Ellie on Yahoo! Answers

Which Quora Users use Yahoo! answers?

I do! I have answered questions on Yahoo! Answers since 2007. I am not a frequent user, i.e. I have almost made it to Level 3. I am Javelina on Yahoo! Answers. I like the user interface, and I like Yahoo! Avatars, which are visible on Yahoo! Answers. Moderation is responsive.

There is a surprising amount of accumulated information on Yahoo! Answers. I do worry about its longevity. This is why I believe that Yahoo! Answers, silly as some content may be, is an important repository of (online) knowledge. 

Me with a sweet piggy friend
with help from Yahoo! Avatars

Much of our web of knowledge has grown around Wikipedia. It is primarily due to the fact that Wikipedia is free to access, I suspect. That sounds harsh, but it isn't intended to be. This is my reasoning: It is well and good to cite Royal Society proceedings, or journal articles published by Elsevier or the ACM, but it really isn't of much help to people who cannot access them without an Athens or Shibboleth (academic or other institutional) login access.

Why would it have been important to emphasize Hammurabi's connection to divinity?

Hammurabi was the sixth king of the Amorite Dynasty of Old Babylon, in the 18th century B.C. The Code of Hammurabi is one of the most famous legal codes surviving from the ancient Middle East.

It would have been important for Hammurabi to emphasize his connection to divinity primarily for reasons of credibility. He needed credibility to establish the legitimacy of his seminal Code of Law to gain acceptance by the people of Babylon. This concept is referred to as divine election[1]:

While there is no doubt that these claims represent royal self-promotion in an attempt to increase legitimacy, the general population of a given country presumably gave some credence to this brand of political theology.

Divine election in the context of the reign of King Hammurabi has received relatively little attention. Better known ancient and modern instances of divine election are the Pharaonic dynasties of ancient Egypt, the Emperor of Japan, and Queen Elizabeth II of England as head of the Anglican Church.

The Code of Hammurabi consisted of laws that had evolved over generations[2].

Hammurabi receives his Code directly from the god of justice at the Louvre 
Photo: Christian Larrieu, Réunion des Musées Nationaux via Art Resource, New York.

How to represent database schemas?

What is the best way to visually share and communicate database schemas?

This is my new user name and profile picture on Quora! 

I chose an image from my laptop at random

I am Math Troll. They got rid of the 'real names policy' in 2018 or so.

An Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) will capture:

• the contents of each table,
• the relationships between tables: primary keys, foreign keys,
• some exogenous information such as input data source.

I've become fond of Toad for Oracle as a tool for visually describing existing database schema. Toad could be described as an applications development environment, but it has an ERD creation function, which can be used to generate a nicely portable diagram in a choice of formats, certainly XLS and PNG, and possibly PDF.

In addition to the ERD, it is helpful to have a corresponding data dictionary in document form that lists, by table, the fields (and what they represent as descriptive naming isn't usually an option when field names are restricted to only 8 characters or similarly few bytes), field type and length. Toad generates such a document.

For a quick layout of something conceptual, try using MS Visio, or even MS Excel.