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How come being sad makes me choose to partake in unhealthy lifestyles?
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Those unhealthy things are easy to go to because they offer immediate gratification. You don't get the same instant reward from running on a treadmill for an hour than you do eating a bag of Doritos (despite the fact that you'll probably feel better if you do the former regularly instead of the latter) . When you're sad, you're looking for ways to fix that negative emotion, so naturally you gravitate towards things that will fix it quickly. The problem is just that most of those things are bad for you in the long run, and the things that are good for you in the long run aren't usually immediately gratifying.
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If something makes you sad, you don't want it to happen. It's evolutionarily advantageous to be sad when, say, a relative dies.
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I was taking pictures of a thunderstorm and this happened (see picture). Why?
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Oh got it. I thought that was just the horizon or something. This is caused by a rolling shutter. The shutter on most cameras is rolling, mean it doesn't actually completely open to take high shutter speed photos. It instead reveals a horizontal sliver of the sensor and moves down, so each row on the sensor is actually exposed to light a split second later than the last. Rarely does this matter unless your taking a picture of something moving very fast, like helicopter blades or a lightning strike. Basically what happened is part of your sensor was exposed slightly before the strike, and part of your sensor was exposed slightly after. The tree was there the whole time, so it shows up regardless.
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This all has to do with where you are relative to the lightning. Basically, thunder is emitted along the length of the lightning bolt. Depending on your position and the lightning's orientation, some of this thunder makes it to you faster, because it was emitted closer to you. This can make thunder sound like a sharp crack or a long low rumble.
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What would happen if you swapped some ants between colonies? Would any(ant) notice? What about swapping a queen?
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They are pheromone specific so yes, they would notice and they would kill an intruder. This is a terrific book on ants - Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson
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Depending on species, it would probably be killed if it tried to join another colony because it doesn't have the right scent: _URL_0_
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What is stopping semiconductor manufacturers layering transistors on top of one another?
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They do layer them. And yes, it makes them generate more heat. Because all of three contacts on a transistor are conductive, if you stuck two next to each other in a way that made their contacts touch they would short out. You need to put a layer of non-conductive material in between them so that they won't interfere with each other. Many circuit boards and chips are already layered. _URL_1_ And yes, heat is a concern because the insulating plastic makes it harder to radiate heat away from the circuitry. For example, an Intel CPU (the solid-looking cracker-sized tab in the middle of your motherboard) can have up to 20 layers. The most complex electronics use alternating sequences of acid etching and "printing" laminate to achieve the desired three-dimensional pattern. _URL_0_
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Of course when such chips are made the manufacturing process isn't perfect and some errors may render transistors nonfunctional. The chips are designed with some level of redundancy so certain kinds of errors can be "worked around" but enough errors can render large sections of the chip inoperative. Instead of just throwing out this under-performing CPU the manufacturers perform what is called "binning". Chips able to perform at certain thresholds are separated into different product lines so a higher performance product which is crippled by broken transistors might be sold as a lower performance unit for less.
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What purpose does the red edible part of watermelons serve?
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The general theory about fruit is that fruits contain seeds and "food". (Like the red part of the watermelon.) Animals eat the fruit to get the "food" part, walk somewhere else (could be miles away), and excrete the seeds, which helps the plant spread to new places. Watermelons have been artificially bred (apparently for at least 4,000 years now) to be bigger and have more "food" part.
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Watermelon should sound hallow, which means that the sugar (which stuff) concentration is high enough to cause "cracking" inside the flesh of the watermelon (the red stuff.) There is air inside those cracks. So a watermelon should be firm, with no soft spots and sound like a weak drum. If the watermelon is soft, it's rotten, throw it out. If it doesn't sound like a drum at all and sounds completely solid, then it's sugar concentration is low. It's not as ripe as it could be, but it could still be ripe enough to eat. Some people like watermelons that are super sweet (drum sounding) and some people like watermelons that are not (solid sounding). No one likes a rotten watermelon (soft or having soft spots).
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Why massaging an aching muscle (after a workout for example) greatly decreases the recovery time?
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During intense exercise, there may not be enough oxygen available to complete the process, so a substance called lactate is made. Your body can convert this lactate to energy without using oxygen. But this lactate or lactic acid can build up in your bloodstream faster than you can burn it off. Massaging the muscle after helps breakdown the acid in the muscle and releases so the body can expel it from your body faster.
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> Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), also called muscle fever, is the pain and stiffness felt in muscles several hours to days after unaccustomed or strenuous exercise. > The soreness is felt most strongly 24 to 72 hours after the exercise. It is thought to be caused by eccentric (lengthening) exercise, which causes microtrauma to the muscle fibers. After such exercise, the muscle adapts rapidly to prevent muscle damage, and thereby soreness, if the exercise is repeated. > Delayed onset muscle soreness is one symptom of exercise-induced muscle damage. The other is acute muscle soreness, which appears during and immediately after exercise. Source: wikipedia By working out you damage the muscles, which results in them feeling sore as they repair.
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When cars are towed, how does the owner know that it was towed rather than stolen?
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Cop here: A lot of times there will be a sign that tells you what tow company tows from that area. We do still get a lot of calls about stolen cars that end up being towed, though. In my state, tow companies are required to submit every car they tow into a database that's searchable by police. 9 times out of 10 when you call 911 to report your car stolen and give the operator your license plate, they'll be able to tell you where your car was towed to. I've had a handful of cases where a car was towed and didn't get put in the tow file (usually repossessions). In those cases we'll do a report, the car will be entered into NCIC, and then we'll find out later it was towed and just have to close the case. Again, this is my state, I can't speak for states that don't have this system.
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I used to work for a repossession company. The cars we towed were owned by the bank or the rental car agency, and not by the people driving the car. In some cases the people driving the cars could be charged with theft if they did not turn the car over to us. There are very specific laws that cover what a tow truck can and cannot do. I hope that helps but I don't think that fully answers your question.
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What's the difference between ethnicity, nationality, and race?
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Race is a made up social construct born of the scientific ideas originally meant to define origins based on skin tone but we now know there's no scientific difference that makes sense to classify us this way. Nationality is your country of origin. Ethnicity is your culture of origin. An ethnic group is not necessarily limited by geographical borders but refers to the people themselves and their shared culture and customs.
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Race is usually broader, and categorizes people with similar features such as skin color, hair, and facial characteristics. Races such as caucasian, mongoloid, negroid, and australoid are very broad terms that cover people of many different countries. Ethnicity is more cultural and narrow. People of simiar ethnicity may share common ancestry, language, clothing, history, and food. For instance, Europe is filled with different ethnicities while all of them are still classified as being part of the Caucasian race.
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"History" book cites no sources?
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Who is the author? Is the author at a credible institution, like a University? If not, does the author have some other claim to expertise in the field? Who is the publisher? What other sorts of publications do they put out? Investigating those two questions can tell you quite a bit about the credibility of a source. Citing sources is standard and expected in academic publishing, though some very credible authors don't bother. If the book is more in the popular consumer realm, citations often get dropped.
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That's a pretty wide open question. I could rattle off a dozen books that I think are especially illuminating, but the next poster could rattle off a dozen completely different titles and that list would be just as valid. I do think that there are foundational works in many areas of history, and that reading them would be beneficial to the average person. The problem is that there are so many areas of history that it would be somewhere between irresponsible and impossible to construct an authoritative list. If you have a particular interest, let me know, and I'll try to steer you to a couple of important books on the subject.
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What happens to reproductive organs after chemotherapy?
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Reproductive organs remain intact, but, as with any chemo, they could become damaged. The reproductive organs are discouraged during chemo to produce reproductive cells. Also, the reproductive cells, such as sperm and eggs, are more than likely either damaged or disabled.
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This is a very broad question. Is there something specific about chemotherapy that you don't understand that isn't answered by the wiki? Please provide more clarification, your question presently is only going to merit the most general of responses, which are easily available to you.
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Why is there no smoke coming from my incense stick until the fire goes out?
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Incense sticks are primarily made of wood (or similar materials) and scent. Wood burns at a higher temperature than the scent. When the fire goes out, the top of the stick is not as hot (it's just the right temperature), and the scent evaporates to form a white smoke with a smell. But if there is a fire, it means that the temperature is higher, high enough to burn both the wood and scent in the flame. Because it is too hot, the white smoke is completely burnt in that flame and will not be seen. (If you were to put many sticks together for a larger flame, you may instead see some black smoke, which is the result of the wood burning. The black smoke is not easily visible with only one stick burning. Do not try this at home.)
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Because the smoke is what's burning. Its actually a fine mist of evaporating oils that is flammable.
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How does an animal with static camoflauge know where to hide?
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They don’t “know” per se that they are on the correct pattern that matches their camouflage. It’s all about evolution/natural selection basically. The individuals that survive tend to hide in areas that they blend into and therefore pass on the genes for that pattern. It’s more so that they evolved the pattern to match where they hide than hiding to match the pattern. Source: I’m a wildlife biologist.
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Short answer: they don't. All they know is that they didn't get eaten. Genetic mutations that affect an animal's colour or texture are relatively common. Having fur or feathers a different colour, or a different length, or patterns of stripes or dots; all of these can happen with a single genetic change. Any population of camouflaging animals will vary between individual animals in the effectiveness of their camouflage. The animals that by chance happen to have the most effective camouflage, are the ones that don't get seen by predators and eaten. These animals survive, reproduce, and pass on their genes for effective camouflage. Repeat.
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With Cell Carriers dropping Domestic Roaming charges, what is the point of coverage maps?
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Coverage maps now are frequently used to show 4g coverage. Depending on your phone and carrier, there are several different types of 4g, which are not all compatible with each other. Because of this, you may not be able to maintain a 4g connection while roaming. It is fairly likely though, that you'll still be able to connect to a 3G network, at a lower speed.
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It's using GPS to determine your location, not cell towers. As long as you have 3 satellites you can get a signal for you can get a position, the more satellites you are able to 'see' the more accurate the position. Likewise, if you're in an area where there is no cell coverage, you can still use the GPS in the phone to get your position or use an application that has offline maps. Edit to add: if you have 'airplane mode' set on the phone it should disable all radios including GPS, and you would not get geo-tagged photos.
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When fires are created, like camp fires and burning oil in engines, are we permanently destroying oxygen in the air or putting it in a form that will never be made again into oxygen within a reasonable time frame?
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The main gas produced by fire is CO2. Plants convert CO2 into Oxygen, so relatively speaking it is not a very long time for it to be converted. Also around 80% of the worlds oxygen is produced by algae, plankton and other marine plants in the oceans, not by land based plant life.
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Flammability stems from an objects reactivity in the presence of Oxygen. Fire, burning or otherwise creating a visible flame is an exothermic reaction that typically involves the prescence and active chemical interaction with Oxygen or other gases. Most typically, you are going to need a fuel, which is easiest to find in something carbon rich like wood, paper or coal/charcoal. Secondly, you will need an Oxidizer. Third and lastly, you will need heat to start the initial reaction. When you heat the fuel in the presence of an oxidizer, a flame is the result. Once the flame starts, it is effectively self sustaining as long as you still have fuel and an oxidizer available. You remove one or the other and the flame will die.
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Why do companies with perfectly good mobile sites want us to download their app so badly?
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It's a marketing tool. Having their app on your phone basically means they have their company now in your pocket. They know how much you check your phone. Now that their app is there they have an ad right on your phone! Push notifications? Perfect! Yes their website is amazing and very mobile friendly, but their website isn't on your phone, you have to go to it through another app. Downloading their own app basically means you just subscribed to their company and you are now their Guinea pig.
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Two main reasons. 1) Ads and in app purchases (not Reddit obviously but other apps generally have ads they make you watch and stuff they try to make you buy), and 2) generally people spend more time in apps than in their browser and companies know it’s very unlikely you’ll go to www.companyname to log in every single time you want to view their content. They want it to be convenient.
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Why is it unsafe to eat raw hamburger meat but safe to eat Steak Tartare?
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Inherently it's not. Preparation is the important factor. The more of a meat that has had the chance to touch air, the higher the chance it may have picked up some bacteria or what have you. When you're going to prepare tartare, it's likely safe to assume a lot of extra precautions have been made to clean all the cutting devices and handle the meat in a positive way. When you're grinding up a few hundred pounds of lower quality ground beef these precautions may not be as important. In MANY cases, there's likely nothing wrong with eating rare/raw beef provided you're able to trust who prepared it.
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And we can also convolute the "safety" question with the "tasty" question. Some foods we find to be sufficiently pleasant raw that we're willing to take foodborne illness risks (sushi, carpaccio, etc.); some foods are thought to be unpleasant raw (I've heard raw chicken has a slimy/pasty mouthfeel). So it's a matter of a cost-benefit analysis. If the benefit of the taste is enough to outweigh the risk of foodborne illness you're willing to take, then you may go for the raw goods. This model also incorporates various "doneness" of cooked meats and individual preferences in those regimes. Some may not find sufficient benefit in a medium-rare or rare steak to justify their perceived risk in eating such food.
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Why do elevators have an up and down button?
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Very old ones have just that, a single button. Basically 2 buttons is better than one button because the elevator can plan where to take people. Imagine you are in a 20 story building, and you are going from the 6th floor to the 9th floor to visit a friend. Now if there are two buttons you hit “up” and the next elevator going up picks you up. You travel 3 floors with potentially 3 stops. Lets say there is only one button. You get picked up by the next elevator to go by your floor. In it is someone from the 20th floor going to the basement. You are now travelling 7 floors down (its not gonna turn around and screw him over), and then 10 floors up. You could potentially make 17 stops on your 3 floor journey. Thats why they put two buttons.
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Those buttons are in a elevator with 2 sets of doors. 1 set of buttons opens/closes the front doors. The other set opens/closes the rear doors.
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if we were to terraform the moon, how much mass can the moon take before gravity make the earth and moon colliding with each other?
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Keep in mind any mass you add to the moon you would be taking from the earth. I cant imagine this being anything more than a negligible amount.
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Larger and more dense than anything we have ever created, and possibly would ever create so long as we inhabit only this earth. Gravity is a weak force and generating enough for it to be a structural concern (that acts in any direction other than towards the earth's core) is a materials science problem more than engineering. You'd have to build something on the scale of the Moon, and assuming you're using resources from earth alone you're going to have to take an equivalent amount of mass from the earth which is going to really fuck with literally everything.
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Does fiber networking rely on our same visual "Roy G Biv" spectrum? If yes, can current technology use the colors like channels to increase bandwidth?
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Fiber works on infra-red light, rather than visible light. The reason for this is that glass is more transparent in infra-red than visible. Visible light only has quite a short range in fiber, whereas infra-red can go 50 miles, and more importantly, infra-red can be boosted by erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (a special type of optical fiber energized by a laser which acts to boost optical signals) However, yes, you can have multiple different channels on different colors to increase bandwidth. This is called wavelength division multiplexing. Dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) can pack up to 160 channels onto a single fiber; with each channel carrying up to 40 Gigabits/second.
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Optical fiber can carry lots and lots of data thanks to [wavelength division multiplexing](_URL_0_). Basically, different data streams are sent as different colors of light. This can be done even with simple on/off signaling.
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Why can't we domesticate other wild animals?
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We potentially could. But domestication is a process of many many generations that involves changes at the genetic level. In other words, it takes a lot of effort and a long time. You have to have storage for the animals and their care and feeding, you have to guide their reproduction through generations, waiting for the next generation to reach sexual maturity so you can do it again, and so on. All in all it's a lot of work to do, especially if you don't have a particular reason to do it beyond 'just because.'
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There is a difference between "domesticated" animals and "tame" animals. A domesticated animal refers to the whole species. A tame animal only refers to that particular animal. When it is the whole species that has been tamed (i.e. domesticated) then to some extent that species is not aggressive towards humans (this does not mean some won't attack...that of course happens but it is not usual). A tame animal is still a wild animal at heart and must be cared for with extra caution and by someone trained in appropriate handling of the animal. We have seen many examples of lions or bears that seem docile but never mistake them for a pet. They are handled with extreme care and the potential for something to go wrong is far greater than with a domesticated animal.
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The distinction between jam, jelly, and preserves.
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Jam is made with the solid part of the fruit. Jelly is made with the juice from the fruit. Perserves uses the solid fruit, the juice and sugar with a gelling agent like pectin as a preservative. BUT They are all perserves in a sense it's just the way they are made and what is used to make them that makes them different
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Jams and jellies didn’t come out of taste preference. They were invented so people could enjoy that fruit year round. Since Bananas are good all year people never preserved them, and therefore, never became a type of jam or jelly.
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Here on Reddit, we see a lot of "Scientists have discovered..." posts. Why do I never see any instant results from something like this?
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I guess because of exaggerations, and title clickbaits. Let's say some laboratory made some small discovery which helps them understand a disease more, but there's still a lot of uncertainty and problems on the way to curing it. But it somewhat helps and they are one step closer now. Now they make an article, article goes with somewhat like "Scientists understood the way X works and it's massive breakthrough in X study", and then article itself explains why they are still very far from curing X. And then redditor reposts it with title "Science about to cure X!" and as the article is huge and complex most people never read it and just assume we're about to cure X.
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I think it's a different culprit than the other responses. I think it's simply because there aren't really any big world-changing philosophical ideas left. There are so many philosophies out there, different ideas, etc, that at this point, it pretty much all seems like old news. Any new ideas will come from purely scientific fields, and at that point, it's a scientific discovery, not really a philosophical discovery.
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Why is English the World-language?
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It dates back to the [British Empire](_URL_0_). Basically, around the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Britain came to "own" lots of other countries, which heavily influenced (through force or simple assimilation) their cultures including language. It doesn't hurt that nowadays the most powerful nation in the world is (arguably) the U.S.A. which also speaks English.
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English is legendary for its tendency to "acquire" words from other languages, and the rules that apply to some do not always apply to others. English is an inconsistent, bizarre, organic mutant of a language, flexible and creative, and indifferent to your arbitrary "rules", man.
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What are the implications of the authenticity of the "Jesus' wife" papyrus? Do any credible historians believe Jesus was married?
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I presume you raise it because there are some recent articles about it in Harvard Theological Review. The question about authenticity really relates to the fragment discovered, it has very little to do with actual historical Jesus studies. THe main proponent of the fragment being genuine and not a forgery is Prof King. She accepts the carbon-dating by Tuross and that would put it into the 8th century, which is into the Islamic period. Alternate Carbon dating in a report by Hodgins gave results of 405-350 BC and/or 397-209 BC alongside another test giving 659-969 AD. Clearly there are some issues with the Carbon dating. As far as I know, no historian is making a claim about Jesus being married. Only "the media".
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You might be interested in these previous threads: * [So, what do we actually know about the life, existence, etcetera of the man called Jesus Christ?](_URL_6_) * [Is there any, even the slightest amount, of evidence (outside of the Bible, of course) of Jesus' life and the plagues that occurred in Egypt as claimed in the Book of Exodus?](_URL_6_) * [What is the historical proof for Jesus Christ besides the Bible?](_URL_5_) * [What historical facts do we know about Jesus?](_URL_5_) * [What is the oldest document referencing Jesus Christ and how do historians account for the lack of documentation on him from his time?](_URL_6_)
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Will a planet(s) eventually form in the Kuiper/Oort Cloud?
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No, there's very little matter out there and it's *extremely* low density, and the Kuiper Belt can't really create large accumulations of bodies because the gravitational influence of Neptune will perturb orbits too much. The Kuiper Belt has really low density, but it's ultra-crowded compared to the vast empty expanse that is the Oort Cloud. It's never actually been directly observed, but its presence is inferred from the presence of long-period comets. These all have highly elliptical orbits, which prohibits them from ever clumping together. It's possible that there are objects out there with circular orbits, but probably not because there's nothing to circularize the orbits and thus any perturbations would not be easily corrected.
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The Oort Cloud hasn't been directly observed yet. We infer its existence from the presence of long-period comets, but we haven't yet confirmed observationally that it's there. As Weed_O_Whirler said, the rubber-sheet analogy is limited, in part because it's a 2-dimensional analogy for something that's happening in 3 dimensions.
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Why sun turns orange at sunset?
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The air absorb and scatter light but the amount depends on the color so it does it less to orange then blur light. The sky is blur because air scatter more blue light then any other color. By mass most of the atmosphere is close to the surface. 50 % is below 5.6km and 90% below 16km. Light at the sunset passes a long distance close to the surface. 10 km at ground level is more air the the shortest path from space to the ground and light as sunset passes trough more air then that. So when the air absorbs and scatter red, orange light less then other color mor red and orange light will reach use and the sun will have that color.
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Blue and green have shorter wavelengths than red and orange. During a sunset (and sunrise), light from the sun has "more atmosphere to travel through." The sun is at a lower angle on the horizon than during the day so it has to go a longer distance through the atmosphere before it reaches our eyes. Since blue and green have shorter wavelengths, they are scattered at a greater degree than red and orange, which is why the sunset appears more reddish than blue like during the day. _URL_0_
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Why do planets in the solar system orbit the sun in almost the same axis?
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When the solar system was forming, it was made out of gas, and at some point the gas started spinning. Gravity caused the gas to continue to spin, and over time, particle collisions canceled out upward and downward spin, resulting in a single flat disk of gas that was spinning in the same direction. That planets formed out of this disk, which is why they spin the same way.
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The common explanation involves figure skaters, and I will drag it out here with a minor change. Imagine that the sun is a hockey goalie spinning in a circle in the middle of the rink. He is a huge guy. Along comes a female skater who grabs his hand and is pulled into the turns that he is doing. They both feel a pull on their arms as they continue making circles. Now imagine the hockey goalie has arms made of rubber. As he circles, the pull on his arms allows the rubber to stretch out and pull the girl around. She will make a pull-out, the arm will stretch, then he will pull in, and she will come closer to him. That's what happens with planets in orbit of a star. The pull of the gravity is enough to keep the planet in orbit, but the planet keeps trying to pull away.
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Can lungs be cleaned from tobacco tar?
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Probably not. I've dissected plenty of humans. Anyone who smoked or lived in a city has some black shit in their lungs. The macrophages, specialized cells whose job is to consume foreign material that makes it into the body, eat up the tar and pollution and store it on the lung periphery. Smokers have patches of the black stuff on the outside of their lungs, even if they didn't get lung cancer.
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I've been smoking cigarettes since I was a kid; my lungs are literally made out of leather. Smoke paralyzes the cilia in your throat. When you quit smoking it will start moving again and bring all that mucous up and you'll hack your lungs up.
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why do old pictures not have people with acne in them as opposed to today where it seems a lot of people have acne?
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It's purely down to the amount of pictures taken nowadays. Pretty much everyone under the age of 30 has had their picture taken at least 5 times, the majority of that time would be during their teen years when acne is most prominent. People in the 1950s didn't have as many pictures taken, I bet a few people could go a good few years without ever even seeing a camera, they were still fairly expensive back then. Plus they weren't digital, so the quality isn't all that good, chances are if someone did have acne it wouldn't look as bad as on a photo today with how good cameras are now.
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It could just be selection bias, where people who had bad acne avoided taking photos or only kept flattering photos of themselves
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How did the early silent films create the on-screen text?
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You mean where the [intertitles](_URL_0_)? They literally painted the text onto a board, filmed it and spliced the frames into the film.
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Printing the titles onto clear overlays, then layering the titles onto the film is one method, simply filming the text on printed sheets is another.
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Why is jury duty mandatory in the US?
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Because the US consitution (6th amendment) guarantees the right to a trial: > by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed The only way of creating an impartial jury is by getting a random pick from the population, and not just people who want to serve on a jury . If they only took volunteers, they wouldn't have enough people to guarantee a jury, and the ones they would get would either have plenty of free time, or like judging people. Both qualities wouldn't meet the standard of an "impartial jury".
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Because no one wants to raise taxes in order to pay jurors more money. And most people would not want to pay more taxes to pay jurors more money.
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Why are basic life saving medications like antibiotics put behind a paywall of having to see a doctor using insurance?
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Medicines that require a prescription require a doctor, because they are dangerous if used incorrectly. So the authorities insist that you can't have them unless a professional decides they are right for you and tells you when and how to use them. For example, misuse of antibiotics can lead to much worse infections by resistant bacteria.
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If you have universal, socialized medicine it cuts costs in a number of ways. First off is that it removes the profit motive from insurance companies. Dealing with insurance also creates a lot of paperwork, overhead and people that need to be paid - you get rid of all of that when everyone is covered by a single payer. In the US, people that can't afford coverage are forced to use expensive emergency rooms when things get really bad rather than get less expensive preventative treatment.
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Liddell Hart, and also J.F.C Fuller seemed to have influenced the post-war Germans,like Guderian and others, how or why did British tank doctrine and equipment seem to lag so far behind leading on till WW2?
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British military doctrine was firmly entrenched and unbroken for a long time within the british military tradition. The germans had to basically start over from scratch after the treaty of Versailles so was open to innovation and fresh ideas to get an edge over their opponents. They knew no matter what form the next war would have they were surrounded by enemies and could fight a war on 4 fronts possibly. They needed a way to defeat a larger army quickly and switch fronts to meet a new threat. Lightning war was a sure recipe. And it wasnt just the british who gave them these ideas. The french army was also dabbling with the idea of massed armour penetration but thought it was too rash. The germans also trained with the russians and picked up some of their ideas as well.
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Believe it or not, the US Army Air Force went to the banks in New York City, where blue prints for all of the factories built in Weimar and early Nazzi era Germany with money loaned by Wall Street investment banks were stored. This was only a partial picture of German industrial capacity. They used photo-reconisance to learn more about German industrial capacity. The British also used spies to learn more, but they never had a complete picture and missed some glaring bottlenecks. For example, the Electrical grid. They did not realize how sparse the German electrical grid was. They assumed it had a lot more redundancy than it actually had. It also took the RAF and USAAF a long time to realize oil was another critical choke point. In the summer of 1944 they gave oil refineries and synthetic oil plants a much higher priority.
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How tenable is the Aryan Migration Theory (Indo-European migration into the Indian subcontinent around 2000 B.C.)? Does the evidence prove it, disprove it, or is it as yet inconclusive?
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Is there any evidence to suggest a non-Indo European substrate in Sanskrit?
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This theory gets a lot of credance these days. Unfortunately, I'm afraid I can't recommend very many veritable resources on this theory, because I don't know any. The theory that environmental change was the main culprit involved in the fall of the Roman Empire has gained a lot of support in recent years, but unfortunately most of the literature on the subject were done by people outside the field of classics, and many of them are unfortunately nearly as sketchy as the recent attempt by a *biologist* to determine the Indo-European homeland not by any biological evidence, but by modelling linguistic dispersal, a field in which he admitted he knew almost nothing and was totally unqualified to base a scientific study on. My cynicism aside, I'm sure that someone here can recommend something worthwhile, since very few theories get popular without at least some small basis in proper scholarly work.
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Why are graphing calculators so expensive, even with their archaic features?
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Probably due to simple supply and demand - most high school math classes require one, as well as college level math, and TI has a huge foothold in Graphing Calculators. Also they are built very well with good materials and rarely break even when dropped.
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Because most people know how to use them. If every student has a different graphing calculator, the teacher and/or students have to figure out how to use each one. If the whole class has identical calculators, the teacher can instruct the whole class keystroke by keystroke. TI invested heavily in educational outreach, and the result is that the only graphic calculator most teachers know how to use is a TI.
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Why is it oftentimes forbidden to sit on the stairs at public venues/auditoriums (as long as it isn't extremely crowed)? Wouldn’t sitting people also evacuate in case of a fire emergency?
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They might. They might not. They might start to evacuate a few seconds after the main herd of people head towards the stairs, and get crushed. When you're planning for evacuations, and doing the timings etc, you need to start from the assumption that the stairs will be clear. Also, it's incredibly easy to trip over someone who's sitting on the stairs, regardless of whether there's an evacuation in progress or not.
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have you never been in a fire safety course in one of these buildings? 1) the doors to the stairwells are fireproof/fire resistant for x number of minutes 2) if you notice each floor has a landing that will seem larger than it should be. 3) the stairways are separate from the rest of the building, Different ventilation system, etc. with fire proofing between the rest of the building and the stairwells. So what does a person in a wheel chair go? same place as everybody else, Stairwell, and wait for the firefighters to get to them. Unless the fire was started in the stair well (which in that case everybody is fucked), or the doors are not closed properly (most are on heavy springs that close them automatically), the person waiting there will be pretty safe from the fire. the thing that will kill you the quickest is the smoke, hence the separate ventilation. Source: I've had a number of jobs in very tall buildings, and this has been part of the safety training more times than I can count.
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Why do musical keys sound different from one another?
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We have divided up the octave into 12 equal parts for our convenience. This allows us to play in any key. The thing is, the frequencies of the actual notes are not all equal distances apart. Some notes are a bit off and this makes the keys subtly different. It goes much deeper than that really - but this is explain like I'm five. If you want more depth, [Equal Temperament](_URL_0_)
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notes one octave higher have exactly twice the frequency and have the same "sound" to humans. One of the earliest diatonic scales (similar to the modern do re mi....) have notes generated by using frequency ratio of 3/2 for each fifth note. (a fifth note to musicians is the interval between C and G for example) by multiplying this ratio repeatedly you can generate a circle of fifths (all the tones and semitones) Modern tuning adjusts this a bit to be less discordant so that you can transpose music from one key to another and yet sound fairly harmonious. & #x200B;
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Does a clean/waxed car get better fuel efficiency than a dirty car?
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Technically, yes. Vehicle manufacturers design their cars with certain degrees of aerodynamics. Allowing the CSR to get dirty not only effects the aerodynamic output, but if its dirty enough, the dirt adds weight. I say technically though because the differences tend to be miniscule and unnoticeable unless you are pushing performance envelopes.
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If the power on the grid comes from renewables like wind, hydro, or solar, or from non-carbon producing technologies like nuclear, then you have saved on pollution created by that car. Even when the power comes from gas, oil, or coal, in general a large and dedicated power station can produce power more efficiently than your individual car can. Typically an internal combustion engine gets about 20-30% efficiency: from the total energy content of every unit of fuel it consumes, 20-30% of that is converted to usable propulsion and electricity for your car. The rest is lost as heat, unburned fuel, and in pushing the exhaust out the back. A gas turbine generator set operating at design load like it could in a power plant, on the other hand, typically gets much higher efficiency, in the 50-60% range (much closer to the theoretical max). So again, even in the case where polluting fuels are used to make that electricity, you're still moving that car at the cost of less pollution for every mile you drive.
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What is it about fluorescent colors that make them so "loud"?
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Fluorescent colors are essentially materials that reflect light that is invisible to the naked eye as light that is visible, giving the impression of there being more light. So things like highlighters and caution cones take frequencies of light which are out of the visible spectrum and reflect them as frequencies that are visible. Blacklights seem to make anything glow because they emit such a large amount of invisible light that more objects are able to appear fluorescent under them.
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You are right to be skeptical of these claims. In the past I have seen studies which claimed that "hyperillumination" by fluorescent lighting causes stress and disrupts our circadian rhythms. However, they were not published to peer-reviewed journals, and appeared to be funded by companies which were selling their so-called "natural light" bulbs. Ultimately, it appears to simply be a marketing term when applied to light bulbs for general use. [Source](_URL_0_) That said, the relationship between stress and health is well-known. If you find the light from fluorescent bulbs harsh or irritating (or perhaps the sound - I can usually hear a buzz or high-frequency tone from fluorescents, and it drives me mad), then you would gain a real benefit by removing a stressor from your workplace.
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Explain the physics principles behind why punching a wall will hurt more than punching a boxing bag.
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Compressibility. The punching bag compresses, the wall doesn't. That's also why cars are safer now that they have crumple zones in the front and rear rather than solid frames.
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The blocks and boards are non-pliable and stationary, whereas a body *is* pliable and if you punch someone hard enough they are just likely to fall back and displace some of that initial power. If you punched someone laying down on the ground as hard as you punched the blocks on the ground, it would be likely you could break ribs, but imagine trying to punch a trampoline or spandex pants full of meat. No matter how hard you punch, you aren't likely to get through because it is pliable.
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Why is oil being traded in dollars supposed to be so important to the USA?
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Right now the US dollar is the world reserve currency, meaning it is the standard used for trade around the world. This does two things: - Countries need to purchase US dollars for trade. This creates international demand for the US dollar and increases its value while giving money to the US. - Countries that own large quantities of US currency have an incentive to favor international policies that keep its value high so they don’t lose money This increases the strength and influence of the US in the world.
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A lot of oil comes from the Middle East. Political instability might lead to chaos on the ground, that could result in less of it being produced in the future. You're probably familiar with the idea that prices are determined by supply and demand. If just as many people want something, and there's suddenly less of it, the price will rise. OK, so how does this cause the price of oil to rise *before* there's actually chaos on the ground causing less of it to be produced? The way this works in practice is pretty complicated, and is largely controlled by [futures markets](_URL_0_), but, basically, if I think oil will be worth $60 a barrel in a month, why would I sell it to you for $35 a barrel today? I'd make way more money just holding onto it for a month and selling it then. So, if you want to buy my oil today, you're going to have to give me more than $35 to get me to part with it — the price rises as soon as there's a reason to *think* it might be in shorter supply in the future.
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Why do things become radioactive when exposed to gamma rays?
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Gamma rays generally don't make things radioactive. Neutron radiation can, as a nucleus can absorb the neutron and become a radioactive isotope.
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Basically, radiation interacts with matter in a few ways to produce various effects, gammas can induce a photoelectric effect/ compton scattering, which will cause an atom to release an electron and become an ion. Alpha and beta radiation are charged particles, and can therefore scatter or be absorbed. The negative effects are most notable when the DNA is compromised. This could result in 4 things happening. The cell dies, the cell repairs itself and continues to be a cell, or the cell survives, and produces cells that have altered DNA. The effects of radiation therefore fall into 2 catagories radiation sickness (large amounts of cell death from altered chemistry), cancer(altered daughters producing more altered cells.) And thats basically it.
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Glass bottles... What's the reason behind them being green, brown or clear?
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Clear - Lets you see what you are drinking, also glass is normally clear. Green and Brown - Usually for beer bottles, it helps keep the beer from going "skunky". Sun light is not good for beer.
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Because they are white in color, and often used as a milk alternative. If they were clear they would be called waters or juices.
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were things Beethoven and other products of German culture especially unpopular in England during the wars?
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Not a full answer, but the British played Beethovens 5th on every loudspeaker upon the final defeat of Nazi Germany. The short-short-short-long of the opening of the song is also morse code for the letter "V", for "Victory".
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I thought this was helpful: _URL_0_ TL:DR: they learned a lot from WWI and applied it to their armies and officers. That plus nationalism and the German national character propelled them.
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What was the social structure of the 13 Colonies in 1775? What was the relative size and nature of the middle/lower class etc?
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Of the colonies in 1775, generally speaking, farmers and small-time businessmen and merchants (for lack of better word, I'll borrow the term "petite bourgeoisie") comprised the stratified layers of social composition. Capitalism hadn't fully concentrated into large transcontinental businesses at that point, but was rather consistent in small traders, market exchange, and merchanting. There were of course the wealthy and slave-owners, landlords and nobility, etc., but these comprised a smaller percentage of the population than the average-earners and poor. Politically, the vote was confined to those who owned land. If memory serves me correctly, the ability to vote and to run in elections was granted upon a stratified property basis, with the wealthier being able to climb the ladder higher.
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Can someone answer this for early colonial America as well?
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Why is it that I have to unplug my modem and/or router every now and then to get the internet working?
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It's awesome that you think the blinking light means "you must unplug and plug me back in". Speaking as an engineer, that was NOT the intent behind that button. I'm going to use this as a story in an upcoming usability meeting. But...to answer your question. It's the same reason that your PC would need to get rebooted (you're lucky that it doesn't!). The software/hardware combination is just buggy. Higher end routers with fewer consumer features don't have this problem. For example, in our datacenter we reset our router almost exactly NEVER. We're talking periods of years without a reset other than for patches/updates and config changes.
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a T3 timeout is your modem saying "screw this, I can't keep my connection stable. Maybe if I reconnect and renegotiate I'll get a better connection". When that happens, the modem has no connection between it and the cable head end and thus no internet connection. I'd complain to building management or whoever is in charge of the internet. You're paying for the service somewhere, you need to bitch until you get it.
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Can brain damage alter what a person sees?
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Yes. Most often this will be "negative" phenomena—a loss of some aspect of perception. This can be loss of depth information (*astereoscopy*), loss of color (*achromatopsia*), loss of movement continuity (*akinetopsia*), loss of recognition of objects (*visual agnosia*, of which *prosopagnasia* for faceblindness is one particularly salient example), or problems with judging size/shape (*metamorphopsia*). To the extent brain damage may cause seizures affecting the occipital, parietal, and temporal lobes, positive phenomena ranging from gyres of color to fully-formed hallucinations of people can occur.
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Yes, there are many areas of the brain that can be damaged without causing death/unconsciousness. The bizarre effects that have resulted from some such brain injuries has actually provided a huge amount of information about the brain. The most famous case is [Phineas Gage](_URL_0_)
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What exactly is a social security number?
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An SSN serves 2 purposes. 1) It is the Account Number for your Social Security account. Whenever you earn income, whether as an employee or as a self-employed person, your account is earning credits based upon your earned income and the amount paid into the system by you, and your employer if you are not self-employed. 2) Many other government and non-government agencies/companies/entities piggyback on the SSN system as a means of providing a unique Identification Number to any individuals with which they do business. This makes your SSN a de facto national ID number.
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It's the closest thing that the U.S. has to a national ID and it's necessary to get a job (usually), apply for credit cards, sign a lease, obtain a passport (usually although there are exceptions), etc. The issue is that the number itself isn't vetted or checked that often against the social security database and numbers can be obtained from someone's mail or just guessed at random. Often, people will steal a number of someone they know or someone who is deceased. Also, when you apply for a credit card or sign a lease, no one asks for the social security card itself just the number. This can be problematic. So, if someone has your social and another piece of info they can get credit cards and do all sorts of other things in your name that would ruin you.
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Many technological advances in the past decades can be attributed to NASA. How much (if any) technological advances can be attributed to the Soviet space program?
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I know it may not be what your looking for but I think a lot of your answers will inevitably be in regards to rocketry. On that front, the Soviets developed a number of advanced rocket engines, some of which are still some of the best in the world. The [RD-170](_URL_0_) for instance maintains the title as the most powerful rocket engine in the world. Most people believe this title goes to the American F-1 engine which was used for the Apollo program. However the F-1 is only the most powerful single cone engine, and comparatively the RD-170 outputs over 1,000,000 more Newtons of thrust. Secondly the [NK-33](_URL_1_) rocket engine which was originally developed for the Soviet Moon program has the second highest thrust to weight ratio of of any rocket. Similarly, it also has a very high specific impulse. It's only other contender is the SpaceX Merlin 1-D which was developed very recently.
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It was really expensive, the scientific gains weren't that publicly known, and there was a huge loss of popular opinion in the shuttles after Columbia.
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Why is it bad to wash your hair with shampoo every day?
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I depends on the person. I have baby fine hair and moderately oily skin. I cannot go a day without shampooing. I've tried and it doesn't work for me. The no shampoo crowd frequently push the idea like religion. But if you try it and it doesn't work, trying harder isn't a solution. Shampoo your hair and go on with your life.
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Different types of hair grow on different parts of the body. We don't NEED shampoo, it just happens to be formulated to make our head hair easy to brush and look shiny. Some people even think that shampoo is bad for your hair and head. _URL_0_
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what do DJs do when they're on tour?
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[Here's how two real DJs cut, scratch, and mix at a live show. Notice the two cases of records on each side.](_URL_0_) My brother saw them perform a month or two ago. They had rappers and dancers on stage with them, too. He said it was a killer show.
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Traditionally, djs would 'beat matxh' two records, mix them and continue to build a set if music. As times gone in and tech has progressed from analogue (vinyl) to digital (cdj/mp3) inputs the ability to modify or create music on the fly has become more possible. Paul van Dyk, Richie Hawtin etc all create 'live' music x which is a modified on the fly sample blended with other beats, synths, samples and input from keyboards / drum machines they play. Its really rather talented. 'Dj's' that mix sets using mp3 usually have the software beat match for them and requires little to no talent - hence the likes of Paris Hilton 'dj'ing'..
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Why do we sing in the shower?
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The extra humidity probably makes it more comfortable to do so there than anywhere else in the house. There's probably also a greater sense of privacy in the bathroom. I'm sure the sound of running water adds to that feeling. I don't sing in the shower because I find it deafening.
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I've read that it is because we sing in our heads a part of the song, which is not finished. But our brain likes to finish stuff so you just keep singing it.
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Why do we sing in the shower?
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Bathroom singing, also known as singing in the bathroom, singing in the bath, or singing in the shower, is a widespread phenomenon. Many people sing in the bathroom because the hard wall surfaces, often tiles or wooden panels, and lack of soft furnishings, create an aurally pleasing acoustic environment.
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I've read that it is because we sing in our heads a part of the song, which is not finished. But our brain likes to finish stuff so you just keep singing it.
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Two independent Astronomy questions
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The surface temperature of the Sun will decrease during the red giant phase. However, it's surface area will increase enormously, so there will be a large increase in the Sun's luminosity. This is why the Earth's temperature will rise. And here's an image of sunrise seen from low-earth orbit: _URL_0_
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Here [**is a link**](_URL_1_) that addresses this specific gif, and why it is not correct. I came across this in /r/astronomy a few months ago, so if you want even more information, I would check out the [**comment section of that post**](_URL_0_), which also contains a link to the article as well. EDIT: Spelling
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How is the NSA able to "hack" into someone's phone or computer device at any given time, but a hacker cannot? Does the NSA have special tools, or do companies allow them to get into peoples devices?
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> Does the NSA have special tools, or do companies allow them to get into peoples devices? It's a combination of both. The NSA develops its own tools and does intense research into applications to find their weak spots and take advantage of them. They also either ask or demand companies give them information about how to circumvent the security precautions on products like hardware and software. It's also likely inaccurate to assume the NSA can hack any specific item at *any time* and also that hackers *can't*.
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It's basically impossible for them to crack it. The device is encrypted and has lockouts to prevent brute forcing. When someone's phone does get "hacked" there are a few things that cause it and all of them are user fault. 1) a dumb password like 111111 or 123456 2) the person can reset the phone to factory settings by plugging into iTunes, figuring out your iCloud account from the hint, and then logging into that. The phone would still have been wiped though. So yea. Having good passwords is basically all you need
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why do jobs give training even for one that requires you to have knowledge of the subject already?
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At the very least you need training on company procedures. And engineers and developers studies are very generalized and are more about getting the basic skills down. There's so much specialized software and equipment out there that pretty much anyone will need training on it when first exposed to it. And pretty much any high level profession needs constant training of new techniques that are being developed in their field.
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1. They don't know everything about their subject. They certainly know everything about the part of their subject covered by the syllabus. Ask them a question outside the scope of the course and it may be that they can't answer it. 2. That said, they might in fact know a lot more about it than is covered by the syllabus because they may be doing research in that area. What they are teaching you is way below the level of what they are researching, so it's on a par to teaching children how to count to them. 2. They are paid to know it, which is a big incentive. 3. They learned it years ago, whereas you were taught it only last month. 4. They have taught the material hundreds of times, so it is second nature to them. EDIT: missing word
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Why do doctors ask you to cough while feeling up your man-bits at a check up?
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They're checking for a hernia, which is the word that describes something poking through a wall it's not supposed to be poking through. When you cough, you tense up your abdominal area and put some pressure against one such wall (down there by your man-bits). The doctor is making sure the wrong stuff doesn't bulge through that body wall near your man-bits. If it does, you're at risk for a more serious injury when that stuff pushes *through* the wall near your man-bits.
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He is checking for a hernia when you do this. A hernia is a strain in the muscle (a weak point or a separation) and when you cough you increase the pressure in your abdomen. If there were weak spots in your abdominal muscle (specifically, where your balls came out of your abdomen as a baby or child) it would be apparent when you increase that pressure.
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What's going on when we have a bad headache/migraine? Is the brain telling itself that it feels pain or is the brain itself actually in pain?
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It's never your brain. The brain doesn't have pain receptors and can't actually feel pain. The membrane around your brain can feel pain, but the brain itself cannot. The pain you feel is not your brain - it's usually blood vessels being either dilated or constricted in your head.
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Brain tissue itself has no pain receptors, so the pain from headaches comes from areas that do have pain receptors: the cranium (the periosteum of the skull), muscles, nerves, arteries and veins, subcutaneous tissues, eyes, ears, sinuses and mucous membranes. The lack of pain receptors in the brain tissue itself is what permits awake brain surgery as seen in [this video](_URL_0_).
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Why do we get that strange feeling when we walk down a static escalator?
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I get it. I think it's because we have trained ourselves to believe that the escalator will move. Our bodies naturally "pre-compensate" for the movement, and when it doesn't come, our pre-trained equillibrium sends false messages. This is compounded by the fact that all escalator stairs look pretty much the same, and they're usually different from non escalator stairs (they're usually bigger steps, and then there are those grooves...). It's sort of like "sea legs" you get after being on a boat for a long time, and then get off on dry land. Or the weird motion you sometimes get after walking on a treadmill and then getting off suddenly to walk on earth. Except that it's accentuated by the visual cues about what an escalator should "do" to your body.
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Basically every time you used the escalator, it moved by itself. The first times it felt weird because your body wasn't used to use stairs that move by themselves. So the first time you used an escalator, you probably felt like you lost balance and needed a few seconds to stabilise. After many uses, your brain got it, and told your muscles and body in general to adapt, and to counter the movement of the escalator as you stepped on it. From the moment your body adapted to it, your brain knew that " Big metal steps = need to balance and lean slightly forward ". But this time, the escalators were not working, they were not moving. So when you stepped on it, your body leaned forward a little \( since your brain thinks that escalator = need to balance and lean forward a little \), but the escalators didn't move, so you kind of lost balance, that's why it feels weird. Edit : It's actually called the [Broken escalator phenomenon](_URL_0_)
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What is the difference between drinking alcohol and Isopropyl alcohol?
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Drinking alcohol is ethanol. Isopropyl alcohol is isopropanol. Despite similar names, they're different chemicals. Ethanol gets you drunk, isopropanol makes you get sick and die.
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Alcohol is good because it kills most bacteria and is inert enough to be handled frequently by humans. Isopropyl is stronger because it will obviously kill you if you ingest a little bit of it where as alcohol/ethanol from fermentation of sugars is less so and doesn't even kill much of your gut bacteria without a significant volume ingested. Beers and wines aren't even considered disinfectants where as straight liquor like vodka, whiskey, and especially high abv corn liqours like everclear kill bacteria a bit more efficiently.
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What factors led to the eventual French victory during the French Revolutionary Wars?
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For one, it instilled, for the first time in Europe, a profound sense of nationalism amongst the people of France. Previously, a commoner would identify as being a member of a certain province, or as the subject to a king. However, now, the French people's were united as Frenchman fighting for a common cause. I'm on mobile right now so sorry if this answer is a little lack-luster but this link would be a good place to start. _URL_0_
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Follow up. If the American colonies were so upset by the raised taxes from the French and Indian war how did other British colonies view the war of independence?
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Why is inflation so bad for an economy.
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Inflation isn't an issue of just what bills the government can print. The issue is that the value of the money people have is changing, and that influences their decisions. A little inflation is actually often considered a good thing. Because the dollars people have are losing value, they are more likely to spend. This keeps the economy going. Too much inflation, and prices are constantly rising. This means people can't make educated decisions between goods. Labor contracts also mean that while the cost of living is rising, pay increases lag behind.
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The inflation caused rarely meets the increase in pay. The other issue is that increasing prices of labour makes some people lose their jobs and it's down to a value judgement as to whether the increase in living standard of some poor people is worth the decrease in living standard of other poor people. Poor people also spend a greater percentage of their pay than rich people do. But seriously, be very skeptical when anyone (including me) talks about economics because it isn't fully understood and we use MODELS THAT APPROXIMATE THE TRUTH and are not necessarily the truth.
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Why do some actors go uncredited in films?
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There are a number of possible reasons. For one, some big name actors may not want a bunch of minor roles on their resume, as it may hurt them in the future. It could also be because their apperance in the movie is just as a favor to the director, and that they don't need any special credit. Another example is the actor playing John Doe in Se7en. He insisted on not being named in the opening credits, so as to keep his identity a secret. This also had the benefit of him not having to do interviews or make public apperances before release.
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Originally actors and actresses were not credited for their work. Eventually some bright spark realised that if they are using popular actors and actresses they can increase sales in subsequent films by advertising the fact these actors and actresses are in the film. When this started they were credited at the start (much like you still see in many tv shows today) but it was just the feature roles listed. Eventually it was decided that everyone deserved a little recognition and running those credits to start a film would take too long. Noone wants to read a list of names for 5 minutes before they get to watch the film. The natural solution was to do this toward the end.
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What is the smallest subatomic particle?
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According to our current best knowledge, quarks and leptons have no substructure. Protons and neutrons are made of quarks; electrons are leptons. The gauge bosons - also apparently without substructure - mediate the forces that hold everything together.
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According to [Wikipedia](_URL_0_), the smallest insects (130 micrometers) are male [*Dicopomorpha echmepterygis*](_URL_3_), one of a family of wasps called [fairyflies](_URL_2_). The smallest arthropod (90 micrometers) is [*Stygotantulus stocki*](_URL_1_), a tiny crustacean that parasitizes slightly less tiny crustaceans.
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If a Rail Gun does not use propellant, why is there exhaust fire in the videos?
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That's not fire, that's plasma. A railgun, consists of two conductive rails, and a large bank of capacitors. The projectile is electrically conductive and sits between the two rails. When the railgun is fired, the capacitors are connected to the rails, and a very high current (around 1000000A) flows through the rails, creating a strong magnetic field which propels the projectile down the track. This current is so high that it vaporizes parts of the conducting armature that carries the projectile - which creates the cloud of plasma that you see in the images. Also, there's a number of anwers that say it sets the air on fire. Fire is a reaction between oxygen and *some other fuel* ; oxygen alone does not burn.
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> I know it has to do with the fuel to air ratio and having extra fuel in the exhaust, but how does it really work? That's pretty much it. If the fuel mixture is too rich, there isn't enough oxygen for it all to combust in the piston. When that very hot fuel is exposed to oxygen in the exhaust system, it catches on fire. If there is as lot of it, that is enough for the flame to be visible past the exhaust pipe.
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Why can a game i start be stuck in the loading screen forever first time i start it, but startup normally second time i do so?
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When you first load a program, it gets loaded into memory from the hard disk. Once you've run it one time, it exists in RAM until something else takes its place. When you run it the second time, it loads from memory rather than the disc. Memory has a much, much faster read/write time than a hard drive does so it loads fairly quickly. This is why SSD drives are so popular. They ARE memory and therefore are significantly faster.
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Look at your I/O (Disk usage), most of the time, that is what is slowing down your windows startup the most. That's why so many people buy SSDs, they are much faster than regular hard drives (but obviously more expensive).
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How does the human body tend to itself when you havent eaten for days? What about havent drank?
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There's a general rule of threes for your body's survival. 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water and 3 mins without air. Without food, your body starts to consume its reserves. First to be consumed is the sugar reserve kept in your liver (about 500 grams). Then the body will try to breakdown the body's fat and muscle for energy and proteins necessary for your metabolism. But it can't break it down as fast as it needs it, thus eventually, you'll die However your body doesn't have water reserves in the same amounts. Without regular intake, your body has only so much water and it will try to conserve it as much as possible, but without water your body can't get rid of toxic metabolic byproducts like ammonia. These toxins will build in the body and eventually cellular activity will cease without water in which to dilute nutrients and toxins for transport. Edit: Grammar
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Not sure if I can explain this properly but here goes. Not eating for a long time can cause stomach acids and digestive juices to build up . Juices like bile in excess cause some mild nausea , this maybe what you experienced when you tried not to gag. But as soon as you eat , these juices get put to work digesting and gets used up. So no more nausea or we don't feel sick.. hope this helps.
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Why is the Illuminati associated with the number three and triangles?
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A lot of Illuminati symbolism is derived from Masonic symbolism, especially the Eye of Providence (which I believe is what you are referring to - the pyramid with an illuminating eye atop it). The number 3 and triangles play important roles in Masonic teaching and rituals. For instance, the "3 Great Lights" of the lodge form a right triangle. There are 3 Masters who sit in specific places during lodge meetings. Of course, any arrangement of 3 objects is going to form a triangle (edit: unless it's in a straight line). How "3" and triangles originated as sacred symbols is mixed. 3 is significant in Christianity, which Masonry borrows from (Father, Son, Holy Spirit, aka the Holy Trinity). Triangles were symbolic of practicing Masons back in the day as tools of the trade. Additionally, it ties into the Sacred Geometry, which is also fundamental Masonic teaching.
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The Illuminati was originally a group of Enlightenment thinkers who met in secret because the Bavarian king and the Roman Catholic Church opposed them. They opposed superstition, prejudice, religious influence over public life, abuses of state power and supported women's education and gender equality. This original group was disbanded, and other groups have used the name since then. The big deal today is that some people think that there is still a secret group which has control over governments and economies (probably not true).
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Why do some states require you to reveal your identity when you win the lottery?
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It's to prove that it wasn't a scam. The lottery is generally regulated by the government to some capacity and so they want to ensure that it's transparent. If you didn't require to reveal the identity of the winner it would be very easy to see a situation where the governor's siblings all just happen to be the winners each time and no one would be able to find out. This was the case for McDonald's Monopoly game for many years when it first came out.
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It's done to try to mitigate cheating. There have been cases where the lottery has been rigged, allowing someone in the agency running the lottery to set the winner to either their own tickets or that of a trusted partner in the fraud while hiding under the blanket of anonymity. By making winners public, it would be immediately apparent if someone working at the lottery or one of their friends or family won. It gives confidence to players that the game is fair and that they have a chance to win. Here's an article related to the question: _URL_0_
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How can we determine root cause of fire with any degree of accuracy when fires are so destructive?
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My uncle is an arson investigator. I've asked this question. Many things tell an experienced investigator where a fire started and how it spread. The way certain materials react to different temperatures, like carpet, linoleum, drywall, paint, wood, electrical wiring, they can tell where the fire was hottest. Thickness of smoke residue on walls and ceiling and vertical level of smoke lines. Spread lines on ceiling, can tell which direction fire fed from and how large fire was at each point in the structure. They can identify and test for accelerants and residues. Using all these clues, and the knowledge they've acquired from investigating so many other scenes, they can usually tell exactly what happened. Sometimes even when an entire structure is gone, they can tell certain things you think would be impossible.
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We learned a little about this at the Fire Academy, but obviously I was never a real investigator. One thing that happens is that the more stuff that is on fire, the hotter it gets, which means the longer the fire is going the more fully and quickly stuff burns. So you can use that to start to trace back the fire to where it started (incompletely burned stuff, more smoke residue because stuff wasn't burning all the way, etc). Also, smoke patterns can be very telling, because they are an indication of an "impure" burn, which means things are not hot enough to burn all the way. So, smoke residue on one part of the house, but none elsewhere means you may have found the origin room, and further sleuthing will tell you more. Similarly, if you find no slow start to the burn, then it may mean that accelerants were involved, which may point to arson. There's obviously a lot more to it, but there's a couple of real examples that we learned many years ago.
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When factoring a polynomial expression, what does it mean for a root to have multiplicity greater than one? Does it make the expression "more 0" than if it had had only multiplicity one?
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If root r has multiplicty k in p(x) then (x - r)^k can be factored out of p(x) (EDIT: And (x - r)^(k + 1) can't be. The multiplicity is the maximum number of times (x - r) can be factored out). For example, p(x) = (x - 2)(x - 4)^3 has two roots, the root 2 has multiplicity 1 and the root 4 has multiplicity 3. Multiplicity can tell us about the behavior of the polynomial in certain situations. For example, if the multiplicity of a root is odd, then the polynomial will cross the x-axis at that root. There are more details here: _URL_0_
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The beloved quadratic formula is a tool for finding the roots (points where the value of the function is zero) of a second degree polynomial (a parabola). Many polynomial equations can be expressed as the product of a set of first-degree polynomials (linear equations). Factoring polynomials to that state will make it easy to calculate roots, as where any first-degree factor is equal to zero, the product of all factors (aka the complete higher order polynomial) will equal zero.
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Why is the play button a sideways triangle, the pause button parallel lines, fast forward button (and so on).. how did this come about and why is internationally recognized?
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The vertical lines represent the sides of frames on a reel. Pause means you are stopped between two frames, play means you are moving through the frames left to right (hence the arrow), fast forward is moving through the frames at some multiple of 1x, and the scene skip button pushes you forward to some preset "hard" frame edge.
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I believe the pause symbol originated from the Caesura symbol. In music the Caesura indicates a brief pause and the symbol is two parallel slanted lines like this: // _URL_0_
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Why does a GPS tracker require a monthly fee/service to "connect," but a GPS car navigator (e.g. Garmin) does not?
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So GPS is a completely passive technology. A GPS receiver listens to signals broadcast by a group of satellites at known locations, and uses the timing difference between those signals to calculate its own location relative to the satellites. But the end result is that *only the GPS receiver knows its location*. The satellites don't even know that it exists. But if you want to track someone remotely, how do you get the location off of the GPS receiver and onto your computer/phone screen? You have to have it transmit its location somehow. For instance, over the cellular phone network. And *that* is what you're paying for. Without a subscription, the tracker will still know where it is; that costs nothing. But it won't be able to remotely *tell* you where it is.
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I had wondered this same thing. As best as I understand, it's a little bit like asking why a radio station does not become over-tasked from too many receivers. The answer is the the station exerts a fixed, unchanging amount of energy to broadcast the radio waves over a certain distance. Adding more receivers does increase the "energy cost" of the system as a whole, but the bill is footed entirely by the receivers -- if you want to listen to the radio, you have to buy the radio and plug it in or put in some batteries. So it is with GPS. *What,* exactly, the satellites are broadcasting is slightly complicated, but basically it's information about the satellite's position in spacetime. When you buy a GPS receiver, you are buying a device that is able to receive this information from 3-4 satellites at once and then perform calculations to infer your position on the earth.
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What is the principle of least action?
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Say, you take a rock, you throw it straight up, and catch it at the same height. Considering all the forces in play, record the amount of energy (the strength of your throw both vertical and horizontal) and the amount of potential energy (due to gravity, wind resistance, weight of the rock, etc) between when you release the rock and catch it again. The principle of least action means that the rock will follow a path that can be predicted by balancing potential energy and actual energy; which is basically another way of figuring out a path without using Force = Mass X Acceleration. And the universe isn't going to go out of its way to make the rock ding you on the head.
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I guess any system where you need to minimize a functional can be considered a kind of action principle...if so you can find it in many places. I am working on my masters thesis in Physics and I am working on a model to predict blood vessel growth in tumors. The equations that describe the system come from a functional derivative of a free energy.
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Why do French People eat so much fat and bread but still manage to be so skinny?
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Because they don't eat that much. Yes, bread and fatty foods are a major part of their diet, but French portion sizes are laughably small compared to what Americans eat.
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Generalising, but it's because the body has two broad drivers of feeding: * direct nutrient deficit (ie, you need energy - or at least, your body thinks you need energy!) * pleasurable food consumption - also known as [hedonic hunger](_URL_1_). Hedonic hunger probably primarily evolved to promote the consumption of high-energy foods even if you are 'full', to put on more fat and increase resistance to famine. French fries are high in fat, salt and easily digestible carbohydrates - a perfect food to put on that survival weight! [This review](_URL_0_) goes over the evolution of hedonic hunger in quite an easy to understand fashion.
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Did the Portuguese and Japanese recognize that they both played chess after contact?
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1200 AD is a little late for the spread of chess/shogi to Japan. It was most likely introduced to Japan sometime during the early Heian Period (794-1185) or late Nara Period (710-794). However the actual date is unknown. The earliest piece of physical evidence is "Shin Saru Gakuki" written between (1058-1064) that has passages written about Shogi
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Answered previously [here](_URL_0_) with notes on practices in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.
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How does wax build up in your ear?
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Earwax is your body's way of keeping dirt, dust, bacteria and everything else out of your ear canal. The hairs along the entrance dispense a sticky oil that traps things and prevents them from getting in. The build up or massive amounts show that your body is either producing a lot of the cerumen which does the trapping or are in an environment with a lot of dirt dust and others in the air.
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Ears like vaginas are self cleaning. Earwax is a self-cleaning agent, with protective, lubricating and antibacterial properties. There are tiny glands in the outer ear canal constantly pump out a watery substance, which gets mixed with bits of dead hair and skin and together is called earwax! There is also wet and dry earwax the wet earwax is the dominant gene and the dry earwax came about as a mutation in Northeast Asia
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Does playing your music louder on your iPod or phone cause your battery to run out faster, or is battery life independent of volume level?
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If the volume is louder than it's putting out more power. So yes listening at a higher volume will drain the battery faster. BUT the difference in power draw between medium and high volume is much less than most other functions on your phone. After some goggling I found a max of 60mW (.06W) output for the headphone jack. And .66W for the display on an iphone 5. So having the screen on drains the battery 10x faster than turning the volume all the way up. With out finding the power ratings of the CPU and RAM and other components I can't do any real calculations but I would guess the power drawn by the headphone jack is just a small percentage of the total power draw. Cranking the volume shouldn't decrease listening time by more than a few minutes.
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Yes. Louder = more energy. That energy has to come from somewhere and in the case of a phone it comes from your battery. However that said the drivers in your headphones are very small, on the order of milliwatts. So the difference is negligible compared to something like the screen, CPU or GPU.
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With regards to the weather, Why does a low pressure system result in low temperatures and high pressure system result in high temperatures.
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Tldr high pressure shoves the clouds out the way. This results in hotter day time temperatures and cooler night time (clouds act like a blanket). Source AS geog
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Because the air doesn't absorb a lot of sunlight for one thing. The sun mainly heats the ground and the surface water and they heat the air. That means its warmer near the ground. Second the air pressure is lower the higher up you go because there's less air above it getting pulled down by gravity pressing in. As the air rises then it expands into the lower pressure air, and expanding air gets colder, its the same way an air condition works.
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How did WWII diesel submarines get rid of the fumes when they were underwater?
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They ran on batteries underwater. The batteries needed to be recharged with the diesel engine, which could only be run on the surface, because of the need for air to run the engines and the need to exhaust the fumes.
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high strength steel containers. the coffin surrounding the reactor is strong enough to survive a torpedo hit. the rest of the submarine will be destroyed before the reactor leaks. the entire thing is shielded like crazy....because if it wasn't, the entire crew would be dead in a matter of hours. there is no direct contact of radioactive coolant and seawater. there's nothing to leak.
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The difference between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and their respective significance.
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The Taliban are a group of people in Afghanistan (similar to a political party actually) who at one point ran the government. The Taliban are focused on Afghanistan, they don't have any international aspirations. They are simply a political group inside Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is an international organization that was once run by Osama Bin Laden. They are multinational and stateless, with networks across many regions. They have international aspirations and want to have a large and unified Islamic state
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Taliban - Tribal alliance from Afghanistan. They want control of Afghanistan/Pakistan, as that is the territory they are present in. ISIS/ISIL - Product of the Syrian Civil war, their organization is attempting to create a unified Islamic state throughout the Region they are present in. Al Qaeda - International organization without (apparent) statehood aspirations. Their professed motivation is the removal of non-Muslims from the mid-east, including, but not limited to, US and Israeli citizens/military. As to why they are different, they are different in a similar way to how Coke and Pepsi are different. They have different leadership structures that to not answer to a connected chain-of-command or state.
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Is there anything to the American Protestant work ethic legend or is it a mythical construct?
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Just as a point of clarification, it's not an American myth. Max Weber, a German sociologist, invented it in the early 20th century. So although many Americans believe it, it's really something we share with most of Northern Europe.
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I know nothing of the, I assume, television show that you're referring to. However, there were certainly people in the west of France whose religious views were regarded as "unorthodox" by the Church, such that there was a missionary campaign in the early 18th century to attempt to reestablish conventional christianity, ie the Catholic Church, led by Louis-Grignion de Montfort. It wasn't very effective. However, I've read nothing of human sacrifices or anything like that, it was, as far as could be seen, the remnants of pre-christian beliefs. Sacred groves, sacred wells, saints with odd names, with animal features, that kind of thing. An example from the later 18th century has a peasant offering a candle for the Archangel Michael, and one for his snake _URL_0_ . Savary's contemporary account of the war in the Vendee gives several examples of these. Admittedly, he's seeking to show the Vendeans as primitives, but that doesn't mean that there was some truth to his stories.
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why can't I control other people when lucid dreaming but can, seemingly, control everything else.
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Practice. There's no real reason why you can't. You're brain is not physically wired to prevent you from ever controlling your dreams fully. I've lucid dreamt for as long as I can remember (as far back as about the age of 3), and I control every aspect of everything. It's really extremely boring, after a lifetime. No surprise. Ever dream all night of sitting on your butt, doing nothing, because you're bored, out of ideas, and just waiting for your body to wake up? It gets that bad. I don't envy an omnipotent omniscient god one bit. Nightmares are great, I have no control over them. I don't know what's going to happen. Totally worth the shock and fear.
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That's just it. You are more awake. You have more awareness, so you have more control, It turns more into what you would like to happen. You should look into Lucid Dreaming.
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Why does it take a while for our eyes to adjust to lighting differences?
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Vision in dim lighting (scotopic vision) relies on rod photoreceptors. Rods are extremely sensitive. A single photon is enough to trigger a cellular response. Photoreceptor cells are special in that they are activated by darkness and de-activated by light. This means they are depolarized by darkness and hyperpolarized by light. You can say that the 'activated state' means that they are maximally prepared to process incoming visual stimuli--their sensitivity increases. Rhodopsin is the photopigment for rod photoreceptors. When it is activated by a photon, it triggers a chemical cascade that results in the cell being hyperpolarized. Now, it takes rhodopsin about 30 minutes to get back to its deactivated state. Which means it takes half an hour for your scotopic vision to get maximally sensitive again. Visual processing is covered nicely in Purves' *Neuroscience*.
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Time is a factor here. Videocameras change aperture over time. Human eye does this too. So when you look at something bright, you're not necessarily even seeing the not-bright stuff in your field of view that you're not looking at. Even the sensors in our eyes change how much light they need to produce a signal (to the brain). E.g. nightvision. Again though, this is over time.
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How do social media communities start when they have no users?
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This is the reason most of them fail. The genius of Facebook was that it started with a small, elite community and expanded from there. You need a ton of capital because it takes a long time to get up to a critical mass that makes it usable for the general public.
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The cycle is basically that any good website starts off small, gets popular after 2-5 years, then as they slowly grow and grow, the new users bring shit content with them, disheartening the people who made the community to begin with, and then they go find a new site, while the old slowly dies, but never really, because server costs are low, and if they scale back correctly, they can perpetuate somehow being active **forever**
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What was the Soviet Union's equivalent of Operation Paperclip? Who did they pick up?
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An excellent book on this topic is Red Moon Rising, by Matthew Brzezinski, which goes into the history behind the Soviet and US rocket programs immediately following the war. I would answer your question more in depth, however I'm at work right now and the book is at home. I'll come back to it tonight when I get off work. However, the main gist is that a large number of the engineers surrendered to the Americans, including Von Braun, while the Soviets were able to get the lower echelon workers and factory technicians. The Soviets were able to "shang-hai" some of the upper level engineers by drinking them under the table and kidnapping them in the middle of the night after they passed out, which Brzezinski goes more in depth about in his book.
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I'm not quite I understand what you mean. The "counterinsurgency" that was carried out was nothing more than conventional mopping up operations, sometimes not being more than a platoon of soldiers facing off against a lone sniper. The Nazi "insurgency" that existed after the war was nothing more than a bunch of uncoordinated fanatics and was never a practical threat beyond theory. There were plans made up on how to deal with a possible insurgency, but since an actual insurgency failed to materialize, they were not actually put to use. Since I am not close to as well-read on the Eastern Front as I am on the various other fronts, perhaps one of our experts on here can enlighten us how it looked on the Soviet side?
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When creating a standardized test of any kind (intelligence, proficiency, personality, etc...), how do the people that design them test that they are accurately measuring what they are supposed to test?
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For the most part they don't. This is why the SATs change every year and sometimes they're extremely difficult, and sometimes not. Otherwise you can know if a test is accurate by testing known samples. Take personality for example, you know bob is an introvert so you design a test to test him. Now somehow bob tests as an extrovert, but you know hes not (cause you talk to Bob and have decided he's not) so you change the questions until he tests as an introvert, then move to the next person. Eventually you're going to have something that works for most people with known qualities and then you can test people with unknown qualities. Similarly with intelligence tests there should roughly be a bell curve. If you have 100 questions, and 100 people, 1 person should get all of them right 10 should get 90 or more right, etc. If all the people are getting 100% right you redesign the test.
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The main issue with standardized testing is that they tend to test a fairly narrow amount of knowledge/skills. This poses two main issues. One, anyone who's weak in those areas, or just generally doesn't excel in a standardized testing environment, will be counted as an all around poor performer. Also, since a lot of schools have their funding based on standardized test scores, schools will have teachers teach the tests, not necessarily what will be best for students later in life.
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How did we get domesticated cats?
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Cats became domesticated after humans developed agriculture. Stored crops attract vermin like mice and rats, which attract cats. Over many generations, the least fearful cats would be the most likely to stay near human settlements and interbreed with one another. It's possible for domestication to get started this way without any direct selective breeding by humans. Dogs probably got started the same way, with some wolves who were less afraid of people following hunter-gatherers and living off their scraps rather than hunting prey for themselves.
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It might be the other way. Cats and dogs have domesticated humans. We give them shelter, food and love sometime more than to other fellow human beings.
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If the bottom of the ocean is so cold, why isn't it frozen?
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Because the pressure of the water above stops the water from expanding and freezing. Also, any ice that did form would float up and quickly melt
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Think of it this way. The difference between frozen water (ice) and water that is not frozen is "only a few degrees." The earth's surface is mostly water, much of it frozen. So if the water is frozen a 0 degrees, and the temperature raises a single degree, the water is not frozen anymore. This does a few things. One, sea levels rise. That's bad, especially if you live near a coast. The ice makes the oceans cooler. That's bad, especially if you are a fish that cannot survive colder temperatures. Which is bad if you are a species that eats that fish. It's bad if you rely on rain, since colder oceans mean less rain. So it's basically bad no matter who or what you are. A "few degrees" is just a downplayed and frankly wrong way to think about it. The world is in balance, upsetting the balance is bad no matter the degree.
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How does the adaptive immune system fight off new variants of pathogens, if there're no existing B or T cells with antigen receptors that can detect them?
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Lymphocytes have a unique cellular capability called V(D)J recombination: _URL_0_ These are random rearrangements to the DNA sequence within T-cell receptor encoding regions of the genome (T-cells) and immunoglobulin encoding regions of the genome (B-cells). This happens in every newly generated lymphocyte, leading to a diverse population of cells, each encoding a unique variant. In sum, this leads to an enormous repertoire of potential combinations, estimated at 3×10^11. Those that are usefully reactive (e.g. recognition of an active pathogen) are expanded, those that are autoreactive are removed by the thymus during cell maturation, and those that are neither usefully reactive (yet) nor autoreactive just poke around in your lymphoid organs or circulatory system until they either die a peaceful death after a few weeks or months, or become usefully activated.
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Our immune cells (T and B cells) form 'Memory cells', once they encounter an infection or antibody. - After a naive T or B cell encounters an antigen/infection it becomes activated and begins to proliferate (divide) into many clones or daughter cells. - Some of the daughter cell clones will fight the infection. - Some of the cells will form memory cells that will survive in an inactive state in the host for a long period of time until they re-encounter the same antigen and reactivate.
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Why do laptops have "waves" going across the screen when looking through a phone camera, but they are not seen by our naked eye?
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It's called aliasing, or more exactly moire pattern: both camera sensors and LCD screens are made from pixels. Pixels are not contiguous but are made to either display (LCD) or capture (sensors) specific color, like red green or blue. Now when you focus your camera on laptop screen, the individual pixels on the sensor do not match the pattern of pixels from the LCD - you get a piece of adjacent red or blue pixel or even uneven number of LCD pixels projected onto sensor pixel - that causes unevenness of light exposure and thus a Moire pattern, which you call "wave".
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two reasons: 1) antenna. a laptop is big and can have a big antenna. many companies put them around the screens. 2) interference. remember the iphone 4 "scandal" where if you "held it wrong" you would lose signal? that's an extreme case, but your phone does have to deal with YOU as intereference. on a laptop, you can structure things such that your hands are out of the way and do interfere.
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What is the circle of fifths and what are its uses?
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[The Circle of Fifths] (_URL_0_) is a music tool. It relates every key signature in Western music to a sequence that goes up by a fifth in one direction or down by a fifth in the other. For example, if you're in the key of C Major, and want to add one sharp to the key signature, you would go up a fifth, putting you in G Major (whose key signature has one sharp). This is at first useful just for learning music theory, as it makes identifying keys very quick and easy. Afterward, it's a great tool for composition. A lot of music uses parts of the circle as chord progressions to create sequences of musical ideas. A popular example is the pop song "I Will Survive", whose chord progression goes about halfway around the circle.
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Within every major or minor scale are six triad chords, numbered 1 to 6. Three of them are major chords, and three are minor. Each of those chords is the 1 chord of another key. For example, in the key of C major, the 5 chord is G major. G major is also the 1 chord of, well, the key of G major. In fact, that's how triads are named--they're named after the key they are the 1 chord of. G major also has a 5 chord, which is D major. D major's 5 chord is A major. And so on. The sequence G, D, A, etc is called the circle of fifths. After twelve steps through that cycle, you are back at G again, which is why it's called a circle.
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If lightning starts at the ground how can people be "struck" by it?
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This might be helpful for explaining _URL_0_ You can see that the lightning starts at the top. It then ionizes the air around and propagates in every direction (hence the branches). Once any of the branches touches the ground or anything conductive, the remaining charge in the clouds discharges to the ground.
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[This](_URL_0_) YouTube video will show you how a lightning strike happens in super slow-motion. It's really amazing. Basically, the lightning feels its way down towards the earth (stepped leader). It's like a blind man looking for a switch on the wall. Naturally, the closer objects will be "seen" first. This is pretty much why it'll go towards the closer object.
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How do countries manipulate their currencies?
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Governments can manipulate their currencies in a few ways: * Most directly, they can print/mint more/less paper money/coins. * Central banks can effect the supply of money by applying pressure to interest rates. Through the [multiplier effect](_URL_0_) lower interest rates can, effectively, lead to an increase in the money supply and higher interest rates can effectively decrease the supply of money. The supply of money in the economy has direct and real effects on the economy. Excessive amounts of currency lead to inflation of prices and makes the currency cheaper in terms of exchange rates.
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Like everything else, currency responds to supply and demand.
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What was love really like in the Middle Ages?
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Marriage for love was not completely unheard of. With those not of noble birth, typically the gains of a planned marriage would be minimal. So peasants, merchants, would very much have freedom to follow their hearts. In regards to nobles, it depends. If you're a first born child, it's likely all that responsibility would make the prospect of love marriage out of reach. But later born children wouldn't have as many confining responsibilities, and would more likely end up marrying for love
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[This thread](_URL_0_) from /r/AcademicBiblical should help answer your question in so far as it related to the ancient western world.
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Why are we ticklish?
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Could be completely wrong, but I heard that its a form of protection. You will notice that most places you are ticklish are rather vulnerable/sensitive parts of your body. Being ticklish there sort of trains you to try and defend those place.
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Think about where people are ticklish: Their sides, the bottom of their feet, armpits, the back, etc. The prominent school of thought is that parents instinctively tickle their young to teach them a defensive response to protect the most vulnerable areas of their bodies.
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I did a hot-water polysaccaride extraction on fungi-colonised woodchips, precipitating with ethanol. Will I have plant/fungi DNA in my polysaccarides?
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DNA precipitates in ethanol as long as there isn't vanishingly low salt, so yes, there's a good chance it might co-purify. The question is there DNA in your sample, and if so, how much and is that a problem? I can't really know if it would be a problem or not for you, but if you think you have an appreciable amount of DNA, and you're concerned, you can look at your sample spectroscopically. Nucleic acids show absorbance in the 230-280nm regime, while sugars don't. This might be a way to estimate your contaminants? Also, are there any other compounds in your sample that could precipitate in ethanol? It might not necessarily be DNA and could be other things present before your extraction.
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Yes, fungi absolutely do have DNA! I work in a lab that specializes in genetic sequencing in bacteria but we occasionally do fungi as well. [Here](_URL_0_) is an article I found that is pretty extensive and includes a glossary to ease you into the vocabulary.
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I saw a video of a guy running his car on gas vapor instead of injected gas. Quick searches bring up stories of people getting ~400mpg but I can't find any reliable sources. It's this a hoax? Can I actually run my truck on gas vapors and save tons of money?
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It is a hoax. Well played, though. He knows people want to believe. He repeats some commonly held beliefs, "We're payin' too much for gas. Not gettin' enough gas mileage." He pulled a relay, but who knows if it was for the turn signal? When he holds his hand over the hoses, it stalls. That's what would happen if you cut off the air to any combustion engine. The truth is that vehicle engines are designed to work on a very specific fuel/air mixture. Manufacturers have played with this a bit in the name of efficiency. But a given engine will run roughly or stall if the mixture is too lean or too rich. If this guy is able to atomize enough gas through his bong apparatus to keep the engine running, that means it's burning roughly the same amount fuel as if it were coming from the fuel line. If he's claiming he's using less fuel, it's because he's: a) going softly on the throttle, b) not measuring the mileage correctly, or c) a liar.
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VW had been working on this for years.. they have a working plan to release this exact type of thing. 261 MPG _URL_0_ Also my VW turbo diesel makes next to no smoke and drags my butt around at a cool 45-55 mpg not all diesels are made to smoke..
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What happens to photons that are emitted into empty space with nothing in its path to absorb it?
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> Does it just travel on for eternity? Yes, until it hits something. > What if a photon isn't emitted unless it will be absorbed? Emission of a photon has to happen before its absorption. What you're saying isn't possible, as it would violate causality. A "later" event cannot be the cause of an "earlier" event. > Does every photon have to be absorbed eventually? Not necessarily, although if the universe is infinite, the probability of the photon eventually hitting something [is 1](_URL_1_). Keep in mind that this "something" doesn't necessarily have to be a star or a planet. There are cosmic gas and dust clouds much much larger than stars, and even interstellar space [isn't *completely* empty](_URL_0_). I would guess that a photon emitted in a random direction has a higher chance to hit an interstellar particle than to hit a "solid object", although I have no math to back this up.
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"Empty space" is never really empty. Some amount of energy permeates all space. This energy has a density and is capable of creating particles out of the vacuum. This will happen even in the "empty space" between the electron and nucleus. A good example of what actual "empty space" is thought to look like at the quantum level is seen here: _URL_0_ So again, "empty" is a bit of a misnomer. Things are happening all the time in every region of space, even the ones with the lowest energy density.
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how do police get messages that were deleted months ago (via FB or text) ?
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Nothing on facebook is ever deleted. Just because you delete it doesn't mean facebook doesn't keep a copy. Similar things go for text, although this varies more from carrier to carrier. In the very least, they keep records for a long time even if they eventually delete them. The main point is that the data isn't just stored on your phone, it's stored for a long time on the service it is sent through whether you delete it locally or not.
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Police reports are public records. Any time the police have an official interaction with you, there is a file of it and anyone can request it. These lawyers likely create a FOIA request and send it to the local police department.
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