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I heard someone state 'the Roman empire never ended, we just call it the catholic church nowadays.' Could someone explain this statement for me? | When the institutions of the catholic Church were created it was not onto a blank space. While in the first two centuries Christianity was, to an extent, a subversive an occaisionally revolutionary movement, when it was legalized it was bent into the shape of the Roman empire and became a true imperial institution. The most obvious example of this is the geographic arrangement of Church territories into dioces, which matched the imperial divisions instituted by Diocletian. Although there is certainly good, early precedent for organizational divisions of the Church, the specific way in which it was done was very distinctly imperial.
That being said, the idea that the Church is actually a continuation of the empire rather than an institutional fossil of it is not terribly justifiable (if nothing else, the Orthodox Church has at least as much claim to legitimate continuity). I would hazard a guess that someone saying this is perhaps attempting to grant historical legitimacy to the Church and overstating it a few touches. |
Did merchants or towns along the Silk Road's land route ever develop a creole language similar to sailors? | The language of the Silk Road in the medieval and post-medieval period, that is, from about 900 AD to 1850 was Persian (now often called Farsi).
This was the primary spoken and written language in the central portion of the road's transit, from Samarqand and the Ferghana valley (modern Uzbekistan) almost to Tabriz in Iran, and was understood in Turkistan (now Xinjiang, China) and well into what is now Turkey. It was also the native language of perhaps a majority of the road's merchants, whatever their ethnic origin might have been. Indian merchants all spoke Persian; so did Armenians. Persian was the literary language of Turko-Mongol governments that ruled the Silk Road territories from the 12th century as well. It was the perfect lingua franca.
Turkic dialects were of course understood, as they covered a similar range, but they were less rooted in urban areas and the sedentary population.
It's worth remembering that actual transit from China to Istanbul more or less stopped in the early 1500s as Iranian silk was then shipped directly west and Safavid Iran effectively closed its eastern borders to trade. The Silk Road then became two separate roads: one going from Iran to Aleppo or to Istanbul, and one, much less travelled, overland from China north of the Caspian Sea through Russia. In any case the maritime trade had become much more important.
James Corcoran, Religions of the Silk Road, Richard Frye, the Heritage of Central Asia, Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, any of the Cambridge Histories of Central Asia or of Iran or even Marco Polo's account discuss this pretty clearly. I don't have a complete bibliography handy so maybe someone else can dig up more sources.
EDIT: Adjusted a date. |
why is scientology, with its heavy cult-like status, still allowed to carry on as a religion? | In the USA we're protected to freely assemble for any reason so long as it's peaceful. Any group of people can get together and do whatever they want so long as it's not harming anyone or breaking any laws.
So, just like Lutherans can get together every Sunday and sing songs and recite prayers in unison, so can Scientologists.
Cults are protected, just like all other groups, under the First Amendment. So, until Scientology breaks some laws they won't get disbanded - and even if they do break laws it's likely only those specific people involved will get charged with a crime.
Check out Wikipedia's [Legality of Cults (Bottom of the page)](_URL_0_) page. |
surveyors who survey land and roads before a new construction project. what are you doing? | They are measuring the land (the actual dimension of plot, etc.) and the topography, or changes in elevation. They need to do this so they know exactly what work needs to be done, make sure they comply with set-back and other zoning considerations, know how much dirt needs to be cleared to level the site, and so on. |
why is it that in the past, society could afford really elaborate, ornate public buildings or big civic projects, but now there seems to be no money for anything but the most functional buildings, and we can barely pay for road maintenance? | It's about how we spend money, not how much. For example, take the subway station being built in New York at the World Trade Center--it's supposed to be a centerpiece of transportation and commerce in the area. It looks rather sober and minimalist. But even adjusting for inflation, it's much more expensive than Grand Central Station! I know which building I like better. |
what is happening when our brain is tired from studying but we are not physically tired? | Task fatigue. The exact, molecular mechanisms of what is happening inside your brain is not completely understood but essentially the process in your brain that stops it from paying attention to other stimulus and only on the task at hand, in this case studying and not looking at Reddit, gets physically tired and looses effectiveness. The father you push this mechanism without recovery, just like a muscle, the less effective it becomes.
Read more about it here:
_URL_0_ |
why does moving my hair sometimes hurt my scalp if i haven't showered? | Imagine I have some putty and a pencil. I put some putty on a table in a gob and then stick a pencil right in the middle of it.
At first everything stays pretty much the same. The pencil stays upright and the putty doesn't really move. But after a couple of hours you would notice that the putty has drooped a little but and that the pencil is leaning just a little bit to the side. The hole from where you stabbed the putty is still fine though, it wraps around the pencil airtight.
Next imagine I go to stand that pencil back up so that it's perfectly straight. When I do, I have to displace some of the putty out of the way from where I stabbed the pencil. Now instead of a perfect, pencil-sized, hole in my putty I have a slightly deformed oval.
Now imagine the putty is your scalp and the pencil is a single hair on your head. Easy enough, right? |
Between 1914 and 1918, over 2 million Africans were mobilized for the war effort, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers, carriers and civilians died in the conflict. How is the Great War remembered or memorialized in sub-Saharan Africa? How does it shape the story of the people of Africa? | To analyze the effect of the Great War in sub-Sahara Africa, we must first have to distance ourselves from our more Euro-centric values when we look at history. Sub-Sahara Africa incorporates numerous ethnicities, languages, religions and is incredibly diverse. The effects of the Great War in Sub-Sahara Africa are as varied as the peoples that live in it.
When Colonial powers came to Africa, they imposed their own values of government and what constitutes a nation-state. Oduntan in his thesis, states that the Egba for instance viewed the Great War in terms of their local politics and to take sides as a matter of local practicality and making the best out their situation. Basically, they tried to live their lives as best as possible, as free as possible.
In addition, some peoples in Africa saw it as way to make it some breathing room, Chafer writes about the Volta-Bani Anticolonial war, a revolt in 1915 against French Colonial rule in the middle of the Great War.
While others, as M'Bokolo affirms, especially for African elites, it opened the door for what they saw as an expansion of the African consciousness and a chance to modernize their country along the lines of what Indian nationalists later did. Not only that, it deculturalized the soldiers, and exposed them to other ways of doing things, making them unhappy with the current situation in the countries.
Not only that, WWI was a shattering moment, when old lines were destroyed and the dynamic between colonizer and colony came into question. Colonial soldiers were given arms and expected \*nay\* encouraged to now kill other white men. Not only that, they had deeply personal and intimate contact with the civilian populations of Europe.
Ultimately, though, the sheer destructiveness of the conflict, and the lack of advancements and recognition by Colonial Authorities, led to an increase in the vocalization of anti-colonial sentiment.
However, the legacy of the great War is mostly forgotten, cemeteries to askari, porters and fallen colonial troops are mostly ignored. Local ethnic loyalties, pay and professional advancement was what drew most colonial troops to serve in the Great War, and this sentiment reflects on the legacy of the war in the minds of the peoples of Africa.
So thus, while it did plant the seeds of anti-colonialism, the Great War is seen as ultimately a tragedy, a futile waste of resources, lives and time. A colonial war, waged by Europeans, for Europeans at the cost of their colonies. Something that is best left forgotten.
[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)
& #x200B;
[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)
Oduntan, Oluwatoyin B. (2010). [*Elite Identity and Power: A Study of Social Change and Leadership among the Egba of Western Nigeria 1860–1950*](_URL_5_) (PDF) (PhD). Halifax, Nova Scotia: Dalhousie University. pp. 218–232. [OCLC](_URL_4_) [812072776](_URL_6_). Retrieved 12 November 2017.
Chafer, Tony (2005). ["Review: West African Challenge to Empire: Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War"](_URL_2_) (PDF). **VIII** (2). African Studies Quarterly. [ISSN](_URL_3_) [2152-2448](_URL_7_). Retrieved 12 November 2017.
M'Bokolo, Elikia "au coeur de l'ethnie ; ethnies, tribalisme et etat en afrique", 2007
& #x200B; |
joyful people are said to have a twinkle in their eyes, what physically changes in a depressed or sad person's eyes to create the "dead eye" effect? | Emotionally healthy people emote with their eyes. When they smile, the outer corners of their eyes tend to wrinkle. They raise their eyebrows when they're happy to see you. They look around to see the world and to observe others. Their eyes, in other words, are "alive."
Depressed people either don't feel these things, or spend so much time not feeling them that they lose touch with how they'd usually express them. A depressed person will smile with their mouth, but not their eyes. They won't move their gaze around to see the whole picture - they don't care. They basically use their eyes strictly as a tool to grab certain information and not trip over things. They might not even be paying attention with their eyes, or with any of their senses. They might point their eyes at you just so you'll think they're fine. In other words, their eyes are "dead." |
if the blue pigment is so uncommon in nature, where did we get the pigment to create paints in times such as the renaissance | Pigments (such as paint) were made primarily from lapis lazuli,c cobalt, and azurite. Which are all minerals. Dyes (for clothes and such) were made from plants such as woad.
[Source](_URL_0_) |
why does fresh brewed coffee taste better than 3 hour old coffee. what happens to the liquid over time? | Oxygen! When the beans are roasted, amino acids and sugars start combining and reacting, creating hundreds of new compounds that make up the smell and flavor of your coffee. There's a name for the process that I can't think of off the top of my head, something like the mallard reaction.
These new compounds are tasty, but delicate. Once they've been sitting in your cup getting touched all over by oxygen, they begin to oxidize. Oxidation is the process where oxygen molecules steal electrons from other molecules and they become unstable and start to decay. It's sort of like when you leave a cut apple out and it begins to brown because it's no longer protected by the outside skin. |
what exactly does crystal meth do to someone? what's so addicting about it? | Meth makes you really really happy. More happy than you could ever get without drugs.
But it also reduces your ability to become happy. It very quickly reaches a point where you *have* to keep using meth, because you can never really feel happy without it. |
if brian williams lies once and gets fired, why is someone like bill o'reilly still on the air? | Brian Williams wasn't fired. He was suspended for 6 months.
It's also worth noting that Williams and O'Reilly work for different networks and are involved in completely separate controversies. Furthermore, Williams is an anchor on a national news program, while O'Reilly hosts an opinion-based show. The two controversies are being handled by different organizations, so there's no requirement that their punishments must be similar. |
why do the touch screens of some mobile phones only work with the finger. they dont work with a pen or anything else. why so? | Most touch screens with a hard surface, like on phones etc, use an effect known as 'capacitive coupling' (hence the name capacitive touch screen) to sense a press. The surface of the panel forms a capacitor with your body and the circuitry senses this.
It requires a slightly conductive pointer, hence why a hotdog will work but an insulating pen wont.
A resistive touchscreen (they are *slightly* squishy to press) relies on physical pressure, so any pointer will work with them.
Then there's infra red touchscreens too, which line up a row of sensors and IR transmitters (like a row of tiny versions of your TV remote) along the edges of the screen and sense your finger blocking the light from travelling from one side to another. They can use anything that isn't transparent to work. |
In "Born in the USA" Springsteen sings "Got in a little home town jam/So they put a rifle in my hand/Sent me off to a foreign land/To go and kill the yellow man". Is he referring to some kind of punishment where troublemakers would be drafted during the Vietnam war, or something else? | A good case to examine regarding "go to jail or join the military" or "forced volunteering" is [*United States v. Catlow*](_URL_0_), conducted in the United States Army Court of Military Review and the United States Military Court of Appeals in 1973-1974. The U.S. military has always striven to obtain quality soldiers; men who are found "physically, mentally, or morally unfit" are barred from joining the military. The medical and legal standards for enlistment are sometimes relaxed in times of war, and in times of peace or after the U.S. military became all-volunteer, are often applied in a stricter manner.
Paragraph 2-6 of Army Regulation 601-210, dated May 1, 1968, provided that juveniles of enlistment age, during any point in their legal proceedings, could either continue with their proceedings as normal or, following the proper procedures, enlist voluntarily into the Regular Army for a specified term of service, after which the charges against them would be dropped;
> 2.) Persons who, as an alternative to further prosecution, indictment, trial, or incarceration in connection with the charges, or to further proceedings related to adjudication as a youthful offender or juvenile delinquent, are granted a release from the charges at any stage of the court proceedings on the condition that they will apply for or be accepted for enlistment in the Regular Army.”
Thomas W. Catlow, born on November 14, 1951, was charged with loitering, resisting arrest, assault, and illegally carrying a concealed weapon a month before his seventeenth birthday. Catlow's home life was complicated. His parents had divorced, and his mother handed over legal guardianship of him to his uncle; however, Catlow continued to live alternately with his mother and father. In juvenile court, Catlow was informed by the judge that he could either serve five years' imprisonment for the charges, or three years in the Army. It is implied that Catlow opted for the latter, and an Army recruiter contacted him to start the induction process.
Catlow was enlisted into the Army on November 20, 1968, six days after his seventeenth birthday, and the juvenile court charges were dismissed on November 28, 1968. A problem soon arose; Catlow was a minor, and his mother, who was not his legal guardian, had signed the consent form. Catlow soon made his displeasure for military service known, and informed authorities that he thought his enlistment was not genuine. Catlow went absent without leave for a cumulative period of nearly two years, and was soon court-martialed by the Army and sentenced to six months' confinement and hard labor, forfeiture of all pay and benefits, and a dishonorable discharge. Catlow appealed his conviction.
The appellate counsel (Catlow's lawyers in the appeal case) cited the Army regulation and Catlow's enlistment circumstances as proof that Catlow's enlistment into the Army was invalid, but the Army Court of Military Review rejected their assertion in *U.S. v. Catlow, 47 C.M.R. 617 (A.C.M.R., 1973)*, saying that Catlow, unlike many other jailbird soldiers, had avoided an actual conviction, that there were "many beneficial aspects of military service," and that his civilian legal proceedings and the official dismissal of the civilian charges against Catlow made his enlistment valid.
The United States Court of Military Appeals had a different opinion in *U.S. v. Catlow, 23 U.S.C.M.A. 142, 48 C.M.R. 758 (1974)*. They contended that Catlow's enlistment, as a result of the policy and circumstances, was "not the product of his own volition," and that "inherent vice affected his acquisition of the status of a member of the Army." The charges against Catlow were dismissed. Another case, from 1975, *United States v. Dumas*, played out in a similar fashion; the defendant was not given proper consent to join the military by his legal guardian, and so his enlistment was invalidated.
The U.S. military soon moved to re-write their regulations, and the choice of "go to jail or join the military" was done away with. it was still a problem in the Army as late as December 1977; many civilian courts had yet to be informed of the policy changes, which exasperated military authorities.
All U.S. military branches [now explicitly prohibit a person from enlisting](_URL_1_) if they are released from civilian legal proceedings under the stipulation that they join the military. Military recruiters are also prohibited from appearing in court on the behalf of any applicant, and may not offer advice to, or help to an unqualified applicant to enlist.
**United States Air Force:**
Air Force Recruiting Regulation, AETCI 36-2002, table 1-1, lines 7 and 8;
> [An applicant is ineligible for enlistment if they are] released from restraint, or civil suit, or charges on the condition of entering military service, if the restraint, civil suit, or criminal charges would be reinstated if the applicant does not enter military service.
**United States Army:**
Army Regulation 601-210, paragraph 4-8b;
> [Any] applicant who, as a condition for any civil conviction or adverse disposition or any other reason through a civil or criminal court, is ordered or subjected to a sentence that implies or imposes enlistment into the Armed Forces of the United States, is not eligible for enlistment.
Paragraph 4-32a of the same regulation states the following;
> Waiver is not authorized if a criminal or juvenile court charge is pending or if such a charge was dismissed or dropped at any stage of the court proceedings on condition that the offender enlists in a military service.
**United States Coast Guard:**
Coast Guard Recruiting Manual, M1100.2D, Table 2-A;
> An application may be denied when, based on articulable facts, it is determined that accession would not be in the best interest of the Coast Guard.
**United States Marine Corps:**
Marine Corps Recruiting Regulation, MCO P1100.72B, Chapter 3, Section 2, Part H, Paragraph 12;
> Applicants may not enlist as an alternative to criminal prosecution, indictment, incarceration, parole, probation, or another punitive sentence. They are ineligible for enlistment until the original assigned sentence would have been completed.
**United States Navy:**
Navy Recruiting Manual-Enlisted CNRC1130.8H, Section 02083(l):
> Applicants may not enlist as an alternative to criminal prosecution, indictment, incarceration, parole, probation, or another punitive sentence. They are ineligible for enlistment until the original assigned sentence would have been completed.
**Sources:**
"Forced Enlistments Plague the Army." *American Bar Association Journal* 63, no. 12 (December 1977): 1699.
Milburn, Travis. “Exploring Military Service as an Alternative Sanction: Evidence From Inmates' Perspectives.” Master's thesis, Eastern Kentucky University, 2012.
Schogol, Jeff. “Judge said Army or jail, but military doesn’t want him.” Stars and Stripes (Washington, D.C.), Feb. 3, 2006.
United States. United States Army. *Department of the Army Pamphlet 27-50-19 The Army Lawyer, July 1974*. Washington: United States Department of the Army, 1974. |
is it possible to attach a cable to the moon that is also attached to the earth or hangs in our atmosphere that can then be used for energy or as a means of transport to the moon and back? | No. There is no known material that could stretch that far without breaking under it's own weight. Plus, there is that whole pesky thing where the moon orbits around the earth, and both bodies are spinning themselves all the time, so we would get wrapped around each like a dog on a leash pretty quickly.
But you could get part way there with a [space elevetor](_URL_0_)
**EDIT:** The goddamn moon goddamn spins. Once every 28 days thereabouts. Yes, the same hemisphere always points towards us, and no, it won't get tangled in our leash, we will get tangled in its. But it does, in fact spin, counterclockwise from the north pole, it goddamn spins. The Earth also spins, so does your middle school science teacher, in the early grave you all have sent them to.
**EDIT 2:** I'm glad so many people got a laugh out of this, I certainly didn't see all these upvotes coming. Please stop drawing attention to this post, the Grammar Vigilantes are coming after me for ending my sentence in a preposition (but they don't seem to care that I used the singular 'teacher', and then the plural 'them', or that I misspelled 'elevator').
**EDIT 3:** Thanks for the gold. I may have to post my own ELI5 to find out what it is. I'm hoping I can use it to buy an amphibious yacht and drive around the world. |
why some import cars, such as the nissan r34 skyline is illegal to own or so hard to get in america? | The US has many many regulations on cars, stuff like emissions controls and safety. Some of this can be extremely expensive to engineer and build, and on low-production models it's not practical. The bigger problem is the testing requirements: manufacturers are required to crash test cars and it's an extremely expensive process. And if they change something, like the transmission, they may have to re-do all the crash testing.
Imported cars are required to meet many of these requirements, even if you are just trying to get one car through customs. |
for most websites, when you enter your login info incorrectly, why can't the website tell you specifically whether the username or the password is incorrect? | They *can*. They just **don't**, because doing so is a security risk. If a hacker tries a username and password and gets back "username is invalid", they'll move on to another username instead of wasting time on one that doesn't exist. And if they get back "password is invalid", they know that they have a real account, and can focus on trying to hack it.
It's more secure to never confirm or deny that an account exists. |
how does the secret service avoid hiring someone with the intent of killing the president? | Extensive background and psychological tests.
EDIT: Forgot this was ELI5...
So you are sitting at the lunch table when you get a sudden urge to poop. You look around and see all those nasty second graders eying up your oh so delicious chocolate milk. Sitting across from you are two boys, Johnny and Tommy. Johnny and you hang out a lot and you know he is a swell kinda guy. He is super nice, lets you borrow his pokemon over the weekend and his mommy, daddy, and sister are all totally rad.
Tommy, on the other hand, wipes his boogers on the playground swingset and you know that his bigger brother likes to bully the other kids.
Who are you gonna trust to hold onto your chocolate milk when you go poop? |
Why are there four different Gospels that cover much of the same material? What was the intended purpose, or who was the intended audience, of each Gospel? | The Gospels were all written at least 50 years after Christ (Mark) to 100 years after him (John).
We think the Gospels are inspired by works we have since lost. The most famous is the "Quelle" or Q source (Quelle means source in German), which is supposed to be a list of sayings of Jesus.
Basically what Bible scholars do is they read each text meticulously, line by line, then they compare what is similar and different between each. Doing this - it is pretty ingenious - they are able to reverse engineer earlier texts and even figure out what percentage of each text comes from each earlier work. We started doing this in the 1800s and it's persisted to present day Bible scholarship.
The other early work (other than Q) is Mark. Basically we think Matthew and Luke used Mark (the earliest Gospel) and Quelle as sources.
The first three Gospels are called "synoptic," meaning they have roughly the same presentation of the Jesus story.
The last Gospel, John, is considered anomalous so it gets its own category. It doesn't have the same sources as the others and Jesus goes on long, philosophical sermons in it which he doesn't in the others.
We call the authors of the Gospels the evangelists.
In the New Testament, Matthew was placed first because *originally* we thought it was the earliest Gospel. This conclusion came from its (mostly Jewish-oriented) perspective. More recently scholarship has accurately found Mark was the earliest, using the reverse engineering method I mentioned.
There is some division over how you can interpret each Gospel but I usually present it to my students as the following:
Matthew - The "Jewish" perspective on Jesus
Christianity was originally a sect of Judaism, so Matthew is often more concerned with interpreting Christ's teachings in relation to Jewish law and tradition. Matthew is also the only Gospel written in Aramaic, not Greek.
Luke - The "Gentile" (or Greek) perspective on Jesus
As time proceeded, Christianity began to attract adherents who were non-Jews (Gentiles) - mostly people from the Hellenic world - but there was much resistance to this as it was originally a Jewish sect. Luke's view is often focused on interpreting Christ to make it more accessible to non-Jews.
The next two are my views of the other Gospels and how I usually teach them (I like to keep it simple and clear), but just know you could dispute these and interpret them differently:
Mark - Emphasis on the "Humanity" of Jesus
As you know the Christian view of Christ says he has a dual nature, both human and divine. I base this reading mostly on the very interesting conclusion to Mark - the resurrection. The resurrection is left ambiguous in the original version of Mark. Jesus does not reappear to the disciples or overtly demonstrate his risen form. This Gospel also focuses on the "mystery" of who Jesus is. It is accepted he is a prophet, and he demonstrates miracles throughout, but it is unclear who he is.
John - Emphasis on the "Divinity" of Jesus
And this is how I usually frame John: as one in which the divinity of Christ is accepted - there is no "mystery" like in Mark. Focus on his godhood rather than his humanity. For example, he begins as a divine "Logos" which preexisted.
Getting back to your question - you raise a very interesting point about the unique situation in which there are four different accounts of effectively the same narrative in Christianity.
The Gospels *do* offer different versions of events, tweak the exact things said by Christ, *and* contradict each other at different points.
While in earlier epochs you might run into the danger of being accused of heresy, I feel it enriches the religion greatly and opens it up to many different analyses and lenses.
Perhaps it is also not the point we are supposed to get *the exact version of what happened,* but rather understand the overall synthesis or theme of Jesus' teaching. |
how our phones, ipods, laptops and other devices know the exact percentage of battery remaining. | They don't, it's just an estimation. As charge level decreases, so does the voltage the battery outputs. The device can measure this and use it along with other factors (how long since charger disconnect, age of battery, number of charging cycles it's gone through, etc.) to estimate how much charge it has. It's just that, though, an estimation, not an actual measurement. |
why does google have a high turnover rate when it offers such good compensation? the average google employee tenure is only 1.1 years. | Head-hunters. Head-hunters everywhere. Generally, if you landed a job at Google, you're the shit at whatever it is you do. You are *extremely* employable. Because of this, other companies want to hire these people, and the average Google employee is batting off job offers left and right.
This massive demand means that Google has to work just as hard to retain its talent as it does to attract it in the first place. |
How is it that Marijuana is considered forbidden in Islam, yet smoking hashish was such a big part of Ottoman and Turkish culture? | The short answer is that alcohol is specifically named as haram by the Qur'an, while hashish is not.
The long answer is that modern marijuana prohibition in the Muslim world is based on the simple interpretation that alcohol is haram because its mind-altering properties interfere with your relationship with Allah. Marijuana also has mind-altering properties, which can interfere with your relationship with Allah. Therefore, it is haram.
Interpretations of the Qur'an have changed over the years. The Ottomans had not developed that interpretation at the time, most likely because hashish was used like coffee and tobacco as a parlor drug, not as a means of debauchery. |
why does it seem that the more religious a society is, the more anti-sex it is? | All major religions, well the Abrahamic religions anyway. Teach that sex before marriage is wrong. Hence being 'anti-sex'.
Edit: When I said 'anti-sex', I was assuming that OP meant societies attitude towards sex before marriage. I didn't mean that any Abrahamic religion forbids sex. |
Did medieval colleges have what we today would consider electives, if so what are some examples of them? | I'm going to preface all of this by saying that every University was different, and that as time passed Universities tended to develop rather individualised traditions in different countries. If I have overlooked any special examples, I do apologize.
Generally, no. Scholasticism, the governing philosophy of early Universities, taught the Seven Liberal Arts: Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. The first three were called the *Trivium* and made up the curriculum of a Bachelors Degree. The *Trivium* was seen as preparation for studying the more difficult *Quadrivium* (the last four subjects). Once a student had completed the *Quadrivium* they were considered ready to teach at a University level, and granted a Masters Degree. Unlike modern Universities, there weren't exactly majors or minors, and in the early stages of the University there weren't individualized departments. "Faculties" of Law, Theology, Medicine, and other subjects gradually materialized.
So instead of choosing a major, fulfilling its requirements, and then taking interesting electives on the side like we do now, medieval students had to first choose a University that specialized in whatever subject they were interested in. For example, Paris was well-known for theology, Bologna was well-known for Law, and Salerno was well-known for Medicine. At University, students sometimes chose their own professors and paid them directly, or sometimes they were assigned professors and paid tuition to a central authority. The caveat was that they could only really study the Liberal Arts.
That being said, medieval intellectuals were much less confined by disciplinary boundaries once they took their Masters than modern scholars are. A scholar with enough experience and respect could research, think, and write about almost whatever they wanted.
NOTES: Paul Oldfield "The Kingdom of Sicily and the Early University Movement"
Peter Denley "Medieval Italian Universities and the Role of Foreign Scholarship"
A.B. Coban "Decentralized Teaching in the Medieval English Universities" |
how do fingernails grow when they seem so firmly (and sometimes painfully) attached to the skin underneath? | You might want to check out this other reddit post: _URL_1_
The long and short of it, apparently:
Fingernails grow outwards at a rate of approximately 3 mm per month (0.1 mm per day). This means that the skin under our nail is pulled off by our nail so slowly that the pain receptors are not set off and we feel nothing. The microscopic tears in the nail bed heal just as quickly as they are formed, so you don't notice it.
Edit: I can't seem to find a whole lot of information on this topic online. It all seems to be... conflicting. dr-mc-ninja offers a [different viewpoint below](_URL_0_). |
JFK & LBJ seem like completely opposite personalities. How well did they get along working together? | Not so well. In Robert Caro's last LBJ volume he talks about the relationship in detail. LBJ saw JFK as a lightweight in the Senate. But JFK saw the value in having Johnson on the ticket because oil-rich Texas was a crucial fundraising state for Democrats. Once in the Whitehouse JFK basically ignored Johnson and essentially treated Bobby Kennedy as his Vice President. Caro writes that during the run up to the Cuban missile crisis JFK solicited Johnson's opinion and was horrified by what he considered Johnson's irresponsible hawkishness. Their relationship got so bad that many believed Johnson was going to be removed from the ticket in 1964 in favor of then Texas governor John Connally. |
A Labour official (UK) recently stated that the Jews were the“chief financiers” of the African slave trade. Is there any truth to that? | It's absolute nonsense, and something of a popular anti-Semitic trope in some radical black nationalist circles (ironically, it's also becoming popular with neo-Nazis), and is now apparently being taken up more broadly in some far left circles. It has its origins largely in the 1991 book *The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews*, published by the Nation of Islam, which is a work of grotesque psuedoscholarship that simply does not stand up to any kind of scrutiny. I have answered a question on the exact scope of Jewish involvement in the slave trade before [here](_URL_0_), which I'll reproduce below in quote boxes:
> Well, the slave trade was a massive international enterprise; we have evidence of about 35,000 slave voyages that occurred between 1500 and 1866, and though we don't know how many ships were involved because their names often aren't recorded and others are known only by estimation, clearly you need a lot of people and a lot of ships to pull that off. So within that operation, you're of course going to get involvement of Jewish labour and finance; that's an inevitability. On the whole though, Jewish involvement is entirely in line with their representation in the population; there is no disproportionate rate of investment or participation on the part of Jewish people.
> For example, from 1715 to 1765, we have evidence of only 377 slaves who were brought from Africa to New York on ships owned by Jewish accounts or financed by Jewish capital; that's less than 1% of the total slaving activity in that period. The largest area of Jewish involvement seems to be in the trade of slaves out of Jamaica onto continental North America, where Jewish investment accounts for 8% of all traffic there before the slave trade is abolished by Britain; but this is an exception rather than a rule, and in other contexts Jewish involvement is virtually non-existent. In importing slaves to Jamaica for instance, only 0.4% of all slaves were transported on Jewish ships. The broad pattern is one of minimal Jewish involvement in the slave trade and especially in the trade coming out of Africa. In the Caribbean, we also generally find - with the exception of Suriname (where there was disproportionately high Jewish investment in sugar) - that when Jewish families and estates own slaves in the colonies themselves, they own fewer slaves than their Christian counterparts.
> So if we were to take the Jewish involvement out of the equation, and assume that no-one had filled the gap of Jewish involvement, we would see only the tiniest reduction in the volume of the transatlantic trade. Jewish people simply were not involved in the slave trade in any meaningful way, as either distant financiers or as ship operators; whilst it is important to acknowledge the role of every agent in the slave trade and slavery, as a whole Jewish involvement is quite ancillary to the story.
Eli Faber's book *Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight* (1999) is a superb rejection of the idea that the Jews were the driving force behind the slave trade, and is essentially a direct response to the nonsense peddled in the 1991 National of Islam book; such is the lack of support for the idea in academic circles that some reviewers were confused as to why Faber had bothered to write a book disproving something that no-one in academia believed in the first place! |
20 years ago there was a lot of fear about the effects of china having too many men because of sex-selective abortion. shouldn't we be seeing the brunt of that now? | there have been much talks about it. China is the leading male-female disparity country for the young generation age group. by 2012 census, there are 40 million more males than females. additionally most people in the under 30 age group are only childs as well.
there already a big gap of unmarried males because of unable to find a partner, whereas almost all females in the 20-30 age group are married. |
why does air come up from underwater in bubbles instead of a constant flow of air | Ever notice how if you drop water on a table it wants to stick to itself and form little beads, instead of spreading out evenly? One of the properties of water molecules is that there is an uneven distribution of electrical charge. Molecules like this are called polar molecules. [Picture](_URL_0_) The cause has to do with the shape in which the hydrogen and oxygen bond together, and how that causes the electrons to be distributed around the molecules. One side is positively charges, the other negative, so water molecules want to stick to one another (positive from one to negative of another). A cup of water is, in a sense, like a cup full of weak magnets.
When you add air to a container of water, it could spread out into an even stream, or disperse evenly, but because all of the water wants to stay together, it segregates itself from the air, forming bubbles. This is the same phenomena that makes oil and water not want to mix. Oil is a non-polar molecule, so when you mix it with water, the water forces all of the oil into a separate spot so that the water can all be together.
Density also plays some role in this: air, oil, etc. separate to the top or bottom because they have a different density than water, but the reason they do so in individual bubbles is because water is a polar molecule. |
how felix baumgartner broke the sound barrier if humans have a terminal velocity of around 175 mph? | Terminal velocity isn't just some number that's always true. It's the velocity at which air resistance (which increases with velocity) matches gravity (which barely changes). As such, it depends on air pressure which directly relates to air resistance, plus also stuff like surface area. Since Baumgartner jumped from so high, air pressure is extremely low, and terminal velocity is higher than in convential jumps. As Baumgartner fell to more normal altitudes, air pressure increased and he slowed down. |
many games didn't come out for the n64 because the cartridges could only hold up to 32 or 64mb. yet when you open one up, it's mostly empty. could they have not just put more chips on a larger board? | It's not a matter of how much space is in the cartridge that limits the size, it's how much linear address space the cartridge slot can address. The issue was the design of the console itself, not the cartridges per se.
edit: thanks for all the upvotes, folks, but i was wrong here. This is a memory mapping architecture issue, not an address lines issue. The memory map only allocates $8000-$FFFF as rom cartridge space. That is 32 megs. So we also now know that 64meg cartridges were bank selected. Can someone translate that to 5 year old speak for me? i got stuff to do. |
why do places like new york city use a steam network to heat buildings where in other parts of the world use boilers and pipes? | New York City is an old city with old buildings. Back in the day, it was seen as "modern" to have a central steam facility pushing steam to buildings rather than requiring them all to operate their own boiler.
These buildings are still standing & the technology works well enough that it's still used. Nobody would build a city this way today - we have gas & electric heaters - but it's not worth tearing it out and replacing it. |
why do pens dry out when the cap is left off, but the caps themselves have holes? | The pens dry out because the ink contains solvents. The solvents are volatile and will evaporate if exposed to the air too much.
The caps slow this down but they don't completely prevent it. The solvents will still evaporate but will largely just sit inside the lid if there's no air moving past the pen.
The holes in the lid are there so children are less likely to choke and suffocate if they swallow one.
Edit: I'll just add this...
_URL_0_ |
Why was the US caught so unaware during the battle of the bulge if they had cracked top level German communications? | Although the German high command still considered the Enigma cipher machine secure, they did suspect heavily that the Western Allies were using signal analysis (i.e. studying the frequency or size of intercepted signals to glean information on German intentions) and human intelligence from agents in occupied territory to aid their understanding of upcoming operations. So during the leadup to the Second Ardennes Offensive the Germans sent no signals over radio, but sent individual messengers with orders. Couple this with almost all preparations being prepared on German soil meant there would be very few leaks of human intelligence. The Germans even gave the operation a defensive sounding code name: Die wacht am Rhein (Watch on the Rhine).
So the Germans went out of their way to mount a surprise offensive, and the Americans (and Brits for that matter) fundamentally underestimated German capabilities and intentions. The American 12th Army Group was sending officers on leave and preparing to dig in along the front for the winter after the debacle of Operation Market Garden failed to get the Western Allies into Germany. The only divisions in reserve on the whole Western Front were the Airborne Corps consisting of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. The Allies had no idea the Germans had been able to assemble such a collection of armor, had the fuel reserves to mount an offensive with them, or would dare to mass their armor together in the face of total allied air superiority.
The Germans managed to gather armor and fuel by starving the Eastern and Italian fronts, stockpiling as much as possible, and running the whole operation on the barest of shoestrings with armored columns being expected to capture Allied fuel and ammo dumps for resupply. The Germans were only able to supply two day's worth of supplies for an all out offensive, and if the timetable was even slightly disrupted the chances of reaching Antwerp were virtually nil. To counter Allied air supremacy, the attack was to be mounted in fog and snow when allied fighters would be grounded.
In the event, the offensive was a shambles despite success the first day. The Germans had little trouble breaking through the weak American front across from them: the four American divisions were either green or had just come out of a nasty battle in a nearby forest that left them depleted and needing reinforcement. One - the first incidentally - of several important communications hubs on the way to the Meuse river was Bastogne, which possessed seven roads in and out of town. Hastily occupied by a brigade of the 10th Armored Division and the under supplied and lightly equipped 101st Airborne Division, the German 5th Panzerarmee threw almost all its strength against Bastogne but failed to either defeat the Americans or force their surrender which totally disrupted the German left flank of the advance. The 6th SS Panzerarmee on the right was checked by Americans and a few Brits dug in along heights to the north if St Vith, and was forced westward *away* from the Meuse where it too was to be checked when the 2nd Armored division met the 2nd Panzer division and fought them to a standstill.
Meanwhile, the weather cleared and Allied fighters began to hunt down every German tank they could find. The ever energetic Patton had already pulled his third Army out of an eastward attack, and with startling rapidity turned them 90 degrees toward north and set off on a new attack towards Bastogne where the 101st Airborne was successfully holding off a Panzerarmee by itself and kindly brought them supplies to go over to the attack. Hitler declared there would be no retreats from ground gained, and Patton said to Bradley (I paraphrase) the kraut has stuck his head in a meat grinder and I've got my hand on the crank.
At no point, despite the total initial surprise and the confusion sewn in the rear areas by German commando operations, was the offensive seriously likely to succeed. The conditions were too poor, the Germans to shaky logistically and the American Paratroops too stubborn to let the Germans pass. |
why can't surgeons simply cut out the fat and excess skin or perform extreme liposuction to people that weigh 500+lbs? | The body will react adversely to a sudden change. It's for this reason too that people who are fasting never go for a buffet on finishing it. Instead they start slowly with liquids then light food before they can return to their normal diets. The human body needs to get conditioned. A sudden loss of fat might end up killing the person. |
Atatürk reformed and secularized Turkey. He changed many things to differentiate the new Turkish republic from the fallen Ottoman empire. He, for example, changed the alphabet, abolished the Caliphate, etc. Why did he stick with the obviously non-secular Ottoman flag, then? | I'm not entirely sure why the flag is "obviously non-secular." The star and crescent's association with Islam is because of the Ottomans, not the other way around, and is a Turkic symbol. See for example these previous threads on the matter:
_URL_1_
_URL_0_
If you had some other idea as to why it's obviously non-secular perhaps you could elaborate? |
British artillery could have shot at Napoleon during the Battle of Waterloo but Wellington refused the opportunity and said "It is not the business of commanders to be firing upon one another". Why did he say this? | There was a similar controversy during the Civil War in which an artillery barrage ordered by General William T. Sherman killed Confederate General Leonidas Polk (in fact, Polk was cut in half by a shell). Sherman goes to deliberate lengths in his memoir to say that this was not intentional but simply meant to scatter the cluster of officers who were observing his troops. As I think your question implies, this is somewhat strange considering the strategic advantages inherent in killing the leader of your opposing troops. You would think he would claim credit for it!
I would venture to say that aside from the general notions of honor and military protocol prevalent among military elite at that time, another part of it is that leaderless troops aren't exactly *good* for anyone, even for their opponents. The chaos and the disorder that go along with such an event do not necessarily make for decisive victory, can lead to slaughter and uncontrollable troops, nor always settle the conflict as it needs to be settled. |
how do shows like the walking dead get such realistic backgrounds of places. (city, towns etc..) | Your example is just a movie lot. With fancy editing, a very enclosed space can seem much more expansive. The same can be done when shooting on location: close off half a block of city street and shoot it from three different angles, you can make it seem like you're shooting across half a mile of city.
But CGI is used a LOT more than you might think to replace backgrounds and add detail. Check out [this video.] (_URL_0_) I'm willing to bet you never would have guessed that most or even all of those were entirely faked. |
what is the emotional 'awwww' feeling we get when we see cute things? why does it happen? | This is basically the brain releasing neurotransmitters like oxytocin which is normally only released when we are in love or when we feel safe/protected or are caring for children. Allegedly animals we find cute (cats/dogs) were selected for their "cuteness" over centuries but what makes them cute turns out to be the ratio/proportion/distance of their eyes and face face shape, which is nearly that of human children. So, in essence only human children were originally meant to elicit that feeling but we have created/found other things that also stimulate that part of the brain and thus sort of tricks us into finding it attractive/urge to protect it from harm. Baby animals are also like this and there have been citations of adult animals caring for young of other species probably also for similar reasons: their brains are sort of hardwired to instinctively care for "cute things" which babies of most species are. |
in english, why is "i" capitalized, but not "me"? | **ELI5: Probably because it looks better.**
Once *I* became a single letter (originally it was normally spelt *ic*) it gradually grew taller because (and I suppose this is conjecture) it didn't look very good. Originally it was not capitalised and it is a trend that started at the end of the 1300s (i.e. when Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales) and has stuck.
Edit: As /u/proudlom points out [in his comment below](_URL_0_) there is no definitive answer to this question. |
how can roman bridges be still standing after 2000 years, but my 10 year old concrete driveway is cracking? | Because they are two totally different things with almost nothing in common. If you built a Roman style arched bridge today it too would last forever.
Lemme elaborate: Your driveway has to flex like a big long beam, the bridge is an arch. All of the weight there is going straight down into the rocks of the arch legs. Concrete can't bend very well. Rocks are really good at just holding up weight. Your driveway is all concrete that cracks (except for the aggregate, but let's move along), the the arch legs of those bridges are big hunks of rock that don't crack. Your driveway has rebar. The bridge doesn't. Your driveway is sitting on top of the soil, which moves every year as the ground freezes and thaws. Or as water erodes it. Or about a thousand other things that can undermine what your driveway is sitting on. The legs of those Roman bridges go down to bedrock and don't move.
All of these things cause your driveway to crack and the bridge to not. |
why do towels that feel so rough on the skin dry you so much better, but towels that feel soft don t dry well at all? | Part of roughness means there's more highs & lows in the towel fibers. That increased surface area allows more area for absorption and therefore allows for better drying.
You could try to make a towel soft by increasing the density of fibers/yarns but then if you increase it too much you just approach a solid surface meaning there's less surface area for absorption again. I'd say in reality there's a balance in the type of fibers/cloth a towel has which determines its softness/absorption capabilities and your actual fiber/yarn count. There are very soft towels (supima cotton) which can be [extremely good at drying](_URL_0_). You don't necessarily need to sand your skin to get a good towel. I personally use the Pottery Barn towels that Sweet Home recommended a few years ago, and they've spoiled me. I end up hating most towels at hotels unless I stay at a nice place. Even the JW I stayed at a few months ago had towels that felt like sandpaper. |
when you drink a significantly larger amount of liquid than the average bladder can hold, what does the body do with surplus until it's time to let it go? | Consumed liquid doesn't immediately find its way to the bladder.
First, it sits around in the stomach until the stomach contents are sufficiently digested, where the mixture is passed to the intestines. Most of the water is absorbed into the blood stream in the large intestine.
Once in the blood, the excess water is removed by the kidneys and then passed down to the bladder.
All of these processes take time, and the bladder gradually fills until you feel the urge to urinate. |
There are a number of famous "Lonely Mountains," such as Mt. Fuji or Mt. Rainier. Did J.R.R. Tolkien ever visit any of them? If not the real world, was there a literary or mythical inspiration that he drew upon to create Erebor? | One of the most hated interview questions among authors is what in their published works was “inspired” by real life. The novelist Jonathan Franzen likes to tell the story of a writer who sarcastically answers such questions with percentages.
> “Is your new book inspired by your life?”
> “Yes, 26 % of it.”*
The point is that a writer’s work is entirely dependent upon her life, knowledge and experiences. But even the writer may not be able to decisively pinpoint something in her work and say “this chapter was inspired by my own life but this chapter came from my imagination”.
In the case of J.R.R. Tolkien, his life and writing are extremely well-documented. He left copious notes behind and his friends and family have been willing to talk to researchers and biographers. For instance, Tolkien admits the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings “owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme” and that Bilbo and the Dwarves’ journey in the Misty Mountains was inspired by his own experiences hiking in Switzerland.
Other aspects of his work have been directly linked to real-world counterparts, such Beorn’s house which has been decisively traced to Hrolf Kraki’s Hall. Tolkien’s illustrations of Beorn and his dwelling are unmistakably copied from a “Nordic mead-hall” published by his friend E.V. Gordon in An introduction to Old Norse.
The Lonely Mountain was originally called the Black Mountain in early drafts of The Hobbit. The first maps Tolkien drew of the area showed that it was not quite lonely – in fact, it was probably loosely connected to a mountain chain at its north-east corner or to the Iron Mountains, the home of the dwarf Dain and his kin. This idea is retained somewhat in his published maps and text, although the Mountain’s solitary nature became much more prominent as the Hobbit narrative developed.
The prime role of the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit is the home of the dragon. In Tolkien’s writings dragons are drawn from a tradition depicting them lying on mounds of treasure in prominent lairs. This is the case with Beowulf’s dragon, Sigurd’s Fafnir, as well as “early Silmarillion” dragons like Glorund.
The bad guys in Tolkien’s writings at this stage tend to have major heights for their strongholds, including the Necromancer’s castle and Sauron’s tower in the Luthien myth (Sauron is named Thu at early stages). This idea survived into the Lord of the Rings with the Dark Tower in Mordor and Saruman’s Orthanc in Isengard. In the case of dragon's, they are depicted as more of an animalistic or natural power, so they are in prominent natural landmarks like mountains instead of built landmarks such as towers.
So the dragon lair needs to be prominent, and no height is more prominent than a volcano. Was the Lonely Mountain a volcano or inspired by a real-life volcano? One of the most compelling pieces of evidence is Tolkien’s own [drawings](_URL_0_), which depicts a noticeable crater at the top.
What kind of mountain has a crater, unless it is a volcano? Case solved, right? Well, maybe not. In the published text no crater is mentioned.
> Only its high peak could they see in clear weather, and they seldom looked at it, for it was ominous and dreary even in the light of morning.
> There far away was the Lonely Mountain on the edge of eyesight. On its highest peak snow yet unmelted was gleaming pale.
So what conclusions can we draw? John D. Rateliff has a good point to make regarding the geography of Tolkien’s world. Tolkien was writing a legendary history.
> The ‘legendary’ part is worth stressing, since Tolkien was writing fantasy, not pseudo-history or pseudoscience… This liberates him from any obligation to make the details of his setting consistent with ‘what geologists may say or surmise’…
So what is the decisive answer? How much of the Lonely Mountain was inspired by mythical or real-life places?
26% of it, of course. ;)
There is a huge wealth of great material regarding Tolkien and his works, but in regards to this question I drew heavily upon John D. Rateliff’s two-volume The History of the Hobbit.
* Note: I don't recall the actual percentage Franzen says in his joke, but the actual number is irrelevant in regards to how much of a writer's work is "imaginary" or "real". |
my daughter asked me what condensation is, i tried i explaining but she didn't understand. i need a genuine eli5 on what condensation is. | There's lots of water that hangs out in the air. It's very spread out and in very, very small little bits. Some stuff is really good at attracting these little bits of water and collecting them. One thing that does this is a surface that's really cold, like a chilly glass.
Water has an easier time of hanging out in the air when it's warmer, so when the chilly glass makes the air around it colder, the water in the air has a hard time staying in the air and sticks to the glass instead. |
why is the name "sean" pronounced like "shawn" when there's no letter h in it? | Seán comes from the Irish name for John, the accent on the a (called a fada) makes the a longer and so changes the pronunciation as well as this Se in Irish is often pronounces as SH.
The name Shawn in an anglicised version of the Irish name Seán. |
Why is Paris a popular city for peace negotiations? Why are there over 20 treaties of Paris? | This doesn't seem to be anything unusual for a European capital. According to Wikipedia:
[25ish in London](_URL_1_)
[10 in Madrid](_URL_2_)
[6 in Lisbon](_URL_0_
[9 in Berin](_URL_3_)
[12 in Vienna](_URL_4_) |
how can the president sign all these executive orders without approval? what's to stop them from making all their campaign promises and their party's agenda into executive orders? | Executive orders can only impact very narrow areas. They are, by definition, orders issued by the chief of the executive branch of the federal government, and as such can only impact federal agencies directly under the control of the executive branch, or in areas where authority has been expressly delegated to the executive branch by Congress.
The president cannot legislate by fiat, and such power remains vested in Congress. |
why do humans need pillows and what would happen if we slept without them on a regular basis? would this cause long term spinal problems? | Edit 4: All the way at the top so you can read it first.
Disclaimer: I am not a ~~doctor nor chiropractor~~ medical professional. While I do have some medical experience, I am in no way qualified to provide medical advice. I am simply sharing what training I've received and my personal experiences either with customers or what I've felt myself. I am doing this of my own free will at the low low price of... wait for it.. free. Yes that was a salesman joke. Now all comments I've expressed are opinionated. Please research this topic yourself before purchasing a mattress. Trust but verify.
I currently work at a Colorado based Mattress Store. While you don't need a mattress or a pillow, it does wonders for hip, neck, back, and shoulder pains.
A properly fitted mattress provides about 2/3rds of your support. The mattress in conjunction with the pillow provides the remaining 1/3rd. I feel that this support is necessary IF you want the best nights rest possible. You can still sleep without it but not optimally. The way it was explained in my training is as follows.
A mattress that is actually fitted to your sleeping habits and body, reduces how much your muscles have to work throughout the night to maintain the natural S curve of your spine. If your muscles work hard throughout the night maintaining this position you tend to wake up with a tense back and/or back pain. The part the pillow plays is also quite important. An improperly fitted pillow typically causes neck pain due to similar reasons. The neck muscles work and are stretched throughout the night from the lack of support.
Please note that this a very general statement and that every person is different as well as the mattress they sleep on. Many people will say that they sleep absolutely amazing on their current mattress that is 40 years old (no exaggeration, true story). However, I used to think that Motorola Razr was the best phone ever. Then I tried something new, the Samsung Note. To be clear, my point is that just because you feel something is the best you've ever experienced doesn't mean you can't experience something better.
Bonus (A few general mattress rules) :
If you are a side sleeper try to avoid firm mattresses. They place a lot of pressure on your shoulders and hips with very little give. This leads to more tossing and turning throughout the night (even if you aren't completely awake/aware).
Adjustable bases, sometimes called hospital beds, are used in hospitals for a reason. They reduce pressure on your body by forming a S curve to help match your spine's curve. Also, they raise your feet above your heart causing increased blood flow to facilitate healing. Why do you think doctors tell you to keep certain injuries elevated?
In regards to pillows, most stomach sleepers need a thin pillow. Side sleepers often need the thickest. The reason for that relates to your shoulders. The pillow needs to be about as thick as the distance from your neck to the edge of your shoulder so that the neck is in line with spine. Back sleepers are often needing something in the middle. Although almost every customer claims to need the fluffiest fluffernugget of a pillow we have. Very few of them will listen otherwise. So we sell it to them. The customer is always right. No matter how ridiculously wrong they are.
Edit 1: A lot of people have asked about the best pillow for someone who switches between their stomach and side throughout the night. There isn't a specific pillow or really even a best one. What works for me may not work for you. However this is what I personally do:
What worked for me, and **might** work for you is this. I purchased a thin pillow that I was comfortable with on my stomach. Now, most side sleepers end up having an arm underneath the pillow essentially "increasing" the thickness of the pillow to match a so called side sleeper pillow. This worked for me. My arm made up for the missing padding. Again, this is what is good for me.
Edit 2: There has been a fair amount of skepticism regarding the increased blood flow portion of this comment. The medical field is slightly outside my area of knowledge. However, while I am not currently retracting this statement, I am going to research a little more in depth. Hopefully I come back with a more satisfactory explanation.
Edit 3: Wow. Um. Gold. Huh. I really appreciate that! Truly!
*obligatory first gold comment followed by lame pun*
Edit 5: There's been a lot more interest on this subject than I expected. I've answered most of the questions at least once, some more. If I haven't addressed yours, the answer may be in another comment. Tonight however, I'm turning in. I may be able to answer some tomorrow morning. Past that, I feel like the subject was been pretty well exhausted. I do wish I every a excellent night's rest! Good night!
Edit 6: Editing the edit. I get it, a lot of people don't like chiropractors. |
why does it take 30 mins for my dogs bloodwork to come back yet mine takes 24 hours? | Probably depends upon the workload of the lab techs and/or the urgency of your results.
I'm Aircrew in the military (not U.S.) and my blood work comes back within a week for my yearly medical, but if I'm sick and possibly medically grounded, my results have come back as quick as 1 hour.
Also, certain tests require more time. Perhaps your dogs tests are simple and yours are not... |
since the ps4 and xb1 are x86 based, how come you can't just rip the os and run it in a vm to emulate them? | _URL_0_
Making everything the guy above me mean jack shit.
The reason why you can't just do it is because it's encrypted on the nand flash, but if you figure those keys out, you can run it as an os on a pc. No need for an APU cause you can modify the IRQ addresses |
a piano and a violin can play the same note but their sound differs; you can tell them apart. how do notes differ with each instrument, but retain the characteristics of its assigned pitch? | Sounds are usually described by three characteristics - pitch, loudness, and quality (or "timbre"). Pitch is determined by frequency and describes how high or low a note is. Loudness is what it sounds like (forgive the pun - I simply mean loudness is self-explanatory). Everything else is generally categorized as "timbre," which is what allows you to tell the difference between a piano and violin playing a note at the same pitch and loudness.
Quite a bit goes into timbre such as harmonic content, attack and decay, and vibrato. I don't really know enough about those to explain them further other than to say they are characteristics of sound waves that affect how you hear, but don't change the pitch or loudness. If you can find an app that lets you play around with a synthesizer, you can usually change those settings directly so you can play around with how they affect sound.
Edit: There are some more technical responses below from people who know more about this than I do. Check them out for more details. And thanks to everyone who provided more details!
Edit 2: Most of the comments below are saying that attack (the beginning of a sound and how long it takes to get to peak volume/loudness) and slight variations in the pitch and loudness are the physical properties that create different timbres, though the area is still being researched. Apparently when you play a note on an instrument the part of the instrument producing the note actually produces multiple frequencies and can have slight variations in loudness. The frequencies not associated with the pitch you hear are called overtones. You generally only perceive the fundamental frequency (the pitch of the note), but the overtones change how you perceive that. To bring it back to your original question, you can tell the difference between a piano and violin playing middle C because they have different attack, overtones, and the loudness during the note will change slightly. And you might not be able to tell the difference if you didn't hear the attack (the beginning of the note).
As an added bonus, if I understand correctly, the different overtones result in a different spectral flux and the changing loudness over the duration of the note results in a different spectral envelope. |
If the use of magic was seen as heresy in the Catholic church, why was Merlin, a renowned wizard, seen as a good and admirable figure from the Arthurian legends? | sorry if this is against the rules, but sort of a side-question, challenge of the basic assumptions of this question:
was Merlin even viewed as a "wizard" in the sense that we think of him today? I feel like a lot of people's conception of Merlin today might come from the Disney Sword in the Stone movie which portrays him as a sort of crackpot always casting spells and doing "magic". But, I read most of Book 1 of Le Morte d'Arthur and in it, I believe the only real "magic" that he does is at the very beginning he turns Arthur's dad into a likeness of Arthur's mom's husband so that he can bang her. After that, it seemed liked all Merlin really did was tell the future (Arthur would come to him for council and Merlin would say "blah blah blah is going to happen and this person is going to fight this person and the result of the battle will be this person is going to die")
Basically, I wonder if the question should be: was he even viewed as a "wizard" (and what did that mean back then - also no time is specified so when?) and was he even viewed as "good and admirable"? because the OP makes the assumption that he was but maybe the Catholic church was anti-Merlin.
I think a better question would be: What was the Catholic church's stance on "magic" during the popularity of Arthurian legend (medieval time period) and how was Merlin viewed in the eyes of the church and the general populace? |
why did iraq invade and annex kuwait in 1990? how could they have not anticipated that much stronger countries allied to kuwait would intervene and drive them out? | Because, well, history wasn't on the side of that. Iraq was the strongest military power in the region. While the Cold War was winding down, the US and USSR still didn't see eye to eye, and both had, within the past generation, had foreign military adventures (Vietnam and Afghanistan) that were PR disasters at home.
Saddam figured that as long as the oil kept flowing, the west wouldn't give a shit who was selling it, or about the politics of the region.
That math might have been true a decade earlier, but clearly not in 1990. |
why does the severe weather alert system that broadcasts over your television sound like i'm logging on to the internet in the 90's? | It's actually quite intentional.
The Emergency Alert System is designed to be broadcast in case of any emergency, whether it's a weather alert or a Presidential Alert. The system doesn't differentiate where the signal is sent, and is broadcast nationally for each alert, but you don't see the ones that don't apply to you because of those tones at the beginning of the broadcast.
The first time the modem noise is played, the EAS is broadcasting information about the affected area, the type of alert, and the originator to the EAS device located at the station. This code is then repeated two additional times in order to ensure that the data was correctly interpreted on the receiving end. The receiver at the broadcast station reads this data, determines automatically if the alert is valid for the broadcast area, and cuts into whatever is playing in order to relay the information.
This is the same principal as the handshake your modem used to connect to the internet, but with different data since certain things are assumed (Baud rate, transmission format, frequency, etc.)
The three tones at the end of the EAS broadcast are the "End of Message" tones.
TL;dr: It's because the alerts are sent by a system that's pretty close to a modem.
(edit: Moved a few letters around for clarity's sake.) |
Was there anyone in Hitler's High Command that had serious misgivings about invading Poland and triggering the Second World War so soon after recovering from the First? Or was it a unanimous decision to put boots overseas? | The line in the sand for the German Generals was not the invasion of Poland. By then, it was already too late. It was the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Their resistance to Hitler's war plans in 1938 and before the invasion of Czechoslovakia were the reason why he used the first chance to get rid of General Werner von Blomberg, then War Secretary and CiC of the Wehrmacht, as well as General Werner von Fritsch, then CiC of the Army, in the so-called [Blomberg–Fritsch Affair](_URL_3_): Hitler blackmailed Blomberg with the latter's much younger wife's past and had his henchman Heydrich disseminate rumours that Fritsch was homosexual. Von Blomberg was pressured into retirement, von Fritsch was transferred and later sought death in combat.
Even after Hitler forcibly retired 16 Generals and transferred 44 more, the head of the German General Staff [Ludwig Beck](_URL_1_) tried to organize his peers against Hitler's war plans. A meeting that took place on August 4th 1938 showed that with the exceptions of Generals Ernst Busch and Walter von Reichenau, the entire General Staff presciently considered a war to be unwinnable and eventually to lead into catastrophe. In particular, General [Erwin von Witzleben](_URL_0_) made plans together with, among others, Generals Franz Halder, Walter Graf von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt, Paul von Hase and Erich Hoepner to arrest, imprison and eventually put Hitler before a court in the event of a Franco-British declaration of war. At the same time, [Admiral Wilhelm Canaris](_URL_2_), who was working with Beck and von Witzleben, sent Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin to Britain as his envoy, asking for a British declaration of war in the event of a Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. That declaration would have given the General Staff both the pretext and support for the above-mentioned overthrow of Hitler.
Chamberlain's caving-in at Munich however destroyed the German generals' plans. Beck was eventually pressured into retirement, von Witzleben was transferred to Heeresgruppe two and Canaris shifted his efforts to more clandestine means. All of them were and eventually killed after the failed [20 July plot](_URL_4_).
Other Source:
Joachim C. Fest: Plotting Hitler's Death: The German Resistance to Hitler, 1933-1945. Phoenix, 1996 - ISBN 0753800403 |
how is the earth's core still hot 4.5 billion years into its existence? | The earth is actually still heating itself. We're not just a bunch of rock, the core and mantle actually have atoms breaking down, releasing heat. We are effectively sat on a nuclear reactor set to slow.
Early earth was hotter, and has lost a LOT of heat over time, but the amount we have left isn't just here form the start, our planet is effectively burning fuel to keep active. |
Historically, do Native Americans on reservations tend to vote in US Presidential and Congressional elections? Do Presidential candidates try to court this group? | Actually, no. Historically, Native Americans have had low voter turnout rates. And likewise, candidates do not often try to gain the Native vote as opposed to other groups. There are several reasons for this.
**Population**
The first deals with population. [In 1920, the population of the United States was approximately 106,021,500.](_URL_0_) The American Indian population was between [~244,400 and ~336,300,](_URL_6_) depending on the agency who conducted the census (either the Census Bureau or the BIA). For the natives, this makes up between 0.23% - 0.31% of the U.S. population around the time the Indian Citizenship Act was passed in 1924. With Indians making up so little of the population, there was no benefit for candidates to try and campaign for their vote by the time they were counted as citizens.
Even today, the Indigenous populations of the U.S. make up only [1.7% of the population at best, 0.9% at worst.](_URL_5_)
**Government Prohibitions**
Prior to 1924, some Native Americans did become U.S. citizens. This was accomplished through several means. Certain treaties made provisions for Indians to accept U.S. citizenship if they met certain requirements. Others became citizens once land was alloted to them via the General Allotment Act of 1887. However, this still did not grant them the ability to vote.
[In 1884, a particular case made it all the way to the Supreme Court.](_URL_3_) An Indian man had tried to register to vote in Nebraska, but was denied, even after having renounced his tribal citizenship. When the Supreme Court made its ruling, they decided that American Indians were not covered under the 14th Amendment and they refused them the ability to vote.
Despite all Indians becoming citizens in 1924, many state governments continued to be opposed to Indians being able to vote, particularly those states with large native populations. They worked their way around the 15th Amendment (passed in 1870), which barred states from passing laws that prohibited citizens to vote based on race, by passing laws that targeted natives on reservations, land that isn't under state jurisdiction. Through this method, states like South Dakota denied Indians the right to vote until the 1940s. New Mexico denied Native Americans from voting until 1962.
So regardless if Indians were looking to vote or not, many of them simply couldn't.
**Voter Participation System**
In this category, there are a few things that would hinder Native Americans from voting. One big thing is poverty. One analysis from 2012 reports the following:
> Voting experts have found that income is a major predictor of whether an individual is registered to vote.^6 Among the American population at large, 11.5 million low-income Americans are not registered to vote and the registration gap between low-income and high-income citizens is over 19 percent.^7 According to the Census, 12 percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives live below 50 percent of the poverty level, and 26 percent live below 100 percent of the poverty line.^[1]
Additionally, many Native Americans do not have easy access to voting stations. Since a number of reservations were placed in isolated and unfavorable areas when they were established, the natives who continue to live there face difficulties when attempting to vote. [This is made evident even in recent elections in states like Nevada.](_URL_2_)
**History and Culture**
This section is probably the biggest reason why we see Native American voting turnouts so low and answers if they are politically active.
I don't think it is a big surprise that Native Americans have a huge distrust of the government, whether local, state, or federal. There is a joke in Indian Country about how "Indians don't sign papers" or "remember the last time we signed a piece of paper?" The general notion is often along the lines of "Why vote? We [Indians] get screwed over either way." The distrust runs so deep that Native Americans have a hard time even voting in their own *tribal* elections. There are plenty of historical reasons as to why this is, but even contemporary reasons. David Wilkins highlights the tension on the state level by saying:
> Although sharing a level of citizenship and land masses, the sovereigns have jealously guarded and been protective of their collective political, economic, and cultural resources. Tribes resent the states' constant attempts to tax and regulate their lands, wages, and industries, and are displease that many states are still reluctant to concede the reality of tribal sovereignty and recognized tribal competence to handle increasing amounts of regulatory, judicial, and administrative duties. States, especially the western states, resent the fact that they lack basic jurisdiction over Indian lands and may not tax those territories without congressional and tribal consent.^[2]
But native voter participation will vary from place to place, tribe to tribe. Many tribes in the Pacific Northwest are of a more liberal nature from what I have experienced. Plus, many of those reservations are located in urban areas. This offers more voting locations, more societal influence, and chances of decrease poverty. But tribal citizens that hold fast to their traditions often rejecting voting. This is because voting and the structure of tribal governments are not Indigenous institutions. By voting, many natives believe this legitimizes the colonizer's rule and do not want to participate in that, which is understandable. Personally, I avoided voting for a while because of these reasons. It was actually only this year that I decided to vote. The earlier cited report also relays this:
> Attitudes about voting vary among tribes and individuals. While a small handful of tribes express hostility toward voting in American elections, many more are strongly in favor of it. As Jefferson Keel president of the National Congress Of American Indians, stated at the most recent annual State of Indian Nations Address, “As grandmas on the Navajo nation and young people in Alaska Native villages go to the ballot box this November, they are stand-ing on the shoulders of those who fought hard for that right...Our America is a place where all candidates know that we matter, and America sees it at the ballot box.”^14 According to Wilkins, “Many of the native nations argue, in fact, that from their perspective, voting may be the best and possibly only way to protect their remaining land rights, economic rights to conduct gaming operations, and cultural rights like bilingual education.”^15
Since many Native Americans faced issues that are inherent in their status that do not affect other groups in the United States, the general concept for many Indians is that to be native is to be political. The struggle for sovereignty and the demonstration of that sovereignty conveys a political message even if it is being carried out through different aspects, such as a social movement. What is happening in North Dakota with the Standing Rock Sioux is an example. Another would be the American Indian Movement during the 70s. Since tribal members typically possess dual citizenship, their actions either call into play or effect something in the political sphere. Native Americans are often involved in politics, but it is their own politics, whether traditional or tribal governance. In terms of the American political system, we are starting to see the emergence of a larger politically active bloc for Native Americans.^[1] Younger generations and changing political landscapes have started to change the previously held ideas. Not an abandonment of tradition, but a re-envisioning of where Native Americans should direct their attention in order to improve tribal sovereignty.
Beyond that, I can't go much further without violating the 20 year rule.
**Conclusion**
For many years even after becoming citizens, Native Americans have faced challenges when it comes to voting, regardless if they wanted to or not. Because of their relatively small population numbers, they are often not large enough to warrant the attention of political candidates like those running for President. However, smaller elections would benefit in doing so because some states have, proportionally speaking, large native populations like tribes in the Southwest U.S.
Many Native Americans are against voting in U.S. elections, but it really comes down to the area and tribe. As for being politically active, that all depends on the context, whether that be personal, local, tribal, state, or federal politics. In the end, though, there isn't really a whole lot of data that has been done on Native American voting patterns until recently, beginning approximately in the 1990s. The first reference to that report I quoted makes note of this in several places and has a reference in its footnotes.
___
**References:**
[1] [Wang, Tova. (2012). "Ensuring Access to the Ballot for American Indians & Alaska Natives: New Solutions to Strengthen American Democracy."](_URL_4_)
[2] [Wilkins, David E., and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark. American Indian politics and the American political system. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010.](_URL_1_)
**Edit:** Added in links to the references. Also added a couple sentences to 6th paragraph under "History and Culture" and to the conclusion. |
why do canadians, or at least where i'm from, still measure height in feet and inches and weight in pounds if we use the metric system? | Purely because that's what people are used to and when you're talking informally it's easier to visualise (for example) a person who is 6'2" compared to imagining someone who is 1.88m.
We do exactly the same thing here in the UK. We have the metric system and are mostly fine using it where we need to but when talking informally to someone you're much more likely to say your weight in stones and pounds, height in feet and inches and distances in miles. We're happy enough working in litres and kilos too though. |
why do wounds itch when healing, prompting us to scratch and potentially re-damage the area? | Part of the healing process is removing any potential pathogens that may have gotten into the wound, so there is an inflammatory response at the site of injury. More blood flows to the area and more white blood cells are recruited to kill stuff, and in the process release different chemicals that cause you to be itchy, like histamine. |
a friend of mine who lives in germany told me citizens receive help from the goverment if they do not have a job or a home, how can germany afford it to do so, and why do they do it? | This is commonplace throughout Europe. We have high tax rates that enable a high quality of welfare provision. This extends to free or low cost medical and dental care, housing, and cost of living benefits.
The answer to why is because these societies have decided that the expense of helping people through rough patches is worth it in the long term. It can help reduce crime, keep people out of worse poverty, which saves health costs further down the line. Or they just support it on moral grounds. Or a mix and match combination of factors. |
how sean penn located el chapo to conduct an interview yet none of the intelligence agencies looking for the wanted drug kingpin could find him | The did find him. A few days after one of the interviews the Mexican government attacked one of the interview locations and Chapo only narrowly escaped. It's widely believed that his continued contact with Penn is the main reason they were able to eventually re-capture him. |
who is davy jones and why is the bottom of the sea referred to as his locker? | Davy Jones is a character from old stories sailors used to tell eachother to frighten eachother. It was believed that if you died while on sea, your soul would go to the bottom of the sea, where Davy Jones would capture it and place it in his Locker. |
What led to the downfall of "big research", ie Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, IBM Research, etc. | It's a complicated question. My understanding, from talking to people who have studied this quite a bit (there are people where I work who study this question very directly relationship to industry and physics), is that a few important changes have occurred. One is that these big behemoth companies like Bell and Xerox and IBM underwent significant financial struggles in the late 20th century. That never helps anybody. The other is that around the same time, there is an emergence of what we might label as "start up" culture. Scientists at universities were encouraged to take their academic research and commercialize it directly, starting small, speciality companies based around their niche areas. (This is part of a longer movement of "technology transfer" in the university system, as well as the [ability for scientists to patent the results of publicly-funded research.](_URL_1_))
The combination of these effects means that the big companies no longer feel like it is worth maintaining general R & D divisions, where only maybe 10% of the total work at most will turn into anything profitable for the company. Instead, they simply buy up the start-ups (or their intellectual property) that seem to be the real winners — they only pay for the stuff that they think is actually going to be useful to them. So they've pushed the general R & D function back to the universities. They care a lot more about the bottom line today than they used to, in part because they no longer have some of the near-monopoly advantages that they used to have, what with increased foreign competition, fragmentation of the markets, and technology disruption, etc.
Such is my understanding of it, anyway, which is derived mostly from a few talks and conversations. You can see [some of the results of my colleagues' research here](_URL_0_) — look in particular at "Part 1" for a pocket history of physics in American industry in the late 40 years, which discusses some of the corporate changes as well.
I don't know whether this trend applies everywhere; the above is done mostly with regards to the physics industries of the original question. I'm sure biotech and big pharma has their own stories. |
how does 'bail' work in america? why do they attribute money to the severity of crimes? | It's a form of protection for the accused. There can actually be a long time between arrest and trial and there is only one way to guarantee that the accused shows up to trial: jail them in the interim.
Since a person not yet tried is technically innocent, and since this interim period can be long (and historically has been used to jail people indefinitely), we have the option of releasing them until the trial.
But we still need a way to ensure they show up for trial, so we have bail. They pay money that the court keeps until they show up for trial. If they show up, they get the money back, if not, they lose the money (and get other crimes added to their charges, to boot).
The more severe the crime, the more severe punishment the accused faces, and the greater incentive is needed for them to appear to face that possible punishment, so we have higher bails for those crimes.
EDIT:
Some answers to common replies:
1. Yes you can get the money back even if you are guilty, but the government will take from that fees, fines and other penalties. Since it's money you would owe anyway, them taking it out of money they are already in possession of is the same thing as giving you all the money back and then just taking the money anyway.
2. It is not a loan. It is collateral. You do not get interest and it is not adjusted for inflation.
3. Yes, this is just one of many aspects of the US criminal justice system that hurts poor people more than rich people. It is not the only aspect nor the aspect that hurts poor people the most.
4. People that cannot afford bail outright (almost everyone) can use a bail bondsman. This is a person or company that will pay your bail for you, but the price of that is they permanently keep 10% of that fee. So if your bail is $50,000, you pay the bail bondsman $5,000 and they will foot the rest of the bill to the government. So you are permanently out $5,000 as opposed to being temporarily out $50,000. If you skip trial (meaning the bondsman loses their money) they will hunt you down and find you and not be very friendly about it.
EDIT2:
Update from /u/wickedogg regarding bond bailmen:
> As an attorney who works for a bail bondsman, hunting people down is not the main consequence of skipping trial. The main thing that we do is go after the people who agreed to guarantee the bail. The accused (to use your term) needs someone to go to the bondsman for him and usually that person is a parent, or uncle, or other family member. That person signs a guarantee and a confession of judgment along with providing a detailed accounting of all their assets, job, and personal information. When the bail gets forfeited I file the judgment and take the money out of bank accounts, garnish wages, and take property. All of this is motivation for the family to make sure that the accused shows up in court in the first place, or turns himself in soon after skipping a court date. |
why does the number 142857 behave like it does when multiplied? | Because 142857 x 7 = 999999.
edit: oops, let's make the automod happy.
142857/999999 = 0.142857142857...
It also equals 1/7.
Now multiply by 10, and keep only the part after the decimal point.
0.428571428571... = 3/7
Repeat this process for the rest.
edit 2: extra explaining
what we want is a repeating decimal expansion where the denominator is a prime number after we simplify to lowest terms. In base 10, that means it has to be something like 142857/999999, or 5882352941/99999999999.
since the number is prime, multiplying by 10 and keeping the part less than one only will inevitably cycle through all the positions of the repeating decimal.
*my apologies for my previous iterations of this explanation; i feel like i was one of those asshole textbook editors that says "because of this fact, a simple proof follows, which i have left as an exercise for the reader"* |
why do i get sleepy after reading 2 hours or studying but my scumbag brain can play skyrim all night without getting tired? | Because your brain releases small, constant spurts dopamine and adrenaline when you're playing a video game that excites you. You feel tired due to constant dopamine being released, but you stay up because of the constant adrenaline being released. When you study...you're bored. Nothing is really being released other than you just getting tired because of a tough day.
I'm sure somebody can provide a lot more information on it!
Cheers!
Source: wrote a report on it. (Junior in highschool and a gamer.)
Edit: spelling. Wording. |
how do flies constantly fly into hard objects at high speeds(walls, doors, windows, etc) but never manage to get hurt? | Arthropods that fly have very low mass. They also have a lightweight armour made largely of chitin. This exoskeleton protects their nervous system (brain) organs and muscles. It's like a body helmet. Lastly, they have an open circulatory system that prevents them from inflammation damage, i.e., bruising. |
why are medical bills ridiculously expensive if no one can afford them in the first place? | Insurance **is** the reason. Insurance removes the patient from the cost of treatment. When was the last time you think someone shopped around for an X-Ray? They don't. How much is an X-Ray? Who cares, I pay $X per month for insurance and they take care of it.
Due to this, there is very little downward pressure on prices as the people doing the "purchasing" are not price sensitive. |
why do certain countries, such as the united states, seem to always be at war with someone? how have some countries managed to stay relatively peaceful? (ex. switzerland) | The US has a large economy and far reaching economic interests. This puts it in conflict with almost anything ~~nasty~~ contentious on the planet, as somehow it impacts their interests.
Switzerland has a relatively narrow set of economic interests (banking) that encourage neutrality in conflicts. They also benefit by being close to powerful countries with a vested interest in protecting them from attack. This allows them to be protected by proxy. |
how is it possible for a nap as short as 15-20 minutes to significantly boost our alertness for the rest of the day? especially considering the fact that it doesn't involve a deep sleep stage? | A “power nap” as it is called is usually between 15-30 minutes, and when done correctly, avoids the deep sleep stages. The first 30ish minutes of sleep are spent in Stage 1 and 2, which are the lighter phases. During these, the brain is semi-relaxed, slows down signals, and gets some rest. It is important to wake up before Stage 3 and 4 because waking up during those leaves the person dazed and more tired, because the body was interrupted during its shut off stage. Power naps are like trying to reap as many benefits of sleep as possible without actually becoming fully asleep, meaning one feels more alert in less time. It can be compared to putting on a bandage when you’re really busy until you have time to get stitches. |
if a man and a woman both get drunk and have intercourse, why is the man charged with rape due to the woman not being able to consent due to being intoxicated, when, by the same logic, the man is intoxicated so cannot give consent either? | Because that is not true. I'm assuming this is about that ridiculous poster that made its rounds in /r/pics. Regardless though, it isn't even true that being drunk means you are unable to consent (it is only at a certain level of drunkness that comes into play) and the law governing that is written completely gender neutral. Women don't have an up on men in this case.
[This] (_URL_0_) comment has some good explanation of the laws in this case. |
In WWII, were there any Audie Murphy-level one man armies on the Axis side? | [Simo Häyhä](_URL_0_) would be the closest approximation I could think of at the moment. He was a sniper for the Finnish army during the [Winter War](_URL_1_) against Russia 1939-1940. During this time, he amassed 505 confirmed kills against the Soviet Army [possibly more due to the fact that kills had to be confirmed by another officer] and became feared as the 'White Death', as he was known to dress in white snow-camouflage.
The man was an especially skilled marksman, using his rifle's iron sights as they did not fog up in the cold air and also allowing him to increase his accuracy. He was shot in the jaw by a Russian soldier after numerous attempts to eliminate him prior (including artillery and counter-snipers), but survived and was promoted to the rank of Second Lieutenant. |
i just watched the big short, and i still don't understand what "shorting" is. how does buying credit swaps profit you when the market collapses? who pays that out and why? | Let's say you own $1000 of stock I think it is going to go down in price.
I borrow those shares from you, and immediately sell them for $1000. The next day, the stock goes down and is only worth $900. I buy them back, and return them to you, plus a little cash for your trouble. I've just made almost $100 from your stock going down.
That's what shorting is, essentially sell a share of stock you don't have, then buying it for less when its price goes down. Essentially, you are buying a negative share of stock.
The downside is if the price goes up. If you sold it for $1000, but the price goes up to $1100, you will have to spend that much to return the stock you borrowed. |
how did a small country like japan occupy a vast country like china, while still projecting power elsewhere, during the buildup to ww2? | 1: They didn't occupy all of China, only parts of the coastline.
2: China was in the middle of a Civil War between the communists and the nationalists, they weren't prepared for an invasion. The two factions did band together to repel the Japanese, but it was an uneasy alliance, and by 1938 it was breaking down.
3: China wasn't exactly the most technologically advanced nation at the time of the Second Sino-Japanese war. For example, they still used biplanes while the Japanese Air Force had actual fighters.
4: Not only were the Chinese technologically inferior, they also had less of everything except manpower. Take a look at the chart [here](_URL_0_). In 1939 Japan had almost 5 times the aircraft, 4 times the tanks, and 1.5 times field artillery. By 1941, the ratios got even worse.
5: Japanese soldiers were fanatics during battle. Officers often stressed the importance of no retreat, of death over dishonor. This led to Japanese troops achieving victories from the brink of defeat.
6: Japan had the resources to control major cities, but lacked the manpower to lock down the vast countryside, where the Chinese would often launch guerrilla strikes. And by 1941, when the USA joined the war, Japan had to reallocate resources to another front. |
why did the u.s. government need a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol, but didn't to ban other drugs? | The temperance movement sought a constitutional ban, not a legal ban, so as to prevent the ban from being easily repealed. A super-majority of the members of the 65th Congress favored prohibition -- but that was really an oddity. Many in politics opposed prohibition, and anti-prohibitionists might retake a majority at any time. The temperance movement enacted a constitutional ban to ensure that, without a 2/3 majority, Congress couldn't repeal the ban on the sale, transport, and manufacture of alcohol.
Opponents of prohibition also preferred the constitutional ban -- because it didn't include any provisions for enforcement. They thought they could deliver prohibitionists a moral victory, while still using their power to block good enforcement. Ultimately, they succeeded -- alcohol was banned, but everyone still drank. Of course, this ended out being a huge disaster, but that's another matter.
Daniel Okrant's *Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition* details the nitty-gritty of the prohibition battle including the risk that Congress might repeal.
For the record, Congress claims the authority to regulate drugs today under the interstate commerce clause, given that most drugs include components traded across state lines, or are sold across state lines, or are sold by groups that operate across state lines, etc. etc. etc. See *United States v. Lopez* for more information. |
do i even read anymore, or has my brain memorised all the words/patterns that i need and recognises it automatically ? | You are reading this reply right now. You've never seen this particular combination of words before, yet you somehow understand my meaning anyway because I've arranged them in a way that makes sense to you. This is called reading, you're doing it.
You cannot possibly store in your brain the near infinite possible arrangements of all the words you know. You are stringing together words to infer meaning on the fly. Your brain has to a degree some hard wiring for language, earned through millions of years of evolution, that makes you capable interpreting arranged letters as words, and those words fit together to form larger concepts. With these tools people can take thoughts from their own heads and put them in other people's heads. It's fucking amazing when you think about it.
The reason we know this language (and reading by extension) ability is hard-wired is we see it develop independently all over the place. It's been studied extensively. When you look at people from remote areas that have had little to no contact with other civilizations, you see they've created language with mostly the same rules and constructs. When you put people together that can't directly communicate (which was common during the international slave trade), you see that they develop crude "pigin" languages, and then those pigins get more complex in the next generation to form a "creole", and those higher level languages seem to wind up operating the same way (for the most part). Groups of deaf people will independently develop their own language with each other that operations mostly the same way everyone else's language works. I'd recommend Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct for more on this.
EIDT: Who to for thanks many to gold from is, yo! |
If I were a middle class man born around 6th century BC: would it have been better for me to live in one of the Greek City states, or somewhere in the Persian empire? | There's a lot of ground to cover here - I hope this answer will make some kind of sense by the time we get to the end.
**3 Problems with your Question**
First, you're asking about the 6th century BC, but the Persian Empire doesn't actually exist for the first half of that century. Around 550 BC, Cyrus II conquers the heartland of the Medes, which can be seen as the rise Achaemenid Persia (though this is a slight simplification as Cyrus was a Teispid). Throughout the rest of the century, the new power of Persia keeps expanding, absorbing first Lydia and Babylon, and then most of eastern Iran, the Levantine coast, Egypt, parts of the Indus valley, and Thrace. Persia is not a constant presence, but a growing world empire, and the reach and nature of its dominion are only just taking shape. For the sake of this answer, I will assume you were born at some point in the reign of Darius I (c. 522-486 BC), which is generally considered the period when Achaemenid power solidified.
Second (and you probably know this already), you could be living in a Greek city state *and* in the Persian Empire. The Greek cities of Western Asia Minor, those on the south coast of the Black Sea, and the settlement at Naukratis in the Nile Delta are all part of the Persian Empire by the end of the 6th century BC. This complicates your question for a number of reasons, but it also helps. We can make a better comparison between places to live if they both belong to the same cultural zone but exist under different political circumstances.
Third, the "middle class" is a modern concept. The Ancient Greeks did not know it; while I don't think we have enough information about the socio-economic or political thought of the Persians, I doubt they knew it either. It is true that the Greeks idealised the philosophical concept of the middle as a superior "third option" that avoided unhealthy extremes, but this concept did not map onto any particular social, economic or political group in society. Indeed, the ideal of the middle was malleable to the point of meaninglessness. Aristotle once refers to a regent of Sparta as a member of the "middle" because he wasn't a king. In practice, the Greeks saw society as divided into two groups: the rich and the poor. The difference between the two was that the former owned enough to live a life of leisure, while the latter had to work to get by. In this worldview, every single person we would consider "middle class" was considered one of the poor. This category may have been very broad, ranging from penniless day labourers to well-to-do independent farmers, but it wasn't subdivided in any meaningful way (except, of course, for the strict distinction between free citizens and slaves).
So, when we're talking about a "middle-class man" in the 6th century BC, we have to bear in mind that we're applying an arbitrary modern distinction onto a past that didn't recognise it. Generally, the existence of slavery and the peculiarities of a subsistence economy led to a system of labour relations that doesn't quite overlap with what we know today. For the sake of this answer, I'll assume you are either an independent small farmer or a specialist craftsman - categories that would put you above abject poverty, but would still require you to use your own labour (along with that of your family and slaves) to survive.
**The Nature of Persian Rule**
This is where we get to what you're really asking: are the conditions of life in the Greek city-states c.520 BC fundamentally different from those in the Persian Empire? Would the average man of modest means notice the effect of his political situation?
We should not be distracted here by Greek rhetoric about how all the subjects of the Great King were his slaves, and how the barbarian ruled his realm with an iron fist and with the arbitrary cruelty that was typical of an oppressive despot. This is mostly a matter of propaganda. In fact, we have the counter-propaganda too: Persian reliefs from Persepolis show that the Persians themselves liked to see their empire as a collection of peoples cheerfully joined in the worthy task of supporting the righteous rule of Ahura Mazda's representative on Earth. They paid tribute, and in return they received peace and justice from the king.
In practice, all the evidence we have suggests that the Persians liked to rule, as most empires do, by affirming and preserving existing administrative structures and political systems in return for tribute and loyalty. In other words, they were happy to let their subjects do their own thing as long as they paid tribute every year and sent as many troops as the king needed. The famous Cyrus Cylinder confirms the privileges of the old Baylonian priesthood; Darius' self-representation in Egypt casts him as a traditional pharaoh, honouring and paying for the upkeep of the old cults and temples. In Asia Minor, the Greeks were initially allowed to keep the tyrants that ruled their cities. When the Ionians rose in revolt in 499 BC and deposed their tyrants, the Persians, upon crushing the revolts, decided to let them keep their new democracies, too (Herodotos 6.43.3). As long as the tribute kept coming in, the Persians were cool with whatever.
It follows that we shouldn't think of the Persian Empire as a despotic, barbaric realm in which all freedom of thought and enterprise was stifled. Rather, it was an agglomeration of semi-autonomous communities that were free to do more or less what they wanted as long as they paid the tribute, served the Persian war machine, and recognised the complete subordination of their foreign policy to the interests of Persia. Individuals within the empire may not have noticed its presence very much, unless the tribute came partly out of their pocket, or if their area had received a Persian garrison.
This form of rule, coupled with the *Pax Persica*, meant that the Greek cities of Asia Minor actually flourished once they had fallen under the Persian sway. Possibly their integration into the imperial system opened up new markets for their traders; certainly their connection to the old civilisations of the East generated a boost in intellectual development, with the first medical and ethnographic treatises, the first world maps, and the first histories ever written all originating in late 6th century BC Ionia. Herodotos (5.28) notes that Miletos, which had suffered endless internal strife before, became "the jewel of Ionia" once the Persians guaranteed the position of its tyrant Histiaios. A similar development may well have taken place elsewhere in regions that were previously unstable. In regions that had previously enjoyed unity and stable rule (like Egypt under the Saite dynasty), life would have gone on more or less as before.
**So Where Would You Rather Live?**
So let's get down to brass tacks. As a man living in modest comfort, where would you be better off? As should be clear from the above, it really depends on where you are and what you do for a living.
As an independent farmer, your life is likely to be the same all over. Both the Greek world and the Persian Empire knew a small leisure class of large landowners, but the small farmer was known to the Greeks by the late 6th century BC, and no doubt he would have been seen elsewhere too. And the life of a small farmer was hard work wherever you happened to live. The only difference between *some* (but by no means all) Greek city-states and most of the Persian Empire is political representation. In states like Athens, you'd have a vote in the Assembly, and a share in the political processes of your community. In most Greek cities you'd enjoy certain rights as a freeborn citizen. These things were still in development, and even many Greek states were run by tyrants, or by oligarchs, like the cities of Phoenicia, but still, if politics is your thing, you might be happier in Athens or Cyrene than somewhere in Mesopotamia.
If you're a specialist craftsman, you really want to be in the trade network, regardless of where you might be. From the Phoenician cities on the Levantine coast, a centuries-old trade web spread all over the Mediterranean, and you could profit from this web whether you were on Samos or Cyprus or Sardinia. The example of Ionia above shows that being part of the Persian Empire doesn't seem to have hampered trade - indeed, it may have boosted merchant activity as more regions became pacified. By the late 6th century BC, you could also benefit from the new network spreading east over land - the Royal Roads that connected the western administrative hubs of the Empire to its core in Persia. Where you obviously *don't* want to be is "off the grid", in remote semi-autonomous parts of the Persian Empire that saw limited economic activity. If you were in the [old Assyrian heartland](_URL_0_), for instance, or in some distant area of the Iranian plateau, there would be little else for you to do except sell to your local community. Far better to be in one of the wealthier, better connected parts of the Empire, like Ionia or Lower Egypt. |
Is it true that Marcus Crassus was killed by being forced to drink molten gold? | Cassius Dio, a Roman historian writing about 200 years after Crassus' death, [says this](_URL_0_):
> and while Crassus even then delayed and considered what he should do, the barbarians took him forcibly and threw him on the horse. Meanwhile the Romans also laid hold of him, came to blows with the others, and for a time held their own; then aid came to the barbarians, and they prevailed; for their forces, which were in the plain and had been made ready beforehand brought help to their men before the Romans on the high ground could to theirs. And not only the others fell, but Crassus also was slain, either by one of his own men to prevent his capture alive, or by the enemy because he was badly wounded. This was his end. **And the Parthians,** ***as some say,*** **poured molten gold into his mouth in mockery**; for though a man of vast wealth, he had set so great store by money as to pity those who could not support an enrolled legion from their own means, regarding them as poor men. [emphasis mine]
However, Plutarch, a Greek historian writing 100 years earlier, [says this](_URL_1_):
> Some, however, say that it was not this man, but another, who killed Crassus, and that this man cut off the head and right hand of Crassus as he lay upon the ground. [...]
> Surena now took the head and hand of Crassus and sent them to Hyrodes in Armenia [...]
> Now when the head of Crassus was brought to the king's door, the tables had been removed, and a tragic actor, Jason by name, of Tralles, was singing that part of the "Bacchae" of Euripides where Agave is about to appear. While he was receiving his applause, Sillaces stood at the door of the banqueting-hall, and after a low obeisance, cast the head of Crassus into the centre of the company. The Parthians lifted it up with clapping of hands and shouts of joy, and at the king's bidding his servants gave Sillaces a seat at the banquet. Then Jason handed his costume of Pentheus to one of the chorus, seized the head of Crassus, and assuming the role of the frenzied Agave, sang these verses through as if inspired:
> *"We bring from the mountain*
> *A tendril fresh-cut to the palace,*
> *A wonderful prey."*
> This delighted everybody; but when the following dialogue with the chorus was chanted:
> *"Who slew him?"*
> *"Mine is the honour,"*
> Pomaxathres, who happened to be one of the banqueters, sprang up and laid hold of the head, feeling that it was more appropriate for him to say this than for Jason. The king was delighted, and bestowed on Pomaxathres the customary gifts, while to Jason he gave a talent. With such a farce as this the expedition of Crassus is said to have closed, just like a tragedy.
It's kind of difficult to marry the two accounts: the one with Crassus being beheaded and his head then being treated as an object of mockery during a spontaneous performance in front of the king, and the other with the Parthians pouring gold into the mouth of his corpse. Unless they Parthians took the head and poured gold into its mouth after it arrived at the king's palace; or they poured gold into the open throat of the decapitated body. Or, possibly, Cassius Dio was merely recording an apocryphal rumour about the Parthians' treatment of Crassus.
We just don't know for sure. |
why is "cause of death" public record? does our medical right of privacy end when we die? | Your privacy ends when you die... since you're dead....
Cause of death is a matter of public record because it is an important piece of data. How you died can indicate a disease outbreak... or a murdering spree... or a serial killer... or the fact that you lived to be 103 and died like all old people do. |
why are passwords shorter than 8 characters easy to crack? (according to snowden) | Short passwords have small degrees of entropy. Smaller degree of entropy means that they're easier to guess randomly. Adding numbers and symbols does increase entropy, but it's still way less effective than simply adding more characters.
There's an xkcd that explains this pretty well, and I'm sure it will be posted 100 times in this thread because of that fact. |
due to time dialation, are there places in the cosmos where the universe is only minutes old instead of 14 billion years? | Theoretically, there are such places (relative to our frame of reference). However, we can't see them because the universe was not [transparent](_URL_0_) until about 400 thousand years after the big bang, or the universe was expanding faster than the speed of light at the time.
---
Edit: I probably mistook the question. My answer talks about the appearance of the universe due to the time it takes for photons to reach us. But time dilation is to do with relativistic effects such as matter moving relative to each other in actual space, or regions of high gravity. |
if i close my eyes does my hearing ability improve because my brain has to process one sense less or is this just a placebo effect? | Working memory can only handle a very small amount of information at a time, so closing your eyes does improve your hearing in the sense that it helps filter out distractions and increases recall for auditory information. Closing your eyes does not, however, increase the actual acuity of hearing. |
file names. why can't microsoft office save or open files that have slashes or colons in their names? | Slashes and colons are used as part of the *file system*; that is, the thing that tells the computer where to look for a file with that name. The Windows OS has been updated to distinguish between a slash in a filename and a "meaningful" slash, but MS Office has not.
Before things like Windows and Macs existed, you had to make a computer do things by just typing commands. Spaces were "meaningful" when you typed in those commands, so it was impossible to have a filename with spaces in it. Because of that, some very old programs cannot handle filenames with spaces. |
Who was the first person to get shot and who was the first person shooter? | To put it quite simply: We have no idea. If you mean shot with a firearm, it could be anybody who had access to one of the early firearms developed in Europe, up to and including cannons. Cannons, however, were used mainly for siege warfare, so if somebody died by cannon before they died by arquebus (or something similar), it probably was as a side effect.
If you mean by any ranged weapon, then we will probably never know, as most ranged weapons such as slings, bows, etc. are centuries, if not millennia older than writing or recorded history. |
when attempting to sneeze, why does looking at the sun/a light source trigger it? | Imagine your nerves controlling sight as a sidewalk in a neighborhood. Normally, there's a normal supply of people walking on it and everyone stays on the path. Sometimes, there's a huge burst of people (looking at something bright). The sidewalk is so crowded that some people end up stepping on the lawn of the neighboring houses. Mr. Sneeze, living in one of the houses, sees this and gets out of his house to yell at the people to get off his lawn.
The process is known as photic sneeze reflex and it affects 18-35% of the population. The mechanics behind it are not fully understood but it may be due to nerve signals being confused when there is a rapid burst from seeing bright light. |
a long time ago, a person was able to work 40 hours a week and support a family. today two people need to work 40 hours a week to barely support themselves living together. what changed? | Stagnating wages, skyrocketing cost of living, poor transportation and heavy traffic make the less-expensive suburbs very difficult to live in while working in the city. A huge increase in tuition costs resulting in everyone in their 20s being sacked with tens of thousands of dollars of debt. |
why don't some planets in our solar system orbit the other way around the sun? | Try to imagine the solar system before there was even really a star. There would have been a cloud of material flying all around. If everything was very random, then very little would have enough speed to avoid being sucked into the newly forming star. If some things had a velocity in one direction and other things had a velocity in another direction, then they would likely end up dragging on each other, slow down, and get pulled in.
What we think happened is that as the sun was forming, it acquired a spin and that spin ended up transferring to the cloud of material, shaping it into a disc which eventually would collect together to form the planets. Without this spin, the material would have just fallen into the sun and it would have burned a little bit brighter. |
why my internet speed says 185 mbps on speedtest, but youtube videos still lag and take a long time to load. | Speed tests are done under ideal conditions from servers with the bandwidth possible to "max out" the testing program.
Most servers you connect to on the internet are not like that. They are often overworked and the bandwidth provided to them would be fine if they were serving 100 people at once, but its probably many more multiples of that.
You're basically fighting other people to get the same content. You can only cram so much down the pipe then it has to contend with all the other traffic around it as well to get to you.
Most ISP speedtests and speedtest applications look for the closest server to you so you can see your maximum throughput. A lot of ISP based speedtest applications...you don't even leave their network, so you don't see any internet latency or congestion.
A speedtest tells you the potential of your line. In real life, you can only download as fast as the server you're connected to can send it...plus internet overhead.
Its like taking a race car on an open track. With no other cars around, you can push it to the limit. But on the freeway at 5pm in bumper to bumper traffic, that race car will be lucky to see 15 mph. It doesn't matter what kind of horsepower you have under the hood-you can't run into or run over other cars to use it to its maximum potential. You know it can do 200mph, but in that case, its only going to do 15.
Edit: Thanks for the gold. I didn't expect this to blow up. I've tried to reply to a few people before I go do what I need to do this morning. |
why do prebuilt gaming computers from companies like dell, hp, alienware, etc. have processors way more powerful than needed yet totally skimp on other components like video cards and ram? | They probably have a deal with Intel to push these heavyweight chips, and to maximize profit, they skimp on the other parts.
They are basically relying on peoples' ignorance.
Look at any computer sold at say, Best Buy. Sick i7 processor and a 2TB HDD? Probably has a piece of shit video card. Lower end processor and hard drive? Probably has 8GB of RAM.
They basically use the expensive part as the selling point, and gloss over how terrible everything else is.
It's all about money |
how did tumblr get its current reputation (i.e sjw's, "check your privilege", etc) | There's a phrase my school teacher used to say, "Water tends to find it's own level."
I think porn sites actually is a great example of that. If you go to any random porn site, and then they have a lot of, say, pregnant porn uploaded by the users, people who do not like pregnant porn might stay away from it. The more people that stray because of the prevalence of pregnant porn, the more concentrated the pregnant porn has become on that site, until that site has a reputation for being the site for pregnant porn.
Tumblr's vocal social justice commentators have likewise turned people who aren't into that away from the site, leaving it more concentrated, so if you *are* into that you're more likely to post there. |
why is february the month with 28 days, and not april, november or any other one? | There was a time when the year began in the month containing the beginning of Spring, namely March. This meant that February was the last month of the year, and it originally had 30 days.
July and August were renamed for Caesars of Rome and at the time those months were only 30 days. To honor the greatness of the Caesars, those months were extended to 31 days each and the days were taken from the end of the year, which at the time was February. |
What did people do before modern medicine when they tore a major ligament such as an ACL or Achilles tendon? Was life over or did they attempt a rudimentary fix? | First things first, ligaments are very different to tendons. Ligaments connect bone to bone; tendons connect muscle to bone. If you injure a ligament, your joint will be destablized; if you injure a tendon, the muscle it attaches to will no longer be able to usefully pull on anything.
In response to your question, it wasn't until Avicenna, a thousand years ago, that tendon repair was well documented and recommended. Galen describes one instance of tendon repair on an injured gladiator but generally recommended against it. The vast majority of the world population even in Avicenna's time did not have access to Avicenna or the surgeons he trained, so the answer to your question is... live as best they could.
ACL repair as a modern surgery is only about 100 years old. You can function reasonably well with a torn knee ligament by the way -- you'll certainly have trouble doing anything athletic, and your knee may buckle frequently, but you should be able to walk.
Further reading:
Insights into Avicenna’s knowledge of the science of orthopedics. Behnam Dalfardi et al. World journal of orthopedics 5 (1), 67, 2014 |
Is it true that the root of the etymology of "slavic" comes from the word "slave"? Was this name self-applied, or externally applied, to the slavic peoples? Where did it come from, where did they come from, and who were these peoples' oppressors? | You actually have the etymology backwards - it is not that the word "slavic" comes from the word "slave," but rather that the word slave comes from the word slavic. From the Oxford English Dictionary: "medieval Latin sclavus, sclava, identical with the racial name Sclavus (see Slav n. and adj.), the Slavonic population in parts of central Europe having been reduced to a servile condition by conquest; the transferred sense is clearly evidenced in documents of the 9th century."
I don't know much about the 9th century in Europe, hopefully someone will come along who can talk about the medieval Mediterranean slave trade in more detail. However, David Brion Davis discusses this briefly in his *The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture* (page 52). Davis's key point is that, even long prior to the beginnings of *African* slavery in Europe, the word slave had an ethnic/foreign connotation. Davis compares the latin word *servi,* which has no ethnic connotation, with the new word *sclavi,* which was used first by the Germans in the 10th and 11th centuries, and then by the Italians in the 13th century, to indicate captives brought out of the Black Sea region as part of a Mediterranean slave trade. The word rapidly spread into English and French as a way of distinguishing "unfree foreigners from native serfs" (Davis). When Spain and Portugal began to import African slaves in the 15th century, they applied this existing term, the meaning of which had shifted from denoting slavic servants with a notably lower status, to foreign servants with a notably lower status of any ethnic origin. |
A cracked photoplasty post claimed that after the holocaust homosexual prisoners were not released but forced to serve the remaining of their sentence. Is this true? What happened to homosexuals after? | From an [older answer](_URL_2_):
**Part 1**
/u/Kugelfang52 has gone into this before [here](_URL_1_). It is very important to mention here that this subject matter, as well as a more general history of Nazi persecution of homosexuals, both gay men and lesbian women, is still a subject that has not been researched very well yet.
Aside the problem of continuing social stigmatization and even criminalization of homosexuality in the decades following WWII (in East Germany, paragraph 175, the section of criminal law concerning male homosexuality, was ceased to be enforced in 1957 but remained on the books until 1968; in West Germany remained on the books until 1969; in Germany it took until 2002 to have all the Nazi convictions against homosexuals annulled), is the problem of sources.
As Kai Hammermeister showed in his article *Inventing History: Toward a Gay Holocaust Literature* (German Quarterly 70.1 (Winter 1997)), sources from the perspective of homosexual victims are practically non-existent and that even establishing the basic facts of persecution is difficult:
> The trouble already begins when we consider the historical facts. Though we do have a fairly good sense of the how and why of the persecution of homosexuals under Hitler, this sense nevertheless remains a rough outline without much color or detail. Historians have bemoaned this fact time and again; it seems that one cannot write about the gay Holocaust without lamenting the absence of enough documents, dossiers, confessions, reports, or simply stories. (...) Nonetheless, historians have agreed on a general picture regarding the persecution of homosexuals by the National Socialists. Without going into phases and specificities of this persecution, I only want to mention a couple of numbers that serve to emphasize the extent of these events. About 100,000 gay men were registered by the Gestapo, half of whom were sentenced by an NS court for their homosexuality. It is widely assumed that between 10,000 and 15,000 gay men wore the pink triangle in concentration camps; the number of homosexual inmates in other prison camps, for example in the so-called Moorlager, is still unknown.
However, even the details Hammermeister gives are somewhat in dispute. There have been suggestions that the actual number of people persecuted is much higher. One of the few homosexual survivors coming forward after the war and relaying his experience, Heinz Heger, contends that the number of homosexuals persecuted and killed ranged into the 100.000s. Ruediger Lautmann: *“Gay Prisoners in Concentration Camps as Compared to Jehovah’s Witnesses and Political Prisoners,”* in Michael Berenbaum (ed.): A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, (New York: New York University Press, 2000) 200-206 writes based on a comprehensive review that about 100.000 homosexuals were charged and imprisoned by the Nazis, 15.000 ended up in concentration camps and about 3.000 survived until the end of the war.
Of these estimated 3.000 survivors only 15 men had come forward to tell their story, 6 of them anonymously, and the last known homosexual survivor of a concentration camp had died in June 2012.
The same principle problem applies to the study of the treatment of homosexual men under Allied occupation in Germany. What can be said with certainty is that in the American, British and French zones, paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code of 1871 remained in effect in its Nazi version of 1935 (this version had removed the previously held "tradition" that the a crime was only committed when penetrative intercourse had happened, in the Nazi version, criminal offense existed if "objectively the general sense of shame was offended" and subjectively "the debauched intention was present to excite sexual desire in one of the two men, or a third.", meaning that physical contact was not required anymore). In the Soviet zone, the pre-Nazi version of § 175 was applied.
Before going into further details, it needs to be stressed that as to why this remained in effect in the Western occupation zones, also a lot of research needs to be done still. However, it is an interesting trend that while the laws and provisions in many European countries at the time was to lessen or stop the policing of homosexuals relationships between men (Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland all decriminalized homosexual behavior in the 1930s and 1940s, Poland never legally criminalized homosexuality except during the German occupation), Great Britain and the US went in an opposite direction.
In the decades preceding WWII, GB and the Us increasingly started to police homosexual behavior. When it came to the occupation of Germany, the problem was further confounded by the fact that a large swath of US policy makers who were involved in setting up the occupation of Germany were convinced of the sexual immorality of the Third Reich and of the need to return to Christian values and morality in order to combat the corruption and sexual licentiousness they believed was a core element of the Nazi version of fascism (see Andrea Slane: *A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy*).
What shaped the Western Allies' policy towards homosexuals in Germany further was the plan on how to deal with survivors of concentration camps. The Handbook for Military Government in Germany Prior to Defeat or Surrender (published in 1944) specified that after liberation, one of the first duties of the Allied troops was to separate the victims of Nazi persecution into different and predominantly national categories, a huge and in practice incomplete feat that not only lead Jews to protest (for they wanted to be grouped in one category rather than their national category) and that lead the predominantly German category of victims of social persecution (asocials, homosexuals, criminals) to be grouped in the "criminal" category because their arrest and imprisonment was actually based upon laws. As Michele Weber writes:
> For American troops serving under military policies that increasingly penalized homosexual active in military service and coming from states where homosexuality was classified as a crime, it was not surprising that homosexuals were categorized as criminal under the American system of classification.
The procedure as laid out in the *Handbook* for this group of victims was explicit: "Ordinary criminals with a prison sentence still to serve will be transferred to civil prisons." Meaning that if somebody convicted under §175 by the Nazis, which held a provision for imprisonment for up to 10 years, and imprisoned in a Concentration Camp could be imprisoned by the Allies if they believed that the person had not served their sentence in full. For those who had "served their sentence", freedom was guaranteed but fear of being arrested again under §175 remained.
This was not really in line with the guidelines of denazification set by the Allies themselves. Since §175 restricted citizenship, and it was the Allies explicit policy to remove all laws that restricted citizenship based on politics, religion or other categories, it should have been at least reverted to its pre-1935 version. Furthermore, Law number 11 of the Control Council concerning Nazi Law stated: “No German law, however or whenever enacted or enumerated, shall be applied judicially or administratively within the occupied territory in any instance where such application would cause injustice or inequality, …by discriminating against any person by reason of his race, nationality, religious beliefs or opposition to the National Socialist Party or its doctrines."
And yet, §175 remained in _URL_0_ practice this often lead to cases like that of Karl Gorath. Gorath, a homosexual survivor of the camps, was arrested by the American authorities in Germany in 1946 and sentenced again under §175 to a prison sentence by the same Nazi judge who had sentenced him in the 1930s.
As for numbers: Michele Weber states that under United States administration, an estimated 1,100 to 1,800 men were arrested yearly on charges of violating Paragraph 175, a number significantly higher than it had been in the Weimar Republic. A substantial study of how many of them were convicted and subsequently imprisoned does not exist yet.
It is interesting to note that in contrast, in the Soviet zone, not only did the Soviets return to the pre-Nazi version of §175 and argued for that to be adopted in all occupation zones but also the number of cases involving the legal provision was much smaller. Jennifer Evans counts 129 cases of persecution based upon §175 in East Berlin until 1952, which can be chalked up to the fact that under their rules of evidence, penetration had to have happened and it required physical proof, something not on the books in the Western zones. All that despite the fact that Stalin had re-criminalized homosexuality in the USSR in 1934 and that as Günter Grau has argued, when it came to safeguarding the sexual mores of young males, the East and West upheld similar images of respectability and moral endangerment. |
why does uk english just say "in hospital" when us english says "in the hospital"? | There are other similar ones such as going to church/school/bed.
The distinction between those and things like the grocer, is that they convey the idea of being in a certain state.
e.g. I'm going to church vs I'm going to the church.
The first implies you are going to church for Sunday service or similar.
The second just means you are going to the physical church building.
I'm not sure why they diverged on some things like hospital but not others.
Edit: to add... so in the UK we might say, I'm going to THE hospital (to visit my friend), but I'm going to hospital (for surgery) |
If the French Revolution didn't see the establishment of a lasting democracy in France, why do we consider it so significant? | Your question presumes the idea of 'progress' - that history is a linear development slowly building up to the world we have today, and past events should be remembered primarily in terms of how they led us here. This view is far from uncommon, but historians need to be very careful not to project modern values and assumptions backwards onto the past. The French Revolution was immensely significant *at the time* because it changed Europe socially, politically, militarily and ideologically. Many of those changes are still with us, others have faded away or been overtaken by subsequent changes.
Politically, socially and ideologically, the French Revolution is often credited as the birth of the modern nation-state. It began a process whereby the inhabitants of France actually became French, giving people a sense of national identity and standardising language, culture and administration. It changed people's political identity by both expanding it horizontally (no longer just Norman or Parisian, now *French*) but also vertically (not just a peasant, now a citizen). In doing so, it swept away the last cobwebs of the middle ages. By then exporting the revolution intellectually (Jacobinism) and militarily (Napoleon) this process was echoed across the continent. For example, the Holy Roman Empire was finally dissolved.
Militarily, the creation of a nation meant the possibility of a national army. With the *levee en masse* (conscription) Napoleonic France completely changed how war was fought. Gone was the gentlemanly manouvre of small professional armies. Instead, huge armies of enthusiastic patriots able to break free from supply lines and 'live off the land', only to come together and overwhelm the enemy in massed column melee attacks. As Napoleon put it: "You cannot stop me; I spend 30,000 lives a month." Even bulwarks of monarchical conservatism such as Prussia were forced to respond by imitating the French militarily, but conscription isn't something the army can just *do* - ultimately, the state of Prussia had to make significant domestic political and social concessions as a result.
In summary, the French Revolution *created* the nation-state of France. Then, it gave Napoleon the tools to export that Revolution. By a combination of direct imposition and indirect imitation, this had a significant impact on countries across Europe. |
In Saving Private Ryan, a few American soldiers open the hatch of a Tiger tank to drop a grenade inside , is there any documentation of this actually occurring in ww2? | Most tanks' hatches did have locks to stop the hatch from being pried open from the outside, and a system to stop the hatch from falling closed and bonking the unfortunate crew member on the head, and that included the Tiger tank. The commander of the tank in *Saving Private Ryan* probably foolishly left his hatch unlocked.
Tiger I tank commander's hatch. The three bars served to lock the hatch closed.
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The commander's hatch of the "Tiger" in *Saving Private Ryan* is actually a rather poor representation, being just a flimsy piece of sheet metal. The real Tiger's hatch was quite heavy and couldn't be held open with just a rifle barrel as depicted in the movie.
Another example; Tiger I tank loader's hatch. You would turn the small wheel to move the bars and lock the hatch.
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in relation to your point about tanks' hatches being pried open and things thrown inside them, the Marine tank battalions in the Pacific devised a solution. In response to the suicidal tactics used by Japanese soldiers equipped with grenades and pole mines, each battalion systematically put combinations of chicken wire cages or nails on their tanks' hatches in order to stop Japanese bombs from actually touching the tank; this would reduce potential blast damage. Wooden planks on the tanks' sides were used to stop Japanese magnetic mines from sticking, and apparently provided minimal protection against light Japanese antitank guns. Sometimes, the planks were used as a form for a layer of concrete and left in place. Planks or poles were also sometimes placed across the suspension arms to stop things from being shoved inside and jamming up the wheels.
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Late model (lowered) Sherman split-hatch cupola. The torsion springs and toothed "claw" and catch helped hold the hatch open. Early Shermans did not come with this feature, and it was retrofitted.
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why do pimples (zits) on the inside of your nostrils hurt so much more than any others? | Not a dermatologist, but I'd guess it was due to the skin being thinner and also because the inside of your nose if pretty sensitive. It doesn't see much outside activity other than filtering small debri and the occasional nose pick. This is likely part of why materials that feel soft to our fingers, like tissue paper, still irritates and causes soreness to our nose as we get sick. Your nose just isn't used to the additional activity. |
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