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Why would an all-knowing and all powerful god want to be worshipped? | I wanted some philosophy of religion perspectives on such a question. Worship is often taken for granted, I.e. if there is a God, then surely we must worship it. Has anyone put forth an argument to why God would command worship? | I won't put forward a serious explanation here, but just to put your question into context, if you listen to actual religious people or read either the Gita, the Quran or the Bible you must face the possibility as it's usually explained that it is us who need the grace or presence of God, not the other way around. The destiny of the religious depends on their relationship with the God, so even if it would seem to be a command, it is a pillar of faith and only an imperative as in building your own future - like saying "you must connect this device to the outlet if you want to use it" would seem to be a command but you should not forget about the conditional part. | 120 | 176 |
ELI5 the business model of "All drink sizes are the same price". | Several comments touch on the foundation of this practice, but no one has really answered your question.
The most common answer is *Fountain drinks are really cheap!* And, while that's true, it doesn't explain why all sizes are offered at the same price. It only shows that the business is making a profit, no matter which size you choose. In other words, no one has explained why cutting the profit margin actually helps the business.
To demonstrate, let's suppose that our restaurant starts off with drinks prices as follows:
Small: $1, Medium: $1.50, Large: $2.00.
Clearly, if the cost of the soda is super-cheap, then the restaurant makes the most money on the large drink. So, why undercut their own profit by offering the large drink for only $1?
It's because a customer can go anywhere to get an overpriced soft drink. All of your competitors are charging about the same price for a large drink. The thing is, this tactic doesn't bring any new business. It only ensures that your repeat customers are paying a premium to drink a large soda. In order to draw new customers, you need to give them an incentive to come into your store.
So, here's the long-term strategy. Price all the soda sizes for $1. Yeah, you are going to lose a bit of revenue in the short term. But the plan is to get new faces in your store. Some of these customers will become regular visitors. Over time, they will generate enough sales to make up for the lost revenue. You should start seeing an uptick in customer orders. | 52 | 51 |
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[General Fantasy] Why can't you just cast a spell to make you younger and use it again each time you become too old instead of becoming a lich or something? | Even if you must do it every few years, it's not going to get any harder. | It depends on the setting.
In Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 there's no spell that can definitely make you younger. In addition, lichdom has more advantages than just fighting old age. You can't be killed without your phylactery being destroyed and you get a huge boost to power.
In Harry Potter, the only way to make you younger without side effects is the elixir of life from the Philosopher's stone. It's possible that there'd be fewer horcrux-users if the recipe for the stone were public knowledge. Sadly, it is not. You could potentially use unicorn blood, but that has some terrible side effect. It's not clear what that is, but it's probably comparable to the damage from making a horcrux, and you have to keep killing unicorns instead of just making one horcrux and being done with it. I've heard it suggested that continued use of the polyjuice potion could work, but that might only make you look young.
I imagine in general either anti-aging spells are extremely difficult to impossible or that people become liches for the other advantages it has. | 41 | 40 |
ELI5: What exactly is a conductor doing? | In classical performances and stuff, besides keeping tempo in check. Is he really needed? | First, what you don't get to see while watching a performance is all the work a conductor has put into shaping the music. The conductor is much like the director in a movie: they decide how to interpret to music like a director interprets a script, and they select what sounds best. If a piece of music says to slow down, the conductor has to decide *how much* to slow down. They have to decide how certain sections should sound, how to use dynamics effectively, and how the pauses in the music are executed. The conductor also decides, or at least helps decide, who is fit to be in the orchestra, what the proper balance of instruments is, and who should be playing.
Come the time of the performance, the director is in charge of keeping the tempo, yes, regardless of what environment they are playing in, and the ears cannot be totally trusted with keeping tempo. The director also is constantly providing reminders of what they have rehearsed, and is instrumental in keeping everyone together and focused, no pun intended. | 18 | 15 |
Why is causing children suffering as punishment via physical harm unacceptable but causing them suffering via mental harm (by say, isolating or boring them) acceptable? | Obligatory “I’m not saying we should do x but just want to know why exactly”. | How's three choices of how you want to tackle this:
If you want to make a purely philosophical case, you also need to ask what your ethical framework is. Is it consequentialist (achieving desirable ends), deontological (a defined set of rules), normative (what people just.. think?). the level of acceptability can change depending on what stance you take.
but as this seems to be a more concrete and practical question, we can fall back to the concrete principles of bioethics
* nonmaleficence: With boredom/isolation there is usually no intent to harm. With physical punishment, if we go with the idea that corporal punishment leads to no desirable outcomes (as can be argued for the child's development), and it comes from an attempt to violate, then the common sense moral judgement that this is not good or desirable
* autonomy: this is where it gets tricky, but its far easier to say that children have the ability to choose what they want to do when they're isolated or bored. When you beat a child, it is conventionally by force and restraint. Second, someone might say that the body is one's personal property and essential for living. If you beat the shit out of a child, you are damaging that which does not belong to you, and you are comprimising their ability to sustain their lives.
* beneficence: is the intent to better the child or the situation?
* justice: Could the punishment be just? **That is largely dependent on whether you think the child is morally responsible for their actions**
That last part is the clincher. Many times we presuppose children are helpless and incapable of being accountable for their actions. If they can't be blamed for what they do, is punishment ever acceptable? Your call on that one. Based on that, you can plug and chug to see whether boring a child and beating a child fall in the same moral vein.
Third, if you approach this from a politico-philosophical perspective (in the broad sense of examining about how groups of people should fall into place and interact and whether/or how they should be "ruled) you could just say it's precedent and that's ok, or that certain forms of isolation are wrong and others aren't, or that this has little political content, or that you cannot delineate when non-physical control of children goes from ok to all-out not okay.
there are infinite ways to skin this cat.
| 34 | 87 |
CMV: More people need to be educated about Net Neutrality before the public opinion surveys about it actually matter | I am a big, big supporter of net neutrality. Commonly, people (especially on Reddit) will cite the fact that 83% of Americans, including 75% of Republicans, support net neutrality. However, my attention was brought to [this](http://freebeacon.com/politics/new-poll-less-than-one-in-four-familiar-with-net-neutrality/) article. Although I support NN, how can that survey be used as a supporter for it despite the fact that the majority of people can't accurately describe what net neutrality is? How can someone claim to support something when they don't know what it is they're supporting?
I am VERY open to changing my mind on this, but it's just something I've been wondering about.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Most people don't know much about health, but healthcare is still important to them. Most people don't know anything how the military actually works, but the common defense is still important to them. Most people don't even know we have three branches of government, but still believe that the Constitution is important.
The fact that people are generally unknowledgable about Net Neutrality is not a surprise. Most people are unknowledgable about most political topics. If polling can be used to justify any political point - be it healthcare, or education, or military funding - it can also be used to support NN - the public is certainly no more and no less informed about NN than anything else. | 10 | 29 |
[Cowboy Bebop] How is it possible that the Bebop crew make enough money to maintain a spaceship but can barely afford food? | It's been a while since I watched the anime, but I remember that the crew's hunger comes up often, living off bell peppers sans beef and cup noodles.
Obviously a spaceship is an extremely complex piece of equipment that needs many systems to be functioning perfectly in order to not succumb to some sort of catastrophic failure. You'd expect that this entails a very strict and expensive degree of upkeep. To give a very rough real life comparison, an [F35-B fighter jet costs $9.1 million dollars per year](https://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastienroblin/2021/07/31/f-35a-jet-price-to-rise-but-its-sustainment-costs-that-could-bleed-air-force-budget-dry), and that doesn't even go to space.
It seems to me that since they are making enough income to maintain the ship, they should have enough of a margin to keep a crew of (initially) 2 people well fed. If the budget is so tight that they can't afford even that, you'd expect that one day some sort of urgent repair or occupational cost would come up that completely takes them out of action, leaving them unable to fly to any bounties and having to take up local work.
Are the resources and technology required for a spaceship significantly cheaper than we'd expect due to advances in manufacturing? Is food significantly more expensive? Or seemingly, they really are operating on the tightest budget possible, maybe skipping some maintenance here and there, and it's out of sheer luck that the Bebop stays in working order throughout the series. Like I said I haven't watched the series in 6 years or so, based on the synopsis some of this might be addressed in the episode Mushroom Samba but I don't know the details. Thank you for reading! | It's more than just simple money factors. Meat is extremely scarce so it typically costs more than spaceship parts. It's not a choice between an expensive ship part or food money it's a choice between a single meals worth of meat or a ship's maintenance fees. The bebop crew can eat on their limited budget but with how much they travel around the system and all the gate fees, docking fees, and refueling costs it's just not worth spending a few thousand ulon for a steak when the same price could get you peppers and mushrooms for a month. | 74 | 42 |
[General SciFi] Aquatic aliens | So I have been thinking and it seems reasonable to say that an aquatic or semi-aquatic species would have an easier time traveling in space and such because they can just pressurize water in their ships. Also they're used to not really having an up.
What do you guys think? | Aquatic species have a massive number of hurdles to overcome before they can even try to build a spaceship.
Living underwater means no fire, this means...
- No ability to keep yourself warm in cold environments, this means that their expansion on their own planet would be limited to warm environments. This would limit population growth and access to raw materials.
- Being unable to cook food limits your potential food sources. We rely on a massive number of foods that are toxic or inedible in their uncooked state (e.g. potatoes). Cooking breaks down complex chemicals into a more digestible form. The ability to cook food allows greater expansion into areas where your traditional food sources are not available. Not being able to cook food restricts the food supply, in turn limiting population growth, and geographic growth into areas where raw edible food cannot be grown, again limiting access to raw materials.
If the human race did not have fire, most of Europe, Canada, the Northern States of America, Russia, Siberia, Alaska and Northern China would all be uninhabitable and our diet would be restricted to fruits, fresh meat, lettuce and whatever other vegetables you can eat raw. Without foods like potatoes or corn, agriculture, and in turn, our population density would be limited, preventing the formation of large cities, required to form the kind of society that creates scientific knowledge.
No fire also means...
- No ability to smelt metal. Some metals like Gold can be found in their raw form, but most require smelting from ore. The inability to smelt means no Bronze Age, no Iron Age. The best tools they'd be able to make would be stone, they'd literally be stuck in the Stone Age forever.
Should they somehow get past that, living underwater poses a number of other problems when trying to develop "science".
- Most early chemistry was learned by mixing liquids together, or placing a solid in a liquid and measuring the results. That's simply impossible to do underwater. Trying to perform a chemical reaction when the entire environment is a solvent will produce no worthwhile results.
- Trying to learn about electricity while underwater would be equally pointless. Before you can start building batteries and transistors, you need to understand what electric charge is, what a conductor is, what an insulator is. Water conducts electricity, any charge that is built up will be instantly dissipated, making it near impossible to study. Even if you could somehow build a battery underwater (see above about trying to make sulfuric acid and lead plates) the charge would be conducted by the environment, causing it go flat incredibly quickly. No electricity means no electronics, no computers..
Should they somehow overcome all these problems and develop a society on a par with 20th Century humans, a spaceship full of water weighs massively more than a spaceship mostly filled with air. The Apollo Lunar Ascent module weighed 4,500 kg. Filling it with water would add another 7000 kg to that (plus additional fuel to carry the extra weight, additional weight for reinforced structure).
Manned spaceflight, even just orbital flights, would be unattainable for them using rocket technology.
TL:DR An aquatic species would have a hard time ever making it past the stone age. | 45 | 16 |
ELI5: Red, Green and Blue make all the colors for TVs/monitors... Why not Red, Yellow and Blue? | We've all messed around with this function on a computer at some point, and I could never figure out why it was Green instead of Yellow. A simple color wheel would suggest this, right? | Monitors emit light, so they use *additive* colour mixing. Paints absorb light, so they use *subtractive* colour mixing. The primary colours of each process are directly opposed.
You have red, green and blue in additive colour mixing because those are the peak wavelengths of the three kinds of cone cell in the typical human eye. You can mimic the mixture of cone cells activated by any visible wavelength by mixing different amounts of light at each of those peak wavelengths.
Then you have the subtractive primaries that each remove one of the additive primaries from white light. Cyan subtracts red, magenta subtracts green and yellow subtracts blue. | 62 | 44 |
ELI5: Why do so many businesses use computer programs that look like MS-DOS? | Changing a business computer system is like rebuilding your house while you're still living in it. It seems like a good idea at the time, so you start building new walls around the outside of your house. Then when you get about halfway finished your wife gets pregnant and now you have to work an extra bedroom into the new house. So you move something here and alter something there and you can just about get a new bedroom in. But now the house will cost more and it'll take a few more months to get done.
So your wife now decides that since the new house won't be ready in time she needs to have a new kitchen in the old house, so you stop building the new house and put in a new kitchen. But now you see some benefits to the new kitchen, so you change your plans and tweak some things so maybe you can use bits of your new kitchen in the new house.
And then solar panels become a thing, so you decide you want them, which means redoing the roof.
And then you get a promotion at work and a company car (this is akin to a business getting a new client who works a bit differently from the old clients) so you need to build a garage.
And then you stand back having lost some weight and lost some hair, and realise that there wasn't anything really wrong with the old house in the first place, it just needed a bit of attention here and there. But now you have a mish-mash of old house and new house, and the garage is in the pool, and the nursery is nowhere near the main bedroom, and the kitchen is half upstairs and half downstairs, but at least the roof doesn't leak and you still have cable. Just.
And that's why businesses don't like to change their computer systems. | 17 | 20 |
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What determines if a gene is recessive or dominant? | Genes aren't really recessive or dominant: they just code for proteins, and the particulars of the proteins determine what happens when you have a mix of both kinds.
Let's say there's a particular process in your body that needs protein A to function (say it's an enzyme). Protein A is coded for by gene G. There's a slight mutation to gene G called H which codes for a slightly different protein B. Protein B does not aid particularly in the process, but it doesn't hinder it either: it's basically inert.
If a person has two copies of gene G they will have plenty of protein A and the process proceeds as normal. If they have two copies of gene H, instead, they have no protein A and the process can't function. Such a person is sick. But if someone has gene G and H, the inert proteins don't hinder the normal ones from carrying out their work and so that person is healthy.
Based on this analysis we can say that the normal gene G is dominant over the mutated variant H, but we needed to analyze the coded-for proteins and their functions to determine this, and it's an unhelpful simplification to say that this happens on the gene level.
Now imagine another mutated gene, F, which instead of coding for the inert protein B instead codes for protein C which is actively harmful to the process in question. In this case a person with one gene G and one gene F is unhealthy: so you might say that gene F then dominates over G. | 14 | 15 |
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ELI5: when a news story says something like "the fire caused $50 million in damage" how are they calculating the dollar amount? | Depending on the scope of the damage, they could get an estimate from the fire department. They know the extent of the damage, and can guestimate what it would cost to repair/rebuild.
When you talk about larger disasters, like the Fort McMurray fire, they also take into account a number of other factors like disruption to the local and larger economy. | 46 | 138 |
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What has changed in Darwin's theory since the publication of the Origin of Species? | I'm curious as to how much Darwin's theory may have changed due to modern science. Obviously due to the advancement in genetics, we have a better understanding of how evolution occurs, but has anything in the theory majorly changed itself? I'd love any answers I can get. Thanks you guys.
Edit: I can't believe the amount of responses I got. Wow. You guys helped me out a lot and it was great reading what information everyone offered. I learned a few new things and I appreciate how helpful you guys are! Keep it up /r/askscience! | Darwin's original theory explained evolution in terms of accumulated genetic mutations in an ancestral line chosen by natural selection.
Horizontal gene transfer, common in bacteria, shows that genes and traits can be transferred from one species to another regardless of ancestral lines. Endogenous retroviruses indicates that this may also happen in complex organisms like humans, but the significance in evolutionary terms is unknown.
Additionally, epigenetics suggests that offspring may have some advantages that stem from the ancestor's life rather than just its genetic code.
Natural selection is still equally valid, but the mechanisms by which genes are aquired, inherited and expressed may be more complex than Darwin thought. | 274 | 488 |
CMV: I don't see the point in marriage. If two people want to be in a relationship, they don't need an official certificate | Obviously depending on your area/jurisdiction there may be some legal/tax benefits etc to getting married, but I'm discounting them for the purposes of this post. The fact remains that the vast majority of people get married for some other reason, and I can't really fathom why.
A minority of people are insecure and seem to need it to know their partner won't run away. Others are immature and buy into the whole 'fairytale romance' thing. But for the most part it just seems to be because it's the 'done thing', and I don't get it. Marriage is a social construct. There have been plenty of cultures throughout human history that have had no institution of marriage. And plenty that have had differing norms, e.g. polygamy. The only reason it still exists in the western world is that it's a holdover from the bad old patriarchal days of a woman basically being a man's property. Why should this one particular form of relationship be so privileged over, and more popular than others?
Furthermore, if two people are genuinely happy together and want to form a long term relationship, then why not just do it? Why do you need the ceremony, the official bureaucratic institution? What is the point? Surely if you're at the stage where you want a long term relationship with someone, you trust each other enough to know that you're both genuine about it? I really really don't get it and would love for someone to change my view.
EDIT:
Thanks for all your responses and contributions. I'm really enjoying the thread and sorry if my answers seem a bit short or flippant, it's only because there are so many comments to get through. I just wanted to make a couple of points:
1. I probably should have made this clearer initially, but I don't really have a problem with people getting married just for the legal perks. That's why I excluded it in the first place. But I think I've confused a lot of people by explaining myself badly on this one. Sorry!
2. Arguments about marriage being needed so that two people stick at it when times are tough don't convince me. I don't think there's any point to staying in an unhappy relationship, and you shouldn't create artificial barriers to stop someone leaving.
EDIT 2:
Thanks to u/alosec_ , who pointed out perhaps a better initial question would have been: without appeal to any cultural conditioning (legal or otherwise), what makes marriage objectively special or meaningful?
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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!* | Marriage offers a lot of benefits.
1) Tax deductions.
2) Visitation rights in prison and in the hospital.
3) The right to make medical decisions when your spouse is incapacitated.
4) Default rights to inheritance.
5) Coverage from insurance policies, right to pension and military death benefits, etc.
6) Legal protections from being compelled to testify against your spouse.
And lots of smaller things. | 143 | 506 |
ELI5:Is it possible that something (nothing in particular) we consider "true" in math could not be true | For example, what if we found out 6^0 (6 to the 0th power) does not actually equal 1? How would that affect what we know about mathematics? Is this question even feasible? | There's a difference here between math and science.
In science, we make observations about the world and try to find equations that help us explain and predict what will happen. If we discovered tomorrow that gravity is twice as strong if you stand inside a giant magnet, that would totally cause scientists to revisit everything they know about gravity and magnetism. That's not very likely to happen, but surprising discoveries on a smaller scale do happen all the time in science, and the theories have to change to accommodate those new discoveries.
In math, though, mathematicians clearly define what they mean by a number, what they mean by raising a power, and so on. Everything we know in math we know for certain because it's either been defined that way, or proven to be that way. Math doesn't change based on observations of the world, math stays what it is, and we change the mathematical equations we use to explain the world.
So nobody could ever discover that 6^0 is not 1, because it's been defined that any number to the power of zero is 1. It didn't have to be defined that way, but it makes more sense than any other possible value.
Occasionally there have been cases where mathematicians believed something to be true but hadn't proven it, and it later turns out to be false. Occasionally they even believe something has been proven, but this is far less likely because there are a lot of smart mathematicians out there and an incorrect proof doesn't usually last long.
| 38 | 54 |
ELI5: What even is plastic? | You've probably heard that everything is made up of atoms. Well, atoms come together in different ways to form unique molecules. Sugar is a molecule, for example.
Plastics are very special molecules called polymers. These polymers are made up of monomers, which are like lego blocks that can be stacked up on top of each other to make a bigger and bigger molecule. What makes plastics really special is that these molecules are very big and stable, and it's very hard to pull the lego pieces apart and break them down again. That is why plastics last for so long in the environment. | 30 | 26 |
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ELI5: How are underwater tunnel highways, like the Lincoln and Holland Tunnel, built? | edit: Thank you for all the responses! I learned so much :)
and to those of you who were like "why can't you just google it" I DID. That's why I made this post, because I was left answerless and confused. Believe it or not, thats what this subreddit is all about. If you wanna bitch about nothing head over to /r/bitch or better yet, /r/adviceanimals | In a variety of ways, depending on the exact circumstances.
If the geology and cost permits it, they'll just tunnel through the rock under the water, and then seal the tunnel walls with concrete or something to prevent leaks.
Sometimes, prefabricated tunnel sections are built on land, then put on a barge, taken to the appropriate spot and submerged. That's how they built the trans-bay tube for San Francisco's BART system.
| 404 | 913 |
ELI5: this wonky jet stream giving planes the extra speed from a tailwind. What happens if a 777 breaks the sound barrier? | How bad can this extra fast jet stream really be for commercial travel? Is it dangerous? Do planes have ways to slow down if they get caught in it?
Edit: wow. Lots of information. Thanks people. | We can measure the speed of an aircraft in two ways - ground speed, and airspeed.
Ground speed is how an observer, stationary, on the ground would perceive the aircraft. Airspeed is how fast it's going relative to the air that it's in. If you have an aircraft that's doing an airspeed of 500mph in a 200mph tailwind, it'll give it a ground speed of 700mph.
It's rather like if you're on a 100mph train and start to jog down the carriage at 4mph - to an observer by the side of a track, you're doing 104mph, but the effect on your body is no different to you doing 4mph.
It's the airspeed that's important when it comes to deciding if an aircraft is going to hit problems. It may be really fast to a ground based observer, but it's quite normal for the aircraft. | 60 | 66 |
How far can we travel away from Earth? | I'm taking a Cosmology class right now, and I recently watched [this kurzgesagt video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL4yYHdDSWs) about our absolute boundary in the universe. So far in class we've mostly just been going over the expansion of the universe, so I tried to justify the assertion in this video to myself: we cannot travel outside of our local group.
The Hubble constant at the current time is 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec. I set up an equation where the change in distance, dx, is equal to the hubble constant times the distance times the change in time, dt. Solving the differential equation, you get that the final distance is equal to about 1.03 times the initial distance over the course of 500 million years. Something about 3 mpc away (the diameter of the local group) would not even increase in distance by a megaparsec. At half the speed of light, you could travel about 77 mpc in this time. This is ~25 times the diameter of the local group.
I know that the Hubble parameter changes in time, but my textbook seemed to suggest that it would not change in any meaningful way over the course of 500 myr. Even if it increased by two orders of magnitude (I tried this by just having it start at two orders of magnitude higher), the distance is still well within travel distance.
Where is Kurzgesagt getting this from, then? I feel like I'm missing something entirely or that I'm wrong about the evolution of the Hubble parameter in time. | If we neglect engineering issues (your rocket accelerates as much as you want anytime you want) you can reach all things that are closer than ~16 billion light years. That is far, far outside the local group. If you decide to do that you can't come back to Earth any more, however. If you want to come back you are limited to 8 billion light years.
If you travel much slower than light then you'll be limited to whatever is gravitationally bound to us and stays close to us - that's mainly our local group. | 34 | 61 |
If gravity is the bending of space-time, then how can there be a graviton - a single particle of gravity? | I just don't get that part. The presence of matter causes space-time to warp, and it is this warped space-time which we experience as gravity - at least that's how I've heard it explained many times. If this is the case, then how can there be an exchange particle for gravity? (The graviton, as I understand it).
The two things don't add up for me - is it a wave/particle duality thing? Does anyone have a vaguely decent which can help me wrap my head around this? | Consider the electric field around a charged object. When the object accelerates, the electric field changes and information that this changes has occurred propagates outward at the speed of light. This is electromagnetic radiation. If the change in the source of the field is discrete (like an electron changing energy levels in an atom) then the propagation of the field is also discrete: we call this a photon.
When a bound gravitational system changes, the gravitational field around it changes and this propagates as gravitational radiation. Gravitational radiation has been indirectly observed by monitoring the orbital decay of pulsars. If there were to be a discrete change in the source of the gravitational field, that discrete quantum of gravitational radiation would be a graviton. | 24 | 38 |
I believe that STEM majors are inherently superior to Humanities majors. CMV. | STEM majors are demonstrably useful: they have countless practical applications. The society we live in today is so great precisely because of the merits of science and technology.
They are also based in truth and fact. In science, one person can be right, and a billion people can be wrong. The person who's right can do experiments, and prove that he's right. Science then changes itself to accommodate this new, correct view, even though so many people thought it was wrong. In the Humanities, determining what's right and what's wrong is literally a popularity contest.
People say that Humanities teach you skepticism, but this isn't the case in my experience. Science is the subject that teaches doubt: I was shown the evidence and explanations behind all scientific theories, and it was impressed upon me never to accept anything as dogma. Whenever I was taught something, I knew that it made sense, and I knew the justifications for it.
In Humanities, I'm constantly told inane bullshit about symbolism, with little to no evidence offered as backing. It seems as if people are unabashedly making things up as they go. I have to come up with bullshit ideas, and then couch them in vagaries and complicated language, so I can obfuscate the utter inanity of what I'm saying.
I'll also never use any of this ever again. There are absolutely no practical applications to literary analysis. People may say that Humanities are a study of culture, and that culture is what makes us human. Well, if that's the case, then why do I have to care about what some academic thinks is important? I can argue that Batman is just as integral to society as something like Pride and Prejudice. Why can't I just read Batman comics all day?
I think that if someone wants to major in a Humanities, he/she should just not go to college and save the money. I could probably learn just as much by buying some famous books, and coming up with dumb explanations about what I think the authors meant.
On an aside, I have an anecdote concerning Humanities and bullshit. I had to read an article for my writing class. It was the most inane, arcane bullshit I've ever read in my life. It read like a retarded kid got a hold of a Thesaurus. The entire article was just vague, unformed ideas, splattered with complicated language. The next day, the T.A. talked about the article. He said that the language was very common to articles in the Humanities, and that in the Humanities, terms like the ones in the aforementioned article would be essential.He basically admitted that in Humanities, you have to use overly-complicated words and try to confuse your readers, instead of using very simple, to-the-point language and teaching them something.
Finally, I don't think that I'm smarter than someone without a STEM major. I really admire craftsman like carpenters and plumbers, because they do difficult, and often disgusting work that I wouldn't be willing to do. They are an integral part of our society.
Of course, I'm also implying that I admire craftsman much more than Humanities majors, because the only thing a Lit major can do when my toilet is clogged is explain how the backed up feces is symbolic of the mire of societal expectations or something retarded like that.
Sorry for rambling and ranting. Writing this was cathartic, in a way. It's still a Change My View though. I would like to see some of your responses. | Its easy to point at literary criticism as an example of "worthless" humanities but at the very least you should take a look at other humanities fields before dismissing the entire set of fields. Once you see that some humanities fields are worthwhile you might be able to see that literary criticism is useful.
Imagine we want to try to solve geopolitical problems like the strife between Israel and Palestine. Its going to be **really** hard to accomplish this without understanding the political and social climates and histories of the two nations. This is a situation where history, sociology, and political science are critical to being able to find possible solutions. You aren't going to be able to engineer your way out of this issue.
What if we want to understand the ethical and legal implications of the NSA spying programs? Are we going to be able to do that with just technical understanding? Absolutely not. The technical details of the NSA programs are far less interesting than the social and political details. We need humanities people to be able to make ethical arguments about technological privacy. In fact, it is really easy to see why we need humanities in our discussions when we see many of the major techie privacy or computer freedom advocates talk. Most of these guys have somewhat reasonable arguments but are unable to present them without coming across like raging assholes. Look at the story of Weev and the legal battle surrounding what he did. The important parts of his situation are not the technical parts but the nontechnical parts. At the very least you should be able to see why having both technical and non-technical expertise is needed in order to be able to deal with these sorts of situations.
What if you want to decide whether a particular bill is good policy? How will you decide? There isn't some function that we can plug bills into and see if they will benefit society, and even if there was which metrics would you use to define benefit? What if there is a bill that will increase economic freedom at the expense of some other personal freedom? Is that a bill worth passing? How will you argue for or against such a bill. All of these questions fall into the realm of the humanities.
Even if you say "history, political science, law, sociology, etc are all social sciences so they don't count" you still have the entire field of philosophy which has had massive impact on how we decide to organize our societies. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was mostly taken from John Locke - a philosopher.
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Also, there are plenty of academics who study comic books, in particular by using them as a lens through which we can study the periods that they were written in. | 47 | 17 |
Can isolated mountains like Erebor, the Lonely Mountain from LOTR actually exist in real life? | You usually find a mountain as a part of a mountain chain. Is it possible for geological phenomena to favor the formation of a fairly large mountain that exists in isolation, without being a part of a mountain chain? | Volcanoes are your best bet, as the other mountain-forming processes tend to be regional effects.
Certain types of overlapping folds, if they contain the right layers of rocks in the right order, could also do it. Salt domes are another potential candidate.
It also depends on how isolated you need it to be. Near Kilimanjaro, for example, there are a number of large volcanic cones that don't really merge with their nearest neighbors. They are still related to each other in the tectonic setting that created them, but you could take a photo of some of them and it could be passed off as Erebor. Its mineral richness compared to Erebor might be questionable.
There are metrics such as topographic prominence and topographic isolation, but these don't quite measure what you're looking for.
The mineral richness may be the real hard part, even moreso with the isolation. | 21 | 19 |
CMV: Many on the left focus too much on white privilege | I believe that white privilege does exist, at least to a degree. Some amount of ardent white supremacists still exist, and a larger number of people who hold discriminatory views without being hostile also exist. This is a problem, and I support efforts to address this problem as we can.
However, a growing trend since the 2010's has been to place white privilege as one of, if not the, biggest problems in society. Scarcely can leftists even mention another issue without making it about race, too. It's not enough to say "10,000 people are homeless in x city", they've also got to say "a disproportionate number are black". Does that really change anything? Is it not enough for some people that they're homeless? Why does their race factor at all? You see this on issue, after issue, after issue. If it's not made about race, it's as if some people don't care.
I'm a leftist. I live in a deep blue state. I've voted Democrat or further in every election I've ever voted in. I want to feel less agitated about this topic. But I do, and for a number of reasons.
1) Class is more important than race. In just about any scenario, a rich black man lives a better life than an impoverished white man. Given this alone, poverty should be considered the most important issue with regards to privilege and power, and yet race so often seems to distract from this. Talking about white privilege as such a central issue implies racism is a bigger problem than poverty.
2) It misses the trees for the forest. Any generalized statement like "white people are privileged" is going to have a million caveats to it. You can say, for example, black people are disproportionately killed by police, and this is a fact. Some go the extra step and say that whites don't know what it's like to fear police. Sad to say, it's also a fact that police kill thousands of white people every year. This fact is, for some reason, very rarely ever mentioned in discussions of police brutality. Plus, on an even more basic level, there's just people who are exceptions to any rule. Assumptions, in that way, are kind of inherently toxic when taken uncritically.
3) It's counterproductive. Focusing on race is inherently divisive. It reinforces that race is something that matters, which moves us further away from the goal of a colorblind society. Some reply to this by saying we're just not ready for a colorblind society. To that I say, how exactly will a colorblind society ever come about on the path we're headed? At what point do we get to say enough is enough? The historical realities of discrimination will never truly go away, and focusing on race only strengthens it.
My biases: I'm white, I grew up in a low income family in a racially diverse minority-majority community in a blue state, I'm Irish by ethnicity, my dad would probably go further on all this than what I've said here.
Alright, tldr, basically I think white privilege is real but it's secondary to class and toxic to focus on so much besides.
If you want a delta, be respectful and try to build off what I've written here.
CMV.
Edit: To anyone going around downvoting this conversation, you are part of the problem. | > which moves us further away from the goal of a colorblind society
Do you think having a classblind society would address class based issues (homelessness, access to healthcare, ect)?
If not, then why do you think willful blindness to race based issues will solve them? | 14 | 16 |
[Marvel] Does Spiderman have any Martial Arts Training or is it all just Spidersense? | Through experience and trial and error he has essentially developed his own bespoke form of martial arts that exploits his enhanced agility and spider sense.
When he lost his Spider sense he enlisted the help of Shang Chi to develop a new style that still made use of his enhanced abilities (sans Spidey Sense) but was more formalized as an actual martial war (Way of the Spider, or Spider-Fu).
He also has some prior generic combat training from Captain America (but who doesn't.) | 102 | 50 |
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CMV: There is nothing wrong with a non-obese guy dating an obese woman, and people who think otherwise are bigots | I'm using a throwaway because this concerns me personally and some of my friends know my regular account name. I hope that's okay with the mods. I'm a young guy (average attractiveness, unfit but not overweight) who's recently started dating a quite obese girl. I've gotten a lot of flak about it, both in the form of trivial insults ("wow, she must be *really* funny or something") and more serious serious comments like that I'm damaging my image by dating someone "below me" and that by telling her I'm attracted to her the way she is and so on I'm encouraging an unhealthy lifestyle. I *do* find her physically attractive (call it a fat fetish if you want, but I think it's just taste) although of course if she wanted to lose weight for her own reasons I'd be fully supportive and stay with her. She's funny, artistic, and fun to be around, and I think everyone insulting me or her because of our relationship is little better than people who criticize interracial relationships.
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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!* | Holding men and women to different standards (expecting women to be beautiful by society's standard of beauty, expecting women to be nice, expecting men to be wealthy, expecting men to work hard, etc etc) is certainly a societal problem. But it isn't bigotry. They don't think you are a traitor to skinny people for dating a fat woman. They just think you are mismatched in quality, and that a mismatch in quality only makes sense if the 'flaw' is in some way shared.
By all means, date her if you like her. But don't judge the people who are judging your relationship. They are trying to help you, and their criticisms are informed by the fact that relationships with large mismatches in 'quality' have higher rates of breakup/divorce. They aren't bigots, they're reflective of a societal problem but aren't themselves problematic on an individual level. | 18 | 17 |
ELI5: How can cgi be used to cast objects on thin air like they do in football matches without the need of a green screen which is used in movies | My understanding of a green screen is that the green screen defines the cast space on which an image or a video is cast on. Any space which isnt green isnt detected as cast space. However in football they just cast stuff on thin air without the use of a green screen. How does that work..... cause movie makers spends LOADS making entire green rooms. | The purpose of chroma keying is preserving the foreground. The things that go *in front of* the screen are preserved and the shot being composited in goes behind them. In compositing overlays for sports broadcasts and such the overlay is *supposed* to be the "topmost" thing in the final shot. That's what it's there for. | 15 | 31 |
CMV: Our current "world leaders" are incapable of the necessary change required to avert climate change. | In light of the most recent [IPCC report](http://www.ipcc.ch/) and my own reading of [Ugo Bardi's *Extracted*](http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/extracted:paperback) it seems clear to me that the only way to avert **more** climate related disasters and catastrophic economic change is to immediately push our economy to be more decentralized and distributed.
My view, which I wish to discuss, is that our current "world leaders" are not going to be able to make the sweeping systematic changes required to make this *inevitable* shift in our economy. Any changes they will propose will be weak and impotent. I believe that it is within their power to do what needs to be done, but they lack:
* The political **courage** to stand up against the institutional (aka corporate, private or monied) power.
* The **will** to dismantle and distribute their own political power
* The **trust** that other leaders will do the same
The assumption I am making is that a **massive restructuring of the economy is going to happen**. Infinite growth is an insane way to operate on a finite planet and *is* going to stop and decline if not collapse.
My fear is that people keep waiting for "world leaders" to do something to soften this transition, to fix this problem, which they are not able to fix.
Change is coming and if we wait for the "world leaders" to lead we will find ourselves following the change, rather than guiding it.
EDIT: great discussion, but very few people even touched on my point. I don't feel that anyone convinced me that world leaders are going to be able to deal with climate change. It seems clear that we, citizens of the world, will be leading the change. Good luck out there.
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your benevolent overlords. 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!* | What do you mean by decentralized/distributed economy?
Because to me, the solution to your problem isn't decentralization and distribution, it's increased centralization and the nationalization of major industries at the hands of a dictatorship.
As long as you have democracy, you will never have the political will to enact meaningful change in time to prevent environmental catastrophe. Decentralizing political power means that people will pursue their own interests with their increase in relative power, and people in general are awful long term planners.
You make a major assumption that everybody would suddenly commit to an expensive long term goal, and that the only thing preventing this is political power centralization by ineffective leaders. You've got it backwards- democracies are typically *terrible* at long term planning because people in general vote for their interests instead of the greater good. Autocracies, on the other hand, can do it much better because you are relying on one person to make a decision instead of millions upon millions of fickle voters.
This also solves the problem of trust - it's much easier to negotiate with someone who is going to be in power for long periods of time than it is with someone who could be elected out of office in a few years.
Courage and a successful political career in a democracy are unsustainable. If you try and stand up for your beliefs, and those conflict with the interests of your constituency, you are no longer a successful politician. A dictator, on the other hand, can make those tough choices without fear of being taken out of office by electoral means.
You can solve the environmental problem, or you can have a democratic state. To me, there appears to be no way to reconcile the two. | 38 | 260 |
ELI5: How was Germany under Nazi army able to find the money to fund WW2 when their economy was in shambles just a few years ago? | I just wish to highlight there's a good page on wikipedia that goes into depth about this.
But in short, almost instantly after ceasing powers the nazis reorganized the economy into a state-driven and controlled "free-market", loaning credits to companies and making their rivals illegal. They also relied heavily on "special credits" given to corporation that worked with the Nazi regime.
Essentially what happens is you tell a company you will give them money in the future if they do something - with the promise of money coming in the company hires more people - these people then buy stuff in the economy and the government get's revenue from those purchases and the loop continues until it all falls down.
A lot of credit was taken as a guarantee as Hitler had assured people and the party that the east was German Living Space - and therefor the riches would come with eventual conquering of all of Europe. | 122 | 111 |
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CMV: Having racial dating criteria isn't racist | People can have racial dating preferences and it shouldn't be problematic or labeled as "racist". To clear the water, I want to state that I personally don't have any racial dating preferences, although I have a huge soft spot towards wavy-curly haired women. Let me pose some examples for you, it should be fine if a black man only wants to date white women. As long as he doesn't put down black women and other races. It's ok for a white guy not wanting to date black women because they are simply just not his type. But if he were to state that he doesn't date black women because they are "loud" or "chicken-eating bitches" then he is a racist piece of shit. | Is your view that aesthetic preference isn't racist?
Hypothetically, say we have a person who prefers light skin. If they reject an albino black person because they're black, that's different than just not preferring the look of most people who are black.
A racial dating criteria isn't the same as generally having an aesthetic preference that tends to exclude people of a race. Another example would be someone dating a mixed race person who doesn't look like they're that race.
If someone doesn't like the aesthetic of say, asian women, but dates a white/asian woman unknowingly, and upon finding out they are asian rejects them, is that racist in your view? Because that draws the line between a merely aesthetic and racial criteria.
I am not sure how "your type" can be inclusive or exclusive to race when race is something about a person that you can be completely in the dark about since aesthetics nor personality necessarily tell you what race a person is. | 13 | 16 |
ELI5: What are the differences between lumen, lux and candela and why do i need to know? | We were talking about it in school and i understood nothing. | Lumens are how much light is emitted by a light source. Lux is how bright a surface is (lux = lumens/m^(2)). Candela is how far you can be from a surface in order to light it up.
I shall try to explain this better. Take for example a 100mW green laser pointer. It emits about 10 lumens. A candle also emits about 10 lumens. This means that if you aimed both of them at a white ceiling, your room would be lit up about the same amount.
The laser, however has a much tighter beam (about 2.1×10^-6 steradians vs about 10 for the candle). This means that the candle has about 1 candela while the laser has about 5 million. This means that the laser would be as bright from 5 million metres away as the candle would be from 1.
To explain lux, imagine you're in a dark room and you're trying to read a book. If the pages aren't bright enough, you can't read very well. It doesn't matter how much total light you have (gigantic pages don't help you read if the text is the same size) but it does matter how much light you have per unit area. The minimum illuminance needed to read is about 2-3 lux.
Note: The numbers in this comment may be out by a factor of 2 or so. | 67 | 139 |
How much energy would you need to create different types of mass, such as sub atomic particles, or even whole atoms? | In general you need energy equivalent to the amount of mass you want to create, according to Einstein's mass-energy equivalence. In practice, if you want to be able to generate any sort of particle out of nothing, you'll need much more energy to control the processes and machinery you use. | 706 | 3,127 |
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A lecturer, on a side note, said that if at all possible, always stay as far away from C and C++ and use other tools instead. Does this make any sense? | I'm still fairly new to programming, so I'm just wondering here.
If I were to build software like, say, Photoshop or Pro Tools, **what other options would I have besides C and C++?** Aren't the features in C essential to building software from the ground up?
Thanks in advance! | You should always use tools of the highest abstraction level that allow you to solve your problem within efficiency constraints. This is because many lower level automation mechanisms save you work and include the quality of the overall solution, as you "build on the shoulders of giants."
Ideas you can reuse, without building your own:
1) Garbage collection
2) Operating system portability
The reason to choose a lower level interface is to handle two situations:
1) You want to UNDERSTAND the underneath
2) you can not satisfy the operational / efficiency needs at the current level of abstraction.
Just like math, you don't need to understand the fundamental theorem of calculus to measure the speed of a car with a sensor. You don't need to understand assembly to make a webpage. BUT, it is fun and enriching to spend some of your time understanding the deep underneath. | 81 | 54 |
I've heard it reflects badly if you do your PhD at the same place as your undergrad. Is the same true if you have a different undergrad but a Masters and PhD from the same institution? | I'm currently in a terminal Masters program which results in not only the degree but a industry credential, thus why I am in this program instead of going directly to PhD. However, my long-term goal is to teach at the university level. My main interest is teaching but I would be pleased to be involved in research as well.
I am happy with this geographic location and with the faculty in my department, and would be interested in staying here for a PhD. Is this something that would come back to bite me if I were to finish a PhD here then go out to find a job as a professor and/or researcher? | The stigma attached to this varies a lot by field and is mostly an outdated concept. Your collaborative opportunities aren't as strongly tied to your geographical location anymore.
*If* you're going to move, move up. Don't move just for the sake of moving. | 54 | 37 |
ELI5 How does the human heart seemingly keep going as a muscle without fail through years while other muscles in our body get fatigued within minutes or hours? | Cardiac muscle cells contain more mitochondria than skeletal muscle, meaning each cell has more available energy, making the muscle more resistant to fatigue. On top of this cardiac muscle has more readily available blood supply than skeletal muscle, allowing for better transfer of nutrients in and waste products associated with fatigue (like lactic acid) out. | 84 | 153 |
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ELI5: If a dog's hearing is better than a humans, why don't dogs seem uncomfortable when the TV volume is loud? | You're working from the presumption that "better" hearing means they perceive volume to be magnified, however this is not the case.
Think about humans with differing eyesight. If one person has better eyesight than another, they might be able to see objects off in the distance more clearly, however that doesn't mean that nearby objects appear magnified or that everything seems brighter to them. They're simply able to see more thing in fine detail.
Similarly, dogs are able to pick up more sounds than we can -- they can hear frequencies that we cannot, and they are more sensitive to quiet and subtle noises that we may not notice. This doesn't mean that everything seems *louder* to them, however, only that they are able to hear more than we can. | 88 | 52 |
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ELI5: How do they translate made up words when translating something like Lord of the Rings into a language with a writing system like Chinese or Japanese? | Not sure about Chinese, but in Japanese it would be translated as faithfully as possible phonetically, since Japanese also has a syllabic/phonetic writing system (kana) in addition to kanji (which is what you're thinking of). | 12 | 20 |
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I've finished "Imagined Communities" by Benedict Anderson, what are some further interesting reads that corresponds with his ideas, whether as a critique or a further build? | Here are a few suggestions of texts that address some of the same questions that Anderson grapples with, specifically as they relate to nationalism.
Books
Nations and Nationalism by Ernest Gellner
Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec by Richard Handler
Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? by Partha Chatterjee
Articles:
Arjun Appadurai “Patriotism and its Futures” in Public Culture (1993)
Simon Harrison “Cultural Difference as Denied Resemblance: Reconsidering Nationalism and Ethnicity” in Comparative Studies in Society and History (2003)
Katherine Verdery “Whither ‘Nation’ and ‘Nationalism’?” in Daedalus (1993) | 15 | 46 |
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ELI5: Why does Israel spy on the US? | Everyone spies on everyone as much as they are able if they are smart.
Making decisions requires information. If you don't have correct information then you are less capable of making the right decisions. Therefore if you value making the right decisions then you must also value pursuing accurate information, even if those people with the information don't really want you to know. You see, the people making the decisions swore an oath to their own people and owe it to them to make the right decisions, and they don't owe the people who want to keep secrets anything at all.
This is why everyone has spies of varying ability, even if nobody wants to talk about it. | 27 | 21 |
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ELI5: When a zygote first begins to divide in the womb, how do the new cells "know" what to differentiate into? How does a "kidney cell" know that it's a "kidney cell" and not a "brain cell" or a "nose cell"? | Each cell in your body contains your entire DNA sequence, or genome, but not all genes are "turned on," so to speak. Rather, some cells use only parts of your genome, and other cells use other parts of your genome. No cell in your body uses the whole thing.
So, your question really might be rephrased: how do the cells know which set of genes to use?
For that, you have to go all the way back to the moment of conception. The point at which the sperm enters creates some damage on the way in, which we call a pole. The egg cell starts depositing chemicals in the area in response to the damage.
As the cell starts to divide, some new cells grow near that pole and are being influenced by those chemicals that were dispatched in response. The influence is that it starts turning certain genes on and off: specifically, they start activating genes that start creating proteins. Some of those proteins will diffuse to farther reaches of the cell, but most of them stay local. The farther away, the weaker the effect.
These chemicals, in turn, will end up turning other genes on and off. This creates multiple layers in the developing embryo (3 layers, to be exact). Each layer only has the capability of forming certain types of cells.
How each cell comes to "know" its function (i.e., has certain genes turned on, or "expressed," if we use better terminology here) starts to become a little different at this point, as a few different processes are in play, and not all organs form at the same time. It would be a different explanation for each one.
Within a few weeks, most (not all, but most) of the cells have differentiated before starting to divide. For example, cells that form the heart walls are already cardiac muscle cells: they're just splitting into more cardiac muscle cells to complete the process. Once something becomes one kind of cell, it isn't going to be able to switch to something else. It's fixed in that particular role.
By the time you're born, your "nose cells" can only split into more nose cells because they're fixed in the role. You can't grow a "kidney cell" there because the genes for the kidney aren't active in the nose cells, and if they split, you'll just have two cells that don't have the kidney genes active. As such, you can't grow a nose in your kidneys or another hand on your ear. | 38 | 53 |
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Eli5 , How do windsurfers get back to where they started if the wind is only blowing one way? | The only way I can think that this would be possible is if the wind was blowing directly onshore?
Edit: thanks for all the well thought out replies. I think I’ve got it figured out know, I’ve always Been a bit confused about ships tacking into to wind and I think the key thing I was missing was the sail being using like as an airfoil creating pull, used in tandem with with the fins/keel . | Sailing ships, and windsurfers, can make progress upwind by tacking.
Say the wind is coming from the north. The ship can sail as close to the wind as northeast or northwest. So if it alternates, first going this way and then that, the *net* movement will be north. | 284 | 344 |
ELI5: 1/X^n = X^-n | The relationship between different powers is as follows:
You can get from X^n to X^(n-1) by dividing the former by X.
That is, X^n divided by X equals X^(n-1)
Given that X^1 equals X, we can use the above rule to find X^0.
X^0 is X^1 divided by X. X^1 equals X so X^0 is X divided by X, or 1.
Now, we can use the above rule to find X^(-1).
X^(-1) is X^0 divided by X. X^0 equals 1 so X^(-1) is 1 divided by X or 1/X. Since X^1 equals X, we can substitute that back in and get 1/X^1
And you can keep going. You'll find that, through the same methods, X^(-2) equals 1/X^2 , X^(-3) equals 1/X^3 and so on. | 61 | 33 |
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Physics question, if stars moving away/towards Earth appear blue/red shifted, how do we know their colours are red/blue because they are moving, and not just that they are a red/blue coloured star that’s relatively stationary? | (I hope this makes sense, I wrote this whilst very sleepy, and also I can’t quite remember how it works) thank you! | Specific elements shine brightest at different specific colors of light. Sunlight/starlight doesn’t have even amounts of each color, some colors are brighter than others due to specific elements glowing brightly at that color.
So when measuring red/blue shift, they look for those peaks in the color spectrum and see how far off they are from the “normal” peaks of the color distribution. | 39 | 18 |
CMV: I don't understand why we put so much into taking care of very disabled people | To preface this I am not saying we shouldn't help them at all as that would be very inhumane
I don't understand why we funnel so much time and money into trying to make them suitable for simple things like wiping your self in the bathroom. My school pours large amounts of money into a program that is aimed to help mentally disabled people function but it is essentially a daycare for them which also holds back anyone that just barely qualifies for the program from getting an actual education.
I just feel like the money would be better spent trying to improve some of the massive flaws of the school instead of doing the job which there are already institutions for. | Well setting aside the more troubling implications of this question for the moment, there is a sliding scale of "disability" and it's not always cut-and-dry. Disability is not a binary thing where you are either "normal" or "disabled." Some people have medical conditions that limit their functionality; some people are perfectly healthy and just unable to perform certain tasks to satisfaction because of their physical inclination. There's a very real question of where you draw the line between "disabled" and "not disabled."
If you only count people with drastic physical / mental injuries / deformities / health issues, then that's still something that's fluid. You can develop an illness; you can suddenly be injured; your health can naturally decline over time for genetic reasons.
If you count anyone with some kind of health problem or injury that poses an obstacle to them in any way, however slight, you're including a lot of people who are probably perfectly functional in society with no assistance and wouldn't even likely consider themselves "disabled."
We take care of "very disabled people" for the same reason we take care of normal people, because they need to be taken care of. Unless you mean to make the case that someone's life ceases to be "as valuable" because of their economic contribution or cost to society, there's no good reason *not* to that doesn't necessarily involve undercutting the inherent value of human life on some arbitrary external value basis. | 335 | 403 |
ELI5: why does the body make SO MUCH snot during a cold? | The presence of snot makes sense I guess, but why does the body make so damn much of it? How could leaking enough fluid to damage surrounding skin and half-drown a person be productive? | What's important to understand about diseases is they're not creating symptoms because they're intelligent little fiends who enjoy your misery. Many of these symptoms have been evolutionarily selected-for to spread specifically that virus. Rhinoviruses for instance are adapted to live and thrive in your nose and usually can't find purchase at all in other biomes of the human body. So they make you sneeze, in the hope to get inhaled by others noses, and they make your nose run, in the hope the snot will get picked up and as people constantly touch their faces hitch a ride to a new nose. White Plague (tuberculosis) makes you cough because it lives in the lungs. Blue Plague (cholera) is adapted for your lower GI tract, hence it makes you poop all over the place. Malaria is adapted for your blood stream, hence it hitches a ride on bloodsucking mosquitos; lyme disease is also bloodborne, hence it uses ticks as its vector. Part of what makes the nastiest diseases so nasty is they are so virulent as to live anywhere in your body. Black Plague for instance comes in multiple horrifying varieties depending exactly on how it enters the body and where in its whimsy it chooses to colonize; Ebola is similar in that you're losing infected blood from every orifice and making new orifices to ooze blood/virus. COVID-19 on the other hand is relatively "nice" compared to Black Plague in that it can only get a foothold via the lungs or eyes, but like Black Plague once it gets in it gets everywhere. Not only can it kill you horribly, something like half of survivors have almost random debilitating symptoms for what may be the rest of their lives. Zoonotic diseases are like that, because by definition they've become so protean that not only can they colonize different biomes on the same species body, they can jump to different species.
Interestingly, diseases don't "want" to kill you, in that it means they die too. Admittedly their highest evolutionary priority is reproduction, but after time passes they have a tendency to evolve to be nonlethal. The simian version of HIV (SIV) for instance is endemic to wild primates but also doesn't appreciably affect their health. Meanwhile HIV in humans has killed 33 million people since the start of the HIV epidemic in 1981, and still kills something like a half million people a year. | 981 | 833 |
[Saw Film Series] How is Jigsaw able to almost psychically know people's darkest secrets? Like the bystander who saw Jeff's son get killed, or the woman who smothered her baby? | He was an engineer with a knack for picking up subtlety, seeing how things worked and understanding them, with both people and machines. Once he went off the deep end and decided to start killing people, that *reading people* got cranked up to *obsessively fixating on anyone and anything*, and he started stalking people until he learned *everything* about them.
In some of the later films it's revealed he had dossiers on tons of people locked away, comprehensive files that detail everything he could learn about them. Those were people who he could watch closely enough to learn their secrets and how to get at them. There were probably tons of people he stalked and watched, but didn't learn enough about them to figure out their dark secrets; only the victims he *was* able to uncover enough about got captured.
Edit: he was also blackmailing a police officer, and was using him for both his access to police files as well as an extra set of eyes and ears. | 37 | 35 |
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CMV: Knowledge is valuable in so far as it is useful. The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is pointless. | It's difficult, if not impossible, to say what knowledge will or won't be useful before it's acquired. Einstein's theory of general relativity seems, at its surface, like a curious explanation of how the universe works that operates at such a massive scale that it's irrelevant to day-to-day life.
But modern GPS systems need to compensate for the behavior predicted by general relativity, and in fact, doing that compensation is one of the main things that causes GPS to function the way it does.
The end point of knowledge may be its practical application to the benefit of mankind. But it's impossible to predict what route to take to reach that endpoint. The accumulation of knowledge is like filling out the areas of a map—you might even discover new destinations in the process, or shortcuts to get from one point to another, relationships you never realized existed. | 23 | 15 |
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Death penalty, Correction centers and society | It is quite easy to jump to judgement of someone who killed, raped another human being. Lock them up and throw away the key right? Who’s with me? Well it is my hope that as a society, we can say wait lets hold on for a second. Doesn’t that make us animals, being ruled by emotion rather than rationale.
Sometime ago I watched one of the Netflix series on criminals on death row. One specific trend that can easily been seen is that they all had specific circumstances in their early childhood, whether sexually abused or radically traumatized in one way or another. In other words, we could posit that it is society who made these humans into criminals. Our societies failures create these criminals. Shouldn’t it be societies responsibility then to ‘fix’ them? After all the prisons are so called correctional facilities.
I am in no way saying that guilty parties should be allowed to walk, but shouldn’t we as a society rethink our system? Neurological research shows that dysfunction in the brain can lead to such acts of violence in individuals, some scientists go as far as saying that these individuals cannot control themselves in the moment. The fact is that these people can be fixed with treatment, and thus should be allowed to come back into society to provide some sort of benefit. After all it is a human life.
May 1st 2011, Obama came on the television screen in the hospital to announce that Osama Bin Laden was killed, quickly thereafter the news organization turned to showing people cheering, embracing and celebrating this achievement. At the same moment the doctor of a close friend of mine walked into the waiting room to announce that he has passed. In this moment, no form of celebration from my side was possible, rather it was fairly enraging that someone can celebrate the death of another person after all it is a human life, enemy or not.
The death penalty shouldn't ever be used, unless even after incarceration they continue to be a danger both to staff and others. The irony of capital punishment is that it is a legal form of murder, murder by jury (society). But, murder it is nonetheless.
I would like to hear your thought, opinions, rationale? Am I completely wrong on this, is there some truth to my opinion? | You may find Pereboom's "Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life" and *Living Without Free Will* chapter 6, and Smilansky's "Pereboom on Punishment - Funishment, Innocence, Motivation, and Other Difficulties" and "Hard Determinism and Punishment: A Practical Reductio" helpful. | 19 | 63 |
ELI5: Why can parrots imitate human speech, but our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, cannot? | Primates have vocal cords which are used to make sound, then your mouth and tongue to form that sound (humming) into more distinct sounds used for words. Human vocal chords and tongues have evolved in a way that makes them precisely controllable (which is needed for speech), while our close relatives do not have this adaption, so are only capable of making barks and yelps.
Birds make sound through a completely different method. Instead of using vocal chords, lips, and tongues, they have a syrinx, which are almost like speakers. They just control the vibration of the syrinx very precisely, so they can imitate humans, animals, and even machines. Many birds don't have particularly sophisticated syrinx, so they can only squawk and chirp, but some birds have evolved the precise control needed to emulate almost any noise they hear. | 304 | 231 |
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ELI5: How is war profitable | I was wondering this when I debated war with my brother who said, that at least war and tax money going to the us army is not wasted, since war is profitable.
But how is war profitable? The Iraq war cost 5 trillion dollars, which is more money than exists in the entire world. And the US military has an annual budget of 500 Billion, which is about switzerlands GPD.
So how can you possibly recuperate that much money? Because that is more money than oil could possibly be worth.
So how does the US military make its money back? | War is profitable to specific people/institutions. It comes with a commensurate loss by others (ex: taxpayers).
​
That money being spent goes to defense contractors like Blackwater, Lockheed Martin, McDonnell Douglas, and they get rich. When government spends money, that money goes into the economy, usually boosting it because there's more money floating around. Is there a lot of debt? Yes.
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War is costly for some and profitable for others. The US military makes its money back by asking for more spending by the government into the defense budget. | 52 | 27 |
Does repeated exposure to COVID after initial exposure increase the severity of sickness? | I’ve read that viral load seems to play a part in severity of COVID infection, my question is this:
Say a person is exposed to a low viral load and is infected, then within the next 24-72 hours they are exposed again to a higher viral load. Is there a cumulative effect that will cause this person to get sicker than they would have without the second exposure? Or does the second exposure not matter as much because they were already infected and having an immune response at the time?
Thanks. | There is evidence that suggests that repeated exposure during your initial infection could lead to an increase in the severity of your symptoms. As you said the term "viral load" is extremely important in order for us to understand why the virus hits some people harder and others not so much and we know that for a couple of reasons. Our immune system doesn't have as much time to deal with infected cells as their amount increases. The bigger the viral load the more cells become infected and the more the virus replicates and that's a poor prognostic factor. We know that for a fact based on how the current pill (paxlovid) for covid works, it disables a protease that allows the virus to properly replicate thus it REDUCES the viral load. If you take paxlovid days after the initial symptoms then its effect becomes insignificant and it's basically not nearly as useful. The same goes for another pill knows as oseltamivir (for the influenza virus) which also doesn't allow for proper replication of the virus inside our cells thus it reduces viral load and leads to a less severe infection. Also the covid infection is a biphasic infection which means it has 2 parts. The virulant part (first 7 days) and the inflammatory part which leads to what we call "covid pneumonia" today. The higher your viral load is during the initial infection the stronger of an immune response your body will induce which is more likely to lead to an extreme autoinflammatory response.
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So in short, yes repeated exposure increases viral load and viral load leads to worse symptomatology and possibly triggers the second inflammatory phase of the covid infection. | 1,707 | 3,851 |
How are musical tastes developed? And do musical tastes necessarily have an effect on how a person behaves or acts? | I've always been curious about this.
Specifically, I'm wondering if someone has never heard music until they're 16 years old, and start listening to a broad range of genres, how would the person identify what their musical taste is? In this case, they wouldn't have an influence in their upbringing to what music is listened to.
And to the second question, I'm not really asking if the person is more violent for listening to screamo etc. but rather more small ways of thinking. | What constitutes aesthetically appealling music has been argued quite a bit in the West by music theorists, philosophers, and musicologists over the last few millennia. One common argument has been an appeal to natural law, from Pythagorean ratios and tuning to Rameau's explanation of major and minor harmonies and tonality being derived from the overtone series (and a speculative subtone series). To some extent this line of reasoning continues today in the work of spectral music composers an theorists and outsider figures like the drone/raga/just intonation artist La Monte Young.
Other era specific theories you might find interesting are the baroque affects which ascribe a particular feeling and color to differing harmonies and the gallant style from the classical era (Haydn, Mozart, CPE Bach, etc.) that emphasized a simple elegance and eveness in phrasing, melody, and harmony.
Study of past ages and the eccentric tastes of foreign cultures during the 20th and 21st century has led most modern scholars to conclude that while these culture specific theories are neat, musical taste is almost entirely a product of environmental conditioning. An appeal to nature only makes sense in a culture that values that sense of nature, the affects of the chords were learned, the gallant style was framed on either side by historical periods of immense complexity (late Baroque and Romantic). Isolated cultures often value the use of varying tuning systems, rhythmic frameworks, melody, timbre, etc. | 384 | 1,265 |
Why are most moons tidally locked? | With the exception of Pluto's smaller moons, all the moons in the Solar System are, to my knowledge, tidally locked with their respective planets. Why is this?
Wikipedia says,
> Most major moons in the Solar System, the gravitationally rounded satellites, are tidally locked with their primaries, because they orbit very closely and tidal force increases rapidly (as a cubic function) with decreasing distance.
But I don't honestly have any idea what any of this means. | Tides are a small bulge induced by gravity differences when two astronomical bodies interact. You can see that with the sea, but it also works on rocks. It is less noticeable, but has been detected on earth (most notably with the large hadron collider).
When the smaller body is not tidally locked with the larger one, the bulge is not always in the same place (as are our sea tides). The rotation of those moons induce a small shift on where the bulge is compared to where it would be if the moon was tidally locked (as much as sea takes time to go up and down, so do the rocks). Gravity pulls on the misaligned bulge, acting as a break on the small body's rotation until it is in step with its rotation around the bigger one.
The closer you are to the bigger body, the stronger its influence on the smaller one. | 48 | 113 |
[Corruption of Champions] Wouldn't dealing with... well, everything drive a human insane? | This protagonist is confronted with demons, goblins, person sized bees, constant risk of pregnancy (even if male), repeated risk of death, and somehow, the character seems almost completely normal in conversation, and doesn't act all that weird.
Just got raped 5 times? Go back to camp and chill, sleep for a couple hours, and go out again without any dwelling on the past.
Does this person have any actual mind? | Typically the people selected from the village to enter the portal are ones the town has deemed 'suitable' for the task. Remember, the initial task about you being a Hero is a lie, you're really a sacrifice to keep what's on the other side of the portal satiated for a while.
In order to keep from frequent sacrifices, the town would have to pick someone who wouldn't buckle immediately from the stress and pleasure this world is fraught with. Even if they did give into their urges straight away they are still performing their task well enough; keep whatever is on the other side occupied. | 19 | 38 |
ELI5: how original parts or models of machinery is made. | How are machines parts made so exactly. I assume there is a master model that all lives are made from but how are those master models created so precisely and how are they measured. | There's a variety of manufacturing methods used to create machine parts.
The "simplest" is to create the parts from stock material in a workshop, piece by piece, using lathes, mills, etc to precisely machine down each piece to the required specifications.
When designing a machine, the entire thing will be modelled in CAD, with each part being inspected for conflicts with other parts.
From this CAD model, parts will be assigned tolerances, which will determine the minimum and maximum size each part can be and still work.
As for measurement, measuring tools are calibrated against known standards, so that each tool agrees with each other. There is some tolerance in this process, which needs to be understood.
This is a very simplistic look at design and manufacture. | 22 | 15 |
ELI5: Why did humans seemingly evolve to be unsuited for living in nature? | * We struggle to survive in cold or wet climates without clothing and shelter
* We have limited vision in low light
* We can't see clearly underwater
* Our babies require constant care and oversight for first couple years of life
* We have significantly less strength-to-weight than our ancestors
* We're much slower than most of our prey and require tools to kill
and others
It seems like our necessity for tools and shelter was in response to our state of evolution, so why was it beneficial for humans to evolve from sustainability in the wild and into a more domesticated lifestyle? | > so why was it beneficial for humans to evolve from sustainability in the wild and into a more domesticated lifestyle?
All tradeoffs for that great big powerful brain we've got.
If you're wondering why it was beneficial, **look around you**. Look at the world. What animal is the apex predator in every environment it enters. Humans live in every corner of the globe and we dominate every species we encounter. Sure we do it through tools, but those tools are a direct result of our single overwhelming evolutionary advantage: That brain. | 28 | 16 |
ELI5: What's DOMA and why is it considered unconstitutional? | There are a couple of arguments, mostly to do with ennumerated powers, equal protection and full faith and credit.
The 10th Amendment says in part that any power not specifically given ('ennumerated') to the federal government by the Constitution belongs to the individual states or to the people. As the regulation of marriage isn't at all related to any of those powers, the argument is that DOMA is unconstitutional by that reason alone; in other words, Congress never had the authority to make any law about marriage, that being the job of each state to decide for itself.
Article 4, Section 1 of the Constitution says essentially that each state must recognize as valid the laws of all the other states; in this case, essentially meaning that if you get married in Massachusetts, Kentucky isn't allowed to act like you're not married when you visit Louisville. This is why opponents of gay marriage care what other states do, since they're legally prohibited from just ignoring it.
The 14th Amendment says in part that the states are required to apply all laws equally to all people. The way it's written, this doesn't apply to the federal government, so DOMA itself has been hard to challenge based on equal protection so far, but it has been an obstacle to state-level laws banning gay marriage. | 10 | 16 |
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ELI5: Can someone briefly explain chaos theory and any modern practices/uses of it? | Most mathematical functions we use regularly are relatively well-behaved: if you take a few inputs and their respective outputs (both of which can be multiple variables) you can predict what other input would get you in terms of output, at least in the ballpark. This is especially true if the initial outputs are almost the same: you can expect outputs which are almost the same.
But sometimes that is not the case: you slightly alter the input and you get a very different output. This is especially true in cases where you aren't taking exact inputs but approximating them (such as what we do in pretty much every actual physical application of physics): what you initially thought were two equal inputs were not equal and their end results are very different.
However, we are still dealing with functions: they are actually predictable if the input is the same, but it's much more difficult to approximate them. We can study them to see if there may be some interesting things we discover about how they behave, but they are harder than other functions.
One application is developing what looks to us as randomness generators: you take a sufficiently exact initial measurement, and then run that into a chaotic function. This is not truly random as if you knew the input you would know the output (a series of numbers), but it's hard to land on the same sequence twice.
Similarly, good encryption requires functions which behave somewhat "chaotically" to an observer: you want an output which does not give you a clue of the corect input even if you only have near miss. You can technically reverse engineer most encryption algorithms with enough correct key-value pairs, but the goal is to make such a calculation completely impractical. | 16 | 17 |
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What would happen if every child born had $X put into an 18 year trust and when they turned 18 that money could either be used for college, or help starting adult life? | This could be much more intricate, but couldn’t this be some sort of “free college” compromise | Quick Math to work with: government gives newborn $1,000 in S&P, which averages 10% annual return = $6,000. At best a semester’s worth. Let’s use future college cost of $100k - if government is paying it won’t be cheap in 18+ years. Thus, X would need to be $16,653 per baby at 10%/yr compounded monthly. Using 4m US babies = annual cost of $66,624,000,000, or $66.6B. Not quite free. | 21 | 22 |
How were roots and logarithms inititially calculated without the use of calculators? | Right now all I do is use the root, log or ln button in my calculator and it spits the answer out. Is there a systematical way of calculating this by hand? | There are methods that can be used to approximate roots and logarithms using pen and paper. Calculators also use such approximation techniques, but can perform them much more rapidly, so they can produce much better results.
For square roots, the oldest known approximation method is the Babylonian method. This method works by taking, for the square root of an input value S, an initial guess, x0, for the solution (perhaps the nearest integer root, but any guess works). You then compute the average of x0 and S / x0:
(x0 + S / x0) / 2
This value you call x1 and you repeat the process with x1 instead of x0. This can be iterated until the desired accuracy is reached, as the estimate comes closer to the actual solution with every iteration.
Approximation methods for logarithms are a bit more complex, but follow the same pattern of iterating a set of simple operations until the approximation reaches the desired level of accuracy.
Note that in the past, people working with logarithms often used so-called logarithm tables, large tables containing many precalculated logarithm values. | 2,315 | 4,601 |
Why is there discrete states of matter, as opposed to a continuous “spectrum” of matter? | Why does matter go through discrete phases of solid → liquid → gas, rather than a continuous change going through a “buttery” or “syrup”-esque phase? | At the atomic level, the temperature of a substance is a measure of how energetic it's particles are. The higher the temperature, the higher the average kinetic energy of the atoms or molecules that make up that substance. For most substances, these particles attract one another with a strength governed by the various attractive forces at play, such as electric forces, van der Waals (sp?) forces, and chemical bonds. At low temperatures (and high pressures) the particles don't have enough energy to break these bonds, and the substance is solid. At medium temperatures some but not all of these attractive forces can be overcome, and at high temperatures the particles become completely separated and exist as a gas.
So why are there no in-between states? Because these bonds are binary; either they exist or they don't. Either the temperature is high enough to break the bonds, or it isn't. There is a very clear threshold above which the bonds are broken, and below which they remain intact. This translates into a clear division between states of matter.
Interestingly, because temperature is an average measurement, it's possible (and indeed quite likely) for individual particles to have a much higher or lower kinetic energy than that average and break or form bonds independently of the rest of the substance. This is how water can evaporate without boiling, for instance. It's also possible for particles in a solid substance to gain enough energy to sublimate directly into a gas. | 88 | 144 |
CMV: Religion should not have any legal protection from the government beyond free speech. | If I make a facebook post saying "I love Jesus", and my boss fires me because he saw it, I can sue him (if I can prove it).
If I make a Facebook post talking about how I believe in aliens and the NWO is out to get us, and my boss fires me because of it, I have no legal recourse. I exercised my free speech, but my employer can fire me for any reason, to include my free speech.
Both "Jesus" and "aliens" are emotional beliefs, and things people believe are real.
Furthermore, I could say 'I like red cars", and if he got wind of that, he could fire me.
Why does belief in Jesus trump belief in red cars and aliens?
If my employer says I cannot wear my Star Wars shirt to work because it's unprofessional, I cannot sue.
If my employer says I cannot wear my turban to work because it's unprofessional, I can.
Why does the turban get a pass?
If I tried to argue that it caused me emotional distress if I didn't wear my Star Wars shirt, because George Lucas might be displeased with me if I didn't, then my boss would consider me mentally ill. Yet somehow if you are upset you can't wear your turban because Allah will be displeased with you, you get a pass.
I'm all for freedom of religion, but why does it deserve any more protection than free speech already has?
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We have those laws that protect us from discrimination on select things. Race/Religion/Sexual Preference/etc. We decided those were important not because they're any more sacred than anything else, but because of the degree of discrimination that we've seen in the past, and because they're easy to identify.
You're right, there are a billion things that people get discriminated on every day.
We have stuff like favorite sports teams, what kind of car you drive, and even the stuff you brought up like belief in aliens. That stuff may result in discrimination, but it's not as widespread or as apparent as race or religion. And also, if you do believe in crazy stuff, it's very easy to hide it from your professional life. You can't really hide being black. While you can "hide" your religion, religious discrimination is very powerful and if anyone wants to, they can fairly easily find out if you follow a religion.
Height, weight, and attractiveness are probably reasons for discrimination just as much as some of the protected ones - but those are very hard to quantify. What is tall? What is short? What is attractive?
So it all boils down to a few things that we, as a society, have selected as being not only important, but easy to see. | 31 | 137 |
ELI5: How do seeds know which way is up? | So I was doing some gardening with my 9yo daughter and we moved on to planting some seeds. She was studying them carefully before dropping them into the holes in the compost. I asked her why and she said that she was trying to make sure she planted them the right way up, otherwise they wouldn't grow upwards and flower.
As cute as it is, this got me thinking... How does a seed know which way is the right way to grow? | ELI5: Plants have cells that can tell which way is down. The roots know which way is down. The leaves/stems decide which way is up by sensing the light.
In the most simple of terms, plants have cells called stratocytes in the tips of roots that respond to gravity. They give a signal that releases a plant hormone that directs the growth of new cells.
In the shoots and stems, a similar process occurs which directs growth upward. Mature plants don't really have this ability anymore and thus use the angle of the light to "decide" where to grow. This is called phototropism.
A seed in utter darkness will know to grow roots downward, but a plant in utter darkness will not know which way to grow upward because there is no light for it to chase after.
| 3,377 | 12,458 |
If you introduced a near-vacuum at, say, -20C, what would happen to an ice cube? | I know boiling points are dependent on pressure (if you put water in a vacuum bell at room temperature, you can induce boiling without changing temperature), but I'm not sure what happens to solids / melting points. | Ice will sublime - go from solid phase to gaseous phase.
This is, in fact, how a lyophilizer - or freeze-dryer - works. You first freeze your sample solution until it is frozen solid. You then put it in a lyophilizer, which utilizes a very strong vacuum to keep the headspace pressure low. Your sample will then begin to sublime - and since sublimation, like boiling, is endothermic, this process keeps your sample cool. This will continue (for several hours, for a small sample) until no more water is left in your sample, and all you get is a solid powder of whatever was dissolved in the solution is left.
You may also have seen this in freeze-dried instant coffee. | 23 | 15 |
What do professors/postdocs look for in undergrad students wanting to volunteer in their lab? | Are there any particular qualities they look for? I've been told that they just assume undergrads have no research experience and I'm guessing it isn't as big a factor as it might be with grad students/postdocs. I've also been told enthusiasm is a big factor, though I'm not sure how I'd show them my enthusiasm/passion over text (since I'd have to email them before meeting with them, assuming I met with them at all).
Is there anything else they look for? | You have to show genuine interest in their work. Don't send out the generic "I want research experience, are you looking for people?". Say you looked at their work and find X particularly interesting. Say you had some questions about Y paper or research. Ask if you can meet with them to discuss more. Then at that meeting, after you've talked for a bit, say it's really interesting and you'd love to do that type of work. Do they have any openings? | 62 | 75 |
CMV: Nearly all problems in history are caused by the human obsession with categorization | While we can say "money causes all the problems! Look at the wars for oil!" or "religion causes the problems! Look at the crusades!" and so on, these things are true but I believe it all stems from our innate "desire" (if I can call it that) to categorize things.
What I mean by this is that essentially, everyone puts a divide between themselves and others through certain artificial grouping methods, allowing a disconnect which ultimately leads to acting unfavorably towards each other.
For example, a war for oil might stem from differing political beliefs, and because they're from x country, you feel no (or far less) sympathy for those people. Even though we're all the same people, we have this man-made concept of a "country" to divide us and disconnect us from others. Same thing with crusades - all part of the same human race, but the man-made concept of religion again puts a disconnect between people and ultimately leads to armed conflict.
There's the artificial divide of politics - I looked at all Trump supporters like they were assholes, racist, etc. Not that I necessarily believed *literally every last one of them* was racist, but categorizing them into a big group which generally shared certain qualities. Then I realized a large majority of my family, whom I've loved my whole life, are Trump supporters and we're really not all that different. Similar idea with racism/sexism/xenophobia/etc. - generalizing a big group into a set of core characteristics.
I also thought I'd never hang out with some redneck who chews and drives a big obnoxious truck and goes hunting every weekend or whatever. I'm in college right now for Computer Science, and I made a friend this year in working on a project together. He's smart, gets his work done, etc. no complaints about him - but then I realized when he was talking to me once that he was exactly the type of person I thought I'd never be friends with. We're similar in so many ways, and had I known what he was like from the start, it might have warped my perception of him.
There's also global warming. The average person just looks at it like it's the big bad companies causing all the problems, or they think it's China and it's pollution, or whatever the cause, and disassociate themselves from the problem, never (or rarely) making lifestyle changes to improve it. They put themselves in a separate group from "global warming causers" and brush it off like someone else will take care of it.
Or even something I saw recently - it was some Facebook video talking about how people with dimples are on average more popular or better looking or something along those lines. Of course this is not nearly as "big" as a war, but it's a good example of how "low down" this goes - putting a divide between people with dimples and people without. Making you feel like you're "superior" because you have dimples. (I put superior in quotes because I think that's a bit strong but it's the same sentiment)
We are constantly being divided by preconceived notions of beauty/looks/actions, man made concepts like religion/country/politics despite being fairly similar in most ways, and ultimately it leads to virtually any problem in history. 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!* | I would say arbitrary categorization shapes most human conflicts, but it doesn't necessarily cause them. Suppose you have two tribes of people living near a spring, which is the only source of water in the area. The spring has enough water to feed 200 people, but each tribe has 150. Eventually, they'll probably go to war with each other and one tribe will be destroyed or flee the area. You may say the distinction between one tribe and the other is arbitrary and meaningless. But that categorization only defines who is on which side of the battlefield. The battle itself happened because there were more people than the water could support.
The same can be said of most conflicts, including competition for mates (creating arbitrary definitions of "attractive"), oil (limited number of oil wells), power (51% of people are going to vote for one candidate, 49% for the other; how you draw that line is arbitrary) etc. | 17 | 36 |
How do photographers make the sun/moon look massive? | [Like this](http://imgur.com/1EGovcg) | Simply by zooming in with powerful lenses on far away objects. Think about the size of the moon relative to other objects on the far horizon- a tree may appear to be the same size of the moon if it's far enough away from you. Now, simply zoom in on that scene and the moon will appear gigantic. | 25 | 36 |
Finance vs Economics | How can we differentiate Finance and Economic.
Or can we ?
Is stock market a topic under finance or economics. | Finance is one tiny subfield within economics. The stock market is a topic in Finance, which is one subject within this tiny subfield of economics.
Here is the way to think about it: Someone with a Ph.D. in Economics can transition to becoming a finance professor in no time. In fact, we can be Finance professors by taking a little test while in graduate school, thus getting a "Field" specialization in finance (and making sure that some of our research in our dissertation is related to finance in some way to make it credible). There are also several 8-week summer programs in the US that takes Econ Ph.D.s and re-credentials them as Finance professors. However, it does not work the other way around: Someone with a finance Ph.D. would have a very hard time convincing people that they could be an effective economist-- it *could* be done, but would take a very long track record of publications in econ journals. | 68 | 68 |
ELI5: What does exactly happen in your brain when you try to remember something but cannot and then you remember it out of nowhere after a while | There are different parts to memory, one of which is memory recall. There are also standardized ways in which the brain can essentially malfunction including a recall error where one's memory is primed but there is a failure to recall the relevant information while the feeling of familiarity still remains. An example of this is the tip of the rounge phenomenon. Your brain knows there is something to recall but fails to recall it. | 163 | 661 |
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What is the importance of the prime numbers? | I've often wondered what the importance of prime numbers are, since they seem to be stressed in mathematics. I've asked this question many times (this is the first time I've asked reddit), and I either get my question "answered" with a question, or a smarmy answer.
Can someone please explain to me the applications and potential benefits from, say, one day finding *the* prime number formula? I do know that there are applications for this in cryptology, but outside of this, I'm not sure what the implications are or what the importance is. Thanks in advance for any help! This question has always nagged at me.
| Just to give an illustrative example, one of the most important properties of the natural numbers is the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, which says that every natural number has a unique prime factorization. This fact was crucial to Gödel's proof of the Incompleteness Theorems, which is widely considered to be one of the deepest results about mathematics that has ever been proved. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems state that any axiomatic formal system that is powerful enough to capture arithmetic will always be either incomplete (in the sense of not being able to prove everything that's true) or inconsistent (in the sense that one can prove a contradiction), and that no such system can prove its own consistency. Gödel's famous proof involves attaching a number to each symbol in the formal language, and then storing these numbers as the exponents on an increasing sequence of prime numbers. This "arithmetization" assigns a number to each statement in the formal system, and because of the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic such an assignment is guaranteed to be unique. Given a number, we can write the statement that it represents, and given a statement, we can calculate the number that gets assigned to it. Arithmetization gives the formal system a *recursive vocabulary*, meaning that the system can say things about itself. For example, Gödel proved that there is a statement which says of itself "This statement is not provable." If the statement is false, then the system is inconsistent, and if the statement is true, then the system is incomplete. Gödel proved that this is an inherent property of such systems, and that there is no way of getting around incompleteness (such as by adding new axioms). This groundbreaking and frankly shocking result of metamathematics depends entirely on the properties of prime numbers. | 19 | 31 |
ELI5. Why does recovery from an injury or cut, takes longer time for a person with high blood sugar than a normal person | Non-enzymatic glycosylation from high concentrations of circulating blood glucose causes microvascular damage (tissue level), damage to normal cells and their extracellular matrices (cellular level), and causes up-regulation of inflammatory protein synthesis making it more difficult to recruit cells to maintain the healing process (molecular level). These all contribute to poor wound healing in diabetics.
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5yo version:
In people with diabetes, the amount of sugar in their blood is much higher than in someone without diabetes. This extra sugar is more than their body can handle, so it sticks to the cells all by itself. Once this happens, the cells don't work as well as they should, and it makes it a lot harder for those cells to ask for help from other cells to heal.
Source: MD | 152 | 85 |
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CMV: I genuinely think Breath of the Wild is an overrated game. | Greetings!
I think that Breath of the Wild (for either Wii U or Switch) is an overrated game which is exclusively appreciated by the nostalgic fanbase, and I think it fucking sucks.
Let me just say that I DO have the game for Switch, but it's the worst 60€ I ever spent. I hate the graphics and the fact that the game is too slow at times. I also hate that every single weapon breaks in very little time (even though it is not like that moving on).
I could ignore all of this stuff if it wasn't for the extremely low framerate (it's between 30 and 20), and it's literally unplayable because of that!
I'm certainly not an RPG fanatic, but I love games like Skyrim and Fallout 4.
Though, I love the tutorial because it was perfectly structured and gave me a huge insight on how the game is like. However, I don't feel that it deserved the Game of the Year award.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Understand that everything and anything that can be judged is subjective. Meaning the experience of the subject (Breath of the Wild) varies depending on the individual’s personal perception of it. To call something underrated/overrated is superfluous. Try not worrying about what others think about something and only concern yourself with how *you* feel about it. No one’s going to change your view about something that’s subjective.
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What's stopping Open Access journals | Can someone explain to me why publishing research papers can't just be like submitting code to Github? Why do you have to go to a publisher when you have to pay them and they put your paper behind a paywall? | Who coordinates peer review? Who pays for web hosting space and ensures that all articles will be available online forever?
There are lots of open access journals, but they require publishing fees to cover the costs of publishing, even online. | 78 | 56 |
ELI5:Why don't car manufacturers make all cars as visually appealing as Ferrari's or Lamborghini's? | There's a lot of reasons but I'll try to come up with a shorter list -
1.) form follows function. There's no way to make a car that looks like an exotic sports car that can still haul 5+ passengers and carry lots of cargo.
2.) platform sharing. many vehicles in production today share platforms, engineering, chassis designs, etc with other models. Ferrari's and Lamborghinis have bespoke chassis (although yes the Gallardo does share it's platform with the also exotic Audi R8). Carmakers want to design a platform that is as versatile as possible and able to used in as many different vehicles. Toyota uses the same design architecture (in various forms) to underpine the Camry, Highlander, Avalon, Venza, Lexus ES, and Lexus RX. Nissan is unique in having designed a platform that can be used on everything from a sports car (370z) to a SUV (Infiniti FX) to a large luxury sedan (Infiniti M). Then again, the 370z does not quite have the same stance as a purebred sports car like an S2000 or Boxster, and the FX is also just about the most car like SUV you'll find. When you compare the Mustang, Challenger, and Camaro, one key reason the Mustang is several hundred pounds lighter is the Camaro and Challenger are essentially two door sedans (the Camaro sharing it's platform with the late lamented Pontiac G8 and the Challenger with the Charger), so they are heavier, whereas the Mustang does not and is designed to be a sports coupe. Common architectures/platforms/chassis designs require compromise, and that's not something Ferrari or Lamborghini have to really do.
3.) not everyone likes the look. for some people, their car is no different than their washing machine - it's an appliance. they want something bland and simple that gets the job done. making a bland looking car is also the least offensive and polarizing, and therefore more likely to have the broadest appeal. People are far more likely to buy a car who's styling has no effect on them than one that they find ugly.
4.) a carmaker may have it's own design language that it is trying to convey. A Mercedes or a BMW have their own distinct looks that identify the brand, and styling one of their cars to look like a Ferrari or Lamborghini wouldn't look right. Brand identity is something very important to many carmakers, and they try hard to make their cars recognizably theres. Look at the grill Ford is now putting on all their cars, or Cadillacs vertical headlights and tailights. Same goes for muscle cars like Camaros, Challengers, and Mustangs. They just wouldn't look right any other way. | 2,928 | 2,427 |
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ELI5: why is it that when we yawn our hearing decreases massively for a second or two? | Your throat is connected to your ears by tubes that allow pressure to equalize between the inner and outer ear. This is why yawning can help pop your ears, by manipulating those tubes. When you yawn, they are pinched shut, which increases the pressure in your inner ear momentarily. That increases pressure makes it harder for sound waves to move your eardrum, which makes everything sound muffled | 17 | 18 |
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ELI5: Why is alimony paid for people without kids? | If one of the partners was not working, it is assumed that they were bringing other things to the marriage (keeping up the house, cooking, yard work, entertaining, etc.), and that these things were a benefit to the working spouse in his or her career.
Alimony gives the non-employed spouse a financial safety net that provides some time to get on his or her feet and find employment. | 65 | 105 |
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How does eye color change? | I know that some people have eye colors that change noticeably and that children may have blue eyes that change color as they get older. How/why does this happen?
Edit: Also please answer kwagener's potential color changes "Mine go from dark brown to bright green depending on the mood I'm in" | It's not that the amount, or color of, pigment in the iris changes, but as the iris dilates and contracts, the pigment becomes concentrated or spread out, changing the perceived color. There are also differences in perceived color depending on the type and intensity of the light source.
As for babies, some are born without the pigment fully developed, and it takes time for it to come in. | 24 | 41 |
ELI5: How did shampoo become popular if there aren't any benefits to using it? | I can see why once people start using it they don't want to stop due to greasy hair, but why did it start if its not useful? Also, if there are benefits that I don't know about, what are they? | There are a lot of benefits to using shampoo, you simply are not suppose to use it more than once or twice a week. Shampoo cleans your hair removing both dirt and natural oils. This is a good thing if not done too much. | 45 | 43 |
ELI5: What distinguishes light that reflects on a window and light that travels through? | If you go to a window, you can obviously see out of it and also see your own reflection to an extent. My question is: someone on the other side of the window can also see you in the window. So, if a photon of light is reflected from a point on your body, what decides whether that photon is going reflect on the glass or go through?
Follow up, no widows have patches of “dark spots” as you can see your entire reflection as well as the entire of what’s on the outside. So is this a completely random selection process as a photon from the same point will sometimes reflect, sometimes not?
I’m gonna be surprised if I get an answer to this, but I hope I do! | First, ELI18, then ELI5.
ELI18: When any electromagnetic wave meets a discontinuity in a dielectric medium, part of the wave is reflected and part of the wave is transmitted. The amount reflected and transmitted depends on the dielectric constant (or index of refraction) of the medium and the frequency of the electromagnetic wave (it happens for radio waves as well as visible light waves). It also depends on the angle of the light to the interface, and if you are traveling from a medium with higher index of refraction to lower index, the wave will be totally reflected if the angle if incidence is below the angle of total internal reflection*. It also depends on the polarization of the incoming wave, with the reflection coefficient depending on both the angle and the polarization state.
ELI5: When light enters a material other than air, some of it goes through, and some of it bounces off. How much goes through and how much bounces off depends on the material, the color of the light, the angle the light hits the material, and from which side you are shining the light. For glass, if you shine the light straight at the glass, or look at your reflection, about 4% (or 1/25) of the light bounces back, and 96% (24/25) goes through. That amount changes if you tilt the glass. But what if you shined the light from "inside" the glass? In that case you can get 100% to bounce off the inside surface of the glass. For example, think about a fish tank. If you shine a light into the water, part will go through and part will bounce off. If, however, you shine a light through the side the aquarium at a shallow angle and off the surface, you can get all of the light (100%) to bounce off the surface and back out the other side. Similarly, if you shine, for example, a laser pointer into the edge of a sheet of glass so that it skims the edge from the inside, then at a low enough angle 100% of the light bounces back in. That is how optical fibers guide light - by shining the light *inside* the material at a low angle to the sides, the light just keeps bounding along the edges (or surface if the fiber is round) until it comes out the end nearly as bright at it started.
*edited based on zuppenhuppen's comment - thanks! | 23 | 48 |
ELI5 the difference between colonialism and imperialism | And why is colonialism painted as much darker? Isn't imperialism just colonialism within the same continent? | **Imperialism** is one nation taking over another nation's land or territory and establishing political and/or economic control over that land and its native population.
**Colonialism** is one nation taking over another nation's land or territory, establishing political and/or economic control over that land, moving *their own* population into that land, and usually eradicating or forcing out the native populations.
The prime difference is between *just* exercising political & economic control of a conquered land (imperialism) vs actually displacing -- in part or in full -- the native population of the land with the conquering nation's own population (colonialism).
What the British colonists and later the United States did to the native populations of North America was colonialism, because they forced the native populations off their land and slaughtered (or otherwise caused the death) of the majority of indigenous peoples on the continent.
What the British empire did to the Indian subcontinent was (for the most part) imperialism. They exerted political and economic control over the populations of that continent, but (for the most part) they did not displace those populations and ship in a bunch of British people to settle the lands that had belonged to displaced populations.
There's a lot of "for the most part" caveats in that, because when something flips from imperialism to colonialism is a big grey area. | 210 | 89 |
What does synthetic a priori knowledge have to do with the thing-in-itself? | In other words … how do they relate to each other? These are two separate, but related, theories, right? According to Kant, the thing-in-itself is impossible to know, but any possibility of metaphysical knowledge will be that of the synthetic a priori variety. Thanks. I'll hang up and listen. | Synthetic a priori knowledge, for Kant, is possible because of our a priori intuition of space and time. These are intuitions, and have to do with both our experience of objects and the possibility of experience in general. In the schematism, Kant explains how we can use these a priori intuitions of space and time to apply the categories according to "schemata," which are something in the imagination that provides something like a "rule" or a "blueprint" for an object. For example, Kant says, the schema for a plate would be "circle."
So how does this apply to examples like mathematics? The idea of number would fall under the category of quantity, and its schema is based off sequence in time (a priori intuition). The schema isn't a picture in your head, because you can picture five things in your head, but not a thousand, yet five and a thousand can both be imaginatively constructed using the same number schema. This schema serves as a kind of "middle term" that brings together your a priori intuition of space/time (say, the time it would take to count to ten, the temporal sequence) with the category of the understanding (quantity) and applies it as a rule for sensations (numbers are constructed in sequence according to a rule). This is also, for Kant, how we construct ideas like "dog" as a rule that classifies a diverse amount of sensations as a "dog." The schema "dog" is a certain rule that organizes our sensations into the experience of a dog.
Yet because we need both the intuitions and the concepts, that is, both the *a priori* conditions of space and time **and** the categories, neither pure intuition alone nor the pure application of categories can supply us with a priori knowledge.
Since the *a priori* conditions of space and time are conditions of receptivity (the sensations we receive), not spontaneity (the categories we think), there's something "outside" of the manifold that we're experiencing (the thing in-itself), yet we cannot apply concepts to it, because there's no schema to allow this.
Thus, Kant famously writes:
>Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without content are blind.
We can *think* the thing in-itself, and we know it must exist, but because our intuition of space and time is what makes *a priori synthesis* and the application of the categories possible, we can't know what things are like prior to our spatio-temporal intuition.
Edit: Only a being with **intellectual intuition** (like God, for example) could ask about, say, the idea of "things in general" (not just spatio-temporal things), and then ask if "every thing has its cause." Because we can only apply the concept of cause based on the schema, and this involves the spatio-temporal intuition of an irreversible ordered sequence. Likewise, we cannot ask whether the thing in-itself is a "cause," because this would require us to know how to apply the causality to non-temporal, non-spatial things, again requiring intellectual intuition. | 15 | 19 |
[Superheroes] I just discovered I have superpowers; what job will let me support myself but also give me the most flexibility to fight crime? | Character Background
* 21-year-old that lives in New York City
* A high school graduate, they began working and living on their own as soon as they graduated
* They are an orphan and grew up in foster care
* They possess Spider-Man level physical abilities
* Do to their morals, they are unwilling to steal and use money from criminals
* Edit-Some additional information
* He wants to keep his identity secret
* There are no other superheroes in the city | Don't establish a secret identity, join a notable super team and make sure you become a common name, make also sure to develop a good social media presence, then start offering endorsement of products for money and appear in advertisements, you can also start selling merchandise. Also definitely get a Patreon account(or an alternative website).
This way you can earn a decent amount of money, where focusing on being a crime fighter actually increases your earnings. | 336 | 552 |
If it is moral to live in restraint, why do only sick people do so? | Hello everyone, I need existential help! A puzzle troubles me endlessly.
I can't decide between morality and meaning. If it is not absolutely moral to live a meaningful life, and if it is not absolutely meaningful to live a moral life, which of the two should one choose?
Perhaps you care about pleasure, beauty, creativity, love, passion, peace, serenity, health, wealth, safety, excitement, competition, or relaxation. But is it ethical?
A sensible, ethical person works as effectively and efficiently as possible to minimize universal suffering, maximize universal happiness, saves as many lives as possible, or support the environment. Is that the meaning of life?
Is it good to water one's tulips while children are being killed in a war in another country? Is it good to feel corroded by regret because one kicked a friend off a bridge to save the lives of three strangers? Is it selfish to be passionate? Is it naive to be a savior?
To what should one dedicate one's life? What should one care about? How can one defend one side of the dilemma for the other? Is there a sane way out of this?
Is art a corrupt waste of time? Is a moral life a life squandered to showing off? Are passions immortal? Are moral people existential failures?
Is this a savior complex leading me to take place in society? Is it good to get rid of it? Should I torture myself for its wishes? Imagine a patient is tortured by his conscience because he knows he could be of more use to the world, is this person sick?
How do I decide for myself? How should I live? Is it OK to live a meaningful and only kind of not immoral live? | >A sensible, ethical person works as effectively and efficiently as possible to minimize universal suffering, maximize universal happiness, saves as many lives as possible, or support the environment.
Only if you accept a very particular version of consequentalism. But yes if you do accept this then this is what should dictate your life, morality is about that which we should do, how we should live, but if you have all these concerns maybe you don't accept this very particular version of consequentalism. | 30 | 31 |
On what topics have philosophers reached a general concensus? | Some background on me so as to explain why I'm asking the question: I've taken two undergraduate level philosophy classes, one general introductory course and another on Existentialism. My question stems from the fact that in both of these classes we examined various thinkers and their selected works, taking apart their arguments and dissecting how they thought about different topics. Sometimes works from different authors would be put into conversation with each other, but for the most part my classes focused on each philosopher individually. This leads me to the question, on what topics have the general philosophical community reached a conclusion? All these different writers have all this discourse on various subjects; do they ever all come to an agreement? | Philosophers (like everyone else) are in a general consensus about most things: what happens to a rock if you let go of it, what color oranges are, how many seconds are in a minute, etc. If there's a general consensus on some topic, though, philosophers don't study it, because what would be the point? So every time you study a philosophical issue, it's one not everybody agrees about, because if we all agreed, there wouldn't be much reason to study it. | 14 | 16 |
Can mitochonrial DNA control RNA instructions, imposing a threat to transcription sequences in organisms (specifically mammalian)? | Mitochondrial DNA is exposed to genetic mutations, as is the Nucleic DNA. In humans, mitochondrial DNA provides instructions for making molecules called transfer RNA (tRNA) and ribosomal RNA (rRNA) which are complementary cousins of DNA. One of their main functions is carrying the transcribed DNA to different ribosomes in the body. Since the RNA is created by the Mitochondrial DNA, is it possible for instructions to be altered causing deficiencies in the organism? If so, what are they, and how high is the rate of incidence (occurrence)? | > One of their main functions is carrying the transcribed DNA to different ribosomes in the body.
I think you're a little confused here. Genes transcribed from mtDNA stay within the cell they were transcribed in.
> is it possible for instructions to be altered causing deficiencies in the organism
Sure, although changes to the coding genes in the electron transport chain are typically cell lethal and those genes are highly conserved. Same goes for rRNA genes.
> If so, what are they, and how high is the rate of incidence (occurrence)
Rare. As many of the possible changes to mt genes are lethal and unlikely to be passed on | 31 | 177 |
ELI5: How do non-English speaking programmers write code? | Are there translations for popular languages or do they simply memorize what the English words do (like print, for, loop, etc.) | We code in English using the English keywords but it's common to see things such as method names declared using a mix of words in two languages:
E.g. English and Portuguese:
* 'getContaCliente' instead of 'getClientAccount'.
* 'ClienteDAO' instead of 'ClientDAO'
* 'ContaFactory' instead of 'AccountFactory'
* 'Codigos.getInstance()' instead of 'Codes.getInstance()'
Also note that while valid, accentuation is actively discouraged and almost never used (except in code comments):
* 'Códigos.getInstance()' is irksome | 400 | 335 |
[WAKANDA] How does wakanda prosper with luxurious economy if it never shared it's natural resources with the world ? | This always confused me even in the comics.
(Lol its*) | 1. lack of colonization prevented their natural resources from being plundered.
2. vibranium allowed them to advance their tools faster than everyone else.
3. their agriculture and crafts and medicine allowed for a higher standard of living, higher birth rate and child survival rate, allowing them to have and support the extra population to send out into the world for research, spycraft, and reconnaisance. (The War Dogs and other programs)
4. constant underestimation of Wakanda by western colonizer nations allowed them to move under the radar, allowing knowledge, technology, political secrets, and other resources to flow into wakanda, or else be utilized and invested in other nations, under identities not associated with the Panther's lands.
5. using these resources, Wakanda was able to quietly build up funding in the outside world, aim colonizing forces at their neighbors or other countries, keep wars and profiteers from their lands, and bring any useful technology or technique home.
6. spend six hundred years doing this, keeping the secret safe (by any means necessary), compounding interest, sacrificing other nations to the west in order to defend wakanda, and infiltrating anything and everything that might develop into a threat.
By the time Wakanda announced its presence to the rest of the world, Wakanda is strong, yes. But still small, still relatively minor. | 25 | 17 |
ELI5: How do you text in Chinese? | To my understanding, the Chinese language is composed of complex characters that usually represent words. So how do you text with a language on a limited keyboard? | Pinyin and knowing the tones.
Chinese has a writing script based on roman alphabet which is what kids and beginners use when first learning the language. This is called pinyin. This is basically the phonetic transcription of the language.
There are then 4 corresponding tones in Chinese. Flat (1), Rising (2), Falling-Rising (3) and Falling (4).
The word 'train-station' in Mandarin is huǒchēzhàn. So you type it out like that but add the tones by adding a number after the corresponding character. (But not every character has a tone.)
So huǒchēzhàn would be huo3che1zhan4 and this would type out as 火车站 | 36 | 23 |
ELI5: Why is cancer so common in some organs, and so rare in others? | You always hear about breast, skin, lung, and colon cancers for example, but things like brain, pancreatic, and stomach cancers seem to be so much more uncommon. Are some types of cells more susceptible to damage than others, or are some more resilient? | Usually cells that reproduce quickly or are subject to DNA damage are going to be more likely to become cancerous.
Cancer is when our own cells begin to replicate without stopping, recruiting resources to feed themselves. It all begins with a single cell which accumulates the right combination of mutations to do all that. Mutations occur when there are errors in DNA replication as cells divide or repair themselves, copying themselves slightly incorrectly.
Most mutations don't really cause any problems or noticeable changes, if they don't outright kill the cell. And it isn't just one mutation to cause a cell to be cancerous, it takes quite a few. But if you have trillions of cells all rolling the dice over and over eventually you will end up getting the right (or wrong) combination.
Cells that replicate more frequently naturally are rolling that dice more often. Carcinogens and things like UV light cause more damage to DNA which needs repairing, again another roll of the dice. This is why someone who smokes is more likely to develop lung cancer but isn't guaranteed, they are making many more rolls but may just never get the combination. Similarly someone who cares for themselves perfectly may get unlucky and develop cancer anyway. | 74 | 41 |
ELI5: why do hospitals use stainless steel instead of antimicrobial copper alloys? | Go into any medical facility and it looks like everything in there is made of stainless steel, but hospital acquired infections are a serious problem. Wouldn't antimicrobial copper or brass for equipment and tools reduce the spread of infections? | Excellent question! Like many things, the simple answer is cost.
There are businesses who have started selling copper coatings for surgical suites, but right now they're considered a luxury. Copper is extremely expensive, and regular disinfection is pretty effective at keeping stainless steel near-sterile.
Source: currently in a biomedical materials class in which we discussed this exact thing last week. | 34 | 20 |
Why don't sealed terrariums explode? | Is it balanced so perfectly that the oxygen released by the plants is utilised by microorganisms that in turn provide carbon dioxide and nitrogen/waste, which feeds the plants and the cycle restarts? I'd just imagine there being some offset that causes gas accumulation eventually causing the glass jar to explode.
Especially when the animals within, snails and such, piggybacking on the plants I introduce, begin to breed?
Similarly to when I did sauerkraut that one time and didn't provide a release valve 😅
How can these jars stay sealed for years with no mishap it's amazing! | In order for the pressure to build up, you need something that is solid or liquid to be converted into a gas. In your sauerkraut case the bacteria doing the fermenting broke down your cabbage (solid/liquid) and released part of it as a gas.
In most ecosystems (the terrarium in this case) things are broken down and turned into gasses, but then other organisms will work in the opposite direction and turn those gasses back into solids. When a plant is doing photosynthesis, it is using power from the sun to take the carbon on CO2 and turn it into glucose (sugar), which is taking gas out of the terrarium and turning it into a solid (sort of). Other organisms will take nitrogen (N2) out of the air and turn it into something usable (often ammonia), which is then released again as big molecules break down. The balance of all of this is very important, and when things get out of flux it can have negative impacts. Sometimes runoff from farms can put too much (solid) nitrogen into an ecosystem and cause algal blooms that kill everything off.
Luckily ecosystems evolve in such a way that things are often kept at sort of a balance. If you have an ecosystem with too much oxygen in the air then organisms that can use that oxygen will flourish and naturally reduce it. So when you make a healthy terrarium you often are getting all of those balancing components. It is possible to create the sauerkraut situation though, if you don't have places for your water to drain and move through you can cause bacteria similar to the ones fermenting your cabbage to build up quickly, and then will create excess pressure, though there is less food available so it might not explode. | 71 | 58 |
I can't afford to pay Jstor $18 for every article I don't have access to. What's the best way to pirate philosophy? | I was making a reading list for the summer, and there's so many articles [like this one](http://www.jstor.org/stable/40441225) that I don't have access to through my university. What sites do you use to illegally acquire your journal articles? | To second /u/thenaterator: most libraries have an option to request papers through inter-library loan if your library does not already have a copy, and many libraries will scan .pdfs of journals that they hold on the shelves. (Some have a formal option to do this. Sometimes it just takes a nice email or a box of chocolates to the right person).
No matter what you do, you should get in touch with the reference librarian in charge of philosophy at your library. Librarians love to help, and summer is the least busy time for them. If there's a way to make this work at your library, they'll find it for you.
Another great option is to look at the website of the author. At least 50% of the time, recent journal articles will be linked for free off of the authors' website. They'll say "penultimate draft" or some other bs, but they're the genuine article for any purpose less than explicit citation.
If it's not on the author's website, try a google search for the exact title of the article. And check sites like philpapers.com and academia.edu for copies.
Another option is to email the author of the paper and (briefly!) explain your plight. Philosophers love to talk about their work, and remember what it was like to be a poor broke student. Many will be happy to send you a copy of their work.
A last-ditch legal option is that many databases now allow you to "rent" papers for 24-hours for something on the order of $6-7. And if you're renting a lot of them, chances are that (a) your parents or family might pay for some; (b) the billing department might be willing to give you a discount.
Bordering into the illegal, the next best thing to do would be to go to the closest in-state library and log on to a computer there. This computer should have online JSTOR access. Download some .pdfs of papers that you want, and email them to yourself. Librarians have to stop you if they catch you (it's breach of contract) but they don't really care as long as you're not too obvious.
Still in the realm of the illegal: find a friend who has good VPN access to JSTOR and other databases. Have them download the papers for you.
| 56 | 105 |
ELI5: Why can a refrigerator from 1943 still function perfectly but cars need their air conditioning recharged after only a few years? | I always assumed they were both simply heat pumps, so why does one run out of juice so fast? | Automotive refrigeration uses many rubber seals and gaskets. Whereas domestic refrigeration is all copper or aluminum with brazed connections. There are no rubber gaskets or seals. It’s a hermetically sealed system. | 544 | 836 |
Can the brain hold infinite information, or does it have a finite capacity once reached max you will have to start "forgetting/deleting" some of those information? | As some others have pointed out, there is probably a theoretical upper bound for the information capacity of any amount of matter, brains included. More practically, the brain does have a vast ability to store information, but much of the time this involves condensing memories down into more efficient forms. For example, you probably don't have a very clear memory of most of the birds you've seen, but all of those experience have contributed to your representation of birds. Episodic memories (memories for specific events) are reconstructed based on cues, rather than stored in their entirety - this process leads to many of the well-documented biases in our memory.
Our ability to search our memory may impose more limits on what we remember than what the brain can actually store. To use an analogy, compare memory to the internet: to find something we input search terms into google (or bing, if you're Spider-Man). However, if our search terms aren't specific enough, we'll be drown in unwanted results. As more and more memories pile up in our brain, certain mnemonic cues will become less and less effective. This model of competition between different memories with the same cues is perhaps currently the most accepted theory to explain long-term forgetting. It also explains why suddenly receiving an unusually specific cue from the external world can trigger a vivid involuntary memory. | 170 | 340 |
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What's your best case for or against a materialistic view of life? | I, a questioning atheist, have been dealing with the reality of my imminent death recently.
Though I did find solace in the anecdote "The materialistic view (in that the physical reality is the only reality) is not a fact, but simply another point of view."
What's your best case for or against materialism? | (I posted this in reply to your post in /r/DebateReligion as well, to get comments there too.)
There are only a couple of common arguments for materialism.
**(A)**: Parsimony: 'A world with two kinds of things (material and immaterial) is more ontologically complex or profligate than a world with only one (material).' Reply: No one has ever really given a remotely plausible argument for using this kind of parsimony in philosophical applications. See, especially, recent crticisms by Huemer (2009) and Sober (2009). Basically, no one has reconstructed an explanation of why parsimony is evidentially relevant in a way that explains why it's pertinent to traditional philosophical arguments. (Why, exactly, should we expect the world to contain fewer kinds instead of more?)
**(B)**: Interactions: 'How could a material thing interact with a material thing?' Reply: This argument at least has some plausibility. But it seems to kind of tacitly assume that the only kind of interaction is physical-causal, whereas instead, we might think about the instantiation-relation as an interaction. Physical interact with physical objects that instantiate non-physical properties. In any case, the argument is a bit question-beggy; if someone already believes in nonphysical entities, then it's not at all clear why they should think that a special kind of causation is at all problematic, unless someone imports a different argument for materialism.
In contrast, there are many distinct arguments for dualism. I'll mostly just look at mind-arguments.
**(C)**: Knowledge (Jackson): 'Someone might know all physical facts about some creature without knowing the experience-facts about it, so those aren't the same facts.'
**(D)**: Conceivability (Descartes, Chalmers): 'One can conceive of a world where the physical facts are the same but the experience-facts are different, and the converse, so they aren't the same facts.'
**(E)**: Objective-vs.-subjective (Nagel): 'Physical facts are objective; experience-facts are inherently subjective; so physical facts aren't experience-facts.'
**(F)**: Unity of consciousness (Leibniz?): 'Brains comprise parts, but minds are simple. So brains aren't minds.'
**(G)**: Intentionality (e.g. sort of Searle): 'Some mental-states have inherent intentionally (aboutness). But physical objects don't. So some mental-states aren't physical objects.'
**(H)**: Persons: 'Persons have different persistence-conditions (and other different properties) than physical objects. So persons aren't physical objects.'
Other, more general arguments against materialism would point to examples of other seemingly-immaterial objects. So:
**(I)**: Objects: 'Facts about epistemic justification and moral justification seem to be nonphysical objects. So do numbers, propositions, properties, relations, and maybe sentences.'
**(J)**: God: Here, just import the traditional arguments for theism. Most are bad, but some aren't *too* bad.
While someone might only be, e.g., 20% sure of any *particular* one of these arguments that it's sound, as noted, they're mostly independent, so that person might still be over 50% sure that *one or another* of them is sound. | 12 | 25 |
ELI5: How do windows on the ISS and other spacecraft not fog up? | Since it is extremely cold in outer space, moisture in the air inside a spacecraft should condensate on the inside of the windows. How is this prevented? | Condensation on your windows occurs because the heat from inside transfers to the outside through the glass, thus creating cold air right on the glass layer which causes the water to condensate out.
It's cold in space (when in shadows, otherwise it's actually really hot), but there is a very limited ability for heat to transfer in space. Heat transfers through conduction (touching something that has a lot of heat), convection (fluid currents carrying heat), or radiation. Heat from inside the ISS can only transfer to space outside via radiation. And radiative heat transfer tends to be very small unless the absolute temperatures involved are very large. | 33 | 38 |
ELI5: Why do cooked vegetables grow bacteria (and therefore must be refrigerated) but raw vegetables don't? | If I buy a pack of raw bell peppers and tomatoes, I can leave them out of the fridge for a week and they're still ok to eat. When they eventually go bad it's because they rotted, not because there's bacteria on them (I think).
However, we're always told that cooked food, like let's say I fry the peppers and tomatoes, must be refrigerated and if I left that out for a week it wouldn't be safe to eat. Is that true? Why? | Cooking breaks down the vegetables and exponentially increases the surface area that the bacteria can start working on.
As an experiment, try chopping up some salad into very fine pieces. They'll go bad by the end of the day while the unchopped ones are still good to eat for at least a day or two. | 33 | 30 |
ELI5: if brain damage occurs after about 4 minutes without oxigen, how can the world record for apnea be almost 25 minutes? | I'm first year in med school but I'm afraid this is physiology, which is a subject I haven't started yet. Feel free to explain this like you would to a first year med student instead of a 5 year old if you want lol. This is probably a really stupid question, but I really don't get it.
What exactly is the difference between not breathing because unconscious (so brain damage after about 4 mins without O2) and apnea/free diving while conscious?
You're still not breathing but your tissues and brain are obviously still absorbing oxygen from your blood flow, gradually decreasing the O2 concentration. Without new oxigen intake, you should still run out of blood oxigen in a couple of minutes, and surely taking a deep breath before holding it isn't enough to make it another 20+ minutes? What's so different then from being unconscious, and why the two times are so widely different? | People train very hard to reduce their body oxygen consumption and at the same time increase their lung capacity and blood oxygen absorption. So while for a normal person brain damage occur after 2-4 minutes the worlds best free divers with all their training and preparation can stay under water in calm conditions for about 10 minutes.
When you talk about 20-25 minutes that is not unaided. In order to do this the divers prepare themselves by breathing pure oxygen to fully saturate their blood and lungs for hours before attempting the dive. And still it is possible that the world records have only been possible using a variety of drugs to help increase absorbed oxygen and decrease oxygen consumption. | 48 | 39 |
ELI5: Why the death penalty cost so much ? | Lawyers fees through many court cases. You go through tons and tons of court appeals and trials etc before being executed. It's also a lengthy process lasting many years in most cases, so they also have to pay for your jail costs, and provide you with a lawyer for the entire time, and pay their lawyers to fight against you | 11 | 15 |
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[Star Wars] What would have happened if Vader found out that Leia was his daughter rather than finding out Luke was his son? | For this to happen, a lot of things need to happen differently.
Firstly, Vader found out about Luke when he and the Emperor looked into the pilot who'd managed to make the shot that destroyed the Death Star. From there, it wasn't hard to figure out that Luke was his child, and that Padme had apparently given birth before she'd died.
So if we're assuming that Vader found out about Leia rather than Luke, how did it happen? Well, it seems rather unlikely that Leia would ever be in the cockpit of that X-Wing in the Battle of Yavin, so let's look at it from another direction. Leia was taken to Alderaan to be raised by Bail and Breha Organa. They managed to keep Leia secret from Vader all these years... but what if they'd failed? What if, somehow, Vader discovered Leia was his daughter while she was still a child? If that's the case, then Vader would likely personally travel to Alderaan to retrieve her himself. No doubt Bail and Breha would try to stop him. No doubt Vader would not take that very well. There will be blood spilled. Alderaan's government and populace would object to Vader simply marching into a Prince's home and taking his adopted daughter, possibly killing the Prince and his wife in the process. This would lead to widespread political and popular unrest against the Empire in Alderaan, which would in turn likely lead to a heavy-handed Imperial response.
So basically, if Vader discovers Leia's his child while she's still young, then it ends in an Alderaani bloodbath.
Afterwards, Vader and the Emperor would likely start training Leia in the Dark Side of the Force. Their success might depend on how young Leia was at the time, the younger the better. Eventually, Leia becomes a key Darkside assassin and operative for the Empire. Deprived of such a key politician and negotiator, the Alliance to Restore the Republic never really gets off the ground.
Next, what if Leia is kept hidden from Vader until after she joins the rebellion. One of the first key encounters between Vader and Leia took place when he captured her ship, the Tantive IV. Suppose that Vader senses Leia's Force presence during this encounter, and realizes that she's his daughter. Well then, Vader would likely take her back to Coruscant and try to turn her to the Dark Side. Unlike training her as a child, however, the adult Leia proves much more resistant against Vader's teachings. However, because she never had a Jedi mentor like Luke had Obi-Wan, Leia's resistance is eventually worn down, especially when Alderaan is destroyed by the Death Star. Leia's spirit is broken, and she submits to the Empire. In this scenario, Leia still serves the Emperor and Vader, but not as a high-ranking operative. Instead, her role becomes largely symbolic and political, where she serves as a symbol for rebel-friendly systems abandoning their misguided cause and returning to the embrace of the Empire. She also uses her Force powers to get a leg up on the other side during negotiations and discussions. She never receives any combat training, because the Emperor does not trust her.
Oh, and the Alliance to Restore the Republic *still* doesn't get anywhere, because they've lost one of their most important leaders. | 40 | 30 |
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Does a change in the curvature of space-time literally change the shape of a local object? | First it helps to think that objects, as defined and perceived by humans, are fundamentally manifestations of fields in space-time; you can't separate them.
Now if you draw a circle on a piece of paper it is only a circle because the paper is flat. If you curl the paper up it is still the same drawing, it is still a circle if one considers only the surface of the paper, but it is not a circle if one considers the projected image on another flat surface (yet the circle itself has not changed). Likewise if we have a really long pole in space that is curved only to the right (space itself curved that is), standing at one end and looking down its length it will appear straight, but from above it will appear to bend to the right. In fact the only way to define the pole as straight is to choose a co-ordinate system that makes it such.
So the answer to your question is that there is no 'shape of a local object' to change. | 13 | 30 |
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