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ELI5: Why would we consider it ridiculous to call Obama white, but not to call him black, when he's half black half white? | For a lot of mixed race people, their racial identity is one they chose. Obama could identify as mixed, as black or as white. At this point, he's chosen to operate his life as a black man and therefore people should refer to him as a black man.
also, from a purely historical standpoint, there was that whole "one drop rule" here in America | 19 | 33 |
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CMV: Other than some personal satisfaction or enjoyment there is no real purpose to a baby-on-board sticker for a car | CMV: Other than some personal satisfaction or enjoyment there is no real purpose to a baby-on-board sticker for a car
The most common reason I've heard for this other than "it's fun" (which is fine, I'm not saying people shouldn't use the BOB sticker for "fun", but I'd treat it on the same level as a bumper sticker then) is:
1. People know that there's a baby and drive safer.
This doesn't sound true. It's one of those things that people just assume is true. I'm going to drive just as safe if there's a BOB sticker than if there isn't. My safety and car is at stake too. The fact that the owner of that vehicle is a parent is of little concern to a driver who is commuting.
If anything, this is simply divulging extra information to strangers, which makes you less safe (reminds me of that classic Bill Burr bit of how families often put on the back of their cars, essentially the menu for the serial killer in the car behind them)
Other than some personal satisfaction, can someone please change my view that there is no practical or functional purpose to using a BOB sticker? Frankly, a more stronger take on this which you can also CMV is that parents are better off not using the sticker at all.
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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!* | It's very useful for first responders. If the adults are unconscious it can be hard to know that such a small person is on board. It can also cause them to prioritize the baby because they have a higher chance of dying. | 34 | 15 |
ELI5: How are animal actors selected (auditioned/bred) during/for the audition process? | Auditioning and breeding are two massively different things, so let's take them separately.
First, an animal breeder selects animals that have certain traits like appearance and intelligence and obedience. Generally the best acting animals had smart parents, and aren't dumb-as-a-post types like poodles or afghans, or hyperactive like irish setters.
Then training takes place to ensure the animal can follow commands. This can take years. Some individual animals train much better than others so the trainer selects those to put forward for the more challenging roles.
Finally the audition comes... and the audition is just as much about the handler/trainer as it is about the intelligence and obedience of the animal. Sure you want a gorgeous black horse when filming Black Beauty... but you might need a second no-so-gorgeous-but-smarter-or-gentler horse for some of the closer-in shots such as head-nuzzling an unconscious Aragorn or for the child-actors to ride. And they rely heavily on the reputation of the trainers and handlers to secure this.
So you're often getting a collection of animals for a specific role... and if that doesn't work out, there's always CGI to create those velociraptors or clone a few more for the dalmation puppy horde. | 14 | 79 |
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Would a person weigh more at the pole than at the equator? | I ask because it seems the centrifugal force would be greater at the equator than the the pole, effectively reducing the force of gravity at the equator. This question is assuming the Earth is a perfect sphere (which I know is not the case). | Assuming a spherical earth there would be a difference resulting from the earth's rotation. So yes, you would weigh slightly more at the poles than at the equator.
Now for the earth as an oblate spheroid there is the same difference, plus you will weigh even less at the equator because you'd be farther away from the centre of the earth. | 21 | 64 |
ELI5: How does a government "shut down social media"? | I often hear that during times of unrest or insurrection, a government will "shut down social media." How do they selectively disable parts of the internet. Do they control all the ISP's in their country and rely on their cooperation? Is there an infrastructure issue? Thanks for enlightening me. | In countries which practice broad Internet censorship, the government controls crucial parts of the network infrastructure--either directly or with the cooperation of Internet service providers. The government can direct domain name servers in the country to return no or the wrong IP addresses for certain domains, or direct ISPs not to allow connections to a blacklist of IP addresses.
Both methods can be bypassed (e.g. using DNS and a proxy outside the country), but they may still be widely effective when the majority of people do not know how. | 1,305 | 3,053 |
If fast food workers are successful in raising their wages to $15 an hour, many will lose their jobs after the restaurants shift to more automated machinery CMV | First of all, $15 an hour is more than many managers make already at fast food joints. So the payscale would make no sense with employees making more than management.
Second, the cost of labor would more than double for each employee. And since fast food is generally a low skill job, fast food restaurants will opt to use more machinery to operate. I.E., self serve registers, more automation in food prep, and operating with as few human workers as possible. You could easily pay a technician $15 an hour to keep the machines functioning correctly and get much more for the dollar than a regular employee.
That said, this will result in fast food employees getting fired. But not only that, technicians and efficient management will be emphasized and it will require more skill to have the possibility at working for a fast food restaurant. | Automation takes time and technology. The more immediate impact to the workers would be the sudden competition for the jobs from semi-skilled, more reliable, workers. The sort of people who are currently in the 12-15/hour range doing work that requires minor intelligence and showing up every day. They'll easily outcompete the lowest performing fast food workers, meaning that their 'big win' has put them squarely at unemployed.
| 14 | 17 |
ELi5 : How do modern smartwatches calculate steps, blood pressure and oxygen level in blood ? | What are the technology behind this ? | Oxygen level is done via the color of your blood. That is called *Reflectance pulse oximetry.*
The watch shines a light on your skin and the color reflection lets it measure blood flow and oxygenation.
Steps are calculated by the accelerometer, which basically measures how fast and where the watch is going. There is a little math and analysis going on, but basically one swing forward and back is one step, because we swing our arms synchronous with our legs. | 23 | 29 |
ELI5: How is it the island of Java can support it's 140+ million people in area the size of North Carolina? | by depending on trade for food and other resources, and coping up with less personal space. there's still some farms and forests, but yeah its hard to get away from other people.
the total north carolina population is about 10 million? heck, Jakarta (the largest city in Java) alone has 20 million people...
source: i live there. | 12 | 20 |
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ELI5:Why are witches usually regarded as being evil while wizards are more generally portrayed as good? | Wizards, in most lore, get their powers from studying and schooling where they learn the "science" behind their magic. They tend to be more on the "good" and responsible side of magic.
Witches/Warlocks are given supernatural abilities, usually from something evil (demon, devil, whatever) - they tend to be on the "personal gain" and "evil" side of magic.
Sorcerers are born with supernatural abilities and can go either good or evil and can hone their skills through training. Think Elsa from Frozen. | 281 | 361 |
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ELI5: What did Edward Snowden actually reveal abot the U.S Government? | I just keep hearing "they have all your data" and I don't know what that's supposed to mean.
​
Edit: thanks to everyone whos contributed, although I still remain confused and in disbelief over some of the things in the comments, I feel like I have a better grasp on everything and I hope some more people were able to learn from this post as well. | In a nutshell he revealed data that showed that the US government, and multiple allied governments had the ability to do things like listen to everyone's phone calls, read their texts, their emails, follow their internet searches, track their locations (via GPS in phones) and also remotely activate people's cell phone cameras and microphones to listen and see what people are doing in real time.
In short, it was estimated that the data revealed that the US and it's allies had transparency into roughly 80% of all digital communications in the US.
It's less that this was "Bad" honestly, more that these agencies shouldn't have been doing A. to US Citizens, and B. on US soil and C. that the major data providers, the Verizons, AT&Ts, etc, were providing the "keys" to their networks for the government to provide this access. | 23,250 | 27,328 |
[Marvel/DC] Why should I become a henchman? | I'm a small time, but effective crook. I'm not an idiot; I'm decent with my fists and handy with basic weapons. I mostly get into petty theft and occasionally muggings, etc. I try to keep a low profile and even have a day job.
Why would I become a henchman to big time villain? What's in it for me? Seems like I'm likely to get my head stomped and wind up in prison. | Sleep, rest and relaxation.
When you work for a group you don't have to know everything or be everything.
You get a safe place to sleep at night, good meals when your not breaking into weapons labs or going on a diamond heist.
And when your finished for the day you can sleep well knowing you have twenty guy who have your back a badass boss and 4 sentries on duty.
| 41 | 38 |
What causes Amino Acids to "fold" into proteins? | The amino acid sequence of a protein is going to ultimately determine how it is going to fold, and the folding is stabilized by several factors. The biggest factor driving protein folding is hydrophobic interactions.
If you're unfamiliar with this, its basically the same idea as when you add oil to water, they dont mix and the oil will move together. This is because although the entropy of the oil is going to be decreased by being near each other, the overall entropy of the system is increased by the water molecules being moved away form the hydrophobic oil.
This same principle drives the folding of proteins. There are several amino acids that have big bulky hydrophobic groups that water wants to push away from and forces themselves to be near each other. Once folded the protein's folded form is further stabilized by other interactions such as di-sulfide bonds, electrostatic interactions between polar side chain groups, hydrogen bonds, and van der waals interactions. | 38 | 95 |
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ELI5: Why are most or even all toilets made of ceramic material? | Is their any benefit or its just a common style? | Mainly it is a better material for sanitation and durability versus the cost of production and ease of manufacture.
The alternative of say stainless steel like airplanes or prisons use would be overkill for but make sense when you don't want the weight of ceramic or don't want easily broken parts.
Plastics could work but using ones that don't scratch if cleaned would drive up the costs too.
Glass would be costly to mold and not provide a benefit versus ceramic.
Then possibly a artificial stone like solid surface countertops and sinks might work, but molding the shapes of the bend so it flushes and fills might be more expensive too and not provide a benefit either.
Having a material that doesn't rust or corrode and is easy to clean works pretty well in a bathroom. | 17 | 20 |
eli5: How did fuel injected engines work before we would have had computers to control them? | how did an engine without a carburetor exist as early as the 1950s when modern fuel injected engines can’t really function without being computer controlled? And why would we still use carburetors for so long after fuel injection already existed? | Modern fuel injection engines use the computer to fine-tune the fuel air mix, generally to maximize fuel efficiency but they have power curves built into them and all sorts of tweaks.
That's not necessary for fuel injection to work, though. It can just open the injector for a set period of a revolution and call it good. Older injection models worked like that just fine, using analog sensors on the cam and crank shafts to monitor timing. Later versions could even take into account the throttle position with a simple relationship rather than an actual computer calculation. Modern technology could do that as well, but they're not set up to. You can't adjust the injection timing well that way, and it's just all around inferior to the modern EFI setups in terms of both power and efficiency.
As to continuing to use carburetors: They're cheap, simple, and could dump a metric fuckton of fuel if you had a big motor you were trying to feed at WOT. early injection systems could be a bit quirky, and it could be problematic to get them to deliver the right amount of fuel across a wide RPM band, particularly in larger, thirstier engines. You also got intake injection systems that served as a sort of in-between, with one or two injectors sitting where an older carburetor would to get good atomization, but without the complexity of an injector per cylinder setup. | 27 | 20 |
ELI5:How is the sex of a baby determined? | A race to determine who finishes first? X or Y? I mean, can you really "increase" your chances of having a boy or girl?
Maybe it's just pure luck | The sex of the fetus is determined by the sex chromosome born by the sperm (x for girl and y for boy). Since sperms originate from diploid cells which contain one X- and one Y-chromosome, the chances of being boy and being girl are both 50%.
If you specifically want a boy or girl, you should do an IVF before which you can artifically select an X- or Y-chromosome bearing spern cell. | 10 | 17 |
ELI5: What is the superstring theory? | Well, let's start with ordinary, classical particle physics. It uses particle scattering at various energies to find out that some particles, electrons and neutrinos mainly, seem to be "point particles" - that no matter how high an energy we've managed to bounce things off them with, they don't react like there's any internal structure at all inside, just the one charged point.
Other kinds of particles - pions, for instance, and protons and neutrons - do show internal structure, and "quarks" are what we call the apparently-a-point particles they're made of - a quark and an antiquark for pions (and no, they don't last long), and three quarks for a proton or a neutron, both fairly stable on subatomic timescales. Quarks also seem to be point particles under our probing, even though we can't ever see one by itself, we have to probe combinations of them like a proton. Sort of like trying to examine beans when you can't get them out of a beanbag.
Anyway ... having these be point particles causes some bits of the advanced math you describe them with to blow up, to give "infinity" as a result for quantities that clearly aren't infinite in the real world. There's a process called "renormalization" that can comb the infinities out and leave usable answers, but it's nonintuitive ... and sometimes doesn't work. oops.
So around fifty years ago, someone had the thought "Hmm. ... What happens if point particles AREN'T points, way down small where we can't probe yet? What if, instead of drawing worldlines as they move, and interacting at points where three or more worldlines meet ... they are vibrating strings or loops of string? That trace out very very thin tubes, or surfaces, and meet at connections that don't have sharp corners?"
And when you try this, the math doesn't work right at all in our normal 3-space-one-time-dimensions space. ... but can work perfectly, without infinities, in different ways in ten, eleven, or 26 dimensions (one time and the rest space). Perfectly enough that "...we'd better investigate this further" was a shared thought among everyone who looked into this.
Having too many dimensions can be explained away - if you have some of them be ones that don't go off to infinity in either direction, but rather loop back on themselves, like a ring or a donut. You end up with 22-dimensional donuts, or 6- or 7-dimensional ones, but the math can be done. The remaining problem is that there are WAAAY too many ways to make even a 6-D donut, let alone a 22-D one, and we also can't get the math done _after_ that to handle interactions and get out what the answers for simple ordinary quantities would be, even if we pick a specific teeny donut.
So string theory has had a great deal of pure math work done on it ... but hasn't produced any predictions for experimental results at ALL, not even for the particles we know about, that match up correctly. So technically it's still just "the string hypothesis", because it can't actually be tested, though nobody calls it that. ...but we don't have any _better_ way right now to solve the math-theory problems with those infinities.
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tl;dr - string theory tries to develop "what if particles aren't little points with various qualities, but little strings, maybe looped, instead?", because you can get rid of some unwanted infinities that way.
--Dave, don't EVEN ask about knots | 18 | 15 |
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CMV: Traffic lights and four way stops are objectively inferior to roundabouts. | Since my town installed roundabouts, I've found that they are remarkably more efficient than the traffic lights and four way stops.
Four way stops force all vehicles to come to a complete stop, traffic lights force many vehicles to come to a complete stop before continuing movement, roundabouts allow most vehicles to go through while maintaining inertia.
Traffic lights also would appear to be the most expensive of the options, considering building costs, general upkeep, paying engineers, and installing vehicle detecting hardware.
Traffic lights also seem to have an increased risk of high speed accidents, because drivers will not always have to slow down and pay attention. WSDOT did a study on this, and they found that [roundabouts had 90% less fatalities than traffic lights.](http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Safety/roundabouts/benefits.htm)
Roundabouts also allow traffic to move more quickly than 4 way stops, [according to mythbusters.](http://www.wimp.com/testroundabout/)
tl:dr; Roundabouts are safer, more efficient for maintaining inertia, faster, cheaper. They are better for drivers as well as tax payers.
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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!* | Roundabouts require significantly more real estate than four-way stops/traffic lights, which is a problem is areas where land is at a premium. This is especially problematic in cities or other urban areas. | 93 | 121 |
CMV: A lack of funding isn't the primary reason for the shortcomings of inner-city schools: a lack of family structure is. | This post pertains to inner-city schools in the United States.
While I acknowledge that there are other challenges that inner-city school districts face (lack of funding, poor teaching, etc.) my opinion is that these issues are minimal compared to what many students deal with outside of school.
Certainly there are plenty of success stories of students coming from single-parent or no-parent households, but these situations put students at a severe disadvantage.
A few statistics:
* 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes – 9 times the average
* 85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes – 20 times the average.
Source: <http://thefatherlessgeneration.wordpress.com/statistics/>
These statistics account for just single mother households,; I would assume single father households or foster homes would exhibit similar results (if anyone wants to provide this data, that would be helpful).
So here's my view point that I'd like you all to argue against:
Pumping more money into city school districts will do little to solve their problems. Until we can start improving the student's lives outside of the school, anything that's done within the school district itself will have a minimal affect.
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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!* | Giving more money to inner-city schools can help students' lives outside of school. When schools need to make budget cuts, the first things to go are generally school-related extra curricular activities, like sports, clubs, bands, etc. These are things that inner-city students could use to stay away from a negative lifestyle outside of school. Lets say an inner-city school has a football team which has 60 students on it as well as a cheerleading squad with 25 students and a band with 40 students. Budget cuts happen and now all three of these activities are forced to be cut. This leaves these 125 students with nothing to do after school while living in a poverty-stricken area. What do you think these students are going to do now instead of engage in school-related activities? On top of this, these activities allow for parents to be able to work more to support their children instead of being forced to leave them unsupervised for longer periods of time.
TLDR: A lack of funding reduces school-related activities which can keep students out of trouble and prevent them from dropping out. | 20 | 32 |
Eli5: How do they know if it is a valid card number? | When you are asked to input your card information online, how is it that some websites can automatically know if you input an invalid number and others cannot, before payment is processed?Example: as soon as I typed the last number of my card wrong, it went red and would not allow me to continue before I corrected it. | TMI About Credit Card Numbers
There’s actually a ton of information contained in a credit card number. This information isn’t really necessary for understanding how to use a credit card, it’s just here so you can learn for fun. The ISO or the International Organization for Standardization categorizes the numbers like so:
Digits 1 – 6: Issuer identifier numbers
First digit: Represents the network that produced the credit card. It is called the Major Industry Identifier (MII). Each digit represents a different industry.
0: ISO/TC 68 and other industry assignments
1: Airlines
2: Airlines, financial and other future industry assignments
3: Travel and entertainment
4: Banking and financial
5: Banking and financial
6: Merchandising and banking/financial
7: Petroleum and other future industry assignments
8: Healthcare, telecommunications and other future industry assignments
9: For assignment by national standards bodies
The first digit is different for each card network:
Visa cards begin with a 4 and have 13 or 16 digits
Mastercard cards begin with a 5 and has 16 digits
American Express cards begin with a 3, followed by a 4 or a 7 has 15 digits
Discover cards begin with a 6 and have 16 digits
Diners Club and Carte Blanche cards begin with a 3, followed by a 0, 6, or 8 and have 14 digits
Digits 2 – 6: Provide an identifier for a particular institution
Digits 7 – 15: Unique personal identifiers
Identify the cardholder name
Unique to the issuer
Digit 16: Check digit
This last digit verifies card numbers for accuracy to make sure that they weren’t input incorrectly
The rest of the digits are also different for each card network:
Visa cards:
Digits 2 – 6: Make up the bank number
Digits 7 – 12 or 7 – 15: Represent the account number
Digits 13 or 16: Is a check digit
Mastercard cards:
Digits 2 & 3, 2 – 4, 2 – 5, or 2 – 6: Make up the bank number; depends on whether digit two is a 1, 2, 3 or other digit
Digits after the bank number, up to digit 15: Represent the account number
Digit 16: Is a check digit
American Express cards:
Digits 3 & 4: Are type and currency
Digits 5 – 11: Represent the account number
Digits 12 – 14: Represent the card number within the account
Digit 15: Is a check digit | 482 | 344 |
CMV: NASA and the government should not be able to put factories or large building's on the Moon ever. | NASA recently revealed that in the next couple years they will have people on the Moon. With the end of space travel to the Moon I believe this is a great and needed mission for seeing how the human race does with new planets in the future. When people get there I'm sure they will have some little houses and building for gardens but I do not believe they should be allowed to build and large building's there at all. I say this with the sense of national parks their beauty is preserved and no profitable company or industries are allowed to build there. I believe this is what has to be done to the Moon when I look up at the moon through a telescope I should see only craters and other natural occurring landmarks not a building or store. I believe we have to preserve the natural beauty of the Moon for future generations. However I understand that this may have to be done and am willing to change my perspective on this. I will be happy to hear any and all opinions on this matter. | What is the purpose of preserving a national park, a coral reef, or a rainforest? I'd say it's at least partially because there are living things that live there such as plants and animals. Those environments are their homes.
On the other hand, the moon is a lifeless rock. No living thing exists there. It's completely empty. We could detonate 1000 nuclear bombs there and not even a fly would be hurt.
You could say that the moon is a special lifeless rock and should be preserved the way it is. But there are trillions upon trillions of moons outside of the Earth's atmosphere. There are 193 other moons in our solar system alone. The only distinctive thing about the moon is that it's the one that happens to be closest to us.
Overall the Earth's moon is not special and there are no living things there. That makes it the perfect place to put factories and large buildings. Those factories and buildings might hurt people, plants, animals, and other organisms on Earth, but they wouldn't disrupt anyone on the Moon. We could test Chernobyl style nuclear power plants, and even if they exploded, no one would get hurt. We could leave radioactive material on the surface of the moon, and it would be nothing compared to the almost infinite amount of radioactive material spread out throughout the universe. We can use the moon for a ton of things without any consequences or harm done to any living thing. Perhaps we'd lose the natural beauty of the Moon, but we'd trade it for unlimited usable energy, which means that global warming would be fixed.
Ultimately, your argument is like saying that no one should go play outside after the first snow. Sure the snow looks beautiful and untouched by human hands. But letting kids run around, go sledding, throw snowballs, make snowmen, etc. is it's own kind of beauty. And it's great to let kids have fun on one acre of land, especially if we have thousands of acres of untouched virgin snow as well. | 34 | 21 |
ELI5: How do probiotics work and why can taking them sometimes cause extreme abdominal discomfort? | Probiotics are colonies of good bacteria. Taking them is suppose to repopulate the gut with said bacteria, but if you get too much, if they have to fight with the existing bacteria and either die, or you are eating a diet that causes them to produce a lot of waste you will sometimes have discomfort. | 99 | 226 |
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Why do so many prescription meds have a side effect of "suicidal thoughts"? | Pharmaceutical companies are required to report any side effect that occurs in any patient taking the drug during a clinical trial, whether they think that adverse event is related to the drug or not. Some clinical trials can last for a year or more. In addition, many clinical trials are for medications that treat serious illnesses. Because of these factors, it is not uncommon for people with serious illnesses to have thoughts of suicide sometime during the course of their treatment. The question is whether those thoughts occur at a higher rate in the experimental arm than in the control/placebo arm.
Some medications do legitimately cause an increase in suicidal ideation. But there are also some where suicidal thoughts are listed as an adverse event, where the drug itself likely doesn't play much of a role. | 174 | 515 |
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ELI5 Why are some Water Towers very tall and skinny with small reservoirs while some are pretty short and fat with huge reservoirs. | I know it has to do with water pressure and gravity but the range of size and height, which I have seen, is quite vast. In fact, by our home we have 2 that are on either side of the freeway. One is tall and skinny with a small reservoir and one that is short and wide with large reservoir. Why? | One major factor for the height of the water tower depends on the terrain. You need to have the tank high enough over the area supplies water to for enough pressure. If the ground is flat you need to build a tall tower but if there is a hill that is high enough you can just put the tank on the ground on top of the hill.
The size of the tank will depend on the usage of the network you are supplying, If you design the tank so it can provide enough water for 24 hours even if there is no power it is quite obvious that the size depends on demand.
You can build the tank so it lasts longer or so it is large enough to if the city grows. It is also a question of money so tanks you place on the ground can have extra capacity for a minimal extra cost. | 56 | 76 |
ELI5: The difference in the effects between Adderall and Ritalin | How it works:
-Both have the same ultimate chemical response in the body (increased dopamine and norepinephrine activity) but go about it in a slightly different way.
-Ritalin (methylphenidate): blocks the reuptake of dopamine and norepinephrine by your neurons, so these two chemicals hang out and are active for a little bit longer than normal.
-Adderall (mixed amphetamines): both increase release of dopamine and norepinephrine as well as blocks reuptake. Same end result, chemicals hang out for a bit longer.
-Both have a handful of other receptors that they bind to and have somewhat limited activity, but the above is the major mechanism of action.
How your body breaks it down:
-Both have peak blood concentrations at right about 3 hours after taking the dose
-Ritalin has a half life of about 2-3 hours
-Adderall has a half life of about 7-8 hours
This results in Adderall more commonly being taken once a day vs twice a day for Ritalin.
As to why one medication might work for one patient who tried and failed the other? Patient response does very, similar to how some patients respond to Zoloft but not Prozac (anti-depressants), both work on the exact same receptors in the body, but doesn't always result in the patient getting the same response. | 10 | 16 |
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Why are Psychoanalysis and Marxism such common talking points among philosophy students? | Hello r/askphilosophy,
I have been having repeated run- ins with philosophy students at the B.A. and M.A. level that are fascinated with Marxism and Psychoanalysis, taking their tenants either as gospel or heavily criticizing the ideas. How common is an emphasis on these topics? Is this just how things are right now or is it more of a false confirmation bias on my part?
This is more of a question about academic culture than it is in regards to a specific philosophical question, so mods please delete if this isn't the place to ask this question. However it seems strange that these topics are so popular given that each of them are really outdated with more than a hundred years distance between their modern academic fields in economics and psychology, respectively.
Thanks very much for your time and cheers!
edit: idk maybe this is just a dumb question | Marxism and Psychoanalysis are subjects of discourse among a group of perspectives that run through critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism, and therefore have a big place in mid-to-late 20th century continental philosophy.
Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari... This is also squarely where Slavoj Žižek works (plus Hegel), and he's been maybe the most popular philosopher outside of philosophy for, like, the last thirty years.
But outside of contemporary philosophy, there tends to be little to no attention given to this intersection of ideas. So you just might be around a school with a popular continental philosophy department or something! | 27 | 19 |
ELI5: How units of time (seconds, minutes, hours, etc) became seemingly universal around the world while other units like weight or distance did not? | Weights and measures were independently developed all over the world. Timekeeping, on the other hand, with accuracy beyond "mid day" or "late afternoon" only got serious with the advent of precision clocks, almost all of which were developed and spread from Europe during exploration. Since everyone was trying to steal from/copy/improve on clocks for several reasons, not least of which was accurate sailing in the middle of the ocean, timekeeping was sort of easy to standardize on. | 133 | 156 |
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CMV: philosophically speaking there is no reason not to live in a virtual reality once it is possible. | Heyah guys,
I hope I am allowed to submit this since my view is not actually a *I would rather kill you then Change my mind* Kind of view, but rather a simple thought I have been entertaining recently after an Argument with a friend about why I enjoy DnD.
My idea is simply that from a philosophical standpoint it it perfectly reasonable for everyone to live their life in a fake reality if possible. The reason being that a virtual reality would simply have infinite possiblities and could be tailored to our liking. It could simply be the fulfillment of your dreams.
I know that this is going into the *why should we not all do drugs* territory of philosophy but I don't think that These two Topics are the same. For one the satisfaction of a fake reality would be real, unlike a drug making you chemically happy in a virtual reality happiness would stem from actual accomplishments.
Footnote: ist just a Thing I have thought about in my free time, so please Refrain from telling me to see a therapist -,-
Footnote 2: Yes I have not read 100 books on the Topic so please Refrain from telling me I am an idiot. I am however always open for book suggestions.
Edit: I think I Need to clarify that this is a philosophical question. Technical Problems like my Need for Food and drink are out of the equation.
Edit 2: I am also not neccessarily talking about a virtual reality Headset, but about a full on virtual reality.
Like the Matrix minus Hugo Weavings creepy laughter
_____
> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | The reason to live in both realities is that they compliment each other. Philosophically speaking, to live only in our reality or only in the virtual reality is to miss the point of virtual reality and escapism altogether.
To truly appreciate virtual reality, it has to be in constant comparison to the real reality it serves as an escape from. Otherwise, it will simply become "reality" and lose its specialness. | 15 | 19 |
[MCU] What would happen if you tried to hold an Infinity Stone? | So we know what happens with the **Power Stone**... it consumes you and blows everything up around you.
The **Tesseract** was shown to burn Furys hands. It also burned through the floor and went into the ocean. It also reacted to Red Skull when he grabbed it and banished him to a planet far away to protect the Soul Stone. Thanos did hold the actual space stone with no ill effects, but Thanos is not everyone.
The **Soul Stone** was also held by Thanos in his hand, but once again, but that was AFTER he made the sacrifice to own it. Plus, he's Thanos after all. What happens if you don't own it and try to grab it?
What would happen with the other 3 stones?
**Time** Maybe it sends you back a million years
**Reality** Could send you to a alternate reality? Or maybe it just turns back into liquid form and consumes you.
**Mind** Could corrupt your mind. | I asked this a few months ago and u/LiminalSouthpaw gave a good answer I'll post here:
Space: As Red Skull found out firsthand, the Space Stone can send you anywhere in the universe. If you are not precise in your intentions, it will.
Reality: There's a very real risk of becoming trapped in a simulation of your own making as your subconscious feeds the Reality Stone desires. The good news is that it will all collapse as soon as you stop focusing on it, so you'll probably escape eventually.
Time: Obviously, time travel is dangerous. The worst possibility is essentially hell - trapped in an endless time loop or future sight, dilated relative to "objective" time such that every second which passes in the normal world is a trillion years for you.
Mind: The Mind Stone is less dangerous than most until used in esoteric mechanisms, as happened with Ultron and Vision. For simply holding it, your mental capacity will be expanded to vast limits (and, incidentally, give you the ability to use the other stones in relative safety). The risks of this are in that your enhanced mind may also come with enhanced flaws and that you are now enabled to dangerous things. If you had depression, you now have godlike depression. You'll figure out how to build a planetcracker antimatter bomb in your basement if given a week or two to solve all of physics. There are endless ways for this to end badly for yourself and everyone.
Soul: All of the Stones are intelligent. This is dangerous. But the Soul Stone has an intelligence that expresses regular volition and even opinions. This is dangerous beyond words. To get the Soul Stone you have to have committed a horrifying sacrifice - but that does not mean you are worthy of its power. The Soul Stone may well decide to use your mind as a seat of power instead of the other way around - or if you are more fortunate, it may simply hold open your empathetic gates and let all the suffering of the world flow through you.
| 143 | 407 |
ELI5: Why is the Human body’s core temperature 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) across the species, regardless of ethnicity or environmental location? | There are slight variations even person to person, let alone ethnicity to ethnicity. However, our body’s require precise temperature regulation to maintain status quo, or homeostasis. Things that are poorly affected with temperature change would include blood clotting, hormone systems, and metabolism, for example. Similarly, losing heat increases energy requirements to keep the body (properly functioning) at normal temperatures and can cause very bad things to happen like heart attacks (from increased cardiac demand and perhaps decreased O2 supply). A simple compensatory mechanism to increase heat production in the body is shivering, which increases metabolic demands anywhere from 100-500%, but is very ineffective at actually keeping us warm. That’s why we have behavioral modification techniques such as putting warm clothes on, getting out of the cold, or finding heat sources.
In high body temperature situations our cells begin to lose their functioning abilities too, just in a different way. In the brain for example, the cells become more excitable and their resting membrane potential (ability for the cell to become active) is altered, in the bad direction. This is why some people have seizures when their temp is above 40C/104F.
All in all, we must have normal temperatures to ensure our bodies function at their best performance.
Edit: spelling, grammar | 31 | 74 |
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Asked to work on supervisor's grant in exchange for thesis feedback | I finished my PhD some time ago, but by the end it was a very toxic environment and I am still processing everything that happened. I recently remembered something that happen during writing my thesis which I did not think was unusually at the time, but I am starting to wonder if other people have had a similar experience.
Basically several months after I handed over my thesis to my supervisor for feedback she came to me and said she just simply did not have time to read my thesis. At that point she told me the only way she would ever have time to read it was if I took on some of her workload. Specifically she told me that for every hour she spent on my thesis I had to spend an hour working on her grants.
I agreed to do it because I was desperate to leave and had not gotten any feedback up to that point. It was not complicated stuff, mostly making or resizing figures and generally fixing the formatting of the grant. It did not bother me at the time, but I mentioned it to someone in my current lab and they were shocked that I had been asked to do that. So now I am curious if this is a common experience. Has anyone else been asked to work on supervisor’s grants or otherwise take on some of their work if they want feedback of their thesis?
I will add that I probably did a total of 6-8 hours of this kind of work on her grant, so it was not a huge burden (and that is the total amount of time she spent giving any feedback on my thesis) | A lot of PIs, especially newer ones without experience and research staff, are overwhelmed with mundane and banal things like filling out forms and perfectly aligning documents. They may understandably try to pass this off onto someone else.
Regardless, passing it off to a student on a quid pro quo deal is just inappropriate. Getting you through a MS or PhD is also a feather in their cap, and you contribute highly skilled labor to their projects. There's 0 educational value in a nearly-PhDed person doing this type of nonsense.
On the other hand - and this gets at some of the core issues with academic labor conditions - swallowing your pride and just doing this thing to get out of indentured servitude is probably the most efficient way forward.
When supervisors do these types of things enough in non-academic sectors, workers find another job or push back. | 88 | 65 |
Are hemp plastics structurally distinct from petroleum-based plastics? | A friend the other day tried to tell me that hemp-based plastics are superior because they're biodegradable, but I don't know that I believe that. After all, it is still plastic... right? | "Plastic" is a term that describes a material that uses polymers as the main component. This covers an absolutely huge range of chemical structures, giving plastics a wide variety of properties. Hemp-based plastics, AFAIK, are cellulose-based, so they are absolutely biodegradable. Petroleum-based polymers include things like polyethylene and polystyrene, which are very inert and not biodegradable.
From a chemistry perspective, they are completely structurally distinct materials. | 120 | 99 |
ELI5: why is blood pressure not measured in psi? | Before digital blood pressure measurement tools became widely available, the device used to measure blood pressure would literally consist of a column of mercury, and the pressure would just be the height of that column (millimeters of mercury = mm Hg).
Obviously now it can be anything but healthcare workers are very familiar with what normal values are in mm Hg so it's easier to ask the computer to do the math rather than have people doing unit conversions in their head. | 20 | 17 |
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Is boiling hot water more effective at killing bacteria than a dish soap? | There are a lot of factors that go into this and it's impossible to answer the question without defining things more strictly.
Dish soap will absolutely disrupt cell membranes for bacteria, but its effectiveness will vary depending on the soap's concentration. Boiling water is a very effective disinfectant, but the time that water boils is an important consideration. Briefly dipping an object in boiling water won't completely sterilize it, while boiling for an extended period will. It's also going to vary depending on the bacteria. Some will be more or less vulnerable to soap, while others will be more or less resistant to heat. | 25 | 15 |
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ELI5: Does the heart ever develop cancer? | It seems like most cancers are organ-specific (lung, ovary, skin, etc) but I’ve never heard of heart cancer. Is there a reason why?
Edit: Wow! Thanks for all the interesting feedback and comments! I had no idea my question would spark such a fascinating discussion! I learned so much! | Cancer more or less only develops in cells that are dividing. And then mostly so in cells that are (1) dividing a lot and (2) exposed to some sort of toxins (the sun, smoke etc). Heart muscle cells do not divide at all, and the other cells in the heart only divide very sparsely, plus they are not really exposed to any kinds of toxins.
But still, they can become cancerous, it is very rare, but not impossible. It's called cardiac sarcoma and mostly come from the connective tissue of the heart (so not from the heart muscle cells themselves, but from the random other cells in the heart that help them). | 6,649 | 4,955 |
Is the soil underneath cities nutrient rich, poor or normal? | I was just thinking the other day about the soil underneath cities.
A lot of cities have trees and plants growing in the ground and it occurred to me that cities completely stop the natural cycle of dead things decomposing in the ground replenishing nutrients. On the other hand, they don't have much growing there, so the nutrients are not used up much.
So my question is, is the soil underneath cities nutrient rich, poor or average compared to countryside? | Nutrients are really only applicable to topsoil (the dark layer of soil ranging in depth from inches to a few feet). The foundation of any building or even a road will be deeper than the topsoil layer so the question is mostly moot. | 13 | 38 |
How can chemicals like CO2 acidify water if they don't contain H+? | Hello there,
Carbon Dioxide, when it dissolves in water and becomes what is known as an *aqeuous ion* in chemistry, essentially splits a water molecule thanks to its higher electronegativity in relation to the water molecule.
The new molecule that forms is known as *Carbonic Acid* with formula H2CO3.
The equilibrium equation looks like this :
CO2 + H20 <==> H2CO3^- + H^+
Carbonic acid is a very weak acid, with a equilibrium pH of 5.7 at one atmosphere of pressure at room temperature.
Carbonic acid also rapidly decomposes, given time, into CO2 gas and water. Its acidic equilibrium is maintained by keeping solutions at pressures only slightly higher than 1 atmosphere.
The very best examples of carbonic acid in every day life are :
* A can of carbonated soft drink.
* Respiration
In a can of carbonated soft drink, the fizzyness of the liquid comes from being a solution of carbonic acid, kept in equilibrium by being canned at a pressure greater than 1 atmosphere. When we open the can, the pressure of the can is brought into a new equilibrium with the outer atmosphere, at 1 atm. As a result, the CO2 dissolved in the water now starts to escape, and the drink is saturated with bubbles of escaping gas - which is very pleasant on the tongue of the person drinking it. Eventually, all the gas escapes out of the water, and we say that the drink is 'flat', and contains no escaping gas.
In our blood, and in the blood of all other animals, cellular respiration produces CO2 as a waste gas by product of glycolysis and other metabolic energy processes. To keep this from poisoning the cells, large animals (like us) dissolve this CO2 into the blood in the form of Carbonic Acid, H2CO3. The solution is very dilute (blood does not, after all, fizz when we get a small cut of a vein), but the solubility of CO2 in water as Carbonic acid is good enough to allow the gas to escape into the alveoli of the lungs, and then be exhaled into the air in the process of respiration.
The small amounts of CO2 from soft drinks and human&animal respiration are taken up by plants in the sea and the land, to make new plants, food, and biological material for the animals - this is the biological carbon cycle.
As rain drops fall through the air, they have enough time to interact with CO2 in the upper troposphere to form weak carbonic acid solutions. In areas of extreme CO2 concentration in the air (though this is typically a little over the mean atmospheric CO2 concentration 0.25% on average), the result is what is known as *Acid Rain*, which in turn can have effects on lakes and rivers, but only over a very short time.
By the way, this naturally occurring acid rain is not related to the more desctructive Acid Rains created by human industrial pollution of the atmosphere by sulphur chemistry, where rain combines with Sulphates in the atmosphere to form the very corrosive Sulphonic Acid, a close a relative of the very corrosive Sulphuric Acid. Acid rains, in general, are not very destructive unless sustained over incredibly long periods of geological time.
Hope this helps.
| 30 | 28 |
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ELI5: What stops me from being reinfected with an illness if I stay in the house where I was sick? | Wouldn't I just be breathing the same infected air? | It can happen, but by and large once you’re infected with something, your immune system learns how to deal with it. It begins to make antibodies that are like medicine customized for the exact thing that infected you.
So if you get infected a few days after feeling better, the germs are killed almost instantly upon entering your body and the infection never takes hold. | 42 | 23 |
ELI5: Why is the human eye colour generally Brown, Blue and other similar variations. Why no bright green, purple, black or orange? | Eyecolor is determained by the amount of melanin in the iris. Melanin is a darkish pigment that helps protext the skin and eyes by blocking damaging UV rays.
The color comes from how light is refracted in your eyeball with the melanin. Blue eyes have the least amount, leading to the color blue being reflected mostly, in a processes similar to how the sky is blue.
More melaanin causes more brown tones, leading to green with a little more, and greys and growns with other amounts.
The way light reflects with this pigment doesn't allow for purple or other colors to show. | 6,712 | 12,348 |
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How do seeds know which way to grow? | Plants sense gravity and then bend in response to it. This is called called gravitropism. One of the major gravity-sensing parts of the plant is the root tips.
Plants also sense light, and bend to respond to it. This is called phototropism.
Both processes act in concert to orient a plant appropriately.
The bending is achieved through the action of a growth-regulating plant hormone called auxin. When it's secreted selectively, those regions with the higher concentration of the hormone grow and elongate more quickly, which causes a bend in the overall structure. | 4,337 | 5,309 |
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What's your general reading strategy in the context of a daunting reading list? | Hi all, a bit of a meta discussion here.
I've always been one of those people who has insisted that if you didn't read something carefully, you didn't read it at all. In my academic life, I've prided myself on being someone who maybe hasn't read as much as some of my colleagues have claimed to, but for the things I did read, I read them very well--I think there's some moment during a Derrida interview where the interviewer points to the expansive bookshelves in his office and asks him, "how many of them have you read?" and he replies in jest, "just these three--but I read them really, really well." That's sort of what I mean. I take my time to understand every sentence, I take voluminous notes, and as a result there's a relatively small number of texts that I am very familiar with.
However, over the course of the writing of my MA thesis, I've come up against the limitations of this way of doing things--namely, my very sparse literature review and general lack of serious engagement with secondary sources. I have a lot of (what I think are) profound things to say about the book that is central to my thesis, but it is largely my own reaction to the text with very little engagement with the surrounding scholarship.
Now, for the MA thesis, I was sort of able to get away with this insofar as the particular topic I chose had to do with a topic that was almost entirely neglected in my area, such that there were really only maybe three or four papers that were directly related to what I'm working on.
For the PhD, however, I am jumping over to a totally different area, and this is an area that has arguably been one of the most hotly debated topics in French intellectual life for the last 40 years. As a result, I'm faced with a reading list that, with my reading style, I will never be able to even come close to touching in the span of four years. I'm hopefully beginning my PhD next winter semester, and there's already over 350 items in my Zotero folder for this project--many of them are short papers, but a significant number of them are long, dense books that would take me, at minimum, a full semester to read through "carefully".
Has anyone been faced with a similar issue before, and if so, how did you adapt your reading style to match this new challenge? What's the best way to intelligently skim a long, dense, complicated book?
**EDIT: Thanks for all the great words of advice, everyone! This has certainly helped me put a few things in perspective. I think the main takeaway for me, personally, is to continue to narrow my topic until the relevant reading list is much less daunting. I have a habit of being overly ambitious (I'm currently feeling the sting of this as I struggle to finish my MA thesis) and when I first described my dissertation idea to my future supervisor, he told me that it wasn't a dissertation, it was a life's work. The project is significantly more narrow now but not narrow enough, I think.** | Prioritize and change your reading technique according to this prioritization. There will be secondary sources you really only need two paragraphs from, there will be others that are central to an issue you're discussing. Develop an ability to switch between careful reading for what is important and quick surveys to look for what is important. Don't feel shy to use the references someone else gives in a paper or literature review you think is important as a guide for what to focus on. Don't feel shy to read abstracts, scan tables of contents, and ctrl-F for key words as techniques to survey large bodies of literature in search of what looks to you like stuff of the most importance.
On widely discussed topics, no one can read everything. Be confident in defending this principle, with reference to your reasoning for how you select what to focus on. If that's not enough to get you through, strongly consider narrowing your thesis topic until it *is* enough to get you through. | 40 | 108 |
CMV: The only valid moral philosophy is one that compels minimization of suffering and maximization of happiness. The disdain at the idea of killing someone for their organs is not evidence of a flaw in utilitarianism, but in human evaluation of ethical conundrums. | Since the dawn of moral philosophy, it seems, people have attacked systems of ethics with a variation of this tactic:
Person 1 - "I've come up with a system of ethics. Let me explain it to you. It's based on these principles..."
Person 2, after thinking - "Ok, but imagine y scenario. It feels weird to just allow y scenario to happen, but it does, if your ideas are true."
This is ridiculous. A moral system can't be wrong because "it allows x to happen and I don't like that because x seems axiomatically bad". Moral systems serve to evaluate our actions and tell us what the right thing to do is, not to just conform to our ingrained sense of morality. They should only care about how we feel about certain scenarios inasmuch as they have to factor that into their analysis. Suggesting otherwise is a naturalistic fallacy.
And yet, a ton of arguments I see time and time again utilitarianism in general falls into this basket of bullshit reasoning.
"A single healthy man’s life is greater than that of four dying people because muh feelings"
“I can’t push a fat man onto the train tracks to save 5 people why would I do that how could you suggest I do that”
These are not arguments against utilitarianism. They’re statements about how you feel about certain scenarios in ethics. You haven’t argued for anything, unless your goal is to establish a moral philosophy of “my personal inclinations”.
Actions should be evaluated by their consequences. If an action does not cause suffering, then, even if unsettling, it is either good or neutral.
The only bad thing in the world is suffering. The only good thing in the world is joy. All else is meaningful because it means a subset of these emotions or a mix of them. The child dies, but the bad part is the fact that you/the child’s family are suffering from it. Things like eating and having sex are fun not because all sentient beings are somehow objectively attracted to these things, but because we’ve evolved to have those value systems. We care about our young because we were programmed that way by nature, and that doesn’t make it less meaningful, but it does show that what’s really bad about children dying is the suffering that results. Not the death of the child.
Given this I find it hard that hedonistic utilitarianism isn't more accepted. Minimization of suffering and maximization of happiness should be the basic goal of all people. Good and bad emotions are the only things that are, in of themselves good and bad.
The reason, I think, that something as obvious as utilitarianism is not more accepted, is because human morals aren’t bound by what is going to actually help us as a society. Not just that, anyways. I think humans care about things like whether or not the person was “involved” in the trolley accident. The reason most people flip the switch to divert the trolley into 5 people instead of 3 but refuse to push the fat man onto the tracks to stop it wholesale is because the fat man is an onlooker. He’s not “involved”. Humans care more about people that didn’t get themselves into situations where they would be tied onto train tracks. They’d rather get rid of the “bad” humans than the “good” ones. Not only do I think this is faulty reasoning, I find it disgusting as well.
Note: I have to answer you guys from my phone and I cannot type as quickly as I’d like, so I will be answering fewer comments until I reach my home desktop computer.
Edit: I'm going to be back in an hour, something came up, I made some quick replies. | > Minimization of suffering and maximization of happiness should be the basic goal of all people. Good and bad emotions are the only things that are, in of themselves good and bad.
This isn't well-defined though. Minimizing suffering and maximizing happiness can be in conflict. Consider the following scenarios:
Scenario A: 10,000 really happy people
Scenario B: 20,000 really happy people and 50,000 content people
Scenario C: 50,000 really happy people, and 100,000 desperately miserable people
Is B preferable to A because there is more happiness, even if the average happiness is lower? Is C preferable to B because there is more happiness, even if there is more suffering?
If there's no logical order of preference to those scenarios, the goal is impossible. | 21 | 39 |
Why don't we just eat calorie bombs that have the reccommended daily intake instead of spending money on low carb, expensive foods? | A few quick answers:
* A calorie bomb would still need to be made from something digestible, i.e. **food**
* Your body is made of lots of different types of stuff, and you have to supply it with new supplies that can be made into all those different types of stuff so it can keep itself fresh and also so it can heal from injury, so **variety** of intake is important
* Energy extraction from food happens in stages, and your digestive tract wouldn't be able to cope with all your daily calories at once. As an example, your **blood sugar would spike** dangerously high, a ton of insulin would be released to capture it before it gets flushed out in your urine, some of the sugar would inevitably be **lost in your urine** anyway, and you'd develop insulin resistance (aka **type-II diabetes**)
* Storing the excess energy-rich molecules as fat (so they don't get flushed through in your urine) and then breaking them back down again as and when you actually need the energy throughout the day would be an **inefficient** back-and-forth, losing energy at each stage | 46 | 27 |
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CMV: Suicide is a fundamental human right for all people regardless of their situation, and forcing people to live is a form of slavery. | You can't truly have the right to life without having the right to end it. Your life is first and foremost owned by you, and thus you have the right to destroy it. Anyone else stopping you using your own life how you want when it doesn't affect others is abusing you.
Yes there is the "irrationality" argument that suicide for generally physically healthy people can only be a decision when they are not in a rational state to decide. This is problematic for multiple reasons
- There is no reason for suicide to be an irrational decision if it is a cost benefit analysis between the net expected benefits and suffering of life for a person. That's as rational as any analysis can get.
- It is a completely subjective value judgement to decide if someone's preferences or conceptions of benefits and suffering is rational or not.
- There is no way to rigorously justify that society knows what is better for an individual than they do themselves. In fact since the individual is the one with first hand experience of their life, they are likely to be more informed.
- People may be irrational in short periods of time where they haven't conducted a cost benefit analysis of life but some people are suicidal their whole lives and you cannot state that they are constantly in a state of irrationality, especially if they are functioning members of society which most of them are.
- Reasons for supposed suicide "irrationality" may be untreatable mental illness brain chemistry, or untreatable physical chronic illness. This is not irrationality and represents a suffering a rational individual may chose not to want to live with.
It is not automatically true that everyone snaps out of wanting to be suicidal or will eventually be glad they didn't do it. Plenty of suicidal people will die of other causes, and also plenty of the people who would likely not snap out of it will go to extreme (stressful and even more unpleasant) lengths to kill themselves whatever barriers are placed in front of them so it is not the case that everyone does snap out of it.
But the most compelling reason that suicide is a human right isn't to do with rationality at all, it's to do with consent. In every other decision people make, we value consent and the fact that we don't value consent with the right to live vs die is hypocritical. No one can be forced into a job they don't want. No one can be forced to date someone they aren't interested in or associate with people they dislike. So why can we force people into a life they don't like? That is violating their consent of the experiences they are willing to undergo. I don't owe it to anyone to date or associate with them or to work for them. So I don't it to owe anyone to live for them.
Therefore, forcing people to not be allowed to commit suicide is forcing them into a form of slavery, where they have to work in a life, live with people, and live in places they don't want to. Forcing people to live is as bad as forcing people to take up certain activities they don't want to. And if there is no activity a person wants to take up then so be it. They fundamentally deserve autonomy.
Edit: Just for clarification I am pro people undergoing a set duration of therapy in order to make them "see the light" and not act "irrational", but if beyond that people are still suicidal they should be allowed to die.
| Should people have this right no matter what age they are? Suppose there's a four year old, who wants to exercise this right. They understand the difference between existing and not existing, that this decision is permanent, and that they might change their minds if they waited long enough. They understand that, and they'd still like to go through with suicide. | 11 | 101 |
What is the point of a fellowship postdoc? | I’m a few months in to my fully-funded two-year postdoctoral fellowship. The administration and faculty are nice, I’m given a (shared) office/a computer/software, I’m working on a few different projects with different faculty, etc. However, I just can’t shake that the feeling that this is just an extension of my PhD. I’ll get a few papers out, but I can’t do anything PI-level and then my time runs out and I’m back on the market.
Does a completed postdoc really improve your chances of a faculty position? Because, productivity-wise, this doesn’t really seem different than a 7-8 year PhD. Thoughts? | As a postdoc on a fellowship you would normally be in complete control of the direction of your project, usually with some level of budgetary control.
Standard postdoc you are usually the PIs bitch for whatever project they got funded.
Whether it's 'worth it ' depends on your field, goals, and other experience. | 24 | 18 |
How did early astronomers know that those slightly brighter dots of light were planets? How did they know the order of the solar system? | What distinguished the planets from the stars for ancient astronomers was not their brightness, but the fact that some objects were always in the same relative positions to each other in the sky, while others moved around and could be found near different stars at different times. The ones whose positions were fixed were the *stars* and the ones that moved around were the *planets*. (In fact, the word "planet" comes from the Greek word for "wanderer," reflecting this property.)
Of course, people did not know what the physical properties of the planets and stars were in terms of their composition and such, but did know that they behaved differently in the sky.
| 59 | 49 |
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CMV: People who get offended easily are assholes. | All through my life I've believed that being able to take a joke about yourself is a brilliant characteristic that someone can have. Whenever I've come across someone that can't take a joke about themselves-which is meant in a lighthearted way-I develop a dislike for this person. I tend to go through life judging others by their ability to keep themselves calm and collected in a situation where people are laughing at them, and 'roll with the punches' and move on.
**TL;DR** Basically, I wanted to simply submit the title of this post, to see if there are any reasons why not to believe this.
EDIT: Sorry I haven't replied in a while, it took me some time to read all your replies. Thanks!
It seems though, that a lot of people have misinterpreted what I meant, and that's my fault, I didn't explain myself properly. I should really have emphasised the '**easily**' part. When I said easily offended, I certainly didn't mean by jokes about someone's appearance, or lifestyle choice, or anything like that. If you get offended by stuff like that, that's *normal*. Although, as a guy who started losing his hair when he was 18, I now take insults like that with a pinch of salt.
What I meant was, if you get drunk one night and do something you regret, then your friends all remind you of it the day after, and you can't laugh about it, for example. Or, if you state your opinion about a piece of art, or music, and someone gets offended because they like it, and they can't see past the fact that it's just another opinion about something.
Sorry for not clarifying!
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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 just 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!* | Well possible situations not saying they are necessarily you are:
1) You got them on a bad day.
2) You're far more offensive than you really think you are.
3) For some reason that particular subject is especially offensive to them.
Neither of those three situations would necessarily mean that the person is an asshole. | 38 | 27 |
eli5 Why do people iodize salt? | Was in a cafe today and saw this salt canister that said iodised salt. Why do they do that to the salt? What does it add? | Iodine, in tiny amounts is necessary for the human body. It was found in the early 20th century that people were not getting enough in our diets. Salt is an easy delivery mechanism because it doesn't spoil and generally speaking it's a predictable delivery method for the amount necessary. | 61 | 25 |
ELI5: why do all your joints ache when you have an infection? | When you have an infection, your body fires up an immune response. Think of your body's immune response as the SWAT team.
When you first get infected, a minor response is made by the body.. cops are called essentially. 8/10 times Cops get the job done. Sometimes, the cops are not equipped well enough, so SWAT is called. SWAT basically goes everywhere and causes inflammation while fighting away the infection wherever it may reside.
The inflammation causes your joints to hurt :)
Tl; dr - Infection causes immune response and inflammation. Systemic inflammation causes joints to ache.
Source: Med student
Edit: Grammar | 82 | 76 |
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Why does jerking a table cloth quickly from a table not disturb the plates but if you do it slow they all come off? Shouldn't there be the same amount of friction whether you pull it fast or slow? | If we look at Newtons second law: F=ma, we can clearly see that force is proportional to acceleration. When we pull the table cloth away quickly, a higher force is required to accelerate the dishes with the table cloth. The force of friction is given by u*Fn, where u is the coefficient of static friction (depends on the two materials in contact) and Fn is the normal force, so like you said, the force that can be provided by the friction does not change, however it is not high enough to move the plates with a fast enough acceleration when we pull the cloth away quickly.
Also, once the cloth begins to move relative to the plates, we no longer use the coefficient of static friction, but rather the coefficient of kinetic friction, which is even lower. Once the cloth begins to move out from under the plates, theres even less frictional force. | 35 | 51 |
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ELI5: Why are pills usually the same size for different sized people? | I’m eating pollen medicine. They are small pills and I should eat one per day. I realized that I, as a big dude has the same dose as a small tiny woman would have. One pill per day. Even if I have three times the mass. Why is it this way? | Some medications, like anaesthetic, are usually given as individual doses because it’s typically injected, and the effectiveness is based off of body size. But things like antihistamines target specific areas and don’t get effected by body weight, so you can take the same amount as a much smaller person with pretty much the same effect | 17 | 19 |
ELI5: evidence for other dimensions (beyond 3) | At the simplest level, a dimension is a number you need to describe something fully. For instance, in our 3d space, you need 3 numbers to describe where something is...up/down, left/right, forwards/backwards (or any one of an infinity of equivalent systems).
But actually, it's immediately clear that 3 numbers isn't enough to describe something. You need another one to describe *when* something is. Therefore, in this sense, time is a dimension. General relativity, our excellent theory of how space and time works, describes time in exactly this way - it gets more or less the same treatment as a spatial dimension, though it's mathematically a slightly different type of thing so it ends up not behaving quite the same...such as only going one way for us.
Now, you're probably actually thinking about extra dimensions in the popular science way, where people throw terms like '11 dimensions' around like confetti. These dimensions are theoretical, and arise from making a set of assumptions and seeing that these assumptions necessitate those dimensions. The central idea to this area of science (and all other areas, though the other ones often have existing practical successes) is trying to make a unique prediction from these assumptions. If that prediction could be verified, the assumptions would have strong evidence for being correct, and so would the dimensions. We *do not* currently have good scientific evidence for these theories, and the existence of more than 4 dimensions is not well accepted scientific theory at the moment.
To elaborate a little further, the extra dimensions discussed here aren't quite like the dimensions you think of as up, down, left and right. A good (and common) example is of an ant on a telephone wire. From some way away, this system seems 'one dimensional' to you because you can describe where the ant is with a single number - how far along the wire it is. However if you look closely, as the ant does, it's actually a two dimensional system; the ant has both a distance along the wire and a distance *around* the wire. This 'around' is still a dimension because it's a number that you need to describe where the ant is, but you couldn't see that dimension from far away, because it's so small as to seem irrelevant to you. The idea in string theory (or whatever) is that there may be analogous cases on quantum scales which may govern how particles behave without being obvious to us. | 17 | 18 |
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How much of a person's voice is based on their larynx's physical properties, and how much is based on their brain's insructions to said larynx? | Say my friend and I had our larynges swapped, how much would we sound like ourselves, and how much would we sound like each other?
Additionally, how large of a role do the other aspects of the body that affect voice affect this? Say we swapped our brains, and so we had each other's mouths, lungs, et cetera? | Your voice for a given sound, let's say the vowel "eeee" (which is written in phonetic alphabet is /i/) depends on several different factors. First, the tenseness of your vocal folds determines the fundamental frequency of the voice production. Then, the shape of your vocal tract will amplify some of the harmonics of that fundamental frequency, and dampen others. The amplified frequencies are called formants. These formants are the distinguishing characteristics between different vowels that were all made with the same initial fundamental frequency.
Part of which formants are amplified is going to have something to do with the length and shape of your actual vocal tract, but most have to do with where you place your articulators (tongue, teeth, lips, velum, etc.). For the vowel /i/ you have your tongue in a high front position, so the given vocal tract shape amplifies different sounds than the production of /a/ which has a low and back tongue placement.
So if you switched vocal tracts, then the harmonics of a given sound you were producing might change some, but it will probably only be by a relatively small amount of Hz in either direction. These changes would probably not even be enough to alter the perception of the listener, so you would still sound just like you.
However, there are a lot more aspects to what makes you sound like *you* and not your friend. Things like how fast or slow you say each sound, different mannerisms you have, how far you open your mouth when you talk, how much you distinguish your vowels or enunciate your consonants, and idiosyncratic aspects of how you pronouns words (like "pellow" for "pillow"). Those are all much more brain based that vocal tract based.
source: currently working on a paper on the differences in formants between vowel productions in isolation and running sentences, as a speech pathology master's student
TL;DR You will probably sound pretty similar to what you do right now, with a few very minor differences
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ELI5: How did prohibition ever gain enough popular support to become law? | Given the massive popularity of alcohol, including among lawmakers, how did the temperance movement ever manage to get it banned? | 1) Because of the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840) and the Third Great Awakening (1850-1900), the American people became increasingly religious (yes, that's possible), and the religious fervor translated into a zeal to improve the society, and one of the greatest scourge these religionists see is drunkenness (and people back then drank A LOT considering how cheap hard liquor was back then). These people just eradicated slavery, and they were moving down the list of societal ills.
2) Because of the Woman's Suffrage movement, as married women and children were one of the people most heavily affected by drunkenness (i.e. husbands drinking away all the money, spousal/child abuse under the influence, etc). Prohibition has great popular support amongst the women of America. And as women's political rights increased, so did the power of the prohibitionists. In fact, one of the Suffragette's main arguments was that it allowed women to escape drunken husbands.
3) The alcohol trade was heavily involved in governmental corruption scandals (in part because they tried to fight the prohibitionists), and so reform-minded progressives (who were in favor of increasing governmental regulation and oversight) increasingly allied with the prohibitionists against a common enemy. | 71 | 112 |
Can someone please answer an evolution question? | I heard from a Christian teacher at my school that evolution is impossible because mutations can only result in a loss of complexity in an organism. They told me that new genetic information cannot be introduced, that only old information can be manipulated (either by being lost or changed into a different base pair, like C-G to T-A). Please could someone here explain how complexity is created in evolution? | That's not true, it's possible for mutations to cause genes or chromosomes to duplicate, allowing addition of information.
Your teacher most likely cannot explain the results of the E. coli long term evolution experiment. | 126 | 73 |
ELI5: What am I feeling when someone puts a finger close to my forehead, over my "third eye"? | Edit: I am referring to the feeling you get when someone hovers a finger over your nose and more or less between the eyes when they're closed (where some people claim our third eye would be). It is as if you could feel the finger is there without it touching you. If you haven't experienced it, you should try it! | A change in heat, light (even with your eyes closed you can detect changes in light), and ambient sound (stereo hearing can detect objects, try standing one inch from a wall). So many senses besides your eyes work together to help you "see". | 27 | 20 |
ELI5 Why did contact with the Vikings not have the same effect on Native American population that contact with Europeans at a later date did? | After contact with Columbus and Europeans in the 14-1600's Native Americans lost massive amounts of people due to exposure to diseases they had no natural resistance to. Why wasn't there a similar effect when the European Vikings came to love settle in in North America. Wouldn't they have brought similar diseases with them? Wouldn't they have caused a similar effect?
EDIT. It seems like it comes to the point that Viking society wasn't dense enough to produce the plagues that the later settlers brought. I never would have thought about that. Thank you guys so much!! | That assumes they had any significant contact with a group that then had significant contact (before dying) with more natives. Knowing the vikings it's also possible they were terrifying enough that the natives stayed the hell away. Remember the Europeans also brought horses, lots of people, and they intended to bring people and gold home. The Vikings were not thinking on that scale, but on a much more personal kind of scale.
Plus, the vikings could have met some brutally stiff resistance, while the Europeans had firearms plate armor, and horses. | 1,067 | 2,856 |
How did Copernicus arrive at the conclusion that not the Earth but the Sun was the center of our solar system? | Considering he made this discovery over 500 years ago, even before telescopes had been invented, how did he know that? What were the reasons for him to start to doubt the then almighty image of geocentrism propagated by the Church and most of his fellow scientists of that time? To me it sounds like a terrific discovery for a man living in medieval times! | Copernicus used his and others' observations of the motions of the planets to develop a mathematical framework that described the positions of the planets accurately while being consistent with a heliocentric universe. Unfortunately, because he still held to the concept of heavenly spheres, he couldn't get rid of epicycles. His model predicted the movement of the planets accurately enough to be useful for making predictions. However, since it kept the mathematical tricks used for geocentricity and wasn't better matched with observations, it wasn't obvious that it was correct, or closer to correct, than the geocentric model. | 15 | 18 |
CMV: Any interaction that increases an intellectual property's value is not a cultural interaction it is a commercial interaction ie Video Game culture is not a self-actualized culture but a consumption culture driven for profit | I do want to preface this subject with the fact that I am not a philospher/anthropologist/ect. Some terms may be misused. If that is the case please let me know.
The base interactions with many aspects (or subcultures) of "geek/nerd" culture are not self-actualized. Here is my logic:
A self-actualized culture is one where the culture's members are also participants. They can directly determine what is culture by, at the minimum, choosing what to take part in and what not to, thus changing canon. At the maximum, it means participation by direct creation by the members of the culture.
By that definition, a self-actualized culture requires control of the culture by those who take part in the culture. I cannot legally tell a Batman story because participants in comic book culture do not have any control over Batman. While members can write fan fiction if that Batman media gains any real traction it will be stomped out. We have seen this for Pokemon and WOW in fan spin-offs and old version support respectively. An additional example is the history of Fifty Shades of Gray which started as a Twilight fan fiction. To legitimately exist Fifty Shades of Gray had to become something separate to the “Twilight subculture.”
A self-actualized culture requires ownership of the culture by those who participate in the culture. Any nationalist folk characters are inherent to that culture and owned by its participants. Paul Bunyon is “owned” by participants in American culture. As a participant, I can legally create Paul Bunyon stories that, if accepted by culture, have no less standing than the existing ones. While ownership does not re
A self-actualized culture requires the creation of the culture by those who participate in the culture. This is more applicable to specific subcultures rather than widely applicable. For example, anyone can build a video game and platforms like Steam have made distribution more equitable. Yet, there are some strange asterisks in cultures who have multinational corporations participating in creating. The gap in availability and distribution between “indie” creators and corporate ones is generally massive.
My final point is in interaction. How much can you expect to interact with, say, comic culture without increasing the value of an owned IP? And how much can you actively take part while only consuming second-hand content?
All this does not mean “geek/nerd” subcultures are not “real.” When I first began to think about these ideas I thought, “geek/nerd culture is not real.” But real value has been created by the participants and there is a deep identity caught up in the culture. That is why I eventually shifted to it not being self-actualized instead of the term real.
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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!* | I think you should consider the architect, the city planner, the music venue, the museum, the civic center. These are all capital driven spaces in which culture exists and is created. The _space_ in which culture exists is both part of the culture and not deterministic of it.
The point here is that culture is _never_ independent of forces of capitalism. We might lament that things have become "too commercial", but they were always commercial - the music happened at the concert in the hall with the beer being sold and the art happened in the gallery, in the retail store, in the shopping district, with the artist agent and so on.
One way to look at it is what it would be like if you took away the culture. There is _nothing_ in the batman product that implies the subculture that exists _around_ it. It could be a group of people sitting around in velvet seats listening to PhD's talk about the social meaning of comics, but thats NOT what it is. Did "batman" determine the culture as it actually exists? Nope. | 12 | 17 |
CMV: Imperial Measurements are completely useless | Hello, so I came up on a YouTube video, which practically explains everything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk
I would like to know if there's any usage of imperial that is more practical than the metrics. So far I think that they are completely useless. The main argument is: the metric system has logical transition (100 cm = 10 dm = 1m) so it's practical in every case scenario, because if you have to calculate something, say, from inches to feet, it's pretty hard but in metrics everything has a base 10 so it's easy. | If at any time you need to divide your unit of length measurement into thirds, imperial shines. What's 1/3 of a meter? 3 decimeters, 3 centimeters, 3 millimeters etc etc. What's 1/3 of a yard? A foot. Period, end. What's 1/3 of a foot? 4 inches. Period, end.
For volume it is even better, because that is a base 16 system, which goes into binary way better than base 10 could ever hope to. It's also a perfect square, which makes it really easy when you're dealing with halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, etc. | 145 | 201 |
How is a clean room, such as a room that prepares semiconductor chips, made clean? | * Air filters similar to the HEPA filters for home use
* carefully designed air flow both in the room and between the room and the outside
* carefully designed furniture both in shape and materials to create less particulate
* protocols for what you can wear, how to enter and exit the room, and how to act in the room
* protocols for interacting with the objects which are required to be in the clean rooms
* protocols for transport in/out/around of protected objects
* knowledge of how and why objects need to be clean
* particle counters for precise knowledge of just how clean the air is
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What would happen if everyone invested their disposable income? | What would happen if everyone *wisely invested their disposable income, rather than consuming unproductive stuff?
*Investing in companies not related to consumables
Obviously, major consumable industries would go out of business. Ignoring the short-term unemployment, what would the economy eventually look like? | The level of GDP or income per capita in the US strictly increases in the long run as investment increases. So GDP per person would go up.
However, the savings rate (or investment) that maximizes consumption per person in the long run is equal to capital's share of income, which in the US is about 40% of total income (GDP).
For reference. The current rate of investment in the US is under 20% iirc, far from the 40% "golden rule".
If we invest up to that amount, our consumption per capita (standard of living) and GDP per capita would both increase. GDP per capita would increase by more than consumption per capita.
If we save/invest at a level greater than 40% of GDP, our consumption per person would be lower. Why would GDP per capita go up but not consumption per capita?
With such an excessive amount of investment going on, greater than the "golden rule rate of savings" of 40%, the size of the capital stock would become extreme.
Capital depreciates with time (things break, become out of date, and need to be replaced or repaired). With a capital stock of enormous size, an excessive portion of GDP go towards replacing the depreciating capital stock and cannot be used for consumption. GDP grows little for each unit of additional saving/investment, but the "cost" is the ability to use that unit for consumption instead. At the theoretical extreme, when 100% of income is invested, GDP per capita is highest but 0 consumption occurs obviously (because 100% of the income is being saved/invested).
&#x200B;
This is all insights from the Solow Model. | 59 | 53 |
[General] What valid reasons would post-scarcity civilizations have conflict? | EDIT: I think my base question is: "Do you think conflicts between post-scarcity civs is realistic or simply drama for the sake of good fiction, and why?"
Post-scarcity: have fusion energy or something better, have matter replicators of some sort, bam!: no one needs to ever work again and everyone can have everything they want. This is a prior to my question, so arguing against it is not recommended. On top of that, VR sims of the Matrix / Holodeck / Sword Art Online variety should be endless amusement for most people.
It seems to be rather common that sci-fi universes of Star Trek level tech or higher (or a tier lower) have aliens that are dicks and go around blowing up, enslaving, or just stealing all the resources from a planet. Examples include the Covenant in Halo or the plot of the new (hopefully last) Transformers film where they've decided they need Earth's resources.
I find it completely ridiculous that a civilization would have FTL, energy resources to power space travel, the levels of automation that would likely exist for any civ reaching FTL and fusion-like energy production, etc and think they need to pick on Earth of the habitable planets in the galaxy.
Regarding habitable planets, if Earth is one planet with life forms, and the invading aliens also had a planet, that likely means there are literally millions if not more potentially habitable planets in the galaxy, many of which would be uninhabited. But also, if you can travel here in a space ship, you should be able to set up environments in space, like living on a giant ring or something with all the farmland you need.
This came out sort of ranty, but I think I at least included enough information for a start. Thank you for reading this far. | >many of which would be uninhabited.
The problem is, most of them aren't. In most Sci-Fi, if a planet has a stable biosphere, it usually has some form of native live that would compete with settlers.
Still, Post Scarcity does not mean Post Effort. Even with something akin to Replicators, and access to fusion power, something like Terraforming is going to take time, resources and effort. It's a lot easier to just settle an already inhabitable world than it is to make a barren rock habitable.
And, as stated, since most planets are already inhabited in most Sci-Fi, that leads to conflict.
Then you've also got social conflicts. Just because you don't have resource limitations doesn't mean you aren't still prone to disagreements. Maybe your species abhors slavery, but the one next door embraces it. Or your god doesn't like their god. Or They're white on the right side and you're white on the left side. Post Scarcity just means you don't have to compete over resources, it doesn't mean your ideologies can't compete. | 41 | 49 |
Why don't spiders get stuck in their webs? | Their webs use many different types of silk. Some are elastic, some are strong, and some are sticky. They can also mix these properties as necessary. They know which will lines are sticky a d simply avoid stepping on them. Some also have a coating on their feet which helps avoid issues. | 16 | 23 |
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How does single server with single app deployed handle multiple requests? | i was just searching about this on Google. didn't find much relevant information about this question.
Every article on Google mentions that it's with the help of TCP sockets handling the request by containing the information about source port destination port etc.
But it didnt answer my questions that how does single server handle request like say " if i have Nodejs application on a server and let's say 100K user requests about some content at the same particular instant." then how does this server will work to handle these requests and provide the result at the same instant
Also sorry please me if I'm missing something | so the topic you're asking about is called concurrency in programming terms, and ***very simplified*** there's a concept called threading.
one thread is executing X piece of arbitrary code. the program keeps creating threads for each request and is as such executing Y pieces of arbitrary code. how does it handle all of this at once? well it doesn't - a processor, while cheating in some high level ways, can essentially just do one thing at once, and one core can also do one thing by itself which is why you keep on hearing about core counts mattering.
so, it doesn't actually do everything of task X at once, it does a little and moves on to X2 and does a little there, then X3, then X4 and so forth.
a lot of programming languages try to handle this somewhat seamlessly in the background, but that's the ELI5 explanation.
if you don't use threading the program will very likely do ***everything*** of task X first before moving on to task X2, which might turn out to be very time inefficient especially if the task involves waiting for something like say a network response. | 10 | 37 |
ELI5: How and why do shows like "Rick and Morty" use a different director for every episode while maintaining stylistic consistency? | Why would they want a different person directing each episode? Wouldn't that cause some amount of inconsistency and discontinuity between episodes? What's the point? | In a TV show, the showrunner has more say in the stylistic direction of the show, but they also have to oversee scripts for future shows, talk with producers, studios, and the network, etc. This is a ton of work, as long as the style/feel of the show is established, and the script is more or less set, they can plug another staff member in as a director for any episode and not have any noticeable inconsistency | 304 | 563 |
Why did we decide to use asbestos and lead in the manufacturing of numerous items? | Both of these were used because they have beneficial properties, and the extent of their negative properties were not yet known or were not yet fully appreciated.
Asbestos is an incredible insulator, which is why you often find it wrapped around pipes or lining air vents. It is also resistant to fire, and so was incorporated into a variety of building materials, such as panels and tiles.
Lead has a bit more of an interesting history. The atomic symbol for lead is Pb, which stands for its Latin name, *plumbum*. In fact, lead was the Roman plumbing material of choice, prized for its softness and malleability which allowed for relatively easy redirection of water flow. Somewhere along the way, after the toxicity of lead was recognized, that practice stopped.
Lead was added as a fuel/petroleum supplement because it acts as a lubricant in the internal combustion engine. This also became less common as it was recognized that the volatilized lead passed through the tail pipe and into the air we breathe, and engines were redesigned to perform without the the leaded gasoline. Some aircraft still use leaded gas.
Lead was also added to paints because it increased the durability of the paint product and because it provides a lovely shade of white. | 49 | 53 |
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CMV: People should not be encouraged to go to university or college simply to "find themselves" | By "find themselves", I'm referring to the idea that the primary reason for attending college is to develop or experiment with your identity more, and become more mature. I'm not saying that college does not contribute to a person's maturity, but I don't think that it should be anyone's main reason for attending. These are my issues with this viewpoint:
I think the main purpose of college is to educate people who have chosen a specific subject they want to study or train students skills that correspond to a particular career path. People who are attending mainly to change as a person usually are going into college without a particular field in mind, or without career goals that they are actively pursuing. I don't see why people without a clear goal in mind should be encouraged to go to college just because they expect that experience will make them better somehow. College in north america is also incredibly expensive for most people and I don't see why anyone would need to spend that much money in order to find himself/herself. If someone's main reason for studying in college is to become a better person through education, it would make much more sense for that person to simply use the internet and/or library (which don't leave people with huge student loans) to study and explore their interests independently before committing to a degree they make not even be invested in. It honestly confuses me how so many people seem to believe that going to college will change them as a person more than any other experience in life. Again, I would agree that college can change a person for the better. I just think that the decision to attend college should not be based on the expectation that it will somehow help people to "find themselves", and instead be based on having a strong interest in a subject and/or a career in a particular field. | Most graduate programs don't really care what your undergraduate major was. Most employers don't really care what your undergraduate major was. For Most college graduates - their major literally doesn't matter. The only relevant fact, was that they graduated at all.
Unless you are literally going into engineering - your major doesn't matter. You can go to Medical School with an English Degree. You can go to Law School with a Chemistry Degree. You can work for a Fortune 500 with a Philosophy Degree or Art History Degree.
> think the main purpose of college is to educate people who have chosen a specific subject they want to study or train students skills that correspond to a particular career path.
Even if you have a particular career path - the specific subjects studied at the college level don't impact your ability to go into that career (except for engineering).
So why not do some self-exploration while you're there?? | 17 | 40 |
ELI5: Why can different parts of the human body withstand different amounts of pain? | Some parts are more important and exposed (ie: eyes, hands, feet, groin) and so they need to be protected more, and the easiest way to do that is to make it feel bad when something damages them, so that you avoid that happening.
Other parts are already very well protected by bones and muscle (brain, heart, most internal organs) so they don't usually get damaged from outside stuff, and that means they don't need to tell you as quickly. This actually causes problems, such as when people get tumors or other growths, and don't notice it until it starts damaging everything around it and making things too cramped in there. | 16 | 37 |
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ELI5: In statistics, why can't you sample a group larger than 10% of the whole? | I've been told that taking a sample larger than 10% of the population will be less accurate than say, taking a sample of 50% of the population. How does this work? To me it seems that, the more people you sample, the more accurate the study will be. | there is a certain ratio of cost to reliability. in theory it would be best to make a study on the whole population. but since that is near impossible and at least very costly we use samples. and there is a certain minimum sample you need for the sake of accuracy. depending on the size of population, method of picking for sample and so on, you achieve a number that is the minimum. A bigger sample should be more accurate, the closer you get to the number of all of the population.. You will usually go with somewhere close to the minimum (not less, sometimes slightly more) because of cost. | 34 | 98 |
If ocean water had a higher viscosity, would wave size be affected? | Yes because the viscosity changes the amount of energy needed to make the substance move, in this case you are asking about wave size so you are going to need more force to make the wave grow at least the actual size of waves right now.
Imagine having a sea full of pancake syrup. If you throw a rock at the sea. The rings that are created on the impact would travel a little bit of space compared to what they normally do.
Fun fact: you can “hear” the difference in viscosity based on the temperature of the water at the moment you are pouring it on a cup. Temperature changes the viscosity of the water so it sounds different.
I’m gonna add more knowledge: since temperature is energy being transferred to water particles “charging them” ( in this case ) energy transmission between particles it’s gonna be easier thats why it’s easier for hot water to flow. If seawater was hotter there would be bigger wavers
At high temperatures the viscosity index lowers making it more fluid.
Edit: since a lot of people are worried about global warming and the temperature of the sea I’m gonna answer it: yes the oceans are getting warmer but the increase in the temperature on the seas are really low to make a noticeable change (on the height of waves)
Ice caps melting would do more damage because sea level rises so more land is eaten by the sea. Temperature would affect somehow( in viscosity) but it’s too small to make an really extreme impact noticeable at first sight on the wave height ( in this case) we should be more worried about reefs bleaching and plastic destroying animal life. | 2,653 | 6,739 |
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ELI5: Do other languages have as many accents as English? Why or why not? | There are wildly different English accents across the globe, but does this happen with other languages? I feel like it would, but I've never heard/seen anything about it. | Everyone is giving examples of specific languages, so I'll just give a general answer: it's a resounding yes. Virtually all languages will have some kind of accent variation based on geography. Accents may also be based on things like social class or ethnicity, and other languages will have those as well.
You hear more about this for English because it has the most widespread community of speakers (and in your case, OP, you hear about it because it's your language). | 33 | 46 |
[the culture] are drones human conscience in robotic bodies or are they sentient machines ? | And what's this 1:1 intelligence, is it a rating system for how smart a thing is ? | They're sentient machines created and raised in such a way that they can interact with humans in a natural fashion.
It's possible for humans to become drones, but this is considered eccentric and would result in awkward interactions with other drones.
Drones tend to have mental capacity generally similar to humans, or at least within the same order of magnitude, as opposed to Minds who may as well be gods compared to us (they simulate universes for fun, for pete's sake).
It seems drones have a lineage going back all the way to AIs created before the creation of the Culture meta-civilisation, and may well share origins with the Minds. | 49 | 52 |
ELI5: Japanese soldiers in WW2 movies are usually portrayed as stupid and tactless, fanatically charging towards heavily defended positions and only using bayonets, is this actually true or a media falsehood? | Well? | The Japanese army focused on close quarters tactics which can be very effective under the right circumstances. Unlike the European theater of the war where there were a lot of wide open fields, the Japanese fought most of their battles in dense tropical forests or the rugged terrain of China. It was also meant to be a psychological tactic. A bunch of guys charging with bayonets and screaming like maniacs would unnerve all but the most battle-hardened veterans. The average Japanese soldier wasn't fanatic loyal to the emperor body and soul but it certainly worked to his advantage if his enemy thought that. | 77 | 63 |
ELI5: What's the catch of "free rewards cards" (at like Ingles or WalGreens) | I really can't believe they'd give cheaper items for nothing. What's the catch? All I can find are ads online. | They get better data on your purchasing habits. This means that they can aggregate huge sums of data and figure out patterns.
For instance, one super market chain figured out that a lot of their customers were buying both beer and diapers. Why? Dads on the way home. (This was a while ago…)
Target caused a little stir a few years back because they tracked customer buying habits and were able to predict life events before the customer even knew. In particular, they realized that the sudden purchase of certain products usually meant the customer was pregnant and they marketed pregnancy and infant products.
This came to light when the customer was a teenage girl who hasn’t told her parents she was pregnant yet.
The catch? They will know a lot about you and can predict all sorts of things about what you might be getting ready to do.
Edit: fixed a typo | 91 | 28 |
Why Walter Benjamin concluded that the "aestheticization of politics" would lead/has led to war? | The problem with mass reproducible media is that it formally creates communal, utopian experience (e.g. via everybody adopting the perspective of the film lens) without necessarily creating the substantive conditions which can realize that communal, utopian experience in the real world (e.g. outside the theater). Thus, we have a tension in that people desire the communal, utopian experience given to them by mass media but cannot actually have this experience because they live in a fractured, alienated, exploitative world.
There are two solutions to this problem. The one Benjamin advocates is overthrowing the existing order of things which prevents the realization of communal, utopian experience - in other words, communist revolution. The contradiction is resolved when we politicize aesthetics to recognize that its fantasies cannot be fulfilled without genuine social-economic-political change, and then go on to enact such change.
The one Benjamin warns against is the aestheticization of politics. Instead of attempting to change the material conditions of our existence to realize the communal, utopian dream of mass media, we aestheticize reality to extend unto it the utopian illusion. War, Benjamin argues, is a prime candidate for a mass, communal experience - nationalistic fervor of the sort mobilized by the Nazis made people feel like they were a part of something larger, after all. War for the glory of Germany (... or America, etc.) is an aesthetic remedy to a political problem. As such, we get a temporary, bloody, and futile "solution" to a structural problem. | 41 | 31 |
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Authorship Negotiation | I’m a full time research employee (not a student) who was desperately asked to join a STEM research project that needed to be revived so it wouldn’t fail. I accepted and have been working on it for nearly a year. I updated an intervention and coordinated expert panel review of it as well. We are in the middle of testing everything now, and I realized nobody ever spoke to me about authorship.
I’m first generation college and feel very taken advantage of by the PIs I work with because most ethical standards note authorship should be discussed upfront and first.
I recently reported racial misconduct in the lab and feel I may be denied authorship in retaliation.
I’d like advice on how to negotiate authorship now while I search for a new opportunity. | Despite what you've read about ethical standards, authorship is usually not discussed upfront, other than between collaborating PIs. With students, authorship is implied, providing that the student does productive and rigorous work under the PI's supervision.
If you've done what you describe and you're the student most actively leading the work, it's fine for you to assume you're on the paper, and to ask your PI (1) if there's anything you should be doing to start preparing the manuscript, or (2) what their expected timeline is for this to get written up. | 88 | 48 |
CMV: STEM is more important than art in society | I believe that science and technology are more important than art, music, and similar fields.
Without STEM, we would have never developed antibiotics, cured smallpox, invented the automobile, and made thousands of other extremely important developments of the modern world. While pretty pictures and enjoyable music may slightly increase enjoyment of life, I don't see any major benefit of those that is more important than the benefit of science. Life might suck without art, but who would die without it?
I know that I am probably missing some reasons why art is important to society. My view could change if you show me some other ways that art benefits society in a more important way than science.
Edit: **I am not saying that art is not important.** I think that art and STEM are both very important. My view is that STEM is more important than art.
Edit 2: I have changed my view and now believe that they are equally important because they both require each other.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | You’re falling victim to the fallacy of reification, which in short refers to treating an abstract concept as if it were a material thing. An example might be treating IQ as if it were a real material quantity, instead of a representation of one aspect of an immaterial human intelligence.
In this case, you are comparing STEM and art as if they were two differerent “things” that exist in the world. You are thingifying STEM and art. Neither STEM and art exist in such a demarcated way that you can compare them like this. Instead, what exists is human individuals interacting with each other and the world. In place of thinking of “STEM,” think of it as “humans using the scientific method to inquire about the mechanics of their universe.” In place of art, think of it as “humans self-expressing what it’s like to be human.”
Seeing it this way, you might realize that to deny the equal importance of both is to deny a fundamentally important part of what it means to be human. There isn’t such a thing as engineering, there are engineers, some of whom happen to rely on the work of artists because they want to communicate their work and brand in a visually-engaging manner. There isn’t such a thing as art, there are artists, many of which rely on the work of engineers for the digital software they use to create artwork. For every engineer using art, there’s a an artist using engineering. When you realize the arbritrary demarcations and boundaries between STEM and art don’t really exist and get blurred everyday when you work in these fields, you start realizing that society is oftenmessily interconnected like this,
In short, sure, you could argue that life is more important than death to society, because that’s how we as a community decide how to define life, death, and importance to society. But really, you can’t discuss what it means to be human without both life or death. In the same way, you can’t discuss human society without both STEM and art. | 49 | 18 |
If telomers get shorter with every split of a cell, doesn't this mean we can pretty accurately calculate when someone will die of old age? | The concept behind the question is an interesting one and the idea of predicting the lifespan of an individual based on biological indicators is indeed a popular research topic.
Long story short specifically for telomeres, the answer is "not really". Different cells divide at different speeds. Also, many cells do not divide any further at all. If someone got even a minor injury or a mildly traumatic event or some weird habits, that would affect cell division as well. And then there are the individual differences in telomere lengths. Given all these, it will be virtually impossible to predict the "endpoint" of cell division in the real-time scale, let alone predicting one for an individual based on a few cells.
Also, generally telomere length is not the limiting factor for humans. There's some evidence that it can be a contributing one, but it is not really a major factor (the correlation was not practically significant and causation is somewhat dubious). There are many other ways a person can die "of old age" depending on the definition, including cancer, neurological disorders (Alzheimer's etc.), osteoporosis, cardiovascular diseases, kidney failure, weak immune system etc. etc., all of which are very much age-related. There are even sayings that most people don't have Huntington's Disease because we die before we reach the age of developing one. | 2,678 | 7,244 |
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ELI5: Why can't we use the ocean to dump onto fires? | Saltwater changes the pH of soil and can really hinder the regrowth of plant communities.
If you consider an area that seldom receives rain then you have a very long time before enough freshwater (rain) has fallen to restore soil chemistry. | 300 | 120 |
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ELI5: Why does phone voice quality still suck, while Skype and FaceTime sounds like the person is right next to me? | Telephone systems were deployed many decades ago and it was important that different systems were able to communicate with each other. Regulators defined standards for how these systems communicate with each other with a particular focus in ensuring that call quality was minimally clear while allowing as many conversations at the same time as they could manage. Over the years, voice communication technology has changed radically, but these interoperability regulations have proven to be politically difficult to change as few can agree on what they should be replaced with and what the costs in money and reliability might be.
Since Skype, FaceTime, and countless others are internet software applications, so internal communications on their networks don't have to adhere to telephone standards and can use modern audio encoding techniques to create much better sound quality. Some mobile phones are capable of Wideband audio, a.k.a. HD voice, where compatible devices talking over a compatible network can increase the quality of a telephone conversation. | 3,452 | 3,398 |
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Does capitalism tends to create monopolies? | Yesterday, I had a discussion with my brother who is a libertarian. And he would argue that the government is the principal cause of monopolies with their regulations.
I can understand that regulation tends to create oligopolies. For example in sectors that are extremely regulated (in Europe) like energy, for a new company to compete with a large existing one is almost imposible.
But we can see in sectors that are less regulated like tech companies, monopolies arises everywhere like Microsoft, google, etc.
Can someone explain if there is a relation between regulation and the tendency for monopolies? Or the other way around. | The size of the typical firm in an industry is determined by the efficient scale in that industry. In some industries this scale is large enough to the point where one firm (a monopoly) outperforms all other firms. This is a "free market" phenomenon. In other industries the efficient scale is smaller so monopolies will never happen.
Government imposition of artificial barriers to entry can also cause monopoly | 28 | 18 |
What keeps Jupiter, a gas giant, from collapsing under its own gravity and becoming a dense solid? | Hydrostatic equilibrium is what you want to look into. It's what keeps big round things round, from planets to stars.
In Jupiter's case, the gas at the center is hot from the extreme pressure exerted by gravity. The heat and pressure causes the gas to rise, so there's an equilibrium between gravity pulling down and the heat and pressure pushing out. | 25 | 24 |
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CMV: Owning the property rights to a fictional work does not make a company the sole authority on how that fictional work should be imagined. Considering some installments in a series "non-canon" is a perfectly valid audience response. | In recent years a lot of old fictional franchises have had new installments released that have been controversial with fans of the older installments. Sometimes, fans of the older works refuse to consider the newer installments to be part of the same story as the older installments. People often dismiss this as childish and petty, suggesting that if the rights-holders say it happened, it happened. Notable examples include Star Wars and Star Trek.
I would say that the author has authority over one thing: the text of their story. Within that text, they can describe the past, present, and future of their world. If they so choose, they can insert a story told by another work into the text of their own. What they cannot do, however, is insert their work into the text of another pre-existing story.
So, for instance, I think it's perfectly valid for the makers of the new Star Wars movies to say that the events shown in *Return of the Jedi* happened in the history of their fictional world. What they cannot do is tell us that we can't watch *Return of the Jedi* without accepting the new movies as that world's future. We did so for decades before the new movies were even made, they can't make us stop now. Once the story's out in the world, it has a life of its own.
I think the people who look down on those who don't accept some installments of a fictional work are giving corporations more authority than they should be given. It's fine to not accept everything that's branded with the same name. | Canon inherently requires an authority though as it is a list of what is officially accepted as happening in the text. You can reject having a canon and form your own personal canon but again canon is defined by some authority listing certain works as official. Without someone making that list then there is no canon. | 17 | 37 |
What's the difference between Marxism and Communism? | Marxism is a collection of philosophical, political and socioeconomic schools of thought, commonly employing Marx's analysis tools of historical materialism, his critique of capitalism, and Marxian theories of economics.
In Marxist philosophy, a Communist society is a classless, stateless and moneyless society where the means of production are commonly owned by the workers. Communists seek to achieve this form of society, generally through the abolishing of capitalism through a worker led revolution. There are many forms of communism, and most communist states claim to follow some form of Marxist ideology (most notably Marxism-Leninism), but there are other non-Marxist communist ideologies.
So Communism is a collection of ideologies concerned with achieving a communist society, while Marxism is a philosophical and economic framework employed by communists and socialists, though not exclusively. | 55 | 40 |
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Why are rockets/ spacecraft corrosion resistant, if there is no oxygen in space? | I was reading about the different types of alloys used in rockets, and many of them are labeled as 'corrosion resistant'; does this actually matter or is it just a useless byproduct of the alloys that rockets use? (btw, sorry if I used the wrong flair.) | There are 3 main aspects that are relevant there on why you would want corrosion resistant materials.
First while the goal is to send the thing to space it will spend a significant amount of time on the ground first. Even in a clean room environment you can get corrosion. Moreover contrary to a lot of other vehicles and systems you can't easily protect the materials with paint, oils or other rust inhibitor because they are typically not vacuum compatible. Rockets also often launched close to the coast where they can have to spend days in hot humid environment where there can be salt water spray.
The second thing for some parts is that a lot of propellants are very chemically agressive and corrosion resistant materials are usually also pretty resistant to chemical reactions.
The last one is that there is actually oxygen in space! It's a very tiny amount but at the very top of the atmosphere you get what is called "atomic oxygen", basically instead of O2 it's single atoms of oxygen. Those are way way more agressive than normal oxygen and it can be a significant problem after years in low earth orbit. Plastics might get attacked for example. Using stainless steel or passivated aluminium really helps cutting this effect. | 2,917 | 1,807 |
Why are we so far from a scientific consensus about the best diet? | I understand that human needs are complex are human bodies are adaptable, so we shouldn't expect a consensus list of The Best Things for Everyone to Eat. However, it seems to me that **some** options should be off the table.
Some eating habits are nearly diametrically opposed. When I was younger, "low-fat" was generally accepted, and now that is even subject to opinion.
I don't want to have to think about what to eat. It should be something scientifically testable! So why aren't nutrition scientists making strong claims that trim down the number of "healthy" diet options? | Testing it is actually quite hard. You have a few different options, which all have problems.
First of you could try to look at large groups of people and their diets. This has been done by some of the high fat diet folks. They look at people from Greece, and see that they have less hearth trouble than average. So a high fat diet must be good. However, there are lots of problems with it. For one thing, there are lots of factors. Maybe it's not the high amount of fat that makes it good, maybe it's the fact that they drink more goats milk, have a better medical system or more friends. You can find groups following most diets that live a long time. So this way isn't all that effective.
You could get a group and ask them to follow a diet, and observe them. If the group is big enough (which it often isn't), you can get some good data. However, people don't follow diets. If they break it, the data lose a lot of value.
Note: Sometimes it can be interesting to know if people break their diets. Because maybe some diets are easier to follow than others. Should that be taken into consideration?
Those are the two big ones, but there are of course a few other ones, all of them with problems. Case studies with only one guy (or a very few), the small group makes those worth less even if you can make sure they follow the prescribed diet. Animal studies, but animals aren't the same as us.
Then you have a few systemic ones. For one thing there is the fact that you have lots of groups all earning lots of money on different diets. And since there are so many flaws in the studies, making them say what you want them to isn't all that hard. So you get sponsored tests, that show that the best diet is the one the sponsor wants.
Independent studies often lack money, which makes them small (and that makes them inconclusive).
And lastly you have the insane number of relevant factors. Different people want different diets (underweight people vs overweight, women vs men, old vs young), different diets are good for preventing different things (one is good for the hearth, one for the brain, one for muscle growth, etc). | 17 | 85 |
ELI5: what does the spleen do with old/unviable red blood cells after it has filtered them from the bloodstream? | Healthy red blood cells simply pass through the spleen by virtue of their shape and ‘youthful’ flexibility making it possible to pass through a series of small “passages”. Damaged, malformed or otherwise misshapen and nonconforming red blood cells are caught in that network and broken down by white blood cells. | 37 | 20 |
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I think that education is the single most important factor in the development of a country. CMV. | Education is the most important weapon against poverty but also other problems in 3rd world nations.
1. Children will have a chance to get a better job in the future. If you can read in those kind of countries I think you have a very big chance to get a good job because nobody can in the country.
2. They learn to think being rational and critical at politics. Particularly in the Middle-East they need that. The people blindly follow political movements without thinking rational and being skeptical. People need good education for rational thinking and a critical attitude. Eventually when they will have that kind of mindset. The whole country will change and a huge part of their problems will be solved.
3. People need to learn what’s good and bad. I’m not talking about religious things but they need to be learned some values and standards. Central Republic of Africa is the country with the most raped women. Why? I say it’s because the people can’t think normal or rational. It’s probably not the only thing that causes it, but I think it’s the biggest cause of it. Other things that cause it are religion and poverty. Both can be solved with good education and good clear thinking. A good example is that they learn that everybody is equivalent to each other.
4. The children will learn to read, write and calculate. Three very important things for the development of a child. Also they learn things like social knowledge, working on your future, dreaming about the future (it can be an important incentive and motivation for the child).
5. The children will learn practical knowledge like hygiene and how to prevent diseases. Their parents probably don’t know about it so who else will they learn it from? They have a problem if they don’t know how to take care of themselves because eventually nobody will do it for them. It’s sickening to know that people are dying because of simple things that can be learned in a good way at school.
6. The children will learn about sexuality. That will prevent very much diseases, confusion, misconduct and so on just because they wouldn’t know about such things like physical space, limits how far you can go with women etc.
7. Girls won’t learn how to stand up for themselves with all the consequences. They will deal with forced marriage, circumcision and exploitation.
8. Eventually if everybody in the country is high educated. The economy will be a service economy. Many 3rd world countries are agriculture economies and a view are a little bit changing to industrial economies.
So this is why I think education is the most important way to build up a good developed country. Mainly because education encourages rational thinking and teaches children practical things that will help them stay alive.
| What about basic infrastructure? How are the children supposed to get to school if there are no roads? What about electricity? Emergency services?
I agree that youth are the most valuable resource any country has, but there are other essentials that are required in order to adequately utilize that potential
| 32 | 94 |
ELI5: Why do radio waves pass through walls while light waves don't? | Waves tend to interact with things that have a similar scale to their wavelength. A solid, opaque object like a wall has microstructures that are of a similar size to the wavelength of light (i.e. very, very small - nanometre to micrometre scale) so it interacts strongly with visible light and therefore blocks it. But the wavelength of a radiowave is much greater, often measured in metres, so it doesn't interact anywhere near as much with materials that would block visible light. | 78 | 221 |
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ELi5: Why is matter referred to as 'information' when related to black holes? | Whenever I read an article about black holes or other enormous gravity wells, I always see something like "...and since information can't escape the event horizon...". A good article will go on to say something about matter being called information, but this confuses me. It seems to confuse some authors as well, as I occasionally see the term conflated with 'data'.
If it's as simple as two similar terms, wouldn't it be good for science communication's sake to just keep calling it 'matter', at least outside of academia? If not, why do we call it 'information'? | usually when matter does things in the universe, we know about it because we can see it--either through visible light or other types of radiation
a black hole absorbs not only the matter itself, but _all_ of the things that might let us know stuff about that matter
so 'information' in the black hole context doesn't refer to just matter, but matter PLUS everything that might tell us stuff about that matter. we say information to broadly assert that no clues of any kind may be found about matter after it enters | 428 | 466 |
ELI5: Why do we usually see meteors fall to Earth at an angle, but rarely straight down? | EDIT:
So no definitive answer, and some conjecture going on. Wheels up boys and girls, we're going to r/askscience | Because everything in space (with mass) has a relative orbit and gravitational force. In fact, you even have a gravitational force. As the distance to a planet or star gets smaller, its gravitational pull gets stronger. Since the meteor already has a velocity vector (a magnitude and direction) it begins to accelerate towards the planet and it changes direction. So the meteor is still flying in its original direction and speed but now it's being pulled in another direction with additional speed. There are no fixed points in space so an object can't fly directly to a point. Every time it passes anything in space with mass it will move slightly towards it, depending on how much mass the meteor has and how much mass the object has. Imagine you're driving down a straight road doing 75 mph and ahead of you on the side of the road is a powerful magnet. As you get closer to passing the magnet, it's going to pull you towards it. So imagine that when you combine the speed and direction that you're already going with now a force pulling you sideways, you will tend to move you at an angle between the two. Much like how a meteor will enter the earth. Of course an object in space wouldn't have traction or frictional forces of the road but hopefully that helps makes sense of it. | 36 | 110 |
[Star Trek] How can it be that every Holo-room can create more emotionally convincing personalities than Data ever was? | Those personalities were driven by conversational algorithms, tailored to present convincing facades within scripted scenarios. They were not inherently sentient, but non-self-aware bots puking out pre-drafted dialogue and pulling, when needed, from banks of text (and body language, and scenery) which looked statistically relevant. Given the leisure time and desire for recognition that drives the lives of most Federation citizens, many holodeck scenarios have been worked on for countless hours, to the point where the illusion of interaction with sentient beings is nearly flawless.
But at the end of the day, these aren't real people with real feelings, and the things they say aren't being motivated by anything but an instinctive reaction to stimuli provided by holodeck visitors. Data is something entirely different- and wonderful. | 165 | 190 |
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Is there a limit to the number of planets that can plausibly form around star systems of two or more stars? | It depends on how closely the stars orbit each other.
There are three types of possible orbits for planets in a binary star system:
1. Planet orbits around Star A
2. Planet orbits around Star B
3. Planet orbits around the gravitational centre of Stars A and B
In cases 1 and 2, the upper limit for how many planets can have a stable orbit around each individual star will depend a great deal on the closest distance between stars A and B as they orbit each other. If the minimum distance is several hundred AU, then functionally it’s nearly the same as if the stars weren’t orbiting each other at all. If the minimum distance is within a few AU or less, then neither star is likely to have planets in stable orbits around them and only them.
In case 3, it depends on the maximum distance between the stars. If the stars are close to each other and have a relatively tight orbit with low eccentricity, then stable planetary orbits will be able to exist closer to the dual-star system, which in the end means more planets will be able to form and orbit around the two stars. If instead the stars have a highly elliptical orbit around each other, they may not have any planets orbiting around the dual system at all.
As a nearby example, the Alpha Centauri system has three stars. A and B orbit around each other in an elliptical orbit. Their closest approach is distant enough for each star to have 3, maybe 4 planets each in stable orbits around each star, but no more than that. Any planets that orbit around the gravitational centre of the system would be many hundreds of AU distant and would have orbital periods of many thousands of years; these would all be uninhabitable frozen snowballs.
Proxima Centauri is extremely distant from the other two stars, so much so that their gravitational influence on it and its surroundings is negligible. So Proxima can have just as many planets around it as it could have if the other two stars weren’t even there. | 13 | 40 |
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Writing letter of recommendation for professor | Hello,
One of my former professors just asked me to write him a letter of support for his promotion/review. I agreed without hesitation because he has supported me greatly through my years as a student at my former college. Now, I've never written a recommendation letter before, and I need some help on formatting. I want to get it right because he's such a great person and truly deserves to continue teaching at this institution.
1. How do I address the letter? (Professor said I have to email the letter to a committee member)
2. How long should the letter be?
3. What should I cover and how do I start out the letter? Anyone have any example letters? | You're a student. Don't put so much pressure on yourself. The committee knows you don't know much about this process. When in doubt, ask the prof this.
1. You can use either "To whom it may concern" or "Dear X department," etc..
2. He really should have told you this one. Probably not more than 1-2 pages. Preferably at least one, at most 2.
3. This really is just up to you. It will help most if you point out **concrete** ways in which your professor helped. Highlighting personal anecdotes of his working with students or service to the department will be useful.
Examples (if true, but you get the idea):
- "Prof X frequently held his office hours on Saturdays to help students who were busy during the week, and this really highlighted his commitment to teaching."
- "He used group work in an effective way by checking in with group members regular to ensure that everyone was contributing equally."
- "When portions of the class were struggling, he did not take it as a reflection of the students but engaged in self-reflection as to his teaching style and adjusted in a way to help the rest of the class get back on track." | 16 | 18 |
ELI5: How did humans in Asia evolve to have narrower eyes, why did Africans skin stay black while Arabic and European peoples became lighter? | No offense meant, just phrasing the question as best I can as to how some humans evolved with certain traits and how the process occurred. | If you live in the tropics, dark skin is a helpful adaptation, because it protects your skin from sunlight (fewer sun burns and cancers).
If you live in the northern latitudes where there is significantly less sun certain times of the year, light skin is a helpful adaptation, because it allows more sunlight to penetrate the dermis, thereby creating more vitamin D.
The primary characteristic of east Asian eyes is called the *epicanthic fold*, and we believe it may have evolved to protect the eye from harsh winds, but the jury is still out on that one. | 139 | 202 |
ELI5: Why do photographs sell for millions of dollars when the photographer could just release a duplicate at any time? | For example, Cindy Sherman's [Untitled #96 ](http://i.imgur.com/X3ZAkpz.jpg) sold for $3.9 million.
Is there anything preventing photographers from producing multiple copies?
| When artists sell pieces for this much, part of the sale includes a guarantee about how many copies of the work they will reproduce. If the artist were to go on and make more, presumably the first purchaser could take the artist to court and null the sale, forcing them to return the money. | 122 | 228 |
ELI5: How are we certain that the laws of physics are true for the WHOLE universe and not just our Earth/solar-system? | The ways in which we observe the rest of the universe (by telescopes, hadron colliders, etc.) are all done here on Earth, so how are we so sure these laws are so accurate for the entire universe? | I was reading Three Body Problem by Liu CiXin and a very good theory was presented. Turkey Theory, there is a barn full of turkeys, but one of them is very smart. He is science turkey. He noticed that every day at 1:00 pm the farmer would come out to feed all of them, so he made it into a law. We get fed every day at 1:00. Until thanksgiving day when the farmer came in and slaughtered them.
It could be that the laws we know are subject to abrupt change in the future. What we see as a pattern, could just be a fluke. | 34 | 35 |
ELI5: How do motion sensors work? | The general function behind most, whether it uses infrared, ultrasound, or even a webcam, is a game of "spot the difference." When calibrated in a still room, the sensor knows that the general "image" it is "seeing" is a scene without any movement. When something changes, usually within a set tolerance level, (many are designed not to trigger the alarm when a pet or anything smaller than an average adult human wanders through the area) the sensor sees that there's a significant difference in the "image" and hits the panic button. This can range from ultra-sophisticated 3D imaging using a complex network of sensors down to a beam of light going from full to dim/off. Even a tripwire rigged to a mousetrap does this on a mechanical level, though something like this is much easier to circumvent. | 19 | 18 |
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CMV: Feminism is the wrong approach to gender equality | Hello! Let me preface by saying I don't believe there is a better sex. Your genitalia is not indicative of your role in society, your actions and decisions are. That being said, feminism is a movement for women, not equality for all sexes. I believe there should be a larger, more inclusive movement that doesn't cater to a special interest group and addresses the injustices that men and trans individuals experience on a daily basis. If this were feminism, then it wouldn't be called feminism.
I look forward to all productive or inquisitive replies!
Edit : thanks for keeping it amicable folks
_____
> *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!* | Feminism is a component of the broader equality movement stemming from the perception that women are not treated equally in society. Many feminists will advocate for equality, for trans rights, to address male victims of sexual assault or domestic violence. Feminism itself, however, is a movement with a more specific aim.
It is a movement that fights for equality by demanding more rights to go towards a historically victimized group, much in the way that civil rights leaders in the 1960s up to today acted.
You can be a feminist and advocate for the rights of other marginalized groups at the same time. Moving towards equality is not a mutually exclusive exercise. Some people are just more focused in their approach. This is fine, and really a part of any kind of struggle of this kind. There are people who advocate for the homeless, for the mentally ill, for victims of domestic violence. It doesn't mean they don't care about the other groups or the broader issue. | 45 | 46 |
ELI5: Who wrote the bible and how can we trust the things that are in it? | The bible is a collection of stories written over a long period of time. Some of the chapters are contemporary others are written long after the fact. Some are possibly reflective of what happened at the time, others are fantasies, some are probably complete forgeries.
Can we trust the contents? That depends on who you ask. r/Christianity will give you a vastly different answer to r/atheism | 124 | 18 |
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