175
TL;DR: No, the image is photo-shopped.
This is shown by:
Finding an earlier published image which is extremely similar, aside from the content of the placard being Israeli flag (star of David) instead of a message; and no other changes aside from minor image processing ones (different compression ratio, minor cropping)
Preponderance of circumstantial ...
105
No. It is a complete invention of an urban myth.
Unless anybody produces a Royal Navy document that even does any mention of this influence of Coriolis effect, this seems to be just untrue. A complete fabrication for a good story – good for teaching physics but very bad history.
It seems to be an annoying urban myth. The Coriolis effect is present and ...
91
I'd like to note that this answer contains mentions of particular instances of cannibalism, and while no unnecessary details have been included, it may still be upsetting to some people.
Yes, undoubtedly so.
Stories of cannibalism by Japanese troops has been presented by both Japanese soldiers and prisoners they captured.
Various members of the Indian ...
89
The New York Times reported in the 29 May 2012 article Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will:
Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is ...
84
There are several points to consider here.
1) Depleted Uranium is not that much "depleted".
"Depleted uranium," the byproduct of the enrichment process, has about 0.002 percent 234U, 0.2 percent 235U and 99.8 percent 238U, and about 60 percent of natural uranium's radioactivity.
-- U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, emphasis mine.
2) Uranium is ...
82
The original photo appears to have been posted by Ukrainian soldier Andrew Zaharov on his Facebook photo album. as it predates the articles from any of the news sources below.
The initial hit for this image was carried out by cropping the image with Photoshop, then performing a reverse image search, which resulted in a hit to this Ukrainian news site, ...
79
According to Wikipedia, there have been four declared wars between India and Pakistan. None of them were "won" or "lost" in that neither party in any of these wars was forced into unconditional surrender (as happened in, for instance, WWI and WWII).
That being said, it's fair to say that Pakistan did not fully achieve any of their ...
78
Although the person named existed and served in the Royal Flying Corps, the story itself is very likely not true.
First the good news. "Dattabraya Laxuman Patwardhan" certainly existed and was apparrently a member of the Royal Flying corps. The London Gazette of 25 March 1919 records his appointment to the temporary honorary rank of Second Lieutenant. The ...
69
Factcheck.org covers this: "Donald Trump and the Iraq War", FactCheck.Org
On September 11, 2002:
Howard Stern asks Trump if he supports invading Iraq. Trump answers hesitantly. “Yeah, I guess so. You know, I wish it was, I wish the first time it was done correctly.”
Whether that is "support" is a semantic argument, so I just present the facts about what ...
48
No, the figures that were used to produce this graph are inaccurate, exaggerating the ratio.
The basic numbers being claimed are:
Christian Europe killed 100 million in the 20th Century, consisting of:
60 million in World War II
16 million in World War I
millions more in colonial wars.
Muslims killed more than a 2 million people or so in political ...
39
Check out this paper: Cancer mortality in Serbia, 1991–2015, published in 2018. The study is based on official data on cancer-related deaths. The conclusions drawn by the authors are:
Overall cancer mortality rate (ASR - age-standartized rate) increased between 1991 and 2009 by 0.8-0.9% per year.
After 2009, the trend changed to decline, again by 0.9% per ...
35
I did some more research on this tonight, and was able to answer my own question, at least to some extent.
The conclusions seem to be:
For the world as a whole, this is a very unlikely claim.
For the United States of America in particular, this is likely true, at least for the deaths of Americans in wars since the country was founded. This is possibly the ...
35
Rudolph Verner, the gunnery officer of the Inflexible, which took part in the battle, wrote a short set of notes about the successes and difficulties encountered during the engagement. He writes
Deflection caused considerable difficulty, and on two occasions one gun fired some five or six consecutive rounds nearly a ship's length astern of the target.
I ...
34
It's plausible.
The map appears to be based on the same data set as this interactive map by The Guardian, which is of "every incident where somebody died" in Iraq, between 2003 and 2009, and is based on data obtained via Wikileaks.
We took all these incidents where someone had died and put it on the map above.
Of relevance to the question, from the raw ...
32
The claim is essentially correct -- tens of millions of Orthodox Christians died of political violence in the 20th century. However, everything that Mr. Serfes tries to imply by making that claim is basically wrong.
Complications
First, it's hard to be more precise about the claim because Mr. Serfes' essay loaded with so much hyperbole that his claim is ...
28
No, it is not fair to say that "a missed telegraph pole delivery" was "what caused" World War II. Even if we are willing to give the Joker the benefit of doubt, that he meant "one of the causes", the impact of that one missed delivery is much less significant than The Joker, or the web articles you quoted, imply.
Poincare's decision to invade the Ruhr came ...
25
It is difficult to give a straight answer to the question, because if we define peace as the absence of war (example), we still have the problem of the nebulous definition of war. Does war include guerilla wars, civil wars, insurgencies and other forms of conflict? Does war have a clearly defined start and end date?
For example, when did World War II end? ...
25
Unclear, but a still considered a serious problem. With the parameters of the statement provided, it is difficult to definitively confirm or refute it. In order to do so we would would need to know the time frames involved (e.g. one year versus the entire campaign) along with what "attacked by the enemy" means. The latter could be resolved through the use of ...
25
Yes.
According to Politifact who examined the claim by Mark Shields:
You know, Judy, the reality is -- and it's a terrible reality -- since Robert Kennedy died in the Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968, more Americans have died from gunfire than died in … all the wars of this country's history, from the Revolutionary through the Civil War, World War I, ...
24
The evidence is that he didn't begin to publicly voice opposition to the war in Iraq until about a year after it began. Before that he expressed support for it.
Washington Post:
We have found no evidence of his early opposition to the invasion. Trump expressed lukewarm support the first time he was asked about it on Sept. 11, 2002, and was not clearly ...
23
King Goujian's army was known for scaring its enemies before battle by forcing its front line, composed of criminals sentenced to death, to commit suicide by decapitating themselves.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia did a poor job in translating Shiji. As pointed out by the OP and Wikipedia, the exact corresponding sentence in Chinese (second sentence of second ...
23
According to the CDC (Table 18) in 2013 there were 33,636 deaths due to firearms, of which 21,175 were suicides. That leaves 12,461 (of which 281 were "undetermined", so could have been suicide).
12,461 deaths per year is 34.1 per day. At that rate reaching 2,501 would take 74 days, which was March 15th.
The WaPo article claims that for this year the date ...
22
Although exact numbers are hard to come by, there is clearly a higher rate of suicides among veterans than the general population and that number exceeds the number of combat deaths in Iraq missions until 2011 and Afghanistan missions from 2001 to the present.
This article from the Military Times notes that:
in 2014, the latest year available, more than ...
20
Whether the following qualifies slavery as the "principal" cause of the Civil War is a matter of some subjectivity, but we can determine that slavery was the primary reason for the South's secession.
In his book The creation of Confederate nationalism: ideology and identity in the Civil War South, historian Drew Gilpin Faust explains:
leaders of the ...
20
Timestamps are not a good source of information unless you are really sure where they come from. They are set using the system time of the computer creating the file, which might, for example, be set incorrectly; or the program might make a mistake when creating them or writing them to the file. For a quick demonstration of why timestamps are not reliable, I ...
20
Yes, at least sometimes.
In the 2nd episode of the 2nd season of the British TV show Scrapheap Challenge the challenge was to build a cannon. They tested the cannons in a DERA facility where "real" cannons are tested, and the test was supervised and lead by DERA personal.
When firing the second time, the host of the show asked the DERA person that was in ...
19
The amounts of agent orange, in units of 55-gallon (208 liter) drums by company is as follows:
Dow 78,235
Monsanto 67,065
Hercules 49,945
Thompson-Hayward Chemical (T.H. Agriculture and Nutrition ) 21,055
Diamond Alkali /Shamrock 12,555
US Rubber (Uniroyal) 11,635
Thompson Chemicals 7,185
Agrisect 1,875
Hoffman-Taff 410
The above data is from table 2.2 (...
18
"Wars haven't killed all that many people," eh? I think you want this Wikipedia page on that topic. Simply summing all these estimates (using lower bounds where ranges appear) gives 344,998,537 as the death toll of this "very incomplete list of wars (an estimated 3,010 wars have taken place in recorded human history and 438 are recorded here).[1]" Plenty of ...
17
Red mercury does indeed exist, mercury (11) oxide (HgO) varies from yellow to red, here. The more fine the particles the more towards the yellow it is, the bigger the lumps, the more red.
There is the neat trick that if you heat it in a low oxygen environment (say one in which there is charcoal to snap up the O2), it decomposes to mercury and oxygen (2HgO =>...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
