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5fdtl8
|
In "Diplomacy" by Kissinger, he mentions that 19th century Russia had both Asian and European focused foreign offices. With the European directive being dominated by "Baltic Germans". Who were these Baltic Germans and how important of a role did they have in Tsarist Russia?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fdtl8/in_diplomacy_by_kissinger_he_mentions_that_19th/
|
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"Did they ever have nationalist tendencies? Were they trusted?",
"From an [earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_)\n\n**Part I**\n\nAlthough the state's trust in its Baltic German minority waned over time, it was an especially privileged group in the imperial state hierarchy, especially in the Petrine and Katrine years. Baltic Germans in this period found a wide variety of roles inside the Russian state apparatus and the state tended to not interfere much in the internal affairs of this ethnic minority until the mid-nineteenth century. The were several different overlapping rationales behind the Russian imperial state's employment of its Baltic German minorities as a class of state servitors. \n\nOne important reason for the state's preference for Baltic German servitors was the perceived cultural and educational advantage that this group allegedly possessed. German language and culture, especially the Lutheran religion, tied this group to the Central European cultural sphere, and, by extension, to the West. This was clear cultural capital that placed the Baltic Germans in an advantageous position that many of the empire's other numerous minorities lacked. Moreover, the Baltic German educational system, as exemplified by such institutions as University of Dorpat, was much more advanced than most parts of the empire. As a whole, the Baltic German elite were much more educated than the empire's other nobility in the eighteenth century, making them as a class much more suitable as servitors to a modernizing state. Eric Lohr has termed one of central tenets of the Russian state's nationalities policies in the eighteenth century as \"attract and hold,\" in which the state sought to enlist qualified foreign groups in its service and then make them beholden to the Russian state. This policy underlay the Katrine era's advocacy of German colonization of the Volga as imperial circles felt that Central European methods could make this region more productive. In the case of the Baltic Germans, there was little need to attract them as the region had already been conquered. But the state did engage in a series of patchwork methods to \"hold\" the Baltic Germans, namely by delegating local authority to the Baltic German nobility and upholding their local rights and privileges over the other Baltic peoples. Catherine II approached the delegation of authority towards the Baltic German nobility as part of a larger process that domesticated this influential minority to Russian rule. \n\nBut there was more to the Romanov state's employ of the Baltic Germans than just the community's cultural capital. One factor that dovetailed with the minority's purported sophistication was the demography of the Baltics which made a Baltic German political hegemony increasingly shaky without outside support. Service in the Russian state increased the dependency of the Baltic German nobility on the good graces of the Romanovs to uphold their privileges. The Baltic Germans thus possessed a virtue other minorities in the empire frequently lacked: reliability. Delegating power to Baltic Germans carried a much lower risk of rebellion in the eighteenth century as any powerful patrons in Central Europe were quite distant and the highly stratified Baltic society feed into antagonisms between the Baltic Germans, which by some estimates was only ten percent of the total population, and their non-German neighbors. This rigid social stratification helped foster a more reactionary and elitist mentality among the Baltic German nobility, which also made them more psychologically comfortable serving a Romanov autocrat. But there was wiggle room for the Baltic Germans even in such an asymmetric power relationship. Emperor Nicholas I was reputed to have said the difference between a Baltic German noble and a Russian one is that the latter serves the state and the former the imperial house. The Baltic German nobility tended to treat its relationship with the Romanovs as a personal compact between the sovereign and the the Baltic Germans as a corporate estate. This was a type of relationship that the Romanovs were ill-favored to accept as it implied a limit on autocratic authority. One of the few consistencies of Romanov nationality policies was was the notion that state authority was sacrosanct and any compromise with an ethnic group set a dangerous precedent. \n\nNicholas I's remarks on the nature of Baltic German loyalty was emblematic of a growing distrust of the state to this largely *Kaisertreu* ethnic group. Cracks in the reciprocal relationship had already appeared in the early nineteenth century as the tsarist state sought to regulate Baltic German institutions. The French invasion of 1812 opened up new suspicions of the hitherto quite loyal estate. The presence of many Baltic Germans and German emigres in the Russian officer corps was the cause for alarm during the retreats before Napoleon and a loosely organized \"Russian party\" faction in the officer corps blamed the retreats on the Baltic German commander Barclay de Tolly (mistakenly disparaged as \"the Finn\" by Bagration- de Tolly's own origins were quite mixed- he was a German-speaking member of a Scottish family that emigrated to Livonia in the 1600s). Baltic Germans were disproportionately represented in the army's ranks and the Russian party blamed them for the largely bloodless abandonment of Russian territory prior to Borodino. Although Nicholas I remained predisposed to the Baltic Germans as a special class of servitors, his administration began a process of clawing back various prerogatives and privileges. Orthodox ministers began to convert the Baltic peasantry, much to the annoyance of the Lutheran Baltic German nobility. Speransky's great project of codifying the empire's laws meant that the various laws upholding Baltic German hegemony came under scrutiny by St. Petersburg. Although delegations from the Baltic German nobility were able to persuade the court of the the sanctity of local law, the centralizing trend f the Romanov state was quite clear. The Nicholavean era also saw an attempt by the state to bind and regulate the Lutheran church closer to the Russian state with Nicholas I upholding his brother's right to appoint a Lutheran bishop and promulgating an 1832 law that abrogated existing promises of Lutheran autonomy and instead designating the Baltic Lutheran church as \"tolerated church.\" This law subordinated the Lutheran Church to St. Petersburg and put it under the watchful gaze of the Ministry of the Interior. \n\nAlthough the Nicholavian policies of the 1830s and 40s brought a definite chill between imperial-Baltic German relations, the twin events of the 1863 Polish revolt and German unification severely degraded the functionality of this relationship. The Polish revolt kindled fears of both real and (more often) imagined fears of Polonization among the Baltic and Western Provinces' peasantry and the state ramped up efforts at Russification of these groups. This ensured even more tensions between the Baltic Germans and the state as both religion and the educational policies of the region increasingly came under state, not local, control. German unification also cast a shadow on the Baltic Germans' own German identity as it was feared among Russophile and Slavophile circles that German nationalism would use the Baltic Germans against the imperial state. This climate of ethnic suspicion led to further restrictions on the Lutheran church, a *Kulturkampf* of sorts, and in turn fostered the very connections with pan-Germanist circles that the Russian imperial state feared already existed. Although pan-Germanism found very little converts within the Baltics, the Russification efforts of the state became a *cause célèbre* for *Kaiserreich*-based pan-Germans and romanticized notions of a besieged ancient Germanic empire on the Baltic marches soon emerged as a stock trope in these circles. \n"
]
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||
4wd0q8
|
Employment status of prostitutes in the Old West
|
My main question is to the employment status of prostitutes in the old west working at saloons or brothels. Were they simply bought and sold from one madame/saloonkeeper to another (such as what the Mann Act targets) or was there a portion of prostitutes who could move freely from one location to another and choose where they worked? Did they make their own money and give a cut to the saloon keeper/madame in exchange for room and board or were they more like contract workers? Finally, how much control did the saloon keeper/madame have over a prostitute in their every day life, especially concerning their ability to switch jobs (choose a different occupation or simply choose a different place but remain a prostitute).
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4wd0q8/employment_status_of_prostitutes_in_the_old_west/
|
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"I would love to hear what insight /u/itsallfolklore has.",
"First, the West covers a great deal of territory and whatever the \"West\" means spans many decades, so arriving at generalities is problematic. In general, the West could be an extraordinary free place: the women who found themselves engaging in sexual commerce may have had circumstances that hemmed in their choices, but they were usually free to leave for another community and strike out in any direction they wished. An exception to this would be Chinese-American women who often arrived in what amounted to slavery, and so their ability to chart their own courses could be terribly limited. I will leave the plight of Chinese-American prostitutes for others to address.\n\nFor the others, employment and employment options could be extremely fluid. It was, needless to say, a rough life. One received better protection in a brothel, but one had to pay for that protection in the form of sharing proceeds. Independent contractors frequently worked out of \"cribs\" - the one or two-room cottages in the red light district that served as home and place of business. Some did - as you indicate - work out of saloons, but this was often a matter of working outside the law, since communities frequently established the red light district through ordinances, restricting prostitution to only that area, and yet most saloons were outside that district.\n\nIn Virginia City, Nevada, the focus of my research, there were prostitutes operating out of the notorious Barbary Coast, particularly after the red light district burned during the Great Fire of October 26, 1875. With the rebuilding of the red light district, city officials worked to relocate prostitution to the designated area, but many lingered in the Barbary Coast, working out of back rooms of saloons. Community officials spent several years attempting to have prostitutes leave the area, and they were ultimately successful.\n\nAnne Butler, [Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery](_URL_0_) (1987) remains a classic work on the region's prostitution.\n\nLet me know if you have any questions or if I was not clear here.\n ",
"I need to add - particularly given your user name - that Anne Butler found that Irish immigrants made up a disproportionate number of the prostitutes in the American West. Nineteenth-century Irish women tended to immigrate in numbers equal to the men, and they often arrived single. These statistical traits made them unusual among immigrant women, and so this may have been a factor in how they filled the ranks of prostitutes in the West.\n\nOn the other hand, I found next to no Irish prostitutes in Virginia City, a fact that I discussed with Anne (who was a delightful person and a wonderful historian). We speculated that the absence of Irish prostitutes on the Comstock might have been due to the influence of the imposing Father Manogue, who ruled the spiritual half of Virginia City with an iron fist - and an imposing 6'3\" frame! Anne and I wondered if it was simply the case that he would force any Irish woman out of the ranks of the fallen in an act of saving them and their souls. There are accounts of Manogue performing similar acts of interference, so it is not impossible to imagine such a thing."
]
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"https://www.amazon.com/Daughters-Joy-Sisters-Misery-Prostitutes/dp/0252014669/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1470442885&sr=1-3&keywords=anne+butler"
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3vdga6
|
why did the us care so much about not letting cuba, parts of latin america, vietnam, and other parts of the world become communists?
|
Why were we so infatuated to the point that American blood would spill all so these countries didn't become communist nations. But let's say we left them all to their own devices and they became communist, couldn't we still have had diplomatic relations with them, trade with them, etc? Or is the conspiracy theory answer of "Well it's not that we didn't want them to be communists, we used our influence to prevent that so we could make them our puppet nations and thus rape them of their resources" yada yada. Was it all because of the cold war and that we didn't want to lose these territories to the influence of the Russians?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vdga6/eli5_why_did_the_us_care_so_much_about_not/
|
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"We were (and some argue still are) at war with Russia. Allowing a communist nation in our region of influence would give Russia a point that they could use to attack up directly faster than we could react, and it would siphon money and political influence away from us. ",
"Im actually taking US history and we're going over the cold war right now. The main political idea behind the Vietnam war and the other attempts to stop the spread of communism was called the \"Containment doctrine\". You see, the leaders of the US viewed Communism as an ideal that was bent on world domination. They viewed communists as fanatics that would stop at nothing short of conquering the world. Every country that turned communist was, in their eyes, another step towards communists ruling the world. In an attempt to stop that, the leaders of the US decided that anywhere communism tried to take hold, the US would go and fight it. The problem with this mindset was that it allowed the communists to choose the time and place of any conflict with the US, a fact they exploited many times, most notably in Vietnam.",
"Basically, the view was that the Soviet Union was trying to take over the world and that it had to be contained. The communist world was seen as a monolithic bloc. If a country became communist, it was considered to be merely part of a vast Soviet empire spreading out across the globe. Communists in Latin America and Southeast Asia were not seen by the U.S. as legitimate, but as puppets of Moscow.\n\nAt the time, World War II was still recentish. Everyone remembered the Munich Pact, when Neville Chamberlain gave away part of Czechoslovakia to satisfy Hitler's expansionist appetite, only for Hitler to turn around and demand more. People were determined to avoid that mistake with an expansionist Soviet Union."
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1rhzht
|
Can anyone help identify the pictures on this scrimshaw? [x-post] r/whatisthisthing and r/antiques
|
UPDATE: We have found the two pictures that aren't Jenny Lind thanks to some awesome redditors like yourself. The original engravings were printed in 1841 and 1840, so the tusk might be older than we thought.
"The Engagement" is actually called "The Bower" and was printed in the Countess of Blessington's "Gems of Beauty" Book, which can be seen [here.](_URL_2_) It looks like the artist's name is Edward Henry Corbould.
"The Elopement" is from the 1841 issue of "The Keepsake" and can be seen [here.](_URL_0_) The artist is also listed as Edward Henry Corbould, and the engraver as Alfred Theodosius Heath.
Hopefully now we can find a link to my family tree in that time period. Although, my mother seems to think the etchings on the scrimshaw could have been done from reprints.
We did think that we found the [picture of Jenny Lind.](_URL_3_) But in the scrimshaw her head is facing the correct direction while her arms are mirror opposites of the photo. For some reason the appraiser was not convinced this is the photo the artist used to make the scrimshaw.
Thanks everyone for the help!
ORIGINAL POST:[Here](_URL_1_) is an album with pictures of the scrimshaw.
The scrimshaw was passed down through my dad's family, and my mom recently took it to the New Bedford Whaling Museum to have it looked at. I guess the people at the museum were very impressed with the piece, and said they'd never seen this artist before. Ultimately, we would like to figure out when it was made and try to find the artist's name.
The family story goes that the tusk was given to my father's great-grandfather as a wedding present from the captain of a whaling ship. We aren't sure which set of great-grandparents it was given to, and unfortunately any family members that could possibly add more details to the story have passed away.
Originally, because of the drawing of Jenny Lind, the experts at the museum thought that the tusk was made around 1950. However, according to our genealogy, my dad's great-grandparents got married in 1881 (Andrew M. Palmer and Orletta "Lettie" Cragin) and 1869 (Benjamin F. Peabody and Ann Eliza Dare). The date will be key in attempting to determine the artist's name. In order to pinpoint the date the scrimshaw was made, it was suggested that we try to find the original photos that were used to trace the pictures onto the tusk.
The people at the museum said that the picture of Jenny Lind was likely from an actual photo or playbill because the scrimshaw shows her with a big nose. I guess artists would usually try to correct her nose when they drew a portrait of her?
For the other photos, originally my dad thought that they came from Godey's Lady's Book. However, the people at the museum also suggested looking in Harper Collins Monthly. I found a plate titled "The Elopement" in the table of contents of the February 1850 issue of Godey's Lady's Book, but I haven't been able to find a scanned copy of the plate to confirm that it's the picture on the scrimshaw.
Basically, I have hit a dead end in my research. It would mean a lot to my dad to find the artist's name and learn more about our family history. I am usually on my computer and will try to add more information and answer any questions anyone has.
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rhzht/can_anyone_help_identify_the_pictures_on_this/
|
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"What an interesting mystery! I find a depiction of Jenny Lind pretty reasonable for the 1880s, because she did the big American tour in 1850 so people would probably remember her from then. The scrimshaw might predate the wedding by a while too. \n\nMy library has digital copy of Godey's Lady's Book and I took a look at the \"Elopement\" plate from that issue -- completely different picture, sad to say. \n\nWas your great grandpa into opera by any chance? I have a bit of an idea that these might be depictions of opera scenes from some role Lind was known for. "
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3021315&partId=1&people=132028&peoA=132028-1-2&view=list&page=1",
"http://imgur.com/a/Lyynx",
"http://books.google.com/books?id=PtNJAAAAcAAJ&pg=PT66&lpg=PT66&dq=%22the+bower%22+%22Edward+Henry+Corbould%22&source=bl&ots=IkAgjHUAMG&sig=b9dda-sByYAWjU4U-pFyeJwM91U&hl=en&sa=X&ei=LO-cUqWnD-aayQHRnoDADg&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22the%20bower%22%20%22Edward%20Henry%20Corbould%22&f=false",
"https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/20811/187.091.000.webimage.JPEG?sequence=11"
] |
[
[]
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51x7bt
|
why is footage from camera that was attached to you always shaky while you don't see same shaky effect through eyes?
|
Hey, why is it that when we use camera without OIS attached solidly to our body - we get shaky footage even though it was moving at same speed/distance/direction/force as our head.
While through eyes everything looked smooth and seamless?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51x7bt/eli5_why_is_footage_from_camera_that_was_attached/
|
{
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"There's three things going on:\n\n1) Our eyes automatically counterbalance the effects of walking; as we step up slightly during our gait, our eyes look slightly down (pretty much automatically) to keep our field of vision somewhat stable. Most cameras don't do this, so it's shakier than an actual person's vision.\n\n2) Your brain screens out a ton of unnecessary or useless input. Remember, our retinas actually see a ton of blood vessels as well as a blind spot (and everything's upside-down), but our brain just removes all the unnecessary junk without us realizing it. Similarly, our skin is constantly sending all kinds of little signals to our brains as our clothes rub against it, the breeze blows, etc, but again our brain just filters it out. It's the same way with a decent amount of shakiness; our brain automatically stabilizes our view somewhat\n\n3) We *do* see some shakiness, more than you probably realize. First-person videogame movement started to feel a lot more realistic when they added \"head bob\", where the camera moves a little as your character walks. "
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2yto4u
|
if diamonds are just compressed carbon, why cant we make a machine that just compresses carbon into diamonds
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yto4u/eli5_if_diamonds_are_just_compressed_carbon_why/
|
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"text": [
"We have them. They make industrial diamonds for saw blades and the like quite frequently. We produce diamonds all the time through a variety of processes, though it only recently we have been able to make gem quality diamonds of size in the laboratory. ",
"There's a pretty good overview of man-made diamonds at this Wikipedia link: \n\n_URL_0_\n\nBasically, we can and do make diamonds.",
"We can and we do.\n\nIt has only been very recently that jewelry quality diamonds have been possible to produce economically. The diamond mining cartels are doing everything they can to block their distribution.",
"We do and the diamond industry (i.e. DeBeers - evil fucks) went nuts because you can't tell the difference. Even an experienced jeweler with one of those monocle things can't tell the difference. "
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2hrt3c
|
Why do we "Weigh" things in kg,g,and mg, if grams are units of mass? If I've got some powder on a scale and it reads 40mg, is it actually calculating the weight and then dividing it by 9.8 to tell me the total mass of the powder on the scale?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2hrt3c/why_do_we_weigh_things_in_kggand_mg_if_grams_are/
|
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" > Why do we \"Weigh\" things in kg,g,and mg, if grams are units of mass?\n\nWe measure mass by exploiting Newton's 2nd law: F=ma. The acceleration due to earth's gravity at its surface is about 9.8 m/s*^2*, so we can measure an object's mass by measuring the force gravity exerts on it and then dividing by 9.8 m/s*^2* (using F=ma -- > m = F/a). If you know the force on earth's surface (ie weight) then you know the mass, and vice-versa.\n\n > If I've got some powder on a scale and it reads 40mg, is it actually calculating the weight and then dividing it by 9.8 to tell me the total mass of the powder on the scale? \n\nYes.",
"The mass of something has two effects: it resists acceleration, and it attracts other things by gravity. To measure mass, you have to measure one of these two effects. An ordinary scale measures the force of gravitational attraction of the object to Earth. If you used your Earth-calibrated scale on another planet, you'd get the wrong results.\n\nYou might be able to use a low-friction rig, like an air-hockey table, or mag-lev to float an object, then push it with a known force and see how much the object accelerates. This would work regardless of the force of gravity, whatever planet you're on."
]
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14rjf5
|
Kind of a weird question, but do any historians here feel that being religious affects their professional career?
|
Like for example, if you're a Christian studying early Christianity or the history of the Church. Or a Muslim studying Islamic history, Hindu studying Indian history, etc. Do your non-religious colleagues view your work any differently?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14rjf5/kind_of_a_weird_question_but_do_any_historians/
|
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"A lot of the people in Reformation history are Christians, and I've never seen anyone suffer as a result of it.",
"It's weird that you mention that, because I just finished a course on American History after the Civil War during Reconstruction.\n\nFirstly, I noticed that very often, when spoken about, religion was downplayed and more clinically discussed, and secondly, I tended to noticed, though not in terms of religion, that I consistently underestimated how powerful specific ideas and thoughts were. While I was reading texts, I kind of brushed off a whole bunch of notions, such as how thoroughly racist people were, with a sense of incredulity. I felt that I was biased in hoping for the good and rejecting stories of extreme inhumanity as being exaggerations. It was weird being disproven time and time again.",
"I have a really strong tendency to always downplay the religious role in a conflict and focus on the economic and political causes. I had a really positive experience with organized religion and it's hard for me to see it being used as a way to inspire hatred and violence. I've definitely downplayed the religious fervor role to my own detriment.\n\nHowever, I do maintain that for the majority of conflicts, the political and economic reasons are what drive massive groups of people (like states) to war while religion is used to differentiate the people and inspire hatred and to dehumanize the enemy. But in terms of small scale and less organized conflicts, religion has been the cause. Most leaders weren't fervent enough to go to war over god given its costs; many exceptions however.",
"Once I started teaching, I stopped wearing the cross necklace that I used to wear daily. I felt that an obvious indication of my personal religious affiliation would potentially create preconceptions in my students, and since my classes tend to discuss medieval/early modern Christianity, I want them to feel free to ask genuine questions and have genuine conversation without fear of offending their Christian TA (which they wouldn't). \n\nIn my own research, it hasn't been a problem. I can separate my personal anger toward such historical actors as crusaders and conquistadors from my professional interaction with their texts.",
"I'm not religious. That said, I can readily attest that this is a *massive* problem, and has been at least since Reimarus (who published anonymously, so far ahead of his time that, to paraphrase Schweitzer, later generations owe him admiration, but no gratitude, since they drew nothing from him). Reimarus did not put his name on his pamphlets for fear of retribution. Rightly so, the great Strauss would lose his job when he wrote his masterful (and polemical) *Leben Jesu*.\n\nLooking at the last century, we can look at examples such as Albright, with a \"spade in one hand and the bible in the other,\" or Yadin (from whom the quote comes, though it describes Albright better) or more recently even such giants such as Charlesworth who declare that it is \"possible, perhaps even probable\" that Jesus was raised from the dead. Or the Christian anti-Semitism in the work of the brilliant J T Milik or John Strugnell. Or the great Raymond Brown or John P. Meier defending the historicity of the virgin birth (or at least holding out the possibility that it represents the earliest layer of tradition, against all evidence). By happy coincidence they are Catholics both. Remarkable how well that works.\n\nI could list scores of examples. The saga of theology crippling history in the study of Christian or Israelite history is a long and not terribly proud one, unfortunately. It is increasingly shifting, with more and more cries for Biblical studies to become a truly secular discipline, but even now it is emphatically not the case.\n\nTo some extent all history is autobiography (we could argue over how much, but the bare fact is really kind of self-evident), but this is more than that. This is theology actively and explicitly precluding objectivity. To my mind, it's shameful, though there are many who (for, I would suggest, purely theological reasons) disagree."
]
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1fki9o
|
If you were trapped in a room to die of dehydration with nothing to drink but alcohol, would you live longer if you did or did not drink it?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fki9o/if_you_were_trapped_in_a_room_to_die_of/
|
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"Well, if you were willing to drink your own urin, you are good to go.\n\nProblem with alcohol is that it blocks your Pituitary gland from producing Vasopressin.\n\nThis hormone makes your kidney reabsorb the water from your urine.\n\nSo if you drink alcohol, you lose a lot of water from your system.\n\nBut if you drink your own urine, you will be good (aside from losing salts and giving you a really bad time from all the toxins produced by breaking down the alcohol) but you will enmd up with *more* water, since the alcohol you drink isn't pure ethanol I guess but an \"alcoholic drink\""
]
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|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
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||
2zkl14
|
why do three-pin sockets block two-pin plugs when this security measure can easily be bypassed by a three-pin plug key or using a stick to push the relevant lever?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zkl14/eli5_why_do_threepin_sockets_block_twopin_plugs/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cpjqzyw"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text": [
"Because you're supposed to be more afraid of the fire you're likely to start by doing that than proud of how clever you are for using the stick. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
4khalb
|
How do T-cells know which cells they've already inspected?
|
From what I understand, T-cells are constantly traveling in the body, inspecting cells by looking for antigens. If they're self antigens, then the T-cell doesn't attack, whereas if they're non-self, they attack. My question is how does a T-cell know when it just inspected a cell? Does the T-cell leave something behind on the cell to mark it as checked or does the cell itself present something on its surface to indicate that it has just been checked? If there is no such system, then what prevents the T-cells from being stuck in a loop, and just inspecting the same cell over and over?
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4khalb/how_do_tcells_know_which_cells_theyve_already/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d3f0i52",
"d3f6bjw"
],
"score": [
13,
3
],
"text": [
"It doesn't know. And it doesn't loop because it's not like the T-cell specifically waits until the current cell under investigation has \"passed inspection\" before moving on. The T-cell just moves around, continuously coming into contact with other cells in the neighboring environment, and if it happens to brush shoulders with bad antigens then it triggers an attack. But if no attack is triggered, it'll just keep on happily moving about. The key is that the time it takes to trigger an attack is much less than the time it takes a T-cell to \"move over\" any given cell.",
"T-cells have long processes that they use for palpating/probing MHC (the cell-surface molecule that presents antigen). If they find a matching antigen they are activated, if not, they move on (diffusion or what-not).\n\nMuch of this probing/activation will happen in lymph nodes, where there's plenty of cells jostling for attention to present antigen, so there's no need to \"mark\" a searched cell.\n\nIn any case, since each T-cell recognizes a specific antigen, \"marking\" it would be useless, since the antigen must be tested over and over until (if ever) the matching T-cell finds it."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
4k2l4a
|
what are the main doctrines of christianity?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4k2l4a/eli5_what_are_the_main_doctrines_of_christianity/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d3blac8"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"- Believe God exists and created everything\n- Believe John 3:16\n- Love God\n- Love people\n- Pray faithfully\n- Acknowledge the existence and reality of heaven, hell, and eternity\n- Don't be stupid"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
2sra7p
|
Black babies as bait for alligator hunt?
|
thanks so much for reading.
[so I came across this short article](_URL_0_) and a few other similar ones after a search.
This can't possibly be true? I know slaves in the USA were treated with extreme brutality, but it isn't the horror of it that's silly.
A baby slave had a lot of potential value, much more than a chicken or some other animal they could use to bait gators instead.
The worth of that baby when grown and sold (or kept for work produced) would be way more than whatever they would get from catching a gator.
*disclaimer--Slavery was abhorrant and cruel, when I speak of a slave's 'worth' I hope you know what I mean, not the intrinsic value of every human being.
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2sra7p/black_babies_as_bait_for_alligator_hunt/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cns6cio",
"cnsel3n"
],
"score": [
14,
2
],
"text": [
"Holy cow. I had never heard of this before. I did a search of GenealogyBank (they have a large American newspaper database) for the phrase \"gator bait.\" I found a few articles that talked about exceptionally large alligators being caught (around 1900-1910) that mention using a pig leg or a live pig stuck on a hook (poor pig) as bait.\n\nBut I also found this article: \"Naked Pickaninnies Bait For Alligators; But They Suffer No Serious Effect,\" *Evansville Courier and Press* (Evansville, IN), 16 Sept. 1923, p. 15. (It's behind a paywall so [I made a copy](_URL_0_)--sorry its a bit choppy since it's on imgur.) (I just realized--it's a reprint of the same article that's quoted in the last line of the story linked by OP.) It's a sorta tongue-in-cheek, quasi-human interest article (so I'm a bit suspicious of its 100% veracity), but it explains that babies are used as bait by sitting the kid in the shallows of the water and letting it splash and make a lot of happy baby noises that would attract alligators. Honestly it's horrific (no matter how much the author smirks that the kid is happy doing it), but I suspect that was likely how babies were \"traditionally\" used as bait--if this was ever actually practiced. Alligators didn't eat the kids, but the kids were used to lure the animals.\n\nI am somewhat suspicious of that guy quoted in the article as saying that the kids were actually eaten by alligators for the reasons you mention--setting aside the obvious morality of it, it doesn't make any sense from a monetary perspective. I'd like to see some contemporary evidence corroborating those statements. (Have any researchers out there read anything on this?) \n\nIt's not uncommon for stories passed orally from one generation to another to be inadvertently distorted. I suspect that is the case here. I haven't made a study of African-American or slave narratives, but I do study another group of Americans who were badly treated in the past, and it's interesting how the stories that are repeated now by members of that group don't 100% match the historic, contemporary sources--some details are sensationalized, and some details are forgotten. But--as I've stated--I've not made this a matter of study and I'd be very interested to hear if anyone here can give us more details about this bizarre practice. Was it actually a documented practice, or was it sorta a menacing joke?",
"Generally it would be a good commodity if your slave was healthy. This means naturally that the slave would be treated well to be strong and hard working. \n\nThe fact that they were slaves with no rights would allow the brutality you mentioned to happen. It may have happened with something like this existed - _URL_0_ \n\nSuffice to say something this torturous was very rare. Even [Harriet Ann Jacobs](_URL_1_) documented purpose with the mistreatment. [Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl](_URL_2_) is a tragic but worthwhile read if this interests you. It's free to download on an ereader (forgot which one). "
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2014/02/black_babies_used_as_alligator.php"
] |
[
[
"http://imgur.com/9BoAJrY"
],
[
"http://www.prairieghosts.com/lalaurie.html",
"http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Ann_Jacobs",
"http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Harriet_Jacobs/Incidents_in_the_Life_of_a_Slave_Girl/"
]
] |
|
6aiaj3
|
what keeps your skin cells in a human shape instead of them reproducing outwards indefinitely?
|
I remember in high school biology we were shown diagrams of what it looks like when someone gets a cut and the cells reproduce to fill the gap as it heals, but I'm having trouble understanding what makes them know they're done.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6aiaj3/eli5_what_keeps_your_skin_cells_in_a_human_shape/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dhes9td"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Oversimplified: Skin grows upward from a base layer - as you go further there's less and less blood supply, and cells aren't supported. The outer surface of your skin is substantially dead cells that form a protective layer.\n\nIn the case of injury, other tissues are involved, and chemicals help signal where repair needs to happen. An abscence of those chemicals means repair can stop."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
2urllh
|
How many primary sources do we have about Rome from 700 _URL_0_ 500 a.d?
|
I am always astonished about how much we know. And how many sources are preserved. Im curious about things like Cicero's works. Do we have many old decaying scrolls? Is most of what we have, including the accounts of sexual debauchery, the result of collection and preservation by the Catholic Church? How much was recovered from the Arabs during the Crusades? Or brought to Europe by Greek refugees from what was the Byzantine Empire? How many works do we have that the oldest copies come from the Medieval Period?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2urllh/how_many_primary_sources_do_we_have_about_rome/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cob2pqb"
],
"score": [
20
],
"text": [
"Virtually all of our literary sources on ancient Rome were transmitted through the Christian monastic system. The oldest literary manuscript we have is the Vatican Vergil, which dates from the early fifth century CE. There are a small handful of manuscripts from about that time period, but I think they are all of Vergil and the Bible.\n\nIf you want texts that are older than that you are in the realm of what I consider archaeology, or at least epigraphy. In Latin, there are a handful of extended literary compositions preserved in inscriptions--the most famous is the *Res Gestae Divi Augustus*, an extended (what I would call) pseudo-autobiography of Augustus. There are a few things like this (Claudius' Lyon tablets being another well known example) and there are also examples of poetry on tombs and the like. But outside of these few lucky finds, the vast majority of the corpus of surviving non-transmitted Latin are dedicatory inscriptions, tomb epitaphs, etc. There are also a few examples of administrative records, such as the Vindolanda Tablets.\n\nWith Greek we have a few more sources, and not only because the corpus of transmitted Greek literature dwarfs that of Latin. For one, Greek was a common language and culture of Egypt, and Egypt's hot and dry environment preserves manuscripts, giving us some rather extraordinary \"new\" texts (such as Menander and the Oxyrhynchus historian). Added to that, there are many places in the Greek speaking parts of the empire with a *very* vigorous epigraphic habit, meaning we have more examples of things like civic history from the Greek world. But even with Greek, these finds pale in comparison with the amount of transmitted literature."
]
}
|
[
"b.c.to"
] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
3vzz2y
|
What are some things that are attributed to Roman culture and society, but actually come from the Etruscans?
|
What are some of the Intricacies of the Etruscan people or any interesting articles about them? I've been fascinated by their culture for awhile but don't know where to find out more about them.
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vzz2y/what_are_some_things_that_are_attributed_to_roman/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cxseimx",
"cxsh9dc"
],
"score": [
49,
23
],
"text": [
"A whole lot! Tarquinian kings ruled Rome until 509 BCE, so much of early Roman culture was derived from the Etruscans. Etruscan art became highly sophisticated during the Orientalizing period (c. 700-570 BCE), and Etruscan bucchero pottery exhibited particularly fine craftsmanship for its era that was later imitated by Roman potters. The Tuscan temple plan was originally an Etruscan invention, as were burial urns, tumulus tombs, and corbel arches, to name a few. There aren't many things the Etruscans did that weren't later surpassed by the Romans (the invention of the true arch, for example), but many elements of Roman culture were Etruscan in origin.\n\nI just finished a term studying Classical Art and Archaeology in Rome and visited several significant Etruscan sites (Veii, Sutri, Falerii, Volsinii, Chiusi, Arezzo, Volterra, Populonia, Roselle, Cosa, Tarquinia, and Cerveteri), so hopefully I can be of some help if you have any more questions.",
"While it was the Pheonicians that most likley invented the script that would later become the Latin alphabet, it changed hands through different cultures and langauges before it got to Rome. The Greeks picked up the Pheonician script, where it was changed to better fit their langauge and then spread to their colonies across the Mediterrean. The Etruscans probably picked up this alphabet from Greek colonists in Southern Italy and were using it by the 7th century B.C. \n\nEtruscan is not an Indo-European language, and it lacked many sounds found in Greek and Latin, like the /g/ sound, as in gate. The third letter of the Greek alphabet Γ, represented this unused sound. The Etruscans did, however, have the \"hard C\" or /k/ sound, as in cat, and started using Γ to represent it, almost entirely replacing the use of Κ. \n\nThe Latins also had some problems with the Etruscan alphabet once they started using it. Unlike Etruscan, Latin had both the \"G\" and \"C\" sounds. However, instead of converting Γ (which was now written much like the modern C) to the /g/ sound, and using K for the /k/ sound, like in Greek, they kept the Etruscan way and invented a new letter G to fill in for the /g/, by adding one additional mark. Also through sound differences, this is the way the Etruscan also lead to the letter F. \n\n*The Etruscan Language: An Introduction* by Giuliano Bonfante, Larissa Bonfante "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
1tqn9d
|
why did humans lose fur?
|
Why did we lose the need for fur?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tqn9d/eli5_why_did_humans_lose_fur/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ceaj9km",
"ceal6x5",
"ceau3v7"
],
"score": [
8,
5,
2
],
"text": [
"_URL_0_ \n \nThis article brings up an interesting fact about humans and their long-distance running abilities. \n > “Ancient humans exploited the fact that humans are good runners in the heat,” Dr. Bramble said. “We have such a great cooling system” — many sweat glands, little body hair. \n \nHumans are outstanding long distance runners, and are (were) able to run down almost any animal. Part of that is our ability to not overheat during the run. Which is helped by not having fur.",
"There are a lot of ideas on this one, but two not very well known and in my eyes good ideas are:\n\n1. A combination of hair 'loss' (or reducing the thickness of the fur) to reduce the amount of parasites on the body and (later-on) sexual selection on hairless bodies. [nytimes,with even more theories](_URL_1_) \n\n2. This concerns the whole evolution of mankind and proposes we have an (semi-) aquatic ancestor. Almost all 'naked' animals have had (semi-) aquatic ancestors. (for example the elephant) [TEDtalk about this hypothesis](_URL_0_)\n\n\n**1. To prevent parasites from nesting and sexual selection 2. We evolved from 'aquatic apes' who lost their fur because they lived in water** ",
"Plot twist: We never had fur."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/health/27well.html"
],
[
"http://www.ted.com/talks/elaine_morgan_says_we_evolved_from_aquatic_apes.html",
"http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/science/why-humans-and-their-fur-parted-ways.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm"
],
[]
] |
|
2kua7f
|
Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens avoided becoming totalitarian?
|
We have quite a few *imaginary* examples of countries with mass survelliance ("1984", etc), but do we have any *historical* examples of countries engaging in mass survelliance? And if yes, have any of those countries avoided becoming totalitarian?
The question was raised by a famous cryptographer Bruce Schneier in [this article](_URL_0_), but was not answered.
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kua7f/has_any_country_that_engaged_in_mass_surveillance/
|
{
"a_id": [
"clpc1al"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
" > > The question was raised by a famous cryptographer Bruce Schneier in this article, but was not answered.\n\nThis isn't as good or insightful a question as you might think it is.\n\nPre-modern governments tend not to have the power or technology to conduct surveillance of individuals en masse in society. The pre-modern state tend to be laissez-faire by necessity, even centralized governments like imperial China's rely on the local land only gentry outside the government for administration below a certain level. There might be surveillance of segments of the political elite, or the occasional purge of commoners, but day to day surveillance of ordinary people's lives are well beyond the capacities of pre-modern states.\n\nTotalitarianism in this sense is also anachronistic, because even the most brutal governments would not be able to exercise the power that, say, the USSR had over its citizens outside of perhaps looting and pillaging during war time.\n\nSo you are only really asking about the 20th century, and the answer is that historically speaking regimes which had mass surveillance actually collapsed and turned into more democratic entities. The Statsi and East Germany, the KGB and the USSR are probably the two best examples of this. "
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/government-betrayed-internet-nsa-spying"
] |
[
[]
] |
|
6qmliu
|
what's the difference between a strategist and a tactician?
|
In an article I read today, putin was referred to as a good tactician, but not a good strategist. I thought the we're synonyms. To be honest.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6qmliu/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_strategist/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dkyev5o"
],
"score": [
15
],
"text": [
"Strategy is big picture, tactics is more technical. A military example would be: \n\n\"let's move our armies to X area to damage the enemy's food supplies\" - strategy\n\n\"let's go this way and flank the enemy with our soldiers\" - tactics"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
3kpk1d
|
why do children so often cry on public transport whilst a private car sends them to sleep?
|
Children five and below whether in a buggy on a busy or quiet bus/tram/train in a parents arms or buggy, always seem to get agitated whilst in a car very young children tend to sleep, why?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kpk1d/eli5_why_do_children_so_often_cry_on_public/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cuzdkuw"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Maybe its all the strangers comming off and on the bus. \nWhen its a car its just your family and you all the while. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
4rq6cc
|
the difference between curd and yogurt.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rq6cc/eli5_the_difference_between_curd_and_yogurt/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d536mbs",
"d536on3"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"I like both cheese (curds) and yogurt and no one has answered, so I'll have a go at this. \n\nMilk is made of water, sugars, fat and proteins. When they're all flowing together as a liquid, that's milk or cream.\n\nCurds are formed when the proteins in milk get bunched together and tangled up so that part of the milk turns solid, and part turns extra watery. The solid part is the curds. The liquid part is called whey. If we press the curds together, they become various kinds of cheese. \n\nYogurt is formed when tiny, tiny microbes decide they want to live in the milk. The microbes are called lactobacilli. When there's such a crowd of them living in the milk that the milk gets thick, that's yogurt.\n\nMaybe for your sixth birthday we can make some cheese! Or yogurt! Go ask mom. ",
"Curd is made by coagulating milk through adding an acidic substance which causes the milk proteins (casein) to tangle up and form solid masses.\n\nYogurt is formed by bacterial fermentation of milk. Living creatures, tiny bacteria, eat the lactose in milk and excrete lactic acid as waste. This acid then causes the same sort of curdling process which makes the milk proteins clump together to a certain extent.\n\nCottage cheese is curdled milk which is drained but not pressed, leaving some whey and individual loose curds. Usually it is washed to remove the acidity."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
6jhdnv
|
Could there be a noticeable change in heat on objects that are illuminated by a regular light bulb?
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6jhdnv/could_there_be_a_noticeable_change_in_heat_on/
|
{
"a_id": [
"djefepp",
"djel0ek",
"djenwu0"
],
"score": [
2,
2,
6
],
"text": [
"After a couple google searches and some reading, it appears that there is a noticeable change depending on the type of bulb and the object that is being studied.\n\n 1. _URL_0_\n\nTake this website which goes into explaining how LED lights are more energy efficient and emit less heat because it does not waste as much electricity. There is also a video on the page that shows a chocolate bunny melting while being under an incandescent light compared to another bunny barely melting under a LED light. \n\n2._URL_1_\n Incandescent lights do produce heat because the light seen is the heating up of a wire so that visible light is produced. Which heats the air around the bulb and the bulb itself causing the heating up of the room.\n\n 3. Now an object like a human would theoretically heat up a minuscule amount because your getting hit by light. Compared to something like the sun though which is EM radiation which your body absorbs more so then a lightbulbs light.\n\nI am a going to be a freshman next year so this is my best explanation and shot at answering your question. ",
"A filament bulb basically emits black body radiation so there would be quite a bit of infra-red and short wavelength visible light emitted. These wavelengths are especially good at being absorbed by everyday matter. 'Noticeable' of course depends on the flux from the bulb, the material and the size of the object but yes such light sources do heat up objects",
"Speaking from decades of experience, old style incandescent bulbs radiated 90+% of the energy they consumed as heat. That meant 25 watts was just mood lighting and 40w could barely be read by.\n\nBut if you sat by a lamp with a 100w bulb, your bare skin could feel the sensation of heat and under a 200w bulb your skin would noticeably warm. Also:\n\n* Some light fixtures came with fire hazard warnings not to use bulbs higher than 60w. \n\n* Bulbs 60w and up gave painful burns if you touched them while illuminated (or even for a minute or two after).\n\n* A children's toy from the 60's-70's, the EZ Bake Oven, produced simple baked confections using the heat of a 100w incandescent light bulb."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.earthled.com/blogs/led-lighting-faq-frequently-asked-questions/how-much-heat-is-generated-by-led-light-bulbs",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb"
],
[],
[]
] |
||
7ufqev
|
How were microprocessors made before automated robots (which use microprocessors) were invented?
|
This seems like a paradox - since microprocessors require a level of precision beyond what is humanly possible, we use computers to do the precise work. How were the processors made before those computers were even invented?
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7ufqev/how_were_microprocessors_made_before_automated/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dtkb3zm",
"dtkgkwk",
"dtko6mg",
"dtkuhnt"
],
"score": [
10,
4,
5,
3
],
"text": [
"Microprocessors are really just integrated circuits (ICs). The first IC was fairly primative and was developed by Jack Kilby. You can see what it looked like [here](_URL_0_).\n\n\nKeep in mind, integrated circuits are really just circuits made out of semiconductor substrates (e.g. silicon). The actual circuit components such as resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc can be made _outside_ of silicon as well. That means that you can actually build a computer with discrete components (not an integrated circuit). In addition to building a digital computer like that, I'd suggest looking into the topic of analog computers, which run entirely on analog signals (using op-amps and resistors) instead of digital signals.\n\nPrimative machinery used to make the first commercially available ICs were made of the aforementioned computers. In reality, they weren't automated, but rather a computer assisted system. Laser etching is a popular method for creating the structures in semiconductor substrate, and computer control of the motors that move the laser around allow for much greater precision than a human could ever achieve.\n\nYou can effectively \"boot strap\" and over the years the technology keeps getting smaller, more precise, and cheaper.",
"You could also build computers out of vacuum tubes:\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nPicture:\n\n\n_URL_2_\n\n\nAs /u/IHappenToBeARobot says, once you have primitive ICs, logic gates, you can build board level implementations of microprocessors. We used to do things like that in school on breadboards, where now students program FPGAs.\n\n\nIf you take a 70% feature size reduction every 2 years (50% every 4), you could work back from 0.18um in 2000 (approx) to see what the feature sizes were in 1963 when CMOS was invented.\n\n\n_URL_1_",
"I want to complement what others have mentioned: a computer is not a device that consists of microprocessors, transistors, or even vacuum tubes; a computer is any device that, given an input, can perform mathematical calculations. These calculations can be done in many different ways, not only with transistors.\n\nGottfried Leibniz, one of the developers of calculus, designed an entirely mechanical computer to help him calculate taxes: [the stepped reckoner](_URL_2_). The machine, designed and manufactured, between 1672 and 1694, is one of the first practical computers ever invented.\n\nLeibniz also thought of the [binary system](_URL_0_) [[2](_URL_1_)] which would eventually result in modern computing. He did this 150 years before [Charles Babbage](_URL_3_), who is considered the father of modern computing.\n\nSo, to answer your question: modern computers (processors, transistors, etc.) were built with older computers.\n\nHow did a person create a hammer? He used an older hammer. And that one? Well, he used an even older one. And that one? An older one, and so on, all the way back in time to the first stone used as a hammer. You use old technology to create new technology, and then this new technology to create even newer technology. This is what has happened throughout history.",
"From a manufacturing point of view, microprocessors are really just integrated circuits (ICs). ICs are made using a *lithographic* process, which means that you only need to \"create\" the processor design once and then you can photolithographically make as many copies of that processor that you need.\n\nThis is not a process that you need robots for. Robots certainly make this process more efficient and more accurate, but they're not a fundamental requirement. The biggest challenges in this process is creating the \"photolithographic mask\" and then correctly aligning multiple lithographic masks over the same IC at different points of manufacture.\n\nYou can generalize ICs (and microprocessors) into a few different generations:\n\nSmall scale (dozens of transistors)\n\nMedium scale (hundreds of transistors)\n\nLarge scale (thousands of transistors) \n\nVery large scale (up to a million transistors)\n\nUltra large scale (billions of transistors)\n\nEarly ICs, up to thousands of transistors, were created by hand. Engineers would design the circuits on graph paper, and large layout teams would then create lithographic masks based on those designs by hand with materials such as Rubylith tape. The processes involved were precise, but they weren't dramatically precise. You can see a composite image of these masks here:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe Intel 4004 had a 10 micrometer process size. This means that all of the components of the processor need to be aligned to one another down to some small fraction of a micrometer (I don't know, maybe +/- a micrometer?). This is extremely precise by most standards, but pretty crude by modern IC standards, which use ~10-20 nanometer processes. You can achieve this kind of accuracy by hand with precise measuring tools (micrometers) and very careful setup. The next processor, the 8008, was designed in a similar way and had 3,500 transistors. \n\nThese early ICs were full-featured CPUs, and once you had the first microprocessors you could use these to design and build the next generation of microprocessors. At this point the industry took off.\n\nThe next Intel chip, the 8080 (1974) had 6,000 transistors. The 8086 (1978) had 29,000 transistors. The 286 (1982) had 134,000 transistors. The 386 (1985) had 275,000 transistors."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/42/Kilby_solid_circuit.jpg"
],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vacuum_tube_computers",
"http://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/complementary-mos-circuit-configuration-is-invented/",
"http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/images/icp/Y769191X98488M20/us__en_us__ibm100__603calc__vacuum_tubes__840x600.jpg"
],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#Technology",
"http://history-computer.com/Dreamers/Leibniz.html",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepped_reckoner",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Computing_pioneer"
],
[
"http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~mcnerney/2009-4004/4004-masks-composite.jpg"
]
] |
|
97cz7c
|
why is it bad for our body to shower daily, but it's okay to wash our hands many times a day?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/97cz7c/eli5_why_is_it_bad_for_our_body_to_shower_daily/
|
{
"a_id": [
"e4797af"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"I think I'll have to disagree with your premise. Can you show evidence that your claim of daily showers being bad?\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
21i6vz
|
the difference between countries ruled by england (eg scotland/wales) and colonies of england (eg canada/australia)
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21i6vz/eli5_the_difference_between_countries_ruled_by/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cgd8qzo"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland are all constituent countries of the United Kingdom. Although England is the largest country and home to the capital, England does not rule the other countries. in fact its the other way around as the other countries each have thier own governments while England does not.\n\nCanada and Australia are Commonwealth realms, in that they are both in personal union (the Queen of Canada, Australia and Great Britain & Northern Ireland are all the same person) and both members of the Commonwealth of Nations - the club founded for ex-members of the British Empire. They have no formal constitutional links to the United Kingdom and are not colonies\n\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
1ncjk8
|
Do more physically attractive people tend to have more pleasant (or even sexy) voices? What role does voice play in human mate selection?
|
Edit: Woke up this morning to quite the response from /r/askscience. Thanks ladies and gentlemen, you are always a pleasure!
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ncjk8/do_more_physically_attractive_people_tend_to_have/
|
{
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"cchcvuq",
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"cchm35l"
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"text": [
"Not so much. The markers identified for physical attraction (facial symmetry) and voice preferences (vocal tract size) do not correlate in either direction. Furthermore, the studies that have discovered these preferences lack cross-cultural validation.\n\n**Voice:** Even within a population, these preferences appear to shift. In one study of native English speakers, men appear to prefer ladies with higher-pitched voices while women's preferences shifted to higher-pitched during breastfeeding and lower-pitched elsewhere (Apicella & Feinberg, 2009). \n\nVukovic et al. (2010) demonstrated that women's preference for male voice pitch depends on the woman's own vocal pitch.\n\nAs most studies in this area seem to focus on pitch, an understanding of what causes a voice to be higher or lower pitch is important. Roughly, this depends on the size of the person - specifically, their vocal folds. This is somewhat akin to a wind instrument, in that short vocal folds will produce higher pitches (e.g., the mouthpiece of a trumpet) and longer vocal folds will produce lower pitches (e.g., the mouthpiece of a tuba). For a brief overview, see this [NCVS article on the fundamental frequency in voice production](_URL_0_).\n\n**Physical attractiveness:** Again, judgments of physical appeal vary widely by culture. However, studies that have looked at this tend to identify facial symmetry as a key attribute (e.g., Grammer & Thornhill, 1994). While facial symmetry may have some relation to vocal tract shape, the size of the vocal tract bears little relationship to facial symmetry.\n\nDoes that answer your questions?\n\n**References:**\n\nApicella, C. L., & Feinberg, D. R. (2009). Voice pitch alters mate-choice-relevant perception in hunter–gatherers. *Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences*, 276(1659), 1077-1082.\n\nGrammer, K., & Thornhill, R. (1994). Human (Homo sapiens) facial attractiveness and sexual selection: The role of symmetry and averageness. *Journal of Comparative Psychology*, 108(3), 233.\n\nVukovic, J., Jones, B. C., DeBruine, L., Feinberg, D. R., Smith, F. G., Little, A. C., Welling, L. L. M., & Main, J. (2010). Women’s own voice pitch predicts their preferences for masculinity in men’s voices. *Behavioral Ecology*, 21(4), 767-772.\n\n**Edit:** Corrected explanation of where the fundamental frequency comes from. Thanks to [seabasser](_URL_2_) and [badassholdingakitten](_URL_1_) for their helpful comments!",
"Production of the sex hormones testosterone/estrogen/progesterone contribute to secondary sex characteristics; in males one of those is the deepening of the voice. In a sense a deeper voice could signal a mate capable of reproduction. \n\nBabies have also been proven in studies to better recognize high pitched voices (Moms, females) than lower ones. ",
"[Yes, at least women](_URL_0_)\n\nIn the study referenced above, women whose faces were judged more attractive also tended to have voices that were judged to be more attractive. \n\nEDIT: Changed 'aces' to 'faces'",
"Yes, to the extent that voices are indicative of at least one dimension of attractiveness. \n\nMen rate female voices indicative of smaller body frame as more attractive. Women rate male voices indicative of larger body frame as more attractive.\n\nIt is well documented that men find women with smaller frame sizes more attractive and that women find men with larger frame sizes more attractive.\n\nXu Y, Lee A, Wu W-L, Liu X, Birkholz P (2013) Human Vocal Attractiveness as Signaled by Body Size Projection. PLoS ONE 8(4): e62397. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0062397\n\nVarious other studies point to more mating options for women with high voices and men with low voices, higher degrees of mate guarding toward these groups, and more offspring for these groups.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Is there any evidence to suggest confirmation bias towards those we see as attractive? i.e. something along the lines of, 'that person looks attractive, I therefore think that person's voice is also attractive.'",
"There was a study a few years ago that showed that the upper body strength of males was evident in their voices.\n\nArticle:\n_URL_0_\n\nStudy:\n_URL_1_",
"I watched a documentary called The Science of Sex Appeal. They did a brief part where they talked about the importance of voice in sex appeal. They said that the attractiveness of a man's voice to a woman seems to depend on where she is in her menstrual cycle. For example, when a woman is ovulating, I believe she tends to prefer men with deeper voices because it indicates fertility (testosterone levels), and whenever a woman is not ovulating, she tends to prefer men with higher, more feminine voices. Apparently men can also detect when a woman is ovulating based on her voice, and that is when they find women the most attractive.\n\n\nI'm just speaking from memory here, so some of the information might be swapped around.",
"Ovulation cycle also plays a role in the perception of attractiveness in a voice. women's voices at peak fertility were rated as more attractive then the voices of women during menstruation.\n\nSource: Back in college I took a course on Biology of Sex and Evolution and our professor did a study on this."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.ncvs.org/ncvs/tutorials/voiceprod/tutorial/influence.html",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ncjk8/do_more_physically_attractive_people_tend_to_have/cchehlb",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ncjk8/do_more_physically_attractive_people_tend_to_have/cchixui"
],
[],
[
"http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347203921233"
],
[
"http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0062397"
],
[],
[
"http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19045-male-voices-reveal-owners-strength.html",
"http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1699/3509"
],
[],
[]
] |
|
j3jz4
|
can somebody please explain how the person betting $1billion that the united states will lose it's aaa rating will make money if that happens.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3jz4/eli5_can_somebody_please_explain_how_the_person/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c28um4p"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"You can [short sell](_URL_0_) anything. In this case, he shorted US government bonds.\n\nShort selling is the practice of borrowing a stock or bond (or anything) from person A and selling it to person B. Then after the price goes down (hopefully), you buy it from person C and sell it back to person A. Boom - you pocket the difference. \n\nExample: You borrow Microsoft stock from Person A and sell it on the market for $50, then when the price goes down to $40, you buy it back and give it back to Person A: pocketing an easy $10 minus the small interest you had to pay to Person A. The risk is that if the price goes to $90, person A (or more likely the broker you use) will demand you give the stock back (margin call), thereby forcing you to repurchase it at $90: losing you $40. \n\nIf you borrow money to make that first purchase (leverage), you can make more than you originally had - or go totally bankrupt if the price goes up."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_%28finance%29"
]
] |
||
srfvm
|
Red and blue images on my phone look 3D through my corrective glasses. What gives?
|
Normally I wear contacts constantly. One night a few months back I was giving my eyes a rest, wearing my glasses while perusing the web on my old first gen Moto Droid. I opened an image and was shocked to see a red typeface practically leaping out at me from a darker blue/black background. I thought it was neat, but easily dismissed it as an optical illusion.
Today the same thing happened, and the red in the image was so intensely 3D that I decided to do a GIS for "red on blue." I looked through a dozen images, all with the same result - they appeared to be 3 dimensional, with the red or warmer colors leaping forward, and the more blue, cooler images receding in the background. I took my glasses off to see if the effect persisted - it did not. Finally I had my girlfriend come and try my glasses to see if the effect was replicated for her. It was, she was amazed. Next I went to my computer monitor to see if I got the same effect - nope. The only combo that works is my glasses with my cell phone.
What gives?
TL,DR: My glasses seem to create the illusion that images on my phone are 3 dimensional. Why? How?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/srfvm/red_and_blue_images_on_my_phone_look_3d_through/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c4gcc7a"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"It looks like the polarizer on your phone and the anti-glare coating on your glasses Real interacting to create a ChromaDepth effect.\n\nThis website explains the phenomenon quite well:\n\n_URL_0_"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://jaredjared.com/chroma.html"
]
] |
|
3qm851
|
why do some pencil sharpeners work perfectly and others simply mutilate my pencil slowly without sharpening the lead?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qm851/eli5_why_do_some_pencil_sharpeners_work_perfectly/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cwge5zo"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"There is 2 main factors to a good pencil sharpener. 1 - Blade sharpness, the sharper the blade the more smoothly you can sharpen your pen without the tip \"cracking\" and the sharper it is the sharper the maximum sharpness the tip can be. 2 - The plastic guider that guides the pencil into the blade, if the guider is of bad quality it may guide the pencil such that when you sharpen it the tip of the pencil does not touch the blade at all thus making the pencil dull."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
5gcajg
|
what happens if a wedding guest "speaks now" instead of "forever holding their peace"?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gcajg/eli5_what_happens_if_a_wedding_guest_speaks_now/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dar3jb1"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"Usually nothing. By that time if someone speaks up at that moment, they're drunk or delusional. \n\nBut, there is a good reason to do this. Marriage is a funny institution, so one cannot legally be married to two people at a time. I remember reading a case where a women had been trying to get her husband to sign divorce papers. He wouldn't and was ducking her for years.\n\nSo she showed up to the wedding and objected, on the basis that he was still legally married. The official couldn't go on with the ceremony, so he was forced to sign. It was a mess, but I've heard of it happening before (and it'll surely happen again)."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
1vvhma
|
What exactly would Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels have been charged with had they been tried at Nuremberg?
|
More importantly, what would they have been found guilty of?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vvhma/what_exactly_would_hitler_himmler_and_goebbels/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cew7g8p"
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"text": [
"There were 4 indictments leveled against Goering and the other high ranking Nazi's in the first of the series of Nuremberg Trials. They were:\n\nA. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace\n\nB. Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace\n\nC. War crimes\n\nD. Crimes against humanity\n\nGoering was convicted of all 4, and there is no doubt Hitler would have been convicted as well.\n\n\n\nNow, let's look at Himmler. He would said he was innocent of the first two as he was not a military man and didn't plan any wars. On the second two who would have denied knowing of the crimes.\n\nOn the second two there is no doubt he would have been convicted as of course he was involved but also his subordinate Kaltenbrunner was convicted with the same defense.\n\nHe may have been declared innocent on A. or B., but it's unlikely as other party insiders were convicted of them, including Hess, when Hess was probably innocent of that anyway. Even Wilhelm Frick, the minister of the interior was convicted on B simply because of his high rank pretty much.\n\nSo, Himmler is convicted of all 4 and executed most likely.\n\nGoebbels would have said that he was the minister of Propaganda and was not a military man and that his position was a civillian one and that's it.\n\nHe still gets convicted on all 4 because: \n\n1. He specifically was involved in war crimes including the overseeing the shipment out of Berlin of Berline's jews. 2. His role as a propaganda man would have still gotten him convicted as they convicted Julius Streicher of it even though he was just an evil dumbass who edited a magazine and had no real power.\n\nAs to the first two, I contend that Goebbels still would have been convicted for the some reason Hess was. \n\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
fgknil
|
what happens to my feces when it’s at the gates but i’m driving and can’t stop to defecate? it feels as though it simply goes away and i get a bit of stomach rumbles
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fgknil/eli5_what_happens_to_my_feces_when_its_at_the/
|
{
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"fk583xy",
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"text": [
"What makes you feel like you have to poop (or pee for that matter) is that there are muscles in your stomach which you don't have any control over. Those muscles try to push the poop/pee against muscles that you do have control over, so you have to push back to keep the poop/pee in.\n\nEven though you don't have conscious control over those push out muscles, you do still have some unconscious control over them. When you're in a situation where you know you can't poop/pee right now, those muscles relax and stop pushing. This means that you don't need to push back to hold the poop/pee in anymore, and the feeling of having to go to the bathroom goes away. But the poop/pee doesn't go anywhere - its right where it was back when you felt like you had to go to the bathroom, its just you can't feel the poop/pee unless its being shoved forward against the muscles that you control.",
"So the muscular contractions called *peristalsis* moves the stuff down the pipe, including into the 'ready for pooping' area, which stretches as it fills up. The stretching sends signals to your brain that say \"man, you gotta get rid of this.\" If you resist the urge for a while, then it can get pulled back up into your colon tract by a reversal of those contractions.\n\nThis reduces the stretching on your backbasket which in turn reduces the signal, and allows the body to possibly get some more water/nutrition out of the stuff until the next wave of contractions pushes it back into position.\n\nYou don't want to do this too much, since it can contribute to making the mass hard and lead to constipation.",
"The peristaltic is called the muscle movements in your bowels that you're not in control over.\n\n\nThe peristaltic moves the stool through to the rectum, the part of the bowel that connects to the anus.\n\n\nWhen it is due - lol 🤭 - the inner sphincter relaxes and the peristaltic tries to push it out.\nLucky you have full control over the outer sphincter to prevent this.\n\n\nNow the peristaltic just doesn't keep pushing like in a tug of war - instead the brown rope gets pushed - it gets tired after a while and stops. It will restart after a while.\n\n\nYou could keep this tug of war going which is a really bad idea.\n\n\nSince absorbtion through the bowels is involuntarily, toxins and water from the stool gets absorbed.\n\n\nBoth are bad and the latter will leave you with a brick hard, not so smooth, bad for excreting shaped plug made of stool.\n\n\nGood luck getting that out without serious labour pain and a loose rectum."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
1al93m
|
Is there any scientific studies on the difference between children raised by gay parents vs. heterosexual or single parents?
|
I'm just curious if it has been researched and if there's any peer reviewed articles about the subject.
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1al93m/is_there_any_scientific_studies_on_the_difference/
|
{
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"text": [
"Not sure why this is getting downvotes, the question is valid, we are all shaped by our experiences and our environment it is not a controversial hypothesis that there could be differences between heterosexual parents and gay/lesbian parents. In the same way that there could also be a difference between gay men and lesbian parents, or a single mother or a single father. Or a big family, the gender make-up of the sibelings, all factors that have a different impact on an upbringing.\n\nThere has been some research done on this but there isn't a lot. There is more on lesbian parenting then on gay men parenting.\n\nSample sizes also seem to be a problem especially with gay men. Factors like adoption on a later age then infancy can skew with the results.\n\nThis is a quote from page 14 of the first link posted below:\n\n > In conclusion, the results of this study point to family\n > processes as being more clearly associated than family\n > structure with positive outcomes for parents and chil-\n > dren in adoptive families. Family process variables such\n > as parenting stress, parenting strategies, and couple\n > relationship satisfaction were significantly associated\n > with assessments of child behavior problems. In com-\n > parison, parental sexual orientation was unrelated to\n > children’s adjustment. That family process was more\n > closely associated than family structure with outcomes\n > among adopted children is a result that is important\n > both to developmental theory and to family policy.\n\nThis seems to be the general consesus from most sources. This however hardly really answers your question. Most studies I have come across try to measure the overal happiness, disadvantages compared to peers, grades, etc. Not other differences like personality.\n\nThis is quoted from the 4th link below at the end of the article:\n > * Teenage boys raised by lesbians are more sexually restrained, less aggressive and more nurturing then boys raised in heterosexual families.\n > \n > * Adolescent and young adult girls raised by lesbian mothers appear to be more sexually adventurous and less chaste. Sons of lesbians display the opposite – boys are choosier in their relationships and tend to have sex at a later age than boys raised by heterosexuals.\n > \n > * It is more common for both lesbian moms to be employed, to earn similar incomes and to cut back on their hours of paid work in order to nurture young children. Some research indicates that egalitarian parenting contributes to child well-being, Stacey said.\n > \n > * Same-sex couples proved better at managing disagreements and anger than did comparable heterosexual married couples. Research suggests that parental conflict may be one of the most significant sources of difficulty for children, Stacey said.\n\nHardly conclusive, one of the researchers explained why on this subject there probably isn't a lot of data.\n\nQuote is again from the 4th article linked:\n > \"*Studying how the numbers, genders and sexualities of parents interact to influence children could give us valuable information relevant to central questions in family theory,*\" said Biblarz.\n > \n > \"*Researchers have been reluctant to investigate differences among children for fear that such evidence will be used to discriminate against gay families.*\" \n\n**TL;DR**: General consesus seems to be that kids of gay parents don't suffer any big measurable disadvantage or advantage compared to their heteory sexual counterparts that is linkable to the sexual orientation or parent gender make-up. The difference outside of societal performance hasn't been studied much at all so there hardly is any data credible data on this that I could find.\n\nSources:\n\n* _URL_0_\n* _URL_3_\n* _URL_4_\n* _URL_2_\n\nMy own credentials: Non, other then following the physics course online of MIT which has nothing to do with psychology. If anything seems out of context or misleading then my apologies, make sure read the sources.\n\nThere is a pretty extensive article on LBGT parenting on Wikipedia, I didn't read it though, have fun checking the sources! If you are any lucky some will start with _URL_1_.\n\n* _URL_5_"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://people.virginia.edu/~cjp/articles/ffp10b.pdf",
"blog.heritage.com",
"http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/6908.html",
"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3000058/",
"http://news.usc.edu/#!/article/29991/Do-Children-Need-a-Mother-and-Father",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_parenting"
]
] |
|
u9ca1
|
Who were the major "sex symbols" of the 19th century?
|
The 20th century saw the rise of the modern sex symbol with the advent of motion pictures and magazines with pictures, but surely the citizens of the 19th century felt the need to get their freak on as well. I'm aware that Byron and Liszt had their female admirers, but who were the Marilyn Monroes and Cindy Crawfords of that era?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u9ca1/who_were_the_major_sex_symbols_of_the_19th_century/
|
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"I have a feeling it would've been a more local thing than it is now without TV or other mediums that are as conducive to giving people national or international fame and exposure.\n\nI don't really know, I'm merely speculating that it's a very modern phenomenon.",
"A discussion of this sort should probably begin with Sarah Bernhardt, who set Europe ablaze with her acting and her rambunctious public persona from the 1870s onwards. She was rumoured to be romantically linked with dozens of then-famous men - including some, like Gustave Doré, Alphonse Mucha, and *Nikola Tesla* (who famously rejected her advances) who are still well-known today. This is to say nothing of the European royals who clamoured to have her on their arms, ranging from the smallest satellite houses of Belgium up to the man who would become King Edward VII of the United Kingdom.\n\nShe was scandalous, fun, beautiful (by the standards of the age, at least; I think [she's pretty great](_URL_0_) even by our own, too - picture by Doré), outspoken, and existed at the centre of a sort of riotous, unending party that traipsed around France and the rest of Europe during *La Belle Époque*. \n\nAs for others, I'm afraid I know rather less. You'll probably want to look into courtesans, who were that period's equivalent to Crawford/Monroe-style sex symbols. [Liane de Pougy](_URL_1_) was an especially famous one, but I only ever heard of her while investigating celebrities who lost children in the Great War and don't know much about her beyond that she was a very big deal - though not on the level of The Divine Sarah.",
"Well, in my field of study, you often come across people that actually achieve a fairly modern \"superstar\" status. Liszt was no doubt one of those (thank you for mentioning him btw). He would often perform with the same class of gimmicks and bravado that a pop star might today. In one incident, he finished a concert by coming out during the applause in a cape. People were screaming for an encore, but he acted completely worn out and tired giving the melodramatic \"I'm too tired to go on\" line. Of course when the women (and most of the men I'm sure) screamed for an encore, he suddenly found the strength to go on. He ripped off his cape and dashed to the piano, as though adrenaline suddenly took over. I don't remember what he played, but it must have been something like [this](_URL_4_) because the crowd went wild. \n\nTo answer your question, women would often faint when they could get their hands on a finished cigar butt of Liszt. \n\nBeethoven attracted the attention and lust of many women. If he wasn't such a depressed misanthrope, he probably would have had women lining out of the door to marry him. Women would describe his works as profoundly powerful and affecting. We consider his works to be powerful today, you can only imagine what people felt when they were brand new and played by the man himself.\n\nIf you want a Marilyn Monroe, look no further than Alma Mahler, wife of [Gustav Mahler](_URL_1_). She was considered an extremely vivacious and beautiful girl and attracted tons of attention from most of the Viennese artists of her time. She had relationships with Max Burckhard, and Alexander von Zemlinsky (another composer) before settling with Mahler. After Gustav's death, she went on to flirt and/or marry several other prominent artists of the time. These included Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius, and Franz Werfel. She basically cheated on two of her famous husbands, and was inspiration for many works both musical and visual. Gustav Mahler's [8th symphony](_URL_2_) was dedicated to her after he found out about her affair at the time. I believe the [9th](_URL_0_) and [10th](_URL_5_) symphonies were his struggle to accept his cheating wife. [Bride of the Wind](_URL_3_) by Kokoschka was also directly inspired by her. ",
"I don't know whether he quite fits the definition but Richard Francis Burton, a Victorian orientalist/explorer/adventurer who first translated the Kama Sutra, was infamously outside the sexual mores of his time. He's an extremely interesting figure and it's worth at least perusing his Wiki page.",
"Sneaking in on the early 19th century, but [Emma, Lady Hamilton](_URL_0_) was renowned for her beauty, and gained fame working as a model (and high-class escort of sorts) in her teen years. She is most famous for being Nelson's mistress.",
"I think [Sarah Baartman](_URL_0_) counts.",
"This might be cheating, but you could say that the Biblical character [Salome](_URL_1_)was considered a sex symbol in the late 19th century, albeit a controversial one. There were numerous public representations of the character, including by Oscar Wilde, Richard Strauss, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Jules Massenet. She defined the femme fatale! \n\nI think the best places to look for something like this would be in the accounts of notorious public women, like actresses and - as NMW said - courtesanes. Of course, photographs weren't at such a ubiquitous point that they are now, so the renown of a woman would reach farther than her image. She might have a few pictures taken to give as keepsakes to her lovers, but nothing was being mass distributed.\n\nIt was hard to be a public woman and not be considered a prostitute until later in the century, so this situation did not allow for \"sex symbols\" until later. And many public women later in the century weren't overtly sexual, but maybe just flirtatious. The lower-class [grisettes](_URL_0_) that would attach themselves to some up-and-coming socialite (cf the novels of Balzac) or later the higher class lorette (can't find a good link) that would be sort of similar to a call girl who only fucks her friends, and does it in pearls. Lorettes were named such because many of them lived near Notre Dame de Lorette in the (then) northern part of Paris. \n\nAn exception to this \"no photographs\" rule is the [Countess of Castiglione](_URL_2_), who loved having her picture taken. These probably were not disseminated, but it gives us a look at what was pretty in the second half od the 19th century. Also see [Marie Duplessis](_URL_8_) who was the \"arm-candy\" of Dumas. Perhaps also we might think of \"women about town\" who were public without being eyebrow-raising, like the great [Anna de Noailles](_URL_3_). \n\nAlso [La Orteo](_URL_4_)...\n\nand maybe even [George Sand](_URL_7_) who dressed like a dude and smoked cigars. (Someone once said she looked like a locomotive when she briskly walked around Paris, puffing on her cigar).\n\n**EDIT: How could I forget???**\nYou also might want to add to this list a certain [Victorine Meurent](_URL_5_) who you might remember from Manet's seductive [Olympia](_URL_6_). This pose, otherwise well known under less provocative artistic contexts, became a popular pose for early pornographic photographs."
]
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[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://www.alef.net/ALEFArtists/GustaveDore/VictorianLondon/GustaveDore-SaraBernhardt.Gif",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liane_de_Pougy"
],
[
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=wIwypCFayBQ#t=5s",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYM54vhLYTU&feature=player_detailpage#t=248s",
"http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8c/%27Bride_of_the_Wind%27%2C_oil_on_canvas_painting_by_Oskar_Kokoschka%2C_a_self-portrait_expressing_his_unrequited_love_for_Alma_Mahler_%28widow_of_composer_Gustav_Mahler%29%2C_1913.jpg",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=15IonM3w__I#t=205s",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ikTni7DPROM#t=480s"
],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Hamilton"
],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Baartman"
],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grisette_\\(French\\)",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salome",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Oldoini",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_de_Noailles",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Belle_Otero",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorine_Meurent",
"http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Edouard_Manet_038.jpg",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sand",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Duplessis"
]
] |
|
27t15e
|
Why are Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian (Uralic Languages) under the same language family and how did they become related?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27t15e/why_are_hungarian_finnish_and_estonian_uralic/
|
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"They didn't become related. The common roots of the 3 languages (with only about 200 related words) originated just west of the Ural Mountains and grew further and further apart with time. The first mention of any Uralic language was in 98 AD in Tacitus's \"Germania.\" The languages are very distantly related. ",
" When linguists say that languages are \"related\" or belong to the same \"language family\" they're actually making a very specific claim: that the languages are all descended from a single older language that existed in the past. An example of this that might be more familiar to you is the family of Romance languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese, and others are all descended from Latin.\n\nThese languages share certain similarities because of their common descent, but the reason they belong to the family of Romance languages is not *because* they're similar, but instead because they all originated as dialects of Latin. What were initially smaller regional differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary became bigger over time, until eventually they came to be regarded as separate languages.\n\nEDIT: To address the question more specifically: The history of the Uralic languages is pretty unclear, because written records only go back so far. The ancestor language (Proto-Uralic) is only known from linguistic reconstruction -- that is, by analyzing the existing languages in the family, we can infer that the ancestor language had certain properties. But it was never written down, and the relative dominance of Slavic cultures in the East and Germanic cultures in the West obscure the issue further. We can't even say with much precision in exactly what region of Europe Proto-Uralic was spoken, but it is often regarded to be in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, which is why the family is so named."
]
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[] |
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ssr8y
|
burning wood to create energy does not create global warming?
|
I was watching a Feynman video on youtube where he was talking about fire..
he explains that trees take CO2 and break it into C and O2 with energy provided by the sun (by this point am assuming this is and Endothermic reaction). Then he later states that when you collide O2 with C again with enough energy they will reattach themselve creating CO2, and releasing the "light" (flames) or energy previously provided by the sun to break them appart in the first place.
So if trees take the CO2 in the air to grow, and then when they die (burn) they release that CO2 that was originally in the air back to the air again, burning woods to create energy would not create any surplus of CO2 in the atmosphere, thus not creating any global warming (I know am taking big leaps here).
Its all a balance of some sort I guess. If we (the planet) are a closed space (theres no CO2 getting in or out of the planet) and everything is balancing out, why do we have global warming? is the CO2 generated by burning oil not initially in the air?
Sorry if this sounds stupid!, I know am making a mistake in here, I just wanna know where..
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ssr8y/burning_wood_to_create_energy_does_not_create/
|
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"Our planet has not always been the same as it was now. It took a very long time for photosynthetic life to store all of the carbon currently sequestered. (It's also worth noting that not all carbon in the world is either in plants or the atmosphere.) The problem is that when people burn wood for fuel, we have the capacity to burn wood far more quickly than plants can fix CO2 from the atmosphere. Though the net amount of carbon on Earth is pretty fixed, the percentage in the atmosphere is currently increasing.",
"We dig up coal, gas, and oil to burn carbon from eons ago, faster than the CO2 is consumed by today's trees. In addition, there are other greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.",
"It helps to break the carbon cycle into two separate timeframes, the biologic timescale which acts over days to years and the geologic timescale which operates over thousands to millions of years. Trees growing and dying operate over the biologic timescale and the carbon system has enough active mechanisms to balance this out (such as ocean uptake and growing new trees). Although, climatic shifts can alter what this balance is.\n\nFurthermore, the interactions between the biologic timescale and the geologic timescale must also operate in balance. Factors such as volcanic activity and rock weathering (ways to put the carbon back into the atmosphere) must balance out with mineral sedimentation and carbon-based organism layering (basically as tiny marine organisms die and sink to the bottom they are covered with mud, sand and sediment, over millions of years the heat and pressure causes the organisms to break down into fossil fuels).\n\nWhat is currently occurring at a vast scale is mankind’s production and use of fossil fuels. A part of the geologic cycle that would have ordinarily taken millions of years to re-enter the atmosphere is being emitted in a matter of decades. This is preventing the natural mechanisms from keeping the balance.\n\nIn direct relation to your question on wood burning; deforestation (and land use change in general) is also leading to an increase in atmospheric concentration as mankind is disrupting the natural balance of the biologic carbon cycle. But estimates place this at about 10% of the impact of fossil fuel use. Finally, if we were to grow the wood to be used as fuel on unforested land, this would be carbon neutral, as all of the emitted CO2 would have come from the atmosphere and would be placed back in the atmosphere. But there just isn’t enough arable land to grow and harvest the amount of fuel we would need to run our planet.\n\nAlternatively, you could use carbon capture and storage (technology that I currently research) to sequester the emissions from biofuels. This would take the emissions from the atmosphere and place them back into the geologic time scale; one of the only reasonable ways of achieving negative emissions.\n\n"
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7ii4rn
|
beyond the protection of fame and money, how do serial sexual predators like cosby, weinstein, or spacey get away without serving any jail time?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ii4rn/eli5_beyond_the_protection_of_fame_and_money_how/
|
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"You can only get jail time of you're convicted of a crime. A lot of the people accused of sexual misconduct are accused of behaviors which aren't actually criminal. They might be unlawful civilly, where they could be sued over it, or they might just be severely frowned upon, but you only get jail if you're convicted of a crime. What is and is not a crime is not open to interpretation - there has to be a pre-existing statute on the books, in effect, that spells out exactly what counts as that crime. \n\nEven when they are accused of a crime, sometimes they aren't charged with a crime because the statute of limitations has elapsed, which means they can no longer be charged for that, or the prosecutor lacks a good-fairh belief that the charge could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt - at which point the ethical rules forbid bringing the charge. \n\nCosby was tried for a criminal offense. He was acquitted: the jury did not believe the evidence proved him guilty *beyond any reasonable doubt.* Whether the jury felt that someone's testimony alone wasn't enough, or whether the long delay before reporting it made the jury question the accuracy or authenticity of the testimony, we'll never know, but the criminal court is not designed to convict everyone who's guilty - it's designed to convict the fewest number of innocent people possible. \n"
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[] |
[] |
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4cu1dn
|
Why is hypoglycemia a symptom of diabetes?
|
How does diabetes cause hypoglycemia even if you don't take extra insulin?
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4cu1dn/why_is_hypoglycemia_a_symptom_of_diabetes/
|
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"Future Med Student here!\n\nHypoglycemia, or low blood glucose, is a side effect of treating diabetes. There are 2 types of diabetes, insulin dependent or non-insulin dependent. In insulin dependent (type 1) the pancreas produces little or no insulin; in insulin independent (type 2) the pancreas produces insulin, but the body's cells are resistent to its effects.\n\nSo that brings us to what insulin does- insulin is a hormone that, when it binds to its receptor, it causes the cell to mobilize glucose transporters to the cell's surface so that they can bring glucose into the cell. Taking extra insulin, enough that the body is *forced* to respond, even if it is resistant, would cause excess glucose to be taken from the bloodstream into the cells, causing hypoglycemia. Those that take extra insulin, or have not had a meal in a long time (thus, there is little glucose in the bloodstream), will develop hypoglycemia. *Hyper*glycemia, or high blood sugar, is a symptom of diabetes. Hypoglycemia, on the other hand, results from treating diabetes"
]
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[] |
[] |
[
[]
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|
2l5pe1
|
Why do we steer vehicles from the front, but aircraft (elevators/rudder) from the rear?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2l5pe1/why_do_we_steer_vehicles_from_the_front_but/
|
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"That's a good question, but in short the way vehicles and aircraft are controlled aren't really related. I can explain why standard aircraft have the control surfaces at the back on the tail (the rudder/vertical stabilizer/elevator/horizontal stabilizer assembly being called the *empennage*).\n\nAlso note, some ground vehicles like forklifts do use the rear wheels for directional steering because it enables you to align the forks more easily in tight spaces by making the front wheels near the forces your pivot point. And also note, some aircraft do have their control surfaces towards the front of the aircraft - the original wright flighter had the elevator at the front of the craft. Some modern fighter aircraft such as the Eurofighter also do this with \"canards\".\n\nThe first role of the empennage of a standard aircraft configuration is for *stability*. Think of it like a weathervane/weathercock: when you perturb the aircraft in a yaw or pitch motion, the vertical and horizontal stabilizers respectively return you to a straight orientation. This works because they're located far behind the center of gravity of the aircraft. If you were to reverse this configuration and had the empennage in front of the center of gravity, they would have an opposite effect on stability.\n\nImagine holding a large board, plywood or posterboard in the wind. If you try to orient it into the wind, it'll quickly try to pitch up or down, and it's difficult to hold it flat and level -- that's instability. Now if you hold it downwind, it's very easy to hold it flat and level, the wind helps you -- that's stability.\n\nSo knowing that you need that empennage at the rear of the aircraft for stability, it makes sense to also put your control surfaces (elevator and rudder) there as well, because you have a nice long moment arm giving you good control authority compared to something closer to the center of gravity, where you'd have no moment to work with.",
"Planes can steer from the front, using [special flaps called canards.](_URL_0_) Since a plane's center of lift must be [behind the center of mass,](_URL_1_) it is often more stable to steer (vertically) from the back. Note that the ailerons, which are really how an airplane steers, are on the wings, which are more or less centered.\n\nCars etc. steer from the front because when you steer with the front wheels, the vehicle turns about the point level with (or just behind) the driver. This makes intuitive sense and helps avoid hitting the curb and such when turning. Some specialized vehicles turn from the back to help align the front with loads or docks.\n",
"Aircraft generally turn using ailerons or other types of control surfaces on their wings. This can be pretty close to the CG. Once banked, elevator is used to perform a turn, and rudder only coordinates it to keep G forces aligned.\n\nYour question is more about why we don't flip the wings, engines, and control surfaces around and fly the plane backward. Like the top answer says, stability is a factor, but you could have a stable aircraft with basically the same CG in relation to the Mean Aerodynamic Chord (MAC). Drag plays a factor, but that could be worked around by sweeping the control surfaces, and they wouldn't create more drag for the amount of useful input they could provide. Visibility plays a factor, but you can always put the pilots farther forward.\n\nI would say that the only reason is that it would be a radical design change, more expensive as a result, and offer no real benefit while being a little more complex. The current design is more simple to achieve because of previous work. However, you could sweep back the fuselage more and possibly gain some efficiency there through reduced drag, but you could cause turbulent flow over the fuselage and wings, leading to increased drag as well. \n\nTL;DR It's possible to do it either way, but would be more work to design, test, and market with pitch and yaw controls in the front of the aircraft.",
"We don't steer airplanes with the tail surfaces.\n\nTurns are made by banking (motion around the roll axis) initiated by the ailerons. The rudder serves to keep the turn coordinated, neither slipping nor skidding. Another way of seeing the rudder's job is correcting for adverse yaw induced by the ailerons.\n\nThe tail's horizontal control surface, or \"elevator,\" has to do with controlling the aircraft's pitch attitude, which mostly affects airspeed.",
"An aircraft control surface located forward of the wings, will disturb the airflow over the wings, complicating design and limiting the size of those controls. Some canards generate lift, to counter this loss.\n\nAlso note that aircraft are \"steered\" using a combination of aileron, elevator, and rudder. The ailerons are actually located on the wing.",
"Forklifts are a vehicle that drive from the rear. If you've ever driven one you'll immediately realize that it totally different. They steer from the rear because it allows you to maneuver in tighter spaces and perform an almost zero radius turn. Cars don't do this because they need to operate safely at high speeds, not maneuver between shelves in a large room.\n",
"When you move a nose wheel aircraft (most aircraft are) on the ground. You stear using a sterable nose wheel or a castering nose wheel with differential braking. So, you stear a plane on the ground from the front. Just like a car. When a plane is flying you are not using the rudder and elevator to stear. You are using the primary flight control sufaces (elevator, rudder, ailerons) all congruetly to fly. ",
"Well the [Xp-55](_URL_0_) had it's elevator in the front and it's rudder on the wings. In a similar pusher you could put the rudder in front, but it's blocking your view.",
"Tire Engineer here, this has to do with the way that slip angles are generated and how the lateral forces effect the vehicle's yaw.\n\nTires are a lot less like railroad tracks and a lot more like rudders than people realize. Tires are always slipping if they are cornering or driving / braking. Slip angle is a function of wheel steering angle, but there is a phase lag between the drivers input and the actual force being generated by the tire. \n\nSo, when you steer the front axle, there is a delay, and then lateral force builds in the front of the vehicle. This force induces a torque about the vehicle's center of mass which starts yaw rotation. Yaw causes slip angle to build in the non-steering tires in the rear, and they begin to build lateral force. This behavior is stable and comfortable to the driver because the vehicle will initially yaw in the direction of the turn (lateral force is is in the direction you are turning, so lateral force in front of the CG will turn the vehicle into the turn).\n\nIf the rear wheels steer first, the initial yaw is in the opposite direction of the turn, which causes the vehicle's inertia to be opposite of the turn, causing an understeer feeling even if there is none, as well as requiring more total yaw moment to turn the vehicle. This is also typically why vehicles have a 'stiffer' front roll gradient than the rear, so lateral force will build more quickly in the front axle, and start to induce the correct direction yaw from the initial turn in.\n\nE: clarity",
"It appears that the science behind this has been answered but I would like to try to show you what your idea might look like. The Wright brothers attempted what you are talking about in their [flyer 2](_URL_2_). Here is a [picture](_URL_1_) to show you how the plane is set up. The elevator is in the front which disrupts the flow of air over the wings and causes it to be more unstable. Now, if you look up their first few flights they stay really low to the ground and don't make many sudden pitch movements. When Roosevelt was taken up in a flight during 1910 you can see what the forward elevators do to stability in the video [here](_URL_0_). (flight is around 2:40) Forward elevators turn the flight into a dangerous roller coaster. ",
"Something of note in regards to ground vehicles: One reason cars don't steer from the rear is wall trapping. If you're driving beside a fixed barrier, turning away will move you away. Whereas if the vehicle was rear steer, it would swing towards the barrier before moving away. If there isn't enough room, you'd strike the barrier and essentially get pulled into it. This was a problem with early (rear steer) ice resurfacing machines, they couldn't get close enough to the edge of an arena without risking getting stuck against the wall.",
"having a small horizontal and vertical stabilizer *behind* the center of gravity causes the natural stable orientation of a plane to be nose-first. So if you lose power or stall out or something, the tendancy of the aerodynamics is for the plane to start falling nose-first towards the ground which hopefully gives you enough speed to regain control. \n\nFlat spins are dangerous because they are a situation where the angular momentum of the plane cannot be overcome by the small forces which would otherwise stabilize it. ",
"If you've ever driven a fork lift, you'd know why.\n\nRear wheel steering is very twitchy and tough to control because you are sitting in front of your center of gyration. Its great if you are trying to maneuver in a factory or warehouse at slow speeds, but I could see it being very dangerous in a car. \n\nBut keep in mind, there are a few cars that have rear wheel steering. Infiniti and Honda messed around with the technology back in the 90s - you did most of your steering with the front wheels, and the backs offered a few degrees of turn in. At slow speeds they would go the opposite direction of the front wheels, while at higher speeds, they would go in the same direction as the fronts. The added complexity and cost made it a fairly short-lived option. I think only one or two cars nowadays offer 4 wheel steering.",
"Others have posted good responses so I'll offer some I points not well mentioned. \n\n Propellers were the early means of propulsion for planes. Having a propeller and pitch controls in the front is complicated and doesn't work well. Other configurations were tried with varying success. Propeller in the front with pitch and yaw control surfaces in the rear was simplest and very effective. Whatever the configuration, the rotational inertia of a spinning propeller needs to be taken into account for an effective design; best to have pitch and yaw control surfaces on the opposite end of the plane than the propeller. Roll controls act in line with a propeller's spin and so center of gravity is the main consideration there. \n\nThe added inherent instability of a canard layout is great for fighter aircraft, where maneuverability is important. When done right, the plane is maneuverable and loses less speed in tight turns, which is a big plus during evasive maneuvers. There is one problem, however, I learned from a test pilot, who was a friend's father. With the front canard layout for high performance aircraft the pilot is also seated toward the front of the plane. When the pitch controls are mounted in front as well it adds a little bit more g-force load to the pilot because he/she is at the end of the up/down pivot point. Having these controls at the rear of the plane means the pilot experiences less up and down movement as the plane turns because it is the rear causing the rotation. For a visual; put a ruler in front of you and move one end up and down while keeping the other in place. You should get the idea. It is a small difference, especially since the plane is also moving forward in flight, but he said he could feel a slight difference and the g-meters in the cockpit confirmed this. ",
"No need to get into the physics and honestly, the equations and concepts are a little difficult to get across anyways without having a board to draw on, but the answer is actually very very simple:\n\nFor aircraft, forward control surfaces are less stable than rear control surfaces because on a forward control surface lift increases as pitch increases, while on a rear control surface the opposite happens - the ailerons force reduces as pitch increases.\n\nFor cars/trucks/land craft forward control surfaces are more stable than rear control surfaces. \n\nDespite the mathematical complexity of proving this it's actually not that hard to visualize either. Just think, when you drive backwards and turn the wheel a little bit the car very quickly wants to turn too much due to an increase in loading on the control surfaces which will act to move those control surfaces farther from the neutral point, making the car want to skid sideways. This effect can be reduced by putting those control surfaces farther back and putting more vehicle weight towards the front\n\nAircraft are the same - when a canard acts to increase pitch that action actually inherently increases lift on those canards, making them want to increase pitch more than was intended. This effect can be neutralized in an aircraft by sizing the canards appropriately and placing them further forward on the fuselage. ",
"Wheeled ground vehicles and aircraft are very different.\n\nCars (and most ground vehicles) have front wheels that steer and have \"caster\", which means that the axis around which they steer is forward of the wheels' contact with the ground, making them inherently stable. Here in the US shopping carts are set up the same way, with fixed wheels in the back and caster wheels in front (crazy euro carts often have casters on all four wheels which is great for drifting in the produce aisle, but terrible if you want to actually change the direction the cart is moving).\n\nThe caster on a shopping cart is more pronounced and obvious than a typical automobile, but they both work the same way.\n\nSo fixed wheels in the back and casters in the front in an inherently stable setup. To demonstrate this without being ticketed for reckless driving, next time you're in an open parking lot with a shopping cart (but not a \" trolley\" in a \"car park\"), try this. Give the cart a good shove in an open direction. Be sloppy about it, and push it slightly off from the direction its pointing. As long as you don't go so far as to make it fall over, it will stabilize and coast in a straight line (assuming the pavement is flat and the wheels are working correctly).\n\nNow try the same thing, but start out with the cart going backwards. The cart will almost always whip around and start coasting in the forwards direction. Backwards is inherently unstable.\n\nThat's one reason why you don't want to drive fast backwards. And why cars steer with the front wheels.\n\nI'm now imagining US redditors shoving carts around lots and enjoying the thrill of seeing carts spin themselves around forwards, and Euro redditors thinking I'm speaking complete nonsense.",
"In the beginning of the automotive era there was one car that had rear wheel steering. It had better maneuverability and control than contemporary designs. Unfortunately the car got in an accident at the World's Fair and the design was abandoned.\n\n_URL_0_ for more info!",
"Aircraft don't turn using the tail. A pilot turns in the air by rolling the aircraft left or right. As the aircraft rolls the lift acting on it gets a horizontal component. This is what turns the aircraft.\n\nAs for a car, if only the rear wheels turned, the car would be unstable at high speeds. There are some trucks that have four wheel steering though.",
"Airplanes aren't \"steered\" by the rudder. Their turns are controlled by adjusting the direction of lift created by the wings.\n\nIn straight-and-level flight, the lift created by the wings has one directional component which is straight up or vertical. But when you roll the aircraft via the ailerons, the lift component is split into two parts, vertical and horizontal. As the aircraft rolls more, the vertical lift component shrinks as it transitions into the increasing horizontal component. The horizontal component of lift is what pulls the plane around a turn.\n\nAs for steering cars, the reason we use the front wheels is because it is more stable than using the rears. If the rear wheels were used, cars would be prone to a pendulum effect where the rear end would swing back and forth uncontrollably, making people spin out all the time."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canard_(aeronautics\\)",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxUULv9B5xQ"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Curtiss_XP-55_Ascender_in_flight_061024-F-1234P-007.jpg"
],
[],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIlpDwMKzJo",
"http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wright/flye-nf.html",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfyvspnko04"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_car"
],
[],
[]
] |
||
yt865
|
why can't they make space elevators with propellers on them to reduce tension forces?
|
The big problem with the space elevator idea is the huge forces pulling the cable upwards. Very hard to makes something that can withstand those forces.
Why can't they build into the cable some stations that have propellers thrusting the cable toward the earth to reduce this tension?
The propellers could be powered in the short term by a ground-based plant, but maybe in the long run by wind turbines also built along the cable.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yt865/why_cant_they_make_space_elevators_with/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c5ylxbc"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"That would only work in the atmosphere, where the propellers have something to push: air. But the cable will experience the same amount of tension above the atmosphere, where there is no air for the propellers to push. The only real solution is to find a way to manufacture, in large quantity at reasonable cost, a material with the necessary tensile strength."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
24dd16
|
What are the margins of error in elections? If a study hasn't been done, how could we construct one?
|
Obviously any measurement has some margin of error, systematic and theoretic. Whether it's hanging chads, database errors in electronic counts, fraudulent votes, etc. there's got to be some known/measurable error within an electoral system.
For simplicity I'm assuming elections as they occur in the US, at a state or national level. But other data would be helpful as well if it's available.
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/24dd16/what_are_the_margins_of_error_in_elections_if_a/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ch61xx5",
"ch620nh"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"You can look at recounts to get a sense of how much the count varies on repeated measurements. I found some statistics here: _URL_0_\n\nBased on those 72 counties, the average relative change in Prosser's vote was 0.999877827 and the standard deviation over counties was 0.001448963.\n\nIn terms of absolute votes, the average was -5, the standard deviation was 12, and the rms change was 13.\n",
"Exactly what do you define as error for this measurement? It's extremely tricky to be defined, and the answer totally depends on this. That's because if you want to measure the length of an object this quantity is unequivocally defined. In elections what is it that you want to measure?\n\nFrom how you worded your question I assume you define that what you want to measure is what percentage of votes each party gets amongst the people who decided to vote. In this case the error is only due to fraudulent votes, counting errors (in manual voting systems) and software glitches (in electronic votes).\n\nI don't know if a study about how much errors all these factors in the end introduce. I suspect nonetheless that the fraudulent component depends greatly on the nation involved. BTW, how do you consider coercion? Because if you threaten someone into voting who you're telling them to vote, it's fraud but not on the counting side! Let's forget coercion, for the sake of simplicity.\n\nThere's a very simple way to construct a study to cross check the errors on the counting side in places where pools are manual. You just need to collect all of the electoral voting cards from all of the nation, then **randomly** pick ten thousand cards maximum and count them. With 10 thousand ones you're supposed to get the actual voting percentage with a statistical error of just 1%. Maybe you tag the cards and have them counted many times by different people to be sure that this counting operation is 100% correct. If you go to 1 million cards you get a one permil error! It might seem a lot but in Italy usually 10 thousand cards are scrutinized in half a day by about 12 people in total. (in groups of three, where each of the three checks the votes for increased security) \n\nOf course, this does not take into account cards that \"disappear\". Nonetheless, serious democracies have systems in place so that if any card is \"lost\" it triggers some indicators somehow. \n\nWith software systems this instead is extremely difficult. I'd say it's impossible, but I can't find a find way to prove that's for sure theoretically impossible (pretty hard to prove something it's *not* possible). If the data are lost or manipulated somewhere during the acquisition phase or before being transmitted there's no way to assess this a posteriori, I'd think! \nProbably you can just do an enormous number of trials before the vote and have something in place to trust the software company (which is not trivial, even if you've got the code open to be analyzed and you're sure that's the real code)\n\nThe last possibility is to make a survey and asking people if they voted and for who they voted. But here you're going to introduce such a big error, not only due to the limited number of people interviewed but also in the corrections needed for lies and less-reacheable demographics that the margin of error wouldn't be satisfactory, unless you're looking for errors bigger than 5% let's say (very rough estimate)"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://gab.wi.gov/elections-voting/recount/county-by-county"
],
[]
] |
|
bzere2
|
what makes some color combinations more aisthetically pleasing than others?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bzere2/eli5_what_makes_some_color_combinations_more/
|
{
"a_id": [
"eqrwopt"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Mostly it comes to personal preference. I would recommend watching this video by Kurzgesagt about what makes humans 'like pretty things.'"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
46p23j
|
When does a baby get its own blood type?
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/46p23j/when_does_a_baby_get_its_own_blood_type/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d07jqrn"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"Depending on what you mean, either a. immediately upon conception, because the blood type is genetically determined or b. around week five when first blood cells are formed according to those genetic instructions."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
boi28g
|
It's a common trope in 19th century fiction for a character to descend into insanity. What would 19th century "insanity" mean in modern medical terms?
|
For instance, did they mean schizophrenia? Clinical depression? Bipolar disorder? Or was it just a catch-all?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/boi28g/its_a_common_trope_in_19th_century_fiction_for_a/
|
{
"a_id": [
"enh7zcy",
"enlgp4c"
],
"score": [
419,
100
],
"text": [
"Edit: Thanks for your patience, everyone. I hope you will enjoy my answer: please scroll further down the page to find what became many hours of research for your amusement and edification.\n\nCould you please give some examples of the texts you mean? For example, a lot of research has been done on the trope of the \"madwoman in the attic\" trope and hysteria, which was a medical diagnosis of the time primarily, but not exclusively, applied to women. This is the 19th century novel madness that I'm most familiar with. The classic study on this is the aptly titled *The Madwoman in the Attic* by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from 1979. I actually just gave a presentation about Silas Weir Mitchell, the so-called \"rest cure,\" and representations of female insanity in 19th century literature, but I'd like a confirmation that this is the sort of thing you're talking about before I delve in, for fear that I might be off-base. (Another possible contender for \"madness\" is the sudden shock that characters suffer that changes them completely in some books, such as what happens to Sir Leicester Dedlock in *Bleak House* or Mr. Hale in *North and South.* You might also be thinking of the kind of \"madness\" that Ben Gunn suffers from in *Treasure Island*, or the insanity of characters in Edgar Allan Poe's stories.)\n\nI should also note that our contemporary understanding of psychology really can't be read onto an artifact of the past. At most, we can say that today what was diagnosed/described one way might be diagnosed as a certain disorder. Also, the way that madness is represented in a fictional story is not necessarily reflecting actual medical understanding, but as a literary device is serving some other purpose.",
"(part 1 of 3)\n\nWe have to be very careful about making modern diagnoses of disorders of the past, and doubly so when dealing with fictional characters. The diseases the characters are depicted as suffering from are, after all, not drawn from medical observation but from the author’s understanding of mental health *as it is represented by* contemporary science and medicine. Therefore, the illnesses of the characters reveal more about how many Victorians *imagined* the female mind and body than they do about actual disorders. It is possible to make tentative links between what we see in the novels, Victorian medical science, and today’s understanding of the mind, and I will briefly try to do that, but we must keep in mind that these are fictional characters created by authors reproducing contemporary ideas about how proper and disordered female minds work.\n\nAs we usually do when starting to talk about the Victorian era, let’s talk about the cultural role of women. The shorthand we commonly use to talk about the separation of the sexes (the concepts of sex and gender were undivided in the Victorian imagination) is that, while men could move in the public or commercial sphere, women were limited to the domestic sphere, where the [“Angel in the House”](_URL_0_) was expected to create a safe, peaceful, loving, and nurturing atmosphere for her husband and children. This home life was represented as a cure for the corrupting influence of work, since middle class Victorians rising up the social ladder had to contend with older notions that working for one’s money (as opposed to earning “rents” from one’s properties, as the gentry and aristocracy did) has a tendency to make one grasping, greedy, and vicious. As the middle class gained property and prestige in the course of the 18th and 19th century through trade, banking, industry, etc., they made an argument that they had more moral authority than the traditional elite. The middle class did this by increasingly representing work as ennobling and morally uplifting, while they depicted the aristocracy as lazy, decadent, and debauched. The infamous court of the Prince Regent, later George IV, who had several illegitimate children and ran up debts in the hundreds of thousands of pounds, was a favorite target. In this way, the idea of work was being transformed in the Victorian imagination, but it was still feared that contact with the world of commerce would cause one to turn into a—well, a Scrooge: a hard, cruel, heartless miser interested only in profit. In the contemporary imagination, the Victorian man’s best defense against this was his wife, in whose tender hands the peaceful home was an oasis of healing away from the dirty, greedy world of commerce. I write this to show the immense pressure on women to behave according to strict gender roles: to be dutiful, patient, passive, loving, self-sacrificing, and immaculate. To be all of these things was seen as not only good and proper but natural, the healthy state of a woman’s body and mind. To not be those was not only a personal failure but a disorder.\n\nWe will be awhile, since we haven’t even gotten to madness yet, so tell your servant to bring you up a cup of tea. Before we do get to madness, I have to touch on two factors related to this separation of spheres: female sexuality and female creativity. To the Victorian patriarchy, a woman’s active sexual enjoyment was a source of horror. Among other things, it suggested that a woman might desire sex outside of those occasions when her husband did, which might lead her into any number of scandalous pursuits. A common trope in 19th century pornography was that a meek and virtuous virgin, once raped, finds that she loves sex and wants to have it with any man she meets (see as an example 1828’s *The Lustful Turk*). While unmarried Victorian women and wives were expected to be beautiful sexual objects, for them to actually enjoy sex was thought to lead to infidelity and even abandoning marriage for a life as a kept mistress or prostitute (it was a common trope that prostitutes were morally degraded women whose love of sex led them to that profession). When it comes to writing, many Victorian men held that women simply could not create literature. In *The Madwoman in the Attic*, Gilbert and Gubar quote Gerard Manley Hopkins equating the writer’s pen with a mighty penis, as well as Rufus Wilmot Griswold (today known chiefly as Poe’s frenemy and rival) writing that some men might be fooled into thinking that a woman has literary skill when she is just pouring her overflowing female emotions onto the page… and he wrote this in his intro to a book of poetry by female poets. Gilbert and Gubar extensively quote women writers grappling with being smothered and silenced, struggling with the pervasive notion that to write was to transgress what it supposedly meant to be a good woman, to enter a world where, they were told, they had no place and no skill. As Virginia Woolf wrote in 1931 in her essay “The Angel of the House,” “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.” Gilbert and Gubar phrase their summary of this so well that I will quote them at length:\n\n > Before the woman writer can journey through the looking glass toward literary autonomy, however, she must come to terms with the image on the surface of the glass, with, that is, those mythic masks male artists have fastened over her human face both to lessen their dread of her ‘inconstancy’ and—by identifying her with the ‘eternal types’ they themselves have invented—to possess her more thoroughly. Specifically, as we will try to show here, a woman writer must examine, assimilate, and transcend the extreme images of ‘angel’ and ‘monster’ which male authors have generated for her. … [T]he images of ‘angel’ and ‘monster’ have been so ubiquitous throughout literature by men that they have also pervaded women’s writing to such an extent that few women have definitely ‘killed’ either figure. Rather, the female imagination has perceived itself, as it were, through a glass darkly: until quite recently the woman writer has had (if only unconsciously) to define herself as a mysterious creature who resides behind the angel or monster or angel/monster image … (16-17)"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4099"
]
] |
|
2say64
|
how do chinese speakers imply sarcasm?
|
In my very limited knowledge of the Chinese language I know that the inflection of a syllable changes its meaning, so how does one say something sarcastically?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2say64/eli5_how_do_chinese_speakers_imply_sarcasm/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cnns33f",
"cnnuib8"
],
"score": [
21,
5
],
"text": [
"You can still stress syllables in Chinese without changing the tone. In addition in China people tend to be very creative with word choices and puns to imply sarcasm or even insults. \n\nSource: Native speaker. ",
"Chinese speaker here, though not extremely well-versed.\n \nMainly, one would imply sarcasm in exactly the same way as English. Just like how you would roll your eyes and go \"Riiighhhtt....\" There are only four inflections in Chinese - high, rising, low and \"severe\" are how I'd describe them. So that leaves lots of room for stress and tonal shifts - otherwise Chinese songs couldn't exist, or at least be far harder to write!\n\nDepending on where you come from, there may be colloquialisms which are used to ridicule people. There are lots of \"four-letter proverbs\" or chengyu, which are either very cliched or somewhat sophisticated in usage - when you hear these directed at you it's a safe bet it's in sarcasm. Chinese also has a ton of homophones, so in the pleasant event that you can imply something different with a same-sounding word, you get a lot of good puns and jokes out of that."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
y4jnf
|
Question about US Air Force rank structure during WWII
|
so my girlfriends grandfather was in the Air Force during WWII and we recently received some of his medals and the ranks from his uniform. Well the ranks were [this](_URL_0_) when that is an Army rank shouldn't it be [this](_URL_1_) instead, and we are 100% sure that he was Air Force
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y4jnf/question_about_us_air_force_rank_structure_during/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c5sa4rk"
],
"score": [
10
],
"text": [
"Short answer. The Air Force was a branch of the army in WW2 and used Army ranks. It was known as [The United States Army Air Forces](_URL_0_).\n\nThe US Air Force was not active until 1947."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://imgur.com/q6jHL",
"http://imgur.com/uI9Ov"
] |
[
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Air_Forces"
]
] |
|
19ba5o
|
How did ancient Greek and Roman sculptures survive in such good condition for so long?
|
Furthermore, were sculptures passed down for care through the generations or were they mainly just left alone where they originally stood from antiquity, eventually being found again and transferred to a museum?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19ba5o/how_did_ancient_greek_and_roman_sculptures/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c8mh799",
"c8miuyo"
],
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"text": [
"One of the larger factors in the survival for more than 2000+ years of Greek and Roman statues (and buildings) has been the relative lack of large scale heavy industry in their immediate vicinity. \n \nA great deal of damage was caused between circa 1940 and 1980 by [Acid Rain](_URL_0_) which, while less of a threat now due to stricter emissions control, remains an ongoing cumulative threat. \n \nThe Parthenon being blown up by explosives was a singular tragedy, altering the chemistry of the very air we breathe and causing it too dissolve millennia of history carved in stone is a Greek tragedy. \n \n",
"The unfortunate thing is that most didn't survive.\n\nAlmost all bronze sculptures were melted down to be remade into other items. This includes almost all of the Greek bronzes that were the inspiration for so many of the most famous Roman marble statues.\n\nMore marble statues survived, but even the best preserved tend to be damaged (the Venus de Milo missing her arms, for example).\n\nWith regards to how they survived, the bronze Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius only survived because early Christians thought it was a statue of Constantine and so didn't melt it down like they did with statues of pagans.\n\nSome marbles survived in churches or the estates of wealthy families (cared for for generations, as you suggested), others were buried by their owners for safekeeping and never dug up (and are therefore fairly well-preserved) and others were just lucky to have survived being buried relatively unscathed."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain"
],
[]
] |
|
3q80e2
|
why do people that play hockey or other sports left handed prefer to golf right handed?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3q80e2/eli5_why_do_people_that_play_hockey_or_other/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cwcynjb"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Canadian kids starting to learn hockey are taught to place their dominant hand on the end of the stick. This translates to playing golf \"left-handed\""
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
3ia2xh
|
if we have enough grain and milk sitting in silos around the usa to feed the world why do we give farmers subsidizes to burn it instead of using that money to give it away?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ia2xh/eli5_if_we_have_enough_grain_and_milk_sitting_in/
|
{
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"text": [
"To stabilize the price. Too much supply will result in price drop which will drive lot of farms out of business which will decrease the supply and cause price spike. \n\nWe are doing this to stop volatility in prices. ",
"Short answer is time and money.\n\nMilk goes bad relatively quickly, and it would be ludicrously expensive to ship it around the world. The people who don't get milk don't get it because *they can't afford it.* Yes, it would be nice if we could just ship it off to anyone who needs it, but who would foot the bill?\n\nGrain is the same, though time is less of an issue, as it doesn't spoil as fast as milk. Money still is the reason that we don't just give it away. It's cheaper to burn the excess than it would be to ship it around the world.",
"Unless I missed something, I don't think they really do that anymore. I know they used to, but there are better ways to do it.\n\nAnyway, the reasons are:\n\n1. Price stabilization. Most foodstuffs are fungible--that is, it's a commodity. It doesn't matter if the grain is grown cheaply in Iowa or wastefully in Alaska, grain is grain. As such, it doesn't matter what a farmer does, how efficient he is, or how wonderful his practices are, at the end of the day the price he gets is the same price everyone else gets. If *everyone* has a bumper crop in a year, *no one* gets all that much money, and it's entirely possible for everyone to go broke at once. Stabilization helps. \n\n2. We *do* ship a lot of food to other starving nations, and we also have many government programs that help feed our own people. The problem, at least with shipping it overseas, is that we risk destroying their own agricultural system. How could a country ever get on its feet if the US just dumps free grain on it every year? \n\n3. Generally speaking, though, we really *don't* burn/waste food much anymore. Farmers have gotten prety good at limiting their own production, or--more likely--converting production to different crops. (I.e. 10 fields of corn in a year where corn is in need, and then switching to 6 corn/2 soybean/2 wheat to match the market needs.) Various co-ops, government programs, crop insurance, and the like all do a lot better of a job of managing food supplies than dumping it.\n\nAgroeconomics is actually pretty complicated, and the reasons rarely boil down to greedy capitalism. ",
"We do not burn grain and dump milk to the river anymore. We pay them to not produce it. We used to have a domestic aid program that used the surplus to feed poor-poorish Americans. I remember eating government cheese, peanut butter and such. It wasn't a bad way to stabilize prices. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
1qpfiw
|
why did nature make us intelligent instead of strong?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qpfiw/eli5_why_did_nature_make_us_intelligent_instead/
|
{
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"text": [
"More efficient I guess. Work smart, not hard.",
"We are actually quite large and strong. We are not as strong as some other primates, but we have a lot more stamina, and we can run farther (although not faster) than just about any land animal in existence. While we lack the innate weapons of other large predators, we can still kill many smaller animals with our bare hands or with extremely simple tools.\n\nThe theories behind the evolution of intelligence are varied. One idea is that at some point intelligence became sexually attractive and so increased over time. A similar theory states that intelligence was used to succeed in complex social environments, and so more intelligent individuals would have more progeny.\n\nSo, to answer your question, we are reasonably strong and have incredible stamina and intelligence. Some scientists have proposed that the shift from strength to stamina (relative to other large primates) occurred when our primate ancestors left the forest and began living in grassland environments.\n\n",
"Nature didn't make us intelligent nor strong. Humans that weren't intelligent enough were just killed off over time.\n\nCompared to many predators you see around today, humans aren't very big. Even the strongest human by today's standards would have difficulty wrestling a bear or tiger. Imagine that, a long time ago, humans were smaller and predators were larger.\n\nHumans relied on cooperation and tools to survive. Strength was great, but if you couldn't function with a group, you got killed. Intelligence was encouraged. Later, the invention of agriculture, permanent settlements, and specialization of roles led to humans thriving.\n\nStrength was still useful, however. Strong hunters and farmers did much better than their weaker counterparts. However, as a whole, natural selection tended to kill off the human populations that weren't intelligent enough to gather food efficiently, ward off predators, and ward off other tribes of humans.",
"I don't agree that we're intelligent *instead of* strong. We're stronger than a lot of animals *and* smarter than they are. ",
"My try:\n\nImagine a lake in the nile delta. Loads of buffalos are there and want to drink from the lake because it is the only one around. One of them, lets call him Waldo, aproaches the lake. He does not mind, settles down and slurps loads of water and is relieved. Suddenly Waldo is hearing a sound. In the next moment he finds himself in the water . A crocodile dragged him in (Waldo is no more at this point). \nThe other buffalos look at Waldo and see that he is in danger. Now they could assume that they are in danger too but they are not smart. \n\nThey are a huge herd, aproximatly 1000 animals. Meaning that when there are 20 crocodiles in there every croc gets with absolute possibility a buffalo and eats him. So the buffalos have still 980 individuals in their herd minus Waldo. Because the animals get more kids than they are dying they have a positive balance of their population. \n\nNow imagine Waldo's friend Peter, who is a *homo erectus* (our ancestor), living with his family and friends approaching the same situation. Peter is sad that Waldo died. Peter is smarter than Waldo so he knows the danger of the scene. So he thinks: \n\"how do i get to drink some of the water without finding myself in the stomach of the reptiles?\" \n\nBecause the crocodiles are dumb like the buffalos they do not think of strategical hunting methods. Peter now could use buckets or dig a well... you get the idea\n\nBecause it was easier to become intelligent than to become stronger, because of the evolutional competition (look up ecological niche) we are intelligent. Why would we fight with crocodiles for some water? We just could trick them or evade aggression. \n\nToday we are at the point where we shape the environment in our will. We use giant excavators instead of shovels to increase our efficiency. Before that we got shaped by our environment. But do not assume that evolution stands still. That is not the case. \n\nAsk if you do not understand. I am not a native speaker.\n\nRIP Waldo 15.11.2013",
"Strong animals would similarly ask \"why did nature make me strong?\" ... but they are not intelligent enough to introspect in such a way and post it on the internet.",
"Hmm. I admittedly haven't researched this a whole lot, and other people have certainly covered facets of this issue better than I could have.\nHowever, my cultural anthropology professor provided me with a very simple explanation (of course biased towards culture) that made a lot of sense to me.\n\nThe one thing that is constant when you're studying evolution is that change happens. That's the constant theme throughout. This means that when a species adapts too well to its environment, and that environment changes (which it will, eventually), that species is either going to decline, die out, or change (if it can within the time frame necessary for survival). Relatively speaking, humans are not very PHYSICALLY well adapted to any specific environment. We don't have very good claws, we can't run very fast, we're not particularly strong (compared to other animals; this is all relative of course but just speaking generally). So the adaptation that humans and hominids developed is culture. Our culture, or 'intelligence', allows us to create clothing for warmth, and fire for warmth and cooking, and build shelters when we cannot withstand the environment as it changes. Culture is a mental adaptation that can change with the environment, and that could be why humans have been such 'successful' animals. Our adaptation is mental, not physical, and therefore it can change in many more ways, a lot faster, than physical traits could, which could help explain why that particular adaptation has worked so well for us compared to a physical adaptation like 'strength'.\n\nAs other comments have stated, there's no real way to 'know', but I found that explanation to be, if nothing else, really interesting to think about!"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
ro9xu
|
Is there an end to the obesity epidemic in sight?
|
As long as I can remember this issue has been called "worsening." Here we are decades in, with billions spent, and yet the heat maps have only gotten redder. Is there a critical point we are approaching? What solutions, if any, have real promise?
Policy and culture have clouded this issue so much that I don't even know where there is consensus. I am interested in what the actual science has to say. Thanks for your time.
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ro9xu/is_there_an_end_to_the_obesity_epidemic_in_sight/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c47cvri",
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8,
5
],
"text": [
"I found better data for overweight so I will make my arguments for overweight instead of obesity. The correlation is so high that it makes no difference.\n\n1) The adult population of some states in the US is now ~67% overweight (Mississippi, West Virginia) and the trend is still going up. So we have not reached an upper bound yet.\n\n2) Childhood overweight increases the risk for adult overweight and the rate of overweight children is increasing.\n\n3) Overweight in the US is associated with low income. The current economic crisis puts a lot of pressure on the middle class and increases poverty.\n\nSo from 1-3 I would estimate that overweight/obesity will increase in the near and mid-term future.\n\nWhat could turn the trend around?\n\n**Medical breakthrough**\n\nA magic pill that makes people thin or crave only for healthy food could eliminate obesity virtually overnight. But even if such a drug is found today it will take years to get it to the market and it might be quite expensive.\n\n**Policy change**\n\nThe government could stop subsidizing high-fructose corn sirup, make laws for maximum portion sizes, ban advertisement for fast food, tax unhealthy food and so on. Some of this is done in Europe but I doubt it will find enough support in the USA. The status quo is too profitable.\n\n**Change in Food culture**\n\nIt is always possible that home-cooking for friends and family with fresh and healthy ingredients becomes mainstream. This is impossible to predict and in a deeply divided country like the US it is very difficult for a trend to get everyone on board.",
"The solution to the obesity epidemic is probably not going to come from a cultural push to value exercise and diet changes over the status quo, it is likely going to come from a pharmaceutical company. There are hundreds of pathways being looked at for potential therapeutic drug development, but the major problem with drug development is that the biochemical steps of how appetite is regulated in the human body is still not understood. Unfortunately, a lot of mammalian biochemical research relies on mice and rats, and their appetite regulation is different than ours. \n\nRight now, the market has three main approaches to tackling obesity: (1) preventing absorption of food, (2) increasing basal metabolism with amphetamines, (3) chemically altering our desire for food with antidepressants. Each one has been shown to induce weight loss (in fact, the antidepressant weight loss link was accidentally discovered as a side effect of drugs like Wellbutrin and Topamax), but they also all come with their costs. The push now is to combine strategies two and three into a single combination product, and the results have been good but also come at the cost of having to start taking antidepressants and amphetamines daily. \n\nI believe it will be awhile until targeted drugs are released that directly affect adipose metabolism (and nothing else), but there are some promising strategies that are being examined biologically. For example, some researchers are showing that increasing the mitochondrial density by inhibiting autophagy (mitochondria fusion/destruction) in adipose tissue can lower mouse weight. The clear obstacle is determining whether this can be scaled up to humans, whether we can only induce autophagy inhibition in adipose tissue, and whether its safe. Other research is looking at ways to increase metabolism in fat tissue by inhibiting enzymes that attenuate signaling pathways. Recently, the compound found in red wine, resveratrol, was found to protect against diet-induced obesity and glucose intolerance in mice. The study didn't examine exactly why, but did mention that it was probably because the mice had increased respiration rates and a faster metabolism. \n\nI think you asked a question that's nearly impossible to answer in a single post, but I hope I gave you some general themes that illustrate the disconnect between the translational, pharmaceutical-side of things, and the theoretical biological side of things."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
1ncbum
|
If fever is a common means of thwarting infection, why haven't bacteria and viruses evolved to tolerate a slightly higher body temperature?
|
It seems like those two types of organisms evolve at breakneck pace so why hasn't evolutionary pressure selected for this?
P.S. I'm sick and feel like someone put me in a burlap sack and beat it with wrenches hence the interest.
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ncbum/if_fever_is_a_common_means_of_thwarting_infection/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cchcklb"
],
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18
],
"text": [
"You've struck on a very interesting and \"hot\" topic in evolutionary medicine.\n\nOne interesting theory (and I may be biased, since it's been posited by my adviser) claims that it's a form of micro-selection. First, it should be noted that even one \"strain\" of a pathogen still exhibits slightly different variants, as one would expect in a rapidly reproducing genetic organism. So, basically, by altering the environment a few degrees, you are selecting for pathogens that thrive in a slightly hotter environment. Then, you facultatively lower the temperature (break the fever), and engage in another micro-selection event, but the original pathogens may at this point have been outcompeted by the slightly more temperature-tolerant pathogens. In a sense, you're pitting them against each other."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
2s6tuw
|
What does the word Way mean in The Milky Way?
|
Is it this definition?
a particular area or locality
e.g. "I've got a sick cousin over Fayetteville way"
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2s6tuw/what_does_the_word_way_mean_in_the_milky_way/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cnmqonl",
"cnmx88w"
],
"score": [
19,
3
],
"text": [
"In the night sky without light pollution, you'll see a white cloudy band, like a milky-colored road through the sky. Presumably because of this, this band was called in Latin the \"Via Lactea\" which we translate into English as \"the Milky Way\" -- *way* as in *road* or *path*. And this band is the Milky Way galaxy as we see it (not counting closer stars that we see as individual points of light).\n\nYou might want to take a look at [this](_URL_0_).",
"In Sweden, the word is vintergatan which means \"The winter street\"."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.universetoday.com/84662/why-is-our-galaxy-called-the-milky-way/"
],
[]
] |
|
57mpde
|
when i'm watching satellite tv, is the satellite transmitting all the channels at once for my receiver to pick one or is my receiver requesting a channel to the satellite?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/57mpde/eli5_when_im_watching_satellite_tv_is_the/
|
{
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"d8t6itp",
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],
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2,
2,
5
],
"text": [
"The satellite transmits everything. Your home equipment certainly doesn't have any way to communicate with a satellite. \n\nYou tune to a frequency similar to regular broadcast. That tuning determines what information received from the satellite actually displays. ",
"The satellite broadcasts all the signals at once; your receiver tunes in to the one that you have requested.\n\nThe clue is actually in the name -- \"satellite **receiver**\". It isn't nearly powerful enough to transmit back to the satellite, you'd need a much larger dish for that. What's more the satellite isn't just sending the signal direct to your dish alone, it's sending it over thousands of square miles, so it has to be a wideband broadcast.",
"They broadcast from a few satellites on horizontal and vertical polarity. Your dish selects which satellite and polarity, but it still **receives many channels at once**. \n\nThe signal going from the dish to the receiver has many radio carriers, and the receiver has to tune to the desired one. Further, within each carrier there are multiple digital streams, each representing one channel. \n\nThey have video on demand as well, but that uses an internet connection."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
3u350z
|
why do first nations / native people in canada continue to live on reservations where they have poor housing, below par schools and medical access, few jobs, poor quality of life and limited prospects for their children?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3u350z/eli5_why_do_first_nations_native_people_in_canada/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cxbg04c"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Partly culture but mainly land claims. If they all abandoned their reserves it'd be harder for them to claim their treaty rights on the land.\n\nI think this duality inside Canada is a shame though. It's basically apartheid. They live in squalor because of how remote they are but they can't really relocate because of costs (and social issues that prevent them from having paying jobs/money) and land claims. \n\nIt'd be nicer to declare reserves as undeveloped (or less invasively developed) national parks (e.g. prevent destruction of wildlife) and then just make them all part of Canada proper (e.g. natives don't have to hold their flag post anymore)"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
66owsa
|
what's causing the very high pitched engine noise and bangs usually rally cars produce?
|
I come across videos of Rally cars, and played Dirt Rally, and in almost every documentation I see Rally cars have a different, high pitch and powerful sound, accompanied by loud bangs. What's happening? different engines or engine enhancments?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/66owsa/eli5_whats_causing_the_very_high_pitched_engine/
|
{
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"text": [
"The high pitched noise is the turbo (basically a vacuum cleaner to suck more air into the motor).\n\nThe bangs are excess gas/air igniting in the exhaust when they let off the gas, because when you are sucking that much air & gas through the motor, it can't stop following instantly when you lift off the accelerator.",
"No sound deadening, long travel heavy duty suspension, and rough terrain all add up to lots of noises you won't hear from circuit racing cars. Also all the components are much more sturdy to handle the punishment of rallying, which leads to a much more heavy handed driving style.",
"Straight cut gears (used because stronger than the quieter helical cut gears used in most road cars)will whine\" at higher road speeds.\nA blow off valve or BOV will vent excess turbo boost pressure when the throttle is closed, this generally produces a high pitched \"squeak\"\nAn anti lag system will delay the ignition after the throttle is closed so that the fuel/air mix is still burning when it enters the exhaust manifold so keeps the turbine spinning so full boost can be made sooner when the throttle is opened again. This makes the loud pops and bangs. Also massively shortens turbo life to around 1000km.",
"I've been a gearhead all my life and a huge rally fan (I sadly live in America where it's hard to partake in anything not football or nascar). I worked on Blackhawks in the army and have been around card ALL of my life... That said I still learned a lot from the responses! "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
5kij60
|
why do pets play with/are scared of their own tails? do they not know they're their own?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kij60/eli5_why_do_pets_play_withare_scared_of_their_own/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dbob0up"
],
"score": [
48
],
"text": [
"Young dogs and cats do it because it's fun. They like having fun just like we do. Slightly older pets might do it to get attention from humans since we tend to find the spectacle to be hilarious. If you have an elderly pet chasing their tail regularly, you might want to consider taking them to a vet because it might be indicative of another problem."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
30y7yj
|
What was the long term ecological impact of the Narnian ice age?
|
Were the effects limited to Narnia, or were they felt in Archenland and Calormen, as well?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30y7yj/what_was_the_long_term_ecological_impact_of_the/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cpx3vtk"
],
"score": [
13
],
"text": [
"The Narnian ice age (which is more properly categorised as a pessimum, as Narnia was - still is - in an ice age during the entire time, an ice age being properly defined as a time when both the polar caps are full of ice year long, and when the sweet sea that rocks Aslan's realm drops below 10 degrees surface temperature) was of course, as all climate phenomena are, felt in effect in the entire North part of the world. Whereas some regions were rendered completely uninhabitable - such as the Far North, where the population mostly retreated underground, where fabulous archaeological traces remain - or suffered from a severe drop in agricultural output, such as Narnia and to a lesser extent Archenland (the population of which was boosted by Narnian immigration, both to escape the climate and the persecutions of Jadis), others suddenly felt the effects of warmer climes. The biggest example for this category is Calormen, where the hinterland of Tashbaan in particular became a major agricultural centre almost overnight, allowing the city's warlords to progressively subjugate the nearby dukedoms, and create the Calormene Empire, headquartered in Tashbaan obviously. Another country which suffered terribly from the pessimum was Telmar, whose population of Talking Beasts, already weakened by hunting, was made entirely extinct by the shortages of the Winter."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
69y5jv
|
how to choose delicious watermelon?
|
Hi,guys. Hot summer is around corner. Does anyone know how to choose delicious watermelon by its appearance or something else?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69y5jv/eli5_how_to_choose_delicious_watermelon/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dha7ksm"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"Weight and sound. The heaviest one per size means that they have more water, and usually more sweetness. When you tap on the watermelon it should be more of a dull/muffled thud rather than a higher pitched sound."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
acjjgd
|
Do Immunosuppressant medications cancel historical vaccinations?
|
If a patient has received vaccinations in their lifetime for a disease such as Typhoid, would the administration of auto immune system suppressants make the previous vaccination defective?
|
askscience
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/acjjgd/do_immunosuppressant_medications_cancel/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ed8kzjk",
"eda2b35"
],
"score": [
2,
3
],
"text": [
"They don't make them defective, it's just that your immune system may have trouble responding to a disease even if it knows what it is. \n\nThey're not too certain of the effect of current vaccines. The disclaimer is, it might work, won't hurt to try.",
"Defective? No. The vaccine-induced immune responses would be suppressed via general suppression of humoral and cellular responses, but it would still be recoverable. Vaccine-induced immunity is essentially stored in memory B and T cells. If an infection occurs, these cells recognize elements of the pathogen and undergo clonal expansion to mount an attack against it. The only way to permanently remove the vaccine-induced immunity would be to kill the reservoir of related memory cells."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
2bngzw
|
why am i so tired after flying, or other times where i sit all day?
|
I have been on airplanes most of the day today, but I feel extremely tired. Why is it I feel tired after sitting most of the day, not using as much energy as normal?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bngzw/eli5_why_am_i_so_tired_after_flying_or_other/
|
{
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"text": [
"I know that, for me, I feel tired when I get off a plane because I just spent the past few hours scrunching in my shoulders and arms and keeping my legs together in order to not encroach on the space of the person sitting next to me. If I were sitting in a regular chair at my office for the same duration of time, I would be able to have a much more relaxed posture. Airplane seats just aren't made for a taller person with broad shoulders, but I'd rather inconvenience myself than get in someone else's space. ",
"Are you staying hydrated? I flew approximately 226,000 miles in the past year and realized staying alert afterward was a matter of hydration many times. \n\nEven then, I always try to be productive on flights because I know that sometimes my body will just want to crash when I get to my destination. ",
"I think it's a combination of:\n\n- Jet lag: East/West travel through time zones put the circadian rhythm out of sync. This causes things like hormonal imbalance and fatigue.\n\n- Dehydration: You may not be aware of how little food and drink you've had throughout your travel as you don't do much physical activity. This causes things such as dizziness, headaches, loss of appetite, tiredness, confusion, and irritability.\n\n- Dry Environment: The air you breathe in an airliner was heated from -30 Celsius to room temp with the engines, so most of the humidity is gone. Staying in this very dry environment is what causes the plane to feel \"stuffy\". This also dehydrates you slightly quicker.\n\n- Low air pressure: Airliners are usually pressurized to the equivalent of 8000 ft above sea level, which means you receive much less oxygen per breath. This causes light headedness, tingling, fatigue, loss of appetite, and nausea.\n\n- Unergonomic Posture: Sitting upright for long periods at a time with very limited exercise is a recipe for aches, pains, and fatigue.\n\nEdit spelling.",
"Being a bird is a rough time. We all have to play with the hand we are dealt. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
15h76l
|
Since the Earth and the Sun are constantly moving in their respective orbits, is it fair to say we'll never be in the same spot in the Universe again?
|
As I understand astronomy, the Earth is orbiting the Sun, which is in turn moving in the Milky Way, which is moving outwards like the rest of the Galaxies. Or is there a chance we will return to this "point" some day?
Edit: Thank you for all the interesting answers, I learned a lot today
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15h76l/since_the_earth_and_the_sun_are_constantly_moving/
|
{
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"c7mesc7",
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],
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2
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"text": [
" > As I understand astronomy, the Earth is orbiting the Sun\n\nThat's one reference frame. There's also a reference frame in which Earth is stationary. Both are equally valid, though one may be preferable for various calculational purposes.\n\n > the Sun, which is in turn moving in the Milky Way\n\nThat's one reference frame. There's also a reference frame in which the sun is stationary. Both are equally valid, though one may be preferable for various calculational purposes.\n\n > which is moving outwards like the rest of the Galaxies.\n\nThis is technically also a valid reference frame, but it's a very, very odd one. Specifically, it's taking some arbitrary intergalactic point in space as being stationary. I *suspect* this is because you have a view of the universe as a bunch of galaxies all receding from some central point where the big bang occurred, but it's important to realize that this is *not* how things went down. Rather, at the moment of the big bang, every point go further from every other point. As such, which point you choose to take as your \"fixed\" center away from which everything else is expanding is arbitrary: where ever you are in the universe, you will see all sufficiently distant galaxies as receding from you at a rate proportional to their distance.\n\n > is there a chance we will return to this \"point\" some day?\n\nIn the reference frame centered on Earth we never leave this point, and that reference frame is just as valid as any other.",
"Determine what this point is.\n\nNo honestly, to determine where a point is, you need something to reference that is locked or unchanging. Nothing like that exists in the universe. The universe is relative, and depending on your reference things can change.\n\nAs RelativisticMechanic has stated, the Earth only orbits the Sun from our reference point. Another reference point can show the Earth as unmoving and stationary. \n\nSo how can an answer be applied, when the concept of a specific place doesn't exist in the Universe? The closest would be the CMB reference frame, and that only allows you to get a reference of your speed relative to that reference frame. No ultimate reference frame exists.\n\nThis is simliar to asking \"Where the big bang happened?\" and the answer is everywhere. Space itself expanded into existance along with time and matter, it happened everywhere at once and is continuing to expand in all directions equally today."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
44d4fw
|
is the human immune system "stronger" now than it was 1000+ years ago? (not including knowledge of simple things like hand washing, etc.)
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44d4fw/eli5_is_the_human_immune_system_stronger_now_than/
|
{
"a_id": [
"czpc1lq",
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],
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8
],
"text": [
"Evolution does not change a lot in a thousand years. There is a dance between infectious diseases and their hosts. A really deadly disease kills the host and therefore itself.\n\nWe have found antibiotics that work for a while.\n\nLet me relate a story about malaria.\n\nMalaria is the number one killer of humans. It has done this for a long long time. There are specific malarias for all vertebrates. There are specific ones for humans, several species.\n\nHumans invented DDT. We thought we had malaria licked. DDT was used very widely. There was a dramatic fall in malaria cases for a while. Then DDT resistant mosquitoes developed. DDT not working. It also was doing widespread damage in the environment. It was banned.\n\nLater a new technique was developed. Spraying DDT on the inside of huts killed only the female mosquitoes which had fed on the blood of humans. Resistance would not become widespread. We thought we were winning.\nThe hut wall spraying campaign began. Hut wall spraying only killed mosquitoes on the walls of huts, and cats. The cat effect was noticed by villagers. They liked their cats. Cats kill rats and mice.\n\nDDT also kills wasps that live in huts preying on caterpillars living in the roofs of the huts. The wasps died. The caterpillars thrived. The roofs fell in.\n\nFinally it was noticed that female mosquitoes were no longer always stopping to rest on the walls of the huts. Instead they fly outside first. Evolution in action.\n\nNow bed nets education and permethrin seem the way to go. For now. \n\n",
"In such a short amount of time (evolutionary speaking) there would be almost no innate difference in \"strength\" - by which I assume you mean the ability to combat infection from bacteria, viruses, and parasites etc.\n\nImmune systems need training to get \"better\" or \"stronger\". So exposure is really the only way to improve your immune system. This is as true today as it was 1000 years ago.\n\nStarting from scratch (i.e. a totally new immune system), and given the same exposure to the same infectious agents - you should find no difference in the ability to combat the infection.\n\nThough if you had the ability to time travel - either person in this scenario would likely be doomed. Bring a person from 1000 years ago to today, or take a person today and drop them off somewhere 1000 years ago - and both people would have very poor immune systems in comparison to the native people of that time.\n\nThis is because neither person would have a \"trained\" immune system against anything they would encounter in this time (since bacteria evolves much faster than humans). Both people would likely get sick very quickly, if not outright die from the exposure.\n\nIn short - it's not about which point in time that makes a better immune system, it's about what the immune system is exposed to during that person's lifetime (assuming no other health issues)."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
7zrjef
|
What was Julius Caesar’s legacy as a politician? Was he remembered as an absolutist and a populist or as the demigod that tried to end the corrupted Senate?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7zrjef/what_was_julius_caesars_legacy_as_a_politician/
|
{
"a_id": [
"durkjj7"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Not to discourage further answers but you might enjoy reading these:\n\n[Why when people hear Julius Caesar, do they think of a great historical figure and a tragedy in the form of his assassination, when he was so obviously a tyrant?](_URL_0_) by /u/Celebreth\n\n[Was Julius Caesar a reformist, a conservative, or just an opportunist?](_URL_1_) by /u/Tiako\n\nBut there's always more that can be said on this!"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21574z/why_when_people_hear_julius_caesar_do_they_think/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hfg6f/was_julius_caesar_a_reformist_a_conservative_or/"
]
] |
||
wp74v
|
why people enjoy the bitter taste of alcohol
|
I've always found the taste of alcohol to be quite unpleasantly bitter. How do so many people find alcohol enjoyable at all? Milk, tea, soda, juice,... taste so much better, why aren't they more popular at parties and social events?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wp74v/eli5_why_people_enjoy_the_bitter_taste_of_alcohol/
|
{
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"c5f81yn",
"c5f82sr",
"c5f8cf5"
],
"score": [
2,
6,
2
],
"text": [
"You know how sometimes you prefer apple juice over orange juice? People also prefer some beers over others. The great thing about beer is that the flavors of it range so much. You can have a nice, smooth beer without any bitterness or you can get a really bitter beer depending on your tastes or the occasion. \n\nPlus, beer gets you drunk.",
"Even though alcohol isn't usually as pleasant to drink as soda and juice, drinking it usually makes people happier and more social. That's why people like to drink alcohol at parties and social events.\n\nAlso, having milk at a party would be a [poor choice](_URL_0_).",
"Depends what alcohol you drink. Some drinks are fruity and sweet. If you drink more expensive, refined spirits, they tend to be less unpleasant to taste.\n\nIf you're talking abour Beer, it can be quite bitter. Tastes do develop, and, frankly, there are some beers that are really tasty, enjoyable to drink for the taste, not the alcohol.\n\nSoft drinks are less popular because they don't get you drunk. Being a bit drunk can be fun. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FM3Em7FIOc"
],
[]
] |
|
1576zn
|
What the rationale for the Soviets letting the East German army keep it's Prussian tradition?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1576zn/what_the_rationale_for_the_soviets_letting_the/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c7jzni4"
],
"score": [
10
],
"text": [
"Though I'm not an expert, I think the assumption you're making is incorrect. The East German army didn't keep Prussian military traditions, they adopted Prussian military traditions. \n\nThe National People's Army was established in 1956. East Germany didn't have an army before then. Post World War II communism also fully embraced nationalism and allowed for it. As long as the commissars were there keeping the army firmly within the ideological grasp of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, there were no issues.\n\nThe USSR and East Germany's neighbors knew that the DDR wasn't going to be invading its neighbors as well. Germany was divided, people were trying to escape the DDR whenever they could, and the Warsaw Pact's command structure pretty much allowed the USSR to take control of a member state's military whenever they wanted. The East German army was relatively small and East Germany never had a large population either. \n\n**tl;dr If the East Germans want to goose step around in stahlhelms, that's fine as long as they're communists. If the USSR wanted to, they could change things up pretty easily.**"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
fossrl
|
how does morse code work
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fossrl/eli5_how_does_morse_code_work/
|
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"text": [
"With silences. A silence the duration of three dots separates between letters, while a silence with the duration of 7 dots separates between words.",
"Morse code comes from a time when we couldn't transmit voice or video over wired and wireless links yet.\n\nImagine having a radio where the only reliable sound you can make is a beep. So we invented a method of using different beeps to represent a message.\n\nMorse consists of 3 symbols.\n\nA dot or short beep\n\nA dash or a long beep\n\nAnd a space or silence\n\nEach letter and number is encoded using a series of these symbols separated by a space to represent the end of a word.\n\nInterestingly a lot of abbreviations we still use comes from Morse. Like MSG for Message, or OK for okay. This was to make it easier to transmit messages. So technically we've been using internet slang since the Morse days.\n\nThe most famous one of course being SOS (Save our Souls) which was used because SOS in Morse is ... - - - ... which was very easier to transmit and very noticeable.\n\nIf you've studied aviation at all you would know that all airports have a 3-digit designation like YYZ (Toronto) which also comes from the Morse days\n\nWhen you get good at it people can listen to morse and translate it live.\n\nThis is a live translator that you can input words and sentences and see what the output would sound like in Morse. You can hear the spaces.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Letters, words, and sentences were separated by increasing amounts of silence.\n\nAlso, telegraph operators would typically write the letters down as they arrived, and if something was unclear you could figure it out by context.",
"It's all about the timing. A dash has to be a certain length of time (something like the time of two dots, I think), and a break between letters is another certain length of time, and the break between a wordis a longer length of time.\n\nIt means that the system can transmit as fast or as slow as you like, because it's about the rhythm and spacing and consistency, rather than anything else. It also means that it's as simple as possible - you can transmit with a \"dot\" that you can only turn on/off once a second (e.g. a lightbulb that's slow to come on), or at 100WPM... so long as a dash is the same length of time as X amount of dots, and the breaks are the appropriate number of \"dot\" pauses.\n\nAnd you only need ONE signal - digital on or off. No guesswork, interpretation, etc. required."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"https://morsecode.world/international/translator.html"
],
[],
[]
] |
||
2iqj4s
|
[META] Is it just me or are there way more [deleted] comments in this sub as compared to other popular subs? Why is that?
|
All too often I am late to a post, only to see endless streams of [deleted] comments. It seems like this phenomenon is more pronounced in this sub than others.
So first, am I wrong? Do I just really crave the information more in this sub, so memories if the [deleted] stuff stands out in my mind? Or is it actually more prevalent here than elsewhere?
If it is prevalent here, well, why could that be? Any insight would be much appreciated.
And finally, I'm sorry if this post is out of line. I tried to read the sidebar, but it was hard to navigate on mobile. Mods, of you have to delete this, I would still like some of your thoughts (so if that is the case, message me?).
Cheers
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2iqj4s/meta_is_it_just_me_or_are_there_way_more_deleted/
|
{
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"text": [
"This subreddit has quite clear rules and they are enforced well. This results in a very quality sub, and in turn a reasonably popular one. It also results in some posts being graveyards of deleted comments. This is a testimony to the greatness of our all powerful overlord moderators. Long may they reign.\n\n",
"Trust me on this: I don't mod here, but I mod over in ye olde /r/askscience which has a similar comment philosophy. You are *not* missing anything in these deleted trees. The contain unsourced answers, bad attempts at puns, etc. \n\nIf you're here because you're interested in history, then the deleted trees are a good thing! What is left is quality, informative, and well written answers that are correct. \n\nI wish we could run AskScience as tight as they do over here, but with 3+ million users it is nearly impossible.",
"You certainly aren't mistaken! The moderation team is very active and we are aggressive in our enforcement of the rules. Posts that break the rules of the sub are removed, and in cases of egregious or repeat violations, the poster is warned for their behavior, or even banned.\n\nSome time ago, I did an impromptu study of removed comments in a thread that had gotten popular. I didn't save a link to the thread, but because I'm a very messy person, I still have the paper I did the tallies on, so I can give you a run down of what the deleted comments in a typical thread are!\n\nOut of the 60 TOP LEVEL comments *(this excludes follow up comments)*\n\n* 3 User Comments were visible\n\n* 2 Mod Comments were visible\n\n----------------------\n\n* 3 comments had been removed for being [questionable or simply wrong.](_URL_1_)\n\n* 1 comment was removed pending a [request for a source](_URL_2_)\n\n* 7 comments were removed for [being one one or two sentence answers.](_URL_1_)\n\n* 4 comments were removed for being [personal anecdotes](_URL_3_)\n\n* 2 comments were removed for [being jokes](_URL_4_)\n\n* *23* comments were posts that [were only links, with no context](_URL_0_). Mostly Wikipedia I would imagine, but I didn't separate what the links were in my notes.\n\n* *13* comments were removed because they were comments asking why all the comments had been removed!\n\n* 2 comments were removed because they simply made no sense whatsoever.\n\nSo as you can see, generally speaking you aren't missing anything. Hope that clarifies things for you a bit."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_do_not_just_post_links_or_quotations",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_sources",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_personal_anecdotes",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_jokes_and_humour"
]
] |
|
3ypvwa
|
who owns the land that roads are on? can you purchase that land?
|
All roads take up a little bit of land, usually a thin strip of land. Who owns that land?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ypvwa/eli5_who_owns_the_land_that_roads_are_on_can_you/
|
{
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"cyfk83a"
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"text": [
"The exact arrangement varies by location. In some places, the land is owned by the adjacent landowners, but the city, county or state government has a right of way permitting it to build the road. This means that if it were ever stricken as a public road, it would revert ownership to the adjacent owners.\n\nIn other areas, the land is simply owned by the government, and it can use it as it likes. One side effect of this is that the air space above the road is government-owned, too, so you have to purchase permission if e.g. you want to build a walkway over the road."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
2rrqjr
|
the sports and competition seeding system for playoffs or things like octa/quarterfinals
|
Why are teams pitted against each other the way they are? Why does the first seed always compete against the last seed?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rrqjr/eli5_the_sports_and_competition_seeding_system/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cnimqh3",
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3
],
"text": [
"In some activities this is called the \"power protect\" tournament system. It is to reward the players/teams/competitor with the best regular season or preliminary rounds performance. \n\nThis system is the most likely to produce the two best teams in the final round... Notice that the only way the #1 seed and the #2 seed will ever meet in this tournament will be in the finals because they have been 'protected' from playing each other.\n\n",
"It results in a more likely outcome of a final between the best teams. If you seeded 1st vs 2nd, 3rd vs 4th, etc, then you're guaranteed to knock out one of the top 2 teams in the first round."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
1hnsh4
|
If I went to 1st century Rome with 100 pounds of salt, how rich would I be?
|
Would I be able to buy a house? How long could I live off it? Would I screw up the local economy too badly?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hnsh4/if_i_went_to_1st_century_rome_with_100_pounds_of/
|
{
"a_id": [
"caw4qep",
"caw5957"
],
"score": [
164,
47
],
"text": [
"Are you sure you didn't mean to write pepper or some other (for that age) luxury spice? At that time the Mediterranean cultures already knew how to extract salt from the sea and salt mines were abundant. 100 pounds of salt wouldn't get you very far. ",
"I also would like to ask what should someone travelling back to 1st century Rome take with them that they could reasonably carry in the space of a rucksack that would be the most valuable?\n\nObviously something that would not be a new invention or beyond their greatest capabilities, something that at the time period would be the most valuable substance or item. Or would it just be gold?\n\nEdit: Some decent suggestions but as I said not something outside their capabilities. Not things that are completely unknown for the time period just things that are extremely rare. Even rare knowledge or inventions so long as it had been discovered by someone of that time period and they are credited. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
1x3r17
|
Does the flight from Europe and USA (and in the other way) lasts longer/shorter because of Earth movement beneath the plane?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1x3r17/does_the_flight_from_europe_and_usa_and_in_the/
|
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"text": [
"It doesn't create any real effect on travel time; Air in our atmosphere tends to rotate with the earth. A small headwind however can change flight times by hours. These winds tend to blow in one direction, so traveling one way you'll have a tailwind, reducing your travel time.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Main reason why flights from the North America to Europe are shorter is because the upper-level winds in the atmosphere at the mid-latitudes blow west to east. Aircraft heading east travel with a tailwind whereas aircraft heading west have a headwind. \n\n[Here is an image of the 250 millibar wind speeds](_URL_0_) (approx 30,000 feet above sea level), at 12Z Wed Feb 05 2014 per the 0-hour GFS model run at the same time. The jet stream blows anywhere from 100-200 kt+ from the west in the winter months. It weakens in the summer months and migrates poleward a bit.",
"You'll experience the Coriolis effect, especially if you travel north near the pole and come back down, which many planes do.\n\nHere are some fun reads\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_",
"Solar heating generates 3 convective cells in both the north and southern hemisphere. Near the equator are Hadley Cells. They tend to generate constant winds about 15^o north and south of the equator. Over the poles there are Polar cells, they're like big static air glaciers with vortexes on the edges. In between the Ferrell Cell mixes between the warm tropics and the cold polar cells. Those are more ropey and twisty. At the top of the Ferrell cell air has been lofted up from the tropics and is flowing towards the poles. That air has the rotational velocity of the equator, so when it gets far north if it has retained a lot of that equatorial velocity it tends to jet along on the boundary where the cell convects down. That boundary is the [jet stream](_URL_0_).\n\nEvery day, twice a day airline service companies develop a network of tracks that cross the northern and southern oceans to take advantage of these tailwinds. The westbound tracks avoid the jetstream. Eastbound tracks follow them. Its like a line of spagetti strung out over the oceans. They're called North Atlantic Tracks (NAT) between Europe and the US. These are just lat/longs like YHZ (halifax) to 65N060W to 66N050W 70N040W to 71N030W etc all the way to Shanwick, which is near 0W (ie Grennich Meridian). There are six to ten NAT tracks for both the day and night tracks [west and eastbound tracks](_URL_1_). \n\nThese tail winds can be anywhere from 30knots to 200knots. A nautical mile per hour is just a bit faster than a mile per hour. The entire route won't have high tail winds usually. The routes the flights fly is more a minimal gas track than it is a minimal time track. \n\nPlanes don't exactly compensate for Coriolis effects. I've never heard that term used in an aeronautical setting. If they are high enough to take advantage of jet streams they're not choosing their routes. They just fly the routes they're cleared to fly, crabbing into the wind to maintain their assigned heading. They're expected to stay at a specific altitude to within about 300' and a specific course to within no more than 4 or 5 km deviation laterally. Most big planes don't float off course much at all over the ocean. You can tell time by them."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/dynamics/q0027.shtml"
],
[
"http://imgur.com/Sj1EzPZ"
],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_route",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect#Rotating_sphere",
"http://geography.about.com/od/physicalgeography/a/coriolis.htm"
],
[
"http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/080104_gfs_maxwind_anim.gif",
"http://www.bcavirtual.com/VA%20flight%20School/atlantictracks1.gif"
]
] |
||
33pud5
|
Some modern animals look just like their long-extinct ancestors. Have these "living fossils" really not changed in millions of years?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/33pud5/some_modern_animals_look_just_like_their/
|
{
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"text": [
"It might be easiest to explain using a specific example. I'll use one of the poster boys of living fossils, the horseshoe crab, the best studied of which is the atlantic horseshoe crab, *Limulus polyphemus*.\n\nAlthough \"horseshoe crabs\" may have been extant as early as 450 million years ago, *L. polyphemus* itself is not nearly so old. In fact, the entire genus *Limulus* is, at best, in the tens of millions of years old, when it genetically split from the other variants of horseshoe crab (of the genus *Tachypleus*). Though the horseshoe crabs look very similar anatomically, speciation did occur multiple times through its long history. In comparing currently extant horseshoe crabs to the oldest fossil, that of *Lunataspis aurora*, there are anatomical differences - the backplate of extant horseshoe crabs is fused, while on *L. aurora*, it is in two parts.\n\nSetting speciation and morphology aside, there is also genetic diversity, and even geographically-delineated change within *L. polyphemus*. Populations sampled along the east coast of the United States showed significant diversity in their mitochondrial DNA sequence, and a north-south \"break\" was found, demonstrating current divergences in the species.\n\nReferences [here](_URL_2_), [here](_URL_1_), and [here](_URL_0_).",
"Fossils only record the shape of part of the animal. There could be all sorts of, say, biochemical changes going on that we'd never be able to detect.\n\nKeep in mind that if fossils of a lion and a tiger were found today, they'd almost certainly be classified as the same species.",
"When most people talk about \"living fossils\" today, I think they really mean \"conservative morphology\". For instance, modern cockroaches are morphologically similar to their Carboniferous ancestors, but we know for a fact that their biology has changed significantly since then (for instance, ancient cockroaches apparently used external ovipositors), making their more direct ancestors more recent. True living fossils are, IMO, quite rare; Gingko and Lingula are pretty good examples."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.jstor.org/stable/2410522?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents",
"http://www.genetics.org/content/112/3/613.full.pdf",
"http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4983.2007.00746.x/full"
],
[],
[]
] |
||
b5pk01
|
what does a non compete clause stop workers from doing?
|
I've been hearing it more and more in movies recently.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b5pk01/eli5_what_does_a_non_compete_clause_stop_workers/
|
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"text": [
"It means you can't go work for a competing company either durring employment and usually for a set period after you leave the company.",
"And it is not legal in many areas.",
"I'm a consultant. I signed a non-compete that prevents me from getting a job with any companies that are current clients of the firm I work for for 15 months. Generally I bill at a higher rate than even the fully burdened cost of a full time employee and that is to prevent companies from using the consulting firm as a headhunter then hiring good people out from under them. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nIn practice, ti actually happens all the time, but the non-compete gives the consulting firm the leverage to negotiate continued contracts or some kind of settlement for the loss of business. I've never seen anyone who really wants to leave get stopped, so in this case it's pretty amicable. (who wants employees that actively don't want to work for you?)",
"A noncompete clause says something like “if you leave our company, you can’t go work for competitors during a defined time period within a defined geographic radius.” The actual competitors will typically be listed, but they may also be described. \n\nThese may or may not be legally enforceable. This depends on a lot of factors, including your state law, your job duties, and how broad the agreement is. \n\nBut even if the noncompete clause *is* enforceable, it may or may not prevent you from working at a competitor. It’s more likely to require you to pay money damages for breaching the agreement. Those damages may be paid by your new employer if you agree with them to do that. ",
"You can’t work in a similar field for a set length of time. This used to be pretty standard for executives in a lot of fields. It was a plot point in Mad Men, for example—the creative director couldn’t just quit and work for another advertising company. In real life, Conan O’Brien quit his hosting job with NBC and then he couldn’t just go and start a new TV host job for some months after quitting. Once that time had passed, he got his current job at a new channel.\n\nHowever, it is increasingly becoming common with low ranking people in companies who get paid very little. This in effect means they can’t leave the company where they work because they can’t work in any other company that uses their skills. When this kind of contract clause is used for people working almost paycheck to paycheck, it means they’re trapped. An executive doesn’t live paycheck to paycheck so can afford to wait out the contract, or have their new company buy out their contract. Like Conan O’Brien could wait 8 months with no job. But Joe the plant supervisor whose salary is $50k/year and has a mortgage, a family, and a baby on the way can’t quit and get a job at McDonald’s but he is forbidden from working as a plant supervisor elsewhere for 3 years.",
"I was downsized by a major company that tried to tell me if I took the severance package I could never work in that field again, anywhere. Completely illegal. I raised sand and they backed down pretty quick. Post employment non competes are illegal in Oklahoma. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
6b6wwa
|
why are mortgages so much more common in the u.s. than in other countries?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6b6wwa/eli5_why_are_mortgages_so_much_more_common_in_the/
|
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2
],
"text": [
"Why do you think this is?\n\nPeople take out loans for homes in every corner of the globe, they usually cannot purchase them straight up.\n\nA mortgage is just the name of a loan you get to buy a home."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
18ien7
|
how do women in burqas pass through customs in an airport?
|
I'm not trying to be in any way offensive, but how does photo identification work for Islamic women wearing full burqas?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18ien7/how_do_women_in_burqas_pass_through_customs_in_an/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c8f2dvt",
"c8f2qvh"
],
"score": [
6,
5
],
"text": [
"Honestly women in full burqas are a small fraction of all Muslim women. And usually from the poorest Islamic nations. I doubt many of this already small population actually fly. But if they did I'm guessing a female security officer would ask to see them unveiled. ",
"In India they go into a closed booth where a female security officer does any inspection and identity verification."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
q9jlk
|
Are hormones passed from the donor to the recipient in a blood transfer? How do they treat the blood before it's ready for use?
|
Is the treatment process mostly emulsification? I don't imagine hormones to have much mass, and they would probably differ from one to another. So do they just leave them in?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/q9jlk/are_hormones_passed_from_the_donor_to_the/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c3vujnj"
],
"score": [
8
],
"text": [
"Yes hormones exist in transfused blood. Whole blood or plazma will contain [hormones from the donor](_URL_2_).\n\nIn most cases the hormone levels are insignificant so they aren't a consideration. However, in some cases the remaining hormones are used for [therapeutic purposes](_URL_0_).\n\nThe hormones can break down over time. A much faster change is in the concentration of nitric oxide in blood. Nitric oxide dilates blood vessels, so an [infusion of blood with very little nitric oxide can cause problems](_URL_1_). It is becoming more common to also give nitric oxide along with a blood transfusion to avoid these problems.\n\nIn some cases blood is frozen for long term storage. I know that freezing blood will destroy some of the surface proteins, making rejection less likely, so I assume that the same process could degrade hormones faster, but I don't have any real evidence to back that up."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21051865",
"http://www.economist.com/node/9941992",
"http://www.mayoclinic.org/blood-transfusion/"
]
] |
|
9iw7pm
|
are there any negative side effects to eating a tumor?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9iw7pm/eli5_are_there_any_negative_side_effects_to/
|
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"text": [
"When you say eat, do you mean like eating with your mouth and digestive system or like with your immune system attacking something?",
"I’m honestly not sure how much nutritional benefit could be gained, but it wouldn’t be poisonous nor give you cancer. Only side effect would be grossing out the redditors who read your question, afaik. ",
"No more so than eating non-cancerous tissue of the same cell type.\n\nMammalian cells can’t survive the digestion process, only a few specialized bacteria have that honor. The tumor would be broken down and digested just like any other animal tissue. \n\nAs for how it would taste, that would depend on the type of cell the tumor was made of and how it was prepared, but likely it wouldn’t be very good.",
"I love how this question is tagged “learning” as if anyone here is going to apply this knowledge ",
"I don't know if this applies to humans, but there are known instances of contagious cancers. One example is the Tasmanian devil, who has been decimated by a contagious face cancer. \n\nJust to be on the safe side, I would advise *against* eating a tumor.",
"Biologically, there probably wouldn't be any negative effects, as the tissue would be broken down during the digestion process. Socially though, I would think cannibalism would be looked down on.",
"I had a small fatty, gelatinous tumor removed from my breast called a myxoma and enjoyed it atop a ceasar salad alongside some green olives.",
"I got a piece of fried chicken with a tumor on it. I am no doctor, if this it wasn’t a tumor I don’t know what the hell it was. It looked like regular chicken meat other than the fact it was a strange out of place growth. Ate around it, but I bet it would have tasted like chicken.",
"A tumor is still organic tissue, it would be destroyed in the digestion process, as for the taste, it depends of what kind of tumor and obviously if it's cooked, seasoned, etc.",
" > *What would it taste like?*\n\nPicture this conversation:\n\n < chewing > \n\n\n\"It might be a tumor.\"\n\n\"It's not a tumah.\"\n\n & #x200B;",
"An unusual but interesting question. \n\nAs mentioned, beyond a possible change in texture and possibly taste, i do not expect a particular difference from regular tissues. \n\nI also suspect the cow industry doesn't segregate cancerous parts. That would be very difficult. \n\nIn other words : I'm pretty sure that Macdonald burgers would already have some, very regularly. ",
"Have you been listening to Nirvana?",
"The more important question here, is why? ",
"I read that as \"tuber\" and thought \"No, why are you asking?\" Now I'm gonna go and throw up.",
"Thanks for asking this gross question. I recently found out I'd spent the last little while swallowing semen from a cancerous testicle. And I was mildly concerned but know cancer isn't contagious. I still didn't know if this was different as the cells were entering my body. as I'm not the one seeing an oncologist, I have no clue where to ask. Google mildly reassured it was safe. I'd still like more reassurance.\n\n(the guy didn't know either. Just found out a few weeks ago) "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
1zf3mn
|
How close do atoms in a given space have to be in order for sound to be able to travel across them?
|
I've learned that there's no sound in space, because there are none (or very few) atoms, whereas sound moves just fine through our atmosphere. So where's the line drawn? How many atoms are needed for sound to travel and how close must they be?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1zf3mn/how_close_do_atoms_in_a_given_space_have_to_be_in/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cftadur"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"The is no distinct line. The average distance between atoms in a gas (ideal gas really, but it's the same at the low-pressure limit) is inversely proportional to the pressure. \n\nSo what you're asking is the same thing as what the lowest pressure is, at which you can have sound. But sound is a propagating [_fluctuation_ in the pressure](_URL_0_). Clearly, the fluctuation in the pressure (i.e. the amplitude of the sound wave, or simply 'volume' of the sound) can't be larger than the absolute pressure, since the pressure cannot go below zero. The less matter you have to make waves in, the smaller the waves can be. \n\nSo sound doesn't 'stop' at any point, a single atom bouncing off something could be counted as part of a sound wave, but it's certainly not a very _loud_ sound. So it doesn't stop, it just gets quieter.\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.castlegroup.co.uk/images/2011/03/sound-pressure-graph.gif"
]
] |
|
38hx6h
|
How does β-NMR-spectroscopy work?
|
I'm trying to learn more about this form of spectroscopy as part of a lecture on nuclear chemistry I'm attending. So far, I haven't come across a really concise explanation of the process and what is detected in comparison to standard NMR.
I'd be glad for any help in understanding this method!
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/38hx6h/how_does_βnmrspectroscopy_work/
|
{
"a_id": [
"crvjlnc"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"I'm surprised nobodies said anything yet, so I guess i'll try to give it a shot.\n\nBasically any NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) application is using the nuclear spin of the material to identify what the material is. It's done by using magnets to orient the direction of the spin, then using another magnet that is pulsed to essentially \"flip\" the spin state. [This explains more about what exactly is the NMR lab](_URL_1_). \n\nFrom what I [gather] (_URL_0_), beta-NMR is a method of NMR which implants beta particles into whatever material you're studying to reduce the amount of sensitivity you need. That is because beta particles have more spin than other particles.\n\nI would highly recommend asking this is the physics community. This stuffs a bit out of my league, I've only done a couple labs on PNMR, and ESR so I am still trying to understand it myself."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.triumf.info/wiki/bnmr/index.php/%CE%92-NMR/NQR_Manual#Introduction",
"https://www.physics.rutgers.edu/grad/506/Pulsed_NMR.pdf"
]
] |
|
16qz2b
|
How close exactly was India to the USSR? What was the nature of the Indo-Soviet friendship, and were the Indo-Pakistani wars actually proxy wars?
|
Indian guy here with a great interest in my country's relationship to the Soviet Union. I've always wondered how exactly the relationship between the two countries worked, especially during the Cold War and during the time of India and Pakistan's nuclear tests.
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16qz2b/how_close_exactly_was_india_to_the_ussr_what_was/
|
{
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"text": [
"Enemy of my enemy is my friend. USA was afraid of the potential impact of USSR having access to Arabian sea. So they had strong point in endorsing Pak, and provided aid/arms. Indo-soviet ties became a natural consequence. Two non-aligned nations thus sided with major powers. There are few stranger bed fellows than these. A democratic nation naturally prefers other democracies. Pakistan before 2000 was not seen as a liability. The n-factor and 9/11, along with now defunct Ussr blostered new ties. India still doesn't trust US, a country which imposed millitary sanctions, when it comes to defence procurements.",
"The USSR has always had fairly warm ties with India, and these ties became warmer as the Sino-Soviet split became apparent. The deterioration of the USSR-China relationship made close ties with India a natural fit. USSR began aid and technology transfers to India and both countries jointly developed their military industries. There was always Soviet support for Indian sovereignty, cultural, industrial, and technological exchanges. There were never any military entanglement though, despite weapons sales. \n\nThe Soviets took a more neutral stance on India's issues with Pakistan and acted as peacemakers. Kosygin himself helped broker the peace deal during the 1965 war. \n\nThis has always been strange to me, and a testament to Indian diplomacy. India has maintained cordial relations with both sides during the cold war, successfully maintained its interests in the region, and didn't fully commit to one side or the other. While Indian relations with the USSR were warmer than with the US during the 1970s and 80s, it still didn't go over to the Soviet camp completely. ",
"While India and Pakistan received aid and arms from the Soviets and the U.S. respectively, I wouldn't characterize their wars as proxy wars - the motivation for the conflicts were completely internal and were not encouraged by their patrons. ",
"Great question. \n\nI would love to add a little more complexity to the question if I may. \n\nHow did China (and Chairman Mao) end up siding with Pakistan? The US, USSR, India, Pakistan and China relationship is so damn interesting.",
"You've been provided with almost everything here. You'd be aware of prior Indian use of British military hardware? \n\nWell, during the Bangladeshi war of Independence the US pressured Britain to not resupply India and this is where the strategic relationship was cemented. \n\nSoviet direct foreign policy rarely clashed with India due to areas of influence, and with Nehru (did I get the right guy?) being such a prominent member of the anti-colonial Non-Aligned Movement the seeds of Indias independent decision making were born. The difference, in this case was that India was always too powerful to be 'taken' by either side, unlike say Korea, Chile, Iraq or Yugoslavia. ",
"I think it should be noted that under Nehru, India pursued a very unique and previously untried foreign policy based on peaceful universal ideals centered on championing human dignity throughout the world. His rather unconventional stance which centered on humanitarian ideals didn't win him any close friends in either the US government or the USSR. \n\nPeople often mistakenly and dare I say even ignorantly label India as being part of the non-alignment movement during the Cold War. I would disagree, well, by that I mean I would disagree that Nehru himself was non-alignment anyway. His vision for India's role in international politics wasn't centered on playing the Russians off the US in order to keep India untangled from Cold War intricacies. Instead, he hoped to help establish a new world order based on humanitarian ideals.\n\nUnfortunately, one could say Nehru's idealism was effectively quashed when the Chinese under Mao easily invaded India. Mao's invasion seriously traumatized Nehru and made him largely question all of his previous idealism. A few years later, Nehru died a broken man unsure of himself and the efficacy of his international policies.\n\nFor more information, I recommend you check out [The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World](_URL_0_).\n\nOh yes, and btw, there are still many questions unanswered about the Sino-Indian relationship. Academically speaking, so much work can be done in that area of history."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16qz2b/how_close_exactly_was_india_to_the_ussr_what_was/"
]
] |
|
1grwsb
|
why is muhammed ali considered the greatest (or one of the greatest) boxers of all time if he lost five times?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1grwsb/why_is_muhammed_ali_considered_the_greatest_or/
|
{
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"text": [
"Because he was an incredibly polarizing personality and a very, very dominant boxer in his prime. I would suggest watching his fights to understand.",
"It's how you wiin, who you win against and how you come back. Ali did it all in style, entertained and was a good boxer. I think people need to realize that loses in a career meant you went against good competition, or that you got cocky and needed to come back. \n\n He fought what... 60 or 61 fights and lost 5 you say.. maybe a few non decsions. Thats a good record I say.",
"Good answer here: _URL_0_\n\nThe point about not focusing on losses is well taken. If we focused on the negative, we'd all be talking about the fact that Babe Ruth failed to hit the ball more than 65% of the time over his entire career.",
"because of who he beat and he was a great self promoter. People loved to watch him box he was smooth and exciting to watch.",
"You should ask this in /r/boxing to get better answers. ",
"From an article by Max Kellerman. \n > The only heavyweight champion in history to beat more than one other great heavyweight in that heavyweight's prime -- and Ali did this several times when he was no longer at his best! Even if you take Joe Frazier and George Foreman and even Sonny Liston off his resume, Ali still has an argument for greatest heavyweight ever. He beat Floyd Patterson twice, Jerry Quarry twice, Ron Lyle, Ernie Shavers, Jimmy Ellis, Doug Jones, Ernie Terrell, Joe Bugner twice, Oscar Bonavena, and George Chuvalo twice. And this isn't even name dropping because I left out old Archie Moore and Zora Folley, and washed up Cleveland Williams and too many others to mention here. Between 1964 and 1967, when Ali was in his prime, he was the untouchable. Between 1970 and 1978, a faded Ali dominated the most talent-rich heavyweight landscape in history.\n_URL_0_\n\nThe ELI5 he beat a lot of the best fighters of all time while in their prime.\n",
"It's worth mentioning that he is not the consensus greatest fighter of all time.\n\nThat honor often goes to \"Sugar\"Ray Robinson (not to be confused with Sugar Ray Leonard)\n\nI think people are so quick to declare him the greatest of all time because \n\nA) He is one of the greatest ever\nB) He is perhaps the most famous boxer in history",
"For a champion, boxing is largely about ducking fights, fake title bouts against tomato cans, and making challengers jump through hoops to get to you.\n\nAli took on all comers. He fought some of the greatest heavyweights of all time, and fought them often, and lost to a few. He also fought in a few bouts in the late 70s when he was well past his prime.",
"To be the best you have to beat the best. In this way Ali is considered to be so great because he beat many of the other \"one of the greatest boxers of all time\" Sonny Liston, George Foreman, Joe Frazier, etc. Also most of loses came at the very end of his career and the loses before that he avenged. Losing 5 times is also not a big deal when you win 56 times. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120415141107AASNHXn"
],
[],
[],
[
"http://a.espncdn.com/boxing/columns/kellerman_max/1345943.html"
],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
dghk3k
|
what does the secretary general of the united nations do?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dghk3k/eli5_what_does_the_secretary_general_of_the/
|
{
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],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"He or she expresses concerns... sometimes, on rare occasions, they express deep concerns. That’s about it.",
"The title is pretty explanatory. The UN itself is mostly consisting of clerical and administrative staff as it is the member nations who make all the decisions and executes those decisions. The Secretary General is the top most position in the UN and he is responsible for everything the UN organization does. Basically he is the secretary of the UN General Assembly. So when they want to have a meeting they delegate the tasks to the Secretary General."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
1rdonn
|
why schrödinger's cat needs to be observed, and why someone/thing needs to be observing everything around us?
|
Even a wiki page would be great, I just wouldnt know where to begin.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rdonn/eli5why_schrödingers_cat_needs_to_be_observed_and/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cdm71cf"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"It is a bit different than that. In normal physics, when you don't measure something you don't know the value of whatever it was that you did not measure.\n\nWhen you *do* decide to measure the value (you *observe the system*) you find one single value. You deduce that it did have that particular value all along, even at the time when you hadn't measured it yet. Furthermore, when you repeat the measurement you expect to find that exact same value, no matter how often you measure it. Within tolerances of accuracy.\n\nIn quantum physics, this is not the case. You can make measurements, and each time you measure something the outcome can be one of several possible values. The first measurement yields 3, the second and third measurement yield 7, and the fourth measurement yields 3 again. You cannot know in advance what value will be measured, only that it will be one of several distinct values that follow a certain statistical distribution.\n\nThis phenomenon is explained by assuming that before the measurement, the quantum physical system has *several different values for the same quantity at the same time*. In quantum physic speak we say that the system can be in different states at the same time. We do not know what state it is in until we make a measurement (observe the system) and as we make more measurements, we will find different values grouped according to some statistical distribution.\n\nNow, the experiment involving Schr & ouml;dingers cat says that a certain elementary particle has or has not decayed during a certain time. If it has, the cat is poisoned, if it hasn't, the cat lives. Because it is a quantum physical system, we say that the two states (decayed particle/not decayed) both exist at the same time for the system. This translates into the cat being both dead and alive at the same time prior to the measurement. Only after observing the system, one would find that the cat is either dead or alive.\n\nHere is the wikipedia article on this experiment:\n\n_URL_0_\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat"
]
] |
|
4t71v2
|
Books about US Covert Activity?
|
Topics like the early CIA operations like Mongoose, Bay of Pigs, SOG in Vietnam, etc. I'm struggling to find books on these subjects. Any help wood would be great.
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4t71v2/books_about_us_covert_activity/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d5f397h"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"While not a strictly CIA operation \"Blind Man's Bluff\" was a good read on submarine operations during the Cold War, specifically Operation Ivy Bells which detailed the tapping of undersea cables between Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok.\n\nAs a former spook, this book still feels wrong to read because of what's in it."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
3vum24
|
how can the distance of a light year be consistent?
|
From what I understand a light year is about 9.4605284 x 1012 kilometers. Also, time slows down when you near the speed of light. Now if someone travelled close to the speed of light for that distance and back again to earth, we'd say "Hey - you've been gone two years!" but that person would claim they've been gone a lot less than that since time went slower for them. However, that would mean that they travelled two light years (there and back again) in less than two years (from their experience of time). Since that's impossible it would seem that the distance of a light year should vary according to the speed of travel. Obviously I'm misunderstanding a concept here, but I'm not sure where I'm going wrong. Any help would be appreciated.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vum24/eli5_how_can_the_distance_of_a_light_year_be/
|
{
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"cxqt4bw",
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"text": [
"This is actually a good question.\n\nAnd the problem isn't with just \"light years\". You can apply that argument to any distance.\n\nThe answer is that part of the relativistic effects along with time dilation is length contraction. That is, the closer you are to the speed of light, the more distances are contracted for you. What you measure 1 light year for you, could be 10 meters for me. This is a important result of the postulate that the laws of physics are the same in all reference frames. Because otherwise, as you said, you get some wonky stuff like it taking twice the time to travel a distance d than it should take.\n\nSo not is only time relative, but so is length. If you're going infinitely close to the speed of light, the whole universe will essentially be contracted to almost 0.\n\nHeres a helpful image.\n_URL_0_",
"A light year is a measure of distance, not of time. I can go a light year in a year, or in 50 million years. Nobody says for example, \"what took you so long? You've been gone a mile!\".\n\nTime is really only measured locally. The clock on board the ship and the clock back home will differ when the guy on the ship comes back..so there really is no way you can say they were gone *objectively* two years..it depends from whose perspective. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://philschatz.com/physics-book/resources/Figure_29_03_03a.jpg"
],
[]
] |
|
49f601
|
when trying to regain balance, why do we lean towards the side that is off balance?
|
For example if you are walking on a curb and start tilting to the left, your body instinctively shifts weight towards the left. Wouldn't it make more sense to shift weight to the right to counteract the difference in weight?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49f601/eli5_when_trying_to_regain_balance_why_do_we_lean/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d0rbaeg"
],
"score": [
25
],
"text": [
"Your upper body/head/chest seem to move to the left; this is so that your hips/center of mass will move to the right. Your hips/waist/belly easily counteract the tilt. It is impossible, however, to move your waist to the right quickly without moving your upper body to the left. Does that make sense?"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
3280bw
|
countries with a president and a prime minister
|
How exactly does the balance of power in these countries work? Is it the same across the board? For example, Italy and Russia have both a Prime Minister and a President, who is really in charge? What is the difference between the two offices?
I live in the UK, so Prime Minister is usually the highest political office, but for example, in America, it is President, but they don't have a Prime Minister.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3280bw/eli5_countries_with_a_president_and_a_prime/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cq8qhhl",
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],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
" It goes back to the idea that it has been found by experience that a country needs both a head of state and a head of government. A head of state personifies the nation, acts as a focus of national unity, acts as diplomatic host, and is generally just \"there\". A head of government actually runs the country having been appointed by the head of state, either as the result of an election or by however else the country works. ",
"It depends on the country. In France, the president is the top dog. In Italy, the prime minister is the top dog. In Russia, the one named \"Putin\" is the top dog."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
54allt
|
how were modern day scholars able to translate works written in archaic english (e.g. the canterbury tales) so accurately when the language used is so different from the english today?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/54allt/eli5how_were_modern_day_scholars_able_to/
|
{
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],
"text": [
"It's actually pretty straightforward, because we have lots of text from the intervening periods. If all you know is modern English and you have to read a text from the 1300s, it's hard, but if you also have studied what English looked like in the 1400s, the 1500s, the 1600s, the 1700s, etc, you can understand all the changes that happened in the language, the grammatical forms that got dropped and what they're equivalent to, the vocabulary that got introduced, and so forth.",
"You have a lot of texts written in Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Victorian English, etc., so you can trace the evolution of the language and backtrack. By now, Old English is an easy language to learn since we know so much about it. \n\nThings that help:\n\n* Having the same text in multiple periods (the Bible)\n\n* Having translations of earlier texts done in different times (English doesn't rely on this as much, but for example we know a lot about Japanese and its evolution thanks to people adapting Genji Monogatari every 50 years or so starting the 12th century)\n\n* Having repetitive texts drawn out over the centuries (census data, tax books, etc.)\n\n* Having a fairly straightforward evolution that you can explain using historical context (Sudden French loanwords? Go figure, it was after France became a cool place. Sudden Latin influence? Go figure, it was around the time that the church had a say in written language)\n\n* Having a lot of text to work with\n\nYou can also figure out pronounciation based on linguistic analysis and old songs which use rhymes (Ever notice that Shakespeare sometimes randomly doesn't rhyme? That's recorded language change right there, and you can figure out the pronunciation of old words based on the fact that, in Shakespeare's time, they used to rhyme)\n\nIt's harder with languages that don't have as much data to work with, but fortunately English started writing down things pretty early.",
"There are a lot of differences, but they are well understood differences. \n\nWe can go from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Milton to Defoe to Austen to Dickens, and see how the language evolved in small steps. Once you have a good understanding of each step, you can make the greater leaps between eras."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
hy6sp
|
What causes the planets to align the way they do?
|
Not in a geometric sense. What causes them to align on seemingly one plane? As in, why aren't they in the Z direction at all?
Why is it [this](_URL_1_) and not more like [this](_URL_0_)?
Or maybe I'm overthinking it and that's just the way we illustrate it to make it more conceptually viable.
EDIT: I know that's not what an atom looks like. -_-
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hy6sp/what_causes_the_planets_to_align_the_way_they_do/
|
{
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"text": [
"This is answered in the sciencefaqs.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Well, one, an atom in no way looks like that. Two, [this](_URL_0_)",
"Because they're formed from a rotating cloud of gas and dust, and things that rotate tend to spread out in their equatorial plane."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/upload/yuiupload/1602818382.jpg",
"http://www.montana.edu/wwwmor/education/NASAtrunks/imagesP/solarSystem.jpg"
] |
[
[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/sciencefaqs/comments/fui70/why_do_all_the_planets_in_our_solar_system_rotate/"
],
[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/sciencefaqs/comments/fui70/why_do_all_the_planets_in_our_solar_system_rotate/"
],
[]
] |
|
88svql
|
Did civilization recede in China in periods of disorder between dynasties?
|
At least in popular imagination, the political collapse of the Roman empire in the west was accompanied by civilization crumbling. -- I'm just starting Chris Wickham, *The Inheritance of Rome*, so maybe it's exaggerated, but anyway, western Rome isn't the point of my question.
In China, as I understand it, some dynasties effectively ended and the land fell into political disorder: Spring and Autumn, Warring States, Three Kingdoms, Northern and Southern dynasties, Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Is it believed that there was a recession of civilization in those times? I think population dropped. Did cities empty, like Rome did after the 5th C? Was literacy greatly diminished? Was any technology lost? Could people or goods travel between areas, and did it happen about as much as before?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/88svql/did_civilization_recede_in_china_in_periods_of/
|
{
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"dwnz22m"
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"text": [
"Well, let me start by saying that, as I sit here in an at-least-nominally-republican society, typing away in a Latin script, and using a language deeply infused with Romantic vocabulary, and speaking from a high Judeo-Christian social perspective… that reports of fall of Roman Civilization remain somewhat exaggerated.\n\nThat said, your point is well-taken… certainly something happened around 476 CE… and that something tends to be viewed, as Gibbon put it, as the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire…Just as long as we don't look too far to the east, and as long as we say that Merovingians don’t count because of… reasons (and I’m sure there are some very lovely ones that my Roman colleagues can fill us in on!)\n\nAnyways, let’s trend toward the meat of the question: did a similar process happen in China during its tremendously long periods of internecine conflict? You’ve asked the question in 4 parts, and about 3 broad periods (between Zhou and Qin, Han and Sui, and Tang and Song, respectively). These, I’d say are very good choices, since they certainly account for the longest of the struggles to reclaim imperium, and thus the periods that seem the ripest for total social collapse…\n\nBut before getting into the specifics, it’s important to note a critical difference in worldview between East and West that will help to explain the differences in both expectation and outcome of the Chinese conflicts versus the Roman “collapse”. There are two main ideas that it’s important to understand: the Mandate of Heaven, and the Dynastic Cycle. The Mandate of Heaven corresponds broadly with the European Divine Right of Kings – with one key difference…its innate transferability. “Created” by the first Kings of Western Zhou after the Duke of Zhou’s victory over the last, corrupted King of Shang, Di Xin. The giant question mark hanging over the victory, however, was “how in the world is what we just did legitimate? How could we possibly be in the right if we just attacked Heaven’s very emissary on Earth?” In a debate between the second Zhou king, Cheng, and his two top advisors, his uncle the Duke Dan of Zhou and Duke Shi of Shao (two of the three Grand Guardians second only to the King himself), King Cheng stated:\n\n > Stop! I, the young son [of King Wu], do not dare to disregard the command of the Lord on High. Heaven was beneficent to King Wen [his grandfather], raising up our little country of Zhou, and it was turtle-shell divination that King Wen used, succeeding to receive the mandate […] *Wuhu!* Heaven in brightly awesome – it helps our grand foundation! […] It is that I will proceed through the borders and lands pointed out by our ancestors; how much more so now that the divination is also auspicious. As so, expansively I will take you east to campaign. Heaven’s mandate is not to be presumed upon; the divination is aligned like this.\n\nThough the specific “role” of Heaven was questioned – notably be the Duke of Zhou, who was a big proponent of the idea that “Heaven helps those who help themselves” – nevertheless the idea would stick and stick *hard*: the ruler has the divine right to rule, but not based on blood or ancestry, but rather his righteousness… and should the ruler – no matter how ancient or auspicious his line might be – fail to uphold that righteousness, then Heaven could and would strip him of his right to rule and bestow it upon another who would go on to overthrow the unworthy monarch. It’s particularly ingenious from the perspective of a warlord fresh off of victory, in that it both retroactively justifies the already accomplished rebellion, while also throwing up a firewall against any future rebellions. After all, the winner of any such conflict is Heaven’s will – and the loser is in rebellion against Heaven’s Own Son.\n\nThe other major concept that traces itself way all through Chinese history is the innate circularity of time itself – as true detective Rust Cohle put it, “Time is a flat circle.” And while any number of other civilizations like to look back and emulate their civilizational predecessors… China tended to view itself particularly strongly through that lens – or as I like to call it, their “Zhou-colored glasses.” Everything’s about getting back to the Zhou Period, which would post-Warring States come to be viewed as the Great Civilizational High Point when everything was great, all the women were strong, all the men were good looking, and all the children were above average. Even as late as the mid 8th century CE, there were rulers like Empress Wu Zetian who’d go whole-hog and actually rename her period of rule back to Zhou in an attempt at emulating “the good ol’ days” from 1800 years prior. This also played out in the circular nature – or rather, the circular **understanding** - of government, namely in the concept of the “dynastic cycle”, which dominated Chinese political and historical opinions for much of its historiography. Simply put it’s the idea that a dynasty rises, comes to power, improves the nation, slowly declines, causes Heaven to become displeased, loses the Mandate of Heaven, has rebellions crop up against them, and is at last overthrown and replaced with a new dynastic order that has received the Mandate afresh… wash, rinse, repeat ad infinitum. Now there are quite a few issues with that understanding, but the fact that most people in positions of power understood it as true deeply affected how periods of instability affected the empire. To wit – largely the role of a rebel leader was not to try to break away from imperial rule* (*exceptions do apply, please see store for details), but rather to supplant it. Thus even rebellion and ages of civil strife could be incorporated into that cycle-structure of historicity… as the old saying went, “China long united must divide; long divided, must unite.” Though there would always be a drive to shatter an aging and corrupted empire into is constituent parts, there was an equally-strong gravitational pull that would ultimately yank them back together: the understanding that no mandate to rule could be effectively claimed if the realm remained incomplete – one had to prove his worth through overwhelming conquest or not at all (as several of the northern emperors during the 5 Dynasties period found out to their chagrin… one does not simply claim the Mandate of Heaven by calling a foreign king “daddy.” It is folly.).\n\nIn terms of population, such conflicts generally weren’t nearly so destructive as to greatly reduce China’s numbers and in fact, as per R. Eno, “During the Warring States years, the overall population of China grew rapidly, spurred by great strides in agricultural technology.” This is not the case during the 3/16 Kingdoms, nor the 5 Dynasties eras, while did see population fall off significantly from their dynastic highs… though typically that was more to do with things like natural disasters like famines and floods, rather than direct conflict.\n\nIn terms of the cities, they did not empty during any of these conflicts like we find at the end of the Western Roman Empire, largely because they had – unlike their far-western counterparts – specifically designed their cities to be the safest possible places in the even of attack. Though certainly specific cities were largely abandoned ahead of attacks, there was not the largescale shift to a manoral system because there was no need for one – cities and their massive walls provided far greater defenses than any countryside castle could. In fact, the period that seem most like the “fall of Rome” in the 5th century is actually one of the *failed* rebellions against the throne – the An Lushan Rebellion from 755-763 CE, which did see an absolutely **tremendous** fall off in terms of population. This was due to both the destructive nature of the conflict, but at least as much as that, people just up and saying “peace-out” to wherever they’d live until that point, and dropping off the books. In fact, between 755 and 764 – the two censuses that surround the rebellion – the taxpaying population went from 52 million in 8.9 million households, to just 16.9 million in 2.9 million households. Even so, the idea of city = safety would never really lose its luster for China.\n\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
1xpdp2
|
how does opening a beer with just a refrigerator magnet and a quarter work
|
Saw a video of a guy opening a beer by putting a refrigerator magnet under it and tapping it with a quarter at the base of the neck. How does this work?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xpdp2/eli5_how_does_opening_a_beer_with_just_a/
|
{
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4
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"text": [
"It's a trick - a normal fridge magnet and bottle of beer wouldn't do that. I strongly suspect the bottle is rigged before the video starts and the magnet is just a red herring.\n\nIt might even be completely fake."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
1ak6bi
|
Did Spartacus ever truly threaten Rome / the Republic?
|
Yeah I love the show. But I've read up a bit and apparently his army moved past Rome twice to/from the Alps? Was there ever a time, either during that period or from a historian looking back, that it was believed Spartacus was a true threat to Rome?
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ak6bi/did_spartacus_ever_truly_threaten_rome_the/
|
{
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"To the Romans of the time, he was at least an existential threat. Here was a slave leading a slave army plundering a pillaging right through the heart of Roman territory, teasing Rome itself. As to what the slave army was capable of, that is up for speculation. Certainly the initial campaigns against Spartacus were lackluster, and not taken so seriously. Once those were defeated, there was general panic. ",
"An uprising of slaves was nothing new to Rome. Spartacus led the third Servile War. The trouble with this war, or any war with slaves, was no Roman general was very interested in conquering the slaves; primarily because it brought no glory or loot. \n\nBut if you lost, which was a possibility, it meant defamation and the loss of any prestige. You would certainly be kicked out of office (all Roman generals held political office) and perhaps worse consequences. Those factors delayed some Roman generals in engaging Spartacus. Once his threat increased the generals eventually saw that defeating Spartacus would, in fact, bring them glory and support of, I think, the Senate. ( I say the Senate because I'm unsure of whether defeating slaves would of brought support of the people/lower classes)\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
e8wh8k
|
- i saw a ted video today about altering the dna in bacteria to fight cancer. how does one "edit" the dna in something??
|
In the video (and similar videos I've seen) they say that they change the DNA to change the organisms' function, but not how they do it.
I know DNA can change through mutation, but how do geneticists alter DNA sequence??
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e8wh8k/eli5_i_saw_a_ted_video_today_about_altering_the/
|
{
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"text": [
"Kurzgesagt made [the most clear and amazing video](_URL_0_) about how we can use CRISPR to edit DNA",
"So the most common and promising method, which is still pretty early on, is called CRISPR-Cas9. \n\nBasically it’s a modified version of a bacterial defense system. Bacteria basically use it to help cut out attacks by viruses and stuff. The enzyme, Cas9 basically finds strands of DNA that match a certain template and just cut it out to prevent it from causing damage. \n\nScientists realized though that this was programmable. They could give it basically any DNA strand and it could find it and cut it out, either removing it entirely or replacing it with something else. \n\nIt’s still a fairly newish technology, and there’s concerns about if it makes extra changes and what kind of unexpected side effects could occur from changing DNA we don’t fully understand, but it could be some game changing stuff in the not too distant future."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://youtu.be/jAhjPd4uNFY"
],
[]
] |
|
1biiob
|
How can a complex protein fold in milliseconds, yet it takes current supercomputers an immense time to find the lowest energy state? How do they know how to fold?
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1biiob/how_can_a_complex_protein_fold_in_milliseconds/
|
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"They can actually fold even faster than that.\n\nI don't know specifically about protein folding, but I can give it a try.\n\nThink of a molecule and the charge interactions, bond angle restrictions, etc., as a complicated differential equation. All the interactions impact all the other interactions. The molecule reacts to all these restrictions and interactions concurrently. The supercomputer has to essentially step through all those interactions in time and space. The actual modeling is highly complex and has to be done to a high degree of precision. Unlike the molecule, which does all this at the same time, the mathematical complexity expands dramatically with every atom added. \n\nThe same thing happens, pretty much, whenever you model nature.\n\nThe interesting thing about protein folding is that there is a small set of 'correct' answers (though one really correct answer). When you are modeling the future you don't know what the correct answer is. Now, if you are modeling a large scale natural phenomenon, limited computing resources always means you have to use simplifications and heuristics (\"it just seems to work\") in order to get the answer within your lifetime. Unfortunately, such simplifications can have a significant impact on the end result: if you model water as 1 cubic meter blocks, your model is not going to correctly reflect what happens in a real river.\n\nMy modeling professor (who is a pretty famous guy in those circles) always stressed \"never assume your model reflects nature - nature tells you what is wrong with your model.\" \n\n",
"Similar to the question of how all planets and objects in the universe can perform the incredible n-body equation that governs their reactions to gravity instantly, whereas trying to compute that reaches total impossibility in no time...\n\nit is simply the universe performing physics and chemistry through whatever fundamental method governs everything.",
"They don't \"know how\" to fold. They don't know anything, and, I guess you could say, there is no \"how\" to know. They are following the laws of physics, those involving thermodynamics, entropy, quantum mechanics and all that follows, and their folding behavior is going to depend to some degree on their environment (e.g. pressure and temperature).\n\nA computer has to simulate all of that in one way or another to calculate protein folding, because the operations it performs do not follow those same sets of rules (obviously the computer itself has to at its lowest level, but it is processing information at a higher level). It follows human made instructions that operate at a higher level than the mechanics that dictate something low level like chemistry or physics.\n\nThis isn't too dissimilar from any other simulation problem. Why does a computer take so long to render what we saw in Avatar or even Toy Story? Then, take into account that it isn't even simulating most of the mechanics that would be involved if those scenes were real. The computer games we play seem pretty fast and often very lifelike, but that is because a lot is being left out.\n\nThe computer isn't simulating every atom or even every molecule or even every cell of every Na'Vi. Part of that is because it isn't necessary, but the other part is that it can't do it in real time and in a lot of cases it wouldn't be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time at all. The computer operates using human constructs to process information at a much higher level of information. It is processing information in terms of 0s and 1s and using math, both of which are very low level themselves, but the computer is not actually operating at those low levels. We think of it as operating on bits, but it's actually operating on representations of bits; a magnetic field, an electric charge, a photon or the absence of one, and so on. When we do math (in our head, on paper, with a computer), we don't actually have access to the information we are processing directly. And so when it applies mathematical principles to those bits, it can't just perform the math on the bits. It has to perform the math on the entire representation, whatever that may be, and then transfer that to wherever it needs to go, down a wire or a fiber, for example, and that adds additional time and energy requirements.\n\nEDIT (I think this clarifies my point):\n\nThen, consider that we aren't even talking about information in its most basic form, but physical phenomenon with physical properties and parameters (all of which are described by that information). So all of the low level math that we are simulating in a computer has to be used to simulate still higher levels of abstraction. High enough to get from bits and math to atoms or molecules and all of the mechanics that govern them, but not so high that a complete simulation is unnecessary (for example just displaying an image/model of the protein or its chemical formula, etc.).\n\nEND OF EDIT\n\nAtoms and molecules, on the other hand are governed by the fundamental mechanics of the universe, not some system separated by many levels of abstraction, like a computer or even a brain.\n\nDoes that make sense and answer your question?\n\nAnother edit, because I'm still not quite satisfied with this answer. I tried to avoid including this, because some people might disagree on it being a scientific answer:\n\nIn other words, the universe is a computer that processes information. We don't yet have access to the levels of abstraction where this takes place, certainly not to a degree that allows us to incorporate them into our own computers.\n\nSo, our computers have to simulate that (or, they end up doing so anyway in order to do the math we need them to do). Similarly, adding further levels of abstraction to simulate higher level processes of the universe (relative to information itself) requires humans to create additional constructs to bridge the gaps and those just move the computer's simulation that much further away from the level of abstraction it is simulating.\n\nHopefully that adds some clarity to my answer.",
"That's (very much) like asking how a ball knows which way is down. It doesn't - it just falls to a location with lower potential energy.",
"This is the basic premise of [Levinthal's \"paradox\"](_URL_1_) - here's a sort of brief summary: \n*1. If you were just calculating the possible structures for a 100 amino acid polypeptide, you would have 99 peptide bonds, and both phi and psi angles for each bond, so 198 phi/psi bond angles total. If a bond angle can be in one of three stable conformations, the protein can misfold into a maximum of 3^198 different conformations.\n*2. Rather than examine all of the unrelated structures, we can look at the lowest free-energy structure by examining the [free-energy landscapes for protein folding](_URL_0_) (borrowed from [this](_URL_3_) paper.\n\nSomeone that does molecular dynamics simulations can probably explain this better than I could, but from what I understand, a lot goes into creating the [force-fields](_URL_2_) that are applied to these simulations, and the user has to take care that your simulations aren't getting artifically stuck in the non-lowest free energy well.",
"If anybody knows this, then please go claim you Nobel prize.",
"The flip side is that proteins *don't* always fold correctly, and there is a whole buttload of machinery that help proteins fold correctly and target improperly folded proteins for degradation. For example, see [\"chaperone proteins\" or \"molecular chaperones\"](_URL_0_). They're called chaperones because they \"prevent inappropriate interactions,\" lol",
"To give the very oversimplified answer, each nucleotide is just reacting to its environment. In computational terms, it's basically massive parallelization.",
"So this may be a bit off topic but I think it is relevant enough to mention. We're still learning how protein folding as a process works. One project, [Foldit](_URL_0_) which is a game that allows players to fold \"proteins\" in the most energetically favorable way. The people running the project then use this data to improve algorithms related to predicting protein folding, structures, and interactions. Its also pretty fun and is platform agnostic -- if only they had an iOS/Android version.",
"I have no formal education in science, but is this reasonable logic? Each object (let's say an atom) is in effect its own computer. It interacts with other objects and performs its own calculations. When a ball hits the floor, each atom in the ball, in the air and in the floor would be doing their own calculations. That means trillions (maybe more, I'm not sure) atoms doing calculations at once, versus your supercomputer(s), which number far fewer in cores or \"total computational power\". Also, as one of the other commenters mentioned, it would make sense that there's an added (but small) delay between computing that information and then transferring it in a computer. I'm not sure how well this logic carries over to your example of a complex protein unfolding, perhaps someone with more knowledge can elaborate.",
"Others have mentioned the abstraction issue, but there's something else. We don't have a good way of finding the optimum. It doesn't take that long for a computer to fold a protein. It takes that long for the computer to fold a protein a billion times to find the right sort of folding.",
"In an ELI5 sort of explanation, you can think of it this way.\n\nIf you drop a ball, it could take a few minutes for a person to calculate exactly how the ball will fall, but the ball does it without needing to calculate this. It doesn't fall that way because it \"knows\" that's how to fall, it's just following physics and being pulled to Earth by the force of gravity.\n\nIn the same way, proteins fold not because they know how to fold, but because physics pushes and pulls on the proteins by forces from interactions between atoms and molecules. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
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[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://i.imgur.com/nhn5D6w.png",
"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC48166/",
"http://www.gromacs.org/Documentation/Terminology/Force_Fields",
"http://www.embnet.qb.fcen.uba.ar/embnet/references/frustra_ref1.pdf"
],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaperone_%28protein%29"
],
[],
[
"http://fold.it/portal/info/about"
],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
1yl8u8
|
why does the us have less money now than it did in the mid-20th century?
|
Reading about World War 2 -- It seems like the US had unlimited industrial capacity to produce planes, bombs, aircraft carriers, etc. Has the US government simply shrank, or what's going on?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yl8u8/eli5why_does_the_us_have_less_money_now_than_it/
|
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"1. WW2 created a post-war boom for us. We spent enough to stimulate industry and manufacturing, without spending so much that we crippled ourselves with debt.\n\n2. Cold War. We were willing to spend much more because Communism.\n\nEdit: for some reason I thought OP was talking about post-war era. But essentially #2 is true if you replace Communism with fascism. We no longer have an urgent need for military equipment so we don't build it.",
"The US government didn't do all that production; they converted essentially all factories to wartime production...car companies made tanks and engines, pipe companies made gun barrels, airliner companies made fighters and bombers...basically, the entire industrial capacity of the US for *everything* switched to war production. Today, we don't do that. Even after fighting for over a decade in two wars we never switched any significant manufacturing capacity from consumer to military. ",
"The question you're asking is really two parts, or could be asking two different things. Firstly, the question about the US could be asking about government spending or economy (GDP) as a whole. The second question is about the context of WWII and the portion of government expenditure put towards wartime production.\n\nIn response to the first question, it is simply not the case that the US has \"less money\" now. The US is MUCH wealthier on both a gross and per capita (per person) level than it was in the 1940s. This goes for the economy as a whole and for government expenditure. The government to this day continues to spend large amounts on defense, subsidies, aid, and non-discretionary programs like medicare and medicaid. \n\nThe reason it may seem like \"the US has less money\" is because a significant proportion of US (both government and economy-wide) expenditure was put towards wartime goods. Basically the proportion of government expenditure that made up overall economic expenses (GDP) was significantly higher. Partly because the economy was smaller then than today and partly because of the reasons previously mentioned. So, how did the US government pay for it? You may be interested in a primer Keynesian economics and deficit spending, which influenced the Roosevelt administration's economic programs. But a large part was through the [Lend-Lease Program](_URL_0_) where we loaned and sold supplies to almost all of the Allied nations.\nLastly, as far as comparative wealth, there were actually extreme shortages and rationing during WWII, so while there were plenty of tanks and guns, other household goods and foodstuffs were being reallocated to the war."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease"
]
] |
|
7d6mv0
|
How could the "stab in the back" myth have formed if Germany had essentially become a military dictatorship under von Hindenburg and Ludendorff?
|
Title.
I read that they basically ruled the German Kaiserreich as dictators. If I understand the "stab in the back" myth correctly, part of it says that the government betrayed the German military. If *they* were the leaders of the government, how could it have betrayed them?
|
AskHistorians
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7d6mv0/how_could_the_stab_in_the_back_myth_have_formed/
|
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15
],
"text": [
"The key words here are \"essentially military dictators.\" The Hindenburg and Ludendorff duo had broad powers within in Germany, but the civilian government conferred these powers on them. The duo operated within *Oberste Heeresleitung* (Supreme Army Command/OHL) which nominally was under the leadership of the Kaiser. Wilhelm II had already delegated his own significant powers to OHL leadership. The duo's OHL was the third of the war and Ludendorff went about restructuring the German state to better suit military prerogatives. He staffed the War Ministry and the new *Kriegsamt* with pliant servitors. Much of the existing organs of the German state such as the Foreign Ministry or the Chancellery likewise became subordinate to the OHL or were sidelined. The Kaiser arguably became a victim of the latter process as he found himself locked out of key decisions made by OHL and complained of his lack of real power. \n\nSo if the duo was a military dictatorship, it was a *de facto* one. OHL did not displace the existing branches of government but rather tried to subordinate them to military needs. This was not entirely successful and a good many bureaucrats and officials resented the power the duo exercised. This became important as Germany's military fortunes waned throughout 1918 and there was growing momentum for an armistice. Hotheads within the OHL still wanted a death ride and ride the war to a conclusion, but mutinies in the fleet as well as wider urban unrest forced Wilhelm II's abdication. The confused state of events led to the Reichstag seizing power and declaring a republic as well as an armistice. \n\nThis chain of events was what provided the nucleus of the *Dolchstoßlegende*. More than a few nationalists and the army leadership portrayed both the November Revolution and Ebert's declaration of republic as a betrayal of the front. According to this self-serving narrative, it was not the military that lost the war, but people in Kiel or Berlin. This pernicious myth gained a degree of currency because the OHL dictatorship was not a formal one but rather one that evolved within the existing structure of the *Kaiserreich*'s government and military. The *Reichstag* and the central government both had the power to take away the broad authority of OHL, which they did. OHL was also quite canny in making sure that it was the new government that made the armistice overtures and not the military.\n\nOf course, not everyone in Germany bought the *Dolchstoßlegende*. A good many Germans recognized that OHL's incompetence and promises of impending victory only served to make the defeat that much more bitter. But this was swimming against the tide of public opinion. Von Hindenburg helped to popularize the idealized vision of an undefeated army betrayed by communists, socialists, Jews, and other enemies of the *Volk*. The *Dolchstoßlegende* became much like many other types of conspiracy theories: evidence for the conspiracy simply did not matter. Adherents of the *Dolchstoßlegende* were not concerned much with proving the conspiracy so much as they were as using it as a political cudgel against their enemies. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
1gkp6i
|
why are there flights that take longer than 12 hours?
|
When I flew from Chicago to Shanghai, it took 16 hrs. However, since the Earth spins at a rate of 1 rev/day, it seems like the furthest a flight should take for something almost directly around the world is 12 hrs. I think it might be because the atmosphere is part of what spins as well, but I'm not too sure.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gkp6i/eli5_why_are_there_flights_that_take_longer_than/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cal4yf7",
"cal57tf",
"calkxzx"
],
"score": [
11,
9,
2
],
"text": [
"Earth may spin 1 rev/day, but planes spin with it so the spin of Earth doesn't matter at all. Its just about the speed to get from A to B.\n\ni.e. Why doesn't a boat just take 12 hours around the world?",
" > I think it might be because the atmosphere is part of what spins as well, but I'm not too sure.\n\nThis is exactly it. \n\nThe Earth, the atmosphere, and everything within the atmosphere (within reason) is also spinning at 1 revolution per 24 hours. \n\nBecause it's all moving together, the relative velocity between them is approximately 0 (ignoring wind, tidal currents etc..).\n\nSince the relative velocity between you, city A, and city B is all 0, the fact that the Earth is rotating doesn't really affect the journey time between the cities, as for all intents and purpose (from your frame of reference) they're completely stationary. ",
"If the speed of the rotation of the Earth mattered you would never be able to fly West-to-East because the Earth rotates faster than planes fly."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
tr4hx
|
Is is any more likely that the universe is not expanding, but that every point or particle in it is shrinking in size? Does the distinction even matter?
|
Hypothetically, If every particle in the universe is shrinking in size at the same rate, would it not seem to the observer that in fact the space between one point and another was expanding?
Theoretically there is some rate that time could be speeding up or slowing down as particle size approaches 0, that would cause all points in the universe to appear to be accelerating away from all other points.
But this could in fact just be the exact opposite of the alternative. Would it matter if the answer was one way or the other? Would we ever be able to prove it?
Maybe I'm way off the mark?
For the record, I'm not a physicist if that wasn't inherently obvious. I'm just fascinated by this sort of thing.
|
askscience
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tr4hx/is_is_any_more_likely_that_the_universe_is_not/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c4p13xl",
"c4p399u"
],
"score": [
2,
5
],
"text": [
"You are misunderstanding why we think the universe is expanding. The expanding universe is inferred by analyzing the redshift of distant galaxies. Redshift is caused by the doppler effect, meaning that as objects move away from the observer, the light waves decrease in frequency, and thus energy, thus turning more \"red\". The faster away, the more red. From quantum mechanics we know that the quanta of light emitted from certain atoms are always the exact same, and may compare them. We see that more distant galaxies are more red, and assume that the farther away something is, the faster it is moving away from us.\n\nIn this way, things aren't \"shrinking\" at all. One may instead posit that light could be slowly losing energy as it travels over long distances, thus accounting for the observed redshift, but this isn't a common idea.",
"I am a cosmologist and this thought has crossed my mind before and I have discussed it with my colleagues. And I can't give you a good reason why this would be impossible. However, it seems less likely, because there is no known mechanism that could even come close to causing something like this. Whereas we know that the contents of the universe cause it to expand or contract, so it is just a simple explanation that it's the space itself that is expanding. And by Occam's razor, we follow this explanation until we find a problem with it."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
12zgm0
|
Why isn't Guy Fawkes night celebrated in the Republic of Ireland?
|
I know guy fawkes wasn't for irish independence but you'd think blowing up the then protestant parliament is something the Irish would get behind. I'm basically wondering why his attempt isn't celebrated in Ireland. At all. I know the English, burn his effigy but still, the 5th of Nov is nothinged in Ireland...
|
AskHistorians
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12zgm0/why_isnt_guy_fawkes_night_celebrated_in_the/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c6zfxtl"
],
"score": [
17
],
"text": [
"Guy Fawkes Day is a day of celebration of the fact that King James I *survived* the attempt on his life; not that the attempt was made. The day was enacted by Parliament specifically in thanks that the Protestant Monarch was alive. \n\nThe day also mobilised significant anti-Catholic feeling. [Wikipedia states \"a study of the earliest sermons preached demonstrates an anti-Catholic concentration \"mystical in its fervour\".\"](_URL_0_) The effigies burned on the fire are not just of Guy Fawkes himself (who is symbolic of all unruly Catholics), but often are of various other Catholic figures such as the Pope. \n\nBasically Guy Fawkes is a very Protestant, pro-English Monarchy holiday. The connotations attached to the event would have to be quite radically re-worked before it could be acceptable to the Irish. \n\nEDIT: speaking personally for a moment, my backcountry New Zealand family celebrates Guy Fawkes to this day by burning an effigy of the Pope, along with the more normal setting off of fireworks. I don't think this is typical, and my family did it more because we'd always done it rather than anything else, but it does suggest that the anti-Catholic feeling still survives within the celebration even today."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_Night#Early_significance"
]
] |
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