id
string | qid
string | question
string | answer
string | score
int64 | token_len
int64 | mlt
string |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
AskReddit/eh7nwfs
|
aueqn6
|
What's your cute story behind how you, your parents or your grandparents met their spouse?
|
Grandparents met at school. Been together ever since. They were married at 18, and they are still married now. They are 86. My parents met on the bus. My dad was working not far from where my mum lived. My mum sat next to him for a couple of stops, and got chatting. My mum was 18, my dad was 19 when they got married (62 and 63 now) Me and my missus, was on a Lunch break at college, I was in my second year of college. I bumped into my missus and she dropped her lunch. I apologised, and took her to a cafe nearby and had some lunch with her. We've been together since. I was 18, she was 16. We got married a couple of years ago. I'm 32, she's 30
| 3
| 184
|
[MLT:300]
|
AskReddit/e8gktvc
|
9rfxp4
|
What is the quickest you've quit after starting a new job?
|
Not sure but this qualifies. I started Friday morning, I quit Saturday afternoon with at least 3hrs left until quitting time. Manual labor, working for a Pepsi warehouse. Shiftleader was a drunk and there were bees everywhere.
| 3
| 46
|
[MLT:50]
|
AskReddit/ex1jzq1
|
cr2672
|
What was your most bullshit looking excuse that was actually true?
|
My sister was dating this guy in middle school that smoked weed. I was a freshman in high school, but I was brave and a bit edgy, but still hadn’t ever been around weed before. Her boyfriend left some pot seeds at her house and she was freaking out. As the big sister, I told her I would take them and dispose of them. I stuffed them in my jacket pocket and meant to dispose of them in the gutter. When I went to throw them away, there suddenly wasn’t anything in my pocket. I figured they had fallen out or something, either way I was relieved because they were gone and no longer her burden. Fast forward a few months. Someone made up a rumor that her and I were selling drugs. We both got sent to the dean’s office and they searched our stuff. Turns out I had a hole in my jacket pocket and the seeds had fallen into it. I remember the school cop saying, “oh, you thought the old hole in the pocket thing would work, eh?” I tried to explain and they just laughed. I got arrested. The perfect example of when trying to do the right thing goes totally wrong, not to mention a “bullshit excuse.”
| 2
| 244
|
[MLT:300]
|
AskReddit/enjqf27
|
borla3
|
What are some games that you really liked but now can't get back to them because you played something objectively better?
|
I can't stand Call of Duty anymore. The last one I played was Infinite Warfare and I got so tired of the jet pack movement system it had. My friend recommended Battlefield 4 to me and I have barely touched any CoD since then. I know the recent Battlefields haven't been great, but to me I've had so much more fun playing them.
| 4
| 74
|
[MLT:80]
|
AskHistorians/c8x52iw
|
1afywn
|
How significant was the South Vietnamese military in the Vietnam War?
|
bernadito's answer is good, but to add a little extra to it, the quality of the ARVN varied quite a bit depending on time and circumstances. The Johnson administration's efforts towards improving the ARVN were, depending on who you ask, either minimal or inept. Westmoreland's team focused far more on winning the war themselves than on enabling the ARVN to win it for them. After Abrams took over, things got better. This was part conscious policy choice (vietnamization) and part realization by the southern regime that if the Americans were pulling out and that they needed to get their house in order if they expected to survive. By 72, the ARVN was certainly not one of the best armies in the world, but it was large, well equipped, and reasonably competent. With no US ground forces, but considerable US air support, it did manage to repel the 72 invasion, if just barely. Of course, in 75, US congress forbade material aid to the south, and without supplies, all the equipment became useless, and the south fell to a much weaker invasion.
| 2
| 231
|
[MLT:300]
|
explainlikeimfive/cotxip9
|
2wteb1
|
How to get to the Moon?
|
The Apollo project used a rocket called a Saturn to send a 3 person crew to the moon and back. The Saturn had 3 main stages which sent the Command & Service module (the part with the crew) and the Lunar Module (the part that landed on the moon and returned to lunar orbit) to the moon and the Service Module's engine sent the crew home to earth. The first stage of the Saturn rocket, the Saturn V, burned kerosene and liquid oxygen. The 2nd and 3rd stage burned liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. To fly to the moon a series of orbits had to be calculated - the first an orbit around the earth, the second a partial earth orbit with apogee (furthest point) in the vicinity of the moon, the third a lunar orbit, and the final a partial lunar orbit with an apogee in the vicinity of the earth. (Plus orbits for the Lunar Module to descend and ascend to and from the surface of the moon and rendezvous with the command module). These are all complex curves that change based on the relative gravitational effect exerted on the spaceship by the Earth and the Moon which changes at every point in the trip. The planners of the mission also needed to calculate how much food, air and water the crew would need, and how much additional fuel the spacecraft would need for minor course corrections and attitude adjustments. The planners needed to calculate how much electricity the ships would need and for how long. The planners needed to consider the temperature changes affecting the ship (hundreds of degrees when in the sunlight, close to absolute zero when in shade). They had to determine how much radiation the crew might be exposed to and how to minimize that exposure under various conditions and scenarios. They worried about what might happen if the ship were struck by a fast-moving meteorite. They also needed to figure out how the crew could determine with a very high precision where they were at any point of the trip so that their trajectory could be recalculated and adjusted if necessary. And they needed to figure out how the ship could re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and slow down enough so that it could land with parachutes in the ocean. Rockets are an example of Newton's 3rd Law which says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The action of expelling rocket exhaust which is made up of gasses which has a mass at a very high speed generates an equal and opposite force on the rocketship, causing it to accelerate in the direction directly opposite where the rocket exhaust is going. It took the Apollo crews about 3 days to go from the Earth to the Moon, they spent about 3 days in Lunar orbit, and spent 3 days returning to the Earth. Starting in 1968 there were 9 Apollo flights to the moon. 6 missions landed on the moon. The last trip and last landing was in 1972.
| 5
| 589
|
[MLT:700]
|
AskReddit/c2oz0xs
|
l1c37
|
What is the funniest thing you've heard/seen a sleep-talker or walker do?
|
oh god this is so easy. i was sleeping at my ex-boyfriend's house one night, and i wake up to him on his stomach with his arms out in front of him, punching furiously at the wall. i (stupidly.i later realized) shook him, trying to wake him up enough to get him to stop, and he turns to me and immediately says "in my defence, i was saving a kitten from being eaten by a zombie", then promptly went back to sleep. didn't remember a thing in the morning. another time he got up in the middle of the night, started putting his jeans on over his pajama pants, and then walked over to his alarm clock and started staring at it. i asked him what he was doing, and he said "i'm trying to see what time looks like". he's a deep dude.
| 4
| 175
|
[MLT:300]
|
explainlikeimfive/ct42kss
|
3ddibg
|
How do space vehicles, like new horizon, navigate through the asteroid belt?
|
> maybe thats just the impression I have gotten from tv and movies. That's your problem right there. The asteroid belt is pretty empty. The average distance between objects in the asteroid belt is about 600,000 miles.
| 3
| 49
|
[MLT:50]
|
explainlikeimfive/cvr2jxu
|
3ntckq
|
What exactly happens between the director of a movie finishing filming, and the movie coming to the cinema?
|
Cut all the film together into one coherent storyline. Cut out scenes that the director doesn't like, re-film scenes that the director is unsatisfied with, etc. Add in the music, sound effects, and visual effects. In modern times, visual effects can take a long time and cost a huge portion of the overall film's budget. Show a rough cut to test audiences and see what they like, what they don't like, and then go back and make changes as necessary. If a film totally bombs with test audiences, the studio might simply kill the project right there, before blowing any more money editing and marketing the film. Market the film. Don't underestimate this part. Studios take months, frequently more than a year, to build up hype for a movie, and oftentimes the marketing is what will make-or-break the movie. If no one's even heard that the movie is in theaters, they're not going to go see it, even if it's a great movie. And conversely, sometimes really mediocre movies can still make big money if the studio goes all out to saturate the media with marketing for the movie.
| 2
| 230
|
[MLT:300]
|
explainlikeimfive/ce27bfe
|
1sxh9v
|
Why can we eat our beef steaks rare, but need to eat pork well-cooked?
|
Chef here, There is a higher risk of being infected by parasites or bacteria from raw pork, pork is classed as dirty meat because of the diets and upbringing of the pigs and a little bit of evolution thrown in. You can also be infected from beef as well, but its not as common as bad pork.
| 12
| 63
|
[MLT:80]
|
AskReddit/c1g8b0f
|
fis7d
|
How much sleep do I actually lose if I wake up in the middle of the night for a few minutes, and then pass out again?
|
Maybe, are you fully awake, or are you just stumbling to the bathroom and back? Usually when you wake up naturally in the middle of the night it comes between your optimal sleep periods, so the only sleep you're missing out on is less important anyway.
| 3
| 52
|
[MLT:80]
|
AskReddit/c6v28k7
|
12h574
|
What is a time someone surprised you by not knowing something that you thought was common knowledge?
|
A dear friend of mine thought dying Easter eggs with food coloring rendered them inedible. Every year she threw out dozens of delicious hard cooked eggs.
| 3
| 30
|
[MLT:30]
|
explainlikeimfive/ecg0fg2
|
a92nf9
|
What is the difference between centre of mass and centre of gravity?
|
The center of mass is the mass-weighted average position of your body. The center of gravity is the gravitational force-weighted average position of your body. The center of mass tells you the average inertial behavior (how the body as a whole responds to arbitrary forces on it), while the center of gravity is telling you how one particular force (the gravitational one) is acting on average on the body. Under normal Earth circumstances (uniform gravitational field), the two points are the same - gravity always acts like it's accelerating the body at its center of mass, not applying any sort of differential forces on it. When the gravitational field is not constant (e.g. for a large object orbiting close to the planet, so the 1/r^2 field strength becomes noticeable), these two points are not the same. This means there are now internal stresses on the body, which can manifest in various ways - it can be a torque, it can be internal tension. Gravity now sees the body as an extended object instead of a point mass, and starts to affect the structure of that object.
| 7
| 219
|
[MLT:300]
|
AskReddit/dn6vzhr
|
70yxvx
|
What are some good medium to light revenge tactics for a coworker who's ruining everybody's time at work?
|
Story: work as a chef, chef also works there in lower-management who ankle bites, spreads rumours and poisons the well for everybody, and everyone is out for blood. So minor revenge tactics could be blamed on anybody and everybody. Therefor, a blameless crime. What would you do?
| 2
| 60
|
[MLT:80]
|
AskHistorians/ctzt12h
|
3gnt7y
|
Are there countries that have ever imposed economic sanctions on the US?
|
Just to clarify would you include things such as blockade of ports preventing trade during war time ala civil war or just internationally agreed to sanctions?
| 2
| 28
|
[MLT:30]
|
AskHistorians/d3zl9p5
|
4myl11
|
Why did the Vikings depict Thor using a hammer as a weapon when the war hammer wasn't a weapon the Vikings used?
|
Thor as a god predates the Viking period significantly, and might even predate other popular gods like Odin. It is quite likely that the ancestral god for the later Icelandic Thor was the 'Hercules' that Tacitus refers to when describing the gods of the Germanic peoples (besides Mercury/Odin, and Mars/Tyr). Note however that Tacitus also refers to Isis/Nerthus as subject of worship, and we also have the numerous dedications to various mother goddesses, as well as the national gods like Saxnot or Yngvi/Frey, so it is not so straightforward to connect Roman gods to Icelandic ones. However, there is a 10th century description of the temple at Uppsala which also mentions the three gods Thor, Odin, and Frey, reminding of the three gods of Tacitus, in which Thor is in fact described as carrying a club. The club, unlike the warhammer, was actually an occasional weapon of war of the ancient Germanic peoples, as the clubs from the postwar sacrificial site of Alken Enge show. Hercules' club was also carried as protective amulet by Romans, just like the Thor's hammer was later. On the other hand, Thor as depicted in the Icelandic stories seems very much a 'regular guy', not the war-god of the earlier sources. The Icelandic sagas are full of people who improvise weapons and fight with whatever is at hand, so Thor fighting with a hammer would not be out of character. Besides, the boundaries between a club, a hammer, and an axe are pretty fluid.
| 35
| 324
|
[MLT:500]
|
AskReddit/dy5m9ks
|
8fqdmf
|
Which film director would you want to direct the rest of your life?
|
Taika Waititi as a Kiwi, I feel that he would understand the Aussie lifestyle pretty well. And the fact that his story telling methods are so out there and wacky makes me think life directed by him would be awesome.
| 5
| 47
|
[MLT:50]
|
AskReddit/eeyljvk
|
ajtdvt
|
What are some of the signs you are getting ready to be dumped by your boyfriend or girlfriend?
|
Nothing is for certain but some of the signs I've noticed are: They call or text less, or differently. Like if they usually use a ton of smilies or punctuation and Al of a sudden it's one word answers and no emotes. They seem to be creating arguments out of nothing, especially ones that lead to questioning the relationship. They bring up issues you've had in the past suddenly, not stupid things but big problems that you may have put in the "cross the bridge when we come to it" catagory. This is a sure sign too if they bring these issues up out of absolutely nowhere. You may notice a change in attitude of their friends/family to you. If she has told them you're on your way out there will be an awkwardness when you are with them that will be unexplainable from your perspective. They don't seem like they want to spend time with you anymore. This could be for many reasons but if they are still making an effort to see you and when you are together seem happy then it's probably not that they are planning to leave you. -They become overly possessive of items you share or for which ownership is ambiguous. They alter long term plans, and especially short term seemingly irrelevant choices that seem strange because they will be obstacles later on. Like if you had planned to take an African Safari together and they suddenly cancel the appointment they have to get necessary shots etc for a flimsy or weird reason. Little things that aren't obvious but things you wouldn't do if you planned to stay.
| 4
| 315
|
[MLT:500]
|
askscience/c6cts2l
|
10el8g
|
Why does spinning protons create a magnetic field?
|
A spinning charged sphere will produce a magnetic field, that much is classical electromagnetism. But 'spin' of protons, electrons etc, isn't really spinning. We call it "intrinsic angular momentum" and it behaves very much as if the particle was spinning on its own axis, but it doesn't behave in exactly that way. The protons aren't actually spinning. But we don't really understand exactly what spin is or how it comes about. Anyway, this is one of the ways that spin does behave as if the particle was spinning on its own axis. The combination of charge and spin result in a magnetic moment. (You can also have a magnetic moment from the non-intrinsic angular momentum of the particle, such as an electron in atomic orbitals that have angular momentum, in which case you have an 'orbital magnetic moment' as well) Neutrons have spin but not charge, so they "shouldn't" have a magnetic moment. But, they're not elementary particles that are infinitely small. They're comprised of quarks, which do have charge, so the charge isn't zero everywhere at the tiny scale of the neutron's size (10^-15 meters or so). So the result is that neutrons do have a slight magnetic moment, but much smaller than that of protons. Neutrinos, which are elementary particles, might also have a magnetic moment, due to a bit more complicated quantum-mechanical phenomena. But it's extremely tiny if it exists. > Why does spin-spin splitting occur in high resolution NMR spectroscopy? Well, magnetic interactions. If you put a proton in a magnetic field, its two spin states split into a higher and lower energy level, one 'with' the field and one 'against' it. (you could perhaps visualize this as a water-wheel were you turn on the flow of water, making it easier for it to spin in one direction, and just as much harder in the opposite) When you have multiple spins in close proximity, you have magnetic interactions between them. Two protons with two spin states means four possible combinations. (up-up, up-down, down-up, down-down) So now you don't have a splitting into two energy/spin states but four. But two of those (up-down, down-up) have the same energy.
| 11
| 475
|
[MLT:500]
|
AskReddit/c548f5l
|
vg8u9
|
What's the best way to clean a large amount of blood out of your bed sheets?
|
step 1 remove body step 2 burn sheets step 3 replace sheets with red/black high thread count sheets
| 9
| 22
|
[MLT:30]
|
AskReddit/ebkvf48
|
a59n59
|
What is the most pointless thing you have been paid to do at work?
|
Work in a scrap metal yard, I regularly get paid to stand in the yard with a fire hose and wet the dirt to stop dust.
| 4
| 28
|
[MLT:30]
|
AskHistorians/djd3y97
|
6jagby
|
What was the explanation for Iceland's extremely long and short days pre-Heliocentrism?
|
A geocentric model can accommodate this phenomenon perfectly fine, as long as it accepts that 1) the earth is round, and 2) that orbits can shift throughout the year. Given that scholars in both ancient and medieval Europe acknowledged both of these facts, they explained the Arctic midnight sun as a purely natural phenomenon. It's unclear whether or not ancient references to the island of Thule refer to Iceland, the Shetlands, the Faroes, or some other unidentified island in the far north, but ancient discussions of it are relevant here. Pytheas of Massalla (4th century BCE) wrote a now lost but widely cited geography of the far north, in which he described Thule as lying at the utmost northern extreme of the Ocean, with nights and days that could last six months. His description was widely referenced and elaborated by successive geographers, such as Strabo and Pliny the Elder. Strabo happened to think that Pytheas was full of it, disbelieving most of he wrote about Thule. Nonetheless, he conceded that the description of long days/nights was consistent with contemporary models of astronomy and geography: > And yet, if judged by the science of the celestial phenomena and by mathematical theory, he might possibly seem to have made adequate use of the facts as regards the people who live close to the frozen zone, when he says that, of the animals and domesticated fruits, there is an utter dearth of some and a scarcity of the others, and that the people live on millet and other herbs, and on fruits and roots; and where there are grain and honey, the people get their beverage, also, from them. As for the grain, he says, — since they have no pure sunshine — they pound it out in large storehouses, after first gathering in the ears thither, for the threshing floors become useless because of this lack of sunshine and because of the rains. (Geographica 4.5.5) Pliny the Elder was more inclined to take Pytheas at his word, and elaborated on why there should be such long days and nights in these northern latitudes. Since the earth was spherical, and objects near the equator cast no shadow at certain times of the year, Pliny figured that the length of days must vary both across latitude and across time. Thus, when discussing Thule, he writes: > During the solstitial period, as the sun approaches to the pole of the world, and his orbit is contracted, the parts of the earth that lie below him have a day of six months long, and a night of equal length when he is removed to the south pole. Pytheas, of Marseilles, informs us, that this is the case in the island of Thule, which is six days' sail from the north of Britain. (Naturalis Historia 2.77) Later in the Naturalis Historia: > The most remote of all that we find mentioned is Thule, in which, as we have previously stated, there is no night at the summer solstice, when the sun is passing through the sign of Cancer, while on the other hand at the winter solstice there is no day. (4.30) As you can see from Pliny's description, his model is geocentric (the sun approaches the pole), but the basic facts of the midnight sun are intact. Very few of these classical authors ever had occasion to actually travel this far north, but their accounts of Thule and its strange natural phenomena were well-known by the time that Europeans actually discovered and settled Iceland.
| 27
| 739
|
[MLT:800]
|
explainlikeimfive/du32ft1
|
7wtjfy
|
Why and how does weather change?
|
Weather fronts move across the planet because of exceedingly complex interactions. For instance, warm air is less dense than cold air, so as the air is warmed, say, in the tropics, it rises higher in the atmosphere, which creates an empty space for the more dense, heavier cold air from the poles to rush in and fill that space. That creates wind and moves large weather fronts around. Wet, humid air is warm, but still somewhat dense so it stays lower to the ground. Cold air can shove itself underneath the wet, humid air and push it into the atmosphere, where the water cools and condenses into rain. Sometimes hot air gets between the two fronts and prevents the cooling air in the upper atmosphere from dropping down and the hot air on the ground from rising up, creating a "cap" on the rising pressure of the hot air on the ground. This causes intense storms and tornadoes when a hole forms in the cap and the hot air can rush up through the hole rapidly. Some of the weather is driven by ocean currents, where water at the poles cools and sinks to the bottom, and warm water from the tropics moves towards the poles to take its place. This carries warm water north and creates strong circular currents that, for instance, keep England somewhat warmer than expected given its latitude, and New England somewhat cooler. That warm water heats the air above it and water evaporates into the air, creating weather fronts. The same thing happens with the huge air currents in the upper atmosphere, circulating different temperature air throughout the world. As two fronts collide, they throw different temperature air around, creating new fronts and disrupting other fronts into a chaotic, barely-understood mess of weather fronts. The two fronts may smash into each other and prevent the other from moving, which in turn stops any fronts behind them from moving, so you get these waves of weather as the fronts build up enough pressure to break through. So you might get a wave of very warm, balmy air that brings pleasant weather, but it's behind pushed by a wave of cold air behind it. The cold air may bring storms if it gets underneath warm, humid air, or it might just be crisp and cold. All of this is compounded by the changing of the seasons. As the Earth tilts along its axis as it orbits, the two hemispheres experience more or less direct sunlight, which changes the overall temperature in that hemisphere. One will be warm, the other cool, which again drives ocean and air currents across the globe that collide in complex ways.
| 3
| 514
|
[MLT:700]
|
explainlikeimfive/djwbowg
|
6lspo6
|
How did scientists figure out how to make computers?
|
The whole field built on top of other stuff over many years. First, people figured how to control electricity with electro-mechanical relays. Relays are binary - ON or OFF, like bits in a computer. Then they figured things like how to combine them to make a circuit that can make some basic boolean logic gate - for example, an OR gate, application may have been "turn the lights on if any of these 5 light switches is on", an "AND" gate might be "only start this machine if the power switch is ON AND the operator has both hands pushing the safety buttons ON". Those are the building blocks of logic, which can then be combined to do things like add up numbers or run a sequence of steps / make a basic decision depending on the state of various things. A lot of the early stuff was built around making mechanical telephone exchanges (Strowger) rather than requiring human operators - no coincidence that Tommy Flowers worked for GPO Telephones and most of the equipment at Bletchley Park will look very familiar to telephone engineers. So you have circuits of relays that count your sequence of pulses (dialled number) from your telephone, connect through the system deciding if a circuit is busy or available, etc. etc. it all starts to look a lot like a sort-of-computer. From there, you build up to making a system where you are able to change the steps or decisions (the program) without having to re-wire the circuit specially for each task, perhaps by feeding punched cards in or putting pegs in a board. All this can still be done with relays, or any other sort of controllable switch. In parallel to these advances in thinking about how to make "computing machines", electronics got smaller, faster, more efficient and reliable as valves replaced relays, then transistors replaced valves, then we put multiple transistors and things on a sliver of silicone to make a chip, then we put a whole load on one chip to make a processor. You could make a modern computer out of relays (or wood & marbles) but it would be huge, expensive, slow, and unreliable. If you search on Hackaday.com, some guy made an entire computer out of single transistors to demonstrate how it all happens, it plays tetris and takes up a whole room. He's done a really good job, written loads about how it all works & goes together etc. There's also nand2tetris which skips the first couple of steps but does cover most of it quite well.
| 7
| 525
|
[MLT:700]
|
AskReddit/c9vknn2
|
1e0eif
|
What can the right side of your body do that your left can't, and vice versa?
|
Throw a baseball. I can throw a ball around 80 mph with my right hand, but with my left I throw a ball like a girl. That sort of elbow bent and locked into position while pushing your forearm forward type throw.
| 2
| 48
|
[MLT:50]
|
explainlikeimfive/cjzzs55
|
2ej61e
|
Why are people who are mixed race (black and white) simply called black in America?
|
Depends on how dark the persons skin is. Very few people would call mariah Carey a black person. Or vin diesel. Or the rock
| 5
| 29
|
[MLT:30]
|
AskReddit/cva9uck
|
3lxoip
|
What's the best piece of trivia you know?
|
That the word trivia comes from latin, means three streets, and stems from the Romans putting up signposts on crossings where three streets met, showing information about each of the directions
| 1,204
| 35
|
[MLT:50]
|
explainlikeimfive/e78ffil
|
9liqwi
|
How does a projector project black colour on a white screen?
|
Projectors and laptops are all back-lit - they shine white light, and a filter provides the color. Both your laptop and projector have an LCD screen in front of the back-light to act as the filter. The LCD screen has 3 color channels, red, green, and blue. Each channel can vary opacity up to 256 degrees, from completely translucent to completely opaque. These color channels are grouped into sets of 3, one for each color, and are so small your eye doesn't readily see them - the sum of their color values meld in your mind's eye to a single color. So when all three color channels are set to 256 or fully opaque, they block out all the light that would otherwise pass through them. This is why there's a big focus on black-levels on projectors and screens, and it's hard to read through the marketing manipulation of how black-levels are measured to understand just how true-to-black a device can get. Your money is spent on size, resolution, speed (it takes time for the filter element to transition from one level to another, limiting frame-rate - you'll see blurs in fast motion like an action sequence or sporting event), and blackness. There are 2^8*3 or 16,777,216 possible colors your display can show. This is 24-bit or "true color". There are other technologies that can display more, but they're rare and expensive snowflakes. The damning thing is you won't see the additional color range without special data formats that can describe that additional color depth, which common image and video formats don't. There is such a thing as 32-bit color, but this doesn't actually provide you with any additional color depth, but a 4th channel called "alpha", which is used for color blending. Alpha is a measure of how transparent each pixel (group of 3 color channels) is, so if you layer graphics, the image beneath can show through to that degree. If you look at some of your fancy desktop windows, title bars, and desktop bar, if you can see some of the desktop wallpaper behind it, you have 32-bit graphics to thank for it. So bear in mind, alpha isn't a color channel you see - computational algorithms use it to blend the 3 color channels together for a new final product, which is going to be in terms of 24-bits of color.
| 2
| 508
|
[MLT:700]
|
AskHistorians/cy510sd
|
3xi11m
|
Why is it traditional to remove your hat out of respect, especially in the context of mourning?
|
I think this question may suffer from being a bit too broad. The tradition you’re mentioning isn’t present everywhere, and not even is it universal in Western culture. The practice in some situations is tied to religious significance which non-observers are not obligated to adhere to, e.g. in many sects of Judaism: > Not only do the Jews keep their hats on their heads at funerals, but in some countries they still wear black caps at weddings, in token of mourning for the destruction of the Temple. (Wagner, Manners, Customs and Observances) But limiting ourselves to a general overview of the Anglo-Western tradition, as a "manner" or expression of civility, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable declares removing one’s hat to be: > a relic of the ancient custom of taking off the helmet when no danger is nigh. A man takes off his hat to show he dares stand unarmed in your presence. This is a rather general statement, unfortunately, but may speak to the notion of removing one’s hat at the dinner table or even just in one’s home being a sign of comfort - specifically, that the owner of the home has provided a place of sufficient refuge. The consensus seems to be that hat removal customs translate into our modern practices via the Victorians (unsurprisingly). Dress for Deference and Dissent: Hats and the Decline of Hat Honour (Corfield, Costume 1/1989; 23(1):64-79), traces the evolution of especially British hat decorum, arguing: > Using an everyday and highly visible item like a hat was an effective and very personal means of communication. And related to our conversation here: >during the eighteenth century, it became decreasingly common for men to wear their headgear - other than wigs and nightcaps - indoors, as social etiquette became increasingly formalised and as housing also became better heated. That applied both in private homes and at public assemblies unless the purpose of a gathering was military or ceremonial. And: >Above all, as the head was symbol of authority, the covering or uncovering of the head, in Western society, was for men an important signal of relative status. Whether and how universally regarded in practice is impossible to ascertain; but the expectation was clear enough. The traditional custom was expressed in the Princeton College rules of 1756. They declared that: ‘Inferiors, when they come into the company of a superior or speak to him, shall show their respect by pulling the hats’. It’s clear that socially-conscious people of this period studied hat etiquette as a means to indicate, refine, and/or advance their social standing, so this could be the mechanism by which these behaviors were passed on. But as Corfield points out, regardless of evolving expectations on hat wearing in the public and private spheres, a constant was that it remained a gesture of respect to remove it, especially at funerals. Perhaps this was because the funeral was, generally, inherently non-secular and constant, and therefore not subject to the whims of fashion that were readily participated in outside of this context. Both the Catholic Church and the Church of England required parishioners to remove their hats during worship and, by extension, religious mourning. EDIT: Clarity.
| 72
| 673
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[MLT:700]
|
explainlikeimfive/ewihmbw
|
coiu85
|
Why did early planes have more wheels in the front and now most wheels are in the back?
|
Lots of reasons. It was not practical at all for the pilots but it was very practical for the designers. The shape of a low wing airplane lends itself well to a taildragger configuration. The wings are natural mounting points for retractable landing gear (needed if you want better range and speed, incredibly important in a fighter). The nose and tail have to be proportioned such that you can fit a massive heavy engine up front (not to mention machine guns, ammo, and fuel) and still have an aircraft which is either slightly nose heavy or neutrally balanced about the center of lift at the wing. This meant you tended to need a long tail sticking far out. Adding a little weight to the tail in the form of a tail wheel helped add a little ballast to the aft end of the aircraft, and prevented you from adding EVEN MORE weight up front in the form of a nose gear. Excessive nose weight causes constant elevator up trim to be required for forward flight, which causes extra drag. Excessive tail weight causes a positive feedback loop in the controls that can make an aircraft stall uncontrollably (there is a saying that “nose heavy airplanes fly poorly, tail heavy airplanes fly once!”) This was a huge pain for pilots, and still is. Taildraggers are their own separate type certification for pilots. The steering is not nicely linear like you are used to in a front steering vehicle, small steering inputs can get very high rates of turn, and it’s not uncommon for a beginning pilot to experience a “ground loop”, where you spontaneously do a spin on the ground while taxing. Visibility is also severely impacted. Most taildraggers don’t have visibility of the runway on takeoff, you are looking out the sides of the aircraft to judge your distance against centerline. Eventually you get enough airflow over the elevator to purposefully lift the tail wheel off the ground, switching you to steering with the rudder airfoil and leveling the aircraft for visibility and angle of attack management at takeoff. Landing is equally blind. There was a time late in the war when Germany had exhausted its supply of trained pilots, and the fresh pilots were experiencing higher casualty rates from landings/takeoffs of tail dragger aircraft than from actual combat! Edit: forgive me, i completely neglected the second half of the question. Modern aircraft evolved different propulsion methods, namely 'jet' type aircraft, which have engines either wing or tail mounted. This alleviated the above design constraints. You also can go out of your way to make a tricycle gear aircraft ANYWAY, just because of its inherent benefits. Obviously taildraggers still exist but they are so much less practical that modern aircraft design just pushed away from those initial concepts for quality of life and practical reasons.
| 10
| 557
|
[MLT:700]
|
explainlikeimfive/ddq6t67
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5tzlkp
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Is land mass fixed to the earth beneath or does it float on the sea?
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Land is not floating on the sea. Land is attached to the crust. The crust is what you find below the sea and surrounds the entire planet. Now, the crust is sort of floating on the magma layer below. The thicker parts of the crust (5-70 km thick) are high enough to be above water, the thinner (oceanic crust, under 5-10 km thick) are covered by the water. A typical bottom of the sea would be at 3.5 km below sea surface, a typical continental platform would be like 200 m. This means, surrounding the continents, there is a 200 m deep and like 100 km wide shelf than then steeply falls to the 3.5 km see bottom. On that shelf, any mountain, if you will, is an island. And big plateaus are "continents". You can also have underwater volcanoes, that spit the magma underneath the crust and can, with time, become higher and higher until they become visible islands. Like Hawaii. And then, there is The Netherlands.
| 3
| 226
|
[MLT:300]
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AskReddit/c7geq0q
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14tpra
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What is the best day of your life?
|
I worked at a Six Flags over the summer of 2009 and I've legitimately thought about writing a book about it. It was the worst/best/worst experience of my life, and I met a ton of really weird and interesting people while I had the job. The best day I've ever had also happened while I was there. I worked at the Superman ride, which was the most popular one in the park. We would regularly have 2+ hour wait times and by the time I finished cleaning the line and shutting things down for the night it would usually be around one in the morning. Everyone who worked there was exhausted, but we had ways of coping with the stress. I also worked at the bumper cars, which was right next door. It was actually the largest bumper car stage in the entire country. 27 cars if I'm remembering it correct. That ride didn't have the wait times or the stress of the Superman ride, but I would always have to make sure that people were wearing their safety straps right before I let them start crashing into each other. No matter how explicitly I mapped out how the straps worked (one over each shoulder, like a backpack), there was always someone who would be wearing them wrong. This one kid put both straps around his neck one time and acted like there was nothing dangerous about that at all. The floor of the bumper car arena was graphite, which helped the cars run smoother or conducted electricity better or something. I don't know, I wasn't paid to know, but these floors needed to be buffed nightly to make sure they stayed smooth and workable. The floor buffers we used were pretty standard, but only me and one other guy in the department were able to get the hang of them, so after about a month of working at the park I got attached to nightly buffer duty. It was nice. I didn't have to deal with customers, I could work at my own pace, and I was usually out of there before my friends who were back on the Superman. So one day while I was walking over to my station at the Superman ride I decided to check up on the people who were working at the bumper cars. Say hi, see how their day was going, stuff like that. When I showed up the floor of the arena was bright orange and TK (tall kid, we called him that because he was tall), my boss the short lesbian, and one other employee who I can't remember were trying to wrestle the buffing machines into submission. It had rained earlier in the day and the floor had flooded, leading to a rapid build up of rust in the graphite on the platform. Nobody could ride on it until the floor was spotless, and I was one of the only people available who could do that job efficiently. Me, TK, short lesbian, and nameless girl spent about four hours cleaning that floor, joking around, and having a great time while our uniforms got hopelessly dirty from all the rust floating around in the air. By the time we had finished we were all too dirty to get to work on the Superman. Company cleanliness standards and things like that, so they had us wait in the "backstage" area while people got new suits for us. Backstage there was some sort of employee appreciation thing going on. They had free churros and drinks for the people who were on break, so me and my filthy comrades got to lay around, essentially getting paid to eat fried batter and drink soda for around an hour before we finally got replacement uniforms. When I finally got back to the Superman it was around eight at night. They had me stand at the beginning of the line and greet people coming in. My shift ended after two hours of that and I got to go home after doing a little cleaning. TL;DR: Six Flags paid me $7.20 an hour to eat churros and hang out with friends.
| 2
| 800
|
[MLT:800]
|
AskHistorians/ebq9izp
|
a5wbyx
|
Could the Spanish Civil War of the 1930's be accurately described as a conflict between democracy and fascism?
|
Though all the democrats were with the Second Spanish Republic and all the fascists with the Nacionales I'm afraid it was considerably more complicated than that. To context and backdrop! Spain oft had a weaker national identity and more tumultuous internal politcs than most of its European neighbors (and still does to a degree, see Catalan and Basque separatism) and this was as true as ever in the troubled century preceding the civil war. The Napoleonic occupation weakened Spain to the point it lost the majority of its colonial empire in a series of wars of independence, its ruling Bourbon dynasty was replaced deposed and restored, and its many experiments in constitutionalism had always been met with severe reactionary movements, most of them violent. The spirit of the time was political chaos and social upheaval, and Spain was intractably divided along multitudinous internal lines. This state of affairs takes us until 1923, when, in a precursor to the civil war, there was a military coup d'etat that established a military dictatorship for just under a decade. Ultimately Spain's many constitutional forces, with the tepid support of the monarchy, forced an end to the dictatorship and the establishment of The Second Spanish Republic. Alas The Second Spanish Republic proved no more capable of establishing order than any of its democratic or royal predecessors. It came under fierce attack from reactionary conservatism for its socially liberal reforms, from the Church (which was still a very significant power in the Spanish nation in a way it no longer was in most Western European countries) after a spate of anti-Catholic violence and legislation, and finally from anarchists and communists as the Republic often brutally repressed those organizations when they engaged in civil disobedience by ordering strikes and protests and the like. Under attack from both the left and the right the center could not hold, and it did not. Under the leadership of a cabal of army generals (which ironically did not initially include Francisco Franco) the nationalist forces, or Nacionales, instigated a nationwide rebellion in which conservative, Catholic, fascist, and royalist groups united to oppose the "red hordes" threatening Spanish civilization. The Republic fought back, with democratic forces assisted by socialist, anarchist, and communist groups. The former and still latent hostility between many of these Republican forces ensured they would never be as united as the rebels, and indeed as the war progressed there would come to be serious infighting amongst the Republican factions. The struggle quickly became in part a proxy war, with Franco seeking and receiving direct military support from the other fascist powers of Italy and Germany, and the communist elements of the Republican forces receiving aid from the Soviet Union. The Western democracies committed themselves to non-interventionism and remained neutral throughout the struggle. The war, of course, ended in victory for the Nacionales and the establishment of Franco's fascist dictatorship. But I hope I've illustrated three facets, that describing the struggle solely as fascism vs democracy is grossly reductive as both sides consisted of a plurality of factions, most of which were neither democratic nor fascist, and autochthonous issues like anti-clericalism were far more important to the rightist forces than any kind of international fascist ideology. Secondly that even when viewed as a proxy conflict between the great powers the struggle would more accurately be labeled as fascism vs communism than fascism vs democracy. The final hoped for takeaway that the civil divisions that erupted into those three years of violence long predated Mussolini's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento or the ideological divides of 1930s Europe.
| 4
| 719
|
[MLT:800]
|
AskReddit/cm2qvcy
|
2mbm26
|
What is a genre of games you love, but fully acknowledge that you're terrible at it?
|
I thought I was good at Tetris until i downloaded a tetris game on facebook where you compete against your friends for a high score when I realized I'm the worst person I know at Tetris.
| 2
| 41
|
[MLT:50]
|
Ask_Politics/d7jkxw7
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52ej68
|
What stage does a court case need to get to for the media pick up the Doe v Trump child rape case?
|
It'll probably have to get past the Motion to Dismiss that will inevitably appear. The timing is too suspicious and the charges too defamatory for the media to start widely reporting on this absent additional evidence or corroboration.
| 8
| 46
|
[MLT:50]
|
AskReddit/cowajl3
|
2x2h6g
|
What is something you can't learn from the internet?
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Real life experiences, can't learn how air smells on the internet and I'm still yet to find a place to make realistic fake money.
| 2
| 28
|
[MLT:30]
|
AskReddit/d35so7j
|
4jdkvz
|
What is something that looks insanely difficult, but is actually surprisingly easy?
|
Picking locks. Seems like magic until you learn the concept then its pretty simple. Most people can learn it in a fairly short amount of time. "Mastering" it is difficult but a basic level of skill is pretty easy.
| 3
| 47
|
[MLT:50]
|
AskHistorians/df4isp1
|
6093rg
|
Why did the Soviets accept the Finnish peace agreement instead of installing the puppet government they had prepared, despite having (at great cost) crushed the Finnish army?
|
That kind of happened twice, first in 1940 after the Winter War and second in 1944 after the Continuation War. In 1940 the Winter War had turned out to be a bit of a humiliation to the Soviets. Finland had been able to resist the invasion for much longer than the Soviets had thought possible. Secondly, there was a risk of intervention by the western allies, primarily the UK and France. This was during the 'sitzkrieg' or Phony War period on the Western front, before Germany had occupied France. Both Western powers still considered the Soviet Union a great threat. The Finnish government was conducting negotiations with the UK and France about direct military aid. The UK had promised that aid to Finland would arrive in April 1940, which prompted the Soviets to offer peace to Finland in which Finland would retain its independence but would cede large amounts of territory to the Soviet Union, including a sizeable buffer zone around Leningrad, which had been the Soviet Union's primary war goal. There was still a faction within the Finnish government that favoured continuing the war while waiting for Western assistance despite the severe depletion of the Finnish military. Uncertainty about the number of Western troops and the timetable of their arrival delayed Finland's response to the 1st of March 1940 deadline set by the Soviets. That uncertainty eventually caused Finland's government to want to negotiate on 6th of March, which the Soviet Union accepted despite the original deadline having been passed. In 1944 the situation was very different. Finland was de facto allied to Germany even though no formal alliance had been established. Finland was a fairly small and unimportant part of the larger war so the Soviet Union wanted to end that part to be able to fully concentrate on Germany. This was especially important after the Normandy landings and subsequent "race to Berlin". To deal with Finland, the Soviet Union launched a major offensive on 9th of June 1944. Finland was nearly defeated but president Ryti made a secret deal with Germany, in which he acquired German material aid in exchange for a promise to stay in the war to the bitter end. That was enough to practically stop the Soviet advance in the end of July 1944, for the moment. Enough to make the Soviets evaluate their larger war aims and consider peace with Finland. Another issue was that communism was still a force within Finland despite having been heavily suppressed after the Civil War, especially in the 1930s. The Soviets thought that there was a chance of a communist takeover after the peace was made. In any case, the territorial cessations made sure that there was a good enough buffer zone around Leningrad and Finland was to pay sizeable war reparations. All that made peace an attractive choice for the Soviets since they would be able to shift all those troops and equipment South to fight against Germany afterwards. To summarize: In 1940 Soviet primary war goal achieved. Threat of Western assistance to Finland and ending up in a war against the UK and France. In 1944 Finland managed to (temporarily) stop the summer offensive of 1944. Race to Berlin and the Soviet wish to focus on Germany. A chance of creating a friendly government in Finland anyway. Source: Suomen historian pikkujättiläinen, 2003 ISBN 951-0-27365-1
| 83
| 710
|
[MLT:800]
|
AskReddit/cdbq9j3
|
1qdk31
|
To be/Currently Married users of Reddit, how did you and your Significant Other meet?
|
I owned a consulting company, some 15 years ago. She hired my company to do some work for the company she was working for. I was interested, but I did not want to get involved with a client, it would be unprofessional. When she told me she was quitting her job, I thought that would be my chance. She immediately told me she was quitting to accept a job in another city, about 1,000 miles away. Two years later, I sent her an e-mail and we started chatting online. She was flying for business and had a couple of hours in my city between flights. I met her at the airport and we had coffee. The next weekend she invited me over to her place. I flew there and we spent our first weekend together. Soon after she quit her job and moved in with me. We got married 6 months later. We are still together, it's been 10 amazing years. We moved to another country, she earned her PhD, I found a challenging and rewarding new career. We had a child, he is 7. We are happy.
| 2
| 228
|
[MLT:300]
|
AskHistorians/d1i0pde
|
4cft27
|
Do local historians produce the best history?
|
I think you might want to be careful with how you phrase this, because my first impression is that you were asking about a specific kind of history known as 'local history', which focuses on limited areas (a city, province, etc.) instead of national or transnational narratives. It's actually really interesting and often provides a level of nuance that traditional national narratives, often dependent on the writings of officials in the capital, don't shed much light on. If the question, as I understand it, is whether natives to a region or country are the best sources for it, the answer is 'not necessarily'. In the 20th century a good many great historians specializing in Spain were actually Englishmen; Raymond Carr, J.H. Elliot, Henry Kamen, etc. Their work in turn was widely influential among Spanish historians who reworked their approaches to take into account the research and theoretical issues tackled by these English historians. Now, there was a special context for this. Spain was under Franco and there wasn't exactly a great deal of space or allowance for potentially subversive reinterpretations of history, which stifled history produced at home and instead opened doors to reinterpretations from abroad. A similar phenomenon happens with Cuba, despite a good number of great Cuban historians living and writing on the island, like Oscar Zanetti Lecuona. History on the island has generally been very tightly controlled by institutions and individuals interested in the politicization of history as a tool in a larger political debate vis-a-vis the justification of the Cuban Revolution and Cuban sovereignty generally in the face of the threats from the US. As such, many of the best historians specializing in Cuba are actually doing their work abroad or are foreign born; Louis Perez Jr. (not actually Cuban), Alejandro de la Fuente (Harvard, self-imposed exile), Marial Iglesias Utset (Harvard, emigre), etc. Another point that is key to understand is that historians from abroad often have insights and an edge against native historians of a given country due to resources. Again, I point to Cuba. A historian in a tenure position earning 50k or more a year and backed by institutional support for his/her research has an edge against third world historians in Cuba with limited access to up to date bibliography, constant economic challenges, limited to non-existent institutional support, etc. Native historians always have certain advantages that you can't simply buy, of course. Their knowledge of the language, familiarity with the culture (especially issues which may not have found their way into more traditional narratives), etc., do give them a certain edge. However these advantages are often overwhelmed by the many difficulties that third world countries (or countries with limited academic freedom) have. Foreigners also have the slight advantage that is being outsiders. Without a particularly strong bone to pick, they can sometimes more fairly assess issues which contemporaries and natives can't touch without a series of ingrained prejudices or blindspots causing difficulties.
| 4
| 599
|
[MLT:700]
|
AskHistorians/egomzt1
|
arla7v
|
Would a Roman from the 1st-2nd century AD recognize anything in the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) in the 11th-12th century as "Roman"?
|
In religion, language, and many other respects, the Byzantine Empire of the Comnenian period was very different from its Roman ancestor. It continued, however, to preserve many of the cultural traditions, some of the institutions, and one of the great cities of the Roman world. In the second century, the Roman provinces that made up the future heart of the Byzantine world were linguistically divided. In the Balkans, heavily influenced by the legions along the Danube, the lingua franca was Latin. Greece and Asia Minor, however, were almost entirely Greek-speaking. A Roman time-traveler to the Byzantine world would find that Greek (albeit a very different-sounding Greek) had persisted in Greece and Asia Minor, but that Slavic languages had replaced Latin in the Balkans. He would also discover that - despite a modest tenth- and eleventh-century revival in Byzantine legal circles - knowledge of Latin had virtually disappeared. But if, like many educated Romans, he was a fluent reader of Greek, he would be gratified to find that knowledge of the Greek classics was alive and well among the Byzantine elite, and that many Byzantine authors continued to use a classicizing literary style quite similar to that employed by educated speakers of his own day. If a Roman time traveler found himself in court, he would also discover that Byzantine civil law was still based on the Code of Justinian (and thus on the legal traditions of his own day). That law had of course been translated into Greek, and modified by the various later compilations; but it was very clearly, and proudly, part of the Roman legal tradition. A visit to the imperial palace, with its cadres of officials and pneumatic throne, might disconcert a time traveler accustomed to the pseudo-republican governing style of Trajan or Hadrian. The autocratic and bureaucratic Byzantine court, however, was far from being un-Roman; it just late Roman, based on a model of imperial rule pioneered by Diocletian and Constantine. Perhaps the most impressive demonstration the Byzantines were still Romans, however, was the city of Constantinople itself. Before it was burned and pillaged by the crusaders, Constantinople - alone among the cities of the medieval Mediterranean world - continued to look like a classical city. Our Roman visitor would of course have been baffled by the churches; but the grand public squares and impressive galleries of bronze and marble statues would have reminded him of Rome - just as Constantine intended.
| 1,009
| 510
|
[MLT:700]
|
explainlikeimfive/dawo8ba
|
5h1mmg
|
What's to stop a president from passing everything via executive order?
|
An executive order only covers the actions of the executive branch, and has to conform with existing law. So, for example, the president can't issue an executive order that changes the tax rate, which is Congress's constitutional responsibility and spelled out in current law. Even if the president issued such an order, Court's wouldn't enforce it. If you were, for instance, charged criminally with failing to pay the new president-set tax rates, you could defend yourself by saying that the rate was invalid and win. A valid executive order would be something more like the president saying that the IRS should only contract with companies that offer whistleblower protections for their employees. There, the president is giving the same kind of directive to the IRS that a CEO might give to the company they run. That's the traditional area of executive orders. They can be more elaborate in areas where the Presidency has a lot of power. For instance, when it comes to military operations and activities, the president's executive orders can be more elaborate and far reaching. There is a gray area as well. So, for instance, the Congress has given the president some discretion when it comes to immigration and the resources available to agencies that enforce immigration laws are insufficient to fully enforce every law on the books. But, does that mean that the president can issue an executive order that says not to enforce certain immigration laws? or an order that lays out a complicated system to identify people who shouldn't be subject to immigration enforcement? On that kind of stuff, people are divided. To TLDR it, the limit is that executive orders lose to laws and lose to the Constitution. They can only tell the executive what to do, and, even then, there are limits, even if those limits are less clear and highly detail dependent.
| 7
| 357
|
[MLT:500]
|
explainlikeimfive/e1zytaf
|
8x0y1l
|
Why do darker objects absorb more heat than white objects?
|
Dark objects absorb the energy from light where white objects reflect it. Dark objects will also cool faster than a lighter colored object of the same temperature
| 4
| 28
|
[MLT:30]
|
askscience/edywpe6
|
afdvj0
|
Can Three of the Four Types of Volcanic Eruptions Happen Underwater?
|
The viscosity is referred to as basic and acidic. Basic magmas have a low viscosity whereas acidic are high. You're right that high volatile (gas) content will cause it to degas when confining pressure is released. Exactly the same Principe as opening a carbonated drink, the volatiles can no longer stay dissolved in the low pressure environment and leave the magma returning to their gaseous state. Both acidity and volatile content are on a sliding scale not binary. When it comes to eruptions in different media, air Vs water, the biggest difference is how quickly the lava cools and solidifies. In air it cools relatively slowly but in water much quicker. As you may know when something cools slowly it gives time for the crystals to form and grow. In rocks the size of the crystals is called the grain size. The largest grain sizes are found in igneous intrusions that never left the surface and cooled very slowly stuck underground. The smallest grain sizes are when the lava cools almost instantly such as underwater, this leads to things such as volcanic glass where the lava has cooled so quickly it is more akin to glass then a rock. Eruptions can also happen under ice Subglacially. An interesting example is Eyjafjallajokull which when it erupted under a glacier in Iceland blasted shards of volcanic glass and ash Into a giant cloud which shut all air traffic over alot of Europe for a week or so. Krakatoa is the classic example of a high volatile acidic eruption. It was the loudest noise ever recorded, travelling around the world 3 times. The entire mountain was demolished and turned into ejecta and effected global weather for several years. If you're interested in world building some interesting examples to look at could be: Olympus mons, the largest volcano known to man. A shield volcano on mars that's taller than Everest, it's so large that it couldn't exist in earth because its own weight would cause it to sink into the mantle. Pele's hair, happens in Hawaii where the wind catches the streams of lava and draws them into fine strings that look like hair. Lava tunnels, where the outside edge of a lava flow solidifies but inside continues to flow. This leaves behind intricate networks of tubes left behind, often known to be fragile and prone to collapse. Carbonate lava, the vast majority of magma is predominantly sillica based like most rocks but there is such thing as carbonate lava, carbonates are the basis of limestone and chalk. Carbonate lava has only been observed at Ol Doinyo Lengai in Tanzania where it erupted as a low viscosity flow which ran down the sides of the volcano, it is dark in colour when liquid and hot but becomes a light colour when it solidifies and cools. It is also interesting that it is the lowest temperature lava at 500-600°C
| 2
| 585
|
[MLT:700]
|
askscience/dqghll6
|
7g0aoe
|
Why do our hands and other extremities shake?
|
There are too many possible causes to answer succinctly. One common cause of shaking (that itself has any of a number of causes) is a combination of "too-strong" impulse strength to stabilizing muscles (over-correction, even very minor over-correction) and the inherent delay of neuron message transmission to extremities causing longer feedback loops (delayed commands). Both can be extremely minor effects that result in 'shaking' of extremities. But it's really just too broad of a question to answer accurately. There is plenty of "intentional" shaking that the body does for various reasons (eg: the shaking one does when cold). There is also a variety of disorders that can cause shaking for different reasons ranging from brain problems (damage, communication issues) to muscular problems, and any number of other causes.
| 4
| 166
|
[MLT:300]
|
explainlikeimfive/ewwu1o1
|
cqjepb
|
What caused the Great Recession?
|
There is an excellent documentary called Inside Job (2010) which gives a good breakdown of one part of it - the sub-prime mortgage disaster. It really boils down to big institutions lying about the value of products, and selling them to one group of investors while telling different investors to steer clear. It was a horrific case of fraud, which caused some very big institutions to struggle, having serious knock on effects. Last I heard, nobody has been tried for the fraud.
| 3
| 97
|
[MLT:150]
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AskHistorians/cktcubr
|
2hiubi
|
Why did Los Angeles become the epicenter of filmmaking?
|
This is really two questions rolled into one: Why did the American film industry end up in California? Why is the American film industry internationally dominant? Why did American film-makers move to Hollywood? There really is no singular answer to that question. One oft-cited reason is that, in the 1910s and 1920s, the Motion Picture Patents Company (Started by Thomas Edison, though really a trust of major movie producers of the early film era) controlled patents on various technologies related to filmmaking. The move out West helped escape patent enforcement, but this narrative doesn't really explain the whole story, especially after many of the MPPC's patents became either unenforceable, void, or expired. Film-making, especially in the early years of industrial moviemaking, required lots of two things: Light, and space. Early cinema would often use tiny sets placed side by side in a warehouse, where multiple films could be shot at the same time; but as expectations shifted and movies became more involved, the need for bigger studios and particularly for location shooting grew. Demand for movies was constant year round, and outdoor location shooting was both economical and appealing for audiences, but making movies in upstate New York in February is not a fun experience even with today's technology; back in 1915, it was nigh impossible. California's dry Mediterranean climate is sunny year round, which is of course a boon to film-making, both for logistical reasons (You don't have to deal with snow, sleet, muddy roads, or heavy rain) and for cinematographic reasons - the film emulsions of that era needed quite a lot of light, and clear daylight is ideal. Meanwhile, California and the Los Angeles/San Francisco Bay regions in particular, offered very cheap real estate in close proximity to a city. Out East, and especially in New York City, you had to choose between cheap real estate, and good access to downtown. In an Edwardian Los Angeles that was just starting to sprawl, you didn't have to choose. The final reason is simply that California has a very diverse set of microclimates and geographies, which allowed for incredibly diverse location shooting. You have beaches, forests, mountains, deserts, prairies, and cities. You even have a bit of the wild west nearby, which is convenient as this shift coincides chronologically with the rise of the western film in American cinema. Why did the American film industry become dominant? This touches on a broader question of why the US became politically and economically hegemonic over the 20th century, but with regards to film, the major reason is this: Internal market. The US was a large country with a large population, relative to other industrialised nations at the time. This large urban population meant a big internal market for film, which in turn meant that US film studios had an easy time of exporting their product overseas - films would pay for themselves in the domestic market, and then, in foreign markets, they would go on to outcompete the local product. American film is not, by any means, universally dominant; it failed to establish a strong hegemony in markets that had strong protectionist safeguards (Eg, France) and in markets that had severe cultural barriers (Eg, India). But otherwise, a combination of this competitive advantage and inertia made Hollywood filmmaking the hegemonic standard against which other film industries are compared.
| 12
| 703
|
[MLT:800]
|
AskReddit/do8u8hx
|
75t4oy
|
What's the nicest thing a complete stranger has ever done for you?
|
A gentleman I met at a Terry Pratchett book signing mentioned he had an extra copy of Good Omen's signed by Neil Gaiman and told me he'd send it to me. A few weeks later it showed up in absolutely pristine and carefully wrapped paper, no return address. I have no way to thank him for his extreme generosity. We maybe spoke a total of 10 minutes together in a half empty town hall. It was single handedly the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for me. It's unfortunate I was unable to get Sir Terry Pratchett himself to autograph it as well.
| 2
| 126
|
[MLT:150]
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AskReddit/edyg0sa
|
afgh52
|
What was the "accident" at your high school?
|
Not high school, but in grade 8 a girl smuggled alcohol from her house and drank some with other students Somehow only suspended for 2 days. My middle school had a really odd punishment system.
| 2
| 41
|
[MLT:50]
|
askscience/csp21c4
|
3bpd86
|
HOW did humans discover complex processes like fermentation, brewing, farming, mining, blacksmithing, pottery and textile manufacturing?
|
People are very good at noticing patterns. It's what makes our intelligence really good. And language helps us pass the knowledge of those patterns on to others and create a sort of history. And example of this might be that I notice every time the birds fly south apples grow on trees. I say, "Hey, when birds all start flying south we can go to apple trees and get apples." Someone else then might add, "And birds fly south when it starts getting colder." While a third person might have noticed, "And it starts getting colder when the sun setting more in the southwest." So then we decide, as a group, that we should call the period of time when the sun starts setting in more in the southwest, it gets colder, birds start flying south, and apples are ready to eat "Fall." Likewise, someone else may notice that there are always a set number of days between "falls." So all of a sudden we don't need the birds, or the trees, or the weather. We can tell when the apples are ready simply by counting the days since the last time the apples were ready. We've created a simple calendar. Most animals can do this to some degree, but nothing as complex as humans can. And what may have taken ten years to notice can now be passed down to the next generation thereafter by simply saying, "These apples are ready to eat every 365 sun rises." Years of experience summed up in a short, 3 second sentence. But how's that help with fermentation and agriculture? Well, the same way as discovering apples regrow annually. Someone noticed that plants make hard shelled things that aren't too tasty. When these hard shelled things fall on a piece of dirt they might sprout into the kind of plant they came from. So maybe they experimented - put in dirt. Nothing happened. They told someone else about the observation and that their experiment didn't work. The second person maybe then said, "Well, now that you mentioned it, I noticed lots of things start growing after rain." So the first person repeats the experiment but adds water this time. Bam, a few days later a little plant pops up. Fermentation might be similar. Someone collects wheat or fruit, puts it in a jar. The fruit/wheat gets some water and the sugars ferment. The person decides to drink the water in the jar 'cause they're thirsty. "Hmm," they say, "This water tastes kinda good." They drink more and feel good ('cause they're a little tipsy). They tell their friends and the friends try it out. Someone then might notice, "Hey, I never get sick drinking water that I've left rotting fruit in and it always makes me feel good. I should try this with other stuff." A few iterations later and we've got the first low-alcoholic brewery in the world. And then maybe that farmer guy from the previous example walks by the fermenting pots and says, "You know, you can grow that barley and those fruits next to your hut. You don't have to go out and forage anymore. Lemme show you." Bam! We've got agriculture. So it's an iterative learning process that starts off with a few observations, some knowledge passed between people, and trial and error.
| 7
| 669
|
[MLT:700]
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AskReddit/d26zxfd
|
4f9d1k
|
What's the most inappropriate thing a child has said/done to embarrass you in public?
|
My approximately 5 or 6 year old daughter was with me when I was in line at a hardware store. She asked me about something on a shelf or whatever, and I casually answered her. She replied with "I see said the blind man to his deaf wife." I was initially embarrassed, but the other guys in line just laughed a little and I realized that she is a sponge and absorbs every single thing I say and do.
| 3
| 88
|
[MLT:150]
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AskReddit/ciqt6qi
|
2a22e2
|
If Forrest Gump were set between 1990 and 2010, what events would Forrest unwittingly find himself involved in, and how?
|
A Young Forrest Gump gives Gorbachev the ideas for Glasnost and Perestroika on a plane. "That nice man with the funny mark on his head went ahead and tried to help his people." A young Forrest Gump tells Governor Ronald Reagan that his mama always said that that walls separate people, and it would be best to tear them all down and get to know one another. "I soon heard that nice governor was telling the Russians that we needed to get to know another." A young Forrest Gump stares down a Chinese tank in Tiananmen Square in the street before being pulled back into the crowd. "I tried to stop that little man in that tank, but I was pulled back. And that's all I have to say about that." He meets a young Mark Zuckerburg who's in high school, and tells him how he wished he could reconnect with all of his college alumni, but can't. "That nice young man went on to create an entire book of faces." Forrest Gump meets Mohammed Atta in a taxi, who forgets his plane ticket, and Forrest chases him down through the airport, and gives it to him. "Sir! Sir! You forgot your ticket." Hands it over to him. Yeah. That last one was kinda dark.
| 298
| 262
|
[MLT:300]
|
askscience/d8kivg8
|
56mgyk
|
How can we know the Sun's surface temperature when the Sun's corona around it is hundreds of times hotter?
|
The corona and chromosphere are very tenuous, so most of the light emitted by the photosphere passes right through them. By comparing the emission spectrum of the sun that's observed when looking directly at the central region and the spectrum that's observed when looking only at the outer layers (achieved by observing the outer edges of the sun), we can separate the two. Note that we we can get a very good picture of the photosphere itself even without doing any of the above. The photosphere is tens of thousands of times denser than the chromosphere and about a trillion times denser than the corona, so without very sensitive equipment (or an eclipse blocking out the photosphere), the chromosphere and corona are invisible. What we see when we look at the sun is essentially just the photosphere. Unlike the corona and chromosphere, the photosphere is opaque so we can't make similar direct observations of the layers below it. Understanding the inner layers of the Sun requires different techniques, including seismology, neutrino astronomy, nuclear and particle physics experiments and computer simulations.
| 12
| 221
|
[MLT:300]
|
AskReddit/c7zypnq
|
16vx0f
|
What's the best (or most epic) war movie you've ever seen?
|
there are many great war movies. I can't reall pick the top 1 so I'll give some of my favorites Kingdom of Heaven, Full metal jacket, All quiet on the western front, The great dictator, Apocalypse now.
| 2
| 47
|
[MLT:50]
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AskReddit/e4gaj4p
|
98ijzx
|
What's the craziest thing that happened at your workplace?
|
had an armed robbery, so 911 was called. coworker clocked out maybe 5 minutes before it happened and went in the bathroom to change because they had to go somewhere right after work. silent alarm and all that, coworker had no clue anything was going down. coworker comes out of the back to leave right as like 9 cops come swarming in in full armed robbery mode, hands on guns and all that. coworker unfortunately matched the description of the robber (really did too, bad day to be white, wear jeans, a blue hat, black sneakers, and a red tshirt my guy) and got ordered down at gunpoint. again this poor guy had no clue wtf was happening, didn't know we just got robbed.
| 3
| 156
|
[MLT:300]
|
explainlikeimfive/dsy3r9k
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7rmup7
|
Why is it that cameras cannot take a clear picture of an LCD screen?
|
Monitors and TVs typically have a set refresh rate - 50Hz and 60Hz are fairly common. This means that the screen is redrawn around 50 or 60 times a second. To the human eye, this looks smooth - it's fast enough to be almost unnoticeable. Cameras, though operate differently from our eyes. If the frame rate of the camera matches the refresh rate of the screen you're looking at, it'll probably look fine. Usually, this isn't the case. The camera then could capture a partly drawn screen as one of it's frames, and then capture a different part of the screen in the next frame, etc. Net result: it looks like it flickers (or you see moving black bars), since it does this very quickly. The black bars are a slightly different story from the flickering - the issue there is called aliasing. It's the same reason why if you film a wheel moving at the right speed, it can look like it's spinning backwards. If you think of video cameras as just taking a lot of pictures really fast, the way we perceive motion in a video is that you assume things move the smallest amount possible. So if a wheel has 8 spokes (evenly spaced, 360/8 = 45 degree separation) and rotates 35 degrees between frames, you'll probably think it took the shortest possible rotation - 10 degrees in the opposite direction (this breaks down if the spokes are distinguishable). The black bars you make see on some cameras are the same effect - the camera captures snapshots at different points in time that make it look like the bars move in a way vastly different from the actual scanning of the screen.
| 9
| 353
|
[MLT:500]
|
AskReddit/eaj835x
|
a0o76d
|
What do you have in your house that requires explanation every time you have guests over?
|
There’s a ukulele on a simple little shelf on the wall when you first walk in, and it seems to perplex a lot of people. It’s a souvenir from our honeymoon to Kauai. I thought it was cool. Apparently, a lot of guests find it a little strange. Oh well.
| 23
| 63
|
[MLT:80]
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AskHistorians/eduwsnl
|
af1ilk
|
Do animals have historical agency?
|
Timothy Mitchell's book Rule of Experts has a well-known chapter that makes a semi-serious argument that mosquitoes have to be understood as agents in the history of mosquito-borne diseases, riparian agriculture, etc. In this, Mitchell is working a bit off an idea that is associated with the critical theorist of science Bruno Latour, referred to as actor-network theory, which also tries to understand environments, objects, animals and institutions as "agents" in an active sense. ​ There is also a considerable body of historical work at this point on relationships between animals (both domesticated and wild) and human communities that tries to understand those relationships as ones that humans did not control in some masterful sense. A good deal of this examines the shift in cultural and intellectual thought in early modern Europe from everyday or folkloric frameworks that saw animals as possessing responsibility and agency for their actions and saw animals as being subject to human punishment. Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre discusses one famous instance of this; Patrick Phillips' Medieval Animal Trials mentions many such examples. Jon T. Coleman's Vicious brings some of this perspective into a discussion of why early European settlers in North America killed wolves in such large numbers. In fact, many human societies have seen animals as possessing some form of will, intention or agency, whether quite literally ascribed to actual, real animals, or through mythological or religious visions. Many spiritual practices referred to as "animism" have seen agency or intentionality as widely distributed not just through animals but the entire natural world, including plants, rocks, water and other natural systems. So this is at least a widely distributed idea in human history, including in the present day. What are the obstacles to seeing animals as agents? Fundamentally, the problem here is the distinctive modern, Enlightenment-inspired understanding of agency that is so powerful in contemporary political and legal systems. "Agency" is itself a pretty messy and frequently underdefined or underspecified term. It can be a polite synonym for the modern vision of individuals as conscious, self-willed, self-ruling, autonomous actors who are responsible for all of their actions and who rationally decide to do whatever it is that they do. It can mean something far vaguer that implies both action and some conception of intention to act but doesn't necessarily rest on such a specific conception of mind, consciousness and individuality. Sometimes when we talk about agency, we also are talking about the conditions that allow (or prohibit) human action--so we can speak or less or more agency, or "giving back" someone their agency, or complain of situations that restrict or repress agency. ​ For this reason, to talk about animals having agency is inextricably tied to implying that animals not only act but intend to act; that they are in some sense or another aware of their actions. Here you slip from r/AskHistorians to r/AskPhilosophy in a substantial way, because I don't think any historian is ever going to provide unimpeachable evidence of the self-conscious intent of an animal to act in a particular fashion, whether that's a household dog, a mosquito, or a medieval pig that has destroyed the grain stocks of a peasant village. I think it is within the purview of historians to suggest that animals act in ways that are responsive to human action, that those actions are unpredicted and uncontrolled by human action, and thus are in some sense autonomous "agents" in the unfolding of change over time, independently of human agency. If you have an interest in the next step, which is appraising animals as intentional or conscious or self-aware, you have to jump to a slightly different epistemological and methodological conversation.
| 12
| 765
|
[MLT:800]
|
AskReddit/c5kblc6
|
x99kn
|
What are some good gifts for a birthday and/or good as a housewarming gift?
|
As you said yourself, if she needs something she'll buy it. Don't focus on what she needs, but rather focus on something that's nice to have but will also remind her of you. If she loves books then buy her a nice 1st edition by her favorite author. If she loves cooking buy her a marble rolling pin. As far as generic housewarming presents for other friends, wine is the traditional gift.
| 2
| 87
|
[MLT:150]
|
AskHistorians/d2hwc0x
|
4ghm0n
|
Was Phillipé I of France hesitant of William the conquerors conquest of England?
|
The short answer is that Philip (or Phillipe*) wasn't hesitant about William's conquest of England, because there was nothing he could do about it. I imagine he wasn't very happy about it, but not because William would become independent: in 1066 Normandy was totally independent from the French crown's influence and its duke, a 38-year old veteran commander, was in no position to lose it, particularly to a 14-year old king who hadn't yet done anything at all of significance. To understand why this is, let's take a bit of a closer look at French politics in the 11th century. While not as weak as some historians would make them out to be, the early Capetian kings ruled through alliances and influence, rather than by direct military might, as primus inter pares ('first among equals) amongst the great French princes (of which the Duke of Normandy was one). Up until 1051, the Normans were the French crown's most important and powerful ally: William's grandfather Duke Richard II was particularly important in Philip's grandfather King Robert II's Burgundian wars in the late 1010s. William's uncle Duke Richard III had been married to Philip's aunt, Adela, in the 1030s. When the illegitimate William became Duke at 9 years old in 1037, he was supported in his precarious position by King Henry I, Philip's father, who continued his support until after William had consolidated his rule in the duchy with his first great military success at Val-es-Dunes in 1047. The relationship turned sour in the 1050s however, and William's increasingly expansionist policies, such as attacking Maine, prompted royal campaigns against William in 1051, 1054 and 1057, all of which the Normans successfully repulsed. After Henry's death in 1060, and the accession of the 8-year old Philip, William had pretty much free reign to do whatever he wanted, and, although Philip might have disliked it, there wasn't much he could do. Relations between the Normans and the French kings remained cool right up until the French reconquest of Normandy in 1204. Philip took the first opportunity given to him to strike at William, but that didn't come until 1077, when William's eldest son Robert came to Paris seeking aid in rebelling against his father. William ended up buying Philip off by giving him part of the contested Vexin region. In fact, as far as we know the two men met in person only once, in 1079, at Gerberoy on the Norman-Picard border, but we know next to nothing about the context. But, as was the case with the conquest of 1066, there was probably unease and suspicion on both sides, but no open conflict. *Conventions on names in medieval history are weird, but they're usually translated into the English equivalent. So we have Philip I, William I and Henry IV in the eleventh century (not Phillipe, Guillaume and Heinrich) but Louis-Phillipe I, George IV and Wilhelm II in the nineteenth (not Louis-Philip, Georg and William). I'm not sure there's any logic to it, but it's weird to think about.
| 37
| 713
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[MLT:800]
|
AskReddit/e4ed6r7
|
989p19
|
What’s more dangerous, being too fat or too skinny?
|
I mean it really depends how far on either side of the spectrum. People at 600 phone don't usually make it past 50 but if too skinny means literally starting to death then that's more dangerous. Not really comparable.
| 2
| 49
|
[MLT:50]
|
askscience/cp33q99
|
2xsbka
|
How might the amount of water in a tea kettle affect the time it takes to start whistling?
|
There are quite a few more variables you would need to answer this question: heating power, heat loss to the environment, atmospheric pressure, starting water temperature, kettle orifice size etc. In general though, for a normal household tea kettle it should take more time to start whistling if there is more water. Assuming you are going from about 20 C to 100 C there is a huge amount of energy associated with the heat capacity of the water. Comparably, relatively little water needs to boil in order to increase the pressure of the kettle enough to start whistling. Your general equation would look something like: Energy to whistle = (water volume x water heat capacity x temperature increase) + [(void volume / molar volume water vapor) x enthalpy of water vaporization] x pressure increase This just tells you how much raw energy is needed to get X water volume to boiling and put Y amount into steam for the pressure needed. It ignores heat transfer coefficients, heat losses, and other more complicated phenomena. To put some numbers to it, the molar heat capacity of water is about 75 J/molK, enthalpy of vaporization is 41 kJ/mol, we'll assume 20 to 100 C and 1 atmosphere gauge pressure needed to whistle. The pot is 1 L and we'll look at half full. E heating = (500 g / 18 g/mol x 75 J/molK x 80 K) = 167 kJ E vapor = 500 mL / 22.4 mol/L x 41 kJ/mol x 1 atm = 0.9 kJ As you can see, there is a huge imbalance here. The heat of vaporization is massively larger than the heat capacity of water, but we only need to vaporize a very small amount of water to increase the pressure in a small vessel by quite a bit. Obviously you can increase the whistling pressure and void space of the vessel to swing the equation to the other side, but I don't believe that is realistic for a normal teapot. For instance you can put the same amount of water in a 90 L teapot and then the two energies would would be equal, or increase the pressure needed to 150 atmospheres. Absent these extreme teapots or including a lot of other complications like variable heat transfer rates, changing the water volume is going to be the one thing that dominates teapot whistling time.
| 2
| 522
|
[MLT:700]
|
AskReddit/c1hzo34
|
fr1qw
|
What's the most hypocritical thing you've ever witnessed another person do/say?
|
Not the most hypocritical thing, but maybe the most frequent. Friends buying green/organic items because they want to save the environment (make themselves feel better), but fail to recycle almost everything.
| 3
| 39
|
[MLT:50]
|
explainlikeimfive/e4t7lxs
|
9a63v5
|
How is it possible that a pair (male and female) of an animal species can populate an entire territory?
|
Think back to school when you were asked a question “Would you rather have a penny doubled every day for 30 days or $10,000?”, and how if you chose the penny option you would get around5 million dollars. Well now say we have some 2 bugs were that just dropped in a new area, and they had 10 children. well a year passes, the first 2 bugs die, mating season began, and the 10 children had grouped into 5 pairs and had 10 kids each, totaling 50 new bugs. The next generation has 250 kids and so on. (If you remember graphs the equation would be (.5•x)•10). By the 10th generation assuming all live to reproduce you will have 19,531,250 bugs. Now the most dangerous parts of inbreeding are called “recessive diseases”. Essentially if you inherit 2 parts of a bad gene from your parents you have a disease. Well say by the 7th generation these bugs start to get them, say it kills off 20% of the bugs. well at the 7th generation you have 156,250 bugs, when 20% die you are left with 125,000 bugs. now the next generation has 625,000 bugs, and by the last generation you have 10,000,000 bugs. While by the 7th generation they started losing 1/5th of the population due to inbreeding, they were still able to reproduce at a higher rate than they died. What stops a lot of organisms from expanding out of control are called “limiting factors”. This can be anything from the sunlight that reaches a given area to the predator population. One of the biggest limiting factors is food and space. Say with the bugs at the 10 generation have ate too much of the food, and no longer have a stable population because they are starving. This kills more bugs until an equilibrium is established or the ecosystem collapses. Say these bugs nest and at a population of 10,000,000 there’s not enough space for all the nests and many bugs are left outside where they freeze/get a virus/eaten. Now Immagine if the 10,000,000 insects had no limiting factors aside from the inbreeding, well they gotta eat, and the next generation is queued for 40 million. This puts a strain on the ecosystem and they can eat till there’s nothing left, at which point they die until an equilibrium is established. TLDR To answer your question in short: They do die from inbreedinf inbreeding but they have so many offspring it doesn’t matter, so it’s up to other limiting factors to essentially put up barriers to keep them from spreading. But Invasive species are frequently a problem wherever they are.
| 1,993
| 622
|
[MLT:700]
|
AskReddit/cl7q8ra
|
2j2de5
|
How can we as citizens stop police brutality?
|
Pay politicians to care about it enough to enact laws which would discourage police brutality. I hear that having police wear mandatory cameras has reduced complaints of brutality.
| 2
| 30
|
[MLT:30]
|
AskReddit/de6xzu9
|
5w3465
|
What were the top headlines of the first 30 days of Hillary Clinton's presidency?
|
Hillary Clinton signs executive order replacing US constitution with Sharia law. In an unrelated event, Clinton Foundation receives $10 billion in donation from UAE.
| 7
| 29
|
[MLT:30]
|
explainlikeimfive/dxm4rvj
|
8dcrqr
|
How does a computer delete/get rid of a file, and clear the hard drive?
|
It's pretty simple. The computer tracks the location of each free space on the hard drive. When a file is deleted, instead of physically removing each bit on the hard drive (very slow) the computer simply adds the file's location on the hard drive to the list of free spaces. This is important to know because when you delete a file it's not technically gone from the hard drive untill it gets overridden. This makes accidental (or intentional) deleted files recoverable. So nothing is ever deleted from the hard drive. It is always storing. In the case of a cleared hard drive it is storing a bunch of garbage. Hope this answers your question.
| 5
| 133
|
[MLT:150]
|
AskReddit/d2ggir9
|
4gd3vs
|
How has someone else substantially changed your life?
|
Hm. I have several people who have influenced and greatly changed my life. None were particularly short instances. One of the top changers is my old Russian Teacher. This woman was 70 at the time she was my teacher, vegan (I'm not, but it's relevant for reasons), ran two miles a day during lunch, had PhDs in Russia and the US and was just the most compassionate badass I have ever come across. I was not good at Russian by any stretch of the imagination, but she never gave up on me. My Russian classes were all day, every day plus homework and after school study hall. I remember many an evening sitting in the classroom with her as she patiently helped me fight through and understand the language and grammar. She was always kind, but the second I started self-pity or claiming I couldn't she turned into a mama dragon and let me have it. Her wrath was scary and inspiring. (I'm not sure how to best answer that) She never, ever, said anything negative that was not constructive and she never let me believe I was capable of failure. She is one of those people that, gah it's hard to explain. Just being around her was enough to be influenced by her. She never directly did anything either, she always guided me where I needed to go and let me get there. Kinda like the rumble strips on the road. As long as I was in between the lines and heading the right way I was good, but the second I veered off she would guide me to the right answer without giving me the answer. (There is probably a better analogy, but I'm doped up on benadryl and at work. Forgive me) She grew up in Soviet Russia and has been living and teaching in the US for YEARS. I'm actually going to visit her this weekend. It's been about 4 years since I graduated with top grades. People always say to lead and teach by example and that is what she does. She loves fiercely and is the most realistic yet compassionate woman I have ever met. Without her I most likely would have failed out of class and my life would be vastly different. Her teaching me to believe in myself and to not give up helped me learn what I am capable of. I was accepted to a prestigious state university this year. I start next month after 6 years of military service and I honest to god owe all of that to the influence she had in my life over the course of a full year. I never would have thought myself capable of being a doctor much less doing anything but military service. I know it seems a bit low-key, but not everyone who changes lives does so in an instance or a day. She said a lot of wise things and is incredibly smart, but that pales in comparison to simply showing interest. She comforted me when I was having personal issues. When I asked for extra help she was always there. When I was mad or irritated she taught me how to deal with my emotions constructively. She was always positive and always sees the good in people. I can't say enough about her. I strive to see life as she does every day and through her I learned how to truly love and care for others, even if I don't like them. Questions welcome. I apologize for not being more concise. It's hard to describe such an enigma of a woman.
| 2
| 695
|
[MLT:700]
|
AskReddit/c0xpz4m
|
d5j1l
|
Are any of you blind?
|
My brother-in-law is blind. He uses software called window-eyes to read whatever is on the screen. He also has text to speech software on his phone, and the preferred audio book player for the blind is the victor stream.
| 2
| 48
|
[MLT:50]
|
explainlikeimfive/exflmdu
|
cslwgi
|
Why we die if the bees die?
|
Bees make plants grow. Chicken eat plants. You eat tendies. No bees=no plants=no chickens=no tendies=no you.
| 25
| 27
|
[MLT:30]
|
AskReddit/c16nd1s
|
eaon6
|
When you play air guitar do you try to make your fingering look realistic?
|
I actually play a real guitar so when I'm playing air guitar I mimic the actual fingering. I've had people tell me I look stupid and "that's not how you play guitar".
| 5
| 39
|
[MLT:50]
|
AskReddit/eix4l2t
|
b34qv5
|
What is a solid reason you would need to wear 2 pairs of pants?
|
Skiing - snow pants + regular pants Extreme cold - legging-type stuff + other pants Prank involving pants
| 2
| 23
|
[MLT:30]
|
AskHistorians/dft2zvl
|
63ayf7
|
How did religion evolve from polytheistic to monotheistic?
|
Unfortunately for your analogy, the development of separate religious orders often happens more in the form of discrete events, like the Great Schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. In addition, systems of polytheism did not become, but were supplanted by those of monotheism. Monotheism is far older than you may think – Pharoah Akhenaten in Egypt apparently attempted to expunge all deities besides Aten in the mid-14th Century BCE, but this change was quickly reversed after his death. However, more modern concepts of deism in particular are as old as pre-Socratic Greece. The philosopher Xenophanes, writing in the late 500s and early 400s BCE, published works in which a mainly naturalistic (albeit scientifically incorrect) explanation for the universe nonetheless revolves around a 'god of the gaps', with an eternal prime mover at the centre – what Tim Whitmarsh in Battling the Gods refers to as 'deity-max'. This is by no means the origin of monotheistic religion, however. A crucial problem with this for ordinary Greeks was that this god could not be worshipped. How do you appeal to total abstraction? In a sense, a number of both pre-Socratic and sophistic philosophers are not unlike pantheists, using 'divinity' as an effective synonym for 'nature' or 'the order of things'. Remaining in the classical realm, there were rational attempts to explain the existence of religion. According to quotations and fragments from Philodemus' On Piety, the mid-4th Century pre-Socratic Democritus argued that people originally devised pantheons to ward off evil, creating gods as the perceived need to keep ills such as natural disasters away increased, whilst the late-4th Century sophist Prodicus argued that they created gods to keep positive events like bumper crops coming. The Sisyphus fragment, meanwhile, comes from a play in which a character claims that the gods were created in order to keep the masses in check (its authorship is unknown – some suggest the tragedian Euripides, who was highly critical of the Greek pantheon, but the more common attribution is to the Athenian dictator Critias, a student of Socrates). This goes some way as to explaining why polytheistic religions were more widely accepted in the classical era than monotheistic ones – it was easy to accommodate sudden changes, be they natural or geopolitical (such as the sudden Athenian adoption of the Thracian goddess Bendis, as noted in Plato's Republic.) At the same time, one can understand why the Romans changed to Christianity despite this. If we go by the Sisyphus view, the advantages of imposing a central religion on a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic and multi-cultural empire may have been seen to outweigh the disadvantages of having to overturn existing religions and becoming less accommodating of potential future additions. In addition, the centralised Roman world was arguably more stable than the fragmented states of classical Greece, and so there was somewhat of a greater spiritual need to secure an afterlife as well as have a good mortal life. Existing Greek cults like the Eleusinian Mysteries were also too fragmented to compete with Christianity, despite probably (if we go by, among other sources, Aristophanes Frogs) having that personal, afterlife-based focus. Thus, in many ways ideas about monotheism have been bouncing around since the classical period, but the transition from polytheism to monotheism as the dominant European religious type can hardly be considered evolution. The Greek pantheistic ideas arguably had little effect on or influence from Abrahamic monotheism, as they originated from an increasingly naturalistic philosophical climate, and the Roman adoption of Christianity can be considered a geopolitical ploy based upon the merits of monotheism for large empires, not the inherent disadvantages of pantheons.
| 4
| 799
|
[MLT:800]
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AskReddit/cfos7bz
|
1yy1j7
|
How do you stop your feet from sweating/stinking?
|
The smell is due to bacteria breaking down the organic compounds in sweat and wet dead skin, so regularly washing your feet with antibacterial soap will help.
| 5
| 30
|
[MLT:30]
|
AskReddit/ch1621d
|
23w8hc
|
What is a skill everyone should have before going to college?
|
Critical thinking skills Written communication skills Personal finance skills And the most important one for learning in a college environment: How to ask good questions.
| 2
| 27
|
[MLT:30]
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AskReddit/c4f4p2o
|
sk04w
|
Can someone help me become a flight attendant?
|
I am a flight attendant. Hopefully I can be of assistance! Start applying for every airline you can. The industry can be notoriously difficult to break into, and I know many people who have been knocked back from several airlines (more than once!) before they got the job. The flight attendant recruitment process is unlike applying for any other job. My advice to you is to read up on what's required, the airline(s) you're applying for and ensure your resume is perfect and tailored to the job prior to sending it off. I don't reside in Canada, so I'm not sure of the exact requirements for your particular country, but flight attendants where I live require a first aid certificate prior to applying. You also need to be extremely flexible, so having other commitments could be an issue, depending on the airline and contract you're working under. With my contract/airline, I need to be 100% flexible, so things needing regular commitments are completely out of the question for me. Others are luckier in that respect, but it just depends on the airline! Typically, the process goes like this: if you're invited to attend a recruitment day, it will start off as group activities. They might be up to 100 people there, so you need to stand out. Get there early, be immaculately groomed and polite to everyone you meet. You will be closely watched as soon as you walk in the door. When I first walked into the room at my interview day, I sat down at a table while we were waiting to start, introduced myself to everyone there and started chatting. It's a good idea to do this as there are eyes everywhere watching how you get along with people. The individuals at my interview day who were shy and sat by themselves or didn't interact with other hopefuls during the waiting periods did not make it through to the next round. Sometimes, other interview hopefuls are airline employees in disguise. To start off, you'll probably be split into smaller groups and asked to work on a team activity. It might be something creative like designing a new perfume or TV show and marketing it to a particular age bracket, or creating a new logo and slogan for the airline. The observers will be watching you for how well you work in a team (whether you can lead etc) and interact with others. I'd recommend trying to stand out and perhaps help lead the discussion, whilst not being too overbearing at the same time. If someone in your group is quiet, make an effort to include them. After the first round concludes, many people will be culled. Those invited to attend the second half of the day will generally now have a one-on-one interview with a recruiter. Questions are behavioral based and typically centered around past experiences. Such as how you've gone above and beyond for a customer or perhaps how you've dealt with a manager who asked you to do something unethical. If you Google flight attendant interview questions, you can gather a rough idea of the kinds of things that are asked. Don't prepare your answers, but definitely think about a few scenarios you can tell them about. They will probably ask you why you want to be a flight attendant too. I'd recommend staying away from cliched answers such as, "because I love to travel and I love people." Be more creative and passionate! Being a flight attendant is a wonderful job and I wish you the best of luck! I was in a mundane, monotonous 9-5 desk job before I started working as cabin crew, and it's been the best change I could have ever possibly made. If I can help with anything else, please don't hesitate to ask.
| 2
| 748
|
[MLT:800]
|
explainlikeimfive/dvwaei6
|
85c479
|
How are businesses able to acquire phone numbers like "333-3333"?
|
They are called gold numbers and many phone operators sell them for pretty high prices. They are usually rated from how memorable they are. A single digit number would probably cost six figures or more. There are also independent companies who buy and sell gold numbers.
| 8
| 50
|
[MLT:50]
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AskReddit/cbmvv74
|
1ka6gr
|
Which names do you associate with certain character traits?
|
Any male name that starts with the letter J is a jerk. Particularly the name James. Even names in other languages that translate to a male name in English starting with J like Diego. Diego is James in Spanish. (In case you haven't realized it yet, I had a bad childhood experience with a guy named Diego and a guy named James.)
| 3
| 70
|
[MLT:80]
|
AskHistorians/caz11fa
|
1hxqjs
|
Why did the French kingdom become much more centralized than the Holy Roman Empire?
|
Here’s a simplified “textbook” version. I’ll let experts German history expand and correct this, because it's probably out-of-date in some ways. In the 900s until the 1000s, monarchial authority in France was extremely weak. The French king held only a small part of France—the “Ile de France” or the area immediately around Paris to Orleans—while his barons held much more territory, like the Counts of Flanders and Champagne in the north, the Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy to the west, and the Duke of Aquitaine in the south. What this Capetian royal house did have was: 1) the sacred aura of church-anointed kingship, which carried some respect and made the monarch primus inter pares even with his comparative lack of land; 2) an unbroken line of male heirs from 987 to 1328, which meant no dynastic fights, which were perpetual in the HRE; and 3) mostly tireless kings (say Louis VI) who carefully policed their rights in the territory they did hold and the territories they gained through expedient marriages. By carefully tending their royal lands, by expanding them through marriage, and by turning to the same bureaucratic innovations—record keeping, fiscal organization, development of institutions of centralized royal justice—by the reign of Louis IX in the mid-13th century, the French crown had created centralized institutions and gotten their barons (mostly) under control. In the HRE, Investiture Controversy between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV in the late 1070s (at the moment when both France and England were beginning to develop centralized habits of thinking) diminished the emperor’s authority, especially once Gregory excommunicated and deposed him; now his barons could resist his attempts at centralizing by refusing to obey an “unchristian”, deposed ruler. This just gave them an excuse for their existing policies of resisting royal authority. When his son, Henry V, died without issue, German barons, already in revolt, flexed their muscle and elected the next HRE. (There had always been an elective element to the office, but heredity tended to win out.) This amped up the tensions between rival baronies, especially the famous Guelfs (whose power was in Saxony) and Ghibellines (the Hohenstaufen of Swabia). When Frederick Barbarossa was elected as a compromise candidate in 1152, he also compromised with his barons, allowing them to keep many rights they had seized during the imperial weakness (an Interregnum, actually). They were also settling lands to the east, which gave them land unimpeded by imperial claims. Frederick also made the mistake of turning his attention to Italian lands and affairs, which would be a constant distraction. HR emperors were continually ensnared in Italian affairs (in both northern Italy and Sicily) from then on; Emperor Frederick II spent most of his reign in Sicily while his barons romped in the north. The imperial title itself was elective by the time of Frederick II, which brought no continuity, as opposed to France where the Capetian queens pumped out heir after heir for 341 years! In contrast, between 1273 and 1400 there were ten emperors from 6 families and 5 of them were never officially crowned. Both France and the papacy interfered in imperial affairs whenever possible, the French to protect their eastern border, the papacy to avoid encirclement by imperial power in both the north and south of Italy. The imperial domain itself was ill-defined which was a weak power-base. All this meant that the HRE grew increasingly fragmented and the imperial title meant less and less. Edit: proofreading
| 31
| 800
|
[MLT:800]
|
askscience/c7tdptf
|
166wb5
|
How does the hair on my legs know when to stop growing?
|
The hair doesn't start growing when you cut it, and stop when it reaches its max length. Instead, every single hair continuously grows for a set period of time, falls out, and the re-grows from scratch, over and over and over. However, the follicles are not all synched up, so the hairs in an area are all at slightly different lengths. If you look closely, you should be able to find quite a few short hairs (that you haven't cut recently, and are short because their predecessor recently fell out), but they're hard to spot with a quick glance, because they're mixed in with a lot of longer hairs. So when you cut the hairs, the ones that were already in their growth phase will continue to grow. Some of them were close to their max growth already, and will soon fall out without ever getting back to their max length. Others had just started growing, and will continue to grow for much longer. Over time, all the hairs will reach equilibrium.
| 14
| 204
|
[MLT:300]
|
AskReddit/dta2z93
|
7t5od7
|
What is something that is actually true, but not for the reasons most people think?
|
Truth: Capitalism is failing in America right now and old truths are no longer true, such as "trickle-down" wealth. Wage gap is widening at an alarming pace. Reason people think it's true: Capitalism is bad and we need more socialism/communism/something not-capitalism. Reason it's actually true: Mega corporations have learned how to wheel and deal in congress to legislate away their competition instead of innovating their way to the top. Also, some industries have been regulated so much that they are no longer operate as traditional capitalism (eg. Healthcare - you don't shop the best quality for the lowest price, you go where you're "in network" of your insurance).
| 3
| 143
|
[MLT:150]
|
AskReddit/ebyveka
|
a6xwao
|
What is something that only rich people can get?
|
I work in asset management now for very wealthy. ($500mm minimum net worth), I will talk about individuals first then institutions. Access is the answer here. there’s a lot of politics to any person or institute with money so understand these are sweeping generalizations: Billions said it right when they described Bobby axe as a planet. These people work with and talk about sums of money that are larger than developing nations GDP’s. Most of their deals start in the $250mm These are side projects. These are ventures that very rarely sell under the $1bn mark. If they want meetings. They get meetings. Day, night. You need to talk to a CEO friend of theirs who can fix your supply at 4am? Done. You have a passion project that needs $20mm? Done. They want to invest $100mm now instead of $10 because the wind changed on Tuesday. Nothing is off limits. Yes they buy toys. But it doesn’t really get anyone’s rocks off anymore. These people create global money making machines from their cell phones because they want to get throbbing erections (ladies too, there are plenty at the elite level), just looking at a balance sheet. After $500mm in personal worth. (Actual assets, not just paper equity shares) the size of the deals expands, but the process remains relatively homogenous. You are just entirely global in your projects, and can create pipelines to support your endeavor. VS domestic+established international pipelines only. Now let’s talk about institutions. Because if high networth individuals were planets these things are black holes. I talk fairly regularly with the CISO of a company that deploys $100-$200bn in assets (i won’t give exact numbers to keep deductible id info to a minimum) Deploying $100bn in assets opens all doors. No country is off limits. No project. No industry. No labor practice. You are untouchable. You can collapse economies. You can influence any market you need. If there is competition you absorb it. They have corporate structures so intense it would take decades to pick apart. All of it totally legal, all of it very transparent in filings. The bottom line is they get what they want. Period. The scale is nearly impossible to really comprehend. I know I’m still amazed. There is an important distinction here between extremely smart and extremely rich. However, I’ve found that even those of average intelligence, were extremely talented in business. All of them are charismatic, and you want to like them. They build reliable networks that can deploy experts they can trust, very quickly.
| 3
| 547
|
[MLT:700]
|
AskReddit/dyth6u4
|
8ip2nk
|
What's the best 3 dollars you ever spent?
|
In the UK, spent £2 on a frame for a picture I painted for my grandparents. I'm an amateur artist but I enjoy painting things for family and friends and popping them in little frames for simple gifts. The last time I ever saw my Grandad alive I gave them the picture. My grandma and he both loved the picture (my grandad couldn't see super well at the time but it brought him joy that I'd made them something home made, he couldn't stop talking about the picture and it brightened his day when he was in a lot of pain). It was the last time I saw my grandad, he passed away less than a week after I gave him the picture. My grandma still has the framed picture on her wall, every time I see it I remember my Grandad being happy to receive it, and it sets off my memory of all the other happy times we spent together.
| 2
| 184
|
[MLT:300]
|
AskReddit/cmkno72
|
2o87qt
|
What argument about religion do you hate hearing?
|
Any argument against Religion that tries to disprove faith using logic. The entire point of faith is that it defies logic and is pure belief. Any argument for Religion that tries to prove faith using logic. The entire point of faith is that it defies logic and is pure belief.
| 5
| 57
|
[MLT:80]
|
explainlikeimfive/cnmn8q2
|
2s6kal
|
How are survival instincts (a baby giraffe walking, a neonate's sucking reflex) passed on genetically?
|
The very short, oversimplified answer is that the brain functions that manage those behaviors are fully or nearly-fully developed during gestation, which allows the instinct to be "learned before birth". If you think about evolution as having its own agenda, and/or starting at birth, this is hard to wrap your mind around. If you think of evolution as a continuous process, something that happens with life as we know it at all times, then it makes sense. In other words, if a baby dies because it's not well equipped in the womb, that's an evolutionary failure; it's also a failure if the baby dies because the gestation period was too long, weakening the mother, or the baby was too large to give birth to, or the mother was slowed by being pregnant and was eaten. From this viewpoint, the winning strategy is to grow the baby as fast as possible, with a minimum instruction set and minimum physical characteristics to give it a good chance of survival, and then to give birth to it. Let's take the fact that herd animals (say, horses) can get up and walk very soon after birth, and can run shortly after that. It doesn't take too much imagination to see the physical characteristics that are useful here: the shape of their legs, the presence of muscles, and so on. If the herd has to move on almost immediately after birth, but the baby horse has no legs, that's not a horse that's going to survive. If it has legs, but no muscles, it won't survive long. Over time, there is a set of competing pressures: how developed should the foal be (stress on the mother while pregnant) vs. how underdeveloped can it be (easy to be preyed upon after birth). The current resting place for these pressures is a foal that is weak (quicker birth), but can quickly get up and run (competent). The same process happens with the brain structures. If the foal has to learn to run, then it's just as bad as not having grown legs yet. It's a better evolutionary strategy to have the foal be born with the "knowledge" of how to run already in place. It has been proposed that the tradeoff here is extra information needing to be encoded in the genome: you have to grow this knowledge into the DNA, rather than having the ability to learn it after birth. This is a slightly more complicated process than learning through experience: where failures in learning from experience can occur repeatedly, a failure state in a genetic sense is the horse dying. It takes longer to adjust the DNA to have that built-in behavior (generations) than to learn something (repetition over time in a single organism). What makes this so unusual to us humans is that we are very unusual in this regard: at some point in our cultural development, mothers (and society in general) took over the majority of the responsibility for caring for the baby. Human babies are incredibly helpless relative to other species' offsprings. The tradeoff that we got for this is that more of our "genetic bandwidth" (for lack of a better analogy) has been freed up to give us more flexible brains: if you study how human brains (and the higher functions of other animals as well) develop in utero, rather than building an extensive network of built-in knowledge, we build a very complex learning scaffold that allows us to be born with very little instinct but stupendous learning ability.
| 2
| 706
|
[MLT:800]
|
AskReddit/d1nzmd0
|
4d5wvj
|
Would you want Facebook to notify your friend list in the event of your death?
|
I would prefer a family or friend write a post a week or two following my death. This way, anyone who should hear it from my family personally would have; anyone being surprised by the news wouldn't be a close friend or family member. And coming from my family would be a little less "cold" than just a Facebook notification.
| 5
| 68
|
[MLT:80]
|
AskReddit/dj0adb6
|
6hqajn
|
If you left your music player on shuffle at a party, what's the most embarrassing song that would play?
|
Depends on what you find embarrassing. Some people might laugh at my hip hop/rap stuff, some people might laugh at the extreme metal, and most would scratch their head when staticy drone music starts playing.
| 3
| 43
|
[MLT:50]
|
askscience/cqq1fil
|
33y7bx
|
How far would the earth need to be from the sun during it's red giant phase to be at the same temperature it is now?
|
The issue is more than heat and light. It is the fact that the sun will bloat enough to reach the orbit of Earth. Our planet's orbit will then start degrade due to friction with the solar atmosphere until it falls into the core of the sun. You would need to move the planet for it to survive. If you can do that then a solar shield is not needed to protect the Earth from the ambient solar flux, though we might still need it for some other problems that I will mention. As for how far it would we need to move, this is much more complicated that it would first seem. We would need to deal with several chaotic processes. As a star starts to burn helium gas there are immense instabilities. Flares, massive outgassing, huge sunspots, and like phenomena that will make it hard to put Earth in any safe place in the solar system and the lost solar mass means any orbit we occupy may change over time. Still by moving a large asteroid like Vesta into an orbit where it passes close enough to Jupiter or Saturn to steal some of their orbital momentum and then returns to Earth to donate that energy to Earth's orbit, we might be able to do this over thousands of years. Of course, we would need to deal with the possibility of losing the moon. Moving mars out of the way and avoiding the asteroid belt. Luckily if we plan right, we can use Jupiter to pull us into our final orbit without needing to move it. To resolve the issue of constant instability in the sun's flux, we might be able to use your solar fabric idea as a sort of dynamic shield to protect ourselves. It is very possible to construct this sort of shield. Rather than one giant one, though we could more easily create thousands of small satellites with a huge carbon fiber webbing that will be held in shape by slow rotation. On this we can place mylar or some other highly reflective material. These can be staged at one of the Lagrange points. Once needed they can deploy their webs and then use the sun's own light to sail to where they are needed. With a large enough arrays, we could shield or heat the planet as needed. As to where, we would need to move Earth to somewhere outside Jupiter's orbit and then use the shield to protect the Earth from the solar instabilities and to adjust for solar flux change until it become severe enough that the planet needs to be moved again. The sun will always be outgassing and heating constantly so we will need to be ready to react with the solar shield very rapidly. In addition, there will be a problem with illumination. While the sun will be much hotter, it will much more diffuse. Instead of a bright point light source, it will be more a big red blob. In addition, the sun while hotter will be emitting more of its energy in the infrared range. We may find ourselves in a situations where the planet is warm enough but too poorly illuminated for plant life. There are solutions to this. We would need to either use the solar shield to increase the illumination or modify the life on Earth to accept these conditions. We can increase the illumination by selecting a material for the shield that is most reflective in the spectrum needed by plants and reflecting that light back to Earth with the consequence of needing to move the planet further out to avoid overheating. As another option, we can heavily modify the plant life on our planet to thrive in the modified spectrum. Fortunately there are a few high specialized bacteria that have shown us the way for this. These have pigments that are able to grab two photons in the infrared range and pass the now sufficient energy for photosynthesis to chlorophyll so it should be possible to add this feature to most plants. We may need to make modifications to animals as well to function better under these conditions.
| 7
| 771
|
[MLT:800]
|
AskReddit/c1okz0t
|
gm9lw
|
Is washing your produce really that important?
|
Most super markets get them covered in pesticides and a thin coating of wax to make them shiny. So yeah its kinda a good idea to wash your produce
| 2
| 30
|
[MLT:30]
|
AskReddit/duegz8k
|
7y8qkn
|
What are some adult equivalents to experiencing Disneyland for the first time as a child?
|
Never been to Disneyland I'm still young Listing to wu tang clan, nas, mobb deep and biggie for the first time feel pretty good
| 3
| 30
|
[MLT:30]
|
AskHistorians/e2mz0dr
|
8zfx5l
|
Why did Christian theologians hold disputations with Jews in the Middle Ages?
|
Christians did consider Judaism as a threat to Christian theology, but not quite in the way you think for disputations. The problem Jews posed to Christianity was fundamentally that they were the religion around when Jesus was, who were promised the messiah of the Hebrew bible, yet rejected Jesus as that person. This is fundamentally the underlying tension that creates Christian antisemitism, and it leads easily towards positions where Jews are actively denying Jesus because they're terrible, or something like that. Christians were very much a secondary audience in disputations. True, they were present at many of them, but strengthening their faith was a bonus. The primary goal was to proselytize to Jews. By achieving this goal, the conversion of Jews to Christianity would itself work as a faith-strengthening mechanism for Christians. Disputations were attempts to counter the theological problem Medieval Christians faced when encountering Jews, but they were not supposed to resolve that directly. It is instructive to get into some of the details of what disputations were like. There are a few famous ones--Barcelona in 1263 is probably the most famous, which pitted Rabbi Moses son of Nachman (known in Jewish sources by the acronym-name "the Ramban") against a convert from Judaism to Christianity named Friar Paul. This one seems to have been won by the Ramban, though it was a bit of a pyrrhic victory for him as he was exiled. Friar Paul actually led the Christian side in another disputation later in Paris. Not all went so well for the Jews The disputation in Tortosa in the early 1400s, again between a convert to Christianity and a Rabbi (though not one so prominent as the Ramban) seems to have been followed with a flurry of conversions to Christianity, though the results of the disputation certainly worked in concert with an increase in anti-Jewish violence in the previous decades. But, none of these were debates quite in the sense we'd think of them. Jewish attendance was generally compelled. This meant that if the Jewish side won, the status quo was maintained, but if the Christian side won, Jews would be persuaded to convert. You might wonder why Christians wouldn't just compel Jews to listen to priests preach at them, and it's a good question--they did, it's just less famous. Jewish leaders complained that this violated the norms of their residency in Christian countries, which largely fell on deaf ears, but a debate would pre-empt much of that. Jewish compulsory attendance at Christian sermons or disputations were closely tied with efforts to missionize among Jews more generally, and anti-Jewish decrees that would push them towards conversion. To sum up, priests were not holding these disputations because they were afraid of Christians being persuaded by Jews. The point of them was to attempt to convert Jews, and in concert with other anti-Jewish policies, this was occasionally successful. Sources: Stacey, Robert C. "The Conversion of Jews to Christianity in Thirteenth-Century England." Speculum 67, no. 2 (1992): 263-83. Bachrach, Bernard S. Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe. University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Chazan, Robert. Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Chazan, Robert. The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000-1500. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
| 2
| 732
|
[MLT:800]
|
AskReddit/e4pmwiw
|
99qfg7
|
Why do photographs come out in-focus when the photographer that took them wasn't wearing his/her glasses when taking the picture?
|
No one is giving you a serious answer because they don't understand cameras, I guess. It's a legitimate question, though. If cameras didn't account for this, visually impaired people would never know if their image was focused correctly until after it was taken and would have to blindly trust the autofocus, which can be highly inaccurate. That would be a huge inconvenience. For this reason, most quality cameras allow you to adjust the viewfinder to your specific visual needs. On mine, it's a as simple as a little dial right next to the viewfinder. If that wasn't there, manually focusing your image would be impossible and you would never know where exactly the image was focused. For this reason, people with glasses don't need to wear them when looking through the viewfinder.
| 4
| 157
|
[MLT:300]
|
AskReddit/coyxmdp
|
2xcn2k
|
What do you typically do when you're stuck in traffic or at a red light?
|
I'll be honest: I'm usually on my phone. And, I question most of the rest of the responses on this thread, because when I look around me at a red light, the vast majority of other drivers are also on their phones. I try not to text while actually driving, though.
| 25
| 61
|
[MLT:80]
|
AskHistorians/civ2ajg
|
2ah58s
|
Why is it called the "Golden Age" of Piracy?
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Piracy has been glorified and romanticed in various ways for 300 years, or about since the time the pirates of the "Golden Age" sailed. I wouldn't really say academic historians developed the phrase, it came out of people writing in the late nineteenth century. As far as I can tell, the term isn't meant to glorify the action of robbery on the high seas and other associated crimes - but it refers to a period or a string of periods of heightened pirate activity practiced by European-descended peoples sometime during the Age of Sail. Often these ages came about in circumstances where valuable targets were vulnerable to attack and governments unable to stop them or unwilling to stop them since it provided an advantage (such as a force to use against others or a source of income). There are a number of periods that are considered part of or the core of the "Golden Age": The Elizabethan "Sea Dogs" of the sixteenth century The "Buccaneers" of the Caribbean from the 1630s-1670s (with their peak in the 1660s) The pirates heading out to the Pacific side of the Americas in the 1670s and 1680s The pirates who raided the Indian Ocean and Red Sea in the 1690s The pirates who raided all throughout the Atlantic Ocean (and Indian Ocean at times - and the Caribbean got especially hit) in the 1710s and 1720s The pirates who came out of being privateers for new nations carved from Spain's former territories in the 1810s and 1820s. Now, the period in the 1710s and 1720s is the most well known and considered the Golden Age the most since the most famous stories/famous pirates (at least numerically) come from that period (you can thank Charles Johnson's General History of Pyracy published in two volumes from 1724-1728 for that). Often, the men who raided the Red Seas in the 1690s are attached to the Golden Age along with the previously mentioned period, since their stories also got promoted as much as those of the 1710s and 1720s (and also received coverage in the previously mentioned book, in addition to other publications in the early eighteenth century). The next well known extension is to add the Age of Buccaneering to all of it because of Alexandre Exquemelin's History of the Buccaneers of America telling their stories. Those three periods are the most commonly associated with "Golden Age" in the order I just presented them.
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| 558
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[MLT:700]
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AskReddit/cdabrgc
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1q8r1s
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Why is there no real competition for YouTube?
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It isn't about what the consumers want, it is about where the uploaders put their content. Consumers might want a site that is marginally functional and isn't continually getting worse and putting ads up, but uploaders want page views and YouTube has the most viewers. Consumers don't leave because they can't find as much content elsewhere. Uploaders don't leave because the consumers are all on YouTube. It is a completely circular problem, and the only really possibly competition would be from a major social media outlet offering a better product (ie, if Facebook sponsored Vimeo and integrated it into their services).
| 7
| 120
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[MLT:150]
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explainlikeimfive/deeb7p1
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5x063z
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What is 'Legacy Code' in programming?
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It is code, often written in archaic languages running on archaic systems, that no one who has to work with it really understands anymore. The original programmers have retired or are dead, the company that made no longer supports it or is out of business, and the requirements are lost or never existed. If it serves a vital purpose, it becomes a sort of a black box everyone is afraid to touch. It doesn't interface well with more modern software, so it takes increasingly convoluted hacks to keep it working. Eventually the company will bite the bullet and commission a project to replace it. These projects often fail and the company returns to the legacy software.
| 13
| 133
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[MLT:150]
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AskReddit/cmxf905
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2pk3an
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Is it wrong to say that babies/children are ugly?
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Baby dog, cute. Baby cat, cute. Baby panda cute. Baby human, ugly disgusting monster that shouldn't exist.
| 3
| 25
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[MLT:30]
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AskReddit/egp87s5
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arro9j
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What was the time you were most scared of your parents/siblings and why?
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I've never been scared of a sibling but I was scared of my dad once, he was so mad that he was holding his fist like he was going to hit me. My mom talked him down. All I did was tell them I found beer in my sisters room and they didn't punish her (she was very underage) and I told them I didn't think it was right or a good idea for them to not address that. He was mad because he said it was not my place to question their parenting. I get that, but hit me? Whatever. I've since realized my dad is a narcissist who does not like to be questioned at all. I worry about my mom tbh.
| 2
| 142
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[MLT:150]
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explainlikeimfive/d9o9mry
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5bgee9
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How is time a dimension?
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You need three numbers to specify a point in normal space - this is because there are three independent directions. This means the space is "three dimensional". Now let's bring time into things. How do we describe an event at a point in space and at a particular time? We would need four numbers - three for the location, and one for the time. They are each independent. Following from the logic above, it seems like combining space and time like this creates something that looks four dimensional. This is a general principles argument - in math, when you have an "4 dimensional system", it really just means there are four variables. In our world, though, it is more than this - the laws of physics treat time and space on very much the same footing. The math doesn't notice much of a difference between the two, as dictated by Einstein's special theory relativity! (Note that there is a slight difference between a dimension of time and dimension of space, but the difference is basically just a flipped minus sign.) According to Einstein, time and space are just artefacts of an 4 dimensional structure called space-time. They don't really even exist by themselves! Things happening "at the same time" for one person happen at different times for another, and different people don't always agree on how long objects are. I can try to explain this with an analogy: Vectors are made up of a bunch of components - an x component, y component, and z component for example. The individual components change if you rotate or change your perspective, but the overall length of a vector stays the same. The separate components are really just part of one whole object. In spacetime, when we change perspectives, see different distances and different times - our components have changed. But just like before, there is a total length that doesn't change - but now the length has to do with both time and space. The three space coordinates and one time coordinate are really just part of one four dimensional object. You can look into special relativity and find all sorts of experiments confirming these weird results. We have to use them to make our satellites work!
| 9
| 432
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[MLT:500]
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AskReddit/esg2kis
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c7ludy
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What's the embarrassing or cringe worthy thing you've heard in game chat?
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Ive heard a guys wife literally leave a guy mid raid and he started crying. The entire party chat heard it go down.
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| 26
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[MLT:30]
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