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Are there any Philosophers of Art which have examined the idea of the starving or suffering artist? | After reading Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley, this quote stick out to me : "Perhaps it is good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?"
Are there any philosophers of art that explore this sort of idea? | This is a central concept in Nietzsche's thought. He considered Goethe to be the pinnacle example of the Ubermensch because he defied societal conventions to transform his suffering into great works of art. | 53 | 88 |
The mitochondria and chloroplast are examples of endosymbiotic relationships, but are there any other examples of eukaryotic cells forming an endosymbiotic relationship with another organism? | If there aren't, then what stops cells from forming such relationships? If there are, what is the nature of the symbiotic relationship, and are they able to pass on these endosymbionts to subsequent generations? | Corals have a symbiotic relationship with Zooxanthellae. The symbiont performs photosynthesis and helps feed the coral. The coral aids the symbiont with waste removal, safety, and a supply of carbon dioxide. Corals are not born with symbionts, they acquire them from the environment. In times of stress, the coral may eject their symbiont. That's called coral bleaching because the photosynthetic symbionts are the primary source of coral's color. | 11 | 18 |
Why do my car windows fog up in a way that I can't wipe it off? | I googled and understand the basic gist of why it fogs in general (humidity, temperature, etc) and that all makes sense.
.
But what I do not understand is why sometimes it seems to fog up...differently? I wipe off the outside with a rag and then wipe off the inside with another dry rag. My common sense then tells me that I should be able to see clearly. Yet, there is seemingly some phantom fog that can not be wiped on either side of the windows regardless of how hard I try to wipe it off. Only when I start to turn on the heat/AC or open the windows does it gradually begin to disappear.
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Why does this occur? Everytime I drive I make a mental note to myself to ask ELI5 but I always forget!
My car is an old car if it makes a difference (i noticed newer cars seem to fog less, but I don't know why that is the case) | The chemicals produced by human breath (due to diet as well as environment) go beyond what natural evaporation is capable of. Speaking anecdotally, try purchasing some Rain-X anti-fog wipes and cleaning all of your internal window surfaces. You will not be disappointed. | 29 | 233 |
Is everything humans do natural? | We are part of nature, so is what we do natural? | This question pivots on whether we have a clear consensus about what it takes for something to be "natural" - once we have that in place, we can determine which, if any, human behaviors count as natural.
Importantly, natural and good are different concepts. Usually there's an implicit assumption behind questions like this that what is natural is acceptable or right or praiseworthy -- which is just a variation of status quo bias. | 55 | 64 |
AskScience AMA Series: I'm Wallace Arthur, enthusiast about extraterrestrial life, author of The Biological Universe: Life in the Milky Way and Beyond (Cambridge University Press), and Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. AMA about our search for alien life! | I'm a biologist who has spent over 40 years studying the diversity of life on planet Earth. I've written many books dealing with questions about this amazing biodiversity, but recently I've become fascinated by questions about life on other planets. The number of known planets is now well over 4000 - a very large number compared with the mere eight we knew of until recently, and yet only the tip of the suspected iceberg of about a trillion planets spread across our local galaxy. Some of these planets almost certainly host life. But how many, and what is it like? These are the central questions of my new book [The Biological Universe](https://www.amazon.com/Biological-Universe-Life-Milky-Beyond/dp/1108836941), published by [Cambridge University Press](https://www.cambridge.org/thebiologicaluniverse).
I began my scientific career with a PhD from Nottingham University in England, went on to teach and carry out research at several other British universities, and am now Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland in Galway. I have held visiting positions at Harvard and Cambridge universities. I was one of the founding editors of the scientific journal Evolution & Development. My previous books include Life through Time and Space (Harvard 2017). This was described as 'brilliant and thought-provoking in every way' by Sir Arnold Wolfendale, Britain's Astronomer Royal (only the 14th person to hold this position since its origin in the year 1675).
Ask me anything about:
+ What alien life is likely to be like
+ How widespread it is likely to be
+ How soon we are likely to discover it
+ How close is the nearest alien life to Earth
+ What are the implications of discovering it
I'll be on at 12 noon Eastern (16 UT), AMA!
Username: /u/WallaceArthur | The more intelligent vertebrates of Earth (primates, corvids, cetaceans) seem to be able to communicate with each other and express basic thoughts and emotions across species. There are even accounts of such cross-species intelligent interaction between humans and octopus. Does that give you hope that intelligence in non-terrestrial species would, at least on a basic level, be understandable to us, and vice-versa? | 178 | 3,126 |
CMV: Logic and Philosophy should be taught at a younger age to better education and prepare our youth for more complex jobs and an overall more educated culture. | I believe that Logic and Philosophy should be taught at a much younger age to improve critical thinking, arguments, and to open the door to different career choices such as programming and mathematics. A more educated populus is also good because people become more open minded and open to differing viewpoints. America seems to be lacking in these areas as shown by our world ranking for education and loss of more advanced jobs such as programmers and doctors. Our current polarization when it comes to social issues is a problem in it's own right. Logic and Philosophy are both important for opening your mind to be ideas and can both help with other areas of learning. Critical thinking is an extremely important skill in today's career fields. It allows an individual to be innovative, a better problem solver, and more open minded to any new idea they may run across. Not only is it an important skill for jobs but it also pushes individuals to look their own perceptions, biases, and world view, which is good for any culture. | What makes you think learning philosophy is going to fix polarisation? Philosophy itself can be relatively polarising, depending on where you fall on particular issues.
And assuming you are talking about school, which current classes/subjects would you cut in favour of these types of classes? | 146 | 1,139 |
[Dune] Is the "Known Universe" really the entire known universe? Or is it just the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies? | We know that Shaddam IV, Paul Atreides, and Leto II Atreides were Emperors of the Known Universe, and that Arrakis is the center of it. However, is it really the entirety of the known universe? Or is it just our home galaxy plus its satellite galaxies? Is there an explanation on how big the Known Universe actually is? | By "known", Imperial types usually mean "actually surveyed and catalogued by one of the Proper People(tm)"
IOW, they automatically exclude whatever they don't already own as being "unimportant enough to count".
So, it's not even the whole galaxy. It's a few hundred lightyears around Earth, maybe a few thousand. It doesn't even include all of the space that humanity spread out to during The Scattering following the reign of Leto II. | 115 | 85 |
What do mosquitoes contribute to the environment? | Besides being tasty bat, dragonfly and hummingbird food, mosquitoes primarily feed on nectar, so are useful pollinators. There may be a handful of rare orchids that are dependent on mosquitoes, and they are the primary pollinators of the cacao tree. | 26 | 18 |
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ELI5: How does a radio station determine the popularity of their shows? | Obviously they'd need stats to know whether a specific talk show/ dj is getting a lot of viewers to let advertisers know that it's worth paying to put an ad on their station. Can they tell, like television, how many "listeners" there are? I doubt it because they just send out a signal that other devices pick up. Do they rely on surveys? Callers? | There are "consumer research companies" specializing in studying this issue for radio stations and other media companies. These consumer research companies, such as Nielson, do large surveys to determine what people are listening to, watching, and reading. They've benefitted enormously from the refining of "scientific" polling and have used it to make a successful business.
After the surveys, consumer research companies sell the information back to the media companies (radio, TV stations) who can then better determine where to spend their advertising dollars and which radio hosts, for example, are doing well with particular demographics. | 10 | 19 |
Why do we still use stenographers? | With all the new voice to text technology that is out there
these days I can't help but think this job is becoming outdated.
Edit: if I'm not mistaken court sessions are videotaped as well | Put simply, the audio/video recordings would need to be transcribed at some point to make them searchable. That COULD be done after the fact, but then the transcriber would have no way to resolve a question if something went unheard or was mumbled. If they are right in the courtroom then they have an opportunity to resolve the question in real time, which would be impossible if they waited to transcribe the tapes later. | 10 | 27 |
How is it I can see through a Diamond, even though it's the densest form of carbon? | When something is more dense, its atoms are closer together. If that's the case, then why do the closer-together atoms in a diamond allow more light through than the further-apart atoms of coal? | Atoms are not little opaque balls that block light. Rather, atoms are collections of electric charges (protons and electrons) which can interact with light via their electric charge. The color and transparency of a material is an emergent phenomenon that arises from how the electric field in light interacts with electric charges in the atoms of the material. Whether an object is opaque or transparent is not a fundamental property of its electrons or even its atoms. Rather, it arises from how the electrons are bound in atoms and how the atoms are bound to each other.
Light that encounters a material can either get absorbed, transmitted through, or reflected back. A material is transparent when most of the light that encounters the material is transmitted through. This happens when there is not a strong mechanism in place to absorb or reflect the light. Since light travels forward on its own even when no material is around, transmission is the default behavior for light, i.e. transmission is what always happens when absorption and reflection are poor. Strong absorption and reflection of light by a material usually happen when the electrons in the material couple strongly to the oscillation of the electric field in the light, and are therefore able to redirect the light. The transparency of a material is therefore a function mostly of how strongly or loosely the electrons are bound to one place in the material, and is not a function of how close the atoms are. An extreme example is metals. Metals contain a sea of electrons that are very loosely bound to one place (the conduction electrons). As a result, the electrons are free to respond strongly to the waving electric field in light. Therefore, metals have high reflection and high absorption, and therefore low transmission. In contrast, all the electrons in diamond are very strongly bound, so they cannot interact much with light, so diamond has a high transparency. The whole story is a lot more complex than this because there are so many different ways electrons can form bonds and behave in a material, and because atoms are really quantum objects, but this is a good starting picture. | 64 | 53 |
ELI5: Why are vision problems so common in humans? | There are a ton of people who have to wear glasses or contacts in order to see, have humans as a species always had so much of a problem with vision? Are our eyes worse now than our ancestors were? | humans need glasses to see fine detail, like letters. in a hunter gatherer sense, 99% of peoples vision is probably sufficient. i suspect there are plenty of animals that would want glasses if they were intelligent enough to know they were missing out on something. but since most land animals have a highly developed sense of smell compared to humans, they probably dont care. | 17 | 61 |
ELI5: Why does scalding hot water sometimes feel cold at first? | That's all | There are two major set of nerves which help sense temperature. There's the nerves that sense extremes in temperature, and the nerves that sense that something is warm. The nerves that sense warmth take slightly longer to activate.
You can actually fool your nerves in a kind of neat way. If you hold two hoses in your hand, run ice water through one and warm (not hot) water through the other it will feel like it's burning you. The warmth-nerves are saying "there's warmth" while the extreme-temperature nerves say "it's extreme", which your mind interprets as scalding. | 15 | 20 |
CMV: Food Delivery Apps Should Change their Tipping Model | On all the food delivery apps I use, they recommend tipping the driver on a percentage of the total bill. Why is that?
I'm arguing that delivery drivers should be tipped on an algorithm based on distance they have to travel to deliver to the household, and not based on how much a person has paid for the food.
It's not like a driver has to do more work based on the price of the food. The cost associated with their job - gas, time, depreciation of their vehicle - is all tied to distance not price. Also, especially with higher end restaurants, a higher overall price doesn't assume more/larger boxes, it simply means the food is more expensive. I would definitely understand tipping more if the driver has to carry more packages but that's not always true.
Is my logic sound or do I need to change my view? | The tipping system in these apps is all about incentivizing you to tip, so as to incentivize more drivers to join and get the existing drivers to do more deliveries. They have no incentive to make algorithms to "tip fairly", but you are well within your rights to do such a calculation yourself. | 109 | 359 |
[General] How do immortals always get so rich? | Vandal Savage, Sebastian Shaw, Ra’s Al Ghul. How do immortal (or at least very very long lived) people alway gain so much wealth? I know even if I lived for 2000 years I would still have no idea how to get rich | There's lots of possibilities, compound interest, not needing to retire, learning to handle money by sheer volume of trial and error. Over a long enough time, you're more likely to just get lucky eventually and getting richer if you're rich is much easier than getting rich if you're poor.
Even being absent minded can be a path to wealth for immortals. Put off decluttering the basement for about seventy years and you're sitting on some valuable antiques.
That said, not every immortal actually is rich. Angel and Hob Gadling both come to mind. | 44 | 16 |
ELI5: How can bamboo grow up to 3ft per day whereas other plants can get no where near as close to this speed? | Bamboo grow in a different manner to normal plants. Rather than growth through mitosis (splitting and division of cells) they already have present a number of cells and these cells stretch and elongate these cells. They become turgid (full of water) and stretch.
Tldr;
They don't grow faster. They fill with water and stretch into their adult shape fast. | 174 | 255 |
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ELI5: why can’t we just plant a huge amount of trees instead of trying to stop CO2 emissions? | It seems to me that most of our governments and environmentalists are focusing on people’s and companies’ reduction of CO2 emissions when discussing how to deal with climate change. This requires a lot of social pressure and people’s sacrifice. So I always wondered if we couldn’t just plant a whole bunch of trees and other plants to solve the problem? I don’t think anyone would oppose that. | Trees can help to offset CO2 emissions, but they’re not ‘free’ to grow — they require the correct soil and a lot of clean water.
You can grow trees where they’re not entirely meant to be growing, sure, but then you have something like Southern California that burns down if someone looks at it incorrectly.
It’s also important to note that you can’t cut down an existing forest and then just plant a bunch of trees to quickfix the fuckup — forests are highly complex ecosystems from root to canopy and Chet from Toledo planting 3000 of the same species of spruce tree where there used to be a thriving forest isn’t going to fix anything. | 112 | 40 |
Is it possible to imagine a universe where the fundamental laws of mathematics are different in the same way scientists can imagine a universe where the laws of physics are completely different than ours? | Mathematics is already not limited by this universe - it's only limited by our imaginations and the rules of a given mathematical system. E.g. set theory has one set of rules, category theory has another, and something that's possible or true in one system may not be possible or true in another.
As such, the "fundamental laws of mathematics" really have nothing to do with physical universes, and shouldn't be affected by them.
But if the question is about whether we might have a universe where putting two balls into a box results in the box containing three balls, so 1+1=3, that's not actually a question about mathematics, it's just a question about which of the many possible mathematical systems we can imagine apply to the universe in question.
One example of this would be the structure of space, which in our universe appears geometrically flat: so the angles of a triangle, even one with sides that are light-years across, add up to 180 degrees. But in a universe where space has some other geometry, e.g. hyperbolic, then the angles of a triangle in that universe would add up to less than 180 degrees.
This is not a change in the fundamental laws of mathematics, though. It's just a universe with different mathematical properties.
| 61 | 94 |
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Why has HIV not mutated to be transmitted more easily, say via respiration? Are we, the human species, just lucky that non-curable deadly viruses happen not to be as easily transmissible as say the common cold? | This has intrigued me for a while. I feel like if random chance, in the evolution of the HIV virus, had made it more easily transmissible, the human species could have been nearly wiped out over the last 30 years.
Thoughts anyone? | Viruses respond to selection pressure, sometimes this correlates with opportunity to enhance their means of infection, sometimes it doesn't. Much of the HIV-1 genome is efficiently evolved for infection in macrophages and T-cells (vpx/vif/vpr/nef/vpu). Essentially, HIV-1 would have to undergo numerous genomic alterations including its tropism (which carries implications for its cell entry) and virion stability.
This is highly unlikely to occur because of the sheer number of mutations required and the difficulty of responding to such hypothetical pressures in a coherent and successive manner. HIV-1 is highly evolved to its niche, and it is much easier (probability wise) for it to die off than to morph into something so different so quickly. | 52 | 115 |
ELI5: Why is university called "college" and college called "community college" in the United States? | The meaning of the term 'college' varies a lot between countries.
In Canada, a college is sort of like a technical or trade school that you attend at around age 18. It's a post-secondary education path similar to university but the material is more practical/hands-on and specialized. The term 'college' is also sometimes used to refer to schools within a larger school (e.g. a college within a university).
In the UK, the term college usually refers to a bridging school that students attend around the age of 16. It may help prepare and qualify students for post-secondary education (e.g. at a university) once they reach age ~18.
In Australia, the term college may be used as a more general term for many different types of schools, including schools that are primarily geared toward teaching children under 16 years of age.
In the US, the term college basically just refers to any post-secondary institution of education whether that be a university, a technical/trade school, a 'community college' or what have you. Like Canada, the term 'college' is also sometimes used specifically refer to a 'school within a school' at universities that are made up of multiple colleges. | 105 | 116 |
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ELI5: What's the difference between a formula and an algorithm? How does an algorithm work? | An algorithm is a sequence of steps. A formula, on the other hand, is an expression of information.
For example:
The volume of a sphere is represented by the formula:
V = 4/3 π r3
That formula encodes the volume of a sphere based on it's radius. There are no steps in the formula, just information (The relationship between the radius and volume of a sphere).
To calculate the volume of a sphere you might use the algorithm:
1. Cube the radius
2. Multiply by π
3. Multiply by 4/3
but notice that the above algorithm doesn't describe the formula it self, it describes how to apply the formula and get a result.
A Genetic algorithm, however, can be expressed as a series of steps, but there is no concise representation for the information within a Genetic algorithm. i.e. there is no formula. | 12 | 38 |
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ELI5: How do overseas "tax havens" work? | Companies need to pay company taxes on what they earn.
Different countries have different taxes, some high, some low.
To save money, the company says that it lives in "Tax Haven"
Company pays less in taxes.
_____
Tax heavens are often small island nations, who have no industry or tourism. So instead, they have really really low or no taxes at all (Cayman Islands). So the companies will move to their island, and then make them money, roads, houses, offices and so on.
It's a win for the 50.000 people living on the islands. But a huge huge loss for the other countries, who loose tens of thousands of billion dollars each year. | 40 | 87 |
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ELi5 How do we know 1cm is 1cm all around the world? How are we sure about it? | A centimeter is defined as 1/100th of a meter.
A meter is (currently) defined as the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second - which means everyone uses a universal standard definition.
\---
In the 18th century, a meter was defined as 1/10,000,000th the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle path at sea level. In 1799, they actually made a metal bar to serve as the prototype meter, and then made bars precisely measured to the same length that could be carried to other countries so that every country could have their own meter standard (which they could then make copies of). In 1872, they conducted another survey and found out that the calculations were slightly off, and the meter standard that they'd been using was off by two tenths of a millimeter. There was an uproar (in small circles) and in 1875 an international bureau of weights and measures was founded as a result. In 1889, the new standard meter was ratified and standard meter bars where distributed at a ceremony in Paris.
In 1870, a guy named James Maxwell gave a speech and basically said: we determined the size of the meter based on a survey of the size of the Earth, which is fine as it probably doesn't change too much, but there's no reason to believe that size and shape won't ever change. By the 1960's we had figured out that using the size of the Earth was kind of a fool's errand -- continental plates can move and the shape change slightly and you couldn't accurately pin the size of a meter on a measure of a the surface of a ball that was slowly changing shape. So, they settled on the wavelength of light emitted by excited atoms of krypton-86 as a means to define a meter, 1,650,763.73x the wavelength of the emission line of krypton-86, to be precise.
This simple measure was then restated in terms of the speed of light in a vacuum (which can be accurately measured in a variety of ways | 8,285 | 7,287 |
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[Ready Player One] where the fuck is the government in all of this? | A corporation keeps slaves in metal boxes with electrical control and torture devices so they can carry out menial labor in a video game, it is even confirmed that people have died doing this. The same corporation then murders several people with drone placed bombs for financial reasons and gets away with it in a world that is filled with cameras and tech that could easily incriminate them. They also seem to have hit-squads of armed troops that can invade homes and attack people with impunity. Then the police conveniently show up to arrest mr. Evil CEO as he is pointing a gun at some kid in a trailer park while seemingly ignoring the years of flagrant human rights abuse and corporate inquest. Is there some explanation about this in the book? Am I missing something? | In the book:
- Indentured servitude is explicitly made legal. You get a job at IOI based on your skill set to be able to work off your debt. Then they take off living expenses and anything else they can think of and people have to work there forever. Also, the jobs are actual jobs like customer service rep.
- They planted meth making equipment on the building so it looked like another meth explosion (which is not uncommon in what amounts to a gigantic trailer park).
- They have armored dudes to collect people in debt and bring them in. They don't have an official hit squad like that IOI chick in the movie makes it out to be, but the collection of people is perfectly legal so they don't have to hide that they're going in for someone.
- He doesn't point a gun at a kid in a trailer park. | 58 | 60 |
ELI5: What stops the first kernel of popped corn from burning until the last kernel pops? | The last kernel being the one you feel safe stopping the microwave at, without burning the entire bag. | Microwave ovens heat food by exciting water molecules: the radiation gets absorbed by water most readily, and tends to pass through most other food bits pretty easily.
Unpopped popcorn kernels contain little bits of water inside that are heated, boil off into steam, and burst out of the kernel, forming the popcorn itself and allowing the water the escape.
While the first popped kernel sits around waiting, microwave radiation is passing over and through it and getting absorbed by other water molecules in other kernels, causing almost no damage to the first kernel at all.
It's not until all the popcorn has been popped that very little concentrated amounts of water remain in the whole set of popcorn, so the microwave radiation starts getting absorbed more readily by the fleshy bits of the popped popcorn kernels. That's when they start to burn, and it's before that point that you want to stop the microwave. | 58 | 60 |
Are all central banks created equal? | I think it's safe to say that, generally speaking, most countries' Central Banks are run by economic experts and are usually safely decoupled from the government enough to do their job effectively.
With that being said, why do central banks take fairly different actions when presented with similar scenarios? E.g. ECB putting negative rates when the US Federal Reserve expressed no interest in doing so, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand raising rates to counter inflation even though the Federal Reserve believes inflation to be transitory and to wait things out a bit longer before a rate hike.
Is this difference just in mentality towards different scenarios? Is it a difference in expertise? *Are* there differing level of expertise among central banks? A lot of people seem to give the Federal Reserve grief for QE and related stimulus, but the ECB is engaging with these activities as well, are they not?
Any help or literature pointing to comparisons would be great. | Central banks jobs are to maintain steady price levels in an economy. If different central banks act in different ways its because they're dealing with different economies.
The ECB might set negative rates to promote growth but the fed might think the US economy has no need for further stimulus or thinks QE is a better tool to achieve their goals.
Central banks are also given different tasks by their government. For example in the UK it's set a 2% inflation target. In other countries this differs.
Finally some central banks have different political influences. Most western central banks are thought of as being relatively Independant from government. Other central banks much less so. An example of this is Turkey. Which is lowering interest rates despite high inflation because that's what the government wants. | 11 | 20 |
ELI5: What is the significance of the letter in the title of vitamins e.g. vitamin A? | Also, why are there so many different vitamin B's? | Vitamins were named alphabetically according to which ones were discovered first. There are so many different vitamin Bs because at first all of the different types were thought to be very similar and all called "vitamin B". Later it was found that they serve different biological functions and were renamed. All the vitamin Bs together are called vitamin B complex, by the way. As for the missing gaps (B12 existing when there are only 8 types of B vitamins, the jump from vitamin E to vitamin K), those are from substances that were thought to be vitamins being named, then discarded after scientists realized that they didn't classify. | 26 | 16 |
Is there an obvious reason why this sum approaches 1? | I was thinking about infinite series the other day; I knew the harmonic series diverges, and I knew the sum of 1/squares approaches *π*^(2)/6.
I then assumed the sum to infinity of 1 over cubes would also converge; and so I wondered, if I were to sum these limits in a new series, would they too converge?
Σ(1/n^(2)) + Σ(1/n^(3)) + Σ(1/n^(4)) + Σ(1/n^(5)) ...
I just ran it in python now, and obviously, as I should have realised, the limits of each term approaches 1 as the powers approach infinity, and so the whole series diverges.
Buuuuuuuut... I then thought, if I subtracted 1 each time and did the infinite sum from n = 2, would that converge? I changed my python code and was surprised to find the whole series approaches 1.
(Σ(1/n^(2)) -1) + (Σ(1/n^(3)) -1) + (Σ(1/n^(4)) -1) + (Σ(1/n^(5)) -1)... = 1
Just to clarify were on the same page, because typing maths here is difficult; my code is as follows:
n = 2
c = 0
for n in range(2, 20):
a = 0
b = 2
for k in range(0,100000):
a += 1/b**n
b += 1
c += a
print(str(n) + ' : ' + str(a))
print(str(c) + '\n')
Reading up on this, I found that what I'm doing is using the Riemann zeta function. And on the wiki page for the function, there is a formula that says the infinite sum of the integer points of the Riemann zeta function minus 1, equals 1; this [image](https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/b8fae8dd436dacd8a9f6264c8de78db55b70bbc6) shows it properly notated.
So my question is: is there an easier way to show why this approaches 1? The Riemann zeta function is very complicated but I'm wondering if there is some way to show this with simpler algebra. The result is so nice but I can't really get my head around where it comes from. | First note that subtracting 1 from each of these sums is the same as removing the first term from each sum, aka the term when n = 1. So now, we're looking at
Σ(1/n\^2) + Σ(1/n\^3) + Σ(1/n\^4) + Σ(1/n\^5) + ...
but when n starts at 2 now. Now, we can "switch the order of summation", to gather up all terms with n = 2, n = 3, n = 4, and so on, so that the new sum looks like
(1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ...) + (1/9 + 1/27 + 1/81 + ...) + ... or
Σ(1/2\^k) + Σ(1/3\^k) + Σ(1/4\^k) + Σ(1/5\^k) + ...
Each of these are just a geometric series which we can sum up by the usual formula to get that the nth series is equal to 1/(n(n-1)) = 1/(n-1) - 1/n. Now, if we sum that up over n >= 2, this looks like 1 - 1/2 + 1/2 - 1/3 + 1/3 - 1/4 + 1/4 - ... which is what we call a telescoping series that sums to one.
I've ignored a lot of details in the above argument like why we can even switch the order of summation that depends on certain things about convergence but these can be justified. | 27 | 32 |
ELI5: Sinkholes | What causes them and how are they so perfectly formed? (e.g. - http://www.dvhardware.net/news/guatemala_sink_hole_2.jpg) | There are many different kinds of sinkholes, and they are formed in different ways.
The one you have pictured was formed by rainwater seeping through the hard top level of the ground, and eroding (rubbing away) the weaker soil underneath. Eventually there is too much tension on the top level and it cracks and falls into the hole. | 10 | 30 |
[Mad Max] How are these giant, gas guzzling monstrosities that folks try to pass off as cars in any way viable? | Conspicuous consumption is the basis of any civilization.
Just the sight of a giant tank with a flame thrower/guitar is going to give any enemy pause.
Immortan Joe was kind of a genius, he picked a spot with water and a working oil well to set up his empire. | 66 | 34 |
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ELI5: How do puzzles benefit our brains? | Like, yeah I can see how it helps keep your brain active by like ‘solving problems’, but how else does it benefit the brain?
How does it improve the brain? What specifically happens? Are there other types of ‘puzzles’ we could create to better help ourselves or even overcome certain problems?
Exercises memory too I guess? | Puzzles mostly help your brain get better at doing those specific kinds of puzzles. Most of the “train your brain using these puzzle games” style services or activities tend to greatly exaggerate the expected benefits. There might be some from just generally being active, and some skills that you practice or learn in the process of doing puzzles might help with working on more general problem-solving, logic or spatial reasoning, but for the most part, it’s not actually doing anything special to your brain to improve it in any particular way. | 16 | 31 |
Most philosophers, historically and contemporary, seem to be critical of their (current) society and would prefer a move towards their ideal. Are there any philosophers who strongly advocate the status quo and discourage change? | I hope it's clear what I'm asking. Most philosophers' positions are arguably ideals. And most of those positions don't look exactly like our current way to organize society, our economic models, and what happens in politics. But are there philosophers, who, for whatever reason, actually defend the status quo and strongly discourage change or progress?
I'd be happy to hear answers in a wider sense, where the 'status-quo' could mean any nation on the planet (of course somebody who sees Sweden as close-to-ideal, doesn't truly defend "his" status-quo if he lives in the US, but that's fine). But I'm especially curious about philosophers who defend the status-quo of their society. For example, an US-American philosopher, saying that the US-American society+economic model is fine the way it is and discourages any change in either direction. | Kant, in realizing the potency that Humean skepticism would have on traditional notions of God, the soul, morality, etc. grounded on pure reason, i.e. reason unbounded by sense-experience, sought to re-establish justification for these views on practical reason.
Kant, though, was also a principal philosopher of the Enlightenment and argued for constitutional republicanism in the waning days of absolute monarchism. | 13 | 16 |
[World War]When humanity invent FTL the Race have trouble understanding how it works because they use different mathematical notation.Would learning alien mathematical notation just be matter of learning what are the equivalent of stuff like + & = symbols, or would it be more complicated than that? | It would be more than the basic symbols, ftl could use concepts like pi or Eulers constant. They may use a different number system, binary or base 360. It could require some complex translation, but math is math, regardless of language. | 17 | 18 |
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How can someone become algeric to something they were not previously allergic to? | One of the biggest points of the immune system is the ability to adapt to new threats. This is the whole reason vaccines work, that we can fight off diseases we haven't seen, and that there are a bunch of childhood diseases you never get again. The immune system is constantly monitoring the body for unfamiliar things showing up where they shouldn't. On the flip side, there are a bunch of checkpoints to make sure that the immune system isn't flagging parts of you as the enemy, which is important because the immune system has some pretty serious weapons to destroy stuff.
The systems involved in figuring out friend vs. enemy are really complicated, but long story short, they're not perfect. Sometimes, harmless proteins in food get flagged as the enemy, even if you've had it before-- it's sort of a low-risk odds game each time you eat something. Generally speaking, the body is a lot more tolerant of stuff that shows up in the gut as "probably food," but very mad about unfamiliar stuff showing up in the blood as "probably enemy." | 44 | 38 |
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ELI5: Why didn't America stick with the Westminster model when choosing how to run a government? | Because each State in the Union was a sovereign entity that chose to create a federation to increase total military strength and trade negotiation power with other nations. They only gave up a part of their sovereignty to this federal government.
In the Westminster model Power starts at the top "national level" and is then rationed out at different rates to the units making up that nation. It means that the member countries/entities of the union are not sovereign because the power does not start with them, it is granted to them. | 12 | 15 |
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AskScience AMA Series: I am Dr. Saad Omer and I'm here to talk about vaccines and the diseases they prevent. Ask Me Anything! | With vaccine preventable disease outbreaks making headlines around the world, we would like to welcome Dr. Saad B. Omer for an AMA to answer any questions on vaccines and the diseases they prevent.
Dr. Saad B. Omer (www.saadomer.org) is the William H. Foege Chair in Global Health and Professor of Global Health, Epidemiology & Pediatrics at Emory University, Schools of Public Health and Medicine. He has conducted studies in the United States, Guatemala, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, and Australia. Dr Omer's research portfolio includes clinical trials to estimate efficacy of maternal and/or infant influenza, pertussis, polio, measles and pneumococcal vaccines and trials to evaluate drug regimens to reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Moreover, he has conducted several studies on interventions to increase immunization coverage and demand. Dr Omer's work has been cited in global and country-specific policy recommendations and has informed clinical practice and health legislation in several countries. He has directly mentored over 100 junior faculty, clinical and research post-doctoral fellows, and PhD and other graduate students.
Dr. Omer has published more than 225 papers in peer reviewed journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, the Lancet, British Medical Journal, Pediatrics, American Journal of Public Health, and Science. Moreover, he has written op-eds for publications such as the New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post.
Dr. Omer will begin answering questions at 4:30pm EST and come find him on twitter ([@SaadOmer3](https://twitter.com/saadomer3)) after!
---
The AMA has concluded. From Dr. Omer:
> Thanks everyone. I really enjoyed interacting with you. I know there are many questions I wasn't able to get to. However, I'd would be happy to continue the conversation in coming days over Twitter - a medium I use more frequently. My handle is @SaadOmer3.
> P.S. Sorry for the typos (I'm sure there're many). I am a bad proofreader; particularly in a hurry.
| What's the best way to approach an anti-vaxxer with young children (when the topic comes up)? Is there a method of coversation that doctors have found to be the most effective into convincing them to get their kids properly vaccinated? Or has facebook ruined any ability to have a factual, evidence-based conversation with parents. | 548 | 5,737 |
[Pokémon] Nidoran question | I'm a Pokémon trainer, and have had a question for a while now I was hoping a professor or a breeder could answer for me.
Why do they consider NidoranF and NidoranM two different species of Pokémon?
I know they look different compared to most Pokémon and evolve into different Pokémon; but they aren't the only Pokémon that evolve according to gender or with gender differences.
There's also a handful of Pokémon that have different types depending on what region they're from and even some that have evolutions that vary from the others like a Meowth from Galar taking a different evolution; or a Zigzagoon from there getting an extra one. These would show with genes and stuff like that wouldn't it; but they still count them as one?
Why don't the Nidorans count as one | The Nidorans were discovered by Professor Oak before he was aware of concepts such as regional variants. Other Pokemon do have sexual dimorphism but not to the extreme extent of the Nidorans, so he gave them separate entries. | 73 | 64 |
ELI5: how can Pepsi use Coke in their ads so prevalently without legal issues? | ...confusing | Why do you think there ought to be legal issues?
Anyone can use any other brand in their commercial so long as they don't construe that brand as endorsing your own (without their permission) or say anything untrue about it.
You usually won't see a company show a competitor's brand in their commercial because they don't want to increase their competitor's brand recognition. Since it's impossible to increase Coke's brand recogition (it is the most recognized brand in the world), there's no incentive for Pepsi to avoid using them on this count. | 149 | 413 |
How exactly did we find out about Earth’s internal layers if we never dug that deep? | The crust, mantle, and core. | Mainly by analyzing seismic waves. It's basically like taking an ultrasound of the Earth, using earthquakes as the sound source. Computer models are also helpful. And finally, looking at mineral samples on the surface can provide information about the conditions in the mantle under which they were formed. | 26 | 19 |
CMV: There should be no exceptions for generally applicable laws on religious grounds in the US. | The Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution are in logical tension so far as exceptions to the law are concerned; it reads in relevant part "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
An exception to a facially neutral, generally applicable, law on the basis of religion is, by its very nature, a law favoring one religion over another; members of the preferred religious denomination are freed from the obligations borne by members of the disfavored religious denomination. Such preferences between religions are categorically prohibited by the Establishment Clause as interpreted by the Supreme Court.
Lemon v. Kurtzman 403 U.S. 602 (1971) instituted the "Lemon Test", requiring that laws (a) must have a secular legislative purpose; (b) that the principle effect of such a statute must not advance or inhibit religious practice; (c) must not result in "excessive government entanglement" with religion. Clearly, exceptions to generally applicable laws do not have a secular purpose and have a primary purpose of advancing religious practice, and thus are by the Lemon Test unconstitutional.
Admittedly, the Lemon Test has fallen out of favor to some extent with the current justices, and the Free Exercise Clause jurisprudence uses an entirely different legal standard. The substantial burden standard, originally the product of Sherbert v. Verner 374 U.S. 398 (1963) and Wisconsin v. Yoder 406 U.S. 205 (1972), and, after its abandonment in Employment Division v. Smith 494 U.S. 872 (1990) (among other decisions), the result of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000bb et seq.) demands that any law which places a "substantial burden" on the exercise of religion be subject to strict scrutiny.
This system is logically untenable. Not only does the favoring of one religion over the other patently violate the Establishment Clause, but also the application of this standard has been painfully unprincipled.
Hobby Lobby v. Burwell 573 U.S. ____ (2014) granted religiously based exemptions to generally applicable laws to for profit corporations. We ought to repeal the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and eliminate all exceptions to facially neutral, generally applicable laws on the basis of religious belief.
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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!* | It's quite possible to write generally applicable and facially neutral laws which in fact target specific religious groups. For instance, if you wrote a statute which said that driving tests are only to be conducted by the DMV during daylight hours on Saturdays, you would essentially ban Jews who observe Shabbat from ever obtaining a driver's license. Permitting observant Jews to do their tests on a different day of the week would be an exception from this rule, but one which the government ought to undertake so as not to significantly impair their freedom relative to other members of society who are not commanded not to drive on Saturdays.
There needs to be some level of recourse when legislators use their power to target religious practices without using their name directly. There are a lot of governments, especially local governments, which are actively hostile to religious minorities in their communities. | 15 | 25 |
ELI5: How do vending machines distinguish between different denominations of bills? | For a long time, I assumed the midget inside counts but today my friend told me I was wrong. Please enlighten me. | The primary method vending machines use to recognize the denomination of paper money is through a magnetic scan; paper currency is printed with magnetic ink, similar to the ink on the MICR line of a check, that makes it easily identifiable to machines with magnetic scanners. In addition, each denomination is marked with different fluorescent properties. Many vending machines and other machines that read paper currency use an ultraviolet light to scan the bill, read the fluorescent response and issue the appropriate credit.
Credit = www.ehow.com | 33 | 50 |
ELI5: Why does water form into droplets as its smallest unit? What's special about that specific size? | Surface tension causes drops to take a shape which minimizes their surface area per unit volume. It starts as a sphere, because that's the most effective shape, and then it's pulled into a droplet by air friction as it falls. | 17 | 64 |
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How can I be ready for competitive programming? | Hey, I'm a high school senior.
I have good knowledge in python, C#, C, html, CSS, and JavaScript.
How can I be prepared for competitive programming like IOI and other competitions? Where should I practice and learn? And what topics I should learn? | Competitive programming is less about what languages you know and more about how many data structures and algorithms you have memorized. Study up really hard on that and pick 1 language to get really really intimate with, python or java are great choices. | 38 | 51 |
Does restorative justice reduce recidivism? | Yes.
Sherman, L., Strang, H., Mayo-Wilson, E., Woods, D., & Ariel, B. (2015). Are Restorative Justice Conferences Effective in Reducing Repeat Offending? Findings from a Campbell Systematic Review. Journal Of Quantitative Criminology, 31(1), 1-24.
Objectives: This paper synthesizes the effects on repeat offending reported in ten eligible randomized trials of face-to-face restorative justice conferences (RJCs) between crime victims, their accused or convicted offenders, and their respective kin and communities. Methods: After an exhaustive search strategy that examined 519 studies that could have been eligible for our rigorous inclusion criteria, we found ten that did. Included studies measured recidivism by 2 years of convictions after random assignment of 1,880 accused or convicted offenders who had consented to meet their consenting victims prior to random assignment, based on 'intention-to-treat' analysis. Results: Our meta-analysis found that, on average, RJCs cause a modest but highly cost-effective reduction in the frequency of repeat offending by the consenting offenders randomly assigned to participate in such a conference. A cost-effectiveness estimate for the seven United Kingdom experiments found a ratio of 3.7-8.1 times more benefit in cost of crimes prevented than the cost of delivering RJCs. Conclusion: RJCs are a cost-effective means of reducing frequency of recidivism. | 29 | 47 |
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Is there a theoretical possibility of some day being able to empirically verify that particles are strings? If not, what is the theoretically smallest thing we will ever be able to see in a microscope? | To verify something it has to be true. String theory is a highly speculative approach, and it is unclear if it has any connection to reality.
*If* string theory is a good description, then we could in principle verify it with giant particle accelerators. Where giant probably means “larger than the solar system” ... | 18 | 18 |
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ELI5: What is our current computer storage bottleneck? | So, what limits our current storage speeds? Is it the actual storage medium, the interface from it to the host, or the willingness to develop faster storage? | There are engineering solutions to all of those issues. The bottleneck is cost. Faster equipment is more expensive, and once storage is "fast enough" it's not profitable to make faster replacements. | 27 | 35 |
Eli5 How do scientists know that nuclear fusion is the source of energy of the Sun? | There's a lot of science done beforehand. E.g. we know that every element swallows certain parts of light's spectrum and reflects the rest. This is like a fingerprint for every element, we can read simply by analyzing which frequencies in the light of a star are missing.
We also can classify stars by age and noticed that older stars hold more heavier elements than younger ones.
We also know that about 75 % of gas in the universe is hydrogen, the rest is helium and that stars form from these gigantic clouds collapsing under their own gravity. Thus we know stars gain energy from compressing stuff a lot. Also the older a star gets the more helium and the less hydrogen it appears to have. Where did the hydrogen go and where does the helium come from if the mass of the star is somewhat stable (in fact it's decreasing)?
The answer is that there MUST be a mechanism making helium out of hydrogen and heavier stuff out of helium and so on up to iron.
Theoretical calculations have it that stars of a certain mass fulfill the criteria for fusion to happen and also deliver enough energy from the inside to maintain themselves from collapsing further. | 49 | 45 |
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CMV: The United States would have turned out very differently if its initial gun laws had been different. | Canada and the United States are a little bit like a "twins separated at birth" study. There are many similarities in their formation. They were both initially inhabited by indigenous peoples, mostly from the same original group. They were both colonies. Canada was a colony of Britain and France and the U.S. was a colony of Britain, France, Spain and Russia but for both of them, the major influencing mother country was Britain. They both gained independence, developed similar laws, spoke mostly English, explored and spread across their respective land masses and participated in many of the same large events (gold rush, world wars, etc.) In spite of all this, they have turned out to be two very different cultures.
In the United States, firearms had few restrictions from the beginning. They started out with 69 Indian wars where they conquered and subdued the indigenous population. They had enough guns to revolt against Britain and win their independence. They spread across their land mass with the gun becoming the power. There were actually gun fights in the streets in some western towns. As they continued on their growth to become the world power, they were constantly involved in wars. Since 1776, there has only been 17 years where the U.S. was not involved in a war.
In Canada, the first major controlling European influence was the Hudson's Bay Company, a company based on the fur trade. As the indigenous people were necessary in this business, their policy became, "Don't shoot your customers." (tic) Canada had zero Indian wars. They definitely weren't nice to the indigenous people but they didn't have wars. Almost immediately after becoming a nation, Canada develop the RCMP which spread across the country. Revolvers were banned in Canada so that there could be no dramatic street shootouts. Canada did not have enough military might to mount a revolt against Britain so they negotiated a settlement for independence instead.
There are obviously many other influences that plotted the course of each country but, it seems to me that had the United States started with the same gun limitations as Canada, they would have turned out very differently. | You are attempting to distill national differences down to a single item.
Here is a list of why they are different:
- One fought a revolution for independence, the other did not
- One has a strong widespread agricultural climate (southern US) which bred significant use of slave labor - the other does not.
- One has a largely inhabitable landmass while the other does not. Canada's northern reaches, while inhabited by people, have nowhere near the population density of the US nor the climate to sustain a large population.
- One is roughly 10x the population of the other. (California has more people that Canada)
- One has vastly different social safety nets that than other
- One has vastly different history of treatment of African Americans
- In the early/mid 20th century, one turned into a global superpower which continues today. The other did not. Arguably, Canada has had to bend to the will of the US in this time.
- In the early days of both countries - meaningful gun laws did not exist. It was not until much much later that gun laws got stricter
Sorry but no, gun laws are not the reason the US and Canada differ. | 94 | 44 |
Why are Goku and Vegeta so much stronger than other Saiyans? | It's not like the standard Saiyans didn't spend their entire lives fighting and training too. What makes Goku and Vegeta and their children so much more powerful than any other saiyans (excluding Broly)? | There are three key points explaining Goku and Vegeta's strength :
* They are many times beaten almost to the point of death, which in Saiyans boosts immensely their power level. If they survive. Most notably, Goku spends the whole journey to Namek training to the point of near death and then eating a Senzu bean to recover. It is said that's why Frieza exterminated the Saiyan race : he feared their limitless potential.
* They both unlock the Super Saiyan state through their emotions. Goku was raised on Earth, where he developped human feelings of love and compassion. When Frieza kills Kulilin, his incredible sorrow and rage breach his last restraints and he's able to reach Super Saiyan state. Vegeta's story of becoming a Super Saiyan is a bit more elliptic, but it is said that his jealousy, anger and self-hatred for letting Goku surpass him in such a crushing way led him to reach Super Saiyan too.
* And to top it all, they both assimilate Earth fighting techniques, which rely less on raw power and more on subtle control. Goku is trained from infancy by great masters, while Vegeta is an elite fighter who recognize and "steal" superior techniques (and notably learns to sense power levels when he understands that scouters are useless against Earth and Namek fighters).
As to why their children are even better, it is also explicitly stated that mixing Saiyan and Human blood creates the strongest fighters. As Gohan showed in his fight against Cell. | 40 | 46 |
ELI5: What exactly is escrow? | Escrow is like a third party referee who makes sure that payments are made as agreed to.
If you're buying a property, you'd put the money into escrow, and this guarantees to the seller that if everything else proceeds as planned, they will be paid. You wouldn't give the money directly to the seller, because there may still be other things to take care of before the sale is finalized.
The escrow prevents the buyer from changing his mind in the middle of the process. | 25 | 59 |
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Since CPUs and GPUs are good at two different areas of math, arithmetic and linear algebra respectively, is there research in creating different types of processors good for differential equations and even higher levels of math? | While deep learning took off thanks a lot to better GPUs, it got me thinking if we could make other ML algorithms more viable by inventing processors good at other types of math that lend a hand to the aforementioned alternative ML algorithms. | The main difference between a CPU and a GPU is the number of operations performed per "decision" (branch instruction). CPUs do better when there are lots of branches, while GPUs are optimized for more operations per branch.
The main focus of research right now is in AI acceleration. These AI processors look very much like GPUs. They use smaller data values, and have a few new instructions to do the operations used for AI (for example, dot product). | 27 | 18 |
CMV: Companies are not people, and shouldn't be given the same rights nor be taxed as such | I think that companies are (quite obviously) not people, and should not be treated as people. I think that it is wrong for a corporation's money to be used as political leverage, simply because a companies agenda is inherently competitive, and not inherently cooperative, such as the government, a civil body, should be. Because of this I think that corporate personhood should be aboloshed, and a for-profit corporation should not be allowed to put funds towards public policy, as their interests may not align with those of the public. Accordingly, corporations are not people whom need to pay money (in the form of taxes) to keep the government running, as this is the duty of the citizenry. Big companies find ways to avoid taxes while the small companies pay plenty and don't have the resources to find tax loopholes, so it's not really fair how it is. | Being treated as a person sometimes has its downsides too - for example, people can be held liable to pay various costs associated with their actions (fines for breaking laws, for example).
Similarly, we might want to treat companies as people in cases where doing so makes it more straightforward to hold those companies responsible for things (like causing pollution, for example). | 26 | 130 |
Could I make the case that any sequence of numbers i choose at random, no matter how long, like 53948714, can be found somewhere along the digits of pi? | The property that every finite sequence of digits can be found at some point in the decimal expansion of a number is called "normality". A "normal number" is a number that has this property. So your question becomes: Is pi normal?
The answer is: Probably, we don't know.
It can be shown that almost all real numbers are normal ("almost all" being a technical term that means that the set of exceptions has a Lebesgue measure (which is a way of measuring sets) of zero), but we can also construct examples of real numbers that have a non-terminating, non-repeating decimal expansion that don't contain every sequence of digits (for example: 0.10110011100011110000...).
Whether pi is normal or not is still an open question, but the fact that almost all numbers are normal makes it very reasonable to assume that it is. | 35 | 33 |
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ELI5: Do obese people, on average, take more from the tax pot (extra healthcare etc) or add more (because they die earlier and don't collect as much pension or old age healthcare) relative to the average person? | EDIT: see lung_doc's reply below which is much more betterer than this one.
Research has unfortunately shown that healthy people do cost more to society than unhealthy people. Despite the expensive medical procedures associated with common cancers and heart disease caused by bad diet / smoking, a healthy person who lives a long full life will inevitably face these issues in old age and for is likely to need more treatment over a longer period of time. Also, longevity is an inevitable drainer on the pension pot. | 46 | 80 |
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How can the stock market keep growing year on year? | It confuses me where that 3% annual growth comes from. Those of us with index funds are banking on it continuing indefinitely, but how can that be possible? Nothing in the universe keeps growing indefinitely.
Does the economy keep growing because it still has people and commodities in agrarian or village societies which it commodifies and brings into the global market? Or is it that technology is still making human labor more productive? A mixture of these? Will the market ever stop growing? | Long-term economic growth has three components: (1) Labor, (2) Capital, and (3) Technological Advancement. When looking at long-term economic growth, it's not unreasonable to assume, at least in a developed economy, that the economy will grow generally each year, as there is more labor, capital, and technological growth each year. Of course, there are potentially cataclysmic events that could happen to disrupt this, but those are not incredibly likely (knock on wood) year to year.
That's why if you look at a graph of US GDP (for example) from 1900 to today, even the great depression seems like a small blip. The great depression had horrible consequences for the country at the time, but the economy went through the cycle and eventually recovered. | 23 | 26 |
ELI5: How do whiskey companies deal with the fact that the product they make today gets sold to a market 15 years in the future? | How do you respond to shifts in demand with a latency of 15+ years for the maturation of your product? | If the demand is higher than predicted:
* Raise prices, of course
* Offer more whisky that hasn't been aged as long. If a distillery produces both a 12 and an 18year bottling, they may choose to release more of the 12 year right away. Of course that means 6 years later they'll have less available at 18 years. At that point they'll either make less money or try to raise prices on the 18.
* Right now, some distilleries that traditionally offered only 12 year and older are starting to release younger whisky, such as 10 or even 8 year old.
If demand is lower than predicted:
* Hold some to sell later.
* Release something called a "bastard malt". That's a whisky that doesn't have the original distillery on the label, and is sold cheaper than the branded bottles. It's not necessarily true that these bottles will be as good as the ones that carry the true distillery name. The taste of the whisky in every cask is different, so the best casks can be retained for the distillery brand.
One thing that gives the distilleries a little more flexibility is that the age on the bottle doesn't mean all the whisky in the bottle is exactly that many years old. It's actually *minimum* age in the bottle. Everything in the bottle is at least that many years old, but may be older.
\* Edit Fixed some typos that made me sound like I'd had a dram or two before answering. | 129 | 240 |
[LOTR/Hobbit] How does Sauron manage to maintain such a large army? | It seems to me that orcs always outnumber the human/elven/dwarven forces that try and stand up against them. How is this possible? Historical documents paint a bleak picture of Mordor being a dark barren wasteland. Nothing grows there, and yet the countryside is swarming with orcs. How are these hordes being fed? Where do they get materials for weapons? | The Sea of Nurnen is an inland large body of fresh water that had lands about it that were fertile enough to support agriculture. Human slaves were used to work the farms around this sea in order to produce food to feed Sauron's armies.
Additionally, Mordor receives tributes from foreign human lands who serve Sauron, sometimes in the form of finished goods, materials and weapons, but also in the shape of food.
Finally, orcs are mutilates elves, so they reproduce after the manner of elves and men. So they can feasibly reproduce all of their life, which is potentially forever. Orcish women may be forced to live as eternal breeding partners while the males go off and fight. Who the women breed with may be of little concern, so long as she continues to breed and produce more orclings. It's a miserable existence, but the orcs have never had easy lives and their masters never seem to care. | 20 | 46 |
CMV: All vehicles, including bicycles, should be subject to license and registration fees that pay for road construction and maintenance AND all vehicles should pay an amount corresponding to the impact they have on those roads. | **Final edit: So, this time I learned I need to be more articulate in my initial argument. Thanks to everyone who contributed! Whenever it's appropriate and the rules allow I'm going to try this one again and see what comes. Cheers!**
In this CMV, for the sake of time and simplicity, I'm pulling primarily from this report release on May 5th of this year, though numerous other sources exist and I'm happy to see any reports that may contradict it. http://www.uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/Who%20Pays%20for%20Roads%20vUS.pdf
My specific view that is subject to change is that
**all road vehicles should be subject to license and registration fees, the amounts of which are determined based on the impact the vehicle has on the road surface**
In other words, all road users should have to pay an amount corresponding to the amount of damage they cause roads. One general rule of thumb that could be used to calculate this (pulled from the above .pdf) is: "the damage a vehicle imposes on a road surface increases to the fourth power of axle weight—that is, a vehicle that weighs ten times as much per axle imposes ten thousand times as much roadway damage as a lighter vehicle." Building this formula into the cost of vehicle registration fees seems to me to be completely rational and should be implemented. In some cases iterations of it are already in place (toll roads, delivery trucks, etc.) It should be expanded to all road use.
This formula, however, only takes into account vehicle *weight*, and not vehicle *usage*, which is a more complicated fee structure, but one I believe should be taken into account as well. Additional fee structures should be explored which take into account miles driven, pollutant emissions, congestion fees, etc.
All this considered, I have no problem with requiring bicycles to be licensed and registered so long as the process is rational and efficient for the owner and the fee structure based on a fair consideration of impact across the board.
Feel free to CMV!
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Taking weight and mileage in account, let's compare a typical car to a typical bike. Say the car weighs 2000 lbs and travels 10000 miles per year. The bike (plus rider) weighs 200 lbs and travels 1000 miles per year.
Since the car weighs 10 times the bike, it's road impact is 10,000 times more per mile. It travels 10 times further, so its total road impact is 100,000 times the bike.
If the annual registration for the car is $1000, then the annual registration for the bike would be 1 cent.
One cent wouldn't even cover the cost of issuing a registration sticker, so the city would lose money on every bike registration. What's the point of that?
Edit:typo
| 54 | 79 |
What is the significance of isotropy in the cosmological principle? What would a cosmology that was homogeneous but *not* isotropic look like? | One example could be that expansion is faster in some directions than others. This is possible even if the universe is homogeneous, and a universe with this property is called a "Bianchi type 1 universe".
There are other possibilities too; look up "Bianchi universes". | 17 | 33 |
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Why does light travel the same speed for all observers? | To my understanding, if something (say a ship in a vacuum) is travelling away from a light source it would observe photons reaching the ship in [time=d/c], while a stationary observer (with respect to the light source) could theoretically observe photons reaching the ship in [time=d/(c-v)] (where d=initial displacement from ship, c=speed of light, v=velocity of ship).
I use this concept whenever I want to remember the implications of time dilation for something travelling near the speed of light, but I realized that I do not understand why this phenomenon should occur at all. My limited search on the subject found only that this is a mystery of nature and has been proven by experiment. Does any have some insight on this matter? | I wouldn't classify it as a "mystery" of nature. But it is a postulate, something assumed to be true, based off of a lot of observations.
The postulate arose because people were playing around with the equations that govern electricity and magnetism. You can test each of the 4 equations independently, they're called Maxwell's equations. And when you put them together in the right way, you get a wave that has some velocity that's equal to 1 divided by the square root of the electric permittivity constant multiplied by the magnetic permeability constant. But as you look at the equations, no where in there did it mention the speed of some observer. Each observer would necessarily come to the exact same conclusions based on the same laws of Electricity and Magnetism.
So Einstein ultimately becomes famous for saying "fine, let's just make this a thing. This speed of electromagnetic waves is a constant value for all observers. And no physical experiment can distinguish between a frame at rest and a frame in uniform motion." Take those two postulates and you get the whole of special relativity. | 17 | 15 |
ELI5: How bankruptcy works and what the different chapters of it mean. | Bankruptcy is a legal process to discharge or reorganize debt. Under backruptcy, any or all of the following could happen:
* some debt is eliminated (vanishes into thin air)
* some of your property is legally forced to be sold to pay debt
* you may be legally forced to pay off debt in a structured way (e.g. 10% of your paycheck for the next 5 years)
The various chapters of bankruptcy in the US are just different approaches to the same thing.
Chapter 7 is basic bankruptcy.
Chapter 11 is more for corporations.
Chapter 13 is more if you make a regular paycheck and need to structure a way to pay back your debts.
Most people who file for bankruptcy use Chapter 7.
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How are modal logic possibilities known ? | Modal logic is concerned with logical possibilities so it has the broadest set of possibilities.
For example we can imagine a world where there is FTL or a world where thermodynamics doesn't exist. There's nothing non contradictory about those at face but how do we know weather there's something or not about the light speed constant and thermodynamics that if violated would produce a contradiction ? | > Modal logic is concerned with logical possibilities
Modal **logic** is concerned with inferences or relations between modal propositions. Asking 'how are specific necessities or possibilities known in modal logic' is somewhat similar to asking 'but how are truths or falsities known in propositional or predicate logic'. A system of logic allows you to evaluate how various propositions relate to each other, you can put something in and get something out. But a certain epistemology in the sense of how we determine truth or falsity isn't built into propositional or predicate logic, and one of how we determine modalities isn't built into modal logic. | 13 | 43 |
"Taking psychedelics is like practical Spinozism" - a professor at my school. What does she mean by this? | This was years ago, at a well-known public university in the United States. I was not in the class and have no way to contact the professor (nor do I know her personally), so I thought I'd see if this corresponds to anything written about Spinoza, or any famous analyses or interpretations of his work. I'll put together what I know and see if anybody can take it from there:
The professor made the title statement. It was quoted on Facebook by another student and attributed directly to her, without any context. I am taking it as fact that the professor said this, and am taking it as fact that there is a reasonable reason she stated it (because she is a real professor with a real PhD, etc.).
I quoted the statement to a graduate student who was teaching a history of philosophy course once, around the time that we started studying Spinoza in that course. He responded by saying (I am paraphrasing this), "Oh yeah I can see what she means, maybe. In that once you really start to get what Spinoza's saying you can sort of get a little high minded, and to perceive the world as he suggests is rather very trippy." Or something like that, he said he could see how Spinoza's sense of the world could seem trippy to people, and relatable to the psychedelic experience.
One more thing: a little bit later on, I was turned onto Deleuze/Guattari and found this quotation: "Children are Spinozists" (*A Thousand Plateaus*, the "becoming" plateau). Since most of the explication for this quote that I've found is only given generally and in reference to tons of other authors I've barely heard about, I decided to just think about it. I remembered that one of my friends who took a class called Early Childhood Development, had mentioned that it takes about three or four years for a child to develop a sense of self as separate from the environment; that before that, to that child, feelings like "hunger" so on are not distinguishable from others - and so, to that child without a sense of individuated self, the world is composed of its feelings. A sort of solipsism. I thought that maybe Deleuze and Guattari had meant this by referring to children as Spinozists, as this description of sensuous experiences (solipsism, the world as a reflection of the observer's psyche rather than being independently of it) can also be, imo, strongly present during experiences while high on psychedelic drugs. Sort of a feeling that 'all is one.'
Note: I have barely studied Spinoza. Like, at all. I have a few other question threads open on r/askphilosophy currently that will display my ignorance regarding Spinozist philosophy and/or scholarship on it. So I'm asking kind of blindly. I'm going to cross post to r/drugs as well, but my gut inclination tells me that more people on this forum are familiar with psychedelic drugs, at least by name, than the number of people on that forum who are familiar with Spinoza's work. Thanks. | Spinoza's Ethics at one point defines the entire universe as being made of one substance – which he identifies as God.
If you take good psychedelics and are have a hallucinatory experience in a safe environment, preferably but not necessarily in nature, you will certainly feel like you are a living part of a massive, even universal organism.
Excited to see Spinoza discussed on here but frankly, this quote doesn't sound like an argument of substance? More like one of those off-the-cuff aphorisms philosophy profs come out with sometimes to get their undergrads' attention. | 112 | 101 |
I understand what standard error is, but not why it's a useful statistic? | This might sound stupid, but conceptually I understand that standard error is the SD of the means of the means, right? But when I see this statistic on my a/b experiments, I don't know what to do with it. Can you help please? | It has similar value to the SD, namely to know the spread around the mean. This is for example important to be able to compare, or rather test, whether two means are different from each other in a statistical sense.
However, in contrast to the SD, the SE also takes sample-size into account. So, as you increase the number of people in your sample, SE (being equal to SD / sqrt(n)) will inevitably get smaller, because sample-size is in the denominator.
Hope this helps. | 19 | 27 |
Is it possible to cold weld the repelling ends of magnets together? If so, would their magnetic fields align? | Magnetic fields are due to the spin of electrons within the magnet. Placing two magnets together would not change the spin of the electrons, so the magnetic fields would not align.
However, over a long enough period of time, if you keep magnets near each other, the magnetic fields from one will affect the spin of the electrons in the other, so eventually the magnetic fields will align. This can take several weeks/months or even years if the magnets are weak. | 92 | 245 |
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ELI5: How can most competing companies (insurance, travel agencies, etc.) all bluntly offer the "lowest prices"? | You know what I mean. Every insurance commercial basically says you get the lowest cost. How can they all legally do that? Isn't there one objectively lowest cost? | Since the question's already been satisfactorily answered on direct, I'll offer some supplemental info that might you might find useful.
As far as the law is concerned, there is a certain class of products that are considered to be exactly equivalent in all situations. Aspirin is the usual example of this; there are many brands of aspirin on the market made by many different companies, but they are all *exactly the same,* by definition.
Which means you cannot truthfully claim that your brand of aspirin is "better." Because it isn't. They're all exactly the same, meaning none is better or worse than any other. It's false — *unlawfully* false, as far as advertising goes — to claim that your aspirin is better than anybody else's.
However, by the exact same rationale, you *can* entirely truthfully and entirely lawfully claim that your brand of aspirin is "best." Because it is. They *all are.* Because they're all exactly the same, meaning there is none better, meaning they're all the best.
There's a critical difference, as far as truth-in-advertising is concerned, because *comparative* and *superlative* claims. If you claim that your product is better than another product — or even just that it's "better" all by itself, without mentioning better than *what* — that's very hard to support, because you have to be able to demonstrate that somebody else's product is worse than yours by some objective metric. But you're absolutely free to claim that your product is "best," because all that suggests is that there is no product which is *better* than yours … which there isn't, by the exact same rationale.
This same general principle applies to claims of "lower" versus "lowest" prices. If you try to claim your prices are "lower," you have to be able to demonstrate that somebody else's prices are *consistently higher* than yours … while claiming your prices are "lowest" is actually the weaker claim, because all that means is that *nobody's* prices are *consistently higher* than yours.
It seems counterintuitive at first, to be sure. One naturally assumes that "best" is a stronger claim than "better" (or more generally, the superlative is always stronger than the comparative). But in truth, it's the other way around. It's a less specific, less conclusive statement to say your prices are *lowest* than it is to say that they're *lower.* | 10 | 18 |
Does the removal of leaves from suburban land very year cause damage to soil quality? | I was watching the town trucks pick up leaf piles curbside and it got me wondering. non-science person here, sorry if im misunderstanding some basic concept. Every year* | Generally leaf litter is a positive contributor to soil health in a number of ways, including but not limited to:
1. Recycling elements such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen to be absorbed again by plants, and playing a part in the nitrogen cycle.
2. Providing important food to microflora and fauna, which in turn work the soil, thereby increasing soil aeration.
3. Helps to break down clay soil, aiding drainage and aeration.
So removal of leaf litter prevents these and other benefits from happening, but to be fair, it's not on a large enough scale to be noticeably detrimental. Various things happen throughout the seasons which add to & subtract from soil health. | 82 | 308 |
ELI5: Why do so many little kids pronounce the "R" sound like a "W"? | It seems strange to me that there are so many younger kids that can't make the R sound and they just substitute it with a W sound instead. (Think "I'm going wabbit hunting")
Also there are plenty of kids who never break off this habit and it can follow them all the way into their early teen years. | Speech-Language Pathology graduate student here. Substituting /r/ with /w/ is common in kids because /w/ requires less muscular control, especially of the tongue. Motor control develops over time, and most kiddos outgrow this by age 5. | 75 | 102 |
CMV: The merit of someone's opinion should not be discredited as a result of their intrinsic features | This post serves as a follow up to another post I recently made, as I feel that the point I made wasn't expressed too well and as such the comments I got weren't necessarily related to my opinion.
No matter what you put into the following quote, it will always be discriminatory: You're a (insert sexuality), (insert race), (insert gender). It is no different from a white supremacist in the 1950's protesting that a black person has no right to vote simply because they are black. Yet, in 2020, the response "You're a straight white male" is so often used by those who call for change. Now, I'm not trying to say that the inequalities faced by minorities are comparable to the less favourable view of white people, I'm just stating that by trying to discredit someone because of their intrinsic values, you are using the exact same argument as a white supremacist did less than a century ago.
I also take issue with this because I believe it makes people less likely to change. Now, I was on twitter (great place to see peoples political opinion), and I found a substantial amount of threads discrediting a certain influencers apologies simply because he's a straight white male, and as such can never fully be sorry for what was perceived to be wrong. Now I understand that Twitter is a rather politically polarised platform, so I know it doesn't represent a majority of opinions, but still seeing that argument was concerning. The reason being is that when you criticise peoples apologies and attempts to be a better person simply because of the colour of their skin, you give them a reason to not want to change. Why should someone feel the need to change when attempting to change is met with "You're only doing this for XXX reason, your a straight white male etc etc."
Now, you might say that white males are historically privileged, and that their knowledge of certain topics is limited. That's fine, however, being a "straight white male" provides no indication of intellectual capabilities or context for that matter. Just on that point, it's also pretty discriminatory to assume someone is a white male based on their opinions, but I'm assuming most people will agree.
This point can also be argued oppositely, to those further on the right who believe that historical pretences are justification for discrediting someone's position or opinion. However, Reddit is generally a left-leaning platform, so I've centred my argument around it | > The merit of someone's opinion should not be discredited as a result of their intrinsic features
Technically, you're right. The only thing about the person should matters are their experience, knowledge, skills, etc. However, as things tends to be the case, one's intrinsic features determine one's experience.
Let's take a man saying: "Giving birth is not painful at all". People will say: "You're a man, you have no idea what giving birth is like".
To be technically correct, what they have to say is: "You never experienced giving birth. You have no idea what it is like". But, because of biology, that's practically the same thing. | 36 | 49 |
[Star Wars] What happens to force users that are not accepted into the jedi order? | They work as, essentially, farmhands and laborers in various agri-worlds to provide for the jedi and local communities.
Or they join the Sith because even though they're powerful enough they're too old, become a dark jedi, hunt down a regular jedi, then repent. Presto! Welcome to the Order! | 137 | 153 |
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ELI5: Why/How the hell can the worst bugs (fleas, ticks, bedbugs, etc) live for MONTHS with no food and just keep repopulating and repopulating and repopulating even though there's NO nutrition? | As if they're not annoying enough when a wave comes into your house, but even the ones that are starved in empty rooms just fucking stay there forever and fuck like rabbits.
Why and How the fuck can these shitty parasites multiply so damn much even though they have nothing? They're surrounded by poison. All the food they do have has poison on it. Some aren't even near animals or people. They just. Don't. Fucking. Die.
How in the hell are these garbage species so immortal? | These pests have evolved to be very hardy, having built-in survival mechanisms that help them survive. Insects are cold-blooded so they don't need to use energy to keep them warm. Additionally, if it gets cold enough, their metabolism will slow down meaning they can go a long time without eating any food.
Unfortunately these pests have just evolved to survive on such little food and reproduce so quickly. If they didn't, they wouldn't have survived as a species. | 16 | 28 |
Eli5 What is actually happening when you burn fat? | This might be a stupid question, I might indeed be stupid. But what is the actual process going on inside my body at 290lbs when I go hiking for example? | Your body needs energy to do things.
When you go on a hike, fibers made of muscle cells must expand and contract. Where do they get the energy to do this?
That energy is bound up as chemical bonds between atoms in various molecules in your cells. The main energy source for much of your body are sugars, particularly glucose. Every cell in your body is capable of performing a complicated process of breaking glucose down to make use of the energy stored in its chemical bonds. This reaction is, fundamentally, no different from burning any organic material. You're taking some complicated molecule and breaking it down into water and CO2 while releasing the energy stored in all the bonds you broke.
Other molecules sitting in your cells, such as fats and proteins, also contain energy in their bonds and can be burnt or broken down to release energy. Fats, among other uses, serve as a long-term energy storage system when you have much more energy than you need. When you start running out of sugar to burn, your cells will start breaking down this excess fat. | 239 | 274 |
Seems like bad code is often more profitable than good code? | I wrote some code 10 years ago for a project. It basically imports user records from one a large enterprise database system to another. It took me about 4 weeks to do this and I was very careful to cover all edge cases and make sure it would work without issue even though they were pressuring me to get it out the door faster. Sure enough it worked every day for 10 years without having any issue at all. I worked my butt off for this.
Now I learned they put a new guy to rewrite the code for the main system, and in order to integrate they wrote a replacement for my software as well. Turns out every month for the last year there have been errors with the new import code and user records are failing to import and people are getting locked out. And the new programmer has to go onsite and tinker with the code and run tests and updates (the enterprise client has a closed network). So they pay him to fly out there and stay in a hotel and pay for meals every month or 2 and he gets paid the high consultant rate for this. So basically since the code always seems to have bugs he keeps getting paid to fix them.
Makes me wonder about things. What are your thoughts? | There are many industries where this happens.
If you're too good at your job, people wonder why they even need you and you get canned.
Meanwhile, those bad at their job, which would then require them to get good at justifying their existence, will often be promoted. | 62 | 138 |
Whats the usefulness of finding new bigger prime numbers? | Probably the most useful thing is the experience we gain in the hunt for the prime number. Writing programs to search for large primes is not trivial. Consider that the latest prime number is 23 million digits long. To store the number in its entirety takes about 10 Mb. People have to develop new algorithms to efficiently manipulate numbers this large. And once these algorithms have been developed they can be applied to other areas of research.
I'll also point out that the search for prime numbers helps generate interest in math. People can take part in the search at home. Some of these programs are run on home computers when they are idle. When people sign up for the programs they often do some self research to understand what their doing. This outreach aspect should not be underestimated in value.
Another point to make is the prime numbers are the building blocks of the integers. Every positive integer has a unique prime factorization. So studying the prime numbers is an important part of number theory. Every time we discover a new prime there's a chance that it will hint at something new pattern that we have yet recognized.
At the same same time prime numbers have some interesting properties that were learning how to exploit. Encryption is often cited, but they can also be used for random number generation, and some other things. It's hard to imagine that a 23 million digit prime being useful today, but who knows what will happen in the future as computing continues to progress and people continue to test new ideas. | 6,269 | 8,163 |
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CMV: The Left in the US has made a better effort to understand the Right than the Right has to understand the Left. | We have seen some pieces in the liberal media trying to understand conservative voters. They haven't necessarily been particularly good, nor has broader effort to understand the right been particularly good on the left's part. However, something is better than nothing, and in at least a few cases these writings have come from a place of empathy. And that's what the Right hasn't done at all, in my view: present an effort to understand voters on the opposing side through a lens of empathy.
So C my V: show me a sincere, empathetic look at left-wing voters coming from a reasonably well-known right-wing individual or institution trying to understand voters on the left and why they think the way they do. (edited for clarity, thanks /u/Generic_On_Reddit)
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | I think you'll be interested in the Graham/Nosek study. In this study a set of political questions are asked of people. 1/3 of the questions are asked of the person answering - their own opinions/ideas. the next third are then ask the person to answer "as a liberal would" and the last third are to be answered "as a conservative would". The results are _very clear_. Conservatives in america are _much more likely_ to understand the liberal perspective then liberals are to understand the conservative.
I think what you're seeing is not a lack of empathy or understanding from the conservatives or a failure to "reach across the aisle in disproportionate ways, but an awaking of the liberals with regards to a reality - their lack of understanding is _unique_. | 666 | 1,016 |
ELI5 what ions and isotopes are | Atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons
If you change the number of protons you get a different element
If you change the number of neutrons you get a different isotope of the same element
And if you change the number of electrons to be different from the number of protons you get an ion
However there are only a few acceptable numbers for each element, not all ions and isotopes can actually exist, but some isotopes that exist still aren’t 100% stable and decay after a while into other atoms, this is what we call radioactivity. | 58 | 28 |
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Do mature trees use more oxygen than they produce? | I started watching QI recently and Stephen Fry made a comment about this in episode 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZZkbb8owAM&feature=player_detailpage#t=1440s. I did a little searching but couldn't really find anything about it. I generally trust Fry, but i had never heard anything like this before. | The answer to this question is highly dependent. Trees can both produce and consume oxygen. They produce oxygen when they are producing sugar through photosynthesis. They consume oxygen when they are metabolizing sugar stores.
Trees would need to produce at least enough oxygen to generate the sugar needed to metabolize for energy. Given that the energy conversion would not be 1:1 do to lack of absolute efficiency in photosynthesis (and other reasons as well, including the use of photosynthesis to generate ATP to meet immediate energy needs), they would generally have to produce more oxygen then they would consume.
Mature (read old) trees would likely no longer have enough leaves to produce enough sugar to survive due to damage (or just being old). These trees would still survive through metabolism of energy stores, thus causing them to consume more oxygen then they produce. Please note, because trees do not consume outside sources of energy, these trees would eventually wither until they either match their energy production levels, or die.
Edit: Knowledge source is a BS in biochemistry, basic understanding of botany, and a knowledge of advanced thermodynamics.
Edit2: ATP is the intermediate energy storage form after photosynthesis. Photosynthesis does *not* create sugar directly as is commonly thought. Instead, it generates ATP which is then utilized to form more complex molecules including proteins and sugar. If you would like to learn more Google "Calvin cycle".
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ELI5 : why are some burgers wrapped in wrappers(hamburger for example) while others are packaged in those “boxes” (fillet-o-fish for example) ? | Much of it is perceived value - a customer will pay more for a product that looks like it's worth more. Plain cheeseburgers and hamburgers are cheap consumables - wrap it with paper, toss them onto the bag, and customer unwraps and eats it.
The more expensive burgers might not cost that much more to make, but they have to increase the perceived value to encourage customers to spend a few dollars more. Boxes are better at displaying the burger when the customer opens it. We know that a Big Mac is really two small patties stacked with a middle bun and a lot of lettuce, and a Quarter Pounder is really a glorified cheeseburger, but the perception of value when it comes in a box means customers will pay more for what they think is more. | 86 | 30 |
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what are the benefits of having a stock market? how does a stock market benefit society? | The primary purpose of the stock market is to provide a means for companies to get funding. By selling ownership in the company, companies are able to raise large sums of money without taking on debt. This money is then used to grow the business and everyone gets to make money. | 175 | 248 |
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why is it we can see through water clearly from the outside but can't see well while opening our eyes underwater? | The angle at which light bends at an interface depends on the refractive indices of both materials. This is Snell's law: sin θ_1 / sin θ_2 = n_2 / n_1. Since your eyes are designed to function in air, with a refractive index of about 1, when you immerse them in water, with a higher refractive index, light entering your eye isn't bent as much, which means it isn't focused properly.
This is why you can see just fine when you put goggles on - they mean your eyes are in air, not water, so light is focused as normal. (The interface between air and water in goggles is (usually) flat, so it doesn't affect the focus of the light.) | 67 | 90 |
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ELI5: What happens to water after I drink it, but before I pee it out? | Also, about how long does the process take? | The water is absorbed by your intestines into your blood, where it forms the majority of the mass of your blood. It circulates through your body. For any cells, it also serves as the fluid that, among many other things:
* Provides cells their filler
* Allows cell membranes to form
* Provides a medium for chemical reactions to occur
* Works as a lubricant between cells
* Serves as a coolant (via blood or sweat)
* Helps deliver oxygen/nutrients and remove waste (again, via blood)
* Carries materials in lymph system
* Serves as a medium for ions in nerves/muscles (allowing you to think/move)
and finally
* serves as a carrier to urinate out toxic waste products.
How long does water stay in you? Until you die. (It's not really reasonable to say "this water goes here and stays for X time," since it's always mixing. You could theoretically have some of the same water you had since you were born.) You literally use water in every single process of life. Without water, **EVERYTHING** starts failing. | 16 | 15 |
[Stranger Things] Why do the attacks stop? | Major spoilers for the whole show:
In the season finale, Eleven destroys a demogorgan. Afterwards, it appears everyone's lives go back to normal, which attacks from the upside down ending. However, I don't understand how this stops the attacks.
We know from Nancy's brief time in the upside-down that there are more than one demigorgon. Therefore killing one shouldn't stop the attacks
We know that eleven's psychic attack didn't close the portals either, as the Sheriff, Joyce, and Will had to get back to our world after that. Therefore any of the other demigorgans should still be able to breach into our world.
So what happens that allows people to go back to living their lives for the most part? Why aren't all the other demigorgans entering our world and still feeding.
Edit: Second question, why did the demigorgan choose to glue Will to the nest instead of just eating him? | First Question: Since El is the first thing the Demogorgons lock onto in the Right Side Up, it's very possible that her death/disappearance into the Upside Down is enough that the Demogorgons can no longer find their way back to our world. They couldn't find their way here before El inadvertently contacted them, so it's possible they can't get here without her.
On that note: The main portal doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Demogorgons' travel plans. They don't seem to need to use it, anyway - they can come and go as they please. Only humans need to use portals, whether the main one or those left behind by the Demogorgons burrowing into our world.
On the second question: They didn't eat Barb, either. Maybe living humans are uniquely necessary/good for Demogorgon reproduction (if the mouth slugs that we see in both Barb's and Will's bodies are a larval stage, perhaps). Barb died (whether by Demogorgon violence or just toxic atmosphere, we don't really know), but she wasn't eaten. | 23 | 26 |
CMV: 'Triggers' aren't a real thing. We should all be able to overcome our issues and not project them unto other people. | EDIT: Title should read: Triggers, in the way they are currently being (mis)used to represent things that cause discomfort or sadness in people, are not a real thing. People who cry 'triggered' because something reminds them of a NON EXTREME incident or issue they are struggling with should not be sheltered or given the attention they are seeking.
EDIT 2: For some reason I feel that not everybody finished reading my post although theres a tl;dr and a very clear message that my views dont apply to extreme cases like in people who have PTSD yet Im getting all these (actually heartwrenching and very valid arguments) about people with PTSD whom my beef isnt with.
EDIT 3: All in all I think my anger towards modern day 'trigger happu tumblrinas' has somewhat subsided and Im beginning to understand that we cant scruitinise how everybody feels and that some people are stronger than others like one user said and that the effects of triggers on some people can be deadly.
Thank you all! :)
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In 7th and 8th grade I was a snob. This was probably because I am the youngest of five siblings and was fairly better looking than my classmates (before the acne, bad eyesight and crooked teeth kicked in) among other things.
I realised this because of the way my classmates talked about me and treated me and I took the summer of 8th grade to transform into somebody else. I do not recall how exactly I did it but I did. Everybody was surprised, myself included, that the transformation was permanent and genuine.
Sadly, I was no longer a bitch but a pushover instead. I was bullied shortly after and had a horrible 8 or so years until I graduated from university. During those 8 or so years, my first love died in a car crash, my parents had a terrible accident leaving my mother unable to walk for a year, of course I picked up smoking, I started to serial-date guys and their treatment to me kept getting progressively worse all while I tried to do well at university because it was getting too expensive for my parents to pay for and getting a job wasn't enough for me to sustain myself.
Add to the above a religious struggle between myself, my society and my own mother who didn't talk to me for three months while I lived in the same house as her because of my religious and romantic choices (I was dating a black guy), and you get a fairly broken person.
I didn't trust anyone, I was naive, nervous, insecure, a people pleaser, somewhat promiscuous and a smoker. I did things I never thought I'd do and was put in situations I never wanted to be placed in.
I was even ashamed of my own psychologist whom I never went back to visit after a couple of sessions because of how fucked up I was.
My issues seem trivial but these are just the things that I haven't blocked out. My view does apply to individuals who have gone through everything but EXTREME trauma.
My POINT is: How can I, and so many people who have gone through worse, emerge as functional if not even better people than we were because of what we went through by using our own logic and reasoning, the help of others, counselling and other resources, while others simply act as if life is supposed to be somehow tailored for them and that whatever 'triggers' them by making them actually have to THINK about what they went through should somehow be erased from their lives?
Tl;dr: Shit happens in life and people should wade through the pile of crap and come out as functional human beings via their own logic rather than project their issues unto others and claim that whatever 'triggers' them to think about their problems must somehow be banished or banned.
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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!* | Some people are stronger than others, some trauma happens very quickly, like a rape, other stuff like abuse over years takes years.
Triggers are real, but VERY rare, it usually happens after a rape, a war or after a childhood abuse. Trigger warnings don't really harm anyone, they are just a courtesy, we have them for everything. Movies (R, PG-13, PG, G, NC-17. And it always says why) video games (M, T, E10, E, EC, AO, and it always says why) TV (TVMA, TV14, TVPG, Y7, Y, G) and it always says why.
They are a courtesy, obviously they should be there so people don't accidentally take their kids to see a dirty movie. When it comes to trauma triggers, most therapists help people either get adjusted or identify triggers, but an extra warning never hurts.
**Edit: "Stronger" was a bad choice of words, some people are less effected.** | 244 | 686 |
ELI5: What is the difference between programming & scripting? Also, is "coding" the act you're performing while programming or scripting, or is coding something totally different? | Scripts are usually a set of coded instructions that are run by the computer on the fly. Programs can be scripts but often they are 'compiled' code. In a compiled prgram, the computer converts the code into a special binary file that will run the instructions faster. Compiled programs are often shipped to users without their source code, so you can't see what is inside. Scripts *are* the source code.
"Coding" usually refers to writing either compiled programs or scripts. Maybe in some circles in implies one more than the other, but you can't depend on that. | 81 | 158 |
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[MCU] How's does Daredevil rebound his batons? | Even enhanced senses don't seem to account for this. He does this on different materials and while moving and fighting. How? | His enhanced senses aren't just hearing and smell, he also has a preternatural sense of his position in space, which, when combined with his "radar sense" allows him to visualize trajectories and angles with superhuman ability. It's also why he's good at parkour, and can maintain eye contact with people while in the mask in order to maintain the illusion of daredevil totally not being noted blind person, Matt Murdock. | 82 | 51 |
Does drinking a large amount of water during or after a meal decrease the effectiveness of stomach acid for digestion? | Any time you increase the volume of your stomach contents, you increase the surface area on which stomach acid can "work." If it begins to work well--by digesting and emptying its contents--the chemical feedback loop inhibits further production of acid.
Water itself is not a signalling factor for gastrin, which is the main chemical that induces the release of hydrochloric acid from the parietal cells of the stomach.
However, there are pressure receptors in the stomach that activate when your stomach distends. So while drinking a lot of water may dilute the HCl concentration initially, the mere presence of additional volume would induce the release of more HCl shortly thereafter.
**TL;DR:** Not really. | 482 | 923 |
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ELI5: How does MVC programming work? | Hi! I just started using codeigniter and I love it! I have programmed in php for a long time, but simple things. Now I am tasked with a big project and CI will help... Only I can't seem to wrap my head around MVC programming. I know what code to write, but I usually don't know where to put it. | The M stands for model. This is where you create a data 'model' of the problem you are working on. You might have a user and that user has certain data related to it like a name and an address and a password. That user might have a 'shopping cart'. There might be many 'items' for sale. You want all of this code to reflect something about reality, but it isn't involved with how to interact with the user.
The V stands for view. This is how the data from the model gets presented to the user. There might be many different views for the same underlying data. All the view needs to know is that it will get model data somehow and then turn that into a data structure which will be delivered to the user. This might be a web page, a JSON object, calls to a graphics API, or something else completely.
The C stands for controller. It's involved with taking input from the user, interacting with the model to get some data, managing delivering that model data to a view, then handing the view back to the user.
MVC is about separating concerns, in this case it separates persistent data (model), creating data for the user (data), and responding to user input (controller). | 13 | 36 |
ELI5: How come eyebrow, eyelash, arm hairs, ect only grow to a certain point, but when you shave them they grow back? How does it know it's been shaved? Why don't they continuously grow like head hair? | Hair length is dependent on how long each hair lives in a certain area. On your head hair can live for years before it dies and eventually falls out. Arm and leg hair might only last a month or so, so it stays short.
tl;dr
Your hair is always growing, it is how often it falls out that makes it stay short, or allows it to become long. | 1,469 | 2,426 |
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ELI5: Why aren't enclosed underground places like parking basements filled with CO2 where we just choke to death? | The contractors which build these buildings are required to add vents to these areas so that there is a bit of airflow through all the spaces. Especially places such as parking garages which might have issues with carbon monoxide from the cars. The vents are not enough for anyone staying there for an extended period of time unless it is designated as living space. And even though buildup of dangerous gasses is one of the reasons for these vents the biggest factor is humidity which will cause mold to grow and destroy the building. Without sufficient venting of the foundation a building might be unlivable in a decade. | 1,391 | 1,297 |
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ELI5: What exactly does DirectX do? | And why do I need to update it for every new game? | Every game has graphics. Graphics are written in complex languages and are unique to every game. DirectX is basically a translator for your graphics card driver.
However sometimes people add new libraries, change some old ones, or code their game differently. So when this happens, DirectX is updated to include these new libraries, so that your game runs smoothly. It's unique in that while DirectX is a standard, you can add exceptions to the standard and have a unique way of coding your graphics. | 24 | 38 |
Why a lot of software engineers say "javascript is garbage" | aside from not having a type system, why do you think js is an ugly language, be as detailed as possible, I genuinely want to know
Edit: I'm so glad that I posted here, since Javascript/ts is the language i use on daily basis it's so valuable to hear other people who are familiar with many programming languages share their opinions, so thanks everyone! | Javascript is not a well designed language (but that can be said about a lot of popular programming languages). Few examples:
* variables are global by default
* the way objects and "inheritance" work is way different any other language in use (ES6 classes improve things, but they are just a facade on the old system)
* how `this` keyword works is pure insanity
* many operations that you expect to work do crazy things, like adding two arrays produces a string
* some operations are plain missing from the language - comparing two arrays means writing a loop yourself, comparing two objects is something you probably need an external library for
* there are not even integers in the language, all numbers are floating-point (that is usually not a problem, but when it starts to be, you are in for a ride)
* the ecosystem is quite terrible, installing hundreds of dependencies is considered normal, there are libraries for single line of code
However, if you want to learn javascript, go for it, don't let me and other people discourage you. There is a famous quote from the creator of C++:
> There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
and javascript is one of the most popular languages. | 123 | 79 |
I have read group theory is used to study a molecules symmetry but why would you want to know its symmetry in the first place? | The symmetries of a molecule affect its chemical and physical properties. For example water, H2O, is slightly asymmetric (looks like ^H O ^H ), which leads to it freezing in a crystal lattice instead of staying a fluid, and it happens in way higher temperatures than it otherwise would. Contrast CO2, which is symmetric (Looks like O C O ), leading to the fact that it's a gas in room temperature and is very hard to turn into a solid or liquid. | 28 | 25 |
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[X-Men] So aside from shooting optic blasts from his eyes, what else does Scott Summers have going for him? | So I was thinking back on the fact that Scott is usually portrayed as the "leader" of the X-Men in the field. Being the leader though, his power seems pretty tame compared to every other mutant they face. He can.....shoot optic blasts from eyes. Great. But so can pretty much any drone, sentinel, 70% of mutants and superheros it seems always have the LAZOR EYES trope going for them.
So what else does the man have? Can he lift a car? Can he withstand a punch from a superhuman? I mean, isn't Scott just an average human, minus the eye beam? | Cyclops has a number of useful abilities. I'll cover them from mundane to supernatural.
1) Leadership: Scott is one of the best field leaders on Earth. Nick Fury comments that Scott is best when he is acting on instinct, leaving behind his insecurities. He makes good calls, he knows his team and knows how to use their strengths. He is flexible, adaptable, and willing to make tough decisions if he has to.
2) Prep Time: Cyclops is no Batman, but he does his fair share of paranoia prep, as evidenced by the literal dozens of plans he had to deal with a rampaging Juggernaut.
3) Spatial Awareness: essentially the same ability that let's Cap pull off crazy shield stunts, Cyclops has a keen understanding of his surroundings that allow him to make crazy banked shots. He is highly accurate and really good at sports that require hand eye coordination (especially pool).
3a) General Badassery: Tied in with the above, Cyclops makes great use of his accuracy. He is an amazing athlete, and a good hand to hand fighter. His close Combat skills have saved him more than a few times.
4) Energy Resistance: Technically Scott is immune to Havok' s powers, but Scott has been on the receiving end of a few energy blasts and survived, which leads me to believe that he has some degree of energy Resistance due to his psionic field.
5) Punch Beams: Cyclops produces blasts of energy drawn from the punch dimension, which inflicted kinetic damage. However, these beams have been shown to have all sorts of properties. Cyclops can control the intensity of his beams and his energy output -- a narrowly focused beam can punch through the Blob. A widely dispersed beam can slow a fall. Cyclops has done enough control to break an arm or redirect an attack, but also has the raw power to destroy Sentinel's in a single attack, hurt Hulk, and even injure Dormammu. Basically, he gets a lot of milage out of his beams, in fact, some might say he gets a suspicious amount of mileage...
5a) Cyclops Is More Powerful than He Knows: Cyclops is known to have mental blocks that prevent him from shutting off or controlling his power. When you look at some of his feats, it becomes clear that one of these blocks prevents Cyclops from realizing that he has a lot more control over his power than he should. Cyclops has fired "banked" shots that have significant force but somehow reflect harmlessly off his surroundings. He has hurt beings that pose planetary level threats. The simple fact is that Cyclops can manipulate he crimson energy, and does so in simple, predictable ways in a desperate bid to hold on to his humanity.
6) Cyclops is a phoenix host: Cyclops has hosted the phoenix twice, and seeing as he is currently doa, it's possible that he may again.
Physically, Cyclops is closer to an Olympic level athlete than a regular person. His accuracy sometimes seems supernatural. Also, there's a bunch of old lore about how his mutation makes him Uber good looking so he can find a better mate. He is hardly any average guy | 50 | 38 |
ELI5: Why do some orgasms feel amazing and others really weak? | Length of time between orgasms, level of arousal, length of time to achieve orgasm, hydration and general focus are all factors in good or bad orgasms.
Abstaining from masturbation/sex for a few days can make for a great orgasm the next time you decide to do your thing.
For men specifically, hydration can really help with seminal fluid production, causing more contractions to ejaculate a larger amount of fluid and a more intense orgasm. | 51 | 77 |
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Why is −273.15° Celsius Absolute Zero? What's stopping you from going any colder? | To overly simplify, lets say that a measurement of temperature is, more or less, a measure of how much the atoms in an object are jiggling about. The more they jiggle, the more they hit the things around them and make them jiggle, and the more some of the atoms get jiggled off and go on their own adventures.
Now, temperature can be measured on different scales. Fahrenheit is one, celcius is another... And kelvin is a third. "Absolute zero" is called that in reference to the Kelvin scale, where the lowest temperature is 0 Kelvin. (This is exactly the same as -273.15c, it's just a different way of showing it.) This temperature is where there is no energy in the object, which is to say, no jiggling of the atoms, completely still. So you can't go lower than that temperature for the same reason a stopped car can't slow down: there is no speed to reduce, no energy to lose, no temperature to drop. | 220 | 132 |
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[General Sci-fi] How does gravity on space ships work? | I know how it works on ships that use centripetal force, but how does it work on most ships from Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, etc? | Usually via gravity generators that can produce gravity fields and/or whatever the force carrier particle for gravity is in that universe (gravitons, typically). Sometimes these fields/particles can be manipulated and projected elsewhere, such as from emitters in the deck plating, to make sure that 'down' is always towards the floor rather than whatever part of the ship the generator itself is. Handy when your ship is long, so your crew doesn't end up walking 'uphill' towards either end.
Some ships just use sheer acceleration to do it. In situations without FTL, travelling at a constant 1G of acceleration is usually the quickest and most comfortable way of handling long voyages where cryostasis isn't available. Technically, however, this isn't actually gravity in the same way that centripedal force isn't gravity. | 27 | 43 |
ELI5: Why are some body parts more likely to get cancer than others? | Cancer can develop during the process of cellular replication because a copy of *all* of the cell's DNA must be made for the new cell. During this process, mistakes can be made, resulting in DNA that accidentally codes for unregulated growth (resulting in a tumor).
Certain types of cells in the body replicate very often and are therefore more likely to develop cancer. Examples of this are the lining of your GI tract or the cells of the lung.
Other types of cells, like those found in your muscles or bones, do not replicate very much at all and as a result are more rare. | 24 | 31 |
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[Watchmen] Can the infinity stones have an effect on Dr Manhattan? | Yes, probably pretty significant effects if used the right way.
For example, the Soul Stone could pull his soul out. The Mind Stone could mind control him. The Space Stone might be able to block his ability to teleport. The Time or Reality Stones might be able to block his ability to sense specific time periods in the future. | 265 | 282 |
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AskScience AMA Series: We are Human Genetics Researchers from the University of Miami, Ask Us Anything about cutting-edge research techniques like CRISPR, advances in personalized genetic medicine, or just anything genetics! | Hi r/askscience and Reddit,
Thank you so much for your time and attention! We are scientists from the Department of Human Genetics at the University Of Miami Miller School Of Medicine. Our department is the 2nd largest recipient of NIH funding for Genetics Research, and we investigate a wide range diseases using the latest sequencing technology and other cutting-edge methods that have helped us understand the human genome in new and unexpected ways. From better understanding developmental conditions to improving personalized cancer treatments, the future of genetics is incredibly exciting and hopeful.
Please let us know any questions you have about the current state or future of genetic research or medicine (EXCEPT PERSONAL HEALTH QUESTIONS OR ADVICE), and we have 3 faculty who have volunteered their time to give their perspectives. Our department is committed to the paramount need for including diverse populations in genetic research, and we hope that engaging with everyone here will help us better connect with the communities we serve.
Here today starting at 3:30PM EST (20:30 UT) are three researchers from the University of Miami, ask us anything!
Username: /u/IAmA_UMiamiGenetics
**Dr Karen Nuytemans, PhD Bio:**
Dr. Nuytemans is a Research Assistant Professor in the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics and the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Department of Human Genetics. She received her PhD from the University of Antwerp in Belgium after which she came to University of Miami, initially as a post-doctoral Fellow, before advancing to her current position. Her research focuses on the genetics of neurodegenerative brain disorders. She has extensive experience working with 'big data' datasets including genotyping and next generation sequencing data, for the identification of common and rare genetic variants in disease. Dr. Nuytemans is specifically interested in Parkinson's Disease (PD) as well as Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). Everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, should have access to personalized medicine. That is why including these disorders across diverse populations in genetic research is one of her main research foci.
**Dr Susan Halloran Blanton, PhD Bio**
Dr. Blanton received her PhD in Human Genetics from Virginia Commonwealth University/Medical College of Virginia. She obtained post-doctoral training in Biostatistics (University of Pittsburgh) and Population Oncology (Fox Chase Cancer Center). Her primary research has focused on the mapping of genes for Mendelian and complex diseases; she has been instrumental in studies identifying over twenty genes/loci for Mendelian disorders. Stroke and the underlying genetics of its risk factors, deafness, retinal diseases, skeletal dysplasias, cleft lip/palate, and clubfoot are among the diseases which she currently studies. She collaborates with Drs. Sacco, Wright and Rundek to identify genetic factors influencing white matter and cognition and their relation to ageing. In addition, she has been involved in developing and implementing genetic education materials for Federal and appellate level judges and science writers in an ELSI sponsored project. Dr. Blanton is the Executive Director of the Hussman Institute for Human Genomics as well as the Associate Director of Communications and Compliance. She is an Associate Professor in the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Department of Human Genetics.
**Dr Michael Cuccaro, PhD Bio**
Michael L. Cuccaro, Ph.D., Director of the Patient and Family Ascertainment Division in the Center for Genomic Education and Outreach at the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics, is a clinical psychologist who specializes in understanding the interplay between genetics and behavior across development. His work reflects this specialization with a focus on cognitive and behavioral disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, dementia, and intellectual disability. His research concentrates on the development of behavioral methods to construct and extend clinical phenotypes of individuals with these and related disorders to optimize gene discovery. Further, he is working to improve recruitment and enrollment strategies to broaden opportunities for underserved populations to participate in genetic research. In addition, as part of his involvement with the Genetics Pathway for medical students, Dr. Cuccaro is involved in studies of medical trainee and professional attitudes about the utility of genomic information in healthcare. Dr. Cuccaro is also an Associate Professor in the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Department of Human Genetics and the Department of Psychology. | How do you deal with the ethics of genetic work when it comes to (1) eugenism, (2) racial discrimination and (3) socially differentiated accessibility of marketable derivatives of your work?
Also, how are recent (\~1 or 2 decades) advances in epigenetics influencing genomic studies?
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edit : typo | 64 | 1,329 |
Explain what defragmentation is (like I'm five) | Imagine you have a big collection of books. You have them on your bookshelf in alphabetical order. Every time you take a book off the shelf, you put it back in a different place, disturbing the order the books started out in. Each time someone goes to the bookshelf trying to find a book, it takes them longer to find it because they are no longer in order. Your bookshelf is now fragmented.
Since you're tired of it taking so long to find something, you decide to go back through and put the books back in alphabetical order, decreasing the amount of time it takes for you to search for books. This is called defragmentation.
The files on your hard drive are all like books, but pages could be scattered all over the place for each individual book. Increased fragmentation leads to longer seek times, which makes finding and loading files take more time. | 32 | 20 |
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