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why is backwards video understandable while backwards audio is incomprehensible? | It is because in a video we can see the actions leading up and proceeding from that action, while audio, the sound is laid out in a very specific way. (English phonetics are very complicated) When a small thing is changed, it becomes nearly impossible to understand. | [
"A backward message in an audio recording is only fully apparent when the recording is played reversed. Some backward messages are produced by deliberate backmasking, while others are simply phonetic reversals resulting from random combinations of words. Backward messages may occur in various mediums, including music, video games, music videos, movies, and television shows.\n",
"Backmasked words are unintelligible noise when played forward, but when played backwards are clear speech. Listening to backmasked audio with most turntables requires disengaging the drive and rotating the album by hand in reverse (though some can play records backwards). With magnetic tape, the tape must be reversed and spliced back into the cassette. Compact discs were difficult to reverse when first introduced, but digital audio editors, which were first introduced in the late 1980s and became popular during the next decade, allow easy reversal of audio from digital sources.\n",
"Reverse echo or reverse reverb, also known as backwards echo and reverse regeneration, is a sound effect created as the result of recording an echo or delayed signal of an audio recording played backwards. The original recording is then played forwards accompanied by the recording of the echo or delayed signal which now precedes the original signal.\n",
"Fast-forwarding is the exact opposite of rewinding, in which tape, music, etc., are moved backward at a user's discretion. In either operation, because of sound distortion, volume is usually muted or severely reduced.\n",
"With an analogue system, the visual fast-forward/rewind effect was generated simply by transmitting the frames faster and/or in reverse; there was an inevitable loss of frame synchronization or 'tearing' but this was accepted as the norm. With a digital system, it is unlikely that the decoder can process the digital stream significantly faster than normal, and certainly not backwards. Therefore, only a subset of frames can be presented to the decoder. \n",
"\"Backwards\" was a studio bootleg recording by Coil. The origin of the source of \"Backwards\" is believed to have been a leak of the studio demo, in the form of a cassette. However, the entire demo was broadcast when Dutch Radio4, a radio station in Amsterdam, had Coil as in studio guests to coincide with a live performance on the date of 2001 June 1. The program was broadcast on 2001 June 18 and a four disc CD-R set of the entire broadcast, made by the radio station, was released in an unknown quantity as \"Dutch Radio4 Supplement\". Although part of the proposed album was eventually released as \"The Ape of Naples\", the material is so augmented that there are very few recognizable samples.\n",
"Reverse tape effects are special effects created by recording sound onto magnetic tape and then physically reversing the tape so that when the tape is played back, the sounds recorded on it are heard in reverse. Backmasking is a type of reverse tape effect.\n"
] |
What happened to ancient cities such as Sparta, Carthage and Troy? | All were destroyed; Troy before the Golden Age of Greece, Carthage by a victorious Rome around 150 BC, and Sparta was sacked by the Goths around 400 AD after centuries of empty autonomy as a curiosity within the Roman Empire.
Interestingly, it appears that the last few speakers of the Spartan dialect are dying out. After millennia, Tsakonian - a descendant of Doric Greek - is restricted to [only a few hundred speakers](_URL_0_).
The cultures of Troy and Carthage, on the other hand, have basically been entirely wiped out by history. | [
"None of the Mycenaean palaces of the Late Bronze Age survived (with the possible exception of the Cyclopean fortifications on the Acropolis of Athens), with destruction being heaviest at palaces and fortified sites. Thebes was one of the earliest examples of this having its palace sacked repeatedly between 1300 and 1200 BC eventually being completely destroyed by fire. The extent of this destruction is highlighted by Robert Drews who reasons that the destruction was such that Thebes did not resume a significant position in Greece until at least the late 12th century. Many other sites offer less conclusive causes for example it is entirely unclear what happened at Athens, although it is clear that the settlement saw a significant decline during the Bronze Age Collapse. While there is no evidence of any significant destruction at this site, lacking the remnants of a destroyed palace or central structure, the change in locations of living quarters and burial sites demonstrates a significant recession clearly. Furthermore an increase in fortification at this site is suggestive of a much fear of the decline in Athens to the extent that Vincent Desborough makes an assertion that this is evidence of later migrations away from the city in reaction to its initial decline, although a significant population did remain. It is possible though that this emigration from Athens was not a violent affair and other causes have been suggested. Nancy Demand posits that environmental changes could well have played a significant role in the collapse of Athens. In particular Demand notes in the presence of \"enclosed and protected means of access to water sources at Athens\" as evidence of persistent droughts in the region that could have resulted in a fragile reliance on imports.\n",
"Troy was a city located in northwest Anatolia in what is now Turkey. It is best known for being the focus of the Trojan War described in the Greek Epic Cycle and especially in the \"Iliad\", one of the two epic poems attributed to Homer. Repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt, the city slowly declined and was abandoned in the Byzantine era. Buried by time, the city was consigned to the realm of legend until the location was first excavated in the 1860s.\n",
"\"I have proved that in a remote antiquity there was in the plain of Troy a large city, destroyed of old by a fearful catastrophe, which had on the hill of Hisarlık only its Acropolis with its temples and a few other large edifices, southerly, and westerly direction on the site of the later Ilium; and that, consequently, this city answers perfectly to the Homeric description of the sacred site of Ilios.\"\n",
"The first city on the site was founded in the 3rd millennium BC. During the Bronze Age, the site seems to have been a flourishing mercantile city, since its location allowed for complete control of the Dardanelles, through which every merchant ship from the Aegean Sea heading for the Black Sea had to pass. Cities to the east of Troy were destroyed, and although Troy was not burned, the next period shows a change of culture indicating a new people had taken over Troy. The first phase of the city is characterized by a smaller citadel, around 300 ft in diameter, with 20 rectangular houses surrounded by massive walls, towers, and gateways. Troy II doubled in size and had a lower town and the upper citadel, with the walls protecting the upper acropolis which housed the megaron-style palace for the king. The second phase was destroyed by a large fire, but the Trojans rebuilt, creating a fortified citadel larger than Troy II, but which had smaller and more condensed houses, suggesting an economic decline. This trend of making a larger circuit, or extent of the walls, continued with each rebuild, for Troy III, IV, and V. Therefore, even in the face of economic troubles, the walls remained as elaborate as before, indicating their focus on defense and protection.\n",
"Troy VIIa, which has been dated to the mid-to-late-13th century BC, is the most often cited candidate for the Troy of Homer. Troy VIIa appears to have been destroyed by war. The evidence of fire and slaughter around 1184 BC, which brought Troy VIIa to a close, led to this phase being identified with the city besieged by the Greeks during the Trojan War. This was immortalized in the \"Iliad\" written by Homer.\n",
"The city of Akragas, destroyed in 405 BC, would again be populated by Greeks, although it would not reach the level of wealth and power it had previously enjoyed. It would grow powerful enough to oppose both Carthage and Syracuse in the struggle these cities would engage in for the next hundred years.\n",
"During the winter of 379/378 BC, a group of Theban exiles were able to sneak into the city and, despite the 1500-strong Spartan garrison, succeed in liberating Thebes. During the next few years, Sparta mounted four expeditions against Thebes, which completely failed to bring Thebes to heel. In 375 BC, Sparta suffered a symbolically significant defeat at the hands of Thebes in the Battle of Tegyra. Finally, the Greek city-states attempted a peace on the mainland by sending diplomats to meet with Agesilaus in Sparta. Epaminondas, the Theban diplomat, angered Agesilaus by arguing for the freedom of the non-Spartans of Laconia. Agesilaus then struck the Thebans out of the treaty. The ensuing Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC marked the end of Spartan hegemony. Agesilaus himself did not fight at Leuctra so as not to appear too belligerent.\n"
] |
what is going on in missouri and at yale with super liberal student protests? | Yeah! So the faculty sent out an email telling the student body not to be super racist and wear offensive costumes on halloween. Then a professor responded to that email saying that it wasn't the school's responsibility to police students like that and they should make their own judgement and face the social consequences of wearing offensive costumes. The students took this response offensively as they thought freedom of speech should be regulated by the school. The professor did not agree. Basically the professor was trying to make a point about freedom of speech and it back-fired on him. | [
"In 2015, a series of protests at the University of Missouri related to race, workplace benefits, and leadership resulted in the resignations of the president of the University of Missouri System and the chancellor of the flagship Columbia campus. The moves came after a series of events that included a hunger strike by a student and a boycott by the football team. The movement was primarily led by a student group named Concerned Student 1950. The movement and protests were documented in two films, one made by MU student journalists and the other, \"2 Fists Up\", by Spike Lee. While it is alleged that bad publicity from the protests has led to dropping enrollment and cutbacks, others have cited budget cuts issued from the state legislature.\n",
"The University of Missouri events inspired other protests or indications of solidarity at nearly eighty other campuses in the United States. Among these were Ithaca College, Yale University, Smith College, Claremont McKenna College, Amherst College, Emporia State University and Brandeis University.\n",
"In November 2015, the college's dean of students resigned after students protested what they called a lack of institutional resources for marginalized students; the dean had implied in an email that minority students didn't fit the \"CMC mold\" and her response to an incident of allegedly culturally appropriative Halloween costumes was seen as lacking. These protests closely followed and were associated with the 2015 University of Missouri protests.\n",
"Rather than the apocalyptic student riot that consumed Kent State University on May 4, 1970, Yale, under the leadership of Kingman Brewster on behalf of the faculty and Kurt Schmoke on behalf of the undergraduates, embraced and then managed the spirit of the protest. The protest lasted two days, May 1 and 2.\n",
"BULLET::::- Student protests began at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and were marked by \"the first building takeover on a college campus\", signalling a new era of militant student activism on American college campuses. For five days, students staged a sit-in of the administration building, temporarily shutting down the historically-black university. The impetus for the demonstration was the punishment of 37 students who had disrupted the university's Charter Day celebration on March 1. Additional causes that were protested the school's ROTC program and military recruitment; the disproportionate number of African-Americans being sent into combat in the Vietnam War; and the lack of curriculum of African-American studies.\n",
"In the fall of 2015 there were a number of racially charged incidents at the University of Missouri campus. Some students held protests, and some called for the resignation of university system president Tim Wolfe, who they said had not provided a sufficient response to the incidents. On November 7 some members of the Missouri Tigers football team said that they would boycott all football-related activities until Wolfe resigned. Coach Pinkel stated that he supported the players. On November 9 Wolfe resigned as president.\n",
"The students protests had begun in April 1968 in response to plans by Columbia to construct a gym in Morningside Park that was opposed by Harlem residents and by disclosures of university ties to the Institute for Defense Analyses, a weapons research think-tank connected with the United States Department of Defense. Several buildings on the campus were taken over, with windows damaged and files destroyed by student protesters. Police cleared out and arrested on charges of criminal trespassing a group of 700 students, but the protests persisted for weeks.\n"
] |
why does driving the same speed feel much faster when it's dark than when it's light | Your field of vision is much shorter at night (the length of your headlights), so things appear to move by you quickly. During the day you see things further down the horizon. | [
"BULLET::::- The loss of night vision because of the accommodation reflex of drivers' eyes is the greatest danger. As drivers emerge from an unlighted area into a pool of light from a street light their pupils quickly constrict to adjust to the brighter light, but as they leave the pool of light the dilation of their pupils to adjust to the dimmer light is much slower, so they are driving with impaired vision. As a person gets older the eye's recovery speed gets slower, so driving time and distance under impaired vision increases.\n",
"However, if the same process is considered in a frame that moves with velocity to the left, the pulse moving to the left is redshifted, while the pulse moving to the right is blue shifted. The blue light carries more momentum than the red light, so that the momentum of the light in the moving frame is not balanced: the light is carrying some net momentum to the right.\n",
"BULLET::::- When you think it is clear, look away, to the road that you are entering. There is an optical illusion that, after a time, presents an oncoming vehicle as further away and travelling slower. Looking away breaks this illusion.\n",
"These roads, with sharp turns and low visibility, barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other, have the same speed limit as many sections of dual carriageways, with physical segregation of and multiple lanes for each direction, only very light turns and excellent visibility.\n",
"Another field that uses this is the automotive industry. LEDs in the dashboard and instrument lighting are designed for use in mesopic luminance. In studies, it has been found that red LEDs appear brighter than green LEDs, which means that a driver would be able to see red light more intense thus more alerting the green lights when driving at night.\n",
"Night driving is difficult and dangerous due to the blinding glare of headlights from oncoming traffic. Headlamps that satisfactorily illuminate the road ahead without causing glare have long been sought. The first solutions involved resistance-type dimming circuits, which decreased the intensity of the headlamps. This yielded to tilting reflectors, and later to dual-filament bulbs with a high and a low beam.\n",
"In traffic, at a red light, many motorists will start to inch up in anticipation of the light turning green (watching the signal of the perpendicular traffic). This will give them a \"head start\" on other motorists on the road.\n"
] |
If I put a flashlight in space, would it propel itself forward by "shooting out" light? | Yes, very slowly.
Light has momentum, even though it is massless, so if you shoot a beam of light in one direction, conservation of momentum will push you in the opposite direction.
A reasonably powerful LED flashlight will use about 1-3 Watt, lets say 3 W. The efficiency of a LED is somewhere between 25% and 40%, so for sake of ease of computation lets make that 33% and we get a net amount of light output of 1 W.
The ratio between the momentum and energy of light is 299,792,458 (Which is also the speed of light). So in 1 second, the flashlight produces 1 J worth of light, which is equal to 0.33 * 10^-8 kg m/s. If the flashlight is not too heavy, say 100 gram or 0.1 kg, that means that 1 second of light would propel the flashlight to a velocity of 10^-7 m/s. This assumes that all light is directed in straight line. The more cone-shaped the bundle of light is, the lower the momentum transfer is.
Leaving the light on for one day would propel the flashlight to about 0.009 m/s or almost 1 cm per second. Unfortunately, operating a 3 W LED for a day uses about 260 kJ of energy. Regular AA batteries have somewhere around 10 kJ of energy (depending on the type). And at a weight of 20-30 grams per battery, you can't carry put more than 2-3 in the device without violating our original assumption of a 100 gram device. | [
"In 1913, Georges Sagnac showed that if a beam of light is split and sent in two opposite directions around a closed path on a revolving platform with mirrors on its perimeter, and then the beams are recombined, they will exhibit interference effects. From this result Sagnac concluded that light propagates at a speed independent of the speed of the source. The motion of the earth through space had no apparent effect on the speed of the light beam, no matter how the platform was turned. The effect had been observed earlier (by Harress in 1911), but Sagnac was the first to correctly identify the cause.\n",
"It may at first seem counterintuitive or \"backward\" to send rays \"away\" from the camera, rather than \"into\" it (as actual light does in reality), but doing so is many orders of magnitude more efficient. Since the overwhelming majority of light rays from a given light source do not make it directly into the viewer's eye, a \"forward\" simulation could potentially waste a tremendous amount of computation on light paths that are never recorded.\n",
"Accordingly, the \"flashlight analogy\" is used to explain the inseparability of action and knowledge present in this theory. One should imagine he is in a dark field at night with only a flashlight. He can vaguely pick out objects around him, but can't really tell what they are. Is that lump in the distance a bush or a dangerous animal? When he turns on his flashlight, however, he creates a circle of light that allows him to see clearly and act with relative clarity. The act of turning on the flashlight effectively created a new environment that allowed him to interpret the world around him. There is still only a single circle of light, though, and what remains outside that circle is still just as mysterious, unless the flashlight is redirected. With organizational information theory, the flashlight is mental. The environment is located in the mind of the actor and is imposed on him by his experiences, which makes them more meaningful.\n",
"People working in hazardous areas with significant concentrations of flammable gases or dusts, such as mines, engine rooms of ships, chemical plants or grain elevators, use \"non-incendive\", \"intrinsically safe\" or \"explosion proof\" flashlights constructed so that any spark in the flashlight is not likely to set off an explosion outside the light. The flashlight may require approval by an authority for the particular service and particular gases or dusts expected. The external temperature rise of the flashlight must not exceed the autoignition point of the gas, so substitution of more powerful lamps or batteries may void the approval.\n",
"A dyno torch, dynamo torch, or squeeze flashlight is a flashlight or pocket torch which stores energy in a flywheel. The user repeatedly squeezes a handle to spin a flywheel inside the flashlight, attached to a small dynamo, supplying electric current to an incandescent bulb or light-emitting diode. The flashlight must be pumped continuously during use, with the flywheel turning the generator between squeezes to keep the light going continuously. Because electrical power is produced only when the handle is squeezed, a switch is not needed. Dyno torches were issued to soldiers during World War II, and were popular in Europe during the war because the electrical power supply to homes was not very reliable. A version using a pull-cord was used in World War I.\n",
"BULLET::::- Flash: A white LED light, not comparable to a real flashlight but usable for adding more light on short distance. Controlled by the \"0\" key in photo mode, the LED can also be manually turned on before taking a picture. This way it could also be used as a very short-lived emergency pocket lamp (if the battery is full)\n",
"Almost any item can be booby-trapped in some way. For example, booby trapping a flashlight is a classic tactic: a flashlight already contains most of the required components. First of all, the flashlight acts as bait, tempting the victim to pick it up. More importantly, it is easy to conceal a detonator, some explosives, and batteries inside the flashlight casing. A simple electrical circuit is connected to the on/off switch. When the victim attempts to turn the flashlight on to see if it works, the resulting explosion blows their hand or arm off and possibly blinds them.\n"
] |
how debt/credit card transactions work | It goes to a service called "Fedwire". Everyone has different banks, so the backbone is a service provided by the Fed that "clears" transactions.
You swipe your card and Target's bank infrastructure, say its Chase, needs your money from BoA. The data is sent about transaction to Fedwire over internet/phone lines when you swipe on the scanner since they need BoA to release your money. This is handled digitally through Fedwire, which is why it is known as an "Automated Clearing House". It simply allows the banks to interact digitally.
The idea of having this central structure, rather than each bank communicating each individual transaction to each other digitally is known as clearing. There are enormous amounts that cancel out. If Chase needs $150 from a BoA account, but other transactions are happening (other people swiping) that result in BoA needing $100 from Chase, BoA will only actually send $50 to Chase, the net amount. It is easier and cheaper to transfer the net amount rather than the total amounts twice (one transaction vs two).
EDIT: this is for debit | [
"In many countries, when a customer submits an application for credit from a bank, credit card company, or a store, their information is forwarded to a credit bureau. The credit bureau matches the name, address and other identifying information on the credit applicant with information retained by the bureau in its files. The gathered records are then used by lenders to determine an individual's credit worthiness; that is, determining an individual's ability and track record of repaying a debt. The willingness to repay a debt is indicated by how timely past payments have been made to other lenders. Lenders like to see consumer debt obligations paid regularly and on time, and therefore focus particularly on missed payments and may not, for example, consider an overpayment as an offset for a missed payment.\n",
"A credit card register is a transaction register used to ensure the increasing balance owed from using a credit card is enough below the credit limit to deal with authorization holds and payments not yet received by the bank and to easily look up past transactions for reconciliation and budgeting.\n",
"Bank accounts may have a positive, or \"credit\" balance, where the financial institution owes money to the customer; or a negative, or \"debit\" balance, where the customer owes the financial institution money.\n",
"Debt results when a client of a credit card company purchases an item or service through the card system. Debt accumulates and increases via interest and penalties when the consumer does not pay the company for the money he or she has spent.\n",
"Card transaction data is financial data generally collected through the transfer of funds between a card holder's account and a business's account. It consists of the use of either a debit card or a credit card to generate data on the transfer for the purchase of goods or services. Transaction data describes an action composed of events in which master data participates. Transaction focuses on the price, discount and method of payment interaction between the customer and the organization. They are based on volatility as each transaction data changes every time a purchase is made, one time it could be $10, the next $55. Since debit and credit cards are commonly used to pay for goods and services, they represent a strong percentage of the consumption expenditure in the country.\n",
"Credit card terms specify the order in which payments are applied to balance(s). In nearly all cases payments are applied to the lowest-rate balances first and the highest-rate last. In countries such as Australia and Germany legislation requires the card company to instead first apply payments to the highest-rate balances. The banks invariably set the order of payment to ensure any balance at a reduced or fixed rate will be paid off sooner than new purchases or cash advances at a higher rate. By avoiding making purchases or taking cash advances, the borrower can ensure that interest accrued every month is at the low beneficial rate of the original balance transfer.\n",
"The credit card may simply serve as a form of revolving credit, or it may become a complicated financial instrument with multiple balance segments each at a different interest rate, possibly with a single umbrella credit limit, or with separate credit limits applicable to the various balance segments. Usually this compartmentalization is the result of special incentive offers from the issuing bank, to encourage balance transfers from cards of other issuers. In the event that several interest rates apply to various balance segments, payment allocation is generally at the discretion of the issuing bank, and payments will therefore usually be allocated towards the lowest rate balances until paid in full before any money is paid towards higher rate balances. Interest rates can vary considerably from card to card, and the interest rate on a particular card may jump dramatically if the card user is late with a payment on that card \"or any other credit instrument\", or even if the issuing bank decides to raise its revenue.\n"
] |
how does a smartphone compass app works if a magnet (in the speakers) are so close to them? | Because the magnets in the speakers don't need to be very strong and as such aren't going to impact the readings very much. For any impact they do have you can also calibrate the magnetic sensor to ignore it from the speakers as that will be constant and always on a single dimension where most smartphone compasses measure the magnetic field in all 3 spacial dimensions (meaning you will get an X, Y, and Z value) | [
"A magnetometer is built-in since the iPhone 3GS, which is used to measure the strength and direction of the magnetic field in the vicinity of the device. Sometimes certain devices or radio signals can interfere with the magnetometer requiring users to either move away from the interference or re-calibrate by moving the device in a figure-eight motion. Since the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone also features a Compass app, which was unique at time of release, showing a compass that points in the direction of the magnetic field.\n",
"A magnetometer is also built-in the iPhone 3GS, which is used to measure the strength and/or direction of the magnetic field in the vicinity of the device. Sometimes certain devices or radio signals can interfere with the magnetometer requiring users to either move away from the interference or re-calibrate by moving the device in a figure 8 motion. The iPhone 3GS also features a Compass app which was unique at time of release, showing a compass that points in the direction of the magnetic field.\n",
"Detecting the device's orientation (often referred to as the compass direction in order to disambiguate it from smartphone vertical orientation) can be achieved either by detecting landmarks inside images taken in real time, or by using trilateration with beacons. There also exist technologies for detecting magnetometric information inside buildings or locations with steel structures or in iron ore mines.\n",
"In addition, since there is no guarantee given by individual manufacturers, it should not be assumed that the magnetometer axes, and the accelerometer axes, have been accurately aligned to the orientation of the iPhone. Professional digital compass software therefore requires a calibration procedure. As noted above, this can be attempted by comparing data from traditional compasses and a digital compass, for example by slowly rotating both compasses together on a fixed horizontal or inclined surface.\n",
"The magnetic compass is the most familiar compass type. It functions as a pointer to \"magnetic north\", the local magnetic meridian, because the magnetized needle at its heart aligns itself with the horizontal component of the Earth's magnetic field. The magnetic field exerts a torque on the needle, pulling the North end or \"pole\" of the needle approximately toward the Earth's North magnetic pole, and pulling the other toward the Earth's South magnetic pole. The needle is mounted on a low-friction pivot point, in better compasses a jewel bearing, so it can turn easily. When the compass is held level, the needle turns until, after a few seconds to allow oscillations to die out, it settles into its equilibrium orientation.\n",
"Many smartphones contain miniaturized microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) magnetometers which are used to detect magnetic field strength and are used as compasses. The iPhone 3GS has a magnetometer, a magnetoresistive permalloy sensor, the AN-203 produced by Honeywell. In 2009, the price of three-axis magnetometers dipped below US$1 per device and dropped rapidly. The use of a three-axis device means that it is not sensitive to the way it is held in orientation or elevation. Hall effect devices are also popular.\n",
"With the advent of the smartphone, geological compass programs based on the 3-axis teslameter and the 3-axis accelerometer have also begun to appear. These compass programs use vector algebra to compute plane and lineation orientations from the accelerometer and magnetometer data, and permit rapid collection of many measurements. However, some problems are potentially present. Measurements made by smartphone geological compasses can potentially be susceptible to noise, mainly due to vibration or rapid hand movement. Users of a smartphone compass should carefully calibrate their devices and run several tests against traditional magnetic compasses in order to understand the limitations of their chosen program.\n"
] |
why is it that when we get hit or injured pretty bad we faint? what is it that makes our brain kinda shut down in that moment? | One reason is that basically the brain is floating in water inside our skulls and if the the blow is strong enough to push the brain with enough momentum to bounce on part of the skull to another and the brain gets short circuited.
Another reason is that a certain amount of pain and/stress is too much to handle and our hearts are beating too fast because its in fight/flight mode and our brain shuts off to prevent us from dying via heart attack. | [
"Fainting can be caused by excessive parasympathetic and vagal activity that slows the heart and decreases perfusion of the brain. The sympathetic irritant effect is exploited to counteract these vagal parasympathetic effects and thereby reverse the faint.\n",
"It can cause dizziness, lightheadedness, headache, blurred or dimmed vision and fainting, because the brain does not get sufficient blood supply. This, in turn, is caused by gravity, pulling the blood into the lower part of the body.\n",
"These are relatively infrequent causes of fainting. The most common cause in this category is fainting associated with an acute myocardial infarction or ischemic event. The faint in this case is primarily caused by an abnormal nervous system reaction similar to the reflex faints. In general, faints caused by structural disease of the heart or blood vessels are particularly important to recognize, as they are warning of potentially life-threatening conditions. Among other conditions prone to trigger syncope (by either hemodynamic compromise or by a neural reflex mechanism, or both), some of the most important are hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, acute aortic dissection, pericardial tamponade, pulmonary embolism, aortic stenosis, and pulmonary hypertension.\n",
"Moreover, this hypocapnia and release of adrenaline during a panic attack cause vasoconstriction resulting in slightly less blood flow to the head which causes dizziness and lightheadedness. A panic attack can cause blood sugar to be drawn away from the brain and toward the major muscles. Neuroimaging suggests heightened activity in the amygdala, thalamus, hypothalamus, and brainstem regions including the periaqueductal gray, parabrachial nucleus, and Locus coeruleus. In particular, the amygdala has been suggested to have a critical role. The combination of high arousal in the amygdala and brainstem along with decreased blood flow and blood sugar in the brain can lead to dramatically decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex region of the brain. There is evidence that having an anxiety disorder increases the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Those affected also have a reduction in heart rate variability.\n",
"People with panic attacks often report a fear of dying or heart attack, flashing vision, faintness or nausea, numbness throughout the body, heavy breathing and hyperventilation, or loss of body control. Some people also suffer from tunnel vision, mostly due to blood flow leaving the head to more critical parts of the body in defense. These feelings may provoke a strong urge to escape or flee the place where the attack began (a consequence of the \"fight-or-flight response\", in which the hormone causing this response is released in significant amounts). This response floods the body with hormones, particularly epinephrine (adrenaline), which aid it in defending against harm.\n",
"The symptoms of a panic attack may cause the person to feel that their body is failing. The symptoms can be understood as follows. First, there is frequently the sudden onset of fear with little provoking stimulus. This leads to a release of adrenaline (epinephrine) which brings about the fight-or-flight response when the body prepares for strenuous physical activity. This leads to an increased heart rate (tachycardia), rapid breathing (hyperventilation) which may be perceived as shortness of breath (dyspnea), and sweating. Because strenuous activity rarely ensues, the hyperventilation leads to a drop in carbon dioxide levels in the lungs and then in the blood. This leads to shifts in blood pH (respiratory alkalosis or hypocapnia), causing compensatory metabolic acidosis activating chemosensing mechanisms which translate this pH shift into autonomic and respiratory responses. The person him/herself may overlook the hyperventilation, having become preoccupied with the associated somatic symptoms.\n",
"Atonic seizures can occur while standing, walking, or sitting, and are often noticeable by a head drop (relaxing of the neck muscles). Fall injuries may result in impact to the face or head. As with common epileptic occurrences, no first aid is needed post-seizure, except in the instances where falling injuries have occurred. In some cases, a person may become temporarily paralyzed in part of his or her body. This usually does not last longer than 3 minutes.\n"
] |
How tall was Jesus Christ? |
There is no literary or other ancient evidence that directly bears on this question, so one is forced to speculate based on average heights of people in antiquity.
The only article I've ever seen address this is a 2002 issue of Popular Mechanics, which suggests that based on skeletal remains a 1st century Semitic male would be 5'1". You can read [the article here](_URL_0_). | [
"\"Jesus de Greatest\" is tall and weighs 40 tons. It stands barefoot with both arms outstretched, and was carved out of white marble. It was unveiled on January 1, 2016. Mass was held at St. Aloysius Catholic Church, Abajah with the presiding of the bishop of Orlu Catholic Diocese, Ret. Rev. Augustine Ukwuoma with hundreds of Roman Catholic priests and worshipers, and the unveiling of the statue was held on New Year's Day. \n",
"Jesus de Greatest is a statue of Jesus Christ located in Abajah village in Imo State, Nigeria. It is considered \"Africa’s largest statue of Jesus\", and is the fifth tallest statue in the African continent. The 160 ft African Renaissance Monument is the tallest statue in Africa, the 66 ft Great Sphinx of Giza is second, the 30 ft Statue of Ramesses II is third, and the 28 ft Nelson Mandela statue is fourth. When it comes to \"the largest statue of Jesus in the world\", tall Christ the King in Świebodzin, Poland, takes the credit.\n",
"As quoted by Eisler, both Hierosolymitanus and John of Damascus claim that \"the Jew Josephus\" described Jesus as having had connate eyebrows with goodly eyes and being long-faced, crooked and well-grown. In a letter of certain bishops to the Emperor Theophilus, Jesus's height is described as three cubits (four feet six), which was also the opinion of Ephrem Syrus (320–379 AD), \"God took human form and appeared in the form of three human ells (cubits); he came down to us small of stature.\" Theodore of Mopsuestia likewise claimed that the appearance of Christ was smaller than that of the children of Jacob (Israel). In the apocryphal Lentulus letter Jesus is described as having had a reddish complexion, matching Muslim traditions in this respect. Jesus's prediction that he would be taunted \"Physician, heal yourself\" may suggest that Jesus was indeed physically deformed ('crooked' or hunch-backed) as claimed in the early Christian texts listed above. In fact, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Ambrose actually considered lack of physical attractiveness in Jesus as fulfilling the messianic prophecy Suffering Servant narrative of Isaiah 53.\n",
"This is the third tallest statue of Jesus in Europe, after \"Christ the King\" in Świebodzin, Poland and \"Cristo-Rei\" (\"Christ the King\") in Lisbon, and the fifth in the world after \"Cristo de la Concordia\" and \"Christ the Redeemer\", both in South America. It is 21,20 metres high, the head is 3 metres in height and the arm-span is 19 metres from finger tip to finger tip.\n",
"His story finds mention in various Hindu texts, including the \"Matsya Purāṇa\", the \"Kūrma Purāṇa\", the \"Liṅga Purāṇa\" and the \"Śiva Purāṇa\". He is believed to have one thousand heads, and one thousand arms, thus having two thousand eyes, arms, and feet. In another version, he has two thousand arms and two thousand legs.\n",
"Most modern Bibles translate to identify Jesus as a better Joshua, as Joshua led Israel into the rest of Canaan, but Jesus leads the people of God into \"God's rest\". Among the early Church Fathers, Joshua is considered a type of Jesus Christ.\n",
"Timothy I, (; \"\", c. 740 – 9 January 823, traditional date of birth 727/728) Patriarch of the Church of the East from 780 to 823, is widely considered to be one of the most impressive patriarchs in the long history of the Church of the East as well as a Father of the Church.\n"
] |
if modern computers are so extremely powerful, how can it take more than 30 hours to render one frame of cg in a movie? | Because 30 hours is the sweet spot. Frames took 30 hours to render 20 years ago, despite the lower computing power available at the time.
If it took more time it would be very annoying to work with, and if it took less time, we could do more in CG^[1], run a more accurate simulation, or build more complex shots without it becoming unworkable
Your question might be why does it takes 30 hours to render a frame when video games can do it in a fraction of a second. The answer is that to get results good enough to be composited seamlessly with reality requires very very precise (and thus compute intensive) light and physic simulations. Video games also do make many concessions to run fast (typically there is a hard limit to the number of lights or objects you can get on screen, and if a scene needs more it simply get replaced by a scene that fit these criteria).
**************************
[1] Doing stuff in CG can often be cheaper, and more flexible than doing stuff practically. | [
"The bulk of computer processing power for rendering the film was donated by the BSU Xseed, a 2.1 TFLOPS Apple Xserve G5-based supercomputing cluster at Bowie State University. It reportedly took 125 days to render, consuming up to 2.8GB of memory for each frame.\n",
"In July 2011, Lindelof said that the film would rely upon practical effects, and would use CGI generally for on-set pre-visualization of external space visuals. Scott said that \"you can pretty much do anything you want\" with digital technology, and, \"Doug Trumbull once said to me 'If you can do it live, do it live.' That was 29 years ago. Even though we have remarkable digital capabilities I still say do it live. It's cheaper.\" Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski convinced Scott that it would be possible to film in 3D with the same ease and efficiency of 2D filming. 3D company 3ality Technica provided some of the rigs and equipment to facilitate 3D filming, and trained the film's crew in their proper operation. According to Scott, the decision to film in 3D added $10 million to the film's budget. Since 3D films need high lighting levels on set, the hallmark dark and shadowy atmosphere of the \"Alien\" films was added in post-production using color grading processes, and the 3D equipment was based on post-\"Avatar\" technology.\n",
"Digital Productions created 27 minutes of animation, in 300 scenes, for the film \"The Last Starfighter\". Each frame of the animation contained an average of 250,000 polygons, and had a resolution of 3000 x 5000 36-bit pixels; they claimed that the imagery was 50 times more complex than the graphics in previous feature films. They estimated that using computer animation required only half the time, and one half to one third the cost, that would have been required if then-traditional methods had been used.\n",
"The film had a small budget of £47,000 (US$72,000) and was shot over two days in the summer of 2009 at Halliford Studios in London. The film was shot on a Phantom HD digital camera, with speeds of up to 1000 frames per second, and no CGI was used in the making of the film. It has a running time of 1 minute 29 seconds.\n",
"The computer graphics for the film were rendered by Digital Productions on a Cray X-MP supercomputer. The company created 27 minutes of effects for the film. This was considered an enormous amount of computer generated imagery at the time. For the 300 scenes containing computer graphics in the film, each frame of the animation contained an average of 250,000 polygons, and had a resolution of 3000 × 5000 36-bit pixels. Digital Productions estimated that using computer animation required only half the time, and one half to one third the cost of traditional special effects. The result was a cost of $14 million for a film that made about $21 million at the box office.\n",
" For the purposes of making the above illustration readable a projection speed of 10 frames per second (frame/s) has been selected, in fact film is usually projected at 24 frame/s making the equivalent slow overcranking rare, but available on professional equipment.\n",
"Animations for non-interactive media, such as feature films and video, are rendered much more slowly. Non-real time rendering enables the leveraging of limited processing power in order to obtain higher image quality. Rendering times for individual frames may vary from a few seconds to several days for complex scenes. Rendered frames are stored on a hard disk then can be transferred to other media such as motion picture film or optical disk. These frames are then displayed sequentially at high frame rates, typically 24, 25, or 30 frames per second, to achieve the illusion of movement.\n"
] |
Spanish Gold Inflation. | What essentially happened was that the Spanish became importers as opposed to exporters. Spain was so wealthy, that they simply paid for all of the goods they required from other European nations including textiles, weapons, ships even. Spain would simply buy it since they had enough wealth to outsource any internal development. This eventually led to their downfall as well, because at the turn of the industrial revolution Spain was so far behind the rest of Europe in terms of industry that they lost a lot of their stature and prestige.
I wouldn't say it became worthless, because they were using it to purchase all of their needs and the rest of Europe was more than happy to provide those services for Spain, but it eventually did lead to stunting the advancement of the nation itself. However, I am not an export in economics, so it may have had a larger economic affect than I am aware of | [
"Generally it is thought that this high inflation was caused by the large influx of gold and silver from the Spanish treasure fleet from the New World, including Mexico, Peru, and the rest of the Spanish Empire.\n",
"The withdrawal of the Bank of Spain's gold reserves to Moscow has been pointed out to be one of the main causes of the Spanish monetary crisis of 1937. While the gold became in practice an excellent source of funding, its usage dealt a hard blow against the coined and printed currency of the country. Nationalist efforts to expose the exportation of the gold put the government's financial credibility in question, and caused general mistrust among the public. A decree issued by the Ministry of Finance on October 3, 1936, obliging Spaniards to yield all the gold they possessed, caused widespread alarm. Even though the government denied in January 1937 that it had deposited the gold reserves abroad (\"vide supra\"), it was forced to acknowledge that it had made various payments with such gold.\n",
"The shortage of precious metals during the late 15th and early 16th centuries eased in the second half of the 16th century. The Spanish mined American gold and silver at minimal cost and flooded the European market with an abundance of specie. This influx caused a relative decrease in the value of these metals in comparison with agricultural and craft products. Furthermore, depopulation – specifically in southern Spain – resulted in a high rate of inflation. The failure of the Spanish to control the influx of gold and the price fluctuations of gold and silver from the American mines, combined with war expenditures, led to three bankruptcies of the Spanish monarchy by the end of the 16th century.\n",
"The Spanish gold onza (or 8-escudo coin) was of identical weight to the Spanish dollar but was officially valued at 16 silver pesos, thus putting the peso on a bimetallic standard with a gold/silver ratio of 16. Its divergence with the value of gold in international trade featured prominently in the continued monetary crises of the 19th century. In the 1850's the low price of gold in the international markets triggered the outflow of silver coins. In 1875 the adoption of the gold standard in Europe triggered a rise in the international price of gold and the replacement of gold coins with silver pesos. While the Philippines stayed officially bimetallic until 1898 with the peso worth either one silver Mexican peso (weighing 27.07 grams 0.903 fine, or 0.786 troy ounce XAG) or 1/16th the gold onza (weighing 1.6915 gram 0.875 fine, or 0.0476 troy ounce XAU), in reality the gold peso has increased in value to approx. two silver pesos.\n",
"Spain legally amassed approximately 180 tons of gold and 8200 tons of silver through its endeavors in the New World, and another unknown amount through smuggling, spending this money to finance wars and the arts. The spent silver, suddenly being spread throughout a previously cash starved Europe, caused widespread inflation. The inflation was worsened by a growing population but a static production level, low employee salaries and a rising cost of living. This problem, combined with underpopulation (caused by the Black Death), affected the system of agriculture. The landholding aristocracy suffered under the inflation, since they depended on paying small, fixed wages to peasant tenants that were becoming able to demand higher wages. The aristocracy made failed attempts to counteract this situation by creating short-term leases of their lands to allow periodic revaluation of rent. The manorial system (manor system of lord and peasant tenant) eventually vanished, and the landholding aristocrats were forced to sell pieces of their land in order to maintain their style of living. Such sales attracted the rich bourgeois (from the French word referring to this dominant class, emerging with commerce), who wanted to buy land and thereby increase their social status. Former \"common lands\" were fenced by the landed bourgeois, a process known as \"enclosure\" which increased the efficiency of raising livestock (mainly sheep's wool for the textile industry). This \"enclosure\" forced the peasants out of rural areas and into the cities, resulting in urbanization and eventually the industrial revolution.\n",
"The flow of precious metals also made many traders wealthy, both in Spain and abroad. The increase in gold and silver on the Iberian market sometimes caused high inflation in the 17th century, affecting the Spanish economy. As a consequence, the Crown was forced to delay the payment of some major debts, which had negative consequences for its lenders, mostly foreign bankers. By 1690 some of these lenders could no longer offer financial support to the Crown. The Spanish monopoly over its West and East Indies colonies lasted for over two centuries.\n",
"The Spanish gold onza (or 8-escudo coin) was of identical weight to the Spanish dollar but was officially valued at 16 silver pesos, thus putting the peso on a bimetallic standard with a gold/silver ratio of 16. Its divergence with the value of gold in international trade featured prominently in the continued monetary crises of the 19th century.\n"
] |
why are teslas super fast off the line and yet at a certain point a non-electric super car will catch up to it? | It's pretty simple, they have instant full torque at any RPM (where most automatic cars are at ~4000RPM or 1500RPM-3000RPM if turbo boosted), however, they are not powerful motors, at least not as powerful as a Lambo, meaning their horsepower isn't enough, plus, Tesla's are damn heavy, over 1000lb heavier. | [
"In a May 2013 interview with All Things Digital, Musk said that to overcome the range limitations of electric cars, Tesla is expanding its network of supercharger stations, tripling the number on the East and West coasts of the U.S. that June, with plans for more expansion across North America, including Canada, throughout the year. , Musk owns about 28.9 million Tesla shares, which equates to about 22% of the company.\n",
"Tesla has indicated on multiple occasions that they were interested in having discussions with other auto manufacturers about sharing the Supercharger network, however no agreements have been completed or made public to date.\n",
"Tesla delivered approximately 2,450 Roadsters worldwide between February 2008 and December 2012. Featuring new options and enhanced features, the 2012 Tesla Roadster was sold in limited numbers only in mainland Europe, Asia and Australia, and as of July 2012, less than 140 units were available for sale in Europe and Asia before the remaining inventory would be sold out. Tesla's US exemption for not having special two-stage passenger airbags expired for cars made after the end of 2011 so the last Roadsters were not sold in the American market for regulatory reasons. The U.S. was the leading market with about 1,800 Roadsters sold. There were fewer than 50 right-hand-drive models of the Tesla Roadster produced and hand built in the UK.\n",
"Tesla responded by publishing logs of the vehicle's charge levels and driving speed that contradicted Broder's account on several factual details. Tesla implied that Broder's behavior forced the car to fail. Broder replied to the criticism in a blog post and suggested that the speed discrepancies may have been because the car had been equipped with 19-inch wheels rather than the specified 21-inch wheels. In the midst of the controversy, a CNN reporter recreated Broder's trip without exhausting the battery. However, two key differences distinguished the two journeys. The weather was about warmer and CNN did the trip in one day; the \"Times\" let the car sit overnight without being plugged in. A reporter from CNBC also recreated the trip in one day without incidents. One week later, a group of Tesla owners recreated Broder's trip without problems. One owner was delayed because his car failed to charge and required two firmware updates.\n",
"In 2018, General Motors decided to end production in March 2019. The primary reason given was that the Volt is a sedan, and sales of four-door vehicles were in decline. Car salesmen were proving resistant to selling the car because it was more complicated (and thus took more of their time) to explain how the vehicle operated. Marketing trends showed that sales of hybrids were dropping as more customers were turning to all-electric vehicles like the Chevrolet Bolt. The range-anxiety associated with all-electric vehicles had been in decline due to better battery technology, and most hybrid drivers were turning on their gas-powered engines less frequently. The battery technology developed for the Volt had already been incorporated into the Bolt.\n",
"To enhance livability, Tesla has developed a network of fast-charging 'Supercharger' stations that allow the driver to quickly and easily top-up the charge on their Model S. A Supercharger takes about 20 minutes to charge to 50%, 40 minutes to charge to 80%, and 75 minutes to 100% on the original 85 kWh Model S. Supercharger networks have rapidly expanded in Europe, across the United States, and in other countries where there is significant demand, and , the network has been established in most American states, thus making cross-country and long distance trips in an electric vehicle feasible and greatly alleviating fears of range anxiety.\n",
"A Tesla Supercharger is a 480-volt DC fast-charging station built by American vehicle manufacturer Tesla Inc. for their all-electric cars. The Tesla Supercharger network of fast-charging stations was introduced beginning in 2012. the electric vehicle network consisted of 12,011 individual Supercharger stalls at 1,422 locations worldwide. Tesla Model S was the first car to be able to use the network, followed by the Tesla Model X and Tesla Model 3.\n"
] |
What causes of death allow or rule out organ donation? | In order to be declared brain dead there are a number of preconditions that must be met. These can vary slightly in different jurisdictions, but essentially there has to be a known disease process that has resulted in extensive brain damage. The damage must have involved the most basic parts of the brain, the brain stem, so that even the most primitive reflexes; those that control breathing, swallowing, pupillary response to light, are no longer functioning.
For an injury to cause brain death it usually is something that is effecting only the brain so that the other organs still function, and has not killed the patient outright, such that they have been placed on life support in the interim.
Head trauma, and strokes are common, as they will often lead to delayed swelling of the whole brain which will eventually cut off the brain's blood supply. A similar thing happens in people who have been starved of oxygen for too long, which you might see in people who have had the heart restarted after a long period of CPR.
| [
"Another major debate around organ donation concerns with the definition of death. Because if the accepted definition if death is \"incorrect,\" removing a heart from a donor who was established dead under the \"wrong\" criteria is tantamount to murder. With life-support and cardiopulmonary resuscitative technology, establishing the moment of death becomes more complicated and opinionated.\n",
"In the United States, where since the 1980s the Uniform Determination of Death Act has defined death as the irreversible cessation of the function of either the brain or the heart and lungs, the 21st century has seen an order-of-magnitude increase of donation following cardiac death. In 1995, only one out of 100 dead donors in the nation gave their organs following the declaration of cardiac death. That figure grew to almost 11 percent in 2008, according to the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients. That increase has provoked ethical concerns about the interpretation of \"irreversible\" since \"patients may still be alive five or even 10 minutes after cardiac arrest because, theoretically, their hearts could be restarted, [and thus are] clearly not dead because their condition was reversible.\"\n",
"Many different major religious groups and denominations have varying views on organ donation of a deceased and live bodies, depending on their ideologies. Differing opinions can arise depending on if the death is categorized as brain death or cease of the heartbeat. It is important for doctors and health care providers to be knowledgeable about differentiating theological and cultural views on death and organ donations as nations are becoming more multicultural.\n",
"If the donor is dead, there is again, in principle, no obstacle to organ donation so long as it is for the purpose of pikuach nefesh, but the reality is that the donor must be dead, otherwise the removal of vital organs would constitute murder, and the issue is how death is defined.\n",
"Many societies have a system for organ donation, in which a living or deceased donor's organ is transplanted into a person with a failing organ. The transplantation of larger solid organs often requires immunosuppression to prevent organ rejection or graft-versus-host disease.\n",
"Orthodox Judaism considers organ donation obligatory if it will save a life, as long as the donor is considered dead as defined by Jewish law. In both Orthodox Judaism and non-Orthodox Judaism, the majority view holds that organ donation is permitted in the case of irreversible cardiac rhythm cessation. In some cases, rabbinic authorities believe that organ donation may be mandatory, whereas a minority opinion considers any donation of a live organ as forbidden.\n",
"The majority of Islamic religious leaders accept organ donation during life (provided it does not harm the donor) and after death in order to save life. Most religious leaders do not accept brain death as a criterion and consider cessation of all signs of life including heart beat as a precondition for declaring death.\n"
] |
How do elements inside cells interact and move to the right places? | Most of the processes in the cell occur by diffusion. Meaning a lot of what is happening is random chance, but since cells are small and much more compact than textbooks and animations show, these processes can occur rather quickly.
Enzymes (the do-ers of the cell) don't really "know" what they're doing. They just do what they do until they are told to shop. Usually it's caused by a feedback mechanism. I guess a decent analogy would be if you were an enzyme who's job was to paint squares, you would keep painting squares until you either you run out of paint or squares. You could also be tapped on the shoulder and told to go home for the night (inhibited).
You're asking a lot of questions that have a complex background that would take pages to explain each one. I would recommend browsing around [this youtube channel](_URL_0_) for a good visual break down of a lot of your questions and more! | [
"Solid areas contain fibrous tissue islands or epithelium that interconnect through strands and sheets. The epithelial cells tend to move the nucleus away from the basement membrane to the opposite pole of the cell. This process is called \"reverse polarization\". Two main histological patterns most often occur: \"follicular\" and \"plexiform\". Other less common histological variants include \"acanthomatous\", \"basal cell\", and \"granular cell\" patterns.\n",
"Cells can orient in response to contact guidance also when located inside three-dimensional structures, such as collagen gels, scaffolds, and soft tissues. For those conditions, it has been demonstrated that the geometrical cues provided by collagen or scaffold fibers are able to influence the orientation of cells. For example, it has been observed that endothelial colony forming cells align along the direction of the fibers present in electrospun scaffolds. Similarly, it has been demonstrated that the collagen fibers present in collagen gels and soft tissues can influence cell alignment, providing the most important stimulus in terms of cell orientation \n",
"The ability of a cell to adhere to and move relative to its environment is mediated by cell surface proteins called integrins that bind extracellular components and mediate their linkage to the intracellular, force-generating actin cytoskeleton. However, the specific molecules mediating the links between integrins and actin and how they are organized at the cell membrane was not known. Dr. Waterman used Fluorescent Speckle Microscopy and super-resolution light microscopy methods to show in migrating cells that actin polymerizes at the leading edge, undergoes a rearward movement towards the cell center, and engages locally to integrins at the plasma membrane via a trilaminar nanoscale structure consisting of specific adapter proteins. The engagement of actin to the focal adhesion results in slowing of actin motion in the leading edge and transmission of its motion to the adapter proteins, and the protein vinculin is critical for this engagement. Dr. Waterman’s work supports a model that draws on analogy of the focal adhesion adapter proteins acting as a mechanical “clutch” to engage the moving actin with the matrix-bound integrins, and thus transmit intracellular force to friction on the extracellular environment to drive cell movement. Dr. Waterman’s works has led to the acceptance of the molecular clutch hypothesis of cell migration.\n",
"Many cell types are capable of migration, such as leukocytes and fibroblasts, and in order for these cells to move in one direction, they must have a defined front and rear. At the front of the cell is the leading edge, which is often defined by a flat ruffling of the cell membrane called the lamellipodium or thin protrusions called filopodia. Here, actin polymerization in the direction of migration allows cells to extend the leading edge of the cell and to attach to the surface. At the rear of the cell, adhesions are disassembled and bundles of actin microfilaments, called stress fibers, contract and pull the trailing edge forward to keep up with the rest of the cell. Without this front-rear polarity, cells would be unable to coordinate directed migration.\n",
"Like a simple cell, a complex cell will respond primarily to oriented edges and gratings, however it has a degree of spatial invariance. This means that its receptive field cannot be mapped into fixed excitatory and inhibitory zones. Rather, it will respond to patterns of light in a certain orientation within a large receptive field, regardless of the exact location. Some complex cells respond optimally only to movement in a certain direction.\n",
"• Evidence indicates that those molecules in the cell's surface that act as the feet of the cell — the integrins, which attach the cell to the substratum — can also be endocytosed and transported through the cell. In this way, fresh adhesion sites (see cell adhesion) are provided at the cell's front.\n",
"When the material is placed in the sun, photons from the sunlight can be absorbed in the p-type side of the semiconductor, causing electrons in the valence band to be promoted in energy to the conduction band. This process is known as photoexcitation. As the name implies, electrons in the conduction band are free to move about the semiconductor. When a load is placed across the cell as a whole, these electrons will flow from the p-type side into the n-type side, lose energy while moving through the external circuit, and then go back into the p-type material where they can re-combine with the valence-band holes they left behind. In this way, sunlight creates an electric current.\n"
] |
if there is a bee in a car and the car is travelling at 50mph, does the bee have to fly faster than 50mph to move from the backseat to the front seat? | > does the bee have to fly faster than 50mph to move from the backseat to the front seat?
No. The bee flies by pushing against the air around it, and all of the air in the car is moving along with the car.
It's much the same as the fact that, even though the earth is rotating from west to east at hundreds of miles per hour (actual speed depends on the latitude), you don't have to run faster than a speeding bullet to take a step from west to east, because the ground you're walking on is moving along with the earth. | [
"BULLET::::- When landing, the ground becomes closer and therefore appears to be moving faster. By keeping the apparent velocity of the ground constant, the bee reduces its own velocity in a continuous manner.\n",
"Although capable of limited flight, it spends most of its time on the ground, and can run at speeds up to . Cases where roadrunners have run as fast as have been reported. This is the fastest running speed clocked for a flying bird, but not nearly as fast as the of the flightless and much larger ostrich.\n",
"Bee hives are transported cross-country in trucks nonstop or with little break. Bees are severely stressed from confinement, heat, weather changes and sudden change in their daily tasks. While on the road for two to three days, it is difficult for the truck driver or the beekeeper to check on the temperature and food level in the hives. Proper nutrition of the bees is affected and there is high risk of bees starving to death on the road trip. One study points to impaired food gland development in migratory bees resulting in improper feeding of brood. North Carolina State University news states that providing bees access to huge amount of food while on road may ease stress due to transportation \n",
"The aircraft were given marks for four tasks: speed over two sets of five laps, slow speed flying and take off and landing distances. Only the Wee Bee and the Brownie, both Cherub engined, had the reliability to complete the speed tests, in which the Wee Bee achieved 70.1 mph (112.8 km/h), about 5 mph faster than the Bristol. It flew at just under 40 mph (64 km/h) and took off to clear a 6 ft (1.83 m) barrier with a run of 705 ft (215 m). Given the Wee Bee's clean aerodynamics it was not surprising to find it took to greatest distance to pull up at landing; wheel brakes were not fitted. Despite the long landing, the Wee Bee ended the competition well ahead in marks of the Brownie, its nearest rival, winning the Air Ministry first prize of £2,000.\n",
"Old and unreliable claims are made that dragonflies such as the southern giant darner can fly up to . However, the greatest reliable flight speed records are for other types of insects. In general, large dragonflies like the hawkers have a maximum speed of with average cruising speed of about . Dragonflies can travel at 100 body-lengths per second in forward flight, and three lengths per second backwards.\n",
"BULLET::::- Similarly, bees slow down in a crowded landscape because nearby objects appear to move faster than objects on the horizon. This is a safety mechanism that reduces the incidence of collision.\n",
"Flies have rapid reflexes that aid their escape from predators but their sustained flight speeds are low. Dolichopodid flies in the genus \"Condylostylus\" respond in less than 5 milliseconds to camera flashes by taking flight. In the past, the deer bot fly, \"Cephenemyia\", was claimed to be one of the fastest insects on the basis of an estimate made visually by Charles Townsend in 1927. This claim, of speeds of 600 to 800 miles per hour, was regularly repeated until Irving Langmuir showed it to be physically impossible as well as incorrect. Langmuir suggested an estimated speed of 25 miles per hour.\n"
] |
"the loudness war", and its effect on music | There are loud and quiet parts in music. Every media format (especially digital ones) has some limit of maximum sound level, so loudness of entire track is determined by it's loudest part.
Most of music producers try to make music louder than their competitors to get the advantage on the radio, etc (people tend to prefer louder track to quieter, all else being equal). But once loudest part of the track achieves the maximum level, the only way to make track louder is dynamic compression. It makes quiet parts louder while loud parts remain the same.
As this competition progresses, mainstream music tracks become more and more compressed. It makes the music lose its dynamics. There are no more "very quiet-quiet-medium-loud-very loud" dynamics, music becomes just "loud and very loud".
This makes music sound tedious. Instead of nice "tension and release" we have just one continuos tension which is tiresome to listen to. Drums lose all the "punch" and sometimes even "clipping" occurs. | [
"The loudness war (or loudness race) refers to the trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music which reduces audio fidelity and, according to many critics, listener enjoyment. Increasing loudness was first reported as early as the 1940s, with respect to mastering practices for 7\" singles. The maximum peak level of analog recordings such as these is limited by varying specifications of electronic equipment along the chain from source to listener, including vinyl and Compact Cassette players. The issue garnered renewed attention starting in the 1990s with the introduction of digital signal processing capable of producing further loudness increases.\n",
"In 2007, Suhas Sreedhar published an article about the loudness war in the engineering magazine \"IEEE Spectrum\". Sreedhar said that the greater possible dynamic range of CDs was being set aside in favor of maximizing loudness using digital technology. Sreedhar said that the overcompressed modern music was fatiguing, that it did not allow the music to \"breathe\".\n",
"By the early 2000s, the loudness war had become fairly widespread, especially with some remastered re-releases and greatest hits collections of older music. In 2008, loud mastering practices received mainstream media attention with the release of Metallica's \"Death Magnetic\" album. The CD version of the album has a high average loudness that pushes peaks beyond the point of digital clipping, causing distortion. This was reported by customers and music industry professionals, and covered in multiple international publications, including \"Rolling Stone\", \"The Wall Street Journal\", BBC Radio, \"Wired\", and \"The Guardian\". Ted Jensen, a mastering engineer involved in the \"Death Magnetic\" recordings, criticized the approach employed during the production process. A version of the album without dynamic range compression was included in the downloadable content for the video game \"\".\n",
"After successful incorporation of music into the war efforts, more was needed in order to keep hopes alive and stable both back in the U.S and in the Home Front. Various times music was used as a tool for battle in the war, whether it was to entertain or to recuperate the soldiers during the war. More importantly was the impact that the music during the 1940s had on the people then and the effect that it continues to have now. Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II argues that music composed during the 1940s was unlike any other time of music because of its emphasis on making the listener feel like they are part of the war or if they are somewhere else. It adds that songs from World War II continue to be used today in order to remember those harsh times of war and to remind everyone of what the cost of liberty and freedom was. Some examples of this would include Aaron Copland's \"\"Fanfare for the Common Man\"\" (1942) and \"\"Lincoln's Portrait\"\" (1942). These are still being played for presidential inaugurations and continue to have the effect of \"loss for freedom\".\n",
"The production practices associated with the loudness war have been condemned by recording industry professionals including Alan Parsons and Geoff Emerick, along with mastering engineers Doug Sax, Stephen Marcussen, and Bob Katz. Musician Bob Dylan has also condemned the practice, saying, \"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like—static.\"\n",
"In September 2011, Emmanuel Deruty wrote in \"Sound on Sound\", a recording industry magazine, that the loudness war has not led to a decrease in dynamic variability in modern music, possibly because the original digitally-recorded source material of modern recordings is more dynamic than analogue material. Deruty and Tardieu analyzed the \"loudness range\" (LRA) over a 45-year span of recordings, and observed that the crest factor of recorded music diminished significantly between 1985 and 2010, but the LRA remained relatively constant. Deruty and Damien Tardieu criticized Sreedhar's methods in an AES paper, saying that Sreedhar had confused crest factor (peak to RMS) with dynamics in the musical sense (pianissimo to fortissimo).\n",
"BULLET::::- Fauser, Annegret. \"Sounds of War: Music in the United States During World War II\" (Oxford University Press; 2013) 366 pages; focuses on classical music in the 1940s, including work by both American composers and Europeans in exile.\n"
] |
What is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall? | Over the largest scales galaxies seem to arrange themselves in a foam like structure with the material we can see sitting where the bubble walls would be. Here is a [picture](_URL_0_) of a universe simulation to give you an impression.
The Great Wall in this would be a particular dense area. Our viewpoint is outside of it so it appears as a wall from where we are looking. If we where inside it would probably appear to look like more galaxies around us. | [
"The central tumulus is built from smaller rocks, and is thought to have been constructed after the surrounding walls were constructed. Connecting to it are four main stone walls. The first wall, shaped like a semicircle, is 50m in diameter and 1.5m wide. That wall is connected to a second one, an almost complete circle 90m in diameter. The third wall is a full circle, 110m in diameter and 2.6m wide. The fourth and outermost wall is the largest: 150m in diameter and 3.2m wide.\n",
"Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall or the Great GRB Wall is the largest known structure in the observable universe, measuring approximately 10 billion light years in length. For perspective, the universe is only 13.8 billion years old. This massive galactic superstructure in a region of the sky seen in the data set mapping of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) that has been found to have an unusually higher concentration of similarly distanced GRBs than the expected average distribution. It was discovered in early November 2013 by a team of American and Hungarian astronomers led by István Horváth, Jon Hakkila and Zsolt Bagoly while analyzing data from the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, together with other data from ground-based telescopes. It is the largest known formation in the universe, exceeding the size of the prior Huge-LQG by about two times.\n",
"The authors of the paper concluded a structure that was the possible explanation of the clustering, but they never associated any name with it. Hakkila stated that \"During the process, we were more concerned with whether it was real or not.\" The term \"Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall\" was coined by a Filipino teenager from Marikina City on the website Wikipedia, after reading a Discovery News report three weeks after the structure's discovery in 2013. The nomenclature was used by Jacqueline Howard, on her \"Talk Nerdy to Me\" video series, and Hakkila would later use the name.\n",
"Capricornus is one of the 88 modern constellations, and was also one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy. Under its modern boundaries it is bordered by Aquila, Sagittarius, Microscopium, Piscis Austrinus, and Aquarius. The constellation is located in an area of sky called the Sea or the Water, consisting of many water-related constellations such as Aquarius, Pisces and Eridanus. It is the smallest constellation in the zodiac.\n",
"The Hercules Cluster (Abell 2151) is a cluster of about 200 galaxies some 500 million light-years distant in the constellation Hercules. It is rich in spiral galaxies and shows many interacting galaxies. The cluster is part of the larger Hercules Supercluster, which is itself part of the much larger Great Wall super-structure.\n",
"Hercules is on the southeastern shores of San Pablo Bay, roughly 4 miles southwest of the Carquinez Bridge. By road, Hercules is roughly 12 miles north of Berkeley, California, 18 miles north of Oakland and 22 miles northeast of San Francisco. The shoreline at this location runs northeast to southwest. Refugio Creek runs through the middle of Hercules in a northwest direction and empties at the shoreline.\n",
"The wall of the Propontis was built almost at the shoreline, with the exception of harbours and quays, and had a height of 12–15 metres, with thirteen gates, and 188 towers. and a total length of almost 8,460 metres, with further 1,080 metres comprising the inner wall of the Vlanga harbour. Several sections of the wall were damaged during the construction of the \"Kennedy Caddesi\" coastal road in 1956–57. The wall's proximity to the sea and the strong currents of the Propontis meant that eastern and southern shores of the peninsula were comparatively safe from attack, but conversely, the walls had to be protected against the sea itself: a breakwater of boulders was placed in front of their base, and marble shafts were used as bonds in the walls' base to enhance their structural integrity. From the cape at the edge of the ancient acropolis of the city (modern \"Sarayburnu\", Seraglio Point), south and west to the Marble Tower, the Propontis Wall and its gates went as follows:\n"
] |
can some please explain what a information system architecture is? | It's basically a diagram of how they want a system or process or *whatever* to work. It's hard to define because it's a pretty vague thing to start with that you can take in many different directions. I bet if your teammates drew you a picture of what they're talking about it would work a lot better than trying to define it with words. | [
"The Information Architecture is the \"what\" of information systems which defines and organizes all information needed to perform business operations and describes the relationships among this information. The Functional Architecture is the \"how\" of information systems which defines and organizes the business functions, processes, or activities that capture, manipulate, and manage the business information to support business operations.\n",
"The Information Systems Architecture is designed to be a classification schema for organizing architecture models. It provides a synoptic view of the models needed for enterprise architecture. Information Systems Architecture does not define in detail what the models should contain, it does not enforce the modeling language used for each model, and it does not propose a method for creating these models.\n",
"Open systems architecture, in telecommunication, is a standard that describes the layered hierarchical structure, configuration, or model of a communications or distributed data processing system that:\n",
"While the definition of information architecture is relatively well-established in the field of systems design, it is much more debatable within the context of online information systems (i.e., websites). Andrew Dillon refers to the latter as the \"big IA–little IA debate\". In the little IA view, information architecture is essentially the application of information science to web design which considers, for example, issues of classification and information retrieval. In the big IA view, information architecture involves more than just the organization of a website; it also factors in user experience, thereby considering usability issues of information design.\n",
"Information architecture (IA) is the structural design of shared information environments; the art and science of organizing and labelling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability; and an emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design, architecture and information science to the digital landscape. Typically, it involves a model or concept of information that is used and applied to activities which require explicit details of complex information systems. These activities include library systems and database development.\n",
"The difficulty in establishing a common definition for \"information architecture\" arises partly from the term's existence in multiple fields. In the field of systems design, for example, information architecture is a component of enterprise architecture that deals with the information component when describing the structure of an enterprise.\n",
"A system architecture or systems architecture is the conceptual model that defines the structure, behavior, and more views of a system. An architecture description is a formal description and representation of a system, organized in a way that supports reasoning about the structures and behaviors of the system.\n"
] |
why is it considered more professional to be clean shaven? | Primary answer: Beards are easier maintained shaven than left to grow. Not having it there in the first place is considered professional since it implies that the person in question takes hygiene seriously by being willing to groom themselves every day.
Ancillary answer: Western cultures prefer cleanly shaven men to rugged ones for the reason indicated above. However, in places such as West Asia and Scandanavia, having a very large or substantial beard shows maturity and how "strong" a man is (i.e. it shows strong hormonal growth in that person). They are also status symbols elsewhere, depending upon what culture you ask. | [
"Since the mid-twentieth century, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) has encouraged men to be clean-shaven, particularly those that serve in ecclesiastical leadership positions. The church's encouragement of men's shaving has no theological basis, but stems from the general waning of facial hair's popularity in Western society during the twentieth century and its association with the hippie and drug culture aspects of the counterculture of the 1960s, and has not been a permanent rule.\n",
"Though it is never explicitly stated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that all male members must be clean-shaven, within Mormon circles it is often considered \"taboo\" for men to have moustaches as the missionaries of the church are required to be clean-shaven as well as the honor code of Brigham Young University requiring students to have similar grooming standards. This has become somewhat of a social norm within the church itself. This often leads those members who do choose to wear moustaches feel somewhat like they do not quite fit the norm, and yet in the studies shown done by Nielsen and White, these men reportedly do not mind this feeling and that is why they continue to grow their facial hair.\n",
"Bringing a shave brush across one's skin produces a mild exfoliation. Because a shave brush is most often used with a shave soap, this effect often replaces the pre-shave routine of washing and applying lotion to the face.\n",
"Today in much of the world, it is common for women to regularly shave their underarm hair. The prevalence of this practice varies widely, though. The practice became popular for cosmetic reasons around 1915 in the United States and United Kingdom, when one or more magazines showed a woman in a dress with shaved underarms. As women's armpit hair contrasts more noticeably with her other body hair than does a man's, it is a significant indicator of sexual maturity and therefore unwelcome in conventional western polite society. Regular shaving became feasible with the introduction of the safety razor at the beginning of the 20th century. While underarm shaving was quickly adopted in some English speaking countries, especially in the US and Canada, it did not become widespread in Europe until well after World War II. Since then the practice has spread worldwide. Some men also choose to shave their armpits.\n",
"In previous times, barbers (known as barber surgeons) also performed surgery and dentistry. With the development of safety razors and the decreasing prevalence of beards, in Anglophonic cultures, most barbers now specialize in cutting men's scalp hair as opposed to facial hair.\n",
"Owing to health concerns, some areas require barbers who provide straight-razor shaving to use a version that employs a disposable blade system. In places such as Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Denver, Boston, Texas and San Diego, however, the professional use of straight razors in barber shops is legal.\n",
"Straight razors were the most common form of shaving before the 20th century and remained common in many countries until the 1950s. Barbers were specially trained to give customers a thorough and quick shave, and a collection of straight razors ready for use was a common sight in most barbershops. Barbers still have them, but they use them less often.\n"
] |
What happens to all the hair that is shaved off or cut, how does it decompose? | Hair is a source of nitrogen, and can be composted to make a fertilizer. I've thrown pet hair in the compost bins for years.
I suspect that it might also, in larger quantities, help soil drainage (though I very well could be wrong about this). | [
"Temporary hair removal may last from several hours to several weeks, depending on the method used. These procedures are purely cosmetic. Depilation methods, such as trimming, shaving, and depilatories, remove hair to the level of the skin and produce results that last several hours to several days. Epilation methods, such as plucking, electrology, waxing, sugaring, threading remove the entire hair from the root, the results lasting several days to several weeks.\n",
"Any remaining hair is removed (\"scudding\") and the skin is dried by attaching it to a frame (a \"herse\"). The skin is attached at points around the circumference with cords; to prevent tearing, the maker wraps the area of the skin to which the cord is to be attached around a pebble (a \"pippin\"). The maker then uses a crescent shaped knife, (a \"lunarium\" or \"lunellum\"), to clean off any remaining hairs.\n",
"All hair can be removed with wax formulated for that purpose. Some individuals may remove part or all of their pubic hair, axillary hair and facial hair. Pubic hair removal using wax is bikini waxing. The method of removing hair is called depilation (when removing only the hair above the skin) or epilation (when removing the entire hair). Beauty salons often offer various waxing services. It is sometimes referred to as \"pubic topiary\".\n",
"Depilation is the removal of hair from the surface of the skin. This can be achieved through methods such as shaving. Epilation is the removal of the entire hair strand, including the part of the hair that has not yet left the follicle. A popular way to epilate hair is through waxing.\n",
"There are many benefits to waxing versus other forms of hair removal. It is an effective method to remove large amounts of hair at one time. It is a long-lasting method, as hair in waxed areas will not grow back for two to eight weeks. When hair is shaved or removed by depilatory cream, the hair is removed at the surface rather than the hair root. Within a few days, the hair can reappear back at the surface. With these methods, hair tends to grow back in a rough stubble. Areas that are repeatedly waxed over long periods of time often exhibit regrowth that is softer.\n",
"Depilation is the removal of the part of the hair above the surface of the skin. The most common form of depilation is shaving or trimming. Another option is the use of chemical depilatories, which work by breaking the disulfide bonds that link the protein chains that give hair its strength.\n",
"Pubic hair can be removed in a number of ways, such as waxing, shaving, sugaring, electrolysis, laser hair removal or with chemical depilatory creams. Waxing involves applying melted, usually hot, wax to the pubic hair that an individual would like to remove. The wax, which adheres to the hair as it hardens, is then covered with small strips of cloth. When the wax hardens sufficiently, the cloth is pulled off quickly, removing the hair from its roots as the wax is pulled away. Waxing can be performed on oneself privately using a home kit or by a cosmetologist at a salon or spa.\n"
] |
When a woman, who has had her womb transplanted, has a child, will the child share her DNA or the DNA of the organ donor? | The womb is also called the [uterus](_URL_1_). This is the organ in which the fetus develops, but it does not contribute to the genetic make up of the child. A fetus is created by the combination of sperm and egg. Eggs are created and stored in the [ovaries](_URL_2_).
The [woman who just successfully had a child after a womb transplant](_URL_0_) had functioning ovaries. The child is genetically hers as an egg from her ovaries (and her husband's sperm) was used to create embryos which were implanted in the transplanted womb (In Vitro fertilization). | [
"A uterine transplant was performed in Saudi Arabia in 2000, from one woman to another, but it did not result in a pregnancy. This advance drew speculation about the possibility of a male receiving a womb transplant, and bearing a child from the transplanted womb.\n",
"Embryo transfer may be used where a woman who has eggs but no uterus and wants to have a biological baby; she would require the help of a gestational carrier or surrogate to carry the pregnancy. Also, a woman who has no eggs but a uterus may utilize egg donor IVF, in which case another woman would provide eggs for fertilization and the resulting embryos are placed into the uterus of the patient. Fertilization may be performed using the woman's partner's sperm or by using donor sperm. 'Spare' embryos which are created for another couple undergoing IVF treatment but which are then surplus to that couple's needs may also be transferred (called embryo donation). Embryos may be specifically created by using eggs and sperm from donors and these can then be transferred into the uterus of another woman. A surrogate may carry a baby produced by embryo transfer for another couple, even though neither she nor the 'commissioning' couple is biologically related to the child. Third party reproduction is controversial and regulated in many countries. Persons entering gestational surrogacy arrangements must make sense of an entirely new type of relationship that does not fit any of the traditional scripts we use to categorize relations as kinship, friendship, romantic partnership or market relations. Surrogates have the experience of carrying a baby that they conceptualize as not of their own kin, while intended mothers have the experience of waiting through nine months of pregnancy and transitioning to motherhood from outside of the pregnant body. This can lead to new conceptualizations of body and self.\n",
"Ovary transplantation, giving rise to successful pregnancies, will result in children who will have the genetic inheritance of the organ donor and not the recipient; it has so far only been carried out on identical twins. Use of an ovarian transplant from a genetically identical donor prevents rejection of the donated organ. This bypasses the need for immune suppressants to maintain the function of the donated ovary, which is not vital for survival. More significantly, many immunosuppressants, such as mycophenolate mofetil, may cause birth defects. Lili Elbe received an ovary transplant in the early 1930s, followed by a uterus transplant, but died shortly thereafter from complications.\n",
"BULLET::::3. Her gonads cannot produce eggs so she will not be able to conceive children naturally. A woman with a uterus but no ovaries may be able to become pregnant by implantation of another woman's fertilized egg (embryo transfer).\n",
"A couple Marie Wells (Samantha Mathis) and her husband Justin (Robert Wisden) have trouble conceiving a child on their own so they turn to the use of in vitro fertilisation to implant an embryo in Marie's uterus. Behind the scenes, however, some scientists, under the direction of a popular televangelist, plan to use the woman to clone Jesus Christ using DNA from the Shroud of Turin. As the child grows in Marie's womb, strange occurrence seem to herald the birth of the special child.\n",
"If there is no uterus, a person with MRKH cannot carry a pregnancy without intervention. It is possible for the person to have genetic offspring by in vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy. Successful uterine transplant has been performed in limited numbers of patients, resulting in several live births, but the technique is not widespread or accessible to many women.\n",
"Uterine transplantation has been performed in a number of people with MRKH, but the surgery is still in the experimental stage. Since ovaries are present, people with this condition can have genetic children through IVF with embryo transfer to a gestational carrier. Some also choose to adopt. In October 2014, it was reported that a month earlier a 36-year-old Swedish woman became the first person with a transplanted uterus to give birth to a healthy baby. She was born without a uterus, but had functioning ovaries. She and the father went through IVF to produce 11 embryos, which were then frozen. Doctors at the University of Gothenburg then performed the uterus transplant, the donor being a 61-year-old family friend. One of the frozen embryos was implanted a year after the transplant, and the baby boy was born prematurely at 31 weeks after the mother developed pre-eclampsia.\n"
] |
since there is a color that is all colors combined, is there a scent that is all scents combined, and what would it smell like? | > By color of all colors I'm referring to black since this is the color you see when all waves of color (visible light) are reflected back to your eye.
You mean white, not black. White light is all wavelengths of visible light (or, at least, equal levels of the three you do sense).
Scents are a bit different, since they're a combination of various chemical interactions, and there are far, far more different scent receptors in our noses.
There's also five taste receptors on the tongue, but flavour typically also includes things like temperature, roughness and texture, astringency, moistness, and so on, which all contribute to how something tastes. Just being a combination of all five tastes (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami) isn't going to taste like a single thing the way white light is perceived as white. It's just going to taste like a sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami thing. Kind of like how lemonade is sour and sweet. | [
"The aroma of pure substance can be described as honey-like, sweet, rose, green, grassy and is added to fragrances to impart hyacinth, narcissi, or rose nuances. For similar reasons the compound can sometimes be found in flavored cigarettes and beverages.\n",
"Generally molecules meeting this specification have molecular weights of less than 300. Flavors affect both the sense of taste and smell, whereas fragrances affect only smell. Flavors tend to be naturally occurring, and fragrances tend to be synthetic.\n",
"BULLET::::- \"Primary scents\" (Heart): Can consist of one or a few main ingredients for a certain concept, such as \"rose\". Alternatively, multiple ingredients can be used together to create an \"abstract\" primary scent that does not bear a resemblance to a natural ingredient. For instance, jasmine and rose scents are commonly blends for abstract floral fragrances. Cola flavourant is a good example of an abstract primary scent.\n",
"\"Green Aria: A Scent Opera\" was an exhibit by Christophe Laudamiel at the Guggenheim that incorporated both over two dozen fragrances pumped through special \"scent microphones\" to 148 seats, accompanied by music. Some scents were intended to invoke natural fragrances, while others were described as \"Industrial\" or \"Absolute Zero\".\n",
"Each enantiomer evokes different neural responses in humans, so are classified as possessing distinct scents. (\"S\")-(+)-Linalool is perceived as sweet, floral, petitgrain-like (odor threshold 7.4 ppb) and the (\"R\")-form as more woody and lavender-like (odor threshold 0.8 ppb).\n",
"The color names for these different types of sounds are derived from a loose analogy between the spectrum of frequencies of sound wave present in the sound (as shown in the blue diagrams) and the equivalent spectrum of light wave frequencies. That is, if the sound wave pattern of \"blue noise\" were translated into light waves, the resulting light would be blue, and so on.\n",
"In 2006, after acquiring partial ownership of the Brut copyright and patents, Idelle Laboratories launched Brut Revolution, an \"ozonic\" variant on the core fragrance. \"As Different As You Are\" is the theme of the fragrance, which is housed in a blue and silver bottle, breaking with the traditional green of the original.\n"
] |
the process of photo restoration | Cracks and folds are removed by carefully hiding them, either hand-painting over them, or simply copying nearby textures over them. Missing parts are painted.
Faded parts of the foto are simply restored by taking the color that are present, and amplifying them (like turning up the volume).
There are tools in the popular photo editing software Photoshop that help with this (healing brush, clone stamp, and various adjustment layers) | [
"Digital photograph restoration is the practice of restoring the appearance of a digital copy of a physical photograph which has been damaged by natural, man made, or environmental causes or simply affected by age or neglect.\n",
"Digital photograph restoration uses a variety of image editing techniques to remove visible damage and aging effects from digital copies of physical photographs. Raster graphics editors (see list below) are typically used to repair the appearance of the digital images and add to the digital copy of the photo where pieces of the physical photograph are torn or missing. Evidence of dirt, scratches, and other signs of photographic age are removed from the digital image manually, by painting over them meticulously. Unwanted color casts are removed and the image's contrast or sharpening may be altered in an attempt to restore some of the contrast range or detail that is believed to be in the original physical image. In addition image processing techniques such as image enhancement and image restoration are also applicable for the purpose of digital photograph restoration.\n",
"Image Restoration is the operation of taking a corrupt/noisy image and estimating the clean, original image. Corruption may come in many forms such as motion blur, noise and camera mis-focus. Image restoration is performed by reversing the process that blurred the image and such is performed by imaging a point source and use the point source image, which is called the Point Spread Function (PSF) to restore the image information lost to the blurring process.\n",
"Photo recovery is the process of salvaging digital photographs from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Photo Recovery can be considered a subset of\n",
"Photograph preservation is distinguished from \"digital\" or \"optical restoration\", which is concerned with creating and editing a digital copy of the original image rather than treating the original photographic material. Photograph preservation does not normally include moving image materials, which by their nature require a very different approach. Film preservation concerns itself with these materials.\n",
"Image rectification is a transformation process used to project images onto a common image plane. This process has several degrees of freedom and there are many strategies for transforming images to the common plane.\n",
"The Conservation and restoration of photographs is the study of the physical care and treatment of photographic materials. It covers both efforts undertaken by photograph conservators, librarians, archivists, and museum curators who manage photograph collections at a variety of cultural heritage institutions, as well as steps taken to preserve collections of personal and family photographs. It is an umbrella term that includes both preventative preservation activities such as environmental control and conservation techniques that involve treating individual items. Both preservation and conservation require an in-depth understanding of how photographs are made, and the causes and prevention of deterioration. Conservator-restorers use this knowledge to treat photographic materials, stabilizing them from further deterioration, and sometimes restoring them for aesthetic purposes.\n"
] |
how do bacteria think? | There is a grievous, fundamental misunderstanding of biology here. I don't know what you think thoughts are, but they are really not at all related to the immune system, performing "actions," or bacteria.
Let's start with a really simple chemical reaction. When you mix baking soda and vinegar, it makes the classic science fair volcano. Mixing these two chemicals causes foam to form. There are no thoughts related to this process. It just happens, like how ice melts or things fall down when you let go of them.
Living things are like that too, only *way* more complicated. Lots of bacteria have genes that, when they enter a potential host, are turned on. The genes can produce molecules that do things like help the bacteria stick to your own cells to infect them, or physically form a shield around it so your immune system can't reach them. There's no thought involved. | [
"Bacteria can use flagella in different ways to generate different kinds of movement. Many bacteria (such as \"E. coli\") have two distinct modes of movement: forward movement (swimming) and tumbling. The tumbling allows them to reorient and makes their movement a three-dimensional random walk. Bacterial species differ in the number and arrangement of flagella on their surface; some have a single flagellum (\"monotrichous\"), a flagellum at each end (\"amphitrichous\"), clusters of flagella at the poles of the cell (\"lophotrichous\"), while others have flagella distributed over the entire surface of the cell (\"peritrichous\"). The flagella of a unique group of bacteria, the spirochaetes, are found between two membranes in the periplasmic space. They have a distinctive helical body that twists about as it moves.\n",
"Bacteria are known to evolve specific traits to survive in their ideal environment. Bacteria-caused illnesses hinge on the bacteria’s physiology and their ability to interact with their environment, including the ability to shapeshift. Researchers discovered a protein that allows the bacterium \"Vibrio cholerae\" to morph into a corkscrew shape that likely helps it twist into — and then escape — the protective mucus that lines the inside of the gut.\n",
"Because of their ability to quickly grow and the relative ease with which they can be manipulated, bacteria are the workhorses for the fields of molecular biology, genetics and biochemistry. By making mutations in bacterial DNA and examining the resulting phenotypes, scientists can determine the function of genes, enzymes and metabolic pathways in bacteria, then apply this knowledge to more complex organisms. This aim of understanding the biochemistry of a cell reaches its most complex expression in the synthesis of huge amounts of enzyme kinetic and gene expression data into mathematical models of entire organisms. This is achievable in some well-studied bacteria, with models of \"Escherichia coli\" metabolism now being produced and tested. This understanding of bacterial metabolism and genetics allows the use of biotechnology to bioengineer bacteria for the production of therapeutic proteins, such as insulin, growth factors, or antibodies.\n",
"Bioluminescent bacteria are light-producing bacteria that are predominantly present in sea water, marine sediments, the surface of decomposing fish and in the gut of marine animals. While not as common, bacterial bioluminescence is also found in terrestrial and freshwater bacteria. These bacteria may be free living (such as \"Vibrio harveyi\") or in symbiosis with animals such as the Hawaiian Bobtail squid (\"Aliivibrio fischeri\") or terrestrial nematodes (\"Photorhabdus luminescens\"). The host organisms provide these bacteria a safe home and sufficient nutrition. In exchange, the hosts use the light produced by the bacteria for camouflage, prey and/or mate attraction. Bioluminescent bacteria have evolved symbiotic relationships with other organisms in which both participants benefit close to equally. Another possible reason bacteria use luminescence reaction is for quorum sensing, an ability to regulate gene expression in response to bacterial cell density.\n",
"The patterns of bacteria collective motion are very different from the motion pattern of an individual bacterium. When flagellated bacteria are moving in bulk liquid, where the locomotion of one individual doesn’t affect the others, this movement is called swimming. single \"Escherichia coli\" bacterium swims in a ‘run-and-tumble’ motion.\n",
"Many bacteria are motile and can move using a variety of mechanisms. The best studied of these are flagella, long filaments that are turned by a motor at the base to generate propeller-like movement. The bacterial flagellum is made of about 20 proteins, with approximately another 30 proteins required for its regulation and assembly. The flagellum is a rotating structure driven by a reversible motor at the base that uses the electrochemical gradient across the membrane for power.\n",
"Communicating with each other using a variety of chemical signals, bacteria exchange information regarding population size, a myriad of individual environmental measurements at different locations, their internal states and their phenotypic and epigenetic adjustments. The bacteria collectively sense the environment and execute distributed information processing to glean and assess relevant information. The information is then used by the bacteria for reshaping the colony while redistributing tasks and cell epigenetic differentiations, for collective decision-making and for turning on and off defense and offense mechanisms needed to thrive in competitive environments, faculties that can be perceived as social intelligence of bacteria.\n"
] |
How important was the transfer of equipment/capital that the allies gave to the USSR during World War 2? Was the USSR dependent on it? | Hello!
Another related question, how much did the supply of Allied apparel affect the combat strength of the Soviet army during the continuation war against Finland? I've heard anecdotes that one of the key reasons Finland was forced into an armistice was that the useful equipment used in the continuation war was primarily US -supplied military gear | [
"Stalin noted in 1944, that two-thirds of Soviet heavy industry had been built with the help of the United States, and the remaining one-third, with the help from other Western nations such as Great Britain and Canada. The massive transfer of equipment and skilled personnel from occupied territories helped further to boost the economic base. Without Lend-Lease aid, Soviet Union's diminished post invasion economic base would not have produced adequate supplies of weaponry, other than focus on machine tool, foodstuff and consumer goods.\n",
"Soviet reports from before the Five Year Plan found that much of the military production capacities in the Soviet Union lay in the country's war threatened Western provinces and notably the city of Leningrad. In 1931 evacuation plans for military production facilities into deeper Soviet territories were drafted beginning a policy that would accelerate and relocate deeper within the Soviet Union during World War II.\n",
"At the same time, at the war's end, the Soviet Union adopted a \"plunder policy\" of physically transporting and relocating east European industrial assets to the Soviet Union. Eastern Bloc states were required to provide coal, industrial equipment, technology, rolling stock and other resources to reconstruct the Soviet Union. Between 1945 and 1953, the Soviets received a net transfer of resources from the rest of the Eastern Bloc under this policy of roughly $14 billion, an amount comparable to the net transfer from the United States to western Europe in the Marshall Plan. \"Reparations\" included the dismantling of railways in Poland and Romanian reparations to the Soviets between 1944 and 1948 valued at $1.8 billion concurrent with the domination of SovRoms.\n",
"In accordance with the agreements with the USSR shipment of dismantled German industrial installations from the west began on March 31, 1946. By August 1947 11,100 tons of equipment had been shipped east as reparations to the Soviet Union.\n",
"The USSR urgently needed munitions, food and fuel that was provided by the U.S. and also Britain, primarily through Lend Lease. The three power kept in regular contact, with Stalin trying to maintain a veil of secrecy over internal affairs. Churchill and other top Soviets visited Moscow, as did Roosevelt's top aide Harry Hopkins. Stalin repeatedly requested that the United States and Britain open a second front on the European continent; but the Allied invasion did not occur until June 1944, more than two years later. In the meantime, the Russians suffered high casualties, and the Soviets faced the brunt of German strength. The Allies pointed out that their intensive air bombardment was a major factor that Stalin ignored. \n",
"In total 4 million tonnes of war material including food and medical supplies were delivered. The munitions totaled £308m (not including naval munitions supplied), the food and raw materials totaled £120m in 1946 index. In accordance with the Anglo-Soviet Military Supplies Agreement of June 27, 1942, military aid sent from Britain to the Soviet Union during the war was entirely free of charge.\n",
"The economy had been devastated. Roughly a quarter of the Soviet Union's capital resources were destroyed, and industrial and agricultural output in 1945 fell far short of pre-war levels. To help rebuild the country, the Soviet government obtained limited credits from Britain and Sweden; it refused assistance offered by the United States under the Marshall Plan. Instead, the Soviet Union coerced Soviet-occupied Central and Eastern Europe to supply machinery and raw materials. Germany and former Nazi satellites made reparations to the Soviet Union. The reconstruction programme emphasised heavy industry to the detriment of agriculture and consumer goods. By 1953, steel production was twice its 1940 level, but the production of many consumer goods and foodstuffs was lower than it had been in the late 1920s.\n"
] |
What would happen if a nuclear weapon was detonated next to a nuclear power plant or next to another nuclear weapon? | The only real difference would be the increased fallout and radiation from the spread of radioactive material during the explosion. The other material wouldn't achieve the critical pressures/temperatures required to set off a chain reaction and it would just get blown into the atmosphere by the blast. | [
"It is impossible for a nuclear power plant to undergo a nuclear chain reaction that results in an explosion of power comparable with a nuclear weapon, but even low-powered explosions due to uncontrolled chain reactions, that would be considered \"fizzles\" in a bomb, may still cause considerable damage and meltdown in a reactor. For example, the Chernobyl disaster involved a runaway chain reaction but the result was a low-powered steam explosion from the relatively small release of heat, as compared with a bomb. However, the reactor complex was destroyed by the heat, as well as by ordinary burning of the graphite exposed to air. Such steam explosions would be typical of the very diffuse assembly of materials in a nuclear reactor, even under the worst conditions.\n",
"Though no nuclear weapons were damaged during the fire and subsequent explosion, according to the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, had nuclear weapons detonated during the blasts, the nuclear fallout would've almost certainly reached Norway, just away.\n",
"The natural nuclear reactors formed when a uranium-rich mineral deposit became inundated with groundwater that acted as a neutron moderator, and a strong chain reaction took place. The water moderator would boil away as the reaction increased, slowing it back down again and preventing a meltdown. The fission reaction was sustained for hundreds of thousands of years.\n",
"In addition, other steps can be taken for safety. For example, power plants licensed in the United States require a negative void coefficient of reactivity (this means that if water is removed from the reactor core, the nuclear reaction will tend to shut down, not increase). This eliminates the possibility of the type of accident that occurred at Chernobyl (which was due to a positive void coefficient). However, nuclear reactors are still capable of causing smaller explosions even after complete shutdown, such as was the case of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. In such cases, residual decay heat from the core may cause high temperatures if there is loss of coolant flow, even a day after the chain reaction has been shut down (see SCRAM). This may cause a chemical reaction between water and fuel that produces hydrogen gas which can explode after mixing with air, with severe contamination consequences, since fuel rod material may still be exposed to the atmosphere from this process. However, such explosions do not happen during a chain reaction, but rather as a result of energy from radioactive beta decay, after the fission chain reaction has been stopped.\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",
"Modern nuclear reactor designs have had numerous safety improvements since the first-generation nuclear reactors. A nuclear power plant cannot explode like a nuclear weapon because the fuel for uranium reactors is not enriched enough, and nuclear weapons require precision explosives to force fuel into a small enough volume to go supercritical. Most reactors require continuous temperature control to prevent a core meltdown, which has occurred on a few occasions through accident or natural disaster, releasing radiation and making the surrounding area uninhabitable. Plants must be defended against theft of nuclear material and attack by enemy military planes or missiles, or planes hijacked by terrorists.\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"
] |
Is time quantized on extremely small (quantum) scales? | As far as we know, and according to our current models, time is continuous. There are some proposed models of quantum gravity where time is quantized at very small scales, like around the Planck scale, but we lack the experimental accuracy needed to access those scales, so as of now we can't know for sure. | [
"In special scale relativity, similar unreachable observational scales are proposed, the Planck length scale (\"l\") and the Planck time scale (\"t\"). Dilations are bounded by \"l\" and \"t\", which means that we can divide spatial or temporal intervals without end, but they will always be superior to Planck's length and time scales. This is a result of special scale relativity (see section 2.7 below). Similarly, the composition of two scale changes is inferior to the product of these two scales.\n",
"The Planck time is the unique combination of the gravitational constant , the special-relativistic constant , and the quantum constant , to produce a constant with dimension of time. Because the Planck time comes from dimensional analysis, which ignores constant factors, there is no reason to believe that exactly one unit of Planck time has any special physical significance. Rather, the Planck time represents a rough time scale at which quantum gravitational effects are likely to become important. This essentially means that while smaller units of time can exist, they are so small their effect on our existence is negligible. The nature of those effects, and the exact time scale at which they would occur, would need to be derived from an actual theory of quantum gravity.\n",
"Second quantization, also referred to as occupation number representation, is a formalism used to describe and analyze quantum many-body systems. In quantum field theory, it is known as canonical quantization, in which the fields (typically as the wave functions of matter) are thought of as field operators, in a manner similar to how the physical quantities (position, momentum, etc.) are thought of as operators in first quantization. The key ideas of this method were introduced in 1927 by Paul Dirac, and were developed, most notably, by Vladimir Fock and Pascual Jordan later.\n",
"In classical mechanics, a special status is assigned to time in the sense that it is treated as a classical background parameter, external to the system itself. This special role is seen in the standard formulation of quantum mechanics. It is regarded as part of an a priori given classical background with a well defined value. In fact, the classical treatment of time is deeply intertwined with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, and, thus, with the conceptual foundations of quantum theory: all measurements of observables are made at certain instants of time and probabilities are only assigned to such measurements.\n",
"In the same way as quantum physics differs from the classical at very small scales because of fractal effects, symmetrically, at very large scales, scale relativity also predicts that corrections from the fractality of space-time must be taken into account (see also Fig. 1).\n",
"The term \"Planck scale\" refers to the magnitudes of space, time, energy and other units, below which (or beyond which) the predictions of the Standard Model, quantum field theory and general relativity are no longer reconcilable, and quantum effects of gravity are expected to dominate. This region may be characterized by energies around (the Planck energy), time intervals around (the Planck time) and lengths around (the Planck length). At the Planck scale, current models are not expected to be a useful guide to the cosmos, and physicists have no scientific model to suggest how the physical universe behaves. The best known example is represented by the conditions in the first 10 seconds of our universe after the Big Bang, approximately 13.8 billion years ago.\n",
"To do this, in LQG theory space and time are quantized, analogously to the way quantities like energy and momentum are quantized in quantum mechanics. The theory gives a physical picture of spacetime where space and time are granular and discrete directly because of quantization just like photons in the quantum theory of electromagnetism and the discrete energy levels of atoms. A minimum distance exists.\n"
] |
why does the air from my table fan feel cold? | Sweat can be a factor (evaporation cools you, of course).
However, more commonly, it's because the air is far below your body temperature, so the more air per minute you're exposed to, the more cooling effect there is. Your body doesn't perceive external temperature, per se, but the rate and direction of heat exchange with the environment.
Air below body temperature then will always cool you. Air above body temperature will still cool you because of evaporation and sweat. However, air with a wet bulb temperature (that's basically the temperature you can reach with sweating) near body temperature is eventually fatal and the more it flows the faster you die. | [
"While fans are often used to cool people, they do not actually cool air (electric fans may warm it slightly due to the warming of their motors), but work by evaporative cooling of sweat and increased heat convection into the surrounding air due to the airflow from the fans. Thus, fans may become ineffective at cooling the body if the surrounding air is near body temperature and contains high humidity. \n",
"Unlike air conditioners, which cool rooms, fans cool people. Ceiling fans increase air speed at the occupant level, which facilitates more efficient heat rejection, cooling the occupant, rather than the space. Elevated air speed increases the rate of convective and evaporative heat loss from the body, thus making the occupant feel cooler without changing the dry bulb temperature of the air. \n",
"On human skin, the airflow from handfans increases evaporation which has a cooling effect due to the latent heat of evaporation of water. It also increases heat convection by displacing the warmer air produced by body heat that surrounds the skin. Fans are convenient to carry around, especially folding fans.\n",
"Fans are used to move air through the computer case. The components inside the case cannot dissipate heat efficiently if the surrounding air is too hot. Case fans may be placed as \"intake fans\", drawing cooler outside air in through the front or bottom of the chassis (where it may also be drawn over the internal hard drive racks), or \"exhaust fans\", expelling warm air through the top or rear. Some ATX tower cases have one or more additional vents and mounting points in the left side panel where one or more fans may be installed to blow cool air directly onto the motherboard components and expansion cards, which are among the largest heat sources.\n",
"Some convective heaters use a fan to help circulate warm air throughout a room. Their heating elements are metal or ceramic and are in direct contact with room air, allowing fan heaters to warm a room quickly.\n",
"A fan heater, also called a forced convection heater, is a kind of convection heater that includes an electric fan to speed up the airflow. They operate with considerable noise caused by the fan. They have a moderate risk of ignition hazard if they make unintended contact with furnishings. Their advantage is that they are more compact than heaters that use natural convection and are also cost-efficient for portable and small room heating systems.\n",
"BULLET::::- Evening: temperatures outside drop. The warm internal air is vented through chimneys, assisted by fans but also rising naturally because it is less dense, and drawing in denser cool air at the bottom of the building.\n"
] |
paying a copay instead of full deductible. | Your policy will tell you when the copay applies, and when the deductible applies. You need to check there, as almost every policy is different.
With that said, typically things like normal visits (annual physicals, OB/GYN visits, etc.) only require the copay, while unscheduled emergency count against your deductible. | [
"A copayment or copay is a fixed amount for a covered service, paid by a patient to the provider of service before receiving the service. It may be defined in an insurance policy and paid by an insured person each time a medical service is accessed. It is technically a form of coinsurance, but is defined differently in health insurance where a coinsurance is a percentage payment after the deductible up to a certain limit. It must be paid before any policy benefit is payable by an insurance company. Copayments do not usually contribute towards any policy out-of-pocket maxima whereas coinsurance payments do. \n",
"A Deferred expense or prepayment, prepaid expense, plural often prepaids, is an asset representing cash paid out to a counterpart for goods or services to be received in a later accounting period. For example, if a service contract is paid quarterly in advance, at the end of the first month of the period two months remain as a deferred expense. In the deferred expense the early payment is accompanied by a related recognized expense in the subsequent accounting period, and the same amount is deducted from the prepayment. The deferred expense shares characteristics with accrued revenue (or \"accrued assets\") with the difference that an asset to be covered later are proceeds from a delivery of goods or services, at which such income item is earned and the related revenue item is recognized, while cash for them is to be received in a later period, when its amount is deducted from \"accrued revenues\".\n",
"A second requirement is that all applications for refunds must be made by a date defined by the plan. If funds are forfeited, this does not eliminate the requirement to pay taxes on these funds if such taxes are required. For example, if a single person elects to withhold $5,000 for child care expenses and gets married to a non-working spouse, the $5,000 would become taxable. If this person did not submit claims by the required date, the $5,000 would be forfeited but taxes would still be owed on the amount.\n",
"Some taxpayers pay their taxes, but include protest letters along with their tax forms. Others pay in a protesting form — for instance, by writing their cheque on a toilet seat or a mock-up of a missile. Others pay in a way that creates inconvenience for the collector — for instance, by paying the entire amount in low-denomination coins. This last method is less effective in countries where small coins are legal tender only in limited amounts, allowing the tax authority legally to reject such payments; for example in England and Wales, 1p coins are legal tender only in amounts up to 20p.\n",
"A payment in lieu of taxes (usually abbreviated as PILOT, or sometimes as PILT) is a payment made to compensate a government for some or all of the property tax revenue lost due to tax exempt ownership or use of real property.\n",
"He then observed that, in order to avoid over-compensation, a claim for restitution of money paid on a total failure of consideration will succeed only if accompanied by counter-restitution of benefits bargained for and received by the claimant.\n",
"Deferred compensation is an arrangement in which a portion of an employee's income is paid out at a later date after which the income was earned. Examples of deferred compensation include pensions, retirement plans, and employee stock options. The primary benefit of most deferred compensation is the deferral of tax to the date(s) at which the employee receives the income.\n"
] |
In Battlefield 1 the military phonetic alphabet is quite a bit differnt as we know it today (Apples instead of Alpha, Butter instead of Bravo, etc). When was it changed into what it is today? Why was it changed? Or does Battlefield's version have no basis on historical reality? | Yes, this is based in history. The British went through numerous versions of the phonetic alphabet and during the WWI period, it was indeed Apples, Butter, Charlie, Duff, etc. [Tables here](_URL_0_)
Due to issues with differences in the phonetic alphabet, and difficulty in pronouncing certain words, after WW2, the newly formed International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) drafted up a new phonetic alphabet, which is frequently called the NATO alphabet as NATO was one of the first major organizations to adopt it in full for all of its militaries. [History here from ICAO](_URL_1_) | [
"The Allied military phonetic spelling alphabets prescribe the words that are used to represent each letter of the alphabet, when spelling other words out loud, letter-by-letter, and how the spelling words should be pronounced. They are not a \"phonetic alphabet\" in the sense in which that term is used in phonetics, i.e. they are not a system for transcribing speech sounds.\n",
"As seen in the comparative chart below, the U.S. Army ranks during World War II were not abbreviated the same as they currently are today having all letters capitalized. Rather, only the first letter was capitalized, followed by the rest of the abbreviated word in the lower case, and a period to indicate it as being an abbreviation. In some cases, two or more letters were capitalized with a slash mark after the first letter to indicate that there was more than one word in the full title of the rank. See the comparative chart below.\n",
"Throughout World War II, many nations used their own versions of a spelling alphabet. The U.S. adopted the Joint Army/Navy radiotelephony alphabet during 1941 to standardize systems among all branches of its armed forces. The U.S. alphabet became known as \"Able Baker\" after the words for A and B. The Royal Air Force adopted one similar to the United States one during World War II as well. Other British forces adopted the RAF radio alphabet, which is similar to the phonetic alphabet used by the Royal Navy during World War I. At least two of the terms are sometimes still used by UK civilians to spell words over the phone, namely \"F for Freddie\" and \"S for Sugar\".\n",
"The first non-military internationally recognized spelling alphabet was adopted by the CCIR (predecessor of the ITU) during 1927. The experience gained with that alphabet resulted in several changes being made during 1932 by the ITU. The resulting alphabet was adopted by the International Commission for Air Navigation, the predecessor of the ICAO, and was used for civil aviation until World War II. It continued to be used by the IMO until 1965.\n",
"During World War I both the British Army and the Royal Navy had developed their own quite separate spelling alphabets. The Navy system was a full alphabet, starting: \"Apples, Butter, Charlie, Duff, Edward\", but the RAF alphabet was based on that of the \"signalese\" of the army signallers. This was not a full alphabet, but differentiated only the letters most frequently misunderstood: \"Ack (originally \"Ak\"), Beer (or Bar), C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, eMma, N, O, Pip, Q, R, eSses, Toc, U, Vic, W, X, Y, Z\".\n",
"The oldest and classical form of the alphabet is \"\" (); the name is thought to derive from the Greek adjective (\"strongúlē\") 'round'. Although ʾEsṭrangēlā is no longer used as the main script for writing Syriac, it has undergone some revival since the 10th century.\n",
"The Allied military radiotelephone spelling alphabets were created prior to World War I and evolved separately in the United States and the United Kingdom—and separately among the individual military services in the two countries—until being merged during World War II. The last WWII spelling alphabet continued to be used through the Korean War, being replaced in 1956 as a result of both countries adopting the ICAO/ITU Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, with the NATO members calling their usage the \"NATO Phonetic Alphabet\".\n"
] |
what exactly do the brackets mean when used in interviews like this: "[we want to] change social attitudes toward downloading." | I often see it used to add words the speaker left out. A sentence like "They have a right to happiness" doesn't confer the idea of the speaker without more context so it might be quoted in print as "[Gays] have the right to happiness". It's used to show added or substituted words for clarity. When used properly it will add understanding without changing the intent of the statement. | [
"The process can isolate the words and phrases used most frequently within a given time period, as well as indicate whether usage is trending up or down. This information is useful for supervisors, analysts, and others in an organization to spot changes in consumer behavior and take action to reduce call volumes—and increase customer satisfaction. It allows insight into a customer's thought process, which in turn creates an opportunity for companies to make adjustments.\n",
"Social media lets users to provide feedback on the content produced by users of social media websites, by means of commenting on or liking the content shared by others and annotating their own-created content via tagging. This newly introduced metadata by social media helps to obtain recommendations for social media content with improved effectiveness. Also, social media lets to extract the explicit relationship between users such as friendship and people followed/followers. This provides further improvement on collaborative filtering systems because now users can have judgement on the recommendations provided based on the people they have relationships. There have been studies showing the effectiveness of recommendation systems which utilize relationships among users on social media compared to traditional collaborative filtering based systems, specifically for movie and book recommendation. Another improvement brought by social media to recommender systems is solving the cold start problem for new users.\n",
"The Opinion Stage widget optionally makes use of social polling and voting (people use their social network identities to vote), intended to promote social sharing, drive social traffic to the site, improve voting authenticity, and facilitate demographic filtering.\n",
"Users can sort comments and posts in a subject by time or score. Default biographies for new users display a randomly chosen quotation about the importance of free speech. Users also have the option to \"mute\" other users and terms. The default profile picture for new users to the site features NPC Wojak, a meme popular on far-right sites. The site offers its users an option to delete their entire posting history in a single click.\n",
"\"The People's Platform\" was created to document how the internet has been instrumental in wiping out the \"cultural industry’s middle classes\" and that the middle class has been \"replaced by new cultural plantations ruled over by the West Coast aggregators.\"\n",
"5. Remarketing: Remarketing plays a major role in digital marketing. This tactic allows marketers to publish targeted ads in front of an interest category or a defined audience, generally called searchers in web speak, they have either searched for particular products or services or visited a website for some purpose.\n",
"There are other related uses of social media aggregators aside from simplifying the user's social networking experiences. Some aggregators are designed to help companies (and bloggers) improve engagement with their brand(s) by creating aggregated social streams that can be embedded into an existing website and customized to look visually intrinsic to the site. This allows potential customers to interact with all the social media posts maintained by the brand without requiring them to jump from site to site. This has the benefit of keeping customers on the brand's site for a longer period of time (increasing \"time on site\" metrics).\n"
] |
When did Europeans figure out that certain birds were migratory and where did they think the birds migrated to? Where did they believe the birds went in winter before that? | Pliny the Elder in Natural History seems well aware of bird migration in the first century AD. He claims cranes fly from the east of India:
> The tracts over which they travel must be immense, if we only consider that they come all the way from the Eastern Sea.
But he doesn’t know where storks come from:
> Up to the present time it has not been ascertained from what place the storks come, or whither they go when they leave us. There can be no doubt but that, like the cranes, they come from a very great distance, the cranes being our winter, the storks our summer, guests.
He thinks swallows don’t migrate that far:
> The swallow, the only bird that is carnivorous among those which have not hooked talons, takes its departure also during the winter months; but it only goes to neighbouring countries, seeking sunny retreats there on the mountain sides; sometimes they have been found in such spots bare and quite unfledged.
…and claims the thrush winters in the north, not the south:
> they are often to be seen in places where they seek their food during the winter: hence it is that in winter, more especially, the thrush is so often to be seen in Germany.
Pliny also points out that geese and swans migrate, and interestingly even knows the V-formation makes for easier flying.
> The flocks, forming a point, move along with great impetus, much, indeed, after the manner of our Liburnian beaked galleys; and it is by doing so that they are enabled to cleave the air more easily than if they presented to it a broad front. The flight gradually enlarges in the rear, much in the form of a wedge, presenting a vast surface to the breeze, as it impels them onward; those that follow place their necks on those that go before, while the leading birds, as they become weary, fall to the rear.
Pliny actually categorises some birds on their migration, or non-migration, which you can see in [Book X](_URL_0_).
| [
"This ' was crucial in understanding the migration of European birds. Before migration was understood, people had no explanation for the sudden annual disappearance of birds like the white stork and barn swallow. Some theories of the time held that they turned into mice, or hibernated at the bottom of the sea during the winter, and such theories were even propagated by zoologists of the time. The ' in particular proved that birds migrate long distances to wintering grounds.\n",
"Before the phenomenon of animal migration was understood, various folklore and erroneous explanations sprang up to account for the disappearance or sudden arrival of birds in an area. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle proposed that robins turned into redstarts when summer arrived. The barnacle goose was explained in European Medieval bestiaries and manuscripts as either growing like fruit on trees, or developing from goose barnacles on pieces of driftwood. Another example is the swallow, which was once thought, even by naturalists such as Gilbert White, to hibernate either underwater, buried in muddy riverbanks, or in hollow trees.\n",
"Migration of species such as storks, turtle doves, and swallows was recorded as many as 3,000 years ago by Ancient Greek authors, including Homer and Aristotle, and in the Book of Job. More recently, Johannes Leche began recording dates of arrivals of spring migrants in Finland in 1749, and modern scientific studies have used techniques including bird ringing and satellite tracking to trace migrants. Threats to migratory birds have grown with habitat destruction especially of stopover and wintering sites, as well as structures such as power lines and wind farms.\n",
"In continental Europe the distance travelled is greater, commonly somewhere between but exceptionally , with ringed birds from the Netherlands ending up in Spain and in Ukraine. In the United States, dispersal is typically over distances of , with the most travelled individuals ending up some from the point of origin. Movements in the African continent include from Senegambia to Sierra Leone and up to within South Africa. In Australia there is some migration as the birds move towards the northern coast in the dry season and southward in the wet, and also nomadic movements in association with rodent plagues. Occasionally, some of these birds turn up on Norfolk Island, Lord Howe Island or New Zealand, showing that crossing the ocean is not beyond their capabilities. In 2008, barn owls were recorded for the first time breeding in New Zealand. The barn owl has been successfully introduced into the Hawaiian island of Kauai in an attempt to control rodents, however it has been found to also feed on native birds.\n",
"BULLET::::- Migration is a common effect of winter upon animals, notably birds. However, the majority of birds do not migrate—the cardinal and European robin, for example. Some butterflies also migrate seasonally.\n",
"In warmer locations, most birds are permanent residents; northern populations, including many European birds, migrate to Africa and southern Asia to over-winter there. The birds may also wander north in late summer after the breeding season, and their tendency to disperse may have assisted in the recent expansion of the bird's range. At one time common in Western Europe, it was hunted extensively in the 19th century to provide plumes for the decoration of hats and became locally extinct in northwestern Europe and scarce in the south. Around 1950, conservation laws were introduced in southern Europe to protect the species and their numbers began to increase. By the beginning of the 21st century the bird was breeding again in France, the Netherlands, Ireland and Britain. Its range is continuing to expand westward, and the species has begun to colonise the New World; it was first seen in Barbados in 1954 and first bred there in 1994. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has assessed the bird's global conservation status as being of \"least concern\".\n",
"While migrating, these birds have been reported travelling through middle America, Florida, the West Indies, Cuba, the Caribbean and Bermuda, finally completing their journey in the wintering grounds of South America, primarily Argentina.\n"
] |
how does a plant 'know' how old it is? | It doesn't. Plants don't age the way animals do. They show symptoms of aging as their structure becomes too large and woody to carry out its functions, but their growing cells are no older now than they were when it first sprouted. There are plants that have been cloning themselves for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, and other plants that could live forever unless something kills them. | [
"\"Dioscorea chouardii\" is related to the yam and grows from a tuber hidden in the rock fissure. From this it sends out a shoot each year which withers away in the autumn. The shoot leaves a scar on the tuber, which makes it possible to estimate the age of the plant from the number of scars; the oldest plants are calculated to have lived for three hundred years, and may be contenders for being the \"slowest growing plants in the world\". The plant reproduces by seed, pollination having been performed by ants. When fertilised, the flower-stem bends over to bury the resulting seedhead in the crack, the seeds being released when it dries. This would limit dispersal possibilities for the plant were it not for the fact that the seeds are transported by ants, which distributes them more widely.\n",
"It is generally olive green, yellowish or reddish green in colour, with reddish stems and branches. These often form branches up to 20 cm long, with current year's growth starting from near the middle of the previous year's branch. This produces feathery fronds in steps. It is possible to estimate the age of a plant by counting the steps - a new level being produced each year. This form of growth enables the species to \"climb\" over other mosses and forest debris that falls on it. It is shade-loving, grows in soil and humus and on decaying wood and often forms mats with living parts growing on top of older, dead or dying sections. Further south, the plants are larger with several steps; further north, in the arctic tundra, the plants are smaller with few steps.\n",
"Carbon dating has found that these plants range from approximately 120–330 years of age and this research also found that populations are heavily skewed towards older plants, meaning there has been little or no replacement in these populations since the introduction of grazing animals in the 1860s.\n",
"It could be aged by counting growth-rings or clump diameter, and on this basis, many Canadian plants are thought to live to over a century or two. See also the thesis by R. Day at Memorial University Newfoundland.\n",
"A plant fossil is any preserved part of a plant that has long since died. Such fossils may be prehistoric impressions that are many millions of years old, or bits of charcoal that are only a few hundred years old. Prehistoric plants are various groups of plants that lived before recorded history (before about 3500 BC).\n",
"They grow slowly at early stage. Later, they grow 1 m/year and the growth rate declines as they become old. Its lifespan is 10 to 20 years. According to the record, the species is not weedy. Reproduction can be enhanced by disturbing the soil close to seed-bearing plants before the seasonal rain begins.\n",
"One school of thought places an age or date point on the cultivars. For instance, one school says the cultivar must be over 100 years old, others 50 years, and others prefer the date of 1945, which marks the end of World War II and roughly the beginning of widespread hybrid use by growers and seed companies. Many gardeners consider 1951 to be the latest year a plant could have originated and still be called an heirloom, since that year marked the widespread introduction of the first hybrid varieties. It was in the 1970s that hybrid seeds began to proliferate in the commercial seed trade. Some heirloom varieties are much older; some are apparently pre-historic.\n"
] |
how does a park like disneyland know when everyone has left the park. | They actually have an after hours crew of around 600 that maintain the park. If someone were left behind, they'd be caught. | [
"According to modern legend, Walt Disney was bothered by the sight of a cowboy walking through California Disneyland's Tomorrowland en route to his post in Frontierland. He felt that such a sight was jarring, and detracted from the guest experience. Since the California Disneyland was small, such a tunnel system could not be feasibly implemented. When the new Florida Disney park was being planned, engineers designed utilidors to keep park operations out of guests' sight.\n",
"The park contains many design nods inspired by Disneyland: The entrance has a train station with two tunnels (on the left- and right-hand side) leading into the Main Street area, just like at Disneyland or Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom (and also similar to many other parks built since Disneyland opened in 1955); over in Outlaw Gulch, there are several tombstones that have virtually the same wording as tombstones outside of Walt Disney World's Haunted Mansion attraction; the rocking pirate ship (Galleon) has played a soundtrack that included splashing water and an excerpt from the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song, \"Yo Ho\". Adventureland is a theme area of its own at Disneyland. The different themed areas in Adventureland are:\n",
"They meet the park's caretaker, a weird-looking old man, who shouts at them to leave, warning them that the park is haunted. They do not believe him and return to the park again at night, thinking that the old man is asleep. While waiting, Ka-ho tells them that he heard that the park used to be a cemetery before it was built. Strange things start to happen when they split up to find Alan. Ka-ho sees something on his camera recorder and follows it into the Haunted House. One hour later, when everyone comes back to the meeting point, they see that Ka-ho is missing too. They split up into two groups again to find him. Ken and Pinky take a ride on the carousel but it starts spinning at a fast speed on its own. Ken manages to jump off the carousel but accidentally knocks Pinky out in the process. Shan is left behind with Pinky while Ken runs away in fear and almost dies from being drowned by a ghost. His crucifix saves him but does not prevent him from being decapitated on a wire later on. Pinky is possessed and dies after slitting her wrist. Shan is apparently killed after being strangled by the possessed Pinky but his lucky charm saves him. Yen, YY and Dan enter the Haunted House and the wax figures inside come to life and attack them. YY is killed by the figurines while Dan dies after being set on fire by the ghosts.\n",
"The first incarnation of the Backlot Tour loaded at the former entrance to The Magic of Disney Animation. The original tour was far longer and more elaborate than the final version. The former tour originally drove through New York Street/Streets of America. However, due to the surprise popularity of the park, New York Street was removed from the tour and made into a public walking space within the first few years of operation. It remained open to pedestrians until April 2, 2016 when Streets of America closed. After driving through New York Street, the tram drove to Catastrophe Canyon.\n",
"Disneyland is a theme park in Anaheim, California conceived by Walt Disney. This is a list of attractions – rides, shows, shops and parades – that have appeared at the park but have permanently closed. Character meets and atmosphere entertainment (e.g., roving musicians) are not listed. Also not listed are permanently closed attractions from Disney California Adventure.\n",
"RealSouthPark.com, a 1999 website that examined real-life people and places that may have inspired \"South Park\" episodes, suggested the settings in \"Pinkeye\" may have been inspired by a supposedly haunted hotel in Fairplay, Colorado, a Park County town that serves as the basis for the South Park location within the show. In a review of the site, however, \"The Australian\" suggested the interpretation was unlikely, since the hotel is rumored to be haunted by ghosts, not zombies.\n",
"In the 1990s, while Disneyland was undergoing a significant expansion project surrounding the construction of Disney California Adventure Park, the city undertook a project of its own in the area surrounding the Disney property and Anaheim Convention Center. The project included removing the colorful neon signs and replacing them with shorter, more modest signs, as well as widening the arterial streets in the area into tree-lined boulevards. The name \"Anaheim Resort\" was coined to refer to the area.\n"
] |
What was the first democracy where over 50% of the population could vote? | Do you mean "where over 50% of the adult population could vote"?
Since in most democracies approximately half the adult population are women, your question can be re-phrased as which democracy first had both, broad adult suffrage and women voters? That would be the British colony of New Zealand in 1893, followed by the colony of South Australia in 1894 and then the Commonwealth of Australia (no longer a colony) in 1903. | [
"The earliest known direct democracy is said to be the Athenian democracy in the 5th century BC, although it was not an inclusive democracy: women, foreigners, and slaves were excluded from it. The main bodies in the Athenian democracy were the assembly, composed of male citizens; the boulê, composed of 500 citizens; and the law courts, composed of a massive number of jurors chosen by lot, with no judges. There were only about 30,000 male citizens, but several thousand of them were politically active in each year, and many of them quite regularly for years on end. The Athenian democracy was \"direct\" not only in the sense that decisions were made by the assembled people, but also in the sense that the people through the assembly, boulê, and law courts controlled the entire political process, and a large proportion of citizens were involved constantly in the public business. Modern democracies, being representative, not direct, do not resemble the Athenian system.\n",
"Most elections in the early history of democracy were held using plurality voting or some variant, but as an exception, the state of Venice in the 13th century adopted approval voting to elect their Great Council.\n",
"In the last decades of the 19th century, the United States, much of Europe, and neighboring Argentina expanded the right to vote. Brazil, however, moved to restrict access to the polls. In 1874, in a population of about 10 million, the franchise was held by about one million , but in 1881 this had been cut to 145,296. This reduction was one reason the Empire's legitimacy foundered, but the Republic did not move to correct the situation. By 1910 there were only 627,000 voters in a population of 22 million. Throughout the 1920s, only between 2.3% and 3.4% of the total population could vote.\n",
"342 million people were eligible to vote, the second-largest democratic electorate in the world after India. It was the biggest transnational direct election in history, and the 10 new member states elected MEPs for the first time. The new (6th) Parliament consisted of 732 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs).\n",
"After 1800 the limitations on democracy were systematically removed; property qualifications for state voters were largely eliminated in the 1820s. The initiative, referendum, recall, and other devices of direct democracy became widely accepted at the state and local level in the 1910s; and senators were made directly electable by the people in 1913. The last restrictions on black voting were made illegal in 1965.\n",
"The emergence of modern democracy generally began with male citizens obtaining the right to vote in advance of female citizens, except in the Kingdom of Hawai'i, where universal manhood and women's suffrage was introduced in 1840; however, a constitutional amendment in 1852 rescinded female voting and put property qualifications on male voting.\n",
"The emergence of modern democracy generally began with male citizens obtaining the right to vote in advance of female citizens, except in the Kingdom of Hawai'i, where universal manhood and women's suffrage was introduced in 1840; however, a constitutional amendment in 1852 rescinded female voting and put property qualifications on male voting.\n"
] |
why not everybody is capable of moving their ears and other body parts? | Some of it is due to lack of practice and realizing you can. Physical therapy for instance helps people locate weakened or atrophied muscles using electrical stimulation so you can find them and learn to use them again.
So for those that can raise a single eyebrow or whatnot, it comes with practice.
For something like wiggling your ears, not everyone can do that. The muscles responsible for that are vestigial in many people, from the time that we could move our ears in response to sound. They did experiments highlighting that sound does activate those muscles in everyone, but very few could actually move their ears with said muscles, because they usually just don't work. I'm sure there are a few other muscles that are similar as far as genetics go. | [
"The ears of a macaque monkey and most other monkeys have far more developed muscles than those of humans, and therefore have the capability to move their ears to better hear potential threats. Humans and other primates such as the orangutan and chimpanzee however have ear muscles that are minimally developed and non-functional, yet still large enough to be identifiable. A muscle attached to the ear that cannot move the ear, for whatever reason, can no longer be said to have any biological function. In humans there is variability in these muscles, such that some people are able to move their ears in various directions, and it can be possible for others to gain such movement by repeated trials. In such primates, the inability to move the ear is compensated mainly by the ability to turn the head on a horizontal plane, an ability which is not common to most monkeys—a function once provided by one structure is now replaced by another.\n",
"Some large primates such as gorillas and orang-utans (and also humans) have undeveloped ear muscles that are non-functional vestigial structures, yet are still large enough to be easily identified. An ear muscle that cannot move the ear, for whatever reason, has lost that biological function. This serves as evidence of homology between related species. In humans, there is variability in these muscles, such that some people are able to move their ears in various directions, and it has been said that it may be possible for others to gain such movement by repeated trials. In such primates, the inability to move the ear is compensated for mainly by the ability to easily turn the head on a horizontal plane, an ability which is not common to most monkeys—a function once provided by one structure is now replaced by another.\n",
"Ear wiggling is movement of the external ear using the three muscles which are attached to it forward, above and behind. Some mammals have good control of these muscles, which they use to twitch and orient their ears, but humans usually find this difficult. J. H. Bair conducted experiments on humans, using a kymograph to measure their ear movements. He found that only two out of twelve subjects had any voluntary control at the start but that the others could acquire this by training with an early form of biofeedback.\n",
"A person with normal hearing can experience this by sticking their fingers into their ears and talking. Otherwise, this effect is often experienced by hearing aid users who only have a mild to moderate high-frequency hearing loss, but use hearing aids which block the entire ear canal.\n",
"Adaptation in the central nervous system through \"neural-plasticity\" or biological maturation over time does not improve the performance of monaural listening. In addition to conventional methods for improving the performance of the impaired ear, there are also hearing aids adapted to unilateral hearing loss which are of very limited effectiveness due to the fact that they don't restore the binaural hearing ability.\n",
"An \"afferent nerve\" is a sensory nerve that conveys impulses from the skin and other sensory organs to the spine and the brain. \"Deafferentation\" is a surgical procedure in which the spinal cord is opened up and the sensory nerves cut so that these impulses do not reach the brain. A monkey whose limbs have been deafferented will not feel them, or even be able to sense where they are in space. At his trial in 1981, Taub told the court that deafferented monkeys are notoriously difficult to look after, because they regard their deafferented limbs as foreign objects, mutilating them and trying to chew them off. Taub continued working with deafferented monkeys at New York University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1970. Engaged in what he saw at first as pure research, he conducted several kinds of deafferentation experiments. He deafferented monkeys' entire bodies, so that they could feel no part of themselves. He deafferented them at birth. He removed monkey fetuses from the uterus, deafferented them, then returned them to be born with no sense of their own bodies.\n",
"Ineffective listeners are unaware of non-verbal cues, though they dramatically affect how people listen. To a certain extent, it is also a perceptual barrier. Up to 93 percent of people's attitudes are formed by non-verbal cues. This should help one to avoid undue influence from non-verbal communication. In most cases, the listener does not understand the non-verbal cues the speaker uses. A person may show fingers to emphasize a point, but this may be perceived as an intent by the speaker to place their fingers in the listener's eyes. Overuse of non-verbal cues also creates distortion, and as a result listeners may be confused and forget the correct meaning.\n"
] |
How did Imperial Germany Treat its Minorities? | I'm mostly familiar with things from the minority-side of things, not the German side. But Imperial Germany did emancipate its Jews, giving them political rights, along with other countries during this era. This (along with the enlightenment) produced new religious movements in Judaism, particularly the Reform movement. The result of this was that Jews tried to re-identify themselves as "Germans of the Mosaic faith" (the same nationality and ethnicity as their neighbors, but a different religion). This meant that Jews in Imperial Germany were meaningfully participating in German society, which at the time was fairly new in Europe (but was occurring at roughly the same time in Europe). German Jews started to be more German culturally, and started replacing Western Yiddish with High German. [This guy](_URL_1_) is a good example of a proponent of this.
I really don't know to what extent this was encouraged by the German government, but given that they emancipated the Jews I imagine it was. So they essentially wanted to incorporate the Jews into being a sub-grouping of Germans, rather than a group on their own. Of course, the pendulum ultimately swung the other way, and in the early 1900s the dualling philosophies among the Jewish thinkers were whether Jews ought to be part of nationalist movements (adopting the national identity of their countries of residence. Note that non-Jewish nationalists sometimes opposed this) or develop a Jewish nationalist movement, namely Zionism. Various events and convincing writers caused the latter to become dominant in the end, but in Imperial Germany the two views were very much both present, with the former being dominant.
edit: See [here](_URL_2_) and [here](_URL_0_) for sources and more information | [
"\"Volksdeutsche\" (ethnic Germans) topped the list as a category. They comprised people without German citizenship but of German ancestry living outside Germany (unlike German expatriates). Though \"Volksdeutsche\" did not hold German citizenship, the strengthening and development of ethnic German communities throughout east-central Europe formed an integral part of the Nazi vision for the creation of Greater Germany (\"Großdeutschland\"). In some areas, such as Romania, Croatia, and Yugoslavia/Serbia, ethnic Germans were legally recognised in legislation as privileged groups.\n",
"This is in contrast to Imperial Germans (\"Reichsdeutsche\"), German citizens living within Germany. The term \"Volksdeutsche\" also contrasted from 1936 with the term \"Auslandsdeutsche\" (Germans abroad, German expatriates), which generally denoted German citizens residing in other countries. The difference between \"Imperial German\" and \"Ethnic German\" (\"Volksdeutsche\") was that those designated Ethnic-German did not have paperwork proving their legal citizenship to work or vote within Germany, though some were either from Germany or from territories that had been lost by Germany during or after World War I.\n",
"Late-19th-century Germans in Austria-Hungary, as a general rule, wanted the Empire to maintain its German character established during the period of Germanization under Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor in the late 18th century, so they resisted the demands of the other ethnic groups for linguistic recognition. Badeni's ordinance was seen by Germans as the \"last straw\" in a series of concessions. Badeni was not prepared for the level of animosity the Germans in Bohemia and elsewhere in the Empire directed at him due to his reform.\n",
"Peukert wrote that when faced with the same financial contains that their predecessors in the Imperial and Weimar periods had faced, social workers, teachers, professors and doctors in the Third Reich began to advocate plans to ensure that the genes of the \"racially unfit\" would not be passed on to the next generation, first via sterilization and then by killing them. Furthermore, Peukert argued that \"völkisch\" racism was part of a male backlash against women's emancipation, and was a way of asserting control over women's bodies, which were viewed in a certain sense as public property since women had the duty of bearing the next generation that would pass on the \"healthy genes\". Peukert maintained that as the bearers of the next generation of Germans that Nazi social policies fell especially heavily upon German women. Peukert argued that for \"volksgenossenlinnen\" (female \"national comrades\"), any hint of non-conformity and the \"pleasures of refusal\" in not playing their designated role within the \"volksgemeinschaft\" as the bearers of the next generation of soldiers could expect harsh punishments such as sterilization, incarceration in a concentration camp or for extreme case \"vernichtung\" (\"extermination\"). Peukert wrote that \"after 1933 any critical public discussion and any critique of racism in the human sciences from amongst the ranks of the experts was eliminated: from then on, the protective...instances of the \"Rechstaat\" (legal state) no longer stood between the racist perpetrators and their victims; from then on, the dictatorial state put itself solely on the side of racism\". Peukert argued that all of the National Socialist social policies such as natalist policies that relentlessly pressured Aryan women to have more and children were all part of the same effort to strengthen the \"volksgemeinschaft\". Peukert argued that despite a turn towards Social Darwinism when confronted with the failure of the welfare state to solve all social problems in the 1920s, that it was the democratic Weimar constitution that had provided a thin legal wedge that prevented the full implications of this from being worked out.\n",
"German nationalists used the existence of large German minorities in other countries as a basis for territorial claims. Many of the propaganda themes of the Nazi regime against Czechoslovakia and Poland claimed that the ethnic Germans (\"Volksdeutsche\") in those territories were persecuted. There were many incidents of persecution of Germans in the interwar period, including the French invasion of Germany proper in the 1920s.\n",
"The multi-ethnic Habsburg Monarchy, Austrian Empire and eventually Austro-Hungarian Empire should therefore not be reduced to the German parts of the empire. There were large ethnic or religious minorities in nearly all regional capitals, like Prague, Budapest or Vienna—microcosmi with their own traditions and characteristics.\n",
"The process of Germanization of other ethnic groups was complex. It included direct and indirect Germanization. Old Prussians were welcomed with the same civil rights as Germans after they were converted, while the Old Prussian nobility waited to receive their rights. There were about nine thousand farms left empty after the plague of 1709, remedied by the Great East Colonization. Its final stage was 1736–1756. Germans revived the farms vacated by the plagues. Thus, the percentage of Germans increased to 13.4 percent in the Prussian villages and neighboring Lithuania, also stricken by the plague. By 1800, most Prussian-Lithuanians were literate and bilingual in Lithuanian and German. There was no forced Germanization, even before 1873. After Germany was unified in 1871, Lithuanians were influenced by German culture, leading to the teaching of German in schools—a practice common throughout northern and eastern Europe. The Germanization of Lithuania accelerated in the second half of the 19th century, when German was made compulsory in the education system at all levels, although newspapers and books were freely published and church services were held in the Lithuanian language even during the German occupation of WWII. At the same time, Lithuanian periodicals were printed in the areas bordering German Prussia, such as \"Auszra\" or \"Varpas\". Between World Wars one and two, in the countries liberated by the Treaty of Lithuanian Brest, Russian and Jewish communists printed seditious literature in native languages until 1933.\n"
] |
why is ford's stock (~$30) significantly cheaper than nissan's stock (~$1,100)? | Prices of individual shares are not as relevant as the overall market cap of the company. Share prices can be driven downward by having stock splits, which most companies do when the per share price becomes high. | [
"According to the \"Forbes\" magazine, Ford was the 371st richest person in the United States in 2013, with an approximate net worth of $1.4 billion. He reportedly owned in Ford Motor Company: 6.7 million shares of Class B stock and 26.3 million common shares; making him the largest single shareholder.\n",
"In 2000, Ford held 14.9% of the market share, ranking second in the market. Market participation was 13.4% in cars and 18.9% in trucks; where Ford maintains leadership, production volume was 56.300 units. Ford ranked first among automotive manufacturers regarding exports.\n",
"On October 21, Tracinda sold the 7.3 million Ford shares at an average price of $2.43, and said it planned to cut further its existing 6.1 percent stake in Ford, for a potential total loss of more than half a billion dollars. Kerkorian sold his remaining stake in Ford on December 29, 2008.\n",
"By the second quarter of 2005, Hertz produced about ten percent of Ford's overall pre-tax profit. However, after 18 years of ownership, the Ford Motor Company announced it would be selling the Hertz brand with the intent to focus more on building Ford cars and trucks. Private equities Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, The Carlyle Group, and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity agreed to purchase all shares of common stock in Hertz for an estimated US$15 billion, including debt, and the business itself for US$5.6 billion in 2005.\n",
"By 1916, the Ford Motor Company had accumulated a capital surplus of $60 million. The price of the Model T, Ford's mainstay product, had been successively cut over the years while the wages of the workers had dramatically, and quite publicly, increased. The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to end special dividends for shareholders in favor of massive investments in new plants that would enable Ford to dramatically increase production, and the number of people employed at his plants, while continuing to cut the costs and prices of his cars. In public defense of this strategy, Ford declared:\n",
"Ford projected sales of 16,000 to 20,000 units per year. These targets were never met, although for the first two years they came close, with over 25,000 units sold. The car continued to struggle to establish its identity in the North American market, both with the public and with dealers.\n",
"According to Tesla, with 5,428 units sold in the U.S. in the third quarter of 2016, the Model X captured a 6% market share of the luxury SUV market segment, outselling Porsche and Land Rover, but behind seven SUV models manufactured by Mercedes, BMW, Cadillac, Volvo, Audi, and Lexus. With an estimated 9,500 units delivered worldwide during the fourth quarter of 2016, global sales in 2016 totaled 25,312 Model X cars, allowing the Model X to rank seventh among the world's top ten best-selling plug-in cars just in its first full year in the market.\n"
] |
What discoveries in the natural sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) have had evident and dramatic impacts on the course of history? | In physics I would note electricity, and electromagnetic theory (which allows radio) is perhaps a separate discovery. The steam engine is also an obvious one, or if you prefer theory you could say thermodynamics - but the applications side was clearly first here. I guess this could also be considered engineering, as could the internal combustion engine, which also shades into chemistry. Going back into prehistory, you have the lever! Or, more generally, mechanical advantage, which allows the spear thrower, the bow, the crossbow, and the catapult.
Chemistry: Gunpowder is perhaps debatable, being discovered well before modern science per se. Antibiotics, although you could consider it biology. Plastics, oh boy. Condoms without latex really suck.
Biology: Genetic engineering - take your pick: The old-fashioned kind with crossbreeding and culling that created all the modern cereals and cattle breeds, or the kind that people get hysterical about that uses pipettes. The latter is perhaps mostly a false alarm so far. The Pill! (Possibly chemistry?) Machine guns are not really practical without smokeless powder - the residue of black powder will foul it very quickly - but I don't know if this gives you the social change you want; at any rate it's pretty indirect. | [
"Historically, the main discoveries were in the fields of endocrinology and physiology. The current research areas are wider and include Neurosciences, Biology of Reproduction, Experimental Oncology and Immunology. Results are published in journals of international recognition, thus demonstrating the level of excellence reached by the different research groups.\n",
"Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have made several milestone discoveries in the field of biomedical research and therapeutics. Recent discoveries include the development of aromatase inhibitors for the treatment of breast cancer by the lab of Angela Brodie, and the discovery of calcium sparks as drivers of heart contraction by the lab of Jonathan Lederer. \n",
"Throughout the 19th century, important discoveries were being made in laboratories and elsewhere. Many of these discoveries gave substance to important theories. Other discoveries could not be explained satisfactorily - either they had only been occasionally observed, or they were inconsistent with the new and emerging theories.\n",
"Staff and students of the university, past and present, have contributed to a number of important scientific advances, including the discovery of vaccines by Edward Jenner and Henry Gray (author of \"Gray's Anatomy\"). Additional vital progress was made by University of London people in the following fields: the discovery of the structure of DNA (Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin); the invention of modern electronic computers (Tommy Flowers); the discovery of penicillin (Alexander Fleming and Ernest Chain); the development of X-Ray technology (William Henry Bragg and Charles Glover Barkla); discoveries on the mechanism of action of Interleukin 10 (Anne O'Garra); the formulation of the theory of electromagnetism (James Clerk Maxwell); the determination of the speed of light (Louis Essen); the development of antiseptics (Joseph Lister); the development of fibre optics (Charles K. Kao); and the invention of the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell).\n",
"Several important scientific developments of the 19th and 20th centuries were made here, mainly at the Old Cavendish Laboratory, including the discoveries of the electron by J.J. Thomson (1897) and the neutron by Chadwick (1932), splitting the atom by Cockcroft and Walton (1932), mechanism of nervous conduction by Hodgkin and Huxley (1930s–40s), and DNA structure by Watson and Crick (1953).\n",
"The scientific and technological breakthrough took place in 16th century Christian Europe, coinciding with the European evangelization and colonization of the American continent. But this breakthrough, which has accelerated at a bewildering pace ever since, did not occur out of the blue. It was the consequence of the philosophy of science elaborated by the early 13th century universities founded by the Church, in Paris, Bologna, Oxford, Naples, Padua, Cambridge, Cologne, Salamanca, etc., etc., as has been brilliantly demonstrated by Pierre Duhem and Stanley Jaki, among others.\n",
"The discovery of the chemical elements and atomic theory began to systematize this science, and researchers developed a fundamental understanding of states of matter, ions, chemical bonds and chemical reactions. The success of this science led to a complementary chemical industry that now plays a significant role in the world economy.\n"
] |
how a double-blind study works, and why it is considered so reliable | Double-blind studies are usually used in medicine. They are to control for the placebo effect.
Let's say you have a new drug and you want to test how well it treats a disease. So, you get a whole bunch of patients with that disease. You give half of them the new drug and half of them a sugar pill (you could also give them the old drug if you want to compare against that instead). The patient doesn't know which pill they got, so that's the first blind. The second blind is that the doctor that gave them the pill also doesn't know which pill they got.
The reason for the second blind is that the doctor's actions might influence the patient. So, if neither the patient nor the doctor know whether they got the new drug or not you can be sure that any effects are from the drug itself and not from the placebo effect. | [
"A double-blind study with only objective measures is less likely to be biased to support a given conclusion. However, the researchers or the sponsors still have opportunities to skew the results by discarding or ignoring undesirable data, qualitatively characterizing the results, and ultimately deciding whether to publish at all. Also, not all studies are possible to conduct double-blind.\n",
"BULLET::::- Blind: The subjects involved in the study do not know which study treatment they receive. If the study is double-blind, the researchers also do not know which treatment a subject receives. This intent is to prevent researchers from treating the two groups differently. A form of double-blind study called a \"double-dummy\" design allows additional insurance against bias. In this kind of study, all patients are given both placebo and active doses in alternating periods.\n",
"In order to avoid experimental bias, experimental blinds are usually applied in between-group designs. The most commonly used type is the single blind, which keeps the subjects blind without identifying them as members of the treatment group or the control group. In a single-blind experiment, a placebo is usually offered to the control group members. Occasionally, the double blind, a more secure way to avoid bias from both the subjects and the testers, is implemented. In this case, both the subjects and the testers are unaware of which group subjects belong to. The double blind design can protect the experiment from the observer-expectancy effect.\n",
"Psychology and social science research is particularly prone to observer bias, so it is important in these fields to properly blind the researchers. In some cases, while blind experiments would be useful, they are impractical or unethical.\n",
"In medical research, the terms single-blind, double-blind and triple-blind are commonly used to describe blinding. These terms describe experiments in which (respectively) one, two, or three parties are blinded to some information. Most often, single-blind studies blind patients to their treatment allocation, double-blind studies blind both patients and researchers to treatment allocations, and triple-blinded studies blind patients, researcher, and some other third party (such as a monitoring committee) to treatment allocations. However, the meaning of these terms can vary from study to study.\n",
"The Illinois study compared the traditional simultaneous method of lineup presentation with the sequential double-blind method recommended by recognized researchers in the field. The traditional method is not conducted double-blind (meaning that the person presenting the lineup does not know which person or photo is the suspect). The critics claim that the results cannot be compared because one method was not double-blind while the other was double-blind. \n",
"There are critics of double-blind tests who see them as not allowing the listener to feel fully relaxed when evaluating the system component, and can therefore not judge differences between different components as well as in sighted (non-blind) tests. Those who employ the double-blind testing method may try to reduce listener stress by allowing a certain amount of time for listener training.\n"
] |
Why is the fine structure constant called "fine structure"? | Atomic spectra have gross, fine and hyperfine structure.
The gross structure corresponds to the energy levels which result from non-relativistic solutions to the Schrodinger equation, with no allowance for the effects of electron spin.
Fine structure results from taking account of relativistic effects, and of interactions between electron spin and orbital angular momentum. This has the effect of splitting what would otherwise be single energy levels into closely spaced ones. It is the fact that these levels - and hence the resulting spectral lines - are closely spaced that leads to it being referred to as fine structure.
Hyperfine structure is an even smaller effect due to interactions with the nucleus.
The fine structure constant was given that name because it appears in the equations for calculating the size of fine structure corrections. | [
"In physics, the fine-structure constant, also known as Sommerfeld's constant, commonly denoted by (the Greek letter \"alpha\"), is a dimensionless physical constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between elementary charged particles. It is related to the elementary charge , which characterizes the strength of the coupling of an elementary charged particle with the electromagnetic field, by the formula . As a dimensionless quantity, it has the same numerical value in all systems of units, which is approximately . The inverse of is \n",
"The fine-structure constant \"α\" is the best known dimensionless fundamental physical constant. It is the value of the elementary charge squared expressed in Planck units. This value has become a standard example when discussing the derivability or non-derivability of physical constants. Introduced by Arnold Sommerfeld, its value as determined at the time was consistent with 1/137. This motivated Arthur Eddington (1929) to construct an argument why its value might be 1/137 precisely, which related to the Eddington number, his estimate of the number of protons in the Universe. By the 1940s, it became clear that the value of the fine-structure constant deviates significantly from the precise value of 1/137, refuting Eddington's argument.\n",
"Physicists have pondered whether the fine-structure constant is in fact constant, or whether its value differs by location and over time. A varying has been proposed as a way of solving problems in cosmology and astrophysics. String theory and other proposals for going beyond the Standard Model of particle physics have led to theoretical interest in whether the accepted physical constants (not just ) actually vary.\n",
"In atomic physics, the fine structure describes the splitting of the spectral lines of atoms due to electron spin and relativistic corrections to the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation. It was first measured precisely for the hydrogen atom by Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley in 1887 laying the basis for the theoretical treatment by Arnold Sommerfeld, introducing the fine-structure constant.\n",
"A stability constant (formation constant, binding constant) is an equilibrium constant for the formation of a complex in solution. It is a measure of the strength of the interaction between the reagents that come together to form the complex. There are two main kinds of complex: compounds formed by the interaction of a metal ion with a ligand and supramolecular complexes, such as host–guest complexes and complexes of anions. The stability constant(s) provide the information required to calculate the concentration(s) of the complex(es) in solution. There are many areas of application in chemistry, biology and medicine.\n",
"Surface tension, represented by the symbol \"γ\" (alternatively \"σ\" or \"T\"), is measured in force per unit length. Its SI unit is newton per meter but the cgs unit of dyne per centimeter is also used. For example,\n",
"Arthur Eddington argued that the fine structure constant was a unit fraction, first 1/136 then 1/137. This contention has been falsified, given that current estimates of the fine structure constant are (to 6 significant digits) 1/137.036.\n"
] |
What happens when a charged particle moves faster than the speed of light in a material? (Cherenkov radiation) | > What is going on at the atomic level in the material that causes this?
The electric field of the charged particle distorts the atoms. When the atoms relax back to equilibrium the excess energy of the disruption is released as photons.
> What happens if the particle is not charged?
Uncharged molecules won't disrupt atoms.
> How fast does the charged particle slow down to sub-luminal speeds?
It depends on how how much kinetic energy they start with. The rule of thumb is that muons loose 2 MeV/cm in water. Electrons loose energy considerably faster. | [
"It is possible for a particle to travel through a medium faster than the phase velocity of light in that medium (but still slower than \"c\"). When a charged particle does that in a dielectric material, the electromagnetic equivalent of a shock wave, known as Cherenkov radiation, is emitted.\n",
"When a charged particle moves faster than the phase speed of light in a medium, electrons interacting with the particle can emit coherent photons while conserving energy and momentum. This process can be viewed as a decay. See Cherenkov radiation and nonradiation condition for an explanation of this effect.\n",
"When a fast charged particle moves through matter, it ionizes atoms of the material and deposits a dose along its path. A peak occurs because the interaction cross section increases as the charged particle's energy decreases. Energy lost by charged particles is inversely proportional to the square of their velocity, which explains the peak occurring just before the particle comes to a complete stop. In the upper figure, it is the peak for alpha particles of 5.49 MeV moving through air. In the lower figure, it is the narrow peak of the \"native\" proton beam curve which is produced by a particle accelerator of 250 MeV. The figure also shows the absorption of a beam of energetic photons (X-rays) which is entirely different in nature; the curve is mainly exponential.\n",
"than the velocity of light in the medium.\". However, some misconceptions regarding Cherenkov radiation exist: for example, it is believed that the medium becomes electrically polarized by the particle's electric field. If the particle travels slowly then the disturbance elastically relaxes back to mechanical equilibrium as the particle passes. When the particle is traveling fast enough, however, the limited response speed of the medium means that a disturbance is left in the wake of the particle, and the energy contained in this disturbance radiates as a coherent shockwave. Such conceptions do not have any analytical foundation, as electromagnetic radiation is emitted when charged particles move in a dielectric medium at subluminal velocities which are not considered as Cherenkov radiation.\n",
"Since the special theory of relativity requires that matter always travels slower than the speed of light in a vacuum, in high-energy accelerators, as the energy increases the particle speed approaches the speed of light as a limit, but never attains it. Therefore, particle physicists do not generally think in terms of speed, but rather in terms of a particle's energy or momentum, usually measured in electron volts (eV). An important principle for circular accelerators, and particle beams in general, is that the curvature of the particle trajectory is proportional to the particle charge and to the magnetic field, but inversely proportional to the (typically relativistic) momentum.\n",
"A charged particle travelling through a material (for instance fused silica) with a speed greater than c/n (n refractive index, c vacuum speed of light) emits Cherenkov radiation. If the light angle on the surface is sufficiently shallow, this radiation is contained inside and transmitted through internal reflections to an expansion volume, coupled to photomultipliers (or other types of photon detectors), to measure the angle. Preserving the angle requires a precise planar and rectangular cross section of the radiator. Knowledge of the angle at which the radiation was produced, combined with the track angle and the particle's momentum (measured in a tracking detector like a drift chamber) may be used to calculate the particle's mass.\n",
"BULLET::::- In some materials where light travels at speed \"c/n\" (where \"n\" is the refractive index) other particles can travel faster than \"c/n\" (but still slower than \"c\"), leading to Cherenkov radiation (see phase velocity below).\n"
] |
why are there still "living fossils that have barely evolved in 100s of millions of years? | If there's a species is still quite a good fit for their environment and no string of beneficial mutations come up to eventually mold a new species, the species just sort of stays the same. | [
"Not every transitional form appears in the fossil record, because the fossil record is not complete. Organisms are only rarely preserved as fossils in the best of circumstances, and only a fraction of such fossils have been discovered. Paleontologist Donald Prothero noted that this is illustrated by the fact that the number of species known through the fossil record was less than 5% of the number of known living species, suggesting that the number of species known through fossils must be far less than 1% of all the species that have ever lived.\n",
"Living fossils exhibit stasis over geologically long time scales. Popular literature may wrongly claim that a \"living fossil\" has undergone no significant evolution since fossil times, with practically no molecular evolution or morphological changes. Scientific investigations have repeatedly discredited such claims.\n",
"Fossils of organisms' bodies are usually the most informative type of evidence. The most common types are wood, bones, and shells. Fossilisation is a rare event, and most fossils are destroyed by erosion or metamorphism before they can be observed. Hence the fossil record is very incomplete, increasingly so further back in time. Despite this, it is often adequate to illustrate the broader patterns of life's history. There are also biases in the fossil record: different environments are more favorable to the preservation of different types of organism or parts of organisms. Further, only the parts of organisms that were already mineralised are usually preserved, such as the shells of molluscs. Since most animal species are soft-bodied, they decay before they can become fossilised. As a result, although there are 30-plus phyla of living animals, two-thirds have never been found as fossils.\n",
"A series of fossils were discovered in the late 17th century that appeared unlike any living species. As a result, the scientific community embarked on a voyage of creative rationalization, seeking to understand what had happened to these species within a framework that did not account for total extinction. In October 1686, Robert Hooke presented an impression of a nautilus to the Royal Society that was more than two feet in diameter, and morphologically distinct from any known living species. Hooke theorized that this was simply because the species lived in the deep ocean and no one had discovered them yet. While he contended that it was possible a species could be \"lost\", he thought this highly unlikely. Similarly, in 1695, Thomas Molyneux published an account of enormous antlers found in Ireland that did not belong to any extant taxa in that area. Molyneux reasoned that they came from the North American moose and that the animal had once been common on the British Isles. Rather than suggest that this indicated the possibility of species going extinct, he argued that although organisms could become locally extinct, they could never be entirely lost and would continue to exist in some unknown region of the globe. The antlers were later confirmed to be from the extinct Irish elk \"Megaloceros\". Hooke and Molyneux's line of thinking was difficult to disprove. When parts of the world had not been thoroughly examined and charted, scientists could not rule out that animals found only in the fossil record were not simply \"hiding\" in unexplored regions of the Earth.\n",
"While small, these fossils are far more common than complete fossils of the organisms that produced them; crucially, they cover the window from the start of the Cambrian to the first lagerstätten: a period of time otherwise lacking in fossils. Hence, they supplement the conventional fossil record and allow the fossil ranges of many groups to be extended.\n",
"Organisms are only rarely preserved as fossils in the best of circumstances, and only a fraction of such fossils have been discovered. This is illustrated by the fact that the number of species known through the fossil record is less than 5% of the number of known living species, suggesting that the number of species known through fossils must be far less than 1% of all the species that have ever lived. Because of the specialized and rare circumstances required for a biological structure to fossilize, only a small percentage of life-forms can be expected to be represented in discoveries, and each discovery represents only a snapshot of the process of evolution. The transition itself can only be illustrated and corroborated by transitional fossils, which will never demonstrate an exact half-way point.\n",
"13 million years ago the area was part of a shallow sea called the Paratethys, which is why there were found few vertebrate fossils. Grains of sedimentary rock were too large to preserve soft tissues or small and delicate bones. However, shells and crabs carapaces, because they were hard enough, survived.\n"
] |
Are there any animals that can see microwaves? | the wavelength of microwaves is about 12 centimeters, so you'd need an animal that had rods/cones that big, right? maybe a blue whale or something.
light is in the 500 terahertz range, microwaves are in the hundreds of mhz range. That's orders of magnitude difference. | [
"Starting in the 1970s, Adair conducted physiology studies as a fellow at the John B. Pierce Laboratory in New Haven to learn how humans and animals react to heat. This work led her to focus on the controversial area of microwaves and their effect on human health. Experimenting first on squirrel monkeys and then on human volunteers, she concluded that microwave radiation from microwave ovens, cells phones, and power lines is harmless to humans and animals.\n",
"In addition, a design constraint is that the microwave beam must not be so intense as to injure wildlife, particularly birds. Experiments with deliberate microwave irradiation at reasonable levels have failed to show negative effects even over multiple generations. Suggestions have been made to locate rectennas offshore, but this presents serious problems, including corrosion, mechanical stresses, and biological contamination.\n",
"High-energy microwaves are used in neurobiology experiments to kill small laboratory animals (mice, rats) in order to fix brain metabolites without the loss of anatomical integrity of the tissue. The instruments used are designed to focus most of the power to the animal's head. The unconsciousness and death is nearly instant, occurring in less than one second, and the method is the most efficient one to fix brain tissue chemical activity. A 2.45 GHz, 6.5 kW source will heat the brain of a 30 g mouse to 90 °C in about 325 milliseconds; a 915 MHz, 25 kW source will heat the brain of a 300 g rat to the same temperature in a second. Special devices designed or modified for this purpose have to be used; use of kitchen-grade microwave ovens is condemned.\n",
"It is shown in research from the 60's and 70's that non-ionizing radiation in the microwave range can provide genotoxic mechanisms in germ cells in animals which are then relayed to the offspring, as well as practical examples have shown that radiation have led to infertility in humans, but little recent research supports this. \n",
"Since 1962, the microwave auditory effect or tinnitus has been shown from radio frequency exposure at levels below significant heating. Studies during the 1960s in Europe and Russia claimed to show effects on humans, especially the nervous system, from low energy RF radiation; the studies were disputed at the time.\n",
"The ability to sense infrared thermal radiation evolved independently in various families of snakes. Essentially, it allows these reptiles to \"see\" radiant heat at wavelengths between 5 and 30 μm to a degree of accuracy such that a blind rattlesnake can target vulnerable body parts of the prey at which it strikes. It was previously thought that the organs evolved primarily as prey detectors, but it is now believed that it may also be used in thermoregulatory decision making. The facial pit underwent parallel evolution in pitvipers and some boas and pythons, having evolved once in pitvipers and multiple times in boas and pythons. The electrophysiology of the structure is similar between the two lineages, but they differ in gross structural anatomy. Most superficially, pitvipers possess one large pit organ on either side of the head, between the eye and the nostril (Loreal pit), while boas and pythons have three or more comparatively smaller pits lining the upper and sometimes the lower lip, in or between the scales. Those of the pitvipers are the more advanced, having a suspended sensory membrane as opposed to a simple pit structure. Within the family Viperidae, the pit organ is seen only in the subfamily Crotalinae: the pitvipers. The organ is used extensively to detect and target endothermic prey such as rodents and birds, and it was previously assumed that the organ evolved specifically for that purpose. However, recent evidence shows that the pit organ may also be used for thermoregulation. According to Krochmal et al., pitvipers can use their pits for thermoregulatory decision making while true vipers (vipers who do not contain heat-sensing pits) cannot.\n",
"The ability to sense infrared thermal radiation evolved independently in two different groups of snakes, Boidae (boas and pythons) and Crotalinae (pit vipers). What is commonly called a Pit Organ allows these animals to essentially \"see\" radiant heat at wavelengths between 5 and 30 μm. The more advanced infrared sense of pit vipers allows these animals to strike prey accurately even in the absence of light, and detect warm objects from several meters away. It was previously thought that the organs evolved primarily as prey detectors, but recent evidence suggests that it may also be used in thermoregulation and predator detection, making it a more general-purpose sensory organ than was supposed.\n"
] |
how was tim tebow so successful in college but not in the nfl? | While the rules are similar between NCAA and NFL football, there's a big difference in strategies. In college, there are lots of teams and not everyone is all that good. In the NFL, the players have more experience, have more physical strength and speed, and only made it to the NFL by being great in college. Combine that with the fact that players can stay on teams for more than 4 years and everyone's concentrated into 32 teams and the result is a lot of really good athletes.
Now that that's established, how does the quality of the players relate to strategy? In college, there is a heavy emphasis on plays like the option. Without getting into too much detail, an option is a play where the running back is near the quarterback and the quarterback, based on what the defense does, either runs with the ball or gives it to the running back. In college, these plays work great because if a player is aiming for the wrong guy, he can't recover and reach the actual ballcarrier. In the NFL, everyone's fast enough where you may be able to do a few option plays throughout the game, but you can't use the college-style strategy of just doing it on every other play.
So where does Tebow fit into this? Tebow has good speed and strength for a quarterback. In college, when he needed to run with the ball, he could knock over potential tacklers. In the NFL, the defensive players are bigger, stronger, and faster. Tebow's no weakling, but he's not going to run over a 300lb defensive lineman or blow by a linebacker. In short, NFL quarterbacks need to rely on passing. Simply put, Tebow was never an exceptional passer. His accuracy was ok and his throwing motion takes much more time than a typical NFL quarterback.
TL;DR: Tebow was a good running QB by college standards. He's not so impressive by NFL standards. Due to strategic differences between the leagues, NFL QBs need to rely on passing ability, which is Tebow's weakness. | [
"Tim Tebow became the full-time starting quarterback for the 2007 season. Although the Gators began with a 4–0 record and were ranked as high as third in media polls, a mid-season slump in which they lost three of four games to conference foes ended their hopes for another national championship. They finished with a 9–4 record and a # 13 final ranking, but Tebow's record-setting season earned him the Heisman Trophy; he was the first sophomore to receive the honor.\n",
"After the season, Elway confirmed that Tebow would be the Broncos starting quarterback going into training camp in 2012. Despite on-field successes by the Broncos under Tebow, he finished the season with the lowest passing completion rate in the NFL (reaching 50% in just four of his 14 games) which led many to question his potential as a quarterback at the professional level.\n",
"After passing on the 2009 NFL Draft for his senior season at Florida, Tebow went on to enter the 2010 NFL Draft. Despite his college success, Tebow's NFL potential was much debated. According to former Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Jon Gruden, who said he could \"revolutionize\" the pro game, Tebow was \"the strongest human being that's ever played the position. He can throw well enough at any level.\" Former Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy said he would pick Tebow with a top 10 pick over any quarterback in the 2010 Draft. However, NFL analyst Mel Kiper, Jr. believed Tebow did not have the intangibles to play quarterback in the NFL. \"I don't think he can be a fulltime quarterback. I don't think he can be the quarterback of the future for you, but I do think in the third round, maybe the second round, he'll be the same as Pat White\", said Kiper.\n",
"As a member of the Denver Broncos, he started the last three games of his rookie season and became the team's full-time starting quarterback beginning in the sixth game of 2011. The Broncos were 1–4 before he became the starter, but began winning with him on the field, often coming from behind late in the fourth quarter, until they won their first AFC West title and first playoff game since 2005, defeating the Pittsburgh Steelers in overtime. Despite the team's success, however, Tebow's potential as a professional level quarterback was called into question due to a perceived lack of passing ability, persistent fumbles, and having the lowest passing completion rate in the league.\n",
"Tebow became the Florida Gators' starting quarterback during the 2007 season when he became the first college sophomore to win the Heisman Trophy. In 2008, Tebow led Florida to a 13–1 record and its second national championship in three years, and was named the offensive MVP of the national championship game. The Gators again went 13–1 in 2009, his senior year. At the conclusion of his college career, he held the Southeastern Conference's all-time records in both career passing efficiency and total rushing touchdowns, appearing second and tenth (respectively) in the NCAA record book in these categories.\n",
"BULLET::::- Tim Tebow (2007) - First sophomore to win the Heisman and a runner-up as a junior and senior, Tebow was heralded by many as one of the greatest college football players of all time, after contributing to Florida's 2006 National Championship as a freshman and then leading his team to another one as a junior. After being drafted in the first round by the Denver Broncos, a team he brought to the NFL playoffs, he was subsequently traded to the New York Jets and then released, briefly picked up by the New England Patriots and then cut prior to the start of the 2013 season. He is currently pursuing a career in baseball instead.\n",
"Tebow finished his rookie season playing sparingly in six games as a back-up (primarily on plays involving the wild horse formation, which is Denver's variation of the wildcat formation) before starting the last three games of the Broncos' season. He passed for a total of 654 yards, five touchdowns and three interceptions. He also rushed for 227 yards and six touchdowns. He became the first quarterback in NFL history to rush for a touchdown in each of his first three career starts.\n"
] |
how are westerner's "chinese" name decided ans given? | Yep mostly phonetic. Generic names such as Mark is normally translated to 马克 (Mah-Ker) while Paul is translated to 保罗 (Bao-Luo). Same thing applies for names that aren't common as well...but im not sure who decides for the famous ppl oops | [
"Chinese people, except for those traveling or living outside China, rarely reverse their names to the western naming order (given name, then family name). Western publications usually preserve the Chinese naming order, with the family name first, followed by the given name. Beginning in the early 1980s, in regards to people from Mainland China, western publications began using the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system instead of earlier romanization systems; this resulted from the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China in 1979.\n",
"\"-ese\" is usually considered proper only as an adjective, or to refer to the entirety. Thus, \"a Chinese person\" is used rather than \"a Chinese\". Often used for East Asian and Francophone locations, from the similar-sounding French suffix \"-ais(e)\", which is originally from the Latin adjectival ending \"-ensis\", designating origin from a place: thus Hispaniensis (Spanish), Danensis (Danish), etc.\n",
"Historians trace Westerners' use of the word Chinese to denote \"confusion\" and \"incomprehensibility\" to the earliest contacts between Europeans and Chinese people in the 1600s, and attribute it to Europeans' inability to understand China's radically different culture and world view. In his 1989 \"Dictionary of Invective\", British editor Hugh Rawson lists 16 phrases that use the word Chinese to denote \"incompetence, fraud and disorganization\".\n",
"Historians trace Westerners' use of the word \"Chinese\" to denote \"confusion\" and \"incomprehensibility\" to the earliest contacts between Europeans and Chinese people in the 17th century, and attribute it to Europeans' inability to understand China's culture and worldview.\n",
"Western names, approximated in Chinese (in some cases approximated in Japanese and then borrowed into Chinese), were further \"garbled\" in Vietnamese pronunciations. For example, Portugal became , and in Vietnamese \"Bồ Đào Nha\". England became \"Anh Cát Lợi\" (), shortened to \"Anh\" (), while United States became \"Mỹ Lợi Gia\" (), shortened to \"Mỹ\" (). The official name for the United States in Vietnamese is \"Hoa Kỳ\" (); this is a former Chinese name of the United States and translates literally as \"flower flag\".\n",
"The modern Chinese name is (\"Kāshí\"), a shortened form of the longer and less-frequently used (\"Kāshígá'ěr\"; Uyghur: ). Ptolemy (AD 90-168), in his \"Geography\", Chapter 15.3A, refers to Kashgar as “Kasi”. Its western and probably indigenous name is the \"Kāš\" (\"rock\"), to which the East Iranian \"-γar\" (\"mountain\"); cf. Pashto and Middle Persian \"gar/ġar\", from Old Persian/Pahlavi \"girīwa\" (\"hill; ridge (of a mountain)\") was attached. Alternative historical Romanizations for \"Kashgar\" include \"Cascar\"\n",
"The term \"Chinaman\" has been historically used in a variety of ways, including legal documents, literary works, geographic names, and in speech. Census records in 19th century North America recorded Chinese men by names such as \"John Chinaman\", \"Jake Chinaman\", or simply as \"Chinaman\". Chinese American historian Emma Woo Louie commented that such names in census schedules were used when census takers could not obtain any information and that they \"should not be considered to be racist in intent\". One census taker in El Dorado County wrote, \"I found about 80 Chinese men in Spanish Canion who refused to give me their names or other information.\" Louie equated \"John Chinaman\" to \"John Doe\" in its usage to refer to a person whose name is not known, and added that other ethnic groups were also identified by generic terms as well, such as \"Spaniard\" and \"Kanaka\", which refers to a Hawaiian.\n"
] |
What was the "known world" for Asian people in ancient times, roman times, etc. ? | The Han Chinese knew a decent amount, but largely shrouded in myth. Here is a list of historical documents:
_URL_0_
The ones translated by John Hill are the best. There are descriptions and names for the chief cities of the Eastern empire, primary exports, notable flora, some not entirely nonsensical reports about the Roman political system, and so on.
The Japanese, at least as late as the Heian period, knew very little about the world beyond China, Korea, and Central Asia. One writer has his character shipwrecked in Persia while sailing from Japan to China, which should give you an idea. | [
"The first continental use of Asia is attributed to Herodotus (about 440 BCE), not because he innovated it, but because his \"Histories\" are the earliest surviving prose to describe it in any detail. He defines it carefully, mentioning the previous geographers whom he had read, but whose works are now missing. By it he means Anatolia and the Persian Empire, in contrast to Greece and Egypt.\n",
"The Indian people established during ancient, medieval to early eighteenth century some of the greatest empires and dynasties in South Asian history like the Maurya Empire, Satavahana dynasty, Gupta Empire, Rashtrakuta dynasty, Chalukya Empire, Chola Empire, Karkota Empire, Pala Empire, Vijayanagara Empire, Maratha Empire and Sikh Empire.The first great Empire of the Indian people was the Maurya Empire having Patliputra(currently Patna, Bihar) as its capital, conquered the major part of South Asia in the 4th and 3rd century BC during the reign of the Indian Emperors Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka alongside their senior advisor, Acharya Chanakya, the pioneer of the field of political science and economics in the World. The next great ancient Empire of the Indian people was the Gupta Empire. This period, witnessing a Hindu religious and intellectual resurgence, is known as the classical or \"Golden Age of India\". During this period, aspects of Indian civilisation, administration, culture, and Hinduism and Buddhism spread to much of Asia, while Chola Empire in the south had flourishing maritime trade links with the Roman Empire during this period. The ancient Indian mathematicians Aryabhata, Bhāskara I and Brahmagupta invented the concept of zero and the Hindu–Arabic numeral system decimal system during this period. During this period Indian cultural influence spread over many parts of Southeast Asia which led to the establishment of Indianized kingdoms in Southeast Asia.\n",
"In the context of the history of classical antiquity, \"Western Asia\" could mean the part of Asia known in classical antiquity, as opposed to the reaches of \"interior Asia\", i.e. Scythia, and \"Eastern Asia\" the easternmost reaches of geographical knowledge in classical authors, i.e. Transoxania and India.\n",
"Asia was the cradle for several significant civilizations, most notably those of China and South Asia. The prehistory of eastern Asia is especially interesting, as the relatively early introduction of writing and historical record-keeping in China has a notable impact on the immediately surrounding cultures and geographic areas. Little of the very rich traditions of the art of Mesopotamia counts as prehistoric, as writing was introduced so early there, but neighbouring cultures such as Urartu, Luristan and Persia had significant and complex artistic traditions.\n",
"European exploration of Asia started in ancient Roman times along the Silk Road. Knowledge of lands as distant as China were held by the Romans. Trade with India through the Roman Egyptian Red Sea ports was significant in the first centuries of the Common Era.\n",
"The region was the cradle of various ancient civilizations such as ancient China, ancient Japan, ancient Korea, and the Mongol Empire. East Asia was one of the cradles of world civilization, with China, an ancient East Asian civilization being one of the earliest cradles of civilization in human history. For thousands of years, China largely influenced East Asia (as it was principally the leading civilization in the region), exerting its enormous prestige and influence on its neighbors. Historically, societies in East Asia have been part of the Chinese cultural sphere, and East Asian vocabulary and scripts are often derived from Classical Chinese and Chinese script. The Chinese calendar preserves traditional East Asian culture and serves as the root to which many other East Asian calendars are derived from. Major religions in East Asia include Buddhism (mostly Mahayana), Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism, Taoism, Ancestral worship, and Chinese folk religion in Greater China, Buddhism and Shintoism in Japan, and Christianity, Buddhism, and Sindoism in Korea. Shamanism is also prevalent among Mongols and other indigenous populations of northern East Asia such as the Manchus.\n",
"Eastern South Asia is a cradle of South Asian civilization. Historical states in the region include those recorded in Indian epics such as the Mahabharata, including ancient Nepal, Vanga, and Pundra; the Greek and Roman recorded kingdom of Gangaridai; major Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms including Kikata, Videha, Vrijji, Magadha, Nanda, Mauryan, Anga, Kalinga, Kamarupa, Samatata, Kanva, Gupta, Pala, Gauda, Sena, Khadga, Candra, Deva, Tripura , and Cooch Behar State. Major Islamic empires in the region included the Delhi and Bengal Sultanates, and the Suri and Mughal Empires (including the important province of Mughal Bengal). A confederation of Muslim and Hindu aristocrats called the Baro-Bhuyan existed in the late 16th and early 17thcenturies.\n"
] |
what's the 'clicky' noise when shaking some types of aerosol cans? | Metal marble in the can to help stir the paint | [
"Cartridge scarers include a wide variety of noise-producing cartridges usually fired from rockets or rope bangers, or on aerodromes from modified pistols or shotguns, which produce a loud bang and emit flashes of light. They include shellcrackers, screamer shells and whistling projectiles, exploding projectiles, bird bangers and flares. Bird banger cartridges commonly use a low explosive known as flash powder.\n",
"The products are most often a can that, when a trigger is pressed, blasts a stream of compressed gas through a nozzle. Despite the name \"canned air\", the cans actually contain gases that are compressable into liquids. True liquid air is not practical, as it cannot be stored in metal spray cans due to extreme pressure and temperature requirements. Common duster gases are 1,1-difluoroethane, 1,1,1-trifluoroethane, or 1,1,1,2-tetrafluoroethane. Hydrocarbons, like butane, were often used in the past, but their flammable nature forced manufacturers to use fluorocarbons.\n",
"BULLET::::- Much quieter and unusual discharge noise. Smaller or empty powder loads, combined with the primer discharge echoing in the casing or barrel, produce an unusual noise. This noise is often called a \"ping\" or \"pop\", rather than the expected \"bang\" of a standard shot.\n",
"Ejection of an empty clip created a distinctive metallic \"pinging\" sound. In World War II, it was rumored that German and Japanese infantry were making use of this noise in combat to alert them to an empty M1 rifle in order to catch their American enemies with an unloaded rifle. It was reported that the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground began experiments with clips made of various plastics in order to soften the sound, though no improved clips were ever adopted. However, this claim regarding the risks of a pinging empty clip is questionable due to hearsay produced as fact by the only known source, the otherwise fairly reliable author Roy F. Dunlap in \"Ordnance Went Up Front\" in 1948. According to former German soldiers, the sound was inaudible during engagements and not particularly useful when heard, as other squad members might have been nearby ready to fire. Due to the often intense deafening noise of combat and gunfire it is highly unlikely any U.S. servicemen were killed as a result of the ping noise; however some soldiers still took the issue very seriously.\n",
"The shaker itself is composed of an electric motor connected to a deliberately unbalanced flywheel. When actuated, the shaker induces a forceful, noisy, and entirely unmistakable shaking of the control yoke. This shaking of the control yoke matches the frequency and amplitude of the stick shaking that occurs due to airflow separation in low-speed aircraft as they approach the stall. The stick shaking is intended to act as a backup to the auditory stall alert, in cases where the flight crew may be distracted.\n",
"BULLET::::- The propellants in aerosol cans are typically combinations of ignitable gases and have been known to cause fires and explosions. However, non-flammable compressed gases such as nitrogen and nitrous oxide have been widely adopted into a number of aerosol systems (such as air fresheners and aerosolized whipped cream) as have non-flammable liquid propellants.\n",
"A stick shaker is a mechanical device to rapidly and noisily vibrate the control yoke (the \"stick\") of an aircraft to warn the pilot of an imminent stall. A stick shaker is connected to the control column of most civil jet aircraft and large military aircraft.\n"
] |
how do airlines get your checked luggage on the right plane when there is a short layover? | They usually sort it at the departing gate. They know which luggage needs to be taken out first. That information is sent to arrive airport. They also compartmentalize the bags. Ie, belt, terminal 1, terminal 2, etc. So this way, its easy to put the bags in correct cart and take it to correct place. | [
"Many airlines have a deadline for passengers to check in before each flight. This is to allow the airline to offer unclaimed seats to stand-by passengers, to load luggage onto the plane and to finalize documentation for take-off. The passenger must also take into account the time that may be needed for them to clear the check-in line, to pass security and then to walk (sometimes also to ride) from the check-in area to the boarding area. This may take several hours at some airports or at some times of the year. On international flights, additional time would be required for immigration and customs clearance.\n",
"Airport check-in is the process whereby passengers are accepted by an airline at the airport prior to travel. The airlines typically use service counters found at airports. The check-in is normally handled by an airline itself or a handling agent working on behalf of an airline. Passengers usually hand over any baggage that they do not wish or are not allowed to carry in to the aircraft's cabin and receive a boarding pass before they can proceed to board their aircraft.\n",
"Some airlines have a self-check-in process allowing passengers with bags to check-in at Self Bag Drop machines. Passengers then attach the baggage tag and drop the bag at the baggage drop belt. Passengers without checked luggage can go straight to the lounge (if entitled to lounge access) and check in at the kiosk there using their ePass (a small RFID device only for its premium customers) or proceed straight to the departure gate. Many airlines use electronic check-in such as ePass, mPass, or similar mobile apps, and these applications serve as the boarding pass.\n",
"The check-in process at airports enables passengers to check in luggage onto a plane and to obtain a boarding pass. When presenting at the check-in counter, a passenger will provide evidence of the right to travel, such as a ticket, visa or electronic means. Each airline provides facilities for passengers to check in their luggage, except for their carry-on bags. This may be by way of airline-employed staff at check-in counters at airports or through an agency arrangement or by way of a self-service kiosk. The luggage is weighed and tagged, and then placed on a conveyor that usually feeds the luggage into the main baggage handling system. The luggage goes into the aircraft's cargo hold. The check-in staff then issues each passenger with a boarding pass.\n",
"Most airports and airlines have automatic readers that will verify the validity of the boarding pass at the jetway door or boarding gate. This also automatically updates the airline's database that shows the passenger has boarded and the seat is used, and that the checked baggage for that passenger may stay aboard. This speeds up the paperwork process at the gate, but requires passengers with paper tickets to check in, surrender the ticket, and receive the digitized boarding pass.\n",
"The term hand luggage or cabin baggage (also commonly referred to as carry-on in North America) refers to the type of luggage that passengers are allowed to carry along in the passenger compartment of a vehicle instead of moving to the cargo compartment. Passengers are allowed to carry a limited number of smaller bags with them in the vehicle and contain valuables and items needed during the journey. There is normally storage space provided for hand luggage, either under seating, or in overhead lockers. Trains usually have luggage racks above the seats and may also (especially in the case of trains travelling longer distances) have luggage space between the backs of seats facing opposite directions, or in extra luggage racks, for example, at the ends of the carriage near the doors.\n",
"This service is generally promoted by the airlines to passengers as being easier and faster because it reduces the time a passenger would normally spend at an airport check-in counter. Some airlines, however, would still require passengers to proceed to a check-in counter at the airport, regardless of preferred check-in method, for document verification (e.g., to travel to countries where a visa is required, or to ensure the credit card used to purchase is genuine and/or matches the identity of the person who made the purchase). If passengers need to continue the check-in process at the airport after performing an online check-in, a special lane is typically offered to them to reduce wait times unless all desks are designated as baggage drop-off points. Furthermore, online check-in for a flight is often available earlier than its in-person counterpart. The process then transfers to passengers' control over their check-in. Airlines may use the system because self-service is frequently more efficient to operate, with a greater ability to cope with surges in passenger numbers. It also lessens activity at the airport, saving airlines money and reducing passenger waiting times.\n"
] |
When (and where) did the concept of "paper money" began? | You might want to check out:
- [When did the Monetary system using "paper money" we have today start?](_URL_0_)
- [What are the earliest dates for paper money?](_URL_1_)
- [How did they prevent counterfeiting of paper money before modern things like holograms, fluorescent ink, and microprinting?](_URL_2_) | [
"Paper currency first developed in Tang dynasty China during the 7th century, although true paper money did not appear until the 11th century, during the Song dynasty. The usage of paper currency later spread throughout the Mongol Empire or Yuan dynasty China. European explorers like Marco Polo introduced the concept in Europe during the 13th century. Napoleon issued paper banknotes in the early 1800s. Cash paper money originated as receipts for value held on account \"value received\", and should not be conflated with promissory \"sight bills\" which were issued with a promise to convert at a later date.\n",
"The precursor of paper money (紙幣) known as \"Flying cash\" were issued by the Tang dynasty, however these bills of exchange could in no way be considered to be a form of paper money as they weren’t meant to be a medium of exchange and were only negotiable between two distant points. The first true paper money in the world was issued under the Song dynasty, these were promissory notes issued by merchants in Sichuan known as the Jiaozi, under the reign of Emperor Zhenzong (997–1022) the government of the Song Dynasty granted a monopoly for the production of Jiaozi notes to sixteen wealthy merchants in Sichuan, as these merchants were slow to redeem their banknotes and inflation started affecting these private banknotes the government nationalised paper money in the year 1023 under the Bureau of Exchange. As these paper notes were backed by the government they were instantly successful and the people regarded them to be equally trustworthy as cash coins, other types of paper notes issued under the Song dynasty include the Huizi and the Guanzi. Before the Mongol Empire conquered China the Jurchen Jin dynasty also issued paper money, the Jiaochao (交鈔).\n",
"Washington Irving records an emergency use of paper money by the Spanish in a siege during the Conquest of Granada (1482–1492). In 1661, Johan Palmstruch issued the first regular paper money in the West, under royal charter from the Kingdom of Sweden, through a new institution, the Bank of Stockholm. While this private paper currency was largely a failure, the Swedish parliament eventually took over the issue of paper money in the country. By 1745, its paper money was inconvertible to specie, but acceptance was mandated by the government. This fiat currency depreciated so rapidly that by 1776 it returned to a silver standard. Fiat money also has other roots in 17th-century Europe, having been introduced by the Bank of Amsterdam in 1683.\n",
"The first French paper money, issued between 1701 and 1720, was denominated in livres tournois (see \"Standard Catalog of World Paper Money\", Albert Pick). This was the last time the name was used officially, as later notes and coins were denominated simply in livres, the livre parisis having finally been abolished in 1667.\n",
"Meanwhile, paper money had been developed. At first, it was thought of for emergency issues, hence were most popular in the colonies of European powers. In the 18th century, important paper issues were made in colonies such as Ceylon and the bordering colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice. John Law did pioneering work on banknotes with the \"Banque Royale\". However, the relation between money supply and inflation was still imperfectly understood and the bank went under, while its notes became worthless when they were over-issued. The lessons learned were applied to the Bank of England, which played a crucial role in financing Wellington's Peninsular war against French troops, hamstrung by a metallic Franc de Germinal.\n",
"Paper money was introduced in Song dynasty China during the 11th century. The development of the banknote began in the seventh century, with local issues of paper currency. Its roots were in merchant receipts of deposit during the Tang dynasty (618–907), as merchants and wholesalers desired to avoid the heavy bulk of copper coinage in large commercial transactions. The issue of credit notes is often for a limited duration, and at some discount to the promised amount later. The jiaozi nevertheless did not replace coins during the Song Dynasty; paper money was used alongside the coins. The central government soon observed the economic advantages of printing paper money, issuing a monopoly right of several of the deposit shops to the issuance of these certificates of deposit. By the early 12th century, the amount of banknotes issued in a single year amounted to an annual rate of 26 million strings of cash coins.\n",
"Development of the banknote began in the Tang dynasty during the 7th century, with local issues of paper currency, although true paper money did not appear until the 11th century, during the Song dynasty. Its roots were in merchant receipts of deposit during the Tang Dynasty (618–907), as merchants and wholesalers desired to avoid the heavy bulk of copper coinage in large commercial transactions.\n"
] |
How do optical illusions appear to be moving? | I'm an artist who creates optical illusions. The big reason this particular type of illusion works is because the value of the lines lead the eye. Other moving illusions can force the perspective with the thickness of the lines. It is the same principle shown in [this famous illusion](_URL_0_) but much simplified. If you look at that one you can see the white color on one side and the black on the other. When you focus on one part of the drawing, your area of view is much smaller and your brain then imposes what it thinks should be in that place instead. It's similar but not quite exactly like the lens of a camera rack focusing. The big difference is that your brain also interpolates what it thinks it should be seeing. | [
"The term illusory motion, also known as motion illusion, is an optical illusion in which a static image appears to be moving due to the cognitive effects of interacting color contrasts and shape position. Apparent motion is the most common type of illusory motion and is perceived when images are displayed in succession at a specific frame rate such as in a movie.\n",
"The illusion tricks us into thinking we are looking at a perspective picture, and thus according to Changizi, switches on our future-seeing abilities. Since we aren't actually moving and the figure is static, we misperceive the straight lines as curved ones.\n",
"Induced movement or induced motion is an illusion of visual perception in which a stationary or a moving object appears to move or to move differently because of other moving objects nearby in the visual field. It is interpreted in terms of the change in the location of an object due to the movement in the space around it. The object affected by the illusion is called the \"target\", and the other moving objects are called the \"background\" or the \"context\" (Duncker, 1929).\n",
"Illusion optics is an electromagnetic theory that can change the optical appearance of an object to be exactly like that of another virtual object, i.e. an illusion, such as turning the look of an apple into that of a banana. Invisibility is a special case of illusion optics, which turns objects into illusions of free space. The concept and numerical proof of illusion optics was proposed in 2009 based on transformation optics in the field of metamaterials. \n",
"Visual or Optical Illusions can be categorized according to the nature of the difference between objects and percepts. For example, these can be in brightness or color, called \"intensive\" properties of targets, e.g. Mach bands. Or they can be in their location, size, orientation or depth, called \"extensive\". When an illusion involves properties that fall within the purview of geometry it is \"geometrical-optical\", a term given to it in the first scientific paper devoted to the topic by J.J. Oppel, a German high-school teacher, in 1854. It was taken up by Wilhelm Wundt, widely regarded as the founder of experimental psychology, and is now universally used. That by 1972 the first edition of Robinson's book devotes 100 closely printed pages and over 180 figures to these illusions attests to their popularity.\n",
"Illusions of self-motion refers to a phenomenon that occurs when someone feels like their body is moving when no movement is taking place. One can experience illusory movements of the whole body or of individual body parts, such as arms or legs.\n",
"The illusion is easily seen when fixating off to the side of it, and then blinking as fast as possible. Most observers can see the illusion easily when reading text with the illusion figure in the periphery. The motion of such illusions is consistently perceived in a dark-to-light direction.\n"
] |
Are their any instances where a historian has run for public office in the US or elsewhere? | Former speaker Newt Gingrich was an assistant professor of history at West Georgia College before being elected to Congress. | [
"Richard Norton Smith (born 1953) is an American historian and author specializing in U.S. presidents and other political figures. In the past, he worked as a freelance writer for \"The Washington Post\", and worked with U.S. Senators Edward Brooke and Bob Dole.\n",
"Leonard Dupee White (January 17, 1891 in Acton, Massachusetts – February 23, 1958 in Chicago, Illinois) was an American historian who specialized in public administration in the United States. His technique was to study administration in the context of grouped U.S. presidential terms. A founder of the field, White worked at the University of Chicago after service in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt.\n",
"Alumni have also served as United States Attorneys General (Nicholas Katzenbach, Peter Keisler) and United States Solicitors General (Walter E. Dellinger III, Neal Katyal, Seth P. Waxman). In addition, numerous editors have gone on to serve as high-ranking public officials (Senator Arlen Specter, Senator Michael Bennet, Senator Richard Blumenthal, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler, National Security Advisor John R. Bolton).\n",
"This list of public administration scholars includes notable theorists, academics, and researchers from public administration, public policy, and related fields such as economics, political science, management, administrative law. All of the individuals in this list have made a notable contribution to the field of public administration.\n",
"Alumni in politics include U.S. Secretary of State John Hay (1852), U.S. Secretary of State and Attorney General Richard Olney (1856), Chief Justice of the United States and U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes (1881), Senator Maggie Hassan '80 of New Hampshire, Governor Jack Markell '82 of Delaware, Rhode Island Representative David Cicilline '83, Minnesota Representative Dean Phillips '91, 2020 Presidential candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang '96, and DNC Chair Tom Perez '83.\n",
"Among the alumni who have become elected officials, successful business owners, and other community leaders are two former governors, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, an Academy Award-winning musician, seven Rhodes Scholars, 14 Truman, Marshall and Goldwater Scholars, the founder of Albertson's Inc. and the co-founder of Patagonia Outerwear\n",
"Raymond W. Smock (born February 8, 1941) is an American historian, who is the Director Emeritus of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education at Shepherd University, and formerly the Historian of the United States House of Representatives (1983-1995).\n"
] |
why are deer extremely sensitive to even the quietest sounds (rustling leaves), but run out in front of cars like they don't hear them? | Maybe they hear the car but think it's farther away so they don't care. Like they hear it, 100 feet away and think the car can't possibly travel at 70 mph to hit me in time, so I'll just run across this road. | [
"A contributing factor to deer-vehicle collisions, as preventable as it is prevalent, is the time of day at which motorists travel through deer habitation. During the daytime, motorists can more easily see and avoid hitting deer. At night, most especially during the dusk and dawn hours, deer are much harder to see, and therefore\n",
"It's known as the hog deer because when it is fleeing from danger it dashes through underbrush with its head down like a hog instead of jumping over barriers like other deer. These animals are crepuscular, meaning that they are active at sunrise and twilight. They rest during the warmer part of the day and then come out from the undergrowth to forage. Mainly solitary, they sometimes form small herds if left undisturbed. As with other deer species, Calamian deer are ruminants, meaning that they have four stomach chambers and chew cud. A soft, high-pitched, nasal call is their main vocalization. Their diet consist of shoots, twigs, and leaves.\n",
"Deer communicate with the aid of scent and pheromones from several glands located on the lower legs. The metatarsal (outside of lower leg) produces an alarm scent, the tarsal (inside of hock) serves for mutual recognition and the interdigital (between the toes) leave a scent trail when deer travel. Deer have excellent sight and smell. Their large ears can move independently of each other and pick up any unusual sounds that may signal danger.\n",
"The species has a range of vocalisations, including loud alarm calls, which are audible over away, growling sounds made by males in rut, and quieter grunts or mews made by females and young. Like reindeer, they can also make unusual, loud snapping sounds from their carpal bones, the function of which is unclear. Thorold's deer rarely run, but they can gallop at up to 35 miles (56 km) per hour.\n",
"Numerous deer live in the Forest; they are usually rather shy and tend to stay out of sight when people are around, but are surprisingly bold at night, even when a car drives past. Fallow deer (\"Dama dama\") are the most common, followed by roe deer (\"Capreolus capreolus\") and red deer (\"Cervus elephas\"). There are also smaller populations of the introduced sika deer (\"Cervus nippon\") and muntjac (\"Muntiacus reevesii\").\n",
"Water deer are capable of emitting a number of sounds. The main call is a bark, and this has more of a growl tone when compared with the sharper yap of a muntjac. The bark is used as an alarm, and water deer will bark repeatedly at people and at each other for reasons unknown. If challenged during the rut, a buck will emit a clicking sound. It is uncertain how this unique sound is generated, although it is possibly by using its molar teeth. During the rut a buck following a doe will make a weak whistle or squeak. The does emit a soft pheep to call to their fawns, whilst an injured deer will emit a screaming wail.\n",
"The simple tactics of reducing speed and scanning both sides of the road for foraging deer can improve driver safety at night, and drivers may see the retro-reflection of an animal’s eyes before seeing the animal itself.\n"
] |
If two galaxies collided, would there be collisions? | It's really true. The space between stars is really quite large. | [
"Collisions occur when two galaxies pass directly through each other and have sufficient relative momentum not to merge. The stars of interacting galaxies will usually not collide, but the gas and dust within the two forms will interact, sometimes triggering star formation. A collision can severely distort the shape of the galaxies, forming bars, rings or tail-like structures.\n",
"Such collisions are relatively common, considering galaxies' long lifespans. Andromeda, for example, is believed to have collided with at least one other galaxy in the past, and several dwarf galaxies such as Sgr dSph are currently colliding with the Milky Way and being merged into it.\n",
"Collisions between galaxies, or galaxy mergers, have been observed directly by space telescopes such as Hubble and Spitzer. However, collisions in planetary systems including stellar collisions, while long speculated, have only recently begun to be observed directly.\n",
"A stellar collision is the coming together of two stars caused by stellar dynamics within a star cluster, or by the orbital decay of a binary star due to stellar mass loss or gravitational radiation, or by other mechanisms not yet well understood.\n",
"A collision is the event in which two or more bodies exert forces on each other in about a relatively short time. Although the most common use of the word \"collision\" refers to incidents in which two or more objects collide with great force, the scientific use of the term implies nothing about the magnitude of the force.\n",
"BULLET::::- A collision or close encounter between stellar systems, including galaxies, may result in the disruption of both systems, with some of the stars being accelerated to high velocities, or even ejected. A large-scale example is the gravitational interaction between the Milky Way Galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud.\n",
"Galactic collisions are now frequently simulated on computers, which use realistic physics principles, including the simulation of gravitational forces, gas dissipation phenomena, star formation, and feedback. Dynamical friction slows the relative motion galaxy pairs, which may possibly merge at some point, according to the initial relative energy of the orbits. \n"
] |
Where can I go to research famine, persecution, and diaspora around the time of German Unification (~1870s). | "The Long Nineteenth Century" by Blackburn is a general history of Germany, ending with WW1. You'll find plenty of information to get started in the book, as it is well sourced. I don't recall it being too specific in that area, but would certainly not hurt to start your search. | [
"Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University publishes a series of booklets called Famine Folios, a unique resource for students, scholars and researchers, as well as general readers, covering many aspects of the Famine in Ireland from 1845–1852 — the worst demographic catastrophe of 19th-century Europe. The essays are interdisciplinary in nature, and make available new research in Famine studies by internationally established scholars in history, art history, cultural theory, philosophy, media history, political economy, literature and music.\n",
"This course of study was established in 1939 by the Reichsinstitut für ausländische und koloniale Forstwirtschaft (English: Reich Institute for Foreign and Colonial Forestry). As of 1946 the University of Hamburg continues the course.\n",
"The first attempt to collect and publish the history of the German dioceses in reference books was made by Martin Gerbert, the prince-abbot of the monastery St. Blasien in the late 18th century, but his works were never completed.\n",
"BULLET::::- \"Bibliothek älterer Schriftwerke der deutschen Schweiz und ihres Grenzgebietes\" (edited with Ferdinand Vetter; 1877–92) – Library of older literary works of German-speaking Switzerland and its border areas.\n",
"BULLET::::- -Bencin, Thomas F. Gottschee: A History of a German Community on Slovenia from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century. Louisville, Colorado: Gottscheer Heritage and Genealogy Association, 1995. Print.\n",
"BULLET::::- Thomas F. Bencin. Gottschee: A History of a German Community in Slovenia from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century. Master's Thesis 1995. Louisville, CO: Gottscheer Research and Genealogy Assn. 2003.\n",
"some hundred journal articles and chapters in books, on German literature, literary history and sociology, critical theory, systems theory, aesthetic theory, including essays in \"A New History of German Literature\" (Harvard UP)\n"
] |
why are chip bags so loud? | Its because of the type of plastic that they use to make the bags. Because chips go stale rather quickly when exposed to oxygen they use a a high density plastic and pack them with gas(not sure what kind nitrogen?) To keep them fresh until you open them. The type of plastic they use is stiff so it makes a krinkley noise when moved. Hope that helps | [
"Chippers of this type have many drawbacks and safety issues. If an operator becomes snagged on material being fed into the machine, injury or death is very likely. Chippers of this type are also very loud. The chips produced may be very large, and if thin material is inserted, it may be cut into slivers rather than chips, and since the drum is directly driven by the engine, materials that are too large or long may stall the engine while usually remaining firmly stuck in the drum.\n",
"Biltong is a common product in Southern African butcheries and grocery stores, and can be bought in the form of wide strips (known as \"stokkies\", meaning \"little sticks\"). It is also sold in plastic bags, sometimes shrink-wrapped, and may be either finely shredded or sliced as biltong chips.\n",
"Originally rubber bags were used to brace pallets inside trucks. They evolved into kraft paper bags with a plastic-bag interior. As metal strapping has become less popular, many companies now use polyethylene- or vinyl-based bags because of their low cost. It is important to match the size of the bag to the void.\n",
"The chips are also known outside of St. Louis because of the rappers Murphy Lee and Nelly. Murphy Lee wrote a song \"Red Hot Riplets\" (from the album Murphy's Law) that mentions them in the chorus. When Murphy Lee was included in the Rap Snacks line of chips, he had them duplicate the Red Hot Riplets recipe as his flavor of Rap Snacks.\n",
"Other than the wide variety of materials used to make them, ear picks vary widely in their tips and embellishments. Disposable plastic ear picks with a cotton swab at one end are increasingly popular.\n",
"Modern snuff boxes are made from a variety of woods, pewter and even plastic and are manufactured in surprising numbers due, largely, to snuff's resurgence amongst tobacco connoisseurs and ex-smokers.\n",
"Chips sold in markets were usually sold in tins or scooped out of storefront glass bins and delivered by horse and wagon. Early potato chip bags were wax paper with the ends ironed or stapled together. At first, potato chips were packaged in barrels or tins, which left chips at the bottom stale and crumbled.\n"
] |
Do we have any primary sources which explicitly accuse Edward II of being a homosexual or is this theory based on innuendo and conjecture? | An anonymous chronicler writing during the civil wars of the 1320s, wrote that:
> ...upon looking on him [Piers Gaveston] the son of the king immediately felt such love for him that he entered into a covenant of constancy, and bound himself with him before all other mortals with a bond of indissoluble love, firmly drawn up and fastened with a knot.
The modern judgement on this by Edward's biographer [J. R. S. Phillips](_URL_0_) is that:
> Such comments have led to the modern assumption that their relationship was definitely sexual. The evidence for this, however, is far from clear. While some of the chroniclers' remarks about Edward II can be interpreted as implying homosexuality or bisexuality, too many of them are either much later in date or the product of hostility, or a combination of the two, and thus not acceptable at face value. | [
"The possibility that Edward had a sexual relationship with Gaveston or his later favourites has been extensively discussed by historians, complicated by the paucity of surviving evidence to determine for certain the details of their relationships. Homosexuality was fiercely condemned by the Church in 14th-century England, which equated it with heresy, but engaging in sex with another man did not necessarily define an individual's personal identity in the same way that it might in the 21st century. Edward and Gaveston both had sexual relationships with their wives, who bore them children; Edward also had an illegitimate son, and may also have had an affair with his niece, Eleanor de Clare.\n",
"The contemporary evidence supporting their homosexual relationship comes primarily from an anonymous chronicler in the 1320s who described how Edward \"felt such love\" for Gaveston that \"he entered into a covenant of constancy, and bound himself with him before all other mortals with a bond of indissoluble love, firmly drawn up and fastened with a knot\". The first specific suggestion that Edward engaged in sex with men was recorded in 1334, when Adam Orleton, the Bishop of Winchester, was accused of having stated in 1326 that Edward was a \"sodomite\", although Orleton defended himself by arguing that he had meant that Edward's advisor, Hugh Despenser the Younger, was a sodomite, rather than the late King. The Meaux Chronicle from the 1390s simply notes that Edward gave himself \"too much to the vice of sodomy.\"\n",
"During the 1690s, rumours grew of William's alleged homosexual inclinations and led to the publication of many satirical pamphlets by his Jacobite detractors. He did have several close male associates, including two Dutch courtiers to whom he granted English titles: Hans Willem Bentinck became Earl of Portland, and Arnold Joost van Keppel was created Earl of Albemarle. These relationships with male friends, and his apparent lack of mistresses, led William's enemies to suggest that he might prefer homosexual relationships. William's modern biographers disagree on the veracity of these allegations. Some believe there may have been truth to the rumours, while others affirm that they were no more than figments of his enemies' imaginations, and that there was nothing unusual in someone childless like William adopting or evincing paternal affections for a younger man.\n",
"Reports that Henry engaged in same-sex relations with his court favourites, known as the \"mignons,\" date back to his own time. Certainly he enjoyed intense relationships with them. The scholar Louis Crompton maintains that all of the contemporary rumors were true. Some modern historians dispute this. Jean-Francois Solnon, Nicolas Le Roux, and Jacqueline Boucher have noted that Henry had many famous mistresses, that he was well known for his taste in beautiful women, and that no male sex partners have been identified. They have concluded that the idea he was homosexual was promoted by his political opponents (both Protestant and Catholic) who used his dislike of war and hunting to depict him as effeminate and undermine his reputation with the French people. Certainly his religious enemies plumbed the depths of personal abuse in attributing vices to him, topping the mixture with accusations of what they regarded as the ultimate devilish vice, homosexuality. And the portrait of a self-indulgent sodomite, incapable of fathering an heir to the throne, proved useful in efforts by the Catholic League to secure the succession for Cardinal Charles de Bourbon after 1585.\n",
"It was hinted at by medieval chroniclers, and has been alleged by modern historians, that the relationship between Gaveston and Edward was homosexual. The \"Annales Paulini\" claims that Edward loved Gaveston \"beyond measure\", while the \"Lanercost\" says the intimacy between them was \"undue\". The \"Chronicle of Melsa\" states that Edward \"particularly delighted in the vice of sodomy\", without making special reference to Gaveston. The portrayal of Gaveston as homosexual continued in fictional portrayals, such as Christopher Marlowe's play \"Edward II\" from the early 1590s, and the 1924 adaptation of that work by Bertolt Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger.\n",
"c. Much speculation has centred on whether Edward and Gaveston's relation was of a homosexual nature. An in-depth discussion of this issue – and an alternative to the predominant view – is presented by P. Chaplais.\n",
"The Eulenburg affair has been held up as one example of homosexuality being used as a means to attain certain political goals. As Eulenburg's wife later commented, \"\"They are striking at my husband, but their target is the kaiser.\"\"\n"
] |
the difference between standard deviation, standard error and variance. | Standard deviation and standard error are both functions of the variance, so we can start by trying to understand the variance first.
The variance is something that, intuitively, measures the "spread" of a distribution. It is how far away on average points from your sample will be from the mean of your distribution, where we say "how far away" in this case means "squared distance." Now there are a whole host of reasons for using the squared distance for this type of thing, an example being that it is *additive* (i.e., var(X+Y) = var(X)+var(Y) for uncorrelated X and Y). This is something we don't get with standard deviation.
However, the variance is not a linear map in that for a constant c,
var(c*X) = c^2 * var(X)
and not
var(c*X) = c*var(X).
We can get this with the standard deviation, which is the square root of the variance. This scale property can be useful because this statistic will then have the same units as your data, so we can say things like "Z number of standard deviations away from the mean" as the units are now consistent.
Finally, the standard error is typically defined as the standard deviation of a given statistic defined from a sample. For example, the standard error of the sample mean is the population standard deviation divided by the square root of the sample size, since the variance of the sample mean is the population variance divided by the sample size. Standard errors are also useful in that they have the same units as elements of your sample, and often statistical tests are based around how many standard errors a point is from a given statistic. | [
"The standard deviation of a random variable, statistical population, data set, or probability distribution is the square root of its variance. It is algebraically simpler, though in practice less robust, than the average absolute deviation.\n",
"Variance (or standard deviation) is not a risk measure in the above sense. This can be seen since it has neither the translation property nor monotonicity. That is, formula_21 for all formula_22, and a simple counterexample for monotonicity can be found. The standard deviation is a deviation risk measure. To avoid any confusion, note that deviation risk measures, such as variance and standard deviation are sometimes called risk measures in different fields.\n",
"Standard deviation refers to the extent to which individual observations in a sample differ from a central value, such as the sample or population mean, while Standard error refers to an estimate of difference between sample mean and population mean.\n",
"The mean and the standard deviation of a set of data are descriptive statistics usually reported together. In a certain sense, the standard deviation is a \"natural\" measure of statistical dispersion if the center of the data is measured about the mean. This is because the standard deviation from the mean is smaller than from any other point. The precise statement is the following: suppose \"x\", ..., \"x\" are real numbers and define the function:\n",
"If is a positive random variable and the variance is given as then the standard deviation is proportional to the mean, which is called fixed relative error. In this case, the variance-stabilizing transformation is\n",
"In all cases, the variance of the parameter is given by and the covariance between parameters and is given by . Standard deviation is the square root of variance. These error estimates reflect only random errors in the measurements. The true uncertainty in the parameters is larger due to the presence of systematic errors—which, by definition, cannot be quantified.\n",
"Unlike expected absolute deviation, the variance of a variable has units that are the square of the units of the variable itself. For example, a variable measured in meters will have a variance measured in meters squared. For this reason, describing data sets via their standard deviation or root mean square deviation is often preferred over using the variance. In the dice example the standard deviation is √2.9 ≈ 1.7, slightly larger than the expected absolute deviation of 1.5.\n"
] |
how rockets like the saturn 5, the soyuz, and the space x rocket stay pointed up and straight. eli5. | Before they launch, they're held in place with scaffolding.
After launch, the force is controlled and directed such that up is the direction they mostly go in, with very minor adjustments in the nozzles to change direction. | [
"SA-500D was one of the five pre-flight configurations of the Saturn V. This configuration showed the Saturn V's \"bending and vibration characteristics\" and verified \"the adequacy of guidance and control systems' design.\" The rocket's of thrust would generate vigorous shaking and it was important to see that the rocket would not shake apart or vibrate itself off-course.\n",
"Soyuz-2, GRAU index 14A14, is the collective designation for the 21st-century version of the Russian Soyuz rocket. In its basic form, it is a three-stage carrier rocket for placing payloads into low Earth orbit. The first-stage boosters and two core stages feature uprated engines with improved injection systems, compared to the previous versions of the Soyuz. Digital flight control and telemetry systems allow the rocket to be launched from a fixed launch platform, whereas the launch platforms for earlier Soyuz rockets had to be rotated as the rocket could not perform a roll to change its heading in flight.\n",
"Soyuz-2 is often flown with an upper stage, which allows it to lift payloads into higher orbits, such as Molniya and geosynchronous orbits. The upper stage is equipped with independent flight control and telemetry systems from those used in the rest of the rocket. The NPO Lavochkin manufactured Fregat is the most commonly used upper stage.\n",
"Finally, after months of delays and problems, the first flight of the Saturn IB lifted off from Pad 34. The first stage worked perfectly, lifting the rocket to , when the S-IVB took over and lifted the spacecraft to . The CSM separated and continued upwards to .\n",
"The Saturn C-x architecture consisted of five different stages (S-I, S-II, S-III, S-IV, and S-V/Centaur) that could be stacked vertically for specific rockets to meet various NASA payload and mission requirements.\n",
"The Saturn V instrument unit is a ring-shaped structure fitted to the top of the Saturn V rocket's third stage (S-IVB) and the Saturn IB's second stage (also an S-IVB). It was immediately below the SLA \"(Spacecraft/Lunar Module Adapter)\" panels that contained the Lunar Module. The instrument unit contains the guidance system for the Saturn V rocket. Some of the electronics contained within the instrument unit are a digital computer, analog flight control computer, emergency detection system, inertial guidance platform, control accelerometers, and control rate gyros. The instrument unit (IU) for Saturn V was designed by NASA at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) and was developed from the Saturn I IU. NASA's contractor to manufacture the Saturn V Instrument Unit was International Business Machines (IBM).\n",
"The Saturn V rocket, which sent astronauts to the Moon, used inertial guidance, a self-contained system that guided the rocket's trajectory. The rocket booster had a guidance system separate from those on the command and lunar modules. It was contained in an instrument unit like this one, a ring located between the rocket's third stage and the command and lunar modules. The ring contained the basic guidance system components—a stable platform, accelerometers, a digital computer, and control electronics—as well as radar, telemetry, and other units.\n"
] |
how can houses in detroit be on sale for a dollar? | my parents owned a house in detroit that they owed back taxes on to the amount of $7k or so. they let wayne county foreclose with no objection. the first time it is put up for auction the price is set at that $7. if it doesnt sell it goes back up for auction 6 months later starting at $50. i thought long and hard about buying it since i grew there but its just a bad investment. there's upkeep ,sure, but there's also property taxes, about $3500 a year. and you're living in detroit.
there are thousands of houses like this in detroit. its a city built for 2 million with only about 650,000 residents. no demand means no value.
and as for renting, that house i grew up in? my uncle is living in it, after foreclosure. he pays the utilities and cuts the grass and NO ONE is coming to kick him out. you dont have to rent in detroit. you can just squat. noone cares.
| [
"The average price of homes sold in Detroit in 2012 was $7,500. , 47 houses in Detroit were listed for $500 or less, with five properties listed for $1. Despite the extremely low price of Detroit properties, most of the properties have been on the market for more than a year as the boarded up, abandoned houses of the city are seldom attractive to buyers. \"The Detroit News\" reported that more than half of Detroit property owners did not pay taxes in 2012, at a loss to the city of $131 million (equal to 12% of the city's general fund budget).\n",
"The house was built between 1890 and 1894 by a prominent lumber baron, David Whitney Jr., who was considered not only one of Detroit's wealthiest personalities, but also one of Michigan's wealthiest citizens. The house is estimated to have cost 400,000 (equal to $ today), and it was featured in several newspapers of that time.\n",
"The average home price is $377,450. Several homes in the neighborhood are priced at over $1 million, including a home that sold in August 2007 for $1.5 million. Another home, which was purchased for $1.4 million in 2006, boasts an underground tunnel linking the main house with the garage, which also serves as an art and wine cellar.\n",
"The house was bought in 2000 for $1.1 million. By 2010 the house had only had four owners, and sold c.2011 for around $3.9 million. In 2016, it was put on the market at the asking price of $5.25 million, and after almost three years, it was sold in January 2019 for $2 million.\n",
"BULLET::::- February 15 – The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced a plan to sell 2,000 abandoned homes in Detroit to the city for sale to homesteaders at a price of not more than five dollars per house.\n",
"In 2015, as a result of delinquent non-payment of county property taxes by the homeowners association after a mix-up where tax bills were being sent to a defunct accounting firm on Kearney Street, a San Jose couple, Tina Lam and Michael Cheng, were able to purchase the street, sidewalks and all other “common ground\", including garden islands and palm trees, for $90,000. Worried that the new property owners would charge them for parking in the 120 parking spaces on the street, the homeowners complained to San Francisco Board of Supervisors asking that the sale be voided. In addition the British Consulate, which has owned a house on the street as a consular residence since 2003, raised security concerns. On November 28, 2017 the Board of Supervisors voted 7-4 to reverse the sale, reverting ownership to the homeowners. After the vote, Supervisor Mark Farrell referred to the couple as \"bottom-feeding pirates attempting to extort and hold San Francisco residents hostage\".\n",
"In 1993, billionaire Ron Burkle bought the home for $20 million – $19 million less than the $39 million asking price (which had included a valuable art collection of old masters paintings in the original asking price) but still among the highest prices paid for a home in the United States in the previous three years.\n"
] |
math constants. | We just found them as we investigated things.
Take Pi; when people were investigating circles & their proportions, someone noticed that every circle's circumference was always about 3 times it's diameter. 'That's interesting' (the words preceding 99% of all major discoveries ever!) and so more investigations led to the discovery that π is actually always exactly 3.14159265.... etc. for every possible circle.
Constants are discovered when you experiment and increasing one thing ways leads to a predictable increase in something else. A spring, for example: if you Han weights off a spring, the spring stretches more the more weight you add. In fact, when you double the weight, you double the stretch. This means you can say that extension is proportional to load, and so extension = a constant x the load. In this case every spring has a different constant - but sometimes we discover that some constants are the same under all circumstances, and so we have Planck's constant, gravitational field constant etc. | [
"A mathematical constant is a number whose value is fixed by an unambiguous definition, often referred to by a symbol or by mathematicians' names to facilitate using it across multiple mathematical problems. Constants arise in many areas of mathematics, with constants such as and occurring in such diverse contexts as geometry, number theory, and calculus.\n",
"A mathematical constant is a number whose value is fixed by an unambiguous definition, often referred to by a symbol or by mathematicians' names to facilitate using it across multiple mathematical problems. For example, the constant π may be defined as the ratio of the length of a circle's circumference to its diameter. The following list includes the decimal expansion and set containing each number, ordered by year of discovery.\n",
"A physical constant, sometimes fundamental physical constant or universal constant, is a physical quantity that is generally believed to be both universal in nature and have constant value in time. It is contrasted with a mathematical constant, which has a fixed numerical value, but does not directly involve any physical measurement.\n",
"This use of \"constant\" as an abbreviation of \"constant function\" must be distinguished from the normal meaning of the word in mathematics. A constant, or mathematical constant is a well and unambiguously defined number or other mathematical object, as, for example, the numbers 0, 1, and the identity element of a group.\n",
"The term physical constant expresses the notion of a physical quantity subject to experimental measurement which is independent of the time or location of the experiment. The constancy (immutability) of any \"physical constant\" is thus subject to experimental verification.\n",
"Physical constant in the sense under discussion in this article should not be confused with other quantities called \"constants\" that are assumed to be constant in a given context without the implication that they are fundamental, such as the \"time constant\" characteristic of a given system, or material constants, such as the Madelung constant, electrical resistivity, and heat capacity.\n",
"An astronomical constant is a physical constant used in astronomy. Formal sets of constants, along with recommended values, have been defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) several times: in 1964 and in 1976 (with an update in 1994). In 2009 the IAU adopted a new current set, and recognizing that new observations and techniques continuously provide better values for these constants, they decided to not fix these values, but have the Working Group on Numerical Standards continuously maintain a set of Current Best Estimates. The set of constants is widely reproduced in publications such as the \"Astronomical Almanac\" of the United States Naval Observatory and HM Nautical Almanac Office.\n"
] |
why wont my graphics card run certain games? | Newer graphics cards come with new features, which the old ones don't support. If a game requests a feature from the card which it doesn't have, it'll likely give up.
| [
"Due to the increasing computing power of each generation of game consoles, a novel use has emerged where they are repurposed into High-performance computing (HPC) clusters. Some examples of game console clusters are Sony PlayStation clusters and Microsoft Xbox clusters. Another example of consumer game product is the Nvidia Tesla Personal Supercomputer workstation, which uses multiple graphics accelerator processor chips. Besides game consoles, high-end graphics cards too can be used instead. The use of graphics cards (or rather their GPU's) to do calculations for grid computing is vastly more economical than using CPU's, despite being less precise. However, when using double-precision values, they become as precise to work with as CPU's and are still much less costly (purchase cost).\n",
"It is worth noting that a high-end graphics card will also use more electricity, or have a higher power draw, than a lower-end card. This power draw only increases as the number of graphics cards increases, adding another cost to a high-end \"rig\". Enthusiasts also tend to overclock their graphics cards which does add power draw. However, as the number of graphics cards increases, the performance gains by adding another graphics card decreases significantly due to the complexity of more than two GPU's communicating to each other in an efficient way. This is another example of depreciating returns.\n",
"It is important to note that no commercially produced Backup Device for Super Nintendo can play back games which use additional processing hardware in the cartridge, with the sole exception of DSP-1. This is due in part to the way in which these processors operate. It may be possible with some copiers to manage to back up a game using an extra coprocessor chip though. A relatively small number of games fall into this category, but there are notable games included, for example \"Mega Man X2\", \"Mega Man X3\", \"Star Fox\", \"Kirby's Dream Land 3\", \"Super Mario RPG\", and \"\".\n",
"Games drove system sales then as they do now, and with its poor gameplay performance, the CoCo attracted little interest in officially licensed ports of popular games. The CoCo 3 did improve graphics capability and doubled CPU performance, but still contained no hardware graphics or sound acceleration. Drawing was performed by the CPU and most of the new graphics modes required at least twice as much processor time due to increased display resolution and color depth. The sound hardware was not changed at all.\n",
"Hardware T&L did not have broad application support in games at the time (mainly due to Direct3D games transforming their geometry on the CPU and not being allowed to use indexed geometries), so critics contended that it had little real-world value. Initially, it was only somewhat beneficial in a few OpenGL-based 3D first-person shooter titles of the time, most notably \"Quake III Arena\". 3dfx and other competing graphics card companies contended that a fast CPU would make up for the lack of a T&L unit. \n",
"One major drawback of buying a prebuilt gaming PC aside from the extra cost is that they are often built with a very powerful CPU, but with a relatively weak graphics card. This results in a \"gaming\" PC that performs poorly in gaming for the price paid. Most games today do not benefit much from having a very powerful CPU with more than 4 CPU cores and hyper-threading, but benefits greatly with a more powerful graphics card.\n",
"The game's environment takes up 60–65% of the CPU bandwidth, primarily because of the moving camera, but also because eight different characters can appear on screen at any one time – a large number for the technology of the time. Because of this, a powerful CPU was required to run the game, since the engine relied on the processor doing all the work in creating the 3D models. However, despite this limitation, the game runs at a minimum of 15 FPS, even on slow systems. The downside to this was that, since processor power at that time was limited, the in-game 3D models tended to look very pixelated, especially up-close and when motionless, due to the low amount of voxels used to display them. However, had the number of voxels been raised to increase the detail on the characters, the game would have become too slow to play, even on advanced CPUs.\n"
] |
How strongly does the IQ bell curve correlate with achievement? | [Here's](_URL_0_) a paper that attempts to relate Piaget IQ tests to standardized test scores for school achievement, and finds little overlap.
[This](_URL_2_) study states > When success measures were regressed against intelligence and personality scales or factors, intelligence did not account for variance beyond that explained by personality.
However, [this one](_URL_1_) seems to indicate that it can be predictive of success, but only in very specific circumstances and that life outcomes (getting a job, getting a career, rate of pay), when controlled for other promotional factors that influence/are influenced by IQ, aren't largely dependent on IQ. | [
"\"The Bell Curve\", published in 1994, was written by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray to explain the variations in intelligence in American society, warn of some consequences of that variation, and propose social policies for mitigating the worst of the consequences. The book's title comes from the bell-shaped normal distribution of intelligence quotient (IQ) scores in a population.\n",
"The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and that it is a better predictor of many personal outcomes, including financial income, job performance, birth out of wedlock, and involvement in crime than are an individual's parental socioeconomic status. They also argue that those with high intelligence, the \"cognitive elite\", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence. The book was controversial, especially where the authors wrote about racial differences in intelligence and discussed the implications of those differences.\n",
"\"The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life\" (1994) is a controversial bestseller that Charles Murray wrote with Harvard professor Richard J. Herrnstein. Its central thesis is that intelligence is a better predictor of many factors including financial income, job performance, unwed pregnancy, and crime than one's parents' socio-economic status or education level. Also, the book argued that those with high intelligence (the \"cognitive elite\") are becoming separated from the general population of those with average and below-average intelligence, and that this was a dangerous social trend. Murray expanded on this theme in his 2012 book \"Coming Apart\".\n",
"The task force concluded that IQ scores do have high predictive validity for individual differences in school achievement. They confirm the predictive validity of IQ for adult occupational status, even when variables such as education and family background have been statistically controlled. They stated that individual differences in intelligence are substantially influenced by both genetics and environment.\n",
"In 1987, Flynn took the position that the very large increase indicates that IQ tests do not measure intelligence but only a minor sort of \"abstract problem-solving ability\" with little practical significance. He argued that if IQ gains do reflect intelligence increases, there would have been consequent changes of our society that have not been observed (a presumed non-occurrence of a \"cultural renaissance\"). Flynn no longer endorses this view of intelligence and has since elaborated and refined his view of what rising IQ scores mean.\n",
"Intelligence quotients are sometimes held to be distributed according to the bell-shaped curve. About 40% of the area under the curve is in the interval from 100 to 120; correspondingly, about 40% of the population scores between 100 and 120 on IQ tests. Nearly 9% of the area under the curve is in the interval from 120 to 140; correspondingly, about 9% of the population scores between 120 and 140 on IQ tests, etc. Similarly many other things are distributed according to the \"bell-shaped curve\", including measurement errors in many physical measurements. Why the ubiquity of the \"bell-shaped curve\"? There is a theoretical reason for this, and it involves Fourier transforms and hence trigonometric functions. That is one of a variety of applications of Fourier transforms to statistics.\n",
"The report stated that IQ scores measure important skills as they correlate fairly well (0.5) with grades. This implied that the explained variance (given certain linear assumptions) is 25%. \"Wherever it has been studied, children with high scores on tests of intelligence tend to learn more of what is taught in school than their lower-scoring peers. There may be styles of teaching and methods of instruction that will decrease or increase this correlation, but none that consistently eliminates it has yet been found.\" \n"
] |
how bad does the situation have to be for a person to seek asylum from another country? and how demonstrable does the threat have to be? (proof) | Hop the border, turn yourself in, and apply for asylum. You'll be granted temporary stay during the trial. If you can demonstrate the need of jumping the border to save your life, you will be granted permenant residency. | [
"A person is eligible for the discretionary relief of asylum if they are a refugee—that is, \"unable or unwilling to return to, and is unwilling or unable to avail themselves of the protection of, [their home] country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.\" By contrast, a person is eligible for the mandatory relief of withholding deportation if they demonstrate a \"clear probability of persecution\" if they return to their country. Because statutes governing these different forms of relief describe the showing the alien must make in different terms, the Court reasoned those showings were different. Furthermore, a \"well-founded fear\" is different, and can be lower than, a \"clear probability\" of persecution.\n",
"Asylum seekers who are denied asylum may face impediment to expulsion, for example if the home country refuses to receive the person or if new asylum reasons occur after the decision. In some cases, these people are considered illegal immigrants, and in others, they may get a temporary residence permit, for example with reference to the principle of non-refoulement in the international Refugee Convention. The European Court of Human Rights, referring to the European Convention on Human Rights, has shown in a number of indicative judgments that there are enforcement barriers to expulsion to certain countries, for example due to the risk of torture.\n",
"Asylum seekers who have committed crimes against peace, a war crime or a crime against humanity, or other serious non-political crimes, or whose actions are contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations, are excluded from international protection.\n",
"Unauthorised arrival into another country may be prompted by the need to escape civil war or repression in the country of origin. However, somebody who flees such a situation is in most countries under no circumstances an undocumented immigrant. If victims of forced displacement apply for asylum in the country they fled to and are granted refugee status they have the right to remain permanently. If asylum seekers are not granted some kind of legal protection status, then they may have to leave the country, or stay as illegal immigrants.\n",
"BULLET::::- A person in need of protection: Claims for asylum under this category are usually made at a point of entry into Canada. Those claiming to be a person in need of protection must be unable to return to their home country safely because they would be subjected to a danger of torture, risk for their life or risk of cruel and unusual treatment.\n",
"A person may face persecution in their home country because of race, nationality, religion, ethnicity, or social group, and yet not be eligible for asylum because of certain bars defined by law. The most frequent bar is the one-year filing deadline. If an application is not submitted within one year following the applicant's arrival in the United States, the applicant is barred from obtaining asylum unless certain exceptions apply. However, the applicant can be eligible for other forms of relief such as Withholding of Removal, which is a less favorable type of relief than asylum because it does not lead to a Green Card or citizenship. The deadline for submitting the application is not the only restriction that bars one from obtaining asylum. If an applicant persecuted others, committed a serious crime, or represents a risk to U.S. security, he or she will be barred from receiving asylum as well.\n",
"That \"Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution\" is enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and supported by the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Under these agreements, a refugee is a person who is outside that person's own country's territory owing to fear of persecution on protected grounds, including race, caste, nationality, religion, political opinions and participation in any particular social group or social activities.\n"
] |
why does the solar system get drawn like a glat plain? are all the planets on the same vertical level? if they are, what happens if we go up? | _URL_0_
The orbits aren't all perfectly aligned. Ceres has the most noticeable tilt, the others are less dramatic. | [
"Most of the major bodies of the Solar System orbit the Sun in nearly the same plane. This is likely due to the way in which the Solar System formed from a protoplanetary disk. Probably the closest current representation of the disk is known as the \"invariable plane of the Solar System\". Earth's orbit, and hence, the ecliptic, is inclined a little more than 1° to the invariable plane, Jupiter's orbit is within a little more than ° of it, and the other major planets are all within about 6°. Because of this, most Solar System bodies appear very close to the ecliptic in the sky.\n",
"Planets rotate at varying rates and thus may take a slightly oblate shape because of the centrifugal force. With such an oblate shape, the gravitational attraction will deviate somewhat from that of a homogeneous sphere. This phenomenon is quite noticeable for artificial Earth satellites, especially those in low orbits. At larger distances the effect of this oblateness becomes negligible. Planetary motions in the Solar System can be computed with sufficient precision if they are treated as point masses.\n",
"Even if the discussion is limited to the Solar System, the Sun is not at the geometric center of any planet's orbit, but rather approximately at one focus of the elliptical orbit. Furthermore, to the extent that a planet's mass cannot be neglected in comparison to the Sun's mass, the center of gravity of the Solar System is displaced slightly away from the center of the Sun. (The masses of the planets, mostly Jupiter, amount to 0.14% of that of the Sun.) Therefore, a hypothetical astronomer on an extrasolar planet would observe a small \"wobble\" in the Sun's motion.\n",
"All other planetary bodies in the Solar System also appear to periodically switch direction as they cross Earth's sky. Though all stars and planets appear to move from east to west on a nightly basis in response to the rotation of Earth, the outer planets generally drift slowly eastward relative to the stars. Asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects (including Pluto) exhibit apparent retrogradation. This motion is normal for the planets, and so is considered direct motion. However, since Earth completes its orbit in a shorter period of time than the planets outside its orbit, it periodically overtakes them, like a faster car on a multi-lane highway. When this occurs, the planet being passed will first appear to stop its eastward drift, and then drift back toward the west. Then, as Earth swings past the planet in its orbit, it appears to resume its normal motion west to east. Inner planets Venus and Mercury appear to move in retrograde in a similar mechanism, but as they can never be in opposition to the Sun as seen from Earth, their retrograde cycles are tied to their inferior conjunctions with the Sun. They are unobservable in the Sun's glare and in their \"new\" phase, with mostly their dark sides toward Earth; they occur in the transition from evening star to morning star.\n",
"An analogous concept applies to other planets: a planet's celestial poles are the points in the sky where the projection of the planet's axis of rotation intersects the celestial sphere. These points vary because different planets' axes are oriented differently (the apparent positions of the stars also change slightly because of parallax effects).\n",
"Most large objects in orbit around the Sun lie near the plane of Earth's orbit, known as the ecliptic. The planets are very close to the ecliptic, whereas comets and Kuiper belt objects are frequently at significantly greater angles to it. All the planets, and most other objects, orbit the Sun in the same direction that the Sun is rotating (counter-clockwise, as viewed from above Earth's north pole). There are exceptions, such as Halley's Comet.\n",
"One practical effect of this is that scalene astronomical bodies such as generally rotate along their minor axes (as does Earth, which is merely oblate); in addition, because of tidal locking, moons in synchronous orbit such as Mimas orbit with their major axis aligned radially to their planet.\n"
] |
biologically we have evolved to have carbohydrates as our main source of energy. why are they such a taboo in the health and dieting scene? | We actually work on sugar and we can break down carbohydrates to obtain that sugar. We store the excess in fat that we can use later.
For the vast majority of the history of life, obtaining food was a major activity that we had to do in order to get enough energy to live and it took energy to do that. For hundreds of millions of years, life walked that fine edge between getting enough energy to live while using less energy to get that food. One of the big survival factors was being able to take advantage of abundances of food by storing it so we could get through times where we couldn't get any (i.e. fat).
With civilization and cooperation, we've made is far less energy intensive to obtain food but it's still too new of a concept for evolution to have possibly caught up. So we have to consciously fight the instinct to consume the abundance of food that lots of people have access to because the mechanisms that used to help us survive (storing excess food as fat) eventually reaches a point where our bodies never evolved to handle the constant higher levels of fat for extended periods.
Focusing on avoiding obvious carbohydrates is a fairly straightforward way for us to self-regulate.
| [
"The most important carbohydrate is glucose, a simple sugar (monosaccharide) that is metabolized by nearly all known organisms. Glucose and other carbohydrates are part of a wide variety of metabolic pathways across species: plants synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water by photosynthesis storing the absorbed energy internally, often in the form of starch or lipids. Plant components are consumed by animals and fungi, and used as fuel for cellular respiration. Oxidation of one gram of carbohydrate yields approximately 16 kJ (4 kcal) of energy, while the oxidation of one gram of lipids yields about 38 kJ (9 kcal). The human body stores between 300 and 500 g of carbohydrates depending on body weight, with the skeletal muscle contributing to a large portion of the storage. Energy obtained from metabolism (e.g., oxidation of glucose) is usually stored temporarily within cells in the form of ATP. Organisms capable of anaerobic and aerobic respiration metabolize glucose and oxygen (aerobic) to release energy, with carbon dioxide and water as byproducts.\n",
"Carbohydrates are the main source of energy in organisms for metabolism. They are an important source of fuel in exercise. A study conducted by the Institute of Food, Nutrition, and Human Health at Massey University investigated the effect of consuming a carbohydrate and electrolyte solution on muscle glycogen use and running capacity on subjects that were on a high carbohydrate diet. The group that consumed the carbohydrate and electrolyte solution before and during exercise experienced greater endurance capacity. This could not be explained by the varying levels of muscle glycogen; however, higher plasma glucose concentration may have led to this result. Dr. Stephen Bailey posits that the central nervous system can sense the influx of carbohydrates and reduces the perceived effort of the exercise, allowing for greater endurance capacity.\n",
"Two of the main functions of carbohydrates are energy storage and providing structure. Sugars are carbohydrates, but not all carbohydrates are sugars. There are more carbohydrates on Earth than any other known type of biomolecule; they are used to store energy and genetic information, as well as play important roles in cell to cell interactions and communications.\n",
"Carbohydrates are an essential energy source for most life forms. In addition, polysaccharides formed from simpler carbohydrates are important structural components of many organisms such the cell walls of bacteria and plants.\n",
"Carbohydrates account for a major portion of the human diet. These carbohydrates are composed of three principal monosaccharides: glucose, fructose and galactose; in addition glycogen is the storage form of carbohydrates in humans. The failure to effectively use these molecules accounts for the majority of the inborn errors of human carbohydrates metabolism.\n",
"Carbohydrates, made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, are energy storing molecules. The simplest one of carbohydrates is glucose, CHO, is used in cellular respiration to produce ATP, adenosine triphosphate, which supplies cells with energy.\n",
"Often in lists of nutritional information, such as the USDA National Nutrient Database, the term \"carbohydrate\" (or \"carbohydrate by difference\") is used for everything other than water, protein, fat, ash, and ethanol. This includes chemical compounds such as acetic or lactic acid, which are not normally considered carbohydrates. It also includes dietary fiber which is a carbohydrate but which does not contribute much in the way of food energy (kilocalories), even though it is often included in the calculation of total food energy just as though it were a sugar.\n"
] |
how to differentiate nuclear blasts from earthquakes | Earthquakes are sinusoidal and logarythmic.. bombs make 1 wave and then small echoes are seen. | [
"Seismic stations record underground pressure waves and transmit this data for processing via secure communication links. There are many challenges involved with trying to differentiate a nuclear explosion from other natural and man-made phenomena, such as earthquakes, mining explosions, and construction. Nuclear explosions exceeding 150 kilotons generate pressure waves that primarily travel through the Earth's core and mantle. These types of explosions are straightforward to identify because the mixture of rock the signals pass through is fairly homogeneous and the signals generated are free from noise. Smaller nuclear explosions are more difficult to identify because pressure waves primarily travel through the Earth's upper mantle and crust, leading to signal distortion due to the heterogeneity of rocks at this depth.\n",
"There are two main considerations for the location of an explosion: height and surface composition. A nuclear weapon detonated in the air, called an air burst, produces less fallout than a comparable explosion near the ground. A nuclear explosion in which the fireball touches the ground pulls soil and other materials into the cloud and neutron activates it before it falls back to the ground. An air burst produces a relatively small amount of the highly radioactive heavy metal components of the device itself.\n",
"The pressure wave from an underground explosion will propagate through the ground and cause a minor earthquake. Theory suggests that a nuclear explosion could trigger fault rupture and cause a major quake at distances within a few tens of kilometers from the shot point.\n",
"BULLET::::- Explosions associated with routine mining practices, such as drilling and blasting, and unintended explosions such as the Sago mine Disaster. Explosions are generally not considered \"induced\" events since they are caused entirely by chemical payloads. Most earthquake monitoring agencies take careful measures to identify explosions and exclude them from earthquake catalogs.\n",
"The blast from a nuclear bomb is the result of X-ray-heated air (the fireball) sending a shock wave or pressure wave in all directions, initially at a velocity greater than the speed of sound, analogous to thunder generated by lightning. Knowledge about urban blast destruction is based largely on studies of Little Boy at Hiroshima. Nagasaki buildings suffered similar damage at similar distances, but the Nagasaki bomb detonated from the city center over hilly terrain that was partially bare of buildings.\n",
"In addition to nuclear explosions, the signatures of many other kinds of explosions can also be detected and analyzed by forensic seismology, and even other phenomena such as ocean waves (the global microseism), the movement of icebergs across the sea floor or in collision with other icebergs, or explosions within submarines.\n",
"The earthquake bomb, or seismic bomb, was a concept that was invented by the British aeronautical engineer Barnes Wallis early in World War II and subsequently developed and used during the war against strategic targets in Europe. A seismic bomb differs somewhat in concept from traditional bombs, which usually explode at or near the surface, and destroy their target directly by explosive force. In contrast, a seismic bomb is dropped from high altitude to attain very high speed as it falls and upon impact, penetrates and explodes deep underground, causing massive caverns or craters known as \"camouflets\", as well as intense shockwaves. In this way, the seismic bomb can affect targets that are too massive to be affected by a conventional bomb, as well as damage or destroy difficult targets such as bridges and viaducts.\n"
] |
how were prescription glasses made accurately before the invention of modern technology? | What modern technology do you envision? Spherical lenses were entirely within the abilities of technology 500 years ago. Prior to that we didn't really bother with glasses.
Also prescriptions sure didn't exist. Such glasses were fairly limited to the wealthy. | [
"Over time, the construction of frames for glasses also evolved. Early eyepieces were designed to be either held in place by hand or by exerting pressure on the nose (\"pince-nez\"). Girolamo Savonarola suggested that eyepieces could be held in place by a ribbon passed over the wearer's head, this in turn secured by the weight of a hat. The modern style of glasses, held by temples passing over the ears, was developed sometime before 1727, possibly by the British optician Edward Scarlett. These designs were not immediately successful, however, and various styles with attached handles such as \"scissors-glasses\" and lorgnettes were also fashionable from the second half of the 18th century and into the early 19th century.\n",
"Despite the increasing popularity of contact lenses and laser corrective eye surgery, glasses remain very common, as their technology has improved. For instance, it is now possible to purchase frames made of special memory metal alloys that return to their correct shape after being bent. Other frames have spring-loaded hinges. Either of these designs offers dramatically better ability to withstand the stresses of daily wear and the occasional accident. Modern frames are also often made from strong, light-weight materials such as titanium alloys, which were not available in earlier times.\n",
"The prototype wooden glasses were developed by Eric Singer, the idea was then shared with Ryan Kirkpatrick, Daniel Genco, Taylor Murray and Philip Peterson. The prototype was made using madrone tree, a pair of rusty cabinet hinges and salvaged lenses from a thrift store.\n",
"Early frames for glasses consisted of two magnifying glasses riveted together by the handles so that they could grip the nose. These are referred to as \"rivet spectacles\". The earliest surviving examples were found under the floorboards at Kloster Wienhausen, a convent near Celle in Germany; they have been dated to \"circa\" 1400.\n",
"The first spectacles utilized quartz lenses since optical glass had not been developed. The lenses were set into bone, metal and leather mountings, frequently fashioned like two small magnifying glasses with handles riveted together and set in an inverted V shape that could be balanced on the bridge of the nose. The use of spectacles extended from Italy to Germany, Spain, France and Portugal.\n",
"The invention of scissors-glasses solved the problem of the single lensed monocle or \"quizzing glass\", thought to be tiresome to the eye, by providing two lenses on a \"Y\" shaped frame. They usually had a ring in the end of the handle so that they could be worn on a ribbon or gold chain around the neck.\n",
"Glass lenses were never comfortable enough to gain widespread popularity. The first lenses to do so were those made from polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA or Perspex/Plexiglas), now commonly referred to as \"hard\" lenses. Their main disadvantage is they do not allow oxygen to pass through to the cornea, which can cause a number of adverse, and often serious, clinical events. Starting in the late 1970s, improved rigid materials which were oxygen-permeable were developed. Contact lenses made from these materials are called rigid gas permeable lenses or 'RGPs'.\n"
] |
is there any way jerking off can result in infertility at some point? | Infertility, no, not at all.
But it can result in a mild case of impotence, if you get used to a different kind of stimulation than actual sex provides. | [
"The insane gynaecologist, Dr. Marukido Sadao (Marquis de Sade), theorizes that a woman is unable to become pregnant if she is writhing in intense pain during intercourse. He sets about testing this new method of birth control by torturing women during sex.\n",
"When the umbilical cord is constricted (q.v. \"accidents\" above), the fetus experiences periods of hypoxia, and may respond by unusually high periods of kicking or struggling, to free the umbilical cord. These are sporadic if constriction is due to a change in the fetus' or mother's position, and may become worse or more frequent as the fetus grows. Extra attention should be given if mothers experience large increases in kicking from previous childbirths, especially when increases correspond to position changes.\n",
"Attempts to insert hazardous objects into the uterus are particularly dangerous, as they can cause punctures leading to sepsis. Ingesting or douching with harmful substances can have poisonous results. Receiving blows to the abdomen, whether self-inflicted or at the hands of another, can damage organs. Furthermore, the less dangerous methods – physical exertion, abdominal massage, and ingestion of relatively harmless substances thought to induce miscarriage – are less effective, and may result in the fetus developing birth defects. However, abdominal massage abortion is traditionally practised in Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia.\n",
"Umbilical cord prolapse occurs when the umbilical cord comes out of the uterus with or before the presenting part of the fetus. It is a relatively rare condition and occurs in fewer than 1% of pregnancies. Cord prolapse is more common in women who have had rupture of their amniotic sac. Other risk factors include maternal or fetal factors that prevent the fetus from occupying a normal position in the maternal pelvis, such as abnormal fetal lie, too much amniotic fluid, or a premature or small fetus. The concern with cord prolapse is that pressure on the cord from the fetus will cause cord compression that compromises blood flow to the fetus. Whenever there is a sudden decrease in fetal heart rate or abnormal fetal heart tracing, umbilical cord prolapse should be considered. Due to the possibility for fetal death and other complications, umbilical cord prolapse is considered an obstetric emergency during pregnancy or labor. Current management guidelines focus on quick delivery, which usually entails a cesarean section. With appropriate management, the majority of cases have good neonatal outcomes.\n",
"Predicament bondage can also involve the use of a single position in which remaining still will not cause any discomfort for the subject, but moving their body will pull on ropes, weights or other devices meant to cause them pain. The subject may then be tickled, sexually pleasured or otherwise enticed to move uncontrollably.\n",
"Although there is no true prevention, there are some ways to decrease the risks. To reduce the chances of uterine prolapse, get the cow up in a standing position and moving around as soon as possible. If the calf needs to be pulled, pull them out slowly and it is even more important to get the cow up and moving after the calf was pulled. When the cow is up and moving, the uterus can drop back into the abdominal cavity which straightens out the uterine horns.\n",
"Exsanguination is used as a method of slaughter. Before the fatal incision is made, the animal may be rendered insensible to pain by various methods, including captive bolt, electricity or chemical. Without prior sedation, stunning or anesthetic, this method of slaughter causes a high degree of anxiety, although other religiously funded studies contradict these findings. The captive bolt is placed against the skull of the animal, and penetrates to cause tissue destruction in the brain, incapacitating the animal so that the procedure may take place. Electricity is used mostly to incapacitate swine, poultry and domestic sheep, whereas a chemical is used for injured livestock.\n"
] |
why are there chechens fighting in the pro-russian side in eastern ukraine, when they originally were fighting against the russians in the chechen wars? | They do what they are paid for by Russian (and Chechen) government.
For now Chechnya is governed by Russian puppet who gets loads of money and will do anything Putin asks him to do.
Why Chechens and not Russian from other regions? I guess they are cheaper and have better skills for purpose. | [
"BULLET::::- Chechen, Abkhaz, Ossetian, and Cossack paramilitaries have been active participants in the insurgency in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Some Chechen opponents of Russian government were fighting pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine for the Ukrainian government.\n",
"The Invasion of Dagestan leading to the start of the new Russian-Chechen conflict was regarded by the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya as a provocation initiated from Moscow to start war in Chechnya, because Russian forces provided safe passage for Islamic fighters back to Chechnya. It was reported that Alexander Voloshin of the Yeltsin administration paid money to Basayev to stage this military operation.\n",
"The insurgency in the North Caucasus is a direct result of the two post-Soviet wars fought between Russia and Chechnya. The First Chechen War was a nationalist struggle, with both secular and Islamist overtones, for independence from Russia and took place between 1994 and 1996. After a vicious struggle between Russian federal forces and Chechen separatist guerrillas, Chechnya was granted \"de facto\" independence per the terms of the Khasavyurt Accord, signed on 30 August 1996. With a devastated infrastructure and various armed factions, subordinate to specific warlords, the next three years saw Chechnya devolve into a corrupted and criminal state, plagued by armed gangs, an epidemic of kidnappings-for-ransom and the rise of radical Islam in the region as a response to suppression.\n",
"The First Chechen War took place from 1994 to 1996, when Russian forces attempted to regain control over Chechnya, which had declared independence in November 1991. Despite overwhelming numerical superiority in men, weaponry, and air support, the Russian forces were unable to establish effective permanent control over the mountainous area due to numerous successful full-scale battles and insurgency raids. In three months, Russia lost more tanks (over 1,997 tanks) in Grozny than during the Battle of Berlin in 1945.\n",
"In 1999, the Russian government forces started an anti-terrorist campaign in Chechnya, in response to the invasion of Dagestan by Chechen-based Islamic forces. By early 2000 Russia almost completely destroyed the city of Grozny and succeeded in putting Chechnya under direct control of Moscow. According to Norman Naimark, \"serious evidence indicates that Russian government developed plans to deport the Chechens once again in the mid-1990s if they had lost the war.\"\n",
"In March 2014 Russia launched a criminal case against Tyahnybok, and some members of Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian National Self Defence for \"organizing an armed gang\" that had allegedly fought against the Russian 76th Guards Air Assault Division in the First Chechen War.\n",
"The Foreign Affairs ministry of Ukraine said that the presence of foreign soldiers amounted to \"undisguised aggression\" from Russia, and \"the export of Russian terrorism to our country\". \"There are grounds to affirm that Russian terrorists funnelled on to the territory of Ukraine are being organised and financed through the direct control of the Kremlin and Russian special forces,\" the ministry said. To date, reports and interviews have shown the presence of Chechen, Ossetian, Tajik, Afghan, Armenian, and various Russian paramilitary forces operating in Ukraine.\n"
] |
why do i see rusty looking spots on the sidewalk and road? | The reinforcing rebar or steel mesh encapsulated in the concrete is rusting. | [
"The road is the subject of folklore and numerous local legends. According to \"Weird NJ\", these rumors have drawn more visitors to the area, to the annoyance of residents, who have in the past gone so far as to smear the pole holding the street sign (pictured) at the road's southern end with grease or oil to prevent theft (Other signs along the road are in vertical type on poles and thus harder to remove and less desirable to display).\n",
"Most roads are cambered (crowned), that is, made so that they have rounded surfaces, to reduce standing water and ice, primarily to prevent frost damage but also increasing traction in poor weather. Some sections of road are now surfaced with porous bitumen to enhance drainage; this is particularly done on bends. These are just a few elements of highway engineering. As well as that, there are often grooves cut into the surface of cement highways to channel water away, and rumble strips at the edges of highways to rouse inattentive drivers with the loud noise they make when driven over. In some cases, there are raised markers between lanes to reinforce the lane boundaries; these are often reflective. In pedestrian areas, speed bumps are often placed to slow cars, preventing them from going too fast near pedestrians.\n",
"The visible marks may appear to be a symmetrical pattern of dash marks on the roadway, as if there were an associated meaning to the pattern. When there are many of them along the roadway, motorists on the interstate highways may interpret the grind marks as an unknown form of mechanical markers, such as ground-in strips, or strange road surface markings. In some cases, these marks are confusing for motorists. When roads are under construction and lanes are laterally shifted, such marks may interfere with temporary lane markings. As the marks from the dowel bar retrofit are not intended to be any form of road surface markings, the responsible agencies try to make these marks smooth and hope to make them less visible to the motorists.\n",
"Several elements that contribute to the unique character of the area are its sidewalks and local roads, as well as landscaping and natural environment. A majority of the area does not have sidewalks. Streets are often very wide within the residential interior of the neighbourhood. Additionally, the streets of the area are littered with many stop signs as well as a fair number of speed bumps.\n",
"Over the years, a large amount of graffiti has been spray-painted on the trestle, especially at the base of the towers nearest the road. The Indiana Rail Road has retained the graffiti: the thickness of the paint prevents rain and snow from rusting the metal, thus preserving the structure.\n",
"\"When you're traveling down the highway, you see an image whether it's dirt on the back of a truck or a splat on a windshield or two birds sitting by the side of the road picking at something. All those things have inspired me at some point in my creativity.\"\n",
"Sometimes the result of roadwork may leave visible marks on the pavements. An example is the dowel bar retrofit process to reinforce concrete slabs in order to extend the life of older concrete pavements. The completion of the process leaves a symmetrical pattern of dash marks on the roadway, as if there were an associated meaning to the pattern. When there are many of them along the roadway, motorists may interpret the marks as an unknown form of mechanical markers or strange road surface markings. When roads are under construction and the lanes are shifted laterally, those marks may interfere with temporary lane markings. As the marks from the dowel bar retrofit are not intended to be any form of road surface markings, the responsible agencies try to make these marks less visible to the motorists.\n"
] |
What are the negative effects of a low carb/high fat diet? | Well.
What happens during a LCHF-diet is that you force your body to burn fat, and only fat. What happens when you metabolize fat is that [ketone bodies](_URL_0_) as produced, leading to a state of ketosis. Ketone bodies *can* be used as an energy source by the brain and other cells, as in the case during starvation as well as LCHF-diets.
There is evidence on both sides of the spectrum. My own personal opinion is: Eat balanced, eat right. Cutting out one part of your diet is unnecessary unless you have a pathological condition. | [
"Some randomized control trials have shown that low-carbohydrate diets, especially very low-carbohydrate diets, perform better than low-fat diets in improving cardiometabolic risk factors in the long term, suggesting that low-carbohydrate diets are a viable option alongside low-fat diets for people at risk of cardiovascular disease.\n",
"Much of the research into low-carbohydrate dieting has been of poor quality and studies which reported large effects have garnered disproportionate attention in comparison to those which are methodologically sound. Higher quality studies tend to find no meaningful difference in outcome between low-fat and low-carbohydrate dieting. Low-quality meta-analyses have tended to report favourably on the effect of low-carbohydrate diets: a systematic review found that 9 out of 10 meta-analyses with positive conclusions were affected by publication bias.\n",
"Low carb is also known as low carbohydrate, high fat. \"Diabetes Research and clinical Practice\" found that low carb positively affects glucose control in patients with type 2 diabetes, triglycerides and HDL (high density lipoprotein). It is suggested that ideal diet requires less than 130 g of carbohydrate a day and claims to be promoted as a permanent lifestyle choice through books and websites. For example, people are suggested to eat green vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, and just as well as whole fat dairy and olive oil.\n",
"Carbohydrate has been wrongly accused of being a uniquely \"fattening\" macronutrient, misleading many dieters into compromising the nutritiousness of their diet by eliminating carbohydrate-rich food. Low-carbohydrate diet proponents emphasize research saying that low-carbohydrate diets can initially cause slightly greater weight loss than a balanced diet, but some studies suggest that such an advantage does not persist. In the long-term successful weight maintenance is determined by calorie intake, and not by macronutrient ratios.\n",
"While many studies have found that including polyunsaturated fats in the diet in place of saturated fats produces more beneficial CVD outcomes, the effects of substituting monounsaturated fats or carbohydrates are unclear.\n",
"Low-carbohydrate diets are associated with increased mortality, but they may miss the health advantages – such as increased intake of dietary fiber – afforded by high-quality carbohydrates found in legumes and pulses, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. Disadvantages of the diet might include halitosis, headache and constipation, and in general the potential adverse effects of carbohydrate-restricted diets are under-researched, particularly for possible risks of osteoporosis and cancer incidence.\n",
"Low-carbohydrate diet advocates including Gary Taubes and David Ludwig have proposed a \"carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis\" in which carbohydrate is said to be uniquely fattening because it raises insulin levels and so causes fat to accumulate unduly. The hypothesis appears to run counter to known human biology whereby there is no good evidence of any such association between the actions of insulin and fat accumulation and obesity. The hypothesis predicted that low-carbohydrate dieting would offer a \"metabolic advantage\" of increased energy expenditure equivalent to 400-600 kcal/day, in accord with the promise of the Atkin's diet: a \"high calorie way to stay thin forever\".\n"
] |
from a business standpoint, what are the benefits and disadvantages of paying employees weekly, biweekly, twice a month, and monthly? | A weekly or every-other week basis can simplify operations: everyone knows that pay periods close one day, and checks are written on another day of the week, regardless of the calendar date.
A monthly or bi-monthly basis can screw with that, as pay periods and payroll processing may not concurrent with the same day of the week every time, but helps employees budget revolving expenses, which are typically also monthly. | [
"The reason that employees are often paid according to hours of work rather than by direct measurement of results is that it is often more efficient to use indirect systems of controlling the quantity and quality of effort, due to a variety of informational and other issues (e.g., turnover costs, which determine the optimal minimum length of relationship between firm and employee). This means that methods such as deferred compensation and structures such as tournaments are often more suitable to create the incentives for employees to contribute what they can to output over longer periods (years rather than hours). These represent \"pay-for-performance\" systems in a looser, more extended sense, as workers who consistently work harder and better are more likely to be promoted (and usually paid more), compared to the narrow definition of \"pay-for-performance\", such as piece rates. This discussion has been conducted almost entirely for self-interested rational individuals. In practice, however, the incentive mechanisms which successful firms use take account of the socio-cultural context they are embedded in (Fukuyama 1995, Granovetter 1985), in order not to destroy the social capital they might more constructively mobilise towards building an organic, social organization, with the attendant benefits from such things as \"worker loyalty and pride (...) [which] can be critical to a firm's success ...\" (Sappington 1991,63)\n",
"Average incomes are substantially lower in the informal economy and there is a higher preponderance of impoverished employees working in the informal sector. In addition, workers in the informal economy are less likely to benefit from employment benefits and social protection programs. For instance, a survey in Europe shows that the respondents who have difficulties to pay their household bills have worked informally more often in the past year than those that do not (10% versus 3% of the respondents).\n",
"A typical description of the salaryman is a male white-collar employee who typically earns his salary \"based on individual abilities rather than on seniority.\" Salarymen are known for working many hours, sometimes up to sixty hours per week. Oftentimes, because of his busy work schedule, the salaryman does not have time to raise a family and his work becomes a lifelong commitment. Companies typically hire the salarymen straight after high school, and they are expected to stay with the company until retirement, around the time they reach the age between 55 and 60. As a reward for the demonstration of their loyalty, companies rarely fire the salarymen unless it is under special \"dire\" circumstances. There is also a belief that the \"amount of time spent at the workplace correlates to the perceived efficiency of the employee.\" As a result of this intense work-driven lifestyle, salarymen may be more likely to suffer from mental or physical health problems, including heart failure or suicide.\n",
"Labour supply curves derive from the 'labour-leisure' trade-off. More hours worked earn higher incomes, but necessitate a cut in the amount of leisure that workers enjoy. Consequently, there are two effects on the amount of labour supplied due to a change in the real wage rate. As, for example, the real wage rate rises, the opportunity cost of leisure increases. This tends to make workers supply more labour (the \"substitution effect\"). However, also as the real wage rate rises, workers earn a higher income for a given number of hours. If leisure is a normal good—the demand for it increases as income increases—this increase in income tends to make workers supply less labour so they can \"spend\" the higher income on leisure (the \"income effect\"). If the substitution effect is stronger than the income effect then the labour supply slopes upward. If, beyond a certain wage rate, the income effect is stronger than the substitution effect, then the labour supply curve bends backward. Individual labor supply curves can be aggregated to derive the total labour supply of an economy.\n",
"Under most circumstances, wage earners and lower-level employees may be legally required by an employer to work more than forty hours in a week; however, they are paid extra for the additional work. Many salaried workers and commission-paid sales staff are not covered by overtime laws. These are generally called \"exempt\" positions, because they are exempt from federal and state laws that mandate extra pay for extra time worked. The rules are complex, but generally exempt workers are executives, professionals, or sales staff. For example, school teachers are not paid extra for working extra hours. Business owners and independent contractors are considered self-employed, and none of these laws apply to them.\n",
"Businesses have overhead costs such as training, rent, and employment taxes that do not adjust with operating hours. These expenses paired with higher wages cause the cost benefit of hiring an extra worker to go down, while raising the marginal cost of an additional worker.\n",
"As wages increase above the subsistence level (discussed below), there are two considerations affecting a worker's choice of how many hours to work per unit of time (usually day, week, or month). The first is the substitution or incentive effect. With wages rising, the tradeoff between working an additional hour for pay and taking one extra hour of unpaid time changes in favor of working. Thus, more hours of labour-time will be offered at the higher wage than the lower one. The second and countervailing effect is that the hours worked at the old wage rate now all gain more income than before, creating an income effect, which encourages more leisure to be chosen because it is more affordable. Most economists assume that unpaid time (or \"leisure\") is a normal good and so people want more of it as their incomes (or wealth) rise. Since a rising wage rate raises incomes, all else constant, the attraction of unpaid time rises, eventually neutralising the substitution effect and causing the backward bend. \n"
] |
if the universe is expanding so rapidly, why do we see no visible change locally? | Because the universe is so huge and we're so small. | [
"Based on a huge amount of experimental observation and theoretical work, it is now believed that the reason for the observation is that \"space itself is expanding\", and that it expanded very rapidly within the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This kind of expansion is known as a \"\"metric\"\" expansion. In the terminology of mathematics and physics, a \"metric\" is a measure of distance that satisfies a specific list of properties, and the term implies that \"the sense of distance within the universe is itself changing\", although at this time it is far too small an effect to see on less than an intergalactic scale.\n",
"Even if the overall spatial extent is infinite and thus the universe cannot get any \"larger\", we still say that space is expanding because, locally, the characteristic distance between objects is increasing. As an infinite space grows, it remains infinite.\n",
"Current evidence suggests that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, which means that the second derivative of the scale factor formula_23 is positive, or equivalently that the first derivative formula_24 is increasing over time. This also implies that any given galaxy recedes from us with increasing speed over time, i.e. for that galaxy formula_25 is increasing with time. In contrast, the Hubble parameter seems to be decreasing with time, meaning that if we were to look at some fixed distance d and watch a series of different galaxies pass that distance, later galaxies would pass that distance at a smaller velocity than earlier ones.\n",
"To determine if the expansion rate of the universe is speeding up or slowing down over time, cosmologists make use of the finite velocity of light. It takes billions of years for light from a distant galaxy to reach the Earth. Since the universe is expanding, the universe was smaller (galaxies were closer together) when light from distant galaxies was emitted. If the expansion rate of the universe is speeding up due to dark energy, then the size of the universe increases more rapidly with time than if the expansion were slowing down. Using supernovae, we cannot quite measure the size of the universe versus time. Instead we can measure the size of the universe (at the time the star exploded) and the distance to the supernova. With the distance to the exploding supernova in hand, astronomers can use the value of the speed of light along with the theory of General Relativity to determine how long it took the light to reach the Earth. This then tells them the age of the universe when the supernova exploded.\n",
"The expansion of the universe reaches an infinite degree in finite time, causing expansion to accelerate without bounds. This acceleration necessarily passes the speed of light (since it involves expansion of the universe itself, not particles moving within it), causing more and more objects to leave our observable universe faster than its expansion, as light and information emitted from distant stars and other cosmic sources cannot \"catch up\" with the expansion. As the observable universe expands, objects will be unable to interact with each other via fundamental forces, and eventually the expansion will prevent any action of forces between any particles, even within atoms, \"ripping apart\" the universe.\n",
"Over time, the Universe and its contents have evolved; for example, the relative population of quasars and galaxies has changed and space itself has expanded. Due to this expansion, scientists on Earth can observe the light from a galaxy 30 billion light-years away even though that light has traveled for only 13 billion years; the very space between them has expanded. This expansion is consistent with the observation that the light from distant galaxies has been redshifted; the photons emitted have been stretched to longer wavelengths and lower frequency during their journey. Analyses of Type Ia supernovae indicate that the spatial expansion is accelerating.\n",
"However, because the expansion of the universe is accelerating, it is projected that most galaxies will eventually cross a type of cosmological event horizon where any light they emit past that point will never be able to reach us at any time in the infinite future, because the light never reaches a point where its \"peculiar velocity\" towards us exceeds the expansion velocity away from us (these two notions of velocity are also discussed in Comoving and proper distances#Uses of the proper distance). The current distance to this cosmological event horizon is about 16 billion light-years, meaning that a signal from an event happening at present would eventually be able to reach us in the future if the event was less than 16 billion light-years away, but the signal would never reach us if the event was more than 16 billion light-years away.\n"
] |
Why are gases more soluble in cold liquid, but solids are more soluble in warm liquid? | Great question. Gas molecules tend to fly around and bump into each other. If you add heat to a gas, which is in a ballon, the volume of the balloon increases because gases expand when you heat them. As you add the heat, the gas molecules move faster and collide with more force. Solids, on the other hand, are in relatively fixed position.
Say you have a pot of boiling water with the lid on, water molecules are constantly being shot out of the liquid and being shot back into it. The amount the leaves and enters depends on pressure, temperature, and volume of the container. The more heat inside the water, the faster the water molecules will shoot out.
A hot gas in a liquid will have a lot of energy and be able to escape the liquid, but a colder gas will have less energy to escape and be more likely to remain in the liquid making it more soluble.
The atoms in solids are in fixed positions and bound together by either ionic or covalent bonding. Let's assume the liquid in this case is water and the dissolvable substance is salt, which has ionic bonds. When you had heat to water the molecules will move faster and with more energy. Water molecules with more kinetic energy will slam into salt particles with more energy which allows it to break apart the salt particles with more ease. Simply imagine throwing a baseball really fast, then really slow, at a LEGO structure. The faster you throw the baseball, the farther the LEGOs will fly. | [
"Both solids and liquids have free surfaces, which cost some amount of free energy to form. In the case of solids, the amount of free energy to form a given unit of surface area is called surface energy, whereas for liquids the same quantity is called surface tension. The ability of liquids to flow results in different behaviour in response to surface tension than in solids, although in equilibrium both will try to minimise their surface energy: liquids tend to form rounded droplets, whereas pure solids tend to form crystals. Gases do not have free surfaces, and freely diffuse.\n",
"Gaseous solutes exhibit more complex behavior with temperature. As the temperature is raised, gases usually become less soluble in water (to minimum, which is below 120 °C for most permanent gases), but more soluble in organic solvents.\n",
"Usually, the greater the temperature of the solvent, the more of a given solid solute it can dissolve. However, most gases and some compounds exhibit solubilities that decrease with increased temperature. Such behavior is a result of an exothermic enthalpy of solution. Some surfactants exhibit this behaviour. The solubility of liquids in liquids is generally less temperature-sensitive than that of solids or gases.\n",
"By contrast, substances are said to be immiscible if there are certain proportions in which the mixture does not form a solution. For example, oil is not soluble in water, so these two solvents are immiscible, while butanone (methyl ethyl ketone) is significantly soluble in water, these two solvents are also immiscible because they are not soluble in all proportions.\n",
"The other type of solids is weak molecular crystals (e.g., fluorocarbons, hydrocarbons, etc.) where the molecules are held together essentially by physical forces (e.g., van der Waals and hydrogen bonds). Since these solids are held together by weak forces, a very low input of energy is required to break them, thus they are termed \"low energy\". Depending on the type of liquid chosen, low-energy surfaces can permit either complete or partial wetting.\n",
"Liquids can interact with two main types of solid surfaces. Traditionally, solid surfaces have been divided into high-energy solids and low-energy types. The relative energy of a solid has to do with the bulk nature of the solid itself. Solids such as metals, glasses, and ceramics are known as 'hard solids' because the chemical bonds that hold them together (e.g., covalent, ionic, or metallic) are very strong. Thus, it takes a large input of energy to break these solids (alternatively large amount of energy is required to cut the bulk and make two separate surfaces so high surface energy), so they are termed \"high energy\". Most molecular liquids achieve complete wetting with high-energy surfaces.\n",
"In general, ionic and polar substances such as acids, alcohols, and salts are relatively soluble in water, and non-polar substances such as fats and oils are not. Non-polar molecules stay together in water because it is energetically more favorable for the water molecules to hydrogen bond to each other than to engage in van der Waals interactions with non-polar molecules.\n"
] |
. why does room temperature coffee taste ‘cold’ but room temperature milk tastes ‘warm’? | Because most coffee you drink is hotter than room temperature, so in comparison to what you expect the coffee to feel like, a coffee at room temperature would feel cold.
But we usually drink milk from the refrigerator so when it's a room temperature it's hotter than what you expect.
And the reason why coffee is usually hot is because you need hot water to properly get the favour out of the grains and the reason why milk is usually cold is because you can keep it longer that way. | [
"A cup of warm milk or a milk-based drink is traditionally used for sleep induction. Hot chocolate is also a traditional bedtime drink but this contains high levels of xanthines (caffeine and theobromine), which are stimulants and therefore may be counterproductive. Also, a pinch of turmeric powder with warm milk reduces stress and induces sleep. The flavor of the milk can be improved by adding honey and/or vanilla.\n",
"Another criterion for tasty milk tea (and also bubble tea) is some white frothy residue inside the lip of the cup after some of it has been drunk. This white froth means that the concentration of butterfat in the evaporated milk used is high enough.\n",
"In parts of Asia and Europe, sweetened condensed milk is the preferred milk to be added to coffee or tea. Many countries in Southeast Asia, such as Vietnam and Cambodia, use condensed milk to flavor their hot or iced coffee. In Malaysia and Singapore, \"teh tarik\" is made from tea mixed with condensed milk, and condensed milk is an integral element in Hong Kong tea culture. In the Canary Islands, it is served as the bottom stripe in a glass of the local café cortado and, in Valencia, it is served as a café bombón.\n",
"Some substances activate cold trigeminal receptors even when not at low temperatures. This \"fresh\" or \"minty\" sensation can be tasted in peppermint, spearmint, menthol, ethanol, and camphor. Caused by activation of the same mechanism that signals cold, TRPM8 ion channels on nerve cells, unlike the actual change in temperature described for sugar substitutes, this coolness is only a perceived phenomenon.\n",
"Transient temperature is not very significant: if coffee is heated to boiling point only very briefly, the taste will be little affected; the longer it is kept at a high temperature the worse the taste becomes.\n",
"The water is normally kept at room temperature, but chilled water is also used. The grounds are filtered out of the water after they have been steeped using a paper coffee filter, a fine metal sieve, a French press, or felt, in the case of the \"Toddy\" brewing system. The result is a coffee concentrate that is diluted with water or milk, and is served hot, over ice, or blended with ice and other ingredients such as chocolate. \n",
"Iced coffee is a type of coffee beverage served chilled, brewed variously with the fundamental division being cold brew – brewing the coffee cold, yielding a different flavour, and not requiring cooling – or brewing normally (hot) and then cooling, generally by simply pouring over ice or into ice cold milk. In hot brewing, sweeteners and flavourings are often mixed into the hot coffee before cooling, due to faster dissolution in hot water. Alternatively, syrup (sugar pre-dissolved in water) may be used, particularly gum syrup. \n"
] |
How did China come to have so many massively populated cities? | One thing to keep in mind is that administrative boundaries work differently in China than in the United States. Municipal administrative units usually include most of the suburbs of a city, and some of the outlying rural areas as well. The most extreme example of this is Chongqing which is the size of South Carolina in order to put the Three Gorges Dam into the Chongqing urban area. However, even other Chinese municipal areas are much larger than their American counterparts.
In fact, the Chinese government is actively trying to keep it's cities small. Engels had strong views about vast urban agglomeration, and much of Chinese policies, from it's investments in intercity high speed rail, and the operation of the household registration system is designed to keep cities from getting too big. The success in this is mixed at best. | [
"Chinese cities of the Song period became some of the largest in the world, owing to technological advances and an agricultural revolution. Kaifeng, which served as the capital and seat of government during the Northern Song (960–1127), had some half a million residents in 1021, with another half-million living in the city's nine designated suburbs. By 1100, the civilian population within the city walls was 1,050,000; the army stationed there brought the total to 1.4 million. Hangzhou, the capital during the Southern Song (1127–1279), had more than 400,000 inhabitants during the late 12th century, primarily due to its trading position at the southern terminus of the Grand Canal, known as the lower Yangzi's \"grain basket.\" During the 13th century, the city's population soared to approximately a million people, with the 1270 census counting 186,330 registered families living in the city. Although not as agriculturally rich as areas like western Sichuan, the region of Fujian also underwent a massive population growth; government records indicate a 1500% increase in the number of registered households from the years 742 to 1208. With a thriving shipbuilding industry and new mining facilities, Fujian became the economic powerhouse of China during the Song period. The great seaport of China, Quanzhou, was located in Fujian, and by 1120 its governor claimed that the city's population had reached some 500,000. The inland Fujianese city of Jiankang was also very large at this time, with a population of about 200,000. Robert Hartwell states that from 742 to 1200 the population growth of North China increased by only 54% percent in comparison to the Southeast which grew by 695%, the middle Yangzi Valley by 483%, the Lingnan region by 150%, and the upper Yangzi Valley by 135%. From the 8th to 11th centuries the lower Yangzi Valley experienced modest population growth in comparison to other regions of South China. The shift of the capital to Hangzhou did not create an immediate dramatic change in population growth until the period from 1170 to 1225, when new polders allowed land reclamation for nearly all the arable land between Lake Tai and the East China Sea as well as the mouth of the Yangzi to the northern Zhejiang coast.\n",
"In 2005, China had 286 cities. Most of China's cities have a population of one million and below. Shanghai is the largest city in China, with a population of 19 million, followed by Beijing with a population of 17.4 million. These are the two mega-cities in China.\n",
"Although country urban population—382 million, or 37 percent of the total population in the mid-1980s—was relatively low by comparison with developed nations, the number of people living in urban areas in China was greater than the total population of any country in the world except India. The four Chinese cities with the largest populations in 1985 were Shanghai, with 7 million; Beijing, with 5.9 million; Tianjin, with 5.4 million; and Shenyang, with 4.2 million. The disproportionate distribution of population in large cities occurred as a result of the government's emphasis after 1949 on the development of large cities over smaller urban areas. In 1985 the 22 most populous cities in China had a total population of 47.5 million, or about 12 percent of China's total urban population. The number of cities with populations of at least 100,000 increased from 200 in 1976 to 342 in 1986.\n",
"The region is, on the whole, more heavily urbanised than most parts of China, largely because it was the first part of the country to develop heavy industry owing to its abundant coal reserves. Major cities include Shenyang, Dalian, Harbin, Changchun and Anshan, all with several million inhabitants. Other cities include the steel making centres of Fushun and Anshan in Liaoning, Jilin City in Jilin, and Qiqihar and Mudanjiang in Heilongjiang. Harbin, more than any other city in China, possesses significant Russian influences: there are many Orthodox churches that have fallen out of use since the Cultural Revolution. Shenyang and Dalian, meanwhile, have sizable populations of Japanese and South Koreans due to their traditional linkages.\n",
"Though Beijing was but a peripheral city to Chinese dynasties centered in Luoyang and Xi'an, it was an important entryway into China for tribal peoples to the north. The city's stature grew from the 10th century with successive invasions of China by the Khitan, Jurchen, and Mongols.\n",
"During the Spring and Autumn period, many cities grew in size and population. Linzi, the prosperous capital of Qi, had a population estimated at over 200,000 in 650 , making it one of the largest cities in the world. Alongside other large cities, Linzi served as a centre of administration, trade, and economic activity. Most of the cities' people engaged in husbandry and were thus self-sufficient. The growth of these cities was an important development for the ancient Chinese economy.\n",
"China is the world's most populous country, and its largest city, Shanghai, is the largest city proper in the world, with a population of 26.3 million as of 2019. According to the Demographic research group in 2017, there are 102 Chinese cities with over 1 million people in the \"urban area\", as defined by the group's methodology.\n"
] |
how does viewing violence affect people's mental health? | I’m not sure there is really a correlation there. More likely people already predisposed to some kind of mental health problem can be affected by viewing violence. | [
"On July 26, 2000 the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry stated that \"prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life.\" However, scholars have since analyzed several statements in this release, both about the number of studies conducted, and a comparison with medical effects, and found many errors.\n",
"Findings on violence committed by those with mental disorders in the community have been inconsistent and related to numerous factors; a higher rate of more serious offences such as homicide have sometimes been found but, despite high-profile homicide cases, the evidence suggests this has not been increased by deinstitutionalisation. The aggression and violence that does occur, in either direction, is usually within family settings rather than between strangers.\n",
"Shortly after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Swanson told the \"New York Times\" that \"Psychiatrists, using clinical judgment, are not much better than chance at predicting which individual patients will do something violent and which will not.” The following January, he told the \"Washington Post\" that “there’s a modest relative risk” for violence among people with a serious mental illness.\n",
"BULLET::::5. \"Failure to account for \"third\" variables.\" Some scholars contend that media violence studies regularly fail to account for other variables such as genetics, personality and exposure to family violence that may explain both why some people become violent and why those same people may choose to expose themselves to violent media. Several recent studies have found that, when factors such as mental health, family environment and personality are controlled, no predictive relationship between either video games or television violence and youth violence remain (Ferguson, San Miguel & Hartley, 2009; Ybarra et al., 2008, Figure 2).\n",
"Despite public or media opinion, national studies have indicated that severe mental illness does not independently predict future violent behavior, on average, and is not a leading cause of violence in society. There is a statistical association with various factors that do relate to violence (in anyone), such as substance abuse and various personal, social and economic factors. A 2015 review found that in the United States, about 4% of violence is attributable to people diagnosed with mental illness, and a 2014 study found that 7.5% of crimes committed by mentally ill people were directly related to the symptoms of their mental illness. The majority of people with serious mental illness are never violent.\n",
"It is hypothesized that initial exposure to violence in the media may produce a number of aversive responses such as increased heart rate, fear, discomfort, perspiration and disgust. However, prolonged and repeated exposure to violence in the media may reduce or habituate the initial psychological impact until violent images do not elicit these negative responses. Eventually the observer may become emotionally and cognitively desensitized to media violence. In one experiment, participants who played violent video games showed lower heart rate and galvanic skin response readings, which the authors interpreted as displaying a physiological desensitization to violence. However, other studies have failed to replicate this finding. Some scholars have questioned whether becoming desensitized to media violence specifically transfers to becoming desensitized to real-life violence.\n",
"Although the vast majority of mentally ill individuals are non-violent, some evidence has suggested that mental illness or mental health symptoms are nearly universal among school shooters. A 2002 report by the US Secret Service and US Department of Education found evidence that a majority of school shooters displayed evidence of mental health symptoms, often undiagnosed or untreated. Criminologists Fox and DeLateur note that mental illness is only part of the issue, however, and mass shooters tend to externalize their problems, blaming others and are unlikely to seek psychiatric help, even if available. Other scholars have concluded that mass murderers display a common constellation of chronic mental health symptoms, chronic anger or antisocial traits, and a tendency to blame others for problems. However, they note that attempting to \"profile\" school shooters with such a constellation of traits will likely result in many false positives as many individuals with such a profile do not engage in violent behaviors.\n"
] |
What caused the United States to have the highest infant mortality rate among western countries? | The [Congressional Research Service](_URL_3_) investigated whether inconsistent recording of births could be the cause of our bad infant mortality rates (IMR) and found that it does not ~~really affect~~ fully explain the results. (There is some effect from the inconsistent recording, but it isn't significant to explain the large gap).
We also have one of the lowest life expectancies of any developed nations and there isn't really any controversy about that statistic. The most likely reason is because we have a poor health care system. High infant mortality is most likely caused by the same thing.
One interesting thing to look at is the IMR of people with different health care plans. "Researchers have found that IMRs are the lowest for infants born to women enrolled in private insurance, that IMRs are higher for women enrolled in Medicaid, and that IMRs are highest for infants born to women who were uninsured."
So basically it is probably safe to say that the primary reason that our IMR is worse than most other countries is that we don't provide very good health care to our citizens.
Links:
_URL_0_
_URL_3_
_URL_1_
_URL_2_
TL;DR Poor health care causes the US to have some of the worst performance in almost every health metric. It is not because we are recording live births differently.
EDIT: Changed a misleading paraphrase. Thanks to /u/ruotwocone for pointing that out.
EDIT 2: I'd also like to point out that the issue of racial diversity was examined by the same CRS study and also found it to not be a particularly significant factor. Included a CDC link with essentially the same findings. | [
"In the 1850s, the infant mortality rate in the United States was estimated at 216.8 per 1,000 babies born for whites and 340.0 per 1,000 for African Americans, but rates have significantly declined in the West in modern times. This declining rate has been mainly due to modern improvements in basic health care, technology, and medical advances. In the last century, the infant mortality rate has decreased by 93%. Overall, the rates have decreased drastically from 20 deaths in 1970 to 6.9 deaths in 2003 (per every 1000 live births). In 2003, the leading causes of infant mortality in the United States were congenital anomalies, disorders related to immaturity, SIDS, and maternal complications. Babies born with low birth weight increased to 8.1% while cigarette smoking during pregnancy declined to 10.2%. This reflected the amount of low birth weights concluding that 12.4% of births from smokers were low birth weights compared with 7.7% of such births from non-smokers. According to the \"New York Times\", \"the main reason for the high rate is preterm delivery, and there was a 10% increase in such births from 2000 to 2006.\" Between 2007 and 2011, however, the preterm birth rate has decreased every year. In 2011 there was an 11.73% rate of babies born before the 37th week of gestation, down from a high of 12.80% in 2006.\n",
"Although the overall infant mortality rate was sharply dropping during this time, within the United States infant mortality varied greatly among racial and socio-economic groups. The change in infant mortality from 1915 to 1933 was, for the white population, 98.6 in 1,000 to 52.8 in 1,000, and for the black population, 181.2 in 1,000 to 94.4 in 1,000. Studies imply that this has a direct correlation with relative economic conditions between these populations. Additionally, infant mortality in southern states was consistently 2% higher than other states in the US across a 20-year period from 1985. Southern states also tend to perform worse in predictors for higher infant mortality, such as per capita income and poverty rate.\n",
"Infant mortality was the major component of life expectancy. Infant mortality was lower in America compared to other parts of the world because of better nutrition. The rates were higher in urban areas, and in Massachusetts statewide the rates increased as the state urbanized. Public health provisions involving sanitation, water supplies, and control of tuberculosis started showing effects by 1900. Public health conditions were worse in the South until the 1950s.\n",
"In the decades following the 1970s, the United States' decreasing infant mortality rates began to slow, falling behind China's, Cuba's, and other developed countries'. Funding for the federally subsidized Medicaid and Maternal and Infant Care was sharply reduced, and availability of prenatal care greatly decreased for low-income parents.\n",
"In the United States, improving infant mortality in the early half of the 20th century meant tackling environmental factors. Improving sanitation, and especially access to safe drinking water, helped the United States dramatically decrease infant mortality, a growing concern in the United States since the 1850s. On top of these environmental factors, during this time the United States endeavored to increase education and awareness regarding infant mortality. Pasteurization of milk also helped the United States combat infant mortality in the early 1900s, a practice which allowed the United States to curb disease in infants. These factors, on top of a general increase in the standard of living for those living in urban settings, helped the United States make dramatic improvements in their rates of infant mortality in the early 20th century.\n",
"In the 1950s, the maternal mortality rate in the United Kingdom and the United States was the same—1 in 1000 pregnant and new mothers died. By 2018, the rate in the UK was three times lower than in the United States, due to implementing a standardized protocol. In 2010, Amnesty International published a 154-page report on maternal mortality in the United States. In 2011, the United Nations described maternal mortality as a human rights issue at the forefront of American healthcare, as the mortality rates worsened over the years. According to a 2015 WHO report, in the United States the MMR between 1990 and 2013 \"more than doubled from an estimated 12 to 28 maternal deaths per 100,000 births.\" By 2015, the United States had a higher MMR than the \"Islamic Republic of Iran, Libya and Turkey\". In the 2017 NPR and ProPublica series \"Lost Mothers: Maternal Mortality in the U.S.\" based on a six-month long collaborative investigation, they reported that the United States has the highest rate of maternal mortality than any other developed country, and it is the only country where mortality rate has been rising. The maternal mortality rate in the United States is three times higher than that in neighboring Canada and six times higher than in Scandinavia.\n",
"It was in the early 1900s that countries around the world started to notice that there was a need for better child health care services. Europe started this rally, the United States fell behind them by creating a campaign to decrease the infant mortality rate. With this program, they were able to lower the IMR to 10 deaths rather than 100 deaths per every 1000 births. Infant mortality was also seen as a social problem when it was being noticed as a national problem. American women who had middle class standing with an educational background started to create a movement that provided housing for families of a lower class. By starting this, they were able to establish public health care and government agencies that were able to make more sanitary and healthier environments for infants. Medical professionals helped further the cause for infant health by creating a pediatrics field that was experienced in medicine for children.\n"
] |
What was the general sentiment felt by WWII veterans towards Vietnam, the Korean War, and the veterans returning home from those wars? | Purely anecdotal
Speaking to Australian Vietnam vets, many were denied admission to their local RSL's, many were told Vietnam 'wasn't a real war' by WW2 vets, and that the strongest condemnation they received was from veterans. I wish I had a source other than anecdote; these were guys from RSL's who came to talk to my class, so I'm inclined to believe them. | [
"As well as the negative sentiments towards returned soldiers from some sections of the anti-war movement, some Second World War veterans also held negative views of the Vietnam War veterans. As a result, many Australian Vietnam veterans were excluded from joining the Returned Servicemen's League (RSL) during the 1960s and 1970s on the grounds that the Vietnam War veterans did not fight a \"real war\". The response of the RSL varied across the country, and while some rejected Vietnam veterans, other branches, particularly those in rural areas, were said to be very supportive. Many Vietnam veterans were excluded from marching in Anzac Day parades during the 1970s because some soldiers of earlier wars saw the Vietnam veterans as unworthy heirs to the ANZAC title and tradition, a view that hurt many Vietnam veterans and resulted in continued resentment towards the RSL. In 1972 the RSL decided that Vietnam veterans should lead the march, which attracted large crowds throughout the country.\n",
"There are persistent stereotypes about Vietnam veterans as psychologically devastated, bitter, homeless, drug-addicted people, who had a hard time readjusting to society, primarily because of the uniquely divisive nature of the Vietnam War in the context of US history.\n",
"One of the contentious issues of the Vietnam War and its aftermath was the American public's response to its returning military veterans. Even as the citizenry's opposition to the war mounted, tales began to spread of returning veterans being mistreated. The archetypical story became one of antiwar hippie protesters spitting upon returning veterans in an airport. Twelve years after the Vietnam War ended, on 20 July 1987, syndicated columnist Bob Greene of the \"Chicago Tribune\" proposed testing the truth of what he considered an urban legend. The headline of his column, syndicated in 200 papers, asked: \"\"If You're A Veteran, Were You Spat Upon?\"\" As he wrote in the text:\n",
"The experience of the Vietnam veteran was distinctly different from that of veterans of other American wars. Once he completed his tour of duty, he usually severed all bonds with his unit and comrades. It was extremely rare for a veteran to write to his buddies who were still in combat, and (in strong contrast to the endless reunions of World War II veterans) for more than a decade it was even rarer for more than two or more of them to get together after the war. Korean War veterans had no memorial and precious few parades, but they fought an invading army and experienced a sense of resolution and accomplishment. The Vietnam War was a long, contentious conflict (1955–75) which in the mid to late 1960s started to lose political and domestic support, most notably in academia and film that often portrayed soldiers of this conflict as ignoble adding to their social alienation. That the Vietnam War was ultimately lost on April 30, 1975, furthered the sense of meaninglessness and malaise. It has been demonstrated that as the perception of community alienation increases, an individual's sense of confidence or mastery in decision making will decrease, and so too their motivation to socially engage.\n",
"That social division has expressed itself by the lack both of public and institutional support for the former servicemen that would be expected by returning combatants of most conflicts in most nations. In a material sense also, veterans' benefits for Vietnam era veterans were dramatically less than those enjoyed after World War II. The Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974, as amended, , was meant to try to help the veterans overcome the issues.\n",
"At the same time, the Vietnam War was becoming an ever-bigger catalyst for anti-war sentiment in the United States, and it became evident that most war casualties came from the working class. Chicano youth in the movement viewed this from a racial perspective, arguing that the Mexican-Americans and other minorities were carrying the main burden of the war.\n",
"The San Jose \"Mercury News\" writer Tatiana Sanchez reported that some American and South Vietnamese veterans were \"angry, [and] disappointed\" with the documentary. They characterized it as a \"betrayal\". She writes: \"veterans of the South Vietnamese military say they were largely left out of the narrative, their voices drowned out by the film’s focus on North Vietnam and its communist leader, Ho Chi Minh. And many American veterans say that the series had several glaring omissions and focused too much on leftist anti-war protesters and soldiers who came to oppose the war.\"\n"
] |
When world war 2 ended, why did German soldiers want to surrender to the western allies rather than the Soviet union? | Couple of reasons, since the invasion of the USSR in 1941 German treatment of Soviet prisoners had been horrendous, kept in wire enclosures until they starved, succumbed to disease, or were simply summarily executed (among the first victims gassed at Auschwitz were Russian PoWs). With no quarter given on the Eastern Front it could hardly be asked. Wehrmacht soldiers rightly feared Russian vengeance, after what had been done in the occupied territories of the USSR, and knew that capture would mean heading for forced labor in Siberian gulags, if they were not shot out of hand. Many, if they survived, weren't released until the '50s.
Treatment of PoWs from the western allies was - comparatively speaking - much better, as was their treatment of German PoWs, although there were incidents of brutality on both sides they nominally adhered to the Geneva Conventions on treatment of PoWs (to which the USSR was not a signatory). A commander of the [352nd Volksgrenadier](_URL_0_) wrote to the families of six men MIA, *"The Americans opposite us have been fighting fairly, they have treated German prisoners well and fed them. If your husband is a PoW, you will probably receive news of him through the Red Cross."* It got him in trouble with the party for suggesting that captivity was a tolerable state.
Compare this to the Eastern Front, where the wretched prisoners taken by the Red Army were known as *Stalinpferd*, a Stalin horse. | [
"One reason for the policy was that the Allies wished to avoid a repetition of the stab-in-the-back myth that arose in Germany after World War I, which attributed Germany's loss to betrayal by Jews, Bolsheviks, and Socialists. The myth was used by the Nazis in their propaganda. It was felt that an unconditional surrender would ensure that the Germans knew that they had lost the war themselves.\n",
"On 8 May, after a signing ceremony in Berlin, the German armed forces surrendered to the Allies unconditionally and the war in Europe was over. Following the war, the Front headquarters formed the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany.\n",
"On 7 May 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allied powers, marking the practical end of World War II in Europe. The German Instrument of Surrender applied to German Wehrmacht forces in Yugoslavia, as well as other armed forces under German control, such as the Croatian Armed Forces. This would ordinarily have meant that they too had to cease their activities on 8 May and stay where they found themselves. The military of NDH, however, came under the command of Pavelić, because as the Germans were about to surrender, General Alexander Löhr, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group E, handed command of the Croatian forces to Pavelić on 8 May. Pavelić issued an order from Rogaška Slatina for his troops not to surrender to the Partisans, but to escape to Austria, to implement the NDH government's decision of 3 May to flee to Austria. Following the capitulation of Germany, Tito issued an address via Radio Belgrade on 9 May calling upon all armed collaborators to surrender, threatening \"merciless response\" from the people and the army should they refuse to do so.\n",
"On 9 May 1945 (Moscow time), Germany surrendered, meaning that if the Soviets were to honour the Yalta agreement, they would need to enter war with Japan by 9 August 1945. The situation continued to deteriorate for the Japanese, and they were now the only Axis power left in the war. They were keen to remain at peace with the Soviets and extend the Neutrality Pact, and they were also keen to achieve an end to the war. Since Yalta they had repeatedly approached, or tried to approach, the Soviets in order to extend the Neutrality Pact, and to enlist the Soviets in negotiating peace with the Allies. The Soviets did nothing to discourage these Japanese hopes, and drew the process out as long as possible (whilst continuing to prepare their invasion forces.) One of the roles of the Cabinet of Admiral Baron Suzuki, which took office in April 1945, was to try to secure any peace terms short of unconditional surrender. In late June, they approached the Soviets (the Neutrality Pact was still in place), inviting them to negotiate peace with the Allies in support of Japan, providing them with specific proposals and in return they offered the Soviets very attractive territorial concessions. Stalin expressed interest, and the Japanese awaited the Soviet response. The Soviets continued to avoid providing a response. The Potsdam Conference was held from 16 July to 2 August 1945. On 24 July the Soviet Union recalled all embassy staff and families from Japan. On 26 July the conference produced the Potsdam Declaration whereby Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Chiang Kai-shek (the Soviet Union was not officially at war with Japan) demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan. The Japanese continued to wait for the Soviet response, and avoided responding to the declaration.\n",
"Some Soviet prisoners of war who survived German captivity during World War II were accused by the Soviet authorities of collaboration with the Nazis or branded as traitors under Order No. 270, which prohibited any soldier from surrendering.\n",
"As it became apparent that war was lost, the Germans became more cooperative, especially as Soviet armies approached from the east. When the prisoners of Stalag Luft I were ordered to leave the camp by the camp commandant, Zemke refused the order. Zemke and his staff negotiated an arrangement for the Germans to depart quietly at night, bearing only small arms, and turn the camp over to the Allied POW wing.\n",
"There were several reasons some Germans decided to end their lives in the last months of the war. First, by 1945, Nazi propaganda had created fear among some sections of the population about the impending military invasion of their country by the Soviets or Western Allies. Information films from the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda repeatedly chided audiences about why Germany must not surrender, telling the people they faced the threat of torture, rape, and death in defeat. These fears were not groundless, as many Germans were raped, mostly by Soviet soldiers, although many by Western Allied soldiers also. The number of rapes is disputed, but was certainly considerable – hundreds of thousands of incidents, according to most Western historians.\n"
] |
why haven't we come up with an easier way to get to the top of mount everest? | The reason they want to go there is *because* it is dangerous and difficult and life threatening. They aren't going up there for the view and to get a tan.
Regardless, standing at that altitude has seriously life threatening effects. Climbers need to acclimate for weeks to be able to survive it. Making it easier would mean people would be less prepared to go, and probably make it even more dangerous.
Also, the area is a nature preserve and of great cultural and religious importance to the people who live nearby. There are monasteries and shrines around it and many areas on Everest are considered some of the most important sites of Tibetan and Indian Buddhism.
On top of that there is the issue of just how *remote* Everest is. It is many, many miles away from running water, electricity, etc. | [
"Sometimes the normal route is not the easiest ascent to the summit, but just the one that is most used. There may be technically easier variations. This is especially the case on the Watzmannfrau, the Hochkalter and also Mount Everest. There may be many reasons these easier options are less well-used:\n",
"The 1921 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition set off to explore how it might be possible to get to the vicinity of Mount Everest, to reconnoitre possible routes for ascending the mountain, and – if possible – make the first ascent of the highest mountain in the world. At that time Nepal was closed to foreigners, so any approach had to be from the north, through Tibet. A feasible route was discovered from the east up the Kharta Glacier and then crossing the Lhakpa La pass north east of Everest. It was then necessary to descend to the East Rongbuk Glacier before climbing again to Everest's North Col. However, although the North Col was reached, it was not possible to climb further before the expedition had to withdraw.\n",
"On the 1975 ascent of Mount Everest by its Southwest Face, he and Nick Estcourt climbed the Rock Band at about setting up fixed ropes that allowed other expedition members to reach the summit of Everest for the first time by a route up one of its faces. Not only was this a key aspect of the climb of the face but, by expending their efforts on this part of the climb, they made it unlikely that they themselves would be able to attempt the summit.\n",
"Because Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world, it has attracted considerable attention and climbing attempts. A set of climbing routes has been established over several decades of climbing expeditions to the mountain. Whether the mountain was climbed in ancient times is unknown. It may have been climbed in 1924.\n",
"Almost all the mountaineering challenges on Mount Everest have now been overcome, but there remain two routes with extraordinary difficulties: a direttissima climb up the avalanche-prone East Face – the only yet unclimbed direct route on Everest, and ascent of the north pillar on the East Face over the (according to George Mallory) so-called \"Fantasy Ridge\". This ridge ends at the centre of the northeast ridge – below the Three Pinnacles. A climber wishing to climb up the Fantasy Ridge on his way to the summit would have to negotiate the east ridge and then climb the Three Pinnacles on the northeast ridge.\n",
"If we accept the fact that they were above the Second Step, they would have seemed to be incredibly close to the summit of Everest and I think at that stage something takes hold of most climbers ... And I think therefore taking all those circumstances in view ... I think it is quite conceivable that they did go for the summit ... I certainly would love to think that they actually reached the summit of Everest. I think it is a lovely thought and I think it is something, you know, gut emotion, yes I would love them to have got there. Whether they did or not, I think that is something one just cannot know.\n",
"The team from the north (Iwan Irawan and Nurhuda) has reached the top of Mount Everest on May 19, 2012. South team ended the expedition without reached the summit of Mount Everest due to Ardeshir Yafftebbi got laryngitis and Fadjri al Lufhfi could not continue the attempt with wind of 50 meter/second (180 kilometer/hour).\n"
] |
why does david cameron want to scrap the human rights act and replace it with "the british bill of rights"? | _URL_1_
> In a speech to the Strasbourg assembly, Mr Cameron said the whole concept of human rights laws was in danger of becoming "distorted" and "discredited" because of the court's decisions.
> "We do have a real problem when it comes to foreign national who threaten our security," he said.
> **"The problem today is that you can end up with someone who has no right to live in your country, who you are convinced – and have good reason to be convinced – means to do your country harm. And yet there are circumstances in which you cannot try them, you cannot detain them and you cannot deport them."**
> "So having put in place every possible safeguard to ensure that (human rights) rights are not violated, we still cannot fulfil our duty to our law-abiding citizens to protect them."
> **Mr Cameron's comments come just a week after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that radical Islamic cleric Abu Qatada cannot be deported for fear he will not get a fair trial in Jordan.**
He believes the HRA goes too far and threatens the national security of the UK. So he wants to put in place human rights, but still keep the country safe.. in his eyes. You can have known terrorists in your country, but who have not violated any UK laws. And with that you cannot deport them because they cannot receive a "fair" trial in their wanted countries for their crimes. So you just keep terrorists on your soil, protected from the courts and deportation. This is just one example of the inconsistencies he sees with the HRA and protecting the UK. He wants to take control back from the EU and allow the UK to determine how to handle such situations.
_URL_0_
> “This is the country that wrote Magna Carta, the country that time and again has stood up for human rights, whether liberating Europe from fascism or leading the charge today against sexual violence in war.
> “Let me put it very clearly: We do not require instruction from judges in Strasbourg on this issue.
> “So at long last, with a Conservative government after the next election, this country will have a new British Bill of Rights to be passed in our Parliament, rooted in our values.” | [
"Prior to the 2010 general election, Conservative party leader David Cameron proposed replacing the Human Rights Act with a new \"British Bill of Rights\". After forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, these plans were shelved and reinstated only after the Conservative party won an overall majority in the 2015 general election. Former Prime Minister David Cameron then vowed to put right what he termed the \"complete mess\" of Britain's human rights laws, on the 800th anniversary of the passage of the Magna Carta by the Kingdom of England, one of the predecessor states to the United Kingdom. Tensions have arisen between those on the political right in the UK, and the European Court of Human Rights, over issues such as prisoner voting.\n",
"Cameron has announced that he would scrap the Human Rights Act 1998 which came into force in 2000. Instead, it would be replaced with a Bill of Rights, based on \"British needs and traditions\". However, he has said that the country would remain a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights, upon which the Human Rights Act is based.\n",
"In 2007, Howard's successor as Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, vowed to repeal the Human Rights Act if he was elected, instead replacing it with a \"Bill of Rights\" for Britain. The human rights organisation JUSTICE released a discussion paper entitled \"A Bill of Rights for Britain?\", examining the case for updating the Human Rights Act with an entrenched bill.\n",
"Sands and Kennedy expressed concern that support for a UK Bill of Rights was motivated by a desire for the UK to withdraw from the European Convention of Human Rights. Writing in \"The Guardian\" in May 2015, Sands argued that plans for a British Bill of Rights could leave some people in the UK with more rights than others and that this would be \"inconsistent with the very notion of fundamental human rights, in which every human being has basic minimum rights.\"\n",
"In 2009, the Conservative party, then the main UK opposition party, announced that, if elected, it would repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 and replace it with a Bill of Rights. In March 2010 the Commission published two statements, including one co-signed with the NIHRC, calling for the preservation of the Act and emphasising that human rights would be best protected by building on the Act instead of replacing it.\n",
"There was also a split on whether to introduce a British Bill of Rights that would replace the Human Rights Act 1998; David Cameron expressed support, but Ken Clarke described it as \"xenophobic and legal nonsense\".\n",
"The decision was severely criticised by Frances Lawrence, Philip Lawrence's widow. David Cameron, as leader of the opposition, argued that the case showed the Human Rights Act 1998 'has to go' and be replaced by a \"British Bill of Rights\".\n"
] |
Why has there never been (widely known?) geopolitical conflict between Canada and the United States? | Anytime there has been something of that description, Britain was always the motivator.
In Canada's position there are a few things discouraging it from picking a fight with its neighbor.
1.) Canada has always had a population dearth relative to the United States. Less people means less resources for industry, research, and, most importantly, the military. It has been perennially outnumbered.
2.) It does not control trade routes that are critical to US trade. With the exception of the Great Lakes, Canada has never had the geographic advantage to just sever a trade line.
2b.) Canada is a modern military, but like many other nations, does not have the Navy to match the US Navy. If they are going to project power over a coastline, you have to be able to go toe-to-toe with the people you are trying to restrict.
3.) The Canadian border, de-militarized as it is, is near impossible to hold without giving you plans. Either side of the border would have to deploy an unreasonable number of units along that border.
4.) The US and Canada share a very similar heritage. A product of British colonialism, a "frontier legacy", and a people who know each others culture well enough on friendly terms. For instance, the NHL has teams from both sides of the border. Our cultures are inter-twined enough that making the other seem like a true enemy would take a lot of propaganda work.
Those are all I can think of off the top of my head. | [
"The dispute between Canada and the United States arose in 1969 with the trip of the U.S. oil tanker SS \"Manhattan\" through the Arctic Archipelago. The prospect of more American traffic headed to the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field made the Canadian government realize that political action was required should it decide to consider the archipelago as internal waters.\n",
"By the mid-1970s Canada's national policy toward Latin America – and other regions of the globe – had almost completely diverged from that of the United States. This was an especially momentous time in Canadian foreign politics because, until this point, Canada had been under the vast political and economic influence of her neighbour to the South. This incredible divergence was essentially manifested in Mitchell Sharp's \"Options for the Future\" (otherwise known as the 'Third Option Paper'), which reaffirmed the tenets of \"Foreign Policy for Canadians\", but considered U.S.–Canada relations in greater detail. Sharp's paper advocated the growth of Canadian economic, political and cultural 'distinctiveness', but did not encourage alienation from America. Ultimately, Sharp's ideas had a profound and lasting effect on Canadian policy and were central to the outward growth of Canada in the international sphere for many years.\n",
"Meanwhile, Canadian foreign relations were beginning to focus on the United States, which had eclipsed Britain as a world power. During World War II, Canada was a minor partner in the alliance between the United States and Britain, and the US had pledged to help defend Canada if necessary. Canada was one of the founding members of the United Nations in 1945, and also of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, but was largely overshadowed in world affairs by the United States. Canada remained a close ally of the United States throughout the Cold War.\n",
"Canada's geographic proximity to the United States has historically bound the two countries together in the political world as well. Canada's position between the Soviet Union (now Russia) and the U.S. was strategically important during the Cold War since the route over the North Pole and Canada was the fastest route by air between the two countries and the most direct route for intercontinental ballistic missiles. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been growing speculation that Canada's Arctic maritime claims may become increasingly important if global warming melts the ice enough to open the Northwest Passage.\n",
"Canada became a self-governing dominion in 1867 in internal affairs while Britain controlled diplomacy and defense policy. Prior to Confederation, there was an Oregon boundary dispute in which the Americans claimed the 54th degree latitude. That issue was resolved by splitting the disputed territory; the northern half became British Columbia, and the southern half the states of Washington and Oregon. Strained relations with America continued, however, due to a series of small-scale armed incursions named the Fenian raids by Irish-American Civil War veterans across the border from 1866 to 1871 in an attempt to trade Canada for Irish independence. The American government, angry at Canadian tolerance of Confederate raiders during the American Civil War, moved very slowly to disarm the Fenians. The British government, in charge of diplomatic relations, protested cautiously, as Anglo-American relations were tense. Much of the tension was relieved as the Fenians faded away and in 1872 by the settlement of the Alabama Claims, when Britain paid the U.S. $15.5 million for war losses caused by warships built in Britain and sold to the Confederacy.\n",
"Smith thought that Canada was destined by geography to enter the United States. In his view, separated as it is by north-south barriers, into zones communicating naturally with adjoining portions of the United States, it was an artificial and badly-governed nation. It would break away from the British Empire, and the Anglo-Saxons of the North American continent would become one nation. These views are most fully stated in his \"Canada and the Canadian Question\" (1891). Donald Creighton writes that Smith was most ably rebutted by George Monro Grant in the \"Canadian Magazine\".\n",
"Prior to the confederation of Canada, in which Queen Victoria took personal interest, a number of issues were of prime concern in the deliberations on the amalgamation of the four Canadian provinces into a country, most notably, the threat of invasion by the United States. It was the explicit intention of the Fathers of Confederation to unite the disparate British entities in North America into a single state under a constitutional monarchy, the men seeing that form of government as a balance between the autocracy of the Russian Empire and the popular sovereignty of the United States, the latter having just led to the American Civil War, which was seen as \"the final stage in the discredit of [American] democracy and republicanism.\" A Canadian crown, the Fathers thought, would ensure diversity and racial harmony in Canada, thereby strengthening its legal and cultural sovereignty, especially considering the presence of the United States and its policy of Manifest Destiny. At the 1864 Charlottetown Conference, the deligates agreed unanimously that the new federation should be a constitutional monarchy.\n"
] |
So what's the upper limit on man-made global warming? | The thing scientists are most worried about is a positive feedback loop in the climate, where if you pass some tipping point, you have runaway warming. I'm not a climate expert, but a positive feedback loop would put the upper limit quite high.
Here's a fake example made up off the top of my head - say at some temperature, the CO2 in limestone (CaCO3) decides it prefers not to be in limestone anymore and prefers to be in a gaseous state. Then, lets say our CO2 takes the temperature right up to this point - then CO2 starts pouring out of the global sources of limestone and then we have more heating and its a runaway positivefeedback loop. It's hard to predict these kinds of things but we want to be safe :D.
Edit: Fixed being stupid. | [
"In 2010, Parties to the UNFCCC agreed that future global warming should be limited to below 2.0 °C (3.6 °F) relative to the pre-industrial level. With the Paris Agreement of 2015 this was confirmed, but was revised with a new target laying down \"parties will do the best\" to achieve warming below 1.5 °C. The current trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions does not appear to be consistent with limiting global warming to below 1.5 or 2 °C. Other mitigation policies have been proposed, some of which are more stringent or modest than the 2 °C limit. In 2019, after 2 years of research, scientists from Australia, and Germany presented the \"One Earth Climate Model\" showing how temperature increase can be limited to 1.5 °C for 1.7 trillion dollars a year.\n",
"The most cost effective way to limit global warming to 1.5°C, a target of the Paris Agreement, includes EU and OECD countries closing all coal-fired power stations by 2030, China by 2040 and the rest of the world by 2050.\n",
"A 2018 study, co-authored by Rockström, calls into question the international agreement to limit warming to 2 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures set forth in the Paris Agreement. The scientists raise the possibility that even if greenhouse gas emissions are substantially reduced to limit warming to 2 degrees, that might be the \"threshold\" at which self-reinforcing climate feedbacks add additional warming until the climate system stabilizes in a hothouse climate state. This would make parts of the world uninhabitable, raise sea levels by up to , and raise temperatures by to levels that are higher than any interglacial period in the past 1.2 million years. Rockström notes that whether this would occur \"is one of the most existential questions in science.\" Study author Katherine Richardson stresses, \"We note that the Earth has never in its history had a quasi-stable state that is around 2 °C warmer than the preindustrial and suggest that there is substantial risk that the system, itself, will ‘want’ to continue warming because of all of these other processes – even if we stop emissions. This implies not only reducing emissions but much more.”\n",
"Limit global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot would require reducing emissions to below 35 GtCOeq per year in 2030, regardless of the modelling pathway chosen. Most fall within 25–30 GtCOeq per yer, a 40–50% reduction from 2010 levels.\n",
"Climate science dictates that global warming of more than 2 °C would have serious consequences, beyond those already being experienced, such as an increase in the number of extreme climate events. In order to avoid a global average surface temperature increase of 2 °C, global GHG emissions need to be reduced by 40–70% by 2050 and carbon neutrality (i.e. zero emissions) needs to be reached by the end of the century at the latest.\n",
"Publicly, fossil-fuel corporations say that they support the Paris Agreement aiming to limit global warming below 2 °C in 2100. Internal reports of BP and Shell show that they have made contingency business models plans for warming of more than 3°C of global warming in 2050.\n",
"Many underlying proposals are designed to limit global temperature changes to no more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, of which 0.8 °C has already taken place and another 0.5–0.7 °C is already committed. 2 °C is usually seen as the upper temperature limit to avoid 'dangerous global warming'. Due to only minor efforts in global Climate change mitigation it is highly likely that the world will not be able to reach this particular target. The EU might then not only be forced to accept a less ambitious global target. Because the planned emissions reductions in the European energy sector (95% by 2050) are derived directly from the 2 °C target since 2007, the EU will have to revise its energy policy paradigm.\n"
] |
Questions for Hitler?
| Well, to start, Hitler was chancellor of Germany in 1933: he was running the show in 1933. You want to talk to him in the 1920s, it seems, so:
Do some research on the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 - that's his first grab for power, but it was ultimately unsuccessful. And while serving his ridiculously lenient jail sentence, he wrote Mein Kampf. I might ask him about the up-and-coming Nazi Party - what he plans to do with it. Ask him about the end of World War I and how he feels about Weimar - he had very strong feelings about these. Ask him about race and struggle - those were the cornerstones of Nazi ideology. | [
"Beginning in February 1924, Hitler was tried for high treason before the special People's Court in Munich. He used his trial as an opportunity to spread his message throughout Germany. At one point during the trial, Hitler discussed political leadership, during which he stated that leading people was not a matter of political science (\"Staatswissenschaft\") but an innate ability, one of statecraft (\"Staatskunst\"). He further elaborated by claiming that out of ten thousand politicians only one Bismarck emerged, subtly implying that he too had been born with this gift. Continuing, he declared that it was not Karl Marx who stirred the masses and ignited the Russian Revolution but Vladimir Lenin, not making his appeal to the mind but to the senses. His rousing speeches during the trial made Hitler famous, but they did not exonerate him. In April 1924, he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment in Landsberg Prison, where he received preferential treatment from sympathetic guards and received substantial quantities of fan mail, including funds and other forms of assistance. During 1923 and 1924 at Landsberg, he dictated the first volume of \"Mein Kampf\" (\"My Struggle\") to his deputy Rudolf Hess. Originally entitled \"Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice\", his publisher shortened the title to \"Mein Kampf\".\n",
"He met Hitler for the last time on 25 February 1945 in Berlin. Wahl was well aware then that the war was lost. The latter issued on this occasion in front of a large number of \"Gauleiter\" the statement that \"the German people did not have the inner strength they were perceived to have\" and therefore were losing the war. Wahl attributed this harsh statement to the stress the \"Führer\" was in and perceived him to be mortally ill. Nevertheless, he could not understand why Hitler continued the war.\n",
"Hitler's talent as an orator and his ability to draw new members, combined with his characteristic ruthlessness, soon made him the dominant figure. However, while Hitler and Eckart were on a fundraising trip to Berlin in June 1921, a mutiny broke out within the party in Munich. Members of its executive committee wanted to merge with the rival German Socialist Party (DSP). Upon returning to Munich on 11 July, Hitler angrily tendered his resignation. The committee members realised that his resignation would mean the end of the party. Hitler announced he would rejoin on condition that he would replace Drexler as party chairman, and that the party headquarters would remain in Munich. The committee agreed, and he rejoined the party on 26 July as member 3,680. Hitler continued to face some opposition within the NSDAP, as his opponents had Hermann Esser expelled from the party and they printed 3,000 copies of a pamphlet attacking Hitler as a traitor to the party. In the following days, Hitler spoke to several packed houses and defended himself and Esser to thunderous applause.\n",
"On 22 April 1945, at his afternoon situation conference, Hitler fell into a tearful rage (famously dramatized in the 2004 German film \"Downfall\") when he realised that his plans, prepared the previous day, could not be achieved. He declared that the war was lost, blaming the generals for the defeat and that he would remain in Berlin until the end and then kill himself.\n",
"Hitler was born in Austria—then part of Austria-Hungary—and was raised near Linz. He moved to Germany in 1913 and was decorated during his service in the German Army in World War I. In 1919, he joined the German Workers' Party (DAP), the precursor of the NSDAP, and was appointed leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted to seize power in a failed coup in Munich and was imprisoned. In jail, he dictated the first volume of his autobiography and political manifesto \"Mein Kampf\" (\"My Struggle\"). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, anti-semitism and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. He frequently denounced international capitalism and communism as part of a Jewish conspiracy.\n",
"Hitler remained in the army, in Munich, after World War I. He participated in various \"national thinking\" courses. These had been organised by the Education and Propaganda Department of the Bavarian Army, under Captain Karl Mayr, of which Hitler became an agent. Captain Mayr ordered Hitler, then an army lance corporal, to infiltrate the tiny \"Deutsche Arbeiterpartei\", abbreviated DAP (German Workers' Party). Hitler joined the DAP on 12 September 1919. He soon realised that he was in agreement with many of the underlying tenets of the DAP, and he rose to its top post in the ensuing chaotic political atmosphere of postwar Munich. By agreement, Hitler assumed the political leadership of a number of Bavarian \"patriotic associations\" (revanchist), called the \"Kampfbund\". This political base extended to include about 15,000 Sturmabteilung (SA, lit. \"Storm Detachment\"), the paramilitary wing of the NSDAP.\n",
"Haffner argues that on gaining office in 1933, Hitler achieved many 'miracles' in economic and military policy.. 90% of Germans approved. Had he died in 1938, he would have been remembered as 'one of the greatest Germans ever'. Few people noticed that he had dismantled the state and concealed the resultant chaos. In the long run, his achievement came to nothing.\n"
] |
I'm no expert of either, but there seem to be some key similarities between Ancient Latin and Greek, like the -us/-os and -um/-on endings. They even have the same word for "I." Did either peoples notice the same thing and suspect that their languages could have come from a common source? | ~~I'm not sure which "other people" you are referring to.~~ The Romans thought that Latin was a dialect of Greek. Modern linguists believe that they are both part of the Indo-European language family and therefore have a common linguistic ancestor. [This article](_URL_0_) will probably interest you | [
"Colonial era scholars familiar with Latin and Greek were struck by the resemblance of the Sanskrit language; both in its vocabulary and grammar; to the classical languages of Europe. It suggested a common root and historical links between some of the major distant ancient languages of the world. William Jones remarked:\n",
"The pluricentric nature of Ancient Greek differs from that of Latin, which was composed of basically one variety from the earliest Old Latin texts until Classical Latin. Latin only formed dialects once it was spread over Europe by the Roman Empire; these Vulgar Latin dialects became the Romance languages.\n",
"Because of the common inheritance of Greek and Latin roots across the Romance languages, the import of much of that derived vocabulary into non-Romance languages (such as into English via Norman French), and the borrowing of 19th and 20th century coinages into many languages, the same numerical prefixes occur in many languages.\n",
"Greek is a largely synthetic (inflectional) language. Although the complexity of the inflectional system has been somewhat reduced in comparison to Ancient Greek, there is also a considerable degree of continuity in the morphological system, and Greek still has a somewhat archaic character compared with other Indo-European languages of Europe. Nouns, adjectives and verbs are each divided into several inflectional classes (declension classes and conjugation classes), which have different sets of endings. In the nominals, the ancient inflectional system is well preserved, with the exception of the loss of one case, the dative, and the restructuring of several of the inflectional classes. In the verbal system, the loss of synthetic inflectional categories is somewhat greater, and several new analytic (periphrastic) constructions have evolved instead.\n",
"In classical antiquity, Latin and Greek were the languages of the dominant political and cultural forces. Afterward, these languages acted for two millennia as essential lingua francas in Western science and religion. As a result, the Western languages have imported many thousands of Greek and Latin words, either through ancestry or through transfer and loan. Many of these same words are found in non-Western languages, such as Arabic, Hindi, Swahili, and Japanese.\n",
"Bernal proposes instead that Greek evolved from the contact between an Indo-European language and culturally influential Egyptian and Semitic languages. He believes that many Greek words have Egyptian or Semitic roots. Bernal places the introduction of the Greek alphabet (unattested before 750 BC) between 1800 and 1400 BC, and the poet Hesiod in the tenth century.\n",
"Greek is one of the few modern Indo-European languages that still retains a morphological contrast between the two inherited Proto-Indo-European grammatical voices: active and mediopassive. The mediopassive has several functions: \n"
] |
Blown up army sizes in Xerxes march on Greece | Hi! You might enjoy the answer I gave to this question [here](_URL_0_). My view is that we need to be thinking about these numbers less in terms of "true or false" and more in terms of "plausible or implausible in a world without written records". In the context of his own work, Herodotos made a lot of effort to justify his numbers, which he probably couldn't have lowered without losing credibility in the eyes of his audience. | [
"General Papagos rushed Greek units to the Metsovon pass where the Germans were expected to attack. On 14 April a pitched battle between several Greek units and the LSSAH brigade—which had by then reached Grevena—erupted. The Greek 13th and Cavalry Divisions lacked the equipment necessary to fight against an armoured unit, and on 15 April were finally encircled and overwhelmed. On 18 April, General Wilson in a meeting with Papagos, informed him that the British and Commonwealth forces at Thermopylai would carry on fighting till the first week of May, providing that Greek forces from Albania could redeploy and cover the left flank. On 21 April, the Germans advanced further and captured Ioannina, the final supply route of the Greek Epirus Army. Allied newspapers dubbed the Hellenic army's fate a modern-day Greek tragedy. Historian and former war-correspondent Christopher Buckley – when describing the fate of the Hellenic army – stated that \"one experience[d] a genuine Aristotelian catharsis, an awe-inspiring sense of the futility of all human effort and all human courage.\"\n",
"On this very morning, at roughly 05:00, large formations appeared over the capital, Athens. The remaining Allied fighter units in the area committed themselves to defending the Allied ships in what became known as \"the Battle of Athens\". Barely 15 Hawker Hurricanes, the entire Allied air presence in Greece at the time, participated in a series of defensive missions over Athens.\n",
"In the west, the positions of the Greek 88th Regiment were assaulted at 18:30. After a brief uneven clash at close quarters, the Germans overran the 88th, which reeled back toward Aetos. According to Greek sources, an attempted counterattack was aborted when the 88th Regiment's commander was killed; however, German sources mention repulsing a Greek attack against the German right flank at 19:00 (which conforms to the actual disposition of forces, with the Greek regimental HQ south-west of the German attack).\n",
"The \"ten thousand\" marched inland and fought the Battle of Cunaxa and then marched back to Greece during the years 401 BC to 399 BC. Xenophon stated in \"The Anabasis\" that the Greek heavy troops scattered their opposition twice during the battle; only one Greek was even wounded. Only after the battle did they hear that Cyrus had been killed, making their victory irrelevant and the expedition a failure.\n",
"When the Allies received the news that Xerxes was clearing paths around Mount Olympus, and thus intending to march towards Thermopylae, it was both the period of truce that accompanied the Olympic games, and the Spartan festival of Carneia, during both of which warfare was considered sacrilegious. Nevertheless, the Spartans considered the threat so grave that they despatched their king Leonidas I with his personal bodyguard (the \"Hippeis\") of 300 men (in this case, the elite young soldiers in the Hippeis were replaced by veterans who already had sons). Leonidas was supported by contingents from the Peloponnesian cities allied to Sparta, and other forces that were picked up \"en route\" to Thermopylae. The Allies proceeded to occupy the pass, rebuilt the wall the Phocians had built at the narrowest point of the pass, and waited for Xerxes's arrival.\n",
"Prior to and during the German invasion of Greece, Major General Zisis was commander of the Evros Brigade (Ταξιαρχία Έβρου) deployed in Western Thrace and consisting of 2,100 men. In the Battle of Metaxas Line (April 6–9, 1941), the numerically and technically superior German Army invaded Greece from the Bulgarian border. However, the Greek fortifications at Nymfaia, near Komotini were able to provide a two-day resistance against enemy attacks.\n",
"The Battle of Phaleron took place on April 24 (6 May Gregorian ), 1827. The Greek rebel forces were being besieged inside the Acropolis of Athens by Ottoman forces under the command of Mehmed Reshid Pasha. Greek forces outside the city were desperately trying to break the siege.\n"
] |
does mutually assured destruction (ie. nuclear weapons) deter nations into waging war against each other? | Lets see. Why would you start a fight?
You want something that other guy has.
You really hate that guy for whatever reason.
A couple of other reasons exist, but the concept is the same.
Now, if that guy has something that will instantly kill or severely hurt you if you attack him, even if you disable him quickly, you wouldn't start that fight.
You won't be able to use that thing you wanted to have and having acted on your hate is probably less valuable then your life.
No rational decisionmaker would decide to attack an opponent who can with near certainty annihilate him if he tried (unless he has a way to circumvent or disable whatever allows his opponent to do this).
Nuclear weapons make pretty sure that you can't win anything by launching an attack.
#EDIT:
About the second part of your question: It would continue to do so until someone develops a way to prevent his own destruction like a reliable defense system or a way to disable the opposing nation so quickly that it can't launch. | [
"The doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD) assumes that a nuclear deterrent force must be credible and survivable. That is, each deterrent force must survive a first strike with sufficient capability to effectively destroy the other country in a second strike. Therefore, a first strike would be suicidal for the launching country.\n",
"According to game theory, because starting a nuclear war was suicidal, no logical country would shoot first. However, if a country could launch a first strike that utterly destroyed the target country's ability to respond, that might give that country the confidence to initiate a nuclear war. The object of a country operating by the MAD doctrine is to deny the opposing country this first strike capability.\n",
"Nuclear weapons may also lessen a state's reliance on allies for security, thus preventing allies from dragging each other into wars (a phenomenon known as chain ganging, frequently said to be a major cause of World War I).\n",
"Critics of nuclear war strategy often suggest that a nuclear war between two nations would result in mutual annihilation. From this point of view, the significance of nuclear weapons is to deter war because any nuclear war would escalate out of mutual distrust and fear, resulting in mutually assured destruction. This threat of national, if not global, destruction has been a strong motivation for anti-nuclear weapons activism.\n",
"First, it is argued that suicidal or psychotic opponents may not be deterred by either forms of deterrence. Second, if two enemy states both possess nuclear weapons, Country \"X\" may try to gain a first-strike advantage by suddenly launching weapons at Country \"Y\", with a view to destroying its enemy's nuclear launch silos thereby rendering Country \"Y\" incapable of a response. Third, diplomatic misunderstandings and/or opposing political ideologies may lead to escalating mutual perceptions of threat, and a subsequent arms race that elevates the risk of actual war, a scenario illustrated in the movies \"WarGames\" (1983) and \"Dr. Strangelove\" (1964). An arms race is inefficient in its optimal output, as all countries involved expend resources on armaments that would not have been created if the others had not expended resources, a form of positive feedback. Fourth, escalation of perceived threat can make it easier for certain measures to be inflicted on a population by its government, such as restrictions on civil liberties, the creation of a military–industrial complex, and military expenditures resulting in higher taxes and increasing budget deficits.\n",
"Some NUTS theorists hold that a mutually assured destruction-type deterrent is not credible in cases of a small attack, such as one carried out on a single city, as it is suicidal. In such a case, an overwhelming nuclear response would destroy every enemy city and thus every potential hostage that could be used to influence the attacker's behavior. This would free up the attacker to launch further attacks and remove any chance for the attacked nation to bargain. A country adhering to a NUTS-style war plan would likely respond to such an attack with a limited attack on one or several enemy cities.\n",
"One view argues that countervalue targeting upholds nuclear deterrence because both sides are more likely to believe in each other's no first use policy. The line of reasoning is that if an aggressor strikes first with nuclear weapons against an opponent's countervalue targets, then, by definition, such an attack does not degrade the opponent's military capacity to retaliate.\n"
] |
can someone explain the chandraskhar limit in simplistic terminology? | During a star's lifetime, the outward pressure exerted from all of the thermal energy being created by fusion in the core holds the volume of the star up against the force of gravity created by all of that mass. When a star uses up its nuclear fusion fuel supply, there's a number of end scenarios that can play out, and which one happens generally depends on the mass of the star.
One of the possible end results is something called a white dwarf. The fusion has shut down, and so that thermal pressure stops, and the star begins to contract due to gravity. This continues and the star gets increasingly dense until something called [electron degeneracy pressure](_URL_0_) stops it. Long story short, at a quantum level, mass resists getting smashed together even denser, and the force of this resistance is called Electron degeneracy pressure.
So in a white dwarf, electron degeneracy pressure holds the star at a particular volume, and assuming no other significant celestial bodies influence it, the white dwarf just sort of hangs out in the universe, slowly radiating away all its residual heat.
But that only happens to most stars. Some stars have so much mass, and create so much gravity, that that inward collapsing is stronger than electron degeneracy pressure. That amount of mass is called the Chandraskhar Limit. If a dying star has more mass than that limit, then it'll contract past the white dwarf stage, and proceed on to a neutron star, or maybe a quark star (we're not sure if those exist), or even a black hole if it's massive enough. | [
"The limiter function is constrained to be greater than or equal to zero, i.e., formula_11. Therefore, when the limiter is equal to zero (sharp gradient, opposite slopes or zero gradient), the flux is represented by a \"low resolution scheme\". Similarly, when the limiter is equal to 1 (smooth solution), it is represented by a \"high resolution scheme\". The various limiters have differing switching characteristics and are selected according to the particular problem and solution scheme. No particular limiter has been found to work well for all problems, and a particular choice is usually made on a trial and error basis.\n",
"The Zero one or infinity (ZOI) rule is a rule of thumb in software design proposed by early computing pioneer Willem van der Poel. It argues that arbitrary limits on the number of instances of a particular entity should not be allowed. Specifically, an entity should either be forbidden entirely, only one should be allowed, or any number of them should be allowed. Although various factors outside that particular software could limit this number in practice, it should not be the software itself that puts a hard limit on the number of instances of the entity.\n",
"In calculus, the (ε, δ)-definition of limit (\"epsilon–delta definition of limit\") is a formalization of the notion of limit. The concept is due to Augustin-Louis Cauchy, who never gave an (formula_1) definition of limit in his \"Cours d'Analyse\", but occasionally used formula_1 arguments in proofs. It was first given as a formal definition by Bernard Bolzano in 1817, and the definitive modern statement was ultimately provided by Karl Weierstrass. It makes rigorous the following informal notion: the dependent expression \"f\"(\"x\") approaches the value \"L\" as the variable \"x\" approaches the value \"c\" if \"f\"(\"x\") can be made as close as desired to \"L\" by taking \"x\" sufficiently close to \"c\".\n",
"The definition of the limit using the hyperreal numbers formalizes the intuition that for a \"very large\" value of the index, the corresponding term is \"very close\" to the limit. More precisely, a real sequence formula_2 tends to \"L\" if for every infinite hypernatural \"H\", the term \"x\" is infinitely close to \"L\", i.e., the difference \"x\" − \"L\" is infinitesimal. Equivalently, \"L\" is the standard part of \"x\"\n",
"A similar argument implies that the limit set has Lebesgue measure zero. For it is contained in the complement of union of the images of the fundamental region by group elements with word length bounded by \"n\". This is a finite union of circles so has finite area. That area is bounded above by a constant times the contribution to the Poincaré sum of elements of word length \"n\", so decreases to 0.\n",
"Keisler proved that a hyperreal definition of limit reduces the quantifier complexity by two quantifiers. Namely, formula_140 converges to a limit \"L\" as formula_3 tends to \"a\" if and only if for every infinitesimal \"e\", the value formula_161 is infinitely close to \"L\"; see microcontinuity for a related definition of continuity, essentially due to Cauchy. Infinitesimal calculus textbooks based on Robinson's approach provide definitions of continuity, derivative, and integral at standard points in terms of infinitesimals. Once notions such as continuity have been thoroughly explained via the approach using microcontinuity, the epsilon–delta approach is presented as well. Karel Hrbáček argues that the definitions of continuity, derivative, and integration in Robinson-style non-standard analysis must be grounded in the ε–δ method in order to cover also non-standard values of the input. Błaszczyk et al. argue that microcontinuity is useful in developing a transparent definition of uniform continuity, and characterize the criticism by Hrbáček as a \"dubious lament\". Hrbáček proposes an alternative non-standard analysis, which (unlike Robinson's) has many \"levels\" of infinitesimals, so that limits at one level can be defined in terms of infinitesimals at the next level.\n",
"The fact that the limit exists takes some effort to prove, though the advantage of doing this is that the proof avoids the use of the axiom of choice and also gives uniqueness of Haar measure as a by-product. The functional formula_64 extends to a positive linear functional on compactly supported continuous functions and so gives a Haar measure. (Note that even though the limit is linear in formula_57, the individual terms formula_59 are not usually linear in formula_57.)\n"
] |
how is it possible that we can have orgasms in our sleep, without any physical stimuli? | All physical sensation is just impulses interpreted by the brain. No need for the actual stimuli, just need the part of the brain that responds to the stimuli to activate.
Same idea as starting a car. The conventional way is to use a key to start the engine. You can bypass the key by hot wiring it (or so movies have led me to believe). Your brain is hot wiring your sexy time centers, bypassing the physical stimulation. | [
"In addition to physical stimulation, orgasm can be achieved from psychological arousal alone, such as during dreaming (nocturnal emission for males or females) or by forced orgasm. Orgasm by psychological stimulation alone was first reported among people who had spinal cord injury. Although sexual function and sexuality after spinal cord injury is very often impacted, this injury does not deprive one of sexual feelings such as sexual arousal and erotic desires.\n",
"In men, the most common way of achieving orgasm is by physical sexual stimulation of the penis. This is usually accompanied by ejaculation, but it is possible, though also rare, for men to orgasm without ejaculation (known as a \"dry orgasm\"). Prepubescent boys have dry orgasms. Dry orgasms can also occur as a result of retrograde ejaculation, or hypogonadism. Men may also ejaculate without reaching orgasm, which is known as anorgasmic ejaculation. They may also achieve orgasm by stimulation of the prostate (see below).\n",
"Human orgasms usually result from physical sexual stimulation of the penis in males (typically accompanying ejaculation) and of the clitoris in females. Sexual stimulation can be by self-practice (masturbation) or with a sex partner (penetrative sex, non-penetrative sex, or other sexual activity).\n",
"Orgasm control is most easily learned through solitary masturbation, although many individuals enjoy including elements of orgasm control in sex with a partner. Masturbation provides the individual with the opportunity of learning about their bodies and the amount of pleasure they can experience without reaching orgasm. Self-stimulation can help both men and women acknowledge the limits of their body and the techniques that may help them in controlling their orgasms.\n",
"Sexual stimulation is any stimulus (including bodily contact) that leads to, enhances and maintains sexual arousal, and may lead to orgasm. Although sexual arousal may arise without physical stimulation, achieving orgasm usually requires physical sexual stimulation.\n",
"There is some debate whether certain types of sexual sensations should be accurately classified as orgasms, including female orgasms caused by G-spot stimulation alone, and the demonstration of extended or continuous orgasms lasting several minutes or even an hour. The question centers around the clinical definition of orgasm, but this way of viewing orgasm is merely physiological, while there are also psychological, endocrinological, and neurological definitions of orgasm. In these and similar cases, the sensations experienced are subjective and do not necessarily involve the involuntary contractions characteristic of orgasm. However, the sensations in both sexes are extremely pleasurable and are often felt throughout the body, causing a mental state that is often described as transcendental, and with vasocongestion and associated pleasure comparable to that of a full-contractionary orgasm. For example, modern findings support distinction between ejaculation and male orgasm. For this reason, there are views on both sides as to whether these can be accurately defined as orgasms.\n",
"Many individuals assert that orgasm control is more often possible with masturbation. This is a direct result of the fact that one is then able to control the intensity and duration of stimulation without having to rely on the partner stopping or changing the type of stimulation in order to postpone the orgasm. Masturbation is then the easy way to learn one's limits and could also be seen as the starting point in the technique of orgasm control.\n"
] |
The Great War: African Theatre Literature? | Hew Strachan tackles Africa in his "The First World War," volume 1. I believe you can buy those sections as one unit on Amazon. He'd be a good place to start. I suggest mining the references and going from there. | [
"Charles Miller (1918 – 1986) was an American author of popular history books on East Africa such as \"The Lunatic Express, An Entertainment in Imperialism\" (1971) and \"Battle for the Bundu, The First World War in East Africa\" (1974).\n",
"The African Theatre of World War I describes campaigns in North Africa instigated by the German and Ottoman empires, local rebellions against European colonial rule and Allied campaigns against the German colonies of Kamerun, Togoland, German South West Africa and German East Africa. The campaigns were fought by German \"Schutztruppe\", local resistance movements and forces of the British Empire, France, Italy, Belgium and Portugal.\n",
"During this period, African plays written in English began to emerge. Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo of South Africa published the first English-language African play, \"\" in 1935. In 1962, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o of Kenya wrote the first East African drama, \"The Black Hermit\", a cautionary tale about \"tribalism\" (discrimination between African tribes).\n",
"In an essay entitled \"The Dead End Of African Literature\", published in \"Transition\" in 1963, Obiajunwa Wali stated: \"Perhaps the most important achievement of the last Conference of African Writers of English Expression held in Makerere College, Kampala, in June 1962, is that African literature as now defined and understood leads nowhere. The conference itself marked the final climax on the attack on the Negritude school of Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire... Another significant event in the Conference, is the tacit omission of Amos Tutuola.\"\n",
"Our chief source is the anonymous \"Bellum Africum\" (\"The African War\"), also known as \"De Bello Africo\" (\"On the African War\"), an anonymous account of Julius Caesar's African campaign, which supplements Caesar's own account of the civil war and seems to have been written by a soldier who had served under Caesar on the campaign. It is usually included in a larger text along with other accounts of the last stages of the civil war, the \"Bellum Hispaniense\" (War in Spain) and \"Bellum Alexandrinum \" (War in Alexandria). For Considius' earlier career we have some information from Cicero's speech \"Pro Quinto Ligario\" (\"On behalf of Quintus Ligarius\") and the ancient commentary to this, first edited by Jakob Gronovius and so known as the \"Scholia Gronoviana\", but now generally cited from the edition of Thomas Stangl.\n",
"BULLET::::- \"African Theatre: Playwrights and Politics\". Editor: Martin Banham, James Gibbs, Femi Osofisan. The second volume in the annual African Theatre series that focuses on playwrights and politics in Africa.\n",
"His studies of Africa in the slave trade led him, at the urging of English historian Jeremy Black to write a systematic study of African wars and military culture in the period of the slave trade, which appeared in 1999 as \"Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800\" (University College of London, 1999).\n"
] |
how dubstep/rap artists can manipulate the computer/synthesizer to get the beat/sound the way they want it? | Well they use specific programs designed to augment sound waves. It started out with having the change the actual circuitry of the physical device to produce such sounds, now you can literally just layer loops and press play, if your a lazy fuck. | [
"BULLET::::- Vinyl emulation software allows a DJ to manipulate the playback of digital music files on a computer via a DJ control surface (generally MIDI or a HID controller). DJs can scratch, beatmatch, and perform other turntablist operations that cannot be done with a conventional keyboard and mouse. DJ software performing computer scratch operations include Traktor Pro, Mixxx, Serato Scratch Live & Itch, Virtual DJ, M-Audio Torq, DJay, Deckadance, Cross.\n",
"BULLET::::4. By manipulating the turntables' platters, speed controls, and other elements, the DJ thus controls how the computer plays back digitized audio and can therefore produce \"scratching\" and other turntablism effects on songs which exist as digital audio files or computer tracks.\n",
"Both Oswald and Negativland made their recordings by cutting up magnetic tape (or later using digital technology), but several DJs have also produced plunderphonic works using turntables; in fact, \"digging\" for samples plays a large part in DJ culture. Christian Marclay is a turntablist who has been using other people's records as the sole source of his music making since the late 1970s. He often treats the records in unusual ways, for example, he has physically cut up a group of records and stuck them together, making both a visual and aural collage. Sometimes several spoken-word or lounge music records bought from thrift stores are mashed together to make a Marclay track, but his \"More Encores\" album cuts up tracks by the likes of Maria Callas and Louis Armstrong in a way similar to Oswald's work on \"Plunderphonics\". Marclay's experimental approach has been taken up by the likes of Roberto Musci & Giovanni Venosta, Otomo Yoshihide, Philip Jeck and Martin Tétreault, although in these artist's works the records used are sometimes heavily disguised and unrecognisable, meaning the results cannot properly be called plunderphonics.\n",
"DJ software can be used to mix audio files on the computer instead of a separate hardware mixer. When mixing on a computer, DJs often use a DJ controller device that mimics the layout of two turntables plus a DJ mixer to control the software rather than the computer keyboard & touchpad on a laptop, or the touchscreen on a tablet computer or smartphone. Many DJ controllers have an integrated sound card with 4 output channels (2 stereo pairs) that allows the DJ to use headphones to preview music before playing it on the main output.\n",
"The software allows manipulation and playback of digital audio sources using traditional vinyl and turntables. This provides DJs with a platform to scratch or beat match their tracks without losing the genuine vinyl/CD feel.\n",
"Sometimes, live performances incorporate prerecorded sounds. For example, a disc jockey uses disc records for scratching, and some 20th-century works have a solo for an instrument or voice that is performed along with music that is prerecorded onto a tape. Computers and many keyboards can be programmed to produce and play Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) music. Audiences can also \"become\" performers by participating in karaoke, an activity of Japanese origin centered on a device that plays voice-eliminated versions of well-known songs. Most karaoke machines also have video screens that show lyrics to songs being performed; performers can follow the lyrics as they sing over the instrumental tracks.\n",
"A DJ mixer is a type of audio mixing console used by Disc jockeys (DJs) to control and manipulate multiple audio signals. Some DJs use the mixer to make seamless transitions from one song to another when they are playing records at a dance club. Hip hop DJs and turntablists use the DJ mixer to play record players like a musical instrument and create new sounds. DJs in the disco, house music, electronic dance music and other dance-oriented genres use the mixer to make smooth transitions between different sound recordings as they are playing. The sources are typically record turntables, compact cassettes, CDJs, or DJ software on a laptop. DJ mixers allow the DJ to use headphones to preview the next song before playing it to the audience. Most low- to mid-priced DJ mixers can only accommodate two turntables or CD players, but some mixers (such as the ones used in larger nightclubs) can accommodate up to four turntables or CD players. DJs and turntablists in hip hop music and nu metal use DJ mixers to create beats, loops and \"scratching\" sound effects.\n"
] |
when i shower and someone runs water, i freeze. hotels? 100's of showers, no such problem. | Hotels have ridiculous tankless water heaters that flash heat water in-line, so they don't retain a huge tank of water like most household water heaters. If your house is older, it probably isn't plumbed very well and/or you have a small/inefficient water heater. | [
"Detainees generally are subject to a daily shower convention: shower takes place by the sink in each cell (sink provides only cold water). Showers are typically allowed after dinner without regard for seasonality. This daily shower is considered a “cell” rule. The detention center provides weekly hot shower but such showers are at the mercy of the furnace.\n",
"In the smallest hotels and some bed and breakfast establishments, the front desk may close entirely overnight. Guests in such facilities are typically given a contact number for an employee or manager, who may be sleeping on the premises or live nearby, for use in case of emergency.\n",
"Like a hostel, many amenities are communally shared, including toilets, showers, wireless internet, and dining rooms. In Japan, a capsule hotel may have a communal bath and sauna. Some hotels also provide restaurants, snack bars or bars (or at least vending machines), pools, and other entertainment facilities. There may be a lounge with upholstered chairs for relaxing, along with newspapers and reading material. \n",
"In December 2009, the health department ordered the hotel to close for numerous health-code violations, including dirty linen, old bedding, bed bug stains, mold growing on the walls, black water spilling from faucets, and broken toilet fixtures.\n",
"It is a member of the European Waterparks Association (EWA), and provides saunas, steamrooms, and various kinds of baths. There are also what are referred to as \"adventure showers\". A small room full of snow, kept at , is also available, so that participants can roll in the snow naked (this often follows use of a sauna or other type of steam room). Like many German bathing areas, people are expected to be nude throughout the sauna part of the resort. \n",
"After each sweat, cooling off is repeated and patrons use the break to drink beer, tea, or other beverages, play games or relax in good company in an antechamber to the steam room. Commercial \"banyas\" often have only a steam room or a steam room and a dry room, depending on local custom.\n",
"Cooling down is a part of the sauna cycle and is as important as the heating. Among users it is considered good practice to take a few moments after exiting a sauna before entering a cold plunge, and to enter a plunge pool by stepping into it gradually, rather than immediately immersing fully. In summer, a session is often started with a cold shower. Therapeutic sauna has been shown to aid adaptation, reduce stress hormones, lower blood pressure and improve cardiovascular conditions.\n"
] |
Question about North American arrow heads. | In areas where natural copper could be found the nuggets were cold worked by natives into a variety of tools including arrowheads. One of these areas was located around the Great Lakes and is called the Old Copper Complex. Copper arrowheads and other tools were also used in Alaska and the Yukon.
The use of copper was completely dependent on the availability of naturally occurring copper that did not need to be smelted. | [
"Lamoka projectile points are stone projectile points manufactured by Native Americans what is now the northeastern United States, generally in the time interval of 3500-2500 B.C. They predate the invention of the bow and arrow, and are therefore not true \"arrowheads\", but rather atlatl dart points. They derive their name from the specimens found at the Lamoka site in Schuyler County, New York.\n",
"A large variety of prehistoric arrowheads, dart points, and spear points have been discovered. Flint, obsidian, quartz and many other rocks and minerals were commonly used to make points in North America. The oldest projectile points found in North America were long thought to date from about 13,000 years ago, during the Paleo-Indian period, however recent evidence suggests that North American projectile points may date to as old as 15,500 years. Some of the more famous Paleo-Indian types include Clovis, Folsom and Dalton points.\n",
"Levanna projectile points are stone projectile points manufactured by Native Americans what is now the northeastern United States generally in the time interval of 700-1350 AD. They are true \"arrowheads\" rather than atlatl dart points, and they derive their name from the specimens found at the Levanna site in Cayuga County, New York.\n",
"About 175 arrowheads that were found on the western side of the Yadkin River at Cooleemee Plantation were classified by Dr. Joffre L. Coe of the University of North Carolina, and Dr. James Bingham, former President of the North Carolina Archaeological Society. The arrowheads which were from different peoples and of different times were dated from approximately 7000 BCE to the 18th century. Several specimens exist which date from 8000 to 8500 years old with the eldest, a Hardaway Point, being dated at 9000 years old.\n",
"Rossville points are a type of arrowhead first recognized as a unique Native American cultural indicator in 1909 by archaeologists of the American Museum of Natural History. They were named by archaeologist Alanson Skinner after the Rossville section of Staten Island, New York where they were found in the vicinity of the old U.S. Post Office building. \n",
"The first arrow-heads were flint, which was replaced by bronze in the 2nd millennium. Arrow-heads were mostly made for piercing, having a sharp point. However, the arrow heads could vary considerably, and some were even blunt (probably used more for hunting small game).\n",
"Although the most obvious origin of the name is that Arrowhead is at the head of the Arrow Lakes, another version claims that it relates to the finding of arrowheads in the ground during construction of buildings in the area, left from an ancient battle between First Nations peoples. Another version says that it is because of the arrowhead-shaped appearance of the lake from high ground in the vicinity. The name of the Arrow Lakes is credit to \"Arrow Rock\", a large cliffside pictograph shot through with clusters of arrows, again relating to an ancient battle (in this case known to be between the Sinixt and the Ktunaxa), which stood above \"the Narrows\", a stretch of fast-flowing channel connecting Upper Arrow to Lower Arrow Lake.\n"
] |
Why can extreme hot weather cause mass power outages/blackouts? | The main reason is that electricity usage is highest during heat waves, because everyone's air conditioning is running at full blast.
There's a second less important reason, which is that fossil fuel and nuclear power plants are less efficient in hot weather. They use outside air and/or water to cool their steam back to water to recycle back into the plant, and that doesn't work as well on a hot day.
In fact, it turns out there's a theorem of thermodynamics that says that the maximum possible efficiency of both heat engines (power plant) and refrigerators (air conditioners) is worse when the outside air is warmer.
_URL_0_ | [
"Power outages can also occur within areas experiencing heat waves due to the increased demand for electricity (i.e. air conditioning use). The urban heat island effect can increase temperatures, particularly overnight.\n",
"Thousands of power outages were reported in Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina, reportedly caused by snow weighing down on power lines. By midnight Saturday morning, when the storm had just begun to strike the area, reported power outages had already exceeded 40,000. In Kentucky, 107,000 power outages were reported. A snow emergency was declared in Washington, D.C., where Mayor Adrian Fenty asked residents to avoid venturing onto the roads. States of emergency were declared in Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and New Castle and Kent counties in Delaware.\n",
"Even away from thunderstorms, atmospheric electricity can be highly variable, but, generally, the electric field is enhanced in fogs and dust whereas the atmospheric electrical conductivity is diminished.\n",
"A second blackout effect is caused by the emission of beta particles from the fission products. These can travel long distances, following the Earth's magnetic field lines. When they reach the upper atmosphere they cause ionization similar to the fireball, but over a wider area. Calculations demonstrate that one megaton of fission, typical of a two megaton H-bomb, will create enough beta radiation to black out an area across for five minutes. Careful selection of the burst altitudes and locations can produce an extremely effective radar-blanking effect.\n",
"It was a hot day (over ) in much of the affected region, and the heat played a role in the initial event that triggered the wider power outage. The high ambient temperature increased energy demand, as people across the region turned on fans and air conditioning. This caused the power lines to sag as higher currents heated the lines.\n",
"February 7 saw yet more major power outages in the Washington, D.C. region. At least 420,000 homes were under a blackout as the snow felled trees and cut power lines. Some 300,000 homes were without electricity in Maryland and neighboring Virginia, while Washington, D.C. was reporting an initial figure of 100,000 power outages for that day. Emergency workers struggled to restore power as of snow and a record snowfall of fell on Maryland. Transport was badly disrupted from West Virginia to southern New Jersey. Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland have declared a short term state of emergency, allowing them to activate the National Guard in order to help cope with the storm's onslaught.\n",
"Further widespread blackouts occurred beginning late on Tuesday 27 December 2016, with areas losing power for upwards of twelve hours following severe storms causing damage to over 300 powerlines in the electricity distribution network. The storms also caused flooding and wind damage, including property destruction due to fallen trees. A total of 155,000 properties lost power at the peak of the storms, requiring over 1200 repair jobs resulting from over 350 powerlines being damaged. As of 7.30pm on Thursday 29 December, there were more than 11 500 households still without power across the state, some for up to forty-six hours, in regions including the Adelaide Hills, Mid-North, Flinders Ranges, and Murraylands. By 9am on Saturday 31 December, there were still more than 1600 households without power for more than 80 hours, primarily across the Adelaide Hills.\n"
] |
modern sociology claims that race is a social construct devoid of any biological foundation. if so, how does forensic science work, or anthropological dna-based migrational studies? | There are no sociological characteristics that correspond 1:1 with skin color, which is how "race" is determined in the United States. That is not to say that skin color is not a biological trait that is passed from generation to generation. Rather, it simply means that behavioral traits we associate with certain races are not genetically linked to the phenotypical traits we use to define those races.
It may be true that the genes that facilitate becoming a violin virtuoso are disproportionately found among people whose ancestors come from Asia. But these genes are not linked in any way to something like epicanthic folds. Also, genes for dark skin are dominant over genes for fair skin, but other, invisible genes from a white parent may be dominant over those from a black parent. Thus, we see Barack Obama as the first black President because we key in on what we can see, but he's just as white as he is black. We call Tiger Woods a great black golfer, but investigate his racial heritage. I think he is actually 1/4 black. These are the kinds of things that sociologists mean when they say race is a social construction.
Many sociology professors articulate this poorly, partly because it is a very abstract concept, and partly because they aren't in the business of explaining abstract concepts, but rather in political indoctrination. But I'm a sociologist and I don't want to indoctrinate anyone and I assure you that skin color is not a primary characteristic that geneticists use to identify haplogroups.
NEVERTHELESS, lumping people together into a social group will cause them to behave in reaction to society as if they are a "real" group. Affirmative action is not an attempt to ameliorate problems caused by skin color. These policies are designed to ameliorate problems caused by people who think that skin color means something more than how far from the equator your ancestors were when they evolved. | [
"Through this small sampling of experts, it is clear that race as a social construction is a common theory. All of the experts in this sampling say that biological race is non-existent. Race therefore must have been created by societies. They were created to do what humans do, to serve the purposes of the majority. The hierarchies created by race have kept the majority \"race\" in control of everything from public policy to the workforce to law enforcement. They benefit from this construction of race. Yet, the minorities, who are just the same genetically, suffer under this system. Most of the points made by the experts expose this issue, yet none truly suggest a way to fix the problem. Bill Nye weighs in on the issue on the same side as the experts in the sample. He says that humans are humans, we are all one species. We have to fix it. If society created the problem, society has to take it on itself to fix it.\n",
"In the social sciences, theoretical frameworks such as racial formation theory and critical race theory investigate implications of race as social construction by exploring how the images, ideas and assumptions of race are expressed in everyday life. A large body of scholarship has traced the relationships between the historical, social production of race in legal and criminal language, and their effects on the policing and disproportionate incarceration of certain groups.\n",
"Similarly, forensic anthropologists draw on highly heritable morphological features of human remains (e.g. cranial measurements) to aid in the identification of the body, including in terms of race. In a 1992 article, anthropologist Norman Sauer noted that anthropologists had generally abandoned the concept of race as a valid representation of human biological diversity, except for forensic anthropologists. He asked, \"If races don't exist, why are forensic anthropologists so good at identifying them?\" He concluded:\n",
"Similarly, biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks agrees with Edwards that correlations between geographical areas and genetics obviously exist in human populations, but goes on to note that \"What is unclear is what this has to do with 'race' as that term has been used through much in the twentieth century—the mere fact that we can find groups to be different and can reliably allot people to them is trivial. Again, the point of the theory of race was to discover large clusters of people that are principally homogeneous within and heterogeneous between, contrasting groups. Lewontin's analysis shows that such groups do not exist in the human species, and Edwards' critique does not contradict that interpretation.\"\n",
"Sociologists, in general, recognize \"race\" as a social construct. This means that, although the concepts of race and racism are based on observable biological characteristics, any conclusions drawn about race on the basis of those observations are heavily influenced by cultural ideologies. Racism, as an ideology, exists in a society at both the individual and institutional level.\n",
"Wagner et al. (2017) surveyed 3,286 American anthropologists' views on race and genetics, including both cultural and biological andthropologists. They found a consensus among them that biological races do not exist in humans, but that race does exist insofar as the social experiences of members of different races can have significant effects on health.\n",
"The majority of anthropologists today consider race to be a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than a biological one, a view supported by considerable genetics research. The current mainstream view in the social sciences and biology is that race is a social construction based on folk ideologies that construct groups based on social disparities and superficial physical characteristics. state, \"Race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one. It derives from people's desire to classify.\" The concept of human \"races\" as natural and separate divisions within the human species has also been rejected by the American Anthropological Association. The official position of the AAA, adopted in 1998, is that advances in scientific knowledge have made it \"clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups\" and that \"any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations [is] both arbitrary and subjective.\"\n"
] |
why do things we do on the internet begin with "e-" instead of "i" for internet? | "e-" stands for "electronic".
Regular mail is sent on physical paper, but "e-mail" is sent *electronically*. It's "e(lectronic) mail". | [
"\"Online\" has come to describe activities performed on and data available on the Internet, for example: \"online identity\", \"online predator\", \"online gambling\", \"online shopping\", \"online banking\", and \"online learning\". Similar meaning is also given by the prefixes \"cyber\" and \"e\", as in the words \"cyberspace\", \"cybercrime\", \"email\", and \"ecommerce\". In contrast, \"offline\" can refer to either computing activities performed while disconnected from the Internet, or alternatives to Internet activities (such as shopping in brick-and-mortar stores). The term \"offline\" is sometimes used interchangeably with the acronym \"IRL\", meaning \"in real life\".\n",
"An \"Internet meme\" is a concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based E-mailing, blogs, forums, imageboards like 4chan, social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, instant messaging, social news sites or thread sites like Reddit, and video hosting services like YouTube and Twitch.\n",
"When the term \"Internet\" is used to refer to the specific global system of interconnected Internet Protocol (IP) networks, the word is a proper noun that should be written with an initial capital letter. In common use and the media, it is often not capitalized, viz. \"the internet.\" Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized when used as a noun, but not capitalized when used as an adjective. The Internet is also often referred to as \"the Net\", as a short form of \"network\". Historically, as early as 1849, the word \"internetted\" was used uncapitalized as an adjective, meaning \"interconnected\" or \"interwoven\". The designers of early computer networks used \"internet\" both as a noun and as a verb in shorthand form of internetwork or internetworking, meaning interconnecting computer networks.\n",
"The Internet standards community historically differentiated between \"the\" Internet and \"an\" internet (or internetwork), treating the former as a proper noun with a capital letter, and the latter as a common noun with lower-case first letter. An internet is any internetwork or set of inter-connected Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The distinction is evident in Request for Comments documents from the early 1980s, when the transition from the ARPANET to the Internet was in progress, although it was not applied with complete uniformity.\n",
"Internet 0 is a low-speed physical layer designed to route 'IP over anything.' It was developed at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms by Neil Gershenfeld, Raffi Krikorian, and Danny Cohen. When it was invented, a number of other proposals were being labelled as \"internet 2.\" The name was chosen to emphasize that this was designed to be a slow, but very inexpensive internetworking system, and forestall \"high-performance\" comparison questions such as \"how fast is it?\"\n",
"It began in late 2001 as an experimental fork by Petr Baudiš of the Links Web browser, hence the \"E\" in the name. Since then, the \"E\" has come to stand for Enhanced or Extended. On 1 September 2004, Baudiš handed maintainership of the project over to Danish developer Jonas Fonseca, citing a lack of time and interest and a desire to spend more time coding rather than reviewing and organising releases.\n",
"The term \"Internet of things\" was likely coined by Kevin Ashton of Procter & Gamble, later MIT's Auto-ID Center, in 1999, though he prefers the phrase \"Internet \"for\" things\". At that point, he viewed Radio-frequency identification (RFID) as essential to the Internet of things, which would allow computers to manage all individual things.\n"
] |
How did cups become a symbol for victory? | hi! always room for more info on this, but you can get started on this earlier post
* [Why are trophies often cups?](_URL_0_) - featuring responses from /u/TheJucheisLoose and /u/ConventionalAlias
if you have follow-up questions on this locked post, ask them here & page the relevant user by including their username | [
"The Cup is made of pure silver. On the top part of the Cup there is the inscription \"OLYMPIC GAMES 1896, MARATHON TROPHY DONATED BY MICHAEL BREAL\". The remaining surface of the Cup had a relief decoration depicting birds and aquatic plants, which were known to exist in the swamp lands of Marathon in ancient times. With this reference, Breal wanted to give the Cup a symbolic significance and connect the ancient Olympic Games with the modern ones. \n",
"\"Cups\" is a version of the 1931 Carter Family song \"When I'm Gone\", usually performed a cappella with a cup used to provide percussion, as in the cup game. It was first performed this way in a YouTube video by Luisa Gerstein and Heloise Tunstall-Behrens as Lulu and The Lampshades in 2009 (under the title \"You're Gonna Miss Me\"). Composition of the song is credited to A. P. Carter and Luisa Gerstein of Lulu and the Lampshades.\n",
"The cup was originally designed by Leslie Buck of the Sherri Cup Co. in 1963, to appeal to Greek-owned coffee shops in New York City, and was later much copied by other companies. The original Anthora depicts an image of an Ancient Greek amphora, a Greek key design on the top and bottom rim, and the words \"WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU\" in an angular typeface resembling ancient Greek, for example with an E resembling a capital sigma (\"Σ\", a letter pronounced like English \"s\"). The blue and white colors were inspired by the flag of Greece. The cup subsequently became the metropolitan area's definitive coffee-to-go cup.\n",
"The cup has been won a total of 10 times by the United States and 6 times by England, including the initial 1876 match. The match was suspended in the 1940s due to World War II and was not revived until the 1990s.\n",
"The concept of having a standard Cup awarded to the winner was thought of by Teófilo Salinas, a boardmember of CONMEBOL, and it was his initiative that led to the creation of one of the most prized awards of the world. The original trophy was created in 1959 by Alberto de Gasperi, an Italian immigrant, who owned an artisan shop in Lima, Peru; the prestigious memento was forged in the Camusso Jewelry workshop, located on Colonial Avenue of the same forementioned city. Gasperi later commented:\n",
"The symbol of the Red Cup originates from the many plastic, red cups, usually filled with porridge and other meals, used to feed school children in WFP School feeding programmes. When WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran began working at the World Food Programme, she was given one of these red cups with the name ‘Lily’ scratched onto the bottom (having been discarded by Lily upon receiving her new cup). Seeing that the cup was a powerful visual tool to help show the world how little food it takes to make a huge difference to a child’s life, Sheeran never travels without it. \n",
"The cup was originally awarded in 1851 by the Royal Yacht Squadron for a race around the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom, which was won by the schooner \"America\". Originally known as the 'R.Y.S. £100 Cup', the trophy was renamed the 'America's Cup' after the yacht and was donated to the New York Yacht Club (NYYC) under the terms of the Deed of Gift, which made the cup available for perpetual international competition.\n"
] |
if i leave the milky way, am i immediately in another galaxy or in a big empty part of space with different galaxies to choose from? | There are large empty spaces between galaxies that have almost no matter in them at all. Except maybe dark matter, but we still don't understand that well | [
"In 2014 researchers reported that most satellite galaxies of the Milky Way actually lie in a very large disk and orbit in the same direction. This came as a surprise: according to standard cosmology, the satellite galaxies should form in dark matter halos, and they should be widely distributed and moving in random directions. This discrepancy is still not fully explained.\n",
"Astronomers have previously noticed that the Milky Way sits in a large, flat array of galaxies called the Local Sheet, which bounds the Local Void. The Local Void extends approximately , beginning at the edge of the Local Group. It is believed that the distance from Earth to the centre of the Local Void must be at least .\n",
"There are 59 small galaxies confirmed to be within of the Milky Way, but not all of them are necessarily in orbit, and some may themselves be in orbit of other satellite galaxies. The only ones visible to the naked eye are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which have been observed since prehistory. Measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2006 suggest the Magellanic Clouds may be moving too fast to be orbiting the Milky Way. Of the galaxies confirmed to be in orbit, the largest is the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, which has a diameter of or roughly a twentieth that of the Milky Way.\n",
"As the galactic plane does not pass through this part of Serpens, a view to many galaxies beyond it is possible. However, a few structures of the Milky Way Galaxy are present in Serpens Caput, such as Messier 5, a globular cluster positioned approximately 8° southwest of α Serpentis, next to the star 5 Serpentis. Barely visible to the naked eye under good conditions, and is located approximately 25,000 ly distant. Messier 5 contains a large number of known RR Lyrae variable stars, and is receding from us at over 50 km/s. The cluster contains two millisecond pulsars, one of which is in a binary, allowing the proper motion of the cluster to be measured. The binary could help our understanding of neutron degenerate matter; the current median mass, if confirmed, would exclude any \"soft\" equation of state for such matter. The cluster has been used to test for magnetic dipole moments in neutrinos, which could shed light on some hypothetical particles such as the axion. Another globular cluster is Palomar 5, found just south of Messier 5. Many stars are leaving this globular cluster due to the Milky Way's gravity, forming a tidal tail over 30000 light-years long.\n",
"The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years in diameter, and the Sun is about 25,000 light-years from the galactic center. The small common star UDF 2457 may be one of the farthest known stars inside the main body of the Milky Way. Globular clusters (such as Messier 54 and NGC 2419) and stellar streams are located further out in the galactic halo.\n",
"Al-Jawziyya also recognized the Milky Way galaxy as \"a myriad of tiny stars packed together in the sphere of the fixed stars\" and thus argued that \"it is certainly impossible to have knowledge of their influences.\"\n",
"Al-Jawziyya also recognized the Milky Way galaxy as \"a myriad of tiny stars packed together in the sphere of the fixed stars\" and thus argued that \"it is certainly impossible to have knowledge of their influences.\"\n"
] |
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