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AMA: Vikings | How far east did the Vikings go? I'm aware of the Volga Vikings and their visits to Baghdad but did they go further east? How accurate is Ibn Fadlan's description of the Ship Burial he described?
| [
"\"The Vikings\" is a British-based society of re-enactors, dedicated to the study and re-enactment of the culture of the Viking Age (790–1066) and the display of authentic Dark Ages living history and combat.\n",
"The Vikings - Vinland is an organization of Viking reenactors, consisting of 12 local member-groups across North America which, in 2006, were united into one governing body... The Vikings. All members of Vinland are full members of a larger society known as \"The Vikings\". Members focus on developing and presenting the reconstructed culture and lifestyle of the Norse. While the major concentration is on the 10th Century, some events are set in the wider period from 790 to 1066, with the appropriate modifications to dress and equipment used. The organization's aim is to provide an accurate and educational portrayal of the Viking period, with an equal emphasis on the daily life of the period, and on the more warlike aspects of life in what was a formative period in European history. The organization was renamed to The Vikings - Vinland in 2009 to better reflect the diverse North American membership of the group. www.vikingsvinland.org\n",
"\"Vikings\" is a historical drama television series, written and created by Michael Hirst for the television channel History. The series broadly follows the exploits of the legendary Viking chieftain Ragnar Lothbrok and his crew, and in later seasons those of his sons. The first season premiered on March 3, 2013 in Canada and concluded on April 28, 2013, consisting of nine episodes. It begins at the start of the Viking Age, marked by the Lindisfarne raid in 793, and follows Ragnar's quest to become Earl, and his desire to raid England.\n",
"Vikings! of Middle England (also known as Tÿrslið) is a Viking re-enactment and living history group based in Leicester, UK. They portray the people who lived, travelled to and invaded Britain in the Viking-Age. The organisation once owned a scale replica Longship called Ratatosk. Tÿrslið's aim is to entertain and educate an audience using a mix of drama, pageant, historical context, demonstration and audience participation.\n",
"Vikings is the third studio album by Danish rock band New Politics, released on August 14, 2015 via DCD2 Records and Warner Bros. Records. Three singles were released, titled \"Everywhere I Go (Kings & Queens)\", \"West End Kids\" and \"Girl Crush\". \"West End Kids\" is featured in the video game \"NHL 16\" and \"Everywhere I Go (Kings & Queens)\" is featured in the video game \"Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5\".\n",
"Thor: Vikings is a 5-issue comic book limited series published by MAX Comics, an imprint of Marvel Comics for adult audiences, in July – November 2003. Written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by Glenn Fabry, the series follows Thor's adventures against a group of thousand-year-old zombie Vikings who attack New York City.\n",
"The Vikings is set in a reconstructed 1000-year-old fortress that is attacked by a Viking Longship. The story begins with a marriage in the village, just before the arrival of a Viking longboat. Special effects include the emergence of a longboat from under water.\n"
] |
'weight cutting' in combat sports | Many combat sports are divided into weight classes. Being at the top of your weight class can give a slight advantage, so if you can lose a few pounds and drop into the next lower class you'll be at the top of that rather than the bottom of your original one. | [
"Fighters can cut weight for a \"day before\" fight weigh-in with modern conditioning and training methods and regain the same weight on \"day of\" the fight. The purpose of a catchweight is to compensate for the ability of bigger boxers to cut weight before a \"day before\" fight weigh-in and regain the weight to exceed the specified limit (division or catchweight) on the \"day of\" the fight with little effect on performance. The catchweight aims to provide a level playing field and to prevent weight mismatches that can endanger the fighters. More importantly, the catchweight ensures the fight is not canceled due to last minute disagreement on fight time.\n",
"Weight cutting is the practice of fast weight loss prior to a sporting competition. It most frequently happens in order to qualify for a lower weight class (usually in combat sports, where weight is a significant advantage) or in sports where it is advantageous to weigh as little as possible (most notably equestrian sports). There are two types of weight cutting: one method is to lose weight in the form of fat and muscle in the weeks prior to an event; the other is to lose weight in the form of water in the final days before competition.\n",
"Cutting weight is a common occurrence in the sport of wrestling. The process of cutting weight allows a wrestler to compete at a lower weight class, facing lighter opponents. The advantage is gained when the wrestler loses only water-weight and fat-weight, but retains lean body mass. The wrestler then re-hydrates himself after weighing-in but before competition begins. If done properly, a wrestler who does cut weight can gain a very significant strength and weight advantage over opponents who do not.\n",
"The promotion banned weight-cutting by dehydration in order to promote fighter safety. Athletes are monitored in their training camps, and have urine specific gravity tests to ensure they are hydrated and healthy right up to three hours ahead of their bouts. Since the new measures took effect, there have been no further incidents.\n",
"Pride made special provisions for fights between fighters of different weight classes or fighters with a large weight difference in the same weight class. The lighter fighter was given a choice of whether or not to permit knees or kicks to the face when in the \"four points\" position in the following cases:\n",
"Throughout his career, Gunnar has never engaged in extensive weight cutting. His training weight is around 175–176 pounds, necessitating only a 5–6 pound weight cut. He has been a big proponent of instituting strict rules against weight cutting, arguing that the practice is dangerous to the fighters and counterproductive to the UFC, as it leads to fights being cancelled or fought at catch weight.\n",
"The style is used by fighters well-versed in submission defense and skilled at takedowns. They take the fight to the ground, maintain a grappling position, and strike until their opponent submits or is knocked out. Although not a traditional style of striking, the effectiveness and reliability of ground-and-pound has made it a popular tactic. It was first demonstrated as an effective technique by Mark Coleman, then popularized by fighters such as Chael Sonnen, Don Frye, Frank Trigg, Jon Jones, Cheick Kongo, Mark Kerr, Frank Shamrock, Tito Ortiz, Matt Hughes, Chris Weidman, and especially Khabib Nurmagomedov.\n"
] |
what is the point of the catcher in the rye? | There really isn't a point, if you want to know the truth. It's just this old crumby book that a whole bunch of phonies _say_ they like even though they don't really understand it for one second. You can always tell when someone's that kind of phoney 'cause they try to impress you with big talk about themes and points and morals and you know the second they start up with that crap that they can't even tell you anything about anything _real_, like a baseball glove or a talk with your sister, or where the ducks go when the lake freezes over. They go on and on about all that lousy crap instead of the _in_teresting parts, where it's nice and exciting and all, it's nice when somebody tells you about their life. But these sad old bastards, they don't have a clue about what the goddam book's about. It's pretty dumb, really, if you think about it. | [
"The name of Rye is believed to come from \"rie\", meaning a bank. Medieval maps show that Rye was originally located on a huge embayment of the English Channel called the Rye Camber, which provided a safe anchorage and harbour. Probably as early as Roman times, Rye was important as a place of shipment and storage of iron from the Wealden iron industry. The Mermaid Inn originally dates to 1156.\n",
"The Catcher in the Rye is a story by J.D. Salinger, partially published in serial form in 1945–1946 and as a novel in 1951. It was originally intended for adults but is read by adolescents for its themes of angst and alienation, and as a critique on superficiality in society. It has been translated into almost all of the world's major languages. Around one million copies are sold each year, with total sales of more than 65 million books. The novel's protagonist Holden Caulfield has become an icon for teenage rebellion. The novel also deals with complex issues of innocence, identity, belonging, loss, and connection.\n",
"Rye, over the centuries, has successively been an \"entrepôt\" port, a naval base, a fishing port, an agricultural centre, and a market town. Rye depends on its tourist appeal, which attracts traffic from all over the world. The old part of the town within the former town walls has shops, art galleries and restaurants.\n",
"The grain has been blazoned here as rye because Parker identifies rye as being “distinguished from other grain by representing the ear drooping”. \"Heraldry of the World\", on the other hand, identifies the grain as wheat, which along with the grapes appears in the arms to represent the municipality's two main crops.\n",
"Rye is one of a number of species that grow wild in central and eastern Turkey and in adjacent areas. Domesticated rye occurs in small quantities at a number of Neolithic sites in (Asia Minor) Turkey, such as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Can Hasan III near Çatalhöyük, but is otherwise absent from the archaeological record until the Bronze Age of central Europe, c. 1800–1500 BCE. It is possible that rye traveled west from (Asia Minor) Turkey as a minor admixture in wheat (possibly as a result of Vavilovian mimicry), and was only later cultivated in its own right. Although archeological evidence of this grain has been found in Roman contexts along the Rhine, Danube, and in Ireland and Britain, Pliny the Elder was dismissive of rye, writing that it \"is a very poor food and only serves to avert starvation\" and spelt is mixed into it \"to mitigate its bitter taste, and even then is most unpleasant to the stomach\".\n",
"\"The Catcher in the Rye\" has had significant cultural influence, and works inspired by the novel have been said to form their own genre. Sarah Graham assessed works influenced by \"The Catcher in the Rye\" to include the novels \"Less Than Zero\" by Bret Easton Ellis, \"The Perks of Being a Wallflower\" by Stephen Chbosky, \"A Complicated Kindness\" by Miriam Toews, \"The Bell Jar\" by Sylvia Plath, \"Ordinary People\" by Judith Guest, and the film \"Igby Goes Down\" by Burr Steers.\n",
"The name Rye House originates from a collection of medieval buildings on an area known as the Isle of Rye due to the fact that the land was directly next door to the River Lea/Lee and in particular the Lee Navigation. When the stadium was constructed in 1935 it was put next door to Rye House on a spare plot which is where the name for the stadium came from. Rye House had been the family home for the Parr family that included Catherine in the 16th century and later a workhouse and tourist attraction in the 19th century. All that remains today of the original Rye House is the gatehouse found to the north of the stadium.\n"
] |
how it is that we exert the same gravity on earth as earth exerts on us? | Your phrasing is a bit off. To be a bit precise, gravity attracts us and the Earth *to each other*.
The force of gravity between two objects is measured by three things: the mass (weight, for ease of reference) of the first object, the mass (weight) of the second, and the distance between their centres. That force **acts equally** on both objects, attracting them to each other and pulling them together. But if one object is much lighter than the other, the same force will move it more.
Imagine you somehow turn gravity off for a second, move three feet (1 meter) up from the Earth's surface, and then gravity back on. You two attract each other until you touch.
But the Earth is MASSIVE, so massive that the little bit of attractive force that pulls it to you is not really gonna move it at all. Instead, the force that pulls you to it brings you downward toward it because you're much lighter. You're much much easier to move, so the force more-or-less is only moving you.
If you were blown up instead so you were the exact same mass and size as the Earth, you two would move together instead. | [
"The gravity of Earth, denoted by , is the net acceleration that is imparted to objects due to the combined effect of gravitation (from distribution of mass within Earth) and the centrifugal force (from the Earth's rotation).\n",
"The gravity of Earth is the acceleration that is imparted to objects due to the distribution of mass within the Earth. Near the Earth's surface, gravitational acceleration is approximately . Local differences in topography, geology, and deeper tectonic structure cause local and broad, regional differences in the Earth's gravitational field, known as gravity anomalies.\n",
"The force of gravity on Earth is the resultant (vector sum) of two forces: (a) The gravitational attraction in accordance with Newton's universal law of gravitation, and (b) the centrifugal force, which results from the choice of an earthbound, rotating frame of reference. The force of gravity is the weakest at the equator because of the centrifugal force caused by the Earth's rotation and because points on the equator are furthest from the center of the Earth. The force of gravity varies with latitude and increases from about 9.780 m/s at the Equator to about 9.832 m/s at the poles.\n",
"The force of gravity on the surface of the Earth, normally denoted \"g\", has remained constant in both direction and magnitude since the formation of the planet. As a result, both plant and animal life have evolved to rely upon and cope with it in various ways.\n",
"The equivalence between gravitational and inertial effects does not constitute a complete theory of gravity. When it comes to explaining gravity near our own location on the Earth's surface, noting that our reference frame is not in free fall, so that fictitious forces are to be expected, provides a suitable explanation. But a freely falling reference frame on one side of the Earth cannot explain why the people on the opposite side of the Earth experience a gravitational pull in the opposite direction.\n",
"Gravity is a fundamental force on earth that influences all biological systems at a molecular level. When biomedical research is conducted in Space, in so-called microgravity environments, certain earthbound limitations disappear, new and different findings are made, and living organisms behave very differently.\n",
"The acceleration due to gravity depends on the gravity of the mass, which rests inside of the object. The gravity decreases at longer distance between centers of mass. The acceleration due to gravity furthermore is influenced by the rotation of the earth. As centrifugal force increases at longer earth's axis distance, thus centrifugal force is highest at the equator and lowest the poles.\n"
] |
Were people in Victorian times actually as weak health-wise as they are portrayed in novels from the time period? | I cannot speak to the actual, physical health of Victorians, but I did once write an answer on the related subject of why one shouldn't take representations of fainting in period fiction as just a reflection of what people were actually doing:
[How did fainting in the Victorian era become so gendered? What social conventions led to the loss of consciousness to be so strongly identified with women?](_URL_0_) | [
"The status of the poor is one area in which huge changes occurred. A good illustration of the differences between life in the Georgian and Victorian eras are the writings of two of England's greatest authors, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Both writers held a fascination for people, society and the details of everyday life but in Austen the poor are almost absent, mainly because they were still the rural poor, remote and almost absent from the minds of the middle classes. For Dickens, only a few years later, the poor were his main subject, as he had partly suffered their fate. The poor now were an unavoidable part of urban society and their existence and plight could not be ignored. Industrialisation made large profits for the entrepreneurs of the times, and their success was in contrast not only to the farm workers who were in competition with imported produce but also to the aristocracy whose landowning wealth was now becoming less significant than business wealth. The British class system created an intricate hierarchy of people which contrasted the new and old rich, the skilled and unskilled, the rural and urban and many more.\n",
"Himmelfarb is best known as a historian of Victorian England. But she puts that period in a larger context. Her book \"The Idea of Poverty\" opens with an extended analysis of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, who helped shape debate and policies through much the 19th century and beyond. \"Victorian Minds\" features such eighteenth-century \"proto-Victorians\" as Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham, concluding with the \"last Victorian,\" John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, whose novels depict a 20th-century imbued with Victorian values. \"The Moral Imagination\" ranges from Burke to Winston Churchill and Lionel Trilling, with assorted Victorians and non-Victorians in between. \"On Looking into the Abyss\" has modern culture and society in the forefront and the Victorians in the background, while \"One Nation, Two Cultures\" is entirely about American culture and society. \"The Roads to Modernity\" enlarges the perspective of the Age of Enlightenment, both chronologically and nationally, placing the British Enlightenment in opposition to the French and in accord with the American. Most recently, \"The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot\" and \"The People of the Book\" focus on attitudes to Jews, Judaism, and Zionism in England from their readmission in the 17th century to the present.\n",
"In her most recent works of fiction she has explored related themes and recounted stories from different points of view in three novels: \"Old Filth\" (2004), \"The Man in the Wooden Hat\" (2009), and \"Last Friends\" (2013). One American reviewer noted that her concern with \"the intricate web of manners and class peculiar to the inhabitants of her homeland\" does not explain why she remains less well known to an international audience than her English contemporaries. He recommended \"Old Filth\" for its \"typical excellence and compulsive readability\", written by a novelist \"at the top of her form\". \"The Spectator\" praised \"The Man in the Wooden Hat\" for its \"rich complexities of chronology, settings and characters, all manipulated with marvellous dexterity\". In 2015, a BBC survey voted \"Old Filth\" among the 100 greatest British novels.\n",
"Rees-Mogg's book \"The Victorians\", published in May 2019, was described by A. N. Wilson in \"The Times\" as \"staggeringly silly\" and \"morally repellent\". Dominic Sandbrook, reviewing the book for \"The Sunday Times\", described it as \"bad, boring and mind‑bogglingly banal\".\n",
"In May 2019, he glowingly reviewed Jacob Rees-Mogg's new book about eminent Victorians, describing it as “a full-throated, clear-sighted, well-researched and extremely well-written exposition of the Victorians and their values”. This was a book other reviewers had described as \"staggeringly silly\" and \"absolutely abysmal\". The historian Dominic Sandbrook described the book as “terrible, so bad, so boring, so mind-bogglingly banal that if it had been written by anybody else it would never have been published”.\n",
"With the fin de siècle erosion of the Victorian moral consensus, Mrs Grundy began to lose her power, and by the Twenties she was already little more than a faded laughing-stock, being mocked for example in the advice book for teens, \"Mrs Grundy is Dead\" (New York: Century, 1930).\n",
"Victorian values emerged in all classes and reached all facets of Victorian living. The values of the period—which can be classed as religion, morality, Evangelicalism, industrial work ethic, and personal improvement—took root in Victorian morality. Current plays and all literature—including old classics like Shakespeare—were cleansed of naughtiness, or \"bowdlerized.\"\n"
] |
Before Einstein, did nobody else consider there was a deep relationship between gravity and space time? | Depending on how you see it, there is also no deep relationship between gravity and spacetime in General Relativity. GR is originally just a generalization of Special Relativity, such that two reference frames relate to one another by Lorentz transformation when acceleration (which means force) is involved. This means, if you switch from one point of view to another, the translation of the physical system into your new point of view is given by the Lorentz transformations.
If you use Minkowski's geometric formulation of Special Relativity, acceleration is the same as a curvature of spacetime. Regardless of what is causing the acceleration, it is necessary to formulate it as curvature in a relativistic framework.
The common interpretation is that mass "causes" a curvature of spacetime. But GR also works as a theory of each other interaction, if you interpreted the associated charge as causing a curvature in spacetime. To associate charge with curvature is actually also the basis for the Kaluza-Klein approach and Yang Mills theory that underlies the standard model.
The difference between GR and a Newtonian theory of gravity is just the Lorentz-invariance, which means: no speed bigger than the speed of light in all reference frames. If you calculate the Lorentz invariance out of GR, you still get the Newtonian gravity potential.
Thus, the big progress of Relativity is that all physical systems have to obey Lorentz transformations. The stuff with mass producing a curvature in spacetime is just an interpretation based on the mathematical formulation, so to speak taking the mathematics literally. | [
"In 1905, Einstein introduced special relativity (even though without using the techniques of the spacetime formalism) in its modern understanding as a theory of space and time. While his results are mathematically equivalent to those of Lorentz and Poincaré, it was Einstein who showed that the Lorentz transformations are not the result of interactions between matter and aether, but rather concern the nature of space and time itself. He obtained all of his results by recognizing that the entire theory can be built upon two postulates: The principle of relativity and the principle of the constancy of light speed.\n",
"Einstein's beliefs had evolved over the years from those that he had held when he was young, when, as a logical positivist heavily influenced by his reading of David Hume and Ernst Mach, he had rejected such unobservable concepts as absolute time and space. Einstein believed: \n",
"Subsequently, Einstein worked on a general theory of relativity, which is a theory of how gravity interacts with spacetime. Instead of viewing gravity as a force field acting in spacetime, Einstein suggested that it modifies the geometric structure of spacetime itself. According to the general theory, time goes more slowly at places with lower gravitational potentials and rays of light bend in the presence of a gravitational field. Scientists have studied the behaviour of binary pulsars, confirming the predictions of Einstein's theories, and non-Euclidean geometry is usually used to describe spacetime.\n",
"Modern cosmology developed along tandem tracks of theory and observation. In 1916, Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity, which provided a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time. At the time, Einstein believed in a static universe, but found that his original formulation of the theory did not permit it. This is because masses distributed throughout the universe gravitationally attract, and move toward each other over time. However, he realized that his equations permitted the introduction of a constant term which could counteract the attractive force of gravity on the cosmic scale. Einstein published his first paper on relativistic cosmology in 1917, in which he added this \"cosmological constant\" to his field equations in order to force them to model a static universe. The Einstein model describes a static universe; space is finite and unbounded (analogous to the surface of a sphere, which has a finite area but no edges). However, this so-called Einstein model is unstable to small perturbations—it will eventually start to expand or contract. It was later realized that Einstein's model was just one of a larger set of possibilities, all of which were consistent with general relativity and the cosmological principle. The cosmological solutions of general relativity were found by Alexander Friedmann in the early 1920s. His equations describe the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker universe, which may expand or contract, and whose geometry may be open, flat, or closed.\n",
"Other physicists and mathematicians at the turn of the century came close to arriving at what is currently known as spacetime. Einstein himself noted, that with so many people unraveling separate pieces of the puzzle, \"the special theory of relativity, if we regard its development in retrospect, was ripe for discovery in 1905.\"\n",
"In 1905 a young, 26-year-old German physicist (then a Bern patent clerk) named Albert Einstein (1879–1955), showed how measurements of time and space are affected by motion between an observer and what is being observed. To say that Einstein's radical theory of relativity revolutionized science is no exaggeration. Although Einstein made many other important contributions to science, the theory of relativity alone represents one of the greatest intellectual achievements of all time. Although the concept of relativity was not introduced by Einstein, his major contribution was the recognition that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant, i.e. the same for all observers, and an absolute physical boundary for motion. This does not impact a person's day-to-day life since most objects travel at speeds much slower than light speed. For objects travelling near light speed, however, the theory of relativity shows that clocks associated with those objects will run more slowly and that the objects shorten in length according to measurements of an observer on Earth. Einstein also derived the famous equation, \"E\" = \"mc\", which expresses the equivalence of mass and energy.\n",
"The concepts of space and time were separate in physical theory prior to the advent of special relativity theory, which connected the two and showed both to be dependent upon the reference frame's motion. In Einstein's theories, the ideas of absolute time and space were superseded by the notion of spacetime in special relativity, and curved spacetime in general relativity.\n"
] |
What causes the scars on the ocean floor? | The long linear irregularities in your image look image look like what we call "artifacts", a direct result of the mapping techniques. Most of what we have for the vast ocean floor bathymetry is fairly low resolution, thus there is a lot of smoothing. When a ship makes a single pass through a poorly mapped area and gathers higher resolution data it creates what looks like a more rough strip.
There are plenty of natural processes which create seafloor lineations.
[The mid-ocean ridge system](_URL_0_) is composed of off-set linear segments. At [Oceanic Core Complexes](_URL_1_) you get striations in the seafloor.
[Ice](_URL_2_) can scour the seabed in sometimes straight lines.
I really think what you are seeing is an artifact of merging data sets though.
| [
"A large number of injuries, up to 66%, are caused by collision with a surfboard (nose or fins). Fins can cause deep lacerations and cuts, as well as bruising. While these injuries can be minor, they can open the skin to infection from the sea; groups like Surfers Against Sewage campaign for cleaner waters to reduce the risk of infections. Local bugs and disease can be risk factors when surfing around the globe.\n",
"Marine debris is a problem created by all of us, not only those in coastal regions. Ocean debris can come from as far away as Nebraska. The places that see the most damage are often not the places that produce the pollution. For ocean pollution, much of the trash may come from inland states, where people may never see the ocean and thus may never put any thought into protecting it. The problem continues to grow in tandem with plastics usage and disposal. Steps can be taken to prevent the movement of inland plastics into the oceans.\n",
"Erosion of beaches can expose less resilient soils and rocks to wind and wave action leading to undermining of coastal headlands eventually resulting in catastrophic collapse of large quantities of overburden into the shallows. This material may be distributed along the beach front leading to a change in the habitat as sea grasses and corals in the shallows may be buried or deprived of light and nutrients.\n",
"Marine debris has been found in the Zmudowski State Beach. Marine debris is man-made solid waste material that enters the marine environment through rivers, streams, drainage, or any other source. Most marine debris is due to land-based resources, such as litter, industrial discharges, and global management. Only 20 percent of the debris found in the ocean comes from commercial fishing ships, cargo ships, or cruise ships. The other 80 percent connects back to pedestrians, motorists, and beach visitors. This clean exotic beach where people come to enjoy and relax is now shifting towards a trash zone. Trash increases the amount of pathogens and chemicals in the water, thereby hurting the water quality. Sea turtles mix up plastic for jellyfish, and grey whales have been found dead with plastic in their stomachs. As a result of marine debris, the oceanic animal population is decreasing in the Monterey Bay area.\n",
"Sonar surveys around many volcanic ocean islands including the Canary Islands, Hawaii, Réunion etc., have mapped debris flows on the sea floor. Many of these debris flows are about 100 km or about 60 miles long, and up to 2 km or about 1.25 miles thick, contain mega-blocks mixed up with finer detritus. The debris flows are now considered to be a normal process where a volcano sheds some proportion of excess material and thereby makes itself more stable. It is also known to occur on all volcanoes based on the land, in or under the sea.\n",
"This type of rash can also be a symptom of Sea bather's eruption. This stinging, pruritic, maculopapular rash affects swimmers in some Atlantic locales (e.g., Florida, Caribbean, Long Island). It is caused by hypersensitivity to stings from the larvae of the sea anemone (e.g., \"Edwardsiella lineate\") or the thimble jellyfish (\"Linuche unguiculata\"). The rash appears where the bathing suit contacts the skin.\n",
"These are a common source of injury to ocean swimmers, especially along coastal surfaces where coral with stationary sea urchins are present. Their stings vary in severity depending on the species. Their spines can be venomous or cause infection. Granuloma and staining of the skin from the natural dye inside the sea urchin can also occur. Breathing problems may indicate a serious reaction to toxins in the sea urchin. They inflict a painful wound when they penetrate human skin, but are not themselves dangerous if fully removed promptly; if left in the skin, further problems may occur.\n"
] |
what is the difference between baking powder and baking soda? | The top comment is correct, but in case it's too technical:
Both baking powder and baking soda are used to create a rise in baked goods. The chemical reaction they cause makes bubbles that puff up the dough. Baking soda needs an acid added to the dough to make that reaction happen (like your grade school volcano). Baking powder is baking soda plus an acid that activates when it gets wet. Which one you use depends on the recipe (is there an acid?) and how much rise you want (baking soda is stronger but too much of either powder can affect tastes so sometimes you want a big rise and you use both). | [
"Many forms of baking powder contain sodium bicarbonate combined with calcium acid phosphate, sodium aluminium phosphate, or cream of tartar. Baking soda is alkaline; the acid used in baking powder avoids a metallic taste when the chemical change during baking creates sodium carbonate.\n",
"In cooking, baking soda is primarily used in baking as a leavening agent. When it reacts with acid, carbon dioxide is released, which causes expansion of the batter and forms the characteristic texture and grain in pancakes, cakes, quick breads, soda bread, and other baked and fried foods. Acidic compounds that induce this reaction include phosphates, cream of tartar, lemon juice, yogurt, buttermilk, cocoa, and vinegar. Baking soda may be used together with sourdough, which is acidic, making a lighter product with a less acidic taste.\n",
"Baking soda is still used to soften pulses (peas, beans) before and during cooking, as in the traditional British mushy peas recipe for soaking the peas. The main effect of sodium bicarbonate is to modify the pH of the soaking solution and cooking water, that in turn softens the hard external shell, reduces cooking times and may alter the percentage of nutrients in the dish, its flavour and consistence. \n",
"Baking soda is commonly added to washing machines as a replacement for water softener and to remove odors from clothes. It is also effective in removing heavy tea and coffee stains from cups when diluted with warm water. Also, baking soda can be used as a multipurpose odor remover.\n",
"As described above, baking powder is mainly just baking soda mixed with an acid. In principle, a number of kitchen acids may be combined with baking soda to simulate commercial baking powders. Vinegar (dilute acetic acid), especially white vinegar, is also a common acidifier in baking; for example, many heirloom chocolate cake recipes call for a tablespoon or two of vinegar. Where a recipe already uses buttermilk or yogurt, baking soda can be used without cream of tartar (or with less). Alternatively, lemon juice can be substituted for some of the liquid in the recipe, to provide the required acidity to activate the baking soda. The main variable with the use of these kitchen acids is the rate of leavening.\n",
"A few tablespoons of ordinary baking soda are spread out in a thin layer on a cookie sheet and baked at 300° F (150° C) for an hour. Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate; by baking it, water and carbon dioxide are exuded and what is left is the alkaline soda ash—alkaline enough to cause discomfort if touched to the skin. In plain text, the chemical reaction is sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) + heat → sodium carbonate + water vapor + carbon dioxide gas. Only a very small of amount of the resultant sodium carbonate is used in the preparation of McGee's pasta dish, just 1 teaspoon of it to 1-1/2 cups of semolina flour. When preparing the pasta, the sodium carbonate is first dissolved in a small quantity of water, which is then slowly added to the semolina. Afterwards, the kneaded dough is allowed to rest for an hour and is then rolled out very thin through a pasta machine and processed into the desired form of noodles. The unused portion of the sodium carbonate can be stored in a tightly sealed bottle and kept for future use.\n",
"Baking powder is a dry chemical leavening agent, a mixture of a carbonate or bicarbonate and a weak acid. The base and acid are prevented from reacting prematurely by the inclusion of a buffer such as cornstarch. Baking powder is used to increase the volume and lighten the texture of baked goods. It works by releasing carbon dioxide gas into a batter or dough through an acid-base reaction, causing bubbles in the wet mixture to expand and thus leavening the mixture. The first single-acting baking powder was developed by Birmingham based food manufacturer Alfred Bird in England in 1843. The first double-acting baking powder was developed by Eben Norton Horsford in America in the 1860s.\n"
] |
How do polarizing filters “know” the orientation of incoming photons? | It's hard to do better than this 60 Symbols video:
_URL_0_
It's not about "knowing" it's that if the incoming light is not perfectly polarized already then no matter what angle you choose it will have SOME component along that axis and that is the component that survives the filter, which is made of long conductive molecules that only efficiently transmit the portion of an oscillating electric field (i.e. light) that is oscillating in the direction ~~of~~ **perpendicular to** their length. | [
"As shown in the figure, the analyzing filters are constructed of a quarter-wave plate (QWP) and a linearly polarized filter (LPF). The QWP always transforms circularly polarized light into linearly polarized light. However, the angle of polarization of the linearly polarized light produced by a QWP depends on the handedness of the circularly polarized light entering the QWP. In the illustration, the left-handed circularly polarized light entering the analyzing filter is transformed by the QWP into linearly polarized light which has its direction of polarization along the transmission axis of the LPF. Therefore, in this case the light passes through the LPF. In contrast, right-handed circularly polarized light would have been transformed into linearly polarized light that had its direction of polarization along the absorbing axis of the LPF, which is at right angles to the transmission axis, and it would have therefore been blocked.\n",
"A Faraday filter, magneto-optical filter, FADOF or EFADOF (Excited Faraday Dispersive Optical Filter) works by rotating the polarization of the light passing through the vapor cell. This rotation occurs near its atomic absorption lines by the Faraday effect and anomalous dispersion. Only light at the resonant frequency of the vapor is rotated and the polarized plates block other electromagnetic radiation. This effect is related to and enhanced by the Zeeman Effect, or the splitting of atomic absorption lines in the presence of the magnetic field. Light at the resonant frequency of the vapor exits a FADOF near its original strength but with an orthogonal polarization.\n",
"Linear polarizing filters can be easily distinguished from circular polarizers. In linear polarizing filters, the polarizing effect works (rotate to see differences) regardless of which side of the filter the scene is viewed from. In \"circular\" polarizing filters, the polarizing effect works when the scene is viewed from the male threaded (back) side of the filter, but does not work when looking through it backwards.\n",
"When determining if the wave is clockwise or anti-clockwise circularly polarized, one again takes the point of view of the receiver and, while looking toward the source, against the direction of propagation, one observes the direction of the field's temporal rotation.\n",
"Lesso and Padgett (1999) and Moreno et al. (2003, 2004) found that there is a change in the state of polarization of a beam of light on passing through a rotated dove prism. Polarization rotation in the infrared has been known for much longer. (Johnston 1977) The polarization-transforming properties of dove prisms are of particular interest because they can influence the signal measurement of the scientific instrument.\n",
"Finally, a linear polarizer is introduced in the path of the first photon of the entangled pair, giving this photon a diagonal polarization (see Figure 2). Entanglement ensures a complementary diagonal polarization in its partner, which passes through the double-slit mask. This alters the effect of the circular polarizers: each will produce a mix of clockwise and counter-clockwise polarized light. Thus the second detector can no longer determine which path was taken, and the interference fringes are restored.\n",
"Next, a circular polarizer is placed in front of each slit in the double-slit mask, producing clockwise circular polarization in light passing through one slit, and counter-clockwise circular polarization in the other slit (see Figure 1). This polarization is measured at the detector, thus \"marking\" the photons and destroying the interference pattern (see Fresnel–Arago laws).\n"
] |
Is there a reason that baldness in babies follows the same general pattern as Male Pattern Baldness? | I think you may have a flawed premise here. Babies generally don't follow male pattern baldness. If they have very thin hair, it is generally very uniform.
Maybe someone else can give you a better answer, but I haven't been able to find a single example of a male pattern baldness newborn for about an hour now. | [
"Although men grow hair faster than women, baldness is much more common in males than in females. The main cause for this is \"male pattern baldness\" or androgenic alopecia. Male pattern baldness is a condition where hair starts to get lost in a typical pattern of receding hairline and hair thinning on the crown, and is caused by hormones and genetic predisposition.\n",
"Although primates do not go bald, their hairlines do undergo recession. In infancy the hairline starts at the top of the supraorbital ridge, but slowly recedes after puberty to create the appearance of a small forehead.\n",
"Some baboons and all gibbons, though otherwise fur-covered, have characteristic naked callosities on their buttocks. While human children generally have smooth buttocks, mature males and females have varying degrees of hair growth, as on other parts of their body. Females may have hair growth in the gluteal cleft (including around the anus), sometimes extending laterally onto the lower aspect of the cheeks. Males may have hair growth over some or all of the buttocks.\n",
"There are two types of identification tests for female pattern baldness: the Ludwig Scale and the Savin Scale. Both track the progress of diffused thinning, which typically begins on the crown of the head behind the hairline, and becomes gradually more pronounced. For male pattern baldness, the Hamilton–Norwood scale tracks the progress of a receding hairline and/or a thinning crown, through to a horseshoe-shaped ring of hair around the head and on to total baldness.\n",
"Additional concerns are hypothyroidism, allergies, epilepsy, diabeties and glandular disorders which may cause baldness. The hair loss occurs at around six months of age, affecting the neck, thighs and tail; however the frequency has been reduced through work conducted by the breed clubs. Hip dysplasia is seen in around 8.3% of the breed, according to surveys conducted by the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals over a twenty five-year period between 1974 and 1999. This was one of the lower results of the sporting breeds, with Greyhounds coming lowest with 3.4%, and the related Boykin Spaniel coming in second highest at 47%. There was no evidence of elbow dysplasia found. The breed has an average life span of 10–13 years.\n",
"Ossicones are present at birth; however, they lie flat and are not attached to the skull as to avoid injury at birth. Male and female ossicones vary in structure and purpose. Males typically have thicker ossicones that become bald on top due to frequent necking. These ossicones also add weight to the giraffe's head allowing them to deliver heavier, sometimes fatal, blows. The added weight is an evolutionary trait bred from necessity. The addition of ossicones also leads to other evolutionary adaptations like heavy hides and specialized dermal shields.\n",
"Bald eagles are not actually bald; the name derives from an older meaning of the word, \"white headed\". The adult is mainly brown with a white head and tail. The sexes are identical in plumage, but females are about 25 percent larger than males. The beak is large and hooked. The plumage of the immature is brown.\n"
] |
I read about children working underground in coal mines during the Industrial Revolution. Is that accurate? | Until 1842, children did work underground in substantial numbers.
[An accident at Huskar Colliery in Silkstone](_URL_1_), near Barnsley in 1838 clearly shows this. A stream overflowed into the ventilation drift after violent thunderstorms causing the death of 26 children; 11 girls aged from 8 to 16 and 15 boys between 9 and 12 years of age.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Children’s Employment of 1842 found that over 5000 children were employed for underground work, some as young as four years old.
You can read the conclusions on employment of children in mines [here](_URL_0_)
* Children (mostly boys, but also girls) did work underground from a very young age.
* The youngest often worked opening and shutting ventilation doors, a job where they spend almost the entire working day alone and in the dark.
* From the age of six, they would be employed hauling coal carriages, sometimes in very low tunnels.
* Working days were 11 to 14 hours. The better-regulated mines had some breaks, the worst not at all and many children complained of a constant, often painful fatigue.
* In case of mine accidents, young children died in explosions, were crushed under tonnes of stone or drowned. Entrusting jobs essential for mine safety to young children was actually a cause of accidents.
[This list of mining accidents 1820-1839](_URL_2_) shows many teenage and younger workers killed.
All this led to the Mines and Collieries Act 1842:
* No female was to be employed underground (as women miners wore trousers and shifts or even went topless, this work was an affront to Victorian sensibilities)
* No boy under 10 years old was to be employed underground.
* Parish apprentices between the ages of 10 and 18 could continue to work in the mines.
| [
"Boys in the Pits: Child Labour in Coal Mines is a 2000 book by Robert McIntosh, published by McGill-Queen's University Press. The book is about child labour in Canada in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with special reference to the history of boys, aged 8 to 15, who worked in coal mines. These boys worked underground, leading horses along subterranean roads, manipulating ventilation doors, helping miners cut and lift tons of coal, and filling wagons with freshly mined coal.\n",
"Being a miner in the 19th century meant long hours of continuous hard labor in the dark mines with low ceilings. Accidents were frequent. Young boys were used outside the mine to sort coal from rocks; they were not allowed underground until age 18.\n",
"At the turn of the 19th century demand for coal increased rapidly for domestic and industrial consumption: steam was used to power factories and steamships. Miners worked in intolerable conditions. Coal was got by hand, hewers using picks and shovels in mines lit by candles. Children as young as five sat in complete darkness opening ventilation doors for \"hurriers\", women and boys who hauled tubs of coal to the shaft bottom. Some coalowners used bonds, paying signing-on fees to the colliers who worked in their coal pits for a year or had to pay a considerable forfeit if the contract was broken. The coalowners used the bond system as a tool for enforcing discipline and fending off the ability of workers to join together to fight for better pay and conditions. The Combination Acts of 1799 made unions illegal. Some coal owners, including William Hulton, paid their workers with tokens or vouchers that could only be redeemed in their company shops, a practice outlawed by the Truck Act 1831. Wages were poor and coal owners introduced a system of fines to enforce discipline. The Duke of Bridgewater paid eight shillings (40p) for a six-day working week with shifts of 12 to 15 hours and fined those who were late half a crown. The wages amounted to a few pence more than given in Poor Law relief and miners worked to keep out of the workhouse. William Hulton reputedly paid the poorest wages in Lancashire and was hostile to permitting his workforce the right to free assembly.\n",
"The first recorded coal mine was in 1528 and by the end of the 19th century there were over 20 collieries in the area. Ladies Lane Colliery belonging to the Wigan Coal and Iron Company employed 282 underground and 40 surface workers in 1896. At the start of the 20th century profitable coal seams were nearly exhausted and concerns were raised regarding the need to diversify industry and further develop the cotton mills. Peak production of coal was achieved just before the First World War. The period between the First and Second world wars was marked by the closure of most collieries and mills including Hindley Field and Swan Lane collieries in 1927, Hindley Green Colliery in 1928; Lowe Hall Colliery in 1931; Lowe Mill closing in 1934 and Worthington Mill was demolished. During the post war period the Hindley workings became part of the large colliery complexes developed at Bickershaw, Parsonage and Golborne.\n",
"The economically important very deep coal mining in the course of the First Industrial Revolution has required highly reputed specialized studies for mining engineers. But that was already the case before the Industrial Revolution, with an engineer as Rennequin Sualem for instance.\n",
"At the beginning of the 19th century methods of coal extraction were primitive and the workforce, men, women and children, laboured in dangerous conditions. In 1841 about 216,000 people were employed in the mines. Women and children worked underground for 11 or 12 hours a day for smaller wages than men. The public became aware of conditions in the country's collieries in 1838 after an accident at Huskar Colliery in Silkstone, near Barnsley. A stream overflowed into the ventilation drift after violent thunderstorms causing the death of 26 children; 11 girls aged from 8 to 16 and 15 boys between 9 and 12 years of age. The disaster came to the attention of Queen Victoria who ordered an inquiry.\n",
"Demand for coal increased with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and a number of deep pits were sunk over the course of the 19th century. The village grew substantially and light industry increased, including the construction of a brewery, mill, and candle factory; as well as various services for the population, including a school, church, at least two nonconformist chapels, and a variety of shops.\n"
] |
A question on Cosmic Radiation and Electromagnetic Shielding | While the earth's magnetic field does help with cosmic rays, you are forgetting the massive attenuation that occurs due to our atmosphere. | [
"This radiation originates from outside the solar system and consists of ionized charged atomic nuclei from hydrogen, helium and uranium. Due to its energy the galactic cosmic radiation is very penetrating. Thin to moderate shielding is effective in reducing the projected equivalent dose but as shield thickness increases, shield effectiveness drops.\n",
"Material shielding can be effective against galactic cosmic rays, but thin shielding may actually make the problem worse for some of the higher energy rays, because more shielding causes an increased amount of secondary radiation, although thick shielding could counter such too. The aluminium walls of the ISS, for example, are believed to produce a net reduction in radiation exposure. In interplanetary space, however, it is believed that thin aluminium shielding would give a net increase in radiation exposure but would gradually decrease as more shielding is added to capture generated secondary radiation.\n",
"Furthermore, without Earth's surrounding magnetic field as a shield, solar radiation has much harsher effects on biological organisms in space. The exposure can include damage to the central nervous system, (altered cognitive function, reducing motor function and incurring possible behavioral changes), as well as the possibility of degenerative tissue diseases.\n",
"BULLET::::- Cosmic radiation is not a common concern, as the Earth's atmosphere absorbs it and the magnetosphere acts as a shield, but it poses a problem for satellites and astronauts. Frequent fliers are also at a slight risk. Cosmic radiation is extremely high energy, and is very penetrating.\n",
"Part of the uncertainty is that the effect of human exposure to galactic cosmic rays is poorly known in quantitative terms. The NASA Space Radiation Laboratory is currently studying the effects of radiation in living organisms as well as protective shielding.\n",
"The health threats from cosmic rays is the danger posed by galactic cosmic rays (GCR) and solar energetic particles to astronauts on interplanetary missions or any missions that venture through the Van-Allen Belts or outside the Earth's magnetosphere. They are one of the greatest barriers standing in the way of plans for interplanetary travel by crewed spacecraft,\n",
"Space radiation comes from cosmic rays emitted by our local star, the Sun, and from stars beyond the Solar System as well. Space radiation can trigger cancer and cause damage to the central nervous system. Similar instruments are flown on the Space Shuttles and on the International Space Station (ISS), but none have ever flown outside Earth's protective magnetosphere, which blocks much of this radiation from reaching the surface of our planet.\n"
] |
why can a light tap or flick or what have you on my testicles hurt pretty bad, but ball-slapping sex doesn't hurt at all? | Well, during ball slapping sex, things hurt less. Hormones, adrenaline, etc. For me at least, it's common for them to be a bit sore after. | [
"Loss of blood flow is one of the biggest risks in cock and ball torture (CBT), which can be seen with loss of color and edemas. Bondage in which the testicles are tied to something else is especially dangerous, increasing the risk of the testicles getting damaged through excessive tension or pulling.\n",
"Blue balls is slang for the condition of temporary fluid congestion (vasocongestion) in the testicles accompanied by testicular pain, caused by prolonged sexual arousal in the human male without ejaculation. The term is thought to have originated in the United States, first appearing in 1916. Some urologists call this condition \"epididymal hypertension\". The condition is not experienced by all males.\n",
"BULLET::::- Preventing the testicles from lifting up so far that they become lodged under the skin immediately adjacent to the base of the penis, a condition which can be very uncomfortable, especially if the testicle is then squashed by the slap of skin during thrusting in sexual intercourse.\n",
"The testicles lack anatomical protection and are highly sensitive to impact. The pain caused by impact to the testicles travels through the spermatic plexus. In extreme cases, a hard strike to the testicles can cause one or both to rupture, potentially sterilizing the victim.\n",
"While less often depicted in media, a strike to the groin can cause pain for female victims too. The skin of the vulva and the clitoris are highly sensitive, making laceration injuries especially painful. In extreme cases, nerve damage can occur to the clitoris.\n",
"Another consideration is loss of sensation, which puts people at risk for wounds such as pressure sores and injuries that could become worse before being noticed. Friction from sexual activity may damage the skin, so it is necessary after sex to inspect areas that could have been hurt, particularly the buttocks and genital area. People who already have pressure sores must take care not to make the wounds worse. Irritation to the genitals increases risk for vaginal infections, which get worse if they go unnoticed. Women who do not get sufficient vaginal lubrication on their own can use a commercially available personal lubricant to decrease friction.\n",
"Because the testes are located within the scrotum, which hangs outside of the body, they do not have the protection of muscles and bones. This makes it easier for the testes to be struck, hit, kicked or crushed, which occurs most often during contact sports. Testicles can be protected by wearing athletic cups during sports.\n"
] |
why we can't see a full circle rainbow? | Because of the physical properties of rain droplet, the light entering and leaving forms an angle of about 42^(o). That means a rainbow is going to be a ring "around" the sun at 180^o - 42^o = 138^(o), or 42^o from the point exactly opposite the sun. Since that point is below the horizon, the earth itself blocks the lower portion of the rainbow.
[But not always](_URL_0_). If you are at a high enough altitude, the can be enough water droplets between you and the ground for a full 360^o rainbow to appear. | [
"From above the earth such as in an aeroplane, it is sometimes possible to see a rainbow as a full circle. This phenomenon can be confused with the glory phenomenon, but a glory is usually much smaller, covering only 5–20°.\n",
"A rainbow is not located at a specific distance from the observer, but comes from an optical illusion caused by any water droplets viewed from a certain angle relative to a light source. Thus, a rainbow is not an object and cannot be physically approached. Indeed, it is impossible for an observer to see a rainbow from water droplets at any angle other than the customary one of 42 degrees from the direction opposite the light source. Even if an observer sees another observer who seems \"under\" or \"at the end of\" a rainbow, the second observer will see a different rainbow—farther off—at the same angle as seen by the first observer.\n",
"In theory, every rainbow is a circle, but from the ground, usually only its upper half can be seen. Since the rainbow's centre is diametrically opposed to the sun's position in the sky, more of the circle comes into view as the sun approaches the horizon, meaning that the largest section of the circle normally seen is about 50% during sunset or sunrise. Viewing the rainbow's lower half requires the presence of water droplets \"below\" the observer's horizon, as well as sunlight that is able to reach them. These requirements are not usually met when the viewer is at ground level, either because droplets are absent in the required position, or because the sunlight is obstructed by the landscape behind the observer. From a high viewpoint such as a high building or an aircraft, however, the requirements can be met and the full-circle rainbow can be seen. Like a partial rainbow, the circular rainbow can have a secondary bow or supernumerary bows as well. It is possible to produce the full circle when standing on the ground, for example by spraying a water mist from a garden hose while facing away from the sun.\n",
"Like most atmospheric optical phenomena, rainbows can be caused by light from the Sun, but also from the Moon. In case of the latter, the rainbow is referred to as a lunar rainbow or moonbow. They are much dimmer and rarer than solar rainbows, requiring the Moon to be near-full in order for them to be seen. For the same reason, moonbows are often perceived as white and may be thought of as monochrome. The full spectrum is present, however, but the human eye is not normally sensitive enough to see the colours. Long exposure photographs will sometimes show the colour in this type of rainbow.\n",
"Rainbows can be observed whenever there are water drops in the air and sunlight shining from behind the observer at a low altitude angle. Because of this, rainbows are usually seen in the western sky during the morning and in the eastern sky during the early evening. The most spectacular rainbow displays happen when half the sky is still dark with raining clouds and the observer is at a spot with clear sky in the direction of the sun. The result is a luminous rainbow that contrasts with the darkened background. During such good visibility conditions, the larger but fainter secondary rainbow is often visible. It appears about 10° outside of the primary rainbow, with inverse order of colours.\n",
"A rainbow does not exist at one particular location. Many rainbows exist; however, only one can be seen depending on the particular observer's viewpoint as droplets of light illuminated by the sun. All raindrops refract and reflect the sunlight in the same way, but only the light from some raindrops reaches the observer's eye. This light is what constitutes the rainbow for that observer. The whole system composed by the sun's rays, the observer's head, and the (spherical) water drops has an axial symmetry around the axis through the observer's head and parallel to the sun's rays. The rainbow is curved because the set of all the raindrops that have the right angle between the observer, the drop, and the sun, lie on a cone pointing at the sun with the observer at the tip. The base of the cone forms a circle at an angle of 40–42° to the line between the observer's head and their shadow but 50% or more of the circle is below the horizon, unless the observer is sufficiently far above the earth's surface to see it all, for example in an aeroplane (see above). Alternatively, an observer with the right vantage point may see the full circle in a fountain or waterfall spray.\n",
"In the world of ordinary experience we might call a rainbow a well-ordered phenomenon; it appears to us to be a coloured arch in the sky, though there is in fact no arch there. We are not suffering from hallucinations, though, for the appearance is grounded in the way the world is ordered – in the behaviour of light, dust motes, water particles, etc.\n"
] |
why do sites sometimes give an error, but if you refresh it a second after it works? | Here's an example.
Let's assume the Google server that I access is in California. I type something into a Google search bar, hit search, and it goes from here in New York State to the Google California Office in 13 milliseconds (0.013 seconds).
The server in California then has to look for what I put in, which takes a couple milliseconds, and then sends that data back to me once it finds it.
This is an entire search done in less than 3% of a single second, and is the timescale we need to remember.
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When a site gives an error, that means the site couldn't be accessed. Or that within the couple milliseconds the server couldn't find the part that had the site you wanted.
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If the error is because there's too many people accessing it, then over the next couple seconds 50 to 100 people will be processed. And once they are done, there's space for your search.
This is exactly like when you are looking for a parking lot at a mall on the weekends. Every spot is filled, so you have to wait until someone leaves their spot before you can park into a spot.
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If it's because the server can't find the literal part where the site is hosted, then it sometimes takes a couple tries for it to finally find what you are looking for. I mean, look at Reddit. There's hundreds of subreddits with hundreds of pages and posts. Finding a specific post the search function means looking through all those posts on all those subs until the desired post is found. Does that sound like an easy thing to do? No it does not, because it's not an easy thing to do. Even for a program designed to search, it's going to be difficult. | [
"Once an accessibility audit has been conducted, and accessibility errors have been identified, the errors will need to be remediated in order to ensure the site is compliant with accessibility errors. The traditional way of correcting an inaccessible site is to go back into the source code, reprogram the error, and then test to make sure the bug was fixed. If the website is not scheduled to be revised in the near future, that error (and others) would remain on the site for a lengthy period of time, possibly violating accessibility guidelines. Because this is a complicated process, many website owners choose to build accessibility into a new site design or re-launch, as it can be more efficient to develop the site to comply with accessibility guidelines, rather than to remediate errors later.\n",
"When showing errors to users, it's important to turn cryptic technical errors into messages that explain what happened and what actions the user can take, if any, to fix the problem. While performing this translation of technical errors into meaningful user messages, specific errors are often grouped into more generic errors, and this process can lead to user messages becoming so useless that the user doesn't know what went wrong or how to fix it. As far as the user is concerned, the error got swallowed.\n",
"Sometimes a mistake can cause a page to end up redirecting back to itself, possibly via other pages, leading to an infinite sequence of redirects. Browsers should stop redirecting after a certain number of hops and display an error message.\n",
"As a simple example, if an application contains a way of viewing some part of the database state, and a way of editing it, then users may edit that state but then not see it changing in the viewer. Alarmed that their edit \"didn't work\", they may try it again, potentially more than once. If the updates are not idempotent (e.g., they increment a value), this can lead to disaster. Even if they are idempotent, the spurious updates place a burden on the database system - and the situation in which replication delays become particularly noticeable is when the database system is at a high level of load anyway; this can become a vicious circle.\n",
"A major advantage of this technique is that when an error does occur it is detected immediately and directly, rather than later through its often obscure side-effects. Since an assertion failure usually reports the code location, one can often pin-point the error without further debugging.\n",
"The worst type of errors are silent data corruptions which are errors undetected by the disk firmware or the host operating system; some of these errors may be caused by hard disk drive malfunctions while others originate elsewhere in the connection between the drive and the host.\n",
"A 404 error is often returned when pages have been moved or deleted. In the first case, it is better to employ URL mapping or URL redirection by returning a 301 Moved Permanently response, which can be configured in most server configuration files, or through URL rewriting; in the second case, a 410 Gone should be returned. Because these two options require special server configuration, most websites do not make use of them.\n"
] |
Reading about the WWII pacific theather. Why the huge difference in losses? | A fast deteriorating supply situation for the Japanese and the industrial might and adaptibility of the US happend. What followed was what always follows when ideology, honor culture and courage clashes with superior firepower.
Quite simply, the IJN didn't surrender when almost any other force would have. They fought until they ran out of everything. Food, ammo, equipment, reinforcements. Usually, being cut of and running out of things it what makes a normal army surrender. The IJN fought on, sometimes even resorting to "banzai tactics" (in essence, a suicide charge) rather than surrender. | [
"The Battle of Midway, in June 1942, brought Nagumo's near-perfect record to an end. The First Air Fleet lost four carriers during the turning point of the Pacific War, and the massive losses of carrier aircraft maintenance personnel would prove detrimental to the performance of the IJN in later engagements. The loss of the four carriers, their aircraft, and their maintenance crews, plus the loss of 120 experienced pilots, resulted in Japan losing the strategic initiative in the Pacific.\n",
"After Midway and the exhausting attrition of the Solomon Islands campaign, Japan's capacity to replace its losses in materiel (particularly aircraft carriers) and men (especially well-trained pilots and maintenance crewmen) rapidly became insufficient to cope with mounting casualties, while the United States' massive industrial and training capabilities made losses far easier to replace. The Battle of Midway, along with the Guadalcanal campaign, is widely considered a turning point in the Pacific War.\n",
"American losses were heavy; 2,403 personnel were killed, 18 ships were damaged or sunk, and 188 aircraft were destroyed. In contrast, the Japanese lost 29 aircraft and five midget submarines. The Japanese judged the attack as a success, believing that they accomplished their primary tactical goal, which was the destruction of the battle line of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The Japanese operations to conquer Southeast Asia and establish to a defensive perimeter could proceed without interference, and the U.S. Navy was unable to launch a major trans-Pacific counteroffensive for two years. However, the two American carriers were at sea at the time of the attack and Pearl Harbor's oil storage, dry dock, submarine piers and maintenance facilities were left unscathed. Additionally, contrary to expectations to shatter American morale and force the U.S. government to seek compromise for peace with Japan, the enormous loss of life and property from the sneak attack led to a tidal wave of outrage by the American public.\n",
"By 1943, the Allies began to gain the upper hand in the Pacific Campaign's air campaigns. Several factors contributed to this shift. First, second-generation Allied fighters such as the Hellcat and the P-38, and later the Corsair, the P-47 and the P-51, began arriving in numbers. These fighters outperformed Japanese fighters in all respects except maneuverability. Other problems with Japan's fighter aircraft also became apparent as the war progressed, such as their lack of armor and light armament, which made them inadequate as bomber interceptors or ground-attack planes – roles Allied fighters excelled at. Most importantly, Japan's training program failed to provide enough well-trained pilots to replace losses. In contrast, the Allies improved both the quantity and quality of pilots graduating from their training programs.\n",
"U.S. figures compiled at the end of the war indicate that the F4U and FG flew 64,051 operational sorties for the U.S. Marines and U.S. Navy through the conflict (44% of total fighter sorties), with only 9,581 sorties (15%) flown from carrier decks. F4U and FG pilots claimed 2,140 air combat victories against 189 losses to enemy aircraft, for an overall kill ratio of over 11:1. While this gave the Corsair the lowest loss rate of any fighter of the Pacific War, this was due in part to operational circumstances; it primarily faced air-to-air combat in the Solomon Islands and Rabaul campaigns (as well as at Leyte and for kamikaze interception), but as operations shifted north and its mission shifted to ground attack the aircraft saw less exposure to enemy aircraft, while other fighter types were exposed to more air combat. Against the best Japanese opponents, the aircraft claimed a 12:1 kill ratio against Mitsubishi A6M and 6:1 against the Nakajima Ki-84, Kawanishi N1K-J, and Mitsubishi J2M combined during the last year of the war. The Corsair bore the brunt of U.S. fighter-bomber missions, delivering of bombs during the war (70% of total bombs dropped by U.S. fighters during the war).\n",
"Around 14,000 Japanese were lost, with well over half being killed, while British forces suffered only 95 killed and 322 wounded. The break-out attempt and the ensuing battle became the last significant land battle of the Western powers in the Second World War.\n",
"Total aircraft losses for the AAF from December 1941 to August 1945 were 65,164, with 43,581 lost overseas and 21,583 within the Continental United States. Combat losses of aircraft totaled 22,948 worldwide, with 18,418 lost in theaters fighting Germany and 4,530 lost in combat in the Pacific. The AAF credited its own forces with destroying a total of 40,259 aircraft of opposing nations by all means, 29,916 against Germany and its allies and 10,343 in the Pacific.\n"
] |
why is it called the "secret service" when it isn't secret at all? how did they get that name officially? | In 1865, the "Secret Service Division" of the US Treasury Department was formed as a federal police agency devoted to investigating and preventing money counterfeiting, which was a huge problem at the time. In it's early years it ended up doing all kinds of law-enforcement and intelligence/counter-intelligence duties. At the time, the only other federal law enforcement agencies that existed were the Post Office police and the US Marshals, both of whom have legally limited jurisdiction (US Marshals are responsible for carrying out the decisions of federal courts, such as serving arrest warrants). Later after the 1901 assassination of President McKinley, the SS would be officially tasked with protecting the President, other high officials, and foreign diplomats. Now it's two main jobs are security for the President and investigating financial crime, including but not limited to money counterfeiting. Since 2003 it's been moved from the Department of the Treasury over to the new Department of Homeland Security.
From what I've read, historians aren't exactly quite sure why it was called the Secret Service, but it might have had to do with the undercover and secretive nature of intelligence-gathering. But it was never intended to actually be a *secret* agency that the public isn't supposed to know about or anything like that. | [
"The U.S. Secret Service is charged with protecting the president and the first family. As part of their protection, presidents, first ladies, their children and other immediate family members, and other prominent persons and locations are assigned Secret Service codenames. The use of such names was originally for security purposes and dates to a time when sensitive electronic communications were not routinely encrypted; today, the names simply serve for purposes of brevity, clarity, and tradition.\n",
"A secret service is a government agency, intelligence agency, or the activities of a government agency, concerned with the gathering of intelligence data. The tasks and powers of a secret service can vary greatly from one country to another. For instance, a country may establish a secret service which has some policing powers (such as surveillance) but not others. The powers and duties of a government organization may be partly secret and partly not. The organization may be said to operate openly at home and secretly abroad, or vice versa. Secret police and intelligence agencies can usually be considered secret services.\n",
"The United States Secret Service was created by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War in 1865 to combat the high counterfeit rate of currency. At the time, one-third to one-half of all U.S currency in circulation was counterfeit. Today, the Secret Service continues its core mission by investigating violations of U.S. laws relating to currency, financial crimes, financial payment systems, computer crimes and electronic crimes. It utilizes investigative expertise, science and technology, and partnerships to detect, prevent and investigate attacks on the U.S. financial infrastructure.\n",
"The United States Secret Service uses code names for U.S. presidents, first ladies, and other prominent persons and locations. The use of such names was originally for security purposes and dates to a time when sensitive electronic communications were not routinely encrypted; today, the names simply serve for purposes of brevity, clarity, and tradition. The Secret Service does not choose these names, however. The White House Communications Agency assigns them. WHCA was originally created as the \"White House Signal Detachment\" under Franklin Roosevelt.\n",
"There are varying definitions as to what being a secret society constitutes. Most secret societies in general would have the following features of 1) claims to exclusivity, 2) their own special secrets and 3) the inclination to prioritize fellow members. Secret societies despite the naming \"secret\" are not in the sense organisations that are unknown to the public, but it is more of its members and many of the activities in which they carry out that tend to secretive rather than their existence.\n",
"A secret identity is a person's alter ego which is not known to the general populace, most often used in fiction. Brought into popular culture by the Scarlet Pimpernel in 1903, the concept is particularly prevalent in the American comic book genre, and is a more genre-specific version of the broader trope of the masquerade.\n",
"\"Top Secret\" is the highest level of classified information. Information is further compartmented so that specific access using a code word after \"top secret\" is a legal way to hide collective and important information. Such material would cause \"exceptionally grave damage\" to national security if made publicly available. Prior to 1942, the United Kingdom and other members of the British Empire used \"Most Secret\", but this was later changed to match the United States' category name of \"Top Secret\" in order to simplify Allied interoperability.\n"
] |
if horse racing tips had any merits, why wouldn't the bookies adjust their odds to match? | Betting on horse races is fairly straight forward. If more people bet on a particular horse because they think it has a good chance to win, odds will adjust. The horses with low odds stay that way because few people will bet on them. The bookies do adjust the odds, in horse racing and pretty much any sporting event. | [
"Betting exchanges compete with the traditional bookmaker. They are generally able to offer punters better odds because of their much lower overheads but also give opportunities for arbitrage, the practice of taking advantage of a price differential between two or more markets. However, traditionally, arbitrage has always been possible by backing all outcomes with bookmakers (dutching), as opposed to laying an outcome on an exchange. Exchanges, however, allow bookmakers to see the state of the market and set their odds accordingly.\n",
"Because of the huge number of betting interests involved, bettors will often try to increase their chances of winning by selecting multiple combinations. This can be costly — a bettor who wants to cover two horses in each race must bet on 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 combinations, or 64 combinations, times $2 for each for a total of $128. This method is called \"boxing horses,\" and is also used with other wagers such as a trifecta or superfecta.\n",
"The fact gamblers can lay outcomes on the exchanges has resulted in criticism from traditional bookmakers including the UK's \"Big Three\" - Gala Coral Group, Ladbrokes and William Hill. These firms argue that granting \"anonymous\" punters the ability to bet that an outcome will not happen is causing corruption in sports such as horse racing since it is much easier to ensure a horse will lose a race than to ensure that it will win.\n",
"Whenever any serious motivation for teams to manipulate results becomes apparent to the general public, there can be a corresponding effect on betting markets as honest gamblers speculate in good faith as to the chance such a fix might be attempted. Some bettors might choose to avoid wagering on such a fixture while others will be motivated to wager on it, or alter the bet they would otherwise place. Such actions will invariably affect odds and point spreads even if there is no contact whatsoever between teams and the relevant gambling interests. The rise of betting exchanges has allowed such speculation to play out in real time.\n",
"Gambling odds don't reflect the bookies' belief in a likely winner, so much as the other bettors' belief, because the bettors are actually betting against one another. The odds are set based on how many people have bet on a possible winner, so that even if the high odds players always win, the bookies will always make their percentages anyway.\n",
"Sportsbooks use systems in their analysis to set more accurate odds. Therefore, the novice gambler may believe that using a system will always work, but it is the general consensus that at some point the oddsmakers will have adjusted for the system to make it no longer profitable. Very short-lived systems are called trends. Any single event that estimates a selection to have a higher likelihood of winning is called an angle as they are meant to be used in conjunction with other angles and trends to produce systems.\n",
"In addition to traditional betting with a bookmaker, punters (bettors) are able to both back and lay money on an online betting exchange. Punters who lay the odds are in effect acting as a bookmaker. The odds of a horse are set by the market conditions of the betting exchange which is dictated to by the activity of the members.\n"
] |
what is that carbon fiber pattern? why is it so appealing? | Carbon fibers have extreme tensile strength to weight ratio. This is good in that a light weight component can support a larger load. However, its strength is highly directional i.e. it is strong only in one direction. So the fibers are woven into a matrix like the pattern you see commonly. The pattern also varies by the purpose it is designed for. Then a resin is added to solidify the pattern. This prevents sliding among the fibers and gains considerable strength because of that.
Think of it as a cotton fabric with glue smeared on it. When the glue dries, the fabric will be less flexible (more rigid) like thin sheet metal.
EDIT: It also looks super cool too!! [And check out the cool highlights that can be added](_URL_0_)!! | [
"Carbon fiber is of interest due to its widespread use in composite materials. Provided there are closed loops of carbon within the composite structure, eddy currents can be induced in the material. Unidirectional carbon fiber composites can have poor susceptibility when fiber to fiber contact is limited.\n",
"The high strength of carbon fiber can be attributed to these four main processes. Having high levels of crystalline regions allows the fibers to withstand high levels of stress. These crystalline regions are formed via the melt spinning process; the crystals are stiff areas that do not deform when an external stress is applied. Orienting and aligning these crystalline regions gives further strength to the fibers, specifically if the orientation is along the fiber axis. Carbonization and graphitization are the two processes responsible for this alignment of the crystalline regions. Pitch based carbon fiber is lower in strength than fiberglass; however, it has a very high elastic modulus.\n",
"Carbon fibers or carbon fibres (alternatively CF, graphite fiber or graphite fibre) are fibers about 5–10 micrometres in diameter and composed mostly of carbon atoms. Carbon fibers have several advantages including high stiffness, high tensile strength, low weight, high chemical resistance, high temperature tolerance and low thermal expansion. These properties have made carbon fiber very popular in aerospace, civil engineering, military, and motorsports, along with other competition sports. However, they are relatively expensive when compared with similar fibers, such as glass fibers or plastic fibers.\n",
"To produce a carbon fiber, the carbon atoms are bonded together in crystals that are more or less aligned parallel to the long axis of the fiber as the crystal alignment gives the fiber high strength-to-volume ratio (making it strong for its size). Several thousand carbon fibers are bundled together to form a tow, which may be used by itself or woven into a fabric.\n",
"Precursors for carbon fibers are polyacrylonitrile (PAN), rayon and pitch. Carbon fiber filament yarns are used in several processing techniques: the direct uses are for prepregging, filament winding, pultrusion, weaving, braiding, etc. Carbon fiber yarn is rated by the linear density (weight per unit length; i.e., 1 g/1000 m = 1 tex) or by number of filaments per yarn count, in thousands. For example, 200 tex for 3,000 filaments of carbon fiber is three times as strong as 1,000 carbon filament yarn, but is also three times as heavy. This thread can then be used to weave a carbon fiber filament fabric or cloth. The appearance of this fabric generally depends on the linear density of the yarn and the weave chosen. Some commonly used types of weave are twill, satin and plain. Carbon filament yarns can also be knitted or braided.\n",
"Carbon fiber is made by pyrolysis of extruded and stretched filaments of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and other organic substances. The crystallographic structure and mechanical properties of the fiber depend on the type of starting material, and on the subsequent processing. Carbon fibers made from PAN have structure resembling narrow filaments of graphite, but thermal processing may re-order the structure into a continuous rolled sheet. The result is fibers with higher specific tensile strength than steel.\n",
"Pitch-based carbon fibers have various end uses due to their high strength. These fibers are used within the aerospace industry due to their high modulus and higher price. These fibers could be used within the automotive and sports industries, but the cheaper PAN based carbon fibers provide a high enough strength for these applications.\n"
] |
- water towers | Water towers make it so that, instead of pumping water *all* the time, you just have to pump water to the top of the tower. This means you can still get water when the power goes out, and that's very important in areas where the power is likely to go out. | [
"A water tower is an elevated structure supporting a water tank constructed at a height sufficient to pressurize a water supply system for the distribution of potable water, and to provide emergency storage for fire protection. In some places, the term standpipe is used interchangeably to refer to a water tower. Water towers often operate in conjunction with underground or surface service reservoirs, which store treated water close to where it will be used. Other types of water towers may only store raw (non-potable) water for fire protection or industrial purposes, and may not necessarily be connected to a public water supply.\n",
"The water tower is designed in the National Romantic style with inspiration from Medieval architecture. Built in a red brick, the cylindrical tower stands 32 metres high and has a diameter of 6 metres at its base. The uppermost part has timber framing. On three sides, four windows, arranged one over the other, provides natural light for the internal staircase.\n",
"The water tower is built in reinforced concrete. It has a round foot print and pilasters at close intervals. The lower part of the structure has round windows in a helix arrangement. It has a diameter of 20 m and is 34 m tall.\n",
"The water tower is a spherical water tank, which was built on a cone-shaped base of cast iron plates between 1907 and 1913. Today, the water tower is a relatively rare representative of the water towers built around 1900 to the \"Intze\" design.\n",
"The Water Tower is a water tower located in Coleshill, Buckinghamshire. It was built by German prisoners of war during the First World War to provide a gravity fed water system for the nearby town of Amersham. The tower is 30 metres (100ft) high with an internal diameter of 5.4 metres (18ft). Its location on the summit of a hill makes the tower something of a local landmark and it is easily visible from the M40 motorway. Central London, Canary Wharf and Guilford Cathedral can be seen from the top of the tower on a clear day. In the late 1990s the tower was turned into a residential dwelling. In 1999 it featured on the Channel 4 programme \"Grand Designs\".\n",
"Water towers are often regarded as monuments of civil engineering. Some have been converted to serve modern purposes, as for example, the Wieża Ciśnień (Wrocław water tower) in Wrocław, Poland which is today a restaurant complex. Others have been converted to residential use.\n",
"The Mechelen-Zuid water tower is a , combined water and telecommunications tower constructed in 1978. Since 1979, it has supplied the water to the city of Mechelen, Belgium, while also hosting television and telecommunications aerials. The concrete spire passes through a wide disc holding water fifty metres above the ground. Higher up, a smaller disc supports telecommunications equipment. Topped by a decorative stainless steel tube, it is claimed to be the highest water tower in the world.\n"
] |
"Blacks" or "African-Americans"? | You might split the difference and go with Black Americans. No one is likely to get mad about that sort of thing in an undergrad paper so long as you're making a good faith effort. Also the general trend is to [capitalize the B in Black Americans](_URL_0_) these days, though that is a hot topic. | [
"African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans or Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group of Americans with total or partial ancestry from any of the black racial groups of Africa. The term typically refers to descendants of enslaved black people who are from the United States.\n",
"Black and African Americans are citizens and residents of the United States with origins in Sub-Saharan Africa. According to the Office of Management and Budget, the grouping includes individuals who self-identify as African American, as well as persons who emigrated from nations in the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa. The grouping is thus based on geography, and may contradict or misrepresent an individual's self-identification since not all immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa are \"Black\". Among these racial outliers are persons from Cape Verde, Madagascar, various Arab states and Hamito-Semitic populations in East Africa and the Sahel, and the Afrikaners of Southern Africa.\n",
"Black and African Americans are citizens and residents of the United States with origins in Sub-Saharan Africa. According to the Office of Management and Budget, the grouping includes individuals who self-identify as African-American, as well as persons who emigrated from nations in the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa who may alternatively identify as Black or some other written-in race versus African-American given they were not part of the historic US slave system. In this case, grouping is thus based on the geography of the individual, and may contradict or misrepresent their self-identification, for instance not all immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa are \"Black\". Among these racial outliers are persons from Cape Verde, Madagascar, various Hamito-Semitic populations in East Africa and the Sahel, and the Afrikaners of Southern Africa including such notable figures as the inventor Elon Musk and actress Charlize Theron.\n",
"This is a list of African Americans, also known as Black Americans or Afro-Americans. African Americans are an Ethnic group and citizens of the United States who have full or partial ancestry of any black racial groups of Africa; Black and African Americans form the third largest racial and ethnic group in the United States behind White Americans and Hispanic and Latino Americans. African Americans are descendants of enslaved black people who are from the United States. To be included in this list, the person must have a Wikipedia article and/or references showing the person is African-American.\n",
"African Americans (also known as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group in the United States. The first achievements by African Americans in various fields historically marked footholds, often leading to more widespread cultural change. The shorthand phrase for this is \"breaking the color barrier\".\n",
"Most African Americans are descended from Africans who were brought directly from Africa to America and became slaves. The future slaves were originally captured in African wars or raids and transported in the Atlantic slave trade. African Americans are descended from various ethnic groups, mostly from ethnic groups that lived in Western and Central Africa, including the Sahel. A smaller number of African Americans are descended from ethnic groups that lived in Eastern and Southeastern Africa. The major ethnic groups that the enslaved Africans belonged to included the Hausa, Bakongo, Igbo, Mandé, Wolof, Akan, Fon, Yoruba, and Makua, among many others. Although these different groups varied in customs, religious theology and language, what they had in common was a way of life which was different from that of the Europeans. Originally, a majority of the future slaves came from these villages and societies, however, once they were sent to the Americas and enslaved, these different peoples had European standards and beliefs forced upon them, causing them to do away with tribal differences and forge a new history and culture that was a creolization of their common past, present, and European culture . Slaves who belonged to specific African ethnic groups were more sought after and became more dominant in numbers than slaves who belonged to other African ethnic groups in certain regions of what later became the United States.\n",
"African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans or Afro-Americans, and formerly as American Negroes) are citizens or residents of the United States who have origins in any of the black populations of Africa. According to the 2009 American Community Survey, there were 38,093,725 Black and African Americans in the United States, representing 12.4% of the population. In addition, there were 37,144,530 non-Hispanic blacks, which comprised 12.1% of the population. This number increased to 42 million according to the 2010 United States Census, when including Multiracial African Americans, making up 14% of the total U.S. population. Black and African Americans make up the second largest group in the United States, but the third largest group after White Americans and Hispanic or Latino Americans (of any race). The majority of the population (55%) lives in the South; compared to the 2000 Census, there has also been a decrease of African Americans in the Northeast and Midwest.\n"
] |
does massage really work to get rid of the 'knots'? what are the knots and why do you sometimes feel worse after a deep tissue massage? | Actual scientific explanations of knots:
_URL_0_
_URL_1_
_URL_3_
and massage:
_URL_2_
**ELIF version-** "Knots" are caused by a damaging muscle/connective tissue combined with swelling/sensitivity from the following immune response. From the papers above, massage often doesn't work in controlled trials, massage hasn't been conclusively shown to increase blood flow/removal of toxins/introduction of __ by a significant amount, soreness has nothing to do with lactic aid (and lactic acid is not even removed faster via massage vs cool-down stretching, and lactic acid injections actually help recover from fatigue faster), and massage doesn't help muscle flexibility/alignment/etc more than stretching.
Massage *has* been shown to decrease stress/stress hormone levels, help with relaxation, and a lot of other "it's all in your head, but what's in your head actually really really matters" factors.
You sometimes feel worse after a deep tissue massage because the mechanical stress damages other cells and pain is stressful.
Source: biomedical engineer, microbiologist/geneticist, neuroengineer, and apparently someone willing/able to spend two+ hours browsing google scholar for the hell of it. | [
"BULLET::::- Friction massage is said to increase mobilization of adhesions between fascial layers, muscles, compartments and other soft tissues. They are thought to create an inflammatory response and instigate focus to injured areas. A 2012 systematic review found that no additional benefit was incurred from the inclusion of deep tissue friction massage in a therapeutic regimen, although the conclusions were limited by the small sample sizes in available randomized clinical trials.\n",
"It has been suggested that massage therapy for TMD improves both the subjective and objective health status. \"Friction massage\" uses surface pressure to causes temporary ischemia and subsequent hyperemia in the muscles, and this is hypothesized to inactivate trigger points and disrupt small fibrous adhesions within the muscle that have formed following surgery or muscular shortening due to restricted movement.\n",
"All types of massage, including Thai massage, can help people relax, temporarily relieve muscle and / or joint pain, and temporarily boost a person's mood. However, many practitioners' claims go far beyond those effects well demonstrated by clinical study. Most clinicians dispute its efficacy.\n",
"Peer-reviewed medical research has shown that the benefits of massage include pain relief, reduced trait anxiety and depression, and temporarily reduced blood pressure, heart rate, and state of anxiety. Additional testing has shown an immediate increase and expedited recovery periods for muscle performance. Theories behind what massage might do include enhanced skeletal muscle regrowth and remodeling, blocking nociception (gate control theory), activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which may stimulate the release of endorphins and serotonin, preventing fibrosis or scar tissue, increasing the flow of lymph, and improving sleep.\n",
"Individually specified massages are essential for improving the muscular function and serve to improve all the muscular movements apparatus. Foot- and ear-reflex zone massage and special forms of traditional massage are used as supportive measures. Thus any tension and over acidification of the muscles, which often lead to pain and loss of mobility, can be treated.\n",
"Alternatively, the massages at certain massage parlors may have a \"happy ending\", meaning that the massage ends with the client receiving a sexual release. In addition to a \"happy ending\" service, given the restrictions imposed upon most striptease venues, some erotic massage venues now also offer a service where the client can masturbate him or herself while watching an artist perform a striptease.\n",
"Thai Massage is a popular massage therapy that is used for management of conditions such as musculoskeletal pain and fatigue. Thai Massage involves a number of stretching movements that improve body flexibility, joint movement and also improve blood circulation throughout the body. In one study scientists found that Thai Massage showed comparable efficacy as the painkiller ibuprofen in reduction of joint pain caused by osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee.\n"
] |
why is the australian dollar so weak against the british pound? | No, the Aussie dollar is pretty strong against the pound, currently sitting at 55 pence.
It is always a mistake to compare currencies absolute values, as these are a result of history. The difference in this case is because Australia switched to decimal currency back in 1966, and with currency being more valuable back then, they chose to make the new dollar equal to 10 shillings, or half the previous non-decimal currency, the Australian Pound. England changed to decimal currency in 1971, and retained the name 'pound' for their currency - which meant that they started with their decimal pound equal to 20 shillings.
With ups and downs since then the relative values of the Australian dollar and the English Pound hasn't really changed. | [
"The value of the Australian pound remained tied to the pound sterling. Inflation in Australia thus increased, less than in Britain, but more than in the United States. The case for a central bank was increased by the need for the government to cut spending after the war to reduce its debt. Commonwealth Bank Governor Denison Miller had been arguing for the issue of Australian currency to be switched from the treasury to the bank, as it had more staff and more monetary knowledge.\n",
"In 1949, when the United Kingdom devalued the pound sterling against the US dollar, Australian Prime Minister and Treasurer Ben Chifley followed suit so the Australian pound would not become over-valued in sterling zone countries with which Australia did most of its external trade at the time. As the pound sterling went from US$4.03 to US$2.80, the Australian pound went from US$3.224 to US$2.24.\n",
"In 1949, the United Kingdom devalued the pound sterling against the US dollar by 30%, and Australia followed suit so that the Australian pound would not become overvalued in sterling zone countries with which Australia did most of its external trade. As the pound sterling went from US$4.03 to US$2.80, the Australian pound went from US$3.224 to US$2.24. Relative to the pound sterling, the Australian pound remained the same at A£1 5s = £1 sterling.\n",
"It wasn't however until the Great Depression that the Australian banks created any substantial divergence from the traditional one-to-one parity between the London pound and the New Zealand pound. Australian and New Zealand raw exports to London were badly hit by the depression, and in an attempt to sustain demand, the Australian banks decided to sell the New Zealand pound at a 9% discount, taking the exchange rate to 110 New Zealand pounds to 100 pounds sterling by 1931. As this was new territory in the history of money, the situation became somewhat confused because a state of affairs now existed in which the exchange rate between Australia and New Zealand was at par and did not correspond to their respective exchange rates with London. \n",
"In 1910, the federal government introduced a national currency, the Australian pound, which it pegged to the pound sterling. In effect, Australia was on the gold standard through the British peg. In 1914, Britain removed the pound sterling from the gold standard, creating inflation pressures. Britain returned the pound sterling to the gold standard in 1925 at pre-1913 parity, effectively revaluing both currencies significantly and unleashing crushing deflationary pressures and falling export demand. This had the immediate effect of making British and Australian exports far less competitive in non-British markets, and affected Australia's terms of trade.\n",
"In 1929, as an emergency measure, Australia took the Australian pound off the gold standard, resulting in a devaluation relative to sterling. Starting in September 1930, the Australian banks began to slowly devalue the Australian pound, and a year later it had been devalued 30% against the Pound Sterling. This had the economic effect of increasing the cost of imported goods and increasing the cost of servicing government overseas debts, which were denominated in the overseas currency, typically in sterling.\n",
"In 1967, Australia effectively left the sterling area, when the pound sterling was devalued against the US dollar and the Australian dollar did not follow. It maintained its peg to the US dollar at the rate of A$1 = US$1.12.\n"
] |
Why does water that you carry feel heavier than water that you consumed? | When you drink it, the water is at the near center of your body, in your backpack it's not. There i more support at the center of your body so it feels lighter. Carrying it on your back also requires a posture that is harder to maintain and thus requires more energy and may exhaust your muscles more. | [
"The buoyancy force is equal to the weight of the body, in other words, the mass of the body is equal to the mass of the water displaced by the body. This adds an upward force to the body by the amount of surface area times the area displaced in order to create an equilibrium between the surface of the body and the surface of the water.\n",
"A molecule of heavy water has two deuterium atoms in place of the two protium atoms of ordinary \"light\" water. The weight of a heavy water molecule, however, is not substantially different from that of a normal water molecule, because about 89% of the molecular weight of water comes from the single oxygen atom rather than the two hydrogen atoms. The colloquial term 'heavy water' refers to a highly enriched water mixture that contains mostly deuterium oxide , but also some hydrogen-deuterium oxide (HDO) and a smaller amount of ordinary hydrogen oxide . For instance, the heavy water used in CANDU reactors is 99.75% enriched by hydrogen atom-fraction—meaning that 99.75% of the hydrogen atoms are of the heavy type. For comparison, ordinary water (the \"ordinary water\" used for a deuterium standard) contains only about 156 deuterium atoms per million hydrogen atoms, meaning that 0.0156% of the hydrogen atoms are of the heavy type.\n",
"Since the human body is only slightly less dense than water, water supports the weight of the body during swimming. As a result, swimming is “low-impact” compared to land activities such as running. The density and viscosity of water also create resistance for objects moving through the water. Swimming strokes use this resistance to create propulsion, but this same resistance also generates drag on the body.\n",
"An early experiment reported not the \"slightest difference\" in taste between ordinary and heavy water. However, rats given a choice between distilled normal water and heavy water were able to avoid the heavy water based on smell, and it may have a different taste. Some humans have reported that heavy water produces a \"burning sensation or sweet flavor\".\n",
"Any object immersed in water is subjected to a buoyant force that counters the force of gravity, appearing to make the object less heavy. If the overall density of the object exceeds the density of water, the object sinks. If the overall density is less than the density of water, the object rises until it floats on the surface.\n",
"where is the density of the fluid, is the acceleration due to gravity, and is the volume of fluid directly above the curved surface. In the case of a ship, for instance, its weight is balanced by pressure forces from the surrounding water, allowing it to float. If more cargo is loaded onto the ship, it would sink more into the water – displacing more water and thus receive a higher buoyant force to balance the increased weight.\n",
"The physical properties of water and heavy water differ in several respects. Heavy water is less dissociated than light water at given temperature, and the true concentration of D ions is less than ions would be for a light water sample at the same temperature. The same is true of OD vs. ions. For heavy water Kw DO (25.0 °C) = 1.35 × 10, and [D] must equal [OD] for neutral water. Thus pKw DO = p[OD] + p[D] = 7.44 + 7.44 = 14.87 (25.0 °C), and the p[D] of neutral heavy water at 25.0 °C is 7.44.\n"
] |
How certain are we of what year it is? Were there every any disagreements, like during the Dark Ages or afterwards, of the exact year? | Well, it's one thing to be off by a day or so, but by a year? That's a massive mistake for an entire population to make. But it wasn't until 525 AD that the AD numbering system began. And there are a couple discrepancies in figuring out when Jesus was born, to start counting. The gospels (for those who take them literally) describe two things that are mentioned elsewhere and let us date it. Matthew says that after Jesus was born, King Herod (the Great) is still alive, because he massacred children in an attempt to kill Jesus. (There's no evidence of any such massacre, though Herod was very bloody). Luke says that Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem only because of the Census of Quirinius. (That they would have to travel to Joseph's ancestral home of Bethlehem instead of staying in Nazareth makes no sense. The Romans would never have demanded that, and it's completely impractical.) ANYWAY... King Herod died in 4 BC, and the Census took place in 6/7 AD. So one, if not both of these is wrong. And if either of them is right, then our AD 1 is wrong. Basically, though the modern consensus is that Jesus was a real person, any attempt to figure out what year he was actually born in is a shot in the dark. So in that sense, we don't know if this really "should" be 2012 or not. But since 525, when they started the AD system, no. No, there's no doubt that it's been kept correctly. And there are enough documents and histories for the previous thousand years that when we label something "44 BC" we're confident that they didn't miss a year.
tl;dr- Year 1 AD is arbitrary, and frankly just a guess as to Jesus's birth year, but accepting that, yes, this is 2012. | [
"Year 229 (CCXXIX) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Severus and Cassius (or, less frequently, year 982 \"Ab urbe condita\"). The denomination 229 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.\n",
"This is the reason that some dates have an apparent discrepancy of one year. For example, a birth date of 10 March 1552 in Florentine reckoning translates to 10 March 1553 in present reckoning, setting aside the aforementioned discrepancy in the beginning of the day. Beginning the year on a date other than 1 January was common during the mediaeval period: the English year also began on 25 March, until 1752; the Venetian year began on 1 March, until 1522; and the French year on Easter day, until 1564 (see beginning of the year).\n",
"Year 144 BC was a year of the pre-Julian Roman calendar. At the time it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Galba and Cotta (or, less frequently, year 610 \"Ab urbe condita\"). The denomination 144 BC for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.\n",
"Year 229 BC was a year of the pre-Julian Roman calendar. At the time it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Albinus and Centumalus (or, less frequently, year 525 \"Ab urbe condita\"). The denomination 229 BC for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.\n",
"The year 696 BC was a year of the pre-Julian Roman calendar. In the Roman Empire, it was known as year 58 \"Ab urbe condita\" . The denomination 696 BC for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.\n",
"Year 208 BC was a year of the pre-Julian Roman calendar. At the time it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Marcellus and Crispinus (or, less frequently, year 546 \"Ab urbe condita\"). The denomination 208 BC for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.\n",
"The year 692 BC was a year of the pre-Julian Roman calendar. In the Roman Empire, it was known as year 62 \"Ab urbe condita\" . The denomination 692 BC for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.\n"
] |
meta plea to eli5 about the upcoming elections. | Also, can we have active moderation? ELI5 will have more and more questions of the "push-poll" variety as the election nears. It will become unusable if half of the posts are "ELI5 why Mitt Romney hates gay babies" and "ELI5 how President Obama can hold office if he's a secret Kenyan Nazi?" | [
"In 2003, the IOP launched the National Campaign for Political and Civic Engagement, working collaboratively with other schools and organizations across the country to engage young people. The IOP also conducts research and surveys into the political views of America's young voters. In addition, the Institute offers conferences for new members of Congress and new mayors, and, after each Presidential election since 1972, brings together top campaign officials to analyze the race in the \"Campaign for President\" series.\n",
"A day before the official launch, \"The Daily Mail\" featured the campaign in a lead article titled 'Give us a vote on our future in Europe: Cross-party campaign launched to secure historic referendum'. It claimed the campaign \"hopes to emulate Barack Obama by harnessing the power of the internet to mobilise support in every constituency\".\n",
"The internet voting on the 21 possible candidates was opened on August 22, 2011 at the program's web-site. A total of around 77,000 internet users voted in the campaign. The voting was closed on December 1, 2011, and the results were officially announced on the same day. The whole campaign was initiated back in May 2007 by Mykola Tomenko, a Ukrainian politician and the deputy of the Parliament of Ukraine of the fifth convocation.\n",
"With global attention on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, IFES gathered 550 participants from 90 countries for the 2016 U.S. Election Program and Seventh Global Elections Organization Conference (GEO-7) from November 6–10. The 2016 USEP and GEO-7 was the largest international gathering of election professionals of the year and the 13th hosted by IFES since 1992. This flagship event brings together election officials, parliamentarians and diplomats from around the world to observe and learn about the U.S. electoral system as well as discuss elections and voting from comparative international perspectives.\n",
"As a result of this contentious election, the National Commission on Federal Election Reform was formed by the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs and The Century Foundation. Its goal was to evaluate election reform, review policy proposals, and offer a bipartisan analysis to the United States Congress, the US Executive Branch, and the American people. The Commission was cochaired by former Presidents Jimmy Carter (honorary), Gerald Ford (honorary), Robert H. Michel and Lloyd N. Cutler, and included distinguished public leaders from across the political spectrum\n",
"The internet voting on the 21 possible candidates was opened on July 7, 2008, at the program's web-site. A total of around 77,000 internet users voted in the campaign. The voting was closed on August 26, 2008, and the results were officially announced on the same day. The whole campaign was initiated back in May 2007 by Mykola Tomenko a Ukrainian politician and the deputy of the Parliament of Ukraine of the fifth convocation.\n",
"The first method detailed in the final report was the usage of the Internet Research Agency, waging \"a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton\". The Internet Research Agency also sought to \"provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States\".\n"
] |
why does it take minutes to take money from my bank account but days to put it back? | What takes minutes is the authorization for somebody to take money from your account, not the time for the money to actually be removed from yours and into theirs. However, once a transaction has been authorized, your bank will show your account as having that much less money, so it can seem like it is final to you (and for most intents and purposes, it is).
For money incoming into your account, it's the same thing, but you see the other side of the story. Money is authorized to be removed from somebody else's account, though the money isn't actually moved to your account for a while.
Returns and other things often suffer another delay before this as the system that processes returns to accounts often isn't "run" until the end of the day, (or even once every few days/a week in many cases).
| [
"Once a current account has been opened with a new bank or building society, the Current Account Switch Service will transfer all the activity relating to the old account to the new one. That includes moving incoming and outgoing payments, and transferring the account balance, as well as closing the old account. An important feature of the service is that although the process happens over seven working days, the transfer of account happens on the final day. This means that customers continue to use the old bank account until the agreed switch day and from then on use the new bank account. This means that there is no loss of service for any period for the customer.\n",
"At the end of each business day, the bank automatically scans and determines what funds in the person's account is idle. It then transfers the funds to preselected interest-earning accounts. At the start of the following business day, the investment plus interest accrued is credited to the primary account. Due to the timing of these transactions, there is never a conflict of demand for the funds.\n",
"Funds sent from a Wallet balance, debit card, or linked bank account are generally available to the recipient immediately, and if the recipient has his or her own Wallet account and card, he or she can make an immediate withdrawal of those funds from an ATM. If the funds are drawn on the sender's Wallet balance, the balance will also reflect this change immediately. Any portion of funds drawn via a linked bank account will take two or three days to actually post to that account, though these funds will show as \"pending\" withdrawals on that account within 24 hours.\n",
"Before 2004, if someone deposited a check in an account with one bank, the banks would have to physically exchange the paper check to the bank on which the check is drawn before the money would be credited to the account in the deposit bank. Under Check 21, the deposit bank can simply send an image of the check to the drawing bank. This reduction of the transportation time from total processing life cycle of a check provides a longer time for the corporation to process the checks. Often, this additional processing time allows the corporation to deposit more items at an earlier cutoff time than they otherwise would. In addition, most banks offering Remote Deposit Capture have extended the cutoff times for deposit-8:00 pm, while the deadline for regular paper deposits is 4:00 pm. The practical effect of the law is that checks can still be deposited and cleared, even if a disaster makes it impossible for banks to exchange the physical paper checks with each other.\n",
"During the course of every day, each bank executes a large number of transactions, such as payroll, retail and business purchases, credit card payments, etc. Some involve cash (or its equivalent) coming into the bank and others of cash going out. Banks do not have a reliable way of predicting what or how much those transactions will be. At the end of each day banks must reconcile their positions. The bank that finds itself with a surplus of cash would miss out earning interest on the cash, even if it's for only one night. Other banks may find that they had more money going out than coming in, and the bank must borrow cash to cover the shortfall. To meet its liquidity obligations, the bank with the shortfall would borrow from a bank with a surplus in the interbank lending market. Depending on the bank's assessment of the type of shortfall and costs, the bank may take out an overnight loan, the interest rate of which is based on the cash rate, which is set by the Reserve Bank (RBA) every month (currently 1.25%); or else take out a \"short duration loan\", known as \"prime bank paper\", for a term of between one and six months and whose interest rate is called the \"bank bill swap rate\" (BBSW), which is set by the commercial banks.\n",
"\"Wired Magazine\" reported in November 2013 that customers were experiencing delays of weeks to months in withdrawing cash from their accounts. The article said that the company had \"effectively been frozen out of the U.S. banking system because of its regulatory problems\".\n",
"When cashier’s checks took weeks to clear the banks, they were often forged in fraud schemes. The recipient of the check would deposit it in their account and withdraw funds under next-day availability, assuming it was legitimate. The bank might not be informed the check was fraudulent until, perhaps, weeks after the customer had withdrawn funds made available by the fraudulent deposit, by which time the customer would be legally liable for the cash already withdrawn.\n"
] |
what is "doping" in cycling and why is it illegal? | Doping in cycling typically refers to the use of any kind of performance enhancing drug. The actual term doping, I believe, comes from the term "blood doping" which means to artificially increase your red blood cell count. A lot of cyclists that have been caught cheating recently have been using something called EPO which allows your body to produce red blood cells faster and to keep the levels of red blood cells higher than normal. This is important to cyclists because red blood cells transport oxygen to and from muscles so the more red blood cells the faster this can happen. The reason this is illegal in cycling is that it gives an artificail advantage to those that use it. | [
"\"The sport of road-race cycling (and it may not be the only one) is like an alcoholic, refusing to accept that it has a problem, as long as it drinks in secrecy. That fact was shamefully proved once again this week when the sport's governing body — the International Cycling Union (UCI) - forced the 1999 Tour to accept Richard Virenque... The baby-faced Virenque faces possible criminal charges of drug-taking and drug-trafficking. Despite his denials, French judicial investigators say they have documentary evidence that he has been doping himself for years. The Tour said last month that he was 'not welcome.' The UCI insisted on Tuesday that he must ride. The Tour gave way. So much for ethical purity.\"\n",
"Motor doping, or mechanical doping, in competitive cycling terminology, is a method of cheating by using a hidden motor to help propel a racing bicycle. The term is an analogy to chemical doping in sport, cheating by using performance-enhancing drugs. As a form of \"technological fraud\" it is banned by the , the international governing body of cycling.\n",
"The practice of doping in tennis involves the use of prohibited, performance-enhancing substances listed by the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). The practice is considered unsportsmanlike and unethical, with punishments for such offences ranging from official warnings to career bans, depending on the severity of the offence.\n",
"Some racing drivers have used doping in auto racing to enhance their performance. Deemed unsafe and illegal by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile. Appendix A to the International Sporting Code determines which substances are banned and mandates penalties.\n",
"The following is an incomplete list of doping cases and recurring accusations of doping in professional cycling, where doping means \"\"use of physiological substances or abnormal method to obtain an artificial increase of performance\"\". It is neither a 'list of shame' nor a list of illegality, as the first laws were not passed until 1965 and their implementation is an ongoing developing process. Thus the list contains doping incidents, those who have tested positive for illegal performance-enhancing drugs, prohibited recreational drugs or have been suspended by a sports governing body for failure to submit to mandatory drug testing. It also contains and clarifies cases where subsequent evidence and explanation has shown the parties to be innocent of illegal practice.\n",
"In competitive sports, doping is the use of banned athletic performance-enhancing drugs by athletic competitors. The term \"doping\" is widely used by organizations that regulate sporting competitions. The use of drugs to enhance performance is considered unethical, and therefore prohibited, by most international sports organizations, including the International Olympic Committee. Furthermore, athletes (or athletic programs) taking explicit measures to evade detection exacerbate the ethical violation with overt deception and cheating.\n",
"Following the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) report on doping in professional cycling in October 2012, Rabobank announced it would end its sponsorship of professional cycling at the end of 2012. Rabobank said that doping was so rampant that it was \"no longer convinced the international professional world of cycling can make this a clean and fair sport.\"\n"
] |
why have desktop app stores not gotten similar development as mobile app stores? | Developers don't like app stores. They take a 30% cut, restrict what your app can do, make you wait to get your app released, don't allow upgrade versions, etc. You don't get direct access to your customer, you can't get their email to try and sell them more crap.
On most mobile devices developers don't have any choice but to use the app store. Or if they can work around it (Android) it not worth the effort because everybody expects the apps to be in the app store.
On the desktop, users expect to get applications directly from the developer, so there is no reason to put up with the downsides of the app stores. | [
"Most companies have acknowledged the potential of Mobile Apps to increase the interaction between a company and its target customers. With the fast progress and growth of the smartphone market, high-quality Mobile app development is essential to obtain a strong position in a mobile app store.\n",
"The launch of Apple's App Store in 2008 radically changed the market. First of all, it widened consumers' opportunities to choose where to download apps; the application store on the device, operator's store or third party stores via the open internet, such as GetJar and Handango. The Apple users, however, can only use the Apple App Store, since Apple forbids the distribution of apps via any other distribution channel. Secondly, mobile developers can upload applications directly to the App Store without the typically lengthy negotiations with publishers and operators, which increased their revenue share and made mobile game development more profitable. Thirdly, the tight integration of the App Store with the device itself led many consumers to try out apps, and the games market received a considerable boost.\n",
"The introduction of Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch in July 2008 popularized manufacturer-hosted online distribution for third-party applications (software and computer programs) focused on a single platform. There are a huge variety of apps, including video games, music products and business tools. Up until that point, smartphone application distribution depended on third-party sources providing applications for multiple platforms, such as GetJar, Handango, Handmark, and PocketGear. Following the success of the App Store, other smartphone manufacturers launched application stores, such as Google's Android Market (later renamed to the Google Play Store) and RIM's BlackBerry App World and Android-related app stores like F-Droid. In February 2014, 93% of mobile developers were targeting smartphones first for mobile app development.\n",
"The introduction of Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch in July 2008 popularized manufacturer-hosted online distribution for third-party applications (software and computer programs) focused on a single platform. There are a huge variety of apps, including video games, music products and business tools. Up until that point, smartphone application distribution depended on third-party sources providing applications for multiple platforms, such as GetJar, Handango, Handmark, and PocketGear. Following the success of the App Store, other smartphone manufacturers launched application stores, such as Google's Android Market (later renamed to the Google Play Store) and RIM's BlackBerry App World and Android-related app stores like F-Droid. In February 2014, 93% of mobile developers were targeting smartphones first for mobile app development.\n",
"The Apple App Store, introduced in 2008, was the first mobile application store operated directly by the mobile platform holder. It significantly changed the consumer behaviour more favourable for downloading mobile content and quickly broadened the markets of mobile games.\n",
"Developers have multiple options for monetizing their applications, ranging from free, free with in-app purchases, and paid. However, App Store has been criticized for a lackluster development environment, prompting the company in June 2016 to announce a \"renewed focus and energy\" on the store. Major changes introduced in the following months include ads in search results, a new app subscription model, and the ability for developers to respond to customer reviews. Additionally, Apple began a process to remove old apps that do not function as intended or that don't follow current app guidelines, with app research firms noticing significant numbers of app removals from the store. Furthermore, with the release of iOS 11 in September 2017, App Store received a complete design overhaul, bringing a greater focus on editorial content and daily highlights, as well as a design similar in style to several of Apple's built-in iOS apps.\n",
"Some users prefer using alternative app stores to avoid using Google services as part of their philosophy. Alternative app stores may also be easier to navigate for users and allow them to find apps easier due to different algorithms or display of apps but users using either third-party app stores or Google Play cannot be certain that the apps they are installing have been checked for malware or computer viruses.\n"
] |
How does a single membrane in an earphone generate multiple frequency sounds at the same time instant? (For example, high hats with vocals) | When a complex sound or mixture of sounds is heard, there is really only one wave that hits your ear. The waves of sound in the air are able to interfere both destructively and constructively, and the function of the final wave is the sum of those of all the individual waves. The result is not a series of waves traveling to your ear in parallel but a single wave describing the pattern of vibrations in the air corresponding to peaks and troughs of various amplitudes and periods. A graphical representation of the wave can be seen on a computer or phone with a simple oscilloscope program or "sound wave" app. One way of thinking of it is getting the air that is already distorted by the wave produced by one tone and further distorting it in the same way flat air would be distorted by the second tone. Analogue media like record players and gramophones record this final wave by electronically or mechanically translating the motion of a membrane into inscriptions on a surface or in the case of tapes recorders, variations in magnetic charge along a length of tape. They can then translate this back into the motion of an oscillator and reproduce the same complex wave that they originally "heard" within their technical limitations.
All your earphones have to do is to replicate the vibration in the air that would have reached your ear if your ear were near the recording device. It simply vibrates according to the electrical signal in approximately the right way to produce this complex wave that contains all the notes of a chord, all the sounds of a street, etc. What is really amazing is that your brain can pick apart the wave into its constituent sounds and recognise them in isolation.
I really recommend using an oscilloscope or something similar to look at sine waves, saw waves and and square waves to see how waveform affects sound volume tone colour and pitch. Also, try multiple sounds at once. One octave of separation means the notes' frequencies are in the ratio of about 1:2. Compare tuned sounds to percussive sounds. It' really fun and helps you undesirable how what you hear is related to the vibrations in the air. | [
"If two sounds of two different frequencies are played at the same time, two separate sounds can often be heard rather than a combination tone. The ability to hear frequencies separately is known as \"frequency resolution\" or \"frequency selectivity\". When signals are perceived as a combination tone, they are said to reside in the same \"critical bandwidth\". This effect is thought to occur due to filtering within the cochlea, the hearing organ in the inner ear. A complex sound is split into different frequency components and these components cause a peak in the pattern of vibration at a specific place on the cilia inside the basilar membrane within the cochlea. These components are then coded independently on the auditory nerve which transmits sound information to the brain. This individual coding only occurs if the frequency components are different enough in frequency, otherwise they are in the same critical band and are coded at the same place and are perceived as one sound instead of two.\n",
"It was possible to modulate the two voices in a two-voice patch in two different ways. Ring modulation had the output of one of the oscillators affect the volume of the other oscillator, resulting in a controlled distortion. Noise modulation caused the second voice in a two-voice patch to sound like digital noise, roughly simulating the effect of an analog synthesizer's noise source.\n",
"BULLET::::- Polyphonic: A polyphonic ring tone can consist of several notes at a time. The first polyphonic ring tones used sequenced recording methods such as MIDI. Such recordings specify what synthetic instrument should play a note at a given time, and the actual instrument sound is dependent upon the playback device. Later, synthesized instruments could be included along with the composition data, which allowed for more varied sounds beyond the built-in sound bank of each phone.\n",
"The concept uses frequency shifting to overcome the narrow bandwidth of regular telephone systems. The input signal is sent on one telephone line as-is, or in some cases upshifted to provide extra low-frequency response, and sent on a second line shifted down by 3 kHz, which is normally the upper bandpass limit in telephony. Thus, an audio frequency of 5 kHz is sent at 2 kHz. A receiver on the other end then shifts the second line back up and mixes it with the first. This results in greatly improved audio, adding a full octave of range, and pushing the total bandpass to 6 kHz. The sound is then acceptable for voice, if not for music.\n",
"In most landline telephones, the transmitter and receiver (microphone and speaker) are located in the handset, although in a speakerphone these components may be located in the base or in a separate enclosure. Powered by the line, the microphone (A2) produces a modulated electric current which varies its frequency and amplitude in response to the sound waves arriving at its diaphragm. The resulting current is transmitted along the telephone line to the local exchange then on to the other phone (via the local exchange or via a larger network), where it passes through the coil of the receiver (A3). The varying current in the coil produces a corresponding movement of the receiver's diaphragm, reproducing the original sound waves present at the transmitter.\n",
"The Directional Hydrophone Command Activated Sonobuoy system (DICASS) both generate sound and listen for it. A typical modern active sonobuoy, such as the AN/SSQ 963D, generates multiple acoustic frequencies \n",
"Half-duplex speakerphones only allow sound to travel in one direction at a time, either: 1) into the speakerphone from the telephone line and out of its internal speaker to its user, or 2) from its user, into the microphone, and out through the telephone line. While the users of the speakerphone are speaking, the phone only transmits sound to the telephone line; its internal speaker is cut off and no sound arriving from the telephone line can be heard by the user. While the user of the speakerphone is quiet, the speakerphone only receives sound from the telephone line and its internal speaker broadcasts that sound to its user. There is a very definite, noticeable switching action each time the phone \"changes directions\" and a cough or other transient noise in the room may interrupt incoming sound from the far end of the telephone connection.\n"
] |
nowadays we are starting to use more paper products than plastic (straws , bags etc) will this his not create a problem in the future because paper is made out of trees ? | I think the idea is that we can farm trees, wood is a renewable resource. Also so long as this wood isn’t burnt and instead is turned into paper, it should in theory soak up CO2 from the atmosphere and leave us better off. | [
"A 2007 report into shopping bag alternatives noted that paper bags were less environmentally friendly than plastic bags due to a higher carbon footprint. Similarly, cotton bags were unsuitable due to the pesticides used and high volume of water needed to create them. The \"greenest\" option was using recycled plastic bags.\n",
"Plastic straws account only for a tiny portion (0.022%) of plastic waste emitted in the oceans each year. Despite that, numerous campaigns in the 2010s have led to companies considering a switch to paper straws and countries imposing bans on plastic straws. \n",
"BULLET::::- Reduce usage of single-use plastics such as plastic bags, straws, water bottles, utensils and coffee cups by replacing them with reusable products such as reusable bags, metal straws, reusable water bottles, bamboo toothbrushes and reusable coffee cups\n",
"The manufacture of paper usually requires inorganic chemicals and creates water effluents. Paper cups may consume more non-renewable resources than cups made of polystyrene foam (whose only significant effluent is pentane).\n",
"The environmental impact due to excessive use of paper has negative effects on trees and forest. Paper production utilizes nearly 40% of world's commercially cut timber. Millions of acres of forests are destroyed leading to deforestation disturbing the ecological balance. Many initiatives are being taken in India for recycling paper and reducing the hazards associated with it. Shree Aniruddha Upasana Foundation (Mumbai, India) is one such organization which undertakes used paper recycling projects. The foundation encourages using paper bags instead of plastic ones which again are a serious hazard to environment. They accept old newspapers, notebooks and so on and recycle the same into paper bags, teaching aids and toys for children.\n",
"In recent years there have been several attempts initiated by public activists to address this problem including the \"Toprak Petq Chi\" (Eng - I don't need a plastic bag) initiative targeting single-use plastic bags. \n",
"Plastic straw use is a controversial topic among four sides, the consumer, corporations, policy makers, and environmentalists. To further explore the views of all four of these groups we will introduce each opposition. \n"
] |
how can only one jet engine fly a twin engine airplane for hours after the other has shut down? | For large passenger jets, the aircraft is designed to be able to fly with one engine shut down (an “in-flight shutdown, or IFSD). That’s why they’re designed with at least two engines.
There’s a concept called ETOPS (Extended Twin Engine Operations, or, more humorously, “Engines Turn Or People Swim”) which means that if a two-engine aircraft has a single engine shut down, statistically-speaking it is a good bet that the other engine will NOT shut down by an independent cause within a certain number of minutes. How many minutes depends on things like engine reliability data, maintenance records, and maintenance crew experience. A twin-engine commercial aircraft is allowed to fly a certain route only if diversion airports are within the range of the aircraft, flying on a single engine, for less time than the ETOPS time limit at all points during the route.
Modern twin-engine aircraft are ETOPS certified for quite a large number of minutes, making long flight times after an engine failure (thankfully) possible.
Hope this helps. You can always do a search for ETOPS to get more info.
Edits: minor grammar | [
"Early American twinjet designs were limited by the FAA's 60-minute rule, whereby the flight path of twin-engine jetliners was restricted to within 60 minutes' flying time from a suitable airport, in case of engine failure. In 1964, this rule was lifted for trijet designs, as they had a greater safety margin.\n",
"The turbofans on twin engined airliners are further more powerful to cope with losing one engine during take-off, which reduces the aircraft's net thrust by half. Modern twin engined airliners normally climb very steeply immediately after take-off. If one engine is lost, the climb-out is much shallower, but sufficient to clear obstacles in the flightpath.\n",
"However, investigators stated that even if a mid-air engine failure occurred, the pilots still could have returned to the airport safely. If an aircraft had a mid air engine failure in one engine, the plane still could fly. All twin engine aircraft are designed to sustain a safe flight even if one of the engines has failed or is switched off due to any abnormality, provided the emergency handling procedures are correctly followed. Similarly, the Beechcraft 1900C also had the capability to sustain safe flight with single engine operation. This suggests that pilot error maybe the main cause of the accident.\n",
"Since the 1990s, airlines have increasingly turned from four-engine or three-engine airliners to twin-engine airliners to operate transatlantic and transpacific flight routes. On a nonstop flight from America to Asia or Europe, the long-range aircraft usually follows the great circle route. Hence, in case of an engine failure in a twinjet (like Boeing 777), it is never too far from an emergency landing field in Canada, Alaska, eastern Russia, Greenland, Iceland, or the British Isles. The Boeing 777 has also been approved by the Federal Aviation Administration for flights between North America and Hawaii, which is the world's longest regular airline route with no diversion airports along the way.\n",
"When twin-engine aircraft are flying across oceans, deserts, and the like, the route must be carefully planned so that the aircraft can always reach an airport, even if one engine fails. The applicable rules are known as ETOPS (ExTended range OPerationS). The general reliability of the particular type of aircraft and its engines and the maintenance quality of the airline are taken into account when specifying how long such an aircraft may fly with only one engine operating (typically 1–3 hours).\n",
"The third-stage engine shut down roughly 40 s earlier than planned because of a fire in the LH2 injector of the gas generator. Insufficient purging had permitted oxygen to freeze in the gas generator during flight.\n",
"In the 1980s, the increased reliability and available power of jet engines enabled twinjets to safely fly on one engine. This prompted the introduction of ETOPS ratings for twinjets, allowing them to circumvent the 60-Minute Rule and fly on transoceanic routes previously serviced by four-engined types. The advantage of redundancy brought by four engines was no longer necessary and they could no longer compete with the lower fuel consumption and maintenance costs of twinjets with higher-powered engines. All but the largest four-engined types, such as the Boeing 747, became uneconomical and this led to the retirement of the ageing 707 and DC-8 fleets.\n"
] |
It's generally understood that a good deal of dangerous animals have bright colors to act as a "warning" (poison dart frogs, coral snakes, etc.), but aren't most of their natural predators colorblind? Wouldn't this diminish the effectiveness of this defense mechanism? | Birds (which are common predators of insects and frogs) have some of the best vision and color detection of any animal. If they were colorblind we wouldn't have colorful birds (color helps them mate and show dominance), because the duller colored ones would be less likely to be eaten by predators, and thus color would have no evolutionary benefit.
Snake (another main predator of frogs) vision varies greatly, with most not being able to see very sharply, but they are able to track movement, and others use smell, heat, or vibration to track prey. Many brightly colored animals will also have a scent that's detectable, and serves as a warning.
EDIT: A letter | [
"Poisonous species often use bright colouring to warn potential predators of their toxicity. These warning colours tend to be red or yellow combined with black, with the fire salamander (\"Salamandra salamandra\") being an example. Once a predator has sampled one of these, it is likely to remember the colouration next time it encounters a similar animal. In some species, such as the fire-bellied toad (\"Bombina spp.\"), the warning colouration is on the belly and these animals adopt a defensive pose when attacked, exhibiting their bright colours to the predator. The frog \"Allobates zaparo\" is not poisonous, but mimics the appearance of other toxic species in its locality, a strategy that may deceive predators.\n",
"One class of honest signal is the aposematic warning signal, generally visual, given by poisonous or dangerous animals such as wasps, poison dart frogs, and pufferfish. Warning signals are honest indications of noxious prey, because conspicuousness evolves in tandem with noxiousness. Thus, the brighter and more conspicuous the organism, the more toxic it usually is. The most common and effective colours are red, yellow, black and white.\n",
"Conspicuousness and toxicity may be inversely related, as polymorphic poison dart frogs that are less conspicuous are more toxic than the brightest and most conspicuous species. Energetic costs of producing toxins and bright color pigments lead to potential trade-offs between toxicity and bright coloration, and prey with strong secondary defenses have less to gain from costly signaling. Therefore, prey populations that are more toxic are predicted to manifest less bright signals, opposing the classical view that increased conspicuousness always evolves with increased toxicity.\n",
"Warning coloration (aposematism) is effectively the \"opposite\" of camouflage, and a special case of advertising. Its function is to make the animal, for example a wasp or a coral snake, highly conspicuous to potential predators, so that it is noticed, remembered, and then avoided. As Peter Forbes observes, \"Human warning signs employ the same colours – red, yellow, black, and white – that nature uses to advertise dangerous creatures.\" Warning colors work by being associated by potential predators with something that makes the warning colored animal unpleasant or dangerous. This can be achieved in several ways, by being any combination of:\n",
"There are however, some actions of prey species are clearly directed to actual or potential predators. A good example is warning coloration: species such as wasps that are capable of harming potential predators are often brightly coloured, and this modifies the behaviour of the predator, who either instinctively or as the result of experience will avoid attacking such an animal. Some forms of mimicry fall in the same category: for example hoverflies are coloured in the same way as wasps, and although they are unable to sting, the strong avoidance of wasps by predators gives the hoverfly some protection. There are also behavioural changes that act in a similar way to warning colouration. For example, canines such as wolves and coyotes may adopt an aggressive posture, such as growling with their teeth bared, to indicate they will fight if necessary, and rattlesnakes use their well-known rattle to warn potential predators of their venomous bite. Sometimes, a behavioural change and warning colouration will be combined, as in certain species of amphibians which have most of their body coloured to blend with their surroundings, except for a brightly coloured belly. When confronted with a potential threat, they show their belly, indicating that they are poisonous in some way.\n",
"Many prey animals are aposematically coloured or patterned as a warning to predators that they are distasteful or able to defend themselves. Such distastefulness or toxicity is brought about by chemical defences, found in a wide range of prey, especially insects, but the skunk is a dramatic mammalian example.\n",
"Although many salamanders have cryptic colors so as to be unnoticeable, others signal their toxicity by their vivid coloring. Yellow, orange, and red are the colors generally used, often with black for greater contrast. Sometimes, the animal postures if attacked, revealing a flash of warning hue on its underside. The red eft, the brightly colored terrestrial juvenile form of the eastern newt (\"Notophthalmus viridescens\"), is highly poisonous. It is avoided by birds and snakes, and can survive for up to 30 minutes after being swallowed (later being regurgitated). The red salamander (\"Pseudotriton ruber\") is a palatable species with a similar coloring to the red eft. Predators that previously fed on it have been shown to avoid it after encountering red efts, an example of Batesian mimicry. Other species exhibit similar mimicry. In California, the palatable yellow-eyed salamander (\"Ensatina eschscholtzii\") closely resembles the toxic California newt (\"Taricha torosa\") and the rough-skinned newt (\"Taricha granulosa\"), whereas in other parts of its range, it is cryptically colored. A correlation exists between the toxicity of Californian salamander species and diurnal habits: relatively harmless species like the California slender salamander (\"Batrachoseps attenuatus\") are nocturnal and are eaten by snakes, while the California newt has many large poison glands in its skin, is diurnal, and is avoided by snakes.\n"
] |
the whole controversy around goldman sachs. | Read Griftopia. Sorry, it's not that simple. That's why it went on for so long. | [
"Goldman has been criticized in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, where some alleged that it misled its investors and profited from the collapse of the mortgage market. That time in Goldman's history brought investigations from the United States Congress, the United States Department of Justice, and a lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that resulted in Goldman paying a $550 million settlement. Goldman Sachs was \"excoriated by the press and the public\" despite the non-retail nature of its business that would normally have kept it out of the public eye. Visibility and antagonism came from the $12.9 billion Goldman received, more than any other firm, from AIG counterparty payments provided by the bailout of AIG, the $10 billion in TARP money it received from the government (though the firm paid this back to the government), and a record $11.4 billion set aside for employee bonuses in the first half of 2009. While all the investment banks were scolded by congressional investigations, Goldman Sachs was subject to \"a solo hearing in front of the Senate Permanent Subcommitee on Investigations\" and a quite critical report. In a widely publicized story in \"Rolling Stone\", Matt Taibbi characterized Goldman Sachs as a \"great vampire squid\" sucking money instead of blood, allegedly engineering \"every major market manipulation since the Great Depression ... from tech stocks to high gas prices\"\n",
"Goldman has been harshly criticized, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, where some alleged that it misled its investors and profited from the collapse of the mortgage market. That time — \"one of the darkest chapters\" in Goldman's history according to \"The New York Times\" — brought investigations from the United States Congress, the United States Department of Justice, and a lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that resulted in Goldman paying a $550 million settlement. Goldman Sachs was \"excoriated by the press and the public\" according to journalists McLean and Nocera—this despite the non-retail nature of its business that would normally have kept it out of the public eye. Visibility and antagonism came from the $12.9 billion Goldman received—more than any other firm—from AIG counterparty payments provided by the bailout of AIG, the $10 billion in TARP money it received from the government (though the firm paid this back to the government), and a record $11.4 billion set aside for employee bonuses in the first half of 2009. While all the investment banks were scolded by congressional investigations, Goldman Sachs was subject to \"a solo hearing in front of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations\" and a quite critical report. In a widely publicized story in \"Rolling Stone\", Matt Taibbi characterized Goldman Sachs as a \"great vampire squid\" sucking money instead of blood, allegedly engineering \"every major market manipulation since the Great Depression ... from tech stocks to high gas prices\"\n",
"Goldman Sachs controversies are the controversies surrounding the American multinational investment bank Goldman Sachs. The bank and its activities have generated substantial controversy and legal issues around the world and is the subject of speculation about its involvement in global finance and politics. In a widely publicized story in \"Rolling Stone\", Matt Taibbi characterized Goldman Sachs as a \"great vampire squid\" sucking money instead of blood, allegedly engineering \"every major market manipulation since the Great Depression.\"\n",
"Goldman Sachs's purchase of an 18% stake in state-owned Dong Energy—Denmark's largest electric utility—set off a \"political crisis\" in Denmark. The sale—approved in January 30, 2014—sparked protest in the form of the resignation of six cabinet ministers and the withdrawal of a party (Socialist People's Party) from Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt's leftist governing coalition. According to \"Bloomberg Businessweek\", \"the role of Goldman in the deal struck a nerve with the Danish public, which is still suffering from the aftereffects of the global financial crisis.\" Protesters in Copenhagen gathered around a banner \"with a drawing of a vampire squid—the description of Goldman used by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone in 2009\". Opponents expressed concern that Goldman would have some say in Dong's management, and that Goldman planned to manage its investment through \"subsidiaries in Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, and Delaware, which made Danes suspicious that the bank would shift earnings to tax havens.\" Goldman purchased the 18% stake in 2014 for 8 billion kroner and sold just over a 6% stake in 2017 for 6.5 billion kroner.\n",
"Goldman has been accused of an assortment of misdeeds, including a general decline in ethical standards, working with dictatorial regimes, cozy relationships with the US federal government via a \"revolving door\" of former employees, insider trading by some of its traders, and driving up prices of commodities through futures speculation. Goldman has denied wrongdoing in these cases.\n",
"Goldman has also been accused of an assortment of other misdeeds, including a general decline in ethical standards, working with dictatorial regimes, cozy relationships with the US federal government via a \"revolving door\" of former employees, insider trading by some of its traders, and driving up prices of commodities through futures speculation. Goldman has denied wrongdoing in these cases.\n",
"Goldman Sachs's purchase of an 18% stake in state-owned DONG Energy (now Ørsted A/S) - Denmark's largest electric utility - set off a \"political crisis\" in Denmark. The sale - approved in January 30, 2014 - sparked protest in the form of the resignation of six cabinet ministers and the withdrawal of a party (Socialist People's Party) from Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt's leftist governing coalition. According to \"Bloomberg Businessweek\", \"the role of Goldman in the deal struck a nerve with the Danish public, which is still suffering from the after-effects of the global financial crisis\". Protesters in Copenhagen gathered around a banner \"with a drawing of a vampire squid - the description of Goldman used by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone in 2009\". Opponents expressed concern that Goldman would have some say in DONG's management, and that Goldman planned to manage its investment through \"subsidiaries in Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, and Delaware, which made Danes suspicious that the bank would shift earnings to tax havens\". Goldman purchased the 18% stake in 2014 for 8 billion kroner and sold just over a 6% stake in 2017 for 6.5 billion kroner.\n"
] |
What causes a gun barrel to rise when I shoot? If I hang upside-down and shoot, will the barrel "rise" away from the anchor point (i.e. my feet) or away from the source of gravity (i.e. the Earth)? What would happen if both are absent (i.e. in space)? Or is something else going on? | The bullet doesn't leave along the line that passes the center of the gravity for the gun. Because of this, the device will experience a torque from the gas that pushes back in the firing chamber, and it will attempt to begin rotating, which is what you should see in space. | [
"The pivoting part that supports the cylinder is called the crane; it is the weak point of swing-out cylinder designs. Using the method often portrayed in movies and television of flipping the cylinder open and closed with a flick of the wrist can in fact cause the crane to bend over time, throwing the cylinder out of alignment with the barrel. Lack of alignment between chamber and barrel is a dangerous condition, as it can impede the bullet's transition from chamber to barrel. This gives rise to higher pressures in the chamber, bullet damage, and the potential for an explosion if the bullet becomes stuck.\n",
"The pivoting part that supports the cylinder is called the crane; it is the weak point of swing-out cylinder designs. Using the method often portrayed in movies and television of flipping the cylinder open and closed with a flick of the wrist can in fact cause the crane to bend over time, throwing the cylinder out of alignment with the barrel. Lack of alignment between chamber and barrel is a dangerous condition, as it can impede the bullet's transition from chamber to barrel. This gives rise to higher pressures in the chamber, bullet damage, and the potential for an explosion if the bullet becomes stuck.\n",
"If the cannon fires its ball with a low initial speed, the trajectory of the ball curves downward and hits the ground (A). As the firing speed is increased, the cannonball hits the ground farther (B) away from the cannon, because while the ball is still falling towards the ground, the ground is increasingly curving away from it (see first point, above). All these motions are actually \"orbits\" in a technical sense – they are describing a portion of an elliptical path around the center of gravity – but the orbits are interrupted by striking the Earth.\n",
"The same forces that cause the ejecta of a firearm (the projectile(s), propellant gas, wad, sabot, etc.) to move down the barrel also cause all or a portion of the firearm to move in the opposite direction. The result is required by the conservation of momentum such that the ejecta momentum and recoiling momentum are equal. These momenta are calculated by:\n",
"Similarly, when a cannon is fired, the projectile will shoot out of the barrel towards the target, and the barrel will recoil, in accordance with the principle of conservation of momentum. This does not mean that the projectile leaves the barrel at high velocity \"because\" the barrel recoils. While recoil of the barrel must occur, as described by Newton's third law, it is not a causal agent. \n",
"In order for a projectile to impact any distant target, the barrel must be inclined to a positive elevation angle relative to the target. This is due to the fact that the projectile will begin to respond to the effects of gravity the instant it is free from the mechanical constraints of the bore. The imaginary line down the center axis of the bore and out to infinity is called the line of departure and is the line on which the projectile leaves the barrel. Due to the effects of gravity a projectile can never impact a target higher than the line of departure. When a positively inclined projectile travels downrange, it arcs below the line of departure as it is being deflected off its initial path by gravity. Projectile/Bullet drop is defined as the vertical distance of the projectile below the line of departure from the bore. Even when the line of departure is tilted upward or downward, projectile drop is still defined as the distance between the bullet and the line of departure at any point along the trajectory. Projectile drop does not describe the actual trajectory of the projectile.\n",
"BULLET::::- \"When you see a launch from the outside, it's a rather glorious, magnificent thing. Inside, it's the absolute opposite of that. It's 137 decibels. It's shaking. Everything is shaking. You're along for the ride and you want to survive that. So, it's not a joy ride for me. It's what I need to go through to get into the incredible serenity and celestial dance of zero gravity.\"\n"
] |
what makes an expensive product so expensive? is it more related to the brand, or the materials? | It's really depends on the product. Some are expensive because of the brand, some are expensive because of msterials. But both and neither can apply.
The better question is what product are you refering to? | [
"Some luxury products have been claimed to be examples of Veblen goods, with a positive price elasticity of demand: for example, making a perfume more expensive can increase its perceived value as a luxury good to such an extent that sales can go up, rather than down.\n",
"This situation is derived by the desire to own unusual, expensive or unique goods. For consumers who want to use exclusive products, price \"is\" quality. These goods usually have a high economic value, but low practical value. The less of an item available, the higher its snob value. Examples of such items with general snob value are rare works of art, designer clothing, and sports cars. \n",
"Specialty goods are unique in nature; these are unusual and luxurious items available in the market. Specialty goods are mostly purchased by the upper classes of society as they are expensive in nature and difficult to afford for the middle and lower-classes. Companies advertise their goods targeting the upper class. These goods do not fall under the category of necessity; rather they are purchased on the basis personal preference or desire. Brand name, uniqueness, and special features of an item are major attributes which attract customers and make them buy such products.\n",
"Many markets for commonly used goods feature products which are perfectly substitutable yet are differently branded and marketed, a condition referred to as monopolistic competition. A good example may be the comparison between store brand and name brand versions of medications - the products may be \"identical\" but the packaging is differentiated by the vendors. Since the goods are essentially alike, the only genuine difference between them is the price - their vendors rely primarily on price and branding to effect sales. In those sectors consumer choice is usually driven by discriminate according to \"lowest price\", with higher-priced variants relying on a sense of exclusivity created by slicker branding to maintain competitiveness.\n",
"When original designers are confronted about the issue of price, they justify their expensiveness by means of the creative effort that goes into both the design and production process. This clearly includes the materials and methods used to produce top quality pieces to sell to consumers. Fashion is in all senses a distinct form of art. There are bad pieces and good pieces, but even a bad or plain painting would still be labeled as artwork. Designer pieces are expensive not only because of the brand name, but also the innovation and creativity of the product.\n",
"Buying status objects such as branded consumer goods is a never-ending cycle of depreciating assets. Even when you get a good deal on premium items, if you choose to replace them frequently, the older items hold no value and have become a sunk cost.\n",
"Several manufactured products attain the status of \"luxury goods\" due to their design, quality, durability or performance that are remarkably superior to the comparable substitutes. Thus, virtually every category of goods available on the market today includes a subset of similar products whose \"luxury\" is marked by better-quality components and materials, solid construction, stylish appearance, increased durability, better performance, advanced features, and so on. As such, these luxury goods may retain or improve the basic functionality for which all items of a given category are originally designed.\n"
] |
Why did Britain/USA not just colonialize Saudi Arabia? | You've pretty much answered your own question. Invading and controlling countries was not the preferred method ot at least was losing favour. That doesnt mean that some control was entirely off the books (vis a vis Persia and the Brits), but that it wasnt the ideal way of gettings one way. It was clear that a pro-western government could be dealt with via treaties, bribes and business arrangements rather than unpleasant invasions and occupation. The fact that Saudi Arabia has remained western aligned and at least partly benign for 80 years odd is evidence it was a reasonable plan. British expansionism had largely stopped at this time and was indeed receeding.
Additionally the US had never, as OlfactoriusRex suggest, ventured too far into interfering directly in these regions, partly as a matter of policy but also as a matter of practicality. US power projection capabilities at that range were fairly poor until post WW2. Some military bods would know more on that than I. The UK of course was the most expert nation at that sort of thing around this time.
The question is thus not so much why didnt they, but why would they? | [
"The background of the Protectorate of South Arabia is part of an effort of the British Empire to protect the East India Route, the sea route between the Mediterranean Sea and India, in and through the southern coasts of Arabia. Already before the opening of the Suez Canal, industrial Britain with its rapidly expanding economy, needed improved communication with British India.\n",
"During World War I, the British government established diplomatic relations with Ibn Saud. The British agent, Captain William Shakespear, was well received by the Bedouin. Similar diplomatic missions were established with any Arabian power who might have been able to unify and stabilize the region. The British entered into the Treaty of Darin in December 1915, which made the lands of the House of Saud a British protectorate and attempted to define the boundaries of the developing Saudi state. In exchange, Ibn Saud pledged to again make war against Ibn Rashid, who was an ally of the Ottomans.\n",
"Philby's view was that both British and Saud family's interests would be best served by uniting the Arabian peninsula under one government, stretching from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, with the Saudis supplanting the Hashemites as Islamic \"Keepers of the Holy Places\" while protecting shipping lanes along the Suez Canal–Aden–Mumbai (then Bombay) route.\n",
"While Saudi Arabia tends to be a sympathizer of Palestine after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Saudi Arabia has majority distanced themselves from the conflict and emphasizes in a more friendlier approach, sometimes even crossing with Israel. Nonetheless, at the reign of King Faisal, a liberal ruler in Saudi history and firmly pro-Palestinian, Saudi Arabia had set up a closer tie with Palestine and supportive of the Palestinian cause to a level after the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, he withdrew Saudi oil from market, causing the 1973 oil crisis. The new oil revenue also allowed Faisal to greatly increase the aid and subsidies begun following the 1967 Six-Day War to Egypt, Syria, and the Palestine Liberation Organization. However, he was assassinated two years later, and the relationship once warm under Faisal, became soured for the second time.\n",
"In the 1980s, Saudi Arabia spent $25 billion in support of Saddam Hussein in the Iran–Iraq War. However, Saudi Arabia condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and asked the US to intervene. King Fahd allowed American and coalition troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia. He invited the Kuwaiti government and many of its citizens to stay in Saudi Arabia, but expelled citizens of Yemen and Jordan because of their governments' support of Iraq. In 1991, Saudi Arabian forces were involved both in bombing raids on Iraq and in the land invasion that helped to liberate Kuwait.\n",
"A charter member of the Arab League, Saudi Arabia has supported Palestinian rights to sovereignty, and called for withdrawal from the West Bank and other territory occupied by Israel since 1967. In 1947, Saudi Arabia was one of several Middle Eastern states that voted against in the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. Saudi troops were sent to fight against Israel in the 1948 and 1973 wars. The 1981 Israel operation Operation Opera, a preemptive strike on nuclear reactor purchased by Iraq from France in 1976, allegedly took place with the cooperation of Saudi Arabia, as the flight path was over Saudi territory.. In recent years Saudi Arabia has changed its viewpoint concerning the validity of negotiating with Israel, which it previously refused. It calls for Israel's withdrawal from territory occupied in June 1967. In 2002 then-Crown Prince Abdullah extended a multilateral peace proposal based on withdrawal that would follow the borders of a two-state solution. At that time, Israel did not respond to the offer. In 2007 Saudi Arabia again officially supported a peaceful resolution of the Arab–Israeli conflict in which Israel was to concede to withdraw to the borders set in the two-state solutions, which generated more official negative reactions from Israeli authorities, citing the Oslo Accords and the Saudis' deviation from those accords. At this time, no demands were made of any other party other than of Israel.\n",
"According to at least one journalist (John R. Bradley), the ruling Saudi family was caught between depending for military defense on the United States, while also depending for domestic support on the Wahhabi religious establishment, which as a matter of religious doctrine \"ultimately seeks the West's destruction\", including that of its ruler's purported ally—the US. During the Iraq War, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal, criticized the U.S.-led invasion as a \"colonial adventure\" aimed only at gaining control of Iraq's natural resources. But at the same time, Bradley writes, the Saudi government secretly allowed the US military to \"essentially\" manage its air campaign and launch special operations against Iraq from inside Saudi borders, using \"at least three\" Saudi air bases.\n"
] |
Have there been Nobel prizes awarded for theories that were later disproven? If so, how does the foundation respond? | Yep, there has been the prize of [Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger](_URL_0_) in 1926.
> The 1926 prize went to Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger, "for his discovery of the Spiroptera carcinoma", a microbial parasite which Fibiger claimed was the cause of cancer. This "finding" was discredited by other scientists shortly thereafter.
| [
"The Nobel Foundation was founded as a private organisation on 29 June 1900 specifically to manage the finances and administration of the Nobel Prizes. It is based on Nobel's last will and testament. At the time Nobel's will led to much specticism and criticism and thus it was not until 26 April 1897 that his will was approved by the Storting. Soon thereafter they appointed the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that was to award the Peace Prize. Shortly after, the other prize-awarding organizations followed; Karolinska Institutet on 7 June, the Swedish Academy on 9 June and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on 11 June. The next thing the Nobel Foundation did was to try to agree on guidelines for how the Nobel Prize should be awarded. In 1900 the Nobel Foundation's newly created statutes were promulgated by King Oscar II.\n",
"The Nobel Foundation was founded as a private organization on 29 June 1900. Its function is to manage the finances and administration of the Nobel Prizes. In accordance with Nobel's will, the primary task of the Foundation is to manage the fortune Nobel left. Robert and Ludvig Nobel were involved in the oil business in Azerbaijan, and according to Swedish historian E. Bargengren, who accessed the Nobel family archives, it was this \"decision to allow withdrawal of Alfred's money from Baku that became the decisive factor that enabled the Nobel Prizes to be established\". Another important task of the Nobel Foundation is to market the prizes internationally and to oversee informal administration related to the prizes. The Foundation is not involved in the process of selecting the Nobel laureates. In many ways, the Nobel Foundation is similar to an investment company, in that it invests Nobel's money to create a solid funding base for the prizes and the administrative activities. The Nobel Foundation is exempt from all taxes in Sweden (since 1946) and from investment taxes in the United States (since 1953). Since the 1980s, the Foundation's investments have become more profitable and as of 31 December 2007, the assets controlled by the Nobel Foundation amounted to 3.628 billion Swedish \"kronor\" (c. US$560 million).\n",
"The Nobel Foundation () is a private institution founded on 29 June 1900 to manage the finances and administration of the Nobel Prizes. The Foundation is based on the last will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.\n",
"After Nobel's death, the Nobel Foundation was set up to manage the assets of the bequest. In 1900, the Nobel Foundation's newly created statutes were promulgated by Swedish King Oscar II. According to Nobel's will, the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, a medical school and research center, is responsible for the Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Today, the prize is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Medicine.\n",
"Emanuel Nobel, however, as head of the younger branch of the family, played a fundamental role in supporting the execution of his uncle's wishes, pleading even before King Oscar II, and an agreement with Robert Nobel's heirs was reached in 1898, thus allowing the creation of the Nobel Prizes.\n",
"According to his will and testament read in Stockholm on 30 December 1896, a foundation established by Alfred Nobel would reward those who serve humanity. The Nobel Prize was funded by Alfred Nobel's personal fortune. According to the official sources, Alfred Nobel bequeathed from the shares 94% of his fortune to the Nobel Foundation that now forms the economic base of the Nobel Prize.\n",
"The executors of his will were Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist who formed the Nobel Foundation to take care of Nobel's fortune and organize the prizes. Although Nobel's will established the prizes, his plan was incomplete and, because of various other hurdles, it took five years before the Nobel Foundation could be established and the first prizes could be awarded on 10 December 1901 to, among others, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. As of 31 December 2015, the assets controlled by the Nobel Foundation amounted to 4.065 billion Swedish \"kronor\" (approx. US$443 million as of 12 December 2016).\n"
] |
Which part of China did Han people originate in? | The earliest that "ethnic Chinese" can be placed with certainty is the 13th century BC, when the Shang were writing divination records in what was clearly an ancestral form of the Chinese language. Shang materials have been found over a large part of north China but concentrated around Yinxu in Henan, identified as their last royal capital. We can confidently identify the late Shang as "ethnic Chinese" because their language shows continuity with later forms of Chinese; their material culture shows continuity with Zhou and later cultures; and Zhou and later texts explicitly refer to them as Huaxia.
Earlier cultures in north China, like the Erligang (15th century BC) and Erlitou (19th-15th centuries BC) are ancestral to the Yinxu culture in the material sense, but they lacked writing and therefore we can't be certain whether they spoke Chinese, another language, or a mix of languages (in the better-documented Zhou period, for example, we know that South China and the northern steppe were each home to numerous distinct language families- the same could have been true of early North China). So while many Chinese archaeologists and historians identify these material cultures with the Xia and early Shang and therefore as ethnic Chinese, this is not widely accepted outside of China due to the lack of written evidence produced by the cultures themselves.
In short, we can be very confident that there was a Huaxia ethnicity at least by the 13th century BC, and at least around the middle reaches of the Yellow River, but because of the nature and availability of evidence the further back you go in time, or the further you get from Yinxu, the less certain things become.
- *The Formation of Chinese Civilization: An Archaeological Perspective* by K. C. Chang, Xu Pingfang et al | [
"During the 4th–12th centuries, Han Chinese people from North China's Yellow River delta migrated and settled in the South of China. This gave rise to peoples including the Cantonese themselves, Hakkas and Hoklos, whose ancestors migrated from Henan and Shandong, to areas of southeastern coastal China such as Chaozhou, Quanzhou and Zhangzhou and other parts of Guangdong during the Tang dynasty. There have been multiple migrations of Han people into Southeastern and Southern China throughout history.\n",
"The Han Chinese people are bound together with a common genetic stock and a shared history inhabiting an ancient ancestral territory for over four thousand years, deeply rooted with many different cultural traditions and customs. The Huaxia tribes in northern China experienced a continuous expansion into southern China over the past two millennia. Huaxia culture spread southward from its heartland in the Yellow River Basin, absorbing various non-Chinese ethnic groups that became sinicised over the centuries at various points in China's history. \n",
"The area of China south of the Nanling Mountains, known as the Lingnan (roughly modern Guangxi and Guangdong), was originally home to peoples known to the Chinese as the Hundred Yue (Baiyue). Large-scale Han Chinese migration to the area began after the Qin conquest of the region in 214 BC. Successive waves of immigration followed at times of upheaval in Northern and Central China, such as the collapse of the Han, Tang and Song dynasties. The most popular route was via the Xiang River, which the Qin had connected to the Li River by the Lingqu Canal, and then into the valley of the Xi Jiang (West River). A secondary route followed the Gan River and then the Bei Jiang (North River) into eastern Guangdong. Yue-speakers were later joined by Hakka-speakers following the North River route, and Min-speakers arriving by sea.\n",
"The prehistory of the Han Chinese is closely intertwined with both archaeology, biology, historical textual records and mythology. The ethnic stock to which the Han Chinese originally trace their ancestry from were confederations of late neolithic and early bronze-age agricultural tribes known as the Huaxia that lived along the Guanzhong and Yellow River basins in Northern China. In addition, numerous ethnic groups were assimilated and absorbed by the Han Chinese at various points in China's history. Like many modern ethnic groups, the ethnogenesis of Han Chinese was a long and lengthy process that involved the expansion of the Chinese dynasties and their assimilation of various non-Chinese ethnic groups that became sinicised over the centuries. \n",
"From the late Han Dynasty to the early Jin dynasty (265–420), large numbers of non-Han Chinese peoples living along China's northern periphery settled in northern China. Some of these migrants such as the Xiongnu and Xianbei had been pastoralist nomads from the northern steppes. Others such as the Di and Qiang were farmers and herders from the mountains of western Sichuan. As migrants, they lived among Han Chinese and were sinified to varying degrees. Many worked as farm laborers. Some attained official positions in the court and military. They also faced discrimination and retained clan and tribal affiliations.\n",
"The Han people originated in Mainland China. Each Han subgroup is generally associated with a particular region in China; the Cantonese originated in Liangguang, the Putian in Puxian, the Foochow in Fuzhou, the Hoklo in Southern Fujian, the Chaoshan/Teochew in eastern Guangdong, the Hakka in eastern/central Guangdong and western Fujian, and the Shanghainese in Shanghai.\n",
"It was during the Northern and Southern dynasties period that the earliest recorded migration of ethnic Han Chinese to southern China (below the Yangtze River) took place. This sinicisation helped to develop the region from its previous state of being inhabited by only small and isolated communities separated by vast uncolonized wilderness of non-Chinese ethnic groups. During this period, the south went from being nearly a frontier to being on a path to the thriving, urbanized, sinicized region that it became in later centuries. In his book \"Buddhism in Chinese History\", Arthur F. Wright points out this fact by stating:\n"
] |
Why does orbital velocity decrease with distance from the planet/sun, but velocity around a turntable increases with an increased radius. | It is because the two are not the same.
Your example of a coin on a turntable has constant angular velocity, regardless of distance from the center. In other words, no matter how far away it is, it makes one revolution in the same period of time. This is _forcibly_ imposed on the coin by the friction of the turntable.
If you look at the equation for [centripetal force](_URL_0_), you'll find that for constant angular velocity, centripetal force increases as a function of distance from the center. At some large distance, friction will not be able to apply enough centripetal force - and your coin will slip and be flung off.
In the case of gravity, you can find this is not the case. The inward force [does not increase as a function of distance](_URL_1_) - in fact, it _decreases_ as a square of distance - so it can never maintain the same angular velocity as you change the distance. | [
"However, as a planet grows more massive and its interaction with the disk becomes nonlinear, it may induce eccentric motion of the surrounding disk's gas, which in turn may excite the planet's orbital eccentricity. Low eccentricities are correlated with high multiplicity (number of planets in the system) based on the analysis of planets observed by the radial-velocity method.\n",
"• Note that, for a given angular velocity formula_27, the centripetal acceleration is directly proportional to radius formula_25. This is due to the dependence of velocity formula_24 on the radius formula_25. \n",
"Note that assuming all rotations are on the same direction and \"Ω\"\"omega;\", as time passes, the angular momentum of the planet decreases and hence that of the satellite orbit increases. Due to its relation with the planet-satellite distance, the latter increases, so the angular velocity of the satellite orbit decreases.\n",
"For a planet, angular momentum is distributed between the spin of the planet and its revolution in its orbit, and these are often exchanged by various mechanisms. The conservation of angular momentum in the Earth–Moon system results in the transfer of angular momentum from Earth to Moon, due to tidal torque the Moon exerts on the Earth. This in turn results in the slowing down of the rotation rate of Earth, at about 65.7 nanoseconds per day, and in gradual increase of the radius of Moon's orbit, at about 3.82 centimeters per year.\n",
"This means the eccentricity vector will gradually increase in the direction formula_63 orthogonal to the Sun direction. This is true for any orbit with a small eccentricity, the direction of the small eccentricity vector does not matter. As formula_75 is the orbital period this means that the average rate of this increase will be \n",
"BULLET::::9. Half of the inequality is attributed to eccentricity, the other to another cause which makes the planet slower at aphelion, less slow at perihelion, without disturbing the equality of motion or transposing it to some other place, whether the circle or the surface.\n",
"When the dislocation velocity is not too high (or the creep rate is not too high), the solute atom can follow the dislocations, and thus introduce \"drag\" on the dislocation motion. A high diffusivity decreases the drag, and greater misfit parameters lead to greater binding energies between the solute atom and the dislocation, resulting in an increase in drag. Lastly, increasing the solute concentration increases the drag effect. The velocity can thus be described as follows:\n"
] |
When in the past did year abbreviations switch over (ex, '90s to 1890s vs 1990s)? | I'm not sure what question you're asking.
The 1890s will always be the "Gay Nineties", as per your link (or [The Mauve Decade](_URL_0_)), just as the 1920s will always be the "Roaring Twenties", and the 1960s will always be the "Swinging Sixties".
However, if you refer to the "nineties/'90s" *now*, most people will assume you mean the 1990s - which don't yet have a "tag" like the 1890s.
What are you trying to learn?
| [
"The first era name to be assigned was , celebrating the political and organizational changes which were to flow from the great of 645. Although the regular practice of proclaiming successive era names was interrupted in the late seventh century, it was permanently re-adopted in 701 during the reign of Emperor Monmu (697–707). Since then, era names have been used continuously up through the present day.\n",
"Abbreviations in English were frequently used from its earliest days. Manuscripts of copies of the old English poem \"Beowulf\" used many abbreviations, for example \"7\" or \"&\" for \"and\", and \"y\" for \"since\", so that \"not much space is wasted\". The standardisation of English in the 15th through 17th centuries included such a growth in the use of abbreviations. At first, abbreviations were sometimes represented with various suspension signs, not only periods. For example, sequences like ‹er› were replaced with ‹ɔ›, as in ‹mastɔ› for \"master\" and ‹exacɔbate› for \"exacerbate\". While this may seem trivial, it was symptomatic of an attempt by people manually reproducing academic texts to reduce the copy time. An example from the Oxford University Register, 1503:\n",
"During the mid- to late 19th century, an acronym-disseminating trend spread through the American and European business communities: abbreviating corporation names —such as on the sides of railroad cars (e.g., \"Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad\" → \"RF&P\"); on the sides of barrels and crates; and on ticker tape and in the small-print newspaper stock listings that got their data from it (e.g. American Telephone and Telegraph Company → AT&T). Some well-known commercial examples dating from the 1890s through 1920s include \"Nabisco\" (\"National Biscuit Company\"), \"Esso\" (from \"S.O.\", from \"Standard Oil\"), and \"Sunoco\" (\"Sun Oil Company\").\n",
"By 1982, the year suffixes had reached Y and so from 1983 onwards the sequence was reversed again, so that the year letter — starting again at \"A\" — preceded the numbers then the letters of the registration. The available range was then codice_33 to codice_34, the numbers 1–20 being held back for the government's proposed, and later implemented, DVLA select registration sales scheme.\n",
"A standard abbreviation is also used for these epochs and stages, mostly in the form Xx where the first letter is the initial letter of the epoch and the second (lower-case) letter is the initial letter of the stage. These are listed alongside the stage names in the list below.\n",
"Certain abbreviations were used in writing, such as for \"meþ\" (modern \"med\", with). The letter combinations and were often written so that one of the letters stood above the other as a smaller letter, which led to the development of the modern letters , , and .\n",
"As early as October 1831, the United States Post Office recognized common abbreviations for states and territories. However, they only accepted these abbreviations because of their popularity, preferring that patrons spell names out in full to avoid confusion.\n"
] |
since space itself is stretching, does that mean that black holes could form more easily in the distant future? | It actually makes it harder for black holes to form because over time matter becomes more sparsely distributed. However, most black hole dynamics are on stellar and maybe galactic scales, which at this time aren't affected by the expansion of space. | [
"In the Star Trek universe, wormhole theory states that if a section in the fabric of spacetime joins together with another section of spacetime, a direct connection can be made between the two, allowing speedy travel between the two (normally unrelated) spacetime coordinates. Black holes are one such way of stretching the fabric of spacetime; so it's theoretically possible to create wormholes\n",
"In general relativity, a black hole is defined as a region of spacetime in which the gravitational field is so strong that no particle or radiation can escape. In the currently accepted models of stellar evolution, black holes are thought to arise when massive stars undergo gravitational collapse, and many galaxies are thought to contain supermassive black holes at their centers. Black holes are also important for theoretical reasons, as they present profound challenges for theorists attempting to understand the quantum aspects of gravity. String theory has proved to be an important tool for investigating the theoretical properties of black holes because it provides a framework in which theorists can study their thermodynamics.\n",
"General Relativity helped to predict the existence of black holes, which are regions of the spacetime exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing – not even light – can escape. The theory also has important implications for cosmology, the study of the structure of the Universe. One of the consequences of the theory is that not only is the universe finite, but should be contracting or expanding, something that was confirmed years later by the US astronomer Edwin Hubble.\n",
"Black hole – mathematically defined region of spacetime exhibiting such a strong gravitational pull that no particle or electromagnetic radiation can escape from inside it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole. The boundary of the region from which no escape is possible is called the event horizon. Although crossing the event horizon has enormous effect on the fate of the object crossing it, it appears to have no locally detectable features. In many ways a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light. Moreover, quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is on the order of billionths of a kelvin for black holes of stellar mass, making it essentially impossible to observe.\n",
"Using global geometry, some spacetimes can be shown to contain boundaries called horizons, which demarcate one region from the rest of spacetime. The best-known examples are black holes: if mass is compressed into a sufficiently compact region of space (as specified in the hoop conjecture, the relevant length scale is the Schwarzschild radius), no light from inside can escape to the outside. Since no object can overtake a light pulse, all interior matter is imprisoned as well. Passage from the exterior to the interior is still possible, showing that the boundary, the black hole's \"horizon\", is not a physical barrier.\n",
"Laplace also came close to propounding the concept of the black hole. He suggested that there could be massive stars whose gravity is so great that not even light could escape from their surface (see escape velocity).\n",
"BULLET::::- A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will deform spacetime to form a black hole. Around a black hole there is a mathematically defined surface called an event horizon that marks the point of no return. It is called \"black\" because it absorbs all the light that hits the horizon, reflecting nothing, just like a perfect black body in thermodynamics. Black holes of stellar mass are expected to form when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. After a black hole has formed it can continue to grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings. By absorbing other stars and merging with other black holes, supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses may form. There is general consensus that supermassive black holes exist in the centers of most galaxies. Although a black hole itself is black, infalling material forms an accretion disk, which is one of brightest types of object in the universe.\n"
] |
how do criminals get away when being interviewed in documentaries on national geographic and such? | The police cannot assume what is on "TV" is true. Neither should you. It could easily be staged or scripted. In order to become evidence, a man or woman would have to testify in court that everything on the video is true. That would make the film makers job very difficult in the future, so you can imagine they aren't running to court to testify. | [
"True crime documentaries have been a growing medium in the last several decades. One of the most influential documentaries in this process was \"The Thin Blue Line\", directed by Errol Morris. This documentary, among others, feature reenactments, although other documentary filmmakers choose not to use them since they don't show the truth. Other prominent documentaries include \", Making a Murderer\", \"The Jinx,\" and \"The Keepers.\"\n",
"When a documentary crew arrive one morning asking questions about the recent violent beachside murder of Amanda Blakely, teen beauty and drama pet, a captivating study into the minds and psyche of the sleepy town unfolds. The lines between the observant film crew, interview participants and police begin to blur, as family members, friends and strangers all start to demonstrate one common thread, everyone is hiding something.\n",
"The series features non-fiction narratives of people who have committed murder or attempted murder or have been accused of committing or attempting to commit murder. Often the target is the individual's spouse. The program is edited in a documentary style, using a central voice-over narration by actress Jody Flader, as well as interviews with people in possession of first-hand knowledge of the case, including law-enforcement officials, lawyers, journalists, friends and family members of both the victims and the accused, and at times the criminals or victims themselves.\n",
"Because most of these crimes take place in private or with some degree of secrecy, it is difficult to establish the true extent of the crime. The \"victims\" are not going to report it and arrest statistics are unreliable indicators of prevalence, often varying in line with local political pressure to \"do something\" about a local problem rather than reflecting the true incidence of criminal activity. In addition to the issue of police resources and commitment, many aspects of these activities are controlled by organized crime and are therefore more likely to remain hidden. These factors are used to argue for decriminalization. Low or falling arrest statistics are used to assert that the incidence of the relevant crimes is low or now under control. Alternatively, keeping some of these \"vices\" as crimes simply keeps organized crime in business.\n",
"In addition to the various people interviewed in this documentary, the film follows law enforcement agencies and their efforts to crack down on this illegal enterprise, such as Sgt. Dan Steele of the Denver vice squad. The film is meant not only to educate people on trafficking, but to help them understand and spot the scouting and manipulating techniques commonly used by traffickers.\n",
"Most criminal investigations and news events happen in a geographical location. Geosocial investigation tools provide the ability to source social media from multiple networks (such as Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube) without the use of hashtags or keyword searches. Some vendors provide subscription based services to source real-time and historical social media for events.\n",
"There is some introductory narration at the beginning describing the neighborhood and the time the documentary was filmed, but some unifying commentary is provided by an interview with Bronx Borough Commander Anthony Bouza, who ascribes the crime rate in the 44th Precinct to poverty, describes the hardening effects of urban violence on idealistic police officers, and likens himself to the commander of an occupying army, saying \"We are manufacturing criminals... we are manufacturing brutality\".\n"
] |
how do communication waves travel in space, for example between the rover or apollo and nasa. don't waves need matter to travel? | Not Electro-Magnetic waves. Those can also travel as particles. Back in the day we did, in fact, thought that there must be a medium in space to allow light waves to travel through, called **aether**, but all attempts to detect it failed, because it doesn't exist.
Electromagnetic signals can act as both particles and as waves in different conditions. Numerous tests show that it has properties of both. It's very confusing, but we just have to accept it. | [
"Mechanical and electromagnetic waves may often seem to travel through space; but, while they can carry energy, momentum, and information through matter or empty space, they may do that without transferring any mass. In mathematics and electronics waves are studied as signals. On the other hand, some waves do not appear to move at all, like standing waves (which are fundamental to music) and hydraulic jumps. Some, like the probability waves of quantum mechanics, may be completely static.\n",
"The idea came to Komerath by analogy with the technique of \"acoustic shaping\", where sound waves can accurately position small objects such as beads into larger solid objects within a weightless environment. In space, radio waves would take the place of sound waves. Although huge amounts of energy would be needed, solar power could be used and the approach would avoid the requirement to transport material from Earth.\n",
"Radio waves are extremely widely used to transmit information across distances in radio communication systems such as radio broadcasting, television, two way radios, mobile phones, communication satellites, and wireless networking. In a radio communication system, a radio frequency current is modulated with an information-bearing signal in a transmitter by varying either the amplitude, frequency or phase, and applied to an antenna. The radio waves carry the information across space to a receiver, where they are received by an antenna and the information extracted by demodulation in the receiver. Radio waves are also used for navigation in systems like Global Positioning System (GPS) and navigational beacons, and locating distant objects in radiolocation and radar. They are also used for remote control, and for industrial heating.\n",
"In radio communication systems, information is carried across space using radio waves. At the sending end, the information to be sent, in the form of a time-varying electrical signal, is applied to a radio transmitter. The information signal can be an audio signal representing sound from a microphone, a video signal representing moving images from a video camera, or a digital signal representing data from a computer. In the transmitter, an electronic oscillator generates an alternating current oscillating at a radio frequency, called the \"carrier wave\" because it serves to \"carry\" the information through the air. The information signal is used to modulate the carrier, altering some aspect of it, \"piggybacking\" the information on the carrier. The modulated carrier is amplified and applied to an antenna. The oscillating current pushes the electrons in the antenna back and forth, creating oscillating electric and magnetic fields, which radiate the energy away from the antenna as radio waves. The radio waves carry the information to the receiver location.\n",
"Primary waves (P-waves) are compressional waves that are longitudinal in nature. P-waves are pressure waves that travel faster than other waves through the earth to arrive at seismograph stations first, hence the name \"Primary\". These waves can travel through any type of material, including fluids, and can travel nearly 1.7 times faster than the S-waves. In air, they take the form of sound waves, hence they travel at the speed of sound. Typical speeds are 330 m/s in air, 1450 m/s in water and about 5000 m/s in granite.\n",
"In radio communication systems, information is carried across space using radio waves. At the sending end, the information to be sent is converted by some type of transducer to a time-varying electrical signal called the modulation signal. The modulation signal may be an audio signal representing sound from a microphone, a video signal representing moving images from a video camera, or a digital signal consisting of a sequence of bits representing binary data from a computer. The modulation signal is applied to a radio transmitter. In the transmitter, an electronic oscillator generates an alternating current oscillating at a radio frequency, called the \"carrier wave\" because it serves to \"carry\" the information through the air. The information signal is used to modulate the carrier, varying some aspect of the carrier wave, impressing the information on the carrier. Different radio systems use different modulation methods:\n",
"For the first time, electromagnetic radio waves (\"Hertzian waves\") were intentionally and unequivocally proven to have been transmitted through free space by a spark-gap device, and detected over a short distance.\n"
] |
why is usb the standard and not thunderbolt? | USB has been around for over 15 years. Thunderbolt's been around for only a couple. Will Thunderbolt become the standard? Maybe. It's hard to see something replacing USB, though. Maybe it will become the standard for displays (although HDMI is quickly becoming a standard on the PC side for that), or maybe storage devices (although USB 3 is pretty darn good, and eSATA already exists).
But mainly because USB has *just now* **almost** fully replaced everything else--definitely parallel and serial ports, and almost replaced PS/2 connectors entirely--that you probably won't see much movement away from USB in a while, just faster speeds of it. Already, you can't really find any new computer out there with USB 1.1 ports anymore (nor a 10 or 100 Mbps network adapter); they're all either USB 2.0, or mostly USB 2.0 with a few USB 3.0 ports as well (and 1 Gbps network adapters). It won't be long before most systems feature mostly USB 3.0, I'd imagine.
As for why Thunderbolt is faster, it's because it's newer, basically. They likely also use more expensive parts, meaning Thunderbolt costs more than USB does, but these parts can run faster. | [
"Thunderbolt is the brand name of a hardware interface developed by Intel (in collaboration with Apple) that allows the connection of external peripherals to a computer. Thunderbolt 1 and 2 use the same connector as Mini DisplayPort (MDP), whereas Thunderbolt 3 re-uses the USB-C connector from USB. It was initially developed and marketed under the name Light Peak, and first sold as part of a consumer product on 24 February 2011.\n",
"Although Thunderbolt has initially had poor hardware support outside of Apple devices and has been relegated to a niche gadget port, the adoption of the Thunderbolt 3 using USB-C connector standard into a wide array of hardware bodes well for market acceptance of the standard, besides that it will become part of USB4 standard.\n",
"With the introduction of Thunderbolt 3, Intel announced that otherwise-standard passive USB-C cables would be able to connect Thunderbolt devices at lower speeds than full active Thunderbolt cables, but still faster than USB 3.1. This allows for cheaper connections to new Thunderbolt devices, with inexpensive USB-C cables costing significantly less than active Thunderbolt cables.\n",
"Backwards compatibility with non-Thunderbolt-equipped computers was a problem, as most storage devices featured only two Thunderbolt ports, for daisy-chaining up to six devices from each one. In mid-2012, LaCie, Drobo, and other device makers started to swap out one of the two Thunderbolt ports for a USB 3.0 connection on some of their low-to-mid end products. Later models had the USB 3.0 added \"in addition\" to the two Thunderbolt ports, including those from LaCie on their \"2big\" range.\n",
"Thunderbolt 3 is a hardware interface developed by Intel and shares USB-C connectors with USB, and can require special \"active\" cables for maximum performance for cable lengths over 0.5 meters (1.5 feet). Compared to Thunderbolt 2, it doubles the bandwidth to 40 Gbit/s (5 GB/s), allowing up to 4-lane PCIe 3.0, 8-lane DisplayPort 1.2, and USB 3.1 10 Gbit/s.\n",
"BULLET::::- Thunderbolt is the successor to FireWire, a generic high-speed data link with well-defined audio/video uses. The latest Thunderbolt 3 uses USB-C as its connector, though not all USB-C is Thunderbolt-compatible.\n",
"Apple stated in February 2011 that the port was based on Mini DisplayPort, not USB. As the system was described, Intel's solution to the display connection problem became clear: Thunderbolt controllers multiplex data from existing DP systems with data from the PCIe port into a single cable. Older displays, using DP 1.1a or earlier, have to be located at the end of a Thunderbolt device chain, but native displays can be placed anywhere along the line. Thunderbolt devices can go anywhere on the chain. In that respect, Thunderbolt shares a relationship with the older ACCESS.bus system, which used the display connector to support a low-speed bus.\n"
] |
car engine terms | > What does a (x)liter V(x)engine means?(The x are the numbers, for example 3 liter V8 engine)
The first is the capacity in liters of the cylinders of the engine. More liters = more air/fuel mixture and more power.
The V8 is the layout and number cylinders. The V indicates an engine with half of it's cylinders on either side of the cam shaft in a V shape. Some (usually smaller) engines have all their pistons in a single line instead, these are referred to with an I instead of a V.
> What does horsepower means?
How much work the engine can do. More horsepower means it can do more work in a shorter amount of time. In vehicles this equates to moving the car faster.
> It's the same as break horse power?
Brake horsepower is a measurement of the horsepower ~~after~~ before power is lost to the drive train. Same unit of measurement, specific point of measurement.
> And what does CC means?
Another way of measuring fluid capacity. 1000cc = 1 liter. | [
"Engine: The word engine derives from \"ingenuity\" and originally referred to contrivances that may or may not be physical devices. See Merriam-Webster's definition of engine. A steam engine uses heat to boil water contained in a pressure vessel; the expanding steam drives a piston or a turbine. This principle can be seen in the aeolipile of Hero of Alexandria. This is called an external combustion engine.\n",
"The engine is a modified version of the road car's engine, including lightened and balanced internals, re-profiled cylinder heads and the engine management system tuned for race use. The engine would now produce , more than the standard road car.\n",
"It is a type of car powertrain layout. Although the term \"mid-engine\" can mean the engine is placed anywhere in the car such that the centre of gravity of the engine lies between the front and rear axles, it is usually used for sports cars and racing cars where the engine is behind the passenger compartment. The motive output is then sent down a shaft to a differential in the centre of the car, which in the case of an M4 layout, distributes power to both front and rear axles.\n",
"Although the term \"mid-engine\" can mean the engine is placed anywhere in the car such that the centre of gravity of the engine lies between the front and rear axles, it is usually used for sports cars and racing cars where the engine is behind the passenger compartment. The motive output is then sent down a shaft to a differential in the centre of the car, which in the case of an M4 layout, distributes power to both front and rear axles. \n",
"All cars have the engine located between the driver and the rear axle. The engines are a stressed member in most cars, meaning that the engine is part of the structural support framework, being bolted to the cockpit at the front end, and transmission and rear suspension at the back end.\n",
"Engine number may refer to an identification number marked on the engine of a vehicle or, in the case of locomotives, to the road number of the locomotive. The engine number is separate from the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN).\n",
"A U engine is a piston engine made up of two separate straight engines (complete with separate crankshafts) joined by gears or chains. It is similar to the H engine which couples two flat engines. The design is also sometimes described as a \"twin bank\" or \"double bank\" engine, although these terms are sometimes used also to describe V engines.\n"
] |
Can aquatic mammals get Decompression Sickness (the Bends)? | Human free-divers can do the same.
The problem is different gas pressures in your breathing mix - for a SCUBA diver or someone working in a pressurized caisson, they inhale air at higher-than-atmospheric pressure, which causes the concentration of dissolved nitrogen in their blood to increase. When they move back to normal pressure, the nitrogen in their blood will come back out of solution and form gas bubbles, causing the bends. Problems can be avoided by depressurizing slowly, so the amount of dissolved nitrogen can slowly return to normal without excessive bubble formation.
For a free-diver or a whale, they inhale air at atmospheric pressure, so they never get extra nitrogen forced into solution in their bloodstream. Thus they can ascend as fast as they want with no problems. | [
"Diving animals such as rats, minks and burrowing animals, are sensitive to low-oxygen atmospheres and (unlike humans) will avoid them, making purely hypoxic techniques possibly inhumane for them. For this reason, the use of inert gas (hypoxic) atmospheres (without CO) for euthanasia, is also species-specific.\n",
"Decompression sickness, also called caisson workers' disease and the bends, is the most well-known complication of scuba diving. It occurs as divers ascend, and often from ascending too fast or without doing decompression stops. Bubbles are large enough and numerous enough to cause physical injury. It is quite possible that all divers have microbubbles in their blood to some extent, but that most of the time these bubbles are so few and so small that they cause no harm. When DCS occurs, bubbles disrupt tissues in the joints, brain, spinal cord, lungs, and other organs. Symptoms vary enormously. DCS may be as subtle as unusual tiredness after a dive, or an aching elbow, or a mottled skin rash. Or, it may present dramatically, with unconsciousness, seizures, paralysis, shortness of breath, or death. Paraplegia is not uncommon.\n",
"With gas stunning animals are exposed to a mixture of breathing gases (argon and nitrogen for example) that produce unconsciousness or death through hypoxia or asphyxia. The process is not instantaneous.\n",
"Decompression sickness (DCS; also known as divers' disease, the bends, aerobullosis, or caisson disease) describes a condition arising from dissolved gases coming out of solution into bubbles inside the body on depressurisation. DCS most commonly refers to problems arising from underwater diving decompression (i.e., during ascent), but may be experienced in other depressurisation events such as emerging from a caisson, flying in an unpressurised aircraft at altitude, and extravehicular activity from spacecraft. DCS and arterial gas embolism are collectively referred to as decompression illness.\n",
"Although this creature does not have a dedicated respiratory system, \"Parborlasia corrugatus\" is able to obtain oxygen by absorbing it through its skin. An animal of its size would typically find it difficult to receive enough oxygen this way, but this worm has a low metabolic rate, and also enjoys the advantage of its environment, which is cold, oxygen-rich Antarctic waters. When \"Parborlasia corrugatus\" experiences lower levels of oxygen in the water, it flattens and elongates its body to aid in the uptake of oxygen by increasing its skin area. This manoeuvre also reduces the distance that the oxygen must travel to diffuse into its body.\n",
"Like other early Ichthyosaurs, there is no evidence of avascular necrosis in \"Omphalosaurus,\" indicating that they were likely not subjected to decompression sickness. Rothschild et al. attributed this to the lack of large aquatic predators in the early to middle Triassic, which meant that \"Omphalosaurus\" would not have needed to quickly dive to escape. Early Ichthyosaurs would have only or almost only had slow movement up and down the water column, or may have had physiological protection for quick water pressure changes.\n",
"Experiments carried out on ethoprophos have shown that the toxin affects animals in various manners. Short-term toxicity effects in rabbits and mice, exposed through different routes include inhibition of erythrocyte and brain cholinesterase. While experiments on dogs gave rise to cellular vacuolisation as well. Acute toxicity studies on rats, in turn have resulted in more effects being observed, namely narcotic, cholinergic and respiratory. The latter was shown to be expressed after a delay of 4 days and linked to an increase in lung weight. Studies carried out with extended exposure of ethoprophos in mice gave the same results as research on short-term exposure had, but in rats a fall in hemoglobin concentrations was also observed. On the other hand, a long-term exposure experiment conducted on dogs found that the toxin led to mild liver toxicity. \n"
] |
in a time when drunk driving is so universally frowned up on and everyone is cracking down on duis, why is it that in some cities a business cannot be issued a liquor license if they don't have enough parking? | It's often that they need a certain amount of spots in order to host any event, or they lack the required number of specialized spots (handicapped, expectant mothers, etc.) Or they lack the ability to have overnight parking for people who wish to drive there, drink, and then come back the next day and pick up their car. | [
"A study of about 39,000 alcohol-related traffic accidents in Kentucky found that residents of dry counties are more likely to be involved in such crashes, possibly because they have to drive farther from their homes to consume alcohol, thus increasing impaired driving exposure. The study concludes that county-level prohibition is not necessarily effective in improving highway safety.\n",
"A high amount of media coverage exists informing users of the dangers of driving drunk. Most alcohol users are now aware of these dangers and safe ride techniques like 'designated drivers' and free taxicab programmes are reducing the number of drunk-driving accidents. Many cities have free-ride-home programmes during holidays involving high alcohol abuse, and some bars and clubs will provide a visibly drunk patron with a free cab ride.\n",
"In May 2008, research published by Adams and Cotti in the \"Journal of Public Economics\" examined statistics of drunken-driving fatalities and accidents in areas where smoke-free laws have been implemented in bars and found that fatal drunken-driving accidents increased by about 13%, or about 2.5 such accidents per year for a typical county of 680,000. They speculate this could be caused by smokers driving farther away to jurisdictions without smoke-free laws or where enforcement is lax.\n",
"Drug impaired driving is today suspected by the European Road Safety Observatory of being the reason that drink driving crash rates no longer reduce in direct proportion to reducing or plateaued numbers of drunk drivers found on roads. It is believed that the remaining ones are carrying more risk than their blood alcohol levels should strictly impart - due to the frequent addition of other drugs. If the historic assumptions about formulae to setting alcohol limits at particular levels to reduce harm (by anticipated degrees) in the target demographic are defunct, the implications for impaired driving reduction policy are major.\n",
"Driving while consuming alcohol may be illegal within a jurisdiction. In some it is illegal for an open container of an alcoholic beverage to be in the passenger compartment of a motor vehicle or in some specific area of that compartment. There have been cases of drivers being convicted of a DUI when they were not observed driving after being proven in court they had been driving while under the influence.\n",
"Research suggests that misdemeanor drunk driving offenses, but not felony drunk driving offenses, are related to county-based closing times for on-premises licensed venues. Requirements for ignition interlock device's for first-time DWI offending introduced with Leandra's Law might explain why there was no relationship between alcohol availability and felony drunk driving offenses.\n",
"In response to problems with underage drinking and in the wake of a number of alcohol-related injuries and deaths, drinking in the parking lots was banned at the PNC Bank Arts Center as of August 17, 2007. This policy has been since changed to allow tailgating and alcohol consumption in the parking lots for specific events.\n"
] |
what is syndication exclusivity? | Syndication is when a show starts airing on other networks. Sometimes they make contracts promising to exclusively air on only specific networks. | [
"Syndication exclusivity (also known as syndex) is a federal law implemented by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States that is designed to protect a local television station's rights to syndicated television programs by granting exclusive broadcast rights to the station for that program in their local market, usually defined by a station's Nielsen Designated Market Area.\n",
"Many regard syndication of site content as a Web 2.0 feature. Syndication uses standardized protocols to permit end-users to make use of a site's data in another context (such as another Web site, a browser plugin, or a separate desktop application). Protocols permitting syndication include RSS (really simple syndication, also known as Web syndication), RDF (as in RSS 1.1), and Atom, all of which are XML-based formats. Observers have started to refer to these technologies as Web feeds. Specialized protocols such as FOAF and XFN (both for social networking) extend the functionality of sites and permit end-users to interact without centralized Web sites.\n",
"Just as syndication is a source of profit for TV producers and radio producers, it also functions to maximize profit for Internet content producers. As the Internet has increased in size it has become increasingly difficult for content producers to aggregate a sufficiently large audience to support the creation of high-quality content. Syndication enables content creators to amortize the cost of producing content by licensing it across multiple publishers or by maximizing distribution of advertising-supported content. A potential drawback for content creators, however, is that they can lose control over the presentation of their content when they syndicate it to other parties.\n",
"Syndication is the practice of selling rights to the presentation of television programs, especially to more than one customer such as a television station, a cable channel, or a programming service such as a national broadcasting system. The syndication of television programs is a fundamental financial component of television industries. Long a crucial factor in the economics of the U.S. industry, syndication is now a worldwide activity involving the sales of programming produced in many countries. While most of the series currently in syndication are either still in production or have only recently ended their runs, the most popular series can command syndication runs lasting decades beyond the end of their production (the most extreme example being \"I Love Lucy\", which remains in syndication as of 2012 despite having ended its run in 1957; other examples of series still popular in syndication after over a decade out of production include \"Seinfeld\", \"Cheers\", \"The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show\", \"M*A*S*H\", \"Happy Days\", \"Laverne & Shirley\", \"Three's Company\", \"The Wonder Years\", among many others). Off-network syndicated series also normally occupy the mid/late morning and late-afternoon time slots.\n",
"Web syndication is a form of syndication in which content is made available from one website to other sites. Most commonly, websites are made available to provide either summaries or full renditions of a website's recently added content. The term may also describe other kinds of content licensing for reuse.\n",
"Brokered programming (also known as time-buy and blocktime) is a form of broadcast content in which the show's producer pays a radio or television station for air time, rather than exchanging programming for pay or the opportunity to play spot commercials. A brokered program is typically not capable of garnering enough support from advertisements to pay for itself, and may be controversial, esoteric or an advertisement in itself. \n",
"Broadcasting syndication is the license to broadcast television programs and radio programs by multiple television stations and radio stations, without going through a broadcast network. It is common in the United States where broadcast programming is scheduled by television networks with local independent affiliates. Syndication is less of a practice in the rest of the world, as most countries have centralized networks or television stations without local affiliates; although less common, shows can be syndicated internationally. The three main types of syndication are \"first-run syndication\", which is programming that is broadcast for the first time as a syndicated show and is made specifically to sell directly into syndication; \"off-network syndication\", which is the licensing of a program that was originally run on network TV or in some cases, first-run syndication (colloquially called a \"rerun\"); and \"public broadcasting syndication\".\n"
] |
What are the chances that the Human race could evolve into two different species that couldn't reproduce with each other? | Some small population that had enough people to maintain itself would have to become isolated long enough from the rest of humanity that they would change enough to not be able to reproduce with us.
The chances are incredibly slim in our modern world, almost impossible. Given that even "isolated" tribes on islands in the pacific did not become new species it likely will never happen. Maybe if we visit other planets and some get stuck somewhere or we have a post-apocalyptic scenario here on earth. | [
"Population-dependent and reversible sex determination, found in animals such as the blue wrasse fish, have less potential for failure. In the blue wrasse, only one male is found in a given territory: larvae within the territory develop into females, and adult males will not enter the same territory. If a male dies, one of the females in his territory becomes male, replacing him. While this system ensures that there will always be a mating couple when two animals of the same species are present, it could potentially decrease genetic variance in a population, for example if the females remain in a single male's territory.\n",
"Barriers to reproduction between two diverging sexual populations are required for the populations to become new species. Gene flow may slow this process by spreading the new genetic variants also to the other populations. Depending on how far two species have diverged since their most recent common ancestor, it may still be possible for them to produce offspring, as with horses and donkeys mating to produce mules. Such hybrids are generally infertile. In this case, closely related species may regularly interbreed, but hybrids will be selected against and the species will remain distinct. However, viable hybrids are occasionally formed and these new species can either have properties intermediate between their parent species, or possess a totally new phenotype. The importance of hybridisation in producing new species of animals is unclear, although cases have been seen in many types of animals, with the gray tree frog being a particularly well-studied example.\n",
"There is no single genetic mechanism behind sex differences in different species and the existence of two sexes seems to have evolved multiple times independently in different evolutionary lineages. Patterns of sexual reproduction include\n",
"There are many intelligent extraterrestrial races as well. Curiously, a large number of them are humanoid, even human-like, in form (such as Kryptonians, who outwardly appear identical to Earth-born humans); some can even interbreed with Terrans. Some of these races have natural superpowers, but they are usually the same for all individuals of the same race, unlike Earth's metahumans. This was explained by the fact that in Earth's distant past Martians experimented on humanity, severely culling the metahuman potential; this means that a species that was meant to have a wide range of powers, like Tamaranians or Kryptonians, ended up \"just...human\". However, there are also plenty of nonhumanoid races.\n",
"Joan Roughgarden argues that some non-human animal species also have more than two genders, in that there might be multiple templates for behavior available to individual organisms with a given biological sex.\n",
"The maintenance of sexual reproduction in a highly competitive world is one of the major puzzles in biology given that asexual reproduction can reproduce much more quickly as 50% of offspring are not males, unable to produce offspring themselves. Many non-exclusive hypotheses have been proposed, including the positive impact of an additional form of selection, sexual selection, on the probability of persistence of a species.\n",
"Mating with unrelated or distantly related members of the same species is generally thought to provide the advantage of masking deleterious recessive mutations in progeny (and see Heterosis). Vertebrates have evolved numerous diverse mechanisms for avoiding close inbreeding and promoting outcrossing (and see Inbreeding avoidance).\n"
] |
What is a good (modern) book on the Battle of Passchendaele? | These may be of some help:
- Your first stop should be John Terraine's *The Road to Passchendaele: the Flanders Offensive of 1917* (1977); while not "modern" in the strictest sense, Terraine is very much reliable on these matters and is one of the fathers of the "learning curve" school to begin with. He doesn't put up with any Lions/Donkeys nonsense.
- Peter Barton and Jeremy Banning's *Passchendaele* (2007), put out by the IWM, is a remarkable piece of work. It's not so aggressively within the "learning curve" school as other works might be, but both Barton and Banning are serious-minded scholars and the quality of their work is enormous.
- Osprey's guide to the campaign (*Passchendaele and the Battles of Ypres 1914-18*, 1997) would be worth checking out just for being an Osprey, but Martin Marix Evans, its author, has supported something like the "learning curve" school elsewhere in terms of the Somme. I don't know if he takes the same line on Passchendaele, but it might be worth checking out. He has another book on this subject (*Passchendaele: The Hollow Victory*, 2005), but I cannot speak to its quality or contents either. The title does not inspire delight, for our purposes, but it could be worth a look.
Incidentally, it would probably be best to avoid Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson's *Passchendaele: The Untold Story* (2003); as much as I've enjoyed their work in other capacities (they penned a legendary take-down of Paul Fussell, for example), this particular book is pretty much everything you are NOT after. | [
"The book has seven chapters, the first two cover the days prior to the battle, four chapters deal with the day and night of each of the two days of the battle, and the last one with the immediate aftermath of the \"hecatomb\". Historical notes are attached.\n",
"Coningsby is the author of a diary of the action of the English troops in France in 1591. It proceeds day by day through two periods, 13 August to 6 September, and 3 October to 24 December, when it abruptly terminates. The original manuscript is among the Harleian Manuscripts at the British Library. It was first printed and carefully edited by J. G. Nichols in the first volume of the Camden Society's \"Miscellanies\" (1847). Internal evidence alone gives the clue to the authorship.\n",
"The Battle (French: \"La Bataille\") is a historical novel by the French author Patrick Rambaud that was first published in 1997. The English translation by Will Hobson appeared in 2000. The book describes the 1809 Battle of Aspern-Essling between the French Empire under Napoleon and the Austrian Empire. The action in the novel follows closely historical observations and descriptions as seen from the French perspective. \"La Bataille\" is the first book of a trilogy by Rambaud about the decline of Napoleon, describing his first personal defeat in a European battle; the other two books cover Napoleon’s defeat in Russia in \"The Retreat\" and his banishment at Elba in \"Napoleon’s Exile\".\n",
"The final four booksknown as \"The Gothic War\" (\"\")cover the Italian campaigns by Belisarius and others against the Ostrogoths. It includes accounts of the 1st and 2nd sieges of Naples and the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd sieges of Rome. The last book describes the eunuch Narses's successful conclusion of the Italian campaign and includes some coverage of campaigns along the empire's eastern borders as well.\n",
"In Hancock's far more extensive version, constituting no less than four books, it is the Germans who launch a surprise attack in 1920, capture Boston despite heroic resistance by \"Uncle Sam's boys\", overrun all of New England and New York and reach as far as Pittsburgh—but are at last are gloriously crushed by fresh American forces. From the present-day point of view, it can be considered as \"retroactive\" alternate history.\n",
"The battle of Cúl Dreimhne (also known as the \"Battle of the Book\") took place in the 6th century in the túath of Cairbre Drom Cliabh (now Co. Sligo) in northwest Ireland. The exact date for the battle varies from 555 AD to 561 AD. 560 AD is regarded as the most likely by modern scholars. The battle is notable for being possibly one of the earliest conflicts over copyright in the world.\n",
"As the title suggests, the novel contains analogues of historical 1942 battles, such as the German drive to, and the Battle of Stalingrad. In the novel, Confederate armies in occupied Ohio drive into Pennsylvania with Pittsburgh as their objective, codenamed Operation Coalscuttle. It also involves analogues of the Battle of Midway, the Manhattan Project, and the Holocaust.\n"
] |
why does the math they teach in school keep changing and getting harder? | One could argue that 3+5=8 hasn't changed in, forever.
The pressure is to teach **more math** in the same amount of time. That means that more intensive techniques need to be used, and students must **work harder**. It's not the math that's different, it's how much math you need that's changed since your parents were in school. | [
"Traditional mathematics focuses on teaching algorithms that will lead to the correct answer. Because of this focus on application of algorithms, the traditional math student must always use the specific method that is being taught. This kind of algorithmic dependence is de-emphasized in reform mathematics. Reformers do not oppose correct answers, but prefer to focus students' attention on the process leading to the answer, rather than the answer itself. The presence of occasional errors is deemed less important than the overall thought process. Research has shown that children make fewer mistakes with calculations and remember algorithms longer when they understand the concepts underlying the methods they use. In general, children in reform classes perform at least as well as children in traditional classes on tests of calculation skill, and considerably better on tests of problem solving.\n",
"However, there is still a large part of school math teaching which consists of \"mass-produced\" memorization, repetition, and mechanically performed operations. Times tables are one example, wherein rote learning is essential to mathematics performance. When a student fails to learn the times tables at a young age, they can experience math anxiety later, when all the students' classmates can remember the tables but they cannot.\n",
"Rothstein, in the 2002 \"New York Times\" article, admitted that \"Nobody really knows why we seem to make more progress in math than reading. But one likely cause is that students learn math mostly in school, while literacy also comes from habits at home. Even if reading instruction improves, scores would suffer if students did less out-of-school reading or had a less literate home environment.\"\n",
"Educators including the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics objected to the \"Math class is tough\" phrase as detrimental to the effort to encourage girls to study math and science, and particularly in association with the phrases about shopping; the American Association of University Women criticized it in a report about girls receiving a relatively poor education in math and science. Mattel initially offered to exchange dolls for nonspeaking ones on request, and later apologized to the American Association of University Women, withdrew the math class phrase from those to be used in future dolls, and offered an exchange to purchasers who had a doll with that phrase. The criticism gave rise to the 1994 \"Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy\" episode of \"The Simpsons\", in which Lisa Simpson objects to sexist utterances by a \"Malibu Stacy\" doll such as \"Thinking too much gives you wrinkles.\" , the collector's price for one of the estimated 3,500 Teen Talk Barbies including the phrase \"Math class is tough\" was around $500.\n",
"Lastly, Lech agreed with Rothstein that another influence on the math–verbal achievement gap could be the quality of the math teachers themselves. Lech referenced literature indicating that U.S. math teachers tend to be much better organized than their humanities counterparts across the hall. Rothstein held that American math teachers tend to be better trained because they have more resources available like the extremely large cash grant from the National Science Foundation for math and science instruction in high school which English teachers cannot reap.\n",
"Math is usually taught as a right and wrong subject and as if getting the right answer were paramount. In contrast to most subjects, mathematics problems almost always have a right answer. Additionally, the subject is often taught as if there were a right way to solve the problem and any other approaches would be wrong, even if students got the right answer. When learning, understanding the concepts should be paramount, but with a right/wrong approach to teaching math, students are encouraged not to try, not to experiment, not to find algorithms that work for them, and not to take risks. \"Teachers benefit children most when they encourage them to share their thinking process and justify their answers out loud or in writing as they perform math operations. ... With less of an emphasis on right or wrong and more of an emphasis on process, teachers can help alleviate students' anxiety about math\".\n",
"Parents and teachers who opposed the New Math in the U.S. complained that the new curriculum was too far outside of students' ordinary experience and was not worth taking time away from more traditional topics, such as arithmetic. The material also put new demands on teachers, many of whom were required to teach material they did not fully understand. Parents were concerned that they did not understand what their children were learning and could not help them with their studies. In an effort to learn the material, many parents attended their children's classes. In the end, it was concluded that the experiment was not working, and New Math fell out of favor before the end of the decade, though it continued to be taught for years thereafter in some school districts.\n"
] |
why no one appears to be talking about lockheed martin's recent claims to have a breakthrough in nuclear fusion technology. | Because they haven't made a breakthrough yet. They have a design that isn't even complete, let alone a working prototype.
| [
"When Lockheed Martin announced a \"major breakthrough\" in fusion power in October 2014, Lincoln described the process of nuclear fusion for the Australian Science Media Centre. He expressed some reservations about the alleged break-through, noting that achieving an energy output greater than the required energy input had limited fusion power development since the 1950s. He said \"It is unclear from the Lockheed announcement as to whether this very major problem has been overcome. If it has, this would be a remarkable achievement.\"\n",
"The successful launch of \"Sputnik 1\" and the subsequent failure of the first two Project Vanguard launch attempts, greatly accentuated the perception in the United States of a threat from the Soviet Union, a perception that had persisted since the Cold War began after World War II. The same rocket that launched Sputnik could send a nuclear warhead anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes, stripping the continental United States of its oceanic defenses. The Soviets had demonstrated this capability on 21 August with a test flight of the R-7 booster. The event was announced by TASS five days later and was widely reported in other media.\n",
"In June 2003, Lockheed Martin sued Boeing, alleging that the company had resorted to industrial espionage in 1998 to win the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) competition. Lockheed Martin claimed that the former employee Kenneth Branch, who went to work for McDonnell Douglas and Boeing, passed nearly 30,000 pages of proprietary documents to his new employers. Lockheed Martin argued that these documents allowed Boeing to win 19 of the 28 tendered military satellite launches.\n",
"In 1979 Edward Teller contributed to a Hoover Institution publication where he claimed that the US would be facing an emboldened USSR due to their work on civil defense. Two years later at a conference in Italy, he made the same claims about their ambitions, but with a subtle change; now he claimed that the reason for their boldness was their development of new space-based weapons. According to the popular opinion at the time, and one shared by author Frances FitzGerald; there was absolutely no evidence that such research was being carried out. What had really changed was that Teller was now selling his latest nuclear weapon, the X-ray laser. Finding limited success in his efforts to get funding for the project, his speech in Italy was a new attempt to create a missile gap.\n",
"The nuclear rocket enjoyed strong political support from the influential chairman of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Senator Clinton P. Anderson from New Mexico (where LASL was located), Senator Howard Cannon from Nevada, and Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine. This enabled it to survive multiple cancellation attempts that became more serious in the cost-cutting that prevailed as the Vietnam War escalated and after the space race ended with the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Projects Rover and NERVA were cancelled over their objection in January 1973, and none of the reactors developed ever flew.\n",
"The Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, on 4 October 1957, came as a tremendous shock to the American public, who had trusted that American technological superiority ensured their invulnerability. Now, suddenly, there was incontrovertible proof that, in some areas at least, the Soviet Union was actually ahead. In the widespread calls for action in response to the Sputnik crisis, officials in the United States and Britain seized an opportunity to mend the relationship with Britain that had been damaged by the Suez Crisis. Macmillan wrote to Eisenhower on 10 October urging that the two countries pool their resources to meet the challenge.\n",
"However, a 1984 US Interagency Intelligence Assessment expresses a far more skeptical and cautious approach, stating that the hypothesis is not scientifically convincing. The report predicted that Soviet nuclear policy would be to maintain their strategic nuclear posture, such as their fielding of the high throw-weight SS-18 missile and they would merely attempt to exploit the hypothesis for propaganda purposes, such as directing scrutiny on the US portion of the nuclear arms race. Moreover, it goes on to express the belief that if Soviet officials did begin to take nuclear winter seriously, it would probably make them demand exceptionally high standards of scientific proof for the hypothesis, as the implications of it would undermine their military doctrine – a level of scientific proof which perhaps could not be met without field experimentation. The un-redacted portion of the document ends with the suggestion that substantial increases in Soviet Civil defense food stockpiles might be an early indicator that Nuclear Winter was beginning to influence Soviet upper echelon thinking.\n"
] |
what's the point of big research stations in antarctica? | I have a professor that goes to Antarctica yearly to study climate change, by examining Ice cores and sedimentary deposits. A lot of things can only be observed in Antarctica about paleoclimate (how the climate was in the past) because Antarctica is pretty untouched by man. | [
"A number of governments have set up permanent research stations in Antarctica and these bases are widely distributed. Unlike the drifting ice stations set up in the Arctic, the research stations of the Antarctic are constructed either on rock or on ice that is (for practical purposes) fixed in place.\n",
"The location of the station had not been researched before the station was built, even though the area is attractive for the type of projects that are the focus of the Czech research in Antarctica. From geological perspective, it is an area of chalk sediments rich in fossils with occasional intrusions of igneous rock. Volcanic activity often took place below the glaciers. The consequences of climate change have been observed in this area since the mid 20th century in the retreat of glaciers and colonisation of the exposed surface by non-vascular plants. Many organisms are completely new to science and there is a high share of endemic species. The freshwater lakes in the surrounding area contain interesting and hitherto uninvestigated communities of algae, cyanobacteria and simple animal species.\n",
"McMurdo Station of the United States Antarctic Program and other scientific research stations on Antarctica resemble the popular conception of an arcology as a technologically advanced, relatively self-sufficient human community. The Antarctic research base provides living and entertainment amenities for roughly 3,000 staff who visit each year. Its remoteness and the measures needed to protect its population from the harsh environment give it an insular character. The station is not self-sufficientthe U.S. military delivers 30,000 cubic metres (8,000,000 US gal) of fuel and of supplies and equipment yearly through its Operation Deep Freeze resupply effortbut it is isolated from conventional support networks. Under international treaty, it must avoid damage to the surrounding ecosystem.\n",
"The International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) was created in 1990 with the purpose of studying climate change through research conducted in Antarctica. Antarctica was chosen as the optimal site to study the atmosphere because of its remote location and relatively undisturbed environment. Research in many fields has been conducted in Antarctica through ITASE, including astronomy, atmospheric sciences, biology, earth sciences, environmental science, geology, glaciology, marine biology, oceanography, and geophysics. \n",
"The Showa Station is Japan's main research station in Antarctica. A vast array of research is conducted there, including upper atmosphere physics, meteorology, seismology, gravimetry, geodesy/mapping, oceanography, glaciology, geology, marine and terrestrial biology, and medical research. Japan's other station, Dome Fuji Station was opened as part of a major ice-coring project. It mainly studies climate change and conducts deep drilling and atmospheric observations.\n",
"Showa Station is Japan's main research station in Antarctica. A vast array of research is conducted there, including upper atmosphere physics, meteorology, seismology, gravimetry, geodesy/mapping, oceanography, glaciology, geology, marine and terrestrial biology, and medical research. Japan's other station, Dome Fuji Station was opened as part of a major ice-coring project. It mainly studies climate change and conducts deep drilling and atmospheric observations.\n",
"The Astrophysics and Geospace Sciences Program sponsors research areas that either use Antarctica as an observing platform or contribute to an understanding of the role played by the Antarctic upper atmosphere in global environmental processes.\n"
] |
why does anybody get any kind of insurance? aren't they statistically formulated to rip you off (after calculating probabilities of accidents etc).. | Insurance is designed to protect you from catastrophic loss. You *shouldn't* buy insurance for a TV or Playstation because losing them won't ruin your life. You *should* by insurance for your health, car or house because losing one of those could put you in a financial hole you can't recover from. Most people aren't willing to take the risk. In theory if you were a billionaire buying something like homeowners insurance would be a waste of money because if you did lose your house you have the resources to eat the cost. | [
"In the United States, economists and consumer advocates generally consider insurance to be worthwhile for low-probability, catastrophic losses, but not for high-probability, small losses. Because of this, consumers are advised to select high deductibles and to not insure losses which would not cause a disruption in their life. However, consumers have shown a tendency to prefer low deductibles and to prefer to insure relatively high-probability, small losses over low-probability, perhaps due to not understanding or ignoring the low-probability risk. This is associated with reduced purchasing of insurance against low-probability losses, and may result in increased inefficiencies from moral hazard.\n",
"Accidental death insurance is a type of limited life insurance that is designed to cover the insured should they die as the result of an accident. “Accidents” run the gamut from abrasions to catastrophes but normally do not include deaths resulting from non-accident-related health problems or suicide. Because they only cover accidents, these policies are much less expensive than other life insurance policies.\n",
"Insurance is often easy to obtain against \"systemic risks\" because a party issuing that insurance can pocket the premiums, issue dividends to shareholders, enter insolvency proceedings if a catastrophic event ever takes place, and hide behind limited liability. Such insurance, however, is not effective for the insured entity.\n",
"EUT and PT predict that people should not purchase insurance for small-stakes risks, yet such forms of insurance (e.g., electronic warranties, insurance policies with low deductibles, mail insurance, etc.) are very popular. Direct risk aversion may explain why, as people demonstrate their literal distaste for any and all levels of uncertainty. By paying a premium (often higher than the cost of replacement) for the possibility that insurance may come in handy, people display direct risk aversion by valuing a risky prospect below the value of its worst possible outcome (replacement at face-value). \n",
"Insurance is just a risk transfer mechanism wherein the financial burden which may arise due to some fortuitous event is transferred to a bigger entity called an Insurance Company by way of paying premiums. This only reduces the financial burden and not the actual chances of happening of an event. Insurance is a risk for both the insurance company and the insured. The insurance company understands the risk involved and will perform a risk assessment when writing the policy. As a result, the premiums may go up if they determine that the policyholder will file a claim. If a person is financially stable and plans for life's unexpected events, they may be able to go without insurance. However, they must have enough to cover a total and complete loss of employment and of their possessions. Some states will accept a surety bond, a government bond, or even making a cash deposit with the state.\n",
"Some drivers opt to buy the insurance as a means of protection against costly breakdowns unrelated to an accident. In contrast to more standard and basic coverages such as comprehensive and collision insurance, auto repair insurance does not cover a vehicle when it is damaged in a collision, during a natural disaster or at the hands of vandals.\n",
"Accident insurance is a type of insurance where the policy holder is paid directly in the event of an accident resulting in injury of the insured. The insured can spend the benefit payment however they choose. Accident insurance is complementary to, not a replacement for, health insurance.\n"
] |
Biography recommendation(s) on the space/arms race during the cold war. | Von Braun is kind of overdone — you're not going to find anything too new or interesting. If it were me, I would seek out other, often-overlooked, plenty interesting figures. Theodore von Karman comes to mind. Qian Xuesen is also an interesting case (though not European...). There were Germans who were taken to the USSR as well — their cases make for interesting contrasts with the ones who were taken to the USA. If you are willing to avoid rockets, and look to atoms instead, the case of Nikolaus Riehl is quite interesting and there is a translated autobiography available. Gernot Zippe is another interesting figure, and one that gets you into many other countries (he is the one who "exported" the gas centrifuge to many European countries in the later Cold War). | [
"During the Cold War, the magazine committed itself to presenting a balanced view of the physical and human geography of nations beyond the Iron Curtain. The magazine printed articles on Berlin, de-occupied Austria, the Soviet Union, and Communist China that deliberately downplayed politics to focus on culture. In its coverage of the Space Race, \"National Geographic\" focused on the scientific achievement while largely avoiding reference to the race's connection to nuclear arms buildup. There were also many articles in the 1930s, 40s and 50s about the individual states and their resources, along with supplement maps of each state. Many of these articles were written by longtime staff such as Frederick Simpich. There were also articles about biology and science topics.\n",
"In 2004, Leonov and former American astronaut David Scott began work on a dual biography/history of the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Titled \"Two Sides of the Moon: Our Story of the Cold War Space Race\", it was published in 2006. Neil Armstrong and Tom Hanks both wrote introductions to the book.\n",
"In 2003–2004 he was a consultant on the BBC TV series \"\". In 2004, he and Leonov began work on a dual biography/history of the \"Space Race\" between the United States and the Soviet Union. The book, \"Two Sides of the Moon: Our Story of the Cold War Space Race\", was published in 2006. Armstrong and Hanks both wrote introductions to the book. Scott has worked on the Brown University science teams for the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter. For NASA, he has worked on the 500-Day Lunar Exploration Study and as a collaborator on the research investigation entitled \"Advanced Visualization in Solar System Exploration and Research (ADVISER): Optimizing the Science Return from the Moon and Mars\".\n",
"NASA's History Division published four translated volumes of the series between 2005 and 2011. The series editor is Asif Siddiqi, the author of \"Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974\".\n",
"Siddiqi's first book \"Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974\" is widely considered to be the best English-language history of the Soviet space program in print and was identified by the \"Wall Street Journal\" as \"one of the five best books\" on space exploration. This book was later published in paperback in two separate volumes, \"Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge\" and \"The Soviet Space Race with Apollo\".\n",
"From 1956 to 1963, Bushnell worked as a United States Air Force historian based in Washington D.C. and New Mexico. He co-authored \"Space Biology\" for the U.S. Air Force, which chronicled high-altitude experiments which experts designed to launch people into outer space during the early years of the space program. He also oversaw the creation of an official written history of NASA and served on the NASA Historical Advisory Committee during this period.\n",
"McDougall is the author of many books on history. In 1986 he received the Pulitzer Prize for History for his book \"\" (1985)., in which he examined the space programs and the politics of the USA, Europe and USSR, arguing that the Soviet Union made its way into space first because it was the world's first technocracy, which he defines as \"the institutionalization of technological change for state purpose.\" He also examined the growth of a political economy of technology in the U.S. and the Soviet Union.\n"
] |
what is the purpose of the extra gears in my automatic car? when (if ever?) should i use them? | If you're driving down a steep slope, shifting into first or second will hold you back so you don't have to ride your brakes all the way down. I recently drove over Sonora Pass, and there was a large section I had to take in first, and some of it I even had to take in second. | [
"The name Self-Changing Gears is sometimes confusing: the gearboxes are not fully automatic, \"selection\" of gear ratio remains a manual choice, but the gear-changing and any clutch control needed is automated. The gearboxes were used in conjunction with a fluid coupling so no clutch pedal was needed.\n",
"BULLET::::- Semi-automatic gearbox: A motorsport application, created initially by Scuderia Ferrari for Formula One, in which the driver can change gears manually, but without having to manually activate the clutch. On open wheel race cars it is usually activated by paddles immediately behind the steering wheel, although touring cars and rally usually place the gear shifter as a gear stick in the more conventional position on the centre console, but occasionally is mounted as a stalk off the steering column, when activated, automatically engages the clutch and changes the gear and releases the clutch without any further input from the driver.\n",
"An automatic transmission's main focus is smooth shifting between gears. To accomplish this it often goes into two gears at once while shifting up, which is known as a shift overlap. In these cars, it is a kit that can reduce or eliminate the shift overlap. It will also reduce wear because the transmission won't be trying to drive in two gears at once.\n",
"Manual transmissions have generally offered a wider selection of gear ratios. Many vehicles offer a 5-speed or 6-speed manual, whereas the automatic option would typically be a 4-speed. This is generally due to the increased space available inside a manual transmission compared with an automatic, since the latter requires extra components for self-shifting, such as torque converters and pumps. However, automatic transmissions are now adding more speeds as the technology matures. ZF currently manufactures 7- and 8-speed automatic transmissions. ZF is also planning a 9-speed automatic for use in front-wheel drive vehicles. The increased number of gears allows for better use of the engine's power band, resulting in increased fuel economy by staying in the most fuel-efficient part of the power band, or higher performance, thereby remaining closer to the engine's peak power rating. Even with more forward speeds and the potential of designing more forward gears to offer higher speed and/or torque, the manual transmission remains smaller and much more compact than its larger, automatic cousin, as referenced by the 991 Generation of the Porsche 911 and the C7 Chevrolet Corvette, which offer a 7-speed manual transmission.\n",
"Automatic transmissions are better suited for these applications because they have a hydraulic torque converter which is externally cooled, unlike a clutch. Torque converters also do not have a friction material that rubs off over time like a clutch. Some automatics even lock the output shaft so that the vehicle cannot roll backwards when beginning to accelerate up an incline. To reduce wear in these applications, some manual transmissions will have a very low, \"granny\" gear which provides the leverage to move the vehicle easily at very low speeds. This reduces wear at the clutch because the transmission requires less input torque. However, the issue of \"handling stops on hills\" is easy to learn.\n",
"- The transmission is not interchangeable with a conventional BMC sump mounted manual gearbox. Because of an extended flywheel mounting flange on the crankshaft, the AP automatic requires to be fitted to its own unique version of the A-series engine. This causes issues for Mini owners wanting to convert to a manual gearbox, since the entire engine has to be changed also.\n",
"All automatics use some sort of manual override of the transmission, with numbered positions in descending order marked below (or to the right) of \"Drive\", which will prevent the transmission shifting to a gear higher than the selected, but maintaining automatic operation between all lesser numbered gears. Such gates will appear as \"P-R-N-D-3-2-1\" for example. On some vehicles (mainly Japanese makes such as Honda, Toyota and Lexus being good examples) these numbered positions are replaced by a single \"L\" (for \"Low\") position, which will hold the transmission in whatever lower ratio is required for climbing steep grades or for heavy acceleration.\n"
] |
What differences would we see in the world (technologically and otherwise) if it was proven that p = np? | I actually just started a research project about this and I've interviewed several people about this. An example of what could be solved include extremely accurate weather prediction. However, not every consequence would be beneficial; computer security relies on the fact that some problems are too complex to efficiently solve. Security might need to be revamped or completely redeveloped if P is proven to equal NP. | [
"The question of whether P equals NP is one of the most important open questions in theoretical computer science because of the wide implications of a solution. If the answer is yes, many important problems can be shown to have more efficient solutions. These include various types of integer programming problems in operations research, many problems in logistics, protein structure prediction in biology, and the ability to find formal proofs of pure mathematics theorems. The P versus NP problem is one of the Millennium Prize Problems proposed by the Clay Mathematics Institute. There is a US$1,000,000 prize for resolving the problem.\n",
"A proof that showed that P ≠ NP would lack the practical computational benefits of a proof that P = NP, but would nevertheless represent a very significant advance in computational complexity theory and provide guidance for future research. It would allow one to show in a formal way that many common problems cannot be solved efficiently, so that the attention of researchers can be focused on partial solutions or solutions to other problems. Due to widespread belief in P ≠ NP, much of this focusing of research has already taken place.\n",
"On the other hand, some researchers believe that there is overconfidence in believing P ≠ NP and that researchers should explore proofs of P = NP as well. For example, in 2002 these statements were made:\n",
"Although the P = NP problem itself remains open despite a million-dollar prize and a huge amount of dedicated research, efforts to solve the problem have led to several new techniques. In particular, some of the most fruitful research related to the P = NP problem has been in showing that existing proof techniques are not powerful enough to answer the question, thus suggesting that novel technical approaches are required.\n",
"PP 2.0 is necessary, because neither positive psychology nor humanistic-existential psychology can adequately understand such complex human phenomena as meaning, virtue, and happiness. Such deep knowledge can only be achieved by an integrative and collaborative endeavor. This calls for a humble science. In other words, PP 2.0 denies that the positivist paradigm is the only way to examine truth claims, especially when we research the profound questions of what makes life worth living.\n",
"NPG works on overpopulation issues and advocates a gradual reduction in U.S. and world population. NPG believes the optimal population for the United States is 150 to 200 million and that the optimal world population is two to three billion. In order to accomplish their goal of a smaller U.S. population, the organization promotes policies which would reduce the fertility rate in the U.S. to 1.5 births per woman, and they advocate for reducing the level of immigration into the United States to 100,000 to 200,000 per year from the existing level of over 1.5 million per year.\n",
"P-1's growth and education is chronicled. P-1 learns, adapts, and discovers telephone switching systems. These systems allow P-1 to grow larger and understand its vulnerabilities (power failures and humans). It learns it needs a way of maintaining itself over time. Through a series of interactions, P-1 discovers Pi-Delta, a triplexed 360/105 in a super secure facility capable of being self-sustaining for long periods of time, operated by the US Government. P-1 seeks to control Pi-Delta but, due to security protocols and process put in place, P-1 is not able to take direct control of it. P-1 believes that having a system like Pi-Delta with more memory in such a secure facility is key to its long-term survival. Yet, P-1 knows that to obtain access to more memory in such a facility will require assistance of a human, someone like Gregory.\n"
] |
why did the dea strike a deal with the sinaloa cartel? | I live in Juárez México, you might have heard of if because at one point in the drug war it was considered the most dangerous city in the world. So I know a bit about this, there are a lot of factors but to summarize, the United States needs the drug trade, it means money , a lot of money, and México is the fastest route.
The problem came when to many cartels started showing up, now you can´t control the intake of drugs, everybody was "importing" drugs without any kind of control (yes the US knows exactly how many drugs they need to let into the border) And you no longer had one head of the cartels with whom you could organize the drug trade.
This was a problem for México also, before there was an unspoken rule, you don´t mess with the people I don´t mess with your drug business, this stopped when all the cartels started fighting. Before if there was a problem, like a rogue dealer or high crime rate in a city, you had a head boss (e.g. El Chapo) who you could go to and he could make decisions.
So to answer your question, things got so out of hand that in the best interest of the Mexican and the U.S. government, they needed to implement the one cartel system that they had before. They picked a leader, El Chapo, sprung him from jail and then began helping him regain control. This has happened, Juárez and most of México y getting back to how things were, you know there is a drug trade, but you don´t see it. Hey, as long as drugs are illegal and there is money to be made, people will sell them, lets hope this changes, meanwhile, things are quiet at least.
TL:DR The U.S. and México needed to implement one head in charge of the cartels, too many cartels where getting out of control, so they decided on one and worked on getting him back in charge. | [
"When Mexican President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006, he announced a crackdown on cartels by the Mexican military to stem the increasing violence. After four years, the additional efforts had not slowed the flow of drugs or the killings tied to the drug war. Of the 53,000 arrests made as of 2010, only 1,000 involved associates of the Sinaloa Cartel, which led to suspicions that Calderón was intentionally allowing Sinaloa to win the drug war, a charge Calderón denied in advertisements in Mexican newspapers, pointing to his administration's killing of top Sinaloa deputy \"Nacho\" Coronel as evidence. Sinaloa's rival cartels saw their leaders killed and syndicates dismantled by the crackdown, but the Sinaloa gang was relatively unaffected and took over the rival gangs' territories, including the coveted Ciudad Juárez-El Paso corridor, in the wake of the power shifts.\n",
"In 2015, a high-profile anonymous official in the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) spoke to a Mexican investigative newspaper on the role of Los Cuinis in the international market. The source stated that Los Cuinis was the richest drug trafficking organization in the world. This statement countered the widely perceived notion of the Sinaloa Cartel being the most profitable organized crime from Mexico in terms of net profit. The source attributed Los Cuinis' success to their control of the cocaine and methamphetamine trade in Europe and Asia, since foreign authorities encountered difficulties in stopping the flow of narcotics or seizing the drug proceeds that the Valencia clan receives from the importations. The source also stated that it is difficult to infiltrate the inner circles of Los Cuinis through undercover informants because the Valencia clan is wary of outsiders.\n",
"By 2012, U.S. intelligence indicated that the Sinaloa cartel and Gente Nueva have emerged victorious and successfully relegated the Juárez cartel to the sidelines. The El Paso–Juárez corridor is a lucrative route for drug traffickers because the DEA estimates that about 70% of the cocaine that enters the United States flows through that area.\n",
"In August 1996, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) launched an anti-drug investigation known as Operation Limelight that initially targeted Mexico's Juárez Cartel and Amado Carrillo Fuentes. During the operation's second phase dubbed Operation Impunity I in January 1998, the DEA focused on the Juárez Cartel's drug corridors in Tamaulipas and South Texas, where the Gulf Cartel was based. The DEA suspected Cárdenas Guillén was the leading crime figure in the Matamoros corridor and was working closely with the Juárez Cartel. In 1998, the DEA opened an investigation known as Operation Cazadores with the intention of arresting him. Undercover agents met Cárdenas Guillén in person at least twice. On 9 June 1999, Cárdenas Guillén threatened to kill Abraham Rodríguez, an undercover Cameron County Sheriff's Office investigator working with the U.S. Customs Service in Brownsville. The undercover agent refused to deliver a load of marijuana on behalf of the Gulf Cartel.\n",
"Since the 2000s, the DEA office in Los Angeles, California, tracked El Mencho' activities and detected that the CJNG had expanded its drug trafficking operations internationally. In 2000, the U.S. government discovered that El Mencho was involved in a cocaine and methamphetamine operation internationally. Five years later, they discovered he had used firearms to facilitate his operations. In 2007, the DEA discovered that El Mencho was involved in a cocaine operation that went through Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and ended in the U.S. They also uncovered a second cocaine shipment from Colombia, Mexico, to the U.S. In 2009, DEA detected that El Mencho was involved in another cocaine shipment originating from Ecuador. Two more shipments were then detected in 2013 from Mexico then the U.S. In 2014, however, the DEA noticed a radical shift in the CJNG's modus operandi; El Mencho' was discovered to have coordinated a methamphetamine shipment that went from Mexico to Australia then to the U.S by leveraging China-based gangs.\n",
"When Cárdenas Guillén was arrested and extradited to the United States in 2003 and 2007 respectively, Costilla Sánchez took the control of the cartel along with Antonio Cárdenas Guillén, who was later killed in a gunbattle in November 2010. Amid the power struggles, Los Zetas separated from the cartel to work independently, transforming northeastern Mexico into a \"war zone\" with daily confrontations and gruesome assassinations.\n",
"Operating out of northern central Mexico, the cartel was believed to smuggle drugs into Arizona, Texas and California from a network of ranches along the northern border region where the drugs are stored prior to shipment. The Sonora Cartel has been specifically linked to operating out of Hermosillo, Agua Prieta, Guadalajara, Culiacán, San Luis Potosí, Durango, Sinaloa and Sonora.\n"
] |
When did Europeans start to refer to themselves as Europeans? | People identifying themselves as European? That's still rather a strange thing to do for anyone. Only a few people who are seriously supportive of the EU would do that. Most others would either identify mostly by their national identity or even by a regional identity, like Scottish, Catalan or Occitan.
And if one would connect to a larger entity, most people would see little reason to then limit themselves to 'European'. People might call themselves "world citizen" to emphasize their international outlook, or "Western" to emphasize their economic and political privilege. This is partially a remnant from the Cold War, in which Western Europeans tended to see themselves as part of the NATO block more than as part of the EU, for better or for worse. It's possible that in the former Warsaw pact states the self-identification as European is easier nowadays, I don't know.
So is there resistance to self-identifying as European? Yes, almost everywhere in Europe this resistance exists. People are anxious to retain some significance in their national or regional identities, as small as the importance of their governments might be to their daily lives. Although most Europeans are reasonably accepting of their European neighbours, and in practice quite supportive of European cooperation, a large part of the European population is very resistant to Europe as an idea. Self-identifying as European would need to overcome that resistance.
And frankly while I personally am quite in favor of further European integration, I would rarely if ever self-identify as European. It just rarely seems relevant. | [
"Yolŋu had known about Europeans before the arrival of British in Australia through their contact with Macassan traders, which probably began around the sixteenth century. Their word for European, \"Balanda\", is derived from \"Hollander\" (Dutch person).\n",
"Historically, learned Europeans were often identified with Latinized versions of their names. Christopher Columbus was published as Christophorus Columbus. In Modern Italian, the same name is Cristoforo Colombo, in Portuguese as Cristóvão Colombo (formerly Christovam Colom), and in Spanish as Cristóbal Colón. Christophorus is the Latin version of the Greek Χριστόφορος (Khristóphoros).\n",
"The first Europeans were reportedly from the French expedition of Pierre Dugua de Mons and Samuel de Champlain, who founded the short-lived nearby Saint Croix Island settlement in 1604. France named the island Port aux Coquilles (\"Seashell Harbour\").\n",
"This same early modern period also marked an increasing awareness in Europe that there were other lands and other peoples whose traditions were not European. Christopher Columbus set sail, as one of the first during the age of discovery and the concomitant globalization of world history. In the words of Gerald Pocius, Europeans discovered the \"other\" at this time. These \"others\" lived somewhere else, in cultures that appeared more cohesive than the contemporary cultures of Europe; their lifestyles seemed integrated and meaningful. Their material culture was also very different than the artifacts common in Europe. These foreign objects were intriguing to the Europeans, however they did not fit in the newly defined genres of \"art\" and \"fine art\", which were for the most part confined to painting and sculpture. To get around this, the artifacts of the \"other\" were labeled as \"folk art\" or \"primitive art\", differentiated from the European elite creations, which were \"genuine art\". These new labels connoted a qualitatively inferior object, the assumption was that they were of a lesser quality than the newly defined European fine arts.\n",
"The first contact with Europeans occurred when Christopher Columbus, who was on his third voyage of exploration, arrived at noon on 31 July 1498. He landed at a harbor he called Point Galera, while naming the island Trinidad, before proceeding into the Gulf of Paria via the Serpent's Mouth and the Caribbean Sea via Dragon's Mouth.\n",
"Early contact with Europeans came about in the mid-16th century, when Portuguese missionaries encountered Mandaeans in Southern Iraq and controversially designated them \"Christians of St. John\". In the next centuries Europeans became more acquainted with the Mandaeans and their religion.\n",
"Italian explorers and navigators in the 15th and 16th centuries left a perennial mark on human history with the modern \"discovery of America\", due to Christopher Columbus. In addition, the name of the American continents derives from the geographer Amerigo Vespucci's first name. Also noted, is explorer Marco Polo who travelled extensively throughout the eastern world recording his travels.\n"
] |
what is redox chemistry and what is it used for? | Redox is a reaction that involves reduction and oxidation of molecules. Examples are electron transfers that happen in living organisms during respiration. | [
"Redox therapy is an experimental therapy that aims to effect an outcome by modifying the levels of pro-oxidant and antioxidant agents in cells. The term \"redox\" is a contraction of \"reduction-oxidation\". For cancer patients, the therapy is predicated on the idea that the redox state of cells may have an effect on cancer development.\n",
"Redox (short for \"reduction–oxidation\" reaction) (pronunciation: or ) is a type of chemical reaction in which the oxidation states of atoms are changed. Redox reactions are characterized by the transfer of electrons between chemical species, most often with one species (the reducing agent) undergoing oxidation (losing electrons) while another species (the oxidizing agent) undergoes reduction (gains electrons). The chemical species from which the electron is stripped is said to have been oxidized, while the chemical species to which the electron is added is said to have been reduced. In other words:\n",
"The redox potential describes which way chemical reactions will proceed in oxygen deficient soils and controls the nutrient cycling in flooded systems. Redox potential, or reduction potential, is used to express the likelihood of an environment to receive electrons and therefore become reduced. For example, if a system already has plenty of electrons (anoxic, organic-rich shale) it is reduced and will likely donate electrons to a part of the system that has a low concentration of electrons, or an oxidized environment, to equilibrate to the chemical gradient. The oxidized environment has high redox potential, whereas the reduced environment has a low redox potential. \n",
"An important class of redox reactions are the electrochemical reactions, where electrons from the power supply are used as the reducing agent. These reactions are particularly important for the production of chemical elements, such as chlorine or aluminium. The reverse process in which electrons are released in redox reactions and can be used as electrical energy is possible and used in batteries.\n",
"A redox titration is a type of titration based on a redox reaction between the analyte and titrant. Redox titration may involve the use of a redox indicator and/or a potentiometer. A common example of a redox titration is treating a solution of iodine with a reducing agent to produce iodide using a starch indicator to help detect the endpoint. Iodine (I) can be reduced to iodide (I) by e.g. thiosulfate (SO), and when all iodine is spent the blue colour disappears. This is called an iodometric titration.\n",
"Redox (\"red\"uction-\"ox\"idation) reactions include all chemical reactions in which atoms have their oxidation state changed by either gaining electrons (reduction) or losing electrons (oxidation). Substances that have the ability to oxidize other substances are said to be oxidative and are known as oxidizing agents, oxidants or oxidizers. An oxidant removes electrons from another substance. Similarly, substances that have the ability to reduce other substances are said to be reductive and are known as reducing agents, reductants, or reducers.\n",
"Redox potential (also known as oxidation / reduction potential, ORP, pe, ε, or formula_1) is a measure of the tendency of a chemical species to acquire electrons from or lose electrons to an electrode and thereby be reduced or oxidised, respectively. Redox potential is measured in volts (V), or millivolts (mV). Each species has its own intrinsic redox potential; for example, the more positive the reduction potential (reduction potential is more often used due to general formalism in electrochemistry), the greater the species' affinity for electrons and tendency to be reduced. ORP can reflect the antimicrobial potential of the water.\n"
] |
why the bullshit of naming sequels with original titles? | Don't know the thinking in the game world, but I read the movie industry avoids numbering sequels because the audience thinks they have to have seen all the films in the series to get the new one, lowering the number of people who go to the sequel. Probably something similar applies for video games. | [
"Not all remakes use the same title as the previously released version; the 1966 film \"Walk, Don't Run\", for example, is a remake of the World War II comedy \"The More the Merrier\". This is particularly true for films that are remade from films produced in another language, such as: \"Point of No Return\" (from the French \"Nikita\"), \"Vanilla Sky\" (from the Spanish \"Abre los ojos\"), \"The Magnificent Seven\" (from the Japanese \"Seven Samurai\"), \"A Fistful of Dollars\" (from the Japanese \"Yojimbo\"), \"The Departed\" (from Hong Kong's \"Infernal Affairs\"), \"Secret in Their Eyes\" (from the Argentine \"El secreto de sus ojos\") and \"Let Me In\" (from the Swedish film \"Let the Right One In\" or \"Låt den rätte komma in\").\n",
"The reasons for this are varied, but usually point towards marketable, linguistic or cultural differences. Some titles may not be easily understood in other parts of the world, and may even be considered offensive. Most title changes are commercial. An example is Italian Director's Sergio Leone's 1971 film initially released as \"Duck, You Sucker!\", as he was convinced this was a well-known English saying. When the film sold poorly, it was subsequently rebranded as \"A Fistful of Dynamite\", similar in name to his 1964 film \"A Fistful of Dollars\", part of the successful Dollars Trilogy.\n",
"In movies, sequels are very common. There are many name formats for sequels. Sometimes, they either have unrelated titles or have a letter added on the end. More commonly, they have numbers at the end or have added words on the end. It is also common for a sequel to have a variation of the original title or have a subtitle. In the 1930s, many musical sequels had the year included in the title. Sometimes sequels are released with different titles in different countries, because of the perceived brand recognition. There are several ways that subsequent works can be related to the chronology of the original. Various neologisms have been coined to describe them.\n",
"Note: This list includes full remakes only; it does \"not\" include films whose narratives have been loosely inspired by the basic plot of one or more of the director's films – as \"A Bug's Life\" (1998) references both \"Seven Samurai\" (1954) and its Hollywood remake \"The Magnificent Seven\" (1960) – nor movies that adopt or parody individual plot elements or characters from a Kurosawa film without adapting the entire film, as \"\" (1977) did with \"The Hidden Fortress\" (1958).\n",
"Although it is rare, some remakes are also sequels to the original film. In this situation essentially the remake repeats the same basic story of the original film, and may even use the same title, but also contains notable plot and storyline elements indicating the two films are set in \"the same universe\". An example of this type of remake is the 2000 film version of \"Shaft\" which was the second film adaptation of the original novel, but was also a canon storyline sequel to the original 1971 film adaptation.\n",
"According to Trevorrow, the film \"isn't a sequel or a reboot or a remake, it's all of those things in a strange way\". He did not wish to make a \"carbon copy of \"Jurassic Park\"\". \"Jurassic World\" features various references to \"Jurassic Park\", and is considered a direct sequel to the first film; Trevorrow stated that the events of the previous two films were not relevant to the new film's story because they take place on a different island. He also said the events depicted in the film's predecessors are still canon in the film series.\n",
"According to critic Roger Ebert, the two films shared little except a title and a director, saying, \"Is this the first time a title has been remade, instead of a movie?\". He gives the movie two stars out of four, praising the performances of De Mornay and Spano and concluding, \"You have to put the plot on hold, overlook the contrivances of the last half hour and find a way to admire how De Mornay plays the big scene, even while despising the scene itself. If you can do that, you’ll find good work here.\"\n"
] |
how do pearls form? | Here's a hint- It's the same material as their shell.
The sand is an irritant to the soft gooey creature, it can't reach to dislodge a grain of sand that is stuck, so it covers it in a layer of the same stuff the shell is made of. They get the minerals from their diet. Layer after layer it gets incrementally larger, just like the shell. | [
"Natural pearls are formed by nature, more or less by chance. On the other hand, cultured pearls are human creations formed by inserting a tissue graft from a donor mollusk, upon which a pearl sac forms, and the inner side precipitates calcium carbonate, in the form of nacre or \"mother-of-pearl\". \n",
"Pearls are formed inside the shell of certain mollusks as a defense mechanism against a potentially threatening irritant such as a parasite inside the shell, or an attack from outside that injures the mantle tissue. The mollusk creates a \"pearl sac\" to seal off the irritation. Pearls are thus the result of an immune response analogous in the human body to the capture of an antigen by a phagocyte (phagocytosis).\n",
"Natural pearls are nearly 100% calcium carbonate and conchiolin. It is thought that natural pearls form under a set of accidental conditions when a microscopic intruder or parasite enters a bivalve mollusk and settles inside the shell. The mollusk, irritated by the intruder, forms a pearl sac of external mantle tissue cells and secretes the calcium carbonate and conchiolin to cover the irritant. This secretion process is repeated many times, thus producing a pearl. Natural pearls come in many shapes, with perfectly round ones being comparatively rare.\n",
"A pearl is created in the mantle of a mollusk when an irritant particle is surrounded by layers of nacre. Although most bivalves can create pearls, oysters in the family Pteriidae and freshwater mussels in the families Unionidae and Margaritiferidae are the main source of commercially available pearls because the calcareous concretions produced by most other species have no lustre. Finding pearls inside oysters is a very chancy business as hundreds of shells may need to be pried open before a single pearl can be found. Most pearls are now obtained from cultured shells where an irritant substance has been purposefully introduced to induce the formation of a pearl. A \"mabe\" (irregular) pearl can be grown by the insertion of an implant, usually made of plastic, under a flap of the mantle and next to the mother-of-pearl interior of the shell. A more difficult procedure is the grafting of a piece of oyster mantle into the gonad of an adult specimen together with the insertion of a shell bead nucleus. This produces a superior, spherical pearl. The animal can be opened to extract the pearl after about two years and reseeded so that it produces another pearl. Pearl oyster farming and pearl culture is an important industry in Japan and many other countries bordering the Indian and Pacific Oceans.\n",
"A pearl is formed when the mantle tissue is injured by a parasite, an attack of a fish or another event that damages the external fragile rim of the shell of a mollusk shell bivalve or gastropod. In response, the mantle tissue of the mollusk secretes nacre into the pearl sac, a cyst that forms during the healing process. Chemically speaking, this is calcium carbonate and a fibrous protein called conchiolin. As the nacre builds up in layers of minute aragonite tablets, it fills the growing pearl sac and eventually forms a pearl.\n",
"Majorica pearls are not formed in mollusks, but are man-made on solid glass balls coated with layers of pigmented and protective lacquers. They begin from high density dull glass with a specific weight, similar to that of real pearls. These nuclei are then dipped into a special pearly liquid, hemage, an adhesive paste made of oil and ground up fish scales or mother-of-pearl for their iridescence.\n",
"Pearl is a primarily feminine given name derived from the English word \"pearl,\" a hard, roundish object produced within the soft tissue of a living, shelled mollusk. Pearls are commonly used in jewelry-making. The pearl is the birthstone for the month of June. Pearls have been associated with innocence and modesty. Because it comes from the sea, it also has associations with the moon and with water. Pearls are also traditionally considered appropriate jewelry for debutantes and brides.\n"
] |
Why do I sink faster in water than others? | Buoyancy in water is all about water displacement.
Generally the fatter you are the easier it is to float. If you are more muscular with very little fat then you will sink. This is why it takes a toll on you. You have to work to stay afloat where others can do little to no work for the same effect.
| [
"A human is unlikely to sink entirely into quicksand due to the higher density of the fluid (assuming the quicksand is on dry ground and not under water, but even if underwater, sinking is still improbable). Quicksand has a density of about 2 grams per milliliter, whereas the density of the human body is only about 1 gram per milliliter. At that level of density, sinking beyond about waist height in quicksand is impossible. Even objects with a higher density than quicksand will float on it if stationary. Aluminum, for example, has a density of about 2.7 grams per milliliter, but a piece of aluminum will float on top of quicksand until motion causes the sand to liquefy.\n",
"'Whatever is less dense than water will float, because whatever is less dense than water will float' sounds stupid, but 'Whatever is less dense than water will float, because such objects won't sink in water' might pass.\n",
"Since the human body is only slightly less dense than water, water supports the weight of the body during swimming. As a result, swimming is “low-impact” compared to land activities such as running. The density and viscosity of water also create resistance for objects moving through the water. Swimming strokes use this resistance to create propulsion, but this same resistance also generates drag on the body.\n",
"Because of their balance issues, swimmers in this class can find the starting block problematic and often have slower times entering the water than other competitors in their class. Because the disability of swimmers in this class involves in a loss of function in specific parts of their body, they are more prone to injury than their able-bodied counterparts as a result of overcompensation in other parts of their body.\n",
"Continued or panicked movement, however, may cause a person to sink further in the quicksand. Since this increasingly impairs movement, it can lead to a situation where other factors such as weather exposure, dehydration, hypothermia, tides or predators may harm a trapped person.\n",
"For any vessel, a favourable flow will improve the vessel's speed over the bottom for a given speed in the water. Difficult channels are also more safely navigated during slack water, as any flow may set a vessel out of a channel and into danger.\n",
"The bottom is often easy to follow by eye and often has suitable tie-off points, but sometimes swimming close to it may cause silting, and it may result in a higher inert gas loading and higher gas consumption than an alternative route.\n"
] |
why are gay pride and black pride encouraged while straight pride and white pride are considered as racist ? | I've always found 'pride' to be a shit word for this sort of thing. 'Not-shame' would be more accurate, but there's no good word for that.
Basically in the past and to a degree in the present homosexuals and black people in the United States, amongst other groups, have been subjected to prejudice against them for their romatic attractions and/or heritage. The 'gay pride' or other such events are meant to simply say "We're not going to be ashamed of who we are because people did, and some people still do, have problems with us for reasons totally unrelated to who we really are. We're not going to give in to racism or anything."
In the USA at least your average straight white person doesn't belong to any group that's been subject to such in the past so it makes no sense to refuse to be ashamed like society has and to a degree still does expect you to be for being white and straight because... well because nobody has been picking on that demographic.
Now maybe white pride would be fine if it was just a bunch of Scots and Germans enjoying their traditional foods and all, but there's also the fact 'white pride' as a term has largely been used by white supremacist organizations so it's sort of tainted by association as well. | [
"The Black Gay Pride movement is a movement within the United States for African American members of the LGBT community. Started in the 1990s, Black Gay Pride movements began as a way to provide black LGBT people an alternative to the largely white mainstream LGBT movement. The movement serves as a way for black LGBT people to discuss the specific issues that are unique to the black LGBT community. While the mainstream gay pride movement, often perceived as overwhelmingly white, has focused much of its energy on marriage equality, the Black Gay Pride movement has focused on issues like medicine, homophobia in their communities and housing.\n",
"Black pride is a movement in response to dominant white cultures and ideologies that encourages black people to celebrate black culture and embrace their African heritage. In the United States, it was a direct response to white racism especially during the Civil Rights Movement. Related movements include black power, black nationalism, Black Panthers and Afrocentrism.\n",
"Political and social scientists commonly argue that the idea of \"white pride\" is an attempt to provide a clean or more palatable public face for white supremacy or white separatism and that it is an appeal to a larger audience in hopes of inciting more widespread racial violence. According to Joseph T. Roy of the Southern Poverty Law Center, white supremacists often circulate material on the internet and elsewhere that \"portrays the groups not as haters, but as simple white pride civic groups concerned with social ills\". Philosopher David Ingram argues that \"affirming 'black pride' is not equivalent to affirming 'white pride,' since the former—unlike the latter—is a defensive strategy aimed at rectifying a negative stereotype\". By contrast, then, \"affirmations of white pride—however thinly cloaked as affirmations of ethnic pride—serve to mask and perpetuate white privilege\". In the same vein, Professor of Education at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Cris Mayo, characterizes white pride as \"a politically distasteful goal, given that whiteness is not a personal or community identity, but has been a strategy to maintain inequities of privilege and power.\"\n",
"Support for straight pride events is often based on religious objections to homosexuality. Groups such as the White Aryan Resistance and Ku Klux Klan have also tried to oppose \"gay pride\" by stressing straight pride.\n",
"African Americans in general tend to have more homophobic beliefs than the rest of the country. More black Americans support the idea that queer people should be condemned, or that AIDS is an acceptable punishment for gay people. Some believe this to be attributable to the effect that conservative church going has on African Americans.\n",
"Officially, discrimination against gays is illegal, though discrimination is widespread, and government officials often ignore the law in practice. LGBT groups operate freely, and the government issues permits and provides security for gay-pride marches. Even though the state provides security for gay-pride marches and gatherings recently these marches and gatherings have led to clashes between the police and the paraders that have accused the government of discriminating them after some homophobic statements made by Colorado and UNACE congressmen.\n",
"While LGBT African Americans often face homophobia from heterosexual African Americans, they also conflict with LGBT Whites due to racism within LGBT culture. According to Margaret L. Anderson and Patricia Hill Collins, \"The linkage between race, class, and gender is revealed within studies of sexuality, just as sexuality is a dimension of each. For example, constructing images about Black sexuality is central to maintaining institutional racism\".\n"
] |
How did ancient archaeological sites like the Palace of Knossos and Troy (but not limited to) get buried? | Most ancient cities quite honestly get torn or burned down due to accidents, conquests, or natural disasters and are subsequently built over.
Tenochtitlan was the Aztec capital. The Aztecs had built and modelled their city over the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan. After the Spanish Conquest and the fall of the Aztec Empire, the capital of New Spain was built over the foundations of the razed city. After the Mexican Revolution, the site now stands as Mexico City.
You listed Troy, which was rebuilt so many times due to war or fire that historians have labelled the various iterations with numbers (Troy VI, Troy VII, etc). Heinrich Schliemann infamously destroyed several layers while searching for Homeric Troy.
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"The site of the Greek colony and its necropolis have been periodically excavated since the 19th century; even though the site has suffered from erosion (and the tombs also from looting), the digs produced rich findings (archaic ceramics, inscriptions, etc.).\n",
"Among the first archaeological sites discovered in Mount Olympus was the excavation site Spathes (Greek Σπάθες, swords). It is a necropolis from the Late Bronze Age. The oldest tombs are from the 14th century BC, the last traces of the use were found from the end of the 13th century, the beginning of the 12th century BC. The settlement, associated with the necropolis, has not been found. Many of the burial offerings were made in the Mycenaean style, so that the Mycenaean cultural circle probably also (see also History and archaeology Pierias) extended over the border of Thessaly to Pieria.\n",
"The first stratigraphic excavation to reach wide popularity with the public was that of Hissarlik, on the site of ancient Troy, carried out by Heinrich Schliemann, Frank Calvert, Wilhelm Dörpfeld and Carl Blegen in the 1870s. These scholars distinguished nine successive cities, from prehistory to the Hellenistic period. Their work has been criticized as rough and damaging — Kenneth W. Harl wrote that Schliemann's excavations were carried out with such rough methods that he did to Troy what the Greeks couldn't do in their times, destroying and levelling down the entire city walls to the ground.\n",
"Also, discovered in 1890, in this layer of Troy VI was Mycenaean pottery. This pottery suggests that during Troy IV, the Trojans still had trade with the Greeks and the Aegean. Furthermore, there were cremation burials discovered 400m south of the citadel wall. This provided evidence of a small lower city south of the Hellenistic city walls. Although the size of this city is unknown due to erosion and regular building activities, there is significant evidence that was uncovered by Blegen in 1953 during an excavation of the site. This evidence included settlements just above bedrock and a ditch thought to be used for defense. Furthermore, the small settlement itself, south of the wall, could have also been used as an obstacle to defend the main city walls and the citadel.\n",
"The Troy Museum ( or \"Truva Müzesi\") is an archaeological museum located close to the archaeological site of the ancient Greek city of Troy, in northwestern Turkey. Opened in 2018, it exhibits in seven sections of a contemporary architectural building the historical artefacts from Troy and some other ancient cities around and on nearby islands. The museum director is Ali Atmaca.\n",
"An alternative site, Hisarlik tell, a thirty-meter-high mound, was identified as a possible site of ancient Troy by a number of amateur archaeologists in the early to mid 19th century. The most dedicated of these was Frank Calvert, whose early work was overshadowed by the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s.\n",
"The topic still under debate is whether Troy was primarily an Anatolian-oriented or Aegean-oriented metropolis. While it is true that the city would have had a presence in the Aegean, pottery finds and architecture strongly hint at an Anatolian orientation. Only about one percent of the pottery discovered during excavation of Troy VI was Mycenaean. The large walls and gates of the city are closely related to many other Anatolian designs. Furthermore, the practice of cremation is Anatolian. Cremation is never seen in the Mycenaean world. Anatolian hieroglyphic writing along with bronze seals marked with Anatolian hieroglyphic Luwian were also uncovered in 1995. These seals have been seen in approximately 20 other Anatolian and Syrian cities from the time (1280 - 1175 BC).\n"
] |
why do leaves turn yellow and wither during fall? | During winter, there is not enough light or water for photosynthesis. The trees will rest, and live off the food they stored during the summer. They begin to shut down their food-making factories. The green chlorophyll disappears from the leaves. They then slowly begin to become waste products of the tree and turn from green to yellow/brown. | [
"Leaves in temperate, boreal, and seasonally dry zones may be seasonally deciduous (falling off or dying for the inclement season). This mechanism to shed leaves is called abscission. When the leaf is shed, it leaves a leaf scar on the twig. In cold autumns, they sometimes change color, and turn yellow, bright-orange, or red, as various accessory pigments (carotenoids and xanthophylls) are revealed when the tree responds to cold and reduced sunlight by curtailing chlorophyll production. Red anthocyanin pigments are now thought to be produced in the leaf as it dies, possibly to mask the yellow hue left when the chlorophyll is lost—yellow leaves appear to attract herbivores such as aphids. Optical masking of chlorophyll by anthocyanins reduces risk of photo-oxidative damage to leaf cells as they senesce, which otherwise may lower the efficiency of nutrient retrieval from senescing autumn leaves.\n",
"The leaves start as a burgundy color when they first emerge in the spring but as they grow and mature into summer, they turn into a deep green which indicates their increasing ability to photosynthesize. When nearing fall the colors turn back into a red to purple color.\n",
"Characteristically the trees shed their leaves for a short period in the dry season to reduce water loss, and produce a flush of new leaves just before the onset of the rainy season with rich gold and red colours masking the underlying chlorophyll, reminiscent of temperate autumn colours. \n",
"When leaves change color in the autumn, it is due to the loss of green chlorophyll, which unmasks preexisting carotenoids. In this case, relatively little new carotenoid is produced—the change in plastid pigments associated with leaf senescence is somewhat different from the active conversion to chromoplasts observed in fruit and flowers.\n",
"As the leaves turn yellow and fall, day temperatures are mostly still warm, particularly in March and April. Days are sunny, the thunderstorm season is over, and rain becomes more sporadic. Nights become colder, and residents often awake to a thick fog blanketing the Armidale valley, but by 9 am fogs have cleared to be followed by a bright sunny day. The year's first frosts usually occur in April, but they are not severe.\n",
"The young leaves in spring are brightly coloured pink to red before turning green; old leaves turn red or purple again before falling. Its petiolate leaves are 50–100 cm long, compound (two or three pinnacles) with leaflets, elliptical to ovate or lanceolate and of entire margins, 2–10 cm long by 0.5–2 cm wide, with petioles swollen at their bases. \n",
"The leaves are deciduous, opposite (or whorled), large, heart shaped, 20–30 cm long and 15–20 cm broad, pointed at the tip and softly hairy beneath. The leaves generally do not color in autumn before falling, instead, they either fall abruptly after the first hard freeze, or turn a slightly yellow-brown before dropping off. The catalpa tree is the last tree to grow leaves in the spring. The winter twigs of northern catalpa are like those of few other trees, having sunken leaf scars that resemble suction cups. Their whorled arrangement (three scars per node) around the twigs is another diagnostic.\n"
] |
why are americans saying special words for school years, like "sophomore"? | Cambridge!
In or before 1688, Cambridge University used a ranking system for students to help professors keep track of student progress: Fresh Man, Sophmore, Junior Sophister, Senior Sophister. These terms relate to the Greek "Sophos" meaning knowledge and were meant to reflect the amount of knowledge the student possesses.
Every major English-speaking University copied this in some form or another. It is why we now consider 4 years necessary to obtain a bachelors degree. The actual names of each rank varied from campus to campus. Importantly the names used at Harvard University were "Freshman, Sophomore, Junior Soph, Senior Soph." Sometime before 1800 "soph" was dropped from the upperclassmen titles.
In the 19th century the US greatly expanded its high school and university offerings. With many founders educated at Harvard, their system was exported across the US.
So the question should be, why did the British Empire stop using these terms? The answer is Empire. The older Universities in Scotland and Ireland adopted the 4 year system but, because they were not founded by Cambridge alumni, they adopted their own ranking terms. At St. Andrews University, for example, the ranks were bejaune, semi-bejaune, tertiand, and magistrate. As the U.K. sought to standardize education throughout its territory, it sought to not impose one campus culture on another, instead going with very clinical 1st-4th year.
The U.K. Terminology translates easily and is unambiguous even in the US, so it should be used in most cases.
TL;DR - Frontier principals had ~~dilutions~~ delusions of grandeur.
| [
"Among high-school and college students in the United States, the words \"freshman\" (or the gender-neutral terms \"frosh\" or \"first year\", sometimes \"freshie\"), \"sophomore\", \"junior\" and \"senior\" refer to the first, second, third, and fourth years respectively. For first-year students, \"frosh\" and \"freshie\" are another gender-neutral terms that can be used as a qualifier, for example \"Frosh class elections\". It is important that the context of either high school or college first be established or else it must be stated directly (that is, \"She is a high school freshman\". \"He is a college junior.\"). Many institutes in both countries also use the term \"first-year\" as a gender-neutral replacement for \"freshman\", although in the US this is recent usage, formerly referring only to those in the first year as a graduate student. One exception is the University of Virginia; since its founding in 1819 the terms \"first-year\", \"second-year\", \"third-year\", and \"fourth-year\" have been used to describe undergraduate university students. At the United States service academies, at least those operated by the federal government directly, a different terminology is used, namely \"fourth class\", \"third class\", \"second class\" and \"first class\" (the order of numbering being the reverse of the number of years in attendance). In the UK first-year university students are sometimes called \"freshers\" early in the academic year; however, there are no specific names for those in other years nor for school pupils. Graduate and professional students in the United States are known by their year of study, such as a \"second-year medical student\" or a \"fifth-year doctoral candidate.\" Law students are often referred to as \"1L\", \"2L\", or \"3L\" rather than \"nth-year law students\"; similarly, medical students are frequently referred to as \"M1\", \"M2\", \"M3\", or \"M4\". \n",
"\"Freshmen\" is the traditional term for first-year students arriving at school in the United States, but the slang term 'frosh' is also used. Due to the perceived gender exclusiveness of the term, some institutions including the University of North Carolina have adopted \"first-year student\" as the preferred nomenclature. Lasting between a few days and a week, the orientation is these students' informal introduction and inauguration to the institution. Typically, the first-year students are led by fellow students from upper years over the course of the week through various events ranging from campus tours, games, competitions, and field trips. At smaller liberal arts colleges, the faculty may also play a central role in orientation.\n",
"BULLET::::- The United States military academies officially use only numerical terms, but there are colloquial expressions used in everyday speech. In order from first year to fourth year, students are referred to as \"fourth-class\", \"third-class\", \"second-class\", and \"first-class\" cadets or midshipmen. Unofficially, other terms are used, for example at the United States Military Academy, freshmen are called \"plebes\", sophomores are called \"yearlings\" or \"yuks\", juniors are called \"cows\", and seniors are called \"firsties\". Some universities also use numerical terms to identify classes; students enter as \"first-years\" and graduate as \"fourth-years\" (or, in some cases, \"fifth-years\", \"sixth-years\", etc.).\n",
"There is additionally a difference between American and British usage in the word \"school\". In British usage \"school\" by itself refers only to primary (elementary) and secondary (high) schools and to \"sixth forms\" attached to secondary schools—if one \"goes to school\", this type of institution is implied. By contrast an American student at a university may talk of \"going to school\" or \"being in school\". US and British law students and medical students commonly speak in terms of going to \"law school\" and \"med[ical] school\", respectively. However, the word is used in BrE in the context of higher education to describe a division grouping together several related subjects within a university, for example a \"School of European Languages\" containing \"departments\" for each language and also in the term \"art school\". It is also the name of some of the constituent colleges of the University of London, for example, School of Oriental and African Studies, London School of Economics. \n",
"The terms \"old school\" and \"new school\" have fallen more and more into the common vernacular as synonyms for \"old\" and \"new\" and are often applied in this conversational way to hip hop, to the confusion and occasional exasperation of writers who use the terms historically. The phrase \"leader of the new school\", coined in hip hop by Chuck D in 1988, and presumably given further currency by the group with the exact name Leaders of the New School (who were named by Chuck D prior to signing with Elektra in 1989), remains popular. It has been applied to artists ranging from Jay-Z to Lupe Fiasco.\n",
"In the U.S., the four years of high school are termed the freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years (terms also used for college years); in Canada, the specific levels are used instead (i.e., \"grade nine\"). As for higher education, only the term \"freshman\" (often reduced to \"frosh\") has some currency in Canada. The American usages \"sophomore\", \"junior\" and \"senior\" are not used in Canadian university terminology, or in speech. The specific high-school grades and university years are therefore stated and individualized; for example, \"the grade 12s failed to graduate\"; \"John is in his second year at McMaster\". The \"first year\", \"third year\" designation also applies to Canadian law school students, as opposed to the common American usage of \"1L\", \"2L\" and \"3L\".\n",
"\"Freshman\" and \"sophomore\" are sometimes used figuratively, almost exclusively in the United States, to refer to a first or second effort (\"the singer's \"sophomore\" album\"), or to a politician's first or second term in office (\"freshman senator\") or an athlete's first or second year on a professional sports team. \"Junior\" and \"senior\" are not used in this figurative way to refer to third and fourth years or efforts, because of those words' broader meanings of \"younger\" and \"older.\" A junior senator is therefore not one who is in a third term of office, but merely one who has not been in the Senate as long as the other senator from their state. Confusingly, this means that it is possible to be both a \"freshman Senator\" and a \"senior Senator\" simultaneously: for example, if a Senator wins election in 2008, and then the other Senator from the same state steps down and a new Senator elected in 2010, the former Senator is both senior Senator (as in the Senate for two years more) and a freshman Senator (since still in the first term).\n"
] |
when drawing straws, are you more likely to get the short straw if you pick first, or after several people have already picked? | It does not matter. Say there is 5 straws. The first one to pick have a 20% chance of picking the shortest one. Now there is 4 straws so the next person have a 25% chance of picking the shortest one. However that is assuming the first person did not already pick the short straw. And there is an 80% chance that he did not. And 80% of 25% is 20% which is exactly the same chance as the first one had. This is true for everyone involved. The last person have an 80% chance that someone already picked the shortest straw so even if he have a 100% chance of picking the shortest straw if that remains that is only a 20% chance.
You can think of the situation differently. What if instead of straws there was sealed envelopes. The order in which you pick your envelope does not matter as everyone is left with an envelope that might be the special one. The fact that you open the envelope just after you have picked it or after everyone have picked does not change its contents. | [
"Straw is a soft, dry stalks containing small grains such as barley, oats, rice, rye, and wheat. Straw is easy to handle and available in most agricultural areas. When deciding to use straw, is imperative to make sure that the straw is not palatable. To do this, the seed must be checked to ensure it is not available for consumption. Straw has excellent absorbency and is unlikely to mold.\n",
"Internal water pulses from the straw (into the drop) and air movement around the suspended solution drop, can cause the rafts to spin swiftly around the drop surface. If there is almost no air movement around the suspended drop, then after approximately 12 minutes or more, the micro rafts may join up and form a latticework, which covers the entire drop surface. If the solution drop hangs too long on the straw (≈ 30 minutes), it may completely calcify over and block the calthemite straw tip.\n",
"Drawing straws is a selection method, or a form of sortition, that is used by a group to choose one member of the group to perform a task after none has volunteered for it. The same practice can be used also to choose one of several volunteers, should an agreement not be reached. It is a form of the practice of drawing lots, only using straws instead.\n",
"Straw is usually gathered and stored in a straw bale, which is a bale, or bundle, of straw tightly bound with twine or wire. Straw bales may be square, rectangular, or round, and can be very large, depending on the type of baler used.\n",
"Ideally such straws should be made of a material that is chemically inert, biocompatible and have physical characteristics that make them resistant to ultra-low temperatures and pressures created by their storage conditions, resulting in the expansion of liquids and liquid nitrogen.\n",
"When the straw reaches the end of the walkers it falls out the rear of the combine. It can then be baled for cattle bedding or spread by two rotating straw spreaders with rubber arms. Most modern combines are equipped with a straw spreader.\n",
"Whilst the majority of the grain falls through the concave, the straw is carried by a set of \"walkers\" to the rear of the machine, allowing any grain and chaff still in the straw to fall below. Below the straw walkers, a fan blows a stream of air across the grain, removing dust and fines and blowing them away.\n"
] |
Is it possible to ever encounter plastic in nature that wasn't made by humans? | Not in the strictest sense, as most definitions I have seen for plastic specifically use the words synthetic or man-made. As such a non-manmade plastic is impossible.
However plastics are really just polymers, long chain molecules that are usually organic (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, maybe a few heavier elements). There are tons of those in nature, you are probably touching a couple right now. Cellulose and starch are good examples, glucose polymers that are in almost every plant. Spider silk, DNA, and proteins are all polymers too. They usually don't look like what we think about when we say plastic but they have the appropriate properties and structures. | [
"A 2004 study by Richard Thompson from the University of Plymouth, UK, found a great amount of microdebris on the beaches and waters in Europe, the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Antarctica. Thompson and his associates found that plastic pellets from both domestic and industrial sources were being broken down into much smaller plastic pieces, some having a diameter smaller than human hair. If not ingested, this microdebris floats instead of being absorbed into the marine environment. Thompson predicts there may be 300,000 plastic items/km of sea surface and 100,000 plastic particles/km of seabed. International pellet watch collected samples of polythene pellets from 30 beaches from 17 countries which were then analysed for organic micro-pollutants. It was found that pellets found on beaches in America, Vietnam and southern Africa contained compounds from pesticides suggesting a high use of pesticides in the areas.\n",
"Some of the organisms are thought to accelerate the biodegradation of plastic materials into potentially hazardous chemicals. This could be potentially advantageous though, as scientists may be able to utilize the microbes to break down plastic that would otherwise remain intact longer. On the other hand, as plastic is broken down into smaller pieces and eventually microplastics, there is a higher likelihood that it will be consumed by plankton and enter into the food chain. As plankton are eaten by larger organisms, the plastic may eventually accumulate in fish eaten by humans.\n",
"The accumulation of plastic debris on the Earth threatens both wildlife and the environment. Plastic debris might choke or trap wildlife, and it could also penetrate toxic compounds into ecosystems. This land-originated problem has become a problem in ocean ecosystem as well since streams and rivers which are close to the land have carried the plastic debris into the coast, and currents transfer it to everywhere in the ocean. Plastic debris is a potential danger to all forms of aquatic life. Some marine species, like sea turtles, take plastic as prey items by mistake. Besides, some species might even pick up plastics and feed their offspring, which cause huge problems on growth and even cause mortality. Toxic compounds in plastics can disrupt hormone regulation in the cells of organisms, which can lead to alteration of animals’ mating behavior, reproductive ability, and even cause the development of tumors. Plastic debris could be a big threat to lives in the ocean.\n",
"The distribution of plastic debris is highly variable as a result of certain factors such as wind and ocean currents, coastline geography, urban areas, and trade routes. Human population in certain areas also plays a large role in this. Plastics are more likely to be found in enclosed regions such as the Caribbean. It serves as a means of distribution of organisms to remote coasts that are not their native environments. This could potentially increase the variability and dispersal of organisms in specific areas that are less biologically diverse. Plastics can also be used as vectors for chemical contaminants such as persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals.\n",
"So far, research has mainly focused on larger plastic items. Widely-recognized problems facing marine life are entanglement, ingestion, suffocation and general debilitation often leading to death and/or strandings. This causes serious public concern. In contrast, microplastics are not as conspicuous, being less than 5 mm, and are usually invisible to the naked eye. Particles of this size are available to a much broader range of species, enter the food chain at the bottom, become embedded in animal tissue, and are then undetectable by unaided visual inspection.\n",
"Manmade objects are often washed ashore in the wrack zone, posing a threat to coastal animals. Plastics in particular are the most common form of litter found on beaches, and it is estimated that 46% of shorebirds ingest plastic in their lifetime while 26% experience entanglement. A variety of effects have been observed in animals that ingest plastic, including reduced reproductive success, changes in immune function, and increased mortality. There is also growing evidence suggesting that plastic bioaccumulates through the food web, so predators may be affected by the accumulation of plastic in their prey's diet.\n",
"Her photographs for the 2014 book, \"Plastic Ahoy!\" by Patricia Newman, were called \"captivating\" by \"Library Media Connection\". The book was based on the 2009 Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastics Expedition or SEAPLEX to the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. The scientists on the expedition found that plastic was in nearly 10% of the fish they dissected. Based on their findings, fish in the gyre have eaten an estimated 12,000 to 14,000 tons of plastic.\n"
] |
If you are on the moon, does Earth appear to go through phases? | Yes.
In fact, it will be the exact opposite of whatever phase the Moon is in as seen from Earth. So if it's a New Moon as seen from Earth, it will be a Full Earth as seen from the Moon; if the Moon is in a waxing crescent phase, Earth will be in a waning gibbous phase. | [
"The lunar phase or phase of the Moon is the shape of the directly sunlit portion of the Moon as viewed from Earth. The lunar phases gradually and cyclically change over the period of a synodic month (about 29.53 days), as the orbital positions of the Moon around Earth and of Earth around the Sun shift.\n",
"In western culture, the \"four principal phases\" of the Moon are new moon, first quarter, full moon, and third quarter (also known as last quarter). These are the instances when the Moon's ecliptic longitude and the Sun's ecliptic longitude differ by 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270°, respectively. Each of these phases occur at slightly different times when viewed from different points on Earth. During the intervals between principal phases, the Moon's apparent shape is either crescent or gibbous. These shapes, and the periods when the Moon shows them, are called the \"intermediate phases\" and last one-quarter of a synodic month, or 7.38 days, on average. However, their durations vary slightly because the Moon's orbit is rather elliptical, so the satellite's orbital speed is not constant. The descriptor \"waxing\" is used for an intermediate phase when the Moon's apparent shape is thickening, from new to full moon, and \"waning\" when the shape is thinning.\n",
"The Earth phase, Terra phase, Terrestrial phase or phase of the Earth, is the shape of the directly sunlit portion of the Earth as viewed from the Moon (or elsewhere extraterrestrially). From the Moon, the Earth phases gradually and cyclically change over the period of a synodic month (about 29.53 days), as the orbital positions of the Moon around the Earth and of the Earth around the Sun shift.\n",
"While the Moon is orbiting the Earth, the Earth is progressing in its orbit around the Sun. After completing a sidereal month, the Moon must move a little further to reach the new position having the same angular distance from the Sun, appearing to move with respect to the stars since the previous month. Therefore, the synodic month takes 2.2 days longer than the sidereal month. Thus, about 13.37 sidereal months, but about 12.37 synodic months, occur in a Gregorian year.\n",
"When the Sun and Moon are aligned on the same side of the Earth, the Moon is \"new\", and the side of the Moon facing Earth is not illuminated by the Sun. As the Moon \"waxes\" (the amount of illuminated surface as seen from Earth is increasing), the lunar phases progress through new moon, crescent moon, first-quarter moon, gibbous moon, and full moon. The Moon is then said to \"wane\" as it passes through the gibbous moon, third-quarter moon, crescent moon, and back to new moon. The terms \"old moon\" and \"new moon\" are not interchangeable. The \"old moon\" is a waning sliver (which eventually becomes undetectable to the naked eye) until the moment it aligns with the Sun and begins to wax, at which point it becomes new again. \"Half moon\" is often used to mean the first- and third-quarter moons, while the term \"quarter\" refers to the extent of the Moon's cycle around the Earth, not its shape.\n",
"The Moon crosses from south to north of the ecliptic at its ascending node, and vice versa at its descending node. However, the nodes of the Moon's orbit are gradually moving in a retrograde motion, due to the action of the Sun's gravity on the Moon's motion, and they make a complete circuit every 18.6 years. This regression means that the time between each passage of the Moon through the ascending node is slightly shorter than the sidereal month. This period is called the nodical or draconic month.\n",
"The Moon orbits the Earth in approximately 27.3 days, relative to a fixed frame of reference. This is known as the sidereal month. However, during one sidereal month, Earth has revolved part way around the Sun, making the average time between one new moon and the next longer than the sidereal month: it is approximately 29.5 days. This is known as the synodic month and corresponds to what is commonly called the lunar month.\n"
] |
Why were the soldiers after WW1 seemingly so much more traumatized than the soldiers after WW2? | I'd say it's a difference of depiction more than anything else. The fact that more armies and more soldiers fought in WWII than in WWI, the new weapons available, the extent of the destruction caused by the war, and the extent of the atrocities committed in WWII, the trauma of the second world war was probably of a much greater scale than WWI; including civilians, the Second World War far out does the first in terms of the trauma.
Of course trauma is hard to quantify exactly, but it must be said that despite the reputation for horror attached to WWI, nothing in my mind at least can compare to the Second World War in terms of sheer human suffering. | [
"Soldiers (and other frontline personnel) returning home from World War I suffered greatly from the horrors of war that they had witnessed. Many returning veterans suffered from what was then known as shell shock; now known as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).\n",
"Veterans of World War I had little affection for the military hospitals; many memoirists complained of an inhumanity that seemed to increase with distance from the battlefield. At the front, wounded soldiers were treated by fellow-combatants and by familiar regimental doctors. 'The wounded man' recalled one soldier, ‘ is in a moment a little baby and all the rest become the tenderest of mothers. One holds his hand; another lights his cigarette. Before this, it is given to few to know the love of those who go together through the long valley of the shadow of death.' (76) All this changed in the rear of the battle zone and in the general hospitals back in ‘Blighty’. Given the restrictions on wartime transport their journey from the front might be surprisingly rapid. Gilbert Spencer (Stanley Spencer's younger brother who also served as a medical orderly) recalled his first terrifying moments at Beaufort when he was surrounded by a 'ward full of wounded Gallipoli soldiers, their skins sunburnt and their clothes bleached and the soil of Suvla Bay still on their boots.'\n",
"Every day during the Second World War, fighting men are \"wounded in action\", the terse military declaration in telegrams sent back to family and loved ones. Compared to similar wounds suffered in the First World War, 97% of the wounded are brought back to health.\n",
"Over the course of the war, the United States mobilized hundreds of thousands of men and endured an estimated 117,465 casualties. Of the men who survived and returned home, post-traumatic stress disorder created a major impact on society. During this time, and still today, post-traumatic stress (then more likely to be known as \"shell shock\") was not fully understood, but because of the traumatic nature of battle, many men were negatively affected after the war. Some men were forced to leave battle, which many people considered cowardice, and there were asylums throughout Europe housing men suffering from this condition. In some extreme cases, men were even shot for showing weakness. There are still people living today who lost family members because of this practice, which created lasting impacts on these children. Additionally, many of these men were teenagers when they left for war, and virtually all were under the age of 30; therefore many of these soldiers were barely out of childhood themselves.\n",
"Due to medical advances, warfare in the 21st century tends to yield more survivors with severe injuries which soldiers in previous wars would have died from. This means that, though fewer service members die, more return from war with injuries more serious, and in turn more emotionally devastating, than ever before. Among these injuries is the increasingly common traumatic brain injury, or TBI, the effects of which can range from a mild concussion to amnesia and serious neurological damage.\n",
"After World War II, countless veterans came back to America and many of them had a difficult time readjusting to civilian life. They searched for the adventure and adrenaline rush associated with life at war that had now left them. Civilian life felt too monotonous for some men who also craved feelings of excitement and danger. Others sought the close bonds and camaraderie found between men in the army. Furthermore, certain men wanted to combat their horrifying war memories and experiences that haunted them, many in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Thus, motorcycling emerged stronger than ever as a substitute for wartime experiences such as adventure, excitement, danger and camaraderie. Men who had been a part of the motorcycling world before the war were now joined by thousands of new members. The popularity of motorcycling grew dramatically after World War II because of the effects of the war on veterans.\n",
"The unprecedented casualties of World War I brought the need for treatment of acute and chronic pain, the means of treating that pain, and the side effects of that treatment, including opioid dependence, to the forefront of public consciousness.\n"
] |
What mathematical structure represents a spin-3/2 field? | You might be interested in the [Rarita-Schwinger equation](_URL_0_). The field is represented by a spinor. | [
"Spin is a 2-to-1 cover, while in even dimension, is a 2-to-1 cover, and in odd dimension is a 1-to-1 cover; i.e., isomorphic to . These groups, , , and are Lie group forms of the compact special orthogonal Lie algebra, formula_39 – Spin is the simply connected form, while PSO is the centerless form, and SO is in general neither.\n",
"In mathematics, a twisted cubic is a smooth, rational curve \"C\" of degree three in projective 3-space P. It is a fundamental example of a skew curve. It is essentially unique, up to projective transformation (\"the\" twisted cubic, therefore). It is generally considered to be the simplest example of a projective variety that is not linear or a hypersurface, and is given as such in most textbooks on algebraic geometry. It is the three-dimensional case of the rational normal curve, and is the image of a Veronese map of degree three on the projective line.\n",
"A Spin structure determines (and is determined by) a spinor bundle formula_10 coming from the 2 complex dimensional positive and negative spinor representation of Spin(4) on which U(1) acts by multiplication. We have formula_11.\n",
"In mathematics, spin geometry is the area of differential geometry and topology where objects like spin manifolds and Dirac operators, and the various associated index theorems have come to play a fundamental role both in mathematics and in mathematical physics.\n",
"More generally, the spin representations of Spin(\"d\") are quaternionic when \"d\" equals 3 + 8\"k\", 4 + 8\"k\", and 5 + 8\"k\" dimensions, where \"k\" is an integer. In physics, one often encounters the spinors of Spin(\"d\", 1). These representations have the same type of real or quaternionic structure as the spinors of Spin(\"d\" − 1).\n",
"This representation has definite spin . It turns out that a spin particle in this representation satisfy field equations too. These equations are very much like the Dirac equations. It is suitable when the symmetries of charge conjugation, time reversal symmetry, and parity are good.\n",
"In mathematics, the spin representations are particular projective representations of the orthogonal or special orthogonal groups in arbitrary dimension and signature (i.e., including indefinite orthogonal groups). More precisely, they are representations of the spin groups, which are double covers of the special orthogonal groups. They are usually studied over the real or complex numbers, but they can be defined over other fields.\n"
] |
double exposure | Originally, a double exposure is an accident where a camera does not advance the film to the next frame, and you take a second picture ontop of the first. This often results in a mess, but sometimes it makes an interesting effect.
Using digital cameras, the term 'double exposure' is somewhat misleading. New cameras actually have a mode that creates double exposures. You take one shot that is very high contrast, and then a second that has a flat texture. The camera mixes them together, and you can end up with a desirable effect. This has been a common photoshop trick for years now, but only recently have digital cameras included the double exposure mode. | [
"In photography and cinematography, a multiple exposure is the superimposition of two or more exposures to create a single image, and double exposure has a corresponding meaning in respect of two images. The exposure values may or may not be identical to each other.\n",
"Double Exposures (A.K.A. Alibi Breaker) is a 1937 British crime film directed by John Paddy Carstairs and starring Basil Langton, Julien Mitchell and Ruby Miller. It was made at Shepperton Studios as a quota quickie.\n",
"Herbert E. Krugman wrote \"Why Three Exposures may be enough\" while he was employed at General Electric. His theory has been adopted and widely use in the advertising arena. The following statement encapsulates his theory: \"Let me try to explain the special qualities of one, two and three exposures. I stop at three because as you shall see there is no such thing as a fourth exposure psychologically; rather fours, fives, etc., are repeats of the third exposure effect.\n",
"Double Exposure is a 1954 British crime film directed by John Gilling and starring John Bentley, Rona Anderson and Garry Marsh. It was made at Southall Studios as a second feature. The film's sets were designed by Wilfred Arnold.\n",
"In photography and cinematography, multiple exposure is a technique in which the camera shutter is opened more than once to expose the film multiple times, usually to different images. The resulting image contains the subsequent image/s superimposed over the original. The technique is sometimes used as an artistic visual effect and can be used to create ghostly images or to add people and objects to a scene that were not originally there. It is frequently used in photographic hoaxes.\n",
"In image processing, computer graphics, and photography, exposure fusion is a technique for blending multiple exposures of the same scene (bracketing) into a single image. As in high dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR), the goal is to capture a scene with a higher dynamic range than the camera is capable of capturing with a single exposure. \n",
"Medium to low light is ideal for double exposures. A tripod may not be necessary if combining different scenes in one shot. In some conditions, for example, recording the whole progress of a lunar eclipse in multiple exposures, a stable tripod is essential.\n"
] |
how do animals that come back from extinction overcome inbreeding problems | They don't. At least not in the short-term. In the short-term they're absolutely will be inbreeding related problems associated with that bottleneck.
In the long-term if the species does survive, it does so because the problematic genes that have been over-represented in the population are slowly culled out by natural selection.
Since that means that the population is going to be less healthy in the short-term, that poses a big problem that can make it even harder to recover from a very low population than it would be otherwise. | [
"Inbreeding and genetic diversity loss often occur with endangered species populations because they have small and/or declining populations. Loss of genetic diversity lowers the ability of a population to deal with change in their environment and can make individuals within the community homogeneous. If this occurs, these animals are more susceptible to disease and other occurrences that may target a specific genome. Without genetic diversity, one disease could eradicate an entire species. Inbreeding lowers reproduction and survival rates. It is suggested that these genetic factors contribute to the extinction risk in threatened/endangered species.\n",
"Inbreeding animals will sometimes lead to genetic drift. The continuous overlaying of like genetics exposes recessive gene patterns that often lead to changes in reproduction performance, fitness, and ability to survive. A decrease in these areas is known as inbreeding depression. A hybrid between two inbred strains can be used to cancel out deleterious recessive genes resulting in an increase in the mentioned areas. This is known as heterosis.\n",
"If the species slated for reintroduction is rare in the wild, it is likely to have unusually low population numbers, and care should be taken to avoid inbreeding and inbreeding depression. Inbreeding can change the frequency of allele distribution in a population, and potentially result in a change to crucial genetic diversity. Additionally, outbreeding depression can occur if a reintroduced population can hybridize with existing populations in the wild, which can result in offspring with reduced fitness, and less adaptation to local conditions. To minimize both, practitioners should source for individuals in a way that captures as much genetic diversity as possible, and attempt to match source site conditions to local site conditions as much as possible.\n",
"Solutions to minimize the factors that lead to extinction and risk of extinction often overlap because the factors themselves overlap. For example, deleterious mutations are added to populations through mutation, however the deleterious mutations conservation biologists are concerned with are ones that are brought about by inbreeding, because those are the ones that can be taken care of by reducing inbreeding. Here the techniques to reduce inbreeding also help decrease the accumulation of deleterious mutations.\n",
"Additionally, this deforestation and fragmentation also leads to demographic instabilities, and an increased probability of inbreeding, consequently leading to inbreeding depression and a population decline. In the case of inbreeding, the problem lies in the increase of the isolated fragments where golden lion tamarins live. Inbreeding leads to low levels of genetic diversity and has a negative effect on survivorship; inbred offspring have a lower survivorship than non-inbred offspring. Fragmentation leads to a decline in dispersal and as a result, a decline in breeding with individuals of other groups. Consequently, inbreeding depression is observed in these populations. With delay breeding, the decrease and shortage of territory puts pressure on golden lion tamarins to disperse in order to find necessary resources and areas suitable for their survival. However, dispersal is risky and requires a lot of energy that could have been used for reproduction instead.\n",
"In a study done on population distribution of \"Milicia excelsa\" in 2009, researchers found that most of the populations that were being studied were inbred. After some analysis the researchers found that the \"Milicia excelsa\" was inbreeding due to lack of proximity to other \"Milicia excelsa\" individuals. Inbreeding could contribute to why this species is moving closer to being on the “Threatened” conservation list. If the numbers of mates available are not high enough because dispersion methods are not effective over long distances, then the species will begin to suffer from inbreeding depression (inbreeding can lead to accumulation of recessive deleterious alleles in a population).\n",
"Purebred wild species evolved to a specific ecology can be threatened with extinction through the process of genetic pollution, the uncontrolled hybridization, introgression genetic swamping which leads to homogenization or out-competition from the heterosic hybrid species. When new populations are imported or selectively bred by people, or when habitat modification brings previously isolated species into contact, extinction in some species, especially rare varieties, is possible. Interbreeding can swamp the rarer gene pool and create hybrids, depleting the purebred gene pool. For example, the endangered wild water buffalo is most threatened with extinction by genetic pollution from the domestic water buffalo. Such extinctions are not always apparent from a morphological standpoint. Some degree of gene flow is a normal evolutionary process, nevertheless, hybridization threatens the existence of rare species.\n"
] |
why is unrefined sugar more expensive than white
sugar? by the same token, why do whole grain
products like whole grain bread and brown rice
tend to be more expensive than their white, refined
counterparts? surely, refining should add extra
cost? | In a third world country unrefined food is cheaper than refined food. But in the western world they realized they can charge more by calling it "healthy". | [
"Brown and white granulated sugar are 97% to nearly 100% carbohydrates, respectively, with less than 2% water, and no dietary fiber, protein or fat (table). Brown sugar contains a moderate amount of iron (15% of the Reference Daily Intake in a 100 gram amount, see table), but a typical serving of 4 grams (one teaspoon), would provide 15 calories and a negligible amount of iron or any other nutrient. Because brown sugar contains 5–10% molasses reintroduced during processing, its value to some consumers is a richer flavor than white sugar.\n",
"BULLET::::- Cost and shelf life – Many sugar substitutes are cheaper than sugar in the final food formulation. Sugar substitutes are often lower in total cost because of their long shelf-life and high sweetening intensity. This allows sugar substitutes to be used in products that will not perish after a short period of time.\n",
"One hundred grams of brown sugar contains 377 Calories (nutrition table), as opposed to 387 Calories in white sugar (link to nutrition table). However, brown sugar packs more densely than white sugar due to the smaller crystal size and may have more calories when measured by volume.\n",
"Despite historical consumer preference for refined white flour, whole wheat flour products are ascendant largely due to changing consumer attitudes. The Whole Grains Council industry association reports an approximate doubling of the whole wheat flour production from 2003 to 2007. In another visible example, whole wheat bread has reached approximate parity with white bread as measured by slice volume in the United States; as of 2010, whole wheat bread narrowly surpasses white bread as measured by dollar volume.\n",
"Caster sugar (also referred to as \"superfine\" or \"baker's sugar\") has a larger particle size than powdered sugar, approximately half that of granulated sugar. It is commonly used in baking and cold mixed drinks because it dissolves faster than granulated white sugar. Caster sugar can be easily prepared at home by grinding white sugar in a food processor to make it finer. The most common food caster sugar is used in is meringue. \n",
"Although brown sugar has been touted as having health benefits ranging from soothing menstrual cramps to serving as an anti-aging skin treatment, there is no nutritional basis to support brown sugar as a healthier alternative to refined sugars despite the negligible amounts of minerals in brown sugar not found in white sugar.\n",
"The product is attractive to food manufacturers, as its use greatly lowers the cost of production compared to using sugar or high fructose corn syrup (due to the lower quantities needed to achieve the same sweetening), while also benefitting some consumers by providing fewer \"empty\" sugar calories and a lower impact on blood sugar.\n"
] |
what is that bubbling creaking sound that my eyeballs make when i'm tired and i rub them? | Wen you rub your eyes from left to right and vice versa, especially over the joint of the two lids, you are causing air to get into and under your eye lids. This forms bubbles and makes squishy noises.
This seems to happen more if you are short sighted, because that means that your eyeball is not exactly spherical and makes it easier for bubbles to get trapped in.
Happens to me too. I am short sighted as well. If i press the edges of the eye lids they seem to flow to the centre. | [
"Periorbital puffiness, also known as puffy eyes, or swelling around the eyes, is the appearance of swelling in the tissues around the eyes, called the orbits. It is almost exclusively caused by fluid buildup around the eyes, or periorbital edema. Minor puffiness usually detectable below the eyes only is often called eye bags. Such transient puffiness is distinct from the age related and gradual increase in the size of the fat pad lying below the lower eyelids (suborbicularis oculi fat – \"SOOF\") which can also be colloquially referred to as eye bags.\n",
"Later, Richard F. Thompson sought the engram in the cerebellum, rather than the cerebral cortex. He used classical conditioning of the eyelid response in rabbits in search of the engram. He puffed air upon the cornea of the eye and paired it with a tone. (This puff normally causes an automatic blinking response. After a number of experiences associating it with a tone, the rabbits became conditioned to blink when they heard the tone even without a puff.) The experiment monitored several brain regions, trying to locate the engram.\n",
"Dry eyes can be exacerbated by smoky environments, dust and air conditioning and by our natural tendency to reduce our blink rate when concentrating. Purposefully blinking, especially during computer use and resting tired eyes are basic steps that can be taken to minimise discomfort. Rubbing one's eyes can irritate them further, so should be avoided. Conditions such as blepharitis can often co-exist and paying particular attention to cleaning the eyelids morning and night with mild soaps and warm compresses can improve both conditions.\n",
"The Bubble Eye is a small variety of fancy goldfish with upward pointing eyes that are accompanied by two large fluid-filled sacs. It is a dorsal-less fish -- good specimens will have a clean back and eye bubbles that match in color and size. Their bubbles are quite delicate, so the fish should be kept separately from boisterous types, as well as sharp tank decor. Although the bubbles will regrow if punctured, injury could leave the fish prone to infections. The bubbles can disadvantage the fish as it is not a strong swimmer, with a seemingly low bobbing head at times; bubbles are infamous for being sucked into filters and siphons in an aquarium.\n",
"The most common phosphenes are pressure phosphenes, caused by rubbing or applying pressure on or near the closed eyes. They have been known since antiquity, and described by the Greeks. The pressure mechanically stimulates the cells of the retina. Experiences include a darkening of the visual field that moves against the rubbing, a diffuse colored patch that also moves against the rubbing, a scintillating and ever-changing and deforming light grid with occasional dark spots (like a crumpling fly-spotted flyscreen), and a sparse field of intense blue points of light. Pressure phosphenes can persist briefly after the rubbing stops and the eyes are opened, allowing the phosphenes to be seen on the visual scene. Hermann von Helmholtz and others have published drawings of their pressure phosphenes. One example of a pressure phosphene is demonstrated by gently pressing the side of one's eye and observing a colored ring of light on the opposite side, as detailed by Isaac Newton.\n",
"BULLET::::- Broth Eye: A man from Yakari's village. He is extremely lazy and unfit, and spends the day lying in front of his tipi and smoking his pipe. In the cartoon, he is called Eyes-Always-Shut, because every time he is seen he is taking a nap, and often someone steps on his belly.\n",
"Palatal myoclonus is a rapid spasm of the palatal (roof of the mouth) muscles, which results in clicking or popping in the ear. The movements of the palate vary in rate between 40 and 200 beats per minute. Chronic clonus is often due to lesions of the central tegmental tract (which connects the red nucleus to the ipsilateral inferior olivary nucleus). Uniquely, the clicking noise does not subside when the patient sleeps.\n"
] |
How does the quantum tunneling effect limit development of micro processors and how do we overcome that? | When transistors get to a certain size, they can’t always hold electrons back, which can cause false signals and errors in computations. As far as I know, we can’t directly overcome tunneling, we can only work around it. | [
"Fundamental quantum mechanical concepts are central to this phenomenon, which makes quantum tunnelling one of the novel implications of quantum mechanics. Quantum tunneling is projected to create physical limits to the size of the transistors used in microprocessors, due to electrons being able to \"tunnel\" past them if the transistors are too small.\n",
"Quantum tunneling does not appear to provide a major catalytic advantage, since the tunneling contributions are similar in the catalyzed and the uncatalyzed reactions in solution. However, the tunneling contribution (typically enhancing rate constants by a factor of ~1000 compared to the rate of reaction for the classical 'over the barrier' route) is likely crucial to the viability of biological organisms. This emphasizes the general importance of tunneling reactions in biology.\n",
"Single-threaded microprocessors today waste many cycles while waiting to access memory, considerably limiting system performance. The use of multi-threading masks the effect of memory latency by increasing processor utilization. As one thread stalls, additional threads are instantly fed into the pipeline and executed, resulting in a significant gain in application throughput. Users can allocate dedicated processing bandwidth to real-time tasks resulting in a guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS). MIPS’ MT technology constantly monitors the progress of threads and dynamically takes corrective actions to meet or exceed the real-time requirements. A processor pipeline can achieve 80-90% utilization by switching threads during data-dependent stalls or cache misses. All of this leads to an improved mobile device user experience, as responsiveness is greatly increased. \n",
"Quantum tunneling is essential for nuclear fusion in stars. The temperature in stars' cores is generally insufficient to allow atomic nuclei to overcome the Coulomb barrier and achieve Thermonuclear fusion. Quantum tunneling increases the probability of penetrating this barrier. Though this probability is still low, the extremely large number of nuclei in the core of a star is sufficient to sustain a steady fusion reaction for millions, billions, or even trillions of years - a precondition for the evolution of life in insolation habitable zones.\n",
"Even though quantum braids are inherently more stable than trapped quantum particles, there is still a need to control for error inducing thermal fluctuations, which produce random stray pairs of anyons which interfere with adjoining braids. Controlling these errors is simply a matter of separating the anyons to a distance where the rate of interfering strays drops to near zero. Simulating the dynamics of a topological quantum computer may be a promising method of implementing fault-tolerant quantum computation even with a standard quantum information processing scheme. Raussendorf, Harrington, and Goyal have studied one model, with promising simulation results.\n",
"Quantum tunnelling can be modeled by using the path integral formation to determine the action of the trajectory through a potential barrier. Using the WKB approximation, the tunneling rate () can be determined to be of the form\n",
"Micro-threads provide a very good solution to hide memory latency best based on the run-time utilization of the microprocessor. For example, if the memory latency is very high compared to processing and context switching time, more micro-threads can be added; this happens when large data chunks are requested from memory or there are many memory hot-spots. If this ration is small, less micro-threads might be introduced at run-time. This depends on factors related to the implemented application and system's run-time factors.\n"
] |
Do the rate of calorie intake and weight gain have any relationship? | eating an extra 4k in a day would drastically alter hormones via increasing insulin and a variety of other hormones (thyroid hormone for example). these drastic hormone deviations shouldn't be seen if you only eat a couple hundred extra kcal per day.
i'm not quite sure, but I believe the drastic changes in hormone levels would promote lipogenesis to a greater extent. i haven't seen any studies on this. | [
"Weight gain has a latency period. The effect that eating has on weight gain can vary greatly depending on the following factors: energy (calorie) density of foods, exercise regimen, amount of water intake, amount of salt contained in the food, time of day eaten, age of individual, individual's country of origin, individual's overall stress level, and amount of water retention in ankles/feet. Typical latency periods vary from three days to two weeks after ingestion.\n",
"Calories expended, however, changed little. Accordingly, Cutler posits that the 20 min average reduced time of food preparation has resulted in an average increase of 100 Cal per day per individual. The extra 100 Cal can largely account for a weight gain of 10-12 lb in the American population over the past 20 years.\n",
"Long-term weight management is directly proportional to calories absorbed from feeding; nevertheless, myriad non-caloric factors also play biologically significant roles (not covered here) in estimating energy intake. In counting energy expenditure, the use of a resting measurement (RMR) is the most accurate method for estimating the major portion of Total daily energy expenditure (TEE), thereby giving the closest approximations when planning & following a Calorie Intake Plan. Thus, estimation of REE by indirect calorimetry is strongly recommended for accomplishing long-term weight management, a conclusion reached and maintained due to ongoing observational research by well-respected institutions such as the USDA, AND (previously ADA), ACSM, and internationally by the WHO.\n",
"A 2007 study demonstrated that administration of 7-keto-DHEA to overweight adults in conjunction with a calorie-restricted diet effectively reverses the decline in resting metabolic rate (RMR) normally associated with dieting. 7-Keto-DHEA demonstrated an ability to increase RMR by 1.4% above baseline levels and demonstrated a 5.4% increase in daily RMR when administered with a calorie-restricted diet.\n",
"The scientific consensus is that any weight loss reported by individuals on an \"HCG diet\" may be attributed entirely to the fact that such diets prescribe calorie intake of between 500 and 1,000 calories per day, substantially below recommended levels for an adult, to the point that this may risk health effects associated with malnutrition.\n",
"While an increase in food intake is often the case after exposure, weight gain involves the body's maintenance of its metabolic setpoint as well. Given this information, it is particularly important to note that exposure during development and initial programming of these setpoints can be extremely significant throughout the remainder of life.\n",
"Studies comparing NSLP participants and nonparticipants have been inconclusive on whether weight gain rates differ between the two groups. The 2008 Economic Research Service study found \"similar calorie intakes for participants and nonparticipants but higher fat and sodium intakes for participants\". The most obvious challenge to efforts to address such problems is that even if more nutritious foods are provided, there is no guarantee that students will eat them. Additionally, the NSLP does not take into account the physiological differences among participants: Some children are smaller than others, some are more athletic, and some have metabolisms that require more calories than the NSLP allows.\n"
] |
When listening to music with earbuds/headphones, how are the producers/artists able to make the music only play on one side? | This is called stereophonic sound, or simply stereo. It works by storing the music in 2 separate channels, one intended to be played by the speaker (or earbud) on the left side and one for the right side.
On the recording side, this effect is created by using specific microphone setups, for example two microphones placed some distance apart. Or as an added effect in post production. In this case, the voice moving from side to the other will be an effect that was added after recording where the voice is initially only present in one channel, but is gradually added to the second channel at the same time as it is being muted in the first. This has the effect of the voice moving from one speaker to the other.
The stereo concept can be extended to more channels and speakers. Surround-sound can contain many channels, each associated with a specific spatial orientation (front-left, back-left, center, front-right, back-right for a standard 5 channel setup) as well as a channel with the low frequencies specifically meant to be player on a subwoofer. | [
"Conventional music recording is produced for stereo playback which makes use of only Left and Right playback for speakers and headphones. The implementation of Dummy Head allows the recording artist to make use of three dimensional sound reproduction. This is because through playback via headphones the listener perceives sound as if they were in the position of the dummy. The recording is perceived through the pinnae of the dummy head.\n",
"The song samples Think (About It). Two turntables were used in the process. One which plays the break in reverse and can be heard in the left ear. The other plays the break normally and can be heard in the right ear.\n",
"Headphone amps with sub-mixing capabilities allow the listener to adjust, mix and monitor audio signals coming from multiple sources at the same time. This kind of headphone amp is often utilized during recording sessions to sub-mix playback of individual stem-mixes or instruments coming from a mixing board or a playback device. In many cases the listeners have their own sets of controls allowing them to adjust various aspects of the mix and individual and global parameters such as channel level, global loudness, bass and treble.\n",
"Yoshimura's music makes use of auditory feedback which he creates using a microphone (to pick up the noise in the room of performance), a small mixing console (used to carry the signal and to record performances), an equalizer (to adjust the frequencies sent to the output - the equaliser is set up prior to, and is left untouched throughout, the performance) and a set of headphones (which project the sound back into the room - no other amplification is used). \n",
"I have to be able to feel the bass. I've worked hard with our producers to make sure that when you play our records on your stereo, you can feel the bass. You might not necessarily be able to hear it all the time, but if you turn it up you can feel the movement in the low end—that it's moving the song. And when it's not there, it should be creating a dynamic.\n",
"The duo use field recordings to form major elements of their music. \"It’s amazing what you can pick up with a field microphone. I mean, you might just hear someone riding around but when you slow it down it’s almost like there’s a beat to it. And then just taking little pockets of that rhythm and stretching it out. A lot of what we do is about experimenting with different little bits of tone that you don’t necessarily hear on the first listen... and then trying to make songs out of them.\"\n",
"In the professional audio sector, headphones are used in live situations by disc jockeys with a DJ mixer, and sound engineers for monitoring signal sources. In radio studios, DJs use a pair of headphones when talking to the microphone while the speakers are turned off to eliminate acoustic feedback while monitoring their own voice. In studio recordings, musicians and singers use headphones to play or sing along to a backing track or band. In military applications, audio signals of many varieties are monitored using headphones.\n"
] |
Why do certain materials in my dishwasher retain water so much longer than others? | Heat capacity.
Ceramic/Metallic objects can store a lot more heat during the long wash/rinse cycles than plastic objects can. During the drying cycle, that helps evaporate any water that remains on them, while the plastic objects cool off before the water evaporates. | [
"Absorption or desorption of water (or other solvents) can change the size of many common materials; many organic materials change size much more due to this effect than due to thermal expansion. Common plastics exposed to water can, in the long term, expand by many percent.\n",
"The heat inside the dishwasher dries the contents after the final hot rinse; the final rinse adds a small amount of rinse-aid to the hot water, as this improves drying significantly by reducing the inherent surface tension of the water. Plastic and non-stick items form drops with smaller surface area and may not dry properly compared to china and glass, which also store more heat that better evaporate the little water that remains on them. Some dishwashers incorporate a fan to improve drying. Older dishwashers with a visible heating element (at the bottom of the wash cabinet, below the bottom basket) may use the heating element to improve drying; however, this uses more energy.\n",
"In many items, moisture encourages the growth of mold and spoilage. Condensation may also damage other items like electronics and may speed the decomposition of chemicals, such as those in vitamin pills. Through the inclusion of silica gel packets, these items can be preserved longer.\n",
"Unlike most plastics, it does not produce significant outgassing even at high temperatures, which makes it useful for lightweight heat shields and crucible support. It also performs well in vacuum applications, down to extremely low cryogenic temperatures. However, Vespel tends to absorb a small amount of water, resulting in longer pump time while placed in a vacuum.\n",
"Of course glass containers can also be reused, and in developing countries this is common, however the environmental impact of washing containers as against remelting them is uncertain. Factors to consider here are the chemicals and fresh water used in the washing, and the fact that a single-use container can be made much lighter, using less than half the glass (and therefore energy content) of a multiuse container. Also, a significant factor in the developed world's consideration of reuse are producer concerns over the risk and consequential product liability of using a component (the reused container) of unknown and unqualified safety.\n",
"One of the key standards of preservation is that of reversibility: anything done to preserve a piece should be able to be undone with minimal damage to the piece itself. Because wet cleaning is a chemical process, it is not reversible, and so should be used only when absolutely necessary.\n",
"Containers such as jars often have an excess of material due to the molding process. This is trimmed off by spinning a knife around the container which cuts the material away. This excess plastic is then recycled to create new moldings. Spin Trimmers are used on a number of materials, such as PVC, HDPE and PE+LDPE. Different types of the materials have their own physical characteristics affecting trimming. For example, moldings produced from amorphous materials are much more difficult to trim than crystalline materials. Titanium coated blades are often used rather than standard steel to increase life by a factor of 30 times.\n"
] |
why shouldn't you clean your earwax? | Cleaning earwax is fine, cleaning too much is when their is an issue. As earwax protects your ears from excess sound, so too little earwax can result in damaged eardrums.
I normally just wrap a tissue round my little finger and clean my ear, this means that only some wax is cleaned as the finger is too big to go fully into the ear. | [
"Ear cleaning in general may also be ineffective when used by one with little experience or guidance. When done incorrectly, significant amounts of ear wax may be pushed deeper into the ear canal rather than removed. The lining of the ear is delicate and can be easily damaged. The ear is also self-cleaning and earwax is needed to protect the ear from dirt, dust, and bacterial infections.\n",
"Earwax, also known by the medical term cerumen, is a gray, orange, red or yellowish waxy substance secreted in the ear canal of humans and other mammals. It protects the skin of the human ear canal, assists in cleaning and lubrication, and also provides protection against bacteria, fungi, insects, and water.\n",
"Earwax, also known as cerumen, is a yellowish, waxy substance secreted in the ear canals. It plays an important role in the human ear canal, assisting in cleaning and lubrication, and also provides some protection from bacteria, fungi, and insects. Excess or impacted cerumen can press against the eardrum and/or occlude the external auditory canal and impair hearing, causing conductive hearing loss. If left untreated, cerumen impaction can also increase the risk of developing an infection within the ear canal.\n",
"Cleaning of the ears is very important for treatment of ear infections. Home remedy cleansing and antiseptic mixtures are made from isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol, boric acid, acetic acid (vinegar), and many herbal extracts in various proportions. In some recipes, povidone-iodine (\"betadine\") is added as well. Some natural ear cleaners may slightly lower the pH levels in dogs' ears, making the ear less susceptible to recurring infections. Many commercial ear cleaners are also available in retail stores and online.\n",
"Excessive body hygiene of the ear canals can result in infection or irritation. The ear canals require less body hygiene care than other parts of the body, because they are sensitive, and the body adequately cares for them. Most of the time the ear canals are self-cleaning; that is, there is a slow and orderly migration of the skin lining the ear canal from the eardrum to the outer opening of the ear. Old earwax is constantly being transported from the deeper areas of the ear canal out to the opening where it usually dries, flakes, and falls out. Attempts to clean the ear canals through the removal of earwax can reduce ear canal cleanliness by pushing debris and foreign material into the ear that the natural movement of ear wax out of the ear would have removed.\n",
"Rabbi Eleazar reasoned that because uses the term \"ear\" (in connection with the slave who refused to go out free) and also uses the term \"ear\" (in connection with the purification ritual for one with skin disease), just as explicitly requires using the right ear of the one to be cleansed, so must also require using the slave's right ear.\n",
"The aim of cleaning is to remove any byproducts of the infection which lead to further irritation and discomfort, and may be in turn, causes of further infection. Good care often involves cleaning the ear daily, to prevent build-up and bring the infection under control.\n"
] |
why is there little to no border security between european nations. | There's an agreement between many European countries called the Schengen Agreement. This means they have all agreed to abolish border controls between their countries, and cooperate on maintaining border controls with countries outside of the Schengen Area. So for the purposes of border controls, it's as if they were a single country, including when it comes to issuing visas.
This is not strictly part of the EU, but it's closely related. Not all EU countries are in Schengen and there's some non-EU countries in it. For example UK, Ireland and Cyprus are currently in the EU, but not in Schengen. While Norway, Switzerland and Iceland are in Schengen but not the EU.
It is closely tied to the EU because in general EU members are expected to join Schengen eventually. Although some members have an opt out (including the UK, but it's leaving the EU anyway so it's moot). | [
"European Union laws prohibit systematic customs checks at any border between two members of its Customs Union. So, there is permanent customs facility at the borders with these countries. However, France has borders with non members of this Union : Switzerland, Andorra, Brazil and Surinam. At these borders are located customs facilities.\n",
"Another example of border security in Europe is the Israeli anti-tunnel barrier along its border with the Gaza Strip, a part of the State of Palestine under the control of Hamas (a militant group backed by the Muslim Brotherhood, a Qatari-sponsored fundamentalist organisation). In order to curtail Hamas’s ability to build tunnels into Israeli-controlled territory, Israel have built a slurry wall. Similarly, Saudi Arabia has begun construction of a border barrier or fence between its territory and Yemen to prevent the unauthorized movement of people and goods. The difference between the countries' economic situations means that many Yemenis head to Saudi Arabia to find work. Saudi Arabia does not have a barrier with its other neighbors in the Gulf Cooperation Council, whose economies are more similar. In 2006 Saudi Arabia proposed constructing a security fence along the entire length of its 900 kilometre long desert border with Iraq in a multimillion-dollar project to secure the Kingdom's borders in order to improve internal security, control illegal immigration, and bolster its defences against external threats. As of July 2009 it was reported that Saudis will pay $3.5 billion for security fence. The combined wall and ditch will be 600 miles long and include five layers of fencing, watch towers, night-vision cameras, and radar cameras and manned by 30,000 troops. Elsewhere in Europe, the Republic of Macedonia began erecting a fence on its border with Greece in November 2015. On the land border between Palestine and the portion of the Sinai peninsula adminitered by the African nation of Egypt, the latter began construction of a border barrier in 2009 prompted by concern that militant organisations were making use of the Gaza Strip smuggling tunnels to move weapons and personnel between Gaza and Egypt.\n",
"An open border is the deregulation and or lack of regulation on the movement of persons between nations and jurisdictions, this does not apply to trade or movement between privately owned land areas. Most nations have open borders for travel within their nation of travel, examples of this include the United States and Canada. However, only a handful of nations have deregulated open borders with other nations, an example of this being all European Union members under the Schengen Agreement. Open borders used to be very common amongst all nations. However post WW1 lead to the regulation of open borders, making them less common and no longer feasible for most industrialized nations.\n",
"Many contemporary examples of border barriers are considered to be effective. Like the Berlin Wall, the Hungarian border barrier, the Spanish Ceuta border fence, and the Israeli border walls, like the Israeli West Bank barrier. In general they lowered the number of illegal border crossings. In Hungary, for example, the number of illegal immigrants dropped from 4500 per day to 15 per day, after a 175 km. long and 4 meter high fence was constructed in 2015. \n",
"EU countries that are not members of the Schengen Agreement are still committed to allow lawful entry by citizens of EU countries; they may however exercise border control at their discretion. This typically presents a significant hindrance to persons who are trying to enter those countries illegally.\n",
"The No Border Network (In the United Kingdom also called \"No Borders Network\" or \"Noborders Network\") refers to loose associations of autonomous organisations, groups, and individuals in Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe and beyond. They support freedom of movement and resist human migration control by coordinating international border camps, demonstrations, direct actions, and anti-deportation campaigns.\n",
"In the Schengen Agreement of 14 June 1985, 26 European countries (22 of the 28 European Union member states, plus four European Free Trade Association states) joined together to form an area where border checks on internal Schengen borders (i.e. between member states) are abolished and instead checks are restricted to the external Schengen borders and countries with external borders are obligated to enforce border control regulations. Countries may reinstate internal border controls for a maximum of two months for \"public policy or national security\" reasons.\n"
] |
Did the Communist party have any chance of success in the post WW1 world? | In hindsight, they probably did not have much of a chance of success. Electoral Communism had its high-water mark on the Continent as minor coalition partners to much-farther-right, distinctly-anti-Soviet labor and social democratic parties in proportional representation nations. (It never had more than one or two MPs in first-past-the-post Britain.) Revolutionary Communism was DOA almost everywhere it wasn't imposed by Soviet occupiers. The closest Communism got to power in the West was Republican Spain, and that through a lot of clever backstabbing in the chaos of the Civil War, with the end result not of victory but of enabling Franco to mop up rather more easily than he might have against a unified center-left coalition.
The rather more interesting question is, with the evidence then available, were those fears reasonable. I think that here you would say, "somewhat so, at least."
Data points supporting this:
The Soviet revolution was truly shocking, a new thing on the face of the Earth. If the French Revolution and the Terror had been a passing fit, this was the chronic disease. It was not unreasonable to believe the Soviets would export revolution or that a sufficiently motivated Communist movement, supported by the Soviets, might powerfully try to execute something similar given a sufficient background of disorder. (Indeed, the Spanish Civil War proved those fears entirely right, even if the effort still fell short).
World War One had created death and dismemberment, industrialization, economic mobilization and privation, and social tumult quite unlike anything Britain, France and Germany had experienced. It was not at all unreasonable to expect worker militancy and political mobilization. And, indeed, that happened. Unionization exploded, political parties favoring or favored by unions grew dramatically, etc. Electoral and revolutionary Communism were not able to catch the benefit, but the property-owning establishment couldn't have known that more centrist parties and labor organizations would be the beneficiaries. (In the UK, Labour surpassed the Liberals first in 1922, and were in government, albeit short-lived, in 1923.) That the post-war environment would be generally fruitful for unions and their political parties was re-demonstrated in 1945 by Clement Attlee's Labour victories coming despite Churchill's personal popularity. | [
"The Communist Party and its allies played an important role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but never succeeded, with rare exceptions, either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda of fighting for socialism and full workers' control over industry, or in converting their influence in any particular union into membership gains for the Party. The CP has had only negligible influence in labor since its supporters' defeat in internal union political battles in the aftermath of World War II and the CIO's expulsion of the unions in which they held the most influence in 1950. After the expulsion of the Communists, organized labor in the United States began a steady decline.\n",
"The Communist International was dissolved in 1943 after it was concluded that such an organization had failed to prevent the rise of fascism and the global war necessary to defeat it. After the 1945 Allied victory of World War II, the Party held to a doctrine of establishing socialist governments in the post-war occupied territories that would be administered by Communists loyal to Stalin's administration. The party also sought to expand its sphere of influence beyond the occupied territories, using proxy wars and espionage and providing training and funding to promote Communist elements abroad, leading to the establishment of the Cominform in 1947.\n",
"The immediate post-1945 period may have been the historical high point for the popularity of communist ideology. The burdens the Red Army and the Soviet Union endured had earned it massive respect which, had it been fully exploited by Joseph Stalin, had a good chance of resulting in a communist Europe. Communist parties achieved a significant popularity in such nations as China, Greece, Iran, and the Republic of Mahabad. Communist parties had already come to power in Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Yugoslavia. The United Kingdom and the United States were concerned that electoral victories by communist parties in any of these countries could lead to sweeping economic and political change in Western Europe.\n",
"The Bolshevik Russian Revolution of January 1918 engendered communist parties worldwide and their concomitant [[revolutions of 1917–1923]]. Few communists doubted that the Russian success of socialism depended on successful, working-class socialist revolutions in developed capitalist countries. In 1919, Lenin and Trotsky organised the world's communist parties into a new international association of workers—the [[Communist International]] (Comintern), also called the Third International.\n",
"The Communist Party (CP) and its allies played a role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but never succeeded, with rare exceptions, either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda or in converting their influence in any particular union into membership gains for the Party. The CP has had only negligible influence in labor since its supporters' defeat in internal union political battles in the aftermath of World War II and the CIO's (CIO) expulsion of unions in which the party held the most influence in 1950.\n",
"By far the largest contribution to the decline of Communist Party was their own success. They had gained support from the poor and non-Caucasian workers by messages of bringing an improved lifestyle, equal rights, and expanded opportunities. But as these promises were coming true there was no longer a need for the Party. Most members, including Jack Wayne Hall, head of the ILWU in Hawaii, became convinced the task of the Communist Party was completed and the Party was dissolved in 1958.\n",
"The success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia posed a threat in the eyes of many Australians, although to a small group of socialists, it was an inspiration. The Communist Party of Australia was formed in 1920 and, though remaining electorally insignificant, it obtained some influence in the trade union movement and was banned during World War II for its support for the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Menzies Government unsuccessfully tried to ban it again during the Korean War. Despite splits, the party remained active until its dissolution at the end of the Cold War.\n"
] |
Would deep-sea pressure have any effect on explosions? | Yes:
_URL_0_
During such an explosion, the hot gas bubble quickly collapses because:
The water pressure is enormous deeper than 2,000 feet.
The expansion reduces gas pressure, which decreases temperature.
Rayleigh–Taylor instability at the gas/water boundary causes "fingers" of water to extend into the bubble, increasing the boundary surface area.
Water is incompressible.
Vast amounts of energy are absorbed by phase change (water becomes steam at the boundary).
Expansion quickly becomes unsustainable because the amount of water pushed outward increases with the cube of the blast-bubble radius. | [
"The blast caused by a sudden release of the gas pressure inside a diving cylinder makes them very dangerous if mismanaged. The greatest risk of explosion exists while filling, but cylinders have also been known to burst when overheated. The cause of failure can range from reduced wall thickness or deep pitting due to internal corrosion, neck thread failure due to incompatible valve threads, or cracking due to fatigue, sustained high stresses, or overheating effects in aluminum.\n",
"Gas hydrate pingo may accumulate non-hydrate gas under pressure leading to explosions that forms craters. Crater depressions of this type have been found on the seafloor of Barents Sea. A trigger for the explosions may be drop in pressure as result of lowering of the sea level.\n",
"The high explosive in a depth charge undergoes a rapid chemical reaction at an approximate rate of . The gaseous products of that reaction momentarily occupy the volume previously occupied by the solid explosive, but at very high pressure. This pressure is the source of the damage and is proportional to the explosive density and the square of the detonation velocity. A depth charge gas bubble expands to reach the pressure of the surrounding water.\n",
"The overall effect of an underwater explosion depends on depth, the size and nature of the explosive charge, and the presence, composition and distance of reflecting surfaces such as the seabed, surface, thermoclines, etc. This phenomenon has been extensively used in antiship warhead design since an underwater explosion (particularly one underneath a hull) can produce greater damage than an above-surface one of the same explosive size. Initial damage to a target will be caused by the first shockwave; this damage will be amplified by the subsequent physical movement of water and by the repeated secondary shockwaves or bubble pulse. Additionally, charge detonation away from the target can result in damage over a larger hull area.\n",
"The heights of surface waves generated by deep underwater explosions are greater because more energy is delivered to the water. During the Cold War, underwater explosions were thought to operate under the same principles as tsunamis, potentially increasing dramatically in height as they move over shallow water, and flooding the land beyond the shoreline. Later research and analysis suggested that water waves generated by explosions were different from those generated by tsunamis and landslides. Méhauté \"et al.\" conclude in their 1996 overview \"Water Waves Generated by Underwater Explosion\" that the surface waves from even a very large offshore undersea explosion would expend most of their energy on the continental shelf, resulting in coastal flooding no worse than that from a bad storm.\n",
"Consequently, explosions where the depth charge is detonated at a shallow depth and the gas bubble vents into the atmosphere very soon after the detonation are quite ineffective, even though they are more dramatic and therefore preferred in movies. A sign of an effective detonation depth is that the surface just slightly rises and only after a while vents into a water burst.\n",
"With increasing depth, the effects of pressure start to occur. The pressure is due to the weight of water above pushing down. The approximate rate of pressure increase in the ocean is 10Mega-pascals (MPa) for every kilometre that is traveled towards the seafloor. This means that hydrostatic pressure can reach up to 110MPa at the depths of the trenches.\n"
] |
why soldiers are such a big deal in the us, while for europe for example it isn't such a big deal. | I don't know the answer and am braced for the downvotes but Americans seen to get very overenthused about a lot of things.
Halloween, Christmas, thanksgiving, soldiers. The world series of sports that only America plays etc. | [
"BULLET::::- The United States Army – Exhausted from all the heavy fighting across the world; it struggles to keep American superpower dominance in the world. The US Army has the power to balance out all types of combat and situations out in the field. The US Army has a brute force of veterans, as they can skill up in specific roles and improve their veterancy. The Army prefers the effectiveness of combat instead of relying overly on new technological weaponry, like the Cartel and the Chimera.\n",
"BULLET::::- The United States Military has a long tradition of foreign volunteers taking up arms for the United States. Foreign born officers, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, Tadeusz Kościuszko, and Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben provided vital contributions to the cause of independence. During the nineteenth century the US Army made extensive use of foreign soldiers, particularly Irish and German. German Jewish troops were common during World War II. Presently, many members of the US Marine Corps are of Latin American and not US nationality. However, many if not most non-American troops in the United States armed forces are usually seeking the expedited United States citizenship that comes with completion of a term of service, and can be seen as aspiring Americans rather than outright foreigners.\n",
"European armies still participate in wars outside the European continent, including conflicts involving NATO members. European soldiers currently are based in Africa, the Americas (Haiti) and Asia (Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon).\n",
"Since the start of the 21st century, the Army has been steadily modernising to become competitive with the armies of other American countries and have also taken certain steps to decrease spending and dependency on foreign equipment in order to become more autonomous such as the domestic production of the FX-05 rifle designed in Mexico and the commitment to researching, designing and manufacturing domestic military systems such as military electronics and body armor.\n",
"Experiences of countries who have abolished draft, especially the United States and France, show that professional armed forces can be more expensive than a draft-based military. Professional armies need to pay their soldiers higher wages, and have large advertising expenses to attract sufficient numbers of able recruits. The above-mentioned difficulties in recruiting soldiers for advanced ranks, as well as difficulties in retaining such higher-ranking soldiers whose term of service time ends, indicates that a professional army might have to make considerable financial efforts to be competitive as an employer.\n",
"The U.S. military is one of the largest militaries in terms of number of personnel. It draws its manpower from a large pool of paid volunteers; although conscription has been used in the past in various times of both war and peace, it has not been used since 1972. As of 2011, the United States spends about $550 billion annually to fund its military forces, and appropriates approximately $160 billion to fund Overseas Contingency Operations. Put together, the United States constitutes roughly 43 percent of the world's military expenditures. The U.S. armed forces as a whole possess large quantities of advanced and powerful equipment, along with widespread placement of forces around the world, giving them significant capabilities in both defense and power projection.\n",
"Despite such qualities, because of its impetuousness, it is much more difficult to control this army than a well-drilled European army, and I can only marvel at and admire the skill of its leaders and chiefs, of whom there is no shortage.\"\n"
] |
how i can circumvent internet censorship with proxy's and vpns. | [Tor](_URL_0_) is pretty good. They have a firefox plugin that gives you a button to enable or disable it. When you request a webpage through Tor, your request gets encrypted and sent to one of the Tor nodes out in the internet. That node sends it encrypted to another one, who then sends it encrypted to another one, etc. Eventually it reaches what's called an "exit node" which will actually go out to the internet and retrieve the web page you want, and then they send it back in the reverse order until it gets to your computer. The "exit node" can be just about anywhere in the world.
This way, your ISP and even people running the internet for your country can't figure out where you're going.
However, Tor is *slow* because it has to travel to so many nodes. Initially it's really slow, but once you start using it for 20 minutes or so it goes up to a little faster than 56k speeds. During the startup stages it has to find good nodes. You also shouldn't have your BitTorrent client running through Tor. | [
"Some networks have an HTTP proxy which can be used to speed up web access when multiple users visit the same websites, and to get past blocking software while the owner is using the network of some institution that might block certain sites. Public proxies are often slow and unreliable and so it is worth the trouble of setting up one's own private proxy.\n",
"An \"anonymous open proxy\" is useful to those seeking online anonymity and privacy as it can help users hide their IP address from web servers since the server requests appear to originate from the proxy server. It makes it harder to reveal their identity and thereby helps preserve their perceived security while browsing the web or using other internet services. Real anonymity and extensive internet security might not be achieved by this measure alone as website operators can use client-side scripts to determine the browser's real IP address and the open proxy may be keeping logs of all connections.\n",
"An open proxy is a forwarding proxy server that is accessible by any Internet user. As of 2008, Gordon Lyon estimates there are \"hundreds of thousands\" of open proxies on the Internet. An \"anonymous open proxy\" allows users to conceal their IP address while browsing the Web or using other Internet services. There are varying degrees of anonymity however, as well as a number of methods of 'tricking' the client into revealing itself regardless of the proxy being used.\n",
"Using a transparent proxy has the unintended side effect, quite independent of IWF filtering, of appearing to websites connected to as originating from the proxy IP instead of the user's real IP. Some sites detect the user's IP and adjust their behaviour accordingly. For example, if trying to download files from a file distribution website which restricts free-of-charge usage by enforcing a delay of typically 30 minutes between downloads, any attempt to download is interpreted as originating from the ISP's proxy rather than the user. The consequence is that if \"any\" user of that ISP has downloaded \"any\" file from the site in the last half-hour (which is very likely for a large ISP), the download is not allowed. This is an unintended consequence of ISP's use of proxy servers, not IWF filtering. File sharing sites distribute files of all types; for example Linux distribution files, which are very large. The use of proxy servers is also reported to have caused the problem with editing Wikipedia (but not the blocking of the actual offending web page) reported above.\n",
"There are services described as anonymizers which aim to provide users the ability to post anonymously by hiding their identifying information. Anonymizers are essentially proxy servers which act as an intermediary between the user who wants to post anonymously and the website which logs user information such as IP addresses. The proxy server is the only computer in this network which is aware of the user's information and provides its own information to anonymize the poster. Examples of such anonymizers include I2P and Tor, which employ techniques such as onion and garlic routing to provide enhanced encryption to messages that travel through multiple proxy servers.\n",
"Different techniques and resources are used to bypass Internet censorship, including proxy websites, virtual private networks, sneakernets, and circumvention software tools. Solutions have differing ease of use, speed, security, and risks. Most, however, rely on gaining access to an Internet connection that is not subject to filtering, often in a different jurisdiction not subject to the same censorship laws. According to GlobalWebIndex, over 400 million people use virtual private networks to circumvent censorship or for an increased level of privacy. The majority of circumvention techniques are not suitable for day to day use.\n",
"A content filtering proxy will often support user authentication to control web access. It also usually produces logs, either to give detailed information about the URLs accessed by specific users, or to monitor bandwidth usage statistics. It may also communicate to daemon-based and/or ICAP-based antivirus software to provide security against virus and other malware by scanning incoming content in real time before it enters the network.\n"
] |
During nuclear fission in uranium, what kind of radioactive rays are emitted? Alpha, Beta or Gamma? | All of them can result from a fission reaction.
After each fission reaction has occurred, the products may generally be in excited states, which can gamma decay to the ground state. Fission products tend to be neutron-rich, so they will usually beta decay one or more times to reach stability. Alpha emission from fission products is more rare than beta, but it's possible as well.
And alpha and beta decays don't necessarily go directly to the ground state in the daughter, so alpha and beta decays will often come with gamma rays as well.
The prompt radiation during a chain of fission reactions will consist of neutrons, gamma rays, fission products, and some light charged particles, while the delayed radiation will consist of alpha, beta, gamma, neutrons, protons, etc.
You can find an energy breakdown for a typical fission reaction [here](_URL_0_). These are averages, because neutron-induced fission of uranium-235 has many possible final states, each one generally having multiple paths by which to ultimately reach stability. So the amount of energy carried away by each kind of radiation varies event-by-event. | [
"The total prompt gamma ray energy in a fission explosion is 3.5% of the yield, but in a 10 [[Nuclear weapon yield|kiloton]] detonation the triggering explosive around the bomb core absorbs about 85% of the prompt gamma rays, so the output is only about 0.5% of the yield. In the [[Nuclear fusion|thermonuclear]] Starfish Prime the fission yield was less than 100% and the thicker outer casing absorbed about 95% of the prompt gamma rays from the pusher around the fusion stage. [[Nuclear weapon design#Fusion weapons|Thermonuclear weapons]] are also less efficient at producing EMP because the first stage can [[ionization|pre-ionize]] the air which becomes conductive and hence rapidly shorts out the [[Compton scattering|Compton current]]s generated by the [[Nuclear fusion|fusion]] stage. Hence, small pure fission weapons with thin cases are far more efficient at causing EMP than most megaton bombs.\n",
"The emission of a gamma ray from an excited nucleus typically requires only 10 seconds. Gamma decay may also follow nuclear reactions such as neutron capture, nuclear fission, or nuclear fusion. Gamma decay is also a mode of relaxation of many excited states of atomic nuclei following other types of radioactive decay, such as beta decay, so long as these states possess the necessary component of nuclear spin. When high-energy gamma rays, electrons, or protons bombard materials, the excited atoms emit characteristic \"secondary\" gamma rays, which are products of the creation of excited nuclear states in the bombarded atoms. Such transitions, a form of nuclear gamma fluorescence, form a topic in nuclear physics called gamma spectroscopy. Formation of fluorescent gamma rays are a rapid subtype of radioactive gamma decay.\n",
"Radioactive nuclei (radionuclides) commonly emit gamma rays in the energy range from a few keV to ~10 MeV, corresponding to the typical energy levels in nuclei with reasonably long lifetimes. Such sources typically produce gamma-ray \"line spectra\" (i.e., many photons emitted at discrete energies), whereas much higher energies (upwards of 1 TeV) may occur in the continuum spectra observed in astrophysics and elementary particle physics. The boundary between gamma rays and X rays is somewhat blurred, as X rays typically refer to the high energy electronic emission of atoms, which may extend to over 100 keV, whereas the lowest energy emissions of nuclei are typically termed gamma rays, even though their energies may be below 20 keV.\n",
"The emission of a gamma ray from an excited nuclear state allows the nucleus to lose energy and reach a lower-energy state, sometimes its ground state. In certain cases, the excited nuclear state following a nuclear reaction or other type of radioactive decay can become a metastable nuclear excited state. Some nuclei are able to stay in this metastable excited state for minutes, hours, days, or occasionally far longer, before undergoing \"gamma decay\", in which they emit a gamma ray.\n",
"How are gamma rays and neutrons produced by cosmic rays? Incoming cosmic rays—some of the highest-energy particles—collide with the nucleus of atoms in the soil. When nuclei are hit with such energy, neutrons are released, which scatter and collide with other nuclei. The nuclei get \"excited\" in the process, and emit gamma rays to release the extra energy so they can return to their normal rest state. Some elements like potassium, uranium, and thorium are naturally radioactive and give off gamma rays as they decay, but all elements can be excited by collisions with cosmic rays to produce gamma rays. The HEND and Neutron Spectrometers on GRS directly detect scattered neutrons, and the gamma sensor detects the gamma rays.\n",
"Compared to a pure fission bomb with an identical explosive yield, a neutron bomb would emit about ten times the amount of neutron radiation. In a fission bomb, at sea level, the total radiation pulse energy which is composed of both gamma rays and neutrons is approximately 5% of the entire energy released; in neutron bombs it would be closer to 40%, with the percentage increase coming from the higher production of neutrons. Furthermore, the neutrons emitted by a neutron bomb have a much higher average energy level (close to 14 MeV) than those released during a fission reaction (1–2 MeV).\n",
"Uranium appears in nature primarily in two isotopes: uranium-238 and uranium-235. When the nucleus of uranium-235 absorbs a neutron, it undergoes nuclear fission, releasing energy and, on average, 2.5 neutrons. Because uranium-235 releases more neutrons than it absorbs, it can support a chain reaction and so is described as fissile. Uranium-238, on the other hand, is not fissile as it does not normally undergo fission when it absorbs a neutron.\n"
] |
How do you determine the boiling point of water under certain vacuum pressures? | You use [Antoine's equation](_URL_0_) which is an empirical forumala that gives you the vapour pressure as a function of temperature. Each chemical has different A, B and C constants. You're going to have to convert your vacuum units into absolute pressure to use it however. To save you time, here's a graph of the result for water:
_URL_1_ | [
"The boiling point of a liquid varies depending upon the surrounding environmental pressure. A liquid in a partial vacuum has a lower boiling point than when that liquid is at atmospheric pressure. A liquid at high pressure has a higher boiling point than when that liquid is at atmospheric pressure. For example, water boils at at sea level, but at at altitude. For a given pressure, different liquids will boil at different temperatures. \n",
"Boiling-point elevation describes the phenomenon that the boiling point of a liquid (a solvent) will be higher when another compound is added, meaning that a solution has a higher boiling point than a pure solvent. This happens whenever a non-volatile solute, such as a salt, is added to a pure solvent, such as water. The boiling point can be measured accurately using an ebullioscope.\n",
"When measuring vacuum, the working liquid may evaporate and contaminate the vacuum if its vapor pressure is too high. When measuring liquid pressure, a loop filled with gas or a light fluid can isolate the liquids to prevent them from mixing, but this can be unnecessary, for example, when mercury is used as the manometer fluid to measure differential pressure of a fluid such as water. Simple hydrostatic gauges can measure pressures ranging from a few torrs (a few 100 Pa) to a few atmospheres (approximately ).\n",
"A pressure hypsometer as shown in the drawing (right) employs the principle that the boiling point of a liquid is lowered by diminishing the barometric pressure, and that the barometric pressure varies with the height of the point of observation. \n",
"Experimental measurement of vapor pressure is a simple procedure for common pressures between 1 and 200 kPa. Most accurate results are obtained near the boiling point of substances and large errors result for measurements smaller than . Procedures often consist of purifying the test substance, isolating it in a container, evacuating any foreign gas, then measuring the equilibrium pressure of the gaseous phase of the substance in the container at different temperatures. Better accuracy is achieved when care is taken to ensure that the entire substance and its vapor are at the prescribed temperature. This is often done, as with the use of an isoteniscope, by submerging the containment area in a liquid bath.\n",
"The boiling point is an important property because it determines the speed of evaporation. Small amounts of low-boiling-point solvents like diethyl ether, dichloromethane, or acetone will evaporate in seconds at room temperature, while high-boiling-point solvents like water or dimethyl sulfoxide need higher temperatures, an air flow, or the application of vacuum for fast evaporation.\n",
"The boiling point of a substance is the temperature at which the vapor pressure of the liquid equals the pressure surrounding the liquid and the liquid evaporates resulting in an abrupt change in vapor volume.\n"
] |
if we can produce phone screens that are 6" in diameter with a full hd resolution, whats stopping us from making 16k tvs? | Nothing is stopping us. Theres just no market value. Even 4k is limited by content creators actually making their products 4k in resolution, most of the market for media consumption is for 2k displays.
| [
"An important consideration, however, is that this is based on the physical screen size in millimeters and is not proportional to the screen size. As such, an 18 mm tube with a resolution of around 64 lp/mm has a higher overall resolution than an 8 mm tube with 72 lp/mm resolution. Resolution is usually measured at the centre and at the edge of the screen and tubes often come with figures for both. Military Specification or milspec tubes only come with a criterion such as \" 64 lp/mm\" or \"Greater than 64 line pairs/millimeter\".\n",
"In addition, the transmission need not convey as high a resolution as would be needed for a larger display. MediaFLO streams are only 200-250 kbit/s, which would be insufficient for a larger screen size.\n",
"As noted above, DCI 4K is 40962160, while 4K UHD is 38402160, producing a slight difference in aspect ratio rather than a significant difference in resolution. Traditional displays, such as LCD or OLED, are 3840 pixels across the screen, with each pixel being 1/3840th of the screen width. They do not overlap—if they did, they would suffer reduced detail. The diameter of each pixel is basically 1/3840th of the screen width or 1/2160th of the screen height - either gives the same size pixel. That 38402160 works out to 8.3 megapixels, the official resolution of 4K UHD (and therefore Blu-ray UHD discs).\n",
"Initially, the line up included 11-inch screen-size model and 13-inch screen-size model but the 11-inch version was dropped by the end of 2011 due to the low popularity in Korean market. Instead, 15-inch model superseded 11-inch one in early 2012. The screen size was slightly increased from 15.0 inch to 15.6 inch in 2014 but the thickness remained the same at .\n",
"In comparison to 4K UHD (38402160), the 16:9 5K resolution of 51202880 offers 1280 extra columns and 720 extra lines of display area, an increase of 33.% in each dimension. This additional display area can allow 4K content to be displayed at native resolution without filling the entire screen, which means that additional software such as video editing suite toolbars will be available without having to downscale the content previews.\n",
"Screen sizes are measured in diagonal inches; feature phones generally have screen sizes below 3.5 inches. Phones with screens larger than 5.2 inches are often called \"phablets.\" Smartphones with screens over 4.5 inches in size are commonly difficult to use with only a single hand, since most thumbs cannot reach the entire screen surface; they may need to be shifted around in the hand, held in one hand and manipulated by the other, or used in place with both hands. Due to design advances, some modern smartphones with large screen sizes and \"edge-to-edge\" designs have compact builds that improve their ergonomics, while the shift to taller aspect ratios have resulted in phones that have larger screen sizes whilst maintaining the ergonomics associated with smaller 16:9 displays.\n",
"WQVGA has also been used to describe displays that are not 240 pixels high, for example Sixteenth HD1080 displays which are 480 pixels wide and 270 or 272 pixels high. This may be due to WQVGA having the nearest screen height.\n"
] |
what "chained cpi" is, and how it affects the social security cuts. | Standard CPI has a couple of problems in that it overestimates inflation for consumers as it doesn't account for substitution in consumer behavior.
In the simplest example imagine someone is buying Lays brand chips that cost $2 a bag. Suppose that the price rises to $2.20 a bag, instead of accepting the higher price point some consumers will seek out a cheaper an alternative (store brand at $1.20 a bag) and so measuring inflation based on the change in price of these goods produces an inaccurate result as some consumers have achieved a cost saving as a result of the price increase.
Currently SSA use the standard CPI in their cost of living adjustments and due to the substitution bias this means that every year the program gets very slightly more generous. Chained CPI is an alternative measure that is corrected for the substitution problem so the benefits offered by SSA remain much more static then they would otherwise.
Another idea that is also being floated is setting benefits based on region instead of nationally. SSA use two indexes to calculate benefits; CPI for All Urban Consumers and CPI for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers. The names describe why these introduce a problem; not everyone is an urban consumer (and when they are the index biases for larger urban centers) and the spending behaviors of clerical workers is hardly indicative of the population as a whole. | [
"Application of chained CPI has been suggested as a means of reducing the US federal budget deficit by reducing the rate of growth of government benefits. The Moment of Truth Project estimates that moving to the Chained CPI would reduce the deficit by about $390 billion in the first decade alone, with roughly one third of the savings from Social Security, another third from increased federal revenue (via inflation-indexed tax provisions such as more slowly growing tax bracket thresholds), and the remaining savings from a combination of other spending programs and reduced interest on the debt. The Congressional Budget Office estimates switching to the chained CPI would save $340 billion \n",
"Moving to the chained CPI would reduce Social Security benefits by 3% for the bottom 60% of Social Security recipients and 4% for the top 40% of beneficiaries (per estimates for 2050 from the Social Security Administration ).\n",
"In 2012 and 2013 as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations, President Obama repeatedly proposed the application of chained CPI to social security benefits as a way to address budgetary shortfalls. This position was controversial with many, including Democrats and Social Security advocacy groups.\n",
"Zero Tolerance Knives (ZT Knives) is a knife brand of Kai USA, headquartered in Tualatin, Oregon, United States. Both Zero Tolerance and Kai USA are members of the Kai Group, a global cutlery company.\n",
"A cutoff or threshold is a limit used for binary classification, mainly between normal versus pathological (or probably pathological). Establishment methods for cutoffs include using an upper or a lower limit of a reference range.\n",
"Finally, the fourth level looks at the broad societal factors that help to create a climate in which violence is encouraged or inhibited: the responsiveness of the criminal justice system, social and cultural norms regarding gender roles or parent-child relationships, income inequality, the strength of the social welfare system, the social acceptability of violence, the availability of weapons, the exposure to violence in mass media, and political instability.\n",
"Social Security Disability Insurance (SSD or SSDI) is a payroll tax-funded, federal insurance program of the United States government. It is managed by the Social Security Administration and is designed to provide income supplements to people who are physically restricted in their ability to be employed because of a notable disability, usually a physical disability. SSD can be supplied on either a temporary or permanent basis, usually directly correlated to whether the person's disability is temporary or permanent.\n"
] |
can insects see cells and their organelles? aren't there insects or other very, small microorganisms (think face mites or mites in general) that can see things as small as mitochondria? any organism with eyes that can detect things- what's the smallest thing they can visually perceive? | People are talking about what the smallest visible thing actually is and while I find that very interesting, I wonder if they might be overlooking something (but I could be wrong).
An eye has to be fairly complex in order to perceive small, intricate things, and as far as I'm aware, the smaller a creature is, the less distinct and precise its vision by virtue of necessity. I think the better question is: is it possible for eye cells to be arranged so efficiently that they can perceive themselves? | [
"Many small organisms such as rotifers, copepods and flatworms use such organs, but these are too small to produce usable images. Some larger organisms, such as scallops, also use reflector eyes. The scallop \"Pecten\" has up to 100 millimetre-scale reflector eyes fringing the edge of its shell. It detects moving objects as they pass successive lenses.\n",
"The compound eyes of arthropods like insects, crustaceans and millipedes are composed of units called ommatidia (singular: ommatidium). An ommatidium contains a cluster of photoreceptor cells surrounded by support cells and pigment cells. The outer part of the ommatidium is overlaid with a transparent cornea. Each ommatidium is innervated by one axon bundle (usually consisting of 6-9 axons, depending on the number of rhabdomeres) and provides the brain with one picture element. The brain forms an image from these independent picture elements. The number of ommatidia in the eye depends upon the type of arthropod and may be as low as 5 as in the Antarctic isopod \"Glyptonotus antarcticus\" or range from just a handful in the primitive Zygentoma to around 30 thousand in larger Anisoptera dragonflies as well as in some Sphingidae moths.\n",
"All other parties interpret this as a large compound eye, the hexagons being preserved ommatidia (all researchers agree these are the same structure). This is supported by fossils of \"Dollocaris ingens\" which are so well preserved that individual retinula cells can be discerned. The preservation is so exceptional that studies have shown the species' numerous small ommatidia, distributed over the large eyes, could reduce the angle between ommatidia, thus improve their ability to detect small objects. Of the arguments above, it is posited by opponents that eyes are complex structures, and those in the Thylacocephala display clear and numerous affinities with compound eyes in other arthropod fossils, down to a cellular level of detail. The 'cephalic sac' structure itself is poorly preserved in Osteno specimens, a possible reason for interstitial 'sclerites'. The structural analogy with a cirripede peduncle lost supporting evidence when the 'ovaries' were shown to be alimentary residues, and the sac muscular system could be used to support the eyes. The unusual position of the stomach is thus the strongest inconsistency, but the Thylacocephala are defined by their unusual features, so this is not inconceivable. Further, Rolfe suggests the eyes' position can be explained if they have a large posterior area of attachment, while Schram suggests that the stomach region extending into the cephalic sac could result from an inflated foregut or anteriorly directed caecum.\n",
"At a cellular level, there appear to be two main \"designs\" of eyes, one possessed by the protostomes (molluscs, annelid worms and arthropods), the other by the deuterostomes (chordates and echinoderms).\n",
"While most insects have three simple eyes, or ocelli, only two ocelli are present in all species of Lepidoptera, except a few moths, one on each side of the head near the edge of the compound eye. On some species, sense organs called chaetosemata are found near the ocelli. The ocelli are not homologous to the simple eyes of caterpillars which are differently named as stemmata. The ocelli of Lepidoptera are reduced externally in some families; where present, they are unfocussed, unlike stemmata of larvae which are fully focussed. The utility of ocelli is not understood at present.\n",
"Most insects have one pair of large, prominent compound eyes composed of units called ommatidia (ommatidium, singular), possibly up to 30,000 in a single compound eye of, for example, large dragonflies. This type of eye gives less resolution than eyes found in vertebrates, but it gives acute perception of movement and usually possesses UV- and green sensitiity and may have additional sensitivity peaks in other regions of the visual spectrum. Often an ability to detect the E-vector of polarized light exists polarization of light. There can also be an additional two or three ocelli, which help detect low light or small changes in light intensity. The image perceived is a combination of inputs from the numerous ommatidia, located on a convex surface, thus pointing in slightly different directions. Compared with simple eyes, compound eyes possess very large view angles and better acuity than the insect's dorsal ocelli, but some stemmatal (= larval eyes), for example those of sawfly larvae (Tenthredinidae) with an acuity 4 degrees and very high polarization sensitivity, match the performance of compound eyes. \n",
"Xiphosurans have up to four eyes, located in the carapace. A pair of compound eyes is on the side of the prosoma, with one or two median ocelli towards the front. The compound eyes are simpler in structure than those of other arthropods, with the individual ommatidia not being arranged in a compact pattern. They can probably detect movement, but are unlikely to be able to form a true image. In front of the ocelli is an additional organ that probably functions as a chemoreceptor.\n"
] |
Solar thermal farms are 19th century technology, why isn't the US full of them? | This chart from the Energy Information Administration shows the levelized cost of energy from various renewable and non-renewable sources:
_URL_0_
Essentially, solar thermal is among the costliest sources of generation, even when compared with other renewable alternatives. Still, it has had some success in California's renewable energy marketplace.
To your point on the death valley solar farm, the nearby Mojave desert is one of the most active solar development regions in the world. Since death valley is a national park, it's pretty doubtful that there will be any development there. | [
"Solar thermal power plants can generally be built in a few years because solar plants are built almost entirely with modular, readily available materials. In contrast, many types of conventional power projects, especially coal and nuclear plants, require long lead times.\n",
"In the early 1970s, before the Arab Oil Embargo and the spike in oil prices, Northrup became interested in the commercialization of solar thermal systems, particularly for heating potable water and swimming pools. Such systems had already been commercialized in other countries where climatic conditions were favorable, energy costs were high, and there was a tradition of scientific innovation notably solar power in Israel. Work in the United States had been limited to academia and a few companies in Arizona, Texas, and California. Northrup began experimenting with solar collectors to heat air, using finned heat exchangers, and engaged solar pioneer Professor John Yellott as a consultant on the absorptivity and emissivity or various surfaces and configurations, and on the transparency of various glasses and glazing material that exhibit the \"greenhouse effect\" - transparent to incoming solar radiation, but opaque to the re-radiation of infrared from the heated surface - hence a thermal trap or collector that exhibits the \"greenhouse effect\".\n",
"The system was designed to model a way of addressing global warming and the burning of fossil fuels. The solar energy is captured by 800 solar thermal collectors located on the roofs of all 52 houses' garages. It is billed as the first solar powered subdivision in North America, although its electricity and transportation needs are provided by conventional sources.\n",
"The early development of solar technologies starting in the 1860s was driven by an expectation that coal would soon become scarce. Charles Fritts installed the world's first rooftop photovoltaic solar array, using 1%-efficient selenium cells, on a New York City roof in 1884. However, development of solar technologies stagnated in the early 20th century in the face of the increasing availability, economy, and utility of coal and petroleum. In 1974 it was estimated that only six private homes in all of North America were entirely heated or cooled by functional solar power systems. The 1973 oil embargo and 1979 energy crisis caused a reorganization of energy policies around the world and brought renewed attention to developing solar technologies. Deployment strategies focused on incentive programs such as the Federal Photovoltaic Utilization Program in the US and the Sunshine Program in Japan. Other efforts included the formation of research facilities in the United States (SERI, now NREL), Japan (NEDO), and Germany (Fraunhofer–ISE). \n",
"Solar heating systems are a well known second-generation technology and generally consist of solar thermal collectors, a fluid system to move the heat from the collector to its point of usage, and a reservoir or tank for heat storage. The systems may be used to heat domestic hot water, swimming pools, or homes and businesses. The heat can also be used for industrial process applications or as an energy input for other uses such as cooling equipment.\n",
"Several large solar thermal power stations have also been built. The largest of these solar thermal power stations is the SEGS group of plants in the Mojave Desert with a total generating capacity of 354 MW, making the system the largest solar plant of any kind in the world. , the largest photovoltaic (PV) power plant in North America is Solar Star, a 579 megawatt photovoltaic power station near Rosamond, California. The Geysers in Northern California is the largest complex of geothermal energy production in the world.\n",
"Solar thermal technologies had a sizable initial uptake in the pioneering days of the 1970s. By 2001 more than 40GWhr was produced from solar hot water technologies, equating to 0.1% of the total electricity consumption in New Zealand.\n"
] |
Did people living in the Roman Empire call it the "Roman Empire"? | It was more common to refer to people ethnically rather than in terms of a kingdom, although "Romans" often referred to themselves as *Romani*. So you had Etruscans, Etrurians, and so on which made up the body. All people could collectively be referred to as *The Populus*, however that's not really the name for the empire.
EDIT: I believe that, distinctly, populus refers to a man who is of fighting age, not just 'anyone'.
Older (BCE) coins can be found stamped with SPQR, *"senatus populus que Romanus"*, i.e. 'the Senate and People of Rome' but this is obviously from very early on in the empire.
Shortest, cleanest answer is: There wasn't a proper name for the empire, but there was a proper identity shared by citizens used to identify themselves. | [
"Though Marcellinus does not refer to the Empire as a whole after 395, only to its separate parts, he clearly identifies the term \"Roman\" as applying to the Empire as a whole. When using terms such as \"us\", \"our generals\", and \"our emperor\", Marcellinus distinguished both divisions of the Empire from outside foes such as the Sasanian Persians and the Huns. This view is consistent with the view that contemporary Romans of the 4th and 5th centuries continued to consider the Empire as a single unit, although more often than not with two rulers instead of one. The first time the Empire was divided geographically was during the reign of Diocletian, but there was precedent for multiple emperors. Before Diocletian and the Tetrarchy, there had been a number of periods where there was more than one co-emperor, such as with Caracalla and Geta in 210–211, who inherited the imperial throne from their father Septimius Severus, but Caracalla ruled alone after the murder of his brother.\n",
"The Roman Empire (, ; Koine Greek: , tr. ) was the post-Republican period of ancient Rome, consisting of large territorial holdings around the Mediterranean sea in Europe, North Africa and West Asia ruled by emperors. From the accession of Caesar Augustus to the military anarchy of the third century, it was a principate with Italy as metropole of the provinces and its city of Rome as sole capital (27 BC – 286 AD). The Roman Empire was then ruled by multiple emperors and divided in a Western Roman Empire, based in Milan and later Ravenna, and an Eastern Roman Empire, based in Nicomedia and later Constantinople. Rome remained the nominal capital of both parts until 476 AD, when it sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople (Byzantium in Ancient Greek) following the capture of Ravenna by the barbarians of Odoacer and the subsequent deposition of Romulus Augustus. The fall of the Western Roman Empire to Germanic kings, along with the hellenization of the Eastern Roman Empire into the Byzantine Empire, is conventionally used to mark the end of Ancient Rome and the beginning of the Middle Ages.\n",
"The word \"Roman\" was a reflection of the principle of \"translatio imperii\" (or in this case \"restauratio imperii\") that regarded the (Germanic) Holy Roman Emperors as the inheritors of the title of Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, despite the continued existence of the Eastern Roman Empire.\n",
"The Roman Empire usually refers to the post-republican, autocratic government period of Roman civilization, centered on the city of Rome on the Italian peninsula from 27 BC to 330 AD, and in Constantinople on the Bosporus from 330 to 1453 AD.\n",
"BULLET::::- Roman Empire – The Roman Empire was the post-Roman Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean.\n",
"The Roman Empire, at its height (c. 117 CE), was the most extensive political and social structure in western civilization. By 285 CE the empire had grown too vast to be ruled from the central government at Rome and so was divided by Emperor Diocletian into a Western and an Eastern Empire. The Roman Empire began when Augustus Caesar became the first emperor of Rome (31 BCE) and ended, in the west, when the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the Germanic King Odoacer (476 CE). In the east, it continued as the Byzantine Empire until the death of Constantine XI and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE. The influence of the Roman Empire on western civilization was profound in its lasting contributions to virtually every aspect of western culture.\n",
"The Roman Empire is one example of a republican empire. Originally, Rome was a monarchy, ruled directly by an absolute ruler. The king was later overthrown and replaced with a Republican system that protected certain rights of the citizens. Over time, the republic broke down as the Roman senate started to cede more and more authority to the consul. When Augustus took power the senate gave him the title of \"Imperator\", or \"emperor\" in English.\n"
] |
Any sources for reading about CIA, NSA, or just secret intellegence over all? Good non fiction. | Look for James Bamford's books:
The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America
I've read and enjoyed the first two, didn't read the third, yet. Remember the first rule about fight club. | [
"Espionage and secret operations have long been a source of fiction, and the real and perceived U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is a source of many books, films and video games. Some fiction may be historically based, or will refer to less action-oriented aspects, such as intelligence analysis or counterintelligence.\n",
"Many authors of spy fiction have themselves been intelligence officers working for British agencies such as MI5 or MI6, or American agencies such as the OSS or its successor, the CIA. 'Insider' spy fiction has a special claim to authenticity, and overlaps with biographical and other documentary accounts of secret service.\n",
"A cache of top secret documents leaked in 2013 by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who obtained them while working for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest contractors for defense and intelligence in the United States., revealed operational details about the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its international partners' global surveillance of foreign nationals and U.S. citizens. In addition to a trove of U.S. federal documents, Snowden's cache reportedly contains thousands of Australian, British and Canadian intelligence files that he had accessed via the exclusive \"Five Eyes\" network. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published simultaneously by \"The Washington Post\" and \"The Guardian\", attracting considerable public attention. The disclosure continued throughout the entire year of 2013, and a significant portion of the full cache of the estimated 1.7 million documents was later obtained and published by many other media outlets worldwide, most notably \"The New York Times\", the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, \"Der Spiegel\" (Germany), \"O Globo\" (Brazil), \"Le Monde\" (France), \"L'espresso\" (Italy), \"NRC Handelsblad\" (the Netherlands), \"Dagbladet\" (Norway), \"El País\" (Spain), and Sveriges Television (Sweden).\n",
"In June 2013, reports from a cache of top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its international partners had created a global system of surveillance that was responsible for the mass collection of information on American and foreign citizens.\n",
"On November 9, 1995, Specter revealed that from 1986 to 1994, the CIA gave Defense officials, Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and President-elect Bill Clinton 95 reports from suspected or known Soviet/Russian sources. For 35 of these reports, which dealt with weapons technology and arms control, the CIA believed that they came from double agents; of these, 11 were sent to presidents, and Clinton received at least one before his inauguration. According to Specter, the presidents were not alerted to the sources of the intelligence, although reports to other agencies indicated their questionable origins. The decision to continue disseminating the reports was allegedly made by mid-level DO officers \"who thought they had screened out the disinformation.\"\n",
"Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American whistle-blower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and subcontractor. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments, and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.\n",
"The book discusses how the CIA works and how its original purpose (i.e. collecting and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, and persons in order to advise public policymakers) has, according to the author, been subverted by its obsession with clandestine operations. \n"
] |
How did the introduction of the pocket watch effect surveying? | Finding longitude and latitude were very big problems for a ship out on the ocean. It was impossible to precisely measure the distance from one day to the next with no hard and fast landmarks, and the actions of currents and imprecise speed gauges made it hard to correlate knots with actual travel. Use of navigational tools like sextants and chronometers were key. However, for surveying on land, that was not the case. From a precisely measured base line, triangles could be laid off to map any piece of ground. The typical tools of chain, plumb bob, and transit would suffice. Sightings of the sun would not be needed, or precise time measurement. They would of course be needed to place continents and islands in the correct distance from each other. | [
"The use of pocket watches in a professional environment came to an ultimate end in approximately 1943. The Royal Navy of the British military distributed to their sailors Waltham pocket watches, which were 9 jewel movements, with black dials, and numbers coated with radium for visibility in the dark, in anticipation of the eventual D-Day invasion. \n",
"Around 1764/65, he devised a means of manufacturing a pocket watch that could be thinner, favouring the onward quest for further miniaturization. His radical design broke with a 300-year tradition and ushered in the age of precision timekeeping, the modern pocket watch was born.\n",
"In 1675, Huygens and Robert Hooke invented the spiral balance, or the hairspring, designed to control the oscillating speed of the balance wheel. This crucial advance finally made accurate pocket watches possible. This resulted in a great advance in accuracy of pocket watches, from perhaps several hours per day to 10 minutes per day, similar to the effect of the pendulum upon mechanical clocks. The great English clockmaker, Thomas Tompion, was one of the first to use this mechanism successfully in his pocket watches, and he adopted the minute hand which, after a variety of designs were trialled, eventually stabilised into the modern-day configuration.\n",
"The rise of railroading during the last half of the 19th century led to the widespread use of pocket watches. A famous train wreck on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway in Kipton, Ohio on April 19, 1891 occurred because one of the engineers' watches had stopped for four minutes. The railroad officials commissioned Webb C. Ball as their Chief Time Inspector, in order to establish precision standards and a reliable timepiece inspection system for Railroad chronometers. This led to the adoption in 1893 of stringent standards for pocket watches used in railroading. These railroad-grade pocket watches, as they became colloquially known, had to meet the General Railroad Timepiece Standards adopted in 1893 by almost all railroads. These standards read, in part:\n",
"Pocket watches were the most common type of portable timepiece from their invention in the 1500s right up until the advent of the wristwatch after World War I. The first wristwatches were modified pocket watches with flanges attached to their sides to which a band was fastened. Pocket watches typically were connected to a fob or a chain; as the popularity and production of the timepieces increased, so did the production of various types of decorative watch fobs. In the 19th and 20th centuries over 500 million pocket watches of various types and qualities were produced in America. This number was far surpassed by watch production in Europe, with an estimated 400,000 pocket watches produced each year. With the standardization of time, men and women of all classes throughout the world used these time-keeping devices.\n",
"Pocket watches were the predecessor of modern wristwatches. Pocket watches, being in the pocket, were usually in a vertical orientation. Gravity causes some loss of accuracy as it magnifies over time any lack of symmetry in the weight of the balance. The \"tourbillon\" was invented to minimize this: the balance and spring is put in a cage which rotates (typically but not necessarily, once a minute), smoothing gravitational distortions. This very clever and sophisticated clock-work is a prized \"complication\" in watches, even though the natural movement of the wearer tends to smooth gravitational influences much more than for a pocket watch.\n",
"The first digital pocket watch was the invention of Austrian engineer Josef Pallweber who created his \"jump-hour\" mechanism in 1883. Instead of a conventional dial, the jump-hour featured two windows in an enamel dial, through which the hours and minutes are visible on rotating discs. The second hand remained conventional. By 1885 Pallweber mechanism was already on the market in pocket watches by Cortébert and IWC; arguably contributing to the subsequent rise and commercial success of IWC. The principles of Pallweber jump-hour movement had appeared in wristwatches by the 1920s (Cortébert) and are still used today (Chronoswiss Digiteur). While the original inventor didn't have a watch brand at the time, his name has since been resurrected by a newly established watch manufacturer.\n"
] |
how come even after just wearing my glasses for an hour without touching them, they’ll still get smudged? | Your eyelashes may hit the lenses, leaving behind oils. And airborne dust may also get caught in said oils, further adding to the smudges noticed. | [
"The glasses appear to be more susceptible to damage than the screwdriver; in \"The Girl Who Died\", a Viking warrior takes the glasses off the Doctor's face and easily breaks them in half. Nevertheless, the glasses continue to appear via replacement or repair until the end of the season. They return the following season during the Doctor's temporary period of blindness, showing the ability to scan his surroundings and transmit the information to his brain, as well as transmit any data recorded to them. However, while he is able to tell things about a person such as height, weight, gender, age, and even heart rate, he doesn't get enough detail to know faces, clothing, etc. (\"Extremis\") He was once able to tell that a person was holding a computer tablet, but not what was written on it, as well as 'see' a combination lock but not the numbers. (\"The Pyramid at the End of the World\")\n",
"\"Why are you making such a sad sight? I'm from the express train of the Stadtbahn and during the fastest part, my hat, my stick and my glasses fell from the car! So what? And I could only pick up the stick and the glasses! \"\n",
"If the mask's lens are covered in paint, it is important not to simply wipe the paint off, because doing so may cause debris to scratch the lens. The player should leave the field and clean off the lens using water and a towel or a piece of cloth or you can bring your own.\n",
"There have also been concerns over potential eye pain caused by users new to Glass. These concerns were validated by Google's optometry advisor Dr. Eli Peli of Harvard, though he later partly backtracked due to the controversy which ensued from his remarks.\n",
"Many complications arise when contact lenses are worn not as prescribed (improper wear schedule or lens replacement). Sleeping in lenses not designed or approved for extended wear is a common cause of complications. Many people go too long before replacing their contacts, wearing lenses designed for 1, 14, or 30 days of wear for multiple months or years. While this does save on the cost of lenses, it risks permanent damage to the eye and even loss of sight.\n",
"Small glass fragments can also be a problem if they get under someone's skin, so care is needed to ensure that fragments produced when cleaving fiber are properly collected and disposed of appropriately.\n",
"When the lens first contacts the eye, it should be comfortable. By making sure that particular attention is given to the eyelid margins for the presence of inflammation and signs of debris in the lashes, wearing contact lenses should be easy. A brief period of irritation may occur, caused by a difference in pH and/or salinity between that of the lens solution and the tear. This discomfort fades quickly as the solution drains away and is replaced by the natural tears. However, if irritation persists, the cause could be a dirty, damaged, or inside-out lens. Removing and inspecting it for damage and proper orientation, and re-cleaning if necessary, should correct the problem. If discomfort continues, the lens should not be worn. In some cases, taking a break from lens wear for a day may correct the problem. In case of severe discomfort, or if it does not resolve by the next day, the person should be seen as soon as possible by an eye doctor to rule out potentially serious complications.\n"
] |
how do dogs know to be gentle with babies? | Weve been breeding dogs for 40 thousand years to do things we want. The ones who didnt, didnt get to reproduce. Part of this was selecting for good hunting dogs, tracking dogs, guard dogs, but not murdering your children is also a trait that would be selected for. | [
"They make fairly good watch dogs. When necessary, this dog will bark to alert its family that someone is nearby. This breed is typically good with other pets, especially when socialized at an early age. This dog gets along well with children, but it may be a good idea to socialize this breed at an early age as well as to supervise play time with children to make sure that the dog does not get hurt as a result of its small size.\n",
"It is critical that human interaction takes place frequently and calmly from the time the puppies are born, from simple, gentle handling to the mere presence of humans in the vicinity of the puppies, performing everyday tasks and activities. As the puppies grow older, socialization occurs more readily the more frequently they are exposed to other dogs, other people, and other situations. Dogs who are well socialized from birth, with both dogs and other species (especially people), are much less likely to be aggressive or to suffer from fear-biting.\n",
"They make great, affectionate family dogs, but do not trust strangers. Many can be very protective of their owners or property, so they sometimes bark when someone is coming. Owners should have patience with these Laikas because they can hold grudges for a long time. Also, they can be aggressive towards unknown dogs that come near their home, but should be friendly with dogs that they live with, or dogs away from their home. From a young age, they see small animals, such as squirrels, as potential game so they will more than likely go after them.\n",
"In domesticated dogs, the process of socialization begins even before the puppy's eyes open. Socialization refers to both its ability to interact acceptably with humans and its understanding of how to communicate successfully with other dogs. If the mother is fearful of humans or of her environment, she can pass along this fear to her puppies. For most dogs, however, a mother who interacts well with humans is the best teacher that the puppies can have. In addition, puppies learn how to interact with other dogs by their interaction with their mother and with other adult dogs in the house.\n",
"Pups between the ages of 9–12 weeks who were permitted to observe their narcotics-detecting mothers at work generally proved more capable at learning the same skills at six months of age than control puppies the same age who were not previously allowed to watch their mothers working. A 2001 study recorded the behaviour of dogs in detour tests, in which a favorite toy or food was placed behind a V-shaped fence. The demonstration of the detour by humans significantly improved the dogs' performance in the trials. The experiments showed that dogs are able to rely on information provided by human action when confronted with a new task. Significantly, they did not copy the exact path of the human demonstrator, but adopted the detour behavior shown by humans to reach their goal. A 1977 experiment by Adler and Adler found that puppies who watched other puppies learn to pull a food cart into their cages by an attached ribbon proved considerably faster at the task when later given the opportunity themselves. At 38 days of age, the \"demonstrator\" puppies took an average of 697 seconds to succeed, while the observers succeeded in an average of 9 seconds.\n",
"Their natural wariness, while valuable in a herding dog which might need to alert their shepherd of strange animals or people, combined with their herding bossiness, can lead to shyness or aggression in even the most friendly puppy if not properly managed. Frequent socialization from a very young age can help counter this trait.\n",
"As with all dogs and babies, introductions should be gradual, though most Standards will tolerate a baby and learn to be gentle and will respect toddlers so long as the child is supervised. A Standard Poodle will be fine in a family with many children provided the environment is stable, orderly, and relaxed, with enough room for the dog to go out and retire somewhere quiet if needed. Miniature and Toy varieties tend to have less patience with young children and might find certain children's antics too much to handle, especially because young children are much larger than they are and may attempt to grab them without understanding how their attempt to hug the pooch is terrifying to a small dog. They are likely to bite out of fear and thus are better suited to homes with teenagers or older children. Poodles dislike being left alone or left out of the family fun and some get anxious at being left in the house alone, but sign of nervousness or neurosis is atypical and not how a poodle of any size is meant to behave. Miniature and Toy Poodles must not be treated like babies and be picked up and carried around constantly and never put on a leash to walk: they will start to believe they are in charge and that they do not owe anyone good behavior and they become very spoiled and uncontrollable.\n"
] |
Does listening to neuroacoustic music have any measurable effect in putting people to sleep? | The man is a quack and he has no scientific studies (besides his own) backing him up. There's no identifiable process behind the supposed 'theory', and everything I've read is nonsense.
So in short, no. Nothing beyond placebo. | [
"In another study, specifically looking to help people with insomnia, similar results were seen. The participants that listened to music experienced better sleep quality than those who did not listen to music.\n",
"The use of auditory stimulation has been shown to increase PGO waves during waking and sleeping cycles with neurons associated with transfers of auditory information. Even while the subject is awake and in total darkness, the amplitude of PGO waves increases by auditory stimulation. Another study also found that auditory stimulation increased the amplitude of PGO waves in slow-wave sleep and REM sleep and did not reduce the amplitude of the waves with repeated auditory stimulation. From this research, scientists can theorize that PGO wave generation from auditory stimulation contains a positive-feedback mechanism that can be excited by evoked PGO waves.\n",
"Hobson and McCarley proposed that the PGO waves characteristic of “phasic” REM might supply the visual cortex and forebrain with electrical excitement which amplifies the hallucinatory aspects of dreaming. However, people woken up during sleep do not report significantly more bizarre dreams during phasic REMS, compared to tonic REMS. Another possible relationship between the two phenomena could be that the higher threshold for sensory interruption during REM sleep allows the brain to travel further along unrealistic and peculiar trains of thought.\n",
"A meta-analysis by the American Psychological Association furthermore showed how listening to music can result in progressive relaxation and that listening to classical music one hour a day increases greater brain coherence and more time spent in the alpha state (state of aware relaxation stimulating imagination, intuition and higher awareness). Studies on premature babies have also found that while receiving special care and being exposed to classical music they physically and mentally developed significantly faster than those babies who weren’t exposed to classical music. Further studies have also indicated that incorporating Art into academic education for disabled children better supported cognitive development and improved communication skills.\n",
"Neuroscientists have learned a lot about the role of the brain in numerous cognitive mechanisms by understanding corresponding disorders. Similarly, neuroscientists have come to learn a lot about music cognition by studying music-specific disorders. Even though music is most often viewed from a \"historical perspective rather than a biological one\" music has significantly gained the attention of neuroscientists all around the world. For many centuries music has been strongly associated with art and culture. The reason for this increased interest in music is because it \"provides a tool to study numerous aspects of neuroscience, from motor skill learning to emotion\".\n",
"Although more research should be done to increase the reliability of this method of treatment, research suggests that music therapy can improve sleep quality in acute and chronic sleep disorders. In one particular study, participants (18 years or older) who had experienced acute or chronic sleep disorders were put in a randomly controlled trial and their sleep efficiency (overall time asleep) was observed. In order to assess sleep quality, researchers used subjective measures (i.e. questionnaires) and objective measures (i.e. polysomnography). The results of the study suggest that music therapy did improve sleep quality in subjects with acute or chronic sleep disorders, however only when tested subjectively. Although these results are not fully conclusive and more research should be conducted, it still provides evidence that music therapy can be an effective treatment for sleep disorders.\n",
"The effects of strictly listening to music have long been explored and has been given the name the \"Mozart Effect,\" which is known to cause a \"small increase in spatial-temporal reasoning\". As seen with the Mozart Effect, listening to music has been proven to affect the brain and mood, as well as spatial temporal reasoning, but does not have any long-term benefits. A 1981 study at Mission Vejo High School proved that music students had a higher GPA than students who did not participate in music (3.59 vs. 2.91). There have been studies done verifying music as an enrichment activity that causes an increase in self-confidence, discipline, and social cohesion, as well as academic benefits. 7\n"
] |
when you listen to music on high volume in a loud place, does it damage your hearing the same way as it would in a quieter place? | If you turn your music up, it will be more likely to damage your hearing. Doesn't matter how loud it is relative to your background noise. That's not considering if the background noise is loud enough to damage your hearing as well | [
"According to the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks, the risk of hearing damage from digital audio players depends on both sound level and listening time. The listening habits of most users are unlikely to cause hearing loss, but some people are putting their hearing at risk, because they set the volume control very high or listen to music at high levels for many hours per day. Such listening habits may result in temporary or permanent hearing loss, tinnitus, and difficulties understanding speech in noisy environments.\n",
"Noise as high volume is common for musicians from classical orchestras to rock groups as they are exposed to high decibel ranges. Although some rock musicians experience noise-induced hearing loss from their music, it is still debated as to whether classical musicians are exposed to enough high-intensity sound to cause hearing impairments. Music-induced hearing loss is still a controversial topic for hearing researchers. While some studies have shown that the risk for hearing loss increases as music exposure increases, other studies found little to no correlation between the two.\n",
"The interaction between the loudspeakers and the room (room acoustics) plays an important part in sound quality. Sound vibrations are reflected from walls, floor and ceiling, and are affected by the contents of the room. Room dimensions can create standing waves at particular (usually low) frequencies. There are devices and materials for room treatment that affect sound quality. Soft materials, such as draperies and carpets, can absorb higher frequencies, whereas hard walls and floors can cause excess reverberation.\n",
"There are a variety of prevention strategies available to avoid or reduce hearing loss. Lowering the volume of sound at its source, limiting the time of exposure and physical protection can reduce the impact of excessive noise. If not prevented, hearing loss can be managed through assistive devices and communication strategies.\n",
"When exposed to a multitude of sounds from several different sources, sensory overload may occur. This overstimulation can result in general fatigue and loss of sensation in the ear. The associated mechanisms are explained in further detail down below. Sensory overload usually occurs with environmental stimuli and not noise induced by listening to music.\n",
"When sensorineural hearing loss (damage to the cochlea or in the brain) is present, the perception of loudness is altered. Sounds at low levels (often perceived by those without hearing loss as relatively quiet) are no longer audible to the hearing impaired, but sounds at high levels often are perceived as having the same loudness as they would for an unimpaired listener. This phenomenon can be explained by two theories, called \"loudness recruitment\" and \"softness imperception\".\n",
"Many people are unaware of the presence of environmental sound at damaging levels, or of the level at which sound becomes harmful. Common sources of damaging noise levels include car stereos, children's toys, motor vehicles, crowds, lawn and maintenance equipment, power tools, gun use, musical instruments, and even hair dryers. Noise damage is cumulative; all sources of damage must be considered to assess risk. If one is exposed to loud sound (including music) at high levels or for extended durations (85 dB A or greater), then hearing loss will occur. Sound intensity (sound energy, or propensity to cause damage to the ears) increases dramatically with proximity according to an inverse square law: halving the distance to the sound quadruples the sound intensity.\n"
] |
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