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Eli5: what is SWAT up to when theres not like a hostage crisis or something? | Obviously those types of things don't happen everyday so like what do they do ? | Depends on the agency. In many, SWAT is a part-time job, so they're regular patrol or detectives until there's a call-out.
In bigger agencies where they can afford full-time SWAT, they generally operate much like the fire department - training, working out or other administrative duties until they're called out, and then they go to work. | 22 | 21 |
ELI5: Why you see colors when you close your eyes really hard. | I've always wondered why this happens, almost as if the colors dance in and out of sight when I shut my eyes and focus on the backs of my eye lids. Any knowledge on this? | Sight is caused by the cells at the back of your eye reacting to light. These signals are carried along a wire called the retinal ganglion to the part of your brain that sees.
The cells in your eye and retinal ganglion cells are designed to be stimulated by light, but can be stimulated by lots of things. Pressure on the eyes, electric shock, or very strong magnets.
You can also stimulate the visual area of the brain directly. The visual area is right at the back. A strong impact here will cause you to see "stars", random patterns of light. | 13 | 29 |
Can oral vitamin B12 work effectively if taken sublingually? | Oral absorption of B12 is variable and requires several cofactors to transport it across the intestinal mucosa. A sublingual formulation may increase absorption a little, but clinical evidence is really inconclusive on that.
If you have a deficiency your best option is to get your levels up to the normal range via IM or SubQ injection, then you can use oral supplementation to keep those levels where they need to be. | 10 | 41 |
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ELI5: What exactly is attraction and how do we develop these attractions to specific traits, qualities, and behaviours? | Help me reddit?? | It is a combination of biology, experience, conditioning, and learning.
Biology - We are (generally) biologically attracted to people with symmetrical facial structures, indications of ability to pass useful traits to offspring, people of the same race, social economic status, education level, etc.
Experience - We are (generally) attracted to similar people that we've been in previous relationships with or who have had important roles in our lives. Which is why we are sometimes attracted to people who are like our parents, or mentors, idols, etc.
Conditioning - We are conditioned to be attracted to people who fit a certain ideal. This is reinforced by images we see on TV, in movies, in magazines, pornography, advertising, etc. We constantly see these "ideal people" succeed, be desired, and are represented in sexual and romantic ways which makes our brain associate them with attraction.
Learning - We learn from others what is attractive. Parents and friends influence our values of what we find attractive and worthwhile in potential partners. | 11 | 30 |
If everything is changing, what is the object of our knowledge? | Everything is constantly changing, if everything is changing, then what is the ‘object’ of our knowledge if not the rational constructs of the mind? | *Most* would say your premise is flawed because e.g. 2+2=4 is not changing; it's always true and always will be, and thus can be a constant object of knowledge.
To tease out your question further, do you think 2+2=4 is not true, or that it will not be true in the future? Or are you asking about a particular *kind* of knowledge? If so, what sort of things are you thinking of? | 10 | 16 |
Are there any molecules which are visible to the naked eye or through visual light microscopy? | Are there any molecules (I'm thinking probably a protein) which are so large they are visible to the naked eye or can be seen using standard light microscopy? | The answer is basically no, because once you get to the point where we are talking about polymers/organic materials the term molecule gets kind of blurred. As /u/argurotoxus said "A molecule is defined as the smallest fundamental unit of a chemical compound that can take part in a reaction."
If that is the case basically only incredibly complex molecules (like biologically generated ones) would be large enough without simple repeating units and these molecules are nearly impossible to separate out as individuals.
The main issue here is the efficiency of our eyes as photon detectors and the fact that we simply cannot see on that scale even with magnification help. This means that unless we could get a single strand, isolated we could never separate them. Even if we could get a single strand, you might be able to see a small amount of light distortion as the molecules scatters some light but otherwise you wouldn't be able to make out any actual structure.
Edit: Finished a thought in the 2nd paragraph. | 16 | 56 |
Is there any scientific basis to the old trick of rubbing your hands on stainless steel to remove garlic/onion odors? | I've heard that a good trick to remove the strong garlic or onion odor from your fingers after cutting vegetables is to rub your hands with a stainless steel spoon or other utensil. Is there any scientific basis to this theory? And if so, what is the chemistry behind how it works? | Transition metal elements are useful as catalysts, and they may favour the decomposition of certain organic molecules. If the molecule happens to have a very strong odour, it may be broken down into less odorous molecules. Therefore, if you rub a metal well against something strong-smelling, there's a reasonable chance the odorous substances present will be broken down and the smell abated. Not all metals work, however, and some may be better than others in different occasions.
A related curiosity is the origin of the "smell of metal". A compound must be suspended in air to be smelled, and for most metals it's difficult to imagine that enough of their atoms manage to become airborne at room temperature, because most metals have very low vapour pressures (basically they have high boiling points). It turns out that the smell of metal is actually due to compounds present in the oils produced by the skin. When a metal is touched, oils are left on its surface, and they start decomposing into other organic substances to which we have associated the smell of metal. | 43 | 104 |
CMV: As long as there is money to be made in medicine, we can't trust it 100%. | I'm going to talk fairly generally here. I've become sceptical over the years, I don't trust advertising or big corporations in general very much.
Now without delving into a vaccination/cure debate, there's two scenarios I can't get out of my head:
1) If a vaccine is no longer needed, but using it makes a big company money, it will stay in production.
2) If there is more money to be made from HIV treatment than a HIV cure, it'll take longer to find the cure.
Is there any hard proof that shows my negative view of the world to be untrue here? Isn't capitalism in medicine a bad thing?
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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!* | Here is the thing - "medicine" is just an umbrella term that accounts for hundreds of different companies that all have competing interests. The logic of capitalism is that those competing interests will worth themselves out over time.
For example, both of the situations you've put forward would be true if the only entities involved were pharmaceutical companies and patients. However, we also have _insurance companies_ in the mix as well, and very often their financial interests are in direct conflict with the pharmaceutical companies; insurance companies make profits when treatment costs are low, and pharma companies make profits when treatment costs are high. If a vaccine were no longer needed, the insurance company would simply stop covering it on your policy because they could do so without any major health risks to their customers - you. Same goes with an HIV cure - if it was cheaper to cure HIV than to treat it, you bet your bottom dollar that is what insurance companies would be doing.
Now, you could argue that insurance companies can't do these things if pharma companies are repressing research to keep their products viable. This would be true, except there are several pharma companies all in competition with one another. If one of them were to discover the cure for HIV, they would have a monopoly on treatment (since no one would use treatments when a cure existed) and would make serious money off of that discovery. It would be less for pharma companies as a whole, but much better for the one that discovered the cure, so they are all trying to become the one company that discovers the cure so they can shut everyone else out. This of course doesn't factor in all of the other, private research institutions that are not part of this game that are all looking to find said cures for their own selfish reasons (notoriety, grant money, etc.)
| 47 | 113 |
ELI5: Why does water stop evaporating when it reaches cloud-level, instead of floating into space? | Actual question from my actually 5 year old son, which I tried to research but couldn't understand the answer myself. Hoping someone can explain to both of us. | Cloud level itself is dependent on things like the temperature and moisture content of the air mass, and it varies widely.
Moist air rises until it reaches its dew point, the temperature where that moisture condenses out as visible water vapor that we know as clouds. Whatever altitude that occurs at (based on the atmospheric conditions) is "cloud level". There can be many such layers of clouds at any given time.
Vertical development, where the clouds are lofted much higher than they would otherwise be, is seen in atmospheric disturbances like thunderstorms that pump warm, humid air up into the atmosphere. | 20 | 24 |
ELI5: Why paper and photographs are predominantly rectangular rather than square shaped? | Photographs tend to be primarily portraits or landscapes. The human face on average is longer than it is wide, and therefore a vertical rectangular format works best for depicting it (this is true in painting, drawing and relief sculpture as much as in photography). Landscape photography works best in a horizontal format, since what tends to be most interesting (middle distance and horizon) is horizontal, and you can crop out immediate foreground and all of that uninteresting sky.
Paper tends to be rectangular because of writing and printing. In theory, a square shape would work just as well as a rectangular (usually vertical) shape for printing books and manuscripts -- and in fact there are quite a few square-format books that have been printed. But various conventions of writing and publishing in most languages have made it so the layout of text tends to be vertical: page numbers, footnotes, comfortable line length for reading in languages that print horizontally, etc. | 11 | 26 |
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When someone increases their flexibility (via stretching/yoga/exercise), what is actually happening at a molecular level? | Flexibility is increased by reducing the reflexive muscle tension that occurs when a joint is flexed past a certain point. For example, there is no connection travelling across your groin that prevents you from doing the splits. It's muscle tension in each leg that automatically kicks in. This means that increasing your flexibility is to some extent a psychological exercise. | 50 | 199 |
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[WH40k] Why does The Imperium use the equivalent of paper for administration? | I've heard that the Administratum have entire worlds dedicated to data storage, yet you frequently see them writing with quills.
In the 2nd Millennium, it was supposedly calculated that DNA storage (a new form of data storage at the time) could hold a zettabyte of data on a single gram. Every single word spoken by every human up to that point in time would have taken up 42 zettabytes if recorded as audio.
40,000 years later, everything is supposedly much more advanced from the 2nd Millennium, even if it has regressed somewhat.
Why would the Adeptus Administratum dedicate entire worlds to obsolete data banks, even going as primitive as using paper and parchment? By the 42nd Millennium, a single continent sized chunk of DNA storage should theoretically be enough to satisfy the data storage needs for the entire Imperium for the rest of eternity.
So, why paper? | Because paper is inert (more or less) and does not require a reader more advanced than someone knowing how to read to decipher it. It makes the medium significantly less directly susceptible to the corruption of Chaos, and records can still be deciphered even if there is another Mechanicus schism or Chaos incursion renders the tech that would retrieve and read other formats of data inoperable. | 188 | 184 |
Eli5: if there are a ton of harmful bacteria in every persons mouth, why is it relatively safe to give/receive oral when genitalia is so sensitive to foreign bacteria? | The bacteria in your mouth can cause harm depending on your diet and personal hygiene habits. They are also specialized at living in this environment and prevent harmful bacteria from taking residence in this nutrient rich environment. Along these lines - most of the time, most of the bacteria in your mouth are protective, not harmful.
It's a similar story with the vaginal microbiology. Specially adapted, usually protective.
When you swap bugs from one environment to another they don't do well. It would be like plunking a lion down in the Arctic.
Source: PhD Microbiologist, working in Oral Care 10+ years. | 5,020 | 6,793 |
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Why Pitch Up to Go Up while Flying? | I was ruminating over the physics of flying, and I arrived at the question: why would you want to pitch the aircraft up in order to increase vertical speed? I know lift is based on both airspeed and on angle of attack, but doesn't increased speed produce a higher increase in lift than does an increased angle of attack?
Let's say that a plane is accelerating down a runway. The angle of attack is 0, and the speed is increasing. At some point you want to pitch up ("rotate") to lift off, but wouldn't that reduce the vertical component of the lift vector? So then where does the extra vertical acceleration come from? The thrust vector, which is now pointing slightly up?
Thanks! | In introductory flight training (I only have a few hours, so pilots feel free to correct me) you actually are taught to control altitude/rate of climb largely by using airspeed. Increase throttle to go up, decrease throttle to go down.
>At some point you want to pitch up ("rotate") to lift off, but wouldn't that reduce the vertical component of the lift vector? So then where does the extra vertical acceleration come from? The thrust vector, which is now pointing slightly up?
The lift vector and thrust vector do change a bit, but it's comparatively minor - typically less than 10 degrees on takeoff rotation. The effect of changing the angle of attack on lift production is a much larger factor.
>Let's say that a plane is accelerating down a runway. The angle of attack is 0
Actually that's not exactly true, depending on where you define a 0 angle of attack. Next time you're at an airport look at the orientation of the wing root of an airliner on the ground. With a level fuselage the wing root is mounted around +3 degrees. | 20 | 34 |
ELI5 what it means for something/someone to be Straussian? | Leo Strauss was a philosopher who is most associated today with his research in hidden meanings. He believed that most serious authors wrote in ways that led public interpretations to differ from secret interpretations meant for their students and close associates.
A very simple example might be if someone says something like "we're going to London again", most listeners will interpret that as they're going to the city of London, England. However, someone who was with them on their last trip and knows their schedule may realize they are referring to something memorable that happened on that trip (like getting lost) and apply that to their current situation.
If there's a reason for an author not to speak openly about their true beliefs (like persecution or punishment) they may hide references to those beliefs in innocent statements in a way that serious study or insider knowledge can reveal them. | 51 | 27 |
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ELI5 how does torrent system work? | In a traditional situation, you have a Server and a Client. The Server is basically a big computer that handles the request of the Client, if you for example want to download a legal copy of a movie, the server would send it to you.
That has the advantage of having a clear and simple structure and depending on the server, a reliable source for your movies.
A torrent system is a peer to peer system, which means there are no dedicated servers, just clients, but everyone fullfils a little bit of the role of the server.
If you want to download another legal copy of a movie, you would not download it directly, but download a file that basically tells you what you need to download, your client will than ask every other client if they can provide it to you (which is called seeding) and you download it from many different sources.
The whole system relies on the premise that you make yourself available for seeding after that, so far that you can only download if you seed at the same time.
It is basically a decentralized version of a server, stretched over many clients. | 29 | 30 |
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Private property, best arguments for and against | I'm familiar with Locke's argument of natural property rights but I find it quite unconvinving really, is there any other arguments which build on it/are based on it with great detail?
Would also like to read some proper philosophical arguments against the idea of private property, is there Marx/Engles I should be reading or any other reccomendations people have? | In Hegel's Philosophy of Right he offers a defense of property by claiming that property is an extension of the individual will, and in order to be fully free we must be able to make our will exist in the external world through property. | 26 | 33 |
What makes someone a philosopher? | **Context:**
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I have been off and on the streets for the last few years, I am trying to get my life back together and I've taken some philosophy course before, I like reading about it but it wasn't until this semester when I started taking my education seriously that I want to make it my primary academic focus. I typically go and participate in activities (really just free food) with other homeless people and I mention that I'm studying philosophy and they go on about how they have all these deep thoughts about the nature of man and whatnot. I know better than to outright question them because that's just rude, but I get called a bad person and told that my thoughts aren't valuable if I don't outright 100% agree with them. Today there was a dinner and I was talking about a podcast I was listening to and how they were poking fun at George Berkeley's logic about how things aren't real but they are real but it's weird, this guy responded with "But things are real, I can see them" and as pressing me to explain further and I said I couldn't because I didn't really understand myself. and he went off on a tangent about how we experience things and how there are unfalsifiable (idk if that's a word but he used it) truths and how if I couldn't explain it then why even bring it up and how I'll never be a real philosopher.
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**Question:**
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What makes someone a philosopher? At what point can you make a good argument for or against something? How are you supposed to engage with someone in meaningful discourse outside of the classroom?
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Yes my feelings are a little hurt but I'm curious about what it means to be a philosopher, to explain things, and how I what methods there are to converse with people without either side escalating. If there are books you can recommend that'd be helpful too. | Typically, it's someone who has at least a master's or a Ph.D. in the field, since they've demonstrated high-level understanding of the discipline and have contributed something meaningful to the field's body of knowledge(At least in the case of Ph.D's). Others who don't have these degrees in philosophy can still be considered philosophers in contemporary times if they are recognized as a philosopher by other philosophers(whose qualifications are more obvious). The latter typically happens after they've contributed something meaningful to the field.
Saul Kripke, for instance, is a widely and deeply esteemed philosopher because of *Naming and Necessity*(And other works, too), even though he has no Ph.D. or master's in philosophy. In fact, his only formal postsecondary credential is a bachelor's in math from Harvard. Of course, you gotta be a serious genius to have that background and still be able to make substantive contributions to the discipline, especially like his. | 16 | 23 |
ELI5: Why do some forms of pain, like stretching a sore back or picking a scab, feel so incredibly satisfying ("hurts so good")? | I don't think there's a simple, single explanation to all of the situations you're asking about, but in regards to stretching a sore muscle, your movement pushes your body to the pain threshold, which draws your attention to it, and then you release. The pain dissipates so quickly, the relief hits you like the most sublime freight train. | 16 | 29 |
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[Grand theft auto] How is the economy doing so well? | The health care industry and medical technology have become so advanced that they can quickly repair and heal people on the brink of death after extreme injuries, as well as seemingly resurrect the freshly deceased. Combine the profitability of the healthcare industry with that of the barely regulated arms and munitions industries, on top of all the other industries such as automotive and entertainment, and you've got a bustling economy. | 140 | 124 |
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ELI5: How does spending huge amounts of money on the military by the government pay off? I.e., Unlike spending on technology or resource extraction which inherently produces materials or products that have value, what does the military produce that has inherent value? | security, stability, and jobs. When your looking to set up shop for your massive international company, you want to know that you wont get displaced by a warlord that wants to take what you have.
Theres certainly some research gains in the defense industry, things that come out of places like lockheed and boeing defense programs that advance technology. | 24 | 15 |
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Starting Computer Science Bachelors in a week, pro tips? | enrolled in computer science because i have always been fascinated with the seemingly endless applications of the computer. I hope to one day start my own company, preferably in game design (generic, I know). Does anyone have any tips concerning my goal or the program in general, I really dont know what to expect and any advice would be appreciated. Thanks. | It's very easy to learn where you stand by writing programs. Write lots of programs. Don't depend on a grade to tell you how you are doing, depend on the programs you can write.
It's a doing skill more than a knowing one.
It's a complex craft. Start now and don't stop. If you get ahead, it will make classes easier.
It's a very rewarding trade. Best of luck! | 11 | 15 |
ELI5: The difference between a corporation, a company, and a business | Bonus points: why is it that it's specifically corporations that are associated with villainy in so much fiction, and not all companies in general? | I think you are confusing a few terms as they are all intertwined. Business is a trade of goods or services, thus most companies are engaged in business. And corporation means that the company is a legal entity, in this case the most important thing you should note is liability (what you owe). Say your company owes $100,000 but the whole plant/land/assets is only worth $50,000 and you go bankrupt. You only have to pay $50,000 to whomever you owe. However if you are not a corporation (in which case your likely a sole proprietor or partnership) and lets say you are in the same situation as above. They take your $50,000 from the company, then they can take your personal house, car, land etc to make up for the other $50,000. | 16 | 44 |
CMV: The Bible is sexist. | By "The Bible", I am including both the canonical Old Testament and the New Testament. By "sexist", I mean that the Bible portrays women as completely inferior to men. Its overall message towards women is condescending at best, and murderous at worst. However, I'm open to the idea that I may simply be reading it wrong, which is why I made this CMV.
Keep in mind that I'm not saying "Christianity is sexist" or that "Christians are sexist", because it depends on the Christian, and the vast majority of them are not. I am only going off the text of the Bible, not its application in the real world. And before someone starts a battle over semantics, I'm not arguing that every single book or passage contains some sexist thing, but the message is there in the Bible as a whole, implicit if not explicit, and isn't really contradicted. I've avoided naming specific verses for this introduction, because there are too many, but I'll pull them out as needed. | Can you give specific examples? It's difficult to judge without them.
What's the overall message towards women specifically, and what makes you say that?
There are women prophets (e.g. Sarah) who are sometimes superior to male ones, women heroines (e.g. Yael), and women as leaders (e.g. Miriam, Devorah, etc.). The laws regarding female slaves and war captives are more progressive than any in the time of its writing. | 176 | 768 |
[Culture] What exactly are Displacer units, and how do they compare to forms of FTL travel found in other popular SciFi ‘verses? | Displacers encapsulate matter in a containment field and then shunt it through hyperspace to another location in realspace. The energy requirements rise dramatically with the amount of mass and the distance displaced. Culture Displacers were precise enough to accurately deliver chemicals into a biological body for medical purposes, but the largest shipboard and orbital based ones were powerful enough to move a small starships across a system. Some Culture ships could even execute "snap" displacements where they're moving at high speed relative to the target, sometimes with less than a second in range of the target.
Shields that extend into hyperspace (standard in the Cultures' galaxy) can block displacement since they block hyperspace.
The biggest drawbacks of displacement as a form of FTL travel are that it relies on a separate unit (external to the mass being displaced) and it quickly scales to be massively more difficult than simply putting a hyperspace field engine on the object and having it move itself directly. | 32 | 40 |
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In winter bugs like spiders, flies and mosquitoes, seemingly die off. How is it that after the winter they're able to come back in such numbers? A layman would think the winter would cause an extinction of some insects. | Insects survive the winter months in a variety of different ways. Some migrate, like birds and other animals, to warmer climates from which they will return at the end of winter. Others can enter a sort of hibernation. A lot of insects will "overwinter" in some sort of non-adult stage of development, either as an egg, pupae, larvae, etc. This requires the young insects to be deposited somewhere warm and with relative shelter, deep underground or in the foundation of a building. Their genetics allow them to enforce this infantile stage of development until weather conditions permit. | 22 | 16 |
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Stress levels for teaching staff | Apologies for any mistakes - on mobile.
I’m a professor and I have been in university education for years & years in a humanities discipline.
In the last few years, I’ve noticed a definite sea change in the unrealistic expectations of students, and their litigiousness has accelerated. I’m exhausted. I can’t keep up with their constant demands and neediness, and feel like unless I award them all 100%, tell them that they’re geniuses whilst also listening to their (often extremely upsetting) stories about how, for example, they were abused as children, and act as counsellor, they will complain about me. In fact, sometimes they do.
My mental health is seriously deteriorating and there’s no staff support at my current place of work. I’m at the end of the line and really want to leave academia for good, except that I worked myself to the ground to get where I am. I feel like I can’t give up even though I know it’s making me ill.
The short question after these meandering few paragraphs is how do you deal with the stress that comes from difficult student behaviour and expectation? | I get the impression that some professors are overly invested in their work and students, And work them selves down to the bone and create unnecessary stress for themselves because of that, Bending over backwards to meet perceived requirements Rather than creating and enforcing boundaries as to how far they will go to meet Requests and needs. | 52 | 78 |
Where does the kinetic energy go here? | Imagine you and your buddy Neil Armstrong are in space. You both see a bunch of objects of different sizes and at different distances moving towards your direction, all of them around the same speed.
From your frame you calculate the kinetic energy of all this particles.
Then Neil pushes you while grabbing the spaceship, giving you the same speed and direction as this particles. From your new frame of reference all this stuff is standing still. The kinetic energy you can measure now is from the spaceship and from Neil which is less than the original.
**What happened with the energy? Where does it go? Or is energy relative?**
...You then remember Neil has just double-crossed you and curse him at the top of your lounges while you descend into deep space
| That's right, the kinetic energy (KE) you measure for a system depends on your frame of reference. This idea is both true in classical mechanics (i.e. the kinetic energy is not Galilean invariant) as well as in special relativity (the kinetic energy is not Lorentz invariant). The simplest example is a ball sitting on the floor of a bus. In the frame of reference of someone sitting on the bus, the ball is standing still and can be said to have zero kinetic energy. On the other hand, for a bystander on the ground, the ball is moving at the same speed as the bus (v) and so its kinetic energy will be 1/2mv^(2). | 102 | 169 |
ELI5: Why are chemical formulas in the order they are? Why is it H2O and not OH2? Why is it C6H12O6 and not O6H12C6? | There are multiple ways of listing chemical formulas. The most commonly used notation is the "Hill system". It is carbon first, then hydrogen, then alphabetically. It is done that way to make it consistant and easier to read. | 38 | 17 |
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ELI5: Where is gray, white and black on the light wavelength scale? | If they are just shades, how does it work? | White through black don't have specific wavelengths, rather they are a combination of all varying wavelengths of light, in equal measure. Large amounts of all wavelengths will produce white, fewer will produce grey, and none will produce black. You can see this effect by looking at a screen up close - white is not truly white, it's actually red, blue and green pixels all being lit up brightly, which we perceive as white from a distance | 26 | 27 |
How do people die from burns? | How does somebody die from large burn wounds if they are still internally sound? I'm wondering what the actual mechanism is e.g. blood loss, shock, etc. | Skin represents the major barrier to infection and disease across the body. Compromising that barrier opens the patient up to opportunistic infection across the entire wounded surface. Additionally, skin prevents water loss, and given a large enough surface area, dehydration can become a serious consequence. | 25 | 17 |
ELI5:How does the post office redirect your mail when you change addresses if the info is handwritten on envelopes? | The post office scans the address and uses optical character recognition (OCR) to digitize the address. The computer then helps sort the mail to the correct destination and can apply any address changes.
If the writing is too poor/damaged then a person has a look and tries to make it out and sort the package manually. | 12 | 30 |
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In The Hobbit why is it that when Bilbo picks up something like keys or an object like a rock it stays visible yet when he draws his sword it remains invisible? | Same with his clothes, why does he not have to strip? | The ring of power, enhances those qualities that exist within the user. As a consequence, anything that is considered part of the user will be enhanced by the ring. Bilbo considers the sword and his clothes as part of himself (not physically but part of his character), but not simple objects like keys or a rock are unimportant to him and thus rendered visible. | 141 | 73 |
How are some cats/dogs able to find their owners despite being over a hundred miles away from home? | Inspired by this [article](http://www.cinemablend.com/pop/Homeward-Bound-Cat-Walks-190-Miles-Reunite-With-Owners-51827.html) about a cat who walked 190 miles away from where the family had lost the cat. How does the animal even know which sense of direction to head towards to find the family?
EDIT: I know most pets wouldn't make the trip but how do even these few pets that do make it, make it? | Many animals have geolocation abilities, especially birds and fish, who often migrate huge distances to the same locations year after year. Animals have a variety of mechanisms for this - including magnetoception (detecting the earth's magnetic field), mechanisms involving sun position and plight polarisation, and visual and olfactory clues (sights and smells).
While it is not clear what mechanisms mammals might use to navigate, it is clear that in many cases they can (I can't find it, but there was a study done a few years ago that discovered most herbivores graze aligned north-south).
What is perhaps most worth noting is that almost all of these stories are about animals *returning* home - that is, going back to a location they are familiar with, not tracking their family to an unknown 'new' location. The former is much more explainable than the latter would be!
| 96 | 263 |
ELI5: Why do computers get slow? | And how can I prevent it? | It can vary from computer to computer, but its usually a combination of a few things:
* Startup processes - the more you install over time, the more that runs in the background
* Wear and tear - over time you may lose performance as the hardware itself ages, especially with hard drives
* malware - bad software is bad, and will cause a lot of problems over time
* Driver issues - drivers are instructions for your computer. Out of date drivers can cause your computer to be pretty inefficient.
A simple analogy is this:
You start out a lean, fast, runner. Over time, you start adding things to your running regiment. As you add things, it takes you a little longer to get out the front door. You get out eventually, but maybe it takes you 1 minute instead of 15 seconds.
Since you've got these other things on your mind, when you try to do things while juggling, sometimes it takes you a while. Normally you can run and wave to the neighbor within 30 seconds of leaving the door, but now you have that morning weather software and the news software that slow you down a bit, so you don't get a chance to wave until about a minute out the door instead.
You try cleaning up your regiment with some new techniques(new drivers) so that you do your regiment more efficiently, and that helps a little bit here and there. Some regiments run better thanks to your new techniques, others aren't effected - some might even be worse than before. But you take what you can get.
One day you end up getting sick from a virus, and *everything* goes to crap. Your running slows down, you have a hard time trying to wave to the neighbors, and some days you can't get out the front door.
At that point, sometimes starting fresh can help - you strip yourself back down to your basic new-runner state, (reformatting), and go from there. But its been a while - your joints might not be as good (hardware getting older), so maybe you need 30 seconds instead of 15. Still better than where you were though! | 228 | 290 |
ELi5: Why does my iPhone shoot photos at 3264 × 2448 but only shoots video at 1920 × 1080? Is this just a restriction that Apple has placed on the camera to make it shoot in a common resolution or is there a technical reason? | There are a few technical reasons which can explain that.
Either the camera sensor can not sustain 24 fps at 4k (because it takes to much time to move the data from the sensor to memory), or the CPU can not handle a 4k video stream (can not compress it fast enough or doesn't have enough memory). | 39 | 43 |
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Do UV sanitizing wands really work and if so, how? | UV radiation damages the DNA of cells. The idea is to hurt them to a point that prevents them from being able to replicate efficiently, not to simply kill them off the first go.
UV radiation however is only good for surfaces and only OK for water sources (need more intensity/time to do the same effect). For damaging cells within the bulk of an item, high energy X-rays, gamma rays, and electron beams can be used (and are used very often for sterilizing foods and medical equipment). The best part of it all is that you can package an item, and then without even opening it up, sterilize the contents! | 11 | 18 |
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Can someone explain Aristotle's process of how we become virtuous? Do we use reason to determine what is virtuous, and then through habituation exercise those virtues? | Indeed, but it's important to remark that this habituation involves applying the same principle to different situations, which results in different correct courses of actions. Sometimes the corageous thing to do is retreat; others, to march forward. Hence why the rational determination of the principles of virtue does not collapse into deontology, much less consequentialism. | 28 | 86 |
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ELI5: In quantum physics, why do particles react differently when being observed? | Thanks guys! This is all really interesting stuff. | It's important to remember that what you normally think of as "observation" is not the same as how we usually "observe" tiny particles like photons. Most people relate "observation" to a passive act like watching, whereas in reality in order to observe the location of a photon we physically need to interact with it by bouncing things off of it.
Imagine being in a pitch black dark room with an empty tin can on the ground, and your job is to figure out where the can is using a tennis ball. Well, you can just throw the ball around until you hit the can. The problem is that now the can is somewhere else, since you just hit it with a tennis ball. So, all you know now is where the tin can WAS, since it's somewhere else now by the very nature of how we figured out its location. | 133 | 53 |
ELI5: Can the brain function if some nonessential parts get removed?How? | Brains are elastic and their substance can be reallocated to different uses, to a point. Severe damage can be worked around. The internet is an analogue. If the US was removed from the internet due to a catastrophic event, traffic could route around it and the whole would continue in a functional but diminished capacity. | 10 | 23 |
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ELI5: Why do our tummies rumble when we are hungry? | This can be explained by a closer look at how the digestive system functions.
The digestive system is, in essence, a long tube that starts at the mouth and ends at the anus. This tube connects with the various organs and passages that play important roles in digestion. One of the most important things to know about the digestive system is the manner in which it propels food. Waves of muscle contractions move and push the contents continually downward in a process called peristalsis. In addition to moving your meal along its digestive path, these contractions also help churn food, liquid and different digestive juices together, rendering them into a gooey mix known as chyme.
Stomach growling is the result of this process. Moving with those solid and liquid chyme ingredients are gasses and air. As all these ingredients get pushed around and broken down into easy-to-absorb bits, pockets of air and gas also get squeezed and create the noises we hear. Stomach growling can happen at any time -- not just when you're hungry -- but if there's food in your stomach or small intestine, the growling becomes quieter. It's like putting a pair of sneakers in the dryer by themselves versus with a load of towels. The towels muffle the noise of the shoes as they bounce around.
But you may be wondering -- if your stomach is empty, why are the muscle contractions that digest food happening to begin with? The reason has to do with hunger and appetite. About two hours after your stomach empties itself, it begins to produce hormones that stimulate local nerves to send a message to the brain. The brain replies by signaling for the digestive muscles to restart the process of peristalsis. Two results occur: First, the contractions sweep up any remaining food that was missed the first time around. Second, the vibrations of an empty stomach make you hungry. Muscle contractions will come and go about every hour, generally lasting 10 to 20 minutes, until you eat again. | 39 | 38 |
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ELI5: How in the HELL does electromagnetism work? | Seriously, I’ve been baffled to this day about charges, what “positive” and “negative” actually mean, and how magnets can repel or pull towards one another just based on proximity. How do the molecules know they’re close to each other? Is it some basic chemical principle that says “okay, you do this”, or is it something much more complicated? Somebody explain this in the simplest terms or link me a video please | Certain particles have charges. Charges can be one of two types, called positive and negative. There's no real reason positive charges are called positive or negative charges are called negative, that's just convention. A charge is surrounded by an electric field, and a moving or spinning charge is surrounded by a magnetic field. Particles of opposite charges make fields that point in the opposite direction, and particles with larger charges make stronger fields. Charges have a force exerted on them by electric fields, depending on the strength and direction of the field, and moving charges have a force exerted on them by magnetic fields, also determined by the strength and direction of the field. There isn't really an underlying reason for why they experience a force this way, other than "that's the way the universe works". | 13 | 17 |
ELI5 Why we say "Islamic" extremism instead of "Muslim" extremism | If we're talking about extremist Jews, we wouldn't say "Judaic extremism" right? | Typically, "Islam" refers to the religion, and "Muslim" to the people who follow Islam. "Islamic" is used for anything that is part of the larger culture of Islam- Islamic art, Islamic Music, Islamic Prayers....and so on.
So we say "Islamic extremeISM" and "Muslim ExtremeIST" | 49 | 28 |
ELI5: What makes it so your body can stay in a coma for years and just randomly wake up? Why are comas so unpredictable for how long you are asleep for? | Imagine you're playing Dwarf Fortress. Your fortress is big, complex, and detailed levels stretch from surface to the underground caves. Suddenly there's a cave in that collapses a wide area of tunnels three quarters of the way down your whole fortress. This is a gigantic mess. The majority of your dwarves will be tasked clearing rubble, digging new tunnels, redigging old tunnels, basically repairing the whole fortress. It takes too many dwarves to spare any for trading or diplomacy or military, so you close up the fortress while the long repairs are underway.
Normally this would spell death as the fortress is not farming or hunting food for itself, but other fortresses in the area donate foodstuffs while the long repairs are underway. They don't know the progress of the repairs, but they're hedging that your dwarves can get it done. If they do, if they manage to get things *just* to the point where the fortress can operate again, the gates will open and the dwarves will pour out to get things running again.
Sometimes they can't. The chasms are too big, the remaining stone too weak to build with. This fortress is never going to be up and running again. It's dwarves will live only as long as the food supplies last. But we can not know that, we can only judge by what we can see from the outside. | 4,557 | 3,920 |
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Why do Asians have dry ear 'powder' and Westerners have wet ear 'wax'? | Edit: Not ALL Asians have dry ear wax and not ALL Westerners have wet. And Thanks for all the input from the pro's. | There may be an answer to this question, but in evolutionary genetics, you should always keep in mind that there is not necessarily a *reason* for differences between populations. If a mutation occurs that does not reduce fitness, then the mutation may persist even if it does not increase fitness. So it is possible that a mutation occurred that caused the dry earwax randomly in an Asian person, and the dry type worked about as well as the waxy type. So over many many many years that mutation came to persist across the continent. So it may not be that dry ear wax helps you survive better in Asia or something like that, just that the random mutation happened to occur in Asia. | 653 | 982 |
ELI5: How are allergies able to be acquired as people get older? | I've have friends who have just started to be allergic to some foods that they weren't allergic to before. How does this happen? | Allergies are caused by our immune system mistaking food or innocuous particles like pollen, for invading pathogens.
How does this happen? Well, all cells and viruses have chemical markers on their surfaces call Antigens. Our own cells can recognize each other by reading their antigens, and our immune cells are the same. When an immune cell encounters another object, it will read its antigens, and if it doesn't recognize them as friendly, it will attempt to destroy the object.
The immune system is also adaptable, and it has a memory. When we get chicken pox for example, after defeating it, the system will keep a record of the chicken pox antigens, so when the disease is encountered later on in life, our immune system already knows how to fight it.
Things that cause allergies also have antigens, and sometimes our immune system will encounter an antigen on some food, and mistakenly think its an invading pathogen. The immune system then mobilizes, attacks the foodstuff, and then keeps a record of its antigens. When the food is next encountered, the immune system will recognize it, and unleash its power to attack the food. The side effects of this battle is what we know as an allergy.
Because our immune system can make a mistake at any point in our life, we always retain the chances of developing new allergies. | 83 | 150 |
ELI5:If you got in a plane and started flying flat along with Earth then maintained that direction, would you eventually begin flying out of the atmosphere? | Or would the plane follow the curvature of the Earth? | tl;dr: The plane would need to follow the curvature of the earth.
As an airplane gets higher in the atmosphere a few things happen. First, as the plane encounters less air resistance, it can move faster, generating more lift. Counteracting this, however, is the fact that the air gets thinner, so less of it is displaced by the airfoil, so overall less lift is created.
At a certain point, even if you have a plane that can somehow generate enough lift to get to the very top of the atmosphere, the oxygen content is not high enough to fuel the combustion of the fuel inside the jet engines, so the engines will flame out.
There are certain ways to get around this problem by using different air compression designs. Ramjets and scramjets are for ultra high altitude planes that travel many times the speed of sound. These engines do not have traditional fans to compress the air, relying instead on the shockwave of the air hitting the engine intake to compress the air for it. Because of this, you have to already be flying at very high speeds to use these types of engines, making them a logistical challenge on commercial aircraft (along with many other reasons this is completely infeasible.)
However, even these engines fail at high enough altitudes, so you would need to carry your own oxygen supply for combustion, like traditional rockets. You may notice now that we are no longer talking about the original subject, so the short answer is that the plane would follow the curvature of the Earth unless you had very special engines to get it to the upper atmosphere. Even then, it would eventually need to follow the earth's curvature unless you are flying a rocket ship. | 35 | 54 |
[Diablo 2] - So Blaise didn't fare so well in her most recent fight against Rakanishu... | She did, at least, die honorably.
But now I am wondering - Akara claims that Andariel turned many of their sister Rogues against them and drove them from their ancestral home. (paraphrase of her words) Apparently they all became demons. Whatever. Further, Kashya freaked out when Bloodraven began resurrecting dead Rogues as zombies.
And here I am informing Kashya that poor little Blaise died from demonic electrocution. (*damn lightning demons, scourge of Sanctuary I tell you. Listen, if you ever go there, make sure to take a [Djinn Slayer](http://diablo.wikia.com/wiki/Djinn_Slayer) with you.*)
Kashya didn't seem worried in the slightest, she offered to resurrect Blaise for a mere 50000 gold, which, for some reason, I just had lying around. **This leaves me with a few questions:**
* If Kashya (who seems to have no magic capabilities whatsoever) can just resurrect her fallen comrades, why didn't she just do that every time one of her scouts died instead of waiting for Hell to do it?
* If Akara's claim about demonic corruption of the Rogues is true, can I really trust a resurrected Blaise not to suddenly turn on me when I'm hoofing it up Mount Arreat? | Resurrection requires ingredients which are consumed by the resurrection procedure. Gheed the Trader has a monopoly on the supply of these ingredients and demands Kashya pay him 49,995 gold for them^1.
Kashya could not resurrect her fallen comrades because Kashya doesn't have that kind of money.
She learned her lesson, though, and is now saving up, 5 gold at a time.
^1 He also claims that at that price, he is cutting his own throat, but that he honors and respects Kashya which is why he is willing to do it. | 13 | 29 |
ELI5: Why do you get so hungry when you are high? | I was thinking, what makes you so hungry when you are high? | In your body you have an Endocannabinoid system which has a role in appetite, pain-sensation, mood, and memory.
It's suggested that THC the psycoactive compound in cannabis activates a receptor called CB1 which directly increases appetite when fired. | 17 | 29 |
ELI5: How does a person know where their body parts are located, (nose, mouth, etc.) without looking? Such as eating popcorn without taking eyes off movie. | It's called your proprioception sense, and it's provided primarily by 'stretch' receptors in your muscles that tell your brain how far the muscle is extended. Your brain then knows where your limbs are, and can use that to build a map of where the rest of you is (like your nose and mouth).
| 21 | 19 |
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When a seed requires 6 weeks of cold weather to germinate, what makes it take so long -- i.e., what happens at week 6 that didn't happen before, or how does the seed "know"? | It's not necessarily about freezing, either, as there are seeds that you can germinate in a fridge (staying above freezing). | Plants (and seeds) sense temperature in a number of ways, though it is not precisely known how seeds 'count' how many days/hours they've been at cold temperatures. However, as others have pointed out, t is known that plant hormones such as jasmonic acid, abscisic acid and gibberellins all play an important role in either inducing or repressing dormancy and germination.
Some of the ways plants sense temperature changes may give us some clues as to how they might 'count' how long they've been at a certain temperature. For instance, plants actively adjust the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fatty acids in their membranes to maintain fluidity and functionality of said membrane in response to decreasing (or increasing) temperatures. By decreasing the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fatty acids (i.e. adding more unsaturated fatty acids) the membrane will remain fluid at lower temperatures.
Now, if you think of a seed as a bank and each structure (organelles, membranes, etc) within the seed as a separate bank account, with transactions between accounts being represented by biochemical pathways and money being the separate chemicals and molecules involved in these pathways, it could be that by draining one 'account' continually over time (like the account that produces the precursor to unsaturated fatty acids) in order to increase the amount of 'money' allocated to another 'account' (the membrane), it could be that the plants eventually realize, "Oh shit, its been cold a long time, maybe we should germinate the next chance we get because this really sucks."
On the note of hormones: they, like fatty acids, have to come from somewhere; often they have to go somewhere as well. Source and sink. So, if the enzyme that produces the hormones from whatever precursor molecules and the enzymes that move these hormones from the source to the sink are both more active at lower temperatures than the enzyme that senses this hormone at the sink, it's likely that the hormone will build up within that sink (a tissue, organ, etc). Excesses in certain hormones at a given location past a given threshold can lead to genetic reprogramming; it can turn genes on and off. So, if the sink enzymes are not active, and the concentration of the given hormone continues to increase over time, it could then activate genes that cause germination. On the other hand, if the temperature isn't low enough (and therefore the sink enzymes can effectively process this hormone in some way) or the duration isn't long enough (and therefore the concentration of the hormone doesn't reach a particular 'gene activation threshold') the genes may never turn on and lead to germination.
tl;dr No one really knows exactly how seeds do it, but hormones and membrane fluidity could be a potential signal. | 21 | 222 |
ELI5: Why do all vitamin supplements say that their claimed benefits aren't verified. Do we really not have any confirmation of what vitamins do? | We have confirmation of what vitamins do.
What vitamins do and what vitamin supplement sellers want you to believe they do, however, are two entirely different things.
Stops your teeth from falling out? That's something vitamins do.
Treats the common cold? That's not something vitamins do.
For people who's teeth aren't falling out as it is, the second one sells better. | 3,004 | 4,623 |
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ELI5:Why does air come up from underwater in bubbles instead of a constant flow of air | When you have air under water, the water molecules would rather be next to other water molecules rather than air molecules.
By forming a bubble, the air molecules are able to form a shape which minimizes the amount of air which is next to a water molecule.
Another way to think about it: Imagine a giant field packed with 100,000 Boston Red Sox fans and 10,000 Yankee fans. The Yankee fans are greatly outnumbered and dispersed in a crowd of Red Sox Fans. Given that a Yankee fan would much rather be next to another Yankee fan than a Red Sox fan, we can imagine that any Yankee fan would look around and try to walk towards the nearest group of Yankee fans so that they could cheer together. Once there were enough Yankee fans in one area, they would form into a circle, so that only the Yankee fans on the outside had to be next to Red Sox fans, and the rest of them could be surrounded by other Yankee fans.
If you want to go even deeper, the Yankee fans could move towards the edge of the field if they were close enough to see it, so that only one side of them had to be next to the Red Sox fans, as they would rather stand next to a wall than next to a Red Sox fan. Then they would form a semi-circle.
This same phenomenon describes why you get bubbles forming on the edge of a glass more often than you get them in the center.
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ELI5: when you take pain meds like aspirin or ibuprofen, does it go treat the pain at the location or is it a general dulling of pain in your whole body? | Edit: Thanks for all the great answers guys! | Once NSAIDs such as aspirin are absorbed, they are widely distributed throughout the body. The drug doesn't all localize to the site of inflammation, and it's not as though there is some substance that binds the drug and carries back only to the injured cells. Unlike opioids which act centrally, however, NSAIDs act locally to reduce pain and inflammation by inhibiting an enzyme (COX-2) which produces inflammatory compounds. COX-2 itself isn't a prostaglandin precursor, but rather an enzyme. | 303 | 976 |
Eli5: Why does a broken neck sometimes kill someone instantly, while other times it is treatable? | Also, does this happen in real life the way it does in movies/tv? I'm amazed by the sheer number if action movies that use this as a method of eliminating enemies, and I'm curious if it plays out this way at all in reality. | Your spine are obviously bones and each vertebrae has a complex design to them, with what amounts to wings of each surface.
You can break one of these wings and things will usually be fine with surgery.
The only way a neck injury can cause paralysis or death is by damaging the spinal cord. To do this, you have you change how the vertebrae relate spatially with each other. There are several ways of doing this. A crushing injury isn't usually as bad and a rotational injury. If one vertebrae moves in front of the other, you're going to compromise the spinal cord.
You can also damage the nerves that exit the spinal cord at each vertebrae level by breaking off the wing.
In terms of instant death, you must damage the spinal cord (or nerves that exit the cord) at the levels of C3, C4, or C5 as the nerves exiting this level control the phrenic nerve which allows your to inhale and exhale. The mnemonic is "3, 4, 5 keeps you alive"
There is also internal decapitation where the C1 vertebrae gets disconnected from the skull base, usually with the spinal cord getting severed too. Rarely is this not fatal | 23 | 26 |
ELI5: How you can figure out what key a song is in. | Depends on how much information you have. If you just have the audio file, try looking up a chord chart or a lead sheet online, and go from there. If you can't find a chart, you'll have to use your ear to find the chord. The basic rule is whatever chord the song starts on, and ends on is the tonic, and you can use that to figure out the key. For example, if the first chord is an Em7, chances are it is in the key of Em (this rule is quite often broken, depending on the complexity of the arrangement, but it's a good starting point).
If you have the sheet music, then the key signature should be there, and you can easily work it out from that.
Hope this helps. | 26 | 105 |
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ELI5: Why in Australia is Liberal deemed right-wing, when in America it means the opposite? | It makes watching American politics on youtube that tiny bit harder. | To understand this a brief history of liberalism and conservatism is needed.
Liberals emerged in opposition to the European monarchies and favored individual liberty. As liberalism evolved, they became divided on how to best pursue liberty. Initially, liberals generally sought freedom from government coercion. Other liberals argued that the least well-off needed to be helped by the state to truly obtain liberty. The division is basically between how much the government should intervene into the economy with classical liberals on the more free market side and social liberals on the more state-welfare side.
Due to this history, a lot of European "liberal" parties are rather centrist. The US is strange because the libertarians and conservatives (pre-Trump) were actually pretty close to classical liberals. The social liberals are more like the moderate Democrats.
Plus, the far left parties in Europe have strong communist and socialist influences that are absent in the US. Also, the conservative parties were the "Church and State" people that defended the monarchies. The US also didn't have that same dynamic. And of course, the US always has to be unique so we call anyone on the left "liberals" and those on the right are conservative. So the Aussies probably have things labeled correctly and it's the US that's making things difficult.
Related - The right and the left is not the same in every country. For instance a labor party might be center-right in country A, but center-left in another country B even if they have the same positions because country A and B are ideologically different as a whole.
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[All Star Superman] What exactly did Lex Luther see when he had Superman's powers that made him understand how the world works? | Everything.
But for a real answer, he saw the connections of the universe. In general most creatures only comprehend a small percentage of the information we get from our senses. Most of the sounds, smells, etc are discarded to avoid overwhelming our minds.
Lex was likely able to process all of this information and even more of it thanks to his enhanced senses and intellect. This means being able to feel the vibration of the universe and how every thing and everyone is connected by the thread of space and time. He would be overwhelmingly aware of everything and everyone around him. It would be impossible for him to ignore their presence.
In short. What Lex saw was that we're all we've got. He was unable to disconnect himself from the rest of the world with the illusion that he was above or better than them. | 75 | 64 |
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[Ethical implications of memory manipulation.] | A common ethical dilemma regarding telepathy or technology that allows someone access to another person's mind is the manipulation of their memories. Some examples would include:
1. Overwriting someone's memories/personality as an alternative to the death sentence to make them a productive and safe member of society.
2. Forcing an individual to forget details or events that might put a person or organization at risk (e.g., the neuralyzers in "Men in Black.").
3. Implanting false memories or mental blocks as a means of deterring a certain behavior.
However, what are your thoughts on the ethics behind entering an individual's mind to assist them in encountering memories that may be the causative root for criminal or delinquent behavior? For example, entering the mind of a prisoner with multiple convictions for assault to assist him in facing the memories of physical abuse from a parent and obtaining closure? | A few things:
* Modifying memories should always require consent. The right to remember is a basic human right.
* Modifying memories to change someone's personality, or as a correctional tool, would make sense. However, the most ethical way to handle it would be as an alternative to a prison sentence or other punishment.
* Cosmetic memory alteration would be a thing. You could use it to get rid of trauma, attempt to change your personality, or download recreational memories. Charles Stross calls the profession of a memory-eraser an "apologist," because a good apologist will argue in defense of your memories and who you are right now.
* Memories may be a valuable commodity. You would get people who perform wild stunts or other outrageous things so that they can sell the memories. You might also see news reporters release first-hand sensory reports on their streams. Crowdfunding models might lead to things like 24/7 sense streams, or people who act based on their audience's votes.
* If you can plant memories into someone, it will be used as a training tool. If the risk of brain damage is high, or varies from person to person, that may also be a factor (such as re-training your career being impossible, or a certain percent of the population being un-trainable).
* You can bet that memory manipulation would be used to protect trade secrets. Usually by willing parties under contract who are getting paid very very well.
* Copyright law should never extend to memories, because that would lead right into a dystopia.
* Criminal theft of memories can and will occur, especially for stealing passwords and other private information. Modifying someone's memories without consent would be equivalent to rape.
* This same technology makes brain backups and personality uploading possible, leading to immortality via cloning. | 26 | 31 |
Can i teach? | Is it possible to teach with just a master's degree?
I mean i still dont know if I want my phD but I know for sure that I was my master's.
| I’m a community college prof with a master’s. In most US states a master’s is sufficient for being CC faculty, but you need to show experience of TAing, as it’s quite competitive. Feel free to ask me more questions about landing a CC job.
Also, if you’re interested in K-12 teaching that’s an option. Most states you can get a preliminary license with a content-area bachelor’s and some exams, but then you’ll need graduate education classes to get a longer term teaching license. | 51 | 28 |
ELI5: Why is it healthy to strain your heart through exercise, but unhealthy to strain it through stress, caffeine, nicotine etc? What is the difference between these kinds of cardiac strain? | Exercise causes natural vascular dialation allowing the increase in heart rate to provide your circulatory system with more oxygen.
Caffeine and nicotine cause vascular constriction along with the increase in heart rate. This puts more stress on your heart since it has to work even harder to achieve the same level of blood oxygenation. | 15,818 | 24,454 |
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ELI5: Why do they use a hose to splash water during high dive competitions? | It makes the surface of the water visible, so the diver can see where it is as they are aligning to go through it. If the water was still, it would be very hard to see where it started. As others have said, it also ripples the surface, giving a little smoother transition from air to water and air to water. | 100 | 51 |
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ELI5:We've all heard the phrase you can't shout fire in a crowded theater, what law are you actually breaking, what is the punishment? | When you ask about law, you really need to specify a jurisdiction. The famous saying about shouting fire in a crowded theater comes from a Supreme Court ruling on which types of speech are protected by the First Amendment, *case Schenck v. United States*--false shouting fire in a crowded theater, one justice suggested, would clearly not be. (*Schenck* was later overruled, but this particular example is probably still true.) This only means that this is a kind of speech a state or city *could* establish a law against.
To pick a jurisdiction, causing a commotion in this way could violate Title 18 of the Pennsylvania Statutes, § 5503:
> A person is guilty of disorderly conduct if, with intent to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof, he:
>1. engages in fighting or threatening, or in violent or tumultuous behavior;
2. makes unreasonable noise;
3. uses obscene language, or makes an obscene gesture; or
4. creates a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no legitimate purpose of the actor. | 48 | 95 |
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ELI5: Why does restaurant/on tap coke taste better than bottled coke | Or to the same effect. Why does draught beer taste better than bottled beer even if they're the same beer | A number of reasons:
1. Fountain soda uses local tap water which affects the taste.
2. Fountain soda carbonates the soda at the tap, which causes lower carbonic acid content than bottled. Also less carbonation overall. Try tasting a fresh coke vs one that has sat in the fridge for 30 minutes.
3. Restaurants can change the ratio of syrup to water, which changes the taste.
All of these add to make the beverage taste completely different.
As to the draught beer, none of the above applies. Draught beer is already carbonated but is generally fresher than bottled or canned beer. Plus you shouldn't know the difference as you are only five!!! | 130 | 58 |
[ELI5] All of the different graphics options for games? | I know what resolution and texture quality mean, but what exactly does
* Shader Quality
* Lighting Quality
* Filtering
* anti-aliasing
* Buffering
* FSAA
* V-Sync
**Edit:** Also, bloom.
And all the other random ones that you usually find.
| Each of these settings let's you adjust the trade-off between image quality vs. frame rate and what your system is capable of:
Shader quality: the level of detail of computed textures and surfaces
Lighting quality: detail and softness of shadows and reflected light
Filtering: details in layered textures
Anti-aliasing: the sharpness of edges, makes edges less jaggy
Buffering: better frame rates due to more precomputed drawings
FSAA: Full Scene Anti-Aliasing, draw each frame multiple times and blend the drawings together for even sharper edges
V-Sync: The refresh rate of your monitor. Adjust as needed to reduce image tearing, or just leave it disabled if no there's no tearing issues.
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ELI5: How does a twin turbo engine actually work? | I understand how a turbocharger works, but when a car has two turbos, do they both work the synchronously, or does the second one kick in when more power is required? Are both of the turbos identical? | There are a few systems, but typically one is smaller and spools up faster, forcing the air into the second which is larger.
- The first turbocharger doesn't usually directly affect performance, instead it is used to increase the responsiveness of the second. This doesn't typically improve the final amount of boost much above that of a single larger turbo, but improves responsiveness. *End result: responsiveness, but not much extra power*
There are two other main approaches, though, where both do work together
1. Both are the same size, and are used synchronously or independently to either act as a single larger turbo, or to allow "staging" of the turbocharger power (ie half or full boost). This is slightly more responsive than one turbo, but not by much, but provides more boost than one turbo. *End result: lots more power, but not much more responsiveness*
2. One is larger and the other smaller, allowing the smaller to kick in earlier for responsiveness, while the larger gives a larger boost but with normal turbo responsiveness. *End result: More responsiveness and a moderate amount more power, although typically a more complex system* | 17 | 54 |
[Batman beyond] which single animal genes spliced with a human would be most affective to defeat terry. | In an episode he fights gene splicers. Which animal would give it's splicer the best chances of beating terry 1v1? | Cats have a well-rounded set of advantages. Enhanced strength, speed, and agility, not to mention superhuman senses. Plus it's easy enough to cover up if you want a night in town. And if it turns you into a hot catgirl, so much better. That was the first Batman's weakness too. | 48 | 37 |
ELI5: Will eating protein before a workout help build my muscles build quicker? | I was told If I eat a protein bar or drink a protein drink prior to a work-out 💪it will build my muscles faster. Is this true? And if it’s true, how does it build out muscles?
Thank you! | The research about the protein/anabolic window is mixed.
The clearest picture is that working out completely fasted (hungry) is bad, can lead to catabolism (destruction) of muscle tissue, but it's less clear if WHEN you eat your protein truly matters as long as it's within a few hours on either side of your workout.
The idea that you have 30 minutes post workout to consume at least 30g of protein is largely debunked. | 32 | 17 |
ELI5: Why do some large military planes use propellers instead of jet engines? | I though that jet engines are more powerful and more fuel efficient? How come we don't see any smaller military applications using props? | Jet engines are more fuel efficient at high altitudes and speeds. Propellers are more fuel efficient at lower altitudes and speeds. Giant transport aircraft aren't generally going to be flying at high altitude, nor are they designed for supersonic flight.
The high power-to-weight ratio of turboprop engines at low speed allows these planes to take off from land on runways that are much shorter than if they used turbojets, as when you're bring supplies or troops to the front line you probably won't have a long paved runway.
| 253 | 422 |
ELI5: How does WWE work? How fake and how staged is it? How do their performers progress and is there any actual competition? | I just watched [this video by Max Landis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYvMOf3hsGA&oref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DVYvMOf3hsGA&has_verified=1) and the way he speaks about wrestling seems to imply that their athletes play a game against eachother and try to be better. How much of the events and show is written, how much is rehearsed and how does the background of everything going on work? | Think of wrestlers as performance artists. They get paid to perform in front of audiences by doing physically tasking and dangerous things. It's a spectacle. Musicians perform their songs, and wrestlers perform their moves.
Wrestling makes this performance more interesting by pretending to have competitions. They are not strictly athletic competitions, rather they are competing to outperform each other in terms of entertainment. Who has better moves? Who has technical skill? Who is charismatic? This is a factor that helps determine a wrestler's progression within the company. If audiences are willing to pay to see someone perform, they will presumably be better compensated.
Another aspect is merchandising. The wrestler's who do well, have merchandising deals, and get a small cut of the sales. If a particular wrestler's merchandise sells well, its another sign of success and thus generates more revenue and allows the company and its employees to grow.
Wrestling is scripted and trained for quite extensively. They try their best to stick to scripts, but there are lots of instances of things not happening according to plan, and wrestlers are expected to be adaptable and experienced enough to handle those things. This versatility has to come in both physical form as well as "Mic" aka speaking form.
The crazy characters and stuff you see wrestlers doing are essentially a way to add flair. To add personality and diversity that will draw the widest possible audience.
Hope this helps! | 34 | 15 |
CMV: The biggest mistake of environmentalists is telling people to "save the environment". Environmentalism is about saving ourselves. | Environmentalists (politically) made a huge miscalculation by framing their goal as humans vs. environment. As if there is a will, and a "comfortable" spot for the environment, and humans are disturbing it the way you might disturb your sleeping parent.
But this just isn't the reality. Environmental *change* of any kind is indisputably bad for many different species, but *the environment* is *everything*. Humans are *incapable* of destroying life on earth. We couldn't do it even if we tried with our nukes in a concerted effort... life itself is so much more monolithic than our society or species, and we don't really understand that point of view well because we don't have any predators, giving us the illusion that we *control* life.
But, back to the main point I'm making: this misunderstanding/paradigm that environmentalists subscribed to and pushed has framed environmentalism as altruism. For some people this attracts them to it, and makes them feel good about doing things like recycling. For other though it gives them the impression, because of the framing, that environmentalism is about doing things which are painful/expensive/difficult because they are "right".
That's a load of shit.
Environmentalism has exactly one goal: to prevent global changes to the Earth's environment that would destabilize our ability to run a functioning society. That's it.
The reason we worry about species going extinct is because 1) we don't understand much about how the species interacts with the systems we depend on and 2) some species we have direct use for. Really #1 is just "this species *might* be part of #2". Look at mosquitos. We have no use for them, and though it might be less than ideal from their perspective, the species that depend on mosquitos it would seem can find alternate sources. So we have seriously discussed *purposely* eradicating the species.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this, but whether it's right or wrong, it is not altruism. Environmentalism is and always has been about keeping the *entire world* in a state that we are comfortable with. To make things easy for us. Every single thing we want to do environmentally is, at its root, about reducing the pain/expense/difficulty that we cannot control.
By framing environmentalism as "saving" the environment, most people have the WRONG impression that we are somehow a threat to life itself, and it's through an act of altruistic restraint that we can redeem ourselves. But it's really that we are a threat to ourselves, and everything else is collateral damage. | We could have a functioning society with or without green spaces or preserved natural lands.
And sure, while we ca't destroy all life, we can damage a significant part of it. We can destroy or fracture habitats. WE can remove alpha predators from ecosystems and we can over-fish till there is more plastic in the water than fish.
I don't have to destroy your house to make it a pretty shitty place to live.
| 128 | 1,258 |
Why does a Faraday Cage work better than a solid object? | If I take a radio and put a metal mesh trash can over it, the metal mesh acts as a Faraday Cage and the radio stops working. However, if I take a solid metal trash can and put it over the radio, it continues to work.
Why does the Faraday Cage work but the solid metal does not? | Both should work equally well, in theory. The thing with Faraday cages blocking EM waves is that the diameter of the holes in the mesh should be less than the wavelength of the wave trying to pass through it.
Maybe check the material that the solid trash can is made out of? | 42 | 86 |
What did early humans do in terms of oral hygiene? | Might be a silly question but early humans, they surely got cavities? Did they have a form of brushing, or did they just deal with tooth decay? | I watched a documentary of dentistry awhile back and it had a study a dentist did back in the late 1800s where he went to Africa every five years and took pictures of peoples smile. At the beginning all the smiles were bright and vibrant with little to no dental care but as western influence increased and their diets changed to include more sugar and what not the smiles got worse and worse until their teeth were completely destroyed. It was pretty interesting to see. Before we started eating all the crap we do now days we really didn't need to do much to our teeth. | 22 | 20 |
ELI5: What makes non-native English speakers sound foreign when they have good grammar? | By "when they have good grammar", I mean that it's good enough that the grammar itself wouldn't be the tipoff that they're not a native, so what is?
Edit: I meant over a text-based medium, so also excluding audio tipoffs. | Native speakers of English tend to use a lot of words and phrases that are native to the region or culture that they learned English in.
As an example, a native English speaker from Australia might use the phrase "they're right cunts" to describe a group of people that were being unruly, whereas an English-as-a-second-language speaker from Germany might call them "hooligans". It's these phrases and words that form the backbone of our language skills. Another easy example would be an American describing a punch from out of nowhere as a "sucker punch", but an Australian would call it a "king hit".
It's the same language but used differently. Depending on where and when you learned the language, your choice of idioms and words will be slightly different, and it is incredibly easy to spot when compared to your own native culture. | 105 | 90 |
ELI5: How do radar and communications jammers work? | Been in the news a lot lately. I’ve always assumed it just overloads an area with some sort of signal, but I know nothing about this kind of stuff so it’s a wild speculation. | Radar signal is a radio wave, which acts very much like waves on water.
Imagine a perfectly still pool (e.g. indoor one, and you are the first person there). If you drop a ball on one side, you will see waves spread out in pretty circles, and then you will see them bounce off the sides, and some of them will return to the point where you dropped the ball.
Radar picks up those returns and uses them to figure out what's out there. Unlike the pool, radar can only "see" waves it its actual spot. Think of it as looking at a rubber ducky bobbing up and down in the waves.
Now imagine that your pool had a bunch of kids jump in and start splashing around. Even if they are on the opposite side of the pool, they will make a lot of waves in entire pool, and small waves from your dropped ball will be impossible to see. This is how "signal overloading" works.
"interference" means dropping a second ball into a different part of the pool, to create more waves that aim to confuse whoever is trying to observe the waves from the first ball. | 65 | 56 |
ELI5- How are we able to send and receive data so fast through space from places as far as New Horizons reached at Ultima Thule? I understand there is a massive signal station, but 4.5 BILLION miles away? HOW. | All of this transmitted data is in the form of electromagnetic radiation (i.e. "light") that literally travels, at well, the speed of light, so even very long distances can be covered in very little time. There is also relatively little interference in outer space, so it doesn't take a terribly strong signal to cover a long distance. | 48 | 38 |
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[40k] I am the governor of a backwater hive world . just 150 billion subjects. 3 months ago a orc waagh made planetfall, we deployed our PDF regiments, they are all but gone now. how do i request reinforcements, from who do i request them and how long till they get here. | The next level is sector capital. Arrival time depends on the size and readiness level of the sector. You would have asked for help before PDF was completely wiped out. Ork WAAGHs are serious business, and the cleanup is always a pain. Even small ones usually require much more than PDFs. They are also pretty high priority, as they get much bigger with every conquered world.
You'll likely receive help from the closest Space Marine chapter, who might be there faster than the Guard the capital organizes.
Either way, you need to conscript more defenders from your population the moment you detect the orks, on an ongoing basis. Population is what makes a Hive, and if the orks eat them anyway you might as well arm them and point them in the right direction. | 167 | 175 |
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ELI5: Why do governments care so much about reducing public debt if they are the sovereign issuer of their currency? | I’m not an economist but basically it has to do with supply and demand.
These two factors are always more or less balanced. If you pump currency into the market it’s value will drop.
Think of it this way. You have a basket of apples that you want to trade. Each apple is worth one orange. All of the sudden the farm next door starts supplying more apples then they used to. They’re willing to trade two apples for one orange. You used to be able to get an orange for each apple but now, because there’s more supply, you can only get half as many because people can just go trade next door decreasing the demand.
Now imagine that the apples are currency (the oranges can still be oranges). This is called inflation. It’s the increase of prices and fall of purchasing power.
If the government decided to print money to pay off their debts they would flood the market with currency and crash its value.
Different governments have different regulatory bodies monitoring their currency and trying to manage debt, inflation, and purchasing power but it’s not an exact science so everyone is basically just doing the best they can.
TLDR: All in all it’s a very complicated system but the short answer is: the more money you print the less it’s worth. | 18 | 23 |
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Why do some countries become more secular while other countries become more religious in the same period? | For example, Iran is becoming more secular, as exemplified by its headscarf protests, while Indonesia is becoming more religious, as shown by its recently passed law against extramarital sex. This is interesting since both are occurring simultaneously - factors that might be attributed to one (e.g., influence of Western social media in Iran, religious indoctrination among youths in Indonesia) cannot be attributed to the other (i.e., it does not seem to be working that way in Indonesia / Iran). | Follow up questions:
1) Why do you think the level of religiosity in Iran and Indonesia would move in the same way?
2) Do you think the examples you listed are a reflection of the general religiosity of the countries in question, or are they maybe tied to other factors? | 13 | 33 |
[Independence Day] What "language" or symbols was the helicopter trying to communicate use? | Specifically the modified copter with big flashing lights that was destroyed. | a common notion for communication to aliens that we are intelligent is to use patterns of prime numbers, this gets across the point that we at least have a basic grasp of maths and aren't just dumb apes and it doesn't require a common language.
I know that those lights were specifically prime numbers, but we didn't see that much of them. | 21 | 31 |
Why isn't Sam Harris a philosopher? | I am not a philosopher, but I am a frequent contributor to both r/philosophy and here. Over the years, I have seen Sam Harris unambiguously categorized as 'not a philosopher' - often with a passion I do not understand. I have seen him in the same context as Ayn Rand, for example. Why is he not a philosopher?
I have read some of his books, and seen him debating on youtube, and have been thoroughly impressed by his eloquent but devastating arguments - they certainly seem philosophical to me.
I have further heard that [Sam Harris is utterly destroyed by William Lane Craig when debating objective moral values](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvoiOnvx0Qg). Why did he lose? It seems to me as though he won that debate easily. | His argument for objective morality is
Clearly, Utilitarianism is true; therefore, Utilitarianism is true. There's a little bit of rhetorical flourish, but if you analyze it that's all it breaks down to. | 22 | 18 |
Do you think reality consists of sequences of complex but deterministic events which we currently cannot assess, or do you think there is true randomness? Why? | Just for fun, had this conversation with a friend earlier. I think I’m in the deterministic boat. | Another philosophical puzzle in Stats is whether, by probability, we mean subjective uncertainty or objective frequencies. This is the Bayesian versus frequentist debate.
Also, how do you know the right way to model the probabilities of events? Say you are trying to predict the life expectancy of an individual. You could just take the human average. But you could factor in race, gender, diet, ... could you factor in height? It probably doesn't tell you much but it would also be surprising if every height group had exactly the same life expectancy. Factor in religion? How do you even decide who's which religion--lots of people are easy cases, but lots aren't--how do you even decide what a race is when the boundaries between races are very ill-defined and not the ones that current society operates on. If you had infinite data (so that every factor's level has a large representation in the data) would you count every possible description of a person as a predictor? | 14 | 21 |
[Star Trek] How do private citizens get spaceships? | Assume I am your average Federation citizen. I didn't go to/didn't graduate from Starfleet Academy, so I'm not serving on a ship or station. Now, however, I want to see the galaxy in a runabout, or start a shipping company or something. Does Starfleet have surplus auctions like the ? I know that Utopia Planitia exists, but do they make civilian ships, and if not, who would? Would I be better off looking for a ship on a frontier world like Bajor, or just looking for one outside of the Federation?
EDIT: Think post-dominion war or Voyager times for clarification | I believe there are shipyards that make civilian ships, also you would probably need some pilot/captain licence (like driving licence for car) and official registration number and name of ship, same as today's maritime ships, probably also mandatory transponder. As for payment, issue of currency is somehow messy in Star Trek: in First Contact Picard states that there is no money in Federation, but he probably meant that there is no money in classical, 21st century meaning, but some other universal transfer of value (energy credits or something like that?). Other races use different types of currency, so there has to be some system Federation uses to trade with them, maybe similar system to how Soviet Union used to trade with western countries. There seems to be money in Kirk era, as we see in 2009 Star Trek. | 14 | 22 |
[Star Wars] What was the "Force" like in Medieval Times? | Is the Force something that only comes into existence in a futuristic society? If not, how would "Force" users be seen in Medieval (or earlier) times.
| The force exists in many societies that are not technologically advanced, but it takes a long time for force sensitive races to identify and harness their force powers, but which time their technology will usually have advanced greatly as well. Very little is known about the very first force sensitive species to develop and what path they took, so it's very hard to say at what stage in their cultures force use became something spectacular and what effect it had.
Many more recent force sensitive individuals in this situation though have been treated as anything from respected shamans, to witches burned at the steak, to gods (depending on the social climate, and the particular culture) | 12 | 19 |
Why do economists not look at income data at the individual level? | Edit: Please ignore my claim that the UK provides long term income data at the percentile level- I misspoke (aka was stupid and wrong) and the closest I can find to this now is annual income by decile. Apologies for any issues/trouble.
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I am a political science grad and one of the things that has been bugging me for the years now is why it is so hard to find long-term data on income over time for individuals. I live in the UK, and it is possible to view income over time by percentile (and therefore see, for example how the income level of the 10th percentile has changed year on year), but I have been completely unable to find any source of data detailing the yearly or quarterly changes of income for individuals over any extended period of time.
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This was not core to my degree, or the work I do now, but I have a genuine curiosity about a) what the financial history of individuals in this country (and many others) look like (how many trend up, how many trend down, to what extent, and in what distribution etc) and b) whether there is any connection between, for example, upwards or downwards trending personal financial history and political orientation, levels of political engagement, etc. I feel like it would be a useful way of collecting and consolidating data, but it also does not seem to be done, so I just wondered why that was. I understand that privacy would be a major concern, and that ethical considerations of data use would be important, but if these concerns can be addressed, would this not be something economists would find useful? PoliSci nerds definitely would.
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P.S. If the issue is a logistical one, why is that the case? I understand that it might be tricky to survey large numbers of people independently, and unlikely that all of them would even reliably report back yearly income from far in the past, but wouldn't tax returns serve as a valuable source of info? | Data tracking individuals over time is called "panel data," and there are some studies that analyze it. Try searching for "panel data" and whatever your topic of interest is. For the US, the National Longitudinal Study of Youth has high-quality panel data covering a wide range of topics.
I think I've heard of researchers getting restricted access to anonymized tax data, but the publicly available data is all aggregated, for privacy reasons. Even anonymized data might have enough information to identify specific individuals. | 105 | 89 |
CMV:Immigrants who are illegal and/or do not pay taxes, should not get any public service that come from tax money | This includes any sort of welfare assistance, health care, etc. I honestly don't care if they come to America or not. They do some good, and they do some bad. But they shouldn't get the benefits that come from being a legal immigrant, or a citizen. I'm including anything that is paid for by tax dollars, including public school and other such services. The benefits that are provided by the government are (in most cases) for citizens only. It cheapens the lot for legal immigrants and citizens alike if you get the same benefits regardless if you are legally present or not.
EDIT: I'm mostly referring to income taxes, because I'm assuming the cost of unavoidable (such as police and firefighting) public services will cancel out sales tax.
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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!* | Are you talking about income taxes, or all taxes? For example, everyone pays sales taxes when they purchase almost anything. If an illegal immigrant purchases alcohol or tobacco they are paying taxes. If they buy gas then they are paying taxes. If they own property they pay property taxes. If illegal immigrants pay these types of taxes, why should they not be eligible to receive at least some public services?
Also, it's impossible to stop illegal immigrants from using all public services. How do you keep illegal immigrants off public roads? How do you stop them from going to public parks? How do you ensure that they don't receive emergency services? How does the military protect its citizens but not illegal immigrants? The list goes on and on. | 16 | 19 |
eli5, How do ant tunnels not collapse? | How do ant tunnels not collapse? Our mines always have supporting beams, but do ants so the same? | By being very very small and a bit sticky.
There are two things in effect here. Firstly, small things are much more structurally sound than the same thing but bigger. This is because as you increase the apparent size, mass increases exponentially. Imagine a cube that's 2 meters on each edge. This cube's height, length and depth are all 2m. Its volume is 8m^3 (2x2x2), and its surface area is 24m^2 (2x2x6). Now imagine the same cube but 4 meters on each edge. It's volume is 64m^3 (4x4x4), and its surface area is 96m^2 (4x4x6). Its height (how big it looks) has been multiplied by 2, but its volume has been multiplied by 8 and its surface area by 4. A large tunnel has to support *far* more mass proportional to its size than a small tunnel does, so it's more likely to need supporting.
The second thing is the material in question. Mines are carved into rock, and rock comes in layers. Typically, mines follow one of these layers, because they want to mine whatever's in that layer. The entire layer is made out of the thing they want to mine though, and if they mine the whole thing out, there'll be nothing to support the layer above. Mines must find compromises then - mine out as much of the layer as possible without causing the ceiling to collapse from too much weight being on too little support. Many mines fail to strike the right balance here, because rock layers contain faults and weaknesses that are difficult to predict, and get a partial collapse as the area between two supporting walls caves in. Additional supports can be added to allow more of the layer to be mined without the roof falling.
An ant is not trying to mine coal or iron, nor is it digging through heavy rock layers. Instead, it's burrowing through sand or dirt. This is much lighter, and so its much easier for the sides of the tunnel to support. It's also separated into many grains, so where in a mine an entire rock layer will collapse, in sand and dirt, most collapses are just a few little fragments falling off, instead of the entire thing coming down. Wetness of the particles makes them sticky too, and allows them to hold a shape better. This is particularly effective on the scale of ants because the stickiness force of water works better the smaller you get. | 48 | 27 |
ELI5: Why do conservatives classify healthcare, education and infrastructure as "big government" but not the police and military? | Giving the state authority to shoot people and deprive them of their liberty on an arbitrary basis isn't an overreach of their authority but providing essential services isn't? I'm a little lost here in this line of thought. | It has to do with what you see as the role of government. Some people believe that the government should take an active role in people's lives, providing services on a day-to-day basis and enforcing rules and restrictions on various facets of society. Others believe that the government should instead be a safeguard against violence both internal and external and otherwise should let people live their lives unhindered by government interference. A belief in a strong police and military nicely aligns with the second view because both are necessary to prevent violence committed against each other and from an outside aggressor. | 65 | 53 |
ELI5: Why does the milk in my coffee not spoil after hours in my thermos? | The spoiling of milk products is due to the growth of certain strains of microbacteria that cause fermentation byproducts. It takes a reasonable amount of time with the ideal conditions (room temperatures, proper oxygen..etc) to grow these bacteria. WIthin a few hours these bacteria may grow in minimal amount of numbers, although not enough to spoil milk in a (most likely still warm) thermos. | 25 | 31 |
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Why does glass appear transparent? | It's made from solid matter and even when very thick appears clear. What's the transparent property? And do other animals also see it as transparent? | Glass is transparent to visible light. Matter will be opaque when it is made up of atoms or molecules that scatter light or absorb light. Rough glass will scatter light, this is why sand isn't transparent. Glass used in windows or other things is made smooth by letting it cool from a molten state.
And glass simply doesn't absorb visible light. The electrons in a glass molecule are bound too tightly to be excited by visible light.
| 34 | 100 |
CMV: Tipping culture promotes the wrong mindset: that every good action must be rewarded in some way | Tipping culture is bad because it creates a mindset that you should always be rewarded if you're being nice.
For Restaurants. They should just pay fairly and let their staff also have a bad day. Normally businesses assume risk and employees don't, why is it different for service staff which tends to already be financially disadvantaged.
For everyone else. Do something nice and feel good about yourself, you don't need someone else to make you feel good about yourself.
Willing to change opinion if someone can show me that the motivation of external rewards like tips creates more benefit to society rather than being nice from the get go, and sometimes simply accepting that some people aren't. | >Willing to change opinion if someone can show me that the motivation of external rewards like tips creates more benefit to society rather than being nice from the get go, and sometimes simply accepting that some people aren't.
Tipping culture promotes excelling at your job, and receiving monetary rewards for it.
For some reason people automatically assume 'Tipping Culture = Always tipping". They seem to forget that the tip is a reflection of the service given.
It has an added benefit where if you are not good at your job, your pay reflects that. | 13 | 84 |
ELI5: What is Chinese Social Credit, and how does it affect the lives of the citizens? | I was curious because I was certain it was a hoax, but I wanted to be sure. | The end goal is meant to be a national system that enables a person or company to have a particular score that determines their 'trustworthiness' based on moral and or legal actions. In its current state, the system differs in implementation province to province and there's no set standard for what it should look like, what matters in terms of score and what the particular punishments are. The aim is to have a national system and set of standards that are equal across the country at some point but its moving along very slowly.
The closest relative is the US credit score system, which rates people based on able they are to pay off debts, rewarding people by lower interest/cost loans and punishing through higher interest/cost loans and some businesses will deny the ability to rent housing from them, affect employment, etc, etc.
Social credit is like an expansion of that, which punishes individuals for not following laws like jaywalking or not paying taxes on time (subject to the area) or rewarding through particular actions like wearing a mask or signing into places for contact tracing (again, subject to the area). The other addition is the expansion to businesses, which rates businesses based on their practices, and punishes them for not paying employees on time and rewards them for following codes and things like environmental legislation. And in turn has the capacity to reward/punish based on score.
Reporting is often overly vague and excessively broad. There's concerns about overreach and extralegal punishment, but particular actions that affect score and punishments/rewards that get reported on may or may not even exist. In some instances there are plans or an example given for a particular thing but is not actually implemented anywhere. Or particular actions that can affect score are given as a proposal but not integrated. | 29 | 20 |
ELI5: Why can we take hi-def photos of galaxies light-years away, but yet can only get little pixel pictures of Pluto? | With a pair of binoculars you will be able to view huge skyscrapers from miles away. But you can't see a gnat on a car just 50 yards away. Same idea basically. Galaxies are massive objects lit by the billions of stars within them. Pluto is just a speck reflecting a tiny bit of light from the sun. | 180 | 90 |
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What can the James Webb telescope see that hubble can't? | uh | JWST will be able to see different wavelengths of light.
The Hubble observes in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared (0.1 to 1 μm) spectra, the JWST will observe in a lower frequency range from long-wavelength visible light through mid-infrared (0.6 to 27 μm). This will allow the JWST to observe high redshift objects that are too old and too distant for the Hubble and other earlier instruments to observe.
In addition, and most exciting to me is that the JWST will be able to measure the atmospheres of Exoplanets. So if we see a planet that has a very similar atmosphere as ours, then that's strong evidence that it may harbor life. | 45 | 32 |
CMV: We should move away from income taxes, sales taxes towards carbon taxes, land value taxes | A person’s labor belongs to themself but this planet belongs to everyone. This is really good way to look at property rights, from a moral and practical perspective. It definitely looks like the current economy is plagued by excessive rent-seeking. The current system of taxation is rapidly increasing economic inequality to extreme levels. Taxing carbon footprints, land and use of non renewable sources would prevent the rich from hoarding resources needed to build wealth. One argument against this would be the loss of revenue for the government. In such a system low revenues would co relate with a clean environment and lower economic inequality, which would reduce the need for higher revenue. | Let's simplify and assume everyone's goal is to be 'wealthy' in a monetary and assets based manner. This is the premise you indicated with the inclusion of a wealth gap into the conversation. That means that everyone is striving for the same thing. Some people are successful at it, some inherit it, and most just don't succeed.
Part of the story to success is the navigation of the current tax/market/societal environment. Owning property can generate you a lot of money. Debt is cheap.
If you change the tax/market/social environment you're not going to level the playing field.. Youre simply giving the smart successful people a different set of parameters to solve for. Some will, some won't.. there will be churn, but in the end everyone is still striving for the same goal which cannot be achieved by everyone at the same time.. it's not win win. You can't be wealthy if someone isn't poor.. if everyone is wealthy you all cease to be wealthy.
It might be that you disincentivize people from owning lots of property. But you've disincentivized it for EVERYONE. The market will balance out. This is happening in the housing market already. We are currently seeing some of the lowest lending rates in a long time. This means the cost of owning a home should be less. However because people can afford more due to the low rates, people charge more for the base price of the house. This has led the housing market right back to the highs that it was at prior to the recession.
Markets balance. Your changes don't incentivize wealthy people to get poor, they just change the strategy one must follow to be wealthy. | 12 | 19 |
ELI5: How is information inferred from mathematical formulas? | Let's use gravity in space as an example.
We know (based on experiments on Earth) how gravity works. You release a ball, it falls towards the Earth. We also know that the larger the planet is, the more force gravity pulls with. This is why you can jump higher on the Moon.
These forces determine how planets orbit. It's the reason we orbit around the Sun; the Sun is massive, so it pulls on the Earth. We've seen this sort of behavior with a lot of planets, so we know exactly how orbits are supposed to look.
Now, let's say we see an orbit that makes no sense. Based on our understanding of gravity and all of the planets in the proximity of the new planet, we know what the orbit should look like. However, it looks entirely different!
There are a few possible explanations. One is that our equations for gravity are wrong. We may have misunderstood how things worked, and need to adjust the equations. A second explanation, however, is that there is an unknown object out there. This could be introducing different forces of gravity that would affect the orbit of our new object. Based on our equations, we could try to figure out where that new object should be based on how the orbit looks. | 39 | 44 |
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ELI5: Who notifies Google about newly made roads for their maps? | Do they keep tabs on that sort or thing, or do they wait for their yearly map imaging to add it in? | There are companies specialized in this sort of thing. They monitor local government announcements, planning permissions, etc., and when they see a new road is being constructed, they will go and collect the data.
Google's maps business is big enough for them to own some companies like that as a subsidiary, but sometimes they might just hire external companies to gather the data and provide it in a format that's easy to plug into the Maps database. | 13 | 24 |
ELI5: Marijuana. | I have grown up all my life surrounded by massive propaganda campaigns against the use of marijuana, all of them asserting its dangerously harmful effects and how it's a detriment to society. As such, I always perceived marijuana-usage to be largely taboo, something only done in a civilization by the very lowest of the low.
Now that I am nearly done with high school, I've found that not only is it not taboo, it's actually very common and even (apparently) misinterpreted by the moralistic media and harshly oppressed by the law. What I want to know is simple: scientifically, if marijuana is as beneficial and safe as many of my peers claim it to be, then how did this massive war on pot come to be? I also want to know both the flaws of and the arguments for both sides of the cannabis-legalization debate. What are the potential effects, both good and bad, of the use of marijuana? A non-biased reply is preferable. | "Marijuana" is a special word for the common hemp plant, or cannabis — which is a plant that has been used for thousands of years for a lot of different things; such as rope, fabric, paper, oil, and drugs. The word "marijuana" or "marihuana" used to be a rare slang expression, but government people in the early 20th century started using it a lot in order to make hemp sound more foreign, and to make it sound scary to people who didn't like foreign things.
When people smoke or eat the buds or resin of the hemp plant, it does a bunch of different things to them. The most obvious is that it usually makes people feel good. Depending on the kind of hemp and the person doing it, it can make people feel happy, excited, relaxed, and a bit dizzy. It can make music sound prettier, make colors seem brighter, and make silly things funnier.
On the other hand, it can also sometimes make people scared or overwhelmed and unhappy. And other people think it makes them lazy or boring. People are different, and while some people like the effects of cannabis a lot, others don't. That's normal — just as some people really like the taste of olives or broccoli or red wine or blue cheese, and others really dislike them.
Hemp does other things, too. One is that it usually makes people a little bit hungry — you might have heard of this as "the munchies". This same effect helps keep people from throwing up if they are sick. This is why many people with AIDS or cancer use cannabis — because the medicines they take for AIDS or cancer are very powerful and make them throw up, but the hemp helps stop that.
Why does cannabis make people feel relaxed and happy? It affects certain parts of the brain, which are involved in feeling emotions, pain, and other sensations. It does this in a way which — for some people — can cancel out depression and certain kinds of chronic pain. This is another reason people take cannabis as medicine.
But people also often use cannabis just because it is pleasant and fun — just as people play games, or watch TV, or do other hobbies, or use other drugs like beer or coffee, just because they like to do so. A lot of people believe that there is nothing wrong with doing things just for fun, so long as nobody else is getting hurt. (It wouldn't be okay for a parent to just play games *all day* and neglect their kids — but that doesn't mean it's bad to play games *once in a while*.)
On the other hand, sometimes people use cannabis too much. It's not very common — it's actually a lot *less* common than people drinking alcohol too much. But because smoking hemp is pleasant and relaxing, people can get used to doing it a lot. This can make it harder for them to do other things with their life. The fact that cannabis is against the law makes it even harder, though — because they have to hide what they are doing, which makes it harder to change.
Today, cannabis is against the law almost everywhere. This means that when the police find out that someone is doing it, they come around and arrest people and take them away to jail. They often take away their car and house too. And if they have kids, those kids might have to grow up without their parent around to take care of them. This is really sad! Many people think that *even if* cannabis is bad for people, it's not as bad as what the government does to people who use it today. *Even if* you think that using cannabis is a bad idea, that it makes people goofy and silly and lazy, you might agree that this isn't as bad as dragging those people away to jail. | 129 | 110 |
[DUNE] If interstellar travel without spice is impossible, then how did they find/get to Arrakis in the first place? | Arrakis is clearly not where humans came from. In fact, I think in this universe they came from Earth. | Advanced artificial intelligence computers and blind luck navigating FTL. Spice doesn't create FTL it just makes it safer without the aid of thinking machines. Before the discovery of the prescience spice grants (ability to see the future) machines calculated the safest route based on billions if not trillions of variables or humans just YOLO'd it into the void and sometimes managed to not die in the process. | 575 | 293 |
CMV:Children/Teenagers with ANY mental disabilities should not be put on the same standard as children/teenagers without. | I am currently a 15 year old in high school and it is so hard for me. I have Bipolar disorder, Depression, and terrible social anxiety. I have been at the same level at people like my friend, Wyatt, who has nothing wrong with him, at all. I feel like it's very unfair that in my public school, I have to do the same exact thing as someone like Wyatt. I have a way harder time doing anything than him. It doesn't even have to be a big change, it could be something like getting less work, getting more attention from the teachers, or/and getting a different assignment overall.
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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!* | Having mental health issues *should* put you on an IEP, so if your health issues are interfering with your work you should be able to get resources to help.
That being said, "any" mental health issues is a pretty huge stretch because they have widely disparate impacts. Kids with chronic narcolepsy don't need the same accomodations as kids with mild autism who don't need the same accomodations as kids with dyslexia who don't need the same accomodation as kids with anorexia. In some cases, the academic accomodations a school should have in place are minimal and would mostly deal with testing allowances, while in other cases it might require individual teaching and special education classes.
I am not saying the system in place always works but it recognizes the need for nuance in how kids are accomodated in a way your argument doesn't. | 19 | 21 |
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