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{ "a_id": [ "cacp1r4" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "In the 1832 Supreme Court case Worcester v. Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall, in the majority opinion, ruled that the Cherokee nation was its own distinct community and not subject to the laws of a particular state. How, Andrew Jackson chose not to enforce that ruling, thus paving the way for the Trail of Tears. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c28xn6q", "c28xndo", "c28xoxe" ], "score": [ 3, 5, 3 ], "text": [ "Refinancing a mortgage is when you talk with the bank who loaned you the money to buy your house and make a new deal with them about the money you still owe them. Usually you do this if you can get a lower interest rate (how much extra money you have to pay them for the service of loaning you money) than you had in your original loan agreement (mortgage).\n\nTaking out a second mortgage or a \"reverse mortgage\" is when you borrow money from a bank (usually) with the promise that if you don't pay the money back they will get your house as payment.", "You find a house that you like and make an offer to buy it. With that offer, you include something called \"earnest money\" that goes directly to the sellers, typically $1000-$2000. This money shows that you are serious about buying the house. If the seller accepts your offer, you will sign a contract to buy with a specific closing date. If you decide to break this contract for any reason other than it fails inspection, you lose the earnest money.\n\nBetween now and the closing date, you will have the house inspected. You'll also line up financing... this is the loan you'll need if you don't have enough for the house in cash. Typically you have to put down 10%, but some lenders will let you put down 3.5%. If you put down less than 20%, you have to pay PMI or private mortgage insurance every month.\n\nOn the closing day, you will go to an attorney's office and they will have drafted all of the paperwork for you, and typically done all of the bureaucratic legwork. Most of this is known as \"closing costs\" and typically runs around $4000. You sign the paperwork and the house is technically ready to move into.\n\nYour lender then begins charging you your monthly payment for the loan. At first, your payments go mostly towards paying interest on the loan. This is bad because you're not paying down much of what you borrowed to buy the house. However, the money you use to pay interest is tax deductible, so a new home owner will see a nice tax credit. You can see how much principle you're paying down on something called an amortization schedule that you'll probably receive from your lender.\n\nPeople refinance their mortgage to change from their existing mortgage to one with different and better terms. Sometimes they will refinance to get a better interest rate, as many people are doing now. There are typical closing costs involved, just like when you bought the house, so you have to weigh if paying those are worth it.", "I cannot explain about buying a house (I choose to rent a townhome, so maintenance, landscaping, etc, don't fall entirely on my shoulders), and I don't know enough about refinancing to explain it, but I've been through second mortgages with my father, so I can explain that.\n\nThere are actually two things that a \"second mortgage\" can refer to, so I'll explain the more common way first.\n\nThe most common use of \"second mortgage\" is actually an incorrect use of the phrase as far as banking is concerned, but is correct in a literal sense. In this usage, a second mortgage is not unlike selling your house to a bank, with the bank then letting you rent it again (though all normal concerns, such as maintenance and landscaping, are still your own concern).\n\nThis is done by basically taking a large loan out and using your home as a way to guarantee that you will repay the money that you have taken. Put another way, the bank gives you a large sum of money to have first dibs on your home should something happen to you or your ability to repay what the bank has given you.\n\nThe only catch with this is that you have to fully own your home, first. This brings us to the second \"correct\" (but less common) use of the phrase:\n\nThe second type of \"second mortgage\" is actually the \"correct\" use of the phrase. In this case, you have already taken out the first loan from the bank, using your home to guarantee you will repay the money, and once some of that money has been repaid, you decide to take out a second loan using the value of your home MINUS what you still owe the bank.\n\nLet's play with some numbers in that second case to make it clearer:\n\nYou decide to buy a home, and borrow $250,000 from the bank in order to do so. \n\nOver several years, you repay the bank $100,000, meaning you only owe $150,000 to the bank, but your home is worth $250,000. This means that the bank owns 60% of your home ($150,000) while you own 40% ($100,000).\n\nIf you fall on difficult times or find you need money for some reason, you can take out another loan and use your home as a guarantee again, but because you only own $100,000 worth out of your $250,000 home, you can only borrow up to that $100,000 amount.\n\nIf something were to then happen and you could not pay for the rest of your home, the banks would sell your home and take their money back from that.\n\nThere is more to it than this, but it begins to get into the finer points of rights of sale and ownership and fun little things in the banks, so I won't go any further than this, but if you want to learn more, there is plenty left to wrap your mind around." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cdbhw8w", "cdbhxuz" ], "score": [ 8, 2 ], "text": [ "Population density. Notice the vertical line on [this map.](_URL_0_)\n\nIt's not cost effective to provide dense coverage where the population isn't also dense. Typically you'll see coverage over major roadways or cities or pockets of population. \n\nCoverage resumes on the west coast.", "Here are some examples of what I'm asking about..\n\n_URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.mapofusa.net/us-population-map.gif" ], [ "http://imgur.com/a/Df98w" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cr3r87s", "cr3uds5" ], "score": [ 11, 2 ], "text": [ "To get more data the radio needs to work harder, which takes more power. The radio is the second largest power consumer in your phone behind the screen, so if you're say streaming netflix you're killing your battery because you're asking the radio to do a ton of work and then using it to watch a movie. ", "When you are using cellular data, your phone is literally converting energy that was inside the battery into messages to send to the internet. If you want that message to go extra far, you in general need more energy. \n\nHow tired would you get if you were shouting out messages all day that were loud enough for people to hear thousands of feet away? " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d30edqp" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "[There you go](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ "https://www.reddit.com/r/quityourbullshit/comments/4ion56/video_game_designer_daniel_vávra_is_called_racist/" ]

[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ipxz3/is_it_plausible_for_moors_or_other_blackskinned/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cctlxbd" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "I'm only qualified to give a response for european music, so I hope there is someone out there who is learned in asian and african music who can contribute as well. There were definitely different \"genres\" of music as far back as the late medieval period. The split between sacred music and court music is a perfect example. Consider the difference between chant and plainsong (sacred) and early lute based songs. \n\nDoes anyone have expertise in early medieval music? I am aware of the sacred musical tradition in this period, but when did folk music and dance music begin to appear? " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dqcuwhu" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "There was a time a few years ago the government has heavily subsidising solar power. The subsidy was so high that if you had a large enough roof you could not only get all your electricity for free but earn money by selling the surplus to the grid.\n\nWith house prices being very low in the North it was much easier to buy a large enough house to achieve the threshold production to make a profit." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ct28cho", "ct28khh", "ct291e7", "ct29vsi" ], "score": [ 3, 3, 4, 2 ], "text": [ "\"it's too distributed\", you have pretty much answered it yourself. The internet, in its simplest form, is just a collection of interconnected computers. A computer can be cut off or like in your article a large group can be cut off but the internet cannot be shut down.\n\nA worldwide power outtage is the only thing i can see bringing it down. No computers, no internet.", "The internet is composed of a vast number of linked computers. If there was a vulnerability that affected all or a significant portion of those computers, then the web could no longer link together and you wouldn't have access to the *whole* internet, but you'd still have access to the portions that are hosted around you. The \"internet\" wouldn't be able to be shut off unless every computer was disconnected from every computer.\n\nYou might be able to take out the internet by targeting a few specific servers. For example, ISPs have what are called \"backbone\" servers, which, as the name entails, form a backbone to an internet connection. If these go offline, you'd see a large chunk of the internet go offline as well, from your perspective, but not from the perspective of others who don't use that backbone. Sometimes one server manages most or all of the connections going into some local area, and so if that went down then you'd see a service disruption. However, the distributed aspect of the internet inherently has redundancy, and so most likely service would go back up soon.\n\nAnother type of server you could target are called Dynamic Name Servers (DNS), which convert a website name (like _URL_0_) into its IP address. If you were able to bring all of these down, you would not longer be able to access websites using their domain names, but you still could with their IP addresses. For example, type reddit's IP address (198.41.208.141) into your address bar. You can access it there.\n\nYou can see the computers that a request to a website goes through by using the `traceroute` command. If you're on Windows, open the command line, and if you're on a Mac, open terminal. Type `traceroute < web address > ` and you should see the computers that the request routes through. If any of them go down, the network should adapt and find another way through.", "The only method I am loosely aware of to kill/shutoff the internet is if a major AS like AT & T or Level 3 were to go rogue and start advertising routes for basically every IP address and send them more or less nowhere. I wish I could tell you that I am a network engineer and I understand this in depth, but I don't.\n\nYou can read up when Pakistan did this to youtube by mistake here: _URL_0_\n\nBasically have a more trusted actor than Pakistan do the same thing, but to a much wider array of addresses.\n\nThis method is not forever but it would shut down most/all of the internet very rapidly.", "I forget exactly when it happened, but I remember some few years ago when the / a major fiber cable running off the west coast of N America was cut. Then over the next week or so major fiber cables were cut in the Mediterranean, off of Europe, and I think in Asia also. It sounded like a coordinated attack on the internet to me. However, I believe cut sections were repaired rather quickly and then I never heard anything about it again, which seemed really shady and quite hush hush to me.\n\nBut like you said it's not really centralized or run through a singular hub anywhere. Not to mention satellite internet would be very difficult to cut by any conventional means." ] }

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[ "http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/07/broken-cable-reportedly-disconnected-us-island-territory-from-internet" ]

[ [], [ "reddit.com" ], [ "http://research.dyn.com/2008/02/pakistan-hijacks-youtube-1/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fasca9t" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Typically if you hit someone hard enough to knock them out, it’s caused some degree of brain damage. Even if very mild, you definitely gave them a concussion. I’d wager they go into a sort of deeper sleep from their brain being jarred. Unconsciousness in that way is different from sleep." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "degqs1t" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "In Texas (and maybe other states, I'm not sure) a mother can sue a doctor for failing to properly diagnose problems with a fetus. This started in a 1975 case where a pregnant woman sued her doctor. She got rubella while pregnant and claimed her doctor failed to properly diagnose her or warn her about the effect the illness could have on her baby. She had the baby who had several medical problems. The court held that she could sue the doctor for the baby's medical expenses since the doctor negligently failed to tell her about the possible complications.\n\nThis bill would make it so that a woman cannot sue a doctor for negligently failing to tell her about potential fetal defects before birth. \n\nProponents of the bill argue that every life is worthwhile and people shouldn't be able to sue doctors for failing to tell them their baby isn't worth having. They also think that some doctors might be more likely to recommend abortion in order to avoid a lawsuit.\n\nOpponents of the bill argue that doctors should fully inform their patients of everything they can and that some doctors who oppose abortion might not reveal all the risks of a pregnancy in order to encourage the mother to carry the baby to term if they don't have to worry about being sued for it." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cwncg1z", "cwno3fm", "cwnqs92" ], "score": [ 25, 5, 3 ], "text": [ "Don't listen to some of the ignorant comments here. The only truth we know about dreams is that we don't really know what their exact purpose is. There are many interesting theories about it, but the true purpose of dreaming is not yet understood.\n\nThat being said, you can definitely choose to find meaning behind your dreams through your own interpretations of them. But that's all it would be at this point- interpretations.", "During the night your brain does garbage collection. It decides what to save and what to throw away -- essentially, it's copying stuff that it thinks is worth saving to your left side and setting up the right side for another day of sensory overload. As you don't have two brains, the process reuses the bits of brain that you don't need while you're asleep as scratchpad space. Hence, you appear to see and hear stuff. However, the stuff that goes in there isn't organised, so what you get is a patchwork of memories mashed together -- dreams. When you awake, your brain then needs those bits of brain again, so the dreamscape rapidly fades. As to whether they can tell you anything, that's up to you -- sometimes the juxtaposition of two otherwise unrelated memories can give you perspective you wouldn't get otherwise. ", "Reality: Nobody really has a definite answer.\n\nFacts: Dreams always happen, sometimes you just forget them. \nStages of sleep are mapped in intensity. Basically, more vivid parts of a dream happen at certain stages.\n\nSome stuff points to connections between the real world events and your dreams. But again, we don't know for sure." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ebyvezp" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "They see with their eyes.\n\nUmm... I'm not sure what you really expected. They usually have two little eyes on their head which they use to look around, but they may also just navigate from the dead, cold bird towards the warm flesh of the girl who just picked it up." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "f7kmkvx", "f7lmjjz" ], "score": [ 14, 3 ], "text": [ "Ok\n\nMost stars are basically giant fusion reactor which constantly spits out radiation and charged particles, \n\nAnd think there are trillions of them around the galaxy and universe doing that exactly, depending on the type of star they spit out different ranges of radiation and at different strength, \n\nthose radiations cause currents of matter, particles and energy which are called \"solar or stellar winds\".", "Solar wind is the stream of charged particles moving away from a star. The upper atmosphere of stars is called the corona. It's an extremely hot, high energy plasma consisting of mostly electrons, protons and helium nuclei. They get blasted away from the star in all directions at extremely high speeds (hundreds of kilometers per second) and flow outwards into space. It's not like wind here on Earth in the sense that you can feel it, but it can produce very small amounts of pressure to move over objects." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fc57f32", "fc5al9v" ], "score": [ 41, 6 ], "text": [ "The brain does not allow us to willingly kill ourselves, on an instinctive level. If you jump headfirst out of a window, you'll be forced to try to save yourself during the fall. You will raise your arms to try and break the fall. This is analogous to preventing us from biting our fingers off.\n\nHowever, both can be overcome with planning. If you put your finger on your mouth and have your friend uppercut your jaw, you can take a finger off. Similarly, all common methods of suicide rely on putting oneself in a position where your body doesn't realize you're going to die until it's too late to prevent.", "Your body isn't designed to react uncontrollably to pulling a trigger or jumping out a window or not. Your central nervous system doesn't know that your finger pull may lead to you dying or your stepping off something will lead to a 40' fall. \n\nYour body does have uncontrollable reactions to pain and poison and suffocation. Milliseconds after these events, your body will start to try and stop or fix things without your help." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c1rr3gv" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Allow me to parse your question into a few different ones (I'm going to interpret \"rewrite\" loosely, to include getting a cell or cells to express a single new gene. More complicated \"rewrites\" are possible using similar techniques, but may be disproportionately more complicated to carry out.):\n\n > Do we have the technology to \"rewrite\" the DNA of every cell of an individual organism?\n\nYes. Consider bacteria: We can introduce new genes into bacteria through [transfection](_URL_4_), [transduction](_URL_13_), and other methods. On top of that, there's the recent big steps *towards* synthesizing bacteria from scratch (I say \"towards\" because it depends on what you mean by \"from scratch\"). Here's a [layman friendly (pdf)](_URL_7_) article from Science, as well as the [actual report](_URL_8_).\n\n > OK, what about multicellular organisms?\n\nYes. Some techniques involve altering the DNA over a couple generations, or, to \"rewrite\" at the very start of an individual's life i.e. a one-cell stage. For instance, see the procedures for making knockout mice ([wikipedia](_URL_9_)), and the use of [nuclear transfer](_URL_2_) to make [Dolly](_URL_12_).\n\n > What about a multicellular organisms that are here, now? (This starts to get to your question.)\n\nYes. Though don't count on getting every cell, oh, and it may or may not be permanent, depending on the technique and the cells you're targeting. One technique is biolistics (here's [wikipedia](_URL_0_), and here's an example from [PNAS](_URL_5_)). \n\n > What about something big and complicated, like a human?\n\nYou won't get every cell, or even most of the cells. But, you *can* do a \"rewrite\" in a specific set of cells. ...see, another technique involves using a virus, loaded with custom DNA, to infect a cell. Viruses are picky about the cell type they infect. Also, some cells in your body replicate and are shed very quickly (e.g. most of the cells that make up your skin, or those lining your digestive tract), so doing a \"rewrite\" in only those cells isn't very interesting ... the effects would be as temporary as those cells' lives. On the other hand, you could infect cells that stay with an animal for most/all of its life. For instance, you can infect neurons with this technique. \n\nThis is used in optogenetics (here's [wikipedia](_URL_3_) ... Deisseroth lab is a big player in this, so [here's their website](_URL_6_) which has links to several research articles). \n\nThat technique has also been used, in humans, to treat a type of blindness called *Leber's Congenital Amaurosis*. Here's a [ScienceDaily article](_URL_10_) if you want a brief overview, and here's a journal article ([NEJM](_URL_11_)) on the topic.\n\nFor a bit more info, here's a [technical review of gene therapies at the retina.](_URL_1_)\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biolistics", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2903913/?tool=pubmed", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transfer", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfection", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10411936", "http://www.stanford.edu/group/dlab/publications.html", "http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5981/958.full.pdf", "http://www.sciencemag.org/content/329/5987/52.full", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knockout_mouse", "http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080427194726.htm", "http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0802268", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_\\(sheep\\)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transduction_\\(genetics\\)" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "coriqr4", "corj004", "corjy6t" ], "score": [ 7, 9, 5 ], "text": [ "The announcement was more than likely made for political, not military reasons. There is obviously no military reason, other than misdirection, to announce plans in such an obvious way.", "The warning is given so that civilians have an opportunity to get out of the area. \n\nThis type of warning is given in this situation because, even if they have all of the time in the world to prepare a defense, they can not win. If this were a war between equals, or an existential war, warning would not be given.", "A couple of reasons. First as others mentioned, to give civilians a chance to get out of the way before the attack. Second, if the military knows that a certain location is where bombs and weapons are hidden, or where low level leaders are hiding, and the military announces they intend to attack that building.\n\nMaybe ISIS will try and relocate those people and weapons. If we monitor their attempts to relocate, perhaps get hints as to the locations of other weapons caches or higher level commanders in ISIS." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ec8a6rx", "ec8ob21" ], "score": [ 39, 2 ], "text": [ "It is pretty unlikely that you have the capability to learn while sleeping like that. It has been theorized that your brain spends your time sleeping to unpack the information from the day and store it, so it may not be able to learn additional information because it is already at capacity.\n\nHowever, this is a subject of study and there are many of us that would like to be able to retain, process and internalize knowledge both faster and during periods of sleep.", "You can't learn if you input information into your brain while sleeping. There have been various companies sellkng products like this and they have yet to prove any of their claims. \n\nYou can however learn by reading something before bed. Your subconscious will puzzle over it during sleeping hours and this can help you memorize stuff you already kinda know. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cgcfx7t", "cgcfyf9", "cgd2995" ], "score": [ 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Please tell me you are not doing shots with single malt scotch?\n\nCheaper blended whiskys are mixed with grain alcohol (basically vodka), more expensive whisky will be just made with malt barley and pure spring water", "I think it is because it is cheap whiskey--they called that stuff \"rot gut\" for a reason. You get more of the alcohol and none of the delicate and varied undertones from whiskey produced with loving care in Scotland, because they don't use as many ingredients or age it in barrels that will add to the taste. You should taste the whiskey, not the alcohol.\nAlso, consider aging: you can drink moonshine right as it drips out--and your stomach and brain will hate you for it! So the processes are different, the ingredients are different. You can test this by having a shot of grain alcohol. It's your body's way of saying YUCK. ", "You're putting some nasty shit into your body, it is going to react in that way. I once drank a pint of 5 o'clock spiced rum (I know, it's shameful) and I ended up puking my guts up for several hours. It's garbage!" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ciexk1h", "cieya0j", "ciez3vl", "ciezqzw", "cif0nqv", "cif4e9a", "cif6ubg", "cifdhpq" ], "score": [ 14, 38, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Perhaps to help avoid overt corruption? If they were appointed or nominated by the justice system, it could look shady. Allowing citizens to vote for their own judges lends more legitimacy to the position.\n\nThis is just my guess. ", "Perhaps not the answer you're looking for, but electing judges (and a few other legal professions, such as district attorney) is an almost uniquely American habit. Much of the rest of the world (certainly that which is based on the British legal system) performs judicial appointments via the legislature or executive, or from within the judiciary itself. Seems to be working out fine for us so far.", "Judges are elected in the States (California at least)?\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland they are appointed by the executive. I can see flaws in both systems however.\n\nHow is the public to know who makes a better judge? Many people don't even care what politicians represent them never mind what judges are picked.\n\nOn the flip-side it appears there could be a lot of backscratching if they are appointed by the politicians. Sliding brown envelopes over the table and such things.", "It's not a universal rule. Some states allow election, some require appointment, some have a hybrid system where the judges are appointed but must go through periodic retention elections (just a vote saying keep them or don't keep them). It's sporadic because each State is allowed to choose their own method of choosing judges. Federal judges are appointed by the President after first being approved by the legislature. Generally speaking, they don't campaign like normal politicians because they also have ethics requirements enforced by the BAR Association, and doing so would violate them. Essentially, the BAR Association won't allow them to make campaign promises, because then they might have to keep them, and that's not justice, its politics. (In a nutshell). ", "Federal judges are not elected, but are appointed by the president and confirmed by the US Senate for life terms.\n\nState judges are either elected by the public or appointed (typically by the governor). They can generally only campaign to the extent allowed by their state's code of judicial conduct. This varies by state.\n\nAs others have described, there are both good and bad reasons to allow judges to campaign. But giving a particular stance on a specific issue can make a candidate judge run afoul of those rules of conduct. At best they will cast a specter of bias on proceedings regarding that issue (defeating the purposes of justice).", "The bigger question for me is why do we elect the county coroner? At least that's what happens in my state.", "I think it comes down to checks and balances. We vote for the executive and legislative branches, so if the judicial branch (even at low levels) was appointed by one of the other two it would create an imbalance of power on whichever side had the power to appoint the judges.", "The founding fathers were very skeptical of direct democracy. They intentionally limited the power of the electorate, creating things like the Electoral College, or non-direct election of Senators. They also established a federal judiciary with appointed judges.\n\n50 years later, the pendulum had swung. There was a strong movement to return power to the people. This view was typified by Andrew Jackson, who proposed all sorts of changes to the Constitution to give power to the electorate (including elected judges). This approach resonated with people. And, while the Constitution was not amended to allow for elected federal judges, most of the states that joined the union during this era or later used elected, rather than appointed judges." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ck5ayl2", "ck5c7gh" ], "score": [ 19, 71 ], "text": [ " > there is a huge emphasis on the significance of infantry combat with troops engaging in combat only occasionally receiving support from armor, air, or artillery\n\nArtillery is in a completely different category from armor and air here and rare would be the battle in which neither side drew on artillery support. WW2 armies were equipped with mortars at the company or even platoon level, so even if a unit were completely isolated they'd have *something*. And in normal circumstances, \"real\" artillery pieces would be firing on both sides. Particularly in the attack, going in without artillery support against a prepared position is just suicidal.\n\nWhile I'm sure that the absence of armor and air support is more a function of technical limitations or design choices in the video games you're thinking of, it *is* true that the importance of armor and air on the WW2 battle is easy to exaggerate. Keegan's *Face of Battle* has some good remarks on this in the concluding sections. Most of the fighting men of most \"armored\" divisions, especially in the later war, were actually foot-slogging infantrymen, and \"tank\" battles were \"heavily intermingled with confused infantry combats of a kind little different from those with which soldiers of the First World War had experienced in many of the great offensives.\"", "I think one thing which many downplay was just how static the soldier's experience of WWII could be. It was not all, or even mostly, aggressive attack and counterattack like popular culture implies. German offensive successes in 1940-42 (what most people call Blitzkrieg, although the Germans never called it that) and the Allied breakout from Normandy have both given the impression that such sweeping moves were routine, but attacks were almost always slow and grinding. In fact combat in WWII in my opinion bears much more resemblance to the stereotypical view of WWI than the view espoused by films and games set in WWII. It's inarguable that the belligerents of WWII went into the war with methods that had been developed in the latter stages of WWI--in particular WWII re-emphasized the necessity of tremendous amounts of supporting artillery fire to neutralise enemy defences and 'shoot' the attacking troops into enemy defences. What's more, the pattern of fighting became more slow and grinding as the war went on--the Germans abandoned anything resembling Blitzkrieg and began to build their tanks as mobile bunkers and emphasize flexible defence by groups of heavily-armed infantry; the Allies relied more and more upon the brute fire-power that their industrial superiority could supply. British troops eventually became so reliant on this support that the routine reaction to coming under fire was to go to ground and wait for fire support. The same kind of tactics used in Normandy, with any attack supported by tons of shelling and any enemy counter-attack smashed by artillery as soon as it began, resemble closely those developed on the Somme, where artillery was used in just this manner--the effect on the landscape was similarly destructive. In WWII soldiers fought in basically the same way their fathers had fought in 1918, with the addition of more mobile tanks (of which there were always relatively few compared to infantry), portable radios, reliable motor vehicles (though the only fully mechanised army at the beginning of the war was the British Army), and larger firepower.\n\nThis continuity is summed up really well by John Ellis in *The Sharp End of War*, which is a great book on the soldier's experience which I'd recommend you read if you can.\n\n > Above all, perhaps, the two world war have in common the shovel and the entrenching tool. From 1914 onwards the paramount fact in war was firepower of such intensity that only in holes in the ground could the front-line soldier even begin to feel relatively secure. Armoured vehicles briefly robbed defensive tactics of their supremacy, but by 1941 at the latest anti-tank gun, the mine, and a little later the bazooka/PIAT/Panzerfaust, had done much to restore the balance. Attacking remained a hazardous and slow procedure, only to be undertaken when necessary and with the maximum amount of fire support...though World War II never had trench systems as static or elaborate as those on the Western Front, the individual soldier nevertheless spent much of his time burrowing into the ground...if defensive firepower was no longer sufficiently predominant as to make only the most trivial gains possible, it was still quite enough to make progress agonisingly slow and to necessitate constant retrenchment after each desperate bound. Even when troops were not themselves on the defensive, actual advances across the battlefield were sporadic and slow, each attack a frenetic spasm in the troglodyte routine. In the front line at least 90 per cent of the infantryman's time was spent under cover either on the defensive, often under bombardment, awaiting an enemy attack, or nerving himself to the prospect of going forward.\n\nI'd also recommend *Time to Kill: The Soldier's Experience of War in the West, 1939-1945* for excellent, more academic assessments of the key belligerents. Otherwise there are countless works which look into the minutiae of how individual armies operated and how the precise forms of battle differed greatly, as others have pointed out." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "da53tkc" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "North Korea made the shift starting in the late 1940s. 1949, officially.\n\nSouth Korea was still using them quite frequently as late as the 1990s, and you can still find plenty of examples of mixed script Korean in academic texts today. In the early 90's newspapers finally switched over to Hangeul. However Chinese characters (*hanja*) are still used for abbreviations and some technical terminology where they can clear up ambiguity. Officially, the teaching of *hanja* stopped in 1971 in South Korea for younger students. In both Koreas, *hanja* are still taught to high schoolers, but in limited number. It's also worth mentioning that prior to this, hangeul was only really standardised in the 1930s, and then again in the 1980s. \n\nIn Vietnam, Chinese characters (chữ nôm) were replaced in the 1920s. The system that replaced it wasn't too new. It was developed and in use by missionaries in the mid 1800s.\n\nWhy, for both languages, is a little more complicated. A big part of it had to do with national identity. A big part of it had to do with efforts to improve literacy. On those grounds even Mao Zedong made early pushes to replace Chinese characters with an alphabet, though this ultimately never happened (though it got close in some places).\n\nAnother significant factor is that at this time (early 20th century) the practice of writing all formal texts in Classical Chinese was falling out of favour across Asia. People were starting to use the vernacular to write, rather than an archaic form of another language entirely. If you're going to write the way you speak, then there's less perceived value in using an old foreign orthography to do it, especially when the list of perceived shortcomings is quite long when it comes to how that script can represent your language.\n\nSimply put, one could say that the sort of nationalism that was developing at the start of the 20th century across the region (e.g. 五四運動) was really the key factor." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "deu27r6", "deu2tp5", "deu38k7", "deu78mf", "deu7k3b", "deu9e9z" ], "score": [ 28, 4, 47, 4, 2, 7 ], "text": [ "Imagine how the public would react if intelligent life contacted earth. Pandemonium. Men In Black did a pretty good job of summing it up, \"A person is smart. People, however, are dumb, panicky, and stupid\"\n\nIf intelligent life was discovered people would freak out. We aren't ready for that as a society. Hell, we are hardly ready to find bacteria on mars and be ok with it. ", "Any nation that established contact with a superior alien intelligence could glean incredible technological and military advantages over its adversaries. It's possible that the \"official\" government (or whatever their analogous social structure is) representing the alien species might not want this, and enforces laws to prevent us from obtaining this technology, which is why we haven't had \"real\" contact yet - but this might be circumvented by individuals or small groups seeking to gain by trading secrets to us in exchange for raw materials, safe haven, or even acquiescence to operating facilities/bases in our solar system, or even on earth.", "It is almost guaranteed that evidence of extraterrestrial life would destabilize the planet. \n\nWe've seen how people behave at a Walmart on Black Friday - How would they act if they found out there was a superior species *out there*?\n\nFear, hope, riots, gatherings would occur. Everything you know and love about your society would become insignificant. We'd suddenly become a global society, finally identifying as *human* rather than American or Chinese, black or hispanic. Governments would lose control after a large portion of our species becomes unified in such a manner and the rest descend into an existentialism induced chaos.\n\nHow then would we find structure? Who is in charge of the entire planet? How do you decide? \n\nIt would be much safer to keep knowledge of extraterrestrials from the common people and avoid such an embarrassment to the visitors. We're basically still the same creature that evolved to survive on the plains of Africa. Sometimes we need to maintain this sort of control over our society.\n\nThe aliens might even realize this themselves and command us to keep it a secret. They'd have to understand the reality or else they'd simply fly some of their ships over our cities or start a broadcast on all frequencies.\n\nSupposing this, we would presume then that Governments would decide (or be instructed) to begin unifying the planet culturally in preparation for this extraterrestrial-based social unification. Globalism would be encouraged, peace and understanding would be encouraged. Wars would slow down or vanish completely...\n\nBut instead we see that petty wars over money and territory continue to this day. We see wars against terrorism on TV, but read on the internet that we're the terrorists. We still see petty squabbles and social striations. We still let our own people die of starvation while others are forced to undergo drastic surgeries to reduce their weight. We'll force women to reproduce and then wait patiently to put that unwanted child into prison 18 years later.\n\nIf the government(s) are in contact with extraterrestrials then those extraterrestrials are probably not the ones that we'd want to meet. If they were then we would expect much different behavior from our financial elite and our governments.\n\nWe might expect those aliens to be non-benevolent anyway. \n\nYou don't end up with advanced technology from a friendly environment. Wars and struggle are what inspires intelligent beings to create technology. What use is a nuclear reactor when your food is plentiful and weather pleasant? What good is a fortress when you have no enemies?\n\nWhat is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? \n\nThe idea that any star-faring civilization will be the same ones who've been forced to bend and break their environment to survive could be reason enough for the riots and chaos of an Earth now made aware of extraterrestrial intelligence.\n\nImagine you're a peaceful alien and humans landed on your planet. Would you be worried? You would if you knew about our history genocides, hate, and destruction.", "Because it's the government, and by that I mean that any news about alien activity would immediately be followed by \"What are you, our government, doing about it?\"\n\nAnd while I'm sure there are first contact and emergency response plans in place, in a lot of the possible scenarios we won't be able to do much about it.\n\nAnd admitting THAT is what would destabilize the planet.\n\nThe answer is the same as for the question \"why would the government classify information about an impending extinction level event\" (large asteroid hitting the planet, for example).", "Religions would fall apart, people would give up on persevering and expect the aliens to maintain humanity by eliminating hunger and other primitive responsibilities. This is bad not only for the corrupt government industrial war profiting complex for obvious reasons such as the elimination of pollution, diseases, and war itself but also humanity would simply have no responsibility over itself, we might even become more unstable than we already are. We are still only a few hundred years into the discovery of technological advancements. I really wish there was some way benevolent extraterrestrials could make their selves known to the ones who want to have peaceful and loving relations with them. \n\nDear benevolent, loving extraterrestrials, if you're reading this, I love you, and want to learn from you. I know I may be terrified at first but with time, I hope that we can come to trust each other and you can show me the stars and the infinite loving beauty of the universe. ", "\"Lots of us had abortions\"\n\n\"What is that?\"\n\n\"It's when you terminate the potential of human life when it is still just a clump of developing cells.\"\n\n\"How efficient! This is wonderful! Let's us feast on these wine and crackers you speak of!\"" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cbtkm79" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "No knock warrants just mean they don't knock. They will loudly and repeatedly identify themselves as law enforcement agents, and they will be wearing vests with POLICE in large letters on both sides. So there's really no way you could legitimately not know if they are are law enforcement agents." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cnpk7kz" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "I know it may not be what your looking for but I think a lot of your answers will inevitably be in regards to rocketry. \n\nOn that front, the Soviets developed a number of advanced rocket engines, some of which are still some of the best in the world. The [RD-170](_URL_1_) for instance maintains the title as the most powerful rocket engine in the world. Most people believe this title goes to the American F-1 engine which was used for the Apollo program. However the F-1 is only the most powerful single cone engine, and comparatively the RD-170 outputs over 1,000,000 more Newtons of thrust. \n\nSecondly the [NK-33](_URL_0_) rocket engine which was originally developed for the Soviet Moon program has the second highest thrust to weight ratio of of any rocket. Similarly, it also has a very high specific impulse. It's only other contender is the SpaceX Merlin 1-D which was developed very recently. \n" ] }

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[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-170" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d05ccco" ], "score": [ 14 ], "text": [ "I have a theory that the reason for this is fairly simple: miscommunication.\n\n\"Medieval\" usually refers to the European Middle Ages, a period that stretched from the Fall of Rome in 476 until the Fall of Constantinople in ~~1492~~ 1453. There are about a thousand differing start and end dates, but using the demise of two Roman empires is convenient and a little poetic -- because, unlike dating it to Gutenberg's printing press, we don't have to quibble over whether to point at when he started or the vague \"c. 1525\" figure that better represents the spread of the printing press. But what's important here is that, no matter the exact start and end dates, the period corresponds to a stupidly long period of time. If we go with a more conservative figure of dating the start to 800 when Charlemagne founded the Holy Roman Empire, we're still looking at a period of nearly 700 years from start to end. More time separated a Genoese soldier on the walls of Constantinople in 1492 from Charlemagne than what separates this sub from Columbus himself. That's the first thing that makes communicating on this subject rather difficult at times.\n\nThere's also the matter of nomenclature. How do you define \"peasant,\" exactly? For most people, especially those who don't study medieval history, a peasant is probably just someone who occupies the second lowest strata of society (being just one step above slaves). A farmer, basically. Maybe a fisherman or hunter. \n\nIf we look at the English at Agincourt, 5/6ths of their army could probably be classified as \"peasantry.\" Yes, the longbowmen absolutely did go to war with a fairly extensive kit and a very specialized skillset. Yes, those longbowmen had to meet various requirements to actually qualify for service (like actually being able to draw and fire one of those massive warbows). Yes, those longbowmen would have been paid for their time and entitled to various rights while on campaign (most notably looting). But they weren't men at arms (who could very well have held sizable tracts of land) and they absolutely were not of the proper nobility (who comprised, perhaps, 100 of the 6,000 English soldiers at Agincourt). \n\nNow let's return to the first sentence in this post. Even if we get past all the traps above, the miscommunication *still* arises from the fact that when I say the English army was largely comprised of the peasantry, I'm referring just to social standing. If someone who is not as well informed on the subject were to then read that part of my post and see me classify the English army as peasantry, said person could, not knowing any better, simply conjure up the stereotypical image that Hollywood likes to give us of the peasant: dirty, dressed in earthy tones (bonus points for dirty brown), and probably featured on a set that is just as drab-looking as they are. \n\nThere are probably another half dozen factors that would contribute to the miscommunications that seem to breathe new life into these misconceptions on a regular basis, but I think that you've got the idea. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c5j7gqt", "c5j870s", "c5j9j51" ], "score": [ 2, 8, 2 ], "text": [ "nothing is stopping them. it happens all the time. sometimes a group of cops will walk into your house and throw a bag of coke on the table while arresting you. ", "It happens. Cops have been known to plant drugs on suspects to arrest them. \n\nWhy don't they? Well should they be caught the will be on the other end of that jailtime. ", "Usually the lack of a motive. It's a good idea not to give them one." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c38h9e2", "c38h9e2" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "[Coley's toxins](_URL_0_) were developed from when William Coley observed a small number of patients whose incurable cancers went into remission following sepsis caused by streptococcal infections. In this sense, the spontaneous remission followed infection, so it didn't go away \"on its own,\" but it did go away without intervention.", "[Coley's toxins](_URL_0_) were developed from when William Coley observed a small number of patients whose incurable cancers went into remission following sepsis caused by streptococcal infections. In this sense, the spontaneous remission followed infection, so it didn't go away \"on its own,\" but it did go away without intervention." ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coley%27s_toxins" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coley%27s_toxins" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cacoqf8", "cacpney", "cacthjq", "caczblo" ], "score": [ 8, 7, 6, 2 ], "text": [ "~~Yes! Here's a [video](_URL_0_) of an aluminium foil ship floating in sulphur hexaflouride.~~ \n \nWait, this isn't what you asked at all. Sorry, ignore.", "(I assume you mean a solid block of matter floating in a gas - not any trick such as floating a little tinfoil boat on a heavy gas, which is quite trivial.)\n\nGoogle \"phase diagram\".\n\nAt high enough pressure and temperature, many substances are gaseous. Due to the high pressure, density is also high.\n\nWhat you need to find is two substances which, at the same high temperature and high pressure, one of them is a gas, the other is a solid, and the density of the gas is higher than the density of the solid. Perhaps a combination of a heavy gas and a lightweight metal, and hope the gas doesn't decompose at that temperature (if it's not a simple element).\n\nHere's the phase diagram of water, which is rather complex as phase diagrams go - most of the others are simpler:\n\n_URL_0_", "In general theory, sure it's completely possible. All that would be required is for the denisty of solid to be less than the density of the gas. In reality, it would be difficult with near standard temperature and pressure conditions. \n\nThe lowest density readily available solid that comes to mind off the top of my head is Lithium, with a density of 534 kg/m3. The most dense gas near STP is Xenon, with a density of 5.89 kg/m3. So, it's no dice, at conventional conditions. \n\nHowever, the critical density of Xenon is around 1100 kg/m3, which means it can be compressed (and heated as neccessary) to a density above 534 kg/m3 while still being clearly defined as a gas.\n", "On a related note, does anyone know what the lowest density solid material know to man is? Google just loves aerogels, which are clearly not solid." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=1PJTq2xQiQ0" ], [ "http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c4y9a2p" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "*Diogenes the Cynic*, L. Navia (2005)" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c1ssqzm", "c1stdhl" ], "score": [ 2, 4 ], "text": [ "What quantum entanglement is about is measuring a correlated *system* of electrons. You need to measure both particles and communicate (classically) the results of those measurements to determine that system. \n\nYou can check out more of it on [this](_URL_0_) thread.", "It's kind of a version of Schrodinger's Cat, also known as the EPR paradox. For the wiki article, read:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHere's it in short - one type of subatomic particle (a muon) can decay into an electron of spin up and an electron of spin down. However, before you measure the spin on the electron, you don't know which one is spin up and which one is spin down. Actually, it's funny, they both exist in *both states*, with 1/2 probability for either way. Until you measure it, they exist in both states. However, let's say you separate these two electrons by some distance. Now, if you measure the spin on one of the electrons, and it comes out positive, you know with 100% certainty that the other electron is negative. This means that you have just transmitted *information* in zero seconds, and if velocity is distance/time, and distance is non-zero, you've just transmitted information at infinite speed, which is actually greater than the speed of light. This is the nature of the paradox that Einstein shat himself over for 20 years. \n\nThere are lots of interpretations, most of which I'm not familiar with, but have a huge section in that wikipedia article, so I'm going to read that now and you're welcome to join me in that if you'd like. \n\nIf you don't want to read the wiki, well, here's what Feynman has to say about it:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nBasically, experiment is experiment. There is no 'why', just 'how'. Later we figure out the why, but usually it's pretty hard to understand because we don't have everyday experience about it. It's just the way nature acts! You don't have to like it, you just have to know it's true. \n\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gbrwr/could_someone_please_explain_how_quantum/" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kekayfI8Ii8&amp;t=0m11s" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cyla0xz" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Could be that ganga you just smoked? I personally haven't had this experience." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fik3scx" ], "score": [ 13 ], "text": [ "There is. A lot of it. But constant turbulence of the surface prevents it from getting too clumped up. Additionally, there are a *lot* of things eating the algae, too, which keep algal populations manageable.\n\nSometimes those things get out of whack and you end up with [massive algal blooms](_URL_0_) that cover huge swaths of the ocean.\n\nYou rarely see solid mats of algae, though, because of the constant motion and turbulence. Algae that *does* clump together has evolved into different forms that are strong enough to deal with the ocean currents and don't *look* like algae, like [giant kelp](_URL_1_), which is, in fact, algae, not a plant." ] }

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[ [ "https://earth.esa.int/documents/257246/2274906/Algal_Blooms_animation", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Sanc0063_-_Flickr_-_NOAA_Photo_Library.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cqgpq8u" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "In Iceland it certainly, from a Saga perspective (from the viewpoint that they reflect society in the Sturlung period, that is from about 1200 onwards) does not seem uncommon for 'farmers' (in Medieval Iceland nearly everybody was a farmer, as there were not urbanised areas/ towns|), or lower class landowners, to possess an axe or spear at least.\n\n\n\nAxes and spears have the virtue of being relatively cheap to make; only a small amount of poor quality iron was necessary, and although I am not convinced by the argument axes did have utilitarian purposes.\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ciwtm8h" ], "score": [ 25 ], "text": [ "You are right, it isn't that simple.\n\nFirst of all, the nazi persecution of the Jews happened incrementally, not all at once, and it was by no means clear that \"they were going to die anyway\". It is clear to us in hindsight, but you have to keep in mind that the concept of rounding up men, women and children, putting them on trains, unloading them at a purpose-built death camp, and gassing them, was never before encountered in the history of the world. It was so novel and alien an idea that hardly anyone at the time believed it was happening *even when they were told about it by eye witnesses*. Escapees from Auschwitz and Treblinka told their fellow Jews and were disbelieved initially. The same escapee reports were relayed through the Polish government in exile to the Western allies, and they disbelieved it too.\n\nSecondly, \"the Jews\" were not a nation with an army. They were a people who were a small to tiny minority in a number of separate occupied countries. They had no governing structure or access to arms. They were not unified structurally in any way.\n\nThirdly, and most importantly, there *was* Jewish resistance, what's more, it even arose in the most dire and impossible of circumstances.\n\nThere were uprisings in several Polish ghettos, most notably those of Warsaw in January and April-May 1943, and in Bialystok in August 1943. They were of course brutally suppressed and everybody to the last child was carted off to Treblinka and killed.\n\nThere were Jewish partisan groups fighting the Germans in Poland, the Baltic states and the Soviet Union. The reason there were separate Jewish partisans is, by the way, is that often Polish and Baltic partisans refused to admit Jews as members and even went so far as to kill them...\n\nLastly, there were uprisings in the death camps themselves. \n\nThere have been three large-scale uprisings in Nazi death camps. As the odds were stacked heavily against the inmates, these stories make for some bleak reading.\n\n**[SonderKommando revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau](_URL_0_), October 7, 1944**\n\nThe Sonderkommandos were groups of Jewish prisoners charged with processing the belongings and handling the cremation of other prisoners. They knew that they would not be allowed to survive the war and had gathered some makeshift weapons and explosives. On the fateful day, they managed to set Crematorium IV on fire and kill three SS men. Some of them escaped briefly but all were recaptured and killed. In all, the revolt cost the lives of 451 members of the Sonderkommandos.\n\n**[Treblinka uprising](_URL_1_), August 2, 1943**\n\n300 inmates of Treblinka managed to escape, of whom 200 were recaptured (sometimes with the help of the Polish inhabitants of the region) and killed. According to various estimates, about 60-70 of the Treblinka escapees were still alive at the end of the war. Three guards were killed in the uprising, as well as about 600 of the 800 to 900 inmates. After the uprising, two more transports of Jews arrived and were killed. Shortly afterwards, Treblinka was dismantled, ploughed over and turned into a farm. The remaining inmates were killed at Sobibor.\n\n**The Sobibor Uprising on October 14, 1943**\n\n12 German officers were killed in the revolt as well as a number of Ukrainian guards. As Sobibor was strictly an extermination camp, where those that arrived by rail were immediately gassed, the number of prisoners was very small, just enough to keep the camp running. 300 out of 700 inmates managed to escape during the revolt. Many were recaptured and killed rather quickly, others were killed by the Polish resistance they met in the forests around the camp, still others were betrayed by Polish inhabitants of the region. Some were helped by the Poles, though, mainly in return for money and valuables belonging to gassed Jews that they had smuggled out of the camp. It should be remembered that to harbour Jewish refugees meant an almost certain death sentence at the time. Only about 50 of the escaped survived the war.\n\n\n\nImmediately after the revolt, all remaining prisoners in Sobibor were killed and the camp was dismantled.\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/revolt/sonderevolt.html", "http://www.ushmm.org/research/the-center-for-advanced-holocaust-studies/miles-lerman-center-for-the-study-of-jewish-resistance/medals-of-resistance-award/treblinka-death-camp-revolt" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cfxxbjw" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "Not even a tiny little bit.\n\n* Just to be clear, strictly speaking \"Minoan\" is the name of a style of material culture. It is often dangerous, and often wrong, to equate that with a particular ethnic group, language, or political entity. Certainly by the historical period Crete had a very diverse ethnic composition. Having said that, it is very possible that \"Minoan\" does equate to a single political entity controlling the island from Knossos (there's some archaeological evidence suggesting that; but it's not crazy to disagree with that conclusion and see Minoan Crete as a group of autonomous palace cultures).\n* As a bit of background, the so-called \"Old Palaces\" of Crete were destroyed in the mid-18th century BCE, and it is often supposed that earthquakes were the cause. This destruction did not interrupt ongoing development, however, whatever the real cause.\n* The palace (i.e. \"Minoan\") culture of Crete didn't come to an end until ca. 1450 BCE.\n* There have been attempts to pin this on the eruption of Thera/Santorini, to be sure. Geological evidence of a powerful tsunami has been found at various points on the coast of Crete.\n* However, these attempts are just a tiny bit flawed by the data we have relating to the date of the eruption. Dating by pottery evidence is extremely contested in terms of absolute dates, but relative dates are secure; the eruption belongs to the period known as Late Minoan 1A, yet we know there was a building boom in the Late Minoan 1B period. Even without absolute dates, that's fairly damning. Moreover, radiocarbon dating has pointed to an earlier date still, in the late 17th century. Even before that, some archaeologists had already been arguing for a 17th century date (Stuart Manning's 1999 book on the subject argued for 1628/1627, based partly on ice-cores taken from Greenland, evidence that has subsequently been challenged); one olive branch that was buried alive in the eruption has been radiocarbon dated to 1627-1600 (95% confidence). Even without consensus on the dates of pottery styles, there's a pretty good consensus putting it, if not before 1600 BCE, then certainly not much later. You can't blame events in the 1400s on an event with that kind of dating evidence.\n* (Having said that, it is moderately safe to say that the Minoan settlements on Thera itself were wiped out by the eruption.)\n\nInstead, evidence of destruction caused by human agency in the LM 1B period, followed by evidence of Mycenaean material and textual culture on Crete in the LM II and III periods, points to Mycenaean invasion as the occasion of the downfall of the Minoan palace culture. Attempts to drag Thera into it are unnecessary and unfounded.\n\n\"Atlantis\" doesn't even enter into it. That's a \"legend\" that was invented for a specific occasion by a 4th century BCE philosopher, and which he set in the Mesolithic (in the 10th millennium BCE, to be specific). And in myths recorded after 800 BCE, it takes some believing to see historical events even in the Iron Age, let alone in the Mycenaean period, let alone in the Minoan period.\n\n**Edits:** formatting error; added a bit more detail about Manning's book." ] }

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[ "http://video.pbs.org/video/1204753806/", "http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/features/sinking-atlantis/the-fall-of-the-minoans/61/" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "dkh0mr5", "dkh1j0r", "dkh3vpt", "dkhl99r", "dkhlo8t", "dkhtzo8" ], "score": [ 18, 9, 2, 2, 2, 3 ], "text": [ "It's simply far, far, far, far, far, faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar simpler to travel across the surface. \n\nMaintaining (for that matter, even creating) a tunnel through the earth is beyond our technological capabilities for the far forseeable future. Even if we could do it, it would be astronomically expensive, with the total benefit of shaving a few hours off however many vehicles we could fit through it.\n\nAdditionally, the center of the earth itself is a solid metal ball, with liquid metal around it, and above that viscous rock. ", "The deepest hole we've ever managed to dig (and we're not really sure why the hell it worked) is a 7.5 mile borehole in Russia. It's 9 inches in diameter. \nWe're terribly confused by how they managed to get it that deep; sediment layers and rock formations aside, the enormous pressure at that level should cause it to collapse in on itself. \n\nThe biggest issue is... well, why the hell would we? Subways are great and all, but trying to connect even just two cities is a huge amount of effort, time, and money. Far easier for everyone to just build a road or hop a flight. ", "Another aspect others aren't mentioning is propulsion. Once you got to the center, you'd have to overcome gravity to get back out to the other side. A body in freefall towards the center of the Earth will eventually just settle in the center of the planet.", "The center of the earth isn't lava. It's a solid core of metal, surrounded by a liquid core of metal. And is about 7000 degrees. And under massive pressure from all the rock and metal above it. Oh, and much of that heat comes from radioactive decay, so it's pretty radioactive down there too. \n\nIn short, an absolutely terrible place for humans to be and way, way beyond our technological capabilities. \n\nIt's like asking \"why aren't we trying to send an astronaut to the surface of the sun?\" Because we'd be dead and anything we'd be able to make to get there would be destroyed long before we arrived. ", "The thing is that we know more about space than we do about the center of the Earth. The people in here are telling you what scientists BELIEVE is at the center of the Earth. The fact is that we literally having only scratched the surface (we have dug down very little compaired to how much there is overall) of what is under our feet. Even the Russia dig changed some of what we thought we knew about the center of the planet. We simply do not have the technology, nor the need, nor the funds to throw at this kind of project.", "We *have* considered it. (Not through the molten core, of course, but using tunnels as a means of travel.) In fact, Elon Musk appears to be making significant headway towards making tunnels as easy to build as streets.\n\nThe long-term benefits can be enormous. If a tunnel is perfectly straight (i.e. it doesn't follow the curvature of the Earth, but instead makes a direct line from point A to point B) and if friction can be significantly reduced (evacuating air from the tunnel, levitating the train with magnets, etc.) then the train could be made to travel with very little energy involved.\n\nThe engineering challenges, however, are significant. \n\n* The cost of tunneling (Elon Musk appears to have solved that one, though not at any great depth.)\n\n* Depending on how long the tunnel is, it may dip several miles underground, which presents a whole host of additional challenges above regular tunnel-digging.\n\n* Then there's the cost of evacuating the air and KEEPING it evacuated. It may prove cheaper to just put more energy to fight the air friction than to keep it evacuated." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cyt65uj" ], "score": [ 18 ], "text": [ "The premise of this question is rather flawed. In democratic Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, Westminster-style systems are the distinct minority. Far more common in the aggregate are three other systems: strong Presidents (i.e., not only executive Presidents in the US sense but possessed of significant legislative power exercisable by decree), US-style systems, and French-style hybrids, with an executive President who shares authority with a Prime Minister and Cabinet somewhat or entirely responsible to the majority of the lower house of the legislature. \n\nWhere Westminster-style systems prevail, it's for one of three reasons. Mostly commonly, because the state was a former British colony, felt comfortable with that system, and never had a post-democratization crisis which required (or permitted) a strong Presidency to take shape. Secondly, because the state wanted to become a constitutional monarchy (such as the Commonwealth states which retained the Queen, or Japan or Thailand) and the Westminster system is the obvious solution to the state having, by definition, a head of state who is both non-elected and required to be above partisan politics. Third, pretty much only in Eastern Europe, because a state had a legacy of mistrust of authoritarian leaders and wanted to emulate the Westminster style systems prevailing among their western European (new) peers." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ecnbbpt" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) is actually mostly a WWI term which didn't have a whole lot of application to WWII. However, it is commonly used as a moniker for all Australian and NZ land forces in WWII.\n\nAs part of the British Empire, Australians and New Zealanders were deployed alongside other Commonwealth forces, mostly in two theatres: they served in North Africa with the Eighth Army and then in Italy with the same unit. They served in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, the latter theatre mostly being in defensive dispositions. \n\nSome major and famous battles involving large ANZ forces are:\n\n(1) Tobruk: the Australian 9th Division was surrounded by the German Afrika Korps in the harbour town of Tobruk where it survived a seven month siege April 1941 - November 1941.\n\n(2) Battle of Second El-Alamein: the above Australian unit and the New Zealand 2nd Division were closely involved in major parts of this battle, in which British General Montgomery broke through Rommel's (Stumme's) defences and reversed the Axis offensive momentum in North Africa. \n\nRommel was very complimentary to the New Zealand troops in North Africa, and the Australians too. They say that Rommel said that if he had to capture hell, he would use Australians to take it and New Zealanders to hold it. But I am not sure if he ever really did say that. \n\n(3) Battle of Greece. Big disaster, but not their fault. It was a bad move.\n\n(4) Australian troops were deployed to defend Singapore from the Japanese. These units did not perform very well. Many were captured with some dishonour (if you want to think about it that way). The Australian commander in this battle escaped Singapore while his troops marched into captivity and became quite an unpopular person for this. \n\n(5) Australian troops protected the city of Port Moresby in New Guinea, which was the closest port facility to Australia that Japan could reasonably occupy. When US carrier units forced the Japanese away from an amphibious landing, they went overland, through dense jungle, along the Kokoda Track. Australians repulsed them in very difficult fighting.\n\nA lot of people seem to be prone to saying that Australia/New Zealand troops were the \"shock units\" of the British Empire (they also say this about Highland troops, Gurkhas, Canadians, et cetera). There's not a lot of evidence to support this. If you look at the Australian Army in WWII you find units of varying calibre. Some were excellent, some were not. The British deployed the Australians and New Zealanders were they were needed and they went to those places and fought the Germans, Italians, or Japanese there. \n\nHowever, as Japan got closer to Australia, significant Australian units were withdrawn to protect Australia, a military decision the British were not too happy with but that they couldn't politically resist. Australia raised large military forces, but many were simply used for the defence of Australia against a potential Japanese invasion.\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cesemc2", "cesemtt", "ceseniu", "ceseo1k", "ceseq2x", "ceskx06" ], "score": [ 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Indians are from the Indian subcontinent. Native Americans were in the US before it was the US.", "Indian is based on the incorrect assumption that Columbus had arrived in Asia. Most indigenous people prefer, NA, so I hear.", "I was always taught that Native American or American Indian was preferred to calling them \"Indians,\" just because the term \"Indian\" should refer to someone with an ethnic background from India. The federal government still has the \"Bureau of Indian Affairs\" but I think the name is a holdover from when it was created. I suppose the best way to find out would be to ask someone who is an Indian or Native American.", "Native is preferred. Early Europeans that discovered the Americas thought they'd found passage to India and called the natives Indians by mistake. Thus, using that term just makes you appear ignorant.", "I am not in any way for PC. But, as a descendant of a Native American, I prefer Native American. It's just more accurate. If you know the tribe (Cherokee), etc. that works too. Indian is not as offensive as calling a black person the \"N\" word, but it's kind of like calling a dog a spaceship -- it just doesn't make sense.\n\nOn a side note, my Grandfather did kind of like the US immigrants calling him \"Chief\". They meant it as an insult, but in his sub-tribe, it meant \"I am your humble servant\".", "The best way to refer to an indigenous person is to recognize them by their tribal nation. When I introduce myself or get asked, \"What are you?\" I tell them that I am Coushatta before anything else. I am from the Coushatta tribe of Louisiana.\n\nMost of the time just \"Native\" works best, at least for me it does. To be honest, when non-Indians go on and say or spell out Native American or American Indian it's a little frustrating. That's a lot to spit out of your mouth. \n\nredskin, injun and chief are good way to catch an ass beating (again, personal preference)." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c62y5nx", "c62z0um" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Some references [here](_URL_0_)", "I'd just like to point out that camouflage has a variety of use cases with distinct considerations. Camouflaging is different for objects of different size, either still or active, in different environments and against different observers in different ranges.\n\nMilitary camouflage on individual fighters is often enhanced with stuff like tree branches (or anything comparable, depending on the environment), which serve to break the form of the fighter. In this case the pattern has to provide a good base. Military camouflage is also not only used against humans observing with naked eye, but also optical enhancements and various imaging tech.\n\nThere are a variety of patterns, digital and otherwise, that are widely used with no consensus on what's \"most effective\". The Latvian army uses an interesting pattern with [really big squares](_URL_0_), the Germans use random dotted shapes, and some armies still don't bother with camo patterns at all. There are also fractal patterns, striped patterns, and traditional looking new patterns. MultiCam is not a digital pattern, but the US Army has started issuing MC equipment to some troops over UCP. The British introduced a new pattern with familiar distinct British camouflage pattern shapes but MultiCam-style colors.\n\nMany people are willing to bet that digital is not better. New patterns are being created and tested in new ways all the time.\n\nI can't say what the considerations are when it comes to hunting. One thing that comes to mind is that different animals see and pay attention to different things.\n\nI don't have better sources than what I've read in the past and short military service, but in my own experience it's pretty hard for the human eye to focus on the kind of random scrabble of digi patterns. The most important job of the camouflage is not to resemble some natural object, but to blend in as \"noise\" and not be picked out.\n\nAlso, military camouflage needs to be feasible to produce in mass quantities at a reasonable cost, and provide a good compromise in a variety of environments (which are different for each organization). In addition, military-issue equipment needs to be very durable, which might or might not create some limitations on what kind of patterns can be issued." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.hyperstealth.com/digital-design/index.htm" ], [ "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Latvian_G36KV.JPEG" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cf3qose", "cf3r5nk" ], "score": [ 5, 2 ], "text": [ "because the flame isnt hot enough, so it's basically just spitting the gas residue onto the snow.", "The black stuff is soot from the lighter flame." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cokxtkh" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "The human immune system is pretty good.\n\nYou don't get a cold every times somebody sneezes around you. You don't get e.coli every time somebody undercooks a burger.\n\n...and you don't get HIV every time your dick touches somebody." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cp2vdot", "cp2vds3", "cp2vfqn", "cp2vmd4" ], "score": [ 3, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "So, *nothing* holds up against tornadoes. You can build a tornado-resistant house, but it's extraordinarily expensive and frankly not worth it. You essentially need to build a missile-proof bunker. Bricks will not stand a chance against one.", "Price. A brick and mortar house is more expensive, and tornadoes and floods don't happen all the time. It doesn't make financial sense for most people to build a home that can withstand something that has a very low likelihood of happening to your home. The \"regular\" natural disaster is not really that regular. sure, tornadoes will happen in the midwest, but the likelihood of it happening t your particular house is fairly low. Its cheaper to build a safe room to survive the event if it does happen.", "First, the US has a lot of wood, so that makes it easy to build with that, and very cheap. [That's part of why the US has likely the largest median home size in the world](_URL_0_). You just don't get as much space as cheap with brick and morter.\n\nBut more importantly there are a TON of houses in the US, and very few of them actually get destroyed in natural disasters. Even in the worst area of the US for tornados the odds of a structure ever being hit by a tornado is 1 in 5000, that's pretty slim.\n\nFinally, brick isn't really all that great. Sure it's nice against wind but tornados aren't dangerous because of the air blowing, but because of what the air blows. Your nice brick and morter house wouldn't hold up well when a car is thrown against it at 60 miles an hour.\n\nSo...\n\n1. You're not THAT likely to have your house destroyed\n2. Building with sturdier materials is more expensive, and you get less for it\n3. Those sturdier materials probably aren't going to protect you all that much.", "I'm in Australia, and events such as flooding are so rare that it's not worth the extra cost of building it that way, but most insurances don't cover it, so it's very much a 'cross fingers and hope for the best' situation. Also, almost all suburban houses are brick and mortar anyway, which holds up much better against flooding and fires. Bushfires are a much bigger threat here, but the same rules apply. If you're in the danger zone, get your garden hose ready and hope the firies get it under control in time.\n\nAnd destructive tornados are almost non-existent here." ] }

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[ [], [], [ "http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/average-home-sizes-around-the-151738" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ckq0yk6" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Many animals including birds and insects have the ability to purge their stomach contents on command. Bird feedings and flies vomiting stomach acid is an example of this phenomena. Once it goes past the stomach there is usually in mammals at least a one way valve that prevents food from going in the opposite direction. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e8cc9wc" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "You might get a good answer on r/truefilm as well." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cgga1fd", "cggoru4" ], "score": [ 5, 2 ], "text": [ "It actually does depend on the driver, and other factors. Manufacturers are known to cheat a little bit with this, but usually not so severely that it results in a grossly inaccurate time. The following factors are important:\n\n1) Condition of the pavement or strip (wet, smooth?)\n\n2) Temperature, humidity, and ambient air pressure\n\n3) Weight of the car\n\n4) Sunny or cloudy (affects temperature of track and tires)\n\n5) Intake temperature (engine revving can destroy performance)\n\n6) Use of rollout in determining time\n\n7) and... of course... they're going to be using a skilled driver, who will try different combinations of launch rpm and wheelspin\n\n8) Fuel -- highest recommended octane for that vehicle\n\n note: fuel is a real kicker, as the proper fuel provides cooling and maximum power availability for a well-designed engine. using a lower octane will cause the engine's computer to reduce engine output. using a higher octane will waste fuel and result in a lower efficiency and less acceleration", " > Does this not heavily depend on the driver?\n\nYes an no.\n\nA professional driver can probably accelerate faster than you or I. But the difference between a typical professional and world class driver isn't that great, especially in a stock vehicle. Those few hundredths of a second might win a drag race, but don't really offer enough wiggle room to misrepresent what a car can do. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dzlua7q", "dzlxey8", "dzm3roj", "dzm50gi", "dzm8xh4", "dzmc5pk", "dzmcnpf", "dzmhcf7", "dzml2fy", "dzn04vp" ], "score": [ 103, 3748, 56, 25, 8, 9, 7, 2, 52, 3 ], "text": [ "By measuring it. There are so many contributing measurements that it is difficult to list them all in a reddit comment. [Wikipedia has an article](_URL_0_).\n\nThe small uncertainty is simply a result of very precise measurements.", "There's a phenomena called the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB. If you point a radio telescope in any direction, you see radio waves from the CMB. Looking at radio waves from the CMB is kind of like looking at visible light from the sun. If you go far back enough in time, the universe was denser and hotter, so dense and so hot that hydrogen atoms filled all of space ~~and there was fusion happening everywhere~~. But as time went on, the universe became less dense and less hot, until ~~fusion stopped happening and~~ the light could travel freely through space. The light we see from the CMB is from the moment that light could freely travel.\n\nInterestingly enough, both light from the CMB and light from the sun follow a blackbody spectrum. In fact, anything with a temperature emits blackbody radiation. If you measure the intensity of the light at different frequencies, you can fit the temperature. Right now the CMB is in radio, which is cold (about 2.73 kelvin), but if you go back in time the CMB light was much hotter. The reason it's colder now is because light is a transverse wave. As the universe expanded, the peaks and troughs of the light waves expanded with the expanded space. This phenomena is known as red-shifting.\n\nAnyway, if you look in different directions, the original temperature of the CMB is almost exactly the same in every direction, to about one part in 100,000. But it's not exactly the same in every direction. If you look at different angles, the temperatures can be slightly different. If you look at temperature deviations as a function of different angles, you can calculate what's called a Power Spectrum. The Power Spectrum allows you to solve what are called the Boltzmann Equations. The Boltzmann Equations are thermodynamic equations which constrain many parameters of the universe, such as its age, the expansion rate, the density of normal matter, density of dark matter, etc. Solving the Boltzmann Equations constrains the age of the universe.\n\nAs a side note, the Boltzmann Equations are perhaps the most compelling argument for dark matter, since it's impossible to fit the Power Spectrum without a dark matter component (but this argument is so technical that many people are not familiar it).\n\nedit: if anyone is interested in learning more, this is a good resource: _URL_0_. It's the 2015 Planck results, an experiment to map the CMB super precisely.\n\nedit2: As others have mentioned, the period of fusion was between 10 seconds and 20 minutes after the big bang, and is known as big bang nucleosynthesis. The period when light could travel freely was much later, about 380,000 years after the big bang, and is known as the time of last scattering. \n\nAlso I should mention there are easier, more intuitive ways of calculating the age of the universe, such as measuring the Hubble Constant directly from redshifts and distances and calculating T = 1/H. However, the current best margin of error of 59 million years comes from precise measurements of the CMB Power Spectrum.", "The CMB was the result of electron capture by protons and helium nuclei, ~380000 after the BB. At this point the universe was a hot plasma consisting of free, unbound electrons, H and He nuclei and photons. Upon cooling, below the ionization threshold for neutral hydrogen , and expanding to a lower threshold density, the mean free path of the photons greatly exceeded the spacing between the nucleii. Protons captured electrons thus emitting light, neutral hydrogen atoms formed and the universe became transparent. This is a similar state as the photosphere of a star, the region where light escapes. \n\n\nFusion resulting in deuterium, helium and lithium nucleii as a result of the BB ended long before the birth of the CMB. Fusion did not re-commence until stars ignited due to collapsing clouds of neutral hydrogen clumping up to a critical density. Once lit, reionization occurred as the universe was now bathed in a new source of light. Fusion was not directly involved in the creation of the CMB.The energy scales for fusion and electron capture are widely separated hence they separate in time in the early universe.", "As far as I understand it (someone correct me if wrong), the margin of error is only correct under assumption that the right model of universe expansion is used. Under different models, the age might be different. The margin of error is on the measurements plugged into the model and isn't on the choice of model itself\n\nThere's some additional evidence of the age of the universe, one of which is that stars/galaxies can be shown to be a certain age. That puts another limit on the age of the universe, which matches well with the CMB results, but is less precise overall.", "Basically, we assume a cosmological model, and fit its parameters based on observations of what the universe has now (amount of radiation, matter, etc.). Then we look at that model and determine how log after the big bang the universe became opaque (and how hot it was at the time.) Then run the clock forward until the light from that time matches a 2.7k blackbody. \nOf course, if it turns that the LambdaCDM model is not sufficient, the age of the universe could be quite different.", "Keep in mind that any scientific statement has an implied caveat: “ based on the information that we currently have”. In this case, there almost isn’t a number small enough to represent how little of the universe we’ve actually explored / studied, however despite that it seems as if we’ve managed to unlock some pretty significant secrets. We pretty much understand the lifespan of a star for example. So we actually might be right about the age of the universe, but realistically there’s probably some seriously crucial information that we’re missing that means our numbers are way off. ", "This also has to do with Hubble's constant. What Hubble's constant reveals is that galaxies that are more distant tend to travel at higher velocities away from us. By plotting all of these galaxies with distance on the X-axis and velocity on the Y-axis, it reveals an upward sloping line, and the slope of that line is the value of Hubble's constant. Its units of measurement are (kms^-1). / Mpc, and 1/Hubble's constant will give us an UPWARD estimate of the age of the universe. The reason it is an upward estimate is because this number assumes that there is no mass or deceleration in the universe, and that these galaxies have been traveling at this speed for all of time. \n\nHowever, acceleration of the universe started ~5 billion years ago due to dark energy becoming more dense than regular matter. (Dark energy remains the same density regardless of volume.) Imagine dark energy as when you throw a ball in the air, and when it hits it's maximum height on the parabola, it starts to rise rather than come down back to the ground. \n\nThis number has fluctuated in the last 100 years, for Hubble himself estimated his own constant incorrectly. By measuring the distance to galaxies incorrectly, he came up with the number 500(kms^-1) /Mpc, which put the universe at about 2 billion years old, when archeologists measured the earth to be about 3-4 billion based on dating rocks. To this day, we know Hubble's constant to be ~73.8 (kms^-1) / Mpc +/- 2.4(kms^-1) / Mpc. This puts the universe at around 13.8 billion years old. ", "[An interesting lecture by Prof Carolin Crawford of Gresham College on the subject.](_URL_0_)\n\nGreshem college, Perimeter Institute, Fermilab, and SLAC have great youtube channels for this kind of stuff. Also, look up Sean Carroll. He's a great science communicator on cosmology and physics.", "There are many ways and clearly many answers. For those who do not want to read any lengthy answers, I will make a couple breif ones\n\n1) Edwin Hubble noticed that almost all galaxies when being looked at are \"redshifted\". Redshirting is like listening to a police siren going away from you, the sound waves are stretched, but in this case it's lightwaves. Not only that, but the further a galaxy was from us, the faster it was moving away. This can be witnessed in the perspective of nearly any Galaxy you put yourself in. This discovery leads to the idea of an expanding universe. Over time we asked \"wait, what if we wound the clock backwards?\" So we did, and realized, logically, everything was closer together back in the past, and with lots of math and computations, we calculated that all matter was concentrated to a single point which is the beginning of The Big Bang. We don't know what happened before then, so we just leave it at that\n\n2) The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) has been redshifted as well, but to a much larger degree, making their once visbile light waves stretch out so much that they are now radiowaves. Not visible to the human eye, but once were. When you look at the CMB, you notice that everything is uniform with very minor variations. This suggests that all of these points we look at that are billions and billions of light-years away were once all together. There is some fancy math to be done here but it essentially proof of concept of the big bang, some fancy math was done (Blotzman Equations as mentioned in other comments), and it gives you the general beginning of when the universe might have been", "There's a great book on this that talks about the multiple ways we know this, by my old advisor, called (appropriately) \"How Old is the Universe?\" It's readable, but goes being pop sci, so it's actually worth reading, imo. You should check it out!" ] }

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[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe" ], [ "https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01589" ], [], [], [], [], [], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yocBZphGnFg" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "catwc3r", "cau2fio" ], "score": [ 11, 2 ], "text": [ "Well that depends on where the object originated. For example, if it was simply floating in the space that the Earth is moving into, then yes. It will fall like a normal object with an initial downward velocity equal to the speed of the Earth. If the object originated from Earth's frame of reference, it would not matter which side of the planet it launched from because in both cases it would have the same initial velocity. I hope that helps", "If it's dropped from an arbitrary point in space, yes. The earth's movement would shorten the distance required.\n\nIf the object was launched from earth (i.e. projectile motion like a cannonball being shot vertically) then no. The initial velocity would always equal the final velocity, as energy is conserved.\n\nThe key here is relative velocity. When you drive down the highway and toss something forwards, it's moving at whatever speed your car was moving plus whatever velocity you imparted on the object. Of course, this is relative to the earth. Relative to you, the object isn't moving that quickly, it's just as though you tossed the same object the same way in a parked car. That's relative velocity in a nutshell.\n\nHope that helps!" ] }

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[ "http://imgur.com/F7F852r" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "di3vhgo" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "Engels was not in charge of the business he was sent to Manchester to join - a cotton thread factory. It was majority-owned, and run, by his father's business partner, Peter Ermen.\n\nErmen suspected that the younger Engels had been sent to spy on him, so he refused to place him in positions where he had much responsibility or participated in strategic decision-making. Engels was largely restricted to mundane clerical duties in what he called \"the bitch business\", spending 20 years maintaining an extensive correspondence with suppliers and clients, while systematically raiding Ermen's petty cash box for some of the funds he passed on to help support his colleague Marx.\n\nAs for the living conditions of employees, it was horror at the appalling slum conditions that he found in Manchester that prompted Engels to write his first book, *The Condition of the Working Class in England* and which inspired much of his radicalism. It's well worth mentioning in this connection that, while Engels had the money to live comfortably, and from a social point of view was expected to do so, he actually preferred to spend most of his time living in cheap lodgings under an assumed name with his mistress, an Irish worker named Mary Burns.\n\nI have written in much more detail about Engels's time in Manchester, conditions in the city, and his relationship with Mary Burns, [here](_URL_0_). It's a fascinating story." ] }

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[ [ "https://mikedashhistory.com/2013/08/02/friedrich-engels-irish-muse/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d9kab8e" ], "score": [ 78 ], "text": [ "Your question presupposes a couple of things that aren't necessarily true. First, the Confederates weren't in any better position to just storm \"Washington City\" (as it was known then) than the Union was to march straight into Richmond. The early months of the war saw both sides consolidating and, even more importantly, drilling the civilian-soldiers pouring into the respective capitols. Moving an army en mass is an extremely complicated undertaking, and neither side (but especially the Confederates) had the infrastructure in place to get their armies and supply trains organized for a major offensive (let alone a siege). If nothing else, the timeline illustrates this clearly. The war started in April 1861, and the first major clash of the armies came at Manassas/Bull Run in late-July of that year. If it was as easy as just sprinting the 100 or so miles to take the other city, both sides would have tried to do so: but it just wasn't feasible. Either side trying such a thing so early in the war would have been playing with an all-in proposition with extremely green troops (and with no one left behind to guard the capitol just abandoned in case things didn't work out). So in the Spring of 1861, it was a risky proposition at best, and a reckless one at worst.\n\nSecond, Lincoln was keenly aware of the strategic and symbolic importance of holding Washington, and some of the first actions he took when assuming office was to reinforce and fortify the city. The accounts you mention of Lincoln saying \"why won't they attack\" sound vaguely familiar, but I don't immediately recall a source for that. Do you have one? To my mind, that conversation or recollection had to do with the period immediately after 1st Manassas/Bull Run, when the Union was on its heels a bit (though never in any real danger of losing Washington). \n\nThe truth of the matter is that both sides in the Spring of 1861 had extremely raw armies with little formal training outside of the officer corps. The armies had neither the infrastructure, numerical strength, or knowhow to pull off so audacious and difficult an operation as sacking the other side's capitol. Even in 1862, when McClellan had a well-trained, sizable army at his disposal, he was unable to take Richmond (a city with far fewer defenders and defenses than Washington). To think that the Confederates could have sacked Washington so early in the war just doesn't jive with the facts and what leaders then (and historians now) understood about the actual capabilities of the Confederate army, such as it was.\n\n[Sources, Bruce Catton, 'Mr. Lincoln's Army'; James McPherson, 'Battle Cry of Freedom'; Doris Kearns Goodwin, 'Team of Rivals'] " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c8k8ksm", "c8kahxf" ], "score": [ 22, 12 ], "text": [ "OK, here are the top ten deadliest battles of both wars. You have to remember that these \"battles\" were often more like \"offensives\" or \"campaigns\" - they could last up to several weeks or months (in WWI), and weren't settled in a day like most medieval battles. People died in their thousands or tens of thousands in a daily meat grinder.\n\n**WWI**\n\n1. The Hundred Days Offensive (1,855,369 casualties), 1918\n\n2. The Spring Offensive (1,539,715), 1918\n\n3. The Battle of the Somme (1,219,201), 1916 (The British lost 60,000 men in a single day, more than the Americans lost *in all of Vietnam*).\n\n4. The Battle of Verdun (976,000), 1916\n\n5. Battle of Passchendaele (848,614), 1917\n\n6. Serbian Campaign (633,500+), 1914-1915\n\n7. First Battle of the Marnes (483,000), 1914\n\n8. Battle of Gallipoli (473,000), 1915\n\n9. Battle of Arras (278,000), 1917\n\n10. Battle of Tannenberg (182,000), 1914 (The only one on the Eastern front)\n\n**WWII**\n\n1. Battle of Stalingrad, 23 August 1942–2 February 1943: (1,250,000–1,798,619)\n\n2. Battle of Berlin, 16 April–2 May 1945: (1,298,745)\n\n3. Battle of Moscow, 2 October 1941–7 January 1942: (1,000,000)\n\n4. Battle of Narva, 2 February–10 August 1944: (550,000)\n\n5. Battle of France, 10 May–25 June 1940: (469,000) \n\n6. Battle of Luzon, 9 January–15 August 1945: (332,330–345,330) \n\n7. Second Battle of Kharkov, 12 May–28 May 1942: (300,000)\n\n8. Battle of Kursk, 5 July–23 August 1943: (257,125–388,000)\n\n9. Battle of the Bulge, 16 December 1944–25 January 1945: (186,369)\n\n10. Battle of Monte Cassino, 17 January–18 May 1944: (185,000)\n\nSo, if you're wondering why we Europeans aren't all that gung-ho about wars and invading Irak and bombing Iran and having civilians running around with assault rifles, you can read the reason in the numbers above. Most of us our countries were invaded (or were attempted to) and people died like flies and lay rotting in the streets and in fields and in the forests. It's sickening and there *has* to be a better way.", "A huge factor in the casualty figures of early 20th century wars versus Vietnam and onward, is the lack of body armor.\n\nThe easiest part of the human body to hit when you shoot at someone is the torso, from belly button to clavicle. This is because its at barrel height when you raise your weapon to fire. It is also the biggest body area, everything else is an appendage or the teeny tiny head. This area of the body was completely and utterly unprotected amongst normal soldiers in WW1 and WW2. \n\nIn the US Army, I spent a year in Iraq in 2005. Everytime I went off base, I wore full body armor. Ceramic ballistic plates in a kevlar flak jacket, protecting my back and torso. I had kevlar pads protecting my sides (where the vest buckled together), protecting my throat, and protecting my groin. My helmet was layered kevlar, not stamped steel. \n\nThis level of personal protection has led to an extremely high percentage of combat injury survival. While I was there, it blew my mind that in the world wars, young soldiers just like me went up against the strongest armies in the world wearing basically street clothes. Combat injuries were far more lethal back then. Thousands (millions?) of brave young men died in battle in those wars where they would have survived today. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "clb3u61", "clb54uf", "clb5635", "clb6mp7", "clb8702", "clbccb9", "clbcmpj", "clbf65l", "clbin50", "clbyorl" ], "score": [ 14, 12, 4, 76, 25, 28, 3, 5, 4, 5 ], "text": [ "According to a friend who works for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, and has to do air quality testing at the only Splenda plant in the United States, \n\nSucralose (splenda) is produced by treating Sucrose (sugar) with poisonous gasses to replace several of the OH groups in its chemical chain with Cl. If i remember correctly, he said they use Phosgene gas to do this. I am not 100 percent on whether or not it's Phosgene. But certain that they use poisonous gasses to replace OH with Cl. \n\nThis apparently causes your body to treat is like something undigestible, therefore making it a 0 calorie sweetener.\n\nTL;DR: they use poisonous gas to turn real sugar into something your body won't treat as food. ", "People are stupid and believe whatever bullshit crosses their facebook feed. ", "I have looked into it before and the only reason I can possibly come up with was it was made by guys who were trying to make an insecticide. _URL_0_ on the history section. Somehow that translates to \"it's a poison!\" ", "One thing people don't understand is that a molecule isn't necessarily toxic just because a toxic molecule was used to make it. For example, I'm currently trying to make an anti-tumor drug but a few of the reagents are carcinogenic.", "An article recently published in Nature has linked sucralose along with other non-caloric artificial sweetners to glucose intolerance via alteration of intestinal microbes. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nI wouldn't call it poison. I would be concerned about the consumption of artificial sweetners and impact on rate of diabetes and obesity. \n\nAlso, Just because the synthesis of the artificial sweetner uses hazardous reagents does not mean the sweetner itself is hazardous. If this were true most of the approved drugs on the market would fall into the same category. Tylenol (Acetaminophen) synthesis uses acetic anhydride which has an NFPA health hazard of 3 which is the same hazard as hydrochloric acid.", "The short answer: \n\nBecause there is a deplorable lack of understanding of basic science among the general populous.\n\nThe slightly longer answer:\n\nThe word chemical means something different to people who's understanding of science comes primarily from watching the news. \"Are chemicals killing your baby? More at 11:00.\"\n\nBut everything is made up of chemicals. Water is a chemical.\n\nThings with long scientific names might sound like they are dangerous as well, but there's no causative link between the length of a chemical's name and the affect it might have on a person. Some very dangerous things have short names and others with long names are beneficial - while the reverse can also be true.\n\nSome uninformed people (such as the media) believe that chemicals that are similar to another in the components that comprise it, must necessarily have similar characteristics. But this is not so. In fact even a very minor change in the constituents of a molecule can radically impact the properties it demonstrates. Strangely, the people who say things like \"margarine is only one molecule away from being plastic\" assert that eating margarine is bad for you because it's like eating plastic - but they never consider that their (faulty) logic also implies that plastic is only one molecule away from margarine. So, even using their own (faulty) logic we can demonstrate that that slight distinction in chemical makeup is significant - since plastic does not present with the same properties as does margarine.\n\nNot really related to your question directly, but still interesting:\n\nIn fact, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that everything you take in when you ingest splenda can be accounted for at the other end - in your fecal or urinary discharge. That doesn't mean that while it's in your body it can't still have an impact, but our bodies do not retain it as they do some other things. ", "From wikipedia \"A repeated dose study of sucralose in human subjects concluded that \"there is no indication that adverse effects on human health would occur from frequent or long-term exposure to sucralose at the maximum anticipated levels of intake\".[21] Conversely, a Duke University study conducted on rats (funded by The Sugar Association[22]) shows that sucralose consumption levels of 1.1 mg/kg (below the FDA 'safe' level) to 11 mg/kg, throughout a 12-week administration of Splenda, exhibited numerous adverse effects, including reduction in beneficial fecal microflora, increased fecal pH, and enhanced expression levels of P-gp, CYP3A4, and CYP2D1, which are known to limit the bioavailability of nutrients and orally administered drugs.[23] These effects have not been observed in humans,[21] and the relevance of this animal study to human health is unknown. The study has been the subject of some controversy, with experts disagreeing over the validity of its conclusions.[24] The other ingredients in Splenda, dextrose and maltodextrin, are listed as generally recognized as safe because of their long history of safe consumption.[25][26]\"", "One thing that occurs is that when you eat it you have an insulin response, but there is no sugar for the insulin to work on. It is thought that this free insulin causes nervous system degeneration. ", "I think you are referring to the new studies that are saying sugar substitutes can change the bacteria in the gut. And, I don't know, lead to obesity and diabetes...But go ahead and punch away! (Please don't give it to kids)\n\n_URL_0_", "There is more research showing that artificial sweeteners have little to no effect than otherwise. The few articles against it are standing against mountains of evidence of previous studies. Splenda is not \"poison\", and neither is aspartame (unless you have PKU). Saccharin on the other hand has had a multitude of negative studies, thus why sweet n low has faded from the market. People often mix the dangers of saccharin with other artificial sweeteners. " ] }

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[ [], [], [ "http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucralose" ], [], [ "http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7521/full/nature13793.html" ], [], [], [], [ "http://www.nature.com/news/sugar-substitutes-linked-to-obesity-1.15938" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "f6pwfl1" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Emergencies. What if there is some sort of accident while you’re driving and you can’t pull over? What if you want to pull over and sleep with the heat on? What if you need to jump start your car alone, hopping in and out. \n\nAlso it’s too easy to trick the car. It also creates another system that could go wrong and cause the car not to start. That’s no good. \n\nWhat if the kids in the back seat undo their belts while you’re sailing along. \n\nIt’s just a terrible idea. Now... breathalyzers connected to the ignition are a good idea!! Hahah" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "f08bj2w" ], "score": [ 16 ], "text": [ "You can hear it without shrinking, you just need to get close with your ears. Maybe the spider has to sit in your ear chewing on its food.\n\nIt is not your size really that determines that, it is more that evolutionary your ear are not designed to hear something like that, since it was never important for your survival.\n\nEdit: Typo" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c701f0t", "c6afkf0", "c6afr8w", "c6afunl", "c6afyo7", "c6ah3jm", "c6akc95", "c6anf2d" ], "score": [ 2, 18, 5, 3, 5, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Hey there.\n\nWould this happen to be a Kaldi's in the St. Louis/Midwest area?\n\nI'll break it down as easy as I can, \n\nDepending the cafe you either have the choice of a 12oz, 160z or 20oz drink, or it's 8oz, 12oz or 16 oz. (Going through some changes, like getting rid of the 20oz size and the names that are counterintuitive.)\n\n**Latte**: Espresso with steamed milk and a small amount of foam (about 20% depending the size.)\n**Cappuccino**: Espresso with steamed milk and more foam than a latte. Traditionally, it will be 1/3 espresso, 1/3 milk and 1/3 foam. When someone orders a 16oz cappuccino, that ratio isn't possible but there's more foam than a latte would have.\n**Espresso**: coffee, in its simplest definition, just brewed under pressure creating an emulsion rather than a solution. \n**Macchiato**: Espresso with a small amount of foam on top.\n\nAlso depending on the cafe there will be some flavor options to add to your coffee, but my suggestion is to try it without first to see if you like it. Hope that helps! Send any other questions our way :) ", "My good friend The Oatmeal can explain it all in [a handy infographic!](_URL_0_)\n\nLets break down your question. Size? I comes in small, medium, and large. Starbucks loves to use Italian names for their sizes because foreign branding works. Ingredients? Ground coffee, milk, sugar, cream and maybe in very select cases [Chicory Root](_URL_1_).\n\nYour different types of drinks depend on how its brewed and what's added to it. You can brew coffee by drip, steam, press and cold brew to name a few but it all comes down to putting water through ground coffee beans. Whats added to it in the process also determines what it is. A Cappuccino is steamed coffee and milk put together. They have weird names because coffee was considered very foreign and a product of the elite so the foreign branding and elite-ish culture stuck around.\n\nEdit: Straight black coffee is typically far too strong for most people to drink. For your first drink I recommend a Café au lait (say it \"Cafe-o-lay), that's standard drip coffee with steamed milk added. It's easy to drink and one of my favorites.", "[Here](_URL_0_) is a helpful chart that shows you what makes up some of the most common coffee drinks. \n\nAnything with \"latte\" in is is going to be espresso and steamed milk. \"con Panna\" means with whipped cream, and in America a \"Caffe au Lait\" is generally a latte made with strong coffee rather than espresso.\n\nAs for the sizes, many places have there own naming scheme, I don't think there is any sort of standardization there. Most places will have their different sizes sitting out on the counter though so you'll know what you're getting. ", "Not a coffee \"expert\" but perhaps that's good because I won't be able to go over your head. Coffee culture is like wine or beer culture: it's about learning the minute differences between roasts, preparation styles and can basically be ignored if you're willing to just experiment to find what you like.\n\nFirst off, ignore any special names for the sizes. Just ask to see the cups if you're not sure how much you want.\n\nThe base is obviously coffee, what is added to it or how it's prepped is what the names represent. Coffee comes in different \"roasts\" — darker roasts being more robust or flavorful and lighter coffees being smoother, sometimes more acidic in the taste.\n\nCoffee comes hot by default and you can ask for \"room\" to add cream or sugar. These things make the coffee's taste a bit easier to handle. \n\nI would say that the other base is espresso. Espresso is to coffee as liquor is to beer. You can get it added to coffee, it's hardcore caffeine and hard to develop a taste for. Now that you've got a primer let's move into the terms.\n\nMocha/other flavors: A Mocha is a latte or cappuccino with chocolate added in. You can also get caramel, vanilla, pumpkin spice— all kinds of different flavors in any thing. They often come in those syrups you see behind the counter.\n\nIced- Coffee is poured over ice. Sometimes stores actually just prepare cold coffee instead.\n\nCappuccino- Steamed milk with coffee, often with flavoring.\n\nLatte- Steamed milk with espresso, often with flavoring. \n\nFrappe- Coffee is blended like a smoothie. Often mixed with something like chocolate syrup to make a \"Mocha Frappe\" or caramel. Sometime you can get mint or \n\nAmericano- Espresso blended with water.\n\nThere are probably some things that I'm missing but you should have a good primer now to work with. The keys with any sort of culture revolving around any of these sorts of ritualistic drinks (beer, wine, coffee) is to ask questions when you're confused and most importantly experiment to find what works for you. \n\nGood luck. \n\n(Edited for grammar.)", "One additional note to make is that there's different types of roasting- the simplest explanation is light/medium/dark (there's a more complicated scale that goes half city/city/city plus/full city/full city plus/vienna/french/italian, but light/medium/dark is the most common one). It's literally light/medium/dark brown beans, depending on how long it was roasted for.\n\nA common misconception is that dark roast coffee is stronger. It isn't. Caffiene content is actually lower, and the strength of the coffee depends on how it was brewed, not the type of beans. This misconception exists because people develop this bizzare macho \"I'm tough because my coffee tastes bad and I drink it anyway\" attitude quite similar to the attitude towards alcohol consumption held by 18-25 year old boys. Darker roasts have a more burnt, bitter taste, which most people don't really care for, but because it's less pleasant to drink, people think it's stronger, and therefore think that drinking it makes them cooler.\n\nMost fancy drinks are based around espresso. It's a more concentrated and stronger brewing method. There's no difference between the beans. Espresso machines require a finer ground than regular drip machines, so lots of pre ground coffee is sold as \"espresso\" if it's been ground more finely. Darker roasts are also more popular for use with espresso, so you'll often see some very dark roast stuff labelled as \"espresso\". However, the beans themselves are the same, and there's nothing stopping you from making very dark roast coffee in a drip machine, or from using light roast coffee in an espresso machine, as long as the grind size is correct for the machine. It's all about personal preference.", "\"Coffee is a drug that makes you talk.\"\n\n~ Leonard Cohen", "ONce bought jamaican blue mountain peaberry beans. That was the best coffee i ever had.", "Walk up and say \"ey ky va medium coffee\"\n\nIt's what I do and it works every time." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://theoatmeal.com/comics/coffee", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicory" ], [ "http://api.ning.com/files/5KVSTLOc0W9-*WiIcAUEkcsRkL8D8-XeA9Uc2W6*6NGzQyyBg5huXZUhV1GqV4ASXrjgerkaYxkOsECV-utMGQ-rTAmhf6On/espressoorcappuccino.gif" ], [], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ciugag6" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "1) This would depend on the gut flora and how they respond to the treatment. A lot would die from the antibiotics, although some do survive. This can cause gastrointestinal distress because the antibiotics essentially change the biodiversity in the intestines. You end up having high abundance of some, low abundance of others, and this really messes with the intraspecies controls that they exert on one another that will promote high population growth of microbes that are normally kept low due to interactions with other microbes. So to answer, the biodiversity changes.\n\n2) The flora can fix itself because you never really 100% kill everything in your gut. If you did, you would have more problems than runny poo because of malnutrition and what not. Also, a lot of food carries these microbes, and when ingested, will re-establish a normal community. If it is a serious concern, then probiotics and things can be taken." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cqdklk0", "cqdkm7o", "cqdkszc", "cqdlt3j" ], "score": [ 2, 3, 5, 2 ], "text": [ "Religiosity in general is in decline in the West. The reasons why are a subject of considerable controversy, to say the least.", "Because people are beginning to think rationally about religion. ", "Expanding religions have historically grown most in times of colonial power structures or population booms. As the people of the western hemisphere have lost new places to expand into and supplant existing cultures with their own, and don't have as many children as the rest of the world, there has ceased to be an avenue for growth. Islam and Hinduism lose plenty of adherents over time, but high birth rates means those religions are still expanding.", "I would guess its not from lack of faith, or disbelief in christianity, but a overwhelming amount of information that church leaders in the western world are some really terrible people. Its really hard to self identify with Pat Roberts types as they unashamedly milk poor people for cash to fly private jets. How do you continue to support a church that is blatently disobeying its own tenants? Ie clergy screwing kids and hiding it With help from superiors?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cboln8g" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It's not like people were putting together catalogs of what was in style for the season, but ideas and styles were communicated visually as well as aurally. Men and women would have both been interested in hair styles, but in the West women's styles were often more elaborate. There is actually a really great record just in the art that each culture left behind, but it is notable that there are much fewer depictions of the working classes than upper classes. I personally like sculpture for hair styles since you get to see things all the way around. I love [this Minoan fresco](_URL_1_) but it's hard to tell exactly what is going on, compared to this [Etruscan sarcophagus.](_URL_0_) One of the more notable hair styles in ancient Roman art is the [bust of a Flavian woman](_URL_2_). I also took [this picture](_URL_3_) at the Getty Villa (which is all antiquities) earlier this year because of how well it shows all the detail, but I'm kicking myself for not getting the information on it.\n\nAnyway, to answer your question, there is a MASSIVE record of hair styles from Mesopotamia to the renaissance. Let me know if there's any culture or time period or region or kind of style (mens/long/braids etc.) that you're more interested in and I'll try to find you some sources! " ] }

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[ [ "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Louvre%2C_sarcofago_degli_sposi_00.JPG", "http://www.ancientgreece.com/media/img/Minoan_Queens_Fresco.jpg", "http://www.xtimeline.com/__UserPic_Large/36744/evt090926115000072.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/JuhX1sq.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c6rd4os", "c6rdj2s", "c6rdtai" ], "score": [ 3, 6, 2 ], "text": [ "I dont think the slightest infection will just outright kill them that seems extremely wrong, seeing as how as babies we are exposed to thousands of microbes and build immunities to them as they grow.", "They get it from mom.\n\nVaginal birthed babies aspirate as they pass through, breast fed babies get it as they nurse (from the skin), and they otherwise acquire it in the classic stick-everything-in-your-mouth stage. ", "This was asked yesterday. I provided an answer here: _URL_0_" ] }

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[ [], [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11upf3/where_does_the_bacteria_in_our_bodies_originally/c6psmkc" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c6sll0c" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Warning. I am not a graphics researcher so my answer is an educated guess. I would say that we aren't even close.\n\nPhoto realistic stills are still very difficult. Graphics research would be a lot less exciting if all they did was make existing systems render faster. Advances in the way we handle light are still being made (I think). This is critically important for making things like skin and hair look correct. Then we have to deal with physics engines, which are still extremely rough approximations of the real world. Getting rigid objects to behave correctly is tricky, let alone fluids. While this is partially a product of our limited resources when rendering at 60fps, remember that Brave and Tangled were considered to be huge tech achievements in how they handled hair. Those stills are rendered by supercomputers working for a long time. Getting the render time down to 0.02 seconds is not easy.\n\nI think it is tempting to say that CGI in movies is photo realistic but I don't think we can say that yet. Remember when you saw the star wars prequels and they looked amazing? Look again and notice how far we have come since then. It is difficult to imagine how much we can improve our tech. The recent hulk movies are another good example.\n\nYou could probably cheat a bit and make a game in an environment that was easy to handle. Limited light sources along with hard and smooth surfaces are much easier to handle than grass, skin, and water. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d2kvrb9" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Molecules are really small and difficult to deal with on an individual basis. It isn't like you can just strain them out like with a sieve." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ckrb13m", "ckrbauu", "ckrbcx4", "ckrbd0a", "ckrbfoo", "ckrc309", "ckrc3yg", "ckrc4zj", "ckrc5j7", "ckrc5jf", "ckrcq8e", "ckrctjf", "ckrcy0y", "ckrd23a", "ckrd4go", "ckrd62v", "ckrdpri", "ckrdy9k", "ckrdzf7", "ckrdzqy", "ckre6h4", "ckrf9g3", "ckrfk0o", "ckrflgk", "ckrg3o9", "ckrg3s0", "ckrgwx7", "ckrieoq", "ckrijfs", "ckripk7", "ckrk86t", "ckrkfdf", "ckrkhdb", "ckrlexr", "ckrmfc6", "ckrmlvd", "ckrmmyy", "ckrnlsx", "ckrocji", "ckrq6p2" ], "score": [ 15, 17, 4, 3, 26, 3, 14, 3, 4, 47, 9, 8, 5, 11, 2, 2, 2, 3, 6, 5, 12, 2, 4, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 5, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Two questions:\n\n1) are you familiar with how prostitution and the economy of it worked in Rome? What would be the cost if a prostitute? Were they individuals or were they housed in a brothel?\n\n2) how would a poet go about seeing sponsors for his work? I'm thinking like Catullus or Virgil or the like. Would a rich patrician support them in exchange for laudatory words?", "Lets say I want to buy a house. Was there anything similar to the concept of a mortgage that I could get to finance my purchase?\n\nIf so, how did mortgages and other securities function? I mean, at its core a mortgage is really just a loan using the property itself as collateral, so it doesn't seem like an alien concept, but was there any of the complexity that we have now present in that part of the financial system?\n\nAlso, how available would this be to someone?", "how much of a thing was free enterprise in ancient rome? Would we recognize the economy if were dropped from 2014 America into 100 AD Rome?", "1. How much does the Roman roads benefits the economic of the Empire? \n2. How does the people in Rome get rich? Does being a general in post-Marius Reformation helps?", "A few questions that've been bugging me lately. \n\n1. To what degree was the high Roman Empire a \"capitalist\" economy? I understand there is a world of hurt involved in defining what capitalism is, or what constitutes a capitalist economy, as well as the fact that clearly the bulk of the economy of the whole empire did not operate primarily from a capitalist/wage-labor mode of production, but I am interested in your personal perspective on to what extent it existed and where. \n\n2. What is the current thinking (and who are currently the major historians/archaeologists dealing in the subject matter) on what role the Roman city played on the economy? I believe you've mentioned to me that the idea of the Roman city as a parasitic entity (I think this is Moses Finley) is out of date. I'm wondering who replaced Finley, and who I should be reading as of now?\n\n3. How different would you categorize the late Roman economy (i.e. that suggested by Wickham) from the high Roman economy? I know that the late Roman economy seemed marked by greater command after Diocletian, with much revolving around the twin grain doles of Carthage-Rome and Alexandria-Constantinople. Whereas it seems the high Roman economy was much more free floating, though much revolving around the central wheel spoke of the city of Rome itself. \n\n4. Which would mean a corollary question (I have asked this previously, but I'm not sure if I got your thoughts on it), how necessary was Rome itself to the high Roman economy? Could provincial markets exist robustly on trade to other far flung provinces without Rome as the hub?\n\nThanks a bunch. ", "I was just thinking about these questions in the context of Caesar's (and others') land laws: in brief: \n\n1. Caesar's law redistributed \"public\" land. Does this mean the land in question had no private owner prior to redistribution? How did this land come to be public in the first place? What was it used for if it had no private owner? \n\n2. If I recall, other laws redistributed land in *latifundia* -- that is, large privately owned parcels of land. Is my understanding of the term and the laws correct? How was that accomplished? Was there a concept in Rome analogous to eminent domain? \n\nThank you in advance!", "1. Was there a middle class?\n\n2. When the Romans conquered a territory, how did they go about integrating it into the economy? How did they make sure currency was distributed for example?\n\n3. What did the Romans export, and to whom?", "if I understand the Roman's view on economics, they had no concept of debt? Or was it interest? How did that function when the government was low on funds? No money, just debase the coinage until you get what you need? What about a private person, how would they come up with funds to purchase something?", "How would someone receive the grain dole? Was there a kind of application process for it? Were there any concerns in the Roman world about \"welfare fraud\"?", "This is something I've long wondered:\n\nDuring the height of the Empire, Rome had a population close to a million people, and most of those people lived in apartment blocks. They presumably didn't have any arable land as part of their personal property. So what did those people do all day? Did they work 9-5s like we do today? Did they leave the city to work in agriculture? Did they just not work in an organized fashion?\n\nTL;DR What was the typical job of a city dweller like?", "1. I've heard it said that one of the important differences between economies of the ERE an its western counterpart was the relative proximity of the former to other wealthy empires (Persia, India, China etc). How true is this? It seems to me, at least, that long distance trade could only be in very luxury items and thus would only affect the super-rich, if anyone at all. Bulk items (grain, livestock, wine etc) which were the bread and butter of the Roman economy couldn't really be transported except via the Mediterranean and its river systems given the technology limitations of its day. So basically I just want to know how important was external trade for the Roman economy.\n\n2. How efficient was the Roman economy and did it degrade substantially as a result of the transformation from the predominantly middle-income, family farm model, to a more plantation-oriented one with the super-rich landowners and poor tenant farmers, with seemingly almost nothing in between them. \n\n3. How developed was banking in the roman world? Of course there were private lendors. But say I am a mercant/businessman/landowner operating in Italy and North Africa, possibly Hispania. What options do I have? Can I write a check to someone without needing to physically transfer gold coins from one place to another? How did Roman banking compare to medieval Italian ones? How were ledgers maintained?", "How flexible was the labour force? Were most people highly trained from childhood/adolescence and at risk of unemployment? Or would the average worker change their job based on economic changes?", "Thank you for the AMA.\n\nWhat sorts of data are available on wages, prices, incomes, and land rents during Roman times? (To fix a time scale, say 100 BCE through 500 CE, but most interestingly for me roughly 80 CE to 180 CE.)\n\nTo what extent was the Roman military an important element in building infrastructure, both in the core and on the periphery?\n\nIs there anywhere I can go to get a monetary history of ancient Rome? Basically a discussion of the stock of money and the level of prices from (say) 100 BCE to 500 CE? ", "David Graeber, in his book \"Debt: the first 5000 years\", characterizes the Roman state economy as a \"military-mining-slavery complex\". I'll summarize his argument below (I hope fairly) for any readers who are not familiar with it. \n\nMy question is, is this interpretation of events accurate? If so, how large was the \"money\" economy, ie based on coin, compared to the non-money economy? How did exchange work without money during the Roman Empire?\n\n___________________________________________\nGraeber argues that Rome introduced coinage as a kind of \"trick\" to feed it's massive armies: By paying the army in coin and requiring the taxes to be paid in coin, the elite obliged all tax payers to find something to do that soldiers would pay them for, whether supplying goods or services. This obligation did away with the need of supporting a vast system of logistics to feed otherwise hungry soldiers, and allowed for the provision of far larger armies than would otherwise be possible. These armies were engaged in constant expansion and enslavement of subject peoples, who worked the mines, from which the metal for coinage came from in the first place. ", "The Roman Empire is often touted as being a progressive high-point on the historical arc of the ancient world. Are there any instances of progressive populist tendencies in Roman economic policy? How would leadership respond to a large disturbance in agricultural production caused by disease or conflict? ", "How did the Roman economy help unite the empire as a whole, did domestic trade help bring the empire together? \n\nDid other places 'Romanize' to take part in the Roman economy, or did many pre-empire market customs persist in trade? \n\nHow much Roman trade took place with foreign markets was it a significant part of economies, did it only really affect frontier provinces or the empire as a whole?", "To what degree was there a concentration of wealth to fewer and fewer individuals and if so what part did this play in the fall of the Roman empire?", "Your comment about public amenities being funded by tolls makes me wonder-did the Roman world have a comparable institution to the _waqf_(that is, a legal mechanism for endowing a public amenity or charitable service in an inalienable manner with a specific source of revenue)?", "In the first century BC, after the end of the Cimbrian War and up to the Principate:\n\n* How widespread was currency and currency use in rural areas, especially between farmers independent of the larger latifundia? \n* I remember hearing that an urban prole might subsist almost entirely on donations from various patrons, even spending their mornings going practically door-to-door. What forms did patronage take between rural patrons and clients (for example, between Pompey Strabo and his Picentine clients)?\n* How much of the Italian agricultural sector was dedicated to the growing of grains, versus \"non-staples\" like olives, wines and livestock? \n\nAs for Rome herself:\n\n* Were there licenses required to run businesses within Rome, or any other limitations that we know of? What about craftsmen in general? \n* Were there any economic limitations to the Pomerium? I.e. were there any trades or crafts that were illegal to ply inside/outside of its boundary?\n* Was the Tiber ever used to transport goods to and/or from Rome?", "How liquid was capital in the Roman economy? How would one go about cashing in one's property, or say borrowing against anticipated revenue, if most wealth was tied up in land and its products? \n\nHow much did Romans understand about the law of supply and demand? Were there large price spikes or drops in markets, and were those taken advantage of by speculators? ", "So, I've been thinking of something to ask you about, and I have something!\n\nWhen the Romans absorbed other polities, be that via the medium of conquest or peaceful annexation, by default that includes inheriting the pre-existing economic system within those polities. Are important socio-economic roles consistently usurped by Romans in their new acquisitions? Were those economies Romanised over time, to fit with the expectations of Roman economic oversight (and maybe ethics)? Or would places like Nabataea, or Utica, or Massalia have retained distinctly individual organisation? ", "I've heard alot of theories regarding the Roman taxsystem and how it played a role in the downfall of the empire, that the size of the empire made it impossible to collect taxes due to rampant corruption and rebellions over taxation. \n\nHow was taxes collected in the Roman empire and how effective was the collection? \n\nDo you have any examples of what type of taxes that was collected (salestax, tariffs, incometax etc) and high/low it was? \n\nHow did the structure of collection system look like? Did they use local rulers to collect in client states and conquered areas who then later paid a % of it to Rome or did the Roman senate/the Emperor appoint someone from Rome?\n", "I had heard that the amount of early Roman coins had a lot of gold in them and that over time, less and less gold went into the coins with hardly any gold in them at the collapse of the western empire. Is that true? ", "Interesting AMA!\n\nCan you explain briefly how their currency was developed and what they defined as wealth?", "Thanks for hosting this! I have a bit of knowledge in feudalism, but translating that into an understanding of the Romans can get a bit fuzzy.\n\nHow much control did peasants/farmers have in in their labor? Were their crops or construction projects dictated by government officials / nearby patricians, or were they largely just restricted by tradition and necessity?", "Was there an organized black market of any kind? What objects would it sell? How did the empire deal with it? ", "Interesting idea for an AMA. Thanks for doing this. I have two questions, both about physical currency:\n\n1. Who controlled the money supply? Was there an official \"mint\" that produced all of the coins in the empire, or did different areas mint their own local currency? Was there an idea (like today) of limiting the amount of coins in circulation?\n\n2. To what degree was counterfeit currency a problem? I mean, we have examples of counterfeiting from ancient China to the Aztecs, so I assume there had to be some. Do we know what methods were used? Did they have controls or safeguards in place to prevent or detect counterfeit coins? Were there specific laws in place to punish people for doing this?\n\nForgive me if these questions reflect a gross misunderstanding of Roman economics, since my knowledge on the topic is close to zero.", "Was there anything resembling medieval guilds or later trade associations in Roman times?", "Thanks for doing this AMA!\n\nWho was the richest Roman ever. I was thinking crassus but I heard that emperors controlled insane amounts of the GDP at times.\n\nAlso when was Roma at her most economically stable/rich. Was it during the reign of the Antonines?\n\nWhat is your favourite aspect of the Roman economy?\n\nThanks!", "Thank you for doing this AMA; this is such a fascinating topic! \n\n1. What was the nature of economic interaction between urban and rural zones? \n\n2. What was settlement like outside of Roman cities? Would most rural inhabitants have been tenant farmers, or small freeholders? What were the mechanics of this type tenancy? \n\n3. To what degree did “regional specialization” exist within the differing regions of the Empire?\n\n4. What resources would you recommend as an introduction to the Roman economy?\n", "What do you think of the level of monetization? I've met several numismatists who argue 1) ancient governments including Rome were not interested in coins as primarily an economic tool, and 2) most people would not have dealt very often with coins. I have a hard time buying either of these claims.", "1. What were the major advancements in agricultural technology during the course of Rome?\n2. Did the extensive use of slaves damage the economy with less jobs open to plebs? I believe that Caeser tried to introduce reforms to make it so every farm had a certain percentage of free men working.\n3. How did the Romans manage to work out taxes for such a vast empire? Did they delegate it to governors and if so then what was the extent of the corruption?\n4. Finally I was told by my teacher that Southern italy's economy was permamently damaged due to Hannibal's scorched earth tactics is this true?\n\nThanks for all the time you are giving :)", "Were there jewelers? If so, what kinds of people would be able to afford even the most basic jewelry, and where did it come from?", "Hi,\nthanks for making this AMA!\n\n**Introduction**\n\nCurrently I write a paper about the inclosure of the commons in England in the Late Medieval an stumbled upon the social stratification of England. So I'm also interested in the poulation of the roman empire. There is at least one point in english medival history where we have very good numbers for the number of people who where slaves, cottagers, tenants-in-chief, freeholder and all the other kinds of dependent people. ([Domesday Books of 1086](_URL_0_)).\n\n**Question**\n\n*Do we have some kind of social statistics of a certain point of time of the whole Roman Empire?* How many people belonged to the nobilty (of Rome), were slaves, were of Latin/Itallic origin, were foreigners, were soldiers, were freeholders of land ect. \n\nAdditional Question: Is there a book you can recommend about this topic?\n\n", "Ooooh, I've got a question I've been wondering about for ages! I'm curious what the economic fallout of the Punic Wars was like. My understanding is that Carthage was the biggest trading hub in the western Mediterranean, and I'm wondering what happened to all that port traffic after it fell. Was there a net decrease in trade across the Mediterranean? Did the merchants just all start operating out of a different home port? And if trade did decrease, did it ever pick back up to its pre-war levels? Actually, do we even have any data to answer these questions?", "Hope I'm not too late to this thread! I have two questions, each with multiple parts. I hope they're not too tedious! \n\nI remember having read that Rome, as a city, had an big issue with chronic unemployment. How large was the segment of the population that was directly dependent on the *panem* part of *panem et circenses*? And was this unemployment issue also a problem in other large cities of the Empire? And when the empire began to decline and the capital was moved, was this problem still present? I know it was an issue in Constantinople, but was there a similar problem in Mediolanum and, later, Ravenna? \n\nYou point out that the Roman Empire had an economy mostly based on agriculture. I remember reading that many wealthy Romans had large agricultural estates, which were often located in many different places, as wealthy Romans liked to diversify their portfolios. However, how did they stop things such as embezzlement or theft when they were absent from such disparate estates? Even if they had overseers and administrators, I imagine it must be difficult to make sure they're not taking advantage of you. So my question is: What was the state of financial/fiscal law enforcement and how did it work?", "What regions were the most important for the economy of the Roman empire (agriculture, mining, slavery, tools ...)? Who did own the ships for the commerce in the Empire (individuals, family, association...)?", "Could you recommend a good book(s) on this subject? Seems quite fascinating.", "How did the trades work? Were there just small shops with one or two craftsmen, or big factories with more? How were people trained? Were the craftsmen self-employed or might they just work in a shop owned by a senator? \n\nAlso how were grand public building projects like aquaducts or temples organized? Were there contractors who submitted bids like today? Would the work be done by free men or slaves?", "Was mass slavery beneficial to the economy at large at any point or did it cause more unemployment problems than it solved? I feel I should know this so I can prepare for the day when robots are doing all the future jobs. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "clnbjcc", "clnhmw4" ], "score": [ 1743, 311 ], "text": [ "As it should be when connecting tire companies with restaurant reviews, the Michelin Guide's popularity started to rise with the innovation of the \"motor tourist,\" the vehicle-toting traveler. The Michelin Tyre company made its first *Guide Michelin France* in 1900. The first Michelin Guides were just driver's handbooks, with tips for vehicle maintenance and nearby petrol stations. These pocket Michelin Guides were given out freely for \"l'instruction sur l'emploi des pneus Michelin pour voitures et automobile\" (instructions for the use of Michelin tires on cars and automobiles). The ultimate goal was to reassure new drivers that, even if they left town in their new motor vehicles, they could still find petrol stations, mechanics, and even post offices. As Kory Olston points out in her study of *Michelin* maps, the guide's popularity was indebted to the rise of motor tourism in turn-of-the-century France. The *Michelin* maps were designed differently than standard travel guides; town plans were relatively sparse and two-tone, with major roadways taking the focus instead of urban landmarks. The guide catered to bourgeois drivers, offering a \"more restrained number of tourist venues\" with a \"clarity of display to make it easier for their readers to traverse unfamiliar municipalities easily.\"\n\nIn 1926, these \"tourist venues\" finally included restaurants for motor tourists to frequent on their holidays in the countryside. The *Guide* of 1926 included a \"restaurant star,\" or a single star to denote a particularly special dining experience. A decade later, the second and third stars showed up, along with a criteria: one star for \"Une très bonne table dans sa catégorie\" (a good site in its category), two for \"Table excellente, mérite un détour\" (an excellent site worth a detour), and three for \"Une des meilleures tables, vaut le voyage\" (one of the best sites, worthy of a trip). Within three decades, the *Guide* had gone from a mechanic's handbook to a special purchase for rich motor tourists looking to get the best out of their journeys.\n\nThe three-star feat is more difficult to explain. One possible reason for its \"impossibility\" may come from the fact that the third star didn't exist during the WWII era. During the War, the *Guide* was simply reprinted from its 1939 edition, and then post-war shortages forced Michelin to put a halt on three-star ratings until 1950. *Guide* critics are anonymous, so there's not much testimony on the elusive three-star review--but we can guess that the restaurants that *do* have three stars have supreme quality of ingredients, consistency between visits, and head chefs with dedicated personalities.\n\nSources:\n\nKory Olson, *Maps for a New Kind of Tourist: The First Guides Michelin France (1900–1913)*. Available [here](_URL_2_).\n\n*Michelin Guide History*. Provence and Beyond. [Here](_URL_1_).\n\n*The Michelin Guide: Over 100 Editions and a Century of History*. ViaMichelin. [Here](_URL_0_).\n\n", "It's also worth noting that Michelin is a family-owned company with a very peculiar business philosophy. They believe that their core product is mobility, rather than tires, and they have showed time and again a strong commitment to promoting easier ways to travel, which in the early 20th century was indeed a main obstacle to the auto industry as people did not projected themselves traveling long distances on a daily basis. The Guides were intended to facilitate road travelling; as were a series of road milestones that Michelin helped installed in France throughout most of the 20th century in order for drivers to locate themselves in their maps. Another example was their decision in the late 40's to invest heavily in the radial tire, which was consider a more reliable tire as it lasted longer and was safer than the industry's standards for the time. To many competitors, the radial was a nonsensical investment, as it implied redesigning factories for a product that would last longer and therefore sell less. The company has retained this approach and in many ways it helps explain why a small family company in the middle-of-French-nowhere could become a world leader. " ] }

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[ [ "http://www.viamichelin.co.uk/tpl/mag6/art200903/htm/tour-saga-michelin.htm", "http://www.beyond.fr/food/michelin-guide-history.html", "http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03085691003747142#/doi/full/10.1080/03085691003747142" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d1qnx5i", "d1qvfp9", "d1r2jic", "d1r77qz", "d1rb7rh", "d1rkaou" ], "score": [ 22, 16, 16, 4, 6, 6 ], "text": [ "On the main square of the old centre of the Sicilian city of Syracuse stands the [Duomo di Siracusa](_URL_0_). On the outside, it is a beautiful 18th century High Sicilian Baroque church. \n\nOn the inside, it is a [Greek temple](_URL_1_).\n\nThe columns that still support the roof of the church date to the 5th century BC. The building was originally a temple to Athena; it is mentioned in the writings of Plato (who lived in Syracuse for a while) and Cicero.", "One of the more interesting examples of this, encompassing both my hobby and day job, is the case of the HMS Revenge and *Royal Sovereign*. Construction of the ships started in late 1913 and early 1914, and they were finished in 1916. They saw service in both World Wars. *Revenge* fought at Jutland, while *Royal Sovereign* missed it. In the Second World War, *Revenge* saw service escorting convoys, while *Royal Sovereign* was transferred to the Soviet Union as the battleship *Arkhangelsk*. In 1944, *Revenge* was disarmed and used as a training ship, while *Royal Sovereign* would be returned to the UK in 1949. The ships were both scrapped in 1948-49. However, much of the machinery from their gun turrets would be saved. In 1949, Bernard Lovell at the University of Manchester wanted to build a massive radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire. This telescope had to be steerable, so they needed two big motors to rotate the telescope in elevation. The turret motors from *Royal Sovereign* and *Revenge* were cheap and easy to acquire, given that they were lying around after the battleships were scrapped. The telescope ended up being built around these two motors, and they're still in place in the telescope today.", "The oldest building in Virginia actually dates to the late 15th century. Not possible, you say? It was originally constructed in Lancashire, England but was carefully dismantled, shipped, and reconstructed in Richmond in the 1920s. So this [English Tudor manor](_URL_0_) is now a 17th century museum in America.", "The Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg was transformed into a [Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism](_URL_0_) in the Soviet period. Needless to say, it did not present religion positively. It was transformed back into a church in the post-Soviet period. Now people line up for ages to kiss the Orthodox icon (Our Lady of Kazan) within the church.", "Since moving to Brussels, I've noticed quite a few surprising uses made of older buildings here. There's a even a verb made up from the city's name that designates buildings whose interior has been exchanged, leaving only the historical facades intact.\n\nA good example of such change is the former hippodrome, the [Hippodrome de Boitfort](_URL_2_) near the forest, which I visited only to find a golf course on the former racecourse. The golf course was founded in 1988 (featuring nine holes), while the hippodrome itself goes back [to 1875](_URL_4_).\n\nI was also impressed to find the [Comic Strip Museum](_URL_3_) inside a large building by famous Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta. It was designed in 1905 and originally housed the textile department store *Magasins Waucquez*. The building was left to abandon since the 1920's, and only saved through an initiative started by an architect and a few well-known cartoonists (including Hergé) after 1980. Similarly the current [Music Instrument Museum](_URL_1_) is housed in another Art Nouveau building from 1899 , the former Old England department store.\n\nTo finish up I thought I'd mention the world's only streetcar traversing a forest, the [tram 44](_URL_0_). Its rails were originally built in 1897 to connect two parts of an international exhibition, the palais du Cinquantenaire and the château de Tervueren – all three constructions started by Leopold II. The rails are still in use today, using historical streetcars in summer.", "This isn't that interesting, but I have to talk about it because I was there yesterday.\n\nAfter the USS *Nautilus* was decommissioned she was painstakingly preserved and turned into a living [museum of naval history.](_URL_0_) Obviously the boat is small so it's built around a whole complex, but the *Nautilus* is definitely a centerpiece.\n\nOne interesting thing about the museum is that it's run directly by the U.S. Navy, which of course has access to the entire naval history of the nation. It's a very educating visit, even for someone like me who knows too much about submarines already." ] }

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[ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/features/trivia" ]

[ [ "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/SiracusaCathedral-pjt1.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Syracuse#/media/File:0778_-_Siracusa_-_Duomo_-_Navata_destra_-_Foto_Giovanni_Dall%27Orto_-_22-May-2008.jpg" ], [], [ "http://www.agecrofthall.com/View.aspx?page=home" ], [ "http://saint-petersburg.guide/didyouknow/kazansky_cathedral_st_petersburg_russia_museum_of_atheism_in_soviet_russia" ], [ "http://www.simplonpc.co.uk/Tram_Brussels/7500_090320-3038_b.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Musical_Instrument_Museum_exterior.JPG", "http://fr.academic.ru/pictures/frwiki/80/Pesage_de_Boitsfort.JPG", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Comic_Strip_Center#/media/File:Etage_MBBD.jpg", "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-04TONFe_q_w/VW6U-IsL0II/AAAAAAAAP_k/3ttj2qbjV_k/s1600/PBIBL-PH-BRUX-PATR-Hippodrome%2Bde%2BBoitsfort-Compo-13.png" ], [ "http://www.submarinemuseum.org/aboutus.shtml" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c4rb0xw", "c4rbdus" ], "score": [ 2, 5 ], "text": [ "Also how do they measure up as an alternative roofing material?", "Depends on the type of panels. For crystalline Silicon (most common), energy payback times (how long it takes to produce the energy required to make it) are a few years. Silicon is the second most abundant element on the planet, so supply isn't really an issue. The problem for c-Si is centered around cost -- growing crystalline wafers is very expensive. There are a variety of other technologies which could replace or improve on c-Si. These are all in varies stages of development from on the market now to a decade or more from commercial manufacture." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "duockve", "duodv0y", "duoqbiz", "duoqpza", "duouw92" ], "score": [ 39, 344, 4, 4, 4 ], "text": [ "Yes it takes more energy to run with 4 limbs vs 2. This is one reason that humans are such good endurance sprinters. Being able to run 15+ miles non stop is fairly uncommon in the animal kingdom, where as humans in good shape can do that fairly consistently. ", "The really simple answer is that humans run more efficiently because we let gravity do a lot more of the work; when we go forward we're basically putting one foot out and falling forward, then pulling ourselves forward and repeating the process with the other foot. When quadrapedal animals run, they need to propel themselves forward with their front and back legs; the advantages of this are that they can put more of their total muscle mass into running and you get more sources of speed, and run faster/quicker; pretty much any quadraped can out-sprint a human. But humans are the undisputed champions of distance-running on Earth, partly because their run is more energy efficient.\n\nThe other thing that helps us run, just as a sidenote, is the fact that our bodies are really good at not overheating. A cheetah for instance can only keep up their vaunted 60 mph run-speed for a very short distance without overheating and exhausting themselves. But our ability to have the airflow of our forward motion wick heat away by evaporating sweat off of us is one of nature's best heat regulation mechanisms, and allows for humans to run for hours on end without stopping, when properly trained.", "Running on 4 legs is more efficient, and allows for different gaits at different speeds.\n\nHumans exceed at running long distances because we excel at removing excess heat from our bodies via our superior ability to sweat.\nSweating is the only thing we are truely better at physically when compared to anything else in the animal kingdom. We can chase animals to death not because of good technique, but the ability to stave off exhaustion.", "Efficiency depends on the animal, actually. Animals that run all the time, horses and deer for example, have tendons in their legs that act like bouncy springs, conserving quite a bit of energy. On the other hand, bears for example, lots of muscles in their limbs, but more for killing prey and climbing trees, not as efficient at running as a horse.\n\nTo answer your own question, what takes more energy, running on 4 legs or 2, take an animal that can do both, bear or gorilla for example, and ask yourself do they prefer to run on 2 legs or 4?", "Related: \"Persistance Hunt\" where human hunters literally run thier prey into exhaustion. \n_URL_0_ \n(Bonus David Attenborough narration)" ] }

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[ [], [], [], [], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "clk1h6j" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "Ever try and do a push up with someone sitting on your back? (Don't do that.) It's kinda like that.\n\nExternal pressure modulates *where* the boiling point is, the mechanism is still the same, but it's where the thermodynamic scale tips in favor of phase change. A high pressure provides a lot of surface force onto the liquid (though molecular collisions) which force the liquid molecules to be of even higher thermal energy to escape into the vapor phase.\n\nYou can do this at home with some water and a pump and a sealed jar of water. As you lower the pressure, the water will begin to boil at room temperature. Here's a chart of this for water: \n_URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Water_vapor_pressure_graph.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d3s6yvi" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Just to clarify, the thing that makes split-brain patients interesting is that they can highlight cognitive difficulties (things to do with thoughts being broken), which we were not aware of prior to these experiments. The reason we were not aware of these difficulties is that they do not manifest in daily life. You will find very few, or maybe no, situations where information is coming into just one of your two sense organs.\n\nWikipedia has a really nice article on [split-brain patients](_URL_1_), and there are descriptions of case studies. YouTube also has a [video of one of these patients being tested](_URL_2_) by [Michael Gazzaniga](_URL_0_). It's only ten minutes and worth a watch." ] }

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[ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8" ]

[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gazzaniga", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain#Case_studies_of_split-brain_patients", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfGwsAdS9Dc" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "czphwf0" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "It is technically called Lunar New Years because, as you know, the calender is based off the phases of the moon. It is commonly called Chinese New Years in the west because \"white people\" first heard of this from the Chinese immigrants who came during the California Gold Rush of 1849 to 1860s. Chinese New Years has been changed to be known as \"Lunar New Years\" now because Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese culture also still/used to celebrate this Lunar New Year.\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "duacc1y" ], "score": [ 21 ], "text": [ "The answer to both your questions is yes. People do have colonic bacterial ‘fingerprints’, but they are not static and change over time depending on a multitude of factors. The bacterial biome can change the odor of a persons flatulence but that is also dependent on diet, illness, etc. For example the smells associated with a *C. diff* infection are quite unique. \n\nThe gut biome is usually initially colonized during birth as the baby passes through the vaginal canal. C-sections are of course a different mechanism. You inherit fart smells from your mother in most cases. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e759oie" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "It is about their purpose. The foam in soaps and shampoos is part of what makes it able to clean the dirt and oils from the hair and scalp. Conditioner is there to add back in some of what is lost since not all those oils are required to be stripped away as part of that cleaning, so they are made differently, conditioner is not a soap." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cl8aavi" ], "score": [ 14 ], "text": [ "With very few exceptions, air has a certain level of water vapor in it, which is what we refer to as humidity. Air can only hold so much water vapor in it until it is completely saturated, and this is what we mean when we say the (relative) humidity is 40%: currently, the air has 40% of the maximum amount of vapor it can hold. The amount of vapor air can hold is dependent on temperature and warmer air can hold more vapor while colder air can hold less.\n\nA related quantity is called the dew point, which is the temperature where the relative humidity (RH) would become 100% (the air cannot hold any more water). So if the temperature is 70F and 50% relative humidity, the dew point is 60F, which means if we cooled the air to 60F without adding or removing any water vapor from it, the RH would be 100%, which makes sense since cold air can't hold as much vapor as warm air.\n\nSo when you take your 70F/50% air and run it through your air conditioner, it is cooled to well below the dew point. Since you can't have greater than 100% RH, that means that some of the water vapor has to come out of the air. When it gets pumped into the room, it gradually warms back up to 70F, but since it lost some water vapor in the air conditioner, your relative humidity will now be lower.\n\nSimilarly, when you heat air, you're raising the amount of water vapor it can hold without actually adding any vapor to it, so your RH will go down.\n\nAs an aside, natural gas heaters produce water vapor as a product of combustion, but I don't know if that vapor makes it into the heated air or is condensed/exhausted elsewhere.\n\nEDIT: Corrected a dew point typo" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dqgiozc", "dqgjwy3" ], "score": [ 14, 3 ], "text": [ "/u/cthulhushrugged is right on here. The question can't be answered, and if it could, it would be an anthropological question just as much as a geo-climactic one. \n\nA note on the latter, though: the Danube watersheds were largely primeval forests in prehistory (though this is a gigantic region and can't really be so easily categorized in any period). The others you mention (Nile, Mesopotamia, China, Indus) were naturally more predisposed to farming for surplus, which is the key to \"getting ahead\" (as Diamond might put it). \n\nAnd a second note: as attractive as they are, arguments based on geographical determinism are almost always flawed. They work well on paper, but not in practice. ", "As someone who studies Ancient Mesopotamia, I might be able to give a partial answer to the question.\n\nThe area that is known as the \"Fertile Crescent\" comprises the Levante, as well as the Taurus and Zagros Mountains. this area contained perfect conditions to allow hunter-gatherers to transition from migrating tribes into permanent settlements. Marc Van De Mieroop states, \"The process took several millennia and involved the domestication of plants, primarily cereals, and of animals. The archaeological sites where we see these changes happen are usually located at the borders of different ecological zones, whose occupants took advantage of varied plant resources and hunted different animals.\" The idea is that the Fertile Crescent sat in a zone where dry-farming (rain-fed agriculture) could take place. But the other essential ingredient is the availability of domesticable plants and animals.\n\nArcheological digs at the city of Jericho show a city wall dating back to around 9000 BCE. It is one of the earliest sites showing a transition from moving with the supply of food and water to a permanent community. Jericho had plentiful fresh water and plants and animals hunter-gatherers could use for food. Van De Meiroop again states, \"Selective hunting of wild animals also replaced previous indiscriminate killing. People culled wild herds to procure a proper age and gender balance, and protected them from natural predators.\" This is the slow transition from hunting and gathering into a more sedentary life. These tribes no longer needed to move with the herd as the availability of resources allowed the tribes around the Fertile Crescent to settle down permanently. \n\nIt was a slow process. \"Direct control of the food supply via cereal agriculture was achieved through a series of probably inadvertent steps from the eleventh to seventh millennia as humans became more practiced at sowing, husbandry, harvesting, and storage.\" The tribes of the Fertile Crescent stumbled onto an area perfect to experiment and perfect the tools necessary to form permanent communities. \n\nEssentially, it is not only the fertile soil and climate that determined where civilizations began but the availability of domesticable plants and animals. \n\nBibliography:\n\nVan De Mieroop, Marc. *A History of the Ancient Near East*. West Sussex: Blackwell, 2016. \n\nAn interesting read:\n\nWilkinson, TJ. \"The Structure and Dynamics of Dry-Farming States in Upper Mesopotamia [and Comments\nand Reply].\" *Current Anthropology* 35 No. 5 (Dec. 1994): 483-520" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d7qxzz7", "d7qzazz", "d7rjthd" ], "score": [ 8, 19, 4 ], "text": [ "[Here's a great thread on this topic, which includes an answer from yours truly.](_URL_0_)", "While this might be a bit of a stretch since in the end it is billed as an Allied military victory, I think the Battle of Anzio and its after effects failed to accomplish their primary objectives.\n\nAt the end of 1943/beginning of 1944 the Allies were bogged down assaulting the Gustav line, a series of German defensive works that spanned the Italian peninsula west to east, with its anchor in the town of Monte Casino. Churchill's idea was to land two infantry divisions to the northwest of the Gustav line near the city of Anzio. According to Rick Attkinson's book *The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944* this attack appeared to demonstrate two benefits, it would either force the Germans to divert troops from the Gustav line, making an Allied breakthrough there more likely, or the troops at the Anzio beachhead could advance inland and trap the defenders between several Allied Divisions.\n\nThe first landings took place in January 22, 1944, and at first things looked great. The Allies managed to land 36,000 soldiers and 3,200 vehicles without any casualties at all and the American General in command at the beach, John Lucas, quickly consolidated the beach head. Unfortunately, after this, things just got worse and worse for the Allies. With only two infantry divisions and no supporting armor, it was important for Lucas to advance rapidly inland, as the Anzio beachhead was surrounded by high ground, perfect for the defensive mastermind Albert Kesselring, who commanded the German forces in Italy. According to Lloyd Clark’s book *Anzio: The Friction of War. Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944.* Lucas considered his force too small for his mission, and worried about Kesselring’s inevitable counter-attacks that would feature heavy artillery and tanks, he also declined the aid offered to him by Italian partisans, who claimed they could help his divisions navigate the local, hilly terrain. \n\nThus, Lucas spent too much time consolidating the Anzio beach head, and Kesselring could move minimal reinforcements to the hills and mountains surrounding it, and a long battle of attrition that resembled the stalemate at Monte Casino grinded on for about four months. In the end, the Allies took the town and Abbey of Monte Casino after assaulting it directly 5 times, and it was only after Allied armies began marching north that Major General Lucian Truscott, who had replaced Lucas coordinated a successful breakout of the beachhead. Clark’s book also points out that in the aftermath of Anzio yet another Allied failure shows it head; as Truscott was driving east to capture retreating German division from the Gustav line, his commander, Lieutenant General Mark Clark ordered Truscott’s corps northward to liberate Rome, in what is widely considered a purely symbolic victory for the Allied armies. This decision by Clark allowed thousands of German soldiers and their equipment to withdraw to the Gothic line, another set of defenses similar to the Gustav line that was towards the north of Italy.\n\nThus we see not only did Anzio not directly lead to the Allied breach of the Gustav line (you could even argue the troops who breached the Gustav line were the ones that allowed the Anzio breakout), but the Allied divisions that landed failed to trap retreating German forces. So despite the fact that the Allies eventually “won” the battle of Anzio, the poor planning and decisions made would help the Germans keep the fight up in Italy until almost the last days of the war in Europe.\n\nSources:\n\nThe Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944; Rick Attkinson\n\nAnzio: The Friction of War. Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944; Lloyd Clark\n", "A non-exhaustive list:\n\n1. Norway 1940: the British and French fail to hold Norway against a fairly light Wehrmacht force, despite maintaining a hold on the important port of Narvik for some time.\n\n2. Greece and Crete 1941: stripping forces from the armies that had just trounced, but not finished off, the Italians in North Africa, Wavell and Churchill attempt to defend Greece from Italian and German attack. The defence is a farce against strong German mobile- and air forces and an undignified evacuation ensues. The Germans then attack the island of Crete with an air-mobile force. Allied mistakes and weakened air power (because of losses associated with Greece and the refusal of the British high command to allow quality Fighter Command units to leave Britain) see this very close-run battle turn to victory for Germany. The German force did however suffer heavily though in the ensuing evacuation the Commonwealth army and naval units suffered heavily as well. \nThis represented a regrettable waste of forces that could have been useful in...\n\n3. Malaya/Singapore/Burma 1941-2: A large Commonwealth force, given time to prepare and what should have been ample resources, is trounced out of the Malay peninsula by a much smaller Japanese force. Two British capital ships, which could have stopped the seaborne component of the attack and against which the Japanese had no available comparable ships, are sunk. The highly defensible island of Singapore is easily accessed by the Japanese army.\nThis defeat is probably Britain's greatest ever, and represented the end of British, and indeed European, power in Asia forever. The Japanese force rolled on into Burma where they defeated the Commonwealth armies present, stiffened with forces sent in response to the initial attack. A counteroffensive in the Arakan Peninsula in 1942 made no progress whatsoever, took heavy casualties, and the British forces had to evacuate precipitously to avoid being encircled. \n\n4. Philippines 1941-2: While the British Commonwealth forces in Asia were suffering their calvary, US Forces under Douglas MacArthur were attempting to defend the Philippines. Warned, prepared and well-equipped (like the British, this refers to resourcing in general, in both cases the forces were not balanced and much equipment was not good enough), MacArthur's inept leadership, bad luck and the skill and detailed planning of the Japanese saw the US-Filipino force routed from their best positions and driven down the Bataan Peninsula.\nMacArthur's propaganda machine was so effective in making ordinary Americans believe in his skill and tenacity that Roosevelt was unable to slate to him responsibility for ultimate failure (FDR was probably also happy to have MacArthur 'busy' in the Pacific, rather than plotting against him at home).\n\n5. The Channel Dash, 1941: after a raiding cruise in the Atlantic, three German heavy ships retired to the French port of Brest, where they were held by a British blockade. Here, they were bombed repeatedly by British aircraft and although Bomber Command was not very effective in 1941, occasional hits were obtained. \nIn early 1941 the Germans executed a plan to sail the ships *straight up the English Channel* to safe harbours in northern Germany. Due to good luck and British ineptitude, all three ships pulled off the escape without suffering a scratch. \n\n6. Dieppe 1942: A mostly Canadian force was landed on the French coast at Dieppe in 1942 for a sort of large raid. The idea was to test attack and the German defence of a coastal port, expand on the commando raid technique, and probably to placate the Soviets' demand for a Second Front. \nCo-ordination failures, rapid German response, and a multitude of small failures (for instance many tanks simply couldn't advance on the beach, which consisted of small, smooth stones) led to something of a disaster. The sheer difficulty of the mission was known, and was also a factor. Many of the lessons were applied to the D-Day landings.\n\n7. The Dodecanese Campaign, 1944: Churchill was obsessed with Greece, and was the impetus behind this plan which landed Allied troops on Greek Islands. The British command failed to rapidly secure Italian co-operation, losing the chance of gaining support from the large Italian garrison. Also, the US government refused to take part, denying the support of American units including, crucially, long-range fighter aircraft.\nOut of range of meaningful support, especially air support, and with other higher priorities the Germans were able to marshall strong forces including paratroopers with lavish support by otherwise-obsolete Stuka dive bombers, to smash the British (and Greek loyalist) units, which had no hope of evacuation. The famous, elite Long Range Desert Group was squandered in this operation.\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3my48t/we_often_hear_about_the_great_battles_the_allies/" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dgp19tu" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It's not. Take a look at the [western coast of the island of Hawaii](_URL_0_). The land on the western coast is considerably more recent than the land on the eastern coast. The weather and mountain range plays a large role as well but the fresh land was so rocky and porous that it could not hold water sufficiently to make fertile land." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kailua-Kona,+HI/@19.6878634,-155.818729,80868m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x79540eb26a91b401:0x7911d83882da5a7!8m2!3d19.639994!4d-155.9969261" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "clc8m4d", "clce286" ], "score": [ 16, 5 ], "text": [ "Here's three things:\n\n1. Most of the perpetrators of the Black Legend weren't simply saying \"the Spanish are very oppressive to indigenous peoples.\" The Pope called them \"the scum of the Earth.\" Immanuel Kant, in *Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime*, calls the Spaniard cruel, centuries behind in science, lazy, ignorant of reform, and un-European (derogatively). These are not objective utterances. Pope Paul IV, for instance, had what you might call a personal vendetta against the Spanish, having hated growing up there and being a political opponent of its royalty. Black Legend wasn't always a criticism of deeds, but the defaming of a people.\n\n2. In modern popular accounts, criticism of the Spanish is typically tied with a hidden \"noble savage\" motif. The narrative is as follows: the Inca are living their happy peaceful life in the Andes. They've got a lot of cool things: roads with regular storehouses/rest stops, a diverse religious culture, nifty stoneworking techniques, etc. Then the white man comes with his horses and guns and tramples over them, forcing them to near slavery in tin and silver mines. Poor Inca! That was rightfully their land, and they never did anything to deserve that!\nWhat's wrong with this? Any time you see this story, the Inca are the good guys and the Spanish are bad. As targustargus tried to point out, this completely lacks nuance and knowledge of Andean prehistory. For instance, the Inca were only native to the Cuzco area. They had conquered the rest of the Andes within the past hundred years, and they were still conquering places in the far north when the Spanish first arrived. Like the Spanish, they were a small ethnic group with big ambitions for conquest who laid their own culture and infrastructures on top of subjugated groups and who appropriated resources, culture, and religion for their own goals.\nAdditionally, the mit'a system you bring up was in fact an effective method of creating an infrastructure. In the Inca empire's brief existence though, this was often an infrastructure for conquest, with roads to facilitate troop movement and storehouses to extend campaigns. If a people joined the empire through treaty, then such a taxation might be reasonable. But if you're a former citizen of the enormous city of Chan Chan, defeated by Topa Inca Yupanqui's army ~1470, being forced to help replicate your own destruction is unspeakably humiliating. As an archaeologist of pre-Inca cultures, I am regularly frustrated by how much cultural knowledge has been lost due to the Inca conquest.\n\n3. In addition, popular accounts focus on the Spanish actions and downplay native agency. It's always \"The Spanish conquered the Inca\" and it's never \"The Inca attempted political intrigue and military outmanuevering against the Spanish, but failed.\" The conquest changed the Spanish as it did the Andeans.\n\n**TL;DR Popular narratives downplay any benefits of the Spanish conquest and romanticize the prior Inca conquerors.**\n\nSome good sources for complex looks at the conquest period:\n\nGose, P. (2008). Invaders as ancestors: on the intercultural making and unmaking of Spanish colonialism in the Andes. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.\n\nMumford, J. R. (2012). Vertical empire [electronic resource]: the general resettlement of Indians in the colonial Andes. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.\n\nRamos, G. (2010). Death and conversion in the Andes: Lima and Cuzco, 1532-1670. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.\n\nWernke, S. A. (2013). Negotiated settlements : Andean communities and landscapes under Inka and Spanish colonialism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.\n", "CommodoreCoCo has brought up some good point, but one thing I'd add is that the Black Legend is not about the brutality of European conquerors in the New World in general, but claims the Spanish were uniquely bad.\n\nThe Spanish did some bad things, but were they so much worse than the Dutch? The English? The French? The Portuguese?\n\nIn some ways, I would say they took different approaches. For example, the English were more likely to regard American Indians as being foreign states, while the Spanish were more likely to regard them as being Spanish subjects. Although thanks to the power differences, bigotry, etc, the Spanish authorities treated their Indian subjects worse than they treated, say, the typical Castilian peasant, and the English treated the Indian foreigners with more cruelty in war and less respect in peace than they did with, say, the Dutch when fighting the Anglo-Dutch wars or the treaties ending them. (This isn't to say that, say, the English never engaged in outright conquest, or that the Spanish never recognized the sovereignty of American Indian powers or signed treaties with them; just that the general patterns varied to some degree.)\n\nCan we say the Spanish were *worse* though? That's a tougher call. From a sort of \"international law\" perspective, the Spanish approach of outright, often unprovoked conquest seems worse, but bringing people under the authority of the crown did give them some rudimentary sense of responsibility, whereas, say, the English coercing an Indian tribe into signing a \"cede your land to us, and move somewhere else and starve to death\" treaty felt much less responsibility.\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cykfbz5" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Orbiting happens when you continuously fall towards the planet but keep missing. Missing the planet happens because of sideways motion, you drop towards the planet a bit, but your sideways motion has taken you so far the planet is still just as far away as it was before.\n\nIf you orbit too fast, you will just fling out, if you orbit too slow, you won't be able to miss the planet, your free fall ends in a crash.\n\nNow, the curious thing is, gas cloud can have momentum, that is, spinning energy. And this energy will be retained unless external force acts on the system. And in space, there aren't that many external forces. So if gas cloud spun one way, so does the star that forms from it, and so do the planets that eventually orbit it." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cbci8zr", "cbcid3u", "cbciktn", "cbcirbf", "cbck19h", "cbck6g9", "cbckakf", "cbckdq4" ], "score": [ 2, 5, 2, 12, 3, 2, 2, 3 ], "text": [ "Truffles. Truffles on everything.", "Well, you said it in the question. It's a luxury restaurant. You don't eat their food because the food is good. You pay them for the atmosphere, service, and over-all treatment you receive. The food is just something they do on the side. Although, typically, I would expect that they do have at least a few meals available, that will not be the main reason for going to a luxury restaurant.", "I think there are two possible reasons:\n\n1) Perfection. Some luxury restaurants consider their food to be masterpieces of artwork. You're not paying for the ingredients but for the time and skill of an artist to make the perfect ravioli.\n\n2) Atmosphere. As LordHomogy said \n > You pay them for the atmosphere, service, and over-all treatment you receive. \n\nThis can be about the addiction of the kind of treatment, or about the social prestige of being able to have it", "Well, lets start with the food itself. The food components used in a luxury restaurant like a Michelin-starred one are generally of very high quality and fresh. Where \"normal\" restaurants may substitute with e.g. pre-made sauces and pasta, a luxury restaurant of certain reputation will always prepare everything fresh and by themselves. Deep fried products and other convenience foods are (almost) never used. So, besides the high purchasing prices of the components used in \"luxury\" food, you have to add the cost of time needed for its preparation. Producing a stack of self-made ravioli, for example, takes a lot of time.\n\nAnd all this time that is needed forces a luxury restaurant to have enough kitchen staff/cooks to deal with the immense workload they have to deal with if the restaurant is full. Cooks in luxury restaurants are usually very well-educated and have a lot of experience, so they are paid very well. This is especially true for the chef (de cuisine), since he is the one that designs the product and is responsible for its success. A huge amount of creativity, sense of taste and understanding of different kinds of tastes and cuisines is necessary, so you can imagine that they'll earn a lot.\n\nBut it doesn't end at the kitchen staff. If you go to a luxury restaurant, you expect excellent service which is provided by well educated and experienced waiters, lead by an even more experienced Maitre d'. Additional services usually include a Sommelier who counsels you on your choice of wine for your dish. All these people want to get paid, too.\n\nThen you have the equipment. Tables, chairs, chinaware, silverware, tablecloths, napkins... you name it. Where \"normal\" restaurants might not concern themselves too much with the condition of your silverware, a luxury restaurant cannot afford anything less than perfection, so theiy'll replace anything that looks remotely worn out quickly. Costs that have to be covered, too.\n\nAnd on top of that you have an owner, who wants to drive a Porsche, too. Usually a renown chef with years of experience who likes to earn six figures a year at least. Add all that up and you easily get a $100 three course meal.", "The stuff in that piece of ravioli are probably more expensive than what's in most restaurants: pasta dough made on site, high quality cheese, each ravioli made by hand, and finished off in truffle oil. All of those combined with the higher end service and atmosphere in the restaurant equal a higher price than a bowl of average ravioli at Olive Garden.", "Sometimes it's a simple as a brand image. For instance, you can buy a shirt for 5 dollars at a place like Target or Walmart, or you can buy a shirt that costs $40 because it was made by Tommy Hilfiger.\n\nThis isn't the only reason, but is one of the major ones.", "I can only assume you are paying for the good service and ambience", "Part of that price is a filter on customers, folks who frequent Maury or Jerry Springer are not likely to buy a $60 Ravoli. People with kids rarely are going to buy a $60 Ravoli. Pricing like this allows rich people to have a meal in peace" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cagcwgd" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "They aren't allowed to. NSA's main goal is to investigate/surveillance foreign intelligence(foreign military threats to the US and since 9/11, terrorist plots and threats , Not *foreign intelligence services* ) And they can only investigate US citizens if they can find a link between that citizen and a foreign terrorist and with a warrant acquired by the FISC court(Foreign intelligence services court, a 11 member panel appointed by the chief justice of the supreme court himself)\n\nPlus they are legally bound to as of current, three laws of which that deals with terrorism. The Patriot act, Protect america act of 2007 and FISA amendments of 2008. \n\nTLDR: They are legally and constitutionally barred from surveillance of anything other then foreign threats(terrorists/plots/attacks/ enemy military actions)" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cnlbxhu" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "Well some people actually do still wear kimonos as a part of their everyday. \n\nBefore we start, we should define what kimono are. In Japanese, 着物 *kimono* literally means 'thing you wear'. In other words, for Japanese people, kimono literally just meant 'clothes'. Anything you wore was a kimono. This only changed with the introduction of Western clothes which were called 洋服 *youfuku*, literally meaning 'Western garments'. Now a days, when someone says kimono in America, it conjures up images of [elaborate traditional dress](_URL_8_) and [images of elegant women or high quality dress](_URL_4_). \n\n[But everyday clothes were also called kimono](_URL_0_). And kimono are not exclusively worn by women. The [traditional clothes of Japanese men can also be called kimono](_URL_10_). Pop media has contributed to the image of 'exotic' Asian women or geisha and the kimono has taken almost fetish like levels of sexual association by some people (in a similar way the china dress is). \n\nIn my post, when I talk about kimono, it is generally inclusive of all traditional Japanese clothes, as worn by men, women and children, as well as the different clothes worn by elites in the capital as well as the farmers in the fields. Now let's begin. \n\nThe first shift from kimono to western dress began with the Meiji Period during the mid 19th century, after the opening of the ports by Perry. It was a part of the large importation of various technologies, knowledge & information, methods, foods, and various other things from the West. \n\nA big proponent of adopting Western clothing was **military dress**. \n\nThe Japanese government were moving away from the feudal samurai - lord system of military power in favor of establishing a central, government funded and nationally associated professional military in the style of [Prussia or the British Empire](_URL_1_). \n\nThe government forbid military men from wearing kimono to any official functions and/or while on active duty, forcibly committing a massive organization in Japan to the Western dress. Government officials were also bound by similar rules put forth for the bureaucrats. \n\nYou can see here an illustration of what the average officers and line infantry would have looked like in the newly formed [Japanese Imperial forces](_URL_7_). \n\nThis was a time of many firsts for the Japanese military, including the first time they had a really unified command and a standardized uniform, uniting the armed forces of Japan in mind and body. \n\nThe other big driving force of adopting Western clothing were **Japanese elites**. \n\nTo see how rapid the changes made during the Meiji Restoration were, look no further than the Emperor himself. This is what [Emperor Meiji looked like in the early days of 1872](_URL_5_). \n\nLater that year, he would cut off his top knot, a sign of hundreds of years of tradition, and adopt Western dress to symbolize his support for progress, pragmatic adoption of Western things, and a new Japan. [This is what the Emperor looked like just one year.](_URL_6_)\n\nThe Meiji Restoration was a top-down movement to rapidly industrialize Japan and to make the transition smoother, the ruling elites of Japan believed that they needed to be able to absorb Western culture, language, science, and ways if they were to also be able to rapidly learn Western medicine, military strategies, economic systems, and earn a strong position in global politics. \n\nThis led the elites of Japan to lead the way and pioneer adoption of all things Western. Western food, Western entertainment (to put the Meiji Restoration in context, Western composers like Wagner, Liszt, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, and Dvořák were all alive and making music during this time. Mozart and Beethoven had only been dead for maybe 20 years), Western literature, and of course, [Western dress](_URL_9_).\n\nMost notably, *men adopted suits* rather quickly and it became the norm to wear a suit to work for the upper and middle class. Lower class citizens generally kept wearing their kimono, especially farmers. The Meiji Restoration mostly focused on urban populations, while rural areas generally just kept going about daily life as they always did as the gap between urban and rural areas grew wider and wider. \n\nAnother notable thing is that **women generally did NOT adopt Western dress**. Many new ideas and ways of thinking were being born in Japan but gender equality was not one of them. Female participation in the labor market did not change a great deal during the Meiji Period and most women remained the masters of the home and hearth. This meant that they still spent the majority of their day at home, child rearing and maintaining the household. \n\nWomen quickly found that western dress was incredibly impractical for the inside of the average Japanese home. So the vast majority continued to wear kimono at home. As a matter of fact, most men also continued to wear the kimono at home as well. They would wake up, change into their suits, go to work, then come home and change into more comfortable kimono as home wear. \n\nFor elites, some women would also wear Western style dresses outside but many continued to wear kimono even outside. One of the big reasons was that for the first time, sumptuary laws from the Edo period that forbid the common people from wearing kimonos with silk or ostentatious colors, designs, etc. were repealed. The average Japanese women could now wear glamorous kimono that were previously only permitted on those of incredibly high status or even restricted to only the Imperial court. \n\nThe design of the kimono changed quite a bit. To the outside world looking in, one may not be able to tell the difference but for the average Japanese woman, the changes were huge. They were suddenly allowed to buy (and able to afford!) silk, they could pick and choose designs that previously would have literally been forbidden to someone of low status. It sparked a massive uptick in the domestic textile industry and helped propel a major part of Japanese light industry development during the time period. \n\nThe design of the kimono also changed. [For example, the *obi*](_URL_2_), the sash that is tied around the waist that holds the kimono together while also being decorative. Because of the repealing of sumptuary laws and a general change in the way society thought about clothes in public spaces, the way one could wear a kimono was relaxed quite a bit during the Meiji Period. For example, in this picture, the obi is tilted and simply tucked as opposed to being tied in a more complex and 'proper' way that would have been necessary for clothing etiquette during the Edo Period. \n\n[The obi was also featured lower and 'boxier' than in previous designs](_URL_3_), as a result of the influence of Western dresses. [With lower, boxier obi](_URL_12_), the sillouhette of a woman's kimono now looked similar to that of a Western dress worn over a corset that accentuated the bust and hips into an S curve. \n\nAfter the Meiji Period, Japan enters the Taisho Period, between World War I and World War II. Japan experiences even more freedom and liberation of clothing culture and more people wear Western clothing during everyday moments, including casual Western clothing. Western clothing is no longer something simply worn at work. This is also a period of a rise in **Western architecture**(_URL_11_) that further facilitated the wearing of Western dress (particularly in the home). \n\nThe kimono becomes increasingly out of fashion when worn outside of the home and adoption of Western clothes steadily increases. Western clothes are associated with progress, civilization and modernity while kimono are symbols of the past. That being said, there were reactionaries that disapproved of the rapid changes of Japanese society refuse to adopt Western ways and Western clothing. \n\nBy the time World War II ends and Japan begins to rebuild, Western clothes are a dominant part of Japanese clothing culture. In most work places, especially corporate office jobs, the business suit is standard and often required. Many uniforms are Western style. And casual Western clothing like shirts, pants, etc. are everywhere. By the 1950s and 1960s, much of Japan is wearing Western clothes on a near constant basis, with traditional dress being taken out during the summer for festivals, religious ceremonies, holidays, etc. \n\n_URL_11_ To say that people have 'stopped wearing' kimono is a little misleading. The vast majority of Japanese people wear kimonos several times a year, especially during summer. It's not uncommon to see Japanese people wearing kimono on the streets, even in major metropolitan cities.\n\nDuring the summer time, which is unbearably humid and hot in Japan, many people wear simple kimono because they are cooler and light, helping people deal with the heat. \n\nAnd it's almost a staple to wear kimono to festivals throughout the year in Japan, whether they be children, teenagers, or adults. \n\n**If anything Japanese people wear their traditional dress a great deal more than most other cultures.** " ] }

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[ [ "http://www.meijishowa.com/images/3723.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Hohenfriedeberg_-_Attack_of_Prussian_Infantry_-_1745.jpg", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/40/85/9c/40859c16f8cf16d164213318a350cbc1.jpg", "http://traditionscustoms.com/sites/default/files/obi_kimono.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/NKQlVaB.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Meiji_tenno3.jpg/408px-Meiji_tenno3.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Meiji_Emperor.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/JapaneseArmy1900.JPG", "http://www.spectrum-art.com/artists/haruyo/Twelve-Layer-Kimono_350.jpg", "http://www.meijishowa.com/images/3752.jpg", "http://www.meijishowa.com/images/253.jpg", "http://markystar.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/053.jpg", "http://image.webftp.jp/shopimages/mamechiyo/3_020008000034.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dpqr2ge" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "In humans the average internal temperature is 37.0 °C. However, we don't always has exactly the same temperature at every moment of the day. Temperatures cycle up and down, controlled by our circadian rhythm. The lowest temperature occurs about two hours before we normally wake up (Altough the circadian rhytm can be altered). Temperatures also change according to activities and external factors.\n\nIt really depends, if it is cold outside, your limbs will be much cooler than the rest of your body. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cc1szhm", "cc2jffe" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Rainfall certainly does; as well as interference caused by the leading edge of a storm front. The general phenomenon is called [rain fade](_URL_0_). \n \nRadio and TV are just colors of light that we can't perceive with the human eye. They can be affected by physical objects (like raindrops). ", "Your TV reception is a lot weaker during the rain because they have a very tight operating margin at a pretty high frequency. There is a very slight amount of rain attenuation at the low microwave frequencies your cell phone works at. You can see some empirical curves from Skolnik's book here: _URL_0_\nThe context is RADAR but your cell phone is the same deal.\n\nAs far as your TV goes, it operates at a much higher frequency, 10-14 GHz with a much lower link margin. When they engineered satellite TV they basically designed it to have sufficient link margin to be up 99% of the time. From Pratt's Satellite Communications, a simple model for rain loss is: k*(R)^alpha dB/km. Where the coefficients k and alpha are from an empirical table dependent on frequency and polarization, and R is the rainfall rate in mm/hour. For a typical vertically polarized satellite TV transmission at say 12 GHz those coefficients would be k=0.0168 and alpha=1.200 . Your path length through the rain is dependent on your location and is somewhere around 5 km in the southern US. " ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_fade" ], [ "http://gs.flir.com/uploads/file/tech-notes/tech%20note6%20-%20performance%20in%20rain.pdf" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "csy2pes" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "One must remember that when Rome fell, the people in the provinces did not simply disappear. They, for the most part, stayed right where they were. The people of Gaul spoke a vulgar form of Latin, but it had become region specific, displacing much of the Celtic languages that were there before. \n\nA linguist might be better suited to answer this question.\n\nHowever, once Rome fell, the provinces were open for invasion. Here is where your tribes come in. Let's take, for example, the Franks. The Franks raided into Gaul even before Rome fell. Some of them stayed. Various people who were called Franks were some times enemies and some times allies of the Roman. When Rome fell there were Franks in the Roman army. Thus it can be assumed they spoke vulgar Latin, or something very similar.\n\nSlowly the Franks gained control of much of Gaul and there developed Old French, which was based completely in Latin, thus a Romance language. \n\nEngland did not have as long a period of assimilation with Rome. Rome was not as entrenched and so Latin did not become as wide spread. The same goes with Germany. If the average person did not speak it, it did not last. \n\nOf course Latin remains an important language in England, as in the rest of Europe, partially because of its ties with the Catholic Church.\n\n\n------------------------------------------\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\n[Gregory of Tours History of the Franks](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/gregory-hist.asp", "http://www.webpages.ttu.edu/joseppri/oldfrench/langue.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cffvfc9", "cffvj46" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "Perhaps the chute was partially open?", "The article says the parachute malfuctioned, not that it didn't open at all. The full story is that the parachute partially opened and that she hit the ground at 50 mph instead of terminal velocity. Also, she landed in a way in which her legs absorbed the power of the fall." ] }

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[ "http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/teen-survived-parachute-malfunction-remembers-being-39-scared-180754787--abc-news-topstories.html" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "cbdad3r", "cbdan4j", "cbdbsx5", "cbdci9i", "cbde6o8", "cbdfii4", "cbdio71", "cbdk971" ], "score": [ 59, 121, 113, 4, 6, 830, 2, 8 ], "text": [ "I'm not qualified to answer this but are you asking what it would cost to build with modern equipment, techniques and resources or an exact replication of the way that the Romans did it(obviously without real slaves)? \n\nThere is also the added problem I believe of the exact formula used for the concrete that the Romans used, still needs to be rediscovered for a perfect replica to be constructed.", "You might want to post this to [r/estimation](_URL_0_)", "The book *The Colosseum* by Kieth Hopkins and Mary Beard apparently has an estimate from a surveying company on how much it would cost today to build the foundations alone for the Colosseum. Came in at $57 million. \n\nHere's the [review](_URL_0_) of the book where I found the figure.", "We don't know how much marble was used in the seating and facade, which would be a large part of the cost if you were to build one today.", "I think the more interesting question would be the following:\n\n\"In terms of relative cost, what modern sports stadium is roughly equivalent to the Roman Colosseum?\"\n\nThe underlying question would be how exceptional is something like Wembley Stadium in England compared to that classic beauty", "Woah something I can answer. I work at an architecture firm, so I can give some insight but I've never worked on a stadium. I mostly work on large higher ed. and hospital projects.\n\nThe Colosseum is a load bearing masonry structure. Large scale projects stopped being built this way around 1900. The last great examples in my city, Chicago, are the [Monadnock Building](_URL_1_) and the [Auditorium Theater](_URL_4_) (bonus trivia, this is where Frank Llyod Wright started practicing architecture under Louis Sullivan).\n\nThe reason almost no one builds this way anymore is that it requires a lot of labor and as a very rough rule of thumb labor makes up about 2/3's of the cost of a building project (applies in US anyways, in China it's 1/3 labor 2/3 material). I mention this because the final number I come to will be lower than it would be to build this out of brick and stone. I'm not sure what the premium would be, 50% maybe?\n\nHere's the size from [Wikipedia](_URL_2_):\n\n > It is elliptical in plan and is 189 meters (615 ft / 640 Roman feet) long, and 156 meters (510 ft / 528 Roman feet) wide, with a base area of 6 acres (24,000 m2). The height of the outer wall is 48 meters (157 ft / 165 Roman feet). The perimeter originally measured 545 meters (1,788 ft / 1,835 Roman feet). The central arena is an oval 87 m (287 ft) long and 55 m (180 ft) wide, surrounded by a wall 5 m (15 ft) high, above which rose tiers of seating.\n\nThat gives you an area of about 246,340 SF or 22,900 m^2 . This completely ignores the fact that the actual area is not two dimensional (multi-story). I can't find a resource to provide this info which is definitely a limitation of this answer.\n\nI'm taking the area:cost ratio for recently constructed stadiums from this article in [The Atlantic](_URL_3_). I made a [quick spreadsheet](_URL_0_) to come up with a cost of $473/SF or about $5,100/m^2.\n\n246,340 SF x $473 = ~$166,500,000\n\nAgain, this ignores the fact that the area is much larger than this. The Colosseum held 50,000 people which is about the size of a modern baseball park in the US. The ranges in the spreadsheet go from about 1 million to 1.3 million SF (about 93,000 - 120,000 m^2). This would give us:\n\nLow\n1,000,000 SF x $473 = ~$473,000,000\n\nHigh\n1,300,000 SF x $473 = ~$615,000,000\n\nSo $500-600 million plus a huge premium for the fact that it's load bearing masonry. You're probably looking at a **$750 million to $1 billion building** (570-750 million euros) if you were to build this today.\n\n**Edit:** formatting and forgot to divide by four for the equation of an ellipse which is (A x B x 3.14)/4 with A and B being half the long and short axis.\n\nAt the risk of being incredibly facile I will mention that, to a large extent, the construction process and methods used to build the Colosseum would be very familiar to us today. Obviously the tools have changed but the guy laying the stones? Basically the same. On a much smaller scale this is how many buildings are still built today in the developing world.\n", "Sorry if this was already asked but I didn't see it in the existing comments. Do we know how much the Colosseum cost to build in Roman currency at the actual time it was built? I can't imagine records weren't kept for its costs somewhere. If we do know, just out of interest how does that translate to, say, present day Euros?", "Can I ask a similar question? Was the arena used after Rome's collapse? Today it's just sitting there, when was it stop being used?" ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/estimation/" ], [ "https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.journalofromanarch.com/lancaster.pdf" ], [], [], [ "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aljj79ehE3zVdHZac1RwMlRVNlJJQ2MyQTNZQXgxVWc#gid=0", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadnock_Building", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum#Physical_description", "http://www.athleticbusiness.com/articles/article.aspx?articleid=3893&amp;zoneid=27", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditorium_Building" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e5wmxlo" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Human vision is 210 degrees wide and 150 degrees high. But if you lay on the ground you are on a flat plane so you can only see 180 degrees wide. 150 degrees is 150/360=0.41 of a circle. So you can see maximum of 41% of the sky without moving your eyes.\n\nA more complex question if that mound of that field of view you can process and notice. We usually move our eyes and look directly at what we are interested in.\n\nThe the percentage of what is out there we can see with a naked eye is small. \nThere is a estiamtion of 43000 object that is possible to see with a naked eye but most o them are hard to see.\n\nThere is a estimation of 200-400 billion stars in out galaxy but the majority cant be observed by any human telescope.\n\nThere is a estimation of 100 billion galaxies observable universe. We can see a 9 with a naked eye byt the look like a fuzzy small object or like a star.\n\nSo the percentage of what is out there we can see is close to 0%" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbmbyz3" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "Rich investors with lots of cash buy houses for cheap, from desperate sellers who need the money fast. Then they can take their time, fix them up a bit, and sell them at full price when ready." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ejfzste" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Highly stable. Looking at the surface geology and chemical composition of the planets, there's no evidence that they've moved significantly in the past few billion years. All the movement happened at the very beginning of the solar system.\n\nWithout gravity, planets would move in straight lines. Gravity pulls them toward the sun, bending their path into nearly-circular orbits, but does not make them spiral in closer and closer. Sun + gravity + one planet is a stable system. For a planet to move closer to the sun, it must trade energy and angular momentum with other nearby objects, through collisions or close fly-bys.\n\nThe various planetary migration hypotheses, including your article, are talking about the very earliest history of the solar system, when the planets were surrounded by a cloud of gas and tiny bits of rock called planetisimals. In that time, there was plenty of mass for Jupiter to trade energy with: its gravity pulled on planetisimals, throwing them farther from the Sun: by action vs reaction, this pushed Jupiter closer in.\n\nBut eventually, almost all the planetisimals got swept up to build the planets, or ejected out of the solar system. Now there's nothing left for planets to push against, so they're locked in place. Now it's true they could push against *each other*, but they're far enough apart that their pull on each other is too weak to do much... and Jupiter, being the biggest, is especially hard to move." ] }

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[ "https://www.sciencealert.com/jupiter-wasn-t-born-in-its-current-orbit-now-we-might-know-where-it-came-from" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "cxxda9g", "cxxevyo" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "The murderer was charged with and convicted of two crimes each carrying a life imprisonment sentence. The sentencing judge ruled that the sentences not be served concurrently. \nThe two charges now exist independently of one another, and can be appealed and removed independently. This means that if the murderer can later prove he didn't do one of the crimes in an appeal, he's still got another life sentence. ", "Sometimes a life sentence is capped, say at 20 years. So two life sentences can make sense. However if the accused is sufficiently old, multiple life sentences could result in imprisonment until death. In that case the sentencing is just a formality to ensure that the law is upheld (plus there's always the low but non zero chance the prisoner might survive the sentence)" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c9wu6bb" ], "score": [ 29 ], "text": [ "The other responses in this thread have it basically correct.\n\nThe interior of the Arabian peninsula is not a hospitable place. It is [very dry](_URL_0_), and isn't traversed by any permanent rivers. This affects both the *why* would people conquer it and the *how* would people conquer it.\n\nThe climate meant that the few people who did live in the interior of the peninsula were small groups of nomadic herders. These groups neither posed any significant threat to larger polities, nor had much in the way of cities and wealth worth taking. \n\nEven if people did want to add the peninsula to their domains, there really wasn't any feasible way to march or garrison any significant number of troops across/within the desert. The land isn't fertile enough for an army to forage or for a garrison town to plant gardens. There aren't rivers to drink out of or ship food to garrisons in the interior. \n\nConversely, the coasts of the Arabian peninsula have long supported agriculture, fishing, and mining economies. Coastal population centres were well integrated into East African and south Asian maritime trade networks, and the rise of Islam and its tradition of the Hajj provided major financial, political and religious incentives for empires to control Mecca and Medina.\n\n*Edit:* I see the other comments are now dropping like flies. If there's part of this answer that doesn't meet subreddit standards or needs elaborating, please mods, let me know and I'll do my best. But please keep in mind that this question is a counterfactual one, and it's difficult to provide sources, documentation, and explanation of things that *didn't* happen. " ] }

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[ [ "http://www.glaphyridae.com/Biogeografia/img/Lev/middle_east_rainfall1973_b.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ctizoi9", "ctizslt", "ctj1c2z" ], "score": [ 10, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Generally speaking you aren't taxed on your savings, you are taxed on your income. The only advantage to moving it overseas is to prevent a garnishing of your assets. For the most part tax haven accounts are more for companies and corporations. The idea being if it is cheaper to do business in another country and pay import/etc taxes many companies will do it. Not everyone can because it makes things more complicated from an accounting/structure standpoint which has costs and corporate structure associated.", "It may simply not work for the vast majority of people--they have taxes withheld on their paychecks. The people who do get involved in off shore banking are usually wealthy/high earners. Further, they usually go about it in a legal way. This costs a lot of money though. CPAs and tax attorneys need to be hired and you'll be looking spending 10's of thousands annually making sure all your ducks are in a row. As you can tell, you'll need to be earning a lot of money to make this worthwhile. ", "You aren't taxed on the money you have, but the money you make. It's not enough to move money into some account off shore, the whole process is much more elaborate, and geared toward avoiding paying taxes on interest accrued or capital gains; income tax, too, sure, but rich people don't get rich on income tax.\n\nAnd to pull this off, you need a lot of money just to get started, and there are fees involved where you need to make enough money to make it worth while. Also, something like an equity swap, you need a mutual partner who is willing to go in with you to make it work. Poor people don't have friends like that." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ciacrt5" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "If a molecule is too lypophilic it will get stuck in the membrane and won't come out. Certain membrane dyes used in molecular biology work this way and are used to label the membrane for imaging. A good drug has a balance of hydrophobic and hydrophilic groups.\nIn general, a drugs preference for where to go can be measured by determining its partition coefficient. In pharmacology the partition is usually measured between octanol and water. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cd3tqsi", "cd3tul4", "cd3uein", "cd3unbr" ], "score": [ 9, 110, 19, 2 ], "text": [ "The bottom of your pan is actually semi porous with grooves, scrapes etc, and when food burns, it's carbonized or caramelized in those pores. Glass may be more forgiving. There's no replacement for scrubbing in my experience, but \"easy off\" oven cleaner has helped a shit ton for my stainless steel pots after the elbow grease runs out, just do it outside and don't get it on your skin. Also soaking for a night or two in soapy water can help. Just arm yourself with the tools for removal, and it shouldn't be too bad:heavy duty scraper, green scrubby, metal scrubby, soap and easy off. Easy off is acid based, but maybe someone out there knows of something enzymatic that works better? Interested in hearing the other responses.", "The milk contains proteins and sugar. The excessive heat applied to the pan caused the proteins to coagulate and bind to the source of the heat. The first amount of protein has thermal insulating properties that allow the pan to get even hotter, since less of the heat gets transferred to the water content of the milk. The higher heat of the pan causes the proteins and sugars to brown then burn through partial pyrolysis and caramelisation (Maillard reaction). You can remove the protein without scraping several ways. You can remove the liquid and heat the pan even more, generating huge amounts of smoke and stink until the pyrolysis is complete and the proteins turn to ash. Ash is easy to wash and rince away. Or you can use solvents and heat to dissolve the proteins and sugars. Water is a good solvent. Leaving the pan soaking overnight in water will hydrate most of food particles enough to clean the pan with light scrubbing. You can also alternate soaking, heating, and light scrubbing for several repeated cycles. You can also use an acid like vinegar or home strength hydrogen peroxide to soak for a while. The acid will react and dissolve the protein very well. That's why hydrogen peroxide is used in a lot of soft contact lens cleaners - to dissolve proteins that have built up. Acids are a bit less safe to use around kids, pets, and ignorant adults.\n\nDon't heat milk over excessive heat. Heat slowly and continue to stir constantly, not leaving it unattended for a second. When you're heating milk, what else is so goddamned important that you have to leave it? Pretty much nothing. If someone needs emergency assistance while you're heating milk, turn off the heat source, move the pan off the heat to a safe place to cool, then go administer the aid and call 911. Better yet, microwave the milk in a microwave safe container for one minute. At least it has a timer to shut itself off.", "Heat denatures protein. Denatured proteins have lost their shape and will mold to almost any tiny surface. This makes them \"sticky\". On a pan, tiny strands get into all the microscopic crevices and then harden with the heat and localized dehydration in the burn.", "The reason is protein. There is a lot of protein in milk. Eggs stick like hell to pans, if you don't use some kind of oil or teflon. Fish sticks like hell if no oil or teflon is used. Meat does too.\n\nVegetables don't stick, as they are mostly carbs. Nor does fat, obviously.\n\nProtein.\n\n*Why* does protein stick? \n\nI'm sure it has to do with protein being a much more complex molecule than fat or carbs. The protein gets into the little scratches and holes in the pan, and then forms chemical bonds. And protein has iron in it. So the whole iron bonding. The stuff that is difficult to get off is not the burned milk that is above the pan. It is the stuff directly on the pan, therefore it MUST be some kind of milk protein to pan bonding.\n\nI can't tell you that it is the C-Fe-O7 (I made that up) part of the protein that bonds with the Fe2-PDQ9 part of the pan. So if anyone knows that part, jump on in." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cdxcyv2" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "I'm cautious to comment, because my main impression of this period of Chinese history was formed through reading Jung Chang's autobiographical/biographical *Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China*, and her later work with Jon Halliday, *Mao: The Unknown Story* (both are available from Amazon). You need to understand that Chang did not have a pleasant experience during the Cultural Revolution, and developed a strong antipathy towards Mao as a result of this. That said, her work in *Wild Swans* is sourced directly from interviews with her mother - it is primary material.\n\nWith that in mind, Chang relays the experience of her mother, then a ranking official in the Communist Party's Chengdu Education administration when she was told of the Hundred Flowers campaign:\n\n > When my mother’s level was told about Mao’s speech soliciting criticism of officers, they were not informed about some other remarks he had made around the same time, about enticing snakes out of their lairs - to uncover anyone who dared to oppose him or his regime.\n\nAfter about a month of the campaign, in June, \"Mao’s speech about ‘enticing snakes out of their lairs’ was relayed down orally to [Chang's] mother’s level.\"\n\nBoth of those extracts are from *Wild Swans*. In *The Unknown Story* Chang and Halliday are direct:\n\n > On 27 February 1957, Mao delivered a four-hour speech to the rubber-stamp Supreme Council announcing that he was inviting criticisms of the Communist Party. The Party, he said, needed to be accountable and ‘under supervision’. He sounded reasonable, criticising Stalin for his ‘excessive’ purges, and giving the impression there were going to be no more of these in China. In this context, he cited an adage, ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’. \n > Few guessed that Mao was setting a trap, and that he was inviting people to speak out so that he could then use what they said as an excuse to victimise them. Mao’s targets were intellectuals and the educated, the people most likely to speak up.\n\nChang and Halliday then tell us that\n\n > On 12 June, Mao issued a circular to the Party, to be read to all members ‘except unreliable ones’, in which he made it explicit that he had set a trap. He did not want his Party to think he was a liberal – in case they themselves should turn liberal. In this circular, Mao set a quota for victims: between 1 and 10 per cent of ‘intellectuals’ (which meant the better-educated), who numbered some 5 million at the time. As a result, at least 550,000-plus people were labelled as ‘Rightists’. While many had spoken out, some had not said anything against the regime, and were pulled in just to fill Mao’s quota.\n\nIn *Wild Swans*, Chang notes that her mother faced enormous pressure to make the quota of around 5% of intellectual dissenters.\n\nBased on this, especially the timing of Mao's speeches and the selective way in which the circular was distributed, it's fairly apparent that Mao's only goal with the Hundred Flowers campaign was to tease out potential dissidents and then neutralise them. But if I was you, I'd check additional sources besides Chang/Chang and Halliday.\n\nRelating to your second question, Mao made a lot of noise about Marxist/Marxist-Leninist thought - I have a copy of the *Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung* (the famous \"Little Red Book\") somewhere (for a political history course at University), and there were quite a few lines about how Marxism or Marxism-Leninism was the foundation of all their efforts and ideals, as well as numerous references anyone familiar with communism would recognise; this book was studied assiduously in China during his life. Chang notes in Wild Swans that her brother was praised by his commanding officer in the People's Liberation Army for having \"studied Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought conscientiously.\"\n\nChang and Halliday also contend that his disdain for intellectuals was selective:\n\n > To Mao, writers, artists and historians were superfluous. Scientists and technicians, however, were largely exempted from persecution – ‘especially those who have major achievements’, a September 1957 order decreed; these ‘must be absolutely protected’. Scientists who had returned from Europe and America, in particular, were to be ‘neither labelled nor denounced’. Nuclear physicists and rocket scientists were treated extra well. (Throughout Mao’s reign, top scientists were given privileges superior even to those enjoyed by very senior officials.)\n\nBased on this, it seems that Mao reconciled his distaste for intellectuals with Marxism by turning the latter into a doctrine - \"Mao Tse-Tung Thought\" - a sort of sanitised, approved, orthodox intellectualism, where critical thought is reserved for criticism and condemnation of \"class enemies\". There's no conflict there at all - that kind of constrained thinking is the opposite of intellectualism.\n\nHope that provides you with some clarification; like I said, I'm drawing on two sources, and although one is direct primary material, they are both subject to a certain bias. With luck, someone here with a wider background will be able to provide better insight." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "djng35b", "djocxjf" ], "score": [ 5, 2 ], "text": [ "It looks like [a guandao](_URL_0_). According a legend it was invented Guan Yu (~200 AD), but there is no evidence it existed before the 11th century.", "Yes, it is real. However, it's not sure if it's practical weapon or just ceremonial weapon like other oversized weapons in history. In the historical book of three kingdoms, Guan Yu used a spear, not this thing. Here is the 500 years old Vietnamese guandao belonged to an emperor:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nIts length is 2.55 meters. Human for scale:\n\n_URL_0_\n" ] }

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[ "http://imgur.com/a/Ecxo4" ]

[ [ "http://mandarinmansion.com/antique-chinese-yanyuedao-aka-guandao" ], [ "http://imgur.com/a/mJjbT", "http://imgur.com/a/AYHzk" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "eov9eln", "eovcked" ], "score": [ 4, 2 ], "text": [ "Like others have mentioned, it can be the glass breaking and causing rainbows (from diffraction). You asked specially about Liquid Crystal Displays, the liquid can flow around when the display is (more accurately, the pixels are) broken.\n\n“Flatscreen” is a physical shape and not a method of building a display - these can have many methods. LCD is one type, the others will have different reasons for weird behaviors when they break.", "The LCD panel in your monitor has way more electronics on it than just liquid crystals! The circuits to control the pixels are etched into the panel too, along with millions of wires to connect everything together. These are so small that you don't even notice them.\n\nWhen you crack the display, some of these wires and circuits are broken. Some areas are partially damaged - for instance, the red pixels may be destroyed but the green and blue still work fine. Other areas might have power but no signal - these areas turn random colors because the pixels interpret random noise as commands from the system. \n\nThe way the engineers distribute the wires, pixels, and drivers on the panel influence what happens when it breaks. Usually, pixels and other parts are connected in lines or rectangles. When you crack the panel, the entire line or block fails together.\n\nIt's also possible for the cable that connects the panel to the device to break, or the circuit that translates images into instructions to fail. These are the coolest-looking failures, because the panel is still working, but the data are damaged! When this happens, colors can get all mixed up, weird sparkly fringes can appear around details, different pictures can blend together, and more." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c2tptg0", "c2tptg0" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Your front page is made up of the top topics from the subreddits to which you subscribe. Each person starts with default subreddits to which they subscribe, but subscriptions can be changed simply by hitting subscribe or unsubscribe on the right side of a subreddit topic's screen. \n\nWhen someone refers to the front page in a general sense, they mean the front page of r/all, the \"subreddit\" that includes all subreddits. The link to r/all is at the top left of the screen, next to to \"my reddits\". This is the front page for all reddits and is considered to have the most important front page.\n\nSo, how does reddit decide which posts get listed in the top 25? [Here's a good explanation.](_URL_0_)\n", "Your front page is made up of the top topics from the subreddits to which you subscribe. Each person starts with default subreddits to which they subscribe, but subscriptions can be changed simply by hitting subscribe or unsubscribe on the right side of a subreddit topic's screen. \n\nWhen someone refers to the front page in a general sense, they mean the front page of r/all, the \"subreddit\" that includes all subreddits. The link to r/all is at the top left of the screen, next to to \"my reddits\". This is the front page for all reddits and is considered to have the most important front page.\n\nSo, how does reddit decide which posts get listed in the top 25? [Here's a good explanation.](_URL_0_)\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jiwxs/eli5_how_the_reddit_frontpage_is_determined/c2cj9wy" ], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jiwxs/eli5_how_the_reddit_frontpage_is_determined/c2cj9wy" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cfy6k4x" ], "score": [ 13 ], "text": [ " > I was never taught why frogs are born as tadpoles instead of miniature frogs.\n\nSome frogs do have direct development: \n_URL_1_\n\nMany salamanders do too, like many of the Plethodontid salamanders like Redbacks.\n\n > Other than insects such as butterflies\n\nThat \"other than\" covers [most animals](_URL_0_). \n\n > I can't think of any other species that aren't born as tiny versions of the adult form. \n\nTunicates, Cnidarians, marine crustaceans like lobsters and barnacles, many marine fishes (flounders, eels), etc. flukes, echinoderms (starfish, urchins, and sea cucumbers), many salamanders, etc.\n\nHaving a larval stage is typical of animals, not unusual. A tiny animal is unlikely to occupy the same ecological niche as a large animal: it experiences the physical environment differently, it must eat different prey, it will have more and different predators. So why should a tiny individual have the same body plan as a big inidividual? Individuals also must disperse at some point. Sessile organisms like barnacles and tunicates must have motile larvae the same way plants must have motile seeds. Butterflies that are good dispersers as adults but do not grow have larvae that are poor dispersers but very good at growing. \n\nLosing the larval stage tends to happen in organisms that are mobile as adults and those that invest more resources in a few offspring rather than spreading them out over many offspring (these have a direct trade-off, if an animal has many offspring they cannot be large). Having large offspring (relatively speaking) means that a specialised fast-growth-from-tiny-size stage can be skipped. " ] }

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[ [ "http://plankt.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/suppl_1/i149/F3.expansion.html", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11223880" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c6jfbl1", "c6jnc44" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "There has been a [related investigation.](_URL_0_)", "The way certain things \"sound\" is known as timbre (pronounced \"tamber\"). The timbre of an instrument is determined by the which frequencies the instrument has. For example, plucking a properly tuned violin's A string produces a sound with a base frequency of 440 Hz. On top of this frequency are multiples of this fundamental (880 Hz, 1760 Hz, etc...). You can greatly vary the timbre of this sound by altering the \"amounts\" of the frequencies (such as instead of using 3 units of 440 Hz, 2 units of 880, 1 of 1760, you can use 5 units of 440, 1 of 880, and 3 of 1760. Each of these combinations will produce a vastly different sound).\n\nApplying this to popping sounds: Popping sounds also have a certain timbre to them that involve a multitude of frequencies, with their own certain combinations of these frequencies that produce the popping sound.\n\nAdditional notes: You can play around with sound and frequency by installing Audacity. [Vi Hart](_URL_0_) has a video that demonstrates how this is done (as well as having a very good lesson about sounds)." ] }

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[ [ "http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/774352.stm" ], [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_0DXxNeaQ0" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "csc0d0l", "csc0ln3" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "You can evict them of course, but usually they just sneak in when nobody is there, in the middle of the night for example. \n\nAnd sometimes it is even legal and the squater has actual legal right, saying that you cant just evict them yourself, but first have to go to court. ", "The reasoning behind it is, for the most part, to prevent honest people from being made homeless because of dishonest landlords/owners. In theory, you could get a gullible person to pay rent without a lease, and the moment the cash is in hand, the landlord calls the cops and gets them hauled out. Without a paper trail saying that they were truly tenants and paid rent, there's nothing stopping this from happening. Honest people are now homeless and without the money they paid because they were taken advantage of. So instead of dragging them out by the ankles, the cops leave it to the courts to decide who is actually in the right, and then act accordingly.\n\nIt's not a perfect system, and people certainly take advantage, but not as many as you would think. There's a reason these stories are newsworthy, they're the exception. It's also not true that you can't do anything about it, you can. You just have to file with the courts to get them removed. It's inconvenient and you're unlikely to get your filing fee back as they're probably just going to disappear, but it works. \n\nTL;DR - The justice system would rather have an honest property owner be inconvenienced than for an honest tenant to be homeless because they were taken advantage of." ] }

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[ "http://www.wfla.com/story/25297909/soldier-says-strangers-broke-into-his-home-and-wont-leave" ]

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