"The straight borders are specific latitude and longitude lines, for example the panhandle is formed by the 100th and 103rd meridians on either side up to 36 degrees 30 minute latitude for the northern border."

Okay now that actually makes sense to me and my laypersons knowledge of how map borders are formed.

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The curvy borders of Texas follow rivers (often based on the river course at some fixed point in time). The straight borders are specific latitude and longitude lines, for example the panhandle is formed by the 100th and 103rd meridians on either side up to 36 degrees 30 minute latitude for the northern border.

Surveyors use a variety of methods (GPS and lasers today) to convert a legal line into a physical straight line on the ground.

The same as with every other extremely straight border in the world (US-Canada, almost all of Africa, Middle East, etc.): Someone took a map and a ruler, drew a line and said "This is now the Border between X and Y" with no regards to the people living there (ethnic groups), geography and topology.

Pretty much. But judges generally will stop at 10-7 because otherwise the fight becomes absolutely unwinnable for the other side.

I think in your second example you would have horrendous screen tearing

China has been the dominant force in the region for around 2000 years. For long stretches of that time many countries had formal suzerainty treaties with China, sometimes even direct vassalage.

Chinese characters were in use in Korea, Japan and Vietnam for centuries before anyone they were exposed to anything Western.

Confucianism is much more of a moral philosophy than a religion. It doesn't focus on origin myths, the afterlife, gods or spirits. It's a set of philosophies around the relationships of people. Much closer to Plato's Republic than the Bible.

Confucius lived over 2500 years ago. Jesus' teachings made it all over the world in less time than that. Indonesia is pretty far from Mecca and it's become the largest Muslim country in the world just 1300 years after Muhammad. It's not at all surprising to see significant cultural diffusion to nearby neighbors after all that time.

And people move around too. Over thousands of years there are many factors that make people pick up their stuff and check out the neighbors; wars, natural disasters, famines, rumors of new opportunities. China has had a very large population for a long time. There have been a lot of Chinese people moving to neighboring countries. So to a large extent Chinese culture extended throughout Asia because so many Chinese people wandered around Asia.

Just sent you a PM. Keep up the good work!

Well, why was Greek and Latin culture so influential throughout all of Europe? I think the most compelling explanation for both of these is that they were literary cultures in the Ancient period. For generations Japanese scholars were learning Chinese to study the ancient classics, all of which were written in Chinese long before Japanese writing had even been invented. And they didn't start using Chinese characters and loanwords necessarily because they just loved Chinese culture so much - it was because all the ancient and prestigious texts used those words and characters, the same as we write with the Roman alphabet and use plenty of ancient Greek loanwords in English.

IIRC everyone you get knocked down, you subtract 1

All you really need is a system for denoting "do this part before you calculate the rest" (parentheses). As long as you have that, you can do every calculation exactly right, regardless of whatever other order of operations you have.

The only issue you'd have is clarity. A dozen nested parentheses is not a recipe for clear equations.

Banks pay you a small amount of interest for putting money into savings, CDs, etc. while charging customers a higher rate of interest to customers who borrow for home mortgages, car loans, credit cards, business loans. That spread is their income. So you put money into your savings account and get 2% interest on it, and they then lend at 6% for a mortgage, or charge 20% on credit card balances.

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It is basically the income equivalent of a company benefit, for income calculation/taxation purposes. Like if you got a company car and used it 50% for work, but also 50% for personal use and the lease was $500/mo, then you'd have to report $250/mo. (or $,3000 a year) as income because use of the car was a form of compensation worth $3000.

The reCaptcha is actually tracking mouse movements prior to clicking the button to see if they're human-like or bot-like.

The cultures of China, Japan, and Korea were in close contact for millennia before they had any real interaction with the West. That's plenty of time for significant cultural exchange, even if the process is extremely slow. In fact, the conventional wisdom is that East Asian countries (especially Korea and Japan) have Westernized shockingly quickly given that the bulk of that process has happened over just the last century.

Religions in particular can spread very quickly before then sticking very tightly. Buddhism is primarily practiced in East Asia but started in South Asia. Islam started in Arabia but has adherents from Nigeria to Indonesia. Christianity started in Jerusalem (kind of) and is now practiced by at least a substantial minority on every continent. By comparison, taking Confucianism across some mountains or a sea is pretty easy.

The sacred texts

A couple things... one Dental insurance is entirely seperate and different from Health insurance, and has fairly low caps on what it covers annually.

But fixing a tooth isn't the same as just seeing a doctor, its more like a medical procedure and a medical procedure could easily cost you $1000's out of pocket if you haven't hit your deductible. Your twice annual exam/cleaning is like a regular visit and those have a nominal cost with insurance typically.

It's important to understand that corporations regularly do things stupidly.

Potential reasons why a branding exercise might cost more than you'd think:

• It's being driven by someone who has no idea what they want, they just don't like the status quo.
• It's being driven by someone who got approval for a large design budget and needs to spend it lest they not get access to a similar budget number for the following year.
• It's being driven by a consultant, who has sold some executive on the idea that a logo change is just what's needed to lift the company's sagging stock price.

Then you factor in things like focus groups and awareness campaigns and building renovations required to change signs and other, similar foolishness.

China has done the best at having culture, society, and governance for an extended period of time. China had ships ten times larger than anything in the west before the time of Columbus. They could have colonized the world long before anyone else but never desired to. They kept records well over an extended period of time so could build off the advancement of individuals. It was easy for developing cultures around them to copy their work instead of duplicating it.

Edit: I get it CPP bad but that's just from 70's to today. China has a much longer history.

So just to keep your touchstone prices in perspective, a private company near me performs diagnostic radiography.

If you are worried about a sports injury or something, you can make a booking and get an MRI, and one of their doctors will provide a report. GPS, physiotherapists etc will recommend getting scans done before treatment.

After this private clinic makes it's profit, and with no insurance involved, it's 200 dollars for an MRI. First world European country, where everyone is making plenty of profit.

You guys get hosed.

We didn't figure it out, we made it up.

Brackets being first makes sense because all that brackets do is change the order. If they weren't first they'd be useless.

The others are fairly arbitrary but do make some sort of sense. Exponents are repeated multiplication, multiplication is repeated addition. So it does make sense to go from the "most powerful" operation to the least powerful.

But if we wanted to we could have an order of operations that does addition first and exponents last. We'd just have to rewrite all our equations if we wanted to get the same result.

I had never thought about that. There'd still be some nuance to how you clicked on it, since you don't touch on just one point and you can touch with different pressure and for different lengths of time, but if thinks it's not enough then you'll just get one of those image classification popups to complete.

Say you were calculating the trajectory of a probe on its way to one of Jupiter's moons (Europa Clipper for a real world example). Your plan is to launch from Earth, and with the help of both Earth and Mars' gravity three years later to launch the probe into Jupiter's orbit.

The calculations for this would be complex and orders of operations would absolutely matter. Would these calculations even be possible using a different order of operations? I know if we did, our equations would have to be different, I just can't begin to imagine what that would look like.

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