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[ "Its not just their muscles that are specialized for swimming constantly. Fish also have a whole specialized organ called a swim bladder that allows them to adjust their buoyancy by pumping water in and out of the swim bladder. Since buoyancy is a hydrostatic force produced by the water itself, the fish expends very little metabolic energy when using the swim bladder to adjust its position. A fish can adjust its swim bladder at any depth so that its weight is supported entirely by the water. This means that a fish can float on the surface of a body of water, or float at the bottom. Wherever it is in the water, a fish is *always* floating. A fish experiences virtually no gravitational resistance thanks to the swim bladder and buoyancy. This cuts down on metabolic expenditure massively. The fish's relatively weak and small striated muscles can focus entirely on lateral movement, while the swim bladder can be used to adjust vertical position at very very small metabolic cost.", "Those fish that need to keep moving to prevent suffocation often simply place themselves in a way that they face an underwater current. This has the same effect as moving around in still water and the fish are thus able to relax for a while." ]

[ "On a market-to-market basis. Each store has X expenses and Y revenues. As long as Y is larger than X, that store will survive and will be more or less \"successful\". It's true for every McDonald's restaurant - every individual store has to be profitable or they'll shut it down. If you open your own restaurant, all you need to do is find a way to convince people to eat at your place instead of anywhere else. It's hard to compete on prices alone because big chains tend to benefit from economies of scale, but you'll find that smaller restaurants usually have greater variety, better customer service, or some other feature that gets people to come to them. In some cases, people will eat at a smaller restaurant just to benefit local businesses.", "Would like to point out that a \"small business\" isn't necessarily as \"small\" as you think it is. What defines a \"small business\" is a different set of standards depending on what market the business operates within.\n\nSo, for an arbitrary made up example, a clothing distributor/whole seller is a small business if it does less than $5 million in gross receipts in a year, while a clothing retail store is a small business if it has less than 20 people. In this example, the clothing distributor can have 1,000 employees and as long as it makes less than $5 million is considered a small business. The clothing retailer can make $25 million in a year, but have 10 employees and is considered a small business.\n\nOnce again, those numbers are completely made up and not reflective of what the true numbers are, but gives you a better idea of what can be meant by someone when the words \"small business\" is thrown around.\n\nFor more accurate info, check out this link: _URL_0_ It pertains mainly to the USA." ]

[ "Geeks tend to be obsessed with culture that is more accessible than highbrow culture (opera, fine arts). Nerds tend to be geeks who are more socially awkward. The culture that both nerds and geeks like is easier to access, and it's easier for them to find communities of like-minded people online. \n\nBecause people don't need to settle for the lowest common denominator in their media (a person can watch/read/listen to anything they want at any time) most people will eventually find some obscure corner of media that would have been exclusive to geeks and nerds in another time, and this has given credibility and community to both geeks and nerds.\n\nThe problem is that nerds, by definition, will always struggle socially, but people around them will be more understanding than in the past. Geeks have it made, though.", "They're really not.\n\nGeeks have a reputation for being smart, and for being underdogs so it's a nice label to attach to yourself, all that's happened is the bar has been lowered enough so that your average Joe can pat himself on the back for watching star wars and reading at least one book without being told to.\n\nThis bit by Chelsea Peretti sums it up pretty well _URL_0_", "It's just a fashion trend. Cowboys used to be popular, now it's super heroes. The \"new\" nerd culture is manga and anime, but even that's becoming popular now. ", "\"mainstream culture\" isn't actually a thing that ever existed, at least not in the sense I think you're thinking of. popular culture is and always has been no more and no less than the sum of all its components. i think what's happened recently is that the amount of pop culture in existence has hit critical mass and there's no longer any kind of defined mainstream, especially with the internet", "Well nerds is cool now! No more getting stuffed in a locker now that bullies are pumping our gas. ", "New, even more bizarre departures from \"mainstream\" culture are now the outcasts. Neckbeards for example, are the new nerds. These guys take it to a new level, living exclusively in their parents' basements, having \"relationships\" with cartoon characters which are not always even humanoid, wearing fedoras, eating pretty much nothing but doritos and drinking mountain dew. The are self-loathing social outcasts in complete denial and insist they are enlightened and euphoric.", "Because a confluence of things (such as the computer revolution) resulted in geeks recently becoming a demographic with disproportionate discretionary income, i.e. lots of spending power, to spend on whatever appeals to them.\n\nThis resulted in (among other things) stuff like lots of Hollywood movies being targeted at this lucrative new demographic, and when Hollywood is using it's cultural super-megaphone to spotlight and glamorize geeks and the things geeks love, then geeks (and the things geeks love) become mainstream.\n\nTL:DR; Geeks got money, and money shapes culture.", "Because \"geeks\" now have money and influence. This is the only reason.\n\nCertain groups attain representation in media only when companies want to target them. Advertisers then put pressure on networks and content creators to manufacture cultural products (tv shows, movies, books, etc.) that cater to that demographic.", "Note: The specifics of the definitions of both \"nerd\" and \"geek\" (as well as a few other related terms) have changed a number of times over the past fifty years -- and have had regional variations as well for those fifty years.\n\nSo it's a mistake to come across the term \"geek\" in a 1970s story and assume it means precisely the same thing as the term \"geek\" when found in a 2010s story, for example.", "You know how people into cars, tuning, fixing etc are generally popular? What about sports fans? They are genuinely seen as nothing wrong with them.\n\nWell... Car nuts used to be grease monkey's, odd people always stuck with their head in the cars. Not normal they said. Off, not doing things normally. Same thing with sports fans.\n\nWell... Then they grew up. Raised there kids in the culture, things normalized, older generations that didn't get it die off and well... It's seen as cool and hot to build cars, fix a car etc.\n\nSo build a PC? You're an odd duck. 10-30 years or more from now? Seen as classy, hot and cool.\n\nIt's the same with any new introduction and this isn't just with nerds and geeks(Way to many sub groups etc) but in general what is occuring... Well old nerds and geeks grew up. People are already used to their culture, and they raised their kids in that culture. It's seen as less \"weird\" and at the same time due to a lot of successful people who were geeks and nerds give a face of... Well success. It's good to be nerdy, you could be the next Steve Jobs!\n\nPeople adopt, people like being with it. Times change and nerdy/geeky stuff(Even cars were nerdy once) are fun, but people only join in to the fun when it's more accepted. Anime when I was a kid? I'd be laughed at, so you'd pretend to not watch it and never discuss it at school etc. Hell some of the worst experiences in school was some friends would avoid you at school just to avoid accidentally talking about anime to be in the clique they wanted to belong to but really weren't that person and neither were most in those cliques. They wanted to fit in, these people are fitting in!... Oh they hate what I like... But I want to fit in... Yeah I hate that to!(After school watches a season of X show) etc.\n\nIt's really hard to give a concrete answer but mostly anything new is seen as strange. Over time that new thing is accepted, older people die off, large subsets of the strange people grow up and raise strange kids, those kids proliferate the culture more in a more accepting environment.", "I would put it down to two different factors.\n\nThe first is the rise of IT and tech companies. Computers, programming, the internet etc. have generally attracted people who were a little off-kilter by mainstream society's standards. However, they've become an essential and valuable part of everyday life, and the tech industry is massively profitable--there's still that aura of weirdness around IT workers and such, but they're now a part of everyday life on all levels.\n\nSecondly, I would put it down to a shift in media trends and consumption. Like computer-related things, entertainments such as video games, fantasy fiction, and comic books were very much niche hobbies. But now in 2014, video games are a massive cultural enterprise, the most avidly-watched TV show is based on a long-running fantasy novel series, and Marvel's movies routinely rake in billions. So all of these weird niche hobbies...aren't so niche anymore.", "I read an article a while ago where somebody said that geek culture and mainstream aren't actually (and will never be) integrated. It's more like (and this is how the article put it) there's a thick wall between geek culture and mainstream and the mainstream occasionally fires a harpoon through the wall and pulls something out from the geeky side into the mainstream side, and then the hole gets patched up.\n\nI think it makes some sense. There will always be geeky things and ideas hidden away from the mainstream." ]

[ "Think of graphics cards like countries, maybe the GeForce TI 10 series cards all speak some form of Spanish. AMD Radeon cards all speak a flavor of Russian. And so on and so forth for every graphics card type.\n\nAs a developer this would be a nightmare to write games against. I'd have to have special code for each graphics card that I want to support and that means I'd have to learn many different languages.\n\nInstead, OpenGL and DirectX have done that for you. They let you speak in a single language and they handle the translations to the various languages of the graphics cards.\n\nThe difference between the two was, at first, OpenGL was an open standard that worked on multiple platforms, while DirectX is a Microsoft technology and was primarily Windows only. I think that DirectX has kind of supplanted OpenGL for the most part. But in essence, they're the same thing. Just like AMD vs GeForce.\n\n", "Designing a game engine is a lot of work and will usually take years for a graphically intensive game. In these years things such as physics and shaders are modelled and implemented, what isnt implemented though is the really low-level stuff (e.g. How the GPU - I will pretend that consoles use a GPU, even though they really use an APU which is a combination of a CPU and a GPU - handles buffers, actually produces 3D objects from vertices, etc.). These things generally don't vary much between games since they are common data structures and considering ways to implement them so different GPUs from AMD and Nvidia can use them efficiently is loads of work by itself.\nSo instead these things are supplied in their own libraries so engine designers can use these things and safely assume they work. OpenGL and DirectX are two such libraries. As a side note, historically DirectX is a lot more but it doesn't really matter nowadays and I don't think it's what you're asking for.\nThe difference between them is that DirectX is owned and developed by Microsoft whereas OpenGL is, as implied by the name, open-source. They will differ in performance here and there but I don't know how specifically.", "DirectX is a suite of APIs designed by Microsoft for their Windows operating systems. These APIs are intended for use by multimedia and game software developers and enable consistent and reliable access to the computer's hardware in a semi-abstract fashion.\n\nPerhaps the most well known component of DirectX is Direct3D.\n\nDirect3D is an API that enables programs to draw and render 3D graphics. Using the API allows developers to write a program without paying close attention to the nature or capabilities of the underlying hardware. Microsoft specifies various DirectX and Direct3D feature levels, and hardware manufacturers design hardware compliant with those feature levels.\n\nDevelopers design their programs around one or more major Direct3D versions and one or more feature levels and use the best one that is supported. For example, most modern graphics cards support the Direct3D 12 feature set. Direct3D 12 is supported only by Windows 10 and has been updated with every major Windows 10 update. Ergo, a game that is written purely for Direct3D 12 will run only on Windows 10 with only a Direct3D 12 GPU and will not be supported on Windows 8.1 or older, or on any GPU lacking Direct3D 12 support.\n\nHowever, a game programmed for Direct3D 11 will run fine on Windows 7,8,8.1, and 10 as long as the GPU supports at least Direct3D 11. The bulk of the games on the market right now fall into this category.\n\nOpenGL is a high level specification for an API that performs drawing on a virtual graphics card. OpenGL is not an API itself and there is no reference implementation of OpenGL. Rather, OS vendors can choose to ship OpenGL libraries that work with their graphics subsystem and graphics card vendors design their drivers to tie into this system. As a result, OpenGL is entirely independent of any OS, programming language, hardware vendor, or software vendor.\n\nDevelopers that use OpenGL design their programs to draw to the virtual graphics card in the fashion described by the OpenGL specification and the OS provided OpenGL library, graphics driver, and GPU take care of the rest.\n\nOne major difference between Direct3D and OpenGL is that the OpenGL API specification itself does not change with the addition of new features. Graphics cards support varying levels of OpenGL and optional extensions as do the graphics drivers, but the OS and its OpenGL library are just a middle man. When developers build around a certain Direct3D feature set they're guaranteed certain functionality as long as that feature set is supported. However, when a developer builds around OpenGL they have to probe the real graphics card at run time through the OpenGL API to determine what features are supported because they will not know ahead of time. A benefit of this approach is that OpenGL is fairly immune to OS obsolescence; OpenGL 4.6 features (the newest at this time) can still work on games running on Windows XP if there's a compatible GPU installed with drivers that support the newest features.\n\nMicrosoft provides a C++ implementation of OpenGL with every version of Windows and most Linux distributions use Mesa3D. GPU vendors have to perform the rest of the work in the drivers." ]

[ "The density of galaxies is like a handful of golf balls scattered over all of Europe, so the number of collisions will be very small. \nThe real danger is that we might get flung out into intergalactic space by the fluctuations in gravity.", "very unlineky, very roughly...\n\nstars are lightyears apart and lightseconds in diameter.\n\nso your odds are roughly 1 second divided by as many seconds as in a year, except in 3d space this value is taken to the power of 3.\n\nby this rough approximation, your odds of of randomly appearing stars taking up the same space, within the space that stars occupy on average, is roughly 1/10^23", "If the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy collision is a merger event then the likelihood of objects colliding rises to certainty as the two central black holes will eventually 'collide' and merge. Best not get too close.", "None of you guys are calculating the effects of the gravity of stars and planets, or the ejection of material and energy after a collision. There will be a beautiful chaos. So much destruction, but at the same time so many wonderful new creations." ]

[ "I think he's pretty much useless as someone discussing actual history--he often makes very obvious errors that even someone with only moderate knowledge of a subject could pick up on. \n\n[For example, he seems to think America's possession of B-17 bombers prior to Pearl Harbor posed a some sort of threat their national security,] (_URL_0_) which is of course wildly inaccurate given how far Japan actually was from any American launching point at the time. The Doolittle Raid (with the longer range B-25) was launched from a carrier and was little more than a pinprick/suicide mission to make a point rather then actually do much damage. And given that that raid shocked Japan, I don't think B-17's worried them too much.", "I think it is pretty robust and has the highest degree of understanding and always uses the most reputable sources. Those who say he has an agenda are curiously also those who seem to always deny CIA-based historians have any." ]

[ "Didn't Apple say that their iPhone 4 \"retina display\" had 360+ pixels per inch and that was the max discernable resolution that the human eye could perceive?", "Maybe for pixel density as in resolution, but if we keep on reducing the density of pixels then we will be able to add more pixels each dedicated to differant shades of a single colour in the same amount of space to act as a single pixel. This would allow us to generate more shades of colours, therefore it would still benefit the display in terms of the amount of colours it could produce.", "As a side question to this, would greatly increased pixel density (say, taking a 6GP image instead of a 5MP image) allow for greater \"enhancement\" of an image? Like Blade Runner or CSI." ]

[ "They have specific requirements, and they test that the code works in all the likely cases. \n\nIt's the opposite of \"Marketing says we need to get our product on sale first, even if it doesn't work, we can always issue patches later that are backwards compatible, even though that might make it really hard to really fix the problems, because users are a dime a dozen.\"\n\nThat's why the Boeing Max8 MCAS problem is so newsworthy. A major airplane maker put a feature in to maintain \"just like an ordinary 737\" even though it had a lot of unexplored performance envelope. The \"not fault tolerant - pilots will be the failsafe\" solution has been in the 737 for ages, but that depends on pilot expectations being the same. Violating those expectations for marketing reasons is very rare in aerospace.", "for those kinda of system you have a few options:\n\n1: make them simple, os simple in fact that evne if they do crash they cna recover faster than it may lead ot issues(not good if you need to preserve data for instance, but generally good for stuff like sensors)\n\n2: assymetric redundancy: aka having a system with a back up, but said bakc up works in a different manner so niether cna be affected by the same kind of error.\n\n\n3: have multiple system working in tamdem and copare their output\n for istance many miliatry aircraft have 3-4 flight computers on board, if one of those start outpuuting weird data it get evaluated and if found erroneous its rebooted.\n\n\nalso worth noting that misison critical systems that you cant afford ot have failing. go thru much more rigorous testing.", "The short answer is that they do a lot testing and any problem the test find is not just fixed but analyzed and policies enacted so there's less chance of happening again in the future.\n\nYou can find more information in [They Write the Right Stuff](_URL_0_) an article about the people who wrote the Shuttle software.", "Avionics use something called a 'real time operating system' which is different than your standard Linux or Windows software. Bugs are far more rare because the systems do fewer discrete things and operate closer to the circuit than a general use operating system does. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis sounds great, like why do we deal with these crappy general use os if this one is so much better? That is a complex answer but it mainly revolves around GPOS (general purpose OS) being good enough for most things. Free your developers to make games and profitable software.", "There are several standards that are adhered to and validation processes that mission-critical software systems can undergo, depending on their purpose... DO-178 is for aircraft systems, but there are others for medical devices, etc. For the most stringent, coverage analysis is done and each line of assembly code (the lowest level that they look at, as far as I know) is assured to place the system into a good state after execution. There are standards-compliant operating systems, graphics libraries, etc. Validation is expensive, understandably, but even code that doesn't crash doesn't necessarily work as imagined... there are famous examples involving rockets, etc.", "There are two important parts to this and a third lesser important (but still very important) part.\n\nPart 1: Specific Hardware.\n\n * What does this mean?\n\nThe software developed for a given plane design ONLY needs to work for that plane and that design alone. If you are upgrading the Boeing 747 with a few improvements then the bulk of the software may very well be the same as the previous software with only changes made to the parts concerning the altered hardware. Your 747 engine software doesn't need to know how to handle an engine meant for a 737 and so none of that code is in there. There's no If Statement asking \"What kind of engine is this? Should I use the 747 module?\". The code was specifically designed to work with THAT model aircraft and nothing else.\n\n * Why is this important?\n\nThis is important because in computers/phones/etc that software has to support a variety of hardware states. Apple TENDS to have a reputation of their equipment being more stable and that is almost entirely because their hardware is locked down. For any given iPhone you'll have the 2-4 versions Apple puts out and that's it, so the new version of the iPhone OS is designed FOR those phones. Now an important point here is that a lot of the issues iPhones develop later in their lives are because the newer OS, which you get, is meant specifically for the newer phones. It'll be backwards compatible with the older hardware for a few generations, but in general they only take the effort to make sure that basic functions still run at all and won't brick the phone. As a terrible example, lets say the new camera software expects some feature that your old phone doesn't have. They'll make sure the lack of that feature doesn't crash the camera software, but they won't necessarily make sure that the safety systems that prevent the crash from happening don't slow the phone down with software inefficiencies that the newer phones CPU can handle without trouble. However more on the Microsoft side, Windows is designed such that basically every combination of hardware you can conceivably make SHOULD work, but it isn't guaranteed to work perfectly, simply because there is no possible way they can make sure of that. GPU A and CPU A might work wonderfully together, but GPU A and CPU B might have a TINY little mismatch that happens only in extremely rare circumstances only brought about by a singular random event inside of a video game you play such that one will send a message to the other that the other just can't handle and things come crashing down.\n\n * What are the implications?\n\nPurpose build software for a specific piece of hardware ALWAYS works better (assuming proper engineering standards are applied anyway). Think of it from a practical standpoint of converting data from one type to another. In some hardware you might have a \"least significant bit\" (which digit is the 'zero/one' space) where the bit in question is the first bit (ex: 1000) and in others it will be the last bit (ex: 0001). If your software has to handle the possibility that the hardware given to it could be one or the other, then when a number arrives in the computer, before it can do anything else, the number gets passed over to a piece of code which interprets that number to make sure it matches how the computer works (ex: if you have 1000 and the computer is expecting the opposite direction, the number must be reversed before the computer can use it), before the number is used. This is true EVEN if the number is correctly formatted. This little extra operation doesn't take much processing to do, but it IS less efficient than just knowing for sure that the number is arranged one way or the other. If you only have to do this once every few minutes, it's no big deal, but if you have to do this hundreds of thousands of times every second of operation, it adds up to a lot of wasted calculations that you don't have to do if you KNEW that the number was ALWAYS organized in a particular way.\n\nFinally, all this together means that your software knows EXACTLY what is possible from the hardware. If the hardware CAN throw a particular error or spit out a particular output, your software WILL be able to handle it because you designed it to do that. In a situation where you don't know what hardware is plugged in, you have no proof that your software will be able to handle (or even understand) a given error message or input from the hardware, because you don't know all the possible inputs you might get.\n\n**tldr: By having a VERY constrained hardware set, the software can be designed EXACTLY to handle what that hardware can do. This means no matter what the hardware does, the software can do something with what it's told instead of freaking out and crashing.**\n\nPart 2: Limited Actions.\n\n * What does this mean?\n\nYour phone and your computer have effectively infinite actions that you the user can direct it to do. This doesn't mean that you can ask it to add any number to any number (though that is part of it), it more means that you might want to install a particular game and play it, or go online and look at a random web page that the programmer of your phone/computer had never seen before. The specific number of individual actions that you can make your system do are too large for any team of coders to anticipate and test for, they have no idea what you might want it to do, so they do their best to handle the average cases.\n\nIn the case of planes, they know EXACTLY what all the things a pilot can do are and they know EXACTLY how these actions are allowed to interact. They don't have to anticipate that the pilot might want to plug in a disco ball in the cockpit and try to have the throttle lever control how fast the ball will spin or the flaps lever control how bright the spotlight on the ball is, because there is no possible way for a pilot to DO that.\n\n * Why is this important?\n\nBy knowing EVERY action a pilot can take in the plane, it becomes possible to ensure you accommodate them. Depending on the circumstances you may not be able to accommodate all of them with specifically designed code to handle that action, but you can guarantee that there is some default behavior that is acceptable. Ex: Maybe you don't have code that handles specifically what to do when the pilot pushes the 'cabin lights' button while also adjusting the throttle, but you can code the 'cabin lights' button to always toggle the lights no matter what else is going on, and you can code the throttle controller to always adjust the engines based on the position of the throttle no matter what else is going on. And thus you have handled the scenario of what happens when the pilot pushes the cabin lights button while adjusting the throttle without actually writing code specifically to deal with that scenario.\n\nWith a phone, it might be possible that the software you are running takes control of your volume buttons and uses them for some purpose (brightness say), meanwhile it cares about touch inputs on the screen to control the USB device plugged into the phone. Maybe the creator of the software you are using never anticipated that the users would have the dexterity, or reason, to be poking at the volume buttons while tapping the screen while the USB device the software was meant for was not even plugged in. This could cause the software to hang in a loop as it tries to figure out what to do. Meanwhile in a panic you try to minimize the app, only to realize that the volume buttons are still 'grabbed' by the software because your phone hasn't realized the app is crashing and is just steadily caching every volume push waiting for the app to take the inputs, and in a panic as you are pushing the various buttons you somehow manage to overflow the volume-button cache on the phone and the phone makers never expected that would be possible, and so the new value goes beyond the allocated memory space and changes a value needed for the OS which becomes a value that the software never expected to see and so the phone stalls and crashes. With a phone or computer, the programmers cannot know that this scenario might happen and take actions against specifically it. (Not a perfect example of course, the phone programmers should always expect that somehow the volume input cache might overflow and throw in some safety programming to handle it, but you get the idea.)\n\n * What are the implications?\n\nThis means that generally speaking, no matter what the pilot does with the controls, the plane knows what it should do in response. There's never any possibility of confusion where a combination of inputs/actions from the pilot are unexpected or unhandled. As such the programmers have made sure that no matter what has happened, the plane has an answer to it. The answer might not necessarily be terribly meaningful in the grand scheme of things, but it is an answer that is logical given the inputs it has been provided. A given scenario might be best handled by the plane simply refusing to change states. Ex: The plane has some sensor on the landing gear to know for sure that it is on the ground and the pilot sends it a command to retract the landing gear, the plane might just do nothing. Note: It is always a best-practices thing in the case of 'do nothing' to provide some feedback to ensure the user knows that [the system heard you, the system doesn't care.](_URL_0_)\n\n**tldr: Because the programmers know EXACTLY what all the possible actions of the pilots are, they can program things to handle ALL of those actions.**\n\n[1/2]" ]

[ "Temperature is only *one* of the factors that determine the phase of a material. You have to consider the pressure as well. If you heated a fluid to a very high temperature, namely past its boiling point (at standard pressure) it would turn to a gas phase. However, if you maintained that temperature, but confined that gas and increased the pressure immensely, you would condense that gas back to a liquid.\n\nThis concept works the same way in space. You have temperatures that are very very low in space, but since the pressure is even lower these elements will stay in gas phase in space.\n\nEDIT: To help visualize this, there are [phase diagrams](_URL_0_) for each material that will show what phase the material will be at for each combination of pressure and temperature. As an interesting aside, there is a singularity at a certain combination of temperature and pressure called the \"triple point\" where there will be gas, liquid and solid phases all present.", "The other answers here have missed a trick. Hydrogen isn't really a gas in space. \n\nThe first problem is that in such a low density environment, temperature has no real meaning. Temperature is a bulk property of a material - in space there is no 'bulk'. There are so few particles floating around that they hardly interact, meaning that there is no bulk temperature.\n\nWhen we say that space has a 'temperature' of 2-3 K, we can only really say that because if you took a thermometer (which wouldn't work, incidentally) into space it would read above zero because of the cosmic microwave background _URL_1_. Thermometers normally work by measuring the energy of particles hitting them (in a variety of ways). There just aren't enough particles in space to do that. \n\nIn fact, the hydrogen (and other particles) in space tend to be ionised, so they're really a form of plasma. \n\nThe best phase diagram for hydrogen I could find is here _URL_0_ and as you can see, it doesn't really help. Quite simply, matter at that low density doesn't behave like matter that we're used to.\n\n" ]

[ "To expand on this magnificent question... Is there a global map with locations of dinosaur fossil finds marked so we could see where we could expect to find them?", "I googled fossil map and [this article](_URL_0_) came up. I'm no paleontologist, but I'd guess that dinosaur fossils are pretty rare.", "Drumheller, Alberta. You can find them lying on the ground in the park.", "Generally speaking, the easiest way to find dinosaur fossils is in a museum. They're all nice and above-ground too.\n\n(In all seriousness, you're also going to want to look for an area where there's been a history of geological activity, because otherwise the fossils will be well and truly buried.)", "In colorado there is a huge area around strasburg (probably all the way down the rockies) were you can go and see the K-T boundary and just break open rocks and see tons of leaf fossils. One of my friends found a raptor claw and all i got is a bunch of snail fossils. They're just sitting on the ground, all over the place. \n", " > Does the average paleontologist find 20 dinosaur fossils a day\r\n\r\nMore like hundreds of little pieces of broken bone and stray teeth per year, and a couple of finds complete enough to be interesting (maybe 1/5 of a skeleton). \r\n\r\nMostly-complete skeletons are rare. \r\n\r\nBut people do stumble across \"boneyards\" with remains of hundreds of animals. \r\n\r\n\r\n > The fossils were found in the desert landscape of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), in south-central Utah - a vast tract of land Dr Sampson called \"one of the country's last great, largely unexplored dinosaur boneyards\".\r\n\r\n\\- _URL_2_ - \r\n\r\nPaul Sereno had a good documentary or two on his expeditions in the Sahara.\r\n\r\nI'm guessing that I'm thinking of this - _URL_0_ -\r\n\r\nOr maybe here - _URL_1_ - " ]

[ "The thing they were sitting on absorbed heat energy from their body. When you sat on it that heat energy started to transfer to your body through conduction. \n\nYour chair is probably close to room temperature so there might be a 15-20 degree (F) difference in temperature depending on the chair’s material and how long they were sitting there.\n\n", "It’s because the seat is warmer than you. We cannot detect temperature absolutely. What we feel when something is warm or cool is the energy transfer taking place. A property of thermodynamics is equilibrium, which is essentially the system balancing out.\n\nImagine it like this:\n\nYour hand is warmer than ice, so your hand contains more thermal energy than the ice. However, energy likes to be even, or at equilibrium. Since your hand isn’t even with the ice, energy from your hand flows into the ice when you touch it. This energy loss from your hand is detected as cold. Inversely, if your hand touched a stove, energy from the stove would flow into your hand, which is detected as hot.\n\nWhen you sit in someone else’s chair, their body temperature is going to be slightly different than yours. If the chair feels warm, it’s because it’s warmer than your body. When you sit back down in your own chair, it’s the same temperature as you because it’s been at equilibrium with your body temperature.\n\nEDIT: Changed \"objectively\" to \"absolutely\" to better reflect how thermoreceptors function.\n", "If you sit where something else was it's either warmer or cooler than you. Cooler tends to only go to down to room temperature unless really cold, so you don't tend to feel any different from if there was nothing there. Warmer, you'll almost definitely feel, so it sticks out in your mind. \n\nYou are you-temperature, and your body is so used to feeling you-temperature that things that are you-temperature get completely ignored. Like how your house doesn't usually smell like anything to you because you're used to it, but you can pick up on the normal smell of other people's houses. ", "There are three temperatures here. Let's call them cold medium and hot.\n\nYour cold ass sits in a cold seat. Ass is not losing heat to air anymore. Now it's hot ass. Chair becomes medium thanks to hot ass. When you stand up, hot ass cools a bit. Maybe to medium. Medium ass back to medium chair (mind you the chair has been getting cooled too, so it's no difference actually), no abnormal temperature sensation. \n\nSitting into another chair is simple enough. Your cold ass touches a medium seat. You feel that that seat is warm. ", "Naturally conducting heat is the transfer of thermal energy from a hotter place to a colder place through contact.\n\nWhen you sit down in someone else's seat, your butt is colder than the seat. So the heat (or transfer of thermal energy) is from the seat to your butt.\n\nWhen you sit back in your own seat, your butt is the same temperature. No temperature difference, no transfer of thermal energy.\n\nWhen you sit in a new seat, your butt is hotter than the seat. Thermal energy transfers from your butt to the seat. The heat is from your butt to the seat.", "Was the seat wet? Was it not your wet?", "Your skin feels DIFFERENCES in temperature. Once your bum has heated a seat to your body temp and you sit back onto the chair, you won't notice the temperature of the chair because it is not different from your body temperature. When you sit onto a chair that is preheated to somebody else's body temp, unless it is the same as your own, you will notice the chair's different temperature.", "Your butt gets warmer when you're sitting than when you're standing, so does the chair you're sitting on. If you're stood up and sit in someone's chair right after they get up, their butt and chair will have gotten warmer than yours. If you stand up from your own seat and then sit back down a little while later, both your butt the chair have had the same amount of time to cool off, so it doesn't feel warm. I imagine if you and a person were both sitting and you immediately swapped in to their chair as they got up, the difference would be much smaller and just down to differences between people, however this doesn't happen often enough to notice.", "This really didnt need to be asked lol. You ok op? ", "We don't all have the same butt temperature or even body temperature for that matter. We actually have very good ability to distinguish change in temperature (+-0.1'C) and it is very common that two individuals can have different base body temperature. not to mention different butt compositions.\n\nConsider this: When was the last time you had skin to skin contact with someone else and couldn't tell if they were warmer or cooler than you? \n\nNot discounting the psychological bias effect of sitting down on a chair we knew we weren't sitting in just moments before: we expect that chair to feel cool. it would be more than a distraction to then find out that the chair is pretty close to your own ass temp, plus the realisation that it could have only come from a foreign ass, both factors adding up to what one can only describe as an uncomfortable thought. so maybe its not so much \"this is much warmer than my butt.\" but maybe also \"this shouldn't be this warm!\"", "Sometimes I get up from my seat and I notice there are traces of sweat from where my balls were laying on the seat. #sweatyballs", "It's all relative, it's like going from a cold house to a hot outside and a cold outside to a hot house. You get used/adapt change your own temp to match it.", "Because once you've been sitting somewhere for a while, your ass and the seat have reached a combined average temperature and so there's no temperature difference for you to feel. If you assume the seat of someone with a warmer ass, the seat will be slightly warmer and so it will feel warmer for a while.", "When u sit down, you also heat ur pants which reduces heat loss but when you sit down to someone elses chair, the seat is heated but ur pant is not so it is warm", "You assume objects will be cooler than you.\n\n1. The person who sat on a chair before you has a lower body temperature. The chair is cooler than you. You don't notice.\n\n1a. Nobody sat on the chair before you. It is cooler than you. You don't notice. \n\n2. The person who sat on it before is warmer than you. The chair is warmer. You notice.\n\nSo you'll naturally only notice these situations. \n\n", "Thermodymaic equilibrium. Your rear and your chair have achieved it (same temperature). Your rear and someone else's chair has not, with the chair having slightly more heat than your rear when you sit down...therefore said seat gives heat lovingly to your rear. ", "When I lived in China, it was a so curious to see when a seat became available on a bus. They’d go stand by it for awhile before sitting. I learned that it was supposedly because there was a fear of disease spreading through the heat. To this day, I find it kind of gross sitting in someone else’s heat. ", "Was a difference in heat so hard to figure out? What other factors made you so confused???", "I'm thinking it has something to do with contact points. Every seat is slightly different and even if you sit in the same style you contact the new seat different than the original seat. Once your standing the air is colder and when you sit in the new seat different points on your body feel the temperature difference.", "There is no temperature difference. It just has to do with your expectations before you sit. ", "Because if you ass has cooled down enough for you to notice the change in temperature then so has the seat.", "When you sit back in your own seat, you subconsciously expect it to be warm. Your brain knows you've been sitting there and it would only register consciously if it were cold. This is because your brain picks up much more information from the environment than you realize, but it's designed to filter out info it deems irrelevant. But when you sit in someone else's seat, it's warm, and your brain is not expecting that since you have not been sitting there. This trips your brain's \"something's off\" detector and registers on a conscious level. This is why people always feel a little surprised when this happens, even though it's super expectable that the seat would be warm, and it's happened to all of us many times. The brain is amazing and weird. " ]

[ "Particle accelerators accelerate ions and you can't get many ions together as they repel each other. The densities accelerators reach are much lower than the densities of solid materials. If you collide two beams then most atoms will just fly through. That means you increase the density at most by a factor 2 - still not enough to get anything interesting.\n\nWhat you can do: Shoot onto a target from all sides, make the surface material expand so rapidly that it compresses the interior. While you could do that with particle accelerators it is easier to do it with lasers. The [National Ignition Facility](_URL_0_) does that to start fusion. In principle it should be possible to start fission that way, too.\n\nNIF has a large factory hall to produce the laser beams. The target is very small, but the overall experiment is not.", "Criticality is an easily and commonly misunderstood concept. It isn't some magical number or even some magical mass — for a bomb, it's just, \"what kind of configuration will create LOTS (i.e., trillions of trillions) of fission reactions on the time scale of less than a millisecond?\" There are a number of ways of doing it (some involve increasing the mass, some involve changing the geometry, some involve changing the density, some involve several things at once, etc.), that result in quite different types of bombs (in terms of output, size, volume, etc.), but they're all toward that essential end.\n\nCould you get some fission reactions in a particle accelerator? Sure! It's been done. It's how they did a lot of early research on fission, prior to reactors. \n\nCan you get _trillions of trillions_ of reactions that way? Probably not! How are you going to using a particle accelerator to get that many reactions in a short amount of time? (And if the amount of time is not fast, at best it will blow itself apart, at worst it will just not do anything.) \n\nThere have been schemes for using accelerators to generate large number of neutrons to do interesting things (e.g., the Materials Testing Accelerator, which was part of the origins of the Livermore lab, was in essence a giant accelerator used to irradiate \"fertile\" material like U-238 with neutrons, to generate plutonium). But all of those things take time, which is bad for an explosive fission reaction.\n\nYou could imagine schemes in which you used an accelerator or laser to implode a small capsule of U-235 to potentially very high densities, similar to the laser fusion schemes /u/mfb- references. Some very advanced laser fusion target designs do utilize small amounts of fissile material as a means of enhancing the reaction, which is not all that surprising since this is how the secondary of a thermonuclear bomb also works. But these are small reactions compared to a full-scale nuclear bomb, and require very specialized setups (you can't just plunk them into any old particle accelerator). " ]

[ "According to Cecil Woodham-Smith (in her 1962 book The Great Hunger), the English gave minimal aid mainly due to a rigid ideological belief in free markets. It seems that both political parties, but especially the Whigs who were in power during the worst of it, really believed that the market would provide all that was needful regardless of context, and that any aid would make things worse. \n\nTheir evident dislike of the Irish made this an easy belief for them to sustain. ", "Calling the Irish Potato Famine a genocide is fairly contentious, and is almost exclusively a political thought. There were certainly a number of political and socioeconomic factors arising from the British rule of Ireland, including widespread poverty in the aftermath of (and despite) Catholic emancipation in 1829, which led to Irish farmers being unable to effectively produce crops. But there were also a multitude of biological reasons, predominantly lack of genetic diversity among potato crops and the rapid spread of blight, which shared an equal if not greater (and ultimately causative) part in the incipiency of the Potato Famine. This is particularly important, as the 1948 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 26 explicitly defines genocide as an act committed with intent to destroy a racial, ethnic, religious or national group. The British government maintained a fair deal of discriminatory and anti-Irish policies and laws during that time, but the famine itself did not arise out of intent, nor any explicit action on the British government's part to target the Irish population. Their response to the famine, while arguably weak and to a point ineffective, was ultimately intended to halt the effects of the famine by providing relief to those affected through public works. So by the United Nations' definition, the Irish Potato Famine would not be classified a genocide, but there is room for discussion on to exactly what extent the policies and reactions by the British government either caused or exacerbated the famine.", "I've done a lot of research on this subject and I've recently posted a very detailed answer in a different subreddit. I will copy-paste that answer here, including the sources, and [link the actual discussion](_URL_2_) so you can also check out other -very hostile- replies and my answers to those :\n\nThere is a lot of misconception about the Irish famine in this thread. I have done a lot of research on this very same subject in my capacity as a historian and I can't help but share what I've encountered. It might not be read by many people considering this was posted 7 hours ago, but it's worth a shot. History incoming, skip if you're not interested.\n\nI see that it's still common practice to solely put the Irish famine on the English government. I even see someone saying how it was genocide and that the harvest was more than sufficient to feed all Irish citizens. That's just completely incorrect. Genocide implies a deliberate strategy and malintent. What actually happened was a lot more complex and way less malificent. The potato famine was caused by the phytopthora infestans, a previously unknown type of fungus. It's suspected to have arrived from Southern America and it might have been only moderately succesful for awhile due to various reasons, one of which is meteorological conditions. Before 1700, cultivation of the potato wasn't that widespread. Its leaves are poisenous and the edible part lies underground, so it was actually considered to be a demonic plant and it was only sometimes given to animals as sustenance. However, once people discovered how efficient it was (resilient, high calories, grows anywhere) it quickly blew up and became one of the most important foodstuffs in Europe. When the phytopthora infestans finally struck, it destroyed upto 90% of the harvest in Central Europe. It hit hardest in Ireland, Belgium and northern France, but other regions weren't spared either. The extent of the damage was very regionally specific however, so the isolated position of Ireland already put it at a heavy disadvantage. Regions in both Germany and France could rely on the supply from less central regions to alleviate their needs. The same could be said for Belgium, but both Belgium and Ireland were mostly left to their own devices.\n\nHowever one major difference between Belgium and Ireland was the fact that poor farmers in Ireland mostly relied on the monoculture of the potato to complement their diet while agriculture in Belgium was vastly more diverse. At the same time, the government in Belgium was still very new and it's power was rooted in a long tradition of municipal power. While Ireland was largely dependent on the English government, which was still controlled by 'laissez-faire' entrepeneurs. Communication between Ireland and the English government could also be called sporadic and troublesome at best. Despite this rough communication and the reluctance to abandon their 'laissez-faire' ways, the English government made some attempts to intervene in Ireland. Unfortunatly, most of what they did came either too late, was a grossly incompetent action or it backfired because of miscommunication - which honestly has been the trend ever since. So in short, it wasn't some malificent ploy by the English government to starve the Irish. It was a famine with far-reaching consequences allover Europe exacerbated by the monocultural tradition of Ireland, horrible infrastructure and it's geographical and political isolation. The incompetence of the English government didn't help either, but they lacked the tools and the mindset to do so. They often reacted just as poorly to regional issues.\n\nAs K.H Connell stated in his article on the potato in Ireland, no government could have prevented the catastrophe that was the Irish Famine. That being said, there were power structures and laws in place that exacerbated the situation to some extent, one could blame the Brittish government for not adressing these in time. However, given the swift occurence of the disease, the general lack of infrastructure to assess or adress the situation and the prevalance of 'laissez-faire' politics, it can hardly be called malintent.\n\nConnell, K. H., ‘The Potato in Ireland’, in: Past & Present, 1962\n\n**EDIT : Because a lot of people are saying that the export of produce shows the malintent of the English government, check out my other comments. The farmers in Ireland were 'forced' to sell in bulk to the market. This was practically the same for every other region in Central Europe struck by famine.**\n\n**EDIT 2 : Two threads on /r/Askhistorians telling the same exact story from a slightly different perspective :**\n\n1. [Would you classify the Irish Potato Famine a genocide? If so, why?](_URL_1_)\n2. [Historians, what's your take on the argument that the Irish Potato Famine was in essence an act of genocide perpetrated by the British government?](_URL_0_).\n\n**EDIT 3 : I can see how many people are still calling bullshit and feel very strongly about this. To prove that this isn't as controversial in historiography as you might think, I'll post a few sources by reputable historians, so you can check it out yourself.**\n\n**Sources : **\n\n- CONNELL, K. H., ‘The Potato in Ireland’, in: Past & Present, 1962\n\n- VANHAUTE, Eric, ‘”So worthy an example to Ireland”. The subsistence and industrial crisis of 1845-1850 in Flanders’, in: Vanhaute, Eric, Paping, Richard & Ó Gráda, Cormac, When the Potato failed. Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845-1850, Corn Publication Series. Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area 9, 2007\n\n- VIVIER, Nadine, ‘A memorable crisis but not a potato crisis’, in: Vanhaute, Eric, Paping, Richard & Ó Gráda, Cormac, When the Potato failed. Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845-1850, Corn Publication Series. Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area 9, 2007\n\n- SCHELLEKENS, Jona, Irish Famines and English Mortality in the Eighteenth Century, in: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1996\n\n- Ó GRÁDA, Cormac, ‘Markets and Famines in Pre-industrial Europe’, in: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2005\n\n- MOKYR, Joel, ‘Industrialization and Poverty in Ireland and the Netherlands’, in: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1980\n\n- MAHLERWEIN, Gunther, ‘The consequences of the potato blight in South Germany’, in: Vanhaute, Eric, Paping, Richard & Ó Gráda, Cormac, When the Potato failed. Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845-1850, Corn Publication Series. Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area 9, Turnhout, 2007\n\n- KINEALY, Christine, A death-dealing famine: the great hunger in Ireland, Londen, 1997.\n", "I don't find the debate over the term genocide very useful in regards to the Famine. British attitudes,even at government level were very complex and varied during the crisis. Thrre are some essential points to keep in mind :\n\n1. The crop failure was enormous. Sen and his popularisers do not really address how an early nineteenth century state could have addressed such a deep and prolonged agricultural collapse. Even closing the ports would only have made food cheaper, it would not have given the food to the starving.\n\n2. British policy was initially very radical for the time with a huge intervention in the economy. It changed for a range of political, economic and ideological reasons. This change certainly exacerbated the crisis but it was not primarily designed to increase the casualties. Despicable yes, genocidal no. \n\n3. There were some in the government who believed the Famine was an act of divine providence acting through the laws of economics. I explain this to students as seeing the Famine as a 'downsizing'. I don't think 'genocidal' deals with this attitude in a historical way. One of the reasons for it, for example was a belief that the British State should not bail out the Irish economic elite.\n\nTo summarise the Famine was the outcome of a natural disaster combined with a particular response from state which made things much worse. We should criticise the British government response both in hindsight and in historic terms but I am not convinced that debating genocide accomplishes much.\n\nA couple of useful sources:\n\nPeter Gray, *Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843-50* (1999)\n\nLiam Kennedy, *The Great Irish Famine and the Holocaust* _URL_1_ \n\nCharles Read, *Ireland and the perils of fixed exchange rates*, _URL_0_" ]

[ "Basic logic here. If you sleep, then you're less tired later. If you're less tired later then you won't be able to easily sleep.\n\nIt's pretty darn simple. Actually, studies have shown the health benefits of a short nap in the afternoon. An hour seems like too long, though.", "I used to have the same issue. Now I nap for 15-20 minutes. It’s enough to recharge my batteries but not enough to ruin my regular sleep schedule. Give it a try and see if that works for you" ]

[ "Well, the fact that they had to fire so many people was probably because they didn't have enough stuff for them to do, because there was a decrease in orders, leading to a smaller turnover and hence less money to play employees.", "It's usually for precisely this reason - because there's not enough work to go around. Say you're building a car in a plant which employs 1700 people. Now, suddenly, that model car stops being made because reasons. You decide that your range is enough and you don't need to replace it with a new model. So, you have this huge plant and 1700 people. \n\nYou might shift 200 people to other plants and bump the good ones into management, but about 1500 people are going to be there with nothing to do. So, you close the plant and get rid of the 1500 people associated with it.\n\nBasically, that's how.", "Siemens has about 360,000 employees. This means that 4500 firings = about 12 employees for every 1000. That's not a lot. Now, either entire divisions are closed, in which case there's no need to replace them, or it is a company-wide cut down, in which case the managers are told to find the bottom 1% workers and fire them.", "Usually when a company is firing that many employees, it's a layoff, which is because they don't have enough upcoming work for them. And yes, it will mean more work for the remaining employees.\n\nBut think of it this way: you own a factory with 100 employees. Each employee makes one widget a day, five days a week. So, you are shipping out 500 widgets every week. This meets your order requirements.\n\nBut then, sales tells you that orders are drying up, and for the next year, at least, you will only be selling 250 widgets per week.\n\nSo, what do you do? Make extra widgets that you can't sell? Pay people to come to work and not make widgets? No, you're going to lay off 50 employees, and then staff back up if and when the market improves.", "Sometimes, as a CEO, you find yourself with more stock options than tradition salary. So you want to maximize your stock value before you move onto the next company. You fudge the reports to make it look like sales are excellent while laying off massive numbers of people. In the short term the company seems to be on the rise, as profitability looks great on paper for the time being. Loads of inventors jump on the hot stock, you sell your options and move on to the next big thing. Bubble pops, company goes under, but you made yours.\n\nMaybe not typical, but it happens." ]

[ "Don't know if I am a 100% right, but I'd say it has to do with the mass you're trying to heat up and burn. Less mass needs less energy to heat up, and that's why smaller pieces of wood burn easier than logs.", "Fire is a chain reaction of oxygen in the air and carbon in whatever is being burnt. Kindling or smaller pieces or wood have a lot of surface area and therefore have more contact with oxygen, making them easier to burn. Once you've started that chain reaction and released a good amount of energy it becomes easier to continue the chain reaction with harder to burn things, such as solid wood, witches, heathens, or whatever else it is you're trying to burn. \n\nHope this helps! ", "The explanations about mass to surface area below are all basically spot on. However, nobody mentions that the wood itself is not actually burning. Combustible gasses (hydrocarbons) within the wood are released by heat. These gasses then react with oxygen to burn. There are very few solids and no known liquids that will burn without first becoming gasses." ]

[ "I would assume that an animal that even gives off the slightest signal of being sick will be avoided by predators, as this could in turn sicken and potentially be the demise of the predator.\n\nThe animal playing dead may seem like a trivial display, but the predator has to weigh up the risks of possibly ingesting bacteria, viruses, whatever. ", "They also lack theory of mind, so it doesn't occur to them that something could be trying to trick them. ", "Imagine you were defending yourself against someone and your adrenaline got all pumped up and you went batshit crazy at it to defend yourself. At the point when they stop moving, the crisis is over and you start to feel safe again. Whether that is because they are unconscious, dead, or faking it, doesn't matter. And you are a thinking, reasoning human being, not an animal acting solely on instinct. \n\nAnimals that are prey species will have instincts to protect themselves from being attacked and this includes trampling, headbutting, biting, goring with horns or antlers, etc. Once the thing stops moving, the instinct to defend itself abates and it loses interest. \n\nAnimals that hunt have similar instincts about prey that is running away or moving around, it triggers aggression. When the prey stops moving, it loses interest other than the need to feed if it's hungry. \n\nSo for something like a bear, which will likely display territorial or defensive aggression and lose interest when the crisis is over, this won't work on something like a pack of wolves, that are likely wanting to eat you. When you stop struggling, it's time to eat....." ]

[ "Not sure about the effects on citizens, but my understanding was that most nuclear testing in Nevada was in deep underground caves which minimized any adverse effects on the population. Fallout, by its very definition, requires an airburst type of detonation in order to disperse radioactive particles in the atmosphere. ", "Thank the vastness of the West and the fact that thermonuclear weapons had not been developed at the time open-air testing was being conducted. With that being said, there were quite a few cancers in nearby regions, but you don’t immediately develop cancer from moderate radiation exposure. Couple that with poor documentation in the 50’s-80’s, if you find yourself with cancer decades later from radiation exposure, good luck fighting for that in court. \n\nFrom Wiki\n > St. George, Utah, received the brunt of the fallout of above-ground nuclear testing in the Yucca Flats/Nevada Test Site. Winds routinely carried the fallout of these tests directly through St. George and southern Utah. Marked increases in cancers, such as leukemia, lymphoma, thyroid cancer, breast cancer, melanoma, bone cancer, brain tumors, and gastrointestinal tract cancers, were reported from the mid-1950s through 1980", "1. The bombs were relatively small.\n2. The actual site is a desert, without civilization to make it look like the game.\n3. The fallout caused a statistically significant increase of cancer/like sicknesses. [Some stats.](_URL_0_)\n", "The majority of fallout comes from a ground burst, yet most nuclear blasts are air bursts to maximize damage.\n\n\"The air burst is usually 100 to 1,000 m (330 to 3,280 ft) above the hypocenter to allow the shockwave of the fission or fusion driven explosion to bounce off the ground and back into itself, creating a shockwave that is more forceful than one from a detonation at ground level. This \"mach stem\" only occurs near ground level, and is similar in shape to the letter Y when viewed from the side. Airbursting also minimizes fallout by keeping the fireball from touching the ground, limiting the amount of debris that is vaporized and drawn up in the radioactive debris cloud.\"\n\nExamples on Nukemap\n\n100 kt air burst at the Sedan crater - _URL_2_\n\nNo fallout pattern\n\n100 kt ground burst at Sedan crater - _URL_0_\n\nLong fallout pattern\n\n_URL_1_ - the crater was created with a 104 kt device by Operation Storax Sedan shot\n\n\"The explosion created fallout that affected more US residents than any other nuclear test, exposing more than 13 million people to radiation. Within 7 months of the excavation, the bottom of the crater could be safely walked upon with no protective clothing and photographs were taken\"", "The short answer is there is one.\nHowever compared with the likes of Fukushima & Chernobyl, a Nuclear bomb does not produce a huge amount of contamination partly due to the amount of radio-nuclei present - Approx 50kg of U235 in \"Little Boy\" compared with 20000 kg/year for a 1GW reactor.\n Additionally, the fallout created is usually fired up into the air where the wind dilutes it across a wider area compared with the likes of Chernobyl where a huge cloud of heavier than air particles contaminated soil for miles around.\nThat said, the ground is radioactive around the actual test site and I wouldn't be stopping around there for a few picnics. The Sedan Test (Shallow underground explosion to see how useful Nukes were in farming - as you do) was one of the most fallout intensive tests ever producing a massive amount of radioactive dust which is believed to have contaminated the food sources.\n\nChernobyl vs Nukes\n_URL_1_\nSedan Crater\n_URL_0_\nGeneral Nevada Stuff - The sources from this are a good read\n_URL_2_", "There were 100 above-ground tests conducted and hundreds of below ground tests, all of which did indeed have health and environmental consequences. The city of [St. George, Utah](_URL_0_) received the vast majority of the nuclear fallout and the area saw a dramatic uptick in cancer diagnoses for several decades following the tests. Large areas of the US were contaminated by Iodine-131, as illustrated in [this map](_URL_1_), but the effects were nowhere near as acute as they were in the immediate vicinity of the testing.\n\nAs for why the whole region isn't considered uninhabitable - parts of it absolutely are. It has been more than half a century since the testing took place, but there are still several areas with high measurable levels of radioactivity. In particular, some of the underground tests left large craters full of radioactive rubble that are considered unsafe even today. Underground testing did a good job at preventing the majority of atmospheric contamination, but left the site itself far more contaminated. There was/is also concern that aquifers in the area were contaminated heavily by all of the underground testing.\n\n", "We did experience it. In fact a group of people got together, mostly Citizens of Utah who lived down wind of the tests. In fact they became known as the \"Down Winders\". They sued the Federal Government, but they lost. Apparently unable to prove their case, even though the increased cancer rates of the Down Winders was well documented.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAs I was searching for this link, it appears the US is paying people who are down winders that have cancer.\n\n[This](_URL_1_) is a site to get claim forms and information.", "_URL_0_ Perhaps the cause of the cancers that killed these movie stars.\n\nEvery person in the US who was alive during these tests have a different amount of Cesium in their bones than anyone who died before the tests. \n_URL_1_\n\nArchiologists will be able to tell when you lived by this Before fallout/ after fallout.", "Turning Point did a great doc on this-\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI’m from St. George, so I’ve done a bit of research into it out of my own interest. It’s pretty dark stuff! Apparently the Nevada Test Site does a public tour once a month. I’d love to go, but they’re booked out through next summer.", "On a happy note, Akiko Takakura was in reinforced concrete building that was 300 meters from ground zero and sustained only minor injuries from the 16k bomb at Hiroshima. She was 88 in 2014 and was 20 when it happened. Drank the black rain and everything. Had children and raised a family.\n\n\"Twelve of those who were within 500 meters of the hypocenter at the time of the atomic bombing are still alive\"\n\n_URL_0_\n", "I'm surprised no one has mentioned a couple of things. One, fallout was extensive. Don't let people say things like \"Low level, minimal ground effects\"\n\nIn fact the radio active fallout was continental in scope. [Kodak discovered radio active contamination from packing straw in Iowa](_URL_1_)\n\nAnother way they were able to test the fallout; milk. Radio active fallout would show up in the milk supply as a isotope of Iodine, not found from any other source. [Likely it killed way more people than the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ever did.](_URL_2_)\n\nHere's a google search that shows many maps linking the [Iodine in milk from the tests](_URL_0_:)\n\n\nMaybe it's really that there was an active effort to minimize the apparent effects and the fact that it was essentially in one spot. Millions of Americans likely died because of the testing. Now if you tested all over the country and focused on city centers you would likely have seen the kind of effects you are asking about. It's pretty scary to think how extensive the effects were and there were really only a small number of locations used.", "Strictly you can walk around at any of the above ground detonation sites today and suffer no real or obvious ill effects. You'll get a slight dose but no worse than flying over the poles or living in Telluride (12K feet).\n\nMost fallout has relatively short half-life and that is also the most intense radiologically. So the greatest risk is short-lived - after 3-6 months, the radiation dose from high radiation sources is 1% of peak; and within 2 years it's a a tiny fraction of that.\n\nLonger half-life materials last longer but have far lower radiation dose so are low risk anyway. The long half-life sources come to dominate within a few years but are nearly at a background dose rate.\n\nOn top of all of this, there is still weather including rain, snow and wind even in the Nevada desert so what was left on top of the soil has long ago been washed away and diluted to low concentrations. That further reduces any direct risk.\n\nThis is why you can walk on the detonation sites. How do I **really, really** know? I've been to these sites - I used to hold a Q-clearance and participated in \"UGTs for radiation effects on electronics\" back when testing was still being done. Wore a film badge and all that. Total radiological dose reports listed nearly zero dose from my visits. I still have the paperwork for it.\n\nIn general, there's a lot of misinformation about radiation. People are still stupid enough to confuse non-ionizing cell phones with ionizing gamma rays. It's almost like we no longer teach science in schools!!", "The fallout due to nuclear testing was extremely widespread across America. For example, regions of New York were as heavily irradiated as some of the heaviest irradiated areas around Nevada. This is due to the explosions kicking up irradiated soil and radioactive particulate riding the jet stream eastward across America. Missouri is another hotbed of radiation due to this spread of radioactivity, there was a study done in St. Louis in the 60's I believe about the amount of radioactive strontium in children's teeth because it acts similarly to calcium, but exists nowhere in the world naturally, so it had to have come from the nuclear tests. There is another great, but devastating article where a woman who lived in Utah(also heavily hit) discusses watching her friends in her neighborhood die of rare cancers and leukemia. She was afflicted with thyroid cancer, due to radioactive iodine getting into the food chain and into the milk she drank,most likely. Its definitely worth a read.\n\nFallout spread map:\n\n[_URL_5_](_URL_4_)\n\nAnother fallout map showing deposit amounts:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nArticle about the woman(Mary Dickson):\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\nArticle in NYT about the ST. Louis baby teeth survey:\n\n[_URL_3_](_URL_3_)\n\nThere's a ton to dig into here and to cause a fallout scenario in real life, \"Less than two grams of Cesium-137, a piece smaller than an American dime, if made into microparticles and evenly distributed as a radioactive gas over an area of one square mile, will turn that square mile into an uninhabitable radioactive exclusion zone. Central Park in New York City can be made uninhabitable by 2 grams of microparticles of Cesium-137\"\n\nArticle from: [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)", "Not to diminish the suffering if those who have been affected, but the simple fact of the matter is that radiation and nuclear fallout are not nearly so bad as popular media would have you believe.\n\nOh, we still shouldn't be detonating atomic bombs on the Earth's surface (or in orbit...), but the paranoia surrounding, for example, nuclear power, is just absurd.", "One thing I haven’t seen stated in this discussion is that the Nevada tests were all at the start of the nuclear era, when bombs were relatively small. The Hiroshima bomb was only 15 kilotons I think. Today’s bombs are 20+ megatons. If we had done several megaton fusion explosions in Nevada, then it would be full on fall out scenario there.", "There’s a book titled “The Tainted Desert” by Valerie Kuletz that is specifically about this. It talks about the nuclear testing, and how so much of it was done on land nearby Indian Reservations and that the impact was horrific but how the government used their own studies to prove there wasn’t a connection between the two. It’s similar to the post-9/11 cancer issue for first responders (which was finally corrected) and the current attitude of the American EPA. ", "The easiest way to think about this is, a successful detonation if a nuclear device burns most of the fuel contained in it. Obviously there will be radioactive material released but much less so than a Chernobyl type event.\n\nAbove ground testing spreads a small amount of fuel over a large area, factor in things like altitude and you may even be sending material into the jet stream or another air current which can distribute it for hundreds of miles.\n\nBelow ground testing releases a larger amount of fuel typically due to that fact that the blast is contained and not as much fuel is allowed to be fully consumed, but as long as the surface isn’t breached, most of the waste will be under ground and kept in a smaller area.\n\nObviously factors like the distance from the water table, the yearly level of precipitation, as well as how permeable the soil is all factor in. So does the half life of the primary radioisotope used, some elements degrade into much less harmful elements rather quickly, others take several millennia or more.\n\nCompare this to a Chernobyl type event and it’s not even close to comparable. There were two major explosions during the Chernobyl disaster, one was due to steam pressure, the other is thought to have been a very small scale nuclear explosion. Which one happened first has been a subject of debate. What is fact however is two explosions happening roughly 3 seconds apart tore apart fuel channels and graphite rods, and blew the top and a large portion of one side off of reactor #4.\n\nA smaller series of explosions then sent a large amount of burning nuclear fuel all over the reactor complex, much of it landing on the roof of reactor #3 and a section containing pumps and other cooling equipment. This material was so radioactive that specialized robots that later attempted cleanup were destroyed in minutes due to exposure. The largest chunks of material closest to the blast were from graphite rods that ignited once exposed to the air outside the reactor.\n\nWhen air reached the burning reactor an air flow was established from the intense heat causing a strong thermal updraft that sent material that was now on fire high into the atmosphere above the reactor and carried on air currents far from the site. The area that was directly downwind is now know as the red Forest as the radioactive debris blown there killed the trees and causing them to change to a red color.\n\nThis cloud of material kept spreading out over a significant portion of Europe and dissipating gradually as it went.\n\nReactor number 4 contained just under 200 tonnes of nuclear fuel, a frightening amount of which was blasted out, some researchers are still finding tiny fuel fragments in the town of Pripyat, and surrounding areas in the exclusions zone. \n\nBy comparison, a nuclear bomb with an 8 kiloton yield contains about 1 pound (0.45kg) of uranium. One of the largest blasts at the Nevada test range (shot Storax Sedan) was 104kt (30% fission, 70% fusion). I’m not sure exactly how much material was in the warhead but I’m sure we can safely assume 12 to 15 pounds. \n\nThis 1280 foot wide and 300+ foot deep crater was safe to walk around in without protective gear just 7 months after detonation. Which to me at least, gives a pretty good example of why the test range is relatively safe to visit today.\n\nThe marshal islands are another story altogether, but those were far larger bombs tested there. \n\n", "Fallout is mainly stuff that's already in the environment that gets contaminated by radioactive particles being attached to it. In the case of a nuclear weapon detonated above ground, there's relatively little fallout because most of the radiation is up in the air, it's still dangerous and people still did get exposed to radiation, but it didn't contaminate the soil like you think.\n\nIf you look at an even like Chernobyl, the explosion wasn't like a nuke going off above ground, it was a steam driven explosion that also blew up the source of radiation, and sent tons of radioactive dust into the air which eventually covered the entire area. There's also a lot more radioactive material in a reactor core than there is in a nuclear bomb, so if you generate enough heat to melt that material, and then vaporize it and mix all of that material with dust and debris and spread it out over a small area it's going to be incredibly radioactive, versus a nuclear bomb detonated in the air which will produce less radioactive fallout and also be able to quickly dilute it and spread it out through the air, not much of it settled on the ground and instead it just sort of floated around the globe.", "I went to school with many kids whos parents were part of what they called The Downwinders, all of them having sometype of cancer attributed to the nuclear tests near Wells, NV. They received government payouts for various types of cancer they eventually got later in life. They were not paid enough. ", "It's still affecting Americans today. In fact, victims of the very first atomic weapon detonation (The Manhattan Project) are [still seeking help](_URL_0_). ", "Here is a 1957 map of the nuclear-weapons archive. \n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\nJust for kicks... Compare this to the presidental result per capita in 2016. \n\n[**_URL_2_](_URL_0_)", "The National Cancer Institute did extensive epidemiology and found the atomic tests caused 10,000 to 75,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer from iodine-131 fallout that got concentrated in cow's milk. NCI made maps showing county-level exposures.\n\n_URL_0_", "You get cancer! And you get cancer! *Everyone* gets cancer! \n\n[John Wayne, Susan Hayward, and 90 other people developed cancer after filming “The Conqueror” near a nuclear testing site] (_URL_0_)", "You should check out Bundyville, an podcast from an NPR-affiliated radio station that explains the recent actions of the Bundy family and how it is grounded in a history of anti-government beliefs. Turns out Cliven grew up in communities screwed over by the nuclear tests and their fallout, and that significantly contributed to his distrust of the feds.", "The Japanese who survived the acute effects of the US atomic bombs have had normal or even somewhat higher than average life expectancy.\n\nThe exclusion area at Chernobyl is teeming with animal life, now that the humans have left.\n\nThe main cancer-causing effect of the bombs is thyroid cancer from I131. Not only can it be blocked by taking iodide pills, but it has a half-life of only 8 days, so has practically no long-term ability to initiate cancer.\n\nIn the face of REAL threats, like cigarettes, autos, guns, and global warming, it's amazing that people are still obsessing about radioactivity. ", "It had effects on children far away from Nevada. I was a part of the St Louis Baby Teeth Study.\n\"... radioactive strontium-90 levels in the baby teeth of children born from 1945 to 1965 had risen 100-fold and ... rose and fell in correlation with atomic bomb tests.  Early results from the Baby Tooth Survey, and a U. S. Public Health Service study that showed an alarming rise in the percentage of underweight live births and of childhood cancer, helped persuade President John F. Kennedy to negotiate a treaty with the Soviet Union to end above-ground testing of atomic bombs in 1963.\"\n_URL_0_", "Most residual radiation actually decays at an exponential rate. The only long lasting radiation comes from the actual residual pieces of the source. That’s why we can visit places like Hiroshima pretty easily (not much actual material), but not places like Chernobyl (lots of material).", "People already talking about the differences between tests and meltdowns, and pointing out that there was indeed some suffering.\n\nBut really the main thing to know here is that (with possibly one tiny exception) none of the Nevada tests were thermonuclear. This distinction means, at the very least, there's a hard limit on just how big a boom you can get, and there's a pretty direct correlation between yield and fallout.\n\nThere is a reason why there are a bunch of old atomic preparedness films from the late 40s/early 50s. If it's atom bombs we're talking about, certainly it's not the absolute end of the world (just close). Those films are laughable today because of the staggering difference in scale offered by hydrogen bombs.", "I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject:\n_URL_0_\nThis is a superb photojournalistic effort that explores the health issues of those living down wind of the test site. If this doesn't wake you up to the dangers of blind obedience to authority, nothing will.", "Lots of people were exposed to radiation from the nuclear tests, and it's estimated that up to three quarters of a million people have died prematurely as a result of those tests. At the time they conducted the tests, they didn't realize how dangerous they would be. People affected by the tests are called \"downwinders\". If you want to know more details, google that term. One of the ways that we came to understand the extent which people were irradiated was the Baby Tooth Survey--researchers collected baby teeth and studied the change in radioactivity through the years. \n\nIf you're interested in this era, you may want to check out the movie The Atomic Cafe. The documentary was made around 1983 but it was just restored and re-released. ", "One of the effects on citizens that the nuclear bomb tests had that I have not seen mentioned yet, is that there is huge amounts of contaminated water in aquifers in Nevada from underground nuclear tests. I’m talking trillions of gallons. That effects citizens for generations, especially being located in the desert. \n\nSources: \n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_" ]

[ "There may be bacteria in the area that your body and immune system aren't used to, which could make you sick.\n\nThis is because for the most part, North America and First World Europe have good, clean drinking water, and many destinations for travel aren't as well maintained when it comes to their water infrastructure.", "some countries have lower water-purification standards than the US. you could get sick if you drink their water. natives have either developed a tolerance to the unclean water OR they're just used to it." ]

[ "In a surround sound setting (such as a movie theater) the dialogue is pretty much entirely on the center channel (the speakers behind the movie screen). In a setting like that you can crank up the center channel so that you can easily hear dialogue during the movie (and generally in a movie theater dialogue is easy enough to hear).\n\nWhen the audio gets converted from surround sound to stereo they don't always do a good job of combining these channels, and you end up with a movie where it feels like you need to change the volume every 3 seconds to hear people talking without destroying your eardrums when the action happens.", "Watch movies in VLC. Use the compressor in the audio filters settings. Set a low threshold and add some gain.\n\nIt will make everything relatively equal loudness. Thats what compressors are for basically.", "Most of the movie sound are designed for surround sound systems. The center speaker/channel is where majority of the speech are used. Play around with your TV or home theater's dynamic range and increase the center channel output. Some pirated movies online simply have shitty encoding and no matter what you do, the speech are still low. ", "Easy to blame the TV but I've notices this for a long time. TVs, computers and some theaters . The fucking music will over power dialogue sometimes and its very annoyoing having to hold the volume button to hear dialogue and not blow my ear drums a minute later with noise, bass or whatever_", "Ooohhh same question about YouTube commercials. They just blast out of your speakers like there's no tomorrow. ", "Compared to the sound of a gunshot, your voice is actually pretty quiet.", "It's called preserving audio dynamics. In real life, somethings are quieter or louder than others. This is an example of audio dynamics. Some mixes in movies use what is called compression (some TVs have this effect built in). Compression makes the quieter parts louder, and the louder parts quieter so there is a more uniform volume. However, this squashes the audio dynamics. For some sound mixers/engineers, having a high dynamic range - a big difference between loud and quiet - is important.", "I'm half deaf, so this really sucks. Combined with tv manufacturers putting speakers in the back, I need fucking subtitles to understand the dialogue. Dynamic range is for the feel and experience of the scene, but the whole show/film is fucked if all I can hear is mumbles and whispers. It's nice of them to make most of this hushed talking some of the most important plot points.", "This is probably because your sound system isn't neutral. Neutral means that your speakers produce sound just as it was created. A lot of audio systems/settings increase the bass and treble (Bose, Beats). This is usually done to make the sound seem more impressive, but it is almost always a bad thing.\n\nThe filmstudio folks pre-mixed the audio of the movie just perfectly. If you watch the film you don't want to mess with this mix, thus your system needs to be as neutral as possible. \n\nHowever it often is justified to increase the volume of the center speaker if you're using more than 2 speakers. Oftentimes the center speaker only does the speech. If you can't hear the speech well enough you want to increase the volume of that speaker. Increasing the volume of all speakers will make you want to decrease the volume each time an explosion happens.\n\nIf you are using just 2 speakers, you'll want to pick the stereo audio track of a movie. It's pre-mixed to be perfect for stereo.", "Here's how to help fix that in VLC. You'll have to do this at the start of each movie, but it doesn't take long and it helps.\n\nHead to Tools > Effects and Filters and click on the Compressor tab.\n\nWithout changing your TV’s volume from its usual spot, find a quiet scene in the movie and raise the Makeup Gain slider until the volume is at a comfortable level. This will boost the volume of the entire movie so you don’t have to change your TV or computer’s volume from its usual setting.\n\nRaise the Ratio slider all the way up. This will ensure that any sound over a certain volume threshold will be turned down to a level you set.\n\nWithout changing the volume, find a loud scene in the movie and start playing it. \n\nLower the Threshold slider until the sound is at a non-earthquake-inducing level.\n\nLastly, move “Attack” up to about 50ms, and “Release” up to about 300ms. This makes everything a bit more fluid, so your movie will change volumes when necessary but it will happen a bit more gradually.", "More dynamics = more drama and more excitment. Simple formula that makes movies better.", "I think the best method is using MPC-HC with ffdshow or LAV filters. Gives me the best experience without having to adjust volume manually all the time. Dialog is very easy to understand with those.\n\n\nFor ffdshow:\n\n\nVolume = > _URL_3_\n\n\nMixer = > _URL_0_\n\n\nIn volume you activate normalization. And Mixer tells ffdshow to mux your input audio to stereo. You can also set center to 200% or even 300% so that talking will be easier to hear.\n\n\nFor LAV filters:\n\n\nMixer = > _URL_7_\n\n\nVolume in MPC-HC = > _URL_1_\n\n\nYou see it's almost similar, but you can't make center as loud as in ffdshow and normalization is done in MPC-HC itself, otherwise it sounds not as good.\n\n\nAnd if you listen at night and have thin walls you can use Sound Lock on top of it. Just skip at the credits or one loud passage and limit your volume as you like. Never had complains since that. But mostly the Mixer and Volume normalization should do the trick. AND DON'T FORGET do deactivate night mode if you watch on TV now. Sorry it's in german, don't know how to change that. I could make more pictures if people have problems to find the settings.\n\n\nffdshow tryouts: _URL_2_\n\n\nLAV filters: _URL_4_\n\n\nSound Lock (optional): _URL_5_\n\n\nMPC-HC: _URL_6_\n\n\nINFO: If you use 32 Bit MPC-HC make sure your filters are 32 bit too. Or MPC-HC won't be able to see them. Same for 64 bit.", "Hey there are a lot of incorrect answers here, saying that this is a result of not having good speakers, or needing surround sound, or setting your tv to have low dynamic range. The reality is the Re-Recording mixer just did not to a great job. ", "this is a good problem. a wide dynamic range is better than all the audio compressed.", "Is this /r/needadvice or ELI5? I've only seen one comment who actually tries to explain what was happening in dummy terms and I've seen countless try to \"fix\" his \"problem\". ", "Lots of people are talking about it from a technological standpoint, and how you should set up dynamic compression. That talks about how to *solve* your problem, but not why movie producers would choose to do something like this in the first place.\n\nOrchestras take pride in their dynamic range, making the difference between their pianissimo and fortissimo as big as possible. This makes them very impressive to listen to in real life. Sure, changing tempo and key are good tools to take the listeners on a journey of peaks and valleys, but volume is another fantastic tool to use too, especially since we respond reflexively to loud noises, but get calmed by softer ones.\n\nHowever, if you've ever tried to listen to a live orchestra on CD in your car, you've probably noticed that the sound of your car running on the road usually drowns out everything. Then if you go to turn it up, sooner or later, the orchestra blasts you out, and you have to turn it down again... and back up... and back down...\n\nHowever, an orchestra isn't going to do a performance where they limit their dynamics just so it would be less annoying to listen to on CD; it would be a lot more boring for the live audience.\n\nSomething very similar is likely happening with movie theatres and DVDs. Movie theatres have lots of expensive sound systems, which make it possible to have a large dynamic range to capture the audience. However, if that means that watching it on DVD is a bit more annoying, oh well. Another incentive to go to the movie theatre instead.\n\nIt takes time and resources to remix all the dynamics again, although, I know that ZombiU for the WiiU is one of the only video games that I've come across where, in the audio settings menu, you can choose to have high dynamics or low dynamics.", "I'm a little surprised by how much misinformation is in this thread. \n\nI'm an audio mixer. Here's why you're hearing things the way that you are:\n\n - most films are mixed for a theatrical setting. Theaters (in theory) do two significant things differently than a laptop setting: they control ambient noise so that you can hear the quiet parts, and they play back the mix at a calibrated loudness setting that matches what the director was hearing during the mix. \n\n - by listening from a laptop out in the world, that audio mix is now competing with the ac noise, traffic, kids screaming and whatever else is making noise around you. Sit in a super quiet environment and you'll likely have a better experience hearing the soft stuff. \n\n - movies DO tend to be mixed *dynamically*, meaning that the director will usually call for gunshots and explosions to be as loud as he can get them. Given that he's in a calibrated (and quiet) environment, a director can end up getting them pretty dang loud. It's about the cinematic experience. \n\n - some bigger budget films get a separate \"home theater\" mix that is done in a smaller room and at a softer level. This greatly reduces the dynamics and makes the mix translate better to uncalibrated situations, while still preserving the integrity and intent of the original mix. \n\n - most films do NOT get a home theater mix. Therefore the dynamics of the theatrical mix will tend to jump around because you're having to crank the volume of the soft parts up way higher than was originally intended in order to get over the noise that exists in your listening environment. ", "The sound editors intend it that way, simply to increase the contrast and to shock you--making their scene seem more violent--like the typical slasher scene where the teen quietly walks down the basement stairs, and suddenly the cat shrieks and jumps across the screen.\n\nIt's a cheap effect and a better director/sound editor could find different ways to evoke the sudden-ness and extremeness of the scene.", "To sum it up quickly, either you're watching the movie with with bad audio settings or you're just watching a movie with really bad audio mixing. I bet it's the first option.", "I remember reading somewhere that movies are mixed for sound-proofed theaters with great acoustics where voices carry nicely to your ears. I guess not all companies do a good job of converting that sound for our family rooms.", "Films are mixed in a controlled environment, where the quietest and loudest moments are known quantities. Theaters are (supposed) to play films back at a set level, so that they will sound like the director intended. When you take a film mix into your home, the environment is not the same-- the room probably isn't as quiet as a theater, (there is more ambient noise, like your AC, the dishwasher, traffic, etc) meaning that you will have to bring the volume up to hear the dialogue. Also your tv room is probably much smaller and more reverberant; and you are much closer to the speakers than you would be in a theather. This has the effect of making loud moments seem louder. \n\nTLDR; a film mix will sound different in your small room at home than in a big theater because of acoustics.\n\n", "Answer: There are different aspects to sound that make it high fidelity, one of them is dynamics. Dynamics are the difference in level from the softest sound in a recording, to the loudest. The softest sound is determined by the noise floor of the recording, with digital recordings like DVD, Bluray, etc, that noise floor is almost non existent which allows for very soft sounds to be clear. The loudest sound in a recording is determined by how high you turn up the sound and how powerful your system is. Most movie theaters have high output power, and multiple speakers delivering the sound but despite different size theaters, and different audio systems they use a calibrated sound level so that the movie is played back in the way the creator intended. This mix might be good in a calibrated theater, but may cause trouble for some viewers depending upon what they are watching/listening with. \n\nSo if you are using a playback system with little output power, like a television, and you turn the volume up to a comfortable level for the soft sounds, it won't have enough power or \"headroom\" left over to accurately reproduce the loud sounds, the amplifier will begin clipping as it runs out of power, like cutting the tops off a hill and making them flat, and it doesn't sound very good. Hence your speakers blowing up. \n\nBecause someone may be watching a movie using TV speakers, or using a home theater amplifier or head unit, the DVD and bluray standards support dynamic range compression. Most televisions, movie players, and stereos have a setting for dynamic range. You can select full range for a stereo, or max compression for a television. What that does is make the softest sounds louder, and the louder sounds softer, so there is less range in levels and it's easier to hear dialogue during quiet scenes and without distortion during loud scenes. \n\nIf you want the best fidelity, use a head unit and a powered subwoofer and buy a DVD or bluray that is THX certified. These discs usually contain a calibration sound that you can use with a sound meter to set the correct loudness of the audio system.\n\nThe familiar THX sound is actually there for calibration purposes, it plays across all frequencies at a constant level and allows a consumer or a theater to calibrate the loudness or level of their audio. \n\n", "I mean...have you ever fired a gun? I cant speak for an explosion on any large scale but I have fired many guns in my life. Some pistols in particular are incredibly louder than you would think IRL. \n\nEven the loudest human yell is nothing in comparison, but regular dialogue? I think others in this thread have given much more useful answers but i'm just sayin... there kinda should be a huge difference in levels or that would be pretty weird.", "many times it's because of how the sound for the film was mixed. ", "I don't get it. But I've been using closed captioning for years although I hear normally. Way more comprehension ", "I always assumed it was for emersion. Do you know the volume difference between a conversation and gunshot at the same distance?", "I understand it's supposed to be that way. The rustling of a leaf is supposed to be as loud as a leaf rustle and a gunshot is supposed to be as loud as a gunshot. The speakers in a movie theatre are calibrated kinda like this. My advice is find a scene where someone speaking, turn it up til their voice is at a normal level and then just embrace those loud cannon explosions if they come up :)", "This is only a problem for me when i torrent mp4s. when i watch movies on netflix using the same speakers there isnt that disparity in volume between dialogue and efx", "Because explosions are utterly deafening compared to dialogue. Have you ever tried talking over an artillery bombardment before? Gunshots vary from suppressed handguns which are no louder than a car door slamming to miniguns which blare over pretty much everything else.\n\nMany of these things are so loud that not only is speech inaudible when they are going on, it is for some time afterwards as well as you ears recover.", "I use an application called Sound Lock on windows, it works on every video app and its done wonders for me. I haven't got yelled at for waking up my girlfriend when the music gets loud in a movie since I downloaded it lol. Its free too!", "This will probably get lost in here but, I'm a re-recording mixer in hollywood and this is my wheelhouse so here's the ELI5-iest answer i can give.\n\nIt has very little to do with Surround vs. Stereo. It's all about dynamic range.\n\nLets think about it as percentages (These are fake percentages for clarity):\n\nIn **film** Dialog is 50% of the maximum volume.\n\nIn **TV/Web** Dialog is 75% of the maximum volume.\n\nIf your computer goes to 100% of its own volume, and knows that the loudest sound in your **Film** should be 100% volume, then dialog will only be 50% of your computers total volume.\n____________________________\n**Master Class**\n____________________________\n\n*Why is film dialog softer on TV/Web?*\n\nFilm and TV have different dynamic range standards. A film's dialog should hover at around 65dB on a mix stage. That leaves roughly 40 dB of headroom for things like big SFX (maxing out near 105dB, LOUD). Theaters obviously reproduce this 65dB \"sweet spot\" for film goers so that it all sounds correct.\n\n\nBut when you put that on a computer or TV, which doesn't calibrate its volume for films dynamic range like a theater, all it knows is \"The loudest sound in the movie is the loudest my volume gets\", that all falls apart.\n____________________________\n\n*So how come Breaking Bad sounds fine on my TV/Computer?*\n\nWhen I mix a TV show all of that headroom gets squashed, so dialog and the loudest SFX are much closer in volume. That's why you probably have no problem watching something like Breaking Bad on your laptop, it was designed for that listening space in mind. They're mixed in the same environments, just to different dynamic ranges.", "Is there a way to compress dynamic range systemwide on PC?", "Yes, this pisses me off - having to turn the volume way up to hear what people are saying, then having to turn it back down when something loud happens (since I have neighbours). ", "I've found the answer to the foolishness of erratic volume (well at least for home theaters)...it's called buying an audio compressor. I really don;t care what the the producer of a movie wants me to hear....I want to hear he dialogue more than anything.\nI've had to resort to closed captioning sometimes in order to underssnad what the actors are saying.", "I compression software/app would help keep your ears and speakers alive.", "Now someone explain why shitty sound production seems to be the rage in action films nowadays. \n\nEmotional moment? Can't hear shit buddy, the generic Zimmeresque music is playing too loudly.", "Better question: Why can't the sound editors manage to remove the .au EOF sound off of the gunshots, explosions, songs, squeeling tires and every other fucking sample in the movie?\n\nSeriously, that's not the spent cartridges going \"tid-WINK\" that's the EOF indicator used by apple sound editing software.", "Yeah, I've turned off movies before because of this. \"What are they saying??\" *turn up the volume* \" *jet explosively decompressed BOOMSSHHHH!!!!\" RIP eardrums...", "A lot of answers about surround sound settings on your TV so thought I'd share the other reasons for varying levels of audio in TV, particularly films.\n\nWith audio mastering you are trying to get the audio to the loudest level you can (listen to the difference in volume to say a local bands recording compared to some professional dance etc) without distorting. You want to use all of the \"space\" available whilst keeping dynamics, well, dynamic \n\nIn TV and film you have dynamics too, explosions should be loud and dramatic to help the story so compared to speaking it is much louder. Think of an orchestra playing all the quiet sections of a piece at full volume. When they come to the big build up crescendo at the end it won't sound so dramatic if it isn't played louder than the rest. It's all relative.\n\nAnother example is how TV adverts in breaks are louder than the shows. That's because the shows normal volume isn't at 'full' to make sure that music and explosions etc stand out and make an impact whereas the TV advert can afford to be at full volume because it doesn't need to worry about leaving space for louder items in the mix. It just needs to shout \"BUY MY SHIT\". \n\nThis is trying to be a sort of ELI5 of audio mastering and I'm a bit drunk and am not really reading what I've put but did study music production/studion engineering... Just obviously didn't study how to explain things in a sensible way...\n\nEdit - as to ads\n", "I don't understand why there isn't an audio options setting for Voice, Sound Effects, Music just like there is in every game that is released. If we can adjust all that in game settings why not movie settings? ", "So fuckin stupid. Whoever is in charge of this Hollywood, please fuck yourself with a cactus...sideways.", "I don't have an answer, OP. Just wanted to say that I sympathize with you. As a mom with a baby that will only sleep on me, trying to watch a tv show or movie is such a pain because of the dynamics. Either I can't hear what they are saying or something is waking the baby up. We tried to use subtitles, but it's not often available either. Luckily the SO figured out a way to compress the audio in xbmc a few weeks ago and that has helped soooooooooo much. ", "I HATE THIS! ugggh... so glad to see a post about it. It's like the rest of the world enjoy these sudden shifts in volume, nobody question it....\n\n\nI spend way too much time adjusting volume. I think they should come up with a program for computers that would automatically adjust the volume (does it exist? for like, netflix etc.) And make TVs with that feature as well. It has come to the point where I respect the moviemakers less when the only tactic they can come up with to make it scary or actionsfilled is to crank up the volume. \nI even miss those scenes because I'm so busy going *sigh* and fiddling with the mouse or remote. Only to have to adjust it 2 seconds later...", "I work in Audio Post Production, I do sound for TV and films. In our industry, sound mixers love dynamic range. The idea being that you can make big moments seem much bigger based on the relative volumes of the things around it. Same in the reverse, softer moments seem softer and thus can have a more emotional impact.\n\nBUT this approach only really works for films seen in the theater - the ideal environment for them to be viewed (well that's how it's accepted anyway). \n\nI watch a whole lot of movies and tv from my computer, Netflix etc, and I HATE DYNAMIC RANGE. I live in an apartment with paper thin walls and I'm constantly running from my couch to my audio interface to turn up or down the volume. \n\nI argue with my boss, a well known mixer where I'm from, that there needs to be at least 2 separate mixes, one for a theater, and one for home. He disagrees.\n\nIt seems to me to be an outdated attitude. 90% of the audience watching the films we work on, are not seeing them in a theater, nor anything like our mix room, they are listening on shitty laptop speakers or shitty tv speakers, in the background while they are cooking dinner. And dynamic range is entirely inappropriate in this situation, yet my old school boss still thinks it needs to be ridiculously dynamic.\n\nTL;DR - Many high level sound mixers are old dudes living a false belief that everyone has a stellar audio system at home and mix as such.", "I was watching the original Battlestar Galactica in an art host theater once. Somehow the projectionist got the sound backwards and PEOPLE TALKED REAL LOUD and the spaceships, laser blasters, etc were *^real quiet^*", "As an apartment dweller that loves TV and movies, but wants to be a considerate neighbor, this drives me fucking insane!", "I just got into an argument last night over this same damn question.", "Yeah, I completely understand your frustration. I'm not surprised at all by the people in here criticizing your complaint and/or setup. Not everyone has the space or money to implement a surround sound system which basically necessitates subtitles and/or upping the volume to uncomfortable levels. I would love to see newer media take advantage of using a separate channel for dialogue much the same way PC games do these days.", "Here ya go: _URL_0_ Soundlocker. We use if for our home theater. Set the maximum you can tolerate, and all the volume gets adjusted accordingly. Boom.", "I have always found this annoying and am glad you asked. ", "Putting a compressor between my computer and my amplifier was the smartest thing I've done in a while, and I'm a computer programmer. Late night ebay splurge was totally worth it.", "It's because with stereo sound you're missing the center channel that is usually reserved for dialog. ", "I generally talk at a lower volume than explosions and gunshots.", "Your third edit makes me wonder what kind of know it all toddlers are on here. I instantly understood what you meant and I don't even watch movies much. ", "The audio channels for movies are mixed so as to sound good in a *theater.* Theaters have HUGE banks of 'center channel' speakers behind the screen, so they don't need to boost that channel much to get it to sound good in a theater. As for the left/right and surrounds, many times those are relatively small wall-mounted units along the side walls, and those get pumped with a lot of extra juice to boost the audio levels. In *home* audio systems, the opposite is true: center channels are relatively small, and left/rights are bigger, thus you get big sound effects and superquiet dialogue. The main issue is that the studios that produce movies for DVD get lazy and don't bother to remix the audio channels for a home audio system, leaving it at the 'theater' setup. Sometimes in later releases, the audio is 'remastered' to fix this problem (like when a movie is re-released for an anniversary special edition or if another studio buys the rights), but not often. This is more of a problem lately as profits go up, studios spend less and less money on remastering for DVD because they're pretty convinced nobody cares. Except us, and they don't care about us, apparently.", "Sound engineer here.\n\nI notice this frequently on certain movie files that have been ripped from a Blu-Ray disc with a 5.1 surround mix. I think the rip doesn't properly collapse the surround mix back into two-channel stereo, leaving you with no centre fill (dialogue) and heaps of bassy SFX that would have been meant for the sub woofer.\n\nJust a suspicion. I could be completely wrong.", "There is something called \"Dynamic Range.\" A high dynamic range has very loud parts and very quiet parts. A low dynamic range has somewhat quiet parts at the softest, and somewhat loud parts at the loudest.\n\nIn the case of your movie, they've cranked the dynamic range up really high. I suspect it is because they know you won't be able to hear the talking parts, which will then make you crank up the the movie volume to much louder than you want.\n\nHigh volume tends to make audio more intense and engaging. That's why clubs or movie theatres play music at (or often beyond) the legal maximum volume, just below the Hz threshold for acute ear damage. A movie with high volume benefits similarly. In fact, this is why the 15 year old in your car who cranks up the bass and treble is smugly satisfied with the \"better sounding music\" with their equalization - not because they improved the mix, the mids are mostly gone - but because the total output is much louder.\n\nIt's all about them controlling what volume you watch their movie at and not you. If this bothers you, you can set the dynamic range in the audio options on any decently made DVD or Bluray, and if you can't, I recommend ripping it to your computer, where many media players can modify this, then playing it on your computer or burning a bootleg with a dynamic range that won't cause your neighbors to call the cops.", "Turn up your center channel. That's where the dialogue originates. Turn down your side speakers and rear speakers and bass bin if you have one, that's where the explosions and surround sound comes from. Done! You may, if you can, raise the treble of the center channel and cut the bass, this way the vocals slice thru even at low volumes. Don't turn up above 10K because this is where \"sizzle\" and high hats live: these frequencies can be exhausting to the ears and don't add legibility to spoken words. Professional audio offers \"compressor/limiter\" circuits which automatically provide an over-all volume ceiling, some home units may offer similar features. I have found that MOST audio engineers have blown their ears out long, long ago. These guys are the ones who create the insanely loud action sequences, they don't even know HOW loud they come across: best example \"Imax\" which to me means... I Max The Volume!!!!", "MPC Home Cinema with ac3filter and DRC turned up to about 12 works really well." ]

[ "First of all, fifthworldproblems is a joke subreddit based on firstworldproblems. The idea behind fifthworldproblems is that the \"fifth world\" is like some inaccessible parallel universe; one in which \"My spawn refuses to inherit my reign and become the harbinger of unchosen souls. How will he ever experience the bliss of quintillium hyperconsciousness?\" is a common, or funny, question to pose.", "In it's simplest sense, it's a sci-fi roleplaying subreddit.", "First \"world levels\":\n\nFirst world — the nations allied with the US during the Cold War; now usually taken to be synonymous with \"developed\".\n\nSecond world — the nations allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War; this term is largely no longer used, but the \"problems\" subreddit seems to think it should mean a country that's \"not fully developed\".\n\nThird world — the nations that were unaligned during the Cold War; now usually taken to mean \"undeveloped\".\n\nFourth world — nations and peoples that are basically unrecognized by the larger world.\n\nFifth world — sometimes meaning landlocked developing countries, sometimes referring to an aspect of Native American mythology; the subreddit appears to think it means \"world of chaos and madness\".\n\nThe \"n-thworldproblems\" subreddits are dedicated to posts about problems faced by people living in these worlds. In this trend, \"fifthworldproblems\" is a place to post about the sorts of problems encountered by people who live in a world of chaos and madness where the laws of physics are more like impolite suggestions to be disregarded unless absolutely necessary.", "First of all, fifthworldproblems is a joke subreddit based on firstworldproblems. The idea behind fifthworldproblems is that the \"fifth world\" is like some inaccessible parallel universe; one in which \"My spawn refuses to inherit my reign and become the harbinger of unchosen souls. How will he ever experience the bliss of quintillium hyperconsciousness?\" is a common, or funny, question to pose.", "In it's simplest sense, it's a sci-fi roleplaying subreddit." ]

[ "Similarly, if an asteroid is travelling at near light speeds heading right towards us wouldn't we not be able to even see it until it was too late?", "My calculation gave me about 250 days for a travel to alpha centauri at speed 99% speed of light. 4,5 light years the distance is :) Fun relevant fact. \nedit (someone correct me if i'm wrong )" ]

[ "I take it you're referring to animals *of different species* becoming friends/companions/packs. Most dogs will naturally associate with other dogs. As merely an anecdotal example: growing up I had two dogs, one of which was much older than the other, blind and deaf, and like the text in your photo blurb, the younger would always help the older move around.", "[These National Geographic videos should answer the question](_URL_0_)\n\nAlthough you will have to draw your own conclusions regarding the mechanisms involved", "Here's a pretty well known anecdotal example of an elephant and dog that are inseparable friends:\n\n_URL_0_", "Friends how? There's a story out there of an elephant befriending a dog [here](_URL_0_). In the same vein, horses are very social creatures and shouldn't really be kept alone. It's always best to have horses in pairs/herd, or at least get them some kind of other animal they can bond with, be that a goat, barn cat, or what have you, they still need something. \n\nI don't know that they're 'friends' in the sense that we consider friendship, but they do tend to seek each other out. ", "My nearly adult dog became \"friends\" with my roommates' nearly adult cat after we moved in together. One would be visibly upset whenever the other was gone for long periods of time. Given how old they both were, I don't think it was imprinting or anything like that.", "I read somewhere that cats just see humans as giant cats. I'm not sure how they came to that conclusion. Species recognition is a really interesting topic though!", "[It usually happens with animals of higher intelligence, mostly mammals. You ever heard of Koko's Kitten?](_URL_0_)", "This thread is filled with anecdotes. This is not my domain, but here are papers/topics that might help:\n\n* [Human/Animal bonds](_URL_0_). \n\n* [Attachment Behavior of Animals](_URL_2_)\n\n* [Attachment theory ... Evolutionary... blah blah](_URL_1_)\n\n\nSo, what were my search criteria? Your question of friendship falls under a few topics within psychology: attachment theory, theory of mind, companionship and social cognition. I also used \"cross-species\" as one of my search terms in Google Scholar.\n\nI don't know how much, if any, research is done in this domain. I'm sure most instances are case studies or intra-species (i.e., just chimpanzees, just rabbits, etc...). You might be able to find case studies of cross-species companionship and bonding within anthropology or zoology. This is going way beyond my domain, now, though.\n\n\n**EDIT**: A term you might want to use in your searches, from here on out, is \"bonding\". I believe that's the proper term for intra-species pals that are raised/reared together and then become chummy.", "Laymen here. \n\nRadiolab did a piece on vampire bats. If I recall correctly, essentially it says that if one bat wasn't able to feed, another *unrelated* bat would feed it. Then if at a later time the second bat couldn't feed, the first bat would remember when it was helped and return the favour. It eventually appeared that they formed bonds and friendships.\n \nHe also says (regarding friendships amongst animals) \"Oh, I don't think it's unique, but I don't think it's very common. I think it would be quite *un*common.\"\n\n[Radiolab Shorts: Blood Buddies](_URL_0_)", "In the papers, it's called interspecies interactions. It actually does happen between different cetacean species in normal circumstances: _URL_0_", "There are many cases of animals of different species bonding. Are they \"friends\"? I don't know, but they're [damn adorable.](_URL_0_)" ]

[ "_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nThe term clean coal is used to indicate some measures to help remove atmospheric pollutants. Problem is, it does nothing about the radiation, sludge, factory/mine greed, mountain clearing, or anything else that is environmentally damaging.\n\nI'm having trouble locating a good source, but there are 2300 coal plants in the world, and just ONE clean coal plant (that I know of) in Germany.", "What the coal industry does is called [greenwashing](_URL_0_) by claiming coal is \"green\".", "To make coal plant emissions \"clean\" you have to remove all kinds of bad things from the exhaust. Then, this needs to be stored and disposed of. \n\nSo, making the coal \"clean\" just concentrates the harmful chemicals, and then disasters like [this](_URL_0_) can happen", "There is a process called coal gasification that is a little more complex then just simple combustion of coal. In this process coal is turned into carbon monoxide and water (syngas) which can then be reduced to hydrogen and water, or run through a process known as Fishcer Tropsche to be turned into a gasoline like substance.\n\nI believe that many of the toxic compounds in the coal are turned into a tar which can then be converted into other products. There are also ways of sequestering the sulfur and nitrogen and converting those into products like ammonia and sold. Carbon sequestration using algae or other methods can be used to reduce carbon emissions as well.\n\nThe problem with coal gasification is that it is very expensive. There are huge capitol costs that the company has to face so not very many plants of this type are being made because they simply cannot compete with the old way of burning coal to make energy. Basically there are a lot of things that companies can do to make burning coal more clean, but they would never be able to turn a profit with electricity costs being so low. \n\nsources\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)", "Ecological Risk Assessor here: You have remember the process used initially to obtain the coal. Harvesting and such. It's not just about the air. Right now I'm having to learn quite a bit about selenium which is naturally occuring in areas where coal is found. If that stuff gets moved around and into the water system it has major impacts to aquatic organisms and causes reproductive effects in birds who eat the aquatic organisms if it doesn't just straight out kill them. The fracking industry isn't much better regarding their techniques used to obtain that \"clean\" energy source. It seems odd to me that we haven't put two and two together and noted that...we're in a drought...and fracking companies are taking millions of gallons of potable water, mixing it with chemicals, completing their process and dumping these millions of gallons of water w/chemicals deep into underground wells where it is essentially taken out of the ecosystem forever. Hopefully they'll come up with a way to either take the contaminants out of the water so it can be returned to the ecosystem or perhaps figure out how to use brackish water (it gets more complicated bc the chemicals they add react differently when water with varied dissolved solids are used) instead of fresh water. But...until then I would not consider it a \"clean\" energy. *edit-typos", "Besides all the other stuff mentioned by other posters, burning [coal also emits mercury](_URL_0_). ", "How the hell is it that everyone in this thread is wrong and filled with antidotes and politcal bs? Are the mods all asleep? \n\nThe clean in 'clean coal' is that they remove sulfur from the coal. That is it. Nothing else is removed, just sulfur, and they label it as clean coal. Clean coal still has the same levels of CO2, mercury, and all the other harmful elements that come from burning coal. ", "I worked in a coal mine for 4 years and can comment on a few things about actual differences in coal. Not all coal is the same. The two main differences is the btu \"content\", and the ash content. I cite these two measurements for this discussion because the lower the ash content the less you have left over after burning the coal. This is the obvious unwanted direct by-product of burning coal. The btu content is another metric of interest because the higher the btu value, the lower the mass of coal that must be burned for a given energy output, thus lowering the mass of CO2 exhumed. \n\nLike I said before, depending on what seam the coal comes from, these two values are different. In the mine that I worked at the coal seam was over 2kft deep, had negligible ash content, and some of the highest btu content in the states. There was a \"washing process\" that removed the coal from the constituent rock content, but it was not an \"ash washing\" process as described in other places on this thread. When burned, this seam would produce almost no ash and less CO2 per kW.\n\nI say this to point out that there are differences in coal that make the coal have differing by-products when consumed. There are some coal seams (like the mine I was working at) that have almost no ash by-products and lower CO2 levels when consumed. This is not to say that the \"full process\" is clean. All mining in some way is environmentally damaging, some more than others.\n\ninvestor report. Turn to Page 7 for information regarding specifics of the coal seam. Following for information about the mining process.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEDIT: Spelling, reference" ]

[ "The wires inside break over time, leaving a tiny gap. When you bend the end, you can move the wires just enough to close the gap and reconnect again. But you have to hold it in place to keep the wires touching each other.", "Sometimes the problem is more that the charging port is filled with lint, and it takes the repositioning of the cord or bending it to get enough contact between the charger and the port to actually charge the phone. ", "You explained it yourself, you fixed the connection. Just a broken wire reconnecting, completing the circuit." ]

[ "Weather is controlled by so many things other than latitude. The topography and the proximity to water (especially the ocean) have massive effects on the temperature and climate that can completely overshadow the effects of latitude.", "If we take Europe for example, France is approximately at the same latitude as Canada, but weather in France is relatively mild, and it definitely doesn't get as much snow as Canada. \n\nWestern Europe gets the Gulf Stream, which is a warm air current from Mexico/Florida that crosses the Atlantic to reach Europe, making Western European winters milder. But it's only mild for those countries which have a more or less \"Atlantic climate\" and can feel the effects. The further you go into the continent, the less that effect is felt. Thus by the time you get to Russia, the warm current faded out, and thus Russia cold like northern Canada :)", "It all has to do with the Earth's radiation budget - radiation from the sun, that is - and how that energy is processed. Places on the Equator get a ton more solar radiation year round, while places on higher/lower latitudes get lower/higher during winter/summer respectively. Radiation, in this respect, is simply solar energy. Sunlight.\n\nOceanic currents and air circulation (e.g. mid-latitude jet stream) help move around the radiation from places of constantly high radiation to places with alternating radiation. This is where your question comes in: Much of Russia (and other continental areas like the Prairies, the Steppes, etc) is incredibly far inland. This means that it is hit with intense seasonality, unlike places like Vancouver or Anchorage. Yes, Anchorage gets cold but it does not get nearly as cold as places like Tomsk in Siberia. This is all due to the proximity of the sea.\n\nThat's the simple answer: Inland Russia is incredibly far from the sea.", "If you look at Norway, the coast is warm and nice because of the Mexican gulf stream. Where as inland Norway (behind mountains and shit) can be cold as fuck. Looking at you Røros. ", "Geography influences climate just as much as latitude. For example, as the sun rises, water takes longer to heat up than land, and when it sets it takes longer to cool, which affects winds. Another example is [ocean currents] (_URL_0_), these are like giant highways of water, water from warm places like the carribean moves norh to Europe and brings its heat with it, giving Europe a nice mild climate. Yet another example is mountain ranges, which have a huge effect on wind patterns.\n\nI'm not sure why russia is colder, it might be the Gulf Stream, which takes heat to Europe and not to Asia, also, have you ever been to Alaska or Canada? Those places are just as cold as russia. And at the same latitude." ]

[ "What /u/skipweasel said about bitrates is bang on - it's like the difference between me slowly spelling something out letter by letter compared to shouting it at you quickly and being surprised that you didn't catch it all.\n\nThere's also the matter of clutter.\n\nNASA are using enormous dish antennas on the top of mountains, with nothing between them and the spacecraft - remember that space is pretty much empty, there won't be a planet that just randomly appears between the transmitter and receiver!\n\nA mobile phone in an urban environment doesn't get these luxuries. It has a tiny little antenna, and there could be all manner of things between the base station and handset. Just the walls of a modest house will have quite an effect on the received signal level.", "A key to this is a *massive* amount of error correction built into the signal. NASA knows that the transmission will get degraded over the long distance for several reasons...and so they put a lot of redundant information in the signal to ensure that they have a complete file once they receive it.", "It also has to do with the bands (range of frequencies) that are used. Certain bands have better propagation, but have lower data rates. The power is also a huge factor. Mobile devices are very low power devices compared to long distance transmitters.", "I think based on the collection of response, this can be answered on a higher level. It's way more important. So important NASA gets to spend a little bit of everybody's money to make it happen. This means they can do a lot of things to make it work. Your cell phone or the radio? No big D. " ]

[ "Also, in addition to other answers, some holsters have more than one retention type. The holsters used by the city where I used to work (i wasn’t a cop but I was a shooting instructor) had a thumb strap, the gun had to be pushed down and then forward, and a thumb button.", "Follow-on question for anyone, something I've wondered about from curiosity (and watching too many cop shows lol) :\n\nIs there a risk or chance that the officer could not unholster his/her weapon? How long does it take to unholster the weapon, milliseconds? ", "They're called active retention holsters, and they require a more complicated movement than simply \"pull on it\" to release from the holster. The exact mechanism depends on brand, make, model, but typically the holster attaches to the trigger guard and has some kind of strap or hood above the weapon.\n\nAdditionally, police train specifically in tactics to prevent their gun from being stolen. Again, exact technique varies by department, and some are better than others, but police officers give a lot of thought to not having their gun stolen." ]

[ "The Hubble is in a low Earth orbit because that's where the space shuttle could go. The Hubble was designed to be upgraded over time, and in order to get to it, it had to be placed in that orbit. In fact, if the Hubble had been placed in a higher orbit, it would not have been possible to correct the defects in the primary mirror, and the overall mission would have been much less successful.\n\nIt has a 97 minute orbit (14 or 15 orbits per day, not 97 orbits per day). It is capable of taking very long exposures; the [Ultra deep field](_URL_0_) had a total exposure time of nearly a million seconds, combined from 800 individual exposures.", "As for the James Webb telescope and it's orbit, [Wikipedia](_URL_1_) explains it pretty well. They need to keep the instruments very cold and want to shield them from the sun. L2 Lagrangian point is constantly behind the Earth as seen from the sun, but that is actually irrelevant in this case. First, Earth is not big enough to completely block the sun and also, the telescope will be at a fairly large [halo orbit](_URL_0_) around the point so it will not be in the shadow of Earth at all. However, being at L2, the sun will always stay in the same direction which means that it's fairly easy for the telescope to have a sunshield of its own." ]

[ "There's a reason why we pump our arms when we sprint -- it actually assists in the motion (try running without moving your arms, and see what happens). All runners generally want to have a strong set of core muscles as well (abs/back, etc) to help give them better body control and maintain proper form when they begin to fatigue. You can still be pretty fast without having a muscular upper body, but at a highly competitive level, it tends to help more than it hurts. Flexibility is also extremely important for runners (it doesn't help to have big arms if you can't move them easily), so there is some trade off. ", "As someone who followed sprinting in the 80s, one point that I don't see represented is the influence of [Ben Johnson](_URL_0_)\n\nBen Johnson stood out in the 80s as a sprinter with a terrifically developed upper body compared to his competitors. Yes, it was later to be revealed as a product of his steroid used, but analysis of Johnson's technique showed he was using the upper body to get out of the blocks (starting position) in 0.13 seconds, over 0.05 seconds faster than any of the rest of the field. He would throw his arms up as part of his motion and get into a running stance measurably faster.\n\nEven though he was later disgraced for steroid use, Johnson did change the view most sprinters had on upper body development and from that point on, you'll see sprinters seriously working on their upper bodies. I'm not saying that it was because of Ben Johnson, but he was certainly proof that convinced everyone that you could gain an advantage with a large muscle mass upper body.", "Physiologically, being a world class sprinter tends to select those who have predominantly fast twitch muscle fibers. This, combined with good genetics means that its possible the rest of the body would be more inclined to hypertrophy under even after minor stimuli.", "Through my experiences running track during high school and some of college, it's all about balance. Regular Balance and balance of muscles. For instance the purpose of emphasizing the arm movements while running is that it almost tricks your legs in to digging deeper with eaach step. Hope this helps at all.." ]

[ "everyone with direct access to the internet has a specific number called an IP address. very few of these people have domain names, which are just words--like _URL_0_--that point to their number--the IP Address. a DNS server matches the two together.\n\nthe numbers, IPv4 address, can only go up so high, to 255.255.255.255 from 0.0.0.0 with some special numbers that can't be used. domain names can be just about anything with a certain extension, like .xxx. so these are virtually unlimited.", "There are a lot of IPv4 addresses but we've almost used all the major \"groups\"; the \"groups\" themselves will have all the addresses in them handed out relatively soon.\n\nHowever, the creation of a new TLD (top level domain) doesn't necessarily mean anything... sure, people want new .xxx names, and they might need new IP addresses for their servers, but other people are already getting internet for the first time (new IP address) and getting new domains/servers (new IP addresses).\n\nThankfully, we have IPv6 which mathematically speaking should last us a very long time. It's not fully implemented by everyone and we really should switch at some point soon, but people will probably keep using IPv4 for a long time.", "Like you're Five: when you go to your friend's house, what info do you need to give to your parents?? The address (Domain Name) because nobody would go out and remember civil lot number (IP address). So, what if the city extends with a new street in an old section? They get new street name and number, everyone his happy. But most of the time, they just cut the terrain into lot a, lot b, lot c without a new number ( you can easily run multiple websites and domain on one unique server with a static and unique IP), so, basically the city doesn't care that it has no more possible lot number, cause she just split one in the street without caring.", "Multiple domain names can point to one IP, so more domains != more IPs.", "everyone with direct access to the internet has a specific number called an IP address. very few of these people have domain names, which are just words--like _URL_0_--that point to their number--the IP Address. a DNS server matches the two together.\n\nthe numbers, IPv4 address, can only go up so high, to 255.255.255.255 from 0.0.0.0 with some special numbers that can't be used. domain names can be just about anything with a certain extension, like .xxx. so these are virtually unlimited.", "There are a lot of IPv4 addresses but we've almost used all the major \"groups\"; the \"groups\" themselves will have all the addresses in them handed out relatively soon.\n\nHowever, the creation of a new TLD (top level domain) doesn't necessarily mean anything... sure, people want new .xxx names, and they might need new IP addresses for their servers, but other people are already getting internet for the first time (new IP address) and getting new domains/servers (new IP addresses).\n\nThankfully, we have IPv6 which mathematically speaking should last us a very long time. It's not fully implemented by everyone and we really should switch at some point soon, but people will probably keep using IPv4 for a long time.", "Like you're Five: when you go to your friend's house, what info do you need to give to your parents?? The address (Domain Name) because nobody would go out and remember civil lot number (IP address). So, what if the city extends with a new street in an old section? They get new street name and number, everyone his happy. But most of the time, they just cut the terrain into lot a, lot b, lot c without a new number ( you can easily run multiple websites and domain on one unique server with a static and unique IP), so, basically the city doesn't care that it has no more possible lot number, cause she just split one in the street without caring." ]

[ "Simply said: There aren't any awkward silences.\n\nTo expand a little on that, when there is a background noise (eg. Tv, music) it makes us less nervous to talk since we feel it's more allowed than after there has been a silence. ", "I think because then only the person you're speaking to can hear you. It gives a little privacy and allows a more intimate conservation. But when it's dead quiet everyone can hear everything. That's my theory. Source, my convoluted thought process. ", "I hate how this practice has spilled over into television. Now when i watch sports highlights, i have to endure loud, awful music in the background while commentators have to shout over it. ESPN started it a few years ago and now NFL network, NHL network and MLB network all do it. WTF is going on???", "Music sets the mood. Without music the mood of the room is set by the people talking, and if it's a room full of people being awkward and uncomfortable than part of your brain (sometimes unconsciously) will tell you that you're in an uncomfortable place. Having the right music tells that part of your brain that this is a room full of people having a good time rather than people trying to get to know each other", "1. No awkward silences.\n2. Good music has physiological consequences. Think about it. People listen to music to change their mood, so when they're talking to people, the music they're playing can do the same. Calm them down. Excite them. ", "I will add that the reason we like to dance together is because there's a deep subconscious discovery thing that happens. When you and I put on music and we both hear the same thing and move in rhythm to the music together there's a greater sense that you are *together.* As in we are both human beings experiencing the same thing. There's an added level of empathy for your fellow dancers. A sense of belonging. That's how church and temple prayers work too. \n\nThere's actually tons of science they've done with infants and empathy and bouncing up and down to music vs. bouncing randomly while music is on. It's very interesting stuff. ", "I think it also gives a sense that something is going on. Have you ever just sat on ur couch with a laptop browsing or whatever and have it feel weird in the silence. You then just decide to put on the news or something on the TV. I guess there are also some actions or activities that innately feel unnatural without some other task that is running at the same time.", "Not to mention it's a natural conversation starter, it's either \"I love/hate this song\" or \" I saw this band on tour back in....\" \nor \"who the hell is playing Nickelback?\" or to quote Patrick Star, \"I don't get Jazz.\" It's a shared experience when among strangers who may have no other common starting point.", "People don't usually like being the only noise in a group. Also, I find anyway, if it's music I am familiar with and like, I am more talkative. ", "I realize this is pedantic, but it's important to note that this isn't true of all music. \n\nMusic is very polarizing, and it has the power to drive people away just as quickly. Case in point: the owner of an inner-city convenience store who cleared loiterers by piping country music to the parking lot", "One point worth mentioning is when the music is too loud to hold a conversation people will drink faster, increasing sales.", "Privacy. People don't like being overheard by the entire room and when there's nothing but you and the people and no one is talking you don't want to be the first because then everyone is listening to you. That makes it public speaking something a lot of people have a fear of.\n\nWith music your voice only travels so far and even so people can listen to the music and not you. This makes it easier for people to begin talking as their effective radius of communication is much more intimate.", "Why has this morphed into playing music so loudly at a social gathering that people can't talk without shouting and usually can't be heard?", "To add to what others have said, it's ultimately about a sense of rhythm or \"order\". Without music, the sounds around you are disjointed, conversations clashing together, random noises Breaking in, etc. When music is on, it gives the space narrative flow. You're part of a system, a rythm. That's what our brains are wired to seek out. ", "Now I am thinking having music in class can help student focus more and learn faster and at the same time make professor relaxed. ", "Tl; dr\nIt removes the awkward silences.\n\nDuring communication with someone we don't know, we find silences uncomfortable. That is one of the reason why we use fillers (\"uhmmmm\", \"eeeeeh\") mid or between sentences.\nHaving background music, makes us focusing on the music instead of the silence, making us feeling comfortable.\n\nAlso music summons up emotions and memories and gives us something to talk about too.\nThe result is actually like feeling more at ease and like as we know the person more too.", "Musician here, with comment about this same phenomenon. 99% of gigs are about getting people talking, about being ignored yet appreciated.", "There's a lot of answers here and I feel most of them aren't really answering the question well. Yes, there's the awkward silence part, but music is more than that. \n\nMusic is like audible emotions. It can move your mood in a certain direction. This is really important for social settings because it joins our moods and makes us feel in unison. Those that are not willing or able to feel the mood of the music will likely move away from the party; which further separates everyone into those that are emotionally connected and those who are not. \n\nThis is probably one of the main reasons music has been useful for humans through our evolution. It's an extension of our emotional/social selves and helps us to join together, bond, and unify our emotions.", "So as social creatures, humans find discomfort in being the oddball and sticking out. It helps create cohesive social units. People are uncomfortable and awkward in silence because if they are the one to start conversation they either stick out and everyone can hear, or they have to be super sneaky quiet which looks suspicious. Music and other background noise creates an auditory security blanket, where the individual conversations can be drowned out and providing a common social conversational topic starting point.", "Personal theory is that singing releases endorphins. Adding background noise to an environment forces everyone to speak louder, which simulates that.", "“A moderate level of noise enhances creativity compared to both low and high levels of noise. Moderate background noise induces distraction which encourages individuals to think at a higher, abstract level, and consequently exhibit higher creativity.”\n\nSource: Exploring the Effects of Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition\n\n[Rainy Cafe](_URL_0_)", "Not a scientist but as the official party thrower of my high school years I think I'm qualified to put in my two cents. I think it has to do with a few things. First if the music is loud enough it can help you feel more comfortable about talking because you won't be overheard by everyone, think about how awkward it is when the music stops and you're still talking about how hot that chick you've been staring at all night is. Anther reason is that music tends to put people in a specific mood, so you mostly hear happy music at social events, the booze helps with that too. One last reason I can think of is that it can helps ease the awkwardness of the silent moments of conversion, plus it helps to keep you from over thinking what to say next if you're just enjoying the music. All these things together help make it a more lively event that allows people to be more open and social. \n\nBonus. Dimming the lights helps to, people do crazier things if they don't feel like they have a spotlight on them.", "(obligatory \"I'm not an expert, but...\")\nIt might have something to do with the fact that from the moment our ears developed in our mother's womb, we've never experienced true silence. Before birth you heard the constant \"shush\" of her blood, the whoosh of her breathing, and the thump of her heartbeat- after you're born, white noise and music are still calming and help you sleep longer and more peacefully. Raindrops, waves, the wind, and many other natural sounds also help produce this effect. We even see it in those people that can't seem to sleep without a fan on- for some it might be temperature, but for others even just the noise of a fan is comforting. \nHowever, the sounds of the city/public places can get very stressful (sirens in the distance, cars rushing by, electronic (unnatural) sounds, and the constant babble of strangers (i.e. potential threats)) and can set a person on edge, even unconsciously. It can add a tense undertone to a situation, and cause us to retreat into 'social solitude', which could be one of our auto-responses to stress (shutting everyone and everything out in order to promote inner comfort). Playing music in the background would give your ears something soothing to fall back on, so that they had something to focus on other than the stressful sounds of society, putting you more at ease and thereby making conversation and interactions with others in general an easier affair.", "Even if l there is no one talking there is still sound so no awkward silence and no one feels obligated to forcefully fill the void.", "For me it doesn't, but that's because 100% of the time the music is terrible and only serves as an irritant.", "Personally i would say it stops people lugging in! Get to chat with the music as background noise to stop people listening in. It means people split off into groups of people they want to speak to, covered by the music. Its like a safety blanket.", "Maybe simple because when there's only silence, whenever you start talking, you feel like everyone is listening to what you're saying and so you feel some pressure. When there's music, you feel like what you're about to say isn't going to be the instant focus of everybody in the room", "I would say because people can talk at a normal level without feeling awkward or like people are listening in on their conversations", "Its like having a toddler around. It provides a universal topic for conversation and more importantly a common barrier between people to center their attention on.\n\nMusic in particular can strike many emotions in people, and depending on the choice of artist and song can and does create the whole mood and atmosphere of an event.\n\nAs an example an introverted person who is usually shy or just reluctant to engage in conversation or approach even a small group of people may get a temporary moment of happiness when a song comes on they recognize or like. This happiness leads to excitement which can lead to courage. If they see somebody else who also enjoys the song, they won't see them as so much of a threat and would be more willing to put themselves out there.", "I always figured its because people like to dominate and talk over one another... their ego won't allow some other \"voice\" they can easily feel superior to by pretending they aren't there and speaking their own opinion over them.\n\nIt might also have a more subtle reason that when voices are being heard (song, tv, movie) that the \"conversation\" has already started, but that its not REALLY a conversation, its more just noise. Sorta like how its easier to have a conversation with someone when you're in a crowded mall and everyone is talking to each other. Its a sort of busy white noise that tells our monkey brains \"now its socially acceptable to make sound with our mouths\" In contrast to, in silent moments, at home and such, i dunno people don't always have to talk. There's time in the day to talk and time in the day to be silent. People like both. In a socially new situation, people kinda need the \"ok, you can talk now\" of what I said above.", "Because when the talking fizzles out it isn't silent because you know what's Awkward? Silence. ", "As a DJ and Lyft driver, I have a theory of why music eases awkwardness and encourages conversation. \n\nMost importantly, it breaks the \"surface tension\" we perceive when words are spoken over silence. It prevents one's words from existing naked, in a vacuum, standing by themselves. Instead, the words flow along with the music, like a boat on a stream. \n\nAlso, it sets the tempo and emotional ambiance of the scene. It informs the listener of what cadence to use or even what topics to bring up. \n\nAlso once I heard that Love is not two people looking at each-other, but looking in the same direction- likewise, as others have said, it gives the people a common experience to share rather than a game to play. ", "I AM the person that HAS to have music on at gatherings. I'm known for turning on streaming tunes on my phone in my pocket at a simple backyard barbecue. Music isn't just white noise and interruption of annoying guests, its soulful, bliss and comfort of what you enjoy. Without music , life is useless in my opinion. From the moment I wake until I'm ready to sleep, some sort of tune is on. It creates comfortable atmospheres for most anyone. It's a subject to talk about. You can play games or song along to it. Some people simply just love a great beat to bob back and forth to. We are all different but we all enjoy music in one way or another. ", "For clubs, if there's loud enough music other people can't eaves drop on you and you can't hear other people. You can only talk to people close to you. For someone with mild social anxiety, being able to have a private conversation in public is a nice feeling. Once there's multiple conversations going on, add some alcohol, and you have an official good vibe party", "Because music, and more specifically rhythm, fires up your neurons and organizes them into consistent paths that help the brain function. \n\nHuman thought is totally chaotic and abstract. So when we are in our normal 'zoned out' state of mind, our neurons are firing in all different directions that cause confusion and anxiety and things of that nature. \n\nBut when those neurons find a path and a pattern to follow, it clears your mind. This is what happens when an idea clicks in your head, or when you are achieving something that you can do well on a high level (such as playing a sport or having a good conversation). \n\nRhythm is all based on patterns. The main reason we enjoy music in the first place is because our brains are pleased by these patterns; they're like a mind game. \n\nWhen music is playing in the background, your brain is subconsciously feeding off of the patterns of the song. It frees your brain from having to deal with millions more neurons trying to find a path. \n\nBasically, music frees your brain from having to do a lot more work. And it organizes the clutter into something more easy to understand. ", "This goes along with my discomfort in Target stores--they don't play any background music and it feels...wrong. It does have the nice effect of making me hurry rather than browse around, so I suppose that's a positive side-effect to being sort of creeped out while you're looking for cheap-ish clothes and movies. ", "I once wrote a sociology paper related to this topic. Music is often used by businesses to invite certain people and exclude others. Certain people feel more comfortable and relaxed when surrounded by unobtrusive classical music, perhaps played inside a high-end bistro. Others feel at home in a shop blaring EDM.\n\nSo it falls to the consumer to self-select. If a coffee shop consistently plays '60s folk music, a certain clientele will end up frequenting the place, further cementing the coffee shop's identity. But other potential customers may never return to that same coffee shop because they find that music uninteresting or off-putting. \n\nThis form of musical manipulation is used a lot in shopping malls--think of all the stores like Pac Sun that play skater punk or whatever else allegedly caters to their desired customers. Banana Republic does the same with adult contemporary. You can hear the shop before you even see it, and think \"This place is for me/is not for me.\" If your grandparent were walking right next to you when you passed one of these shops, they'd probably hear the music and immediately recognize that the shop has nothing to offer them, whether in terms of merchandise or social atmosphere. \n\nedit--spelling", "I thought music was there to cover up the awkward pauses...and so others can't hear the awkward conversation you were having.", "Several reasons. It covers awkward silences which may stop conversations dead and makes it sound to you like the conversation is continuing even if it's not. (Top tip if you're on a date or with someone one on one you don't know that we'll, put some back music on as it will ease the flow of conversation and mask any awkwardness. Plus it may give you a go to topic to talk about if you're stuck as you can at least discuss the music.) \n\nIt can set the theme or tone of an evening, get every pumped up for copious drinking and dancing or set the mood for a quiet DnD night. \n\nCommon interests spark dancing and conversation. This is best recognised at events like weddings where there's a DJ. Watch how the age and groupings of people change on the dancefloor depending on the song choice. A good DJ will recognise the patterns and play crowd pleasers. Whole generations are marked by their own decade and choice of music. \n\nSome studies have shown that people who sing a song together end up with synced up heartbeats and lower blood pressures. Potentially explains the \"holy\" feeling you get as part of church choirs and the like. Ever been in a room full of people singing the same song? It can be awesome inspiring (or creepy, depending on your take on synchronicity.)\n\nLots of reasons. ", "It's the same as kids talking on a school bus then stopping when the bus stops, the louder background levels induce social vehaviors for some reason. We play 200 shows per year so i can attest to loud + alcohol. Hahahaha _URL_0_ ", "Because it provides context. Whether good or bad, people have a natural emotional reaction to music they hear based on their own personal experience, but usually people will have a somewhat similar experience based on rhythm and tempo. Music provides a common emotional baseline for people contextually from which they can draw a mutual experience from and thus \"relate\" to one another." ]

[ "Because the room you’re in is small - the mirror doubles (ish) your distance from the chart. ", "Every doctor’s office I’ve ever been to never used a mirror or anything, we just looked at it straight on. " ]

[ "The phrase \"stronger immune system\" is meaningless. The \"immune system\" isn't one thing; it's a whole bunch of vaguely-related things all lumped into one because humans like definitions. That means that you can lose part of your \"immune system\", and have other parts unaffected, or increased, or decreased.\n\nThere is extremely complicated cross-talk between the different components of the immune system, just as there is complicated cross-talk because the \"immune system\" and the \"nervous system\", the \"digestive system\", and the \"circulatory system\", so it's difficult to make simple predictions as to what happens to one part when another part changes. For example, some forms of allergy seem to be [more common in HIV patients](_URL_0_), while others seem to be unchanged. \n", "I think this is a very interesting question (ignoring over-simplification of the immune system). One fact hasn't been addressed here. If we are going to frame immune responses in terms of \"strength\" and \"weakness\", we must first bear in mind that our immune systems have both \"reactive\" and \"regulatory\" components. Most of these answers ignore the critical role the immune system has in turning off inflammatory reactions. Saying that someone with allergies has a stronger immune system is true in a very narrow sense, but ignores the fact that the opposite response which prevents allergies is also immune-mediated. The truth is that a portion of the immune system has an increased reaction to specific antigen, which overwhelms the regulatory immune response provided by another set of immune cells. In a sense, the allergic reaction can be a case of both \"stronger\" and \"weaker\" immune reactions, depending on which cell type you focus on. The key is to remember that we can't make any generalizations on a \"system\" level. ", "Here is a slightly different take on why your question is hard to answer the way you asked it.\n\nApplying terms like stronger, believing, mistakenly, harmful, etc. to the immune system is anthropomorphism. The immune system reacts to things. Whether the response is to a pathogen, or whether it is protective is not a \"mistake\".\n\nSo, allergic reactions are thought to be a normal response to pathogens like parasites. In some cases allergens are close enough to pathogens or encountered in a context with a pathogen, and cause an immune response. This response might actually be beneficial, since that might mean a more sensitive response to parasites, at the expense of allergies to pollen.\n\n\"Stronger\" in this context is too broad. Stronger meaning more antibodies? More T-cells? Better neutrophils releasing more bacterial killing factors? This is one reason when a supplement says \"strengthens the immune system\" don't waste your money.\n\nPeople with AIDs still experience allergies, they have B-cells and make the antibodies needed for allergies. The response may be low, but it can also be overblown because they have lost some of the regulatory T-cells to control the response. People who get chemotherapy to wipe out their bone marrow and immune system rarely have allergic reactions until their transplant begins to work. They still have circulating antibodies they made before losing their immune system, so they might have a reaction early on to something they were already allergic to, but for the most part they don't have allergies again until much later.", "So no one has so far mentioned the so-called \"hygiene hypothesis\", that lack of early childhood exposure to certain microbes results in the immune system training improperly, leading to allergies and other inflammatory diseases. Worth a read.\n\n_URL_0_" ]

[ "I should preface this with \"I am not an expert\".\n\nIt's possible, but keep in mind that evolution doesn't tend toward intelligence or any other trait. Evolution tends towards reproducing and any traits which help with that are selected for.\n\nI personally think that it was unlikely that we would have evolved. What I mean by this is that the time period between coming down from the trees and becoming smart was a very dangerous time for us. Of the 30 or more hominid species to have existed, only 1 remains. Furthermore, at some point around 50k-200k years ago we went through a bottle neck. Meaning that there was only about 100k of use on this planet. We could have easily died out then.\n\nAnyways, I would say that another animal would have to evolve the ability to have a reasonably fine ability to manipulate the environment (such as hands), and be able to survive till their brains got large enough for them to create tools and inventions to secure their survival.", "Even if it takes millions of years I was thinking of something like this:\n1) Rats face certain threat\n2) The only rats surviving are the ones able to fight back that threat, the weaker rats are eliminated\n3) A new threat appears, even more advanced\n4) repeat step 2\n5) With time, new threats appear, which are not just physical threats but they require the use of some simple logic thinking.\n6) Step 2 again\n\n", " > thousands of years\n\nmillions, really. But yeah, why not?", "[NdGT talking about this](_URL_0_)", " > If humans don't disappear from earth, could we be talking about more than one \"smart\" species on earth in thousands of years?\n\nIt's possible but highly unlikely. Humans probably have the broadest ecological niche on the planet and are quite possibly one of the greatest examples of a generalist species. In an ecosystem where we are already present, I simply don't see a way for such a species to come about. If we aren't altering the habitat to suit our needs, we are either destroying it by either accidental or purposeful introduction of an invasive species, or fighting to preserve it and keep the structure of the natural ecosystems stable. Regardless of which we are talking about, the point is that we are creating conditions that select for both our continued existence, and for other organisms that won't threaten our continued existence; another \"smart\" species would be competing with humans. Granted, it's possible that a species could develop and out-compete us, or at the very least narrow our niche, but when we factor in things like technology and the advantage it gives us, it's highly unlikely and might as well be impossible. The only way I could really see another \"smart\" species developing on this planet would be for our species to go extinct.\n", "I really discourage language like \"evolve by necessity\". There is no \"goal\" in evolution. It happens, and when it works out we retroactively attribute a purpose to said evolution.", "We did not evolve from apes, apes and we evolved from a common ancestor. But, otherwise, yes, it should be possible for some other sentient creatures to evolve.\r\n\r\n > what tells us that some of the current animals that we know cannot have a similar evolutionary timeline?\r\n\r\nThere is no \"evolutionary timeline.\" Evolution is NOT a process of improvement. It does not result in progress, only change. If given infinite time, some species would evolve to sentience while others would devolve or go extinct. This is an important concept to understand, as failure to appreciate it can lead to intellectual death sentences like eugenics.\r\n\r\n > As far as I understand, they evolve by necessity.\r\n\r\nNo, that's not the case. Evolution is not intentional, and it's not guaranteed. In the case of rats, the chances they would evolve to be smart to compensate for their weakness is balanced with the chance they would go extinct, or evolve so that they are both weak and stupid and try to out-reproduce other creatures. There is no guarantee of progress, or even any reason to expect progress as the result of the evolutionary process. \r\n\r\nThe problem with predicting the future of evolving systems is that we are inside one. Can another intelligent species evolve? If chimps were slightly smarter, would we enslave them? History suggests yes, we would. It also suggests that we would destroy them if they ever even came remotely close to being able to replace us in any capacity at all, even if that is as slave labor.", "Necessity doesn't necessarily tend towards intelligence. Also, there is not much in nature that is purely advantageous with no drawbacks. White muscle can't have myoglobin for aerobic exercise; the myoglobin in red muscle excludes the muscle itself, and can't be as strong as white muscle. Muscle itself also requires upkeep. Brains, flight, and \"warm-bloodedness\", all require a lot of energy.\n\nHell, with what criteria would we mark human-like intelligence in animals anyways? Is it communication, tools, creative problem solving, manipulation of environment, what? \n\nThere's also competitive exclusion to keep in mind. Two animals can't occupy the same niche in the same location for long; one will be simply better than the other in that niche, and the other will be excluded from it. A terrestrial human-like intelligence is less likely to evolve as long as humans are still around. \n\nBut given enough time, who knows? " ]

[ "[Although people are working on it](_URL_0_), producing cellulase on the scale you're describing, to feed that many people that much food, isn't more efficient than just growing edible crops in the first place. Also, your assertion that there's plenty of grasses to eat in the places where people are starving, I'm not sure is true: the places that need food are generally experiencing drought so those native grasses are often not growing enough to provide enough edible material even when processed. Heck, most 'grains' are essentially a grass, if they could grow grains instead of native grasses, they would.", "People aren't starving from lack of calories anymore.\n\nThey are dying from malnutrition: lack of vitamins and minerals.\n\nProducing tons of cheap sugar won't help.", "Cellulases can break down cellulose from wood or grass into sugars. However, wood (and grass) consist of more than just cellulose. Untreated wood also contains other compounds (e.g. 'oily' lignin) that reduce the activity of your cellulase. Cellulases work best with pulp (the raw material for paper made by grinding and 'cooking' wood). However, pulp is more expensive than sugar. Therefore there is currently no economic incentive to convert cellulose into sugars.\n\nHowever, there are [processes up and running](_URL_1_) that produce ethanol (biofuel) from straw using cellulases. Furthermore, carbs are not the main issue in malnutrition. Vitamins and proteins are more important. Interestingly, proteins can be produced from industrial waste streams (for example from diluted methanol, [single cell protein](_URL_0_))\n" ]

[ "Subjectivity is opinion, and Objectivity is fact.", "Something objective is universally true. Something subjective is only necessarily true to someone who shares your perspective.\n\nNoteworthy: There are no known objective facts because we will always occupy a particular perspective. Instead, there are only varying degrees of subjectivity." ]

[ "Modern devices, including Google Glasses, are essentially computers. They are built around specific hardware, and have some mostly-useful software included in them - but other than that, they're not much different to your home computer.\n\nThat means that, like your home computer, they are capable of doing lots and lots of things, if only you could put the appropriate software on there.\n\nThe restrictions which jailbreaking gets around (certainly on iPhones, which is what I'm most familiar with) generally prevent you from installing software that isn't \"approved\".\n\nI haven't been following Google Glasses all that closely. But it's built on Android, which means that it's much easier to install software, without it needing to be approved, than it is on the iPhone. But there are still some things which the operating system won't allow the software to do, and the recent jailbreaking attempts to (or maybe succeeds in, I'm not sure) get around these. One example, I think, is the ability to record video without turning on a little red light on the front of the glasses.", "Sometimes, it is for security reasons. One example is bootloader locking. A bootloader is a program that runs when you turn on a computer or other device that then loads the main operating system. Most companiesdo not provide access to the bootloader by default, because it is a security risk for a novice user. That \"Music Sync\" program you downloaded might actually contain a virus that overwrites the bootloader on a device you plug it, for example. However, an advanced user can unlcok the bootloader and install another operating system on their device.\n\nOther times, it is for economic reasons. Apple doesn't want you buying apps anywhere except their store, so they prevent you from loading non-approved apps onto an iPhone. Verizon has been paid millions of dollars by the NFL if they install an NFL app on everyone's phones, and they don't want you to just uninstall it.\n\nLastly, it might be a feature that isn't ready yet. If they allowed people to access the incomplete version, they would not be impressed and think the product was bad.", "Say you have a car, and you don't trust the person driving it to be able to maintain it properly. What you can do is put a big lock on the hood of the car. The driver can drive the car, but they can't modify it in any way. **Everything under the hood is still required for the car to function properly.** It would be harder to remove all the stuff under the hood than it would be to simply lock everything away from the driver of the car. If the driver was really determined, maybe they could go visit a mechanic to see if they could somehow open the hood of the car without damaging the car. The mechanic may be able to find a flaw in the lock using his expertise. Maybe the mechanic could even teach the driver how to do it so he could share this knowledge with his friends, and suddenly everyone can open the locked hood of their car without damaging it. Now everyone is free to modify their car any way they want.\n\nWhy didn't the person locking the hood simply remove everything under the hood? Again, because everything under the hood was required for the vehicle to function properly. The only thing they could do was lock it away.", "One of the big reasons is warranties and customer support. With the iPhone, app makers are not allowed to change certain settings using apps (like the ringer or alarms) because doing so could produce a bug that would make basic, important features (again, like the ringer) not work. This would make people mad, they would phone Apple, and Apple would be responsible for the problem, and it would lead to bad press for the phone. There's also security issues. If a third part app has a bug or spyware that gives away private information, people will blame Apple. A jailbroke phone can access apps which do these banned things, but if Apple finds out you did that, they void the warranty. " ]

[ "I am not good at it but I do it enough that I know a few tricks.\n\nIf you want to do something like add 86 and 37, you know that 86 is 14 less than 100, so call that 100 and take 14 off the 37, so this is 123 perhaps a little easier than carrying in your head.\n\nI don't know any real addition tricks that aren't some variation of this.\n\nThere are lots of tricks when multiplying. To do 10's you add a zero, obviously. To do 20's you double and add a zero. 5's is add a zero and halve. 18 you can do 20 and subtract 10%, like 18 x 33 is 660 - 66 = 594. There are lots of these.\n", "It's okay. Doing math in your head is never a good thing anyways. Once you get to higher math, such as calculus, doing derivatives and integrals in your head will be so much slower than just writing it on a piece of paper. \n\nThere is no easy way to do math in your head, you are either born with a very large memory buffer, or you have to memorize certain things. ", "I am not good at it but I do it enough that I know a few tricks.\n\nIf you want to do something like add 86 and 37, you know that 86 is 14 less than 100, so call that 100 and take 14 off the 37, so this is 123 perhaps a little easier than carrying in your head.\n\nI don't know any real addition tricks that aren't some variation of this.\n\nThere are lots of tricks when multiplying. To do 10's you add a zero, obviously. To do 20's you double and add a zero. 5's is add a zero and halve. 18 you can do 20 and subtract 10%, like 18 x 33 is 660 - 66 = 594. There are lots of these.\n", "I break everything down into smaller sums. Say 162\\*7. Times 7 is tricky, but \\*5 is easier, I can times by ten (add another nought) and divide by two. So if I can work out 162\\*5, I just need to add another 162 twice. \n\nIn other words, turn a sum you can't do into one you know you can do.\n\nAs for the quickly part, I guess you just need to practice a lot.", "It's okay. Doing math in your head is never a good thing anyways. Once you get to higher math, such as calculus, doing derivatives and integrals in your head will be so much slower than just writing it on a piece of paper. \n\nThere is no easy way to do math in your head, you are either born with a very large memory buffer, or you have to memorize certain things. " ]

[ "I don't know the definitive answer to this question, but if I were to start looking for one, I'd have these things in mind...\n\n\nA. There needs to be an evolutionary reason for a species to do so. IE a species would have to be living around a radioactive material for millions of years in order to develop the resistance. Though the radiation would kill them long before they developed any reasonable resistance.\n\n\nB. Higher level radiations aren't quite the same beast as something as low as the visual range. Visual light kind of just nudges the sensing cells around when it strikes the eye. The force due to the fields of the waves are relatively low. UV light is dangerous because it is much more energetic. A gamma photon hitting a cell is like a cannon ball firing at a sheet of paper. When it hits other particles, the force is catastrophic.\n\nJust for comparison, the energy of a visual light photon is to a gamma photon as the mass of the earth is to the sun. \n\nDeveloping the organ to sense a gamma photon would being like developing a baseball mitt to catch a rocket. ", "Some species of shrimp can detect ionizing radiation:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nand rats can smell it:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHumans can smell/taste ionizing radiation too, just the dose levels are such that it is not very useful for survival. Basically, ionizing radiation breaks down chemical compounds (radiolysis), and the products of radiolysis can be tasted or smelled, or otherwise detected. It's only a matter of dose. Ultimately, any animal can respond to radiation by dying, and many can sense it at levels somewhat below that.", "Spiderwort's flowers change color when ionizing radiation is present. \n\n_URL_0_" ]

[ "Imagine i have bunch of dirt clumps sitting on the ground of various sizes. If I step on them, which ones are the first ones to get get broken down into smaller size clumps? The larger ones because they’ll make contact with my foot first. Conversely the smallest grains of dirt may never feel the force of my foot. Over time, repeating this process will create very small bits of dirt of uniform size", "In a desert, sand is created by wind picking up the smallest rocks (sand) and whipping them at rocks that are too large to get moved by the wind until the force of the wind–carried sand blasts away tiny chips of the rock. This will keep happening to the chips until the rock is chipped into pieces small enough to get picked up by the wind rather than blasted by it. " ]

[ "For most of the business I've worked for, the registers wouldn't have any ten dollar bills in them at the start of the day. Still not quite certain why, but it was just always how it was. So, quite often, it wasn't that we were hoarding all the ten dollar bills. It's just that there were none to be given at all. ", "I worked cash control, and at the store that I was at, 10 dollar bills were always losers. By this, I mean that if we started the day with $10000 in 10's, we'd end the day with $7000 in 10's. Every few days we'd have to buy a couple straps from our bank and have them delivered. \n\nWe never discouraged our cashiers from giving out 10's, but I could see where a smaller business would run out pretty fast, especially if they can't keep a lot of cash on site for safety reasons. If you've only got 50 10's in the safe, then you don't really want to give them all out too fast, because getting more might be a pain in the ass.", "$10s are versatile, and the cashier doesn't get very many of them.\n\nPeople frequently pay with $20 bills for small purchases, which can quickly deplete $5 bills in the absence of $10s. Depletion of $5s is a good way to start running through huge stacks of $1s, and have upset customers who don't like a large number of small bills. So hoarding $10s and only using them to \"protect the fives\" is somewhat necessary for stores that don't get a large enough volume of cash coming through to reliably replenish the fives or pretty much anywhere in the morning.\n\nAt a typical medium to high volume convenience store, people pay with $20 for small purchases like coffee and a breakfast sandwich *all the time* in the morning, then the lunch rush gives more 5s and 10s than in the morning. The effect is more pronounced on Monday and Tuesday than later in the week. I worked at one for 7 years and this pattern almost always holds! I guess people carry bigger bills from payday/weekends and then collect smaller ones from change to use later.\n\n10s also, in a pinch, can be used as change for larger bills (50s and 100s) without giving the customer a ton of bills back. But mostly stores hang onto them when they can so they can slow down how fast they blow through 5s, which can fly away very, very quickly, especially on a busy morning shift. At least that's how it was where I worked. Holding 10s until you really need them can help avoid weird change situations later.", "In the service industry where there is tipping, the server might give you a 5 and five 1's to make sure you have the correct change to leave the tip. " ]

[ "Because the name translates to Joshua in English. Edit: And we differentiate the Son of God by using Jesus, (the Greek name for Joshua). ", "Americans do name their sons Jesus, if they are in hispanic families.", "To flesh out and correct a couple of comments here:\n\nRe: Jesus/Joshua. The New Testament was written originally in Greek, and Jesus is the the English spelling of the Greek word. It is equivalent to the Hebrew name Joshua (hence why the Old Testament characters are called Joshua).\n\nThe name Jesus is associated uniquely with Jesus Christ (because there aren't any others mentioned in the New Testament).\n\nThe difference between white and latin american cultures I suspect may be a protestant/catholic divide. The latin american/hispanic cultures are predominantly catholic-rooted and name their children Jesus in much the way other religions do. Due to the Reformation, much of northern Europe (white) became protestant. For protestants, the concern is that naming your child Jesus is a bit like calling your son 'God' (note that you only get Muslim kids called Mohammed, not Allah) - it could be considered blasphemous, and that has become embedded in the culture - so now for an English family to name their child Jesus would come with a bunch of connotations.\n\nEdit: tl;dr: Protestant-background Americans don't call their kids Jesus because it could be considered blasphemous. Latin cultures have a Catholic background and therefore do, similar to other faiths." ]

[ "It could easily enough be proven by finding all other instances of intelligent life in the universe and declaring that they developed after we did.\n\nJoking aside though, that is a very interesting question, and a fun one to think about. I look forward to hearing an answer to this question.", "I think that, given an infinite universe, the absence of intelligent life is a statistical impossibility.\n\nThe sheer range of evolutionary pressures that led to homo sapiens is nigh innumerable and of such chaotic nature, that I believe it's very possible a second \"roll of the dice\" would throw the date of our birth off by thousands, if not millions of years.\n\nIt's just that the universe is really, really huge, and the distances are really, really far. If you pointed the strongest radio signal we could muster here on earth in every possible direction, there would still be giant holes just at the edge of the solar system.\n\nConditions are perfect for the universe to be teeming with intelligent life, and for us to be completely oblivious to the fact.", "Very similar to time travel. If time travel is possible, then where are all the time travelers?", "Wouldn't the whole 'first' or 'last' civilization to develop depend solely on the observers viewpoint?", "In addition to your possibly correct statement, there would need to be considerable coincidence in time frames for civilizations to meet. In other words, if it takes 10k years to develop interstellar space flight, in order to meet another civilization, they would have had to exist in a form compatible with modern communications to be detected during the search time. For example, our \"search time\" has been roughly about 100 years (give or take), thus within the 13 billion years the universe has been around in order to detect another civilization, they would have to be as evolved, or nearly as evolved, in technology almost at the exact same time as us. Being as how the production of life in the universe is such a highly improbable event, or maybe not (no frame of reference), it may be very unlikely that we encounter another life form. Another example, think back 50k years ago, humans existed, but to some alien we looked just like apes running around with a bunch of other animals. They may have come, having had lived and developed for 10's of 1000's of years, saw \"us\", and thought nothing of it. Coinciding time frames are usually never considered in this discussion. Just saying.", "Layman here. It's always seemed strange to me that we look skyward for life with such human expectations. We're governed by the rhythms that are particular to our world, and all of our evolutionary pressures have had this at their foundation as well - the endless heartbeat of day and night, the eventual emergence of seasons, the push and pull of the tides.\n\nWe've evolved into what we think of as a human timeframe - our 24 hour days define much of what we do, our 70+ year lifespan does exactly the same. Interstellar distances seem impossibly far to beings such as us who sense and process the world in the ways that we do - a journey of a few thousand years is utterly incomprehensible to us, akin to a fruit fly deciding to start flying around the earth.\n\nWe're so used to experiencing the world within our own particular timeframe, and it seems unlikely to me that any other nearby intelligent lifeform would necessarily live their lives similarly. Perhaps they live for three of our weeks, experiencing entire alien lifetimes of experience within that time. Or perhaps they live for many tens of thousands of years, at home somewhere in a stable orbit around a cold sun.\n\nPerhaps if we analyze all the SETI data we've been collecting over the past 30 years, patterns will emerge that we haven't been looking for on our human scales of time. Doesn't seem strange to me that we haven't yet found evidence of alien civilisations though. We're looking with our earthbound preconceptions of what life is and how it communicates. Why should it be similar?", "No. \nLook at every process required for our sun to form and subsequently our planet and everything that makes life here possible. It could have all happened in a much earlier stellar generation - there is nothing special about this time.", "I don't believe it's anywhere close to an equal probability for us to be the first intelligent life forms vs not the first. Planets like Earth are very common. The materials that make up Earth are extremely common in the Universe. This is called the [Mediocrity principle](_URL_0_) and with it, it's logical to assume that life MUST have started somewhere before us, because there's a plethora of older earth like planets out there.\n\nHowever, I've been trying to get the [same theory](_URL_1_) expanded in the Fermi Paradox wiki, but it's been slow. Without someone writing a book about it, it's hard to find reliable sources talking about it.\n\nI do believe it *might* be possible (though not probable). Afterall, life had to start somewhere first...why couldn't it be here?", "I like to think about how before people travelled the earth people didn't know for certain about other civilisations on the same planet. Soon we'll be able to travel into space efficiently and frequently so who knows what we'll find. \n\nWhether we find something or not remains to be seen. The fact we even made it into space is a reason to be proud of ourselves. Pity about war and hunger though. (nb. I am not making a correlation between the two). ", "I have heard this mentioned before by Michio Kaku, that not only may we not be in the right space to find others, but we may not be in the right time to intersect others, which includes other intelligent civilizations blowing themselves up or running out of resources a billion years ago.", "I've always wondered why people assume other life out there would be so *similar* to human life. Ignoring silly cartoons of \"Martians,\" what makes us think that another galaxy's life would fit into our [characteristics of what makes life \"life\"](_URL_0_)?\n\nWhy, for instance, would another galaxy's life have to be comprised of cells?\n\nWould they have the same senses we do?", "Life has been here for roughly 3.8-4 billion years. In that time, we've evolved. To an alien observer with our level of technology on a planet orbiting alpha centauri a, we would be undetectable. Who is to say that other life may simply have not yet evolved to the point of an inter-steller presence, akin to how we have?", "Your idea could be correct, but its highly improbable (to assume intelligent life is common but we are just very very special for being in the first 0.0000001%) and seems implausible to me. If say we are under 1000 years from interstellar travel as a byproduct of billion years of evolution; its absurd to think that there are many others by that we are at the very front of the pack. E.g., it seems absurd to assume that the Cambrian explosion that was 530 million years ago couldn't have possibly been 530,001,000 years ago instead. Even if we were say in the first 0.01% of civilizations; with billions of stars in the galaxy they'd be millions ahead of us if it was particularly common. Hell; there's no fundamental reason that we had to have the dark ages/crusades. One could easily imagine that if the Greeks decided to do experiments and have the Renaissance rather than just philosophize that there could have been electricity, radio, and television ~2000 years ago.\n\nSolutions proposing that distant interstellar travel isn't scientifically feasible; or that civilizations are quite rare in space and/or time (in time meaning they self-destruct from war/over consumption/resource depletion).", "I like to think that on the journey of exploration that comes with intelligence, every species inadvertently produce something so unpredictably catastrophic that it annihilated them. Like a really big super LHC.", "The best book I've read on this subject is [Stephen Webb's *If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens... Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life*](_URL_0_).\n\nThe book discusses your proposition as well as many others. It gave me a much greater appreciation of the large number of conditions that may actually be necessary for intelligent life to evolve. \n\nAt the end of the day, I think the answer to the question as to why we don't see any ETs is that it takes a great many coincidental conditions for life to evolve far enough while constantly struggling against a great many factors that can bring about its demise. ", "I think you're violating Occam's razor. By that I am not saying it isn't possible we are one of the first... but it is like saying we are the center of the universe. It wasn't that it was impossible that it could have been true, just highly unlikely. You start traveling down an erroneous path when you start with an assumption that we're special in some way. You should start with an assumption that we're not special to answer your question of why we have not received contact.", "I've been watching a shit ton of Sagan Series lately and this is a topic I think about on almost a daily basis. I love the perspective you have here - it's something I haven't considered.\n\nI don't think we need to think of a life-supporting-planet or civilization of having developed as much as a billion years before ours. Consider how long our civilization has been in existence and how much technological achievement we've seen in the past 100 years. ONE HUNDRED YEARS! Compare that civilization's history - compared to earth's - compared to the universe. I strongly believe that any civilization that is as little as 3000 years ahead of us (to give an extremely safe estimate) would have mastered interstellar travel and communication - if it is possible.\n\nOther factors / risks to consider: \n\n* Have these civilizations destroyed themselves?\n* Consider what a remote place in the Universe we inhabit\n* Rate of progress for a planet/civilization (I see no reason why evolution should take significantly longer or shorter than it was for planet Earth but it might)\n* Limitations on how old a civilization can get before shit gets too real on their planet and evolution has to \"start over\" (think Ice Age type cycles)\n* There's other stuff like major catastrophes that could wipe them out but idk if that's worth considering (how can we possibly estimate those chances?)\n\nOne last point. Not only have we been making exceptional technological progress, but also social and empathetic progress in the last 100 years. Any civilization that reaches space will have dealt with gigantic social issues that we are plagued with (nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, preserving a livable climate on their home). It is all tied together though. Only because of the internet and other technologies connecting the entire earth are we starting to take the steps necessary to achieve this. **Where I'm going with this:** Any civilization we come across that is significantly ahead of us technologically, is that much ahead of us empathetically. I don't think we need to worry about being eaten or fearing these visitors.\n\nThen again I might be young and naive. It might turn out that is truly is the nature of life to be bloodthirsty, power hungry, and ambitious. Competition, after all, is why your genes have lasted into this generation.\n\n**TL;DR** Even if we can deduce that we are \"necessarily one of the first civilizations in the universe\", the estimation would still be +/- a few hundred thousand or even a million years. That is more than enough time for a civilization to achieve the things we dream of.\n\n*Rephrased - Though an interesting concept, the inaccuracy in the estimation voids asking the question to begin with.*", "Yeah my thoughts run the same as your own on this topic, and Jared Diamond writes about it in The Third Chimpanzee. Basically: Why assume that life should develop technology? In 3.5 billion years of life we've just now started playing with it, and only a minority of us could actually explain to you how to build a radio transmitter. That's not exactly a shining inevitable Hegelian drive towards Star Trek.\n\nIt seems like in order to have tech we had to have cities with specialized professions, and to have that we had to have big social brains, and to have that we had to have first large social groups, and second the need for behavioral flexibility. I'll find a cite later if somebody wants it, but suffice it for now to say that we see encephalization occur in protohumans simultaneous with a period of climatological uncertainty in the Great Rift Valley from which we sprang. And level of behavioral sophistication is pretty directly correlated to brain size which is correlated to body size- I can get a cite for that later, it's physical anthropology.\n\nSo you need life, then big life, then big social life, then big social life demanding behavioral flexibility, then big social life demanding behavioral flexibility organizing in large numbers, then then big social life demanding behavioral flexibility organizing in large numbers who striate into specialized professions, then then big social life demanding behavioral flexibility organizing in large numbers who striate into specialized professions and value time spent producing \"pure knowledge,\" then then they have to do that for a few hundred years before they're even sending out radio waves, much less Star Trekking around.\n\nFermi Paradox always seemed, to me, to skip a lot of steps. I'll accept that the universe is full of \"life\" where \"life\" includes viruses, prions, spiceosomes and single-celled organisms. I think you need a better understanding of how rare we are on our own planet before you start calling us inevitable.", "\"Locally early\" is a reasonable position.", "There were second generations stars by 12 billion years ago _URL_0_.\n\nAnd second generation stars can have planets and all the needed elements. Add 4 billion years to develop intelligence. So there could be intelligent life 8 billion years older than us. ", "The Fermi paradox is overvalued. Its basic premise is a set of poorly integrated assumptions. All the Fermi paradox achieves is to highlight the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial life which lets us infer an almost useless maximum for the probability of intelligent life per cosmic mass.", "It could easily enough be proven by finding all other instances of intelligent life in the universe and declaring that they developed after we did.\n\nJoking aside though, that is a very interesting question, and a fun one to think about. I look forward to hearing an answer to this question.", "I think that, given an infinite universe, the absence of intelligent life is a statistical impossibility.\n\nThe sheer range of evolutionary pressures that led to homo sapiens is nigh innumerable and of such chaotic nature, that I believe it's very possible a second \"roll of the dice\" would throw the date of our birth off by thousands, if not millions of years.\n\nIt's just that the universe is really, really huge, and the distances are really, really far. If you pointed the strongest radio signal we could muster here on earth in every possible direction, there would still be giant holes just at the edge of the solar system.\n\nConditions are perfect for the universe to be teeming with intelligent life, and for us to be completely oblivious to the fact.", "As a biologist my biggest problem with the Fermi paradox is that humans, with a typical anthropologist viewpoint, often *assumes* that intelligent life as an outcome of evolution, is obligatory. No, it's not. Just because our species alone out of millions and millions of others managed to evolve intelligence, does not make it compulsory. \n\nIf we look back at evolution and the enormous amount of species that evolved, we can count how many times a novel thing has arisen in different taxa, and how successful that trait in particular has been. We can see for example that flight has evolved separately many times. And many different taxa is still flying today. It seems to be quite beneficial here on Earth. To have two sexes in a species seem to be advantageous as well, it has evolved many times. Asexual species arise every now and then but the majority seem to get out-competed by sexual species (there is one good exception here, can't remember if it's rotifera). \n\nSo lets look back and see how many times intelligence have evolved on this planet. Yes only once. It is and have been extremely rare. You may argue that dolphins and octopuses are fairly intelligent, sure, but they don't at all have the level of intelligence required to pursue space flight. Not even close. (edit: what I mean with intelligence in this post is the level of intelligence needed for contacting extraterrestrial civilizations- i.e. the level of intelligence discussed in the fermi paradox.) Intelligence is absolutely not an obligatory outcome of evolution. Single-celled bacteria lived and thrived for billions of years before multi-cellular life even arose. We were lucky. \n\nIt may happen elsewhere on another planet, the universe is huge. I don't doubt for a second that life has arisen elsewhere, probably many times, but the probability for *intelligent life* to evolve will be low.", "Very similar to time travel. If time travel is possible, then where are all the time travelers?", "Wouldn't the whole 'first' or 'last' civilization to develop depend solely on the observers viewpoint?", "In addition to your possibly correct statement, there would need to be considerable coincidence in time frames for civilizations to meet. In other words, if it takes 10k years to develop interstellar space flight, in order to meet another civilization, they would have had to exist in a form compatible with modern communications to be detected during the search time. For example, our \"search time\" has been roughly about 100 years (give or take), thus within the 13 billion years the universe has been around in order to detect another civilization, they would have to be as evolved, or nearly as evolved, in technology almost at the exact same time as us. Being as how the production of life in the universe is such a highly improbable event, or maybe not (no frame of reference), it may be very unlikely that we encounter another life form. Another example, think back 50k years ago, humans existed, but to some alien we looked just like apes running around with a bunch of other animals. They may have come, having had lived and developed for 10's of 1000's of years, saw \"us\", and thought nothing of it. Coinciding time frames are usually never considered in this discussion. Just saying.", "Layman here. It's always seemed strange to me that we look skyward for life with such human expectations. We're governed by the rhythms that are particular to our world, and all of our evolutionary pressures have had this at their foundation as well - the endless heartbeat of day and night, the eventual emergence of seasons, the push and pull of the tides.\n\nWe've evolved into what we think of as a human timeframe - our 24 hour days define much of what we do, our 70+ year lifespan does exactly the same. Interstellar distances seem impossibly far to beings such as us who sense and process the world in the ways that we do - a journey of a few thousand years is utterly incomprehensible to us, akin to a fruit fly deciding to start flying around the earth.\n\nWe're so used to experiencing the world within our own particular timeframe, and it seems unlikely to me that any other nearby intelligent lifeform would necessarily live their lives similarly. Perhaps they live for three of our weeks, experiencing entire alien lifetimes of experience within that time. Or perhaps they live for many tens of thousands of years, at home somewhere in a stable orbit around a cold sun.\n\nPerhaps if we analyze all the SETI data we've been collecting over the past 30 years, patterns will emerge that we haven't been looking for on our human scales of time. Doesn't seem strange to me that we haven't yet found evidence of alien civilisations though. We're looking with our earthbound preconceptions of what life is and how it communicates. Why should it be similar?", "No. \nLook at every process required for our sun to form and subsequently our planet and everything that makes life here possible. It could have all happened in a much earlier stellar generation - there is nothing special about this time.", "I don't believe it's anywhere close to an equal probability for us to be the first intelligent life forms vs not the first. Planets like Earth are very common. The materials that make up Earth are extremely common in the Universe. This is called the [Mediocrity principle](_URL_0_) and with it, it's logical to assume that life MUST have started somewhere before us, because there's a plethora of older earth like planets out there.\n\nHowever, I've been trying to get the [same theory](_URL_1_) expanded in the Fermi Paradox wiki, but it's been slow. Without someone writing a book about it, it's hard to find reliable sources talking about it.\n\nI do believe it *might* be possible (though not probable). Afterall, life had to start somewhere first...why couldn't it be here?", "I like to think about how before people travelled the earth people didn't know for certain about other civilisations on the same planet. Soon we'll be able to travel into space efficiently and frequently so who knows what we'll find. \n\nWhether we find something or not remains to be seen. The fact we even made it into space is a reason to be proud of ourselves. Pity about war and hunger though. (nb. I am not making a correlation between the two). ", "I have heard this mentioned before by Michio Kaku, that not only may we not be in the right space to find others, but we may not be in the right time to intersect others, which includes other intelligent civilizations blowing themselves up or running out of resources a billion years ago.", "I've always wondered why people assume other life out there would be so *similar* to human life. Ignoring silly cartoons of \"Martians,\" what makes us think that another galaxy's life would fit into our [characteristics of what makes life \"life\"](_URL_0_)?\n\nWhy, for instance, would another galaxy's life have to be comprised of cells?\n\nWould they have the same senses we do?", "Life has been here for roughly 3.8-4 billion years. In that time, we've evolved. To an alien observer with our level of technology on a planet orbiting alpha centauri a, we would be undetectable. Who is to say that other life may simply have not yet evolved to the point of an inter-steller presence, akin to how we have?", "Your idea could be correct, but its highly improbable (to assume intelligent life is common but we are just very very special for being in the first 0.0000001%) and seems implausible to me. If say we are under 1000 years from interstellar travel as a byproduct of billion years of evolution; its absurd to think that there are many others by that we are at the very front of the pack. E.g., it seems absurd to assume that the Cambrian explosion that was 530 million years ago couldn't have possibly been 530,001,000 years ago instead. Even if we were say in the first 0.01% of civilizations; with billions of stars in the galaxy they'd be millions ahead of us if it was particularly common. Hell; there's no fundamental reason that we had to have the dark ages/crusades. One could easily imagine that if the Greeks decided to do experiments and have the Renaissance rather than just philosophize that there could have been electricity, radio, and television ~2000 years ago.\n\nSolutions proposing that distant interstellar travel isn't scientifically feasible; or that civilizations are quite rare in space and/or time (in time meaning they self-destruct from war/over consumption/resource depletion).", "I like to think that on the journey of exploration that comes with intelligence, every species inadvertently produce something so unpredictably catastrophic that it annihilated them. Like a really big super LHC.", "The best book I've read on this subject is [Stephen Webb's *If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens... Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life*](_URL_0_).\n\nThe book discusses your proposition as well as many others. It gave me a much greater appreciation of the large number of conditions that may actually be necessary for intelligent life to evolve. \n\nAt the end of the day, I think the answer to the question as to why we don't see any ETs is that it takes a great many coincidental conditions for life to evolve far enough while constantly struggling against a great many factors that can bring about its demise. ", "I think you're violating Occam's razor. By that I am not saying it isn't possible we are one of the first... but it is like saying we are the center of the universe. It wasn't that it was impossible that it could have been true, just highly unlikely. You start traveling down an erroneous path when you start with an assumption that we're special in some way. You should start with an assumption that we're not special to answer your question of why we have not received contact.", "I've been watching a shit ton of Sagan Series lately and this is a topic I think about on almost a daily basis. I love the perspective you have here - it's something I haven't considered.\n\nI don't think we need to think of a life-supporting-planet or civilization of having developed as much as a billion years before ours. Consider how long our civilization has been in existence and how much technological achievement we've seen in the past 100 years. ONE HUNDRED YEARS! Compare that civilization's history - compared to earth's - compared to the universe. I strongly believe that any civilization that is as little as 3000 years ahead of us (to give an extremely safe estimate) would have mastered interstellar travel and communication - if it is possible.\n\nOther factors / risks to consider: \n\n* Have these civilizations destroyed themselves?\n* Consider what a remote place in the Universe we inhabit\n* Rate of progress for a planet/civilization (I see no reason why evolution should take significantly longer or shorter than it was for planet Earth but it might)\n* Limitations on how old a civilization can get before shit gets too real on their planet and evolution has to \"start over\" (think Ice Age type cycles)\n* There's other stuff like major catastrophes that could wipe them out but idk if that's worth considering (how can we possibly estimate those chances?)\n\nOne last point. Not only have we been making exceptional technological progress, but also social and empathetic progress in the last 100 years. Any civilization that reaches space will have dealt with gigantic social issues that we are plagued with (nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, preserving a livable climate on their home). It is all tied together though. Only because of the internet and other technologies connecting the entire earth are we starting to take the steps necessary to achieve this. **Where I'm going with this:** Any civilization we come across that is significantly ahead of us technologically, is that much ahead of us empathetically. I don't think we need to worry about being eaten or fearing these visitors.\n\nThen again I might be young and naive. It might turn out that is truly is the nature of life to be bloodthirsty, power hungry, and ambitious. Competition, after all, is why your genes have lasted into this generation.\n\n**TL;DR** Even if we can deduce that we are \"necessarily one of the first civilizations in the universe\", the estimation would still be +/- a few hundred thousand or even a million years. That is more than enough time for a civilization to achieve the things we dream of.\n\n*Rephrased - Though an interesting concept, the inaccuracy in the estimation voids asking the question to begin with.*", "Yeah my thoughts run the same as your own on this topic, and Jared Diamond writes about it in The Third Chimpanzee. Basically: Why assume that life should develop technology? In 3.5 billion years of life we've just now started playing with it, and only a minority of us could actually explain to you how to build a radio transmitter. That's not exactly a shining inevitable Hegelian drive towards Star Trek.\n\nIt seems like in order to have tech we had to have cities with specialized professions, and to have that we had to have big social brains, and to have that we had to have first large social groups, and second the need for behavioral flexibility. I'll find a cite later if somebody wants it, but suffice it for now to say that we see encephalization occur in protohumans simultaneous with a period of climatological uncertainty in the Great Rift Valley from which we sprang. And level of behavioral sophistication is pretty directly correlated to brain size which is correlated to body size- I can get a cite for that later, it's physical anthropology.\n\nSo you need life, then big life, then big social life, then big social life demanding behavioral flexibility, then big social life demanding behavioral flexibility organizing in large numbers, then then big social life demanding behavioral flexibility organizing in large numbers who striate into specialized professions, then then big social life demanding behavioral flexibility organizing in large numbers who striate into specialized professions and value time spent producing \"pure knowledge,\" then then they have to do that for a few hundred years before they're even sending out radio waves, much less Star Trekking around.\n\nFermi Paradox always seemed, to me, to skip a lot of steps. I'll accept that the universe is full of \"life\" where \"life\" includes viruses, prions, spiceosomes and single-celled organisms. I think you need a better understanding of how rare we are on our own planet before you start calling us inevitable.", "\"Locally early\" is a reasonable position.", "There were second generations stars by 12 billion years ago _URL_0_.\n\nAnd second generation stars can have planets and all the needed elements. Add 4 billion years to develop intelligence. So there could be intelligent life 8 billion years older than us. ", "The Fermi paradox is overvalued. Its basic premise is a set of poorly integrated assumptions. All the Fermi paradox achieves is to highlight the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial life which lets us infer an almost useless maximum for the probability of intelligent life per cosmic mass." ]

[ "The closest star is [Proxima Centauri](_URL_1_) which is 4.2 light years away. That's [about 170,000 times farther than Mars](_URL_3_). A lot of effort has gone into looking for planets in the habitable zone of this star, but nothing has been found. Still, it can't be conclusively ruled out.\n\nThe fastest interstellar probe we've ever built was [Voyager 1](_URL_2_) at about 62,000 km/h. At that rate it would take [about 73,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri](_URL_0_).\n\nThe chances of there being an as-yet undetected planet in the inner solar system are virtually nil.\n\nIn short, don't get your hopes up.", "What I think you're asking: if we magically added another planet to our solar system how close could its orbit be to Earth's without the planets' orbits becoming unstable.\n\nIn a *highly* idealized (i.e. practically impossible) case you could put another planet in the same orbit as Earth. If the other planet is small enough you could put it at one of the Lagrange points, or if the planet was the same mass as Earth you could put it exactly on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth. However, there are problems. In the small planet case it would have to be small enough that it would have serious trouble holding on to an atmosphere. Also, the closest Lagrange points (L1 and L2) are unstable. In the Earth-mass case that arrangement is also unstable (see [Can two planets of equal mass orbit around a fixed body within their opposite's L3 Lagrangian point?](_URL_0_)).\n\nSo, what about another planet that does not share Earth's orbit: In a two planet system, if the planets are on initially circular orbits they will be \"Hill stable\" (stable against close approaches for all time) if they're at least 2.4a1(m1/M+m2/M)^1/3 apart (a1 is the semi-major axis of the inner planet, m1 is the mass of the inner planet, m2 is the mass of the outer planet, and M is the mass of the star, from Gladman 1993). So, if both planets are Earth massed and Earth is the inner of the two planets you could put the other planet at 1.05 AU. HOWEVER, that is only true for two planet systems. If more planets are involved it gets vastly more complicated: the co-efficiant might be more like 9 instead of 2.4 (Smith & Lissauer 2009). So you might have to put it at more like 1.2 AU, which from my quick calculations looks like it would be ok (far enough away from Mars and Jupiter). Note: this is all back of the envelope calculation and furthermore it ignores the effects of resonances. To know more definitively one would have to run numerical integrations.", "The closest star is [Proxima Centauri](_URL_1_) which is 4.2 light years away. That's [about 170,000 times farther than Mars](_URL_3_). A lot of effort has gone into looking for planets in the habitable zone of this star, but nothing has been found. Still, it can't be conclusively ruled out.\n\nThe fastest interstellar probe we've ever built was [Voyager 1](_URL_2_) at about 62,000 km/h. At that rate it would take [about 73,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri](_URL_0_).\n\nThe chances of there being an as-yet undetected planet in the inner solar system are virtually nil.\n\nIn short, don't get your hopes up.", "I understand; you are asking about a star's [habitable zone](_URL_0_)! I learned about this in astrobiology.\n\nWe define a habitable zone as the doughnut-shaped area around a star that provides the right amount of energy to maintain liquid water. Too close, and the planet dries up like Venus. Too far and it freezes, like Mars.\n\n(There are some exceptions; a planet could be outside of a habitable zone but still have liquid water due to greenhouse, volcanic, or tidal effects. Europa is an example.)\n\nOur solar system's habitable zone ranges from .7 to 1.3 AU, where 1 AU is the mean distance between the sun and the earth. Mars sits just outside at around 1.5 AU. \n\nA habitable zone differs depending on the type of star. Larger and hotter stars have habitable zones that are comparatively farther away.", "What I think you're asking: if we magically added another planet to our solar system how close could its orbit be to Earth's without the planets' orbits becoming unstable.\n\nIn a *highly* idealized (i.e. practically impossible) case you could put another planet in the same orbit as Earth. If the other planet is small enough you could put it at one of the Lagrange points, or if the planet was the same mass as Earth you could put it exactly on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth. However, there are problems. In the small planet case it would have to be small enough that it would have serious trouble holding on to an atmosphere. Also, the closest Lagrange points (L1 and L2) are unstable. In the Earth-mass case that arrangement is also unstable (see [Can two planets of equal mass orbit around a fixed body within their opposite's L3 Lagrangian point?](_URL_0_)).\n\nSo, what about another planet that does not share Earth's orbit: In a two planet system, if the planets are on initially circular orbits they will be \"Hill stable\" (stable against close approaches for all time) if they're at least 2.4a1(m1/M+m2/M)^1/3 apart (a1 is the semi-major axis of the inner planet, m1 is the mass of the inner planet, m2 is the mass of the outer planet, and M is the mass of the star, from Gladman 1993). So, if both planets are Earth massed and Earth is the inner of the two planets you could put the other planet at 1.05 AU. HOWEVER, that is only true for two planet systems. If more planets are involved it gets vastly more complicated: the co-efficiant might be more like 9 instead of 2.4 (Smith & Lissauer 2009). So you might have to put it at more like 1.2 AU, which from my quick calculations looks like it would be ok (far enough away from Mars and Jupiter). Note: this is all back of the envelope calculation and furthermore it ignores the effects of resonances. To know more definitively one would have to run numerical integrations." ]

[ "Well that depends on the sensitivity of your design to small imperfections. \n\nEarths radius is about 6300km,\nAnd I up until about .1 radians sin(x) is approximately x, to at minimum 2 decimal places. If 2 decimal places is adequate accuracy then that works. .01 radians gives you 4 decimal points of accuracy. \n\nThat corresponds to a length of about 100km, being off by an amount on the order of 100m.\n\nOr 10km being off by an amount on the order of 1 meter. 1 meter variations in altitude occur pretty often in 100 square km areas. As such, I would expect structures who have a dimension larger than 100km to need to account for the curvature of the earth in addition to the local topography. Where at 10km you can probably get away with just considering the local topography, ignoring the curvature of the earth\n\n", "Before laying the foundation of the building, you have to make sure that you are placing the foundation on a level surface. This is called the pad. The dirt gets graded to the pad, and then the foundation is laid. The graded pad will create an even surface for the building, regardless of the curvature of the earth.", "The Humber suspension bridge has a main span a little less then a mile long (4,626 ft). Due to the Earth's curvature the two main supporting towers (510 feet tall) are 1.4 inches further apart at the top than the bottom.\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_0_)", "Mostly structures aren't big enough to need to worry about it, but even for those that could be, it would probably make more sense to level the area first - with excavation or fill. This is the beginning of almost all construction on any scale except very long tunnels and bridges. Leveling the ground area after careful surveying is what is always done to build things like stadiums and roads. ", "For the LIGO gravitational wave experiment this was a serious complication as described [here](_URL_0_). In the case of LIGO it was very important that the tunnel was straight and flat for it's entire 4km length.\n\nEdit: gravity - > gravitational", "The terrain of the build site is exponentially more important than the curvature of the earth. A flat piece of land over a mile curved 8 inches. A small hill or anything at all is more impactful to foundation. You dig down 12+ feet and make that area flat, it doesn't matter if there is 8 inches of higher ground on one side. ", "I work as a detailer for steel buildings. We have on occasion worked with bridges. Each trade has a tolerance built into it: how far off from perfect they can be. For us, it's 1/16\" per piece (usually up to a max of 60 ft long, can be longer in special circumstances). In the field, it's usually a tolerance of 1/8\" per location. Fabrication also has its own tolerances. In addition, bridges and other long structures typically have thermal expansion joints at frequent intervals. Lastly, our standard holes for connections are 1/16\" larger than the bolt size, and often short slots are usdd, providing even more field tolerance.\n\nI mention this because our tolerances generally far exceed the curvature of the world. I have never once had to assume a difference in elevation based on curvature, and we've detailed bridges that were over a mile long. Someone else has mentioned the curvature in inches per mile, so I defer to their expertise on that. In practice, an engineer may check it in considerations, but I would wager it doesn't affect very much in practice. \n\nOn the other hand, curvature is used in surveying, which is an important part of designing a structure.", "For anything you are going to construct over ground (including seabed and the like) you need a detailed model of the local topography. This model will already take the Earth's curvature in consideration, irrespective of scale, as well as many other factors. When it's time to project the building or bridge or whatever, the designer will work with whatever ground shape the model gives them, instead of thinking in terms of flat vs curved surface.\n\nTl;dr: it's always taken into consideration, but there is no special pondering about it.\n\nSource: I build topographic models for infrastructure projects.", "I’m a roadway engineer. On any project we work on, the curvature of the earth is already built into the survey we receive from the field. So it’s taken into account but nobody does any special calculations for it. ", "Architect here. Really large buildings are actually broken up into a sequence of smaller buildings that are connected by expansion joins that allow for each smaller building to move independently. Great care is used to make these expansion covers blend in and give an appearance of continuous design both for [exteriors](_URL_1_) and [interiors](_URL_0_).\n\nBetter question is how long can you make a continuous structure before it is too rigid to function. And this is what structural engineers do as part of their scope. ", "Per the top google result, curvature of the earth is approximately 8 inches per mile. Local topological features are going to massively outweigh that. \nFor roads though if you are travelling hundreds or thousands of miles, it introduces problems. See the [system of township roads in Alberta, Canada](_URL_0_) for an example. A correction line is introduced every 24 miles, because the curvature would otherwise make the north/south roads converge.", "As others have said, on typical building scales leveling of the local topography matters much more, however the earth's curvature does have to be [taken into account](_URL_0_) by survey engineers who are doing that leveling on even relatively small scales. I was talking to one of the survey engineers in my firm a few weeks back about this and he mentioned they account for the Earth's curvature even when surveying across a small plot - less than 100m in width. ", "A question I have an answer to! In surveying, a plane survey is created for a project that is less than 5 miles long. This does not account for the curvature of the earth. However, anything longer than that is a geodetic survey. This will account for the curvature of the earth. ", "The Akashi Kaikyo one of the largest suspension bridges, had to do so. \n\nIt's very stable, despite the Osaka Quake, and its longest span, ca. 2000 m., which is about 2 Km. Total length including approaches, ca. 4 kms. That's the best practical answer. A real existing structure.\n\nThe two main towers, about 900' tall, were NOt built horizontally to each other, but were pointing slightly outwards from each other, and the suspension cabling had to be adjusted accordingly.\n\n_URL_0_", "Probably on the scale of hundreds of miles.\n\nBecause, as many have pointed out, local terrain matters much more than curvature.\n\nIt may have been more accurate to ask how large does a building have to be for gravity to be measurably (significantly) not parallel at all points. Which is when a building would need to have more distance between upper levels than lower levels.\n\nImagine a building built hundreds of miles across. It could be straight, having the middle rest on solid ground, and the ends supported by stilts or some support structures. At no point does it *need* to yield to the curvature of the earth or gravity. However, if gravity is aligned with the center, the ends would have gravity shifted slightly, perhaps causing some psychological discomfort and requiring structural adjustments. ", "I'm a roadway designer (recent grad, not engineer yet). As far as I know on the design side as I don't have too much experience on construction side, I have never seen a standard or anything that accounts for curvature of the earth. Design speed (typically speed limit +5mph in the US) is what's used to determine how the horizontal curvature and vertical profile of the road are determined. Of course there are things like, what type of terrain (flat vs mountains) and forecasted traffic volumes that help determine things like super elevation and max grade. There could be some way it can be accounted with the equations we use, but from what I remember in college, curvature of the earth is never a factor when deriving these equations, we assume flat as far as I know. \n\nAgain, I only have a couple years of experience so maybe there has been projects where they do, although I think structural engineers would know more about this stuff in general.", "Many transport authorities work on a different grid system than maps. For example if you overlay London Underground maps directly onto a topographical measured survey as used by the Ordnance Survey you will notice slight errors even on a single site.\n\nYou think you’ve lined up a corner of a building exactly and move to the other end of a big site and there seems to be a tolerance issue.\n\nIt’s because one takes account of the curvature of the earth and the other doesn’t.\n\nVertical alignment errors are crazy between the two systems. Say you build a 20 mile tunnel under London, and want to link into an existing tunnel, and line up using OS, what happens? You’d be over 250ft out of vertical alignment by the end.\n\nIt’s huge. Remember it’s not 8 inches per mile. It’s 8 inches per mile squared. Worth pointing out this is a parabola and not accurate for very long distances, but is reasonably accurate for the usage here.", "If during the construction of Vasco da Gama bridge in Portugal (more than 12km) the curvature of the earth would not have been considered, it would end up 80cm higher in one end than in the other\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is a nice pic", "As I understand it, level and flat are two different goals when building something. \n\nIf you are building something level, you have accomplished your goal if you can put a bubble level at any point on the surface and it shows it to be perfectly level. A level surface follows the curvature of the earth\n\nIf you are building a flat surface, you have succeeded if you can project a laser line from one inch off the surface of one end to one inch off the surface of another end and the laser is one inch off the surface at all points in between. A flat surface does not follow the curvature of the earth and will get further away from the surface of the earth the farther you go away from the center.\n\nSomeone with more knowledge of building engineering and design would have to weigh in on if/when buildings are always built on a level surface vs a flat surface. ", "LIGO and VIRGO, the gravitational wave detectors would definitely have to take this into account, along with those being constructed would have to take this into account, as they are very large and VERY sensitive", "One of the final operations of Contract 1 pier construction was to cast pre-fabricated steel tower base units into the tops of the main piers. These had machined top surfaces ready to receive the steelwork of the bridge towers. In setting these to level an allowance had to be made for the curvature of the Earth over the c.1 km main span distance; this amounted to about 3/8th of an inch (c.1 cm) apparent difference in level.\n\n[Prince of Wales (Severn Bridge)](_URL_0_)", "A lot of folks are missing something big here. When you build things on the ground you do a construction survey to set elevations for reference. This involves moving tripods or other survey equipment around to set the reference points, and the equipment is calibrated at each setup to \"know\" that gravity points down, to the Earth's center. So you really don't need to account for the curve of the Earth, as it is built into the process of calibrating what is \"down\" at each setup point.\n\nExample: You're building a really long canal and you need the water to flow. Don't you need to account for the Earth's curve? No. The elevation model already does that, as long as the canal profile goes down in elevation, water will flow the right way.", "It has to be REALLY big - someone here has mentioned the Large Hadron Collider. \n\n\nPeople don't understand how things look flat if the world is round because the human mind has a hard time understanding how big earth is and how small we are. \n\n\nThe earth is so big that for most practical purposes we can treat the ground as flat.", "No such size exists.\n\nConsider the Great Wall of China. It's way long enough for the curvature to affect the structure of the wall, yet, it was built without that being considered in the design.\n\nUnless something special about the building requires ridiculous alignment, it's fine for the building to just be built as it goes.\n\nEven bridges don't have to take curvature into account, generally speaking. They're just straight lengths between height posts.", "Not sure if this is a duplicate of another's comment, but I was stationed at Holloman Air Force Base and there was/is a test track that rumour had it at over nine miles and set such that it didn't follow the curvature of the Earth. I know this isn't an answer to the question but I've always wondered if that were true. I've been to the track and even had the opportunity to watch the ejection seat test of the F-20 Tigershark. There is info on Wikipedia but I can't make heads or tails of it. Thanks!", "The Earth's curvature is not accounted for in construction projects. Construction survey is \"plane\" survey, meaning you ignore the curve because it's intangible. Most often site or road plans reference some authentic verified geodetic data as a basis for everything to be built off. There is error between sites often and it is tracked and corrected.\n\nBuilding foundations are set to specified elevations. Elevations are how much higher in meters or feet than \"sea level\" something is. Sea level is zero, and a mountain can be \"3000 feet above see level.", "None, duh because the Earth is flat!\n\nBut really, I know this isn't what you asked, but large bridges like the Golden Gate bridge, or this here example of a power line, show a pretty good example of a curvature.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThat said, the divergence itself usually doesn't have to be take too heavily into account because the effects on a small scale are negligible and gravity tends to take care these issues by itself. Precision would really become more of an issue in a structure that spans a mile or upwards. Measurements I found measured height change to distance at 0.8mm per 100m. Don't know if that's accurate but still, you'd need a pretty long structure before accounting for the curvature becomes a significant architectural concern.", "I worked for a company whose main manufacturing plant covered 60+ acres. Inside that plant, there were hills and valleys incorporated in the design (the factory expanded over time and resulted in various floor levels.) So I imagine that curvature of the earth would not play any part in the design.", "I have worked on a couple of buildings that are long, 2000 ft plus. We never had to account for curvature but we did have problems with tolerances. At more than 1000ft GPS, surveys, and physical measures all lack the necessary accuracy so you have to build in extra give somewhere. ", "As someone else said, the only reason you might do this is if you for some reason had to control for the curvature of the earth for scientific purposes. The curvature of the earth for anything this small is really irrelevant because the landscape will be the way it is completely independent of the overall curvature of the earth. Another possibility someone else mentioned is a bridge over the ocean, but I can't think of any purpose of gauging the curvature of the earth for a building on land.", "In most cases, the earth curvature is meaningless. When it matter is when you need something that is trully level, like the Large Hadron Collider, because it send a light (laser) beam, and if the tunel is bent too much then it will cause trouble. But there is other factors to consider before that, and it does include the moon gravity, but also thermal changes, because it make things change size...\n\nThe vast majority of building don't care if the earth is flat or curved, and you can follow the earth. You will first encounter issues with the actual terrain way before you have to deal with the earth curvature! Heck, even a mountain will first be an issue!\n\nSo unless it is a massive scientific experiment, chance is that they won't even think about it. There is way too many more important factors that will get there before, and chance is that those will compensate for the curvature indirectly. For example, thermal expension zone, that can be quite a big play there, yet the earth curvature would have a minimal effect, the result is that it will be 'noise' in the calculation, and will be negligeable. Then that thermal relief will handle it indirectly.", "The [Lake Pontchartrain Causeway](_URL_0_) in Louisiana is a great example. It bisects a huge lake, and is so long that it has to take into account the curvature of the earth. Not only did they have to engineer it to curve with the Earth, but they had to make it about 6\" longer than it would have been if the Earth were flat. ", "When I worked for Target Corp, we had a huge warehouse in CA.\n\nWhen it was originally built, it followed the curve, to save excavation costs.\n\nYears later, we added a large automated storage retrival system which had to be flat.\n\nOne end of the ASRS was level with the rest of the building, and the other end had steps.\n\nIt took some getting used to, as you didn’t feel like you were going downhill in either situation." ]

[ "Lets say Bob buys apples, and Sam sells apples.\n\nThe current price of apples on the market is $1 per apples, but if there's a drought, there will be fewer apples, thus maybe apples will be worth $2 per apple.\n\nSo Bob wants to buy apples in four months. He could either just wait to buy them at that time, but he doesn't know when the price will be. Bob thinks the price will go up to $1.25 per apple and he knows he'll need apples. He calls sam, and he says hey, I'd like an buy a Call which gives me an option to buy 100 apples at a price of $1.10 per apple in four months. I'll give you $5 as a premium for this deal. \n\nSam thinks to himself that this is a good deal. If apples are worth more than $1.10, he'll still make $1.10 per apple, but if apples are less than $1.10, he'll make $5 from the premium, and he'll just sell his apples at market price.\n\nBob and Sam both feel like winners. Sam has made guarenteed money, and Bob isn't at a risk of losing a bunch if he needs to buy apples when they're more expensive.\n\nNow we have Ted, who is an apple trader. Ted thinks that apples are going to go up to $1.25 per apple from their current $1 price. He makes the same deal with Sam, but Ted actually doesn't care about owning apples. He spends $5 and now has a right to buy 100 apples at $1.10 per apple. Ted wants the price of apples to go up so he can use this call option to buy $100 apples for $110 , but immediately sell them for $125. He'll make a $10 profit after his $5 premium. If he was really lucky, and apples were worth $2 per apple, he would make $85 from his $5 premium.\n\nNow if you want to understand the options market, replace apples with stocks. Options allow you to set a future price you have the right to buy a security for at that price. It's good for the seller because they reduce risk and gain a premium. Its good for the buyer because they reduce risk but lose a premium. It's good for a trader because they can make large amounts of money with a smaller gamble. In the end, everyone has a reason to get involved, just not everyone wins.\n\nPuts are a little harder to understand. They're a bet that the price of the commodity or security will go down.", "Examples. I'm going to use baseball cards. \n\nMy friend has a card that's worth $100 today. It's pretty rare but you can buy them on ebay for $100. Now this player, I think he sucks and that his card is WAY over valued. I think that this card will fall to $50 within the next year.\n\nSo my friend and I cut a deal. He will lend me his card, and I will give him back a card in 12 months time. Same player, same card condition. It won't be his literal card, but he does not care as long as it's the same player in the same condition. In exchange for borrowing his card, he charges me $5 for the year. \n\nSo I borrow my friends card, and sell it on Ebay for $100. I wait 1 year and it turns out I was right! I buy a card, same player and quality, for $50 and return it to my friend on time. \n\nSo I've made a profit of $45 ($50 profit less the $5 rental). \n\nThat's a \"put\" option. The key concept is that one stock in a company is exactly equal to any other stock in that company. So I can borrow a stock, sell it, then purchase it at a later time and return it to the lender. The lender does not care if they get returned a stock that is not the literal stock that was borrowed as long as it's the same class and the same company, stocks are interchangeable that way. \n\nTherefore a put option is a bet on a stock (or baseball card) value going down over time. A bad thing to consider is that losses are basically unlimited. If I'm wrong and the stock price goes up and not down, I'm still obliged to purchase the stock and return it to the lender. Since the stock price \"could\" go up infinity, my potential for loss is also infinite.\n\nA call option is basically the exact opposite. Rather than a contract to borrow a stock and return it at a later time, it's a contract to purchase a stock at a later time.\n\nBack to the baseball cards. My friend has a card that he thinks will keep a constant price or even fall a little but he does not want to sell it right now (for whatever reason). I think the price will go up, and I really want to buy it. \n\nCurrently the card is worth $100. So we write a contract. I have the option (but not the oblation) to buy the card in 1 year's time for $100, and in exchange for this I'll also give him $5 today. \n\nIf the card's market price goes down, I lose my $5 but don't have to buy my friends card, I can go buy some other card. If the market price goes up to $150, I can force my friend to sell me the card for $100. So (accounting for the $5 fee) I have now made a profit of $45!\n\nNow these options don't have to be at the current market price. Often these kinds of options are used as a form of employee compensation. Lets say I work for a large company and their stock price is currently $100 per share. \n\nI'm working on a big project that will make the company a lot of money. If I'm not successful it will not make a lot of money. I want more money to keep doing this work for this company, but my company does not want to take the risk if I'm not successful. So we agree on stock options.\n\nIn addition to my salary, I get the option to buy stock at a later date. So in 1 year's time I have the ability to purchase stock at today's price ($100). If my project is a big success, surly the stock value will go up over that year. If my project fails, the stock price will not change. I receive 1,000 of these options. \n\n2 scenarios:\n\nFirst, one year later and my project is a smashing success. Stock price is up to $150. I take my 1,000 options and use the choice to buy stock for $100 each. I spend $100,000 to use all 1,000 options at $100 per option. I immediately own 1,000 shares of company stock. Stock that is currently worth $150,000. Effectivly my company has paid me a $50,000 bonus.\n\nSecond scenario. My project is a flop. Stock price stays at $100. I don't do anything with my stock options and they expire. I don't get a bonus and am sad." ]

[ "There are already too many PhDs and not enough jobs. Of those who have jobs, most don't make enough to support themselves, let alone a family. I would advise you against this path.", "You've already identified one of the key necessities for success which most coming out of undergrad are clueless about, namely networking, so kudos to you. Network, network, network. Network with your professors, past, current, and future. After you've moved on from one place keep in touch with people every now and then, be it through conferences or otherwise. Network with your colleagues and fellow students, etc. There is no trick to it, or \"how to\" for networking, the best way to learn how to do it, is to do it. When it comes time for a job, committees often must decide between a group of people who are equally qualified; if you know a couple people in the department or on the committee you have a better chance of getting the job. Some would say this isn't fair, but as a current (adjunct) faculty member, I can tell you it is very important when hiring someone that you know that they are not totally social inept or some kind of douchebag.\n\n\nOne of the most important things with graduate work is where you do your studies/under whom. As someone else noted, the market is saturated with PhD's, though it's only a half-truth that there are no jobs. Indeed, there are no jobs for people coming out of mediocre schools, and perhaps second-tier schools also. Why is this? It's because people coming from top-tier programs will take every spot that opens from now and in perpetuity for the foreseeable future. If there are, say 10 jobs opening next year for history professors, and there are 20 people applying from the top-tier schools, and 150 applying from anywhere else, most likely all 10 spots will go to one of those 20 from the top-tier schools. It's a harsh reality, but it makes perfect sense. So, if you can't get into one of the, say, top 10 schools, then don't even bother. I'm in religious studies so I can't comment on which programs these might be, perhaps someone else can help you there.", "I am a PhD candidate in Canada, entering my fourth year. I obviously am not done yet, but I can share some tips with you that I have picked up on, and have been shared with me. I am also funded quite substantially from my federal government, so I have more disposable income than other students do, so my situation may be rosier than other people's\n\n1. Getting good letters, a good sample, and having good grades is super important, as you note. So is finding a supervisor. This is key, and hammering out a specific project was important for me and getting into my program. I know you don't have a narrow focus yet, but when I applied, I had already written papers on my topic, and was able to instill confidence in my prospective school and advisor that I was on the ball, and would hit the ground running.\n2. The school choice is vital, but so is the supervisor. You want good name recognition so when you apply for jobs and grants, you stand out. In essence, the prestige is vital, but equally so is the life experience at the school in question, and if you get along with your supervisor. Don't go to NYU if you hate big cities, for example\n3. Don't do a PhD unless you are fully funded. From what I have heard, not only should you not have to pay for PhD education, since you are in many ways providing a lot of labour to the university, it does not bode well for your career; money often follows those who get it early in their PhDs. In canada, most PhDs are fully funded, though some get much more money than others. It must be noted that the PhD already has a cost in that you are deferring work years, you should not have to pay on top of that. \n4. Apply for any applicable grants from government/private/non-profit, whatever source there is. I trust there are such awards available in the USA. They can be very lucrative and prestigious, and go a long way towards a good portfolio\n5. While a PhD student, you must go beyond working on your theis, and must publish and present at conferences. Start with graduate journals and conferences, but its important to have at least one solid publication in a major journal in your field, preferably in a major historical journal that covers many fields.\n\nI would be remiss if I said that the job situation is tricky right now, worse in the USA than most countries as you have a significant portion of adjunct professors. Nevertheless, its good to, during your PhD do work that allows you to build a `non academic` resume. I, for example, do a whole bunch of work with my Union, and as such, have given myself contacts within the organized labour movement. This opens up opportunities. A PhD isn`t a guarantee for anything anymore, but it still provides many opportunities if you attune yourself to them.\n\n\n", "I very much second what Chrristoaivalis wrote. *Excellent points* all. I would add this:\n\n1. Expanding on Chrristoaivalis' point, go to grad school because you *love* history, not just because you were really good at it as an undergraduate. Sometimes grad school can seem like a “safe” way to keep doing what you’ve been doing and been doing well. Don't do it expecting to find a job waiting. A young man I wrote on behalf of after he got his PhD, *just* got a tenure-track job after looking since 2009. He's a great guy and deserves it, but it takes real commitment. \n\n2. A related point. I counsel students to think about putting a year or two between graduation and graduate school. Test out the world beyond the classroom; search your heart to see what your talents are and whether they match your passion—they’re two different things. It seems to me more and more grad schools are admitting students who are a little older and more experienced in the world. These are people who have made a really informed choice, not just fallen into the next step without a lot of self-reflection. (I went straight from college to grad school and sometimes wonder how my life would be different if I had paused to examine my goals more carefully.) I also find myself writing letters of recommendation for more and more students who’ve been away from school for a few years and have now decided that they really do have a passion for the academic life and *need* to pursue it, not because it will lead to a job teaching/researching, but because learning fulfills them in some way. (If you think you might delay, it’s a good idea to ask you undergraduate profs to write a letter for you now anyway; you’ll be fresher in their minds.)\n\n3. If you do go to grad school, keep in mind that a doctoral degree can be put to uses outside of academia. For instance, large corporations, cities, etc. often want professional historians or people with archival skills to maintain corporate histories.\n", "Variations of this question have come up in the past on /r/AskHistorians, have a [look at them in the FAQ](_URL_0_). They're not all relevant to your situation, but it might be worth reading through them.", "Some thoughts as a dude with a PhD married to a lady with a PhD (so we have a lot of PhD experience between us, at different history programs in the USA):\n\n* Don't go to any PhD program where they aren't funding you in one way or another (e.g. teaching or research) for at least 5 years. The PhD will _not_ pay for itself after the fact. \n\n* Where you go to school _does_ matter in terms of getting a better job. That doesn't mean that the \"best\" schools have the best programs or will be the best for your mental health, historical understanding, or anything else. But job committees spend only seconds looking at your C.V., and they're mostly looking at the name of your grad school and the name of your advisors/letter writers. (Is that a dumb way to make hires? Yes. Welcome to the academy, where dumb things happen despite the presence of smart people.)\n\n* You need to narrow yourself, at least for the application. If you don't pigeon-hole yourself, they will do it for you. And they might do it in a way that isn't good for you. If you don't say, \"I do X,\" they won't know who to think your advisor will be, and if they don't know that, you aren't getting in. Once you are in the door there is always room for flexibility. You're not committing yourself for all time with the application.\n\n* Do yourself a favor, and whenever you get to the point of the PhD program where you could, if you wanted to, get a terminal masters' and leave, take a week off and reassess. That's the best point to figure out if this is _really_ what you want to lock yourself into. Because a masters' in History makes you look educated and well-rounded. A PhD in History makes you look qualified for no job except for academic ones, and the academic market isn't great, and the academy often looks better from the outside than the inside. Once you are in the program and trudging along, it is easy to lose perspective and not really assess whether you still want to do it, and there's the psychological burden of not wanting to be a \"quitter.\" The masters' junction is the place where people ought to figure that out, and usually comes 2-3 years into it, so you should have some idea of what is up with studying history at that point and whether there is anything else you'd be interested in doing. If you have any inclination to leave the academy at that point, any sign that this isn't the only thing you might wanting to be committing yourself to forever, then flee. Trying to get a job in a different sector once you have a PhD in History and are in your early 30s with no other work experience is really, really difficult.\n\n* When applying for programs, always try to figure out who they'd want to pair you with as an advisor, and try to talk this person ahead of time. In person if possible, on the phone if necessary. Because this is the person who will be an \"advocate\" for your application when it comes up for discussion by the admissions committee (which, unlike undergrad admissions, is handled by the department, as you may have figured out). Having one famous senior person and one non-famous junior person is not a bad strategy; the latter is the one who is likely to have the most time to actually talk to you, the former is the one who has the juice within the department.\n\n* Senior faculty know nothing about the current job market and nothing about the possibilities of jobs outside academia. If you want to know what the job market is like, talk to people who are currently on the current market (late-stage grad students, untenured faculty, postdocs). If you want to know what life is like outside of the academy, talk to people outside of the academy, because academics don't know a thing about that (though they often don't realize how ignorant they are on this)." ]

[ "I found this account of someone invited to do a peer review for the journal and was, to put it exceptionally mildly, unimpressed:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nCosmologists can comment further. To be fair, maybe overly fair, I think that it takes more than two years to see if anything of merit that comes from a new journal - but this one does look fairly absurd and gimmicky.\n\nThe submission guideline is very strange - they don't seem to want LaTeX which is the common typesetting language in math and physics.", "My university has access to the service that [ranks impact factors](_URL_0_) for journals. Its the number of total citations divided by papers published. They do not even rank this journal. I feel this is a fairly good indication that no one really takes them seriously.", "It lies right on the front page when it says it gets 800,000 hits a month. With an 492,787 Alexa Rank its more like 800 hits a month. Total garbage I assume but I'm not a scientist.", "I'm a cosmologist and i've never heard of it, doesn't mean it's garbage but it's a red flag for sure... ", "Most certainly journals vary in their quality, but I would recommend learning how to judge the quality of a paper on a case by case basis. I've come across papers in top journals that were just rubbish. For example, this [one](_URL_0_) appears in Animal Behavior, but also happens to be utter garbage (and a highly publicized article nonetheless as this is the one that argues for \"prostitution\" in nonhuman primates). And the opposite is also true, and have been more than on one occasion pleasantly surprised by a well conceived experiment written up in an obscure journal. Look at the Methods section with a fine toothed comb, make sure the conclusions follow from the data, and always always always be thinking of alternative explanation for the data. ", "I don't know anything about the specific journal, but regarding the website, academics and scientists, even highly reputable and accomplished ones, often don't give a shit about web design.", "According to [this press release](_URL_0_) the journal is going out of business" ]

[ "Yeah, sirbruce is completely wrong. It's perfectly possible to have curvature without needing to embed your surface in a higher dimension. Think of a sheet of grid paper lying flat on a table. You then warp the grid lines somehow. The grid is now curved without being embedded in a higher dimension. This is intrinsic curvature (the wiki page sirbruce linked to actually discusses this).\n\nWe have pretty good evidence that if there are other spatial dimensions, then they must be pretty small. Smaller, in fact, than the curvature of space that we measure. So, we must be seeing intrinsically curved space.\n\nI wouldn't worry about arguing with sirbruce - they've made up their mind about the definition of these things, that only extrinsic curvature is \"real\". To be honest, I found about half of their statements to be either semantically empty or just incomprehensible.", "Apparently the spectrum of cosmological graviational radiation would be different if the universe had more dimensions. Hopefully we can test this one day.", "The definition of curvature that mathematicians use does not require an extra dimension of curvature. General relativity does not require a curved-into dimension either.\n\nThe short explanation is that curvature comes from how distance is defined between points. This distance is not embedded in any higher dimension.", "I didn't read the exchange and I don't want to weigh in on the details, but I can give you a strategy that I often use. When arguing with some one who holds crazy views I find it effective to show that their own logical framework is inconsistent. As pointed out by others, you can't reason someone out of a position that wasn't reasoned into it. But you may be able make them realize that their thoughts lead to inconsistencies in the things they believe their framework shows.\n\nIt's a little convoluted and I'm not sure it actually works, but I personally find it more fun. A simple example may be to ask this person if they believe the universe needs \"space\" to expand into. You'd expect someone who believes that curvature requires \"space\" to bend into would also believe the universe must be expanding into something. But they might surprise you. \n\nBut, there is a point in the debate where it's just not worth it. My partner assures me that it's still safe to go to bed, even if someone on the internet is wrong. " ]

[ "If you do not take the full course you have a larger chance of \"selecting\" for resistant bacteria. If you will die..? Kind of depends on what you have and what your doctor told you.. I hope you don't! Good luck!", "You have to take the full course to make sure that all the bacteria is killed. If you don't take the full course, the bacteria still alive have a chance of developing an immunity (becoming resistant) to the antibiotic. This means that the antibiotic will not work against that bacteria. This is why there are now so many cases of \"super-bugs\".", "The main reason is that if you just stop taking them as soon as you feel better, there will still be a high bacterial load present, and they will simply multiply and make you sick again. \n\nYou have to basically wipe them out. That's what the full course is designed to do. \n\nThe 'helping to create more resistant strains' is also true, but for you, personally, this is a secondary factor. \n\nIf you want to get better, take the full course. Otherwise, don't bother taking any. ", "You might.\n\nYou'll start to feel better after the antibiotics kill off 90% of the germs in your system...but the 10% left are going to be the toughest, most resistant ones. If you let up and they build back up, they will be much harder to get rid of." ]

[ "Why is any modifying adjective used anywhere?\n\nIt's just a descriptive term. Though, it is somewhat old fashioned. You would be more likely to hear it from 1940-1960 than you would today. ", "I've personally lived in the Midwest, the west(wyoming colorado new Mexico) , south and north east, and have never encountered this, it might just be a stereotype, with maybe 2 out of 10 people doing it.", "In southern part , we use these terms as a sign of repect we don't mean to sound Unproper but over the years we've just been Accustomed to this slang words", "The only times I've ever heard of it used was with a friend's grandfather. He was okay with us calling him Old Man Willis. It wasn't disrespectful or derogatory at all, we loved that guy." ]

[ "The entire class of SSRIs (Prozac etc) can make depression worse and even induce suicidal thoughts. I noticed that Welbutrim now carries this warning as well even though it has a different mechanism of action.", "There is a class of hallucinogens called deliriants that, in contrast to more popularly used recreational drugs, most often cause feelings of dread, anxiety, and dysphoria.\n\nAnti-psychotic drugs very frequently induce dysphoria as well. You could maybe say it is one of their 'primary' effects even though it's obviously not administered for this purpose.", "yes, source - _URL_0_" ]

[ "And conversely, what did the Chinese know about the Romans?", "just to keep this alive: I would very much like to hear about it too. of course, roman can mean many things if you include the eastern empire.", "Quite a bit, actually. By 0 CE, trade along the Silk Road had blossomed to such an extent that silks were [the most popular luxury item in Rome](_URL_0_).", "Ancient civilizations had more contact with one another than you'd think. the Romans certainly knew a good bit about the Chinese, and vice versa. While the Chinese knew of the existence of the Romans, they didn't particularly pay them or any other outside culture much attention. They did, however, trade fairly regularly with them, though it was indirectly through trade with the peoples who lived between the two flanking Eurasian powers, that in turn traded with the Romans (Arabs, Slavs, Indians). The Chinese would exchange lacquered goods, fine silks, china (pottery), etc. for Roman goods such as embroidered rugs, glassware, ore, etc. \n\nRomans and other ancient civilizations had some idea as to the size of their own and other continents, certainly not like we have today, but they had explorers, merchants, and traders that brought back hand drawn maps, journals, etc. that contained reports of what they had seen, the geography of the land, and descriptions of the peoples that lived there. ", "I remember hearing somewhere that they found little copper and gold Buddhas in Pompeii. There wasn't an epic meeting of Emperors, but they knew of the \"great lands\" one way and the other. Problem was this was like trying to trade with the moon, if space was full of dudes trying to make the most of cheese routes.", "This is a bit off-topic, but you might want to read up on [Greco-Buddhism](_URL_0_), which led to a lot of interesting cultural stuff in both East and West, including quite possibly the anthropomorphic representation of the Buddha (why do you think he's wearing a toga?)", "Thread from /r/ancientrome: _URL_0_", "Here's the show that the OP mentioned, currently downloading all the episodes!\n\n_URL_0_" ]

[ "Expanding on the question: Is it worse for the landfill not to have that organic material in the mix? Does that organic material help with the slow decay of the other garbage there? Could the moisture and organisms held by that organic material help break down the other more durable materials in the landfill?", "Due to the fairly anaerobic environment inside a landfill, the organic materials inside undergo surprisingly little biodegredation. For example, old newspapers can be perfectly readable after sitting buried in a landfill for many decades. As for \"ecolittering\", ryashpool is right that organic material dropped on the street or sidewalk is likely to end up in a storm sewer and thus in the nearest stream, lake, or bay, contributing to the local biological oxygen demand there (which is a Bad Thing). \n\nTL;DR - A proper compost heap is best, landfill is next best as the carbon is effectively sequestered there.", "Your scheme may go berserk in dense populations. In sparsely traveled areas, the local ecosystem could easily absorb, and possibly benefit, from the odd banana peel or apple core hucked out the window. Major cities would have the double whammy of having a barrage of apple cores flying out of car windows and reduced wildlife to consume disposed items. \n\nLittering is a runaway effect. Once enough individuals (probably a mere 1%) start tossing crap out the windows, visible accumulations develop which encourages others to do the same. I kind of doubt that humans are smart enough to discern the difference between fruit detritus or a water bottle when it comes to littering." ]

[ "PWM is basically sending different *average* voltages over time when you only actually have one or two voltages to work with (like 0 and 1 in binary).\n\nFor example, if you can only send 10 volts, and you need to provide 5 volts over 1 second, then you send 10 volts for half a second.\n\nThe 'width' of the pulse is how long you send it for.\n\nI'm not familiar with arduino programming, but I imagine PWM is a way to send variable voltages using only a binary source, which is easy to code as long as your program/computer's timekeeping is good.", "Look at a microwave oven. The thing is, you can't easily regulate power of a MW oven. So, what does it do when you set a lower power. Well, listen to it. You hear it humming for a while, then silten, then humming, silent and so on. That is what they do. If you, for example, set it to 75%, it runs (for example) for 3 seconds, the switch off the emitter for 1 second, and repeat this.\n\nThis is PWM. Instead of regulating output finely, you turn it full on, then full off, and regulate the power out using the ratio between time on and time off.\n\nThis is usually done for one or more of several reasons:\n\n* Thing is controlled by a computer, and computers like simple on/off.\n* Thing is hard to control finely, it's much easier to just go full on/off. For example, the heater in my house, which works on wood pellets, either burns as efficiently as possible, or is off.\n* The process you are regulating is quite slow. If you are, say, heating a house, there is an inherent slowness in the system, so it isn't noticeable if the control \"flickers\".", "Other people have explained what PWM is, so here's some basic things that it's useful for in the Arduino world:\n\nLED brightness: You can't* dim an LED; it's either on or off. So if you want to dim it, you need to make it flicker really fast. The longer that it's on each pulse (duty cycle), the brighter the LED is.\n\n*You can run LEDs at different brightnesses, to a point, but it's inefficient and you don't get a very good range. Better to use PWM.\n\nMotor speeds: By adjusting the duty cycle, you can change the speed of the motor. (Be careful, motors can draw a lot of current, and you can overload the output capacity of the Arduino.)\n\nBasic audio: There's a tone() library that extends the built-in PWM featured to let you control the frequency instead of the duty cycle. This can be used to generate basic square-wave sound output to a piezo speaker.", "In PWM a transistor is used to rapidly switch a fixed voltage on and off, typically on a fixed but sometimes variable \"carrier\" frequency. The on time of the switch is the width (time duration) of the \"pulse\". The width of the pulse is set to different time duration's (modulated) to provide a percentage of the power that would be available if the switch was left on 100% of the time. For example if the switching occurs 10,000 times per second (10 kilohertz) and the width of the pulse is set to 1/5000 of a second, 50% power is delivered.\n\nFor industrial motor drive applications the carrier frequency may also be varied to prevent harmonics with the stator, but the concept is the same.", "Have you ever played video games with the keyboard or a D-Pad to move? If you want to run full speed you hold the button down. If you want to run half speed, you tap the button on and off so that it's down half the time and up half the time. Your character has some momentum so instead of going and stopping over and over they just move at a slower rate. That's PWM." ]

[ "Large permanent structures (including middle class housing), coinage, mass-produced high quality pottery, and lower-class literacy all continued in the East, while all of those strongly diminished or even ceased entirely in the West during the time many call the \"Dark Ages\". Bryan Ward-Perkins talks a lot about archaeological evidence of the West's severe decline in his book \"The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization.\"", "[From \"Daily life in the Byzantine Empire\"](_URL_0_)\n\nGives a good window into 12 century Constantinople but nothing earlier as requested by OP.", "If you're asking about the quality of life for *most* people in the Byzantine Empire and the Early Medieval West (which I think you mean when you say Europe), then we're not talking a huge change in day-to-day affairs. As *most* people lived off the land in some way or other, and lived in hamlets, villages or even isolated home/farmsteads, there wasn't a huge difference. \n\nWhen war came, the thing that changed was largely an issue of the different kinds of people who were coming to kill you and steal or destroy all your property. \n\nIt's quite a recent thing to consider large shifts in the ways people live their lives. The Industrial revolution, for example, seems to me to be the largest such shift traceable in a single generation.", "I think it depends where you were. Life in greece was always different than life in one of the Themes out in Asia-minor, especially after the onset of Islam. \n\nWhile i'm not a historian, I have studied the Theme system, and believe that it likely influenced the life of people in what is now the heartland of Turkey (asia minor) to a great extent. \n\nTheme system is the systematic settling of soldiers in areas that are prone to raids. The idea is that quickly, a motivated local force can repel such intrusions. Had the double sword effect of greatly distributed military power and subsequent destabilizing political effects ", "I would recommend checking out Procopius as he is the main Primary source for the age of Justinian, one of the zenith eras for Byzantium. \n\nAccording to him it was fairly decadent for the upper class but sometimes terrifying for the lower classes. Gangs and political factions (demes) formed around specific sports teams, particularly chariot racing, and riots would break out with supporters from opposing sides killing each other (See \nNika Riots).\n\nWhen I get home I may pull some quotes from Procopius if I can find my old copy.\n\n" ]

[ "Because electrical charges come in two flavors, positive and negative. Positive and negative charges cancel each other out (at least over large distances), and since they attract each other, tend to occur in equal numbers in a given area of space. In other words, planets, stars, and especially galaxies tend to have little or no net charge on them, with the result that electrical forces have no noticeable impact (again, on large scales).\n\nGravity, on the other hand, only has one \"charge\", so every unit of mass adds to the effect, and nothing subtracts. The end result is that gravity becomes very very strong as you get lots of mass, while electrical forces tend to become non-existent as you get lots of mass.", "Adding to the other answers, a commonly pondered question in physics is why the gravitational force is so *weak* compared to the other forces. Consider how easily a fridge magnet is able to pick up a paperclip, overcoming the gravitational attraction of the entire earth." ]

[ "Grapes are surprisingly easy to grow depending on the variety. You can cover a bundle with sawdust, kept it wet and warm enough at the right time and they will sprout roots which then can be planted in the ground to grow into new plants.\n\nOthers are grafted, where you use the roots of one type of vine and basically attach another variety onto the top, and the new growth from the grafted plant will be genetically identical to the plant you took it from. \n\nTo get them seed less, they will have selected plants that had fewer seeds, and eventually found one with no seeds and used that to graft over and over. I don't know for certain, but there is every chance that all seedless grapes come a plant that is identical to the first seedless grapes plant.", "First, many plants are incredibly easy to clone. Once you have a seedless variety, you can multiply it as needed through cuttings and grafting.\n\nAs for the variety itself, they are infertile offspring of fertile parents. For plants that can't be propagated through cuttings, (such as seedless watermelons) there are two parent strains that will reliably produce seeds that won't be able to produce seeds themselves." ]

[ "[This GIF](_URL_0_) depicts it exactly.\n\nWhen moving around a circle, the sine function represents your vertical movement and the cosine function represents your horizontal movement.", "Here's one of the best ways of describing the point of trigonometric functions that I've ever seen:\n\n > **Motivation: Trig Is Anatomy**\n\n > Imagine Bob The Alien visits Earth to study our species.\n\n > Without new words, humans are hard to describe: “There’s a sphere at the top, which gets scratched occasionally” or “Two elongated cylinders appear to provide locomotion”.\n\n > After creating specific terms for anatomy, Bob might jot down typical body proportions:\n\n > * The armspan (fingertip to fingertip) is approximately the height\n* A head is 5 eye-widths wide\n* Adults are 8 head-heights tall\n\n > How is this helpful?\n\n > Well, when Bob finds a jacket, he can pick it up, stretch out the arms, and estimate the owner’s height. And head size. And eye width. One fact is linked to a variety of conclusions.\n\n > Even better, human biology explains human thinking. Tables have legs, organizations have heads, crime bosses have muscle. Our biology offers ready-made analogies that appear in man-made creations.\n\n > Now the plot twist: you are Bob the alien, studying creatures in math-land!\n\n > Generic words like “triangle” aren’t overly useful. But labeling sine, cosine, and hypotenuse helps us notice deeper connections. And scholars might study haversine, exsecant and gamsin, like biologists who find a link between your fibia and clavicle.\n\n > And because triangles show up in circles…\n\n > …and circles appear in cycles, our triangle terminology helps describe repeating patterns!\n\n > Trig is the anatomy book for “math-made” objects. If we can find a metaphorical triangle, we’ll get an armada of conclusions for free.\n\n[...snip...]\n\n > **Tip: Trig Values Are Percentages**\n\n > Nobody ever told me in my years of schooling: sine and cosine are percentages. They vary from +100% to 0 to -100%, or max positive to nothing to max negative.\n\n > Let’s say I paid $14 in tax. You have no idea if that’s expensive. But if I say I paid 95% in tax, you know I’m getting ripped off.\n\n > An absolute height isn’t helpful, but if your sine value is .95, I know you’re almost at the top of your dome. Pretty soon you’ll hit the max, then start coming down again.\n\nYou can read the whole post to better wrap your head around trigonometry here: _URL_0_" ]

[ "Generally not an ideal diet to be on for a long time, however for fat-loss purposes it is fine. That is key here, I am going to talk about this in the sense of FAT-loss being the goal, not weight loss. Those are NOT the same things.\n\nWhen you go on Atkins Diet at first you will feel sluggish and like you cant think very well. That is because you are not eating carbs/sugars that your brain needs. As you start to eat more fat and produce ketones(free fatty acids) your body goes into ketosis, a process where your body relies on fat for you daily energy needs and not carbohydrates.\n\nBenefit 1: Stable energy levels throughout your day since there is no sugar spikes disrupting your glucose/insulin levels whenever you have a meal or snack.\n\nDanger 1: Possible sluggishness in the begining as you get adjusted to ketosis.\n\nMost of the weight you lose at first will be from water loss. You eat less carbs, which means less glycogen for your muscles and glycogen helps retain water in your muscles.\n\nHowever as you get well into ketosis your body will start to burn fat for normal day to day usage this means your fat stores will also go down, given enough time.\n\nBenefit 2: You will lose fat...eventually. Give it a few weeks to see it in the mirror.\n\nDanger 2: Stop the diet after initial water loss and immidiately put that water weight back on and think that the dies doesn't work. This is because you are judging by weightloss rather than FATloss. Judge by the mirror not the scale.\n\nNow the really important part noone understands. Atkins diet is catabolic. You eat way less calories than you need throughout the day and your body will be burning off body energy stores. Including fat AND protein. Meaning muscles. Your muscles are only tapped for energy once you have been on Atkins for a while. So at first there is no danger of losing muscle.\n\nDanger 3: Prolonged use WILL cause muscle loss as well as fat loss.\n\nHow to use Atkins and avoid MUSCLE-loss and maximize FAT-loss?\n(Note: We are not even considering the term WEIGHTloss as that is misinterpreted. Most people want to lose fat not hard earned muscle.)\n\nSimple:\n1. Exercise\n2. Cycle a day of carbs at the end of every week.\n\nBasically 5-6 days of atkins/ketosis\nThen 1-2 days of Normal eating.\n\nThis way your carb stores are replinished and will keep off the muscle degrading.\n\nEdit: Ze Grammers", "The Atkins diet is not dangerous, IF you read the book and follow instructions.\n\nThe Atkins diet is commonly mis understood.\n\n1. He only reccomends you go on the no-carb(30-40 grams) for two weeks. This adjusts your body to ketosis and shows you that it will work. He tells you not to maintain this for more than two weeks as it can be dangerous. After the two weeks, you are to slowly add carbs to your diet until the ketosis stops(they sell paper strips you urinate on to determine if ketosis is happening). Once you have found the level of carbs that stops your ketosis, you back your carbs off just slightly to maintain ketosis and you will continue to lose weight. Once you have hit your weight level(this is a slow weight loss process not fast as it happened in the first two weeks) you add just enough carbs to maintain your weight.\n\nMost people are not satisfied with the slow weight loss and extend the two weeks beyond what is recommended. That is what makes it dangerous.\n\nThe reason the diet got a bad wrap in the media is he is strongly against any processed foods. That includes processed flour and sugar.\n\nBoth of these products take the natural product and extract only the bad parts, taking out all the fiber and other healthy stuff the natural product provides. It takes 3 feet of whole sugar cane to produce 1 teaspoon of sugar for example(I have tried to find the correct numbers with no luck, but this is an example of what I am trying to say). This is the same with processed flour. He hated any products that were processed.\n\nWhen you start increasing your carbs you are to stay away from any processed foods. This includes almost any breads and cereals you buy at the store. Instead you are to get these carbs from fruits and green vegetables. this is the part almost everyone ignores since you just about can't find anything that isn't processed in our regular grocery stores. \n\nThe other thing about the diet few people understand is high fat high protein diets also reduce how much you eat. When was the last time you ate an entire bag of chips as opposed to the last time you ate a dozen boiled eggs? fats and proteins take longer to digest than carbs and thus you stay full longer. This also helps to reduce your intake.\n\nI was on the diet when I was younger, I read the book and I was one of the ones that extended the \"no carb\" period, but I knew that I was incorrectly following the diet. If you read the book you will get a better understanding of how it works. Feel free to ask if you have any questions.", "No five year old is going to read all of these long responses. Let's be realistic here. I want a TL;DR option. ", "Here's a pretty huge oversimplification of it.\n\nFirst you enter stage one known as Induction. Basically you eat meat and veggies until you lose enough weight to comfortably enter stage 2\n\nStage 2 is known as Ongoing weight loss. In this stage you start adding more foods that have carbohydrates in them which you were restricted from in stage 1, such as fruit. Also dairy products. A carbohydrate is a sugar or starch.\n\nStage 3 is Pre-maintenance. In this stage you add even more carbohydrates back in, but still weight can be lost.\n\nStage 4 is Lifetime Maintenace. At this point you can eat pretty much any food except for stuff like refined sugars. Generally people eat around 100g of carbs a day at this point.\n\nAnd this diet is not dangerous.", "_URL_0_\nHe didn't die because of the diet.", "Atkins died from slipping on icy pavement at the age of 73", "Generally not an ideal diet to be on for a long time, however for fat-loss purposes it is fine. That is key here, I am going to talk about this in the sense of FAT-loss being the goal, not weight loss. Those are NOT the same things.\n\nWhen you go on Atkins Diet at first you will feel sluggish and like you cant think very well. That is because you are not eating carbs/sugars that your brain needs. As you start to eat more fat and produce ketones(free fatty acids) your body goes into ketosis, a process where your body relies on fat for you daily energy needs and not carbohydrates.\n\nBenefit 1: Stable energy levels throughout your day since there is no sugar spikes disrupting your glucose/insulin levels whenever you have a meal or snack.\n\nDanger 1: Possible sluggishness in the begining as you get adjusted to ketosis.\n\nMost of the weight you lose at first will be from water loss. You eat less carbs, which means less glycogen for your muscles and glycogen helps retain water in your muscles.\n\nHowever as you get well into ketosis your body will start to burn fat for normal day to day usage this means your fat stores will also go down, given enough time.\n\nBenefit 2: You will lose fat...eventually. Give it a few weeks to see it in the mirror.\n\nDanger 2: Stop the diet after initial water loss and immidiately put that water weight back on and think that the dies doesn't work. This is because you are judging by weightloss rather than FATloss. Judge by the mirror not the scale.\n\nNow the really important part noone understands. Atkins diet is catabolic. You eat way less calories than you need throughout the day and your body will be burning off body energy stores. Including fat AND protein. Meaning muscles. Your muscles are only tapped for energy once you have been on Atkins for a while. So at first there is no danger of losing muscle.\n\nDanger 3: Prolonged use WILL cause muscle loss as well as fat loss.\n\nHow to use Atkins and avoid MUSCLE-loss and maximize FAT-loss?\n(Note: We are not even considering the term WEIGHTloss as that is misinterpreted. Most people want to lose fat not hard earned muscle.)\n\nSimple:\n1. Exercise\n2. Cycle a day of carbs at the end of every week.\n\nBasically 5-6 days of atkins/ketosis\nThen 1-2 days of Normal eating.\n\nThis way your carb stores are replinished and will keep off the muscle degrading.\n\nEdit: Ze Grammers", "The Atkins diet is not dangerous, IF you read the book and follow instructions.\n\nThe Atkins diet is commonly mis understood.\n\n1. He only reccomends you go on the no-carb(30-40 grams) for two weeks. This adjusts your body to ketosis and shows you that it will work. He tells you not to maintain this for more than two weeks as it can be dangerous. After the two weeks, you are to slowly add carbs to your diet until the ketosis stops(they sell paper strips you urinate on to determine if ketosis is happening). Once you have found the level of carbs that stops your ketosis, you back your carbs off just slightly to maintain ketosis and you will continue to lose weight. Once you have hit your weight level(this is a slow weight loss process not fast as it happened in the first two weeks) you add just enough carbs to maintain your weight.\n\nMost people are not satisfied with the slow weight loss and extend the two weeks beyond what is recommended. That is what makes it dangerous.\n\nThe reason the diet got a bad wrap in the media is he is strongly against any processed foods. That includes processed flour and sugar.\n\nBoth of these products take the natural product and extract only the bad parts, taking out all the fiber and other healthy stuff the natural product provides. It takes 3 feet of whole sugar cane to produce 1 teaspoon of sugar for example(I have tried to find the correct numbers with no luck, but this is an example of what I am trying to say). This is the same with processed flour. He hated any products that were processed.\n\nWhen you start increasing your carbs you are to stay away from any processed foods. This includes almost any breads and cereals you buy at the store. Instead you are to get these carbs from fruits and green vegetables. this is the part almost everyone ignores since you just about can't find anything that isn't processed in our regular grocery stores. \n\nThe other thing about the diet few people understand is high fat high protein diets also reduce how much you eat. When was the last time you ate an entire bag of chips as opposed to the last time you ate a dozen boiled eggs? fats and proteins take longer to digest than carbs and thus you stay full longer. This also helps to reduce your intake.\n\nI was on the diet when I was younger, I read the book and I was one of the ones that extended the \"no carb\" period, but I knew that I was incorrectly following the diet. If you read the book you will get a better understanding of how it works. Feel free to ask if you have any questions.", "No five year old is going to read all of these long responses. Let's be realistic here. I want a TL;DR option. ", "Here's a pretty huge oversimplification of it.\n\nFirst you enter stage one known as Induction. Basically you eat meat and veggies until you lose enough weight to comfortably enter stage 2\n\nStage 2 is known as Ongoing weight loss. In this stage you start adding more foods that have carbohydrates in them which you were restricted from in stage 1, such as fruit. Also dairy products. A carbohydrate is a sugar or starch.\n\nStage 3 is Pre-maintenance. In this stage you add even more carbohydrates back in, but still weight can be lost.\n\nStage 4 is Lifetime Maintenace. At this point you can eat pretty much any food except for stuff like refined sugars. Generally people eat around 100g of carbs a day at this point.\n\nAnd this diet is not dangerous.", "_URL_0_\nHe didn't die because of the diet." ]

[ "Bulgaria managed to save all its jews (don't remember any details, but that's what we're thaught in school anyways :) ) ", "Hungary was a bit of an unruly ally. We joined the war in 1941, the prime minister tried to stay out of it as long as possible, but certain circles wanted nothing else but to finally be on the \"winning side\". We partook in the invasion of Yugoslavia (not much combat, but it was a great spectatcle when hungarian troops marched in and reclaimed lost territories) and the initial invasion of SU (not that big of a participation).\n\nThe next years the germans wanted more and more. Hungarian armies were mobilized and directly helped their german allies in many battles, for example Stalingrad, where a whole hungarian army was decimated during the russian encirclement.\n\nAfter the failed attempt to leave the war, the hungarian fascists took over and the war turned into desperate mode. The last remnants of the army fought while the country was turned into a battlefield. Meanwhile nearly half a million ethnicities were deported. (the local law enforcement agencies did most of the work with great speed)\n\nAnd to answer the question. Yes, the population pretty much supported everything. Why? The scars of 1920 were still pretty freash in people's minds, and Hitler was the only politician who was willing to atleast hear us out. And well, the politics in Hungary was very right winged at the time, not a big suprise considering the close proximity of Germany." ]

[ "Well, these are two \"recent\" examples\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n- Apart from that, just google \"Shortest wars\" - which will give you a lot of fitting examples.", "Mexico in the Mexican-American War (1846-48) is a pretty striking example. \n\nThe Mexican military hadn't been able to contain the Indian (Navajo, Appache and Comanche) raids across the entire north of the country. Since Independence was won in 1821 the country had also been in a state of political flux, with frequent turnovers of Presidents and was on the verge of civil war.\n\nHardly the ideal time to rattle the sabre and start a territory war with the U.S.", "I would say that it is more complicated than a country just rushing into a war that it can't win. There is a third alternative to just winning or not winning. That alternative is the stronger country not wanting to fight. There is no way that Hitler should have been able to occupy the Sudetenland or take any of those first countries. Britain and France could have and should have smashed him. They did not so his gamble worked. \n\nWhen Iraq invaded Kuwait, Saddam assumed that no one would oppose him. He knew that his military would be crushed in a conflict but was betting on no conflict happening. His gamble did not work. ", "[The War of the Triple Alliance](_URL_0_) in South America.\n\nBasically (it is a very complex subject that deserves reading up on) Argentina and Brazil meddle in Uruguay one too many times for Paraguay's taste, and it boils over into war. Paraguay is pretty seriously unmatched, but the war doesn't end until the vast majority of their male population is killed in the war.", "I'd suggest the War of the Triple Alliance.\n\nIn 1864, Brazil, with tacit support from Argentina, intervened in a Uruguayan civil war. The intervention was largely successful, and the faction Brazil favored gained effective control of Uruguay.\n\nAt which point, Paraguay intervened against Brazil, with Argentina and Uruguay entering the fray shortly afterwards.\n\nThe war lasted until 1870, and is generally thought to be the most destructive modern war in per capita terms, with many estimates suggesting that 90% of Paraguay's male pre-war population and 60% of its overall pre-war population were killed either directly or indirectly.\n\nI really don't know too much more than that, but it certainly seems like a contender as an answer to your question.", "Argentina over the Falklands (Maldives) come to mind. Great Britain trounced them and the Argentinians attempt to use the war to whip up nationalism failed as well. ", "The Uganda–Tanzania War is a good example. Idi Amin ruined his country then attacked another In hopes of looting enough to keep going. His meddling caused his undisciplined army to quickly lose. Then he challanges the elderly Tanzanian president to a boxing match. \n_URL_0_", "Admittedly it stretches the boundaries of the word \"war\" but the Emu War of 1932 involved the Australian army trying to help local farmers cull a large amount of emus. After about a month the military withdrew and decided to get out of the emu killing business altogether.\n\nThe weather that year forced an absurdly large number of Emus into western farm land, and the ill prepared farmers reached out to the government for assistance. The minister of defense sent in Major G.P.W. Meredith who brought with him a small amount of soldiers, two Lewis Automatic Machine Guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. The first attempt involved killing about 50 emus. \n\nAfter a second attempt of \"campaigning\" Meredith issued a report claiming to have killed 986 birds (out of an estimated 20,000) using exactly 9860 bullets.\n\nIn his report Meredith had this to say: \"If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds, it would face any army in the world. They could face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks\"\n\nSummarizing the culls, ornithologist Dominic Serventy commented:\n“\tThe machine-gunners' dreams of point blank fire into serried masses of Emus were soon dissipated. The Emu command had evidently ordered guerrilla tactics, and its unwieldy army soon split up into innumerable small units that made use of the military equipment uneconomic. A crestfallen field force therefore withdrew from the combat area after about a month.\"", "The War of the League of Cambrai. Venice vs the Papal States, France, Spain, the HRE and later England.\n\nVenice won." ]

[ "The Voyager probes. Unfortunately, while they may last billions of years, the chance of an intelligent civilization finding them is *very* remote.", "There are actually a number of books and documentaries that have popped up. According to 1 or 2 documentaries on the history channel, the pyramids would out live our plastics. Even those, however, would be ground down to nothing by erosion after a couple hundred million years. NatGeo also did one, and you can watch it [here.](_URL_0_). \n\nI thought it was very interesting that they said plastics aren't quite as permanent as we think they are. They won't actually stay solid objects for thousands of years. Maybe only a couple hundred, if i am remembering that documentary correctly. \n\nYou might also want to look at this book. _URL_1_", "Porcelain if in a geologically stable area could last buried for a very long time. It's pretty much impossible to be certain of anythings integrity over a billion years though.", "U-235 and U-238 have halflives on the order of a billion year. If you have nuclear fuel of any kind, it will still be measureable for a handful of billions of years. ESPECIALLY if it is highly enriched Uranium, that would be noticable for ......basically forever, I think.", "The history channel did something sweet about this. \n\n_URL_1_\n\nEdit: Heres the [link](_URL_0_) to the full youtube version. \n\n", "I doubt mount rushmore will be recognizable after a billion years, but in the fossil record there will be a massive, unexplained extermination event that killed off thousands of species. That will be our monument.", "Well that flag on the moon isn't going anywhere." ]

[ "If you are a volcano, yes. \n\nIn fact, if you are a big enough volcano, and you blow up all at once rather than gradually letting out magma and pressure, you can make a sound that travels around the world several times. \n\nEdit: The loudest sound documented in historic times was the explosions of Krakatoa, which sounded as cannons being fired to people 5000 kilometres away, and caused a measurable pressure change travelling the world three and a half times over the course of five days. On the first pass it was powerful enough to cause a change in sea level in the English channel. \n\nPrior to human history, or humanity in general evolving, we see evidence of several explosions that would make Krakatoa seem like a firecracker. ", "No. Sounds come from vibrating matter, which requires energy. Each next vibration is slightly less because there us less energy to make it. Say it took 100E (for energy, trying to Eli 5 this after all) to make a person a metre away hear it perfectly. To make a person 2 metres away hear it the same volume might take 1000E and 3 metres 10000E! The further back the person is, the exponentially greater the energy is needed (it's not this ratio, obviously). " ]

[ "Attempt to get holiday volunteer gigs at your local museum as soon as possible. ", "If you're interested in pursuing Roman history, do what no one at uni will tell you to do until later, and take as much Latin as you can. Our standard (for me at Sydney Uni, it's two junior subjects) for honours qualification is generally far below the rest of the world, so you'd be disadvantaged on the increasingly global post grad circuit. That said, widespread reliance on the Classics is decreasing as more reliable and accessible translations of texts become available on the net. However, a history degree isn't just a gateway into academia, and it teaches you writing, research and source analysis skills that are useful in almost every field", "If you want to do Roman, you won't find anything here. History jobs around here revolve around archaeological/anthropological work with Aboriginal grave sites, or, more often than not, sorting sea-shells from coastal camps. \n\nA friend of mine did her Masters in Archaeology, majoring in Indig. studies and got work as part of a large civil engineering company as a field archaeologist. The work was pretty good and she got to travel a lot - every build site required 2 or 3 trenches to be dug, soil samples and stuff sorted just in case they found something. Before that, she worked for Indigenous Affairs Victoria...mainly in an office but also dealing with a lot of elder councils in regards to zoning, planing and building permits, etc. " ]

[ " > it doesn't make much sense that your body would make you gasp for breathe when the logical choice would be to not breathe in.\n\nNot really addressing what this response is, whether or not it happens to all humans, and what causes it: remember that we humans are just tall, bipedal apes who like all other lifeforms on this planet are products of evolution.\n\nAnd evolution does not reward that which is perfect. That \"makes sense\" or is \"logical\". Only that which is *\"eh, that's good enough\"*. To get enough members of a species to breeding age to pass on their genes, to evade their predators and find sufficient food to pass an environment's selection process. Everything alive today has passed that brutal filter. Everything that didn't is very, VERY dead.\n\nSo the follow up question would be, *would the urge to inhale on encountering very cold water be a selective pressure that would prevent a large number of organisms from reaching breeding maturity?*\n\nAnd the answer to that question is certainly *no*.\n\nEspecially considering our species, homo sapiens, originated on the continent of Africa where freezing cold water sources would have been non-existent.", "The reflex to inhale when exposed to a colder temperature is to stimulate the newborn's first breath after delivery.\n\n(I cant find sources though. I think it was two germans who tried to map all reflexes and that was their conclusion.) I dont know if it still holds water.\n\nAnd I fully agree with /u/sovietwomble that this is more beneficial than to not have it. In some cases it might be a disadvantage though. Just that the pros outweighs the cons." ]

[ "According to Newtonian mechanics, by arranging a bunch of black holes in a circle the gravitational forces will be minimized in the center due to the extreme and equal outward pull of the gravitational forces along the circumference. A better arrangement would be a hollow sphere of black holes, ensuring net gravitational pull of zero in all dimensions rather than just the plane of the circle. According to Einstein's [Theory of Relativity](_URL_0_), higher gravitational forces make time go more slowly compared to an observer who is experiencing less of a gravitational force, and vice versa. So, compared to an observer on the circumference of the circle, time would be passing more quickly for an observer in the center of the circle. This isn't a matter of perspective: clocks measure irreversible time discrepancies. ", "This may seem like a very mundane question but I would like to expand my knowledge a lot more than it is. What are we basing time off of in the first place?" ]

[ "I've observed rain falling at a rate of 3 inches per hour before over a long period of time many years ago during a hurricane. That unit is without respect to area. Over 1 square mile that is [ 63360 (inches per mile) x 63360 x 3 ] = ~2,350,000 cubic feet of water per square mile per hour. Yes, clouds are big enough. Clouds are only the visible (condensed) water vapor. There's much more water that's invisible in the air itself in gas phase. Rainfall has been recorded falling at rates MUCH higher than 3 inches per hour many times, but it's quite rare. [many records indicate 15+inches per hour occur over brief time spans in very small areas]", "There is a record of a [34 inch rainfall event over 12 hours](_URL_0_) in Smethport, Pennsylvania on July 18, 1942. \n\nIt has also been claimed that 15.78\" of rain fell at Sahngdu in Inner Mongolia on July 3, 1975 in one hour; but that observation is poorly documented.\n\nI suppose those could would have to do as far as historically verifiable upper limits go.\n\nWhen you talk of clouds \"maxing out\" on their carrying capacity, you've got to remember that most rain is formed when hot moist air rises. This cools that hot and water saturated air, thus decreasing it's carrying capacity (as the solubility of water vapor in the atmosphere decreases as temperature goes down). To \"max out\", as you say, the intensity of the rainfall, you have to get the hottest and wettest air possible to rise and cool as rapidly as possible.", "In the hydrologic sciences we have observed maximums, but our observation techniques (radar, satellite, rain gauge) all have their own associated measurement errors. Theoretically, there is not a defined upper bound. Instead we characterize rainfall rate distributions using a probability distribution. An exponential distribution is a simple distribution that is commonly used, and it does not have an upper bound, although the very high values would be very unlikely. \n\nAs air temperature rises, the air can \"hold on to\" more water vapor. If the air was hot enough, and cooled very quickly, theoretically it could precipitate all of its water all at once, resulting in a very high rain rate. ", "Here is a link to a blog by Chris Burt from Weather Underground regarding rainfall rate records. [link](_URL_1_)\n\n[And a handy chart.] (_URL_0_)", "Civil engineers may use a \"probable maximum precipitation\" which is like what you have described. This rate differs from location to location, and is dependent on factors like local weather and geography. In the US, the [National Weather Service](_URL_0_) has documents that describe this rate for different regions. As mentioned by /u/GreenTeaForDays and the paper below, there are alternate ways of describing the maximum rate using probability distributions.\n\n_URL_1_", "Let's assume we start with a mass of air covering one square kilometer and extending to the top of the atmosphere, and that it's at 100% humidity at a very high temperature, say 40 degrees.\n\n40 degree air holds 50g water per kg of air.\n\nAt atmosphere of pressure is 101kPa, which means a column of air of 1m^2 weighs about 10^4 kg, so our 1km^2 air mass weighs 10^10 kg. Therefore it holds 5x10^11 g water.\n\nThat's 5x10^8 L, or 5x10^5 m^3 , which is enough to cover 1 km^2 to a depth of 0.5m.\n\nSo if we have a mass of fully saturated atmosphere, and dumped all the rain out at once, we would get 50cm of rain. \n\nNote that if the fully saturated atmosphere is 50 degrees instead, that roughly doubles the carrying capacity and we can get 100cm of rain.\n\nThe only question left is how quickly can we do that? I'll leave that to someone more qualified.", "Engineer here. What you're referring to is the \"Probable Maximum Precipitation\". Civil Engineers typically design to protect the public during a 100-yr storm event (ie: a 1% chance of occurrence per year) and sometimes a 500-yr storm event (0.2% chance), there are mathematical models, however, that can theoretically estimate just how much rain can physically occur. Further information here [NOA PMP](_URL_0_)", "Woo, it's good to be a hydrologist sometimes!\n\nWhat you're referring to is called probable maximum precipitation (PMP). It's a theoretical maximum that's used for the design of dams and other things that would necessarily need to know something like that.\n\nThe short answer is: There is no short answer. It's very location dependent. The way that we do it is basically by maximizing everything that goes into rainfall (lift, available moisture, etc.) and then running a model and seeing what comes out. We basically turn the model up to 11. But that varies depending on where you are. Some places just don't have the lift source that others do, or the available moisture in the air.\n\nHere are some references if you wanna get detailed about it.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBut since we're all looking for numbers, the maximum *rate* is incredibly high, in the tens of inches per hour. However, it quickly becomes a question of how long that rate can keep up. Rain sucks energy and moisture out of the air. It can't just keep raining like that forever, so there's a maximum instant rate, a max 1-hr total, max 3-hr total, and so on out to a couple of days. ", "The question can't be definitively answered. If you could control all variables at will you could get a 1x1x1 mile sheet of water to fall at once. You'd just need enough cloud cover and to change the temperature fast enough to instantly condense all of it to water. Obviously something like that would be practically impossible.\n\nHowever, a maximum actual rainfall is beyond our ability to usefully calculate. There's lots of answers in here with suppositions about terrain channeling or other enhancing factors, but at that point everyone is just guessing about random things. \n\nIf you want to know the maximum rainfall rate (mm of rain/unit of time/unit of area) that is possible in naturally occurring conditions your best bet is to look at the historical answers people are posting. Anything else is going to be a thought experiment that is both going to be highly dubious in terms of considering all relevant variables and totally baseless in terms of whether their assumptions are possible.\n\nIn addition, the measured area is a very important characteristic that you can't just offhandedly say 1x1 miles or something. If you went small enough you could have 1 drop land there and have a rainfall of hundreds of meters of rain per second per square meter. Obviously that's a misleading result. I think the better way to think about it is, how fast can a cloud condense. This gets to the heart of the matter, how fast can rain be generated, without needing to consider anything else. \n\nI don't have time to look up atmospheric values and consult my psychrometric tables, but I'm sure someone here could perform such a calculation by making some reasonable assumptions.", "Well I don't know about on earth, but you could theoretically have a planet whose atmosphere was composed of super critical H2O then have it cool. The atmosphere would exit the critical phase and become liquid water. If the entire atmosphere were like this though then it would be a lot less like rain and more like an amorphous hovering blob of water whose edges were fuzzy as it bordered on the critical point. It wouldn't really fall because the atmosphere would have approximately the same density as the water and it would be constantly entering and exiting liquid phase as the temperature and pressure shifted locally. ", "The thing you're asking for is called \"[Probable Maximum Precipitation](_URL_0_)\" and is defined for different areas and time periods. The shortest period and smallest area you're going to get an answer for is 6 hours and 10 mi^2, respectively. \n\nThe numbers are remarkably high - for the northern midwest the 24-hour 10 mi^2 PMP is on the order 30\", which is near the mean annual rainfall. For comparison, the 100-year 24-hour storm in the same region is roughly 7\". \n\nWhat controls the PMP is that there is nowhere near that much moisture in the atmosphere at any given time - from the earth's surface to the top of the atmoshere at any given point there's only enough moisture, roughly, to create 1 inch of rain. So to get more than that you have to transport moisture in from the oceans, and the air currents that carry that moisture only move so fast. \n\nThe link above will lead you to information on how these figures are estimated - it's complicated. " ]

[ "Im not aware of a ton of work in this area, but one guy who is sorta studying this is Gilden at UT Austin. Though he mostly focuses on the nature of musical \"groove\". It's a bit of a new line for him, but he talks briefly about it on his site (_URL_0_). The guy is crazy smart though, so if you're interested keep up with him. Used to be an astrophysicist trained by a nobel laureate before switching to psychology. As for pop science, you might check out an Oliver Sacks book called Musicophilia if you haven't already. Also, there's this scientific american article from a while back, ( _URL_1_ ). I dunno how particular an answer you're looking for, but hopefully something there will interest you more than being called a dumb fuck.", "Some of it has to do with [consonance and dissonance](_URL_0_).", "I'm not sure how well versed in music you are, but the primary difference between a major and minor scale is the 3rd note of that scale. Most of the others stay the same (the rules changing depending on the type of minor scale, but that is more of a music theory question than a psychology question). \n\nSo let us focus a second on the third note of the scale. Basic chords are made up of the root note, the third (be it major or minor), and the 5th. In a well tuned instrument, the 5th has a pitch ratio of 3:2, meaning that for every 3 vibrations of the upper note, the lower note will vibrate two. This creates a generally pleasing effect as the waves that make up these notes restart at the same place every 6 cycles. \n\nNow we look at the major 3rd, which has a pitch ratio of 5:4, which is also pleasing as we hear a sync with the root every 20 vibrations. The minor 3rd, which has a pitch ratio of 6:5, is somewhat less pleasing. \n\nSo you may be asking what this has to do with speech. In normal conversation, the notes our voice makes are rarely larger than an octave. In fact, most speech is within a half octave range (I don't have a source for this, sorry). That means that in order to convey meta-information, we must listen to the subtleties of voice inflection. One who is sad is less likely to add emphasis to certain non-monosyllabic words, thus dropping the pitch, raising the pitch ratio, etc. etc.\n\nThink of Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, and the way he says his name. I'm sure if you say it his way, and then say it as if you were happy to be saying the name, you'd be dropping a major 3rd rather than a minor 3rd. \n\nWe have become quite adept at picking out these subtleties. Here's a paper on how good we actually are: _URL_0_\n\nSorry if this is a bunch of disjoint ideas. Hopefully it helps!", "I highly recommend Dr. Daniel J. Levithin's *This is your Brain on Music.* ", "A *lot* of this is cultural, but some of it is related to physics of sound. \n\nBrushing aside a ton of stuff and zeroing in on western equal-tempered stuff, and then over-simplifying to boot...\n\nA real-world \"note\" produced by an instrument or voice has an infinite sequence of harmonic overtones (you can think of them as \"higher notes\" simultaneously produced by fractional vibrations of the air or wood or string or whatever). Smaller \"fractions\" are the most prominent ones (1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, etc...)\n\nCertain intervals in the 12-tone scale correlate \"perfectly\" (or at least very closely) with prominent harmonics of the root note (perfect fifths and fourths, octaves). These are \"neutral\" and sound neither major nor minor, they just sound sort of consonant and \"reinforcing\" of the sonic texture of the root note.\n\nOther intervals do not correlate to any of the prominent harmonics and sound obviously \"dissonant\" (flatted 2nd, tritone, etc). These again do not sound obviously major nor minor without context, just dissonant and \"unnatural\" and jarring. \n\nNow, there are other intervals (especially thirds) that are close to but not quite right on top of prominent harmonics. The major third is slightly sharp of the \"perfectly\" consonant interval that an untrained ear \"expects\", and the minor third is slightly more flat of the same \"blue note\" or \"perfect third\" that doesn't quite exist on the scale, but that does in nature (sort of). \n\nAs a result, a major chord or passage with a major third suggests a rising pitch, which is a sonic effect we associate with approaching things, excited speech, eagerness, and rising volume. \n\nOTOH, a minor chord, with it's \"flat\" interval, suggests receding sound, decaying sound, and quiet or somber speech. \n\nPart of these associations are due to things like doppler effects and the way that frequency perception changes with volume and distance, and part is related to how speech patterns reflect emotion (which might in turn be related to the former). \n\nFar more importantly, music creates its own impressions and expectations. Progressions and intervals might suggest certain physical phenomena or speech patterns, but they also suggest other songs and melodies you have heard or known, and the associations you have with them. \n\nFor an interesting example of how these kinds of associations and sonic effects interact with the emotional content of a piece of music, try playing [\"Happy Birthday to You\" in minor](_URL_0_), it sounds like a dirge, or something sinister and fatal. ", "i actually did a paper on this for one of my college courses. It was very interesting to see that while some is obviously based off of culture and where you are in the world how you are conditioned to react to certain types of sounds (example: jaws music putting you on edge) a lot of seems to be for lack of better words \"pre-programmed\". There were extensive studies done with with babies reacting to certain sounds like perfect fifths positively so i think there's something in that", "Part of it may have to do with the fact that we are constantly processing scales. Not musical scales, but all sorts of scales. What is a scale? It associates, etymologically, with climbing, and has a general meaning of a kind of traversing and measurement. We are constantly scaling: we view the face of another and \"scale up and down\" the person, their body, their face. We scale stairs: starting, we make our way up or down. We constantly measure, and that measure has a \"scale\" to it: a sense of things across, up and down, etc. We even \"measure\" situations in various ways. We scale our speech, step it up or down, etc. The issue is to draw the connection between the musical scale as such, which will be mentioned in light of your question and is not hard to see, and the scaling we do all the time. \n\nSo take the sense of \"scale\" in a kind of expanded sense that includes a few basic features: a measurement and span, roughly. So just how much of this \"scaling\" do we do? The question is more like: when *aren't* we in an \"scale\" of some kind? Look at any situation you're in and ask yourself where there is a \"traversing measurment\" involved. Whether it's walking to the coke machine or ambling slowly to someone you need to say something uncomfortable to, we're always scoping out and being in some degree of placement, commencement, passage through, etc., various \"things\", all sorts of things. Any \"thing\" in the physical sense has a \"scale\" in it: looking across the thing from left to right, or up and down, etc. Little moments and broad passages. A week is a kind of scale: seven days, one to the next, with a sense of middle, then TGIF, then the weekend, you name it, there's a \"scale\", a line, a measurement in it, a traversing or possible traversing. \n\nSo we have a constant cognitive mechanism of engagement with scales. So when we hear scales, we have a big serious of operations going on that get sparked and engaged. It's on this basis that musical scales have meaning for us, I think. Also, it seems important to include in this internal scales and balances: so we're constantly in scales within ourselves, in our emotions/feelings, though how \"scaling\" as such occurs in this seems a little harder in some was to see, in other ways not. Some comments have mentioned the \"up and down\" of the voice, the natural range of speaking, and how we traverse that range and have predilections for parts of that range, how we are primed to meaning on the basis of placement in that range. \n\nSo you can go on about how the musical scale has signal points, such as the median or 3, which can be high or low, with implications. And that's all true enough, but it seems quite important to realize that we are involved in scales all the time, as I suggested and not just when hearing music. Is there a do-re-mi of the face? Kind of, yes. And of every sentence in this comment, in a way. \n\nSo then the question is: What happens when a musical scale comes into contact with the \"scaling human\". It sets off all kinds of associations. Or can." ]

[ "In my mind, Hannibal was unquestionably one of the greatest military commanders of all time, comparing favorably against both Alexander the Great and Pyrrhus of Epirus, who he ranked ahead of himself.\n\nHannibal successfully led his army from Iberia into Italy, at a time that such a thing was considered impossible such that he audaciously appeared in the midst of the enemy when they least expected it, and subsequently defeated the two major Roman armies in the field.\n\nFrom there, he sustained a campaign in the heartland of his enemies' territory for *fifteen years* virtually cut off from any assistance by the motherland. In doing this, he presided over a multi-ethnic army that must surely have spoken a dozen languages, made up of different people that each had their own agendas and prejudices towards not only Rome but also other components of his army.\n\nRanged against him was the might of the Roman war machine, with its highly motivated and qualitatively excellent soldiers, able to continually replenish losses without ever a thought towards peace. It was Hannibal's misfortune to be fighting the Romans, when any other people in the world would have surely sued for peace a dozen times over.\n\nAnd even so, the Roman's ultimate answer for Hannibal was simply to avoid fighting him. That the most relentless country in the world would have adopted this attitude at all, towards Hannibal alone (never against Pyrrhus, or the Cimbri) is perhaps the most fitting tribute you could bestow upon Hannibal Barca.\n\nAgainst Hannibal, I'd only place Caesar himself as a greater commander because the latter sustained similar circumstances - a campaign lasting years and years amidst a hostile country with little support from the motherland. Even though Caesar was ultimately successful, you can't help but observe that *he* at least had the advantage of fighting with a highly homogenous, effective army against opposition that was oftentimes militarily ineffective. For Hannibal, the circumstances were often exactly reversed.\n\nI would say that of all the generals of antiquity, Hannibal consistently did the most with the least, sustained battle the longest, and won the most undying enmity - and respect - of his greatest adversary.", "Hannibal's reputation stems primarily from the school of military history which subscribes to the idea that war is primarily a series of battles, and that the victor is the side that won the most battles. In this regard Hannibal was an extremely successful general who won many battles, most notably Cannae which was Rome's single greatest battlefield defeat in its entire history.\n\nThe problem is that war is not a series of battles and victories. It is ultimately a contest of nations, and nations are ultimately powered by their economy; and the economy in turn is directed by politics (which at its core is about the government's attempt to parcel out limited resources). Rome may have lost most of its battles against Hannibal, but its economy and political power was much stronger which allowed them to replace their losses even when Hannibal was campaigning in their Italian heartland. By contrast Carthage as a nation was defeated when Scipio Africanus landed an army in Africa and defeated Hannibal in just a single battle at Zama. They simply could not replace their losses the same way the Romans did.\n\nThat said, the \"decisive battle\" school tends to hold Hannibal's strategy - which was to march across the Alps and bring the war to the Italian heartland - in high regard; as they believe the only way Carthage could have won was for Hannibal to bring his superior tactical skills to play and inflict a series of crushing defeats on the Romans until their power base was destroyed. And as noted by other posts, there is a debate whether this meant actually capturing Rome or breaking Rome's hold over other Italian cities. \n\nI instead offer an entirely different view point: I believe Hannibal's invasion of Italy was a grave strategic miscalculation from the outset.\n\nIt bears remembering that the purpose of war is _not_ necessarily the complete destruction of the opposing state. \"Total war\" - involving the complete destruction of the enemy state - is a rarity and not the norm. By invading Italy and threatening the Roman heartland Hannibal in fact drew Carthage into a total war situation, which was disastrous given the strategic disadvantages of Carthage. Hence, rather than being a brilliant \"solution\" that gave Carthage its best chance of winning, Hannibal's strategy in fact basically _destroyed_ any chance of Carthage remaining a major power by forcing it to fight an all-out battle against a superior opponent. Indeed by some accounts this was Hannibal's entire point - these accounts claiming he absolutely hated the Romans and wanted them destroyed as part of a long family grudge - except it never occurred to him that Carthage may end up destroyed because of his actions. \n\nMoreover, the march over the Alps was a tactical disaster in its own right. The Romans may have lost tens of thousands of soldiers in battle at Cannae, but Hannibal lost his own tens of thousands in the winter in the Alps. From a \"battles\" stand point Hannibal may have the higher \"score\", but from an overall _casualty_ standpoint his losses to the winter in the Alps pretty much erased any material lead he may have had.\n\nA stronger strategy for Hannibal would have been to remain on the defensive in Spain and Africa. He would not have lost so many men in the Alps, and his tactical skill would allow him to beat the Roman armies sent against him, especially since he would be fighting on friendly ground. This would hopefully erode Roman support for the war - particularly since they could not muster popular support against an existential threat in their heartland - until an equitable peace could be reached with the Romans. \n\nIn the end of such an alternate scenario Carthage would not have destroyed Rome, but it would have _survived_ and would not have simply been erased from history as was the case in the Third Punic Wars; at which point it was already powerless militarily.\n\nHence, Hannibal is a dangerous example. His strategy revolved around giving the military the best chance of winning _battles_, without considering the wider political and economic issues that would determine who would win the _war_. Indeed, it can be argued that Germany in the First World War - whose initial war plan was inspired in large part by Hannibal and Cannae - fell victim to this trap of creating a strategy that maximized the chance of winning battles without considering if these battles should have been fought in the first place.\n\nEdit: Clarifications." ]

[ "Because it lets you get one extra number per byte. \n\nIt's a stupid analogy but let's imagine that phones have just been invented, and we're giving out phone numbers, but the first model only lets you dial a single digit. So the inventor of the phone, naturally, his phone number is 1. He gives his girlfriend the phone number 2, dials her just by phoning 2. Someone else is 3, 4, 5, and so on. 9 people have phones now, and we say sorry, a phone system that lets you dial *two* digits is just crazy, only 9 phones allowed.\n\n\"But wait!\" you can say, \"Just give me the phone number 0. That's only one digit.\" It might seem weird to start counting from 0, but if we agree to use 0 as an index, we can have ten users instead of nine.\n\nIt's the same thing, basically. If you have 3 bits to represent a number, you can count 8 things if you call the first one zero, 7 things if you call the first one 1. A single byte can represent the numbers 0 through 255.\n\nNow you might wonder why we don't just have the computer subtract one from every number while programming, so that we can count from 1, and the computer will just turn that into 0 under the hood. It's totally possible to have a programming language do that. But then you have to decide in what situations it's going to do that and what situations it's not (because you obviously don't want to get 5 when a user has typed in 6), and remember those situations, and remember to deal with it when moving between them, and interact with stuff that doesn't do that -- and when bugs happen, you have to remember that the computer is tricking you by saying something is one number when it's actually another. It's just not worth the benefit, because counting starting at 0 is only weird for your first day in class, it's not hard to get used to.", "It's to do with pointer arithmetic.\n\nA pointer just tells you where in memory a list starts, and each item in the list follows on from the first. To get the first item, you look at where the pointer points. You add one to get to the next item.\n\nImagine it with house numbers. The pointer, says the list is at house number 133. To get the first item in the list, you look in 133 + 0. To get the next item in the list, it's 133 + 1 .... +2 +3 and so on.\n\n" ]

[ "Helps the editor know what scene they are dealing with afterwards. Especially important when they were recording onto film as rolls might get lost and or misplaced. Recording that information with the shot made things easier to work with.\n\nOh and the ‘clapper’ bit is used to help sync the sound and the picture.\n\nIt was such a critical job that I heard the director usually fired you on the spot if you got it wrong. Not sure how true this is though.", "The final, released sound in a movie or television show is not captured at the time of filming - lot of sound work is done in post production and added to the video afterward. The clapboard gives an easy way to sync the sound to the video when it's ready.", "They are easily identifiable \"markers\" for an editor. Traditional film ended up being a long reel, and finding out where to cut and splice together the clips that actually \"went to print\" was a process that clapboards made more efficient because they took up the whole frame, and also gave the actors a queue for when to begin. Now with digital film and editing, its still useful to find and label the takes one wants to use out of the raw footage, even if they may \"keep rolling\" in the case of a blooper.", "Back in the day the picture and sound were recorded separately and this gave a visible/audible point to synchronize them afterwards.", "It's an easy way to attach the metadata, and the clapper part itself makes it easy to synchronise the video and audio components.", "Helps the editor sync sound and video. Also displays I do such as act, scene and take. The editing process begins by sorting through everything on the camera roll or hard drive in a process called \"logging\". This info is essential to the logging process, which is essential to actually being able to edit without looking through a million random files to find the version of the scene you want to use.", "one of my first jobs in film making was 2nd AC, who is the person who clacks the slate.\n\nthey're used for a few reasons, one is because the clack is so sharp and causes such a spike in audio that's how you sync the audio with the video. notice the slate also has the scene and take number on it and other things as well, one of the reasons that stuff is written on it is so that the editor can see this and immediately know which take it is. and another reason is for the script supervisor, the scriptee, so that they can keep track of it and write all of the information about the scene and the take down, again to help the editor. :) to walk you through it step by step, the 2nd AC writes on the slate the date, director, title, take number, scene number, roll, filter, and MOS, (we always joked it stood for Mit Out Sound cause it means you're shooting with sound from a boom or LAVs instead of from the camera) and the scriptee writes down all of these things as well, they also take note of every detail of prop placement, wardrobe, director's notes, etc. so that the editing process is easier, you have all of the information right there, and you look at scriptee's notes and the first frame of the take and know immediately if that take is no good, or if just the last part is, or if one line is just slightly off, etc. honestly, although this isn't what your question is about, script supervisors are the real heroes of film making. I'm amazed by how organized they are and how much rides on their shoulders. one time we tried to skirt by without one and shot an entire day of close ups with part of the wardrobe missing on an actor and never even noticed.", "They do a bunch of important things.\n\nThey provide a synchronization between video and audio, with the sudden clap noise being the same no matter how far away the microphones are. In real life, a mic can be three or more frames difference between video and audio. (Sound travels about 1.1 feet per millisecond, or about 18 feet in one visual frame).\n\nThey provide color calibration and white balance. They aren't just random blobs of color. Cards have a gray scale from pure white to pure black, which allows for fixing color differences between sensitivity on different cameras. Even tiny lighting differences can result in different video results (like aperture differences to let in more/less light, white balance differences, sensitivity differences, etc). Variations between cameras can affect color in subtle ways. Since the boards have well-established values, it is a quick calibration for the software to make all the cameras produce visually similar results.\n\nThe shot information (scene number, take number, etc) on the board help editors know exactly where the clip belongs. They also say the information aloud before a shot.\n\nModern digital clapperboards have a fast-moving clock, which can be used to help correct (very slight) differences in recording speeds on different cameras. Like color correction, it's a feature that software can take advantage of for correcting variations between cameras.", "Hey there, I mix sound for film and tv. This is a part of my job.\n\nThe clapboard, which is called a \"slate\" is the old fashioned tried and true way of synching sound to video. The slate also has a lot of useful info regarding take, roll (if shooting film), frame rate etc on it which is displayed at the beginning of a take.\n\nThere are also 'smartslates' which are ubiquitous these days. The slate itself is synched to the audio timecode, and then displayed to assist with synch at the beginning of a take. With digital cameras, we also send timecode to the cameras when possible. \n\nIt's all about rendundancy. There's so much money on the line during production that rendundancy can save your ass. If you get into post and have to spend a shitload of time synching audio you may even be replacing with ADR after the fact, it can be a huge waste of money." ]

[ "A long exposure occurs when your have the sensor of a camera constantly sensing light. When a camera is controlled manually, one can choose how long the sensor is on, from 30 whole seconds, to 1/8000th of a second. So, say one has the camera sensing for 30 seconds. That means during this time all light that hits the sensor is being recorded. Now, since the camera is continually sensing light, one must compensate for the amount of light entering the sensor, otherwise it would just keep getting brighter until white. That's a bit more detailed which I can go into if needed. ", "_URL_0_ \nSlow mo guys filming the inner workings if a camera (SLR) at 10k frames per second. Does a really good job at showing the mechanical differences between short and long exposure, and why different amounts of light are needed for each. " ]

[ "Phenylalanine is an essential amino acid which means that you must get it from your food or you will start to have issues. You really only need to worry about it if you have a genetic disease like phenylketonuria.", "I'm more concerned about the sweeteners myself.", "not only is phenylalanine safe for consumption by normal people, it is *required*.", "Your headline is a little bit misleading, and as a result, I don't think anyone has actually addressed your concerns.\n\nWhile your interest was probably piqued by the can warning you that it contains phenylalanine, you don't have to directly worry about that. As long as you don't have PKU, a metabolic genetic disorder, you don't have to worry about consuming phenylalanine and impairing cognitive function--like drvitek said.\n\nWhat you're worried about is the artificial sweetener aspartame which is made using phenylalanine. It's generally recognized as safe, and you really shouldn't be uneasy about ingesting it if your only concern is getting cancer or another disease. That being said, I wouldn't recommend using it or any other artificial sweetener. Your gut epithelium actually contains taste buds, and these taste buds help regulate the secretion of insulin. Artificial sweeteners bind to the sweetness receptor in the gut--just like they do to your tongue--and may signal the body to release insulin, impeding weight loss.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nJust stick with water, man.", "Aspartame is made up of aspartic acid, phenylalanine and methyl ester.\n\nAnything that you consume that contains aspartame will have phenylalanine in it.\n\nI personally don't consume anything with aspartame in it. [Here's a good video that explains why](_URL_0_)" ]

[ "With electrical transformers when you step down the voltage you step up the current, and vice versa. The input is 0.2A but at 230 or 110v, while the output is at a much lower 5v but at a much higher current", "Because you need to differentiate between some key values:\n\nAmperage (Amperes/Amps, A) \nVoltage (Volts, V)\nWattage (Power, W)\n\nVolt * Amp = Watt\n\nLet's say that whatever you need to charge needs 12v - this means the output side of the charger must supply an amount of amps at 12v. The more amps, the faster the charge, but also the hotter and more volatile the charge.\n\nOn the input side, it may take for example 230A and draw a current of 0.05A. This equals 11,5W. In a perfect system, this would then be converted into 12V at 0.95A. In reality, there is some loss due to heat, so actual output will be significantly less.", "Imagine a pipe that has water going in and water going out, the water is going 30 mph when it goes in but 60 mph when leaving. How does it do this if there is the same amount of water leaving as entering? \n\nEasy the pipe is half as big on the out end meaning that half as much water but twice as fast. \n\n~~Current~~ Amps and voltage are like pipe diameter and flow rate. Current is the total amount of water flowing. \n\nEdit: fixed current vs amps. ", "Water is a great way to visualize how electricity works.\n\nImagine that you have a hose (without a nozzle) and you are watering your lawn. It's easy to reach the flowers and plants a few feet away. What do you do if you want to reach plants farther away? You put your thumb on the end of the hose to create a jet that shoots a smaller stream of water much farther. Your thumb restricted the flow (current), increasing the pressure (voltage), so that the water could travel further. \n\nThe AC adapter works in the exact opposite way. It takes 0.2 amps of current (flow) at 115 volts (pressure), and reduces the pressure to 5 or 9V depending on the phone. The decrease in pressure necessitates an increase in flow to 1.2A, to keep everything even, just like the hose example.", "You've noticed that the charger can cause the current to increase by a factor of six. But what is current anyway?\n\n\"Current\" is just the number of electrons flowing past a certain point in the wire in a certain amount of time. 0.2A is actually a LOT of electrons per second: more than there are grains of sand on a beach. These electrons flow into the charger from the wall socket, deposit their energy and then flow back out again, back into your wall socket. This deposited energy is what is used to make electrons on the charger's output wire flow. The electrons coming from input wire are all crammed together tightly and are under a lot of pressure to pass through your charger. On the other hand, the electrons on the output wire are more spread out and able to accept more electrons quite easily. So one input electron has enough energy to move about six output electrons.\n\nOK, but ***how*** does one input electron move six output electrons?\n\nWhen a current flows in a coil of wire, it makes a magnetic field around the wire. And when a magnetic field is made around a coil of wire, it makes a current flow in that wire. Your charger has two coils of wire, wound with each other so that they share their magnetic fields. The first coil, connected to the input of your charger, has lots of turns, so it's very hard to start pushing current into it. But in the first coil, because each electron has to go so many times in a circle to get through, one electron can create a large magnetic field. The second coil of wire has a lot fewer turns, so it's pretty easy to get current flowing in the second coil. But in the second coil, because each electron only has to go a few times around the circle, it takes many electrons to create the same magnetic field as the first coil. In this way, a few incoming electrons can get lots of output electrons to flow.\n\n**TLDR: a wire coil and an electric current can create a time-varying magnetic field which can be captured by another coil of wire. Lots of coil turns corresponds to less current.**" ]

[ "If your question is about how a single hard-drive, which is able to only put one piece of information in one place at one time, is able to somehow store 4 files at once, the answer is simply that it doesn't really. \n\nIf you slowed everything down, you'd see what is actually happening is that your HDDs are actually taking little chunks of each file and writing them to various locations on the hard drive one after the other. These little chunks can come from one file or multiple files.\n\nImagine it like going to an airport and going through baggage check. Your bag gets thrown on a conveyor belt with every other bag from every other passenger. Each bag, however, has an instruction on where it goes. Machines or people will look at each tag and route it to the right plane for its flight, but each bag is handled one at a time. If you sped it up, it would look like bags are being routed simultaneously, but that's just perception because of how quickly it was happening.", "The downloads themselves are split into thousands of tiny packages each, with are received one after another. The network controller of your computer opens these packages, sees which download they belong to and send the data inside to the right place of the memory.\n\nSince all downloads are being stored in the memory, they can be copied to the hard drive piece by piece, one after another." ]

[ "As long as a group is seen (or sees themselves) as an oppressed or disadvantaged minority, doing things to \"level the playing field\" or give them advantages are generally accepted. For the white (\"privileged\") class is frowned upon because it's assumed that they already have all of the advantages they need.\n\nOf course, neither of these things is necessarily true, but we're not a very rational species.", "They idea is that main stream culture is white. That since the majority of the population of the United States is White there is no need for special churches for them since all churches except for ones started by minorities are white. Mainstream news and entertainment is aimed at a white audience and uses largely white actors and reporters etc. The reason there are specific black churches and channels is to create a cultural space for black people in which there culture can be expressed and they can see themselves depicted media and religion. \n\nTldr. Mainstream society is white so black aimed TV and churches try to create a cultural space in which they feel represented.", "I think it is due mostly to the majority/minority relationship between white and black and that, historically, the white-only movements were overtly racist.\n\nIf you went to countries where whites were in the minority (Japan, Saudi Arabia, Africa), you would find places where white people collected and there would be no sense of exclusion, just people with something in common, like you find in a club. It would be due to their relatively small numbers, not to keep others out or down.", "The way I understand it is that minorities and disadvantaged groups were historically (and arguably still are, to some extent) seriously under-represented in mainstream culture. The existence of, for example, black- or women-only organisations is a way of addressing that problem, allowing people to do something without the views of the majority overriding their preferences.\n\nIt happens everywhere - you see 'gaijin bars' in Japan, or Chinese clubs and societies in western universities. Wherever you're a minority, there is motivation to get together and just do things with somebody who shares your culture. And this isn't generally necessary for somebody who is part of the majority, because their culture is expressed well in everyday life.", "This is just like when a child asks it's parents on father's/mother's day, why there isn't a \"children's day\". Because *every day* is children's day. Every month is white history month. Every TV channel is a white TV channel. \n\nBasically, there is no need to designate yourself if you belong to the status quo. It is already implied. Straight people don't have to have an antithesis to the rainbow sticker on our car because it is implied that most people are straight. Blacks are something like 13% of the US population. By default, there are already more white churches, more straight bars, more white tv channels, etc. ", "There *are* white churches, and white TV channels. You may not notice it if you're white, because you think of them as just \"regular\". Look, nobody's preventing white people from attending \"black\" churches or watching \"black\" TV channels. It's just that when most TV channels show relatively little content aimed at black audiences, and lots of content aimed at mostly white audiences, it's useful to have one channel that focuses on things black people want to see. Anyone can still watch them.", "As a white person, I have never felt like I was unwelcome at a black church, or i couldn't watch BET if I wanted. \n\nProducts marketed to specific races or ethnicities aren't a problem as long as they are not denigrating to other races or ethnicities.", "They don't have churches \"for black people\". They simply end up with very few whites ... when the culture is acknowledged to be African-American in nature. Some really do have consistently present whites, very few, who feel far more comfortable that way.\n\nHowever often black folks have no alternative to join white churches and build a life there. The culture is very much not an issue or a problem, and yet (at times) people at these white churches can feel there should be restrictions that are rule-based instead of simply attendance-by-choice." ]

[ "Interns are not **working** they are **learning**. It's an opportunity to learn about a job by being involved with it.", "UN treaties are really not the place to try to enfoce something like this. They have zero enforcement power., and really just serve as a prebuilt mechanism for large countries to try to get sanctions passed every now and then, if they want to. Also if violating it were really that much of an issue, a country could just pull out of the treaty. The place to stop this is at the national level, with laws that forbid it, and a Government that is interested in enforcing those laws. Trying to bring real change from UN actions is unwise.", "International conventions have absolutely no bearing on US law and no authority in the US. We are a sovereign nation. So appealing to them means nothing. \n\nAdditionally while there are laws regarding wages, and laws regarding slavery there is nothing that bans you from volunteer work. That is what unpaid internships are classified as. You are a volunteer, not a forced worker and as such are not by default entitled to any kind of pay. You also agree to this by taking the volunteer position. \n\nThat said, some States have heavily restricted what qualifies as an unpaid internship or outright banned them. But the specifics vary by State. ", "Legally, interns MUST be paid IF the business is benefitting from their labor in any way. An unpaid internship is supposed to be strictly educational, even to the *detriment* of the business that is helping you. (People spending time teaching you, etc)", "It's hard to force people to not volunteer their time for free. It's their time, they can do what they like with it, including (constitutionally protected) associate with other people. Including in relationships that involve work-like behavior.\n\nWho bans volunteers?", "1. In some places they are. \n\n2. You can think of it this way - The intern gets paid $X for their work. The intern then pays $X for training. \n\nI took on a few short, unpaid internships and they were crucial for helping me get stronger internships thereafter and launch my career. \n\nIf opportunities like that go away then it'll pretty much just be people who are born well connected who have a chance at class mobility. ", "You pay to go to school right?\n\nUnpaid internships are usually for people who have no real world experience and need to be taught on the job. You are paying for your education by working instead of paying.\n\nNow you have the skills you need to get a paying job where you work for money instead of education.\n\nThat's the process at least. Most unpaid internships are crap through, you work for free and they don't teach you anything. Make sure the internship is worth your time, or at least will be worth it on paper to get where you need to go." ]

[ "Related to your question, you might want to [review AskHistorian's section on why \"The Dark Ages\" is outdated as a term](_URL_0_). This means that people trying to answer the question might not be sure about what period you're describing unless you provide specific dates or more recent periodization (ie. \"Early Middle Ages\" or \"Late Antiquity\").", "And yet no one has answered the question. What did Western Europeans know about the earlier Roman Empire? Were they aware of its laws? It's language and culture? Did they feel less civilized than the earlier Romans? What did they regret? \n\nIt's worth noting that the Romans themselves had been Christians for a few hundred years, so had any later Europeans known this they might very well have felt more kinship to the Romans than you might think. \n\nIn any case, telling us that there was also a Byzantine Roman Empire in the East so that the Empire didn't really fall hardly addresses the OP's original question. There were in the West large numbers of people no longer under the authority of the western Roman Empire. What did they know of the earlier Roman Empire? And what did they think about it? ", "If the question pertains to what European (well Western European) people knew about Rome then we need to get into medieval ideas of history and more importantly one needs to understand the medieval notion of *translatio*. Also since \"the dark ages\" is a notoriously vague term, I'm going to discuss primarily the 12th century.\n\nOn the first issue, when we ask what Medieval scholars *knew* about Rome, we need to first establish what that question would entail for them. Certainly Medieval authors knew a variety of Roman historians, such as Suetonius and Sallust, as well as a variety of authors writing this related to history, such as Vergil and Lucian. But this really isn't the question at hand, as the question shouldn't be, did they know these authors, but rather, how did they use these authors to create a sense of history. Now there are a variety of arguments over whether there was a bona fide sense of history in the early middle ages, the problem being twofold. First of all, they continued to maintain the classical understanding of what \"history\" was, indeed to quote Isidore:\n\n > History is so called from the Greek term ίστορεῖν (“inquire, observe”), that is, from ‘seeing’ or from ‘knowing.’ Indeed, among the ancients no one would write a history unless he had been present and had seen what was to be written down, for we grasp with our eyes things that occur better than what we gather with our hearing, since what is seen is revealed without falsehood.\n\nBut most historians of the Early Middle Ages, at least, were Monks who were simply collating other texts and stories they had heard. Secondly, again for the Early Middle Ages, we know that a lot of what they wrote simply isn't correct, indeed Smalley pointed out that the more a medieval historian quoted Suetonius (I believe) the less accurate their statement was likely to be.\n\nNow there is an important break in the twelfth century with a revival of historical thought. Now there is a theoretical underpinning to this in the increased historical discussion in the development of history as the literal sense of a text, particularly the bible. This new historical thought is particularly prevalent, and potentially developed, in the writing of Hugh of St Victor, as well as later Victorine writers, who stress the importance of knowing history and of history as the fundamentally important level of understanding for the text to be meaningful.\n\nBut we should not understand, as some have, this change as equivalent to the idea of textual criticism in the Renaissance, wherein they were interested in finding the \"real\" texts of Antiquity. Rather the historical sensibility of the twelfth century, and middle ages more generally, was presented under the theme of *translatio*. This means that the centrally important organizing concept in medieval political history was the idea of the translation of empires (or *translatio imperii*). This concept emerges out of the Christian histories of late antiquity, like those of Eusebius-Jerome and Orosius, where they used the beasts and statue in the book of Daniel as an organizing principle of world empires. Namely they argued that there was a succession of world empires concluding with the Romans. As a result, the Roman empire sort of had to be the continued empire. Thus for both their own political propaganda and for this eschatological imperative, Western Empires presented themselves as continuers of the Roman empire. It also meant that the drive of historical knowledge was not knowing things about the past, but saying things about the present, it was about drawing direct continuities between the ancient Medes and the twelfth century Germans (or whoever).\n\nNow this gets more complicated as by the twelfth century, in the heart of the investiture controversy, the donation of Constantine (or more accurately the myth thereof) became an important principle. Essentially the story was that Constantine I, after converting to Christianity, gave political rulership over the Western Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester.\n\nSo with all that in place, the Western Christians understood the Romans as the last world empire, they knew the chronology of the Romans, particularly of the imperial period, as they had gathered from the various Classical historians, as I mentioned earlier. But they were particularly interested in figuring out *what* happened in the Roman period, as that would be, to an extent, beside the point. Likewise, for them the Roman empire never fell. To go with Otto of Freisings version, the Roman empire passed from the romans to the Greeks, with the Byzantine empire, until the time of Charlemagne. Then, since Charlemagne was crowned by the Pope, the legal arbiter of the Western Roman Crown after the 'Donation of Constantine', Charlemagne became the Roman emperor, with the empire passing from the Greeks to the Franks. Finally, with the decline of the Frankish empire, and the Crowning of the German emperors like Otto I, the Roman empire passed from the Franks to the Germans. Hence, to the medieval mind, the Roman empire didn't end at all and indeed the western Roman Empire was still thriving. This is particularly evident with Frederick Barbarossa calling his empire the Holy Roman Empire, no matter what Voltaire happens to think about it.\n\nNow since this idea of history is fundamentally forward looking, so the Roman past wasn't generally viewed as something different, and the present wasn't viewed in relation to the past, as we would understand it. Rather the past was largely viewed in relation to the present. So, for example, with the illustration of emperors in the Manuscripts of Otto's work we see Augustus, Charlemagne and Otto I all represented as looking [exactly the same](_URL_0_). \n\nTL;DR: they knew essentially the history of Rome as recorded by Roman historians but they didn't understand Rome as a historical civilization in the same sense that we do. Rather Rome was still alive and well in the various successor states to the Roman empire, be it the Byzantine Empire, the Frankish Empire or the German Empire. And although it is technically true that in the Byzantine Empire the Roman Empire didn't fall till 1453, that isn't how it would have been viewed in Latin Christendom through the Middle ages. ", "We haven’t considered the popular knowledge of Rome and its history, both in terms of its literature and its architecture.\n\nThe first thing to establish is the vast amount of Roman literature theoretically available to scholars throughout the Middle Ages, though a lot of it wasn’t systematically edited and studied until the Renaissance. Scholars estimate that about *90%* of our current store of Latin literature was preserved by Carolingian monastic copyists in the 9th and 10th centuries. How much and how widely people consulted this material varied by time and era. In the 12th century there was a so-called “Renaissance of the 12th century” in which the literature of Roman antiquity (knowledge of Greek was lost in the west by then) was widely studied, appreciated, and imitated, though often only parts of works were known. It’s in this same period that the poet Jean Bodel divided literary sources into the three “cycles” of the “matter of Britain” (the Arthurian legend”), the “matter of France” (stories of Charlemagne, like the *Song of Roland*), and the “matter of Rome,” which focused on Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and very fragmented knowledge of the Trojan story. A lot of source material for the details of this Roman matter was Ovid’s *Metamorphoses*, that great encyclopedia of mythology from the early 1st century CE, which was widely known and cited in the Middle Ages (though its “pagan” settings and themes were often moralized). \n\nVirgil and his *Aeneid* were adored, as was Horace. Cicero was widely known and loved, though again, only parts of him were known, perhaps most importantly his *Dream of Scipio* from the *Republic*, which had an extensive 5th-century commentary by Macrobius. It was the primary vehicle for passing down ancient cosmology to the Middle Ages. Boethius helped pass important philosophical ideas into the Middle Ages in his wildly popular *Consolation of Philosophy* (among others, King Alfred the Great made a translation of it into Old English). As qed1 noted already, Suetonius and Sallust were admired as historians. It clouds our understanding of the medieval knowledge somewhat in that these Roman historians tended to be lumped together with fiction writers under the general category of “literature.”\n\nSome knowledge of Roman history was crucial to understanding the New Testament. In the story of the Nativity, Roman soldiers were important characters (esp. in the “”Slaughter of the Innocents,” a very popular trope) and in the Passion. \n\nIn architecture, the Carolingians were shameless borrowers of Roman style, even though their ability to produce it on a monumental scale could be limited. The surviving gateway of the abbey of Corby, for example, mimics Constantine’s Arch in Rome. A mid-12th-cenury monastic pilgrim named Benedict wrote a popular tour guide to Rome called *The Marvels of Rome* (*Mirabilia urbis Romae*). It spends most of its time talking about surviving pre-Christian structures (Pantheon, Coliseum, Hadrian’s tomb, Hadrian’s Column, etc.). Around 1200 another clerical tourist arrived there, Master Gregory from England, who also wrote a guidebook, *On the Marvels of the City of Rome* (*De mirabilia urbis Romae*). He’s even less interested in Rome’s Christian history. (An aside: He was absolutely captivated by a nude statue of Venus: “It seems more a living thing than a statue,” he wrote. “I can’t explain it other than that some magical spell compelled me to go back three times to see it, even though it was two miles from where I stayed.”) The Bishop of Winchester (Henry II’s brother) visited the city in the 1100s and brought back Roman statues to England. “Romanesque” architecture, most obviously, copied the floor plan and architectural elements of the great Roman public basilicas. Roman ruins were visible all over Europe and usually noted a s such.\n\n*Very* importantly, Justinian’s 6th-century codification of Roman law, the *Corpus Iuris Civilis* was rediscovered in the late 11th century and put to wide use by the mid-twelfth. This body of Roman legal *thinking* was enormously important on shaping medieval theories of law and the state from then on.\n\nFinally, and most obviously, of course, was the use of Latin as Europe’s official educated language. This meant that a linguistic thread of continuity stretched between ancient Rome through the whole Middle Ages, into the Renaissance, and beyond into the 18th century.\n" ]

[ "This is a very good question, but I don't know if can be aquatically explained to a 5 year old.\n\nStill, I would love to see someone do it.", "[This](_URL_0_) might help", "1. Register as an LLC or S Corp with people you trust.\n2. Sell your product or service (in the market applicable)\n3. Go [Viral](_URL_0_) (Or find other methods of growing)\n4. Do taxes (and keep the government happy with you)\n5. Profit..?", "1.Get a table and sign \n\n2.Make lemonade\n\n3.Get bitches.\n\n4.profit.", "GET A LAWYER. Seriously. In my state, I was able to create an LLC (sort of halfway between sole-proprietor, where you're personally on the hook for everything, and a corporation where you're heavily protected) for about $150 in attorney's fees, plus a couple hundred in various filing fees with the State (which you'll pay anyhow).\n\nExactly what you need to do will vary a lot. However, I can give you some things to keep in mind that likely apply to you:\n\n* Register your business with the State and Federal governments and get Tax IDs from them.\n* Learn about the rules for collecting and filing your state and local sales taxes\n* Set up bank account(s) for the company. Keep your personal and company finances *completely separate*.\n* Learn about the rules for paying yourselves. For example, in my State, an LLC partner can get a \"paycheck\" and be considered an employee, or take \"draws\" on funds and not be. There are pros and cons to each.\n\nMost states have some kind of network for new business owners, and many have free guides to operating a business in that state. Avail yourself of these. For example, the [State of California's *Step by Step Guide to Starting a Business](_URL_0_) is on the Secretary of State's website.\n\nTry a Google search for \"starting a business in YourState site:.gov\"", "i will paypal $5 to anyone who can explain the steps of setting up a business from A to Z, LITERALLY starting each sentence with the sequential letters of the alphabet A..., B..., C..., etc.", "I suggest getting an accountant asap. They will help you figure out if you need to incorporate, LLC, etc. Tax-wise, they can make a big difference... I had started my business as sole-proprietorship but I'm getting killed on taxes this year. Had I gone to an accountant at the beginning, I would have incorporated from the get-go and saved money on taxes. But that all depends on what your business is like so their knowledge is necessary. My accountant helped me with my tax ID number and all that too.", "**A**lways\n\n**B**e\n\n**C**losing\n\n...\n\nI forget the rest", "While these guides might be helpful, you're not going to get the info you need from here. You need to do some research. People (including me) go to school for several years just learning how to set up a business. The rest of them (including both my parents and grandparents) just start doing it and learn as they go.", "ELI5: It's like a lemonade stand. You need to know what to sell, where to sell it, to who, and for how much. Then you need permission. Your parents let you do it out front and hold onto your money for you so no one steals it. From then on out it's just making the lemonade better and easier for your customers to get to while keeping track of how much you're spending on the mix and how much you're making on top of that.", "Does anybody know how it works in California? ", "Helped someone in a similar situation last year. It's surpisingly easy to start your own corporation or other business entity. Here's the broad outline:\n\n1. Hammer out w/ your partner the basic contours of how the business is going to work (who puts up what capital, who gets what % of income, how voting works, what happens if one person decides to leave, etc.).\n\n2. Decide on a form for the business entity (corporation, partnership, LLC, etc.). You can read up on the relative merits of different legal entities in any \"How to start a business\" book or online. For a two-person small business, an LLC (limited liability company) is pretty convenient; for the rest of the steps, I'll assume an LLC, but setting up a corporation is pretty analogous.\n \n3. Pick a name for your business entity and check whether it's available (you can do a search on the website for your state's secretary of state (SOS)). If there's already a business with the same (or similar) name, try again.\n\n4. While you're on the SOS's website, download the Articles of Incorporation form for whatever type of business you're going to start (LLC, corporation, etc.). Fill this form out (it's short) and mail it to the SOS along w/ the requisite filing fee (a couple/few hundred dollars). A couple of weeks later, the SOS will mail you back a certificate of registration and, voila, you now own an LLC.\n\n5. Draft the LLC's Operating Agreement (OA) (a/k/a bylaws in the corporation setting). This is the formal document that takes all the stuff you decided on in Step 1 above and makes it all binding and official. You can pull a draft OA from the internet or from a how-to-set-up-a-business book and tweak the boilerplate to your tastes, but you're really best-off getting a lawyer involved here to at least *review* the thing you drafted. All the owners/members of the LLC must sign the OA, but you don't need to file it anywhere.\n\n6. Get an Employer Id. Number (EIN) from the IRS. You can apply for one online at _URL_0_.\n\n7. Once you have an EIN, you can open a bank account for the LLC/corporation/etc., obtain company credit cards, and the like (you **must** keep business funds separate from personal funds).\n\nThat's pretty much it. For setting up a business entity anyhow. Going forward, there will be a bunch of other stuff to think about -- like reporting requirements (maybe, depending on the state), insurance, taxes (you may need to do them quarterly; talk to an accountant), how to represent yourselves/the company when contracting with clients, how to keep records, etc. -- but actually creating a corporate \"person\" is pretty straightforward.", "This post is timely as fuck. I'm starting my own business this summer, too!", "1. File articles of incorporation with the Secretary of State\n2. Apply for Federal ID number at _URL_0_\n3. Register with the sate department of taxation.\n\nI'd also suggest doing a few basic business planning things like developing a mission statement and setting 2, 5, and 10 year goals.\n\nYou may also want to decide on ownership and rules for adding new owners and seeking financing later.", "Don't forget [/r/Insurance](/r/Insurance) !", "If you wanna save some lawyer costs and are in the USA, _URL_0_ is great.", "Okay, similar question, how about something smaller, say, indie game developer?\n\nPS: Would that also count as \"company\"? ", "Also, subscribe to /r/entrepreneur. Lots of helpful people there and the FAQ on the sidebar has some handy resources. \n\nGood luck to you. " ]

[ "Electricians do things like wire homes and install new equipment. Basically they are concerned with how power gets from the powerline outside to the piece of equipment you are trying to power.\n\nThe electrical engineer is typically the guy that designs the piece of equipment that needs to be powered. They work mostly on the component level, getting small parts to work together to perform a task.\n\nThe other role electrical engineers play is the power grid itself. Power engineers design the power grid, so all the high voltage lines were designed by an engineer. A technician/electrician likely did the physical installation of the power lines.", "/u/campbellp25 pretty much hits it on the head. I work for a major Electrical Products provider for the medium and high-power electrical distribution market. We employ both electricians, and electrical engineers.\n\nThe Engineers are designing equipment, primarily [CTs](_URL_0_) or Current Transformers for use is substations and other distribution equipment. \n\nOur electricians, on the other hand, do the installation and testing of the equipment.\n\nTL/DR: Engineers Design, Electricians Install", "A mechanic fixes the brakes on your car. A mechanical engineer designs brake systems for cars.\n\nIt's a pretty similar distinction between electricians and electrical engineers. One designs things, the other builds/fixes them.", "Electricians pull wire. Electrical engineers solve math problems. " ]

[ "If you try searching here for micronations, you'll get a fair number of hits. ", "Your island would be selected for random military training exercises. Typically these would occur without warning and in the very early hours. In between drills, you will be cited for environmental infractions due to the military waste (shells, unexploded ordinance, and the various pit latrines scattered about) that would be endangering the island habitat. \n\nDon't let that deter you, it sounds like a wonderful project.", "They would ignore you until you stopped paying taxes, then you would be fined by the IRS and arrested if you refuse to pay." ]

[ "The photograph was taken with a narrow-angle camera. The Sun and other planets are simply too far from Earth to be featured in it. (The Moon is in the photograph too, but it is not visible without additional processing.) It should also be noted that the colorful streaks in the photograph are most likely due to scattering of sunlight off the camera. This is similar to when you take a photograph of a bright object, and spikes and/or halos appear in the photograph.\n\nSo what Voyager's camera \"saw\" was a frame of empty black space, with the exception of a pale blue dot, taking up less than 1 pixel of the over 600,000 total pixels of the photograph. There was also an even fainter dot (the Moon).", "They were out of the frame at the time. The Pale Blue Dot is actually just one small part of the larger Voyager 1 [Family Portrait](_URL_1_), which captured the Sun and every major planet except Mercury. \n\n[Here](_URL_0_)'s a smaller section of it showing the Sun, Venus, and Earth. " ]

[ "This is a frequently asked question, you may be able to find good discussion in these threads too:\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n\n", "I know the Hubble is used to looking at faraway, relatively dim objects. With its proximity to the Earth, could it even look at us without being damaged by the larger amount of light the Earth reflects?", "I'll just leave this here: _URL_0_", "From a purely practical standpoint, it would be at best a fruitless exercise, and at worst, would result in catastrophic damage to HST's Instruments. Pointed at the bright Earth, The CCD-based instruments (WFC3, ACS, etc.) would most likely saturate, so they would not produce viable images. Other instruments such as STIS could be catastrophically damaged by such a bright source." ]

[ "There is some decent information here, if interested in learning more, OP may like _URL_0_\n\n", "First person I shot took a direct hit to heart with a 45 and one to the spine just to the left of the heart (facing me). It took him almost 10 minutes. The second was to the head and that was instant. Alot of police officers in my area use 9mm which is even worse. We had a guy in the mid 90s that got unloaded on (was on ALOT of drugs) and was still walking around till one of our SWAT guys clocked him with a shotgun. Outside of a direct head shot or a chest shot with 50 cal etc you can last 10 minutes easily. Friend got shot 8 times and now has a patched heart, missing his left lung and part of his liver. He is also missing alot of his intestines now.", "I saw that video of the politician who offs himself live during a press conference.\n\nEven though he puts the gun in his mouth and shoots the top of his head off, he clearly takes 6 or 7 seconds to die from the blood loss. You can tell he's still conscious.\n\nSo that whole thing about a little bullet to the head killing you before you hit the ground is bullshit.\n\nUnless, of course, you're talking .50 caliber which will obliterate your skull." ]

[ "Vaccinating a population (assuming it's an effective vaccine) doesn't necessarily prevent infection, but limits transmission. So assuming the people who caught the mumps were vaccinated, they likely were exposed to someone who was infected and not vaccinated. The non-vaccinated person will generally have a more severe infection and be much more infectious to those around them due to the higher amount of virus they are producing.\n\nThe vaccinated people, while not completely protected, should have had a much milder course and had much less chance of infecting others, if they were infectious at all. \n\nYour assumption of the good health of professional athletes is probably less than accurate. Their care is geared toward performance, they are under a lot of stress and their bodies are pushed to the limit. On top of that, you have people in very close physical contact (smashing into each other during games) and close living conditions (busses, locker rooms, etc.) that increase the risk of transmission. Like infections spreading through dorms/boarding schools or military training camps.", "In addition to what has already been said, it's important to remember that vaccines are not perfect. They aren't just \"not foolproof\" or \"occasionally fail\"-- most of them have pretty low effectiveness rates compared to what the common belief is. We think of them as \"making us immune,\" but in reality, the effectiveness is not 100%. Mumps vaccines, in particular, appear to have effectiveness between [64% and 88%](_URL_0_), depending on the type of vaccine used. \n\nHerd immunity means you're much less likely to be exposed-- but once somebody is directly exposed, the odds go back to something like one in four vaccinated people getting sick if directly exposed to a sick person. ", "There's also the fact that the MMR shot does is not effective forever. Sure, mumps protection lasts over 10 years in 90% of users, but it's not forever. Those booster shots aren't just to pick up the people who didn't get immune the first time. They also actually increase the longevity. \n\nSource: _URL_0_" ]

[ "Dopamine. The chemical that gives your brain pleasure. Games are designed to produce dopamine reactions to cause the player to feel happy and give a constant sense of achievement. Calculus does not have this same design, but if you can turn it into a sort of game with rewards for yourself you might find that it helps. It's called gamification and it works quite well for some people.", "Also, we are weirdly reticent to do things we are forced to do. If you found the logic behind calculus a fun puzzle, you wouldn't want to stop after only a few minutes. Conversely, if you were a LoL bug tester that had to play for 8-10 hours a day a record various bugs, you'd abhor it and want to call it quits pretty quickly, in all likelihood. ", "Calculus texts as presented in the US at least are stripped down to the core necessities needed to do the mechanics. It is really an entire genre of literature spanning hundreds of years. All of the explanations and reasoning behind what you are learning has been removed.\n\nImagine learning L.o.L. at a desk with a teacher teaching you moves and sequences without ever showing you the game at all, or even telling you that it is a game. Then once or twice a chapter you git hit with an actual opponent as a bonus question and you don't know what to do because you have just been learning sequences, not how to react to a changing combat landscape. This just causes frustration for you." ]

[ "So your father's brother's son is your first cousin. You go up one generation, then a sibling over, and down one generation. 1 = first.\n\nYour grandfather's brother's grandson is your second cousin. Up two, a sibling over, and down two. 2 = second.\n\nBut what about your grandfather's brother's son? Up 2, sibling over, down 1. How do you handle that difference? You call them a first cousin (using the smaller of the two numbers) once removed (using the difference of the two numbers.\n\nYour great great grandfather's (4) brother's son (1) is your first cousin 3 times removed. Your great great grandfather's (4) brother's great grandson (3) is your third cousin one removed. ", "Let me take a stab at a simpler explanation.\n\n\"Removed\" refers to a change in generations.\n\nYour parent's first cousin is your **first cousin - once removed**.\nYour grandparents first cousin is your **first cousin - twice removed**.\n\nIt also works the other way (i.e., your relationship to younger generation.) \n\nYour first cousin's child is your cousin once removed.\nYour first cousin's child is your child's second cousin. (This relationship is not \"removed\" because your child and your cousin's child are of the same generation.)\n", "Drew this to help you visualize it: _URL_0_\n\nBasically, number of generations away from being the same level down from the shared ancestor as you.", "I always just thought it meant they messed up bad enough to basically be disowned by the family", "I would venture to say this is the best response for your question: _URL_0_\n\nThough, to be fair, if I can have cgp grey explain something to me, I will always go that route.", "wow i always thought that 'removed' meant divorced and then remarried back into the family. TIL otherwise. ", "\n A first cousin is someone who shares the same grandparent(s) as you, but not either parent; the child of your aunt or uncle.\n A second cousin is someone who shares the same great-grandparent(s) as you, but not parents or grandparents\n A third cousin is someone who shares the same great-great-grandparent as you, but not parents, grandparents or great-grandparents\n\netc.\n\nA first cousin once removed can be either:\n\n The child of your first cousin\n The first cousin of your parent\n\nA second cousin once removed can be either:\n\n The child of your second cousin\n The second cousin of your parent\n\nIf you have a first cousin once removed, then you are also the first cousin once removed of that person. If you have a second cousin once removed, then you are also the second cousin once removed of that person. Your second cousin's children are the third cousins of your children.\n\nEach time it is removed once, that person will go one generation down or up. Each time it is removed twice, that person will go two generations down or up.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe easiest translation is it means, \"distant,\" in terms of generations. Your first cousin, twice removed, is your first cousin's grandparent or grandchild (two generations removed). Since your first cousin's grandparent would be your grandparent, however, you can assume they're talking about their grandchild.\n\n", "All these responses and nobody linked to the awesome Wikipedia article yet?\n\n_URL_0_", "I always explain it this way:\n\nMy mom's first cousins are my first cousins once removed.\n\nMy mom's first cousins' children are my second cousins.\n\nMy mom's first cousins remain my first cousins, with a generation removed since they are her generation and not mine. Their kids, however, are the same generation as me, but we're now into a whole new generation down, hence the \"second\". \n\nMy second cousins' kids will be my second cousins once removed, but my kids and their kids will be full third cousins. My kids will also be first cousins twice removed to my mom's actual first cousins. So on and so forth. \n\n[Here's a helpful diagram](_URL_0_)\n\n", "The simplest way I’ve heard it explained:\n\n1. Count how many generations back you have to go until your familial line and your cousin’s familial line meet as siblings. Always start with whoever is the earlier generation. This is the # cousins you are. For example, if your dad and their mom were siblings, you are first cousins because you only had to go back 1 generation for your lines to meet as siblings. If your grandfather and their grandfather were brothers, for example, you would be second cousins, because you had to go back 2 generations to find the sibling connection.\n\n2. If you and your cousin are not the same # of generations descended from those siblings, then the “removed” comes in. It simply describes the difference in generations from the sibling connection to you and your cousin. For example, if your dad and their grandfather were siblings then you are first cousins (1 generation up from you to find the sibling connection) once removed (the # generations difference between you and them). If your great-grandfather and their mother were siblings then you are first cousins (1 generation up from them (the earlier generation) to find the sibling connection) twice removed. \n\nEDIT: corrected second example", "I always think ELI5s are easy to just Google but generally theres some justification for wanting a redditor to explain its complexities in lay form. But seriously this is just a basic definition.", "If no one has posted this yet, [here is an insanely helpful chart for family relations!](_URL_0_)", "I've got a few family members I'd like to have \"removed\". ", "What would my dad's niece's son be considered? Second cousin?", "[Here's an interesting graphic we use at work all the time](_URL_0_) \n\nSource: I deal with people's estates, and sometimes finding heirs is a bitch. ", "Cousins have common ancestors.\n\n\n0) (zeroeth) cousins share a parent (these are siblings, 1 gen from common ancestor)\n\n1) (first) cousins share a grandparent (2 gens from common ancestor)\n\n2) second cousins share a great grandparent (3 gens from common ancestor)\n\n...\n\n\n\nAbove, the cousins are the same gen count from the common ancestor. When they are not the same gen count (ie my grandfather is your great grandfather), then they are \"removed\" from each other. The removal is the same as the difference in generations.", "Maybe it's a cultural thing, but all of my parents' cousins are my aunts and uncles, and all my cousins' kids are my nieces and nephews.", "CGP Grey covered this in an excellent video: _URL_0_", "[Here's](_URL_0_) a chart to show you, it's easier to visualise the relationships this way\n\n", "Any german speakers here? Is this comparable to \"Graden\"?\n\"Cousine ersten Grades, zweiten Grades usw.\"?", "Three words: Parent's sibling's kids. Siblings is how you get across, parents and kids are how you get up and down.\n\n1st cousin: parent's sibling's kid. 2nd cousin: parent's parent's sibling's kid's kid. 3rd cousin: parent's parent's parent's sibling's kid's kid's kid. 2nd is your grandparent's sibling's grandkid, 3rd is great grandparent's sibling's great grandkid.\n\nSo that's fine if you go up (parent) as many times as you go down (kid). When you don't match them though, the difference between the two is the \"removed\" part. For example: your parent's parent's sibling's kid is your first cousin once removed, since one of the kids is missing. If you also got rid of one of the parents, they'd be a first cousin, so it's first cousin once removed. Parent's parent's parent's sibling's kid is your first cousin twice removed (two kids missing), and that kid's kid is your second cousin once removed (only one kid missing).\n\nReally, it's just keeping track of where they are up (parents) and down (kids) this family tree, specifically the parent - > sibling - > kid relation. If you keep track of that, the rest will figure itself out.\n\nSource: my second cousin once removed has won the Superbowl a couple of times, so I've been explaining this to not-ridiculous-family folk for the last ten years. ", "In genealogy, there's a trick called \"count the Gs.\" In other words, common grandparents, great-grandparents, etc., determine the degree of cousins, and the difference between relationship gives you the removed.\n\nLet me make this clearer. If you have the same parents you're siblings, so stop there. If you don't have the same parents, the first step is to determine the most recent common ancestor, which will be at least a grandparent.\n\nOkay. You have at least one common *g*randparent? That's one G, so you're first cousins. You're both grandchildren of that grandparent, so 1G - 1G = no removed. You're direct first cousins.\n\n*G*reat *g*randparent in common? Two Gs, so second cousins.\n\n*G*reat *g*reat *g*randparent in common? Three Gs, third cousins, etc.\n\nNow let's suppose that your grandmother is your cousin's great grandmother. We stop at the most recent, so that's one G (for your *g*randmother) and you're first cousins. But it's your cousin's *g*reat *g*randmother, so for him or her, it's 2G. 2G - 1G = 1G, so this person would be your first cousin once removed.\n\nA little more complicated one: your *g*reat *g*randfather is your cousins's *g*reat *g*reat *g*reat *g*randfather. So, your *g*reat *g*randfather = 2G. Second cousins. His *g*reat *g*reat *g*reat *g*randfather = 4G. 4G - 2G = 2G, so this person would be your second cousin, twice removed.\n\nAnd so on. The hard part isn't figuring out what degree of cousins you are, of course. It's figuring out how you're related in the first place...", "[CGP Grey has a great YouTube video explaining family trees](_URL_0_), in which he also explains (and illustrates) once and twice removed in a very simple way.", "It is the worst way of defining a family. Take a look at this chart:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nNotice that \"cousin once removed\" has 2 meanings: once in the generation before yours, and once in the generation after. Its a mess.", "*x*th cousin, *y*ce removed: x is the lowest amount of generations until the common ancestor, and y is the difference between the gap.\n\nsrc: CGPGrey", "Before you can understand what the \"removed\" part means, you must first understand what the number means in 1st, 2nd, 3rd cousins ect. What the number means is simple. It is how many generations you must go back beyond your parents before you find a common ancestor. Therefore if you and your cousin share a grandmother you have to go back one generation beyond your parents until you share an ancestor, and they are your first cousin. If you share a great grandmother, you must go back two generations beyond your parents and they would be your second cousin. (Therefore, the children of your uncle/ aunt are your first cousins. The children of your parent's first cousins are your second cousins).\n\nThe problem arises however when you compare family members of different generations. For example, lets pretend your mother has a cousin name Mary. If you trace back your lineage to Mary, then you would find that you and her share your great grandmother, and Mary would be your second cousin. However, if you were to trace back your lineage from Mary's perspective, she would say that you and her share her grandmother and you would therefore be first cousins. When this is the case you go by the person of the oldest generation. Therefore you would start with Mary and trace her lineage back to your grandmother and she would be your first cousin. But then you would count how many generations are between you and Mary and you would find one. That would make you and Mary (your mothers first cousin), \"first cousins, Once removed).\n\nIf you then go on to have children, your children and Mary would still share Mary's grandmother as a common ancestor. However now there are two generations between your children and Mary so it would make them \"first cousins, twice removed\"", "How come you didn't just Google this?", "Snitches get stitches, and sometimes you gotta call the ghost busters. ", "This really seems like one of those unnecessarily difficult western concepts.\n\nIs it not easier to just say that you and your first cousin are first cousins, while your and their children are second cousins? And so on and so forth. It's much easier to just follow the generations. This is how the rest of the world does it, if I understand correctly. The actual generation is thrown in there.", "This will probably get burried, so I'm going to PM the OP. \n\nBut [this](_URL_1_) is by far the best explanation about family tree thanks to youtubes CGP Grey. He also did a [part 2](_URL_0_) explaining cross and parallel cousins. ", "For you and a given cousin, find the first common ancestor you have working up the family tree. Count how many generations are between you and that coommon ancestor and your cousin and that ancestor. Subtract these two numbers (the generational difference). This is how many times removed you are.", "... now that I think about it, the word \"removed\" is kind of weird too. Re moved. Quite literally \"moved again.\" ", "What is the son of the couple consisting of my father's brother and my mother's sister?", "Awesome tutorial I stumbled upon one day:\n_URL_0_ ", "Don't believe no one has done this yet...\n\n_URL_0_\n\nReally good explanation by grey, you see on which level the lower cousin is and subtract it by the other cousin. Difficult to explain on text, though the video should do the trick :)", "I know I'm late to this post, but I've read a few of the responses here and want to throw in my $.02 for the heck of it. I, my family, and every other family I have ever been familiar with goes by this, incorrect or not:\nParallel cousins are considered \"first\". If there's a generation difference between you and the other (your parent's cousin, or your cousin's child, for example) that is considered second cousin, or once removed. A two generation split would be third cousin, or twice removed, and so on.\n", "I always referred to my mother's cousin as my \"second aunt\" as opposed to a \"first cousin once removed\".\n\nTo me, it makes more sense, as my cousins' mothers are my aunts, so I call my second cousins' mothers my second aunts, etc.\n\nGenerational differences are accomplished via \"great/grand\", and the direction via niece vs aunt.\n\nI'd call my grandma's cousin my grand-second aunt\n\nI guess, the algorithm for determining the term might be:\n1) Navigate directly up or down to appropriate generation. One step is a parent/child (no prefix), Two steps is a grand. Add a great for any subsequent steps.\n\n2) Determine relation to great/grand/parent/child, be it cousin, second cousin or more.\n\nThis feels less insane to me for some reason.\n\n", "Wow! This really blew up, beyond my expectations! I want to thank you all for your posts and answers :)" ]

[ "Its not just your repiratory system, overdosed folks are passed out and unconcious\n\nIts just that the respiratory failure is what kills them. The heart still functions because it can beat on its own, so its the lack of O2 that kills ya.", "The heart can fail with certain drugs that cause an upper effect. Meth and cocaine are examples. You die from opioid overdose due to your body succumbing to the dirty side effect of opiates: decreased respirations. Part of their problem is that they not only naturally lower your drive to breathe, but they also shift the threshold for needing to breathe upwards. We naturally produce carbon dioxide and our brain uses the levels in the blood to determine how fast and deep we must breathe to blow it off. We still need to maintain some in the body for essential functions and acid/base balance. The thing that opiates do is shift this threshold higher. Meaning even with increased CO2 levels from not breathing fast enough, you don't see an increase in the drive to breathe. That's how you die. You quit breathing enough (or at all) and you stop bringing in fresh oxygen/removing co2", "Heart cells beat automatically on their own. A special part of the heart called the sinoatrial node is like a conductor for an orchestra. It is the pacemaker for the rest of the heart. The brain just tells the SA node to speed up or slow down slightly.\n\nThe lungs don't breathe on their own. The brain has to tell them to inhale and exhale. One part of your brain does this consciously (take a deep breath), and one part does this unconsciously (when you are asleep or not paying attention to breathing). This unconscious part is called the pre-Bötzinger complex and it's located in a part of your brain called the pons. Opioids interfere with its function.\n\nThere are many drugs that can cause the heart to stop working too in an overdose. For example, a drug called adenosine can cause your heart to stop beating for a few seconds (which is really scary if you aren't prepared for it). There are many drugs that can cause the brain to stop working in an overdose too. But most of those drugs aren't used recreationally. No one takes adenosine for fun, and it feels like you're suddenly having a heart attack if a doctor gives it to you. Meanwhile, opioids happen to be a popular drug at the moment, and they happen to work on the part of your brain responsible for coordinating your muscles for breathing.\n\nThree more points:\n\n1. Doctors give adenosine if your heart cells are all beating off rhythm. Adenosine stops all of them for beating at once for a few seconds, allowing the SA node to take over again (hopefully.)\n\n2. Rhythm matters in opioid use too. For example, if you take a stimulant like cocaine, your body feels like it's getting ready to fight or flee from a predator. If you take a depressant like opioids, your body feels safe and wants to rest and digest. This digest part means that opioids should cause you to poop more. But the problem is that you need a coordinated activity of muscles to squeeze your intestines and push the poop out (like you're squeezing out the last of the toothpaste). Opioids mess up the nerves in your guts ability to coordinate. So you squeeze poop forward and backwards randomly, causing constipation.\n\n3. Naloxone is really important to have around if you use heroin or other opioids. If you stop breathing, someone can quickly inject you with it and it will save your life. Of course you need someone who notices you aren't breathing and knows to inject naloxone. But your chances of surviving are a lot higher. Doctors are trying to figure out other ways to avoid this problem besides using naloxone in an emergency.", "Your breathing muscles get direct input from your brain, telling them to move and breath. Big doses of narcotics basically make the respiratory center of your brain go to sleep, and your breathing muscles stop doing what they're supposed to.\n\nThe heart gets feedback from the brain to help regulate heart rate, but isn't dependent on it. You could completely remove a heart from a human body, and it will keep pumping on its own (if it had blood supply, etc). It doesn't require input from the brain to keep going. You can even grow beating heart cells in a petri dish." ]

[ "Short answer: largely with lasers. You have things that are easy to measure like Doppler and Stark shifts, mass/volume/density of a cooled cloud (shadow case by laser absorption) that all change based on temperature. Really, though, as alluded to by RRumpleTeazzer's answer, temperatures that low are more \"calculated\" from other observed effects than they are directly measured (like, say, by the expansion of mercury).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nYou can also measure the ballistic expansion of a cooled substance when you release the magnetic trap (that you are inevitably using). If you are interested, read more at this Scientific American article: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "There are certain materials (notably platinum, for this purpose) that change electrical characteristics based on their temperature. Most commonly, they have a lower resistance as they get colder. We can tell how cold that material is by putting a tiny amount of electricity through it and measuring how much of that electricity makes it through -- the more that does, the colder the material must be. We have really good graphs that show how much resistance there is at any temperature. We can know the temperature by measuring the resistance and finding that point on the graph. And we can extend that graph to accurately predict what happens at very cold temperatures.\n\nSo we put that kind of material in the near-absolute-zero chamber, run a tiny amount of electricity through it (it has to be a small amount or the little bit of heat it makes can be a problem!), and measure the result. Seeing where that result lands on the graph tells us how cold the material is very accurately! And since that material sits in the chamber, we know how cold the chamber is too.", "Why is measuring this more difficult than any other temperature?", "A lot is made of how particle speed decreases with temperature, but that’s sometimes not the best way to do it. The speed of a piece of metal, for example, is pretty much zero regardless of its temperature. Electrical resistance is a good one, since there are a variety of thermal dependencies in resistance, but these all have minimum temperatures, below which quantum effects drown them out. Those effects are the most frequent justification for selling high-end hdmi cables, which would be fine if people were concerned about television image quality on Pluto.\n\nMagnetic phenomena are also quite useful for measuring ultra-low temperatures, especially since the number of available states in a magnetic system at low temperature can be small enough to be countable. One definition of temperature is the rate of change of system entropy as system energy is changed. If you can measure the system entropy directly (entropy is a measure of the number of equivalent microstates, and is exponential with magnetic moment, so can be measured with an NMR/MRI machine), you can add a little bit of energy, measure the change, and calculate the temperature base on that.", "We look at how much/fast the atoms move. \n\nMovement = energy. Energy = Heat. \n\nNo movement = No energy. No energy = cold" ]

[ "No.\n\nThe Constitution is worth exactly the paper it's written on and what it's worth to those who profess to uphold it.", "When the Constitution was written, they didn't necessarily expect there to be parties. (Notice how they aren't mentioned in the Constitution.)\n\nThere is one theory, based on the Tenth Amendment, that the states (and the people) have the power/duty to disobey laws and other actions of the federal government that are obviously against the Constitution.", "I think you misunderstand the meaning of \"checks and balances\". Checks and balances is a philosophy that states that each branch should have the power to regulate the actions of each other branch. It does *not* give power to the parties in any way.\n\nThe entire purpose of the structure of the government was to prevent a single organization from supplanting the power of the others, meaning that governmental power could be as decentralized as possible. If a party wins control of the majority in the House, Senate, and Presidency (yes, I know that's not the three branches of government, but it's the real focus of this discussion, so bear with me), then it is entirely within their rights to push their agenda. The government was built precisely to allow for this type of change. The support of a wide variety of people in disparate states was necessary to pull off the current Republican domination of the government, and the Constitution was written specifically to allow the people to enforce the desired change by electing representatives that support their wishes.\n\nAs much as it may upset you, there is nothing unconstitutional about the current situation in government. In fact, the Democrats were in much the same position in 2008. The constitution was written precisely so that this type of radical shift in policy could be implemented by the voters if they felt that the government acting in accordance with their wishes. ", "Nope.\n\nThat said, it's kind of intentional. If they're popular enough to get all 3 branches of government, the thinking goes, people must want them there for a reason.\n\nYou don't even need all 3!\n\n All it takes is ~2/3 of Congress(or 2/3 to propose, 3/4 to pass state legislatures), and voters willing to keep voting you in, to make literally any changes to the Constitution/government you want. Again, the founders thinking was \"don't like it? vote for someone else\"\n\nedit:\n > The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress;\n\nDo that, and you can do whatever you want.", "If it does that then it's not bypassing the checks and balances at all. It's doing exactly what it is supposed to do, enacting the will of the people. ", "It depends on what you mean by bypassing all checks and balances. If you just mean getting a highly partisan agenda made into law, that can definitely be done if Congress passes laws supporting that agenda, the President approves those laws or makes corresponding executive orders, and the Supreme Court is willing to rule that the actions are in line with the rules in the Constitution. However, that would probably be more like an agenda being approved by or surviving checks and balances, rather than bypassing them entirely.\n\nIf you mean something more extreme like enacting laws that blatantly go against the Constitution or cause changes that would alter a branch's power, that could also be done, but it would require an amendment to be passed. An amendment generally requires approval from 2/3 of each house in Congress plus 3/4 of the states. If passed, an amendment can't be rejected by anything other than another amendment and it could even alter the balances between branches. An amendment can be as partisan as possible, although it's unlikely that a partisan amendment could pass. Also, the criteria for getting an amendment passed are very different than just having a majority in Congress and the Supreme Court, plus the President. ", "There are some constitutional law theories that may allow it, but they haven't succeeded in practice. They stem from the fact that while the federal government has 3 branches, that's only half of the picture. The individual states have rights as well (although they can really only challenge the federal government if they act together).\n\nThe first is called [nullification](_URL_1_). This is a legal theory that each state has the right to nullify any federal law that the state believes is unconstitutional. This isn't explicitly laid out in the constitution, and has been rejected by both state and federal courts every time it's been tried.\n\nA similar option is called [interposition](_URL_2_). This involves multiple states acting together to prevent the ability of the federal government to enforce laws considered unconstitutional. This would buy the states time to go through the process of challenging laws. It would also wait out the clock until the next election which could correct the issues (the members of the House of Representatives have two year term limits).\n\n\nThen there's an option that's never been used and is rarely discussed in Article V of the Constitution. Article V discusses how amendments to the constitution are proposed, and so far they have all used the first option - a two-thirds vote by both the House of Representative and the Senate (then ratification by the states). But there's a second option, often called an [Article V Convention](_URL_0_) - If two-thirds of the state legislatures apply for a convention to propose amendments, the states could decide to directly change the Constitution *without any say from federal government*. The state governments would be able to restructure the government at will, as long as three-quarters of the states agreed on new amendments proposed.\n\nChanging the Constitution directly isn't something to do lightly, of course. An Article V Convention is really just a last resort in case the three branches of government unite to do something extreme, like amending the constitution themselves to make the president a dictator for life. But it's a good reminder that the federal government is only given power by the states, who are given power by the people of the states, which is noted in the very first line of the Constitution. The power comes from \"We, the people of the United States\" - nowhere else.", "Roosevelt tried to do this by adding justices to the Supreme Court, but if I remember correctly the current court wouldn't allow it.", "A very disturbing part of current politics is that it is the concept of checks and balances that makes it work.\n\nI read parts of the constitution of the Soviet Union which stipulated that printing presses would be available in the basements of public buildings for all to use. This was clearly the dream of revolutionaries who had finally come to power. The Soviet Union had nearly 100 % voting in every election. On paper the Soviet Union had a very democratic government. In practice it did not work that way.\n\nThere are other governments in the world which are democracies. I call them failed democracies because they have not really served their citizens well. On my list are Venezuela and Greece. But I do not want to argue which countries should be on the list or which ones have truly failed. My point is that democracies sometimes really do not work. Germany was a democracy. Hitler rose to power in it.\n\nOur country could slide down into something like those.", "It's not about the three branches of government revolting - it's about the people revolting. What's in the Constitution on this is the Second Amendment. ", "The second ammendment\n\n\nIt applies to the People rather than the branches of government \n\nAnd it allows the people to keep their republic " ]

[ "I'm assuming curly fries are a standard recipe for most places; each with maybe a slightly custom recipe. Here is a recipe for arbys which I consider pretty standard. _URL_0_", "Arbys' curly fries are soaked in wheat starch (sometimes labeled 'modified food starch') to add crispness. Unfortunately, wheat starch has a bitter aftertaste when fried so they seasoned the hell out of them to cover it up. The seasoning combination proved to be popular and was subsequently copied.", "I went to a Jack Astor's and their \"curly fries\" didn't have any special seasoning, they were just your standard fries in curly fries form.", "Better question: why don't ALL fries have that similar seasoning?", "I think that I am in the minority in that I prefer my fries without that curly fry seasoning technique. It's too....greasy maybe. That doesn't sound like the right words but there is definitely a different texture that I don't appreciate as much. I'll still eat them though.", "Growing up in a Hispanic household my mom used to always put Adobo and cumin on fries. Tastes somewhat the same as the seasoning on chain restaurant curly fries. " ]

[ "Human beings are in the same animal family as gorillas, chimps and bonobos. We are evolutionary descendant from a primarily plant eating species with poor night vision. We spent most of our biological evolution, and the evolution of our great ape evolutionary ancestors, as prey, not predator. We have almost no fangs to speak of. No claws what so ever. My fat lazy housecat can outrun me in a short sprint without much effort. Our night vision is poor, our hearing is pretty week and our sense of smell may as well not exist. \n\n\nWe are, in almost all regards, a prey species, not a predator one. The only thing that makes us a predator species, and in fact the planetary apex predator, is because we have big brains, and our ancestors figured out that if we slapped a sharp rock on top of a long stick, we could make a spear, and none of our biological disadvantages mattered anymore. \n\n\nBut being primarily a prey species with poor night vision means that being out, alone, at night was a dangerous thing. So at a certain level, fear of the night, and fear of the dark, goes right down to our genetic level. We are the genetic ancestors of apes too afraid to go out at night. Because those who \\*did\\* go out at night got eaten.", "Because we dont see at night. And who knows what can hide there waiting to eat you. During the day you can see it and react but during the night you stand no chance. At least that was the problem of our ancestor" ]

[ "You should definitely look a some archaeological literature. Social History is relatively new branch of History that became prominent only in 1960s. You will be hard pressed to find anything written before and even things written after are lacking because they rely on archaeology and extrapolation which often cannot satisfy the real historical inquiry (the kind of detail and the kind of contemporary analysis we often see in political history).\n\nThat being said I think you might benefit from looking into Middle Age's witchcraft records. They deal primarily with women who for the most part had no influence back then which accidentally gives you a glimpse of commoner's life. Works such as Malleus Maleficarum may be of some use if you are willing to wade through rampant misogyny, religious fanaticism and incredible gullibility of people just to witness some social history from the primary source.", "I seem to remember enjoying the works of Phillippe Aries.", "[Christina: A Medieval Life:](_URL_0_). Michael Wood delves through medieval court records to follow the fortunes of a 14th century village in Hertfordshire and, more particularly, the family of peasant Christina Cok. ", "You can give Sayings of Spartan Women by Plutarch a shot. It's not all common folk, many of them are aristocratic women, but there are passages about commoners and even slaves, etc. My classical studies education is quite limited and it's mostly to do with war and politics. Sorry that I can't contribute more.", "Aron Gurevich, Lucien Febrve, Marc Bloch, Jacques Le Goff, and Carlo Ginzburg are all very good.", "The iconic work in the genre of microhistory, and well worth reading is *Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324*. It was originally written in French, but I'm fairly certain it has been translated into English.", "Looking for good old fashioned head numbing numbers then look no further then the Domesday Book. \n_URL_0_\n\nPopulations, wealth, status, taxes etc.\nA good historian can pull a lot of tasty information out of this monstrosity.\n\nNot solely based on the commoner per say...but still useful. ", "\"A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock\" by Judith Bennett is a pretty good, easy read about a peasant around the 14th century.", "You should definitely look a some archaeological literature. Social History is relatively new branch of History that became prominent only in 1960s. You will be hard pressed to find anything written before and even things written after are lacking because they rely on archaeology and extrapolation which often cannot satisfy the real historical inquiry (the kind of detail and the kind of contemporary analysis we often see in political history).\n\nThat being said I think you might benefit from looking into Middle Age's witchcraft records. They deal primarily with women who for the most part had no influence back then which accidentally gives you a glimpse of commoner's life. Works such as Malleus Maleficarum may be of some use if you are willing to wade through rampant misogyny, religious fanaticism and incredible gullibility of people just to witness some social history from the primary source.", "I seem to remember enjoying the works of Phillippe Aries.", "[Christina: A Medieval Life:](_URL_0_). Michael Wood delves through medieval court records to follow the fortunes of a 14th century village in Hertfordshire and, more particularly, the family of peasant Christina Cok. ", "You can give Sayings of Spartan Women by Plutarch a shot. It's not all common folk, many of them are aristocratic women, but there are passages about commoners and even slaves, etc. My classical studies education is quite limited and it's mostly to do with war and politics. Sorry that I can't contribute more.", "Aron Gurevich, Lucien Febrve, Marc Bloch, Jacques Le Goff, and Carlo Ginzburg are all very good.", "The iconic work in the genre of microhistory, and well worth reading is *Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324*. It was originally written in French, but I'm fairly certain it has been translated into English.", "Looking for good old fashioned head numbing numbers then look no further then the Domesday Book. \n_URL_0_\n\nPopulations, wealth, status, taxes etc.\nA good historian can pull a lot of tasty information out of this monstrosity.\n\nNot solely based on the commoner per say...but still useful. " ]

[ "Generally, extremophiles are specialists. They specialize in living in volcanic vents, underground lakes, sulfuric acid drips, etc. By definition, specialists have a very narrow niche. I don't think there are any that could survive a vacuum. [Tardigrades](_URL_0_) are capable of entering a stasus that could survive in a vacuum, but they wouldn't be able to reproduce until they reached a suitable habitat.\n\nIt may be possible to genetically engineer something that could thrive in space, but that's not my field of expertise.", "Layman here. As far as I know, this is entirely speculative and most likely complete hogwash, but some people suggest that mushroom spores have what it takes to be interstellar seedlings. It's been said that they're light enough to be wafted practically to the boundaries of the atmosphere and could conceivably be blasted into space by any major atmospheric event.\n\nAs if that's not wildly speculative enough, [Terrence McKenna](_URL_0_) has suggested that perhaps extraterrestrial mushroom spores are the progenitors of human intelligence - that the consumption of psychoactive compounds brought to earth by these spores led to increased visual acuity, interpersonal bonding, even early religious experiences, all of which gave certain evolutionary advantages to those proto-human groups which consumed them.\n\nSo yeah - interesting conjectures. I don't know if they're backed up at all by anything even remotely resembling real evidence.", "It might be theoretically possible for them to survive, but another thing you need to take into account is that space is really, really empty, and everything is really far away. The chances of actually hitting another planet with your extremophile capsules would be virtually nil without specifically targeting them. I don't think dispersion would work." ]

[ "Why do you say that it's logical that breakfast be the heaviest meal of the day?", "Heavy breakfasts such as the full English breakfast, which is around 1000 calories depending on the portion size, are still a common practice among manual workers who will need that food energy to do their work during the day. Light breakfasts are more popular among office workers who are physically inactive for most of the day, but may be short on time in the morning and don't want to cook and eat a big meal.\n\nSo the declining popularity of big breakfasts is in part due to the changes in the workforce - more service jobs, less physical labour.", "Having to move very quickly when waking up means having no time to eat a heavy breakfast and no time to digest. This is normal : most people lived a rushed lifestyle in the past and now from the morning on, having only rest time at the end of the day, where it is now safe to be slow and sleepy and digesting a larger meal", "In other countries dinner isn't such a heavy meal. I went to Israel and there lunch is the biggest meal and dinner is just a quick bite.", "Many people have 1+ hour commutes to and from work, so spending 30 mins cooking a real breakfast cuts into sleeping time. If they have kids they have to drop off at school, time is even more compressed. \n\nBy contrast, the evenings feature 4+ hours of available time to cook and eat. \n\nAlso, eating heavy in the evening isn't that bad as long as you're not also eating heavy for breakfast and lunch. Your metabolism doesn't slow down that much overnight. Weight gain from eating late normally corresponds with an overall sedentary lifestyle. \n", "Simple explanation. In the morning your body just woke up, you move more slowly, still asleep and your body doesn't need that much energy so you end up having a light breakfast or no breakfast at all. Then throughout the day you move more, you do something, even watching TV, your body is functioning more, you observe, you move, you think and that takes energy and needs calories and that's why after a long day in the evening people tend to be more hungry.", "There is no such practise or anything, people just do what they want - some eat breakfast, some dont. You also dont want spending hour or so cooking in the morning while you are still asleep." ]

[ "The etymology of China is far from settled. According to the Oxford English Dictionary:\n\n > Not a Chinese name, but found in Sanskrit as *Chīna* about the Christian era, and in various modified forms employed by other Asiatic peoples. In Marco Polo *Chin*, in Barbosa (1516) and Garcia de Orta (1563) *China*. So in English in Eden 1555. (The origin of the name is still a matter of debate. See *Babylonian & Or. Recd.* I. Nos. 3 and 11.)\n\nThere is reason to be skeptical about the oft-repeated derivation of China from Qín 秦, the first unified imperial dynasty of China. According to Nicholas Ostler in *Empires of the Word* (2005), the Sanskrit *Cīna* चीन \"applied mainly to the area of Tibet, though also on occasions included Assam and Burma (Sircar 1971: 104–5). China as a whole was known to the Indians as *Mahācīna*, 'Great China'\".\n\nSircar, D. C. (1971), *Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India*, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.", "I have also heard that the name \"Zhongguo\" didn't actually originate as meaning \"middle kingdom,\" the derivation that's commonly (traditionally?) attributed to it. Is that true? Can anyone speak to the source and diffusion of the name, as well as those of the current popular understanding of it as \"middle kingdom\"? This may be a better question for another subreddit, but I like this one for its rigorous standards for answers." ]

[ "I would love to have this explained as well. It seems silly that a judge commanded her to do something like that. Shouldn't she simply be fired? She is refusing to do her job correctly. Each time she does this she is making the state vulnerable to lawsuits. Why is it that the legal action being taken is against her instead of the state for employing someone who is willfully breaking the law?", "Think of it like this. Your parents tell you its ok to have an imaginary friend. Your parents ask you to do your chores, but your imaginary friend says not to after you've agreed to do your chores. You then cry and whine to everyone that your parents are being unfair and say that anyone who doesn't listen to your imaginary friend is ruining your life. Your parents are the government, your imaginary friend is Jesus, and your chores are to get paid 3 times as much as you should be paid to sign pieces of paper that let people be married under the government's eyes.", "ELI5: How could she be divorced three times, and still claim religious exemption for a religion she clearly picks and chooses the rules she wishes to follow?", "Can't she just be replaced with someone who isn't an incompetent nut?", "I don't, in any way, agree with this woman, and I don't mean, in any way, to blame the couples who just want to get married. But my question is, Why do they have to get their license from HER? Can't they go to another city or county? They shouldn't have to, but they can, right? \n\nI feel like, if it was me, I'd want to make a stink about how awful she's being, but I'd want to be married more.", "The 14th amendment states \"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States\". Wouldn't KY making her issue marriage licenses be enforcing a law that infringes on her right to freedom of religion? I know that the 14th amendment was intended for former slaves but it should still apply to everyone correct? \n\n", "Is there anything stopping the governor from bringing in clerks from other counties into Rowan County to issue the marriage licenses?\n\nI don't see why there should be a delay if there are other clerks in the state who are willing to issue licenses.", "Could she quit herself? Couldn't someone bribe her into quitting?", "Let me start by saying I'm FOR marriage equality, but what I don't get is why isn't she just moved to a different position within that office and the \"office manager\" or someone else fulfill the license requests? Just as I have the right to my opinion of marriage equality, she has a right to her opinion of no equality, but this should be a non-issue. Just have someone else do the job...", "Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. - Romans 13\n\nAny questions, Ms. Davis?", "What exactly is a \"county clerk\"?", "Why do \"Christians\", I use quotations out of respect for people that acually do follow Christianity, why do they cherry pick their believes she doesn't want to be stoned to death ok that's understandable. Then why does she feel ok to get married again that's just as sacrilegious as gay marriage and even worse since she had a child from an afair. \n\nI just don't understand how Christian Conservative Terrorists can make these more stand claims while they're completely devoid of morals under their own beliefs?\n\nTldr;\n\nWe must call these people what they are \n\nChristian Conservative Terrorists, \n\nand refuse to address them as anything but what they are.\n\nIf you're Christian you have just as much duty to stomp this out as an Islamic would Radical Islamic Terrorists.", "Since she is being jailed for contempt, and can't be 'fired' because she is an elected official, does that mean she's basically stuck in jail believing herself to be a martyr for her cause until she either resigns, gives up, or is impeached?", "How is Kim Davis refusing to do her job of issuing marriage licenses different than Barack Obama refusing to enforce immigration and drug laws?", "ELI5: How come this job is done by an elected official and it is not just a regular government position for which you can apply?", "Now that Kim has been jailed and 5 of her 6 deputies have agreed to issue licenses - what happens now with her son, the 6th deputy who is still refusing? Is he able to skate by now that the office is issuing in general? How is he held accountable to the law now too?", "I've begun to see those arguing in support of Kim Davis stating that the ruling of the Supreme Court does not make a law and only Congress can create laws therefore she is doing nothing wrong. So what is it that the Supreme Court does that are not making laws? Is it that equal marriage is a right, not a law? I'm pretty much convinced these people are just using words and nothing they argue in this situation makes any sense. Also if this argument actually made sense, even her incompetent lawyer would have been using this in her defense but rather he chose to invoke Nazi comparisons.", "Can someone explain to me the limits of the freedom of religion regarding this case, and why her actions and decision are or are not protected?", "Why is all the focus on Davis when she is not the only clerk pulling this stunt?", "Question:\n\nShe is being jailed indefinitely until she gives gay marriage licenses out. How are they still going to make her do it once she is released? She goes back to work, refuses a licence, goes back to jail, goes back to work, again refuses, back to jail. Is this how this is working?\n\nAre they going to force her to quit her role?\n", "Forgive my ignorance when it comes to US law, but I do not understand why Kim Davis was put in jail, instead of just fired? Wouldn't a better solution just for whoever is her boss to fire her for non-compliance and the problem would be solved?", "There is an old saying that comes to mind in this case: \"Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose\". \n\nShe can't be fired because she is elected. \n\nShe is not in jail because of her religion, she is in jail because of contempt of court. \n\n\nThe law of the land is not a moveable feast. You cannot decide which ones you are going to obey and which ones you are going to ignore when you are an elected official. Her right to practice her religious beliefs (swing her fist) are trumped by the law of the land when she violates the legal rights of others (tip of my nose). Court told her to stop swinging her fist into other people's noses, and she kept beating up on others anyway. ", "Can someone explain the argument of a Hindu man being thrown into jail for refusing to slaughter a cow. I don't understand the similarity. Wouldn't the cow have already been slaughtered and he would be filling out the paperwork stating the cow was slaughtered? It's a state document for an action that has already taken place, correct?", "Can someone explain how it is that she is getting out of jail, but still saying she is not going to issue licenses? I thought that to get out of jail, she had to either resign or agree to issue licenses to homosexual couples. So how is it that she's out but not doing either of those things? What happens next? ", "It's simple. Her job has certain requirements. She is unwilling to perform her job. Rather then bitching and moaning about her \"rights\", she needs to find a new job. That's the way it works in the real world. \n", "What is happening now that she has been released. And, why was she released?", "I don't understand the big debate. Kim Davis is citing freedom of religion not just \"while\" but in order to force her religious views on others. Literally the only reason she thinks it is ok to not issue marriage licenses to same sex couples is precisely the reason why its NOT ok. The blatant hypocrisy is baffling. This government was specifically founded secularly, so any justifications for her actions as a GOVERNMENT official that are \"because religion\" are invalid. ", "Gay marriage does not make babies so some people have a problem calling it marriage. Others see it as an attack on a cultural practice that has been around for thousands of years.", "One last thing. How do we know that Davis really is acting out of religious faith and not just bigotry because she hates gays?\n\nWouldn't the government have to have some sort of RELIGIOUS TEST for her to pass to make sure it's actually religion and not something else?\n\nLet's say I'm in the air force. And I realize on the eve of battle that I am a Quaker pacifist. Can I keep my job and pay but not fight? Do they join me up to a Quaker tester machine to see if I'm lying?\n\nLet's say I'm a meat inspector. And I convert to Islam. (Like Davis had a religious awakening whilst on the job). Can I not certify any meat processors that are not halal? How about if there are none? Can I just sit on my ass?\n\nGovernment has a DUTY to uphold the constitution (the real one, not the one they wish it was if Jesus was president) and perform FAIRLY and within the law for all US citizens. Otherwise there is no freedom, only anarchy driven by money, power, and religious zealots. " ]

[ "In my state they capture the face with one camera and then when we are in the intersection they capture our back plate with another camera.", "In order for a red light camera to have any chance of being admissible evidence, it needs to get at least two pictures: one of the car before it enters the intersection with the traffic light in view, and one of the car in the intersection. The angle on the first one almost ensures that the back plate will be visible, since it would have to be taken from behind the car.\n\nThe reason both are required is because if only the first was taken, one could argue they never entered the intersection, and if only the second was taken, one could argue it didn't turn red until after they were in the intersection." ]