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ELI5 : How is "corrected vision" is tested and why isn't it always 20/20 if it's corrected? | Okay so I am researching a health regulation for a friend of mine and it says your corrected vision needs to be less than 3 diopters. Now considering that a 20/20 vision would be 0 diopters, how can even a corrected vision could be less than perfect? Why is it considered "corrected" even though the patient can't see perfectly? | It’s tested with those letter charts, to see if you can read the finest lines as well as someone with 20/20.
Some people with horrifically bad 20/200 vision are just too far out from normal to be corrected completely through any traditional means, but bringing them down to 20/40 will improve quality of life considerably. They’re heavily corrected, but it’s not perfect. | 34 | 24 |
CMV: There is too much grass in the United States | I just feel like from parks to lawns to the side of highways that grass is overused in landscaping. This post is in reference to grass that is planted by people and requires maintenance, not prairie grass, or wild grass that grows in meadows.
1. Grass is the most irrigated crop in the United States, and more total area is covered by lawn than by crops.
2. Properly maintained grass uses a lot of fertilizer and pesticides which are bad for the environment.
3. Forests and Meadows are just as if not more aesthetically pleasing than a well-manicured grass lawn and take a lot less time and money to maintain.
4. Most people don't even take good care of their lawns, leaving them overgrown and spotted with weeds.
5. Whole regions of the United States get on just fine without having much grass.
6. A lot of grass dies in the winter and looks dumb for half the year anyway.
Edit: This is not a call to ban planting grass, just to encourage alternatives in home and public landscaping.
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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!* | The best thing about grass is that it provides a low maintenance multi-use space, which is also beautiful. Want a fair only once a year? Grass. Concert? Grass. Control stormwater? Grass. Temporary carpark? Grass. Football game? Grass. It's everywhere because it's useful. You can't have all of those with a meadow or forest. | 606 | 1,012 |
ELI5: why do we use "the birds and the bee" to explain sex to children? | It was explained to me once that it's a very simplified explanation of how plants reproduce. Bees pollinate flowers, which creates fruit, which birds eat, which spreads out the seeds, and makes more plants. | 191 | 245 |
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ELI5 How come water based liquids sting wounds but oil based liquids or ointments don’t? | Our bodies use water, in our blood, as the main fluid to move stuff around. So water is special to us in a way that oils are not, when water touches our wounds, it's sort of like the right plug fitting into the right outlet.
Our nerves, which are exposed in a wound, use chemicals called "ions" to transmit signals up to our brain. When water touches an exposed nerve, if that water contains too many ions (like salty water) or too few ions (like distilled water) it can cause the nerves to misfire and transmit a signal to the brain that we perceive as "stinging". If the water has just the right ion balance, which we call "saline water", it wouldn't trigger that sensation. | 14 | 15 |
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ELI5: Why do animals like squirrels and frogs move like they are lagging? | We have mostly 2 types of muscles in our bodies. Type 1 and type II
The type one muscles are mostly for endurance. Where as type II allow for explosive bursts. You may have heard of "quick twitch" muscles, which is what animals like frogs and chickens and chipmunks are mostly composed of. These muscles fire rapidly and explosive allowing for bursts of speed and high jumping and rapid directional changes.
When all of your muscles are of the type II variety, you move in a twitchy, jagged manner. Like if everytime you used your arm, it was a karate chop instead of a smooth fluid motion.
Edit. Every single one of you just karate chopped! | 17 | 16 |
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ELI5 How do rich people go bankrupt yet continue to be multimillionaires? | Bankruptcy occurs when some entity cannot generate the necessary cash to settle immediate obligations. An illustrative example might be someone owning a $10m home but has a bill for $500,000 that they cannot pay. On paper, their net worth is $9.5m but they can still be forced into bankruptcy if their creditors insist on immediate payment. Bankruptcy is a court mandated process that resolves the situation among the various parties - there are complicated rules around how this works. | 46 | 46 |
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[Assassins Creed]What would be the consequences if the villains won in each game? | I am only talking about the historical villains. | In most games, the main consequence would be the faster development of society and an increasingly orderly world that comes at the expense of personal freedom.
Al Mualim at the end of Assassins Creed 1 actually shows us the result of a completely unchecked Templar victory (complete loss of free will due to the Apple of Eden, Templars become Masters of a world full of zombies) though it is notable for the fact that he went too far *even for the Templars*. | 53 | 52 |
[Star Wars] What causes the different personalities of clones? | In the Clone Wars, some clones are shown to have different sort of personalities. One might be friendly and good with children, another might be cold and distant or overly aggressive. Why is this? Are they different aspects of Jango's original personality or are they engineered that way? | Personality is a product of many things. Yes genetics is one. However so are hormonal conditions in the womb. In the case of clones any slight changes in batch maturation chambers would have a similar effect. Lastly and not so trivially... environment. Clones will meet different people, posted to different locations... assigned different jobs. Maybe survived battle.. maybe never seen it. All these factors combine to make one clone a badass and another the funny guy | 28 | 18 |
CMV: We shouldn't group people into generations, because all it does it pit people against eachother. | The generation groups that are currently alive right now are the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millenials, and Generation Z
My view is that people should not be grouped into these kind of generations, because all that it does is turns people against eachother, and doesn't provide any benefit for any of the listed "generations"
The "generations" seem to love to criticize the generations older or younger than them and place stereotypes on them.
Some examples of generalization that I've heard (thru real life conversations and the internet):
"Generation Z is obsessed with social media and are always on their phones, have a short attention span, and are attention seekers"
"Millenials are self-centered, entitled, want everything handed to them, and are easily offended"
"Generation X is cynical, don't work well in teams, and have a negative attitude towards everything"
"Boomers ruined the economy, are spoiled, out of touch, stuck in their ways, and will never learn to use technology well"
"The Silent Generation places too much value on authority, are stuck in their ways, and are overly loyal to brands, and have out-dated opinions"
Obviously, these are just stereotypes and are not true for the majority of people of those "generations". Those sterotypes could also apply to anyone of any generation (for example, ANYONE can be cynical - not just generation X).
If there is any truth to these sterotypes, they may have more to do with human nature or age. For example;
Boomers and the Silent Generation are labeled as "out of touch, have difficulty with technology, and are stuck in their ways". But one day when Millenials and Generation Z are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond, we too will be "stuck in our ways" because as people get older, it becomes harder and harder to change your ways that you've known for decades. And there will be new technology by then that we too will have difficulty learning how to use.
Generation Z and Millenials are labeled as entitled, self-centered, with a short attention span. However I think that's more to do with being young. As we get older we will become less "self-absorbed". Bommers and the Silent Generation were also likely self-absorbed and entitled in their youth too.
All this negative labeling of the generation is just causing people to turn against eachother. How often do you hear the phrase "OK Boomer" on the internet followed by an article or meme criticizing a middle aged person's views or behavior. And how often do you hear the term "The young people of today ..." followed by a rant about how easy the young generations have it or criticizing their views or behaviour.
If society stopped group people into generations based on the years you were born, society as a whole would be kinder to people outside of their age group, because these dumb negative sterotypes would not exist. We could get along better at work and be more productive, and finally we would not get into useless arguments about young generations vs. Old generations. | But it's useful for tracking cultural changes. For instance, the television technology and norms of boomers (not many networks, lots of shared experience), GenX (reruns, cable explosion, widely diverse experiences), and millennials (prestige TV, streaming, marathoning) is incredibly useful for studying how the medium changed and affected people in turn. | 43 | 146 |
CMV: A conspiracy theory is not necessarily false. | Many definitions of conspiracy theory include that the conspiracy is false. Most are derided as false, but I believe some of them (at least portions of them) could theoretically be true.
1. **The Broken Clock:** Conspiracy theories are speculative in nature. Often they make logical leaps without evidence. There is nothing to suggest that these leaps are categorically false. One could accidentally come to the conclusion that is true but using incorrect logic, similar to how someone could mess up the math but, by happenstance, get the correct answer.
2. **Division of Conspiracy Theories:** Conspiracy theories are often grandiose, but they don’t need to be. We could divide these theories into multiple parts, and each “part” is in itself a conspiracy theory. While “the CIA is engaged in mind control” is a conspiracy theory, one of the parts of this theory is MKULTRA, which, before it was revealed as a real experiment, was a conspiracy theory limited to the lunatic fringe. The mistake in the logic is that when one of the smaller units is shown to be true, the theorists use this as “evidence” that the entire theory is true. Yes, MKULTRA was real, but the results were not close to mind control as described in the more grandiose theories.
3. **The Smallest Conspiracy Theory**: Based on the logic of (2), there must be some smallest unit that we could conceivably call a conspiracy theory. I would say that the smallest possible conspiracy theory is one person covering up a crime or some other truth they don’t want the general public to know.
4. **The Insufferable Pedant Corner:** A conspiracy theory is a theory about a conspiracy. “Conspiracy” is a legal term about the planning of a crime. You could parse the phrase to mean a theory about a plan to commit any sort of crime. Theranos engaged in a conspiracy to defraud investors, and the ones who claimed they were defrauding investors with little to no evidence were engaged in conspiracy theories. When the evidence was revealed, it was no longer a theory, and became a criminal case. Even then, because the law in the US specifies that defendants are innocent until proven guilty, you can make a case that a conspiracy theory isn’t true until proven beyond a reasonable doubt in court. But because court cases often end in mistrials or found not guilty by some technicality, there must be some conspiracy theories which happened, but were not ruled as such for one reason or another.
While most conspiracy theories are false, the ones most likely to be true would have a narrow scope and impact compared to the “standard” explanation. “United 93 was shot down” is more believable than “9/11 was an inside job” because the former requires fewer elements to have been fabricated. | Could you define how exactly to change your view?
There have been proven conspiracy theories in the past. Therefore, your statement is not so much a *view* as it is a fact. This post is analogous to saying "CMV: A house doesn't have to be built with bricks" | 63 | 41 |
ELI5: Why is the NBA predominantly a black man's sport? | Was watching a game with friends when the question came up. Someone said it's because they're raised playing it, my black friend tried to argue that it was because black people are generally more athletic. Hopefully someone can solve this dispute. | Basketball is a popular urban sport. It doesn't require much space. A court is inexpensive, durable and requires no maintenance and the can easily be used for other community functions. The only equipment you need is a ball and the shoes on your feet.
In the early days of the NBA, it was seen as a **Jewish** sport, since there were a lot of Jews living in urban areas playing the game intensely. Due to complex socio-economic factors, the wealthier Jews moved out of the dense cities and the poorer Blacks moved in, leading the Blacks to play more basketball.
You also need to factor in that Blacks still generally come from lower socio-economic backgrounds, have less educational & career opportunities than other races. This leads many of them to pursue athletics as a way to achieve success in life.
Blacks have a small advantage over whites. On average, it's not really that noticeable but when you're only picking 500 of the best athletes in a country of over 300 million, that little edge starts to make a big difference.
It's interesting to note that, as the Hispanic population in the US continues to rise (especially in urban areas), the NBA has aggressively started marketing the sport to Hispanic viewers. It probably won't be long before we start seeing more (American) Latino players in the league. We already have some big names, like Carmelo Anthony & Brook Lopez. | 51 | 18 |
Why does water form these tiny air bubbles on the side of a glass bottle if it is allowed to sit still for a while? | [They look like this.](http://imgur.com/ctfos8j) | Most water has various gases dissolved in it, like oxygen or carbon dioxide. The warmer the water is, the less gas it is able to hold--that's why your soda foams up so much more when it's hot than when cold. Also, the less pressure the water is under, the less gas it's able to hold--that's why your soda foams up when you open the can and release the pressure.
Water comes out of the tap, where it was cold and under pressure, and starts to warm up. These gases come out of solution, forming bubbles. The bubbles formed at the wall of the glass tend to stick there until they get big enough to break away, which sometimes never happens. | 11 | 15 |
Scared about interview to work in lab : (( | so im an undergrad student and i emailed a super cool important prof at my school for a chance to work in his lab.
I WASNT EXPECTING ANY ANSWER AT ALL but he RESPONDED??? and he set me up with an interview with his research associate.
IM SO SCARED IDK WHAT TO EXPECT. i really want this position.
anyone know what the interview process will be like or how i can prepare | Relax. There is truly nothing to be scared about. Interviews are two-way processes. It is an opportunity for you to learn about them and for them to learn about you. If you are a good fit for their needs, they will invite you to work in the lab. If not, they will not. There is no failure in that scenario, so there is nothing to be nervous about. It is just a process of discovering whether or not it is a good match. | 96 | 72 |
ELI5: Why isn't it possible to wring a cloth completely dry? | Water, at the molecular level, forms attachments to fibers that are absorbant like cotton. The small weak forces keep the water attached and prevent you from physically removing it by trapping it and also providing it a haven. You can't compress the fibers with your hands hard enough to squeeze the small pockets where the water resides and remove them.
So between the cotton being a good absorbant and your lack of physical strengh required to manually remove the water, some will inevitably remain. Even in a "dry" shirt, there is still ~1-3% moisture in the shirt at all times due to the cotton absorbing water straight out of the air or off your skin. | 13 | 16 |
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Send me a reading list for teaching in higher ed! | I am extremely interested in teaching pedegogies for higher ed. Please send me the titles of books (or hyperlinks to them) or journal articles that are related to teaching philosophies, styles, or pedegogies.
Bonus points for pharmacy education or health professional educations! | How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, by Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K. Norman (Jossey-Bass, 2010).
Also Thomas A. Angelo and K Patricia Cross Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers
2nd Edition | 10 | 25 |
If an object is "blue" because it only reflects blue light, then why isn't it invisible or at least colorless if we shine red light on it? | Most materials aren't perfect absorbers of light outside the range that makes up the main color. A blue object will still reflect a small amount of red light.
If an object would absorb 100% of the light falling onto it, it would not appear to be invisible, but instead would appear perfectly black. | 90 | 56 |
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CMV: That Alpha Male v. Beta Male concept in humans is bullshit. | There are entire industries that exploit the false idea of alphas and betas in human beings, but in reality it is a cheap scam. The idea is overly vague and also sexist.
I argue that only the people (usually men) who watch videos about “being alpha” on the internet know very much about this concept because it is, in reality, not a good descriptor of the actual happenings between people in the real world.
The concept is also too vague. If you research the concept of alpha, what you will get is a myriad of men and women listing different, occasionally contradictory, and extremely vague concepts. This essentially amounts to being told to be confident.
The concept is sexist as well, as the concept depends on a rigid definition of what a “man” can be, and also assumes that women lack autonomy when around an “alpha” man.
There are many other reasons why this concept is wrong and harmful, but this is just a few of them.
EDIT: My position is that this concept does not describe interactions between humans in a meaningful way. And honestly, we should move on to more useful and accurate concepts. | 1) Evolutionary Psychology is a thing. There are people that believe that humans still retain elements of our more primal selves, and see currently living mammals as living examples of our former selves.
2) Many animals from the Lion to the Walrus have alpha and beta males.
So if you believe the first idea, and the second idea - you get the concept that alpha males and beta males exist in the human subconscious and impact our behavior - at least somewhat.
The reason it is vague and occasionally contradictory - is because it isn't conscious, its not intentional (usually), and just kinda happens when people aren't being mindful of their behaviors.
Entitlement exists. Jealousy exists. Whenever you hear alpha and beta - if you sub in entitlement and jealousy, you will usually be close to the intended meaning. | 300 | 1,503 |
ELI5: How do wireless phone charges work? | How does it manage to charge your phone through a entire rubber / plastic / metal case, and through the actual phone itself, and somehow penetrate the battery to charge it? | Any sort of electric current will generate a corresponding, changing magnetic field. Vice versa, a changing magnetic field will create a current in a nearby electrical circuit. This is how most electricity is generated; you physically move a magnet near a coil of wire to create a current, which is the electrical power that everyone uses.
So wireless charging uses the electrical current in the charger to create a changing magnetic field. This changing magnetic field, near a phone, will create an electrical current in the wireless charging "module" in the phone. The phone is designed to use that current to charge itself. | 71 | 51 |
ELI5: Why does America help and support Israel so much? | 1. Highly organized and well-funded political backing from pro-Israeli groups (AIPAC, et. al.), and a lack of similar political backing from pro-Palestinian groups.
2. An undercurrent of apocalyptic Christianity in certain political groups in the U.S. that believes the existence of Israel is a requirement for the second coming of Christ.
3. A continuing belief in the U.S. that the Jews need require some form of reparation for the Holocaust, and that support of Israel constitutes such reparation. | 167 | 332 |
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What's so special about lead (Pb) that makes it block radiation? Can other elements do this? | The material that you want to use to shield against radiation depends on the type of radiation you're shielding against.
But lead is a very common shield for high-energy photons, so I'll assume you're asking about them.
To shield against high-energy photons, you want a material with a high atomic number (Z). The density is relevant as well, but the Z is more important.
The attenuation of the photons entering the shielding goes like e^(-kx), where x is the distance into the shielding, and k is a coefficient that depends *linearly* on the density of the shielding, but on some *power* (greater than 1) of Z.
Additionally, the densities of condensed matter (solids and liquids) really don't vary very much between materials, whereas Z can vary over almost two orders of magnitude (from 1 to just under 100).
So any solid material has "good enough" density, but particularly solids with high Z, such as lead and uranium, are the best for this purpose. | 63 | 92 |
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ELI5: How are standardized tests so expensive? | For example, the SAT is about $50 ($70 for late registration), subjects tests are about $20, and AP tests are $95. What goes into these for such a high price? | The price of a good or service isn't wholly dictated by how much it costs to produce or provide, but how much can be charged to achieve maximum profitability for the seller. It's mostly about how much people are willing to pay.
With that said, the production cost of the product is probably a bit higher than you realize. Some portion must go to supporting test centers (for some tests, anyway), which must have a proctor, security measures, and generally a fixed physical location. You have to employ people to generate the content, and refresh that content periodically. You have to design multiple test forms and then find a way to norm them (often, there will be entirely different questions on different forms, not just the same questions in different orders).
I'll also state that the SAT and AP tests are cheap. Try seeing how much taking the MCAT, GRE, a GRE subject test, or the LSAT will cost you. It's much worse. I'd imagine this is partly because it's easier to demand a higher price for these tests, as people are willing to pay it. I'd imagine a small part of the additional cost is getting people to produce the actual test questions (of course, there have been controversies about how similar tests are from form to form, and year to year... so this probably isn't a huge part of it). | 91 | 212 |
Is it purely coincidence that the human sleep cycle roughly matches the day and night cycle of Earth or is it the time of day that determined our sleep habits? | For example, if days lasted 48 hours on Earth instead of 24 hours, would humans have adapted to stay awake for all the daylight hours and sleep for twice as long or do humans biologically need around 8 hours of sleep to function regardless of the amount of sunlight? | Nearly all life on earth (including fruit flies, plants, single-cell organisms, and even individual cells in the human body) has a circadian rhythm roughly 24 hours long, suggesting that this is a trait that evolved due to environmental influence. It's impossible to know how circadian rhythms would evolve on a planet with a different light-dark cycle, but there's no reason to expect life would do anything other than develop rest/activity cycles in line with the local light/dark cycle.
I can't think of any studies that experimentally manipulated the amount of sunlight to see whether sleep need varies, but observational studies have shown that people will sleep more during the winter and less during the summer. There are a lot of other possible explanations for that though. | 11 | 15 |
I think parents should be held more accountable for the behavior of their offspring, CMV | Parenting has a dramatic effect on a child's outcome in life. I think we should have a system in place that reflects that. If your child is good, you reap benefits. If the child harms society, you don't.
Let's give parents a tax break (or EITC) that varies accordingly to their child's earnings, or something. If the child is convicted of a criminal offense, the money decreases. | How do you account for many parents being in a better position to raise children than others? What about children with disabilities (physical and mental)? How about the simple fact that children aren't robots? While parents can influence them, they're ultimately their own conscious beings who make their own decisions. | 41 | 76 |
Does applying ice or cold water to a superficial burn make any impact on the actual injury? Or does it just soothe the pain for a moment? | The initial effect would be to lower the temperature. This will decrease the amount of damage at the cellular level.
Second effect would be to cause the constriction of the blood vessels in the area. This will decrease the amplitude of the immune response, and therefore inflammation, in the area that was burned.
I am sure there are other benefits and maybe other can chime in. | 33 | 29 |
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CMV: I do not think that my political positions being religiously motivated invalidates them | **PREFACE**:Before I get into the meat of my argument for my point of view, I wish to clarify several things. First is that I am not claiming persecution. Sometimes people are obtuse or dicks because of my beliefs, but I do not think that experience something that happens to me at a disproportionate rate (except on certain forums). Secondly is that I want to avoid debating the specifics of my beliefs, for example whether or not gay marriage/abortion is permissible or morally acceptable or not. What I want to argue is that my political motivations (at least many of them) having their source in my religion does not invalidate them. For example I do not agree with the idea that my disagreement with Roe vs Wade, and my desire for its reversal, being rooted in my Catholicism means its void because of the first amendment and/or we do not live in a theocracy (For the record I am not against the former or in favor of the latter, but more on that later). Now onto the argument proper!
When discussing politics with others the hot button issues of homosexual marriage, abortion, etc often come up. Due to me attending one of the largest public universities as a Burkean conservative Roman Catholic most of my discussions are with people who have beliefs antithetical to my own. The most common objection to my religious inspired political and/or ethical prescriptions is that they are based on my religion, which is to be a private hobby and thus unfit as a basis to prescribe anything to anyone else. They are based on my *so* outlandish metaphysics, superstitions, etc that not everyone shares. The first amendment to the constitution is supposed to close the door on that, right? In this post I will argue that this argument is not fair to me and other religious people because I feel it is an imperfect interpretation of the constitution, and because I do not feel the worldview of the secular, along with all the ethical/political prescriptions that flow from it, are in a completely different category from me. Thus I am not under any more legal prohibitions than they are in promulgating my beliefs and them being the motivation for what I think the law of the land ought to be.
Ethical theories and worldviews often flow from one's metaphysical view of the world, or lack thereof, thus the progressives and libertarians I debate are in the same boat as I. The common worldview between the both of them is a worship of the human will. David Bentley Hart, an orthodox theologian, philosopher, and brilliant academic, once described the prevalent secular worldview as a belief in nothing. He is not saying that they have no beliefs, and he does not even say this as an abusive description, for he has friends (that he considers to be rational and ethical) in the academic ivory tower that describe themselves as nihilist. He is not even saying that the secular are nihilist. They don't believe in nothing, for they may have all sorts of beliefs such as democracy, environmentalism, etc. He claims that they believe in *the* nothing. That there is no meaning, purpose, etc within the universe per se. Yet this changed when human beings came along, for we find ourselves in a fertile void where we can decide our own meaning of life and live our lives as we see fit. The only prohibition on behavior in this world would be the will of others. Though not many are able to articulate their belief like this, I say among millennials this sort of existentialism is the default "obvious" position. What is the modern turn but importance being placed on the individual human will? We see the understanding of relationships and marriage change from a form of self sacrificial love and duty, agape, to an avenue of self fulfillment. In modern times the quality and importance of a work of art is determined by what the artist intended and/or what separate meaning can be drawn from an admirer. These notions would be alien to both the sensibilities of medieval, classical, and even renaissance peoples. I shall dub this fundamental view of the world "Will worship", and call its practitioners either existentialists or will worshipers.
Like any belief of this caliber there is a split, they are not in full agreement in how this is to be understood and practiced. The main sunni-shia split is between those who think every individual will has an absolute sovereignty and that demands obedience and respect and those who believe satisfying a plurality of wills is the highest good. I shall call the former sect either the right or libertarians, and the latter either utilitarians or leftists. You will even notice that each denomination has its fundamentalist. Objectivist and ancaps take the most straightforward rightist interpretation and apply it in the most extreme sense, being devoid of scruples over the problems of others so long as no one individual's expression of will is impeded. The leftist fundamentalist can be found in the "SJW" movement, whose extremist members believe that the most fundamental human freedoms should be bent when enough of a minority population even feels vaguely threatened by what one individual chooses. However, most are not fundamentalist. The majority feel that both are correct and worth respecting, so they occupy some middle ground where sometimes the individual sovereignty triumphs over the concerns of the majority, but if the majority are suffering enough then it is okay to violate the freedom of either a small group (or an individual as the case may be).
You can see countless examples of ethical precepts based on this foundation. For example, many believe one should just leave someone alone to their behavior so long as it is not in anyone else backyard. There is also the "who are *YOU* to tell *ME* what to do?" Another change is the notion that some behaviors are inherently wrong or right is replaced by utilitarian calculation. Even the will worshippers that dislike utilitarianism, typically the rightist libertarians, have a deontology formed around one's individual freedom to express his will being an end in itself that is not to be violated. Either way ethics have changed from something objectively true, independent from the thought of the one or the many, to something that is either subjective or only inter-subjectively true based on the ever changing consensus. This is the reasoning for many who love abortion. I do not mean those that consider it a necessary evil or a tragedy they reluctantly permit, for I can respect that and welcome their perspective. I refer to those who consider it a moral victory for society, the people who make me feel ill. Since the thing inside her cannot feel being stabbed in the head, why should it have any value when compared to someone who has all her nerve endings, and most importantly, can give consent? WW2 was long over by the 1970s, but that did not halt the murder of millions being considered a *triumph of the will*
Something that irks me about holders of liberal (both in the classical sense and in the colloquial definition that equates to progressive) and existentialist thought is that they assume that this is the obvious default position of mankind. Not only from my perspective as someone who disagrees, but even by looking at history, one can see that those "truths" are not so self evident. Those who hold these opinions tend to have a narrative of the world similar to Whiggish or Marxist history. Their opinions are the obvious truths one can come to looking at the world with enlightened logicTM and scienceTM. Tragically these obvious truths have been forgotten and twisted by the influence of irrational superstition and/or unjust social orders. I disagree with this because even the most secular historians and academic philosophers have been skeptical of these atheist triumphalist meta-narratives about medieval times and the modern turn away from them. I also disagree because before the modern turn, and even before the advent of Christendom, there were the stoics, the Platonists, and Aristotelians that had ethical theories closer to classical Christian ethics than modern theories despite not deriving their philosophy from any theology or theological authority.
Allow me to summarize what I meant by this wall of text. I do not think a prohibition on all forms of mandatory welfare or wealth redistribution, on the premise of the supremacy of the individual will, to be a reasonable and permissible legal opinion while prohibition of abortion, on the premise of ethics being a matter of obligations and virtues to be satisfied, is out of bounds politically because **THAT** is just your own private pet fanciful worldview to be ignored because of the first amendment. Both are ethical precepts flowing from a philosophical framework of what the universe is and what humanity's place is in that universe. It is not that the former is solely a reasonable opinion based on demonstrative reason and the *obvious* realities of the world while the latter is just a backward moral scruple, a holdover of a benighted and primitive age.
So what does this all mean? Does that mean I am justifying theocracy? If voting can be mandatory so can the mass or attending confession? Far from it. My thoughts on this matter are similar to the late Justice Antonin Scalia. It is permissible if a motivation for someone's vote, for the passing of a law, etc is religious in nature. The only prohibition is one that has a rationale that does more than just appeal to the authority of your religion as if that were obviously sufficient. I can't just throw Bible verses at people when arguing against abortion. I cannot just say "God says so". In the same vein the person who argued, against me, in favor of total legal protection of the most ludicrous gender identities on the basis of him and his ilk being "on the right side of history" is also not okay (the more you think about it, that statement is just the progressive equivalent to "God is on our side").
Because of that prohibition it would be impossible for me to justify forced baptism or make the eucharist mandatory. However I think that should also preclude trying to change your toddler’s gender or trying to make some new age meditation mandatory. This is because I do respect individual’s freedom and other modern values. I know I made a rant against those advocating them but the ideals themselves are not my problem. I think nationalism, individual liberty, and inclusivity/equality are important. What makes me disagree with the alt right, fundamentalist libertarians, and SJWs respectively is that they have a philosophy that only takes one or two virtues and takes them to ludicrous extremes that obfuscate all others because of their own private worldview they wish to preach just as a religious zealot does. I do not think my Catholicism is either in a separate category from them, and thus is not subject to more limitations under the first amendment than they are.
SIDE NOTE: Another thing I notice is that those who pull the “But that is your religion! What about the first amendment?” card is that it is inconsistently used as a cludge against Christianity. They use it against conservatives all the time, but I doubt a Wiccan or New Age practitioner appealing to their pantheism as a motivation for combating climate change would receive the same treatment from the secular progressive positivist cosmopolitans.
**TLDR**: I do not feel that my religion or religion in general should be precluded from the realm of issuing ethical prescriptions and attempting to have those precepts influence the law of the land. This is because the underlying existentialism of libertarians and progressives has a similar function to religious metaphysics in how it motivates us to act as social and ethical animals. That existentialism is also not just some obvious and reasonable default rationale of human beings, it is a philosophical worldview just as non self evident as the precepts coming from divine revelation or any philosophical school. This does not justify theocracy because even if laws can be justly advocated for and passed by religious/philosophical motivation, one must have a good argument that does more than appeal to the obvious moral authority their worldview possesses.
**EDIT**: I am getting a lot more responses than I thought I would! Some good questions and points have been made and that rocks! However, I ask that you are forgiving if I neglect to respond and/or respond in good time because I am currently juggling like 5 discussions and am already overwhelmed
> *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!* | We do ask that people think through their moral decisions, especially those that are impacting their political views.
For example, if a person thinks tall people shouldn't be allowed into bathrooms with the normal-sized.
That view being religious in nature, while not *automatically* disqualifying it as a valid option, certainly should not grant it immunity from critical examination.
*why* should tall people not be allowed in bathrooms?
If the only reason the person gives is "my faith prescribes it" that doesn't seem to fit the goals of democracy, where all ideas should be debated in the public square before ballots are taken.
Instead, a claim the idea is based on the faith stops all conversation.
You can't debate the person's god, after all.
On top of that, people tend to so closely hold their faiths they consider questioning as an attack not on the idea, but on the faith, and the believer as well.
At that point there isn't debate at all. Just one person asking 'why?' and the other saying 'you can't ask me that'
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Eli5: How do photo restoration artists know the supposed colors of greyscale images? | Are the colors based purely on their assumptions/imagination, or do the greyscale images retain some sort of data that tells what color on what part? | I often color old black-and-white photographs as a hobby and, most of the time, you just have to guess when you colorize an image.
Sometimes, for famous people, you can do historical research to find out the color of their hair and eyes or even their homes' furnishings (for instance, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna had reddish gold hair and blue eyes and her mauve boudoir was all lavender with pistachio green carpets). You can also do research to get a general idea of the kinds of colors that were popular, say, in the Victorian or Edwardian eras... but that's pretty much it. | 576 | 656 |
ELI5: Why is English the default language in the world? | I mean I know the British Empire was vast, but how come it did so well when there were Dutch, Spanish, Danish, French fleets that were just as advanced at the time? | For 300 years British Empire had a lot of colonies where English was language of government and trade.
Then, in second half of 20th century, as British Empire disintegrated, USA took dominance on world stage. | 47 | 20 |
ELI5: How do dryer sheets remove wrinkles and/or reduce static if it's just the small sheet? Wouldn't it not be touching all the clothes in the load? | Dryer sheets are fabric squares soaked in fabric softener (either quaternary ammonium salts or silicone oil).
As the dryer blows hot air through all the clothes and mixes them around, the fabric softener very lightly coats all of the load. This thin coating of softener gives the laundry the nice scent and the positively charged chemicals (cations) help equalize the electrons building up from all the clothing rubbing against each other. | 6,300 | 8,540 |
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[NSFW] How does Superman (Man of Steel) have sex with Lois Lane without killing her? | We have evidence from the films that Superman has fine control over his voluntary movements... but never see anything about his involuntary movments.
Also, Superman surely must have had diarrhea once. Did he destroy the toilet? | Plenty of options. Red sun lamps in their bedroom, low-grade kryptonite exposure, Kryptonian physiology being different enough that he *has* no involuntary movements, years of practice controlling his strength to fit in among humans extending even to reflexive movement, or maybe his protective aura extends around her, protecting her from harm... not to mention the dozens of perfectly good nonpenetrative options available to him.
Or hell, maybe she just is always on top. | 59 | 42 |
ELI5: What are the fundamental differences between face lotion, body lotion, foot cream, daily moisturizer, night cream, etc.?? | Worked as a cosmetics chemist for 2 years after school. It varies depending on the function of the lotion/cream. If its a general moisturizer very little difference, maybe a slightly different ratio for the thickener to decrease tackiness for something facial rather than something advertised for the body. However if it's something like an acne cream or sunscreen the "active ingredient" would have a significantly different ratio. For example a common active in acme creams is salicylic acid. Ones targeted for the body might have 10-25% more of the acid than facial ones. | 3,895 | 8,848 |
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Why don't all cuts form scar tissue? | Short answer: Your skin has multiple layers and growths outwards. The stem-cell layer is the so called stratum basale and the last layer before the subcutis. When you damage this layer, the skin cannot regrow from the inside. In that case the wound is filled by fibroblasts instead which leads to scarring. | 37 | 48 |
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How are mathematical models of biological processes created? How can they be used to understand complex phenomena? | I'll give a very simple example.
Mitotic cells divide with a certain period t. Each time the cells divide, there are twice as many. Thus, as a function of time t, the number of cells N can be described as N(0)2^t/T where N(0) is the number of cells at t=0.
This might be too simple, because not all cells divide at the same time, or with exactly the same periodicity. But if you have a large number of cells, then you know that the number of new cells being created is related to the total number (if you have twice as many they'll create twice as many new ones in a given time period). So you can write down a differential equation: dN/dt=kN where k is some constant. You can solve this differential equation to get N(t)=N(0)e^kt which is a similar form to our simple doubling equation (k is inversely related to T).
This might still be too simple. What if the cell's division is hampered when cells get too dense. This might occur because cells interact with each other, so there could be a negative term in the rate that depends on N^2 (how likely the cells are to interact with each other). Then you have dN/dt=kN-qN^2 which has a different solution (I think resembling logistic growth), and you can make it more complicated to reflect the circumstances.
This type of modelling is used for bacterial populations, predator-prey relationships, epidemiology, etc. | 10 | 29 |
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ELI5: If we use degrees ( ⁰ ) to measure angles, why do we also use degrees as a measurement of temperature? | The most basic meaning of "degree" is "An individual step, or stage, in any process or scale of values."
There are 360 degrees in a circle because there are 360 individual steps. (You can fine-tune a degree using arcminutes (1/60th of a degree) or arcseconds (1/60th of an arcminute, or 1/3600th of a degree).
Similarly, there are steps in temperature. 1 degree Celsius is ever so slightly cooler than 2 degrees Celsius. | 57 | 34 |
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Microwaves and radiowaves, how do they penetrate different material? | I was curious at how microwaves dont pass through the metal mesh on the window, I understood this was due to wavelength but it didnt make sense how the waves just can just slide throughthe holes until I read that one should imagine the wavelength doesnt form in one direction but in all like a blob, so the long wavelength disallows it from passing through. That is until I was curious how radiowaves can pass through walls and small bits of earth when they have wavelengths much longer than that of microwaves.
Also how would microwaves penetrate food? Or do they simply heat from the outside?
I did slme reading but nothing seems to click or make sense, is there some kind of sweet spot between wave speed and wavelength?
I havw no background in optics or whatever physics concentration this is, I am simply curious. | Many materials are nigh useless for attenuating EM radiation. For example, like you say, radio waves will pass through many common obstacles in our world. Likewise, high energy gammas will pass straight through your skin and into your body.
Certain materials, however, such as the mesh on the microwave and also lead, are able to stop electromagnetic radiation. In the case of lead, this is because on the atomic level, the particles of material are very large (lead has a high Z) and it's very easy for the gamma to hit the particles and be absorbed or scattered then absorbed.
In your example, the mesh screen is effective as shielding because the wavelength of a microwave is relatively large. Think about it like trying to feed a rigid S-shaped material through a hole without tilting it or moving it up or down to help it pass through. The holes simply aren't large enough to allow passage, and the waves are reflected. In this way, the microwave acts as a sort of inverse faraday cage for your food.
So you might ask why doesn't visible light also get prevented from leaving the microwave? Visible light has a much smaller wavelength, so it is able to be transmitted through the holes.
EDIT: the reason why radio waves, with an even longer wavelength than microwaves, are able to pass through so many materials anyway is that there are relatively few conductive and or attenuating materials placed around our world, whereas the mesh is both to a degree. | 17 | 30 |
Can a Starfleet vessel travel at exactly the speed of light so that a supernova appears to be frozen at a given moment in its blast and have more time to study? | If this is possible, could the ship move forward and back to any given moment of the blast and study that particular instant? | In theory, but that works only with sensors that inspect the electromagnetic spectrum. While that's certainly *helpful*, standard sensors function through manipulation of subspace. This is a faster-than-light process, so you can't take advantage of dancing around the speed of light issue, and also has a rather serious quality issue at very long ranges.
The advantage is that you can drop expendable probes around a star that's about to explode and have plenty of time for them to transfer all the information back to their home ship before the slower-than-light shockwave reaches the probes. | 12 | 24 |
ELI5: If sound travels fastest through solids and slowest through gases, why does heat do the opposite? | Aren't they both just the vibration of molecules? | Heat transfer in a gas is primarily through the movement of the gas. As the gas gets stirred up the hot gas can move across its container very quickly.
A hot solid can transfer heat very quickly in the same way. Heat a bucket of ball bearings up. Then through the bucket of bearings across the room. All the heat just moved across the room in a second. | 27 | 20 |
ELI5: Why does leftover food that has been in the fridge smell different than when it was just cooked? | And then when you reheat it in the microwave, the smell returns. I’m probably just thinking about it weirdly but if there is a scientific explanation, I would be pleased to know! | Not too complex. Smells come from particles evaporating up from the object. Cold objects evaporate much more slowly -- and *some* molecules are more affected by this than others, so the blend changes. | 1,582 | 3,549 |
If something is conscious, is it automatically alive? | Obviously, there's plenty of life (in the biological sense) without consciousness. Unless we're panpsychists, we tend not to think plants, bacteria and so on are conscious. And of course, living animals are unconscious during deep sleep, comas...
But let's say we can have strong AI and say of it that it's conscious. Would we also consider it to be alive, in some sense? To what extent is the concept of consciousness bound up with the concept of life, of being alive? Have any philosophers denied that something can be conscious if it is not also alive? | Even in biology there is no exact definition of "life." But generally life is considered to perform respiration, maintain homeostasis, and be made of cells. If we created some kind of self-replicating AI it may end up challenging our current definitions of life. One thing to remember is that "life" is a scientific concept. It's not derived from pure logical thinking but from applying rationality to what we observe in the world. New observations may end up causing us to rethink what we mean by "life." This is true of all scientific concepts (for example, we rethought what "gravity" is in the wake of Einstein despite his theories being indistinguishable from Newton's in most ordinary applications.) | 56 | 84 |
ELI5: why are Anti-Cancer drugs so expensive? | Cancer is a tremendous collection of wildly different conditions, each of which can require the development of very different cancer drugs to either treat or prevent.
Some anti-cancer drugs exist now and are very expensive. Others have yet to be developed, with many of those in their research and testing phases now. When they're available, they will be very expensive too.
They're so expensive because they're being developed by private or public companies who have a responsibility to their own shareholders and owners to make a profit. To make a profit, the price you sell something at has to be greater than the price required to create it.
And this is the problem: the price to create and sell an anti-cancer drug is **ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS**. Here's the steps:
* research and development to identify possible treatment vectors
* animal testing
* safety testing
* clinical trials on volunteer patients, often over years.
* approval from government medicinal and drug organizations
Every one of those steps takes time and costs a lot of money, and your new drug could fail at any one of those stages, meaning all of that money you spent you get NOTHING for.
So companies in the anti-cancer drug business charge a lot because they have to pay for the drug they're producing, plus finance all the drug variants that are in development, and cover the lost costs of all of the drug variants that didn't pass their tests... and still earn a profit for their shareholders. | 25 | 76 |
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[Predator 2]What if Agent Keyes' operation was actually a success? | Keyes and his team manage to neutralize the Predator at the Slaughterhouse and get him into proper containment for transport elsewhere. What would the repercussions be? | Best case scenario, they get to make advances in non gunpowder based projectile weaponry, cloaking technology, advanced optics, possible medical revelations, etc.
Worst case scenario, they don't try to remove his wrist gauntlet, and he nukes everyone.
Or maybe knowing he'd been incapacitated, the rest of the predators on the planet come after him and kill all of his captors, it doesn't strike me that they'd just leave one of their own as prisoner. | 21 | 26 |
[DBZ] What are the limitations of Shenron's powers? (from /r/Monsterdeconstruction) | [**Original post**](http://www.reddit.com/r/monsterdeconstruction/comments/36hmfm/what_are_the_limitations_of_shenrons_powers/)
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| The strength of the dragon balls depends on the strength of the creator, how many wishes you can make, and any limitations the creator imposes.
For example, when the sayains were headed to earth they tried to take them out with a wish, but Kami was not strong enough to take them out so the wish couldn't be granted. On Namek they could make three wishes, but had the limitations of only bringing back one person at a time. | 16 | 19 |
ELI5: Why do lawyers need need certification, if the defendant, who isn't a lawyer, can defend himself? | If there's a precedent for a non-lawyer to defend, why does a lawyer need certification at all? | When you hire somebody to work for you, you want them capable of doing the job. Let's say you find somebody on the street, and ask them for legal advice. let's pretend the advice they give you is actually illegal. If you take that advice to trial, and it backfires on you, you're the only one to blame. The random person on the street can say whatever he wants to you, no matter how illegal it is, but it was your decision to follow it.
Now, instead of random people on the street, we have lawyers. They have a piece of paper saying that they know the law. So, if they give you illegal advice, and the judge asks you, "why did you do it", now you can say that a lawyer with a certificate, who should know better, told you to do this, and you trusted him because he has that piece of paper. In this case, you wouldn't get in trouble, but the lawyer would.
Society demands that professionals, not just lawyers, have formal training and certification because it holds them accountable, not their clients, for any wrong doing. | 314 | 508 |
CMV: I don't believe humans are meant to be monogamous. | I don't believe humans are meant to be monogamous. Based on the fact that we used to be cave men and women and men would typically have multiple partners in order to pass their lineage on, I believe that while we have clearly evolved from that, biology has still framed us to struggle with monogamy. In many ways, I think we have animalistic tendencies when it comes to interpersonal relationships and that people will always struggle with looking for someone better because of natural selection and all that jazz. Also, testosterone is a powerful thing.
Marriage, for example, is a social construct and legal contract more than anything. And, whether married or not, failed relationships and cheating is just way too prevalent to be coincidental. I think our bodies struggle with remaining loyal to one person, even if we are emotionally complex enough to realize that this is wrong.
While, from an idealistic stance, I think it's awesome to think we could find one partner who is "the one," and successfully remain with them indefinitely, I have a hard time believing that is indeed the case. Change my view.
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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!* | Monogamy actually does offer some biological advantages. For instance, 90% of birds are monogamous. There are two kinds of monogamy in birds - lifelong monogamy and social monogamy (which exists only for one cycle of breeding and chick-raising). Monogamy is biologically advantageous when offspring are unable to fend for themselves and require constant attention from the parents. Human infants are much more similar to baby birds than they are to, say, baby zebras.
You're also only looking at monogamy from a male-centric perspective of spreading genes. Females of a species have their own biological strategies for maximizing their number of healthy offspring that survive to adulthood.
Additionally, humans aren't just meat sacks filled with genes. We're social animals. Monogamy is a way of forming strong family bonds and lineages, which are part of the "social DNA" of human society. Cheating is frequently a response to *social* needs, not biological ones. People who are past the breeding age still cheat. People cheat when it's against their breeding and child-raising interests. | 526 | 401 |
ELI5: How do they make vitamin tablets? | Where does the vitamin come from and how do they make it into pills? | Vitamins can be derived from plant or animal products, or produced synthetically in a laboratory. Vitamin A, for example, can be derived from fish liver oil, and vitamin C from citrus fruits or rose hips. Vitamin C is water soluble, so all you need do is crush or grind the plant material and then shake it up with water. A common method is to grind the material with some clean sand in a mortar with a pestle. The material can then be filtered or centrifuged to get rid of the debris. The vitamin C will be in the water. The water is removed and what is left is made into tablets.
Producing it synthetically just means that we have learned what basic chemicals make up the vitamin. Those chemicals in a very purified form are mixed together and put into tablets.
Most commercial vitamins are made from synthetic vitamins, which are cheaper and easier to produce than natural derivatives. So vitamin A may be synthesized from acetone, and vitamin C from keto acid. There is no chemical difference between the purified vitamins derived from plant or animal sources and those produced synthetically. That said, some people react differently to the different versions and have a preference for one type or the other. | 10 | 17 |
ELI5: Why does it feel like when you are thirsty, sugar feels like a replacement for something to drink? | Sorry for my bad english. Let me explain;
Some days when I dont drink a lot I start to get really hungry for sugary candy. After I eat it I dont want feel thirsty for a while again. I could live a day without drinking at all but not feeling thirsty because of sugar. How come? | Fruits contain alot of water.
Fruits also contain alot of sugar.
If you couldn't get water directly, fruit would also give you water.
Your body hasn't learned it can get sugar in candy, it thinks you are getting the sugar from fruit.
So it thinks you got some of the water in the fruit until your fluid balance tells you other wise. | 16 | 25 |
ELI5: Why can a company fire an employee for a Facebook comment, but not sue a non-employee for defamation because of a Facebook comment? | The standards are different.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, an employee is "at will." This means that the employer can fire them for any reason or for no reason at all. In the present day there are some restrictions on this---you can't fire someone because of their religion, for instance---but very few.
Thus, posting something on facebook can get you fired, but so can not posting something, or posting the wrong thing, or any other thing that the employer doesn't like.
A lawsuit for defamation is very different. Here, you're not dealing with the employer's decision to keep someone on the business's payroll, but with the employer's desire to use the courts to get something. In the U.S. at least, the standards for defamation are very, very hard to meet. As such, very few of these cases are filed.
As a note, though, this is not any different than suing an employee. You can fire the employee for their facebook post, but unless you met that same high burden, it would not be any easier to sue the employee for defamation than it would be to sue the third party. | 25 | 69 |
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What are some metaphysical questions that are not ontological? | My understanding of the distinction between the two is as follows: Ontology is a sub discipline of metaphysics. Metaphysics is the study of what exists. Ontology is the study of being.
I presume there is subtlety that I missing. What is the difference between existence and being in this context?
Is there consensus on the topic? | I’m not sure there is any consensus on how to make the distinction.
Often “ontology” refers to the question of what exists. So one does ontology when one argues whether numbers or properties exist.
Asking what the world is like, then, would be a metaphysical question that isn’t ontological. So given that properties exist, what are they like? are they tropes or universals?
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ELI5: What is the evolutionary benefit to a species, such as the Praying Mantis, to have the female kill the male after copulation? | By eating the male, the female gains a lot of nutrients, which will enable her to have healthier and stronger offspring. In this way, there is a higher chance that the genes of both the male and the female are carried on. | 30 | 26 |
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ELI5: Why is space black? | Why is space black? | Color comes from light, light directly from a source or light reflected/scattered off a surface. where there is no source or no surface there is no light. Space is a vacuum so there is no source and there is no surface, so there is no light in space. That makes space black. | 27 | 35 |
ELI5: How have we been able to make the physical size of memory sticks such as SD cards and flash drives smaller and smaller while being able to hold much larger amount of bytes of data? | We find and/or invent new manufacturing processes that allow us to make smaller and smaller circuits and components. Sometimes that's a matter of building more accurate machines, sometimes it's a matter of creating new materials. | 20 | 44 |
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Bringing family to reception at a conference? |
I am attending a conference next month and my grandparents will be in the same city. My school is putting on an ‘alumni and friends’ reception at a beautiful venue in honor of the conference. I told my grandparents about it and they would like to attend with me. They have helped support me in my graduate school education and mean a lot to me so it would be hard to tell them no. Do you think anyone have a problem with this? | I would ask the organizers of alumni event if you can bring quests or not. Sometimes those events require registration fees as well to cover food and drinks. In most cases you can register a guest as well.
If it's held at the same venue as the conference, you might want to ask those organizers as well. I've been to conferences where they rigorously checked ID badges when entering the venue and you would not be able to bring in anyone who wouldn't be registered. So definitely check with the appropriate people. Would be a shame to show up with your grandparents and to then find out they can't enter the event. | 78 | 92 |
ELI5: what happens to the water used to make concrete? | Can the concrete degrade, until the water escapes? | Concrete setting is a complicated process and depends on the materials used. But part of the process is the hydration of the ingredients. The water actually becomes part of the ingredients. The water remains but is part of the chemical components. Concrete is also produced which will set under water. The Romans understood how to make concrete including underwater concrete. It is part of how they were so good at construction. | 24 | 30 |
[Star Trek] How do people pay for services and real state? | In before, no society can ever be post-scarcity as services and land can't be replicated.
My biggest examples are prostitution, concerts and real estate.
"Organic" prostitutes will always be in demand rather than VR/holodeck. And they are going to want some better incentive than "I'm doing it because it's my hobby".
How are these prostitutes going to be compensated without cash?
On the other hand, concerts: even in the future, a band coming to town will be limited by the arena's capacity. And yes: VR/holodeck, but a lot of people would rather be in the real life concert.
How are the scarce tickets going to be allocated?
Finally: real state, even with teletransportation, valuable land is scarce by nature.
Imagine living right across the street from Starfleet HQ in San Francisco. That neighborhood HAS to be among the most prestigious ones in the whole Federation.
How are the flats allocated there? Do they all go to senior Starfleet personnel?
What about living on the moon next to the Neil Armstrong memorial complex? Who gets to decide who lives there and why? | (you may get a more in-depth response in /r/DaystromInstitute)
The federation is very much a meritocracy. The "currency" is your skills, who you know, and how influential you are.
Keep in mind that humanity as a whole has an entirely different mindset than the material-based one we have today. Honestly the people who just wanted to pleasure themselves until they died all withered away in a VR sexscape decades ago, those who are left are much more driven toward improving themselves and humanity as a whole. To a federation citizen, someone demanding that they want a mansion estate overlooking the moon landing site would be silly and entirely unnecessary. Possibly bordering on a psychiatric case
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A starfleet captain would of course be allotted a stylish condo next to starfleet HQ. both because of his station, the need to be near starfleet, and that he would likely need to entertain guests. If you werent involved with starfleet you certainly could ask them if they would let you live in one of their dorms. They may or may not let you, would probably tell you to try for the academy
Any sort of event like a concert could apply for an appropriately sized venue for the expected crowd. Though if space was truly a concern, it would be up to the performers to decide how they wanted to allot the space. Honestly with how the federation behaves, most performers would likely just be in small concert halls playing to select people
and yes, a federation-based prostitute would provide his or her services because they would want to
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Land and resources arent as scarce as you'd think. The Federation isnt just stuck on just one planet. if you wanted your own vineyard you could just charter a ship to one of the hundreds of arable planets.If you really wanted to be on Earth, all the land is being utilized by some entity or another. You would need to convince them to let you use it. The federation wouldnt seize the land oustide of extreme edge cases
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And their is actually a form of physical currency. Gold-pressed latinum. a non-replicate-able material that is used mainly outside the federation. but in the Federation, if you want that captains condo you take the starfleet exam and work your way up to captains rank. you want that vineyard? ask for an apprenticeship and if your good you'll inherit it. | 41 | 31 |
ELI5 : How is 70% Alcohol more effective in killing microorganisms than 90% or 100% concentration? | I don't know if this applies to ALL organism, but papers i just read stated it's more effective in killing co*id and some other bacteria.
#But HOW? | 70% percent of alcohol is ideal to a stronger solution. Pure alcohol coagulates protein in contact. Suppose the pure alcohol is poured over a single celled organism. The alcohol will go through the cell wall of the organism in all direction, coagulating the protein just inside the cell wall. The ring of the coagulated protein would then stop the alcohol from penetrating farther from the cell, and no more coagulation would take place. At this time the cell would become inactive but not dead. Under the favorable conditions the cell would then begin to function. If 70 percent of alcohol is poured to a single celled organism, the diluted alcohol also coagulates the protein, but at a slower rate, so that it penetrates all the way through the cell before coagulation can block it. Then the entire cell is coagulated and the organism dies. | 75 | 30 |
Is my chemistry teacher smarter than a 5th grader? | There IS enough information, and the pressure does indeed increase.
1. Assuming it starts as an inflated soccer ball (in the conventional understanding of "inflated" for a sports ball), the initial pressure of the gas is greater than the ambient/atmospheric pressure. The gas is contained by a thin, closed elastic membrane, and static equilibrium of the system is maintained via mechanical stress in the membrane. (This is physics, not chemistry).
2. Let us also assume that the initial and final shapes of the membrane are perfectly spherical (which is a very reasonable assumption).
3. Using PV = nRT, the constants of this system are R and T while n is increasing (by the problem statement). We can immediately conclude that the product PV increases as gas is added.
4. From here, the relation between P and V is in question. If the volume contained within the elastic membrane were to increase, the surface area of the membrane must also increase. This is because we assumed the initial volume to be spherical in shape. Any increase in the surface area requires a deformation of the elastic membrane, with which comes an increase in the mechanical stress. To maintain static equilibrium, this must be balanced by an increase in pressure inside the membrane. In other words, pressure and volume either both increase or both decrease; otherwise, static equilibrium cannot be maintained.
5. Since the quantity PV increases (from 3) and since an increase in P requires an increase in V (from 4), we may conclude with certainty that the pressure increases.
QED | 33 | 26 |
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ELI5: Why do Verizon and AT&T both claim to have the nation's largest network? | There are different ways you can measure largest...number of customers, number of towers, square miles of coverage.
On top of that, "network" is also vague...is it phone service, internet service, 3G, 4G?
So it is is pretty easy to pick and choose a definition that could make either one the largest. In ads, you'll often see an asterisk and some fine print describing the exact criteria. | 12 | 17 |
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CMV Stated funded Religious schools should not exist | **Correct Title: CMV State funded Religious schools should not exist**
Edit: I'm located in the UK
Many of us agree religion is the cause of major problems today. Segregation from others is not the way to solve this.
What has religion got to do with education? Why should children have to pray and take part in holly communion if they attend a Catholic school at the expense of tax payers?
I'm looking to send my son to the best school, just by chance in my area its a catholic school. Why should he miss out on a better education because I simply refuse to let him take part in practicing religion until hes of age to decide for himself?
Should all schools not treat all children equal? |
The fairness of it lies in the public funding. Should a religious school get the same funding as others? In the UK, as long as they follow a prescribed curriculum, they get funding. The Catholic schools merely teach more. There is no requirement that a school NOT teach things in order to receive funding.
To more indirectly answer you, if the religion of the school factors into your decision and causes you to think of that school as undesirable, then perhaps it is not the "best." That's a very subjective statement. Also, there is a misunderstanding: Catholic schools in the UK do not generally require their students to become Catholic. They merely give priority to Catholics when too many people sign up. That makes sense for a school that delivers religious lessons with a Catholic focus (though they do teach most religions in religious studies class, it is from a Catholic viewpoint). | 106 | 702 |
[Halo] A question about civilian life? | So this is something I have wondered about the halo franchise. Why is it that civilian life is not that different from our own? For example: I was watching Halo ODST gameplay footage and while watching I noticed that civilian life isn't that different than ours. While seeing new Mombasa the city looked like it could be from the year 2150 instead of 2550. Shouldn't we be far more advanced than this? | Has civilian life really changed much in the past five hundred years? We go to work, raise families, go to the bar, watch entertainment performances, etc. What we do hasn't really changed, only the way we do it. | 19 | 21 |
Can I escape harm from a fireball by diving under water? | I was watching "True Lies" earlier today, and there is a scene where Arnold dives into a body of water just as a fuel truck explodes above him. As he swims a few feet under water you can see a massive fireball right above him.
Is this situation possible in real life? Given that I'm submerged in a few feet (or even inches) of water, what temperatures can I survive, and for how long?
And when that critical temperature/duration threshold is reached, how will I be hurt? Will the water become hot enough to burn me? Will it evaporate away exposing my body to the raw heat? Or something else entirely?
| I have recently had a class about mass and heat transfer so i'll try to help you out:
Okay, you dive into the water to escape the raging fire, you stay submerged at 2 meters below the surface of the water. Lets say the firebolt is at 1000°C and remains constant. Lets also assume the water is perfectly still to simplify the calculations.
Let's say your body is at all times the same temperature as the water (which is very close to the real situation because the human body is largely made up out of water and therefore will heat at approximately the same rate as the water it's in). When your body (or the water) reaches 42°C, you will pass out. Lets say the initial temperature of the water is 15°C.
Now follows a bit of a technical part which you probaly won't be interested in:
We use the solutions developed for transient heat transfer in a semi-infinite region, the non-dimensional temperature is (T-Ti)/(Ts-Ti) = 0,027. We now calculate the estimated time out of the error function to be: t = 800 hours.
Conclusion: It would take a VERY long time for you to get hurt. The reason it would take so long is because water can consume alot of heat before rising in temperature, and also because we assumed the water you are in to be a semi-infinite region. This basically means that we assumed the body of water to be very big in surface and in depth.
Even if it was just a small pool you dove into, it would still take a long time for you to get hurt, so to answer your initial question: yes, you would be completely safe. | 11 | 16 |
What makes a person's voice distinct? | Too many things to count, but I'll generally try to divide it into two broad categories:
1. The way our muscles and cavities are made and aligned. This refers to the composition of the muscles which make up our vocal folds, pharynx, soft palate, etc. Also, the ways the tunnels and tubes in our throat are connected help shape the sound we produce.
2. The way our brain instructs us to produce sound. This means, how we articulate certain consonants and vowels, our various speech patterns when we communicate, and the inflections we use when we breathe and communicate ideas. | 23 | 67 |
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ELI5: When sea level rises, why wouldn't it rise the same amount everywhere? | I was reading [this vox article](https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/6/1/15724164/9-questions-climate-change-too-embarrassed-to-ask), about climate change and it's potential effects on the globe. One thing they mentioned was that sea levels would rise – though not necessarily uniformly around the world.
> Higher sea-level rise: The expert consensus is that global sea levels will rise somewhere between 0.7 and 1.2 meters by the end of the century if global warming continues unchecked (that's between 2 and 4 feet). And that's only the average. In regions like the eastern United States, sea-level rise could be even higher.
That seems counterintuitive. I thought there was some law of physics that says that if I pour water in one side of my bath tub, the whole thing will level out – so it won't be higher in any one place. Why would it not rise uniformly everywhere? | While what you said is generally true in small scale, large scale is a bit different.
You have serious gravitational pull from primarily the moon but the sun as well which makes the oceans look more oval than round. This is the same phenomenon that causes the tide cycle.
When you add water to a system like that, you don't see uniform change in water levels. Everything rises some, but the high tide area would tend to see a more dramatic rise. | 11 | 16 |
ELI5: Why can I usually hear when a person is black, without seeing them (phone calls or radio etc). And I don't mean accents. | Maybe it is an accent, and I'm just not aware I'm detecting it.
**Edit: Apparently talking about differences in the "races" is racist.** | There can be a very slight innate difference from race to race, but it's more to do with culture and accent than physiology - although physiology can sometimes play a part. However most likely if you heard a black guy who was, say, dutch or portuguese, you wouldn't be able to tell his race.
To make another example, Phil Lamarr is a black guy who's a prolific voice actor, if you didn't know who he was you'd never be able to tell the color of his skin. However I've noticed it's very difficult for white guys to do convincing voices of black characters.
Edit: Come to think of it, Phil Lamarr's normal voice doesn't sound like any particular race. Watch some interviews of him and see for yourself. | 15 | 17 |
If an experiment were conducted outside of an academic environment (e.g., in a home-based DIY laboratory), could the results still be published in a peer-reviewed journal? | **tl,dr: see post title. For further information, keep reading.**
Let's pretend that a *previous* mentor (ex-mentor) has recently retired, offering you some of his/her outdated laboratory equipment. However, you cannot install this equipment in your *current* mentor's laboratory due to space constraints. Thus, you suggest setting up a home laboratory - in a garage, basement, shed... wherever - using the donated equipment.
You used this equipment daily while working in your ex-mentor's laboratory, so you can use it and troubleshoot it like a pro. Once it is installed, calibration and diagnostic checks demonstrate that the devices are in optimal condition. To be on the safe side, you replicate an experiment you previously conducted in your ex-mentor's academic lab space. You find that your newly-collected data is identical to your previous data, suggesting that the changed setting has not impaired the reliability of any facets of experimental design. You have a novel research question that can be adequately explored with the type of data collected by your [fully armed and operational] home lab. After some intense brainstorming, you derive four hypotheses that are capable of directly supporting your research question.
However, you don't yet have adequate "street cred" in your field of study. You are currently enrolled as a graduate student, although you have co-authored several publications, including one "first author" article. As well, your current mentor is a new assistant professor; a great mentor, but still trying to make a name for him/herself in your field of study. Additionally, your institution is not particularly prestigious... but this may be irrelevant to the point, given that the research would be conducted outside of your university.
Given all this information, I'd like to see what others' opinions are regarding how such research would be seen in academia, and in particular, by journals. If you submitted a manuscript on the basis of data collected in your home laboratory, would they even give it the time of day? Do editors and reviewers have to see an institution on a submission before they'd consider spending their time on it? Keep in mind that I am not trolling for a debate on "how the academic publishing system is so fucked up, blah blah." If it helps, this is another way to frame it: What is the probability that research conducted in an "informal" environment would be accepted for publication by a journal, given that you can demonstrate the reliability of collected data, and that those conducting the research have academic credentials?
| In the field of Astronomy, there are a number of papers published by those who aren't affiliated with a major research facility. In many cases, it's variable star research, although there have been some publications on asteroids and comets as well. | 10 | 19 |
[Warhammer 40k] I'm a fish-out-of-water time traveler in the 41st Millennium - what should I do? | Due to warp-related fuckery I've been plucked out of the 21st Century and dropped into the grimdarkness of the far future. What's the best I can do in this situation? | Depending on your location, Citizen, find a skill that makes you valuable to the most important person nearby, and integrate into society. It will be difficult, but if you are lucky and skilled, you will do well enough to survive and live the equivalent of a low-class lifestyle. If you are on a chaos world, your best chance at survival is ruthlessness. You live among animals and rabid dogs, act accordingly, and pray that the Emperor takes mercy on your soul. | 19 | 17 |
ELI5: What's going on in the brain when you "turn down the music to see better"? | Reducing cognitive load. It's not so much that you need to see better, like the way glasses bring things into focus, but you are scanning the environment for clues and processing those clues. It's one of the more demanding cognitive tasks you can do. Your brain knows that any other distractions are just going to divert resources away from your primary task. | 75 | 67 |
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I think economic mobility is more important than wealth distribution. CMV | What is the actual impact of unequal wealth distribution?
Is the argument that rich people cause poor people? I'm not sure I buy that. If money and wealth were fixed, then yes, distribution matters, but they're not. The rich get richer, yes, but so do the poor and the middle class - albeit at a slower rate. But if I give you $1 you're $1 better off, even if I give the next guy $100. And the poor in America are rich compared to the poor in most of the rest of the world.
Perhaps the more compelling argument is that the rich control the system (government, economy etc) which allows them to stay rich and keep the poor poor. If that's the case, the the problem isn't really wealth distribution, but economic mobility.
As long as rich people can get poor and poor people can get rich (even over the course of generations), I don't really see an inherent harm in unequal wealth distribution.
CMV | There is a fairly well established sociological phenomena where the greater the disparities in a society, the greater the visibility of these disparities, and the greater the social isolation between disparate groups is, the less compassionate and cooperative the group is expected to be in the future. This is all related to the just-world hypothesis which says that as people become accustomed to having wealth, they tend to believe that this distribution of wealth is correct and the natural result of just processes. This mindset results in a lack of concern for the justly poor and a reinforcement of belief in the systems which resulted in this disparity. This also creates social forces which increase societal levels of crime, poor health, and unhappiness for everyone in society.
Highly unequal wealth distributions also often directly result in decreases in socio-economic mobility. People tend to distribute themselves geo-socially in groups of homogeneous socio-economic status. Ignoring the effects of locally derived tax bases resulting in disparate infrastructure for children born to parents of differing SES, the social endowment of growing up in communities with differing relationships to work and money and the interpersonal connections available to these groups can vary dramatically making the children of the wealthy much more prepared and supported in being wealthy themselves. | 15 | 27 |
Do plants have a life expectancy? Can you predict how long a plant will live, given the proper conditions? | There was a story in the newspaper about a tree that had "reached the end of it's life-cycle." It is the centerpiece of a large condo/shopping center, and is going to be removed for public safety reasons. They claim to have consulted 6 arborists who all said it had died a natural death, at approximately 125 years old. I find this claim strange, considering the age of some plants alive on earth this very moment. | Yes, plants do have a life expectancy. Every species has its own natural life expectancy, but it can be also affected by the environment, disease, etc. A simple example would be annual plants - they germinate, grow, flower, set seed and die within a year.
Predicting how long a plant would live is a bit of a different story, mostly because of 'proper conditions'. Plants that don't live in a closely controlled glasshouse will have to survive changing conditions and that affects how long they live. Weather changes and climate changes, so defining 'proper conditions' is tricky, since plants that were perfectly adapted to a given environment 100 years ago don't have to be so perfectly adapted now (for example some seeds need frost before they germinate). | 10 | 48 |
Can someone please tell me why we curve-fit? | I'm doing a physics project that includes Gaussian and Lorentzian 'fits', and I want to get a basic of understanding of why we curve-fit, and why those two fits are considered good. | "Curve-fitting" means different things to different people but in general when you are fitting a curve you are doing some form of hypothesis testing. **Hypothesis Testing** is the basis of science:
* Step 1) Make a hypothesis;
* Step 2) Test hypothesis with data.
In many branches of science a good hypothesis requires expressing a proposed idea in a mathematical formula. For example, the mathematical expression of Newton's 2nd law is F=ma. Suppose you wanted to test this hypothesis, than you would take some mass, **m**, and push on it with a variety of forces, **F**, and measure the resulting acceleration, **a**. A 'curve fit' in this case would be to see if your data (the measured accelerations as a function of forcing) provides a good fit to the hypothesized linear relation F=ma as opposed to some alternative hypothesis such as F= ma^2. By testing your model against the data you determine if it is consistent. A key subdetail is that in many cases you have to be careful with understanding the measurement uncertainties of the data. In the real world with real data, you might not find a perfect relationship F=ma in your data but it's crucial to be able either reject the hypothesis or conclude it's statistically "close enough" given the uncertainty of your measurements. If your measurement quality is really poor, you'll find that you can't discriminate between competing hypotheses because all the different 'curve-fits' look as good as the next one.
In your specific case it sounds like you are testing whether the data is consistent with a hypothesis that the measurements will follow a specific type of distribution, either Gaussian or Lorentzian. By curve fitting you should (in optimal situations) be able to determine that one of these hypothesis provides a better fit to the data. Another key in any sort of experimental design is to insure that the data you get is going to be sufficient to conclusively test the hypothesis you start with. If you get shitty data and you may be unable to draw any sort of conclusion from the 'curve fitting.'
The practice of "curve fitting' is often abused in many different ways (badly formed hypothesis, poor experimental design, neglecting data uncertainties, statistical trickery, etc...) Detailing all those cases would be a book-length rant. | 16 | 17 |
ELI5: What is the difference between quantum physics and quantum mechanics? | Quantum physics is the term given to any branch of physics which is quantized - that is, in which things exist in discrete packets.
Quantum mechanics is a specific field of quantum physics.
There are others; like quantum field theory, quantum electrodynamics, and quantum chromodynamics.
Quantum physics is the group which all these disciplines belong to. | 24 | 53 |
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ELI5: Dark Matter | I tried to read a bit about it but it was all a bit to scientific for me. Would like to know why we have it and what role does it play in our cosmic universe like i am 5. | We have a pretty good idea of how gravity, motion and mass all work. We are pretty good at figuring out how big things are, how much mass they have, and how fast they are moving. When we look at a galaxy, we like to figure out things like how much mass it has, how fast it's rotating, and how big it is. We even take a close look at how fast the galaxy is rotating at different points, for example the middle, the outside, and places in between.
From what we know of mass, gravity, and motion, we would expect that far edge of a galaxy would rotate slower than a spot closer to the middle. If you make a graph of the speed stars are rotating about a galaxy versus how far away they are from the center, it's called a rotation curve. That graph should look like a children's slide. It goes up really quickly from the center, and then slides down and down as you go towards the edge of the galaxy.
The problem is, it doesn't. When we actually look at galaxies, and draw the graph, it looks like a cliff instead. It goes up quickly (as predicted), but then it stays more or less the same, all the way out. So now we have a problem. Something is wrong with the picture. It's possible that we don't know as much about gravity as we think. However, every experiment we've tried, even really, really complex ones, tells us that we've got gravity nailed. It's also possible that we don't understand how to measure speed and mass from a long way away. Again, however, we've done a lot of experiments, and they all tell us we know what we're doing. So we need a way to explain why the galaxies aren't moving the way we expect.
There are a number of theories that try to explain this. The dark matter theory basically says that there is a lot more mass than we thought in a galaxy. When we estimate the mass of a galaxy, we're mostly doing it by looking at the things we can SEE, like stars (nice and shiny). But what if there was a lot of mass we COULDN'T see? Well, there are black holes. But the truth is we can still 'see' those by the way they warp other stars light, and make them move. Even accounting for black holes, galaxies are still way short on matter to explain the motion we see.
So what if there was matter we couldn't see, but it was really spread out, so we wouldn't see it bending light, or moving stars around? What if there was a whole bunch of it? Well, it turns out that if there WAS a bunch of matter spread around that we couldn't see, then all our observations would actually work out again.
There are other explanations for why our observations may be off, but most are dependent on us being wring about things we're pretty sure we're not wrong about, like how gravity works. There are also other observations that don't match reality unless we add in 'dark matter'. So right now, assuming that there is a crap-load of matter in the universe that we simply can't see is the best way we have to explain why our observations don't match our predictions. | 54 | 50 |
ELI5: Why is it said that Florida, Arizona, and Nevada could only grow with air conditioning when many of history's great cities flourished in similar climates long before the invention of A/C? | Havana, New Orleans, Charleston, Santo Domingo, Cairo, Baghdad, Ahvaz, Shibam, Zanzibar, Angkor, Hue, and Singapore all were prominent world cities long before mechanical air conditioning was invented. | Most of those cities also had great reasons to exist. Like trade routes, road junctions, ports, rivers, lots of arable land, etc. Phoenix ain't got shit. It is a huge, worthless desert not near anything of any note. It's only attraction is that it's pretty, and most people don't want to live with 100+ degree temps all summer just for pretty.
When air conditioning got cheap enough for home use places that were pretty and had inexpensive land but totally shit weather got a lot more attractive. | 60 | 67 |
Long term effects of shaking a Earthquake resistant building. (concerning Japan) | Reposted from here: http://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/gpgau/long_term_effects_of_shaking_a_earthquake/
Perhaps a civil engineer or similar could chime in on this one. So, the buildings held up well to the initial intense shaking of the big one but what about the prolonged semi-daily aftershocks. Could cracks in structures develop like they do in a 737 after tens of thousands of takeoff/landing cycles? Can the stress be cumulative like that in a tall building? Some say the aftershocks will last a year or more. Thanks. | Even after small earthquakes, some level of permanent damage is expected in structures. So yes, the stress in a structure could be cumulative. Fortunately, this damage is relatively easy to spot in most modern structures so that the buildings that are no longer habitable can be spotted. Also, it is unlikely that the failure of a structure after an aftershock would be catastrophic; more than likely it would be localized to particular floors or could just result in a leaning building.
That being said, the factor of safety in these structures is likely fairly high, so i wouldn't be too concerned about sudden collapse after an aftershock. If another large earthquake comes however, some structures may not be able to handle the damage. This was an issue for some structures in Christchurch- they had a large quake several months ago and when the most recent one happened, some of the structures had not been fully repaired and subsequently collapsed. | 14 | 15 |
[Doctor Who] In adventures with multiple Doctors, why doesn't the Doctor's later incarnation remember the adventure's outcome, having already experienced it one or more times? | It is part of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.
In almost all cases like this only the latest version of the Doctor (or any other Timelord) can recall the event at all.
The Third Doctor first commented on it and it has been fairly consistent since then. | 47 | 50 |
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CMV: The logic behind getting rid of the electoral college would apply equally to getting rid of the senate. | The argument that I hear for why the electoral college is bad is that it allows for situations where the president wins despite losing the popular vote. The argument tends to be that we are a democracy where each person should have equal voting power and equal representation but as it currently stands some people's votes count for more than others based on where they live.
Keeping aside whether or not I agree with the stance for eliminating the electoral college, I do think it's weirdly misplaced. The issue isn't the electoral college but is the fact that there's rounding errors in the House of Representatives and, far more importantly, that each state gets 2 senators regardless of their population. The rounding errors are minor and something I think everyone would be willing to live with, if only to _not_ bloat the House to obscene levels, but the senate is an egregious example of some people having more federal power than others based entirely on where they live.
Wyoming is the least populous state. California is the most populous state. When it comes to the electoral college Wyoming gets 3 votes for 577k people or 1 vote per 192k people. California gets 55 votes for 39.56 million people or 1 vote per 719k people. This is the extreme version of what people seem to argue about in regards to the electoral college. However it's so much worse when you look at the Senate. Wyoming gets 2 senate votes for 577k people, or 1 vote per 288k people. California gets 2 senate votes for 39.56 million people, or 1 vote per 19.78 million people.
The views I have that I want contested are the following:
1. The logic is the same between the two institutions.
2. Excluding potentially partisan reasons, such as your political party being more likely to win the popular vote vs the electoral college, this perceived unfairness is the only reason the majority people want to eliminate the electoral college.
3. People who want to eliminate the electoral college but state they do not want to eliminate the senate are hypocrites or ignorant.
4. Any argument that the average informed citizen would recognize as a decent argument for keeping the senate would equally apply to keeping the electoral college.
Edit 1: I've conceded the point that people might view it an issue if they do not look at it institution by institution but instead look at the federal government as a whole to everyone during my first pass at replies. Since my view on that particular notion has already been changed, further comments will not be getting a delta if it relies on that! Thanks so much for the discussion so far!
Edit 2: I've probably burned a decent chunk of my "be unproductive at work" time so far. I'll be back at lunch or after work and keep answering things as I can! I love the discussion so far guys. After that I'll be periodically checking in here! | While the logic may be the same between the institutions - smaller states need to have a say in Federal matters - one can make an argument as to _how much_ say they should be allowed to have. One can agree with putting their "thumb on the scale" and still feel that one should only be allowed "so many thumbs"
- The Senate is obviously weighted towards smaller states by design.
- The Reapportionment Act of 1929 capped the House at 435 members and guaranteed each state at least one House member to each state. This _again_ favored smaller states, as small states like Wyoming or Montana would get a higher amount of representation, as you can't have less than one House rep regardless of population.
- The Electoral College, being simply the sum of the Senate and House reps, reinforces the smaller state advantage inherent in both the Senate and House.
So, in the three areas where we have Federal elections - Presidency, House and Senate - we give an advantage to smaller states in _each one_. We put three "thumbs on the scale" and have no representative body that is truly decided by popular vote.
It is logical for someone to say, "Small states should have an advantage in _some_ institutions, but they shouldn't have an advantage in _every_ institution." Eliminating the Electoral College and going with a straight popular vote would leave the advantage inherent in both chambers of Congress, yet eliminate the advantage in the Presidency, which some may feel is an acceptable re-balancing of power between state's rights and the popular will. | 27 | 28 |
[Star Trek] What if Borg Assimilation Was Voluntary and A Little Less Creepy? | There's really no reason for all the black tubes and creepy glowing eyes. Cyborgs could be attractive or at least less evil.
If the Borg just visited worlds and offered assimilation into their "Shared Consciousness" (Sounds better than hive mind), could they be successful? Would the Federation stop citizens from volunteering? | It's an interesting question, and the answer mostly revolves around what the Borg then does and how the Borg 'mind' is structured. In every instance we've seen, Assimilation seems not to be a means but an actual end to the Borg. Their goal is to just... assimilate everything.
Now, if Assimilation becomes voluntary, then it can no longer be an end (or at least not pursued with such ruthless efficiency as the current Borg do). Then the question becomes, what now is the Borg's end goal? Why do they assimilate? The answer to that question - and whether it is mutually exclusive with the Federation's goals - will give most of the answer.
The other half of the answer is whether an Assimilated person has their personality overwritten. Obviously, in the canon-Borg they do: Being turned into tools for the Borg's objectives. Now, whether or not the Federation finds the Borg's goals appreciable, they might still find their means a little too extreme if it involves subsuming someone's mind and identity. If the Borg do *not* do this, however... are they still even the Borg anymore? | 43 | 92 |
ELI5 - Why does everything sound muffled underwater if sound travels 4x faster in water? | It’s a lot to do with how fast your diaphragm in your ear can vibrate which increases clarity. The faster the eardrum can move the more information it can resolve. The increased viscosity of the water compared to the air reduces the sensitivity of the ear. | 81 | 83 |
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They say that a photon takes a million years to make it out of the Sun. But what does it even mean? How do we define that a particular photon now is the "same" photon that was there then? | When I'm doing photons-in-a-box problem with large enough number of photons, and I add a photon in, and later I let a photon out, there isn't really a sense in which I can say which one of the photons got out, any more that when I add 1+1=2, and then subtract 2-1=1, can I tell which one did I subtract (quite literally, this is how Fourier transform seems to work). They just blend into one wave until I decide to unblend them.
I'm imagining the interior of the Sun to be a giant soup of photons, constantly absorbed, reemitted, bouncing around. Sometimes new photons are created by fusion, and sometimes some photons get out into the interstellar space, but how do we "track" them? | It would be more accurate to say: "The energy from a photon released by a fusion reaction in the core takes about 1 million years to reach the surface." They start as gamma ray photons. Due to the density they only travel a short distance before colliding with a particle and being absorbed. That energy is re-emitted (sometimes as multiple photons with less energy each) then re-absorbed by something else. That random process continues until an energy-excited particle near the surface finally releases a photon that escapes into space.
Consider the game "Plinko" as an analogy for this. The million year figure is a statistical approximation, not a measurement. | 95 | 167 |
What are the most fundamental assumptions that physicists have to make in order to derive the laws of physics? | EDIT: To clarify, I mean is there a particular set of first principles from which the laws of physics (or most of them at least) can be mathematically derived. For example, I imagine one of the assumptions would be the size of the fundamental constants, another that information cannot travel faster than c, yet another may be that there are 4 dimensions.
Essentially I am wondering what physical first principles we do not have an explanation for and so have to assume a priori in order to derive the laws of physics. | Causality
Locality
and
Repeatability
Which basically sums up to saying that when something happens, it happened because of the previous state of the system, that the system is not influenced by the results from other systems it doesn't interact with, and that if the system was put in the same state it was before it would behave in the same way. | 18 | 24 |
Why does lime juice pulp settle but lemon juice pulp floats? | Here's a photo of what I'm talking about:
https://i.imgur.com/cUyHaJi.jpg
Both were squeezed, strained, and allowed to rest the same time and method. | Not to oversimplify, but sometimes, the answer really is simple. Limes are more dense, and as pulp is still made heavily of the fluid in the lime, it sinks(Lime juice being slightly more dense than water). By comparison, Lemons and Oranges are Less dense than water, and their pulp will generally float. | 136 | 283 |
Philosophers who wrote about the concept of space | Hello, my next year's philosophical field of study will be "Space". It involves space in every meaning of the word. I'd like to learn a few things in advance.
I've thought about the relations between human and space, how space is used to dominate men, the space of the body, the space of a stadium, a prison, spatial causality...
Can you recommend me a resource that revolves around space? Whether it is a specific article, a book, or a philosopher that has significant work about space. | The Leibniz-Clarke correspondence is a classic debate about absolute vs relational conceptions of space. Kant's transcendental aesthetic argues that space (along with time) is the "form of intuition." There is also an early essay by Kant called something like "On the Nature of Directions in Space" which has the famous incongruous counterparts thought-experiment. | 10 | 24 |
ELI5: How does software / firmware physically 'interact' with hardware. | I understand, at least at a superficial level, that integrated circuits contain many many transistors, which act as 'switches' for current flow. By applying a current to the transistor 'base' (or not applying a current), the current flow from collector to emitter can be used together with others for AND, OR, NOR etc, which in turn can be built up to be used for many complex processes.
What I don't understand is how the 'program' (software or firmware) can apply this switching signal in the first place. Somewhere there is a physical change- i.e. current is allowed to flow to the 'base' contact on the transistor. How does this happen without a physical switch? What mechanism is in place to allow current to start and stop without a physical interaction?
I would love to know in the context of a simple microcontroller, something like an arduino, rather than the complexities of PC. | The program is stored as a physical difference. From the moment the software is written to a computer (or read from a disk) it is already a physical voltage in the computer. All that's left is for it to move around via those transistors. | 16 | 15 |
Why do I have to think for a second about left vs. right, but up vs. down comes to me immediately? It's not just me, right? | Up and down are defined by the direction of gravity. Things always fall down, never up. Your feet are always down not up. Your head is alway up, not down. But left and right are more or less symmetric. | 26 | 32 |
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CMV: Textbooks should not offer practice problems without an answer key. | My view is simple, if a textbook does not provide answers for practice problems, it should not have practice problems at all. It is impractical to not have a way to check your work when studying and as such is pointless without having a section dedicated to problems in each chapter. Many textbooks have a solution manual that accompanies the text so they should put the problems in that instead of the normal text book. Companies only do this gauge every penny they can and I doubt they would include everything in one book when they can sell two. Therefore, practice problems should be in the solution manual. | Teachers often use textbooks to assign homework problems. If they give a key to all problems, the teachers will have to use a different resource which will be a hassle for students as well. Most textbooks I've seen have the answer key to half of the problems, which works out best for everyone, leaving some practice problems for students and some assignment problems for teachers. | 985 | 5,804 |
What is the utility of Kant's distinction between analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori knowledge before expounding upon his premises of the categories of the mind in Critique of Pure Reason? | So I am a little confused about why he begins his metaphysics with this. I get that the categories of the mind are a priori (although the usage of a priori here is still perplexing - how can categories, conceptual filters belonging to the mind, be called a priori if they themselves are not actual knowledge, only objects of knowledge?) and that maybe clarifying the definition of that would be useful, but overall a little confused. Feel free to spew to me about the work in general if it seems I am misunderstanding something; the more the merrier.
Thank you so much!!! | The best way that I've seen this explained is that the distinctions are a way in which Kant *formalizes* an already existing problem: how to account for concepts like causality? Recall especially that Kant is responding, in part, to Hume - Hume's problem is that experience alone cannot provide us with a concept of causality (all you can experience are 'constant conjunctions'). So *empiricism* cannot furnish the ground for causality. However it's also clear that *logic* alone (rationalism), can't do the trick either: no logical connection between propositions can provides us with a ground for causality either (recall Kant's dismantling of the ontological argument: existence is not a predicate: you can't 'logic' your way into existence).
So if causality cannot be accounted for either by means of 'sheer' empiricism nor 'sheer' rationalism, you need a kind of 'third way' to account for causality. For what is causality? It is an *extralogical* connection between things: a relation that is not 'merely' logical (causality can't be reduced to transitive relations between propositions), nor merely empirical. A connection stronger than 'constant conjunction', but not as strong as logical transitivity: neither *a posteriori* nor *analytically a priori*: it must belong instead to the order of the *synthetic a priori -* an 'alogical' connection. This is the sense in which these distinctions *name* existing problems in philosophy, as Kant understood them. This is why the whole of the CPR is oriented towards to question of 'how is the synthetic a priori possible?'. This is, as a were, a synonym for 'how is (knowledge of) causality possible?', among other things (to which Kant will answer: 'because transcendental subjectivity').
This is also why Kant sees himself as charting a path between both empricism and rationalism. If you keep Hume in mind while trying to understand these terms (and Leibniz to a certain extent), it helps alot. | 27 | 52 |
ELI5: Why do we get bored? | Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, GABA, and other neurochemicals. We get a boost of dopamine from novel and stimulating activities. Eventually, or body produces less of it for the same experiences repeated over and over again, so we no longer get the same satisfaction that we had before.
Basically, new experiences are exciting and fun because our brain makes chemical soup to reward us for trying new things. Eventually our brain quits giving us the same chemical soup and changes the ingredients, so we get bored.
It's essentially drug withdrawal. | 1,122 | 723 |
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Does human vision have a better horizontal resolution than vertical resolution? | Does having eyes in a horizontal line result in better horizontal resolution in humans or is it same in both horizontal and vertical directions? Also, what is the aspect ratio of human vision? Is circular, elliptical or something completely different?
I have recently studied few video coding standards and wondered why we have more resolution in horizontal than vertical in most standards. | Simple answer: each eye covers an area taller than it is wide, but combining the two human binocular vision is 200⁰ wide and 135⁰ high.
Complex answer:
There's not that much difference in the up/down vs the left/right distribution of photoreceptors, but most of your "resolution" doesn't really come from them in a practical sense.
Your visual perception isn't really light entering your eye. You perceive a model of the world that exists in your visual cortex, this creates an imagination of the outside world dreamt by flesh and guided by sensory input and visual memory; it holds an internal perceptual "canvas" that is "painted" by your eye glancing at parts of the scene.
The high resolution part of the eye is the macula at the centre of your vision, it sees an area about the size of a large coin at arms length, and as you look around it paints in most of the detail and colour into your imagined world. Given enough light and 20/20 vision, its practical resolution is roughly that of 8k cinema screen, but it's 360p and blurred within a few degrees.
Human eyes constantly dart about to keep the canvas fresh, and like a pigeon jerking its head about you're actually blind during these "saccades". The movements are driven by the visual attention system, which gives the burning feeling that something must be looked at, and that is in part driven by the outer areas of the eye that detect movement. Force your eye to keep still for too long and the canvas will gradually descend into a dreamlike chaos; visual memory is transient and depends on constant change. Hallucinogenic drugs massively reduce this time window, if you're into that sort of thing.
So while eye resolution and field of view is part of the picture, eye movements and visual memory drive most of what you actually perceive. The canvas itself still seems wider than it is tall unless you shut one eye, but its characteristics are that of a window into a subjective, imagined 3D dream of the world, rather than being based solely on eye hardware. | 343 | 228 |
Does chlorine that settles in to ground when irrigating lawns or draining swimming pools degrade into something else, or remain unchanged? | I work in water utilities. 99% of residents in my city irrigate their lawns with city water, and we like chlorine to be 1.8-2.1 in this city. All run off from irrigation and when people drain pools and the like seeps into their lawn, and all water eventually makes it to the lake system. It's common knowledge here that chlorinated water once "filtered" through ones lawn removes nearly all the of the chlorine from the water by the time it makes its way back into our lake system.
So my questions is, does all that chlorine sit in the ground unchanged? Or does it eventually degrade into something else? | Chlorine gas is very reactive and can oxidize most organic matter it comes in contact with. It does not stay chlorine for very long in an high-organic load environment such as soil. The chlorine in treated water will gain two electrons from something in the environment and become two chloride ions (Cl-). | 16 | 67 |
ELI5: How do people solve rubix cubes in <10 seconds? | Edit: Rubik's, my bad. | Rubik's cubes are actually solved with a formula, or simple set of rules. Once you know those rules by heart, it just becomes a matter of applying them in the most efficient way (to minimize the number of moves required) and then moving your hands very, very quickly. Those with good memories for images can actually look at the cube once then put on a blindfold and solve it from memory.
EDIT: Rubix -> Rubik's, got it. | 4,259 | 4,443 |
what does it mean for the universe to have a shape? | I’ve read different articles discussing theories of the shape of the universe but I can’t wrap my mind around all of the jargon explaining what that means and why it’s important to study. help! | This is a question that arises out of mathematical topology and geometry, but has relevance to astronomy, cosmology, and our understanding of how the universe works.
Imagine a group of 2-d people who live on a 2-d surface. There are certain properties about different surfaces that have meaningful consequences for those people.
For example, suppose the 2-d people lived on the surface of a sphere. If a 2-d person starts walking along the equator and never changes direction, they will eventually come back to exactly where they started. This cannot occur if the 2-d people live on a different type of surface. If they lived on a flat, infinite sheet (such as a Cartesian plane), then they would start walking in any direction and they would never come back to where they started. There are other models too- such as a torus (a doughnut shape). If our 2-d people lived on the surface of a doughnut, then they could walk in a straight line and come back to where they started, and it would even be possible for two people to walk in a straight line and never cross paths- something that you can't do on a sphere.
This is actually already relevant to astronomy. It is known that some stars and galaxies appear at two different places in the night sky. One plausible explanation is that we live in a "sphere," and that the light from such a galaxy had circled the universe so we see multiple copies of the same galaxy here at Earth. (The real explanation is gravitational lensing, however.)
Suppose our 2-d people live long enough to develop mathematics and topology, and they understand the difference between living on a flat plane, a ball, or a torus. Now they want to know what type of shape they live on. Well- it's not easy for them. We have the benefit of an "extrinsic" view of their world and we can consider "extrinsic" properties- in particular, we are 3-d people and can see how their 2-d surface is embedded in 3-d, so we can easily just look say that this is a ball versus a flat surface. Instead, the 2-d people have to develop some measure of "intrinsic" properties of such surfaces. For example, a really smart 2-d person named Riemann might realize that if you live on the surface of a ball, it's possible to draw triangles whose angles sum to greater than 180 degrees. Imagine you start walking at the equator and go 1/4th the distance around the ball, then make a 90 degree turn left and walk another 1/4th distance to the north pole, then make another 90 degree turn left and walk back to where you started. You have just traced out a triangle on the surface of the ball whose internal angles are each 90 degrees. This is impossible on a flat surface, so the 2-d people can actually cleverly measure and start to rule out what kind of surface they live on.
Now you see where this is going! Imagine that we are 3-d people (we are) who can be thought of as living on a 3-d surface that is embedded in some larger 4-d space. It is hard for us to visualize, because we are not used to thinking of ourselves as living on a 3-d surface, but that is the equivalent situation. Just like the 2-d people, we can come up with intrinsic measures of different types of 3-d surfaces, and start thinking about how to rule out different kinds of 3-d surfaces that we might inhabit.
If you are interested in reading more, a great introduction to the topic is *The Shape of Space* by Jeffrey Weeks. You can also see that author give talks on Youtube if you search. | 14 | 15 |
ELI5: Why do the nerves on genitals produce pleasure when touched whereas those on other parts do not? | The brain. Everything is how the brain is wired to interpret it. For the genitals certain types of touch will be interpreted by the brain as pleasurable....... but a different touch in the same area will be interpreted as painful. It all depends on how the brain interprets it.
It's take that from the amount of pressure, whether you're turned on or not, the type of movement and so on and so on. | 56 | 59 |
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Roughly how far apart are galaxies? | It varies of course, but on the order of millions of light years. Our nearest neighbor of a similar size as the Milky Way is 2.5 million light years away. There are a couple of dwarf satellite galaxies about 10x closer to us (the Magellanic Clouds, visible from the Southern Hemisphere). Galaxies in the middle of clusters can be closer together. The Virgo cluster has ~1500-2000 galaxies in a sphere about 7 million light years in radius, so there are 2-3 galaxies in every cubic Mega-lightyear, and is more concentrated towards the core. | 38 | 30 |
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When did human beings start exercising? | From an anthropological standpoint, when did humans start developing and using exercises to improve physical fitness? When did we discover that repetitive motion + resistance = growth? | Physical activity for the sake of fitness began when we'd progressed to the point that members of society could survive without significant physical exertion - i.e., when society had reached a point where physically contributing members could support nonphysically contributing members to a degree where a primarily sedentary lifestyle was possible. Leaders, the aged, artisans and others would fall in this category.
There are references as far back as the early Chinese dynasties recognizing lack of activity as a contributor to ill health, so it's a connection people made pretty quickly. Remember, in a state of nature fitness is the norm - or you die. We wouldn't have "developed exercise" so much as we would have noticed an odd phenomenon of sedentary life and developed techniques to address it. | 179 | 368 |
Eli5 Why is force equal to mass multiplied by acceleration and not speed ? | If a car moves consistently at 80 kmh and it weighs at 600kg, is it not generating any force? since you know, a=0, am I stupid or is Newton ? | Newton's first law: an object in motion will stay in motion unless a force acts upon it. An object flying through space at a constant speed has no force acting upon it.
There's two things that may make this a bit confusing here on Earth.
First of all, any thing in motion constantly has forces acting to slow it down like air resistance and friction so, unlike in our simple scenario, you do need to apply a force to keep it moving at a constant speed.
And the second is that as soon as the object runs into anything else, it'll exert a force on that object (causing it to slow down). So any time you try to interact with a moving object, you cause a force to happen. But the force it exerts depends on how fast it decelerates, so it's still about acceleration. That's why modern cars crumple in a crash- by making it take longer for the car to decelerate to 0, the force on you will be lower. | 33 | 17 |
How relevant are the classic philosophical texts to answering philosophical queries today? | Philosophy, like many other disciplines, has a rich history of influential thinkers writing important works. Philosophy has Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein, Popper, to name a tiny fraction of what I consider the biggest name Western philosophers. Physics has Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Einstein etc. Mathematics has Euclid, Leibniz, Newton etc. All of this is to be expected.
But also like other disciplines, in the age of modern academia philosophy research has become vast, with academic papers becoming the main way research is initially published. And as with other disciplines, textbooks (on and offline) summarise historical ideas and debates.
But unlike with other disciplines, students are often encouraged to go back and read the original classic texts. And these texts are sometimes seen as a necessary point of engagement for many questions, and subsequently are often referenced directly.
My question is: In general, how important is it for philosophers today to read and engage with the classic texts to produce good research? Is it ever/often sufficient to understand their ideas from textbooks, and then focus one's engagement with contemporary philosophical papers? Or another way to put it would be: for an essay on topic X, is it more valuable to read the classic books on X, or to read the same number of pages of textbook entries summarising the classic books and contemporary papers on X?
Time is money after all, especially in an academic's life. | It would vary from text to text, of course, but at the very least the historical philosophers would probably shine some light on contemporary questions. That being said, since the historical philosopher's insights might have been incorporated into the body of knowledge that contemporary philosophers bring to bear on a question, there might be nothing gained from reading the historical philosopher -- even though, technically, he or she does illuminate the question. But you can see why it would very from text to text, then, because in some cases, contemporary philosophers might not be fully appreciating the insights of historical philosophers. | 14 | 27 |
CMV: When a person says they can “love more than one person at the same time” (romantically) they really mean “I can get what I want from more than one person at the same time.” | In reading about and hearing people talk about open marriage, polyamory, non-monogamy, I often hear the statement "I am capable of loving more than one person at the same time." My skepticism of this is that when people say "love" in this context, I think maybe they mean "be attracted to" or "get needs met by." To me that's not the same thing as love, which requires self-sacrifice. Can you "be there no matter what" for two, three or more people at the same time? People who live in different households? Similarly I have heard "love is not a pie where the more I give one person the less there is for another person." But time, attention and resources ARE a limited pie. Can you really be a loving partner to multiple people the same way you can to one person? Does the answer change if you live in the same household with more than one partner? As a nonmonogamy skeptic, I'm still aware that there seems to be this minority of people who insist it's the natural way for them to live and seem to "make it work" somehow. I'm not in favor of restricting it, but I'm a skeptic of it.
Please try to make your case without analogizing to having more than one child or loving both parents. These are very different kinds of love. | First, non-monogamy is an umbrella that includes open marriages and polyamory. Open relationships are not about loving multiple people, but rather about meeting the sexual needs of both partners. Polyamory is about loving multiple people. Both have many opportunities for exploitation (as do monogamous relationships), but they are not inherently exploitative.
You seem to understand that love involves a good deal of *giving*. Your premise is that it's hard to give enough to one person, let alone more than one. But this isn't necessarily true - not everyone needs the same amount of time, thoughtful gestures, or physical intimacy to feel loved. So if you have a partner that does not need as much of those things, it's possible to devote adequate resources to another person. People in healthy non-monogamous relationships often place higher value on trust that's built up through familiarity over a long time, rather than over a short but intense period. | 26 | 60 |
ELI5: Why did the crowd go CRAZY when Jobs revealed the Macintosh? Literally jumping up and down. Was it that huge of a leap forward? (video included) | [I just saw the reveal for the first time, and it's blowing my mind.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY)
Look at those people at 4:28. It's a riot, and Jobs seriously looks like he's crying (I don't blame him, must be amazing to see people react that way to a product from the company you started in your garage with a friend).
Could someone explain what PC's were like at the time and how this was different? I've read some Wikipedia articles that don't really explain everything I'm curious about.
Thanks! | I believe it can be summed up as such:
1. It presented a graphical user interface (GUI), rather than a command line interface (CLI) like most computers of that vintage. This made the Mac far more appealing to novices and your average layman.
2. It was cheap. (In comparison to other computers of the time. The type of hardware that the Macintosh shipped with would have easily cost $100,000 otherwise for that type of performance.)
3. It was available at a consumer level. This kinda goes hand in hand with the cheapness of it. | 19 | 35 |
CMV: "Good-paying" factory jobs won't come back to the United States. | I am becoming endlessly frustrated with rhetoric from politicians that promises the return of "good paying" manufacturing jobs if they are elected president. These proposals typically lay out some variation of these three steps:
1. Cut regulations
2. Cut income taxes, especially on the rich
3. Cut corporate taxes
Supposedly these three steps will incentivize business owners to invest into the state or the country, which will benefit the rest of the population by creating jobs. I find it incredibly mind-boggling that there are blue-collar workers who believe this theory wholeheartedly even as their purchasing power declines by the minute.
Income inequality appears to have really kicked off during the Reagan administration, and it was given a huge boost after the passage of NAFTA and similar trade deals. Union busting sealed the deal by allowing corporations to stiff workers, but eventually those companies, too, moved their manufacturing overseas.
I guess this is where I stand: I can't begin to wrap my head around why people think that a flat tax is an acceptable proposal, and that any progressive tax proposals are "punishing" the rich. Obviously the wealthy are only trying to maximize their profits, but their business practices have meant the loss of millions of factory jobs. The wealthiest people in America are making more money than ever before, and, in my opinion, they deserve to pay more in taxes to make up for the fact that former workers no longer have that money to spend on necessities. Instead of investing that money back into the community through charities or higher taxes, the richest people seem to hide their money abroad or invest it into hedge funds or mutual funds.
That brings me to another point: how is wealth created? By making investments. But it is impossible to buy stocks and bonds when you have no disposable income.
At this point, I am convinced that social mobility is a myth. I believe that the housing discrimination of the past has led to racial disparities today, and that the sub-prime crisis disproportionately affected black people. Black people tend to be more likely to live in lower-income areas, and this becomes a vicious cycle because school districts are funded by property taxes. Owning a home is one guaranteed investment. You can take out loans against your house, you can fix your house and sell it for more than what it was worth, etc. But if you could not buy a home in the first place, and your children cannot buy a home because they can't find a good-paying job, your family is most likely doomed to repeat that cycle unless some outside force steps in.
I'm kind of rambling though. I suppose my point is is that those three steps I listed above will only hurt the lower and middle classes more, and will not end up bringing more jobs to the US. I think we could slash the corporate taxes entirely and we still would not even be able to compete with the profit margins available by manufacturing products in other countries. In addition, slashing income taxes for the upper brackets will devastate the rest of the population. For example, look at Illinois or Louisiana. I think that similar flat taxes for the country would trigger a massive recession, especially because our small monthly growth numbers are being held back not because of consumer spending, but because of government spending. I think that every politician who believes in neoliberal economics knows that US manufacturing cannot compete with manufacturing abroad, and only wants to implement those policies as a favor to the people who fund their campaigns.
I don't think factory jobs will be coming back to the United States. CMV.
| Specialized manufacturing or all types of manufacturing?
We still make things in this country. We just don't make everything.
Specialized manufacturing will still be a US thing. Making and pinning shirts probably won't. | 58 | 268 |
ELI5: Why does everything hurt more when you're cold? | I was wearing sandals in cold weather, stubbed my toe and thought I was going to die - it hurt way more than when I'm just hanging out in a room-temperature place. Why is this so? | Things (well, things that aren't water) constrict when cold, becoming more rigid and inflexible. Impact injuries are softened if there's enough flexibility to spread the pressure of impact around (in an extreme example, a kevlar vest "spreads" the force of a bullet impact). In this case, if your toe were constricted and inflexible because of the cold, the force of stubbing it will be much more concentrated on where it hits. | 28 | 77 |
ELI5:Why did health insurance prices go up in the United States when almost all Americans have it now? Shouldn't prices have went down? | Law student studying insurance law here.
Insurance companies used to be able to pick and choose who they insured. That means they could exclude people with preexisting conditions or really high likelihoods of being sick. BUT. Now under ACA, they are not allowed to exclude anyone because of a preexisting condition.
This seems like a really good thing. Everyone gets healthcare now! The problem is that insurance is about managing **risk**. You can think about it like a form of gambling. You're effectively betting a certain amount of money (your premium payments to the insurance company) that you'll get sick and incur MORE money in medical bills than the amount you are paying. If you get sick enough, you "win" the bet and the insurance company "loses." BUT, that's ok, because overall enough people who are also paying insurance premiums will "LOSE" their bets by NOT getting sick. The insurance co can use some of their "winnings" to pay out to you and everyone is happy.
Now, gambling only works if there is, in fact, a **risk** (meaning some sort of uncertainty). Without a "risk," there's nothing to gamble on. Think about it. You gamble on football games BEFORE they happen because there is a certain measure of uncertainty involved (i.e., you don't know for certain which team will win). You legitimately cannot gamble on a game that has already happened, because everyone already knows the outcome. The same is true of people with preexisting conditions. There is nothing to gamble on because they already KNOW they are sick. The football game is over. The home team has won. There is nothing to bet on. THAT is why insurance companies would historically exclude people with preexisting conditions. They were effectively always "winning" their bets because they would inevitably pay in less than what they were getting out. Sure, they may pay premiums, but the premiums will always be less money than the amount the insurance company has to pay out to cover bills (that's the whole point of getting them coverage in the first place! They couldn't afford to pay for their own coverage, but they COULD afford the premiums).
That's where ACA comes in. By forcing insurance companies to accept people despite pre-existing conditions, they effectively forced the insurance company to take on a LOT of losing bets. The insurance company has to be able to pay somehow, though (or go bankrupt....which some did), so they have to **raise everyone ELSE'S premiums** in order to pay for all of these losing bets.....but that means all the healthy people are suddenly paying wayyyyyy more than they're getting out.
This caused some people to do some mental math and realize that even though they would be FINED for NOT having health insurance (as mandated by the ACA), it was less expensive to pay the fine than it was to keep paying for health insurance. Additionally, because the insurance companies wouldn't be allowed to turn them away if/when they eventually DID get really sick, they could just hold out until then and wait to reenter the health insurance market when they really really needed it.
This causes a MASSIVE death spiral. The pool gradually gets smaller and more healthy people choose to drop out and take the fine, mostly leaving behind the people who are already sick and really do NEED the insurance. Because of this, the insurance companies are faced with even FEWER healthy customers who are "losing" their bets and a higher and higher percentage of sick customers who are "winning" their bets, forcing the insurance companies to raise prices still further.
Hope this helped!
edit: TL;DR: making insurance companies accept people with preexisting conditions means more insurance companies lose money which means higher premiums for healthy people and more healthy people dropping out. | 1,848 | 1,957 |
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CMV: a 0 to 4 GPA scale is a poor way to represent grades | At a glace the current grade scale makes sense, anything under a 60 is considered not worthy of passing so we divide the passing region into four equally sized quadrants and make those the 4 passing grades. You then assign the quadrants a number from 1-4 and since an A is more valuable than a D it gets a higher number score and your total GPA is just the average of all numbers per credit.
The problem comes from making the base zero occur at 59% rather than 0% on an exam. Going from a 60% to a 70% means you are going from a 1.0 to a 2.0 which means that a C is twice as valuable as a D despite being only a 10% difference in score. This is not an adequate reflection of the work necessary to obtain a C vs a D (or any other letter grade for that matter)
While one could argue that by simply understanding how the grading scale works they'll understand that a D is not half as valuable as a C, that still does not mean that the method itself is flawed. | Former university teacher here.
First, keep in mind what grades are supposed to measure: retention and understanding of the material being assessed. (Hopefully there's good alignment between what is being assessed and what is being taught, but that's a different problem.) A 75% grade means you are able to show you understand 75% of the material.
Second, keep in mind what "failure" is: it says that a learner is not able to prove that they have retained or understood enough material to progress to the next course. Within a course, such as a mid-term or even a single assignment, grades are intended to give a simple measure of the likelihood the student will be able to keep up with future material.
That's why not all systems use 60% as failing: different courses, programs, etc, may have a better measure for that break-even point where a learner is likely to be unrecoverably behind.
So what would rebasing the grade scale to 0% for failure do? It would complicate what grades mean from "how much material is retained" to "how much material is retained _beyond the bare minimum to continue_". But that's what GPA already is, right? So the two different measures accomplish two different goals: grades are about overall retention while GPAs are about likelihood of continued success.
But notice that in neither case is anything said about the effort of the learner. Neither grades nor GPAs measure effort.
And what would an effort score measure? Would it measure the time a learner put in? How would you account for time learning alone versus with a tutor or study group? Or maybe we could come up with something that measured the "ease" at which a student absorbed one concept after another? And how do you measure the change of this score over time? And does it account for life events? Or social issues?
And would those be as effective as grades or GPA at indicating whether a student needed more time with material before progressing? Or whether they'd do well with more advanced or applied material in the future?
Grades and GPAs aren't perfect, but they're simple and clear and cover the basics well enough. | 13 | 24 |
Subsets and Splits
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