Why are the Chinese so disciplined?

I’m guessing by disciplined you might mean this:

70th Anniversary Celebrations of the founding of the PRC

or maybe this…

Student studying despite his room being flooded.

Well, first let me tell you a little secret:

Chinese people are very disciplined.

But, to some extent this is also a stereotype.

Before we get into the second point, let’s address the first point, where does the discipline of those pictures above come from?

If I can make one generalization about life in China, it would probably be that life in China is one big competition. Life anywhere is competitive of course, but there are some particular reasons why life in China is particularly competitive.

It consists of: traditions, difficult and poverty-stricken recent past, vast size and density of population, rapid modernization, and full-on capitalism.

Regarding traditions, China has always been a meritocratic society (in principle at least). To get up high in society, you have to be educated. How to test level of education? Exams! So for centuries China has had a competitive examination system which means from a very young age children are already set against their peers to try and achieve better than them. This remains today. Addin the fact that there are literally hundreds of millions of other people around you, and the game is on!! No wonder why you get students studying for a whole day at the hands of a Tiger Mom who claims they’re doing it for the child’s own good.

What does having a good job earn other than respect? Obviously money. And for most of China’s recent history, there wasn’t a lot of it around. Families therefore have a built in protection mechanism where money = survival. Even if you’re already rich, you need more because who knows what will happen tomorrow? This is why in China a lot of marriages are still arranged as monetary contracts.

If the past was difficult, then modernity and capitalism, which are predicated on the concept of individualistic competition, has made the individual’s strive for success (survival) a whole lot more complicated.

This isn’t just relevant to individual families but to the nation on a whole. China has just emerged from what was called the ‘century of humiliation’ where it was beaten down by western imperialist powers. The first picture is a symbolic display of how far China wants to show it has come, the might of its military that it can afford, that will protect it against global competition.

In other words, to be modern, to survive, whether as an individual or a nation, relies on money’s ability to afford status and security, which means engaging in a competition against millions, many of which have a strong head start over you.

Ok, so why did I say China also isn’t as disciplined as we might assume?

Despite the impressive work and study ethic of Chinese people, I was also surprised when I lived in China over how relaxed people were. Sometimes it made me wonder how anything gets done.

This might seem like a contradiction, but China is full of a lot of contradictions.

Basically, I rarely sensed ‘rush’ or ‘deadline’ in China. Any deadline that was set turned out to be flexible. Most of the time, people never finished what they were supposed to do by the deadline, and that was ok. I often walked into offices thinking ‘I bet they’re going to delay this issue’, and every time, they did, unless I absolutely insisted. In fact, I still haven’t received proof of the qualifications I earned with them over 3 years ago! They said they’d email them to me, I thought “well, let’s see…”.

In one work setting, people freely came and went when they liked. In another work setting, everyone stayed the required time but spent most of it on Wechat talking with friends.

I also found a lot of Chinese people had great respect for the work ethic of the Japanese and Koreans, which they considered stronger than their own (not sure how many people think this though).

I’ve been careful not to say Chinese people ‘lack’ discipline, because they certainly don’t. I’ve shown clearly the ways in which many people work and study very hard and the pressures they face. There’s just a greater sense of flexibility and freeness to how things should be done.

On the one hand, it could be quite annoying, there are situations that really do need to be done and it was frustrating people weren’t really doing their jobs.

On the other hand, maybe I’m the one at fault. A relaxed, more free sense of work certainly sounds appealing to anyone. Considering the competitive nature of the society overall, maybe it’s a good thing there is a lot of flexibility in the work place.

if you want a society that is highly competitive and has a highly structured work ethic, then look to Japan. But also make sure to look at Japan’s rates of mental health issues and tiredness.

How can the computer keeps track of the seconds?

Because of this

that’s quartz crystal. Quarts has a property called Piezoelectricity. Crystals with this property generate a charge when pressed or modify their shape when charge is applied to them.

This property allows you to create a Crystal oscillator which oscillates in regular intervals.

Each computer has several crystal oscillators generating different pulses which drive the computer.

To know when a second passes, you only need to know the frequency (i.e. number of oscillations per second) of that crystal. You then simply count these oscillations.

Modern computers have special chips for this. They are commonly called Real-time clocks. These chips contain everything necessary to keep track of time: oscillator and counter. They are also battery-backed so they continue to run even if the computer is switched-off and disconnected from power.

Why they use Depleted Uranium in the anti-tank shells?

Some are. Depleted Uranium is great for making the cores of armour-piercing rounds.

It’s harder and denser than lead, but the most attractive characteristic is that it’s self-sharpening. Basically, most bullets disintegrate or squash when they hit a hard object.

However, a hard impact doesn’t squash depleted uranium bullets like this. Rather, it shaves material off the side, almost like sharpening a pencil. So as the bullet penetrates deeper and deeper, it retains its shape and minimizes the resistance that a squashed bullet would have. That’s why depleted uranium is popular for use in the anti-tank shells of the M1 Abrams.

It’s very expensive though, and illegal for civilians in most parts of the world

Why fingers and toes after soaking in water get wrinkled?

After soaking your fingers or placing your feet into water for a while, they might get wrinkled like this:

Why?

Some might say that’s due to being in water a long time, which makes our skin swollen. Before I also thought it was just a random accidental effect of the wetness.

But, have you ever wondered why this scene only occurs on the fingers and toes?

Why doesn’t it appear on the other parts of our body?

A scientific study did research on finding the reason that wet fingers and toes wrinkle.

The study showed that if you cut the nerves to the fingers and toes, the wrinkle phenomenon disappears, which proves the wrinkling is a self-directed act rather than a phenomenon caused by wetness.

Then why would our brain send the signal only to wrinkle the fingers and toes? The study made an F1 racing car tire analogy.

The smooth tire provides a superb grip under dry conditions; by contrast, the wrinkle tire gives better grip on wet ground. The wrinkles will construct a drainage network that will channel away the water on the surface and thereby maintain a firm grip.

Our body is truly still a big mystery to the entire human race

https://www.changizi.com/uploads/8/3/4/4/83445868/pruney.pdf

What will happen if a bullet were fired from the Moon aiming at Earth?

The .220 Swift remains the fastest commercial cartridge in the world, with a published velocity of 4,665 ft/s (1,422 m/s) and the escape velocity of the MOON is 2,400 m/s so the bullet will not leave the vicinity of the Moon and will eventually return to the surface.

The only ballistic (Non missile) round that would leave the moon would be one coming from a railgun which can reach a velocity of upwards 5–6000 m/s (21,600 km hr).

A railgun Round .

If aimed very accurately which would be very difficult to do it could enter the earth’s atmosphere at a speed in excess of 40,000 km/h or 11,100 m/s .

As the projectile reenters the Earth’s atmosphere it will compress the air ahead of it to a temperature of 8000–10,000ºC and melt and burn up , not striking the ground but vaporizing 15 -20 kilometers above ground maybe terminating in a loud explosion.

The earliest human known by name to historians?

Kushim Tablet, c 3,100–3,400BC. Photo Credit: The Schøyen Collection, Oslo and London.

Go back far enough in time and people stop being real. They become mythical. Iry-Hor, who ruled Upper Egypt in the early 32nd Century BCE, is the first pharaoh known by name. Until just a few years ago he was thought to be a legend. Neithhotep, wife of Pharoah Narmer, who united Upper and Lower Egypt a few decades after Iry-Hor’s reign, is the first woman known by name; until recently she was believed to have been male.

It’s their written names that make them real. And before the Egyptians, it was the Sumerians, the first urban civilization, who invented writing. They used reed styluses to mark clay tablets with pictograms representing both numbers and words. Though it’s a partial script, not a language (you couldn’t use it to write poetry), this cuneiform was useful for keeping the humdrum records of city life—who owned what, or, sadly, who owned whom. Some of the earliest Sumerians we know of are slave owner Gal-Sal and his two slaves, Enpap-x and Sukkalgir, named on a tablet dating from about 3100 BCE.

By then Uruk, the Sumerian metropolis on the banks of the Euphrates River, was the world’s largest city, with as many as 80,000 residents living inside a little over two square miles: priests and priestesses, warriors, merchants, craftsmen, laborers, commoners, a king. But we only know one of them by name.

Perhaps 54 centuries ago a scribe (male or female, we don’t know which) in the temple of Inanna, goddess of love and war, inscribed a record on a clay tablet a little over 2½ inches across and ¾-inch thick. The translation is literally 29,086, barley, 37 months, brewery, beer. (Sumerians loved their beer, so thick it had to be sucked through a filter straw.) It’s an invoice, or a receipt, or a promise of delivery; an accounting, depending on the amount of a measure, for a lot of barley beer over three years. And it’s signed for.

Translation by historian Prof. Yuval Noah Harari, Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Schøyen Collection.

The symbol in the lower left is actually two separate symbols, two separate sounds: ku and shim. “Kushim” has no known meaning in Sumerian. It could be a title for the transaction, occupation, or organization. But it’s believed to be the name of a person—and though scholars are divided on this, if it’s from 3,400 BCE, it’s the earliest known written name in history.

The Sumerian civilization lasted 2,500 years. Between 500,000 and 2,000,000 cuneiform tablets have been found. Less than 100,000 have been interpreted. (Including fragments, Kushim left us 77, all written in the same hand.) They include thousands of names, and it’s not unlikely that an earlier name will be discovered. But until then lowly Kushim, who kept accounts of beer, is the first.

Do 

scientists really know what gravity is?

Yes, it is true.

We can calculate it with an incredible degree of precision. We can describe its effect all but completely, but we do not have a theory on what gravity is, not yet - despite the popular saying.

Typically we describe gravity as a fundamental force of nature (one of four), but physicists argue it may be an emergent phenomenon instead. Evidence support both.

I’d say the following points help illustrate what we know and do not know about gravity:

1. “Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation” (1686) - offers no explanation to what it is. It is a law that describes how it works, not what it is.
2. “Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity” (1915) - tells us that planets and stars (any matter) bend the fabric of space, and thereby produce gravity as an effect of this fabric bending - yet we have no theory to tell us what this fabric is made from, or even whats its fundamental properties are.
3. The nearest to a “theory” of gravity we have, is the “General Theory of Relativity,” and even this doesn't really describe what it is.
4. We have made up a term to cover for our lack of knowing why gravity cannot hold galaxies together. Our current understanding of gravity tells us galaxies would fly apart, especially at their outer rims. They do not. They should. Ergo, something-something-gravity keeps them from doing this. We call this ”dark matter” (“dark gravity” would be a better term?).
5. We know gravity is not always uniform, even when conditions are unchanged. We believe gravity is the same, and what is measured today will measure the same tomorrow. It is the consensus. However, there is some evidence suggesting, this may not be true. Inconsistent gravitational anomalies have been recorded when we slingshoot spacecraft around Earth - more specifically, data from Galileo &, NEAR Shoemaker show irregular gravitational deviations that should not be. We do not know why. [EDIT: A solution was found in 2013, ref; Anomalous Earth flybys of spacecraft - thank you to Eric Platt for pointing it out in the comments]
6. “Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation” is not universal. It fails near very strong gravitational fields, such as black holes, and it is assumed to be false when the gravitational fields are very weak, like amongst atoms. Moreover, we have no solution. Indeed “The General Theory of Relativity” bests “Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation” when gravity is very strong, but it too fails amongst atoms.
7. We have not tested gravity as well as the other forces. We assume gravity is among all matter, but we have never successfully tested this thoroughly. By contrast, we have with the electromagnetic force, but not with gravity. We know our equations begin to fail slightly when two objects are already one meter apart.

So, indeed; we do not know what gravity actually is. We have ideas, and we can calculate it very well, and even calculate our mistakes (or lack of knowing) very well. But so far, the theory that nails it, elude us.