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What's The Difference Between?

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Butterfly Moth
Fruits Vegetables
Goat Sheep
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Meteor Meteorite
Shiite Sunni
Seal Sea Lion
Dolphin Porpoise
     
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Butterflies And Moths

Butterflies, skippers and moths all belong in the insect order Lepidopteron. Worldwide, there are five families of butterflies and one family of skippers, which share some specialized similarities in body form. All of these families are present in Australia. Moths form a larger group of 125 families worldwide. In Australia, 82 families of moths are represented.

However, there are some overall rules that can be used to tell a moth from a butterfly or skipper.  Note that there are always exceptions to each 'rule'.

  Moth Butterflies & Skippers

Antennae

 

Have simple thread-like or 'feathery' antenna without a club. Have a thickened club or hook on the tip of the antenna, never 'feathery'

Color

Duller colors
 
Brighter colors
Wings Wings are linked together with a bristle-like structure called a frenulum. Wings are not linked – no frenulum
 

It goes on and on, check it out.

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Fruits And Vegetables

Fruits Vegetables
Fruits are or contain seeds, they develop from the ovaries. Nuts,
olives,
tomatoes, peas and runner beans are all examples of fruits, as well as the obvious ones like apples, oranges and grapes.
Vegetables are non-seed containing plant matter. They include leaves, such as cabbage, lettuce or watercress; roots, e.g. carrots or beetroot;
bulbs, like onions, and tubers such as potatoes.
 

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Goats And Sheep

  Goat Sheep

Tail

 

A goat's tail will go up (unless the goat is frightened, sick, or in distress). Sheep tails hang down and are often docked (cut off) for health and sanitary reasons.
 

Grazing vs. Browsing

Goats are natural browsers, preferring to eat leaves, twigs, vines, and shrubs. They are very agile and will stand on their hind legs to eat vegetation. Sheep are grazers, preferring to eat short, tender grass and clover. They like weeds and can graze very close to the soil surface.
 
Who's Smarter? People often say that goats are "smart" because they are very curious and inquisitive. They are more independent than sheep, who are usually aloof to people. People often say that sheep are "stupid" because of their strong "flock mentality."
 

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Ken And Barbie

Wait a minute.  You don't know the difference between Ken and Barbie.  Houston, we have a problem.  But, here at Sancombandcompany.com we can help.  Please contact the web master for further instructions.

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Meteor And Meteorite

Meteor Most of us probably have seen meteors or shooting stars. A meteor is the flash of light that we see in the night sky when a small chunk of interplanetary debris burns up as it passes through our atmosphere. "Meteor" refers to the flash of light caused by the debris, not the debris itself.
Meteroroid The debris is called a meteoroid. A meteoroid is a piece of interplanetary matter that is smaller than a kilometer and frequently only millimeters in size. Most meteoroids that enter the Earth's atmosphere are so small that they vaporize completely and never reach the planet's surface.
Meteorite If any part of a meteoroid survives the fall through the atmosphere and lands on Earth, it is called a meteorite. Although the vast majority of meteorites are very small, their size can range from about a fraction of a gram (the size of a pebble) to 100 kilograms (220 lbs) or more (the size of a huge, life-destroying boulder).
Asteroid Asteroids are generally larger chunks of rock that come from the asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter
Comets Comets are asteroid-like objects covered with ice, methane, ammonia, and other compounds that develop a fuzzy, cloud-like shell called a coma and sometimes a visible tail whenever they orbit close to the Sun.

The Hubble Web Site has some fantastic pictures and whole bunches of information for boys and girls of any age to enjoy.

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Shiites And Sunni

The Islam religion was founded by Mohammed in the seventh century. In 622 he founded the first Islamic state, a theocracy in Medina, a city in western Saudi Arabia located north of Mecca. There are two branches of the religion he founded.

The Sunni branch believes that the first four caliphs--Mohammed's successors--rightfully took his place as the leaders of Muslims. They recognize the heirs of the four caliphs as legitimate religious leaders. These heirs ruled continuously in the Arab world until the break-up of the Ottoman Empire following the end of the First World War.

Shiites, in contrast, believe that only the heirs of the fourth caliph, Ali, are the legitimate successors of Mohammed. In 931 the Twelfth Imam disappeared. This was a seminal event in the history of Shiite Muslims. According to R. Scott Appleby, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, "Shiite Muslims, who are concentrated in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, [believe they] had suffered the loss of divinely guided political leadership" at the time of the Imam's disappearance. Not "until the ascendancy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1978" did they believe that they had once again begun to live under the authority of a legitimate religious figure.

Another difference between Sunnis and Shiites has to do with the Mahdi, “the rightly-guided one” whose role is to bring a just global caliphate into being. As historian Timothy Furnish has written, "The major difference is that for Shi`is he has already been here, and will return from hiding; for Sunnis he has yet to emerge into history: a comeback v. a coming out, if you will."

In a special 9-11 edition of the Journal of American History, Appleby explained that the Shiite outlook is far different from the Sunni's, a difference that is highly significant:

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... for Sunni Muslims, approximately 90 percent of the Muslim world, the loss of the caliphate after World War I was devastating in light of the hitherto continuous historic presence of the caliph, the guardian of Islamic law and the Islamic state. Sunni fundamentalist leaders thereafter emerged in nations such as Egypt and India, where contact with Western political structures provided them with a model awkwardly to imitate ... as they struggled after 1924 to provide a viable alternative to the caliphate.

In 1928, four years after the abolishment of the caliphate, the Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna founded the first Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Sunni world, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). Al-Banna was appalled by "the wave of atheism and lewdness [that] engulfed Egypt" following World War I. The victorious Europeans had "imported their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theatres, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices." Suddenly the very heart of the Islamic world was penetrated by European "schools and scientific and cultural institutes" that "cast doubt and heresy into the souls of its sons and taught them how to demean themselves, disparage their religion and their fatherland, divest themselves of their traditions and beliefs, and to regard as sacred anything Western."14 Most distressing to al-Banna and his followers was what they saw as the rapid moral decline of the religious establishment, including the leading sheikhs, or religious scholars, at Al-Azhar, the grand mosque and center of Islamic learning in Cairo. The clerical leaders had become compromised and corrupted by their alliance with the indigenous ruling elites who had succeeded the European colonial masters.

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Osama bina Laden is a Sunni Muslim. To him the end of the reign of the caliphs in the 1920s was catastrophic, as he made clear in a videotape made after 9-11. On the tape, broadcast by Al-Jazeera on October 7, 2001, he proclaimed: "What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted. ... Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more [than] eighty years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated."

Juan Cole, a well-known historian of the Middle East, has pointed out on his blog, Informed Comment, that the split between Sunni and Shiites in Iraq is of relatively recent origin:

I see a lot of pundits and politicians saying that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq have been fighting for a millennium. We need better history than that. The Shiite tribes of the south probably only converted to Shiism in the past 200 year s. And, Sunni-Shiite riots per se were rare in 20th century Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites cooperated in the 1920 rebellion against the British. If you read the newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, you don't see anything about Sunni-Shiite riots. There were peasant/landlord struggles or communists versus Baathists. The kind of sectarian fighting we're seeing now in Iraq is new in its scale and ferocity, and it was the Americans who unleashed it.

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In December 2006 the New York Times reported that it is not just ordinary Americans who find it difficult to remember the difference between Sunnis and Shiites:

SURPRISE quiz: Is Al Qaeda Sunni or Shiite? Which sect dominates Hezbollah?

Silvestre Reyes, the Democratic nominee to head the House Intelligence Committee, failed to answer both questions correctly last week when put to the test by Congressional Quarterly. He mislabeled Al Qaeda as predominantly Shiite, and on Hezbollah, which is mostly Shiite, he drew a blank.

“Speaking only for myself,” he told reporters, “it’s hard to keep things in perspective and in the categories.”

Not that he’s alone. Other members of Congress from both parties have also flunked on-the-spot inquiries. Indeed, some of the smartest Western statesmen of the last century have found themselves flummoxed by Islam. Winston Churchill — in 1921, while busy drawing razor-straight borders across a mercurial Middle East — asked an aide for a three-line note explaining the “religious character” of the Hashemite leader he planned to install in Baghdad.

“Is he a Sunni with Shaih sympathies or a Shaih with Sunni sympathies?” Mr. Churchill wrote, using an antiquated spelling. (“I always get mixed up between these two,” he added.)

And maybe religious memorization should not be required for policymaking. Gen. William Odom, who directed the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan, said that Mr. Reyes mainly needs to know “how the intelligence community works.”

Yet, improving American intelligence, according to General Odom and others with close ties to the Middle East and the American intelligence community, requires more than just a organization chart.

A cheat sheet is in order.

The Review asked nearly a dozen experts, from William R. Polk, author of “Understanding Iraq,” to Paul R. Pillar, the C.I.A. official who coordinated intelligence on the Middle East until he retired last year, to explain the region. Here, a quick distillation.

What caused the original divide?

The groups first diverged after the Prophet Muhammad died in 632, and his followers could not agree on whether to choose bloodline successors or leaders most likely to follow the tenets of the faith.

The group now known as Sunnis chose Abu Bakr, the prophet’s adviser, to become the first successor, or caliph, to lead the Muslim state. Shiites favored Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. Ali and his successors are called imams, who not only lead the Shiites but are considered to be descendants of Muhammad. After the 11th imam died in 874, and his young son was said to have disappeared from the funeral, Shiites in particular came to see the child as a Messiah who had been hidden from the public by God.

The largest sect of Shiites, known as “twelvers,” have been preparing for his return ever since.

How did the violence start?

In 656, Ali’s supporters killed the third caliph. Soon after, the Sunnis killed Ali’s son Husain.

Fighting continued but Sunnis emerged victorious over the Shiites and came to revere the caliphate for its strength and piety.

Shiites focused on developing their religious beliefs, through their imams.

 

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Seals And Sea  Lions

Pinnipeds, fin-footed marine mammals, are divided into two categories: earless seals (true seals) and eared seals (sea lions). Earless seals like the Northern elephant seal and harbor seal are believed to have descended from a line of terrestrial mammals similar to otters. Eared seals like the California sea lion and the Northern fur seal are believed to have descended from a bear-like mammal. Adaptations like fins for mobility, blubber for warmth and hydrodynamic body shape help both species survive in an aquatic habitat.

Many of these pinnipeds make their homes around the Bay.

Below is a graphic differentiation between four of the six species of pinnipeds found in Northern California, courtesy of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito.

Pinnipeds

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Dolphins And Porpoises

Identity Crisis: Dolphin or Porpoise?
What is the difference between a dolphin and a porpoise! "Dolphin" usually refers to the specific group of small, toothed cetaceans in the family Delphinidae. There are over 30 species of true dolphins, including familiar species like the bottlenose, spinner, and spotted dolphins. Although the largest members of this group are commonly called whales because of their size, they are actually most closely related to other dolphins. The large dolphins include killer whales and pilot whales.

"Porpoise" refers to six species in the family Phocoenidae. All porpoises are relatively small by cetacean standards, measuring 7 feet (2 meters) or less as adults.

The notable differences between dolphins and porpoises are these:

 

Dolphins Porpoises
Always have cone-shaped teeth Always have spade-shaped teeth
Usually have a beak Never have a beak
Usually have a hooked or curved dorsal fin (some have no dorsal fin) Usually have a dorsal fin shaped like a triangle (some have no dorsal fin)

Heyning, John E. Masters of the Ocean Realm: Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), p. 31.

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