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eli5: Why most people can turn both eyes inwards but not in the opposite direction? | Turning eyes inward is a very natural motion, for focusing both eyes on something that is very close to your face. You naturally do it all the time.
Pointing your eyes outward is not a "natural" motion, because there is no occasion where you would focus your eyes on two different objects. Your brain is inherently trained to use binocular (two eyes on one object) vision, not monocular (one eye on one object). | 108 | 45 |
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ELI5: why don't Italians speak latin? | What happened to latin? Surely if the centre of the Roman empire was in Italy they would still speak latin today!? | All languages evolve over time. The Latin language spread out and, as languages do, evolved in different ways in different areas to give us the modern Romance languages Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and so on.
Even when Latin was still being spoken as Latin, it changed from one generation to the next. The early Romans spoke Old Latin, which evolved into the Classical Latin which is what we usually think of as "Latin", and which went through many changes over its lifetime; changes continued throughout the Mediaeval period and the Renaissance.
Latin is still spoken in the Vatican, of course, which is in Rome, and has the world's only ATM that can display instructions in Latin. But it's not the same Latin the Romans spoke: it's a later version, Ecclesiatical Latin.
All these versions of Latin were those spoken by the educated people. Ordinary people spoke vulgar Latin ("vulgar" simply means "of the people" and doesn't mean "obscene"), which again varied from place to place and through the generations -- just as most of us today speak a version of English that you wouldn't expect to hear the US President use in his State of the Union address.
And there is one version of this vulgar Latin that has survived to this day. Well, in truth, many of them did and are now French, Italian, Spanish, etc., but this one is much, much more closely related to actual Latin than any of the others, including Italian. It's a language called Ladin, spoken in remote communities in the mountains of northern Italy. So if you want to know what happened to Latin, apart from the slightly artificial version used by the Church, it still exists and is spoken by about 30,000 people. Cicero, however, would not be able to understand a word. | 115 | 65 |
ELI5: What is happening to my eyes when I'm looking at something but, I can make it look blurry or clear on demand? | You are focusing your eyes differently. This is like in a tv show or movie when a camera will be on two people, focused on a person in the foreground, and then the focus changes to the person in the background. Your eyes are like the camera, focusing on different things with some effort | 16 | 34 |
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[Star Trek] How do I become a stellar cartographer? What should I major in, in university, and what do I need to become a good stellar cartographer? | What do I need to major in? And what do I need to become stellar cartographer? | Math and computer science would be the underpinning as everything is based on math and you would use the computers to project celestial movements. Physics, astrophysics and astronomy would be the more specialized courses. Starship navigation since the most common use is to guide ships through the galaxy. Then finally Stellar Cartography would be the specialization in how to take your knowledge to make the maps used in the ship's computer and navigation. | 18 | 16 |
How do scientists know how much dark matter a galaxy has or doesn't have? | You take a galaxy and measure the rotation speeds of the stars. When you plot them on a graph of orbital speed Vs their radial distance, you'll see that it doesn't add up. There should be more mass present to account for all that speed. Then you figure out how much mass should be there for the stars to be going that fast and voila. (Simplified version) | 15 | 16 |
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How does the deep sea maintain life? | Sun light is the main source of power for life but deep in the ocean is pitch black so, how does it sustain life without a high energy source like the sun flowing into the system | There are microbes in the deep sea that can perform chemosynthesis, by eating chemicals flowing from thermal vents on the ocean floor. There’s also whale falls, when a dead whale (or other large animal) dies and sinks to the bottom, along with other random flotsam sinking down.
| 31 | 29 |
[MCU] Why Captain America didn't lift Thor's hammer in Age of Ultron? | We later know for Endgame that he's able to do it. So why he didn't achieve it in Age of Ultron? | There's a number of theories. One is that he didn't want to move it to protect Thor's ego, another is that Mjolnir didn't consider being lifted as a party trick to be a worthy cause, and refused to move more than it did despite Steve being worthy otherwise. | 281 | 217 |
Eli5: Why do we end up more tired from sleeping longer than recommended amounts? | Why is it when you sleep for 10-12 hours you end up more tired throughout the day than if you had 8 hours of sleep? | Three main reasons: 1. If you’re sleeping 8 hours normally and one day decide to sleep for longer, you end up disrupting your natural circadian rhythm, which leaves your body in a jet lag state because it’s a bit confused. Keep a consistent schedule for better sleep. 2. Waking up later might mean you wake up at a different sleep stage. You might be waking up in a deep sleep state instead of the usual rem or light sleep stage you normally are used to. Your body cycles through these stages every hour and a half on average. 3. If you’re sleeping for too long it might be a health issue like sleep apnea preventing you from getting a good night sleep. Your body isn’t getting the rest it needs. | 444 | 767 |
ELI5: Will we eventually reach a point where we have "cured" most causes of death, or will they just be replaced with new causes? | Most causes of death are problems with cells aging and not reproducing properly, or problems with build-ups of substances such as "bad" cholesterol.
Once we fix that issue, we may find that new diseases spring up once you pass age 200 or so, but it's more likely that we will live until we have some accident or violent death.
Population control is less of an issue than you might think. Already, the reproductive rate is decreasing. More and more people are deciding to have only one child, or none at all. If you think of the people you know who have a lot of children, chances are they are either doing it because of ignorance of proper birth control or a religious reason. There are exceptions - people who just love having kids, but the people who have no kids compensate for them. | 116 | 242 |
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CMV: Art should never be viewed in a vacuum, and should always be viewed as part of the culture surrounding it as well as a production of its creator/s. | My friend believes that art should always be viewed in a vacuum when reviewing it, and judged solely based on its own merits. I'm of the mind that art - **especially** contemporary art - should be primarily viewed as a product of culture and its creator/s, as well as compared to the rest of that creator/s' library of work in order to assess it fairly.
He explained his viewpoint for a while, but I remained pretty much entirely unconvinced, due to, I suppose, how "useless" or rather "not useful" I find it to be when critiquing art, given that I feel when a work is viewed as divorced from a library of work surrounding it (say, divorcing Bloodborne from the Dark Souls games when talking about design), it loses a significant element of context and appreciation, as well as potential for critique.
I'm interested, however, in this philosophy of art that he seems to espouse, and I'm wondering if anybody can convince me of its merits beyond a thought experiment. | Each has its own merits.
Judging the work as a single cohesive experience tends to maximize the emotional and sensory impact of a work. You don't think about it, you foreground it and let the content wash over you.
Judging the work through its context is a more intellectual sort of appreciation. You'll make all sorts of interesting insights and connections, but the work will feel less immediate, less immersive.
I think the best method is to first experience it "in a vacuum" then experience it in context. | 11 | 19 |
ELI5: "Race is a Social Construct" | I've been doing some reading and I just don't grasp the 'ideas' behind that phrase. If someone could explain it a bit, it'd be great.
Thanks. | Really good answers in here.another way you can think of it is skin color biologically is no different from hair color. That is, it's irrelevant to who a person is in terms of intelligence or personality.
| 51 | 46 |
If a woman's eggs are fully formed at birth, why does having children later in life increase the risk of developmental disabilities? | source: biomedical sciences major with a few courses in genetics.
the simple answer is, eggs aren't fully formed at birth. i believe they become arrested at... metaphase I? then after menstruation, eggs continue to go through the first phase of meiosis and stop again into meiosis II until fertilization does (or doesn't) happen. therefore, eggs still have a lot of work to do, and damage early on (the normal course of a woman's life) can affect them quite a bit later on down the road. the ova that a woman has at 35 have been exposed to a lot more chemicals and what-have-you han a man's sperm when he's 35, because he will constantly produce new sperm while her eggs have been beaten up by life for 35 years.
hope that makes sense. | 34 | 99 |
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ELI5: How does soap actually kill bacteria? | All soaps work by having two different properties on a single molecule (a property called amphoteric). One end of a soap molecule like to bind to water and the other end likes to bind to organic molecules like dirt and oil. Looking at the cellular side, all cells have some sort of membrane that surrounds them. This membrane is similar to how your skin surrounds and protects you. These membranes are similar to soap in that they have water and organic binding ends to their molecules. In fact, the bubbles seen in soap are very similar to the membranes around your cells.
Soap is very good at getting into and disrupting these membranes, effectively punching holes in cells. Because of this, unlike the claims of earlier posters, BOTH antibacterial and "normal" soap are capable of killing cells, although much of regular soap's mode of action is to help wash away the cells rather than outright killing them. In the case of the antibacterial soap, it often contains an additional antibiotic (triclosan), which further disrupts the cell membrane. This gives it a more potent effect than normal soap, but both are still very capable of killing a cell.
It should also be noted that recent scientific studies have claimed that there is very little, if any benefit that anti-bacterial soaps have over normal soaps. Both are just about equally effective at getting rid of bacteria. | 69 | 77 |
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ELI5: what does it mean when a game engine is tied to the fps? why is high fps sometimes casuing problem? | playing ff14 atm and the devs said any fps above 90 fps causes game enging problem problem and apparently causing out of bound issues and stuff, how is that related to fps? isnt that more like model collision? | So tying a game to frames per second means that certain actions are updated on a per-frame basis. The simplest way to think about this is, consider a ball that bounces up and down. To create this we need to track acceleration, velocity, directional, and current position. Given we have finite resources, we can not track this in a continuous manner. Instead we need to update all these on a schedule. We could set this schedule to be every **X** milliseconds. Alternatively, we can tell the engine to update the numbers every time a frame is rendered. The issue with this, is that as frames increase or decrease, we change how often we update numbers. In this toy example that isn't necessarily a problem.
I will give two real world examples where this does become a problem. The first is Skyrim. Their engine is tied to FPS. In fact, when you go over 60 FPS everything tends to go berserk. But a real issue is with attacking and damage. Attacks occcur and then there is a "cool down" before another attack can happen. At higher FPS, these attacks can occur faster than at slow FPS. On the flip side, the player can take far more damage in the same "wall clock" amount of time. So in a way the game does not have "damage per second" but rather "damage per frame." So at 90 FPS, you can take 50% more damage per second, because there's more frames for this damage to occur in." It doesn't work exactly like that, but you get the picture.
The other example works exactly like that is Call of Duty Advanced Warfare. One of the weapons in that game was a laser cannon that dealt damage every frame. This is fine on consoles which all run the same frames per second. On PC however many players have 100+ FPS. Console generally run between 30 and 60 FPS (I believe AW was locked to 30 FPS.) This meant on PC this laser cannon did over three times the damage it did on consoles.
The moral of the story? Don't use frames to updated your game. | 43 | 38 |
ELI5:Why, when applying for a U.S. job, is a candidate asked if their ethnicity is Hispanic, Latino, or other? Why are they then asked if their race is American Indian, Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, White, or Two or More Races? | Example: http://i.imgur.com/ck3Ib0V.png
Are the terms "race" and "ethnicity" used accurately in this context? If so, why is the Latino/Hispanic ethnicity singled out? Why is the Asian "race" singled out yet no one can identify as "European"? And why the heck does this matter on a job application?
Thanks in advance! | In the US, under Title 7 legislation, employers with at least 15 or more employees are required to keep that information on all applicants that apply. In the event of a disparate impact lawsuit, that info, along with other data, will be used as evidence of discrimination. | 18 | 22 |
What are some criticisms of Peter Singer's philosophy? | * Martha Nussbaum's Capability Approach
* Alasdair MacIntyre's *After Virtue* in which he likens the principle of utility to a conceptual fiction that might produce beneficial actions, but a fiction nonetheless.
* Eva Kittay challenges Singer's attitude towards the euthanasia of disabled infants in a 28 day period as a mother of a profoundly disabled woman.
* Robert Solomon argues that Singer refuses to speak in languages beyond that of a limited logic and reason that denies human compassion.
There are many other critics who condemn Singer's perceived dismissal of human dignity. What exactly are you looking for? | 20 | 42 |
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ELI5: What would happen if I pissed into an electrical outlet? | It depends on two main factors: how solid your stream is, and whether you're connected to a ground.
If you're not connected to a ground (ie wearing shoes with rubber soles), no circuit would be made, so no current would flow through you. The relatively low voltage of household current isn't enough to hurt you.
If you're connected to a ground (eg barefoot on a metal floor), then if your stream doesn't break apart, and provides a path to your body, current will course through your lower body, burning any flesh it goes through. As the path doesn't flow through any essential organs, it most likely would not be lethal, but it would cause permanent damage.
As for what would happen to the outlet, that depends on the protection at the outlet. Urine has enough impurities to provide a good path to ground, so any fuses or breakers would trip fairly quickly. In the meantime, (or if the breakers aren't working), the current flow would melt and burn the plastic of the outlet.
I don't recommend testing. | 266 | 271 |
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ELI5: Why do doctors wait until they suspect cancer before sending someone for an MRI/CT scan instead of having a scan done at 40 or 50 years old the same way prostate exams and mammograms are recommended? | Other people have already pointed out the cost and radiation exposure. Another factor to consider is incidental findings. If take 100 people and give them all a full body scan, you'll probably find some weird-looking thing in at least 20 of them. This guy has a thing on his kidney which could be a benign cyst or it could be a cancer. This lady has some stuff caked onto the ovaries, could be ectopic endometrial tissue but could be cancer. This guy has a lump in his abdomen, could be a meckel's diverticulum but it could be a cancer. Maybe two of the people with a weird finding actually have cancer, and one of them is probably too far along for it to be helpful to have found it now anyway. Meanwhile, the other 18 people who turned out not to have cancer just ended up having unnecessary surgery. With those 18 unnecessary surgeries, two had severe post-operative complications, one of whom died, two are now pooping into a colostomy bag, one is impotent, one is infertile, and two now have chronic pain. So overall we've maybe saved one life, but also lost one life and substantially messed up several others. Overall, it appears that this group of 100 people is worse off for all having gotten a scan. | 885 | 526 |
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Does i^i have a fixed, real value? | Given that you can use the identity e^ix = cos(x) + isin(x) to prove that i^i is real (by letting x=pi/2 and raising both sides to the power of i) that would suggest that i^i = e^-pi/2, however since there are multiple values of x which could work just as well (5pi/2, for instance) and these would give different values, does i^i have a set real value or can it vary or is it just not as simple as I think it is? | Since we use the natural logarithm to calculate this exponential, and the natural logarithm is a multi-valued function, you should expect multiple solutions. i^i represents all of these values, so in a sense it's a set (e^(2pi k - pi/2) for all k in Z), but more correct is to think of these points as lying on a twisted surface that revolves about the origin infinite times in both directions. Think of an infinitely tall helical parking building - these solutions represent the same parking space on each floor.
Edit: Coming to think of it, the parking space analogy breaks down because the solutions are in different places from level to level, although always on the real line. The point is that each solution is on it's own level. | 33 | 111 |
[Alien] What exactly does Ash mean when he describes the Xenomorph as a "perfect organism"? | It's extremely effective at killing, breeding, surviving, and adapting to the point that the DNA of its offspring can rapidly change in a single generation.
That last one is the main thing. If suddenly teleported to a new universe, one xenomorph could inseminate the local wildlife once, and suddenly perfectly fit inside that ecosystem.
Thus, if the goal of life is to propogate your species, in a scientific sense, they beat anything else in the known universe, except maybe some things on the molecular level. | 395 | 280 |
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[Alien]Why does cloning Riply also clone the parasite? | We know that a gestating an xenomorph take upon the genetic properties of the host. It appears the transference is two ways. Remember they are nanotech bio-weapons. The sample they has must have been when the queen's DNA has already spread through her system. We see evidence in the failures and that the new clone has alien xenomorph properties. The 2d alien the new queen makes is an even worse genetic melange. | 19 | 18 |
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Why is Zinc more electrically conductive than nickel, and why is nickel more electrically conductive than iron? | I observed that in the 3rd shell of Zinc there are 18 (full), while in Nickel there are 16, and in iron there are 14. Does this mean that the lower number of electrons in the 3rd shell = more electrical conductivity? | Electrical conductivity is a property of condensed matter, and it is influenced by a vast number of phenomena, much more than the amount of electrons surrounding a nucleus.
At the microscopic level metals are crystalline, the atoms are stacked orderedly in arrays (crystalline lattices) whose shape is determined by the symmetry class. Different materials may have different crystalline form.
What happens to the atomic orbitals, when you put several atoms close together regularly as in a crystal?
In metals, the outer electron shells of the atoms overlap enough to give rise to composite "super-shells" called conduction bands. They are spatially de-localized (spanning the entire crystal) and are only partially filled with electrons, so that even a small electric field can give a bit of kinetic energy to the electrons in it, having them move.
Conversely, in insulators the outer electrons go into the valence band, completely filling it, while the conduction band is empty. There is a significant energy gap between the full valence and the empty conduction band and electrons cannot accept energy because they have "nowhere" to go, energetically speaking, being held back by Pauli exclusion principle. Only when the electric field is really strong they may jump from valence to conduction, this is the so-called "dielectric breakdown".
Back to electrical conductivity, different metals may contribute more or less electrons to the conduction band, the more the better.
But then you also have to think about what may disrupt conductivity:
the electrons in the conduction band are able to "collide" with the imperfections of the crystalline lattice. The main ineliminable source of those crystalline defects is given by the thermal vibrations of nuclei around their rest sites: a nucleus being displaced amounts to a temporary electric charge that may attract or repel the electron, changing its momentum.
So, in general, electrical conductivity is a non-trivial phenomenon somewhat affected by atomic properties (the number of electrons in the outer shells), but principally determined by how the single atoms stick together (as a crystal) and by how the crystal properties, such as temperature, affect the dynamical behaviour of electrons in the conduction band.
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I believe that governments should take care of the needs of the people, and that corporations should take care of the wants. CMV | This doesn't mean that all restaurants should be run by the government. It means that if someone can't afford to eat governments should pay for that person. | Who gets to decide what is a need vs a want? Is a prosthetic limb, a wheelchair, a hearing aid or a pair of glasses a need or a want? Is a 2000 calorie/day diet a need or a want? What if it consists of empty calories? Is shelter a need or a want? | 14 | 48 |
CMV: Feminism is a bad name for an equality movement, because the name represents a “side” and this creates bias against it. | It is worth noting that I’m not against the movement, just the naming.
I believe that the name “feminism” creates a wrong bias that feminists do not strive for gender equality but for positive discrimination for women. This is because it has the root “feminine” and is seen generally as purely a women movement. It is a term that linguistically excludes men.
Now, historically women have been the oppressed gender. It is true that much progress is still required for women’s rights. However, to do this, men and women need to work together. Because the movement is called “feminism”, it creates the impression that it is a struggle SOLELY for women. On the contrary, gender equality concerns everyone.
“Feminism” makes it sound like women fighting for women, which invokes a defensive reaction in men. It is a term that excludes them and declares war on them, linguistically. The word represents a side, the women’s side. It makes it sound like the only goal is the glorification of women. However, there are no sides in this matter. The feminist movement seeks for the improvemenr of everyone’s life.
I see people talk about how feminism affects men, especially in areas where they are forced to exhibit masculinity and suppress emotions. So, it is not a only a women’s movement after all.
An all encompassing term such as “equalism” would be much more inviting for people of all genders and backgrounds. The framing would be a struggle not for “women rights” but for “gender equality for all”. | Egalitarianism is probably the word you're looking for, lots of people prefer it, but feminism is a movement that was founded on the goal of bringing women up, and working for women. Yes, gender equality benefits everyone, and men can be and are involved in feminist work, but it is largely comprised of women, and has been working for women since it's inception. That men react defensively to a thing that isn't about them, even if it greatly benefits them, is kind of the problem that feminism is working on. | 33 | 144 |
ELI5: When plants face the sun, how do they know where the sun is, and how are they able to orient themselves? | There are cells in the stem of the plant that grow at different rates depending on if they are lit by the sun or not. The ones that are not in sunlight grow more than the ones that are, causing the stem of the plant to twist towards the sun. When you watch a time lapse of a plant growing it can really look like the plant “knows” where the sun is, and is actively moving towards it, but in reality the directional growth is just caused by chemical reactions, and is completely automatic. | 70 | 63 |
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ELI5: Why is it acceptable for beef to be pink in the center, but not poultry or pork? | If handled properly during processing, beef and fish carry minimal risk of containing pathogens. Damn near all of the US poultry population is infected with salmonella (especially by the time it makes it through a processing plant). Meanwhile pork can have all kinds of nasties, considering the way pigs live and eat.
There are poultry populations in other countries that are pathogen free. In France for instance, there are chicken breeds you can eat rare/medium rare. | 20 | 26 |
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ELI5: What happens when lotion is applied to really dry skin on a cellular level? | Your skin is a complex organ that relies on natural oils to stay sealed and hydrated. We wash these oils off several times a day, showering and washing our hands. This leads to two problems: rough calloused skin, which has built up, and cracked bleeding skin which has worn down. Lotion simply replaces the natural oils that were stripped off. The oil coats your skin, forming a barrier that seals moisture in. Once your skin stops losing moisture, it can heal and regenerate the worn down areas from the bottom up. The built-up layers become soft again so you don't notice they're there.
Lotion is essentially a mix of water and vaseline. Creams, balms, etc are all just different, stronger formulations of water and vaseline. Once you get up to the highest, you're simply coating your hands in name-brand vaseline and putting cotton gloves on before bed.
Since our skin does its most dramatic healing at night, if you only apply lotion once a day, let it be before you go to bed. | 597 | 643 |
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CMV: I don't believe that "developing countries" will actually achieve a "developed" level like the other countries. | I really REALLY want to change this view.
As someone from a developing country and that has lived in several countries considered "developing", I honestly cannot see a future for my country and other similar ones. Day by day my country gets more unequal and therefore violent and unstable, yes, I know that there might be a few statistics that are positive, but most statistics actually show that things are getting worse. I know that technological advances do make things easier for a lot of people but even that goes against poor countries that cannot handle automatization with such a huge amount of unqualified workers.
I can also notice that the gap between "developed" countries and "developing" countries just keeps getting wider and there are even some world leaders that strategically try to destabilise entire poor countries or regions in order to improve their own countries or businesses.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | You can take singapore as a study case. Back in the 40s it used to be dirt poor. Slums everywhere. Forward to 2017, it's the richest country in the world (per capita). So, it happened, other countries that are a good example of this China, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Estonia. | 47 | 62 |
ELI5: why raising the minimum wage ≠ a consequential rise in the cost of living. | I've searched ELI5 and have almost found the answer to my question, but usually it ended up linking to studies (which I love reading) without really explaining why.
Could someone ELI5? | The argument that a rise in the minimum wage *would* cause a rise in the cost of living rests on two assumptions:
* minimum wage employees make up a substantial portion of the workforce.
* paying minimum wage employees is a significant portion of the costs faced by most companies.
These two assumptions are, simply put, not true. There are about 3 million people (out of about 150 million workers) in the US making minimum wage. Furthermore, only about half of most businesses costs are wrapped up in paying wages. The cost increase of a minimum wage hike is simply not large enough to have a meaningful effect on cost of living. | 44 | 97 |
CMV: A prenuptial agreement, in regards to division of property, is a perfect valid agreement, and shouldn't have a negative stigma. | I find that this can be seen upon as greed or egotism, hower I simply see it from an economical standpoint.
When you're in a relationship, and you split up, you normally divide things by who it belongs to, even if there is a major difference or similarity in income. I bought the TV, I should keep the TV. You bought the couch, you should keep the couch.
This suddenly change when you enter marriage. The division is now 50/50, even though the contribution could be 90/10.
I come from en economic background, so I just see it as asset placement. The one who contributed the most, should have the most in a settlement.
I know there is such a thing as an enabler. If one partner allows the other partner to work more or be more effective, this can contribute to the overall utility of the home. I.e. the example of the 60's family where there is a houseworking woman and a working man. The woman does all the work at home, so the man can focuses on his work, bringing home income. However this model can't be accurately projected into the present world, where both men and women work equally and split house chores.
So I would find it completely valid if a woman, on average over the period of the marriage, contributed double what her husband did, she should receive double the amount of assets as him. The same goes the other way around.
Take an example of a firm on a stock market. There are 100 contributors to the firm (100 shareholders), 90 of these hold a total value of 9% of the firm i.e. 0.1% each. The remaining 10 hold a total value of 91% of the firm i.e. 9.1% each. If the firm closes down, the assets of the firm shouldn't be split in 100 equal parts. No, it should be split by contribution to the firm. The same goes if the firm produces a dividend, the dividend should be split according to contribution and not equally. This is also how firms legally work.
By splitting it equally it removes the incentive to invest more, why should I invest more than the bare minimum if I'm only able to receive the average under all circumstances?
Now take this back into the relationship, if my spouse produces x amount of income and "invest" it into our shared life (Contribution), why should I invest 2x or 100x? I know it's an extreme example, but it gets the point across. Only if I know that I can keep the difference, I have an incentive to invest. Everything else is irrational.
Please take in mind that I'm not up for the "You bought this, you keep this" mentality in a marriage, since you could have split your income in-equally i.e. I buy groceries for the month, and you buy the table and chairs we need. If one only buys all the necessary items like food and general supplies, this should be seen just as much of a contribution as buying a table and chairs, under the assumptions that these equal in cost. I'm only focusing on contribution.
As I said, I've not taken any sociologic or politologic assumptions into my thoughts, only the economical aspect.
Hope you can help me out here. I've presented my views to friends and family over the years and most of them sees this as greed or like I have egotistic views. I simply can't see why I should contribute with twice as much as my spouse and expect to share equally. Or how I cannot feel guilty by contributing half as much as my spouse and expect to receive equally.
This is clearly hypothetical. | Problem is that a lot of contributions are difficult to assess.
House chores has to be done. How much should this be taken in account in the "full economical" point of view ? Hours at minimal wages ? Hours at your current wages in your work ?
What if you got children ? You both wan them, but it's obviously the wife that is going to be pregnant, have to take some maternity leave etc. Maybe she'll miss a raise because of that, can you account it in contribution model ?
Basically, the 50/50 split is saying "we both contribute to our family in different ways, and as quantifying it is really too complicated, we consider we do half each".
*TL;DR*
If both of you are persuaded that one partner is going to contribute way more than the other, then a prenuptial agreement will be necessary. But people tend to consider than a relationship where there is a main contributor and a "freeloader" is not a healthy relationship, thus are retro-propagating this impression onto the agreement, which looks like "ok, we are marrying knowing that we are in a dysfunctional relationship", and it looks weird. | 41 | 88 |
ELI5: Why do live TV hosts experience delays when talking to reporters on the scene? | Like, it's the current year, if I fire up Discord, Skype or even FaceTime I can talk to or video message people on the other side of the country with close to zero lag, as if they're right here with me. Still, when I watch TV sometimes I see that there's a delay in the communication between the host and the reporter on the scene, even if they're in the same city.
\- So, we have Jim on the scene to bring us the newest news
\- \[camera focuses on Jim, 3 weird seconds passes\]
\- Oh yeah, John, we're here with Ms. Davis who lost all her belongings on the Godzilla attack... | All the apps you mention have the benefit of being able to use existing ground infrastructure; wifi is within a few hundred feet at the most and cellular a few miles before it is onto ground lines. Those are great if you can get them, but the field reporters want to be able to ensure they can speak without interruption which means they need to control every step of the network.
To do this they typically use satellite communications, only needing to have a clear view of the sky from their van to form a video link no matter where they are. The penalty is that the much longer round trip distance causes a slight delay in the communications. | 23 | 15 |
Ways to stay involved outside of school? | Preferably want to hear from humanities people but science people can jump in if they have something to say.
I'm an undergrad senior and I really want to be an Egyptologist. However, based on the fact that I've been rejected from every Ph.d program I applied to but one unlikely program I still need to hear from and how agonizing I'm finding writing my thesis to be, it looks like I'll never get to put this NELC degree to use. So when I'm not at my boring desk job pushing papers or fetching coffee, will there be any way for me to stay involved in academia - besides just reading the lame books meant for people with no academic background or shelling out money I won't have for actual scholarly publications. I want to contribute something to our corpus of knowledge, but it's starting to look like I have nothing to offer.
TL;DR (in metaphor form) If it turns out you aren't cut out for the the ivory tower, can you still visit or are you locked out forever? | Why Egyptology in particular? Are History, Classics, or Anthropology/Archaeology not of interest to you?
A big part of the game of academia is finding your niche. Few people can decide exactly what they wish to do so early. If you really want to make a contribution, why not study a place and period that has had less attention? | 13 | 16 |
CMV: Police power should never be "for hire" for private entities | I read about how NFL refs accidentally left the "K" balls used for kicking at their hotel prior to the Patriots - Chiefs playoff game. The balls were then given a state police escort to the stadium.
Even if the cost to the taxpayers was zero (I am assuming the NFL or team paid for the officer's time), it greatly bothers me that police authority can be used to support a private entity.
You most often see this when uniformed police officers are hired to handle security at an event or to manage traffic, using their authority to stop traffic so that people leaving private property can leave more quickly, rather than having to wait for the usual breaks in traffic. If you violate those officer's directions, you are subject to a normal traffic fine.
It seems that no private entity ought to be able to rent police authority for the benefit of themselves or their customers. If an officer is not on regular duty, serving the public, he should not be able to use his uniform, badge, or official vehicle to secure a benefit for himself or anyone else. (Obvious exception for trying to arrest someone actually breaking a law while he is off duty).
Obviously, police departments / lawmakers do not see this is an abuse of powers, so there must be some good reason why this should be allowed.
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General tools and tips for starting a PhD? | I am going to be starting this fall and I’m primarily interested in hearing about must-have tools and programs which will make my experience smoother. Are there things you wish you knew going in?
I’ve already been told to check out Zotero or Mendeley for taking notes on PDFs, are there other programs I should know about?
Thanks!
Edit: it’s a social sciences degree. | For STEM: Consider taking the time to learn a bit of programming. R is a good start, Python is good too. Data sets in the literature are getting bigger and bigger, to the point where it's unfeasible to look at them without the help of coding | 17 | 15 |
CMV: If workers are always working extra hours, the company needs more employees | A friend of mine is working for a company for a couple of months now. After his new boss was hired, a lot has changed in his team and now there's a lot of new projects and changes to existing ones. As a result, everyone's been working extra hours every single day and the boss thinks that this is OK and the team is performing well.
I don't think that this is OK as there are lots of consequences in the foreseeable future: burnout, decrease in performance, mental health, etc. The way I see it, the company needs to hire new employees as that would distribute the hours needed for each project into more people working regular hours. There's simply not that many people available in the team to work in everything that they have planned. With each employee working 8 regular hours a day, they constantly need to work extra hours. | It costs more money to hire a new person than merely the hours they work. A lot more. It's basically cheaper to pay someone double time for 80 hours of work than it is to hire two people. (A slight exaggeration, but not by much)
Besides the salary cost and benefits, providing space and resources for the person to do their work is also more expensive.
This is why it's cheaper most of the time to hire one specialist than it is to hire 3 non-specialised people and split the workload and the salary.
So if workers are always working extra hours, that's by design. Companies are trying to push to get the most out of their investment in salary cost.
Built into that system is an understanding of staff turnover etc that is already quantified. People burning out is never a surprise to the business and is already paid for, so to them it doesn't matter all that much if people stay or go as long as the turnover stays within acceptable bounds. | 1,218 | 8,058 |
CMV: It's not rude to correct someone's English if they're learning it as a second language. | A lot of people seem to think it's rude to correct someone's English, and to me it seems that it's only rude if it's condescending or the person is a native English speaker. I think that if someone is learning English (which is a difficult language to learn) and makes a mistake then it'd be a good thing for someone to correct them. This way they'll learn something new about the language that they'll use later.
If I were learning another language, then I know I'd want people to help me as long as they weren't being rude about it. One of the easiest ways to learn a language is by speaking to people who have already mastered said language, but a lot of that probably comes from them correcting your mistake. Otherwise you'd have to hear the correct way to say/write something multiple times before you'd realize you were making a mistake, and even then it'd be confusing since different rules apply to different words, for example, someone may think the plural of goose would be "gooses" because someone said the plural of dog was "dogs", so they'd just assume that plural means you add an S. If someone corrected them when they said "gooses", then they'd learn right then instead of having to read the word "geese" somewhere. | I think fluency is developed through practice, which takes a combination of opportunity and courage. If someone is getting corrected all the time, even though they are capably communicating what they mean to, it’s bound to interrupt their ability get in the flow, not to mention sap their courage to practice a second language. | 26 | 77 |
In mediums where the speed of light is reduced, are relativistic effects greater at lower speeds? | No, relativistic effects are determined by c, the unchanging speed limit of the universe (also the natural conversion factor between distances in space and time). Light happens to travel at this speed in vacuum because it's has no mass, and it's known as "the speed of light" because light was the first massless particle discovered. | 24 | 60 |
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What's the difference between the Law of Excluded Middle and the principle of Bivalence? | Hi friends,
If we say:
Bivalence - A proposition is either true or false
LEM - Given any proposition, either it's true or it's not true (P ∨ ¬P)
How are these two different?
What's the difference between "true or not true" (LEM) and "true or false" (Bivalence)?
Given a pair of contradictory opposites, if both the LEM and Bivalence result in only one option being true, the other being false or "not true", how are they different? | LEM excludes the possibility of a proposition being neither true nor false, but still allows for individual propositions to be both true and false. Individual propositions which are both true and false violate the principle of Bivalence. This is because the principle of Bivalence is *not* "a proposition is either true or false" (as you put it) but rather "all propositions have exactly one truth value, and the only possible truth values are true and false." | 23 | 55 |
How bad would it be to have non-professors write letter of recommendations for grad school? | On the application it shows a list of types of recommenders (professor, employer, family member, co worker, friend etc.) Im only thinking about this because I'm anxious my professors aren't responding to my email requests although I still have a few weeks for the deadline. I have one from one of my undergrad professors so far though | It's fine to have a non-professor write a letter of recommendation since as an undergrad you're not expected to have a relationship with multiple profs, and an employer is probably a better judge of your work ethic than someone that just taught a class you were in. But you should ideally have at least one solid recommendation from a professor that knows you in an academic context | 21 | 16 |
ELI5: Why do some foods have an after taste - And what causes the after taste? | There are two things you need to know; how taste buds work, and how saliva works
Saliva is the first part of digestion, believe it or not. The food is actually being broken down at a molecular level before you even swallow it!
Taste buds are sort of similar to the nerves you have on your skin. Your hands are really good at understanding the texture of what it touches, whereas your shoulder for example, is pretty bad at it. You can think of taste buds in the same way. Taste buds are just very very specialized nerves (sort of), that can understand what different things taste like.
The regular flavor of something is just how the taste buds process that food. The *aftertaste* comes when your taste buds start tasting the food *after* it's been broken down. The few particles of food left in your mouth after you swallow are still being broken down, and your taste buds do their job by "tasting" these leftover compounds. | 23 | 27 |
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ELI5: Why does it hurt more to get an IV put in your hand than in the crook of your arm? | I have tiny little veins and nurses are never able to stick me in my arm, but they’re able to find better veins in my hand. Whenever I see a new doctor, I tell them to just start in my hand because the constant sticking in my arm always makes me pass out. But they always seem really hesitant, since the hand hurts more than the arm.
My question is why?
| The hand has more nerve endings (sensors) because you need to feel what you're doing with your hand while doing complex tasks (typing for example).
The high density of "useful" nerves to sense touch, temperature, etc, also comes with a lot of nerves that detect pain. Arguably this serves a purpose, allowing you to detect/avoid injury while using your hands. But evolution isn't perfect, and many things that aren't clearly helpful occur as "side effects" of helpful adaptations. | 24 | 43 |
ELI5 how anesthesia works | I mean the putting you to sleep kind | The specially trained doctor administers three drugs. One reduces your consciousness, making you drowsy, or unconscious or comatose. Another paralyzes the body so it doesn't move during surgery. A third numbs the bodies sensation of pain. Three doctor makes sure you have the right amount of each by watching your vital signs, like heart rate, oxygen saturation, so you are unaware, still, and not suffering. | 16 | 15 |
Why do diesel locomotives have electric engines? | I hope this is the right sub reddit for this question...
Why do diesel locomotives and even some ships use Diesel engines to power generators that then run electric motors to "drive" the vehicle?
From a scientific perspective, why don't we do this for cars? | There are a few advantages but the most significant one is that it simplifies the coupling of the diesel engine to the wheels. By having the diesel drive a generator and putting electric motors on the wheels, you do away with complex drive shaft and transmission systems and just run some flexible cables to the wheel motors. Imagine the size of the clutch that would be needed on a typical locomotive. The electrical control system also replaces the need for a mechanical gearbox. Again, imagine trying to double clutch a train.
On ships the main advantage is being able to connect multiple diesel engines to multiple propulsion devices without complex mechanical couplings - just wire them together instead.
It isn't done on cars because a mechanical transmission is more efficient and simpler for small scale machines. | 36 | 28 |
How efficient are our best solar panels compared to the leaves of plants at converting solar energy? | Plants usually have an efficiency around a few percent while the best laboratory devices have an efficiency of over 40%. A commercial solar cell will probably be closer to 10%. So in conclusion even a "bad" solar cell will usually be better at extracting useful energy from sunlight than plants. | 54 | 115 |
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Eli5: why do lips get chapped in cold weather compared to hot? Doesn’t the hot air absorb the moisture more? | Hot air does make moisture move more, but that also includes nearby water sources, making the air more humid.
The higher water content of the warm air doesn't suck from your lips as much as the very dry cold air.
Plus, when it's warmer, you're sweating more, applying moisture more directly. | 163 | 275 |
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CMV: The power of magic has caused people born into the wizarding world in Harry Potter to lack critical thinking and problem solving skills. | The ability to use magic in the Harry Potter universe has allowed for creative solutions to a lot of problems that people face. However, I believe that using magic to solve problems has caused people born into the wizarding world to be unable to think through basic problems well themselves. Instead, solving a problem is just knowing the name and wand movement of a spell that will take care of things. This reliance has bled into how people navigate all situations that don't have an obvious or magical solution.
I've been going back through the entire plot, mostly by listening to the podcast Mostly Nitpicking do a full movie series run, and have noticed how a lot of characters lack what people typically consider common sense in a lot of situations. The character who does seem to know everything in every situation is one who was born and raised entirely isolated from magic, Hermione. I think a lot of what makes her studious nature so unique is that she actually wants to understand things and how to deal with unexpected circumstances while people born into magic aren't worried about figuring things out for themselves.
A real life analogy to this could be comparing a student who came from a privileged background and had others, like their parents, do things for them versus a student who didn't have this luxury and needed to do more for themselves. A student who never needed to do things on their own typically struggles more with critical thinking than their peers because they're used to having other people do that for them. In Harry Potter, those born into magic face a similar problem as a result of magic replacing the need to do many things themselves.
This seems to be most apparent with the three main characters. Ron, the only character who has relied on magic to accomplish basic tasks for his entire life, is shown to be less independent in his thinking, to have less initiative, and to look like an absolute dunce when a solution isn't obvious. Meanwhile, Harry and Hermione take initiative for themselves much more frequently and are able to reach solutions themselves. This is a small sample size admittedly, and I'm using it more as an example than as proof.
I can see how the ability to use magic to help with things can foster more creative thinking and promote problem solving skills, but I don't think that plays out in the people in the universe. Instead, magic is hamstringing most witches' and wizards' ability to think effectively for themselves. | Keep in mind, the books were told from the perspective of Harry Potter.
Harry Potter learned through rote memorization, mostly, but there were underlying principles to magic that he did not understand.
This is alluded to in several places in the books. Harry excelled in potions class using notes written in margins, written by someone who clearly understood why the potions worked enough to be able to modify them.
Professor Slughorn asked the students to customize a antidote based on the principles of potions, and Harry had no idea how to do it, but he got around it by grabbing a bezoar stone.
Hermione explains that one can not produce food out of thin air because it is one of five exceptions to Gamp's law of elemental transfiguration. What that means, Hermione obviously knows, but Harry clearly does not.
Magic only seemed to be rote memorization, rather than derived from underlying fundamental principles, because the main perspective of the story was ignorant of those principles (which conveniently prevented Rowling from having to come up with and explain to readers hard magic rules). | 1,089 | 2,917 |
ELI5: Why can't humans see clearly underwater? | Light travels differently in water, due to the refractive index of water. That's why looking through the surface of water, straight objects can look bent, and spearfishing is so difficult! Since we are evolved to see through air, our vision gets screwed up when looking at light through water. Having an air pocket between the water and the eyeball like in goggles solves this as the light goes back to normal speed in the air. | 16 | 21 |
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APIs Explained ... | I dunno but I don't understand APIs fluently.
Does anyone know of an informative article or perhaps a website or just personally explain to me frankly wtf APIs are an why we need them ...
Edit:
Thanks everyone for your empathetic contributions.
Guess what; I have a better understanding of APIs now than I did before. | API - Application Programming Interface. It is a way of allowing you to access the data from another application or a way of applications to communicate with each other.
Take the example of a restaurant, since it belongs to someone else and you are not allowed to go to the Kitchen therefore the menu is the API. Allows you to make an order for food. Food is like data which you request for. The order you make is called an API call. When you make an order, the waiter will give you a response eg the food is available or not. Same happens with APIs, when you make an api call, you will either get a successful response and get your data or get an error and no data.
Now you can refer to the more technical explanations given in the thread | 130 | 52 |
ELI5: Why do some animals (like spiders or lizards) spend so much time just doing nothing? What is happening and why? | Most organisms are in a constant struggle for energy. Obtaining energy is dangerous, you have to leave your save burrow or go risk injury in a hunt.
That's why many organisms develop strategies for minimising the risks they need to take. And one of the most popular strategies is simply having simple, low demand physiologies, slow metabolisms and generally low energy needs.
Warm blooded animals are fairly unique. We're like a car with the engine constantly running. That means we're ready to go from zero to a 100 right away but we're also guzzling gas constantly, even if we're standing still. That's why warm blooded animals need toc constantly eat. Some of the smaller more high energy creatures like humming birds can starve to death in a matter of hours.
By comparison, cold blooded animals waste zero energy on body heat. The downside is that they need to warm their bodies up with external heat like sunlight in order to get their digestive enzymes working or to get their muscles ready for fast action.
But on the upside, they need so little energy that they have to take far fewer risks than warm blooded animals. Some cold blooded animals can go up to a year or even longer without food. | 18,698 | 26,837 |
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ELI5: what makes pain differentiate into various sensations such as shooting, stabbing, throbbing, aching, sharp, dull, etc? | How big the area causing the pain is, plus the method of damage of the tissue e.g. are the cells too hot, or physically cut, and therefore which types of nerve cells are stimulated (e.g. A-d fibres can be stimulated by mechanical or thermal stimuli, or C fibres which can be mechanical, thermal or chemical).
Some nerve fibres have special coatings (myelination) which allows the signal to travel faster e.g. A-d pain fibres | 3,452 | 7,504 |
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ELI5: Can someone explain money laundering? | Someone on YouTube was explaining money laundering, which is basically getting “dirty” money, and doing a bunch of things to clean it up. My specific question is, how can money be dirty? I just don’t understand | Let's say that you're a drug dealer. You make money illegally by selling drugs. You're rich, BUT you have a problem. If you want to make a large transaction, like buying a house or a car, you need to go through a bank. And the bank has to check where you got your money from, to make sure that you're not a criminal. If a bank has reason to suspect that you're making your money from crime, they'll ask the police to investigate.
So, if you want to spend your "dirty" money that you made through crime, you need to "clean" it. Traditionally, a laundromat was a good way of doing this. You would buy a laundromat, or become partners with the owner of a laundromat. Then, you'd lie and claim that the money you earned by selling drugs was actually profit that your laundromat made. Now, the bank will go "You made this money legally, good for you!" and let you use that money to get a fancy house or car.
Many money laundering tricks are more complicated ways of making it seem that a business is really profitable when really it's not, so that you can pretend that it's earning enough money that the banks won't get suspicious. Because if you earned $1 million selling drugs, but claim that you made it with a week's work at your laundromat, the bank will go "No, that can't be true. We're getting the police to investigate you." | 58 | 27 |
Eli5 why is it called 'Nucleic ACID' when one of its components is a Nitrogenous BASE? | The acidity comes from the phosphate groups used in forming DNA and RNA molecules. These phosphate groups are quite similar to phosphoric acid. The only difference there is the replacement of two of the protons from the phosphoric acid with protons from the sugar molecules of the nucleotide. This leaves only one remaining proton, which is very acidic. That easily-lost proton is what causes nucleic acids to be so acidic. | 138 | 192 |
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ELI5 why older cartridge games freeze on a single frame rather than crashing completely? What makes the console "stick" on the last given instruction, rather than cutting to a color or corrupting the screen? | The way games usually work is that there is a large part of the executed code to calculate the game world (i.e. where is everything, what values does everything have, what is the next step for the AI, etc.), and then render the scene in one go and update the screen with that new scene rendition. The graphics card will just put on screen whatever it was last told to output, forever.
So if any of that fails, you are stuck with whatever the latest "update the screen" did.
In modern software, the game runs in a container, which is monitored by the operating system, and as soon as a crash is detected, the OS will kill that container, present a nice error message to the user, and then continue on as if the game was never started.
In older consoles, the game was basically taking direct control of the console's hardware, including the graphics card, so if the game crashed there was nothing there to detect that crash and order the graphics card to display something else. Same goes with input controllers etc., so your only option was to unplug the power supply and reboot the console. | 7,172 | 7,790 |
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Today I found what appears to a be a plant that repaired a broken limb with as smaller support limb. What is going on with this? (Pics inside) | So I am calling it a buttress, but I don't really know what this phenomenon is called. I have been unsuccessful in googleing any information on the matter.
Please excuse my fuzzy phone pics.
[PICS](http://imgur.com/a/wQDtH#0)
PS: I posted the same gallery in r/plants to see if they could identify the plant itself, in case that helps.
EDIT: Thanks for all of the responses. The AskScience community is awesome! I was hoping I would get some lovely *tropism kind of word to help me get a better handle on the subject.
It seems many people are suggesting inoscculation and/or gravitropism combined with stem damage. Upon further inspection I realized that the smaller, connecting, stem grew from a node closer to the end of the parent stem and re-attached to a point on the same stem, but closer to the stalk. It was able to do this because of the bend in the stalk.
I am wondering now if the leaf stem's grafting behavior wasn't triggered by the bending/damage to the parent stem. | I realize this may not be of any help for this particular post, however, when trying to identify a plant species you need a picture or it's full form, an upper leaf, under leaf, the bud, branching pattern, and any fruit or inflorescence , also knowing the location and whether it is a high and dry site or low and wet (near a ditch) is also very helpful. | 366 | 888 |
ELI5: Why do we close our eyes when we hear a loud noise? For an example when someone is hammering in a nail. | Your eyes are the single most important part of perception as a human - People who cannot see are massively disabled and their entire life changes.
Likewise, it makes sense to try and protect the eyes, and closeing them increases their protection.
If you hear a loud noise and react, it is a defense mechanism. Your body is instinctively thinking "Loud noise, potential danger, might damage eyes, close them for a moment in case something might damage them," which makes sense considering your eyes are extremely soft (Basically just balls of wet jelly) and it doesn't take much to destroy them.
Flying bits of debris can easily destroy an eye, even a well placed bit of tree bark, and a loud noise usually means sending debris flying, and an eye has FAR better chance to survive if it has a thick layer of skin and muscle covering it than just a thin, white membrane. | 158 | 174 |
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How do we recognize what language we hear is even if we don't know it? | All languages have characteristic sounds and sound patterns. This is called phonology. Languages also have characteristics beyond just sounds such as stress pattern, length of each sound, and pattern of intonation.
If you've heard the language before and had it identified to you, you probably picked up on some of the characteristics and can recognize them again. | 45 | 194 |
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ELI5: Why is female circumcision so much more frowned upon than male circumcision? | . | Female circumcision is something of a euphemism, and the term covers a large variety of different practices. These are rarely analogous to male circumcision, where for example just the critoral hood is removed. There are cultures which do that, but it's rare.
More commonly, it involves the removal of the entire clitoris and/or parts of the labia, and sometimes goes much farther than that. An equivalent operation for a male would be, perhaps, removing the entire head of the penis instead of just the foreskin.
They aren't in any sense analogous procedures... | 51 | 16 |
People can learn many complicated things. Given this, how does the big-5 model represent a "truth"? Can't I just train people to have different traits? | Arguably this happens when people
* join cults or manipulative relationships where they are "changed" as people
* are influenced through advertising to impulse-buy
* are trained to fight in the military | How does one train Openness without being open to new experiences? How does one train Conscientiousness unless one is conscientious enough to see it is important? Etc?
Personality traits determine *how* someone reacts to cults, advertising, the military, etc.
Now, life experiences may make personality traits more or less extreme, but, like handedness, it won't completely change. For example, if you break your dominant hand, you can get good with your non-dominant hand, but if the broken hand heals, you'd go right back to it. | 15 | 18 |
[Counter Strike] Why are elite police officers allowed to paint their weapons in such flamboyant manners and why do they need to buy them before each mission, even when a nuclear power plant is in danger? | Every soldier is given a sort of requisition budget before they go into the field, determined in part by how well they did on previous missions. They can use this budget to buy weapons and other gear based on personal preferences, tactics, and the mission at hand.
As far as the weird camo goes, that's up to the individual soldier. It is used in part to mark a weapon as theirs. Some like to be tactical and use patterns that would work as actual camouflage, but considering the nature of the majority of their missions that is usually unnecessary. This leads to soldiers basically showing off and getting to use their designs for a variety of more aesthetics purposes. | 40 | 39 |
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How do satellites know their precise location? | We can track satellites using ground based stations (IGS) and use the data to make corrections to signals from things like GPS satellites. This data is not always transmitted back to the satellite, so not all satellites know where they are, per se.
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ELI5: how can NASA connect to distant planet rovers and far off satellites but there are still dead zones to cell phone coverage and internet connectivity on Earth | NASA's satellites have a clear line of sight between whatever's on Mars or in space.
On earth there's a ton of radiation interference and construction materials that block radio signals... cell signals are also based on towers on the ground. If you live 500 miles out in the woods and you're the only person there and there's no tower you're not going to get a signal. | 22 | 22 |
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Can someone please explain solar flares? How large are they and how long do they last? | To be brief on what is an amazingly deep field:
Solar flares are the visible manifestations of magnetic explosions in the upper atmospheres of the Sun. Where a chemical explosion takes chemical potential energy and turns it into heat, a flare takes magnetic potential and turns it into heat (among other forms of energy).
Where this energy stored is in the complexity of the field. Generally more complex, tangled fields have a higher energy density. When a set of circumstance that are quite subtle are reached then a previously complicated magnetic field configuration can relax via a process called 'magnetic reconnection' into a more simple field.
The excess energy is converted into other forms such as thermal energy of the solar plasma and into high energy, non-thermal beams of particles. These hot gasses glow brightly and these particle beams generate high-energy photons.
It is this radiation that is the flare.
They are big events but they do vary in size over many orders of magnitude. The flares we see are classified by an array of satellites called GOES. The classes from smallest to biggest are A,B,C,M,X. Each class represents a ten times increase in luminosity from the class before. We also expect that flares can be significantly smaller than we have a hope of detecting. In fact such small flares, called nano-flares could be much more common than any other type.
An X-class flare can be extremely luminous across the spectra (from radio to gamma-ray). Such a flare can release over 10^25 Joules over the course of a few seconds up to maybe an hour. In energy terms that is something like 100 billion megatons.
In terms of physical size the site of the explosion is not really resolved, it is quite small compared to the sizes we deal with when it comes to the Sun. However, we can observe the region which is heated and the region which beams of particles impact (the footpoints) and all these scales are vast, many times the size of the Earth. | 14 | 26 |
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How did structuralism lead to post-structuralism? | If it did it at all? Thanks :) | Structuralist like Claude Levi Strauss were interested in discovering laws of human society and behavior. They did this by studying the history and anthropology of the world, especially places and times at deviance with the present moment. Post Structuralists said that these alleged scientific laws about society or behavior were really just hamstrung by the perspective of the structuralists themselves... so the post structuralists criticized the timeless universalist claims of structuralism (which claimed to discover fundamental underlying structures) and tried to show the difficulty of making claims about all of history/humanity without taking a stance on history/the human which was historically parochial (epochal for Heidegger, epistemic in Foucault talk).
Structuralist: Claude Levi Strauss, Althusser, etc.
Post Structuralist: Michel Foucault (though people are claiming he was a neoliberal at heart).
How did it structuralism lead to post structuralism? Well originally people said things like “Africans are primitive”, structuralists claimed that dynamics of African tribal family structure were indicative of underlying dynamics at work in Western European families too... and then the post structuralists said, the notion of a family as understood as such and of the methods for comparative analysis are fundamentally reflective of a peculiar historical attempt to discover/invent/force comparisons in order to render foreigners knowable and therefore malleable for our power structure. We will assume they really are just like French families, and then we will make it so, and force our way of life on them.
Allegedly... Derrida claimed that this is neither good nor bad so we cannot really criticize it, and this is considered post post structuralist aka deconstructivist. There is a curious parallel mirroring of the original pre structuralist view and the de constructivist one. Deconstructionist claim that they don’t take a stance on anything, that they want to show how language forces people to take a stance and be biased when it is used in traditional manner but there can be more inclusive ways to use language that preclude being parochial whereas post Structuralists say it is inevitable to have to take a stance on your present moment and they try to be open-honest about it (disclosing their own biases and identity and such).
Contemporary analytic philosophy and mainstream academic science feels more aligned to structuralism because the notion of discoverable timeless rules and dynamics formed the historical development of most knowledge in their view. At best they will concede that this is a work in progress and we need dissenting views to iteratively clarify our understanding. In which case they end up somewhere like Descartes and Hegel sketched... and Heidegger’s criticisms of Husserl’s inside/outside distinction could be levied against them as could later Wittgenstein. | 44 | 43 |
Is there a mutation that adds new genetic information? | As a basic example, you can have duplications. Instead of having one copy of gene A in the haploid genome, a duplication gives you two. Now, the two copies are free to accumulate different mutations. Say, A stays relatively conserved, still performing its original function, freeing up the second copy to change more freely, becoming A* with a different function. And there's your new information and functionality. | 28 | 23 |
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ELI5: Why do medics keep you awake when you’ve had a traumatic injury? Why would being unconscious be more dangerous? | Until the patient has time to get to a hospital and get good diagnosis, it is hard for anyone in the field to determine (other than gross external injuries) what actually is the most urgent issue. The patient is actually the best guide (location of pain, what happened etc) to assist them for immediate treatment. They will often want to know if the patient has any existing conditions, allergies or on medication as this informs them what they should avoid.
In the case of head injuries and internal bleeding, in particular, there might be very little external signs. But if the patient cannot maintain consciousness or follow simple instructions, it might be indicative that there could be trauma and this needs more attention.
Once a patient loses consciousness, a large part of this feedback mechanism is lost. | 461 | 232 |
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Any advice for a someone who aspires to be a philosopher? | It is the one thing I always loved. It is called philosophy. And for the first time in my life ( 17 years old ) I have started reading it and watching lectures about it. Yet I feel like I am missing something or doing something wrong, perhaps I am missing intelligence ( Average educated right now - Now doing above average education ) or perhaps it is due to my ADD ( Which prevents me from fully concentrating on the text which I'm reading ). Anyway, I love it, just as much I love science and just as much I love music. But I still feel like I'm not making any real progress, meaning that I am not really developing the philosophical mindset or skill. I still have sometimes a lot of trouble mainly with logic and things like philosophy of mind. For example: I read something and they use arguments which literally kill my brain ( metaphorically ). I am always open-minded, I always use a dictionairy, I always try my best. I assume you know where I am going. It is a lot of trouble I know that. Most philosopher in history had different views, different backgrounds, different arguments. So any advice about how one can get a more philosophical mindset? How one can become a better philosopher? How can one develop himself correctly as a philosopher? How one can improve this great skill? How one can read philosophy ( Works like: Beyond good and evil or the gay science, Being and time, Aristotle's metaphysics, Major works of Ludwig Wittgenstein ( I am planning to read all those ), philosophy of mind and logic ( Those two in particulair hurt my brain )) and making sure his brain survives?!
I here apoligize If I have been wasting to much of your time for such a simple question and I ofcourse I apoligize for If I have been obscure or unclear. Anyway for those who did understood and answered, thank you for answering! I will try my best to take the advice to my own heart! | >How one can become a better philosopher? How can one develop himself correctly as a philosopher?
Reading. A lot. There are reading lists out there, but the important thing is to just *do* it.
Writing too. Loads of it.
On a more personal level, get your condition under control. Meds, therapy, daily rituals/procedures, meditation, whatever works. That'll help you with *life*, not just philosophy. | 25 | 34 |
CMV: If Affirmative Action's purpose is to help minorities out of the poverty cycle then we should give less support to those who study something that has a lower chance of making money. | The highest paying majors tend to be the most math heavy, which is hard for pretty much everyone much less someone from a disadvantaged background who comes in not knowing even single variable calculus (which I've seen first hand).
By further putting pressure to go into these difficult majors one has the chance to amplify the mismatch effect (Google it). It takes the students at the margin of switching into a more rigorous discipline but don't because they doubt their academic background or interest level. These students now go into the more rigorous discipline.
Put another way think of it from the perspective of no affirmative action. You give more money to students in the harder (and more than likely higher earning) majors. Take it to the extreme and consider all high earning majors being paid for in full by a third party. This leads to tons of people going into these majors because they're free. Most will simply not be able to finish unless they have a strong math background and are good at it. End result is a ton of wasted resources.
Of course it also might not make any difference whatsoever because students don't tend to choose a major with a large weighting on future expected earnings. In this case it's just another subsidy.
Anyway the point is that the effect is ambiguous at best. It would probably cause a larger portion of minorities to go into these majors at the cost of a higher drop out rate. Expected graduate earnings could go either way but the standard deviation of earnings would almost certainly increase. | 18 | 44 |
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ELI5 : why is a room heated to 65 quite comfortable, but a room cooled to 65 is freezing!?!? | Temperature contrast and adaptation difference.
When the room is heating, your body adapted to the cooler temperature, thus it relaxes and your blood vessels slightly expand (they were contracted to lose less heat). When the room is cooling that means your body adapted to conduct more temperature (expanded blood vessels to prevent overheating) and cooling brings some shock, thus your vessels have to contract due to the potential risk of freezing.
Same goes with contrast showers — you alternating hot and cold water, thus providing a slight thermal shock to the body. It may be good for your blood vessels tonus, but some people may suffer panic attacks because of them. | 46 | 51 |
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ELi5 What is mathematics & why does it work | Mathematics is a language based on logic. It's nothing more than a way to describe things. It's precision is what makes it useful. It seems there is not much we can not describe with the language of mathematics. | 15 | 16 |
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How much formal education is necessary to become a philosopher? | I am currently pursuing philosophy at the undergraduate level. If I do not go to graduate school, then would I still be taken seriously if I were to pursue a career as an academic philosopher? If not, then are there any philosophy careers for non-academics?
Are there any renowned (academic or not) philosophers who haven’t had formal education in the field?
Thanks in advance for any answers. This is my first post in the community. I’ve read the rules, but please let me know if there’s anything I can clarify. | There have been many famous autodidact philosophers throughout history. But that is no longer likely feasible. You can still publish in journals if you are a BA student. But not going to graduate school is not going to get you into the academic philosophy world. | 68 | 56 |
Why does my external speaker have louder ground-hum when the computer it is plugged into displays brighter colors? | Your monitor uses a scheme called "dynamic contrast" to improve it's contrast ratio. When brighter colors are displayed, the backlight intensity increases, which requires more current from it's power supply. The audio amplifier's power supply is, obviously, not as well isolated from from the power line noise as it could be and is reacting to the increased load with increased noise. | 23 | 38 |
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ELI5: Why are older electronics more durable and last longer than newer ones? | Wouldn't it make sense if they kept making them strong? | As things get more components, they have more potential points of failure.
Imagine an old style coffee maker that just has the heating element in the base that powers the whole thing. As long as that heating coil works, everything works.
Now get a nice fancy coffee maker that has an automatic water dispenser, bean grinder, WiFi enabled, etc. That is more parts that can fail.
If every part has an average lifespan of 10 years, then the basic coffee maker has a 50% chance of working after 10 years, but the complex one has a 6.25% chance of working (each part independently only has a 50% chance of working, and you need all of them to still work). | 26 | 17 |
[The last of us] Where are the quarantine zone's rations coming from anyway? | Humanity's industry has been all but destroyed, even what remains of the military seems to be relying on scavenged tech. So forget all the bitching about 'half ration weeks'. How are these guys getting any rations?
Are there farms out there, with constant lookouts for infected, or are people out hunting/foraging/scavenging for 20 year old preserved food? | Any untouched wildlife would be hunted for food and rationed. Any reserves found anywhere from scavenging new areas to picking off the dead would also be portioned and rationed. If you came into a new area and found one pickle in 100 acres of land then that pickle gets portioned.
Besides all that there are farms, perhaps not successful ones but ones that might supply these troops. There would be people who expected the end and prepared with an abundance of food but didn't survive, perhaps their supply is found.
Realistically we are never out of food. Anything can be good if your desperate | 15 | 24 |
ELI5: What can high-profile law firms do to win cases that smaller law firms can't? | In other words, what's the difference between highly-paid attorneys and lower-paid attorneys? | Larger top-tier/Magic Circle law firms pay their employed solicitors very well, and they're very large organisations. This gives it three main advantages.
First, they have more people that they can put on the project (which achieves certain economies of scale/cost).
Second, the people they have are likely the best lawyers around, because they are given more money for working with the big firms than the little firms.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the size of the firms allows the lawyers within to become more specialised. Many big legal matters are complicated, and your local attorney will have to know about things like contracts for goods or services or land, conveyancing, family law, basic criminal law, etc. That means your local attorney will necessarily have less experience and knowledge than a specialist in any one technical area because they won't have the time to devote to other things, like corporate insolvency, or intellectual property. They'll only know the basics well, where a lawyer from a big firm can have specialist knowledge of the area of law that's relevant. | 44 | 49 |
[Pokemon] Why do so many trainers only train a single type of Pokemon? | It should be obvious to anyone that a team with some type diversity is much stronger, since your entire team wouldn't have a glaring weakness. But so many trainers seem to focus on one type.
I guess it would make sense that many people just catch the type that's readily available (like fishermen who catch Water types) and some catch their favorite type because they don't care that much about winning. But even highly competitive trainers, even many of the regional Champions seem to focus on one type. Why? | What's better, being A master of a balanced team or being THE master in one thing?
Also, because it's cool. Certain regions hold overwhelming percentages of similarly typed pokemon and not everyone is on a journey.
Not everyone is a combatant in the league, you'll even fight kinder-gardeners, regular gardeners, old people, cops, immovable children in shorts, and most of them are just having fun. | 58 | 74 |
CMV: What stops "neckbeards" from socializing and being sexually active is not looks and money, it's their failure to thrive socially when they were younger. And that one is definitive | During the news cycle about the Isla Vista shootings, one thing that was often said (though I can't seem to find the reddit posts about it, not even those I saw in SRS) was that the fact that the murderer was a rich and rather-good-looking guy who was a virgin at 22 was proof that the RedPill's/neckbeards' idea that what you need to get laid is have money and looks was flushed down the toilet, and that it's a myriad of factors, each person their own world, that contributed to attraction.
While I'm not arguing that it is looks and money that attracts people or not, I will point out the following. /r9k/ usually has posts about the matter, and people did go there trying to "make them see reason" with this same argument. But I've found that in general, what they argue is their problem, and what I say is the problem the general socially-awkward, old, virgin men have is not their lacks of looks, money or hygiene, but the fact that they failed to socialize early on in life.
They point out that the fact that they have no friends at all, and haven't for a long time, ostracized them from the normal social growth a normal human being has during his/her teens and early 20s. Because of this, they are unable to mingle and interact with people on a peer-to-peer basis (here I'm purposely excluding "out-of-pity" cases). They come out as strange, weird, creepy because they lack the knowledge about how to behave in social venues properly, how to interact with people their same age accordingly and, above all, their condition becomes painfully obvious.
It's easy to spot a "neckbeard"/"foreveralone"/"robot" or whatever, even if they don't meet the physical stereotype, because they are the ones that don't talk much about themselves (because they don't do anything one can consider "fun"), they seldom talk about going out (because they don't), they don't know about any night place or cool club or bar, don't know about drinks, they don't talk about sex even in the more tongue-in-cheek, casual way. Their ostracism becomes obvious. If one were to talk with one for a certain length of time, friendless background would come up eventually (since one of the things one talks about when meeting someone is what they do for fun, for instance). Their lack of social experiences would come up eventually too. And if they are men, and are currently in a bar or other "more social" place, their inexperience with women and flirting would also become obvious.
All this will conspire against their inclusion. People will feel uncomfortable next to someone like that, or at least feel sorry for him instead of seeing him like a peer. Thus it becomes a vicious circle, that unlike looks or money, they don't have a chance changing it (since they can't travel back in time to socialize properly, at the right time).
This one quote regarding "counter-proof" to their beliefs I could find:
* > [I'm far from handsome, I work at fucking wal mart, and I'm a fat dork who likes my little pony, and never played a single organized sport.
But gasp I've had shifty eyesthesex
It's almost like making sure your partners are comfortable, willing, and feel safe around you as a person (and actually being a decent person) goes a long way huh? Because despite what le reddit thinks, women aren't shallow robots with secret sex manuals](http://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/27gxam/thats_because_women_give_the_gift_of_sex_to_men/ci1fm0c)
(Note this one also comes with the unfounded belief that "women don't care about looks, only evil men do!")
I haven't met, found or heard of someone who has been able to make that "comeback" under those circumstances, and I doubt I will.
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Social skills are just that, *skills*, and like all skills they can be improved with practice. Some people are more naturally socially adept, so they've never had a problem socializing or fitting in, other's are more inept, so they either have to work harder at it, or don't have any friends that they could relate to. Even though its tougher when you get older, you can still improve your social skills, regardless of your aptitude level. | 23 | 28 |
ELI5: Why aren't there any green stars? | Stars emit light mostly based on their temperature which produces light of all wavelengths, but with a peak. The higher the temperature, the shorter the wavelength of the peak light and the more blue it appears. Colder stars peak at longer wavelengths of light and appear more red. Two stars with similar surface temperatures will emit light of very close to the same distribution.
Our Sun's peak is ~500nm while the color green is ~510nm. In this sense, our sun is a 'green' star, but we perceive its light as being white. Humans only see a narrow band of wavelengths and we are adapted to use the light in that range. Thus we see the natural illumination of the sun as 'white'.
So, there are 'green' stars but we see them as white because that is how our eyes and brains perceive that distribution of light. | 14 | 23 |
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How were we able to measure how big the sun is? | I was just wondering because I've heard throughout my schoolyears the size of the sun and the distance, but we are not able to get close to it. How do we know? | Combination of two methods for direct observation:
1. Parallax: gives you the distance to an object. Works by making angular measurements of the distant object from two positions whose location is precisely known, and then using trigonometry to determine the distance. If you know two angles and a the length of one side of a triangle, you can figure out all the remaining dimensions.
2. Apparent width: Using the appropriate filter (welding goggles work well) one can measure how wide an object appears at a certain distance from ones eye. Once you know the distance to the object, you can determine how wide it really is by taking the ratio of distance and widths. (real width) = (measured width) x (distance to object - distance to measured width location) / (distance to measured width location). Of course in reality, the sun does not have a defined surface or edge, but this method will get you some idea of the scale of it. | 17 | 26 |
[ELI5] How does Google Maps get real time traffic information? | One of the things Google is very good at is acquiring and analysing information, often from a range of different sources.
I believe the real time traffic information can come from two places. The obvious one is that they buy it from another company that specialises in it - say TomTom and just plug it into their own systems.
Another is quite simply using the sheer volume of android devices out there. Your little Android device (and possibly your iPhone with Google maps installed) regularly phones home to Google and reports its position. Google can take all those readings and accurately guess how fast traffic is moving based on how fast each device is moving along a road. | 21 | 33 |
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I understand the first 4 derivatives of position, (displacement, velocity, acceleration, and jerk) but can someone explain snap to me? | Everything up to acceleration is quite easy to understand. Even jerk is somewhat easy: the change in acceleration. But how do you explain snap, the change in the change in acceleration, in layman's terms... | Let's add a layer of abstraction:
You have a foot pedal, and the position of that pedal perfectly controls the acceleration of a vehicle, Jerk is how fast the pedal is moving, and snap is the acceleration of the foot pedal. | 84 | 26 |
Can anyone help me understand Peter Singer's argument in favor of vegetarianism? | I am trying to view vegetarianism from a philosophical standpoint and have heard Peter Singer makes a very sound argument for why we should not kill animals for food. I believe the crux of his argument is in [this essay](http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/singer02.htm). I've seen it written that Singer believes we should extend the same rights of consideration to animals, but I need help ironing out what exactly that means. Can anyone familiar with Singer or the text linked shed some light on this for me? | In its most basic, Singer's view on animals flow from utilitarianism. Animals can feel pain and pleasure because they are (at least many of them are) sentient; if we abide by utilitarianism and think we ought maximise pleasure and minimise pain, we should consider the consequence of our actions on the pain and pleasure of animals just as well. There is nothing inherently different in their pleasure and pain, aside from degree.
Treatment of animals on animal farms and slaughterhouses is objectionable on utilitarian grounds since it prevents pleasure in animals, and increases their pain. On the other hand, vegetarianism is a perfectly good way to live, and reduces our happiness much less than it creates pain in the animals we eat. From there on, it's pretty clear that we should be vegetarians for Singer. | 15 | 18 |
Can people who work in business and finance see how much money is in american people's savings accounts? | News media people sometimes point out that most americans have little to no money in their savings accounts. That news media people say this that means that they can see how much people are saving or not saving? If capitalists can see how much money americans are putting into their savings accounts that means that capitalist can raise the price of goods and services if they see that people are saving their money and thus always keep americans as close to bankrupt as possible? | Of course a bank employee handling bank accounts can see the balance. But doing anything"nefarious" with that info is illegal, and they really don't even care.
>That news media people say this that means that they can see how much people are saving or not saving?
That's mostly based on surveys. Banks can't just go out and talk about people's financials for reasons that should be obvious. It's kind of confidential.
>If capitalists can see how much money americans are putting into their savings accounts that means that capitalist can raise the price of goods and services if they see that people are saving their money and thus always keep americans as close to bankrupt as possible?
Competition exists. Firms can't just raise prices because they want to, at least not successfully. | 44 | 15 |
Is there any good answer to "why be moral?"? | Edit: I guess another way of putting the question would be to phrase it the way Macintyre phrased it (paraphrasing Macintyre paraphrasing Kierkegaard): For what reasons do we have to even think, act and lead a life in terms of "good, bad, excellent, virtuous, evil,..." at all?
I've considered many views regarding this issue but a lot of them don't seem to connect to the actual theory itself aside from some naturalist virtue ethicists like Foot (or Aristotelians in general for that matter) which connects the moral theory with reasons for action but all of them have the problem of "real interest" (a discussion of this by Williams in his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy). Kant doesn't really give you a reason to be moral at all, just says that it is immoral to violate the famous formulations but we CAN violate them. I'm not saying that means we "should", I'm questioning whether the "should" actually gives you a reason to follow what you should do at all. Utilitarianism of the Benthamite-Millian type answers the motivation question by linking the higher pleasure of being a utilitarian with the act of utilitarianism (maximizing welfare and minimizing pain) but this feels like a delusion, the claim that it is in the interest of the moral agent to be a utilitarian because being a utilitarian is itself a higher pleasure that is pursued.
I'm also not talking about "moral" in the concrete such as "donating to charity" or "saving a drowning person", I'm talking about the reasons to do any of these, whatever it os that they have in common to be called "moral".
Sure, maybe I'm speciesist to favor humans to animals (Singer's claim) but there's really no reason to care about it if you haven't already adopted the moral rules and virtues of Singer's consequentialism.
I'm currently in favor of Williams's "internal reasons" hypothesis which states that whatever it is that you do, it must be of a personal sets of reasons for actions that you already have from your biologically constituted (the sensation of empathy for example) and culturally developed sense of value. There is no reason apart from this (possibly changing) set of values. No "transcendental reason" (Kant) or "real interests" (naturalist virtue ethics). | Kant actually says that we have an innate desire or intuition towards treating others with dignity in our inherent worth as humans. From an evolutionary biological perspective as well, this would be supported as our species could only survive tens of thousands of years ago through cooperation. There's nothing about humans as individuals that is competent in the realm of predators. Our strength was in our numbers. | 29 | 18 |
What's a good data structure to store hexagon-constrained graph? | I'm making a small game that will have a graph-like map. The game consists of roads (edges), and cities (nodes), and each connection angle is at a multiple of 120º. Here's a diagram to illustrate what I mean:
​
​
[Example diagram](https://preview.redd.it/vwcuahd0hag41.png?width=4966&format=png&auto=webp&s=75f8de50a5f70163b243f8fd41ddb36b2e2402fe)
Additionally, all the cities (nodes) must be connected, and the roads (edges) are undirected, making it a complete graph. It is also worth noting that the map of the game is infinite and not constrained by the image above in any way whatsoever.
I've made several games before, some with tiles, some with a free map, and even some with a hexagon-based map. These all have common data structures to be stored in, eg. 2d/3d array, list of objects.
But when trying to figure out a data structure to use for my game, I've been stumped so far. Using a graph would be simple (And good for AI too), but when it comes to transversing through it 60 times a second, it becomes very inefficient.
What are your thoughts on this? Is there any simple structure, or do I just have to maintain a list of cities and roads?
Also, here are some use cases for the map that I can think of off the top of my head:
1. Rendering/updating
2. Pathfinding
3. A way to find all the nodes of the graphs that have available connections (keeping in mind each can only have 3), to easily let the user place down new roads/cities
Any thoughts, criticism, or advice are welcome.
Thanks! | Consider a 2D array. For a point `(x, y)`, its neighbors are defined as follows:
If `parity(x) = parity(y)`, then the neighbors are `(x+1, y), (x, y+1), (x, y-1)`.
If `parity(x) ≠ parity(y)`, then the neighbors are `(x-1, y), (x, y+1), (x, y-1)`.
which encodes
```
|_|‾|_|
| |_| |
|_| |_|
```
You can verify the topology is the same as
```
\_/‾\_/
/ \_/ \
\_/ \_/
```
The angles are only needed for rendering, and can be calculated from the same parity comparison, so you don't need to store them. | 13 | 20 |
[Parks and rec] how is Ron Swanson so rich? | Throughout the show they mention how much money Ron has but at the same time every time Ron has a chance to make money like selling his cabin and making chairs he turns it down. Where does he get all this money? | Most people get their first job some time between their 16th and 18th birthday. Ron Swanson's first day of work at the sheet metal factory was when he was 9 years old. Median pay of a sheet metal worker as of 2012 is about $43,000 a year, but Ron was made floor manager inside a week, which easily puts him at $60,000 a year. He continued working at the sheet metal factory until he ended up leaving, hitchhiking to get to college at age 18. That means he had earned a good $540,000 in his pocket when he came of age. Because of his libertarian philosophy, Ron also believes in investing in two things: gold and property. Considering that Ron was born in 1960, he started work around 1969, when gold was around $270 an ounce. For reference, as of today, gold is worth around $1,114 an ounce. Ron also invested in property of an undisclosed address and size around Pawnee, ~~ID~~ *IN*, which likely also increased significantly in value. Add to this his side ventures of being Duke Silver, woodworking, construction, city work, and other things which are frankly none of our business. On top of all that, other than tools and meat, Ron tends to be a penny pincher. | 72 | 29 |
What are some fundamental books on sexuality ? | Hey I'm pretty new to this topic but my asshat flatmate won't stop making weird arguments (redpill-lite) on this topic and I want to be armed with something substantial. What are some important books I can read on this massive topic ? Any important books under this umbrella is good for me. | *Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality* by Sigmund Freud
*The Second Sex* by Simone de Beauvoir
*Gender Trouble* by Judith Butler
*The History of Sexuality* by Michel Foucault
*What IS Sex* by Alenka Zupančič
Some of the works mentioned are not strictly philosophical, but they are essential reads—after all, sexuality cannot be conceptualized without psychoanalysis. | 87 | 101 |
ELI5: What makes days feel like they're moving faster than others? | Like, I've noticed some days just feel faster than others whether or not i'm actually doing anything. Why is that? | This can depend on how many things we're focusing on or dealing with but is also highly subjective
Fundamentally the more new things (or different kinds of things) we're focusing on means our brains pay less attention to the passage of time
If we're focused on a single thing then our brain pays more attention to the passage of time
Another aspect is how 'known' a task or action is, if your brain has done something many times then it is not working to lay down new pathways and is left to free associate, this can cause time to seem to pass quickly as we're not focusing on the passage of time.
Of course if you are thinking about time you will notice it, if you're having fun or concentrating or very busy then time will seem to pass more quickly as you haven't thought about it
This is all theory, we don't know exactly why | 18 | 90 |
How long does it take you to read a Philosophy paper that is, say, thirty pages long and what advice do you have to reduce the time? | Hello! I am an Undergraduate Philosophy major and recently, I've noticed that it takes me very, very long to get through Philosophy papers. I was reading Rawls's *A Theory of Justice* and I realized that I was taking almost an hour just to get though something like 10-12 pages (of [this](http://www.univpgri-palembang.ac.id/perpus-fkip/Perpustakaan/American%20Phylosophy/John%20Rawls%20-%20A%20Theory%20of%20Justice~%20Revised%20Edition.pdf) kind of text). I had to keep going back and rereading sentences I had already read to understand it, just because of how dense it was. If you were to hand me a novel, like *A Game of Thrones*, I would be flying through the pages. This is starting to affect me more and more, because it takes forever to finish the reading assignments for my classes.
**Could you give me any advice to reduce the time it takes to read papers?** | An hour for 10-12 pages is not a bad reading rate. You should not assume that reading slowly is a bad sign; almost always it's reading quickly that's worrisome. You're doing exactly the right thing; keep it up! | 34 | 37 |
ELI5: Why are crocodiles much more widespread than alligators? | Is there anything specific that makes crocodiles more widespread? | Crocodiles have special adaptations that allow them to tolerate saltwater whereas alligators are strictly limited to freshwater areas. Since freshwater areas are generally isolated and separated by saltwater areas, this confines alligators but not crocodiles. | 36 | 25 |
CMV: Game developers should form a labor union | With all the light that's been made semi-recently of the workplace abuse, discrimination, and the resulting lawsuits and walkout at Activision-Blizzard, as well as the generally less than ideal working conditions within the industry(stress, long hours, low pay), this got me thinking.
The situation in the game development industry seems to be quite similar to that of a lot of pre-union workforces. Like them, they also have no representation, no reliable way to fight back against the stuff these companies often put them through.
That's why I think they should unionize. They would get better pay, better hours, less stress that they could be laid off or fired at nearly any moment. There are already very few industries that can get away with what game developers often deal with.
Members should contribute financially, they should elect leaders, they should set up online resources and a media relations unit to help get their messages out.
Individual groups (for instance, programmers, artists, sound designers) could also have their own delegates to represent their particular concerns.
So that when action is taken in the future, it would be more organized, more timely, and more effective overall.
As always, please CMV.
EDIT: Some things that would change my view would be:
Explaining how a union wouldn't solve all the industry's problems
Explaining what problems with the industry a union wouldn't solve
Explaining the new problems a union would introduce for the industry
| Generally speaking a union benefits people that are.
A.) Learning a specific type of labour, which is not transferable between job.
B.) Are working at the same position for a long period of time.
The trade off to the company being that they will get workers, that will spend a large amount of time learning a specific type of labour, that will be supported through out the life cycle of the business.
New media production, especially video games is not that type of labour. People design and learn new types of technology all the time and skill often have to be relearned between positions.All of the labour can be done remotely by team overseas, at a lower wage. The management company will often be sold or be restructured between projects.
Basically, the fact that video games development is bad, doesn't mean that labour reform shouldn't be had, but a Union won't really solve the issue, as it hasn't solved the modern issue in the film production industry or the animation industry.
TLDR: Labour reform are a good idea, a Union isn't the only Labour reform. | 121 | 705 |
ELI5: How does one "invent new maths"? Like Isaac Newton inventing Calculus, or John Napier logs. How does one answer a mathematical question that's never been answered? | It's about seeing things in a different way (and studying math of course). You want to solve a problem, or even just see things in a different way... so you define new things and apply them (as long as they are consistent with known math) to see if something interesting pops out.
For example, Newton was trying to describe the speed of a falling object. Since gravity changes the speed of falling object, he *defined* the mathematical concept of "rate of change" (derivative) of a function. He also found out that you can *apply* this concept also if you want to compute the area under a curve. | 376 | 430 |
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ELI5: Why do muscles hurt the day after they are damaged, by over exercising or injury from a fall, and not at the time of the damage? | If I workout too much, why don't my muscles hurt that day? Why is it not until the next day, or some time after the event that leads to the pain, that the muscles start to ache? | When you work your muscles, you are causing small amounts of injury that will need to be repaired to be stronger. When an injury occurs in your body, your body releases endorphins which are natural painkillers (the source of runner's high).
In the short term, they allow you to ignore the pain coming from the injury. Why? Because the humans that immediately collapsed in pain from injuries are the ones that get caught by the large animal chasing them or the ones that can't move away from an impending landslide after getting hit with a rock.
The natural painkiller allows us to ignore our pain so we can get ourselves out of danger first and worry about recovery second. | 16 | 22 |
ELI5: What causes the random feelings of ants walking on your skin? | I would say capillary dilation/constriction. Your blood vessels have little tiny extensions called capillaries that service your tissues directly, and they have muscles around them that squeeze and relax depending on what is needed. If you are cold, they will squeeze so the heat in your blood is insulated from the outside; conversely, if you are too warm they will relax and let blood through to try to shed that heat. Other things like injuries, illness, hormone changes, and sympathetic/parasympathetic responses will also cause your capillaries to open or close en masse.
tl;dr tiny blood vessels open and close to regulate heat and distribute resources | 10 | 26 |
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ELI5: Why can some overweight people lose weight with no excess skin, but others skin doesnt go away? | It depends on how fast the weight loss is, how long the person was overweight, the method of weight loss, and then genetics. If someone was seriously overweight for 30 years before finally getting lipo, they'll have excess skin. If someone was seriously overweight for a short period of time but lost weight through dieting and exercise (a more long term solution versus lipo) then that person will probably not have excess skin. Also as height mentioned, age is a factor (edit) | 153 | 384 |
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My daughter wants to be an astrophysicist... help? | I got through some college level science just fine but forgot most of it. I am an attorney and architect and so I can't help her much in way of astrophysics although I am pleased the alliteration can continue. She is very bright and I want to encourage her to follow her passions so a few questions. What resources should I provide a 13 year old? What is the practical application of it, are you doomed to be an academic? Do you go to work for NASA I just have no idea if it is remotely practical. Anyone have a suggestions? | (1) It's great that you're encouraging her to aim high and follow her interests. That's the most important thing.
(2) She's 13, so it's pretty likely that her interests will change before its time to make any big decisions. In the mean time, exploring physics, space, etc. is an excellent way to develop general scientific and academic skills.
(3) To explore this now, you might looking into space camp, astronomy camp, physics camp, etc. if you can afford it. | 76 | 75 |
ELI5: When loading something, why does the progress bar often speed through the first 99% but stall on the last 1%? | Often the progress bar is just a representation of the number of tasks or operations that are remaining (to be completed).
The problem is that some tasks/operations may be much more complex and time consuming than others and the progress bar often does not take this into account.
So if there are 100 tasks/operations to complete, the first 99 may be very simple and trivial (like change a setting here, change a variable value here, copy a small text file here, etc.) and the final operation may involve a complex set of steps like extracting a large number of files from a compressed archive or finalizing the installation and validating data integrity of all the files that were installed.
Sometimes the final step also involves some sort of external process/command that takes a while to respond and the installation program simply has to wait until the external process/command completes and returns a response. | 58 | 56 |
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[Pacific Rim] How are 8 Chinook helicopters able to lift one Jaeger robot? | Referencing the latest information...
It would appear that 8 Chinook helicopters are able to lift and transport one Jaeger robot. One Chinook helicopter has a lift capacity of 28,000 lbs. Times 8 is 224,000 lbs.
A robot is quoted as weighing 2,500 tons [of awesome]. I'm guessing short tons since he has an American accent. 2,500 short tons is 5,000,000 lbs.
So 8 Chinooks [the one's I'm familiar with] should only be able to life 4.48% of a Jaeger!
By my math it would take 179 Chinook helicopters to carry 1 Jaeger. What do you think is going on here?
PS: Referencing the Jaeger info-sheets reveals even larger (and more confusing) numbers, ranging from 6,000 to 7,000 tons each. Perhaps it's the difference between fueled and dry weight? Truly we must learn more. | Just as the Jaeger program jumpstarted neural science, it also reinvigorated the defense industry's interest in maximising the lift from helicopters. What you see as Chinooks are actually greatly advanced and specialised | 16 | 15 |
ELI5: How did the Christian Church become established after Jesus' death? | Lots and lots of missionary work and being implanted right in the middle of the Roman Empire. A lot of people attribute the Roman emperor Constantine as being the catalyst the really pushed Christianity forward to become a world religion.
Happy Easter! | 31 | 89 |
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ELI5: If the free market works so well, why do corporations need $93 Billion in annual government subsidies? | Saw this on my FB feed and seemed like a good question for ELI5. | Ideally, subsidies exist to incentivize behavior which the market doesn't value enough, like development of solar technology or new medical treatments. However, in our country, the biggest recievers of subsidies are oil companies. This is due to corruption. | 24 | 93 |
What Epistemological View Does the Majority of Science Currently Support? | Title says most of what is needed to answer. For example, Rationalism, Empiricism, one of Empiricism's many forms, Perspectivism, Disjunctivism, or an Other? | None?
For the most part, scientific results aren't really relevant to these sorts of debates. To be sure, some results about the brain, etc. might be relevant for *some* epistemic debates, as are various results in learning theory, evolutionary biology, etc. But it's not like we can go out and look at the physics of the world and say "ah, we ought to be rationalists!"
Insofar as science is relevant to debates about the proper epistemology, it's more through its methods than its results. Empiricists of various stripes have long argued that rationalists don't have any good way of making sense of why science should be successful, for example. But that's quite a bit different. | 11 | 18 |
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