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[Star Wars] While the Emperor was in power, did he create anything that helped the Galaxy, or was his rule entirely harmful? | While the Emperor's rule was oppressive enough that a rebellion was created to overthrow it, was it equally harmful to all members of the Galaxy, or did some species or planets benefit from it? | Many worlds which supported the Empire did very well. They were provided with technology, healthcare, everything they needed to have a comfortable and happy life as a reward for their loyalty. Many of them were uh...rewarded even more when Operation Cinder came into effect. | 46 | 47 |
CMV: It Is Somewhat Normal For Somebody To be Sexually Attracted to Somebody Under 18 or even 15(PLEASE READ DESCRIPTION BEFORE POSTING) | To get this out of the way:
"I am in no way what so ever endoursing sex with children. It is wrong for many reasons 1) they do not understand how to make conscious decisions about such topics 2) they can and 99.999999% of the tims will be hurt and mortified by such acts 3) they are not able to understand the emotions involved in sexual acts. I hope I don't need to justify this point. I am not and I have never been attracted to anybody outside of my age range or older. This is not a pedo post or pedophile endorsement post. This is merely speculative."
It seems thay what defines somebody as attractive is very often things that make them seem younger. It seems that perky breasts, faces without wrinkles, and less body hair seem to be attractive to a large number of people. Evolutionarily this is makes sense as a younger woman is more capable of carrying a child before they die (assuming high rate of death before adulthood). However, whenever this topic is brought up it quickly devolves into saying "but it's a child" I say "but evolution causes cannabalism to be common so it isn't exactly catering towards everyone's happiness". So would it not follow that many if not most people would find pubescent teens attractive?
Update: I've realised that the evolution depends on both the mother and the father's willingness to stay and protect her during pregnancy. For this reason, there are many more factors than just looking young. As well young mothers are typically unfit for child birth. | What view do you want changed? It’s hard to tell exactly how old some people are, and I’ve been guilty of thinking a 15 year old girl was extremely attractive and hit on them before knowing she was underage. It’s not immoral to be attracted, but acting on it is. | 26 | 18 |
ELI5: What's the difference between a neuron and a neuroglial cell? | They seem to be similar and I'm having trouble figuring out the difference between the two. | Neuroglial cells are a few different types of support cells for the neurons. They don't transmit information, but they produce chemicals for the neurons and provide insulation so electrical information can move faster. | 15 | 34 |
ELI5: How did seemingly uneducated individuals such as the Wright brothers and John Moses Browning accomplish such feats of engineering? | Is it related to the time period?
This question applies especially to the wright brothers, since aerospace is such a difficult area of research. | A proper education is just formalizing the process of getting knowledge. Just because they didn't go to school for aerospace engineering doesn't mean they were clueless on the subject matter.
The levels of details and feats of engineering are completely different between back then and today. Back then they just needed something that can glide and something that gave enough power to keep the craft up without weighing too much. And maybe not kill the pilot. Today aerospace engineering is more concerned about something being able to survive velocities that would tear limbs off human bodies, carry thousands of times more weight, and be able to do so in the most efficient way possible as safely as possible. | 12 | 16 |
Trying to understand Eriksons theory | How does someone move through the stages in Eriksons identity theory? | It's important to recognize that Erikson's stages are not as clear and discreet as they are often made out to be. They were never intended to represent discontinuous tasks in a fixed order, just a simplified representation of dilemmas that tend to be more prominent in particular times of life. Questions of identity neither begin nor end with adolescence, for example. That just tends to be the phase of life where questions of identity are most central.
That being said, "moving through the stages" mostly seems to depend on cognitive development and changes in life circumstances, rather than anything to do with the archetypal dilemmas of the stages. For instance, a baby is considered to have moved from the infancy stage to the early childhood stage not when they have resolved the "trust vs mistrust" task, but when they achieve a higher level of cognitive development and become able to interact with the world in new and more active ways. Likewise, one typically moves from the middle adulthood to older adulthood stage when one hits the retirement/empty nest phase of life where what one should be doing with one's time is not always so clear. | 10 | 16 |
eli5: Why do we always get strong urge to be lazy if its better for the brain to be active | I mean its so much better for the brain to be active working doing useful things stimulating your brain or working out, we all have a reward system and everytime we finish a task we feel a sense of accomplishment but everytime you should be doing something that you know will feel good in the end you just get this urge of doing nothing today and just relaxing,
shouldnt our brain be chasing this sense of accomplishment? Where does this feeling come from | The environment we find ourselves in today is very different from the conditions that humankind has faced for the vast majority of our time on planet Earth. For most of our existence (and for most species alive today) a steady diet was not guaranteed, and malnutrition/starvation was a very real danger. If our far-distant ancestors found themselves in a safe place with plenty to eat & drink, one of the wisest things they could choose to do was *nothing,* which conserved valuable calories and exposed them to no new dangers. | 7,616 | 7,216 |
ELI5: What is Monsanto and why should I care? | Seriously I haven't read into any of this and would much rather have someone explain it to me rather than dig through articles. | Monsanto is a company takes seeds, changes their DNA, and gives the special new properties. They try to make new products that are better than what nature has provided by giving the seeds better yields, more nutrition, or resistances to things like pesticides and insects.
There are a few problems surrounding the company. Number one is that they patent the seeds they produce. Many people are upset about this because they are patenting a living thing. Lots of people say that nature has created life and therefore it should not be allowed to be patented. Other problems arise when seeds naturally spread onto farms that didn't buy them, thus violating the patent agreements.
Number two is the loss of diversity. Nature has a way of creating genetic diversity among all the plants. If the plants have been genetically engineered, some people fear that there will be a loss in genetic diversity as people plant only the GMO crops and don't save the seeds, leading to genetic stagnation. Loss of diversity could pose problems if a virus evolves the ability to hurt this specific type of crop. Since all the crops would have the same genetic makeup, the virus could theoretically kill everything like in the Irish Potato Famine.
Lastly, some people claim GMOs cause adverse health effects. People claim that they cause cancer and all kinds of other diseases as well as contributing to declining bee populations. There have been reports that both prove and disprove these allegations but the problem is that this issue has been so heavily politicized and there is so much money on the table that the truth will be hard to find.
I think protesters today are angry about all these things. They don't want to eat GMOs, they don't want people to grow GMOs, and they don't want Monsanto to sell GMOs. | 18 | 48 |
[DC] Many heroes (e.g. Captain Marvel) are said to be blessed with great intellect. How does someone like Batman keep up? | He just studies as best he can about everything he can, but focuses on the subjects which are most relevant to his job.
With maybe the exception of criminology and forensics, Batman wouldn't claim to be the smartest person in the world or even the League in any specific field. But he gets his edge from basically being a master generalist in all fields. | 38 | 43 |
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ELI5: How does UV light kill bacteria, and why is it used for cleaning things? | Ultra-violet light can ionize the DNA in cells and break it down, disrupting cell function and eventually killing the bacteria. It also creates small amounts of ozone which can do serious damage to cells.
It's used for cleaning because it's a fairly non-invasive way of disinfecting surfaces that doesn't require any toxic or damaging chemicals. | 202 | 190 |
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By what mechanism(s) do our orifices resist infections that cuts in our skin do not have? | There's several:
* Friendly bacterial flora. They are capable of "out-competing" the bad bacteria in places like your mouth and anus. If the area is already colonized, it makes it that much more difficult for pathologic bacteria to colonize. A good example showing this is that if you wipe out someone's natural flora with antibiotics, they have a susceptibility to c. diff, which is a pathologic bacteria
* Physical mechanisms. The urethra is probably the best example of this. When you urinate, it flushes out bacteria. Things like a catheter that take away that natural flushing mechanism and can lead to UTIs. Women have a shortened urethra, which also leads them more susceptible to UTIs than men.
* Chemical mechanisms. Two examples of these are saliva in your mouth and vaginal secretions. They create a chemically unfavorable environment(pH, denaturing enzymes) that combat bacteria.
* Your actual cellular immune system. Places like your GI tract contains MALT, or Mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue. MALT is a highly concentrated area of immune tissue which helps fight pathologic bacteria
* Antibodies. Mucosal surfaces like the GI tract contain high concentrations of IgA immunoglobins, which bind to pathogens and prevent infections
Sterile environments like the bloodstream and unnatural orifices(skin cuts) lack some of these barriers which can lead to infection. edit: **Just some clarification -- the sterile parts of your body DO have protective systems(including antibodies and the cellular immune system), but lacks some of the other ones. This is why you don't get an infection every time you get a cut.** | 334 | 476 |
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The nature of mental illness | I hope not to upset anyone with this question; I myself have been in both behavioural psychiatry and am currently undergoing psychoanalysis, so I don't wish to come across as unsympathetic to people with psychological struggles.
I am wondering what has been said to the idea that mental illness isn't a particularly functional category; that is to say, because there is no determinable "norm" of psychological state, there is no way to determine someone as being in a problematic state based on their deviation from such a norm.
Rather than labelling some people as "mentally ill", which our society seems far too eager to do (e.g. in cases of terrorism), wouldn't it be better to actually look at people's issues on a case-by-case basis, without having to put them in some normative (or, rather, non-normative) category?
Thanks, I hope my question made sense. | Perhaps you'd like to check out M. Foucault's *Madness and Civilization* and the critiques thereof - it's one of the bigger analyses concerning how the concepts of folly/ madness/ mental illness were placed in relation to moral ideals and institutional order in historical periods from the Renaissance to the modern times. Foucault's point would be that the category *is* functional, only not in the field it's supposed to affect directly - he perceives it as one of the categories that help actively create and categorize social identities and models of behaviour rather than describe any psychological states. The book seems to polarize its critics, but it's a must-read if you're interested in social foundations of the common, normalized perception of mental illness. | 24 | 42 |
[sci fi in general] Why is it always assumed that if belligerent aliens could reach earth we wouldn't have a chance? | I can get behind the idea of Aliens devloping FTL technology but what if that's what they put their entire planets resources into and kinda just left their weaponry at lets say, just above chemical-projectile weaponry level - sure, they're not like an adversary we have ever fought before, but why do we instantly assume they have laser death rays and stuff? | Interstellar travel requires solutions to problems that are far, far beyond our capabilities; a civilization that is able to do that would have technology that outpaces is in every imaginable way, by necessity.
For example, space debris. One of the bigger issues with putting something in orbit around Earth is that there's a bunch of stuff floating around, moving at very fast speeds, and if one of those things crashes into your vehicle, it could very well cause a catastrophe.
Now imagine that you're traveling at a considerable fraction of the speed of light. Now, a single grain of sand is a doomsday weapon to your vessel, just because of the speeds involved. An interstellar vessel needs to solve for that, which means they will have durability that makes our weapons look like squirt guns.
The ability to accelerate something to a high fraction of the speed of light also allows for some very high-impact weaponry. They don't need laser guns and death rays when they can just throw a rock at us at six-hundred million miles per hour. They could cause an extinction-level event trivially. | 176 | 55 |
If you lost an extreme amounts of weight, through exercise or surgery, could you use the excess skin for graphing for burn victims? | Your cells have specific proteins on their membranes that serve as markers for your immune system to differentiate self from non-self. These proteins can vary from person to person, although they serve the same function.
The reason you typically graft skin from yourself is that the skin will not be rejected by your immune system, where as if you used someone else's there's a very likely chance it will be rejected and cause an immune response. The larger the graft, the more higher chance of rejection.
In a person whos body has already been weakened by the fire or damage, a full, deep tissue autograft (skin from another person) is taxing, along with the requirements of immune suppressing drugs.
Mesh grafts are now the most widely accepted. It allows a framework for new skin to grow while allowing the damaged and removed tissue to heal and drain, lessening the chance of infection and need for immune suppressing medications | 29 | 30 |
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What's the best way to attain basic understanding of social sciences without taking it up as an academic study? | I've been fascinated by snippets of social science through politics, shows like The Wire, concepts in film and literature, etcetera. But I've never taken social science/humanity subjects for A level, like most of my friends have. I'm reading through Bourdieu's Forms of Capital essay and I was wondering if there's some sort of recommended reading list, or a social science 101 rundown with topics. Sorry if wrong subreddit. | It sounds like your interested in Sociology, which is one of many social sciences, given your reading of Bourdieu.
What sorts of things are you interested in? Research books and journal articles? Classical theory? Contemporary theory?
There are many topics available for exploration to sociologists. Are you interested in gender and sexuality? Race? Stratification? Class? Poverty? Education? Religion?
Any good reading list will include at least *The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism* by Max Weber, *Capital* (Save this one for when you're pretty comfortable reading heavy texts, maybe start with *The Grundrisse*) by Karl Marx, *Rules of the Sociological Method* by Emile Durkheim, *The Sociological Imagination* by C. Wright Mills, and *Distinction* by Pierre Bourdieu.
To me, that's a good spread of sociological work. Sometimes, books will lack context or the things and ideas they put forth will not make sense. If that is the case, you can always ask on this sub and someone will clarify or provide context. | 13 | 28 |
ELI5: How close are we to curing cancer as a fundamental illness? | You can read "The emperor of all maladies" to get an idea about the development in medical science re cancer. Out of 1000's of different types of cancer, we can fully cure 2-3 types; however, we are able to lengthen the life of pretty much any and every patient with cancer, so there is some progress. Out understanding about cancer is primitive, we cut it (surgery), burn it (radiation), or poison it (chemotherapy). All three treatments do harm to good sells along with cancer cells. In short, our most advanced medical treatment consists of killing cancer cells before we kill our patients; unfortunately, we often do kill our patients. | 17 | 18 |
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PhD grad wants 1st author for all his student’s projects | I spent 2 years of undergrad doing doing grunt work for this PhD student. I got all the experiments done and I wrote up the manuscript. I did this project also for my 4th year undergraduate thesis. Based on contribution, we decided it was fair that I would be 1st author. I submitted to a journal and it got rejected.
Some time passes and now the PhD student wants first authorship because this manuscript is a ‘significant part of his PhD’. Nothing in the manuscript has changed since the previous submission. Our supervisor is extremely non-confrontational and has not helped in mediating the situation except to suggest that we should discuss more. We have been in discussion for 4 months now, with no solution in sight.
Now after looking at the lab’s publications, I realized that none of the students who did experiments for the PhD (at least 6 students) have ever published their own 1st author paper. The PhD has first authored all of them. The PI set up the lab such that each student had their ‘own’ project and during lab meetings the PI always encouraged us to publish as first authors.
The PhD student is extremely controlling and it seems the PI is also at his whim because they co-authored on a patent.
Is there anything I can do in this situation? It is evident that I did the majority of the work for the paper, but now the PhD wants to use his position to take 1st author.
Edit: Also wanted to add that my thesis was copy-and-pasted and used verbatim as a chapter of the PhD’s thesis. Is that common practice? | This is difficult to assess without more information. Doctoral students do sometimes have helpers such as undergraduates who gain some research experience. What is important is not only who did the grunt work but whose idea was the hypothesis. OP's language of "did experiments *for*" the doctoral student make me question whether these were the doctoral students' ideas. The lesson learned here is that it is crucial to establish authorship order early on so there are no misunderstandings. For this particular case, it was already established that OP would be first author so unless something changes there is no reason to switch. The PI needs to step in here. | 246 | 186 |
ELI5: Why are humans naturally psychologically damaged by taking another human's life, or killing most things? | It largely depends on *empathy*, the ability to imagine an outside perspective combined with personal experience. Most people understand and consider that other people, and other creatures, have lives and (at least) instinctive goals if not necessarily goals on a conscious level as we understand that. This can make us hesitant to wound or kill, and often remorseful if we do hurt or kill an animal or another person. That said, there are exceptions, people whose brains work differently, such that they don't feel empathy nor remorse when they hurt or kill. | 37 | 36 |
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ELI5: When trying to sleep, how can one position be so comfortable when you first get into it, but then uncomfortable after 5 minutes? | What's nice for your muscles and what's nice for your bones and ligaments isn't always the same thing, especially if you have posture problems.
You might have a tight shoulder for example, and being in a particular position might relieve that. But the same position could put stress on your spine. So you lie down and feel shoulder relief, but a few minutes later your spine starts hurting.
If you have persistent problems with sleeping comfortably, you may want to get checked out by a physiotherapist. Especially if it's back or joint pain. | 168 | 364 |
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ELI5: If we make skin and muscle cells when we heal cuts and heal/generate bones after breaking them, why wouldn't we be able to grow a finger if one is cut off? | Our body heals like a blind handyman repairing a house.
If a ball crashes through a window, you call up the blind handyman and they feel around the impact. Glass shards. Window frame. Must be a broken window so that can be fixed completely by ordering a new window.
One day a car dries through the wall, taking out the entire window frame. After everything is cleaned up, you call up the blind handyman. However, they only feel the large hole in the wall and has no idea there used to be a window. The best and quickest thing they can do is seal up the hole to prevent things outside from getting in and things inside from getting out (scar).
Our body heals based on the surrounding tissues near the wound. If it can't figure out what was there or if the wound is too large, it becomes a scar. | 17,611 | 8,056 |
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ELI5: How does a currency become "stronger" or "weaker" with respect to other currencies? | How do countries ensure that their currency remains stable? | Mostly the best ways to keep your country's currency stable are to:
1. Make sure there is a market for your country's goods and services abroad. Foreigners will want to buy your currency so they can buy your goods and services. This demand increases the value of your currency.
2. If the demand for your currency starts to get too high, it will become too expensive and foreigners won't be able to buy your country's goods and services any more. If this happens, your government can print more money to buy your people things like roads, hospitals, schools, or bombers. This increase of your money will lower the value of your currency.
If you are good at balancing these two strategies, your country's currency should stay fairly stable.
I hope this helps. Please rule your people justly and kindly. | 44 | 32 |
Is there a psychology principle to being attracted to people you see often? | I was talking with a group of people about which actor, actress or singer you find attractive. I was arguing that of course famous people are beautiful people, but I think they’re attractive because we see them all the time. I see beautiful people everywhere I go and a lot of them are of the famous people ‘’caliber’’. I was looking up for a psychological aspect to it. I found out about the Mere-exposure effect; I don’t know if that can justify my train of thought.
So, people in psychology are their thesis or research (sorry if that not the right term) arguing about this? I appreciate any feedback | It's thought that people whose appearance is associated with a low cognitive load (i.e. Whose appearance is easier to process) are perceived as more attractive. Repeated exposure would certainly help there | 48 | 65 |
Why are Japan's and Korea's Gini indexes so low even without big income redistribution policies? | There are major policies for redistribution—namely, Japan’s tax code.
The top income bracket in Japan starts around $275K, and is 45%. The top income tax bracket in the US begins around $550K and is 37%.
In addition, the top bracket for Japan’s inheritance tax is 55%, with estates over around $200K being taxed. The US has no federal inheritance tax, with only estates of over $11MM being subject to estate taxes, which cap out around 40%.
Lastly, Japan has no step up in basis upon death, whereas the inherited assets in the US will typically receive this step up.
All this contributes to making it more difficult to build generational wealth in Japan vs. the US. | 33 | 62 |
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ELI5: why does every element want to be iron? | I was just reading about how the sun isn’t “burning” so much as constantly exploding and sucking in more hydrogen to explode more. In the article is said that every element wants to be iron, so when an element is higher than iron, it goes through fission, and when it’s lower than iron it goes through fusion. Up until it becomes iron, cause everything wants to be iron.
Why? What does that mean? What’s so special about iron? | Light elements release more energy when they fuse than is required to fuse them, and heavy elements release more energy when they split than is required to split them. Iron is in the middle of that.
If you keep fusing elements on the core of a star, you eventually get to iron, but then the process runs out. Similarly, if you keep fissioning atoms, you eventually get to iron, and then it's mostly not possible to split atoms further. | 30 | 19 |
[Deadpool] Why can't Wade's regenerative powers repair the damage to his skin and appearance? | The entire Deadpool film revolves around Wade Wilson seeking revenge against Francis for torturing him and leaving him scarred and deformed, and he stays away from Vanessa due to fears of her reaction to his appearance. But if Deadpool can recover from bullet shots and completely regrow severed appendages, why can't his skin repair itself back to its condition prior to the low-oxygen tank exposure? | One explanation is that his cancer itself benefits from his healing factor. It's constantly growing at a hyoernormal rate. His healing factor also is constantly killing the cancer cells in an ever lasting battle of healing factor vs healing factor.
In fact in the comics, an alien race duplicated his healing factor and gave it to themselves - only to quickly explode because they didn't have his cancer to keep his healing in check | 94 | 90 |
ELI5: Has vision deteriorated significantly with advancements, or could most full grown adults just not see well before the 1700s? | Virtually every friend and family member I have has corrected vision. Mine's not horrible, but I couldn't perform simple functions without correction. Is this a new phenomenon, or did people just wander around with blurry vision? | Sight deficiencies are not a lot more common today than historically. However, you do have to keep in mind that throughout history and throughout most of the world, people did not read, and in fact mostly did farm labor. That removes quite a lot of the need for glasses in the first place. | 22 | 18 |
Accessing Elsevier papers | First of all: F**k you Elsevier, for making contributions and most importantly access to science damn expensive, especially for the students (such as me) that really need these papers.
This leads me directly to my question: Unfortunately in my field a lot of relevant papers are constantly published in Elsevier Journals, which I can’t access through my university, Sci-Hub also doesn’t help with these in a lot of cases.
Any further ideas?
I do not endorse piracy, but it drives me nuts if I can’t access the relevant papers in my niche research field close to the end of my PhD. Especially for my theoretical part I would need this access. | If you have time, just email the researcher. I've done this a handful of times and it gives me an excuse to establish a new professional connection. Researchers are always delighted to share their papers for free; the only entity who benefits from these paywalls is Elsevier. | 220 | 274 |
Eli5: What determines if a metal produces an oxide layer? | Firstly how reactive it is to oxygen. A metal like gold is practically inert and so won’t readily oxidise in air. Where as something like sodium or aluminium will oxidise very quickly.
Secondly the physical properties of the oxide. Aluminium oxide isn’t water soluble and is fairly hard so sticks to the metal very well, on the other hand rust on iron is very weak and will be quickly eroded, revealing more iron to oxidise and losing much of the material. | 23 | 38 |
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What is perspectivism? How is it different from relativism and skepticism? | (More specifically Nietzsche’s perspectivism, if that helps?)
I’m getting these confused, can anyone help me differentiate between them? | Skepticism is an epistemic claim about what we can claim we know. Relativism is an evaluatory claim about how we judge between two positions related to values. Perspectivism, at least as it is applied to Nietzsche, is an epistemic claim about truth being related to a given perspective, or outlook/worldview/standpoint. | 11 | 22 |
why do the carbons in graphene only have 3 bonds? | Each carbon atom in graphene is sp2 hybridized and bonded to three other carbon atoms via sigma bonds. The remaining p orbital is perpendicular to the plane of the carbon atoms, but it is most certainly not non-bonding; in fact, these p orbitals give graphene its remarkable properties.
The electrons in the aforementioned p orbitals are delocalized due to resonance (or molecular orbitals, according to MO theory), similar to benzene, but on a much greater scale. Thus, there are partial double bonds in addition to the sigma bonds, and overall, each carbon has four bonds. | 22 | 34 |
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ELI5: The core principles of Immanuel Kant's philosphy. | I really need a dummy explanation here. I already read the Wikipedia page three times and still don't understand. | Kant answers 3 big questions:
1- what is reality?
Kant says there's a real world outside of your body. But the way you experience this world (using your senses of seeing, hearing, touching etc.) creates a map, or model, of this outside reality in your mind, which is unique to YOU. Even things like space and time are unique to you. So if you had different senses, like Superman has superhearing, you'd have a completely different model of reality.
2- what should be? (Right and wrong)
This is Kant's most famous contribution (categorical imperatives.) It means when you conclude that something is wrong, it is wrong 100% of the time, under any circumstances, and for everybody. You can't say murder is wrong then justify using it in some situations (capital punishment, war, etc.) It does not change nor does it matter where or when.
His point is that because your model of reality is unique to you, you can always come up with situations to convince yourself what you're doing isn't wrong ("it's not stealing if you're starving.") And there would be no sense of morality if enough people do that. The only way that there can be any morality is that right and wrong are universally established.
3- How should society be governed?
So since right and wrong are universal, societies should be governed by a constitution and by the rule of law. Pure democracy (rule of majority) is not the answer, because no matter how many people believe something to be right, wrong is always wrong. | 88 | 100 |
ELI5: How do we develop crushes on people? | Lots of different reasons. Most influential factors include:
- Proximity: You’re more likely to have a crush on someone who you have multiple classes with each day than you are to have a crush on someone who lives across the country.
- Pheromones: Chemical signals, so to speak, that indicate a good genetic match or a person who is ovulating, to name a couple examples (there’s been a study where people use unscented soaps and deodorants and wear the same white t-shirt to bed every night for a week and then different people come to the lab and sniff the shirts to decide which person they find most attractive based on pheromones more or less. Heterosexual men prefer the shirts of women who are ovulating, and also like the smell of shirts worn by homosexual men the least)
- Similar Levels of Attractiveness: This applies a bit more to the kind of person you actually end up in a relationship in as opposed to a crush. But a person tends to pursue people who are about the same level of attractiveness as they themselves are. This way, you protect your ego because you perceive the crush to be less likely to reject you. There are obviously exceptions to this (20 year old women dating wealthy 70 year old men, as an extreme example)
- Admirable Qualities: That person has some sort of qualities that you would like to adopt in yourself or associate with your internal image of your ideal self. A person who is socially awkward and anxious and wishes they weren’t, for example, might have a secret crush on the outgoing, friendly person who strikes up conversations with the people who look like they could use a friend. This has a limitation: our egos come first - we don’t want people who we perceive as being so much better than ourselves that we feel inferior.
- Time: The more time you spend with a person (similar to proximity), the more you start to really pay attention to a person. Think of the experiment where complete strangers stare into each other’s eyes for minutes at a time, and by the end of it, they feel a bit more comfortable with them even if they never exchange words.
There are a looooot more but these are the most commonly observed in lab settings
Source: Psychology of Relationships and Intimacy class in college; also have a degree in psychology.
Edit: Pressed enter between each bullet for better readability | 15 | 15 |
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ELI5: Why do some non carbonated, sealed drinks increase in pressure when you shake them? | For example, shaken coffee or milk. When you open the container, it releases pressure. Where does the increase come from? It doesnt happen with water. It seems to be more likely if the liquid can produce bubbles when shaken. The gas in the container is the same as before shaking, why does the pressure increase? | Gases dissolve into liquids at varying amounts depending on the liquid and gas. Gases also escape liquids based on the pressure of gas above the liquid. A bottle of juice at rest has a volume of gas on top, a volume of liquid on bottom, and a surface area of interface in the middle, all at equilibrium. When you shake a bottle, you produce more surface area which allows dissolved gas to partition from the liquid into the bulk gas phase. When you stop shaking there is exists a greater amount of gas in the bulk gas phase, which results in a greater pressure. That pressure of gas either escapes when you open the bottle, or is forced back into the liquid to establish the initial equilibrium. | 12 | 15 |
ELI5: Why are pistol bullets usually wider than rifle bullets? | A smaller Pistol caliber is 9mm.
While a larger size rifle caliber is only 7.62mm.
Why is that?
| Bullets have both length and width that contribute to their volume, and therefore weight and power. In a rifle, the magazine can generally be whatever dimensions are convenient for the designer to make them. For a handgun however, the magazine goes inside the grip, and so must fit within a human hand. This restricts the forward-to-back dimension of the cartridge so that pistol bullets need to be short and stubbier than rifle bullets to fit. In order for the bullets to stay big, they just make them wider to compensate.
On another point, because the case, and therefore powder volume of a rifle is so much larger, rifle bullets tend to go close to 3x as fast as a handgun bullet. Even so, at the extreme ranges that a rifle is used, the bullets can fall over 3 feet, making it important to keep that velocity up. Lower bullet mass and narrower bullets help with that. Since a handgun is so much more difficult to shoot accurately, its not really important that it's terribly effective past a few tens of meters.
Thirdly, since the bullets move slower, (this is a little controversial) it has fewer mechanisms for wounding. Rifle bullets will send a shockwave through flesh, damaging organs even far away from the wound channel. Handgun bullets are slow enough that they don't really do that. In order for an organ to get damaged by a handgun bullet, the bullet has to actually pass through it. Making the bullet wider increases this chance.
TL;DR Handgun bullets need to be short to fit in the grip, they are slow because they don't need range, and they are wide so that they still have adequate wounding potential at low energy. | 25 | 16 |
How does auto adjusting focus "know" when focus is correct? | With our eyes it makes sense, we focus on something and then our brain says "Ok, we are good here" so focus is done. How is that kind of "verification" achieved with automatic means? | It typically uses contrast to figure it out. When neighboring pixels in the auto-focus area have the most difference between them is when it assumes focus is maximized. This is why you'll find your camera has a hard time obtaining focus when aiming at something without any contrast-y details in it, like the sky. | 76 | 84 |
ELI5 - Why is it when people are racist towards say Asian, or African people they are labelled racists, but against Jewish people it’s called anti-semitism? | Part of the issue is that the Jewish identity isn't just a race. It's also a culture, a religion, and an ethnic group all at the same time. Because Jewish people traditionally only marry other Jews, and the religion doesn't have a tradition of actively looking to convert people, most Jews are descended from the same ethnic group. But not all, as some people marry into Judaism. And there are some converts, just not many.
So it's not 100% an ethnic group, some Jewish people are from a different background.
Judaism is also a religion, but it's also the culture associated with the religion as well, and some people who are Jewish may not be religious, but still consider themselves Jewish because of the culture they were raised in.
This is all a way to say that Jewish identity is complicated enough where a separate word to describe bigotry against them is necessary. | 366 | 143 |
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[Powers] What would you call an ability that has the power to see so perfectly into the future with 100% accuracy so much so you can change it? | I like writing powers and the thing the intrigues me the most is how precognition can be so overpowered to the point of Manipulating fate. | If you can accurately predict the future, how can you change it? If you did, the future you saw would then be inaccurate. To change it, you need a *less* accurate view - you need to be able to see a *possible* future, or to see what would happen without your interference. Then, as long as it is permanently active, you simply keep acting to change the future until you see the result you desire. | 40 | 40 |
CMV:Some cultural practises are objectively wrong, and denying that in a morally relativistic way to be 'progressive' and avoid cries of 'racism' is harmful. | I was just moments ago confronted in the wilds of Reddit with a user who seemed to argue that we cannot objectively judge aspects of a culture.
I disagreed.
I can only paraphrase what s/he posted, as I can't do the imbedded quoting thing, which was:
>"Objective"and "culture" are not compatible
Here was my response, which I'm just copy pasting for convenience:
>Well, that's exactly my point.
I am arguing against cultural relativism.
Female genital mutilation is objectively wrong, and I don't respect the cultural right of a group to perpetuate it's practice because "it's their culture, don't be a colonialist".
Any cultural practice that violates human rights is objectively wrong, from stoning gays to death, to lynching black folks, to denying suffrage to women, to trophy hunting endangered species, to aborting only female fetuses.
If we can't objectively judge behaviour then anything cultural goes, including all the horrible examples I listed that some cultures did/do consider acceptable.
In Afghanistan now there is the practice of kidnapping young boys into sexual slavery which is relatively widespread. Bacha Bazi, if you want more NSFL reading.
Islam forbids it, and it is against the law but it is a millenia-old cultural tradition which has persisted to this day.
Can you not *objectively* judge that *cultural* practice as wrong?
That person then simply downvoted me (out of spite?) but declined to offer any rebuttal or explanation. Therefore I'm not sure if there is some cognitive dissonance going on with that person or if there really is a reasonable defense of moral relativism.
I'm hoping someone here might be able to offer me an argument. I don't like the implications changing my view would have, but I'm honestly open to it.
Thanks so much for reading, and for any responses!
**EDIT** well, I feel foolish for phrasing this question with 'objective' as it seems pretty clear to me that's impossible, thanks to all the answers from you folks.
Not that I'm too happy about that, maybe I'm having an existential crisis now in a world where someone can tell me that torturing children being wrong is just my opinion.
I'm a little bitter at the universe, but very grateful to the users here.
Have a good night :)
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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!* | The truth is that there is nothing you can point to that suggests that certain kinds of ethical systems or cultural practices or traditions are objectively wrong. There is nothing empirical and nothing logical that supports your belief. You just believe that you're right because it really feels that way to you. Your justifications for believing some foreign cultural practice is "wrong", whatever that even means, are fundamentally identical to the justifications *they* might use in their belief that *your* cultural practices are wrong. Remove your own prior beliefs and approach both positions impartially and you'll find this to be true.
Of course, this doesn't mean you have to let everyone, or anyone, do whatever they want. That there is no objective standard with which to evaluate ethical notions does not imply you cannot or should not enforce your own preferences onto others. In fact, it gives you free reign to do so without invoking some spooky nonsense-on-stilts rationale. Subjectivity does not disallow activism, in short. | 26 | 82 |
Cmv: lawn work is unnecessary | This isn't out of a hate of lawn work or anything like that, I just purely do not understand why we decided that half- decapitated grass is the status quo. Why is this normal? Who made this decision? Can I have a yard of cloves and flowers and ferns instead? I think that there are so many other ideas of what could make a "lawn". Why did this start and why can't we change this idea. I would rather every house have a field of flowers or something. I really do not get any of this. Does this keep insects away? Fight me. | Historically, grass was a sign of wealth.
If you owned a farm, every square inch was valuable. "Wasting space" was a luxury of the rich. Hence, grass.
You are correct that in the modern day, it isn't strictly necessary. You could put any number of plants there. You could make a rock garden. You could put down astroturf.
But much like the wedding cake, the wedding dress, and high heeled shoes, that which the rich used to do, became the norm for everyone, once everyone could afford it. | 19 | 31 |
Eli5: What does it mean when music is played in a certain "key" | I understand musical notes but nobody has been able to explain to me what a "key" is in music.
For example, how does "beethovens 3rd symphony in e-minor" differ from "beethovens 3rd symphony in f-minor"? | A key has two parts - the selection of notes you use, and the specific note you choose to be the "tonal center" or home note of your piece. There are 12 notes in all, and you typically choose 7 of them to make up your scale. If you think of the numbers on a clock, and you mark 7 of them as "your" notes according to a pattern\*, and one as your tonal center, you can get an idea of how that works. The tonal center is the one you typically come back to in order to give a sense of finality to your musical phrase or passage. Anyway, in the examples you use, E and F are the tonal centers, and the "major" or "minor" indicate the pattern by which you choose your 7 notes. In E minor, you'd center on E, and choose your 7 notes based on a "minor" pattern\*. In F minor, you'd center on F and choose your 7 notes based on the same "minor" pattern. | 18 | 16 |
CMV: While white people will never be able to understand what it means to be a minority, that doesn't mean we cannot be critical of their actions. | I recently got in an argument with a friend regarding the BLM (Black Lives Matter) interruption of Bernie Sanders speech. I argued that while I understand their frustration, I still hold its unacceptable to break the law the way BLM did.
My friend argued back that since both of us are white, we can never understand the situation and the anger these representatives of BLM feel. Therefore, she argued, we cannot criticize their actions since we cannot and can never understand their perspective.
My friend showed me [this article](http://time.com/3605606/ferguson-in-defense-of-rioting/) in defense of her argument. I'll quote from the conclusion,
>Instead of tearing down other human beings who are acting upon decades of pent-up anger at a system decidedly against them, a system that has told them they are less than human for years, we ought to be reaching out to help them regain the humanity they lost, not when a few set fire to the buildings in Ferguson, but when they were born the wrong color in the post-racial America.
In response to the article, I essentially argued that while I do feel for minorities in the U.S, violence is neither a morally sound or pragmatic way to go about change. I also felt that the argument presented (we are not minorities, therefore we will never be able to understand, therefore we cannot criticize) is fundamentally unsound.
I'd love to hear some support for her viewpoint, because I am an open-minded person and I care about racial equality America
So please, CMV!
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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!* | Civil disobedience has long been a tool used to gain awareness and acceptance of movements in the United States. From our forefathers throwing tea into the Boston harbor to Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat, people who have wanted to enact change have accepted that non-violent protest - even when in violation of the law - is sometimes required.
So long as the people who violate those laws are willing to suffer the consequences of that violation in exchange for the benefit that those violations may bring, then it is a tool in the toolbox for those who want change. | 11 | 17 |
Why do postmodern philosophers use language as the basis of all knowledge, meaning etc.? | In my HS worldview class, we are reading Grentz's *Primer on Post Modernism*, he goes through some of the main postmodern philosophers, Foucalt, Derrida, Rorty to name a few. One common thread that seems to be running through these is a tendency to in some way connect language to meaning.
My question is, what makes language a better understanding of "truth" or "meaning" or "knowledge," than anything else? | Postmodern philosophers argue that our entire understanding of the world is representational/symbolic/semiotic. That is when we see/hear/taste/whatever something, we mentally re-present that stimulus to our self and our understanding of that re-presentation occurs within the context of all of our historical, cultural, and personal re-presentations. Much of postmodern philosophy focus on the linguistic, because it's a common and powerful form of representation, but most (if not all) also recognize that wide rage of non-linguistic representations that we also use in our minds when understanding.
PoMo philosophers don't argue that language is a better understanding of truth, meaning, or knowledge, they argue that it is the only understanding. For postmodern philosophers, there is no such thing as non-linguistic/non-symbolic knowledge or meaning. All knowlege or meaning is a re-presentation. | 14 | 15 |
Do noise canceling headphones harm your ears because it doubles the energy going into them? | My friends and I were discussing this today and one of them said that noise canceling headphones work by recording ambient noise and playing back the inverse to cancel out the frequency, but even though the frequency is no longer perceived as sound, the energy from both waves (original and inverted) still go into your eardrums, which is bad for you. Is this true? | Sound is a mechanical wave resulting from alternating compression and rarefaction of the medium it travels in. So when two waveforms cancel out, this means that mechanically, there is zero movement. So although on the outside it seems like they might add up, the motion of the air caused by the speaker in your headphones are synched so as to exactly cancel the noise. That is, the ambient noise moves the air one way and the speaker moves it right back to where it was, and all that before it hits your eardrum. So actually, if the noise cancellation is perfect, zero energy hits your eardrum.
Cred: Currently taking engineering physics as part of mechanical engineering major | 206 | 109 |
CMV: I think moral laws can be established by logic & science and would be preferable than those currently established by faith and cultural norms. | I first came across this idea when I heard of Sam Harris. I'll quote from him
"Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds -- and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life."
I guess ultimately this is a very utilitarian moral philosophy, essentially replacing good with wellbeing. I think the concept of wellbeing is much easier to quantify and operationalise than 'good', as good is much more vaguely defined than wellbeing, which looks more at individuals than whole situations.
He answers two initial criticism in his article here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/a-response-to-critics_b_815742.html
I'd try to at least flick through the article before replying with an attempting at changing my view. I think he addresses the problems of measuring wellbeing pretty well in the article, and what he calls the persuasion problem as well, although if you think you can expand on the argument go ahead.
I've heard this fellow Sam wants to Nuke all Muslim countries or something, I don't think that, I just think that there is a better way to determine morality than scripture (rubbish), trying to figure out what god wants through observing nature (Aristotle and all western religions as far as I'm aware) or just relying on tradition and cultural norms (the only other alternative to science and logic I can think of).
I guess pure nihilism is one position you could take (although arguably this is something addressed by Harri in the section on the problem of persuasion) plus I don't think anybody is really a nihilist when it comes to the crunch.
**EDIT**
I've included this quote from the article incase you can't read through it
"It seems to me that there are three, distinct challenges put forward thus far:
1. There is no scientific basis to say that we should value well-being, our own or anyone else's. (The Value Problem)
2. Hence, if someone does not care about well-being, or cares only about his own and not about the well-being of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)
3. Even if we did agree to grant "well-being" primacy in any discussion of morality, it is difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure well-being scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of morality. (The Measurement Problem)
I believe all of these challenges are the product of philosophical confusion. The simplest way to see this is by analogy to medicine and the mysterious quantity we call "health." Let's swap "morality" for "medicine" and "well-being" for "health" and see how things look:
1. There is no scientific basis to say that we should value health, our own or anyone else's. (The Value Problem)
2. Hence, if someone does not care about health, or cares only about his own and not about the health of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)
3. Even if we did agree to grant "health" primacy in any discussion of medicine, it is difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure health scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of medicine. (The Measurement Problem)
While the analogy may not be perfect, I maintain that it is good enough to obviate these three criticisms. Is there a Value Problem, with respect to health? Is it unscientific to value health and seek to maximize it within the context of medicine? No. Clearly there are scientific truths to be known about health -- and we can fail to know them, to our great detriment. This is a fact. And yet, it is possible for people to deny this fact, or to have perverse and even self-destructive ideas about how to live. Needless to say, it can be fruitless to argue with such people. Does this mean we have a Persuasion Problem with respect to medicine? No. Christian Scientists, homeopaths, voodoo priests, and the legions of the confused don't get to vote on the principles of medicine. "Health" is also hard to define -- and, what is more, the definition keeps changing. There is no clear "metric" by which we can measure it, and there may never be one -- because "health" is a suitcase term for hundreds, if not thousands, of variables. Is an ability to "jump very high" one of them? That depends. What would my doctor think if I wanted a full neurological workup because I can only manage a 30-inch vertical leap? He would think I had lost my mind. However, if I were a professional basketball player who had enjoyed a 40-inch leap every day of his adult life, I would be reporting a sudden, 25 percent decline in my abilities -- not a good sign. Do such contingencies give us a Measurement Problem with respect to health? Do they indicate that medicine will never be a proper science? No. "Health" is a loose concept that may always bend and stretch depending on the context -- but there is no question that both it and its context exist within an underlying reality which we can understand, or fail to understand, with the tools of science. "
I think maybe the biggest flaw with the idea is that it could become a very authoritarian philosophy. I think that's the real area for discussion.
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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!* | Science is amoral, it cannot help us decide what we should value ... you can use 'science and logic' to help you make decisions *after* you have already decided what you are aiming for with your moral values, but you can't use 'science and logic' to decide what you want to achieve with these moral values in the first place.
Even if you decide that ''well being'' should be optimised with your moral laws, science still can't help you decide *whose* well being is more important in situations where there is a clash of interests, eg: improving the well being of one person will be detrimental to another person.
You still have to make your own moral rules and your own moral decisions ... using science is like using a calculator to help you decide. | 12 | 27 |
ELI5: How did climate change become about politics? | Historically, industries like oil and coal that drive human emissions of carbon dioxide -- or industries like lumber that reduce the ability to offset the impact of carbon emissions -- tend to be highly profitable. This leads to concentration of wealth in a few hands. People who make a lot of money from those industries found they could take a small percentage of what they earned to pay for political influence. This goes back hundreds of years. This was often used to enact policies that should lead to even greater concentration of industry ownership and wealth in fewer hands. Hyper-wealthy individuals gained much greater power in politics. All this happened well before climate science even began. After climate science pointed to the dangers of global warming, people in those industries decided it would be a more effective strategy to influence not only politicians, but public opinions as well. So they funded supposedly apolitical nonprofit foundations to cause people to disbelieve climate science. Many politicians went along with this because it increased their campaign funding and also their chances of winning or holding onto their offices. | 17 | 34 |
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Java projects that would look impressive in an entry-level interview? | I'm applying to an entry level software developer apprenticeship program, and the final step of the admissions process turned out a lot more intimidating than I expected. The last 8 minutes of the final interview will apparently be reserved for me to show off a project I'm proud of. The logical solution is to dig up some of my old college projects, but aside from group projects, I wasn't exactly the best at commenting back then and many of them were from when I just started programming, so I'd probably have to rebuild from the ground up anyway.
The direction I was given was that the project should be "complex, but within my ability to explain". Though admittedly, I don't have the best grasp of what's considered "complex" for an entry level position. Maybe I'm actually overqualified, or maybe I'm in way over my head, I just don't have much frame of reference.
The projects I can remember off the top of my head are *Battlecode*, *Hunt the Wumpus*, *The N Queens Problem*, *Game of Life*, and *Sudoku*. I'm worried that since all of these are really famous programming exercises, it would make anything I present look mediocre, if not inherently suspect. I'm probably worrying for nothing, but that's just in my nature. Can anyone spare any advice on what kind of project would probably be ideal for an interview like this? | If it’s a backend role, maybe stand up an api and attach it to a database with some dummy data and do something cool with it?
If all you have to fill is 8 minutes you could probably fill the time with a smaller project of that scope. | 11 | 21 |
It's normal to not imagine things as you read descriptions in a novel? | I was watching a youtube video earlier today and someone pointed out that their visualization of things while reading wasnt really good, after that everyone else said that they automatically imagine what the book is describing. The thing is that I dont really see a detailed picture and I dont imagine the situation clearly.
Im not looking for help or anything but I would really appreciate if you know if this has a name or where can I do some research about this topic.
Sorry if I have been redundant but hopefully I have been clear. thanks for reading. | There is a wide range of ability to visualize.
Some people see things very vividly. Some Dont. It's not really a condition but just a spectrum of ability.
Unless you lost the ability due to disease or injury. Then it's a disorder. | 30 | 76 |
ELI5:Why are people supporting Jeremy Clarkson when he punched his boss and threw a fit? | There are a variety of reasons.
* Something to bear in mind is that anyone who was likely to be turned off by Clarkson being an arsehole has long since departed. He's done plenty of controversial and offensive things already, thus weeding his fanbase down to only the core of people who don't care about that sort of thing
* Some people just want to see the show and literally don't care about what Clarkson did
* Some people see Clarkson as a valiant warrior against political correctness and/or leftism at the BBC, and they think that the beeb is just looking for an excuse to sack him to advance their 'agenda' | 67 | 69 |
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If it were possible to put a pipe straight through the earth, from north to south pole and you dropped a ball down the pipe what would happen? | Ignoring air resistance and assuming the earth is a homogenous sphere,
The force F acting on the ball while within the earth is described by:
**F** = -GMm/R^(3)**r** where r is the distance from the centre of the earth to the ball.
For those that have studied springs, this equation is of the form:
**F** = -k**r** where k = GMm/R^(3)
Or equivalently:
**a** = -ω^(2)**r** where ω^2 = k/m = GM/R^3
ω is the angular frequency of such a system, and is also given by ω = 2π/T where T is the period of oscillation.
Given those equations, we can calculate T to be:
T = 2π(R^(3)/GM)^(1/2) ~= 84 minutes.
That's the time it takes to fall right through the earth and come back to its starting position. Coincidentally, that's also the time it takes to make a full orbit at the surface of the earth (it's not exactly a coincidence, since simple harmonic motion along one axis is simply circular motion projected onto that axis).
Since there is no air resistance, the ball will fall right through to the other side, reverse direction, then fall back to its starting point indefinitely in simple harmonic motion.
If there is air resistance, the amplitude of this oscillation will decay exponentially and eventually the ball will come to a rest at the centre of the earth. | 780 | 521 |
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Why do some nations that produce enough food to provide for their whole population end up importing that same food? | I believe this is the case for Canada with wheat. | The reasons can be very simple. Canada has free trade with the US. The border between the two countries is very long and most of the population of Canada lives very close to the border. As a result, the transport cost of transporting a good across Canada may be larger than the administrative costs of importing it from over the border in the US.
The price of a good (e.g. wheat) may favour Canada at one place along the border and may favour the US at another place on the border. | 89 | 62 |
ELI5: Why does light need to consist of particles to explain the photo effect? | We know from the wave picture of light that there are two ways you can increase the energy you are delivering to a system if you shine light on it. You can either:
* Increase the amplitude of the light wave i.e. the height of the wave, making it brighter.
* Increase the frequency, i.e. the number of wave peaks packed into a certain time period, shifting the colour.
Now, when you shine light on the surfaces of certain metals, you can liberate electrons. What you find is that you will only see a photocurrent (current of electrons liberated by light) above a certain frequency of light, unique to each metal. As you turn up the frequency, the number of electrons reaching your collector will increase. But, importantly, the same effect is not observed if you increase the intensity of the light.
So what are our observations?
* There is a minimum frequency of light required for electrons to be liberated, and therefore a minimum energy.
* Turning up the frequency increases the number of electrons we detect.
* Changing the intensity has no effect on the observation of electrons. This means the energy has to be delivered to the electrons all in one go.
The only logical conclusion is that the light must be delivering energy to the electrons in discrete packets, or quanta, to push them out of the metal, and that the energy of each packet is proportional to the frequency. When one of these packets, which we call a photon, hits the electron, it delivers it its energy, which will free it from the metal if it's enough. Any excess will be given as kinetic energy, meaning faster moving electrons that can travel further and hence more will reach our collector.
The photoelectric effect is fundamentally inexplicable by the wave nature of light, and the particle nature is the simplest explanation which turns out to also give us views into a whole world of other phenomena related to quantum mechanics. Indeed, QM gets its name from quanta, which refers to discreteness. | 25 | 85 |
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CMV: I think that in the end, humanity will grow to become a prosperous eternally happy bunch & that every person can do something to help today. | If you look at history, it's very clear that stuff is getting better- only 100 years ago, there were no *proper* democracies & medicine was extremely unadvanced.
Nowadays, we have all this amazing technology & medicine & a rapidly growing list of new democracies.
It seems that by each century in history you go forward so far, thing get way better. I think this trend will continue.
**I know someone is going to mention about global warming/overpopulation,** but I do genuinely believe that will will come up with solutions to all of this, many of which are already in the pipeline. So many people seem to have a doom and gloom view of how the world is getting much worse. To me, this just seems like a contradiction in history.
I think anyone can help by being nice to others, and also by donating money to whatever cause, even if it's technological development. Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but then again, perhaps I'm not. | I will address a couple of assumptions here that you may want to reconsider:
1) You suggest that history is one steady progression towards a better and better society. By and large that has been true for very recent history, but much of human history is the story of great societies being destroyed and regressing. At the height of the Roman Empire, much of Europe had stability, plumbing and clean water, a healthy economy, infrastructure. Those luxuries were not guaranteed, they were destroyed and didn't come back for a long time. In the Middle Ages, the Islamic world was very advanced - they had science, trade, and many other things. Then the Mongols came and burned it all down, killing millions of people along the way. You could argue that the region has never recovered. History shows that it is anything but "very clear that stuff is getting better."
2) Just because something can happen does not mean that it definitely will happen. We can address climate change, overpopulation, and other problems, but only if we take them seriously and treat it as a real threat. If everyone had the attitude of "everything will turn out fine, just relax", then we would never find the motivation to solve these problems. Hard societal problems can only be solved if we face the reality that we *need* to solve them or else we're doomed. | 20 | 40 |
How is being trans, non binary and viewing your self as a different gender not considered a mental illness [serious] | I am not hating on anyone or any group of people..but isnt their other mental illnesses where the persons believe they are something they are not? And if so how does this differ thank you | Think of your 4 D’s for diagnosing a mental illness, which are dysfunction, distress, (statistical) deviation, and danger. How do these present in someone with gender dysphoria? Dysfunction is not necessarily present if they are otherwise able to go to school/work, feed themselves, have a clean home, and so on. Distress is absolutely there and is the hallmark of gender dysphoria because the patient is clearly upset about the situation. Deviation is also there since the majority of the population does not suffer from it. And danger may be present in the form of high risk of suicide. So since gender dysphoria causes particularly intense distress and potential danger (suicide), it shows that treatment is necessary to improve the patient’s quality of life. And what kind of treatment do they want? Gender reassignment, often through hormone therapy, surgery, and social presentation. Back to your question, gender dysphoria IS the mental illness, but simply being trans/NB is not. | 23 | 15 |
ELI5: Why do I wake up with a stuffy nose when I stay the night at somebody else's place? | It seems like every time I stay over at a friend or family members house, I wake up with a really dry, stuffy nose. This often happens without staying the night as well if im there for a few hours. Not sure if anybody else gets this, but can anyone explain it? | It is the bodys natural reaction to a new/unfamiliar enviroment. Their different detergents, soaps, air pollutants, pet dander, and even human dander all cause your body to have a mild allergic reaction and up the defenses. In this case, primarily the nasal entrance. Some people are more susceptible to allergies than others, you are in that list. You will also find that when you travel to new locales, the new pollens and other irritants cause you to feel stuffy or ill for the first week or so. | 15 | 20 |
ELI5: if there is no actual "touch", just electric impulses between atoms that give the feeling of touching, how does a knife, for example, break bonds to "cut" something? | There are two kinds of bonds- intramolecular (forces that hold atoms together in a molecule) and intermolecular (forces that exist between 2 or more molecules). Typically intermolecular forces are much weaker and those are the bonds you can sever to make a "cut". For visualization, think of a bowl of uncooked rice and you take a chopstick to make a imaginary line to through the bowl. You are not cutting any individual/singular rice, but your chopstick will still go through because the pressure you are creating are enough for the rice to essentially get out of the way. In this case, each rice is a stand in for one molecule made of atoms. So while you can separate the molecules (rice) from themselves, but you cannot split a single molecule (not with a chopstick at least). A knife works similarly on a microscopic level, by creating pressure and repulsion between the molecules to separate and therefore cut. Hope this helps. | 97 | 81 |
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Why do current-carrying wires have multiple thin copper wires instead of a single thick copper wire? | In domestic current-carrying wires, there are many thin copper wires inside the plastic insulation. Why is that so? Why can't there be a single thick copper wire carrying the current instead of so many thin ones? | A single wire that's thicker will be harder to bend. It will also fail entirely when it breaks.
Multiple thin wires will allow easier manipulation of the wire overall. Also if any part breaks, it's just a few strands that break (usually the ones on the outside of the bend). The break won't affect the wire because the current still travels alongside through the unbroken strands.
Tl;dr greater flexibility and more durable wires. | 7,406 | 6,972 |
[Star Trek] How do the Borg handle non-humanoid races? | How would they have assimilated or otherwise dealt with the Founders? The Calamarain? The Prophets?
Bonus question: How would they have dealt with all of those BEFORE they got the nanoprobe technology? | The Borg are probably researching assimilation techniques for all types of life 24/7, almost like a background program in the collective. It's just that it's incredibly difficult and not nearly enough information has been gathered to make a trial run. | 15 | 23 |
Why can you rename, or change the path of, an open file in OS X but not Windows? | The Windows filesystem identifies files by their paths (including the file names)—if you change a file’s path, applications and the operating system will perceive it as a new file with no connection to the original.
The OS X filesystem identifies files by an independent file ID, which remains fixed if the file is moved or renamed. | 2,771 | 3,408 |
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ELI5:are numbers real things and where do they come from | This is a question from an actual 5 year old. What are they made of and where do they come from in the universe
I was not sure of the correct answer | Mathematics is a language more than a separate science. Its job is to put the descriptions of natural phenomena into a form that we can understand and work with. So numbers are "real" the same way words are "real" - they *describe* something real. | 62 | 52 |
Did humans discover or invent mathematics? | Plato said that numbers, as well as all mathematical phenomena, objectively exist, and humans uncover the mysteries of these phenomena. According to him, mathematics is a manifestation of logic itself.
While this view makes sense, and is quite practical, I find that there are some problems with it. Some mathematical phenomena seem to be defined into existence, for example, imaginary numbers and the complex plane. Do imaginary numbers have any relation to reality, or do they exist simply because we've arranged our axioms in their favor?
For that matter, how do we know any of our axioms are correct? We develop axioms because the only way to coherently prove anything with mathematics is by rigorously defining the terms used. But how do we know that our definitions are true? | >Some mathematical phenomena seem to be defined into existence, for example, imaginary numbers and the complex plane.
How are the complex numbers any more or less "defined into existence" as, say, the natural numbers? | 13 | 21 |
ELI5: Why do we board up the windows of abandoned or currently renovating buildings instead of leaving the glass? | A small apartment building near my house is being renovated and they’ve removed all the windows and doors and covered them with plywood. Presumably there wasn’t a problem with EVERY window, so why take them all out and board them up? I imagine they were intending to replace them, but why take them out as the very first step in the reno? | Doing so prevents injury risk if they break during other renovations on site. It also mitigates against vandalism, as well as break-ins. And, as you noted, all windows would likely be replaced anyhow. | 551 | 320 |
ELI5: Why can perception of time vary so drastically? Like when you're on drugs, or e.g. slow motion car crashes. | Also, do animals have a similar perspective to humans for the rate at which time travels? And do different humans generally perceive time as moving at a similar rate? | Your brain needs to process everything you see, hear, feel, think, etc.
The faster it does this, the slower times goes for you. It's like an assembly line, and the fastest worker is pretty much waiting for the next piece to arrive.
So by that logic, all humans and animals perceive time in a different speed depending on what's going on in their life and how their brain works. | 41 | 74 |
What should someone majoring in math this summer do to enrich themselves? | I'm majoring in mathematics and I'm looking into doing research after I graduate so I'm trying to get mathematical modeling under my belt. Finding a relevant internship is difficult and I'd like to try my hand at doing personal research or something equally helpful... something I could possibly put on my resume... What would be good?
| Learn to code (if you don't already). It seems like a lot of math research nowadays requires it, and that a lot of the jobs out there for math grads are in data analytics.
Source: SO is a math PhD person. | 11 | 18 |
When fish look out through aquarium glass, what can they see? | When I look into a fish tank, the sides appear mirrored, but the back is clear. Sometimes the fish appear to be attacking, or swimming with, their own reflections; what do they see? Also, is the vision of tropical fish sophisticated enough that they could perceive individual humans, or do they just see motion?
EDIT: This is turning out to be a lot more complicated than I imagined, due to the behavior of light passing between matter with different refraction indices. Thanks for the interesting answers, please keep them coming!
EDIT THE SECOND: Here's an image showing roughly what the fish see when they look through the side of the tank (not exact, but close enough), with reflections of the interior surrounding a circular, distorted image of the exterior...
http://i.imgur.com/TMlhY6M.jpg | When looking outward at a flat tank side, there’s a *critical angle* determined by the refraction indices of the air, glass, and water. This angle would define a circle which would always be the same apparent size and direction as the fish moves (much like a rainbow). Within this circle, the fish would see a fisheye view of everything in the room on the far side of the plane of the tank glass. Outside the circle, the fish would see an ordinary reflection of the interior of the tank. | 68 | 215 |
ELI5 How the Royal Family Works - Who becomes what (king, queen, prince, etc) when people die? | My friends an I are arguing and can't find the information to help us understand. We're from NY and very confused.
Help us British redditors, you are our only hope. | You're question is incredibly vague :L But I'll try to answer, based on the assumptions that:
- You mean the British Royal family
- You just want an overview of the laws of succession
**The Current Order of Succession is:**
- Queen Elizabeth II
- Prince Charles (Elizabeth's eldest child)
- Prince William (Charles' eldest child)
- Prince X (William's eldest child)
- Prince Harry (Charles' second child)
When the ruling King/Queen dies, the throne passes to their eldest child. It used to be that it would always pass to a son before a daughter (So if a King had a 20 year old daughter and a 1 year old son, the throne would go to the son first). This was recently changed, due to society becoming more equal than when the laws were first written.
After them, the throne goes to their oldest child etc. If they have no children, it goes to their eldest sibling, then the sibling's children.
The title of Prince/Princess goes to the children of the King/Queen, and any children in the MALE line. So the children of a Prince are Prince/Princesses, but the children of a Princess aren't. This may change due to the new laws.
Princes prefer to use other titles if they have them. The reason that Prince William is the Duke of Cambridge is because he was awarded that title. An awarded title is more impressive than one you automatically get. The Queen's husband is called Prince Phillip, because although women get their husband's titles, men don't get their wife's (Similar to surname). Phillip is already a Prince, as he's a member of a different Royal Family (Prince of Greece and Denmark).
If you have any more specific question's, I'd be happy to answer! | 17 | 19 |
ELI5: Why does the tounge muscle not grow even if it's constantly moving? | For example, when you workout, your muscles (biceps, pecs, legs, etc.) get bigger by time. Why not the tounge? | Muscles get as big as they need to be, I.e. if you don’t work out your bicep and just use it for your normal day to day going about your business, it will settle at a certain size, that size will be different person to person.
The cardiac muscles don’t keep growing just because they are beating all the time, they get as big as they need to be to carry out their work then stop growing.
I suppose it is possible, you could set up some sort of resistance training rig for your tongue and strengthen it, it may even grow bigger. | 30 | 26 |
If I point a laser to a planet, does it reach its surface? | I've been reading an article about a laser that was pointed to a mirror on Moon's surface and reflected back, calculating the exact distance between the Earth and Moon.
That came with the question in my mind, if I take a laser pen, point it directly and correctly to a planet, it will reach its surface, or would it be disturbed by the atmosphere and/or other factor? What would be the effects suffered by the laser out of the atmosphere and outer space? The laser have light speed? How much time would it take to reach Mars, by example?
Sorry for any grammar errors. | It depends on what you mean by "reach its surface." If you're just asking if any photons from the laser beam reach the other planet, the answer is yes. And they will go there at light speed. But then, your question is no different from asking if light from a light bulb on Earth reaches another planet, or asking if light reflected from the other planet reaches us.
If you're asking whether or not the laser beam reaches the other planet's surface like a coherent beam of light, the question gets more interesting.
* While a laser beam may look perfectly collimated at short distances, diffraction from the aperture of the laser actually causes the beam to spread out a bit as it travels. When you shine a normal, handheld laser at the moon, for example, you illuminate a giant patch of the moon many square kilometers in size. Also, since the power/number of photons is constant as you go along the beam, if the beam spreads out, the intensity will drop. (The light would be too weak to see with the naked eye. Moon laser ranging experiments use very high-powered laser pulses in order to get a signal, which is still very weak, back from the reflectors.)
* You also have to take into account the dispersive and refractive effects of our own atmosphere. The molecules in the air will attenuate the beam, making it much weaker by the time it gets to space.
* You also have to take into account the dispersive and refractive effects of the other planet's atmosphere, if it has a significant one.
All in all, your beam will be extremely weak, extremely spread out, and pretty much useless (assuming our current level of technology). But theoretically, some small fraction of light from your laser will reach the surface. | 65 | 38 |
What does the phrase 'they are in the world, but not of the world' mean? | I saw this phrase mentioned in relation to the Stoic/Epicurean ideal, however, when I search the phrase I only get back numerous Christian/Biblical references. How does the above phrase relate to either Stoicism or Epicureanism?
Thanks | Well, first is important to remember that the early stages of Christianity were heavily influenced by the Hellenistic philosophy (especially by the Stoicism, Epicureanism and Neoplatonism). Now, the extract that you refer comes from The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetu to see the relation between that phrase and the Stoic/Epicurean ideal is necessary to expand this passage. "The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and christians are scattered through all the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, yet is not of the body; and christians dwell in the world, yet are not of the world. The invisible soul is guarded by the visible body, and christians are known indeed to be in the world, but their godliness remains invisible. The flesh hates the soul, and wars against it, though itself suffering no injury, because it is prevented from enjoying pleasures; the world also hates the christians, though in nowise injured, because they abjure pleasures." The relation lies that just as the christians are not reigned by the corporeal pleasures the stoic or epicurean must restrain also from this kind pleasures. For the stoic this means that he needs to master his own pleasures to keep them at bay and for the epicurean to choose between an everlasting pleasure instead of wanton pleasure. Both schools want to achieve the same result the ἀταραξία, but they differ from the means by which they can achieve this. (The stoic thinks that he needs to endure the pain and renounce to all the corporeal pleasures whereas the epicurean flees from pain in general and procures a life with moderation)
So to answer your question the phrase 'they are in the world, but not of the world' refers that the Stoic/Epicurean lives in the world, but they don´t abide to the way of the worldly, because this means to live a life without restraint. | 22 | 27 |
CMV: The idea of a Federal Minimum Wage is foolish at best. Minimum wages should be set on a state, or even local level. | There is a lot of talk about raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $15/hr or so. Some people like it. Some people hate it. I hate it at the national, and even maybe the state level.
I live in a small midwestern town. My hourly wage job (chemist) pays about $20/hr and I can easily afford the mortgage payments on a 3 bedroom multifloor house. There are a lot of factory jobs here in town that pay between $13-$16/hr. Home prices here are low enough to allow these people, especially if they are married, to afford to buy a home. Rent on apartments is rarely over $400/mo or so. But if I took my salary to a city like New York or Chicago, I could barely afford to put food on the table. Cost of living varies hugely across different areas, especially rural vs. urban. The minimum wage should too. A "living wage" is not standard throughout the country. Cost of living probably varies a lot even within a state. I can't imagine living in Amarillo, TX is anywhere close to as expensive as living in Dallas or Austin.
I realize that there are probably a whole of issues with implementing this and I'm glad to discuss them, but I think it's a better system.
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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!* | Should there be any regulations set at the federal level? Why did we outlaw slavery if the state's were perfectly capable of making that choice on their own? Why set national standards for automobile safety? Surely a person living in the open spaces of Wyoming or New Mexico doesn't need to have a car with passenger side airbags.
States do indeed set minimum wages according to state level cost of living. This doesn't mean as a nation we can't agree to a minimum level.
Furthermore, having states in charge of a minimum overall would lead to a race to the bottom, as each state can attract more business in a prisoners dilemma situation of undercutting minimum wages in other states. | 13 | 32 |
[Cyberpunk 2077] How is maritime travel still possible? | It is stated in a shard (and I believe other places) that during the 4th corporate war, Arasaka, in their benevolent wisdom, flooded the world's oceans with self replicating mines. This has basically made maritime travel nearly impossible and made the necessity to build a wall around Coronado Bay. Why then do we see multiple ships in the game? These range from simple cargo ships to an Arasaka super carrier. Even if Arasaka had the ability to disengage their mines (which they don't, since the mines believe their updates are a virus and reject them), that still leaves out Cargo ships which we know have in fact brought cargo from places like the USSR. | There are ways to temporarily clear a path and get ships through, and there are also safe zones near coastal areas where more hardened defenses keep the replicating mines away.
Maritime travel is basically impossible, but it still can be done at great cost and effort. All this did was limit non-essential travel and increase the need for in-country manufacturing as most transport is done by air and therefore more expensive. | 41 | 30 |
Eli5 How does wind work? | As in the weather not the gas. Thank you! | In general terms different materials behave differently when the sun heats them up. Some reflects away most of the light, some absorb the light and release it as heat into the air and some slowly heats up and releases the heat to the air even long after the sun have gone down. This means that the air on the surface of the Earth gets heated unevenly. And when the air gets heated up it becomes less dense and floats up. This creates a low pressure region where surounding air that is cooler and therefore less dense will get pushed into to replace the hot air. And this movement of air from cold high pressure regions to hot low pressure regions is what causes the winds. Of course the real world is a lot more chaotic and there are lots of effects both on local and global levels which dominate the weather. But this is the basic principle. | 106 | 91 |
Why is plant DNA so much more complex than animal DNA? | Their genomes can be larger, but larger did not necessarily mean more complex.
That being said, there tend to be fewer constraints on the genes of plants. Animals, at least bilateral animals, have very tightly-regulated developmental plans involving large numbers of genes that must work in concert. Plants, on the other hand, have much more flexible developmental plans. This means they are better able to cope with copies of genes, new genes from other organisms, or even entire extra chromosomes without suffering negative effects. This will tend to result in having more genes, more duplicate or closely-related genes, and more "dead" genes in their genomes on average than bilateral animals under otherwise similar conditions or constraints. | 18 | 17 |
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How did the evolution that produced the Angler fish work, especially the sexual dimorphism? | If evolution is just a series of small mutations, wouldn't males getting smaller and weaker jaws make them less likely to survive? How did the parasitism even evolve? Did a male angler fish suddenly think, okay I'm just going to bite this female, and somehow they fused? | So consider the environment most angler fish live in. Most live in dark areas with limited resources. To make things harder they eat living things rather than dead things. Living things are kind of rare, but it's how the angler fish do. The female is the primary producer of children, so in order to produce lots of children you need a lot of energy. This can't happen if you are competing with your own species. So to combat this the males get smaller and require less energy. In addition, males are programmed to seek out the female and attach. Some females in nature (namely geckos) store sperm cause your don't know when the next meeting will be. Angler fish take this a step further and basically collect gonads.
Edit:a word. | 15 | 24 |
Could you perceive reality without interpreting it? | Could you "turn off" your human interpretation and still be able to understand what it going on in front of your eyes? | This is a question that is often asked by people who are skeptics of metaphysical concepts. Philosophers have spent years trying to answer this query, but no one knows how to fully comprehend the answer. However, many philosophers have come up with close approximations.
One philosopher who has tried to answer this question is Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). A philosopher and classical German idealist, Kant believed that humans cannot perceive reality without interpreting it because of their own innate mental processes —our minds are hardwired in a specific way that enables us to perceive and understand reality as we do.
Philosophers will continue to question and answer the idea of human interpretation versus raw data for time immemorial, but no one truly knows how to resolve the question. | 72 | 140 |
ELI5: why is it more efficient to produce energy by fusion instead of nuclear power? | i once read an article where it says fusion is like one million times more efficient to gain power then a power plant (hope you get the point, english isn't my first language)
Edit: i mean fission vs fusion | Firstly to clearify some of the vocabulary. Both fusion and fission power is nuclear power. Our current nuclear power plants are fission based, which means they split heavy atoms in a chain reaction to produce energy. Those heavy elements have to be mined, enriched and within the running power plant they have to be moderated and controlled to prevent an explosion. All that takes a lot of resources and energy.
Fusion would mean to take very light atoms and fuse them together. That fusion also produces energy. Since the light atoms are much smaller, a lot more fusion events can happen in the same space and time than splitting heavy elements. That means the energy density in fusion is much higher. There also are more benefits to fusion. The raw material we need for fusion is way cheaper and cleaner to produce (basically water), the fusion leaves much less waste behind (basically helium) and the chain reaction of a fusion plant isn't self sustaining. That means a breach will let the fusion reaction fizzle out instead of explode. | 57 | 55 |
ELI5: Why do I need to get my oil changed in my car? | What exactly happens to the old oil? | The purpose of oil is to lubricate and aid in keeping engine parts cooler. It forms a thin barrier around things like bearings to prevent excess friction. Over time the viscus property starts to decay and the parts basically rub against each other and start to wear out and thus the requirement to change oil. | 19 | 45 |
CMV: A core aspect of capitalism makes it less effective at producing quality goods and services. | To begin I am not arguing that capitalism is bad/good. I am also not arguing that capitalism is the best /worst economic system out there.
What I am arguing is that a core aspect of capitalism makes it less effective at producing quality goods and services than an economic system without this aspect.
The reason why I believe this is due to a quirk in human nature. Humans have both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. It has also been shown that when someone is intrinsically motivated to accomplish something giving them extrinsic motivation can have negative impacts on their performance ([Source 1](https://courses.lumenlearning.com/teachereducationx92x1/chapter/incentive-theory-of-motivation-and-intrinsic-vs-extrinsic-motivation/), [Source 2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect)). This is not always the case though because extrinsic motivation can make people accomplish repetitive and non-creative tasks faster ([Source 3](https://fs.blog/2016/08/daniel-pink-two-types-of-motivation/)).
Since a core aspect of capitalism is that we give someone a stand-in for the value ( money ) they contributed to society (some would argue that we give even less) that then causes that person to become more functionally fixed and less creative which, I am willing to argue, reduces the quality of the goods and services that we create. This is ok for some jobs but I am also willing to argue that a majority of the jobs that go into developing new goods and services should require creativity and adaptability.
I may not be able to respond right away since I am going to class soon but please tell me your thoughts. | Is there an example of a non-capitalistic society consistently creating higher quality goods than and being more inventive than capitalistic societies?
The theory is all well and good, but does not it make sense to look at practice? | 31 | 20 |
CMV: Management and upper management should focus on educating entry-level employees in to more advanced business practices to encourage critical thinking and improve productivity. | I always thought that entry-level employees should be encouraged to learn more about internal company processes to increase agency and bridge the gap between leadership and subordinates in the workplace.
The lack of business-oriented education on entry level employees is in my point of view a barrier to entry to management positions, which is a valued endeavor for any company attempting to grow.
More employees = more managers required
In a traditional sense, the best way to educate yourself in the process of leadership positions is to study and obtain a degree, but there should be other ways to obtain that knowledge and apply it in a more practical manner, not to mention the cost of getting an education.
In too many places I see people stuck in the same job position for years, even decades. Sure not everyone wants to be in a management position, but everyone should have the opportunity to be empowered to move up and not perceive themselves as another disposable worker drone in a given attrition rate.
The standards for management appear high but if it is in the best interests of a company to gain more leadership positions, then the standards required of the employees seeking to pursue a higher level do not seem to be clearly communicated to employees. They are only communicated to them what is expected of them as *employees* and not individuals with agency and knowledge empowered to improve the company in the future.
There should at least be a *layered* approach to the education of entry-level employees, slowly and systematically walking them through the process of understanding the *why* of business decisions and the many different functions management operates that will at least prepare them for a future role should they wish to pursue it. | Any reasonably competent manager will do exactly as you are suggesting they should — but most employees have no desire to improve in these ways that are actually beneficial, so it will largely appear to any outside viewer that “management doesn’t put in the effort.”
The employees that do want to move up and put in the effort are very, very often recognized and trained accordingly. | 14 | 55 |
ELI5: Why does watered down coffee still give me the same amount of caffeine and alertness? | You'd have to go into more details in the brewing variables. When you use less coffee grounds it could still be enough for the water to reach its saturation point. So additional coffee grounds may not had more caffeine. | 11 | 15 |
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[Star Wars] Why don't astromech droids speak common? | Throughout all the movies and shows we can see that astromech droids serve a major role on spaceships of all purposes and sizes so why do they only talk in beeps and boops? Sure, many people that work with them can understand them but wouldn't it make it a lot more useful if they could communicate with everyone? | Leaving a language barrier helps to keep slaves in line.
Because that's what most Star Wars droids are. We are given all the indications they are sentient, yet they are treated like property, and continually mind-wiped to keep them submissive. | 45 | 32 |
[Star Wars] Why is the dark side hazardous to the user's health? | What is it in particular that causes one to get side effects such as yellow eyes and scrotum face? Is is through being evil or from using certain Force powers? If a Jedi used Force lightning to start a campfire or sterilize some drinking water, would he suffer ill effects? How does the Force know if you are being naughty or nice and why does it punish you for being evil? | This is an analogy I've used before, but think of the force as a flame. There are plenty of applications for fire that are quite safe. Cooking, heating, illumination. You can also use fire as a weapon, but it's pretty hard to do it safely.
The force is like that. Because it expresses itself in our reality through the living force, it is fundamentally aligned with life. Creating it, protecting it, fostering it. To turn it against that purpose isn't exactly *evil*, it's simply inclement to life, and that isn't limited to the person you're using it against. Using the force to harm is like attacking someone with boxing gloves that you've set on fire. Fearsome? sure. Effective? Yeah. Harmful to yourself? No doubt.
The force "punishes" you in the same way you could say a flame would punish you. Some applications of the force just aren't.. healthy.
Again, there isn't a reason to think that the dark side of the force is intrinsically evil, in the same way that a predator that kills to survive is evil. it simply appeals to the kind of mindset that we often perceive as malevolent. Bending reality to your will. Power at any cost. | 32 | 16 |
ELI5:how does a company like McDonald's make their food taste exactly the same on such a large scale? | forgive my ignorance. but a bigmac has tasted the exact same in Maimi in 1999 as it does in LA in 2004. its always the same no matter the time or place. | Highly controlled food quality, highly controlled cooking process, highly controlled preparation.
That's one of their big selling points as a restaurant. It doesn't matter where you go... the food is the same. Not necessarily good (for you or otherwise) but its the same. A safe bet if you are new to the area. | 300 | 396 |
ELI5: How does the NBA draft work? | I'm Australian and drafts aren't done over here so it's a completely foreign subject. Over here, teams just offer people a place on spot much like you might be offered a job in the real world. | The draft exists in the interest of competitive balance. The NBA wants all 30 of its teams to offer a product to fans worth selling, and that can't happen if incoming players are free to sign contracts with whichever team they want. The good players would be more likely to sign with teams that are already good, or teams that are in bigger markets. The skill gap between the top 5% of NBA players and the bottom 95% is simply too large to allow all the best players to go on a few teams.
So the basic idea is that all teams go through the draft before free agent signings, and they can use the draft to obtain the exclusive right to sign a player. And the order that teams go in the draft is largely determined by the reverse standings from the previous season (so the worst team in the NBA from the previous season is guaranteed a very high spot in the draft, which means they can select a player they think will be very good). Obviously, there are ways to change draft order; there's a lottery now, so the worst team isn't guaranteed the top spot in the next draft, and teams can also choose to trade away their picks in upcoming drafts. But most spots don't change.
So if a team selects a player in the draft, they have the exclusive right to sign a contract with that player (I believe that right lasts for one year). And players almost always sign a contract with the team that drafts them - higher draft picks get bigger contracts, after all, as well as being able to play on a team where they probably won't be overshadowed by another player. | 10 | 17 |
Is natural lump charcoal ash with no additives good for your garden? | Google has a mess of answers that aren't helpful whatsoever. Everything from "Yes, it's great for the PH in the soil" to "No, the ash will turn into lye in the ground". | It depends on the acidity of your soil. There are ancient Amazonian groups who increased the charcoal content to decrease the leaching and reduce acidity of Amazonian soils . It's called terra preta.
However, you don't want to add too much or it becomes to basic. | 11 | 68 |
ELI5: When a US judge rules something as unconstitutional, why is it not automatically the same ruling for all other states? All states have the same constitution right? | Often those rulings will be used as legal precedent to help overturn the law in other states, but it can't automatically apply everywhere for two reasons.
First, it's often a state law being overturned.
Second, the state court only has jurisdiction over that state.
Plus, it may be unconstitutional in terms of the state's constitution - most if not all states have one in addition to the federal one. | 604 | 1,289 |
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ELI5: If our cells are constantly replicating, how do we age and die? | Like how we always shed dead skin, yet we grow more to replace it.. | Imagine --- that --- these --- words --- represent --- genetic --- information. Whenever --- your --- chromosomes --- replicate --- they --- often --- get --- shortened --- just --- a --- little --- bit. To --- protect --- your --- genetic --- integrity --- these --- chromosomes --- have --- buffers --- on --- their --- ends --- which --- can --- be --- shortened ---- without --- harm. Eventually --- these --- buffers --- (telomeres) --- get --- depleted --- and --- your --- chromosomes --- finally --- start --- suffering --- damage. Now --- you --- have --- a --- problem. | 46 | 23 |
Why do so many philosophers dismiss evolutionary psychology? | Philosophers have often been critical of evolutionary psychology for the same reasons that biologists and psychologists have often been: typically, out of a combination of concerns that it (i) has a pseudo-scientific methodology that produces just-so stories rather than scientific knowledge, on the grounds that the elements used in the classical form of evolutionary psychological explanation are untestable;
and, that it (ii) rests on false premises like hyper-adaptationism. Viz. the inference, central to classical evolutionary psychological methodology, that since an organism has a trait that trait is the product of an adaptation, is widely regarded as resting on an account of evolutionary adaptation that has been refuted on scientific grounds. | 92 | 49 |
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How to answer questions about why do you choose this school? Why do you think you're the best fit for this position? | Well, I'm applying assistant professor positions in social sciences, and I found that the hardest interview questions that I'm facing now is how to answer the questions such as why do you choose to come to xxx university? Why do you think you are the best fit for this position?
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From what perspective should I answer this type of question? Thank you! | Before you go to the interview, do some research about the school and the department and see what you find interesting about it. Some things to look for:
* Where is is located? City vs rural, what part of the country/world, what physical climate / geography. What can you do in the area in your down time?
* How big is the school?
* What is the school known for?
* What is the school’s mission statement?
* How big are class sizes?
* What research is being done in the department?
* what courses do they offer?
* among those courses, what is one you’d really be looking forward to teach?
* among the courses they *don’t* offer, what is one you’d like to develop and teach for them?
* are you more interested in teaching grad or undergrad courses? Intro or advanced undergrad?
* who is faculty in the department? Do you know any of them personally or professionally, like have you met them at conferences or read their work? Who would you most want to collaborate with?
* How does your research fit with their research?
* What facilities do they have (teaching or research) that you’d be looking forward to using?
Do your HW - honestly half of these are useful to find out before applying even - and it’ll help you to answer those specific questions and others. | 43 | 31 |
Have any non-masters/phd economists been able to get hired as economists for large companies like Amazon? | Government seems to be the only place that lets you reach high career levels with experience over degrees. It’s common to see “x years of experience, PhD preferred” in government where they’d prefer a PhD but also accept experience in place of degree. Government is also fine with training you into positions.
I look at a lot of private sector economists job openings and they explicitly *require* a PhD. Lets say you’re in government and reach a GS 12-15 as an economist with 10 years experience and a bachelors. Does it not matter just because you don’t have a PhD?
I have no interest in a Masters or PhD. While I love learning, academia made me miserable and I’ve worked myself to an Economist position in the public sector in 4 years after graduating. It doesn’t make much sense to me for the private sector to put so much value on a PhD when a PhD is like an apprenticeship that teaches you how to produce research in your field. The whole point of a PhD is to stay in academia and do research. Yes you can go private sector but that’s not what a PhD is designed to do. In fact many people struggle to retain PhD grads because a lot of people hit the masters level in the program and then leave for the private sector.
I’m just wondering if you’re even considered without a PhD even if you have years of experience as a high level economist and proficient tech skills in C, C++, Python, and Linux. There are PhDs who don’t even have that. So are you automatically disqualified from consideration just because of the degree requirement? | I can't speak for them, but many PhD job market candidates from top programs will be applying for those jobs. They will mostly have similar technical skills and the best candidates have forthcoming publications. Now, that doesn't mean don't apply, but don't going in thinking those with PhDs only have a degree. | 14 | 15 |
ELI5: Why do all kids around the world like sugary food (like candy, chocolate, sugary drinks, etc.) more than anything else, and when reaching adulthood, most don't get obsessed with it that much? | Even if they're not hungry, they would eat candy at any time
Also, how much is too much for children? | Evolution and experience.
Sugary foods are loaded with energy.
Most of our existence, we could not get enough food, so when we found something like berries, loaded with energy, it was beneficial to eat them as much as possible. So we evolved to crave those kind of foods.
Now that we have a surplus of food, we don't need to eat as much, but we are still wired to crave it.
As for why kids over do it with candy, that's personal experience. Eating too much sugar at once has negative effects on our body, which we don't really recognize until later in life.
There's also a bit of rebellious nature at play. Parents tell their kids don't eat all that candy. So the kids do. When the kids become parents, they see how foolish that was. | 18 | 17 |
ELI5: How does dna being data work? | I saw a meme on TTT about how one sperm cell has 37.5MB of DNA on it, and a full ejaculation is something like 1500 terabytes. How do they figure that out | In order to determine this, we first need to determine how we're defining data.
DNA comes in four chemicals (adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine), and they always pair up in a particular way: adenine and thymine pair up, and cytosine and guanine pair up.
This means there are four cases to consider: A-T, T-A, C-G, and G-C. No other combinations are possible.
This means that, to represent four base pair combinations, we need to use (at minimum) two bits each. `00` could represent A-T; `01` could represent T-A, and so on.
There are eight bits to a byte, so we can encode four DNA base pairs into a single byte.
The human genome contains about 6x10^9 base pairs. Given that, we can calculate the total size of the human genome to be
>6×10^9 base pairs/diploid genome x 1 byte/4 base pairs = 1.5×10^9 bytes,
or roughly 1.5 GB. Since sex cells contain half the genome each, a sperm cell holds 750MB. Similar calculations reveal that an average ejaculation contains something on the order of 135,000 TB. | 42 | 24 |
CMV: The author is the final authority on any of his or her stories and the only true interpretation is the one they intended | I often hear sentiments like "every story can be interpreted a thousand different ways", implying that any and all interpretations of a given work are equally valid. As a writer, I wholeheartedly disagree with that.
If I were to write a story about wizards trapped on a rock in space, and a reader interprets it as them being stuck in limbo after dying tragically while that wasn't my intention, their theory is simply wrong and holds no water. They either just misread my story or didn't like it and decided to change it up so that they'd be able to stomach it better.
Similarly, if I wrote a poem about jazz and 99% of my readers interpreted it as an allegory for suicide instead, that still wouldn't be the correct interpretation. It would mean that I failed at conveying my theme to my audience and that I need to do a better job next time. If people called the allegory brilliant and declared me a genius, it would be dishonest for me to accept their praise.
I find it disrespectful to the author and the hard work they put into their writing when fans insist that their story means something that it doesn't. Of course speculation about literature and its intended meaning is integral to certain college classes and a pass-time for some (i.e. in a book club). I don't think that there's anything wrong with that, but I do believe that the goal of literary discussion should be to figure out what the author meant rather than what the reader wants a work to stand for.
I have dropped an English lit class before because the teacher was into the whole "La mort de l'auteur" thing and I felt like I wasn't going to learn anything from him that semester. He'd encourage students to interpret classical novels as an allegory for social media, for instance, and I found it ridiculous and unhelpful. It was just make-belief and it didn't teach us any of the actual morals and themes hat the authors of the past had so carefully crafted and labored over, and put bits of their being into. It was disrespectful. | This approach always strikes me as kind of shallow as it relies on an understanding of literature that is deeply fixed and doesn't allow for any emergence or accidental brilliance to come out in the work or in people's individual relationship with the work.
This approach also denies analysis to huge portions of works where we have no understanding of the author or the social context of the work especially if works don't have one clear author. How are we to analyse the works of Sappho of Lesbos or the Epic of Gilgamesh or Beowulf or a huge number of oral storytelling traditions if we are limited to just the author? | 17 | 16 |
ELI5: Why does feeling or hearing certain things, such as rubbing your nail on sandpaper, literally send a shiver down your spine? | Human hearing has evolved to be much more sensitive at certain frequencies (in particular the 1-4khz region). This is so that we can more clearly distinguish things like human speech, crying babies etc.
As a trade off of this, certain sounds that have their root frequency (lowest and generally loudest frequency in their spectra) or a lot of harmonics (higher frequencies above the root frequency) within this range are extremely jarring to us, as they reach the "peak" of our hearing at much lower sound pressure levels than other frequencies will.
This is why sounds like scratching cutlery, smashing glass, babies crying and nails on a chalk board can catch our attention so easily and have the potential to be downright painful.
Source: years of audio engineering | 375 | 1,192 |
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ELI5: From where did the first bitcoin get its value? | >I understand money's value is associated with something materialistic like gold or, in the case of the US, given a value based on the strength of the economy.
So why does gold have value? Why does the economy have value?
In the end, "value" is an abstract notion that was invented by humans, and essentially means "people want this thing, and will give you other things to get it." Money has value not because it's backed by anything, but because people *believe* it has value.
So the first bitcoin had value because someone somewhere wanted it, and was willing to trade something else for it. | 12 | 21 |
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Why does glass break in the pattern that it does? | For example: My windshield got hit with hail, beside where the hail hit at the bottom, one crack went directly up until halfway and then a 35 degree angle across most the windshield. Why didn't the crack continue straight up from the halfway mark, is it because weaknesses in the glass? | Glass is amorphous, meaning it's molecular structure is more or less randomized. Because of this randomness a crack in glass generally just goes through the path of least resistance.
If it were crystalline, meaning it's molecules are packed into repeating, ordered shapes called unit cells, it would fracture in a more normal, predictable way (like table salt always being tiny cubes - it's because of their molecular structure). | 12 | 19 |
ELI5 How do direction work in space because north,east,west and south are bonded to earth? How does a spacecraft guide itself in the unending space? | Spacecraft are able to determine their position and orientation through a combination of on board sensors (like star sensors) and off board trackers (like radar). Beyond that, it is typical to describe their position and velocity as an orbit. These orbits can be described using a few variables that indicate the size, orientation, and direction of the orbit. These are called "Keplerian Elements."
So, for example if you wanted to convey information about a satellite above the Earth, you wouldn't say "It's 500Km above the ground, moving 7km/s in the Northwest direction" but you could say, "The satellite's orbit has a semimajor axis of 6800km, with an eccentricity of .01, inclination of 23 degrees..."
Of course, there are other ways of keeping track of and describing these, but that's one of the most basic ways. | 6,752 | 16,250 |
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ELI5: When did some foods become associated with meal-times, and why? Example: eggs, bacon for breakfast. | As the title says, when did certain types of food become associated with eating at certain times of day? When did steak become associated with dinner, for example? When did soup become a lunch meal, as opposed to a hot breakfast dish? Etc, etc.
EDIT: Thanks for the responses. I'm now going to eat eggs and bacon because eggs and bacon. | Time needed for preparation. Eggs take a little bit of time to cook, so they're a breakfast food. Something like lasagna takes longer to cook, so it's a dinner food.
There's another factor, too. Back in the early second millennium, breakfast was seen as a necessary evil, and the sign of either a glutton or a working peasant. Seeing as peasants were more common than gluttons, breakfast was mostly a way to get the energy they needed for their work. Food that was high in quick energy took priority. | 49 | 99 |
Why are iron (Fe) and cobalt (Co) good catalysts for creating hydrocarbon chains? | I've been reading on slurry bed reactors, and i know that cobalt is more power efficient (less heat required) than iron in reactors, but what i don't understand is the mechanism which Co or Fe allow Carbon Monoxide (CO) and Hydrogen (H) to do this:
>(2n+1) H2 + n CO → Cn H(2n+2) + n H2O
I have no chemistry background, so be gentle!
Oh, and if the explanation explains where "coke" comes from in this reaction, that would be excellent, too.
Thank you! | There are at least three possible mechanisms, and which one predominates may depend on temperature, pressure and catalyst. As to why these metals (and nickel and ruthenuim) are good, other metals would give either different, less useful products or nothing at all, or not be stable under the conditions. All these metals absorb CO and H2 well on to their surface, which is a key prerequisite to getting them to react. The precise steps after these two molecules absorb is still being studied. | 12 | 304 |
ELI5: Why does the way back always feel shorter than they way there? | I certainly hope I'm not the only one who notices this, but what exactly is the mechanism that makes the way back from any given destination feel like it took less time than it took to get there in the first place.
EDIT: Did what I should have done from the get go, googled it and found [this article](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/story/2011-08-30/All-in-the-head-Why-the-return-trip-always-seems-shorter/50193384/1).
Turns out it has nothing to do with the fact that the route is more familiar but rather because you're always overly optimistic about how long it's going to take to get there, so the trip there feels long, which in turn skews your perspective on the way back making you feel pleasantly surprised that it wasn't that long at all. | If you are going somewhere for the first time you are devoting a lot more processing power to following directions and looking out for signs/landmarks, etc. That makes time and distance seem greater. There is also the anticipation of some event/experience to keep you mind working hard; again creating a feeling of greater time/distance.
On the return you are returning to the familiar. You don't have to process all the details around you because you have been there many times before. Typically going home also involves relaxation and comfort/familiarity. Your brain stops working so hard and time/distance seem shorter. | 42 | 90 |
Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) prevents muscle atrophy by causing muscles to contract. Why aren't we using this in hospitals and homes if immobility is such a problem for the older generation, disabled, or bedridden? | Cost-Benefit: you'd need a trained physiotherapist to properly attach the electrodes (pads) and to monitor the patient for any adverse reaction. Some folks couldn't withstand even the minor effort at exercise. You would have to continue the therapy indefinitely in the case of someone with a spinal injury in order to maintain any muscle gains; as soon as you stop, the muscles will atrophy again. Actor Christopher Reeve did use EMS for some time after his injury to maintain his physique, but gave it up after awhile. Again, cost/benefit.
Atrophied muscles in the extremities don't seem to be related to major health issues. Stephen Hawking lived into his 70s despite being immobile for much of his life.
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Bigger issues are bedsores and UTIs or infections from contact with bodily waste. In most facilities, managing these take up much of a caregiver's time. Reeve had recurring issues with bedsores, and his death was due in part to a reaction to the antibiotics being used to keep the infection in check. | 30 | 46 |
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Eli5: What exactly is Anarcho-syndicalism? | Anarcho or anarchist means opposing unjust/unnecessary hierarchies
Syndicalism is transferring ownership of the means of production (factories, farms, places that make stuff) to the unions that are working there.
Anarcho syndicalism is combining these two concepts, abolishing hierarchies and transferring ownership of the means of production to unions working their. | 16 | 16 |
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