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Did Vikings or pirates ever develop moral codes limiting what they could do to their victims?
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A very curious bit of Viking morals: it's wrong to steal, but it's right to take by force. One of the Icelandic sagas tells of a Viking raid in the Baltic, where the Viking party manages to steal stuff from a farm under the cover of darkness without the occupants realizing what's going on. Halfway back to the boats, the Vikings feel ashamed and return to murder the men and burn the farm down with the women inside, so that they're not thieves, but raiders. This was not done to hide their act, but to legitimize it. Generally, victims of raids were expected to take revenge by counter-raiding, or be entitled to financial compensation; inability to properly respond to a raid was seen as a loss of honor of the victim, not of the raider.
This culture of 'might makes right' also included the practice of Holmgang; to settle disputes through single combat. Occasionally, this got so much out of hand that some berserkers just went around Iceland making fights with everyone so they could challenge (or get challenged) into a Holmgang and take the loser's stuff. This possibility for abuse led to complex rules and restrictions, and eventual abolition. Normally disputes were settled peacefully at councils.
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Do you favour the "Dark Matter" hypothesis, or do you feel that the statement "Perhaps we simply don't understand gravity well enough" is a more plausible solution?
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So we haven't ruled out alternate gravity theories, but the majority of astronomers are definitely in the WIMP dark matter camp. There are alternate gravity people, but it hasn't really caught on at all. But yet, in the general public people seem to think of dark matter as some sort of weird phlogiston theory, and that it seems much "simpler" to "just change gravity".
So I'll try to defend why dark matter isn't as weird as it seems:
1. We already know that there are particles that interact only through the weak nuclear force and gravity: neutrinos. We have built neutrino detectors and found them. We're just looking for a fatter neutrino, not something entirely different to anything we've ever seen before.
2. The Bullet Cluster can't be explained by alternate gravity - it really shows that the gravity is not where the visible matter is.
3. It's actually quite elegant physically, because we have all the physics for particles worked out. We can set up a simulation with a bunch of dark matter and see if it falls into galaxy-sized clumps etc. This means it's a very testable theory, because it's not as flexible as changing gravity. We have some unknowns (like the mass of the particle), but we aren't changing the basic laws of physics, so we can run simulations and make predictions for observations, and hence either confirm or rule-out dark matter. For example, dark matter should be its own anti-particle, so with a good enough instrument we should be able to observe the gamma-rays it produces
4. Some fairly sensible extensions of the "standard model of particle physics" naturally produce a particle with properties very similar to what a dark matter particle should be. Although there's no proof that any of these models are correct yet, so this point is not super solid.
Although it's worth pointing out that we really do need to actually find the particle before this is in the 100% confirmed category, it's definitely the favoured option.
Next: why is changing gravity weirder than it seems?
1. Einstein changed gravity by making a very small number of very strong assumptions, and all of general relativity naturally flowed from that. GR is basically the simplest possible solution that satisfies these basic assumptions. But if you're making GR more complex, you can change it in any direction you like. You can make it fit pretty much any data you want. You aren't bound by the laws of physics any more, because you're changing these laws. So if anything contradicts your theory, it's much easier to adjust your theory to make it fit. So it's much harder to prove or disprove the theory, and that makes it unsatisfying.
2. The most popular model, Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) doesn't even change GR properly. It's more or less just an ad-hoc modification to basic Newtonian gravity to make it fit the data. The fundamental physics isn't justified at all, it's literally just changing the equations to fit the data.
So, to put it a bit harsher than it probably deserves, we have a choice between a minor adjustment (adding a new particle similar to other particles we have observed) that is inflexible enough and specific enough to be properly tested, and a major adjustment (changing the fundamental laws of general relativity) that is too flexible and unspecific for us to design really good tests to confirm or disprove it.
This is all my perspective as an astrophysicist. Someone who does particle physics or who works directly on general relativity may have a different opinion.
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Was oral hygiene, or lack thereof, ever a deterrent for people to kiss before contemporary methods became available?
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I am not knowledgeable enough on historical oral hygiene practices to answer the first part of your question.
However, I can answer your second question:
> Has kissing always been a part of people's love lives?
Well, prior to written history, we have a hard time concluding whether or not people kissed. There are various hypotheses for how kissing developed, ranging from "feeding" hypotheses, akin to canines and birds who pass food to juveniles through their mouths, to hypotheses which imply that kissing is a way of exchanging olfactory information. It's a very interesting anthropological discussion.
But from a HISTORICAL perspective, kissing is mentioned in writing about 5,000 years ago, in Sumerian poetry: (Kramer, Samuel Noah (1981). History Begins at Sumer (3rd revised. ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press., _URL_1_)
Later examples from Egypt also mention kissing, and are fairly specific: _URL_0_, _URL_2_
So I can't tell you about how people felt about kissing due to oral hygiene, but people were definitely kissing in a romantic context since almost the beginning of recorded history.
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why do some antennas such as the kind for tv have such a rail-like design?
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The series of parallel elements are called directors, and they, in effect, focus the signal.
A simple wire, sticking up, will have a sensitivity pattern which is circular with is centre around the wire, but this isn't much use for receiving faint signals and shutting out interfering signals. The [Yagi-Uda antenna](_URL_0_) uses the row of directors to stretch the sensitivity in the direction of the directors - that is, along the line of the "rail" of the antenna. This allows it to collect faint signals from (nearly) a single direction.
The gains can be quite startling, but adding extra elements has increasingly little effect, so you don't often see ridiculously long versions.
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Did the USSR have any kind of attempt to appeal to the youth similar to how Captain America got big in the US?
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The kinds of figures that were lauded by Soviet propaganda were "everymen" who, because of their love of their country etc. etc., rose to do incredible things. The case in point here is Alexey Stakhanov, of the Stakhanovite movement. It would have been at odds with Soviet ideology for science-manufactured supermen to be the heroes.
To elaborate a little more: Stakhanov was a coal miner who supposedly performed way over his quota limit in the Stalin era. The Soviet propaganda organs manufactured a "movement" out of his feat, encouraging all workers to perform well above their (often unrealistic in the first place) quotas.
Another who fits this description is Trofim Lysenko, a "barefoot agronomist" who had some rather loopy ideas about how to improve crop yields (under collectivism) that were at odds with Western genetics. Lysenko's essentially peasant status was one of the things that made him appealing for the propaganda organs, and it led to denouncements of more stereotypically elite scientists as bourgeois.
My generalization is primarily for the Stalin era (1928-1953). I don't know how much flexibility there was under later Soviet premiers in their heroic archetypes. Under Stalin one of the most popular plots for films was a variation on "boy meets tractor," just to give you an indication of what Socialist Realism meant for various types of media. It does not involve space aliens who can fly, fight for peace, justice, and the Soviet way, etc., or mutants (god forbid), or science-augmented men, or anything like that. These are _deus ex machinas_ and as we know there is know _deus_ other than the hard-working "new Soviet man" under Marxist-Leninism!
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Why did the Catholic Church seem to be opposed to lay people reading the Bible?
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Not exactly true. Catholic Church does not opposed lay reading Bible. In fact, reading of the Bible is part of the Mass and regular attendee of the Masses will hear a large portion of both Testaments in span of few years.
Given, that Catholic rites formed in the period of nearly universal illiteracy that alone shows that Church was never against peoples learning the contents of the Bible.
However, Catholic have a different stance on interpreting it. Theologically it's based on 2 Timothy, where Paul gives eponymous Timothy right to *righteously divide the word of truth* and in practice it means that only the Church hierarchs (bishops, approved theologists and such) can properly interpret the Scripture and teach doctrine as spiritual successors of the Apostols.
Hence the problem Church had with the Bible translations was not laymen reading the Scripture, but laymen reading *heretic interpretation* of it.
Case in point- papal bull in 1713 as you name it, commonly known as [Unigenitus](_URL_0_). The bull was targeted against heresy called *Jansenism*, and ascetically against Pasquier Quesnel, one of the main advocates of Jansenism. Who, by the way, spread his teaching by publishing abriged version of Gospel with commentaries (*Abrégé de la morale de l'Evangile*).
*Unigenitus* condemns 101 notions of Quesnel, giving source of condemnation:
> _URL_1_ is useful and necessary at every time, in every place, and for every kind of persons, to study and know the spirit, piety, and mysteries of sacred Scripture.
Pope point to *1 Cor. xiv. 6*:
> Now, brothers and sisters, if I come to you and speak in tongues, **what good will I be to you, unless** I bring you some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or word of instruction?
or the very next Quesnel proposition:
> 80.The reading of sacred Scripture is for all.
Pope replies with the Acts of the Apostles:
> And on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet. The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.” Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. **“Do you understand what you are reading?”** Philip asked.
In short, Catholic view is that reading the Bible is pointless- or even harmful- if you do not how to interpret and understand the text, and it much better leave it to the properly trained professionals something that is made even mere clear rebuffing statement 85
> To interdict to Christians the reading of sacred Scripture, especially of the Gospel, is to interdict the use of light to the sons of light..
Pope responds pointing the most famous lines of Luke:
> No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light.
And that essentially it: Catholic Church is not against lay people reading (or hearing) the Bible, but is very much against theologically-inept Joe's going wild with they own interpretations of it. That's the job for properly trained and educated priests.
It somewhat similar how modern scientists and academics are often opposed to amateur researchers.
P.S. In English speaking world Catholics have image of Bible haters, because of suppression of John Wycliffe, who was proclaimed martyr of reformation. However his work was suppressed not because he dared to translate Scripture to English, but because he views were, in fact, *extra heresy*. He even openly denied authority of the *spiritual liege*!
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Why are there so many volcanic eruptions recently? Are they somehow connected or is it a coincidence? Or is it just new media coverage?
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The current level of activity is normal. On average, there are usually ~20 volcanoes in some stage of erupting at any given time. The recent news worthy eruptions (e.g. Hawaii and the recent one in Guatemala) are not connected. So the short answer it's just the coverage and/or the fact that these two eruptions are happening in populated places and that both are being filmed a lot by locals (mostly safely in the case of Hawaii and **really** unsafely in the case of the Guatemalan eruption, you should never be as close to a pyroclastic flow as some of the people shooting video are). As for the rates, couldn't find any particularly good plots, but you can check out [the smithsonian](_URL_0_) weekly eruption report to 1) get a sense that there are lots of eruptions going on that aren't making the news and 2) if you go back into the archives, which span ~18 years, you can get a somewhat qualitative sense that this number of currently erupting volcanoes isn't particularly odd. As a side note, this is not quite real time, so this is the summary for last week so it doesn't yet include the eruption in Guatemala.
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how did "cheater boxes" (cable descramblers) allow you to watch premium tv channels for free?
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Way back when, television was an analog signal. More accurately, it was a *series* of analog signals that your 100%-analog color television could use to produce a picture. You have three signals for color (your TV only looked at one if it was black-and-white) and a "timing" signal that indicated when it should start drawing a new line. The "vertical hold" was a sometimes-manual synchronization to that signal.
"Scrambling" was really just that. Some of the signals were inverted, some of them were switched. But, fundamentally, you couldn't *add* in junk or actually do significant *math* to obscure the signal, because televisions simply didn't have the ability to un-do that and produce a working picture for your paying consumer. Likewise, before relatively powerful integrated electronics became available, it wasn't economically feasible to give a customer a powerful computerized set-top box just to watch some television.
So your "encryption" was a scheme with only a few variables. Throw off the synchronization here, swap a color field here, and it would make the picture "off" enough to be unwatchable. But, likewise, once someone figured out your mechanism, they just had to create a relatively simply "decoder" to bring that signal back.
TLDR: Analog encryption wasn't terribly complicated, but it was analog, so it required *hardware* as opposed to something digital, which might be more complex, but also could be done with a wider variety of hardware. Nowadays, everything is digital (because computing power, even for high-definition video, is so cheap) so analog encryption/decryption isn't a thing.
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Why can't I remember a smell or taste the same way I can an image or a sound?
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Psychology undergrad here: The big problem with your chemical senses (especially with smell) is that you can't properly assign a specific perception of an aroma to a certain stimulus. You know very well which porperties a stimulus for your eyes must have for you to perceive it as "blue" or "red", but what properties does a molecule have to have for you to perceive it as "cherry" or even more difficult, which specific molecules do produce the aroma of "coffee"? Turns out that this is a very complex question, as many chemically very similar molecules are perceived as drastically different smells or vice versa. Taking this difficulty into account, a complex cognitive representation of the aroma stimulus in your memory seems very challenging. However, your smell is the only sense that doesn't connect with the Thalamus before reaching its corresponding cortex area and limbic structures like the Amygdala or the Hippocampus, therefore the emotional memory of an aroma is much more directly accessible, thus more intensive, and in some way that's compensating for a complex cognitive representation as your sight or hearing can offer.
Edit: Linda Buck and Richard Axel won the 2004 Nobelprize in Physiology or Medicine for their pioneering research on olfaction, you might want to take a look into this, as it uncovers the complexity of olfactory encoding:
_URL_1_
The idea of a certain cell assembly representing an aroma, thus creating an "olfactory map", is further explored in this article:
_URL_0_
All of this shows that neuronal representation of aromas is very complex and enigmatic, much more so than stimulus representation in the visual or auditory system.
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Why did the Constitution specify March 4 (the date) for the start of the new president's term? Why did FDR specify January 20 (the date) as the new date in the 20th amendment?
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To answer the first part of your question:
The Constitution did **not** specify March 4, or any other date, as the beginning of the new President's term. It stated only that the length of the President's term was four years. And, while the Constitution gave Congress the power to set the date for the selection of Electors, and the date the Electors should cast their votes, it did *not* give Congress the power to set the date on which the President's term began.
Congress met for the first time on March 4th 1789. This date was the [result of a vote of the Continental Congress](_URL_0_):
> Resolved, That the first Wednesday in January next be the day for appointing electors in the several States, which before the said day shall have ratified the said Constitution; that the first Wednesday in February next be the day for the electors to assemble in their respective States and vote for a President; and that **the first Wednesday in March** next be the time, and the present seat of Congress [New York] the place for commencing, proceeding under the said Constitution."
[EDIT: So, to answer OP's specific question, it looks as if they were fond of Wednesdays, and March 4th happened to be a Wednesday in 1789].
Although Congress didn't count the electoral votes of the first Presidential election until April 6th of that year, and President Washington was not sworn in until April 30th, his term in office was retroactively considered to have begun on March 4th (since that was when the new Constitution "commenced").
Since every Presidential term was four years long, as specified by the Constituion, every subsequent Presidential term (until the XX Amendment was enacted) also began on March 4th.
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In many medieval movies such as Braveheart there are often scenes with military commanders shouting motivational speeches to entire armies on the battlefield without using voice amplification of any sorts. In real life, were they really able to hold speeches like that and is this how it was done?
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The answers are further back in time than you're asking about here, but while you're waiting this thread might interest you:
[*Do the speeches we often see before a battle in most literature and visual performances have any historical basis. Did the kings and generals leading an army ever give a speech to rally the troops. Or is this just a modern romanticism?*](_URL_0_) featuring /u/Thrasyboulus, /u/Celebreth, and /u/Quietuus
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What's a piece of knowledge from your area of historical study that you enjoy telling people about, and why?
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'Pirates' helped finance the first Episcopal church in Rhode Island, Trinity church. The church denies this (and are technically correct), as none of the men were ever convicted of piracy, or they were under a Letter of Marque at the time (making them privateers).
This little factoid allows me to begin the long and fascinating story of Henry Avery, Thomas Tew, Thomas Paine, William Mays, William Kidd, the ingenius (read: pirate brokering) Rhode Island governors, and the Golden Age of Piracy... all in one wonderful teaser fact.
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Are there any disagreements between English and U.S historians on any facts/aspects of the American Revolution?
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Hi there!
If you've come to the thread and are wondering why there's no answer yet, please be patient: [we have found](_URL_4_) that it takes an average of 9 hours for a good answer to appear on a popular thread - properly researching and writing an answer takes time. Additionally, it's currently well past midnight on the East Coast of the US right now, which means that plenty of the historians interested in this topic might already be asleep. Please be patient! If you want to be reminded of this thread in 24 hours, [please see here for information on how to send a private message to RemindMeBot](_URL_1_) to remind you about this thread.
If you're wondering what's in the 14 removed comments at the time of writing, there are four separate smartarses who've posted a one word reply ('Yes') or a variant ('I guess so'). One other clever chap made a joke imitating the English accent. There is also already a complaint about removed comments. Some of these attracted replies saying "in before this gets deleted" and the like. There is also one attempt at an answer which was too vague and short to reach our standards. You're not missing anything great, we promise.
All of these comments get removed on /r/AskHistorians because the huge majority of our subscribers really do want accurate, comprehensive, in-depth historical answers based on good historical practice and high-quality sources. It's amazing how many downvotes and reports an obvious shitpost can attract on a popular thread on /r/AskHistorians within minutes, thanks to our readers (if you see it, report it!)
Please see [our subreddit rules](_URL_6_) for more information on how to write an answer up to our standards. On /r/AskHistorians, we want people answering questions to be able to explain not just what the basic facts are, [but why we know that these basic facts are right, and to put those basic facts into context](_URL_5_). This is why we encourage [the use of primary and secondary sources in answering questions](_URL_2_), rather than tertiary sources like Wikipedia, podcasts and textbooks.
In other words, on /r/AskHistorians, we'd rather have no answer than bad attempts at answers. By removing the short, quick, bad answers that would otherwise crowd them out, the well-researched in-depth answers (that take people time to research and write) are more likely to be seen ([see this graph for more detail](_URL_0_)). The downside to this is that we have to remove a lot of shitposts and comments wondering what happened to the removed comments. The upside is that our contributors consistently post amazing stuff to /r/AskHistorians (which we collate the best of every week in our [Sunday Digest](_URL_3_)). Alternatively, if you want to discuss history without these constraints, /r/history or /r/askhistory might be more appropriate subreddits for you than /r/AskHistorians.
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Why "666" for the beast? Without a base-10 positional representation system, this number wouldn't look particularly remarkable.
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I can't tell you much about the numerological implications of the number and the interpretation of Johannes, but I'm going to say something about Roman numbers that might be helpful:
Roman numerals don't use positional notation, but they still represent base-10 - there are symbols for the decimal powers: I, X, C, CD (= later M) and so on, combined with symbols for half of them: V, L, D. Fun fact: the symbols for the half of the decimal powers are simply the letters chopped in half: X > V; C > L; CD > D. DCLXVI (or ΧΞϚ in Greek numerals) when spoken or written out it is *sexcentos sexaginta sex*, *hexakosioi hexekonta hex* in Ancient Greek, (sixhundred sixty six), so it loses none of that remarkableness and in fact has much to do with the number 6. In fact, it allows additional interpretations when written that way, since numbers are written with the same symbols as names are - Johannes remarks that:
> ἀριθμὸς γὰρ ἀνθρώπου ἐστί, καὶ ὁ ἀριθμὸς αὐτοῦ ἑξακόσιοι ἑξήκοντα ἕξ
"for it is the number of a human, and his number is sixhundredsixtysix", one interpretation being that you can reconstruct it into the name of a human.
See also /u/talondearg's answer on Greek numbers and the numerological implications.
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How exactly was the French Revolutionary Army able to defend France from being invaded by a coalition consisted of every European country, and also end up expanding French territory?
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I'd like to point to [this post I made a few days ago](_URL_0_) for reference.
Notably this bit:
> All men between the ages of 18 and 25 were to be forcibly conscripted for military service -- all men. Men into their 30's would also regularly volunteer or be called upon as well though. If you were fighting your first few years in the military would be one of utter disorganization and panic. Revolutionary hype would be ripe and you and your comrades would feel it. Any officers living a little too luxuriously? Mob them and send them to the guillotine. Your NCO being a little too harsh on you and your mates? That doesn't sound like liberty or fraternity, I don't like being drilled! You'd probably be part of a mob that killed him or stripped him of his power. It is very likely you would be witness or a participant in the murder of an individual whose only crime was being a bit rich, an aristocratic heritage, or was being a bit too strict with you.
> Where you fought doesn't really matter, your life would be hell. Supply issues were rampant as the Royal Armies rather sophisticated supply system would be sacked entirely for being part of the old system. A new administrative service would be created which had a semi-independent status, its *commissaires-ordonnateurs* only responsible to the Republic itself and not the commanders it served. These men, responsible for collecting, storing, preparing, and issuing foodstuffs and clothing along with disbursing money were filled with endless opportunities of larceny. Supplies and cash would frequently vanish before reaching the troops going into the pockets of Revolutionary leaders in Paris. Vincentius Zahn, a pastor in Hinterzarten, watched a French army pass through in 1796 which would be about when the supply issue began to stabilize. So this is the best case scenario you're about to read:
> > One did not see [compared to the Austrian army] so many wagons or so much baggage, such elegant cavalry, or any infantry officers on horseback below the grade of major. [Austrian infantry lieutenants had their own mounts] Everything about these Frenchman was supple and light -- movements, clothing, arms, and baggage, In their ranks marched boys of fourteen and fifteen; the greater part of their infantry was without uniforms, shoes, money, and apparently lacking all organization, if one were to judge by appearances alone. . . These French resembled a savage horde [but] they kept good order, only some marauders who followed the army at a distance . . . terrified the inhabitants.
> You had no shoes most certainly. The Directory in '95 had to pass a special order just to give all the Officers their own shoes and even that wasn't filled out entirely. Your uniform was nonexistent as is mentioned but just a loose collection of tattered blue or white with the French tricolor somewhere on it if you could manage. You had no regular supply of food from the country itself but had to survive off of war. Most early campaigns you would fight in would not be explicit offensives but 'liberating' nearby towns across the Rhine or in North Italy for supplies. Soldiers had no issue foraging on their own French lands as well. If you were a conscript you would most likely abandon your men while marching through familiar land. Many Divisions would lose half their men on extended marches through attrition and desertion alone.
> Artillery and cavalry was restricted mostly to pre-war soldiers who had the training and knowledge to perform those duties. If you were conscripted you were almost certainly put into one of two areas -- light infantry or regular infantry. *Tirailleur* and *Fusilier* respectively. Assuming you did not desert after being thrown into one of these two sections you would get two very separate combat experiences. The post-Revolutionary army was very fond of skirmisher forces for some inexplicable reason. I say that mainly because inexperienced troops are very poor skirmishers. They generally aren't crack shots and flee at the slightest sign of trouble. Yet whole battalions were frequently deployed as entirely skirmishers, a tactic dubbed *"tirailleur en grandes bandes."* If you were part of a skirmisher force you would likely not be thrown directly into the fray. You would be sent on small scale raiding 'missions' with a small number of other skirmisher comrades and an officer as a sort of training exercise. You would raid storage caches or small villages so that you would get used to being under fire in a more controlled environment for your officer to control you. As you would go into battle against a formal Austrian, British, Italian or Prussian army your duty would be constant harassment.
> If you were thrown into the fusiliers you would be heavily drilled about formation. The common trope about Napoleonic warfare are two sides standing in line formation staring each other down 50-100 yards apart and shooting at each other. This is a shitty strategy for the French, pardon my French. Line formation is inefficient for untrained conscripts because, like a phalanx, it requires holding formation and firing in concert -- two things conscripts will not be capable of doing on a few weeks of training under heavy fire. The French military doctrine of this time was one of constant attack -- always being on the offensive. It was the only way they would abuse their manpower advantage. You would be organized into a column of just a few men wide and dozens of men deep. You likely would not fire your weapon once or just once in a battle, as you were charging at full sprint into the enemy line. That is what the column provided -- it gave depth to the line, did not require a lot of organization, and was only used as a formality to charge into shattered and notably *thin* lines of the enemy. British, Austrian, Italian and Prussian troops were professional armies and would fight in that line formation. It would not stand up to constant column charges.
> How would a normal battle go? Well, again, it depended on your position in the army. Again you were most certainly in the infantry if you were just a farmer. Let's imagine it from the enemies shoes. Swarms of skirmishers would begin to envelop your tight, strictly dressed formations firing from cover in completely disorderly formations. When I say swarm, we're talking 2:1 or 3:1 ratios at times. If you stand still, you will be continuously picked off. If you try to fire on them, you will only hit a few as they were extremely scattered. If you tried to charge them they would drift away, still shooting, and follow you when you try to fall back into your strictly disciplined line.
> Eventually your line would be in tatters you, a Brit or Austrian alike, would look up across the horizon. Out of the smoke comes a howling, trampling, massive rush of thousands of men with bayonets extended with the weight of 12 men against every yard of your exhausted line (which were only 3 deep when it all began). Your professional, organized, and chivalrous armies would try their best but they would keep running into issues. A French NCO who was completely outnumbered and outmaneuvered that just failed to recognize his hopeless situation and charged anyway, killing thousands in a last stand. Inexperienced French officers who would show a shocking disregard of accepted military strategy and turn every engagement into a mindless, all out slugfest where fancy tactics and strategy of the non-Revolutionary sides meant nothing and would buckle under the weight of thousands of Frenchmen bearing down on them.
> Back to the French perspective. Let's say, somehow, you survive all of this. It's not unreasonable, many did. You did not get poked with a bayonet or shot in a charge or desert your men or didn't get caught hoarding anything. You survived the '90's into 1799 when the Directory would fall. A hundred battles would harrow you. You would time and time again throw the English and Austrians back in particular. What many tens of thousands died of combat many more would die of your governments incompetence. The patriotic enthusiasm you held in '91 seemed immature and stupid to the ragged veterans of 1799. The bands would play the patriotic airs of those first years of revolution -- *Chant du Départ*, *Ah ça Ira*, and the *Marseillaise*.
> The bands would play and you would sing, but they would mean nothing to you. You were a professional soldier in a professional army now. You, who fought out of pride and comradeship in '91 had spent the last decade learning to loot and murder to survive and would hold little reverence for any person or any idea and especially for that damn Revolution. Your Generals would be a wolf-breed, disrespectful of authority and independent minded. All of you, officers and men together, were survivors. Men of steel, toughened to all the hardship and conditions of the worst wars in history up to that point, thoroughly fed up with the *gros-ventres* -- big bellies -- of the Revolutionary government in Paris who had used and abused you. You had won dozens of victories and thrown the entirety of Europe onto its backfoot but you had no peace, no shoes, and not a square meal in nearly 10 years. It was this army that would make Napoleon Bonaparte First Consul at the beginning of the 19th century. And this army was comprised of you, dangerous metal which would be forged into the Grand Armée -- the greatest military force the world would ever see.
Basically, if I had to make a **tl;dr** of it all? The Revolutionary Armies early on would conscript basically everyone and the more professional, more 'efficient' European armies would simply be overwhelmed. Maneuver and tactics went out the window when you have 3x as many people swarming down on you all shooting wildly into your formation and charging into you, disregarding all casualties. Sheer force of numbers would push the primarily Austrians and British back and allow the French to get early territorial gains in the 1792-1797 First Coalition War.
By the time of the Second Coalition War between 1798-1802, the goal was not to reinstate the Monarchy but to just at least contain the French from taking more land and at best taking back some of what they gained. Despite getting many early victories with the help of the Russians, they would eventually back out and the British and Austrians primarily would face the reality -- Napoleon was now in charge and was the military genius he is. At his feet lay a military which had been fighting for a decade straight, easily the most experienced and battle hardened group in Europe. As the rest of Europe was playing catch up with the idea of mass conscripted armies, France had perfected it over the past decade of failure and death and had a horrifying combination -- an experienced conscript army led by arguably the most talented general in history. This would allow them to wage multiple wars of aggression throughout the early 19th century and convincingly win them and conquer most of Europe.
----
Notes:
Elting, John, *"Swords Around a Throne: Napoleons Grand Armee"*
Rothenberg, Gunther, *"The Napoleonic Wars"*
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what is motivation? i mean what is going on in the brain when somebody gets motivation or has motivation?
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A popular model of motivation requires two things: an incentive (something of value), and the belief that you will get that thing. So, what is going on in your brain is an appraisal of value (I want that thing) and an assessment of your ability to do what is needed to get that thing.
Goal-setting plays a large role. You don't just "have motivation". You have to have motivation to do something. Motivation has a direction, it's not a state-of-being.
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why does hard cheese which has been maturing for years have a sell-by date of only a few weeks?
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It's been cut.
As 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.
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if you start off completely awake and energized but then start dozing off during a boring class or a study session, what exactly is happening physiologically to cause this ?
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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.
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What is the longest "unbroken" chain of royal or dynastic succession in known history?
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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.
However, 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_).
That 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.
Sources:
* Packard, Jerrold: *Sons of Heaven: A Portrait of the Japanese Monarchy (1987)*
* Hoye, Timothy *Japanese Politics: Fixed and Floating Worlds* (1999)
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why do most websites have character limits for passwords while at the same time they force you to have an upper/lowercase letter, and a number to make your password more secure. wouldn't removing the character limit and allowing much longer passwords make them more secure than 16 characters?
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Convention.
There 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.
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if redbull lost a lawsuit over their "gives you wings" slogan, how do the current commercials still include the slogan without a small disclaimer included?
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Actually, that law suit (for $13.5 million) was not because of the tagline "give you wings" (which is clearly understood as humor).
The 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.
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Do satellites travel with the rotation of the earth or against and if they go both ways would two identical satellites going opposite directions at the same altitude have to travel at different speeds to maintain orbit?
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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.
Think 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.
So unless you have specific launch requirements or orbits in mind, it's simply cheaper and more efficient to launch satellites into prograde orbits.
There 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.
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why does the burn of putting your leg in hot water seem to come a second or so after it’s been pulled out?
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So there’s ‘two’ nervous systems that usually work together. This is an example of where one takes over first.
- CNS = Brain. It controls the actions you think about so it takes longer to work.
- PNS = No Brain. Controls reflex actions, ones you don’t have to think about, so it’s faster.
The leg in hot water reaction would work something like this:
1. Leg goes into water
2. PNS realises you are in danger.
3. PNS moves leg out of the water because it knows you’re in danger.
4. CNS realises leg is out of water
5. CNS realises leg is in pain and lets the brain know, meaning you only then feel pain.
I hope that’s simple enough, ask any questions if you need clarification.
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why do egg-whites foam when we whisk them and do not when there is just a very tiny amount of egg yolk in it?
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The foam form the whites is formed by proteins from the protein-rich egg-white. The yolk contains fats that destroy the protein foam (also called an emulsion). You can try this by mixing in a tiny amount of cooking oil into the egg-whites: it will have the same lack-of-foam effect as a tiny amount of yolk.
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why old film clips, like ones of ww2 almost always seems sped up faster than 1x?
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As you probably know, the speed at which motion picture film runs through the camera determines its frame rate, given in frames per second (fps). When run through a projector (which you can think of as a backwards camera) at the same speed, the movement looks natural to us. If turned more slowly or quickly, however, it plays out in fast or slow motion, respectively (the terms "undercranking" and "overcranking" are still used for these techniques, derived from the literal cranking mechanism used to run early cameras and projectors).
Obviously this enthralled audiences, and early camera operators took advantage of this at times, but the cliche of its ubiquity happened more by accident. In the early days of the medium, both cameras and projectors were usually operated at a lower speed than the 24fps that later became the industry standard (particularly with the advent of synchronized sound in the late 1920s). I've shown silent films while working as a projectionist, and they're often distributed with instructions to be run at 18fps so that movement shows up normally. If shown at 24fps—which has often been done, either because of insufficient equipment or human error—you would be seeing everything at 1.5x the speed of the actual motion, hence the cliche of old films running in fast motion.
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where and how does all the energy created by power plants get stored? or is the power being generated as it's needed?
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The latter, mostly. In the case of plants that use some sort of fuel, the energy is *already* stored in whatever fuel that is being used. Generating energy from the fuel first, and then storing it back inside something else to be extracted later is a *huge* waste of everything. When you have too much power, you use less fuel. When you have too little, you use more, it's generally as simple as that.
In case of solar plants and such however, it gets interesting. Storing large amounts of energy is one of the biggest problems of today's engineering and there is considerable research being done about this very issue. There are some ways of storing the energy that a solar plant generates during the day, but they aren't exactly ideal. It usually revolves around conversion of electricity into some other form of energy. Like using the power from a solar plant to pump very large amounts of water uphill, which is essentially converting electrical energy into potential energy. You later let the water flow downhill and turn some turbines to generate electricity again. Or you could use the power from your soalr plant to pump air inside a huge tank to create pressure, and when needed you let the highly pressurized air out and, again, turn turbines with it. Obviously there are considerable losses involved in such techniques, but energy storage technology is still a developing one. We're getting there.
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Why did the vice president switch from being the second place finisher in the US presidential elections to a ticket with the president?
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The most obvious answer is the election of 1800, but the election on 1796 had some impact on the 12th Amendment as well . The way the constitution was originally structured, electors from each state had 2 votes each with no distinction for president and vice president. It was also the case that many states decided to allot proportional votes (Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina).
The 1796 election between Thomas Jefferson & John Adams was the first contested election as it was the 1st that Washington wasn't running in. The election was pretty nasty even by today's standards with party papers for the Federalists accusing Jefferson of being an anarchist and atheist and Republican papers charging John Adams with having monarchist sentiments and eyeing the creation of a "throne" which his son could inherit. In the end Adams won the electoral college vote with 71 votes to Jefferson's 68. Federalist electors didn't coordinate their "second" votes and split their votes regionally so that Thomas Pinckney (southerner) received 59 votes and Oliver Ellsworth (northerner) received 11. If the Federalists had voted in a block, they would've sent 2 Federalists to the White House. Instead the mix-up allowed Jefferson to finish second and sent him to D.C. to work in the cabinet of a president he had just accused of wanting to destroy the Constitution (Imaging HRC as Trump's VP, it wouldn't be pretty). In the end, Jefferson was relegated to watching over the Senate in what he described as pretty monotonous task (he did oversee a rather unimpressive Andrew Jackson fill an interim Senate term). Jefferson spent his term under the radar and wasn’t serving any advisory roles in the Adam's cabinet. He also played a role in drafting the KY & VA resolutions which sought to directly undermine the Adams supported Alien & Sedition Acts.
In 1800 the same cast of characters ran for the presidency, but this time 2 things had changed: Electors became more disciplined in voting the party preference for President and Veep, and 2 states (NY & VA) independently decided to no longer give proportional electoral college votes. With Aaron Burr's open campaigning (which many saw as unseemly) the Republicans won New York and won the election. Republican electors were too disciplined though and Jefferson and Burr tied with 73 votes each (The Federalist had actually coordinated their votes and allotted Pinckney one less vote than Adams). Burr, being the scoundrel that he was, didn't concede the presidency to Jefferson and, as per the Constitution, the House had to decide the election. This led to 35 separate votes in which Jefferson and Burr kept tying. Eventually on the 36th vote Jefferson was selected as Pres and Burr and VP. Hamilton convinced some Federalists that Jefferson was the least bad option for president-he would undo Federalist policy, but he was at least a known quantity unlike Burr who just seemed power hungry. The whole Hamilton-Burr conflict escalated pretty quickly after that.
So after 2 contested (I mean in the sense that Washington wasn't the unanimous choice) elections it was pretty obvious that no one foresaw how nasty party politics was going to get in 1787 when the Constitution was drafted. So, the 12th amendment stipulated that electors still had 2 votes, but they needed to be marked for President and then Vice-President. The way the text reads it may seem like the intent was to have a separate election for Veep, but it was really about allowing electors to vote for the party ticket.
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Alexander the Great marched all the way to India. How did he supply his army?
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So Alexander the Great's great cause he conquered the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Until he passed over the Indus, all the lands he had conquered had either been Persian satrapies or at least within the Persian orbit. This included everything from Thrace, the Levant, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia itself, all highly developed societies with an organized and ancient tradition of rule.
Though every generation saw its share of separatist movements, Persian satrapies were generally quiescent and obedient to Persian rule. Once Alexander showed up as an unstoppable menace however, Persian satraps would often betray the Persian central authority and surrender themselves and their services to the conqueror. The political result of Alexander's conquests being that satraps were either trusted Greek advisors placed to the position by Alexander or they were holdovers from the preceding Persian state. Further, the officials serving within state ministries continued to hail from the local area, as they had under the Achaemenids.
With Alexander's attention focused on his military conquests, oversight of his empire was slack as long as the necessary materiel and soldiers arrived for his campaigning. Alexander notoriously conscripted men from his conquered provinces (much like the Persians had) and expected to collect the same sort of tax revenue as his predecessors. But with his constant warfare, he wasn't going to conduct a full audit of his empire's finances.
Satraps realized this. Basic quotients of money and goods traveled to Alexander or back to Macedon on Persia's famous road system. But beyond what was needed to slake Alex's immediate demands, the administrators of the Persian bureaucracy could act nigh indiscriminately. The Macedonian army wasn't traveling through to set up a longstanding, permanent civilization; they moved at lightning speed, conquering a continental empire in less than a decade. Thus the local politicking of each court, in Susa, in Sardis, in Babylonia, went completely unchecked. Corruption spread as the only state obligations were to Alexander, a foreign conqueror who moved increasingly further away. Sometimes, they revolted, and Alexander executed several of them for this (Arrian VI.26) on his way back from India. Normally, however, they sent goods where they needed to go as the state apparatus built up by Darius and Artaxerxes could easily handle both completing Alexander's limited fiscal desires and fleecing their own pockets.
In addition to receiving replenishment from centralized redistribution Alexander's army could expect to collect sustenance and good grace from any ruler through whose lands it passed. There was of course the underlying coercive aspect to parking the greatest empire the world had ever known next to anybody's palace, but most kings, satraps, or rajs (if that's what they were called yet). When local supplies were limited, such as in the Central Asian steppelands, high mountain passes in the winter, or in the Gedrosian Desert, his army had serious problems with attrition. In sum, they were a much more live off the land type army, though they did it in a rather "civilized," rather than Hunnic fashion.
Sources:
Paul Cartledge's *Alexander the Great*
Arrian: _URL_0_
Seriously, check Arrian out. Alexander brought a bunch of historians with him to document his conquests, and what gets passed down to us is nothing short of pulp fiction. It paints Alex as a mega badass who successively beats Achilles, Hercules, and Dionysus in his feats.
Duncan Ryan *The Achaemenid Empire* -super fast breeze through Achaemenid history. Not too much content, but does give a rough trajectory of their empire. I recently read it just to cover my bases as I begin to do more research into Near Eastern history
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Could polar bears and penguins be introduced to their respective opposite poles (south, north) and survive?
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Its unlikely that they would survive. [Polar bears](_URL_5_) are adapted to eating seals, but its very hard to hunt them in the open water so they hunt on land. Two common ways of catching seals include: crashing through the ice using their paws and kill the seals in their dens or stalking air holes and kill seals as they surface for air. These conditions are not as common in Antarctica because it is an area where land is covered in ice, with no seals under it but the Arctic is ocean covered in ice with seals under it. (There are seals in Antarctica, they would just be harder to hunt). Of course assuming you transferred the polar bears to areas with penguin colonies they would have pretty good (but seasonal) food source - unless it is the [Emperor](_URL_3_) which winters in Antarctica. But over time, the penguins being defenceless against polar bears would probably be exposed to intensive hunting pressure from which they may be extirpated from the region.
Its probable that polar bears could survive Antarctica temperatures - they have many [adaptations to the cold weather](_URL_4_) - thick fur, lots of fat, skin that is black ~~to absorb the sun's heat and clear fur to allow the rays in~~. I do not know the absolute lowest temperature that a polar bear can survive but I do know that [Antarctica](_URL_0_) experiences colder temperatures than the [Arctic](_URL_1_).
"The temperature in Antarctica has reached −89 °C (−129 °F)...Temperatures reach a minimum of between −80 °C (−112 °F) and −90 °C (−130 °F) in the interior in winter and reach a maximum of between 5 °C (41 °F) and 15 °C (59 °F) near the coast in summer. And Antarctica is colder than the Arctic for two reasons. First, much of the continent is more than 3 kilometres (2 mi) above sea level, and temperature decreases with elevation. Second, the Arctic Ocean covers the north polar zone: the ocean's relative warmth is transferred through the icepack and prevents temperatures in the Arctic regions from reaching the extremes typical of the land surface of Antarctica." and from the Arctic article...". Average winter temperatures can be as low as −40 °C (−40 °F), and the coldest recorded temperature is approximately −68 °C (−90 °F)." So polar bears if transferred to Antarctica would possibly have to face temperatures as low as −80 °C which is colder then what they are normally exposed to at −40 °C. This could potentially be problematic, but not unsurmountable.
The problem with penguins is that they are essentially adapted to living in an environment where they have very few land predators - only sometimes are eggs/chicks killed by predatory seagulls. Adults main predator is killer whales from the ocean. Anyway... penguins in the Arctic would have a hard time of making it because of land predators like the polar bear, arctic fox or wolf. Even if they lived on cliffs like [puffins](_URL_2_) they can't fly so they would not be able to get to and from the sea. It would be better if they were transferred to a location - island - where no land predators can get them, but bare rock is available in summer for nesting (if the species requires). In terms of food there would be plenty of fish in the Arctic ocean for them to hunt, probably something like pollock. Also, temperatures in the arctic are warmer, so they wouldn't have to deal with being too cold so much as being too warm, especially in the summer months if they live in areas where it gets above what they might normally be exposed too.
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The rate of universal expansion is accelerating to the point that light from other galaxies will someday never reach us. Is it possible that this has already happened to an extent? Are there things forever out of our view? Do we have any way of really knowing the size of the universe?
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Yes, there are galaxies from which we will never receive any light at all. (Any galaxy beyond a current distance of about 65 Gly.) There are also galaxies whose light we have already received in the past but which are currently too far away for any signal emitted from us *now* to reach them some time in the future. (Any galaxy beyond a current distance of about 15 Gly.) The farthest points from which we have received any light at all as of today are at the edge of the observable universe, currently at a distance of about 43 Gly.
For more details, [read this post](_URL_0_).
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Why are batteries arrays made with cylindrical batteries rather than square prisms so they can pack even better?
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First of all, some packs are made with prismatic cells. The pros and cons of cylindrical vs prismatic cells themselves are more important than packing efficiency. Notably, cylindrical manufacturing is more mature, and cylindrical cells tend to be better (in energy density and cost per kWh) at lower capacities, which most packaged battery packs are.
Here's an in-depth article on the cylindrical vs prismatic question: _URL_0_
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Back in the days when people believed witchcraft was a real thing and prosecuted people for being witches, how could they on one hand believe in malevolent magic and yet believe they could arrest, imprison and execute a "witch" and the witch would not escape/take revenge with their magic?
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The answer lies in our conception of magic. To most people in the modern world the first image that comes to mind is Harry Potter making things fly around the room, shooting big, violent spells everywhere. Historically, this is not how witches were seen.
Magic was almost always related to a relationship with the Devil, which made it inherently evil. The witches gained their power by worshipping Satan. By doing his bidding on Earth, he in turn granted them with extraordinary powers.
Their resulting magic was much more subtle. Most reports from Europe and the Americas allege that a certain person cast some magic upon a cow and killed it or caused some crops to fail. Magic was used to harm others, but not in the direct way that we often see in popular culture.
Take the Salem Witch Trials, perhaps the most famous example in American history. When a few girls started acting in a strange manner, screaming and writhing to draw attention, it was assumed that people had cast spells upon them to make them suffer. The results of this case aren't really important for your question, but this would be an example of a way that people believed magic took a direct and tangible effect.
Arresting and executing the witches was simply reasserting God's will on Earth. The witches were under guard and were never expected to bust out riding a broom while breathing fire. The most they could do was, in a rather lengthy time, slowly poison one's soul or cause incremental physical ailments.
So, since most of the time charges instead focused on abstract allegations of sabotage and rarely human violence, they were not too worried. Most mass-hysteria episodes coincided with difficult times economically, politically, or environmentally, but it was always easier to say, "My cow died and I hate that girl. She's a witch!" The girl could take revenge, but it'd be rather difficult for her to find the time to slowly implement her incremental magic if she's constantly under surveillance and then burned to death.
Edit: Sorry for the lack of sources and formatting, I'm a little bit new here.
* Dr. Brian Pavlac's book *Witch Hunts in the Western World: Persecution and Punishment from the Inquisition through the Salem Trials* is a good overview of the topic. If you want a quick version, his website lays it out pretty well with a few FAQs.
For example, regarding their conception of magic he writes, "Usually the danger was seen in an organized conspiracy led by the Devil. Or the concern was witches causing harm (maleficia) through spells: raising storms, killing people or livestock, and/or causing bad luck." As people became more and more hysterical, the government almost always stepped in to counteract the Devil's influence, so it was very much an institutionalized phenomenon.
He also briefly comments on why outbreaks occurred in some places more than others. He writes, "Historians are still trying to explain the reasons for this great variety in witch hunting. Important factors could have been: the power of the central government; the independence of local authorities; tensions created by war, failing economies, or famine; and uncertainties about religious conformity."
For more info on the Salem witch trials...
* The rather famous Cotton Mather left a firsthand account of the trials. He describes how New England culture understood magic and its effects throughout. For example, he wrote the following of the first case that triggered the trials.
> It was not long before one of her Sisters, an two of her Brothers, were seized, in.Order one after another with Affects' like those that molested her. Within a fe weeks, they were all four tortured every where in a manners very grievous, that it would have broke an heart of stone t have seen their Agonies. Skilful Physicians were consulted for their Help, and particularly our worthy and prudent Friend Dr. Thomas Oakes,' who found himself so affronted by the Dist'empers of the children, that he concluded nothing but an hellish Witchcraft could be the Original of these Maladies.
As you can see they didn't believe witchcraft worked anything like we do today. Because of this their fear of a witch locked up in a jail cell was naturally much different than our's would be.
There are many more books on the Salem Witch Trials, and it really is fascinating to look at why the entire thing happened.
* I'd recommend *The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-By-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege* by Maryilynne K. Roach. It's essentially a timeline of the whole thing with the historical context. It's kind of long, but very informative, and not overly academic.
* For a more scholarly take try *Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England* by John Demos.
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I'm a young Macedonian man in the Hellenic period. Why would I follow Alexander the Great to the edge of the known world knowing that death was certain? What was life like for me during Alexander's conquests?
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This is a great question and a fascinating one. It's always difficult to tell what the average person's life was like in antiquity. If you ever study Alexander's life in depth, you'll run into many unanswered questions and conflicting accounts. If a figure as famous as Alexander remains mired in ambiguity, imagine how tough it is to pinpoint the life of this "average man".
First, it's reasonable to conclude that the average soldier didn't know they were going to the edge of the known world. The most they knew was that, after the Greeks were suppressed, they were headed for Asia Minor. Alexander probably didn't even know he was going to end up in India.
It's also important to note that these weren't people randomly joining up. Alexander's father, Phillip II, handed him "the most perfectly organized, trained, and equipped army of ancient times", according to JFC Fuller (maybe hyperbole/exaggeration but it illustrates the point well.)
Second, death was not "certain" any more than death is "certain" in any military campaign. Why does anyone do anything? Because it's a job; because there's treasure abroad; because there's honor in battle; because your culture and society expects you to fight; because you've been raised as a warrior since birth; because they were conscripted during the campaign; because they fought as allies for political reasons or as mercenaries for monetary gain.
There's thousands of reasons why someone would fight. With the dearth of primary sources (e.g. "Dear diary, I am joining Alexander's army because XYZ") it's difficult to pinpoint what the average soldier lived like, much less what ambiguous concepts and paradigms drove them to pick up a spear and go kill people in Asia Minor.
The primary sources we do have are often Alexander's top lieutenants talking about the man himself, troop movements in the aggregate, grand strategy, and so on. When they do address the troops, it's usually as brief as "the troops were happy because we won" or "the troops were pissed for lots of reasons. Then Alexander gave a great speech that everyone loved."
Your third question is a little easier. We know a fair amount about what life was like. For instance, Alexander had this group of elite soldiers called the Heitairoi, or the "Companion Cavalry". We know that they loved to do two things: Drink and hunt. Alexander himself got some pretty serious alcohol poisoning during a big party with the Hetairoi a few weeks before he died. It's hard to tell from the sources, but they certainly seem related.
Wikipedia is a pretty good source on the Hetairoi. This article seems moderately well sourced and accurate: _URL_0_
We know plenty aout the more technical details; equipment, logistics, and so on. The average soldier's load, for instance, was thirty pounds. Most were on foot, but the wealthier soldiers were on horseback. Most of the gear was carried by troops, rather than servants or pack animals, which meant the army was mobile and flexible (but that also means the every individual dude was humping his own gear for thousands of miles on foot). There are lots of sources about this and they're easy to find; some of my info comes from here: _URL_2_
Many of these young soldiers found wives in Asia Minor, following the "conquering" of the Persian Empire. Some accounts suggest Alexander encouraged this.
Peter Sommer's writings are highly interesting. He's not really a historian, but he replicated Alexander's journey on foot. There's a documentary on YouTube where he makes a bunch of observations about what it must've been like. You can read more here: _URL_1_
Ultimately, the best place to look to is the sources. The original accounts of Alexander's lieutenants have been lost, but we have five main surviving accounts based on those lost accounts: Arrian, Curtius, and Diodorus Siculus (also Justin and Plutarch but those wouldn't help answer your question at all). These are fairly cheap. They are also probably available on google scholar, perseus or some other database.
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When the mars rover went to mars were they able to remove all bacteria and small life from it? If not could any of the bacteria be able to live in the harsh conditions of mars? And how do they obtain soil samples looking for bacteria if it could possibly be from the rover itself?
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Anything that is sent to Mars is thoroughly inspected, cleaned, and sanitized {[_URL_1_](https://_URL_1_/msl/mission/technology/insituexploration/planetaryprotection/)}. There are some microorganisms that can still survive a trip to Mars, such as a well-known [Tardigrade (Wiki)](_URL_0_). That's the main reason rovers avoid parts of the planet that contain water or ice - they can still carry Earth's life and contaminate it {[_URL_4_](_URL_2_)}.
So far all life-detecting tests done by rovers are interpreted as negative. If we find a sign of life on Mars, we will make sure it's not brought by us from Earth.
**Edit: Answering a few questions that keep repeating.**
> *Why do we refrain from contaminating Mars? Wouldn't that be an interesting experiment?*
It would be, but before we do that, we want to make sure there is no native life on Mars that we might accidentally destroy (as we often do). If we find micro-organisms there, it would be nice to study them without our own organisms getting in the way wherever we go.
> *Wouldn't a manned mission contaminate Mars?*
It will. Before we can send humans to Mars we will have to modify the rules of the Outer Space Treaty. Hopefully we can find life there before we send humans. If not, hopefully the first humans will find life. If we don't, it's pretty clear there is no life there. But we will not be colonizing and terraforming Mars until this question is answered.
> *Shouldn't we search for life in water-rich zones, instead of the opposite?*
Yeah, ideally we should, but because our rovers are not 100% clean, letting invasive life forms flourish in Mars's potentially already living waters, before we have a chance to at least send a few of them back to us, is just not worth it. On top of that, we don't need to check water contents to determine if Mars has life - the atmosphere and soil can give us enough clues to answer that.
> *Don't we have the technology to sterilize things to 100%? Or are we that neglectful?*
We do have the technology, and we can use it with ease. The problem is that if you want to sterilize a circuit board, you end up frying it. One proposed idea is to build a rover on Mars with 3D printers, and sterilize all the necessary materials separately.
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(Math) Do we know everything there is to know about math? Or are there new discoveries being made in mathematics?
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No, we don't know everything there is to know.
One good way of getting a quick view of recent advancements in mathematics is to read the list of winners of the [Fields Medal](_URL_1_) and the [Abel Prize](_URL_4_), paying attention to the citations. In general, though, recent advancements in mathematics are very difficult to understand for the layman, and I can't possibly hope to go into every one of them for you (for lack of both time and knowledge).
Some very famous recent proofs of statements that are not so difficult to understand (although the proofs certainly are) were those of [Fermat's last theorem](_URL_3_), the [Poincaré conjecture](_URL_0_) and recent work on the [Twin prime conjecture](_URL_2_).
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In the 1970s UK sitcom Fawlty Towers, a few guests are shown to live permanently at the hotel. Was this common during this time? What factors led people to choose life in a hotel, and did this have a long history?
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Hotel living has a *long* history--the *Eloise* books by Kay Thompson are probably the most famous example. I can talk a little bit about some of the earlier history, specifically, hotel living in Paris!
*(This is adapted from several of my earlier answers with some new stuff thrown in).*
Paris is the City of Lights...but it sure wasn't very lit in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it had one of the lowest electrification rates of any major city. It also had one of the worst housing situations in the Euro-American world, especially given the *doubling* of the population between 1871-1920. As you can imagine, this burden fell mostly on immigrants and the lower classes.
Attempts at mitigating the horrific conditions, like establishing factories in the suburbs instead of the city (with extensive slum settlements building up around them), or even some government-sponsored housing projects, could never come even close to meeting demand.
As a result, Paris even more so than other cities developed a system of "hotels."
But these are not what we often talk about in the U.S. at the time--the de facto boarding houses for single men where housekeepers would take care of "women's work" for them, or for single working women where they could be watched and "stay respectable."
No, these were tenements with really lousy--metaphorically and often literally--living conditions.
The *hotels garnis* resembled very lousy--metaphorically and often literally--versions of our hotels today: single-room "apartments" with no kitchen. (Although, sometimes also no bathroom). They even often had a restaurant on the ground floor. So when you hear about Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre spending all their time in cafes...well, guess what.
Parisian hotels were filled with transient workers, new immigrants, basically the young and poor--single women and men, single women with children, young couples.
To give you an idea of the conditions of the worse of these: Helmut Gruber describes housing for the working women of Paris (in the slum tenements known as "insalubrious islands" and in the hotels garnis) as:
> The majority lived in domiciles lacking indoor water, heat, electricity, daylight, and ventilation, and they shared slovenly sanitary facilities...It is difficult to imagine where and how they actually washed their clothes, and how often...The absence of hygiene is evident from reports by teachers of the lack of cleanliness of children and from the high death rate from tuberculosis and pulmonary disease.
But despite these conditions, hotel residents weren't all just sitting around cafes philosophizing. Gruber also notes that tenement and hotel residents were *very* active organizing in order to keep rents down to something they could afford on their salaries, protesting to the government to enforce protections for them against landlords/slumlords.
~~
*We used to have a really great answer on the U.S. end of things I mentioned, but that user seems to have deleted it.*
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Does the electromagnetic spectrum abruptly stop at gamma rays.. or are there higher energy/shorter wavelengths out there?
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No, there is no sharp cut off, though we don't have a standard term for super-high energy photons. Typical gamma rays from nuclear have energies of 10^(5) to 10^(7) eV. Astronomical sources can yield energies around 10^(13) eV, indicating that they coming from processes other than radioactive decay. If you can find a way to create a high energy photon, it will have more energy.
In fact, the notion of a photon's energy is dependent on the frame of reference of the observer. The fastest particle every observed was a cosmic ray (likely a proton) with an energy of 3x10^(20) eV. Imagine that that cosmic ray was observing a gamma ray that we observed as traveling towards the cosmic ray and, in our frame, with an energy E. To the cosmic ray, that gamma ray would have an energy that was between 10^(11) and 10^(12) times bigger. That means, if things were lined up right, nuclear gamma rays we observed at 10^(7) eV or astrophysical gamma rays that we observed at 10^(13) eV would, to this cosmic ray, have energies of over 10^(18) or 10^(24) eV, respectively.
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how is downloading movies/books online any different than going to your local library to check out movies/books for free?
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First sale doctrine applies to libraries, video rental outfits, etc.
From [Wikipedia](_URL_0_)
> The doctrine allows the purchaser to transfer (i.e., sell, lend or give away) a particular lawfully made copy of the copyrighted work without permission once it has been legally obtained. This means that the copyright holder's rights to control the change of ownership of a particular copy ends once ownership of that copy has passed to someone else, as long as the copy itself is not an infringing copy.
They purchased the copy legally, so they can lend, sell, or rent it out as they see fit so long as they're not duplicating it.
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why does putting the air conditioner on 25°c in a cooling mode feel different from the same 25°c in heating mode?
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In cooling mode, the thermostat will wait until the temperature goes over 25°C and then turn on the AC until it falls back under 25°C. This produces a 'spike' of cold air when the AC is on, followed by the temperature slowly drifting up toward warm.
In heating mode, the thermostat will wait until the temperature goes under 25°C, then turn on the heater until it is back over 25°C. This produces a 'spike' of hot (and dry!) air when the heater comes on, followed by the temperature slowly dropping back down toward cold.
Naturally, these feel different from one another.
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how was space x able to build better rockets than nasa having less budget and experience?
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They haven't really.
1) They utilized all of the science that NASA learned thus they "had" the same experience level as NASA.
2) NASA has never had a massive budget. Even during the Space Race their budget was relatively small. Companies like Space X's budgets are comparable in size.
3) NASA stopped designing new Rockets for a time when they were operating the shuttle. When they retired the shuttle they started designing new Rockets again and will be constructing them for the upcoming missions.
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4 continuous hours in the sun results in a sunburn, but 4 hours broken up into 15 minutes chunks does not.
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Light is radiation. Radiation is like a really tiny bullet that can shoot through important stuff in your cells (like your DNA). Damaged DNA can cause cancer. When your body detects that the DNA in a cell has been damaged, the cell kills itself for the greater good of the body. No cell, no potential cancer.
Now think of a tinted window in a car. Not as much light gets through it, right? Like a tinted window, your body releases a “tint” called melanin which is what makes you darker when you’ve been in the sun. Your body does this to avoid as many radiation “bullets” passing into skin cells and making them commit suicide.
If you expose yourself to 4 hours in a row, you don’t give your body time to release the melanin to protect your cells so they die and cause sunburn.
If you give your body enough time, it can tint your skin to protect you and you don’t burn (or not as severely).
Edit:
I could go into detail about basal reversal repairs and the issue with double helix breaks, but would it be an ELI5? I’m not going to explain enzyme metabolic rates n shit to a 5 year old. The melanin vector is easiest (and is one of the primary factors).
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Was Russia/Stalin truly hoping to share the Europe with Germany/Hitler or was Stalin playing a waiting game?
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First of all let me say that Stalin didn't leave a diary so we can't exactly say what his emotions or personal thoughts were with confidence. That said, he was probably neither of those things.
The idea that he locked himself in a room for 3 days is certainly not true. We do have a record of his itinerary of the first day after the German invasion. Stalin spent the entire day meeting senior officials and generals, from before 6am to after midnight. He continued to have a fairly busy schedule that entire week. Nor could we say that he was really "shocked". Under a cover of military exercises, the Red Army began to mobilize before the Germans had invaded and certain units were ordered to move toward the border. A special directive was issued to the troops that an imminent attack was likely. All of these steps were significantly belated - mobilization should have began nearly a month prior. To say that Stalin was completely shocked would be misleading. Also to say that Stalin and Hitler were "friends" is a bit preposterous - the two have never met or even interacted directly.
That said you COULD make a case that Stalin fell into a state of despair or panic slightly later, about a week after the war began, when it became clear that things were developing catastrophically, the city of Minsk had fallen, and that war might be lost. He retreated to his dacha outside of Moscow, and didn't see people for a period of 3 days. Stalin is described as depressed. When several senior officials came to visit Stalin, upon seeing him he supposedly thought they came to arrest him. However this hypothesis, too, is tenuous. Stalin frequently worked in his dacha, so him being there isn't really evidence of him trying to hide. Almost all evidence comes down to memoirs of a single person, Anastas Mikoyan. Unlike several people who later wrote about Stalin's possible depression, such as Khrushchev, Mikoyan was the only one actually on the scene. It is certainly possible that Stalin was feeling down after receiving terrible news from the front. Anthony Beevor writes that Stalin even floated the idea to offer huge swaths of western USSR (including Ukraine and Belarus) to Hitler in exchange for peace but was then dissuaded of this. In short, it seems that Stalin was more affected by how poorly the war was going rather than the start of the war itself. Beyond that, there isn't a whole lot of evidence to go on, beyond a couple memoirs and speculations of Stalin's associates.
Lastly, there is the idea that Stalin himself was about to invade Germany and that Hitler just preempted him. This hypothesis was popularized by a former Soviet spy who wrote under a pseudonym Viktor Suvorov. However, almost no reputable Russian or western historian supports this idea. While it is definitely possible that Stalin planned to eventually attack Germany, it is extremely unlikely that would have happened that year. The Soviet military was undergoing wide-sweeping reforms and reorganization and was in no shape for a major war at the time.
EDIT: My first gold ever - thank you kind sir/lady!
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How did Native Americans in Canada survive the massive snow dumps and -20/-30 degree weather?
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1. Could you please specify what era you're interested in? In 2006, 50.3% of people living in the Northwest Territories identified themselves as Aboriginal Canadians (First Nations, Metis, Inuit, or multiple/other Aboriginal identities), along with 20% of people in Yukon and 85% of people in Nunavut. Their methods of dealing with winter, and reasons for living where they do (or rather, in 1997) will obviously be quite different from 1957 or 1857 or 1657.
2. This is a little sideways, but: if you're interested in pre-colonial or early colonial era, I have an [earlier answer](_URL_1_) on how Jesuit missionaries in 17th century Quebec confronted winters. It talks a lot about what/how the Jesuits learned from the Montagnais nation (and in some cases, what the Montagnais knew and did that the Jesuits didn't or couldn't do).
I'll excerpt some of the relevant portions and add in more details:
~~
*The "Jesuit Relations" of the 17th and 18th centuries have a lot to say about the challenges and benefits faced by early European settlers--in this case, Jesuit missionaries--in the deep of winter in "these wretched lands." A theme that emerges, over and over, is that winter makes travel easier and being indoors harder.*
Fr. Paul le Jeune, arriving in Quebec in 1632, describes learning how to walk with snowshoes from the local Montagnais--he was so sure he was going to fall on his face at first, with every step he took--but he had grown quite skilled (though not as good as the Montagnais).
In 1640, Fr. Joseph Marie Chaumonot wrote back to Rome...[the Jesuits] probably used snowshoes as well--Chaumonot tells us that among the Hurons, snowshoe-making is very specifically the women's task. Le Jeune describes the Montagnais using their snowshoes to shovel, but I'm not sure whether the Jesuits adopted that practice. For transportation across unfrozen waterways, like the St. Lawrence River, the Montagnais would use their canoes as in summer. Over the snow, they pulled sleighs or sleds made of wood.
...[The Jesuits] weren't hunters, so while (writes Le Jeune enviously) the Montagnais were chowing down on moose, the Jesuits ate dried eel (which, yes, they had known to eat--and maybe were getting from?--Native women). Le Jeune writes that winter actually *aided* the Montagnais in catching eels:
> This work is done entirely by the women, who empty the fish, and wash them very carefully, opening them, not up the belly but up the back; then they hang them in the smoke, first having suspended them upon poles outside their huts to drain. They gash them in a number of places, in order that the smoke may dry them more easily. The quantity of eels which they catch in the season is incredible.
Winter was also the season for moose hunting (and hence, eating):
> On the 19th [of December], the snow being already very deep, they captured eight elks or moose. About that time one of them, named Nassitamirineou, and surnamed by the French Brehault, told them that he had dreamed that they must eat all of those Moose; and that he knew very well how to pray to God, who had told him that it was his will that they should eat all, and that they should give none of them away, if they wanted to capture others. [The Montagnais] believed him, and did not give a piece to the Frenchmen.
Father de Noue, another Jesuit, told Le Jeune his experiences of traveling with a group of (I think) Montagnais:
> The inns found on the way are the woods themselves, where at nightfall they stop to camp; each one unfastens his snowshoes, which are used as shovels in cleaning the snow from the place where they are going to sleep. The place cleaned is usually made in the form of a circle; a fire is made in the very middle of it, and all the guests seat themselves around it, having a wall of snow behind them, and the Sky for a roof.
> The wine of this inn is snow, melted in a little kettle which they carry with them, provided they do not wish to eat snow in lieu of drink. Their best dish is smoked eel. As they must carry their blankets with them for cover at night, they load themselves with as few other things as possible.
And modern practice to the contrary, drinking chocolate is actually a *Central* American tradition.
~~
The *Jesuit Relations* are available [for free online in English translation](_URL_0_)! I suggest opening a few volumes and searching for snow, ice, and related terms if you're further interested in this particular topic.
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How did Nazi Germany a regime born out of the ruins of World War 1 have so much access to a diverse pool of top notch academics by world war 2? ( Rocket scientists, Gunsmiths, Cytologists/ciphers, Tank and aircraft engineers)
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It seems to me that you assume that if there is hunger and some political chaos that all the institutions stop functioning? Germany before WWI was one of the most advanced countries on the planet, they won the most Nobel prices in the sciences up to that point. WWI was 4 years and after it was over the scientists or institutions didn't just disappear.
They might have been destitute right after the war but they still had one of the biggest economies in the world plus the institutional memory and tradition in the sciences, engineering didn't vanish.
_URL_0_
I hosted the spreadsheet on my Google docs if that is easier:
_URL_1_
There GDP took hits in those years but they never got below France there level and overtook England in the inter war period. GDP is a flawed way to look at the economy but it's useful to illustrate my point that they weren't as destitute as you might have thought.
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How did 0-60 become the standard by which a car's acceleration is judged? Why did 60mph become synonymous with "fast"?
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Automotive journalist here.
Your question is intimately tied to the history of automotive magazines, and I’m not aware of a really good, academic history exploring that. I can tell you that the form itself dates back to the earliest days of motoring — Carl Benz filed his patent for the “vehicle powered by a gas engine” in 1886, and both the American publication The Horseless Age and the U.K.’s The AutoCar published their first issues in 1895.
But they were more industrial news for makers and sellers of cars than consumer opinion for many years. Prior to the development of the car review, automotive magazines experimented with being industry publications full of sales data and how-to repair guides, but the car review we know today was a post-world war II creation.
The father of the modern car review - a journalist’s opinion of the car based on their experience of driving it - was American Tom McCahill, and he’s widely credited within the industry as the first to publish 0-60 times.
He convinced Mechanix Illustrated to publish the first such article, where he reviewed his own personal 1946 Ford Coupe, which, he noted, got from a dead stop to 60 mph in about 23 seconds. He left us no notes on how he made this measurement. But he repeated the test in subsequent reviews.
Why did he pick 0-60 instead of, say, 0-50? Sad to say, no one seems to have recorded his answer.
I will note that it’s quite close to a 0-100 kph measurement, which would seem intuitively more logical. But I have no evidence that he even considered this. Models at the time were generally not sold on multiple continents, so it seems doubtful that it entered his mind.
Both his review format and his test caught on. By the middle 1950s, publications like Sports Cars Illustrated (today known as Car and Driver) and Motor Trend made it the heart of their content, and they all published 0-60 times.
It’s worth noting, however, that they didn’t all use a standard technique and haven’t stuck with the same technique all along. Innovations in drag racing particularly changed the numbers — beginning in the 1960s, drag strips used a light beam system to measure time — and in the U.S., enthusiast magazines rented time on these for testing. Because of the way they trigger, the machines allowed the car to roll about 1 foot before they began to measure. The technology has changed, but to keep their numbers consistent, many publications still test with “one foot of roll-out.”
This practice never caught on in Europe, where drag racing was never a significant phenomenon. Hence, American and European publications tend to use different methods that can produce different measurements. In a world where enthusiasts argue over every tenth of a second, that becomes a little humorous.
Hope that helps. I wish there were better sources to point you to, but to the best of my knowledge, the first good academic history of our field has yet to be attempted.
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If I put a flashlight in space, would it propel itself forward by "shooting out" light?
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Yes, very slowly.
Light has momentum, even though it is massless, so if you shoot a beam of light in one direction, conservation of momentum will push you in the opposite direction.
A reasonably powerful LED flashlight will use about 1-3 Watt, lets say 3 W. The efficiency of a LED is somewhere between 25% and 40%, so for sake of ease of computation lets make that 33% and we get a net amount of light output of 1 W.
The ratio between the momentum and energy of light is 299,792,458 (Which is also the speed of light). So in 1 second, the flashlight produces 1 J worth of light, which is equal to 0.33 * 10^-8 kg m/s. If the flashlight is not too heavy, say 100 gram or 0.1 kg, that means that 1 second of light would propel the flashlight to a velocity of 10^-7 m/s. This assumes that all light is directed in straight line. The more cone-shaped the bundle of light is, the lower the momentum transfer is.
Leaving the light on for one day would propel the flashlight to about 0.009 m/s or almost 1 cm per second. Unfortunately, operating a 3 W LED for a day uses about 260 kJ of energy. Regular AA batteries have somewhere around 10 kJ of energy (depending on the type). And at a weight of 20-30 grams per battery, you can't carry put more than 2-3 in the device without violating our original assumption of a 100 gram device.
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What caused the United States to have the highest infant mortality rate among western countries?
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The [Congressional Research Service](_URL_3_) investigated whether inconsistent recording of births could be the cause of our bad infant mortality rates (IMR) and found that it does not ~~really affect~~ fully explain the results. (There is some effect from the inconsistent recording, but it isn't significant to explain the large gap).
We also have one of the lowest life expectancies of any developed nations and there isn't really any controversy about that statistic. The most likely reason is because we have a poor health care system. High infant mortality is most likely caused by the same thing.
One interesting thing to look at is the IMR of people with different health care plans. "Researchers have found that IMRs are the lowest for infants born to women enrolled in private insurance, that IMRs are higher for women enrolled in Medicaid, and that IMRs are highest for infants born to women who were uninsured."
So basically it is probably safe to say that the primary reason that our IMR is worse than most other countries is that we don't provide very good health care to our citizens.
Links:
_URL_0_
_URL_3_
_URL_1_
_URL_2_
TL;DR Poor health care causes the US to have some of the worst performance in almost every health metric. It is not because we are recording live births differently.
EDIT: Changed a misleading paraphrase. Thanks to /u/ruotwocone for pointing that out.
EDIT 2: I'd also like to point out that the issue of racial diversity was examined by the same CRS study and also found it to not be a particularly significant factor. Included a CDC link with essentially the same findings.
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Was the Sherman tank a name resented by US soldiers from the south during WWII?
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If this question isn't relevant, feel free to remove mods.
Given the nicknames M3 Lee, M3 Stuart, M3 Grant, and M4 Sherman, why were Union and Confederate general names given to tanks, or any modern weapons for that matter?
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why are smartphones $500-700+ while laptops with the same or better specs are considerably less?
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Designing electronics when you have no, or relaxed space constraints is **much** easier and therefore cheaper. Also, the specific parts, while maybe less powerful, are likely more efficient with regards to power (this is highly variable, of course). So even though your particular processor or whatnot is *slower,* it has a more complicated design to ensure better battery life and smaller physical size.
EDIT: A lot of people are nitpicking about the fact that margins are very high in devices like Samsungs phones and the iPhone line. Just because their *raw materials cost* is low, and the profit margin is high on the device, does not mean miniaturization is irrelevant. The reason they can charge those prices, is because miniaturization is **hard** and they've made new, successful, miniature devices. They are recouping their R & D costs. The market will push these prices down (as evidenced by Google's new phones) because the bulk of the R & D is done, and that cost isn't repeated. Companies learn from one another, which is in part some of the issues with patent laws but that's another story.
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what's wrong with the word 'negro'? how is 'black' politically more correct than 'negro'?
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Apparently words that have a neutral definition can become slurs if they are constantly used to describe someone we don't like. Negro, just as a word outside of any context, is completly neutral; it's the Spanish word for black. However, because it was previously used to name people that we oppresed, the word is now bad. Just like Chinaman or Jap. Chinaman is bad but Englishman is good, and Jap is bad but Brit is good. These words are bad because at some point in time, they were used negatively. If there was a big war, and the word "person" was used to describe the enemy in propaganda, you would not be allowed to call anyone a "person" afterwards.
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how do free mobile games make money when all the ads in the game are from other free mobile games?
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In game purchases are the primary income stream for that kind of game. Advertising is a thing too - last quarter [Zynga reported 18% of revenue in advertising](_URL_1_) - but it's not what the business is built on.
It's worth remembering that a large portion of the income in this kind of in game purchase comes from a small portion of the player base, which is often [directly targeted with addictive mechanisms](_URL_0_).
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if working out is just damaging and repairing muscle tissue, couldnt we just mechanically damage the tissue and recouperate saving time and energy?
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You can actually build muscle with electro stimulation. By putting electrodes on your skin in the right place the muscles will contract with each pulse of electricity. It's not a pleasant feeling. My roommate had a stimulator for his back muscles when he was injured and to fuck with me he just threw the contacts on me. Fucker, it's unpleasant. Supposedly Bruce Lee use electrostimulation to work his muscles out when he was doing something he had to do that wasn't physical.
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why are services like uber and airbnb considered by some to be disruptive to the economy?
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Hotels and cab companies are regulated and taxed, they have to follow certain rules in order to keep their operating license. If I rent you my house for a short stay or pick you up and drive you around the government doesn't get any tax revenue from that and I'm not bound by the same licensing requirements. Because the hotels and cabs I'd be competing against do have to pay taxes and follow those regs I'm operating at an unfair advantage. Of course I can charge less than Yellow Cab, I don't have to pay for official inspections or cab medallions.
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why do most foods, drinks etc have to be refrigerated after one use? what happens to the contents after just one use?
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For some products, they are packaged in a environment and method so that the package is sealed, and pathogens are not present. This results in a product with a long shelf life when unopened. Once the package is opened, it is no longer sealed from the environment, and it is possible that bacteria may come in contact and grow rapidly in a warm setting.
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During the Waco standoff in 1993, why did large segments of the American population rally around the leader of a doomsday cult who was sexually abusing young girls, rather than their own government?
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You said during, so I'll try to keep the focus as contemporary as possible to the siege. Nevertheless, I only found one opinion poll taken from before the lethal ending to the Waco Siege and that only polled Waco residents, a small and obviously not-representative sample of the US population. Further, in [this series of polls](_URL_0_), it's interesting to see how radically public opinion shifted against the government as the nineties progressed.
To clarify the "large segment" who supported David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, I found three opinion polls taken from April 1993.
70% of people polled supported the government's actions at Waco, versus 27% who opposed it according to [the ABC Poll from 1993](_URL_0_).
[A poll from the New York Times](_URL_3_) found 8 out of 10 Americans believed David Koresh was responsible for the deaths at Waco.
And finally, a poll taken from the [Waco Tribune Herald (footnote 5)](_URL_1_) has only fifty percent of locals supporting government action against the Branch Davidians, though 82% supported the government's ending of the siege.
As detailed in both the CBS poll and Gore Vidal's *Decline and Fall of the American Empire* those who opposed the actions of the FBI and ATF were largely hostile to what they perceived as government overreach. They saw the Branch Davidians as harmless, "minding their own business," and not doing anything that should provoke the violent repression meted out by the federal besiegers. The fact that it was families pitted against heavily armed troopers with armored personnel carriers and tanks made for pretty poor optics regardless of whose side one took.
The first, ostensible reason given by the Clinton Administration for infiltrating the BD Compound was to seize illegally held arms, a stick in the eye for Americans who hold the Second Amendment dear. When the agents assigned to this mission were repulsed and the situation began to heat up, George Stephanopoulos, the White House Communications Director changed the narrative to one of trying to save the children sequestered with their families. Against this claim, Pastor Robert McCurry points out that [this was an illegitimate use of federal force](_URL_2_) given that child protection falls under state jurisdiction. McCurry, well attuned to the limits of legitimate force, rails against what he sees as a monstrous attack by the government against its people.
Remember, this is less than a year after the "[Ruby Ridge Massacre](_URL_4_)" during which a shootout between government agents and a family fleeing the law left a US Marshal, a mother, and a son killed. That event garnered quite a bit of sympathy for the family caught in the crossfire and among certain people, predisposed them against the kind of government "repression" that occurred at Waco. Both Ruby Ridge and Waco were precipitated by Firearms charges and involvement by the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms). Given the Second Amendment and the mythology of private gun ownership enabling the American Revolution and protecting "Liberty," the federal government's perceived use of violence to monopolize its control of domestic firearms in these two instances rattled certain segments of the population.
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How and when did the Star and Crescent become a symbol of Islam? What exactly does it represent?
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This is primarily trying to answer another question, but it touches on the question you’re curious about:
* [Why didn't the Turkish Republic change its flag?](_URL_0_)
I’m afraid, though, that I come at this as someone who’s interested in the Early Turkish Republican era/the Late (19th century) Ottoman Empire, so I don’t know much more about this early/middle Ottoman question than I listed in that answer. (Edit: this particularly doesn’t cover at all when the star and crescent became a *global* symbol—it obviously appears on flags outside the former Ottoman Empire and outside the context of Pan-Turkism on, for instance, the flags of Pakistan, Malaysia, and Mauritania.)
/u/Chamboz and /u/CptBuck might have more to add.
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How and when did pepperoni become the default topping for pizza in the U.S.?
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We've had to remove a number of posts with people sharing what they like on their pizza instead of pepperoni and/or challenging the OP's assumption. Please, if you want to discuss your favorite pizza, that is for another subreddit.
As for the fact that Pepperoni is the default topic, "default" is up for debate, I agree, but I think we can all agree that "most popular" is not a very contentious observation, and supported by [polling on the matter.](_URL_0_) So I would ask that further discussion be focused on pepperoni's popularity in the American pizza business, and not on what *you* like on your pie. Thank you!
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why does my cat retain the ability to bound at 30 mph and jump vertically 5ft if he sleeps all day?
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I assume your cat, like almost every cat, likes to jump up on things and tends to go bat-shit crazy in the middle of the night and run around like a maniac sometimes. This is its exercise.
Compare that to a reasonably fit human that works out regularly - not a gym nut or anything but just a guy who works out like twice a week to stay healthy and fit. He'll probably work out for what, a couple of hours? And that won't be nonstop, it'll be in sets with frequent breaks. So in reality he spends less than 30 minutes actually exercising, and he does that twice a week. So less than an hour per week exercising and he's perfectly fine.
TL:DR You only need to exercise a little to maintain your muscles.
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Why did elevated beds arise in some cultures while others use beds low to the ground?
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**EDIT: /u/extesser is right, it's mostly dominated by heat conduction and not a temperature gradient. I'll leave the post untouched for the history books, since it sparked some interesting replies!**
_________________________________________________________
I can only speak for the Vikings in Norway. Temperature is one reason for why it emerges. Cold air sinks, hot air rises.
If you're a Viking living in a longhouse(ref: _URL_0_ ), sleeping on the floor might just kill you. Get up on a bench, and you're much better off.
Ideally you'd want to stay up against the roof if you wanted to stay as warm as possible - but smoke from the firepits collect there so the practical middleground would be benches or elaborate furniture with legs.
I can't speak about what they do in the tropics, but I know from personal experience that bugs alone make elevated beds an attractive solution.
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How do lakes deep underground maintain an ecosystem with no energy input from the Sun?
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Underground aquifers could support primitive microbial life-forms if they were adapted to living off the minerals, and hydrogen seeping into the water from the surrounding rock. They may also adapt similarly to deep sea life that lives off of/near hydrothermal vents if they're present in the underground aquifer
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what happens to caterpillars who haven't stored the usual amount of calories when they try to turn into butterflies?
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Edit: This is an incorrect answer to the original question and could be misleading. This is an example of what could happen if the caterpillar cocoons early due to disease or infection NOT say climate or environmental pressure.
They generally don't survive once they are out. The body will usually form but wings and legs and such don't come out so well. There are a number of different environmental pressures that would force a caterpillar to try early including food pressure or disease but I'm not aware of a mechanism internal to the pupae to regulate conservation of limited resources when transforming early.
I raise Monarchs and had one go into chrysalis fairly early in its life cycle and come out earlier than expected. It made an attempt at being a butterfly but the second wing wasn't formed and not all of its legs worked.
Imagine you planned for a $100,000 house and hired your contractor but only gave them $75,000. With no adjustments to the original plan the contractor would build until they ran out of money and then quit leaving you with say a roof and walls but nothing on the inside.
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Where do stereotypical "redneck" names like Bubba, Skeeter, or Cletus come from?
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LIke many Colloquial things, the etemology of these names is tough to trace because their use is rarely documented very well.
The etemology of the word bubba has [reportedly](_URL_3_) traced to the german word "Bube." (meaning boy), or a similar sounding Gullah Word [BuhBuh](_URL_0_) meaning brother. - See also [this article](_URL_1_) referencing different Gullah words for Brother, "Buh" "Bruh," and other contractions of the term all meaning "brother," and used as a familial term among African American Communities in the Antebellum south.
> Animals in the tales refer to each other as 'brother' in the same manner that slaveholders referred to their chattel as 'family.' On one side, they are indeed 'brothers' and 'family,' for they belong to the same species. On the other hand, certain characteristics, such as race or class, circumvent true kinship. These lessons were not lost on the young.
It's notable that in many southern Baptist Communities "Brother" is still a fairly frequent term used to reference a man who's a member of the community. "You should go see brother john."
Given the fairly limited German population in the South (Although a non-trivial population of German Catholics settled in the Mississippi Delta in the late 1800's and early 1900's, as well as significant german populations in Texas (per a comment) the Creole interpretation is more likely. And it's a fairly straightforward path as to how it would have gained more widespread use.
As to "Skeeter" - the root word is Mosquito. [Mirriam Webster](_URL_4_) lists the first known use of the word as referencing a mosquito to be 1839. It comes from earlier English origins describing something that is quick and darting (hence it also describing a small boat). Given the presence (or abundance I might say) of mosquitos in much of the South, it's not unusual that it might have some use as a nickname.
Cletus is trickier. Most sources seem to indicate the name is of greek origin. " It actually had some popularity as a given name in the late 19th century. I'm unable to find any sources specifically identifying how it *specifically* became associated with rednecks that predate its use on the Simpsons for the Character [Cleetus Spuckler](_URL_2_) who is a stereotypical hillbilly character with his first appearance in 1994. Edit: a comment response did point out that the Dukes of Hazzard (airing 79-85) had a character named Cletus as one of the Sherrif's deputies.
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If you had a properly sized lens completely free of any imperfection, could you build a magnifying glass that could see atoms?
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No, because the wavelength of (visible) light is longer than the distances between atoms, so they cannot be distinguished are the therefore non-resolvable. 1000x magnification is about as far as light can go, which allows you to see bacteria, but not viruses.
Electron microscopes are instead used because the wavelength of electrons...or something...is short enough to distinguish between two objects at that scale.
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When they say that CERN achieved a heat record of ~5 trillion degrees, what does that actually mean/do?
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It is a really, really small space with very, very few particles in it. So the real world effect is incredibly, undetectably small. The temperature is measured by looking at the energy of released particles, or by the spectrum of emitted thermal photons. That's why the article says they have to convert the energy measurement to a temperature.
Interesting follow up I don't know the answer to - can you then assign a temperature to the p-p collisions at the LHC? I would think those have an even higher average energy, and thus higher temperature.
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what gives soap operas that “low quality” feeling to them? is it the lighting? the dialogue? it’s very distinct, but hard to pin down.
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It's the frame rate. Most soap operas are shot at 30 frames per second (technically 29.976 but that's irrelevant). Film is shot at 24fps. We have been trained by experience to see higher frame rate video as being lower quality.
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how are there enough cows to supply the over 15k macdonalds and burger kings in u.s.
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First, a single cow produces an awful lot of hamburgers. A grown steer produces about 500 pounds of beef, which is 2000 quarter-pound hambugers.
Second, there are enormous herds of cattle on ranches in the rural parts of the US, which you generally don't see because they're not along highways, but the US is enormous and can easily hold them. The state of Texas alone has more than 11 million cattle, or 22 billion hambugers worth.
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how do we know counting rings in a tree is a definitive "1 year"?
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In places with seasons, trees go through a predictable growth-dormant cycle that produces the distinctive ring pattern.
Since most of these seasonal trees go dormant regardless of what the actual winter temperature was that year (they're timing the day lengths, not responding to unpredictable temperature swings) a ring is produced even if the year's weather was very unusual.
You get big rings for years with optimal growing conditions and weak rings for drought years.
Rings are less pronounced and more difficult to count in trees that prefer more tropical climates, since they may grow all year instead of stopping entirely on a regular cycle.
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When and why did the US stop allowing (literal) boatloads of immigrants to just show up at a port and begin living in the US?
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It wasn't just one single law but rather a series of laws. The first was the Page Act of 1875 that primarily targeted Asians, particularly Chinese people, that were immigrating to the western United States to work menial jobs like railroads. Just like we see in the debates today about Hispanic people coming to the United States to work mostly low-wage jobs, there were concerns about taking jobs away from white Americans, as well as diseases, immorality, and integration of the Chinese into American culture.
Another major law was the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely limited the number of people that could come from any one country to 2% of the number of people from that country that had already immigrated. This was similar to the Page Act in that it was designed to preserve a certain ethnic makeup of the country. But these laws continue to change over time and even now we see debates about how to "fix" them. The shift from almost entirely open borders to what we have now was very slow and incremental.
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it is said that children are (almost) immune to motion sickness up to the age of 2. why?
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The main reason for motion sickness is our body has trouble reconciling the visual cues for no movement with the physical sensation of movement. The difference causes our bod to freak out, and we throw up to expel whatever apparent poison we've consumed.
Children don't have the history to realize there is a discrepancy yet.
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Has there been a higher peak than Mt. Everest on Earth throughout its history?
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This is one of the most asked questions in the Earth Sciences category on this sub, for example, here are a variety of answers to this question (or flavors of this question): [1](_URL_13_), [2](_URL_14_), [3](_URL_6_), [4](_URL_12_), [5](_URL_15_), [6](_URL_9_), [7](_URL_1_), [8](_URL_8_), [9](_URL_2_), [10](_URL_16_), [11](_URL_7_), [12](_URL_0_), [13](_URL_3_), [14](_URL_10_), [15](_URL_11_), and more that I got tired of linking.
In short (and without rehashing all of these answers or parsing out the spurious ones), there are a variety of mechanisms / properties that impose limits on the height of mountain ranges on average and the height of individual peaks within those ranges. These limits are not precise (despite what some comments in the various links above suggest) and depend a lot on the details, many of which are hard to estimate for extant mountain ranges let alone past mountain ranges. With that uncertainty in mind, we generally think that the Himalaya represent something near the limit of the absolute height mountain ranges can reach. In terms of quantitatively estimating the height of past mountain ranges, there are techniques that allow us to make rough estimates (e.g. [paleoaltimetry](_URL_4_), [geothermobarometry](_URL_5_), etc), but in general these would only tell us about the average elevation of a range (and with pretty large uncertainties again), not the height of individual peaks. Thus, **the question isn't really answerable**.
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What did it really mean to be released from a Gulag? Where would one be "dropped off" after serving their time in a camp?
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The gulag was a massive system over a large period of time, so it's difficult to talk about it just as one thing. In fact, it was incredibly variable - that might have been its most defining feature in the end. So let's look at one particularly instructive moment - the 1945 amnesty. There is an absolutely fantastic article on this topic that I will mention at the outset, from which much of the following comes. I'll just throw the citation up here at the beginning so people can go find it if they want:
Golfo Alexopoulos. "Amnesty 1945: The Revolving Door of Stalin's Gulag." *Slavic Review* Vol. 64, No. 2. (Summer 2005), 274-306.
Indeed, the very premise of Alexopoulos article is as follows:
> Stalin's labor camps and colonies formed a dynamic , variable, and unstable system in which a majority of prisoners came and went, and the 1945 amnesty reveals the movement and tension of this revolving door. (275)
So it is not that the 1945 amnesty was typical, but rather than it was such a massive moment when it came to people departing the Gulag that it reveals that variation and dynamism.
So, in 1945 you about one million gulag prisoners either released or having their sentences reduced more or less all at once. It was a very controlled and measured process.
Alexopoulos explains:
> No only did they *[Officials in the labor camps -TMH]* manage the issuance of passports, provide transportation from the camp or colony to the prisoner's new location, and issue (or not) material goods and food for the journey, but more importantly, Gulag authorities decided the destination of each ex-prisoner. According to the Gulag leadership, the issue of where to settle amnestied prisoners 'had to be approached with care' in order to provide maximum assurance that the former inmates would 'return to an honest life.' (292)
One specific treatment an inmate received was largely dependent on who they were, what the crime had been, and what the leadership thought was their best chance at avoiding the person returning to a criminal life. Leaving aside for the moment the "true" criminality of various things - the Gulag did, after all, hold many political prisoners - there were still many different kinds of people who had to be integrated back into Soviet society. Destinations could include ones family or place or origins in the best case scenario, or communities designed explicitly for the rehabilitation of prisoners that were nonetheless distinct from the Gulag system and where they might be working in heavy industry. Others faced exile that meant they weren't imprisoned, but were neither free to return to many parts of the Soviet Union that were likely more desirable. (293-294) Keep in mind that the freedom of movement throughout the Soviet Union was in many cases highly restricted, so simply being out of the Gulag didn't mean you could go just anywhere even after you arrived at your destination. In some extreme scenarios, prisoners were technically released from their prison term and marked in the system as having served their time, but were nonetheless required by law to continue working the same job they had worked in the labor camp as 'civilian laborers'.
Assuming the best case scenario, you still had to integrate yourself back into the society and economy with a criminal record, which was no easy task. Alexopoulous cites 100s of documents he found in GARF (the largest archive in Russia), of former prisoners appealing to be given a clean record after release to help them integrate back into the economy more easily. Remember that when the economy is state run, that criminal record is going to follow you literally everywhere and a lot of jobs simply won't be available to you.
Although the amnesty in 1945 provides us with a major data point, for lack of a better term it actually quite a bit to expose the extent to which the system was incredibly variable. The Gulag wasn't just a place you got thrown in and rotted, although that did happen. People were constantly entering and leaving the system. Still, the experience could be arbitrary. Sentences were extended without warning. The conditions were terrible, and even if and when you did get out, your life wasn't necessarily just going to go back to normal. The high turnover in the Gulag also exposes another feature though - that it permeated Soviet society. With so many people coming and going, many ordinary Soviet people would have had contact with people who had some experience of the Gulag, which meant that it was a very present system in the minds of Soviet people. It wasn't some far away place, but paradoxically close to home despite the often remote locations of the camps. This kind of thinking, thanks in large part to Alexopoulos' article is becoming more the norm in studies of the Gulag.
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how is that alcohol 70% is better than alcohol 90% as disinfectant ?
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70% alcohol has 30% water, and that water is necessary for the alcohol to interact at all with the cells it’s killing.
It’s like cooking pancakes. You know how when your pan is really hot and you put in pancake batter, it cooks the outside really fast? And then you can flip it, but it does the same thing to the other side and the middle doesn’t cook very well? 90% alcohol is like that. It doesn’t penetrate well into cells or clumps of microbes because it just fries everything it touches on the outside. The 70% alcohol is like cooking on medium heat with a moderately hot pan. It contacts the outside, too, but the water helps it penetrate to cook the inside (denature proteins deeper) as well.
From _URL_2_
> The presence of water is a crucial factor in destroying or inhibiting the growth of pathogenic microorganisms with isopropyl alcohol. Water acts as a catalyst and plays a key role in denaturing the proteins of vegetative cell membranes. 70% IPA solutions penetrate the cell wall more completely which permeates the entire cell, coagulates all proteins, and therefore the microorganism dies. Extra water content slows evaporation, therefore increasing surface contact time and enhancing effectiveness. Isopropyl alcohol concentrations over 91% coagulate proteins instantly. Consequently, a protective layer is created which protects other proteins from further coagulation.
> Solutions > 91% IPA may kill some bacteria, but require longer contact times for disinfection, and enable spores to lie in a dormant state without being killed. A 50% isopropyl alcohol solution kills Staphylococcus Aureus in less than 10 seconds (pg. 238), yet a 90% solution with a contact time of over two hours is ineffective.
Edit: Because there’s been some confusion, I’d like to add two points. First, higher concentrations of alcohol solutions (specifically isopropyl) may still be superior as solvents, for use on things like electronics for cleaning, because water is generally bad for electronics. Second, what we’re talking about above you should think of as referring only to ethanol and isopropyl alcohol (which is not safe to consume). There are other alcohols but we’re just sticking to the ones commonly used.
Edit 2: Some people have questioned the source, which is good and part of science. The source offered a decent write-up of what numerous PhD mentors have taught me, and it’s consistent with the science. At the risk of making this too long, here’s what the CDC has to say, from _URL_0_
Adding water enhances effectiveness of isopropyl and ethyl alcohols:
> The most feasible explanation for the antimicrobial action of alcohol is denaturation of proteins. This mechanism is supported by the observation that absolute ethyl alcohol, a dehydrating agent, is less bactericidal than mixtures of alcohol and water because proteins are denatured more quickly in the presence of water
Isopropanol and ethanol effective bactericides
> The bactericidal activity of various concentrations of ethyl alcohol (ethanol) was examined against a variety of microorganisms in exposure periods ranging from 10 seconds to 1 hour 483. Pseudomonas aeruginosa was killed in 10 seconds by all concentrations of ethanol from 30% to 100% (v/v), and Serratia marcescens, E, coli and Salmonella typhosa were killed in 10 seconds by all concentrations of ethanol from 40% to 100%. The gram-positive organisms Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes were slightly more resistant, being killed in 10 seconds by ethyl alcohol concentrations of 60%–95%. Isopropyl alcohol (isopropanol) was slightly more bactericidal than ethyl alcohol for E. coli and S. aureus 489.
Kills viruses at these concentrations
> Ethyl alcohol, at concentrations of 60%–80%, is a potent virucidal agent inactivating all of the lipophilic viruses (e.g., herpes, vaccinia, and influenza virus) and many hydrophilic viruses (e.g., adenovirus, enterovirus, rhinovirus, and rotaviruses but not hepatitis A virus (HAV) 58 or poliovirus) 49.
Isopropanol similar to chlorhexidine
_URL_1_
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how can someone physically consume 74 hot dogs and what is the "aftermath" like?
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For the consumption, practice. They need to eat progressively larger amounts of food or liquids per a period of time so their stomach can (somewhat) comfortably stretch to hold it all and they can get used to eating/drinking way past their body’s ‘I feel full’ point. I don’t know about the rest, it isn’t talked about much.
Edit: Liquids too.
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A Song of Ice and Fire depicts medieval warfare as devastating the countryside, crop harvests, and peasant population with widespread abuses of non-combatants. Is this accurate of what warfare was really like during the War of Roses time period?
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Yes, and for a much longer period than just the Wars of the Roses (ie. mid-to-late fifteenth-century). The encastellation of Europe in the eleventh- and twelfth-centuries made violent marches through enemy territory, known as [the chevauchée](_URL_3_), a highly popular and essential military tactic. The purpose of this form of warfare was to damage your opponent's financial income and their reputation - since one of the features of good lordship was the ability to protect and nothing demonstrated bad lordship like hiding in a castle while your land was ravaged. The treatment of non-combatants is [a central topic to the study of chivalry](_URL_0_) (side-note: Gillingham has several fantastic papers available through _URL_1_, I highly recommend taking advantage of this and his other freely available articles), often romantacised by the idyllic imagination that noble warriors would spare those not explicitly involved in the combat, has been comprehensively demonstrated as untrue, [see this post for more information](_URL_2_).
In this Martin is accurate, but this does not mean, of course, that all knights were bloody sadistic torturers (ie. they were not all Mountains that Ride or the Bloody Mummers) but that such actions were a widely accepted part of warfare and only condemned within certain moral contexts or because they might contravene accepted norms or desired (quasi-idealised) standards but usually not explicit legal structures.
However, even the standards of chivalric conduct have been noted as being thrown out the window during periods of civil conflict. As Philip de Commynes, writing about the Battle of Towton (1461), noted King Edward 'shouted to his men that they must spare the common soldiers and kill the lords, of which none or few escaped'. As demonstrated by the violence of the Anarchy of the mid twelfth-century; the Baronial Movements of the thirteenth-century; the deposing of Edward II in the fourteenth-century; and the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth-century, it is clear that chivalric conduct often did not withstand the force of civil strife (and these examples just restricting us to England and Normandy).
Traditional non-combatants usually lacked even this thin veil of protection, and when the aim was to better yourself at the expense of your enemy (and doubly so when you knew you would be unlikely to keep hold of any territory you might ride through) it was a fairly vicious time to not have a set of walls to hide behind.
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Were cannonballs considered "reusable" after being fired? or would they be deformed/ damaged after impacting a target.
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**Occasionally, but typically under only specific circumstances.**
In the first centuries after the development of the cannon, stone shot was used in most cases. Stone is frangible; it tends to shatter upon impact, and even if a stone cannonball did not shatter, it was easily converted to peaceful use as building material. Both of these factors tended to work against the recovery and re-use of stone cannonballs. During [excavations at Edinburgh Castle between 1988 and 1991](_URL_1_) archaeologists discovered a handful of never-fired stone cannonballs and fragments from rounds that had clearly been used and shattered.
The use of iron shot began to take off in the 16th century and by the 17th century, they were almost ubiquitous. The issue here, as with stone, is that poor-quality iron (endemic in this period) is brittle and will shatter upon impact just as stone will. Given that cannon shot were designed to be destroyed, they were typically constructed of the cheapest iron possible, which increased the likelihood that they would fracture or deform.
Now, allow me to divert you into the question of **why** and **when** solid shot would be recovered. Solid cannon shot, whether iron or stone, tends to be *extraordinarily* heavy for its size and is difficult to handle because of its shape. You have to have a *reason* to go through the effort of recovering a particular solid shot. It is much easier to get new shot from your logistical train than to go through the effort of recovering shot. Large-scale shot recovery only makes sense if your own supplies are limited.
You might need a block and tackle setup to lift the shot. You'll need wagons and horses to carry the shot away. All this is expensive in both time and labor, which means you typically see shot recovery take place only where large concentrations of artillery have fought in a confined area. The effort of mustering a shot-recovery detail is offset by the ability to collect large amounts of shot.
Remember, too, that you have to cope with matching the shot's caliber ─ something not always easy if both sides in a battle aren't using compatible ammunition.
So to recap: In order for shot-recovery to be feasible, you need to have a shortage of ammunition that forces you to recover shot. You need to have the manpower to be able to recover the shot. You need to be fighting between approximately 1500 and 1870. You need to be at a place where large amounts of artillery were used in a confined area.
This checklist limits how often cannon shot was reused, but it did happen time and again. Stephen Bull, in his book *The Furie of the Ordnance* about artillery in the English civil wars, writes, "It is likely that the largest number (of 17th century cannon shot) were picked up and reused, or scrapped, within a relatively short period of the time they were fired or lost. Shot are recorded as having been removed from many of the major battlefields, notably Marston Moor and Naesby, over a very long period of time."
Mark Thomson's book, *Wellington's Engineers* about military engineering during the Peninsular War, references an account from Alexander Dickson: "the soldiers were offered a bounty for every roundshot they could recover for re-use and so as not to discourage them, even roundshot of calibres which were of no use were paid for."
During the Crimean War, when vast amounts of artillery were leveled against the Russian defenders along the Black Sea, the practice of round shot recovery [was captured on camera](_URL_0_), with the cannonballs in the ditch having been rolled down a hill by soldiers seeking to collect them.
Finally, during the American Civil War, the logistically-strapped Confederacy's quartermaster department [mined the Seven Days battlefields for almost a year afterward](_URL_2_), recovering supplies and spent cannon shot to be used in the war effort. At isolated places like Ship Island, in Texas, and elsewhere, Confederate artillerymen recovered Union-fired round shot in order to keep their guns fed.
The development of exploding shot and artillery shells brought an end to the era of recovering round shot. Even by the time of the American Civil War, round shot was on the way out of circulation.
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when movies make horses fall, is it real, and if not, then how do they do it?
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In the past, a device known as the "running W" was used to trip horses at a specific point, but it is now illegal. It is possible to train a horse to fall over on command in such a way that neither it not the rider are in much danger, and this method is used currently. As with any trick, teaching the horse to do this requires practice and the correct incentives. There may be other ways of getting a horse to fall over, but I'm not aware of them.
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according to data we have discovered 14% of all organisms on earth. where does this number come from, if the other 86% of haven't been discovered yet (and therefore we don't know if they exist)?
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Well it's a bit outside my area of expertise, but if I had to make such an estimate, I would look at the rate at which we're discovering new species, and how that rate has changed over time. That would allow me to estimate how many species we're likely to find in the future. If the number is much larger than the number of species we already know, that would get your 14%.
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Did the 'Cult of the Feathered Serpent' play a significant role in the end of Mayan civilization?
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No, not really.
The "Feathered Serpent Cult" is a name that archaeologists and iconographers have given to a pan-Mesoamerican explosion of imagery associated with Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan dating to the Epiclassic period (around the time of the Classic Maya collapse). It appears to be a larger religious movement associated with sacrifice, the ballgame, and the nobility. It's most prominent in Central Mexican sites like Tula and among the cultures of the Gulf Coast such as the Totonac city of El Tajin. Some time during the Early Postclassic a group of people from the Gulf Coast (Putun and Itza peoples, specifically) migrated into the Northern Yucatan and created a kind of hybridized culture with the Maya who were living there. At this time cities like Chichen Itza begin to show an increased focus on Kukulkan and ballgames in imagery.
Although it's tempting to see the Feathered Serpent Cult as a kind of Mesoamerican *opus dei*, that's not really accurate. I'm not even sure the word "cult" is a fairly accurate descriptor. Feathered Serpent Tradition might be better. Here's Susan Toby Evans (2008:386) discussing this cultural shift:
> Turning to the central Yucatan Peninsula, the motivations for the intrusion of Central Mexican stylistic motifs are more difficult to recover. Large-scale migration seems unlikely. Religious proselytization, in the form of an emphasis upon Central Mexican belief systems, may have been an important factor, but seems secondary to both military conquest and securing trade routes.
This had virtually nothing to do with the collapse of Classic Maya centers, except that it happened at about the same point in time. The Maya "collapse" was fairly localized. The densely populated southern lowlands had a major demographic collapse, but the Northen Yucatan (where the Feathered Serpent "Cult" took hold) was largely not affected other than in the loss of trading partners.
* Evans, Susan Toby. 2008 *Ancient Mexico and Central America: Archaeology and Culture History* 2nd edition. Thames and Hudson.
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Is there a speed a cell phone can go to not receive wifi or cell signal anymore?
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The frequency bands for both Wi-Fi and LTE are both reasonably narrow, so you will hit a point where the waves for the node you are trying to connect to are red or blue shifted to the point where your device will not be able to communicate on them
A long time before you get to that point, you will not be in range of the access point long enough for your device to negotiate a network connection
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If fusion power was as widespread as fission today, what would the worst case "meltdown" scenario be and how bad would it be compared to fission meltdowns?
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Since fusion reactions take place only under very specific conditions (very high temperature and pressure), any disruption in the operation of the reactor would cause the necessary conditions for fusion to disappear, which would halt the reaction.
Unlike nuclear fission, which in many cases can be self-sustaining and needs active intervention to be slowed down (in the form of control rods, for example), a fusion plasma takes a lot of work to be kept in the right state. Except of course when it is so large that its own gravity does the trick, like in stars. But that won't be the case for earthbound fusion.
So if there is a catastrophic incident in a hypothetical fusion reactor, the reactor and surrounding building could be destroyed and the high energy particles could irradiate some of the debris. But that's about the extent of the damage. Unlike the unmitigated meltdown of a fission reactor, the damage would be very localized.
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does alcohol tolerance come from your body learning to metabolise it more efficiently, or your brain learning to function better whilst under the influence, or both?
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Both. Alcohol is metabolized into its non-toxic (less toxic?) form by enzymes in the liver. Once your liver realizes that it is frequently encountering this thing, it starts producing more enzymes which allow it to break the substance down more quickly.
Furthermore, since your brain *technically* doesn't want to lose motor control to alcohol, the system of neurotransmitters which are affected by the presence of metabolized alcohol eventually compensate to lose less fidelity when encountering it.
EDIT: It might incorrect to say it is metabolized into a less toxic form. I'm a little shakey on that - acetaldehyde and acetate are toxic substances, but that is nonetheless what the body does to the ethanol as it processes and prepares to excrete it.
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My mother and grandmother keep saying that living in the Soviet Union was way better than it is now because during then there was alot of food with cheap prices and i hardly believe that,was it actually true or am I getting brainwashed?
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Adapted from an earlier [answer](_URL_0_):
You can poke around the internet and easily find graphs that claim that the average Soviet citizen had a higher caloric intake than the average American until the Soviet intake plummeted in 1991.
These generally come from FAO data, but an [examination](_URL_1_) of a number of different sources will show a spread of estimates.
A major takeaway is that the two big datasets available to international researchers on Soviet nutrition are through the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the US Department of Agriculture, as well as some official Soviet sources, such as Goskomstat and Torgovlya SSSR. A huge problem with the data sets available is that it's very much comparing yabloki to oranges. A lot of the official data is for Food Balances (food produced, plus food imported, minus food exported), which is not the same thing as food consumed by households. For one thing, such a data set will not capture the massive wastage issues in Soviet food production and transportation, and will erroneously capture Soviet food production that was actually used for livestock rather than human consumption. The Soviet data furthermore is in kilograms and not calories.
So most researchers have had to adjust the data to some degree. It's worth pointing out that Robert Allen (in his From Farm to Factory), when adjusting the data, comes to results that roughly match the FAO data.
Igor Birman, who was a Soviet economist who emigrated to the US in 1974, attempted to compare the two countries' nutrition in Personal Consumption in the USSR and the USA (1981). Birman considered the FAO data (and similar results produced by the CIA at the time) to be too high for reasons noted above, and found that, while Soviet diets were adequate (ie, in general the average person wasn't malnurished), caloric intake was slightly below US average intake, and if anything should be higher, because of a colder Soviet climate and a younger and more physically active population.
Birman also criticized the CIA's attempt to compare diets. He noted that the Soviet diet was much higher in bread and potatoes than the American diet, and higher in fish consumption, but much lower in meat and fruits. The average Soviet consumed more dairy than the average American, but this was mostly cheese (usually tvorog), as opposed to fresh milk. Some of these products, such as bread, were often considered superior to the American versions, especially by emigres (anecdote: this is true), but others, such as meat, were considered inferior. Soviet citizens also tended to spend a much larger proportion of their income on food purchases compared to Americans. Interestingly, much of the meat and dairy supply available to Soviet citizens came from private production by farmers, rather than from collective or state farms.
Birman notes that there were significant inequalities in what was available in major cities such as Leningrad and Moscow and more provincial ones, as well as what was available to party members versus nonparty members, and that certain foods (say, pineapples or avocadoes) that one could find in US supermarkets were simply unavailable to anyone. Soviet citizens also often consumed fresh products much more based on seasonality. And I should note that Birman doesn't hold back in his criticisms of the US either: he notes that rural and urban poverty in the US has real malnutrition issues, and that just because US supermarkets have choices doesn't mean that everyone has the ability to exercise that choice.
So in summary: there are data sets that show the average Soviet citizen's caloric intake as higher than the average Americans. Some historians, notably Robert Allen, consider these more or less accurate, but all the data sets need adjustments in order to be compared to US figures. With that said, even when Soviet citizens were eating adequately, they were eating a very different diet from that of Americans, one that would, for example, include eating larger amounts of potatoes every day.
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From Facebook: "Pineapples were a status symbol in 18th century England. They were so expensive that you could rent them by the night and take them to parties with you". Can I get more insight on this?
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Collecting exotic plants of all kinds was quite a popular pastime for the landed gentry and aristocracy of 18th century England. By this I mean that people were devoting a great deal of time and energy to bringing back prized specimens to grow and cultivate in Britain. Such was the benefit of Britannia's increasing global reach. As you might imagine this was quite an expensive enterprise. Bringing both live plants and seeds from the Caribbean, South and Central America, Australia, and India required a great deal of effort. Live plants need sunlight, soil, and fresh water (something lacking on the open sea) while seeds need to be kept safe from insects and rats as well as requiring proper storage. A gardener named James Lee (1715-1795) wrote a meticulous guide on the subject of proper seed management whilst in transit.
With all this in mind, being able to get one's hands on some exotic specimen from a far flung corner of the earth and cultivating it on one's pleasant British estate was a great way to show off one's means. Pineapples were very much a part of this, as were other exotic fruits like mangoes and oranges. These were the best for displaying wealth as such things require a greenhouse in order to flourish. If you had pineapples then you were telling the world that you had the wealth to obtain and cultivate them. Some people went to absurd lengths to articulate this. The Earl of Dunmore's 1761 [greenhouse](_URL_0_) is a good example of this.
Furthermore, pineapples were in high demand not only from aristocrats but from mariners as well. James Cook and others realized that pineapples were a great source of vitamins and could fend off scurvy. Pineapple patches could be found in harbors around the world in order to supply a good diet to sailors. This boosted demand and therefore the exclusivity.
In terms of cost I haven't anything on the specific price of pineapples but I can offer some insight on the money people spent on exotic flora. In Feb 1821 a visitor to the Duke of Marlborough's Whiteknights Park recorded that the Duke had sunk 40-50 000 pounds into his plant collection and was 10 000 in debt. That's an extreme example but it gives you an idea.
Sources: Chilean Trees and Shrubs: A History of Introduction to the British Isles by William Charles Noble, Hidden Britain by Tom Quinn, Foods that Changed History by Christopher Cumo, Daily Life in 18th-century England by Kristin Olsen
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Were Romans broadly aware of the First or Second Triumvirates at the time they were active, or would they have sounded like conspiracy theories?
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There's a great deal of misinformation that keeps appearing and disappearing on this thread.
Yes, the Romans were aware of the Triumvirate, and of the agreement between Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus popularly called the "first" Triumvirate. In reality, there was only one Triumvirate, that of Octavian, Lepidus, and Antony. This was a legally-defined collegiate magistracy, which though extraordinary nevertheless had a legally defined tenure of office, which was renewed several times between its creation and its eventual expiration prior to Actium. There was nothing to hide as far as the Triumvirate went, as it was a public office.
Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus were known to be working together pretty much from the moment it happened. They did not make any great attempt to conceal their cooperation, and openly extended hands to others as well. In a letter to Atticus (Att. 2.3) Cicero mentions that towards the end of December 60, between Caesar's election to the consulship of 59 and his assumption of the office, Caesar sent Balbus to him to offer him a partnership among the dynasts, specifically saying that he would value Cicero's advice as equal to Pompey's, and that he would reconcile Pompey and Crassus. Cicero has some difficulty turning down the offer, since he was following 63 very closely tied to Pompey and, as he says, hoped to resolve the quarrels with his senatorial enemies that had been hovering over him since his consulship, but ultimately he tells Atticus that he can't do it. In April of 59, early into Caesar's consulship and before Cicero started speaking out against him towards the end of the year, Cicero says to Atticus that he doesn't envy Crassus at all for his alignment with Caesar (things were not going well for the dynasts in mid-spring), and apparently Cicero was the original choice for the third dynast.
The dynasts also appeared publicly. If there were any who still weren't aware of their alignment to each other, when the agrarian bill to settle Capua was promulgated relatively early in 59 there could be no doubt. Not only was it strongly in all three men's interest, but in a contio prior to the bill's promulgation Caesar invited Pompey and Crassus to the rostra in order to say whether they supported the measure or not. They did, and apparently made some sort of threatening overture: App. B.C. 2.10 seems to suggest that they encouraged the people to show up to the vote carrying daggers, and Plut. Caes. 14.3-4 says that Pompey threatened to use military force to get the bill, which would settle his soldiers, passed. Bibulus was also invited to a contio, and foolishly accepted--Morstein-Marx has shown that though invitations to contiones were frequently extended to rivals, they were almost never accepted, because as is the case with Bibulus a rival speaking at a contio typically was a target for the crowd's ire, not a legitimate speaker. Yet another indication would have been Pompey's marriage of Caesar's daughter. In May 59, only one month after poking fun at Crassus for siding with the dynasts Cicero has this to say (Att. 2.9):
> etenim si fuit invidiosa senatus potentia, cum ea non ad populum sed ad tris homines immoderatos redacta sit, quid iam censes fore? proinde isti licet faciant quos volent consules, tribunos pl., denique etiam Vatini strumam sacerdoti dibaphoi vestiant...
> > Now indeed, if the power of the senate was so hateful, what then do you think ought to be when it has passed over not to the people but to three unrestrained men? So let them make whomever they wish consuls and tribunes, and let them even dress up Vatinius' tumor with a priest's twice-dyed purple
This is the first surviving written reference to a "rule of three," though App. B.C. 2.9 tells us that Varro published a book or pamphlet called the Tricaranus, or "three-headed monster."
By 56, however, the dynasts' relationship was weakening, since they had gotten what they had wanted and no longer had much need for each other (therefore Suetonius refers to the triumvirate as a "societas," which is not quite a coitio, though Caesar was accused of forming one with L. Lucceius, which was staved off according to Suetonius by Cato's rampant bribery). However, with Cicero returned from exile and Pompey's power over the senate in Caesar's absence significantly weakened, the dynasts reopened their relations at the so-called Conference at Luca in 56. The "renewal" of the triumvirate, if an unofficial agreement can really have official renewal, was a public event. The dynasts got together at Luca in Cisalpine Gaul, and agreed that Caesar should continue prosecuting the war in Gaul and that Crassus and Pompey should share the consulship of 55. With the dynasts at Luca were so many magistrates, promagistrates, and senators that according to Plut. Caes. 21.5 there were 120 lictors at the conference and over 200 senators. App. B.C. 2.17 repeats these figures. An earlier meeting between Crassus and Caesar had already taken place at Ravenna, says Cic. Fam. 1.9. In the same letter Cicero tells us that he himself was in negotiation with the dynasts through Pompey and his brother. Cicero had attempted to drive a wedge between Caesar and Pompey while ostensibly trying to restore the regular function of the state (or more concretely, as Tatum very persuasively argues, trying to get the dynasts to agree formally that Clodius' tribunate was invalid) by reopening the question, settled two years earlier, of what to do about the commission to settle the ager Campanus. When Pompey visited Caesar at Luca Caesar did not like what Cicero had had to say, so Pompey spoke to Cicero's brother Quintus, one of Caesar's legates in Gaul. Cicero says that Quintus reported that Pompey told him:
> nisi cum Marco fratre diligenter egeris, dependendum tibi est, quod mihi pro illo spopondisti
> > Unless you urge your brother Marcus on carefully (i.e. make him shut up), what you promised me on his behalf you'll have to pay.
Quintus had, while heading out to Gaul, tacitly guaranteed his brother's cooperation.
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how can straight talk use the same towers as verizon and other top tier providers?
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Mobile phone companies own a lot of spectrum and towers, generally more than they can use (for now, things are growing). They sell their excess capacity to other providers, such as Straight Talk to use unused portions of their mobile phone networks. It's making $0 while not in use, so they'd rather sell it then have it generate no cash for them.
Just about all large mobile phone companies do this to a fairly significant degree, and as such, its not uncommon for a company (such as a Straight Talk) to have deals with multiple providers in order to make sure their network is good enough, as often one single provider can't give them everything they need.
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if we die after roughly 3 weeks without eating, why do eat 3 times a day?
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Eating three times a day is actually a modern invention (modern in terms of human history as a species). It wasn’t uncommon, or even unhealthy to eat once a day, or sometimes skip a day every few days. It still isn’t unhealthy to do that today, you are just so used to eating three times a day that it would be difficult.
We die after 3 weeks of not eating because we are healthy and well nourished. If you ate rarely and were malnourished you would die much quicker. We eat daily to make sure we are in top health.
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why do we say "on the plane", "on the train", but "in the car"?
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Presumably in this case because a car is ours, so we're *in* our possession.
The others are open to the public, so we're *on* the service.
At least, that's how I assumed it works.
****
Edit: Giraffebacon has an awesome theory that it doesn't depend on possession, but **control**. If you control something, you're in it. If not, you're on it.
Edit 2: Of course there are exceptions. Bikes / skateboards you are physically "on", and can't be "in", so the rule doesn't apply.
Edit 3: thedrew is [very clever] (_URL_0_).
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How did the free peasant republic in Dithmarschen in the 15th and 16th centuries actually function?
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I've basically covered this on a podcast, so let me start with that.
Your answer is in this episode:
_URL_0_
That show was actually about the region south of Dithmarschen. But the cause of their freedom was the same:
It's swampy and tough economics there. There were NOT actually independent on paper. They were under the Bremen Archbishop, for example. But since that was tough to enforce, and the people so poor that they were all basically egalitarian and helped each other -- no nobility formed. Just like in East Frisia.
Added to that, it was a buffer state between Denmark and the German empire. So, just weak jurisdiction to begin with. Far away and usually not worth the trouble.
The Franks (Charlemagne) just gave up on the region after holding it for 20 years.
Technically there were under Hamburg (church-wise) ..but probably barely even knew that (in the 11the century control was just nominal on paper, really).
What you are referring to is the same that happened in other remote, coastal areas. They eventually founded a "Bauernrepublik" or Farmers (Peasant's) Republik. Meaning they elected 48 judges to run things.... which... just like in East Frisia, eventually started to come from fewer and fewer families, and the judges dynastic families became the de facto nobility.
The local "militia" were good at fighting in the Watt. They could even just open the dikes and flood the enemy.
Don't underestimate the border factor though.. Even in the 19th century they were still kinda part of the Danish crown, and part of Bismark's Prussia, until wars were fought. But just the fact that they weren't clearly and directly ruled gave them a lot of freedom. Only 1866 was it really, finally, officially part of Germany (Schlesswig Holstein Prussia).
Sorry about the lack of sources. I can update this later.
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5: why is it so hard to replace plastics with another material with similar properties?
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Cost: plastic is extremely cheap to produce (also to recycle), currently nothing as cheap exists so companies will keep using what makes them the most money.
Properties: there actually aren't many materials with similar properties:
- recycled/compostable plastics aren't as maleable and mess up the recycling of normal plastics.
- paper, well just see the outrage of paper straws
- metal costs too much and is heavy
- the cutting edge "plastic killers" don't currently work on large scale due to lack of technology/knowledge in how to scale (eg. Nanostructures)
In actuality plastics are probably the most important, useful and revolutionary material technology in history. It would also be the most environmentally friendly material if we would be able to close the loop and recycle most of it. Problems only arise when it ends up in nature, which I personally believe to just be due to severe incompetence on parts of government, companies and to some extent people.
AFAIK "fact" to take forward: Producing paper straws rather than plastic ones is often a net loss in terms of GHG emissions, habitat loss and chemical intensity.
Use this to always think about the whole life-cycle of products and on the many different ways the environment can be hurt.
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I've always wondered: if I am in an airplane that is traveling JUST under the speed of sound, and I sprint down the aisle, would I break the sound barrier?
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No because the air that you're in is moving as fast as you are so your person is never near the speed in its immediate surroundings to break the sound barrier.
Now if you were on the wing or top of said aircraft somehow and could run against the wind, I hypothesize that you would break the sound barrier.
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Why is it impossible for objects weighing less than 0.02 milligrams to form a black hole?
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A black hole of mass less than around .02 milligrams or so would have a Schwarzschild radius of around a Planck length or less. At this scale, general relativity cannot be trusted; we need a theory that incorporates general relativity and quantum field theory. Thus, at the very least, we can say that such a black hole could not be described by general relativity.
But we can go further. Quantum mechanics tells us that an object with such a mass would have a Compton wavelength greater than its Schwarzschild radius, which would make it not possible to constrain this mass to be in a small enough region to form a black hole. It is reasonable to expect this to hold even in the eventual quantum theory that incorporates gravity, and if so, that would preclude the formation of a black hole with such a mass.
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In one my my professor's lectures, he mentioned that Japan tried to surrender before Hiroshima, and the US rejected the proposal. After Nagasaki, they accepted a nearly identical proposal to the one they rejected. Is this true?
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Like most stuff that gets introduced in lecture courses, it's mostly right, but more complicated.
Prior to the decision to drop the bomb, some members of the Japanese political leadership were working behind the scenes to try to negotiate a conditional surrender whose terms did (in many ways) closely resemble the unconditional terms of peace that was later accepted.
But both the American public and the American government were hostile to the idea of a conditional Japanese surrender, while the Japanese public and military were vehemently opposed to the idea of an unconditional surrender.
So much so, in fact, that even if U.S. forces had been willing to consider a conditional surrender and it had been a politically feasible option, U.S. military strategists believed that, even if Japan's political elite were acting in good faith during negotiations, they would never be able to convince the Japanese hardliners in the military to accept the negotiated outcome and actually surrender.
So your prof is right in that there were negotiations and discussions on the table to end the war without the bomb, largely on terms that wound up being acceptable after the bomb. But whether or not that alone made the bomb unnecessary depends on whether or not one believes that those negotiations would have been politically feasible to the people and powers that be on either side of the Pacific without the bomb.
If you're looking for sources on it, "Marshall, Truman, and the Decision to Drop the Bomb" by Gar Alperovitz, Robert L. Messer and Barton J. Bernstein talks about this a bit, as does (iirc) John Chappell's *Before the Bomb*.
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Did any of the ancient civilizations know they were one of the first human civilizations or have any understanding of the significance of that?
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what really happens when people die of "old age" or "natural causes" ?
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what happens is the family and doctors agree it is not worth determining what the actual cause of death was.
actual cause is often heart failure, but frankly could be almost anything that isn't blatantly obvious from an external inspection.
edit: stroke is another common cause. may actually be even more common that heart attack for "old age" deaths, as it can hit suddenly with less obvious symptoms.
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if networks cancel a show mid-season and have filmed the rest of the season, why aren't the rest of the episodes released online?
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Well sometimes they are, so there is no rule/law against it.
However the show makers often do not have the license / copyright to their own shows. So it´s not up to them to release the episodes however they want.
The network on the other hand who does have the rights, doesn´t really have an interest in releasing the episodes for free. They might have other plans for monetizing them or they just don´t want to release them at all for many reasons (out of spite, to not support a competitor, etc.)
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why is the us police force becoming more militarized and more powerful? or is this a misconception?
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I'm a cop. Its hard to argue that police isn't becoming more miltarized but I think its vastly over rated. Two agencies in my county have a bearcat (like a tank with no big gun) but it it rarely used and all the agencies borrow it when needed. Aside from a taser, I have received no new weapons since I started 15 years ago.
Edit: Some good comments, I'll just edit this post instead of responding to each one.
I don't have access to anymore equipment than I did 15 years ago. Well I suppose we have .40 caliber pistols now instead of 9mm but besides that and the taser, everything else is the same.
Generally the bearcat is used for barricaded and armed subjects. I work in the SF bay area of California which is extremely liberal and has very tight gun control. I pulled an AK-47 and an illegally modified shotgun off a suspect two weeks ago. Criminals are now heavily armed and the police need to be able to match them in firepower. The bearcat would have been eventually been used if that suspect had barricaded himself in a house. We can use it to provide our SWAT teams with mobile cover to either take the house or launch non-lethal ordinance at the house (gas, stun grenades, etc).
I have read about SWAT teams being used unnecessarily. My contention is that sometimes the news outlets don't have all the facts. Don't forget that a **judge** must authorize no knock warrants. However, there are probably a good number of search warrants being served by SWAT teams than is truly necessary. I just don't have enough facts to talk about specific cases. I will note that any search or arrest warrant involving the sale or manufacture of illegal narcotics is pretty much an automatic SWAT call out. Major dealers and producers can make $25,000 a week and they usually have guns.
SWAT teams and the rise of police firearms training is to counter the evolution of the way the criminal element does business. 40 years ago, officers didn't have shotguns or vests because they weren't really necessary. Today, pulling a handgun off a felon is not rare. Being attacked is not rare. Like I said earlier, I pulled an AK-47 off a suspect recently. A shotgun and pistol cannot counter an AK-47. If I have to respond to an active shooter situation, I want the weapon that can deliver the most rounds, with the most accuracy, with the least reload time and that is my M-4. I have an M-4 in my patrol car. I actually remove it for calls maybe once a year. I have never had to fire it outside of the training range. But if that active shooter crisis happens at your children's high school, you'll be glad that I'm trained and armed to deal with the threat. They waited for the SWAT team at Columbine. That shit can never happen again.
Edit2: I'll also just note that I have been a soldier and a cop my entire adult life except for 4 years of college and a few years tooling around the white collar corporate ladder. I have never been issued a fully automatic M16 or M4 at any point.
Edit 3: Some people have argued that we don't need patrol rifles (M4). As I've said earlier, I pull it out maybe once a year. I have pointed it at one person in 15 years and have never pulled the trigger outside of the range. If it is taken away from me it will have pretty much zero effect on my day to day activity. However, if someone starts shooting at the high school I will not be going in. I'll secure the perimeter and wait for people who have the proper weapons and training to arrive. This can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours.
Edit4: I'm going to bed. Thanks for the great discussion everyone. A few last thoughts. There is only three things I really need to do my job: my gun, my vest, and my radio. If you take away the rest you just reduce my options and flexibility. Sure some cops think they're navy seals when they go through rifle training but the rest of us know that the weapons we carry are a responsibility to protect and serve and not a booster for our egos. I don't think its a good reason to hamstring all of us.
I'll say in closing that we're human just like you. Most of us are married (some formerly) with kids. If crime ended tomorrow and we got paychecks for helping old ladies cross the street then we would be happy.
Got up to pee. Holy shit GOLD!!! Thanks!!!!!
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Is it possible that dinosaur fossils played some role in the origin of dragon myths?
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It is possible, yes, that fossils (not necessarily just dinosaur fossils) did play a role in the development of dragon myths. It's mostly all speculation, really.
Most fossils that people find are either recognizably some smallish organism, like a seashell or a small fish, or a disarticulated bone or piece of a bone. All perfectly laid-out skeletons just don't really happen very often at all, and even then it takes a keen eye to discern what is what.
We do know that prior to Georges Cuvier's pioneering work in comparative anatomy, people very often tended to assume large fossil bones were the bones of creatures that were still alive at the time, or possibly giant versions of them. In the Western world, it was also frequently assumed they were the remains of animals and people killed in Noah's flood. One particular thigh bone (now known to be from a type of meat-eating dinosaur) was originally thought to have been the thigh bone from a giant antediluvian person, then for the while the fossilized scrotum of said person, then recognized again for a leg and not a ballsack, and finally correctly identified as not from a flood-victim giant human at all.
Also, prior to Cuvier's work, we really didn't have a concept of extinction. The world at this point was also not fully-explored by any one group, so there was an idea that even though these giant critters may not be around *here* anymore, the might still be found out *there* somewhere. Thomas Jefferson actually gave specific instructions to Lewis and Clark for their westward exploration to try and find a living specimen of a giant ground sloth--an animal known from fossils and which the founding father assumed based on assumptions that were perfectly rational for the time to still be kicking around out *there* somewhere.
There are some speculations that specific fossils may have influenced certain mythological creatures. For example, some myths of the Griffin describe a four-legged creature with wings, a beak, a horn on the back of the head, and lives in the desert and guards gold. The dinosaur *Protoceratops* has four legs, shoulder blades that to the untrained can look sort of wing-like, a beak, a frill on the back of the head which if the sides break off--which is very common--can look like a horn, its remains are found in the deserts of Mongolia and China in areas where gold deposits are not unheard of. It's possible, maybe even plausible, but not really testable.
Stories of mythical beasts, like dragons, grow and change with the times. They ultimately have many sources, some from the natural world, some purely fantasy. Fossils may explain part of the stories, but not all of them.
Consider that if you go to the Roman and Medieval sources, a "dragon" is described many different ways, many of them only having a passing resemblance to what we today would agree on is a prototypical "dragon." For example, in some medieval bestiaries based on Pliny the Elder's works, dragons are described as giant snakes that live in the East (i.e. India), live in trees and hunt elephants by dropping on them from the trees and constricting them, and are deathly afraid of jaguars.
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what's all the fuss about megaupload? do that many people really need file storage?
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Online storage is generally seen as the way of the future. If you have a fire at home and your hard drive is destroyed, what happens to your data? If you collaborate with people on many projects, how do you keep your files in sync? If you work at home and on the road and in the workplace, how can you keep your data in check? All of these are solved by online storage.
Edit: also pirating.
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Have there ever been mafias/organized crime syndicates in the United States that were German, French, or Scandinavian?
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There has been one case of plagiarism, several jokes, and a number of contentless posts offered up as "answers" to the OP's question.
This is AskHistorians. We ask that your answers be in-depth, comprehensive, and such that an historian might give. You should also be able to back your post with proper sources if requested. If you cannot provide an answer that meets our requirements, please refrain from posting. We prefer no answer to speculation, educated guesswork, jokes or memes.
Thank you.
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since essentially everything nowadays causes cancer, should we just assume that we still don't really know what causes it?
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Here's the thing with cancer: at its most basic level, whether or not you get cancer comes down to statistics and randomness. Cancer happens when you get a combination of mutations that cause a cell to reproduce continuously, avoid cell-suicide, infiltrate other tissues, etc. All a carcinogen is is a substance believed to increase the odds of such a combination of mutations occurring. Thing is, you could be a lifelong smoker, eat tons of processed meats, regularly get exposed to radiation, and yet never develop cancer just because you were lucky enough to never have the right mutation combination in the same cell at the same time. Conversely, you could do everything right and still get cancer due to a simple transcription error during cell reproduction.
Because of this inherent randomness, it's *extremely* difficult to predict and understand which substances actually create a significantly increased risk of developing cancer.
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