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what is existentialism? it seems like a lot of redditors believe in this philosophy.

([This](_URL_0_) is a good answer, but I figured I'd try for a more 5-year-old explanation.) You know that game you play, where you keep asking "Why?" until your parents get annoyed? That's basically what a lot of philosophy is. We say that it's important to get good grades. A philosopher asks, "Why?". Then we say that it's because it's important to get a good job some day. But the philosopher just asks, "Why?" again. The label we give you as a philosopher depends on what you think the last answer is, where it's not possible to ask "Why?" any more. If you think that you can just go on asking "Why?" forever, and there's never going to be a final answer, then you're a nihilist. You don't think that it's really true that it's important to get good grades, because there's nothing that says so. If you think that the last answer is "God says so", then you're what we call a "Divine Command" theorist. You think that, ultimately, God is the one who decided it was good to get good grades. There are lots of other possible answers. You might think it is something to do with the way people's minds work, or maybe even how the whole universe works. The existentialist thinks you end at a different place than anyone else says. He thinks the last answer to the "Why?" game is just, "Because you said so." He thinks that, in the end, *you* get to decide what is right and wrong, and what is important to your life. This isn't the same as nihilism, because there *is* a final answer. It's just that the final answer means that the whole thing was up to you all along. This means that different things can be important to different people. You might ask Johnny and Billy whether it's important to get good grades, and they might disagree, but both be right. If Johnny says, "It's important for me to get good grades, because I say so," then it's really true that it's important for him to get good grades. But if Billy says, "It's not important for me to get good grades, because I say so," then that is true too. A lot of existentialists have more complicated versions of this. They might think that only certain people really understand their own minds well enough to know what is really important to them, or that it's a difficult process to make the decision of what's important to them. But the basic rule is that it is ultimately your own responsibility to decide what's important to you. EDIT: Nuwbs makes a really good point in the comments, that it's not quite true that you can just do whatever you want to. Most existentialists will say that the choice of what you decide is important is both really really hard, and really really important. A lot of what existentialists talk about is how to make that hard choice, and how to live once you've made that choice. In other words, how do you decide whether getting good grades is really important to you? And if you decide it *is* important, what does that mean about how you should act? (If you just decide grades are important because your mom said so, and you still don't really do your homework, you're not being a good existentialist.) Exactly how they answer those two questions is one of the main ways different existentialists disagree with each other.

Hellenistic Feminist Revolution?

Female agency is a complex matter and I cannot even pretend to address all aspects here, nor will I pretend to be an expert on this question. I will focus mainly on money and general mobility as the factors I’d consider most important. I hope this helps. First, it is important to note that our knowledge of Greek law is unfairly dominated by the relative “abundance” of sources for Athenian law. Athenian law treated women harshly, but may not have been representative of “the Greek world”. The extant law of Gortyn, for instance, treats women quite differently in some respects (for instance in cases of sexual assault) and the normative potential of women in the lower classes to act on their own behalf was probably always greater than that of daughters of wealthy families; agency also always increased with age. Fundamentally, the increased mobility of the Hellenistic world caused stricter, traditional, local norms to soften (as may be familiar in the form of Perikles’ restrictive citizenship law). With mobility and more monetary, less land-based forms of wealth came the need to compromise in marriage contracts and ensure, in the interest of the wife’s family, that her property was protected to a greater extent, allowing her more economic freedom as a result. This mobility was due, among other things, to the kingdoms, the infusion of wealth they caused, the banking systems provided, and the professionalization and “internationalisation” of soldiers, engineers, doctors, performers, athletes, etc. that they fostered. As the Hellenistic world made the Greek cities wealthier, the number of festivals they held also increased, including night festivals, which allowed women more legitimate opportunities to leave the household. In the late Hellenistic period, women’s associations with not purely cultic functions also began to appear, along with their own financial administration, providing another space, in which women could have their own social circles and financial independence. Another factor that contributes to the idea of a revolution is the increase in epigraphic culture in the Greek cities and the proliferation of honorific inscriptions. Elite women who controlled property are more tangible in this medium than before, because they engaged in the giving of benefactions to cities and temples, paying for sacrifices, buildings, games etc. In return, they were granted public honours or left dedicatory inscriptions, allowing us greater insight into their background. Funerary stele of elite women also show a greater emphasis on learning, with book rolls appearing for instance, so the value of educated daughters may generally have increased, though this was surely also a side-effect of increasing wealth. Due to the revitalisation of monarchy in the Hellenistic world, and potentially the influence of Near Eastern (e.g. Achaemenid) models of female (elite) agency, the role of the Hellenistic queens, such as Stratonike, Apama or Laodike, probably also played a part in this process of relaxing the limits imposed upon female agency, since they were experienced as powerful actors in politics not only among the elite, but also at ground level. The queens appear not only to have used their familial connections to conduct politics, but also to have supported more familial aspects of life through benefactions (such as providing dowries for poor women, supporting cults new couples sacrificed to, marking their own agency by means of gifts to prominent sanctuaries such as Delos, etc.). This in turn granted the familial sphere more prominence in the world and the queens provided models other elite women could follow. That said, it is important to remember that not everything changed for the better. There were conservative moves as well, for instance the renewal of institutions for the control of decorum and decency (gynaikonomoi) in some cities, notably Athens, and the insistence on traditional rules especially in cities that had enough citizens and wealth enough to do so. Even in Ptolemaic Egypt women generally held very little land, the true mark of elite independence in Antiquity, and that is where their legal standing was probably best. Even in relation to just land dealings women really occur only occasionally, though there are, as always, exceptional cases, such as Eirene, who acted as an entrepreneur in her own right despite being a married woman. Overall, the level of women’s engagement in the economy on largely their own terms was nevertheless probably higher in the Hellenistic world, especially in Egypt, than in Classical Greece. Since women were still subject to *kyrios* approval for entering into substantial contracts under Greek law (as in Athenian law, though not under Egyptian), widows may have generally enjoyed the most freedom of action. This approval may, however, have become a mere formality at least in some cases. Finally, a general word of caution may be in order, since the wealth of papyrological evidence from Egypt that attests such female agency in concrete detail may be skewing the general view of how much women’s agency grew in the Hellenistic period, since Egypt had different legal traditions that created a second set of expectations Greek norms had to engage with. Egyptian evidence is thus not necessarily representative of the Hellenistic world, but comparable material does not really exist elsewhere. Our other written material mainly illuminates the world of elite, propertied women, so while it seems that their constraints relaxed on average – though certainly not everywhere – it is difficult to say the same for the lower classes; providing an actual statistical assessment of this question is prohibited by the material. Overall, I would therefore hardly speak of a revolution. The changes also hardly stemmed from any sort of structural awareness of an injustice that deserved to be rectified. The changes were a result of increasing wealth (especially in the form of coined money), greater mobility, and the ideological and political superstructure of the Hellenistic kingdoms. *Some reading:* Chaniotis, Angelos, Age of Conquests, London 2018. Pomeroy, Sarah B. Women in Hellenistic Egypt: from Alexander to Cleopatra, Detroit 1990. The paper by Gillian Ramsey in Coşkun, Altay; McAuley, Alex (eds.), Seleukid royal women: creation, representation and distortion of Hellenistic queenship in the Seleukid empire, Stuttgart 2016. James, Sharon L.; Dillon, Sheila (eds.), A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, Malden, MA 2012, esp. part 3. Thompson, D., “The Hellenistic Family”, in: G. Bugh (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World, Cambridge 2006, 93-112.

how are short daytime naps supposed to be beneficial when it takes you 1.5 hours to go through one full sleep cycle?

You don't need to go through a full sleep cycle to experience benefits from napping because your brain does different things at different stages of sleep. REM sleep (which takes about 1.5 hours) is important for making new connections in the brain and solving creative problems, but you don't need to do that in order to rest during the day. Shorter naps may allow to experience benefits of rest without the grogginess associated with longer nap times. Personally I think naps are terrible and nothing is better than a full night's sleep. I was living life wrong when I used want to nap all the time.

why do people go diving with a snorkel that is not hooked up to any oxygen tank?

With a snorkel you can swim with your face in the water, checking out all the fishies and coral and still being able to breathe just fine. This is when you're at the surface of course. Snorkelers sometimes dive deeper, and the snorkel fills with water and they hold their breath. Then they return to the surface and blow the water out of the tube and continue breather, but they never have to actually surface with their face above water. What you're seeing is temporary. They only dive under the surface for a few seconds at a time for a photo op or something, for most of the time they are using the snorkel as intended.

Could anybody help me with good but easy written sources for the history of the United States from the end of WWI to present?

_URL_1_ PDF here: _URL_0_

can solar storms permanently alter earth's magnetic field in some way?

Technically yes due to [Alfvens frozen flux theorem](_URL_0_). We know that the solar wind (and hence solar flares) interact and move the magnetic field lines. Due to Alfvens theorem field lines are "frozen" to the fluid flow. So if you move the field lines you move the flow and vice versa. So technically a solar flare would have an effect on the fluid flow inside the Earth which in turn dictates the magnetic field. No disaster movies here though it would be complete negligible due to the timescale of the event and how little it would change the flow in comparison to turbulent motion.

As modern medicine increases our longevity further and further, will different types of diseases emerge?

One has to assume yes on diseases never encountered before, but there isn't much of a detailed list at this time. A couple of things to think about. 1) Nuclear DNA damage There is some debate over whether accumulated nuclear DNA damage is relevant to human aging beyond cancer risk over the present human life span. But if we extend life significantly then it'll eventually cause issues through metabolic dysregulation if nothing else - a whole range of possible conditions that could look like metabolic syndrome or something completely different based on loss of tissue homeostasis. _URL_2_ 2) Buildup of waste metabolic byproducts Extending life will have to involve removing metabolic waste products, e.g. lipofuscin consistuents, cross-linked compounds in the skin, etc. There are any number of these, all building up at different paces, and early rejuvenation therapies will probably only target the bare minimum, i.e. those that definitely cause age-related disease, and are building up rapidly. If you look at lysosomal storage diseases, which are caused by accelerated build up of some of these waste products, you'll get the idea of what might happen when you let compounds build up over a very long time that normally don't cause issues because they never reach pathological levels: _URL_4_ Another thing to look at is TTR amyloidosis, which is likely what kills supercentenarians who survive everything else, for an example of this pathology: _URL_3_ 3) Brain mysteries Its an open question as to what happens when you run a brain for a long, long time, even if the damage that causes aging is periodically repaired. The general consensus seems to be "expect issues, probably with memory" but I'm not aware of anyone who has anything other than speculation on this. 4) Unforeseen genetic programs Is aging programmed to any degree at all, or is it just a reaction to damage? i.e. is there a clock anywhere that will cause things like stem cells to shut down over time, or is that shut down just due to epigenetic changes resulting from levels of damage? The evidence suggests the latter, but it's always possible that some programs exist somewhere. 5) Issues with never-replaced cells and macromolecules Some of your cells are never replaced. Some of the actual machinery in those cells is also never replaced over a lifetime. Dealing with this isn't on the list of things to do for the first rejuvenation biotechnology: _URL_1_ So given radically longer lives, this may come back to be a real issue. e.g. see the nuclear pore macromolecules: _URL_0_ 6) Damage is aging So a general framework for thinking about this is that aging is nothing more than the accumulation of damage and the flailing of systems ill-suited to cope with that damage. So anything that's going to happen over very long lives has to be triggered by some form of damage that isn't being repaired. "Damage" here could mean broken cellular mechanisms, accumulated waste chemicals, cell populations dying, etc.

What do historians specializing in Medieval history think of Peter Wilson's *Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire*?

I haven't read it, but I am inclined to do so. I'm nearly finished his *The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy* and I've been really impressed by it. While one good book doesn't guarantee the quality of the others, especially as *Heart of Europe* ventures a bit beyond his usual comfort zone, I'm willing to trust the quality of his scholarship enough to give it a try.

where do illegal drug chemists get the skills to make hard drugs such as meth or krokodil?

It doesn't really take skill; all you need is a "recipe" and the necessary equipment. Discovering new compounds to get people high is where it takes skill. That's more the purview of designer drug manufacturers than meth cookers.

what would a free-trade agreement between the us and the eu mean to these countries and to the rest of the world?

The trade agreement would give tariff free access to the $1 billion wealthiest people on the planet. It would significantly lower the cost for businesses that are based in the USA and export to the EU and vice versa. It is basically an attempt to compete with China both now and in the future, if EU and USA based firms can trade tariff free with each other it gives them a competitive advantage over Chinese business. So the idea is free trade, but the result is protectionism on a large scale.

How is a full DNA transcribed and what is the end result?

There are actually many instances of errors when transcribing a genome. When you're looking at sequencing something larger than say, 1kb of DNA, a common method is shotgun sequencing. While this can sequence entire chromosomes, it has to break them up into smaller parts and reassemble them after. There can be many gaps in the sequence after reassembly, usually at points of sequence repeats. Other errors in the output can pertain to base calls, insertions, deletions, no-calls and miscalls, all of which can have minor differences from the actual sequence. There are plenty of formats for sequences. Plain text, FASTA, EMBL, GenBank or GCG, just to name a few. [This](_URL_1_) website shows several formats and what they look like. Formats for FASTA, for example, can be broken down into coding regions, nucleic acids, amino acids, non-coding RNA regions like tRNA or rRNA, each with their own file extension. These files are called *chromatograms* and some have different extensions (such as .ab1 or .fsa) which require a program to run them. For viewing .ab1 chromatograms for routine sequencing I usually start with Chromas, but [here](_URL_0_) is a good list of available programs. After Chromas you need to input the sequence into a program that can manipulate the sequence, such as DNAman or any of the other programs available. > Is there a tool out there that does regular expression matching for every known genetic sequence of diseases or pretty much anything correlated to anything? That would be nice, but you're assuming we are much further along than the current state of the science is. Only a small fraction of genes that cause human genetic disease have been identified. Within the human genome is an estimated total of 6000 genes that have a direct impact on the diagnosis and treatment of human genetic diseases. Also know that some diseases have many genes causing them, so it's not as easy as "gene x = disease y". I'm not sure of the exact number of genes identified, and I'm not aware of any programs that can scan your file for genetic diseases; to my knowledge this is still only done by professionals with the appropriate tools.

why doesn't alcohol have the nutrition block?

Because alcohol is regulated by the ATF not the FDA. It looks like they're planning on requiring it soon though.

what is a thermoradiative cell and how/why does it work?

I don't know, on a physical level, how this system works. Frankly, I'm too tipsy to research it. However, I can answer some of this from a thermodynamics perspective: Energy alone is not normally useful. It tends to become chaotically distributed everywhere. This is best demonstrated by heat, where the kinetic energy of atoms and molecules gets sort of distributed evenly between all of them and becomes useless. In order to use energy, we actually need to harness its transition into a more useless state. The energy in sunlight is in a very useful state - we call this "low-entropy". Normally it just generates heat in small amounts, which is considered "high-entropy" and not very useful. The energy in a gas engine is fairly useful, as it is at high temperature, but could in theory be less useful than sunlight which is at even higher temperature. Basically, the get useful energy, we put a dam between energy in a more and less useful (lower and higher entropy) state. The warmth of the Earth is high entropy (as it is relatively low temperature) and so normally quite useless unless we find something of *even lower* temperature. Luckily for us, space is even lower temperature than the Earth, and so by putting a dam between the (relatively) low-entropy energy of Earth and the higher entropy of space, we can harness useful energy.

how do computers know where to send a web request if they only know a web address?

There are databases of where to look called DNS servers. They translate the web address to an IP address; which the computer understands and uses to send messages to.

why do we praise the Templar Knights?

I haven't ever heard of someone praising them. I have heard people enthused by the mystery of the order, and the various myths that have sprung up around it. To compare them to terrorists is fallacious in the extreme, as well as anachronistic. They were an international organization, authorized by the pope to guard pilgrims on their way top the holy land. That they were a militant group does not equate them to terrorists, as they were not furthering their own goals, but were simply protecting what had already been conquered by the first crusaders (or attempting to reconquer, but that still falls within that job description). They also became a sort of "proto-bank". Pilgrims would donate their belongings to the order, in exchange for a note of appraisal for what the items/land were worth. they could then exchange the note at any branch of the order. The production from the land they accrued, in addition to the belongings of deceased pilgrims made them incredibly rich. They were also very secretive, with secret rituals and draconian rules, they drew suspicion like a magnet. That, and after living with the Muslims (often quite peaceably) for decades, they had picked up some eastern habits, they were eventually disbanded for heresy. The charges were brought up by the king of France, Philip IV, who owed huge sums to the templars, and it is believed that his main goal was to destroy his debt while acquiring as much of their own wealth as he could, and the heresy was just a plausible excuse. According to legend, while on his execution pyre, the grand-master of the order cursed the king, his torturer, and the pope, and that they all died within a year. Combine that with the fact that most of the order fled to ground, it's easy to see why there are so many myths and legends about them.

I want to learn more about Syria during and just after the French mandate

Check out the recent book *A Line in the Sand* by James Barr. He's one of the first English-language writers to look at the British/French power games in the levant, and he also take advantage of recently de-classified French sources which have been ignored to date. It's also very readable.

wth is going on with r/all?

this isn't really the right forum, 1: _URL_1_ 2: _URL_2_ 3: _URL_0_ 4: /r/outoftheloop

Did WWI fighter pilots carry extra magazines for their machine guns? If so, how much did they carry?

The [Lewis Gun](_URL_0_) had a 97 round pan magazine attached to the upper wing on a 'Foster Mounting' that allowed the pilot to pull the gun backwards and change the magazine. Bear in mind the rate of fire on the Lewis gun was around 500rpm and that gives the pilot around 12 seconds of firing time. The SE.5a carried two spare magazines in the cockpit, and changing them in flight must have been an interesting operation! > I know that WWII planes often only carried enough ammo for something like 20 seconds of sustained fire, which considering the range of WWII planes isn't very much ammo at all. Its less about range and more about the weight of fire. The early models of Spitfire and Hurricane carried eight machine guns, with the SE.5a only carrying two - one of which was basically an infantry squad's light support weapon. The British typically equipped their fighters with 300 to 350 rounds per gun, meaning they were carrying around 70kg of ammunition and firing 160 rounds per second with a mix of ball, AP, incendiary and tracer ammunition. EDIT: The rate of fire of the Lewis guns modified for use on aircraft was actually increased to 700-750 meaning the 97 round magazine would last about 8 seconds, not 12.

Why is mercury a silver color at room temperature when other metals glow fire red at liquid temperature?

The color of glow is dependent on temperature, not state. The glow you see is the [blackbody radiation](_URL_0_) from the metal. Since liquid mercury or gallium are only 300^o K or so, they don't glow very much in the visual spectrum. Additionally, since the radiation emitted is a function of T^4 , things around room temperature don't give off much radiation period. If you heated mercury to 1000^o K or so, it would glow. Likewise, if you poured molten iron into a ceramic crucible, the iron and the crucible would both glow the same color, despite one being solid and one being liquid.

Did the USSR suffer from a reverse "Baby Boom", a slump in birth rates after World War II?

So while it isn't 100 percent focused on your question, you may find [this answer](_URL_2_) to be of interest, as it does touch heavily on the pro-natal policies of the Soviet Union during and following the war as they attempted to encourage procreation. Edit: I've gone and reposted it here with some small additions to touch on demographics after quickly checking through to see what my sources noted there, but I would just doubly note that hard numbers are *really* hard to come by for the period, and we only have estimates for some of them! ---------- Looking at natalist policies in the Soviet Union, especially with regards to abortion, we can see a *lot* of policy being driven by concerns about the birthrate, and its rise and fall. Especially at the time of the war, there was very explicit concerns raised about the issue and policies were changed and created with the explicit goal of raising it. In the Russian Empire, and the first few years of Bolshevik rule in Russia, abortion was illegal. But, as in most places where the procedure is illegal though, the procedure was nevertheless popular, but insanely dangerous. One observer pre-1920 noted: > Within the past six months, among 100 to 150 young people under age 25, I have seen 15 to 20 percent of them making abortions without a doctor's help. They simply use household products: They drink bleach and other poisonous mixtures. The decision to legalize the procedure, and make it simple to obtain, was almost entirely a practical decision. In 1920 they became legal if done by a doctor, essentially in acknowledgement that it would happen no matter what, so the state should do its best to make it safe. They were subsidized by the state, so free to the woman. In 1926, the abortion rate was 42.8 per 1000 working women, and 45.2 per 1000 'housewives' (compare to the US today, at [13.2 per 1000 women](_URL_0_). Modern Russia continues to be very high, at [37.4 per 1000 or so](_URL_1_)) But this wasn't to remain. As noted, the change was not because abortion was seen as *good*, but that legalizing it was a necessary evil and that the state would work to eliminate the underlying economic reasons driving women to have them. As it turned out, poor women were no more likely to be using this 'service though'. If anything, it was the better off women who were getting more abortions. Even worse, the birthrate in the USSR was falling precipitously, from 42.2 per 1000 in 1928 to 31.0 in 1932, according to a government study released in 1934. Thus the law changed in 1936 when policies started to return to pushing more 'traditional' gender roles for women, and included restricting abortion again - it required a medical reason now. As before though, just because it is illegal doesn't mean women don't seek them. After 1936, "back-alley" abortions were on the rise, and they certainly carried additional risks with them, and penalties for obtaining one meant injured women would only be further harmed by not seeking treatment: > Women who became infected during these procedures or who sought assistance for heavy bleeding were often interrogated at the hospital before they were treated, as the authorities attempted to learn the names of underground abortionists. Abortionists were punished with one or two years’ imprisonment if they were physicians and at least three if they were not. The woman herself received a reprimand for her first offense and a fine if caught again. Abortion statistics aren't readily available for this period, but my book notes that as the birth rate didn't seem to change much - rising briefly through 1937 when it reached 39.6 per 1000 but again beginning to decline until leveling out at 33.6 per 1000 in 1940, the same rate as 1936 when the law went into effect - as the laws became restrictive again, this would imply women weren't especially deterred by the law and continued to seek them at the same rate as before (see 1926 numbers), if not higher. There was no ready access to, nor education regarding, other means of birth control (Aside from abortion as birth control, by far most common being 'coitus interruptus'), so it was really the only means of family planning available to women. The massive population losses that occurred in the early 1940s further increased pro-natal policy planning, but with both carrots and sticks. Laws to assist so called "war widows" (referring not simply to women who lost husbands, but women who lost the *potential* for a husband due to the decline in the male population) both in raising their children as single mothers as well as having children in the first place. Soviet propaganda campaigns to encourage motherhood predated the war even, but the massive calamity of course kicked it into overdrive. During the war, there was a definite decline in the birthrate due to "general decline in the reproductive health of mothers, as reflected in the high rate of premature births", as characterized by the People’s Commissar of Public Health G.A. Miterev, and Soviet leadership worked hard to try to turn that around, with their clear awareness that to see further decline would imperil the ability of the USSR to bounce back in the long term. Programs and incentives to encourage motherhood existed, such as awards for bearing a certain number of children and various state assistance programs for both married single mothers, while legal penalties were either added or increased, most especially with the Family Law of 1944, which further penalized abortion and increasingly penalized divorce as well. The shortage of men also meant a very important shift, in which the Soviets worked to try and both destigmatize single-motherhood by increasing state benefits they could receive and featuring mothers of ambiguous marital status in propaganda, while also tacitly encourage even *married* men to sleep around by preventing the single mothers from suing the father for child support, and making it harder for their irate wives to divorce them. The result being that many men would have numerous affairs, and even unmarried men would often bounce from relationship to relationship. Now as to your question, which is basically whether or not the Soviets were successful in reversing the trend during the war years? Well, not terribly. There *was* a definite boost in the fertility rate immediately after the war years, but it was rather short lived, and quickly began to decline again. Here is a table of the fertility rates of the US and USSR, which allows for a comparison of the 'Baby Boom' in America, for the period in question: Year | USA Total Fertility | USSR Total Fertility | - | Year | USA Total Fertility | USSR Total Fertility ---|---|----|---|---|----|----| 1926| 2,909| 5,566 | - |1944| 2,567| 1,942 1927| 2,827| 5,418 | - |1945| 2,491| 1,762 1928| 2,656| 5,318 | - |1946| 2,942| 2,868 1929| 2,524| 4,985 | - |1947| 3,273| 3,232 1930| 2,508| 4,826 | - | 1948| 3,108| 3,079 1931| 2,376| 4,255 | - | 1949| 3,110| 3,007 1932| 2,288| 3,573 | - | 1950| 3,090| 2,851 1933| 2,147| 3,621 | - | 1951| 3,268| 2,914 1934| 2,204| 2,904 | - | 1952| 3,357| 2,898 1935| 2,163| 3,263 | - | 1954| 3,541| 2,974 1936| 2,119| 3,652 | - | 1955| 3,578| 2,909 1937| 2,147| 4,308 | - | 1956| 3,688| 2,899 1938| 2,199| 4,351 | - | 1957| 3,767| 2,903 1939| 2,154| 3,964 | - | 1958| 3,703| 2,940 1940| 2,301| 3,752 | - | 1959| 3,712| 2,903 1941| 2,399| 3,742 | - | 1960| 3,653| 2,940 1942| 2,628| 2,933 | - | 1961| 3,627| 2,879 1943| 2,718| 2,366 | - | 1962| 3,471| 2,755 So as you can see, they did bounce, with a sharp - and important - increase in 1946 and 1947, but certainly didn't regain pre-war levels like we see in the US, and even bigger, while they had been far higher than the US before the war, the total fertility rate is now noticeably lower (with a minor exception being, when broken into age cohorts, a higher rate in the USSR for women over 30) and stabilized much quicker within a few years of the war (stabilized being a relative term. there would be later drops). So all in all, yes, there was a brief boom that we can see, and it likely was quite important as far as the stability of Soviet population numbers go, but it wasn't as long lasting as we see in the US, puttering out somewhat quickly. Edit: Fixed the table to it is easier to see without having to scroll

why did kim jong il make so many trips to china and seemed to get along with its leaders when they have different ideologies?

They may have different idealogies, but from the perspective of global politics, they are on the same side. North Korea and China, and to an extent, Russia, all are not supporters of a world where the USA is a military leader/policing nation. Put simply, North Korea provides a buffer between China's border and US military bases in South Korea. If North Korea were to fall or be integrated into a USA leaning South Korea, the USA could set up bases, observatories etc much closer to China's border, and that is a big no no for China, as it gives the USA way too much potential information gathering that China doesn't approve of Furthermore, China wants to be the leader in Asia. Without supporting NK and having it fall, China's position as the dominant power in Asia would be threatened by US friendly nations such as SK and Japan

why do dogs go berserk over squeaky toys.

Basically, to the dog it sounds like a wounded animal and so the dog gets a sort of "thrill of the hunt."

Before NMR and similar instrumentation, how would chemists characterize a molecule?

Chemistry goes way back. Jons Jacob Berzelius was the man I consider the true father of chemistry. He had a thing for blowing air on hot rocks, and measured the weight changes very carefully. He figured out that things always happened in proportions... 2:1, 1:1; 1:4. With Dalton's concept of atoms, and Lavoisier's hot new discovery of oxygen (well, like 20 years earlier, things were slower before the Internet), he was able to figure out that various atoms had various weights, and that they hook together in various proportions. Once you have those three concepts, stoichiometry is not far behind. From there, you can do elemental analysis (burning things and weighing the various products, knowing how many oxygens go in per everything else) you can start systematically going through every known compound to figure out what it's made of. This has its limits. In ~1828, a chemist named woehler published his compound for silver cyanate. His contemporary, a fellow named Liebig, was all "listen schmuck, you can't have done it right, because I already found that compound. It's called silver fulminate, it's got the same ratios, and it's totally different! Why don't you move to Norway with the rest of the saps?" We'll, long story short, Liebig was a jerk, and woehler had stumbled on the concept of isomerism, which was the first clue that how the atoms were connected was as important as their ratios. This process goes on and on. Before long people are shining lights through materials to look for gaps in the rainbow- spectral lines- and using that. With every discovery comes a new tool, X-rays, infrared, ultraviolet, all of them have a niche and the sad result is that us poor chemists have to do a whole lot of work ;)

what art deco and art nouveau is?

Art Nouveau is a pretty, delicate, girly, mostly interior style of decorating and art. Late 1800s. Think of Rivendell from Lord of the Rings, basically. If an elf would use it, it's probably Art Nouveau. Lots of whiplash curves. Alphonse Mucha posters. Art Deco, on the other hand, is the kind of stuff you see on Ayn Rand book covers. Lots of metallic stuff, very hard geometrical lines and so on. Or like, the type of skyscraper that a Dick Tracy, noir film, private investigator's offices would be in. Think the Chrysler Building, the Empire State building and so on.

Definition of War vs Conflict

I would argue that you're both wrong. > it was actually only a military conflict since it was never declared a war by Congress. That's a terribly American-centric view of the war and of war in general. Had North Vietnam declared war on the United States would it not have constituted a war if Congress had failed to reciprocate? Revolutionary and civil wars (and the Vietnam war had elements of both) rarely involve formal "declarations of war." > Until then he holds that it was a full fledged war and not a conflict War is a subset of conflict. The reason why there is a preference for the terminology of "conflict" is precisely because "war" has legalistic objections surrounding issues like, for example, the treatment of detainees. It's for that reason that over the course of the 20th century you've seen a shift from the Third Geneva Convention in 1929, that is, officially, "Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Geneva July 27, 1929" to the universal adoption of the terminology of the [Universal Law of Armed Conflict.](_URL_0_) The use of the terminology of "war" and "declarations of war" (which are a historical rarity over the past two centuries) was too easy for states to abuse, particularly after the experience of WWII where it was almost universally abused by all sides to one extent or another (the incomparable extreme of course being the holocaust.) If you want an academic article citing discussion of this, you could start here, as an example: _URL_1_

What was the French attitude toward the white flag in the 17-19th centuries; wasn't it established by that time to be the flag for negotiation/surrender?

So the Bourbon kings' use of a white banner as their standard was quite controversial, even unpopular, during the 19th Century. But I can't speak to whether any of this was due to the white flag's association with surrender. In all my sources that discuss the white Bourbon flag, it was unpopular not for what it was, but for what it wasn't: the tricolor. (Also worth noting: there are several variations on the "white flag" that were used, including a pure white version and one containing fleurs-de-lis on the white field.) The issues arises on three major occasions in 19th Century French history. One is in 1814-15, when King Louis XVIII is restored (twice) to the French throne. On both occasions, he insisted on using the white banner of French kings of old — white symbolizing purity. But the tricolor had been France's flag for more than two decades, and had been the flag under which the French armies had won victory after victory. "The white flag of legitimacy, not the tricolor of the Revolution (including the constitutional monarchy of 1789-92) and the Empire, as to be the flag of Louis's reign," writes Louis's biographer Philip Mansel (177). "The first mistakes had already begun." While some royalists preferred the white flag, and many other French people doubtless didn't care, significant shares of the population took it as an insult. Joseph Fouché, an intelligent if unscrupulous bureaucrat who served both Napoleon and the Bourbons in key roles, warned early on that the tricolor was "little understood" by the Bourbons and "is only apparently a frivolous" matter. "The color of the flag," Fouché said, "will decide the color of the reign." Louis ordered soldiers to burn their tricolors, as well their regimental eagle standards — provoking several instances of mutiny (Austin, 51; Jardin and Tudesq, 8). Louis persisted, and on the basis of English and Prussian arms managed to keep his throne despite this. The second moment came in 1830, when a popular revolution overthrew Louis's younger brother Charles X and replaced him with the duc d'Orléans, a more liberal Bourbon cousin named Louis-Philippe. In the midst of the "Three Glorious Days" that overthrew Charles, a young journalist and activist named Adolphe Thiers grew up a manifesto calling on Louis-Philippe to replace Charles. It was only eight sentences long, so I'll reproduce it in full: > Charles X can never again enter Paris; he has caused the blood of the people to be shed. > > The republic would expose us to frightful divisions; it would embroil us with Europe. > > The duc d'Orléans is a prince devoted to the cause of the Revolution. > > The duc d'Orléans has never fought against us. > > The duc d'Orléans was at [Jemmapes](_URL_2_). > > **The duc d'Orléans has carried the tricolor under fire; the duc d'Orléans alone can carry it again; we want no others.** > > The duc d'Orléans has declared himself; he accepts [the Charter](_URL_1_) as we have always wanted it. > > It is from the French people that he will hold his crown. (From Price, 163) This was a little over-ambitious — Louis-Philippe was still quite on the fence about becoming king — but it shows the importance people placed on the tricolor. A few days later, on the verge of assuming power, Louis-Philippe needed to win over the support of the Parisian crowds, so he traveled to the Hôtel de Ville of Paris for a famous scene with the aged Marquis de Lafayette: > Louis-Philippe promised to uphold the guarantees of public liberties... This was enough to satisfy Lafayette, who shook his hand. However, through the open windows loud shouts of 'Long live the republic!' and 'Down with the duc d'Orléans!' could be heard from the Place de Grève. At that moment Lafayette revealed once again his genius for the symbolic populist gesture. He took hold of one end of a large tricolor flag lying in the hall, gave the other end to Louis-Philippe, and the two of them advanced with it on to the balcony. At first the people only cried 'Long live Lafayette!', but when he dramatically embraced Louis-Philippe they gave both men a prolonged ovation. (Price, 175) It was the support for the tricolor, and the symbolism it contained, that helped make Louis-Philippe king. The tricolor would remain France's flag throughout Louis-Philippe's reign (dubbed the "July Monarchy," after the July revolution that brought him to power), the short-lived Second Republic, and Napoleon III's Second Empire. The white flag enters the picture for a third and final time in the 1870s, after Napoleon III's downfall. A provisional government had been elected, with a dominant majority of monarchists — though the monarchists were crucially divided between those supporting restoring Louis-Philippe's heirs and those who wanted to bring back the Bourbons in the form of Charle's grandson, the [Comte de Chambord](_URL_0_). The two sides, after much acrimony, struck a deal: the childless Chambord would become king, and Louis-Philippe's grandson would become Chambord's heir. "What their plan did not consider," writes historian Frederick Brown, "was the obduracy of Chambord." Chambord insisted that the white flag of the Bourbons once again become France's flag. "'[That flag] has always been for me inseparable from the absent fatherland; it flew over my cradle, I want it to shade my tomb,' he declared in a statement published on July 6 by the royalist newspaper *L'Union.* '[Under that flag] the unification of the nation was achieved; with it your fathers, led by mine, conquered Alsace-Lorraine [in 1697]... In the glorious folds of this unblemished standard I shall bring you order and victory!'" (41-2) Chambord's supporters pleaded with him to change his mind, but "rational heads could not prevail upon him to bend." The white flag was so unpopular that even many legitimists refused to contemplate abolishing the tricolor now. There were around 180 "legitimists" — supporters of an old-style monarchy under the Bourbons — in the Assembly at that point (out of 638 deputies). But after Chambord's ultimatum became known, a majority of them "dissociated themselves from his manifesto." Only around 80 stuck behind Chambord. The rest, Brown writes, "finding revolution and anachronism almost equally objectionable... pledged allegiance to the Republican tricolor but yearned for a policy of ambiguous complexion — something neither lily white nor true blue." (Brown, 42) None of these sources, in their discussions of the white flag, mention anything about people objecting to it because of its association with being a flag of truce or surrender. That's not to say there weren't those objections, and my sources mention the topic in passing while discussing broader political concerns. If anyone has sources that discuss the fights over the French flag in the 19th Century, I would very much like to read them! **Sources** - Austin, Paul Britten. *1815: The Return of Napoleon*. Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2002. - Brown, Frederick. *For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus.* New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. - Jardin, André, and André-Jean Tudesq. *Restoration & Reaction: 1815-1848.* Translated by Elborg Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. - Mansel, Philip. *Louis XVIII.* Rev. ed. Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1999. - Price, Munro. *The Perilous Crown: France between Revolutions.* London: Macmillan, 2007.

if falsely imprisoned for a long period of time, do you receive any compensation?

In South Africa , you receive your freedom back.

how can people hold two opposing ideas at the same time? e.g. "doublethink"

I don't think it would be especially difficult, although I might be misunderstanding the nature of your question. The ability to hold two different opinions within your mind or consciousness is a ripe example of mental maturity, in my opinion. Ultimately all opinions are not true, simply on the basis of the fact that all thoughts and therefore spoken words are only half of the truth. If that doesn't seem to make sense, let me explain. No thought can explain something fully. A thought is, in its essence, a viewpoint. A perspective. And all perspectives or viewpoints are one-sided. Any situation, circumstance, condition, person, place, or thing, can be thought of and seen in many different lights and perspectives. However, what many people seem to miss is that every single one of these is accurate. You can say, "The world is full of horrible people" and your statement would be correct. But your friend could counteract your argument by saying, "That's not so, I know many good hearted and genuine people" and he would also be speaking the truth. And you can do this with anything. Ultimately, the way we see and experience everything is dependent upon the way we look at it. If we change the way we look at something, suddenly, it's different to us. And so, being able to hold two different opinions without create conflict within your mind is not impossible, but simply dependent on whether or not you realize that nothing exists "as fact" if you will. Everything can be thought of in a new way and so look different to us. Someone who is able to "Doublethink" is someone who realizes that there are two (or more) sides to everything, and that every one of them has some truth to it.

if stars explode because they run out of fuel, what fuels the explosion?

A star is basically a massive continuous H-bomb in space. The thermonuclear reaction at the center is constantly trying to blow it apart. Gravity pushes back in the other direction. Forcing the star's mass towards the center. As a star burns up its hydrogen fuel it starts to fuse heavier atoms. That seriously amps up the energy output, and the star swells to a huge size. After it burns out its supply of iron there's nothing left to fuel the fusion reaction, and gravity takes over. The star's still gigantic mass collapses in on itself, and if there's enough it it, causes a catastrophic explosion. On last truly apocalyptic fusion bang that blows the whole thing into a trillion pieces.

What is the historical significance of Kiev to Russia?

Several nations claim to inheritance to the Kievan Rus. The Vikings did indeed sail down through Russia's many rivers and settle in several areas, Kievan Rus being the most well known. Although it is debated whether the founders were Slavs or Varangians (I imagine it was both). It was perhaps the first powerful state in that part of Eastern Europe. The Rus kingdom spread beyond modern day Ukraine and into modern Russia, thus both nations can claim successorship from Kievan Rus. The principalities set up by the Kievan Rus were largely left intact by the Mongols. Muscovy rose to prominence under the Mongols and it is this principality, under the Grand Duke of Moscovy, Ivan (later the Terrible) that united the others and finally defeated the Horde, making way for the Russian Empire. (_URL_0_) (_URL_1_)

By the time the last Roman Emperor in the West came to power in 475, the "Empire" was really just Italy and some other small parts. But just 100 years previously, the Empire had dominated Europe and North Africa. How did the citizens feel about this decline?

There's parts of your question that I'll leave up to people far more educated than myself on the subject to answer, but I'll try to clear up some misconceptions. Firstly, you state that "in 100 years it was all gone." That's not quite true: the entire eastern portion of the empire survived on the as the Byzantine Empire for almost another thousand years. However, the Western Empire rolled over and died completely. Also, Roman power returned to Italy during Justinian's reign, albeit briefly and weakly thanks to the plague and the Lombard invasion. Secondly, the empire of 375, while appearing in terms of territory similar to that of Rome's golden age, was far from the days of Augustus. Plague, famine, and constant war during the Crisis of the Third Century had diminished the population of the West, already less urbanized than the eastern part of the Empire, quite substantially. Furthermore, the empire was suffering from attacks and settlement by Germanic peoples like the Goths around the late 4th century: far before end of the Western empire, these "barbarians" came to dominate much of the military and part of the government as well. So, in fact, the final Romans' grandparents wouldn't have been born into the great empire you might be misled by a map into believing still existed. Most of those outer regions soon became extensively settled by "barbarians" like the Goths, Franks, and Burgundians, and were semi-autonomous if not independent in all but name anyway. That being said, the Western Empire wasn't in an un-salvageable state at the beginning of the fourth century. When the province of Africa, a vital, rich, and mostly undisturbed region fell to the Vandals, everything really started to fall apart. Finally, I'll give a stab at you asking what people formerly part of the empire would have thought. I'll say, first of all, that it's difficult to determine what the common man would have thought: it's not like he had the ability or the will to express himself. However, the "barbarian" rule in certain parts of the empire, such as Italy, really wasn't that bad and not too much of a disruption from Roman rule. Rulers like Theodoric consciously tried to preserve Roman traditions and were respectful of the native culture. In Iberia, the formerly Roman populace had tensions with the Visigoths, who followed Arian Christianity as opposed the the mainstream Chalcedonian beliefs. In Carthage I know that the Vandals had some mildly prosperous trade and that the region was still rich enough to be Justinian's most valuable conquest, indicating the people were probably still doing alright for themselves. Sources: A History of the Byzantine State and Society, Warren Treadgold Byzantium, The Early Centuries, John Norwich History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon. (has more than a few issues...) I wish I could answer certain parts of your question more in-depth, but my specialty in is Byzantine history, which often lightly sweeps over the events in the Western Empire during late Antiquity. I think your questions are pretty good ones, though it's difficult for anyone to answer some of them. I'm looking forward to seeing one of our resident Roman experts try to take a crack at doing so!

How did the modern Chinese concept of nationhood and race develop?

This is quite similar to [a question asked recently](_URL_1_) by /u/michelecaravaggio that I began drafting an answer to, so helpfully I can kill two birds with one stone here! Admittedly, I'm only really capable of taking the narrative up to the early Republic, before the KMT came to power in 1927, so hopefully someone with a much better grasp of the 20th century's dynamics of race and nationhood like /u/drdickles may be available to step in. The concept of race is not at all alien to modern China, and there is indeed a character for it (which always makes things easier), 族 (Mandarin *zu*, Cantonese *zuk*, Hokkien *chok*, Hakka *chhuk*), often found in contemporary usage in the compound 種族 (Mandarin *zhongzu*, Cantonese *zong zuk*, Hokkien *cheng chok*, Hakka *chung chhuk*), itself at times compounded into 種族歧視, 'racism'. The emergence of this concept is a bit murky, and there has been disagreement over when exactly conceptions of ethnicity became common across China. The crucial thing, though, is that there's a relative consensus that the first people to broadly accept the nootion of 'essentialist' ethnic identities were not the majority Han Chinese, but rather the Manchus. Manchu conceptions of ethnicity are again a source of controversy: those influenced by Mark C. Elliott's study of the provincial Banners err on the side of the Manchus having had a concept of ethnicity from at least the early 17th century, which was made a protected identity following the Banner reforms of the Qianlong reign, while those operating under the framework suggested by Pamela Crossley's study of imperial ideology prefer to view ethnicity as the product of the Qianlong Emperor's promotion of a new, essentialist mode of emperorship. Edward J.M. Rhoads, in his study of the development of Manchu and (to a lesser extent) Han identities in the period between the end of the Taiping War and the Northern Expedition, notes that even then, Manchu identity was still a shifting concept until the post-imperial governments equivocated it with Banner enrolment. And that's just for Manchu identity! While Han identity did change alongside Manchu identity, the move towards genuinely accepting a more 'essentialist' view of that identity began very much in the 19th century. I've recently discussed the shifting basis of Manchu identity [in this answer](_URL_0_). It may seem that discussions of Manchu identity are not directly relevant to the issue of Han identity, but as Crossley and Rhoads both suggest, ethnic policy towards one group almost invariably had bearings on the conception of others. For example, the Banner reforms of the Qianlong period recategorised most of the Hanjun (Han-martial or Military Han) portion of the Banners as either Manchus (if from Liaodong) or Han (if not), and while this liminal group had never been a major part of the population of the empire as a whole, this does point to a policy in which hybrid identities like those of the Hanjun would not be tolerated, and instead the empire's peoples would be increasingly lumped into immutable overarching categories, or as Crossley terms them, 'constituencies'. In her view, as with James Millward in *Beyond the Pass*, the main five constituencies were the Manchus, Han, Mongols, Tibetans and Muslims. The exact basis for defining these was still somewhat unclear. To some extent, it was linguistic – Manchus speaking and reading Manchu, Han Chinese (in all its too-often-forgotten varieties), Mongols Mongolian, Tibetans Tibetan, and Muslims Chaghatai Turkic and sometimes Arabic. To some extent it was religious – Manchus were mostly shamanists, Han were (supposed to be) Confucians, Mongols and Tibetans practiced Yellow Hat Buddhism, and Muslims were, well, Muslims. However, both of these sorts of idealised identity construction were difficult to reconcile with the realities of identity on the ground. Manchus were increasingly Sinophone, Muslim enclaves in China tended to speak the Chinese variety of their particular locale rather than a Turkic language, and of course there are all the varieties of Chinese that were and are spoken across the vast expanse that is China proper. Shamanism seems to have declined outside the imperial court, Han were often Mahayana Buddhists, some Mongols further west were Muslims, the Red Hat sects of Tibetan Buddhism retained a presence in the Tibetan diaspora in Sichuan, and, Islam being a diverse religion despite modern stereotypes, by the 19th century orthodox Sunnism had to wrestle with growing Sufi sectarianism. The response from the Qing court was partly Procrustean, such as through military campaigns to suppress troublesome religious minorities, be they rebelling secret societies among the Han, the Jahriyya Sufi movement among the Hui, or the Bön- and Red Hat-practicing Jinchuan, a Tibetan diaspora group in Sichuan. But aside from trying to force these groups to conform to certain cultural expectations, there was also a move towards altering the basis of identity itself. As with most Qing ethnic policy, this began with the Manchus but percolated down. In Crossley's analysis, this is first evident with Qianlong-era texts stressing the immutable, bloodline-derived nature of Manchu identity, including the 1743 *Ode to Mukden* (ᡥᠠᠨ ‍‍ᡳ ᠠᡵᠠᡥᠠ ᠮᡠᡴᡩᡝᠨ ‍‍ᡳ ᠪᡳᡨᡥᡝ *Han-i araha Mukden-i fu bithe*) and the 1783 *Discourses on Manchu Origins* (滿洲源流考 *Manzhou yuanliu kao*), which nonetheless still called on contemporary Manchus to at least perform their ethnic roles through, for example, revival of linguistic practice. My linked answer above goes into a bit more detail on this front, though at the time I wrote it I had overlooked the continued promotion of Manchu despite its gradual diminution as a point of ideological significance. But let's turn our attention to China's numerically (and now politically) dominant ethnic group, the Han. During much of the Qing period, the Han conception of ethnicity was in very much a transitional state. The late Ming, when China's frontiers were decidedly closed off thanks to fortifications and embargoes against the steppe peoples, saw the emergence of a degree of ethnic essentialism, with its fiercest proponent being the political philosopher Wang Fuzhi, who lived through the Manchu conquest of China in the 1640s-60s. Under the Ming, he had confidently asserted that 'civilisation' and 'barbarism' were physically separated by cosmic design, and implicitly denied the transformative agenda of Mencian Neo-Confucianism. At the same time, though, such essentialism was always a minority position, and under the Qing that sort of belief in cultural transformation remained standard. The Yongzheng Emperor's 1729 *Discourse on Righteousness to Dispel Confusion* (大義覺迷錄 *Dayi juemi lu*), aimed at a Han Chinese audience sceptical of Qing acculturation, stressed that by virtue of coming to rule China, the Qing had acculturated to its ways (in the original text, 'Manchu' appears only twice, referring both times to the pre-conquest state). However, just six years later, the Qianlong Emperor proscribed the text and began asserting hard boundaries between the imperial constituencies, as illustrated above. However, despite officially declaring his opposition to his father's programme of *gaitu guiliu* towards the indigenous peoples of Taiwan and southern China, a programme which very much played into the hands of Neo-Confucian transformative ideas, the Qianlong Emperor failed to completely halt attempts to 'civilise' (or perhaps more accurately 'make Han') the indigenous peoples of China's southern liminal zones. As put by William T. Rowe, notions of transformation were still evident from the 1820s (here, he comments on ethnographic interest in indigenous peoples being motivated by a rather Rousseau-like notion of 'noble savage' predecessors): > if these savages were indeed the ancestors of Han Chinese, was it not remotely possible that something had been lost as well as gained in the course of the civilizing process? This was suggested by one Chinese observer of Taiwanese aborigines in the 1820s. Deeply affected by the cultural malaise of the troubled Daoguang era, with its economic depression, recurrent natural disasters, and ominous threat of European expansion, he argued that the rampant commercialization of contemporary society had corrupted our [sic] inherent propriety and that we [sic] should “get back to fundamentals, like the ancients,” along the model presented by these noble primitives. Rowe also cites two divergent examples of Sinophone groups who either sought to shed or obtain distinct identities during the close of the Early Modern period: the Tanka and the Hakka. The Tanka 'boat people' of Fujian and Guangdong plied the provinces' coastal waters thanks to a lack of good farmland, but many sought to obtain landed property, a crucial affirmation of Han status, and thereby gain, within a couple of generations, formal recognition as Han by their peers. The Hakka, on the other hand, also faced with economic hardship, though possessing somewhat stronger linguistic unity than the Tanka, gained a much more palpable sense of subgroup identity, distinct from the Yue-speaking Punti of Guangdong and Guangxi and the Min-speakers of Fujian, and maintained this sense of identity in spite of broad migration to Taiwan and Southeast Asia. The existence of Tanka and Hakka 'otherness' well into the 1860s does suggest that neither a singular notion of 'Han', nor one based purely on heritage and bloodline, was necessarily dominant at this point.

How many times have 'the Jews' been expelled/exiled/ejected/etc?

Important note, the Babylonians did not expel the Jews from their [the Babylonians'] land as the Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English did. The Babylonians conquered Judea (the land of the Jews) and expelled them from there TO Babylonia, although it should be noted that mostly the Judean elite was expelled while the peasantry largely remained.

why is fascism conscidered right wing and communism conscidered left wing?

The wings are an incomplete portrait of political spectrum, since an accurate description also needs to include the vertical authoritarian/libertarian axis. Communism falls under authoritarian left while anarchism is libertarian left. Conversely, fascism would fall under authoritarian right while something like Objectivism would be libertarian right. Not using that scale, however, there is a concept in sociopolitical studies known as horseshoe theory, which dictates that the farther an ideology drifts from center, the more it comes to resemble the opposite end of the spectrum.

What happened to the Carthaginian people after the fall of Carthage?

Many of them were killed, many of them were sold into slavery, and many of them undoubtedly lived out there lives scarred by the horror that they witnessed. The city of Carthage itself remained devoid of urban settlement, despite the fact that it is a really good spot for a city, until it was designated as a location for a Roman colony by Julius Caesar. No doubt this colonization itself (and the earlier colonizations of North Africa) caused great hardship to the local people. I'm saying this because I really don't want to sugarcoat the process of empire for Rome, which is quite easy to do given what the next paragraph will be. The description of the sack of Carthage in Appian's *Punica*, particularly section 26, is quite horrifying--one particular detail that sticks out is that one street was so slippery with blood that the Romans could not pursue fleeing enemies down it. That being said. Rome never, or at least never unambiguously, pursued a their policy of conquest on the level of population (what one might call "genocide"). There was obviously mass slaughter, but it was always towards a particular end, and not the end itself. So there was never a real attempt to "de-Punify" North Africa, as once the area itself was conquered, there wasn't really a point. And so despite the wars the area itself remained overwhelmingly "native" in origin, which means that the participants in the enormous prosperity of the province in later times would also have been overwhelmingly native. During the imperial period, North Africa became one of the great lynchpins of the empire and its economy, Carthage became one of the largest cities (perhaps equal to Antioch and Alexandria) and some of the most spectacular remainders of the Roman period are found there. Carthage was also one of the great cultural centers of the empire, and in Late Antiquity was in many ways the heart of the Latin Christian world. The wealth of the province has been known about for some time, but the original assumption, bolstered by apocalyptic visions such as Appian's, was that it was a thoroughly Roman sort of place, with the old culture stamped out or at least relegated to the rural and poor. More recently this image has been turned inside out, and many of the indications that were used to show thorough Romanization have been convincingly demonstrated to show the opposite. For example, the Capitolium is a particular temple form modeled off of the Capitoline temple in Rome and basically only appears in Italy and North Africa. It was long thought to be a sign of imperial imposition, but recent scholarship by archaeologists such as Andrew Wilson and Naomi Norman have argued pretty convincingly that, for one, in Africa they were built on local initiative, and for two, they are best interpreted within an *African* cultural context. After all, the Carthaginians had their *own* triad of Tanit, Bel and Eshmun, and there are tons of Tanit related imagery throughout the period. So the broad answer to your question is that despite the brutality of conquest, the Carthaginian people were the determinant influence on Roman North Africa, which became one of the most prosperous areas of the empire. My big influence here is David Mattingly, particularly his *Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire*. He is mostly interested in the enduring divisions and conflict in post-conquest provincial society, which I am mostly eliding over.

why are all the celeb naked pictures allowed on reddit but there was such a drama surrounding zoe quinn?

Well I think you could blame the Quinn thing on corrupt subreddits. Also the pictures are never related, we aren't on r/gonewild :-P

Why did tank destroyers using the Sherman tank chassis have thinner hull armor.

The M10 was a unique vehicle, and wasn't converted from anything that was already produced. The original prototype of what would become the M10, the [T35](_URL_0_), was just an M4A2 Sherman with a different, open-topped cast turret mounting a 3-inch gun. The armor on the upper hull was later changed to sloped plates, creating the [T35E1](_URL_1_). These two prototypes were delivered at the same time, in April 1942. To reduce the weight of the vehicle, the armor on the upper hull was reduced from 1 1/2 inches to 3/4 inch thick. The T35E1, standardized as the M10, entered production in September 1942 with a different turret, constructed of welded armor plate. Both the head of the Tank Destroyer Force, Major General Andrew Bruce, and the head of the Armored Force, Major General Jacob L. Devers, were not particularly pleased with the M10. It was as heavy as a standard Sherman, no faster, and had only slightly better firepower. Bruce favored his pet project, the T49, which would later become the T70, standardized as the M18, or Hellcat. It was light (with the requisite thin armor), and extremely fast, two of the qualities his Force found paramount The armor on the lower hull of the M10 was the same as on a normal Sherman; 2 inches on the front, 1 1/2 inches on the sides and rear, and 1/2 inch on the floor. The M10 lacked the additional 1/2 inch thick belly plate under the driver's and assistant driver's positions that provided them additional protection from antitank mines, presumably to reduce weight. The M36 tank destroyers, as they were converted from existing M10s, featured the same armor protection. Bruce did not favor this vehicle either, as it was heavier and slower than even the M10.

Will a leaf continue to carry out transpiration once removed from its plant?

As far as I know, there are no significant differences in the measurement. We did transpiration measurements on olive leafs with the LiCor 6400-XT and we always took the leafs and brought them to the device. Although I was just the 'picker' during these measurements, I was wondering too. My advisor claimed to have made reference measurements and there were no differences regarding olive leafs. The whole process from cutting the leafs and transporting them to the device took 2 minutes maximum at 40 degrees Celsius and very high vapor pressure deficits. However, I could imagine other species like tomato that lose their turgor instantly and close their stomata immediately. Porometer measurements were always executed at the living plant in that specific experiment.

how can al qaeda both launch attacks against shia's yet also work with shia militants?

One reason is the strategic use of lesser enemies against greater enemies. Another is that al-Qaeda is a gigantic organization with lots of franchises. Some groups start independently and then declare allegiance to al-Qaeda in an effort to secure prestige, expertise, funding, weapons, etc and while ideologically similar are methodologically different. At one point ISIS was an al-Qaeda franchise (hence why they were called al-Qaeda in Irag for a time) that did take advice from the head office until they broke off to do things their own way. Bin Laden in particular was actually quite against the idea of Muslims murdering other Muslims (it's a big sin in Islam to do that anyway) even if they were of different sects. His strategy was to win the hearts and minds of other Muslims and loudly shouting "Fuck you, apostate scum! Shi'ites are infidels that deserve to die!" has a tendency to promote sectarian violence. Bin Laden thought getting the US out of the Middle East was more important than homogenizing Islam.

We have Vampires and Werewolves, what did ancient people get scared by?

Your examples are things that ancient people did get scared by that we do not. Getting killed by wild beasts is a fluke nowadays, and while we are still afraid of twisted aristocrats, they take a different form in our imaginations than vampires and mummies. The monsters we're really afraid of are aliens, robots, serial killers, perverts, cults, conspiracies, and zombies.

SF₆ exists, so why are sulfur compounds with two triple bonds not a thing?

Because bonding isn't as simple as there being "free" bondable electrons. Each electron populates an "orbital", or energy state, that has a particular "shape" and definition. I don't know the exact orbital shell of Sulfur off the top of my head, but it's likely that the particular arrangement and geometry of its bonding electrons isn't able to support those structures in a stable way. Also, it's most likely to do with how freaking electronegative Flourine is (the highest on the scale at 3.98, aka: The best element at attracting an electron density to itself) I expect the SF6 molecule to have a very complicated and convoluted bonding geometry. EDIT: [See the hexaflouride wiki page](_URL_0_), it's a complex formed with heavy elements with lots of electrons. Flourine is, most likely, just brute-forcing its way into a stable orbital pair in the looser outer orbitals of these larger atoms.

Why does lake ice sometimes crack in a spiral?

Your pics look like straight lines. What spirals?

when my computer freezes, why does the music hardly ever freeze or lag with it ?

It depends on how your computer freezes. I've had plenty of freezes where the sound gets frozen too and puts out a rather nasty stream of sound. Typically though, unless it's the program MAKING the sound that's crashing, your computer is hung up on some other program, and all of its resources are frozen trying to resolve the problem.

I'm looking for reading recommendations on labor history of Nazi Germany (in English)

Although it is long out of print, Robert Smelser's biography *Robert Ley: Hitler's Labor Leader* is a good introduction to the *Deutsche Arbeitsfront*, the state body that governed labor affairs and replaced trade unions. The ability of the NSDAP to recruit among certain segments of labor in the Weimar Republic is covered in the anthology *The Rise of National Socialism and the Working Classes in Weimar Germany*. Conversely, the anthology *Business and Industry in Nazi Germany* examines the role of capital within the Third Reich. Richard Overy's *The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932-1938* is a good overview of the Third Reich's peacetime economy and the structural strains created by its particular form of recovery. Finally, although it sounds like fodder for the likes of American far right conservatives, *Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933-1945* by Kiran Klaus Patel is a comparative history of the *Reichsarbeitsdienst* (RAD) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) examining issues like masculinity, collective identity, and tacks a transnational approach to the issue of labor's relationship to the state.

why are furry creatures who lick themselves clean not constantly gagging on hair?

They developed specific physiologies from their repeated lickings that prevent things like immediate gagging, but that doesn't exclude them. For example, a cat will occasionally throw up a hairball. This is the exact hair that they licked off themselves. It's just stored in the digestive tract until a good time to hack it up all at once. Perhaps if human licked themselves more often, we'd develop similar physiologies.

how can insurance companies legally create terms for damages that are impossible to claim?

By the sound of it, if you had purchased the same flood insurance as the home owners, with the same terms, you would not have actually been covered. If the insurance company is saying, "You would have been covered if you had flood insurance", they are probably just taking your word for it that a flood occurred. They have no reason to look further and specify that your situation would not have been covered under their usual flood insurance terms, because (when they are talking to you) they really only have to get across the point that you aren't covered, because you definitely didn't have flood insurance. Only when they are talking to the home owners do they look further and then see, oh wait, it doesn't meet our criteria for a flood.

How long does it take to test someone for ebola?

Hypothetically between about 2 and 6 hours for either an ELISA or for a genetic test via PCR under ideal conditions. There may be some freaky kits to let you do it a bit faster but that is unlikely for ebola.

why is white a brighter color?

White is a combination of all the colors of the visible spectrum. In screens, all colors are mixed using red, green and blue subpixels. So to get white, you have to turn on all three at the same intensity. Thus you get three times as much light as you would for a solid blue color.

Where does science draw the line on what is living and what is not?

From, the perspective of an origin of life researcher, life must be considered as a continuum. Some things are clearly living or not, rocks versus cats, but may things fall in between. Viruses are most certainly alive, they can't reproduce by themselves, but then again neither can a human (you need 2). My preferred distinction is to consider most organisms as cellular life and viruses as capsidated life (though non capsid viruses do exist). Where the line truely blurrs, is when you start looking into the chemistry of self replicating systems and the origin of life. Is an enzyme that can make more copies of itself alive? And well, all you can really say is that its more alive than a rock, but less alive than a cat. The real challenge is determining suitable tests for whether life is present somewhere, such as mars. The last lander sent to mars that tested for life had a criteria such that an internal combustion engine would be considered alive. So when we do decide to draw a line and say this is alive and this is not, it is going to be based on measurable quantities that can be determined through relatively simple experiments. Not on ambiguities involving wheter we should consider something to be alive if it can't reproduce on its own.

why many bands/artists in the 60s/70s could release multiple albums each year, yet nowadays artists struggle to put out an album in a two year period.

Maybe because back then you could actually make money on records. These days releasing a record serves the purpose of getting your music out there and getting fans excited to see you live. Performing live is where the moneys at and when artists are on the road, they don't have the time to work on new records.

Why does a feather fall at the same rate as a hammer when they are in a vacuum? Surely the one with greater mass (gravity) should attract the earth a bit more than the other?

You're only looking at the first piece of this question (although you're quite right about it). The law of gravitation tells us that the force due to gravitational acceleration is equal to the gravitational constant x mass of the first object x mass of the second object / the distance between the objects squared. **F = G x m1 x m2 / r^2**. If we let the first object, **m1**, be the Earth, then it seems obvious that a more massive second object will experience a greater force towards the Earth versus a smaller second object. This is entirely correct. However, the *other* piece of the puzzle is to remember that force = mass x acceleration --- > **F = m x a**. Although the force would be larger for a more massive object, the acceleration would be proportionately smaller, so that it balances out. Mathematically, you can show this by setting **m2 x a2 = G x m1 x m2 / r^2**, and also **m3 x a3 = G x m1 x m3 / r^2**. If you solve for the acceleration of each object, you'll see that it's only dependent on the mass of the Earth, m1. * and as TraumaMonkey pointed out below, the Earth will also accelerate a tiny bit towards the other objects.

the osi model

Are you talking about the OSI-Model as in the computer interconnection model? Oh damn, it's been a while since school. As far as I remember, it is pretty much a (succesful) attempt to standardize how low-level stuff (your USB/Bluetooth/FireWire/DSL/T1 protocols, basically.) ends up interfacing with your applications, and the other way around. How it does that gets increadibly complicated, but unless you're gonna use it in your work (in which case, you should have better resources than reddit) it won't matter that much. One thing to note though, is that the OSI model is ABSTRACT! The whole thing is just to standardize how hardware and software worked together.

why hasn't the us government closed down the deep web and or try to block it from users?

You're confusing deep and dark. Deep us anything unindexable. Settings pages, email inboxes, databases. Dark is where shady, illegal, or exceedingly discreet or private stuff happens.

Why does a flashlight only light up a short distance but you can see the light head on from far away?

If I understand you right, you are asking why at a large distances from a flashlight, you can't see the an object being illuminated by the flashlight beam, but if you turn and look directly into the flashlight from the same distance, you can see that it's on. The difference here is that to see the object under the flashlight beam's illumination, the light from the flashlight has to reflect into your eye. Most objects are no where near 100% reflective. The object only reflects some of the light into your eye - not enough for you to register. The rest of the light gets absorbed by the object and converted to heat, gets scattered in a direction other than the direction of your eye, or gets transmitted through. For instance, a simple, flat, mirror is about 95% reflective, but only in the mirror direction. If you are looking at the mirror at some angle other than the mirror angle with respect to the light source, than you will only receive less than 1% of the light incident on the mirror. If you align yourself with the mirror angle, you will indeed see the light of the flashlight coming off the mirror if you can see it by looking directly at the flashlight.

the setup and dismantling of cranes in construction.

So, for the big skyscraper cranes or "tower" crane, the center pillar the crane rests on can be jacked up - it grows "up" with the building. They'll use a smaller but somewhat portable (or assembled on site) boom crane to assemble the tower crane. Then the tower crane gets jacked up as the building grows. Then, once the building is done, the tower crane will lift up a smaller boom crane to the roof. The boom crane disassembles and lowers the pieces of the tower crane. Remember, the ability of a crane to lift "up" from its own level is limited by the length of its own boom and how far it can elevate it. All the smaller crane has to do is reach just above the component of the tower crane, which if they're both on or just above the roof isn't far. But to lower the tower crane components to street level, that's just lots and lots of cable. Sometimes due to practical considerations, there might be a second boom crane halfway down or something. Roof crane lowers tower crane components halfway, 2nd crane lowers to street. [Outside of really tall skyscrapers though, boom cranes at street level are usually tall enough to reach the tower crane.](_URL_0_) So why not just build with the boom crane on the street? It won't have the lifting capacity of the tower crane. Also it won't be able to hold as much weight out from its center of rotation. The counterweights for the street level boom crane are mounted on the back of the crane itself. The tower crane's counterweights are suspended quite far out. Also, you have to have a lot of bracing for the street crane. The tower crane's stability is anchored by the building itself.

Why do European place names like "Southend-on-sea" or "Villes-sur-mere" explain their location but such names are uncommon or nonexistant in the New World?

Names that describe geographical location? Well in California I can think of many, there's Oceanside, Riverside, Long Beach, Seaside, Quartz Hill. And with the Spanish heritage, California is not limited to English names, there are some in Spanish too: Arroyo Grande (big spring), Morro Bay (bluff), Cerritos (little hills), La Mesa (plateau). In indigenous languages there's Mojave, which means [beside the water](_URL_0_). But I guess they're not common in the Americas because towns in Europe didn't document their founding (I can recall Rome has a myth of being founded); and in the newly discovered territories they colonists tried to leave their personal mark on the towns being founded (family name, crown, religious, or even the new version of were they came).

how are some people able to not only eat but enjoy sour candy?

It's just preference. I like the tingle sour candy or lemons give me. The flavor and tingly feelings are an experience.

why does oil sound like it's boiling before it actually reaches a boil?

In most cases it is water in the oil boiling away. The oil itself would boil at a much higher temperature.

Is it possible to jam the GPS signal?

Yes, GPS jamming is possible - as with any radio communications, you just need to fill the relevant frequencies with enough "junk" to drown out the actual signal. It's also possible to spoof GPS signals, by creating a much more powerful signal that overrides the normal one. This can be used to convince a receiver that it is somewhere else than it actually is - examples of possible uses include misdirecting planes/ships to another destination, by carefully changing the signals you send it over time. In both cases, yes, the area you cover would be limited by your transmission power.

Where did the fish in volcanic crater lakes come from?

Mostly from migratory Birds. A duck that goes from Lake to Lake will often carry eggs on its feet. All it takes is a few and with them traveling so much it's about the only way that you can have a species of fish that spans multiple areas. Otherwise every Lake would end up with a unique species due to a lack of genetic mixing. Some are also intentionally introduced by fisherman or government projects.

why does the fanta in greece taste so much more "genuine" with it's lighter color and more natural taste than the fanta sold in america?

"Real" orange Fanta has sugar and orange juice in it. US orange Fanta has neither of those substances, to save money, and it's really orange, rather than yellower. Interestingly, in Mexico they use the same formula as in the EU, so it's really not a geographic thing.

if a muslim is in space, how does he pray towards mecca? and how would the ramadan work?

Their religion has come up with special rules to adapt over time. Children, old people and the sick dont have to fast. People in special occupations or life threatening conditions are allowed to eat. And mecca is on earth. So just pray facing earth and youre good. If you can time your bows when you pass the middle east I think you get bonus points.

in hollywood, why are successful people in offices always portrayed in context while drinking some alcohol like scotch/whiskey etc? is that really even a thing anymore and if so where did it start?

it may be a sign of wealth to have some expensive whiskey around and to be able to enjoy an expensive lifestyle. I can't tell you if there are really people how have alcohol in their offices, but it is a move hollywood makes to show that a person is rich and successful.

how have the names for the six trigonometric functions originated? (sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant and cosecant?)

It's pretty hard to give an ELI5 explanation, as you will see with the fairly elucidating Wikipedia explanation of the etymology. The word sine derives from Latin sinus ("bend", "bay", "the hanging fold of the upper part of a toga", "the bosom of a garment"). The use of sinus originates in twelfth-century European translations of the Arabic word jaib ("pocket" or "fold").[29] This was in turn based on a misreading of the Arabic written form j-y-b, which itself originated as a transliteration from Sanskrit, of either jyā (the standard Sanskrit term for the sine) or the synonymous jīvā (both literally meaning "bowstring").[30] The word tangent comes from Latin tangens meaning "touching", since the line touches the circle of unit radius, whereas secant stems from Latin secans — "cutting" — since the line cuts the circle.[31] The prefix "co-" (in "cosine", "cotangent", "cosecant") is found in Edmund Gunter's Canon triangulorum (1620), which defines the cosinus as an abbreviation for the sinus complementi (sine of the complementary angle) and proceeds to define the cotangens similarly.

why is it so difficult to get bicycle grease off your hands?

This grease is designed to stay in place and keep your bicycle's gears well lubricated for a long time between reapplication. This stickiness is a good thing and is a desirable product of modern chemistry. Fun Fact: in the "old days" gears would have to be re-lubricated on a frequent basis.

what are vitamin supplements made out of?

In the example you cited, bacteria. There is a non-animal source for every vitamin we need.

Why does your computer screen look 'liquidy' when you apply pressure to it (i.e. pressing your fingernail against your pc monitor)?

Because it *is* liquidy. The screen uses something called a "liquid crystal", which is a layer of a special liquid sandwiched between two pieces of glass or plastic (or one piece of glass and one piece of plastic). This liquid is what forms the image, by changing how it interacts with polarized light depending on the electric field applied.

why are there no freshwater sharks?

Their called River Sharks and they exist. _URL_1_ But basically the problem is that it is difficult for a species to live in both freshwater and salt water it requires really specific adaptation. This is called Euryhaline _URL_0_ and is relatively rare in nature. For large carnivorous it's especially difficult to hunt in fresh water because of the size of the prey. In the ocean your not restricted by the depth of of the water, but in river the walk can be much shallower which doesn't support as large animals and make shark body less adaptable to the environment.

why do fake elections in many regimes end up with 99% and not a 100% of the votes for the candidate? (north korean elections, third reich,...)

Probably to make it seem at least a tiny bit legitimate. Like "see, we didn't even get 100% of the votes, we're totally a democracy."

those black rubber tubes that cross the road and appear to count cars. why are they counting and who puts them there?

They're very simple and cheap methods to gather traffic data for road and traffic planning. They're generally put down by local government and/or highways agencies, or companies working under contract to them. Potential questions they could be asking: * There are planned road works on this road. How much traffic will we need to account for to divert on to other roads? * There are high rates of accidents near this point. How fast are people generally travelling?* * The signals down the road are often getting jammed up. How many cars regularly pass this area? * Are large numbers of people using this side street as a cut-through to avoid a main road? * Are the traffic signals further down the road creating enough natural gaps for pedestrians to cross, or do we need a specific pedestrian crossing here? In short, those tubes are an extremely cheap and effective way of measuring lots of things about traffic for planning purposes. There's also no potentially identifying information collected, so nobody tends to care about being monitored by them. [Edit] *To answer a very common followup question, these lines are usually put down in pairs a few yards apart so that speed can be measured. Measuring speed with a single line is indeed very unreliable because of varying wheelbase lengths, but with two lines you're literally measuring the time to travel between two points which is exactly what speed is.

why are drag queens so easily distinguishable from women in equal makeup?

**Yes, it's the face structure.** Humans are quite good at recognising small details in faces. Our brains are "programmed" that way. Men and women typically have different facial characteristics. To an alien or another animal we all look the same, but we can usually tell the difference.

normal form in databases?

So: Let's get the fundamental idea out of the way. In a database, you'd like to store data in one place, and one place only. You don't want to have it so that a single piece of information appears in multiple places in the database, nor do you want your database to be unable to process requests that "don't fit" in to the database: like being unable to store the information about four children, because you assumed that each parent only has three at most. The aim of the game is that each data appears once, and that the data you're storing is connected in a somewhat logical fashion. So, What are the normal forms? ***1NF*** This is essentially just a sanity check: does your database make any sort of sense fundamentally? A database in 1NF will follow the following 4 rules: 1. Each column only stores 1 value. You f.i won't have a column storing a phone number *and* address: you'd have two columns - one storing phone numbers, and one storing addresses. 2. Each column only deals with a single domain of data. If your column is named "Phone numbers" you would expect every single row in that column to be a phone number. If your "phone numbers" column has a row that has "123, Street Avenue Rd" then you have a problem. This is a pretty common sense rule: Columns store what they say they are storing. 3. Columns in a table have unique names. This is also pretty common sense, if two columns in a table are named "phone numbers" how will the database system know which one you're asking for? 4. The order of the data entered does not matter. It doesn't matter if entry "12" appears before entry "9", or if "John Smith" is before or after "Samantha White". Your database either does not care, or has a column specifically specifying what the order should be (like Date of birth or Alphabetical). You can sort afterwards as you need the data. So, that's all fairly understandable. ***2NF*** The second normal form essentially makes sure that data in a table is identified with the *entire* primary key. A database in 2NF if: 1. it is in 1NF 2. It does not contain any partial dependencies. Partial dependencies are when some columns are identified by *part* of a composite primary key, but not *all* of it. Let's for instance take a simple example I nicked from the internet. You're storing some information about student grades. |Student Id|Subject ID|Student Name|Grade| :--|:--|:--|:--| |1|40|John|70| |1|45|John|80| |2|40|AAron|60| |3|29|Lisa|80| You have a composite primary key from (student id, subject id). In order to uniquely identify a grade you must specify a student, and a subject - since students can be in many subjects and subjects can be attended by many students. However, notice "name" here, which identifies the name of the student. That doesn't depend on the subject, only the student ID. This is partial dependency: a column (student name) is uniquely identified by part of the primary key (The student ID). This column will be the same no matter what subject this student is learning. The solution here is simply dropping the "name" column and adding it to the "Students" table, where it presumably only depends on the student ID: as so. Table Grades |Student Id|Subject ID|Grade| :--|:--|:--|:--| |1|40|70| |1|45|80| |2|40|60| |3|29|80| Table Students |Student Id|Name|DOB| :--|:--|:--|:--| |1|John|12-5-1997| |2|AAron|30-1-1998| |3|Lisa|20-10-1997| ***3NF*** A table is in 3NF if 1. It is in 2NF 2. It doesn't have transitive dependency. Transitive dependency is when a column is dependent on a different column that *isn't* a primary key. If a column is dependent on some information in the database, it *must* be dependent on a primary key. ***BCNF*** This is a bit tricky, but is essentially a stronger version of 3. a BCNF database follows: 1. It is in 3NF 2. for any dependency A → B, A should be a super key. What it essentially says is that if B depends on A, then A is a super-key. A super-key is any value or set of values that can be used to uniquely identify a row. It's fairly rare that a 3NF table is not of BCNF, but I suggest you try to look further in to it on your own. ***4NF*** A database is in 4NF if * it is in BCNF * There are no multi value dependencies. A multi value dependency is essentially where two independent columns both depend on the same primary key. Imagine a table that includes kids and pets of someone. |Id|Name|Kid|Pet| :--|:--|:--|:--| |1|John|Jennifer|Sparkles| |1|John|Billy|Sparkles| |2|AAron|null|Minny| |2|AAron|null|Blubbers| |2|AAron|null|Doggo| |3|Lisa|Sarah|Cuddles| |3|Lisa|Sarah|Junebug| |3|Lisa|Joey|Cuddles| |3|Lisa|Joey|Junebug| Notice how we're just splurging unwanted rows, because we are trying to include each kid/pet combination for each employee. Lisa has two kids and two pets, but gets four rows because we must list each kid and each pet. A better solution would be having a "kids" table and "Pets" table, so that kids and pets can independently depend on the person in question instead of having to try and share a single dependency.

how do dan aykroyd and eddy murphy make mortimer and randolph go broke at the end of trading places.. how did they get rich?

Short selling. At the beginning of the trading day, the Dukes have a fake, unreleased forecast report saying that there will be a shortage of oranges, and therefore the price of frozen concentrated orange juice (FCOJ) will go up. The Dukes' goal is to buy as much FCOJ as they can before the report is released and take advantage of the price increase. Lewis instead waits for the price to go way high and then starts *selling* FCOJ he doesn't even own. Basically, he's borrowing shares and promising to buy them back later. The real crop report comes out, saying there is no shortage of oranges. The price of FCOJ tanks, and Lewis finishes his short sale by buying back the shares he has to own to cover his earlier sale. Lewis sold high and bought low, in that order. The Dukes bought high, much more than they could actually afford, and what they own now is worthless, so they can't pay back the exchange (the "margin call"). This bankrupts them. _URL_0_

How do we know quantum entanglement influences things at large distances disregarding the speed of light?

You're right that entanglement doesn't seem weird if you just assume that the outcome was determined at the point when the particles were entangled. This was once a major interpretation of quantum mechanics, which I'll call "local hidden variables." Unfortunately, it turns out that this interpretation leads to different experimental consequences than quantum mechanics, and experiments seem to show that quantum mechanics is correct. This is in contrast to "Copenhagen"-like interpretations, which claim that it doesn't make sense to assign one or the other coin to "heads" or "tails" until they are measured. This is the usual picture of what you call "quantum weirdness," though as you point out entanglement can't be used to communicate. Let me go over why local hidden variables do not work using a thought experiment (I'm using an edited version of a previous post of mine here). the TL;DR is that using very basic assumptions of probabilities, you can't assign the same kinds of probabilities to a local hidden variable theory that you can assign with a quantum mechanical theory, and experiments have shown that quantum mechanics is correct in these cases. The thought experiment involves a pair of electrons with entangled spins. After being created at the same point, the electrons go in opposite directions towards two detectors, A and B. Unless there is some way for them to communicate "at a distance," they cannot send any information to each other after they are separated. When A and B measure the spin of their individual electrons along any axis, they always get either "up" or "down" with 50% probability each. However, if they measure their spins along the same direction, they always get opposite values from each other. Let's try to explain this using a probability theory, like flipping a coin. If we could solve the classical dynamics of a flipped coin exactly, we could always predict whether it is heads or tails. However, we don't have this info, so we assign some probability P and 1-P of it being heads and tails respectively (probability of heads + probability of tails = 1 of course, you must get some answer). After flipping the same coin many times, you'll be able to reconstruct the probability P. For a fair coin, P = .5, but you could have a rigged coin where P is anything between 0 and 1. Correspondingly, we assume that the two spins have some definite function telling them what their "actual" spin is at any angle, which was determined when they were created, but we can't figure it out. However, we can replace the exact values with some probabilities which successive experiments will converge to. Let's assume that A and B both only measure their particles along the angles 0°, 120°, and 240° with respect to the z-axis. We assume that A has some unknown probabilities for measuring spin up for her particle at these angles: P(A=up,0°) = X P(A=up,120°) = Y P(A=up,240°) = Z where X, Y, and Z are between 0 and 1, and of course, P(A=down,0°) = 1 - P(A=up,0°) = 1 - X, etc., since each probability must add to one (with certainty, either up or down will be measured). Finally, since the distribution for particle B needs to be opposite that for A (the two electron spins are perfectly anticorrelated in any given direction), we have P(B=down,0°) = X P(B=down,120°) = Y P(B=down,240°) = Z. Ok, so we've set up a theory, and we can now try to fit experiments to this. Notice, importantly, that we have to specify all three angles for both particles, because the angles can be changed en route between when the particles are created and detected - unless the particles "know" what is going on somewhere else, they need to have all of the above information specified at the start. Let's ask a simple question. What is the total probability that the A and B spins have opposite spins across any two distinct angles? That is, P = P(A at 0° opposite of B at 120°) + P(A at 0° opposite of B at 240°) + P(A at 120° opposite of B at 240°). This is: P = XY + (1-X)(1-Y) + XZ + (1-X)(1-Z) + YZ + (1-Y)(1-Z). I hope it's clear how I computed this probability from the above definitions. After some simple algebra: P = 1 + 2XYZ + 2(1-X)(1-Y)(1-Z) ≥ 1. Here, the final inequality follows because X, Y, and Z are between 0 and 1 since they are probabilities, so both terms are just positive numbers. This is called a Bell inequality, and **it is totally independent of what X, Y, and Z are**. It applies for any hidden variable theory given the assumptions I've made throughout (mostly locality). Of course, the punchline is the quantum calculation, which agrees with experiment: P_quantum = 3/4 < 1. QED. No matter what probability distribution you give me, whatever values of X, Y, and Z, it will fail to describe quantum mechanics and experiments. How do we reconcile this? One easy way is to allow FTL communication. Maybe the particles know what the detector will measure infinitesimally before they reach it, and they change their distribution then. Maybe the particles communicate with each other faster than light to make their probabilities change. The other way is not to assign probabilities to events which aren't measured, so you do not have any sort of probability distribution like I wrote above. Essentially, each "classical" probability P(A at 0° opposite of B at 120°) assumes that there is some probabilities assigned to the 240° angles, but in local quantum mechanics, you simply don't assign values to the unmeasured angle. But this is precisely the "weirdness" that local hidden variables is trying to get rid of.

What's the evidence behind diet causing acne?

So this one is actually pretty well documented with Google Searches: _URL_0_ **Foods that aid skin care:** These foods increase overall skin health Vitamin A,E, & C rich foods Zinc & Selenium Proper Hydration **Foods that may worsen acne** Milk which comes from cows that have hormone supplements, there is still on going research into how these hormones given to cows affect humans, especially adolescent women. Excessive simple sugars which can raise insulin levels will degrade overall skin health. Increased androgens stimulate sebum production and clog pores. Disclaimer: Generally speaking the foods I've listed here deal with overall skin health, and are not acne specific.

How do we know how intelligent Dinosaurs were? Also were there any that were on the same level as, say, dolphins or really smart dogs?

As a note, we don't generally measure against *absolute* brain size, but we note that most animals fall along a fit of brain size to body mass ratio. Some animals lying above or below this line (humans being reasonably well above it, if I recall correctly) seem to indicate more or less intelligence. Sorry on a mobile device so can't link, but check out wiki for brain to body ratio

as a non-american, please explain to me what's all this "hobby lobby" hullabaloo.

The new Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) requires some private corporations to offer specific healthcare options to their employees. The required coverage includes prophylactics and birth control pills, some of which can be used to induce abortion (i.e. the "morning after" pill). Hobby Lobby is a Christian-owned privately-held business that objected to this part of the law on religious grounds. Generally in the US, there are no religious exceptions granted for generally applicable laws: even if your religion expressly condones slavery, you are not allowed to buy, sell or own slaves in the US (at least since 1865). A law passed in 1993, tendentiously named "The Religious Freedom Restoration Act," requires the government to refrain from infringing on people's (or businesses') religious freedom unless a) doing so serves a compelling government interest and b) there is no "less restrictive" method available to achieve the same end. Yesterday's Supreme Court decision simply applied the RFRA law, and didn't reach the deeper constitutional questions implicated by the case. **TL;DR - It is the RFRA law that opens the door for religious exceptions to US public laws, not the SCOTUS decision.**

In theory, could our blood flow in a constant stream as opposed to at the rhythm the heart pumps it at? If it is possible what would be the advantages and disadvantages of this?

Continuous flow pumps are used routinely in any surgery requiring cardiopulmonary bypass - congenital heart defect repairs in children, valve replacement surgeries in adults, and so on. These pumps are quite large and are operated by a specialist with (in the United States) a specialized college degree. The longer-term extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) pump can replace heart and lung function for a considerable period of time - up to a few months if required. Both of these pumps provide continuous flow but also come with some significant challenges and incur substantial risk. There are a number of implantable pumps that can take over some portion of heart function. The Berlin Heart Excor device provides pulsatile flow, but requires an external drive unit about the size of a rolling suitcase. The HeartMate is an implantable impeller device that provides continuous flow. Its support equipment is considerably smaller. There are newer devices hitting the market all the time, many of which are considerably smaller and more portable than devices only a few years older. Collectively, these are called ventricular assist devices. There is considerable debate regarding the need for pulsatile flow. It is claimed that continuous flow interferes with the kidney’s ability to regulate blood pressure. There does appear to be some evidence for long term kidney injury without pulsatile flow, but there are many individuals who have been supported by continuous flow devices for protracted periods without major loss of renal function. The advantages to continuous flow are mainly in that it is mechanically much simpler to provide continuous flow rather than pulsatile flow. The power requirements generally are less, and the devices themselves can be made much smaller.

r/askscience, is it normal to see different hues of color in each eye?

This was asked last week … *twice.* [Here's the one that survived](_URL_0_), I think.

Is every nerve ending in the hand connected to the brain?

I'm not entirely sure of your question. All sensory nerve endings do eventually end up in the CNS (even though each sense may go through different tracts/paths to get to where they end up), where sensory information is processed. In the case of the hand in particular, you have the Ulnar nerve that innervates your hand and receives sensory input. It originates from the mess of afferent/efferent signals carried by your spinal cord. All sensory nerves of the upper/lower limbs originate from a [spinal nerve](_URL_0_) which then send information toward the brain (afferent). So if you get some sort of sensory information from your hands, the signal gets carried from your hand, back to your spinal cord, up toward your brain where it gets processed. There are multiple synapses from nerve ending at the tip of your fingers to the sensory processing in the cortex. Not sure if that answers your question well enough with respect to the optic nerve (I don't understand what your question is with regards to that)

What factors cause the cake batter to change from liquid to solid?

Most baking is about the gelatinization of starch (from flour). This is what forms the crumb in bread and firms up the foam structure of cakes (the foam coming from the action of leavening agents like baking soda/powder). Each little piece of flour is basically a tiny starch granule. When it is heated sufficiently it will gelatinize and become soft and pliable. Starch gelatinization occurs over a range of temperatures, finishing at around 95 deg. C. During the process the starch will usually absorb water. Also, the presence and quantity of other substances such as fats, sugars, proteins, etc. will affect the temperatature and degree of gelatinization. Note that when a baked good goes "stale" that's usually the gelatinized starch reverting to its granulated form.

how come things like washing machines and cars always stay at high prices, meanwhile things like radios and tvs get cheaper and cheaper?

Cost of things are proportional to the cost of their base materials. Things like electronics become cheaper because they are used in technology that allows you to make NEW technology (like whats used in electronics) faster, smaller and cheaper. So, the reason why a washing machine or car raises price with inflation is because the raw materials like steel, aluminum, and plastic are also rising in price with inflation and supply and demand. But, you cant develop new technology to "make" more steel or plastic faster, cheaper or smaller, you have to acquire it the old fashioned way.

Why did the US government refuse to support Chiang Kai-Shek after WW2, and was this a major cause of the victory of the Chinese Revolution?

The US government refused to support CSK after WW2? What? The US sent a whopping $4 billion to him within two years after the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The US gave him military hardware and trained his troops. The US airlifted Nationalists forces to liberated areas, including Manchuria, and also stationed US troops in strategic areas.

How much water does it take to offset sodium intake?

A "normal" blood panel sodium level is ~140 mmol/L, sea water has a salt concentration of ~600 mol/L, so it has about 4.3 times as sodium as blood. As I understand it, as your salt intake increases, the concentrations in your urine will rise without you needing to increase your water intake, until it hits the maximum concetration level you kindeys are capable of filtering at. However, different sources had different levels: one said [~280 mmol/L](_URL_0_), another said [~500 mmol/L](_URL_1_) while noting that one human subject managed to hit 610 mmol/L in his urine. While it's expected that there be generic variants that result in more or less efficient kidneys, this seems like an overly wide variation to me

why do smoke detectors emit the same noise regardless wether they are out of battery or there is an actual fire?

It would cost more to produce a smoke alarm which emitted two different signals. The goal is an alarm which works for a low cost. So it is cheaper to produce one with one alarm sound. If it goes off, look around for a fire. If no fire, change the battery.

how do people get drugs into prison?

Up the butt.

Abolitionists vs Anti-Slavery?

You might start [at the American Memory collection](_URL_1_). The way to think about this is that Abolition=immediate end of slavery because slavery is bad (usually on moral grounds, ie Fredrick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison) while Anti-Slavery=ending slavery for the US. An antislavery person might think Africans are inferior and so ending slavery might stop their population growth in the US. They might see it as a policy problem, and be willing to be gradual. There are better examples when you look at the stances of politicians. Even Jefferson can seem like an antislavery person at times (later in life). See Ron Takaki's [A Different Mirror](_URL_0_).

What is the smallest animal that can hear?

Whether a longitudinal wave is a "sound" or a "vibration" is a matter of scale. We can't hear sound on the order of 10Hz (wavelength of about 30 meters) but we can feel it. Similarly, a 1cm insect couldn't "hear" sounds where the wavelength is much larger than their body, but could feel them. From the perspective of subjective experience the difference may be irrelevant, and can never really be known to us anyway. A few insects have organs similar to human ears, i.e., tympani / eardrums, such as crickets. Most others detect vibrations with external cilli, somewhat similar to the "hairs" in a human's inner ear. Each of these organs can detect vibrations on the same order of magnitude as their size. There's a chart of frequency ranges for various animals on this Wikipedia page: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) No insects are listed, but physiologicaly insects would be most similar to the bat, shifted upward as their size decreases.

faq on united kingdom vote to remain in the european union, or leave. aka brexit

Why is this vote happening and why should I care/not care as someone who doesn't live in UK?

Did Ancient Israelites Write in Egyptian? Was Egyptian (or any form of it) known in Israel during biblical times and was it utilized in writing?

Am I correct in assuming that by written Egyptian you are referring to Egyptian hieroglyphics in particular? And not to later Egyptian adaptations of other scripts/languages? [New Kingdom Egypt](_URL_1_) (c.1500-1000 BCE) was a garrison power in the Levant alongside their military rivals, the Hittites. Both Egyptian records and archaeological sites in the Levant (including Modern Israel and the Palestinian Territories) corroborate this, and multiple extant archaeological sites therein contain examples of hieroglyphics. However, most modern [scholarly attempts to date the composition of the Hebrew Scriptures](_URL_0_) - which mostly diverge markedly from the supposed dates of composition the text itself alleges - suggest that written composition (as opposed to the likely earlier oral composition) occurred after this period of Egyptian hegemony from the 8th through 1st Centuries BCE, when Egypt was either weakened, divided, dominated by outside powers, or a combination of the three. Although many of the people living in the Levant at the time certainly had dealings with the Egyptians and probably knew their language at least in terms of speaking ability, writing/reading ability is another matter and if it occurred would certainly have been more limited. Additionally, hieroglyphics were a less efficient script than others present in the Middle East at this time so adopting them may not have made much sense. It is also important to note that much of the Hebrew Scripture was not written in the Levant at all, but in Babylon. The Christian Scriptures emerged long after the end of Egyptian prominence, so it is unnecessary to address them here.

Why do some people still believe that the South won the Civil War?

After reading your question and explanation, I can only come up with one plausible explanation. The Civil War was a war fought (essentially) over the equality and humanity of African-Americans. The North argued that blacks shared certain common rights with whites, where the South disagreed (this is a *major* oversimplification, mind you). But then if we examine the final settlement of the Civil War/Reconstruction conflict, we see that blacks have actually gained little. They enjoyed temporary political equality, but things like Grandfather Clauses and Poll Taxes destroyed many black's political representation. Then, Jim Crow reestablished blacks as secondary citizens. Finally, the sharecropping system (and southern culture in general) placed blacks back into virtual slavery and servitude. So what did the North really gain from the War? They ended chattel slavery, and little else (I would argue thats all they really wanted). But look, if your friends have these beliefs, just ask them why exactly they say the crazy shit they say. Then youll know, why they say the crazy shit they say.

why are there lawsuits against google promoting its own services on search results?

When a company becomes big and powerful enough to exert control of all the elements of an industry, it will monopolize that industry unless stopped by the political system in which it operates. Monopolies destroy one of the essential facets of capitalism; competition. Competition is the best way yet discovered to cause businesses to innovate, work hard and grow thereby increasing the wealth of a nation and raising the standard of living for the general population.

How difficult is it to create an accurate text to speech from our own voices?

Very difficult. I am a programmer and once tried to make my own text to speech program. Its difficult because for a text to speech software you need to either record a database of every word in the dictionary in every possible tone (which is really not efficient because it s very expensive and time consuming since you need one voice actor to say words perfectly all day long) or you need to build a perfect phonetic alphabet and create rules to stitch these phonetics together in forming words. The main problem arising not from the words themselves but when you try to stitch them together. We humans don't always follow our own grammar rules when speak because we want to maintain a natural tone. This makes it hard for the computer to mimic because then we would need to create rules for the computer to follow for every exception in our grammar which unfortunately, isn't all written in books.

lake effect snow over 6 feet of snow across a wide region. do the great lakes actually measurably lose the volume of water?

Technically yes, but the difference would almost certainly be negligible. Snow [according to here](_URL_1_) is about 5-20% of the density of water. So if you have 6 feet of snow, you will end up with 3.6-14.4 inches of water. Meanwhile, the [Great lakes have a tidal variation of less than 5cm or ~2 inches](_URL_0_) which is apparently masked by wind and barometric pressure causing lake level variations. So losing 3.6 inches, or even 14.4 inches would probably be unnoticeable. Also, as best as I can tell, the Great lakes have a greater surface area compared to the area blanketed by the snow, so the loss would be even less (if they were twice the size, the depth decrease would be cut in half and so on) So yes, if you have precise enough instruments (based on the second link, they have that level of precision), they would measurably lose that volume of water. But in reality, having precise enough instruments and reducing the data isn't very useful so we almost certainly don't have them monitoring the Great Lakes water level.

Did past civilizations have different attitudes to charity?

Sorry, we don't allow "throughout history" questions. It's not that your question was bad; it's that these kinds of questions tend to produce threads that are collections of disjointed, partial, inadequate responses. If you have a question about a specific historical event, period, or person, feel free to rewrite your question and submit it again. If you don't want to rewrite it, you might try submitting it to /r/history, /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. Good luck!

why can't use power bank or phone in airplane mode on plane?

Regarding the power banks it have become very popular with lithium ion batteries which can put out a lot of power. The disadvantage to this is that they may overheat and cause a fire. It may be that the battery is damaged and a heating it during normal operation might bring two internal wires too close together. The lower pressure in the cabin is not helping either as it can make the internals of the battery to change a bit more then usual. When these batteries catch fire you can not stop it but have to let it burn out. All the heat, fuel and oxidizer is stored inside so a fire extinguisher will not help. And a small fire on an airplane can quickly become a death trap as it may take tens of minutes for the airplane to land so you can evacuate. So be careful when using batteries on airplanes and try to do all your charging at the airport. You do not want to be the first one to cause an aircraft disaster because you were charging your phone, people who smoke in the bathroom have already done it. As for using your electronic devices this is usually fine withing some constraints. Most airliners are instructing their flight attendants to even ignore airplane mode as it does not matter and some are even installing wifi on the airplanes. Putting your phone in airplane mode does however save battery life as the phone usually turns the radio to maximum in order to get some signal but still fails. The only time you are not allowed to use your phone is when the airplane is taking off or landing or if you are annoying other passenger or the flight attendants. Most airplane crashes happen close to the ground. So to make evacuations easier passengers are asked to pay attention during these periods of the flight. In theory reading books or sleeping is just as bad as playing on your phone but there are cultural and historical reasons why the rules are as they are. If you were told to turn off your phone in the middle of a flight it is likely that you were annoying people around you.

Can historians recommend any good books about medieval warfare and life in France in the early 15th century?

Right I was writing this on my phone, cobbling it together from a bibliography for late medieval kingship and nobility, last night so I've rewritten and reposted it. Before continuing it should be said that any comprehensive study of warfare and 'life' in early fifteenth-century France requires an examination of England and Burgundy as well. France was in the process of a civil war between two powerful factions (the Burgundians and the Armagnacs) which had led to two high-profile political assassinations (Louis II, duke of Orleans, in 1407 and John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, in 1419), the French king, Charles VI was mentally frail and prone to bouts of madness which had allowed first Louis then John to impose themselves as powerful regents. In 1415 Henry V had launched his famous *chevauchée* which would culminate in the Battle of Agincourt and the capture of numerous members of the French high nobility (including Charles, duke of Orleans) and the death of many others (including John I, duke of Alençon). Henry's campaigns greatly weakened the French control over Normandy but the impasse was not likely to be broken until, in 1419, the future Charles VII, currently known as the Dauphin Charles, was implicated in the murder of John the Fearless. John's son, Philip the Good, concluded an alliance with Henry V which would culminate in the Treaty of Troyes (1420) where Henry V married the daughter of Charles VI and it was agreed that Henry would become Charles's heir and the Dauphin Charles was disinherited (nominally for his involvement in the death of John the Fearless). For the first time the crowns of England and France would be ruled by one man: Henry V. However, on 31 August 1422 Henry V died and three weeks later Charles VI followed him to the grave. Suddenly the situation was complicated. Henry VI of England was only nine months old and the Dauphin Charles had gathered his supporters and established a base in the south. Following a crushing defeat at Verneuil (1424) Charles was driven back and Orleans was besieged by the English commanders. In 1429, the French fortunes turned. Joan of Arc appeared at Chinon, was investigated at Poitiers, and dispatched with the French army under Raoul de Gaucourt to relieve the siege of Orleans. Here Joan's mission was apparently vindicated by God and suddenly there were a spate of French victories (Orleans, Jargeau, Beaugency, and Patay). On the political front Charles was crowned king of France at Reims on 17 July 1429, a ceremony in which Joan of Arc was instrumental, and secured the support of Arthur de Richemont who became the Constable of the French army. The English incursions against the duchy of Brittany had persuaded the duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, to begin making reconcilatory motions towards Charles VII. [Joan was captured in 1430 and tried and executed as a heretic and schismatic in 1431](_URL_3_). In 1435 at the Congress of Arras, Charles VII and Philip the Good and the entire balance of the war changed. The conciliatory nature of Henry VI of England did not assist matters, and Charles's innovative military reforms (the *compagnies d’ordonnance*) gave him a martial edge over the English. A combined strategy of siege warfare and bribery led to the rapid fall of English strongholds in Gascony and Normandy and after Battle of Castillon (1453) the French were the victors of the Hundred Years War. Now the matter of internal cohesion arose. In 1440, the dukes of Bourbon and Alençon, joined by members of the lower nobility and mercenary companies, had rebelled against Charles (a rebellion known as the Praguerie) and endangered the successes won after 1429. The Praguerie had been brutally put down by Arthur de Richemont, but the tensions were simmering throughout the French nobility. With Gascony and, even worse, Normandy now back under Charles's control. Many of Charles's key supporters had fled Normandy with the English triumph and abandoned immense wealth in lands and goods, while those who had remained were perceived as *collaborateurs*. Matters were exacerbated by the need to deal with Joan of Arc's condemnation and execution as a heretic and schismatic. Joan had been instrumental in Charles's crowning and put the legitimacy of his reign in question, yet Joan had been tried by the Masters of the University of Paris and burned in Rouen, the heart of English power in Normandy. Moreover, Joan was loathed by the Burgundians, the French had actually written her out of their narratives during the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Arras (1435). To reopen the trial of Joan would stir up tensions at a key point in Charles's reign, thus the trial was one of Nullification and not Rehabilitation (the trial record itself and the dead were condemned). However, we have now reached the end of my knowledge and interest in French politics and history and should anyone wish to add more then feel free. There are some fascinating case studies but if your knowledge of medieval France is only cursory then I would highly recommend heading first and foremost to the *New Cambridge Medieval History* series. I'm not sure what you mean by 'life', if you're interested in warfare I assume high politics but you'll need to tell me if you're interested in anything else. **General Surveys:** [New Cambridge Medieval History](_URL_4_), 7 Vol., Cambridge, 1995-2005, vols iv-vii. Cowell, A., *The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts, Violence, Performance, and the Sacred*, Cambridge, 2007. Duby, G., *The Chivalrous Society*, Berkley, 1977. | *France in the Middle Ages 987–1460: From Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc*, trans. J. Vale, Oxford, 1991. (ed.) Duggan, A.J., *Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe: Concepts, Origins, Transformations*, Woodbridge, 2001. Kaeuper, R., *Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe*, Oxford, 1999. | *Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry*, Philadelphia, 2009. Keen, M.H., *Chivalry*, London, 1984. **Pre-Fourteenth-Century Context and Historiography** Bouchard, C.B., *"Strong of Body, Brave and Noble": Chivalry and Society in Medieval France*, New York, 1998. | *Those of my Blood: Constructing Noble Families in Medieval Francia*, Philadelphia, 2001. Caron, M.-T., *Noblesse et pouvoir royal en France (XIIIe–XVIe siècle)*, Paris, 1994. Crouch, D., *The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France, 900-1300*, Harlow, 2005. Flori, J., *L’Idéologie de glaive*, Genève, 1983. | *L’Essor de la chevalerie*, Genève, 1986. **Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century:** Allmand, C.T., *War, literature and politics in the late middle ages*, Liverpool, 1976. | (ed.) *War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France*, Liverpool, 2000. (eds) Bates, D. and Curry, A., *England and Normandy in the Middle Ages*, London, 1994. Blockmans W. and Prevenier, W., *The Promised Lands. The Low Countries under Burgundian rule, 1369–1530*, Philadelphia, 1999. Boulton, d'A., *The Knights of the Crown*, Woodbridge, 1987. | 'The Order of the Golden Fleece and the Creation of Burgundian National Identity', in *The Ideology of Burgundy*. Brown, A., *The Valois dukes of Burgundy*, Oxford, 2001. Curry, A. *The Hundred Years War*, London, 1993. | (eds) with Hughes, M., *Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War*, Oxford, 1994. | 'Two Kingdoms One King: The Treaty of Troyes (1420) and the Creation of a Double Monarchy of England and France', in *'The Contending Kingdoms': France and England 1420-1700*, ed. G. Richardson, London, 2008, pp.23-41. Devries, K., *Joan of Arc: A Military Leader*, Stroud, 1999. Griffiths, R.A., *The Reign of Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422-1461*, London, 1981. Huizinga, J., *The Autumn of the Middle Ages*, Chicago, 1996. This is another 'old' text written in the 1920s. It should be read with the 'New Huizinga' article, below. Keen, M.H., 'The End of the Hundred Years War: Lancastrian France and Lancastrian England', in *England and Her Neighbours 1066-1453*, eds M. Jones and M.G.A. Vale, London, 2003, pp.297-311. Margolis, N., *An Introduction to Christine de Pizan*, Florida, 2011. Paviot, J. 'Burgundy and the Crusade', in *Crusading in the Fifteenth-Century: Message and Impact*, ed. N. Housley, Basingstoke, 2004, pp.70-80. Peters, E. and Simons, W.P., ‘The new Huizinga and the old Middle Ages’, *Speculum* 74 (1999), pp.587–620. Solon, P.D., 'Popular Response to Standing Military Forces in Fifteenth-Century France', *Studies in the Renaissance*, Vol. 19 (1972), pp.78-111. Taylor, C.D., *Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood in France during the Hundred Years War*, Cambridge, 2013. [Preface available here](_URL_1_) and [introduction available here](_URL_0_). Vale, M.G.A., *Charles VII*, London, 1974. | *War and Chivalry: Warfare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France and Burgundy at the End of the Middle Ages*, London, 1981. Vaughn, R., *Charles the Bold*, 2^nd ed., intro. W. Paravicini, Woodbridge, 2002. | *Philip the Good*, 2^nd ed., intro. G. Small, Woodbridge, 2002. | *John the Fearless*, 2 Vol., Woodbridge, 2005. (eds) Villalon, L.J.A. and Kagay, D.J., *The Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus*, Leiden, 2004. | *The Hundred Years War (Part II). Different Vistas*, Leiden, 2008. Walsh, R.J., 'Charles the Bold and the crusade: politics and propaganda', *Journal of Medieval History* 3 (1977), pp.53-87. | *Charles the Bold and Italy 1467–1477: politics and personnel*, Liverpool, 2005. Wood, C.T., *Joan of Arc and Richard III: Sex, Saints and Government in the Middle Ages*, Oxford, 1988. **Primary Sources** (in translation) Brown, A. and Small, G., *Court and Civic Society in the Burgundian Low Countries c.1420-1530*, Manchester, 2008. Taylor, C.D., *Joan of Arc: La Pucelle*, Manchester, 2006. [Introduction available here](_URL_2_)

why certain applications *must* drop everything and shut down when they encounter certain kinds of errors. why can't they just muddle through, or revert to the most recent error-free state?

Some kinds of errors are relatively benign, kind of like you getting a papercut. You either grimace and continue what you're doing, or you take a few moments to put on a bandaid. Either way, it doesn't much impact your life. Other kinds of errors are critical, sort of like a heart attack, or getting shot in the guts. When these kinds of injuries happen, you have to get medical treatment, ASAP. Nothing else is more important. You could be in the middle of some billion dollar business negotiation, but it doesn't matter, you have to get to a hospital, NOW. Similarly, computer errors can be relatively benign, such as "can't find that file", or "couldn't connect to _URL_0_". These are recoverable, and application developers have planned for their occurrence. But the critical errors are things that application developers didn't plan for. They never foresaw an error of that sort. And so when one of them happens, there's no code to handle the error. The application goes into heart attack mode, and the operating system, or OS, kills the application (the OS is a lot less willing to deliver life support than an emergency room is).

how do warring countries share borders?

The borders in question were sites of cross border raids and shellings in both directions for years, until an uneasy peace settled in as a result of larger conflicts. Today the borders are constantly patrolled. The border between Jordan and Israel was mostly quiet after 1967, and no major flare-ups until the peace treaty in 1993. Syria withdrew forces several km after 1973 and its border was mostly patrolled by the UN on the Syrian side, and the Israelis on theirs. When Israel finally withdrew from South Lebanon, the UN took on a role as an observation force (mostly ineffective) while Israel constantly patrols the border. The consensus between the two sides is that they have little to gain from bombing eachother, and are mostly in favor of an uneasy peace as opposed to another conflict.

whenever i hear the same song twice from the same source in a short amount of time, it sometimes sounds like it's being played at a lower pitch or slower tempo. why does this happen?

I've never experienced this. Are you a drummer?