Similar to how kids today join gangs. From a rational expectations perspective, no one should even consider a gang - you're very likely to either end up in jail or dead. People join because they don't have many other options, it looks cool, everyone else around them is doing it, and you get to be a man with a gun and fight.
Adding on to SpareLiver's explanation of motivation, if you attach a "greater cause" to the reason's I've listed above, plus a healthy dose of brainwashing, you can convince quite a few people to resort to terrorism.
|
[
"In a lecture given in University of the Gambia, Zakir strongly condemned the atrocities around the world in the name of Jihad, where innocent people lost their lives, saying \"Jihad is misunderstood by both Muslims and non-Muslims, Jihad means to strive and struggle to make society better, the best form of Jihad is to strive and struggle against non-Muslims, using the teachings of the Quran; to the Prophet Peace Be Upon Him and the Almighty Allah, Islam means peace.\" According to Naik, the killing of any innocent person, either Muslim or not is prohibited by Islam, while condemning the double-standard, played by the western powers and media who describes Muslims as extremists and fundamentalists. He said in unequivocal term that, even in Islamic Jihad, there are laid down rules and regulations as when and how to kill a person, which he noted, totally contradicts what is currently happening around the world, by some groups who claim to fight for Jihad.\n",
"To Muslims living in non-Islamic countries eager to wage jihad, Fadl says, I say it is not honorable to reside with people – even if they were nonbelievers and not part of a treaty, if they gave you permission to enter their homes and live with them, and if they gave you security for yourself and your money, and if they gave you the opportunity to work or study, or they granted you political asylum with a decent life and other acts of kindness – and then betray them, through killing and destruction. This was not in the manners and practices of the Prophet.\n",
"\"Much different from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict equation, the radicalization process of Western‐raised individuals is not triggered by oppression, perceived suffering, revenge or desperation; rather, this radicalization is motivated specifically by ideology. The jihadi, or the Salafi-jihadist ideology is the ideology that drives young men and women born and raised in the West to carry out \"autonomous jihad\" via acts of terrorism against their home countries. While many followers of this particular stream of Islam may not directly advocate jihad via acts of terrorism, or may even condemn terrorism wholly, the fact remains that this is the only stream within the Islamic tradition that is directly conducive to the radicalization process and the sanctioning of \"autonomous jihad\" via acts of terrorism. The Salafi ideology has served as the inspiration for numerous homegrown groups, including the Madrid 2004 bombers (2004 Madrid train bombings), Amsterdam's Hofstad Group, London's July 2005 bombers (7 July 2005 London bombings), and specifically the Toronto 18 group arrested in 2006...In order to create and sustain effective de-radicalization strategies, a major component of counter-terrorism involves the prevention of radicalization through fostering committed partnerships with expert groups within a given community who are working for the de-legitimization of violent extremism. The proliferation of an integral Islamic counter-narrative in the context of being Canadian, and the integration of people at the individual, social, and political level...The success of our implementation strategy is based on a group of professionals and experts that we deal with to implement our strategy...For example, we have medical practitioners as advisers in the implementation of our program, such as psychologists and psychiatrists, who can provide guidance and advice on medical and other factors that may be enablers in the radicalization process, which may be surprising to many. Specifically, we deal with hyperreligiosity, which is a diagnosed symptom of bi-polar disorder treated with prescription drugs...\".\n",
"According to Gilles Kepel, the jihadi violence is rooted in Islamic fundamentalism in the form of Salafism, an ideology that clashes with the values of Western democracies and which entered the United Kingdom when the country gave shelter to radical Islamist leaders from around the world in London. According to Kepel, an individual progresses into violence by first becoming a salafist. Further, he states that salafist ideology has led to attacking targets which symbolizes Western culture, such as the concerts at Manchester and in the Bataclan theater or deliberately timing attacks to interfere with democratic elections. Scholar Olivier Roy disagrees, saying that the majority of Islamic terrorists are radicals first and are drawn to fundamentalist Islam as a result. He has argued that there's no evidence that they go from Salafism to terrorism, noting that Islamic terrorist Abdelhamid Abaaoud was known to violate religious rules about halal food. Roy has also argued that the burkini bans and secularist policies of France provoked religious violence in France, to which Kepel responded that Britain has no such policies and still suffered several jihadist attacks in 2017.\n",
"Azzam claimed that \"anyone who looks into the state of Muslims today will find that their great misfortune is their abandonment of \"Jihad\"\", and he also warned that \"without \"Jihad\", \"shirk\" (joining partners with Allah) will spread and become dominant\". Jihad was so important that to \"repel\" the unbelievers was \"the most important obligation after Iman [faith]\".\n",
"\"\"If you do not wage jihad, you will never be able to get rid of the oppression of the infidels which makes you abandon the religion and which makes slaves of you. Thus, you will not be able to be rescued from the oppression of this world and the torments of the hereafter, or find eternal happiness until you return to the religion of Allah. . .\"\" – Abdul Haq (Memetiming Memeti), a commander in the Uyghur separatist movement Turkistan Islamic Party (East Turkestan Islamic Movement), from a video released by TIP, February 9. 2009.\n",
"I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a 'moderate Islam,' assuming the responsibility of exposing themselves in the first person in denouncing Islamic extremism and terrorism, ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Qur'an. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.\n"
] |
why does the quadratic formula work?
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[This website explains the derivation of the quadratic formula really well](_URL_0_). Basically in ax^2 + bx + c = 0, you're just solving for x, and the quadratic formula is a shortcut so you don't have to do it by hand every time.
|
[
"In elementary algebra, the quadratic formula is the solution of the quadratic equation. There are other ways to solve the quadratic equation instead of using the quadratic formula, such as factoring, completing the square, graphing and others. Using the quadratic formula is often the most convenient way.\n",
"The quadratic formula allows equation () to be solved for . If , and are the three cube roots of one of the solutions in , then the roots of the original depressed cubic are , , and . Another way of expressing the roots is to take ; then the roots of the original depressed cubic are , , and, . This method only fails when both roots of the equation () are equal to , but this only happens when , in which case the only solution of equation () is .\n",
"Although the quadratic formula provides an exact solution, the result is not exact if real numbers are approximated during the computation, as usual in numerical analysis, where real numbers are approximated by floating point numbers (called \"reals\" in many programming languages). In this context, the quadratic formula is not completely stable.\n",
"This gives the quadratic formula. This way one avoids the technique of completing the square and much more complicated math is not needed. Note this solution is very similar to solving deriving the formula by substitution.\n",
"The quadratic equation may be solved geometrically in a number of ways. One way is via Lill's method. The three coefficients , , are drawn with right angles between them as in SA, AB, and BC in Figure 6. A circle is drawn with the start and end point SC as a diameter. If this cuts the middle line AB of the three then the equation has a solution, and the solutions are given by negative of the distance along this line from A divided by the first coefficient or SA. If is the coefficients may be read off directly. Thus the solutions in the diagram are −AX1/SA and −AX2/SA.\n",
"These formulas are much easier to evaluate than the quadratic formula under the condition of one large and one small root, because the quadratic formula evaluates the small root as the difference of two very nearly equal numbers (the case of large ), which causes round-off error in a numerical evaluation. Figure 5 shows the difference between (i) a direct evaluation using the quadratic formula (accurate when the roots are near each other in value) and (ii) an evaluation based upon the above approximation of Vieta's formulas (accurate when the roots are widely spaced). As the linear coefficient increases, initially the quadratic formula is accurate, and the approximate formula improves in accuracy, leading to a smaller difference between the methods as increases. However, at some point the quadratic formula begins to lose accuracy because of round off error, while the approximate method continues to improve. Consequently, the difference between the methods begins to increase as the quadratic formula becomes worse and worse.\n",
"Many \"alternative derivations\" of the quadratic formula are in the literature. These derivations may be simpler than the standard completing the square method and represent interesting applications of other algebraic techniques or may offer insight into other areas of mathematics.\n"
] |
if our bodies run on atp and we can "replenish" that atp from eating alone, why do we need to sleep to feel refreshed?
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sleep isn't for collecting energy, it's for cleaning up chemical buildup in your brain (which is why you can't think right) and your muscles (which is why you feel fatigued)
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[
"The oxidative system (aerobic) is the primary source of ATP supplied to the body at rest and during low intensity activities and uses primarily carbohydrates and fats as substrates. Protein is not normally metabolized significantly, except during long term starvation and long bouts of exercise (greater than 90 minutes.) At rest approximately 70% of the ATP produced is derived from fats and 30% from carbohydrates. Following the onset of activity, as the intensity of the exercise increases, there is a shift in substrate preference from fats to carbohydrates. During high intensity aerobic exercise, almost 100% of the energy is derived from carbohydrates, if an adequate supply is available.\n",
"At rest, the body produces the majority of its ATP aerobically in the mitochondria without producing lactic acid or other fatiguing byproducts. During exercise, the method of ATP production varies depending on the fitness of the individual as well as the duration and intensity of exercise. At lower activity levels, when exercise continues for a long duration (several minutes or longer), energy is produced aerobically by combining oxygen with carbohydrates and fats stored in the body. During activity that is higher in intensity, with possible duration decreasing as intensity increases, ATP production can switch to anaerobic pathways, such as the use of the creatine phosphate and the phosphagen system or anaerobic glycolysis. Aerobic ATP production is biochemically much slower and can only be used for long-duration, low-intensity exercise, but produces no fatiguing waste products that can not be removed immediately from the sarcomere and the body, and it results in a much greater number of ATP molecules per fat or carbohydrate molecule. Aerobic training allows the oxygen delivery system to be more efficient, allowing aerobic metabolism to begin quicker. Anaerobic ATP production produces ATP much faster and allows near-maximal intensity exercise, but also produces significant amounts of lactic acid which renders high-intensity exercise unsustainable for more than several minutes. The phosphagen system is also anaerobic. It allows for the highest levels of exercise intensity, but intramuscular stores of phosphocreatine are very limited and can only provide energy for exercises lasting up to ten seconds. Recovery is very quick, with full creatine stores regenerated within five minutes.\n",
"The cellular respiration process that converts food energy into ATP (a form of energy) is largely dependent on oxygen availability. During exercise, the supply and demand of oxygen available to muscle cells is affected by duration and intensity and by the individual's cardiorespiratory fitness level. Three exercise energy systems can be selectively recruited, depending on the amount of oxygen available, as part of the cellular respiration process to generate the ATP for the muscles. They are ATP, the anaerobic system and the aerobic system.\n",
"Overall, the glycolysis part of the cycle produces 2 ATP molecules at a cost of 6 ATP molecules consumed in the gluconeogenesis part. Each iteration of the cycle must be maintained by a net consumption of 4 ATP molecules. As a result, the cycle cannot be sustained indefinitely. The intensive consumption of ATP molecules indicates that the Cori cycle shifts the metabolic burden from the muscles to the liver.\n",
"ATP is the usable form of chemical energy for muscular activity. It is stored in most cells, particularly in muscle cells. Other forms of chemical energy, such as those available from food, must be transformed into ATP before they can be utilized by the muscle cells.\n",
"From the standpoint of ATP production then, it is advantageous for yeast to utilize the citric acid cycle in the presence of oxygen, as more ATP is produced from less glucose; however, Boulton et al. (1996) have maintained that yeast will follow the anaerobic, rather than aerobic, fermentative pathway if glucose is not limited, in that respiration, although capable of producing more ATP than glycolysis per molecule of glucose, also requires more energy in terms of enzymatic and mitochondrial requirements.\n",
"Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is a complex organic chemical that provides energy to drive many processes in living cells, e.g. muscle contraction, nerve impulse propagation, and chemical synthesis. Found in all forms of life, ATP is often referred to as the \"molecular unit of currency\" of intracellular energy transfer. When consumed in metabolic processes, it converts either to adenosine diphosphate (ADP) or to adenosine monophosphate (AMP). Other processes regenerate ATP so that the human body recycles its own body weight equivalent in ATP each day. It is also a precursor to DNA and RNA, and is used as a coenzyme.\n"
] |
In the 17-1800s, how were dances developed and circulated to the higher classes of European societies?
|
Dances were important social occasions, and people studied to dance well, if they wanted to make an impression. There were dancing masters ( you can see a caricature of one, up on his toes with his typical kit fiddle in [one](_URL_0_) of Hogarth's series The Rake's Progress). There were also plenty of dance manuals- there's a good [collection](_URL_1_) of them at the Library of Congress, available online. The link is to one by Louis-Julien Clarchies, who led a very popular dance orchestra in France circa 1800, perhaps notable for also being black, born in Curacao.
You can find dancing masters and manuals going back into the 16th century, and manuals can be good sources for tunes. Thoinot Arbeau's [Orchesographie]( _URL_2_) was the source for Peter Warlock's Capriole Suite ( and supplied the melody for the carol Ding Dong Merrily On High, found there as Bransle de l'Official) , and many of the dances and tunes in the Playford Dance books (printed 1650 into the 1700's) are still in use.
|
[
"To understand why Quirey says \"The advent of the in polite society was quite simply the greatest change in dance form and dancing manners that has happened in our history\" we need to realize that all European social dances before the waltz were communal sequence dances – communal, because all the dancers on the floor took part in a preset pattern (often chosen by a master of ceremony. Dancers separately, and as couples, faced outwards to the spectators as much as they faced inwards. Thus all present took part as dancers or as onlookers. This was the way with the country dance and all previous popular dances. With the waltz, couples were independent of each other and were turned towards each other (though not in close contact). Lord Byron wrote a furious letter, which precedes his poem \"The Waltz\", in which he decries the anti-social nature of the dance, with the couple \"like two cockchafers spitted on the same bodkin.\"\n",
"The dances popular in mid-century were still being done at the end of the century, but by fewer people. Dance masters, in vain attempts to maintain their place in society and in the economy, invented dances of greater and greater complexity that people followed with less and less enthusiasm. During this period, the bustle replaced the hoop, which necessitated a few changes in dancing. At the same time, ragtime music began to gain mainstream respectability. Some examples of dances popular during this period include the cakewalk, Krakowiak, mazurka, racket, redowa, and the waltz.\n",
"Many social dances of European origin are in recent centuries partner dances \"(see Ballroom dance)\" but this is quite rare elsewhere, where there may instead be circle dances or line dances, perhaps reserved for those of a certain age, gender or social position.\n",
"When dance halls became popular in Europe in the 19th century, the Ländler was made quicker and more elegant, and the men shed the hobnail boots which they wore to dance it. Along with a number of other folk dances from Germany and Bohemia, it is thought to have contributed to the evolution of the waltz.\n",
"From the end of the 18th century English-style contra and square dances became popular. In the 19th century the waltz became the most popular dance in the cities, after having been known in the countryside for a while. Other dance types of the early 19th century are \"hopsa\", \"rheinlænder\", \"galop\", \"sveitrit\" and \"schottish\" all of which were integrated into the popular English style dances, and later developed their own local dance forms. Around 1850 the polka and mazurka entered the popular repertoire. At the end of the 19th century the earlier dance tradition began to lose its place to modern dances from England, Southern Europe and America. From the local tradition of the island of Fanø the tune types \"sønderhoning\" and \"fannik\" have made their way into the standard repertoire of Danish traditional music, and are remnants of the early tradition of Polish derived dances. \n",
"In late 17th century, English country dances, contredances, cotillions, and minuets were popular. The most known dance was the bastringue. In the 18th century, reels and jigs were introduced to Quebec from the British Isles and British colonies in America.\n",
"The origins of ballet dancing can be traced to the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century. Dance masters would teach the steps to nobility and the court would participate in performances as a form of social entertainment. This practice continued for several centuries. In the 17th century, courtly ballet reached its peak under the rule of King Louis XIV. \n"
] |
if we are never really touching anything due to atomic repulsion, how do we get cuts, scrapes and impalements?
|
It's that same atomic repulsion that causes friction, which causes human flesh to be scraped, cut, etc. The object that causes the injury is pushing your flesh out of its way.
|
[
"The Elise Kimble version of Persuader has an atomic axe that can cut objects on a molecular level, allowing her to cleanly shear flesh, bone, steel, wood and any other object except for Ravager's energy swords.\n",
"Other nuclear warfare doctrines explicitly exclude decapitation strikes on the basis that it is better to preserve the adversary's command and control structures so that a single authority remains that is capable of negotiating a surrender or ceasefire. Implementing fail-deadly mechanisms can be a way to deter decapitation strikes and respond to successful decapitation strikes.\n",
"Explosive-based area-denial weapons (mines) may be intentionally equipped with detonators which degrade over time, either exploding them or rendering them relatively harmless. Even in these cases, unexploded munitions often pose significant risk.\n",
"A failed decapitation strike carries the risk of immediate, massive retaliation by the targeted opponent. Many countries with nuclear weapons specifically plan to prevent decapitation strikes by employing second-strike capabilities. Such countries may have mobile land-based launch, sea launch, air launch, and underground ballistic missile launch facilities so that a nuclear launch on one area of the country will not totally negate its ability to retaliate.\n",
"BULLET::::- Any charges on the container and nearby conductive objects should be removed before the experiment by grounding (earthing); touching them briefly to some large conducting object called a ground. Any charge on the object will flow into the ground due to its mutual repulsion. This can be accomplished by touching them with a finger, using the conductive human body as a ground. However the experimenter's body itself should be grounded frequently by touching a good metal ground such as a metal workbench, or preferably a water pipe or the grounding wire of the building's mains power wiring. Ideally the experimenter's body should be grounded throughout the experiment. Some demonstration kits include conductive ground sheets which are laid on the workbench under the apparatus, and antistatic wrist straps the experimenter wears during the experiment, which are connected to a good ground.\n",
"BULLET::::- Cutting open the bitten area, an action often taken prior to suction, is not recommended since it causes further damage and increases the risk of infection; the subsequent cauterization of the area with fire or silver nitrate (also known as \"infernal stone\") is also potentially threatening.\n",
"BULLET::::- Interference – interrupting the line between an attacked piece and its defender by sacrificially interposing a piece. Opportunities for interference are rare because the defended object must be more valuable than the sacrificed piece, and the interposition must itself represent a threat.\n"
] |
why is it called an autopsy for humans, but a necropsy for animals?
|
"auto" means "self" and "optos" means "to see," so the sense here is that when we dissect another human, we are inspecting ourselves. Since animals aren't humans, when we dissect them, we are only inspecting "necros," or "death."
|
[
"Post-mortem examination, or necropsy, is far more common in veterinary medicine than in human medicine. For many species that exhibit few external symptoms (sheep), or that are not suited to detailed clinical examination (poultry, cage birds, zoo animals), it is a common method used by veterinary physicians to come to a diagnosis. A necropsy is mostly used like an autopsy to determine cause of death. The entire body is examined at the gross visual level, and samples are collected for additional analyses.\n",
"An autopsy (post-mortem examination, obduction, necropsy, or autopsia cadaverum) is a surgical procedure that consists of a thorough examination of a corpse by dissection to determine the cause, mode and manner of death or to evaluate any disease or injury that may be present for research or educational purposes. (The term \"necropsy\" is generally reserved for non-human animals; see below). Autopsies are usually performed by a specialized medical doctor called a pathologist. In most cases, a medical examiner or coroner can determine cause of death and only a small portion of deaths require an autopsy. \n",
"A necropsy, which is not always a medical procedure, was a term previously used to describe an unregulated postmortem examination . In modern times, this term is more commonly associated with the corpses of animals.\n",
"Because animals cannot voice their symptoms as easily as humans, exploratory surgery is more common in animals. Exploratory surgery is done when looking for a foreign body that may be lodged in the animal's body, when looking for cancer, or when looking for various other gastrointestinal problems. It is a fairly routine procedure that is done only after tests and bloodwork reveal nothing abnormal.\n",
"Human cadavers have been dissected by physicians since at least the 3rd century BC, but throughout history, prevailing religious views on the desecration of corpses often meant that such work was performed in secrecy. The Christian church forbade human dissection until the 14th century, when the first recorded anatomisation of a cadaver took place in Bologna. Until then, anatomical research was limited to the dissection of animals. In Britain, human dissection was proscribed by law until 1506, when King James IV of Scotland gave royal patronage to the Barber-Surgeons of Edinburgh, allowing them to dissect the \"bodies of certain executed criminals\". England followed in 1540, when Henry VIII gave patronage to the Company of Barber-Surgeons, allowing them access to four executed felons each year (Charles II later increased this to six felons each year). Elizabeth I granted the College of Physicians the right to anatomise four felons annually in 1564.\n",
"Re-evaluation of these marks using high-powered microscopes, comparisons to contemporary butchered animal remains, and recent ethnographic cases of excarnation mortuary practises have shown that perhaps this was a case of ritual defleshing.\n",
"Others have suggested the practices of cannibalism (known also as anthrophagy), or excarnation, which is the practice of removing the flesh and organs of the dead, leaving only the bones. Romanian archaeologist Sergiu Haimovici writes about such a discovery:\n"
] |
why some countries spice a lot their food and others don't?
|
Typically countries use a lot of spice when spices grow well in their climate, or when their climate is very warm and thus foods are prone to go bad.
Countries with neither of these attributes tend to have mild food, other than immigrant groups who came from spicy-food countries.
|
[
"The trade among different countries also largely affects a region's cuisine. Dating back to the ancient spice trade, seasonings such as cinnamon, cassia, cardamom, ginger, and turmeric were important items of commerce in the earliest evolution of trade. Cinnamon and cassia found their way to the Middle East at least 4,000 years ago.\n",
"Beginning in the 16th century, successive waves of Europeans—the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British—sought to dominate the spice trade at its sources in India and the 'Spice Islands' (Maluku) of Indonesia. This meant finding a way to Asia to cut out Muslim merchants who, with their Venetian outlet in the Mediterranean, monopolised spice imports to Europe. Astronomically priced at the time, spices were highly coveted not only to preserve and make poorly preserved meat palatable, but also as medicines and magic potions.\n",
"Most regions in the Middle East use spices. Typically, a stew will include a small amount of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, cumin, and coriander. Black pepper is common, and chili peppers are used occasionally, especially as a separate sauce or as a pickle. Parsley and mint are commonly used both in cooking and in salads. Thyme and thyme blends (za'atar) are common in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, palestine and Israel, and a mixture of dried thyme and sumac (crushed sour berries) is a common breakfast item with oil and bread. Sumac is also sprinkled over grilled meat. Garlic is common to many dishes and salads.\n",
"Sri Lanka has long been known for its spices. The best known is cinnamon which is native to Sri Lanka. In the 15th and 16th centuries, spice and ivory traders from all over the world brought their native cuisines to the island, resulting in a rich diversity of cooking styles and techniques. Lamprais rice boiled in stock with a special curry, accompanied by \"frikkadels\" (meatballs), all of which is then wrapped in a banana leaf and baked as a Dutch-influenced Sri Lankan dish. Dutch and Portuguese sweets also continue to be popular. British influences include roast beef and roast chicken. Also, the influence of the Indian cooking methods and food have played a major role in what Sri Lankans eat.\n",
"Combined, Indonesia and China produced 75% of the world's cinnamon in 2016 when global production was 223,574 tonnes (table). Four countries accounted for 99% of the world total: Indonesia, China, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka.\n",
"Spice is an essential element in Indonesian cuisine. In Indonesian, spice is called \"rempah\", while the mixture of spices is called \"bumbu\", they are chopped finely or ground into paste using traditional stone mortar and pestle, and spread over vegetables, meat, poultry, fish and seafood to add aroma and taste. Known throughout the world as the \"Spice Islands\", the Indonesian islands of Maluku contributed to the introduction of its native spices to the world. Spices such as \"pala\" (nutmeg/mace), \"cengkeh\" (clove), \"daun\" \"pandan\" (Pandan leaves), \"kluwek\" (Pangium edule) and \"laos\" (galangal) are native to Indonesia. However, surprisingly nutmeg, mace and cloves are seldomly used in Indonesian cuisine.\n",
"A spice is a seed, fruit, root, bark, or other plant substance primarily used for flavoring, coloring or preserving food. Spices are distinguished from herbs, which are the leaves, flowers, or stems of plants used for flavoring or as a garnish. Many spices have antimicrobial properties. This may explain why spices are more commonly used in warmer climates, which have more infectious diseases, and why the use of spices is prominent in meat, which is particularly susceptible to spoiling. Spices are sometimes used in medicine, religious rituals, cosmetics or perfume production.\n"
] |
Importance of combat experience during world war two.
|
Obviously more experienced troops will perform better than green troops, but it depends what you really mean as green. True a lot of Allied troops that landed in Normandy were relatively green, but the Allies had been preparing for Overlord for a long time and the troops had large amounts of training. This is massively different to a soldier who has just had a rifle shoved into their hands and told to fight.
I'm not going to say that combat experience made no difference to battle outcomes, but i will say that it is often overstated. In reality soldiers in the war gathered experience relatively quickly, but soon reached a level of diminishing returns after that. For example, a unit with 6 months combat experience performed much better than one with no experience at all, but would not perform much worse than one with say 2 years of experience. Therefore soldiers were able to reach a level of parity with the opposition relatively quickly. So while having experienced troops is a bonus, i would argue that it's less of a factor that manpower, weaponry, technology, tactics and strategy etc.
The main advantage of experienced troops is a certain coolness under fire which makes them less likely to panic. This works better when the veteran soldiers are mixed into formations made of relatively green troops because having people who know what theyre doing improves the morale and fighting ability of less experienced soldiers dramatically. Germany divisions towards the end of the war were often a mix of veteran soldiers and new conscripts. While a veteran unit fighting together is formidible, the logic went that mixing veterans in with new recruits made a much larger force fight more effectively and was therefore worth it
|
[
"COMBAT was a project commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War. It was an offshoot of parent project Coming World Remember Me (CWRM), a collaboration between Vanmechelen and Jan Moeyaert.\n",
"Distinctions between World War II combatives and modern combatives include: 1) The former is based upon explosive high percentage gross motor strikes to vital targets, whereas the latter is based upon fine motor skill grappling. 2) The former seeks primarily to disable the enemy as quickly as possible at all costs, whereas the latter seeks primarily to build \"warrior ethos\" and the courage to close with the enemy.\n",
"World War II combatives are close quarters combat techniques, including hand-to-hand, advanced firearm point shooting methods, and weapons techniques (knife/bayonet/improvised weapons) that were taught to allied special forces in World War II by such famous instructors as Rex Applegate and William Ewart Fairbairn.\n",
"I was especially impressed, for example, with the work of Ben L. Culwell, a young Texan just out of the Navy after nearly five years of active service in the Pacific, whose “Death by Burning,” Death by Drowning,” “Fragment of Concussion Time,” and “Morning at Attu,” among others—all combining Abstraction and Expressionism in a way that produces a maximum of emotional intensity—are among the few really integrated interpretations of wartime experience that I have yet to come across.\n",
"War tourism is recreational travel to active or former war zones for purposes of sightseeing or historical study. War tourist is also a pejorative term to describe thrill seeking in dangerous and forbidden places. In 1988, P. J. O'Rourke applied the pejorative meaning to war correspondents.\n",
"BULLET::::- Many of the generals of World War I had experience in combat, but only from the days before trench warfare became widespread. Because of this, officers lacked the experience that in the past had made it viable to command troops from a distance.\n",
"Military members experiencing wartime trauma may suffer debilitating psychological effects from their experiences, and historical research has found literary references to these psychological packs throughout recorded history. During the First World War era, psychological symptoms suffered by soldiers in war came to be referred to as \"shell shock\". This progressed by the Second World War to being called \"battle fatigue\", or \"combat stress reaction\". As research continued and the understanding of psychology and psychiatry advanced, it gradually became more understood through the 20th century that experiencing trauma could have a variety of psychological and emotional impacts that were genuinely medical in nature. Increasingly, research focused on developing clinical definitions and exploring options for treatments and therapies. The term 'posttraumatic stress disorder' (PTSD), was developed for inclusion in the DSM-III in the 1980s. While not a condition limited to those who had experienced wartime trauma, PTSD is often associated with soldiers returning from wartime.\n"
] |
Age of Discovery - are there any interesting, but relatively unknown discoveries?
|
Try this guy.
_URL_0_
|
[
"The Age of Discovery, also known as the Age of Exploration, was a period in history starting in the early 15th century and continuing into the early 17th century during which Europeans engaged in intensive exploration of the world, establishing direct contacts with Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania and mapping the planet. Scientific matters at this time were of little interest as exploration was mostly commercially and politically motivated. Captivated by the lure of gold, silver and spices, Portuguese and Spanish sailors pioneered new trade routes to the Indies.\n",
"The Age of Discovery, also known as the Age of Exploration, is one of the most important periods of geographical exploration in human history. It started in the early 15th century and lasted until the 17th century. In that period, Europeans discovered and/or explored vast areas of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Portugal and Spain dominated the first stages of exploration, while other European nations followed, such as England, Netherlands, and France.\n",
"The Age of Discovery was a period from the early 15th century and continuing into the early 17th century, during which European ships traveled around the world to search for new trading routes and partners to feed burgeoning capitalism in Europe. They also were in search of trading goods such as gold, silver and spices. In the process, Europeans encountered peoples and mapped lands previously unknown to them. This factor in the early European modern period was a globalizing character; the 'discovery' of the Americas and the rise of sustained contacts between previously isolated parts of the globe was an important historical event.\n",
"The Age of Discovery was followed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by the Age of Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason) which was an era of scientific awakening with a strong belief in the power of reason as the primary source of legitimacy and authority. Scientific fervour and intellectual curiosity at this time resulted in many voyages of scientific exploration around the world facilitated by technological innovations that included the theodolite, octant, precision clocks, as well as improvements in the compass, telescope, and general shipbuilding techniques. Naturalists, including botanists and zoologists, were an integral part of these voyages and the new discoveries were recorded not only in their journals but by on-board illustrators and artists.\n",
"The \"Age of Discovery\" was a period from the early 15th century and continuing into the early 17th century, during which European ships traveled around the world to search for new trading routes and partners to feed burgeoning capitalism in Europe. Historians often refer to the 'Age of Discovery' as the pioneer Portuguese and later Spanish long-distance maritime travels in search of alternative trade routes to \"the East Indies\", moved by the trade of gold, silver and spices. In the process, Europeans encountered peoples and mapped lands previously unknown to them.\n",
"Commonly cited examples of multiple independent discovery are the 17th-century independent formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and others, described by A. Rupert Hall; the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others; and the theory of evolution of species, independently advanced in the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. What holds for discoveries, also goes for inventions. Examples are the blast furnace (invented independently in China, Europe and Africa), the crossbow (invented independently in China, Greece, Africa, northern Canada, and the Baltic countries), and magnetism (discovered independently in Greece, China, and India).\n",
"BULLET::::- Age of Discovery – The Age of Discovery, also known as the Age of Exploration and the Great Navigations, was a period in history starting in the early 15th century and continuing into the early 17th century during which Europeans engaged in intensive exploration of the world, establishing direct contact with Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania and mapping the planet.\n"
] |
I Have Two Chinese Antiques with a Common Theme - Need help with identification and context
|
The old fellow is a *xian*, or immortal sage. Cranes are a symbol of longevity and immortality.
There are couple specific possibilities.
In the carpet, I'm guessing there are two more figures not pictured, and that he's [Zhongli Quan](_URL_3_) or maybe [Zhang Guo](_URL_7_) (is that possibly a phoenix behind him?). Those are the two beardiest of the Eight Immortals, a really common folk art motif.
Zhongli Quan is usually showing off his belly, while Zhang Guo is usually older than the rest of the group.
The statue - and I'm less comfortable here - looks like Shou (or Sau), one of the trio of [Fu Lu Shou](_URL_0_). He's called the "god of longevity," and identified with [the South Pole Star, Canopus](_URL_2_). He's often pictured flying [around with a crane](_URL_1_).
Shou in general looks a little like Zhongli Quan to me... and the statue *could* be Zhongli if (as it seems) his robe is open and those are supposed to be his ribs showing. If there's a fan somewhere, that might also clinch it.
The stick might also lean him closer to another of the Eight Immortals, [Iron-crutch Li](_URL_5_), especially if there's a bottle somewhere on his belt or underfoot. His face doesn't look grouchy enough for that for me, but it's hard without seeing the other seven figures in the same style.
But really, he looks an awful lot like Shou, and Shou is more commonly seen without cohorts than any of the Eight Immortals.
So probably Shou on two, Zhongli Quan on one.
There's an outside chance either of them could be some other immortal or sage ... there are [Seven Taoist Masters](_URL_4_), *Quanzhen qizi*, who are sometimes pictured together (or [written about](_URL_6_)) like the Eight Immortals, and cranes are, as I said, a general symbol of longevity or immortality.
The fact that the dude in the statue has one leg raised is not a coincidence... he's being crane-like, whoever he is, in a way that seems like the internal arts cultivated by the fellow who taught the Seven Masters.
|
[
"Traditionally, Chinese antiques are marked by a red seal, known as a 'chop', placed there by an owner. Experts can identify previous owners of an antique by reading the chops. The pre-revolution Chinese government tried to assist collectors of Chinese antiques by requiring their Department of Antiquities to provide a governmental chop on the bottom of a Chinese antique. This chop is visible as a piece of red sealing wax that bears the government chop to verify the date of the antique. The government of the People's Republic of China has its own definitions of what it considers \"antique\". As of the Cultural Revolution and China's opening trade to other countries, the government has tried to protect the definition of a Chinese antique.\n",
"The Mandarin's House, built in 1869 and located at No. 10 Travessa de António da Silva, is a traditional Chinese styled compound that once housed Chinese Literary personality Zhen g Guanying. The compound covers approximately 4,000 square metres of land and it encompasses architectural elements of Art Deco as well as traditional Chinese styling with Western influence. In 2001 the Government took over the complex from its private owners and in 2005 it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site\n",
"The early Chinese residents chose to build the shophouses near the bank of Terengganu River since the location provides a place for junks and ships to harbour. Like a typical Chinatown in other Malaysian states, the buildings incorporate various styles such as traditional Southern Chinese designs, Neoclassical, or Art Deco. The façades of these shophouses differ according to their styles. Neoclassical buildings, for instance, are rather elaborate and ornate in its decorations, while older buildings are generally bare and simple.\n",
"The street architecture of Chinatown's buildings, the shophouses especially, combine different elements of baroque architecture and Victorian architecture and do not have a single classification. Many of them were built in the style of painted ladies, and have been restored in that fashion. These styles result in a variety of different colours of which pastel is most dominant. Trengganu Street, Pagoda Street and Temple Street are such examples of this architecture, as well as development in Upper Cross Street and the houses in Club Street. Boat Quay was once a slave market along the Singapore River, Boat Quay has the most mixed-style shophouses on the island.\n",
"Chinese art, Chinese architecture, Chinese cuisine, Chinese literature, and Chinese philosophy all have undergone thousands of years of development, while numerous Chinese sites, such as the Great Wall of China and the Terracotta Army, are World Heritage Sites. Since the start of the program in 2001, aspects of Chinese culture have been listed by UNESCO as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.\n",
"Chinatown was opened about 300 years ago by the traders from Southern China and was the first area for business and trading in Kuala Terengganu, although in its current form, the oldest building (many of which are shophouses) dates back from the late 1800s. Today, there are about 270 pre-war Chinese shophouses. Many of these shophouses were originally built with brick, plaster, and timber. Currently, due to the old age of these structures, refurbishments and renovations are carried out to a number of buildings.\n",
"The China Ethnic Museum (中华民族博物馆; pinyin: Zhōnghuá Mínzú Bówùguǎn; also called Chinese Ethnic Culture Park, 中华民族园; pinyin: Zhōnghuá Mínzú Yuán) is a museum in Beijing, China, located just to the west of the Olympic Green. It features displays of the daily life and architecture of China's 56 ethnic groups.\n"
] |
the difference between uhd 4k, super uhd 4k, dolby vision, hdr.
|
UHD is a standard resolution of 3840x2160 pixels. This is the next step up from FHD (Full HD) which has a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels and HD which has a resolution of 1280x720 pixels.
UHD has exactly four times the pixels per field as FHD and maintains the same 16:9 aspect ratio.
UHD 4K is a marketing term used to distinguish the display from other "4K" display formats that use different field sizes and aspect ratios.
HDR is a term used in video processing that has different meanings based on context but all relate to contrast. **High Dynamic Range Rendering** has been used in video games for more than a decade to more accurately reproduce reflections of bright lights without artificially brightening the whole scene.
**High Dynamic Range Video** is a two part display requirement. First, the display must exceed specific peak brightness, darkness, and peak contrast ratio values. Second, the display must be capable of processing 10 bit per sample colour values.
HDRR and HDRV are entirely distinct technologies. HDRR does not require an HDRV display and a standard display will look much better when HDRR is enabled. On the other hand, HDRV is useless if the source material is restricted to a standard dynamic range.
Plasma Display Panels long ago met the darkness and contrast requirements but fell behind in peak brightness. LCDs met the brightness requirement but had terrible darkness and contrast. Only in recent years have LCDs been able to match the colour reproduction of PDPs that are considered obsolete. Moreover, 10 bit sampling was foreign to consumer devices until very recently. Historically, it's use has been restricted to professional devices.
Dolby Vision is a mastering format designed to facilitate accurate encoding and reproduction of colour and brightness by the display. Dolby Vision compatible displays have greater knowledge of how the master was *intended* to look and can use that information to reproduce it as accurately as possible.
|
[
"This resolution, sometimes referred to as 4K UHD or 4K2K, has a 16:9 aspect ratio and 8,294,400 pixels. It is double the size of Full HD (19201080) in both dimensions for a total of four times as many pixels, and triple the size of HD (1280720) in both dimensions for a total of nine times as many pixels. 38402160 was chosen as the resolution of the UHDTV1 format defined in SMPTE ST 2036-1, as well as the 4K UHDTV system defined in ITU-R BT.2020 and the UHD-1 broadcast standard from DVB. It is also the minimum resolution requirement for CEA's definition of an \"Ultra HD\" display. Prior to the publication of these standards, it was sometimes casually referred to as \"QFHD\" (Quad Full HD).\n",
"4K resolution, also called 4K, refers to a horizontal display resolution of approximately 4,000 pixels. Digital television and digital cinematography commonly use several different 4K resolutions. In television and consumer media, 38402160 (4K UHD) is the dominant 4K standard, whereas the movie projection industry uses 40962160 (DCI 4K).\n",
"So while 4K UHD sounds like it has a pixel structures with 1/4 the area of 1080p, that does not happen with pixel shifting. Only a true 4K projector offers that level of resolution. That's why \"true\" 4K projectors cost so much more than 4K UHD projectors with otherwise similar feature sets. They produce smaller pixels, finer resolution, no compromising of detail or color from overlapping pixels. By comparison, the slight difference in aspect ratio between DCI and 3840×2160 pixel displays without overlap is insignificant relative to the amount of detail.\n",
"It supports TV and PC video formats, including standard, enhanced, high-definition, ultra-HD (4K), and 3D video. Due to bitrate limitations of 10.2 Gbit/s instead of the required 18 Gbit/s in the HDMI 2.0 specification, HDBaseT 2.0 can only support uncompressed 4K at 30 Hz with 4:4:4 color coding, or 4K at 60 Hz with 4:2:0 color coding, but not the full 60 Hz with 4:4:4 color. However, using either very light visually-transparent compression or color space conversion (CSC), it is possible to pass 4K/60/4:4:4 formats over an HDBaseT 2.0 link. The visually-transparent compression also provides support for HDR10 formats.\n",
"The term 16K resolution (8640p), also known as 16K UHD, 16K Ultra HD, 16K Ultra High Definition, Quad Ultra HD, Quad UHD, 16K QUHD, 16K Quad Ultra high Definition, or UHDTV-3 refers to a display resolution that has 15360 horizontal pixels by 8640 vertical pixels, for a total of 132.7 megapixels. It has four times as many pixels as 8K resolution, 16 times as many pixels as 4K resolution and 64 times as many pixels as 1080p resolution.\n",
"In comparison to 4K UHD (38402160), the 16:9 5K resolution of 51202880 offers 1280 extra columns and 720 extra lines of display area, an increase of 33.% in each dimension. This additional display area can allow 4K content to be displayed at native resolution without filling the entire screen, which means that additional software such as video editing suite toolbars will be available without having to downscale the content previews.\n",
"The 4K UHD standard doesn't specify how large the pixels are, so a 4K UHD projector (Optoma, BenQ, Dell, et al.) counts because these projectors have a 2718×1528 pixel structure. Those projectors process the true 4K of data and project it with overlapping pixels, which is what pixel shifting is. Unfortunately, each of those pixels is far larger: each one has 50% more area than true 4K. Pixel shifting projectors project a pixel, shift it up to the right, by a half diameter, and project it again, with modified data, but that second pixel overlaps the first.\n"
] |
Chess is a game that has existed in its current form for hundreds of years, and in different variations for over a thousand. How did people in your area of history view the game? Has it always been associated with smart people, for example?
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We know that chess was played in 11th c. Scandinavia and the British Isles and the most evocative evidence of its popularity are the beautifully carved [Lewis Chessmen](_URL_0_) which were made of Walrus ivory and Whale's teeth. They are currently held at the [British Museum](_URL_1_) and the Museum of Scotland. The materials and intricacy of carving suggest they were high status items and the figures depicted show that the game had been adapted to reflect local culture. The Knights and Bishops that we know feature, along side Beserkers and characters from Norse saga. However the set remains enigmatic, we don't know who made them or who owned them.
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[
"The origin of three of the world’s most loved and played games all over the world can be traced back to India. Modern chess developed out of this ancient Indian game - chaturaṅga – meaning four parts. Trace the history of Chess back to the Gupta Period in the 6th Century AD. From the Indian game Pachisi, Ludo has become one of the most popular games in the world, played in all cultures and among all kinds of people. And Snakes and Ladders originated from the ancient Indian game of Mokshapattam, where the squares had morals attached to them. So what are the legends and stories associated with these games which are so much a part of our culture and tradition?\n",
"The earliest precursor of modern chess is a game called chaturanga, which flourished in India by the 6th century, and is the earliest known game to have two essential features found in all later chess variations—different pieces having different powers (which was not the case with checkers and Go), and victory depending on the fate of one piece, the king of modern chess. The original chess board was mathematically revolutionary, as reported by the infamous Wheat and chessboard problem. A common theory is that India’s development of the board, and chess, was likely due to India’s mathematical enlightenment involving the creation of the number zero. Other game pieces (speculatively called \"chess pieces\") uncovered in archaeological findings are considered as coming from other, distantly related board games, which may have had boards of 100 squares or more.\n",
"Another game that has stood the test of time is chess. Chess is believed to have originated in India around the sixth century CE. The game spread to the west by trade, but chess gained social status and permanence more strongly than many other games. Chess became a game of skill and tactics often forcing the players to think two or three moves ahead of their opponent just to keep up. This game also became accepted by many as a proxy for intelligence; people who became grand masters were considered smart. The game portrays foot soldiers, knights, kings, queens, bishops, and rooks. Several portray actual positions in the historical European military. Each piece has a unique movement pattern. For example, the knight is constricted to moving in a L-shape two squares long and one square to the side, the rook can only move in a straight line vertically or horizontally, and bishops can move diagonally on the board.\n",
"Chess became a source of inspiration in the arts in literature soon after the spread of the game to the Arab World and Europe in the Middle Ages. The earliest works of art centered on the game are miniatures in medieval manuscripts, as well as poems, which were often created with the purpose of describing the rules. After chess gained popularity in the 15th and 16th centuries, many works of art related to the game were created. One of the most well-known, Marco Girolamo Vida's \"Scacchia ludus\", written in 1527, made such an impression on the readers that it singlehandedly inspired other authors to create poems about chess.\n",
"In the second half of the 19th century, modern chess tournament play began, and the first World Chess Championship was held in 1886. The 20th century saw great leaps forward in chess theory and the establishment of the World Chess Federation (FIDE). Developments in the 21st century include use of computers for analysis, which originated in the 1970s with the first programmed chess games on the market. Online gaming appeared in the mid-1990s.\n",
"It was the first match of importance in the history of chess and is sometimes referred to today as the World Championship of 1834. The games were published widely, and were annotated and discussed by enthusiasts all over Europe. In the course of the mammoth encounter, both players introduced several innovations, a few of which are still seen today. It might even be said that the modern era of chess began with the McDonnell-La Bourdonnais match of 1834.\n",
"The history of chess can be traced back nearly 1500 years, although the earliest origins are uncertain. The earliest predecessor of the game probably originated in India, before the 6th century AD; a minority of historians believe the game originated in China. From India, the game spread to Persia. When the Arabs conquered Persia, chess was taken up by the Muslim world and subsequently spread to Southern Europe. In Europe, chess evolved into roughly its current form in the 15th century.\n"
] |
why do so many huge companies continue to use very old computers and software when it seems the benefits a system-wide update would outweigh the associated costs?
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> when it seems the benefits a system-wide update would outweigh the associated costs?
Apparently, the management doesn't think so.
Or, they may not be tech-competent. Lots of people aren't, especially people old enough to be managers/business owners.
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[
"This is the case for the computer market over the past decade or so. Every year, computer based companies market machines that are more and more powerful, and cheaper to make thanks to technological advancements. Computer based companies attempt to promote their newer models every year because of this, as it allows them to further increase their profit margin.\n",
"By the 21st century, the situation had reversed. Resources were perceived as cheap, and rapidity of coding and headline features for marketing seen as priorities. In part, this is because technological advances have since increased processing capacity and storage density by orders of magnitude, while reducing the relative costs by similar orders of magnitude (see Moore's law). Additionally, the spread of computers through all levels of business and home life has produced a software industry many times larger than it was in the 1970s. Programs are now usually churned out by teams, directed by committees in software development studios (also known as software houses or software factories) where each programmer works on only a part of the whole, on one or more subroutines.\n",
"BULLET::::- Cost of hardware: The relative cost of software versus hardware has changed substantially over the last 50 years. When mainframes were expensive and required large support staffs, the few organizations buying them also had the resources to fund large, expensive custom software engineering projects. Computers are now much more numerous and much more powerful, which has several effects on software. The larger market can support large projects to create commercial off the shelf software, as done by companies such as Microsoft. The cheap machines allow each programmer to have a terminal capable of fairly rapid compilation. The programs in question can use techniques such as garbage collection, which make them easier and faster for the programmer to write. On the other hand, many fewer organizations are interested in employing programmers for large custom software projects, instead using commercial off the shelf software as much as possible.\n",
"Some of their functions are too important to be left unused, and too expensive to reproduce again. The software industry and researchers have recently paid more attention towards component-based software development to enhance productivity and accelerate time to market.\n",
"By allowing users to bring their own operating system there are significant cost savings to be made by organisations who commonly have many on-site users and are obliged to provide them with computer hardware to allow them to perform specific tasks as there is no longer a need to install a hard drive in each computer. Upgrading and maintaining many PC computers has also become easier as companies only need to supply users with new pen drives containing the operating system boot images rather than having to re-image every PC with the latest build of the operating system thus eliminating upgrade costs.\n",
"As more and more programs enter the realm of firmware, and the hardware itself becomes smaller, cheaper and faster as predicted by Moore's law, an increasing number of types of functionality of computing first carried out by software, have joined the ranks of hardware, as for example with graphics processing units. (However, the change has sometimes gone the other way for cost or other reasons, as for example with softmodems and microcode.)\n",
"Digital preservation is more complicated because technology changes so quickly that a format that was used to save something years ago may become obsolete, like a 5 1/4\" floppy drive. Computers are no longer made with them, and obtaining the hardware to convert a file from an obsolete format to a newer one can be expensive. As a result, the upgrading process must take place every 2 to 5 years, or as newer technology becomes affordable, but before older technology becomes unobtainable. The Library of Congress provides numerous resources and tips for individuals looking to practice digitization and digital preservation for their personal collections.\n"
] |
are different over-the-counter pain medications better for different kinds of pain?
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Ibuprofen, Naproxen, and aspirin are all non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). All are used to reduce fever and inflammation, as well as help with pain.
Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is not an NSAID, which means it does not reduce inflammation. It still reduces fevers and helps with pain, but since it does not have anti-inflammatory properties, it usually cannot help with pain as much as NSAIDs do.
I've read that combining ibuprofen with acetaminophen can work even better to help with pain, but I'm not sure on the specifics of that.
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[
"Pain medication, such as aspirin and ibuprofen, are effective for the treatment of tension headache. Tricyclic antidepressants appear to be useful for prevention. Evidence is poor for SSRIs, propranolol and muscle relaxants.\n",
"Over-the-counter drugs, like acetaminophen, aspirin, or NSAIDs(ibuprofen, Naproxen, Ketoprofen), can be effective but tend to only be helpful as a treatment for a few times in a week at most. For those with gastrointestinal problems (ulcers and bleeding) acetaminophen is the better choice over aspirin, however both provide roughly equivalent pain relief. It is important to note that large daily doses of acetaminophen should be avoided as it may cause liver damage especially in those that consume 3 or more drinks/day and those with pre-existing liver disease. Ibuprofen, one of the NSAIDs listed above, is a common choice for pain relief but may also lead to gastrointestinal discomfort.\n",
"Spasmolytics such as carisoprodol, cyclobenzaprine, metaxalone, and methocarbamol are commonly prescribed for low back pain or neck pain, fibromyalgia, tension headaches and myofascial pain syndrome. However, they are not recommended as first-line agents; in acute low back pain, they are not more effective than paracetamol or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and in fibromyalgia they are not more effective than antidepressants. Nevertheless, some (low-quality) evidence suggests muscle relaxants can add benefit to treatment with NSAIDs. In general, no high-quality evidence supports their use. No drug has been shown to be better than another, and all of them have adverse effects, particularly dizziness and drowsiness. Concerns about possible abuse and interaction with other drugs, especially if increased sedation is a risk, further limit their use. A muscle relaxant is chosen based on its adverse-effect profile, tolerability, and cost.\n",
"Drugs of other types can be used to help opioids combat certain types of pain, for example, amitriptyline is prescribed for chronic muscular pain in the arms, legs, neck and lower back with an opiate, or sometimes without it and/or with an NSAID.\n",
"Pharmacological techniques are often continued in conjunction with other treatment options. Doses of pain medications needed often drop substantially when combined with other techniques, but rarely are discontinued completely. Tricyclic antidepressants, such as amitriptyline, and sodium channel blockers, mainly carbamazepine, are often used to relieve chronic pain, and recently have been used in an attempt to reduce phantom pains. Pain relief may also be achieved through use of opioids, ketamine, calcitonin, and lidocaine.\n",
"Many drug therapies are available for pain management after third molar extractions including NSAIDS (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory), APAP (acetaminophen), and opioid formulations. Although each has its own pain-relieving efficacy, they also pose adverse effects. According to two doctors, Ibuprofen-APAP combinations have the greatest efficacy in pain relief and reducing inflammation along with the fewest adverse effects. Taking either of these agents alone or in combination may be contraindicated in those who have certain medical conditions. For example, taking ibuprofen or any NSAID in conjunction with warfarin (a blood thinner) may not be appropriate. Also, prolonged use of ibuprofen or APAP has gastrointestinal and cardiovascular risks. There is high quality evidence that ibuprofen is superior to paracetamol in managing postoperative pain.\n",
"A systematic review concluded that \"tricyclic antidepressants and traditional anticonvulsants are better for short term pain relief than newer generation anticonvulsants.\" A further analysis of previous studies showed that the agents carbamazepine, venlafaxine, duloxetine, and amitriptyline were more effective than placebo, but that comparative effectiveness between each agent is unclear.\n"
] |
What historical basis is there for pirates being popularly depicted with eyepatches?
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You should read the biographical accounts of Admiral Don Blas de Lazo. Whilst the article I will cite is not academic, I found it very entertaining. _URL_0_
Admiral Don Blas de Lazo lost his eye, leg and hand in the service of the Spanish Navy. He had a peg leg, an eye-patch and a hook hand, pretty much all the stereotypical appurtenances associated with a grizzled mariner, albeit excluding the talking parrot on the shoulder.
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[
"One of the stereotypical features of a pirate as portrayed in popular culture, the eye patch, may have been partially derived from the Arab corsair Rahmah ibn Jabir al-Jalahimah, who wore a patch after losing an eye in battle in the 18th century.\n",
"One of the stereotypical features of a pirate in popular culture, the eye patch, dates back to the Arab pirate Rahmah ibn Jabir al-Jalahimah, who wore it after losing an eye in battle in the 18th century.\n",
"Carolyn Eastman also finds that pirates were represented as hypermasculine characters from the 18th century forward, and she also notes that they were depicted as sexual transgressors. She argues that this imagery of piracy appealed to elite men, who enjoyed the thought of an alternate masculinity without the restraint required of men in the upper classes.\n",
"Rahmah ibn Jabir al-Jalahimah, once the most popular pirate in the Persian Gulf, was also the first to wear an eyepatch after losing an eye in battle. Although eyepatches have since become stereotypically associated with pirates, the source is unclear, and there is no historical evidence to suggest that their use was for any other reason than protecting and concealing the eye socket after the loss of an eye. Most historical depictions of seamen with eye patches are of ex-sailors, rather than pirates.\n",
"Anne Bonny and Mary Read were infamous female pirates of the 18th century; both spent their brief sea-roving careers under the command of Calico Jack Rackham. They were also known to have been associated with other well known pirates: Blackbeard, William Kidd, Bartholomew Sharp, and Bartholomew Roberts. They are noted chiefly for their sex, highly unusual for pirates, which helped to sensationalize their 1720 October trial in Jamaica. They gained further notoriety for their ruthlessness—they are known to have spoken in favor of murdering witnesses in the crew's counsels—and for fighting the intruders of Rackham's vessel while he and his crew members were drunk and hiding under the deck. The capstone to their legend is that all the crew including Rackham, Anne and Mary were tried in a Spanish town close to Port Royal. Rackham and his crew were hanged, but when the judge sentenced Anne and Mary to death he asked if they had anything to say. \"Milord, we plead our bellies\", meaning they asserted they were pregnant. The judge immediately postponed their death sentence because no English court had the authority to kill an unborn child. Read died in prison of fever before the birth of the child. There is no record of Anne being executed and it was rumored her wealthy father had paid a ransom and took her home; other accounts of what happened to her include that she returned to piracy or became a nun.\n",
"The proposal that pirates may have worn an eyepatch so that one eye would be pre-adjusted to below-deck darkness was tested in an episode of \"MythBusters\" in 2007 and found to be plausible, but without any recorded historical precedent.\n",
"Its influence is enormous on popular perceptions of pirates, including such elements as treasure maps marked with an “X,” schooners, the Black Spot, tropical islands, and one-legged seamen bearing parrots on their shoulders.\n"
] |
why shouldn't i wash my cast iron pan?
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Cast-iron seasoning is technically, just oil that has slightly soaked into the metal. This soaking-in is also why the pan is heated to season it as heat expands the molecules of iron allowing room for oil to soak in.
As for cleaning and taste:
You can wash cast-iron with soap and water every time, but then you must immediately re-season it by coating with oil and heating, else it rusts fast. This mostly clears the flavors from previously cooked dishes.
Alternatively, you can clean cast-iron (without soap) using hot or boiling water, then put a small amount of oil on. Recommend to do this while pan is still hot from cooking, if possible. This method leaves behind many of the previous flavors and is no less sanitary than re-using deep fryer oil.
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[
"Because other cookware cleaning techniques like scouring or washing in a dishwasher can remove or damage the seasoning on a bare cast-iron pan, these pans should not be cleaned like most other cookware. Some chefs advocate never cleaning cast-iron pans at all; simply wiping them out after use, or washing them with hot water and a stiff brush. Others advocate washing with mild soap and water, and then re-applying a thin layer of fat or oil. A third approach is to scrub with coarse salt and a paper towel or clean rag.\n",
"Cast iron is a very slow conductor of heat and forms hot spots if heated too quickly, or if heated over an undersized burner. However, it has excellent heat retention properties. If given time to equalize, the entire pan will eventually heat to an evenly high temperature, which includes any iron handles, making it important to use protection to prevent burns.\n",
"A proper cast iron seasoning protects the cookware from rusting, provides a non-stick surface for cooking, and reduces food interaction with the iron of the pan. However, exposure to acidic foods such as tomatoes removes the seasoning, and the cookware must be re-seasoned again. Enamel-coated cast-iron pans do not need seasoning, as the enamel coating prevents rust in most instances. It is recommended to maintain the seasoning frequently to keep the food from sticking to the iron.\n",
"As with other cast iron vessels, a seasoned pan or dutch oven should not regularly be used to cook foods containing tomatoes, vinegar or other acidic ingredients, as these foods will eventually remove the protective layer created during the seasoning process. Cast iron ovens are best suited to cook food high in oil or fat, such as chicken, bacon, or sausage, or used for deep frying. Subsequent cleanings are usually accomplished without the use of soap. Detergent soaps and dishwashers can remove the seasoning on cast iron, so some cookbook authors recommend only wiping the pans clean after each use, or using other cleaning methods such as a salt scrub or boiling water. The protective layer itself is polymeric and not very susceptible to soaps, and many users do briefly use detergents and soaps. However, cast iron is very prone to rust, and the protective layer may have pinholes, so soaking for long periods is contraindicated as the layer may start to flake off.\n",
"Cast iron cookware is seasoned with oil. The surface of the cast iron is not very smooth; it has pits and peaks that are not conducive to cooking. Typically, the cookware is seasoned with oil. This process leaves a thin coat of oil in the pits and on top of the peaks on the surface of the pan. This thin coat actually polymerizes, making it durable and lasting. It also prevents the cast iron from rusting, which it is prone to do. The oil that is used in a seasoned pan combines with any liquid that is used in the cooking process and creates a good contact between pan and food. Even though the cast iron itself is a poor heat conductor, the oil makes the pan effective when it is at a high temperature.\n",
"Cast iron woks form a more stable carbonized layer of seasoning which makes it less prone to food sticking on the pan. While cast iron woks are superior to carbon steel woks in heat retention and uniform heat distribution, they respond slowly to heat adjustments and are slow to cool once taken off the fire. Because of this, food cooked in a cast iron wok must be promptly removed from the wok as soon as it is done to prevent overcooking. Chinese-style cast iron woks, although relatively light, are fragile and are prone to shattering if dropped or mishandled.\n",
"Cast iron cookware is slow to heat, but once at temperature provides even heating. Cast iron can also withstand very high temperatures, making cast iron pans ideal for searing. Being a reactive material, cast iron can have chemical reactions with high acid foods such as wine or tomatoes. In addition, some foods (such as spinach) cooked on bare cast iron will turn black.\n"
] |
why are some showers very steamy, but then the next day in the same shower there will be no steam at all, even at the same temperature?
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Barometric pressure, as the pressure rises and falls with different weather patterns, the steam in your shower will stay around longer or shorter.
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[
"Water left stagnant in the pipes of showers can be contaminated with pathogens that become airborne when the shower is turned on. If a shower has not been used for some time, it should be left to run at a hot temperature for a few minutes before use.\n",
"The effects of dousing are usually more intense and longer-lasting than just a cold shower. Ending a shower with cold water is an old naturopathic tradition. There are those who believe that this fever is helpful in killing harmful bacteria and leaving the hardier beneficial bacteria in the body.\n",
"A steam shower is a type of bathing where a humidifying steam generator produces water vapor that is dispersed around a person's body. A steam shower is essentially a steam room that offers the typical features of a bathroom shower. Steam showers are generally found in self-contained enclosures that prevent the water vapour from escaping into the rest of the room, avoiding damage to drywall, paint, or wallpaper. Steam showers combine the functionality of a standard steam room with many additional features including a shower, FM radio and hydrotherapy. Steam showers are available in a variety of materials, including tile, acrylic, fiberglass, glass, stone, and wood.\n",
"A hot shower will produce steam that condenses on the shower side of the curtain; lowering the pressure there. In a steady state the steam will be replaced by new steam delivered by the shower but in reality the water temperature will fluctuate and lead to times when the net steam production is negative.\n",
"A steam shower could be a regular shower with the added steam feature that is powered by a steam generator. In addition to plain steam, modern steam showers provide additional features such as foot massagers, ceiling rain showers, television, radios, telephones, audio input from an MP3 or CD player, chromatherapy or aromatherapy. A steam shower can use solar thermal technology and lessen the electricity bill drastically by heating the water with the sun. \n",
"If, for example, someone flushes a toilet while the shower is in use, the fixture suddenly draws a significant amount of cold water from the common supply line, causing a pressure drop. In the absence of a compensating mechanism, the relatively higher pressure in the hot water supply line will cause the shower temperature to rise just as suddenly, possibly reaching an uncomfortable or even dangerous level. Conversely, if someone opens a hot water faucet elsewhere, the relatively higher pressure in the cold water supply line will cause the shower temperature to drop suddenly.\n",
"Refraining from taking hot baths or showers may help if the condition is generalized (i.e. all over), as well as possibly for localized cases (i.e. in a specific area). If taking hot showers helps, it may be a condition called shower eczema. If it affects mainly the head, it may be psoriasis. In rare cases, allergy tests may uncover substances the patient is allergic to.\n"
] |
why does a larger screen look better than a smaller screen even if, by adjusting viewing distance, the field of vision occupied is exactly the same?
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Maybe it's because you have to force your eye's lens to focus close things (your phone). And for far images, you don't.
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[
"The principal disadvantage of side-by-side viewers is that large image displays are not practical and resolution is limited by the lesser of the display medium or human eye. This is because as the dimensions of an image are increased, either the viewing apparatus or viewer themselves must move proportionately further away from it in order to view it comfortably. Moving closer to an image in order to see more detail would only be possible with viewing equipment that adjusted to the difference. \n",
"The estimation of the monitor size by the distance between opposite corners does not take into account the display aspect ratio, so that for example a 16:9 widescreen display has less area, than a 4:3 screen. The 4:3 screen has dimensions of and area , while the widescreen is , .\n",
"Some widescreen LCD monitors optionally display lower resolutions without scaling or stretching an image, so that the image will always be in full sharpness, although it will not occupy the full screen. This is most often recognizable upon close inspection, as there will typically be black edges visible on either side of the panel horizon.\n",
"At a fixed screen capacity, efficiency is likely to decrease as aperture size decreases. In general, particles are not required to be separated precisely at their aperture size. However efficiency is improved if the screen is designed to filter as close to the intended cut size as possible. The selection of aperture type is generalized by the table below:\n",
"The eye's perception of \"display resolution\" can be affected by a number of factors see image resolution and optical resolution. One factor is the display screen's rectangular shape, which is expressed as the ratio of the physical picture width to the physical picture height. This is known as the aspect ratio. A screen's physical aspect ratio and the individual pixels' aspect ratio may not necessarily be the same. An array of 1280 × 720 on a display has square pixels, but an array of 1024 × 768 on a 16:9 display has oblong pixels.\n",
"Televisions and other displays typically list their size by their diagonal. Given the same diagonal, a 4:3 screen has more area compared to 16:9. For CRT-based technology, an aspect ratio that is closer to square is cheaper to manufacture. The same is true for projectors, and other optical devices such as cameras, camcorders, etc. For LCD and plasma displays, however, the cost is more related to the area. Producing wider and shorter screens can yield the same advertised diagonal, but with less area.\n",
"If any content is too wide to fit on a display, horizontal scrolling is required to view all of it. In applications such as graphics and spreadsheets there is often more content than can fit either the width or the height of the screen at a comfortable scale, and scrolling in both directions is necessary.\n"
] |
if you were to draw the universe as a circle on a piece of paper, what would be outside the circle?
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Nothing: it's like taking a 5" radius circular piece of paper and saying 'this represents the universe' and then asking what's written 6" from the centre: nothing!
On the other hand, depending on the 'shape' (or more correctly the geometry) of the universe, this might become more meaningful: if the paper is rolled into a tube you can 'go off the top' and end up at the bottom. You'd need to ask someone with a better knowledge of tensor calculus than I have though...
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[
"The subject of these drawings, a small and always visible table is prosaic, it is always at hand. The lines on these drawings are never the contour of the closing of an area: they always move, thus liberating mysterious energies.\n",
"No one has ever seen a perfect circle, nor a perfectly straight line, yet everyone knows what a circle and a straight line are. Plato utilizes the tool-maker's blueprint as evidence that Forms are real:... when a man has discovered the instrument which is naturally adapted to each work, he must express this natural form, and not others which he fancies, in the material ...\n",
"Examples: It is illuminating to consider the pullback of the degree 2 map from the circle to itself over the degree or map from the circle to itself. In such examples one sometimes gets a connected and sometimes disconnected space, but always several copies of the circle.\n",
"The surrounding space in the diagram is the Infinite Divine reality (Ein Sof). The outermost circle in the teachings of Lurianic kabbalah is the \"space\" made by the Tzimtzum in which Creation unfolds. Each successive World is progressively further removed from Divine revelation, a metaphorically smaller, more constricted circle. Emanation in each World proceeds down the 10 sefirot, with the last sefirah (Malchut-Actualisation of the Divine plan) of one World becoming, and being shared as, the first sefirah (Keter-The Divine Will) of the next, lower realm. The vertical line into the centre of the circle represents the path of downward emanation and constriction, from the initial first Ohr (light) of the \"Kav\" (Ray) in Lurianic doctrine.\n",
"If the peg (P) and two cords (K, K) were written in a circle, it would be possible to derive all three meters by starting at a different point in the circle and moving round it. Altogether there are five circles:\n",
"The circle may be open or closed. In the former case, the circle is incomplete, allowing for movement and development as well as the perfection of all things. Zen practitioners relate the idea to wabi-sabi, the beauty of imperfection. When the circle is closed, it represents perfection, akin to Plato's perfect form (Plato), the reason why the circle was used for centuries in the construction of cosmological models, see Ptolemy.\n",
"\"De Tactionibus\" embraced the following general problem: Given three things (points, straight lines, or circles) in position, describe a circle passing through the given points and touching the given straight lines or circles. The most difficult and historically interesting case arises when the three given things are circles. In the 16th century, Vieta presented this problem (sometimes known as the Apollonian Problem) to Adrianus Romanus, who solved it with a hyperbola. Vieta thereupon proposed a simpler solution, eventually leading him to restore the whole of Apollonius's treatise in the small work \"Apollonius Gallus\" (Paris, 1600). The history of the problem is explored in fascinating detail in the preface to J. W. Camerer's brief \"Apollonii Pergaei quae supersunt, ac maxime Lemmata Pappi in hos Libras, cum Observationibus, &c\" (Gothae, 1795, 8vo).\n"
] |
To scale, how big would the earth be if the observable universe was the size of the milky way?
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The diameter of the Milky Way is 100000-120000 light years (_URL_1_). The diameter of the observable universe is about 28 billion parsecs (_URL_0_). So we're scaling down by a factor of about 10^(6), and the scaled diameter of the Earth is around 15 meters.
|
[
"Research released in 2016 revised the number of galaxies in the observable universe from a previous estimate of 200 billion () to a suggested 2 trillion () or more, containing more stars than all the grains of sand on planet Earth. Most of the galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter (approximately 3000 to 300,000 light years) and separated by distances on the order of millions of parsecs (or megaparsecs). For comparison, the Milky Way has a diameter of at least 30,000 parsecs (100,000 ly) and is separated from the Andromeda Galaxy, its nearest large neighbor, by 780,000 parsecs (2.5 million ly.)\n",
"It estimated to be located at a distance of about 330,000 light-years (100 kpc) from the Earth. That is about twice the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud; the largest and most luminous satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.\n",
"The comoving distance from Earth to the edge of the observable universe is about 14.26 gigaparsecs (46.5 billion light-years or ) in any direction. The observable universe is thus a sphere with a diameter of about 28.5 gigaparsecs (93 billion light-years or ). Assuming that space is roughly flat (in the sense of being a Euclidean space), this size corresponds to a comoving volume of about ( or ).\n",
"On January 11, 2013, the discovery of the Huge-LQG was announced by the University of Central Lancashire, as the largest known structure in the universe by that time. It comprises 74 quasars and has a minimum diameter of 1.4 billion light-years, but over 4 billion light-years at its widest point. According to researcher and author, Roger Clowes, the existence of structures with the size of LQGs was believed theoretically impossible. Cosmological structures had been believed to have a size limit of approximately 1.2 billion light-years.\n",
"In 2011 NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and based on observations from the Kepler Mission is that about 1.4% to 2.7% of all Sun-like stars are expected to have Earth-size planets within the habitable zones of their stars. This means there could be two billion of them in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and assuming that all galaxies have a similar number as the Milky Way, in the 50 billion galaxies in the observable universe, there may be as many as a hundred quintillion. This would correspond to around 20 earth analogs per square centimeter of the Earth.\n",
"It is 55,000 light years across (half the diameter of our galaxy), and at the time of discovery, said to \"hold more than 10 times as much mass as the next largest object found in the early universe, or roughly the equivalent mass of 40 billion Suns\".\n",
"In 2015, a study by an international team of scientists suggested, after sorting and sifting through galactic data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, that the Milky Way is actually 50 percent larger than previously thought. It turned out that\n"
] |
What happens when the myelin sheath gets damaged?
|
Similar in principle to what happens when a wire starts loosing its insulation.
The electrical signal carried in a myelinated axon jumps between the small gaps in the myelin sheath. This dramatically speeds up the rate of conduction. When the sheath gets damaged, the signal has to travel along the length of the axon the slow way, where the signal can diffuse and degrade and can simply not be strong enough to perpetuate.
|
[
"CNS demyelination autoimmune disease causes the myelin sheath to deteriorate since the sense of recognition of self is lost.The loss of the myelin insulation either disrupts or prevents neural conduction along the nerve cell’s axon.\n",
"The myelin sheath is a multi-layered membrane, unique to the nervous system, that functions as an insulator to greatly increase the velocity of axonal impulse conduction. Myelin protein zero, absent in the central nervous system, is a major component of the myelin sheath in peripheral nerves. Mutations that disrupt the function of myelin protein zero can lead to less expression of myelin and degeneration of myelin sheath in the peripheral nervous system. Currently, myelin protein zero expression is postulated to be produced by signals from the axon. However, more details about the regulation of myelin protein zero are unknown.\n",
"The oligodendrocytes that originally formed a myelin sheath cannot completely rebuild a destroyed myelin sheath. However, the central nervous system can recruit oligodendrocyte stem cells capable of proliferation and migration and differentiation into mature myelinating oligodendrocytes. The newly formed myelin sheaths are thinner and often not as effective as the original ones. Repeated attacks lead to successively fewer effective remyelinations, until a scar-like plaque is built up around the damaged axons. These scars are the so-called \"scleroses\" that define the condition. They are named glial scars because they are produced by glial cells, mainly astrocytes, and their presence prevents remyelination. Therefore, there is research ongoing to prevent their formation.\n",
"When a peripheral fiber is severed, the myelin sheath provides a track along which regrowth can occur. However, the myelin layer does not ensure a perfect regeneration of the nerve fiber. Some regenerated nerve fibers do not find the correct muscle fibers, and some damaged motor neurons of the peripheral nervous system die without regrowth. Damage to the myelin sheath and nerve fiber is often associated with increased functional insufficiency.\n",
"The process creates a thinner myelin sheath than normal, but it helps to protect the axon from further damage, from overall degeneration, and proves to increase conductance once again. The processes underlying remyelination are under investigation in the hope of finding treatments for Demyelinating diseases, such as multiple sclerosis. \n",
"Research to repair damaged myelin sheaths is ongoing. Techniques include surgically implanting oligodendrocyte precursor cells in the central nervous system and inducing myelin repair with certain antibodies. While results in mice have been encouraging (via stem cell transplantation), whether this technique can be effective in replacing myelin loss in humans is still unknown. Cholinergic treatments, such as acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs), may have beneficial effects on myelination, myelin repair, and myelin integrity. Increasing cholinergic stimulation also may act through subtle trophic effects on brain developmental processes and particularly on oligodendrocytes and the lifelong myelination process they support. By increasing oligodendrocyte cholinergic stimulation, AChEIs, and other cholinergic treatments, such as nicotine, possibly could promote myelination during development and myelin repair in older age. Glycogen synthase kinase 3β inhibitors such as lithium chloride have been found to promote myelination in mice with damaged facial nerves. Cholesterol is a necessary nutrient for the myelin sheath, along with vitamin B12.\n",
"The discontinuous structure of the myelin sheath results in saltatory conduction whereby the action potential \"jumps\" from one node of Ranvier, over a long myelinated stretch of the axon called the internode, before \"recharging\" at the next node of Ranvier, and so on, until it reaches the axon terminal. Nodes of Ranvier are the short (~1 micron) unmyelinated regions of the axon between adjacent long (~0.2 mm - 1 mm) myelinated internodes. Once it reaches the axon terminal, this electrical signal provokes the release of a chemical message or neurotransmitter that binds to receptors on the adjacent post-synaptic cell (e.g. nerve cell in the CNS or muscle cell in the PNS) at specialised regions called synapses.\n"
] |
Could it be possible that degenerate matter ("neutronium") exists outside of neutron stars ?
|
It's the force provided by gravity that turns the matter into "neutronium", so anything that gets ejected from a collision would no longer be under an immense gravitational force. With the loss of this force, the matter would likely return to a more normal state.
|
[
"Another argument against the hypothesis is that if it were true, all neutron stars should be made of strange matter, and otherwise none should be. Even if there were only a few strange stars initially, violent events such as collisions would soon create many strangelets flying around the universe. Because a single strangelet will convert a neutron star to strange matter, by now all neutron stars would have been converted. This argument is still debated, but if it is correct then showing that one neutron star has a conventional nuclear matter crust would disprove the strange matter hypothesis.\n",
"Another hypothesized source of UHECRs from neutron stars is during neutron star to strange star combustion. This hypothesis relies on the assumption that strange matter is the ground state of matter which has no experimental or observational data to support it. Due to the immense gravitational pressures from the neutron star, it is believed that small pockets of matter consisting of \"up\", \"down\", and \"strange\" quarks in equilibrium acting as a single hadron (as opposed to a number of baryons). This will then combust the entire star to strange matter, at which point the neutron star becomes a strange star and its magnetic field breaks down, which occurs because the protons and neutrons in the quasi-neutral fluid have become strangelets. This magnetic field breakdown releases large amplitude electromagnetic waves (LAEMWs). The LAEMWs accelerate light ion remnants from the supernova to UHECR energies.\n",
"Quark-degenerate matter may occur in the cores of neutron stars, depending on the equations of state of neutron-degenerate matter. It may also occur in hypothetical quark stars, formed by the collapse of objects above the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff mass limit for neutron-degenerate objects. Whether quark-degenerate matter forms at all in these situations depends on the equations of state of both neutron-degenerate matter and quark-degenerate matter, both of which are poorly known. Quark stars are considered to be an intermediate category among neutron stars and black holes.\n",
"The concept of degenerate stars, stellar objects composed of degenerate matter, was originally developed in a joint effort between Arthur Eddington, Ralph Fowler and Arthur Milne. Eddington had suggested that the atoms in Sirius B were almost completely ionised and closely packed. Fowler described white dwarfs as composed of a gas of particles that became degenerate at low temperature. Milne proposed that degenerate matter is found in most of the nuclei of stars, not only in compact stars.\n",
"Pulsations with a stable period, similar to those resulting from the spin of a neutron star, have never been seen from Cygnus X-1. The pulsations from neutron stars are caused by the neutron star's magnetic field; however, the no-hair theorem guarantees that black holes do not have magnetic poles. For example, the X-ray binary V 0332+53 was thought to be a possible black hole until pulsations were found. Cygnus X-1 has also never displayed X-ray bursts similar to those seen from neutron stars. Cygnus X-1 unpredictably changes between two X-ray states, although the X-rays may vary continuously between those states as well. In the most common state, the X-rays are \"hard\", which means that more of the X-rays have high energy. In the less common state, the X-rays are \"soft\", with more of the X-rays having lower energy. The soft state also shows greater variability. The hard state is believed to originate in a corona surrounding the inner part of the more opaque accretion disk. The soft state occurs when the disk draws closer to the compact object (possibly as close as ), accompanied by cooling or ejection of the corona. When a new corona is generated, Cygnus X-1 transitions back to the hard state.\n",
"The strange matter hypothesis remains unproven. No direct search for strangelets in cosmic rays or particle accelerators has seen a strangelet (see references in earlier sections). If any of the objects such as neutron stars could be shown to have a surface made of strange matter, this would indicate that strange matter is stable at zero pressure, which would vindicate the strange matter hypothesis. However there is no strong evidence for strange matter surfaces on neutron stars (see below).\n",
"There is a theory that strange particles such as hyperons and dibaryons could form in the interior of a neutron star, changing its mass–radius ratio in ways that might be detectable. Accordingly, measurements of neutron stars could set constraints on possible dibaryon properties. A large fraction of the neutrons in a neutron star could turn into hyperons and merge into dibaryons during the early part of its collapse into a black hole . These dibaryons would very quickly dissolve into quark–gluon plasma during the collapse, or go into some currently unknown state of matter.\n"
] |
What are the differences between Adult Stem Cells and Embryonic Stem Cells in research?
|
To put it simply, one (adult) is already more differentiated, meaning it has already undergone some changes that make it more like the normal adult cells in your body and less like the pluri potent stem cells that can turn into anything (if they get the right signals to do so)
edit: see ren5311's comment below
|
[
"Adult stem cells have provided many different therapies for illnesses such as Parkinson's disease, leukemia, multiple sclerosis, lupus, sickle-cell anemia, and heart damage (to date, embryonic stem cells have also been used in treatment), Moreover, there have been many advances in adult stem cell research, including a recent study where pluripotent adult stem cells were manufactured from differentiated fibroblast by the addition of specific transcription factors. Newly created stem cells were developed into an embryo and were integrated into newborn mouse tissues, analogous to the properties of embryonic stem cells.\n",
"BULLET::::- Embryonic stem cells make up a significant proportion of a developing embryo, while adult stem cells exist as minor populations within a mature individual (e.g. in every 1,000 cells of the bone marrow, only one will be a usable stem cell). Thus, embryonic stem cells are likely to be easier to isolate and grow \"ex vivo\" than adult stem cells.\n",
"The therapeutic potential of adult stem cells is the focus of much scientific research, due to their ability to be harvested from the parent body that is females during the delivery. In common with embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells have the ability to differentiate into more than one cell type, but unlike the former they are often restricted to certain types or \"lineages\". The ability of a differentiated stem cell of one lineage to produce cells of a different lineage is called transdifferentiation. Some types of adult stem cells are more capable of transdifferentiation than others, but for many there is no evidence that such a transformation is possible. Consequently, adult stem therapies require a stem cell source of the specific lineage needed, and harvesting and/or culturing them up to the numbers required is a challenge. Additionally, cues from the immediate environment (including how stiff or porous the surrounding structure/extracellular matrix is) can alter or enhance the fate and differentiation of the stem cells.\n",
"Great levels of success and potential have been realized from research using adult stem cells. In early 2009, the FDA approved the first human clinical trials using embryonic stem cells. Only cells from an embryo at the morula stage or earlier are truly totipotent, meaning that they are able to form all cell types including placental cells. Adult stem cells are generally limited to differentiating into different cell types of their tissue of origin. However, some evidence suggests that adult stem cell plasticity may exist, increasing the number of cell types a given adult stem cell can become.\n",
"Adult stem cells have limitations with their potency; unlike embryonic stem cells (ESCs), they are not able to differentiate into cells from all three germ layers. As such, they are deemed multipotent.\n",
"The information presented here covers the legal implications of embryonic stem cells (ES), rather than induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). The laws surrounding the two differ because while both have similar capacities in differentiation, their modes of derivation are not. While embryonic stem cells are taken from embryoblasts, induced pluripotent stem cells are undifferentiated from somatic adult cells.\n",
"Scientific interest in adult stem cells is centered on their ability to divide or \"self-renew\" indefinitely, and generate all the cell types of the organ from which they originate, potentially regenerating the entire organ from a few cells. Unlike for embryonic stem cells, the use of human adult stem cells in research and therapy is not considered to be controversial, as they are derived from adult tissue samples rather than human embryos designated for scientific research. They have mainly been studied in humans and model organisms such as mice and rats.\n"
] |
Was the Puckle gun used during the American Revolution?
|
As cool as that would be, there's no record of the Puckle gun being used by either side. From the [Long 18th Century Blog Series](_URL_0_):
> "Although John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu (1690-1749) purchased several pro-type models of the gun in 1722, the British army and Royal Navy never placed a major production order. Consequently, no historical record of the Puckle Gun fired in combat exists."
James Puckle actually demonstrated the weapon to the English Board of Ordinance several times: in 1717, while the design was still being developed, several times between 1719 and 1721, and, famously, at a public trial in 1722. The gun impressed the audience by firing 63 shots in seven minutes in a heavy rain. However, it seems to have been treated as a hyper-specialized novelty by both its audience and its inventor. Puckle advertised its speed and rapid-fire ability, and added in the same breath that it could shoot square bullets at the Turks (while round bullets would be reserved for Christians) (Willbanks 2004).
Sources:
Michael Burgan, *Weapons, Gear, and Uniforms of the American Revolution.* Capstone Press, 2012.
George D. Moller, *American Military Shoulder Arms, Vol. 1: Colonial and Revolutionary War Arms.* University of New Mexico Press, 2011.
George C. Neumann, *Battle Weapons of the American Revolution.* Andrew Mowbray Inc, 2011.
James H. Willbanks. *Machine Guns: An Illustrated History of Their Impact.* ABC-CLIO, Weapons & Warfare Series, 2004.
|
[
"The Gatling gun is one of the best-known early rapid-fire spring loaded, hand cranked weapons, and a forerunner of the modern machine gun and rotary cannon. Invented by Richard Gatling, it saw occasional use by the Union forces during the American Civil War in the 1860s, which was the first time it was employed in combat. It was later used in numerous military conflicts, including the Boshin War, the Anglo-Zulu War, and the assault on San Juan Hill during the Spanish–American War. It was also used by the Pennsylvania militia in episodes of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, specifically in Pittsburgh.\n",
"The Gatling gun is one of the best-known early rapid-fire spring loaded, hand cranked weapons and a forerunner of the modern machine gun and rotary cannon. Invented by Richard Gatling, it saw occasional use by the Union forces during the American Civil War in the 1860s, which was the first time it was employed in combat. Later, it was used again in numerous military conflicts, such as the Boshin War, the Anglo-Zulu War, and the assault on San Juan Hill during the Spanish–American War. It was also used by the Pennsylvania militia in episodes of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, specifically in Pittsburgh.\n",
"The \"Brown Bess\" muzzleloading smoothbore musket was one of the most commonly used weapons in the American Revolution. While this was a British weapon, it was used heavily by the revolutionary patriots. The musket was used to fire a single shot ball, or a cluster style shot which fired multiple projectiles giving the weapon a \"shotgun\" effect. There were two variations of the Brown Bess: the Short Land Pattern and the Long Land Pattern. The Short Land was shorter, less bulky, less heavy than the Long Land. Most American fighters implemented the Long Land Pattern.\n",
"The Gatling gun was the first gun to use rotating barrels. It was designed by the American inventor Dr. Richard J. Gatling in 1861 and patented in 1862. Hand cranked and hopper fed, it could fire at a rate of 200 rounds per minute. The Gatling gun was a field weapon, first used in warfare during the American Civil War and subsequently by European and Russian armies.\n",
"The city was also the wartime home of Richard Jordan Gatling, a physician and entrepreneur, who invented the Gatling gun. Tested in Indianapolis and patented in November 1862, the hand-cranked, rapid-fire gun was a predecessor to the modern machine gun. The U.S. Navy adopted the Gatling gun during the war, where it was used on federal gunboats, but the U.S. Army did not formally adopt it for use until 1866.\n",
"In 1885, the newly introduced Gatling gun was first used by Canadian troops during the Riel Rebellion. The 12-pound field gun was used by Canadian soldiers in the Boer War. To provide the Canadian Militia with a source of Canadian manufactured munitions, the government established the crown-operated Dominion Arsenal in Quebec City in 1882. This factory produced bullets and shells.\n",
"Large numbers of Charleville Model 1763 and 1766 muskets were imported into the United States from France during the American Revolution, due in large part to the influence of Marquis de Lafayette.[6] The Charleville 1766 heavily influenced the design of the Springfield Musket of 1795.\n"
] |
During the Middle Ages, why was the suffix “-eth” used, and what purpose did it serve?
|
r/AskHistorians probably isn't the best sub for this question, but the answer is conjugation. Before answering your question in more detail, I would point out that what you heard on the radio was not representative of language during the Middle Ages (moreover the Middle Ages covered a very long period and language was not consistent throughout). What you heard would be more consistent with the 15th or 16th century. One of the most common places people encounter this kind of language would the King James Bible. The explanation below is for that era of language, and although the gist of it applies to the Middle Ages--i.e.
"conjugation,"--the details would be different.
"-eth," and "-est," (and its variations) are suffixes to conjugate verbs. "-eth" and "-th" for irregular verbs are used for third person: "She *shareth* her wealth." "He *hath* one goat." "-est" (also sometimes "-st" or "-t" for irregular verbs) is used for second person: "Thou *sharest* thy wealth." "Thou *art* a true friend." Conjugation gets more complicated when you introduce tense and plural verbs. If what you heard on the radio put the suffix on anything other than a verb, it was just wrong, and would explain why it sounded like nails on a chalkboard. This has become popular lately as a form humor, kinda like "DoggoLingo."
|
[
"BULLET::::- Romance palatal approximant (GE-, GI-, I-) consistently became medieval , as in medieval Catalan and Portuguese. This becomes modern \"ch\" , as a result of the devoicing of sibilants (see below). In Spanish, the medieval result was either (modern ), or nothing, depending on the context. E.g. IUVENEM (\"young man\", Sp. , Cat. ), GELARE (\"to freeze\", Sp. , Cat. ).\n",
"In Old English, \"hīe\" was used as the third-person, personal pronoun (in the nominative and accusative case). It was gradually replaced by an Old Norse borrowing, \"þeir\" (nominative plural masculine of the demonstrative, which acted in Old Norse as a plural pronoun), until it was entirely replaced in around the 15th century in Middle English. \"Þeir\", in turn, became \"they\" as it is known in Modern English today. \"Þeir\" originates from Proto-Germanic *\"þai-z\" (\"those\"), from Proto-Indo-European *\"toi\" (\"those\").\n",
"In 16th, 17th and early 18th century English the spellings — both with and without the \"\"al\"\" — were usually with an \"i\" or \"y\" as in \"chimic / chymic / alchimic / alchymic\". During the later 18th century the spelling was re-fashioned to use a letter \"e\", as in \"chemic\" in English. In English after the spelling shifted from \"chimical\" to \"chemical\", there was corresponding shift from \"alchimical\" to \"alchemical\", which occurred in the early 19th century. In French, Italian, Spanish and Russian today it continues to be spelled with an i as in for example Italian \"chimica\".\n",
"In the 19th and early 20th centuries, some writers wrote their own lists with names such as Wonders of the Middle Ages, Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages, Seven Wonders of the Medieval Mind, and Architectural Wonders of the Middle Ages. However, it is unlikely that these lists originated in the Middle Ages, because the word \"medieval\" was not invented until the Enlightenment-era, and the concept of a Middle Age did not become popular until the 16th century. \"Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable\" refers to them as \"later list[s]\", suggesting the lists were created after the Middle Ages.\n",
"Under medieval Christianity, the Latin \"\"creatio\"\" came to designate God's act of \"\"creatio ex nihilo\"\" (\"creation from nothing\"); thus \"\"creatio\"\" ceased to apply to human activities. The Middle Ages, however, went even further than antiquity, when they revoked poetry's exceptional status: it, too, was an art and therefore craft and not creativity.\n",
"The majority of English affixes, such as \"un-\", \"-ing\", and \"-ly\", were present in older forms in Old English. However, a few English affixes are borrowed. For example, the English verbal suffix \"-ize\" (American English) or \"ise\" (British English) comes from Greek -ιζειν (\"-izein\") via Latin \"-izare\".\n",
"By the 11th century, the role of grammatical gender in Old English was beginning to decline. The Middle English of the 13th century was in transition to the loss of a gender system. One element of this process was the change in the functions of the words \"the\" and \"that\" (then spelt \"þe\" and \"þat\"; see also Old English determiners): previously these had been non-neuter and neuter forms respectively of a single determiner, but in this period \"the\" came to be used generally as a definite article and \"that\" as a demonstrative; both thus ceased to manifest any gender differentiation. The loss of gender classes was part of a general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes by the end of the 14th century.\n"
] |
what is the actual amount of money spent on welfare/food stamps in the united states? how does it compare to subsidies and military funding?
|
_URL_0_
This is more of a search for the answer than simplify a complex subject.
Military is about twice welfare, but subsidizes other countries in a way. "Welfare" draws from other programs in loosely related ways as well.
|
[
"As of 2012, the United States government spent about $50 billion annually on 10 programs, mostly administrated by the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, which in total deliver food assistance to one in five Americans.\n",
"BULLET::::- President Johnson presented a record 135 billion dollar U.S. government budget to Congress for approval for fiscal year 1968. The $135,033,000,000 sought reflected the largest request for military spending since World War II ($72,300,000,000) and $18.3 billion in social programs, to be paid for by an additional ten billion dollars in individual income taxes.\n",
"Government funds provided to poverty stricken individuals by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are often referred to colloquially as \"food stamps\". The parallels between these \"food stamps\" and ration stamps as used in war time rationing is limited, however, since food can be purchased in the United States on the regular market without the use of stamps.\n",
"Offering government food assistance to the lowest income Americans dates back to the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and has continued into the 21st century. In FY 2011, the budget for the USDA Food and Nutrition Service, which is responsible for the major feeding programs, was $107 billion. The largest single food assistance program in the country is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the provisions for which are contained in a Farm Bill that is re-authorized by Congress and signed by the president every five years. Benefits to SNAP recipients cost approximately $75 billion in 2012. Largely uncontroversial for most of its history, the SNAP program was targeted for major cuts by members of the House of Representatives in the 2012 Farm Bill re-authorization attempt. House leaders also endeavored to separate the SNAP program from the Farm Bill, splitting the long-standing coalition of urban and rural legislators who traditionally backed the renewals of funding for the Farm Bill every five years.\n",
"Approximately 80% of the USDA's $141 billion budget goes to the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) program. The largest component of the FNS budget is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as the Food Stamp program), which is the cornerstone of USDA's nutrition assistance.\n",
"The American military government, based on a minimum daily ration of 1,990 kilocalories (July 1948), set a total of daily supplies needed at 646 tons of flour and wheat, 125 tons of cereal, 64 tons of fat, 109 tons of meat and fish, 180 tons of dehydrated potatoes, 180 tons of sugar, 11 tons of coffee, 19 tons of powdered milk, 5 tons of whole milk for children, 3 tons of fresh yeast for baking, 144 tons of dehydrated vegetables, 38 tons of salt and 10 tons of cheese. In all, 1,534 tons were required each day to sustain the over two million people of Berlin. Additionally, for heat and power, 3,475 tons of coal, diesel and petrol were also required daily.\n",
"During FY2017, the federal government spent $3.98 trillion on a budget or cash basis, up $128 billion or 3.3% vs. FY2016 spending of $3.85 trillion. Major categories of FY 2017 spending included: Healthcare such as Medicare and Medicaid ($1,077B or 27% of spending), Social Security ($939B or 24%), non-defense discretionary spending used to run federal Departments and Agencies ($610B or 15%), Defense Department ($590B or 15%), and interest ($263B or 7%).\n"
] |
What happens if a plutonium reactor heats up in a molten pool of salt?
|
I would think they flush it out while its just very salty water. I doubt they let it evaporate until solid before putting new water in.
|
[
"Molten salt reactor designs carry out fluoride volatility reprocessing continuously or at frequent intervals. The goal is to return actinides to the molten fuel mixture for eventual fission, while removing fission products that are neutron poisons, or that can be more securely stored outside the reactor core while awaiting eventual transfer to permanent storage.\n",
"All molten salt reactors have features that contribute to containment safety. These mostly have to do with the properties of the salt itself. The salts are chemically inert. They do not burn and are not combustible. The salts have low volatility (high boiling point around 1400 °C), allowing a low operating pressure of the core and cooling loops. This provides a large margin above the normal operating temperature of some 600 to 700 °C. This makes it possible to operate at low pressures without risk of coolant/fuel boiling (an issue with water cooled reactors).\n",
"The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) was a molten salt reactor run by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It was nuclear graphite moderated and the coolant salt used was FLiBe, which also carried the uranium-233 fluoride fuel dissolved in it. The MSRE had a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity: as the FLiBe temperature increased, it expanded, along with the uranium ions it carried; this decreased density resulted in a reduction of fissile material in the core, which decreased the rate of fission. With less heat input, the net result was that the reactor would cool. Extending from the bottom of the reactor core was a pipe that lead to passively cooled drain tanks. The pipe had a \"freeze valve\" along its length, in which the molten salt was actively cooled to a solid plug by a fan blowing air over the pipe. If the reactor vessel developed excessive heat or lost electric power to the air cooling, the plug would melt; the FLiBe would be pulled out of the reactor core by gravity into dump tanks, and criticality would cease as the salt lost contact with the graphite moderator.\n",
"The smoldering graphite, fuel and other material above, at more than , started to burn through the reactor floor and mixed with molten concrete from the reactor lining, creating corium, a radioactive semi-liquid material comparable to lava. If this mixture had melted through the floor into the pool of water, it was feared it could have created a serious steam explosion that would have ejected more radioactive material from the reactor. It became necessary to drain the pool.\n",
"In order to keep a nuclear reactor intact and functioning, and to extract useful power from it, a cooling system must be used. Some reactors circulate pressurized water; some use liquid metal, such as sodium, NaK, lead, or mercury; others use gases (see advanced gas-cooled reactor). If the coolant is a liquid, it may boil if the temperature inside the reactor rises. This boiling leads to \"voids\" inside the reactor. Voids may also form if coolant is lost from the reactor in some sort of accident (called a loss of coolant accident, which has other dangers). Some reactors operate with the coolant in a constant state of boiling, using the generated vapor to turn turbines.\n",
"The Japanese Nuclear Safety Commission states that it \"assumed\" melted fuel rods in unit 2 have released radioactive substances into the coolant water, which subsequently leaked out through an unknown route to the unit 2 turbine building basement. To reduce the amount of leaking water, TEPCO reduced the amount of water pumped into the unit 2 reactor, from 16 tons per hour to 7 tons per hour, which could lead to higher reactor temperatures. The highly radioactive water halts work on restoring the cooling pumps and other powered systems to reactors 1–4. TEPCO confirms finding low levels of plutonium in five samples during 21 and 22 March. Enriched levels of Plutonium-238, relative to Plutonium-239 and Plutonium-240, at two of the sites in the plant (solid waste area and field) indicate that contamination has occurred at those sites due to the \"recent incident\". Nonetheless, the overall levels of plutonium for all samples are about the same as background Pu levels resulting from atmospheric nuclear bomb testing in the past. However, these weapons did not use fuel that has decayed significantly. Such nuclear accidents as this one are a potent source of biologically accumulating isotopes of transuranic elements such as curium and americium which are incorporated into bones, complexed into the Ca/PO4 hydroxide.\n",
"Most molten salt reactors use a gravity drain tank as an emergency storage reservoir for the molten fuel salt. The IMSR deliberately avoids this drain tank. The IMSR design is simpler and eliminates the bottom drain line and accompanying risks from low level vessel penetrations. The result is a more compact, robust design with fewer parts and few failure scenarios. The salt can however be drained from the reactor by pumping it out the top. \n"
] |
why did muslim countries stop secularizing and embraced islamic fundamentalism
|
Here's an extremely simplified bullet point explanation:
* Most Middle Eastern nations are relatively new nation states (i.e., less than 100 years old) with very artificial borders that are a holdover from the colonial era. As such, most Middle Eastern nations are insanely divided along ethnic/sectarian/tribal lines, and they don't have very strong national identities.
* During the 20th century, many Western governments effectively propped up or supported authoritarian, secular governments in the region.
* These authoritarian regimes did a terrific job of keeping sectarian/tribal conflicts to a minimum, at the terrible expense of human rights to free expression and assembly.
* Most Middle Eastern nations are insanely resource rich with oil. This means a shortcut to wealth for those nations' elites, often at the expense of properly developing their nations' infrastructure, education and economies.
* There has been rapid economic development in the region over the past 50 years, and with that has been Western influence and culture. That bred resentment toward the Western-friendly regimes.
* While we often think poverty is what leads to religious extremism, that's not necessarily the case here. The real culprit is lack of opportunity for people who are decently educated and who come from lower-middle to middle class families. Due to the corrupt and nepotistic nature of the authoritarian regimes in the nation, good jobs are only available to those with connections.
* One of the most critical points: Due to the lack of freedom of expression in many of these nations, Islam became a vehicle for political expression. You couldn't go into the street and protest, but you could generally voice your opposition to the regime in the context of Islam inside of a mosque.
* Mosques became breeding grounds for political activity because they were the only safe space for dissidents to congregate.
* As in any ideological battle, the loudest and most extreme voices either drown everyone else out or outright kill any moderate voices off.
* So, many Muslims were faced with a choice: either siding with their weak national identity or their strong religious identity.
* That's more or less why Islamic fundamentalism exists.
Obviously that is a very simplified explanation and there are other factors I didn't go into.
|
[
"Because Muslims believe that their faith was revealed in its complete form to Muhammad, it has been difficult to adapt Islam to the social, economic, and political changes that began with the expansion of colonial rule in the late 19th century. Some modifications have occurred, however. One response was to stress a return to orthodox Muslim traditions and to oppose Westernization totally. The Sufi brotherhoods were at the forefront of this movement, personified in Somalia by Mohammed Abdullah Hassan in the early 20th century. Generally, the leaders of Islamic orders opposed the spread of Western education.\n",
"While this was not a problem during the colonial era, Muslims wishing to change their religion face severe deterrence. Before 1988, the question of freedom of religion and therefore of questions relating to the desire of citizens to change their religion was exclusively within the jurisdiction of secular courts. But since the law has changed, an amendment stipulates that secular courts no longer have the right to deal with claims by Muslims and that only Islamic Shariah courts have jurisdiction to discuss issues related to human rights . the Muslim community . Apostasy is one of them and it follows that it is constitutionally legally impossible for a Muslim to change his belief.\n",
"During the 19th and early 20th centuries, most Islamic states fell under the sway of European colonialists. The colonialists enforced tolerance, especially of European Christian missionaries. After World War II, there was a general retreat from colonialism, and predominantly Muslim countries were again able to set their own policies regarding non-Muslims. This period also saw the beginning of increased migration from Muslim countries into the First World countries of Europe, the UK, Canada, the US, etc. This has completely reshaped relations between Islam and other religions.\n",
"Islam is seen as \"refusing\" the concept of separation of religion and politics of the Enlightenment, which in turn leads to the necessity for social and political activism, much like the Muslim activists of the 20th century that challenged colonialism and corruption of the government. In addition, the Qur'an tells the stories of the prophets and their \"belief (iman) in God and the struggle (jihad) for social justice,\" which further motivates Muslims to follow the example of the prophets and engage in social activism.\n",
"While some researchers refute explanations of \"Islamic fundamentalism\" as an anti-imperialist political force directed against Western dominance in the Islamic world, others, such as Moaddel, argue that Islam has been politicized only during the second half of the twentieth century as a discourse of opposition, not to Western domination in the state system, but to the ideas, practices, and arbitrary political interventions of a westernizing secularist political elite. This elite has established ideologically\n",
"A number of scholars believe that secular governments in Muslim countries have become more repressive and authoritarian to combat the spread of Islamism, but this increased repression may have made many Muslim societies more opposed to secularism and increased the popularity of Islamism the Middle East.\n",
"Conversion to Islam is simple, but Muslims are forbidden to convert from Islam to another religion. Certain Muslim-majority countries are known for their restrictions on religious freedom, highly favoring Muslim citizens over non-Muslim citizens. Other countries having the same restrictive laws tend to be more liberal when imposing them. Even other Muslim-majority countries are secular and thus do not regulate religious belief.\n"
] |
the difference between ad valorem tax and capital gains tax
|
You've got some of your vocabulary mixed up, and it's like you're asking *what's the difference between asphalt and I-95.*
Capital-gains tax is basically a tax on your profit from buying something for a low price and selling it for a higher one. In a little bit more detail, it's a tax on the difference between your sale price and your cost to acquire and improve (but not maintain) the asset.
Ad-valorem is an adjective to describe taxes that are assessed on the (estimated) value of a property. The Latin just means according-to-value. Many cities and counties have a property tax where homeowners must pay a certain percentage (1%-2% is pretty typical, but there are high-tax cities out there) of the assessed value of their house & land.
|
[
"Capital gains tax (CGT), in the context of the Australian taxation system, is a tax applied to the capital gain made on the disposal of any asset, with a number of specific exemptions, the most significant one being the family home. Rollover provisions apply to some disposals, one of the most significant of which are transfers to beneficiaries on death, so that the CGT is not a quasi estate tax.\n",
"The Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992 (c 12) is an Act of Parliament which governs the levying of capital gains tax in the United Kingdom. This is a tax on the increase in the value of an asset between the date of purchase and the date of sale of that asset. The tax operates under two different regimes for a natural person and a body corporate. \n",
"An \"ad valorem\" tax (Latin for \"according to value\") is a tax whose amount is based on the value of a transaction or of property. It is typically imposed at the time of a transaction, as in the case of a sales tax or value-added tax (VAT). An \"ad valorem\" tax may also be imposed annually, as in the case of a real or personal property tax, or in connection with another significant event (e.g. inheritance tax, expatriation tax, or tariff). In some countries a stamp duty is imposed as an \"ad valorem\" tax.\n",
"A capital gains tax (CGT) is a tax on the profit realized on the sale of a non-inventory asset that was greater than the amount realized on the sale. The most common capital gains are realized from the sale of stocks, bonds, precious metals, and property. Not all countries impose a capital gains tax and most have different rates of taxation for individuals and corporations.\n",
"A capital gains tax can be thought of as tax advantaged or benefitted. When an investor receives profit by selling a capital asset, such as the sale of stock, this is taxed at the rate of the capital gains tax, which is often lower than the income tax. Thus, business owners and investors are incentivized to make profits by making capital gains rather than a steady wage.\n",
"An \"ad valorem\" tax is one where the tax base is the value of a good, service, or property. Sales taxes, tariffs, property taxes, inheritance taxes, and value added taxes are different types of ad valorem tax. An ad valorem tax is typically imposed at the time of a transaction (sales tax or value added tax (VAT)) but it may be imposed on an annual basis (property tax) or in connection with another significant event (inheritance tax or tariffs).\n",
"BULLET::::- The United Kingdom enacted its first capital gains tax, a tax upon the profit realized from the sale of assets based on the sale price, minus the BDV (the \"Budget Day Value\" being the value of the property on April 6, 1965); the law initially applied to real estate and buildings.\n"
] |
how are apple pay, samsung pay, google wallet different?
|
Samsung pay can use magnetic secure transmission, to basically send the information to the magnetic reader on almost all card readers wheras apple pay and google wallet use nfc to process payments
The added capability of samsung allow it to truthfully make claims that it is accepted in more places
|
[
"While Android Pay is only available to Android users, Google Wallet is available on iOS and via Gmail as well. For those using Android, the two products together (Android Pay and Google Wallet) offer a comprehensive payments management system, a “tool for staying in charge of the bank account.” Users can link their bank accounts or debit cards to Android Pay and to their Google Wallet app. With this approach, users can manage their money from one source, with the ability to:\n",
"As of January 8, 2018, the old Android Pay and Google Wallet have unified into a single pay system called Google Pay. Android Pay was rebranded and renamed as Google Pay. It also took over the branding of Google Chrome's autofill feature. Google Pay adopts the features of both Android Pay and Google Wallet through its in-store, peer-to-peer, and online payments services.\n",
"BULLET::::- On 9 September 2014, Apple Pay was announced at the iPhone 6 event. In October 2014 it was released as an update to work on iPhone 6 and Apple Watch. It is very similar to Google Wallet, but for Apple devices only.\n",
"Apple Pay is a mobile payment and digital wallet service by Apple Inc. that allows users to make payments in person, in iOS apps, and on the web. It is supported on the iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, and Mac. It digitizes and can replace a credit or debit card chip and PIN transaction at a contactless-capable point-of-sale terminal. Apple Pay does not require Apple Pay-specific contactless payment terminals; it works with any merchant that accepts contactless payments. It is very similar to contactless payments already used in many countries, with the addition of two-factor authentication via Touch ID, Face ID, PIN, or passcode. Devices wirelessly communicate with point of sale systems using near field communication (NFC), in conjunction with an embedded secure element (eSE) to securely store payment data and perform cryptographic functions, and Apple's Touch ID and Face ID for biometric authentication.\n",
"Google Pay (stylized as G Pay; formerly Pay with Google and Android Pay) is a digital wallet platform and online payment system developed by Google to power in-app and tap-to-pay purchases on mobile devices, enabling users to make payments with Android phones, tablets or watches.\n",
"On January 8, 2018, Google announced that Google Wallet would be merged into Android Pay, with the service as a whole rebranded as Google Pay. This merger extends the platform into web-based payments integrated into other Google and third-party services. The rebranding began to roll out as an update to the Android Pay app on February 20, 2018; the app was given an updated design, and now displays a personalized list of nearby stores which support Google Pay.\n",
"Apple allows PayPal as a mode of payment for App Store, Apple Music, iTunes, and iBooks. PayPal can increase usage by the platform of Apple. In addition, PayPal gets revenue from Apple services especially from App Store. Customers can use PayPal to purchase by connecting their PayPal payment system to Apple ID accounts.\n"
] |
the confusion between r and l when japanese and english are exchanged.
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The Japanese language has no *L* sound. It doesn't have a true *R* sound either. The sound that comes closest to both is actually the same sound - it's a sort of blend between the English L and the English R. It's always transliterated as an R sound because the sound is a lot closer to our R than it is to our L.
|
[
"Due to the difficulties that Japanese have in distinguishing \"l\" and \"r\", this expansion of Japanese phonology has not extended to inventing different kana for /l/ vs. /r/. Therefore, words with /l/ or /r/ may be spelled identically if borrowed into Japanese. One important exception is due to the fact that Japanese typically borrows English words in a non-rhotic fashion, so that syllable-final \"-r\" and \"-l\" can still be distinguished. For example, \"bell\" is ベル and \"bear\" is ベア, rather than both being ベル.\n",
"Japanese does not have separate \"l\" and \"r\" sounds, and \"l-\" is normally transcribed using the kana that are perceived as representing \"r-\". For example, \"London\" becomes ロンドン (\"Ro-n-do-n\"). Other sounds not present in Japanese may be converted to the nearest Japanese equivalent; for example, the name \"Smith\" is written スミス (\"Su-mi-su\"). Foreign sounds can be difficult to express in Japanese, resulting in spellings such as フルシチョフ \"Furushichofu\" (Khrushchev), アリー・ハーメネイー \"Arī Hāmeneī\" (Ali Khamenei) and イツハク・パールマン \"Itsuhaku Pāruman\" or イツァーク・パールマン \"Itsāku Pāruman\" (Itzhak Perlman).\n",
"BULLET::::10. The modern Mandarin initial \"r\" usually corresponds to \"ny\" or \"ni\" in Japanese. At the time of borrowing, characters such as ('person') and ('day'), which have an initial \"r\" sound in modern Mandarin, began with a palatal nasal consonant closely approximating French and Italian \"gn\" and Spanish \"ñ\". (This distinction is still preserved in some Chinese varieties, such as Hakka and Shanghainese, as well as Vietnamese.) Thus Mandarin \"Rìběn\" (, Japan) corresponds to Japanese \"Nippon\". This is also why the character , pronounced in Middle Chinese, is pronounced \"nin\" in some contexts, as in , and \"jin\" in others, such as — approximating its more modern pronunciation. In Wu dialects, including Shanghainese, ('person') and ('two') are still pronounced \"nin\" and \"ni\", respectively. In Southern Min (especially Zhangzhou accent), is \"jîn\" (literary pronunciation) which is practically identical to Japanese On'yomi.\n",
"BULLET::::- Japanese generally uses except after and , when it uses , and after , when it uses an echo vowel. For example, the English word \"street\" becomes in Japanese; the Dutch name becomes , and the German name , .\n",
"BULLET::::7. The consonant \"f\" in Mandarin corresponds to both \"h\" and \"b\" in Japanese. Early Middle Chinese had no /f/, but instead had /pj/ or /bj/ (in other reconstructions, or ). Japanese still reflects this (\"h\" was /p/ in Old Japanese). For example, Mandarin \"Fó\" ( 'Buddha') corresponds to Japanese ; both reflect Early Middle Chinese /bjut/ from a still older form /but/. In modern Southern Min Chinese, this character may be pronounced either [put] or [hut] (colloquial and literary respectively).\n",
"Modern Korean and Japanese share a similar system of demonstrative pronouns: i- (이), ku- (그) and ce- (저) for Korean corresponding to the Japanese ko- (こ), so- (そ) and a- (あ)(“this”, “that” and “that over there”). They both lack a compulsory distinction of plurality (for example \"an apple\" vs \"apples\" is usually not specifically distinguished).\n",
"BULLET::::- There is some dialectal difference here as well, with \"iku\" as more standard, but \"yuku\" common in Western Japan (as well as song lyrics). By contrast, 言う \"iu, yuu\" \"say\" is only a dialectal difference, with standard \"iu\", but Western Japanese \"yuu\".\n"
] |
why does a running hose slither around like a snake when you let go of it?
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Because of Newton's third law. Water is pushed out the hose, so conversely, the hose is also pushed away from the water. This means that, as long as the water in the hose is under pressure, there will be a 'recoil' force acting on the tip of the hose, making it move around.
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[
"When water is supplied to the hose, it flows through the nozzle body to the opening, where it would normally flow straight forward in a stream. Just after leaving the opening it encounters the plug, which deflects the water sideways through an angle. After travelling a short distance the water encounters the outside of the nozzle opening, which deflects it forward again. This two-step process causes the water to be ejected in a ring-shaped pattern, which causes less water to strike any one location, and thereby reduces erosion while also making it easier to water larger areas.\n",
"Stripwound hoses consist of spirals that are loosely interlocked. This causes them to be highly flexible. These hoses come in two basic variants – either with an engaged profile or with an interlocked profile such as the Agraff profile. Both variants offer high flexibility due to the profile structure. However, this results in their not being fully leak-tight. For this reason, they are often used as insulating or protective hoses around an inner tube.\n",
"According to folklore, the distinguishing feature of a hoop snake is that it can grasp its tail in its jaws and roll after its prey like a wheel, thus looking somewhat like the \"ouroboros\" of Greek mythology, or \"Tsuchinoko\" in Japan. In one version of the myth, the snake straightens out at the last second, skewering its victim with its venomous tail. The only escape is to hide behind a tree, which receives the deadly blow instead and promptly dies from the poison.\n",
"Hoses can be used in water or other liquid environments or to convey air or other gases. Hoses are used to carry fluids through air or fluid environments, and they are typically used with clamps, spigots, flanges, and nozzles to control fluid flow.\n",
"A hose is a flexible hollow tube designed to carry fluids from one location to another. Hoses are also sometimes called \"pipes\" (the word \"pipe\" usually refers to a rigid tube, whereas a hose is usually a flexible one), or more generally \"tubing\". The shape of a hose is usually cylindrical (having a circular cross section). \n",
"Common garden hose trigger nozzles are a simple example of the plug nozzle and its method of operation. In this example the nozzle consists of a conical or bell shaped opening with a plug on a movable rod positioned in front of the nozzle. The plug looks similar to a poppet valve. The stem of the valve runs back through the body of the nozzle body to a \"trigger\", normally a long lever running down the back of the nozzle assembly. A spring keeps the valve pressed against the opening under normal use, thereby providing a failsafe cut-off that stops the flow of water when the nozzle is dropped.\n",
"BULLET::::- Holes - Although not as large as river holes, holes in creeks can be very violent due to the steepness of the river. A hole is created by water abruptly rising over a feature on the bottom of the river, and then falling behind this feature. This will create a dip in the river that is lower than the surrounding water, which will then crash in to fill it. Because of the rise before this dip, most of the water filling the dip or hole is coming from downstream, creating an upstream flow of water in the middle of the river.\n"
] |
Why do the poles of the moon have more craters than the equator?
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Possibly because of sheer probability. One hemisphere of the moon is always blocked by the entire mass known as the Earth, and the other is sometimes blocked by the rest of the solar system, while the poles aren't blocked by anything.
|
[
"The far side has more visible craters. This was thought to be a result of the effects of lunar lava flows, which cover and obscure craters, rather than a shielding effect from the Earth. NASA calculates that the Earth obscures only about 4 square degrees out of 41,000 square degrees of the sky as seen from the Moon. \"This makes the Earth negligible as a shield for the Moon [and] it is likely that each side of the Moon has received equal numbers of impacts, but the resurfacing by lava results in fewer craters visible on the near side than the far side, even though both sides have received the same number of impacts.\"\n",
"The lunar south pole is of special interest to scientists because of the occurrence of water ice in permanently shadowed areas around it. The lunar south pole region features craters that are unique in that the near-constant sunlight does not reach their interior. Such craters are cold traps that contain a fossil record of hydrogen, water ice, and other volatiles dating from the early Solar System. In contrast, the lunar north pole region exhibits a much lower quantity of similarly sheltered craters. \n",
"The craters of the Moon that make up the ‘face’ on the south pole have been preserved for billions of years. The Moon's exterior is 16% composed of these craters. These craters have been made by meteors and can be up to 1,600 miles across. Due to the absence of an atmosphere, the Moon cannot protect itself from outer threats like these meteors. Craters are often covered with a mixture of fine dust and rocky debris called regolith. Some research conducted through Clementine suggests that there is also water and ice in some craters throughout the Moon. The craters themselves show a past of being filled with molten lava.\n",
"Compared to Mercury, the Moon and other such bodies, Venus has very few craters. In part, this is because Venus's dense atmosphere burns up smaller meteorites before they hit the surface. The \"Venera\" and \"Magellan\" data are in agreement: there are very few impact craters with a diameter less than , and data from \"Magellan\" show an absence of any craters less than in diameter. The small craters are irregular and appear in groups, thus pointing to the deceleration and the breakup of impactors. However, there are also fewer of the large craters, and those appear relatively young; they are rarely filled with lava, showing that they were formed after volcanic activity in the area ceased, and radar data indicates that they are rough and have not had time to be eroded down.\n",
"Their hypothesis relies heavily on the suggestion that large lunar craters, generally assumed to be formed from meteor impact, are generally too shallow and have flat or even convex bottoms. They hypothesized that small meteors are making a cup-shaped depression in the rocky surface of the moon while the larger meteors are drilling through a rocky layer and hitting an armoured hull underneath.\n",
"Newer research suggests that heat from Earth at the time when the Moon was formed is the reason the near side has fewer impact craters. The lunar crust consists primarily of plagioclases formed when aluminium and calcium condensed and combined with silicates in the mantle. The cooler, far side experienced condensation of these elements sooner and so formed a thicker crust; meteoroid impacts on the near side would sometimes penetrate the thinner crust here and release basaltic lava that created the maria, but would rarely do so on the far side.\n",
"Craters less than about 30 km in diameter were not mapped except for those that are rayed and those occurring in chains and clusters satellitic to larger craters and basins. These satellitic or secondary craters are not distinguished as to relative age or origin. (However, near the southwest map corner, elongate chains are radial to their parent crater Valmiki). In general, secondary craters appear topographically fresher and occur closer to their primary sources than do their lunar counterparts. This effect is probably because the higher gravity field on Mercury compared to the Moon has resulted in higher impact velocities for crater ejecta (Scott, 1977).\n"
] |
how have sports contracts gotten so inflated over time?
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Sports are big money: the NFL made more than $13 billion last year, MLB $10 billion. Teams have to compete for top talent and better representation for players such as the NFL's Players Union mean that more of the total revenue of the league goes to players instead of owners.
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[
"This competition for the best amateur athletes resulted in skyrocketing signing bonuses. In 1947, Major League baseball implemented the bonus rule. The rule prevented the wealthiest teams from signing all of the best players and from stashing those players in their farm systems. Additionally, the bonus market was weakened as a result of inhibited competition. In return, this limited labor costs.\n",
"This is a list of the largest sports contracts. These figures include signing bonuses but exclude options, buyouts, and endorsement deals. This list does not reflect the highest annual salaries or career earnings, only the top 100 largest contracts and thus is largely limited to athletes in team sports and auto racing. Athletes in individual sports, such as golf, tennis, and boxing, are not employed by a team and usually earn money primarily through event winnings. This list also does not necessarily reflect actual money collected by the athletes, since some contracts are eventually terminated (usually due to an athlete either retiring or invoking their opt-out clause).\n",
"As the amount of money involved in professional sports increased, many prominent players began to hire agents to negotiate contracts on their behalf. This intensified contract negotiations that resulted, as well to ensure all player contracts are in accordance with these caps, as well as consistent with the desires of the ownership and its ability to pay.\n",
"In Europe, the wages of the top players have increased dramatically since the Bosman ruling, although this is partly because of increased television revenues. As in North America, the number of transfers involving a fee are on the decline since clubs can wait for players to finish their contracts and become unrestricted. Also in Major League Baseball the larger and more successful teams often trump the lesser income teams from lack of a salary cap.\n",
"One of the reasons that break the contract with ESPN is the severe financial problems happened at that time, since 1999-2000 the production graph line has been moved down. In 2009, a major delay in paying salaries for orbit employees in Egypt, Lebanon and KSA for more than 4 months.\n",
"Changes to workers' compensation premiums have affected sports organizations, horse racing, and puppetmakers. The last of these was a result of them being misclassified under rubber manufacturing rather than theatrical production, putting them in the same risk category as tire manufacturers which work with molten rubber and causing the premium to increase nearly 15 times, before publicity caused the problem to be fixed.\n",
"Things began to change in 1973 when Billie Jean King won \"the Battle of the Sexes\" and cracked the glass ceiling on pay for female athletes. Other players, like Martina Navratilova, broke through that ceiling, decreasing the gap between women and men athlete's pay on a regular basis rather than occasionally.\n"
] |
how does warrant canary work if they can compel you to lie?
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A warrant canary works because you cannot be compelled to lie.
I can be under a gov't warrant cooperate in some way, and I can be barred from revealing the existence of that warrant. If someone asked me directly, I can either lie, or refuse to answer without violating the warrant.
The warrant canary is basically a trick that makes the refusal to answer a positive answer. If I create a policy where I always truthfully say no when there is no warrant, not saying no becomes a yes. I don't violate the terms of the warrant, but at the same time I am able to confirm it exists.
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[
"A warrant canary is a method by which a communications service provider aims to inform its users that the provider has been served with a secret government subpoena despite legal prohibitions on revealing the existence of the subpoena. The warrant canary typically informs users that there has been a secret subpoena as of a particular date. If the canary is not updated for the time period specified by the host or if the warning is removed, users are to assume that the host has been served with such a subpoena. The intention is to allow the provider to warn users of the existence of a subpoena passively, without disclosing to others that the government has sought or obtained access to information or records under a secret subpoena.\n",
"Australia outlawed the use of a certain kind of warrant canary in March 2015, making it illegal for a journalist to \"disclose information about the existence or non-existence\" of a warrant issued under new mandatory data retention laws. It is unlikely a journalist could give a correct canary in this situation anyway, as under this legislation the agency obtaining the warrant is not compelled to inform the journalist of the warrant. Afterwards, computer security and privacy specialist Bruce Schneier wrote in a blog post that \"[p]ersonally, I have never believed [warrant canaries] would work. It relies on the fact that a prohibition against speaking doesn't prevent someone from not speaking. But courts generally aren't impressed by this sort of thing, and I can easily imagine a secret warrant that includes a prohibition against triggering the warrant canary. And for all I know, there are right now secret legal proceedings on this very issue.\"\n",
"On August 1, 2018, the warrant canary on their website briefly vanished, followed by some system downtime. It was then replaced by a transparency report. Five days later, the canary was re-signed using GPG encryption. By August 9, Spideroak had also updated their transparency report, making a statement concerning the canary. It is impossible to tell if the change was internally driven or canary was tripped and the company has been compelled by court order to hide the fact. \n",
"As a matter before a court exercising judicial power, a warrant could be obtained against another person that prohibits its own disclosure of existence or non-existence. However, this could easily be remedied by amalgamating the right to a fair trial with the warrant canary. In Australia, everyone has a right to a fair trial under case law, and the larger picture of this law being the right to access a lawyer, if one were to write a warrant canary in such a way that seeks access to legal representation, it may have the effect of \"triggering\" the canary; informing the larger public of the existence of a secret warrant, and should an authority object or remove such a notice seeking legal representation, could be seen as that authority's infringement of this legal right in Australia (with the goal of the canary to be effectively causing a stay of proceedings) and other common law jurisdictions. This would cure the inherent prohibition in the reducing warrant canaries to be a matter of negative or positive action (the addition of a notice, or the removal of such a notice, whatever the case may be).\n",
"The first commercial use of a warrant canary was by the US cloud storage provider rsync.net, which began publishing its canary in 2006. In addition to a digital signature, it provides a recent news headline as proof that the warrant canary was recently posted as well as mirroring the posting internationally.\n",
"A canary trap is a method for exposing an information leak by giving different versions of a sensitive document to each of several suspects and seeing which version gets leaked. It could be one false statement, to see if sensitive information gets out to other people as well. Special attention is paid to the quality of the prose of the unique language, in the hopes that the suspect will repeat it verbatim in the leak, thereby identifying the version of the document.\n",
"Mid-November 2016, an unexplained stealth error appeared in their warrant canary page, and they failed to respond to requests to update the canary, leading some to believe the collective has become the target of a gag order denying them their right to comment publicly. On February 16, 2017, the Riseup collective revealed that their failure to update their canary was due to two sealed warrants from the FBI, which perforce made it impossible for them to legally update their canary. The two sealed warrants concerned a public contact of an International distributed denial-of-service attack extortion ring and an account using ransomware to extort people financially. The decision to release user information has been criticized in the hacker community. Their canary has since been updated, but does no longer state the absence of gag orders.\n"
] |
Were there any truly secular Muslim empires in history other than modern Turkey?
|
Most Middle Eastern countries have been secular since the end of colonialism, such as Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. In the more homogenous countries (basically all of them except Lebanon, Syria and Iraq), the primary political struggle was between secular military dictators and Islamists. That's changed in the past decade or so as the relatively new university-educated class has demanded liberal democracies, and the old order has been pretty well destroyed by the "Arab Spring" that the liberals championed. Nonetheless, secularists (autocrats that often preached some sort of "Arab socialism") have been in power for most of the second half of the 20th century.
|
[
"Subsequent empires dominated by Muslims, such as those of the Abbasids, Fatimids, Almoravids, Seljukids, Ajuran, Adal and Warsangali in Somalia, Mughals in the Indian subcontinent (India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan e.t.c), Safavids in Persia and Ottomans in Anatolia, were among the influential and distinguished powers in the world. 19th-century colonialism and 20th-century decolonisation have resulted in several independent Muslim-majority states around the world, with vastly differing attitudes towards and political influences granted to, or restricted for, Islam from country to country. These have revolved around the question of Islam's compatibility with other ideological concepts such as secularism, nationalism (especially Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism, as opposed to Pan-Islamism), socialism (see also Arab socialism and socialism in Iran), democracy (see Islamic democracy), republicanism (see also Islamic republic), liberalism and progressivism, feminism, capitalism and more.\n",
"In the Ottoman imperial system, even though there existed a hegemonic power of Muslim control over the non-Muslim populations, non-Muslim communities had been granted state recognition and protection in the Islamic tradition. The officially accepted state Dīn \"(Madh'hab)\" of the Ottomans was Sunni \"(Hanafi jurisprudence).\"\n",
"), the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750) and the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258). In the fourth major caliphate, the Ottoman Caliphate, the rulers of the Ottoman Empire claimed caliphal authority from 1517. During the history of Islam, a few other Muslim states, almost all hereditary monarchies, have claimed to be caliphates.\n",
"During the Delhi Sultanate era, the Muslim kingdoms were among powerful military groups in India, and an Islamic society that descended from the Middle East and Central Asia and from areas which became modern day Afghanistan spread the religion amongst Indians.\n",
"Muslim dynasties were soon established and subsequent empires such as those of the Abbasids, Fatimids, Almoravids, Seljukids, Ajuran, Adal and Warsangali in Somalia, Delhi, Gujarat, Malwa, Deccan, Bahmani, and Bengal Sultanates, Mughals, Mysore, Nizams, and Nawabs of Bengal in the Indian subcontinent, Safavids in Persia and Ottomans in Anatolia were among the largest and most powerful in the world. The people of the Islamic world created numerous sophisticated centers of culture and science with far-reaching mercantile networks, travelers, scientists, hunters, mathematicians, physicians, and philosophers, all contributing to the Golden Age of Islam. Islamic expansion in South and East Asia fostered cosmopolitan and eclectic Muslim cultures in the Indian subcontinent, Malaysia, Indonesia and China.\n",
"Ira M. Lapidus, an Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic History at The University of California at Berkeley, notes that religious and political power was united while the Prophet Muhammad was leading the ummah, resulting in a non-secular state. But Lapidus states that by the 10th century, some governments in the Muslim world had developed an effective separation of religion and politics, due to political control passing \"into the hands of generals, administrators, governors, and local provincial lords; the Caliphs had lost all effective political power\". These governments were still officially Islamic and committed to the religion, but religious authorities had developed their own hierarchies and bases of power separate from the political institutions governing them:\n",
"The Golden Horde (which adopted Islam in 1313) and the Sunni Ottoman Empire (which conquered the Ukrainian littoral in the 1470s) brought Islam to their subject territories in present-day Ukraine. Crimean Tatars accepted Islam as the state religion (1313–1502) of the Golden Horde, and later ruled as vassals of the Ottoman Empire (until the late 18th century).\n"
] |
lake baikal in russia - how did the baikal seals come to reach that lake?
|
It's actually somewhat of a mystery. There are 2 main theories. The first is that some ancestral seals from the Paratethys Sea, (a large, shallow inland sea covering much of Eurasia millions of years ago) could have gotten there by moving north, although this would have required the seals hopping through multiple rivers and lakes across a long distance. The other theory is that they could have moved south from the Arctic through the Yensei and/or Angara Rivers, which connect the present day Kara Sea to the present day Lake Baikal.
|
[
"The Baikal seal lives only in the waters of Lake Baikal. It is something of a mystery how Baikal seals came to live there in the first place. They may have swum up rivers and streams or possibly Lake Baikal was linked to the ocean at some point through a large body of water, such as the West Siberian Glacial Lake or West Siberian Plain, formed in a previous ice age. The seals are estimated to have inhabited Lake Baikal for some two million years.\n",
"The Baikal seal, Lake Baikal seal or nerpa (\"Pusa sibirica\"), is a species of earless seal endemic to Lake Baikal in Siberia, Russia. Like the Caspian seal, it is related to the Arctic ringed seal. The Baikal seal is one of the smallest true seals and the only exclusively freshwater pinniped species. A subpopulation of inland harbour seals living in the Hudson's Bay region of Quebec, Canada (\"lac de loups marins\" harbour seals), the Saimaa ringed seal (a ringed seal subspecies) and the Ladoga seal (a ringed seal subspecies) are found in fresh water, but these are part of species that also have marine populations.\n",
"Early Russian explorers wrongly believed that this lake and Skilak Lake were a single body of water. Early trophy hunters from the 1890s and later took world record moose from the north shore, and the first hunting guide to obtain a license to guide hunters in the State of Alaska called this area home.\n",
"Comephorus, known as the golomyankas or Baikal oilfish, are a genus comprising two species of peculiar, sculpin fishes endemic to Lake Baikal in Russia. \"Comephorus\" is the only genus in the family Comephoridae. Golomyankas are pelagic fishes which make the main food source of the Baikal seal.\n",
"Lake Baikal (; ; , \"Baigal nuur\"; , \"Baigal nuur\", etymologically meaning, in Mongolian, \"the Nature Lake\") is a rift lake in Russia, located in southern Siberia, between Irkutsk Oblast to the northwest and the Buryat Republic to the southeast.\n",
"Lake Baikal is positioned in southeastern (Siberia) Russia, directly to the north of Mongolia. Recognized as the oldest (still existing) freshwater lake on the planet, it is also measured as the deepest continental body of water at 5,315 feet (1,620 m). In addition, it is the largest freshwater lake by volume, containing an astounding 20% of the planet's fresh water. With a maximum width of 60 miles (96 km), Lake Baikal is about 389 miles (626 km) in length. Completely surrounded by mountains, over 300 rivers and streams drain into this massive lake. Detailed map.\n",
"Kessler's sculpin (\"Leocottus kesslerii\") is a species of Baikal sculpin, a freshwater fish native to Russia and Mongolia where it occurs in Lake Baikal and surrounding lakes as well as the Selenga, Angara and Bain Gol rivers. It is the only member of its genus. In Lake Baikal it occurs on sandy, rocky-sandy or sandy-muddy bottoms, ranging from relatively shallow water to depths of . In rivers they mainly occur in slow-flowing channels and floodplains.\n"
] |
How did Thomas Jefferson reconcile "all men are created equal" and the unalienable rights of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" with the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves?
|
I can't comment too much on Jefferson's wider moral and political philosophy because I'm someone who studies slavery in comparative contexts rather than the history of the United States itself, but I wrote an answer to a follow-up in [this thread](_URL_0_) a few months ago that a lot of people seemed to find really helpful in getting their head around how Jefferson could reconcile his slave ownership with his political philosophy emphasising freedom and self-determination. It's a very long answer that runs to the character limit so I can't reproduce it in quote form below, I'm afraid. One key takeaway I would say to be aware of is that Jefferson is by no means unusual of slave owners in his life time, it's just that his particular historical significance as an individual and lasting impact of his political ideas in American political culture that makes him seem somehow uniquely problematic and hypocritical as a figure.
|
[
"BULLET::::- Thomas Jefferson: \"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.\" (Declaration of Independence)\n",
"In 1773–85, Philip Mazzei, a physician and promoter of liberty, was a close friend and confidant of Thomas Jefferson. He published a pamphlet containing the phrase: \"All men are by nature equally free and independent\", which Jefferson incorporated essentially intact into the Declaration of Independence.\n",
"Jefferson and the Second Continental Congress believed the Spirit of '76 \"included the 'self-evident' truths of being 'created equal' and being 'endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights' including 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'\"\n",
"BULLET::::- In 1776, the United States Declaration of Independence declared that \"all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness\".\n",
"Although regarded as a leading spokesman for democracy and republicanism in the era of the Enlightenment, Jefferson has garnered some criticism. Some modern scholarship has been critical of Jefferson's private life, pointing out the contradiction between his ownership of the large numbers of slaves that worked his plantations and his famous declaration that \"all men are created equal\". Another point of controversy stems from the evidence that after his wife Martha died in 1782, Jefferson may have fathered children with Martha's half-sister, Sally Hemings, who was his slave. Despite this, presidential scholars and historians generally praise his public achievements, including his advocacy of religious freedom and tolerance in Virginia. Jefferson continues to rank highly among U.S. presidents.\n",
"I consider Thomas Jefferson to be one of the greatest men in history, the author of the Declaration and an absolute democrat. He serves as an inspiration to millions of Americans. He did much to mould our Republic in a form in which a man's religion does not make him ineligible for political or governmental life.\n",
"BULLET::::- The United States Declaration of Independence (1776) states that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.\n"
] |
is it legal to pirate a game i own legitimately?
|
If I remember correctly, you're not buying the game per se, but a license to play that game on whichever system you buy it for, which makes playing same game technically illegal on an emulator. Hopefully someone else can verify/expand on this.
|
[
"There are a number of Pirates in the game, who immediately attempt to destroy any non-Pirate ship they spot, with the exception of the player once they have achieved a high combat rating. The Pirates do not plunder their targets due to limitations in the game; the player, however, is allowed to board ships, and may from there steal money, cargo, fuel, or ammunition, or attempt to capture the ship for use as their own or as an escort. Another key detail, Pirates may board your ship if they disable you. In \"EV Nova\", Pirates do board and plunder ships, including the player.\n",
"Furthermore, the pirate mechanics have also changed: the pirate moves through the middle of the map in a fixed path every turn, and attacks the owner of any nearby settlements. Players win resources if they are able to fend off the pirate attack (which depends on the number rolled by the dice, as well as the number of warships in the defending player's possession; warships are created from using Knight cards on existing ships), but lose resources if they are unsuccessful. Maritime expansion is only permitted by building a settlement at the waypoint, however, this increases the chances of a pirate attack.\n",
"Among the many activities that corporations can organize is piracy. Actions considered piracy generally involve breaking the in-game law, and can come in a variety of forms. Pirates may camp stargates waiting for other players to arrive, attack players operating in asteroid belts or hunt for players carrying out an NPC agent-assigned mission. Because these activities are considered to be \"illegal\" within the game mechanics, pirate characters often will have low security status and may even be branded as outlaws by CONCORD. Likewise, victims of overt piracy may retaliate without intervention from CONCORD, often via an expressed right to destroy the pirate ship (i.e., \"kill right\"). Although piracy activities are \"illegal\" within the game universe, they are not against the rules of the game, i.e., there will only be in-game retaliation and punishment for them.\n",
"Ironically, the term \"pirate\" has also been used to describe patent owners that vigorously enforce their patents. (See also patent troll) Thus whether one deliberately infringes a patent or whether one vigorously enforces a patent, they may be referred to as a pirate by those that feel they are overstepping their bounds.\n",
"Pirate players capture highest level ships for free. This caused national players to avoid the free ships as the risk of losing an expensive ship was much greater than the reward of defeating a pirate who had a free ship.\n",
"Pirates represent the criminal side of the universe. There are many different branches of the common Pirates that mercilessly plunder and destroy ships. In the game, they can disable and steal the player's goods and money and leave the player stranded in open space.\n",
"In 2012, Braben explained in an interview with developer website Gamasutra his opinion that the sale of secondhand games negatively affects development of new titles, also holding the price of games in general much higher than they would otherwise be. However, later in 2014 he acknowledged: \"Piracy goes hand in hand with sales. If a game is pirated a lot it will be bought a lot. People want a connected experience, so with pirated games we still have a route in to get them to upgrade to real version. And even if someone's version is pirated, they might evangelise and their mates will buy the real thing.\"\n"
] |
Is speed in space measured in relation to something else? If so wouldnt two beams of light going in opposite directions be going at 2c if measured relative to each other?
|
Congratulations! You have actually stumbled upon the same train of thought that led Einstein to develop his [Theory of Special Relativity](_URL_3_).
Essentially, Special Relativity states that no matter what speed you are traveling, the laws of physics will be thee same. Since the speed of light is set by the laws of electromagnetism (specifically, [Maxwell's Equations](_URL_0_)) you will always measure the speed of light to be the same.
The theory also states that there is no "absolute reference frame". So yes, you are correct that in space (and everywhere, really) the velocity of one object must be measured in relation to another object.
While you can't travel at the speed of light, you can travel arbitrarily close to it. But let's say you were traveling away from Earth at 99% the speed of light. The fact is: *you would still measure a beam of light sent from earth as traveling at the speed of light*. And if you shot a bullet out in front of you at 99% the speed of light compared to your spaceship, an observer on earth would still see that bullet traveling at less than the speed of light!
Now, this may seem strange and full of contradictions, but there actually are no contradictions (though there is *a lot* more strangeness: [length contraction](_URL_4_), [time dilation](_URL_2_), [relativity of simultaneity](_URL_1_) all come into play). I suggest you read the article I linked in the first paragraph if you're still curious. But if you have any specific questions I'd be glad to take a crack at them!
|
[
"A series of one-way measurements were undertaken, all of them confirming the isotropy of the speed of light. However, only the two-way speed of light (from A to B back to A) can unambiguously be measured, since the one-way speed depends on the definition of simultaneity and therefore on the method of synchronization. The Poincaré-Einstein synchronization convention makes the one-way speed equal to the two-way speed. However, there are many models having isotropic two-way speed of light, in which the one-way speed is anisotropic by choosing different synchronization schemes. They are experimentally equivalent to special relativity because all of these models include effects like time dilation of moving clocks, that compensate any measurable anisotropy. However, of all models having isotropic two-way speed, only special relativity is acceptable for the overwhelming majority of physicists since all other synchronizations are much more complicated, and those other models (such as Lorentz ether theory) are based on extreme and implausible assumptions concerning some dynamical effects, which are aimed at hiding the \"preferred frame\" from observation.\n",
"The rate at which two objects in motion in a single frame of reference get closer together is called the mutual or closing speed. This may approach twice the speed of light, as in the case of two particles travelling at close to the speed of light in opposite directions with respect to the reference frame.\n",
"In the case where the velocity is close to the speed of light \"c\" (generally within 95%), another scheme of relative velocity called rapidity, that depends on the ratio of V to c, is used in special relativity.\n",
"It also is generally assumed that the speed of light is isotropic, meaning that it has the same value regardless of the direction in which it is measured. Observations of the emissions from nuclear energy levels as a function of the orientation of the emitting nuclei in a magnetic field (see Hughes–Drever experiment), and of rotating optical resonators (see Resonator experiments) have put stringent limits on the possible two-way anisotropy.\n",
"Many experiments intended to measure the one-way speed of light, or its variation with direction, have been (and occasionally still are) performed in which light follows a unidirectional path. Claims have been made that those experiments have measured the one-way speed of light independently of any clock synchronisation convention, but they have all been shown to actually measure the two-way speed, because they are consistent with generalized Lorentz transformations including synchronizations with different one-way speeds on the basis of isotropic two-way speed of light (see sections the one-way speed and generalized Lorentz transformations).\n",
"In the case of formula_8, this gives formula_9. While this is different from the more accurate relativistic result described above, in the limit of small angle and low velocity they are approximately the same, within the error of the measurements of Bradley's day. These results allowed Bradley to make one of the earliest measurements of the speed of light.\n",
"BULLET::::- Direct measurements of possible difference in the one-way speed of light between the east-west and west-east directions on the rotating Earth, by flying atomic clocks between Christchurch, New Zealand, and Thule, Greenland\n"
] |
Does the big earthquake in Alaska today mean there is less of a chance for "the big one" to happen that they keep talking about in the Pacific NW?
|
Releasing strain on one section of a fault can increase strain on another section. See the Anatolian fault earthquake dates as an example. Spoilers: Istanbul is in a tough place.
That said, the PNW is a complex area with a variety of slip types ranging from constant slow slip which isn't a significant danger, to the more classic type of slip in which stain builds up over time until the rocks rupture.
|
[
"Southern Alaska lies at the eastern end of the Aleutian Trench, where the Pacific Plate is subducting beneath the North American Plate. Near Anchorage, the plates are converging at a rate of 57 mm per year. The region has experienced severe earthquakes in the past, including several megathrust earthquakes. The 1964 earthquake, with a magnitude of 9.2, was the largest earthquake in American history and the second largest to ever be recorded anywhere in the world. Though earthquakes are common in Alaska, they often occur out at sea. This earthquake is more similar to the 2001 Nisqually earthquake located near Tacoma, Washington, than to the 1964 megathrust earthquake.\n",
"The Great Alaska Earthquake was the most powerful earthquake recorded in North America, and the second most powerful to be recorded in history. Hitting Alaska about 5:30 pm on March 27, 1964, the earthquake registered 9.2. The damage was immense. The tsunami that followed devastated coastal communities from Alaska to northern California. Landslides demolished entire neighborhoods, railroads and highways were destroyed, and major utilities such as gas mains, electrical grids, and phone systems were obliterated. The USGS estimates that 143 people were killed, and thousands were more displaced. Property damages amounted to $2.3B in 2013 dollars.\n",
"Geologists and civil engineers have broadly determined that the Pacific Northwest region is not well prepared for such a colossal earthquake. The earthquake is expected to be similar to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, because the rupture is expected to be as long as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. The resulting tsunami might reach heights of approximately 30 meters (100 ft). FEMA estimates some 13,000 fatalities from such an event, with another 27,000 injured. It predicts that a million people will be displaced, with yet another 2.5 million requiring food and water. An estimated 1/3 of public safety workers will not respond to the disaster due to a collapse in infrastructure and a desire to ensure the safety of themselves and their loved ones. Other analyses predict that even a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in Seattle would result in 7,700 dead and injured, $33 billion in damages, 39,000 buildings largely or totally destroyed, and 130 simultaneous fires.\n",
"On November 30, 2018, Anchorage experienced a 7.0 magnitude quake, as well as numerous aftershocks. Some buildings and roadways were damaged, and communication and other services were partially disrupted, but no fatalities were reported. The quake, centered about five miles north of the city, was the largest to shake the area since the massive 1964 quake. A tsunami warning was issued and later withdrawn. \n",
"Despite the rarity of strong East Coast earthquakes in the United States, they do sometimes occur. Furthermore, when these rare eastern U.S. events do occur, the areas affected by them are on average ten times as large as western ones for events of the same magnitude. Thus, earthquakes represent at least a moderate hazard to East Coast cities.\n",
"The 2002 Denali earthquake occurred at 22:12:41 UTC (1:12 PM Local Time) November 3 with an epicenter 66 km ESE of Denali National Park, Alaska, United States. This 7.9 M earthquake was the largest recorded in the United States in 37 years (after the 1965 Rat Islands earthquake). The shock was the strongest ever recorded in the interior of Alaska. Due to the remote location, there were no fatalities and only a few injuries.\n",
"On March 27, 1964 at 5:36 P.M. AST, Anchorage was hit by the Good Friday earthquake, which caused tremendous destruction. The magnitude 9.2 earthquake was the largest ever recorded in North America, and Anchorage lay only 75 miles (120 km) from its epicenter. It killed 115 people in Alaska, and damage was estimated at over $300 million ($1.8 billion in 2007 U.S. dollars). It was the second largest earthquake in the recorded history of the world. Anchorage's recovery from the earthquake dominated life in the late 1960s.\n"
] |
why can any guitar company copy designs of a strat, tele, les paul, etc. and it not be copyright infringement?
|
There have been court cases over this very issue, and the conclusion that the judges came to is that these body shapes are so common that they are considered to be generic.
|
[
"Numerous infringements, particularly in the United States was and is being done without his verbal nor written conformity. Andy Soler, the patent holder, had a hand in building all the original Ritz and WRC Guitars. Eric Galletta obtained the Gibson Owned Trademark WRC from Gibson Guitars. WRC Guitars was a nominee by MMR Musical Merchandise Magazine in 1994 as \"Most Innovative Guitar\". Galletta continued to build guitars under the WRC Trademark well into the late 1990s eventually starting his own line of instruments under the Galletta trademark.\n",
"While no changes to the design of the Singlecut occurred as a result of the lawsuit, some Singlecut owners and sellers have adopted the term 'pre-lawsuit' to differentiate their Singlecut guitar from others.\n",
"OLP Guitars was a guitar building company that marketed licensed replicas of famous models by other makers. The company's name stands for \"Officially Licensed Product\". OLP worked with Music Man and other companies. OLP was a subsidiary of Hanser Holdings International.\n",
"On March 21, 2008, EA, MTV, and Harmonix were sued by the Gibson Guitar Corporation for violation of the 1999 , which Gibson claims covers technology that simulates a concert performance via pre-recorded audio and a musical instrument; this follows similar action that Gibson took against the \"Guitar Hero\" series, which was later settled out of court. The Gibson-Harmonix case was put on hold shortly after its filing to allow the United States Patent and Trademark Office to open a re-examination of the 405 patent. On subsequent review, the 405 patent was modified to more exactly define the type of musical instrument that the patent covers, as the original language had conflicted with . Due to the change in language, Harmonix sought to have the case go forward and requested a summary judgement, believing that the new language of the 405 patent did not include the \"Rock Band\" controllers. In mid 2010, the case was settled between all parties under non-disclosed terms.\n",
"All guitars have the \"lawsuit\" peg heads (two small marks on back of headstocks). Schecter was still using Stratocaster and Telecaster headstocks, which Fender had allowed when they were a parts company. It appears this lawsuit may have essentially led to their closing in late 1986 to early 1987. The current owners purchased the name in late 1987.\n",
"Some artists, such as Girl Talk and Nine Inch Nails, use copyleft licenses such as the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that don't allow commercial use. In this way they can choose to sell their creations without having to compete with others selling copies of the same works. However, some argue that the Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike license is not a true copyleft.\n",
"On November 23, 2010, Engadget revealed that WowWee and a number of retailers were being sued for trademark infringement by Gibson Guitar Corporation for unlawfully using the shapes of the bodies and headstocks of Gibson's signature guitars in their Paper Jamz line of battery operated toy guitars. WowWee denied any wrongdoing and asserted that the shapes Gibson claimed as trademarks were generic and therefore could not function as trademarks. On November 24, 2010, the court denied Gibson's request for a temporary restraining order, but on December 22, 2010, granted Gibson's motion for a preliminary injunction. The case was later settled, with WowWee paying Gibson an undisclosed amount for licensing the likeness of Gibson guitars, according to Gibson CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz.\n"
] |
how do car alarms work?
|
It's pretty simple, really. A lot more simple than people think. When a window get smashed, you abruptly change the air pressure inside the car. There is a sensor somewhere inside the car that detects the pressure change.
The same sensor reacts when you have a large dog barking inside the car too, so most car alarms have a setting where you can turn off that sensor either temporarily or permanently.
Added to that, some cars have vibration sensors. They detect when the car is lifted, so that you can't steal the rims without the alarm going off.
Incidentally, those sensors also react to things that are unrelated, like earth quakes or when a train passes by a poorly built parking lot.
Then, to make it harder to bypass the alarm, it reacts when the car battery gets disconnected.
Some alarms also react when you try to remove a light bulb (because, you know, if it ain't blinking people won't react quickly enough) and most of them protect themselves from short circuited lamps because that is one of the oldest tricks in the book to cull an old aftermarket alarm system.
To top it off, the alarm often has its own battery so that it can run the siren independently from the cars electrical system for half an hour or so.
The rest is about entry control. There is a switch in each door. Including the tank cap and the engine compartment.
Sometimes you also replace the central locking motors with motors that are able to lock themselves, because that is also an old trick; if you can physically move the motor in the drivers door, it will typically order all the other motors to open. So if you manage to get access to the motor, the alarm will actually make it EASIER to get into the car. Unless it can lock itself, that is.
|
[
"A car alarm is an electronic device installed in a vehicle in an attempt to discourage theft of the vehicle itself, its contents, or both. Car alarms work by emitting high-volume sound (often a vehicle-mounted siren, klaxon, pre-recorded verbal warning, the vehicle's own horn, or a combination of these) when the conditions necessary for triggering it are met. Such alarms may also cause the vehicle's headlights to flash, may notify the car's owner of the incident via a paging system, and may interrupt one or more electrical circuits necessary for the car to start. Although inexpensive to acquire and install, the effectiveness of such devices in deterring vehicle burglary or theft when their only effect is to emit sound appears to be negligible.\n",
"The simplest aftermarket alarms are one-piece units with a siren and control module. The most common type of sensor is a shock sensor and two wires (12-volt constant power and ground) which are connected to the car's battery. This type of alarm is triggered by vibration transferred to the shock sensor, or by voltage changes on the input (the alarm assumes that a sudden change in voltage is due to a door or trunk being opened, or the ignition being turned on); however it is very prone to false triggers on late-model vehicles with many electronic control modules, which can draw current with the ignition off.\n",
"The individual triggers for a car alarm vary widely, depending on the make and model of the vehicle, and the brand and model of the alarm itself (for aftermarket alarms). Since aftermarket alarms are designed to be universal (i.e., compatible with all 12-volt negative ground electrical systems as opposed to one carmaker's vehicles), these commonly have trigger inputs that the installer/vehicle owner chooses not to connect, which additionally determines what will set the alarm off.\n",
"Generally, OEM alarms monitor the doors and trunk/hatch for unauthorized entry. On some vehicles this is done through pin switches, mercury switches, or microswitches integrated into the latch. On others, the doorlock mechanisms have switches built into them. Some OEM alarms additionally will trigger if the hood is opened, or if the ignition is turned on. A few systems have a shock sensor which will trigger upon a significant impact to the vehicle's body, such as window glass being broken. Motion sensors monitoring the vehicle's interior are installed in some higher end models.\n",
"Alarms often come with a mix of features. Remote car alarms typically consist of an additional radio receiver that allows the owner to wirelessly control the alarm from a key fob. Remote car alarms typically come equipped with an array of sensors along with immobilizers and motion detectors.\n",
"Examples of alarm indicators include a siren, a pop-up box on a screen, or a coloured or flashing area on a screen (that might act in a similar way to the \"fuel tank empty\" light in a car); in each case, the role of the alarm indicator is to draw the operator's attention to the part of the system 'in alarm' so that appropriate action can be taken.\n",
"A security alarm is a system designed to detect intrusion – unauthorized entry – into a building or other area. Security alarms are used in residential, commercial, industrial, and military properties for protection against burglary (theft) or property damage, as well as personal protection against intruders. Security alarms in residential areas show a correlation with decreased theft. Car alarms likewise help protect vehicles and their contents. Prisons also use security systems for control of inmates.\n"
] |
What happens when a solvent evaporates?
|
Yes. When solvent evaporates, you'll have a higher concentration of solute. When the concentration is higher than the saturation concentration, the solute will begin to precipitate out.
This is one way of [recrystallizing](_URL_0_) a desired product in chemistry labs. It's also a way of obtaining large, single crystals by controlling the rate of evaporation such that it occurs slowly.
|
[
"If evaporation takes place in an enclosed area, the escaping molecules accumulate as a vapor above the liquid. Many of the molecules return to the liquid, with returning molecules becoming more frequent as the density and pressure of the vapor increases. When the process of escape and return reaches an equilibrium, the vapor is said to be \"saturated\", and no further change in either vapor pressure and density or liquid temperature will occur. For a system consisting of vapor and liquid of a pure substance, this equilibrium state is directly related to the vapor pressure of the substance, as given by the Clausius–Clapeyron relation:\n",
"Evaporation is a phase transition from the liquid phase to vapor (a state of substance below critical temperature) that occurs at temperatures below the boiling temperature at a given pressure. Evaporation occurs \"on the surface\". Evaporation only occurs when the partial pressure of vapor of a substance is less than the equilibrium vapor pressure. For example, due to constantly decreasing or negative pressures, vapor pumped out of a solution will leave behind a cryogenic liquid.\n",
"Most organic solvents are flammable or highly flammable, depending on their volatility. Exceptions are some chlorinated solvents like dichloromethane and chloroform. Mixtures of solvent vapors and air can explode. Solvent vapors are heavier than air; they will sink to the bottom and can travel large distances nearly undiluted. Solvent vapors can also be found in supposedly empty drums and cans, posing a flash fire hazard; hence empty containers of volatile solvents should be stored open and upside down.\n",
"Evaporation is the elimination of the solvent in form of vapor from a solution. For most evaporation systems, the solvent is water and the heat is provided by steam condensation. In a forced circulation evaporation liquid is constantly circulated through the system. The mixture moves through the heat exchanger where it is superheated under pressure. To avoid fouling a high circulation rate is used, typically between 1.5 – 4 m/s although this ultimately depends on the component properties and is easily manipulated by the circulation pump. The liquid is pressurised through the heat exchanger externally by pressure stabilisers such as valves or orifices or hydrostatically within the system.\n",
"If a non-volatile solute (zero vapor pressure, does not evaporate) is dissolved into a solvent to form an ideal solution, the vapor pressure of the final solution will be lower than that of the solvent. The decrease in vapor pressure is directly proportional to the mole fraction of solute in an ideal solution:\n",
"Water can be removed from solutions in ways other than evaporation, including membrane processes, liquid-liquid extractions, crystallization, and precipitation. Evaporation can be distinguished from some other drying methods in that the final product of evaporation is a concentrated liquid, not a solid. It is also relatively simple to use and understand since it has been widely used on a large scale, and many techniques are generally well known. In order to concentrate a product by water removal, an auxiliary phase is used which allows for easy transport of the solvent (water) rather than the solute. Water vapor is used as the auxiliary phase when concentrating non-volatile components, such as proteins and sugars. Heat is added to the solution, and part of the solvent is converted into vapor. Heat is the main tool in evaporation, and the process occurs more readily at high temperature and low pressures.\n",
"Solvent degreasing is a process used to prepare a part for further operations such as electroplating or painting. Typically it uses petroleum, chlorine, dry ice or alcohol based solvents to dissolve the machining fluids and other contaminants that might be on the part.\n"
] |
why do newsboys in movies etc. say "extra" when calling out headlines?
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Newspapers, back when they where the main source of daily news, used to be printed several times a day (each time being updated with newer information or stories) so for example there would be both a morning and an evening edition of the same paper, and maybe more inbetween depending on the size of the paper and the city.
When something really important happened an "Extra" edition would be immediately printed and rushed to news stands and of course the person selling the newspaper would want to loudly advertise this special event. So the newsboy shouting "Extra!" is sort of like the early 20th century version of a "Breaking News" story where they cut into regular TV programming.
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"Starting in the mid-19th century United States, newspaper street vendors would shout \"Extra! Extra! Read all about it!\" when selling extras. This became a catchphrase often used to introduce events into a narrative in films.\n",
"The stock phrase \"film at 11\" comes from the term once used to close promos for the upcoming newscast that air during prime time programming, promising shots from a breaking story during the 11:00 p.m. newscast. However, it has gone out of the television lexicon; technological advances in remote broadcasting have made transporting film back to the station for editing before broadcast a thing of the past (the phrase has since been replaced with similar ones along the lines of \"story at 11:00\" or \"details at 11:00\").\n",
"During news bulletins an extra dressed as a giant rabbit would stand behind the news presenter, and mime actions related to the news. For example, good news would be greeted with an enthusiastic thumbs up, while during bad news the bunny would hang his head and look sad.\n",
"BULLET::::- Movie Outtakes – these are screen captures of upcoming films (generally taken from the movie trailer), given new word balloons; MAD typically times these pieces to coincide with the movie's general release, either in advance of the full parody or in lieu of it.\n",
"Quotes in the film aided its popularity. \"Titanic\" catchphrase \"I'm the king of the world!\" became one of the film industry's more popular quotations. According to Richard Harris, a psychology professor at Kansas State University, who studied why people like to cite films in social situations, using film quotations in everyday conversation is similar to telling a joke and a way to form solidarity with others. \"People are doing it to feel good about themselves, to make others laugh, to make themselves laugh\", he said.\n",
"After every commercial break, a live action segment featuring a news anchor is shown, saying \"Fighting the frizzies, at eleven.\" In the DVD commentary, Stone and Parker indicate this is a reference to a bootleg tape of \"Star Wars Holiday Special\". The original tape featured a brief clip at the end from WCBS-TV featuring newscaster Rolland Smith informing viewers, \"Fighting the frizzies, at eleven.\" However, while the original news ad was apparently referring to \"frizzy\" hair, the ending credits of this episode of \"South Park\" feature the news anchor boxing a man in a giant fuzzy suit.\n",
"A post-credits scene (also called a tag, stinger, coda, button, mid-credits scene, after-credits sequence, end-credit scene, secret ending or credit cookie) is a short clip that appears after all or some of the closing credits have rolled and sometimes after a production logo of a film, TV series, or video game have run. It is usually included for humour or to set up a possible sequel.\n"
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why do economists say that the euro was 'a bad idea' since its launch in 2002?
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The difference between North and.... Err, between South Europe and the rest of EU is too large. Basically Euro do not allow the southern neighbors to compete with the rest.
Usually this competing would happen by devaluing the currency on hard times, and as such making the wage lower (and also making pensions cost less, inflation adjusted pay somehow never gets put into place) because the wage is paid on the nation's currency, which because of before-mentioned devaluing, well, you get the idea.
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"The introduction of the euro has led to extensive discussion about its possible effect on inflation. In the short term, there was a widespread impression in the population of the eurozone that the introduction of the euro had led to an increase in prices, but this impression was not confirmed by general indices of inflation and other studies. A study of this paradox found that this was due to an asymmetric effect of the introduction of the euro on prices: while it had no effect on most goods, it had an effect on cheap goods which have seen their price round up after the introduction of the euro. The study found that consumers based their beliefs on inflation of those cheap goods which are frequently purchased. It has also been suggested that the jump in small prices may be because prior to the introduction, retailers made fewer upward adjustments and waited for the introduction of the euro to do so.\n",
"The introduction of the euro seems to have had a strong effect on European financial integration. According to a study on this question, it has \"significantly reshaped the European financial system, especially with respect to the securities markets [...] However, the real and policy barriers to integration in the retail and corporate banking sectors remain significant, even if the wholesale end of banking has been largely integrated.\" Specifically, the euro has significantly decreased the cost of trade in bonds, equity, and banking assets within the eurozone. On a global level, there is evidence that the introduction of the euro has led to an integration in terms of investment in bond portfolios, with eurozone countries lending and borrowing more between each other than with other countries.\n",
"In the mid-2010s, polls conducted across Europe, showed that because of the general \"disillusionment with the European Union,\" which has \"more noticeably affected Greece, Belgium, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Italy,\" there is also a \"significant erosion\" in the support for a common currency. In the majority of European countries surveyed in 2015 by Gallup International most respondents \"oppose the Euro.\" In the two \"key Eurozone members\" Germany and France, as well as in Spain, majorities in favour of retaining the euro as common currency are present. Among Eurozone members the strongest anti-euro sentiments were registered in Italy and Greece.\n",
"A 2009 consensus from the studies of the introduction of the euro concluded that it has increased trade within the eurozone by 5% to 10%, although one study suggested an increase of only 3% while another estimated 9 to 14%. However, a meta-analysis of all available studies suggests that the prevalence of positive estimates is caused by publication bias and that the underlying effect may be negligible. Although a more recent meta-analysis shows that publication bias decreases over time and that there are positive trade effects from the introduction of the euro, as long as results from before 2010 are taken into account. This may be because of the inclusion of the Financial crisis of 2007–2008 and ongoing integration within the EU. Furthermore, older studies accounting for time trend reflecting general cohesion policies in Europe that started before, and continue after implementing the common currency find no effect on trade. These results suggest that other policies aimed at European integration might be the source of observed increase in trade.\n",
"Some economists, mostly from outside Europe and associated with Modern Monetary Theory and other post-Keynesian schools, condemned the design of the euro currency system from the beginning because it ceded national monetary and economic sovereignty but lacked a central fiscal authority. When faced with economic problems, they maintained, \"Without such an institution, EMU would prevent effective action by individual countries and put nothing in its place.\" US economist Martin Feldstein went so far to call the euro \"an experiment that failed\". Some non-Keynesian economists, such as Luca A. Ricci of the IMF, contend that the eurozone does not fulfil the necessary criteria for an optimum currency area, though it is moving in that direction.\n",
"The first years of the 21st century have thus far been marked by the rise of a global economy and Third World consumerism, mistrust in government, deepening global concern over terrorism and an increase in the power of private enterprise. The Arab Spring of the early 2010s led to mixed outcomes in the Arab world. While most member states of the European Union introduced a common currency, the Euro, the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union: Brexit. The Third Industrial Revolution which began around the 1980s also continues into the present, and is expected to transition into Industry 4.0 and the Fourth Industrial Revolution by as early as 2030. Due to the proliferation of mobile devices, more than half of the world's population have access to the internet (2018 estimate), allowing humans to be more intertwined than ever before. DNA sequencing cost continues to fall exponentially: the first human genome cost three billion dollars. Today, sequencing only one human genome only costs about a thousand. Millennials and Generation Z come of age and rise to prominence in this century.\n",
"Since its introduction, the euro has been the second most widely held international reserve currency after the US dollar. The euro inherited this status from the German mark, and since its introduction, it has increased its standing, mostly at the expense of the dollar. The increase of 4.4% in 2002 is due to the introduction of euro banknotes and coins in January 2002.\n"
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how exactly do whole grain foods such as rice, pastas, and breads give greater health benefits?
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From my reading,not helpful at all,as grains are still broken down into sugar,plus the wheat of today is very different of the wheat of yesteryear. These videos can explain very well what I'm talking about.
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"Since sizable portions of sugarcane and maize crops are used for purposes other than human consumption, rice is the most important grain with regard to human nutrition and caloric intake, providing more than one-fifth of the calories consumed worldwide by humans. There are many varieties of rice and culinary preferences tend to vary regionally.\n",
"Pasta provides carbohydrates, along with some protein, iron, dietary fiber, potassium and B vitamins. Pasta prepared with whole wheat grain provides more dietary fiber than that prepared with degermed flour.\n",
"Rice is highly prized by consumers as a food grain, especially in south China, and per capita consumption has risen through the years. Also, as incomes have risen, consumers have preferred to eat more rice and less potatoes, corn, sorghum, and millet. Large production increases in the early 1980s and poor local transportation systems combined to induce farmers to feed large quantities of lower quality rice to livestock.\n",
"The demand for more diverse and healthier cereal-based foods is increasing, particularly in affluent countries. This could create new markets for proso millet products in human nutrition. Protein content in proso millet grains is comparable with that of wheat, but the share of essential amino acids (leucine, isoleucine and methionine) is substantially higher in proso millet. In addition, health-promoting phenolic compounds contained in the grains are readily bioaccessible and their high calcium content favor bone strengthening and dental health. Among the most commonly consumed products are ready-to-eat breakfast cereals made purely from millet flour as well as a variety of noodles and bakery products, which are, however, often produced from mixtures with wheat flour to improve their sensory quality.\n",
"Rice is highly prized by consumers as a food grain, especially in south China, and per capital consumption has risen through the years. Also, as incomes have risen, consumers have preferred to eat more rice and less potatoes, corn, sorghum, and millet. Large production increases in the early 1980s and poor local transportation systems combined to induce farmers to feed large quantities of lower quality rice to livestock.\n",
"In 2008, WHO malnutrition expert Francesco Branca cited the lack of real-world studies and uncertainty about how many people will use golden rice, concluding \"giving out supplements, fortifying existing foods with vitamin A, and teaching people to grow carrots or certain leafy vegetables are, for now, more promising ways to fight the problem\". In 2013, author Michael Pollan, who had critiqued the product in 2001, unimpressed by the benefits, expressed support for the continuation of the research.\n",
"The 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend that everyone over age 9 should eat at least three servings of whole grains each day for health. For an outline of scientific studies published on the health benefits of whole grains, see resources below. In 1999, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the use of a health claim that can be used on whole grain foods: “Diets rich in whole grain foods and other plant foods, and low in saturated fat and cholesterol, may help reduce the risk of heart disease.”* However, these claims have certain limitations, and cannot be used on some whole grain foods even if the foods are 100% whole grain. See resources below for more information on health claims and Guideline specifics.\n"
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how come when you have an ear infection or a sinus infection it affects other parts of your head?
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Most of the area just under the skin on your face is hollow sinus cavities. Obviously there are bones and nerves and other things that go through there, but the majority of the area of your face is just a covering for your mouth, nose, or sinuses. Your ears are connected to the nasal cavity by your eustachian tubes, which means that an infection in your ears will often drain down the eautachian tubes and into the sinuses. It's also why you don't want to grab your nose to block a sneeze, because the pressure of the sneeze will drive garbage from your nasal passages up into your ears and can easily cause an ear infection.
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"Aspergillosis of the ear canal causes itching and occasionally pain. Fluid draining overnight from the ear may leave a stain on the pillow. Aspergillosis of the sinuses causes a feeling of congestion and sometimes pain or discharge. It can extend beyond the sinuses.\n",
"If one or more of the paired paranasal sinuses or air cavities becomes inflamed, it leads to an infection called sinusitis. The term \"sinusitis\" means an inflammation of one or more of the sinus cavities. This inflammation causes an increase in internal pressure within these areas. The pressure is often experienced in the cheek area, eyes, nose, on one side of the head (temple areas), and can result in a severe headache.\n",
"Sinus infections can also cause middle ear problems due to the congestion of the nasal passages. This can be demonstrated by dizziness, \"a pressurized or heavy head\", or vibrating sensations in the head. Post-nasal drip is also a symptom of chronic rhinosinusitis.\n",
"Chronic sinusitis can also be caused indirectly through a common but slight abnormality in the auditory or eustachian tube, which is connected to the sinus cavities and the throat. Other diseases such as cystic fibrosis and granulomatosis with polyangiitis can also cause chronic sinusitis. This tube is usually almost level with the eye sockets, but when this sometimes hereditary abnormality is present, it is below this level and sometimes level with the vestibule or nasal entrance.\n",
"Infection of the frontal sinus causing sinusitis can give rise to serious complications, as it is in close proximity to the orbit and cranial cavity (orbital cellulitis, epidural and subdural abscess, meningitis).\n",
"The majority of episodes of sinus barotrauma occur in the frontal sinuses with pain localized over the frontal area. Possible explanations for this might be the relatively long and delicate nasofrontal duct that connects the narrow frontal recess with the frontal sinuses.\n",
"Sinusitis is inflammation of the paranasal air sinuses. Infections associated with teeth may be responsible for approximately 20% of cases of maxillary sinusitis. The cause of this situation is usually a periapical or periodontal infection of a maxillary posterior tooth, where the inflammatory exudate has eroded through the bone superiorly to drain into the maxillary sinus. Once an odontogenic infection involves the maxillary sinus, it is possible that it may then spread to the orbit or to the ethmoid sinus.\n"
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How did Gödel, in his incompleteness theorems, prove a statement that applied to all formal systems, using a formal system?
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I'm going to assume you mean formal systems that attempt to describe the natural numbers (i.e. can perform arithmetic) here. While the proofs of Godel's actual theorems are incredibly complex and incomprehensible, how he proved that the theorems applied to all formal systems was actually quite simple. Godel's theorems apply to all formal systems of axioms that express elementary arithmetic and are consistent, and of which theorems may be listed in an effective procedure, i.e. a method for creating and testing statements about the system in a finite number of steps and could theoretically be done by a human. Godel's proofs relied *only* on these assumptions and therefore apply to all of the formal systems that fit his criteria (which, incidentally, any formal system that attempts to characterize the natural numbers must) because his proofs were completed without loss of generality.
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"Gödel's second incompleteness theorem (1931) shows that no formal system extending basic arithmetic can be used to prove its own consistency. Thus, the statement \"there are no contradictions in the \"Principia\" system\" cannot be proven in the \"Principia\" system unless there \"are\" contradictions in the system (in which case it can be proven both true and false).\n",
"The incompleteness theorems apply to formal systems that are of sufficient complexity to express the basic arithmetic of the natural numbers and which are consistent, and effectively axiomatized, these concepts being detailed below. Particularly in the context of first-order logic, formal systems are also called \"formal theories\". In general, a formal system is a deductive apparatus that consists of a particular set of axioms along with rules of symbolic manipulation (or rules of inference) that allow for the derivation of new theorems from the axioms. One example of such a system is first-order Peano arithmetic, a system in which all variables are intended to denote natural numbers. In other systems, such as set theory, only some sentences of the formal system express statements about the natural numbers. The incompleteness theorems are about formal provability within these systems, rather than about \"provability\" in an informal sense.\n",
"Gödel's incompleteness theorems (Gödel 1931) establish additional limits on first-order axiomatizations. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any consistent, effectively given (defined below) logical system that is capable of interpreting arithmetic, there exists a statement that is true (in the sense that it holds for the natural numbers) but not provable within that logical system (and which indeed may fail in some non-standard models of arithmetic which may be consistent with the logical system). For example, in every logical system capable of expressing the Peano axioms, the Gödel sentence holds for the natural numbers but cannot be proved.\n",
"To prove the first incompleteness theorem, Gödel demonstrated that the notion of provability within a system could be expressed purely in terms of arithmetical functions that operate on Gödel numbers of sentences of the system. Therefore, the system, which can prove certain facts about numbers, can also indirectly prove facts about its own statements, provided that it is effectively generated. Questions about the provability of statements within the system are represented as questions about the arithmetical properties of numbers themselves, which would be decidable by the system if it were complete.\n",
"The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of the natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.\n",
"Gödel's incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that demonstrate the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system capable of modelling basic arithmetic. These results, published by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics. The theorems are widely, but not universally, interpreted as showing that Hilbert's program to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible.\n",
"Employing a diagonal argument, Gödel's incompleteness theorems were the first of several closely related theorems on the limitations of formal systems. They were followed by Tarski's undefinability theorem on the formal undefinability of truth, Church's proof that Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem is unsolvable, and Turing's theorem that there is no algorithm to solve the halting problem.\n"
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why is there zero calorie soda but little/no zero calorie candy?
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I highly recommend you read the reviews before purchasing.
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"Candy is considered a source of empty calories, because it provides little or no nutritional value beyond food energy. At the start of the 20th century, when undernutrition was a serious problem, especially among poor and working-class people, and when nutrition science was a new field, the high calorie content was promoted as a virtue. Researchers suggested that candy, especially candy made with milk and nuts, was a low-cost alternative to normal meals. To get the food energy necessary for a day of labor, candy might cost half as much as eggs. During the 1920s and 1930s, candy bars selling for five cents were often marketed as replacements for lunch.\n",
"Studies indicate \"soda and sweetened drinks are the main source of calories in [the] American diet\", so most nutritionists advise that Coca-Cola and other soft drinks can be harmful if consumed excessively, particularly to young children whose soft drink consumption competes with, rather than complements, a balanced diet. Studies have shown that regular soft drink users have a lower intake of calcium, magnesium, vitamin C, riboflavin, and vitamin A.\n",
"Though sucralose contains no calories, products that contain fillers, such as maltodextrin and/or dextrose, add about 2–4 calories per teaspoon or individual packet, depending on the product, the fillers used, brand, and the intended use of the product. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows for any product containing fewer than five calories per serving to be labeled as \"zero calories\".\n",
"Though they were not labeled sugar-free, four flavors were considered \"Mid-Calorie\": Twisted Lime, Watermelon, Tangerine, and Blueberry. These flavors were sweetened with Splenda, but still included 21 grams of sugar (compared to approximately 45–50 grams in the regular sodas).\n",
"With regard to the ad's assertion that \"all calories count, no matter where they come from,\" critics have pointed out that \"calories from soda are entirely empty calories from added sugar and contain no nutritional value.\" This led The Atlantic's Ruth Faden to declare that this specific assertion was \"inappropriately misleading,\" as well as claiming that there is \"considerable research\" linking sugary drinks to obesity. It was also highlighted in a story by the Medill School of Journalism, which quoted Brenda Murray, a bariatric dietitian, who said, “They’re saying a calorie is just a calorie. But it’s not the amount of calories you take in, it’s the kind of calories, too.\" The ad was also criticized by outspoken critic of sugar David Ludwig, who wrote that \"I’d like to see the big beverage companies market less sugar not sugarcoat their marketing.\" He also stated that \"Consuming sugary drinks increases the risk of obesity more than any other food that we know of, based on recent research (by which he means a September 2012 study in the NEJM)\n",
"The corporation also produces a third flavor of pineapple soda known as Kem. In recent years, CCU is also marketing zero calorie diet versions of Bilz and Pap, better known as Bilz Light, and Pap Light. \n",
"Research from Duke University and the National University of Singapore released in December 2010 tested larger taxes and determined that a 20 percent and 40 percent taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages would largely not affect calorie intake because people switch to untaxed, but equally caloric, beverages. Kelly Brownell, a proponent of soda taxes, reacted by stating that “[t]he fact is that nobody has been able to see how people will really respond under these conditions.” Similarly, a 2010 study concluded that while people would drink less soda as a result of a soda tax, they would also compensate for this reduction by switching to other high-calorie beverages. In response to these arguments, the American Public Health Association released a statement in 2012 in which they argued that \"Even if individuals switch to 100% juice or chocolate milk, this would be an improvement, as those beverages contribute some nutrients to the diet.\"\n"
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If i^4 is equal to 1. Is the fourth root of 1, i or is it 1?
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When dealing with complex roots, you're going to get such results all the time. The fourth roots of unity are 1, -1, i, and -i.
Even if you're just looking for real roots, this result should make it easier for you to understand.
1^4 = 1
(-1)^4 = 1
1 =/= -1
Is the fourth root of 1, 1 or -1? The answer is both.
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"with [[root of an equation|roots]] \"p\" = 0 (obvious) and \"p\" = (1 + \"u\") / (1 + \"u\" + \"u\"), from which \"p\" and \"p\" are then obtained by [[back substitution]]. One can define six such parameters \"u\" = \"p\" / \"p\", for which \"p\" ≤ \"p\" ≤ \"p\" when (\"c\", \"b\", \"a\") is a [[cyclic permutation]] of (1, 2, 3).\n",
"Thus we have and . The number 4 has two 3/2\"th\" powers, namely 8 and −8; however, by convention the notation 4 employs the principal root, and results in 8. For employing the \"v\"-th root the \"u\"/\"v\"-th power is also called the \"u\"/\"v\"-th root, and for even \"v\" the term \"principal root\" denotes also the positive result.\n",
"The square root of 2, or the (1/2)th power of 2, written in mathematics as or , is the positive algebraic number that, when multiplied by itself, gives the number 2. Technically, it is called the principal square root of 2, to distinguish it from the negative number with the same property.\n",
"where \"y\" is any root of the auxiliary quadratic equation and \"ω\" is any of the four primitive 5th roots of unity. This can be easily generalized to construct a solvable septic and other odd degrees, not necessarily prime.\n",
"In the second example we first add 3+1, giving 4; 4 is greater than 3, so we subtract 4 (giving 0) and carry −1 into the third column (the \"−4s column\"). Then we add 2+0 in the second column, giving 2. In the third column, we have 0+0+(−1), because of the carry; −1 is less than 0, so we add 4 (giving 3 as the result in the third column) and \"borrow\" +1 into the fifth column. In the fourth column, 1+1 is 2; and the carry in the fifth column gives 1, for a result of formula_30.\n",
"Let \"E\" = R, and let Φ consist of all integer vectors in \"E\" of length together with all vectors of the form 2\"λ\", where \"λ\" is an integer vector of length 1. The total number of roots is 2\"n\". One choice of simple roots is: α = e – e, for 1 ≤ \"i\" ≤ \"n\" – 1 (the above choice of simple roots for A), and the longer root α = 2e.\n",
"The square root of 2, often known as root 2, radical 2, or Pythagoras' constant, and written as , is the positive algebraic number that, when multiplied by itself, gives the number 2. It is more precisely called the principal square root of 2, to distinguish it from the negative number with the same property.\n"
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Why is a negative base to a fractional square root a nonreal number?
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x^2.1 is the 10th root of x^21 which is imaginary for negative values of x.
Edit: 2.1 is 21/10 not 21/20, oops.
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"No square root can be taken of a negative number within the system of real numbers, because squares of all real numbers are non-negative. The lack of real square roots for the negative numbers can be used to expand the real number system to the complex numbers, by postulating the imaginary unit , which is one of the square roots of −1.\n",
"Since the square of every real number is a positive real number, negative numbers do not have real square roots. However, for every negative real number there are two imaginary square roots. For example, the square roots of −25 are 5\"i\" and −5\"i\", where \"i\" represents a number whose square is .\n",
"The square of any positive or negative number is positive, and the square of 0 is 0. Therefore, no negative number can have a real square root. However, it is possible to work with a more inclusive set of numbers, called the complex numbers, that does contain solutions to the square root of a negative number. This is done by introducing a new number, denoted by \"i\" (sometimes \"j\", especially in the context of electricity where \"\"i\"\" traditionally represents electric current) and called the imaginary unit, which is \"defined\" such that . Using this notation, we can think of \"i\" as the square root of −1, but notice that we also have and so −\"i\" is also a square root of −1. By convention, the principal square root of −1 is \"i\", or more generally, if \"x\" is any nonnegative number, then the principal square root of −\"x\" is\n",
"However, in case of negative numbers, there are various conflicting ways to extend the fractional part function to them: It is either defined in the same way as for positive numbers, i.e. by formula_4 , or as the part of the number to the right of the radix point, formula_5 , finally, by the odd function \n",
"The square root of 3 is the positive real number that, when multiplied by itself, gives the number 3. It is more precisely called the principal square root of 3, to distinguish it from the negative number with the same property. It is denoted by .\n",
"Every positive real number is the square of exactly two numbers, one of which is strictly positive and the other of which is strictly negative. Zero is the square of only one number, itself. For this reason, it is possible to define the square root function, which associates with a non-negative real number the non-negative number whose square is the original number.\n",
"We are not taking the square root of any negative values here, since both \"x\" and 4 are necessarily positive. But we have lost the solution \"x\" = −2. The reason is that \"x\" is actually not in general the \"positive\" square root of \"x\". If \"x\" is negative, the positive square root of \"x\" is \"-x\". If the step is taken correctly, it leads instead to the equation:\n"
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why are there no rip off car models as there is with so many other products in the world?
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There are, they might not rip off the entire car, but components; door latch assemblies, window motors, smaller pieces like that get ripped off all the time and designs get copied.
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"Manufacturers sometimes use pre-production cars to provide the automotive press a chance to experience and create publicity and articles about the models that are yet to appear in dealer showrooms for public view. Some of these cars are exhibited at auto shows. They may also be destroyed during crash tests. Most of the rest are scrapped, as some may not meet automobile safety regulations or emission standards.\n",
"This included a few pre-production and show cars which were later dismantled, before production was stopped due to lack of sales. Most were sold to private owners, with the final ones being sold to customers in the beginning of 2008. Most were sold in Europe and Asia, with only one model sold in America, a supercharged XP model.\n",
"The problem with the many-to-many model is that it can stretch a company’s resources too thinly and soften its focus. One reason for the current financial problems of the world’s largest car maker, General Motors, is that it has tried to be everything to everybody, launching model after model with no clear segmenting, targeting or branding strategy.\n",
"While some vehicles (such as cars exported overseas after severe collision or damaged before the introduction of mandatory branding) may carry no warnings as to their history, others may be branded as \"total loss\" when they could have been quite repairable in the hands of someone willing to install used parts and do the work at a more modest price.\n",
"Surprisingly, despite its production volume, only a few car models are assembled in the country and customers have a very small variety of vehicles to choose from. The lack of competition in the auto industry due to the dominance of a few players, and restrictions on imports in the form of heavy duties have resulted in very high prices of cars in the country. Currently some of the major world automakers have set up assembly plants or are in joint ventures with local companies, including Toyota, General Motors, Honda, Suzuki, and Nissan Motors. The total contribution of auto industry to GDP in 2007 was 2.8% which was estimated to increase significantly over the next decade. The auto sector presently contributes 16% to the manufacturing sector which is predicted to increase even further.\n",
"At its peak, as many as 60 different makes of automobiles were sold and repaired on Automobile Row. Current brands that formerly had showrooms on Automobile Row included Ford, Buick, Fiat, and Cadillac. Other marques with showrooms there that have since dissolved include Hudson, Hupmobile, and Pierce-Arrow. Currently, several car-related businesses stand along this stretch, although no dealers are still there.\n",
"No longer in production, cars and sets can be purchased via eBAY with some rarer cars commanding keen prices, like the red Saab 900 Turbo and the gold, yellow livery Ford Escort. Many of the cars for sale come with poor quality tyres, leaving the cars with no grip. The lack of grip results in the cars just wheel spinning without any forward movement. However, there are replacements available and it is still possible to buy brand new cars in sealed cartons.\n"
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why are green apples called granny smith apples?
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Granny smith are a type of apple. It's a brand name as well, like Given Delicious or Pink Lady.
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"Granny Smith apples are light green in colour. They are popularly used in many apple dishes, such as apple pie, apple cobbler, apple crumble, and apple cake. They are also commonly eaten raw as table apples, and at least one company (Woodchuck Hard Cider) makes Granny Smith varietal cider.\n",
"The Granny Smith is a tip-bearing apple cultivar, which originated in Australia in 1868. It is named after Maria Ann Smith, who propagated the cultivar from a chance seedling. The tree is thought to be a hybrid of \"Malus sylvestris\", the European wild apple, with the North American apple \"Malus pumila\" as the polleniser.\n",
"Arkansas Black apples are generally medium-sized with a somewhat flattened shape. Generally a very dark red on the tree, occasionally with a slight green blush where hidden from the sun, the apples grow darker as they ripen, becoming a very dark red or burgundy color. With storage the skin continues to darken. Arkansas Black is one of the darkest of all apple cultivars, hence the name.\n",
"The Jersey Black apple is an old North American variety of apple, or \"Malus domestica\"; it is thought to have originated c. 1817, but has fallen somewhat out of favor. It is also known as the Black Apple because its skin is very dark red, appearing almost black. It is a dessert apple with sweet white firm flesh. It was once used for the production of cider. This variety is notable for a cross with a McIntosh red to produce the Macoun, which had been thought to have produced the Honeycrisp.\n",
"Granny Smith is much more easily preserved in storage than other apples, a factor which has greatly contributed to its success in export markets. Its long storage life has been attributed to its fairly low levels of ethylene production, and in the right conditions Granny Smiths can be stored without loss of quality for as long as a year. This cultivar needs fewer winter chill hours and a longer season to mature the fruit, so it is favoured for the milder areas of the apple growing regions. However, they are susceptible to superficial scald and bitter pit. Superficial scald may be controlled by treatment with diphenylamine before storage. It can also be controlled with low-oxygen storage. Pit can be controlled with calcium sprays during the growing season and with postharvest calcium dips.\n",
"It is a greyish-green russet apple known for its good winter-keeping qualities, as well as its suitability for making cider and juice. It is not widely grown or commercially available due to general commercial disfavor for russet varieties; the dull and heavily marked face makes it hard to sell now. The yellow-green flesh is firm and coarse-textured, suited for eating fresh and cooking. It is available from growers who specialize in heirloom plants. It ripens from September to October, and so is commonly available in autumn in farmers markets in the Northeast. Each apple contains 12.87% sugar that ferments to 6% alcohol in hard cider production.\n",
"Red Astrachan is a Russian cultivar of domesticated apple, which is an early season apple, juicy, tart and crisp texture with pleasant flavour, and use for eating, cooking and cider. It is medium-sized, crimson colored. As all the early season apples, it is not good for storage. It is known by several other names including 'Abe Lincoln', 'American Red', and 'Waterloo'.\n"
] |
If races can have common physical characteristics, why can't they have common psychological ones?
|
In theory, they can. But so far we haven't found any genetic difference that wouldn't be dwarfed by cultural factors. For example you have lots of discussion in academic performance differences between white, black and asian, but when you look closer you find out that in many black communities it's actually a bit shameful to have good grades, while asian families not only respect academic performance, but tend to be above average when it comes to motivating children to learn.
So in this conditions it's both difficult and pointless to hunt for a pure genetic difference.
|
[
"Individuals who share a similar genetic makeup can also share certain propensity or resistance to specific diseases. However, there are confronted positions in relation to the utility of using 'races' to talk about populations sharing a similar genetic makeup. Some geneticists argued that human variation is geographically structured and that genetic differences correlate with general conceptualizations of racial groups. Others claimed that this correlation is too unstable and that the genetic differences are minimal and they are \"distributed over the world in a discordant manner”. Therefore, race is regarded by some as a useful tool for the assessment of genetic epidemiological risk, while others consider it can lead to an increased underdiagnosis in 'low risk' populations.\n",
"Race in medicine is used as an approximation for more specific genetic and environmental risk factors. Race is thus partly a surrogate for environmental factors such as differences in socioeconomic status that are known to affect health. It is also an imperfect surrogate for ancestral geographic regions and differences in gene frequencies between different ancestral populations and thus differences in genes that can affect health. This can give an approximation of probability for disease or for preferred treatment, although the approximation is less than perfect.\n",
"Nevertheless, he stated: \"The various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other – as in the texture of hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotion, but partly in their intellectual faculties.\" (\"The Descent of Man\", chapter VII).\n",
"In Latin American concepts of race, physiological traits are often combined with social traits such as socio-economic status, so that a person is categorized not only according to physical phenotype but also social standing. Ethnicity on the other hand is a system that classifies groups of people according to cultural, linguistic and historic criteria. An ethnic group is normally defined by having a degree of cultural and linguistic similarity and often an ideology of shared roots. Another difference between race and ethnicity is that race is usually conceptualized as a system of categorization where membership is limited to one category and is externally ascribed by other who are not members of that category without regards to the individuals own feeling of membership. Whereas ethnicity is often seen as a system of social organization where membership is established through mutual identification between a group and its members.\n",
"The existence of races is a token of change in the human species, and suggests there is some significance in geographical separation. Lawrence noted that racial characteristics were inherited, not caused by the direct effect of, for instance, climate. As an example, he considered the way skin colour was inherited by children of African origin when born in temperate climates: how their colour developed without exposure to the sun, and how this continued through generations. This was evidence against the \"direct\" effect of climate.\n",
"Racial groups may differ in how a disease progresses. Different access to healthcare services, different living and working conditions influence how a disease progresses within racial groups. However, the reasons for these differences are multiple, and should not be understood a consequence of genetic differences between races, but rather as effects of social and environmental factors affecting.\n",
"Over a dozen racial categories would be recognized in conformity with all the possible combinations of hair color, hair texture, eye color, and skin color. These types grade into each other like the colors of the spectrum, and not one category stands significantly isolated from the rest. That is, race referred preferentially to appearance, not heredity, and appearance is a poor indication of ancestry, because only a few genes are responsible for someone's skin color and traits: a person who is considered white may have more African ancestry than a person who is considered black, and the reverse can be also true about European ancestry. The complexity of racial classifications in Brazil reflects the extent of miscegenation in Brazilian society, a society that remains highly, but not strictly, stratified along color lines. These socioeconomic factors are also significant to the limits of racial lines, because a minority of \"pardos\", or brown people, are likely to start declaring themselves white or black if socially upward, and being seen as relatively \"whiter\" as their perceived social status increases (much as in other regions of Latin America).\n"
] |
What is the origin/development of food allergies in western societies?
|
with the growth and success of western medicine, public hygiene and quality standards of food production, we created an environment of next to no exposure to parasitic pathogens like worms and protozoa. This sounds good at first, but what also happens is that the part of the immune system that is fending off those parasites is "out of work" from the get-go.
The immune system is a pretty complex topic, so I'll try to keep it simple: There's a plethora of different types of immune cells (the ones I am refering to are T-lymphocytes and B-lymphocytes, each having multiple subtypes). The lymphocytes that don't identify with any subtype yet are called naive cells, and these are the ones that can proliferate (ie develop) into any other subtype. anytime immune cells are fighting infections they will recruit more virgin/naive cells, some of which, strangely enough, actually proliferate into cells that *impede*/ease the immune response (so called regulatory T-lymphocytes). Not without reason: overarching immune response is no joke and can be the cause of death (as in SIRS/sepsis, for example).
With that in mind, let's assess the situation: since we have lacking exposure to parasitic pathogens, we also lack the mechanism used to regulate/normalize the immune response, and it's hard for the immune system to discern real threats and harmless stuff. Allergens have similar epitopes (antigens) to parasitic lifeforms, hence the immune system confuses them with actual parasites and gives off an immune response as if it was one (specifically IgE immune response and secretion of histamin from mast cells, causing the typical allergic symptoms). And since there's nothing to downregulate the response like (memory) regulatory T-cells, you get full blown allergic symptoms.
Notice how, for example, allergy is practically unheard of in African, South American and Asian countries, since public hygiene and supervision of food quality is (objectively, don't call me a racist!) worse in those places. Also statistically people from wealthier and/or cleaner households are more susceptible to allergies.
This is also how desensitizing works: confronting the body with the allergen multiple times gives it a chance to form those regulatory T-lymphocytes, making the reaction less severe with each confrontation.
|
[
"For reasons not entirely understood, the diagnosis of food allergies has apparently become more common in Western nations recently. One possible explanation for this is the \"old friends\" hypothesis which suggests that non disease causing organisms, such as helminths, could protect against allergy. Therefore, reduced exposure to these organisms, particularly in developed countries, could have contributed towards the increase.\n",
"In the developed world, about 4% to 8% of people have at least one food allergy. They are more common in children than adults and appear to be increasing in frequency. Male children appear to be more commonly affected than females. Some allergies more commonly develop early in life, while others typically develop in later life. In developed countries, a large proportion of people believe they have food allergies when they actually do not have them. The declaration of the presence of trace amounts of allergens in foods is mandatory only in Brazil.\n",
"The most common food allergies in adults are shellfish and nuts. The most common food allergies in children are shellfish, nuts, eggs, wheat, and soy. One study showed Balsam of Peru, which is in many processed foods, to be the most common cause of immediate contact urticaria. A less common cause is exposure to certain bacteria, such as \"Streptococcus\" species or possibly \"Helicobacter pylori\".\n",
"Allergies, also known as allergic diseases, are a number of conditions caused by hypersensitivity of the immune system to typically harmless substances in the environment. These diseases include hay fever, food allergies, atopic dermatitis, allergic asthma, and anaphylaxis. Symptoms may include red eyes, an itchy rash, sneezing, a runny nose, shortness of breath, or swelling. Food intolerances and food poisoning are separate conditions.\n",
"Allergens can be found in a variety of sources, such as dust mite excretion, pollen, pet dander, or even royal jelly. Food allergies are not as common as food sensitivity, but some foods such as peanuts (a legume), nuts, seafood and shellfish are the cause of serious allergies in many people.\n",
"With the spread of \"appertisation\", the 19th-century world entered the era of the \"food industry\", which developed new products such as canned salt meat (for example corned beef), but also led to lowered standards of food quality and hygiene – such as those Upton Sinclair described in \"The Jungle\". These bad practices led to the creation of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, followed by the national agencies for health security and the establishment of food traceability over the course of the 20th century. It also led to continuing technological innovation.\n",
"The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology warns that natural lotion containing ingredients commonly found in food (such as goats milk, cow's milk, coconut milk, or oil) may introduce new allergies, and an allergic reaction when those foods are later consumed.\n"
] |
Do Black Holes go anywhere?
|
no. They don't. Eventually the particles that make you up contribute to a scattering process and many eons later will be released back into the universe in the form of Hawking radiation.
|
[
"Black holes are a major source of energy for the Eight Worlds' society. They are quite rare but can be found - if one is persistent enough \"and\" lucky - in the space beyond Pluto. A single black hole, when dragged back into the system and installed in a power station, would be enough for a prospector to live in wealth for the rest of his or her life. Such prospectors - the successors of historical gold prospectors - spend up to twenty years at a time in solitary voyages, constantly keeping an eye on their mass detector and hoping for the one great strike which would make their fortune. Hole hunters tend to be greedy, self-centered and self-sufficient. When more than one happens to discover the same hole, one of them tends to have \"an accident\", far away from any kind of law and order and into which the authorities don't inquire too closely. The propulsion jets used by the prospectors' ships can be made into deadly weapons, able to vaporize a rival's ship in a split second.\n",
"A black hole, known as Cygnus X-1 (an X-ray source believed to be an actual black hole), lies in the constellation Cygnus. An explorer aboard the spaceship \"Rocinante\" journeys toward the black hole, believing there may be something beyond it. As he moves closer, it becomes increasingly difficult to control the ship and he is eventually drawn in by the pull of gravity. The final words of Book I describe his ordeal: \"Sound and fury drown my heart/Every nerve is torn apart.\"\n",
"A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting gravitational acceleration so strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole. The boundary of the region from which no escape is possible is called the event horizon. Although the event horizon has an enormous effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, no locally detectable features appear to be observed. In many ways, a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light. Moreover, quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is on the order of billionths of a kelvin for black holes of stellar mass, making it essentially impossible to observe.\n",
"The defining feature of a black hole is the appearance of an event horizon—a boundary in spacetime through which matter and light can only pass inward towards the mass of the black hole. Nothing, not even light, can escape from inside the event horizon. The event horizon is referred to as such because if an event occurs within the boundary, information from that event cannot reach an outside observer, making it impossible to determine if such an event occurred.\n",
"Black Hole is a black-colored Choujin who has a giant hole where his face is supposed to be. He has the ability to travel through shadows, and the hole on his head leads to an alternate dimension, and he is able to suck his opponents through his hole into this dimension. However, his body is linked to this dimension, and any wounds he sustain would reflect to cracks within the dimension. He was the second Devil Choujin Kinnikuman faces and defeats. He returned in the Dream Choujin Tag arc, where he teams up with his brother, Justice Choujin Pentagon, to form the 4D Killer Combo. They are defeated in the first round by the Muscle Brothers. He returns in the Perfect Origin arc to fight Perfect Large Number Dalmatiman, being the only Devil Choujin to decisively defeat his opponent in the first round of matches. He would also defeat another Perfect Large Number, Jack Faucet, with the help of his brother Pentagon, before collapsing from his injuries and acting as a means of transportation for the rest of the arc. He is voiced by Daisuke Gori.\n",
"A black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing escapes. Around a black hole there is a mathematically defined surface called an event horizon that marks the point of no return. It is called \"black\" because it absorbs all the light that hits the horizon, reflecting nothing, making it almost an ideal black body (radiation with a wavelength equal to or larger than the radius of the hole may not be absorbed, so black holes are not perfect black bodies). Physicists believe that to an outside observer, black holes have a non-zero temperature and emit radiation with a nearly perfect black-body spectrum, ultimately evaporating. The mechanism for this emission is related to vacuum fluctuations in which a virtual pair of particles is separated by the gravity of the hole, one member being sucked into the hole, and the other being emitted. The energy distribution of emission is described by Planck's law with a temperature \"T\":\n",
"Black holes are talked about in this chapter. Black holes are stars that have collapsed into one very small point. This small point is called a \"singularity\". Black holes suck things into their center because they have very strong gravity. Some of the things it can suck in are light and stars. Only very large stars, called \"super-giants\", are big enough to become a black hole. \n"
] |
What’s the science behind a stuffed nose? What is its purpose and how does it occur?
|
Pre med student!
External membranes and skin are the first line of defense in mammals. When your body senses some irritant around the nose or believes that you are sick, correctly or incorrectly, it will signal your nasal membrane to secrete mucus to prevent more pathogens from entering the body. Many pathogens typically enter through your nostrils, so this is the body covering its bases while it works with what it believes to be the matter at hand.
|
[
"The anatomical snuff box or snuffbox is a triangular deepening on the radial, dorsal aspect of the hand—at the level of the carpal bones, specifically, the scaphoid and trapezium bones forming the floor. The name originates from the use of this surface for placing and then sniffing powdered tobacco, or \"snuff.\" It is sometimes referred to by its French name \"tabatière\".\n",
"Eating mucus is the act of extracting nasal mucus with one's finger (rhinotillexis) and the succeeding action of ingesting the mucus from the nose-picking (mucophagy). Nasal mucus is also termed as boogers, snot, bogeys, mucus secretion, and other related terms.\n",
"Mucophagy, despite its benefits on one's immunity, comes with some health risks due to the potential physical aggravation resulting from the action of nose picking, and the germs on fingers and in mucus. Picking one's nose can cause upper airway irritation as well as other injuries including nasal septal perforation (a \"through-and-through defect\" of the cartilage separating the nostrils), and epistaxis (nosebleed). In a study by Andrade and Srihari, 25% of subjects were ailed by nose bleeds, 17% with nasal infections, and 2% with damage more serious than bleeding. W. Buzina studied the fungal diversity in nasal mucus in 2003. 104 samples were gathered with 331 identifiable strains of fungi and 9 different species per patient.\n",
"In sutra neti, a length of wet string or thin surgical tubing is carefully and gently inserted through the nose and into the mouth. The end is then pulled out of the mouth and while holding both ends at once the string is alternately pulled in and out of the nose and sinuses. It is used to clear the nose and also to remove nasal polyps.\n",
"In 2002, American otolaryngologist Dr. Alexander Rivkin began using injectable fillers like Restylane and Radiesse that had recently been approved by the FDA to improve the contours of his patients' noses. He developed an office based procedure consisting of a series of small filler injections in precise locations on the nose. After performing the procedure regularly in 2003, Rivkin publicized the method in a variety of mainstream American news outlets as the \"non-surgical nose job\" and \"injection rhinoplasty.\" The main goal of the procedure was to make a bumpy or curved nose appear straighter. He observed that straightening the nose made it appear smaller (even though he was augmenting) by making it blend better with the contours of the rest of the face. This observation was echoed by later physicians as well. Rivkin's 2009 study of 385 patients remains the largest published experience with this technique in the world.\n",
"The nasalis is a sphincter-like muscle of the nose whose function is to compress the nasal cartilages. It is the muscle responsible for \"flaring\" of the nostrils. Some people can use it to close the nostrils to prevent entry of water when underwater.\n",
"BULLET::::- The \"Lowry Technique\". A combination of Valsalva and Toynbee: pinching the nose to close the nostrils, and blow and swallow at the same time. The nose can be closed without using a hand, using the compressor naris muscles; it can be described as \"wrinkling the nose as if there was a bad smell\". A hand cannot be got to the nose if using a full facemask. Many eyes-and-nose diving masks have two small pockets in their underside, or are like goggles with the soft edge extended downwards over the nose, to let two fingers reach the nose and pinch it.\n"
] |
how come the treasure hunters, odyssey, are being forced to give back the $500m treasure that they found and pulled from the ocean floor?
|
Lawyer here! This case presents a great opportunity to look at abandonment and salvage law.
The bottom line is that Spain - which owned the ship and cargo in question - never abandoned its ownership interest. In order for a person to abandon property, that person must exhibit some sort of *intent* to surrender its ownership of the property. Otherwise, the ownership interest may continue *indefinitely*. This can be done expressly (through a writing, for example) or by implication (through acts that suggest the property is being abandoned). Here, Spain never exhibited any such interest, so it's still the rightful owner of the wreck to this day.
The fact that 200+ years elapsed is of no moment. The wreck was not discoverable or salvageable until very recently, and the law isn't going to strip you of your ownership of something just because it's literally not recoverable for a few generations. That would hardly be a just outcome.
That said, the Odyssey should be entitled to recover under salvage law. Courts across the world recognize the right of a "salvor" to be compensated for recovering a wreck. While the salvor isn't generally entitled to keep the salvaged property itself (since that's still owned by someone else), they do have a right to be compensated for their services (whether agreed to or not by the rightful owner) through an award commensurate with the value of the property recovered. (I *believe* in this case that Spain *did* ultimately pay Odyssey for their services, but I could be wrong.)
All that said, this wasn't your typical salvage case. Here, Odyssey sought to keep the salvage for themselves; they didn't want Spain to get its hands on it. So they engaged in some pretty shady practices before and during the lawsuit in order to keep Spain in the dark. That's why Odyssey was hit with a $1M fee award. You can read some of Judge Merryday's reasoning in that article:
> Spain persistently attempted to secure through discovery from Odyssey the claimed identity of the vessel and the evidence supporting that identification," Merryday wrote.
> "Of course, Odyssey knew at all times that Spain, given the information pertinent to identification, possessed the historical information and the expertise to identify immediately whether the wreck in question was a Spanish vessel, … " he added. "The fact that Odyssey never asked for Spain's assistance in identifying the vessel reveals much about Odyssey's motives and objectives."
Bad faith discovery practices, in my experience, are one of the quickest ways to be hit with sanctions in federal court, so it's no real surprise to see this award here.
Also, as someone who's handled more than a few cases before Judge Merryday, I can tell you that he's very just and capable, and like most judges in his district (and many others), abhors discovery abuses.
|
[
"Mike Johnson initially speculated that the treasure might be from the wreck of the English merchant ship \"Merchant Royal\", which sank on 23 September 1641 whilst returning to London. That ship sank in heavy weather when its pumps failed to keep up with the water leaking through the hull planks. Over half the crew, including the captain, John Limbrey, were able to abandon ship and were rescued by a sister-ship, \"Dover Merchant\", which was accompanying \"Merchant Royal\" from Cadiz to London. The survivors provided a detailed description of the lost cargo—described in 1641 as \"300,000 Pounds in silver, 100,000 Pounds in gold, and as much again in jewel\"—as well as a general location near the Isles of Scilly, about \"21 leagues\" (about 35 to 40 miles) from Lands End.\n",
"More recently, most serious treasure hunters have started working underwater, where modern technology allows access to wrecks containing valuables, which were previously inaccessible. Starting with the diving suit, and moving on through Scuba and later to ROVs, each new generation of technology has made more wrecks accessible. Many of these wrecks have resulted in the treasure salvage of many fascinating artifacts from Spanish treasure fleets as well as many others.\n",
"Together with another sunken treasure hunter, the American John Potter, Sténuit worked for the Atlantic Salvage Company, Ltd. on the specially-equipped vessel \"Dios Te Guarde\" for search and recovery of underwater treasure, beginning another search for the wrecks of the 1702 Plate Fleet, which lasted two years.\n",
"Shortly after uncovering the treasure, another vortex in time is opened, and the rest of Jack's mutinied crew is deposited. The crew quickly learn of the treasure, and open attack on Jack and Bobby, who are forced to defend the house and the treasure. After Bobby, who has by now become close friends with Jack, is captured and held in ransom, Jack is forced to hand over what is believed to be the treasure. The boy is released, but Jack is forced to stay with the crew, who are teleported back to their native time.\n",
"\"Treasure\" sank on 23 June 2000. She went down off the coast of South Africa, between Robben Island and Dassen Island after developing a hole in her hull. However, the hole was not the immediate cause of the sinking. Authorities wanted to tow the ship into the South African harbor for repair, but she was too large for the maneuver and was ordered farther off-shore in an attempt to reduce environmental damage from oil pollution. The ship sank while under tow in rough seas when the tow ropes ripped loose. The ship then drifted eastward and subsequently sank. The ship's crew were airlifted to safety.\n",
"After the discovery, the State of Florida claimed title to the wreck and forced Fisher into a contract giving 25% of the found treasure to the state. Fisher fought the state, claiming the find should be his exclusively. After eight years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favour of Fisher on 1 July 1992, and he was awarded rights to all found treasure from the vessel. Fisher died on 19 December 1998.\n",
"When the final clue reveals that the treasure is at the sunken ship, Freddi and Luther go there and retrieve the treasure, but the two are stopped by Spongehead and Boss who want the treasure. Freddi explains that the kelp treasure is for everyone to share, and the sharks plan on sharing. Freddi and Luther grab the treasure, spread it around to give to everyone, and plant it in Grandma Grouper's garden. The three all go inside her house, ending the game.\n"
] |
why is the english version of a wikipedia article always much longer and more detailed than in any other language?
|
Most other languages simply don't have as many contributors. The German Wiki is actually very good and very active. Some smaller language simply don't have as many editors which greatly limits the amount of subjects they write on.
|
[
"The articles on the Simple English Wikipedia are usually shorter than their English Wikipedia counterparts, typically presenting only basic information: Tim Dowling of \"The Guardian\" newspaper explained that \"the Simple English version tends to stick to commonly accepted facts\". The interface is also more simply labeled; for instance, the \"Random article\" link on the English Wikipedia is replaced with a \"Show any page\" link; users are invited to \"change\" rather than \"edit\" pages; clicking on a red link shows a \"page not created\" message rather than the usual \"page does not exist\". The project uses around 1,500 common English words, and is based on Basic English, an 850-word auxiliary international language created by Charles Kay Ogden in the 1920s.\n",
"The 2nd Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) includes more historical entries because it also lists words that have been obsolete for centuries (back to the 7th century) due to changes in meaning and orthography. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary only covers usage back to the 18th century.\n",
"BULLET::::- Editing a long Wikipedia article can sometimes turn out to be painful and time-consuming due to web-forms limitations. Instead, when WikipediaFS is mounted on a directory, articles become like real files in that directory: it is thus possible to use a text-editor to edit files. Text-editors are generally more stable and less sluggish than browsers and have useful features such as spell checking and wiki syntax highlighting.\n",
"A 2013 study from Oxford University concluded that the most disputed articles on the English Wikipedia tended to be broader issues, while on other language Wikipedias the most disputed articles tended to be regional issues; this is due to the English language's status as a global \"lingua franca\", which means that many who edit the English Wikipedia do not speak English as a native language. The study stated that the most disputed entries on the English Wikipedia were: George W. Bush, anarchism, Muhammad, list of WWE personnel, global warming, circumcision, United States, Jesus, race and intelligence, and Christianity.\n",
"BULLET::::- Articles – English has two forms of article: \"the\" (the definite article) and \"a\" and \"an\" (the indefinite article). In addition, at times English nouns can or indeed must be used without an article; this is called the zero article. Some of the differences between definite, indefinite and zero article are fairly easy to learn, but others are not, particularly since a learner's native language may lack articles, have only one form, or use them differently from English. Although the information conveyed by articles is rarely essential for communication, English uses them frequently (several times in the average sentence) so that they require some effort from the learner.\n",
"The Simple English Wikipedia is a variation in which most of the articles use only basic English vocabulary. There is also the Old English (Ænglisc/Anglo-Saxon) Wikipedia (). Community-produced news publications include \"The Signpost\".\n",
"Since Wikipedia is based on the Web and therefore worldwide, contributors to the same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences (e.g. \"colour\" versus \"color\") or points of view.\n"
] |
Are any ancient roads or bridges still in use today?
|
Sure. [The King's Highway](_URL_0_) in Jordan immediately jumps to mind.
> Was there continued development on these roads even after their empires fell?
I'm less familiar with whether or not the development would have been "continuous" per se (i.e. whether or not the road ever fell into prolonged periods of neglect or disuse. I strongly suspect it would have.) but it has been used and developed by a succession of empires that controlled the region, down to the present Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
There are also roads that by virtue of simple geography have remained in use in the same place, like the Khyber Pass in the Hindu Kush between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
|
[
"Many of the present-day road bridges are on the site of earlier fords, ferries and wooden bridges. At Swinford Bridge, a toll bridge, there was first a ford and then a ferry prior to the bridge being built. The earliest known major crossings of the Thames by the Romans were at London Bridge and Staines Bridge. At Folly Bridge in Oxford the remains of an original Saxon structure can be seen, and medieval stone bridges such as Newbridge, Wallingford Bridge and Abingdon Bridge are still in use.\n",
"Most likely the earliest bridges were fallen trees and stepping stones, while Neolithic people built boardwalk bridges across marshland. The Arkadiko Bridge dating from the 13th century BC, in the Peloponnese, in southern Greece is one of the oldest arch bridges still in existence and use.\n",
"The oldest known constructed roadways are the stone-paved streets of the city-state of Ur, dating to circa 4000 BCE and timber roads leading through the swamps of Glastonbury, England, dating to around the same time period. The first long-distance road, which came into use around 3500 BCE, spanned 1,500 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, but was not paved and was only partially maintained. In around 2000 BCE, the Minoans on the Greek island of Crete built a fifty-kilometer (thirty-mile) road leading from the palace of Gortyn on the south side of the island, through the mountains, to the palace of Knossos on the north side of the island. Unlike the earlier road, the Minoan road was completely paved.\n",
"In addition to the numerous modern bridges over the Tiber in Rome, there remain a few ancient bridges (now mostly pedestrian-only) that have survived in part (e.g., the Ponte Milvio and the Ponte Sant'Angelo) or in whole (Fabricius' Bridge).\n",
"The bridges were described by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus in his \"Histories\", but little other evidence confirms Herodotus' story in this respect. Most modern historians accept the building of the bridges as such, but practically all details related by Herodotus are subject to doubt and discussion.\n",
"One of the bridges in particular stands out — the Ponte Vecchio (\"Old Bridge\"), whose most striking feature is the multitude of shops built upon its edges, held up by stilts. The bridge also carries Vasari's elevated corridor linking the Uffizi to the Medici residence (Palazzo Pitti). Although the original bridge was constructed by the Etruscans, the current bridge was rebuilt in the 14th century. It is the only bridge in the city to have survived World War II intact. It is the first example in the western world of a bridge built using segmental arches, that is, arches less than a semicircle, to reduce both span-to-rise ratio and the numbers of pillars to allow lesser encumbrance in the riverbed (being in this much more successful than the Roman Alconétar Bridge).\n",
"The bridge's construction occurred in the ancient Roman province of Lusitania. In Ancient Rome, the costs of building and repairing bridges, known as \"opus pontis\" (\"bridge work\"), were the responsibility of multiple local municipalities. Their shared costs prove Roman bridges belonged to the region overall, and not to any one town (or two, if on a border). The Alcántara Bridge was built at the expense of 12 local municipalities in Lusitania. The names were added on an inscription on the archway over the central pier.\n"
] |
how do swear words become swear words in the first place?
|
Actually very interesting topic, whilst a good number are just insults, the majority of English language swear words are Germanic origin words as opposed to Latin origin words; when the french-speaking Normans conquered England, they would include more french words when they spoke, whereas the Anglo-Saxons, which made up the majority of English population, had all been including German origin words. Wealthy people (both Norman and otherwise) wished to seem more Norman in order to get further ahead in life, so shunned German origin words; eventually this evolves into "only a poor person says that" meaning a proper person looking to forward there standing in society would never sound so common, then just flat out rude as people continued to emulate the "proper people". Example: cunt is a germanic origin word for vagina, and it's predecessor can be found in 13th century poetry, yet became considered slang, then by the nineteenth century it had the same vulgarity as it does now.
& #x200B;
TLDR: Swear words tend to become swear words because poor people used to say them.
Edit: I love that my most upvoted comment is explaining the origin of the word cunt. I'm a true fucking Scotsman
|
[
"A swear jar (also known as a swear box, swearing jar, cuss jar, or cuss bank) is a device to help discourage people from swearing. Every time someone utters a swear word, others who witness it collect a \"fine\", by insisting that the offender put some money into the box. The container may be made of glass, porcelain, or metal, and may have a lid with a slot. From time to time, the accumulated money may be used for some agreed-upon purpose, or contributed to charity.\n",
"In this form, the speech is usually the insertion of swear words within the sentence structure used to convey various ideas. At times, this use of formulaic language comes about due to the individual being greatly distressed or angry. However, there are situations where swear words are inserted unconsciously even if the individual is extremely happy. When the use of swear words is called to the attention of the individual, he or she may not even have been aware of the usage of such formulaic language.\n",
"As in most languages swear words tend to come from semantic domains considered taboo such as the domains of human excretions, sexuality, and religion. As in most languages, in Spanish swearing serves several functions in discourse, as emphatic interjections expressing emotion, as expressions of interpersonal stances such as aggression or as expression of gender identity, and as forms of linguistic play.\n",
"While not all Finns swear, frequent swearing is a mark of youth culture, sometimes the elderly, and usually not the middle-aged. However, it is commonly considered impolite to swear excessively in public and at official occasions, and particularly in front of children in all regions of the world. Use of swearwords may also imply familiarity as opposed to official distance. Swearwords are used as intensifiers, adjectives, adverbs, particles and to start or finish sentences. There is also an aggressive mood that involves omission of the negative verb \"\" while implying its meaning with a swear word.\n",
"To alter the pronunciation or spelling of a taboo word (such as a swear word) to form a euphemism is known as \"taboo deformation\", or a minced oath. In American English, words that are unacceptable on television, such as \"fuck\", may be represented by deformations such as \"freak\", even in children's cartoons. Feck is a minced oath popularised by the sitcom Father Ted. Some examples of rhyming slang may serve the same purpose: to call a person a \"berk\" sounds less offensive than to call a person a \"cunt\", though \"berk\" is short for Berkeley Hunt, which rhymes with \"cunt\".\n",
"BULLET::::2. \"Language\" – Very mild swear words only shall be allowed. Use of a strong expletive in a sexual context or sexually-based expletives shall not be allowed. Neither shall prolonged and/or successive use of expletives be allowed.\n",
"French-Canadian swear words can be combined into more powerful combinations to express extreme anger or disgust. These intricate uses of French profanities can be difficult to master. The combinations are endless; some people in the French-Canadian community consider mixing and matching swear words to be a sort of skilled art.\n"
] |
How do we have fossils older than the Cretaceous at current rates of tectonic plate subduction?
|
There are some anomalously old bits of ocean floor knocking around - I believe there’s some parts of the Pacific Ocean basin that are 200ish million years old, and a few slivers in the Mediterranean that are remnants of the Neotethys ocean getting on for 300 million years old.
This is not really the answer to your question though. The reason why we have fossils from half a billion years ago (and much farther back when we extend it to all the bacterial life before hard parts got going), is because continents don’t get recycled. Continental crust is much more buoyant than oceanic crust and so tends not to subduct.
When it does, it’s due to situations where the leading (oceanic) edge of a subducting plate which has continental crust attached behind it is chugging at a good pace down that subduction zone. The continental crust will get dragged in, maybe some of it will be assimilated into the mantle for keeps, but essentially it just pops back up again and we get a nice metamorphic mineral assemblage preserved from our continent’s brief (a few million years) trip into the mantle.
So all the fossils of stuff we have older than 200 million years-ish is stuff from land. This may be an area that was always land, with land animals and plants preserved; or it may be an area that was once a shallow sea and due to regional tectonic uplift is now land. Shelf seas are just that: seas which are underlain by continental shelves. If they are lifted above water level, or if sea level drops to expose the sea bed, then providing there’s some sort of preservation mechanism (buried organisms, sheltered from weathering etc) then this whole area will not be subducted as it is part of the continental crust.
We don’t actually have a huge fossil record of vertebrates from the deep water of the oceans proper, simply because we can’t go looking around there quite as effectively or easily as we can on land. There are plenty of research vessels that take core samples of the seafloor sediments though, and these have built up a good record of microfossils for the past 200 million years or so.
In particular, the tests (shells) of single called organisms known as [foraminifera](_URL_0_) are often found, and can be used to correlate ages of the layers based on the species present; to chart the changing shape of ocean basins and certain ocean currents; and even to reconstruct past climates. There are a few other important groups of microfossils we find in marine sediments, namely diatoms, radiolarians and coccolithophores (actually so small they are technically nanofossils) which can also tell us similar things.
Perhaps there are countless untold fossilised beasts that have been swept out to deep waters and that we will never find unless we happen to be coring in *exactly* the right spot. For the most part though, the deep ocean is a quiet place that has a constant, slow rain of plankton hard parts to the sea-bed and not much else. When things like whale falls occur they are a temporary oasis in a desolate land, and all sorts of creatures big and small will come and devour it until even the bones are gone (I believe hagfish get every last scrap of meat from the bone and then some types of worm can actually digest the bone itself).
It would have to be a particularly rare occurrence even by fossilisation standards for a big creature to make it to the seafloor *and* get preserved. I know of one such discovery: the best preserved dino we have, [an ankylosaurus discovered by some miners.](_URL_1_)
|
[
"Their subsequent research showed that the infraposition of the fossiliferous rocks is not their original place, but had been brought about by a gigantic system of dislocations, whereby successive masses of the oldest gneisses, have been exhumed from below and thrust over the younger formations.\n",
"The ages of more recent layers are calculated primarily by the study of fossils, which are remains of ancient life preserved in the rock. These occur consistently and so a theory is feasible. Most of the boundaries in recent geologic time coincide with extinctions (e.g., the dinosaurs) and with the appearances of new species (e.g., hominids).\n",
"Fossils of \"Tectonatica\" are found in marine strata from the Eocene until the Quaternary (age range: from 61.7 to 0.0 million years ago.). Fossils are known from various localities in Europe, North America, South America and Japan.\n",
"The fossil was dated using a combination of palaeomagnetism and uranium-lead (U-Pb) dating which showed that the fossils are not older than ~2.0 Ma. The occurrence of species of animal that became extinct at ~1.5 Ma indicate the deposit is not younger than 1.5 Ma. The sediments have a 'normal' magnetic polarity and the only major period between 2.0 and 1.5 Ma when this occurred is the Olduvai sub-Chron between 1.95 and 1.78 Ma. As such, the fossils were originally dated to ~1.95 Ma. Recent dating of a capping flowstone illustrated this was not possible and the normal magnetic polarity sediments have since been correlated to the 3000-year-long Pre-Olduvai event at ~1.977 Ma.\n",
"The complete lack of fossils is consistent with a Precambrian age for the sequence. This is also shown by the age of the earliest known intrusions that cut the sequence, dated at around 870 Ma. There is also no evidence of the sequence being affected by the 1300-1000 Ma Grenville orogeny. This together suggests an early Neoproterozoic sedimentation age. A possible correlation with the lithologically similar Torridon Group, an unmetamorphosed sequence of similar age found beneath the Moine Thrust, remains unproven.\n",
"The fossil was dated using a combination of palaeomagnetism and uranium–lead (U-Pb) dating which showed that the fossils are no older than ~2.0 Ma. The presence of animal species which became extinct at ~1.5 Ma indicates the deposit is no younger than 1.5 Ma. The sediments have a 'normal' magnetic polarity and the only major period between 2.0 and 1.5 Ma when this occurred is the Olduvai sub-Chron between 1.95 and 1.78 Ma. Accordingly, the fossils were originally dated to ~1.95 Ma. Recent dating of a capping flowstone demonstrated this was not possible and the normal magnetic polarity sediments have since been correlated to the 3,000-year-long Pre-Olduvai event at ~1.977 Ma.\n",
"Sediment isotope analysis of cosmogenic atoms in the fossil yielded an age of about 7 million years. In this case, however, the fossils were found exposed in loose sand; co-discoverer Beauvilain cautions that such sediment can be easily moved by the wind, unlike packed earth, making the date of 7 million years less certain.\n"
] |
ceramic glazes
|
A ceramic glaze is a essentially a powdered glass-forming substance that liquefies at high temperatures, forming a smooth glass layer that is bonded with the ceramic itself. There are many different types of glazes that utilize different chemicals to produce different colors and effects. A flux is a substance added to the pre-fired glaze that lowers its melting temperature, making it easier to liquefy.
|
[
"Ceramic glaze is an impervious layer or coating of a vitreous substance which has been fused to a ceramic body through firing. Glaze can serve to color, decorate or waterproof an item. Glazing renders earthenware vessels suitable for holding liquids, sealing the inherent porosity of unglazed biscuit earthenware. It also gives a tougher surface. Glaze is also used on stoneware and porcelain. In addition to their functionality, glazes can form a variety of surface finishes, including degrees of glossy or matte finish and color. Glazes may also enhance the underlying design or texture either unmodified or inscribed, carved or painted.\n",
"Raw materials of ceramic glazes generally include silica, which will be the main glass former. Various metal oxides, such as sodium, potassium, and calcium, act as flux and therefore lower the melting temperature. Alumina, often derived from clay, stiffens the molten glaze to prevent it from running off the piece. Colorants, such as iron oxide, copper carbonate, or cobalt carbonate, and sometimes opacifiers like tin oxide or zirconium oxide, are used to modify the visual appearance of the fired glaze.\n",
"Ceramic chemistry studies the relationship between the physical properties of fired ceramics and ceramic glazes and their chemistry. Although ceramic technicians have long understood many of these relationships, the advent of computer software to automate the conversion from batch to formula and analysis has brought this science within the reach of many more people. Physical properties of glazes in fired products (like thermal expansion, hardness, index of refraction, color and melting temperature or range) are directly (but not solely) related to the chemistry. Properties of glass melts like viscosity and surface tension are also principally products of chemistry.\n",
"The ceramic is usually used to create jugs, some with tubular spouts, some lids, cooking pots, condiment dishes, and aquamaniles. Decorative elements include applied, incised, rouletted or combed types. The most distinctive decoration is applied clay pads stamped with seals, visible on the exterior of large jugs. The glaze is usually green (but sometime yellow), lustrous and almost metallic.\n",
"Glazes need to include a ceramic flux which functions by promoting partial liquefaction in the clay bodies and the other glaze materials. Fluxes lower the high melting point of the glass formers silica, and sometimes boron trioxide. These glass formers may be included in the glaze materials, or may be drawn from the clay beneath. \n",
"In ceramic chemistry, fired glazes are viewed as composed of oxides (examples are SiO, AlO, BO, NaO, KO, CaO, LiO, MgO, ZnO, MnO, FeO, CoO). Each oxide is known to contribute specific properties to the fired glass. Many materials suppliers publish chemical analyses of their products that cite percentages of these oxides as well as volatile components (components that burn away during firing giving off gases and fumes such as HO, CO, SO).\n",
"Glaze may be applied by dry-dusting a dry mixture over the surface of the clay body or by inserting salt or soda into the kiln at high temperatures to create an atmosphere rich in sodium vapor that interacts with the aluminium and silica oxides in the body to form and deposit glass, producing what is known as salt glaze pottery. Most commonly, glazes in aqueous suspension of various powdered minerals and metal oxides are applied by dipping pieces directly into the glaze. Other techniques include pouring the glaze over the piece, spraying it onto the piece with an airbrush or similar tool, or applying it directly with a brush or other tool.\n"
] |
What do meteorologists actually do these days? Don't computer models do all the predicting?
|
Who do you think makes, improves, and interprets those models?
|
[
"Research by Kondrat'eva, Reznikov and colleagues at Kazan University had shown how meteor storms could be accurately predicted, but for some years the worldwide meteor community remained largely unaware of these results. The work of David J. Asher, Armagh Observatory and Robert H. McNaught, Siding Spring Observatory and independently by Esko Lyytinen in 1999, following on from the Kazan research, is considered by most meteor experts as the breakthrough in modern analysis of meteor storms. Whereas previously it was hazardous to guess if there would be a storm or little activity, the predictions of Asher and McNaught timed bursts in activity down to ten minutes by narrowing down the clouds of particles to individual streams from each passage of the comet, and their trajectories amended by subsequent passage near planets. However, whether a specific meteoroid trail will be primarily composed of small or large particles, and thus the relative brightness of the meteors, was not understood. But McNaught did extend the work to examine the placement of the Moon with trails and saw a large chance of a storm impacting in 1999 from a trail while there were less direct impacts from trails in 2000 and 2001 (successive contact with trails through 2006 showed no hits.)\n",
"In the past, the forecaster was responsible for generating the entire weather forecast based upon available observations. Today, meteorologists' input is generally confined to choosing a model based on various parameters, such as model biases and performance. Using a consensus of forecast models, as well as ensemble members of the various models, can help reduce forecast error. However, regardless how small the average error becomes with any individual system, large errors within any particularly piece of guidance are still possible on any given model run. Professionals are required to interpret the model data into weather forecasts that are understandable to the lay person. Professionals can use knowledge of local effects which may be too small in size to be resolved by the model to add information to the forecast. As an example, terrain is considered in the QPF process by using topography or climatological precipitation patterns from observations with fine detail. Using model guidance and comparing the various forecast fields to climatology, extreme events such as excessive precipitation associated with later flood events lead to better forecasts. While increasing accuracy of forecast models implies that humans may no longer be needed in the forecast process at some point in the future, there is currently still a need for human intervention.\n",
"With the introduction of the computer, meteorologists in the United States began numerical experiments to develop quantitative measurement methods to study circulation and climate of the earth. In 1959 and 1960, Möller came to the United States to work with Syukuro Manabe on the numerical determination of radiative fluxes. Moller's second visit to the United States was the evaluation of measurement data from meteorological satellites. He was the only German belonging to the governing body of the Global Atmospheric Research Program.\n",
"Manipulating the vast datasets and performing the complex calculations necessary to modern numerical weather prediction requires some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Even with the increasing power of supercomputers, the forecast skill of numerical weather models extends to only about six days. Factors affecting the accuracy of numerical predictions include the density and quality of observations used as input to the forecasts, along with deficiencies in the numerical models themselves. Post-processing techniques such as model output statistics (MOS) have been developed to improve the handling of errors in numerical predictions.\n",
"Kelvin Kay Droegemeier (born September 23, 1958) is an American research meteorologist currently serving as the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Droegemeier is known for his research in predicting the development of extreme weather events, and previously served as Oklahoma Secretary of Science and Technology and the Vice President for Research at the University of Oklahoma.\n",
"The American Meteor Society, Ltd. (AMS) is a non-profit scientific organization established to encourage and support the research activities of both amateur and professional astronomers who are interested in the field of meteor astronomy. Its affiliates observe, monitor, collect data on, study, and report on meteors, meteor showers, meteoric fireballs, and related meteoric phenomena.\n",
"The most visible meteor shower in most years are the Perseids, which peak on 12 August of each year at over one meteor per minute. NASA has a tool to calculate how many meteors per hour are visible from one's observing location.\n"
] |
why can't we just throw all of our trash into an oceanic trench? wouldn't it be recycled back into the earth?
|
Trash is all sorts of crazy stuff, including oils that float, plastic bits that float, paper bits that float, wood bits that float and even cans with a little air in them that float. It's also filled with air. And air floats.
So you'd need to seal it and get all the air out of it to keep it down there. So you Wall-E big cubes of garbage as best you can and seal them somehow.
Now you have to deliver it to the dock, and then load it on a vessel, and then pay that vessel huge amounts of money to transport it to that trench because most are pretty far away from land.
Now you're over the trench. The bottom of the trench is way way down there where the water pressure is super high. Drop a Wall-E cube.
As it sinks, its irregular shape causes it to tumble and drift off. So you build a giant cable that you hook your delivery vessel and cubes to to they it drop down straight. Delivery system complete...
But as it falls, the pressure on the cube rises, and any remaining air (because you can't get it all) dramatically increases the chance it's going to rupture if not just float. It does, and all the air and those lovely oils and other chemicals squirt out, and with them comes plastic bits and other pollutants as your case's integrity fails.
A few hours later there's a minor but potently stenchy oil slick under your vessel and that giant floating garbage patch in the middle of the ocean gets just a little bit bigger, and your picture's on a dartboard in Greenpeace offices all over the globe.
|
[
"Another issue is that removing marine debris from our oceans can potentially cause more harm than good. Cleaning up micro-plastics could also accidentally take out plankton, which are the main lower level food group for the marine food chain and over half of the photosynthesis on earth. One of the most efficient and cost effective ways to help reduce the amount of plastic entering our oceans is to not participate in using single use plastics, avoid plastic bottled drinks such as water bottles, use reusable shopping bags, and to buy products with reusable packaging.\n",
"With few exceptions, none of this garbage finds its way back into the cycles of society or nature; it is not taken up for repeated use by industry, nor is it put back into the soil. As a result of poor or non-existent planning, the volume of garbage is too large for nature to reassimilate, and some of it - toxic metals and stable unnatural compounds - cannot be processed by the cells at all.\n",
"Recycling everything is not possible. When it comes to disposal of the remaining waste, environmentalists favor sending it to trash-to-energy plant rather than a landfill where it can pollute the soil, water, and air through contamination and excess methane production.\n",
"Given that about one-quarter of Seattle's garbage consists of easily recycled materials (paper, cardboard, aluminum cans, plastic bottles and yard waste) the city council decided on a mandatory recycling ordinance for its annual economic value. The “Prohibition of Recyclables in Garbage” is estimated to save residents and businesses as much as $2 million per year by keeping future garbage cost low and aiding to the declining recycling rates since 1995 because the recyclable materials themselves hold value.\n",
"Plastic debris from inland states come from two main sources: ordinary litter and materials from open dumps and landfills that blow or wash away to inland waterways and wastewater outflows. The refuse finds its way from inland waterways, rivers, streams and lakes to the ocean. Though ocean and coastal area cleanups are important, it is crucial to address plastic waste that originates from inland and landlocked states.\n",
"It was determined that any environmental cleanup should be designed to remove loose cables, transformers, hazardous material, toxic waste, and ordnance. Nontoxic World War II-related objects such as empty barrels could be left in place; full barrels would be, of course, another issue. All other buildings, structures, and infrastructure—no matter how \"unsightly\"—would be left intact and preserved: in this case preservation can simply mean avoidance and the acceptance that the buildings and structures have a definite place within the landscape.\n",
"It was determined that any environmental cleanup should be designed to remove loose cables, transformers, hazardous material, toxic waste, and ordnance. Nontoxic World War II-related objects such as empty barrels could be left in place; full barrels would be, of course, another issue. All other buildings, structures, and infrastructure—no matter how \"unsightly\"—would be left intact and preserved: in this case preservation can simply mean avoidance and the acceptance that the buildings and structures have a definite place within the landscape.\n"
] |
how did the punctuation marks get their shapes?
|
. comes from ancient greece, there used to be 3 different kinds which sat at varying height, the higher the dot the longer the pause.
! is the latin work Io (joy) with the o smushed under the I.
? derives from the same dots as the period, only it had a squiggle to show that you should raise your voice, like you do when asking a question. It started out being sideways, but was eventually turned upright to work better with other punctuation
, used to be represented by a slash like "/", it just got squished down.
Basically, most punctuation is because some ancient guy said so.
|
[
"Some kind of punctuation is often found in inscriptions of all kinds. In Greek inscriptions a vertical line or a dot, or dots, sometimes indicates the separation between sentences or words, but words are seldom separated by spaces as in modern printing, so that the text is continuous and no division of words exists.This is particularly the case with Greek inscriptions of the best period. In Roman inscriptions it was usual to separate the words by dots. In certain inscriptions a cross () was used to indicate the beginning of an inscription, especially when its direction was erratic. Christian inscriptions sometimes begin with a cross, which doubtless had a symbolic meaning; and a leaf or other device was often placed at the end.\n",
"Punctuation marks included a high dot •, sometimes substituted by a double backslash \\\\ (), which was used roughly like an English period or colon; a slash / (), which was used like a question mark; and a double slash // (), which was sometimes used to separate verses.\n",
"The American first edition used a punctuation mark (resembling an equals sign: '=') between sentences (after full stops, exclamation marks or question marks; in the earlier \"Egoist\" version it had been an m-dash). It has been claimed that these were an attempt by Lewis, an artist, to introduce 'painterly strokes' into literature. This has, however, been disputed by Dr. John Constable, who believes that they are nothing more than a German punctuation mark briefly adopted by Lewis. Lewis himself wrote to Ezra Pound about this when reconstructing missing parts of the manuscript for the U.S. edition: \"Were those parallel lines = Quinn mentions kept going by the Egoist, or not? Could not they be disinterred, & used by Knopf?\" (Lewis to Pound, October 1917). Evidently not all were disinterred, as large stretches of the book as published are without them.\n",
"In more contemporary writing, punctuation marks are borrowed from French, such as exclamation point !, question mark ?, parentheses (), and «» for quotation marks, although \"\" is also common. Hyphens (-) and the ellipsis (...) are also commonly found in modern writing.\n",
"He also invented one of the first forms of punctuation in ; single dots (\"théseis\", Latin \"distinctiones\") that separated verses (colometry), and indicated the amount of breath needed to complete each fragment of text when reading aloud (not to comply with rules of grammar, which were not applied to punctuation marks until centuries later). For a short passage (a \"komma\"), a \"stigmḕ mésē\" dot was placed mid-level (·). This is the origin of the modern comma punctuation mark, and its name. For a longer passage (a \"kolon\"), a \"hypostigmḗ\" dot was placed level with the bottom of the text (.), similar to a modern colon or semicolon, and for very long pauses (\"periodos\"), a \"stigmḕ teleía\" point near the top of the line of text ().\n",
"Two punctuation marks are used in Greek texts which are not found in English: the colon, which consists of a dot raised above the line ( ) and the Greek question-mark, which looks like the English semicolon ( ).\n",
"Quotation marks were first cut in metal type during the middle of the sixteenth century, and were used copiously by some printers by the seventeenth. In some Baroque and Romantic-period books, they would be repeated at the beginning of every line of a long quotation. When this practice was abandoned, the empty margin remained, leaving the modern form of indented block quotation.\n"
] |
Did people really used to talk in such a formal way in the past? Historical novels make it seem like abbreviating words is a new thing...
|
It's pretty much just an affectation of the genre (side note: as a writer of historical fiction, I've run up against this frequently, as I refuse to follow it). People of all time periods used various levels of language depending on the situation and, yes, those levels of language did include slang and "contractions." I put contractions in quotes there as the words they used aren't necessarily the words we would recognize as contractions, but nonetheless serve the same linguistic function.
I think (minor speculation based on experience) that the "no contractions" rule is used to make the characters more distant from us so the time period feels more real. Honestly, a sixteenth-century man rightly pissed off saying "Fuck you and fuck yo' momma" is going to seem REALLY weird, even if it's a translation of the sentiment. "A pox on both your houses" is more of what we would *expect* such a character to say.
In other words, yes, people would have spoken differently but no, our ancestors were not mysteriously lacking in an informal speech register.
|
[
"In April 2008 Hitchings published \"The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English\", a study of loanwords, calques and their cultural significance. Following the English language's history through \"its debt to invasions, to threats from abroad, and to an island people's dealings with the world beyond its shores\" the book examines its unbroken acquisitiveness—\"but for all that [Hitchings'] true object is to reveal past frames of mind and to show how our present outlook is informed by the history squirreled away in the words we use\". Instead of using history to explain language, Hitchings \"picks words apart to find their origins\" and then molds this \"mountain of dense information into an elegant narrative\". The \"Economist\" noted that \"whatever is hybrid, fluid and unpoliced about English delights him\".\n",
"As many new words were entering the English language in the 16th century, Cawdrey became concerned that people would become confused. Cawdrey worried that the wealthy were adopting foreign words and phrases, and wrote that \"they forget altogether their mothers language, so that if some of their mothers were alive, they were not able to tell or understand what they say.\" He also described how \"far journied gentlemen\" learn new words while in foreign lands, and then \"pouder their talke with over-sea language.\"\n",
"BULLET::::- Robert Mannyng (1264–1340) is credited with putting the speech of the ordinary people of his time into recognisable form. He is better known as Robert de Brunne because of his long period of residence as a canon at Bourne Abbey. There he completed his life's work, popularising religious and historical material in a Middle English dialect that was easily understood at that time. His \"Handlyng Synne\" is acknowledged to be of great value for the glimpses it gives into the ways and thoughts of his contemporaries and shows us the language then in common use.\n",
"Finally, the speech ends by claiming to deliver \"verbatim\" to the new generations the final words of those who had previously risked their lives for freedom (246d). They were: to live bravely, for neither money nor beauty is good without virtue, and to strive to exceed their forefathers, who would happily be \"defeated\" in this noble manner. The ancient saying \"nothing overmuch\" (μηδὲν ἄγαν) is wise indeed, and true character is shown by those who neither rejoice in excess when fortunate nor grieve too much in misfortune (248a). These were their ancestors' words. \n",
"In a 1950 lecture he formulated the famous saying \"Language speaks\", later published in the 1959 essays collection \"Unterwegs zur Sprache\", and collected in the 1971 English book \"Poetry, Language, Thought\".\n",
"During this late period, he also produced \"Saying What You Mean\", a practical guide for writers, researched by his daughter, Amanda Claiborne; the less well-received \"Roots of English\", which included a fascinating 're-assembled' hypothetical Indo-European dictionary; and \"Loose Cannons and Red Herrings: a book of lost metaphors\", about metaphors that have merged into common usage to the point that the source of their meaning is obscured.\n",
"The oldest known written uses of the word are in the book \"The Student\" (1750–1751), ii. 41, where it is called \"a word very much in vogue with the people of taste and fashion\", and in Ferdinando Killigrew's \"The Universal Jester\", subtitled \"a choice collection of many conceits ... bon-mots and humbugs\" from 1754; as mentioned in \"Encyclopædia Britannica\" from 1911, which further refers to the \"New English Dictionary\".\n"
] |
why do so many flies end up stuck in the blinds and die there?
|
Because they walk up.
Most people have their blinds angled so that walking up across the blinds takes the fly (through the gaps) to the side where the window is.
To get out, the fly would have to walk downwards (and upside down) on the blinds, and they don't like to do that, so they kinda get stuck on the window side and die of starvation.
|
[
"Because of their attraction to light, drain flies may be monitored by using fan-based traps baited with visible or ultraviolet light. However, only killing adult flies is usually not effective; larval food sources must be removed to stop more flies from emerging.\n",
"Hanged bodies can be expected to show their own quantity and variety of flies. Also, the amount of time flies will stay on a hanged body will vary in comparison to one found on the ground. A hanged body is more exposed to air and thus will dry out faster leaving less food source for the maggots.\n",
"Untamed birds which are not allowed out of their cages regularly, such as most finches and canaries, require larger cages that are long enough to permit some flight. The bars should be spaced so that curious birds cannot stick their heads out of the cage and become stuck. The cage should also have non-toxic paint, because birds tend to gnaw at the cage, and if the paint is consumed, they can die from poisoning.\n",
"Blood loss is a common problem in some animals when large flies are abundant. Some animals have been known to lose up to of blood in a single day to tabanid flies, a loss which can weaken or even kill them. Anecdotal reports of horse-fly bites leading to fatal anaphylaxis in humans have been made, an extremely rare occurrence.\n",
"\"The flies were bad. Little black ones. They pestered the batsmen and fieldsmen incessantly. Ranjitsinhji once explained that his dismissal in Sydney by saying that a fly got into his eye as the vital moment, which could well be true. They are an intense annoyance to a batsman, who must time his last quick flip of his face as the bowler is a few yards off delivery.\"\n",
"There are two mechanisms of bird death due to communications towers. The first is the \"blind kill\" where birds flying in poor visibility do not see the guy-wires in time to avoid them. This is more of a threat for faster flying birds such as waterfowl or shorebirds. Slower and more agile birds, such as songbirds, are not as likely to succumb to blind collision.\n",
"Their flight is delicate and they have a circling flight to avoid walls when they are trapped indoors. The long streamer is conspicuous when the insects are flying and these are the elongated and spatulate hindwings.\n"
] |
how does apple get away with selling iphones in europe when the eu rule that all mobile phones must use a micro usb connection?
|
by making it an adapter that has a micro usb connection
|
[
"Some observers, noting Apple's continued use of proprietary, non-micro USB charging ports on their smartphones, suggested Apple was not in compliance with the 2009 Common EPS Memorandum of Understanding. The European Commission however, confirmed that all MoU signatories, \"have met their obligations under the MoU,\" stating specifically, \"Concerning Apple's previous and present proprietary connectors and their compatibility with the agreement, the MoU allows for the use of an adaptor without prescribing the conditions for its provision\" and \"The Commission does not have evidence that Apple has breached the [MoU] agreement. The iPhone 5 can be used with an adaptor allowing it to be connected to the common charger.\"\n",
"On November 21, 2007, T-Mobile announced that due to litigation commenced against them by their competitor Vodafone, which resulted in a preliminary injunction preventing T-Mobile from locking the SIM card to T-Mobile in Germany, it will sell the phone \"unlocked\" and will offer iPhone without a T-Mobile contract for €999 (US$1,478) at its shops to customers in Germany until the court renders a decision. By the end of November, Apple released another version of iPhone firmware, 1.1.2. This version does not have many new features but breaks unlocks. During Macworld '08, on January 15, Apple released the fifth version of iPhone firmware, 1.1.3; this version repairs loopholes used by \"iPhone Hackers.\" The firmware, however, had been compromised prior to release and new security measures were quickly bypassed. On February 8, 2008, Geohot released the first full software unlock for the 1.1.2 & 1.1.3 OTB iPhones.\n",
"In 2006, Apple announced it would end shipments to Europe of certain products, including the eMac desktop computer and the AirPort wireless access point, as non-compliant with the European Union Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (ROHS).\n",
"In January 2012, Apple won a permanent injunction from a German court after it ruled that Motorola Mobility violated the patents on some of its recent devices (although the Motorola Xoom tablet was ruled not to have infringed on the patent). However, Apple was warned that they would have been required to put up a bond as insurance if they were to allow the injunction to take effect, and any potential sales ban as a result would be limited to Germany.\n",
"In Germany, there does not appear to be any effective law regulating SIM locking. For example, the iPhone was initially offered for sale in Germany exclusively through T-Mobile, and it was locked to T-Mobile's network. They began to provide unlocking codes for that phone after they were sued by Vodafone and a temporary injunction was issued requiring T-Mobile to do so. Vodafone's injunction was later overturned, and the iPhone is again available exclusively locked to T-Mobile. While T-Mobile Germany told the court that they would unlock the iPhone after the contract, they were doing it voluntarily.\n",
"In the United Kingdom, O2, EE, 3, Vodafone, and Tesco Mobile sell the device under subsidised contracts, or for use on pay as you go. They are locked to the network initially, though they can usually be unlocked either after a certain period of contract length has passed, or for a small fee (with the exception of the 3 network, which will unlock the device at any time for no charge). However, all current versions of iPhone are available for purchase SIM-free from the Apple Store or Apple's Online Store, consequently, they are unlocked for use on any GSM network too.\n",
"On 10 August 2011, a German court granted a preliminary injunction pending a full hearing prohibiting Galaxy Tab 10.1 sales in the European Union (except in the Netherlands, where a second action is running). Although Samsung is accused of violating 10 separate patents Apple holds on transmission of data and on wireless communications technology, the injunction was granted on the basis of an alleged infringement of one of Apple's registered community designs relating to the iPad 2. Press sources reported that customs officials across the European Union have seized inbound shipments of the product after the ruling, effectively locking it out of the key European market, and its listing was removed by online retailer Amazon.co.uk. Samsung stated it did not receive a notice of Apple's request to stop sales of its tablet. It has retaliated against Apple's move with counterclaims at home in South Korea and abroad in Japan, the U.S., and Germany.\n"
] |
how are brain surgeons able to remove 30% of somebody's brain, and have them function normally?
|
Every lobe in the brain is symmetrical and can be divided into two parts along the medial line. Each side of a lobe contain copies of one another, so if half of somebody's brain is surgically removed, they will be able to function normally over time. The process of converting all brain functions to a given side is not immediate.
Source: high school anatomy & physiology
|
[
"Each year, about 400,000 people undergo brain mapping during neurosurgery. This procedure is often required for people with tumors or epilepsy that do not respond to medication. During this procedure, electrodes are placed on the brain to precisely identify the locations of structures and functional areas. Patients may be awake during neurosurgery and asked to perform certain tasks, such as moving fingers or repeating words. This is necessary so that surgeons can remove only the desired tissue while sparing other regions, such as critical movement or language regions. Removing too much brain tissue can cause permanent damage, while removing too little tissue can leave the underlying condition untreated and require additional neurosurgery. Thus, there is a strong need to improve both methods and systems to map the brain as effectively as possible.\n",
"Brain surgery involving removing the portion of the brain that is affected by the disorder can be successful in controlling the seizures so that the patient has only a few seizures that are much less intense than pre-surgery. Surgeons may also opt to \"switch-off\" the affected side of the brain.\n",
"Surgery can be performed on mass lesions or to eliminate objects that have penetrated the brain. Mass lesions such as contusions or hematomas causing a significant mass effect (shift of intracranial structures) are considered emergencies and are removed surgically. For intracranial hematomas, the collected blood may be removed using suction or forceps or it may be floated off with water. Surgeons look for hemorrhaging blood vessels and seek to control bleeding. In penetrating brain injury, damaged tissue is surgically debrided, and craniotomy may be needed. Craniotomy, in which part of the skull is removed, may be needed to remove pieces of fractured skull or objects embedded in the brain. Decompressive craniectomy (DC) is performed routinely in the very short period following TBI during operations to treat hematomas; part of the skull is removed temporarily (primary DC). DC performed hours or days after TBI in order to control high intracranial pressures (secondary DC) has not been shown to improve outcome in some trials and may be associated with severe side-effects.\n",
"As the techniques of expert surgeons are studied and stored in special computer systems, robots might one day be able to perform surgeries with little or no human input. Carlo Pappone, an Italian surgeon, has developed a software program that uses data collected from several surgeons and thousands of operations to perform the surgery without human intervention. This could one day make expensive, complicated surgeries much more widely available, even to patients in regions which have traditionally lacked proper medical facilities.\n",
"If resected, the surgeon will remove as much of this tumor as possible, without disturbing eloquent regions of the brain (speech/motor cortex) and other critical brain structure. Thereafter, treatment may include chemotherapy and radiation therapy of doses and types ranging based upon the patient's needs. Subsequent MRI examination are often necessary to monitor the resection cavity.\n",
"He is one of the few surgeons in the United States who performs removal of complex brain tumors via endoscopic techniques, which use the natural nasal pathways instead of opening the skull. This technique provides patients with more effective surgeries and faster recovery.\n",
"Surgery may be used as a last resort in people who do not improve with other treatments. In this procedure, a surgical lesion is made in an area of the brain (the cingulate cortex). In one study, 30% of participants benefitted significantly from this procedure. Deep-brain stimulation and vagus nerve stimulation are possible surgical options that do not require destruction of brain tissue. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration approved deep-brain stimulation for the treatment of OCD under a humanitarian device exemption requiring that the procedure be performed only in a hospital with specialist qualifications to do so.\n"
] |
What about elements cause some to be solid at room temperature while others are gaseous or liquid? What are the differences on an atomic level?
|
for atoms and molecules, boiling points/melting points are by and large determined by what are known as noncovalent interactions, which are basically how two different particles of the same molecule/atom interact with each other.
atomic radius determines a lot about noncovalent forces in individual elements. generally speaking, the larger the atom, the more interactions this atom will have with another atom of the same element because of what are known as london dispersion forces.
If you think of how matter works, a gas is just the same mixture of an element with individual atoms having more freedom to move around and bump into each other. Noncovalent forces hold individual atoms together more frequently and so they have less freedom of movement. SO, you'll see that most of the larger elements will tend to be liquids/solids, while most lighter elements are gases.
Note that this is an oversimplification of more complex quantum mechanical interactions of orbitals, but it generally holds true
|
[
"Only two elements are liquid at standard conditions for temperature and pressure: mercury and bromine. Four more elements have melting points slightly above room temperature: francium, caesium, gallium and rubidium. Metal alloys that are liquid at room temperature include NaK, a sodium-potassium metal alloy, galinstan, a fusible alloy liquid, and some amalgams (alloys involving mercury).\n",
"Another commonly used basic distinction among the elements is their state of matter (phase), whether solid, liquid, or gas, at a selected standard temperature and pressure (STP). Most of the elements are solids at conventional temperatures and atmospheric pressure, while several are gases. Only bromine and mercury are liquids at 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit) and normal atmospheric pressure; caesium and gallium are solids at that temperature, but melt at 28.4 °C (83.2 °F) and 29.8 °C (85.6 °F), respectively.\n",
"Different materials usually have different densities, and density may be relevant to buoyancy, purity and packaging. Osmium and iridium are the densest known elements at standard conditions for temperature and pressure but certain chemical compounds may be denser.\n",
"Since the bulk density of a solid chemical element is strongly related to its molar mass (usually about 3 \"R\" per mole, as noted above), there exists noticeable inverse correlation between a solid's density and its specific heat capacity on a per-mass basis. This is due to a very approximate tendency of atoms of most elements to be about the same size, despite much wider variations in density and atomic weight. These two factors (constancy of atomic volume and constancy of mole-specific heat capacity) result in a good correlation between the \"volume\" of any given solid chemical element and its total heat capacity. Another way of stating this, is that the volume-specific heat capacity (volumetric heat capacity) of solid elements is roughly a constant. The molar volume of solid elements is very roughly constant, and (even more reliably) so also is the molar heat capacity for most solid substances. These two factors determine the volumetric heat capacity, which as a bulk property may be striking in consistency. For example, the element uranium is a metal which has a density almost 36 times that of the metal lithium, but uranium's volumetric heat capacity is only about 20% larger than lithium's.\n",
"Physical properties of elements and compounds that provide conclusive evidence of chemical composition include odor, color, volume, density (mass per unit volume), melting point, boiling point, heat capacity, physical form and shape at room temperature (solid, liquid or gas; cubic, trigonal crystals, etc.), hardness, porosity, index of refraction and many others. This section discusses some physical properties of materials in the solid state.\n",
"At absolute zero most elements become a solid, but not all behave as predictably as this; for instance, helium becomes a highly unusual liquid. The chemistry between substances, however, does not disappear, even near absolute zero temperatures, since separated molecules/atom can always combine to lower their total energy. Almost every molecule or element will show different properties at different temperatures; if cold enough, some functions are lost entirely. Cryogenic chemistry can lead to very different results compared with standard chemistry, and new chemical routes to substances may be available at cryogenic temperatures, such as the formation of argon fluorohydride, which is only a stable compound at or below .\n",
"This is due to a very approximate tendency of atoms of most elements to be about the same size, despite much wider variations in density and atomic weight. These two factors (constancy of atomic volume and constancy of mole-specific heat capacity) result in a good correlation between the \"volume\" of any given solid chemical element and its total heat capacity.\n"
] |
the oil industry and it's subparts
|
Drilling - exactly what you think. Like sucking out the milk from a bowl of cereal through a straw, then processing it further.
Shale - it's kind of like traditional mining, except what you're removing is a rock that's rich in oil, which, again, has to be processed.
Fracking - hydraulic fracturing - essentially using high-pressure liquid to crack open the earth and get to the goodies inside
Obviously new techniques for getting oil can create all sorts of problems with the environment (like how fracking can pollute groundwater), so people get angry about this.
Oil prices fall for a lot of reasons, but hopefully someone else can ELI5 it for you (I can't)
|
[
"The United States oil industry is made up of thousands of companies, engaged in exploration and production, transportation, refining, distribution, and marketing of oil. The industry is often informally divided into \"upstream\" (exploration and production), \"midstream\" (transportation and refining), and \"downstream\" (distribution and marketing). The industry sector involved in oil exploration and production is for all practical purposes identical with the sector exploring and producing natural gas, but oil and natural gas have different midstream and downstream sectors (\"see\": Natural gas in the United States).\n",
"Petroleum refining processes are the chemical engineering processes and other facilities used in petroleum refineries (also referred to as oil refineries) to transform crude oil into useful products such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), gasoline or petrol, kerosene, jet fuel, diesel oil and fuel oils.\n",
"The petroleum industry is involved in the global processes of exploration, extraction, refining, transporting (often with oil tankers and pipelines), and marketing petroleum products. The largest volume products of the industry are fuel oil and gasoline. Petroleum is also the raw material for many chemical products, including pharmaceuticals, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics. The industry is usually divided into three major components: upstream, midstream and downstream. Midstream operations are usually included in the downstream category.\n",
"OIL is engaged in the business of exploration, development and production of crude oil and natural gas, transportation of crude oil and production of liquid petroleum gas. The company's history spans the discovery of crude oil in the far east of India at Digboi, Assam in 1889 to its present status as a fully integrated upstream petroleum company.\n",
"The petroleum industry, also known as the oil industry or the oil patch, includes the global processes of exploration, extraction, refining, transporting (often by oil tankers and pipelines), and marketing of petroleum products. The largest volume products of the industry are fuel oil and gasoline (petrol). Petroleum (oil) is also the raw material for many chemical products, including pharmaceuticals, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, synthetic fragrances, and plastics. The extreme monetary value of oil and its products has led to it being known as \"black gold\". The industry is usually divided into three major components: upstream, midstream, and downstream. \n",
"Petroleum, otherwise known as \"crude oil\", has become the resource most used by countries all around the world including Russia, China (actually, China is mostly dependent on coal (70.5% in 2010)) and the United States of America. With all the oil wells located around the world energy security has become a main issue to ensure the safety of the petroleum that is being harvested. In the middle east oil fields become main targets for sabotage because of how heavily countries rely on oil. Many countries hold strategic petroleum reserves as a buffer against the economic and political impacts of an energy crisis. All 28 members of the International Energy Agency hold a minimum of 90 days of their oil imports, for example.\n",
"Oil is refined into fuel oil, diesel and gasoline. The refined products are primarily for transportation by conventional cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships. Popular alternatives are human-powered transport, public transport, electric vehicles, and biofuels.\n"
] |
why is sparkling water so popular in europe, but not in north america
|
The popularity of bottled water started in Europe, and it started with mineral water from specific famous springs. In a lot of cases, the water from these springs is naturally carbonated. (I say "in a lot of cases" because Evian is not carbonated, and neither are a few other French brands.)
For the most part, in Europe when you buy a bottle of water, what you're getting is the water from that spring as it naturally comes out.
Because people in Europe who buy bottled water developed a taste for this, they tend to expect bottled water to be mineral water, and for it to be naturally carbonated to at least some extent.
In America, naturally sparkling mineral water has never been very popular. A lot of people enjoy things like club soda and seltzer, but that's not the same thing at all and not nearly as ubiquitous for everyday drinking.
When bottled water became popular here, the companies selling it wanted to make it as appealing as possible to as many people as possible, so they neither looked for naturally carbonated mineral springs nor did they try to sell Americans on carbonated water. Especially because it's cheaper just to use filtered tap water and sell it to people using the magic of branding rather than any genuine claims about the source, ingredients, or flavor.
In general in the US, carbonated waters are associated with Europe. The two main brands of mineral water are San Pellegrino and Perrier, which are imported from Europe (and gained popularity/established brand positioning via affluent Americans who had tried these waters in Europe first). Even canned carbonated water brands such as La Croix are given a European brand concept, since relatively few people are dedicated seltzer drinkers.
|
[
"In the United States, the popularity of bottled water declined in the early 20th century, when the advent of water chlorination reduced public concerns about water-borne diseases in municipal water supplies. However, it remained popular in Europe, where it spread to cafes and grocery stores in the second half of the century. Perrier water had been bottled since the 19th century and widely sold throughout the British Empire; in 1977 Perrier launched in the United States. Today, bottled water is the second most popular commercial beverage in the United States, with about half the domestic consumption as soft drinks.\n",
"Other international denominations of sparkling wine include Sekt or Schaumwein (Germany), Cava (Spain), Spumante (Italy) and Espumante (Portugal). Semi-sparkling wines are sparkling wines that contain less than 2.5 atmospheres of carbon dioxide at sea level and 20 °C. Some countries such as the UK impose a higher tax on fully sparkling wines. Examples of semi-sparkling synonym terms are \"Frizzante\" in Italy, \"Vino de Aguja\" in Spain and \"Petillant\" in France. In most countries except the United States, champagne is legally defined as sparkling wine originating from a region (Champagne, Towns \"Reims, Épernay\") in France. Still wines are wines that have not gone through the sparkling wine methods and have no effervescence.\n",
"Bottled water is perceived by many as being a safer alternative to other sources of water such as tap water. Bottled water usage has increased even in countries where clean tap water is present. This may be attributed to consumers disliking the taste of tap water or its organoleptics. Another contributing factor to this shift could be the marketing success of bottled water. The success of bottled water marketing can be seen by Perrier's transformation of a bottle of water into a status symbol. However, while bottled water has grown in both consumption and sales, the industry's advertising expenses are considerably less than other beverages. According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation (BMC), in 2013, the bottled water industry spent $60.6 million on advertising. That same year, sports drinks spent $128 million, sodas spent $564 million, and beer spent $1 billion.\n",
"Fountains in France provided drinking water to the inhabitants of the ancient Roman cities of France, and to French monasteries and villages during the Middle Ages. Later, they were symbols of royal power and grandeur in the gardens of the kings of France. Today, though they no longer provide drinking water, they decorate the squares and parks of French cities and towns.\n",
"Sales records have never been publicly released, but market research suggests LaCroix holds a 30 percent market share in sparkling water sales in the United States, double that of its main competitor, Perrier.\n",
"Canada's sparkling wine producers are found in Southern Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec and Nova Scotia, where growing conditions mirror that of Champagne, Provence and Languedoc of France. In particular, Ontario's appellations are emerging as strong producers of dry sparkling wines as their cooler climate conditions are very conducive to producing excellent, flavourful and not-too-ripe grapes.\n",
"The bottling of natural sparkling water in Serra do Trigo (Furnas, S Miguel Island, Azores) started by the end of the 19th century. The business was founded and early developed by the Machado family. The natural characteristics of these waters have earned it national and international prizes. Between 1895 and 1932, in Europe and in the Americas, it earned five gold medals, one silver medal and two ‘grand prix’ medals. The bottling of these waters has been temporarily shut down between the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Its activity has restarted in 1990, with renewed ownership, capitals and investment. During June 1990, the semi-automatic filling line was inaugurated, with a capacity for 2000 bottles per hour. A second investment was concluded in November 1994: the acquisition of the Gloria Patri still water spring. In October 1995 a flavored sparkling water line was launched (Pedras do Galego). New capital was raised in 1995 transforming the company in a SA (Anonimous Society - Sociedade Anónima - in Portuguese): Promineral SA. The first complete year of activity of Promineral SA was 1996 with over 2.5 million liters put in the markets, mainly in the Azores archipelago, all brands combined. This volume corresponded, at the time, to 56% of the Azorean Archipelago market share. Several difficulties have dictated the end of the production, a process that culminated in the sale of the company to Renova SA in 1999. \n"
] |
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