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{ "a_id": [ "ej9mc93" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Because the phrase \"in season\" is used by humans to describe the time of year when we most prefer the taste of different fruits." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "doiqcyy", "doj68n3", "doj91j2", "dojdgfc" ], "score": [ 231, 12, 57, 7 ], "text": [ "Differentiation is relatively straightforward and can be done by applying a few simple rules. Integration is the tricky thing. One way that computers integrate is by using the [Risch Algorithm](_URL_0_). ", "Taylor series is what comes to mind first for integration but no computer will get an irrational number 100% exact. They have something called precision built into them and are only as accurate as their precision allows them to be, after that they round.", "30 years ago, I worked in a medical lab that used an analog (not a digital) computer to perform real-time integration using an op-amp circuit. Analog computers are very uncommon these days, but they work by manipulating electrical signals, so they can be surprisingly effective in dealing with problems concerning continuous values instead of discrete quantities. _URL_0_", "For certain classes of functions where functions are fully differentiable or derivatibale it's possible to first perform symbolic derivation or integration and then calculate the result. The same way a mathematician would.\n\nIn fact symbolic derivation or integration can be implemented surprisingly easily.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nOne example\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risch_algorithm" ], [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op_amp_integrator" ], [ "http://5outh.blogspot.in/2013/05/symbolic-calculus-in-haskell.html?m=1" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c6z1c5x", "c6z2b62", "c6z3nom" ], "score": [ 101, 4, 2 ], "text": [ "A very curious bit of Viking morals: it's wrong to steal, but it's right to take by force. One of the Icelandic sagas tells of a Viking raid in the Baltic, where the Viking party manages to steal stuff from a farm under the cover of darkness without the occupants realizing what's going on. Halfway back to the boats, the Vikings feel ashamed and return to murder the men and burn the farm down with the women inside, so that they're not thieves, but raiders. This was not done to hide their act, but to legitimize it. Generally, victims of raids were expected to take revenge by counter-raiding, or be entitled to financial compensation; inability to properly respond to a raid was seen as a loss of honor of the victim, not of the raider.\n\nThis culture of 'might makes right' also included the practice of Holmgang; to settle disputes through single combat. Occasionally, this got so much out of hand that some berserkers just went around Iceland making fights with everyone so they could challenge (or get challenged) into a Holmgang and take the loser's stuff. This possibility for abuse led to complex rules and restrictions, and eventual abolition. Normally disputes were settled peacefully at councils.", "Pirate ships would have their own moral code agreed on by the sailors (or enforced by the captain) so it would vary from ship to ship. Some were extremely brutal in their treatment of hostages, some quite gentlemanly.\n\n\nThe pirates themselves have been frequently documented repenting for their sins upon being sentenced to death, so while European pirates could commit some atrocious acts when at sea they very quickly changed their tune about morals when death was a certainty.\n\n\nThere is at least one instance of a privateer captain being stripped of his licence after his crew reported his abuse of them to the British authorities, however I can't for the life of me find the reference in \"The Pirates Pocket Book\". A great little read with some good source material, but poorly organised for finding the quotes you want...", "Pirates, surprisingly enough, did have moral codes, but they did not generally deal with treatment of victims. Bartholomew Roberts prohibited gambling and women on board his ship, though his [flag](_URL_0_) specifically indicates the exact opposite of leniency for citizens of Barbadoes and Martinique.\n\nMarcus Rediker (and subsequent scholars of piracy) talks at length in Villains of All Nations and Between the Devil and Deep Blue Sea about the implicit camaraderie between pirates which extended to the sailors of the ships they captured - since most of them had been recruited from merchant vessels themselves. As Wibbles mentions, it varies from vessel to vessel, but in general, pirates were lenient toward merchant vessels (especially if they yielded) and less so toward sailors and marines from royal navies.\n\nPirate captains were fond of decrees, but as far as MORAL ones go, they were few and far between (except in rare cases like Bartholomew Roberts).\n\nEdit: looks like I've been downvoted to zero. Anyone want to enlighten me?" ] }

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[ [], [], [ "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Bartholomew_Roberts_Flag1.svg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ddka5t3" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It could actually! When water is boiled on a stovetop, the impurities (metal ions) that generally settle at the bottom (fall out of colloid/solution) get pushed up with the bubbles of water vapor that form at the bottom of the kettle. \n\nThat causes a remixing of the impurities and is what gives water a taste. \n\nMicrowaves on the other hand don't heat the water by causing convection as they heat all of the water evenly so convection is minimal. That means the impurities tend to stay out of solution at the bottom of the container and don't affect the taste of the water, which gives it that bland taste." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cun0m7i", "cun0swq" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Because hard set, black and white arguments are easier. They're not more right. They're just easier. It's hard to paint someone as an inhuman monster when you're forced to admit they may be right on some points...or that the issue at hand may be more gray than a lot of folks would like you to know. Also, it's easier to vilify the other party in an argument/debate when you paint them as an extreme antithesis of your viewpoint.", "Because going to the extreme makes people make a choice.\n\nEither you are FOR the horrifying thing they are talking about, or are against it.....\n\nIt makes people choose. Discussing things like reasonable adults doesn't make people angry and excited about an issue." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "exhjdp9", "exhlppa", "exhlu4v", "exhpii7", "exi4822" ], "score": [ 23, 6, 3, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Back then the regulation on corruption and advertising were much looser. Big tobacco companies would pay their own doctors to conducts their own studies and publish false claims. Any studies that exposed the risks of smoking were silenced with money or buried under the flood of false reports.\n\nEdit: Also when cigarettes first came out no one was really sure what the consequences were. It took some time for the correlation between smoking and disease to be noticed, and more time for studies to be done. \n\nIt is very much comparable to what Vaping is now, people claim its better than smoking and “healthy” but no one really knows the consequences yet as it is too soon to determine.", "Most knew that cigarettes weren't healthy. Inhaling any kind of smoke is dangerous. The tobacco companies bribed many doctors to say that cigarettes were healthy, or that they recommend a certain brand. The tobacco companies would use their wealth to try to bury real research into the negative health effects of smoking. It took a while, but eventually when tens of thousands of smokers started dying when they were just in their 50's, did everyone start to realize just how unhealthy smoking is, despite the propaganda of the tobacco industry.\n\nThe same thing happened with leaded gasoline, and now it's happening with climate change. Oil companies have been funding phony/misleading studies to try to disprove human caused climate change. In many regions, they've been breaking heat records every year. Yet very little is being done to lower green house gas emissions thanks to lobbying efforts by big oil companies, just like how tobacco companies bribed doctors.", "Doctors have been aware of the importance of evidence-based medicine for a long time. The problem is that when the lung cancer epidemic became apparent in the 1940s/50s, a lot of doctors either weren't aware of the connection between tobacco and cancer, or they smoked themselves (as a lot of people did) and had their own biases towards the risks.\n\nThis wasn't helped by the fact that tobacco was a huge industry and that medicine, like all sciences, is kept alive by funding. A lot of scientists were sponsored by tobacco companies with the essential goal of disproving anything that claimed that tobacco smoking caused cancer.\n\nAs usual it is the relationship between what scientists consider true based on evidence, and what society considers true based on perceptions and anecdotes.", "If we go back further in time than the answers you've read so far, there was a time smoke was considered [a remedy](_URL_0_) to several ailments.\n\nSo before the days of \"big tobacco\" and corporations selling packaged cigarettes, there is no doubt in my mind doctors at the time believed smoke introduction to the body to be harmless to us.", "There was one campaign urging people to reach for a cigarette instead of a cookie or candy. Healthy weight loss by smoking instead of mindless eating and growing fat.\n\nIt was mostly tobacco companies paying doctors,though." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [ "https://gizmodo.com/blowing-smoke-up-your-ass-used-to-be-literal-1578620709" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dqiecq9" ], "score": [ 28 ], "text": [ "Composed? No. The space of time limited [continuous signals](_URL_2_) is of course uncountably infinite. \n\nDifferentiated? Yes. To explain this, we have to make two assumptions, \n\n * each song can be reproduced with some maximum amount of power, \n * there will be noise added to the signal (which we will assume is [Gaussian](_URL_4_))\n * that all sounds outside our hearing range are immaterial to use and can not be used to differentiate songs.\n\nWe will say this maximum amount of signal power to noise power is S, while the range of human hearing (about 20 to 20 KHz) is W. With these definitions, there are at most \n\n2^(TW log[1 + S])\n\nT-second songs that can be reliably differentiated between.\n\n\nThis observation is in essence, the [Shannon-Hartley theorem](_URL_1_). In more detail, any bandlimited^([1]) (occupying finite frequency range) signal can be reproduced using a version of the signal sampled in time at frequency of 2W. [See here for a graphical representation of this, the middle on the right being the time sampled version of the top left.](_URL_3_). This is, in essence, the [Nyquist Shannon Sampling theorem](_URL_0_). Hence allowing us to replace this continuous signal, with a vector of length\n\n samples = seconds (samples/second) = T (2W)\n\n\nAt this point we have a vector of length 2TW. For every possible song that could be differentiated, we can associate a binary sequence of length *c*. If this sequence was length 3, then 2^3 = 8 songs could be reliably distinguished. Now note that \n\n log(number of songs)/vector length = bits/symbol.\n\nThe maximum number of bits/symbol is a well studied metric, called [the channels capacity](_URL_7_). For the case of Gaussian noise, *c* = 2^(-1) log(1 + S), where S at the outset. \n\nThus the capacity defines the maximum number of differentiable signals subject to the noise, and the sampling theorem the maximum number of discrete points needed to represent the continuous bandlimited function. Multiplying the two quantities gives a maximum number of \n\n2^(TW log[1+S] )\n\nT-second songs. You can also approach this problem from a [rate distortion](_URL_5_) perspective (ie every song within a certain distortion is equally likely, so I just need to pick the minimum number of songs to represent them all), and end up with the same result.\n\n[1]- All bandlimited signals are infinite in time. To account for this nuance you should technically use [prolate spheroidal functions](_URL_6_). The result is unchanged, you need a vector of 2TW for representation.\n\nedit- As /u/DevestatingAttack pointed out, screwed up my units originally. Had bits of song instead of songs. Changed from TW log[1+S] - > 2^(TW log[1+S])." ] }

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[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_signal", "https://www.tutorialspoint.com/signals_and_systems/images/signal_sampling.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_noise", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate%E2%80%93distortion_theory", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolate_spheroidal_wave_function", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_capacity" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c7kpu1d", "c7kq423" ], "score": [ 2, 7 ], "text": [ "I can't answer that question, but it's a difficult one to answer in the first place because \"mental illness\" is not a quantized or definite term. Mental health is a spectrum and what some people might call mentally ill other people call relatively healthy. Saying that somebody is definitely mentally ill or not can be tricky sometimes, and this will keep the percentage from being entirely accurate. Not to mention the potentially huge number of undiagnosed people in the world. ", "About 80% are free from mental illness each year, so says SAMHSA [[ABC article](_URL_0_), [bunch of raw data](_URL_1_)].\n\nBrought to you by the good doctors that invent disorders for drugs rather than the other way around (think prescribing amphetamines to pre-pubescent kids) and have a long history of expanding their diagnoses for profit and power (read some historical/semantic analysis such as Foucault's *History of Madness*).\n\nTheir job is literally to define abnormality from an interview. Talk too much? ADHD. Talk too little? Anxiety and reclusion. Talk to yourself? Bipolar or schizophrenia. Care too much? Obsessive-compulsive. Care too little? Self-destructive behavior. It goes on and on.\n\nOn top of that they have no physiological links to their craft. Blood/fluid tests, gene tests, protein assays? No such thing to a psychiatrist. It is 100% qualitative. Every single other branch of medicine is quantitative -- sure with a physician's experience and discretion -- but at least decisions are grounded in data!\n\nI'm not saying psychiatric disorders don't exist, but certainly over-diagnosed with some disorders invented entirely. So take their data with a grain of salt.\n\n/rant" ] }

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[ [], [ "http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/01/19/1-in-5-americans-suffer-from-mental-illness/", "http://www.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2k11MH_FindingsandDetTables/2K11MHFR/NSDUHmhfr2011.htm" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ecupfzq", "ecuqagp", "ecutiav" ], "score": [ 11, 6, 3 ], "text": [ "Short answer: no.\n\nLong answer: Yes, empty space inside of us is expanding. However, its expanding so slowly that all the forces that normally keep us together are able to counteract that expansion, meaning everything stays together at the same distance", "Nope.\n\n*Space* is expanding, but the atoms themselves are not. Think of it like this: if the space between an atom's nucleus and its electrons gets bigger, the electrons just move closer.\n\nOn the small scale, things like gravity keep us held together even as space expands around us. ", "Yes, but at the scale of the subatomic, this expansion is miniscule and more than overcome by the subatomic forces. You can think of the expansion of space as cumulative. It is practically non existent over atomic scales, but increases at an ever-increasing rate as distance increases. It basically doubles as distance doubles so think of it like counting by 2's. 2,4,8,16,32..... At first the numbers are increasing slowly but after awhile start making huge leaps. Likewise, when looking at distant galaxies, there's been a lot of doubling of distance, so to speak, between us and them, and therefore the expansion of space becomes much more noticeable." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ch1o9p3", "ch1qnvm", "ch1s5c6", "ch1u7c9", "ch26s70" ], "score": [ 42, 8, 13, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "It mostly arises from the Kepler mission, which was specifically designed to systematically find exoplanets. Before, it was basically astronomers booking time on a telescope and hoping for the best.", "You have to remember the first exoplanets were only discovered less than twenty years ago. As soon as we knew they were there people started designing instruments to find them. The sudden surge in exoplanets is from these all these instruments coming online. Kepler is the most notable, but there's also SuperWasp, Harps, Corot etc. \n In fact we're really only beginning to find planets. Upcoming projects like Plato, NGTS, Tess, Cheops, Gaia and others should find thousands more! Exciting times. ", "Because we didn't have the instruments to do this, until the Kepler space telescope, and because it is a very, very tough job, requiring dedicated instruments such as Kepler.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nKepler was specifically designed for this job. By most metrics, this project is a great success.", "As others have mentioned, Kepler has helped with the recent surge of discoveries. But it all started with new imaging techniques and technology. One of the advances that most helped with the search for exoplanets from Earth is Adaptive Optics. Adaptive Optics use cameras and lasers to detect distortions and turbulence in the atmosphere. This information controls a secondary mirror in the telescope which has the ability to deform in order to correct for atmospheric turbulence. When looking at a star before adaptive optics, the telescope would see great differences in the brightness of a star. With adaptive optics, a telescope will have a much reliable view of the star's brightness. One of the ways we look for exoplanets is to measure the brightness of a star over time. When an exoplanet passes in front of the star, we see a characteristic dimming. This dimming could have been an effect of atmospheric turbulence, but with adaptive optics, we can filter out or adjust for that \"noise\" and have the ability to see the dimming that is an exoplanet transiting it's star.", "There are two techniques that are the most effective at finding exoplanets. One is radial velocity which relies on highly precise spectrometry to detect planets. For a long time that technique did not see much use because it requires a fair amount of observation time, it requires computer processing, and until the mid-90s it didn't have sufficient resolution to detect any planets similar to the ones we knew about (our own solar system). For that reason there weren't any radial velocity planet searches made during the '80s. Even though it would have been possible to detect several planets using those techniques. But back then people thought the prospect was to watch a star for, say, over a decade (Jupiter's orbital period is about 12 years) and then get a tiny signal that probably falls under the noise floor of your instruments (3 m/s). Nobody knew about \"hot Jupiters\" like 51 Pegasi b where the radial velocity signal is actually 56 m/s and the orbital period is 4.2 days. Once folks invented ways to get down to 3 m/s radial velocity (by modeling the point spread function) and computing power became cheap then there started to be planet detection surveys. Interestingly, the first planet detection using those methods, which was 51 Pegasi b, was found by two teams (Mayor & Queloz as well as Marcy & Butler) but the second team used post processing of their data, which they hadn't done yet because they didn't anticipate such easily detectable planets. Since then the radial velocity technique has been used to find many dozens of planets. It's a robust technique but it works best for large, close planets around bright or otherwise nearby stars, and is currently incapable of detecting small, Earth-sized planets.\n\nThe other major technique is transit detection. If you can observe the light intensity from a star with enough precision then you can observe the characteristic change in brightness as a planet passes in front of the star. This technique is capable of finding even Earth-sized planets but it has a few down sides. First, only a tiny fraction of planetary systems will have the fortuitous alignment necessary for a transit to be observable from Earth. Second, it requires near continuous monitoring of a star for a long period of time, lest a potential transit event go unobserved. Third, it requires observing 3 separate transit events (at a minimum of 2x the orbital period of observation time) in order to confirm a detection. It is also biased towards detecting large planets in close orbits, but it has the capability of detecting smaller planets and the main limit for farther planets is just in observation period.\n\nHere's where the Kepler spacecraft comes in. Trying to observe a given star 24/7 for a period of years on Earth is not workable. Even if you have an observatory somewhere where there is never any cloud cover there is still day and night, which will prevent continuous observation. But with a space based telescope it's possible to continuously observe the same patch of sky, and to monitor not just one but perhaps thousands of stars continuously. Which is what Kepler did. Most of the stars Kepler observed didn't reveal any planets, but because of the sheer number of stars Kepler was able to observe (145,000) a huge number of detections were possible. Currently Kepler is responsible for 961 confirmed planetary detections. Remember that Kepler is only capable of detecting a planetary system if the orbital alignment is just right, which is a very unlikely event (around 1%), so the actual number of planets around stars that Kepler observed is likely quite enormous given the total number that actually were observed.\n\nSo overall it's a combination of technology and willingness to build the systems and put in the observation time to get these detections." ] }

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[ [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_(spacecraft)" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ctbve0v" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "When light passes through a gas like the atmosphere of a planet or star, the molecules that make up the gas absorb light of very specific colors. If you take this light and split it up into a rainbow, you can see dark lines where this light was absorbed.\n\nMany molecules have had their absorption lines mapped and those can be used to figure out which molecules are present in the gas that the light passed through.\n\nIf we point our telescope at a planet and are very careful, we can measure the light which passes through any atmosphere which may be present on it and can then detect which molecules are present there, including water.\n\nObjects which are in our solar system can be observed more directly than this, but similar techniques are still useful, particularly for very distant or dim objects. For planets outside of our solar system, this is pretty much the only way we can confirm anything about what is present in their atmospheres.\n\nThere are other theories and techniques regarding habitability, however. In particular, the size of the planet, the size of its star(s), and their proximity to each other are very important in determining what is likely to exist.\n\nAnd of course, this is all limited by our ability to imagine what life might even look like. We only have one example to work with, so other systems for something we would even recognize as life are all speculative, but it is very likely that the universe will surprise us with its creativity." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "clyc3xa" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Arrest is done by a police officer based on either probable cause to believe that you are or have committed a crime, or on a warrant issued by a judge. You are detained and subjected to bail and/or other conditions of release (or held) while awaiting trial. Within a few days of arrest, a defendant is entitled to have the legality of the arrest reviewed by a judge, although it is not required to be a formal hearing.\n\n\"Charged\" and \"Indicted\" are both formal initiations of a criminal case. Indictments are handed down by grand juries, after presentation of the case by a prosecutor, while \"charges\" (called an information or complaint) are brought directly by the prosecutor without using a grand jury. It depends on the jurisdiction whether the prosecutor can choose (grand jury or information) or has to use one or the other. If a grand jury indicts, the case will be held over for trial. If an information/complaint is used, a preliminary hearing will be held so a judge can determine whether to hold the case over. \n\nA subpoena is a court order that demands the presence of a person or of documents in a person's possession. They are used to force people to show up in court, in both criminal and civil matters. They are also used to obtain information (like police records) before trial. Basically, it is a demand that carries the power of the court. \n\nHope that helps!" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cv9tjot", "cv9wyzk", "cva3lw1" ], "score": [ 9, 7, 2 ], "text": [ "Inertia: the resistance of any physical object to any change in its state of motion including changes to its speed and direction or the state of rest. \n\nPlus, low friction coefficient between the side of the mug and the liquid. \n\nEquals, the coffee tends to remain in the same place while the mug (and you) moves around it. \n\nIf you spun really quickly for a while, eventually the coffee would start spinning too. Then, when you stopped, the coffee would keep spinning. \n\nGive it a try and report back!", "Since the coffee has relatively low viscosity, rotating the mug only moves the fluid \"layer\" closest to the edge, and this disturbance is not propagated very far into the interior of the coffee before it dies out. If you were to continue to spin the mug around, eventually the boundary layer would begin to transfer rotational motion to the interior, but it might take a while.\n\nIf you were to repeat this experiment with a high viscosity fluid like maple syrup, the vast majority of the fluid would immediately begin to rotate with the mug.", "I see people mentioning inertia, but more precisely the [moment of inertia](_URL_1_) makes it hard to make the coffee rotate much given the small amount of torque you can apply. The coffee is being linearly accelerated just fine as the cup moves around the room.\n\nOf course, even this is a simplification, since the coffee is a fluid and each part of it can spin at a different rate. So you really need to measure the [vorticity](_URL_0_) of the coffee. But since the coffee never really starts spinning, we can pretend it is a rigid body and talk about the moment of inertia." ] }

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[ "http://gfycat.com/FoolishJovialIbizanhound" ]

[ [], [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorticity", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_of_inertia" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c44gfv2" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "To start, migraines are more of a disorder that will happen to a select few sufferers, while headaches are something that can affect everybody. Physiologically, migraines most often include nausea, sensitivity to light, sound, and temperature, and a sensory aura (like tunnel vision) to signal an incipient one. Migraines are usually on one side of the head or above one eye. The cause of most headaches is muscle tension, while the cause of most migraines is neurotransmitter or hormonal issues.\n\nWe used to believe migraines to be caused by vasodilation (blood vessels expand) and headaches by vasoconstriction, but I think it's more complicated. Changes in the volume of blood vessels of the brain - contraction *and* dilation* - occur, known as the \"squeeze and release\" mechanism. This starts in the occipital lobe that controls vision, hence the visual auras people get. The blood vessels first contract, then dilate enough that they become semipermeable and fluid starts to leak out. This process sets off pain receptors and triggers the inflammation response - this causes increased blood flow to the area. Each heartbeat sends another pulse of blood, hence the throbbing of the migraine.\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c7fk8ng", "c7ft14k" ], "score": [ 46, 3 ], "text": [ "The time aboard the ISS is Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) -- which is a time zone roughly halfway between Houston and Moscow, where the two main control centers are located. So when astronauts wake up (at around 7:00 GMT), it is 2 in the morning in Houston and 11 in the morning in Moscow.", "Follow up question: How is time adjusted to time dilation?\n\nEDIT: Maybe I should have clarified more that I meant clocks on the ISS, not clocks in general." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c4d11y0" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Things that can help improve synaptic plasticity (and consequently memory performance):\n\n* [Repetition, spaced trials](_URL_1_)\n* Concentration\n* [Sleep](_URL_2_)\n* Some cognitive enhancers like [caffeine](_URL_3_)\n* [Diet and exercise](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166223609000563", "http://www.springerlink.com/content/cmqeyygkw73m3c82/", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959438806001474", "http://iospress.metapress.com/content/lw1630245745v088/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cuec25y", "cuec9lq" ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text": [ "Software programs are nothing but text in a file (really binary) with some graphics.\n\nA movie is millions of pictures. Its immensely more data.", "Good question. software programs aren't too big because they are mostly made of text. Text is easy to shrink because it's so plain and not a lot of space is needed to store it.. Pictures And video on the other hand require a lot more information to make like where each pixel is and what color it is. Videos are even larger because they are eessentially books of pictures with sound. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e0qa2ea", "e0qa7ra", "e0qa8sa", "e0qabyn" ], "score": [ 3, 2, 2, 3 ], "text": [ "It depends on the game, or rather what type of DRM (anti-piracy software) the game is using. \n\nIn the old days, all you had to do to crack a game was figure out how CD keys were created for it and then make you own the same way. \n\nLater on, companies started connecting their singleplayer offline games to online servers, so you had to figure out what the game and servers said to each other and copy it. ", "They generally use a debugger to step through the computer instructions until they get to a logic point where the game decides whether it's running legitimately or not. Then they switch the instruction.\n\nGames with DRM have the added step that the DRM also has to be neutralized, which generally means finding that same type of logic step in the DRM and changing it.\n\nBeyond that, the actual method depends on what method was used to try and prevent piracy. It's a never-ending cat and mouse game.", "There isn't really a single answer to this, because there isn't a single way to copy protect a game.\n\nAt a high level, all \"copy protections\" are is a specific set of code that looks for / does a specific thing. If the thing that it looks for isn't there or the action is tries to take doesn't work, the code won't allow the software to function. The pirates will then write a patch that disables or changes that specific line of code to do something else, so that it either doesn't check or always passes the check, thus allowing the software to continue to run.\n\nNow, actually writing that patch is often easier said than done, but that is the basic idea.", "A few years ago this was really easy. Basically, whenever the game started there was a short check in the code whether the CD was inserted. The check (in pseudo code) looks like this: \"if CD is not inserted: stop program\". As a pirate you'd try to find out where exactly in the code this part is located (for example using a debugger) and then you replace the \"if not\" code with an \"if\". A simple analogy would be to see a mathematical term \"a - b = 3\" and adding a horizontal line in the minus to make it a plus. This changes the term completely without adding any additional symbols. This means that the game now exits when a CD is inserted instead of when it's out.\n\nNowadays it's a bit more complicated, as companies started adding additional checks, sometimes even checking whether the application has been tempered with. In the end it's just a lot of \"if\" checks, so you basically only have to find all of them and change them." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cncl4y1", "cncldiw" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "Used to work at Wal-Mart. You can ask the customer service desk for shopping assistance. Past that I have no idea.", "Not a bad question. In terms of reading nutritional information I can see the benefit.\n\nIn terms of picking out food, it would still be extraordinarily difficult to shop for food and therefore pointless in that sense.\n\nA better system would be a braille kiosk that functioned like a catalogue and coincided with braille labelling along the aisle. Pick out what you want, maybe the data is transferred to an audio thing, audio things tells you where to go generally, braille aisle thing confirms you are in front of the correct product.\n\nOr just get someone to help. That works too." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dczi1qr", "dczjftl" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "When working properly, the sex cells (sperm and egg) simply have one example of each pair.\n\nWhen the sex-cells are generated, there can be problems where the gamete does not recieve exactly 1 of each chromosome. If this flawed gamete combines to form a fertilized egg, it frequently triggers the female body to terminate the pregnancy, and the mother may never even realize she was pregnant if his occurs early enough.\n\nIf cases where an embryo contains extra or missing chromosomes and survives to term can result in developmental problems of varrying severity, such as Downs Syndrome. ", "Our somatic cells (the ones that form all our body) have two pairs of each chromossome. Even though they carry the same functions, they're not identical, that's what lead to variations in our characteristics. In the reproductive cells formation, there is first a specialized somatic cell. During it's division, it develops intracelular structures called spindle apparatus, that organize each chromossome with its pair and then pull them apart to each side of the cell, then it splits and each side carry one sample of each chromossome. When the male and female reproductive cells merge, they form a zigote, that have the pairs made again. Of course this system can fail during the division, pulling the whole pair to one side and leaving the other without or breaking them in parts. That is the cause of some syndroms, like Down Syndrom, that happens when they have an extra chromossome on 21st pair; Turner syndrom, when the person gets just an X instead of two X or a X and a Y, Cri-du-chat syndrom, when a part of 5th cromossome is missing, etc." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cd86grm", "cd8dkwt", "cd8m42y" ], "score": [ 196, 2, 6 ], "text": [ "So we haven't ruled out alternate gravity theories, but the majority of astronomers are definitely in the WIMP dark matter camp. There are alternate gravity people, but it hasn't really caught on at all. But yet, in the general public people seem to think of dark matter as some sort of weird phlogiston theory, and that it seems much \"simpler\" to \"just change gravity\".\n\nSo I'll try to defend why dark matter isn't as weird as it seems:\n\n1. We already know that there are particles that interact only through the weak nuclear force and gravity: neutrinos. We have built neutrino detectors and found them. We're just looking for a fatter neutrino, not something entirely different to anything we've ever seen before.\n\n2. The Bullet Cluster can't be explained by alternate gravity - it really shows that the gravity is not where the visible matter is.\n\n3. It's actually quite elegant physically, because we have all the physics for particles worked out. We can set up a simulation with a bunch of dark matter and see if it falls into galaxy-sized clumps etc. This means it's a very testable theory, because it's not as flexible as changing gravity. We have some unknowns (like the mass of the particle), but we aren't changing the basic laws of physics, so we can run simulations and make predictions for observations, and hence either confirm or rule-out dark matter. For example, dark matter should be its own anti-particle, so with a good enough instrument we should be able to observe the gamma-rays it produces\n\n4. Some fairly sensible extensions of the \"standard model of particle physics\" naturally produce a particle with properties very similar to what a dark matter particle should be. Although there's no proof that any of these models are correct yet, so this point is not super solid.\n\nAlthough it's worth pointing out that we really do need to actually find the particle before this is in the 100% confirmed category, it's definitely the favoured option.\n\nNext: why is changing gravity weirder than it seems?\n\n1. Einstein changed gravity by making a very small number of very strong assumptions, and all of general relativity naturally flowed from that. GR is basically the simplest possible solution that satisfies these basic assumptions. But if you're making GR more complex, you can change it in any direction you like. You can make it fit pretty much any data you want. You aren't bound by the laws of physics any more, because you're changing these laws. So if anything contradicts your theory, it's much easier to adjust your theory to make it fit. So it's much harder to prove or disprove the theory, and that makes it unsatisfying.\n\n2. The most popular model, Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) doesn't even change GR properly. It's more or less just an ad-hoc modification to basic Newtonian gravity to make it fit the data. The fundamental physics isn't justified at all, it's literally just changing the equations to fit the data.\n\nSo, to put it a bit harsher than it probably deserves, we have a choice between a minor adjustment (adding a new particle similar to other particles we have observed) that is inflexible enough and specific enough to be properly tested, and a major adjustment (changing the fundamental laws of general relativity) that is too flexible and unspecific for us to design really good tests to confirm or disprove it.\n\nThis is all my perspective as an astrophysicist. Someone who does particle physics or who works directly on general relativity may have a different opinion.", "Matter that doesn't interact on the electromagnetic spectrum, but does interact with the higgs field does seem like a possibility. This is basically what dark matter is. We don't know what it is, but we know what it doesn't do. \n\nWe can't actually allow ourselves any more to just say we won't understand gravity well enough because through the standard model we have made great and vast predictions about what we thought it was, and so far they have all been right. Meaning we do have a sort of firm grasp on what gravity is, and our lack of understanding it cannot account for the effects that dark matter has.", "Dark matter isn't that weird. In fact, we already have experimentally verified dark matter. They are called neutrinos. \"Dark\" means non EM interacting. When you look at it from the point of view of TV channels trying to mystify it, it becomes weird. But when you realize how simple the notion is, it becomes a rather logical extrapolation. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c867udp", "c86a9k1", "c86cju1" ], "score": [ 3, 33, 2 ], "text": [ "[Some evidence points to yes,](_URL_0_) but it's hardly a comprehensive study.", "You're basically asking two different questions (even though you didn't necessarily know you were... how exciting). \n\n1.)The first is, \"Can [the activities you listed] cause a concussion/brain injury?\" \n\nA concussion occurs when there is a sufficient level of force applied to the brain that causes alterations in normal brain functions. There isn't a single number that can be used to define the force required to produce a concussion, but it's a fairly high G-force load. **Is it possible the activities you listed could produce sufficient force to cause a concussion? Yes. Do they on a regular basis? No.** So the answer to question one is yes, it can, but it would be pretty rare and would require some pretty aggressive circumstances.\n\n 2.) The second question is, \"Do repetitive subconcussive forces applied to the head lead to brain damage?\" I anticipate this was the question you were really more interested in, and unfortunately we don't really know. If you've heard in the news about the NFL players and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), this is what they're talking about. We've known for a long time that multiple concussions can cause lasting effects on the brain. What is new is the idea that hitting your head over and over and over, but not doing so hard enough to cause a concussion, might be bad as well. So far, the evidence suggests that doing this repetitively over many many many years, there could be some damage that occurs in the brain. We also think there might be a genetic link to the production of a protein that repairs the brain after these small hits, and that's actually what some of my research focuses on.\n\n**The key, however, is that we believe these subconcussive forces must occur with frequency over a long period of time in order to cause problems.** So someone who engages in the activities you listed on a normal basis, and doesn't do so with enough force to cause a concussion, should not experience any brain damage based on the current available research and thinking.\n\nHope that helps.\n\n", "Doubtful that it can cause brain injury. There is some body of literature on the impact of heading on football (american soccer) players. Some neuropsychological findings seem to suggest a relation, but they are clouded by the clear impact of concussive episodes from head to head contact with other players. The evidence on the impact of heading is therefore unclear, and mixed. The accelerations from running, changing direction, headbanging dancing, etc, are going to be more minor. When it progresses to an actual concusssion, the evidence is pretty clear that there is brain damage. If you want to see the real science look at this \n \n_URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/12/18/2449866.htm" ], [], [ "http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=soccer+heading+mri&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C11" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dy8dav8", "dy8f7kx" ], "score": [ 9, 6 ], "text": [ "Higher oxygen content would do two things I can think of off the top of my head.\n\nInsects size is constrained mainly by oxygen content because of how their breathing systems work. If you increased the oxygen content of the Earth, bugs would get bigger. Like, doubling their normal size.\n\nSecond, fire burns more intensely and easily with higher oxygen content. Globally, forest fires would be more common and more destructive, which would balance out the extra oxygen by releasing more CO2.\n\nBut a big problem with generating that extra oxygen in the first place would be the giant amounts of resources needed to ramp up tree planting or algae growth. Those efforts would almost certainly need industries which would pollute so much that it would be difficult to reach even 1%.", "The atmosphere is 4,200,000,000 km^3, that's 4,200,000,000,000,000 m^3 or 147,000,000,000,000,000 ft^3. It's 21% oxygen, so let's round to 10,000,000,000,000 m^3 to raise it 1%. That's a lot. We mostly make oxygen gas by pulling it out of the air. You could split some water, but you'd have a huge amount of super dangerous hydrogen just looking for an excuse to burn and pull oxygen out of the air. It would take a ginormous amount of plants/algae to pull that out of the available CO2 -- **But Wait** -- the atmosphere is only 0.04% CO2. You could only get 1/25^th of the oxygen you want if your converted **ALL** the CO2." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cd3uubp", "cd3v3b6", "cd3yg6z", "cd411bo" ], "score": [ 3, 5, 2, 3 ], "text": [ "They are not. Thats the point, Pi is a natural number where it may or may not be possible to find every finite number string.\n\nBy itself Pi is nothing special, the square root of 2 or log(2), or... have digits just as \"special\".", "Pi (The number), is not special, but the things which you can calculate from this number is very special. Without Pi we could not be able to calculate the surface area and volume of curved faced objects reliably. ", "Pi is an intrinsic property of nature. It holds true for **every** circle. It just happens to be irrational in our Universe. Can't really comprehend a situation where it isnt o.O but that's the way it is.\n\nThere isn't really anything special about the numbers itself, there are lots of other irrational numbers too!", "There are two main reasons the digits of pi are regarded as special, one is theoretical, the other is a respect based on the cultural/historical impact the number had.\n\nI consider theoretical interest to be the answer to why have we calculated out trillions of digits of pi. It remains a way to show off/test computing power. For people, in a similar manner it's a way of showing off memorization skills. All digits of pi of any significance have been known since the 1630s, when they finally calculated it to 39 digits.\n\nIf you use those 39 digits of pi, you can calculate the circumference of the observable universe [within the width of a hydrogen atom](_URL_0_). So we can see that there is no real practical purpose to calculate pi to the extreme lengths that we have, and even the amount most people might know off the top of their head is overkill for any practical application (off the top of my head I know 3.14159 which is good enough to estimate the circumference of earth and only be off by about 100 feet)\n\nIf we look at the history of math, I think it's easier to see where the interest comes from. The question of pi is simple, but the answer is very elusive. Anyone can understand the problem. If you have a circle, and the distance straight across is 1 unit long, what's the distance for a full trip around the outside? Without having pi as a starting point, how would you even start to estimate? I think it is the simple question compared with the elusiveness of the actual answer that has kept people interested for so long.\n\nThe first records that reference pi are from around 2000BC and they only had the first 2 digits right (3.1). At this time the value for pi was basically an educated guess at a number that seemed to closely match the diameter of real objects with their circumference. In 250AD, Archimedes created new math techniques that allowed him them to do more than just guess, with this they were able to get the value to 3.14, and by 480AD they had continued the work far enough to get to 3.141592. But even this wasn't actually calculating pi, it was calculating the total edge length of a shape with hundreds of sides that was slightly larger than the circle, and then calculating the total edge length of a shape that was slightly smaller than the circle. Finally, in the 1600s, Newton and calculus came along, and after more than 3500 years, mathematicians discovered a clear, straightforward way to calculate the value of pi directly. Newton himself used this new math to calculate pi to about 15 digits, he later wrote \"I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried these computations, having no other business at the time.\"\n\nThis is the journey to the value of pi, it took over 2000 years to get more than 2 digits, it wasn't until 1200 AD that more than 7 digits were calculated. If you compare that to some of the numbers listed by other commenters, such as the square root of 2, the difficulty isn't even close. If you understand multiplication and simple guess and check, you can probably calculate more than 2 digits for the square root of two by yourself within a few minutes by just multiplying and adjusting repeatedly." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpyrF_Ci2TQ" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c2uat3z", "c2ube27", "c2uc4iv", "c2ucdpi", "c2ueoea", "c2uat3z", "c2ube27", "c2uc4iv", "c2ucdpi", "c2ueoea" ], "score": [ 39, 16, 11, 2, 5, 39, 16, 11, 2, 5 ], "text": [ "Mars is pretty different to Earth. The atmosphere is about 1% of the thickness of Earth's - it would basically feel like a vacuum to any Earth organism. It also gets less than half the heat the Earth does. So you would need to pump in a lot of gas to make the air breathable, and to trap the heat in.\n\nIt is easy to underestimate the scale of this endeavour. All of the total sum of all of the carbon dioxide emission from all of the industry in the history of the Earth *has* made an effect on the atmosphere, but it's still on the order of hundreds of parts per million (though of course, this is affected by the natural processing of CO2).\n\nWe can use this as an estimate of the scale of the project. What would happen if this scale of industry was producing oxygen and nitrogen instead of CO2? While dedicated machinery might produce air more efficiently, it's unlikely we'll get that scale of dedicated machinery on Mars without already terraforming it already, so this is still a good estimate of an upper limit. We're talking about the effects of 7 billion people here...\n\nAccording to wikipedia, the sum of all of our CO2 emissions is 29,888,121,000 tonnes per year (let's say 3x10^10 ) , while Mars's atmosphere is 25,000,000,000,000 tonnes (25 x 10^12 tonnes). To multiply this by 100 (roughly what we need) would require 2.5 x 10^15 tonnes. So if we had the equivalent of Earth's entire industry on Mars, but producing air instead, it would take about 100,000 years to get an Earth-like atmosphere.\n\nSo even with an unrealistically large-scale industry on Mars producing air, it is not going to happen any time soon.\n\nEdit: No need to downvote the people responding to me - they're just follow-up questions!", "One problem we would face is that the iron core of Mars has frozen which has made Mars lose its magnetic field. Without this magnetic field cosmic wind strips away the atmosphere. Before any real terraforming could take place we would have to find a way to jump start the magnetic field.", "This one has been asked many, many times, and it always degenerates into the same rabble. Engineers and scientists will tell you why it's practically impossible and science fiction fans will tell you what they wish to believe. As much as I love science fiction, I can say without a doubt that we couldn't make Mars livable even if every single person on Earth were working towards that goal. The resources and technology simply don't exist.", "[Read this article](_URL_0_) on terraforming mars.", "Since most here seem to be discussing colonies on Mars...\n\nHow about Venus? There was one idea I ran across on wikipedia involving [Aerostat Colonies.](_URL_0_)\n\nFrom the link: \n\nAt an altitude of 50 km above Venusian surface, the environment is the most Earth-like in the solar system – a pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures in the 0°C–50°C range.[3] Because there is not a significant pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the breathable-air balloon, any rips or tears would cause gases to diffuse at normal atmospheric mixing rates, giving time to repair any such damages. In addition, humans would not require pressurized suits when outside, merely air to breathe, a protection from the acidic rain; and on some occasions low level protection against heat.", "Mars is pretty different to Earth. The atmosphere is about 1% of the thickness of Earth's - it would basically feel like a vacuum to any Earth organism. It also gets less than half the heat the Earth does. So you would need to pump in a lot of gas to make the air breathable, and to trap the heat in.\n\nIt is easy to underestimate the scale of this endeavour. All of the total sum of all of the carbon dioxide emission from all of the industry in the history of the Earth *has* made an effect on the atmosphere, but it's still on the order of hundreds of parts per million (though of course, this is affected by the natural processing of CO2).\n\nWe can use this as an estimate of the scale of the project. What would happen if this scale of industry was producing oxygen and nitrogen instead of CO2? While dedicated machinery might produce air more efficiently, it's unlikely we'll get that scale of dedicated machinery on Mars without already terraforming it already, so this is still a good estimate of an upper limit. We're talking about the effects of 7 billion people here...\n\nAccording to wikipedia, the sum of all of our CO2 emissions is 29,888,121,000 tonnes per year (let's say 3x10^10 ) , while Mars's atmosphere is 25,000,000,000,000 tonnes (25 x 10^12 tonnes). To multiply this by 100 (roughly what we need) would require 2.5 x 10^15 tonnes. So if we had the equivalent of Earth's entire industry on Mars, but producing air instead, it would take about 100,000 years to get an Earth-like atmosphere.\n\nSo even with an unrealistically large-scale industry on Mars producing air, it is not going to happen any time soon.\n\nEdit: No need to downvote the people responding to me - they're just follow-up questions!", "One problem we would face is that the iron core of Mars has frozen which has made Mars lose its magnetic field. Without this magnetic field cosmic wind strips away the atmosphere. Before any real terraforming could take place we would have to find a way to jump start the magnetic field.", "This one has been asked many, many times, and it always degenerates into the same rabble. Engineers and scientists will tell you why it's practically impossible and science fiction fans will tell you what they wish to believe. As much as I love science fiction, I can say without a doubt that we couldn't make Mars livable even if every single person on Earth were working towards that goal. The resources and technology simply don't exist.", "[Read this article](_URL_0_) on terraforming mars.", "Since most here seem to be discussing colonies on Mars...\n\nHow about Venus? There was one idea I ran across on wikipedia involving [Aerostat Colonies.](_URL_0_)\n\nFrom the link: \n\nAt an altitude of 50 km above Venusian surface, the environment is the most Earth-like in the solar system – a pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures in the 0°C–50°C range.[3] Because there is not a significant pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the breathable-air balloon, any rips or tears would cause gases to diffuse at normal atmospheric mixing rates, giving time to repair any such damages. In addition, humans would not require pressurized suits when outside, merely air to breathe, a protection from the acidic rain; and on some occasions low level protection against heat." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [ "http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/814/greening-the-red-planet" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus" ], [], [], [], [ "http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/814/greening-the-red-planet" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ey4sogu" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "The 1907 trial of Big Bill Haywood in Idaho for the murder of former Governor Frank Steunenburg was a first ordeal for the upstart union, and also the most amazing event in US labor history. Read *Big Trouble* by J Anthony Lucas for the incredible story, a tapestry of American society of the time. Haywood's lawyer was Clarence Darrow. Pinkerton James McParland managed the prosecution's efforts. He had been instrumental in defeating the Molly McGuires, and was the go-to guy for anti-labor dirty work.\n\nAstounding shenanigans abound, with jury tampering the mildest of the cheating and skullduggery. The trial was a near-perfect reflection of the struggle between capital and labor at the time. While the trial brought attention to the IWW, it also depleted its meager resources, which might have been better used fending off trade unionism, which was already stronger and easier to sell to American workers. \n\nBy 1917, the Espionage Act allowed the government to characterize the Wobblies as enemies of the state. Haywood was convicted in 1918, and fled to the USSR in 1921. His energy and personality were lost to the Wobblies.\n\nThe emergence of the Bolsehvik regime in Russia, and the Red Scare in the US, marginalized the IWW. Its leadership had been convicted under the Espionage Act, and supportive voices like Emma Goldman's were also lost to Attorney General Palmer's continual suppression of radicals, especially foreign nationals. Also, the US entered the war in 1917, and the resultant nativism pulled workers away from the more radical, and European, approaches to the struggle. \n\nOverall, considering the reliance on Haywood as a leader, the direct efforts of capitalists to destroy the IWW, the legal attacks by the AG, the effects of the war on labor and the attitudes of workers, and the comparative attractiveness of trade unionism to American workers, it shouldn't be too surprising that the IWW lost its appeal and its power. Had the war not intervened, the Wobblies might have continued to grow after its success in Lawrence. \n\nAgain, read *Big Trouble.* It's an amazing telling of the intertwined social forces in play at the time." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cj4sx30" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Iraq is a (mostly) Arabic speaking country, full of people who consider themselves Arabs. Iran is not - it is neither Arabic speaking nor do the people consider themselves Arabs (though there's a minority of Arabs living there). \n\nNone of the countries whose names end with -stan contain a majority of Arabs. I can't think of a single one, anyhow. Asking why they don't consider themselves Arabs is rather like asking why the French don't consider themselves Japanese. They have very different cultures and histories, and speak languages that belong to completely different families. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c3yh0q3", "c3yh1jc", "c3yins3", "c3yipsd", "c3yix6b", "c3yjafd", "c3yjbha" ], "score": [ 9, 33, 15, 2, 3, 21, 5 ], "text": [ "I'm thinking that, because of gravity, no. A planet several thousand times larger than Earth would have many thousand times the gravitational pull as Earth, and so any lifeform would be \"sucked\" inward, in a manner of speaking. \n\nSomeone will hopefully be able to go into greater depth, but basically, the bigger the mass of the planet, the smaller the lifeform because of the gravitational pull.", "There are other scaling problems than just oxygen absorption. Strength is approximately related to the cross-sectional area of a muscle, but mass is proportional to volume. If you double in height your muscle cross section, and thus strength, go up by a factor of 4 but your weight goes up by a factor of 8. If you scale things up too much, you become too heavy to move. This is one reason why terrestrial animals are limited in size and why aquatic life can be bigger. A large planet would have higher gravity and would only make this problem worse.", "Most replies deal with the planet's gravity, but there's a catch in the star's mass as well. The biggest star we've found so far has at most 150 times the mass of our Sun. Stars that massive have a puny life expectancy at a few million years at most. When you have such a massive star exploding in your face after only a couple million years, no giant humanoids have time to evolve.", "Is there a terrestrial limit. Like, do terrestrial planets have a ratio of gravity to radius that it cant exceed?", "I've been building a procedural universe generator and from what research I've come across its unlikely.\n\nI'll share what I've come up, mostly based on different papers and theories Ive read, and combined them... maybe the mods will delete it as I'm sure this breaches the quality standards, who knows.\n\nAnyway I broke my system into two zones based around the \"snow line\", the point where water freezes. This is important because light pressure from the star, it causes an effect which theoretically should push lighter molecules past the snow line (like dust in the wind or a reverse centrifuge). This means that gas giants aren't likely inside the snow line unless they are on a decaying orbit into the star. The snow line in our solar system is about half way between Mars and the asteroid belt I think. \n\nIn this scenario planets you will find will be similar to what we can see in our system. High in heavier metals, comparatively less organic compounds. I came across some research that pointed to a lot of atmospheric gases coming out of cooling planets. So you can expect to get similar atmospheres to what we see in our system, or specifically early earth. Which was predominately CO2. \n\nFor those wondering the CO2 gave way to N due to life excreting it, the primarily source being the planet crust and related scum layer. After those lifeforms subsided O2 producing ones took over. So hypothetically our atmosphere could occur anywhere where a life form starts eating the planet crust/scum. Because our planet is inside the snow line free water from comets, and organics compounds from outside the snow line will be dragged in those style of orbitals. Essentially our system should be fairly representative of a stable system.\n\nInside the snow line a high mass object will either succumb to gravity and collapse into the star. To avoid this it can increase orbit speed to resist the pull. Neither scenario leads to prospects for life. Hot gas giants reported so far have can have orbits around large stars of a day. As far as I'm aware our biology is to subtle to survive under such strain. \n\nSame goes for any object, to escape the gravity of the star (falling in) it will need to be orbiting (falling out) at a sufficient speed to counter act it. The larger the mass the faster it will have to go as each objects falls towards themselves. Close in high mass objects wont be pleasant to live on.\n\nIf the object is large enough to attract the lighter gases it will more than likely form a gas giant which should either continue to grow mass till it becomes heavy enough to collapse into a brown dwarf. To remain in orbit however it will need the fast orbit I just referred to.\n\nOutside the snowline the high mass object is going to accumulate the lighter gases and essentially become a gas giant. Apparently Jupiter is near the max size before a gas giant forms a dwarf star, so essentially Jupiter is the largest non-star formation you will see.\n\nNow this is for a stable system, a non stable system would involve interference from a third party. But as far as I can tell gravity is still the dictator, and once again objects you find will be similar to our system. If a high mass object entered from another system it could inside the snow line BUT it may be highly prone to colliding with things, asteroid, comet strikes that happen in early system formation would be a problem. So basically an unstable system would be a very messy thing, up to you if you think life could form in that scenario, its currently where I'm up to in my research, but my gut feeling is that you would end up with smashed planets and large rocks and not so much nice planets.\n\nSo to answer you question, I doubt it, I don't think physics is on your side. But weirder things have happened.\n\nAs for the smaller planet, if it has flowing water which can be achieved by atmospheric pressure or proximity to the star then yes. Beyond the snowline you wont have much light, so if there is life it will be one honed for a life in the dark. Inside the snowline, if the planet has a magnetosphere (derived or from a magma core) then it should hold atmospheric gases and most importantly water.\n\nIf I was to be a betting man, Id say comets are the source of life bringing complex hydrocarbons from past the snow line, to warmer planets. Since they are high in water I'd bet all life will hold a affinity towards water.\n\nAs I said feedback welcome. Or clarifications on any logic jumps I've made for that matter, explaining it helps me find my own flaws.", "Maybe we are that planet, and there's a planet of really small humanoids somewhere. ", "A few people have answered why some of these things getting bigger are not possible. These probably are more relevant to why you asked the question but I will answer the consequences and likelihood of a 1000 times bigger sun in case you are interested.\n\nNow when you say bigger I don't know if you mean in terms of mass or in terms of size. When it comes to stars the dependences on size can be a bit obscure, for example in a few billion years the sun itself will be way more than 1000 times bigger in size than it is now. There are already loads of stars out there that size and some of them have planets. What life is like on those planets I don't know. The stars will be cooler but brighter so there probably exists some distance away from those stars where you could have a planet that supports life.\n\nI'm gonna go ahead and assume you mean mass. There are no stars 1000 times heavier than the sun, at most 300 or so is the limit (in the very early universe perhaps 500times was possible) and such stars are *incredibly* rare. This is because stars change when they get more massive. More massive stars are hotter, as you add mass they get more gravity so they get denser and hotter in the core and as a result they have more fusion. This makes the stars hotter and bluer. Because the stars are getting hotter they get brighter. They get very bright and in fact this is part of the reason that you cant have stars as big as 1000 times the sun, they get hot and bright before you can accumulate that much mass and they push all the gas away.\n\nA very hot, very bright star is a strange thing [wolf rayet stars](_URL_0_) are stars about 50 times more massive than the sun. They are so hot and bright that they are blowing themselves apart. Blowing the outer atmosphere away with the force of their light. These stars burn so bright they only live a few million years (compared to our suns 10billion+). This would be too short a time for life to evolve. Who knows anyway what the environment would be like the area around these stars is like for planets, huge amounts of stellar wind stripping away any protective magnetic fields and any atmosphere on a planet. Huge amounts of deadly ultraviolet radiation. Even if the planet itself could survive near one of these stars, no life could survive on the planet." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf%E2%80%93Rayet_star" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cg2i250", "cg2i2e6" ], "score": [ 5, 4 ], "text": [ "Live TV broadcasts use geostationary satellites which orbit 22 thousand miles up. So a satellite feed has to go 22,000 miles from the broadcast truck to the satellite (actually it will be more as the satellite will not be directly overhead), then 22,000 miles back to the broadcast center. If the broadcast is from very far away, then it may need to go truck > satellite > satellite > tv station\n\nBy comparison a journey over internet fibre optic cables is only going to need to travel 12,500 miles, half the diameter of the earth", "Because the television networks need a high-bandwidth guaranteed bandwidth, which your Xbox doesn't. So, they will use satellites for the feeds, which accounts for the lag." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ctbc5fd", "ctbc7ky", "ctbc8av" ], "score": [ 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "We still do! My friend went to Germany recently. The majority of texts in Chemistry are all German. The US has Tech but I can't begin to list the developments in Europe. ", "In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Germany was a rising industrial power with a particular focus on the chemicals industry and later rocketry/physics. The German government strongly encouraged the burgeoning chemicals industry (especially big firms like Siemens), which led to conflicting figures like Fritz Haber who invented the process by which pretty much all synthetic fertilizer is made (and without which we could not grow enough food to feed our growing population) and used it mostly to make explosives in WWI.", "For the most part, a government form appropriate to their position in the world, that realised the importance of science to their nation and encouraged its development despite a lack of popular support. It also helped that a lot of the scientific developments had more or less direct military applications." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cu9asds", "cua85oq" ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text": [ "The Japanese used *nengo* (年号), eras declared by the imperial court. They didn't have a set length and a new era could be declared for any of a number of reasons: a new Emperor taking the throne, a natural disaster, astrology, etc. The longest *nengo* lasted for thirty-five years, but the majority were less than a decade long.\n\nTo give some a few specific examples, the Genroku era began in 1688, but when a massive earthquake struck in Genroku 16 (1703), the court declared the beginning of the Hoei era. That lasted until Emperor Nakamikado took the throne in Hoei 8 (1711), at which point it became the Shotoku era. Then when Shogun Tokugawa Ietsugu died in Shotoku 6 (1716) the Kyoho era was declared. If this sounds like a mess, you're not wrong.\n\nI should also mention that these continue to be used in Japanese-language history books. They'll usually define an era once, telling you that Genroku 1 began in 1688, for example, and then just use the *nengo*.", "/u/cckerberos has already mentioned era names, or 年號, but it should always be mentioned that they were originally a Chinese tradition. The era name, or *nianhao* in modern Mandarin, was an essential component of the imperial register in East Asian languages. For a Vietnamese or Korean monarch to take an era name independent of the Chinese one(s) was tantamount to declaring autonomy or independence from the authority of the Son of Heaven, and for a tributary state to use a certain state's era name represented subservience to that state. This was why, in the 1630s, the [Manchus](_URL_0_) who had recently conquered Korea forced the Korean court to use the Manchu era name instead of the Chinese era names the Koreans had used for centuries. Era names were all meaningful and represented the circumstances of the period. For example, the first emperor of the Ming dynasty used the era name *Hongwu* for the rest of his life, which means something akin to \"vastly martial.\" Like other era names this was an intentional decision, highlighting the emperor's military origins and prowess.\n\nThe era name began to be used under Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty, who reigned from 140 to 87 BC and first took the era name *jianyuan*, roughly meaning \"establishing origins.\" He would take nearly a dozen era names during his long reign - as in Japan, era names were flexible and changed regularly according to the circumstances for most of Chinese history. Emperor Gaozong of the Tang dynasty used *fourteen* era names during his rule of 34 years!\n\nThe frequency with which era names changed was reduced greatly by the Ming dynasty, where the tradition of the emperor having only one era name for the entirety of his reign was established. Hence we generally refer to Ming and Qing emperors with their era names: the Hongwu Emperor (\"the emperor of vast martiality\"), the Yongle Emperor (\"the emperor of perpetual happiness\"), the Qianlong Emperor (\"the emperor of lasting eminence\").\n\nKorea, being a weak power and often with a strong Neo-Confucian overtone, used Chinese era names. An interesting quirk: even when Beijing was captured by the Manchus, many of the Korean intelligentsia did not consider the \"barbarians\" to be a legitimate Chinese dynasty. This meant that there were some Koreans who used the last Ming era name, *Chongzhen* (\"honor and auspiciousness\") which began in 1627 and ended in 1644, for centuries after the Chongzhen Emperor died. In fact, there were Koreans who wrote the year 1861 as \"the 234th year of Chongzhen\"! Vietnam is a bit more complicated case, but the monarchs there typically used the title *Hoàng Đế*, or emperor, and thus independent era names.\n\n**Sources:** I don't know of any good book on East Asian imperial language as a whole, and era names will generally be mentioned as a side fact in a book discussing other topics, so you might just want to check [our wiki.](_URL_1_) For Korea perhaps try the article *Contesting Chinese Time, Nationalizing Temporal Space: Temporal Inscription in Late Chosǒn Korea* in the anthology \"Time, Temporality, and Imperial Transition.\"" ] }

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[ [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/eastasia#wiki_china" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c3eli0b", "c3emnl1" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "it's a little simplified. saying \"created out of nothing\" sort of implies that there was nothingness beforehand, which is incorrect. Time itself was created then, so there was no 'beforehand.'\n\nI don't think I helped. This is a difficult concept.", "Time began, as far as we know, at the big bang. At this instant, and slightly after it, our laws of physics don't really apply. And there is no definition of a \"before.\"\n\nHowever, it's wrong to say it was made out of \"nothing,\" because we don't know what it came from. In short, it came from nothing we've seen before or have observed etc., but we don't know quite why it happened." ] }

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[ "http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9672000/9672233.stm" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "czd944z", "czd9905" ], "score": [ 6, 7 ], "text": [ "Not to be a pedant, but I believe you mean the 16th century (1500-1600) as the two rulers in question ruled then.\n\nIt's a little tricky to answer but my interpretation, is that the only army in continental Europe at the time which could truly be considered an 'imperial army' or an army directly linked to the state would be the Ottoman Army, with its large contingent of Janissary corps always ready for active military service.\n\nWars in the 16th Century, as Geoffrey Parker demonstrated, were fought with foreign mercenaries for the most part, but usually with some leadership and high command from the native country. For example, at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, the whole empire of Charles V was used to draw in soldiers and commanders, with the army led by a man from modern-day Belgium and the Garrison of Pavia led by a Spaniard. Henry Kamen states that the army itself had no clear national origin. Some 50% were German, 30% Spanish and the rest from all over Europe.\n\nFurthermore, land and vassals in the Empire of the 16th century would have provided the emperor with little troops, but probably some money via taxation and loans. This was spent, along with all the new world gold, on mercenaries.\n\nAt no point in the history of the Holy Roman Emperor was their a standing army of the kind which would be familiar today. Until the 15th century, it would have been drawn as you say, from vassals and the king's lands, but fairly early on in that century, such troops were entirely ineffective against professional mercenary types which rich emperors could make use of.", "One of the big issues when it comes to English speakers and the Holy Roman Empire is that we translate two words as 'Imperial' that have different meanings in German. We tend to translate both *Reichs-* and *Kaiserliche-* as 'Imperial', when--in German--the former refers more to the institutions and idea of the realm/empire, whereas the latter focuses more on the personhood of the Emperor. So, when something is called 'the Imperial Army', it can either mean 'the Army of the Empire' or 'the Army of the Emperor'. This can lead to confusion in the Early Modern period, espescially when we're dealing with politicking in the Holy Roman Empire. However, as I understand it, convention is to call the army fighting for the Emperor--whoever that may be--gets to be called 'the Imperial Army', regardless of where it came from. Hopefully, this should answer your question. Simply being called 'the Imperial'--or as I often see it, the Imperialist Army--does not imply it was an army of the Holy Roman Empire, but rather could just be saying that it was the army fighting for the Emperor. \n\nHowever, to go into more depth, another concern is that armies did not tend to draw exclusively on one group. A Scotsman might very well find himself fighting for the Emperor against the French, even though his King is supporting the French against the Emperor.^1 So, almost all armies would consist of troops drawn from around Europe, even though they might pre-dominantly consist of recruits from one area or another. We tend to call these 'the Spanish Army' or the 'French Army' based off who they're fighting for, rather than where the troops came from. Charles V's army no doubt includes Germans, but also likely consisted of a great deal of Spaniards, Flemish, Italians, and other peoples from across his realm. \n\nA better question to ask if we're wondering whether the army is the army of the Empire or the Emperor is: \"Who is paying for the war?\" Is the army being paid for out of the Emperor's treasury, through his own incomes, or is it an army voted for and paid for by the *Reichstag* and Imperial Estates? Unfortunately, I don't know that information about the army Charles V brought with him to Italy, so I can't answer you there, but hopefully I would have helped you out somewhat with this issue. \n\n1: This is a hypotheticaal situation, not a statement about the Scottish king's position vis a vis the Italian Wars. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c7m3nnr" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It pains me that I can't remember the source (a book tracing human migration through separate studies of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA), but I do remember reading that originally all homo sapiens had epicanthic folds, and a mutation in the population that eventually migrated to western Europe resulted in that group losing them. \n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e5rt8y7" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "Singaporean here. We are rich because we have low corporate taxes. When it comes to high-skilled, high-salaried industries like banking, petroleum and medicine, the operating costs (skilled labour, input materials, energy costs) are the same worldwide. Even though land is expensive here, over the Long run of a company’s life it represents a minor cost at best.\n\nSo companies trying to max out their profits go for low-tax counties like Singapore, to retain as much of the profit margin as possible. It helps that Singapore is extremely business friendly, English-educated and politically stable. Many companies from neighbouring regions such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, China like to set up operations in Singapore, while international companies from the EU/USA/Australia/Middle East set up regional hubs in Singapore to coordinate their operations in Southeast Asia /Asia as a whole.\n\nEventually, the government gets the money back through individual income taxes, GST taxes (VAT or sales taxes), some smaller amounts through vehicle ownership taxes, property taxes etc. They aggressively invest the tax revenue and the returns provide even more revenue. Since we don’t have social welfare (unemployment benefits, universal healthcare, etc) the government doesn’t need to spend much and accumulates a budget surplus most years. This is again reinvested and provides more income in the future." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ddvlyrn" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "It really depends on what you mean by national identity. National identity definitely did exist to a degree but was not expressed in exactly the same ways as we do in the modern era. Pre modern national identity is not the same as modern nationalism and the reason why this is the case but I recommend the 'Invention of Tradition' edited by Hobsbawm and Ranger for a good series of discussions on this (especially the final chapter by Hobsbawm). Anyway I can give you an overview of some pre modern examples of what might be described as national identity. \n\nFirstly the term nation comes from the Latin 'natio' which, unsurprisingly, is not a modern invention but goes back to ancient Rome - so the term is pre-modern. From the Roman period and through the Middle Ages nation was only one word used to describe a group of people along with others such as gens (people although translated as race in a lot of earlier published texts) or lingua (tongue, language or people) and all of these mean more or less specific things depending on context. Nevertheless the idea that you can identify and demarcate discrete groups, including your own, goes back a long way. Herodotus in his histories gives an account of different cultural groups who are defined by their customs, political organisation and language and he even provides many of them, like the Scythians, with a mythical ancestral origin - so shared customs and origin of peoples this is very much like a picture of a nation. Various Greek thinkers also offered theories as to why different cultures existed including the idea that climate or location affected the temperament of peoples (which was advanced by Hippocrates but significantly developed by Galen) or notoriously Aristotle's assertion that some people are natural slaves. As might be expected this differentiation of other cultures or peoples solidified Greek self identification - they were in the temperate zone, they were not natural slaves. Likewise in Rome you can see a form of national mythmaking in the Aeneid and Tacitus' Germania is a very developed ethnography of different German tribes. Moreover Romans stressed a form of cultural self identity of 'Romanitas' (Romanness) which differentiated Romans from barbarians. This belief in Roman cultural superiority persisted even as the barbarians were at the gates - one letter writer Sidonius Apollinaris writes mockingly in private about how slurred and bad a Germanic king's Latin is all while writing Roman panegyrics for him (in an irony of history the Loeb edition of Sidonius' writing has an introduction from the translator moaning about how bad *Sidonius* is at Latin).\n\nAnyway so now Rome has fallen but in the middle ages we have a lot of evidence for national identities of one sort or another. Early Anglo-Saxon lawcodes have differences in wergild based on rank which seems to include a reduced amount for a free non Saxon. The Exeter Book riddles includes disparaging comments on the Welsh including differentiating them as physically distinct (\"dark Welshmen\"). Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English people makes sure to show the differences between nations and makes sure to stress the unity of the English in spite of political division. Nationality was, therefore, noted in the early middle ages even if there was not really a notion that the nation had to have a political entity to represent it - in fact for a king to have the allegiance of many peoples is prestigious (Asser proudly talks about how Alfred the Great had the allegiance of the different peoples of Britain). During the Viking age there are also explicit references to Englishmen and Danes in decrees - even when they are under the same ruler. The English and Danes also had recognised differences in grooming habits - as can be seen when an Anglo-Saxon monk (Alcuin) writes a letter saying that the English were basically asking to be invaded by Vikings as they had started trimming their beards like them! All throughout this period different peoples associate themselves genealogically as a group and trace descent - the Trojans are especially popular for this. \n\nLater on we see even more evidence of nations being identified with. After the Norman conquest Englishmen sometimes kept their beards as a sign of defiance. Histories of nations appear in which nations have a set character and sins (such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain). Ethnographies start to be written again by writers such as Gerald of Wales (who argues that different nations inherited traits from the climates of their ancestral lands). The importance of nation can also be inferred from the fact that having no nation is not viewed positively - one particularly furious pilgrim to Spain says that the Navarese were no true people (ne veres) and could not trace their ancestry back to a single nation and that this explained their nefarious behaviour (such as poisoning his horse). All of this, however, occurs in a context where a single all encompassing nation (to the exclusion of all others) is hard to find - Lowlanders and Highlanders in Scotland, for example, are sometimes presented as different peoples (gens) but other times as members of the Scottish people - by the same author! The easiest place to find strict national character defined, moreover, is where it is falling apart such as in the Statutes of Kilkenny in the 14^th century. These identify Irish characteristics and forbids English colonists to engage in Irish practises for fear of being tainted by Irishness - this was evidently not working. Nevertheless notions of national identity do exist in Pre-Modern Europe and they could include many ideas we see today - shared genealogy, language, culture, dress, methods of fighting etc. - and existed alongside other forms of identity such as religious.\n\nIf you want to read more I recommend you read the article by Robert Bartlett 'Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity' as it especially gets into the problems of language when addressing nation/ethnicity/race in the pre modern period. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d05etbd", "d05g5yz", "d05hlun" ], "score": [ 18, 7, 2 ], "text": [ "Just working with Newtonian gravity, the maximum speed reached by falling towards the surface of an object is the same speed as escape velocity at that surface (both are calculated by equating gravitational potential to kinetic energy, just in different order). So, what kind of object has an escape velocity equal to that of light? A black hole. So to answer your question, if only Newtonian gravity applied this is what would happen if you fell towards a black hole.", "No.\n\nA lightweight object (such as a cat) falling to Earth from an unlimited distance would impact at escape velocity, approximately 11km/sec, unless slowed by external forces such as air resistance.\n\nThis is because gravity is not a constant strength but is proportional to 1/d^2 (where d is the cat's distance from the centre of gravity of Earth).\n\nAdditionally, relativity complicates things if your cat was instead falling toward a neutron star. It takes *much* more energy to accelerate things to relativistic speeds, and literally all the energy in the universe could not accelerate you to the speed of light.", "Others have already answered what would happen for an object falling towards a fixed object, but what if it was falling towards an object that was constantly moving away so that the \"falling\" object could continue accelerating? In this instance, the object would still never reach the speed of light, because as it approached the speed of light time would actually dilate around it, making the object \"slow down in time\" while still accelerating. Eventually it would get REALLY close to light speed (like 99.999...%), but not quite 100% there. \n\nLet's say this object was a clock, how would this clock look to an outside observer? The clock would be moving at ALMOST light speed, but if you actually looked at the time on the clock face, the second hand wouldn't move because it's local time is so much slower than yours, and as it got closer to the speed of light, it would take longer and longer for the second hand to move." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c8i5p31", "c8i6lux", "c8ia0cu", "c8ib0go", "c8idh39" ], "score": [ 5, 2, 4, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Do pianos require gravity? I always thought the hammers \"fell\" back into place after hitting their strings.", "This is all I can think of, although I wouldn't consider it an instrument:\n_URL_0_\n\nPercussion techniques would be quite difficult without gravity though.", "Proper stick and mallet technique for drumming uses gravity tremendously. (The bass drum that I play uses a vertical mallet drop that is about 90% gravity, 10% muscle). Snare players in particular would find it very difficult to adjust as snare technique relies on microcontrol of the drumstick bouncing on the head in a certain way.\n\nShaker instruments that have loose beads that fly around, like [caxixi](_URL_0_) and [shekere](_URL_1_), would be problematic as those instruments are highly affected by gravity. A lot of the playing techniques for the shaker family involves well-defined up/down moves that are basically ways of letting the beads fall for a split second and then catching them again.\n\nI am wondering if hi-hats and kick-drum pedals of drumsets need gravity to reset to their default positions. don't know though, I don't play set...\n\nAll instruments that hang from straps on the player's bodies (guitars etc.), or that rest right on the body (like sousaphone), would shift around annoyingly. Though the players would probably adjust. It's amazing how much a slightly shifted instrument position can throw off a player, though. ", "A rain stick comes to mind! Not sure if that classifies as an instrument though.", "Tubular bells (for the Mike Oldfield fans) - without gravity they would just clang incessantly against each other after the first strike. If you spaced them so far apart that they would not touch, you would have to chase them as they swung around for each note." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://i.imgur.com/ja3amNB.jpg" ], [ "http://www.musiciansfriend.com/search.jsp?N=700008&Ns=r&Ntk=ALL&Ntx=mode+matchpartialmax&Nty=1&Ntt=caxixi", "http://www.musiciansfriend.com/drums-percussion/toca-shekere-with-glass-beads?src=3WWRWXGP" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cyyq39z" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Yes, and that's part of why the entire duck doesn't freeze. Ducks, other birds, and even some mammals like deer have evolved so that the arteries and veins leading to their feet/hooves/ect. pass very close to each other for quite a long ways. As warm blood travels towards the feet, it passes heat to cold blood coming back in the veins. The result is that the duck's feet are maintained at a much lower temperature than the duck's core body. This reduces the rate at which they lose heat to their surroundings. Tropical apes like us don't have this adaptation, so we lose heat rapidly when we put our feet in cold water. A duck's feet will get cold, but the rest of the duck will remain toasty and warm. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ckdnlr3", "ckdnnny" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Yes. Things also get heavier from dust particles. You get lighter every time you breathe, because you take in O2 and expel CO2.\n\nBut the amount is so ridiculously small that it's irrelevant.", "Ablation, erosion. Additionally, every solid and liquid has a \"vapor pressure\" where the atoms constantly escape into the atmosphere." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c3b1i6o", "c3b1i6o" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "The seasons are caused by the Earth's axial tilt, so yes there would still be seasonal temperature changes on the side of the planet receiving sunlight despite the tidal lock.", "The seasons are caused by the Earth's axial tilt, so yes there would still be seasonal temperature changes on the side of the planet receiving sunlight despite the tidal lock." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d71pczn", "d71rmxz", "d71vx9y" ], "score": [ 11, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "The short version is, it's subjective, and so what is \"good\" is whatever you like the flavor of. However, you can still discuss beer quality by breaking those qualities down into categories.\n\nThings that affect this: \n\n* How strong the beer's flavor is. In general, cheaper beers have less flavor (though again, you personally may like weaker beer)\n* What kind of flavor it has. Some people like the bitterness of beers made with lots of hops (IPAs, etc) while others prefer beers made with wheat (hefeweizen, etc) or something in between\n* What it's alcohol content is. Generally beers with a higher alcohol content will taste stronger, and the stronger it is, the \"boozier\" it tastes. Higher alcohol beers also tend to be more expensive\n* Whether it's filtered or not. Filtered beers will be clear in color and won't have any sediment, but may not have as much flavor as unfiltered beers (though this is not a hard and fast rule)\n* Whether it's pressurized with carbon dioxide (this is what naturally occurs) or with nitrogen (tends to give it a creamier texture)", "Personally, I wouldn't try to overanalyze beer, and as with any consumable, people have a wide variety of tastes. \n \nI'd try an narrow down the type of beer you like. Some people like thick, malty, sweet beers which are typical of many (but not all) stouts. Other people like super hoppy and bitter IPAs. Try different beers and see what you like. Your bartender will often let you try a sip before ordering a pint and many places now serve \"flights\" of beers which typically come with 4 ounce pours of 4 different beers. \n \nI think when any beer tries to sacrifice something, the overall goodness is compromised. Two examples would be low-calorie and gluten free. Also, when brewers try to push the envelope, by adding questionable ingredients or trying to maximize particular characteristic (hoppyness, ABV, etc), the results don't alway turn out great. But there are definitely exceptions where a \"weird\" sounding beer can be quite wonderful. \n \nI also wouldn't listen to some of these misconceptions floating around, such as \"guinness is so heavy, it's like a meal in itself\" or \"like motor oil\". These are uninformed people just re-stating things they've heard. Guinness is quite delicious. \n \nI wouldn't focus too much on ABV, unless you are trying to get drunk on the cheap. But beware of the ABV when you are ordering/drinking beer as some can be much strong than others. \n \nShort answer, a good beer is one you enjoy drinking.", "Whether a beer is good or not depends on several things. Obviously taste, so I'll talk most about that.\n\nAroma is important ( I want IPAs to smell like hops, piney, resiny, floral, citrusy, dank, whatever, and I want Marzens to be malty)\n\nMouthfeel, which is a made up sounding term, is also important. If you are tailgating, you want thin, crushable, watery beers. If you are washing down a good meal, you might want something a bit thicker. You dont want your PBR to be super thick, and you don't want your pliny the elder to go down like water.\n\nAppearance is also important (this is somewhat controversial to say), but if I have a wheat beer, I expect cloudiness, and if I have a pilsner, I expect clarity. \n\nSo first major component of taste is any off flavors. A beer with many off flavors is usually going to taste bad to anyone. Chlorophenols, for example, taste like rubbery medicine, and there might be some weirdos that like it, but it's universally accepted to be bad.\n\nOther compounds can be an off flavor in one style, but desirable to an extent in another style. DMS (dimethyl sulfide) is a corny tasting chemical that is acceptable in some adjunct lagers, but you definitely wouldn't want it in a stout. Kinda like how orange juice tastes good, and chocolate milk tastes good, but you wouldn't want to mix OJ and chocolate milk.\n\nThe second major component of taste is personal preference. There are so many compounds in beer, and each persons ability to taste them will be different. Diacetyl in another off flavor. Person A might drink a beer with diacetyl, and not really taste it, but think the beer is fine, while person B might think the beer tastes really buttery.\n\nNext there are beers that don't fit with the style. A brewery might call one of its beers a belgian dubbel, when really, it's a brown ale. Even if it tastes perfectly fine, you might call this a bad beer. Just like how if you tried to make waffles and ended up with pancakes, you made bad waffles. This is definitely a part of brewing that has a lot of wiggle room, though.\n\nFurther in the post you mention mass marketed beers. The reason so many are poorly rated, is because they are really only one style (adjunct lager) that is supposed to be low in flavor. I dont fault the people who brew budweiser for making flavorless beer, because they make it exactly how they are trying to make it, with ridiculous consistency. They just make what is marketable.\n\nThere are mass marketed beers of other styles, Guinness for stouts, Sierra Nevada pale ale for pale ales, Genessee cream ale for cream ales, carlsburg for pilsners, the list goes on an on." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dg4x3qk", "dg4y0r9", "dg7ayp0" ], "score": [ 9, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Any given quantum state can hold at most 2 electrons, because [degeneracy](_URL_0_) of a state is 2s+1, and electrons have spin s = 1/2.\n\n \n > Also I have read about electron spin, but I'm still rather unsure about what that actually means. \n \nIt's an intrinsic property of particles, like charge is. There were historically some attempts to explain electron spin as electron being a small charged sphere, spinning on its axis, so spin would literally be a measure of how fast the sphere spins, but we now know that this isn't the case, since, among other things, even neutral particles like neutrons have non-zero spin.", "So the reason you have pairs is \nFirst: any particle can only exist at a certain energy level and if it can't it must find another\nSecond: Spin has to do with a lot of things and isn't actually a particle spinning in the classical sense. Essentially particles can have spins of 1 or 1/2(+ or - and 3/2 and such but too complicated for now) and in the case of 1/2 spins there are two wavefunctions( the possible state) for a given energy. One where the function is even and one is odd, they don't interfere and because of this electrons can exist one in one state and the other in the other state. This means the two electrons have equal(ish) energy and exist in the same set of locations at the same time. Spins of 1 don't have multiple functions so only 1 possible state at a certain energy. Because of this only 1 proton/neutron (some other 1 spin stuff) can only exist with 1 particle at any given set of locations. In case of atoms, electrons are in the orbital space and protons/neutrons in nucleus space/energy level\nDon't know how to add credentials so - undergraduate physics Chem double major 1 yr left.\nHope that helps\n", "A quick note that no-one has mentioned yet; while you'll never see electrons act in units of threes in a molecule due to quantum states only holding two electrons at a time, they can and do act alone sometimes. A molecule that has a quantum state containing only one electron instead of two is called a radical, and these tend to be highly unstable and reactive." ] }

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[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_energy_levels" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cx4b3r8" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Referring not to westboro specifically, this problem arises in a lot of religious organizations as a consequence of human free will and gods plan often seemingly being at odds. Basically even though god has already selected these people only god knows who they are and for those people to know god and be saved perhaps someone has to save them and perhaps one of those people is convinced by the westboro folks. Essentially if the westboro folks convert someone its not that they have changed gods plan, but rather that it was gods plan all along for them to be there to change that persons path in the first place. " ] }

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[ "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wsx96/eli5_what_does_the_westboro_baptist_church/cf5bioc" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "cnvfuy2" ], "score": [ 11 ], "text": [ "The USSR went through an extensive demobilisation process following the war. This was part of the vast, and generally quite successful, programme of reconstruction that retooled and rebuilt the economy. By 1950 the Soviet economic production had surpassed its pre-war levels. But on to the soldiers.\n\nFrom a starting point of 11m Soviet soldiers in 1945, at least 8.5m were demobilised in batches over the period 1945-48. As was typical in the USSR, the process was 'difficult' (to quote Harrison) with the state simply unable to manage the transportation and promised material support of returning veterans. (That 1946-47 were also famine years didn't help.) Many soldiers were simply handed their papers and told to make their own way home.\n\nBut if these were years of hardship then at least employment was not a problem. If the veterans did not return home as a privileged cohort (and the degree to which they did is still debated) they had the advantage of a strong labour market. Labour shortages had emerged as a chronic feature of the Soviet economy in the pre-war years and the immense loss of life during the war had only sharpened this. The returning veterans did not come close to filling this gap, hence migration of peasant labour continued to be a feature of the post-war economy.\n\nCrucially, demobilisation furthered this shift towards an urban economy. Approximately half of all veterans found their way into the cities, as part of the industrial workforce. Given that most soldiers had been recruited from the peasantry, this itself represented a significant demographic shift. Flitzer has some detailed figures on industry recruitment (see below, I unfortunately don't have the source to hand) but by and large they would have followed the patterns of pre-war industrial growth - eg metallurgy, mining, construction, etc.\n\nI can't say how many career soldiers emerged from the war. From a macro perspective however, the Soviet economy never entirely demobilised. Many of the war industries, and formations obviously, were maintained into the Cold War. Despite a brief respite under Khrushchev (with a further round of demobilisations in 1953-60) the USSR emerged from the war with an economic 'defence burden' as high, or higher, than that of 1940.\n\n**Sources**\n\nObviously my background is largely the economic and social impact of the war and demobilisation. In this I'm primarily drawing on Donald Filtzer (*Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism*), Mark Harrison (*The Soviet Union After 1945*, *The Soviet Industrial Defence Complex in WWII*) and Michael Ellman (*Socialist Planning*).\n\nI've not read it myself but I've heard good things about Mark Edele's *Soviet Veterans of the Second World War*. I suspect that that work would answer most of your questions." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fn4xf2m" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "The casino advantage in Blackjack is about going last. To simplify a bit, the dealer will win every hand where the player goes bust - but the player loses hands where they go bust and the dealer also goes bust (because the game stops before the dealer gets a chance to go bust).\n\nWhat this means in practice is that the dealer has an advantage when the card mix remaining in the deck creates high variances while the player is better off if the card mix creates low variances. The dealer wins by you going bust, so the casino wants to see a lot of cards that are likely to make you go bust - face cards and tens.\n\nBy counting how many low cards and how many high cards you've seen from the deck, you'll get a reasonable approximation of how 'volatile' the remaining deck is - and if it's too volatile (too high an advantage for the casino), you dial down your bets." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dsp1b9z" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "We think women controlled the material wealth of Viking-Age households because many wealthy women were buried with a [key](_URL_1_). We assume that within the longhouse, there would have been a locked pantry, and only the matriarch of the household had access to it. Presumably this included food, possibly alcohol, and I would guess textiles as well. [Silk](_URL_2_) or [sails](_URL_3_) were both extremely valuable. It would make sense for a matriarch to control the household food distribution and textile production/consumption, and this seems like a pretty solid interpretation of the archaeological evidence. In contrast, textile production became a male industry in the later middle ages.\n\n[Coins](_URL_4_) might also have been kept in these cupboards, although some hoards seem to have been buried in farmhouse floors. I suspect this would have been the safer option, since anyone with an axe could break through the pantry door, but you'd need to convince someone to tell you where the family purse was buried before you could get at the money. If a household were attacked, you could abandon the house, and even if it were burnt down, you'd still be able to dig any buried coins back up.\n\nSo women were probably in charge of managing food and textiles—which were the major material wealth of a Viking-Age farm—but there's less evidence that they were responsible for coins. Of course, much of the stuff that got moved around during the Viking Age was probably traded or gifted, rather than bought for cash. So although there was no such thing as a household 'budget' and even 'finances' seems like an ill-fitting word for Viking-Age households, women seem to have been in charge of the bulk of a farm or family's wealth.\n\nThe rest of the statement you're interested in seems much more dubious. Witchcraft or [seiðr](_URL_6_) wasn't solely associated with women, although some sorts of things that we would consider 'magic' were considered feminine. (Admittedly, 'magic' isn't quite the right word since 'magic' often suggests superstition or illusion.) I've seen no reason to assume that math was considered magic or a particularly feminine form of magic. Instead, [scales](_URL_5_) and [weights](_URL_0_) for measuring silver are often found in apparently male graves. So the reason you can't find proof that women and witchcraft and math and finances all went together as a regular thing ... is probably because there's no proof to find." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=viking+age+weight", "http://images.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=viking+age+keys", "https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=oseberg+silk", "https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=Havhingsten", "https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=viking+age+dirham", "http://images.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=viking+age+scale", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Viking_Way_(book\\)" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cmua6il" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "In general, no, no area is more prone to observing meteorite events than any other.\n\nHowever, viewing patterns and environmental effects can make a large difference in observed rates at the individual level. Meteors are most likely to be observed pre-dawn, when the movement of the Earth is aligned with the skyward direction. Light pollution will also make observing smaller events much more difficult. And general time spent outside will obviously increase viewing rates.\n\nIt's certainly not unusual for these events to occur. There are many thousands of them all over the Earth every day. It's most likely a difference in your personal viewing habits. I'm guessing you didn't spend too much time staying up late at night outside while you were growing up." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "chulw9r", "chuo2ar" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Not really.\n\nReddit is stored on a series of servers, and you probably know how that works for the most part.\n\nWhat happens though, is that when you can't access the specific server needed, they often have one set up for \"overflow\" which is for when the site is really busy, which is dedicated to showing just that \"OW\" picture. Making it much simpler.", "\nLet's say you showed up at town hall and asked to see the mayor. Her assistant asks what you want to see her about, then comes back and tells you the mayor is too busy today. The assistant has plenty of time to shoot the breeze with you, but that doesn't make the mayor any less busy.\n\nWeb sites work the same way. They have a multi-tiered design, with different tiers doing different jobs. The top level tier just handles requests from the internet, while other tiers gather data and build web pages, doing the actual work. When they get bogged down, they web tier might not be busy...in fact, it might have enough free time to notice, and throw up a too busy to load page." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "db8nswg", "db9cotr" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Essentially there are two main theories:\n\n1) CP (charge parity) violations. If reversing charge and parity (flipping in the sign of one spatial coordinate) does not produce exactly the same physics, then the weak force can cause anti-matter to decay faster than ordinary matter.\n\n2) We are in a part of the universe in which matter dominates, in another part of the universe antimatter dominates. This could occur if matter and antimatter repelled one another under gravity, giving the universe a dipole structure.", "The truth is, we don't know. The reason for the matter/antimatter asymmetry of the universe remains an open research question.\n\nWe do know that the excess of matter to antimatter was about 1 part per billion; for the most part, the antimatter annihilated with matter, leaving that 1 part per billion excess of matter to constitute the things we know and see today.\n\nOne possibility is that the universe just began asymmetrically, for whatever reason.\n\nAnother is that the universe generated an excess of matter to antimatter dynamically. In 1967, [Sakharov identified conditions](_URL_0_) needed for this to happen:\n\n1. The laws of physics must violate conservation of baryon number (the thing that distinguishes protons and neutrons from their antiparticles)\n\n2. The laws of physics must have terms that change under the transformations C (replace matter by antimatter fields and vice-versa) and CP (replace matter by antimatter and simultaneously turn things into their mirror images).\n\n3. The universe must have a period of time when it is not in thermal equilibrium.\n\nAll three of these conditions can be met within the Standard Model, but that does not mean that the Standard Model encodes the actual way the matter excess was produced. (Condition 1 arises due to *sphalerons*, processes that are ordinarily *exceedingly* rare, but could have been more abundant in an early, early universe; condition 2 is explicitly met by familiar terms in the Standard Model, and processes that violate C and CP have been observed at accelerators; and condition 3 can also be incorporated, and arises, for example, if the universe expands at a rate faster than the rate of matter-generating processes.)" ] }

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[ [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryogenesis" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c8pi0zy" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The light from your headlights will propagate at exactly the speed of light, as for you and for any outside observer. The Problem with your argumentation is the same with which any relativity discussion starts, that time is a fixed thing. According to Einsteins theory however, this is not true. The only thing that stays fixed in any frame of reference is the speed of light. Time does change according to the lorentz factor, which tends to zero when approaching the speed of light. This means that the time in your spaceship is significantly larger for an outside observer. \nJust to clarify: 1. We cant even think about the concept, since your mass grows with that same lorentz factor and goes to infinity approaching the speed of light. That would mean infinite energy which simply is not there. Therefore thinking about that concept is physically very wrong!\n2. Newtons laws of motion are only valid for \"slow\" speeds. Anything faster than about 0.3c will have significant differences. \n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cvmn6eb" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "The IMAX 3D projector delivers 3D images of unsurpassed brightness and clarity, unlike any other 3D technology available today. IMAX 3D takes advantage of the fact that we see the world through two eyes. An IMAX 3D movie actually consists of two separate images projected onto a special silver-coated IMAX 3D screen at the same time. One image is captured from the viewpoint of the right eye, and the other shows the viewpoint of the left eye. IMAX 3D glasses separate the images, so the left and right eyes each see a different view. Your brain blends the views together to create an amazing three-dimensional image that appears to have depth beyond and in front of the screen.\n\nMore info: _URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.imax.com/about/experience/3d/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cham3pl" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Because they don't need to. They're limbs are mainly tendons that lock in place and many birds hang from trees, it's kinda like how horses sleep standing up (their knees lock)\n\nAlso if they lay down they'd just fall out of trees all the time. Some birds do lay down of course, bigger ones mainly, but they almost always are either non-flying birds or have some kind of stable nest or tree hole." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cdme3em" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "I had a professor by the name of Peter Lacovara who explained this theory in class and why it is wrong. The body of the sphinx is made up of limestone from a former quarry. Everything around it was cut up and taken away to build the nearby pyramids. Not wanting to leave this hunk of rock sticking above the ground they turned it into a statue by importing some other nearby rock to do the head, legs, and arms. It isn't erosion from water, it is quarry marks. It doesn't help that the limestone that makes up the body of the sphinx is of a poor quality and can more easily erode." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e8xdvrq", "e8xee8m" ], "score": [ 8, 3 ], "text": [ "Poppers are a type of chemical known as alkyl nitrates. They typically come in the form of a liquid contained in a small bottle; by inhaling the vapors coming off this liquid, a brief high is produced.\n\n*This is not the same as huffing*. When you huff (inhale the vapors of gasoline, glue, solvents, etc), you are simply cutting off your brain's oxygen supply. Not only is this horribly dangerous and causes long-term damage, but the \"high\" you get is basically the same you could get from holding your breath. The chemical you're inhaling is usually not having any direct effect on you, and thus is not really a drug.\n\nPoppers *do* have a direct effect on you, and when you inhale them you just sniff a little bit of the vapors. You are not denying oxygen to your brain. Alkyl nitrates are considered to be among the *safest* of drugs.\n\nAsking personal opinions & experiences is not what ELI5 is for, but regardless, here's mine. I have used poppers before at parties. They are a fun novelty, but not something I would make a habit out of. I would definitely give it a try at least once if you are curious. They can cause a rapid drop in blood pressure, so sit down when you use them. **Do not drink or touch the liquid**, when ingested it is very dangerous and perhaps deadly. When sniffed, the only real danger is falling over from light-headedness.", "The chemical amyl nitrite has a low vapor pressure, so it evaporates quickly. To distribute it to disco clubs in the 1970s, it was put into tiny glass ampules. Users crushed the ampule and the gas \"popped\" out so they could inhale it. Inhaling nitrites relaxes smooth muscles throughout the body dilating the arteries, as well the sphincter muscles of the anus and the vagina. It gives a feeling of warmth and excitement. Alas, the volume of blood is fixed and the reduced blood pressure can cause problems including death." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "czb6jxg" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "South Germany being the richer half of the country is actually a very recent phenomenon. Over the course of history, the distribution of wealth has changed a lot, depending on political factors as well as the importance of various technologies and industries. The north used to be very rich due to trading etc. and Hamburg remains a rich city, while the south was very rural and agriculture-focussed up until the 20th century.\n\nFor post-war Germany, a good indicator is the \"Länderfinanzausgleich\". This is a fund into which the richer states (Bundesländer) pay money while the poorer states receive money in the form of subsidies. How much every state gets/pays is determined yearly.\n\nIf you look at the timeline of subsidies on the [Wikipedia page](_URL_0_) (section \"Finanzvolumen\"), then you can see for example for Bavaria (\"BY- Bayern\") that up until the mid-eighties, they were considered poorer than the national average and therefore got money from the fund. At this point, the manufacturing and high tech industry took off, propelling Bavaria into todays top position.\n\nNorthrhine-Westphalia (\"NW - Nordrhein-Westfalen), on the other hand, used to be \"in the green\" after the war on account of their massive coal and steel industry. But here we see a decline in the 80's due to rising competition of foreign steel and coal and the closing of mines and steel mills.\n\nAlso, the statistics are a bit skewed due to the fact, that the poorer, former East German states are all in the north, or at least in middle Germany.\n\nBut at the moment, it is basically the powerful automobile industry, their suppliers as well as high tech firms (optics, medical technology, manufacturing, etc.) that cement southern Germany's economical lead.\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4nderfinanzausgleich" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cqr4c0u", "cqr7dki" ], "score": [ 4, 2 ], "text": [ "I recently read a great overview of US riots-- Paul gilje's \"rioting in America\". He identifies many, many riots that achieved their goals, from the 17th c to the present.\n\nAmerican rioting, he argues, has strong roots in the medieval English system of collective violence by the plebeians, which was generally considered an acceptable form of expressing grievances because the patricians were understood as playing a paternalistic role, and therefore allowed their \"children\" to act out, and then made economic or political adjustments to make the people happy. Other successful riots regulated moral behavior in communities. All of these practices were continued in colonial America, frequently with success.\n\nI think it should be pointed out here that Gilje, like many others who've written on the topic, emphasizes the fact that the term \"riot\" is usually a very loaded word that is often only applied to people the speaker does not feel have legitimate justification for their actions, and frequently incorrectly assumes that it does not have a strong organized element. He defines riot as \"extralegal collective violence\" and does not draw a sharp distinction between riots and rebellions or mob-based vigilante violence. So, for Gilje, other examples of \"successful\" riots in American history are the hundreds of mob lynchings of blacks in the American South, whose ultimate purpose was to terrorize and oppress African Americans.\n\nEDIT I think it's also important to highlight gilje's argument that in the 20th c rioting, especially in urban ghettos, became MUCH LESS violent towards people, but more diffuse and destructive of property--being more of a venting of frustrations with a social and economic system that is far more depersonalized than that which existed previously, and this has led to a lesser ability to create change in the way many 17th and 18th century riots--which were often very unorganized themselves--were able to.", "Sorry, we don't allow [throughout history questions](_URL_0_). These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "crsbavk" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Most types of disinfectants that you can purchase for your home are scented in some way.\n\nThe standard cleaning chemicals for hospitals are generally unscented. What you are smelling are the unscented cleaning agents that are applied often because hospitals have to remain clean due to the number of possibly sick people going through it." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cajccqo" ], "score": [ 16 ], "text": [ "Rodric Braithwaite points out in Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89, that the 'liberalness' of Afghanistan was only ever really confined the urban middle and upper classes, who were very much a minority, the majority of the rural population were pretty conservative add the ruthless brutality of the Taliban into the mix and the 'fascism' of the 90's becomes possible." ] }

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[ "http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_images/100527_19-Afghanistan-148.jpg" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "ccowkcq", "ccowyur", "ccp2zd1" ], "score": [ 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "The inside of your car gets hot. Even in the winter, the sun is coming in through the windows. Over time, the heat and sunlight can cause chemicals in the plastic to leech out into your water. It's nothing super bad, but nothing you want to be doing often either.\n\nIf you refill your water bottles, the chemicals will eventually all be gone, and they can theoretically be refilled indefinitely", "It's perfectly safe, it's the environment that kills you .....", "If you open it, you potentially let bacteria and junk in. Leaving it in your car for a week, even sealed, gives the bad stuff a chance to reproduce and spread through the water.\n\nYou do want to drink a bottle full of bacteria poop?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c36m6hk", "c36qfps", "c36m6hk", "c36qfps" ], "score": [ 5, 2, 5, 2 ], "text": [ "That might have interesting effects on kids who swear in front of their mothers.\nThat said, to cross the skin barrier usually requires some sort of solvent to carry the molecule, DMSO is a good one. I wonder if the mint scent does more to wake you up than the caffeine. \nPlus, I've never heard of PEG being called a \"harsh ingredient\" before. ", "This question was asked and researched [here](_URL_1_) pretty thoroughly. The Guardian also did a short article [here](_URL_0_). Both suggest that in order to get any significant absorption, you would have to keep the caffeine against your skin for a few hours, which would not happen while showering.", "That might have interesting effects on kids who swear in front of their mothers.\nThat said, to cross the skin barrier usually requires some sort of solvent to carry the molecule, DMSO is a good one. I wonder if the mint scent does more to wake you up than the caffeine. \nPlus, I've never heard of PEG being called a \"harsh ingredient\" before. ", "This question was asked and researched [here](_URL_1_) pretty thoroughly. The Guardian also did a short article [here](_URL_0_). Both suggest that in order to get any significant absorption, you would have to keep the caffeine against your skin for a few hours, which would not happen while showering." ] }

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[ "http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/accessories/5a65/" ]

[ [], [ "http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/nov/27/thisweekssciencequestions1", "http://www.erowid.org/ask/ask.php?ID=3010" ], [], [ "http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/nov/27/thisweekssciencequestions1", "http://www.erowid.org/ask/ask.php?ID=3010" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cfdbtd2", "cfdbtlm", "cfdbyc6", "cfdccux", "cfddee2", "cfddxvs" ], "score": [ 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "people are less likely to commit crimes if they know they are being recorded imho", "Insurance is cheaper with a CCTV network.", "Detterent. Cheaper insurance. And even though you may not be able to identify people, it still serves to show what happened, which is often useful for insurance and legal purposes.", "Security is never perfect -- it's all about cost-versus-benefits. A cheapo camera won't completely prevent crime, but it doesn't cost much, and it'll do a bit to dissuade casual shoplifting. As the others said, the gadget will probably pay for itself in insurance costs over a few years. Moreover, it *might* help in case of a serious robbery, accident, or liability event, and it may see some direct use in *watching the employees,* who often pilfer an awful lot of store merchandise. A grainy video might not let the management identify Hobo #19036 who smuggled a bottle of hooch out in his stink-rags and never came back, but they just might catch night-shift Steve walking out with a twelve-pack that he didn't ring up. ", "First of all: storing high quality surveilance footage is EXTREMELY expensive. \n\nSecond: The most \"humiliating\" factor about surveilance cameras are the cameras themselves. If someone see that a place has surveilance, they are most likely to cover up their faces anyway. Trying to video someone who has covered their face, doesent get \"easier\" in 1080P 60FPS, if you get what Im trying to say.\n\nLow FPS, low resolution is enough to do the job, contra the costs of it. \n\n\nQuestioning this, would be like asking \"Why isnt there a police-officer standing at the door of every shop? It would make it so much harder for criminals to do their deeds\". It simply costs too much, and the consumers wouldnt pay for it either. \n\n\nIts all about cost efficiency vs. what you actually get.\n", "First off, you won't hear anything on the news about the guy who was quickly identified, arrested, and it's all taken care of. You'll see the footage displayed and a plea for anyone who can identify the individual, and often *people will call in and correctly identify them*. You're likely getting a false idea of how futile those cameras are since you only hear about the noteworthy whodunnits.\n\nThat said, any security is better than no security. It functions as a deterrant in many cases, and even if the footage only sees an individual wearing a blue shirt, black pants, wielding a knife, that information may help identify the perpetrator who has a blue shirt, black pants, and knife sitting in the corner of his bedroom when a search is conducted." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cb90zfj", "cb911i6", "cb91efl", "cb91lp7", "cb92156", "cb92f1f", "cb936np", "cb93b03", "cb93omc", "cb93rrt", "cb93u4a", "cb941un", "cb944i5", "cb9451m", "cb94mmj", "cb950jz", "cb9573p", "cb95dh9", "cb960aq", "cb96582", "cb96kn5", "cb96xgd", "cb98bop", "cb99c16", "cb9cxyi", "cb9d2by", "cb9dw59", "cb9ecpu", "cb9f1ts", "cb9fh2s" ], "score": [ 289, 7, 57, 2, 2, 2, 32, 11, 217, 2, 4, 2, 26, 2, 5, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2, 5, 3, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "when enough people think it is a word, it is a word. The fact people understand it without explanation just helps it along to becoming a word. You have to realize, no word ever existed until people started using it.", "My guess as to why 'conversate' (and many other 'words that people use all the time') isn't recognised as a word is because like 'converse', a word probably already exists and does the job more efficiently. That said, I don't know an existing word that covers 'misremember'. ", "When people say something like \"misremember\" is not a word, they're invoking the idea of an official, regulated language and enforcing its standards. This has some social purposes. For instance, we segregate job applicants by who is capable of speaking and writing in a professional/literate manner (which is defined by, among other things, avoiding non-words like \"ain't\"). The use of and enforcement of standardized language serves a surrogate for educational level and cultural identity.", "That's a perfectly promulent explanation", "side question: who determines what grammar is correct", "The speaker decides when and how to evolve language at whim. The only criteria is having listeners understand it without explanation.", "Our vocabulary is constantly growing and evolving, so there will always be 'new words'. But because we are busy people, with busy lives, and other things to worry about, we can't dedicate *all* our time to learning them. So - a long time ago - we agreed that we had to have certain rules to follow, to make understanding easier. Once you *break* the rules, you significantly increase the chance that comprehension will be lost.\n\nNow to your scenario: although you structured things in unfamiliar ways, you actually *were* still following certain rules, which is why your dad could understand you. \n\n**For example:** Take the word 'misremember'. The reason this makes sense is because the prefix (mis)' is following a well-known rule that means 'mistaken' or 'incorrect' (e.g.: misspell, mislead, misconduct).\n\nAlthough you've put it together in a non-standard way, you're still actually adhering to a known convention, and so people can link the prefix with the verb, and reach a logical conclusion.\n\n**Example 2:** In the word 'conversate', the suffix (ate) means 'to cause to be' (e.g.: originate, resonate, sublimate).\n\nIf you were to *really* make the word up, such as 'griep-remember', or 'converslig' suddenly the meaning is lost completely, because you're not adhering to any convention at all.\n\nAnd so while language is free to morph (and as it catches on, it will become accepted), each individual transition still has to be related to some form of protocol in order to acquire depth of meaning.", "The key here is that when people say \"That's not a word,\" what they mean is that it's considered non-standard. That would include not only neologisms but also an awful lot of words that have been in use for hundreds of years, like my personal favorite, \"ain't\".", "Editor here. If a word is *used* regularly, then it is a 'word' in the genetic sense, meaning a unit of speech with a sufficiently discrete and consistent definition to facilitate the communication of ideas. It does not matter if the word is broadly accepted, appears in books, or otherwise meets conventional standards of what most people mean when they say that something \"is a word.\"\n\nWhen people say this, what they really mean is one of several other things:\n\n1) The word is nonstandard, and inappropriate for the setting or situation.\n\n2) The word is improper, which usually means that it's a malformation of the proper form. (*E.g.,* \"irregardless\" for \"regardless\") Or, it is a standard word, but the *wrong one*. (*E.g.,* Rhode Islanders may say that they're 'agitated' when they mean irritated. Agitation is a rapid reciprocating mechanical action, and it would certainly be very unpleasant if you were being agitated -- throttling is one example of agitation -- but they mean something else when they say this.)\n\n3) The word is not widely accepted. This is the most common meaning, and if you parse it out rationally, it's similar to why men wear neckties: because other men do. People will say something is \"not a word\" if *they* feel that way, and believe that *most others* do, too. In most cases, they're correct about that, but that does not make it not a word.\n\nIn general, if a word is unique, not a malformation or misuse of some other word, and has a discrete and consistent meaning, it's a 'word' for practical considerations. However, many people may still object, and that is their right. Language is a living thing that we construct together, and that comes with plenty of push-pull, usage voting, and compromise.\n", "Yeah totally what is there deal?", "\"What are we looking for?\"\n\n\"Anything hinky.\"\n\n\"Why do you use that word?\"\n\n\"What word?\"\n\n\"Hinky. It's a made up word.\"\n\n\"All words are made up words.\"\n\n -- Abby & McGee, *NCIS*\n\n___\n\n'... There's glory for you!'\n\n'I don't know what you mean by \"glory\",' Alice said.\n\nHumpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant \"there's a nice knock-down argument for you!\"'\n\n'But \"glory\" doesn't mean \"a nice knock-down argument\",' Alice objected.\n\n'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'\n\n -- *Through the Looking Glass*, Lewis Carroll", "Eh it's a fluid concept. It depends on your opinion, but to a lot of people the dictionary is important, or the academic community at large. When you say \"people\" you really just mean the people that you are familiar with. It's entirely possible that someone would have a certain standard of how to speak, and that you and the people you know would not measure up to it. People speak differently, and in general you will be more respected if you sound like you're educated and thus only use \"real\" words.", "Student of linguistics here! (Okay, that was fun.)\n\nThere are two main categories of words (and language). Prescriptive, and descriptive. \n\nThe rule of which your father was referencing was prescriptive. Prescriptive grammar, at its simplest, is your English class. Its about shoulds and should nots, even if it says its about cans and cannots. Prescriptive rules are set by society and those in power. Sometimes these are official government bodies, but in the United States it would be academic organizations, media, and politicians. Its this idea of a standard language that must be spoken, to conform within the dialect that has prestige. To show you can follow the rules. It is very slow to adopt change to language, because of its meant to be like that. Eventually it will accept, and people will forget. (Take for example \"smog\". No prescriptivist would argue that it is a non-word, but its just a blend of smoke and fog, and fairly recently made too). \n\nDescriptive language is what linguists are concerned with! It is how language is actually used and formed. How people actually talk. Within descriptive language, we may say something is idiolectical (a.k.a. You're the only human to say it on the whole planet), but once two or more people start saying it with an agreed upon meaning, then in the descriptive mindset... Congratulations its a word! Linguists would argue there is no right or wrong way to speak or use language, because it is always moving and adapting. While misremember may not be standard now, it may become widely adopted by groups, making it no different than any other word ever. \n\n\nTLDR; Prescriptive language is English class, slow to adapt and resistant to additions for reasons of prestige and commonality. Descriptive language is Linguistics class, quicker to adapt to change in language and concerned with how language is actually used by the people who speak it. Prescriptivists are slow to adopt new words and it has to be commonplace amongst positions of power to do so. Descriptivists just want to see it used amongst people in similar situations.\n\nExtra TLDR: \"The Man\" says he decides and tells everyone that! But really, you decide! \n\nSee here (or google) for more info: _URL_0_\n\nEdit: Did some cleaning to make it more jargon friendly/free. \n\n", "I read this ELI5 in Zoolander's voice. ", "This doesn't answer your question, but you might enjoy it anyway. When I was in middle school, grades 5-8, in the 80s, we had a teacher that would make us write a poem 100 times if he heard us say the word \"ain't\". He was the History teacher, but he would make you stay after school and write the poem no matter where he heard you saying it, even at recess, lunch, or in the hallway. I wish I could remember it. I know it started with:\n\nThere once was a boy who said \"ain't\" \nHe fell in a bucket of red paint. \n", "Every \"word\" is a real word, regardless of whether or not someone agrees to their meaning and use. If every English speaker were to die, except for you, would all of the words you use not be real words anymore? \n\nWe all speak the same language a little differently. Some people don't agree on the way other's use words. When enough people agree though you get dialects. When even more people agree you get a new language.\n\nYou are either helping the language of your father to evolve or break away and form a new language.", "If you're still interested in this topic, /r/linguistics is a great place to check out.", "Conversate is not a combo of conversation and converse. It's something people say when they don't know the word converse.", "I am very much a game-keeper turned poacher on this issue.\n\nThis is precisely how I feel about language. I used to be a bit of a (i.e. an enormous) language fascist, pointing out errors in grammar and mis-use of words; but as you say, the point of language is to be understood. If your meaning is understood, what does it matter if you make up words?\n\nWhich means more to you: \"John is pauciloquent.\" or \"John is not very speaky.\"? Possibly not a brilliant example, but hopefully you get what I mean.\n\nI feel the same about 'phrases'. I have witnessed (and intervened in, with intent to pacify) discussions about whether the expression runs \"He was given free rein on the project\" or \"He was given free reign on the project\". The one that people who want to appear clever will say is 'correct' is the first one, but I'm not really sure how they define 'correctness'. A phrase is just a group of words. If the syntax is legible and the meaning of the words in the phrase is known, *what do you mean by saying \"That's not right.\"*?", "I haven't read the entire thread but so far I haven't seen this answer. In the UK for an \"non-word\" to become a \"word\" it must be submitted to the oxford English dictionary people (wherever they are) and the word must have a unique definition, pronunciation, etymology and have been used by 1000+ people in the same way. This is all then submitted to a draft of the dictionary. \"non-words\" that don't meet the criteria are still stored on card by the dictionary people for future reference. ", "Linguist here. This is probably going to get lost in here, but here goes:\n\nBasically, there is no one magical rule that makes something a word. What you consider to be a word pretty much depends on what approach you take to language in general. Some accept a word only if it is grammatically correct and is accepted by the vast majority of our society (prescriptivism). Some accept anything as a word as long as it can effectively convey the intended meaning and can serve the intended communicative purposes (descriptivism). But most importantly, these two approaches coexist in our society and both contribute to accepting new words. While we have standardized our languages to fit the patterns we have accepted as rules, a good part of what we consider to be 'correct' language comes solely from our intuition that we develop when we learn the language. And so, if the rules mess with our intuition we often simply opt out of the rule. Which means that we can utilize both our intuition and grammar knowledge to accept and create new words, however, whether those words will be understood by the rest pretty much depends entirely on whether the other party shares the same linguistic context. In other words, as an individual, you are free to decide on your own what can and can't be a word depending on the communicative circumstances you're in, however, that does not mean that society will agree with you.\n\nTL;DR Feel free to trust your linguistic intuition to decide on your own what is and isn't a word but don't expect everyone else to agree.", "Misremembering is indeed a real word, a quick Google search finds the following examples:\n\n* The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible than death was the dread of being misremembered after death.\n\"Great Expectations\" by Charles Dickens\n\n* I misremember what occurred, but subsequint the storm A Freeman's Journal Supplemint was all my uniform.\n\"Barrack-Room Ballads\" by Rudyard Kipling\n\t\n* Shall I go back and tell him I misremembered for a moment where the creek is?\n\"A Texas Ranger\" by William MacLeod Raine\n\t\n* I may misremember indifferent circumstances, but can be right in substance.\n\"Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson\" by Thomas Jefferson\t\n\n* I misremember exactly who fired it; wos it you, Meetuck?\n\"The World of Ice\" by R.M. Ballantyne\t\n\n* Didn't I misremember that?\n\"The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands\" by R.M. Ballantyne\t\n\n* All right, Mr. 2001, I says, I'll not misremember.\n\"A Son of Hagar\" by Sir Hall Caine\t\n\n* Judy, darlin', I misremember what I came here for.\n\"Soldier Stories\" by Rudyard Kipling\t\n\n* I do misremember it, lording: but 'tis surely of no account.\n\"Robin Hood\" by Paul Creswick\t\n\n* Only, if ever I were gay, which I misremember, I am gay no more.\n\"The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25)\" by Robert Louis Stevenson\t\n\n\n > Our names are all unspoken, our regiments forgotten,\n > For some of us were pretty bad and some of us were rotten;\n > And some will misremember what once they learnt with pain\n > And hit a bloody sergeant and go to clink again.\n\n\"The Old Soldiers\" by Edward Shanks\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)", "[The Online Etymology Dictionary says \"misremember\" is attested in use back to the 1530s.](_URL_0_)\n\nRoger Clemens had a long career, but I never realized he was that old!", " > Same with a word like conversate, apparently it's a combination of conversation and converse\n\nNo, it's a [back-formation](_URL_0_) from \"conversation\", by analogy with words like \"integrate\", \"congregate\" and \"estimate\".", "They mean not a *dictionary* word.", "I took a few courses in linguistics and have studied the 20th century post modernists.\n\nLanguage is not a collection of words. Language is your life. In this way you speak a very different language than I do.\n\nWhen you use a word I don't understand, let's say (_URL_0_ Word of the Day) grammatology, I don't understand you, because you're not using a word that is relevant or needed in my life. Maybe a screen writer might really understand this word... but I don't. To me... it's not a word.\n\nIf however for some reason script writing becomes a part of my life than suddenly it enters my vocabulary as a word proper.\n\nLudwig Wittgenstein was asked by his faculty and students to solve all of the problems of philosophy. He Bertrand Russell and a group of 10 students each a dictionary, taught them how to use a dictionary and how usage of words is simply a case of confusion and no actual problems of philosophy.\n\nThe word \"boobies\" isn't actually a word, some might argue. But if I ran into a crowd and yelling \"BOOBIES BOOBIES BOOBIES\" no doubt every single woman, mother, and father might feel a need to slap me. Despite it 'not being a word\" it has a context and a real image that is understood.\n\nIf words are only the ones you are allowed to play in Scrabble... then perhaps boobies isn't a word. But if it isn't a word, then why do we understand it? Words are simply the building blocks of a language. Boobies is clearly a building block for an idea in a sentence. Under this explanation boobies is so clearly a word... but then again so is everything.\n\nA language snob might look at the word \"jiggy\" (as in gettin' jiggy with it) as not a word. All you need to do is tell them, if it's not a word then I'm going to go gettin jiggy with it with Person X mom or dad... on your couch.", "Language is a living breathing thing. Those who restrict it are dorks imo. That does not excuse bad grammar though. ", "My wife is really big on the natural progression of language. Language is not a static being but rather is a constantly changing organism.\n\nTake the word \"can\" for instance. \"Can\" is so thoroughly understood to imply \"may\" you do something that it basically has that definition now. ", "You see buddy, way back when when English was very very young, he attended The Scandinavian Private Elementary School. One year, he starred in the school production of Beowulf, and boy was he good. He was a sensation, and people still talk about this production to this day.\n\nBut then English grew older. For whatever reason, he could no longer go to private school, and he attended public school. While in public school, his speech grew rougher and he began speaking in slang. All of his friends thought he was pretty cool, so they imitated him and started shortening words and speaking in slang too.\n\nThen in high school English fell in with the wrong crowd. There was one guy named Shakespeare in his gang, and English just started going down a dark path. He and Shakespeare must have done drugs together, because they were making up nonsense words like \"addicted\" and \"swagger.\" By this time English's old elementary school chums had completely disappeared, and most of his middle school friends could barely recognize him.\n\nAfter high school, English became pretty popular, mainly due to the fact that he was friends with a lot of popular people. Because he was so popular, many people wanted to hang out with him. You know how you are a slightly different person depending on whether you are hanging out with your grandmother or your best friend? Well, English had the same problem. He had different friend groups that he didn't like to mix. And when they did mix, it could sometimes be awkward as one friend group tried to get English to do something that English would never do with the other friend group.\n\n\"Say 'lorry\" for us English!\" his British friend would cheer. \n\"'Lorry?' you must be joking!\" his American friend would sneer.\n\nThis problem was only exacerbated when English discovered technology such as television and the internet. Now English is a personal friend with everyone, and he is also growing up much faster. \n\nJust like how English's old elementary school friends wouldn't recognize the man English is today, sometimes you don't recognize him when he is acting completely different with other people. ", "[\"Authority and American Usage\" by David Foster Wallace](_URL_0_) is a review of a specialist dictionary and usage guide that actually does a rather good job of explaining the different philosophies for the ratification of words, and makes several salient points about how the language we approve of and respects reflects our culture. It's also funny as hell. It's worth a read if you're curious about this topic." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://emedia.leeward.hawaii.edu/hurley/Ling102web/mod1_popideas/mod1.8_descvsprescrip.htm" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://www.finedictionary.com/misremember.html" ], [ "http://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=misremembering&searchmode=none" ], [ "http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#back-formation" ], [], [ "dictionary.com" ], [], [], [], [ "http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ctuk6pu", "ctule96", "ctupdkz", "ctuuspd" ], "score": [ 3, 6, 4, 2 ], "text": [ "Swords are designed for specific styles of fencing and combat. Also, while a crossguard protects your hand, it also hinders your movements, determining how you attack and defend. ", "While there were some (elaborately decorated) cross-guards invented in the Edo period called *katanatsuba* (刀鍔) and another type called *mamorokobushi* (護拳) katanas generally lacked cross guards and hand protections for the simple reason that they were quick withdraw* (not primarily for thrusting however, as I've been corrected) weapons, whereas European swords with the exception of rapiers (which usually have hilts like 刀鍔) were usually broad weapons.\n\nJapan had a different style of combat with the sword--Katanas were quick withdraw weapons, meant to be compatible with a Japanese concept called *Ieaidou* (居合道). The Japanese have developed a whole artform around this concept of swordplay, and it has developed into the sword tradition that Japan has today, with a focus on quick movements as opposed to slower, heavier striking.", "They had no need to - the tsuba was more than enough function as a guard to protect the wielder's hand, as the various other functions of larger crossguards (e.g. to lock swords) were not seen in most styles. A small, round disc to simply ensure you didn't accidentally slip was all that was needed. Swordsmiths were (relatively) more focused on the design of the blade itself, such as the curvature of blades (which you can definitely see the progression of in naginata and katana), were of a larger concern. You could mention too that the katana, being a primarily slashing weapon (note - primarily), combined with how it was used against its contemporary armour counterparts, meant that a larger crossguard had no specific function or significant advantage over a smaller one, such as the tsuba. Not even to mention that the katana was rarely used anyway.", "A related question - why would Japanese swordsmen just attack the hands of someone wielding a Japanese sword?\n\nI come from a fencing background, and in Sabre and Epee (weapons where the hand is target), the hand could be considered one of the main targets to go for (cus it's closer). These sport weapons have much more complete guards that protect the entire hand much more than the Japanese tsuba - yet hands still get hit all the time, with both a cut in sabre and a thrust in epee.\n\nIt seems to me like it would be strangely easy to strike the hands (namely the part holding the sword, not the wrists) of someone holding a japanese sword. What prevents this? Is it cultural? Or is there a technique or something that makes it a poor strategy?\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "chz3b9x", "chz3iam", "chz3omh", "chz70qa", "chz8xjm", "chz9ork", "chzfic7" ], "score": [ 370, 69, 168, 15, 13, 40, 6 ], "text": [ "I am not knowledgeable enough on historical oral hygiene practices to answer the first part of your question.\n\nHowever, I can answer your second question:\n\n > Has kissing always been a part of people's love lives?\n\nWell, prior to written history, we have a hard time concluding whether or not people kissed. There are various hypotheses for how kissing developed, ranging from \"feeding\" hypotheses, akin to canines and birds who pass food to juveniles through their mouths, to hypotheses which imply that kissing is a way of exchanging olfactory information. It's a very interesting anthropological discussion.\n\nBut from a HISTORICAL perspective, kissing is mentioned in writing about 5,000 years ago, in Sumerian poetry: (Kramer, Samuel Noah (1981). History Begins at Sumer (3rd revised. ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press., _URL_1_)\n\nLater examples from Egypt also mention kissing, and are fairly specific: _URL_0_, _URL_2_\n\nSo I can't tell you about how people felt about kissing due to oral hygiene, but people were definitely kissing in a romantic context since almost the beginning of recorded history.", "I'd like to try to answer this, but the way you've worded this questions makes it difficult. \n\nKissing has been around quite a while - some early evidence we have for kissing dates back to around 1500 B.C.E. from The Four Vedic Sanskrit Texts (The Vedas). There's no mention of the word “kiss,” (or the Sanskrit version of it, rather) but there are references to “licking,” and “drinking moisture of the lips.” By the third century C.E. we have the Vatsyayana Kamasutra (better known as the Kama Sutra), which includes a chapter describing how to kiss.\n\nIndia wasn't the only part of the world kissing that far back (e.g. kissing is mentioned in Homer's epics), but it's a convenient example.\n\nSome experts - I'm citing Vaughn Bryant, an anthropologist at Texas A & M - have speculated that kissing came from sniffing. Basically, that there was a lot of sniffing / sniffing greetings going on, and \"at some point, they slipped and ended up on the lips, and they thought that was a lot better.\" (Bryant). Another good source for this kissing / sniffing theory is *The Science of Kissing*, by Sheril Kirshenbaum. \n\nWhen you say \"oral hygiene\" and \"contemporary methods\" is where I lose you. I'm not sure what you mean by these terms - people have been cleaning our teeth as far back as written history goes. Assyrian cuneiform medical texts from 3000 B.C.E. mention teeth-cleaning procedures and toothpicks from roughly the same time have been found in Iraq (Mesopotamia). Greek writings note that Aesculapius - the Greek god of medicine - advocated for oral hygiene. \n\nSo I suppose my problem is that, without knowing what you consider \"oral hygiene\" or \"contemporary methods\", your question can't be answered. Based on what I remember and what I've read, at least, there's no record that a lack of oral hygiene was a deterrent to kissing. \n\nSo I guess, no?\n\nEdit: Poorly researched sidenote - I remember reading that body odor being considered unpleasant is a relatively recent phenomenon, associated with a lack of cleanliness, and that for a long time people liked the smell of BO. Perhaps hand in hand with that is not minding bad breath quite as much. \n\nAnyway, this isn't really my area but I hate to see this thread look so raggedy. Best answer I've got for you, sorry I cant' do better.", "The \"Jests of Hierocles\" has a whole section related to bad breath and it references the issues it caused for romance. I know \"AskHistorians\" isn't normally a venue for jokes, but it seems apropos given the context...\n\n#234:\n\"A person with offensive breath asked his wife, 'Why do you hate me?' She replied saying, 'Because you love me.' \"\n\n\nAvailable on Google Books:\n_URL_0_", "Isn't it worth mentioning that before the advent of processed foods, oral hygiene was not as necessary as it is today? For example, tribal people still have very healthy teeth. Or is this a misconception?", "I can't answer for kissing on the mouth, but I do know that, *tragically*, oral sex was considered taboo in Ancient Greece and Rome due to a fear of \"pollution\" - and not just limited to worries of hygiene. In Greco-Roman society, where there was so much interaction by way of conversation, kisses on the cheeks and mouth, and communal eating and drinking, there was a fear that oral sex could cause some sort of moral pollution, with a physical manifestation comparable to a curse. Additionally, it was thought that oral sex was a form of penetration, so a man who gave head would probably be treated rather similarly to a man who enjoyed getting pegged in the modern day (sort of).\n\nAs a result, there's a lot of poetry by more salacious Roman poets on the subject - Martial has over sixty poems that mention it, and one of the Latin schoolboy's favourite poems, Catullus 16, is bookended by the phrase, \"I'm going to bum you both and make you blow me.\" Also, there's a graffito from Pompeii which rather succinctly sums up Roman attitudes to cunnilingus:\n\n > III.5.3 (on the wall in the street); 8898: Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog\n\nThink on that next time you watch that scene with Jon Snow and Ygritte in the cave.", "It's important to remember that oral hygiene wasn't always lacking in the ancient world. It depends very much on which population and which time period you're talking about.\n\nFor example, Indians have been using twigs from the *neem* tree to brush their teeth for thousands of years (and still do today). The way it works is that they take a twig and chew on it for a few seconds until the fibers separate, and then it becomes a toothbrush. They then use this to brush their teeth.\n\nThe mechanical action of brushing, as well as antimicrobials present in the *neem* tree, are very effective at combating tooth decay. In fact, studies have [found no statistically significant difference](_URL_0_) between the incidence of plaque, cavities and gingivitis using this method, compared to a modern toothbrush and toothpaste.\n\nSimilarly, in many Arab countries the twig of the *Arak* tree (called a miswak) is used as a toothbrush. [Studies have also shown](_URL_3_) that [using a miswak](_URL_1_) is just as effective as using a modern toothbrush/paste.\n\nIt's also good to remember that the incidence of tooth and gum diseases is very related to one's diet. Specifically, diets that are high in sugars and simple starches, or carbonated drinks, predispose to tooth decay and gum disease. Such diets were not widely available in the distant past, so the incidence of these diseases was also low. There are [studies on populations living thousands of years ago](_URL_2_) that show many ancient populations had exceptionally healthy teeth.", "If I remember correctly, in Chaucer's \"Miller's Tale,\" Absalon sweetens his breath with cardamon and licorice in hopes of stealing a kiss from the adulterous Alison. I think this could possibly suggest some awareness of bad breath in the 1300s when the *Canterbury Tales* are thought to have been written." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.love-poetry-of-the-world.com/Egyptian-Love-Poetry-Poem2.html", "http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.4.08.04#", "http://themagentahornet.com/ancient-poetry1.html" ], [], [ "http://books.google.com/books?id=OtMb_pzRnOoC&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=jests+of+hierocles&source=bl&ots=jCnIp0LSmP&sig=MmNtKc_OVkvrlzjJbL7EWkMqNr4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=W1-PU6-AGo_6oASJs4LoBQ&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=breath&f=false" ], [], [], [ "http://www.ispcd.org/~cmsdev/userfiles/rishabh/09%20ajay%20bhambal.pdf", "http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/14973564", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3227510/?report=reader", "http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/15224592" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dl47bvo", "dl47uqg" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "The House of Representatives impeaches him and the Senate holds a trial with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presiding. He can't pardon himself in this case.", "It's an open question about whether a sitting president can be put on trial through the standard criminal justice system instead of the impeachment process. It simply hasn't come up because no prosecutor has ever tried to prosecute a sitting president. There are legal experts on both sides of the issue who believe that the president can only be tried through impeachment or that they can also be tried in a normal court." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "chqea47" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "You may be interested in my answers in these previous threads:\n\n* [At what point did Australians and New Zealanders begin to consider themselves as distinct from the British?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Why did Great Britain grant independence/autonomy to Australia and Canada? Was it political necessity or were there economic concerns?](_URL_0_)\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ob29o/why_did_great_britain_grant_independenceautonomy/ccqi7fx?context=3", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sp0tr/at_what_point_did_australians_and_new_zealanders/cdzw49h" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cr4lgkt", "cr4rixd" ], "score": [ 9, 3 ], "text": [ "They can, it's called crosstalk and it's a big design problem. Normally the signals are small enough that the interference is minimal, and can be fixed by spacing the wires apart. When that doesn't work, foil shielding is used. And if that doesn't work, you can use balanced connections. \n\nA balanced connection is when the signal and the opposite of the signal are sent on two lines. Then at the other end they are subtracted, this doubles the strength of the signal and any shared interference is removed. Professional audio cables are an example of balanced connections, but that's done to prevent interference from the environment. ", "I'm on mobile, but look into twisted pair and common mode rejection. The answers you're looking for are there. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cs7jnpw" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Here's the start of an answer: \"Anarchism\" was not a widely used keyword until 1880 or so, around the time of the establishment of the The International Working People's Association or \"Black International.\" Prior to that, anarchist ideas played a role in organizations like the International Association of the 1850s and the First International, and informed some elements in uprisings like the June Days of 1848 and the Paris Commune. In North America, they were also part of the movement for \"equitable commerce,\" informed the radical wing of the abolitionist movement and inspired the organizers of the various New England reform leagues. But they were, in this early period, generally expressed in the context of larger socialist and/or internationalist movements. Those movements were marked by all sorts of internal struggles, including significant disagreements between anarchistic factions. It was arguably not until after the splits in the International that the various elements, anarchists among them, would emerge as movements in their own right, with the new divisions drawing anarchists together as socialism and the international labor movement split apart. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "df2t96a" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It's something like 4000 miles from there to Moscow, and 2000 miles to California. In both cases most of the trip would be across wilderness terrain with no major roads or infrastructure to speak of. In the age of nuclear weapons, the war would be over long before an army crossing the Bering Strait reached anything remotely important. Even if nuclear war did not break out, a large ground force making such a long and difficult journey would have little hope of survival. They would be hit by air strikes for weeks or months, and then would face a prepared defense if they ever made it to their goal." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fnp4i3m" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "There have been a few previous answers that might be helpful here:\n\n[How easy was it for fugitives to evade capture in the Roman Empire?](_URL_3_) by [u/mpixieg](_URL_2_)\n\n[How were crimes investigated in Roman times?](_URL_1_) by [u/AwesomeDog59](_URL_4_)\n\nAnd a couple by me:\n\n[Prior to DNA evidence, finger prints, etc. how did they solve murders and actually know if they convicted the right person?](_URL_0_)\n\n[I'm living in Ancient Rome and I just murdered someone. What chances do I have of getting caught?](_URL_5_)\n\nIn short - no one! If someone got murdered, that was a problem for the murdered person's family. If they could bring the murderer to court, then the government would deal with it. If not, then there was nothing to investigate. In Rome, the praetor was in charge of investigating, if someone was brought to him. But the government did not investigate crimes on its own." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cu1eet/prior_to_dna_evidence_finger_prints_etc_how_did/exw5x58/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/avdbto/how_were_crimes_investigated_in_roman_times/", "https://www.reddit.com/u/mpixieg/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f3sttl/how_easy_was_it_for_fugitives_to_evade_capture_in/", "https://www.reddit.com/u/AwesomeDog59/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c0nyec/im_living_in_ancient_rome_and_i_just_murdered/er8s1v9/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fj91p7d", "fj91vjq" ], "score": [ 6, 3 ], "text": [ "Barometers can be used to predict the weather or estimate your altitude. If you put your phone in a bag and submerge it underwater, you can use a bit of math to measure its depth.\n\nMost useful stuff the barometer can do, apps already do.", "Air pressure decreases as elevation increases. Air pressure increases as it becomes more saturated with moisture/cools down.\n\nSo, if you monitor the change in pressure, you can tell the elevation change if the weather stays the same, or predict weather changes if you don’t change elevation.\n\nAnd as your phone also contains a GPS which can pinpoint your elevation outside, you can easily track weather systems based on the air pressure — of course, your weather app can do that too." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cxw687x", "cxw6a0i" ], "score": [ 5, 2 ], "text": [ "You are not legally entitled to most government benefits; you must be eligible. If not using illegal drugs is a condition for eligibility, then you can be required to prove that to obtain the benefits. That's not unconstitutional, because you're not being compelled to do anything--it is your choice to seek the benefit of the program.\n\nMandatory tests for intoxication without any suspicion are highly questionable, but that's a very different situation. Going about your lawful business and being required to submit to a test is not the same thing as applying for a benefit and having to submit to a test to prove eligibility.", "It is not a violation of the 5th Amendment, because neither driving nor receiving gov't aid is a right.\n\nWhen you choose to drive, you are giving implied consent to certain kinds of searches. If you do not want to consent, you can choose not to drive.\n\nSimilarly, when you ask for assistance, the gov't can ask you to give up some of your rights in return." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d6y2jzb" ], "score": [ 48 ], "text": [ "Great question!\n\nIn the twelfth century Latin Christian attitudes to this question were rather conflicted. On the one hand you have categorical prohibitions against miscegenation and on the other you have early depictions in chronicles and popular literature where such relationships are romantic and quite beautiful. \n\nWith respect to the former, two decades after the establishment of the Crusader states and Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem the religious and secular elite of these nascent communities met at the Council of Nablus in 1120 to pass sweeping new legislation aimed at policing the sexual ethics and morals of Latin Christians and multi-confessional neighbours. According to canons 12 and 15 Christian men and women who voluntarily had sexual intercourse with Muslims would suffer mutilation; men would be castrated and women would have their noses cut of (rhinotomy). \n\nThis was motivated in part due to a recent history of military defeat, exemplified most dramatically in the annihilation of the Antiochene field army in 1119 at the *Ager Sanguinis* or Field of Blood. The death of Roger of Salerno on the field with the majority of his men signalled to some Latin Christian observers within the Levant that God was punishing the faithful for their moral depravity and lasciviousness with non-Christians. \n\nHowever I should note that there is little evidence of the canons of the Council of Nablus being enforced, so it is uncertain whether or not local administrations had the capacity or will to enforce such laws.\n\nFinally on the other hand we have popular literary depictions of twelfth century knighthood. One of the most famous is the *Cycle of William of Orange,* a collection of tales involving the eponymous protagonist who fights valiantly in a fictionalized and deeply fantastical ninth century context against the enemies of Louis the Pious (the son of Charlemagne). \n\nIn the *Prise D'Orange* the tale recounts how William of Orange seduces Orable, the Muslim wife of the similarly \"pagan\" ruler of Orange, Thiebault. This romance is made licit in the tale through her conversion to Christianity, which obviously complicates the interfaith element of your question. However the point I am making is that Muslim individuals were not necessarily seen as being a maligned *other* and could themselves have great internal virtue making them worthy of Christian affection. Her confessional identity does not complicate William's desire and love, and her conversion is therefore a culmination of her joining him, his house and his faith. Also the emphasis upon a dazzling and beautiful foreign princess who would willingly submit to the sexual prowess of a Christian hero should not be terribly surprising given our enduring tendency towards eroticization and orientalism. \n\nThe earliest chronicles of the First Crusade also discuss how quickly Latin Christian settlers adapted to their new cultural and religious surroundings. Fulcher of Chartres explicitly records in Book III how Catholics took non-Catholic wives and came to embrace some of the local customs and dress. Although once again even Fulcher is careful to state that those saracens who were taken as wives had nevertheless been received into the church through baptism. Whether this is true or not is another matter, although given his clerical perspective it is easy to see why such a detail would be worth emphasizing. The First Crusade: Edward Peters, *The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres\" and Other Source Materials* (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 281. \n\nPerhaps the canonists of Nablus were troubled by the scale of the issue but simply had no means of confronting it despite the notional authority granted by these new legislative prohibitions. \n\n\n\n \n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cc6214s" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ " > would it be cylindrical and would bend back in on itself at the edges if we ever found the theoretical \"edge\". Think of it as going to the top edge of a map in a video game and ending up at the bottom edge.\n\nNo, that would be roughly what happens in a *finite* universe (well, provided it's either not subject to accelerating expansion or you left early enough in the lifetime of the universe). No edge; just wrapping back around on itself. More like the surface of a sphere than a cylinder, though.\n\nIn an infinite universe, you just keep going. Forever." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d3asw2k" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "The first multi-cellular organisms appeared because of evolutionary advantages of having specialised cells. Some seaweeds, for example, give us a look at what the most primitive multicellular organisms were like - they only have a few specialised cells, such as those that grip rock and those that are involved in reproduction. The rest of the cells all do exactly the same thing. The same concept applied to the first animals - initially, there were groups of cells, some of which performed different functions, such as allow the organism to move, while others all performed rudimentary function. We don't know for sure when the first epigenetic mechanisms arose, but we do know for certain that there was an obvious selective pressure towards organisms with a wider variety of specialised cells. Over generations, this resulted in organisms with more specific bundles of cells responsible for different functions - these were the first organs.\n\nThe great thing is that there are many organisms in various stages of evolutionary development. Maggots, for example, don't have a \"brain\", but they do have areas where the density of neurones is greater, which shows us that, perhaps, this is how the first brains came to be. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "de28lf4" ], "score": [ 31 ], "text": [ "**Part 1**\n\nI have previously wrote answers to similar questions [here](_URL_0_), [here](_URL_2_), and [here](_URL_3_) and it is not really possible to gauge the number of how many members of the Wehrmacht were directly involved in war crimes, not at least because the difficulty of establishing what \"directly\" means in this context: E.g. was a group of soldiers guarding an Einsatzgruppen mass shooting directly involved or not?\n\nThe question of how many knew of war crimes and what they knew of them is easier to answer, especially in light of the newer research by Felix Römer as well as Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer. They worked extensively with Allied protocols of conversations between German POWs recorded in Allied camps when they didn't think anybody was listening. Their research uncovered that knowledge of war crimes was ubiquitous among members of the Wehrmacht. Every soldier knew of atrocities that had been committed against Jews and other civilians because they had either been present, had participated or had been told about them by their comrades. During their time as POWs, they quite freely discussed these crimes. To exemplify this, Römer cites among others the following exchange between the Viennese Artillerie-Gefreitem Franz Ctorecka and the Panzer-Gefreiten Willi Eckenbach in August 1944 in Fort Hunt (translation my own):\n\n > C: And then Lublin. There is a crematoria, a death camp. Sepp Dietrich is involved there. He was somehow caught up in this in Lublin.\n > \n > E: Near Berlin, they burned the corpses in one of these thingies [\"einem Dings], the people were forced into this hall. This hall was wired with high-voltage power-lines and in the moment they switched on these lines, the people in the hall turned to ashes. But while still alive! The guy who was in charge of the burning told 'em: \"Don't be afraid, I will fire you up!\" He always made such quips. And then they found out that the guy who was in charge of burning the people also stole their gold teeth. Also other stuff like rings, jewellery etc.\n\n[Römer, p. 435f.]\n\nWhat this passage shows is that these Wehrmacht soldiers, who after all were both on the lower side of the ladder, being only Gefreite (lance corporals) were uncannily well informed even if the story about using electricity for executions wasn't true. But knowing not only of the Majdanek death camp near Lublin but also knowing about Sepp Dietirch's involvement proves them to be very well informed.\n\nOr take this exchange between two Wehrmacht soldiers, Obergefreiter Karl Huber and Pioniersoldat Walter Gumlich, in Fort Hunt:\n\n > H: One day, one guy just came and stole this Russian's cow and so the Russian defended himself. And then we had to hang fifty or a hundred men and women and let them hang there for three or four days. Or they had to dig a trench, line themselves up at the edge and were shot so they fell backwards into it. Fifty to a hundred people and more. That were the so-called \"retributions\". But that didn't help anything. Or when we set the village son fire [...] Partisans were naturally dangerous, we had to defend ourselves against them but this was something different [...]\n > \n > G: Ach, that were war operations. They [the people who did the above] are not really criminals.\n > \n > H: Exterminating whole families, shooting their kids etc., literally killing whole families? We are guilty if the military without any right or any order steals the last bread of some farmer.\n > \n > G: Oh, come on.\n > \n > H: Ach, don't defend them.\n\nThese and so many more conversations of this kind between Wehrmacht soldiers show that virtually every soldiers had either heard or seen these crimes if he had not participated in them himself. And given how numerous the crimes of the Nazis and the Wehrmacht were in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, this is hardly surprising. You already mentioned it in your expanded text above and I go into this in the linked answers but it is imperative to realize that the war against the Soviet Union was planned, conceptualized and fought as a war of annihilation, being in itself basically a huge war crime. Nobody is this fact more obvious than in the OKW's Kriegsgerichtsbarkeit Erlass, which actually forbid Wehrmacht soldiers from being persecuted for war crimes in the Soviet Union. That this was seen as necessary, tells you not just how deeply the Wehrmacht was involved but just what kind of war they planned to fight: One where combat operations and war crimes bled into each other seamlessly.\n\nThe background of this is touched upon in my linked answers as well as by Dr. Waitman Beorn in the linked AMA [here](_URL_1_).\n\nNow when it comes to the question of rationalization, the protocols reviewed by Römer et. al. are also rather enlightening. As you might have noticed in the converstaion between Huber and Gumlich above, these crimes were sometimes regarded as controversial. Römer in his analysis proposes based on the protocols that Wehrmacht soldiers did indeed distinguish between what they viewed as legitimate and illegitimate violence.\n\nTake this exchange Römer cites between soldier Friedrich Held and Obergefreiter Walter Langfeld about the topic of anti-Partisan warfare:\n\n > H: Against Partisans, it is different. There, you look front and get shot in the back and then you turn around and get shot from the side. There simply is no Front.\n > \n > L: Yes, that's terrible. [...] But we did give them hell [\"Wir haben sie ganz schön zur Sau gemacht\"],\n > \n > H: Yeah, but we didn't get any. At most, we got their collaborators, the real Partisans, they shot themselves before they were captures. The collaborators, those we interrogated.\n > \n > L: But they too didn't get away alive.\n > \n > H: Naturally. And when they captured one of ours, they killed him too.\n > \n > L: You can't expect anything different. It's the usual [Wurscht ist Wurscht]\n > \n > H: But they were no soldiers but civilians.\n > \n > L: They fought for their homeland.\n > \n > H: But they were so deceitful...\n\n[Römer, p. 424]\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xc03h/just_how_much_of_the_wehrmacht_was_dirty/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5qhz7o/ama_the_german_armys_role_in_the_holocaust/dczdhhm/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r8pzp/how_often_did_the_regular_german_army_werhmacht/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4skjkq/is_the_depiction_of_nazi_or_german_soldiers_in/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c7oys8q" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "Under a \"classical\" gold standard, money is not convertible into gold; money IS gold. The monetary unit is defined in terms of a weight of gold, and the law defines a right of any individual to go to a mint and turn that weight of gold into an official coin.\n\nThe circulating media of exchange consisted of both these coins, bank notes issued upon those coins, and checking. In many places these bank notes were central bank notes; but many countries lacked central banks, and privately-issued notes traded instead.\n\nThese banks notes were roughly analogous to banking deposits in a checking account. They are a promise to pay backed by a specific banking institution. So just as you usually spend most of your checking account balance without taking cash, but do withdraw some physical currency, people mostly used bank notes, but did redeem some for metallic currency. The metallic stuff was also used between banks.\n\nSo the answer is: yes, during the \"classical\" gold standard period, individuals could turn to the banking system and exchange their dollar-denominated assets for physical gold; and when the financial system was underdeveloped or malfunctioning, they would.\n\nLater, after WWI in Europe, and after the Gold Seizures in the U.S. there existed various gold-exchange regimes. These were not \"classical\" gold standards, and under them, only certain people and foreign governments could exchange paper tender for physical gold. Under these systems it would be more accurate to say that money was \"backed by\" gold (often imperfectly) than to say that money \"consisted of\" gold.\n\nThe answer I have just given is substantially drawn from the following excellent article, which discusses your question in greater depth, and which demonstrates the limited historical scope of a true gold standard:\n\nSelgin, George, The Rise and Fall of the Gold Standard in the United States (August 27, 2012). Available at SSRN: _URL_1_ or _URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2139115", "http://ssrn.com/abstract=2139115" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d314rin", "d31af20" ], "score": [ 11, 4 ], "text": [ "The issuing bank gets a cut and so does the network operator (visa/mastercard/etc).\n\nThat's why banks want you to use *their* cards. Well that and since they're the ones financing your credit they get the interest on the transactions.", "There are a surprising number of people involved to process a single credit card transaction.\n\nThe store has a merchant account at a merchant bank, this allows them to process CC transactions. The merchant typically pays somewhere around 25 cents + 2.0% of the amount on each transaction (it varies from merchant to merchant).\n\nTo authorize the transaction, the merchant bank sends the transaction through the card network, which involves several different parties (processors, acquirers, and sometimes other merchant banks), each one taking a tiny portion of that 25 cents + 2% fee. Visa and MC get their tiny chunk at the end. Their portion of the fee is really, really tiny, but remember they get this for *every single* Visa/MC transaction worldwide, so those tiny amounts add up insanely fast.\n\nOnline stores usually have another party involved, called a merchant gateway, and it's used for processing secure online transactions. This is usually another 10 cents or so per transaction and goes directly to the gateway processor." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dxpmn2k" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Perhaps while you're at it you'd like an ELI5 of the proof of Fermat's last theorem, and a simple explanation of the Hodge conjecture?\n\nSome concepts are suitable for simplified explanations. This is not one of them." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e62fuq5", "e62gi38", "e62gtps", "e62pm4c", "e62s984", "e62tha5", "e62trer", "e62tyoe", "e62uho9", "e62uy4n", "e62w8lg", "e62wm8i", "e62wo00", "e62wwux", "e62x7cn", "e62x88o", "e62xjsp", "e62xv40", "e62y9w1", "e6359sl", "e63jssa", "e76r80w" ], "score": [ 26, 746, 8, 63, 5, 22, 3, 2, 2, 10, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "It may be a form of confirmation bias. Before learning about the term, you subconsciously disregarded every instance of its expression, but now you aknowledge it at every corner because it is fresh in your memory.", "It's called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It happens with band-names, artists and types of food too. Our attention is quite selective and we tend to subconsciously ignore things we don't understand.\n\nAfter we learn it we have confirmation bias where it seems that something we've just learned about is all of a sudden quite common. Sometimes it is but more often it's just that we previously weren't paying attention. \n\nThere's more about it [here](_URL_0_)", "It's called the [Baader-Meinhof phenomenon](_URL_0_), also known as the frequency/recency illusion.", "Normally happens when i or someone i know buys a new car. Never seem to see one. Then you get one and its the most common car on the road", "Neil Degrass Tyson on the JRE? ", "You just notice things more if your brain thinks there's a reason to, that's all. The reality is that if you consciously noticed **everything**, you'd go insane. Your higher mind can't handle that much content, so it constantly tunes a great deal of stuff out, based on heuristic training. (Should you notice that? Then you will. Otherwise, not.)\n\nOne example of this was an experiment proving that drivers only notice road signs where they expect to see them. A regular Stop Sign was erected halfway down a residential block with no other cues. Almost every single driver tested completely failed to notice it. The reason is that our experience teaches us (heuristic learning) to only look for such signs where they normally appear, not where we rationally assume they would not.\n\nA much more common form of this phenomenon is one that almost everyone who's gotten a new (to them) car has experienced: Suddenly, you start seeing 'your' car **everywhere**. This is because your brain now has a reason to pay attention to that kind of car, whereas it previously just tuned it out, so you didn't consciously notice it. This very common experience was lampooned in the video game Vice City, where whenever you steal any car, the game starts spawning a lot more of that same car in the environment.\n", "Same thing here. Ever since Joe Rogan and Neil Tyson talked about that word I've heard it too many times.", "This happens with the number 444 and recently the word \"troglodyte\", or more specific \"troglodytes\"", "You only see what you recognize. People are constantly bloviating, so myriad words are just floating around for the taking.", "I'm more concerned when one person I know uses an odd word a few times, then suddenly lots of other people, who don't know the first one, also start using it. It's very discombobulating ", "It’s due to your neural pathways being recently activated in relation to recognizing that pattern, er..word. Freshly activated pathways/connections are more likely to be ready to fire again so you recognize this pattern right away.\n\n I have no source for this besides what I remember from psychology classes. \nIt is really the explanation behind the “Baader-Meinhoff” effect which explains that this happens and reassures you that you’re not alone in noticing this, but doesn’t explain explicitly why. ", "Sometimes, as others have said, it's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Other times you are literally hearing it 5x as often as normal because word usage doesn't have a perfectly even distribution over time. Here is the [search frequency](_URL_0_) for the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon to give you an idea of how that all works.\n \n\nWhen it gets down to it, language is a deeply social tool and people constantly copy from each other. This is why we had all those movies about asteroids and then zombies and then dystopian YA universes back to back. It's not some secret to the universe that you've only just been keyed in on, people literally just made more movies of that type as they became popular. I would argue that this phenomenon is waaaaaaay more common than the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.", "I know there's the Baader Meinhof but I don't know if I buy that. I consider myself a pretty intelligent person and like to learn things I don't know. So if I see a word I don't recognize or know I, ya know, look it the fuck up because I want to know what it means. I'm not going to read something and just skip over a word because my brain doesn't recognize it...that's not how that goes.\n\nSo when I see a word I don't know and look it up, I find it really odd when I start to notice it all over the place because it's like...where was this word before? I wasn't just ignoring it, WHY WOULD I?\n\nMore evidence for simulation theory if you ask me. ", "This is crazy. I just learned about this phenomenon last week and I keep seeing it referenced. This is so meta. ", "**Literally** used all the time.\n\nMy kiddo does this a lot. Among the words and phrases:\n\n1. Literally\n2. If you know what I mean\n3. To be honest\n4. No offense\n\nHe never actually uses them correctly, but that’s why it’s funny. I often follow up his use of the word “literally” with the British pronunciation “lit-trilly” just to mess with him.", "I once called a lawyer from the big 5 city of London law firms fetching.\n\nOld English Shakespeare quote.......\n\nTorrent of abuse for that use of the English language because Id compared her to a dog! ", "Happened to me with introvert; had to google it and going from never heard it in my life to hearing it like 12times in a month lol ", "The above hypotheses are good but ~~we~~ you can't discount the solipsistic hypothesis that you and you alone are the author of the universe so you are just making more use of your newly created word. ", "Because new things are interesting and cool. You eat a new food (that you like)all the time. Eventually the novelty wears off. \n\nEdit: thought you said “use it” not “see it used.” \nIn that case you are now aware it exists so you notice it. Kinda like you don’t pay mind to foreign languages because you don’t know their meaning. Once a word has new meaning you listen for it involuntarily. That wears off too. ", "Everyone's saying it's psychological but I have a different theory. If you learned the new word on reddit, hundreds of redditors learned it at the same time and a bunch of them want to flex their new vocabulary.", "There is a decorative star hanging on about every 10th house. You’ll start seeing them now.", "Since no ones said it yet, it’s to do with a part of the brain called the Reticular Activating System which essentially acts as a filter on the mind for what we subconsciously want to see (for example the car we just bought or are planning to get)" ] }

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[ [], [ "https://psmag.com/social-justice/theres-a-name-for-that-the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon-59670" ], [ "https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/baader-meinhof-phenomenon.htm" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Baader-Meinhof&geo=US" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d7kg7it" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "Creases form on our hands in the womb. They allow our hand skin to squeeze and stretch without bunching up. These creases are called Palmar Flexion creases." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "femrmdg" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "This is such a very broad topic that there are no scholarly works that deal with the whole thing. On the one hand, you can try Phyllis Tortora's *Survey of Historic Costume*, which is a textbook that can give a broad overview; like all textbooks, though, you lose the nuances and sometimes it's incorrect on the details. On the other, I list more specific works [in my profile](_URL_0_), which won't give you the complete history of high fashion/everyday dress/military uniforms/etc. but are helpful for more specific periods." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/profiles/mimicofmodes" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dwbxea1" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ " > how do we define when it stopped being a clump of rock?\n\nBut it still is a big clump of rock. That's not mutually exclusive with being categorized as a planet, and the actual definition of a planet is rather arbitrary. Pluto is a good example, as it was classified as a planet initially, but the International Astronomical Union updated its definition of a planet in a way that disqualified Pluto, reclassifying it as a dwarf planet instead.\n\nUsing the IAU's definition of a planet, the Earth became one once it met the following criteria:\n\n_URL_0_ in orbit around the Sun, \n2.has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape), and \n3.has \"cleared the neighborhood\" around its orbit.\n" ] }

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[ [ "1.is" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cypvnsj", "cypvorf", "cypw5g3", "cypya2p" ], "score": [ 6, 2, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Because it was the last month of the year.\n\nThe old Roman calendar had ten months -- which is why we see prefixes like Oct- and Dec- -- eight and ten -- for what was at the time the eighth and tenth months. In Rome, the year started with March.\n\nSo, what about the time between December and March? Originally, it was all \"fuck it, it's winter, doesn't deserve a month\". But eventually that became impractical, probably for reasons of commerce. So, they added two months -- January and February, the latter getting the leftovers.", "Actually I believe it was because of the Greek ceasers Julius and Augustus... they took days from February to make their months longer. But I dunno for sure it might be an old wives tale ", "First you have to understand why ancient peoples constructed their calendars. They did it either to time\n\n* When to plant, harvest and perform other agricultural tasks.\n* When to have religious events and festivals. \n\nIn the period that would become February, the ancient Romans did neither of these things. They therefore considered those days to not belong on a calendar and not be part of any year. \nLater on the Roman calendar year was brought up in length so as to cover the full solar year. But there weren't enough left-over days to make two full months. February became the runt of the litter, a decision we've kept up till today. \n(This is also why September through December are months 9-12 but are named for the numbers 7-10 - they *used to be* the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months of a 10-month year)", "It's basically what was said March was the beginning of the year, but calendars were based on the Moon not the Sun which makes for not as accurate calendaring think about how Easter can be from end of March to Mid April. Ceaser decreed that a better calendar should be made so he had it done. The experts he used decided to go with a solar calendar like the Egyptians. So they had to add 67 days to the year 45 BCE or January and February with an extra day added every 4 years (leap year). It was because of this calendar that January became the start of the new year. As January 1st allows for a significant lengthening of the hours in the day after the solstice.\n\nSo most calendar questions I just think Caesar did it." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cl8llh7", "cl8mc83" ], "score": [ 6, 3 ], "text": [ "There is a little bit of truth in the idea that if you can't explain it simply, then you don't really understand it. But that's not always the case, sometimes what you explain might just be really complicated. I mean, you can explain nuclear fission pretty simply, but the simple explanation is useless when it comes to application. You just need to remember that the ELI5 answers aren't meant to be research level answers. They just answer the little questions the person wants to know.", "Explaining things to others generally requires empathy. If you can't imagine not knowing something, you can't explain it. \n\nThis is why questions from young children can be so perplexing. \"Why is the sky blue?\" or \"Why is it called a jet ski?\" is challenging to you because you just accept these things as background. You don't remember not knowing and you've not thought about what not knowing would be like." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dr131mm", "dr14q9p" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "Strictly speaking, PCM is a codec for sound to digital data,while Dolby and DTS are companies that create other codecs (although I think the consumer codec made by DTS may also be called, simply, DTS).\n\nPCM is the most basic codec and basically involve converting the actual audio waves directly to numerical values. It's many thousands of numbers per second specifying exactly how loud the speaker output should be _right now_. That means it's very data intensive, especially as you add additional audio channels (like center, rear left and right, etc)\n\nThe other codecs made by Dolby and DTS are all about encoding more channels of sound, more efficiently than just PCM. \n\n If you're interested in the specifics of the differences between DTS codecs and Dolby codecs I suggest you don't bother. I'm sure that high end audio engineers and audio equipment enthusiasts will pop up talking about the relative merits of each, but as far as I can tell the distinction only really exists to give these people something to argue about.", "In a nutshell PCM is an open standard for storing analog waveforms as digital samples. Pulse Code Modulation. It's not fancy but it's free and all samples are preserved without a loss of quality. DTS, Atmos, Dolby Digital, are proprietary audio formats that convert raw PCM data, into a proprietary audio stream. They modify the original samples and may or may not be lossy/lossless, and you need to pay a license royalty to the companies in order to encode or decode audio using their format. \n\nYou have 2 files on your computer. One is a .wav file, and the other is a .mp3. They both contain music, but .wav is an open standard supported by everything and it contains uncompressed PCM audio, and mp3 is a licensed encoding scheme that requires a mp3 decoder, and the license (it's free now but didn't use to be) to allow software to decode it. The decoded MP3 is converted to PCM (just like the raw format of the .wav) and sent to the sound card where it's played back. \n\nWhen you connect a digital output from a bluray player, computer, or game console to a stereo or TV, the physical connection is just like the files on your computer. They physically share the same type of storage and transmission, but the format of the data is different and needs different decoders to play it back. \n\nPCM sends sound data over SPDIF or HDMI using a format that the stereo or TV recognizes as PCM, and the PCM data is sent to the digital to analog converter or DAC where it emerges as audio. \n\nPCM is not compressed meaning the original samples are preserved. It can have 2 or more channels over the same cable, which get separated out and converted to your center, subwoofer, and surround sounds. \n\nDTS is it's own format though. It uses the same physical cabling (like files on a disk) but the format of the data (like .wav versus .mp3) is different. In order for a stereo or TV to decode the DTS data, it has to have a DTS decoder. Once the DTS decoder finishes with it it's converted back to PCM, the audio is then sent to the DAC just like the PCM data was. \n\nDolby Digital, Atmos, TrueHD, etc are also other formats that can be sent over the HDMI cable. If the stereo or TV has a Dolby decoder on board, it can convert that data into regular PCM samples which are then sent to the DAC and decoded like normal. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c46jo1l", "c46l5t4", "c46lh2l" ], "score": [ 76, 5, 3 ], "text": [ "From [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\n > The surface of the Earth is whizzing by as Hubble orbits, and the pointing system, designed to track the distant stars, cannot track an object on the Earth. The shortest exposure time on any of the Hubble instruments is 0.1 seconds, and in this time Hubble moves about 700 meters, or almost half a mile. So a picture Hubble took of Earth would be all streaks.", "Many people don't know this, but the Hubble telescope was roughly based on a line of spy satellites called [\"Keyhole\" or \"Kennan\"](_URL_0_), satellites that are designed to look down. Another interesting fact is that the Space Shuttle's payload bay was specifically designed to accommodate these satellite/telescopes.\n\nAs others have said, the Hubble telescope isn't able to image the surface, but there are many satellites in orbit that are very good at that. There's an urban legend that they can read a newspaper headline from orbit.\n\nEDIT: qualification", "I think by the time you did enough \"what ifs\" to make the image not blurry and high enough resolution and all that... You would be better off just using a military spy satellite, which I would be willing to guess at this point would probably at least tell you if your shoes are tied, ants might still be a little outside the reach." ] }

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[ [ "http://hubblesite.org/reference_desk/faq/answer.php?id=78&cat=topten", "HubbleSite.org" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c5ot1s7", "c5ounha", "c5ouoeq" ], "score": [ 67, 5, 4 ], "text": [ "[There's a website for that](_URL_0_)\n\n\n > This is a reference to the phrase context-free grammar, which is a technical term used in formal language theory. The play on words is that Cueball does not provide any context for his statement.", "[zincake's really important post](_URL_0_) is buried underneath a negative comment and I want to make sure it (and the point of the comic) gets seen.\n\nOne part of linguistics theory is the study of different classes (or \"types\" of languages, and one of these is a [formal language](_URL_2_) - mentioned in the first panel of the comic. \n\nIf you must know about the various languages, then you might as well check out the [Chomsky hierarchy](_URL_1_). In order to understand the comic, you will need to understand the hierarchy up to a point. What it essentially boils down to (keep in mind I'm summarizing one of Chomsky's greatest papers in like, one sentence) is that a language can be ranked by the way building blocks of the sentence can be formed. \n\nSometimes you get some really terse, really formal languages in the lowest level of languages. Cue zincake's post. Mathematics is a formal language. In it, we have sentences like \"5 + 5 = 10.\" Isn't that a cute sentence. There's a lot of surprising complexity to it, but pretty much everyone over the age of, say, 7 should be able to read it. Even if we gussy it up, \"\\exists x s.t. {x \\equals 5} \\implies x + 5 \\equals 5 + 5 \\implies x + 5 \\equals 10\", the language itself is still easily put together. Note, you will need to be able to read LaTeX and understand mathematical notation to really get what the sentence is saying, but the mechanics are all there. \"Let's say X = 5, then that means that X + 5 = 5 + 5, and therefore X + 5 must equal 10, because we already know that 5+5 equals 10.\" Every bit of the sentence directly flows to the next part, and everything is nice and simple in the end.\n\nAnd so we come to our first type of transitional language, context-free. In it, we say that our sentence is composed of one word. Any word can either terminate (the transition does not continue) or it can propagate, that is, it transitions to some other words *which mean the same thing*. I'm flubbing the explanation here because I don't want to get into the theory of it. Instead, I will show an example. Let's have a language that we just made up, and in it we have a sentence S. Maybe S can be broken down into a noun phrase NP and a verb phrase VP. So now, our sentence S is represented by S - > NP VP. Maybe NP can be represented by the word \"I\", which is a first-person pronoun. Maybe VP can be represented by the phrase \"love you\", which itself contains a verb and a direct object.\n\nWell now, our sentence \"S\", being \"S - > NP VP\", is actually \"S - > NP VP - > I love you\", because the \"NP\" became \"I\" and \"VP\" became \"love you\". We simplify this by just saying \"I love you\", no arrows included. This example doesn't mean that S must always be NP VP (though it seems to be the case quite often), nor that NP can only be the word \"I\" (or, failing that, just pronouns), nor that the only verb phrase in the world is \"love you.\" Rather, \"S - > NP VP - > I love you\" is simply one context-free derivation of the sentence S, using our alphabet and rules. \"I love cake.\" is also a possible sentence, but it's just as much a sentence as \"Mindy is I's cat.\" Wait a second. What happened there? Assuming you've got a pretty decent grasp of English, that last sentence, heck even that one word should have thrown a red flag. What exactly is wrong with using the word \"I's\" to mean first-person possessive pronoun? I mean, it has all the parts that are important, right? Let's draw an analogy. The word \"Mindy's\" makes sense, right? What if it was \"Mindy's catfood\"? That seems OK. Can all possessive nouns be written as \"NP\" followed by an apostrophe-s? Is there a significant difference between \"Mindy's\" and \"I's\", if \"Mindy\" is an NP... and \"I\" is an NP? Do you think \"I's\" should be a valid word in English?\n\nFor better or for worse, \"I's\" is not valid English, because A) grammer and B) context. The two of them go together hand-in-hand, and they manifest themselves in our rules (such as S - > NP VP). The further up the Chomsky hierarchy you go (the next level is context-sensitive and then to recursively enumarable) the more complex the rules become. \n\nBut those systems are not the point of the XKCD comic, at least in my interpretation. Here's a question for you: is English context-sensitive, or is English context-free? Answer? We don't actually know the answer to that question. We're had some good evidence that it's not context-free (such as the Mindy is I's cat sentence), but nobody's proved it is definitely context-sensitive. Why do we have so much trouble figuring it out? Because grammer is a fickle mistress and languages are always changing. And so in the comic, cueball (representing grammer), breaks into the conference without any context. The joke itself is a pun. Check out the alt-text.\n\n > [audience looks around] 'What just happened?' 'There must be some context that we're missing.'", "With XKCD, reading the title text helps. Mouse over the image and you get the title text. You could say it gives you... context?" ] }

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[ "http://xkcd.com/1090/" ]

[ [ "http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1090" ], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xqt2p/explain_this_comic_to_me/c5ot6xi", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy#The_hierarchy", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cihxrn4" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Yes, we can make lighter stable elements split into even lighter elements, but below iron, it requires more energy to split them than you get back. Light elements require more energy to split, and give more energy when fused; heavy elements as opposite -- they require more energy to fuse, and give more energy when split. Iron is basically the middle-ground, the point where the transition between light and heavy happens.\n\nSo, you can split iron or lighter elements, but it requires more energy than you'll get out from the fission.\n\nThis is why we do fission with the heaviest elements (uranium, plutonium, etc.), but we try to produce fusion with the lighest elements (hydrogen)." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e7u9n2a", "e7u9w03" ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text": [ "1 gram of food is about the size a jelly bean. I don’t think there are any beef jerkies with 1 gram servings. ", "You've misread something maybe you should upload the packet so we can understand where you've got it wrong. Beef jerky has approximately 33g of protein per 100g. It's impossible for 1 gram of jerky to have 10 grams of protein." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c2dukd7", "c2dukd7" ], "score": [ 5, 5 ], "text": [ "A thread is a fancy way to say a task. Let's say you want to send shipments of Egyptian cotton from Sicily to Malta. If you have a single plane that can fly 500 mph, you have to wait until it flies there and back (a single clock cycle) before you can load it up and send it out again. In that sense it isn't very quick.\n\nNow imagine you have a fleet of 8 planes. Even though they all fly at 500 mph, you're transporting 8x as much cotton as you were before. This is why the speed (measured in GHz) doesn't mean a whole lot. In the case of the i7 series, it has hyperthreading, which is a fancy way of saying there are twice as many virtual cores as physical cores. Since an i7 is a quad core chip (at least the desktop version I'm familiar with is), there are 8 usable cores, as detected by windows task manager. A core 2 duo, the second generation of Core Duo, only have 2 usable cores. \n\nThe way a thread works is fairly complex, but each core is basically set up to run one thread at a time, but cycle through them so fast that the user interprets them as running in parallel (wikipedia \"time-division multiplexing\"). The only downside to having a lot of cores running in parallel is that a lot of software can only utilize 2-4 cores at once, meaning you have a bunch of cores on an i7 doing nothing for a lot of the time unless you're seriously multitasking. \n\nTo most directly answer your question, it works by splitting a \"job\" into many smaller tasks called \"threads\" and then going through all the threads and doing them individually, but so fast that it looks like they're running simultaneously. If there is more than one core doing this then many tasks can be done at once.\n\nAnyone with more experience in this field can correct me.", "A thread is a fancy way to say a task. Let's say you want to send shipments of Egyptian cotton from Sicily to Malta. If you have a single plane that can fly 500 mph, you have to wait until it flies there and back (a single clock cycle) before you can load it up and send it out again. In that sense it isn't very quick.\n\nNow imagine you have a fleet of 8 planes. Even though they all fly at 500 mph, you're transporting 8x as much cotton as you were before. This is why the speed (measured in GHz) doesn't mean a whole lot. In the case of the i7 series, it has hyperthreading, which is a fancy way of saying there are twice as many virtual cores as physical cores. Since an i7 is a quad core chip (at least the desktop version I'm familiar with is), there are 8 usable cores, as detected by windows task manager. A core 2 duo, the second generation of Core Duo, only have 2 usable cores. \n\nThe way a thread works is fairly complex, but each core is basically set up to run one thread at a time, but cycle through them so fast that the user interprets them as running in parallel (wikipedia \"time-division multiplexing\"). The only downside to having a lot of cores running in parallel is that a lot of software can only utilize 2-4 cores at once, meaning you have a bunch of cores on an i7 doing nothing for a lot of the time unless you're seriously multitasking. \n\nTo most directly answer your question, it works by splitting a \"job\" into many smaller tasks called \"threads\" and then going through all the threads and doing them individually, but so fast that it looks like they're running simultaneously. If there is more than one core doing this then many tasks can be done at once.\n\nAnyone with more experience in this field can correct me." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d41xoxi", "d41xrrl", "d4229bt" ], "score": [ 18, 22, 4 ], "text": [ "It has a few but the law allows them to round down. So it's approximately zero. ", "There is sugar in an orange so there are calories in an orange.\n\nThe sparkling water might have an sweetener that our bodies cannot digest (= 0 calories), or one that does not need very much to achieve the same level of sweetness that sugar does ( < 5 calories = 0 calories). ", "Basically those drinks have only a tiny amount of actual fruit juce just so they can advertise it but still round down the resulting small number of calories. Their flavour is completely due to artificial sweeteners and aromas.\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fmvjg6p", "fmvkvaq" ], "score": [ 3, 5 ], "text": [ "The star can spin which can make the poles behave differently. The balance of gravity pulling in and fusion pushing out will tend to smooth out differences, so it's about as homogenous as a well stirred soup, it might not exactly be equal and there might be some bubbles but on the scale that matter its really is. If you have a kettle on with a lid and heat it up that lid is going to fly off in the direction the kettle is open even if the exact direction could depend a little how the water inside is distributed. Likewise a supernova is going to expand in the \"up\" direction.\n\nThe conditions for fusion to stop happen first on the inside. There are multiple shells of conditions that are conductive to different kinds of fusions. But a region that is now hot enough to do a more demanding kind of fusion must have risen to that temperature and pressure ie passed through the other conditions. Big stars can support significant multiple kinds going on at once while small stars run out of the lighter fuels which ramps the conditions for the next layer.", "There are a number of things to pick apart here.\n\nFirst of all, not all supernovae are core collapse supernovae, but due to thermal runaway processes on White Dwarfs. The mechanisms are different, and the explosions in these cases can in fact be highly asymmetric.\n\nRegarding core collapse supernovae:\n\n > Are coexistent shells the best way to illustrate it? Like is there really a clear and distinct boundary between regions where different elements fuse? \n\nYes, the shell model is the best way to illustrate it. The borders between the shells are not particularly sharp, but the dynamics of the matter inside the star lead to the postulated stratification. It's probably better to imagine the shells as *enriched* of the different elements, than exclusively consisting of them.\n\n > Rather than \"this fuses and then this fuses and then this fuses\" aren't they all kind of going simultaneously?\n\nIt's both in a way. You have these distinct shells, and in all shells, fusion takes place. Even in a late stage star, you have hydrogen fusion, helium fusion, carbon fusion, etc. at the same time, but not necessarily at the same places.\n\n > And then my final question: is the collapse symmetrical? It gets presented as an all at once, from all directions, thing. \n\nYes, the core collapse is symmetrically. However, there have been [processes discovered in simulations](_URL_0_), which can lead to an overall asymmetry in the resulting explosion.\n\n > I get that planetary nebulae seem to come in a variety of shapes... \n\nVery important to point out here that planetary nebulae are **not** the result of supernovae. This type of nebulae is formed from Red Giants shedding their outer layers and usually only contain a White Dwarf. \n\nSupernova remnants are (if they aren't extremely old and distorted by interaction with surround gas and dust) [usually rather spherical](_URL_1_)." ] }

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[ [], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKahy0-IsGY", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_supernova_remnants" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e2v6a2x", "e2v9530" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "It takes a constant caloric energy feed to support every gram of muscle. You're evolved to face the danger of imminent starvation at any time. \n\nSo the muscles grow in proportion to the exercise they get. Which is proportional to your daily activity. They generally stop growing when they are the size that daily activity does not damage them.\n\nYour body doesn't want them to be much stronger than you need. Look up about the loss of strength people in 0g or being bedridden for even a handful of days experience.\n\nEven with manual labor or purposeful exercise, they will respond by growing if you have proper nutrition. There is an upper maximum limit to their growth even in this case (which weight lifters strive to push).", "Your body tries to adapt in ways that helps its survival. Sure having a super strong bicep might help you in some survival instance but what people might not know is your tendons are basically set at a max strength. So if your muscles get too strong they will rip tendons off of bone. This is the main reason for limits on muscle strength growth." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cga6gep" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "Neuroimaging of sign language is a bit thin on the ground; there's only a handful of studies, but they suggest that signed language uses many of the same areas but isn't as lateralized or localized as spoken language processing (e.g., Corina, et al., 2003; Soderfeldt, Ronnberg, & Risberg, 1994; for a dissenting opinion, see Macsweeney, et al., 2002).\n\nTypically, cochlear implantation occurs early in life, but we do have evidence that implantees pick up fine-grained native-like performance on even low-level language tasks, even when their implantation occurs years after typically-hearing controls (Bouton, et al., 2012).\n\n\n**References:**\n\nBouton, S., Serniclaes, W., Bertoncini, J., & Cole, P. (2012). Perception of speech features by French-speaking children with cochlear implants. *Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research*, 55(1), 139-153.\n\nCorina, D. P., San Jose-Robertson, L., Guillemin, A., High, J., & Braun, A. R. (2003). Language lateralization in a bimanual language. *Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience*, 15(5), 718-730.\n\nMacSweeney, M., Woll, B., Campbell, R., McGuire, P. K., David, A. S., Williams, S. C., Suckling, J., Calvert, G. A., & Brammer, M. J. (2002). Neural systems underlying British Sign Language and audio‐visual English processing in native users. *Brain*, 125(7), 1583-1593.\n\nSoderfeldt, B., Ronnberg, J., & Risberg, J. (1994). Regional cerebral blood flow in sign language users. *Brain and Language*, 46(1), 59-68." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fiq2h0s", "fiq58gc" ], "score": [ 3, 9 ], "text": [ "Coffee makes you urinate more. But you did take in less water all around(foods drinks etc) do you did not urinate much. Your body takes in enough water and secrates the useless amount via urination and other thinks. Try getting the same amount of water 2L only water and 1.8Lwater 200cc coffee you will urinate more with coffee one. You most likely did not take in enough watery substance when you had coffees and pops", "Your body only uses what it needs and gets rid of the excess. When it notices it has a whole bunch of water it doesn’t require it sends it straight through you. The reason this is good for you is toxins get diluted more and are flushed out faster. The downside is many of your essential vitamins and minerals will also be flushed out quickly. That’s why it’s important to eat nutritious food daily and not just once in a while.\n\nIn regards to your second question. You can get dehydrated easily if you only drink coffee and pop. Coffee and pop are what’s known as a diuretic. This means it causes more water to be excreted by your cells. This will initially cause frequent peeing but will quickly dehydrate you, at which point you’ll pee much less frequently." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d0qda1g" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "You don't really specify an era, so I'm just gonna talk about the 19th century and the Perry expedition as an example.\n\nWhile planning for the expedition, the US understood Japan as having two emperors, a religious emperor and a military emperor. They addressed the letter it was the mission of the expedition to deliver to the \"Japanese Emperor\", with the intent of giving it to the Shogun in Edo. This lead to some confusion at first. They would become more familiar with the situation given some time after the opening of the country." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d6gw7j2", "d6gyciw" ], "score": [ 80, 14 ], "text": [ "Yes; namely under changes of inertial frames in relativity (Lorentz transformations) E and B fields mix into eachother.\n\nSuper minimal example to show this: static charge, there's only an E field. You change reference frame, it gets moving and therefore part of the E has turned into a B. \n\nSaid in modern words, this implies E and B must be part (components) of a larger object that \"transforms well\" under Lorentz transformations, that is to say it doesn't mix into anything else, just into itself. This object is the Maxwell tensor F.", "Yes! In fact Einstein's original paper on special relativity is \"On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies\" (well it's actually \"Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper,\" but you get the point). A short description is that electrostatics (Gauss's Law) plus special relativity (the Lorentz transformation) give you electrodynamics, that is, electricity and magnetism (ok, you need a few other things like the superposition principle). If you're interested this is the approach, Edward Purcell, who won a Nobel prize for his work on nuclear magnetic resonance which is the technology behind MRI machines, wrote an introductory (at the college level) book on E & M that teaches magnetism as a result of electrostatics and relativity. It's a really beautiful book that enjoys a great reputation among students and physicists.\n\nIt's worth pointing out that viewing magnetism as emerging from electricity and relativity is of course ahistorical.\nMaxwell's synthesis of the subject was published in 1865, forty years before Einstein's paper, but classical electrodynamics is consistent with special relativity (unlike Newtonian mechanics for example). Indeed, the laws of classical electrodynamics directly led to Einstein's theory of special relativity, hence the name of the paper." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c4rkqzf", "c4rlio6", "c4rm2yw", "c4rndrn", "c4roebb", "c4roehf", "c4roxfp", "c4rpmsi", "c4rqeac", "c4rrzur", "c4rudg5" ], "score": [ 17, 42, 9, 44, 2, 29, 12, 3, 2, 2, 3 ], "text": [ "There were attempts. In some ways that's what the proprietary colonies were, and their owners were the Lords Proprietors \n\n*spelling", "William Penn's father lent the King of England so much money during the three Anglo Dutch wars in the mid-1600's. There was no way the King of England could pay these loans back, so he granted William Penn, a large tract of land that became the colony of Pennsylvania. ", "I've got a literal answer to your question of an \"indigenous aristocracy\", but it was long before secession or independence. Walter Ralegh created a Croatan Indian man named Manteo as the first peer of American land. \n\nHe was styled Baron Manteo, Lord of Roanoke and Dasamongueponke, and I can't help but find the whole thing hilarious. Something about the English making a peer of a Native man - as if they were conferring a huge honour - and then depending solely on Native assistance to survive really does it for me. ", "For one they didn't want to create any titles that would have been eligible for representation in the House of Lords which was quite powerful back then.", "I have wondered about this as well, and have asked a number of people and never gotten a straight answer. For example, William Penn was given Pennsylvania, but he just got the land, he wasn't created the Earl of Pennsylvania. The only answer I can come up with is carters, that the lords were against it because they didn't want to dilute their power, and the king didn't want to piss them off.", "Some guesses. I am sure some of all of these are contributing factors.\n\n1) Despite being a corrupt system (ie buying titles) most people within the english aristocracy saw the nobility as being connected to their land and the lineage. Creating a new aristocracy structure at of whole cloth would undermine that illusion that the aristocracy was \"natural\"\n\n2) Many of the folks that setled the north openly rejected the aristocracy. They moved to boston explicitly to get away from it.\n\n3) granting noble titles to colonists would mean that they would have to give those people a position in parlement and thus equal status within the government.\n\n4) colonists were sent to america not to extend the realm, but to extract natural resources and value from the land. there is a built in impermanence to colonization. ", "Titles and the like aren't just something that can be created. the Crown is technically able to enfeoff anyone, but the nature of monarchies is that they are heavily bound by custom and the social order.\n\nIf you wonder why one never developed, there is nothing \"natural\" about the creation of a feudal society. Some societies are feudal, some aren't.", "Not to mention that the sort of Americans who had amassed the lands and wealth to qualify to be ennobled were all slaveholders, like George Washington, who was among the richest men in North America. The Whig aristocrats who advised 18th Century British Monarchs, who while not doing anything to stop slavery and often profiting to varying extents from, did find it somewhat 'icky' ", "The original rules for South Carolina drawn up by John Locke, though never implemented, included hereditary peerage, though different in name from Englands.", "Feudal societies existed in Europe because land was limited. In America, there was no way to keep peasants working on manors when there was plenty of land for them to take for themselves.\n\nNinja edit: I'm not a professional historian ,but I believe this is what Carl Degler argued.", "There was some landed aristocracy earlier on. In its 1663 charter, the Province of Carolina was distributed to eight Lords Proprietors for helping Charles II reclaim the throne. However, after Cary's Rebellion and conflicts with Native Americans in the early 1700's, the colony split into North and South Carolina, and the Proprietors sold their their interests back to the Crown, making NC and SC royal colonies." ] }

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