question stringlengths 44 300 | answer stringlengths 151 13.2k |
|---|---|
why do top nutrition advisory panels continue to change their guidelines (sometimes dramatically) on what constitutes a healthy diet? | I studied nutrition for several years before veering off into archaeology. I still have my textbook Nutrition: Concepts and Controversies, and it's that second one you want to focus on.
The biggest Achilles heel in nutrition science is politics. Take the case of beef. Several decades ago the (I believe) USDA came right out and said "eat less red meat," in response to sound science, and the beef lobby sued like crazy. The revised advice became "reduce intake of lipid-rich proteins," which is nicely innocuous and also applies equally well to PEANUTS.
The fact is the science is still very, very young, and meanwhile the politics of food have deep roots. Every time a new study that's both innovative and objective actually gets funded *and* published it's a goddamn miracle, and that'll be even more true in the next several years. So food officials jump on those studies like lions on a fat gazelle, and that's why things get massively shaken up from time to time.
TL;DR - nutrition is a very new science and food is highly politicized, so new information will almost always be pretty game-changing. |
i've always heard that multivitamins aren't very beneficial because your body can't absorb all the vitamins at once and the excess is excreted. could your body absorb more of the vitamins if you cut the multivitamin into pieces and ate it throughout the day, instead of all at once? | Your body doesn't absorb most of the vitamins from a multivitamin simply because it doesn't need them, not because it couldn't if there was a shortage. If you have a halfway decent diet a multivitamin is almost completely useless to the body regardless of the time of day eaten. |
with all the lawsuits going around where companies can't be sexist when hiring employees how is hooters able to only hire big breasted women | They are hiring models. It is legal to base hiring of models on physical characteristics. They have already been sued over it and won.
Edit: Well I didn't think my short comment would be the at the top. Hooters lost the overall case and had to settle. However, they retained the right to maintain their hiring standards on their female wait staff. They opened many other positions to males as part of the settlement. |
why do celebrities rarely get prison sentences that match the severity of those given to non-celebrities? | * Better lawyers
* Often have positive contribution to society to become celebrities, so better prospects of rehabilitation
* More money = easier rehabilitation for things like addiction/violence
* Reputation damage is often seen as a large punishment which 'normal' people don't have |
Were there any feared knights from medieval history like the Mountain from Game of Thrones? | Feared? Well, sort of. There were definitely some more famous ones. William Marshal comes to mind. He was a sort of proto celebrity and lived between 1146CE and 1219CE.
He was one of the younger sons in his family, and he didn't really stand much of a chance to inherent land. He ended up finding talent as a knight and spent a lot of time tourneying with friends, where he gained recognition with a few royals. He also had a reputation for playing rather dirty:
"The Marshal made a point of playing to win. Wherever he went he was ruthless on the field, mastering tactics (such as grabbing his opponent's horse's reins) that eluded others." (Nigel Saul, "Chivalry and the Birth of Celebrity").
He lived long enough, married the right person, and won enough tournaments to move up in society enough to live comfortably. One of his children commissioned an historical poem about him, and records tell a decent amount.
Works referenced:
PRACTICAL CHIVALRY IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY: THE CASE OF WILLIAM MARSHAL
Richard Abels
Saul, Nigel. "Chivalry And The Birth Of Celebrity." History Today 61.6 (2011): 20-25. Historical Abstracts. Web. 29 June 2014.
(Yes, I know, I haven't formatted my citations properly or similarly, but it's a Saturday, it's summer, this is reddit, and I'm tired).
Basically, yes. And I'm sure that for every knight that we know about, there were many who have been lost to history. |
why can't rob ford be impeached if 'the video' is in police hands? | There is no way whatsoever to remove a sitting Toronto mayor (well, that's not quite true, see below). Neither the city council, the provicinial government, or anything like that have any power to do this. There is no impeachment or recall mechanism. This isn't the US.
The only exception at all is the municipal conflict of interest act, which doesn't really cover anything he has allegedly done in this video scandal. That allows (requires really) a court to remove an incumbent if found guilty of certain forms of conflict of interest. This was already tried on another unrelated matter anyhow, and it failed. |
I'm a German living in western Germany in December, 1944. Do I have any idea how poorly the war is going, or would Nazi propoganda have successfully hidden German setbacks from me? | Modified from [an earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_)
> Enjoy the war, for the peace is going to be terrible- popular German joke in the last year of the war
As the fortunes of war turned against Germany after the Battle of Stalingrad, German propaganda found an imperative need to readjust to this new reality. Prior to the military reversals of 1942, German propaganda had operated on the principle of presenting an "ersatz reality," wherein the state-dominated media maximized Germany's victories and ignored the salient reality that Germany's war was not a short one and her enemies persisted in fighting Germany. The scale of defeats like Stalingrad, the growing Allied bomber raids, and the surrender of German forces in North Africa pricked this media bubble and German propaganda organs responded accordingly.
This retooling of the Third Reich's propaganda apparatus in light of defeat pursued several seemingly counter-intuitive strategies. For one thing, despite the fact that the Third Reich was a personalist dictatorship *par excellence*, the figure of Hitler disappeared from German propaganda. In contrast to propaganda from the earlier years of victory, post-Stalingrad news of German military operations seldom invoked Hitler's name or connected him too heavily to military operations. This was part of a deliberate strategy on Goebbels's part as he recognized connecting Hitler too intimately to Germany's military fortunes made him, and by extension, the legitimacy of the entire regime, culpable when these operations did not bear fruit. Rather than present images of the Führer, Hitler was invoked in late war propaganda as an abstract figure that stood for all Germans. This could just be from invoking his title, or oblique historical analogies such as films that made apparent the connection between Hitler and historical personages like Frederick the Great. Hitler, whose visage was omnipresent in state propaganda between 1933-1941, became an abstraction. By the same token, German propaganda also emphasized the severity and violence of German military setbacks, but with a unique spin. Allied bombing, the Soviet massacres of Polish officers at Katyn, and other actions of the Allies became staples of German propaganda after the tide had turned as it showed that Germany's enemies were merciless. The idea behind this emphasis upon the Allies' purported barbarity was to bind the Germans together through a policy of "strength through terror." This dehumanization of the Allies' military underscored that no compromise was possible and this was a war in which there was to be no quarter given and none expected.
These new strategies often dovetailed with established propaganda discourses that had been present within the Third Reich since 1933. The regime's castigation of the so-called "November Criminals" of 1918 also found new currency in this environment. Interrogations of German troops captured after 20 July 1944 often reported back that one key motivation for fighting on was to prevent a repeat of Germany's humiliating defeat at the end of the First World War. One important component of the demonization of the Allied military was that German retribution was in the making. Since 1933, one of the central legitimizing planks of the NSDAP was that it had enabled German technology and genius to reach its full potential. The vaunted V-weapons tapped into this established narrative that German technical expertise brooked no rivals. But beyond rockets and other *Wunderwaffen*, National Socialism had always stressed the ability of the will to transcend any material obstacles. This propaganda's emphasis upon collective action in the face of numerical superiority fed into this notion that the will is superior to rational logic. Similarly, the destruction of German landmarks and the seemingly indiscriminate nature of Allied bombing heightened the sense that this was a cultural war and that the Germanic culture constantly trumpeted by the Third Reich was in existential danger.
One sinister aspect of the late war propaganda was its turn to a heightened antisemitism. Goebbels used the solidarity of Allied coalition of both the imperial Britain, hypercapitalist United States, and the Bolshevik USSR as evidence of grand global Jewish conspiracy against Germany. Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who by fortune escaped deportation and murder, would note in his diaries the increasingly shrill antisemitism in propaganda as Germany's fortunes waned. The widespread knowledge about the Holocaust amongst the German public imparted a weight to this propaganda that it might not have otherwise possessed. Although they might not have known the specifics of the Holocaust, most Germans were aware that something quite terrible had happened to the Jews in the East. Even though the antisemitism was troweled on so thick to strain credibility in this propaganda, it encouraged the expectation that the Allies would hold Germany collectively responsible for the mass murder of the Jews. This does not mean that the German public accepted the NSDAP and Propaganda Ministry's antisemitism wholesale, but in some cases interpreted antisemitism quite differently than the state. One popular rumor among German civilians in 1943/4 was that Hungary had not been the target of any Allied bombings was because the Hungarian government had spared its Jews. The SD recorded a number of complaints that because the Horthy government has ghettoized Jews in Budapest the Allies would not attack this human shield, and there was grumbling within the German populace that Hitler did not do the same for cities like Berlin or Hamburg. And some of this disgruntlement was not clandestine, but in direct petitions to Goebbels. There were a string of letters to the Propaganda Ministry after the mass operations to clear Hungary's Jews in 1944 demanding that they be used as human hostages against Allied bombing. But the general acceptance of some of the antisemitism produced by Goebbels's machine precluded any thought or possibility of a negotiated peace for much of the German public. News of the Morgenthau Plan, which would have deindustrialized Germany, the expansion of Allied bombing, and the scale of German reverses fostered the expectation of a Carthaginian peace.
The effectiveness of this late-war propaganda is open to interpretation. While it could not rekindle hope in final victory, it did strengthen the resolve of some Germans to see the war to its bitter conclusion. Yet, even as propaganda turned to negative integration (uniting around a threat), it could not arrest the gradual estrangement of much of the German public to the National Socialist state. Goebbels himself appreciated this sentiment and his famous February 1943 *Sportpalast* speech had veiled threats against the "Golden Pheasants" of the NSDAP who were thus far still enjoying a prewar lifestyle. This late-war propaganda often worked in conjunction with greater arbitrary state violence directed against Germans, especially after the 20 July plot. Extralegal state violence had been embedded in the DNA of the Third Reich since 1933, but outside of political enemies and German Jews, most Germans' interaction with arbitrary state violence was the *threat* of it until around Stalingrad, when the security services began a much more thorough crackdown against shirkers and potential fifth-columnists. The 20 July plot helped to further this turn towards extralegal violence and other forms of domestic terror.
In this hypothetical scenario, a western German would have been obviously aware that the war had been going poorly. There were simply too many salient reverses to ignore. The Allied bomber campaign against the Ruhr and the sound of flak would have been something impossible to ignore. Their own government would have also publicized some of the Allied victories as an example that Germany's back was against the wall. By the the winter of 1944, the Red Army had begun to occupy German territory in the East (both in the Reich and those annexed in 1939) and Goebbels's propaganda ministry published lurid atrocity tales. Moreover, the advance of Anglo-American arms across France had eliminated what had been Hitler's greatest strategic victory in 1940. The retreat of German troops as well as the fall of the German city of Aachen in October 1944 would have been a reality that would have been difficult to ignore.
The mid- and late-war propaganda drive for mass action and a collective response to Allied aggression worked in often counterintuitive ways. While it stiffened resolve to not have a repeat of November 1918, propaganda along with the deteriorating war effort engendered a kind of grim fatalism for the future. Both rhetoric and reality heightened the sense of social anomie and the breakdown of society that came as bombing and wartime pressures destroyed the German infrastructure and stretched the civilian domestic economy well past its breaking point. The final agonies of the last few months of the war, as well as the violence meted out to Germans that shirked in their duties, helped to cement the postwar myth that Germans were double victims of the war- who were both subject to extreme violence from their military enemies, but also brutalized by a hypocritical criminal regime. |
Given the technology, political institutions, and social structures in the Game of Thrones series, which century does it most closely resemble? | This is mostly a ramble - I'm inserting things as they occur to me reflecting back on the shows and books.
At first glance, what we see in Game of Thrones is a bit of a mish-mash of various regions and periods of real-life Earth. The political structure of Westeros is strongly feudal, with the power very decentralised. The King of the Iron Throne is almost entirely dependent upon his immediate vassals, the Lords Paramount of the Seven Kingdoms, for actual troops, funds, and goods, having no standing army and only the tiny Crownlands as a personal demesne from which to draw his own military forces. There is essentially no real merchant class in Westeros, with all wealth passing through the hands of the noble families or their factors. The strength of the various duke and count equivalents relative to the king (do we ever hear of any ranks of landed nobility beyond Lords in the series?) means that the stability of the realm is highly dependent upon the personal qualities of the monarch and his relations with his vassals. Even within the series, we've heard about Robert's Rebellion, the Greyjoy Rebellion, the War of the Ninepenny Kings, and the War of the Five Kings, all happening within a single lifetime. All of this points to a kingdom in the equivalent of the Early or High Medieval Period.
At the same time, Westerosi bureaucracy is at a stage about equivalent to Europe in the 1600s - you have public debt (to the throne rather than to the king personally), an elaborate system of taxation and tolls for roads, customs, trade, etc, public works such as the Kingsroad, and the governmental post of "Master of Coin" overseeing the whole process.
Religion does not occupy the same pride of place in Westerosi society that it did at any point in Europe. It seems to be largely a private affair - the Kingdoms tolerate worship of the Seven (the state religion) as well as the Old Gods in the north, and don't particularly seem to persecute (beyond a vague mistrust) foreign religions such as Rh'llor. We don't hear of any prominent schisms or heresies within the Faith of the Seven, nor is there any indication of persecution of interpretations differing from the orthodoxy. None of this bears any resemblance to the Catholic treatment of heathens or heretics within Christendom, though this can probably be put down to there being relatively little political friction between Westeros and the foreign heathens of Essos.
Marriage is a religious affair in the South, requiring blessing from a septon to be valid. The state does not get involved in the process at all. Divorce doesn't seem to be possible, though you can break off a betrothal given sufficient cause (eg. Joffrey/Sansa). Marriage didn't become a religious sacrament in real-life Europe until roundabout the 13th century. The state and legal system began getting involved in the process by the end of the 17th century.
Jousting seems to be a particularly popular pastime amongst Westerosi nobility, and the form we see in the show (a single pair of warriors tilting at one another with a lance across a wooden barrier) only appeared at the turn of the 15th century. Prior to that it was mostly a general melee or a contest of a series of people trying to "get past" a single defender. Tilting finally disappeared in the early 17th century, but had been dying out for a long while.
Technology in Westeros is more comparable to the Early Modern Period than to the Early Medieval. We see windmills, watermills, and wheelbarrows. Castles are highly advanced, with the most impressive (such as Winterfell) able to hold off armies many *many* times the size of their garrisons. Barbicans, murder holes, very very thick walls and rounded towers, deep wells, etc etc all point to a long tradition of castle-building. Civic structures are shown with flying buttresses, gothic arches and vaults, as well as stone bridges with impressive spans such as at King's Landing. All post-12th-century in Europe (though Roman architecture had made use of arches and vaults, the technology had been lost for several centuries). And supposedly these castles have been largely unchanged for hundreds (or indeed thousands) of years.
Metallurgy, particularly steel production, also appears to be well-established. Knights are invariably in full plate, which historically peaked in the 15th and 16th centuries. Even the common soldiery seem to be using steel armour and weaponry (rather than iron), which is particularly impressive/strange given the expense and difficulty involved.
We see plenty of examples of glass, both coloured and clear, in the TV series. Glass lanterns, glass windows, mirrored glass, "far-eyes" or telescopes. Primarily in the South, but still present and unremarked on as being particularly rare.
Likewise the Wall. Ok, it's "magic", which is a good fudge factor, but just look at that elevator system in Castle Black, and consider the sheer logistics involved in repairing and maintaining a structure that size. Hauling blocks of ice to that height would be difficult without a vast slave army, let alone with the skeleton crew we've observed. Westerosi engineering is highly advanced, it seems.
Shipbuilding is somewhere between the 14th and 16th centuries. We see carrack equivalents, as well as cogs with forecastles and gigantic sails. We also see very large galleys in the east, equipped with catapults, ballistae and scorpions. Also, bizarrely, the longboats of the 9th-11th century Vikings dominate the northern seas. |
why green laser pointers cost only a few dollars more than red laser pointer but green self-leveling laser levels cost hundreds of dollars more than their red counterparts | Not my answer but an answer I found on a forum from 2004.
> In a 640nm red laser pointer, there's a red-emitting diode and a lens to collimate (focus) the beam.
> In a 532nm green laser (pointer or larger size), there's a BIG infrared laser diode that generates laser light at 808nm, this is fired into a crystal containing the rare-earth element "neodymium". This crystal takes the 808nm infrared light and lases at 1064nm (yes, deeper in the infrared!). This 1064nm laser light comes out of the NdYV04 (neodymium yttrium vanadium oxide) crystal and is then shot into a second crystal (containing potassium, titanium, & amp; phosphorus, usually called KTP) that doubles the frequency to 532nm - the bright green color you see. This light is then collimated (focused) by a lens and emerges out the laser's "business end". Just before the lens, there's a filter that removes any stray IR (infrared) rays from the pump diode and the neodymium crystal.
Basically, with green diode laser pointers there are lots of itty bitty parts, and they all need to be aligned by hand. If the polarisation is "off", one or both crystals need to be turned. The overall process of making and the parts make the green one more expensive. With red diode lasers, you just slap in the diode and slap a lens in front of it, which makes it cheaper.
You can also see an image [here](_URL_0_) which more or less shows how the green laser pointer is more complex. |
how come some films that were made 20 years ago are now available on blu-ray? | Films that were shot on real film (35mm) can be scanned again and a HD copy be made for BluRay release.
You see, film is great. Really great. So great, that even today, Digital Cinematography cameras like the RED One, Epic, Phantom, Cinealta, Arri, Panavision and such are trying to keep up with what film can really do.
Film captures a great detail of grays and very natural colors, and despite the fact that is was created more than 100 years ago, film is still the bar used to measure digital equipment.
So film is better than HD 1080p, as a matter of fact, digital projectors in theaters are about 4K resolution in order to keep up with what film could do.
I have not shot a single foot of film for four years. Digital Cinematography it's getting there, and the speed and price of the process works in favor of digital.
Hope it helps
EDIT: Added Arri |
sunlight takes 8 minutes yo get to earth but in the perspective of light how long would it take to get to earth? | If light could experience time, it would seem instantaneous. Time would not pass at all once you reach 100% of c. However, it would arrive here to see that we aged 8 minutes and 8 minutes of time relative to us Earth-dwellers has passed.
Basically, at the speed of light, time is meaningless, as it's all based off of the speed of light. |
why don't jet engines have a pointed mesh over them to keep birds and other objects out of them? | 1) That would interrupt airflow
2) Damage to it could cause the metal to get sucked into the engine, much more destructive than a bird
3) A bird impaled on the mesh would still certainly interrupt clean airflow
4) It would add weight. Even a single pound of additional weight is lost fuel efficiency, amounting to quite a lot of money over the lifetime of the plan.
EDIT: 5) Such grating would only be effective at relatively low speeds; once the jet gets going the bird will smash right through it anyway (credit /u/Dr_Evil_Powers) |
Is there any credibility at all to this "discovery" of ancient Chinese petroglyphs in America? | No there isn’t. I’m a archaeologist working in the US Southwest and have had to deal with the pseudoarchaeology that Ruskamp has been promoting for several years. He came and talked at a local archaeology society meeting on the request of one member who was a fan. I was later asked by the society to come in and correct the record afterward. His arguments are laughably sloppy and full of special pleading. In a language where changing a character even a bit alters the meaning or makes it illegible he allows for tons of variation and substitutions in his “identification “ and then abuses statistical tools to give his arguments a feeling of scientific rigor to those who don’t have a background on those subjects. In reality he just makes wild claims that very different imagery is the same and then designs a statistical test to “prove “ it using his already deeply flawed data. He has no knowledge of rock art traditions in the region and if he did, he would know that many of the images he uses in his arguments have long and well documented trajectories of change through time locally and certainly don’t appear out of nowhere as he claims. He combines things from all time periods and claims they are contemporary. He’s a big self promoter and offers to talk to avocational Archaeology groups and sell tours in China. He uses a lot of the same tools as other fringe archaeologists to get stories on his work picked up by fringe publications and then cites them elsewhere as proof that his ideas are accepted. Jason Covalito has a little bit of context on him on his blog [here. ](_URL_1_)
Edit: I just remembered that Angus Quinlan reviewed his book Asiatic Echos in American Antiquity (the journal of the Society for American Archaeology) for a special feature addressing pseudoscience. [link here. ](_URL_0_) |
On 18 April 1930, the BBC announced that "There is no news today". What are some events of your field of history that could have been reported? | I'll leave it to others to actually hazard answers to your question, but I think the 1930 incident that you refer to is sufficiently curious to be worthy of some attention in its own right.
It does seem to be true that the announcement of "No news today" was made; the BBC's own *Yearbook* for 1930 makes mention of the broadcast. But it may help to contextualise. The announcement came at a very early point in British news broadcasting history. The BBC had only been permitted to prepare its own news bulletins, rather than broadcasting already-prepared copy produced by a press agency, in 1928; in 1930, the broadcasting of news was still the responsibility of the Department of Talks, and no separate News Section would be established until 1934. There were no portable sound recorders and no easy means of sending broadcast-quality sound back to a central studio from the field; it was only in 1936 (on the occasion of the great fire that destroyed the Crystal Palace in south London) that a telephone report, with the sounds of shouts, fire engines and flames in the background) was first broadcast live.
Furthermore, 18 April 1930 was Good Friday – a then fairly strictly observed public holiday on which British newspapers did not publish. This latter circumstance created a significant issue for the BBC, since at this point in its history it did not have its own journalistic staff. The existing news organisations of the day had bitterly opposed any suggestion that radio be allowed to become a real competitor to the press, and it was prepared to insist on the copyright it held on its own bulletins to prevent their being used as a source by the BBC.
The Corporation - which was and is publicly funded via payment by its audience of a licence fee – was thus forced to choose between developing its own, enormously expensive, news gathering organisation from scratch, something the newspapers would have decried as a waste of public money, and of reaching an agreement with the printed press. News gathering was not then seen as central to the BBC's mission - even though this was famously defined by its first Director General, [John Reith](_URL_0_), as "to inform, educate, and entertain" – so, under a 1924 agreement made with the two main wire news services of the day, the Press Association and Exchange and Telegraph, it maintained a staff of two editors and two sub-editors to go through the agency tickers to prepare news bulletins. The BBC made no claim to creating or even curating news; a surviving recording dating to 1936 reveals that a copyright notice stating that the news was "Copyright by Reuter, Press Association, Exchange Telegraph and Central News" was read out before the broadcast itself began.
All in all, then, the radio news of 1930 was, according to its historian Tim Crook, "an unselfconsciously amateur operation" which was "held in contempt by Fleet Street journalists" - that is, the staffs of the country's intensely competitive national newspapers.
It would be very interesting to know in more detail than we now do exactly what combination of circumstances led to the announcement you cite. The newswires themselves certainly did continue to operate over holiday periods, but it's possible at least some of the BBC news editing team were on holiday on the Good Friday in question, just as at least some of their newspaper colleagues - with no Good Friday papers to produce - would have been. I would suggest it's also extremely possible that the BBC team had by this point developed the habit of turning to the press of the day for guidance as to what news stories were considered most important and pressing, and using these leads to arrange the radio news bulletin. (It would be fascinating to run a study of any surviving news broadcasts of scripts against the same day's London evening newspapers to check on this, but certainly it does not seem impossible that the BBC's shoestring news operation lacked the experience and confidence to shape a news agenda on its own, and that its "unselfconsciously amateur" ethos did the rest.) Certainly I don't think that anyone working for the BBC at this point in its history considered that it was the Corporation's job to do more than act as a digest of already available news produced by other sources. There were literally dozens of newspapers, from *The Times* downwards, selling many millions of copies daily, that were already doing that job.
One further point worth making – which is a factor [stressed by the BBC itself these days](_URL_1_) – is that in 1930,
> those in charge of the Talks Department, where News was based, drew a definite distinction between "BBC news values" and "journalistic news values".
> It was an absolute rule there should be no "sensationalism". Parliamentary news, not known for its ability to grip the listener, was given special prominence.
Not surprisingly, parliament had not sat that Good Friday, and so it was impossible for the staff on duty that evening to rely on one of the most usual "leads" for the nightly news bulletin.
The reality, then, was that the 18 April announcement was largely a product of the absence within the BBC of any team capable of generating its own news agenda in the absence of the usual guidance provided by the proceedings in parliament and by the newspapers of the day. Even as late as 1936 - at a time of growing international crisis, let's not forget - a junior BBC employee called Richard Dimbleby (later to become an extremely eminent broadcaster in his own right) could still write to the Chief News Editor that
> a member or members of your staff – they could be called 'BBC reporters, or BBC correspondents' – should be held in readiness, just as they are at the evening paper men, to cover unexpected news for the day. In the event of a big fire, strike, civil commotion, railway accident, pit accident, or any other major catastrophe in which the public, I fear, is deeply interested, a reporter could be sent from Broadcasting House to cover the event for the bulletin.
> At the scene, it would be his job, in addition to writing his own account of the event, to secure an eyewitness [and Dimbleby went on to give an earnest definition of how an "eyewitness" was to be defined]... and to give a short eyewitness account of the part he or she played that day. In this way, I really believe that News could be presented in a gripping manner.
Furthermore, [the BBC broadcasting schedule](_URL_2_) for 18 April 1930 reveals that there had already been broadcasts of national and regional sports bulletins earlier that same evening. These seem to have gone ahead as normal; it was only the 15-minute political news broadcast scheduled for 8.45pm that was affected.
The idea that anybody thought there was literally "no news" on 18 April 1930 is thus pretty implausible. The phrase may have been the product of an incautious or hurried scriptwriter, and I suspect that whoever was responsible would have been pretty amazed to see their phrase entering the historical record, and being discussed so earnestly here on AskHistorians 87 years later.
**Sources**
Tim Crook, *International Radio Journalism: History, Theory and Practice* (1997)
Jonathan Dimbleby, *Richard Dimbleby* (1975)
Jackie Harrison, *News* (2005) |
why are human eyes usually blue, brown or green as opposed to any other colors? | The stroma (top layer of the iris) is what determines eye color. For those with no melanin (pigment that makes eyes or skin a warm brown), the only color comes from the Tyndall effect of light scattering in the iris. This creates a blue color, like water with glacial flour or dirty smoke.
When the stroma has a little melanin, it looks green because this blue combines with the the orangey brownish melanin. When it has a lot of melanin, the brown color takes over completely. |
how do music royalties work? does a composer get a check every week or month for life? and typically how much for a hit song? | and also how do the people in charge of royalties know how much a radio station plays the song? I get it when there's stuff on the system as it can just link straight up online but when stations play records or CDs is there a way of counting plays? |
How safe would Ancient cities like Rome and Athens be to walk around at night, for an average man? | I made a longish post about this a while ago, which I still stand by. Long story short, we don't know:
We just don't know. A lot of people will use Juvenal, a satirist of the late first century who painted a very vivid picture of Roman life, to show that the city was very dangerous. However, this is roughly the equivalent of using a modern stand up comedian to get an accurate picture of life in Chicago--I have spent a great deal of time in Chicago and have yet to pay a bribe or get shot, but stand up comedy acts usually revolve around those two aspects. So Juvenal is funny, and he gives a good example of what the grumpy sort of conservative might say, but it isn't very useful in a statistical sense.
So another way people might look at this is whether the conditions for crime exist, although I personally think this is futile as I'll explain later. On the face of it, conditions for crime seem pretty ripe: there was very little in the way of active policing, grinding poverty and copious inequality. But these conditions can also be said to be fairly true for modern Mumbai, which had fewer murders in 2013 (187) than New York City (332), which is quite safe for an American city. Drawing straight lines from a set of observed material or social conditions to crime rate is usually not possible. After all, policemen are not necessarily better at reducing crime than, say, neighborhood organizations like what existed in Rome in the form of *vici*.
But this brings up an issue that is easy to miss: despite the common comparisons to third world cities, Rome is comparable to precisely nowhere on earth. In fact, this applies to every ancient city, as the industrial revolution and rise of globalization has irrevocably altered every settlement of significant size. There are places in the world where you can find villages or small bands that are relatively cut off from mainstream society and live in comparable material conditions as pre-modern people in comparable communities and then use comparative ethnography to understand how ancient communities lived. But there are no places in the world where you can find a city of a million in such material conditions. It is honestly one of the most frustrating and yet tantalizing parts of studying the ancient world.
That being said, it is possible to look at comparative stats from, say, Tudor London. One problem with this is that these statistics can be notoriously difficult to interpret--[this review](_URL_1_) of Stephen Pinker goes over some of the issues of pre modern crime stats. The second is that crime rates vary wildly in modern cities, so they probably would in ancient ones as well.
EDIT: Wow, this got noticed. A great book on ancient Rome is Steven Dyson's *Rome: A Living Portrait of an Ancient City*. It deals extensively with the city itself and is pleasantly "fact heavy". I can also recommend books on Roman urban life in general if anyone is interested.
EDIT2: So apparently my quick comment about Mumbai got the most attention, which is great but further questions about that should be taken over the /r/AskSocialScience. [Here](_URL_0_) is a source for 2009 so you know I'm not making it up. |
what exactly is fire, in detail? how can light and heat come from something we can't really touch? | Fire isn't really a thing that creates light and heat, it is the light and heat that results from a process.
When something is burning, it's a chain reaction of combustion, which is basically a fuel (the material that's burning) combining with oxygen in a chemical process that creates a bunch of heat. This process and all of the heat released by it creates a pocket of gas that's so hot that it glows and emits light. And that glowing gas is the flame that we see . |
why does alcohol leave such a recognizable smell on your breath when non-alcoholic drinks, like coke, don't? | The smell lingers as long as you're drunk because it's not coming from residual booze in your saliva, it's the smell of your blood itself.
When you imbibe an alcoholic beverage, ethanol (the active ingredient that gets you drunk), is absorbed into your bloodstream. Ethanol is a volatile chemical (it evaporates easily), so when alcoholic blood passes through your lungs, some of the ethanol evaporates into the air that you exhale. It's this process that allows a breathalyzer to measure BAC based on your exhalation. |
if ebola is so difficult to transmit (direct contact with bodily fluids), how do trained medical professionals with modern safety equipment contract the disease? | They're in contact with bodily fluids far more often than you or I would be. They take precautions, sure, but when you deal with something that frequently unlikely things can happen.
EDIT - I should have also mentioned something about fatigue and how it can cause individual lapses in safety protocols. This probably contributes pretty heavily, too. |
how does modern sex trafficking work? are the victims owned, bought and sold like chattel slavery or is there something more subtle? | Women and girls are ensnared in sex trafficking in a variety of ways. Some are lured with offers of legitimate and legal work as shop assistants or waitresses. Others are promised marriage, educational opportunities and a better life. Still others are sold into trafficking by boyfriends, friends, neighbors or even parents.
Trafficking victims often pass among multiple traffickers, moving further and further from their home countries. Women often travel through multiple countries before ending at their final destination. For example, a woman from the Ukraine may be sold to a human trafficker in Turkey, who then passes her on to a trafficker in Thailand. Along the way she becomes confused and disoriented.
Typically, once in the custody of traffickers, a victim's passport and official papers are confiscated and held. Victims are told they are in the destination country illegally, which increases victims' dependence on their traffickers. Victims are often kept in captivity and also trapped into debt bondage, whereby they are obliged to pay back large recruitment and transportation fees before being released from their traffickers. Many victims report being charged additional fines or fees while under bondage, requiring them to work longer to pay off their debts. |
why can i not plug a double ended usb into 2 laptops and just transfer files across? | Because USB protocol follows master-slave convention. One device is "ruling" USB bus and other devices must follow. If you connect two computers that way, both would want to be "masters". There is also electrical problem, because both PC are providing power to 5V lines. If that circuitry is badly designed it could just fail when there is voltage from the other side present.
There are however special USB cables designed exactly for data transfer. They act like external network card. |
okay, seriously though, please, can we bring this subreddit back to its original intention? | Yeah I kind of agree with you on that one. I hate how many times "Explain Quantum dynamics in mathematical terms like i'm five" and the like has been asked on this subreddit. It's kind of become a place where people who haven't paid attention in class go to ask about, like you said, their 200-level classes.
That being said, I kind of like that we've moved away from actually talking in baby voice ("pretend that your toy tonka truck fell out of your crib"). We can still use simpler language, but no one is *literally* explaining things to a five-year-old here. If you want that, go over to /r/explainlikeIAmA
What this subreddit was designed for, is that if you don't understand what most would consider a simple thing, like how a car works or why protein is good for you, you don't have to go to /r/cars or /r/fitness and get laughed at. You instead get a non-judgmental, simple explanation, much like a five-year-old would asking the same question.
That is no excuse for not searching for your question though. there were *103 separate fucking questions* as to what the fiscal cliff was. Not okay. |
why do airline passengers have to put their seats into a full upright position for takeoff? why does it matter? | You're most likely to have some sort of accident during takeoff and landing. This is also why your tray tables have to be up and you can't have laptops during these times: ease of evacuation. If your seat is back, and something happens and the plane needs to be evacuated quickly, you just made it harder for the person behind you to get out.
Edit: I've gotten this message lots of times, and as has been beautifully explained, your window thing has to be up so, in the event of an emergency, emergency personnel can see into the plane/you can see a fire, should there be one. |
how come when you're sick you can blow your nose and they'll be completely empty and 5 minutes later they're full and dripping. how does mucus generate so quickly and where is it even made. | The mucus comes directly from the surface of your nose, called a mucous membrane because it produces mucus to protect itself and as lubrication. This mucus is a combination of long, stringy proteins and water, which allows it to stick to most surfaces.
We produce a ton of it while we have upper respiratory tract infections like the common cold because our immune systems are trying to isolate the virus causing the infection and prevent more from getting in. This measure isn't actually that effective, as it only slows down viruses and bacteria can swim right through it, but we do it anyway. Allergies do the same thing because they are an attempt by the immune system to attack something that isn't actually a disease, like pollen. We are less clear on why allergies happen, but some hypothesize that they occur due to infants and children living in environments that are far too clean. Their immune systems don't have anything to fight, so they start fighting random things instead. |
what is a lawyer supposed to do when defending a person who is obviously guilty of a crime? | They're supposed to vigorously defend their client, to the best of their ability. Even the worst person in the world deserves an advocate who will work to make sure they're treated fairly, no matter the circumstance. Justice is blind, after all.
Of course, that doesn't mean that the lawyer will always try to *win* the case. In a lot of cases, the best defense for a client is to fight for a plea deal: in that case, the client is admitting guilt, but for a lesser crime, or in the hopes of a more lenient punishment. |
When and how did the title "Paladin" or "Knight Paladin" become popularly associated with a Knight who is also Healer? From the history of the term it would appear earlier usages were describing knights involved in mostly offensive operations? | Paladins are an invention of high medieval French literature, especially those *chansons* dealing with Roland and his exploits. They're also known as the Twelve Peers, and are, you guessed it, twelve highly esteemed noblemen who serve the (fictionalized) Charlemagne. In the most prominent of the chansons, they die with their leader, Roland, while defending Roncevaux Pass from the Moorish hordes.
That's pretty much it. There were no actual guys called paladins. Knights were not called paladins, except perhaps as a literary allusion. Charlemagne did not spend ten years campaigning against the Moors in Spain; he spent about four months there, before withdrawing his army to deal with domestic troubles. The historical Roland was a minor lord and killed not by tens of thousands of treacherous Muslims, but by outraged Basques whom Charlemagne's army had treated rather shabbily.
My guess would be that Gary Gygax or someone else involved in fantasy roleplaying games seized upon the name and built a player class around it. |
if slouching is so bad for us, why is it such a natural position to sit/stand in? | There is a ted talk on this. It's about [primal posture](_URL_0_).
In short, it's because of our furniture. From when we are babies, our posture is encouraged to slouch, like in car seats. Pelvis tilted in and rounded forward shoulders. This continues through our lives, in our couches and regular chairs. So it is difficult to train your body to sit properly, when it has been doing something else it's whole life.
In the talk she mentions, societies in non-developed areas, they sit and stand properly. Since they were from birth sitting and standing optimally, thanks to not having furniture encouraging bad posture. |
In light of Sharon's death: What actually happened at Sabra and Shatila? Was it the israeli's fault or have they just been given the blame for Lebanese Christian terrorists? | Oh, I wrote my bachelor's thesis about this. Well, about the Kahan commission. The Kahan commission was an Israeli commission, led by several Israeli judges, who were tasked in finding out exactly that - what happened at Sabra and Shatila and how much blame falls on Israel. The conclusion of the report was clear: the Phalangists were directly responsible for the massacre, Israel was indirectly responsible and Ariel Sharon had a personal responsibility. It was seen as a bold and impressive move by the international community - a nation that looked to recognise its own mistakes and responsibilities, an exercise in democracy.
The problem, however, is that the Kahan commission was - despite its unprecedented admission of guilt from Israel - a whitewash. Well, not a total whitewash, since it did lay some blame at the feet of Israel and Sharon, something that was fairly unprecedented at that point. But it was hard to deny those facts - even if you believed the most hardline Israeli version of the events, they'd still carry that responsibility because it happened in territory occupied by the Israeli's. The Kahan commission was a whitewash, however, because while it was undeniably the Phalangists carrying out the massacres, Israel - and Sharon - played an active part in making it happen and can't get away with just an admission of "indirect responsibility".
The short version of what happened, then. Two months after Israel invaded Lebanon, a deal was struck after mediation by the international community. The PLO fighters and Syrian troops would get free passage to evacuate from West Beirut. All was going well, until the assassination of the recently elected Christian president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, on 14 September. The very next day, the IDF invaded West Beirut. By the 16th, the entirety of West Beirut was under Israeli control, having met little resistance after the evacuation. The IDF surrounded the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Israel's allies in the war, the Christian Phalangists under command of Elie Hobeika, were sent into the camps under orders to remove any remaining PLO fighters. During the next three days, between 700 and 3000 Palestinian refugees were massacred under the eyes of the IDF.
While the IDF later claimed they knew nothing of what happened and were powerless to stop it, even while the massacres were ongoing, the international press managed to catch wind of it. What followed was a storm of protest and outrage, even in Israel itself. At first, the Israeli government wasn't prepared to budge - they did nothing wrong, they claimed. In the words of prime minister Begin: 'Goyim are killing Goyim. Are we supposed to be hanged for that?' This position became untenable once 300.000 to 400.000 Israeli's came out onto the streets in protest. The pressure, both internal and international, was insurmountable and by the end of September the Kahan commission was born.
The Kahan commission - officially the "Commission of Inquiry into the events at the refugee camps in Beirut" - was named after its chairman and then president of the Israeli High Court, Yitzhak Kahan. Along with another high court judge, Aharon Barak, and Major-General of the IDF, Yona Efrat, they were tasked in finding out what happened. In their conclusions, they lay the blame at the feet of the Phalangists. Israel and the IDF could not have foreseen the massacre, let alone stop it. They held an indirect responsibility. Then minister of Defence Ariel Sharon and a few military men (including Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan and director of Military Intelligence Yehoshua Saguy) were held *personally* responsible. As a result of this, despite his initial refusal to do so, Sharon left his post as minister of defence, yet stayed on as minister without portfolio. Saguy was fired and Brigadier-General Amos Yaron was suspended from leadership positions within the IDF for three years.
Despite loud praise coming from Israel's allied governments in the West, there was a lot of criticism too. I'll keep these fairly short, but feel free to ask for more information. The commission was criticised for the following:
a) Ignoring witness statements it declared to be biased, such as the testimony of the Jewish-American nurse Ellen Siegel who was present at the camps at the time of the massacre and was about the presence of Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers and officers' testimonies were accepted without question.
b) Assuming the presence of PLO fighters in the refugee camps. This was one of the major criticisms on the facts mentioned in the report. The IDF claimed that the PLO didn't keep their part of the evacuation deal and left a large contingent of fighters in West Beirut, including 2.000 fighters in Sabra and Shatila. No source is given for this claim, except press releases of the Israeli government. More damningly, the IDF claims the massacre resulted in 700-800 casualties - but what happened to the other 1200-1300 fighters then? And seeing as many of the casualties were women and children, how is this explained? Moreover, in the immediate aftermath of the takeover of West-Beirut, the Chief of Staff described the area as "quiet". An intelligence officer was quoted as saying that the camps contained no "terrorists". Worse still, the Phalangists that were sent into the camps numbered only 150 - if they were supposed to confront 2.000 soldiers, that seems a bit optimistic in the capabilities of the militia. In all likelihood, the camps contained no PLO fighters.
c) The second point of major criticism was the ability of the IDF command posts to see what happened in the camps. The Israeli forward command post was a five story building a mere 200m away from Shatila. According to the report, the IDF command couldn't have seen what happened in the camps, not even with binoculars. A ludicrous claim, as independent tests shortly after the massacre proved this wrong - even without binoculars. And even if they couldn't see everything in the camps, there was a mass grave just 300m from the command posts that would have been very, very hard to miss.
d) The report concluded that the IDF had no way of knowing that the massacres were ongoing. They reached this conclusion despite recognizing that the militia shared the IDF command post, where several Israeli’s overheard and reported such communications as militia members radioing Hobeika with questions about what to do with 50 women and children and later with 45 prisoners – the responses being ‘This is the last time you're going to ask me a question like that, you know exactly what to do.’ and ‘Do the will of God.’ respectively. Another message reported 300 casualties at that point. All these events were reported by members of the Israeli staff to their superiors, but were not acted upon. Even on the 17th of September, Israeli reporter Ze'ev Schiff got an anonymous tip from inside the military staff that a massacre was occurring. All these things are accepted as fact in the report. Nonetheless, the commission concluded that the IDF didn’t know the massacre was happening.
e) There were accusations that Israel even supplied material aid in the massacres, in the form of supplying bulldozers and illuminating the camp with flares at night. Supposedly, Hobeika’s militia was flown into Beirut by the Israeli military as well.
f) Another point of criticism revolves around the question if Israel knew of the possibility of a massacre before it even took place. This knowledge would imply criminal negligence or would even imply complicity. The commission mentions this possibility, but rejects it without giving any reasoning. The criticism here is summed up by the words of author Izhar Smilanski: ‘We let the hungry lions loose in the arena and they devoured people. So the lions must be the guilty ones, mustn’t they? They did the killing, after all. Who would have dreamed, when we opened the door for the lions and let them into the arena, that they’d gobble people up like that’
There were in fact many reports of concerns and predictions shortly after Bashir’s death about the nigh-on certainty of revenge and massacres, including by Mossad leaders, the Chief of Staff and the Deputy Prime Minister.
g) In addition to the last point, Hobeika’s militia was known for its brutality and for the massacres it committed, even before Sabra and Shatila. There were plenty of other militias who could’ve been sent in, but the Phalangists were chosen. The implication is clear.
h) The punishments suggested by the commission were often ignored. Sharon lost his minister of defense post, but stayed on as minister. He was even allowed to chair in several defense commissions, leaving him in de facto control of the defense post. Eitan wasn’t punished because he was on the verge of retirement. Yaron wasn’t supposed to have gotten a command for three years, but was appointed as chief of manpower and training shortly after the publication of the report.
These were just a few of the criticism on the report. Since then, there have been a few other commissions – most notably the MacBride commission – but these haven’t been accepted by Israel. Any criticism has been sharply countered, with browbeating, lawsuits and disinformation.
But let me be totally clear: Israel holds a direct responsibility for what happened in Sabra and Shatila and there are some very damning pieces of evidence that imply that members of the Israeli government and IDF were well aware of what was going to happen beforehand, most notably Ariel Sharon.
If there are any questions or if you want to know more about anything, just ask. I left out a lot because this is long enough as it is. As for sources, should I just upload my Bachelor's thesis? It's not in English, though.
e: How the hell do you leave space between paragraphs on this site? Goddamn. |
why do commentators/voice actors from old footage from the 40s 50s and 60s sound so different than reporters' voices today? | I believe what you're referring to the "transatlantic accent" which was taught in boarding schools up through the early 60's (also many actors and the like learned the accent to be more marketable, as it was seen as an upper-class/well-educated way of speaking). |
when my phone is connected to my cars audio system via bluetooth, how does the person talking not hear themself through my speakers? | Your car stereo uses active echo cancellation. It know what signal it's sending out of the speakers so it compares the signal it's picking up on the mic to the signal it's send out the speakers and tries to remove anything that is the same in both.
This is the same technology that works on your cell phone and on modern table stop speaker phones. |
if helen keller was born blind and deaf, how on earth did she learn anything? | She was actually born with both sight and hearing, but lost it to disease at 19 months.
She learned via touch and by having the words for various things spelled into her palm.
She learned to speak by feeling peoples lips as they talked. |
why is it we go into a state of "feeling low" for no apparent reason sometimes and how does it pass away? | Hormonal fluctuations. The body has a natural cycle in which hormone secretion increases and decreases for certain chemicals within the body. Increased levels of certain hormones and decreased levels of other hormones cause your mood to shift. This is why women get so sensitive during menstruation. Not a lot of people know that guys actually have these hormonal fluctuations as well and their cycles can actually sync the same way girls menstrual cycles do. |
Of all the heavy things in the world, why did anvils become the thing that cartoon characters drop on each other? | While I don't claim to be an expert on animation or cartoons, I'm not sure there are any flaired users on this sub and I am probably the closest there is so I will try to answer you question to the best of my abilities. Please note, however, that I don't claim to be an expert in this field and that my claims could easily be disproven later. With that being said, we can begin....
There has been a fair bit of speculation on this answer so far and, while it is against the rules to do so, it is likely that we can only really speculate as to the answer to this question. I can almost guarantee that we will never know PRECISELY the decision making process that went into using an anvil as the archetypal "heavy cartoon object". I can, however, enlighten you on some possible answers.
The truth is that the development of Western cartoons and comic books are closely intertwined. They occurred at roughly the same time and, in general, followed the same sort of course as one another. Many techniques learned in cartoons were carried over to comics, and many techniques learned in comics were carried over into cartoons. The level of abstraction and general "cartoonishness" that both mediums share means that we see a lot of similar tropes and archetypes.
It is often difficult to understand in our modern day, but when looking at old mediums we have to recognize that certain tropes didn't exist at one time. For instance in comic books, there was once a time when things like "movement lines" or "speech bubbles" didn't exist. The idea that you could have panels of different sizes, or that you could have a speech bubble pointing "off-scene" to a character not featured in a panel were actual "developments" or "breakthroughs" in comic artistry.
For instance, many comics of the 1910s and 20s are very, very lifeless. They are very static and repetitive BECAUSE comic artists had to play it safe. Even the original Superman comic (published in June 1938) was fairly lifeless compared to modern comics. Later artists like Jack Kirby would really revolutionize how comics were drawn.
See, animation "tricks" had to be developed over time. If you just threw down a copy of The Watchmen or threw on an episode of Fairly Odd Parents in front of a kid in the 1920s, a lot of the different tricks or tropes we take for granted would be confusing to them.
Now, getting to your anvil question, in reality the "falling anvil" is just another one of these tricks. In order to show "weight" animators had to come up with some sort of symbol which denoted a "very heavy weight". Another example would be something like when a character touches something hot and their hand turns red. These are all animation tricks designed to express to the viewer a certain sensation without them actually feeling it.
But the thing is is that these "tricks" (movement lines, anvils, speech bubbles, etc.) have to be clear for them to work. Without a VERY clear meaning, they could never be adopted because they wouldn't make sense. I'm sure animation history is filled with examples of attempted "tricks" which never really took off because they weren't very clear.
Now, the anvil works very well as a trick because it's meaning is very clear. After doing some research, I learned that it is generally accepted that the first time the "anvil" was used in a popular cartoon was in the 1942 Warner Brothers cartoon "A Tale of Two Kitties" (should have been a "Tail of Two Kitties", but whatever) which can be found here: _URL_0_ at about 4:30.
Now, why did the anvil succeed as a symbol or "trick" denoting "heavy weight"? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, at the time it started to be used (again, if we're assuming the first one was in 1942) the anvil was still a fairly common item. While the "medieval blacksmith" may not exist anymore, anvils were still commonly used in general manufacturing and repair and most people would be familiar with it as an everyday object. Second, the only real attribute people would attribute to an anvil is that it is "heavy". In this way, it is a very recognizable and clear symbol. Other people have referenced pianos and safes as examples of other "heavy objects", but as you rightly point out, the anvil is the true archetypal heavy object in cartoons. The reason is that unlike a piano (which is attractive, expensive, heavy, makes music, etc.) or a safe (which is a complex piece of machinery, is used in bankrobbing scenes, holds money, etc.), the anvil is really, at its core, just a heavy metal object. There is no confusion about it: anvils are heavy. Finally, the anvil is an extremely easy thing to draw. We have to remember that a lot of cartoonists and comic artists were pretty lazy, and drawing a piano or a safe every time you want to use a heavy object was a pain in the neck. But an anvil is a very clear and very easy thing to draw which allowed other cartoonists and animators to adopt it without a lot of hassle.
While it is tempting to think of the "falling anvil" as a trope, we have to remember that (historically speaking), tropes have to start somewhere. The "falling anvil" succeeded as a trope because it was a simple and effective "animation trick" like any of the others which were emerging in Cartoons and Comic books in the early 20th century. Put simply. the anvil is an animation trick like any other: it is simple to draw, it has a very clear meaning, and is recognizable to many people, and for this reason it became a widely adopted symbol of "heft". The reason it has endured into the modern day is BECAUSE it was such a successful "trick". While it is safe to say that many people in our society would have no idea what an anvil was used for, 99% of them would recognize it as a symbol for "heaviness", which means that it was an undeniably successful animation shortcut. |
why are erasers made of rubber, and what makes them able to erase graphite? | Because graphite is very brittile and the rubber snaps the little pieces off the paper without tearing the paper. It doesn't work for pen because ink actually soaks into the page.
[Here is graphite on paper under a microscope](_URL_0_)
The graphite sticks to the rubber because it is sharp and rubber is soft. Little spikes of graphite get stuck in the rubber, weakening the rubbers structure, causing the forces that bind the rubber to itself to be less than the force of friction. This is why hard erasers suck ass. |
Did the Soviets really send their infantry through minefields as if they weren't there? | Russian historian Aleksey Isayev addresses this in [his lecture on Zhukov](_URL_0_) (1:33:05). The long story short is that the myth was born of miscommunication. There was no "mine trampler" units, the intention was to train infantry to disarm simple mines so that it could proceed through minefields and not slow down.
> "There's a very famous story, allegedly coming from Eisenhower, about how if Soviet infantry encountered a minefield, it would advance as though there was no minefield there. This is a retelling over a broken telephone. In reality, Zhukov insisted that regular ordinary infantry should undergo sapper training, because simple mine disarmament, removal of simple minefields, can be performed by a person who has certain combat experience, and the implementation of this in ordinary rifle units, so they would not be stalled in front of minefields waiting for sappers and deal with minefields that they could handle by themselves, moving forward, and not remain in place, vulnerable to artillery attack." |
What were the activities of the VOC in South Sulawesi at the end of the 15th century? How much of an impact did it have on everyday life in the region? | The VOC had no activities and no impact anywhere at all at the end of the 15th or even 16th centuries, mainly because it didn't exist until 1602. But I get the gist of your question, so here goes: the turbulent relationship between the VOC and Gowa/Makassar, the empire ruling all South Sulawesi, up to 1656, and its effect on everyday life. The VOC had no relations with any other S. Sulawesi state until 1660, so I will discuss only Gowa.
Oh, and a nice Dutch poem to start us off:
> Gentlemen, there follows now something of the malevolent Makassar,
> In the island of Sulawesi; in the entire East Indies there was
> No more villainous race than this, rascally, perjured, malign,
> murderous, malignant, savage, perfidious.
> [...]
> In short, they were scoundrels
> spawned by Lucifer, the most desperate ruffians...
But war and hatred were not the only facets of the VOC-Gowa relationship.
# **South Sulawesi and the Arrival of the Dutch**
In 1607, the representatives of the five-year-old Dutch East India Company (VOC) received an invitation from the king of Gowa, the dominant state of South Sulawesi, to trade in his country. Little did either sides understand the transformative century of immense change that both Europe and South Sulawesi had just undergone.
In the first decade of the 16th century the peninsula of South Sulawesi was fragmented into a number of small complex chiefdoms, of which the most prominent included Gowa, Bone, Wajoq, and Luwuq.^1 This geopolitical situation would begin to shift in the early 16th century, when Gowa emerged as the peninsula's first state. It began with Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna (r. c. 1511-1546) of Gowa, who subjugated his immediate neighbors, created the first bureaucratic posts, and generally set the stage for expansion across the entire peninsula. This rapid expansion was accomplished by his son Tunipalangga (r. c. 1545-1565), who conquered the entire peninsula save Gowa's archrival Bone, vastly expanded the bureaucracy, and - perhaps most importantly - oversaw the establishment of the first permanent Malay community in Gowa's port capital of Makassar.^2
With the establishment of the Malays^3 - by far the most important merchant diaspora in 16th-century Southeast Asia - in Makassar, trade expanded greatly. Tunipalangga had conquered the main competitors of Makassar in his great conquests and allowed Makassar to emerge as the natural entrepot for produces from across eastern Indonesia, especially the fine spices from Maluku. Gowa's expanding empire itself provided a source of commercial wealth, for instance by selling tribute from its newly acquired vassals.^4
By 1600, after a brief interlude in the early 1690s when a tyrant discouraged trade, Makassar had emerged as the preeminent commercial center of all of eastern Indonesia. Just one year after the VOC was founded, the Dutch reported that their Portuguese enemies were annually sailing from Melaka, their base of power in Southeast Asia, to Makassar to load their ships with spices. In 1605 Malay merchants may have suggested the *tumabicara-butta* (chancellor/prime minister) of Gowa to convert to Islam, who was soon followed by the young king himself. But Muslim or not, Gowa-Talloq^5 (see note 5 for why I'm calling it Gowa-Talloq now) committed itself to a general policy of free trade, at least in the port of Makassar itself.
The Dutch, of course, wanted to join the game. After an invitation from the king of Gowa the Dutch arrived, hoping to convince Gowa-Talloq to surrender its support for Portuguese Melaka... and were very disappointed to learn that the king believed that
> My country stands open to all nations, and what I have is for you people [the Dutch] as well as for the Portuguese.
The VOC sought to establish monopolies on key Southeast Asian produces, especially the fine spices of clove, nutmeg, and mace. They could then control prices and raise artificial profits. The continual of Makassar's trade of spices made such a monopoly impossible. Furthermore, Makassar was providing safe haven for enemies and competitors of the Dutch, such as the English (who established a factory in 1613) and the Spaniards (whose agent first arrived in 1615). Already, by 1614, a Dutch commissioner was recommending that the Company attack Makassar shipping in Maluku, the Spice Islands.
In 1615 the Dutch informed Gowa-Talloq that there was now a Dutch monopoly in Maluku and that Makassar ships should refrain from heading there. The king of Gowa's response was simple:
> God made the land and the sea; the land he divided among men and the sea he gave in common. It has never been heard that anyone should be forbidden to sail the seas. If you seek to do that, you will take the bread from the mouths of the people. I am a poor King.^6
As for daily life, not much would have changed - just a new group of merchants on the scene, just like the Malays had arrived in the late 1400s and the Portuguese in the early 1500s. The Dutch had not yet established a definitive monopoly on any of the fine spices and hadn't even acquired Batavia.
# **The First War**
War began a few months later, when the VOC factor Abraham Sterck got frustrated about the king of Gowa not paying some debts. Claiming the government in Makassar had failed to protect him from the insults of the Spaniards (with whom the Dutch were still at war), Sterck left abruptly with a number of Gowa-Talloq nobles. The nobles resisted and seven were killed, including a nephew of Gowa's king. The harbormaster of Makassar and another royal relative was taken as prisoner of the Dutch. This incident infuriated Gowa-Talloq and almost resulted in the ousting of the English as well, since the English factor had for some reason left with the Dutch. The English managed to stay, but the Dutch did not.
*And...* I hate to end on a cliffhanger, but I'm not even half done, but I've hit 9988 characters and it's 22:52 here. I'll finish tomorrow, promise.
---
^1 [Map of the current regencies of South Sulawesi, many of which retain the old kingdoms' borders. Note that these are in Indonesian; Luwu here is Luwuq, Wajo is Wajoq, etc.](_URL_0_)
There is an emerging consensus that there were no genuine states in South Sulawesi in 1500, insofar as it matters to distinguish an archaic state from a complex chiefdom. This is best presented in *Tale of Two Kingdoms: The Historical Archaeology of Gowa and Tallok*, archaeologist David Bulbeck's thesis, which most archaeologists cite. But on chiefdom vs state in South Sulawesi, also see *The Lands West of the Lakes: A History of the Ajattappareng Kingdoms of South Sulawesi, 1200 to 1600 CE* by Stephen C. Druce and *Land of Iron: The historical archaeology of Luwu and the Cenrana valley* by Bulbeck and Ian Caldwell, both by archaeologists.
^2 On 16th-century Gowa, a lot of sources. If you want the pure, undistilled facts, I refer you to William Cumming's 2007 translation *A Chain of Kings: The Makassarese Chronicles of Gowa and Talloq*. But check the notes, because Cumming's translation often differs from other historians'. The simplest narrative secondary source, if a bit dated on the archaeological aspect, is the first chapter of Leonard Andaya's *The Heritage of Arung Palakka: A History of South Sulawesi in the Seventeenth Century.* A lot of articles mention the 16th-century as well, but few exclusively so.
^3 Itself a catch-all term for merchants from the Western Archipelago generally. Anakoda Borang, the first leader of the community that would later be known as the Makassar Malays, said that anyone who wears a *sarong* - from a Cham in central Vietnam to a Minangkabau from southwestern Sumatra - is Malay. See Heather Sutherland's chapter "The Makassar Malays" in *Contesting Malayness: Malay Identity Across Boundaries*. Also note that in Makassar usage, the word 'Java' (*jawa*) just means anyone who comes from the Central or Western Archipelago, including Malays. So the Makassar didn't really differentiate different groups of foreign Southeast Asians in language.
^4 For the rise of Makassar and its trading networks in the late 1500s, there is good information in Leonard Andaya's chapters "Applying the Seas Perspective to Indonesia" in *Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1350-1800* and "Eastern Indonesia: A Study of the Intersection of Global, Regional, and Local Networks in the 'Extended' Indian Ocean" in *Reinterpreting Indian Ocean Worlds: Essays in Honour of Kirti N. Chaudhuri*.
^5 Talloq was a small maritime kingdom that was founded during a succession dispute in Gowa around 1500. It was conquered by Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna and brought into Gowa's fold. But when King Tunipasuluq, who apparently did so many horrible things that the *Gowa Chronicle* applies *damnatio memoriae* on him and refuses to mention what he actually did, was kicked out, it was Karaeng Matoaya - king of Talloq - who was at the head. As *tumabicara-butta* and regent for the new boy king of Gowa, Karaeng Matoaya became the most influential man in South Sulawesi. Archaeologist David Bulbeck's research shows that during the reign of Kng. Matoaya, Matoaya's kingdom Talloq was actually considered more powerful than Gowa, at least as far as we can infer from dynastic marriage trends. During Matoaya's reign Talloq also controlled the port of Makassar. See Bulbeck's chapter "The Politics of Marriage and the Marriage of Polities in Gowa, South Sulawesi, During the 16th and 17th Centuries" in *Origins, Ancestry and Alliance: Explorations in Austronesian Ethnography.* So I refer to the kingdom as Gowa-Talloq to better reflect this change in the latter's status.
^6 Primarily from Anthony Reid's narrative account "A Greet Seventeenth Century Indonesian Family: Matoaya and Pattingalloang of Makasar," one of few English-language narrative sources on the relations between the VOC and Gowa-Talloq. |
I've heard a story that Stalin's first wife was the only person he ever loved; and that after she died early, he became permanently cold and bitter towards the world. Is there any truth to this story? | Amateur psychology aside, I don't think there is too much evidence that his wife's death contributed to his politics particularly much. I'm sure it did in fact cause him grief, but I have a feeling there is an underlying "and therefore, he did what he did as leader of the Soviet Union" being asked in this question. To that end I would answer that no, I don't think there is a radical change in Stalin's pattern of behavior/ideology at any point.
I wrote a post several months back about the consistency of his positions (more or less), which is somewhat relevant in this case, so here is the link if you'd like to read that as well: _URL_0_ |
why was the historical development of beer more important than that of other alcoholic beverages? | Because you can provide weak beer to people in times of clean water scarcity without getting them too drunk.
Old castles have records of beer quotas for men women and children. The beer was very weak by today's standards. If memory servers correctly it was 2 pints for children, 4 for women and six for men.
China has a rich tea and porcelain culture for similar reasons. |
why does sweat from our armpits smell significantly worse than sweat from other parts of our body? | The human body has 2 types of sweat glands. The first type is called an eccrine sweat gland. These are located all over the body and produce mostly watery sweat. The other kind is called apocrine sweat glands. Apocrine sweat glands are found in the armpits and groin areas. Apocrine glands make sweat that has more protein and other nutrients than sweat from eccrine sweat glands. All the proteins and nutrients from apocrine sweat are good food for bacteria. The bacteria are responsible for the odors you smell.
~~Anyone who has an old, white, undershirt can see this. Armpits turn yellow because of all the proteins and other nutrients that is in the sweat in there.~~
Edit: So I guess yellow sweat stains are actually from compounds in the deodorant itself and is unrelated to the sweat. Learn something new every day. Thanks for pointing that out. |
Were the British fooled by the Boston Tea Party participants' Mohawk costumes? Or did the authorities assume they were colonists right away? | Think critically; a bunch of white guys with turkey feathers and some buckskin shirts and hatchets hopped up onto a merchant vessel after marching through the streets with torches, and then didn't kill a single soul as they deliberately and carefully only dumped tea into the harbor, taking care not to destroy the ships or other cargo.
This page offers up a number of contemporary accounts, and none of them seem to peg "Indians" as the primary culprits. It was pretty widely known at the time that this was a civic protest against the recent taxations levied. Contextualize it today, and imagine a bunch of guys disguised as Mexican luchadores marching into the LAX harbor and dropping brand new Lexus convertibles over the side, taking care not to disturb the medicine or Apple laptops in adjacent shipping containers. Would you be fooled?
_URL_0_ |
because alcohol dehydrates, water hydrates you, and beer is primarily water, is there an alcohol-by-volume threshold in which beers below this threshold hydrate the body and those above it dehydrate the body? | There was a study that made headlines indicating some low ABV beers might be better than water, but it was never published and doesn't appear to have been repeatable. However, this summary of later studies [seems to indicate](_URL_0_) that beer with less than 2% alcohol (essentially 1 Bud/Coors or similar and 2 cans of water or the ultra light styles) hydrates about as well as water. |
My understanding is that there's no evidence that Ben Franklin wanted the national bird of the United States to be the turkey. Where did this myth come from and how did it get to be so widespread? | There is evidence. It's in letters to his daughter.
"I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing-hawk; and, when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. With all this injustice he is never in good case; but, like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy. Besides, he is a rank coward; the little kingbird, not bigger than a sparrow, attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America, who have driven all the kingbirds from our country; though exactly fit for that order of knights, which the French call Chevaliers d'Industrie.
I am, on this account, not displeased that the figure is not known as a bald eagle, but looks more like a turkey. For in truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours; the first of the species seen in Europe, being brought to France by the Jesuits from Canada, and served up at the wedding table of Charles the Ninth. He is, besides (though a little vain and silly, it is true, but not the worse emblem for that) a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards, who should presume to invade his farmyard with a red coat on."
\-- Ben Franklin, letter to his daughter Sarah, January, 1784
Here's the full letter, if you're interested: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) |
- tesla's solar shingles and power wall. how do they work and could they mean something today or are we still generations away from potential ubiquity? | I have only watched Musk's presentation, so there might be details elsewhere that I have missed.
The main purpose of the shingles is aesthetics. These solar shingles are designed to look like regular house shingles. This starts serving the community who had the money and desire for solar power but did not want the big ugly panels.
Unless there is an efficiency edge (I don't think so) or a decreased cost edge (He kept saying they were a similar price of a regular roof, but I have no numbers to back up this claim) the only thing these new shingles do is aesthetics.
Powerwall is a newer technology that is supposed to solve the problem of uneven use and generation. Solar panels only make energy during the day, but people still use energy at night.
Powerwall is just a giant battery that will store your solar power made in the day, and let you use it at night. Again, batteries are not new, but the affordability of giant batteries is a new thing.
Also note, he specifically says that he does not intend for this kind of technology to replace utilities. He says if we get off gas heating and gas cars, we will triple the amount of electricity we need. That means we need to increase production by three times of what we currently do. |
why is it that when i look to myself in the mirror i think "damn i'm hot" but when i see myself in pictures i seem to be comparatively uglier? | You're seeing, funny enough, a mirror image of yourself while at home. You're used to seeing your minor asymmetrical features on a certain side of your face in the mirror, so seeing them on the other side in a photo is unusual to you. Whereas everyone else in the world sees you the same way as a photograph, you have a "backward" view. |
Why was Plato able to build the Academy in Athens and write dialogues featuring Socrates without fear of also being executed? | It is easy to view Socrates' execution through the lens of totalitarian control of free speech or the stamping out of heresy, but in most respects these don't really fit the situation. Socrates' execution was not part of a broad campaign to stamp out dangerous ideology, it was very specifically targeted on Socrates and specifically happening at that particular time. As is pointed out in both Plato and Xenophon's *Apologies* the actual contents of Socrates' thought was in most respects rather incidental to his execution, if not outright contradictory of the charges. It is, for example, very difficult to view his thought as actually atheistic (which is something that could get you in trouble) or as a rejection of morality. Conventional morality had already been challenged by the sophists, and it is somewhat difficult to imagine Socrates as being more threatening than, say, Gorgias. And to top it all off, Socrates himself was seventy at his time of his trial and had been doing his thing for decades before.
Now unfortunately it is very difficult to actually know why Socrates was executed despite its popularity as a story because we don't have a single speech, or even an example of a theoretical speech, against him. All we have are the presentations of the opposing arguments within the two Apologies: Xenophon had little interest in portraying the opposing side sympathetically, and Plato had clearly not yet developed his talent for presenting strong opposing arguments, as the accuser Meletus is quite possibly the worst interlocutor to appear in any dialogue. Most people today therefore focus on the rather damning association that Socrates had built up in his life. Critias, one of leaders of the brutal Thirty Tyrants, was an old associate of Socrates. Alcibiades, who betrayed Athens (twice!), was another old friend (despite Plato's dialogues making clear a pretty significant amount of mutual lust they seemingly never consummated an eramenous/erastes relationship). Perhaps more importantly however, the sorts of people Socrates kept in his circle were the sorts of rich and well born idle young men who were thought of, with justification, as sympathetic to the Thirty Tyrants--a good example would be Xenophon himself, who was both pretty nakedly oligarchic (although also somewhat liberal in a modern sense--he is an interesting guy) and had joined a Persian army as a mercenary a few years before. In short, Socrates *as a person* was viewed as a threat to the democracy.
So it wasn't really about thought control or stamping out dangerous ideologies. It was about Socrates *as an individual*. |
why are drunk people not able to make conscious sexual decisions but dwi is a conscious decision? | Legally speaking, drunk driving is a thing you do, drunk sex is a thing that happens to you. When you're drunk, your car does not approach you and convince you to drive it, but when you're drunk a person can take advantage of that fact and have sex with you when you normally wouldn't have.
In short, you create the situation where you drive drunk. You drive somewhere, you get drunk, you get in the car. All of these are you, and you alone. You intentionally get drunk, and you are accepting the consequences of YOUR actions, you are not accepting the consequences of a different person's decisions. |
How did German military doctrine differ from Allied and Soviet doctrine during WW2, and what happened to German doctrine afterwards | Yes, German doctrine did differ a lot from both the Allies and the Soviets.
All of course changed throughout the war, as what was available to commanders changed and the strategic possibilities and constraints changed.
**The Germans**
The Germans entered ww2 with one of the absolute best armies the world have ever seen. Building on their experience in ww1, where they had developed both operational and tactic doctrines that were well-adopted for both trench and more open fighting. Flexible defence, where you deployed small groups of troops to the front to hold the line and reserves to the back allowed them to delay and then counter-attack an enemy attack both tactically and operationally (note - tactics involves small units, operations divisions and corps and strategy large armies and logistics). A quick counter-attack to retake lost territory while the enemy was still trying to organise his defence, bring his heavy weapons up, entrench and re-align his artillery to provide defensive fire was often devastatingly effective.
On the offence, the Germans had developed infiltration tactics, meaning that small heavily armed groups of men would attack and bypass strongpoints and heavy resistance to allow following troops to neutralise them, and continue deep into the enemy line to attack support weapons, artillery and logistics and other rear area troops to cause the most destruction.
Building on these two doctrines, the Germans added a concentration of force - especially tanks - and the idea of punching even deeper to completely disrupt the enemy force. This is what Anglo-Saxon sources love to call *'Blitzkrieg'* (the Germans themselves never gave it a name other than *'Schwerpunkt'* - conctration point). Combined with a strong air force and close co-operation between tactical bombers (German infantry would often have Luftwaffe liason officers attached for communition and requests of air support), the Germans brought a revolutionising co-ordination and focus on air support to the battlefield in ww2.
German NCOs were extremely well trained - the Reichswehr, the 100 000 man army the Weimar Republic was allowed was trained so that every soldier could be an NCO, every NCO an officer and so on, to allow for a rapid expansion. German NCOs led from the front, died at a higher rate than regular soldiers, trained with their soldiers, ate with their soldiers and brought a very strong unit cohesion to German units, especially early war. It can probably be said that German NCOs led and kept the German army together throughout the war.
German officers and NCOs were not only very well trained - they were also allowed an extreme level of independence of action in what the Germans called *auftragstaktik*, or mission tactics. The unit was given a mission to solve and allowed a high degree of freedom to solve the mission how they saw most fit (as they were on the ground close to the objective). NCOs and lower officers were also encouraged to take opportunities without waiting for orders as the time to get a confirmation from higher command could mean that the opportunity was lost.
The Germans excelled in tactics and operations, but were not as good in artillery tactics, logistics and strategy as their opponents, especially the British and Americans.
*Auftragstaktik* was picked up by the Western Allies after the war, and is more or less standard for any western army today. Combined arms warfare, adapted to the armies of the time, is also standard in all armies today, as is concentration of armoured assets in specialised divisions.
Soviets, British and Americans will follow below. |
How close was Israel to defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War before the US resupplied them? | Well, the resupply was not something that happened when Israel was close to defeat, at least not in the Sinai. It was *ordered* when the Israelis were facing a defeat, without a doubt. The airlift, which began on 14 October, had been ordered to begin on the 9th, and came after a decisive battle in the Sinai on the 14th, which may have made it superfluous in terms of "saving" the Israelis in the Sinai.
On 12 October, under increasing pressure from Egyptian General Ahmed Ismail Ali, Lieutenant General Sa'ad Al Shazly was given orders by General Ismail (over all objections) to make for the Gidi and Mitla passes. A "political decision" had been made, to relieve the pressure on Syria, and Shazly had his hands tied. He reminded General Ismail of what had happened last time a brigade was caught without air cover, as they would be (they were advancing past air defense ranges), but to no avail. An attack would be launched from the bridgehead. Shazly got it postponed 'til the 14th.
The IDF had been debating ending the war with a ceasefire, or undertaking a hazardous canal crossing, right around the 11th or 12th of October. It didn't think it would be able to continue this war, especially if it turned into a war of attrition. Then word came on the 12th that Egyptian armor was moving and crossing the Suez Canal, appearing to be preparing for an attack on the 13th or 14th. Israel decided to wait, instead of taking initiative or making peace, and to fortify positions.
Shazly put it this way: "The enemy had 900 tanks in his operational zone. We were attacking with 400. We were doing so, against well-prepared positions, in precisely the 'penny packets' that had cost the enemy so dear over October 8-9. And we were condemning our tank crews to attack over open terrain dominated by enemy air power." The Israelis had estimated some 1,000 tanks would be in the attack, so the fact that only 400 showed up was undoubtedly a relief.
The Israelis prepared for an armor battle, which some said they expected to be large and "savage" beyond belief. On the night of the 13 October, the Egyptians heli-lifted multiple commandos behind Israeli lines in the hopes of creating chaos in the Israeli rear. They were almost all captured and killed, quickly. The Israeli fortifications and preparations paid off, when the Egyptians launched the strike at dawn on the 14th. In the northern sector, the Egyptians were repelled with ease, and 50 tanks of theirs were destroyed. In the center, similar losses were had by the Egyptians. The Israelis had fortified on high ground, and fired on the charging Egyptian armor. Egypt's 1st Mechanized Brigade lost 93 tanks, effectively destroying the entire unit, and only 3 Israeli tanks in that area were destroyed: none by enemy tanks, all by rocket fire. In the south, near the Gidi and Mitla passes, the Egyptian attack was contained and the Israelis counterattacked, destroying some 60 Egyptian tanks. Egyptian forces tried to flank through Mitla pass to the south, and were stopped by the tanks they encountered as well as paratroopers. The battle ended with around 20 Israeli tanks destroyed. Egypt had lost around 260. The Egyptians had attacked superior gunnery, faced IAF superiority and bombing, hit fortified positions, and all with the sun in their eyes. In one swoop, Israeli forces watched the Egyptians retreat back to their bridgeheads on the East Bank of the Suez Canal, and an Egyptian general suffered a heart attack (Sa'ad Maamon) and had to be replaced by General Abd El Al Mona'am Wasel. All told, the Egyptians had taken such heavy losses that Israeli forces felt they could finally attempt a counterthrust, a genuine one that would cross the Suez. On 14 October, Israeli general Elazar gave orders for the crossing of the Suez the following night.
With regards to the Egyptian front, Israeli leaders were not only heartened by the sudden success, the airlift made them much more fluid and willing to fight. However, the Israelis were still fearful of a loss, and only in retrospect was the 14 October guaranteed as the turning point of the war in the Sinai. Israelis did not begin to have a confident assessment of their prospects until the 16 October, as the American resupply effort was already underway and helping replace equipment lost in the previous fighting. The airlift was not *fully* intended to "save" the Israelis, but to ensure they could continue their momentum. It was helpful that as soon as it began, Israel had begun to win on both fronts. Thus it was not so much that the airlift came when Israel was "close to defeat" and "saved", but rather it came when the Israelis thought they'd be defeated (it was ordered October 9, begun October 14, Kissinger blamed it on the Pentagon), and gave them more flexibility when they began a counterattack that might've failed because of the Israeli inability to win a war of attrition without getting crucial ammunition and resupply help.
On the Syrian front, the tide had begun to turn earlier, prompting the Syrian pleas to the Egyptians for relief. See, the Egyptians had promised the Syrians they would advance far further than they actually planned to into the Sinai. When the Syrians began to falter, they pointed the finger at the Egyptians, who had stopped advancing. The Egyptians decided to advance as a result, with the results I detailed above.
The Syrians had begun to falter by October 10. The IAF had begun to overcome the Syrian air defenses, partially due to a lack of more defense rockets. The Israelis had been relentless, launching airstrikes in almost suicidal fashion over the 7-8, and the Syrians lost their determination and began to move back. By that point the Israeli counterattack began to drive back the Syrians, and by October 9 the Syrian thrusting forces were effectively surrounded in the "Hushniye pocket". Both sides took severe losses as Hushniye turned into an "armor graveyard", but the Syrians came out worse. Israel began bombing military airfields belonging to the Syrians by October 8, and almost all of them were useless by the 14th. 8 Phantom F-4s, on October 9, managed to get to Damascus and bomb the General Staff and Air Force Headquarters buildings, catching the Syrians by surprise. Only one Phantom was shot down, and the morale blow was crushing. The second wave, another 8 Phantom F-4s, had been slated to hit the same buildings but couldn't get through thick butts safely, so they dropped their bombs on Hushniye's large tank concentrations, contributing greatly to the fight there. The Israelis got slightly overconfident, and on the 10th mounted an insufficiently manned and prepared attack: based on 1967 they had expected the Syrian army to be on the brink of collapse. The attack took serious losses and was called off. On October 11 the Israelis launched an attack aimed to get to Damascus, all the way to the Syrian capital, but they encountered heavy resistance. While the Syrians could not attack, their fortifications and defensive posturing was still very strong, and both sides were taking heavy losses as a result, especially since once again the Israelis sent an undersized force, not expecting such heavy resistance of two strong lines. The Syrians now had higher morale (knowing their capital was under threat), and their SAMs had begun to be effective again (more missiles gotten, closer ranges), curtailing Israeli effectiveness in launching the attack. Eventually these became less effective as Israeli pilots got better at handling the SAMs, and by October 14 when the airlift began they were running many sorties on the Syrian rear, and Israeli forces had managed to fight a difficult campaign that got them within 20 miles of Damascus. There, the ground offensive stopped, and Israeli forces managed to (with the help of the resupply) hold off counterattacks, and make one last achievement on the ground: the capture of Mount Hermon on October 21-22. Because of the huge alarm the Syrians faced with the mounting attempts on their capital, around October 11 Assad appealed to Sadat to advance as he had promised, hence the Sadat response conveyed to Shazly on October 12. The airlift helped the Israelis take Hermon at best, and hold off counterattacks on the 16th and 19th, but also did not "save" Israel: it permitted them greater freedom and kept them afloat during a war that might've turned against them if they hadn't gotten more ammunition and equipment.
Edit: Adding a portion on "Why the airlift, then?"
Well, the airlift came with a few motivations. One was to match, and surpass, the Soviet airlift that had begun on October 10 for the Egyptians and Syrians. It succeeded, in that regard. The Israelis had implicitly threatened to use nuclear weapons by some reports, and gone to a nuclear alert they were sure the US would notice, threatening nuclear war especially if they ran out of conventional weapons and could not sustain their losses (which, at the time, were quite massive). The US also hoped to gain from it, and Kissinger egged the Israelis on, telling them to advance against Syria. He said to the Israeli ambassador: "The IDF must attack [Syria] with all its strength, as if it had another 40 aircraft in hand, and not stint on ammunition or aircraft, because the United States will supply everything." On October 13 he told them to continue their attack, apparently because he knew the airlift was about to begin. The airlift undoubtedly helped Israelis feel secure in advancing. |
why is it that muscle knots on your back/neck/shoulders are indicative of high levels of stress? | This is 2 questions. You pretty much posted the answer to why knots can be associated with stress. That is, prolonged tension, overuse, and poor positioning can basically damage muscle fibers which is one of the several mechanisms which most professionals generally agree can lead to knots (myofascial trigger points).
Stress can cause these because it puts the person persistently in a "fight or flight" mode. The brain may respond with a hormone release (norepinephrine & others) which has a cascading effect through the body that results in tense muscles and postures. Your brain is basically saying hey body, you need to be ready to react and move, so be a little tense. If it lasts a long time it is thought to cause possible damage to muscles. This damage may become evident as knotted areas in muscle fibers.
This is of course an oversimplification, and knots can be a subject of debate when it comes to scientific evidence. I hope this helps when it comes to a possible theory. |
how is it that very complex 10-hour seasons of tv shows can be produced in a year's time, yet 2-hour movies so often take years to produce? | A lot of it is setup that takes place before any production begins - hiring people, finding actors, locations, etc. A tv show has to do that just once - just like in movies, except they get to reuse all of those resources in every episode. |
why is loan sharking illegal but pay day loans which can have an interest rate of over 350% are legal (in the us). | Because the pay day loans still operate within the parameters of the law, such as paying taxes on the loans, paying for a business license and not physically harming the people who owe them money, while sharks purposefully choose to engage in that illegal activity by shirking tax and licensing responsibilities and physically harming their clients who do not pay up. |
is nodding for 'yes' and shaking the head for 'no' universal? or is it a specific to certain cultures? | It isn't universal, but it IS extremely common across cultures, with by far the majority of cultures sharing a head nod as an indication of acceptance or agreement and a head shake indicating refusal or disagreement. One of the common theories as to why this may be is that it comes from how babies use body language to indicate things before they speak. When they are searching for a nipple to latch on to to get food they will scan up and down, and when they want to refuse food they will move their head to the side. |
Why was the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal such a big deal when JFK is well known for his extreme sexcapades? What differentiates the two presidents and why is a president getting a blowjob in the Oval Office a big deal versus JFK having sex often twice daily when everyone seemingly knew about it? | In Clinton’s case, there was a specific legal issue at hand- whether he committed perjury and obstruction of justice in trying to cover up his relationship with Lewinsky.
During the time his relationship with Lewinsky was active, Lewinsky confided the details of their relationship to a friend, Linda Tripp.
At the same time, the President was involved in 2 legal matters. The first was a lawsuit brought by Paula Jones, accusing him of sexual harassment while he was governor of Arkansas. The second was the Whitewater investigation, which was a special counsel investigation (run by Kenneth Starr) into a financial transaction the Clinton’s had been involved in- but grew in scope to investigate a variety of scandals.
Linda Tripp provided the information she had gotten from Lewinsky to Paula Jones’ lawyers, who then put Lewinsky on their witness list. In response, Clinton took a number of illegal actions to try and cover up the relationship.
Knowing that this obstruction was occurring, Tripp then informed Starr, who broadened his scope to include the coverup of the Lewinsky affair.
When the Starr report came out, it showed that Clinton had had an affair, had lied about it under oath, and had encouraged others to lie under oath.
This formed the basis for the Articles of Impeachment, as Congress at that time felt the charges of perjury and obstruction of justice were an impeachable offense. Ultimately, the House voted to impeach on 2 of the 4 charges brought forth- that Clinton had lied to the grand jury, and that he had obstructed justice in the Jones case. In the Senate a trial was held, but neither charge received a 2/3 vote finding Clinton guilty.
I provide the above context to say this- in this case, the tawdry details of Clinton’s sexual behavior were made public record through the Starr Report, and brought up significant legal, constitutional issues to be wrangled with by Congress and in the public sphere, which is why the Clinton-Lewinsky affair attracted so much attention in American popular culture. Clinton’s impeachment by the House was also the first impeachment in modern times.
Sources:
- [House Report 105-830 - Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton](_URL_0_)
- [Starr Report](_URL_2_)
- [CNN 12/19/1998 - House impeaches Clinton](_URL_3_)
- [CNN 2/12/1999 - How the senators voted on impeachment](_URL_1_) |
how much does it really matter where i buy my gas? are “name brand” gas stations any different? | Some "name brand" gas companies include fuel system cleaning additives, but you can buy an occasional bottle of fuel system cleaner at an auto parts store for pretty cheap, and it will do the same thing.
Assuming that you use the correct octane level for your engine, fuel from just about any station should work similarly. |
what exactly was the danger of the y2k bug - what are the consequences of a computer recognizing '2000' as '1900'? | The consequences are that a calculation involving the difference between two dates suddenly returns nonsense values.
Imagine you're running a system that pays a pension for people aged 65 or over. Someone born in 1930 might have been quite happily claiming their pension as a 69 year old in 1999, but in 2000 the computer would think that they weren't even going to be born for another 30 years! |
if slander is illegal in the us, how can presidential candidates run smear campaigns or attack their opponents with blatant lies? | Slander, in most of the US, is a civil tort, and not a crime. In order to enforce it, you have to sue them, and that generally doesn't work out well for anyone in a political campaign.
But beyond that, it's important to note that there is a different standard for slander and libel for people in the public eye. You have to show actual malice, and not just stating something erroneously to be able to prevail in court. |
when an ant bites me, is it because it's constantly biting every surface it walks on, or does it know that it's on a living thing? | Ants bite because they feel intimidated or that the nest is in danger, even if it's not in danger in YOUR mind, the ant doesn't know that you're not a threat, and will bite and sting in defense. The ant does know that you're a living thing, but it doesn't know that you're not a threat. |
why do even videos from the 2000's appear to be very old/low quality when we remember viewing them in higher resolution. | You said it, higher resolution. They'd look just fine if you were viewing them in 800x600 or 1024x768, but you're not. You're viewing them in 1920x1080 or higher, stretching the video onto an area several times bigger than intended. |
why do hippos in captivity always seem so friendly and docile, while wild hippos all seem like savage murders with nothing to lose? | Captive hippos are pampered. They have grown more docile because of human interaction and involvement. Their day is predictable and consistent. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Done. Don't be fooled though.... They are still wild at heart and therefore incredibly dangerous.
Wild hippos are exactly as you described. Savage and fierce. They never have a false sense of security to rely on. They must be ever constant and ready to defend their own. |
Was the attack on Pearl Harbour a gamble by the Japanese Empire, or did they truly believed such a attack would cripple the US to the point of not winning the war? | The Japanese high command was not stupid nor were they blind, they could see the massive disparity in terms of military resources and industrial capacity that existed between the USA and Japan. Pearl Harbor was not necessarily intended to cripple the USA in the long term but rather it was intended to buy time. The Japanese had long identified the United States as Japan's future foe (along with China and the USSR), they had begun making plans for how to fight a war with the Americans as early as the 1920's. It was recognized by the Japanese high command that any drive southwards towards the East Indies and Malaya would be under threat from the US pacific fleet and units stationed in the Philippines. Admiral Yamamoto, also recognized this, and began to make plans to cripple the US fleet so as to give Japan time. Now the destruction of the American fleet also gave the Japanese the ability to implement their "ring" defensive strategy. This strategy called for protecting mainland Japan by building a ring of outposts in the Pacific by capturing various strategic islands, once these islands were secured, they would be fortified and any enemy fleet would be vulnerable to planes or guns on the island.
The Japanese knew a straight fight with the Americans would be suicide because of their vast resources, but they assumed that if they could build this defensive ring, that the Americans attempt to penetrate it would result in high casualties, which would make the American populace unwilling to fight the war. The Japanese strategy essentially rested on the idea that the "decadent" Western nations didn't have the morale to fight a long protracted war with high casualties, on the other hand the Japanese high command assumed that the Japanese people would be unaffected by high causality numbers. They also assumed that Germany and Italy would soon force to Britain to surrender which would lead to the collapse of China and cause a severe amount of damage to America's will to fight.
Source:
A History of Japan by L.M Cullen
Japan's Imperial Army by Edward Drea |
What causes an ice age, and is it possible for us to have another one/when could the nearest one be? | We are technically still in an ice age, called the Holocene, which started 2.6Mya. That 3 massive ice sheets (Arctic, Greenland, Antarctic) still exist, and that year round alpine glaciers still exist, is the reason why. Once they are all gone, you could say the ice age was over.
We are in a warm period of that ice age called an interglacial period, which is why it isn't as cold as you think of an ice age. |
why do our eyes “click” in place when we look around? (ex. looking at a wall and tracing it left and right) | The eyes dont send pictures to your brain if the eyes is currently moving. It may seem like clicky, but its probably you unconsciously stopping for a moment to be able to see.
It does this so you dont see the world like a shaky handheld camera. |
Is there any known way for people to improve their working memory capacity or general intelligence (g factor)? | Ok so first "g" and to a lesser extent WMC, are theoretical constructs that can't be measured. To measure them we use a set of specific tests, like the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), or the digit span task. We theorize that there's some underlying thing that we're measuring called g or WMC and that that may be constant (or changeable), but we can't measure that, we can only use these tests.
So is it possible to get better at the tests? Yes, in fact it's really, really easy. Here: The last question on the WAIS-IV is "Who wrote Faust?" The answer is Gothe. There I just raised your IQ 1 point. There's this common misconception that IQ tests are some kind of magical test that you can't game by just memorizing the answers, but it's not true, you can do a lot better if you know the general knowledge questions before hand. Most people of college age have first hand experience of this: Did studying for the SAT help your score? Most people think it does. The SAT is just a modified form of an IQ test oriented a little more toward verbal IQ and a little less toward performance IQ.
But what about something like digit span? Surely you can't get better at that right? Well again, no. Most people have a digit span of around 7, but with practice you can get better than that pretty easily. The first step is memorizing number pairs so that instead of hearing 52346148 you hear 52-34-61-48. Then you memorize all the triads, the quads etc. There's a famous case study of a [graduate student](_URL_2_) who practiced the digit span task for ~350 hours and ended up with a digit span of around 79. So that's increasable with practice pretty easily.
But those feel like kind of tricky ways, can you just sort of do better overall? Sure, best way I know: go to school. There was a pretty good study in Norway that found that kids who stayed in high school an additional year (and it was compulsory, so this isn't comparing drop outs and non-drop outs), gained about [4 IQ points](_URL_1_). I read one study that college was worth about 8 points a year if you were taking hard classes (and no points a year if you weren't).
Want something that seems more biological? Have a cup of coffee, that's about 1.7 points right there, though the effect is pretty short-lived. Do nutrition and exercise help? Well, probably, but the jury is still out on most of these studies, they tend to find mixed effects or [no effects](_URL_0_). It probably doesn't hurt but it's probably not as effective a use of your time as education.
"But!" You maybe saying because I'm one of those pedantic explainers who likes to personify their listener "am I really getting smarter? These mostly seem like tricks that teach-to-the-test to me." Well, there we hit a snag, because nobody actually knows what it means to be *smart.* We can make up a definition that says "people who do good on these kinds of tests are smart" and we can get good data correlating good performance with good life outcomes and high-intelligence jobs. And then you show that someone who goes to school and works hard gets smarter: isn't that actually true? Doesn't knowing more facts, being better at math, having more critical thinking skills *mean you're smarter?* All that education really did change your brain, and it didn't just change it in a vague way to make it run a little faster, it made it better at specifically doing the things that smart people do. If you gamed the system and just learned all the answers to the IQ test it probably won't transfer, but if you came by that knowledge through schooling: hey that's what being smarter looks like.
**tl;dr** In western cultures we tend to have a bias that "smart" is something you're born with, and that implies that the only way you could get smarter is by changing your biology in some fundamental way. But most of the research supports the perspective of those South Korean kids studying 16 hours a day: smart is a muscle, and studying is exercise for it. |
When horses were used for transportation in the US, were they treated affectionately like pets or as interchangeable tools? Was it okay to borrow someone else's horse? | So I can’t answer this question for all periods. However, I can shed light into this from the perspective of the 18th century.
Horses for much of Americans during this period were seen as living tools that were needed in order for agrarian survival. Until 1790, at least 95% of Americans lived on farms or small villages, not in cities. Agriculture, whether it was cash crops (like tobacco) or food, horses played an intricate part of life for farmers who needed to transport their goods from their farms/ranches/plantations and to ports. Horses and other animals like oxen and mules helped play important roles during this period, especially in the middle colonies, like Maryland.
In Maryland, the number 1 animal used for crop transport were horses. This was especially true for small scale farms (farmers who owned less than 50 acres of land), which actually made up more than 50% of the occupations in the colony by 1775. In Maryland specifically, it was common for farmers to lend or rent their horses to their neighbors. Sources show that religious communities like Quakers, Methodist, and even Catholics (who made up about 11% of the states population) were more likely to let those in their own communities borrow their horses than outsiders. Instances of this can be found all over the place, with people borrowing horses to transport livestock or even lending them to someone to make longer distance journies.
Confiscation of animals like horses also became a weaponized tool by the Patriot government in Maryland in 1777 when groups, like Quakers, refused to participate in militia musters or pay war related taxes. As punishment, the Maryland General Assembky authorized its agents to seize horses and hold them for ransom against Quakers, which happened over 100 of times between 1777 — 1881. Horses at this time were incredibly expensive, often costing over £20, but if you adjust for wartime inflation, would be worth somewhere between $4000 to $6000 today.
I don’t have sources to show one way or another if people treated their animals the way 20th century folks treated their pets, however, I can say that farmers spent a lot of money and care taking care of their horses throughout this period.
Sources for most of this can be found in:
Aglietti, Jason B. *The Friends They Loathed: The Persecution of Maryland Quakers During the Revolutionary War* University of Maryland Baltimore County & Proquest LLC. 2018 |
What is the origin of Rohingyas and how are they different from other Muslim ethnics(Kamans) of the Rakhine state? | [Here's my answer earlier today to the question "How Accurate is the Claim that the Rohingya are 'Bengali' and not Burmese?"](_URL_1_)
> The claim that Rohingyas are Bengalis is true insofar as the Rohingyas ultimately derive from Bengal, but in the end it's a justification for genocide. If the Rohingyas are illegal immigrants from Bengal, why not say that African Americans are illegal immigrants from the Congo? Why not say that the Rakhines, the Buddhist neighbors of the Rohingya, should be deported back to central Burma? After all, it's questionable who the very first inhabitants of Arakan (the western coastline of Burma now shared between Rohingyas and Rakhines) actually were, although Bengali and Mahayana influence seems quite strong in Arakan in the first millennium AD.
> As historian Michael Charney says in a lecture ([YouTube link](_URL_2_))
> > I would like to begin by discussing an immigrant group in Burma, and please bear with me for a few moments before forming any judgments. Before the fourteenth century there is no evidence that they even existed, or for the language that they use, or for the particular religion that they hold today, or for their particular ethnic culture as we would know it. They appear in Arakan in close association with a foreign court; they are both immigrants and foreigners to the region we know as Arakan.
> > I'm not referring to the Rohingya, the theme of today's talks, but to the Rakhine Burmese speakers, the Theravada Buddhists, whose culture, religion, ethnicity, is foreign to the Arakan region and is predated by the Muslim presence there.
> > Now, having said this, can I step back and argue that I'm not seeking to switch the positions of the Rohingya and the Rakhine. I'm suggesting that if we apply the same historical method to the Rakhine that I have seen applied to the historicity of the Rohingya by so much of the "scholarship" on the country in the years since my dissertation, no group in Arakan would pass the test as indigenous.
> Muslims have formed a large proportion of the population in Arakan ever since the seventeenth century. Islam predates Theravada Buddhism in Arakan. Local traditions hold that as early as the eighth century AD, Muslim sailors were shipwrecked off Arakan and assimilated into local society. By the fifteenth century, Muslim mercenaries and merchants were key players in local society. Bengali soldiers helped the king maintain his power; Persian merchants in "ocean-going ships and boats" arrived "yearly without fail"; a "Roman" (an Ottoman, since Ottomans were referred to as Romans by most of Asia) was advising the Arakanese king in the early seventeenth century. But these Muslims were a very small minority, very often itinerants who would come and go. A large and permanent Muslim community did not emerge until the seventeenth century, in the later years of the reign of Mrauk-U.
> Arakan was ruled by the kingdom of Mrauk-U from 1430 to 1785. Mrauk-U at its height was one of the greatest kingdoms in Southeast Asia, its harbors full of "Arabs, Egyptians, Syrians, Turks, Ethiopians, Romans." Most relevant for our purposes, though, is that Mrauk-U was a slaver kingdom.
> Early Modern Arakan was an underpopulated area where one or two disasters could easily wipe out a large segment of the population. The natural solution for the Mrauk-U kings was to abduct people from more populated areas and forcibly resettle them in Arakan. To quote a French doctor:
> > They [the Arakanese] scoured the neighbouring seas in light galleys, called galleasses, entered the numerous arms and branches of the Ganges, ravaged the islands of Lower Bengal, and, often penetrating forty or fifty leagues up the country, surprised and carried away the entire population of villages on market days, and at times when the inhabitants were assembled for the celebration of a marriage, or some other festival. The marauders made slaves of their unhappy captives, and burnt whatever could not be removed. It is owing to these repeated depredations that we see so many fine islands at the mouth of the Ganges, formerly thickly peopled, now entirely deserted by human beings, and become the desolate lairs of tigers and other wild beasts.
> The Arakanese slavers, however, did not break down community ties nearly as severely as Europeans did in the Atlantic slave trade. Upper-caste captives and artisans were resettled in the capital to serve the king, but the more typical captives were humble Bengali farmers, entire villages of whom were resettled in Arakanese territory. The Bengalis were often relocated into jungle areas to clear the forest and put the land into cultivation, thus increasing state revenue. Others were bought by Buddhist monasteries to farm glebe lands, or otherwise set to work already cultivated lands.
> What was the religion of these Bengali slaves? The easy answer would be Islam, but it was more complicated than that. The religion of seventeenth-century Bengal was a Bengali folk Islam which still left room for Hindu and local gods (the modern division in Bangladesh between Muslims and Hindus would not have been meaningful back then). It was these traditions that the Bengalis initially brought to Arakan. But the local gods and spirits and saints of Bengal were precisely that – local – and of less relevance in Arakan. So the Bengali captives devised their own traditions, their own saints and holy places, which integrated popular Bengali Islam into an Arakanese context. Islam was made into a local religion. The Bengalis of Arakan no longer looked towards Bengal for religious guidance, but towards their new homeland. At some point, the Bengalis became Rohingyas (though the word itself would not be widely used until after Mrauk-U).
> A good example of this is the Badr Maqams, shrines dedicated to the Muslim saint Pir Badr-i Alam. Badr Maqams appear to have dotted the Arakanese landscape wherever there were Muslims – we know of at least three, though only one has survived. Muslim pilgrims from all over Arakan would gather here to make sacrifices to the saint to ask for his boons and blessings. Stories were told about the great powers of the saint, and about how he had traveled across Arakan and sanctified it into a Muslim land. The Badr Maqams became regional cult centers, places where Bengali Muslims could religiously connect to their new homeland and leave their old homes in Bengal behind. In time, the Badr Maqams became major centers of worship for even Buddhists and Chinese.
> It is possible that left to their own devices, the Bengalis would have assimilated into majority Theravada Buddhism. However, this was prevented by continuing ties to Bengal and the wider Islamic world. Rohingyas sometimes went to Bengal; sometimes Bengalis escaped Mughal rule to settle in underpopulated Arakan. There were always Muslim merchants in Arakan, who often preferred to trade in Rohingya villages because Rohingyas tended to live closer to the coast and were thus easier to access by sea. Shrines like the Badr Maqam attracted holy men from abroad. All this kept Islam alive in the region.
> How many were these Bengalis? We don't have hard statistics, but we can say that they made up a very large proportion of the population. Michael Charney estimates that the population of the Danyawaddy region (the center of the Mrauk-U kingdom; [all the Rohingya-majority areas and the northern one of the two Rohingya-minority areas in this map](_URL_0_)) was at most 170,000 in the seventeenth century. The entire population of Arakan was likely around 300,000.
> In 1630, we know there were around 11,000 Bengali families in rural settlements across Danyawaddy. The Arakanese continued to raid into Bengal and bring tens of thousands of Bengali captives into Arakan, so even accounting for the horrible conditions the Bengalis endured (some 40% of the captives died on the way, supposedly) and the flight of captives back to Bengal, the Rohingya population of Arakan must have grown substantially by 1700. All in all, it is not implausible that Muslims represented the majority group in Danyawaddy and nearly a third of Arakan's population as a whole. (The Muslim population outside Danyawaddy was insignificant, since 94% of Rohingyas lived in Danyawaddy at the beginning of British rule.)
> This is a significantly larger proportion of Muslims than at the onset of British rule, when Muslims made up a little over 20% of the Arakanese population. This isn't too surprising though, since the British took over after four decades of Burmese persecution of Islam, Burmese relocation of tens of thousands of Arakanese to Central Burma, and the general flight of Danyawaddy's population into British Bengal. It is, however, a significantly *smaller* proportion of the population than the Rohingya made up in Arakan before the ethnic cleansing began (if all the Rohingya went back to Arakan today, they would probably outnumber Buddhists).
> So it is true that the Muslim population in the region was bolstered by further immigration from Bengal under British rule. This does not mean that the Rohingya as a whole are immigrants who simply took advantage of British rule to displace the native Buddhists. The modern Rohingya are mostly descended from seventeenth-century captives and migrants from Bengal, and in my view they have as much right to be termed indigenous as their Buddhist neighbors (many of whom are also recent immigrants from the rest of Burma).
> Sources:
> * *Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modern Arakan* (PhD thesis by Michael Charney and still the leading work on Early Modern Arakanese religion)
> * "Slaves and Tyrants: Dutch Tribulations in Seventeenth-century Mrauk-U" by Sanjay Subrahmanyam |
How do current concepts of fusion reactors manage to have both a super-heated plasma and super-cooled magnets right next to each other? | Unlike a spacecraft, we have more cooling options. We can have huge tanks of liquid N2 just sitting in the parking lot and get them refilled when we run out. We can use heat rejection to the atmosphere or a giant lake to help cool the active coolent lines. In space you can only get rid of heat via radiation which isn't the quickest way to get rid of things. Sure you can hold the heat with phasr change materials like wax but it's only a matter of time before you need to get rid of it. |
Was there any concern in the US government that the Enola Gay could have been shot down before bombing Hiroshima, and that the atomic bomb could fall into the hands of the Japanese? | Yes, as with all flight missions, mechanical failure or being shot down is a completely real and valid concern.
For years, pilots of all nations were equipped with evasion kits. Parts of these kits included cloth maps, [such as this one]( _URL_6_), which would allow for the pilots to be able to navigate on the ground to evade capture. They were also issues something called ["blood chits"](_URL_8_), which included instructions in several languages that basically said, "I'm an American, help me escape and you'll be rewarded." These were most often issued in case the pilots were shot down or had to ditch in places that were occupied by enemy forces or in isolated areas.
They were also often issued survival kits that would include things such as fishing and hunting supplies, gold coins, lengths of rope, and other various items that would aid in their survival. [These are a examples of such.](_URL_1_).
[Here are some other types of kits from the period](_URL_3_), that would include such items as knives, basic first aid supplies, water purification tablets, "iron rations", miniature compasses, flare guns, etc. Pilots and crew were also known to hide such items, such as these examples [were compasses were hidden in buttons or the soles of boots](_URL_7_).
However, in the specific case of the Enola Gay and the secrecy and highly technical nature of the mission, as well as the fact they would be flying over Japan, which meant they would have been shot down over Japan or had to ditch there if they could not make it back out to sea, they had been given specific instructions.
[According to an interview with Theodore Van Kirk](_URL_5_), the navigator for the Enola Gay, they were given instructions on the locations of the search and rescue teams which would be in the area. Additionally, they were told that if they landed in Japan, they were "on their own." Also, there were given cyanide tablets in case they were captured.
The search and rescue operations in those days, were conducted not by helicopters mostly, which were still in their infancy, as demonstrated by the most common American craft the [Sikorsky R-4](_URL_4_), which did see limited use in areas such as the Indo-China-Burma theater. They were heavily limited by range. Instead, most S & R in that period were conducted by float planes such as the [Grumman Goose](_URL_9_). These planes were able to land in the water near the downed pilots who would then load up and be flown back to land or a nearby ship.
Also during this period, it was common for ships to rescue crewmen, including submarines. In fact, President George Bush, a WWII aviator, [was rescued by the USS Finback](_URL_2_), in 1944.
As for the actual bomb. The "Little Boy" bomb was a "gun" style bomb, where an explosion would force a Tungsten-Carbide projectile into the fissile material causing the explosion. The cordite used to detonate the device was loaded in flight and the bomb featured four different electrical safety switches. This was common among all air dropped ordinance during the period. Bombs even to this day are equipped with safeties that prevent accidental detonation. During this period, it was part of the bombardiers duties to remove these safeties and arm the bombs during flight. [Here you can see a cross section of an ANM-64 500 lb. bomb](_URL_0_). At the front you can see where the safety was located. They were designed so that the bombs would not activate unless the safety was removed, so even if the arming cable was pulled due to shifting in flight, it would not be activated (hopefully).
In the case of the atomic bomb, had the plane been shot down or crashed, the bomb at most would not have likely detonated in the full capacity, but have resulted in what we call today a "dirty bomb."
In the case of the Enola Gay, the most probable concern for the crew was mechanical failure. By August of 1945, most of the Japanese Air Force and Naval Aviation branches had been drained of their best pilots, and supplies were quite low. Most bombing runs by Allied crews went unopposed during this period as they were holding the few remaining pilots and supplies for the anticipated invasion. Additionally, the B-29 could fly well above most Japanese fighters, and the shortage of AA ammunition would have been wasted on a singular plane. By this period Japan did not concern itself with singular flights of high altitude bombers as they were considered to be merely reconnaissance flights. |
how do animals develop relationships with their human carers? animals are giving hugs to their owners and what goes on in an animals brain? | Most of these animals are herd/pack/family animals. They interact socially based on trust, affection and mutual benefit, same as humans. A human carer provides an animal with activity, food, treatment, training, and leadership. Pack animals have a need for all of this, same as humans.
We don't really know what goes on in their brains, but it is probably something similar as to what happens in our own. Trust, physical connection and relationships are deeply ingrained instincts in many animals and most mammals, we humans are not special in that regard. |
why putting a spin on things makes them travel straighter (e.g. rifling with bullets) | Gyroscopic effect; the same reason that if you spin a bicycle wheel it will tend to stay in its original orientation. It's a function of something called angular momentum, but you can think in terms of the stability of a bicycle in motion, versus a stationary bicycle. The rotation of the wheels imparts a kind of dynamic stability that requires a certain input of energy to overcome and destabilize.
Edit: Spelling |
In Band of Brothers, Donald Malarkey asks a German POW where he is from. He is surprised to hear Eugene, Oregon and the POW explains his family "answered the call" for all true Aryans to return to Germany. How common was it for German/Austrian-Americans to leave the USA and return to Germany? | < sets up lawn chair; good question! >
Follow up question: there are stories about numerous German POWs who were interned in camps in western Canada (I'm sure in the US too) who were leant out to farmers as general labourers to... well, replace the young men who went off to fight in Europe. There was little risk of escaping (2,000 miles from nowhere, speaking very poor English) and they were eventually accepted as part of the community such that after the war, and being repatriated to Germany, they rounded up their families and immigrated to Canada, the US.
For those American (or Canadian) Aryans who answered the call, I'd imagine the reception might be different. Any stories of such and how they were received (or not) returning from their war internment? Would they have been returned to Germany first, or could they just leave and go home to Eugene Oregon? |
If I flip a coin 1,000,000 times, what are the odds of it beings heads AND tails 500,000 times? | What's important to realize is that the probability of every sequence with the same "outcome" (total # of heads in a given # of trials) is the same. HHTT is as likely as HTHT or TTHH.
So to compute the probability of landing 500,000 heads in 1,000,000 trials, you have to calculate the probability of obtaining 1 particular sequence with this outcome and then multiply it be the number of different sequences with the same outcome.
The sequence of first landing 500,000 heads and then 500,000 tails is such a sequence. The odds of getting it are 0.5^500,000 * (1 - 0.5)^500,000 = 0.5^1,000,000
The number of sequences of 1 milion flips with exactly 500,000 heads is given by the so-called [binomial coefficient](_URL_1_), which in this case evaluates to 1000,000! / (500,000! * 500,000!) and which is an enormous number (unsurprisingly). (The "!" symbol denotes the factorial which is the product of all numbers less than or equal to the given number, so 4! = 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = 24)
Regular calculators can handle neither the extremely low probability of a single sequence or the very large number of possible sequences with the same outcome. So we go to Wolfram Alpha:
_URL_0_
The result: about 0.08%
Note that the above also holds for situations where the outcome of an individual trial is not a 50-50 split between two options. It can also be used for things like calculating the chance of throwing exactly 100 6's in 600 dice rolls (spoiler alert: it's 4.37%)
The general formula to compute the chance of M successes happening in N trials where in a single trial the probability of success is P is:
P^M * (1 - P)^(N - M) * N! / (M! * (N - M)!) |
Why does the flame of a cigarette lighter aid visibility in a dark room, but the flame of a blowtorch has no effect? | Burning things like matches or a lighter isn't very efficient, it produces soot (carbon) which glows when heated.
A blowtorch is much more efficient. There's more heat in a blowtorch flame so it burns away the soot and thus has less material in the flame to glow and produce light.
The glowing of material through heat is called incandescence, which is why we call old light bulbs incandescent bulbs because they would produce light through the heating of an element, incandescence.
Some types of flame are going to produce more incandescent material than others, this effect will vary with temperature, fuel mixture and the atmosphere.
We maximize the effect in light bulbs by filling them with inert gases (like, argon, neon, helium and krypton) to prevent the filament from catching fire.
This way we get all the incandescent glow from heating the filament (like tungsten in this case) without it all burning away. |
why we can blow hot or cool air just by changing the shape of our mouths. | You can only blow hot air. However, when you purse your lips and blow, the narrow opening causes the air to speed up, and faster airflows are better at pulling in surrounding air. So that air that you're feeling in that case is partly air from your lungs, and partly cooler air from the surrounding environment.
Try loosely cupping your hands around your mouth and blowing, and you'll see that the temperature is the same when you're blocking the airflow off from the surrounding, cooler air. |
how does healing bleeding work inside the mouth (wet environment) compared to the bleeding of the skin? | It acts the same way. Your Blood vessel lining contains special enzymes which, when in contact with your blood starts what we call primary hemostasis, which activates the platelets to connect and block the biggest amount of blood from escaping before the nearby Proteins and enzymes nearby are activated to form a fibrin-net and can completely block the wound opening (secondary hemostasis) Just because its wet, doesnt interfere with the clotting as is doesnt require oxygen to work or "dry out" or something
EDIT: corrected primary and secondary hemostasis thanks to u/creativename1998 |
why do hiring managers tag job postings as “entry level” when they require years of closely related experience? why not just be straightforward? | Disclaimer: Personal experience, not actual data
1.) Cynical reason, my husband is being laid off in a few months, he has 13+ years in his field. People are requesting him for "entry level" jobs because of these experience requirements. They tend to use that term to negotiate salary. Which is shady and back handed, but if you ask for (made up numbers) $145k/y for an "entry level" job, even if your work experience means you are far from entry level, they can say, "oh, well entry level salaries are capped at $97k/y," and negotiate down severely.
2.) Possible practical reason, many companies assume internships and/or work study. Entry level may also be in reference to the type of work and not the actual experience. For example, you may be a member of a group and not a senior lead or developer. |
Birth control pills basically prevents the release of an egg. Does that really mean that the eggs stay in the ovaries thus not changing the egg count? | Menopause doesn't begin when a woman "uses up" all her eggs. It begins when she stops releasing eggs. Women don't have a finite number of mature eggs they have a finite number immature eggs known as follicles.
> Throughout her life, the vast majority of follicles will die through a process known as atresia. Atresia begins at birth and continues throughout the course of the woman's reproductive life. When a woman reaches puberty and starts to menstruate, only about 400,000 follicles remain. With each menstrual cycle, a thousand follicles are lost and only one lucky little follicle will actually mature into an ovum (egg), which is released into the fallopian tube, kicking off ovulation. That means that of the one to two million follicles, only about 400 will ever mature.
_URL_0_
So the short answer is no, if unreleased the follicles will simply never mature and menopause will begin.
Edit: Women plural |
Why was Plutonium used instead of Uranium in the "Fat Man" atomic bomb? | Quite simply because we couldn't make enough Uranium in time. Enriching uranium (especially to the levels needed for a bomb) is a very complex process.
Natural uranium is about 99% Uranium 238, and only 1% Uranium 235. Only the Uranium 235 is useful for making bombs, so the Uranium has to be [enriched](_URL_0_)- meaning separating out the 235 from the 238. The first bomb used Uranium which was enriched to 80% ^(235)U.
Plutonium bombs are much harder to build, but plutonium is much easier to enrich. This required us to develop two bombs, but we would have never had enough enriched uranium in time to build a second bomb should have we not switched to plutonium. |
How was John Milton's Paradise Lost, a poem portraying Satan sympathetically and as the protagonist, allowed to be published? Did the Church not attempt to prevent it? | Paradise lost was not seen as sympathetic towards Satan until the Romantic era. It was Blake who said that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it", at the time a radical reinterpretation, but with emphasis on "without knowing". Milton was a devout Christian and though the text is can be seen as subversive from a post-romantic, rugged individualism perspective, the original religious intent is made clear from the beginning, "to justify the ways of god to man". However, as recently as 1941, CS Lewis wrote that the poem does not seek to glorify Satan:
> In the same way, the proposition that Milton's Satan is a magnificent character may bear two senses. It may mean that Milton's presentation of him is a magnificent poetical achievement which engages the attention and excites the admiration of the reader. On the other hand, it may mean that the real being (if any) whom Milton is depicting, or any real being like Satan if there were one, or a real human being in so far as he resembles Milton's Satan, is or ought to be an object of admiration and sympathy, conscious or unconscious, on the part of the poet his readers or both. The first, so far as I know, has never till modern times been denied; the second, never affirmed before the times of Blake and Shelley-for when Dryden said that Satan was Milton's 'hero' he meant something quite different. It is, in my opinion, wholly erroneous. In saying this I have, however, trespassed beyond the bounds of purely literary criticism. In what follows, therefore, I shall not labour directly to convert those who admire Satan, but only to make a little clearer what it is they are admiring. That Milton could not have shared their admiration will then, I hope, need no argument. The main difficulty is that any real exposition of the Satanic character and the Satanic predicament is likely to provoke the question 'Do you, then, regard Paradise Lost as a comic poem?' To this I answer, No; but only those will fully understand it who see that it might have been a comic poem.
In terms of whether this intention resonated with contemporaries, Maltzahn reports that "the conservative Hobart welcomes Milton's christian epic as a counterweight to the irreligious court culture of the day". He goes on to discuss the contemporary need to separate Milton's incendiary political views from his orthodox religious ones. Paradise Lost was controversial when seen as a political allegory, depending on which side of the English civil war you were on. As CS Lewis mentions, Dryden handled this topic as well, and as a royalist he rewrote the poem figuring Satan as Oliver Cromwell, which was certainly meant to be an insult not a compliment.
In terms of Milton's sensitive publications, his Aeropagitica is a polemic arguing for free speech. This and his discussion of divorce were the publications which attracted the most controversy although they were never censored. Remember that this is well after the reformation, and though it might be a generalisation, power lay with either the King or parliament, not with the church. If something was politically expedient it was allowed, see Christopher Marlowe's extremely blasphemous productions of Doctor Faustus while allegedly in the secret service of Elizabeth I.
Sources:
Alicia Ostriker, Dancing at the Devil's Party: Some Notes on Politics and Poetry Critical Inquiry Vol. 13, No. 3, Politics and Poetic Value (Spring, 1987), pp. 579-596
C. S Lewis, A Preface To Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942).
John N King, Milton And Religious Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).
Nicholas von Maltzahn, The Review of English Studies Vol. 47, No. 188 (Nov., 1996), pp. 479-499.
William Blake, The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell And A Song Of Liberty (New York: Florence Press, London, 1911). |
Who was the *last* POTUS to be quoted saying the n-word while in office? | I am pretty sure it was President Richard Nixon. Other President's may have said it since of course, but were not captured on tape saying it.
While Nixon said the slurs privately at the time, the quotes were taped by the White House recording system in the Oval Room (and those tapes are in the National Archives), so it is fair to say that Nixon was indeed "quoted" while in office, caught on tape referring to blacks with racial slurs like "niggers" and "jigaboos".
At one point in the Nixon tapes, when he was working on his first presidential address to Congress, during a conversation with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about how to handle African foreign policy, the President was quoted on tape as saying [*"Henry, let's leave the niggers to Bill and we'll take care of the rest of the world"*.](_URL_0_)
EDIT - Here is a link to some audio from the Nixon tapes of [Nixon talking to Donald Rumsfeld and saying "nigger" in reference to American blacks as well](_URL_1_), though in this instance he plays it off as if he is just quoting Southerners. |
when extremely sleepy (like in lectures), why does falling asleep for even a few minutes provide a dramatic improvement in your awakeness? | It's because of the jolt of adrenaline from being woken up. I was driving once well I was really sleepy (kids, don't try this at home it is dangerous and stupid) and I started to nod off. Until I hit the rumble strip. I was awake alert and awake for a solid hour.
The same thing happens when you nod off in class, and your friend wakes you up.
It's an evolutionary trait if something abrupt wakes you up. Say, a lion trying to eat you. It's really important that you are awake and alert enough to escape the danger. Even though being eaten by a lion isn't really a thing anymore it's still very beneficial. |
When an ISS astronaut goes out for EVA, do the airlocks conserve air, or vent it? What about airlocks on other space vehicles? | The Quest Joint Airlock works like this: an astronaut from either the U.S. or Russia enters the chamber, and the vacuum pump lowers the presure to 3 psi, and then to zero psi. After the air has been evacuated, the external door opens. There's also an equipment airlock that's used for overnight campouts to remove Nitrogen from the crew's bodies to prevent them from getting the bends when they depressurize.
It would be wasteful to let their limited air into space.
Edit: depressurize |
how do we know what latin sounded like? we have written text, but how do we know we're pronouncing it right? | Because unlike some other dead languages people never stopped learning it. The knowledge has always been passed on to someone, particularly within the Catholic Church. Scientists have always used Latin words when naming things, and until recently, Latin was considered an important language to know to be considered properly educated. |
what are freemasons, what do they actually do, and why are they so proud of being freemasons? | The Freemasons began in the middle ages as a means of protecting and disseminating knowledge. To be a Freemason, you must be invited by a Freemason and do a bunch of ceremonies. The preparation for and research of these ceremonies is about half of what they do. The other half is cocktail parties and feasts.
They are a social club with spiritual elements. They only accept men, and you must believe in some being you are willing to describe as God. But other than teach philosophy and rituals and drink, they don't really do anything. It's a social club. You may be familiar with one of their affiliates, the Shriners, who drive the little cars in parades. |
If photons have no mass, how can a laser beam bore a hole through something? Wouldn't the equation E=MC^2 resolve to 0=0? | E=mc^(2) is only part of the story.
The full expression relating energy E, momentum p, and mass m is
E^(2)=p^(2)c^(2) + m^(2)c^(4)
Photons have no mass, but they do have momentum, and thus they have energy. |
how come we can see highly detailed images of a nebula 10,000 light years away but not planets 4.5 light years away? | Compared to nebulae, planets are very very very very very small. You can see a mountain that is 1 kilometre away from you much clearer than you can see a grain of sand that is 1 metre away.
Edit: as several people have mentioned, planets don't emit any light of their own, this makes it extremely difficult to see planets when they're being drowned out by the light of their parent stars. |
If alcohol makes you dehydrated, why is urine clear in colour (while drinking a lot), which indicates that you're hydrated? | Alcohol reduces the production of a hormone called vasopressin, which tells your kidneys to reabsorb water rather than flush it out through the bladder. So once you have drank enough alcohol you stop absorbing the water from what you are drinking and it just goes right through you, which is why your urine is colourless but you are also dehydrated. |
Why did America instigate a coup in Iran when it was already well on the way to becoming a democracy? | The British government's embargo of Iran after the Iranian Prime Minister's Mossadegh's nationalization of the oil industry from primarily British control in 1951 had a seriously damaging effect on its economy. This, coupled with a powerful new sense of nationalism among the Iranian population in the wake of their defiant stand against their former colonial British overlords, produced an atmosphere of extremely high tensions.
At the same time, Iran's main communist political party, the Tudeh, capitalized on the volatile situation by reversing their previous opposition to Mossadegh and joining in support of him instead, taking to beating up and threatening political opponents of the prime minister during the nationalization crisis. Acting in the hopes that Mossadegh would appreciate their support and pivot the country's development toward communism (and presumably closer relations with the Soviet Union), they contributed significantly to British and American foreign policy makers' calculations about Mossadegh's likelihood to oppose the West's goals and interests.
President Eisenhower and a number of senior figures in his administration and the intelligence community were eventually persuaded by British intelligence and convinced by the argument that the situation was unsustainable, and that if left to continue any longer without decisive intervention, the risk of a communist takeover of the government (via the Tudeh party) would become unacceptable.
In what would become a consistent theme for both major powers throughout the Cold War, the U.S. undertook the coup to install a sympathetic government rather than allow self-determination to produce one that chose to align itself in opposition to Washington. The Shah was reinstituted as essentially an absolute monarch, and his rule was supported and financed by the United States for the next two and a half decades.
Now, whether or not this seizure of the Iranian government by pro-communist forces was actually a likely possibility is honestly a matter of debate. But its role as a major motivator for the U.S.' actions seems clear.
Source: *Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran*, Mark Gasiorowski |
how can you time travel if you are going faster than the speed of light? | Ok. From what I understand, here goes:
First, imagine that time is a road on which you can only move forward at certain speed.
Now, Imagine you have two number lines. One number line is labeled "Speed through Time" and the other is labeled "Speed through Space". Each line goes from 0 to the speed of light. If you are completely still (as in floating in interstellar space unmoving) you are moving through time at the speed of light (bear with me). So, your "speed through time" bar is full, while your "speed through space" bar is empty. Now, you ignite a little rocket and start moving at 100 km per second. To move through space at a speed, you have to take a little away from moving through time. Now, your "speed through space" bar as a little bit filled in, and your "speed through time" has a little bit taken away. If you want to go faster and faster through space, you have to keep taking that speed out of your "speed through time" and put it in your "speed through space" bar. Let's say you are now moving through space at very close to the speed light. Your "speed through space" bar is almost full, while your "speed through time" bar is almost empty. If you want to move through space at the speed of light, you need to take away all your speed from the time bar. Now suppose you want to travel even faster through space. Your time bar is empty at this point. Where are you going to get the extra speed? You keep pulling from the time bar. Your time bar is now in the negatives. You're moving through time at a negative speed. Or, better yet, you're moving in the opposite direction down the time road (mentioned at the beginning). So, your time bar is reading less than zero, and your "speed through space" bar is now past the speed of light. So now, you are moving faster than the speed of light through space, and travelling backwards in time.
Sorry if this isn't actually a "LI5" explanation. Could try to clarify.
**tl;dr:** Any speed you want to go through space must be taken out of your speed through time. If you want to go faster than the speed of light (v(s)=c+dv), you must take away all your speed through time and then take a little more (v(t)=0-dv) making your time speed negative/making you go backwards in time. |
Why did Hernán Cortés destroy Tenochtitlan and build México City right on top of it? | Lots of Tenochtitlan related questions recently... So we can note at least two reasons for Cortés' comparatively harsh actions against Tenochtitlan (and the Mexica): military and religious reasons. His native allies also used the fall of the Mexica as an opportunity for revenge. Lastly, not all of pre-hispanic Tenochtitlan was destroyed with the Spanish victory, as its indigenous population rebuilt parts of the city afterwards.
## Military reasons
As you say, the Spanish were at first very impressed with the huge city they found built on Lake Tezcoco (estimates are of roughly 250.000 inhabitants), with its large markets and canal system. This changed with the Noche Triste, when after a massacre carried out by one of Cortés' generals the Spanish were chased from the city. Barbara Mundy notes (in “Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City“)
> While Cortés initially wrote admiringly of the city in his letters to Charles V, his attitude and those of his fellow conquistadores would change dramatically when they attempted to capture the watery city. The surrounding lake functioned like a great moat protecting the island city, and the bridges spanning the breaks in the causeways, which allowed the flow of water from one part of the system to another, could be removed to further isolate the island capital.
> [During the Noche Triste, the Spaniards] found that their enemies used the urband canals as transport routes for canoes filled with as many as 60 armed warriors each. Slogging around the canals slowed the conquistares in their retreat, and when, exhausted, they fled on foot along the causeways, those raised roads served to organize them into a neat firing line for the Mexica sharpshooting archers gathered alongside in the lake in their canoes. Small wonder that they emerged from the war with little appreciation of the role that these causeways and dikes played in protecting the city from the scourges of floods. (p. 76)
This knowledge of the canals and dikes was then used by the Spaniards in their siege of the city about a year later. They methodically destroyed these structures that had helped the Mexica, used them to their advantage, and even cut the city fresh water supply. These were methods of warfare only bent on conquering the city that Cortés and his men had lost once before, without much thought about the long-term effects. These effects were harsh: For centuries after conquest, the city then known as Mexico City would be plagued by heavy floodings, lacking the protection of the dike system, the knowledge of which was lost by then. This led to many projects of draining lake Tezcoco, finished centuries later, which has led to massive other problems for the city.
Here's [the earliest European map of Tenochtitlan](_URL_2_), sent with one of Cortés letters in 1524 so 3 years after the siege. It's probably based on native maps and gives a good idea of the bridges and moats I find.
But getting back to general military reasons: For Cortés at this point it was imperative to conquer Tenochtitlan, since his whole plan was built on overthrowing the Mexic, leaders of the Aztec Triple Alliance. The year between the Noche Triste and the siege of Tenochtitlan he had spent preparing by planning attack plans with canoes, and bringing together more native allies – including from Tlaxcala, Tezcoco and ~~Huejotrinco~~Huejotzinco. His strong reaction against Tenochtitlan was partly typical European siege warfare; and party due to the city's special position lying on a lake, and to his necessity of conquering it. They also fits in a pattern of Cortés using sometimes extreme violence as examplary punishment, so that other native groups would not oppose him (also evident in his later hanging of the last Mexica ruler Cuauhtemoc).
And his native allies were not passive either after the city's fall. One native chronicler (Fernando de Alva Ixtlixlochitl) describes that the Tlaxcalans actually were more brutal against the Mexica who remained in the city, who had been their traditional enemies. While Alva Ixtlixlochitl had an anti-Tlaxcala bias, we can deduce that overall it was in many native allies interest to avenge themselves of their former overlords the Mexica – in part by looting their former capital.
## Religious reasons
After the city had fallen into Spanish hands, major buildings like the palace and the temple were destroyed. However, their fundaments remain intact until today (the temple can be visited), with e.g. the palace building the base of the later colonial palace. In the descriptions of conquistadors like Cortés and Díaz de Castillo they already note their disdain of the temple during their first visit – in contrast to their suprise and admiration of the canal system, and the large markets that were according to them bigger than any in Spain.
Of course, the conversion of the native population to Christianity was officialy the main reason for Spanish colonial expansion. So the destruction of temples fits with a larger pattern of destroying any important symbols of native beliefs: especially statues, art, manuscripts, and of course the large temples. This has to do also with the influence of religious orders in early colonial Mexico. Especially the Franciscans were called by Cortés there shortly after conquest, and showed fervour for destroying signs of native faith; but also of learning about it in order to replace it more effectively.
Stepping back from Tenochtitlan, I'add that the destruction of temples happened in many other cities in central Mexico after they fell under Spanish jurisdiction or were conquered. Even though many were not destroyed as systematically as Tenochtitlan was (in part due to its special position). What is more, destroying temple of other religions and building Christian cathedrals has a long tradition in Iberia. This is what happened during the “reconquista” in medieval Iberia, with the major cathedrals e.g. in Sevilla and Cordoba built over the remains (or partly inside) the former mosques. So that the Mexican conquistadors also built on medieval Iberian patterns here, as in many other areas. We have then in Tenochtitlan also a symbolic replacement of native buildings representing state power (palace) and religion (temple) with their Spanish equivalents.
## After the fall...
The traditional view is how the Spaniards completely destroyed Tenochtitlan and then built Mexico City on its ruins. Barbary Mundy's fascinating study of the city challenges this view by describing continuing indigenous influence in the colonial city. This goes beyond your question so I'll keep it briefer, but hope it adds an interesting perspective.
After the siege, Cortés contemplated leaving Tenochtitlan abandoned and making his new capital in nearby Coyoacan. But something of the city's former splendour seems to've stuck with him, so that he eventually allowed the native people who had mostly fled to return to their city. Of the original ca. 250.000 as many as 100.000 may have returned. He also started the rebuilding process of the city center, following European architecture and city planning. But the many neighbourhoods and outskirts surrounding this centre followed much more pre-hispanic customs.
Mundy notes various continuing indigenous influence in the city: For example to markets were rebuilt, that were so important to the city's ecomony. And the four indigenous neighbourhoods surrounding the centre followed native patters, aligned with the four cardinal directions. They also had indigenous officials in their local administration, and at least until the 1560 the city's governors were descended from the Mexica. Traditional agriculture on the lake also continued on the outskirts.
More basically, while Spanish officials called the city “Mexico City” since the mid-16th century, indigenous elites continued to use the name “Mexico Tenochtitlan” into the 17th century (*edit:* I go into the name Mexico some more [over here](_URL_0_)). Even today, we can notice the continuing presence of Tenochtitlan in Mexico City – one nice example is the city's metro, which has many stops named after pre-hispanic places and rulers. While most of Tenochtitlan was initially destroyed, parts of it were rebuilt and its memory kept alive.
In this way, Mexico City exemplifies how indigenous cultures have since colonial times continued to shape the society of modern-day Mexico. It shows that the idea of a clear break with the past is too simple. Traditional history writing has focused mainly on sources by Spanish priests, conquistadors and historians, who would argue for such breaks: native belief systems were simply replaced by Christian ones, as were native polities, writings, art and languages. By incorporating indigenous alongside European sources, more current research has shown that in all these and other areas, indigenous modes of life did not vanish. They mixed with European counterparts in myriad ways, often in forced ways due to colonial violence, bringing forth new forms. Tenochtitlan did not fall in a day, after all.
& nbsp;
*Edit: Also check out 611131's [excellent answer elsewhere in this thread](_URL_1_) for more on Cortés and on early colonial Tenochtitlan/Mexico City.*
---------
* For those interested in reading more about what happened to Tenochtitlan before and after the Spanish conquest I'd recommend Barbary Mundy's book cited above (*Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City*), which gives and in-depth look at it from a more indigenous perspective.
------
& nbsp;
Edit: Added context; last part; spelling
Edit 2: Added a last paragraph; maps
*Edit 3: Wow! Thanks for the gold kind stranger!* |
Why is it matter in the Sun's core can undergo fusion at 15 million degrees but our fusion reactors need to be 100+ million degrees? | Fusion reactions are a slow/low probability process. In the sun, the time it would take for a nominated atom to undergo fusion would be significant, but this is offset by the sheer number of atoms present.
In a lab based fusion system, the number of atoms in the pool is a lot smaller, so this is offset by increasing the pressure/temperature and increasing the chance of a nominated atom colliding with another and undergoing fusion. |
why does it seem like my body will "wait" until i have time off then i get sick | When you keep yourself stressed out for a long period of time, you're basically in permanent "fight or flight" mode. Your body does this to keep you keen because it senses a threat. you basically convince yourself that these papers or projects (or parties) are a threat that must be dealt with.
When you finally start to relax, your body is able to go into repair mode. Instead of using energy to keep you awake and alert, it will use energy instead to repair itself. When you're sick, you're rarely feeling the actual virus/bacteria wreaking havoc in your system, you are feeling your immune system responding to the threat. Part of feeling sick is to knock you on your butt so you can conserve energy to fight the infection.
So, feeling sick after a long period of up time is your body's way of saying, "Cool, I can finally start cleaning up around here. You sit down and shut up until I'm done." |
If an addict stops using an addictive substance, does their brain's dopamine production eventually return to a normal level, or is sobriety just learning to be satisfied with lower dopamine levels? | It is a complicated question to answer, but it depends on the substance, how physically addicted someone is, how long someone has been addicted, and individual physiology.
Some drugs, like Methamphetamine and cocaine and amphetamine and methylphenidate can certainly cause long term irrreversible changes in dopamine receptors and reuptake pumps, but this usually only happens in cases where these drugs are being abused for an extended period of time in large amounts.
Essentially, the answer to your question is "sometimes".
A very grossly general rule about all this that the more chemically similar to meth and coke the substance is, the more likely prolonged abuse of large amounts with damage your dopaminergic mechanisms permanently.
Amphetamine and methylphenidate are pharmacologically similar to meth and coke, respectively.
More distant cousins of these may be things like MDMA and Methcathinone; some possibility exists that prolonged abuse of these may cause permanent changes in your dopaminergic systems.
Even much further off the family tree you have bupropion, and many other interesting substances. |
If color is the non-absorption of specific wavelengths, wouldn't a 'red' laser consist of every color except red? | The colour of an object is determined by the wavelength(s) of the light that it emits or reflects. If you take an object that doesn't emit visible light on its own, then the visibility of the object is purely caused by reflection of light from other sources.
Depending on what the object is made of, it will reflect some wavelengths of light, while absorbing others. In general, we say that an object is red if it primarily reflects red light and absorbs other wavelengths.
So in that sense, the colour of an object is indeed determined by the non-absorption of specific wavelengths. But what ultimately determines which colour we see is the wavelength of the light that hits our eyes. When we look at a red object, all light other than red is absorbed and only red light is reflected towards our eyes.
But when we look at a laser or other light source, we directly see the light that it emits. So a red laser emits red light which eventually enters our eyes. In this case, there is no absorption or reflection required. |
When people have a high pain tolerance, are experiencing less pain, or are they just better at "sucking it up?" | No, it is not all psychological.
Pain may be mediated by a number of factors, including:
* Sleep deprivation^[1](_URL_5_)
* Sex^[2](_URL_1_),[3](_URL_0_)
* Humour^[4](_URL_4_)
* Depression and/or Anxiety^[5](_URL_2_),[6](_URL_3_)
* And very likely countless others.
Is there likely a significant psychological component? Yes.
Is pain a very multifactorial experience? Yes.
*Unfortunately, the links are to abstracts. Those of you without university/institution access may not be able to see the full articles* |
A PC uses 200W/hour. A heater uses 200W/hour. Do they liberate the same amount of heat? | Yes, a 200W heater and a 200W computer release heat at essentially the same rate. Because the two devices are running at the same power, they are both adding the same amount of energy to the system (to a good approximation your house) in a given unit of time, and ultimately virtually all of this energy will effectively end up as heat. In this sense, the internal structure of the device doesn't particularly matter, for the sake of this problem you can just treat them as block boxes that put out that much power. From the point of view of heat generation it doesn't particularly matter that your computer is a complicated system internally, at the end of the day it puts out heat exactly as though it was essentially just a big resistor like your heater.
The same goes for your light bulb or for pretty much any other appliance operating at that power. The only small difference in the case of a light bulb is that if there are windows or other openings then part of the emitted flux will leave your house and thus won't contribute to local heating (although this energy will also eventually be dissipated as heat elsewhere). However, all of the light and infrared radiation that bounces around the house will ultimately be converted to heat and thus will again be equivalent to the heating caused by a simple heater. |
Do protons and neutrons maintain distinction inside the nucleus of an atom or do they combine into a quark soup? | It does not appear to form a completely homogeneous soup, with elements all misched together; but exactly how a nucleus is structured is still unclear. You can read more about it in [the Wikipedia article about nuclear structure](_URL_0_). |
Why did the scientists involved with the Manhattan Project think the atomic bomb had a chance to ignite the atmosphere? | This never was really an issue. There was a thought that the fusion of nitrogen nuclei in a fusion bomb could create a self-propagating reaction (similar to the explosion propagation). This is because nitrogen is ~78% of the atmosphere.
After researching certain nitrogen/magnesium/helium reactions the scientists concluded that it was impossible to occur. Additionally, the scientist (Teller) who originally thought this may occur realized it would not.
_URL_0_
tl;dr N+N reaction was thought to be able to self-propagate to catastrophic levels with atmospheric nitrogen. This is quite unlikely. |
Is there an example of a mathematical problem that is easy to understand, easy to believe in it's truth, yet impossible to prove through our current mathematical axioms? | The title of your post and the contents are different in a subtle, but important way. The title says "impossible to prove through our current mathematical axioms", whereas the post body says " it has not been able to be proven by our current mathematical knowledge".
The first version is the most profound. Given a set of axioms, we can find problems that are "undecidable" based on those axioms. That is, there is no way to develop an algorithm that always leads to a (correct) yes/no answer. There are quite a number of problems we know are undecidable, but I can't think of any that would be easy to conceptualize by any high school student.
The second version, however, is much more approachable. It simply asks for problems that we've not been able to prove so far, indicating that a proof could exist, but it has simply eluded us. There are a number of such unsolved problems that are relatively easy to conceptualize.
**Goldbach's Conjecture** Any even number larger than 2 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. For example: 42 can be written as 37 + 5, both of which are prime. Goldbach's Conjecture has been checked computationally for a very large set of numbers and so far it always works. But a full proof remains elusive.
**Perfect Numbers** A "perfect number" is defined as a number whose divisors (other than the number itself) add up to that number. 6 is perfect, because it's divisors, 1, 2 and 3, add up to 6. On the other hand, 8 is not perfect, because it's divisors, 1, 2 and 4, don't add up to 8. After 6, the next perfect number is 28 (1, 2, 4, 7, 14), followed by 496 and 8128. So far, all perfect numbers that have been found are even. It is unknown whether odd perfect numbers exist. Or if there are infinitely many perfect numbers.
**Collatz Conjecture** Create a sequence by starting with any positive integer. If it is even, the next number in the sequence is obtained by dividing the previous one by 2. If it's odd, the next number is obtained by multiplying the previous one by 3 and adding 1. Repeat this procedure. For example: 3 - > 10 - > 5 - > 16 - > 8 - > 4 - > 2 - > 1. Once this sequence reaches 1, it'll start to repeat (1 - > 4 - > 2 - > 1). An open question is: Does this sequence always end at 1, regardless of the starting number? This question has been tested computationally for a very large set of starting values and all have ended up with the sequence reaching 1. But a definitive proof is still missing. |
Is there a consensus on what happened to the victims of the Dyatlov Pass incident that don't involve a Yeti or aliens? Is the radiation (if there actually was radiation) on some of the bodies explained? | There is no consensus, sadly. It's even hard to say what facts about the event are true or not. The incident effectively amounts to something like a crime scene, and the evidence is long gone. What evidence that was there was subject to fallible and biased human perception. I do not believe there are enough solid facts to ever form a consensus as to what happened, especially since many of the researchers looking into the incident are actively trying to find "mysterious" answers.
This event occurred in 1959, in the a remote wilderness area of the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. The information that has come down to us about it is just as much legend as fact. It has since been repeated many times in the stories of the "mysterious things" culture (the subculture that hungers for stories about UFOs and Bigfoot). I myself have belong to this subculture (as a fan of folklore, not as a 'believer'), so I have heard the Dyatlov Pass story told and retold in many formats.
I think [Brian Dunning gave the best analysis of the incident I've read in his Skeptoid podcast](_URL_0_). While certainly not immune to error, Dunning generally does a good job of digging out primary sources when they're available. He reports that what translated Russian sources he could find also were spinning wild tales.
I agree with Dunning's conclusion that an avalanche is the most parsimonious answer to "what happened to the victims of the Dyatlov Pass incident", but I know that this is not definitively proove-able.
EDIT:
I just want to make further comments about the 'Legendary' status of the Dyatlov Pass incident. There are many events in history that come to us through contemporary primary sources, but are so poorly documented that they frustrate the modern reader with the eternal unknowableness about something that likely had a simple and/or reasonable explanation. The famous [Devil's Footprints incident in Devon, England in 1855 is another great example](_URL_1_). The incident was reported in contemporary newspapers, but no one who observed it had the skills to properly document it in a way that it would be understandable to a person in 2017. Over the following century and a half, enthusiasts fill in the gaps in the primary source to try to explain it, and it enters the realm of myth and folklore. I think the same process has occurred with the Dyatlov Pass incident. There wasn't sufficient data recorded due to the remote and inhospitable region of the incident, leading to an unknowable "crime scene" in which too much information had already decayed or been lost. Combine the excitement of a mystery with the terrifying mystique of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and you have an Urban Legend of the highest quality ready to go. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.