Recent content by hsiehtm

Basically, after Muhammad died, there was conflict over who would be his successor. The faction that became the Shiites believed that Muhammad's successor must be a relative to Muhammad, while the Sunnis believed Muhammad's successor could be anyone who was worthy. Both sides picked different...

There's nothing wrong with what Google is doing here. It's not like China is giving Google a choice about having a censored version of Google and an uncensored version of Google. The Chinese government is telling Google either to offer a censored version of Google that restricts viewership of...

Let's see to continue with the coffee example, the earth has an average temperature ranging from 0 to 40 degrees celcius while the sun has an average temperature of several million degrees celcius. If you mix the two together, the result would be an average temperature of several million degrees...

I've heard of the US involvement in the Russian Revolution, but I've never heard of the Korean Campaign of 1871 so that's probably more obscure. A quick search on Yahoo! turns up this list of military conflicts including a number of obscure ones. http://www.army.mil/cmh/Moh1.htm

Accidental inventions aren't entirely accidental. The circumstances leading to their inspiration may be accidental, but the actual invention is not. Take penicillin for example, while the discovery of the mold growing inside a Petri dish is accidental, the recognition that the mold was...

Currently I feel that the biggest problem with the American winner-take-all electoral system is this: Suppose that a state has a population of 10 million and 10 electoral votes where supposedly each electoral vote represents 1 million people. If 5.1 million people vote for candidate A while 4.9...

Truman isn't a war criminal since only people on the losing side of a war can be considered war criminals. If by some bizarre circumstances, Japan had managed to win the war after the atomic bombs had been dropped, they certainly would have tried Truman as a war criminal.

Let's just put it this way, Spain finished driving out the Arabs in 1492. Something else really important also happened in Spain that same year which would was largely responsible for the Spanish renaissance.

Didn't these people watch Jurassic Park?

Weren't Turkeys domesticated less than 1000 years ago? Domestic animals are always much genetically mcuh different than a wild animal due to breeding. If people do decide to domesticate a tiger, the end result is a tiger that is physically much different than a wild tiger.

Over 99.99% of all animal species that have ever lived are now extinct. The probability that there would be very large species of animals within that 99.99% is very high. The vast majority of extinct animals are small, but scientists and the media give disproportionate attention to very large...