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{ "a_id": [ "ci8q4ph", "ci8qkgw" ], "score": [ 4, 2 ], "text": [ "Ohh man its complicated..\nSo ISIS is the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. They have been active mainly in Syria fighting against Bashir Al Asad, but have been pushed back there (out of Alepo and denser urban areas) by more moderate rebels (who the US ostensibly supports). Recently they cashed in on the Iraq side of their organization and captured several cities there in rapid succession meeting little or no resistance from Iraqi security forces (trained and supplied by the USA) which freaked everyone out. They got a ton of gold and cash from banks and military equipment left behind by the Iraqi security forces.\nNow weird shit is happening. Iran is offering to send republican guards to Iraq to fight ISIS and the US is considering bombing ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The Kurdish autonomous region has sent soldiers in to hold off ISIS and capture a few cities... basically its the penultimate strange bedfellows type of situation where enemy factions are coming together to try and stop this army who showed up from nowhere and displayed shocking capability. Not a good spot for US regional interests whatever we do will be no bueno. Really points out weakness and division in the Iraqi gov. Basically no one saw it coming.\nSide note ISIS was rejected by Al Queda for being \"too extreme\"\nThere are rumors of old Iraq army brass from the Saddam days working with them.\nThe danger is that Iraq will devolve into a full on ethnic civil war which combined with Syria's war could easily become the biggest genocide of this century.\nThis is what I have gathered feel free to fact check or ask me and Ill explain to the best of my ability.", "OK, as someone who once lived in one of the cities that fell, a major problem is there are three kinds of people there. For the sake of simplicity we'll call them the red, white, and blue people. \n\n\nThere are more of the white people than any other people, so the red people and the blue people never favored a national democracy. \n\nHistorically the red people have been in charge, because Saddam was red. \n\nNow the red people are ousted from power and are the minority. They know that democracy is going to work against their interests, so they are capturing cities from the government. Many of the army soldiers were red people so they quit instead of fighting, and the white ones who stayed and fought were executed. \n\nThe blue people also left because they have their own area they want to make into a separate country.\n\nTo make matters more complicated, Saudis and Syrians are red, and Iranians are white. The blue people are disinclined to help, because they are holding their own borders well, and it only makes their case for them that they should be independent.\n\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "eyqoydz" ], "score": [ 14 ], "text": [ "We define the ecliptic as the plane that contains the Earths orbit around the sun. We define the tilt of a planet as the angle between the normal direction of the ecliptic and the axis of rotation of the planet." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "de4wfo2" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Point of clarification. What are you looking for when you say \"a general history of *the Reconquista*?\" Although the underlying crusade ideology is there for the Christians, and as time wore on Muslims definitely realized their al-Andalus (by then comprised of many little kingdoms) was losing ground to a bunch of Christians, overall it's hardly a unified campaign or even always primarily making progress. There are larger swathes of time where territory either isn't changing hands, or already conquered territory is being filled in (most of the Iberian interior was fairly empty), or Christian and Muslim statelets alike are batting away at each other, making and breaking alliances. \"Reconquista\" is kind of a convenient name, but the point is, it's not really separate from the political and social history of later medieval Iberia.\n\nIs that what you're looking for? Or are you looking for more, military history-style accounts of battles, sieges, civil wars?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c7xi655", "c7xrrnv" ], "score": [ 10, 4 ], "text": [ "See:\n\n_URL_0_ \n_URL_1_", "The heat leaked increases at a rate faster than the clock speed. This increase becomes pretty ridiculous so that the cooling systems needed are not affordable to the average person and the complications of putting in enough power to run it. Add in the ability to focus on improvements other than clock speed so that we have better performing cpus, and focusing on faster clock speed ends up with a pretty bad rate of return compared to other improvements. Economic decisions drive it from there.\n\nNow, new technology may decrease the energy needed for a given clock speed, but the standard of energy leakage increasing far faster than clock-speed would still apply, so you would basically get a one time boost per development. Add in us hitting certain physical limits inside of microchips, and these onetime boosts are running out." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ngv50/why_have_cpus_been_limited_in_frequency_to_around/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/y8anh/why_do_i_have_cpu_with_8_3_ghz_cores_and_not_1_24/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ca16o1u" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "The Romans celebrated plenty of festivals, and I'll highlight a couple of the more important ones for you.\n\n* **Lupercalia:** This is possibly the most famous Roman festival, along with Saturnalia. It was celebrated during February (13-15) and it was a celebration of the health and fertility of the city of Rome. Probably the most famous ceremony of this festival is when two young men run around the Palatine clad in goatskin, holding strips of the skin of animals sacrificed earlier in the day. Crowds gathered to watch and women hoped to be whipped with these skins, believing it would make them fertile. An interesting anecdote occurred in 44BC, when the then-consul Mark Antony refused to participate in this Lupercalia tradition.\n\n\n* **Saturnalia:** Along with Lupercalia, this is a very famous Roman festival. Unsurprisingly, this was a festival honoring the god Saturn and was originally celebrated on December 17th, the solstice, but over the centuries the festivities spread between the 17th and 23rd. Everyone loved this festival, especially servants because on this feast day, their masters would wait on them in a fun (ish) role reversal. Also, gambling was permitted during these festivities, but was back to restricted for the rest of the year.\n\nedit; forgot a word!" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dlixfiz", "dlixipe", "dlj7i91" ], "score": [ 5, 11, 2 ], "text": [ "The heat capacity of water is much greater than air meaning it can absorb heat from the body much faster. This is basically the idea behind how you can reach into a newly opened oven without harm but dunking your hand into a casserole which was baking in there would hurt you.", "Heat generally transfers from molecule to molecule. More molecules means faster heat transfer. The amount of molecules in a given volume is called density. Generally speaking, the denser a substance is, the better it is at transferring energy. Water is much denser than air. So, heat energy from your body will flow faster into water than it will into air. That's why cold water is more dangerous than cold air at the same temperature. The water will \"suck\" the heat out of you much faster than the air", "The easiest example to show you of this can be done with an easy experiment at home. Get some tin foil, or an item with both metal and non metal surfaces. Touch the metal / tin foil surface with one hand, and touch the non metal surface (carpet or plastic or w/e) with the other. \n\nDespite them both being the same temperature, the metal feels colder, because it is more efficient at drawing heat energy away from you, which your body perceives as cold. Water functions in a similar manner, although in this case it is more about conduction vs convection heat loss, which makes a big difference." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d756slw" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The Second Industrial Revolution happened.\n\nGenerally considered to have started in 1870, the Second Industrial Revolution saw the development of a wide range of technologies, manufacturing techniques and chemicals that made many of the weapons and technologies of the First World War possible.\n\nMore efficient means of producing steel (and higher quality steel as well), the internal combustion engine, electrification, pneumatic tires, highly efficient steam engines for ships, increased mechanisation of manufacturing including the mechanical manufacturing of parts for manufacturing machines making them cheaper and standardising them, incandescent lightbulbs, increased production of petroleum, increased understandings of thermodynamics and metallurgy, ball bearings, fertilisers, bicycles, the telephone and much much more emerged from the is period.\n\nYou can probably see how these technologies contributed to the First World War, better steel coupled with better steam engines led to the expansion of ironclad ships and ultimately the first modern modern battleship HMS Dreadnought which kicked off a naval arms race. Developments in manufacturing coupled with increased understanding of metallurgy and new chemicals allowed bigger, more powerful guns to be created. Internal combustion led to powered flight and then the land ship more commonly known as the tank. The development of fertiliser cannot be underestimated as well. By being able to artificially replenish the nutrients in soil, crops could be reason in the same fields leading to an increase in food production which increases supply and in turn drives down prices. This allows nations to feed their people and keep their armies fed. It also allows them to have bigger armies and better manufacturing allows them to equip their armies with newer and bigger weapons. \n\nThis is an extremely vast topic and deserves a much more in depth answer then I have time to give but I'm sure a resident expert will be along shortly to provide a far better answer then this." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cfr3w2a" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Whatever the artist feels he is owed is weighed against public appraisal. It’s supply and demand, but on a very intimate scale, that determines the price. That is to say, the worth of the piece is the highest value a person wishes to pay. If the artist accepts, then that will be the price at which it is sold." ] }

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[ "http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/christopher-wool-blue-fool-5315238-details.aspx" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "dezjeoe", "dezkp9d" ], "score": [ 6, 17 ], "text": [ "Because a lot of people suffer from depression and better to make a joke of it than wallow in it. I think Reddit has almost helped me with my depression because I don't take it as seriously anymore.", "Reddit is a fairly liberal place that likes to focus on fighting for marginalized causes. Depression and mental health are largely ignored in general society and affect a huge number of people, so naturally Reddit wants to talk about it. Also, since Reddit is an anonymous community, it is much easier to talk about our problems when we are anonymous than in person. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "csd1ln0" ], "score": [ 10 ], "text": [ "Rabbits have a reputation of breeding prolifically, which leads to their reputation of having sex very often." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fapxbsb", "faq4829" ], "score": [ 19, 4 ], "text": [ "Memory typically refers to RAM (random access memory) where as SSD (solid state drive) refers to storage.\n\nEasiest way to know the difference is think of RAM as a work table and SSD or other storage device like a hard drive as storage cabinets. \n\nIf you want to work on a project, you can only use as many tools (aka apps) as you have room on your work bench. If you run out of room on your work bench but need something else, you'll have to put something away in the cabinets and search for the new thing you need, pull it out and put it on the work bench to use. The bigger your work bench, the more stuff you can use at one time. The bigger the cabinets, the more stuff you can have in total, whether using it or not. \n\nThings like editing software take up a lot of room on the work bench. Games can too. Games also take up a lot of room in your storage cabinet. Things like pictures are tiny and take up little room on the work bench, but can add up in your storage cabinets if you have enough of them", "Memory is temporary storage, similar to your brains \"working memory\". It controls how much stuff you can have \"in-flight\" or be working on/thinking about simultaneously (e.g., many browser tabs).\n\nSSD is like you brain's long term memory. A big, slow data store for things you want to refer to much later, like a word document or your garage code." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ed2007g" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It's pretty much a huge case of fomo with the placebo effect. You see a bunch of people doing something and your mind thinks that the might be something triggering it that effects you so you begin to physically manifest something like an uncontrollable urge to dance or some kind of sickness" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ctozndn", "ctp0qe6", "ctp19lw", "ctp1ho2", "ctp6qii", "ctp8o17", "ctpd0ns", "ctple7m", "ctpsawz" ], "score": [ 238, 7, 43, 14, 9, 5, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "It's been cut.\n\nAs long as the outside of the cheese is entirely the outside of the cheese (the rind), the cheese will have a substantial shelf life. As soon as you cut it, opening up the more moist interior to oxidation, mold, and bacteria, it has a shelf life. That being said, some cheese (like parmigiano reggiano) will, in my experience, simply get rock hard when kept for too long, rather than spoiling in some way that makes them inedible.", "I worked in the cheese department at a grocery store where cheese wedges are cut from big wheels and there are a lot of fancy, expensive cheeses. When we would cut pieces off the wheel we would put a price tag with a certain \"expiration date\" on them but when the cheeses were getting close to that date we would just re-wrap them and put new price labels on them...We would also cut off mold spots and re-wrap them to sell. ", "The majority of these comments are accurate but there's one thing I've seen to be mentioned.\nCheese is a very tricky food, it requires much care and handling.\nCheese isn't just packaged then thrown in some guys basement to age, it is kept inside of temperature/humidity controlled areas to reduce/increase moisture and so on. Also a reason why you will see cave aged cheese sometimes. Different kinds of conditions make for a different kind of cheese, it's just about knowing what you want from your cheese!", "The most common cause of cheese \"going bad\" in my experience is mold. Mold growth is easy to prevent in a controlled cheese aging facility. In your kitchen it's damn near guaranteed. ", "Cheese is more than a dairy product that you add to your eggs or pizza. It's essentially a living creature. A fungus really. It's a carefully controlled rot of milk, salt, and rennet. When it's mixed right, kept in the right environment it will grow and age into wonderful fully grown cheese. It's similar to beef. Why does beef have a short shelf life. It's been just put in a field or a barn or what have you for years. It's because once you kill the cow cut off the bits you want, the meat will start to spoil. Once you crack a wheel of cheese it died. Unless you are good about keeping the exposed bits sealed. But once the cheese is cut up and packaged. It's a dead part of a once living organism and will succumb to the mold and bacteria that live inside it that make it, well cheese.", "The sell by date is to comply with government and/or corporate standards. It's not a \"becomes poison\" date.\n\nMost cheeses can still be eaten long past their sell-by date as long as they don't visibly look bad (mold, dried out, weeping), or smell off (ammonia smells, especially, are not a good sign). If the cheese still presents as a perfectly good cheese, you can eat it. If there's mold on the cheese, you can usually scrape it off and eat the rest. \n\nAs for why cheeses tend to go bad when technically they're already \"rotten\", that's because part of the cheese making process is to figure out what the optimal age for a cheese is. I mean, you still want to make a product that tastes good. The cheese companies know what age makes a good cheddar, gouda, parmigiano, etc. and produce and sell cheese according to that timeframe. ", "How do they pack all that cheese flavor into a bite sized cracker?", "Mostly because you dont have the condition to keep cheese in the same environment that it was aged in. Plus in most countries it is law to have expiration date on all products even if it last forever(Honey/salt/sugar). ", "French here, most French cheese does not have an expiration date or I haven't heard of a French trowing old cheese. As I get it here, the oldest it gets, the stinkier it becomes. And stinkier = better. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbknthx", "dbkpgfa", "dbkqd1o" ], "score": [ 11, 43, 2 ], "text": [ "I know that the VRAM (video RAM) is only faster because it can be without losing stability. \n\nThere are also less compatibility issues, because it serves only one purpose, and doesn't have to juggle tasks. \n\nI hope someone else can expand on this, but that's what I know for sure. ", "GDDR, similar to GPUs are very parallel in design.\n\nSo while you might have \"dual channel\" or \"triple channel\" memory slots on a system board, GDDR memory can be arranged into 8, 16, or 32 parallel channels on the graphics circuit board. This yields nearly linear performance gains in memory throughput since memory chips are accessed in parallel. For this to work efficiently, this requires that the graphics chip itself is also designed to be massively parallel (unlike CPUs) with hundreds (or thousands) of cores / shader processing units that are all loaded up between ticks and all fired simultaneously on the clock tick.\n\n\n", "VRAM is dual ported DRAM, it can read/write at the same time. This is necessary since VRAM is used as a frame buffer, so you can ouput the final image in the frame buffer without blocking the GPU.\n\nThe rest of the speed increases generally come from configuration of the Graphics Card and how a GPU works. VRAM is technically not faster but just has a wider bus.\n\nCPU's do sequentual work. Today we use 64bit architectures which will read/write in chunks of 64bits into memory.\n\nA GPU, does vector math, so instead of having a single register to operate on one 64bit value, they'll operate on an array of 64bit values. A GPU will need to pull out a lot of values out of memory to do an operation so the VRAM has a wider bus to pull out an array of values much faster. So instead of reading a 64 bit value, a 512b bus can read 8 64bit values at once.\n\nGenerally reading multiple values has a higher latency, so for a CPU to use VRAM it would actually be slower because it would increase the latency for a CPU and would still only be able to read/write in chunks of 64bit. For a GPU the additional latency is offset by being able to read/write more values at once.\n\nedit: I modified my answer based on telling someone else why a CPU would not get benefit from VRAM. I feel like it explains how the differences of a CPU/GPU differ and why the GPU just needs a different type of ram. It may also be oversimplified on the GPU end... " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ctxstgc" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "If you have the DVD/Blu-Ray sets, watch the behind-the-scenes extras. \n\nThese nature photographers spend months and months working to catch the perfect moment (really makes the viewer marvel and appreciate their contributions to public knowledge)." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ekhnnly" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "It really *really* depends on where you're trying to get geothermal energy from. In Iceland, which has tons of volcanic activity and gets all its electricity from geothermal, electricity prices are about half the cost in other Nordic countries.\n\nHowever, in almost every other part of the world, you'd have to drill 5-10 times deeper than in Iceland to reach rock hot enough to run a steam turbine. The extra cost, plus the difficulty in getting water in and steam out of such a deep hole, make geothermal energy impractical.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.geo.tu-freiberg.de/oberseminar/os06_07/Kathrin%20Kranz.pdf", "https://www.statice.is/publications/news-archive/energy/electricity-prices-in-iceland-and-in-the-nordic-countries/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ck2b6ak", "ck2ibtq" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "I can't answer your question directly, but you might try x-posting this /r/japan", "I can't read all of it--the vertical text on the sides is quite difficult and I will leave it to somebody else. But the text on the top 国報身 献、is a wartime slogan that means something like 'serve the country, give up one's body' and the name of the soldier on the bottom horizontal text, I think, is Hisanaga Takeshi. It also gives the family name of the Lieutenant General of his unit (I'm assuming), which was Tominaga and would probably help in locating his family. It's also dated Showa 18 or 1943. " ] }

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[ "http://snag.gy/IgeZO.jpg" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "dsvoqrf", "dsvpsug", "dsvr8cv", "dsvru9o", "dsvsneh" ], "score": [ 10, 3, 5, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "People are always leaving and moving up even when an army downsizes. Ergo there are always needs for replacements at the bottom. \n\nNow you may not get to be a helicopter pilot. There is always need in the infantry", "There is a high turnaround in the military. A lot people join the military for a temporary job once they graduate high school. They only serve for a couple of years because: they need money for college, they figure it's a cheap way to learn a trade (mechanic, technician, driver, etc.) their parents kicked them out and they a need place to go, they have dreams of being war heroes but are quickly disenchanted, etc. Once they meet their short term goals, they leave the military and continue on with their lives. In this case, they always need new recruits to fill in the gaps.\n\nIn some, it depends on the current government policies. If you have military happy government, recruiters will lower the standards and accept more people. If the government cuts military funding, fewer people are accepted.", "People leave the military a lot.\n\nEnd of contract, injuries, KIA, suicides, etc...\n\nSo they always have openings.", "1) Drafts are no longer in effect in most countries so they only have volunteers, which means they have to recruit. \n\n2) There are always people leaving the military (retirement, medical discharge, behavioral discharge, death) and those people have to be replaced. That means that they have to recruit all the time. ", "Most people join the military for a few years, so they need to keep replenishing the ranks since people keep leaving the military. They can use various financial incentives, training program access, how much advertising, etc. to control their immediate needs. Also often has to do with how the general job market is how hard they have to recruit." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dw0dqnv" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "They spend years failing to land on their feet. Its an enormous amount of practice, and even then they aren't always perfect." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cfamr1x", "cfamt1p" ], "score": [ 2, 4 ], "text": [ "Because your school years were the most formative years of your life.", "You can think of it as a very, very mild form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).\n\nBasically, you dream of it because you went through it. If someone does go broke and lives on the streets or get very sick enough that it impacts their life, they will probably have nightmares about being back in that situation." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c82yjqy", "c833wvz", "c833zp2" ], "score": [ 13, 11, 52 ], "text": [ "In terms of quality and variety, I would assume you are right. Although, they had vats of wine, honey, and all sorts of cheeses and wild game, I imagine the quality was not great. \n\nIt's also interesting how the gap between leaders and citizens has been closed / widened since then. \n\nThis White House State Dinner menu is great, but in-line with any business dinner I would have here in NYC. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhereas in several countries, say, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, India, China, Brazil, the citizens are eating way worse than leaders. \n", "Whether the food itself was of a higher quality is pretty subjective, I suppose, although I'd venture that health standards are a lot better in your modern kitchen than a medieval one. There have been some pretty infamous cases of badly-cooked medieval food - most notoriously Henry I's supposed demise after a case of serious indigestion following a meal of Lamprey pie, his favourite dish (albeit against the advice of his doctor - Lamprey is very easy to cook badly, as it goes off very easily). However, what you should consider is just how rich medieval royal food tended to be, and how predominantly meaty it was - that alone, I'd argue, meant that the medieval monarch ate far worse than the modern man, even if his food tasted better. Vegetables were not common to the table as meat was, and what meat there was tended to be roasted and dripping with fat. Honestly, an enjoyable look at the diet of the medieval royals is the _URL_0_ Supersizers Medieval program. It's witty and informative, so give it a look!\n\nDo remember, however, that considering the outliers of modern people will give you examples of people who ate less healthily than monarchs - but in doing so you'd be considering a sample size of about seven billion in comparison with one that's probably in the thousands. On average, I'd venture, someone today **will** eat better than your typical medieval royal.", "Actually, the quality of the cuisine was generally pretty good, if you're talking about how good it would have tasted. As (and it's embarrassing to admit) a Medieval food enthusiast, I can personally vouch for how tasty the food was. It was generally very similar to the modern foods of whatever country you're looking at. Pasties have been around, in one form or another, for a *very* long time. The major documents like the Forme of Cury were recorded because they were the king's, and so forth, so we know less about the smaller manors (much less about food that wasn't being consumed by VIPs), but they probably ate similar foods.\n\nThe flavoring ingredients, the spices and herbs, were imported from all over, and they would have been dried, so they'd keep a long time. Vinegar and oil keep well, too. And there was probably a bigger variety of spices back then! As (I think) a status symbol, courtly food often called for very exotic spices like cubebs, imported from (I think) Madagascar, and grains of paradise, from Ethiopia, which are very hard to find nowadays. Cinnamon and ginger, brought from the East, were especially popular. \n\nAs for variety in the diet, royalty actually did pretty well with that, too. There were large varieties of meats and fish available. Hunting was a regular occurrence and people ate, if anything, more varieties of meat than they do now. Because of religious days, fish was mandated many, many days of the year, and fish is pretty good for you. Apparently fish was called for so often that there are books with writing in the margins that say \"I am so sick of fish,\" and some recipe books suggest that beavers, since they lived in the water, could be considered fish.\n\nVegetables were also pretty varied within the diet, although more things are available now. Again, the kings and queens would have had large gardens to supply whatever was in season. Medieval recipes don't include as many vegetables as modern ones, but they were there. Medieval palates seem to have loved sweetness, as a lot of dishes, sweet and savory, include fruit.\n\nThere was also cheese and other dairy. Cheese tends to keep pretty well. Different countries have different kinds of cheese, and hard cheeses keep better than the others. Again, since stuff was consumed in quantity, I would imagine spoilage wasn't an issue with stuff like milk and cream.\n\nThere were also plenty of starches - there was lots of bread. As a side note, whole grains were actually good for medieval teeth, as they have a scouring effect on the teeth.\n\nSince we're talking about royalty, meat/fish spoilage wouldn't have been an issue, as the meat and fish would be consumed right away in large quantities. Plus, there was available game year-round. Certain vegetables would be kept in root cellars, etc, and they did find ways to keep things from spoiling (after all, it's not like rotten fruit or veg tastes very good).\n\nIn general, we know more about nutrition than people did back then, so we are more conscious of bringing variety into our diets, whereas Medieval royalty was more about flavor and flash (banquets could, for example, feature porpoise as a dish, no doubt served whole as a dramatic platter). Because the more expensive things like meat, cheese, etc taste better, the diet was probably not as balanced between meat and non-meat as it is now.\n\nStill, the Medieval palate had some interesting tastes, and I find it pretty enjoyable to connect with history in such a sensory way. If you're interested, I can post some recipes, etc.\n\nedit: clarity" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.slideshare.net/whitehouse/menu-2012-uk-state-dinner" ], [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH5O_fCstyI" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dc2zkll" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "In some cases they absolutely cannot, and must use a machine such as an \"iron lung\" or respirator.\n\nIn other cases, although their voluntary nerves aren't working, the other nerves that run automatic systems are still in good shape." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cgqyl0x", "cgqylcf", "cgqzmet", "cgr04tw", "cgr0621", "cgr1c1t", "cgr1zje", "cgr2wjj", "cgr4fux", "cgr5nb3" ], "score": [ 5, 58, 3, 16, 11, 6, 7, 4, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Pop stars maybe. Trust me, as an adolescent, I was obsessed with anything with breasts. I had Heather Locklear and Bo Derek posters all over my room. Pop is a lot more mainstream and the musicians (if you can call them that) get a lot more publicity today than in past times, thus they are more visible and people obsess via social media - which we never used to have.", "Boy pop stars are marketed to girls.\n\nGirl pop stars are marketed to girls.", "I am a man and I would bang the fuck out of Justin Bieber. Just saying.", "That phenomenon goes way back. Franz Liszt had panties thrown at him already, and the knights in tournaments received their tokens of favor too.\n\nI guess it comes down to hypergamy: women are attracted to social status. And a performer in front of a crowd, in combination with media campaigns are pretty effective way to simulate social status. And once enough girls start buying it, it becomes real social status.\n\nMen are attracted to fertility. That can be faked too, hence the cosmetics and fashion industry, and more than enough men fall for it as well. But the thing teenage boys look for they can find in all the girls around them in their daily lives. And often those girls are as unattainable to them as pop stars are to the girls.", "Because there are a whole bunch of other male icons for boys to obsess with. Sports superstars, male leads in movies, tv shows, animes, comic books, in addition to a number of male stars in music.\n\nBias also probably plays a role here, young boys would rather be dead than to be caught liking stuff that girls like and mercilessly made fun of by their other male friends.", "Girls want boys that other girls want. Guys just want girls, any of them, it doesn't matter", "I agree with some of the other answers, as a once-adolescent girl with a once-adolescent brother, he had porn to watch, which gave him all the 'female' he needed in his life. I on the other hand, was of course told in various ways that porn is gross and for boys and girls never looked at that, and my friends were all PISSED if they found their boyfriend looked at any kind of porn etc. I was also warned extensively that any older male might possibly molest me and/or be a rapist or pedophile, so I should stay away from them and be disgusted by their sexuality. \n\nSo what good looking, in my age range, guys did I have? Boy bands. ", "Jo Koy explained this best. He was talking about how girls try to get backstage because they want status. But guys at a Madonna concert, when asked to go back stage would be like \"Why? There's a perfectly cute girl selling popcorn right there.\"\n\nIt's essentially biology. Guys want to pass on as much seed as possible, girls want their children to be taken care of, and more importantly obtain the \"best seed\" possible for their children. The \"best seed\" would come from those who have high status in the society.", "I believe its called the sexy grandma hypothesis. Or something like that. If you have kids with bieber... Chances are your kids will inherit his traits. That means lots of people swooning over your kids. That means lots of grandkids. \n\nSo for a gal, theres a huge incentive to go for the popular guy (from an evolutionary standpoint). ", "Because girls are allowed to like 'boy things' and 'girl things' but boys are only allowed to like 'boy things' because 'girl things' would be a step down because femininity is seen as weak and inferior." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "eavizb7" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It's not clear from your question whether you mean new alleles (\"versions\" of genes) or whole new genetic loci (sections of the chromosome), but the answer is yes in both cases!\n\n[Crossing-over](_URL_0_) happens anywhere along the chromosome, both within and between genes. For this reason, after meiosis one gene can end up with its first section from one original chromosome and the rest from its [homologous chromosome](_URL_1_). If one allele has a mutation in the DNA code in the first half and the other has a mutation in the second half, meiosis can create a new pair of alleles: one with *both* mutations and the other with none.\n\nIn this way, brand new alleles can be created during crossing over by mixing up small DNA code changes that mutated independently in different ancestors. Cool!\n\nYou can also end up with entirely new genetic loci through [unequal crossing-over](_URL_3_). Normally homologous chromosomes line in the correct alignment, where each gene on one chromosome matches up with the same one on the other chromosome. But sometimes there are mistakes, especially if there are similar or repetitive DNA sequences on multiple locations on the chromosome. If this happens, you can get one chromosome to give up a chunk of DNA without getting the corresponding chunk back from its partner. This can cause [gene duplication](_URL_2_) in the recipient chromosome.\n\nA cell inheriting the chromosome that lost one or more genes is likely to have problems, but ones that got the extra gene will probably be just fine. In fact, having an extra copy of the gene can be really valuable for evolution, as one copy can be mutated to have a new function without losing the original functionality in the duplicate." ] }

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[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosomal_crossover", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homologous_chromosome", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_duplication", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_crossing_over" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e39fjm3", "e39fk1d", "e39g2bx", "e39my5z", "e3a5reo", "e3a7x2j" ], "score": [ 5, 8, 2, 5, 4, 2 ], "text": [ "You can look at the fossil record and see periods of great diversity, many fossils , followed by periods of few fossils and little diversity with many of these species never reappearing , then anslow growth in diversity over millions of years you can infer extinction events took place.", "Your number is correct and we know different ways. \n\nI note that animals (and plants) go extinct all the time but in order to be a mass extinction event the extinctions have to be within a similar time frame (happen over the same span of time which isn't just instant but can cover thousands of years - such as the current one in which other plants and animals are becoming extinct because of the growing human population).\n \nWe know because of fossil records showing a massive number of some species then \"poof\" suddenly none.. \n\nAs well we can study DNA to note bottlenecks of populations.", "[The answer to your first question is here.](_URL_0_) Although there is evidence for life 3 odd billion years ago it was very simple single cellular in nature and it took billions of years for life to evolve to a point where animals etc as we know then evolved. Evidence for first multi cellular life is 1000 million years ago with the first animals 500 million years ago.", "The first animal fossils in the fossil record are the [Ediacaran biota](_URL_0_), which emerged 635 million years ago, shortly after the Earth emerged from a global ice age known as the [Cryogenian](_URL_1_). Almost the entire planet froze over during the Cryogenian, so it would certainly have been a mass extinction on an epic scale if there had been lots of plants and animals around to go extinct, but there weren't; that all came later, and before that Earth was dominated by microbial communities which are resilient and resistant to extinction events, don't tend to fossilise and when they do fossilise they tend to look alike so it's really hard to tell if there's been a mass extinction when the only thing around to go extinct are bacteria.", "Fossil evidence from before the Cambrian is generally too sketchy to identify the sudden extinction of many species. But there are several good candidates for mass extinction events: 1, the Great Oxidation Event; 2, the Snowball Earth events, and 3, the turnover of the Ediacaran biota just prior to the Cambrian explosion, though to some extent that may be a more gradual replacement. There's also been some argument for a mid-Permian extinction event lately based on new geological evidence.", "There's actually been more than five, but those five are the big ones.\n\nFor instance, there was a mass extinction event about 70,000 years ago which is believed to have been caused by an eruption of Mt. Toba on what is now Sumatra. While nothing compared to any of the Big Five, it is important to us because it's the most likely reason why our genetic pool bottle necked.\n" ] }

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[ [], [], [ "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event" ], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenian" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d99qt9n", "d99qy2k", "d99xsu5", "d99z5t9" ], "score": [ 10, 5, 3, 3 ], "text": [ "Those guys are also not particularly transparent. Since Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, the country's budget and state investment funds are also the royal family's own wallet, whereas \"conventional\" billionaires own far more easily detectable corporate assets.", "There are thousands of Saudi royals. Saudi Arabia is similar to Germany just after its formation where you have a lot of kingdoms and principalities. You even have outlying kingdoms that is not part of the empire. The \"emperor\" of Saudi Arabia does not have full control over all the kingdoms. There are different tax systems and different laws depending on where you are. Some have full Sharia and some are quite progressive. So the income from oil is distributed to all the royals in Saudi Arabia and there is no one super rich individual. In addition the top wealth lists are very open to speculation. When you are rich you might want to hide your real fortune or it might be locked up in less tangible assets that is hard to value. A Saudi prince might get a $2B loan from the bank based on his connections and future oil income but does that mean he have $2B even though that is all debt?", "Many of the billionaire lists specifically exclude heads of state from being eligible for inclusion on their list. If heads of state are included, it can become very hard to assign what is the head of state's personal property, is it the whole nation, some proportion of the nation, how do they treat the Queen of England (who made an agreement with the nation of England to trade their personal holdings for their expenses being paid). ", "It's difficult to determine what's owned by a Saudi royal himself, and what's owned by the state because is royal family is the state. Royalty can pull directly from the state's coffers. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cwq0v7q", "cwq0yxn", "cwq4uh8" ], "score": [ 4, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Broadly speaking, young people not voting shows there is a lack of engagement. This can mean they don't feel like anything will change, or can change. \n \nThis matters because for democracy to function properly (i.e. have checks and balances, a knowledgable electorate etc.) people actually have to give a damn. And what many young people don't realize is, they can make a difference.\n\nMost places, 18 year olds can vote. These are people in university/college, or starting in the work force. Governments play a major role in their lives (i.e. setting tuition levels and stuff like that), so if they have a vested interest in the outcome of the elections.", "Whether it matters or not depends on what party you are in favour of. Young people overwhelmingly identify as democrat. So if you are in favour of democrat policies / a democrat president, the fact that young people feel that way but don't vote should matter greatly to you.\n\nIf you are republican, young people voting isn't necessarily an advantage to you, but you might still be very much in favour of everybody getting involved in the democratic process that elects the government. ", "It turns old people into the ruling class, so laws and policies are created in favor of their interests and views. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cefnlcu", "cefol63", "cefs5sy" ], "score": [ 86, 7, 26 ], "text": [ "^I'm ^not ^sure ^what ^you ^mean ^by ^\"examining ^Rome\". ^If ^you ^mean ^something ^like ^walking ^through ^the ^city ^of ^Rome, ^this ^would ^be ^my ^answer:\n\n & nbsp;\n\nRome has changed massively between the reign of Augustus (27 BCE - 14) and that of Constantine (306-337). Most major monuments are completely new to you. A short list of prominent examples:\n\n & nbsp;\n\n*First century* \n\n* The Colosseum would stand where houses stood during your time, it was built by the Flavian emperors (69-96)\n* Several new forums would have been added near the Forum Romanum and the already familiar forums of Caesar and Augustus\n* The Arch of Titus, celebrating Rome's victory in the Jewish Revolt\n\n*Second century*\n\n* The Pantheon would not be the one you know, built by Agrippa, but a completely different (and more impressive) building built by Hadrian. Surprisingly the original inscription remains\n* Trajan's Market\n* The Column of Trajan depicting victories in Dacia, an area that didn't yet belong to the Roman Empire in your time\n* The Column of Marcus Aurelius\n* The Temple of Faustina and Antoninus Pius on the Forum Romanum\n\n*Third century*\n\n* The Aurelian Wall, a new city wall\n* The enormous Baths of Diocletian\n* The likewise enormous Baths of Caracalla\n\n*Fourth century (up until the end of Constantine's reign)*\n\n* The Old St. Peter's Basilica would be under construction, a church being built by emperor Constantine for a religion you've never heard of\n* The Arch of Constantine, celebrating a victory in the civil war against Maxentius\n* The Basilica of Constantine and Maxentius on the Forum Romanum\n\n*Some other differences*\n\n* The coins have largely different names from the ones you knew, they're also heavily debased compared to the Augustan age\n* People from all over the empire are citizens now due to the Edict of Caracalla in 212\n\n*Some similarities*\n\nIt may surprise you to learn that some things would be very much recognizable to you. For example:\n\n* The number of people in Rome would be roughly the same, although Augustus' age was before the population reached a peak while Constantine reigns after it reached its peak. \n* The Circus Maximus has been improved upon, but has kept most of its original design\n* The Curia Julia, where the Senate debates on the Forum Romanum is pretty much the same building you know\n* The Theatre of Pompey\n* Emperors are still calling themselves \"Caesar\" and \"Augustus\", even though no-one of the Julio-Claudian family remains\n* The city of Ostia is probably still Rome's dominant harbour, although it is in heavy competition with Portus (which is entirely unfamiliar to you)", "If I could ask a follow up, what would have been different *for the entire Empire*, rather than just for the city of Rome?", "Ok, first things first I am promoting you to Senator, because the Equestrian Order is a rather difficult group to define. In many ways it is essentially a tax bracket rather than a socio-political organization as such, and most of the stuff we have is about Senators and the associated social circles anyway, and I think that is what you are looking for. So congratulations!\n\nPerhaps the first thing you notice as you step into the Curia is that there is a much more diverse bunch inhabiting it. The ruling class of Augustus was by no means homogeneous, and one of his great policies was in using local elites rather than running roughshod over them, but he was at the beginning of a process and you are at the end. The current emperor is from Moesia, basically the modern Balkans, and he grew up in Britain. When you disappeared mysteriously Moesia was a semi-Roman region of barbarians and bandits, and Britain wasn't even Roman. In a very immediate way, the accent Constantine and his inner circle speaks with did not exist in your time, but even outside of that the Senate is thronged with Greeks, North Africans, Spanish, Gauls and Syrians--although still favoring the Latin West. On the other hand, these people would be much more similar to each other than an equivalent group would have been in Augustan time, because again, that is at the beginning of a process you are seeing the end of.\n\nFor government service, you will see immediately that things are more bureaucratized. The early Empire was essentially run through overlapping personal connections and the main job of, say, a provincial governor was to ensure that the conflict resulting from this would not erupt in violence, or at least would be pushed towards productive ends. The government now is much more concerned about centralization, and from that a new class of elite has arisen. In the Augustan period one could say that the Empire was run by traditional elites transformed by an Imperial culture, but now the highest officials are truly political and truly imperial. They are, in a sense, mandarins or literatti rather than *nobiles*.\n\nFor religion, to an extent the emperor and his inner circle follow a teaching that did not exist for you, but more importantly the nature of imperial religions had changed. In the Augustan period, worship was still dominated by local practices, but now those have been transformed by a large series of massive, Imperial wide cults. Neither Christ, nor Mithras, nor Sol Invictus existed in a substantial was in the Augustan period, but they are now a crucial part of imperial culture.\n\nThese are just three things, but I hope it gives you an idea of how society became more \"imperial.\" Greg Woolf is certainly the scholar to see for this, and I have heard his new *Rome: An Empire's Story* is intended for a more non-academic audience." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbg74n3", "dbg7cor" ], "score": [ 5, 25 ], "text": [ "They probably adapted the real disease [kuru](_URL_0_). It's a prion disease, similar to Mad Cow disease. A prion is a protein that is folded up wrong. Besides not doing its normal job right, the prion makes other proteins become misfolded. The accumulation of these prions causes brain damage. In particular, kuru results in movement problems such as shaking and an inability to walk. \n\nKuru is spread by cannibalism, particularly of the brain. It was found in a Papua New Guinea tribe thay practiced cannibalism as part of funerary rites. It's pretty rare now that the practice has stopped, but it has an incubation period of up to 40 years so there could still crop up occasionally among people who used to practice funerary cannibalism. ", "Kuru is a real life disease caused by a prion transmitted through consumption of infectious brain matter.\n\nIt was first noted in Papua New Guinea in the 1950s and 60s and has largely remained only in that area due to endocannibalistic practices. They eat their dead.\n\nEating the flesh of a person who wasn't infected with the disease isn't harmful. At least no more harmful than eating most other meats." ] }

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[ [ "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease\\)" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "daejoax", "daen9lm", "daepsa1" ], "score": [ 12, 2, 3 ], "text": [ "EE student bored at a huge family Thanksgiving meal, I'll give this a shot.\n\nThe sine function takes an angle, traditionally labeled 'theta', as its input, and spits out the corresponding ratio between the opposite and hypotenuse sides of a triangle. Specifically, using [this image](_URL_2_) as a reference, you can say that sin(theta) = opp/hyp. \n\nIf you were to plot the sine function as theta varies from 0 to 360 degrees (as theta is just an angle), you would get the classic \"sine wave\" - this is simply a plot of how the ratio between the sides of a triangle varies as you change theta.\n\n[This gif](_URL_4_) should help with the intuition a little bit, here's what's going on: if you watch as the circle (with radius 1) is traced out, really what you are seeing is a triangle with the ratio between sides varying as a function of the angle, the definition of the sine function. [Here](_URL_3_) is what you would see if you took a snapshot of the previous gif. As you let theta increase in the picture, if you reach 90 degrees (pointing straight up) you'll have hyp = 1 and opp = 1, so sin(90) = opp/hyp = 1, as expected. Similar reasoning will show that sine(180) = 0 (since opp = 0), and you can continue to move around the circle to find whatever sine value you are interested in. Understand - **asking for the sine of any number is just like asking \"what is the ratio between the opposite and hypotenuse of a triangle with this angle?\"**\n\nFollowing so far? Here's where it gets interesting.\n\nSine, described above, gives you the ratios between the opposite side and the hypotenuse. If hyp = 1, then sin(theta) = opp/hyp = opp. In other words, it is just the vertical component of the diagonal vector. [Visually](_URL_0_), if we say that the hypotenuse of the triangle represents force (labeled F), taking the sine of the angle will give you the vertical component of the force vector (labeled Fy in the image). Now, since sine is defined as sine(theta) = opp/hyp, we can say: hyp*sine(theta) = opp. In other words, given a vector we can find the vertical component using sine.\n\nBut what if we wanted to find the horizontal component of the vector? Well, cosine is defined as cosine(theta) = adj/hyp. It shouldn't be hard to convince yourself, using a similar argument, that the cosine simply spits out the horizontal component of a vector.\n\nEDIT: I messed this up, slight correction in the comments below. ~~Logically it follows that if you take the sine and cosine of the same angle and add them you will always get 1 - sine and cosine can be thought of as the \"percentage\" that the vertical and horizontal components respectively contribute to the vector of interest, 1 being 100%, which is why sin(90), a vertical line, is 1, while the cosine of the same angle is 0. This is why sin(45) = cos(45) = 1/2, both the vertical and horizontal components contribute equally to the vector pointing at a 45 degree angle.~~\n\nAs an aside, [if you plot the cosine and sine of an angle on the same graph](_URL_1_), you'll notice that the sine and cosine functions are related - specifically, cosine is just sine shifted over by 90 degrees, i.e. sin(theta + 90) = cos(theta). Interestingly, if you noted the \"slope\" at every point of the sine function and plotted it you would get the cosine function. This means, by definition, that the derivative of sine is cosine - I'll leave it at that to keep this in the context of ELI5, learn calculus for more detail.\n\nFinally, we can get into an amazing theorem devised by my main man Fourier - essentially, using the fact that sin (and by extension, cos) are the most fundamental way of mathematically expressing periodic (repetitive) motion, Fourier proved that any periodic motion, no matter how complicated, can be expressed as the sum of simple sin and cosine functions (a Fourier series). This is the heart of modern signals processing used in engineering and technology.\n\n\n\n", "[This GIF](_URL_0_) depicts it exactly.\n\nWhen moving around a circle, the sine function represents your vertical movement and the cosine function represents your horizontal movement.", "Here's one of the best ways of describing the point of trigonometric functions that I've ever seen:\n\n > **Motivation: Trig Is Anatomy**\n\n > Imagine Bob The Alien visits Earth to study our species.\n\n > Without new words, humans are hard to describe: “There’s a sphere at the top, which gets scratched occasionally” or “Two elongated cylinders appear to provide locomotion”.\n\n > After creating specific terms for anatomy, Bob might jot down typical body proportions:\n\n > * The armspan (fingertip to fingertip) is approximately the height\n* A head is 5 eye-widths wide\n* Adults are 8 head-heights tall\n\n > How is this helpful?\n\n > Well, when Bob finds a jacket, he can pick it up, stretch out the arms, and estimate the owner’s height. And head size. And eye width. One fact is linked to a variety of conclusions.\n\n > Even better, human biology explains human thinking. Tables have legs, organizations have heads, crime bosses have muscle. Our biology offers ready-made analogies that appear in man-made creations.\n\n > Now the plot twist: you are Bob the alien, studying creatures in math-land!\n\n > Generic words like “triangle” aren’t overly useful. But labeling sine, cosine, and hypotenuse helps us notice deeper connections. And scholars might study haversine, exsecant and gamsin, like biologists who find a link between your fibia and clavicle.\n\n > And because triangles show up in circles…\n\n > …and circles appear in cycles, our triangle terminology helps describe repeating patterns!\n\n > Trig is the anatomy book for “math-made” objects. If we can find a metaphorical triangle, we’ll get an armada of conclusions for free.\n\n[...snip...]\n\n > **Tip: Trig Values Are Percentages**\n\n > Nobody ever told me in my years of schooling: sine and cosine are percentages. They vary from +100% to 0 to -100%, or max positive to nothing to max negative.\n\n > Let’s say I paid $14 in tax. You have no idea if that’s expensive. But if I say I paid 95% in tax, you know I’m getting ripped off.\n\n > An absolute height isn’t helpful, but if your sine value is .95, I know you’re almost at the top of your dome. Pretty soon you’ll hit the max, then start coming down again.\n\nYou can read the whole post to better wrap your head around trigonometry here: _URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "http://zonalandeducation.com/mstm/physics/mechanics/forces/forceComponents/forceComponents2.gif", "https://share.ehs.uen.org/sites/default/files/images/unit8l3.7_graph1.img_assist_custom.png", "http://www.nextlevelmaths.com/resources/trigonometry/sohcahtoa/images/triangle.png", "http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMAT6680Fa09/Rosonet/EMAT%206690/essay2/rosonet_unitcircle2.gif", "http://giphy.com/gifs/draw-function-trigonometry-NYcPVR3gqfKww" ], [ "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Circle_cos_sin.gif" ], [ "https://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-trigonometry/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "efqbjcd" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "A very brief answer can come from looking at patterns of European colonialism. The Mississippi river, the St. Lawrence, the Columbia, the Fraser, all these are rivers that when they reach the ocean they come out in the middle of a political unit rather than as a boundary. This is largely because while rivers can represent borders, they more commonly represent the center of a drainage system, whose inhabitants move back and forth, and colonial powers tend to compete for control of the mouth of these systems, and to develop settlement around them. \n\nIn the case of the St. Lawrence, this meant that France brought settlers to the river, who settled it on both sides up the river, forming a political unit, and while later an international border was created along a portion of the river, it was largely undeveloped land further upstream than these communities that was able to be divided in such a way. This portion of the boundary was determined in 1783 at the treaty of Paris." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cbnaghm", "cbnd87i", "cbo71gh" ], "score": [ 2, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "A peasant levy was not often called upon but there does exists various folk wrestling and stick fighting traditions that may vary from region to region. \n\nPaulus Hector Mair collected fighting treatises of everything he could get his hands on in the 16th century and includes a number of 'exoctic' weapons in his manuscripts; they range from staffs, to flails, sickles and an amusing 'peasant staff' which resembles an uprooted sapling. _URL_0_", "Many of them would have access to spears, which would probably constitute the bulk of their weaponry. Also, depending on the time and place, many would also be equipped as archers. Many small villages had competitions for archery on a regular basis, especially in England. The spears, in particular, are easy and super-cheap to make. Swords and specialized weaponry were very expensive to create.\n\nBut that being said, the idea of a \"peasant levy\" as a regular feature of armies is not really accurate. There are notable examples (Hussites, various town militias, etc.), but the bulk would be a kind-of \"middle class\" or mercenaries. Most feudal societies had requirements for providing arms, armor, equipment, and men based on wealth/land size. (The term \"Knight's Fee\" is a good example, as it represents the amount of land necessary to support a knight and his retinue.). You don't really want to plop the raw labor force for your agriculture (and source of your income) into a situation where they are likely to all die. The feudal system was definitely propped-up by the creation of a military \"caste\" that protected it.\n\nThis also varies widely based on where and when you're looking for. \"Peasants\" don't necessarily exist everywhere. To use a different region, the warriors of most Steppe-based armies would be equipped to use Bows, Spears, and/or Lassos, particularly bows. On the counter, many of the militias bordering the Steppes would be focused on utilizing light cavalry, hiring other contingents of Steppe tribes, or trained in ranged weapons.", "The majority of Anglo-Saxon soldiers, who served in a semi-professional militia called the fyrd, would have carried spears. Most would have also carried axes, as these were relatively cheap and easy to make in terms of the metal involved, and would also have non-military uses.\n\nProfessional household soldiers known as Huscarls traditionally carried long axes designed to cut a man in two and even stop horses. These can be seen in the Bayeux Tapestry. For an equivalent in popular culture, think Areoh Hotah in A Song of Ice and Fire." ] }

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[ [ "http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Paulus_Hector_Mair" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cwjm0qq", "cwjrak0" ], "score": [ 3, 9 ], "text": [ "I think Thornton's [American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492] (_URL_5_) would probably be a good resource for answering your question (it's at my work office atm, so I'm reluctant to give a more definitive answer to your question lest I answer it incorrectly.)\n\nClearly, the shift didn't take place all at once - it would have been somewhat gradual, from geographic region to geographic region, as peoples came into contact either with one another and got into it over land, or (as in the case of the Columbia River region) came into contact with diseases that decimated their populations before they ever even saw a non-Native. Lewis and Clark's journals report coming into contact with the [Clatsop] (_URL_2_) at the mouth of the Columbia in 1804 as an [already decimated people] (_URL_6_).\n\nThe Dakota *definitely* seemed to be aware of their being a population tipping point for them getting outnumbered, and that that was a very dangerous moment: [Thaóyate Dúta] (_URL_4_) repeatedly warned his people, other Dakota leaders, and non-Native leaders in Minnesota Territory, that the displacement of the Native population by White settlers and the subsequent loss of Native lands would lead to war. That's [exactly what happened] (_URL_0_), with dire consequences for the Dakota that have repercussions to this very day.\n\nThere are certainly [parts of the United States where it's still not true that Natives are outnumbered] (_URL_3_), but I understand that you mean the US as a whole. \n\nEdit: [Here's] (_URL_1_) a cartoon about this exact situation that's so relevant I had just assumed it was by Dine cartoonist Jack Ahasteen, but - nope, it's by non-Native cartoonist Matt Bors. I remember when this cartoon came out, it really struck a chord with all of us it was so on-point.", "This is a huge, and interesting, question. I'm afraid our current data can only go so far in providing an answer. What follows is an analysis of the data, and the pitfalls of trying to definitively answer this question due to everything from notions of identity, evolving racial categories, and lack of solid sources. I will first address the research surrounding Native North American population size at contact, then the issues with calculating the rate of decline until the numbers hit a nadir around 1900. I will then address historical census numbers for the European and African descent populations of the United States. Finally, I will emphasize how all of this is simply an educated guess, based on flawed sources, that reflects a dark history of our nation’s interaction with Native Americans.\n\nFirst, gallons of ink have been spilled debating Native American population size at the time of contact. There are two main camps, “high counters” and “low counters”. In the early 1900s scholars like Kroeber and Mooney looked at the Native American population size during their time, and assumed little changed in Native American lifeways between contact and 1900. They didn’t factor in mortality from disease, warfare, and famine. Kroeber estimated 900,000 people lived in North America, and 8.4 million lived in the entire New World. That is a population density of less than 1 person for every six miles. Other scholars, like Dobyns, formed a group called “high counters”. The high counters held the New World was richly populated at contact, but catastrophic disease spread ahead of colonists, decimating the population, and rendering any colonial-period estimates of population size grossly inaccurate. Dobyns estimated over 112 million people lived in the New World at the time of contact. For reference, only 11 countries today boast a population larger than 112 million.\n\nToday the popular perception has inherited the legacy of the high counters, and their catastrophic, apocalyptic population decline due to infectious disease after contact. In academic circles we are stepping back from the assumption of epidemic disease decimation without concrete evidence of that disease mortality. For example, ten to twenty years ago we might look at a Mississippian site abandoned around 1525 and assume disease carried off all, or at least most, of the inhabitants. However, we now know for many people in North America geographic mobility was a regular means of dealing with resource scarcity, or territorial encroachment, or changes in the political structure. The interpretations of the evidence have changed, and with that change we must modify how we reconstruct the past. All that said, current best evidence suggest the Native North American population size at contact was between 2 and 7 million people. \n\nAs you can see, there are a host of issues and assumptions that go into calculating the Native North American population in 1492, and those issues are only magnified in the years following contact. Native American population size, and subsequent decline or rebound, varied based on geographic location and time. Centuries of warfare, population displacement, epidemic disease mortality, famine, territory restriction, and identity erasure wreaked havoc on Native North Americas. Calculating raw numbers is next to impossible. Native Americans were not included in the U.S. Census until 1860. An attempt at a total count of Native Americans throughout the U.S. was not realized until 1890. Compiling first hand estimates given by those traveling into Native American lands can only tell us so much from their limited perspective. Scholars generally agree the Native American populations hit their nadir (lowest point) by 1900 when the U.S. Census total for American Indian, Eskimo and Aleut was 237,196 (roughly 0.3% of the U.S. population). Since the population decline debate is so contentious, I’m just going to focus on when the “White” population of the United States passed the upper bound of the best estimates of Native American population size at contact. \n\nContinued below..." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.usdakotawar.org/", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/f7/76/be/f776be148f2f41ab4ba6988b0b22550b.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clatsop", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._communities_with_Native_American_majority_populations", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Crow", "http://www.amazon.com/American-Indian-Holocaust-Survival-Civilization/dp/080612220X", "https://franceshunter.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/lewis-clark-and-smallpox/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fjn6k2v", "fjn6xwl", "fjnfb0k" ], "score": [ 12, 8, 2 ], "text": [ "The actual answer is a bit more complicated than that. What cells actually use for fuel is ATP, which is an energetic protein that we make using carbohydrates, fats, and other things as a fuel source.\n\nATP is mostly produced by mitochondria, organelles inside cells, and muscle cells have a lot of mitochondria.\n\nAt any given time, we have a little bit of liberated sugar, glucose mostly, which is floating around in the blood, being taken up by cells that need to produce more ATP, and being used by them to make ATP. When we start to exercise or burn a lot of calories, the amount of free glucose we have in the blood goes down, so we start liberating it by making more out of molecules we have stored.\n\nThe big ways we store energy are as glycogen, a long-chain sugar in the liver, and fat. It is pretty easy to separate glucose from glycogen, so that is the first form of reserve energy we go to. It is a more time-consuming process to make glucose from fats, and there are more bad by products produced. So we don't start burning fats until our bodies know we are in it for the long haul.", "Fat is designed for long term storage in case food becomes scarce. It holds significantly more energy than carbs. A little over twice the amount per gram, actually. So your body wants to only expend what it needs to, as carbs are a weaker energy source, they are the first to go, while it tries to hold on to fat for as long as possible in case of food insecurity.\n\nRemember your body evolved in a comparatively unstable environment with predators still hunting us. Food was a lot more scarce so it is good to have long term energy storage (fat) in case of drought, famine, or any other reason why a food source would dry up. So it created these systems to keep you alive long enough to make babies. Burn the carbs first- keep the fat until you have no food.", "The short answer I learned is, carbs are an easier and faster source of energy\nFat takes more effort to get energy from.\n\nAnd the body doesn't really plan ahead in the same way you do, your body has no idea if you are going to be running for 5 seconds, or 40 minutes. Your body just knows \"oh your running, better fill up on energy\"\n\nIt'll go with the easy solution first." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dhmkurc", "dhmkzlw", "dhml1y5", "dhmrg2m" ], "score": [ 198, 37, 19, 9 ], "text": [ "It would be better described as creaking rather than cracking. When a door creaks, the hinges aren't cracking, there's just resistance that builds up until friction can no longer stop the hinge from moving. The same applies to the beams in your house as some parts of the wood heat & expand faster than others.", "Most likely you are hearing a snapping sound resulting from the friction of slight movements of the nails in the wood, due to expansion and contraction from various physical changes in and around the house, like temperature, pressure, humidity...", "It depends what you mean by hearing it crack. If you mean randomly with no movement, it's the heating and cooling causing expansion of the wood, which ends up pressing against another piece of wood that's tight until it \"pops\" slightly and juts to another position. Think how earthquakes happen on super small scale. ", "Assuming your house is relatively new, the timbers in your house are drying out and shrinking, but they shrink inconsistently and, yes, are actually forming new cracks. This is called checking. When these new cracks form, they can actually sound like gunshots. And timber frame builders expect this checking; it's nothing to worry about.\n\nTimbers dry fairly slowly, at a rate of about one inch of thickness per year, so a 10\" by 10\" timber will completely dry in about 5 years. If your house is older in years than half the thickness in inches of its biggest timber, this is probably not what you're hearing." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "efcn16a" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "It can.\n\nImagine you have a job at a convenience store where they give you a 50% discount on baseball cards. You don’t care for them much, but your friend does. He regularly buys them from you for 90% of list. You never buy anything from him.\n\nYour friend has a trade deficit with you. The trade, though, is beneficial for both of you and you’ll keep doing it as long as it works out for both of you. And you’re not living outside your means to do it. \n\nYour teacher may have been talking about a budget deficit, which is a whole different thing. That is living outside your means. \n\n*edit: I had the trade deficit backwards. Macro at 7am never safe. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e9i4agt" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "**Current:** Immigrants and Emigrants\n\n**On Deck:** Trauma\n\n**In the Hole:** The Balkans\n\nRemember to ask theme-related questions in [a new thread!](_URL_1_)! If your submission doesn't get automatically flaired, [send us a modmail](_URL_0_) with a link!" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/submit?selftext=true" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dfdmxgm", "dfdok7r", "dfdoxwj", "dfdy2fs", "dfe28c6", "dfe2rwu", "dfe324t", "dfe5pcb" ], "score": [ 11, 881, 55, 12, 32, 3, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "It's really more popular with people in the movie industry. It doesn't normally top the list of general audiences.\nIt's partly revered because it's kind of a film making clinic. So many techniques used in the various aspects of cinema are used, and used very very well.", "It's less about being the pinnacle of movie-making and more about being the _start_ of modern movie-making. \n\nIn _Citizen Kane_, director Orson Welles revolutionized how films were shot. There are a number of cinematic techniques that were introduced in _Citizen Kane_ including low angle shots, multiple dissolves, deep focus, non-linear storytelling (in particular supported by the film editing), people talking over one another (most films were shot then as back-and-forth dialogue), full sets with four walls and a ceiling (most films then were shot on sets like stage plays -- 3 walls, no ceiling), incorporation of fake documentary/news reels (which Welles had pioneered on radio with _War of the Worlds_), expressionistic lighting, and more. \n\nAll of these things are so commonplace today that you'll see them in many 30-second commercials, never mind feature films. But in 1941 they were all almost entirely new innovations that people had never seen until _Citizen Kane_. \n\nWatching _Citizen Kane_ today, you'd think \"What's the big deal?\" But the *reason* you think \"What's the big deal\" is because of all the techniques that _Citizen Kane_ introduced to cinema. \n\nPossible recent analogy: think about how the special effects of something like _Jurassic Park_ or _The Matrix_ in the 90's or maybe _Avatar_ in 2009 changed the way that people thought about how films could be made. _Citizen Kane_ had _ten times_ the impact that those films had in people's thinking about how films could be made. ", "If you look at the silents or early talkies, they are almost like theatrical plays. Static stage, camera, and lighting. The story is usually pretty linear, and told exclusively through dialogue (and maybe a bit of action)\n\nIn Citizen Kane, most of the locations are filmed through several different cameras, some at some fairly unusual angles. And a great deal of care is taken with the lighting. All this gives a much greater sense of the locations being actual places instead of a stage with the curtains hidden from view. It also was pretty innovative with the narrative frame - there are flashbacks, montages, and so on. Citizen Kane wasn't necessarily the first movie to use any one of these techniques, but it did so many of them, and executed them so well that it has come to be seen as kind of a master class in how to use the unique properties of cinema to create artwork that wouldn't be possible in any other medium. And the acting, dialogue, cinematography and all that is very well done.\n\nIt also probably acquired a certain amount of mystique because Orson Welles was such a young and unknown quantity in Hollywood when he made it, and then never really lived up to that early promise. It was also very controversial when it came out, because the incredibly powerful newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (whom Kane was based on) tried to bury it during production. ", "Besides its innovations, the performances are amazing, and the guts the unknown Welles demonstrated to take on William Randolph Hearst at the time is testimony to the power of art itself.\n\nThe storytelling is so strong in certain scenes, also. Check out the dialogue-free scene in which Kane and his first wife grow older through a montage of eating breakfast over the years. She is shown reading his newspaper every day until the end when she picks up the rival paper, showing the rift that has grown between them. \n\nAnd the always phenomenal Joseph Cotton is the quintessential \"best supporting actor\".\n\nWatch the movie RKO 281 with Liev schreiber to learn more about what it took to make this film and why it's so important.", "There are a lot of reasons for Citizen Kane being highly regarded outside of its historical significance. As /u/DoctorOddfellow explained:\n\n > In Citizen Kane, director Orson Welles revolutionized how films were shot. There are a number of cinematic techniques that were introduced in Citizen Kane including low angle shots, multiple dissolves, deep focus, non-linear storytelling (in particular supported by the film editing), people talking over one another (most films were shot then as back-and-forth dialogue), full sets with four walls and a ceiling (most films then were shot on sets like stage plays -- 3 walls, no ceiling), incorporation of fake documentary/news reels (which Welles had pioneered on radio with War of the Worlds), expressionistic lighting, and more.\n\nBut it's important to note that it's not just that Welles used these techniques, but *how* he used him. And in fact, many of the innovative things he did where already done in previous films (deep focus is used heavily in The Rules of the Game, 1939), but he was the first to do them all in a single movie. The final chapter of one film textbook I read was dedicated to explaining why Citizen Kane is so great, and it opened by stating something along the lines of, \"Every shot in the movie contains meaning, and the worst of the shots are merely very good.\"\n\nSo to give you an idea, [here's a famous shot that students typically look at in film school.](_URL_0_)\n\nHere are some things to look at:\n\n* Single shot once we enter the house/cabin. Creating continuity in time, and also means that the blocking in this shot is all related\n* Contrast between how the mother is dressed (formal) vs the father (casual)\n* The camera moves away from the window with the mother in the foreground and father in the background, suggesting further that she has control over the scene\n* They sit down. The characters are arranged so that the father is the only one standing. Usually a character standing suggests strength, but since he is still in the background and his dressed casually, this blocking convention is somewhat subverted, just as this scene subverts gender dynamics as a whole. Also, as they debate over the fate of a young Charles Foster Kane, he is scene in the background, between the two parents, playing in the snow. (This all being visible to the audience is an example of his use of deep focus).\n* As the drama in the scene escalates, the father moves to the foreground and the camera tilts up (still the same shot). The shot goes from a wide to a medium-wide, low-angle. The continuity in movement further articulates the rise in drama, and suggests a last ditch effort by the father. He now appears more menacing than before. Maybe there is more to his relationship with his wife and son? \"Anybody doesn't think I've been a good husband, or father...\"(we find out a few moments later that he is not a good father) Note: Charlie is still in the center, background. \n* As the mother signs, the camera tilts back down, excluding the father from the frame, indicating that he has no agency in this scene, or this moment. The mother owns the scene, the mother has \"won\" the scene\n* After the papers are signed, the camera rises, and the father moves back to the window and shuts it. The closing of the window following the signing of the papers, suggests that these documents have actually ended the boy's blissful childhood, a major theme of the movie.\n* They are all standing now and move towards the window, and the mother actually opens in one last time. The dialogue in the following closeup, with her action of opening the window reveals that she may not be as cold as we were previously lead to believe, that she does care about her son's well-being, and this is what she thinks is right for him.\n\nAnd that's just one shot in the movie. That's not even going into the overall structure of it and the depth of the narrative. There's a lot going on in Citizen Kane, and it's acclaim is not unwarranted. Roger Ebert did a commentary track for it, which is supposed to be fantastic. That can explain in more detail why it's a near perfect movie. \n\nEdit: Words", "This doesn't answer your question, but it's one thing that adds to its mystique. Orson Welles co-wrote, produced and directed *Citizen Kane* when he was only 25 years old.", "Well, for one it was highly innovative. Pioneering most, if not all, modern filmaking techniques. Even down to things like story structure, abstract concepts, location filming and more.\n\nSecond, it is a really really good movie. Like brilliantly so. Tells a huge story in concept, but it's also cerebral, sensational, funny and deals with real human flaws. That is also super modern.\n\nA lot of stories in film beforehand were like, fantasies. ", "Apart from technical reasons another factor that plays into its fame was its opposition by William Randolph Hearst - the media mogul that feel that Kane was too much of an autobiography about him that didn’t put him in the most favorable light. He was notorious in exhibiting a lot of pressure to not getting it made. RKO (I believe) defied him and released it anyway." ] }

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

{ "a_id": [ "duwvysd" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The debt is issued through the use of US Treasury securities. The government sells a bond, and the money collected from the bond buyer increases the debt until the bond is paid back." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cmay4ra", "cmb2pff", "cmb58tj", "cmb5dtq", "cmbk4j4" ], "score": [ 67, 15, 23, 5, 2 ], "text": [ "Ok, so: semen contains very little actual spermatozoa and a lot of other components, one of which are alkaloids produced by prostate to - basically - neutralize the acidity in a vagina, so that the spermatozoa survive long enough to reach the egg.\n\nThe alkaline stuff oxidises when it contacts the oxygen in air, which makes it change colour.\n\n^(source: high school biology, I guess?)", "\nIt shoots out runny so it'll come out easily, but it has stuff in it that turns the semen hard almost straight away so it'll stick in the vagina. The stuff that turns it hard it changes the shape of proteins in your semen which makes the colour change (think about cooking an egg white). When the effect of that stuff wears off it turns runny again so the sperm be able to move up towards the egg. \n\n", "It shouldn't if you squirt a little lemon juice on it.", "I just wanna start out by saying....okay, 23 comments but only 9 are readable? Thats pretty horrible.\n\nThe color of the semen is caused by the types of cells and molecules that are all mixed together when travelling from the testes, through the Vas Deferens, and coming together with the alkaloids from the prostate (as /u/thehollowjester has said). \n\nOne thing that causes the Viscosity and color of your semen to change, actually is largely affected by your sperm count. The thicker and whiter your semen is, the higher your sperm count. You would notice that, if you ejactulated multiple times in a row, your semen will get clearer and clearer. That is because your ejaculating faster than your testes can produce. Ever seen precum before you actually ejactulate? Its got a super almost nondiscernable amount of sperm, which gives it its clear color and very watery texture.\n\nSo in conclusion, what is causing your semen to turn white, not only is the oxidation of the molecules, but also your sperm dying off within your own semen and degrading. Which in turn, actually turns them clear.\n\nSource: Phlebotomist/Nursing student", "I have to ask. What situation are you in where you ejaculate and you haven't cleaned it up after five minutes?\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c7kme3k", "c7kmo3a" ], "score": [ 2, 6 ], "text": [ "More importantly... why can't my girlfriend taste anything anymore?? Some kind of sinus infection that's lasted weeks ;_;", "Sinuses are hollow cavities in the skull to lighten the bone structure. They are lined with mucous tissue, and can be subjected to allergens, causing the mucous to swell and produce mucus. This can plug up the sinus cavities and cause pressure and pain. Why your throat swells up and goes numb really has nothing to do with your sinuses. It probably has more to do with histamine release that caused the sneeze in the first place. Here is a good pic of sinuses. _URL_0_ \n\nAs far as not tasting, it's probably because her sense of smell is diminished from sinusitis. \n\nShe needs to see a doctor. I suffer from sinusitis, and it's horrible. There have been cases where the sinusitis has been caused by nasal polyps, which can be removed fairly easily if they are small. Most sinus problems are allergic or viral/bacterial. " ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.webmd.com/allergies/picture-of-the-sinuses" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d5l38kp", "d5lajv5", "d5lfgcb", "d5lq6cm", "d5ls0u4", "d5lscwh", "d5lsj2g", "d5lt0pj", "d5ltaqj", "d5ltatr", "d5ltsbh", "d5luhrv" ], "score": [ 601, 33, 174, 24, 2, 2, 4, 2, 5, 2, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Your brain notices that there's nothing of interest going on at the moment, and tries to shut down to conserve energy. Your studying might be important to you in a higher-function way, but at a core animal level, it's not food, sex, stimulation, or entertainment, and so you're just wasting energy and calories (and therefore dangerously wandering towards starvation and death) by being alert and awake. ", "In this case, your brain can be compared to a car with a bad idle. When you're interested and engaged, your brain has it's pedal on the accelerator and it runs fine. When you are doing things that are not as interesting to you the brain loses engagement and starts to idle. It has trouble maintaining the idle and starts to shut down against your will. Generally, the idle state can be maintained in normal people, but some have issues with it.\n\nThis is actually a sign of mild narcolepsy and you should get tested at a sleep center. I had the same symptoms and that was my diagnosis.", "I had a buddy who had this issue. So he comes over one day and he's like, \"Man I just don't know what's up, I can't stay awake in class. It's like an 8 am'er but I get a good night's sleep before hand and I grab a giant 32oz coke on my way so I'm loaded with caffeine. The next thing I know I'm waking up and the class is leaving. I don't know why I can't stay awake, it's not even that boring\" So this goes on for several weeks, and finally he decides it's bad enough to hit up the campus clinic.\n\nTurns out the dude is a minor diabetic. He was basically sending himself into a diabetic coma every morning in his attempt to stay awake! Made a few life changes like cutting out soda, getting some exercise, and switching to Miller Lite and walla, drops 35 pounds, and gains a ton of energy. \n\nI don't necessarily think this is your issue, but your story reminded me of it.\n\n", "I was taking night classes a few years ago. I was working, married, kids, mortgage, yadda, yadda. I could not stay away during my Calculus class. I found out that if I took a 15 min nap in my car before class -- that I would wake up automatically. And, I would be completely refreshed for my class. I have since learned that it is called a \"power nap\" and I use it all the time.\n\nBut, it is KEY ... to wake up after 15 mins.", "Basically, your brain is like:\n\n\"okay, I'm safe, I'm well-fed, and there's nothing too interesting going on...might as well sleep to save energy\"\n\nThat's basically it. Happens to me too; I get really tired if I'm bored and have nothing to do.", "If this happens in the morning it could be you just feeling sleepy because your body dips in energy. A little caffeine could fix it. If it'sat night you might just need sleep. Otherwise if it's boring do caffeine. If you're worried about sugar you can do coffee. Tea works if you just need a small amount and don'tlike coffee or espresso.", "This is going to get buried, but... It might be your eye sight. If your eyes have a hard time focusing on near objects, it may cause your brain to go into overdrive trying to make sense of what the eyes are reporting. Causes one to become tired after maybe 5 - 10 minutes of reading. ", "Fun fact: if you find yourself singing or humming on a regulaor basic, that means that the job is too easy and its not taking any effort. So if your mind is needing to preoccupy yourself, you'll find yourself humming/ singing (Depending on the person obviously). ", "Ozzy and drix aren't too happy with your decision making. They think there's better things to be done.", "I was dozing off at the drop of a hat ... no amount of red bull, pro-plus or double/triple espressos could keep me awake ... turned out I had a B12 deficiency.\n\nNow whilst I don't doze at the drop of a hat I do have issues with exhaustion and have not had a restful nights sleep of more than two-three hours for over ten years. I've been diagnosed with CFS/ME now!", "i have the same issue but i wake up more tired than i went to sleep. it doesnt matter when i go to bed ill sleep 11+ hours if i set no alarm. \n\ncould sleep right now at 9pm and id wake up at 9am late for work", "This is me. I fall asleep all the time. In lectures, in talks, in meetings. I once got myself tested for sleep apnea, they said that nothing was wrong. Not overweight or anything either. I've had this \"problem\" ever since I was in Grade 10 or so.\n\nIt doesn't really negatively affect me, except that other people see me sleeping, so in that way it does affect me negatively. The interesting thing is that people don't understand that it's unconscious - it's not like I choose to go to sleep. I am awake, and then the next moment I'm not. The discipline I'm trying now is that as soon as I find myself nodding off, I have to struggle to regain consciousness and force myself to get up or something instead of doing the constant head-bobbing thing that people who are falling asleep do." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ep07z7p", "ep34wvt" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Numerous factors- \n\n1 Store size. Different stores are different sizes, and shapes depending on the area they are situated and the availble space/ planned market.. What works for one floor plan doesn't neccesarily work for another.\n\n2 customers. Customers in different areas like different things, so different branches carry different products, and or different stock levels. This means certain types of product need more space in some stores then others.\n\n3 There's more then one possible arrangement that works well.\n\n4 They do tend to have LOTS of things in common. Walk into any supermarket. Fresh Fruit and Veg is almost always the first thing you come to. Dairy products are always kept together. Dental and medical supplies are in the same isle, sweets biscuits and crisps are next to one another. And so on.", "In addition to other answes, the customer base is also factored in.\n\nFor example, when you walk into a Target, whose demographic is women, you see things women are drawn to (in general): women's clothing, jewelry, foundations, shoes, gift cards. \n\nMove to the opposite corner of the store for 'guy' things like electronics, sports gear, tools, fixit things you can't even see from the entrance.\n\nThen there is the hard-flooring racetrack around the store for getting at grab-and-go things like branded foods, detergents, personal care where no decisions are involved. You always buy Crest toothpaste and Tide detergent, so it's easy to find and grab just off the racetrack. If you get deep off the racetrack, you find things where you will need to stop and think and choose, like clothing, toys, small appliances and baby items. Clothing areas are carpeted because it reflects a higher end experience that customers prefer when shopping clothes. \n\nA different big store like Walmart has a different customer base (lower income, with younger kids) so you will see loss-leaders and seasonal stuff like school supplies by the entrance, but a similar racetrack for common items and carpeted clothing areas." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "curtt7i", "curvu2y", "curwqwu" ], "score": [ 7, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Generally I would say that people who are millionaires tend to have a high performance drive. They desire to always perform better. This is what made them wealthy in the first place, and this is what makes them desire ever more wealth. You can always do better.\n\nFurthermore, once you reach the level of being a millionaire, you'll move to a new level of wealth. You'll have all these people around you who are wealthier than you are and can do and buy things you can't. So compared to them, what used to be enough all of a sudden isn't enough anymore.\n\nThat is my take on it anyway.", "To me it seems like addiction. You play a game and you enjoy it, then what's enough isn't a question and you only want more. Other reason is selfishness which is basicly root to all evil deeds in humanity.", "You could live off the interest, potentially. \n\nBut that would be if you're willing to just live off of the monthly income. Emergencies happen. Some purchases require more money. Plus, if you're making enough to have a million in the bank, you're probably used to living a lifestyle a bit above the interest income. Is that income based on the stock market? Then its going to be up and down as that roller coaster goes. Keep in mind once you're no longer employed that you'll have to buy your own medical insurance (if you're in the US). Its not cheap compared to what you pay if you have one through an employer, since they pick up part of it, usually.\n\nMe personally, I'm going to continue working. But then again, I plan to retire from my main job (owning part of a small business) around age 45. What I have in the bank plus my secondary business (rental properties) is going to have to carry me the rest of my life. I'm not counting on social security.\n\nAnd I live semi-frugally. I could probably survive on the interest. Especially once I get the house I'm living in paid off.\n\nSource: I do have a million in the bank. It did, however, take me 11 years to get to that point, its not like I did it overnight. I'm going to work another 10 years or so before I semi-retire. And to accomplish that, I had to put 40% of my income after taxes into the bank/other investments. So, after taxes, figure I'm living off about 40% of my income as well. That, and running my small business consumes 60-80 hours a week of time as well as being on call all the time. Is it worth it? Sure. But I'm going to make sure I'm able to sustain myself the rest of my life too, comfortably." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbdhld9", "dbdilgm", "dbds6ni" ], "score": [ 429, 36, 17 ], "text": [ "Japan has the oldest continuous, hereditary monarchy in the world -- and would, I believe, even qualify as oldest if we included non-hereditary or interrupted-hereditary successions. The Japanese royal family is still in the Yamato Dynasty, which took over the Japanese throne (according to legend) in about 660 BC under Emperor Jimmu. This means there has been a continuous line of descendants (traditionally, Japanese emperors must be male, but there have been several empresses in Japanese history -- though these generally succeeded in extraordinary circumstances) for nearly 2700 years. \n\nHowever, evidence for the first two dozen or so emperors in the Yamato Dynasty is scanty by modern, empirical history standards, and the first emperors are semi-legendary in status. Therefore, the Japanese royal line is often dated back to the time when we have solid evidence in line with modern standards of historicity -- which takes us back to about 500 AD with the birth of [Emperor Kinmei](_URL_0_). \n\nThat said, even discounting that first 900+ years of semi-dubious imperial lineage, the Japanese monarchy would still be about 1500 years old, the longest continuous dynasty in the world by a significant margin. To give a historical context, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Agustulus, was (probably) still alive about the time Emperor Kinmei was born, and Kinmei's dynasty is still on the throne today.\n\nSources: \n\n* Packard, Jerrold: *Sons of Heaven: A Portrait of the Japanese Monarchy (1987)*\n\n* Hoye, Timothy *Japanese Politics: Fixed and Floating Worlds* (1999)", "Now I don't know if it is the longest, but the Chola dynasty had a clear, tracable family tree and record of succession from Vijayala Chola circa 840 AD to Rajendra III circa 1250 AD, that is 410 years of unbroken succession.\n\nNow, the Chola dynasty itself is recorded in Sangam literature and mentioned in the edicts of Ashoka which itself dates back to 300 BCE, however we do not have any clear records of it is the same branch that went from 300 BCE to 1250 AD which would put it at a stellar 1,000 years.\n\nThe Pandyans, another major dynasty in South India trace their lineage back to the same Sangam era literature and have a recorded lineage / succession tree running from approx 300 BCE to ~ 350 AD (roughly 650 years). There is an interegnum and the second group of Pandyans run from ~ 500 AD to ~1250 AD and then the line switches briefly to a matrilineal one when the Pandyan empire was taken over by the son of Lilavati, a Sri Lankan Queen and then it runs continously till the Pandyan empire fell sometime in 1400 AD.\n\nIn essence, the Pandyan Dynasty per se was in recorded existence from ~ 500 BCE to 1,400 AD. They were contemporaries to Darius I and his Achmaemenid Empire and Rome when it was still a kingdom till the Pandyan dynasty / empire fell after the fall of Byzantium. The lineage though is broken up into 3 distinct lines, but their subjects and rivals as well as modern day historians consider the Pandyan dynasty as one entity. \n\nSource - Cholas by Nilakanta Sastri and An Illustrated history of South India by the same author.", "Follow-up: How about the current European monarchs? I know that Queen Elizabeth II goes back to the 10th century via Theodoric (since I'm related to her myself!), do any European monarchs go back further?\n" ] }

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

{ "a_id": [ "chlp9pt", "chlrfzr" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "It depends on what that source has to offer. Most leafy plants commonly eaten are considered \"greens\" like Kale, Spinach, Arugula, etc., and are eaten for the vitamin and mineral content. \"Greens\" are an essentially non-caloric or low calorie, nutrient dense source of minerals that would be difficult to consume through another source. Minerals such as Magnesium, and Potassium are key to your health and leafy \"greens\" offer massive quantities of these nutrients. \n\n*Note: Not all greens are actually green.*\n\nThat's not to say you couldn't sustain yourself on things like fern. There are numerous amounts of wild flowered plants you can boil and pop in your mouth as a snack, but it would require a larger amount to be consumed since they aren't necessarily packed with minerals and/or nutrients.", "We could never be sustained on grass, for example, because grass has a lot of cellulose in its cell walls. Humans can't digest cellulose very well, so we wouldn't be able to get any nutrients from grass. \n\nThe key is also a balance of different plant sources. Some plants have higher amounts of some nutrients, while others don't. Chickpeas are a great source of protein but they don't have enough methionine (an essential amino acid), while corn has enough methionine but not enough lysine and tryptophan (also essential amino acids). If you eat a diet that is balanced in these two crops, then you could potentially meet your amino acid requirements (although not necessarily, I'm oversimplifying here to answer your question). You probably wouldn't get very far if you only ate spinach and nothing else. It's the variety that produces a complete diet." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "f8v6ec7", "f8v6gkf", "f8v8web" ], "score": [ 4, 2, 4 ], "text": [ "The lasers that read the barcode hit it from many angles and scan it very quickly. Also barcodes have something like a checksum, where it's easy to recognize if the data that was read is garbage and needs to be read again. That's why when using hand scanners, like at the grocery store, sometimes it scans a valid item very quickly, and somtimes it takes a while. \n\nThe built-in scanners in the checkout lanes have lasers that shot from the sides and from the bottom.", "The barcodes is designed in such a way that they are easy to read in different conditions. For example the very common UPC-A barcode used to encode almost all retail products all have the same number of bars and only differentiaties in the width of the bars in relation to each other. The barcode is not valid in reverse but can easily be detected as being in reverse allowing the scanner to reverse its scan direction if you scan something upside down.", "It depends on the scanner for many of those to be true. A very simple barcode scanner will simply read one direction (allowing some but not much tilt) while others will use various techniques to account for these challenges.\n\nIn most cases, a beam of light is fired at a thin foil that is extremely sensitive to current change, allowing a rapid low current to be pulsed in to control the angle of the beam. Some, such as grocery store checkout lanes, supply multiple beams and reflectors allowing any angle to be scanned. \n\nThe reflection of the beam is sent back to the scanner when a reflection is possible, toggling an internal state between 1 and 0. During this, either the duty cycle - the time between “reads” of that 0/1 state, is constantly slowed and sped up, or the pulse rate to the reflectors is variated, changing the sampling rate very rapidly. This allows for distance to be much less of an issue. Basically, there’s always a beam of light and the hardware is asking repeatedly “Do you see the emitted IR light?”\n\nThat data is pushed into a cyclical buffer, and each read triggers a checksum calculation. Since the length of the code(s) are known, it allows the assertion “If these are the numbers, their sum should calculate to the check digit.” - if the checksum for example is just a basic digital root, and the numbers read as 6,4,8,3,7, then 6+4+8+3+7=28, 2+8=10, 1+0=1, so the check digit must be a 1.\n\nTo detect the start and end of a barcode, a specific character is often used - since were dealing with binary, it’s often a non-numeral character such as * or a,b,c - this extra data not only serves the purpose of telling a scanner where a start of a barcode is so it knows it can use more processing power to actually read the code, but the kind of code it is so it knows what checksum formula to use and how long to expect the barcode. These little details allow them to be extremely fast as it’s quick to tell, “If my buffer doesn’t start with *, it’s not a barcode, keep reading”\n\nYou can act see the effects of that on much older scanners, they’ll start flickering at a certain rate, quickly ramp up and down, then shut off when it hits that known character, often pausing for 1-2 seconds before the register receives a barcode.\n\ntl;dr, you can take a piece of paper and put a series of dots in a Braille fashion, 1 dot for one, 2 for off. Start a metronome and “read” whatever is under your finger, even if it’s the same dots or 3 dots apart, moving your finger at a constant rate, counting on/off, and grouping every 4 dots. Convert from binary to numbers. Repeat adjusting the metronome up or down until your finger hits each dot once per tick. That’s all it’s doing just using light.\n\n(I don’t expect you to actually do that but if you do - props - it also illustrates how much faster computers are at “thinking” than we are." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "daj38ya" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "It's not official, it is military slang, and is used purely because it is easier to say." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cutmere", "cutmnwh", "cutoxx9", "cutp6kj", "cuts0mc", "cutu292", "cutw0w8", "cutzri8", "cuu1wd4", "cuu45t3", "cuu4e5h" ], "score": [ 258, 4, 31, 5, 137, 3, 34, 2, 2, 3, 3 ], "text": [ "Convention.\n\n\nThere is no technical strength to doing so. Users who will use insecure passwords without the restrictions will use insecure passwords with the restrictions, and cracking these cases isn't all that much more demanding. Meanwhile, increasing password length does substantially increase security. It would be far better practice to have, say, 10 characters minimum and no maximum than is currently common. ", "Fuck forced password security.\n\nI have memorized 6 sets of 8-digit random strings of numbers and used them for passwords since I was a kid. I've never been hacked, had my password guessed or anything, etc. I have never written them down and have never forgotten them.\n\nNow I have websites telling me I need one upper case, one lower case, AND one \"special character.\" Now I forget my passwords all the fucking time or I HAVE to write them down. Fuck. \n\nForced password strength is dumb. Now I need to use shittier annoying passwords so whatever website can protect dumb people who use their pets' names as passwords from getting hacked.\n\nEDIT: And ESPECIALLY fuck websites that make you change it after a certain amount of time. If it hasn't been hacked why the fuck do I need to change it? Does someone have my password and they're like \"eh I won't bother for a couple weeks\" and you intend for me to foil them by simply changing it? Can't they get the new one the same way anyway??", "I'd be ok with it if they would just say what those restrictions are when signing in - the same info it says when registering. Like:\n\nUsername:\n\nPassword (must have one capital and a number):\n\nSince every site is slightly different, I have a ton of variations of my usual passwords. This would help me remember which one I used on a particular site.", "In the past there were multiple ways to store passwords and were acceptable for some time. The oldest way was encryption, then hashing, now salt and hashing. \n\nWith encryption, your password is converted to characters and symbols. The problem? Your encrypted password can be run through a similar conversion process in reverse, known as decryption.\n\nThe method after decryption was hashing. Hashing is one way, meaning that it goes through a conversion process like encryption, except there is no \"reverse\" process to unhash a password. The only way a \"hackor\" could get your hashed password using is guessing your password over and over until they find a hash that matches your hashed password. The problem? It's relatively easy to figure out hashes today. You can typed some hashes into Google and get the original text. \n\nToday we still use hashes, but now add a bit of salt. Salt is random text that gets added to your password before your password is hashed. This way if a hair hackor gets your password, they can't easily crack it. If there was a rogue employee they would also have a hard time getting your original password. \n\nWhen a hackor guesses passwords, the longer the password is and more variety of characters, the longer it takes to crack (at least for hashing). Salting passwords makes these extra password requirements less effective today, but still would be helpful if your password was ever compromised. \n\nThis video does a great job explaining: _URL_0_", "Most people building websites nowadays have internalized that special characters and password length are necessary for strong passwords. The special characters is a lesson that's well learned (I know, \"correct battery horse staple\", but password generators/managers are IMHO even better). \n\nUnfortunately, many also seem to think that a standard password is somewhere around 8 characters, and therefore they believe that doubling this to 16 is a huge step. They are mistaken and a maximum of 16 characters is still quite short for several types of serious attacks. \n\nAs for why having character limits at all: character limits are included to make sure that user input does not exceed any arbitrary but technical limits of the user or server platform. For example, if a common browser would not be able to send more than 255 characters as the value of the password field, then it makes sense to have a certain limit that's below this known technical limit to avoid weird undefined behaviour. \n\nThe problem is when websites have a very low limit. It's unnecessary on a technical level: no current server or browser platform has technical limits this low. So 16 characters is really a stupidly implemented restriction and also a hint that the security people don't know how to do their job properly. Beter character limits should be much closer to e.g. 100 characters. Arbitrary, I know, but almost nobody will hit this limit and for now, it's good enough. And it has negligable impact on website performance. \n\nNOTE: it is also not a matter of reserving a column length in your storage layer! This is an appallingly bad reason for limiting password lengths and if a developer suggests this, this developer should not be let anywhere near any security feature (or be fired completely!) At no point should the platform attempt to store your password in plain text; instead it should store a derivative that reveals \"nothing\" about your password, not even the length. This is done by (amongst other things) applying a certain type of \"hash\" function. From the hash result, you're not able to derive the password, but the same password always results in the same hash. What you do is store the hash result, and when the user logs in, apply the hash to the password entered, and if the results are the same, the password authenticates. \n", "It has to do with the limitations of the hashing algorithms used to encrypt passwords.\n\nIf your password for a website is \"password1\" the website does not store it as \"password1\" but rather puts it through an algorithm that turns \"password1\" into something that looks like gibberish (e.g. \"@#FV$GSDG%%G#H^\"). This is called a hash. Though it looks like gibberish, only when fed \"password1\" will the algorithm return that exact hash. All other passwords will yield different gibberish. At least this is the ideal case.\n\nThe algorithms that are out there do to this are very complex are hard to create (the good ones are). One of the limitations of these algorithms is that if the password becomes too long, the hash becomes non-unique. Such that \"password1\" and \"areallylongpasswordthatdoesntreallymakesenseforanyonetouse\" might lead to the same hash. This means someone could log into your account with either password. To eliminate this issue they limit the length of the password.\n\nMost modern day hashing algorithms can handle more than 16 characters uniquely. If a website only allows 16 characters they are either using a old algorithm (not good) or they just haven't updated the password validation algorithm (means they are lazy). In either case, it means that they aren't serious about their security. It's ok to use these sites just don't reuse the username or password with a site you are serious about keeping private.", "Short answer: you're right, longer passwords are more secure than more complex ones. \n\nImportant note: **if a website puts a character limit on your password, it is NOT a secure website and you should not trust it with any important information... Especially not a password that you use anywhere else!**\n\nLong answer: this has to do with how websites store your password. See, storing passwords in plain text is a big security risk, since any security breach would immediately be a breach of EVERYONE'S account. So instead we use a technique called \"one-way hashing\" so a computer can verify your password without ever knowing what it is. Basically, you develop a consistent system for encrypting text, such that it can't (practically) ever be decrypted. With this kind of encryption, every time you encrypt the same text, you'll get the same encrypted output. So you actually don't have to store someone's password; you just store the encrypted version, and try encrypting whatever gets typed into the login screen to see if it matches. This technique was pioneered in the 1960's, and has been a basic security practice for decades.\n\nThat encrypted string of characters is called a hash. In the last 15 years or so, we've started using systems that make fixed length hashes - that is to say, no matter how long your password is, the hash will be the same length. For example, I use 32 character long hashes in one of my applications. Your password could be \"12345\", or it could be the entire script of Space Balls, but the hash will always be 32 characters long. \n\nAny system that uses a reasonable hashing function doesn't care how long your password is, because the hashed version will always be the same length. Therefore, the systems that do limit how long your password is, are not hashing your password. Note that password minimums are important to protect against automated guessing systems. Password maximums are the sign of incompetence.\n\nTL;DR: any website that limits the length of your password is telling you that they don't implement the most basic security practices that have been around for almost 50 fucking years. If that's their system for storing your password, consider it compromised as soon as you've entered it. And if that's their approach to protecting your data, consider your data pretty fucking poorly protected with them.", "Longer passwords aren't going to be better if they're easier to predict because of having frequent words, frequent word combinations and so on. This is precisely what common password rules try to defend against.\n\nSome commenters have brought up a famous XKCD strip that argues for using common words in passwords. That strip has a big flaw: **it only works if users cannot choose their own password**. If they can the security plummets because users will pick more frequent words and predictable word sequences.", "It all useless if the site stores the password as plain text. Tip, if a site emails your password when you forget it, run, run away.", "Yes. Most websites are programmed by people who don't understand the fundamentals of security. That's why all these hacks are such big news.", "Even a well written site that stores passwords safely as fixed length hashes and uses a type safe programming language that protects against buffer overflow attacks will still have a maximum password length. This is to protect against denial of service attacks where an attacker gets lots of computers to submit passwords that are, say, several megabytes in size all at once. This would stress the servers being attacked by overloading their network bandwidth while these very long passwords are being sent to the server, increasing the memory they require to store all these passwords while their hashes are being computed, and slowing down the calculation of the hashes by requiring the hash algorithm to calculate results on values that are a million times larger than usual. Even if the server doesn't crash it is in for a long period of extremely bad performance where regular users won't be able to log in." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [ "https://youtu.be/8ZtInClXe1Q" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "eadp9tj", "eadtgqn" ], "score": [ 16, 21 ], "text": [ "The centripetal force points toward the axis of rotation, and the centrifugal force points away from the axis of rotation.", "Its often taught in PHY 101 courses that the centripetal force is \"real\" while the centrifugal force isn't. In a purely inertial sense, this is true, however it oversimplifies how we often times approach a lot of real problems in physics. A lot of the confusion comes from the fact that they both describe the same phenomenon in a rotating body.\n\nThe **centripetal force** is the force required to keep an object moving on a circular path while traveling at some tangential velocity. It points directly in towards the center of rotation.\n\nThe **centrifugal force** only exists in rotating reference frames, though it's important to recognize that this doesn't mean it's incorrect to talk about! It is mathematically valid, you just need to be careful about when discussing/using it. It is the experienced \"reaction force\" when an object is traveling in a circular path. It points \"away\" from the center of rotation.\n\nSo if you have a ball on a string and you start spinning it around in a circle faster and faster, eventually the string will break. From an inertial reference frame, this is because the string can only apply a limited amount of force before it breaks (this is its tensile strength). And when the ball is moving fast enough, in order to keep it moving in a circular path at its speed, requires a greater centripetal force than the string can supply. \n\nFrom the strings perspective though, if you were rotating with it, you'd watch the string continue to be stretched more and more as if being pulled on by some outward pointing force. This is what we call the centrifugal force. While it isn't \"real\", it is useful when dealing with rotating reference frames. \n\nNote:\n**Inertial Reference Frame:** a non rotating and non-accelerating reference frame where Newton's laws hold. That is, objects at rest stay at rest and objects in motion stay in motion." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d2hcijg" ], "score": [ 22 ], "text": [ "It's not just a figure of speech. Your stomach can physically expand/stretch. [Competitive eaters expand their stomachs for competition using water](_URL_0_). It really is like a balloon in a way. The size of the actual organ doesn't change, but it's elasticity and response to food can.\n\nThe opposite is not true however. You cannot shrink you stomach. It is an organ and does not change size. What is happening when your stomach \"shrinks\" from not eating is you appetite resets. You stomach has nerves around the outside that indicate when your stomach is \"full\". Those may begin signaling earlier if you have not eaten in a while." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.foodchallenges.com/tips/how-to-expand-your-stomach-using-water/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cysymf3", "cysyuyz", "cyszb1d", "cyt3cnk", "cyt3uho" ], "score": [ 3, 5, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "When on vacation I had a mid-sized cheap car reserved for me. They tried to get me to get a much more fancy and expensive car. My insurance alone would not have covered the full value of the vehicle. I stuck with the cheapo.", "I called my insurance company to make sure that my policy is the same whether I'm driving my car or a rental. It does except for what they call \"loss of use.\" The way I understand it, if you crash the rental, insurance will cover damages to it, but the rental company can claim losses because it would have been making them money if it had not been crashed. \n\nI didn't ask the rental company if loss of use was covered with their insurance, but I'm assuming it is. \n\nSo, for me, the answer is not really, unless you're planning to really fuck up the rental. YMMV. ", "The purpose of travel and location are also factors. \n\nMy personal insurance would cover rental cars for pleasure trips into the US but not if my trip was business. However, I was covered for any trip (domestic) in Canada.\n\nI tried to purchase additional coverage to cover American cars on business trips but the rental car policies were far cheaper for the same coverage.", "If it's a business trip, and the cost of the rental is picked up by your company, by all means get the additional insurance.\n\nRegarding personal use, I asked my sister who used to be an insurance underwriter. (Most of the time, an insurance agent just looks at charts to see whether you qualify and what to charge you. If the charts don't answer the question, the decision goes to an underwriter at the insurance company.) She never gets the additional insurance.", "Also keep in mind, that your credit card may also include insurance when used for a rental car. I know VISA has a policy. It's included as a member, is automatic and costs nothing." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c46nfn6" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "If the planetary system was completely face on and if we assume that it's an Earth like planet orbiting at 1 AU, then it would appear approximately 4x10^-4 degrees wide. That's about 0.012 arc minutes, and a quick wiki check says that the best a human eye could do is around 1 arc minute. So no way you'll see it.\n\nNote that Alpha Cen is probably not a good target since it's a binary (well, technically a triple) star system." ] }

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[ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_eye#Basic_accuracies" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "col0dpk", "colamhm" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Forgive me, I am not certain what you mean by 'undercover regions'. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's travel writings on Turkey and other countries are used as primary sources. Her relish in appealing to her audiences means her writing isn't always reliable as verbatim records of events, but is insightful for us for a range of reasons. Including for understanding then prevailing views of some English people of the Occident and Orient.", "There's lots of sources that could be considered travelogues, and some have of course attracted more scholarly attention than others. A few that I'd particularly recommend:\n\n* For the early medieval north (Vikings, Slavs, Bulgars, Khazars, etc., from an Islamic perspective), there's a great collection in Ibn Fadlan, et al., [*Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness*](_URL_1_) (Penguin, 2012) [$10-12].\n\n* I'd also recommend reading up on two Norse (aka \"Viking\") traders who visited Anglo-Saxon kings in England: [Othere and Wulfstan](_URL_0_).\n\n* For more recent accounts (which are better covered by scholars, but still very interesting), I'd look at Olaudah Equiano's autobiography. Equiano was sold into slavery from Africa, but eventually purchased his freedom and became an abolitionist working against slavery in London. In between, he traveled through the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Arctic. Here's an online collection of sources on [Olaudah Equiano](_URL_3_).\n\n* And another brilliant narrative of the early modern slave trade is Robert Harms' [*The Diligent*](_URL_2_), which uses an officer's journal to track the journey of a slave ship in 1731. Harms is a great writer, and he's provides an excellent example of what all we can learn from a travelogue like a ship's log. " ] }

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[ [], [ "https://classesv2.yale.edu/access/content/user/haw6/Vikings/voyagers.html", "http://books.google.com/books?id=UPCworiqUqcC&source=gbs_book_other_versions", "http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Diligent.html?id=0YILMba_EnoC", "http://www.brycchancarey.com/equiano/index.htm" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cq13nb7" ], "score": [ 27 ], "text": [ "The case of Ex Parte Quirin is of note here, if only to show how inept German sabotage was for the time. A handful of covert German operatives deposited by submarine on the American eastern coast landed in uniform, to comply with the laws of war, buried their uniform, to get around the laws of war, and then started to get busy- only to all be captured within a month or so of their arrival. The issue of whether or not they should be afforded Geneva Conventions is the one the Court takes up in Quirin. Worth your time to read.\n\nThe Japanese also launched a series of incendiary hot-air balloons bound for America, but as far as I know, they caused no significant damage to property or persons in the continental United States." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c8qb0sm" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "Can we make sure the rules do more to encourage searching for answers first? Especially around big news events, the old classics of '3d printing' and 'schrodingers cat' come up constantly too. A giant red bar that flashes up when you mouse over submit like on askscience or TIL might help." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cf9gsac", "cf9obsi" ], "score": [ 2, 16 ], "text": [ "What are the assumptions concerning non-white people in medieval Europe? Please outline the specific assumptions you feel are being made by the blog.", "So, for the record there was [this conversation last week](_URL_0_) which examines some underlying assumptions in using 'race' as any sort of measuring stick of human descriptions before our epoch.\n\n'Non-white', the same as 'black', or 'asian', or any other modern race definition are just that, modern which is what /u/telkanuru is referring to as a 'sociological construct' in the linked answer. So, we are faced with two problems when we look backwards into Medieval Europe.\n\n\\1. The first is the problem of whether the verbal or visual language we receive from the past actually conforms to our indicators of race. The first hurdle is translation, and the second is idiomatic expression. Did a reference to someone being 'black' in Latin actually mean a 'black' person, or did it mean someone with black hair in a culture where black hair was unusual? Or even further, did reference to 'black' actually mean some local idiom which referred to an aspect of character or of origin lost to us now?\n\nThis first point is important because, from examples within my field - the medieval period - we are not going to find chroniclers referring to 'some black guy from nigeria' or some such thing. We have references to Moors, or Moslems, but they might look 'Latino' or 'Middle Eastern' to modern 'scales of race'. Is that a separate race? We might have a reference to someone from Egypt. Or Africa. How are we to establish the race of the referent under these terms?\n\nWhen it comes to visual depictions like we frequently see in MedievalPOC blog, we don't know if the manuscript, painting or fresco coloration is always actually a reflection of a racial difference or if it holds some other meaning. This is not to discredit the blog's intent or assertions entirely, but merely to problematize the assumptions to the point where we return to the same question.\nWhat we can say is that pre-modern western sources did not care to establish race according to what we think is now important. Consider this inversion for a moment: in place of whites and blacks, were are more likely to have heard prior to 1000 a discussion of the natures of the 'race' of Angles, Saxons, Franks, Germans. How are we to reconcile our modern notions of race with these terms?\n\n\\2. The second problem is depth of evidence. If we take some written or visual depictions as actual reflections of skin colour, and therefore of modern race (and I hope you already see the massive problems just getting us to these assumptions) are these 'frequent enough' to make broader assumptions about 'people of colour' in the medieval world? Again, we just don't know because again pre-modern sources didn't use race the way we use race. In medieval society it was apparently far more important to establish whether someone was Christian, or not Christian: that was worth noting.\n\nAll of the above can pretty much stop us from answering a well-intentioned question about modern notions of representation of race so important in many modern discourses. So, that said, I'd like to answer your question on its own terms, whether those we classify as 'non-white' (according to, say, an American census form) were visible in daily life in Western Europe. Realzing of course the depending who you ask today non white may or may not include 'latinos' (Spain) or 'arabs' (again Spain, and many other parts of Mediterranean Europe).\n\nHere's a lot of ifs and mights for you:\n\n* Vikings were exceptionally well travelled 800 -1000 and they may have encountered 'black' people in lower Spain, or southern Italy, or Constantinople, or in the Holy Lands. It is possible that they might have slave-traded 'blacks' or 'middle easterns' and some may have returned to northern ports.\n\n* The Moors of Spain were established through the Moslem invasions of the Iberian peninsula.Those Moslems had come across from north western Africa and so may have included 'blacks' and certainly 'middle easterns'. Those same moors travelled up into southern France and established themselves in colonies and cities from Toulouse to Narbonne to Provence. They established forts and castles in Provence. Beyond the incursions and wars, Moslems travelled up and down the Rhone river trading slaves to 1100. Moslems also frequented ports of Southern France like Montpellier and Nice.\n\n* Of course the various crusades brought Western Europeans in contact with peoples of the middle east which definitely included 'arabs' but might also have included 'blacks' and 'asians'.\n\n* There is some evidence of Irish contact with Mediterranean peoples in the early middle ages - some of those people might have been 'non-white'.\n\n* And of course throughout the medieval period, from late antiquity through to renaissance, we have the travelling merchant; he might have been from northern Europe, or he might have been from southern Europe; he might have encountered 'non-whites' or he might have been 'non-white' himself.\n\nSo we can gather from above that some inhabitants of some towns and some cities in medieval Europe all the way up to parts of Scandanavia encountered 'non-white' peoples, whether they be described by modern terms as Arabic, Middle Eastern, Black.\n\nHow many and how far afield into the very rural landscape of medieval Europe? Who knows. And anyone who makes generalist claims for or against is not arguing about the past but arguing politics of today. It holds something of a lesson if we care to look at it: race is constructed, not eternal.\n\nWhatever we aren't sure of, we can be certain of one thing: there was no such thing as 'white society' in the European medieval period.\n\nnote: this was moved from response to top level in hopes of people reading it and discussing." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wuu4g/the_blog_medievalpoctumblrcom_asserts_that_black" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d7zjf34" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "Although English is a Germanic language, approximately 30% of English vocabulary comes from French in one form or another. This is largely caused by an event called the Norman Conquest, in which a group of people called Normans, who inhabited Northern France and had a degree of Scandinavian ancestry, invaded and conquered England. The Old English-speaking aristocracy was mostly replaced by Norman French-speaking aristocracy, and for at least a hundred years, the nobility of England were primarily Norman French speakers. As a result, many words in English, particularly ones related to politics, warfare, and social class come from French. Many of these Norman French words are different from their modern French words, such as the word castle, from Norman French castel, in comparison to Modern French Château (which had evolved from Chasteau as indicated by the circumflex accent). Eventually, likely around the early or mid 13th century, the Norman/Angevin aristocracy of England lost most of their titles within the Kingdom of France and began to transition to English, which by this point was now full of French words. The higher nobility and Kings of England continued to speak French as their first language until sometime in the 14th or 15th century.\n\nFrench words continued to enter the English language after England and France became more distinctly separate entities, as France and England were still geographic neighbors (there are quite a few Dutch and German words of French origin as well), and because for a long time French was the dominant language of European courts and was therefore a prestige language that many nobles of various countries learned. Frederick the Great of Prussia, for example, spoke French natively and may have preferred it to German, and the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual Austrian army often used French as a common language. Most of the English words and expressions that remain distinctly and obviously \"French\" come from these more recent vocabulary exchanges." ] }

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[ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_expressions_in_English" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "cblboq0", "cbldrfb" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "People talk about doing something like this: \n\nThe mass driver, which is similar to some designs for high-speed trains.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIn most cases it's not practical to launch from Earth's surface to orbit with one of these, since you have to launch at high speed through the atmosphere, and your capsule would be burning up when it left the launch track. \n\nThe exception is building the track so that your capsule launches at high altitudes - on high mountains or supported on some sort of very high artificial support. ", "Lot of misconceptions...only focusing on few. \n\n > So you would have a magnet on top of which you would have people or items then another magnet floating above\n\nIn this configuration, all of the weight is still resting on the bottom magnet. Weight doesn't \"magically\" have zero weight, it is simply being pushed up by the magnet (which pushes the magnet down).\n\nIt doesn't take very much weight to either simply overcome the repelling nature so it stops levitating, or if that was somehow stopped, it wouldn't be long before the bottom magnet was simply crushed because the material couldn't support that much weight.\n\n > could I have an electro magnet on the ground at a launch site, a package that needs to go into space attached to a magnet or inside an electro magnetic container, and an electro magnet is space and use these to transfer materials back and forth?\n\nNo, the magnetic force drops off exponentially with distance. Just like when you get magnets simply a foot apart there is practically no interaction, this drops even more at larger distances. it is simply impossible to create a magnet strong enough to lift human sized objects from space.\n\nBuilding a tube or any other macro structure into space is equally impossible. Space elevators (another alternative idea to launch to space) are made from carbon nanotubes, and have a small payload.\n\n\n" ] }

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[ "http://www.kjmagnetics.com/proddetail.asp?prod=LEV2" ]

[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ckshy9a", "cksi1gt", "cksice0", "ckskpxc" ], "score": [ 4, 10, 5, 4 ], "text": [ "The eternal battle of scientific evidence vs. \"common sense\" dieting vs. weight loss vs. ethical diets", "We have the technology to make whatever we want and the resources to get whatever we want. We have a lot more choices than an animal does. It also helps that we're omnivores and able to make any type of food digestible and tasty, while many other animals are stuck being unable to digest one thing or the other.\n\nAnimals don't have as many choices, so they stick with what they know and have access to. An animal won't be able to get its hands on much refined sugar or MSG, but if it did, it would eat it until sick.", "Think of literally every food you have ever eaten, smelled, saw, or heard about.\n\nOther animals get to choose between Dead Thing and Other Dead Thing.", "Animals generally just eat whatever they can find. They rarely have a surplus of food, so there isn't much of a choice in the matter. If their diet is unhealthy, so be it. Unhealthy is better than starvation.\n\nHumans have the luxury of sitting on their butts and debating endlessly about what food is best to eat because we've got so much of it to choose from. We decide (or tell ourselves we should, at least) what we eat based on what will keep us the most healthy rather than just whatever we can get our hands on.\n\nAdditionally, it's worth noting that most diet-related health conditions people in first-world countries deal with are related to *too much* food. Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are all caused or worsened by an overabundance of food or parts of food. Animals in the wild rarely have that problem, and usually have the opposite one." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dum1m8f" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "This is not to prevent anyone from writing you a full, new answer, but you may be interested in these two answers of mine:\n\n[Why are people today fascinated with the Victorian era?](_URL_0_)\n\n[Dang kids! Or: Why does each generation have such an exaggerated view of fashion in previous ones?](_URL_1_)" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7brmla/why_are_people_today_fascinated_with_the/dpl8k1o/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5zavf4/dang_kids_or_why_does_each_generation_have_such/dex8q7t/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "eprt9u0" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "One of the first things you need to think about is why the Germans came over to the US. The vast majority of immigrants came after the failed Democratic revolutions in the 1890s, so they wanted to live in Republican state. That being said while these Germans hated the Kaiser they didn't want war between the US and Germany, simply due to connections back home. This produced huge strains which would impact how they were treated and how these Germans would act in WWII. Anti-German sentiment was so bad that 16 US states banned speaking German in public some states even required that people change their German names to American ones (Smicht to Smith), thousands of beer halls in the US were shutdown or even burned down, Germans were banned from having certain jobs (strategic/Gov't), internment camps were also set up, there were numerous cases of Germans being killed to seriously maimed due to 'Not being patriotic'. For example a man was tarred and feathered for not buying War Bonds, another man was lynched for 'not being American/Patriotic', and a pregnant woman was reportedly nearly beaten to death for speaking German with a local priest ( Although I have read this mentioned in numerous books I haven't hit any primary sources on it). President Woodrow Wilson even called German-Americans 'Alien citizens'. This caused two things 1) Need/Desire for German Americans to prove their loyalty, 2) complete erasure of German Culture. Point one can best be seen in the case of Henry Gunther a German-American who was killed 15 seconds before the Armistice charging a German machine gun, his death was so controversial that it caused a investigation as to why nobody stopped him and why he did it. As to point two close to fifth of the US population (60 Million people) have German ancestry but despite this less than 5 million have German names and less than two million can speak German. So by the time that WWII came along most German-Americans were so disenfranchised with their culture that they no longer saw them selves as Germans but where in stead were Americans." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c90f4ik", "c90f6w7" ], "score": [ 20, 881 ], "text": [ "In actuality it may improve taste perception.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nHowever, it may be different for some tastes vs. others (e.g., NaCl vs. citric).\n\n[1](_URL_0_)\n\n[2](_URL_2_)", "Dentist here.\n\nTo answer your question about tongue brushing and potential damage to our taste receptors. Yes and No.\n\nLet's start with how it would be a Yes, and work in to the final answer of No:\n\nIf you are using a hard bristled toothbrush, highly corrosive toothpaste (usually whitening toothpaste or something with a thick paste of baking powder mixture), then Yes, you can erode the taste buds on your tongue away.\n\nBut is this a permanent change to your tongue?\n\nNo. And to explain this, I'm going to explain the make-up of our tongue's dorsal surface (the part that contains our \"taste buds\").\n\nOur tongue is a muscular instrument which is used to not only taste food, but also to recognize poisons/toxins (partially through taste), to determine the quality of food by texture, and to help you not only hold on to your food during mastication, but to also chew and swallow your food by acting as a muscular plunge. \n\nIt contains specialized structures called \"papillae\" which are outcroppings of the epithelium making up the tongue and are often confused with just \"taste buds.\" There are several type of papillae, and each has their own function.\n\nThe most numerous type of papilla is the filiform papilla. It is shaped like a little finger that comes off the surface of your tongue and actually does not really involve itself with taste sensation. They are the the part of your tongue that allows you to hold on to food and determine texture. They are also what make your tongue feel rough when it is dry. If they grow too long or their growth is altered by certain anti-biotics, peroxide-based chemicals, or unusual chemical reactions, then they act negatively to hold on to bacteria or fungus to give you a minor case of something called \"hairy tongue.\" I can explain that more if you like, but it's a bit outside the realm of your question. Overall, if you brush too hard, you're more likely to scrape some of these guys away, so your taste won't really be affected directly. What will be affected is how well your tongue can hold on to food and water (which is absolutely necessary to \"taste\") so your taste will be indirectly involved. As a neat experiment, try completely drying your tongue off with a dry towel and then put some sugar or salt on it. If you dried it off thoroughly, you won't be able to taste either!\n\nThe taste buds actually involved in taste are the fungiform papillae. They are little, mushroom-shaped bumps (as their name suggests) on your tongue interspersed throughout. Their histologic structure actually shows that they're like little caverns with centralized \"bulbs\" that are connected to the cranial nerves in charge of distributing taste reception. These are very tough to brush away or damage with toothpaste or a toothbrush because of how they are formed and shaped. So brushing them will not affect taste. (This is how we overall come to the answer of \"No\").\n\nThe other types of taste buds are a bit more boring and are located on the sides and back of the tongue. Brushing them would be very hard to do and even if you did, nothing would happen. If you're interested in learning about them further, feel free to read about the Circumvallate Papillae and the Foliate Papillae. They are also involved with taste, but act mostly as a defensive feature where something very bitter or toxic tasting will be ejected just prior to being swallowed. I'm simplifying a bit, but it's close enough to reality to get the point :)\n\nNow, let's say that you did somehow manage to rub off the top layer of your tongue and damage the papillae somewhat. Well, in a little over a week, that'll clear right up as their average turnover is 10-14 days :)\n\nSo, now you can see how the answer is both a Yes and No, depending on how you want to perceive it.\n\nBut because I really doubt you're going to grind away the top layer of your tongue, rest easy, my friend, and continue to brush your tongue, your teeth, and even the roof of your mouth! Keep your mouth clean and take care of it, because we only get one!\n\nAlso, mandatory dentist reminder: Floss!\n\n\nEDIT: Thanks for the Gold! That was unexpected! :D" ] }

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[ [ "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1034/j.1601-5037.2003.00034.x/full", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0303-6979.2004.00507.x/full", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/264535?systemMessage=Pay+Per+View+will+be+unavailable+for+upto+3+hours+from+06%3A00+EST+March+23rd+on+Wiley+Online+Library.+We+apologise+for+the+inconvenience" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cohdw1w", "cohh7k2" ], "score": [ 153, 12 ], "text": [ "Actually, that law suit (for $13.5 million) was not because of the tagline \"give you wings\" (which is clearly understood as humor).\n\nThe law suit was over the fact that Red Bull oversold the drink's ability to improve concentration and energy, specifically, it did not provide any scientific evidence to support their claim that the drink is \"able to boost energy better than a cup of regular coffee\"--considering that a 8 oz of Red Bull contains less caffeine than 8 oz of coffee, their claim is blatantly false.", "In Canada there is a verbal disclaimer saying Red Bull does not actually give you wings. Apparently Canadians are not all that bright." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cga1661" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "A few of the most famous examples of Roman religious syncretism are the cults of Isis, Mithras, and Sulis.\n\nIsis was an Egyptian goddess of magic and mother of Horus, God of the Pharaoh. She was an incredibly important figure in the Egyptian pantheon so it's no small wonder that her cult thrived under the rule of the Ptolemies after Egypt was conquered by Alexander of Macedon in the 4th century BCE. When Cleopatra died and Octavian claimed Roman conquest over Egypt, slowly the cult of Isis began to take hold. Her cult would later become wildly popular amongst the Romans in Egypt, who would spread it far and wide. A large temple to Isis was even found as far north as Londinium, thousands of miles from her original home on the banks of the Nile.\n\nSpeaking of Roman Britain, one of the Romans most effective methods of conquest was extremely passive, that is to say they imposed no religious doctrine on their recently conquered peoples. Rather, they attempted to find common grounds between the native deities and their own. A god called Sulis had a large following within the north of Roman Britain, near what is currently the city of Bath. Sulis shared many properties with the Roman goddess of war and wisdom Minerva, so the Romans stuck them together and called the deity Sulis Minerva. In this way not only did the Romans assuage any fears of Roman imposition of religious practice, but they also helped introduce those practices passively. Scholars have argued this was almost a more effective tactic than military might for ensuring conquered peoples stayed Roman (although the issue is far more complicated than that).\n\nSpeaking of the military, the cult of Mithras was hugely popular with them, and with the military being found in all corners of the Empire, it's no surprise that cults to Mithras are also found everywhere in the Empire. Mithras was originally a Zoroastrian deity from the near East who was implanted throughout the empire by those same soldiers, and the cult spread from there. Mithraism is a highly structured religion, with seven levels of religious initiation. This highly rigid rank structure mirrored the rank structure the soldiers were already familiar with in the Army and provided yet more incentive for promotion (one has to wonder if an experienced Mithraic infantryman had the potential to exercise power over his newly initiated commanding officer). Mithras was also a warrior and sun deity, the symbolism and significance of which also mirrored the desires and lifestyles of the Roman military. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dtvufaw" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Perhaps briefly (on a geological timescale), when the atmosphere cooled enough for the first rains to fall, the resultant bodies of water may have been pure enough to be considered freshwater with less than 500ppm of dissolved salts. There were almost surely multiple phases of the early Earth's surface water inventory condensing and then being boiled into the atmosphere again by the next major impactor, which would have left salt-flats behind that could be buried by lava and debris before the water recondensed, so that the salt left behind would have been cut off from the surface and wouldn't have quickly redissolved into the recondensing oceans." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d9foe5g", "d9foi7z" ], "score": [ 6, 6 ], "text": [ "Salt changes the electrochemical reactions that happen in the chemoreceptors on your tongue (taste buds). The effect is different for different types of receptors; bitter receptors are inhibited, while sweet receptors have their sensitivity enhanced. Sweet becomes sweeter and bitter becomes less bitter (but only up to a point; too much salt and you'll taste brine).", "It has to do with the vast amount of taste buds your tongue has. On these taste buds are different receptors, which only respond to certain ingredients. There is a receptor that was discovered a few years ago that moves sugar into the sweet receptor only if sodium is present (which is half of what common table salt is made of).\n\nSo since you have a pinch of salt, it activates these receptors and helps more taste buds register the \"sweet\" sensation of sugar." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c48nfh8" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "This is how I understand it. Can someone please fill in the details or correct me on this?\n\nPart of the reason is because, technically, a lot of what they were doing wasn't \"insider\" trading. Typically, insider trading happens (e.g.) when you work for a company or are someway involved in a company and you happen to know that your company did something good, so you and your buddies buy up a bunch of stock in advance of that public knowledge. There are other ways, but basically it's when you or someone you know has knowledge \"inside\" of a company.\n\nThere's plenty of that that went on in Congress as well, and still will. But what was happening was that Congress itself was the \"insider\". It knew it was about to pass a law that, say, hurt companies X, Y, and Z. So they took that knowledge and sold their shares or \"shorted\" them to make a profit off this knowledge.\n\nTechnically, this didn't have anything to do with having \"inside knowledge\" of a company's performance, financials, etc, so it was legal. It's still wrong, though, because it gives lawmakers a financial incentive to make laws one way or another that benefit them financially." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cjfqnqt", "cjfvn4c" ], "score": [ 4, 5 ], "text": [ "There is a mathematical limit to how much data can be compressed, and there's an entire field of math (called Information Theory) dedicated to studying it.", "So far, capacity has kept increasing rapidly. You used to buy the biggest drive you could afford, knowing that it was going to be filled up all too soon anyway, but that you'd be able to get a bigger one in a few years.\n\nThese days, the capacity of a hard drive tends to be much larger than anyone needs, especially with the offloading of capacity to the Internet. You can get your movies and songs online, so they're not eating your disk space.\n\nFiles are more typically compressed to reduce bandwidth, now, so they don't eat too much of your data line, although it's also still handy to reduce storage space. There's always this trade-off with compression, is the problem. It takes time to compress and decompress data.\n\nI'd bet on drives getting larger and cheaper for the next decade or so. Barring a massive improvement in computer speed (unlikely) or cool new developments in compression algorithms (also unlikely), \"more space\" is still relatively easy at the moment." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c8ke8op", "c8kenq9" ], "score": [ 14, 3 ], "text": [ "Purely from Newtonian gravity - i.e., the gravity you learn about in high school - there's no decay under ideal conditions. But we've known that picture of gravity is wrong for nearly a century. The more modern theory, Einstein's theory of general relativity, allows for gravitational radiation, and any orbit will radiate away energy in the form of gravitational waves, slowly decaying over time. This resulted in one of the most impressive tests of general relativity, a [binary pulsar](_URL_0_) whose orbital decay was timed very accurately and found to be in precise agreement with the predictions for energy loss to gravitational radiation, winning its discoverers a very well deserved Nobel Prize.", "angular momentum is important here. Just like regular (lineair) momentum or energy, this is conserved quantity, so it can't increase or decrease on its own. It can only change when it is transferred between objects.\n\nSo how do orbiting astronomical objects exchange angular momentum? Through tidal forces. Because the earth is rotating around its axis much faster than the moons orbital period, the earth is dragging away the tidal bulge (high tide) from the moon. This causes transfer of angular momentum from the earths rotation to the moons orbit and as a result the earth rotation is slowing down, while the moon is moving into a higher orbit (by about 3 cm per year). In addition there is a substantial amount of heat dissipation from the friction (3.5 terawatt according to wikipedia). This should satisfy your concerns about the second law of thermodynamics.\n\n\n" ] }

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

{ "a_id": [ "cyxxlmy", "cyy3xrs", "cyy3zpt", "cyy44n5", "cyy7cr9", "cyy9z2h", "cyywhkp" ], "score": [ 218, 13, 21, 11, 3, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Most satellites are in prograde orbits, meaning that they orbit in the same direction that the earth rotates. This is because retrograde orbits, which orbit opposite the direction of the earth's rotation, require more fuel to launch. \nThink of it like this. If you're in a car going 5 mph and you want to get a projectile going 100 mph you can either throw it forward at 95 mph, or backwards at 105 mph. Obviously forward it easier. That 5 mph car is like the earth's rotation, and the 100 mph projectile (forward or backward, doesn't matter), is like orbital speed. \n\nSo unless you have specific launch requirements or orbits in mind, it's simply cheaper and more efficient to launch satellites into prograde orbits. \n\nThere are a handful of satellites on [retrograde orbits.](_URL_0_) Israeli satellites, for example, are launched westward so that launch debris would land in the Mediterranean rather than neighboring countries. This comes at the expense of a maximum payload that's [30% less](_URL_1_) than it would if it launched eastward- that weight is needed for fuel. Additionally, earth-observing satellites may be launched to be slightly retrograde so that they are on a sun-synchronous orbit. This enables them to have constant illumination from the sun when observing the earth. \n\n", "It's worth mentioning orbits are a great deal more complicated than [\"both ways\"](_URL_0_)\n\nNot to mention, there are [a few ways](_URL_1_) to follow the earth without ever traveling around it (with respect to the sun)", "No one has mentioned [geosynchronous satellites](_URL_0_) yet. They travel with the Earth's rotation such that they are always above one point on the Earth. That orbital period requires that they orbit at a much higher altitude than most satellites. And they are directly above the equator. That's why your satellite dish is pointed southward if you live in the northern hemisphere.", "Just to clarify: Apart from the fact it's nice to *launch* satellites the same direction as the Earth rotates, it doesn't otherwise affect the satellite in orbit, which only cares about the Earth's mass (and distance).", "Hoping I can ask this question here. How exact do you need to be when sending a satellite into orbit? For example, if a company sends a satellite company into orbit, do they have to be exact down to the millimeter or risk having their satellite shoot off toward Uranus? Or do they \"just get it up high enough that it will stay in orbit on its own\"?\nI feel like if they are not exactly in the right \"plane\", the satellite/space station will either crash or shoot off into space, but I'm wondering how tight of a window they have.", "I see this question has already been answered correctly, mentioning the difference between Earth's surface and center of mass. A detail you might be interested in is reference frames:\n\nThe Earth-Centered Inertial (ECI) frame has the X axis pointing to the vernal equinox, the Z axis pointing to the North along Earth's rotation axis, and the Y axis at 90º from X along the equatorial plane. It doesn't rotate with the Earth, that's why we call it inertial (though it's not truly inertial, thus inappropriate for interplanetary trajectories). Alternatively, you can use the celestial-equatorial coordinate system to get spherical coordinates - it's just as inertial as ECI.\n\nThe WGS84 coordinate system, basically latitude and longitude, rotates with the Earth instead. It's clearly not inertial. GPS uses this coordinate system.\n\nNow here's the fun fact: if one satellite is in a prograde orbit and another one in a retrograde orbit at the same altitude, they will travel at the same speed in the ECI frame, just opposite sign. But in WGS84 their speeds will be different due to the rotation of the Earth.\n\nThe problem is not negligible since most satellites in low orbits have a GPS receiver onboard. Never trust your GPS to know if you've achieved orbital speed! (Fortunately it's the launcher who takes care of that.)", "Whether going east to west or west to east satellites at the same altitude are going the same speed. Still, from the perspective of an observer at the equator watching the satellites the ones heading eastward will be going slower than the westward ones." ] }

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[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_satellites_in_retrograde_orbit", "http://www.britannica.com/topic/Shavit" ], [ "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Wjl8FRPqnfA/hqdefault.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Lagrangian_points_equipotential.gif" ], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_satellite" ], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c1gc1ax", "c1gc6at", "c1gc6bf", "c1gc89b", "c1gcqhz", "c1gcr23", "c1gczy7", "c1gdrcv", "c1gdsq9", "c1gdxlb" ], "score": [ 5, 13, 3, 7, 2, 2, 7, 2, 7, 3 ], "text": [ "I suppose one of the cool things would be [retrotransposons](_URL_0_). from wiki \" Like DNA transposable elements (class II transposons), retrotransposons can induce mutations by inserting near or within genes. \"", "I can make a big list actually, of moments I just had to stop and take a moment to digest that. Some of them:\n\n1. The first time I saw the first division of a C. elegans embryo under a microscope. Its quite big so you can see all the aspects of cell division happening with your own eyes and its the most magical thing I've ever seen with mine. \n\n2. The mechanisms with which chromosomes segregate, during mitosis. Especially once all the chromosomes are aligned up at the center of the cell, what the cell does is release a signal that will say, \"all microtubules, DISSOLVE!\". But the problem: the microtubules are what thats holding up the chromosomes there in the center and they can dissolve only in one direction. And the chromosomes need to keep attached to their ends. So as their ends dissolve, the chromosomes will follow them to seperate sides and the new cells form. \n\n3. This [video](_URL_0_). I know I posted it elsewhere just today, but you can spend an entire degree just learning all the phenomena that are portrayed in every single frame of this video.\n\nCould go on, actually.", "Someone's discovered the trick to get a million responses on askscience. Just let everyone talk about their pet projects and interests ;-)\n\nDon't mind if I do: For me science was about how everything \"works.\" And the science at the base of all of that is physics, and the very basic explanation in physics is 2 (or 3 or 1 or 4 depending on how you count) fundamental forces. Strong Nuclear force and the Electroweak force. Every interaction between everything comes out of these two concepts, and some general relativity to account for \"gravity.\" We know electroweak pretty well, it's the merger of electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces. (hence the count of 3 \"total\" forces at common energy scales) \n\nBut the strong force is still so.... crazy. We really are doing our best to understand it, but it's insane how complex it is. For instance light transmits electromagnetism, but light itself is uncharged. The thing that transmits the strong force (gluons) carries \"strong\" charges. Thus the strong force carriers must account for carrying the strong force among themselves as well. It'd be as if light was attracted to itself... crazyness. Then the Strong charge doesn't just come in + and -, but 3 charges and their anti-charges, often called red green and blue (and anti-red,green,blue; because of this naming convention it's often referred to as color). If moving electric charges create magnetic fields, moving color charges create color-magnetic fields. I can't even begin to comprehend what that last sentence even *means* aside from the math. \n\nAs it stands right now my field isn't elegant. It's messy as fuck. And that's why I love it. We're really out on one of the far frontiers of science. We know just enough to know how little we actually know.", "Just a random fact I found amazing. The power released in gravitational waves in the merger of two stellar mass black holes is greater than the luminosity produced by all the stars in the visible universe.", "Photons carry momentum. When an atom absorbs a photon, it receives that momentum. Further more, atoms are very selective about what wavelengths of light they can absorb.\n\nThis means you can use light to slow down and cool atomic gases to a few microkelvin.\n\n_URL_0_", "I am a somewhat frustrated cosmologist. There was a time when I had to stop and say wow, that totally changes how I see ______ on a weekly basis. The feeling got old, I got used to the most bizarre things in physics and now I feel like I know the universe like the back of my hand and literally nothing about it at the same time, whereas in reality I probably am somewhere inbetween. It's depressing.\n\nSo on one hand I could give you a list with 50 items and I wouldn't know where to start, but on the other hand... well one amazing fact just isn't that amazing anymore when it comes with 49 equally amazing facts. The inflation of amazement made me numb.\n\n\nEdit: OK I just thought of something, haha. I'll just share my \"wow\"-moment of the week:\n_URL_0_\n\nI have seen that before a couple years ago when Simon White spoke at my school, but I watched the videos again a couple days ago and it's beautiful. Everyday science is a lot less exciting though.", "[Noether's Theorem](_URL_0_). This means, for example, that the trivially obvious fact of translational invariance of experiments (if I do an experiment on a system at point X in space, then move the whole system to point Y in space, I will get the same results) implies conservation of momentum. Even better, *any* continuous symmetry of spacetime (translational invariance is a type of continuous symmetry) has a corresponding conservation law, here are a few:\n\n* Translational invariance -- > Conservation of momentum\n* Rotational invariance -- > Conservation of *angular* momentum\n* Time invariance -- > Conservation of energy\n* Gauge invariance of the EM field -- > Conservation of charge\n\n\n", "The single most interesting fact I learned was in 9th grade when I learned that bacterial cells outnumber human cells in the human body. The idea that I am a scaffold for a bacteria super community really changed my perspective. The most amazing moment was the first time I dove in a coral reef. I really enjoyed thinking about all the influences that went into shaping this living mountain, tides, light, inter and intra species competition. The evolutionary and ecological balance really helped me appreciate what Dawkins calls \"the greatest show on earth\".", "I had a few serendipity moments which were pretty cool.\n\nI do DNA microinjection into cultured [Aplysia](_URL_0_) neurons. I was injecting a previously unstudied (in Aplysia) PKC isoform. When I imaged the fluorescent protein I saw a pattern that we couldn't explain.\n\nI spent 3 months trying to figure out what I did wrong, running all kinds of control experiments, only to have a long conversation with my supervisor where we figured out that it was actually physiologically relevant. \n\nIt got me my first publication :)", "Parasitism is totally rad - from viruses to multicellular parasites. \n\n[*Ascaris lumbricoides*](_URL_0_) comes in to the body via ingesting contaminated food. It develops in the intestinal mucosa, then invades the bloodstream where it travels to the lungs for further development. Then it's swallowed again, where it lays eggs in the intestines to be excreted in feces - and contaminate more food. Sometimes on its way out from the lungs, [problems can occur](_URL_4_). That image is NSFL.\n\n[*Ancylostoma duodenale*](_URL_2_) gets in to your body through your skin - most often through the soles of your feet when walking barefoot. It too will travel around the body to develop into mature parasites.\n\n[*Enterobias vermicularis*](_URL_1_) is probably known by most parents. Horrifyingly, the \"females migrate nocturnally outside the anus and oviposit while crawling on the skin of the perianal area.\" So yes, at night, the worms crawl out of your ass to deposit eggs. \n\nI could go on and on - and I haven't even started on my true passion for viruses. The amazing thing is that from an immunological standpoint, your body will know a) where the parasite is, b) the best way to fight fight it. You will get a totally different response depending on whether the bug does its dirty work inside our outside of the cell. This is all coordinated through [cytokines](_URL_3_) and protein-protein interactions at the intra- and extracellular level. The scope of the interactions, gene transcription, and coordinated responses required to fight pathogens is simply breathtaking. It gets even more complex when you consider that each pathogen has its own way of subverting the immune system. It's a nano-scale arms race. \n\nFor reals, man - it's totally rad." ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrotransposon" ], [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mszlckmc4Hw" ], [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_trap" ], [ "http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/virgo/millennium/" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem" ], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aplysia" ], [ "http://www.dpd.cdc.gov/dpdx/HTML/Ascariasis.htm", "http://www.dpd.cdc.gov/dpdx/HTML/Enterobiasis.htm", "http://www.dpd.cdc.gov/dpdx/HTML/Hookworm.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine", "http://biglychee.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Ascaris.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cm9ph3b", "cm9phb6" ], "score": [ 2, 6 ], "text": [ "It's a very difficult skill to learn well, and much much harder than holding a steady pitch, at least to do it with smooth even control. Having said that it's an aesthetic choice, people do it because they like it, and because it's a bit showy to use a difficult to achieve skill in a prominent way.", "Long notes can sound boring. Vibrato is intended to add some colour and variety during the course of the note.\n\nVibrato is a skill... but an equally important skill is knowing when and how to use it. It probably shouldn't be used in every note, or for the whole length of the note. The speed and the intensity of the vibrato can and should be varied, between as well as during notes. Basically, it shouldn't be predictable or boring, or else it defeats the point of using it in the first place. \n\nEverything I've said here applies to pretty much all instruments on which vibrato is possible, by the way, not just voice." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "elbajxd", "elc0ksi" ], "score": [ 12, 6 ], "text": [ "It's hard to say definitively whether or not every desert was once under a body of water, but desertification of once arable land is possible with poor land management, such as what happened with Africa after the Romans cut down all the trees. Sand is kind of always there, it's the vegetation and bio-mass that gets carried off by the wind due to the lack of moisture/life which makes the sand visible. It is therefore reasonable to assume that not all sand/deserts are made up of microscopic shell fragments such as those which could be found on beaches. One would assume it's mostly granulated rock, but it's also possible that the land was once underwater and the currents deposited a sediment bed before the land rose above the sea floor.", "Deserts are generally not created by drying up bodies of water. They're just areas where rainfall is small enough to hold back plant growth and prevent the formation of fertile soil. Deserts are also not always sandy: very often the surface is gravel, cobblestones, or bedrock like [this](_URL_0_). Where sand does occur, it's not formed of microscopic shell fragments, it's just fragments of stone that have been broken down by wind, water, and chemical action. You can find plenty of this kind of sand everywhere, it's just that in your backyard, it's probably mixed with lots of decaying plant matter to form topsoil.\n\nIn most parts of the world, beach sand is also mostly made of weathered fragments of rock from land. It's only in a few areas (usually near tropical reefs) that it's made mostly of fragments of sea creatures." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.johntyman.com/sahara/s014.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ceclcbu", "cecyta2" ], "score": [ 11, 8 ], "text": [ "Depending on where in the gut you're looking at, it may change. During starvation, your stomach acid may become more concentrated, and stronger - thus a small amount of bacteria in the proximal duodenum (small bowel coming right off the stomach) may be killed. This would be very minimal, since there are glands in the proximal duodenum that release bicarbonate and neutralize the strong stomach acid.\n\nFurther along, in the distal jejunum and ileum, and the colon let's say, I can imagine the flora there start to die off, since the job of this flora is to help break down various macronutrients (which for them is food), and during starvation, there is no more food reaching that far. Hope that answers your question", "The flora actually begin to change. In children, the bacteria actually fail to differentiate as they normally would (compared to healthy children in the same culture). Because normal flora help in our food digestion, these children have a hard time fully digesting the food they do eat and food given to help nutrition. \nBelieve it or not, it's actually pretty complicated. There's no simple answer like they all die etc. if you're interested, look into the human microbiome project going on right now. SOURCE: I worked at NIH and had the chance to see a lot of talks about this subject and the human microbiome project. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ddn0wgy" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The short answer was, they didn't. Standards varied heavily from region to region. Keep in mind, back then, travel/trade was *a lot* harder, so the effects were much less noticeable.\n\nIn some cases, once things were more developed, they would have a standard- then they'd copy that standard and ship them around the world. But usually they were just really inaccurate.\n\nIf things were really really off, someone might call you on it, but slight variations, how would they know?It wasn't really until the industrial revolution and standards started being really important did things really start to kick in- largely driven because that's when it mattered" ] }

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[ "http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0769529.html" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "c6loyf0" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "\"Taming\" isn't all-or-nothing. There's a range of behaviors that includes whether the animal attacks humans, runs away from humans, tolerates being touched, tolerates various medical examinations and procedures, responds to commands, actively seeks human company, and so on.\n\nThe zebras at the San Francisco Zoo will do all of the things I just listed (with the possible exception of the last one) because of diligent training and regular reinforcement by their keepers.\n\nBut for safety's sake responsible zoos never describe their zebras as \"tame\". That would give a false sense of safety to the public. They may still attack an unfamiliar human. And this is true of horses as well. When working with even the tamest horse you never run up behind it and startle it because there's a good chance you'll take a hoof to the knee, or worse.\n\nSource: I'm a long-time horse owner and friend of San Francisco Zoo keepers." ] }

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[ "http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/11d6xg/this_guy_found_two_grizzly_cubs_with_their_dead/c6lhd94" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "cbpibdh", "cbps0ki" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "Yes. The ozone holes are generally around the poles and move around over time. There are some lovely maps here showing changes over time _URL_0_", "Well, the ozone layer is ubiquitous through the stratosphere. In fact, the predominant sources of ozone are in the tropics, and it's overturning circulations like the Brewer-Dobson that transport ozone to the poles through the year - at least until the polar vortex develops, which cuts off that transport.\n\nYou don't really get \"ozone holes\" over cities in the same sense as the famous ozone hole at the South Pole. That's because the primary mechanism for thorough ozone depletion - polar stratospheric clouds - do not occur anywhere except for in the Antarctic during their winter, and *occasionally* in the Arctic in its respective winter. \n\nSo no - it's not possible for a polluter to \"create an ozone hole\" in a local sense and have it move around to impact a non-polluter. Ironically, a bigger air-quality issue is the generation of ozone or ozone-precursors itself! For instance, polluters that emit PAN (peroxyacetyl nitrate) create non-local ozone pollution. PAN is relatively stable, and can be transported long distances before it breaks down to release NOx; that NOx can react in chemical families with volatile organic compounds to produce ozone as a byproduct of oxidation of the organic species. " ] }

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[ [ "http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/ozone-hole-swaps-pole/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "chwpwme", "chwpxum", "chwrd67", "chwrfuv" ], "score": [ 2, 6, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "If you sell something on Paypal, you have to pay a certain percentage of the transaction to Paypal.", "If you are a merchant selling something through them they take a 2.9% + $0.30 cut of your profit.", "It takes a number of days to get your cash out of paypal and into your back account.\n\nDuring these days paypal deposits the money into an account which earns interest. Imagine the quantity of money they process and you get the picture ", "While I doubt this is how they make most of their money, getting your money back if there's something wrong with your account can take ages..\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cktcpzi" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "During a campaign, an officer was generally allowed a small Wagon to carry personal effects and anything necessary for his work in the field. This would range from a tent and necessary notes to liquor and personal reading. Naturally the higher the rank the more you'd be able to have bit the more you'll also need for your own command (maps, rosters, etc). \n\nThe main people to have a Wagon would be *chief De batalion* whom commanded a battalion (the smallest unit of independent command) on up. High ranking commanders would get a larger baggage train as they'd be allowed more personal effects and need more things relevant to their command.\n\nHowever one thjng that officers were not allowed to have was wives. While this wasn't allowed, this didn't mean that it did not happen. Generally wives never accompanied commanders, commanders would take mistresses (such as Marshals Soult and Massena during their command of the Pininsular campaign).\n\nAs for horses, generally officers would be on horseback while moving but leading from the front (if that was their choice as not all commanders were the ideal leaders like Lannes or Oudinot) on foot. The reason of not being on horse has more to do with being a larger target for sharpshooters and the chance of having a horse (expensive for a lower ranking officer) dying and even falling on you if you're on it when it dies.\n\nI hoped this helped, for more information on the organization of the French Army I'd recommend looking at Swords Around A Throne by John Elting, a very accessable and cheap book." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "crqhqtz", "crr38fl" ], "score": [ 4, 2 ], "text": [ "This is a somewhat controversial topic within the Syriac christian community. Basically there are two main schools of thought: those who identify as Assyrians and descendants from the ancient Assyrians and those who identify as Arameans and their descendants. I will let someone with the 'Assyrian' origin point of view post that since I'm not as well versed in their various arguments but I will provide you with the basic 'Aramean' origin arguments, however first I'm going to go on a slight tangent that is necessary for this topic. Up till the 20th century, the Syriac Christians called themselves in Arabic 'Suryani' which originally meant 'Syrian'. Suryani was not only a term exclusive to Christians but also exclusive to those Christians not of Arab ancestry (the arabs christians were usually Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, or Maronite). During the 20th century however, nationalist ideals started among the Arab Christians of 'Al-Sham'(the Arab term for the Levant meaning \"land of the North\"), and at the helm of this nationalist movement was Antun Saddeh, a Greek Orthodox arab christian. In his movement, the arab christians who identified as 'al-shami' (meaning arab of al-sham), started to adopt the name 'suri' an invented term that was equated with Syrian in English therefore causing great confusion. The 'Suryani' response was to change the translation from Syrian to Syriac. So for the purposes of this post I will be using Syriac, and take in mind that it means 'Suryani', unless I specify that I mean the Syriac language.\n\nThe main idea of the Aramean origin argument goes as this: The Syriac christians, are descendants of the people called Arameans, a group of northwestern semites closely related to the Hebrew and Phoenicians, who during the bronze age collapse settled the land they called Aram. Later on, due to outside influences, namely Greek confusion on the matters of the people they saw as barbarians as they saw all non-Greeks, the name 'Syria' was invented either from a)the Coptic word for Hurrians translated to Greek or b)the Luwian-Hittite word for Assyrians translated to Greek (note that despite there being a greek word for Syrian, the Greeks also had a word for Assyrian, therefore complicating the matter even further). During this confusion the Greeks and later on the Romans would use the name 'Syria' without any solid meaning to refer to people of the near east/fertile crescent region who spoke aramaic. However, during that time, the Arameans continued to identify as Arameans until a gradual process started that was most likely in tandem with the rise of Christianity(which was after all spread by Hellenized Jews who spoke Greek), where they started to called themselves 'Syriac' in their native Aramaic. Eventually, the term 'Syriac' would be used to apply exclusively to the people of Aramean ancestry. So the name Syria would be applied to the former lands of Aram, which makes sense since the Syriac Church was based in Antioch, a city nowhere near ancient Assyria. So due to the fact that Arameans adopted the name 'Syriac', anyone who identified as such was an Aramean whether or not they came from areas like Mosul or Nineveh which thousands of years earlier were considered the Assyrian heartland. They back this up with evidence that during the Iron Age, Arameans settled in large numbers in the Levant and a region of Mesopotamia called Aram-Nahrain (Nahrain meaning \"of the rivers\", possibly a callback to the bronze age kingdom of Mitanni which was from the same area of Mesopotamia, that was called Nahrain by some peoples), which was just north of the Assyrians. The Assyrians on several occasions held massive deportations of Arameans (as well as other peoples such as Jews), not out of the empire, but into its capital. It is claimed that Aramean numbers grew so large that Aramaic replaced Akkadian, and Arameans grew to outnumber the native Assyrians. The origin of the modern Assyrian identity would be in the works of 17th/18th(not sure which one) century western missionaries who upon finding the Syriac christian communities of Iraq, claimed based on archeological grounds that they must be the descendants of the ancient Assyrian, confusing the meaning of 'Suryani'.\n\nLet me know if anything needs clarification, however, I will restate that I expect someone else to post the Assyrian side of this, as I do not want to misrepresent my post as one sided.", "There's a mod on here that supports the continuation of the modern Assyrians from the ancient Assyrians: /u/Daeres \n\nHere are some of his excellent posts:\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_4_\n\nHere's a quote from the last thread:\n\n > \"One thing to bear in mind is that even before Assyria became an Empire, it was the largest state in the Near East. Many of its capitals were destroyed when the Empire was toppled, but several of its major centres continued to be active. Even reduced in size and strength, and without political control, there were still a lot of Assyrians- it was a state capable of raising a standing army of 80,000 Assyrians by about 900-800 BC. We know that worship of Ashur at the city of Assur was still going on before the Arab conquest. That means that the Assyrian identity had survived for 1200 years after the fall of their Empire. It's now about 1400 years since then.\n > \n > Given how many cultures have assimilated or vanished in that 2600 years, I'm just grateful that Assyrians aren't gone from the world.\"\n > \n\nAnd here's a great post about the Arameans from another historian:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nShort post about \"Syrian vs. Assyrian\":\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: Fixing a link." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2u5p7f/is_there_a_difference_between_assyrian_and_syriac/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zcvnq/what_is_the_history_of_the_arameans_when_was/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10qocs/were_the_assyrians_victim_to_a_culturewide/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17h4d9/what_was_the_significance_of_the_name_change_of/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10m94x/friday_freeforall_sept_28_2012/c6eo627" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cw27b8b" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "I tried to read up on this, and also asked my doctor about it, and it seems to not be totally known, in part because there can be a lot of different reasons depending on the person and circumstances.\n\nI think these are usually technically muscle spasms rather than cramps, although they're similar.\n\nSome possible causes:\n - Dehydration\n - Electrolyte depletion (usually salt, sometimes potassium and maybe magnesium)\n - Muscle overload\n\nThat last one is probably what's going on -- it seems like it is most likely to happen with highly underused muscles (or overused muscles in people who work out a lot)\n\nOf course there are also (a zillion) medical conditions that can cause cramps or spasms.\n\nGoogling found this page that looks ok at first glance:\n\n_URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.wikihow.com/Treat-Muscle-Spasms" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cmpiou3", "cmpivi3", "cmpjs8e", "cmpkqpo", "cmpniic", "cmpzi4o" ], "score": [ 6, 27, 11, 164, 8, 2 ], "text": [ "It does not take a continuous exposure but rather multiple exposures that are then stitched together.", "Don't forget that while the Hubble is moving around the Earth, Earth is moving around the Sun. And Sol is moving around the Galaxy. And the Milky Way is moving around inside Laniakea, and....\n\nNothing involved here is staying still, or in the same spot.\n\nBecause it seems like your question is based on the assumption that Earth would obscure the lens of the Hubble for half of that time every 97 minutes, imagine that the Hubble orbited around the equator and was looking North with respect to Earth. From this orientation, Earth would never obscure the image or disrupt the long exposure.", "The objects it points at are so far away, that the rotation around the Earth is negligible.\n\nFor instance, Andromeda is 1.49196325 × 10^19 miles away. The Hubble telescope is at an altitude of 347 miles, so as it moves around the Earth is moves roughly 8620 miles from one side of the orbit to another.\n\nUsing trigonometry, we know that if Hubble looks at Andromeda, that means it's angle changes roughly 3.3116961 x 10^-14 degrees (arctan of ((8620/2)/1.49*10^19). \n\nWritten out, that is 0.000000000000033116961 degrees, or basically negligible in this case.\n\nMy hand moves more degrees than that when I take a selfie in the bathroom, but it doesn't distort the image because the change is so small.", "Hubble uses six gyroscopes to know exactly where it's pointing. These are devices that act a bit like a compass, and always point in the same direction even when the telescope is orbiting.\n\nNext it has four reaction wheels which actually move the telescope. These just use Newton's 3rd law of motion; if the wheel spins one way then the telescope spins the other.\n\nFinally when it's observing, an instrument called the Fine Guidance Sensor will lock on to nearby stars, and make sure the telescope stays precisely pointed in the same direction/orientation.", "If you're thinking of images like the [Hubble Deep Field](_URL_0_) then that was actually made by combining 340 pictures of the same point in the sky rather than a single long exposure.", "Just in case you weren't asking about the earth obscuring the image cause it's in the way for about 1/2 of the time - pick up a pen and make a fist, point the pen at something in the room then orbit the pen around your fit so the pen is always pointing at the object. This is how things orbit naturally, their own spin is independent of the object they are orbiting. Yes, the earth obscures the images, but the shutter isn't open the entire time - it'll close and reopen later on when the earth is out of the way but still be pointed at the same spot. Also - each exposure may only be a few minutes long but there will be many exposures and each image is stitched together with computers so they all line up." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e1tq7od" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "Sporting events mostly. A lot of minor league baseball teams have displays at the end of weekend games. Same with other sports as well. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cg92153", "cg92bwb", "cg92otk", "cg93avj", "cg9oxyn" ], "score": [ 73, 15, 2, 185, 2 ], "text": [ "Until the end of the last ice age (10-12,000 years ago ish), there were a lot of really, really large mammals. Things like mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, glyptodons, titanotheres, short-faced bears, multiple species of giant bison... They weren't as large as the largest dinosaurs but they were as big as many of the dinosaurs we commonly think of. They went extinct in large part because of human stresses (i.e., overhunting). On each continent, one of the first things that happened after human colonization was the extinction of the endemic megafauna. Climate may have played some role, but humans were the major driver. \n \nI don't know if the oxygen content argument works as well for animals with closed circulatory systems. Usually that's a hypothesis that's applied specifically to insects. Insects don't have lungs and their 'blood' (=hemolymph) isn't used for transporting oxygen like ours. Instead, they have this system of branching tubes that open to the outside. The tubes branch and branch and branch until the endings allow for gas exchange on a cellular level. This system works well for small things, but it does place limits on how large they can get. Having a higher concentration of oxygen alleviates that. But that argument breaks down for things like mammals and dinosaurs that have lungs and efficient means of oxygen transport. \n\n**Edit:** [Here](_URL_0_) is an article that actually looked at the distribution of body sizes in dinosaurs versus other groups. Though we see a biased distribution of mammal body sizes currently (because most of the large ones died out recently (on an evolutionary scale)), several groups of dinosaurs were skewed towards larger body sizes. The author's hypothesis is that this was due to predator-prey interactions: herbivore species grew larger as a defense to predation and predators responded by getting larger too. Then the prey species grew larger. Then the predators. And so on.", "First, dinosaurs had a huge size range, from the crow sized compsagnathus and mussaurus to the enormous shangtungosaurus. Most dinosaurs (at least from statistical distribution of fossils) fell in the 100-1000 kg range, so there are plenty of contemporary animals in this range. However, there were numerous evolutionary pressures (fast food feeding, that led to gigantism in the sauropods, the group that included the largest land dinosaurs (_URL_0_). But remember that these evolutionary pressures had over 165 million years (until the extinction event 65 million years ago) to work on species. The earliest known sauropod appeared about 200 million years ago and was only 8-10 meters long (_URL_1_). Gigantism emerges from a number of factors including limited predation, abundant resources all of which interact over long time scales to increase the size of the animal. After the K-T extinction event, damage to the environment (including the other organisms that made up food) put severe pressure on larger animals, letting smaller more behaviorally flexible and environmentally tolerant species prosper. There have been gigantic land species since, but both environmental change (ice ages) and human predation has put serious pressure on them, again, limiting the number of larger animals. In another 100 million years, who knows? We might see other gigantic species if both environment and human resource management improve.", "I'd like to follow up this initial question with a semi related one. Whilst not dinosaur size, we still have very large land and sea animals, but why do we not have any large birds? I know we have birds with huge wingspans, but not any particularly large birds of equivalent size to an elephant or whale.", "From our [FAQ](_URL_5_) (which I wrote, hence the copypasta):\n\nThere have been much larger terrestrial mammals in the past. [*Paraceratherium*](_URL_6_) is an example. There are also mammals alive today that are as large or larger than the largest dinosaurs (blue whales!). However, the fact remains that some dinosaurs - particularly sauropods - were absolutely monstrous. They may not have been blue whale-sized, but they were surprisingly close, and they were terrestrial. It's hard to know exactly what allowed some dinosaurs to grow so big. Sauropods, the largest dinosaurs. had a few adaptations that seemed to [give them a a size advantage](_URL_2_):\n\n- Their long necks were effective for eating lots of plant material with minimal energy expenditure. \n- They almost certainly had a [unidirectional airflow system](_URL_10_) in their lungs because both birds (theropod dinosaurs) and crocodylians (the only other living archosaurs) both have that. This uses countercurrent flow to bring oxygen into the circulatory system. It's part of why birds are so successful as well. \n- They had heavily pneumatized skeletons that made them relatively lightweight for their massive size (something mammals don't have). \n\nIn contrast, terrestrial mammals seem to have both a [limit to how quickly they can increase their body size](_URL_8_) and a [maximum body size](_URL_7_). What causes these constraints is hard to say. The study on maximum body size found that the largest mammals evolved when during periods of global cooling and when there was more terrestrial land area. There seems to be physiological and ecological constraints on their maximum size, because several herbivore groups independently evolved to similar maximum sizes, as did several carnivore groups.\n\nAs for why terrestrial animals are generally smaller today, there was an extinction event at the end of the [Pleistocene](_URL_3_) that [disproportionally affected the terrestrial megafauna](_URL_4_). Nearly 2/3 of animals larger that 44 kilograms that were present 50,000 years ago were extinct by 10,000 years ago. \n\nIt took millions of years for terrestrial animals to have that huge increase in size after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, but terrestrial mammals largely filled that role. Given how geologically recent these extinctions are, it's extremely unlikely that anything would have been able to fill the gaps left by the loss of megafaunal mammals. In that sense it's completely expected that a recent extinction event would leave a gap in body size. \n\nOne thing that does *not* explain maximum body size is atmospheric oxygen levels. There were already large sauropods by around 190 million years ago, around where [this graph](_URL_9_) bottoms out. One example is [*Barapasaurus*](_URL_0_), a 14-meter-long early sauropod from the Early Jurassic. So [whatever led to their gigantism](_URL_1_) was present when oxygen levels were lower than today, not higher. The study looking at body size in mammals also found no relationship to atmospheric oxygen levels. ", "I think you are thinking about it backwards.\n\nIts not \"why didn't they evolve to be dino-sized again\", but rather \"*why would they* become dino-sized again?\"\n\nAnimals are going to evolve because (usually) its a beneficial trait. If land animals after the dinosaurs didn't become huge, its because they were perfectly content to eat and breed and stay away from predators the size they were. " ] }

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[ [ "http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0051925&representation=PDF" ], [ "http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0078573", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691423/pdf/12965005.pdf" ], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barapasaurus", "http://econtent.unm.edu/cdm/ref/collection/bulletins/id/790", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/21251189/", "http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/quaternary/pleistocene.php", "http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5693/70.full", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/wiki/biology/animals_larger_past", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indricotherium", "http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6008/1216.short", "http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/26/1120774109.abstract", "http://www.pnas.org/content/96/20/10955/F2.expansion.html", "http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/birdrespiration.html" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fdosbmw", "fdov4qi" ], "score": [ 3, 4 ], "text": [ "When computers were first built and people came to realize how powerful they were, they needed people to figure out how to make them work and how to make them better. The original designers tended to be mathematicians, physicists, engineers, etc. but no one field could really do it all. Computer science is sort of the catch all term for the people who ended up working on computers, both more theoretical and also applied.", "So, this rundown is my own, and the idea here is to have a pseudo-historical list running in descending order of abstraction. Basically, I'll start with the most abstract and general ideas of the field, and work down towards nitty gritty practical bits that emerged.\n\nBut anyway, the main idea of computer science is to deal with processes, and specifically, unlike mathematics, processes that have extra limitation that you need to be able to perform them in a finite amount of time and space. Because, you know, humans have only limited amount of time to wait for computation to finish, and there's only finite amount of the universe we have access to.\n\nSo, in computer science specifically, what was a rather important point was that sometimes you have these processes be in the form of step-by-step lists of instructions(hereby called \"algorithms\") that even the stupidest could follow. So we built the stupidest thing, and we called it artifical computer(as opposed to computer of the old, who were humans, mostly women, performing calculations as required for some fields of science and engineering and such), and tried seeing what we can do with this concept. So now the question of study became, what can these artifical computers actually do. Some major results were achieved in 1940's, specifically Alan Turing was helpful, where he managed to prove some key things about things that can be computed, and perhaps more importantly, that there were some things that couldn't.\n\nAnd as computer technology advanced, computers itself started to become more complex, and the programs running on them started to require more and more sophisticated thinking, and computer science basically absorbed things like software engineering to itself, taking it further away from pure math world. Things like, what sort of tradeoffs you'd have when designing operating system fit neatly in this world of questions that more or less deal with what can and cannot be done with computers.\n\nBut much of the discussion is still well within confines of pure math as well. Say, computational complexity is a measure of algorithms ability to use fewer steps to arrive at the right answer. You don't need to ever even have seen a computer to be able to answer questions about those kinds of things, and it's ultimately about processes and algorithms rather than this physical device, although limitations of this physical device did end up sparking interest in these types of questions. Likewise, \"formal language theory\" is basically mathematics, but that theory is the main way to understand programming languages, and the theoretical foundation for their existence. So the line gets blurred. I'm unsure but I believe linguistics also makes an appearance here in this multi-dispiclinary mess. Another field that I want to highlight for math'iness is artifical intelligence. Also, worth noting that encryption basically is just taking mathematical problems we can prove are hard in one way but easy in another.\n\nAnd then you also have fields that are more specifically about using computers, like user interface design, or user experience design, which start invoking psychology and such things.\n\nAnd obviously, physical design of computing devices with its electrical engineering, physics and chemistry connections has to be mentioned.\n\nBasically, it started out with a rather simple premise of \"what this box do?\" and then when the box turned out to be very powerful, the field just exploded to cover everything the box touched." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cnosoqu" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "There is no maximum or minimum wavelength, any wavelength can be transformed into another one with the right choice of reference frame. A possible exception to this is if quantum gravity breaks Lorentz symmetry, and then there will be some minimum Planck-scale wavelength." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c9gvaxd" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Your brain has this thing called a circadian rhythm. What it's designed to do is make you sleepy at night time and wakeful during the day. Unfortunately, your body doesn't have a clock inside of it so it has to rely on cues outside of you to know when it's night and when it's day. One of the cues your body uses is light. When you see a bright light at night (awesome sentence) it confuses your brain and makes you more awake. \n\nNote: This is a big simplification but you get the idea." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "euxj53f" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "The angle at which air refracts light changes based on density. There is a temperature and density gradient between the hot grill and relatively cool surrounding air." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "clzp7s9", "clzp9it", "cm03435" ], "score": [ 18, 7, 6 ], "text": [ "Essential oil simple means that is possess a smell similar to the plant it is derived from. It isn't based on anything medical related. Now that doesn't mean that they arn't good for you, it just means that it is a large category that isn't related to anything medical. Its sort of like asking if the category food is good for you. The quality that makes something food doesn't entail it being healthy, but some food can be healthy. You would have to research each individual product to say if it is good for you or not. If someone has a study like that on a broad level they may be able to dismiss them all together.", "[there is some evidence that some essential oils have antibacterial propreties](_URL_1_)\n\n[while others can help with glucose regulation](_URL_0_) but it is a very broad subject and is going to depend on specific oils and specific uses. \n\n\nOne of the problems we run into is that many of the essential oils can and will interact with actual medical therapies, and people taking them and giving them won't know that. They are often metabolically active, and in some cases detrimentally so. \n\n\nIn the end, it is going to depend on the oil, the dose and the intended use if you want a reasonable answer. ", "\"Essential oil\" is a pretty broad category.\n\nIn principle it refers to **any** compounds produced by a plants, that have both a **low boiling point** and also low solubility in water.\n\nEssential oils are created by heating plant materials with steam, then chilling and re-condensing the vapors. At which point you end up with a thin oily organic layer on top of the condensed moisture, which might contain tens of thousands of possible plant compounds.\n\nThere are quite a number of compounds found in various essential oils that are already known to be toxic and/or carcinogenic, *at least in massive doses.* For example, Methyl salicylate found in wintergreen oil, d-Limonene, Saffrole, or Coumarine to name just a few. (note: d-limonene is the principle component in orange flavorings and in small amounts it's generally considered food-safe.) \n\nThis makes sense, because plants don't produce the compounds that are concentrated in EO's just for the hell of it, or because some human might come along and think it smells nice later. \n\nThey produce them to ward off and sicken potential predators, kill disease-causing organisms, interfere with nearby plants competing with them, ( or in the case of flowers, to attract polinators.)\n\n\nWorse, the vast majority of compounds that might be found in EO's haven't been tested in any serious fashion. Although the oils themselves are typically tested in bulk for obvious toxicity on animals. \n\nFurthermore plants that are known to be toxic themselves aren't used to create EO's \n\nMany manufacturers put warnings on their bottles against taking internally, for this reason.\n\n\n\nEssential oils can also trigger serious allergies in some people" ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20487577", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15555788" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cb5jqa0" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ " > Edit: ah dicks, forgot ELI5\n\nHa. It's ok. It's still evident this is a legit ELI5 question.\n\nI really wish there were a better answer, but they pretty much just [close down all the roads](_URL_0_). It's super inconvenient (which is why they try to do it late at night).\n\nLA has something of a habit of frequently inconveniencing its citizens by bringing in massive boulders, sculptures, and even space shuttles." ] }

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[ [ "http://laughingsquid.com/340-ton-boulder-enroute-to-los-angeles-museum-for-giant-sculpture/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c9tb72x", "c9tb9m7" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "The DSM-IV-TR has definitions for alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence - [link](_URL_0_).\n\nIt's important to note that (a) The DSM V is due very shortly and (b) There are many researchers who feel that the DSM does not use the best model. \n\nIn regards to your question, it's worth noting that the criteria are a combination of subjective and objective symptoms. This is common for mental health conditions and one of the more common criticisms. If you lined up 100 therapists and asked them all to tell you whether 100 regular drinkers had a disorder, there would be *some* level of agreement but not total agreement. In nature, all mental health diagnoses are somewhat subjective and therefore open to interpretation by sufferers and diagnosticians.", "There are scientific definitions, yes, though they may vary by source. In the United States, the grail for such criteria is the DSM from the American Psychiatric Association. They distinguish between alcohol abuse and alcohol dependency as distinct forms of alcoholism. Clinically, symptoms of withdrawal are regarded as sufficient but not necessary for diagnosis." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK44358/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "curiq8n", "curk724" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "The aircraft require less power at high altitude because of less air resistance but very few aircraft can operate at very high levels due to the lack of air.", "The plane does indeed need a *lot* of oxygen from the air. The front of the engine has *compressor fans* which suck in huge amounts of air and squeeze it much more densely into a small space farther back in the engine, where it is actually used to burn the fuel.\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c6z5bl2" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "When urine leaves your body it is body temperature. Your body either heats, or is heated, by the cold or hot food and liquids you eat. Urinating itself does not change your body temperature as you are evacuating this temperature stabilized liquid." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "czm7imm", "czm7kje", "czm7pbt", "czm9i01", "czmc0ie", "czmc505", "czmcgxh", "czmcl9d", "czmd9l1", "czmdcw6", "czmez39", "czmf3hy", "czmf87k", "czmfi09" ], "score": [ 20, 35, 347, 6, 2, 30, 11, 5, 6, 5, 2, 3, 2, 5 ], "text": [ "Poland is western Europe now, hurrey ! :D\n\nfor serious - geopolitics - you cover your interests, secure more allies, resourcers or markets, sometimes it aligns with higher goals like human rights.", "Humanitarian missions, formal appeals for foreign military intervention, personal financial investments into regions, political/tactical importance of the region/government they support/fight against. But often in modern times it's been mostly in response to protect lives in response to growing terror organisations. In the cold war era, it was often a battle of communism vs capitalism that required the west to step in to stop the spread of communism and perceived evil. Sometimes it's because of military alliances. It's really hard to give you a definitive answer without a specific example.\n\nBut your assertion that it's only the western world that does this is wholly wrong. The difference is that when the west does it - they're more or less transparent about their presence/reasons for doing it. Asian countries such as India, China and Pakistan have done it before, middle-eastern countries are too unstable in their own regions, so they often don't intervene anywhere else, but they have fought multiple wars in the span of a few decades against each other, so have African countries and African countries often involve themselves in ongoing wars within other African countries to \"Aid\" their allies. Russia has done it multiple times as well. It's just that those countries are the strongest and most stable politically/militarily, therefore they can allow themselves to involve themselves into wars without a risk of destabilising their countries.", "Several reasons. \n\n1) We have interconnected economies. So having trade access to resources means that some conflict that you would not think would affect a country really do affect them. \n\n2) We now have invented weapons that are capable of destroying civilization as we know it with a push of a button. Limiting who gets the knowledge to make these weapons, and watching those countries that do have the knowledge is important and it often means going into war or smaller conflicts to prevent the spread of that knowledge. \n\n3) Much of the world powers attempted to practice the philosophical stance of letting countries do whatever they want in their borders and to their neighbors and only getting involved when there was direct threat to them. What happened was the build up of Germany and start of WWII. ", "long answer: military industrial complex\n\nshort answer: money\n\nAnyone who says we're oversees for humanitarian reasons is most likely a moron. Think of international politics as a game of civilization. Every world leader is trying to get by with whatever resources they have and there are those few dickheads that got lucky with extra science and production and go around screwing over everyone they can because they can.\n\nSure there are humanitarian efforts, but usually the problems these efforts are fixing are directly related to issues our meddling created in the first place.", "I'd say as well as the other reasons the dudes have given, there's a lot of partnerships and treaties that the western world are part of, which mean that they sometimes need to go to war to uphold them", "Polemologist here.\nThere is a number of reason which can be summarised as follows (not necessarily sorted by importance:\n\n1) Ethical duty and R2P (Responsibility to protect). \n- > Something bad happens. You want to help the victims / affected.\n\n2) Globalisation.\n- > Interconnectedness of economies. If others have problems, you may have problems in the future.\n- > \"Failed States\". If things get too problematic in a given country terrorist groups or criminals may proliferate and establish themselves in the given country and sequently, from there, target other countries. It is better to prevent an escalation.\n\n3) Diplomacy.\n- > There are a number of international agreements that define how countries can and should help each other in certain situations, even if not directly interested by a particular conflict. \n- > Blowback and intelligence / diplomatic actions. They can be good or bad. If a diplomatic action or intelligence field operation goes wrong you can become a target. Accordingly, even if you had no interest in getting involved, you have to reply, or be ready to jeopardise your \"reputation\".\n\n4) Maybe the most important. The \"Western world\", has to do it. for the above reasons, and a number of other concepts, we are affected by conflicts far away. \n\nIf you want further informations about this look up \nBalance of Power\nGlobalisation\nEconomic interconnectedness\nR2P\nBackground _____ (insert any conflict here, and the reasons why we intervened will become clear).\n\nIn particular, the book \"Resource Wars\" By M. Klare, explains quite well the war in Iraq. Specifically, addresses an audience with little to no knowledge of international affairs and explains the reasons why all the events happened. SPOILER: of course oil is involved, but to fully grasp this kind of events you must be open-minded. ", "It doesn't. It frequently ignores far worse humanitarian situations, where it could have far more positive impacts. The West/Russia/Iran get involved in conflicts where it is either:\n\na) In their geopolitical interests to do so,\n\nb) In the local political interests to do so, or\n\nc) To get themselves/people they are linked to money.", "There are a lot of geopolitical benefits on top of the economical and moral obligations the US assumes as a top military power. When the US intervenes in a non-democratic country they gain strong political influence, establishing a country's new democratic system and quite possibly selecting who gets the presidential nod. Our involvement in the Middle East is strongly tied to ridding the world of terrorist groups, dictators, oil, and establishing a strong political ally inside a dangerous region. ", "Many of the concepts here briefly touch on it but in political science, this is referred to as the Role of Hegemon. It works, but you basically hope that the entity in charge is sane and ethically acting and that they're the best when considering the alternative.\n\n\n1) is a theory of international relations, rooted in research from the fields of political science, economics, and history. HST indicates that the international system is more likely to remain stable when a single nation-state is the dominant world power, or hegemon.\n\n_URL_0_", "To take a less cynical view than most comments. Look at the issues with refugees in Europe, which in turn is messing the world economy up. It may well have been cheaper to get involved very early and wipe out Isis and or Assad than deal with all this. ", "Lots of good answers here. One thing I've noticed is the US tends to stay out of problems nearby. My guess is because risky military operations far away have a low chance of direct attack in response.", "Here's your ELI5: Because it's easier to oil an engine than it is to fix one. Civilization needs a well oiled engine to progress. ", "I'd label it as a side effect of the NATO system which basically exists to shut down future world war scenarios. If you look at NATO as a hegemony with the US at its head, you have a system where they quickly turn into political firefighters. You really don't want anyone who has the potential to fuck with the hegemony (China, Russia mainly,) to feel like you can't keep any of your metaphorical fingers from getting cut off. You make sure you don't get burned, that way you look more like you can't be burned. ", "The US is about 4.4 percent of the world's population, but we in America have grown accostumed to consuming about a quarter of the world's energy resources (coal, oil, natural gas). \n\nSince we don't actually produce a quarter of the world's energy resources, we must continuously exploit numerous resource producing nations in order to maintain our ever increasing appetite for consumption.\n\nCouple that with a capitalist economy, which absolutely relies on ever increasing growth, it naturally follows that we will be perpetually involved in conflicts abroad in order to both secure resources and to increase profits for our companies. \n\nThis is what every empire in history has done or has tried to do." ] }

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

{ "a_id": [ "cj6gc6b", "cj6gihl" ], "score": [ 18, 9 ], "text": [ "Let's assume that Hernando Pizarro was telling the truth about the size of the ransom and that all the promised ransom was received. Here is the description from Hernando Pizarro \n\n > for that he could give them ten thousand plates, and that he could fill the room in which he was up to a white line, which was the height of a man and a half from the floor. The room was seventeen or eighteen feet wide and thirty-five feet long.\n\nWe'll start with the room. Assuming that the average height of a man was 5 feet, that would make the volume of the room to the line 17ftx35ftx7.5ft. 4462.5 cubic feet. One cubic foot of gold weights 1206 lbs so the total amount in the room would have been, accounting for open space, less than 5,381,775 lbs of gold. There is approximately 280,000,000 lbs of gold above ground in the world. So that would make it about 1.9%. \n\n[Here](_URL_1_) is a picture of silver Incan plates, let's assume the gold ones Pizarro describes are the same size. They are not very big, so let's put their weight at 2 pounds. That would add 20,000 lbs of gold to the ransom which even at 10 lbs a plate is a negligible amount compared to the world's gold supply.\n\n* Sources: \n* _URL_2_\n* _URL_0_\n* _URL_3_\n", "According to my copy of 1491, the room Atahualpa filled was 22 feet by 17 feet, and it was filled to a height of 8 feet.\n\n[According to the BBC](_URL_0_), the total amount of gold in the world is about 67^3 feet^3.\n\nIf you assume that the room was filled by a solid block of gold, it works out to be a little less than 1% of the current gold supply. Of course, there was probably much less gold than that - many objects, like cups, are mostly empty space, and the objects wouldn't have been perfectly packed in there. I think you can reasonably say that the amount of gold Atahualpa was ransomed for was somewhere between .0001% and 1% of the current world supply, and is probably closer to the range of .01% to .001%." ] }

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[ [ "http://greenanswers.com/question/how-much-gold-circulation-world/", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Silver_plates_and_gold_beaker,_Peru,_Chimu_and_Inca_-_Staatliches_Museum_f%C3%BCr_V%C3%B6lkerkunde_M%C3%BCnchen_-_DSC08503.JPG", "http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Pizarro.html", "http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_one_cubic_inch_of_gold_weigh" ], [ "http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21969100" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ctyk9m5" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The so-called 'Order of the White Feather' was created in Britain in 1914 by a former admiral, and essentially involved handing out 'white feathers' to anyone, specifically men, not seen as supporting the war effort, ie not enlisting. Some British women's organizations handed out feathers, an act that symbolizes 'cowardice' on the part of the receiver and which predated WWI. However, they seem to have been a minority, [with Stephen Badsey indicating that most references to them he's seen from the time being in the context of complaints against their activities.] (_URL_0_) It would seem their activities were curtailed, and by 1915 Compulsion had been introduced under the Derby Plan, and eventually Conscription was introduced at the beginning of 1916. The appearance of the White Feather seems to have died out by 1916, which seems to suggest a correlation with Conscription being enacted.\n\nIt's also worth noting that few men before conscription enlisted purely on compulsion; the Derby Plan netted 80 000 in 1915, the roughly same number as that of volunteers in August 1914. [Compare this again to the over 100 000 men that volunteered in the first fortnight of September 1914, following the publishing of the Mons Dispatch.] (_URL_1_)\n\nIf you want some good sources on wartime Britain (1914-1918), I'd highly recommend *The Last Great War: British Society in the First World War* by Adrian Gregory, *A Kingdom United* by Catriona Pannell, *Myriad Faces of War* by Trevor Wilson and *Different Wars, Different Experiences* by Janet K Watson. " ] }

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[ [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziGow3CLalo", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W0657Bwn_A" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d7hk088", "d7hm99g", "d7jdwvo" ], "score": [ 3, 25, 2 ], "text": [ "Follow up, when did the Byzantines stop using Latin and changed to more Greek names?", "That depends on the time period and location. Up until around the sixth century, you can see a lot of emperors having Latinate names, like Flavius Sabbatius Iustinianus (not that I'm biased!), Constantinus, or Iulianus. Later, more Hellenic names appear, like Basileios the Bulgar-Slayer or Alexios Komnenos. It's worth noting that those two are usually anglicized and latinized, respectively, as Basil and Alexius Comnenus. Now, since the Byzantine heartland was around the southern Balkans and Anatolia, Greek names would dominate the lower classes in much of the Empire. At its further reaches, one could also find Slavs, Armenians, Arabs, and others. Furthermore, in Constantinople there existed a large Italian presence thanks to the merchant republics. \n\nAgain, though, you're asking about a period of roughly a thousand years and an area covering much of the eastern Mediterranean. It's hard to generalize. ", "**Background** (to build upon /u/EMPEROR_JUSTINIAN_I) Historically Hellenes practiced mononomia (meaning they only had one given name, i.e. Alexander or Pericles). Typically those names would have two components just like Germanic names. In addition with the long recorded history of Greeks and Hellenes there was a wide record of possible names to give to your child. After the Roman conquest, Greek Roman citizens use a mix of the Roman trianomia (usually the praenomen and nomen of their first sponsor) using their Greek name as cognomen. With the declining use of the trianomina among Roman citizen starting the 4th century BC, Greeks simply reverted back to mononomia in their own language. By the 6th century, even in Latin record of the ERE most individual are only identified by their given name, only old senatorial families keep alive the practice of multinomina.\n\n\nOne of the most important factor in the change of naming conventions among Hellenes is obviously Christianity bringing both names from the Bible, and names related to Christian concept or affiliation (i.e. Theophilos or Christophoros). Side note: some major Latin names made their way into Greek (most notably Constantine), while Greek gave many Christian name to Latin speakers.\n\n\n*So what about the 13th century:* If you look at the Palaiologos line, you see names heavily influence by Christianity, both names from the Bible and theophoric names. But some classic Greek names remain too (Andronicus in this case). This is a feat that is also present in the west with Germanic names coexisting along side Latin/Christian names in the same family (the Capet dynasty of France mostly used Charles, Louis, Robert for their sons since the 10th century, names which are all Germanic but later they also started to used Philippe (i.e. Philip) a very old Greek name, and later Jean (i.e. John)). The 13th century is also a complicated time for the Empire falling to the Latin in 1204. So it is very likely that at some level Germanic or Latin names penetrated into the Greek culture among the lower classes at least for a time. Another interesting things is the use of several family names in the mobility to demonstrate lineage (especially in relation to the former imperial lines), when the West was only starting to spread the use of family names for the commoners." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cw9utx8" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "The Polish army was strong for a country of its economical development - it was well trained and equipped with modern arms. However, they were unable to stand up to the full power of a grand power such as Germany, and even less the power of two grand powers (Germany and the Soviet Union).\n\nThe Soviet-Polish war and the Polish gains in it earned it the enmity of the Soviet Union. It already had the enmity of Germany due to existing partially on previously German land that the Germans wanted back. It also had the enmity of Lithuania, since it had annexed the city of Vilnius and the area around it.\n\nCzechoslovakia and Poland also had a strained relationship, since Czechoslovakia had used the timing of the Polish-Soviet war to grab the contested area of Teschen from Poland.\n\nPoland had friendly relations with Romania and France though.\n\nAs you can see from this, the Polish-Soviet war placed Poland in a strategic and diplomatic vice from which it could not escape. Once Germany and the Soviet Union came to an agreement, there was very little the Poles could do to change their situation." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e490xd5", "e49224s" ], "score": [ 7, 3 ], "text": [ "Gravity pulls things down. You can exploit this for energy, but only once.\n\nOnce the object has exhausted its \"gravitational potential\" (i.e. hit the ground) you can't extract any more without first picking it up again.\n\nWe do extract energy from falling water in hydroelectric dams, but again the water can only pass the dam once.", "Because all of the energy produced by the system must invariably be reused to provide the potential energy used for the next cycle. The amount of energy you put into moving the rock up the hill is equivalent to the energy released when it rolls back down. The result is that you'll never get more energy out than you put in. Then throw in entropy generation as a constant bleed-off of useful energy due to inevitable inefficiencies, and you'll always be operating at a net loss." ] }

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