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1niisw
|
Would galaxies look the same to the naked eye as they do in images taken by Hubble?
|
[Example: Pinwheel Galaxy image from Hubble.](_URL_0_)
To extrapolate on the title:
If you were traveling through space in a craft with a window, would a galaxy appear as it does in the images we see in telescopes?
I know many of these images are made via long exposures, and wasn't sure if the light from the nebula and bands of gas, etc. would be too dim to see without image enhancement.
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1niisw/would_galaxies_look_the_same_to_the_naked_eye_as/
|
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"I'm no expert on this by any means, but I believe that if you were traveling in a spaceship with a window, you WOULD see some color, however the colors would probably not \"pop\" as they do in a long exposure Hubble image. Our eyes don't collect light like CCD chip does. I would guess they would look similar to what the Milky Way looks like in a very dark-sky environment. It would also probably be difficult for your eye to resolve as much detail as you see in these images. You also have to consider that if you are far enough away to see an entire galaxy at once, you are VERY far away. Individual nebulae and stars would be hard, if not impossible to detect. The color you would see, if any ,would be a combination of old red stars and young blue stars mixed with hot, red hydrogen gas and possible blue reflection nebula. ",
"Here are some previous threads on this topic:\n\n[Are NASA's Hubble telescope pictures representative of what galaxies or nebula would look like to the naked eye? How much editing do these photos receive?](_URL_5_) \n\n[If you were hypothetically between galaxies, what could you see with the naked eye?](_URL_2_)\n\n[Are all these amazing photos and scenes taken of galaxies and formations in the universe actually visible to the naked eye?](_URL_1_)\n\nEdit:\n\nAnd some more\n\n[Is it really ever possible to \"see\" a galaxy, nebula, etc. as it appears in photographs?](_URL_4_) \n\n[Media often depicts interstellar travellers looking at enormous and brilliant galaxies. If you were looking directly at a galaxy would it look like that? Or would it be too dim to see with the unaided eye?](_URL_3_) \n\n[Can the human eye actually view galaxies and other celestial objects the way Hubble does? \n](_URL_0_)",
"You are already travelling in that spacecraft. It's called Planet Earth. From it, you can see galaxies at all sorts of distances: too far to see anything with the naked eye (but visible in a telescope); pretty far, so they are just a little smudge on a very dark sky; close enough that it's 6 times bigger than the Moon; and finally so close it covers the whole sky, horizon to horizon.\n\nIn other words, the situation you're describing is not hypothetical. You're already experiencing it.\n\nM31, a.k.a. the Andromeda Galaxy, is close enough it's 6x bigger than the full Moon. And what does the naked eye see? In the words of ancient observers, \"a little cloud\". And you have to be in a place with a very dark sky, far away from cities and industrial facilities and so on.\n\nBTW, these days (autumn) M31 is rising in the east. Drive at least 1 hour away from the city, and look east. You'll see a little patch of milky light.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThen, there's another galaxy, even closer. It's our galaxy. Just look up at night - everything you see is part of this galaxy. In winter, you can see the bulk of it overhead. Again, during winter, drive away from the city at least 1 hour. You'll see something akin to a \"river of stars\" directly overhead.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThe picture you're showing there is the image of a galaxy photographed through a telescope. The image is different from what the naked eye sees, because, well, it's a different optical system and a different sensor. The human eye will never show you a galaxy like that.",
"The short answer is no. That scene at the end of Empire Strikes Back where they are on the space ship outside of the galaxy (at a distance of what I would estimate 300,000 lightyears - assuming it is the same size as the Milky Way) is not realistic. \n\nAs florinandrei said, you already have a front row seat to a massive galaxy (the Milky Way) and it's actually not all that bright, even from a very dark sky site. Yes, there is dust obscuring our view of much of the view towards the center of the galaxy, but even the bright patches of nearest spiral arm are quite dim compared to that scene from Empire or that photograph."
]
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[] |
[
"http://imgur.com/lCIjdw1"
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[],
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pw5un/can_the_human_eye_actually_view_galaxies_and/",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1gi1hz/are_all_these_amazing_photos_and_scenes_taken_of/",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pge5q/if_you_were_hypothetically_between_galaxies_what/",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17a1id/media_often_depicts_interstellar_travellers/",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nh963/is_it_really_ever_possible_to_see_a_galaxy_nebula/",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r3872/are_nasas_hubble_telescope_pictures/"
],
[
"http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~huffman/m31.html",
"http://www.youcanseethemilkyway.com/"
],
[]
] |
|
1x3kwp
|
If E=mc², does energy have gravity?
|
I know for most classical measurements like gravities of astronomical objects, energy would be nearly inconsequential to the equation.
But let's say there's a Neptune sized planet in deep space at nearly absolute zero, if it had a near-pass with a star and suddenly rose 200-400 degrees K, would that have any impact on it's near field gravitational measurements? No matter how minute?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1x3kwp/if_emc²_does_energy_have_gravity/
|
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"The short answer is yes - the rise in temperature would affect the apparent gravity by a little bit. How little? Well, math!\n\nLet's take your Neptunian planet, and raise the temperature by 300K instantly. Now the mass of Neptune is ~10^26 kg, and if we roughly assume its all hydrogen (in reality its about 80%) then using a bit of simple chemistry corresponds to about 6 x 10^52 particles of hydrogen. The thermal energy is roughly given by E = NkT where T is the temperature, N the number of particles and k is Boltzmann's constant; which leads us to an increase in thermal energy of E = k x (6 x 10^-52) x (300) joules. A conversion to mass using E=mc^2 gives m = 2.76 x 10^15 kg. Which looks huge, and is definitely a change in the effective mass, but really is minuscule in comparison to the total mass of Neptune (11 orders of magnitude smaller). It's pretty close to the mass of Mars' moon Deimos, for example.",
"Yes. Relativistically, gravity is determined by the [stress-energy tensor](_URL_0_), which considers mass, pressure, and momentum. It turns out that for non relativistic objects, mass dominates.\n\nIn case you want to know the effect quantitatively, the first correction to Newton's law is replacing the mass of the object with (m +3PV/c^2 ) where P =pressure, V=volume, c=speed of light (for constant pressure throughout). So you can imagine heating on object, increasing its internal pressure, and thus its gravitational field. ",
"Absolutely. Mass and energy are two sides of the same coin, and so both gravitate. In fact, for the first 80,000 years or so of the Universe's history, light's gravity was far more important than all the gravity due to matter, and this caused the Universe to expand at a different rate than later on when matter was gravitationally dominant.",
"Yes, you can even make a black hole if you have enough light in one spot! Energy and mass really are two aspects of the same thing - mass is simply a form of energy that creates a gravitational field and has inertia.\nSource: _URL_0_",
"Yes! Here's an interesting thought experiment:\n\nI have a black box floating in space and it contains a spring. Now I add energy to the box by compressing the spring. Can someone on the outside tell? Well if they have a sufficiently sensitive instrument they can - the box will appear to become heavier by E=mc²!"
]
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|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelblitz_(astrophysics)"
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[]
] |
|
49tyfg
|
Who is responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ?
|
Is there any historical proof that the Romans or Jews made the decision for the crucifixion? Please help.
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/49tyfg/who_is_responsible_for_the_crucifixion_of_jesus/
|
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"There is much better historical evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus than there is for the vast majority of events of the ancient world. Whether you consider the extant evidence to be \"historical proof\" or not is in the eye of the beholder. FWIW, most academic historians would both object to the concept that we can be absolutely certain about any historical event (remember, history is a reconstruction of the past using sources - there is always going to be an angle, evidence, viewpoint, or frame of reference that we lack that can give us a *better* understanding than that which we currently have, even for the most well established events) while also be quite accepting the basic outline of the life of Jesus: he was born and raised in Nazareth, sometime in his late 20s or early 30s he began preaching apocalypticism in Galilee, eventually made a trip to Jerusalem where he was denounced by the local Roman governor as a traitor and executed. \n\nThe crucifixion of Jesus is attested in multiple, independent sources, some of which are from outside the fold of the nascent Christian movement. We have no credible reason *not* to believe it. \n\nYou might be interested in the [FAQ](_URL_0_), in which the historicity of Jesus is discussed, or the [FAQ](_URL_1_) of r/AcademicBiblical, which also discusses this topic, but from their scholarly perspective. \n\nEDIT: I'm now seeing that you're asking who is responsible for Jesus's death, not whether it's accepted as a historical fact, and I'm pretty sure that even the Bible claims it was the Roman governor Pilate, the immediate rise of Christian antisemitism which blamed the Jews for the act notwithstanding. It's been a long time since I've read anything on this topic, but to my knowledge, the only sources that go into detail about the responsibility are the gospels themselves. The outside sources state only that he was crucified. But crucifixion was a Roman punishment, not a Jewish one, so it's likely that it was the result of him committing crimes against the Roman state. Whether a figure like Pilate might offer the crowds a choice as relayed in the New Testament or not is not something I can comment on. There are experts on this sub in Roman history, so perhaps they'll chime in. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/religion#wiki_jesus_christ",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/wiki/historicaljesus"
]
] |
|
61kd5a
|
how the average person would benefit in no way, or support, repealing laws surrounding the sale of their data, yet it happens anyway?
|
[deleted]
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/61kd5a/eli5_how_the_average_person_would_benefit_in_no/
|
{
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"You might need to edit that question so that it makes sense. I can only guess at what you are asking.",
"Most people don't know or don't care.\n\nA lot of very large, very rich corporations will benefit. Corporations fund political campaigns. So voting for something your funders want, and your voters don't care about, is a no-brainer."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
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|
679y7c
|
Why wasn't a Kurdish mandate created during the aftermath of WW1?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/679y7c/why_wasnt_a_kurdish_mandate_created_during_the/
|
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"An independent Kurdistan was actually planned for and provisions to bring it into existence were included in the Treaty of Sèvres. So while the Treaty did not immediately create an independent Kurdistan, it did provide a relatively straight forward path for Kurdistan to become independent.\n\nArticle 63 of the Treaty gave the Kurds autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. Then Article 64 prescribes when and how the Kurds could apply (to the League of Nations) for full independence.\n\nIn brief, if the Kurds could show the majority of the population in Kurdistan wanted independence, and the council of allied nations (sitting in Constantinople) considered they were \"ready\" for it, Turkey *had* to accept the independence of Kurdistan and renounce all claims to that area. \n\nHowever, the successes of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's newly organised Turkish republic meant that the Turks were able to take control of the area earmarked as being Kurdistan.\n\nThe western allies were not interested in another war with Turkey, and the Treaty of Sèvres was abandoned in favour of the new Treaty of Lausanne which set the new borders of Turkey, without any Kurdish state.\n\n "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
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||
26svdo
|
the difference between a deduction and an inference.
|
Title. People always seem to give really complex answers when asked about the difference.
Edit: Thanks for the explanations!
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26svdo/eli5_the_difference_between_a_deduction_and_an/
|
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"A deduction is where you take several statements or facts and say, \"You said you went to medical school, work in a hospital, and you saw a person you referred to as a 'patient'. I deduce that you are a doctor.\" It is an educated guess, that is probably correct.\n\nAn inference is less concrete. \"You said you were a doctor, from that I infer that you are intelligent, care about people, and work in a hospital.\"\n\nThink of a deduction as taking a lot of information, and distilling it down to one fact, an inference is the opposite, take one fact, and extrapolate it out into several inferences.\n\nDeduction = Fact X + Fact Y + Fact Z = A\n\nInfrence = A (therefore I assume) Fact X, Fact Y, and Fact Z.",
"Deduction is something a mathematician does when she proves a thing, using strict rules and meanings of symbols. Correct deductions are always true.\n\nInference is something a statistician does when she inspects a set of data. It involves throwing many different kinds of simplification at a problem and identifying the patterns which are evidence of the system that generated the data in the first place.\n\nWhen Sherlock Holmes reasons about things, he is in fact inferring. He uses a vast storage of data (past cases, strange facts of the human condition, knowledge of tobacco ash) and combines it with the data at hand (the crime scene) and forms several possible patterns, or hypotheses, on what underlying process (crime) actually made this data.\n\nTo summarise: Any time there is large data sets and probabilities involved, any time you guess - even educated guesses - it is Inference. Any time there is strict rules of conduct and a very specific area of investigation, and only one right answer, it is Deduction.\n\nDon't let philosophers tell you otherwise.\n\nSource: self-study in AI, proof theory and statistics."
]
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[] |
[] |
[
[],
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2shjqt
|
why does comcast agree to broadcast commercials for competitors like dish?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2shjqt/eli5_why_does_comcast_agree_to_broadcast/
|
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"It isn't Comcast that's broadcasting the commercials, it's the television networks. To demand that networks stop running ads for a competitor, Comcast risks losing that network from its channel line up, so it's not really worth the trouble (especially if it's a popular network)."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
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||
cd7biw
|
How did English Recency-era fashionable women stay warm in the winter?
|
Thinking of those beautiful muslin (sp?) dresses we see in Austen adaptations, how did anyone stay warm during a British winter? Long woollen underwear?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cd7biw/how_did_english_recencyera_fashionable_women_stay/
|
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"On the one hand, satirists of the time [liked to depict women in thin, clinging muslin gowns all year round](_URL_0_), accessorized with only a shawl or spencer (a short jacket), allegedly showing a true practice. According to these men, women did not make any alteration in their dress to accommodate the weather, and as a result they were extremely susceptible to fevers and colds, and often died.\n\nOn the other, fashion magazines show much more sensible behavior. In *La Belle Assemblée*, for instance, the fashions for February given in the 1812 January issue include a \"winter walking dress\" consisting of a cambric gown (cambric being somewhat heavier than muslin, though still just a cotton) and a pelisse - a long, high-waisted coat - made of red Merino wool lined with yellow silk and trimmed with fur, as well as a cashmere shawl and a Merino hat or bonnet; the related \"notes on dress\" section mentions a number of other warm hats, as well as leather boots lined with fur. The fashions for March given in the February issue include promenade dress of a purple velvet pelisse and a silk \"Minerva bonnet\", a fairly close-fitting style, although in general the text on the fashions of the month focused on how increasingly warm the weather was. \n\nIn addition to being made of warm fabrics, pelisses and spencers could also be \"wadded\", or padded with a layer of wool batting, which might or might not be quilted into a heavier textile. There was also a hooded coat fully lined with fur called a \"witzchoura\", fashionably brought out for the worst of the winter, although it seems to have been a high-prestige garment rather than something commonly worn to block out the cold. Winter bonnets and hats tended to be covered with silk (an insulator) or wool, and to have no brim or very short brims, so as not to catch the wind.\n\nLong underwear as we know it today is a Victorian invention, but women could wear shifts and petticoats made of warm wool flannel. Drawers were only just beginning to be worn, but they could also have been flannel if necessary. And stockings, of course, would be made of thickly-knitted wool."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
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"http://findit.library.yale.edu/catalog/digcoll:976311"
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|
4vlh7v
|
My history textbook briefly mentioned something very interesting...
|
"in the 1570s and 1580s, Elizabeth's troops crushed the Irish uprising with terrible ferocity, inflicting unspeakable atrocities upon the native Irish people."
What is this referring to, and what were these unspeakable atrocities?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4vlh7v/my_history_textbook_briefly_mentioned_something/
|
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"This is in reference to the Desmond Rebellions. These were a series of rebellions in the Irish province of Munster that occurred from 1569 to 1573 and again from 1579 to 1583. It is the second rebellion that your textbook is likely referencing.\n\nThe second Desmond rebellion occurred simply because the first Desmond rebellion, while suppressed, was dealt with little beyond that. The Old English (those descended from the Norman invasion of Ireland) resented the expanding influence of the Tudor English in Dublin, who were eager to consolidate control and exert English cultural domination through the banning of Irish customs which by this time were interwoven with Old English law and custom. These Old English also had lands appropriated by the crown for settlement by (new) English colonists, furthering their anger. Beyond this, there was also the fact that most Old English were Catholic and the Reformation in England, and especially the Papal reaction to it, also helped to set the Old English lords against the Tudor crown.\n\nArthur Grey, leader of the English forces which landed in Ireland during the second rebellion, would eventually be recalled by Elizabeth I in 1582 for perceived excessive brutality, which included the Siege of Smerwick in which a surrendering Papal force was massacred by Grey's orders. Grey's scorched earth warfare would result in both famine in the province and bubonic plague in the city of Cork, where many had fled to avoid the fighting."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
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|
z8358
|
why oil and gold control world economy
|
Why is the world economy dependent on prices of oil and gold and not something else
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/z8358/eli5_why_oil_and_gold_control_world_economy/
|
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"Transport is an important part of a country's economy. If all the oil were to suddenly disappear in your country, it would be a major problem.\n\n* Food, goods, materials - they wouldn't show up in the stores\n* Most people will be unable to get to work\n* The army would be reduced to foot soldiers, they are suddenly weakened\n* A lot of plastic products won't be made anymore\n\nSo you can see that a lot of aspects of your daily life depend on oil.\n\nAs for gold, it is a precious metal. There are many precious metals but traditionally, gold has been the main choice. It is seen as a way of protecting investments. If the price of gold is going up, it means investors are scared and are trying to protect their money by investing in gold. When it goes down, the economy is healthy and investors are happily spending elsewhere. \n\nCurrencies used to depend on the gold a country had, but I don't believe that is true any more.",
"The world economy is *not* dependent on the price of gold. It used to be, and people with certain agendas like to pretend it still is, but today the price of gold is no more relevant than the price of platinum or titanium or diamonds.\n\nThe world economy is dependent on oil for the reasons iamapizza stated."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
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[],
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|
2vrhx0
|
How can you proof that minus one times minus one is one?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2vrhx0/how_can_you_proof_that_minus_one_times_minus_one/
|
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"Taken from [here](_URL_0_):\n\n Let a and b be any two real numbers. Consider the number x defined by\n x = ab + (-a)(b) + (-a)(-b)\n \n We can write\n x = ab + (-a)[ (b) + (-b) ] (factor out -a)\n = ab + (-a)(0)\n = ab + 0\n = ab\n\n Also,\n x = [ a + (-a) ]b + (-a)(-b) (factor out b)\n = 0 * b + (-a)(-b)\n = 0 + (-a)(-b)\n = (-a)(-b)\n\n So we have\n x = ab\n and\n x = (-a)(-b)\n \n Hence, by the transitivity of equality, we have\n \n ab = (-a)(-b)",
"Given a number x, -x means the unique number satisfying x+(-x)=0. In words, -x is the additive inverse of x. Now, x+(-1)x=(1)x+(-1)x=(1-1)x=0x=x, so that (-1)x is the additive inverse of x. Thus minus one times minus one is the additive inverse of -1, which is 1. ",
"By using several axioms and theorems. In this case, lets think about what's happening when we do multiply them together. We get one, right? Many other numbers have this property, which is that every nonzero real number has a multiplicative inverse. More formally, given some number a there exists some number b such that ab=1. In this case, we need to consider these properties of the real numbers:\n\n1) For any real number a, there's another real number b such that a+b=0.\n\n2) For any real number a, there's another real number c such that ab=1.\n\n3) For any real number a, (-1)a=-a where -a is the additive inverse of a.\n\nUsing this we can follow some logic to get our proof. It can go something like this:\n\nConsider -1. Since -1 isn't zero, there exists some number a such that (-1)a=-a=1. Add a, thus we obtain a-a=0=a+1, thus 0=a+1. Add -1, thus we obtain -1=a+1+(-1)=a. Thus -1=a.\n\nramk13's referral also does the same but is stronger, because:\n\n1) He assumes less. He doesn't use the fact that (-1)a=-a, just the axioms given in the definition of a field (the real numbers are identified as a field).\n2) It applies to more than just -1. The product of any two negative numbers becomes positive, and the result is as if you simply found the product of the absolute value of the two negative numbers you chose.\n\nHowever for the purpose of the problem, such a simple solution is acceptable.",
"There are some good proofs already being given in this thread, so I'll try, instead, to give a \"real world\" example of the \"negative times a negative gives a positive\" rule that many people find so counter-intuitive. \n\nImagine that I have a bathtub and I can raise and lower its water level by filling it up or draining it. We can consider raising the level to be \"positive\" and lowering it to be \"negative\". In addition, imagine that we can film this bathtub and when we play the film normally, this is \"positive\"; when we play the film in reverse, this is \"negative\". Now, imagine that we film the bathtub draining (a \"negative\") and then we play the film in reverse (another \"negative\"). What do we see? We see the bathtub fill up (a \"positive\"). In this way, compounding a negative with another negative yields a positive. \n \nAgain, this is in no way a proof and it's not a perfect analogy, but it makes the whole \"negative-negative-positive\" rule seem a little more concrete and less arbitrary."
]
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|
[] |
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[
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"http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.negxneg.html"
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||
a8eta7
|
I want to start writing about history as a hobby. How do I not get everything wrong?
|
This is mostly just for my own gratification, but I'm planning on starting to write a blog, or producing youtube videos about history. It's a subject that interests me and I like writing. So in an effort to avoid ending up on /r/badhistory, how to I make sure I'm being accurate? Mostly what I'm concerned with is recognizing the reliability of sources and how to do it without literally spending years of research on each topic I write about.
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a8eta7/i_want_to_start_writing_about_history_as_a_hobby/
|
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"text": [
"What sort of topics are you interested in? That may go some way in helping you find the lay of the land and avoid obvious pitfalls.",
"Your best bet is to pay an expert consultant.\n\nBeyond that: it first of all depends on how in-depth you want to go with each article or video. If you just want to, say, rehearse the fact of Tokugawa's life, you can probably do a pretty good job with Wikipedia (I know, I know) and something like the Cambridge History/New History of ____ series. It'll be dry, but it'll have the facts.\n\nIf you want to get more at a historical argument question, like you suggested with \"why Nobunaga mattered,\" approach it like an undergrad paper! No need to spend years of research! Find a couple of relatively recently published books from university presses or other reputable academic ones (look at the bibliography of a good recent Asian history book. You'll see what publishers show up over and over). Build your bibliography from there; approach the article or video like you would a paper (argument, evidence).\n\nIf you want to do a Cool Stuff About -type video or article, I would definitely recommend making sure that all of your facts are either cited to a primary source, or are found in at least two secondary works that are not citing the same (non primary) source.\n\nCool project!",
"I recommend getting a membership for your State (or equivalent) or National Library. This should give you access to a lot of digitalised past and current issues of academic journals, as well as some online access to books. The journal access is the most important, though, since it should allow you to find review articles for any book you're interested in reading. If there's not a review (i.e. if it's a particularly bad pop-history book or an old work that didn't make many waves at the time), that's usually a good indication that you should avoid that book.\n\nReviews are also an important way of understanding the flaws in a work - sometimes alternatives that offer better coverage of the weaker parts of the book are provided - and also help you identify different schools of thought. For example, if you wanted to learn about warfare in the Early Middle Ages, you might come across Guy Halsall's *Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450-900*, which serves as the most modern synthesis on the topic. Looking into the reviews, you'll find that they're overwhelming positive, though reading multiple reviews will highlight a number of flaws. [Nicholas Brooks](_URL_1_), for instance, points out some minor weaknesses in Halsall's understanding of the Anglo-Saxon world, as well as the weakness of his arguments for Anglo-Saxon use of cavalry. Meanwhile, [Eric J. Goldberg](_URL_0_) notes that Halsall doesn't make sufficient use of royal diplomas and monastic charters when discussing military organisation and logistics and also that he hasn't paid sufficient attention to recent archaeology of Slavic fortified centers, which demonstrate just how powerful the Slavic rulers the Franks were facing could be.\n\n[Bernard Bachrach](_URL_3_), on the other hand, is very vocal in his opinion that Halsall is a hack and a terrible scholar. This is where you should start to realise that there are two, very different, views of warfare in the Early Middle Ages, and that you've just found the other side. A quick search of reviews of Bernard Bachrach's work will turn up a review by [Guy Halsall](_URL_2_) of Bacharach's *Early Carolingian Warfare*, wherein he airs his own grievances with Bachrach.\n\nHaving read these reviews, you now know a couple of things. Firstly, a significant number of scholars, including specialists, consider Halsall reliable, if not perfect. Secondly, there's an alternate view of Early Medieval warfare, and a lot of it comes down to interpretation of sources. From here, you're going to need to read both Guy Halsall and Bernard Bachrach and try to get a feel for what each is saying (and don't pay too much attention to what each claims the other is saying or is saying about them - scholars are often no better than random people on the internet at fully representing their opponent's arguments). You'll also need to do more research on what the world outside of warfare was like. Searching your State/National library for books on the Early Middle Ages will almost certainly turn up something like Chris Wickham's *The Inheritance of Rome* or the relevant volumes of *The New Cambridge Medieval History*, which reviews will tell you are solid works. Goldberg's mention of recent archaeological work on the Slavic settlements also suggests an avenue you should take. Another search will reveal Florin Curtin's *The Making of the Slavs* and *Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500–1250* to be two books that deal with this area.\n\n(Obviously I've cut out the step of going through multiple reviews for the supplementary texts, but they need to be examined in the same way as the initial text. I should also mention that you should look for recent books, articles, etc whenever possible. Some very specific monographs or journal articles hold up very well even decades later and don't need much reinterpretation, but it's hard to know which these are, and so sticking to more recent works (I recommend published within 30 years or less as a rule of thumb) is generally better practice.)\n\nSearching the library catalogue will also help you find journal articles about specific topics or subjects. You can do a search for blanket terms (like \"Anglo-Saxon cavalry\", for example), or look through the bibliography and citations of the books you've selected for titles that seem relevant to your interest or which are referenced for a specific topic you'd like to know more about.\n\nOnce you have a better understanding of the period and have read some additional work on areas that one or the other are weak on, you can begin to make your own judgements about whether you want to follow Halsall or Bachrach's interpretation and what modifications you think need to be made. This, mind, won't necessarily be a very informed decision - you'd need to be an actual expert to truly make an informed choice (I know I can't) - but it will allow you to discuss alternative viewpoints and why you - or the other author - believe this is wrong. \n\nI've used a specific topic and authors as an example here, but it can be generally applied to pretty much anything. Find what looks to be a good general introduction to the subject, read the academic reviews to determine if it is useful and to see if there are alternate viewpoints, then dig a bit deeper looking for more information on areas that reviewers have highlighted as being weak in the work and read the counter arguments of scholars who have a different approach to the topic. This doesn't guarantee that you won't end up on /r/badhistory, but it will greatly reduce the chances.",
"Building off both /u/sunagainstgold and /u/hergrim you may want to, as a starting point, resign yourself to the point that short of paying an expert to look at it, or spending a year or so studying that particular topic, there probably _will_ be parts of it that specialists will quibble with or even strongly object to. If not a specialist on that particular topic, then a specialist on some general topic (say, military history) represented or used as a basis for an argument in your work.\n\nAs a non-historian who has gained my knowledge through \"hobbyist studies\" I think about this a lot. It seems like every time I go back to re-read a secondary source, I read it a bit differently and come away with a different take on it. In my particular case, there's an unlucky lack of overlap - works on Persian history tend to be useless as sources on Persian religion, and vice versa. But the things that may make me and others consider a source like _Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices_ to be a grossly misleading guide to the Achaemenid Empire, for example that Darius' story of the \"False Bardiya\" should be taken seriously, may be (and is) happily cited by specialists in, say, Jewish and Christian history. If I read a better source like Pierre Briant's _From Cyrus to Alexander_, I might get a better picture of that, but come away with the understanding that nomadic societies are necessarily poorly socially organized, since he uses this as the basis of a particular argument. Those who study the civilizations of the Eurasian steppe would probably do a spit take at that reasoning.\n\nIt's never possible to gain a specialist's understanding of every single topic, of course, so these issues are simple facts of life. But one concrete recommendation I would make to mitigate these problems is to set some constraints (region, subject, era, etc) on the topics you approach. That will allow you to build a broader understanding and recognize when an author may be on thin ice (e.g., you'll notice when they stray outside what the source material tells us). If you do a Dan Carlin-style \"Big Things In World History\" thing... you probably won't.\n\nI'm mostly repeating things that have already been said, but I thought you might like the perspective of someone who hasn't studied history at university level."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0254.2005.00151.x",
"https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article-abstract/120/486/424/396203",
"https://600transformer.blogspot.com/2015/01/an-old-review-of-bachrachs-early.html",
"https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/530670?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents"
],
[]
] |
|
ci3sbf
|
what exactly happens when old elastic gets crusty and loose ?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ci3sbf/eli5_what_exactly_happens_when_old_elastic_gets/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ev1dhiq"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"This is a chemical process. To understand it you have to first understand a bit about the chemical structures that makes elastic stretchy.\n\nAll polymer plastics consist of long molecule chains. Think really really long pieces of string that get all tangled up with each other. The way they get tangled depends on the chain lengths and kind. (Think ropes with knots in them versus normal string). Elastics have a bunch of the chains loosely bound together most of the time, so when you pull they get bound together more tightly and resist.\n\nThere are two major pathways for polymer degradation: thermal and oxidative. (This is a gross simplification, but close enough for a reddit comment).\n\nIn thermal degradation, the elastic can crystalize and become more regular. Rather than being loosely bound together, the chains become tightly packed and get harder to stretch. They may break instead.\n\nIn oxidative degradation, exposure to oxygen, ozone (from fluorescent lights usually), or UV light causes the chains to chemically degrade. They may get shorter (and so not bind well with other chains), or they might “cross link” where they form chemical bonds to neighboring chains so they can’t slip past other chains. In both cases, the elastic properties will change and become more brittle and less springy.\n\nThis is very simplified, but I hope it makes sense."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
2uj81c
|
Why didn't Germany use submarines to alleviate the British blockade during WWI?
|
It seems like, rather than trying to create a counter-blockade of the British Isles (and provoking the United States in the process), Germany might have been better served by attacking the British Navy itself.
Apologies if there's an answer somewhere on the subreddit already. I found questions about the blockade, but no answer to this particular question.
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2uj81c/why_didnt_germany_use_submarines_to_alleviate_the/
|
{
"a_id": [
"co8x05v",
"co90len",
"co91vz4"
],
"score": [
41,
28,
6
],
"text": [
"The German navy did attack the British fleet with submarines from time to time, but the British blockade of Germany was what's called a \"distant blockade.\" Essentially, the main part of the British fleet was based in Scapa Flow, at the far northern end of Britain, and cruisers and smaller ships guarded the approaches around the Flow in between the UK and Norway. The English channel was guarded by its narrowness (you can see right across) and friendly forces controlled both sides of it. So the only possible place for supplies to reach Germany was from the north of Britain, through the UK-Norway gap. The British fleet patrolled and controlled those approaches, but the cruisers and destroyers it used to do that were hard for the German submarines to find, and the main part of the Fleet stayed inside the Flow, which had installed U-boat and torpedo barriers at the various entrances. It wasn't the type of blockade in earlier wars, where ships would stand off the entrance of a port to watch. ",
"The Germans actually built so called merchant submarines and the most famous one and that also made a trip to the US and back was the submarine \"Deutschland\". \nBuilt in 1915 it could carry 700 tons and was mostly used to transport important rare materials for german industries like rubber. \nIt was also a big PR coup for germany and garnered huge sympathies when it reached the US east coast. \nThe UK/France promptly protested the use of the merchant submarines docking and trading with the US since they could not be inspected nor stopped like normal surface vessels.\nThe US rejected that argument though. \n\nThe ship was later converted into U-155 sinking 42 merchant ships or 122.000 gross register tons. \nShe finally returned in November 1918 and was later that month surrendered to the Entente and eventually scraped.\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\nhas a short info page about it aswell as wikipedia. \nGibson´s \n*The German Submarine War, 1914-1918*\ntouches on the subject aswell\n\n\n**Edit: Oh boy, seems like I missunderstood your question. \nStill since it somewhat fits I will leave it here**",
"/u/jschooltiger and /u/disgruntledhobgoblin both have good answers. Here's my contribution.\n\nUntil late in the second world war, submarines were little more than mobile sea mines. Their submerged speed was extremely low and even on the surface they were outmatched by most warships. The best they could do was to position themselves at points they were likely to encounter enemy ships and wait."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://uboat.net/wwi/types/index.html?type=U+151",
"Uboat.net"
],
[]
] |
|
6bopoh
|
what does paying my tv licence actually pay for these days? (uk)
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6bopoh/eli5what_does_paying_my_tv_licence_actually_pay/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dho9srb"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"The TV licence fee is a tax collected by the BBC and primarily used to fund the radio, television and online services of the BBC itself."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
hqdj5
|
What is the physical interaction taking place between a photon and an atom that causes stimulated emission?
|
In stimulated emission, an incident photon causes relaxation of an excited atom. The atom then emits a second photon that has the same phase and wavelength as the first. My question is, what is the physical interaction between the first photon and the excited atom that takes place? Do interactions between the electric and magnetic fields of the photon and atom contribute?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hqdj5/what_is_the_physical_interaction_taking_place/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c1xhx8r",
"c1xilna"
],
"score": [
8,
2
],
"text": [
"This is classic perturbation theory problem in a first or second course on quantum mechanics.\n\nThe simple way to approach it is to think of the atom as a being immersed in an electric field which varies sinusoidally in time. This just introduces a perturbation to the Hamiltonian which is a dipole coupling between different l (ell) levels, coupling l to l+1 and l-1.",
"This is a very common question that has a very funny answer. For a moment, second step back and think of an atom classically as an electron on a spring connected to a nucleus. The spring+mass system has some resonance frequency. Now if you put the atom in an oscillating electric field the electron is going to start oscillating at the same frequency as the field. As it does so, it will radiate at the same frequency as the oscillating field and in the case the field is resonant, the phase of the radiation will be equal to that of the driving electric field. Hence, stimulated emission.\n\nThis is an oversimplified picture, but the point is that even thinking classically, you should expect stimulated emission to happen. The more bizarre phenomenon that you wouldn't expect classically is, in fact spontaneous emission, when an excited atom decays to the ground state without any help from a photon. When physicists were trying to figure out atom-photon interactions, spontaneous emission was where they were getting stuck. \n\nAn intuitive explanation for spontaneous emission that is often given is that the atom is always in some environment, and even at zero temperature, the environment has some residual photons. These photons can cause stimulated emission by interacting with the atom. Thus spontaneous emission is just stimulated emission caused by environmental photons that you cannot control.\n\nYou can make a loose analogy to the mass-on-spring model if you think of the oscillating mass now sitting in its environment which is a table with friction."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
1z25y7
|
making money on a falling stock market
|
I briefly heard of a strategy where people actually make money from a fall of prices in the stock market. What is that strategy is, and can you explain it? I think its called "under cutting" or "under selling".
Not really sure of the exact name.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1z25y7/eli5making_money_on_a_falling_stock_market/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cfpu7yh",
"cfpuajb",
"cfpuaye"
],
"score": [
2,
3,
2
],
"text": [
"Short selling.\n\nThe \"normal\" way of doing things is to buy a stock, wait for the price to go up, and sell it. Short selling involves selling stock, waiting for the price to go down, and then buying it back. You do this either by borrowing someone else's stock to sell, or you can actually just have negative stock for a while (called \"naked shorting\").",
"I believe you're referring to \"shorting\" or \"short selling\".\n\nLet's say that you think that a stock will drop in value. In that case, what you might do is *borrow* some stock from me, for a fee. But it's still just borrowing, and you have to give the equivalent number of shares back to me at the end of the loan period. See, I'm betting on the price not changing much, and so I'm just out to make a quick buck by lending my shares, but I ultimately want to keep them.\n\nSo back to you. You take these shares that I loaned you, and you turn around and sell them. You're anticipating that the price will drop, and you will then be able to buy the equivalent number of shares back for a lower price before the loan period is up. Your goal is to sell those shares at at a high price, and buy them back low enough to offset the fee I'm charging you and make some extra money in the process.\n\nSo if the stock falls in value, you make money. But f it *doesn't* fall in value, you're kind of screwed, because you still have to return the stock to me, and now you're out the fee *plus* the lost value from having to to-repurchase the stocks at a higher price.",
"It's called shorting the market. Let's say the stock price for a company is currently $50 per share. If you think that price is too high, you can \"short\" the stock by borrowing shares of that stock from someone else that currently owns the stock. As soon as you borrow the stock, you sell it for the $50 a share price. If your hunch is right, and the share price drops to $30 per share, you can then buy the stock at $30 a share, return that stock to the person that initially loaned it to you at $50 per share, and you will have made $20 in the process. Of course, if the price goes up you'll end up losing money because it'll end up costing more to buy replacement shares for the stock you borrowed. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
3rire3
|
I understand that back carrying a sword is commonly understood as rubbish, but are there any examples in history of people doing this during war?
|
Question is not bound to a certain time period.
The reason I ask is because people who oppose this idea in an argument mostly prove their point more with common sense (as in "swords are to long to be drawn from the back" for example) as with hard facts.
I too don't think it is very useful to carry a sword on the back (maybe for long marchs it could be), but I want to know if anybody did that in history or if it is solely limited to Hollywood and fantasy games.
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3rire3/i_understand_that_back_carrying_a_sword_is/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cwp4m8h"
],
"score": [
13
],
"text": [
"Unfortunately the period of time during which humans carried swords happens to cover all of human history, so my answer must necessarily be in brief.\n\nSwords, despite the mythology that has risen around them, tended to be sidearms. Spears were often used before swords came out, and when they did come out they were typically drawn from the hip. Specifically, we have examples of scabbards from samurai from multiple periods: ancient Greeks, Romans, various Middle Eastern civilizations, various Chinese dynasties, and Medieval Europe. I am not aware of any that were designed to be drawn from the back. In fact, Edo samurai carried two swords with them wherever they went, and only on their hip.\n\nPhalanx armies in particular tended to be quite regular with their equipment, and they would often have hip-drawn short swords designed for use when a spear breaks or is otherwise lost. Medieval knights would usually carry an arming sword on their hip, though they might have a larger sword designed for mounted combat sheathed in their saddle, but that would still be located in front of them. It is entirely possible that marching soldiers would carry larger swords on their backs, but the only imagery we have shows them carrying their weapons in their hands or in carts. Besides which, it is very unlikely that back sheaths would have been designed to accommodate marches.\n\nThe sword-on-the-back trope probably has its roots in the oversized swords we see in much of media. When artists (both Eastern and Western) and prop designers created exceptionally large swords, out of proportion with what would actually have been used, it only made sense to carry them on your back as they were far too unwieldy to be on the hip."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
2ltfn9
|
would it be possible to knock an asteroid into our atmosphere, and lock it in like a satellite?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ltfn9/eli5_would_it_be_possible_to_knock_an_asteroid/
|
{
"a_id": [
"clxzorg"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"If it were in our atmosphere, air resistance would decay its orbit pretty quickly and then it would just fall to Earth.\n\nBut capturing an asteroid and inserting it into an orbit outside the atmosphere seems plausible eventually, if not practical right now."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
5n6tap
|
Is there a distinction to be made between a German soldier in World War II and a Nazi soldier?
|
Was the eugenics program common knowledge among German armed forces? Did the project create divisive internal politics?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5n6tap/is_there_a_distinction_to_be_made_between_a/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dc95hp6"
],
"score": [
9
],
"text": [
" > Is there a distinction to be made between a German soldier in World War II and a Nazi soldier?\n\nThe argument about whether or not [these](_URL_1_) are \"German\" soldiers of \"Nazi\" soldiers is one which comes up far too often, for numerous reasons, stemming from mere pedantry to concious efforts to disconnect the Wehrmacht from the Nazi cause in what is known as the \"Clean Wehrmacht myth\". I would first refer you to /u/Astrogator's fantastic [response to a similar question some time ago](_URL_0_), and further add my own thoughts on this matter, which echo theirs.\n\nWhile there is a technical argument to be made that not all members of the Wehrmacht (and once they began drafting later in the war, even the Waffen-SS) were literal members of the NDSAP, it is hard to say how much weight that really ought to hold. The cliche, pithy response I often see to this is that we don't call the members of the US Army the \"Democrat soldiers\", but of course, the United States is also a liberal democracy, which elects its leaders, and is a far cry from the single-party German state in which party, state, and government were for all intents and purposes one and the same. The Democrats are not synonymous with the state, despite their control of the Presidency, nor, come next Friday, will the Republicans be following the inauguration of the President-elect. So whether or not an individual, given soldier was a true believer in the cause of National Socialism, or if they were a reluctant draftee resigned to their fate, they certainly were fighting for the interests and goals of the Nazi Party in a way that simply isn't true in a liberal democracy, however much the party currently in power might set the agenda.\n\nOverall, the argument about terminology in this regard often seems to be merely academic. When saying someone was a \"Nazi soldier\", while it can mean that they were 'a Nazi who was a soldier', which, yes, we can't actually know unless he happens to be flashing his party membership card in the photo, it can also mean they were 'a soldier of the Nazis', a statement which it is not particularly easy to disagree with. So in the end, while I would say that someone writing academically should perhaps err on the side of proper terminology, and stick with 'German' instead of 'Nazi' unless they mean \"Nazi\", as far as casual usage goes, I'm certainly in agreement with Astrogator that the argument against it is weak.\n\nNow, as for your second question, well, as I made mention of, there is what is known as the \"Clean Wehrmacht Myth\". There are several fantastic responses about this on the sub already, but [I would direct you to this one](_URL_2_) by /u/commiespaceinvader as i'm partial to it. The short summary is that \"Yes, they were mostly aware, and institutionally complicit.\""
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hw2fv/is_the_use_of_nazi_as_a_general_demonym_for/cub4zwb/",
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-217-0465-32A,_Russland,_Soldaten_auf_dem_Marsch.jpg",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5799li/did_the_rommel_myth_and_clean_wehrmacht_myth_and/d8suoyk/"
]
] |
|
3t9uwy
|
what could happen if a government stopped printing money?
|
Maybe just for a period of time, such as one year.
Hope this isn't too hypothetical, I'd just like to know the possible effects.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3t9uwy/eli5_what_could_happen_if_a_government_stopped/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cx4d5ct",
"cx4eqxu",
"cx4jls1"
],
"score": [
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2,
3
],
"text": [
"Rules say please don't speculate so what DEFINITELY would happen is that (I'll say U.S. currency since that's where I'm from) the dollar would become stronger over that period of time. Manufacturing costs would effect consumerism and things like taxes on imports/exports would drastically change as well. \n\nI'm 100% positive there are tons more ramifications due to banks insuring money and the wealthy not redistributing wealth and things like that...but I'm not an economist. ",
"Governments don't print money... In the US, the [FED](_URL_1_) (Federal Reserve) does. In the EU the [ECB](_URL_0_) (European Central Bank), the UK is special with it's own moneymachine [The Bank of England](_URL_2_).\n\nDon't know what not printing any more money would bring... I guess people would start to use their own solution if shit goes wrong..",
"The answer depends on what you're asking.\n\nIf you're asking, \"what happens if we don't add any money to the monetary base (the collective sum of currency in the market) for the period of year\", the answer depends on the current economic conditions. If the economy has been expanding, then this could lead to deflation. But if the economy is shrinking then this could lead to inflation. Central banks are constantly monitoring how much currency is in the system, and taking money out of it or putting money into it. Keeping the monetary base constant for a period of time is not unheard of, but it depends on the underlying conditions.\n\nBut if the question is if the government stopped printing physical money for a year, this would probably have very little effect in the long run. As mentioned by others, the main purpose of printing money - as opposed to monitoring how much should be in the economy - is to replace old money, which is increasingly getting replaced by electronic funds. Also, the amount of physical currency that people actually use on a daily basis is small compared to the total money in a system.\n\nFor clarification: in the US, the US Mint (under the US Treasury) prints money to make sure there is enough in circulation for the purposes of physical money. The Federal Reserve (the US Central bank) makes sure that there is the appropriate amount of money in the economy as a whole."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"https://www.ecb.europa.eu/home/html/index.en.html",
"http://www.federalreserve.gov",
"http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/Pages/home.aspx"
],
[]
] |
|
35mtb1
|
how do countries with extensive maternity/paternity leave cover those individuals' job positions until they come back to work?
|
And how do companies/business owners feel about it?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35mtb1/eli5_how_do_countries_with_extensive/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cr5ukz9"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"They hire a temporary worker, or divide those tasks between existing employees.\n\nEmployers probably find it to be a chore, but there are lots of other chores, like vacations, benefits, and safe work environments, they there are accustomed to doing as a part of business."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
4a7ex8
|
why do people on reddit put things like "edit: spelling mistakes" when they could have just corrected them and not told everyone about it?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4a7ex8/eli5_why_do_people_on_reddit_put_things_like_edit/
|
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"Comments that are edited after a certain period of time have an asterisk next to the posting time to indicate they are edited. Now, many times people do edit for spelling/grammar/content without noting it and it isn't a big deal. But it's useful to note for at least two reasons:\n\n1. I make a comment and one of the replies convinces me I was wrong, they provided additional useful information, or even I just wanted to make a blanket response to a large number of similar responses.\n\n2. It discourages people from making comments like \"I think kittens are the cutest!\" and then when 100 people reply with \"I agree\" the OP changes the comment to say \"I think Hitler did nothing wrong!\"\n\n\nBut it's primarily #1.",
"Sometimes people edit their post to say something different than before. For example, I could post \"Bernie Sanders is the best\" then get 100 upvotes and supportive comments, and then edit it to say \"Donald Trump is the best.\" Reddit indicates when a comment has been edited, so posters often write why they edited the comment. Edit: spelling mistakes means that they didn't edit it for some nefarious or misleading purpose.",
"[It's part of reddiquette](_URL_0_).\n > **State your reason for any editing of posts.** Edited submissions are marked by an asterisk (*) at the end of the timestamp after three minutes. For example: a simple \"Edit: spelling\" will help explain. This avoids confusion when a post is edited after a conversation breaks off from it. If you have another thing to add to your original comment, say \"Edit: And I also think...\" or something along those lines.",
"For me, it's an old habit from my forum days when after an edit a post would have a time stamp to show it was edited.\n\nSince people could see that a post was edited, it became customary to say why you edited.\n\n",
"1. Make a funny or witty comment.\n\n2. Wait until people upvote you (or even give you gold).\n\n3. Edit your comment to \"HITLER DID NOTHING WRONG\".\n\n4. ????\n\n5. Profit",
"if people have commented on the spelling mistake it can get confusing if you just directly edit it."
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1civgn
|
Why do some sounds cause physical discomfort to our ears? Is it because they are actually damaging them?
|
I'm talking about specific sounds like fingernails scraping a chalkboard or metal utensils scraping metal pans and pots, not discomfort caused by high volume. Furthermore, the sound of metal scraping metal can make me go crazy, whereas nails scraping chalkboard is actually OK for me. Why this variance between people?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1civgn/why_do_some_sounds_cause_physical_discomfort_to/
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"Just a reminder that this is /r/askscience and only posts related to the science behind OP's question are appropriate. **Please do not post about what sounds you find annoying.** Additionally, unsourced speculation and guessing is not acceptable for this forum. Thanks!",
"This is an interesting question, and I know nothing about it. However a quick google search unveils this short [Scientific American](_URL_1_) article, which should shed some light on the chalkboard, at least.\n\nShort story shorter, we don't really know, and it might be a combination of the high pitch and roughness (randomness) of the sound that we find so awful. Not actual damage to the ears.\n\nHopefully someone with more background can shed more light on it. Note this article was written by a neuroscientist, maybe other disciplines could contribute complementary ideas.\n\nEdit: There is a short [wikipedia](_URL_0_) link as well, although it doesn't give much more information.",
"Here's one link I found on the subject that begins to answer the question, though certainly not in any definitive manner. _URL_1_\n\nEdit 1: [This link](_URL_0_) adds a little more info.\n\nEdit 2: [This link](_URL_2_) appears to truly answer the question.",
"Higher processing levels of the auditory system may contribute to the sensation of discomfort due the lack of phase locking (no ITD information) and reduced selectivity at high frequencies. There may be evolutionary aspects, since these annoying sounds resemble screaming. Also, people tend to be fine with high frequency sounds with constant intensity and low variations in the frequency components (think violin harmonics and piccolo). The sounds that make us go crazy tend to vary a lot, fluctuating between low freq components and high freq components (nail sliding down the chalkboard does this). And like you said, every person responds differently, so that's an evidence for higher auditory processing contributing to the discomfort.\n\nYes, it is true that at cochlear level, 4k range is the most amplified by resonance. But the amplitude of the annoying chalkboard sound is nowhere close to the \"feeling threshold\" where hair cells can get killed after a short exposure to the sound.\n\nIn hearing loss, high frequencies are lost first. Maybe the cochlea is more vulnerable to high amplitude high frequency sounds, and this may contribute to discomfort when listening to high frequency tones. But low frequencies always traveling through the base of the cochlea, selective for high frequencies, also contribute to hearing loss occurring at higher frequencies.\n\nI'm not so worried about the annoying specific transient sounds causing damage to the ears, since they're definitely below 100 dB. Well, if you're locked up in a torture chamber where they have a chalkboard-scraping robot right next to you, then you might experience some hearing loss much after you go crazy.",
"I cannot answer the first half of your question better than the information already provided here, but I can say:\n\nNo particular combination of frequencies can damage your ear, only the amplitude of frequencies sustained over periods of time (the louder it is the less time it take to damage your hearing) can cause hearing damage. \n\nThat said, our ears are more likely to be damaged in certain hearing ranges and that may be a reason that we find those frequencies (2k - 4k especially) offensive; because our bodies don't want to be damaged. (as one of the articles in here pointed out)\n\nedit: ack! downvoted in askscience, my biggest fear come true! but let me clarify my post by saying that I am only stating the fact that the timbre, tone, or frequencies of a sound cannot cause hearing damage.\n",
"actually have they tested nails on chalkboard with people who have never seen a chalk board before? maybe its a culture thing. ",
"Perhaps the selection of one sound as \"annoying\" over another is more psychological. \n_URL_0_\n\nIt seems that some people experience extreme discomfort at sounds of say, eating (like myself), while others remain relatively unaffected. While certain sounds may cause actual physical distress in the ear, that is generally more linked with, as people here have already pointed out, the amplitude of waves coming into the ear. \n\nAs for how we react to the content of sounds, that seems a much more psychological realm of study. \n",
"I've read a theory that this aversion to certain sounds may be a protective adaptation related to the sound of grinding teeth. Since there are no pain receptors on the surface of teeth our brains use sound and vibration to sense damage. Teeth grinding against each other and against sand or other hard particles makes a sound similar to those that tend to irritate most people.\n",
"The human ears are delicate instruments designed to pick up a large range of frequencies and sound pressure levels.\n\nBut they can also be damaged by high sound pressure levels (SPL) - especially at high frequencies.\n\nThe level of damage will depend on both the SPL and the duration of the sound.\n\nTo limit the damage, the human ear has several mechanisms dampening a sound before it gets to the inner ear.\n\nThe first line of defense is a muscle that can dampen the hammer-anvil-stirrup mechanical impedance matching system that transfers the vibrations from the ear drum to the inner ear. This small muscle reduces the vibrations that are transferred drastically, but has 2 problems:\n\n* it has a reaction time, so it doesn't have time to work against short impulse sounds like gunshots\n* it tires relatively quickly, so it does not work against sounds that go on for longer times.\n\nOne of the physical discomforts we feel is when this muscle tightens and it is an indication of that the hearing is in danger (either immediate or if we don't do something relatively quickly.\n\nThe second line of defense is turning the head away from the source of the noise. I can't say whether this is a learned defense or an instinctual thing, but I suspect the latter since we share this with many animals. This response is associated with the release of stress hormones and further feelings of discomfort.\n\nThird level is covering the ears and possible running away.\n\nNow finally to the question of whether all sounds that produce physical discomfort are damaging your ears:\n\n* Obviously some sounds (like gunshots) are damaging your ears, but you mostly feel the discomfort as a consequence of the damage that has already been done.\n\n* Other sounds may damage the ears if they are sustained over a longer period of time, so the physical discomfort triggers you defense functions (turning the head away, covering the ears getting away from there etc.)\n\n* And then there is the last category of sounds that cause discomfort regardless of level and will not damage your hearing.\n\nMost of these sounds are disharmonious i.e. the component frequencies are not all multipla of one or a few fundamental frequencies.\n\nMost musical instruments are specifically designed to produce dominantly harmonic sounds, so they sound pleasant to the ear and may actually not trigger the normal physical discomfort even when they are dangerously high.\n\nMetal and nails scraping are examples of disharmonious sounds. Whether you react to them or not may be related to your level of hearing loss and possibly simple genetic or developmental variation.\n\nIt is hard to prove *why* a biological effect like this exists, since there is no guiding intelligence behind it other than your own.\n\n3 likely options do however exist:\n\n* disharmony is a feature that generally can be associated with a sound coming from a sharp impulse event like a gunshot that can damage the hearing very quickly. If the ear was going to take the time to evaluate the absolute volume of such an event before reacting it would be too late, so it reacts immediately to any type of sound that is similar to this.\n\n* Since the dampening mechanism in the ear is only effective for a limited time, the ear cannot simply rely on determining the amplitude of the current level of sound it is hearing to determine whether to warn the body to initiate some of the other levels of defense. This may explain why some sounds cause discomfort even at lower SPL.\n\n* Discordant sounds may (even at low SPL) produce response patterns in the inner ear that are similar to the patterns that appear in cases where the ear is actually being damaged. Since the ear cannot detect whether is has already been damaged to some degree it again can't use the level it measures as an indicator of whether it is actually being damaged right now, so it triggers the discomfort mechanisms no matter what the SPL is.\n\nP.S.\nSome discomfort may also be personal and learned from traumatic experiences.",
"Using my knowledge of both music and physics I can answer this\n\nFrom a musicians perspective when two similar but not equal notes (such as C and C#) are played together they clash.\n\nFrom a physicists perspective when two similar but not equal notes are played (such as 522 Hertz and 554 Hertz, this is the same as C and C#) you have a beat frequency equal to 32. \n\nThis means that the two noises cancel each other out (because of how sound in waves work) and amplify each other 32 times a second. This will make for an annoying combination.\n\nConsequently this also the reason certain sounds feel good because the chords amplify and cancel each other out in a pleasing way.\n\nThis is the best thing I could find online to show you how annoying 10 beat frequencies is when listening _URL_0_",
"“It turns out the sound waves associated with primate warning cries, particularly chimpanzee warning cries, are remarkably similar in appearance to the aversive, middle frequency sound waves produced by fingernails on a chalkboard” -- Randolph Blake, Winner of IgNobel prize for research he published with colleagues D. Lynn Halpern and James Hillenbrand in the journal Perception & Psychophysics in 1986.\n\n_URL_0_"
]
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[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_of_fingernails_scraping_chalkboard",
"http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-is-the-sound-of-fingernails-on-blackboard"
],
[
"http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/10/11/why-we-cringe-at-unpleasant-sounds/45935.html",
"http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/1921-why-fingernails-chalkboard-painful.html",
"http://io9.com/5858325/why-do-you-cringe-at-the-sound-of-nails-on-a-chalkboard"
],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia"
],
[],
[],
[
"http://www.school-for-champions.com/science/sound_beat_frequencies.htm"
],
[
"http://phys.org/news79531741.html"
]
] |
|
1l4pqs
|
why is the united states considering getting involved in the syrian conflict?
|
Like, how would the USA benefit?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l4pqs/eli5_why_is_the_united_states_considering_getting/
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"I'm not sure the US would directly benefit.\n\nBut we have a general motivation to restrict the use of chemical weapons and we have stated that we would take some sort of action if chemical weapons were used. It seems pretty clear that's happened and so we're at a point now where we either do **something** or we basically okay the use of chemical weapons against civilians, which we're not willing to do.",
"International law states that chemical and biological weapons should never be used. If Assad drops sarin on his own people and nothing is done, what precedent does that set for other countries?\n\nSome of the Syrian rebels have ties to al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. No doubt the US is concerned that these chemical weapons could potentially wind up in the wrong hands.\n\nIn my opinion, I find it unlikely that we would invade Syria with an Army. If we were to get involved, we'd use drones and smart missiles like we did in Libya.",
"Lots of political questions on here lately. Hard to answer these without being too biased. This is one of those things where you'll have to sort through lots of information and figure out what you believe.\n\nI'll state for the record that I am against US involvement in Syria, but I think I also have a pretty good understanding of the reasons for becoming involved.\n\nThere is more than just a single reason the US wants to get involved in Syria, so I will try to break it down into pieces.\n\nStrategy (geopolitics):\n\n- The United States has been trying to keep the middle east under control for decades now. Part of this is because of its strategic alliance with Israel, part of this is because the US sees the middle east as the source of all of its problems with the 'war on terror' and partly because of economic interests in the area (oil mostly). \n\n- Syria is part of a much bigger 'game' being played by the major world powers. As part of this struggle, each power is trying to gain powerful countries within each major 'region' in order to try to influence that region's politics and economics. Assad and the government of Syria have been allies with Russia for a long time, and represent a big part of Russia's attempts to gain control of the middle east (Iran potentially being the other). Russia has ALWAYS been trying to gain control of the middle east, or at least parts of it. This goes back to the 9th century and probably even earlier. This could be a major opportunity to deprive Russia of influence in the region and gain a US ally (if things don't go horribly wrong, as they have in the past).\n\n- The US wants to prevent Syria from becoming a 'failed state'. If it looks as though Assad will lose, the US might support one of the 'better' rebel factions to prevent 'worse' rebel factions from winning the country and taking over. This is part of the US's strategy in the global war on terror.\n\n-Economics\n\n-Many people will say the US is going into Syria for oil. This seems like a compelling argument but probably isn't true. Syria has had a great deal of oil in the past but seems to be running out. Its oil production has been decreasing lately and Syria is now an oil importing nation. If this is the real reason, the US government can't do the basic math it would take to show that the oil in Syria won't be worth the money. However, if you make the argument that controlling Syria is part of a bigger effort to control the entire middle east and the oil in the region, the argument might make more sense.\n\nHuman Rights:\n\n- I honestly don't think the US' efforts in the Mid East are completely selfish. I think many in the US government see what is happening in Syria and want to help. There are many in the US government who still feel the US military can be used as a force for good in the world. \nBoth the Syrian government and the rebels have been proven to have committed horrible human rights abuses. The citizens of Syria are genuinely suffering and the situation is becoming a major human rights crisis. I imagine plenty of people in the US government feel they are obligated to do something to help, and part of this needs to involve the US military. The UN seems to be looking for a way to stop the violence in Syria, but simply does not have the kind of power that would be necessary to do anything. Also, because Russia has a permanent seat the on UN security council, the UN will be completely powerless to interfere.\n",
"Eh, I don't think it's so much the benefits right now as that the tragedy of it and now the chemical weapons. Maybe I'm just not cynical enough. That's not to say that there aren't possible benefits, but I don't think that's outweighs the fact that people (yes, even politicians) are seeing something horrible happening and want to resolve it. Granted, often you have to sell it by also pairing moral/ethical reasons with political/economic benefits but I don't think that invalidates the fact that most people who are for intervention probably have less selfish reasons foremost in mind.\n\nBut, eh, possible benefits? Making an example that chemical weapons will not be tolerated. We haven't had a great relationship with Assad. A chance to make a new ally in the middle-east. Weaken Russia's influence since Assad is once of Russia's few friends in the region."
]
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buf155
|
When it was discovered that Ronald Reagan sold weapons to Iran, in defiance of American Law, why wasn’t he impeached?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/buf155/when_it_was_discovered_that_ronald_reagan_sold/
|
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"A number of congressional Democrats wanted to pursue impeachment, but there were several reasons why they ultimately decided against it:\n\n**Domestic Politics:** \n\nPolitically, impeachment had the potential to backfire on the Democrats. Iran-Contra had dented Reagan's public approval, but he still retained a great deal of public support. There was also no guarantee that Americans would view the scandal as severe enough to warrant impeachment. As many Republicans argued, should the president and his staff really be charged with a crime simply because they were trying to bring kidnapped Americans back home? That would have been a tough narrative for Democrats to combat. \n\nThere was another political consideration for Democratic leaders to consider as well. Namely, any potential impeachment proceedings would probably not end until after the 1988 presidential election. Reagan would therefore already be out of office, leading Democrats to believe that impeachment would be largely superfluous. \n\n**Lack of evidence:**\n\nCongress did not have conclusive proof that Reagan was directly involved in the arms-for-hostages deal. As one of the chief counsels to the Senate Iran-Contra committee stated, impeachment would have required an \"extraordinarily high standard of proof\" based on \"credible, direct, and conclusive evidence of guilt.\" At the time, they didn't have access to any evidence that would fit that description. It was only after the congressional investigation that journalists and historians discovered evidence of Reagan's central role in the Iran-Contra affair.\n\nCongressional leaders also believed that Reagan's impeachment would have damaged the legitimacy of America's political institutions. Many Democratic leaders had sat through the Watergate proceedings and remembered the constitutional crisis it created. They simply didn't want to put the country through that again, although they stipulated they would do so if there was clear evidence of criminal actions by the president. \n\n**International politics:**\n\nInternational politics likely played a secondary, but still significant role, in the decision not to impeach. At the same time congressional investigations into Iran-Contra were underway, Reagan was trying to establish better relations between the United States and Soviet Union. In particular, Reagan hoped that the two superpowers could soon sign a momentous nuclear arms limitation agreement. Impeachment proceedings would have greatly damaged Reagan's international standing. Foreign leaders would have no desire to work with a president whose domestic political standing was in serious doubt. Moreover, impeachment would have certainly consumed all of Reagan's attention and, consequently, stalled any chance at a U.S.-Soviet arms limitation treaty.\n\nTaken together, these reasons led congressional Democrats to discard impeachment. The risks were too great, the rewards too little, and the outcome too uncertain.\n\nEdit: fixed some spelling and grammar\n\n**Sources:**\n\nThe best source on Iran-Contra is Malcolm Byrne, *Iran-Contra: Reagan's Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power* (University Press of Kansas, 2014).\n\nDoug Rossinow's *The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s* provides a good overview on the subject.",
"Holy crap! Thank you for the upvotes and answers!",
"For those looking for more insight, the best resource for information on the Iran-Contra affair may be the project/collection at Brown University. This is their [About page describing the project](_URL_1_) and here is the link to their [Documents page compiling government sourced material](_URL_2_).\n\nTo answer OP's question, investigators were unable to unequivocally prove Reagan knew about the deal and Oliver North had destroyed evidence. The Brown University project's [profile of Reagan](_URL_0_) discusses this further:\n\n > Specifically, investigators were unable to produce any evidence that Reagan approved or even knew of the private profits made through the sales to Iran or about the diversion of proceeds to the Contras. Although Walsh found it strange that Reagan would continue to allow these sales to go forward despite complications (Iran released few hostages and even changed the terms of negotiations) unless he knew the profits funded the Contras, National Security Adviser John Poindexter claimed to have kept him in the dark, and any possible contradictory evidence would have been lost when National Security Council staff member Oliver North destroyed official NSC documents.\n\n...\n\n > The question of whether the President, in the discharge of his constitutional office, is criminally liable for false statements and obstruction of congressional inquiries regarding his activities is not a ready field for criminal prosecution. The President is quite different from any subordinate in his relationship with Congress. But the fundamental reason for lack of prosecutorial effort was the absence of proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the President knew that the statements being made to Congress were false, or that acts of obstruction were being committed by Poindexter, North and others."
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"https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra_Affair/documents.php"
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||
3vws4a
|
Did the Gestapo really say "Good luck" in english to catch spies or escaped PoWs?
|
So after watching The Great Escape - my favorite movie :) - again I was wondering if that trick was ever *actually* used?
[Reference to movie line](_URL_0_)
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vws4a/did_the_gestapo_really_say_good_luck_in_english/
|
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"It's on every year, and Gordon Jackson falls for it every. single. time. Maybe this year he won't. Maybe this year Steve McQueen will make it over the wire.\n\nAnyway. \n\nThe film is based on the book of the same name by Paul Brickhill, who was in the camp but was too claustrophobic to be allowed in the tunnels. \n\nBrickhill used the experiences of his fellow POWs when writing the book, but as with a lot of these things it's a muddy issue as to what really happened, what is him faithfully recording someone else's tall tales and what is him making things up. \n\nAll of that said,[ this blog](_URL_0_) gives some specific names and places where this happened - to Sq Ldr Roger Bushell (on whom the Richard Attenborough character is based) and Lt Bernard Scheidhauer, a French pilot, near Saarbrücken. \n\nThe writer is a \"Writer and reader of historical non fiction and fiction, especially escape and evasion and World War 2.\" so I've no idea of his sources but the story pops up again in the [Daily Mail](_URL_1_) - which is not exactly known for its rigorous standards of journalism.\n\nHow true the story is, it only ever seems to come up with regards to those two men, so I'm inclined to think that supports it (false stories often get all sorts of different names attached to them) and that it was a one-off or at least relatively rare occurrence. A suspicious Gestapo man thinking on his feet, rather than something in the Gestapo POW Recapture Manual, so to speak."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0wNl66tT3Q"
] |
[
[
"http://theescapeline.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/good-luck.html",
"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1222565/He-shot-hero-Great-Escape-cold-blood-But-Nazi-DIDNT-deserve-hang.html"
]
] |
|
1fk2n1
|
How did Dante Alighieri's "The Divine Comedy" change the way we view hell? How was hell viewed before its publication?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fk2n1/how_did_dante_alighieris_the_divine_comedy_change/
|
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"I'll be taking a good bit of this from my experience as clergy, so take what I say about contemporary views of Hell with a grain of salt, but I'm fairly convinced its a healthy(?) combination of Dante and Milton. \n\nTo answer your question about views of Hell pre-Dante it depends pretty widely on where and when you were in the early Church. For those Jewish sects who held to the resurrection (The Pharisees and Essenes) the idea was that you went to the underworld (Sheol) which was similar to the Greco/Roman idea of Hades in that it was just a place that the dead went to, and was neither good nor bad. The thought concerning the Resurrection was (and still is for many Jewish theologians) a kind of a benign Universalism. \n\nThis shifts within Christianity for a number of reasons but the biggest factor I can point to off the bat is the Early Church's apocalyptic nature. If the Judgement and the resurrection are coming soon, then why do we need to think of Hell as a place where you go immediately after you die? You go to Sheol with everyone else and then after the resurrection it's not about heaven or hell, but about the New Jerusalem or the lake of fire. (I'm pulling this imagery from Revelation 21.) \n\nThis sets up the dichotomy that was used by much of the early church. It's not about heaven vs. hell, it's about death vs. life, and all of this is sorted out on the other side of the resurrection, not immediately after you die. The idea of the \"Inferno\" comes from St. Jerome's Latin translation of \"Hades\" in the Greek New Testament (Infernus). \n\n(The way that this changes in the early Middle Ages is outside of my area of expertise, so Ill have to leave off with the Early Church.)\n\nThat being said, Dante's genius was taking Greco/Roman myth surrounding death and punishment and synthesizing it with the Christian imagery of the Lake of Fire and the idea of the \"Infernus.\" So when we think of Hell as a place of very specific torment, that's all Dante. What Milton did to add to all this was to make Satan a compelling character and not just the unholy foil to God's holiness. (The book of Job is the only book of the Bible where Satan doesn't play the Fool.) \n\nSo when we think of Hell as a place of specific torment for specific Sins, that's Dante. When we think of Satan as cunning and a brilliant orator and tactician, that's Milton. Where we're at in the popular conception currently is somewhere in between, and pretty far from what the pre-nicene church thought of any of it. ",
"I was never quite sure what to think when our classics professors said \"Dante invented hell.\" After all, Inanna went to the underworld, and so did Gilgamesh. Odysseus went there, and so did Aeneas. \n\nBut if you read Homer and Virgil, their underworlds are not like Dante's hell. Yes, you can see precursors, but demons rending sinners apart, people driven in circles by burning rain, thorn branches spouting blood when broken, and then speaking... Dante invented all that. There were punishments that fit some crimes before, but not on Dante's level. I've read some of it comes from Islamic tradition, but much of it comes from Dante.\n\nOr at least that was always the party line. Then, one day, I was in the back woods of Southern France. Centuries ago, the border moved back and forth between France and Italy, and up in those hills, people still speak a mix of those two languages, with some local patois mixed in. Anyway, there are some old, very old, churches back up there, in places too remote for armies to pass through. Some of those churches are decorated with scenes that would make Dante feel right at home.\n\nHere's an example, although this particular one postdates Dante by about a century or two. It's from a chapel called Notre Dame des Fontaines, outside a tiny little town called La Brigue:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThe church itself dates from the 12th century. If your French is good, there's an article here: _URL_2_\n\nHere's a preloaded google image search: _URL_0_\n\nIf you look at some of the other works in that church, you can see that kind of art was already falling out of favor: many of the others are more, well, positive. But if you wander through the region, which is well off the tourist track, you'll see other examples. \n\nAnyway, it taught me that Dante didn't make this stuff up on his own. It came out of the culture, there were examples in the primitive churches, if not in Florence. He put the specific people there, but the vision of hell was all around him.",
"For pre-Dante visions of hell, three books can guide you:\n\n* Eileen Gardner’s *Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante* (1989, reissue 2008) is a large anthology of medieval sources describing heaven and hell that pre-date Dante. The “Vision of Thurkill” is an especially close cognate of Dante’s idea of *contrapasso* where the punishment fits the crime. [This link] (_URL_0_) will take you to the first pages of the book where you can see the chapters and read some descriptions.\n\n* Jeffrey Burton Russel’s *Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages* (1984) is the third of his trilogy on the development of the idea of Satan (namely, *The Devil* antiquity to first Christians, *Satan* early Christianity, and *Lucifer*).\n\n* Alan E. Bernstein’s *The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds* (1993) traces the idea of hell from ancient Mesopotamia forward.\n\n",
"What’s so vastly different about Dante’s vision of hell to what comes before is his imaginative construction of a new, vastly detailed architecture of hell (in 9 circles), which is derived from his application of scholastic theology to divide hell into layers. The worse the sin, the further down you go. So, (in upper hell) *sins of incontinence or the inability to control your will* (basically not thinking, denying your rationality): the lustful, gluttonous, prodigal & miserly, wrathful, and slothful; and (in lower hell) *sins of violence* (physically doing harm): heretics, the violent against neighbors, against self (suicides), against God (blasphemers), against nature (sodomites), and against art (usurers); and *sins of malice or fraud* (the worst sin because it perverts the intellect and truth): simple fraud = panderers, flatterers, simoniacs, soothsayers, barraters, hypocrites, thieves, deceivers, sowers of discord, falsifiers; and complex fraud = traitors to family, guests, country, and lords. At the vestibule of hell he also creates a Limbo for those virtuous people born before Jesus and for unbaptized babies; these people aren’t saved but they don’t suffer\n\nAdd to this his mix of classical figures (i.e., people from mythology—like Ulysses—and the ancients—like Brutus) and his contemporaries—like his fellow Florentines—often mentioned explicitly by name so that his hell resonates with ancient, Christian, and contemporary history, which imparts an unprecedented universality and immediacy to it: everybody, everywhere, at all times is apt to land in it.\n\nThese points are made in the intros to every decent translation of *The Divine Comedy* of which there are literally hundreds. There are two new ones just out by Clive James and Mary Jo Bang, but ones by Mark Musa, Alan Mandelbaum, Robert and Jean Hollander, etc. are probably better.\n\nEDIT: Added a little more explanation of the three kinds of sin.",
"Milton's influence is just as important to recognize here, so that you can differentiate where elements come from which sources.\n\nMilton's Paradise Lost begins in Hell (after a small Prologue) details Satan, and his fallen, upon a lake of fire. They raise up from it and create Pandemonium, a place of council, where the fallen angels decide how best to get back at God. (Also it's where we get our modern word from meaning chaos, etc.).\n\nSome fallen however seek to end their torment and try to traverse the desolate area that they're now foced to inhabit. And in a minimal, marginal description, Milton describes a part of hell which is the polar opposite of the lake they first lay in, a part of Hell frozen and \"so cold, it's hot\" (I've not checked this quote, doing this from memory).\n\nLikely it's a refence to Hades, which was largely considered cold (this may be a misconception on my part. If anyone could back this up, it would be great.)\n\nI've not read Dante, but I'm somewhat familiar with the works, yet I seem to remember the last circle of hell, containing Judas and Lucifer, is also a frozen place, again a nod to previous conceptions of hell.\n\nLastly, one of the most famous lines from Paradise Lost is Satan's line: \"myself am Hell\". Meaning the externality of \"Hell\" as a place, absent from God, is not the only conception. Satan laments the internality of the disjunction from Heaven and God here, and focuses upon the loss that comes with loosing his home, origins and the place he is meant to be. Going on, Satan describes the ongoing process of Hell, suggesting that it only gets worse, and suggests the Hell he will endures makes his current state Heaven-like.\n\n[Partial quote:\n\"Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;\nAnd, in the lowest deep, a lower deep\nStill threatening to devour me opens wide,\nTo which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.\"]\n\n[I may be wrong in some parts here, however I briefly studied Paradise Lost at in last year at Uni. Appologies for spelling mistakes, typing on my phone here.]\n\nEdit: correcting Auto-corrections.",
"Follow-up question: Why is it common to say \"Dante's *Inferno*\" rather than \"Alighieri's *Inferno*\"? In other words, why is it so common to refer to Dante Alighieri by his first name when we generally refer to authors by their last name? I understand that there are exceptions to every rule, but Dante in particular seems to stand out in this regard."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"https://www.google.com/search?q=notre+dame+des+fontaines+la+brigue&safe=off&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=8S6sUd-iOuPO0gGs7YHQBA&ved=0CEUQsAQ&biw=902&bih=516",
"http://500px.com/photo/18856437",
"http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapelle_Notre-Dame-des-Fontaines_de_la_Brigue"
],
[
"http://books.google.com/books?id=zOYvNNIyjN0C&pg=PA204&lpg=PA204&dq=vision+of+thurkill&source=bl&ots=ucV9zwnJmD&sig=Q1xKC4YaParLbGRmRtie9SD3tmA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Wy-sUfbBIOSIygHsuIDwAg&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=vision%20of%20thurkill&f=false"
],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
3ps44k
|
Could someone help me identify this tool?
|
I am a high school science teacher. I found this tool while cleaning out the lab room. The top cone part is made of copper and is engraved with the text "made in west Germany". The silver blade part is not sharp, and swivels in and out of a groove on the copper cone. Help me identify this tool, Reddit!
_URL_0_
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3ps44k/could_someone_help_me_identify_this_tool/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cw8x726"
],
"score": [
93
],
"text": [
"We have one of these in my lab. It's for making a sharp end to a piece of tubing. Like [this](_URL_0_), but smaller and smoother.\n\nYou insert the cone into the end of the tube, pull the blade closer and spin and the blade will shave off parts of the tube to give you a bevelled end. \n\nI can't find an example or the name of the instrument, but I'll ask my labmate who uses it and get back to you with the answer."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://imgur.com/xkZb8Xe"
] |
[
[
"http://www.testecvw.com/carl/rocket/RocketAssembly02.jpg"
]
] |
|
3nyhzm
|
Which States of the Union didn't join of their complete free will?
|
Just considering how a lot of other political unions got started; I can think of Hawaii as a notable region that got annexed. Considering how so many of them are large and plentiful enough to be thriving countries in their own right, were any others given ultimatums, outright annexed, etc?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nyhzm/which_states_of_the_union_didnt_join_of_their/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cvsio6y"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Well, since you say \"complete\"...western Virginia was, for the most part, not wanting to secede with the rest of Virginia in 1860. When it did go through the process of having the constitutional conventions necessary for the region to become a separate state, some counties ( mostly the eastern panhandle) were not particularly interested in leaving Virginia but were thought necessary by the rest to have in the new state because of things like railroad connections. While most counties were asked to send delegations to the conventions, for these few counties , if they did not send a delegation to say otherwise, they were counted as voting yes. These were under control of the Union Army at the time, and of course there would have been no way to have a free election for any delegates , let alone some who might vote no.\n\nNot the most scrupulous process, perhaps, but I am sure that some Civil War historians could also comment on states like Missouri and Tennessee that had significantly big regions that did not want to secede from the Union but , ~~since they were never allowed a plebiscite on the subject~~ found themselves in the Confederacy regardless."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
274336
|
why do guitars often get out of tune in a higher pitch? wouldn't the strings tend to get looser?
|
I notice if I don't play my guitar for a few weeks the strings are all a half step higher. how can that happen without tighening the strings. I would expect the strings to loosen rather than tighten if left alone for s week ar two.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/274336/eli5_why_do_guitars_often_get_out_of_tune_in_a/
|
{
"a_id": [
"chx8crf"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"When strings stretch, they get thinner, which results in higher pitch. Be sure to properly stretch your strings after putting on a new set and you should have better pitch retention."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
4az3qo
|
How can a molecule be polar, but hydrophobic?
|
Lookin' at you, PLA.
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4az3qo/how_can_a_molecule_be_polar_but_hydrophobic/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d14r9sr",
"d14rdhk"
],
"score": [
2,
3
],
"text": [
"If a molecule has a polar and non-polar end, it has the ability to form micelles, which, when their hydrophobic ends point outwards are hydrophobic. As for PLA, in my undergrad experience, it looks as if it's not polar, as there are 2 oxygen atoms with partial negative charges on opposite sides of the molecule, making it non-polar.",
"I assume you are talking about polylactic acid?\n\n\nObviously the methyl groups are hydrophobic. The ester groups, while polar, don't interact so well with water (See [here](_URL_0_)). So the polymer as a whole is not hydrophilic.\n\n\nAs for why certain (aprotic) polar groups are not easily hydrated, the authors of the linked study proposed that groups which are more easily protonated can form hydrogen bonds with water more readily. (If you can access the full paper, Table 1 correlates pKa with hydration number for several groups, including the ester group.)"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp4029968"
]
] |
|
6qgkk3
|
why do we have to pee 'on' things?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6qgkk3/eli5_why_do_we_have_to_pee_on_things/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dkx4hpq",
"dkx4j9q",
"dkx4quz",
"dkx5ro3",
"dkx9d5a"
],
"score": [
6,
4,
3,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"It's likely from old instincts of marking territory. Not only do you want others to know you're around but you want to them to know you're big and bad, that's why dogs raise their legs to pee (male dog's), it's to show off their size and how heigh they could pee. A flat surface doesn't let us show that. ",
"I actually have no problems peeing in the middle of the field, quite liberating actually, you can pee everywhere you want! ;-)\nI also never understood why people can't per when someone is standing next to them..",
"Ladies try not to pee on things. We try not to pee on our legs, our feet, our pants or underwear, and we lean forward to avoid the \"flow to the back\". ",
"I believe that having to pee on things is not a strong desire. For animals it is much more so, but only for territorial animals (for example: wolves). Way long long long ago we shared a common relative with these territorial animals, and as we have changed over millions of years to become humans today we still retain a minor desire to do so. \n\nThe desire to pee on things comes from the part of your brain that's referred to as \"primitive\", just meaning it hasn't changed much over many many generations. However, a big part of what made us humans is the part of the brain called the frontal cortex. If you grab your forehead that portion of your brain underneath your skull is the frontal cortex. The frontal cortex is what makes you able to problem solve, think about thinking, and do all the other smart things you do. \n\nThe frontal cortex is very powerful and can overide the primitive desires we get from the primitive part of the brain. So if you're not thinking about it you may feel the want to pee on an object, but if you think about peeing your frontal cortex can make you more creative about it. I like to pee of flat surfaces and make designs, pee off cliffs, and pee on the edge of the toilet bowl (to minimize noise). \n\ntldr: if you don't think about peeing you'll find yourself peeing on things, but if you think about peeing you'll be more creative with how you pee.",
"I see it as the same reason why people cant sit in a waiting room without a book or their phones in their face. If there is a chance to entertain yourself you're going to do it. When standing up and peeing outside, just standing there and peeing is boring. Doing some target practice is not. Why would I make peeing boring when I can make it fun."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
70pe2b
|
why does the military use mostly propellar aircrafts for cargo instead of jets?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/70pe2b/eli5_why_does_the_military_use_mostly_propellar/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dn4w34t",
"dn5450a"
],
"score": [
11,
2
],
"text": [
"Prop-driven aircraft are generally cheaper to produce and maintain. Jets give obvious advantages for smoothness, speed, and altitude. But for a cargo plane, ability to land/take off in a shorter distance, to fly slower and at a lower altitude efficiently, and ability to do all of this with heavy load is more important. ",
"Propeller planes, in a military sense, are designed to serve the battlefield in a tactical environment. Prop planes can take off from short, unimproved runways, delivering personnel and supplies closer to the front lines. Jets are more strategic in nature, carrying personnel and supplies over a longer distance. I will say that the C17, the most recent cargo jet, can serve both tactical and strategic missions. Jets also have a larger capacity, delivering cargo and personnel to larger logistic centers, where the payload is off loaded and put on the smaller prop planes for delivery closer to the front. The final delivery is often made by ground vehicles and helicopters."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
1cv18r
|
How were the Triassic-Cretaceous periods able to support such large land animals versus today? Does being ~3°C-4°C degrees warmer really make that big a difference?
|
Just pulling the average temperature cited on Wikipedia: [Triassic](_URL_0_), [Jurassic](_URL_2_), [Cretaceous](_URL_1_)
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1cv18r/how_were_the_triassiccretaceous_periods_able_to/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c9kbvkz",
"c9kc2is"
],
"score": [
2,
3
],
"text": [
"The difference does make a difference to species who aren't evolved to cope with it. The numerous mass extinctions throughout geological time occurred because of natural processes or catastrophes and as such the climate change very fast. If species evolve over tens of millions of years they adapt to whatever temperature they are in as long as it changes slowly enough.\n\nAs for why large animals were supported this is likely due to a number of reasons: \n\n* The fact that dinosaurs were reptiles and the climate was warm - most reptiles thrive in warm environments as it gives them more energy. This is especially true when you are large, this reduces your mass to surface area ratio so you can hold heat more effectively.\n\n* Also because they were reptiles many had honeycomb like bone structures which we can see in birds today. This made them much much lighter for their size so they were about to grow to huge proportions whilst still carrying the weight.\n\n* No predators to remove the species in higher trophic levels. There would still be many large animals in the world if it wasn't for humans and out ancestors hunting them to extinction.",
"Neither temperature nor oxygen levels (which were actually lower than those today at various points) were the reason dinosaurs became so large. Instead, they became large because dinosaur physiology and life history was better suited to large size than mammal physiology and life history. Check out this flowchart (relating specifically to sauropods, but other parts of it apply to others) _URL_0_"
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triassic",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic"
] |
[
[],
[
"http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/files/2011/12/Sander-et-al-2011-gigantism-flow-chart-Dec-2011-tiny.jpg"
]
] |
|
7nx99j
|
how does a split-brain work when the corpus callosum connecting the two brain halves has been removed?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7nx99j/eli5_how_does_a_splitbrain_work_when_the_corpus/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ds57kt1",
"ds5fyaz"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"While the corpus callosum itself has been severed, both sides of the brain still have their connections to the rest of the body. As a result, activities originating in one side of the brain but not the other can't really interact, as demonstrated in [Sperry's experiments](_URL_0_), but those activities can still be carried out. ",
"The brain halves can still connect to each other, but only through secondary means. Basically, through the nervous system. Each half gets feedback from the nerves, and then they reconcile things with each other from the information they're getting instead of having a direct connection. It's not ideal, but in epileptic patients who had it severed for medical reasons or in people who suffer from a physical deformity it's better than no connection."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/split-brain/background.html"
],
[]
] |
||
2i20ou
|
if water pressure behind household taps is continuous, why doesn't the pressure build up and up until the taps are forced off?
|
I wondered this specifically because if a tap is removed while water to a house is on, there is usually a massive ongoing geyser of water until the water is turned off.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2i20ou/eli5_if_water_pressure_behind_household_taps_is/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cky32tu",
"cky381o"
],
"score": [
4,
17
],
"text": [
"Water is noncompressible. And it's not like there is a compressor or even a pump behind it. It's just gravity. Weight is causing the pressure. That's why you have water towers or water tanks up on a hill.",
"It's a constant pressure, but not a constantly *increasing* pressure.\n\nImagine that you're pushing on a locked door with some amount of force. When someone finally unlocks the door and turns the handle, it'll go flying open because of your push. But if the door is never opened, you won't cause it to burst into splinters just because you keep pushing on it with the same pressure."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
atsr4j
|
Battleships on both sides of the war were commonly bristling with anti-aircraft weaponry, yet many fell victim to enemy aircraft anyways. So how effective was ship-based anti-aircraft weaponry really?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/atsr4j/battleships_on_both_sides_of_the_war_were/
|
{
"a_id": [
"eh39f2t"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"Some useful past discussion of this by u/When_Ducks_Attack and u/eighthgear and u/Domini_canes in _URL_0_\n\nIn that discussion, it's noted that a little over 1/3 of the enemy aircraft that attacked US warships and came into range of their anti-aircraft guns were shot down by those guns. The USN had excellent fire control systems for their AA guns, with effective radars and the best (analog) computers of the time. Their ships had plentiful AA guns, and they threw up a large volume of fire at attackers.\n\nHow effective was this - the best naval AA fire of the war? 2/3 of attacking aircraft were not shot down, and about 10% of attacking aircraft hit ships. Aircraft that were shot down before attacking failed to hit, and aircraft under heavy AA fire were more likely to miss.\n\nReducing hit rates to 10% isn't enough, if enough aircraft attack. The Japanese hit Prince of Wales and Repulse with about 10% of their bomb attacks, and about 10% of their torpedoes in their initial attacks (with more torpedo hits after the initial hits slowed down the ships). On the other hand, it's better than nothing. With no AAA, air attacks can be very accurate and effective. Reducing the hit rate to 10% can be the difference between being damaged and being sunk."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33sa2x/effectiveness_of_shipborne_antiair_in_wwii/"
]
] |
||
31cwr3
|
i gave two pints of blood and saline was pumped back into me. how does my body know to make extra rbcs to replace them?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31cwr3/eli5_i_gave_two_pints_of_blood_and_saline_was/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cq0eyss"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"When your kidneys notice that they aren't getting enough oxygen, as is the case when there aren't enough red blood cells, they produce a hormone called [erythropoetin](_URL_0_), or EPO. EPO tells your bone marrow to generate new red blood cells. When the kidneys start getting enough oxygen, they stop producing the EPO and the bone marrow, in turn, stops producing more red blood cells. (The EPO itself breaks down after a while, preventing a \"dose\" of it from perpetually causing new red blood cells to be created.)\n\nInjecting EPO is one of the ways that athletes dope their blood."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythropoietin"
]
] |
||
92x84c
|
How did in the past Ukraine and Belarus become known as "Little Russia" and "White Russia", and why did those terms fall out of use?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/92x84c/how_did_in_the_past_ukraine_and_belarus_become/
|
{
"a_id": [
"e39bjdk",
"e39fi9g",
"e39kcyt",
"e39wuqx"
],
"score": [
21,
3,
3,
17
],
"text": [
"Could you clarify your question further? For example, are you referring to English usages? Belarus means White Russia, and it is literally called White Russia in some languages. ",
"Color terms and size terms for the different Russias have different origins.\n\nA Rus of Colour first starts appearing as the Latin Calque, \"Ruthenia rubra\" or \"Russia rubra\", of \"Czerwień Rus\", of a region which has originally been called after the city of Czerwień. The city, however, was destroyed by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and thus the region bearing it's name (today it's the West of Ukraine) was reinterpreted to be derived from the Slavic word for \"red\". Later maps would also include a White Russia and a Black Russia to cover the parts of christian orthodox Eastern Europe which weren't \"red\" (and those terms could wander anywhere from Lithuania to Moscow and from the White to the Black Sea). \n\n\"Great Russia\" was picked up from the Byzantines (drawing, in turn, from classical conventions).\n\nSource: [I. G. Klimov, К происхождению составеной хоронимики руси, Исследование славянских языков в русле традиций сравнительно-исторического и сопоставительного языкознания, Moscow, 2001, pages 49-52.](_URL_0_)\n\nWhite Russia remained the term used for Belarus (it is the *meaning* of *Belarus*) while the Little/Great division was dropped because it was considered *demeaning* by Ukrainian nationalists (who *preferred* the term *Ukrainian*) as well as the Bolsheviks (Lenin having attacked *\"Great Russian Chauvinism\"*).",
"Hi, you'll find additional info in this thread\n\n* [Why Belarus called as White Russia](_URL_0_) featuring /u/kaisermatias , plus a few links to more threads",
"**Little Russia**\n\nIn the High Middle Ages, a powerful Slavic state arose in modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia. Because the people called themselves the Rus’ and their capital was situated in Kiev, this state came to be known as the Kievan Rus’. Many of the Slavs of the areas under their authority were initially pagans. By the 13th Century, however, many of the Slavic tribes had converted to Orthodox Christianity. After the Mongols destroyed Kiev in the mid-13th Century, two rival successor-states—Galicia-Volhynia and Suzdalia—and many other states arose in its place.^(1)\n\nThe Orthodox Church under the Kievan Rus’ answered to its leader, the metropolitan bishop. The metropolitan bishop—or the metropolitan for short—was known by this title because he was the supreme clerical authority of the metropolis of Kiev. With Kiev destroyed, however, the metropolitan had to move his headquarters elsewhere. He decided to move to Suzdalia. His decision to move to Suzdalia symbolically granted that country an air of legitimacy as the true successor state to the Kievan Rus’. The leaders of Galicia-Volhynia were well aware of the prestige this granted Suzdalia, and therefore insisted that the metropolitan move his headquarters to their country instead. Wishing to avert further conflict, the metropolitan stayed in Suzdalia, but granted Galicia-Volhynia its own metropolitan.^(2)\n\nIn order to distinguish between the two metropolitans, the clerical authorities began referring to Suzdalia as “Major Rus’”, and to Galicia-Volhynia as “Minor Rus’”. At the time, the use of “major” and “minor” may have only indicated that Galicia-Volhynia had fewer eparchies, or clerical provinces. By the 1330s, even secular rulers started referring to the two countries by these terms.^(3)\n\nAfter the Polish conquest of Galicia-Volhynia, the terms “Major Rus’” and “Minor Rus’” fell into disuse. By the 17th Century, the leaders of Muscovy began styling themselves as the leaders of not just Muscovy, but “Russia”, the Greek variant of “Rus’”. With the introduction of the term “Russia”, the terms “Major Rus’” and “Minor Rus’” were revived as “Great Russia” and “Little Russia”. Muscovy was understood to be “Great Russia”, and the majority-Orthodox Christian territories of modern-day Ukraine comprised “Little Russia”.^(4)\n\nUkraine at the time was known by many, many terms. “Ukraine” and “Little Russia” were only two of those terms. In the mid-17th Century, the Tsar of Muscovy—now “Great Russia”—officially changed his title to “Tsar of Great and Little Russia”. With official recognition, the term “Little Russia” became the generally accepted term for Ukraine by the 18th Century.^(5)\n\nIn the last century, growing nationalism in modern-day Ukraine led to a widespread preference for “Ukraine” over “Little Russia”. The term “Little Russia” implied that the people of Ukraine were only one branch of a larger Russian ethnicity, an idea that ran counter to the nationalist sentiment that had enveloped the country. As a completely different term, “Ukraine” implied an ethnic distinction between Russians and the people of Ukraine.^(6)\n\n**White Russia**\n\nNobody is entirely sure how modern-day Belarus came to be known as “White Russia”. Some believe that the name originated from the white clothing that the people in that region wore.^(7) Others believe it originated from the heavy snowfall the region seasonally experiences.^(8) Another possible theory is that the names of many places situated in eastern-central Europe—the old towns of Belsk, Białystok, Beloveža, and Bela, and the rivers Belaja and Beljanka—all closely resembled the root word for “white” common to virtually all Slavic languages. From these names, the whole region came to characterized as a “white” region.^(9) Another theory claims that the term originated from a Byzantine emperor who used the term “white” to distinguish Christian Slavs from pagan ones.^(10) Yet another theory claims that the Russian word for “white” derives from the pagan Slavic deity Belbog, whom the ancient Slavs of modern-day Belarus and Ukraine worshipped. Because these people worshipped a “white” god, they came to be known as a “white” people.^(11)\n\nAnother theory claims that the people who inhabited modern-day Belarus were actually Balts and not Slavs. There is a phonetic similarity between “Belbog” and “Bäldäg”, a Baltic-Teutonic god whose name—according to this theory—means “white day”. Given the phonetic similarity between the Slavic root word for “white” and the words “Belbog”, “Bäldäg”, and “Baltic”, supporters of this theory contend that the supposed “Balts” who inhabited what is now Belarus perceived themselves as a “white” people.^(12)\n\nYet another theory claims that the words “běla,” and “běl’” were used to denote white-colored currency that was used in the region.^(13)\n\nA final theory traces the word “white” to how the Tartars used the word. “White” denoted the ruling Tartar clans, and “black” denoted their vassals. The Slavs—whom the Tartars conquered and vassalized—adopted this particular way of using the words “white” and “black”. “White houses”, “white cities” and “white outposts” were therefore founded as places connected to the ruler of a region who granted these locales special privileges. Often, these privileges entailed exemption from tribute and taxation. This also applied to Church estates, which were known as “white lands”. Lands and people which were not exempt from taxation—and so were in some sense “enslaved” to a ruler—were denoted as “black”. The color white eventually came to be associated with a very specific notion of freedom often connected to leadership.^(14)\n\nSo the theory goes that the Poles gave the appellation “white” to the Western Slavic lands that the Lithuanians “rescued” from Muscovy. Taking these lands from Muscovy—then a vassal of the Tartars—meant that the principalities situated in these lands were now themselves no longer vassals of the Tartars. They were now liberated from the Tartars, and therefore “white”. Hence the name “White” Russia.^(15)\n\nUnlike “Little Russia”, the term “White Russia” technically never went out of use. The name of the modern country of Belarus quite literally means “White Russia”.\n\n**Endnotes**\n\n1 Kohut, Zenon E. “The Development of a Little Russian Identity and Ukrainian Nationbuilding.” *Harvard Ukrainian Studies*, vol. 10, no. 3/4, 1986, pp. 559–576, p. 562\n\n2 Ibid. p. 563\n\n3 Ibid.\n\n4 Ibid. p. 563-4\n\n5 Ibid. p. 565\n\n6 Plokhy, Serhii. “Ukraine or Little Russia? Revisiting an Early Nineteenth-Century Debate.” *Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne Des Slavistes*, vol. 48, no. 3/4, 2006, pp. 335–353, p. 340\n\n7 Vakar, Nicholas P. “The Name ‘White Russia.’” *American Slavic and East European Review*, vol. 8, no. 3, 1949, pp. 201–213, p. 201\n\n8 Ibid.\n\n9 Ibid. p. 203\n\n10 Ibid. p. 204\n\n11 Ibid.\n\n12 Ibid. p. 205\n\n13 Ibid.\n\n14 Ibid. pp. 206-9\n\n15 Ibid. p. 209\n\n**Sources**\n\nKohut, Zenon E. “The Development of a Little Russian Identity and Ukrainian Nationbuilding.” *Harvard Ukrainian Studies*, vol. 10, no. 3/4, 1986, pp. 559–576.\n\nPlokhy, Serhii. “Ukraine or Little Russia? Revisiting an Early Nineteenth-Century Debate.” *Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne Des Slavistes*, vol. 48, no. 3/4, 2006, pp. 335–353.\n\nVakar, Nicholas P. “The Name ‘White Russia.’” *American Slavic and East European Review*, vol. 8, no. 3, 1949, pp. 201–213.\n\nEdit: Formatting, wording"
]
}
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[] |
[] |
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[],
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"http://www.philology.ru/linguistics2/klimov_i-01.htm"
],
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8eopyz/why_belarus_called_as_white_russia/"
],
[]
] |
||
1kvtaa
|
Does counting "one-one thousand, two-one thousand..." after seeing a flash of lightning until you hear thunder actually give you a good estimate how far away you are from the flash?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1kvtaa/does_counting_oneone_thousand_twoone_thousand/
|
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"Yes. It takes sound approximately 5 seconds to travel 1 mile. Light travels the distance almost instantly. So if you count how long it takes for the sound to get to you, and then divide by five, you will know approximately how far away the strike was.\n\nEDIT: For metric folk: Divide by 3 seconds for the distance in kilometers.",
"It works fine as long as you remember that sound travels at about 330 m/s through air. So for every 3 seconds between the flash and the noise, the sound has travelled a kilometer.\n\nThe problem comes when people get that multiplier wrong and think it's a mile a second or whatever.",
"Sound travels at 1,100 feet per second. 5,280 ft in a mile. The thunder boom will travel a mile in about 4.8 seconds.\n\nIf you can count 5 seconds, it's about a mile away.",
"Sound travels 1 mile in 4.7 seconds (or about 1 km in 2.9 seconds). We can round them up to 5 seconds and 3 seconds, responsively. If your counting of \"one-one thousand, two-one thousand...\" is a good approximation of a second (and that's why we add the extra \"one thousand\"; to force a pause in our speech of roughly the right amount of time), then you can take the number that you count up to, and divide by 5 to get the distance in miles, and divide by 3 to get it in km. \n\nYour results will vary based on how closely your counting matches up with actual seconds, your reaction time (how soon after you see lightning do you start counting, and how soon after you hear thunder do you stop), and I suppose also on weather conditions, which will have some negligible impact on the speed of sound. And of course, our rounding will introduce some error as well.",
"Not an aswer to your question, but a helpful hint:\n\nYou can hear thunder to about 16km away. Lightning can strike well beyond that. If you can hear thunder, you're well within strike range, so take appropriate measures.",
"My first thought was \"Doesn't the vertical distance of the lightning matter?\"\n\nThen, I realized something profound - the fact that lightning stretches from the ground to the sky completely explains why the sound of a thunderbolt persists over a few seconds, rather than being an instantaneous CLAP. The sound of the thunder emanating from a few kilometers above ground would take longer to reach our ear, which would totally account for why the sound is smeared over time.",
"yes. assuming you count on time. which most people don't. (it's actually quite difficult)\n\nsound travels ~1130ft/second, varying slightly depending on air pressure.\n\nfor purposes of estimating the distance of a lightning strike, it's fine to round off to 1000ft/second, and treat each second as representing 0.2 miles",
"Mmmm... soundspeed in air at standard conditions is 342m/s. So if you're good at counting \"one-one thousand\", and making it close to a second, it should be about 3 seconds per km. I grew up thinking it was a second per km; damn farmers.\n\nMore specifically, (Deg C)*0.59+331m/s is how fast sound travels in air. \n\nEdit: Also, the soundspeed of water is ~1500m/s, so if the rain is fairly dense, the thunder will get to you a lot faster!\n\nSource: Ultrasonic flow metering instrumentation technologist.\n\n",
"3 seconds per km, 5 seconds per mile is a pretty good estimate. It varies based on the atmosphere's temperature structure (which controls sound speed) and wind. Humidity also has a minor effect. These factors are basically unknowable with much detail during a thunderstorm (because storm atmospheres are so dang complicated and messy), so it's hard to do much better than this estimate.\n\nComplicating this is the fact that lightning strikes are really long (several km) and that thunder is produced along its entire length. Meaning that if you see a strike, and the thunder begins at 15 seconds and ends at 30 seconds after the strike, it means the nearest point of the strike was 5 km away, and the farthest was 10 km away. Reflections off topography can happen in mountainous areas too, but this is generally not a very significant effect.\n\nAdditionally, because the temperature and sound speed actually decrease with elevation, sound waves in the atmosphere generally refract away from the ground so that it's impossible to hear thunder much farther than about 25 km away.\n\nGeometry of the strike controls the pitch/timbre of the sound you hear. Thunder from a strike pointing away from you has a long, drawn out \"roll-like\" sound because it all arrives at different times. Thunder from a strike perpendicular to your line of sight to it arrives approximately all at once, so it's more \"clap-like\".\n\nSource: I just finished my master's degree studying thunder, specifically sound wave propagation during it."
]
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88qoi0
|
how did a rocket with the computing power of a calculator get people to and from the moon?
|
I can’t even get my WiFi to work, but we got to the moon with IT that had less computing power than some toasters today.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/88qoi0/eli5_how_did_a_rocket_with_the_computing_power_of/
|
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"Because almost none of the mission was controlled by that computer. It had fairly simple tasks to do. Most of the mission was pre-computed, and further computing was done on the ground at Mission Control.",
"Same question will be asked in the future: how did people get to work when they didn't have self-driving cars?\n\nThe answer is: the rocket had a [control panel](_URL_0_) full of switches that allowed the astronauts to control every detail and performance of the rocket manually, and they piloted themselves to the moon and back. With the help of Houston Control, which basically had additional people monitor various aspects of the rocket, and provide brain power / calculations when necessary.\n\nIt's all brain power, math done by hand, physics calculations done by hand, and training, lots of training. Astronauts were/are usually Air Force or Navy pilots, and they had / go through extra training for things like navigating by the sun / moon (without instruments), or for the various controls that a space shuttle or rocket has, etc.",
"Because the computing power of a calculator is all they needed. \n\nAs a side note you would probably be surprised how \"ancient\" the computers in space and military vehicles are even compared to the old computer you threw out years ago. They are designed to do one thing well, and do it reliably for decades. The less complexities there are in the system, the less chances of something going wrong.",
"Because you didn't need a lot of computer power (by today's standards) to get to the moon. And most of what you needed could be precalculated, spending hours or even weeks to get the numbers you need.\n\nAlso, it is disingenuous to say the \"power of a calculator\". They aren't talking about simple 4-function calculators, they mean programmable calculators, like the venerable [HP 15C](_URL_0_), are sophisticated computers in their own right, and can perform a wide variety of advanced mathematical calculations. That's like saying a computer from the 1990s was less powerful than a telephone. Today's smartphones are advanced computers that just happen to have phones attached to them. "
]
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|
4ujuv9
|
how come we can't send a spaceship to other planets and back?
|
With all the different types of advanced propulsion techniques that are available e.g. solar sails/ion blasters/etc
They're sending probes to other planets and i understand they just cant send someone there without knowing what to expect, but can't we just get *close*?... And then come back?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ujuv9/eli5how_come_we_cant_send_a_spaceship_to_other/
|
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"We could. But: \n\nThere are still several unsolved problems, mostly involving a deadly buildup of radiation. Closely related to the problem of space being really REALLY big and it taking ages to get anywhere.\n\nIt would be expensive. Like crazy expensive. Super incredibly mega-expensive.\n\nWhen I say we \"could\" that still involves decades of R & D to fine-tune existing ideas and actually build them\n\nThere's basically no reason to do so whatsoever other than \"huzzah, humanity can fly this far out into space\".",
"A few reasons\n\n1. It's really expensive. Probes aren't nearly as heavy as capsules and life support etc\n\n2. It takes a really really long time. Like a mission to Mars just there and back would take much much longer than a year. \n\n3. You have to give the crew some way to relax and also a way to eat etc which means the ship will be super heavy so super big and expensive \n\n4. Radiation is a huge problem in inter solar space and we haven't really figured out exactly how to prevent it. I mean you could coat the entire ship in 10 inches of lead, but that would be super expensive and super heavy \n\n5. There isn't a lot of public desire to do so. This means NASA isn't getting the money they need to make these expensive ventures possible.",
"It's not just a matter of propulsion, it's also time, food, isolation and many other things. Also money.\n\nWe probably have the ability to send people to Mars, the problem is it would likely cost an extravagant amount of money to take a long time to send a bunch of people to their deaths. We still haven't quite figured out how to feed a bunch of astronauts along the journey -- packing all the food would increase the weight to the point where the mass of the spaceship would be prohibitive.\n\nThere's also the long term effects of microgravity on the human body - just recently we discovered that some astronauts have vision problems after being in orbit, but not others. We'll need to figure that one out before we try anything.\n\nAnd as I said at the beginning, propulsion is still getting there. We want something that will have very little mass, but can get us up to a good velocity to shorten the time. Solid-fuel rockets shave great acceleration, but are really fucking heavy. And expensive. Other forms of propulsion, like the solar sails, are very slow. I think our best bet is the EM drive, which is still being examined for suitability. There are a lot of different methods of propulsion, but they are nowhere near being ready for actual use. It takes a long time and a lot of money to get from the drawing board to orbit.\n\nLastly, there's the issue of putting 6 people in a tin can for 8 months. Humans aren't designed to do that, and we need to figure out ways around that, as well.\n\nAnd on top of all this, the political climate means the vast majority of people just don't care about space travel. It's hard to allocate fund\ns to research and development when most people are more interested in feeding their families, or going to war somewhere else.",
"The problems are many as others pointed out but also including propulsion. Most of your fuel is spent carrying the rest of your fuel out of the atmosphere into LEO. \n\nWhen flying to a planet you're going to build up speed which is cool but unless you want to do a few years extra of sling shotting around our solar system you need propulsion to slow back down so you can orbit or land. Then regardless of whether you land or orbit you still need fuel to get back home [and stop when you get here].\n\nRocketry cannot be the answer since the amount of fuel you need to carry is mindboggling at this point. Basically you'd be sitting on top of a bomb capable of taking out most of the east coast.\n\nBut things like sails/etc are not as good once you're far out from the Earth. A sail might get you to [say] Jupiter but then you need to stop. with what solar energy? Worse you need to get back ..."
]
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73hf8k
|
how do mathematicians figure out absurd odds?
|
How do mathematicians figure out absurd odds, such as the chances of being hit my lighting are 1 in x?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/73hf8k/eli5_how_do_mathematicians_figure_out_absurd_odds/
|
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"They don't really \"figure them\" out, instead they measure them. \n\nTaking your example: Around 300 people in the US tend to be struck by lightning on an annual basis (according to medical treatment data), putting any given individual's chance of being struck by lightning in a given year at 1 in 1.08 million. Your odds may vary based on line of work, geographic location, etc."
]
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[] |
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[]
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|
401iq4
|
Which Roman figure is this marble bust of, it's been in my family decades..
|
I have always wondered whom this bust represents.
Thank you for any help.
_URL_0_
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/401iq4/which_roman_figure_is_this_marble_bust_of_its/
|
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"It certainly looks like a bust of a younger Octavian, like those found [here](_URL_1_), [here](_URL_2_), and [here](_URL_0_). But I could be wrong. ",
"I just looked up Octavian... The chest plate is identical.. Thank you!!"
]
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[] |
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"http://imgur.com/LAEcqdY"
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"http://www.egyptorigins.org/images/augustus.jpg",
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|
12vsot
|
Why feature of sound causes words or instruments to sound so different.
|
Why do sounds not all sound like this: _URL_0_
I understand frequency determines pitch and amplitude determines loudness. What changes the 'timbre' of a sound eg. a clarinet vs a flute.
How do we distinguish different words? What physical feature of sound waves determine the sounds of the different vowels for instance? Why do all sounds not sound analogue (by this I mean what you would hear on a synthesiser, or in the video previously posted?)
Thanks in advance!
Edit: I think between you guys you explain it very well. It look's like I will spend the rest of my afternoon reading, not a bad thing at all! Cheers
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12vsot/why_feature_of_sound_causes_words_or_instruments/
|
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"I asked an almost identical question [here](_URL_0_)\n\nThe property is due to the shapes of the waves made by different instruments/materials. The guys who replied to me explained it pretty well :)",
"With instruments, they have a harmonic structure. That is, there is the bass note, lets say A which is 440, and then that value times various integers, so 880, 1320, 1760 and so on. Those integer values are called harmonics. A musical note can be defined as a sound that has harmonic structure of those integer values. The human ear can process 7 harmonics at a time, meaning that if you started out with a hundred harmonics, then slowly took out one at a time, you could get down to 7 before any change would be heard. The tonal difference of any musical instrument, comes from the shape of these 7 tones. If graphed in a bar graph, the graph would appear to slope downward, with higher harmonics not being as loud. ",
"One of Vihart's awesome videos covers this [here](_URL_0_). Be warned, if you haven't encountered her videos before be prepared to waste the next few hours."
]
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[] |
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"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0A72A-c8EU&feature=related"
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|
euwcww
|
if we are constantly intaking more calories than we can use, why aren't we all obese?
|
Edit: Been asked for clarification. I often hear stuff like "that burger is 500 calories, it'll take an hour to work it off"! If this is true, shouldn't we all be slowly gaining weight over the course of our lives? I'd think that, on average, a normal person will eat more calories than they can work off.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/euwcww/eli5_if_we_are_constantly_intaking_more_calories/
|
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"People that do this will eventual be, can I ask clarification on your question?",
"Because there are people who dont? If you take more than you put out then you 100% will gain weight. But I lost 3pounds in the past few weeks which means I had over a 9000 calorie deficit over the past few weeks.",
"It takes a lot to be morbidly obese. Obese is actually a pretty low threshold, comparatively.\n\nPeople that get that big consume 5-8 k calories a day. \n\nMost people are just a bit overweight.",
"we‘re not *always* taking in more than we can use. those who are, however, do gain weight eventually ... quickly or slowly, it adds up. Haven’t you seen the statistics on how heavy today’s people are? Practically everyone today is a size that, just 50 years ago, would have been “the fat guy”. Watch a movie from the 70s and be amazed.",
"Assuming you are very active, you need thousands of calories a day to stay active. Proathletes might consume more than 5000 calories a day. \n\nIf you live a sedentary lifestyle and eat 5000 calories a day, you will get superfat.",
"Because your body burns a significant number of calories just on keeping you alive. Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) represents the majority of the calories your body burns every day, spent on things like keeping your heart beating, your diaphragm moving air in and out of your lungs, and maintaining your body temperature. The precise rate varies from person to person but is usually in the range of 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day. Everything else you do is added calorie burn on top of that. \n\nSo yes if you eat a 500 calorie burger, and nothing else that day, you’re actually probably going to be at an energy deficit and your body will have to burn its energy stores to keep you alive. The issue with a lot of people is that we consume far more calories than we need, and if you do that excessively, then yes you *will* likely become overweight.",
"Because your premise is false. If you regularly consume more calories can you burn, you will gain weight. If you regularly burn more calories than you consume, you will lose weight. Every single person who consumes more calories than they burn will get fat. No person who is not fat consumes more calories than they burn. If you are not fat, you are not consuming more calories than you are burning. It's not any more complicated than that."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
96fz8q
|
Historically what made the Jesuits so hated but not other Catholic orders like Franciscans, Dominicans and Benedictines?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96fz8q/historically_what_made_the_jesuits_so_hated_but/
|
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"Before listing off the reasons why Jesuits were despised by their competitors and opposition, I'd like to note that going into the early seventeenth century, the Jesuits actually enjoyed a pretty respectable reputation among lay people and potential priests. The Spiritual Exercises had proven to be very popular among even lay readers, and the Jesuit emphasis on education and the study of natural philosophy/science alongside theology gave them a notoriety as studious, diligent missionaries, particularly among Catholics in France and the Netherlands. Not only that, but their accomodation strategies across the world, both in Latin America and Asia, had proven very successful in converting formerly \"pagan\" societies to Catholicism. Moreover, ethnographic and scientific information from these exotic places found their way back to European audiences. To give an example, the mid-seventeenth century Jesuit scientist/historian Athanasius Kircher's most famous work, China Illustrata, borrowed from secondary accounts of China and the Chinese that previous Jesuits had reported; Kircher himself never set foot in Asia, and the accuracy of his work suffers for it as well, but nonetheless, his works required several printing runs and translations, demonstrating its popularity.\n\nI bring this up not just as a corrective, but also to show one reason why the Jesuits were disliked or at least treated with suspicion by their colleagues. Over their first hundred years in practice, the Jesuits had become extremely successful, not only in combatting Calvinism and converting heretics around the world, but also in terms of gaining the esteem of princes and other wealthy patrons. \n\nCompeting for resources was obviously a major sticking point for the other orders who needed funding for their own missions (the Dominicans and the Franciscans had already established residences in China and Japan, after all), but moreover the way that the Jesuits found success raised some eyebrows. In the mission fields, the Jesuits practiced a very liberal and accomodating method of converting people. They would translate liturgies, primary texts, and even the Bible to local languages, which might seem fairly innocuous, but the theological ramifications behind adopting the Chinese word \"shangdi\" to refer to God as opposed to the Latin \"Deus\" were considered severe among contemporaries. Moreover, they would also adopt certain rites and try to appropriate ideas and concepts from local religions to make Catholicism seem much less foreign. On top of that, while the Franciscans and the Dominicans converted from the bottom-up (that is, teaching the commoners and then forcing a conversion of society from the masses) the Jesuits worked from the top-down, converting the nobility of an area who would then do the work in supplanting local religions for them. In order to appeal to the elites, this often led to Jesuits like Matteo Ricci for example, adopting the traditional garb of a Confucian scholar, and leading a less poverty-stricken life than their colleagues often did. All the while, they were speaking the local language and possibly practicing or allowing the practice of local rituals. Yes, this made them very successful, but to their Dominican and Franciscan confreres, was this the type of success they wanted, or were the Jesuits inadvertently condemning the souls of locals to Hell with slipshod conversions?\n\nOr, some even ventured, were they even trying to convert people to the Catholic church, or were the Jesuits simply trying to seek power and fame for their own ends? This is probably the criticism most people are most familiar with when it comes to the Jesuits; they were king-makers, conspirators, and power-hungry priests who stuck around at court to try and overthrow the government. In places like France, especially right after the French Wars of Religion, any sort of destabilizing factor was immediately distrusted. Their direct supervision from the Pope made them even more suspicious in the minds of Protestants like the Dutch, who were currently in revolt against Spain, English, whom Spain had recently attempted to invade, and certain Germans, who were in the midst of the Thirty Years' War.\n\nAnd to be fair, Jesuits had gotten involved in some conspiratorial activity. A famous English recusant named William Allen, for example, who was not a Jesuit but was deeply involved in the establishment of the Jesuit English college at Douai, encouraged, supported and even agitated for an invasion of England by the King of Spain. Real or imagined, however, this became the reputation that clinged to them throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where we see the Jesuits being expelled from courts throughout Europe. While the events that lead to the suppression of the Order in 1773 are extremely complex and have many different motives, both the suspicion of political ambitions, and several controversies over rites and their accomodative practices were major influences in why they were disdained. \n\n(Some) Sources: \n\nDonald Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accomodation and the Origins of Sinology\n\nLynn A. Martin, The Jesuit Mind: The Mentality of an Elite in Early Modern France\n\nJohn O'Malley: The First Jesuits\n\nJames Broderick, The Progress of the Jesuits\n\nGeorge Minamiki, The Chinese Rites Controversy: From Its Beginning to the Modern Day.\n\nedits to fix formatting",
"u/NicLewisSLU has covered much of what I wanted to say, but I would also add that - as argued by several historians who consider such changes from the perspective of empire - hostility to the Jesuits was also augmented by their existence as a trans-imperial group. Appreciating this helps us understand why the Jesuits were expelled throughout imperial domains specifically in the mid-eighteenth century. \n\nThis was a period which saw profound efforts at centralisation among leading western imperial powers - for Spain, as one example, efforts to impose imperial authority were prompted following the War of the Spanish Succession, and in particular following defeat at Havana (1762) in the Seven Years’ War. Similar trends can be seen in Portuguese imperial endeavours (Pombal’s reforms especially). \n\nNeither was centralisation unique to the Iberian empires; the British and French empires are further obvious examples. Imposing imperial authority and exploiting colonies more than ever before was necessitated by the experience of intermittent but frequent colonial warfare, the costs of which only increased through the century. \n\n The presence of missionaries who were not obviously subordinate to respective imperial hierarchies posed an obvious threat to imperial authority. There is little coincidence, then, that the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish and Portuguese imperial domains coincided with a period of imperial centralisation. The Jesuits, then, were not just a *domestic* threat. Their presence was also a threat to the conduct of empire. Similar trends can be seen with other groups and bodies which may be considered transimperial. Crackdowns on contraband traders and interimperial trade, key measures in the Bourbon and Pombaline Reforms (Spain and Portugal, respectively), are one example. \n\nThere was obvious pressure from rival missionary groupings and from others in society; but it’s important to consider their role beyond the domestic. The fact that the Jesuits posed a threat to the imposition of imperial authority is also commonly cited as a major factor in their change of fortune in the eighteenth century.\n\nEdit: u/NicLewisSLU mentioned Matteo Ricci as an example of Jesuits departing from “orthodox” missionary practice - you might also enjoy the fact that Ricci literally avoided mentioning the crucifixion in his literature to elites, because he feared it would anger them. It’s hard to consider any greater departure from one of the most central tenets of Christian theology. This might have been exceptional, but the Jesuits really did go to some interesting ends in order to convert. \n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
arukw7
|
how does blood come back to the heart?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/arukw7/eli5_how_does_blood_come_back_to_the_heart/
|
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"Put very simply.....Its a closed system. The heart pushes it in a huge loop back to itself. Valves in veins prevent it flowing backwards and or pooling.",
"Think of the heart as a pump, your veins are the intake lines and your arteries are the output, arteries carry blood rich in oxygen away from the heart and to the muscles where veins carry the oxygen deficient blood to the heart, becomes oxygenated again, and is carried away from the heart by the arteries once again ",
"Thank you, everyone, for the answers, I now know how blood gets back to the heart!"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
1xjro3
|
I saw recently we're going to be having companies mining on the moon for Helium-3. Why, what does it do?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xjro3/i_saw_recently_were_going_to_be_having_companies/
|
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"[Fusion energy](_URL_0_). Controlled fusion hasn't been achieved yet, but we've been really close to achieving it for about 40 years, or so I've been told.",
"Not unless the UN has changed their minds about mineral rights claims on the moon. It could be used as a replacement non-renewable resource for fossil fuels, albeit a much more efficient non-renewable resource.",
"He-3 gets used in a lot of neutron detectors, can be used in MRI lung imaging to increase the contrast of the lung interior, and cryogenics for down to 0.2K.\n\nSince most of the He-3 used on earth was produced in types of nuclear testing that aren't done anymore it has become increasingly rare, and concerns about smuggled nuclear weapons has really driven up demand so it has become quite valuable over the last few years at times costing thousands of dollars per liter at standard temperature and pressure."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Preparing_for_the_Future/Space_for_Earth/Energy/Helium-3_mining_on_the_lunar_surface"
],
[],
[]
] |
||
5p98ps
|
Can birth defects be detected in eggs or sperm?
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5p98ps/can_birth_defects_be_detected_in_eggs_or_sperm/
|
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"Generally speaking, no.\n\nFirst of all, there are many things that happen after fertilization that can cause or prevent a birth defect.\n\nSecond, for many congenital disorders, it's neither sperm alone nor the egg alone that determines whether the disorder will occur; you have to know both the sperm and the egg to know whether a disorder will occur.\n\nFinally, you don't know which sperm will fertilize an egg, so anything that occurs in a small fraction of sperm can't easily be detected.\n\nThat said, there are some cases in which we can conclude from genetics of the parents that the fetus would almost certainly have a genetic disorder. \n\nAnd there are some other cases where we can conclude from genetics of the parents that the fetus would probably have a genetic disorder, and in some of those cases we can test a fertilized egg to see if it has the disorder. In those cases, we can fertilize multiple eggs in the lab, pick one that doesn't have the disorder, and implant it in the uterus to produce a fetus without the disorder.",
"You theoretically could take and egg and a sperm and read its genetics then figure out if there were any genetic defects in the combination. Sounds awesome considering we could in vitro fertilize right? There's a catch. \n\nMAJOR problem is that each of these items is made up of a single cell and would be destroyed in the process of trying to read its genetic code.\n\nThis is why testing for genetic disorders are done after fetus has had a chance to grow and develop. There's more cells.\n\nThe other thing is I'm pretty sure we need more than one cell to pull out and map a whole genome anyways.",
"There are many different type of defects. \n\nSome are present when one single marker is present. \nSome need two.\nSome need a specific combination of markers.\n\nSome happen during development.\n\nSome genes can be tested for by testing the parents. \nTay-Sachs is a disease that is fatal, and genetic. \n\nIt is passed through one mutation in one gene, the HEXA gene. If you have the mutation, and your partner has the mutation, there is a 25% chance the child will have Tay-Sachs. \n\nIf you are diabetic, or don't take enough folic acid during pregnancy, chances are higher that your child will develop clefte palate, although it's still rare. \n\n",
"Nobody tests for defects from an egg or sperm. However an embryo as early as 3 days after development (though in practice generally in 5-7 days) can be biopsied and tested for chromosomal abnormalities. After biopsy the embryo is frozen, and once test results are back can be thawed and transferred to mom. ",
"Finally my research into meiosis and egg development is put to good use!\n\nAs other people have said, some birth defects occurs because of the coming together of egg and sperm, and did not exist before that point. For instance, the presence of 2 particular alleles of a gene can cause a defect. \n\nFurthermore, many events can happen during development of an embryo, after fertilisation, which can cause birth defects too (say for instance defects due to drug abuse by the mother, etc). These cannot always be detected in advance.\n\nHowever, in the laboratory we can look at individual sperm and eggs, and see whether they have defects prior to fertilisation. In humans, between 20% and 50% of all eggs have defects and would either lead to spontaneous abortion or birth defects. It is a ridiculously high number which gets worse with the age of the mother. \n\nThe processes we have to do to monitor these defects in the lab mean that the eggs and sperm cannot then be used to produce offspring, but it may be possible in the future.\n\nSo, as is often the case with these questions, the answer is yes and no, depending on what it is that you mean exactly.",
"Everything can test fine and be good and on track for a healthy baby and then some random cosmic ray of radiation or something else just mutates one cell and that could make it all flop even though everything was fine a moment ago.\n\nDon't be sad about this! That's how evolution works! :D ",
"Tangentially related, but possibly relevant: The current standard protocol for in vitro fertilization (that's when you extract eggs and sperm from the respective donors, form a zygote outside the body, then implant the embryo in the uterus to develop) involves selecting the best embryos based primarily on appearance. Basically, the doctor chooses which embryos to implant based on whether they look generally healthy at the cellular level. The science suggests that we should/might be able to get some amount of information from a single sperm or egg, and more so from a zygote, but practically speaking, we're not totally there yet. There's a lot of gut feelings and tradition involved in medicine.",
"There's something that hasn't been mentioned, which is [polar body biopsy](_URL_0_)\n\nBasically, unlike sperm cells, in which meiosis results in 4 sperm haploids cells, oogenesis results in one egg cell containing 2 polar bodies that are basically the residual genetic material from the remaining 3/4 of the original.\n\nPeople can extract the polar body and sequence that to determine things about the egg's own nuclei without damaging the egg cell, and for now, is sometimes used to detect abnormal genetic copy-numbers. The technique is not entirely reliable, but it might be more related to OP's question."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_body_biopsy"
]
] |
||
9x6pmv
|
Is evolution relative to lifespan?
|
So humans (and other animals) take many many years to evolve, which is influenced by many things such as environment. But, all else equal, does an organism's life span influence the rate it evolves?
Under controlled conditions, could we observe significant evolution for something like a fly?
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9x6pmv/is_evolution_relative_to_lifespan/
|
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"Evolution absolutely is relative to lifespan. Evolution is mathematical. Every generation has selective pressures act on it that affect which individuals are best able to survive and reproduce. The more generations in a given time frame, the more opportunities for selection.\n\nBacteria, for example, can evolve quite quickly, quickly enough to observe as they become resistant to our antibiotics. \n\nHere's a study where they got flies to evolve a tolerance to extremely low oxygen.\n_URL_0_\n\nSelective breeding, which we have used on all sorts of crops, pets, decorative plants, and domesticated animals, is a form of evolution, just with a much stronger and more deliberate method of selection than regular natural selection. This means we've observed significant evolution of all sorts of animals and plants.\n",
"Shorter reproduction cycles certainly help with the speed of evolutionary changes. We see new flu strains appear within a human lifetime, for example. The [E. coli long-term evolution experiment](_URL_0_) only worked because of the short reproduction cycle of E.coli as well. You can't study tens of thousands of generations in 30 years with mammals.",
"So much so that we can abuse it. Domesticated farm animals today are wildly different from their wild ancestors.\n\nThis change is because of guided evolution, also known as selective breeding, done by humans.\n\nBecause of the short reproductive cycle of said animals, there can be visible change within a human's lifespan. This was especially important before modern society, before accurate record keeping was easy."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3038716/"
],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment"
],
[]
] |
|
5jejra
|
When we blow air out of our mouths, to either cool down soup or fog up a mirror, are we actually "controlling" the temperature of the air coming out?
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5jejra/when_we_blow_air_out_of_our_mouths_to_either_cool/
|
{
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"text": [
"When you blow to cool things down part of the air comes from your lungs, but a greater part is pulled from the surrounding air by the vacuum you create blowing. When you blow to heat something up you get much closer and try to minimize the surrounding air.\n\nThere is a good video I will try to find asking people how much they can fill a long plastic bag in one breath.\n\nHere's a similar video. _URL_0_",
"when you blow across your food you are just speeding up the heat transfer rate by having air move over it. this works faster than just letting it sit in still air.\n\nthe fogging of glass is due to the moisture in your breath and the cold temperature of the glass. the water vapor condenses on the colder glass.\n\nbasically the air you blow out is generally the same temperature every time but it is colder than hot food and warmer than cold glass."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UujAMPv3y-A"
],
[]
] |
||
1vjz64
|
Why is RISUG (or Vasalgel or other similar male birth control) taking so long to be broadly available?
|
I remember first hearing about this method of male birth control at least 8-10 years ago. There is also Vasalgel.
Basically it's easily reversible, you get an outpatient injection in your balls that takes a few minutes, and out of the 250 original trial members, it didn't work in only 1 and that turned out to be improperly injected.
The results of the trials (although they seem to be falling under international standards) seem to show pretty amazing results.
Scientifically, what's taking so damn long? I want my reversible outpatient male birth control.
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1vjz64/why_is_risug_or_vasalgel_or_other_similar_male/
|
{
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"text": [
"From Googling around, it seems that in India (where RISUG was originally developed), it's been stuck in clinical trial limbo for a number of reasons (including [difficulty in getting volunteers](_URL_1_)). Vasalgel is essentially the same treatment, but it's going through the US FDA (they [seem to still be doing preclinical trials](_URL_0_)) and they only started that process in like 2010. \n\nI would make two notes on this: \n\n1) A lot of stuff take a long time to get approved. ([Prozac, for example, took 10 years](_URL_2_), and that was a compound developed by a major US drug company.) You may need to adjust your expectations about timelines here.\n\n2) This has been kicking around for a long time, and it hasn't been acquired by any major pharmaceutical or medical company in the US or the EU--the Parcemus Foundation, who's submitting to FDA, seems to have been formed to get this approved in the US, and they're crowdsourcing the trials. Even assuming for the moment that the efficacy and safety are okay (and remember that this treatment has not yet made it through Phase III trials in any country), the fact that the RISUG folks in India have had such a difficult time getting enough people for trials suggests that the demand for this treatment would be very, very low. Even if it gets approved, it may not be marketable."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-home/",
"http://www.webcitation.org/5zHEacvXH",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoxetine"
]
] |
|
2tn8vk
|
why do my cats always seem required to use the litterbox immediately after i clean it?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tn8vk/eli5_why_do_my_cats_always_seem_required_to_use/
|
{
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"text": [
"They are marking their ownership of that box with their scent/pee/whatever. By cleaning it, you \"erased\" their scent from the box and therefore their ownership of that territory."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
2477qg
|
how are canals finished?
|
When a canal is dug how do they complete the canal without the canal quickly flooding and damaging/harming equipment and people? Do they use explosives? If so how would canals be finished pre-explosive.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2477qg/eli5_how_are_canals_finished/
|
{
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"From what I've seen, they basically start in the middle and work towards each end. There will be water that accumulates in the canal as they dig it. This is managed by large pumps. Once they get to the end, they will take their equipment out of the canal and work across the \"dam\" that separates the lake or ocean from the canal. \n\nThen they will dig a small cut in the middle and let the water ease in to the canal. Then dig the rest of the dam out or dredge it. \n\nIf they used explosives to finish the canal then a torrent of water would rush through the canal, possibly damaging the canal. Anything with water is done slowly to prevent this. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
39htzq
|
- what is happening when you can "feel" someone looking at you, and you get the heebie-jeebies?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39htzq/eli5_what_is_happening_when_you_can_feel_someone/
|
{
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"text": [
"Looking at you.. like this?\n\n_URL_0_",
"Humans, like many mammals, are extremely good at noticing eyes that are looking at us. Eye contact is very important in communicating, so much so that we can impart a lot of information with only our eyes and no verbal communication. Infants even stare at their parents to get their attention. There is part of our brain that is so good at detecting someone staring right at us that those parts wont fire if the gaze is off by just a few degrees, like someone staring at a clock just behind us. Your brain is actually so good at seeing someone looking at you that it does it without your noticing it. So the psychic staring effect is really just your brain picking up on something you didn't yourself notice, it's usually someone just inside your peripheral vision. So something happens, like maybe you turn your head just slightly enough that the stare barely enters your peripheral vision for just a micro-second and your brain notices it, but not consciously. And the part of your brain that fires when someone is staring at you goes off, but you don't know why. And the feeling will linger so you get the sense that someone is staring at you, even though that person is somewhere outside your field of vision, even directly behind you. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://i.imgur.com/GOIz8mj.jpg"
],
[]
] |
||
31gwvi
|
Are modern Egyptians really related to the Egyptians of ancient times?
|
Recently, I read a news article where an Egyptian guy is all like "We Egyptians are so awesome. We built the pyramids, y'know?". My first thought was that he was a bit foolish for claiming to be related to the ancient Egyptians. I'm Dutch myself and I know that during Napoleonic times the Dutch republic was renamed the [Batavian Republic](_URL_0_), after a tribe that lived in the Netherlands during Roman times. The implication being that the Dutch are descended from the Batavians, no doubt because of their supposed awesomeness. In modern times however, it's known that the Dutch didn't descend from the Batavians due to many migrations throughout the ages. It seemed obvious to me that this would be the case for Egypt as well.
However, the [Wikipedia article on the Egyptian people](_URL_1_) seems to indicate that the Egyptians from ancient and modern times are indeed the same.
Judging from the Bronze Age collapse and the Great Migration period, for example, the lands neighboring Egypt have been resettled many times over, yet that very specific piece of land has been inhabited by the same ethnic group for... how many thousands of years? It seems to me this would make them a huge exception to the norm.
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31gwvi/are_modern_egyptians_really_related_to_the/
|
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" > In modern times however, it's known that the Dutch didn't descend from the Batavians due to many migrations throughout the ages. \n\nHow is this known? Or rather, what are you sources that the modern inhabitants of the Netherlands are genetically discontinuous with their antecedents going back to the Neolithic? Your assumption is that historical migrations have had a major remodeling impact on populations of the Netherlands (and presumably the same must have occurred in Egypt).",
"If by *related* you mean by blood (i.e. the degree to which modern Egyptians are thought to be *descended* from people who lived there 3000+ ya), it would be worth x-posting to /r/AskScience to get the latest state of genetic research on modern vs ancient populations (if any)\n\nMeanwhile, a few posts in here that may be interesting\n\n* [Are modern day Egyptians racially distinct from Arabs?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Egyptologists, do you consider modern day Egyptians to be the legitimate heirs and successors to the legacies and grand achievements of ancient Egyptians?](_URL_3_)\n\n* [Understanding that race is a cultural construct, what did the people of classical Egyptian civilization look like?](_URL_2_)\n\n* [Are there any elements of Ancient Egyptian culture which survive in the culture of modern Egypt?](_URL_0_)\n",
"You're not going to get very good answers anywhere. The only way to provide a definitive answer is to DNA sequence ancient Egyptian human remains (i.e., mummies). Unfortunately, while mummification preserves the form of bodies quite well, the hot climate of Egypt breaks down DNA quite rapidly. So unlike ancient human remains from colder climates in Europe, researchers have not had much success in sequencing ancient Egyptian DNA.\n\nThere was a paper from *Nature* a couple years ago [about a new technique](_URL_0_) to sequence ancient Egyptian DNA, which appears more promising. It was kind of a proof-of-concept paper to validate methodology. Perhaps in a year or two we may see some papers using this method on some significant number of ancient Egyptian remains.\n\nOther lines of evidence can come from either non-DNA sources (such as ABO blood groups, which preserve quite well in ancient Egyptian remains), or DNA sequencing of modern Egyptian populations. Paleoserological studies on ABO groups [show that the ancient Egyptians match the current populations of Egypt](_URL_1_) quite well. However, they are not as definitive as DNA sequences.\n\nDNA studies of modern Egyptians show that while Egypt went through several invasions in historic times, the DNA contribution from these invasions is only about 10%. The remaining 90% is much older, from neolithic times, presumably including the predynastic and dynastic periods. It consists of a mixture of northwestern African (Maghrebi), middle eastern, west Eurasian, Eritrean (Horn of Africa) and sub-Saharan African ancestries. The best we can tell, these components represent ancient admixtures, meaning they were already present in ancient Egypt.\n\nSo while the evidence isn't very firm, what we do have supports the idea that there is a continuity between ancient and modern Egyptians, with about a 10% foreign admixture from more recent invasions/migrations. The situation should become clearer in a few years as newer methods to sequence ancient Egyptian DNA are applied."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batavian_Republic",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptians"
] |
[
[],
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2iquu7/are_there_any_elements_of_ancient_egyptian/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20n95n/are_modern_day_egyptians_racially_distinct_from/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nzuuc/understanding_that_race_is_a_cultural_construct/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ssl5n/egyptologists_do_you_consider_modern_day/"
],
[
"http://www.nature.com/news/egyptian-mummies-yield-genetic-secrets-1.12793#/b1",
"http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=12409492"
]
] |
|
22a9fw
|
Do humans have the largest offspring in proportion to the parent?
|
For instance, a female giant panda is about 5-6 feet tall when on hind legs and 200 pounds, but the cub can fit in the palm of your hand. Proportionally this offspring is very small. But are humans the largest?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/22a9fw/do_humans_have_the_largest_offspring_in/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cgkvvcf"
],
"score": [
10
],
"text": [
"Since you don't narrow this down to any particular taxa -\n\n > Kiwi eggs can weigh up to one-quarter the weight of the female. \n\n(The equivalent of a 120-pound woman having a 30-pound baby.)\n\n > The kiwi lays the biggest egg in proportion to its size of any bird in the world,[18] so even though the kiwi is about the size of a domestic chicken, it is able to lay eggs that are about six times the size of a chicken's egg.[19]\n\n_URL_2_\n\n\\---\n\nExtinct plesiosaurs such as *Polycotylus latipinnis* apparently gave live birth rather than laying eggs:\n\n > A fossil of *P. latippinis* catalogued LACM 129639 includes an adult individual with a single fetus inside it. ...\n\n > The length of the fetus is around 40 percent of the length of the mother.\n\n_URL_1_ \n\n > This fossil of a pregnant *Polycotylus latippinus* shows that these animals gave birth to a single large juvenile and probably invested parental care in their offspring, similar to modern whales. \n\n(Well, not exactly, since whales give milk and we can feel fairly sure that plesiosaurs didn't do anything similar.)\n\n > The young was 1.5 metres (five feet) long and thus large compared to its mother of five metres (sixteen feet) length ....\n\n_URL_0_"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plesiosauria#Reproduction",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycotylus#Reproduction",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi#Description"
]
] |
|
w873v
|
Is opening eyes underwater harmful?
|
Is there any scientific evidence of opening eyes underwater being harmful in any way, infections aside?
Does chlorinated, sea or other type of water have any negative effect on eyes or vision?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/w873v/is_opening_eyes_underwater_harmful/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c5b5abp",
"c5b5ejn"
],
"score": [
16,
126
],
"text": [
"Do you mean lasting effects or temporary? \n\nAdding to the question, how worried would you have to be about micro-organisms? I know the immune system kicks ass at killing them, but would they be the biggest threat? ",
"[This older JAMA paper](_URL_1_) reports\n > Eye examinations performed on 50 subjects immediately before and after swimming in a chlorinated pool showed that 34 subjects (68%) saw rainbows and/or halos around lights after swimming, a symptom indicating the presence of corneal edema. Forty-seven subjects (94%) had corneal epithelial erosions in a punctate or linear pattern demonstrated by fluorescein staining on slit-lamp examination. No subject experienced a measurable decrease in visual acuity.\n\n[This small-scale study](_URL_3_) reports increased risk for 'ocular symptoms' (defined as burning eyes, watery eyes, blurry vision, difficulty opening eyes, or photophobia).\n\n[This article](_URL_0_) describes some possible mechanisms for damage to the eye from disinfection byproducts (but notes that \"The few publications dedicated to risk assessment do not suggest increased risk, other than for elite swimmers.\").\n\n[This paper](_URL_2_) suggests swimming with hydrophilic contact lenses can result in increased bacterial colonization.\n\nNote that these studies do not specifically differentiate between open eyes and closed eyes while swimming, but seem to assume that it's the swimming itself that leads to risk. The bulk of the studies in this field seem to be looking at respiratory symptoms associated with swimming pools, rather than ophthalmic complaints."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21885333",
"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6842754",
"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15711460",
"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17384776"
]
] |
|
4x5tem
|
why are there about a thousand species of spiders but only one human species?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4x5tem/eli5_why_are_there_about_a_thousand_species_of/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d6cpx5c"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"I'm no expert, and maybe I am totally misunderstanding, but there are what I feel are \"species\" of humans, though I wouldn't use that term.\n\nAfrican, European, Asian, aboriginals, Native American, Hispanic, and I'm sure there are more..."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
72ou7r
|
how does the title of a classical music work? why are they so long?
|
For example:
_URL_0_
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/72ou7r/eli5_how_does_the_title_of_a_classical_music_work/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dnk5onu",
"dnk5vit"
],
"score": [
5,
17
],
"text": [
"They're really long because they use a lot of descriptors so you can easily identify it. There's an opus number, the actual title, a subtitle or a nickname (like \"Eroica\" or \"Pastoral\"), and then a lot of descriptors, usually for the tempo. This is especially the case with movements of a symphony or concerto.",
"Many musical compositions made my famous composers are given first a number based upon what kind of composition it is. For example, Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 was the ninth symphony he wrote. There are other concertos, rhapsodies, fugues and such he may have wrote, but symphonies are different just like movies are different from short films.\n\nOp. stands for Opus. It means which piece it is chronologically out of all the pieces that composer ever wrote. (This can vary as some composers wrote so much music they got their own dedicated numbering system, like Bach and Vivaldi.)\n\nThen the composition can have a name, which may or may not look sensical or fancy because it's probably not English. It may also indicate the key that the whole piece had been tuned to. For example, Fantasie in G-Major.\n\nThen there's the Movement. Movements are to music what scenes are to plays or movies. There's no limit to how short or long they are or how many there should be in a song, but many pieces have three or four movements about 10 minutes long. Along with the movement, they'll have a little description of the mood, speed or emotion of the movement (usually written in Italian). For example, Fuoco means \"passionately, like fire\", Scherzo means \"like a joke, laughing and silly\" and Fortissimo means \"strong and loud\".\n\nThe description may also include some special or interesting instruments being used in the performance. Orgel is German for organ.\n\nTl;Dr, the title includes technical information about the performance rather than just the name, as well as where it might be in the whole piece if the whole piece is very long."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PGuStNiMP4&index=1&list=PLQ5erSrani14-1o8FPZ4MEX0PW_Fd-Of9"
] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
1p0oc2
|
What color would the sky and ocean be in a planet with a red sun?
|
How much would the colors change because of the sun? Would sunsets or the moon be colored differently? Basically, how would the day to day go, if say, I were on Krypton.
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1p0oc2/what_color_would_the_sky_and_ocean_be_in_a_planet/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ccxmctg"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"It is the atmosphere that determines the color of the sky, not the color of the sun. Gasses in the atmosphere scatter blue light more than other colors, so the sky appears blue. When the sun is setting/rising, the color is darker because the light has to go through more air."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
7wjfvs
|
why ships are shaped like a v and not square
|
Wouldn't a squared bottom displace more water with the same height allowing the ship to take more cargo/navigate shallower waters?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7wjfvs/eli5_why_ships_are_shaped_like_a_v_and_not_square/
|
{
"a_id": [
"du0u21d",
"du0u266",
"du0u29e"
],
"score": [
7,
6,
7
],
"text": [
"Yes. And many slow or towed floating platforms, like barges, have exactly that configuration. But if you want a vessel to be able to move through the water with any sort of speed, then a V shape is best for reducing drag. A ship with a square keel requires vastly more energy to push through the water than one with a V shape.",
"Yes but the v shape helps mitigate listing from side to side, which is really important for not capsizing in the open ocean. Some barges that operate in shallower waters use a much more rectangular bottom.",
"Yes. It would allow it doe go though shallower water. And ships designed for very shallow water sometimes do have flat bottoms. \n\nThe issue is they are less stable in rough water. They tend to travel on top of the water, instead of through the water. So everything is a trade off. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
12q0jz
|
Why are Dumas' heroes called musketeers when they use a rapier, not a musket?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12q0jz/why_are_dumas_heroes_called_musketeers_when_they/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c6x6o3a",
"c6x6p9p",
"c6xat7t"
],
"score": [
2,
16,
7
],
"text": [
"Because that's what they were, the rapier was a sidearm. \n\nThe unit that inspired Dumas is covered here at wiki:\n\n_URL_0_",
"Answered your question in another thread but anyway:\n\nBecause Dumas modelled his main characters after, somewhat unsurprisingly, four musketeers. [Charles de Batz-Castelmore d'Artagnan](_URL_2_)(Yeah, take a wild guess at why that was shortend, quite a mouthful), [Armand d'Athos](_URL_4_), [Henri d'Aramitz](_URL_3_) and [Isaac de Porthau](_URL_1_).\n\nNotable members of the French [Musketeers of the Guard](_URL_0_)\n\nEDIT: I suspect, but I can't yet prove this, that the rapier was a purely fictional addition because rapier duels are more interesting to read about than four guys walking around shooting people with muskets. The musket, revolutionary as it may have been, lacks a certain literary flair and it most certainly lacks the romantic element otherwise present in Dumas work.",
"The unit those characters belong to is the Musketeers of the Guard, and they do end up using muskets, when they are actually called upon for actual military service. But mostly, the books follow them in their adventures as they roam around Paris. Carrying a musket around as they go to taverns and such would be a little weird, but having a sword would be expected of gentlemen of their status. If they're expecting trouble somewhere, they'll bring some pistols as well, but mostly they rely on their swords to deal with those insolent bastards from the Cardinal's guard. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musketeers#Musketeers_in_France"
],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musketeers_of_the_Guard",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_de_Porthau",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Batz-Castelmore_d%27Artagnan",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_d%27Aramitz",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armand_d%27Athos"
],
[]
] |
||
1vbauo
|
why do sometimes people not realize they have been shot until someones either tells them or they see the injury for themselves?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vbauo/eli5_why_do_sometimes_people_not_realize_they/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ceqk7tx",
"ceqkayc",
"ceqlum8",
"ceqmfpd"
],
"score": [
2,
6,
4,
3
],
"text": [
"Heard about it [here](_URL_0_).",
"The reason for it (yes it does happen) is a mixture of adrenaline and nerve damage. When a person has been firing a gun a lot the gun, barrel, and bullets will heat up. When this happens the bullet will cause slightly more damage upon entry than normal and can sometimes cause the nerve damage stated above. When this happens it can numb or completely deaden the pain felt in that area leading to why some people don't notice it until after it's pointed out to them.",
"I fell onto a lawnmower when I was young (hide n' seek in the garage with the lights off), the size adjuster on the mower didn't have a rubber cover on it. It put a fat gash in my knee, walked around my friends house for a good minute not feeling a thing. Until my friends mom pointed out I was bleeding. The *second* I look down; craaaaazy pain. ",
"The fight or flight response has been activated. During this people's threshold of pain goes up so that they can either fight or run away even with injury. Experiencing pain at this stage would lessen the ability to do either of those. Pain is there to stop you from causing more damage but when you're in that survival mode causing more damage to yourself could actually save your life."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmJI8Iw_PdM"
],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
4dgzgw
|
A new historian needs help.
|
I am a part of an Air Force squadron and I was just assigned as the historian and was wondering if anyone had any direction on how to logically maintain and organize this information.
Edit: I am starting from scratch and have not been given any real direction. I was told to keep track of the big events and what our unit accomplishes. This is a fairly new unit started in 2013
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4dgzgw/a_new_historian_needs_help/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d1qz1xc",
"d1qz67u"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"What kind of information fo you have? What are you supposed to be doing with it?",
"Are you starting from scratch? Have you any records left over from anywhere else? Have you tried contacting the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell AFB for any opinions? We kindof need a little more background, here."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
8yrz27
|
how do smartphone fingerprint sensors work so quickly when sensors used for visas at embassies are back-lit and take longer?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8yrz27/eli5_how_do_smartphone_fingerprint_sensors_work/
|
{
"a_id": [
"e2d9dc4",
"e2d9iwz",
"e2djvsf"
],
"score": [
13,
4,
2
],
"text": [
"Your smartphone is reading your print vs a small library of a couple of prints you gave it. Those other computers as reading your print and have to compare it to all of the prints it has access to. So it is just as fast to read it but the database size causes it to slow down more and more the bigger the db of the comparing entitity. ",
"So, the technology we have isn't actually comparing fingerprints per se. They take A few points on the fingerprint, and compare them. The more precise you need the comparison to be, the more points you analyze, the longer it takes.\n\nThe phone scanner couldn't reasonably keep everyone but you out, so they settled for speed over precision. If you took 20 people with the same fingerprint type as you (arch, whirl) and messed a bit with angle and pressure, you could probably get into at least one other phone. But, that's super impractical, so for most use that standard of security is perfectly fine.",
"Your smartphone checks one fingerprint against up to 10 stored inside the phone and it has been engineered to do this as quickly as possible. This engineering is affordable because the phone is mass produced.\n\nProfessional fingerprint systems check your fingerprint, usually with a database of millions which is stored somewhere else and shared by others. Even if the system already knows your identity (and is just checking that you are who you say you are) it hasn't been engineered for speed because it's just not needed by customers and just wouldn't be cost effective.\n\nELI5: because it's designed that way, because people wouldn't use it on their phones if it was slow"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
2lsk52
|
If I were in a ship traveling the speed of light and the ship had it's headlights on, would the speed of the light emitted be doubled or would the photons just "get stuck" on the ship?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2lsk52/if_i_were_in_a_ship_traveling_the_speed_of_light/
|
{
"a_id": [
"clxqsdd",
"clxrvtz",
"cly02cv"
],
"score": [
18,
3,
2
],
"text": [
"This is a very common question, and the underpinning of relativity. \n\n1) Your ship can't travel at the speed of light, but let's say it's going _very close_ to the speed of light.\n\n2) The photons would neither get stuck nor travel at twice the speed of light -- from the ship's perspective, the light will move at the speed of light.\n\n3) From the \"ground's\" perspective, or from the perspective of a passing planet, the light will be moving at the speed of light.\n\nFrom everyone's perspective, light moves at the speed of light, no matter how fast the source is moving. ",
"Only massless particles can travel at the speed of light, and massless particles can't emit light, so this situation can never occur. Things that can emit light can go arbitrarily fast but never as fast as light, so you're always in a situation where light travels away from them at the speed of light, for every observer.\n\nYou might know about time dilation: the faster you go through space, the slower time seems to pass for everything else. The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower everything else is. What happens at precisely the speed of light? Does time stop? Sometimes we say that particles that can travel at the speed of light don't experience time. They travel through space only, not through time. That renders concepts of motion or speed meaningless, as they are changes over time. From the perspective of a photon, as much as that makes sense, everything just \"is\". Nothing changes.\n",
"There are some good answers to your actual question, so I'll rework your question an little and perhaps yield a little additional insight. \n\nYou are on earth looking at a ship moving at 0.75c (75% the speed of light) away from you. The ship fires a bullet in the direction it is traveling; the bullet appears to an observer on the ship to be moving at 0.75c. How fast does the bullet appear to be traveling to you (on earth)? \n\nThe answer is 0.96c, not 1.5c. This has to do with how velocities are added when you take special relativity into account. The wikipedia page on special relativity is particularly good, and you can find the formula for calculating the answer to this problem under the section \"Composition of Velocities\""
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
3gbm4g
|
Do our brains process thoughts information at different speeds? If so, can we experience events at different rates?
|
I know this is kind of a weird/dumb question, but let's say someone had a super fast brain that could work at incredible speeds. Could they actually experience things slower, with more detail? This came up in a discussion with my friends about time, and how we could all be experiencing the passage of time differently.
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3gbm4g/do_our_brains_process_thoughts_information_at/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ctwxkal"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"I have the same question. Maybe our experience of time is somehow determined by what we focus on. People who give the same amount of attention to something (would need to be quantified) could have a similar subjective experience of the passage of time. I see, for instance, a time bubble created between two people watching their favorite movie together. Otherwise, it's probably disjointed because people are contending with and not coordinating mostly different stimuli; our perception of time becomes singular. You would have your own niche in time that could only be matched with a feat of joint attention. Just a theory."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
31wii1
|
How famous were people like Mozart or Beethoven in their age?
|
Comparing with actual artists how famous and known they were?
Local celebrities? Michael Jackson mega stars? Unknown dudes?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31wii1/how_famous_were_people_like_mozart_or_beethoven/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cq5qjnl",
"cq5wgzl"
],
"score": [
15,
9
],
"text": [
"Not my flaired field of study, but one I pursued earlier in my college years, so I'll try.\n\nThey were widely popular in the context of their time. Comparing it to Michael Jackson would lead in the wrong direction, though, because\n\na) only relatively few people had access to concerts and the social levels to actually concern themselves with this form of higher culture\nand\nb) Media, in terms of those times, wasn't nearly as image-focused as it is today. Chances are that even those who admired Beethoven and Mozart in their times often had no real idea how they looked until they met them in person.\n\nSo, even more than today, we can't speak about the admiration of \"the public\" but of several \"part-publics\", which is really important to keep in mind. Those public parts who were able to follow higher culture were certainly aware of Mozart and Beethoven in their times and tried to socialize around them every now and then - either in Vienna or, when they were traveling, everywhere they came.\n\nThere's a nice anecdote about Beethoven - in 1812, he met with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Teplitz (Bohemia) - Goethe being the elderly master, Beethoven at 42 still relatively young. They took a walk through the park and people gathered, pointed fingers, were generally excited. Goethetold Beethoven that this kind of behaviour was really getting on his nerves, to which Beethoven replied \"Your Honor [Hochwürden], don't be upset. It's possible that this is about me.\"\n\nIf you want to read more on Beethoven and his popularity at the times, there's a great book, unfortunately as far as I know only in dutch and german by Jan Caeyers: \"Beethoven. Der einsame Revolutionär\". It's a pretty long read but I sped through it in three or four days, as it's excellently written.",
"Mozart traveled, A LOT. Not just for the standards of his time, but for ours. I think we can safely say he spent close to a decade in his travels, and we are talking about a man who died at 35. He was in what we now call Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, England, Belgium/the Netherlands, the Slovak and the Czech Republics. He visited quite a bunch of cities.\n\nIn modern times you see mega stars performing for the rich and powerful, at private events and also for public events. Well, in his travels, Mozart performed for super posh people in the big cities. At 15, he was commissioned to write an opera for the celebrations of the wedding of Archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg, in Milan. \n\nThese days mega stars make loads of money and live surrounded by glamour. Mozart made money by performing and being a piano teacher for the super rich, and later also made money by partnering with other people to present operas (this is new, in this period we start to see musicians become entrepreneurs. Before that, they were employees). He and his wife were into expending A LOT of money (there might have been some gambling, and he might have liked singers and actresses). It came to him asking pretty much everybody for large sums of money, and he would be using one loan to pay another (or at least some interest).\n\nMozart was a child prodigy. A lot of people were talking of the wonder boy. He was a well respected musician at a pretty young age.\n\nHis music circulated in different countries (as sheet music), and it was common for people to copy it (by hand). His sonatas and music for ensembles would be played at home, both by amateurs and hired professionals.\n\nBeethoven traveled less than Mozart, but he visited several cities in Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Slovak and the Czech Republics. He spent most of his life in Vienna. He was working, and even living, close to the super rich. His music was known all over Europe and yes, it also managed to cross the Atlantic (there are surviving newspapers announcing concerts in which his music was played in the big Eastern cities of the US). \n\nThere were thousands of people at his funeral (10-30k), and it was published in newspapers in many cities (including the US).\n\nSo, were they Unknown dudes? Local celebrities? No, they weren't. They were way more well known than that. Michael Jackson mega stars? There was no such thing back in the day.\n\nMega stars are now known pretty much worldwide, by huge numbers of people. They are mostly known because of our modern means of communication. Tours certainly help, but not everybody who knows a mega star has been at one of their concerts. There is some personality cult for mega stars, their lifestyle is wanted by many and their lives become public. Their image and music are kind of a product for people to consume. It's a situation completely different from what Mozart/Beethoven lived.\n\nThe idea of \"the idol artist\" was kind of starting to be created. The first cases of anything similar to the modern personality cult I know would be Paganini and Liszt."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
8zx13w
|
Do we know the socioeconomic layout of Ancient Rome, ie the rich suburbs, ghettos, ethnic neighborhoods, etc.?
|
Particularly interested in whether there was an equivalent to Chinatown, Little Italy, etc. with Gauls or Carthaginians all gathering in one area.
EDIT: I should add that I know that our current Western concepts of urban layout probably don't entirely map to Ancient Rome. I just wanted to give some examples of what you might find in a city today, and whether that had any analog in Rome.
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8zx13w/do_we_know_the_socioeconomic_layout_of_ancient/
|
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" > I know that our current Western concepts of urban layout probably don't entirely map to Ancient Rome\n\nIt's more than that, actually. It's not simply that modern urban planners lay out cities differently today, it's that cities themselves are completely different entities in the modern world. Modern cities have the benefits of rapid transit, either by privately-owned vehicles or public transport. They also are fueled by industry, which given the more or less parasitic nature of cities is significant--modern cities are able to contribute to production in a way that ancient cities could not. Modern cities are freed from walls and from the height restrictions (though Roman residential buildings could get quite tall) of ancient builders. All this means that urban structure of the modern world can give no indication of the urban structure of the ancient world. This might be obvious, but it's not necessarily so obvious in practice. \n\nThere are several models of modern urban development going back to the early part of the twentieth century. Burgess' 1925 model proposed a fairly simple set of concentric rings, with a central business area in the center, surrounded by rings of residential districts getting wealthier as they moved out, with areas of transition in between, and eventually a ring of industry at the periphery. Something like two decades later Hoyt remodeled this according to sectors, or wedges cutting through the rings along transport routes. By this model the highest-income residences mainly lie along one or two thoroughfares, often at some distance to the city, and industry and lower-income residences are close to each other. There are other models: Harris-Ullman, for example, proposes urban land use clustering at several points in a city around important areas (the central business district, or a factory complex, etc.), at which you might find smaller versions of class divides and so forth. The point is that these models all show some of the fundamental differences between modern and urban land use. Most immediately notable is probably transport. Transport at Rome, and most other ancient cities, was by foot. At the most basic level, this explains why the urban area of Rome was so relatively small despite its booming population: the city could not reasonably outgrow the space in which a human being could walk over the course of about a day. At another, it effectively limits the distance at which wealthy residences can be built and still allow reasonable access to the urban center. At Rome this is a serious problem. While senators and other magnates might--and always did--have extensive landholdings in the country, when at Rome they needed to be able to get to the forum daily. As a result you'll find the Palatine, which overlooks the forum, is prime real estate. \n\nHowever, this should not necessarily mean that areas like the Palatine should be considered the Park Avenue of Rome. Neighborhoods like the Palatine, the Subura, or the Esquiline may have had their own little reputations, but in the broad scheme of things there's very little to suggest that one area of the city differed greatly from another at all. Mignone's recent book *The Republican Aventine and Rome's Social Order* sets out, in the first place, to challenge the idea (going back to about 1907) of a \"plebeian Aventine\" and in the second to show that there's not really any evidence for social stratification of this kind. The first point is not really our concern. Let it suffice to say that Mignone goes through the evidence with impressive thoroughness and shows pretty conclusively that there was nothing \"plebeian\" about the Aventine--in fact, we arguably have more evidence for patrician and senatorial residence there! The second point is what we want. Mignone assembles a lot of evidence, including the Regionary Catalogs and the *Forma Urbis*. Both are problematic--the Regionary Catalogs are almost certainly corrupt, and the *Forma Urbis* is highly fragrmentary--but both seem to show pretty conclusively that the large *domus* of wealthier residents and the clustered *insulae* of the ordinary worker are spread pretty evenly through the city, with no region having a particularly larger share of *domus* or *insulae* than any other. Of course, neither the Residency Catalogs nor the *Forma Urbis* likely show the ramshackle housing that was likely characteristic of much of Rome, but the evidence agrees with our literary evidence, which attests strongly to the close physical contact the urban elite had with the rest of the population. \n\nMignone goes further and, in what I think is rather a poor assertion, postulates nucleated micro-districts surrounding individual *domus*. The model relies too heavily on a strict model of clientship, but in any case the evidence we have does not seem to suggest that premodern Rome really *had* socioeconomic districts such as we might recognize them. On another level, it seems hard to see how this could be possible. Mignone's analysis more or less assumes a stable population for Rome, with permanent residents living in the same place over the course of years. In fact--and this actually supports her argument--our evidence strongly suggests that Rome's population was highly fluid. Mortality in the city to disease was extremely high, and even by the most conservative estimates immigration from Italy and eventually the provinces was necessary at a prodigious rate to keep the population stable. The population of Rome *grew* over time. Our evidence suggests that most of these were free people, not freedmen--the numbers of freedmen are too small. The evidence, going back to studies by Brunt in the 1960s, strongly suggests a fairly mobile urban proletariat. Rome's inhabitants were, in large part, semi-migratory day-workers, who roamed the city but also seem to have lacked permanent residences over long periods of time. They might live in the same place for a season if they found work at, say, a monumental building project, but they'd likely return to the country as hired labor at the harvest (a model that persisted until really quite recently even in the developed world) and when they returned they'd be working elsewhere. In such a fluid population how can we reasonably expect distinct districts? These people went where the work was, and since work like building projects was constantly moving (and quite frequently such monuments were not being set up in the boonies) we should expect to see labor move. Even in areas like the Tiber docks, near the Aventine, we seem to see workers coming in and out, and both rich and poor are forced to live within walking distance of the area. This is most pertinent to the question of ethnic districts, which I addressed [here](_URL_0_). But it also makes us wonder again about Mignone's micro-nucleated model. The permanent inhabitants of areas of the city were, by and large, the wealthy and the skilled workers. Skilled workers seem to make more sense as the central units of micro-neighborhoods. Their shops and workshops provided food and the necessary goods of life, and it's abundantly clear in our texts that their patronage was both impoverished and wealthy. Under Augustus these skilled workers, as representatives of their *vici*, became literally the cult overseers of such micro-neighborhoods. We don't see much evidence for large stratification there. Shopkeepers of the same type in particular areas frequently formed *collegia*, but shops appear clustered together--there is no shoemakers' district or butchers' district identifiable at Rome. The necessities of life would need, by obvious logic, to be clustered together within easy reach, and we should see this pattern repeat itself throughout the districts of the city, as these nuclei should crop up everywhere people are trying to survive. I do not believe anybody has yet tried to do that--the project would be immense, and necessarily unsatisfying. But if we could identify patterns of access to such necessities then we might be able to tease out more carefully the horizontal stratification within mico-regions, determining the relationship more closely between the large *domus* of a city block and the shop and tenements surrounding it"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4zpkzv/how_did_the_different_ethnic_quarters_in_rome_and/"
]
] |
|
2w9x1l
|
why can't i use my turbo tax i bought last yeae, this year?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2w9x1l/eli5_why_cant_i_use_my_turbo_tax_i_bought_last/
|
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"Tax laws change every year. Thus the values calculated from last year's software won't necessarily work for this year.",
"While Tax laws and the calculations do change year-by-year, the biggest reason that Turbo Tax has a shelf life is the need of the company that makes it and rewrites the code to match the tax laws to stay in business.\n\nIf it were a program you bought once and then never bought again, the company would have to charge hundreds or thousands of dollars for a single license, just to stay afloat year after year, as they updated their code. Rather, they can charge a small fee (or even allow basic calculations for free) so that they have revenue year-to-year.\n\nThink about it - you really only use the software once a year, and then don't buy or consider buying another license until the next year. They have to pay for their operation somehow!"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
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[],
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||
1ch31x
|
Were there any European attempts to "restart" imperialism?
|
By the late 60s African nations had largely become independent and pretty much every colony had been granted independence save for Hong Kong and Macau. Western European economies were no longer the biggest in the world.
Were they any attempts to try to recolonize places? Certainly, many of the politicians who were involved in European Imperialism were still active.
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ch31x/were_there_any_european_attempts_to_restart/
|
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"France has exerted a lot of effort to maintain loose and informal control over its former colonial empire in Africa. \n\nIf you're looking for formal attempts to regain a colonial empire, the best example might be Spain. After the loss of most of Spain's American colonies, it kept up a series of raids and invasions for a generation until it finally abandoned the idea of regaining its empire in 1833. Spain did reassume control over the Dominican Republic in 1861 at the invitation of the state's elites, but lost it again in 1865.",
"There are three 'exceptions' that come to mind when we're talking about the late 1960ies and African independence. \n\nThe first concerns the Portuguese colonies in Africa of Mozambique and Angola. The Portuguese strongly resisted calls for independence in both territories. Due to settlement incentives, decades of racial segregation an elite European class had emerged which remained in control of what effectively amounted to African serfs used to exploit the natural resources in those countries for the benefit of Portugal and the European elites in Africa.\n\nPartly due to the fact that the wars for independence in Angola and Mozambique became theatres of the Cold War, they lasted well into the mid-1970ies, when they finally became independent.\n\nThe second exception are the French colonies. The French attitude towards their African colonies was completely different, in the sense that France 'granted' independence to its colonies relatively early on, but retained a high degree of control through economic, diplomatic, and political ties. \n\nTo put it very briefly, these French-African relations, named 'Francafrique', were capable of continuing because the French had fostered an African elite which identified as 'French', and therefore saw the relationship as mutually beneficial. A good example is Ivory Coast, whose leader Félix Houphouët-Boigny maintained friendships with the French political and business elite, served in the French parliaments and held French ministerial positions. \n\nThe French have always been prone to 'meddling' in the affairs of its former colonies, for instance by sending its military to quash rebellion, or, when all hope was lost, by evacuating the elites, as happened in 1994 during the Rwandan genocide with Agathe Habyarimana, for instance.\n\nSarkozy and Hollande, like presidents before them, both swore to end 'Francafrique', as it has come under fire as a blatant form of neocolonialism, but many of the business-political ties remain, albeit not as strong as a few decades ago.\n\nFinally, there are the white minority governments of Rhodesia and South Africa. I wouldn't call them a form of colonialism, as they were ruled independently from their former colonial masters, but they successfully contained many of the properties of a colonial, segregated, extractive regime. \n\nThe only other example I can think of which might come close to a restart of imperialism, but which is quite controversial and I have too little knowledge of myself, is the Chinese occupation and incorporation into China of Tibet.",
"One might argue that the Suez Crisis was one of the last attempts by European powers to act in their traditional interventionist role. The UK and France allied with Israel to attack Egypt, force open the Suez Canal, and overthrow Nasser. International pressure, specifically from *both* the U.S. and USSR, frustrated the attempt.\n\nI've always interpreted that as the death knell of active European colonialism in the traditional sense. The old powers were put on notice that all world politics ran through Washington and Moscow, and that their roles were as dutiful soldiers in the Cold War."
]
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[] |
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[
[],
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|
22zze0
|
Where normal citizens traveling between countries under total war? (e.g WW2)
|
Germany is being bombed, and so is London. The US is fighting the Germans, the Italians and the Japanes. But during these total wars, were there any civilians flying to and from these countries? Say I'm a German businessman during the early 1940s. Would it be considered strange for me to walk the streets of London? Say I'm a German businessman, would sitting down at a law office in New York, signing a contract with an American company, be unthinkable? And in that case, at what point of a war would it become unthinkable?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22zze0/where_normal_citizens_traveling_between_countries/
|
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"I do know, at least, that third country nationals were able to use neutral nations as transit hubs. Many of the American officials who went to London in the early days tended to travel by clipper to Spain to avoid war risk, and from there to Britain. Americans could have just as easily transferred on through Vichy France into Germany if they had the proper visa approval prior to December 10, 1941.\n\nObviously, short of being an ambassador on an official mission to reestablish diplomatic relations with a nation you are at war with, you're not likely going to get a visa to allow access to an enemy nation. But, I don't believe I've ever read of visa restrictions on third-country nationals. Maybe someone else has actually heard of some. I'm pretty sure Argentinians could not have been granted visas to the United States given the embargo of fuel rations that went on due to Argentina's pro-axis leaning - however, if they could secure a flight to Spain they would have probably been welcome in Germany. \n\nAnd. If you believe the records of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff organization devoted to petroleum, there were significant fears that Avgas was being diverted from the Caribbean to a German airline that was offering service in neutral South American and African nations. The Americans got around that problem by issuing strict bunker control measures at the refineries (accurate information keeping as to which ships take on fuel and how much), and, by investing resources into Pan American Airlines to force the Germans out of the marketplace competitively (from an unrelated narrative). "
]
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[] |
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[
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|
20cpsd
|
why is ram hardly ever seen as 6gb,12gb or 24 etc?
|
Is there a specific reason as to why this is? I was guessing that it may be because its doubling every time (2GB, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc.) but why is this? Is there a disadvantage of using these?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20cpsd/eli5_why_is_ram_hardly_ever_seen_as_6gb12gb_or_24/
|
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"text": [
"Because computers, being binary machines, do math in base 2. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32... are all powers of 2.",
"It's called dual channel memory architecture and it benefits from having two sticks of RAM which increases the speeds between the memory and the memory channel. This is by far the most common design these days and pretty much every single motherboard out there supports it.\n\nThere are some CPUs which also support triple channel RAM, mainly a couple of Intel i7 9xx CPUs and server Xeons, which is the same thing except that you have three sticks of RAM.\n\nYou can also use uneven numbers of RAM sticks on dual channel systems, there's a very small performance drop of only a couple of percents in the memory.",
"It's because computers are binary, but...i'll try to expand on that a bit.\n\nMemory is accessed through its \"address\". A block of memory will be addressed through 1 or more \"address lines\". This is how the computer says \"give me all the stuff in memory for a certain set of operations\" without knowing what the stuff is - it just knows its address\". Each piece of address information are (or were...back in my day!) called \"address lines\". Each \"address line\" for a block (let's use 256 byte blocks since those are (were!) the common block size) is represented by a binary value. The 256 byte block requires 8 address lines (1111 1111). If you were to add another address line now you'd be able to address 512 bytes ! (1 1111 1111 = 512 bytes). Adding yet another address line and you'd get 1024 and so on. What you don't ever get is a number between 512 and 1024 or a number between 1024 and 2048 etc. \n\nSo...if you were to build RAM that wasn't a good multiplier then you'd have unaddressable space...or...wasted space! That'd be a bummer :)"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
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|
3de5xx
|
why is oskar groening a 94-year-old former bookkeeper & guard at auschwitz birkenau guilty of 300000 counts of accessory to murder in wwii but bush sr , bush jr bill clintion & obama are not prosecuted for iraq & afghanistan wars they ordered that killed millions of innocent people ?
|
_URL_0_
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3de5xx/eli5why_is_oskar_groening_a_94yearold_former/
|
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"the united states does not bow to any international court. they refused to do this because theoretically france could have claimed that george bush, as the governor of texas, was committing crimes against humanity by instilling the death penalty. because of this, it means our presidents, and former presidents can not be tried by an international court, the only conviction that would be credited is if the american court system made the conviction, in fact george bush was charged with crimes, by malayisia as depicted [here](_URL_0_)",
"The one is war and you got to have a quote for those \"millions of innocent people\", the other is unprovoked murder of civilians.",
"Wars are terrible things. Civilians get killed in wars as a sad byproduct of violent attempts to resolve political differences.\n\nBut while the atrocities that went on at Auschwitz happened during a war, they were not *part* of war. The killing of civilians there was not a byproduct of political struggles, it was a direct political objective.\n\nI guess what I am saying is that if Bush and Clinton and Bush and Obama could achieve their goals without killing any civilians, they would have. But the Nazis were *intentionally* murdering innocents.",
"One is collateral damage, the other was a designed system for herding and then eliminating a race",
"Premise incorrect, millions not killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by US.\n\nMany more Afghans and Iraqis have been killed by Islamists than any US action.",
"Guess I can give this a shot..\n\nIf you ever heard the saying \"History is wrote by the winners\" its because its true. The people who are the most powerful can get away with lots. Take Stalin for instance. He killed more of his own people that Hitler did. It is believed some odd 40+ million people were killed by his industrialization, changing the country, ww2, and other \"cullings\". When Russia and Germany took Poland together Russia killed a whole bunch of people as well. I believe recently they discovered one of the mass graves. Chairman Mao of Communist China by his \"reforms\" killed millions. Guess what I'm saying as the powerful countries can get away with a lot more than a weaker one can. Tbh the US is quickly losing its moral high ground. ",
"Simply put, dead civilians in war are collateral damage. Unfortunate, yes, but almost unavoidable. Nazi camps operated during war times but were not a byproduct of the war itself, it was a byproduct of Hitlers agenda. ",
"Perhaps the best explaination, is that in both cases, the US was the victor. Most of the 'Nazis being the embodiment of evil' sentiment comes from WWII era propaganda and the like. Former Nazis are still persecuted because of the German government being basically set up (by the occupiers) to be as anti-nazi as possible. Additionally, the Americans in question were heads of state in a surviving government, unlike the former Nazis, who are opposed, rather than protected by their government. Remember, losers are evil and winners are righteous.",
"This question is very charged, but it has to do with the Nuremberg trials. The ~~Allies~~ Axis lost the war, and trials were held to punish Nazis associated with the war effort. This guy happened to be tried, and was found guilty.\n\nAforementioned people, however, won (side-note: at least they didn't lose, not necessarily won), and no matter if they are guilty of aforementioned crimes, don't get tried.\n\nThe winner writes history.\n\nEDIT: Thank you /u/tlkshwhst for spotting that",
"Because we only have the power to punish those who, follow orders. Not those who give the orders..",
"Because one is largely a case of largely unintended collateral damage, and not people rounded up and killed indiscriminately or enslaved and *then* killed indiscriminately because of their beliefs, race, and sexual orientation in a systematic act of genocide.",
"I always ponder why only elderly German soldiers get in trouble and not the many Soviet soldiers who did equally bad things.\n\nBut I know that in reality, you can commit any war crime you want and kill as many civilians you want as long as you ultimately win the war, then you don't get in trouble.",
"Where are you seeing \"millions\" of civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan? A [Brown University](_URL_0_) article claims that, as of March, 2015, the number of civilians killed is 210,000 as a result of war in these countries."
]
}
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[] |
[
"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3161043/71-years-helped-Nazis-kill-300-000-Jews-bookkeeper-Auschwitz-finally-faces-justice-German-court-delivers-verdict-om-Oskar-Groening-morning.html"
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7y3dn0
|
It seems that in paintings, we only see what nobles wore during formal occasions. Do we know what they would have worn on casual occasions?
|
I'm interested in things like pyjamas, clothes worn during exercise (for knights,) and clothes worn around the house when visitors were not expected, around the time of the Tudor period.
Pictures would obviously preferred, but I understand that most of these things probably would only have been depicted in literature, rather than paintings or other visual accounts.
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7y3dn0/it_seems_that_in_paintings_we_only_see_what/
|
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"Part of the issue here is that you're looking at the formal/informal divide from a very modern viewpoint. As I explained in [this answer](_URL_5_), the twentieth century saw sportswear and \"sloppy\" student clothing become unremarkable everyday dress; as a result, anybody born after 1930 or so has a mindset on the subject that is fundamentally different from that of earlier generations. During the nineteenth century and earlier, people of means - that is, the relatively prosperous middle class and those above that - would spend very little time in clothes that we'd consider \"casual\". Everyday dress was informal because it wasn't ornately/expensively decorated or made out of the costliest fabrics or made in a particular court style, not because it was loose and suitable for sprawling on a sofa. As a result, we can conjecture that casual dress was made in a very similar manner to those we see in fine portraiture, just with fewer jewels and perhaps in more ordinary fabrics. That being said, we do see images of people not in formal dress, such as the portraits drawn by Holbein of the More family (like [this one](_URL_0_) of Meg Giggs), or portraits of [merchants from the Netherlands](_URL_2_).\n\nThe kimono-shaped dressing gown (seen [here](_URL_8_) on John Banckes in 1676) was not worn in Europe until the late seventeenth century, when it was imported from India, despite the fact that it seems like a very obvious thing to make; it could be used in portraiture (along with a cap in place of a wig, once wigs were in fashion) to show that the wearer was an intellectual with the means to a) afford a silk dressing gown in the Indian style and b) sit around in it rather than doing manual labor of some kind, while either reading/writing philosophy or doing high-level merchant tasks. Women were also depicted in these, or in imaginary dresses that gave the impression of a crossed-over front (see [here](_URL_1_) on Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough ca. 1695), for similar reasons, minus the merchant tasks. Again, before this time period, we have no evidence of this kind of thing existing. The closest we come is to the \"jumps\" worn by noblewomen in portraiture that is either in the last few years of what can be considered Tudor - the very end of Elizabeth I's reign - or fully in the Stuart era. \"Jumps\" during this time refers to a lightweight, heavily embroidered jacket worn by elite or possibly also affluent women in extremely informal situations at home. You can see one in [this portrait of Lady Arabella Stuart](_URL_7_), or a later one on [this unidentified woman](_URL_3_). Despite the fact that these were informal, the embroidery could be quite elaborate and even involve gold and silver thread, lace, and sequins. (You may be interested in reading more about [one such jacket](_URL_6_) that appeared in a portrait of Margaret Laton and actually still exists today. The linked blog post also has many macro shots of the embroidery and lace.)\n\nAs far as pajamas go, people didn't wear that much to bed. It's generally accepted that people wore either their shirt or shift/smock (see [this previous post of mine](_URL_4_) on these garments) or a version of these made specifically for sleeping in. It's hard to say what definitely made a shirt or smock for sleeping rather than day wear - we can be confident that a very long man's shirt would be a nightshirt, for instance, because it wouldn't be able to be tucked into his hose, but beyond that ... We also know that nightcaps were worn. Andrew Boorde's 1547 *First Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge* recommended that they be made of scarlet, a red wool, for the warming properties of the wool and the color itself; Henry VIII had red wool nightcaps, as well as red satin ones that were likely worn during the day, despite their name, in informal situations."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/search#/7/collection/912229/margaret-giggs-1508-1570",
"https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/sarah-duchess-of-marlborough-16601744-politician-and-courtier-28557",
"http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436538",
"https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/406064/portrait-of-a-woman",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ushcx/were_accustomed_to_changing_our_clothes_every_day/dtneepe/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/68hta6/j_f_kennedy_despised_how_he_looked_in_hats_and/dgzp4u7/",
"https://hands-across-the-sea-samplers.com/the-layton-jacket/",
"https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/arabella-stuart-15751615-37941",
"http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kneller-portrait-of-john-banckes-t05019"
]
] |
|
42m7qm
|
Does the shape of a galaxy offer any insight on its path of motion through the universe?
|
would a galaxy shaped like a spiraling disk move through the universe perpendicularly to its "disk" similar to how as a helicopter moves forward it pitches its nose down?
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/42m7qm/does_the_shape_of_a_galaxy_offer_any_insight_on/
|
{
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"czbffxz"
],
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"text": [
"No. While galaxies are certainly accelerating one way or another, the forces due to this acceleration are extremely minor compared to the forces of gravity within the galaxy. The orientation of a spiral galaxy is determined by the net angular momentum that the massive cloud of dust that became the galaxy happened to have. Since this angular momentum is conserved except when an outside torque is applied (which basically can't happen to the whole galaxy except maybe during galaxy collisions), the orientation of the disk remains constant."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
rlorx
|
What happened to the natives Columbus kidnapped and brought back to Spain from his first voyage?
|
On Columbus' first voyage, he kidnapped over 20 natives and brought them back to Spain. I have read a lot on Columbus' first voyage but haven't seen anything about what happened to these natives. I know that he presented them in front of Queen Isabella but I cannot find anything about what happened next. These were the first ever Americans from the Carribean to see Europe yet there is virtually nothing I can find written about them and their lives. Does anyone know what happened to them after they arrived in Spain?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rlorx/what_happened_to_the_natives_columbus_kidnapped/
|
{
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"c46u58x",
"c46uoxu"
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"text": [
"As far as I remember from my history classes, they died of disease pretty quickly, I think most of them faded quickly from the historical record though. Generally speaking, natives of the Americas were not considered valuable other than as a novelty since they died so quickly when exposed to so many new (to them) infectious diseases. There were a handful of natives who made the crossing to Europe and then made it back one way or another, but none of those were from Columbus' voyages.",
"I don't recall off the top of my head, but this book will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the Age of Exploration and then some. \n\n[The Age of Reconnaissance](_URL_0_)\n\nWorldCat will help you find it in a nearby library. There have been several printings and you might find a newer addition as well. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://www.worldcat.org/title/age-of-reconnaissance/oclc/492177&referer=brief_results"
]
] |
|
9ibyum
|
what causes an inflated balloon to rise?
|
*Inflated with helium, forgot to mention that in the title :)
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ibyum/eli5_what_causes_an_inflated_balloon_to_rise/
|
{
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"text": [
"The helium inside it is less dense than air, and therefore rises. It's not because its inflated, it's because its filled with helium.",
"It has to be filled with a substance that is less dense than its surroundings. The volume of air in the balloon is then lighter than the surrounding air which makes it go up. ",
"Do you mean a balloon inflated with helium? Because a balloon inflated with air falls to earth in the absence of a wind to blow it around.",
"Standard hot air balloons use propane as a fuel, to heat the air inside the balloons envelope. The hot air is less dense than the air outside, which is cooler, thus creating lift! :)"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
63ofh3
|
how is the so called "nuclear option" with respect to congressional approval of supreme court nominations constitutional? why is congress allowed to set its own rules for the approval process of supreme court nominees?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63ofh3/eli5_how_is_the_so_called_nuclear_option_with/
|
{
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"dfvq6b4",
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"text": [
"Here's the relevant excerpt from the Constitution:\n\n > **He(the President)** shall have the Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur; and he **shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint** Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, **Judges of the supreme Court**, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.\n\nOr, with all the other stuff cut out:\n\n > He(the President)...shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint...Judges of the Supreme Court...\n\nIn other words, all the Constitution says is that the Senate shall give \"advice and consent\" regarding the appointee. It gives no clarification on what \"advice and consent\" actually means - that's for the Senate to decide for itself. The Senate can \"advise and consent\" however they choose.",
"That's how the checks & balances system is laid out. Congress gets to decide how they want to make their own decisions on the other branches. It's considered the \"nuclear option\" because it's a last resort for the majority party to get their way right now, but at great cost in the future when they're no longer the majority party. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
70mzcp
|
What is the gold and silver foil they put on satellites and why is it important?
|
I was looking at a picture of a satellite in the news the other day and noticed that every time I've seen some kind of space-related piece of equipment, it is wrapped in gold/silver foil. Is this real gold and real silver? What is it? Why is it used?
Thank you!
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/70mzcp/what_is_the_gold_and_silver_foil_they_put_on/
|
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"Despite the common knowledge that space is \"cold,\" it's actually difficult to get rid of heat in a vacuum. Spacecraft without a highly reflective surface tend to absorb the sun's energy and heat up to the point of failure. Putting \"foil\" (which is actually a more advanced insulation) around satellites makes sure they can maintain a good operating temperature.\n\n_URL_0_",
"It's thin insulating foil. It's made from a very thin and lightweight but strong mylar film, sprayed with vaporised aluminium which is very reflective but again very lightweight. All these properties make it very suitable for use as insulation round spacecraft to stop radiant heat from the sun building up and damaging them. \n\nAlso known as space blankets...",
"Like a few have said here, the foil is essentially a blanket made up of multiple layers (usually between 10-20) of reflective foil kept apart by spacers so that they do not touch: creating multiple vaccum sections over which heat would need to radiate to pass through.\n\nThis can be useful in 2 major scenarios:\n\n1) For satellites, the MLI (that's what the blanket is called: Multi-Layer-Insulation) is usually used to insulate sun facing sections from solar radiation. Despite space being cold, it is also tricky to get rid of heat because you have no air that you could just fan over the hot parts to cool them. All the heat needs to be radiated away. Heat is produced by electronics on the satellite as well as whatever is absorbed from the Sun or even the Earth if the satellite is flying close enough.\nSo, cover with MLI - > less heat in the satellite - > easier to manage the heat radiation through designated radiator surfaces which face into the dark space (away from sun) for maximum heat shedding.\n\n2) MLI can also work the other way around, keeping heat in the spacecraft. For example a rover on the Moon may need to survive 14 days in complete darkness when the Moon enters its night phase (the Moon orbits Earth once per ~28 Earth days, and also turns on its axis once per ~28 Earth days, so its days and nights are each 14 days long). During this night cycle, the rover will be losing heat to the cold lunar environment and space without any sun heating it. So it will need to produce its own heat (usually using electricity stored in batteries) to keep its sensitive electronics and batteries (!) at a temperature that they will be able to function again. Especially the batteries need to be kept above a certain temperature to function correctly.\nSo: MLI around the rover or the batteries can keep the heat used to maintain their temperature during these long cold nights within the rover and lower the amount of power needed for this 'survival heating'.\n(A rover may also need the MLI during the day to keep out the solar radiation)\n\n\nFinally, whether the foil is gold or silver depens on what material is used to coat it with. The two have different reflectivities/emissivities of solar radiation and infra-red radiation. Depending on which properties you're looking for, you may use one or the other.",
"This is referred to in the space community as Multi Layer Insulation (MLI). There are different types of it, the fancier stuff is made of alumnized polyimide (Kapton) which is where the gold color comes from. [This is a good basic read on how it works.](_URL_0_)\n\nDepending on which way you have the outer and inner layers of the MLI configured you can have it both reflect solar energy and radiate heat, or retain heat while preventing radiation. So certain configurations will keep hot components hot and prevent them from losing heat to radiation, while other configurations will prevent heat from radiating into the component. It is also used to keep warmer spacecraft components (certain instruments, thrusters) from radiating heat to other parts of the spacecraft such as temperature-sensitive instruments. If you are interested in more detail about what MLI can do [check out Dunmore's website](_URL_1_). (I am not affiliated with them in any way but I have used their MLI before).\n\nSource: EP engineer",
"It's called MLI (Multi Layer Insulation). They have two different materials, alternatively arranged into a set and put over the satellites depending on the heat exposure allowed. In other places, special types of paints are used which again has various thermal properties. ",
"Here's an interesting example of changing the surface material to achieve different thermal results :\n\nThe European Space Agency (ESA) sent an orbiter to Mars called Mars Express; its outer MLI large is black, to help it capture heat. Here's an image _URL_2_\n\nESA then sent a spacecraft of the same design to Venus. Because Venus is closer to the sun, they needed to reflect away more sunlight to prevent overheating; they changed the outer surface of the satellite to a more reflective gold layer. Image here: _URL_0_\n\nBrief info here _URL_1_\n\n",
"There are three types of heat transfer: conduction, convection, and radiation. When in space, radiation is the basically all you are dealing with. Radiation from the sun is quite intense and the foil they put on the space crafts is made to reflect the radiation. If you want more information it may be interesting to you to look up emissivity. ",
"A few people have explained it's for insulation to keep out heat but I don't think anyone has explained why it is hard to dissipate heat in space.\n\nOn earth, dissipating heat is pretty easy because heat is removed by usually by contact with a cooler fluid. This is usually air or water. Take something hot an put it in cold water. The water absorbs the heat and dissipates it. In space the only way to dissipate heat is radiation since space is mostly empty. Radiation is far less efficient at dissipating heat so preventing the heat from getting to the satellite is preferable to trying to remove it once it is absorbed. ",
"one side being hot and the other side being very cold means that without moving the heat to the cold side the satellite would warp and crush itself. \n\n\nthis is also why we can use Lasers to shoot down Satellites and missiles. \n\n\nyou heat one side alot and the difference between the two sides is what rips the object apart. \n\n\nin missiles, with a powerful enough laser, this is exaggerated due to the amount of stress already being put onto the missile while it is flying. \n\n\nwith satellites, its harder because the laser is (normally) on the ground and has to deal with its laser needing to travel through air which makes it less powerful. ",
"Some satellites that were supposed to keep cold were clad in a layer of gold under a layer of Teflon. The gold reflected the visible sunlight, to prevent absorption, and the Teflon which is clear in the visible but black in the infrared aided in re-radiating whatever was absorbed. I worked at Space Science and Engineering Center back around 1980.",
"Multi-Layer Insulation (MLI) can be gold or aluminum (aluminum is cheaper but less effective) is designed to both reflect solar radiation and prevent radiation of heat from internal to the spacecraft.\n\nBoth are needed because anything in space will be piping hot on one side and freezing cold on the other depending on it's orientation to the Sun (think of sitting in front of a campfire on a cold night).\n\nThe outer layer reflects high energy wavelengths (uv on down) to prevent overheating and the subsequent layers reflect heat wavelengths (IR) back toward the spacecraft like a blanket.\n\nThey are often called blankets for that reason.\n\nOften times the metallic surface is only a few angstroms thick deposit onto a high temperature polymer like kapton which makes it super light weight. The kapton can be reinforced with threads to make it tough and/or it can be impregnated with carbon fiber to make it conductive so it will dissipate electrons that tend to build up on the surface."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/good-gold-are-satellites-covered-gold-foil"
],
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-layer_insulation",
"https://www.dunmore.com/products/multi-layer-films.html"
],
[],
[
"http://blogs.esa.int/rocketscience/files/2015/01/VenusExpress-2.jpg",
"http://m.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Venus_Express/The_spacecraft",
"http://blogs.esa.int/rocketscience/files/2016/10/Mars_Express.jpg"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
7g1ki7
|
Is a blank 15 minute MP3 the same size as a 15 minute MP3 of music?
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7g1ki7/is_a_blank_15_minute_mp3_the_same_size_as_a_15/
|
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"text": [
"It depends on the compression algorithm used.\n\nA .mp3 file of 15 min is built of a long sequence 0/1 in a specific structure/pattern to be read has music.\n\nA Silent track would be 0s from the start to the end of the track.\nWithout any compression of the data, it is X \"bits\" of 0 where as a track which is Not-Silent would be both 0s and 1s for the same amount X of \"bits\".\n\nCompression works at different levels, but if it were to be applied on 0/1 directly, a sequence like these two :\n\n* 0000000000 \n* 1010101010\n\ncould be compressed to\n\n* 10x0 which might get written has 10010 (binary 10) - 0 (compressed bit) -- > 6 bits instead of 10\n* 5x10 which might get written has 00101 (binary 5) - 10 (compressed sequence of bit) -- > 7 bits instead of 10\n\nwhat if our sequences where a bit different?\n\n* 0000000000000000 (15 0) would become 11111 - 0 still 6 bits\n* 101101101111000 (random) would become bigger than 15 bits because my example compression works better on sequence.\n\nCompression can be compounded on different \"abstraction level of data\". \n\nCompression can be lossless or with loss. Some compression lose data to squeeze it into as less space as possible which cannot be recovered when decompressing without external data.",
"I can’t speak to the particulars of MP3 compression algorithms, but I can address a similar question... either more abstract or more fundamental depending on your outlook.\n\nTo encode 15 minutes of silence, or any single signal, the data you need are an intensity value for each frequency and a time duration over which to repeat it. For 15 minutes of music, you need the same data for each each sampling interval, and it’s necessarily not as simple as a constant tone.\n\nThis concept is the basis for something called Kolmogorov complexity, which says the complexity of any chunk of data is the size of the (smallest) program needed to recreate it. 15 minutes of silence is trivially compressible, 15 minutes of music is less so, and the degree varies based on the characteristics of the music.",
"With CBR encoding, yes, by definition. Bitrate is constant.\n\nIf you use VBR encoding, then the encoder would (should) be smart enough to make your silent file really really small.",
"Making it simple.\nThe \"constant bitrate encoding\" uses up storage based on how long the song is. 3 minutes of silence and 3 minutes of heavy metal will be the same size.\n\nThe MP3's that are probably on your phone are likely \"variable bitrate\" and only makes the file bigger if there is more complicated audio to store. So a silent track isnt very complicated and will make a small MP3 file. But a song, typically, will be complicated and create a bigger MP3 file. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
50cok9
|
If energy is released when bonds form, and input of energy is needed for bonds to break, then why does anabolism require energy, and catabolism "give" energy?
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/50cok9/if_energy_is_released_when_bonds_form_and_input/
|
{
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"d732hxu"
],
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"text": [
"You are right that any bonds must sit in a **local** energy minimum, where you have to put in energy to dissociate them and gain energy by binding them. Otherwise you wouldn't have a bound state.\n\nFor biological reactions, when they say \"require\" or \"give\" energy, what they are actually talking about is the energy difference between a reactant and a product in a chemical reaction. For example, a \"giving\" (exothermic) reaction would look something like [this](_URL_0_), where the net energy change between product and reaction is a release of energy. *However, both product and reactant sit in a local energy minima.*\n\nA reaction that requires energy (endothermic) looks like that reaction diagram, but running in reverse."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/8873c058083501d1d0231886177813e36f7d992b.gif"
]
] |
||
2am17h
|
Did whites in the American South only discriminate against African Americans and not Africans?
|
I heard an anecdote basically saying that "white only" restaurants only applied to American blacks, not people actually from Africa. Is there any validity to this?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2am17h/did_whites_in_the_american_south_only/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ciwlbin"
],
"score": [
2
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"text": [
"Definitely no. The racism was against color. If you weren't white you weren't welcome, and if you were black, you were especially not welcome because the sign is specifically against the blacks. Many people who consider themselves Africans are black, and they were just as much discriminated for their color as African Americans."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
5f3638
|
why do women’s arms angle outward from the elbow, and men’s are straight?
|
after seeing [this picture](_URL_0_) I decided to finally come forward and ask this question. Women's arms and forearms seem to be misaligned.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5f3638/eli5_why_do_womens_arms_angle_outward_from_the/
|
{
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"text": [
"To fit around their hips. Otherwise they would constantly hit their arms on their hips as they walked.\n\nTheir hips are wider than the rest of their body for childbirth.\n",
"Mens aren't straight either. There is a small difference of about 5 degree's. The theory is hips are wider in females and it helps with walking. ",
"That phenomenon is called 'Waage' in Dutch. It's when at maximal extension of the elbow, the ulna moves distal compared to the radius.\n\nSome people have it more than others, since it's more common to those with hyper-mobility. Woman tend to have more mobility than men."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"https://i.redd.it/31qdq2qo9ezx.jpg"
] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
44rf86
|
Was Francisco Franco a fascist or was his ideology different enough from that of Hitler and Mussolini to be considered a distinct political philosophy?
|
I was always under the impression that Franco was a fascist. Did his support of monarchist ideals lead to a significant difference between his party and other fascist movements throughout Europe? I also understand that Hitler and Mussolini had their own differences as well so any issues on which all three of them disagreed would be very interesting to hear about too.
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/44rf86/was_francisco_franco_a_fascist_or_was_his/
|
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"text": [
"Not an answer but the AskHistorian's podcast did an episode on the Spanish Civil war and there was some discussion of this issue.\n_URL_0_",
"Whilst Spain was quite close with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and the association with the fascist Falange, Franco's Spain wasn't really fascist. Franco himself can best be called, well, a Francoist - his main priorities were always the consolidation of his own power, from his climb to Generalisimo in the civil war to the consolidation of the fairly diverse nationalists under his own single party, FET y de las JONS, and the restoration of the monarchy without a monarch. His central ideology can be described as a mix of Spanish nationalism and reactionary Catholicism. \n\nThis involved the reestablishment of church power in Spain (after it had been drastically reduced during the Second Republic) over many areas of Spanish life, including education and legal matters. This is a key area where Francoism differs from fascism; a revolutionary element is a major part of fascist ideology, whereas with Franco, social policy was strictly traditionalist and reactionary, based off the power of the Catholic church in Spain and similar to the 1800s situation. \n\nAnother aspect that differs with fascism is the lack of a popular mass movement. In Italy the blackshirts, in Germany the brownshirts - both were mass movements loyal to their leaders. In Spain the fascist mass movement was primarily made up of the blueshirts (and before the war, Gil-Robles' legalist fascist CEDA) of Falange. Whilst it was definitely a mass movement on the same side as Franco, Franco's support base was rather in the military and clergy. \n\nFalange itself quickly became marginalised during the war within FET y de las JONS after the death of their leader, Antonio Primo de Rivera, in a republican prison in 1937, which lead to a struggle within the party leadership. As the party chaos ensued, Franco, the opportunist he was, exploited to announce the consolidation of Falange into his own organisation, citing the need for unity, where they quickly became almost irrelevant. \n\nFranco also had ambitious ideas to restore Spain to its former imperial glory at home and overseas. This first came to fore during Franco's meeting with Hitler at Hendaye in 1940, where Franco included in his demands for entry into the war all of French Morocco and a suggestion of Portugal's future seizure. \n\nDomestically, Spanish nationalism came through with the centrality of Castillian Spanish and banning of Basque, Catalan and other regional languages, as well as the revocation of any autonomy they had during the Republic. \n\nEconomically, Spain under Franco gets its closest to traditional fascism. Initially, Franco advocated for a strictly independent economy that was entirely self reliant (links to the nationalism here too), much similar to Hitler's ambitions for German autarky. The economy during this period also included the quite fascist single consolidated trade union, the *Sindicato Vertical*, which in theory united employers and employees in one structure, disallowing independence from the state. \n\nThough much of this this changed after 1959 during the \"Spanish Miracle\", sparked by the failure of the autarkic economy to rebuild the country and American promises of economic aid. This period saw the country being opened up to foreign investment and a free market introduced, dramatically boosting the economy and sending it far from the fascist similarities it once had. \n \n\nSources:\n\nPreston, Paul. *Franco and Hitler: The Myths of Hendaye 1940*\n\nPreston, Paul. *The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge*\n\nJensen, Geoffrey. *Francisco Franco: Soldier, Commander, Dictator*\n\nSeidman, Michael. *The Victorious Counterrevolution*\n\nBeevor, Antony. *The Battle for Spain*",
"Not really. Using mainstream modern historians' (Paxton, Mann, Payne) definitions, Franco was a leader of a right wing coalition that included Fascists (Primo de Rivera's Falangists), Carlists and so on, not a Fascist himself. Franco's ideology was more in the vein of a typical pragmatic reactionary. Once the Civil War was over, the political militias that are characteristic to Fascist regimes were defanged or disbanded, the Falangist party (or \"movement\") was made the single legal party but watered down by consolidation with mainstream conservative and reactionary politicians and the exclusion of the less tractable members (eg wartime party leader Manuel Hedilla), the military was stepped down and the usual ethnic/national Social Darwinism was conspicuous by its absence.\n\nSo why's he included with the Fascists?\n\n*The Civil War was fought between two large tent coalitions that quickly became associated with their most radical constituents. Thus the Nationalists became \"Fascists\" and the Republicans became the \"Communists.\"\n\n*The Nationalists were allied with Fascists internationally (Germany, Italy)\n\n*Soviet scholars, who were and remain very influential outside of the Anglosphere, defined Fascist as any right-wing group that sought the violent overthrow of a Liberal or Socialist government\n\n\n\nSources:\n\n*The Anatomy of Fascism* by Robert Paxton\n\n*Fascists* by Michael Mann\n\n*A History of Fascism, 1914–1945* by Stanley Payne\n\n*The Spanish Civil War* by Stanley Payne",
"Franco's regime was far more rooted in conservatism that fascism and at times essentially represented an alliance of factions and forces opposed to the left-wing republic, including royalists, much of the army and colonial classes, big business, the Church, Calvanists and other religious orders etc. Fascism tended to promote a new order, beyond the church, beyond the traditional state apparatus and functions with an economic model that took big influences from marxism. Franco and Nationalists were more in favour of preserving an establishment in the face of a equally nebulous constellation of political and economic rivals.\n\nI think the Spanish Civil War has suffered from a reductive reputation as a battle between socialism and fascism largely because this was the motivation for the majority of the international brigades. I think it was more a battle between two camps that circumstances forced together. The republicans were made up of largely social democrats, regional nationalists (IE the Catalan organisations) and the Anarchist movement (which, especially at the beginning of the war, was far more influential and boasted far bigger numbers than the communists) and the fascist made up of everyone who opposed them. I've always found the best paradigm to look at it is a conflict between reform and the status quo, with a lot of people caught between them. \n\nBeevor and Orwell are my main sources on this, which I understand might give me a biased account, but from reading them and a few others who's names I've forgotten, it's the impression I got."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://askhistorians.libsyn.com/ahp-012-the-spanish-civil-war"
],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
fgzte
|
betelgeuse blackhole?
|
I've been reading a lot of articles lately claiming betelgeuse might be going supernova in 2012. and i know that's BS. but it got me thinking. if betelgeuse were to go supernova and create a black hole how bad would this be for earth? at around 600 some light years away it would be about 3 times closer to us than the closest black hole we know of. do I have something to worry about? or is it so far away that it wouldn't matter in the slightest.
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fgzte/betelgeuse_blackhole/
|
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"text": [
"From a gravitational perspective, at any distance except near vicinity, there's no difference between a black hole and the object it was created from.\n\nE.g., if you could collapse the Moon into a black hole, it would make no difference for us, except we won't get any additional light on the night sky 2 weeks every month.",
"Black holes aren't cosmic vacuum cleaners. Most the mass of the star is just condensed into a infinitely small point but it still has the same amount of gravity at large distances. So the only effect we would see is the lack of a star there anymore. ",
"I have one minor point to add to the other answers - during the formation of a black hole, the star throws off its outer layers, so the resulting black hole will actually be _less_ massive and therefore have _less_ gravity than the star that was there originally.",
"It would be awesome were it to collapse into a black hole. That would be great for studying and might be further evidence for their actual existance.\r\n\r\nAlthough wikipedia seems to think it will collapse into a neutron star instead."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
3ajbeu
|
If Nazi Germany had survived for a few more months than it did, would America have also used the Atomic Bomb on them?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ajbeu/if_nazi_germany_had_survived_for_a_few_more/
|
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"hi! just a heads-up that \"what if\" questions are not permitted here (see /r/HistoryWhatIf), but if we re-spin your question into \"were there plans / at what point were bombs ready\" then you may be interested in what /u/restricteddata and others have to say in these posts\n\n* [Were there any plans or proposals to use nuclear weapons against Nazi Germany?](_URL_3_)\n\n* [What German cities were top on the list for atomic bombing during WW2?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Did the US have specific targets in mind for Germany to drop the atomic bomb on if they had to during WW II?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [Would Truman/The USA have used nuclear weapons against Germany?](_URL_2_)\n",
"Well, this is speculative. No way to know. But if we indulge in some speculation, knowing what factors went into the use of the bomb and how the top people in the US thought about it, I think the answer is \"no\" if we are just extending the timeline a bit but not changing any of the circumstances on the ground. Why? No good targets to use it against (major cities all more or less destroyed), and no good reason to use it (no plausible narrative about how this would lead to surrender). With Japan, a lot of things fell in place that made using the bomb on a city seem extremely appealing; with Germany, even a slightly more prolonged war wouldn't change those circumstances too much, if you are only prolonging it on the \"back end.\" Obviously this requires some imagination as to how it would be prolonged, but I am just imagining we slow down the final invasion of Berlin a bit.\n\nA more interesting situation to consider, in my mind, is, \"what if the atomic bomb was ready a few months _earlier_ than it was?\", rather than extending the war. That makes it a more complicated situation, because if we are talking about the period at or before the Battle of the Bulge, suddenly an atomic bomb looks like it actually could be useful. And, in fact, [FDR did ask General Groves about the possibility in December 1944](_URL_0_). Groves said no, because the bombs weren't ready, and he didn't want to drop it from a British bomber (there were no B-29s in the European theater). The logistics would have been non-trivial, but not impossible.\n\nIf we imagine the entire Manhattan Project got started earlier, then I think the chances of using a nuclear weapon in Europe start getting quite high. And this requires doing less imaginative acrobatics than prolonging the war — the date they got the bomb was fixed pretty strongly by the date they decided to really build one (as opposed to just do some exploratory research), and there were not any particular \"good reasons\" for the date being end of 1942/early 1943. The timeline of the bomb development is more or less: \n\n* Fall 1939, the US starts looking into whether fission is something to worry about, but isn't making a bomb or really investing heavily in it. (Uranium Committee)\n\n* Summer of 1941, the British convince several key American scientists that a bomb is feasible. They take over the program and start to accelerate certain aspects of the research, including developing pilot experiments for the main plants to make a bomb. (S-1 Committee)\n\n* December 1942, a request is made to bring in the US Army Corps of Engineers to handle the construction and coordination necessary to actually build an atomic bomb. (Manhattan Project)\n\nLeading to them having the fissile material (fuel) for three atomic bombs in late July 1945, a little over two and a half years after really starting trying to make the bomb.\n\nThere's nothing too historically special about 1941 being the point at which the US gets excited about it. One could imagine that the scientists who got excited about it in the UK could have been in the US instead (indeed, they were German Jewish refugees anyway) and somehow been successful at convincing people. Or, alternatively, the head of the US program in 1940 could not have taken their report and filed it in a safe rather than passing it around. There are many arbitrary \"delays\" in the US program to build the bomb, and if they hadn't existed, the bomb could have been ready months earlier than it actually was. \n\nAll of which to say is that's the area where I think we can imagine more historical flexibility, without having to imagine up elaborate reasons why the Germans would be holding out for several more months despite the Americans and Soviets being at Berlin's door. \n\nAs it was, the timing of everything meant that they were thinking primarily about Japan as a target from even very early on, and by the time they started doing actual planning for target use, they knew that Germany was just not going to be around that much longer. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lwbtt/did_the_us_have_specific_targets_in_mind_for/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ucutc/what_german_cities_were_top_on_the_list_for/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2y0pau/would_trumanthe_usa_have_used_nuclear_weapons/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2uz9e4/were_there_any_plans_or_proposals_to_use_nuclear/"
],
[
"http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/10/04/atomic-bomb-used-nazi-germany/"
]
] |
||
7mns1g
|
how does siphoning gas from one car to another work?
|
[deleted]
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7mns1g/eli5_how_does_siphoning_gas_from_one_car_to/
|
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"text": [
"You put a long tube into one tank, start sucking and once you've got the petrol coming you lower the top of the tube so that gravity takes care of the rest. \nPour into a can, pour the can into other car. Don't get any in your mouth (this is the hard part)",
"Once you get enough suction to make a gas bridge through the hose, gravity causes the gas to \"fall\" the rest of the way into the other car's tank. Usually people will use a canister instead of their car if their car's tank is higher than the victim's car tank.",
"\nTo begin with your sucking pulls the liquid down the pipe along with gravity as the destination container will be below the source container.\n\nWhen the liquid is moving through the pipe something must come in behind it to fill the vacuum. \n\nSo long as there is only the liquid to fill the vacuum then it will keep drawing the liquid down the pipe. ",
"These answers are correct but modern vehicles have an anti siphon device that won't allow a hose into the tank. You can get a mouthful of gas but it will not hold prime. I know this from personal experience.",
"Thanks for the answers! Really, I was just curious as to how the gas continues after you are done sucking. You start sucking it up and gravity pulls it down into the container, would you then have to keep going back and sucking more or does it pull up more gas on its own? \n\nSorry for the ignorance on this one. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
10njxz
|
If the planet Mercury's day is twice the length of its year, what path does the sun take through the Mercurian sky?
|
Does the high eccentricity of its orbit matter at all?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10njxz/if_the_planet_mercurys_day_is_twice_the_length_of/
|
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"text": [
"I wouldn't say that it's same as Earth, just longer. There would be all kinds of interesting effects.\n\nFirst it's good to know about the different kinds of days there are. On Earth the different types of day are almost the same length, varying only by some minutes. But on Mercury they are vastly different. First, the sidereal day. That is the day measured from distant stars. Pick some star (other than the Sun) and wait for it to do 360 degrees around the planet and return to its original position. Or you can also visualise this so that you're looking at the solar system from above and are stationary and not rotating yourself. Sidereal day is the time it takes for one point on the planet to do a full 360 degrees around the planet. Sidereal day on Earth is 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds. And on Mercury it's 58.6 Earth days (solar days to be specific, see next paragraph) or 2/3 of a Mercury year.\n\nThen there is the solar day, which is what people usually think (without knowing it) when they refer to a day in everyday situations. That is the time it takes the Sun to return to the same point in the sky again. For example, the time from sunrise to the next sunrise. On Earth this is 24 hours. On Mercury it is 176 Earth solar days.\n\n[Here](_URL_0_)'s a good picture to explain where the difference between sidereal and solar days comes from. The picture is from the perspective of Earth. During one day, Earth moves a little bit so the location of the Sun changes in relation to distant stars. So the Earth needs to rotate a bit more than one full rotation with respect to stars for the Sun to return to its original location.\n\nOn mercury one orbital period is 88 Earth solar days. So Mercury does 2/3 of a full orbit when it rotates around itself once (relative to other stars) so the location of the Sun changes dramatically in this time. So the difference between a solar and sidereal day on Mercury is much greater.\n\nBut here's where it gets really interesting. Mercury's orbit is very eccentric. The orbital speed of a planet depends on the distance to the Sun. When Mercury is closest to the Sun, it's orbital speed is much greater than at the furthest point. At the closest point its orbital speed is 58 km/s. At the furthest it's 38 km/s. This is quite a big change and does affect how the Sun appears to move in the sky. Look at [this](_URL_1_) diagram. The small red line marks a specific location on the surface and how it rotates while Mercury orbits the Sun, going from location 1 to location 2 and 3 and so on, location 7 would be at 1 again. So the whole diagram (if you include location 7=1) is two Mercury years, one Mercury solar day.\n\nNow then Look at positions 2 and 3. They're 1/3 Mercury year apart. At location 2, the Sun is about to rise as seen from the red line. At 3 it's still rising. This is because near the Sun, Mercury moves much faster. So the apparent motion of the Sun, as seen from the surface slows down. And then while Mercury gets further from the Sun again, the apparent motion speeds up. So the Sun seems to take fast bursts across the sky when Mercury is furthest from the Sun and then stand still when it's closest to the Sun.\n\nAnd it gets even more interesting. At its closest to the Sun, Mercury actually orbits so fast that the apparent motion of Sun not only stops completely but starts to go backwards. This means that if you're at the spot on Mercury where you can see a sunset when Mercury is closest to the Sun, you'll see the Sun set first (very slowly), then it starts to move backwards and rises at the same horizon where it just set, and then sets again.",
"[This will probably help](_URL_0_). It simulates what the sun would look like from Mercury's surface."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sidereal_Time_en.PNG",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Mercury%27s_orbital_resonance.svg&page=1"
],
[
"http://www.messenger-education.org/Interactives/ANIMATIONS/Day_On_Mercury/day_on_mercury_full.htm"
]
] |
|
2ulv44
|
How did the Nazi's - and the victorious Allies - deal with confiscated Jewish housing?
|
I watched a documentary last night which described how the Jews in liberated concentration camps stayed on in the camps in the weeks after. The narrator said they had no homes to go to.
Were camp inmates offered their old homes to return to? If not, why not?
How were their confiscated homes allocated? Were they given to the homeless or to SS officers who could pull strings or another way entirely?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ulv44/how_did_the_nazis_and_the_victorious_allies_deal/
|
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"text": [
"It depends on where they are from. Housing is usually plenty in rural areas so those houses are looted and deserted; while apartments in metropolitan areas are usually much more valuable. According to Livia Bitton-Jackson's memoir *My Bridges of Hope*, after being liberated from Auschwitz, she, her mother, and brother went back to small town of Šamorín, Czechoslovakia. Their house was in bad shape but still standing. She also wrote that many people did not go back to their home because their houses were destroyed; their hometown became part of another country; antisemitism were still prevalent in their home country (I remember reading in another thread that antisemitism was even worse in German occupied areas than Germany itself); and the fact that many people do not want to see their neighbors who turned them in to the Nazis. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
1nzvze
|
if heat is simply molecules and atoms moving quickly and vibrating, why does shaking water not heat it?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nzvze/eli5_if_heat_is_simply_molecules_and_atoms_moving/
|
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"text": [
"It does, you're just not shaking it enough to have a perceivable effect.\n\n[[Here]](_URL_0_) is an /r/askscience post about this topic.",
"Mechanical energy does not produce much in the way of heat energy, especially as friction between liquid molecules is low. It takes 4200 joules to raise 1kg of water 1 degree C. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://pay.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/powp7/can_water_if_shaken_violently_for_long_enough/"
],
[]
] |
||
1j06sf
|
why is it illegal to switch lanes in an intersection?
|
I get it's illegal but why is it?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1j06sf/eli5_why_is_it_illegal_to_switch_lanes_in_an/
|
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"text": [
"Because it's dangerous. Intersections are far more dangerous than non-intersections because people are crossing in front of each other. That's why we have so many accidents in intersections. So adding on lane changes you're just asking for trouble.",
"The lanes are not marked in the intersection in most cases, so if lane changes were allowed people would just be exiting into an area of unmarked asphalt and allowed to aim for whatever lane entrance they chose. It is an obvious recipe for disaster.",
"You would have to signal your lane change which is interpreted as a turning signal on intersections. Thus, it becomes ambiguous and leads to false assumptions. And furthermore, there is a higher risk of accidents in general as already mentioned by others. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
3b2o4b
|
how is carbon fibre made?
|
Is it manually weaved together or does it naturally form a weave through its chemical bonding?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3b2o4b/eli5_how_is_carbon_fibre_made/
|
{
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"text": [
"carbon fiber starts out as strands that is woven together into a fabric which is then shaped and is imbued with epoxy resin to harden it into a final product.\n\nhow its made video: _URL_0_"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki1aCdkMSeo"
]
] |
|
1564c8
|
If the world were to stop spinning all together, would we feel it?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1564c8/if_the_world_were_to_stop_spinning_all_together/
|
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"text": [
"Yes, all that ocean water moving at 1500 km/h along with the Earth would now be moving at the same speed relative to the fixed Earth. Cataclysmic tsunamis.",
"Catastrophies aside, would something happen to our bodies if the world stopped spinning?",
"It would depends on if it stopped spinning abruptly or slowly",
"If it stopped abruptly, we would have hurricane winds, and tsunamis. We would also be swept away, along with anything which was not very very firmly attached to the ground (think of a car suddenly braking). Lots of other side effects like permanent night/day depending on which part of the globe you are on. ",
"You're currently hurtling along at ~1000 mi/hr. If the earth were to suddenly stop, you would slam rather abruptly into whatever is anchored to the ground directly east of you.",
"we would go flying at around 1000 mile per hour to the east"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
8q21pi
|
how did the human genome project sequence the dna?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8q21pi/eli5_how_did_the_human_genome_project_sequence/
|
{
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"text": [
"By stringing together lots and lots of short, overlapping snippets of DNA from many many copies of the genome. It's called \"shotgun sequencing.\" \n\nImagine that you have a bag containing all the pages from a novel, but they've all been shredded into pieces, and you have to put it together. Finding all the places where the pieces line up is going to be really hard.\n\nNow instead, imagine that you have a thousand bags containing the shredded pieces of a thousand copies of the same novel, and each one has been shredded in a slightly different pattern. If you scan all the pieces into a computer, you can find out where different pieces from different copies overlap and put the novel back together more easily. That's basically what they did with the genome: they took a bunch of copies of the DNA, broke them into pieces a couple hundred units long, sequenced each of those, and then a computer found the overlaps and put it all together. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
7outvx
|
what exactly is a commercial pilot doing in the cockpit during a flight? so many buttons, pedals, paperwork etc?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7outvx/eli5_what_exactly_is_a_commercial_pilot_doing_in/
|
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"text": [
"Chilling most of the time really. Most of those buttons aren't particularly useful most of the time and aside from takeoff and landing, they don't do much. The plane basically flies itself, you don't touch any of the controls and the thing keeps moving forward in flight and especially with modern autopilot being able to change its trajectory, the pilot is mainly there to supervise and call the shots in case anything needs to be changed, say if turbulence requires the flight to elevate or descend. \n\nThis is actually a bit of a problem, pilots fall asleep during flight as a result, this is surprisingly normal on international flights as they tend to be long and that is partially why two pilots are there, but on occasion both fall asleep.",
"there's numerous points durign the takeoff and landing. \n\nduring the cruise legs, there's really nothing much going on. they're watching the front facing weather radar, keeping tabs on the radio, drinking coffee. and on international flights, taking naps.",
"Over twenty years experience, currently flying a 737. All the buttons and switches are basically used for lights, power, pumps and engine start up procedures. Take off and landing are basically the only time I'm controlling the aircraft by hand. There is paperwork sometimes I'm evaluating a first officer, other times just chatting. There is no sleeping on the flight deck, there has to be two pilots awake at all times. Long hauls have more than two pilots onboard so they can rotate sleep. ",
"56% admit to sleeping\n\n33% admit to sleeping and waking up to find the other pilot sleeping as well\n\n _URL_0_",
"I had a cousin who was a pilot of private passengers style jets for 30 years. He flew primarily for one rich guy only, who made deals and had business all over the US. The longer flights, and on the primary company plane he knew well, he said he slept a good bit. \n\nInterestingly enough, his last piloted flight was nearly his last. He was coming into Chicago flight control zone and awoke with a stinging headache. He couldn't identify where he was, or grasp what was going on for a few minutes. He apparently had blood vessel pop in his head, and couldn't reason for a few moments. He found he had turned off the Auto Pilot and was circling back when he finally got it together. He had the approach map out and finally put it together, and landed. I think he notified air traffic he needed a straight landing or such, and set it down. The doctors straightened up what happened in his brain over the following year, but he was close to retirement age and quit rather than go through all the requalification. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://uk.reuters.com/article/oukoe-uk-britain-pilots-sleep/half-of-british-pilots-admit-to-falling-asleep-in-cockpit-survey-idUKBRE98Q0L620131009"
],
[]
] |
||
4yn7t9
|
why do we have finger and toe nails?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4yn7t9/eli5_why_do_we_have_finger_and_toe_nails/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d6p4rbb",
"d6p6xtg",
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"d6p7o0t",
"d6p7qa7",
"d6p7sn8",
"d6p98ur",
"d6pearz",
"d6pepm8",
"d6pfc12"
],
"score": [
13,
11,
59,
4,
335,
50,
3,
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],
"text": [
"They used to be claws which were useful for obvious reasons. These days they don't really serve that purpose although they can be useful tools for picking at things.",
"So it's really hard to say why a species doesn't evolve to get rid of something. We can kind of only guess if the thing I'd not immediately obviously useful. Maybe it's because scratching serves an important function to rid us of insects and things sticking to us. Maybe it's for finer motor control. There's just not a good way to know for sure",
"Your fingernails are important tools. Try peeling an orange without using them.\nToenails are mostly useless today. ",
"You have fingernails so you can pick your nose. \n\nYou have toenails so you can pick your friend's nose. ",
"Fingernails make your fingertips more sensitive by exerting counter-pressure on the pads of your finger. This makes it easier to do all kinds of fiddly little jobs.\n\nAlso, definitely for protection and they work well as tweezers as other folks have mentioned.",
"I believe that I read in a study somewhere that the nail helps to make fingers and toes grip onto surfaces better. They distribute the force that's applied in one point over your entire finger/toe kind of like how a snow shoe works. It's much better than just the tiny bone in the middle and the nail actually extends to the edge of the finger/toe as well, which is something that the bone couldn't do. It could have likely been some sort of derived claw a long way up the evolutionary tree, but the main differences are thickness, curvature, and width, in which nails are optimized more for the purposes which I described rather than those that would suit claws, and while they can still perform these functions, they do not do them nearly as well as claws do.",
"To provide a backing to your finger tips to help you grip better. Also everything everyone else mentioned.",
"[This search](_URL_0_) may help.",
"Wait, when did we start cutting our nails? Did they just wear down at the same rate they grew before that or did the romans have super long nails?",
"\"We\" used to have claws.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThey have evolved to an average size that provides more utility than the genetic resources required to produce them.\n\nIf they became costly to us to the point that people were dying of nail-related infections before reproduction and rearing, or people born without nails became preferred sexual partners, the adaptation could be extinguished.\n\nHair, feathers, hoofs, claws, horns, etc. are made of keratin. Could the human body survive without keratin, and the features provided by it? Yes and no. Ultimately, to not require hair and nails would save on the cost of reproduction and maintenance... but hair, in particular, serves many purposes that cannot be replaced by other means. The cilia in our ears, nose, and respiratory tract are absolutely essential for defense against infection. \n\nSo... we are going to produce keratin... and finger and toe nails are awfully handy, and not particularly expensive... I vote that we keep them... by not reproducing with anonychials.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=finger+toe+nail&sort=new&restrict_sr=on&t=all"
],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsid",
"http://i.imgur.com/eY64Y2C.gif",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonychia"
]
] |
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