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why do the healthiest of foods cause bad gas? | [
"Actually it is because most of people eat that food not so often, so their gut bacteria doesn't know how to digest it, but researches shows that if you eat legumes every day for 21 day your bacteria will adapt and you will get maximum 3% gas more than usual if at all",
"For things like beans and greens, the items themselves contain a sugar called alpha-galactose. A certain enzyme is needed to break that down properly, and some people have more of it than others (and levels can vary within a person at times, too). The enzyme you need is called alpha-galactisodase, and if you don't have enough of that, it's left undigested to ferment with gut bacteria, like the other commenter said.\n\nFun fact: alpha-galactisodase is the main ingredient in Beano and is why it works. But any enzyme formulation containing that particular enzyme will help."
] | These foods contain certain sugars that our body cannot digest. Therefore when those sugars reach the colon the bacteria in the colon begins to ferment the sugars causing gas. (Similar to the way gas escapes a carboy through an airlock when fermenting beer)
|
In layman's terms, what would actually happen in the event that a theoretical vaccum decay would occur? | [
"The decay of false vacuum is a fascinating topic! I think there are multiple mechanisms for this to occur, and I don't know them all. The one I'm most familiar with is nucleation of bubbles of true vacuum.\n\nThat is, at each point in spacetime there's always a non-zero chance of the Universe spontaneously decaying to the true vacuum from its false vacuum state (assuming we're in one). If this decay occurs in one place, then it the decay would begin to propagate outward in a \"bubble\" of true vacuum which, in most cases, expands outward at or near the speed of light.\n\nInteresting factoid: in the early Universe, we expect this may have happened on at least one occasion, and since the Universe then was so energetic, the decay would have occured all over. These bubbles would violently collide, producing gravitational radiation. Some day - several decades down the line, at least! - we hope to observe this background of gravitational waves.",
"A number of things. The system would under go some type of phase transition. This is how symmetry breaking models work. You start out in completely symmetric, unstable state. To reach a stable state, which nature tends to do, you must break the symmetry of the system and therefore the vacuum must decay into a lower energy state. This is also how we believe the universe began. Something known as an inflaton field was in a false vacuum state, decayed into its true vacuum, in doing so forced an exponential metric inflation. "
] | I'd answer the question but the default reddit "there doesn't seem to be anything here" seems to have done it for me... oh wait, damn. |
When I move at speed through the air, it's cold. When an object reenters the atmosphere, it burns up. Why? | [
"The spacecraft re-enters through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds. For an orbital vehicle, it would have to go through the atmosphere from Mach 25 to subsonic speed before landing. Supersonic airflow is heated due to air compression. As the air flow is slowed down tremendously, its kinetic energy is converted to heat. That heat would then be conducted to the vehicle's skin. This is why spacecraft have \"ablative\" heat shields, that is, heat shields that absorb the heat and melt away with the heat. This keeps the vehicle cool.",
"Moving through the air or having a fan push the air away from you will get you away from the air you've heated up with your body... The same goes for anything with an engine.\n\nAbove a certain speed (depending on air density) you are generating a lot of friction against the air which is a greater source of heat then the cool air can absorb at the rate it does.\n\nHere's a neat experiment for you. rub your hands together and while doing so increase the pressure between them by slowly pressing harder as you rub. This increase in pressure acts like the increase in air density as an object descends into the atmosphere.",
"the reason YOU get cold is evaporation. That only happens because there is moisture on your skin. If that effect was not present, the only temperature change you'd see would be an increase, because of friction. However at any speed you could go, it would be negligible. But when things reenter the atmosphere, they have been accelerating in a vacuum, and have reached speeds many times that of even their terminal velocity. That speed is enough to measurable heat it.",
"The answer is actually fairly simple: those two reactions are simply caused by entirely different mechanisms. \n\nYour movement through the air cools your skin because of the temperature difference - specifically, temperature conduction. You are significantly warmer than the air surrounding your body, so this heat is transferred from your body to the air, cooling your skin and warming the air. This reaction happens when you're standing still, too, but moving (or standing in a windy area) ensures a constant flow of cool air to your skin, making the temperature transfer more pronounced.\n\nHowever, the reason objects entering (or re-entering) the atmosphere heat up is, for the most part, not friction (though this is a common misconception), but mainly *compression* of the air in the object's path. Essentially, because the object is moving so fast (even a spacecraft only re-entering from LEO is moving at several kilometers *per second* when entering the atmosphere), the air in its path doesn't have time to get pushed aside by its body, so it violently slams into the front of the object or spacecraft. The vast majority of the generated heat is not friction (though it does play a part), but the sheer energy released by compressing air to such an extent.\n\nSo, in conclusion: The spacecraft also experiences heat conduction, but it no longer cools the craft because of the friction and air compression caused by the craft's speed.",
"Well when you're moving fast the air that you're heating up around you is being stripped away and replaced with air that you haven't heated up. There isn't enough friction with the air at that speed to heat you up significantly. However, when an object is going at very high speeds (i.e. falling through the atmosphere) there would be enough friction with the air to burn said object up. As for the second question, I imagine that it would be a line if you graphed it, because if you were already at room temperature, you wouldn't want to move, but if you were far under, you would have to move pretty fast. I'm really not sure about the last one though.",
"The other answers in the thread are great but this really isn't a question of physics.\n\nYour nerves feel quickly-moving air as cold because it's cooler than your skin, and if it's constantly moving then there's no warm layer of air around your body.\n\nIf you reentered the atmosphere as fast as spaceships do, you'd burn up too. The heating is primarily caused by compression of the air in front of the falling object."
] | There are (at least) 3 different competing mechanisms going on here.
The first is recycling the air that is conducting with your skin. This is why you feel colder when there is wind or when you move. When the air is cooler than your skin and could be kept completely still what would happen is heat is conducted from your skin to the air, warming the air up and cooling you down. The air eventually equalizes temperature to you and you will stop feeling cold.
Generally air is moving a little so warm air leaves and cooler air comes in and there is a constant loss of heat to your surroundings. When it is windy (or you are moving) you have a very tough time retaining your blanket of warm air; it is constantly replaced with new, cold air. This is functionally identical to convection; in convection the hot air natural rises and cold air takes it place, here you are forcing the hot air to leave and replacing it with cooler air with a breeze. A reply has informed me that this has a specific name, forced convection.
If the air was warmer than your skin then this process would reverse and wind would make you feel warmer than sitting still. (you can experiment with this to some extent in the bath, run a hot bath and sit still in it then move your arm and the water should feel warmer).
Clothes do a lot of work in keeping you feeling toasty by trapping this blanket of warm air, keeping the cool air at bay.
When a spacecraft reenters the atmosphere it is going incredibly fast, much faster than the surrounding atmosphere's sound speed. Basically the air in front of the craft can't 'get out of the way' so it is compressed by the spacecraft. A gas being compressed heats up and this causes the dramatic heating of objects re-entering the atmosphere. This is entirely separate from friction.
Friction is when the air passing over the surface of an object rubs against that surface, converting some of the bulk kinetic energy of the flow into random motion (heat). Supersonic aircraft get heated up a lot by friction from the surrounding air.
Whether frictional heating or compressional heating is more important depends a lot on the relative speed, the properties (density, temperature) of the air, the coefficient of friction of the object, the cross sectional area of your object and the wetted (surface) area of the object.
There would never be a speed which would balance this for all objects as it would need a unique solution for each combination of variables.
e: grammar |
what is the big deal about russia invading ukraine and taking over crimea, and what do i, as a us citizen have to worry about it? | [
"National Sovereignty is a very big deal so anytime a country (especially a country with nukes) starts to reject previously agreed upon borders it is a big deal.\n\nThe reason you should care is that Russia has been for quite sometime trying to maintain some degree of influence over several former Soviet republics. As some of these states move away from Russia, it is going to cause conflict and potentially a full blown war.",
"likely to evolve into nothing\n\ncrimea was granted to ukraine as a restitution gift and well over half the population is in favour of annexation\n\nthey already speak russian and maintain russian culture\n\nputin is a total dick but once this blows over they will pay lower taxes to an equally corrupt government and receive additional social benefits\n\nyeah, its a huge problem that a part of a country is essentially being taken over but it hardly sets precedent for speculations of a third world war\n\n"
] | Essentially the events in Crimea threaten to destabilize the European continent.
To give you some scale Crimea is about roughly the same size as Belgium. The real scale of territory that Russia seized really did not hit me until I really compared them on a map. Anyway, since the Second World War there has not been any major land wars on the continent, a relatively rare thing in the continents long & bloody history. Simply put an expansionist Russia threatens that status quo by pitting Russia and its "near-abroad" vs. the West (NATO) for the first time since the dissolution of the USSR in '91.
This concerns you because if Russia decides to attack any member of NATO we are bound by treaty to consider it an attack on American soil and along with the 26 other member countries will provide any available assistance to the country being attacked. The good news is that this is not something to worry about as formidable as Russia is it can not match the military might of NATO with conventional forces. |
why are there different types of helmets if you're riding a bicycle, a motorcycle or a snowboard etc? | [
"Most helmets are pretty similar in basic construction, actually. They're made of a layer of impact protection (frequently polystyrene) with padding for comfort/fit and a shell to spread out the impact, and to cover and protect the impact layer.\n\nAfter that, the design varies to suit the activity. A motorcycle helmet has to handle more force in an accident than a bicycle helmet, so it's built heavier and stronger to match. On the flip side, a bicyclist is sweating more, and isn't going fast enough for the wind to cool a motorcycle helmet, so they have something lighter with good ventilation and airflow, but sacrificing some coverage (although there's exceptions - downhill riders, for example, wear something similar to a motorcycle helmet)",
"They are built for different purposes.\n \nBoth use Polystrene. Polystyrene is great at absorbing impacts but is really only a one time use - try pushing down on some and you'll see it won't return to its normal shape.\n\nA bicycle helmet is made of plastic and some polystyrene. The outer plastic shell will absorb most of the impact from a standard bicycle crash because it is usually quite thick. Anything else will be absorbed by the polystyrene. It does not need to have a large amount of polystyrene because it doesn't need to absorb a huge amount of impact.\n\nA motorcycle helmet has much more polystyrene and uses a thin fibreglass shell. It uses way more polystyrene because in the event of an impact it'll need to absorb much more to keep the rider safe. The fibreglass will barely absorb anything.\n\nThis is why it is important motorbike riders replace helmets after ANY impact. Even if you just drop it from a few feet, replace it - more damage to the polystyrene is more damage to your head if you crash."
] | To have as little protection as is safe for the activity. More protection just gets in the way if you dont need it |
As the sun expands will Mars eventually enter the habitable zone while Earth leaves it? | [
"I don't have an answer, but I *would* like to tack on to the question: would Mars *remain* in a hospitable zone for any length of time? Or would the sun continue expanding at a sufficient rate so that it would simply be within the transition from one inhospitable climate directly to another?",
"Mars is already in the habitable zone, the issue is that it does not have sufficient atmosphere to maintain an environment water can stay liquid much less support life. \n\nWhen the sun expands it will likely engulf Mars as well. ",
"What is the duration of the transition? I imagine a star \"going Red Giant\" is a rather violent and relatively quick transition - once the fuel dynamics change, the star expands to its new balance.\n\nCan anyone speak on how quickly this might take place? Hours? Days? Decades? The faster and more violent it is, the more chances of disrupting Martian orbit. And less time for sublimated gases to escape Martian atmosphere, though the Solar Wind may decrease.\n\nWith enough gases, Mars may experience an induced magnetosphere like Venus, and retain an atmosphere.",
"I've only seen one other person mention the atmosphere of Mars in these answers, and that kind of bugs me.\n\nYou see, to have life as we know it develop, you need some shielding. Shielding like the combination of an atmosphere and a strong magnetic field. The atmosphere will help protect the planet from space debris (along with providing stuff like gas for stuff like breathing or whatever). The magnetic field will protect the atmosphere from the solar winds, and curbing solar radiation a bit.\n\nYes, Mars technically has a magnetic field, like Earth. But that's like comparing a matchbox car to a monstrous dump truck that works in a strip mine. It's not strong enough to retain a good mix of atmospheric gasses, and definitely not strong enough to help protect the surface from radiation.\n\nTl;dr: doesn't matter, Mars' magnetic field is too weak anyways",
"I am more interested in the expansion of sun? Thats the first i heard.",
"For awhile, yes. But we're just talking about temperature here, which is actually the *least* complicated problem that needs to be solved before people could live on Mars. The lack of air, the radiation, and the toxic soil would still be a problem.\n\nOh. And as Mars warmed up, all that ice and remaining water that people talk about using to support a colony would evaporate.\n\n",
"When the sun has consumed all its hydrogen and moves in helium fusion it will expand and become a red giant.\n\nHere's a link discussing it:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIn the link above they say Neptune and Pluto will be in the habitable range but they themselves don't have habitable environments. There a possibility a moon or two of theirs may become habitable.",
"Mars is already in the habitable zone (as liquid water used to flow across its surface). The reason it's no longer habitable (while still in the zone) is bc it's iron core solidified, so it lost the vast majority of its magnetic field, and its atmosphere (and therefore water vapor) was stripped away by cosmic rays (the solar wind).",
"Mars already is in the Habitable Zone, the issue is it's small size making it unable to hold onto a thick atmosphere and sustain geological activity.\n\nEarth has remained habitable despite the brightening Sun because of a negative feedback mechanism that locks CO2 away in limestone, but about a billion years from now CO2 levels will reach 0 and this climate regulation will stop working. That represents when Earth exits the Habitable Zone. At this point nothing can stop the temperatures from increasing and Earth will become a Venus clone.\n\nAn Earth-sized Mars would be the same. It would have Earth-like temperatures despite being farther from the sun because this climate-regulating feedback mechanism would give it much higher levels of CO2. I don't know the math, but I would guess that an Earth-sized Mars would far enough out that it will remain habitable right up to when the sun starts turning into a Red Giant.",
"Temperature isn't the problem for Mars. Mass is. It's low mass has robbed it of much of its atmosphere, with water in particular escaping into space, and it has also robbed it of the volcanism that would otherwise replenish its atmosphere."
] | I believe Mars is considered to be on the edge of the habitable zone right now, and it may actually harbour life under the surface. With a bit more heat from the sun Mars would become more habitable than it is today but it would still be a harsh dead place due to it's thin atmosphere and weak magnetic field.
Also, it's likely that the sun would eventually get too hot for Mars as well, so there may be a brief warm era on Mars until it gets burnt out like Earth |
What protocol do human nerves use? | [
"It's mostly spikes of difference in potential that travels through the nerves. Upon reaching the end of the nerve, at the axone, the difference in potential provokes the release of neurotransmitters. For the muscular nerves, try looking up neuromuscular junction.\nI don't think there's a protocol, in a sense that I don't think there is a symbolic form of communication between muscles and nerves. The basic signal is a bunch of spikes of potential. Signals from neurmuscular junctions of a given muscle add up to provoke muscle's response in a complex way.",
"The output of a neuron is a voltage spike along its axon (axon ~ output signal wire). The amplitude and width of the voltage spikes are fixed, so information is generally encoded in the frequency of spiking. \n\nTo drive a muscle to contract, the motor neuron connected to it will fire voltages pulses into it more frequently.\n\nThe protocol for all neurons is roughly the same. For any given neuron, voltage pulses are received as input from some number of other neurons, the cell decides what its output should be, then it sends some output pulses along its output.",
"Action potentials are all-or-none and pretty homogeneous across neurons, meaning that the spike itself is just a \"hey!\" signal. This signal is often described as binary, but it's not, quite. In a binary representation, 1 and 0 convey equal information; in a neural system, the presence of a spike conveys a lot more information than the absence of one. The complexity of neural signaling is an emergent property of the network - which neurons connect to which others, how strong these connections are, whether the connections are excitatory or inhibitory, the timing of other inputs onto the same output neuron, etc. It's a complex symphony of chemistry, electricity, diffusion, and molecular dynamics. It's also a highly dynamic system, so a set of inputs that triggers a neuron to fire on Monday may not do the same thing on Thursday.\n\nThis doesn't mean that understanding the nervous system is completely hopeless. We've made a lot of progress over the decades, and at this point have a rough map pretty well figured out. We've also mapped out some specific circuits in detail (for example, we have a pretty good understanding of neural processing in the retina, at least for the frog). For others, though, the way in which information is encoded is still mysterious. For example, we can't easily predict the pattern of activity on the auditory nerve that results from any but the simplest sounds. This indicates, to me at least, that there's no single way that information is represented within the nervous system.\n"
] | I'm pretty sure there's not a protocol. Frequency of action potentials encodes to intensity of stimulus, but that's not really a protocol in the sense that a different message will be sent by different codes. |
why is it hard to get a good picture of something that "glows in the dark?" | [
"The reason is that a camera is basically a array of small sensors elements that detects how many photons (light particles) that collides at each element during. Since the number of photons sent out per time unit is so low you would need to record for a long time to be able to distinguish the actual signal from the noise. However if you ''record'' too long the elements will ''overflow'' and ''leak into neighbouring elements'' (causing so called blloming artefacts which is what you see if you take a photo of the sun). Therefore it is easy to construct a camera that would capture great images of glow-in-the-dark products but it would require you to hold it stable for a long time and be useless in normal lighting since everything would become white due to blooming.",
"Are you using a cell phone camera? You need a DSLR, and the trick is to shoot the photo in manual mode with a super slow shutter speed. It greatly helps to have a tripod and a remote control, since slow shutter speeds can make the photo blurry if the camera moves slightly.\n\nIf using a normal point-and-shoot digital camera, you have little control over the functionality, and thus the camera automatically compensates for lack of light by making the shots grainy. And as a rule of thumb, never use flash.\n\n[Here's a photo I took of my glow-in-the-dark LEGO ghost minifigures under a blacklight against a black background in the dark, using a slow shutter speed.](_URL_0_) This was taken with my Nikon DSLR, and with a tripod, a camera remote control, and manual focus."
] | Your eyes are magnificent sensors, and cameras are not as good. Your eye has adaptive gain control, which allows you to see better in the dark by trading "frame rate" for sensitivity. To get the same effect in a camera, you need a longer exposure. If you have a nice camera and a tripod, you should be able to get great images. The camera on your cell phone just has too small a lens. You eye also slightly blooms glowing objects in a dark space, which the camera would not. |
if our part of the brain which records memories shuts down when we are drunk, why is it that we still remember as long as we are awake and/or drunk? why do we only forget after waking up? | [
"There isn't necessarily a part of our brain that \"records memories\" as memories are all encoded and retrieved in different parts of the cortex. Yet the part of the brain that transfers memories from short term to long term is the hippocampus. I'm assuming that alcohol interferes with the function of the hippocampus and therefore memories are way less likely to be transferred from STM to LTM. ",
"Fun Fact: it you get really drunk you can remember everything you forgot from the last time you blacked out. It's a theory known as E=MChammered",
"Drunk people will tell the same story again and again, and not necessarily remember it. I don't think it's sleep that necessarily causes it.",
"great answers from a previous post: _URL_0_",
"There is a deference between being drunk and being blackout (duh), so while I'm not sure about your question, it was explained to me that your brain literally does not record new memories when you are blackout. That is why when someone tells you what you did when you were drunk you might be able to conjure up a fuzzy memory of it, while if you were blackout, nothing will make you remember it.\n\nI think forgetting things while you sleep is just because that happens anyway (like I don't remember all the details of my previous day?) and it is exacerbated by being drunk, making it more obvious."
] | It is said that information is moved from shorter-term memory to permanent memory while you sleep, and that this process is disturbed when you are drunk. |
How is it that dogs and wolves are still the same species? How much more do dogs need to change before they become a different species? | [
"I think being able to interbreed and the resulting offspring is still fertile has something to do with it. When they can't breed and/or the offspring is infertile, they will have separated significantly enough to not be considered so closely related.. I am most definitely not an expert, so take this with every bit of skepticism.",
"Try coming at it from a different angle. Imagine you are immortal and you've seen all species branch off from the first ones and expect to see more come and go. For you then, the idea of a species is very fluid, one species experiences transition phases that lead to it becoming two or five or fifty species. Instead of trying to categorize organisms into this species and that species, you simply accept the fluid nature of chromosomes passing from one generation to the next and getting mixed around and resorted. \n\nSo to answer your questions:\n1. The multiple breeds of dogs and the multiple species of wolves are part of a transition phase in the Canis genus that will probably result in multiple easily distinguishable species but who knows, maybe they will merge back together or one will die out leaving only the other and rendering your question moot or the transitional amalgum of different varieties will persist as long as humans.\n2. Well if you dropped a bunch of great danes and a shih tzus in the woods together they probably wouldn't/couldn't interbreed so by some argument even different varieties of dogs are different species.",
"The problem here is \"what is a species\"? From a macro-organismal scale, we'd consider any two populations that can cross and produce fertile offspring are simply two subpopulations of the same species. From this definition (despite what Linnean taxonomy would have you believe) dogs and wolves are the same species. (N.B. not all biologists subscribe to this, but this is the most mainstream definition we have).\n\nWhat often allows us to demarcate between species is reproductive isolation. This could be to pre-zygotic effects (their gentitatlia won't match up or sperm-egg fusion cannot occur) or post-zygotic (genetic incompatibilities or overall low fitness in an environment).\n\nAt what point will dogs and wolves stop being able to interbreed? Most of the diversity we see in dog breeds is simply standing variation that exists in wolves--in the relatively short time dogs have been domesticated (approx~30, 000 years ago) there are likely very few mutations that would arise. Dogs just have been selectively bred in a myriad different directions. Dogs of smaller breeds, like chihuahuas, probably are already productively isolated from wolves, just due to their small size. As for medium-sized and larger dogs, it would likely take many, many more generations of reproductive isolation before would prevent a fertile cross between dogs and wolves, likely on the order of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years."
] | Dogs and wolves *are* separate species, *Canis lupus* and *Canis familiaris*. There are many species of animals that can still interbreed but are still classified as separate species due to physical, behavioral, or temporal barriers that make it extremely unlikely for the animals to hybridize. Dogs and wolves are more physically distinct than some, so it seems more surprising. |
why would a human get a disease (kuru) from eating another human's brain? | [
"[Kuru is a prion disease.](_URL_0_) \nA prion is a a protein that turns other proteins into copies of itself. \nThe proteins that Kuru can work with are usually located in the brain. \nWhen you eat that infected brain, it contains the Kuru prion, which then starts turning those proteins into more of the prion. Then you die. \n \nSo in conclusion, it's something else, though if I had to place it, I'd say it's close to a virus. It's not really a living thing in many senses, but it reproduces itself. \n",
"You don't get it from eating any human brain anymore than you get AIDS from just having sex with anybody.\n\nYou get it from someone who is already infected and the way you get it is via eating their brains.\n\nKuru is not a virus or bacteria but a prion diseases. Prions are proteins that are somehow folded the wrong way, the bad thing about them is that they make other proteins also fold themselves up in the wrong way.\n\nAnother disease like it is the mad-cow disease and the related Creutzfeld-Jakob disease.\n\nThe mad-cow likely cam about the same way kuru did, because we were feeding cows (who are normally mostly vegetarians) feed that contained among other things the ground up brains of other cows. This way one cow with the problem became many cows with the problem and by eating those cows and specifically their brains humans may have become infected.\n\nOverall it is not a big problem as long as you don't eat any brains of anything or at least not the brains of anything or anyone who might have acted a little strange.\n\nStill it is healthiest to avoid cannibalism as much as possible."
] | The disease comes from improperly folded proteins called prions getting to the brain and destroying tissue. Every person has a small number of these accumulate over their lifetime but if you eat the brain of a closely related species or of your own you have a high probability of greatly increasing the number that you will accumulate.
All human, as well as ape and monkey brains have the chance of giving kuru to humans.
But this same disease can happen with any animal that eats their own kind. Mad Cow is the bovine equivalent of kuru, and it is possible that eating any animal with the equivalent disease can pass it on to a human. |
When performing a gravitational slingshot maneuver, does the direction the planet is rotating in relative to a spacecrafts trajectory make a difference? | [
"Normally no, however if you try to make a slingshot off an object with very uneven gravity, then it might make a difference. Imagine a planet where half of it is made of something very heavy, and the other half something very light, in such a way that you experience stronger pull when you're facing the \"heavy\" side. If this was the case, then rotation would influence the gravity assist.",
"It only depends on the orbital motion, not on the rotation. For all planets apart from Uranus the two happen to be roughly aligned (although Venus rotates in the \"wrong\" direction).\n\nTechnically there is an effect from [frame-dragging](_URL_0_) but it is way too small to matter."
] | You're right, the rotation of the planet about its axis has no impact on a slingshot. What matters is the direction that the planet is orbiting around the sun and where the spacecraft crosses through its sphere of influence. |
Radio waves and Light waves are on the same spectrum. So could you make a "Radio" that uses light waves instead? | [
"actually yes, but its very difficult. To make an optimal antenna you need it to be wavelength/4. For the FM spectrum the wavelength is a meter, so the antenna needs to be about 3/4 of a meter or about 2 and a half feet. Visible light is from 400nm to 700nm so the antenna would need to be from 100nm to 200nm. That is about a hundredth of the width of the smallest human hairs.\n\nThis is actually possible to do though. My professor got his doctorate making NIR (about 1 micron wave length, 2x that of visible light) antennas. The process for making visible antennas is difficult but possible.",
"actually yes, but its very difficult. To make an optimal antenna you need it to be wavelength/4. For the FM spectrum the wavelength is a meter, so the antenna needs to be about 3/4 of a meter or about 2 and a half feet. Visible light is from 400nm to 700nm so the antenna would need to be from 100nm to 200nm. That is about a hundredth of the width of the smallest human hairs.\n\nThis is actually possible to do though. My professor got his doctorate making NIR (about 1 micron wave length, 2x that of visible light) antennas. The process for making visible antennas is difficult but possible.",
"What you are talking about is basically fiber optic communication. \nThe main limiting factor for visible light communication is signal degradation due to the atmosphere, or simply something blocking the line of sight to the transmitter. if you remove those two factors by shooting the beam of light down a glass fiber, you've got an extremely efficient, and extremely fast form of communication.\n\nRadio frequencies are used for most long-distance communication for two major reasons: Firstly, you don't need to lay cable to send the signal. Secondly, they are both easy and cheap to generate, transmit and receive. Lastly, they are very reliable. Radio waves are one of the few forms of radiation that can pass right through clouds, rain, and many structures."
] | What you are talking about is basically fiber optic communication.
The main limiting factor for visible light communication is signal degradation due to the atmosphere, or simply something blocking the line of sight to the transmitter. if you remove those two factors by shooting the beam of light down a glass fiber, you've got an extremely efficient, and extremely fast form of communication.
Radio frequencies are used for most long-distance communication for two major reasons: Firstly, you don't need to lay cable to send the signal. Secondly, they are both easy and cheap to generate, transmit and receive. Lastly, they are very reliable. Radio waves are one of the few forms of radiation that can pass right through clouds, rain, and many structures. |
why is it that a system like the nintendo 3ds/ds can play a game without loading screens, yet games on systems like the ps4/xbox one cannot? | [
"Thats not necessarily the case though. For instance, Pokemon Rumble World has a fairly long loading screen. But for the most part, its because games on the 3ds are not as resource heavy.\n\nI think you can see why [This game](_URL_0_) would load faster than [This one](_URL_1_).",
"Not all 3ds games don't have loading screens. Like this Lego marvel avengers game I got it has loading screens. "
] | Games on the PS4 and Xbone have a lot more information to process and load, and the 3DS and DS have flash memory on SD cards, which while you can put a SSD in the PS4/Xbone to reduce load times, their default Hard Drive is a Hard Disk Drive with 5600 Rotations per minute, meaning they access information off the memory source a little slower than a Solid State drive, but that also means they can have 500gb for a lot cheaper than it would be as an SSD |
what is torque, and why do high torque engines not have super high rotation speed? | [
"Try pushing a wall. Harder. No Harder than that. Did it move? No? well just because you didn't actually didn't do any work doesn't mean you didn't exert a force.\n\nForces have nothing to do with velocity. Power cares about velocity.\n\nTo get a large amount of torque from an engine, for starters you need a engine that can put out a lot of power. But if your engine is moving fast, then all the power is being eaten up by the speed and not the force. You can shift the speed down with a gearbox, but that is inefficient. Might as well just design a high power engine that turns slowly so all the power is due to the high torque and not the rotation speed.",
"There's nothing intrinsic to torque that limits RPM. Since we generally don't want our motors to blow up, we usually govern or throttle them in some way. \n\nYou are right that any motor with unbalanced torque will continue to spin faster until the forces balance or something gives. This is directly analagous to linear acceleration. \n\nNow let's talk about practical motors. \n\nThe important equation is: Power = Torque * rotation speed.\n\nOne interesting thing that arises from this is that, using gears or pulleys, we can easily convert torque to speed and vice versa. It follows that we can design our motor to deliver a certain amount of power without worrying too much about torque or speed. \n\nAlso notice that they faster we spin our motor, the more powerful it gets. The price is that the motor wears faster and the centripetal forces get very large once the motor gets big or fast. \n\nSo practically, we can take one of two directions to design a motor for a specific output: we can make a small motor that spins fast or we can make a big motor that spins slow. The first motor will have a high power or weight ratio but will be expensive to build, expensive to run and expensive to maintain. In a motorcycle, race car or aircraft, the power-to-weight gains outweigh the costs making this the usual choice. On the other hand, the big motor is very heavy for the amount of power it delivers but is comparatively cheap to build, run and maintain. That makes is the better choice for applications where weight is less important than cost such as trucks, ships and trains.\n\n",
"Take a piece of foam. Let's use 'memory foam' they make pillows and mattresses out of, just for example.\n\nPlace a 1 oz. weight on top the foam. \n\nThat 1 oz. will always weight an ounce. It will always applying (due to gravity, in this scenario) one ounce of force against the foam. For ever and ever and ever. Probably won't make much of a dent in the foam, either.\n\nTake a 45 lb. weight (like the kind used in a gym) and place it on the foam. It'll apply 45 lb. of force; forever, and ever and ever. It'll make a bigger dent than 1 oz. =) \n\nThey won't continue to sink over time (assuming the foam doesn't break down or deteriorate). They'll sink initially and stay where they're at. Forever. Until removed. \n\nImagine a cheap battery operated fan. That fan has a little motor. Put a screw driver against a fan-blade and turn the fan on. It won't spin. It may even make noise or break. The amount of force it's capable of isn't going to change. (unless it breaks)\n\nPut a piece of speaker-wire against it and try the same. It'll spin and push the wire out of the way. The wire is weaker than the fan and it's motor. It's a low-torque motor, it doesn't need a lot of force to serve it's purpose. \n\nA cheap \"electric screwdriver\" can't drill through solid surfaces. If it doesn't have enough torque? The engine will stop. \n\nReally good drills will work just fine.. They can be dangerous, too! \n\nSo - a vehicle. A tractor-trailer hauling weight. A truck hauling a camper. An off-road vehicle pulling a truck out of mud. They require more torque than a fan. The engine requires strength and force. It has a purpose. Rotating speed (or RPM)? Maybe it's high, maybe it's not. \n\nDesigning an engine (engineering, lol) requires resources. Sure, you can make a bus really really fast. Give it a few jet engines. That's not practical tho. \n\nTorque requires energy. More torque, more energy. (think, kinetic energy). More energy, more gasoline. A race-car isn't hauling a boat. So, it makes more sense to take the energy used up by excess torque and use it for speed, instead. (different topic)\n\nSO, high torque engines do not have super high rotation speeds because they typically serve a purpose & don't need high rotation speeds. If the purpose is torque, the energy used to obtain a high rotation speed is often shifted (during the design process) to create torque. \n\nOk - applying more force but not increase the rotation speed. Torque is a measurement. It's constant. When an automotive engine creates torque? The measurement of torque is more comparable to an 'ability' - it 'CAN' create 'X' amount of torque. \n\nIf you turn the engine off, it gets no gasoline and there is no torque. Feed it gasoline... and depending how much gas and how quick? That will determine how much torque it will 'force' or 'create'. The amount of torque it creates is variable. (think: volume switch. a decibel measures the pressure of sound, but, an amplifier can create it & control it ...).\n\nSo, applying more force without increasing rotation speed is kinda a combination of [how the engine is designed] and [how the engine is operated]... \n\nBack to your question. Let's consider the foam. Place that same 45 lb. weight on a piece of concrete instead of foam. It's not making a dent and it's not doing so quickly. \n\nAt the end of the day, the missing variable, I think - is a consideration to how an engine is 'designed' ---- based on decisions made by a person. \n\nGREAT QUESTION"
] | Torque is not related to rotation speed. Torque is defined as the force you are using to turn something multiplied by the distance the force is from the center of rotation. For example, if you pull on a 2 foot long lever with 50 pounds of force, you will create the same amount of torque no matter how long it takes you to turn it. |
british currency. pounds, sterling, quid, pence?! | [
"The British Pound Sterling is their official currency. The current exchange rate is 1 British pound per 1.45 us dollars. Quid is just a slang term for a pound. 1 pence is like a penny. Theres 100 pence in a british pound. It has the same name as the unit of weight because 1 pound of silver used to be a standard of currency.",
"What about \"Bob\" then? Bob cratchitt only made fifteen Bob a week and he raised a family on it. But what was/is it?"
] | Pounds are like dollars, pence are like cents. pounds is short for "pounds sterling." Quid is like saying "bucks." |
Light Speed | [
"Yes they do, the speed is based off of how fast we measured light to travel. Our current most accurate measurements would suggest that speed to be 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum. ",
"Yes. Light, being massless, is uniquely sensitive to the *structure* of spacetime itself. In particular, it's sensitive to the conversion factor between space and time.\n\nOkay, that's a bit abstract. What does that mean? When we talk about time being the fourth dimension, of course we don't mean that time is literally, straight up, another dimension, because it doesn't even have the same *units* as space. Spatial distances can be measured in things like miles or meters. Time \"distances\" can be measured in things like seconds or years. So in order to compare time and space - and talk about time as a fourth dimension - we need to multiply time by something which converts time units into space units. That something has to have units of distance divided by time, which turns out to be the units that a speed has.\n\nAll massless particles - light particles, or photons, included - know that speed, and travel at it. For that reason we call it the speed of light!",
"No, the speed of light in a medium other than vacuum depends on the wavelength. This is why prisms work in the way shown in the iconic Pink Floyd logo.\n\nThe classical answer is this. The quantum answer is more complicated, and involves the successive absorption and emission of photons. But I do not feel that the quantum answer is any more correct. In a nearly homogenous medium, the answer given by classical EM is extremely precise, and even works in the ionosphere of the earth.\n\n"
] | > Do all wavelengths of light travel at the same speed?
Yes. In fact, anything massless will travel at this speed at all times. It gets weirder when you look into relativity and find out that it's same no matter how you're moving, so if you move at 99.99999% the speed of light away from me and I shine a flashlight, you'll still see the light going by at the usual speed.
> If so, what is the speed of light based off of?
It's just a fundamental property of the universe. The definition of the meter is based off the speed of light, but the speed of light is one of those things that just "is".
> What would be the biggest implications (scientifically) of breaking the light barrier?
1. Faster than light travel.
2. Relativity.
3. Causality (the principle that if A causes B, then A comes before B).
Only 2 of these can be true. If relativity and causality are true, then FTL travel is impossible. If relativity and FTL travel are possible, then it's possible to break causality. If FTL travel is possible and causality holds, then relativity goes out the window. |
why everyone hates stephen harper | [
"He has a majority government despite having less than half of the popular vote.",
"[These are a few reasons](_URL_0_)\n\nEDIT: Just noticed they changed the front page of that website, to see \"shit harper did\" click the tab at the top right",
"Aside from most of Reddit (mostly liberal demographic) and Quebec, I don't personally see or know of many people who really dislike Harper. In fact, many are quite pleased with the job he's done so far.",
"he raised retirement age to 67, made ei harder to get, wants ppl on welfare to have drug testing, cut daycare and childcare funding, cut healthcare funding, cut funding to single mums and low income families, cut funding for the arts, cut funding to public schools. when he isnt cutting funding to essential programs for our kids and our health heis planning to put a giant oil pipeline through very sensitive ecosystems in bc.\n\ngenerally his policies are bad for the environment, healthcare, education but they cater to the babyboomers coming financial needs so he got the vote. because we had two liberal parties running in the election (NDP and liberals) it was split. Last time the liberals were in power they created huge national debt so many people voted NDP a previously smaller party- but it ended up splitting the vote.\n\nSomeone else pointed out that redditors are younger and the youth in canada tend not to like harper. this bias is true. im 27 my bf is 25 we live in vancouver. our friends range from 21-45, i only know two people that voted for harper. and they voted based on economic policy, they both think he is a douche.\n\ncanada has gotten a lot of flack this year in the media because of the harper admin. Called out on human rights violation for a canadian citizen in guatanamo bay who was supposed to be extradited in oct of 2011 but the government wont acknowledge. He was called out for being \"un-canadian\" at an international environmental conference in rio earlier this year for some of his new policies: like shipping espectice (sp) to india so canada dosent have to destroy it as by first world standards its a bio-hazzard. ( it creates a rare and incurable lung cancer) The enbridge pipeline is a massive backstep in canada's economic policy. Harper was also called out at a recent g20 gathering for being the only country to agree w. russia and vote to open a trading route through the very sensitive eco-system of antarctic waters. \n\ni could go on at length, but you get the jist.\n\nIf you want to know about a canadian politician we did like, check out jack layton. He was the leader of the ndp party but lost his battle to cancer after the election. This has memorialised him a lot he is most remembered by some with his farewell letter: _URL_0_. Not everyone loves layton, but many people saw his platform as \"canadian.\"",
"I understand that Reddit is very liberal, but I'd like to try to be a little more unbiased here. \n\nProbably the best answer I can give you is that a majority of Canadians are too liberal for Harper. In the last election, the Conservatives got roughly 40% of the vote with the remaining 60% going to left-leaning parties (the NDP, Liberals, BQ and Green). Having a (small-c) conservative government in a relatively (small L) liberal county will not win you the affection of the population.\n\nIf you want more specifics, many people (i.e. the 60% who votes liberal) do not like his dismantling of our environmental policies, his disdain for the democratic process in Canada, his unabashed support of Israel, his scrapping of the long gun registry and his omnibus crime bill.\n\nThat being said, not many people deny that he has managed the economy fairly well through the recession for the most part with a minority government.\n\nNow I don't think you will be hearing much good from anybody about Vic Toews. He introduced Bill C-30 which will allow police to force ISPs to give up our browsing information without a warrant as well as a couple other things. He was also very reluctant to fight for Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay where by all rights, he should have fought for the guy",
"He's developed the oil sands by butchering the fishery act removing the need for environmental assessments and artificially inflating the dollar by not factoring the future costs of clean up\n\nHis tough on crime bill will put far more minor offenders away for madatory minimum sentences and simply antagonize an already broken system\n\nWe we're lied to about the cost of the f-35 being purchased\n\nin order to get Canada into the pacific free trade agreement he essentially threw away any bargaining abilities we had which may force us to adopt several internet freedom destroying laws\n\nWhile he has increased funding to R & D science he has slashed budgets in all other scientific areas including shutting down the Experimental Lakes area\n\nThere are a number of other reasons but these stick out to me personally"
] | The answer to this question is a 3 parter. Here goes...
* **Sample Bias.** Stephen Harper is from the Conservative Party. Reddit users tend to lean in the non-conservative direction. It could possibly be that young people tend not to be conservative, and Reddit has more younger users than older users. All that is debatable...however-- the Canadians you likely meet on reddit will more likely than not disagree with the policies of Stephen Harper.
* The **Canadian Federal Electoral System.**
In the latest election, first of all, only 61% of the population voted. Thats about 14.5 million votes. Now, Canada has a first past the post voting system. The concervatives only got 5,832,401 votes. However, they got 166 seats, (electoral districts) out of the 308 in total, a majority, and so were able to govern in their own right. In order to win a seat, *you only need to have more votes than any other candidate*, not 50% or more.
In elections with more than 2 parties, First past the post 'splits' the vote and skews the results.
* He's reasonably **disliked**. In one poll 49% had an unfavourable view of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, while 35% had a favourable impression. |
why do news anchors and politicians say "an history" instead of a history? | [
"The 'h' in history wasn't always emphasized, so 'an' made more sense than 'a', (possibly in England) and the practice hasn't completely ended. Different sources have different views on the correct form, but generally either should work.",
"Basically put, if a person emphasizes the h, it should be a history. If a person omits the h, or says it only very softly when they pronounce it then 'an 'istory is the correct form.",
"It enrages me, too. \"It is an historic day...\" Aaaaargh.\n\nAlso, in early high school, I got into a big argument with a friend about it. Somehow she ended up insisting that it's correct to say 'an house'.",
"The rule is use \"an\" ONLY if the SOUND of the first letter starts with a vowel. That is why...\n\nIn \"an hour\" hour is pronounced \"our\", \"o\" is a vowel so \"an\" is used.\n\nIn \"a historic\" historic is pronounced \"historic\", \"h\" is not a vowel so \"a\" is used.\n\nThe exception to this rule is when your local dialect pronounces it that way. So if you're a cockney Londoner who drops the \"h\" sound from the front of some words (including historic) then saying \"an 'istoric\" is perfectly OK.\n\nIT PISSES ME THE FUCK OFF IT'S SO WIDESPREAD ON TV. THE SCRIPT WRITERS ARE FUCKING MORONS. You are aggravated because you (like me) appreciate that flagrant breaking of rules is generally a bad idea. And it's such a simple fucking rule too. Urgh."
] | No. It's not whether it's a vowel or not.
It's whether it's a vowel sound or not.
|
Does the human brain differ on a physical level, before and after acquiring knowledge? | [
"I know that the brain, when it practices certain things repeatedly, will reinforce the neural connections that were created when the person is learning. So in a sense, yes, the brain does differ on a physical level after acquiring and practicing knowledge. But you can't artificially implant a skill in someone, nor can you determine what that knowledge is just by looking at the brain.",
"Yes, yes, and yes.\n\nThe brain learns by, essentially, changing its shape - the shape of the neurons, or of their dendrites, or of their membranes (i.e. how many of what kind of receptors are there in this part, or that part, or etc). All these kinds of changes can be observed.\n\nIn principle and in practice, if you had data in all the right places, you could tell \"whether or not\" something in particular had been learned. It would also be theoretically possible, but far more difficult (or practically impossible), to blindly decode the information content of any observed change in the brain.\n\nFinally, yes, you could (again in principle) adjust or create synapses so that the brain/person now 'knows' something they didn't before. In practice it is hard to even imagine how it could be done, so I would again vote \"practically impossible\"."
] | Your question is super interesting but science cannot yet explain consciousness, and it seems like "knowledge" refers to a conscious awareness of some fact or state of affairs, so your question is primarily addressed by philosophy (and is often called the mind-body problem).
Assuming that there's nothing like a soul in the brain and that it's only made up of atoms, then one might initially think that if two brains are mentally different then they must be physically different, and if they're physically the same then they must be mentally the same.
To put your question another way: if it were possible to construct a brain atom by atom that was an exact replica of my brain right now, would it have the same thoughts and memories and feelings that I do right now?
Science doesn't know because science can't explain how consciousness arises from atoms. Philosophers disagree, of course, but if you're interested in reading what they think, try googling something like "consciousness physical mental states." |
why do more experienced drivers find the interior lights distracting when driving at night? | [
"If you're paying attention to the road you're constantly aware of small sources of light - these could be the headlights or taillights of other cars, reflective stickers on lane markings or guardrails, road signs, stopped cars, or the flashing light on an emergency vehicle. You're also pretty constantly looking ahead, to the rear, to both side view mirrors, and over your shoulder into your blind spot. Having a much brighter light right next to your eye while you're trying to scan for much dimmer lights at the limits of your vision is really shitty. I don't think of this as an experience/inexperienced driver thing, though... maybe you just haven't don't much night driving yet? Or you only drive on roads that you're very familiar with?",
"The pupils of your eyes constrict (get smaller) as opposed to dilate (get wider) when enough light is available. At night, you want your eyes dilated so you can see the road. ",
"By 'experienced' drivers, I assume you mean drivers who are minding the road and their surroundings. If you are minding the roadway and your surroundings, you will definitely notice that your ability to do so at night is diminished, possibly significantly, by interior lights. I do hope that you can make it to 'experienced' status. ",
"I prefer to even turn my dash lights almost out when I drive at night, less eye strain that way."
] | It makes it harder to see out when it's dark outside. Stand at a house window at nighttime with the lights out and then with the lights on and it'll be a lot harder to see outside. |
Is whale sperm any bigger than human sperm? | [
"How is the sperm of whales collected? Is it done in the wild or post-mortem?",
" > wouldn't the whale sperm have to swim more\n\nNo, because the whale penis and volume of ejaculate are also very large.",
"I may be treading dangerously, but can someone tell me why there are always so many posts deleted/removed in r/askscience threads? It seems as though every time I come here half the comments have been deleted.",
"On a side note, [fruit flies](_URL_0_) have the largest sperm.",
"Keep in mind that sperm are just cells. They should be approximately the same size for any organism. Whales are huge because they have many more cells, not because their cells are bigger.",
"Bigger organisms aren't bigger because of bigger cells. They just have more of them. Therefore I would say that the size of an animal doesn't have much impact on the size of it's sperm cells.\n\nThough I think the egg cells are a different story.",
"According to an episode of QI that I recently watched.\n*The fruit fly has the largest sperm of any organism, with an uncoiled size of around 20 times its own length (5.8 cm).\nTangent: The sperm is the smallest cell in the human body, and the ovum is the largest.*\n\n_URL_0_",
"That depends, are you talking about a sperm whale?",
"Revelant Pun _URL_0_",
"get some target sperm"
] | [In male humans, sperm cells consists of a head 5 microns by 3 microns and a tail 41 microns long.](_URL_2_)
Whale sperm vary in length according to species: [73.8 micron for a porpoise, 40.6 for a sperm whale, 52.5 for a humpback whale.](_URL_1_)
I couldn't find it for the blue whale though, sadly. I will assume the blue whale's sperm is in the same ballpark as other whales, making it close to human sperm in size.
Sperm size doesn't really correlate to organism size; the longest sperm on Earth are from fruit flies; [Drosophila bifurca has sperm 58 mm (2.3 in) long.] (_URL_0_)
**Edit:** Links added. |
What is the Kashmir Conflict? Why has it been going on for almost 70 years? Will it ever be solved? | [
"So, I wrote my masters thesis on the evolution of Indo-Pakistani relations, in the context of Kashmir. This will be a pretty long answer, but below I have pasted some of the most relevant pieces of my thesis. I haven't touched it since 2012, so there is nothing in there post-12. If anyone is interested, I will gladly share the entire thing. \n\nYa, so this is pretty long, and goes into the 1st child comment. The format sucks but I don't feel like spending an hour getting it to look good for a Reddit comment. \n\nThe beginning of the conflict:\n\n > Prior the partition of India, the Indian subcontinent consisted of British administered\n > provinces and more than 560 princely states.28 These princely states, though they recognized the\n > supremacy of the English Crown, were largely internally autonomous. Upon the partition of\n > India, these princely states were given the choice to accede to either India or Pakistan. The\n > overwhelming majority of these states chose to join the new nation that corresponded to their\n > internal religious demographics; however, some were swayed by other means. Most of these\n > princely states were demographically Hindu, so the great majority acceded to India. However, as\n > India was quickly expanding its territory with the incorporation of these states, Pakistan made\n > securing the few majority Muslim states, specifically Kashmir, its key policy goal in its early\n > existence.\n\n > Kashmir or, at the inception of the new nations of Pakistan and India, the princely state of\n > Jammu and Kashmir, was asked to join one of the new nations. However, the Maharaja, or king,\n > of the princely state, Hari Singh, was very reluctant to make a decision.29 There were several\n > reasons for Singh’s reluctance. First, Singh was a Hindu and his state was largely Muslim.\n > While logic would suggest that Singh favored accession to Hindu India, this was not the case;\n > Singh’s ultimate goal was for Jammu and Kashmir to emerge as an independent nation, or at the\n > very least a part of either India or Pakistan with a large degree of autonomy.30 Further, the\n > Maharaja was very skeptical of Indian socialist intentions of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India; he was also skeptical of the possibility of Pakistan greatly diminishing his\n > power.31\n\n > When the question of accession was initially posed, the people of the Poonch region of\n > Jammu and Kashmir became very visibly active in their favor of joining Pakistan, holding public\n > forums and debates, as well as lobbying the Maharaja. Though the Poonchis activism began\n > peacefully, the Maharaja responded with a strong hand. Singh ordered a large contingent of his\n > Hindu troops into Poonch to halt the activism.32 The largely peaceful protests soon escalated to\n > violence as the Maharaja’s troops, in early August 1947, fired upon a peaceful protest.33 This\n > gave rise to a widespread armed conflict, between the Hindu troops and the Poonchis. On 27\n > August 1947, Poonchi rebels attacked and took control of a police station.34 This caused Singh\n > to send in nearly all the troops under his command into the Poonch region, escalating the conflict\n > into all out civil war.\n\n > Though the conflict itself began in Poonch, it soon expanded beyond, with many\n > Kashmiri Muslims taking up arms against the Maharaja’s troops. In the midst of this civil war,\n > Pakistan saw an opportunity to achieve its goal of incorporating Kashmir. It seemed, to the\n > Pakistani leadership, that a small push was all that Singh needed to accept the accession to\n > Pakistan.35 Therefore Pakistan began to arm the rebels. Further, Pakistan set into motion a plan,\n > several months in the making, to invade the region. The plan materialized on 22 October 1947,\n > when more than 2,000 irregular Pakistani troops—consisting of former soldiers, tribal militias,\n > and a dozen or so plain-clothed Pakistani officers—crossed the border into Kashmir, and joined\n > with the already active anti-Maharaja Kashmiri militias.36 These irregulars, after several days,\n > began to close in on the capital of the state, Srinagar.\n\n > With the Pakistani-Kashmiri militia closing in on the capital, India dispatched a\n > delegation to persuade the Maharaja to join India. On 26 October 1947, the Maharaja signed a\n > letter of accession to India, on the basis of India’s promise that it would send troops to halt the\n > rebellion.37 This letter still remains at the core of the Kashmir conflict. Pakistan holds that the\n > letter was illegal, and “India’s continued refusal hold a plebiscite on the question of accession\n > denies the Kashmiri people their right to self-determination.”38 Further, Pakistan argues, the\n > letter was illegal as the Maharaja of Kashmir was not a heredity ruler, but rather was appointed\n > the British colonists.\n\n > Legality aside, once the Maharaja agreed to accede to India, Indian troops were airlifted\n > to Kashmir.39 Once arriving at the end of October 1947, the Indian forces quickly secured the\n > capital. By the end of November 1947, the Indian army had taken over the war effort, which at\n > this point was strictly defensive in nature, from the Maharaja’s troops.40 With the introduction of\n > the Indian regular army, the Pakistani-Kashmiri effort faltered. This was due to an array of\n > circumstances. First, the Pakistani-Kashmiri militia was highly disorganized and unprofessional.\n > Often the actions of the various Pakistani and Kashmiri tribes, which made up a large part of the\n > Pakistani-Kashmiri militia, were dictated by tribal elders who, more often than not, were focused\n > on pillaging and looting villages. Officers were unable, to a large degree, to coordinate their\n > actions against the Indian army.41 The difficulties in coordination of the Pakistani-Kashmiri\n > militia were compounded by the fact that the Indian army, as a result of the division of assets,\n > was highly professionalized and utilized the most modern military equipment.42 The Pakistani-\n > Kashmiri militia was, on the other hand, “a rag-tag force equipped with outdated rifles or homemade\n > weapons in the gun factories of the Frontier province.”43\n\n > As the winter months of 1947-48 came on, the war ground to a halt. This lull gave both\n > sides a chance to reevaluate their strategies and goals of the conflict. Jawaharlal Nehru, at the\n > coaxing of his British advisors referred the issue of Kashmir to the UN. However, Nehru and his\n > military advisors began to work on a contingency plan for a major offensive.44 Though this first\n > step towards working with and through international institutions was involuntary, Nehru would\n > eventually come to embrace these institutions, and they would in fact become the core of\n > Nehruvian international thought which would come to guide the Indian approach to Kashmir in\n > this first phase. Pakistan, during the lull, began to shift its strategy away from the offensive.\n > Once it became clear that the Pakistani-Kashmiri militia was greatly outmatched by the Indian\n > army, the new strategic objectives were to make the expulsion of the Pakistani-Kashmiri militia,\n > which Pakistani strategists had begun to see as the eventual scenario, as difficult and expensive\n > for India as possible, to hold as much of the gained territory as possible, and to stop the Indian\n > army from entering Pakistan at all costs.45\n > \n > 28 Ian Copland, “The Princely States, the Muslim League, and the Partition of India in 1947”, The International\n > History Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 38-69. P. 38-9.\n\n > 29 Praveen Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947-2004, (New York:\n > Routledge, 2007), P. 15.\n\n > 30 Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its army, and the Wars Within. (Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press, 2008). Pp. 40-42\n\n > 31 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, P. 15.\n\n > 32 Ibid, Pp., 42-43.\n\n > 33 Ibid, P. 43.\n\n > 34 Ibid, P. 43.\n\n > 35 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, P. 15-16\n\n > 36 Ibid, Pp.18-22.\n\n > 37 Nawaz, Crossed Swords, P.49.\n\n > 38 S. Paul Kapur, “India and Pakistan's Unstable Peace: Why Nuclear South Asia Is Not like Cold War Europe”,\n > International Security, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 127-152. P. 136.\n\n > 39 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, Pp. 21-23.\n\n > 40 Ibid, P.22.\n\n > 41 Ibid.\n\n > 42 Ibid, P. 22.\n\n > 43 Nawaz, Crossed Swords, P. 50.\n\n > 44 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, Pp. 22-23.\n\n > 45 Nawaz, Crossed Swords, P. 57.",
"I simply wanted to thank the mods for another exemplary job in this highly-partisan discussion. I had minimal info of this situation going in, and I feel more informed about the issue. There was little inflammatory rhetoric and plenty of substance throughout. Thank you once more,as a reader of this sub. "
] | So this is an excerpt from an essay I wrote on the topic that essentially summarizes the conflict. I have cited the sources used in this section at the bottom, hope it helps. If this is not allowed, I will remove it ASAP!
> As both India and Pakistan gained dominion status in mid 1947 around 600 princely states had to be politically integrated into the newly formed dominions. Before 1947, the princely states had operated in conjunction with the British Raj, forming a type of relationship that came to be known as paramountcy. Princely states would cede certain powers, such as control over foreign affairs, to the British. With the creation of India and Pakistan in 1947, as per the June 3rd plan, the relationship of paramountcy between princely states and the British ceased to exist; states regained control of the powers they had initially forfeited to the British Raj. In order to fill the vacuum left by the British, states were supposed to form allegiances (generally based on state demographics and state geography) with either Pakistan or India, as per Lord Mountbatten’s June 3rd plan. Allegiances were formed, for the most part, using instruments of accession, through which princely states would either accede to Pakistan or India.
> For the most part, the majority of the princely states acceded without too much fuss. However, there were 3 notable exceptions to that rule: Hyderabad, Junagadh, and Kashmir. In this essay I will be looking at the cases of Junagadh and Kashmir.
> As the Junagadh conflicted played out in Gujarat, another crisis was unfolding in the princely state of Kashmir. Unlike Junagadh, where the leader was a Muslim and the majority of the population was Hindu, Kashmir had a Hindu leader and a Muslim majority. However, even though the majority of the population was Muslim, this did not mean the whole Muslim population was in favor of acceding to Pakistan; one of the state’s most popular political party’s was the Sheikh Abdullah led National Conference, which shared extremely close ties with India’s congress parties. When India and Pakistan became separate dominions, Kashmir, unlike Junagadh, did not announce its intentions immediately. Rather, Kashmir entered into a standstill agreement with Pakistan, and also attempted to enter into a similar agreement with India (albeit unsuccessfully). As time progressed the situation in the state became less favorable towards Pakistan. Mahajan, Kashmir’s Prime Minister was in talks with Nehru over accession to India. As a result of these talks Sheikh Abdullah, whose popular following and ties to India made him a threat to Pakistan, was released from jail. With the situation slipping through Jinnah’s fingers, he decided to resort to military action. In a telegram to Jinnah, Major Khurshid Anwar discussed the plans to send Pakistani tribesmen into Kashmir. In a telegram on October 18th from Kashmir to Pakistan it was noted that transport of supplies and efficiency of postal services was becoming increasingly difficult owing to the presence of tribes men. Then, on October 22nd tribesmen seized Muzaffarabad. With pressure mounting, and the situation becoming increasingly desperate, Kashmir’s ruler, Hari Singh, acceded to India in the search for military help in restoring peace within Kashmir. In a note to Lord Mountbatten, Hari Singh says, “I have no option but to ask for help from the Indian Dominion. Naturally they cannot send the help asked for by me without my state acceding to the dominion of India. I have accordingly decided to do so”. The Indian government decided to accept his accession until peace was restored. After that, they would gauge the will of the Kashmiri people, and make a decision from there. Hari Singh’s accession, was hotly contested from the getgo. Pakistan maintained that he was no longer in control of his state, seeing as areas of northern Kashmir had been clinched by Jinnah’s tribesmen (In denying the legality of Kashmir’s accession, Jinnah simultaneously denied India’s right to Kashmir, but maintained his own right to Junagadh, because nothing illegal or questionable had happened in Junagadh). But regardless of Pakistan’s objections, India now labeled them aggressors; their “troops” were on foreign turf. Over the following 2 months, rhetoric between the two sides escalated. Various proposals, some of which will be further discussed later, were put forward, but then ultimately rejected. Amongst these proposals was the swapping of Junagadh for Kashmir and an immediate plebiscite to ascertain the Kashmiri populations will. The idea of a plebiscite gained headway, but ultimately reached an impasse when neither side could agree on conditions; both sides wanted a plebiscite to be carried out in conditions that would be favorable to them. Both India and Pakistan eventually took the case to the Security Council. Resolutions were offered in both April and August of 1948. In April, both India and Pakistan rejected the Security Council’s proposal. The proposal required both countries to withdraw their troops, and then a plebiscite administration would be set up. The administration would invite all major political parties of Kashmir to participate in the plebiscite. India rejected the offer saying it did nothing to acknowledge Pakistan’s role as aggressor, and it pitted the two countries as equals, which, in this situation, India claimed was not the case. Pakistan rejected the proposal because the inclusion of major Kashmiri political parties would mean Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference would play too big a role in determining the outcome of the state. In August, only Pakistan rejected the UNs new resolution, which implicitly confirmed Pakistan’s aggressor status. India, given the changes, found the new conditions favorable.
Why was Kashmir important (india centric answer)?
> Kashmir was of key importance to India because it supplied (and still supplies) many of India’s rivers with water, which in turn sustained multiple communities across Northern India. At the same time being in control of Kashmir’s water supply would also mean India could control water flow into Pakistan. Serving as the basing for the Indus river, securing Kashmir would mean securing and controlling the water flows to various rivers across North India. In fact, during military operations in 1947 and 1948 Jhelum became a key point of contention. General Gracey became increasingly aware of attacks on Bhimbur and Mirpur, noting that such an attack would allow India to control the Jhelum, one of the key tributaries of the Indus.
Furthermore, successfully gaining Kashmir would, Nehru claimed, prove India’s status as a secular state. According to Nehru, “If Kashmir went, the position of Muslims in India would become more difficult. In fact, there would be a tendency of people to accept a purely communal Hindu viewpoint. That would mean an upheaval of the greatest magnitude in India”. Having a state with a majority population of Muslims in India would declare India as a secular nation. How could Kashmir exist within the framework of India if it were not a secular nation? Wresting Kashmir from Pakistan, an Islamic nation state, would be the ultimate victory for India’s secularity.
Finally, with Indian control of Kashmir, would make sure that India’s internal security was safe. Northern Kashmir bordered Afghanistan, China, and the USSR at the time of independence. Having a secure Kashmir would secure India’s borders and possibly prevent future incursions by the aforementioned countries. In a telegram to Clement Attlee, Nehru had the following to say as to how a secure Kashmir would reinforce India’s own security: “Kashmir’s northern frontiers…run in common with those of Kashmir, which must depend upon its internal tranquility and existence of stable government, is vital to security of India, especially since part of southern boundary of Kashmir and India are common”. Securing Kashmir would expand India’s presence in the subcontinent and the surrounding area, which would serve to deter potential incursions. Furthermore, Kashmir’s difficult to navigate terrain would also serve as a deterrent for those trying to enter India, especially if the Indian army were able to master the mountains and valleys that enveloped Kashmir.
The section I copy pasted is mostly context and derived from the following sources. Hope this helps!:
Menon, V. P. The Story of the Integration of the Indian States, 130. New York: Macmillan, 1956. Print.
Zaidi, Z. H., and M. Akram. Shaheedi. Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah Papers. Islamabad: Quaid-i-Azam Papers Project, National Archives of Pakistan, 1993. Print. 5
Raghavan, Srinath. War and Peace in Modern India. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.
Lamb, Alastair. Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy. N.p.: Roxford, 1998. Print.
Hasan, K. Sarwar. The Kashmir Question. Karachi: Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, 1966. Print.
|
How does time near the speed of light work for two different frames of reference? | [
"This is the reason that the [twin paradox](_URL_0_) is called a paradox. The astronaut on his journey will see time progress slowly on earth- however, when he turns around to come back to earth, he changes his frame of reference. When he changes frame of reference, many of his coordinates get relabeled. In a sense, he sees the earth experience a whole lot of time at once.\n\nOf course, there's nothing discontinuous about what the astronaut actually -observes-, when we write 'sees' we mean that the astronaut corrects his observations based on the speed of light. The astronaut -observes- time passing faster on the earth when he travels back towards it, because he's travelling into the oncoming light beams. When he corrects for the distance between him and the earth, however, he finds the same thing he found on the way out, that time is passing more slowly on the earth than for him.\n\nThe wikipedia link has more material about this under the 'resolution' section.\n\nEdit: It seems I was beaten by an equivalent explanation. Perhaps I shouldn't write responses while travelling close to the speed of light.",
"Ah this is the classic [twin paradox](_URL_0_).\n\nSpecial relativity states that reference frames that are uniform are equivalent. i.e. they are either traveling at a constant speed or stationary. \n\nThe thought experiment is: if you are on a bus that's traveling at a constant speed, it is indistinguishable from if you are stationary. You can construe yourself as being stationary and the whole world is moving backwards at the constant speed.\n\nBut the moment the bus accelerates or decelerates, you will be jolted forwards or backwards (this leads to general relativity, beginning with the equivalence of accelerating frames and gravity). \n\nSo in this case, the astronaut has to accelerate out, decelerate *and then* make a round-about change in direction. The people on Earth stay stationary relevant to the astronaut and experience no such accelerations/decelerations/change of direction. The two reference frames are no longer equivalent.\n\nThis proves to be an simplification - more details are provided in the link above.\n",
"This is the reason that the [twin paradox](_URL_0_) is called a paradox. The astronaut on his journey will see time progress slowly on earth- however, when he turns around to come back to earth, he changes his frame of reference. When he changes frame of reference, many of his coordinates get relabeled. In a sense, he sees the earth experience a whole lot of time at once.\n\nOf course, there's nothing discontinuous about what the astronaut actually -observes-, when we write 'sees' we mean that the astronaut corrects his observations based on the speed of light. The astronaut -observes- time passing faster on the earth when he travels back towards it, because he's travelling into the oncoming light beams. When he corrects for the distance between him and the earth, however, he finds the same thing he found on the way out, that time is passing more slowly on the earth than for him.\n\nThe wikipedia link has more material about this under the 'resolution' section.\n\nEdit: It seems I was beaten by an equivalent explanation. Perhaps I shouldn't write responses while travelling close to the speed of light."
] | Ah this is the classic [twin paradox](_URL_0_).
Special relativity states that reference frames that are uniform are equivalent. i.e. they are either traveling at a constant speed or stationary.
The thought experiment is: if you are on a bus that's traveling at a constant speed, it is indistinguishable from if you are stationary. You can construe yourself as being stationary and the whole world is moving backwards at the constant speed.
But the moment the bus accelerates or decelerates, you will be jolted forwards or backwards (this leads to general relativity, beginning with the equivalence of accelerating frames and gravity).
So in this case, the astronaut has to accelerate out, decelerate *and then* make a round-about change in direction. The people on Earth stay stationary relevant to the astronaut and experience no such accelerations/decelerations/change of direction. The two reference frames are no longer equivalent.
This proves to be an simplification - more details are provided in the link above.
|
why is unrefined sugar more expensive than white
sugar? by the same token, why do whole grain
products like whole grain bread and brown rice
tend to be more expensive than their white, refined
counterparts? surely, refining should add extra
cost? | [
"For most products, the price you pay at the store has a lot more to do with what people are **willing** to pay than what the product costs to make. If a company can make more money by charging more, because people are willing to pay that much, they will. If raising the price too much costs them sales and profits, then the price will go back down.",
"The term processed gets thrown around a lot, and can mean different things. It's not always about adding chemicals. Now, more processing would normally mean work and therefore more cost, but not always. \n\nFirst, it's not always more expensive. King Arthur whole wheat at Walmart is the same price as Unbleached. \n\n- [Whole Wheat Flour](_URL_1_)\n- [Unbleached Flour](_URL_0_)\n\nWhen there is a difference, there are a lot of factors. There's no single one answer. \n\nIn the case of sugar, its due to the ingredients used. Pure cane sugar is more expensive than \"normal\" sugar. Why, \"normal\" sugar has sugar derived from beats which is more available in the US than cane which grows better in the tropics. \"RAW\" sugar, while less processed is still processed to some degree. It's centrifuged (I don't know the full technique) but something does happen to it. It's also often organic and comes mainly from HI (for those in America), both of which drive the price up. \n\nAnother reason is that sometimes refined foods are cheaper for some reason. White rice has a longer storage life than brown rice for example. Also, canned fruit lasts longer than fresh, and is cheaper than frozen. \n\nFor other products, a lot of it is that many natural products aren't just less processed, but also premium grade. You don't just pay more at whole foods because it's healthy, you also pay more because they are a higher grade product. The same effect happens in other stores. You can get store brand refined product, but if you want the natural stuff, you might have to buy name brand, driving up the cost. \n\nFinally, it can be good old supply and demand. There's a lot of supply of the processed stuff, and less supply of the non processed stuff. This could change over time as our tastes as a culture change. ",
"I suspect that shelf life has a lot to do with it. Whole grains have oils that can go rancid, fresh fruit doesn't last nearly as long as canned, etc. So the processing, while it adds costs, allows the item to be on the shelf a whole lot longer and reduces waste, lowering the cost per item that can be sold.",
"Supply and Demand.\nEconomy of Scale.\n\nSupply and demand is simple. More people want white sugar than unrefined. Lets pretend that unrefined sugar earns one dollar profit. \nWhite sugar only earns 75 cents, because of processing. Pretend the price is the same to buy.\n\n100 people buy unrefined. That earns 100 dollars.\nTen thousand people buy white. That's 7500 dollars\n\nEconomy of scale comes next. \nEverything in manufacturing has 2 main costs. \"Fixed\" and \"Marginal.\" \nFixed costs are what you pay up front to start making something. Lets say it's a donut machine. That costs ten thousand dollars. This is a fixed cost because it never changes. After making a million donuts, the machine only really costs 1 cent per donut, and as you keep making them, the share of cost goes down, making each donut cheaper to make.\n\nMarginal costs are what you have to pay every time you make something. This is usually materials (like plastic), but in our case, it's ingredients. They cost... 20 cents per donut.\n\nNow, it doesn't matter how many donuts you make, they all cost you 20 cents. Fair enough.\n\nNow, you want to make Waffles. A waffle machine will cost... ten thousand dollars. But only 1% as many people want waffles!\n\nSo you only make 10 thousand waffles. Each one costs you $1.20 to make. Those popular donuts? Cost 21 cents.\n\nEven if the donuts need more processing... so many are made that even after the processing, they still come out cheaper.\n\n",
"In a similar vein, I've always wondered why buying a grilled flake at the fish and chip shop would cost more than a battered one. Surely adding batter takes more effort?",
"By the same token, why is diesel more expensive than petrol? It is also less refined.",
"Little business lesson for you. Price isn't determined by cost. Price only has to be higher than cost. The price is higher because there are people who value unrefined products more than refined products, therefore they will pay more for them.",
"It isn't always cheaper to give your customer less. \n\nImagine you have a hamburger stand. You have a well tuned assembly line of employees, each specialized in they task who can turn a patty into a burger in seconds.\n\nSo when someone says hold the pickle, it disrupts the whole process. Now you have to add overhead to track the special burger through the system and get it to the right person, more overhead than a few pickles cost. You could make a second assembly line for pickle free burgers, but there is not enough demand to justify it.\n\nThe same is true for sugar. It might be cheaper to make unrefined sugar, but it is more expensive to set up a supply chain that does *both*, especially when there is a much smaller demand for one."
] | In a third world country unrefined food is cheaper than refined food. But in the western world they realized they can charge more by calling it "healthy". |
why can't we recreate dinosaurs just like in jurassic park? | [
"I read in a dawkins book that there's just no way the DNA could survive so long. Even enclosed in amber and mosquito bodies.",
"I highly recommend watching the TED talk by Jack Horner: [Building a Dinosaur From a Chicken](_URL_0_)",
"Did you even see Jurassic Park?! THATS WHY. It was a documentary.",
"Because dinosaurs… uh… had their shot. They had it, and it was… uh… 65 *million* years ago. Trying to throw humans and dinosaurs back together… well… the kind of control that would take, drunkenAmoeba… it's not… uh… it's not possible. Chaos theory… which shouldn't take much explanation if you're five because… uh… when you're five… well… *everything* you do has unexpected consequences… heh… says you can't because if you do then *velociraptors will eat your face.*\n\n(As I think about it, explaining things to a movie audience isn't actually much different from explaining things to a five year old in the first place.)",
"To create clones you need to take the nucleus of a cell of one animal and place it in an egg without a nucleus of the same species. This is then given to the female and is grown in the normal fashion. Blood (in human's certainly) tends not have cell nuclei, hence it wouldn't be possible for humans. Even if you were able to get the cell nucleus from the blood of an animal trapped in sap for millions of years you wouldn't have an empty egg to put it in, nor would you have a mother capable of hosting it for long enough to harden and form a foetus.\n\nIn 5 year old speak - imagine you have one of those cars that you pull back, let go and they shoot off into the distance. You could take out the little motor of that car, but you'd need another little car that was almost identical to put it in to make it work. Not only that, but you'd need the exact same colour of carpet to pull it back on for it to work too.\n\nIt's been a while since I was 5.",
"I read in a dawkins book that there's just no way the DNA could survive so long. Even enclosed in amber and mosquito bodies.",
"I highly recommend watching the TED talk by Jack Horner: [Building a Dinosaur From a Chicken](_URL_0_)",
"Did you even see Jurassic Park?! THATS WHY. It was a documentary.",
"Because dinosaurs… uh… had their shot. They had it, and it was… uh… 65 *million* years ago. Trying to throw humans and dinosaurs back together… well… the kind of control that would take, drunkenAmoeba… it's not… uh… it's not possible. Chaos theory… which shouldn't take much explanation if you're five because… uh… when you're five… well… *everything* you do has unexpected consequences… heh… says you can't because if you do then *velociraptors will eat your face.*\n\n(As I think about it, explaining things to a movie audience isn't actually much different from explaining things to a five year old in the first place.)"
] | To create clones you need to take the nucleus of a cell of one animal and place it in an egg without a nucleus of the same species. This is then given to the female and is grown in the normal fashion. Blood (in human's certainly) tends not have cell nuclei, hence it wouldn't be possible for humans. Even if you were able to get the cell nucleus from the blood of an animal trapped in sap for millions of years you wouldn't have an empty egg to put it in, nor would you have a mother capable of hosting it for long enough to harden and form a foetus.
In 5 year old speak - imagine you have one of those cars that you pull back, let go and they shoot off into the distance. You could take out the little motor of that car, but you'd need another little car that was almost identical to put it in to make it work. Not only that, but you'd need the exact same colour of carpet to pull it back on for it to work too.
It's been a while since I was 5. |
how do so many countries commit war crimes, and yet there seems to be little action against it? | [
"Leaders don't want to start justice-fuelled conflict because it's expensive and won't get the people on side because the war crimes are kept a secret anyway, so the public don't see them as a problem. The thing you've got to remember is, nothing in international politics is humanitarian. ",
"There is no global government, and what we call international law is not really law and not really that enforceable. International law is a bundle of treaties, and for lack of a better word orders issued by the powerful nations. These can only be enforce if a country chooses to use their economic or military might to enforce them. \n\nCountries that are not important due to location and what resources they have tend to be ignored as using up time and resources to force compliance is not worth it to much of the rest of the world. \n\nOn the other hand countries that are powerful enough cannot really be forced to do anything. To try and use economics against them tends to hurt the countries who stop doing business with them more, and since they tend to have the stronger militaries using war or threat of war against them is normally useless. "
] | There is no world court that can go around arresting people for committing war crimes. The closest thing you have to that is the International Court of Justice. But the ICJ is more of a Western European political tool than anything else. It would never prosecute a Western European leader, and cannot operate in countries that are not militarily controlled by a Western European country.
But there is also a problem with your question, which is the assumption that the commission of war crimes is widespread. There is reason for that because the media in general, and people on the internet in particular, like calling every action by countries they deem to be their enemy a war crime.
In order for a civilian killing to be a legal war crime, the killing needs to be done intentionally, with knowledge of the civilian's status, and there cannot be a military purpose behind the killing.
That means that if a bomb misses its intended target and strikes a civilian that is not a war crime, because there was no intention to kill civilians.
That means that if a building is reasonably believed to be housing solely combatants, but it turns out to be a civilian building instead that is not a war crime because there was no intention to kill civilians.
That means that if combatants are hiding amongst a group of civilians, the killing of those civilians is not a war crime because the killing had a military purpose.
In the modern world, the overwhelming majority of civilians that are killed by a military are killed because their government intentionally deceives it's opponent into thinking that civilian buildings are in fact military buildings or because militants attempt to use civilians as human shields. When civilians are killed under those circumstances it does not give rise to the commission of a war crime. |
What impact did Marcus Licinius Crassus have on society after his death? | [
"Also, while you shouldn't ever cite Wikipedia, their references can sometimes be helpful and a jumping off point. ",
"The fact that in death Crassus lost the standards of his legion to the Parthians had serious political ramifications. Recovering the standards was a major foreign policy point and when Augustus wasable to have them returned it was a major motif he used in propaganda.\n\nFor example,you can see the return represented on this coin: _URL_0_ as well as several others on that site.\n\nThe return is also depicted as the central image on Augustus's breastplate in the famous Prima Porta statue. So, basically Crassus's death was a political debacle that had to be recovered."
] | I'm on my phone but I must say this makes my heart happy.
You might try Alan Mason Ward's "Marcus Crassus and the Late Roman Republic" as a good start. Maybe Plutarch's Lives as well.
I hope these help.
Source: I've written a biography on Crassus. |
why does some electronic equipment (smart tv’s, consoles, computers etc) respond so slowly when they are first turned on? | [
"because you are effectively booting up a computer each time you turn the TV on. What doesn't help is that you are used to analog style tvs, which just needed their components to heat up to effectively start working. modern tvs have parts the need to effectively boot to start working enough for you to see a picture. Some are better optimized than others. I know my Vizio tv will take a while to load, no matter what, but my Samsung tv can load live tv almost instantly, but loading other items seems to take a few extra cycles. ",
"Not sure if you meant first turned on in the context of a hard shutdown or new out of the box experience, so I’m putting both in the ELI5:\n\n**First turned on**: You were just born. You have to set everything up from scratch. Install a language into your brain, install the movement system, fine tune the vision system etc. before you can become fully functional. \n\n**Turn on after a full shutdown:** You just woke up after a great night’s sleep. You’re a bit groggy so you have to take some time to wake up. Eat breakfast, drink your coffee, then go to work. \n\n**Turn on from standby (like most modern consoles)**: You just took a power nap. You’re up now but your faculties are still with you, you aren’t groggy and you’ve already eaten, so you are good to get back to work. ",
"Because they're running a real operating system like Linux or BSD on the cheapest hardware available. They're a computer with a slow disk, crappy CPU and not enough memory, running a shitty, cut-down operating system that will just about run.",
"Imagine if someone woke you from a sound sleep and immediately started asking you to do math problems. It would take you some time to get yourself in the right frame of mind to add, subtract, multiply and divide, right?\n\nThat's basically what's happening inside the device, it's getting into the right frame of mind before it can respond to your demands."
] | They have a lot of things to load into memory and process (startup processes, kernal modules, etc)
Think of it like eating breakfast. It takes a while to get to the eating part because you have stuff to do prior like cooking, getting the dishes, bringing them to the table, etc. |
why do christians think the plain red cups at starbucks are anti-christian, when previous cups' reindeer and snowflakes and evergreens were nordic-germanic pagan symbols and not related to jesus in the first place? | [
"A percentage of Christians is too concerned with appearing to be more Christian and caring about Christian things to stop and actually think about what they're doing.\n\nWhich is something that happens with every group of people. They're too busy being [subgroup]y to stop and consider what, exactly, it means to be a part of that group.",
"They may not have always represented Christmas, but they do now. Christmas, being a Christian holiday, has come to be a pawn in the fight between people who feel that America is too Christian-centric and intolerant of other cultures, and people who feel that Christianity has made America what it is as opposed to say, what the Middle East is. As often happens in these political battles, both sides demand everyone pick a side, and now Starbucks is entangled in it. They picked the politically-correct side, presumably on the basis that that's the side more of their customers are on so they'll lose less business, and now the other side is mad at them."
] | You shouldn't go looking for logic in this red cup nonsense.
Not to mention that this is a very small *very* vocal minority who is complaining about this crap. |
how do 'fake news' companies make money | [
"Have you ever had to \"Ctrl-Alt-Delete\" on a fake news site because of the 456 billion ads spamming and freezing your computer on each page?",
"Ads.\n\nAdvertising models mean clicks= views= ad revenue.\n\n > I mostly see them in facebook.\n\nIf you click the hyperlink, the web page it brings you to will have ads on them. It's a similarish idea to Buzzfeed- have sensational title, people share it, people see the title and are tempted into clicking to see what the fuss is. You now have eyeballs you can monetize with ads.\n\nThen those new people share it, new eyeballs, more money, etc etc\n",
"Advertisements.\nThe advertisement companies run advertisements on their website and then the company hosting the ads get paid according to multiple values, mostly just how many clicks it gets them. \nGoogle runs an advertisement company called Adsense, where the site puts a piece of code in the side of the website. \nIt generates advertisements and Google pays them based off of how many people viewed the page, and how many people clicked it. ",
"Advertisment is not the only answer. Its no secret anymore that russia (and others too) is heavily funding media outlets that produce fake news in order to create a politicsl climate that benefits them. For example, RT (russia today) is a government owned tv channel. It ran massive pro-Brexit campaigns in Britain prior to the vote because russia is ultimately gaining from any separatist movement (weak unions means weaker opponents). Theyre actually the biggest sponsor of the Calexit movement (california exiting the US). "
] | Adverts on their websites and most likely by selling any information that website can gather from you, too. |
how is it that for two months california has had a methane leak and it won't be fixed until spring? | [
"I work in oil and gas at a large plant so I'll answer you what it PROBABLY is, though without knowing the details it honestly could be anything. First of all, shuting off machines cost industry HUGE money, in chemical processing plants like those used to refine and process oil and gas, if one machine goes down, often times an entire segment of the plant that goes down, every thing that feeds into that machine has to stop, everything that machine feeds into has to stop. If you only have 3 concurrent units running, that means that if 1 critical component goes down, 1/3rd of our plant goes down, 1/3rd of our production is down, you make 1/3rd less oil and make 1/3rd less money until that machine is back up. If fixing that methane leak involves taking something critical offline (probably true) then they will do their best to wait until that area of the plant enters a PLANNED outage so they can get a lot of their scheduled maintenance done at the same time that the plant is out anyway, they still lose money, but they get a lot done during that time. In the mean time they likely pay a daily fine for the leak, but that fine is far less than the revenue they would lose if part of the plant was down (for us, each 1/3rd of the plant is responsible for about $5 million dollars of revenue per day, if one is down they are losing 5 million per day, so you can imagine that the fines are a pittance in comparison. ",
"What would happen if we ignited it? Serious question haha. ",
"As a petroleum engineer, I can comment. I can't find all of the details, but they need to drill a relief well to intercept the original well and plug it off with cement. \n\nThey can't flare I believe because the leak is uncontrolled and flaring could be dangerous. A fire would not travel down into the reservoir. \n\nThey likely can't rig up on the problem well itself to run cement because of the leak. Flammability around big machines. \n\nThey should be able to reach 8500 feet in ~10 days but intercepting a small diameter pipe could slow that down significantly. I don't have direct experience with that portion. Then there's the plugging operation to pump cement down the relief well and into the problem well. At each step there's engineering and regulatory work needed that also can take time. In sure there's plenty of parties involved that can add a lot of red tape. \n\n",
"Permanently preventing a gas influx at a low depth is a challenging procedure. Conventional well control involves having a hydrostatic pressure greater than the pressure of the gas. This is typically done by controlling the liquid's weight, more weight = more pressure. Gas's hydrostatic pressure gradient is quite low; think of air pressure difference between Denver and Los Angeles (1 mile of vertical height) is the equivalent pressure of 5 feet of water. \n \nA typical gas well, are designed like telescope, larger shorter (in depth) outer pipes and smaller longer (in depth) inner pipes are cemented together. There is likely a leak between the deeper inner pipe to the more shallow outer pipe. So a high pressure is occurring at a low depth, which cannot be matched from a weighted hydrostatic fluid. \n\nDrilling a \"relief well\" is no easy task. Drillers are attempting to drill a 8000 foot well and hit a 7 inch pipe. Imagine standing on the top of a 30 story building, while holding a 300 foot piece of spaghetti trying to hit a Cherri-O on the sidewalk. So drillers need to go slower than normal to be sure not to go off course. Determining where the drill bit is at needs to occur more often. Also I believe they are restricted to working only day light hours, normal drilling operations are around the clock. At 8000' the hydrostatic pressure will overcome the gas pressure, which would allow a better chance for the cement to 'set up' properly. \n \nTurning everything 'off' doesn't work like you'd want. With well integrity concerns, the gas might find a new way out, by means of breaking different parts of the well/ground, if it's constricted at the surface, which would only complicate the problem. Solving the problem properly at 8000' is more important than a temporary minor mitigation. \n\nLuckily the gas well is isolated, about a mile from people. Even so, natural gas and the gas that gives natural gas it's unpleasant odor, are not harmful. ",
"Californians are exotherms (ie: cold blooded). They stop working when temperatures drop below 60^o F.",
"why dont they just drop a nuke on it? the nuclear fission will burn off any gas and seal the hole. ",
"We have a methane leak?",
"Because people are ignorant to methane. They don't care that it is worse for the climate that CO2, or that we produce a shit-load of it :P \n\nPeople just think methane smells bad, and that's what it does. No harm no foul. ",
"Grew up in Porter Ranch, and still have family there. SoCal Gas and Sempra Energy have operated for 30 to 40 years in Porter Ranch with zero accountability. Local and state politicians have been and are more concerned about contributions and re-election than actual safety (otherwise Sempra's normal operations before the gas leak, which involved Sempra releasing tons of methane regularly into the air) would have been curtailed or stopped. Environmental companies are ineffective in preventing a catastrophe like this, and more geared towards capitalizing on donor sources, media attention, and compromising with big polluters, than dismantling the industries that cause such disasters. Finally, the justice system is a self-serving, corrupt, and wasteful mess (example, BP's spill, largest oil spill in history, resulted in a MISDEMEANOR, and closer to home, the Exide battery recycling plant took decades to close down, and the structured deal protected the shareholders more than anyone else.\nAlso, SoCal Gas covered up the enormity of this industrial disaster, and are only acting because the residents of Porter Ranch (and local grassroots SavePorterRanch) have been holding community meeting and rallies, which are finally getting media attention.\nFinally, natural gas is invisible. If this was more cinematic, like lava flow or a hurricane, it would have received national media attention immediately.\n",
"[Why don't they just nuke it?] (_URL_0_) ",
"What people are having physiological reactions to is called mercaptan. Which is added to the natural gas so people can smell a leak (methane is odorless).\n\nMethane is lighter than air and most of it is rising in the atmosphere, while mercaptan is a heavier molecule and is highly odorous (on order of 1 ppb).\n\nThe leak is over a mile from residential neighborhoods. The question that should be asked is why a residential neighborhood was allowed to be developed by local government close to the largest natural gas storage facility west of Mississippi...",
"This sucks, I live in the area. They are relocating 2500 families for 6+ months. It's affected my business so I know it's hurting a lot of businesses along with the families of course.\n\nWe've already lost out on just over $1k of monthly income due to this and the number is increasing.",
" > Uncontrolled build-up of methane in the atmosphere is naturally checked by methane's reaction with hydroxyl radicals formed from singlet oxygen atoms and with water vapor. It has a net lifetime of about 10 years, and is primarily removed by conversion to carbon dioxide and water.",
"I live in Porter ranch and it's gotten so bad a young girl was in the ICU. Some residents' pets have gotten sick as well. Sadly, SoCal gas doesn't put much effort into trying to solve this issue. The rumor was they tried to cover the smell by using some kind of odor-neutralizer, which failed. Now, mind you, this is in the end of the valley on top of hills and mountains. There are homes practically right by it, very close, actually. So I hope it gets fixed asap but the most we can do is to file a complaint and have the gas company pay for our hotel fees. Several residents weren't getting covered for this at first, so they moved out with their own money. It sucks because generally, this is a nice neighborhood. Average income is highest in the valley and all of LA right after Beverly Hills and has really nice people here. But it's definitely not worth living in this nice neighborhood when shit like this happens.",
"California is desperately trying to show the world how environmentally friendly they are and that's why they've fucked shit up once again. It is taking a while to fix things because they aren't used to solving problems, only talking about or causing them. They're basically the west coast version of Florida with more nonsense"
] | In order to fix the leak, workers have to drill 8500 feet down into the earth, find the underground well, and pump it full of concrete. This process will take months, and can't realistically be sped up.
EDIT: For a more detailed answer, see u/WalterLSU below.
EDIT 2: More info with pictures:
_URL_0_ |
Besides Market Garden, what are some other notable and interesting Allied failures of World War 2? | [
"[Here's a great thread on this topic, which includes an answer from yours truly.](_URL_0_)",
"A non-exhaustive list:\n\n1. Norway 1940: the British and French fail to hold Norway against a fairly light Wehrmacht force, despite maintaining a hold on the important port of Narvik for some time.\n\n2. Greece and Crete 1941: stripping forces from the armies that had just trounced, but not finished off, the Italians in North Africa, Wavell and Churchill attempt to defend Greece from Italian and German attack. The defence is a farce against strong German mobile- and air forces and an undignified evacuation ensues. The Germans then attack the island of Crete with an air-mobile force. Allied mistakes and weakened air power (because of losses associated with Greece and the refusal of the British high command to allow quality Fighter Command units to leave Britain) see this very close-run battle turn to victory for Germany. The German force did however suffer heavily though in the ensuing evacuation the Commonwealth army and naval units suffered heavily as well. \nThis represented a regrettable waste of forces that could have been useful in...\n\n3. Malaya/Singapore/Burma 1941-2: A large Commonwealth force, given time to prepare and what should have been ample resources, is trounced out of the Malay peninsula by a much smaller Japanese force. Two British capital ships, which could have stopped the seaborne component of the attack and against which the Japanese had no available comparable ships, are sunk. The highly defensible island of Singapore is easily accessed by the Japanese army.\nThis defeat is probably Britain's greatest ever, and represented the end of British, and indeed European, power in Asia forever. The Japanese force rolled on into Burma where they defeated the Commonwealth armies present, stiffened with forces sent in response to the initial attack. A counteroffensive in the Arakan Peninsula in 1942 made no progress whatsoever, took heavy casualties, and the British forces had to evacuate precipitously to avoid being encircled. \n\n4. Philippines 1941-2: While the British Commonwealth forces in Asia were suffering their calvary, US Forces under Douglas MacArthur were attempting to defend the Philippines. Warned, prepared and well-equipped (like the British, this refers to resourcing in general, in both cases the forces were not balanced and much equipment was not good enough), MacArthur's inept leadership, bad luck and the skill and detailed planning of the Japanese saw the US-Filipino force routed from their best positions and driven down the Bataan Peninsula.\nMacArthur's propaganda machine was so effective in making ordinary Americans believe in his skill and tenacity that Roosevelt was unable to slate to him responsibility for ultimate failure (FDR was probably also happy to have MacArthur 'busy' in the Pacific, rather than plotting against him at home).\n\n5. The Channel Dash, 1941: after a raiding cruise in the Atlantic, three German heavy ships retired to the French port of Brest, where they were held by a British blockade. Here, they were bombed repeatedly by British aircraft and although Bomber Command was not very effective in 1941, occasional hits were obtained. \nIn early 1941 the Germans executed a plan to sail the ships *straight up the English Channel* to safe harbours in northern Germany. Due to good luck and British ineptitude, all three ships pulled off the escape without suffering a scratch. \n\n6. Dieppe 1942: A mostly Canadian force was landed on the French coast at Dieppe in 1942 for a sort of large raid. The idea was to test attack and the German defence of a coastal port, expand on the commando raid technique, and probably to placate the Soviets' demand for a Second Front. \nCo-ordination failures, rapid German response, and a multitude of small failures (for instance many tanks simply couldn't advance on the beach, which consisted of small, smooth stones) led to something of a disaster. The sheer difficulty of the mission was known, and was also a factor. Many of the lessons were applied to the D-Day landings.\n\n7. The Dodecanese Campaign, 1944: Churchill was obsessed with Greece, and was the impetus behind this plan which landed Allied troops on Greek Islands. The British command failed to rapidly secure Italian co-operation, losing the chance of gaining support from the large Italian garrison. Also, the US government refused to take part, denying the support of American units including, crucially, long-range fighter aircraft.\nOut of range of meaningful support, especially air support, and with other higher priorities the Germans were able to marshall strong forces including paratroopers with lavish support by otherwise-obsolete Stuka dive bombers, to smash the British (and Greek loyalist) units, which had no hope of evacuation. The famous, elite Long Range Desert Group was squandered in this operation.\n\n"
] | While this might be a bit of a stretch since in the end it is billed as an Allied military victory, I think the Battle of Anzio and its after effects failed to accomplish their primary objectives.
At the end of 1943/beginning of 1944 the Allies were bogged down assaulting the Gustav line, a series of German defensive works that spanned the Italian peninsula west to east, with its anchor in the town of Monte Casino. Churchill's idea was to land two infantry divisions to the northwest of the Gustav line near the city of Anzio. According to Rick Attkinson's book *The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944* this attack appeared to demonstrate two benefits, it would either force the Germans to divert troops from the Gustav line, making an Allied breakthrough there more likely, or the troops at the Anzio beachhead could advance inland and trap the defenders between several Allied Divisions.
The first landings took place in January 22, 1944, and at first things looked great. The Allies managed to land 36,000 soldiers and 3,200 vehicles without any casualties at all and the American General in command at the beach, John Lucas, quickly consolidated the beach head. Unfortunately, after this, things just got worse and worse for the Allies. With only two infantry divisions and no supporting armor, it was important for Lucas to advance rapidly inland, as the Anzio beachhead was surrounded by high ground, perfect for the defensive mastermind Albert Kesselring, who commanded the German forces in Italy. According to Lloyd Clark’s book *Anzio: The Friction of War. Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944.* Lucas considered his force too small for his mission, and worried about Kesselring’s inevitable counter-attacks that would feature heavy artillery and tanks, he also declined the aid offered to him by Italian partisans, who claimed they could help his divisions navigate the local, hilly terrain.
Thus, Lucas spent too much time consolidating the Anzio beach head, and Kesselring could move minimal reinforcements to the hills and mountains surrounding it, and a long battle of attrition that resembled the stalemate at Monte Casino grinded on for about four months. In the end, the Allies took the town and Abbey of Monte Casino after assaulting it directly 5 times, and it was only after Allied armies began marching north that Major General Lucian Truscott, who had replaced Lucas coordinated a successful breakout of the beachhead. Clark’s book also points out that in the aftermath of Anzio yet another Allied failure shows it head; as Truscott was driving east to capture retreating German division from the Gustav line, his commander, Lieutenant General Mark Clark ordered Truscott’s corps northward to liberate Rome, in what is widely considered a purely symbolic victory for the Allied armies. This decision by Clark allowed thousands of German soldiers and their equipment to withdraw to the Gothic line, another set of defenses similar to the Gustav line that was towards the north of Italy.
Thus we see not only did Anzio not directly lead to the Allied breach of the Gustav line (you could even argue the troops who breached the Gustav line were the ones that allowed the Anzio breakout), but the Allied divisions that landed failed to trap retreating German forces. So despite the fact that the Allies eventually “won” the battle of Anzio, the poor planning and decisions made would help the Germans keep the fight up in Italy until almost the last days of the war in Europe.
Sources:
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944; Rick Attkinson
Anzio: The Friction of War. Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944; Lloyd Clark
|
how is crime handled in international waters? | [
"What if you're on the high seas and:\n\na.) your ship is not registered to any country. You built it yourself. \nand \nb.) you have legally renounced your citizenship. You're a man without a country.\n\nWould you be autonomous and untouchable? Somehow I doubt it..\n",
"Interpol would get involved if the crime was serious enough. They can be requested by a member country to investigate a international crime.\n\nFor example Viktor Bout, who the movie Lord of War was based, was investigated by Interpol.\n\n_URL_0_"
] | Law on a cruise ship (or any other ship) starts with the flag the ship is flying under. A ship flies the flag of the country where it's registered, and, in general, the laws onboard a ship are the laws of that country. However, when figuring out which laws apply on a sea vessel, territory also must be taken into consideration. Legal jurisdiction on the sea goes something like this [source: Justia]:
A country's internal waters -- areas like bays and ports -- are a part of that country. So when a ship is docked at the Port of Miami, all U.S. (and Florida) laws apply to the ship, its passengers and its crew.
Almost all of a nation's laws also apply in its territorial waters which extend up to 12 miles from its coastline (we'll look at an exception on the next page). A ship departing from a U.S. port cannot open gambling activities until it's 12 miles out, since gambling is illegal in most parts of the United States.
A nation has limited jurisdiction in its contiguous zone -- the area 12 miles to 24 miles from its coast. A country has certain rights within that zone, such as patrolling its borders. For instance, within 24 miles of the U.S. coast, the U.S. Coast Guard is allowed to board any ship suspected of drug smuggling, regardless of which flag it's flying under.
Once a ship is 24 miles from any coastline, it's on the high seas (or international waters). With the exception of certain rights within the contiguous zone, the law of that ship is the law of the country whose flag it's flying. So, a Liberia-registered cruise ship that's 25 miles off the coast of California isn't subject to U.S. law; it's subject to Liberian law.
Source: _URL_0_ |
Twin Paradox - Is the travelling twin younger? | [
"The traveling twin will be younger upon returning to earth. As I recall there are different interpretations on what the 'paradox' should be, but one often confusing point is why it is the twin in the spacecraft who will be the younger, since from his frame of reference the twin staying on earth is the one doing the traveling - so why is he not the younger one? The answer to this is that one of the twins is in an inertial frame of reference, and the other undergoes acceleration (neglect the fact that the earthbound twin is affected by gravity). The formulas are valid in an inertial reference frame, and altered when this is not the case - therefore it is the twin in the spacecraft who will be youngest when he returns to earth.",
"The travelling twin is always younger. If the twin accelerated to a certain speed and stayed there, you couldn't really say who was the younger twin. When the return to the original rest frame is factored in, every inertial reference frame will actually agree the travelling twin is younger. Really, since each frame agrees time has slowed for the traveler, we can accept it.\n\nThe best way to visualize how all of these rest frames agree, is to picture a space station moving away from earth at .8c . This planet passes earth as the twin's rocket ship launces away from earth at .8c. For a while, the space station sees the rocket ship as a stationary object right along side of it. The earth, however, is moving away at .8c . The space station's clock and the rocket ship's clock appear to move at the same speed. The earth's clock moves slower.\n\nBut then the rocket ship reaches alpha centauri, and deccelerates to the earth's speed. At this point, there is a disagreement (between the earth and the space station) about whether the twin's clock ran faster or slower... but the rocket ship isn't done. It has to return to Earth. \n\nThe space station sees the twin's rocket going much faster than .8c. To the space station, the earth is moving at .8c, and the rocket ship is gaining on it. Not only that, but the space station calculates that it will take a long time to catch the earth. The space station sees the twin moving at .9c+, but that is still only .1c faster than the earth. \n\nSo, what ends up happening here, is that even in the space station's point of view the twin is moving with a very high time dilation. All the math balances out, and despite the different rest frames, everyone thinks the moving twin experiences more time dilation."
] | Author of the link sounds totally schizo.
Of course traveling twin is younger. The twin on Earth is inertial and so he maximises proper time between departure and arrival. No matter what the other twin does, Earth twin will always be older. |
When studying electromagnetic forces, how do you picture them? | [
"Be careful with the language. An electromagnetic *field* is different from an electromagnetic *force*. A *field* occupies space like a [vector field](_URL_0_). An electromagnetic force is associated with a specific object, and can be pictured by a singe vector originating from the object to which the force is being applied. \n \nThe difference is illustrated by the image of the earth's magnetic field versus the force/pull/tug felt by a compass' needle. ",
"I just picture classical field lines.",
"Be careful with the language. An electromagnetic *field* is different from an electromagnetic *force*. A *field* occupies space like a [vector field](_URL_0_). An electromagnetic force is associated with a specific object, and can be pictured by a singe vector originating from the object to which the force is being applied. \n \nThe difference is illustrated by the image of the earth's magnetic field versus the force/pull/tug felt by a compass' needle. ",
"I found that the best solution is to stop trying to visualize stuff like electromagnetic in terms of what you already understand, because they are not like something you already understand. You should ofcause gain knowledge of how they work, but i like to rely on the equations and try not to reason to much about anything other than the math.",
"I just picture classical field lines."
] | I found that the best solution is to stop trying to visualize stuff like electromagnetic in terms of what you already understand, because they are not like something you already understand. You should ofcause gain knowledge of how they work, but i like to rely on the equations and try not to reason to much about anything other than the math. |
why do we curse as a reflex? | [
"I would think it is just a learned behavior. As children we see swearing from our parents, the media, and our peers and some of us develop the desire to swear because it's new and often times forbidden. Usually because of the new and forbidden nature of swearing most children become EXTREMELY foul mouthed but break themselves of that habit as they grow. But years of repetively swearing on a whim or swearing when we are subjected to negative stimuli just become habit. Habits take work to break. \n\nFrom personal experience I used to swear like a sailor (as did many of my friends) but I was forced to cut back (A LOT) because I joined the work force and obviously that's not appropriate in a professional setting. For instance, after working with kids for 3 years I've found that these days if I stub my toe or cut myself I don't yell, \"FUCK!\" I yell, \"Ouch\" or \"Shucks\" or \"Crud!\" lol\n\ntl;dr I feel it's just habitual and habits are something that take work to break oneself of. I'm not qualified to say on a psychological level though.",
"Screaming out obscenities or 'bad words' relieves stress, anxiety, and even pain to a limited extent. We say these words in moments of heightened stress to do just that.",
"It's primal. It even spontaneously erupts in primates taught how to do sign language back in the 1970s:\n\n*A small doll placed unexpectedly in Washoe’s cup elicited the response “Baby in my drink.” When Washoe soiled, particularly clothing or furniture, she was taught the sign “dirty,” which she then extrapolated as a general term of abuse. A rhesus monkey that evoked her displeasure was repeatedly signed at: “Dirty monkey, dirty monkey, dirty monkey.”*\n \n*Occasionally Washoe would say things like “Dirty Jack, gimme drink.” Lana, in a moment of creative annoyance, called her trainer “You green shit.” Chimpanzees have invented swear words. Washoe also seems to have a sort of sense of humor; once, when riding on her trainer’s shoulders and, perhaps inadvertently, wetting him, she signed: “Funny, funny.”*\n\n--a selection from \"Dragons of Eden,\" by Carl Sagan"
] | That isn't a reflex. It's a habit.
Comparing the two introduces some really interesting neuroscience topics that have to do with habituation and learning.
A reflex is, broadly speaking, any response that happens *without* conscious thought. If you touch a hot stove, you're gonna pull your hand back *before* the fact that you just touched a hot stove even gets to your brain. It happens entirely without your input.
A habit, on the other hand, is kind of like a *learned reflex.*
Things happen in the nervous system because chemical reactions propagate from one nerve cell to another, like a row of dominos falling over. When an electrochemical reaction propagates from one neuron to another, a kind of feedback happens that ends up strengthening the connection between the two cells. That makes it easier for the same reaction to happen next time; it takes less energy, basically, to knock the next domino over.
That means when a "signal" (it's not really a signal in the sense you might be thinking, but that's a useful metaphor) propagates down a particular neuronal pathway just one time, it becomes *slightly easier* for a "signal" to propagate down that pathway the next time.
Neuroscientists say "What fires together, wires together."
This is the key to *all* learning. You know how you can't really learn something — a skill, or a fact you want to remember, or whatever — by just experiencing it once? You have to practice a skill, or review a fact multiple times before it "sticks." That's because you have to stimulate those particular cells in that particular way a number of times before they "grow together" enough to make it easy for that signal to propagate.
*Habituation* is the logical extreme of that process. It's when you do something *consciously* enough times that it becomes unconscious. Like biting your fingernails, or tapping your foot. You don't *decide* to do that — if that's your habit. Instead, it happens "automatically," because you've *so wired* those particular neurological pathways that signals propagate down them *all by themselves.*
So it isn't a reflex to swear when you hurt yourself or whatever. It's a habit. It's something you did enough times consciously that you've begun doing it without conscious intent. Cause you've *changed your brain.*
(For the record, unlike reflexes, habits can be broken. You just need to *interrupt* the action by conscious intent often enough, and the interruption will itself become habituated, breaking the habit.) |
why is testosterone a controlled substance but estrogen is not? | [
"In some areas you can get estrogen in the form of birth control pills over the counter. In many areas you still need to visit a doctor though.\n\nAnd the reason why these hormones aren't really available over the counter (barring, again, birth control in certain areas) is because they are not harmless fun drugs. They have their purposes, sure, but they also come with loads of both short term and long term side effects, which means that any use of them should be examined carefully to make sure that whatever benefit you want to get from them outweighs the long term effects.\n\nTestosterone, for example, increases the risk of sleep apnea, increases the risk of blot clots, stimulates non-cancerous growth of the prostate (and growth of prostate cancer if already present), has effects on sperm and testicles, and might contribute to heart disease. Which are all very good reasons to sit down with a professional first to determine if hormone therapy is anything you need. If you have a very good valid medical reason for taking it, you will be prescribed it. If you wanna take it for shits and giggles, the doctor is right to deny you. ",
"Oestrogen is a far less dangerous drug, with the main risk being blood clots. It is also far less likely to be abused, unlike testosterone which has significant physical changes relevant to athletics.\n\nThe only people who generally take oestrogen without a prescription are transgender people self-medicating HRT. And while this is dissuaded by Doctors to be doing so unmanaged (because of the inherent risk of blood clots), it's actually fairly safe to take orally if you're not in a risk group.\n\nThe second factor is that oestrogen is a component of \"the pill\", which is a widely used form of birth control, and being the sensitive topic it is, putting needless restrictions on who can get birth control (you still have to see your doctor where I'm from) would be counter-intuitive, since we want birth control to be as accessible as possible."
] | Testosterone can be used for cheating in athletes, and has high potential for unsafe abuse. You might as well ask why steroids are illegal, its just as good a question. |
In WW2 are there any overlooked Axis achievements like the Allied cracking of Enigma or figuring out the magnetic shipping mines and the subsequent degaussing of ships? | [
"While the supported operation had a lot of issues to put it mildly, the deception plan for Wacht am Rhein (the German operational title for the Ardennes winter 1944-45 counter offensive) was quite good.\n\nThis should not be confused with the various infiltration attempts using US uniforms or disguised equipment, those largely failed but still accomplished some modest friction inducing outcomes, but rather the efforts at concealing that the Germans were going to attempt a major counter offensive were very successful.\n\nThis broadly fell into two categories of \"success\" the first of which would be German actions, namely effective operational security (keeping the plan need to know, strict radio discipline) and some deceptive operations (false radio transmissions, emphasizing highly visible defensive measures and actions). \n\nThis was also paired with having a good understanding of what the Allies were thinking. The Allies did not anticipate a significant German counter-offensive, believing to some degree the German Army was beaten to the point it was incapable of such things (to some degree, they were right, the Winter fighting basically left the German forces all but destroyed in the west), and also that the Ardennes would remain a quiet sector due to the limited mobility through that area.\n\nThe result was that the American forces in front of the German offensive were almost totally surprised as the Germans had managed to conceal the signature of a major build up, and attacked at a time and place the Americans (and really the rest of the Allies) did not believe to be a likely event. \n\nOf course, the Germans also greatly underestimated how strongly the American forces would resist, and how capable they were, which led into the whole offensive going off the rails very quickly. But at the least the deception plan worked!",
"During the North Africa campaign the Germans had broken a cipher which gave Rommel a strong advantage. The cipher was the Black Code used by the US military attache, Colonel Feller, in Cairo who gave detailed reports to Washington on what the British were doing in North Africa. \n\nAlso due to a lack of radio discipline and lack of code discipline the Germans made quite a lot of successful intercepts which gave them great insight in the strength and movements of the British armed forces.\n_URL_0_\n "
] | Unironically, the Jerry Can.
Simple, cheap, ergonomic design that allowed compact storage of fuel in a sturdy container resistant to impact, puncture, across a wide range of temperatures, along with maximizing the fuel gotten out of the container as opposed to older containers required a funnel or sort that were used.
While it’s technically a 30’s creation before the war had actually started, it’s still within the era of Nazi Germany.
Likely millions produced since then with the idea staying pretty much the same and being used in pretty much every country across the world. |
fall television - why do networks premier their "hot shows" in the fall? | [
"Because this is the season where Americans are the least likely to travel in general. Also this is the least likely season when Americans travel overseas; even if they go travel they will still be able to watch their American shows. ",
"During the summer, it is light out later, and people are more likely to be aware from home, or in the case of farmers, working. Also, children were out of school, so people would travel or engage in other family activities outside of the house.\n\nOnce school started, the days got shorter, and the harvest was in, people were more likely to watch TV in the evening.\n\n > And does this imply that non-fall premiered shows are of lower quality?\n\nA little.\n\nSometimes they intentionally delay premiers for strategic reasons, but on the broadcast network, a non-fall premier usually means a mid-season replacement series...shows not quite good enough to break into the fall lineup, but they keep them around in case other shows fail.\n\nAnd if a show premiers in the late spring, it is a summer replacement. They are typically even lower quality, and the network is basically saying \"what the hell, maybe someone will like it\". "
] | No expert but I'm going to take a guess. It gets darker and colder causing more people to spend time indoors than outdoors. Because of this, they'll get more viewers. More viewers = more money. |
Is it possible for current human technology to destroy ALL life on Earth? | [
"nice try dr evil",
"No. But we can destroy our civilization easily. That is to disrupt chains of resource extraction,process and distribution. A full scale nuclear & biological & chemical war in 80-th would have resulted in reduction of population to 100 -200 millions of people. ",
"I submit [mass asteroid bombardment](_URL_0_) might work if a person was determined.\n\nEdit: summary for those who cannot open the file:\n\nWith some patience, waiting perhaps a month or two, suitable\nasteroids could be routinely found that would produce weapon\neffects equivalent to nuclear weapons with yields ranging from tens\nof kilotons to many megatons. With some effort, they could be\ndiverted to weapon using technology (and extensive supporting\ninfrastructure) similar to that for exploiting lunar materials,\ngenerating solar power with satellites, or defending against asteroids.\nHowever, at best, it would take months after a decision to use one as\na weapon to reach the desired conclusion. Because much cheaper,\nmore responsive weapons of mass destruction are readily available,\nthis one is likely to remain safely in the realm of science fiction.",
"Not life on Earth, but [this site](_URL_0_) does a good job at illustrating how difficult it would be to outright blow up the world.",
"a mix of biological weapons could certainly put a damper on life, possible destroying all or most complex life, but I think it would be impossible to sterilize the earth",
"I'm going to go against the grain and say yes. The [Teller-Ulam design](_URL_0_) for a fusion weapon is, in theory, scalable up to any size one desires. You'd want to build probably at least a million teraton-sized devices, distributed evenly over the Earth's surface (this would release enough energy to at least vaporize the oceans, which would be a good start).\n\nObviously, we don't have anywhere near the infrastructure or industrial capacity to do this, but if we really wanted to do it, it should be possible with current technology.",
"Cobalt Bomb. \n\n_URL_0_\n",
"Putting aside nuclear weapons, don't we have the capability to engineer biological weaponry that would kill most everyone ?",
"Really the only way to kill off all life is to remove the crust of the planet completely. An event like what created the moon could do it but I don't think we've got technology to do that.\n\nMount a few thousand MeV scale ion engines on the moon to slow it's orbit enough that it crashes into the earth is the only way I can think of to do it with current levels of tech.",
"Nope. Complete saturation with nuclear weapons wouldn't come close to wiping out bacteria and many small animals will keep on going. Life is persistent."
] | No. We couldn't even wipe ourselves (humanity) off the face of the Earth even if we tried _really_ hard. That's not to say we won't have the ability to one day, but at the moment it wouldn't be possible. |
I've noticed on a lot of milk crates they say something along the lines of "using this for anything other than milk is punishable by law" was stealing milk crates ever such a big problem that they had to make a law to address it or was this just a precaution? | [
"hi! could you specify which country you're referring to? thanks!",
"I don't feel like this is a history question at all. Really a cursory google could answer this:\n\n > Theft of milk crates, as it turns out, is an issue taken very, very seriously by the dairy industry. The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA), which runs a whole website devoted to public education on the issues of milk crate misuse, estimates that dairy companies lose 20 million milk crates a year to theft. At about $4 per crate, that’s an $80 million loss per year. That represents just a fraction of a percent of gross national fluid milk sales — in excess of $20 billion in 2012 — but dairy profit margins aren’t huge, and $80 million is $80 million.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAlso:\n_URL_1_\n\nThink about it, they are a great size, and incredibly sturdy therefore they are desirable. The practice in the industry is to place the empty ones outside so the worker can take them with them.\n\nI've acquired a few myself."
] | Yes, that is the case. During the 1970s and 80s these plastic crates were regularly pilfered because of their solid construction and light weight. Today manufacturers have copied these designs and they're sold in stores as consumer goods.
Some states have similar laws for shopping carts, possession is illegal. |
why does everyone on reddit seem to have roommates? (i'm european) | [
"My wife would be *pissed* if I told her to move out.",
"Yes, normally people are ashamed of living with their parents so they try to get good apartments they can't afford and split it with someone else. They would both live together and also there are roommates in college because if everyone had their own room it would be too much.",
"College dorms in the US typically consist of a single room with two people sharing that space. Typically as one progresses throughout school they move into new dorms more like you described or simply move off campus.\n\nIn the US independence is a very big concept. Culturally it is seen as a failure in ones personal and professional life if one does not move into their own home shortly after college. While living with ones parents is very financial sound, it gives the impression (especially if older) that they can not take care of themselves. In order to afford a place to live many younger people will simply find roommates to split rent with until they settle down with a significant other and are making enough money in their career to buy an actual home. ",
"It's common in the UK as well. And in the UK people have *flatmates* instead. \n\nIt's just cheaper to share a house with five people. It makes financial sense. ",
"A lot of it has to do with housing, where I went to college, the apartments were pretty underwhelming, but you could rent a pretty awesome four bedroom house with kitchen, garage, living room, dining room, yard, etc. and have it be much cheaper than a solo apartment. A lot of people can't stand apartments, myself included, and would way rather share a nice household with a group of friends. I've done it most of ny life and it's great. People tend to have problems when they room with immature people or strangers.",
"Some have cited high housing costs and underemployment as the cause of this, but I don't think that's accurate. While these problems are real, they are often exaggerated (and upvoted) on reddit because reddit is disproportionally full of people experiencing these problems (young people bored at work). Regardless of the frequency or severity of these problems, it isn't what drives people to want roommates.\n\nHaving roommates just makes sense. Regardless of the housing market, the cost per person decreases significantly when you share a living room and kitchen. Even housing is cheap in your area, having roommates will save you a few hundred dollars a month, and in many cases allows you to live in a house instead of an apartment, which gives you more privacy from neighbors and other benefits.\n\nSome people move back in with their parents after college, but I think most people try not to. In many cases (maybe because the US is so spread out) that isn't an option because recent grads need to be close to their job and in most cases that's at least a few hours away from mom and dad. ",
"Americans call people they share apartments or houses with roommates, English people call them housemates or flatmates. ",
"Also people often use \"roommate\" to mean \"housemate.\""
] | bias. when people have roomates, they do things and people post shit about it. When people dont have roomates, nothing about roomates is said. No one says 'i live alone and this happened'. so you notice the occasional roomate post and move on to the next ten thousand posts and then after a while you wonder why so many people have roomates.
of course there are other reasons. many people have roomates. but i think the one i said before is probably the biggest factor here on reddit |
why do cops use numbers like 10-4 to talk to each other instead of saying what’s actually happening? | [
"Because it is just supposed to alert other officers of the crime so they will arrive. If someone’s life is at stake it is much more important to get the situation under control prior to figuring out the entire situation,",
"Once upon a time, radio was an analog medium. There was static, and the longer the sentence you said, the more likely part of it would be cut up. So, they made the \"ten code\", with the most common messages. It's really called, Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials Project 14 Aural Brevity Code, an awesome example of sarcasm, a code about being brief with a long name.\n\nIt wasn't ever completely uniform, and then radio became digital and you could actually hear what people were saying. There is still communication discipline pressure to keep messages brief, the spectrum assigned is a limited resource, but pirate codes aren't seen as the solution."
] | Because there are multiple officers all trying to talk on the same frequency so it's good to be brief. Also in case someone is listening it isn't immediately obvious what's going on |
how are hackers able to hack into major companies, steal tons of data, and get out without a trace? | [
"Companies have security measures commensurate to their perceived risk. Sure, some GoT scripts leaked, but that's not going to keep people from watching.\n\nHBO can't afford the sort of IT that would be more hacker resistant. Even the NSA has insiders who leak stuff, that's a much harder threat to deal with that simple hackers.",
"At your house, you have a security system. One of your windows is not covered by the security system, but you don't know that. It's something overlooked.\n\nYou're out at the movies. If someone went through that window and took a photo of your stuff (didn't take your stuff) and then left by that window, and closed the window, when you came back from the movies, would you notice? Is there any way to know someone took a photo of your TV?\n\nIf your security system was working on that window, there would be a record of \"activity\" and then you have to assume what happened specifically. \n\nThe big deal about information security is that only one thing needs to be missed (or not getting properly watched). And this could be something that was working fine before, but some employee wanted to stream game of thrones from somewhere and opened up a hole in security that went unnoticed. IT departments at large companies are like cat herders. It's incredibly difficult to make sure the employees aren't unintentionally sabotaging the company by responding to phishing emails or doing something \"innocent\" by going to a website."
] | First of all, when you 'steal' data, you don't actually 'steal' it. You replicate it. Unless you work at a highly secured site, the IT professionals aren't likely to track access down to this level. If the Vice President of Marketing wants to download 1.5 TB worth of Game of Thrones scripts, so be it. At most, your standard IT department will track *traffic* to see if there's unusual activity - but most of the activity they track will be external (i.e.: over the Internet) and if you've penetrated the company deeply enough, they can distribute the load across many accounts.
In terms of 'how they do it', normally it's an issue of sneaking malicious code onto machines on the internal network. Most people who use computers professionally do not take particularly good security precautions, on the presumption that their IT department deals with that. IT departments at low-security places like HBO also tend to prioritize convenience over security.
So what happens is that a company like Google, Apple or Microsoft is informed/discovers an exploit. They keep this private until they issue a patch to correct it. At which point the exploit is public knowledge but many people will not yet have the patch to protect against it. Since updating an entire company's worth computers is a massive nuisance not only to the IT department but also the users of those computers, you'll often see companies going weeks or months without critical security patches.
You also generally can't lock the barn door after the cows are gone. Once the malware has gotten in through the exploit, it's there. Fixing the exploit won't remove the malware. Detecting the malware is also a very reactive process. Only once someone has found and submitted malware to a database can most anti-virus programs detect it - at which point it's almost certainly too late for the people who were initially targeted.
There are also more subtle tricks you can use. For example, a company like HBO almost certainly has regular backups of their servers. There's a good chance that some element of this backup process electronically submits the information to a remote server. If you've got malware in the system, you can simply redirect the backup to your own computer and then forward it to their server. This is similar to a man-in-the-middle attack (although not strictly so, since it involves compromising one end of the communications). With such an approach, the internal IT department can't even tell from traffic charts what is going on - they expected that large transfer of data.
The fundamental issue is that good security is actually quite easy - it's just incredibly inconvenient. Think about it in terms of physical security. If you want to make sure no one breaks into your home, you can enclose your home in a solid concrete bunker with no openings. Anyone who wants to boost your TV will have to do so with jackhammers and wake the entire neighborhood. But actually *living* in a house entirely contained within a no-access concrete shell would be a nuisance. The same is true with electronic security. Highly secured sites are also incredibly inconvenient sites. If you work at a secured site, you'll have to surrender your phone and all electronics (including items like flash drives) when you enter. You can't browse the web while you're in the building because there are no connections to the larger Internet. If you want to take home some work, you'll have to fill out paperwork in triplicate just so some IT guy will get around to giving you a copy a few weeks from now. HBO executives don't want to live like that, so they end up with their data stolen every now and then. |
What happened to Roman patrician family names? Why don't we see people carrying the surnames Julius, Tarquinius, etc.? | [
"Like most names, they died out when people stopped liking them and using them, e.g. when the family ceased to exist. Some cases, they're just no longer in a recognizable form thanks to linguistic mutations. In others, they fell out of fashion and were replaced by those that were more popular. In Frankish Gaul, for example, we can watch a \"de-romanizing\" start to occur as we find more and more Germanic names in the record. And from what we can tell, people with \"Germanic\" names may have been ethnically Frankish or Roman (i.e. Romans adopted Frankish names), but those with \"Roman\" names were always Romans (i.e. Franks did not adopt Roman names).\n\nThis isn't really a field English-language scholarship cares about a lot, but the Germans love it! Sadly, this means the default reference works are in German. In this particular case, the work to read is Ernst Förstemann's cleverly-named *Altdeutsches Namenbuch*.",
"Hi! You may be interested in this related post from the other day \n\n* _URL_0_"
] | /u/SheepExplosion is right to say that the names simply fell out of use (particularly after romantic naming conventions changed in late antiquity) but it's also true that if we're asking about the patrician families, those had mostly died out by the Principate. The patrician clans of the Principate were artificially created by Augustus, as the patrician order had died out. By Caesar's time only 14 patrician families still had existing lines, out of over 50 families that we know of in the early Republic. From the end of the Conflict of the Orders on the patrician order had rapidly dwindled, and the losses of the civil war accelerated the process. So already by the Principal many of these names were falling out of use or, like Julius and Aurelius, had become more of an indication of status than any blood relation to a noble clan.
As a side note, of the two families you've listed only the *gens Julia* was patrician--the *gens Tarquinia*, which died off almost immediately in the early Republic, was plebeian. The Tarquins were not descended from Romulus' original senators, nor were they one of the "Trojan Families" (such as the *gens Julia*) or one of the Sabine or Latin noble families incorporated into the order in the early Republic (such as the *gens Claudia*). The patrician order is not the same thing as the senatorial class, nor did they make up even a majority (or, by the late Republic, even a significant part) of the senatorial class during any period following the end of the Conflict of the Orders (and arguably before, as there is evidence that the tradition that before the 4th Century opened up all senatorial magistracies to plebeians only patricians could hold the consulship is probably erroneous--the first consul, Brutus, was a plebeian) |
If I were to build a potato clock, then later removed and ate the potato, would I no longer gain as many nutrients/calories from the potato? | [
" > The energy for the battery comes from the chemical change in the zinc (or other metal) when it dissolves into the acid. The energy does not come from the lemon or potato. The zinc is oxidized inside the lemon, exchanging some of its electrons with the acid in order to reach a lower energy state, and the energy released provides the power. \nIn current practice, zinc is produced by electrowinning of zinc sulfate or pyrometallurgic reduction of zinc with carbon, which requires an energy input. The energy produced in the lemon battery comes from reversing this reaction, recovering some of the energy input during the zinc production.",
"It is my experience that the metals used in the potato clock leave the potato tasting nasty. I think zinc is actually poisonous, too. Don't eat the potato or orange or whatever you use."
] | As /u/Osymandius said, you won't get any less energy from the potato, but it will have metal ions dissolved in it, and so you might get rather sick. So uh...don't eat the potato. |
what is the difference between "neo-liberals" and the modern "left" and why do they have beef? | [
"First thing to understand is that Left and Right are to do with economic views. Left being lots of government control, right being complete market freedoms. The second part of the scale is Authoritarian vs Libertarian. Authoritarian being that the government tells you how to live, who to marry etc Libertarian being complete freedom for anyone to do what they want.\n\nOnce that is understood then it becomes much clearer. Old School left believe in both Left economic policies (regulation by the government etc) and Libertarian policies, equality between men and women, free healthcare and the like.\n\nNeo Liberals share the Libertarian views, free healthcare, equal rights, gay marriage etc but do not share the economic views. They often are far more in favour of free market capitalism and deregulation and privatisation of many industrial sectors.\n\nA good example of this is what happened to Labour in the UK. When Labour went from a traditional Left party, to a Neo Liberal party and re branded as New Labour in the mind 90's. Their policies were actually very similar to the previous Tory government in terms of economic policy. Now we are seeing a shift back to traditional Labour economic policy under Jeremy Corbyn.\n\nEdit: Realised I didnt actually answer the question. The reason that they have beef with each other is that they disagree on the economy. And that its actually not really a good idea to lump the two groups together as on the left, because in reality they arent on both on the left. As you said the Neo Liberals tend to be more centrist progressive than left progressive (using progressive to mean Libertarian). Again Labour in the UK is currently going through a big change as the Neo Liberals are now losing ground to the Traditional Left within the party itself, and if it wasnt for Labour doing well in the recent election, no doubt they would be trying to turf Corbyn out.",
"From a European perspective, neo-liberalism is a right-wing policy, promoting pro-corporate measures like privatization, tax cuts for big business and limiting regulation that place consumer, environmental or similar interests above corporate ones. Pretty much the opposite of what the left does.",
"The reason is that Liberalism and the left-wing politics of Socialism represent fundamentally different and incompatible philosophical, academic, political and economic perspectives on the nature of society and human progress.\n\nSometimes Liberalism is grouped in with left-wing politics, or one is used as a synonym for the other, but this is both a) an Americanism and b) incorrect. \n\nLiberalism is the ideology of capitalism. Liberalism is the belief that all human beings are rightfully free from coercion, and are endowed with fundamental rights that allows them to act without interference from the powerful. A critical aspect of this freedom is the free market, or the view that trade and economic activity is best carried out without interference from the government (the principle of \"*laissez-faire*\", or \"let [it] go\").\n\nThis was the case for many centuries, with little government interference in the economic affairs of individual people or private companies. However there was always social pressure for reforms by which the government could help improve the lives of society's poorest and more vulnerable, which came to a head in the early 20th century.\n\nAfter the 1930s and 40s, many countries in the West began to move away from the *laissez-faire* model. Instead, they expanded the level of government spending to create jobs and fund welfare safety-nets for people, and introduce regulations on businesses designed to protect the environment, stop unsafe or exploitative work environments, prevent the sale of unsafe products, etc. This is a brand of Liberal politics and economics known as *social democracy*, and was the norm (\"the post-war consensus\") until the 1980s.\n\n**Neo**liberalism emerged as a reaction against the high-tax, high-spend policies of social democracy. The election of the likes of Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in the UK marked an attitude change in favour of the principles of *classical* liberalism, emphasizing and expanding the role of the private sector in everyday life. Neoliberal policies have focused on privatizing industries that were previously ran by the government, cutting regulations, opening up new markets in foreign countries and enacting fiscal austerity (cutting the level of money spent by the government on society and lowering taxes on corporations and the rich).\n\nSocialists and Liberals are, in fundamental terms, ideologically and practically opposed. The conflict between Liberals (\"neo\" or otherwise) and the left makes perfect sense when you understand that Socialism rejects the idea that capitalism can still bring long-term progress to humanity. While capitalism did advance human civilization, Socialists identify that it also created tremendous economic - and, therefore, social and political - inequality, as the ruling class in society grew rich from the profits made by other people's hard work. Socialists believe that, as capitalism concentrates ever greater percentages of global wealth and power into the hands of fewer and fewer people, eventually the system will collapse, and give way to a Social Revolution that will end the capitalist era.\n\nSocialists see capitalism as the ultimate root cause of inequality and social injustice, and oppose neoliberal policies that have given unprecedented economic and political influence to private companies and unaccountable individuals. Socialists believe that this power is used by the ruling class - the tiny minority of people who now privately own all the tools and resources of economic production - to profit from the exploitation of everyone else."
] | Neo-Liberal has become a term of derision used by some on the Left on people who support the status-quo, usually in areas like economic growth oriented policies, free trade, free speech, and a general position that things are good enough to improve with minor tinkering, not radical change.
The modern Left has factions that believe much more radical change is required and that neo-liberals are enablers of oppression by being incrementalists. |
: why don't we use morphine for lethal injection? | [
"Cyanide is painful and inhumane compared to the current injections.",
"Is a morphine overdose considered cruel?\n\n8th amendment protects against cruel and unusual punishments (which is why states stopped using the gas chamber)",
"Morphine doesn't work very reliably as a poison. Many people take huge doses regularly for medical or recreational purposes without dying. To use it for an execution you'd need to have a large amount available (awkward to run to the morphine store halfway through an execution). Since it's not just a dangerous drug but also a drug of abuse, you'd need to make sure you had extra safeguards in place to secure the supply and prevent diversion by those in charge of it. The mechanism of death or produces could be argued to be cruel, as well. Going to sleep and forgetting to breathe doesn't sound so bad... ... Choking to death on vomit does. Both could happen.",
"Additional to the other good thoughts here, I would imagine a drug like morphine, with high demand for those not on death row, would be better used as intended. Some for executions to make the process more humane makes sense too. I'm not saying they shouldn't be given any, just that priorities for important drugs likely dictate responsible usage is elsewhere.",
"If you want to know the most efficient and humane way to kill a human being, then you can watch the BBC Horizon documentary done by Michael Portillo, \"How to Kill a Human Being\". \n\n_URL_0_\n\nPortillo thinks he has found the perfect solution.",
"Why don't they just use propofol and then chop their head off?",
"if someone would just OD me with Morphine and then also shoot me ~5 minutes later that'd be ok with me",
"People who like the death penalty don't want the condemned to experience euphoria at execution.\n\nPeople who don't like the death penalty don't want morphine to be a work-around of their humanitarian argument.\n\nThere's no lobby for it.",
"Some states use Dilaudid (Hydromorphone) in their lethal injection cocktails. Typically along with a Benzodiazapene.",
"Why don't they use a carbon monoxide chamber to put the victim to sleep with 0 pain and then they eventually asphyxiate?",
"People have suggested Nitrogen asphyxiation as the most humane, cheap and effective way to carrying out the death penalty; problem is that you get a high from Nitrogen and many people were unhappy that murderers get such a humane death."
] | There are many pharmaceutical companies that explicitly state "If you want to buy our drug, you have to promise not to use it to kill people." This is the reason that the US has had so many issues with lethal injection drugs recently; some cocktails have been disallowed by the manufacturers, and some of the new mixtures haven't been as thoroughly tested and aren't having the expected results.
This is a guess, but I'd say the morphine manufacturing companies slapa sticker on the bottle that says "No executions, thanks!" |
Why do most experimental fusion reactors focus on deuterium-tritium fusion, and why isn't deuterium-proton fusion ever used? | [
"Well the Coulomb barrier is the same, but the Q-value for DT fusion is over 17 MeV while the Q-value for d(p,γ)^(3)He is only about 5 MeV.",
"The reason is because deuterium-tritium fusion has *by far* the lowest triple product of *any* fusion reaction. The triple product is a quantitative statement of the necessary conditions that are required in order for the reaction to reach ignition (self sufficiency). In its most common form it is the product of the temperature, density, and confinement time of the plasma. The larger the triple product, the greater the temperature, density, and confinement time have to be, and the more difficult the reactor will be to design. \n\nDeuterium-proton fusion has a far greater triple product than deuterium-tritium fusion. When you say that both reactions experience the same Coulomb force (electrical repulsion), you are correct, but you have to take into consideration the mass of the particles experiencing this force. A tritium nucleus is 3x as heavy as a proton, which means that if both experience the same force the tritium nucleus will only decelerate at 1/3 the rate of the proton. If it takes 3x longer to slow down, its much easier for the two reacting particles to \"crash\" and fuse. Of course, fusion is very much a quantum phenomenon, but the intuition given by this classical physics holds. Additionally, deuterium-proton fusion produces less than half the energy per reaction, meaning that more reactions have to take place to compensate for heat loss from the plasma (which is roughly the same in both cases). This drives up the triple product of the reaction substantially. \n\nIf you really want to do aneutronic fusion (fusion that does not have a neutron as a product), then the best candidate is deuterium-helium-3, since it has the lowest triple product of all a-neutronic fusion reactions. It is still an order of magnitude above deuterium-tritium though (which means it is at about 10x more difficult to achieve)."
] | The difficulty in fusion is over coming the positive repulsion between protons in the 2 nuclei. The closer 2 nuclei get, the more the protons push each other away. Sounds like you're probably aware of that, and also aware that the only way to overcome this barrier is the strong nuclear force exerted by all nucleons at close enough range. Thus, isotopes with more neutrons in their nucleus fuse more readily, because their is the same amount of electric (Coulomb) repulsion, but additional strong nuclear force to bring them together.
In stars, the pressure is huge, and the temperature is huge, but the real key to fusion in stars is sheer number of atoms. The odds of two nuclei passing close enough to fuse is ridiculously low (hence the sun burning hydrogen for 10 billion years), but because there are so many of them, they over come the probability issue. If the odds are 1 in a million, and you have 10 billion, you're going to have a lot of events (these aren't the real numbers; but it gets the point across).
In fusion reactors on earth, we don't (currently) have the luxury of an excess number of particles or lots of time for the reactions to occur (the National Ignition Facility for example uses a DT mixture to initiate a fusion reaction that lasts a few billionths of a second). So we need all the help we can get from the fusion materials. Its basically stacking the deck! |
Over the last few centuries, how did organized sports grow from a pastime, to the crazy multi-billion dollar industry that it is today? | [
"Mass market daily newspapers, in the late Victorian era, developed sports pages to increase their circulation numbers. This increased interest in professional sports among the general public. However, it was the advent of television that allowed the massive increase in revenue to professional sports leagues. Pete Rozelle became the commisioner of the NFL in 1960. Pete really capitalized on the suitability of his sport to television, and he was directly responsible for the explosive growth of television revenue to the National Football League. His great success was noticed and copied by the International Olympic Committee, FIFA's World Cup, Formula One Racing, and to a lesser extent the National Basketball Association, tennis and golf. Baseball and hockey have much lower television contracts and those two sports depend on ticket sales to earn more than half of their revenue. \nSources: \"The Business of Sports\" edited by Brad Humphreys and Dennis Howard is a three volume encylopedia of all the major sports, around the world. \"Rozelle: Czar of the NFL\" by Jeff Davies is a much smaller book that only looks at Pete Rozelle. ",
"Modern international sporting got its start in the late 19th century, pushed largely by french governments chomping at the bit to cleanse the national shame of 1870. "
] | Yes, great question.
Probably *first* asked in circa 2AD by redditius user handocles about the obscene wealth amassed by that crazy charioteer [Gaius Appuleius Diocles](_URL_0_) who when retiring at the age of 42 after a 24 year career reportedly had winnings totalling 35,863,120 sesterces ($US 15 billion), making him the highest paid sports star in history. |
This week's theme: Feminism | [
"I've always been curious about Queen Victoria's strong aversion to feminism (\"Feminists ought to get a good whipping\"). Was there some specific identifiable group of feminists she was reacting to, or did she generally really just hate anyone who advocated for women's rights? Did she have any interactions with feminist groups or feminist writers at the time?\n\nAlso, I understand Queen Victoria felt strongly that women should not be in a position of power. How did she reconcile that with her own position as Queen? I believe I read once that she said she didn't consider herself really a woman, but was somehow blessed with the brain of a man. Towards the end of her reign, did she ever soften her stance towards feminism or concede that other women might have the same abilities that she had?",
"Could anyone explain it to me why my question was flagged with this flair (or whatever it's called)? How can I not flag my question with \"feminism\"?"
] | I hope you guys know what you're in for |
why are vehicles built that under and/or oversteer? | [
"most vehicles don't oversteer from the factory, that's a dangerous thing for the average driver\n\nundersteer makes the driver realize they are going too fast and they react by slowing down, especially with audible feedback from the tires. for an average driver understeer is much safer and easier to control",
"There's no such thing as generic understeer or oversteer.\n\nWhen people say a car has understeer what they really mean is that it has understeer *under certain conditions* - usually going fast round a track.\n\nGenerally speaking said car probably hasn't been designed for those conditions - it's been designed for going to the supermarket, or taking the kids to school, where cornering ability at speed isn't as important as how many seats it has, or how fuel efficient the engine is.\n\nOr if it has been designed for those conditions, the manufacturer has had to make design compromises which contribute to understeer, like making it cheaper.",
"N3rdi is correct. There is no car that doesnt do one of these, infact all can be suseptable to both. AWD cars actually have pretty bad understeer, however new technologies make them often times a bit better than RWD or FWD.",
"If you could create a car that has 100% perfect traction 100% the time, you've won yourself the adoration of every manufacturer and race team except Formula D.\n\nThey do the next best thing, make a car that predictably does one thing or the other when it loses grip.",
"_URL_0_ \nQuality is terrible but the logic, well that is flawless."
] | A 'neutral' car where all four wheels lose traction at the same time all the time is impossible. The balance between front and rear grip is a constantly changing equation, depending on how tight the corner is (cars want to understeer more at low speed than at high speed) and on whether or not you're accelerating (press the gas and weight shifts to the back of the car, decreasing front grip. braking shifts weight forward, increasing front grip).
Oversteer is NOT fun if you're not expecting it. It's useful on the track because it rotates a car into a corner, but it's extremely dangerous on the street. For the average driver, the result of oversteer is the car spinning off the road sideways. Going off the road sideways is about 100 times more dangerous than doing it in a straight line, because your tires will likely dig into soft earth and you'll roll over. Or you'll hit a tree sideways. Or the car will snap back around and put you back onto the street suddenly and you'll get hit in the side by traffic in the next lane. Trust me, you'd rather hit a tree or another car dead on than with the driver's door.
Since you never want that to happen, manufacturers bake in a ton of understeer so that inducing oversteer is extremely difficult. Not impossible (I could drift my wife's Accord just fine) but difficult. That understeer is really just a function of front and rear spring rates and alignment specs.
Oddly enough, cars are a lot more oversteer-prone today than they were 10 years ago. Because you can control oversteer very easily with stability control, cars have inched closer to being neutral. |
what's the difference between underwater pressure and space pressure, and why haven't we explored the ocean as much as space? | [
"Space has no pressure, so the maximum pressure difference is going to be 1 atmosphere (between sea-level and the vacuum of space). Underwater you get an extra atmosphere of pressure (so 2 atmospheres) when you go down as little as 10m, so exploring deep involves a LOT of pressure.\n\nEdit: quick google for a pressure calculator suggests 100 atmospheres by the time you get down 1km, which makes sense given that it's a relatively linear thing",
"In space, there's no pressure because space is basically a vast empty void with nothing in it. So, as we travel out of the atmosphere the pressure tapers off until it gets to zero. Underwater however, the deeper you get the more pressure you have, from all the water above you pushing down. It can get up to a thousand times more pressure than we get on the surface. So, that's one of the reasons why it's so hard to explore the oceans, because past a certain depth you need to build ludicrously reinforced vessels to resist the insane amounts of pressure. That also means things like windows, which are weak points in the vessel, need to themselves be ridiculously reinforced and it becomes very difficult to see out of them. The ocean is also dark. Light doesn't travel far, so unless you know exactly what you're looking for and where to look, it's basically a crapshoot as to what you're going to find. Finally, the only things of interest (that we know of) in the ocean are living creatures, which have a tendency to move. So, we either have to find a place where lots of these creatures congregate, hope we find stationary creatures, use lights to attract them, or sit there and hope they come to us. None of these methods are exactly fool proof and it's extremely likely that we miss out on a lot of goings on down in the deeps because of it.",
"Pressure is dependent upon depth/height, the density of whatever material you're in, and the gravity that's present. The main things contributing to these two pressures are gravity (for water, that of the Earth, and for space, a very weak mix of whatever objects are near) and density (water has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimeter, and the gaseous mixture of space is nearly zero). Those factors combined mean pressure underwater is much greater than the almost zero pressure of the vacuum of space. It's a lot easier to build a craft to navigate pressures closer to what we experience, which would be space as opposed to the ocean's adding pressure per small increase in depth.\n\nIn regards to light, you get more sunlight in the solar system that you would going deep into the ocean. Of course the Earth's atmosphere filters out most of the sunlight that's harmful (higher frequency, more photons per second), so spacecraft also has to be able to properly handle that effect as well which given our large materials based research boom is more simple than getting a really good and hardy flashlight on a submersible."
] | (edited) There is nearly zero pressure in space, but if you had a spacecraft with air for humans to live in inside, there would be pressure pushing *outwards.* This is sometimes referred to as negative 'gauge pressure.' Similarly, in a submarine you have more pressure outside than inside, so it's pushing *inwards* - positive gauge pressure.
Humans need the pressure to be about one 'atmosphere,' or 101kPA, to survive - more, and you have difficulty breathing, can bruise, or in extreme cases be crushed and die; less, and you can't absorb oxygen, and in extreme cases your blood can form bubbles ('the bends') and you can die.
Deep underwater, because water is heavier than air, there is high pressure, and underwater ships or dive suits need to be engineered to hold up the massive weight of water around them. In space, there is near-zero pressure, so ships (for people) need to be engineered to hold the *air in.* But they only need to be able to withstand one atmosphere of pressure pushing outwards.
For every ten meters of water you dive under, you add about another atmosphere's worth of pressure, so diving on the ocean floor means dealing with thousands of times more pressure. |
Why does a star need to go supernova before it turns into a black hole? | [
"This isn't my specialty, but my understanding is that the fusion reaction occurring in a star resists the inward pull of gravity. When a star has run out of matter to fuse, collapse can occur. Depending on the mass of the star at this point, a number of things can happen (black hole, neutron star, white dwarf).\n\nIt largely depends on the conditions of the star. A good place to begin is here: _URL_0_",
"The book [Death from the Skies!] (_URL_0_) by Phil Plait explains this and other related questions with a good mixture of layman and expert language that is easy to understand. Although your question has been magnificently answered by iorgfeflkd and cx91, you might want to read up a bit more on what they explained."
] | Mackinstyle is more or less correct. A ball of gas that is big enough to ignite fusion (a star) will be in a state of hydrostatic equilibrium, where the push of the fusion resists the pull of gravity. When the fuel for fusion runs out, gravity dominates and it begins to collapse. But then the pressure becomes greater, so new fusion processes start, and this becomes a supernova if the star is big enough. The leftovers of this, as you know, may eventually become a black hole.
So to answer your question, when the star collapses towards a critical black hole density, it becomes hot enough that a supernova explosion happens beforehand. |
Seeing as how Jupiter is a gas giant, what would happen if we would step foot on it? Would we keep falling to the centre? | [
"I've written about this [here](_URL_0_).",
"From what I can gather reading this article you would freeze on the \"surface\" then get blown away by the 200 mph winds and then get incinerated if you made it to the core. \n\n_URL_0_",
"We'd stop a couple feet down and be crushed by the pressure of the gas, agonizing pain overwhelmed any sensory input as the lung collapses. Maybe if you lie down but then there'd be only methane to breath.\nIce is at the centre, with immense pressure under gravity the methane gas deposits.",
"In theory at some point buoyancy would be achieved, but it would be quite deadly for humans. \n\nWe don't know for sure what's at the center of Jupiter. Jupiter does have a strong magnetic field which implied there is some sort of metallic center, like earths molten iron and nickle core, however some scientist believe it may not me heavy metals, but [metallic hydrogen](_URL_0_) that's at the center of many gas giants."
] | Well, if you weren't wearing a space suit, no matter where you started you would die almost instantly because there is essentially no oxygen at any level of Jupiter's atmosphere.
But let's say you do have a space suit. What do you mean by "step foot on it"? Jupiter is, as you noted in your question, a *gas giant*, meaning it's made of gas. There is no solid surface. And just like Earth's atmosphere, the gas doesn't really have a "top", it just gets thinner and thinner as you get further and further from the planet, until at some point it is indistinguishable from interplanetary space (which, you may be interested to know, [is *not* a true vacuum](_URL_2_).
But let's say you just get dropped from some height way outside of Jupiter's visible atmosphere. Once you got within about 200,000 miles (about 300,000 km) of the planet's surface, you'd [die fairly quickly from radiation poisoning](_URL_0_).
But let's say your space suit has radiation-resisting superpowers. Well due to Jupiter's extreme mass, you'd quickly accelerate through the tenuous upper atmosphere at about [2.6 *g*](_URL_11_), and burn up just like a meteor flying through Earth's upper atmosphere.
But let's say we dropped you in the middle of Jupiter's upper atmosphere, where the pressure were just about the same as Earth's surface pressure (1 bar). **Now** we're getting somewhere. You'd be falling, but since you're already in the thicker part of the atmosphere, your terminal velocity will be fairly low (taking Jupiter's higher gravity and the atmosphere's lower density into account (it is mostly hydrogen, so its density is about 10 times less than Earth's even though the pressure is similar), your terminal velocity would be about 3200 km/h (2000 mph)). This is probably slow enough that frictional heating and heating from [supersonic compression](_URL_12_) would not burn you up.
But hell, for shits and giggles, and in the name of keeping you alive as long as possible, let's give you a parachute, a little smaller than the one given to the [Galileo probe](_URL_7_), so that you fall at about the same velocity initially (~100 m/s, or about 360 km/h, 220 mph). Now we're cooking. Not literally though, because the temperature at this level is fairly comfortable: The temperature is [just about 0 C (32 F)](_URL_7_), so you'd actually be pretty comfy.
So okay, now you're in your radiation-proof spacesuit, with your handy parachute, falling through the atmosphere just at the top of the clouds. These clouds are made of ammonia, but let's just assume your spacesuit and parachute are okay with that. You'd actually be okay for quite a while; maybe a little bored, but hey, you're on motherfucking **Jupiter**.
After about 5 minutes, you've fallen to the 2-bar level (about twice the average surface pressure on Earth). You are now falling through different clouds, made of [ammonium hydrosulfide and ammonium sulfide](_URL_6_). They don't look much different than regular clouds, but they do have a brownish tint that gets browner the deeper you go. Some people may find this surprising, but you won't feel many ill effects, even as the pressure increases rapidly. The bends are only seen with rapid *decompression*; the only ill effects from rapid *compression* are if the compression is too rapid to allow your body cavities (such as inner ear, sinuses, etc) to equalize. So as long as [your ears are clear of wax](_URL_3_), you should be fine.
About 10 minutes later, you have reached the 4 bar pressure level, which is about 4 times the average atmospheric pressure at sea level, or about the pressure you'd experience under 30 meters (100 feet) of water. The temperature has actually gotten quite cold, and is now around -40 C (-40 F). But assuming all the capabilities your spacesuit already had, I'm sure it wouldn't be too much to ask for a small heater. You are now passing through clouds of water ice, just like you might see at high altitudes on Earth, but it is getting very dark. You are also being whisked along horizontally by winds reaching 200 m/s (450 mph, 720 km/h), but you barely notice as they are not very turbulent.
15 more minutes go by, and you are now at a pressure of 10 bar, or 10 times normal sea-level atmospheric pressure. At bit before this level you should have changed the mixture of air you are breathing; if you breathed normal air at a pressure of 10 bar or more, you would suffer from acute [oxygen toxicity](_URL_10_), which can be quickly fatal (oxygen is actually toxic at much lower pressures, but it would take much longer than our quick decent through jupiter). At the same time, you can suffer from [nitrogen narcosis](_URL_8_), which has similar symptoms to inhaling nitrous oxide initially, but can quickly progress to severe symptoms like coma or death. So as you dive deeper your magic space suit also changes the mixture of air you are breathing, so that the partial pressures of oxygen and nitrogen remain the same as you are used to breathing, with the rest filled with helium or neon, which are the only known gasses which don't exhibit a toxic effect at high pressures. But provided this is all taken care of, you are actually quite comfortable, as the temperature has risen back up to about 23 C (73 F).
Another 25 minutes pass, and you are starting to realize you're in trouble. You are in complete darkness now, and the temperature has been steadily increasing as you go further down: now over 100 C (212 F) and still rising fast. Your spacesuit's systems are starting to fail. Within a few minutes, the temperature is over 200 C (392 F), and you don't have much longer to survive. Not wanting to endure a miserable, burning death, you take your conveniently placed cyanide capsule and end your interplanetary adventure.
**But your body keeps falling**.
Down into interior regions where we have little ideas of the exact composition. Pressure and density are increasing drastically, slowing your descent to a crawl. The atmosphere of mostly hydrogen is actually a liquid now, and is now several thousand degrees, but with essentially no oxygen around your body turns into a charcoal-like substance. Your parachute cuts away, but your spacesuit remains intact because it is convenient to the story, and your compressed, dead chunk of bodily substance slowly sinks, beyond 1,000 bar, beyond 10,000 bar...
Until finally, at an insanely crushing pressure of 2,000,000 bar (and a temperature of 5,000 K, about the temperature of the surface of the sun!), you stop sinking. Because your super-spacesuit is conveniently still intact, your body is still mostly water, which is essentially incompressible, even at these incredible pressures. As such, at this level, where the density is about 1 g/cm^3 or about 1000 kg/m^3 (this is approximately the density of water) you and the surrounding atmosphere are the same density, so you will no longer sink! So there your carbonated corpse floats, for all eternity, until the heat death of the universe.
Sources (among some others linked above in-line):
* _URL_7_
* _URL_9_
* _URL_1_
* _URL_5_
* _URL_12_
* _URL_4_
* _URL_6_
Hope you enjoyed reading! |
hypothetically, what stops someone from flying to a country and never leaving? | [
"If the country they are flying to doesn't want them there, and figures out they are there",
"Nothing really. However if you get caught without a visa you will get deported. You could do it if you lived completely off the grid"
] | Many countries have immigration laws that forbid this. If you violate those laws, the police can deport you. Also, being an illegal alien makes it difficult to get a job or do any other sort of business in that country.
In order to enter some countries, you also have to prove you have plans to leave, like a return plane ticket. |
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