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ELI5: What do investors mean when they talk about derivatives? | What are derivatives and how are mortgage derivatives different than others? | A derivative is any financial product that is based on the performance of another underlying product.
For example, a bank which has issued mortgages might offset its position by issuing a "Mortgage Backed Security". This is a derivative where the payments are based on many individual mortgages. If the homeowners don't pay up, the note pays less.
For an MBS, the mortgage is the underlying, but there are many types of other derivatives. | 25 | 30 |
ELI5: why does it feel like the room is spinning when drunk | How come whenever we lay down and close our eyes when intoxicated that it feels like we are spinning and not really when our eyes are open | Ok so, you've got 3 systems to help you maintain balance. You can function with just two*
You've got your vestibular system, its a series of canals and a few chambers attached to your cochlea in your inner ear. The canals and chambers are filled with fluid, fluid that pushes on gel, or that has heavy 'stone' on top of the gel, which then moves.
Youve got your eyesight, your eyes and ears are intrinsically linked, with reflexes going from ears to eye to keep eyesight steady. But also that eyesight information is used as feedback, your brain uses this information to establish balance.
You've got your proprioception/touch sense of balance, your brain knows what your muscles and joints are doing, where they are and how active they are, and also uses this information to create a sense of balance.
So you're drunk, you've mucked with the inner ear (Alcohol does this for various reasons, others can get into that). But you've still mostly got your vision and your touch/proprioception firing right. You're ok, you can function.
But then you lay down and close your eyes? All of a sudden we've lost another of the 3 systems the brain uses for balance. We've lost one of the inputs, and we're recieving messed up informatuon from the other. So you feel dizzy.
That's why. Your brain uses sight, the vestibular system, and touch/proprioception, all 3, to create the sense of balance. By closing your eyes you've shut out another one of the inputs. Usually that's fine, but you've also messed with the others by drinking. Now there's an issue. | 1,955 | 1,653 |
ELI5: What exactly happens in my body when I don't eat for a day (or more)? | Low blood sugar levels trigger the release of glucose, stored as glycogen in muscles and liver. Fat is broken down to undergo oxidation for further energy requirements. If the fasting goes on for long enough, there is a significant breakdown of muscle to supply amino acids for energy. As the starvation continues, the muscle breakdown slows and fat breakdown accelerates. Large amounts of what are known as ketone bodies are now supplying a large component of your energy.
As a side note, diabetics who don't control their sugar with insulin will observe the same cascade as above since they aren't able to take in the glucose they are eating. That is why some diabetics will present to the hospital with what is known as diabetic ketoacidosis, where their body has been brought to the point where it has to run off these ketone bodies which eventually have dramatic effects on that person's physiology.
| 13 | 32 |
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[The Witcher] Why do the witchers of Kaer Morhen have "American" accents and everyone else sounds British? | Regional dialects. Most of the people you interact with are from a few select regions. parts of Tamaria, Redania, Skellige and Nilfgaard. Tamaria and Redania have very similar spoken prose, while Skellige and Nilfgaard have their own accents.
Well, Kaer Morhen is waaaay up in North-east Kaedwen, in the middle of nowhere. Like most real-world instances, dialect can and accent can shift rather quickly as you move from region to region, sometimes quite dramatically. The peoples in and around Kaer Morhen (i think the're 1 town within a few days travel... its literally the middle of fucking nowhere) have a particular accent, and those raised at the Keep tend to pick it up. | 49 | 65 |
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[WH40K] When did humanity first come in contact with xenos? | When did humanity make first contact with xenos? What were humanities interactions with xenos like prior to the great crusade? | The first known contact between Humanity and Aliens as sometime in M18, after the development of the first Warp Drives allowed humans to rapidly expand outside of it's local stellar group.
This led to the first 'Alien Wars', but also to the development of treaties and alliances with various Xenos species throughout the galaxy. Because Humanity was not united into a single political entity, individual federations dealt with various aliens as they pleased, with Orks being a notable exception, as they were almost always hostile.
During the Age of Strife, some alien species took to preying on the isolated human worlds, which is what drove the Great Crusade and later Imperial policy regarding Xenos. It wasn't all species, of course, and some worlds maintained very close relationships with aliens during the period, until being destroyed by the burgeoning Imperium. | 16 | 15 |
Why does it take so long for eyes to adjust to changes in light when pupils can quickly constrict and dilate? | Pupils adjust for some changes quickly. Night adaption is a chemical process that takes about half an hour in the retina itself, this happens after the pupil has fully dilated.
Wikipedia has more details on the process, am on tablet so hyperlinks are a pain. | 10 | 52 |
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CMV: People and businesses worried about losing their jobs in the oil industry can and should start working in clean or renewable energy. | Maybe I am a little ignorant here, but I see plenty of arguments that shutting down pipelines (Biden executive order, for example) will destroy the jobs and livelihood of people in Canada and the USA. What I don't understand is why these people, who have to know that their employment is teetering as the globe continues its transition to clean energy, don't just simply transition over to working in clean energy.
​
Worked on the oil field? Sweet, you can help in the construction of turbines and solar panels. Delivery? Well, the infrastructure isn't going to magically appear. The way I see it, every job that is lost will inevitably be replaced by a clean energy job, and it is wholly possible it can be transitional for the people that would otherwise be without a career. | Those jobs will not be in the same locations, require the same skills, pay the same, and likely will not be proportionate in number.
And the globe isn't transitioning to clean energy at all, fossil fuel production is not declining nor predicted to decline in any meaningful way. | 25 | 35 |
Can animals reason and use language? | There are *many* different kinds of animals. Also, we don't know a great deal about how nonhuman animals think, so direct answers to your question (even regarding particular species) are all partly conjecture for the time being.
Some animals, such as earthworms, apparently have no reasoning capacity (they operate unthinkingly, entirely on reflex) and no language to speak of.
Some animals, such as hive insects, have no reasoning capacity but *do* engage in certain kinds of communication which might be called 'language'. Notably, bees have a 'dance' wherein they indicate with the motion of their bodies which direction to go from the hive in order to find food. However, these communication schemes are *not* a social development like human languages are, but rather built into the animals' biology; they cannot possibly learn a new 'language'.
Note that, in general, *all* invertebrates seem to be incapable of reasoning, save for the cephalopods and *possibly* portia spiders. On the other hand, most vertebrates seem to possess reasoning capacity, with mammals (save possibly the naked mole rat) and birds in general being the clearest examples.
Some animals have reasoning capacity but no language to speak of. This category probably includes many kinds of fish, most octopuses, and some amphibians and reptiles.
Some animals have reasoning capacity and 'language'. The obvious example is birds that sing to each other. Many birds and mammals fall into this category, along with probably some amphibians, reptiles, fish, and squid. However, in most of these cases it appears that the communication schemes are built into the animals' biology and they possess little or no ability to learn any expansion on their language.
Besides humans, there are some other examples of animals which apparently *can* learn entirely new features of language. There has been some success in teaching sign language to other apes, such as chimpanzees and gorillas. Also, research suggests that cetaceans (that is, whales and dolphins) possess 'dialects' and learn different ways of 'speaking' from each other. Some other animals, such as dogs, horses and parrots, can be taught to respond in unique, non-instinctive ways to human voice or sign commands (e.g. a dog sitting down when you say 'sit'). However, other than the apes and cetaceans, this learned 'language' seems to be a fairly one-way thing; that is to say, the animals respond to *humans* saying things but show little or no indication of using that same 'language' with *each other.*
The one language feature that all nonhuman animals seem to lack is *grammar.* While apes can be taught 1-to-1 associations between specific signs and specific meanings, they don't seem to understand that the signs should be sequenced in a particular way relative to each other. For instance, where a human who wants a banana will always sign 'I want a banana' (grammatically correct), the apes are just as likely to sign 'want banana want banana me' or 'banana me want me banana banana' or any other jumble of signs with those meanings all mashed together. They know that they're putting those meanings together with each other, but the idea of an *abstract rule* by which arbitrary meanings within certain categories (noun/verb/adjective, subject/object, etc) can be systematically assembled into phrases seems to entirely escape their understanding. If you're using a narrow definition of 'language' that requires structured grammar, in that case humans seem to be unique on Earth in our ability to understand and use that kind of language. | 13 | 23 |
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Computers make NO SENSE | Can someone please explain how we mashed together a bunch of metal and electricity, and were able to make it do…. anything? Reminds me of that quote about technology seeming like magic. | Electric current flow through wire. Give current multiple paths. Put gates on these paths. Current goes through path with open gate. If gate #1 is open, do this. If gate #2 is open, do that
Make paths more and more complex with more and more yes or no decisions being made until you have a computer | 53 | 21 |
Is there a reason why denser planets are closer to the sun and gas giants are further out? | What's important here is a concept known as the "snow line".
Water can only exist in two states out in space - as a gas, or as ice. Since the pressure is essentially zero in space, water's phase will only depends on temperature. In our solar system, this threshold is somewhere around 5 AU (where 1 AU = the average distance between the Sun and Earth), known as the snow line. For space inside of 5 AU, water is generally found as a gas, while for space outside of 5 AU, it's generally found as ice.
This threshold is very important for solar system formation. If you imagine proto-planets slowly building up from dust grain sizes up to planetary sizes, you can build a lot faster with rock and ice rather than rock alone. This is especially important if you want hydrogen gas to be a significant percentage of your planet - the general rule of thumb is that a proto-planet needs to be about 5 Earth-masses or greater before it has enough gravitational force to hold on to hydrogen.
Also remember that as the Sun ignites, it also starts blowing all that gas out of the system over relatively short timescales, so the places where the proto-planets can grow to 5 Earth-masses the quickest are the places that are eventually going to have planets with lots of gas. Again, reaching this 5 Earth-mass threshold will happen the fastest for planetary cores made of both rock and ice rather than just rock alone...but that can only happen outside the snow line.
It's no surprise, then, that Jupiter is at 5.2 AU, just outside the snow line, while the remaining giant planets are out beyond that. Inside the snow line, meanwhile, nothing got massive enough to hold on to hydrogen gas, so we just see rocky planets there.
**TL;DR**: Out past 5 AU, water in space becomes ice. This is important because the proto-planets beyond that distance could be built from both rock and ice, allowing them to more easily reach the 5 Earth-mass threshold required to hold on to hydrogen gas. | 21 | 34 |
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Why do most substances in the liquid state thicken as they cool down towards a solid, but some substances, such as water, suddenly become solid at freezing point rather than thickening in a gradient as it cools to freezing point? | The viscosity of water does change with temperature, as do all pure liquids. Going from boiling down to the freezing point, the viscosity of water more than triples. The other liquids you are thinking of are probably on their way to a glass transition rather than freezing into a crystalline solid. In this case, the material will appear to get more and more viscous until it ceases to flow altogether.
Many mixtures exhibit the behavior you are describing, though. For example, mixtures of alcohols and water get very viscous when they are cooled significantly below 0C. | 184 | 477 |
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Do Magnetic Fields Instantly Appear or do they Propagate at the Speed of Light? | Electric and magnetic fields always propagate at the speed of light. That's what light is made of, after all. When we talk about the 1/r^2 distribution for a static charge for an electric field (or the magnetic field of a bar magnet) we're assuming that the charge has existed "forever" in the same position. If you shift that charge over, the electric field will change to the one centered around the new position roughly in a ball that expands at the speed of light. So for electric fields far away, the effect of the nudge will take a long time to be felt, because the resulting ripple will take time to get there. | 17 | 22 |
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Economic Models in Excel? Or online? Change variables, see effect. Solve for max/min. Revise model. | I did a dual-major in university, half in economics, 20 years ago. I thought by now I would be able to find an online economics course with functioning economic models. Nope. Am I just looking in the wrong places? I found online courses with static diagrams, but not functioning models.
Bonus #1: users can change the labels and the data.
Bonus #2: users can revise the model itself. Do you know of any spreadsheet-based or online models that allow users to not just change variables but to edit the model itself?
Hessian Matrices, Lagrangian Multipliers, Local and Global Maxima and Minima, Saddle Points, Higher Order Derivatives ---- these are what my dreams are made of!
(And: indifference curves, aggregate demand, socially-optimal vs privately-optimal output, Edgeworth box...)
\----------- DO NOT REPLY TO THIS POST - REPLY TO MY COMMENT BELOW ------------
(If you reply to this post, I may well never see your reply - AutoMod removes replies unless you're whitelisted. 8 replies to my post disappeared. I want to believe a Moderator will approve the good replies, but 2 days ago I got notifications which showed the beginnings of several replies that looked excellent, and ... I'm waiting. If you reply to a COMMENT, your post will not be automatically deleted.) | Most economic and econometric models are written in languages like Stata, R, Python, or Matlab. For example, many central banks provide data and code in Matlab format. Many applied microeconomics papers provide data and code in Stata format. | 20 | 19 |
CMV: it is normal for adults to be attracted to people who are in their late teens. | I did not know this was an unpopular opinion until recently. Basically my stance is as follows.
People in their late teens are fully physically developed and have all the qualities that other adults find sexually appealing. They are sexual beings both physically and mentally. So it is evident to me that the Natural Order of Things supports my view.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong but, for all of human history up until recently people regularly married people in their late teens and they were seen as adults. I think the change in perception can be attributed to three things:
1. People now marry later in life, the norm in this culture is to sleep around when they are younger. Adding on to that...
2. We have a hookup culture. In the past people may have been more serious about relationships (feel free to correct me if I am wrong) but nowadays a lot of people just hook up and marry when they want to "settle down" later in life. As a result people more readily assume that anyone interested in a younger person is up to no good and isn't serious. Which is probably the source of aversion to this kind of attraction; because they want to protect them.
3. People nowadays do not consider people in their late teens to be adults while in the past they were. I think this could be a result of how present society coddles people even through their college years whereas many later-year teens have the potential to be a functional adult with a job, spouse and kids if raised differently. Probably a result of people getting married later in life which is a result of promiscuity due to culture and availability of contraception.
Furthermore I would actually assert that forbidding relationships based on age, given that both are ready physically and mentally for that kind of relationship, is immoral; because you are stepping in the way of love, no one is getting hurt (besides pain of breakup if that happens), etc.
So basically the only thing I see that supports the argument against my view is that culture opposes it. While culture and soceity's rules may be influenced by truth, they are arbitrary. Society's rules are nothing in the face of objective truth (refer to my statement about the Natural Order of Things above) If they are not molded after it already. Adding on to this, I've heard (again, feel free to correct me if I am wrong) that women's brains become fully mature at ~17 and men's brains become fully mature at ~23. Its why in the past, men were legally considered minors at a later age than women were. If you make the argument that someone cannot rightfully enter a relationship with an adult until their brain is fully mature, you would be forced to also agree that ~17 y/o women should be available and that men should not be available until ~23. My own solution to this is that maturity in decision making is not wholly dependent on this one variable. Many adults don't make very "adult" decisions and many teens make responsible, "adult" decisions. This is, instead, something to assess regarding the individual, which applies to people 20+ as well.
Also I do not believe that such relationships hurt anyone by default. One person may be more inexperienced but that is a vulnerability that the other person does not have to exploit if they are a decent human being after the right thing.
A bit of context: I'm a 21 y/o college student and do find myself attracted to people in their late teens, as well as adults. I feel that this is normal and natual and not a fetish or somehing that is uncommon. I do not get off on domination or whatever like some people think those who have this attraction do. I just find that my brain recognizes those people as fellow adults. I'm also not looking to hook up, I'm a actually abstaining from sex until marriage and take all my relationships seriously; no "spring flings" or whatever for me.
My grandparents met and started dating when grandma was 16 and grandpa was 21. They were and are both very happy and have a good marriage. Imagine if they had dismissed each other as unavailable or were prevented from being together. (Refer to how I said that this kind of prevention is immoral).
ELI5 TLDR: People in their late teens many times cannot be differentiated from other "adults" if you did not know their age. So it is normal to be attracted to them and the current taboo is only a recent, arbitrary social rule based on nothing more than culture.
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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!* | Do you mean physical attraction, or are you also including emotional attraction and stuff? Because if you just mean physical, nobody is going to change your view because it's obviously biologically correct. | 435 | 568 |
ELI5: Why are we able to "painlessly" put down our pets with drugs, but often botch lethal injections? | Why does this happen? Couldn't we just do some math and give the human a higher dose based on BMI and height? What's the difference between the drugs; do we even use different drugs for dogs and humans? | Short and Simple: Nobody manufactures the drugs for lethal injection in humans, so we wind up using *really old* drugs or a cocktail of things not meant for the purpose of killing humans. Also, there aren't many doctors willing to administer lethal-injections... and improper application can leave someone alive and in agony instead of dead.
Longer and Detailed: The Pharmaceutical Companies that make the drugs for Lethal Injections *know* how radioactive the topic of Capital Punishment is. Anyone associated with it is poisoned. Social Media will *crucify* anyone who sells the drugs used to kill people... and that will result in lost business across **all** of their products.
There aren't many executions in the United States, even when the needed supplies are available. That means that lethal injection drugs are a *really* niche product. The lost profit from *not* selling the drugs for Lethal Injection is **much** less than the lost profit from losing sales in every other sector.
So... that opens up another question: Why isn't there a company that *just* fills the need for lethal injection drugs?
The answer to that is that you can't make a profit in that market alone. It's a ludicrously small market, needing less than a thousand dosages of your product per year. Since you can't sustain a company *on* lethal injections, and any company that could afford to do it as a side-gig won't touch it with a ten-foot-pole, there's no supplier.
Which brings us to what we use: Old drugs from when companies *would* sell them, a finite supply that grows less effective with time; and trying to mix a cocktail of drugs that will do the job... to sometimes horrific results.
Doctors and Nurses to administer the lethal injection are hard to find for the same reason. The entire concept of Capital Punishment is **radioactive**. Even if the state shields you from being fired from a hospital or losing your license to practice medicine, your patients **will** eventually learn what you did... and a lot of them are going to look for a doctor that doesn't kill people. Losing your patients isn't worth whatever the state pays you to kill someone. | 1,038 | 1,884 |
ELI5: How do mathematicians like Stephen Hawking "explain" things like black holes etc using only equations? | Just saw The Theory of Everything and it got me wondering. I mean, it's all math!?!?!?!?! | You know how authors write long stories using letters and words and the rules of grammar and writing? Its just like that. With enough knowledge of how to read (math), these kinds of explanations make sense. Dont feel bad that you cant read it. Its just like if you tried to read a story in a language you dont know. You can learn. | 243 | 140 |
I've long wanted to really understand how the global economy ticks, what books do I need to read to begin to understand this? | I realize this is a tall order but I've always felt like a fraud being so deeply into politics and social justice without really understanding how the economy works from a small town to the global stage; the back room deals, the politics, the diplomats, the bankers etc. You advice would be greatly appreciated. | There are lots of books out there. The Economy by CORE is a pretty complete introduction (it’s a large book) to economics in general. An issue with your request is that micro does not directly translate to macroeconomics and macro doesn’t translate directly to international economics so you’ll have to find different books with different theories and try to find their use for your purposes. | 21 | 109 |
How is genetic information added through evolution? | I have often heard the argument from creationists that "there is no known process by which new genetic material is added." This kind of stuff is out of my league (as it likely is for those who normally present this argument), but I would like to be able to refute this point as I hear it somewhat often.
Here's a video that just got posted that really started to grind my gears, as it makes the claim that evolution is "scientifically impossible." Anyone more educated than I want to help explain this away?
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10153084284774899 | A. In terms of physical quantity of DNA, genetic material is added by duplication. Either individual segments of DNA get duplicated or occasionally entire genomes.
The former is more common in animals, while the latter is more common in plants. This is mostly due to how tolerant each type of organism is to having your entire set of genes doubled. (Plants are usually okay with an extra branch or two, animals... not so much).
Sometimes this duplication process can run away with itself. In the case of transposons, so called "jumping genes", they can duplicate themselves to the point that they almost overwhelm all the DNA. Thankfully most species have mechanisms to remove transposons, creating a genetic balancing act where two opposing forces maintain a regular genome size.
Consider a scenario where it is suddenly more fit to have more DNA.
How would evolution select for this? It might tweak the balance of these opposing forces so that more transposons jumped, allowing an increase the overall raw DNA content.
How would it tweak this balance? Natural selection would select individuals that were more prone to transposon jumps. This would result in offspring that had the same trait. This would then go through a positive feedback loop until you hit the ceiling of fitness.
Consider a more drastic step. Let's say a pig is born that has had it's entire genome duplicated. By chance it is far more fit than it's siblings. That increase in genetic content would then spread (and likely create a new species). This while highly unlikely, is a plausible mechanism for new DNA content. Usually something like this would just result in a dead pig.
There is no optimal amount of genetic information. Genomes are a big soup in constant flux with lots of DNA being added, and being snipped out. Most of the time this flux doesn't touch genes because they are mostly essential, but it has the potential to, and sometimes that can result in new phenotypes.
B. In terms of novel genotypes, new genetic material is added by the random force of mutation.
All organisms undergo genetic mutations, random errors in DNA created by polymerase when replicating strands. Any given mutation can have three effects. It can be deleterious, harming the organism. It can be advantageous, benefiting the fitness of the organism, or it can be neutral, having no effect on fitness.
The vast majority of mutations are neutral. This if followed by deleterious mutations, and finally advantageous mutations are exceptionally rare.
New "genetic material" from mutations arises from two sources. New advantageous mutations that are instantly fit and sweep to fixation in all individuals in the population (cause everybody wants that hot new gene). Alternatively, when a population is exposed to a new environment, mutations that were once neutral or even deleterious may suddenly become fit. At that point, these variable sites in the genome suddenly become fixed by the forces of natural selection filtering out only those individuals that have that one allele.
**Tl;Dr** New genetic material is added often in both quantity and novel genotypes. Mutation and duplication work to constantly add new DNA and new patterns of nucleotides. Mostly this results in neutral and unfit changes. Very rarely this results in adaptive changes, but when they do happen they spread fast to everyone in the population.
| 17 | 29 |
Plain English Explanation of Foucault's Archeological Method? | I really want to understand Foucault's arguments, but I'm having trouble understanding his methodology, and every explanation of archeology I've found is super convoluted.
I get that it's an alternative to traditional methods of uncovering history, but what evidence is used? And what exactly is the discursive level? Hopefully this isn't a dumb question.
Edit: Thank you. It probably isn't easy to distil a concept like this, so I really appreciate the answers given. I'll definitely be looking more into Foucault to try to grasp the complexities of his work, and with this confusion sorted out, I feel more confident in doing so. | Archeology is the study of systems of thought by attending to the way in which they are governed by rules which the subjects of those rules are not aware of (they are below or beyond the consciousness of subjects). The rules, for instance, constrain conceptual possibilities (what they can think and therefore do). The subject matter of Archeology is, as you suggest, discourse - literally just how people talk at a given time. So, the Archeologist selects a subject at a particular time, studies how people talk about that thing at that particular time and tries to induce out of that the rules for talking about that particular thing.
The assumption is that the historian can discern how we think (even unknowingly) about [x] by observing how we talk about [x].
So, in *History of Madness*, we look at how people talk about insanity at different times and try to discern the conceptual rules for talking about insanity. We will quickly discover that insanity is different at different times - the rules for talking about it are contingent to a certain discursive situation. So the Archeologist goes about comparing these different conceptual sets by looking at how people talk about things. It focuses on the conceptual consequences of different ways of talking about what you otherwise might think was 'the same thing.'
In general this disrupts the kind of historiography that tries to see history as progressive and continuous in some clearly rational way. This is why, for Foucault, science is such an interesting object of study since it purports to be progressive with respect to the acquisition of knowledge.
ETA - I've tried to say this in a way that avoids too much Foucaultian talk. Some serious Foucaultians will be (perhaps rightly) offended by that minimization. | 21 | 21 |
ELI5: Why is old frozen meats from the freezer considered bad? What happens to the meat? | 1. Aging,
2. Bacteria,
3. Water crystals,
4. Freezer burn
*1. Freezing doesn't stop bacterial growth or meat "aging" completely. Enzymatic reactions are still happening, albeit at a much slower rate, this causes many of the proteins inside to change properties which confer flavor and texture, thus giving meat that "old" taste.
*2. As for bacteria, it will remain semi dormant but still reproduce unless the temperature is very low (at least -19°C), and toxins or any other bacterial waste will still be present and unaffected, with the potential to make us sick when consumed.
*3. When you freeze meat, microscopic water water crystals are formed as the liquids reach freezing point. If that point is reached fast (As in a blast freezer, IQF or submersion in liquid nitrogen), said crystals will be small and not harm the meat's tissues and cells, on the other hand, slow freezing processes cause large water crystals to form. Large crystals act as blades that rupture cell membranes and let the juices inside out, drying the meat and making it tougher.
Lastly, temperature changes in frozen meat also affect quality. Expansion and contraction caused by temperature changes make the tissues grind against the water crystals, and the jagged edges cut the muscle fibers, eventually leading to a pulpifying effect that turns meat into sludge over time.
*4. Meat that is not vacuum packed or otherwise sealed completely in an airtight container will lose humidity in the areas that are exposed, those areas will turn black and dry, and even while not harmful per-se, freezer burnt meat becomes undesirable for consumption.
Source. Certified HACCP inspector with 12 years experience working at a processing plant. | 19 | 17 |
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ELI5: The difference between source code, and what we download when we buy a game | I'm not even sure I'm asking this question correctly; that's how far removed I am. I remember reading that someone had found starcraft source code and the internet lost their minds when he turned it in. | When you write a computer program, you write it using a human readable language, for example C, Java or Python. For example, this is what a basic "Hello world" program (a program that print "hello, world") looks like in C:
#include <stdio.h>
main( )
{
printf("hello, world\n");
}
Things like "include", "main" and "printf" are instructions for the computer that tell it what to do. The computer, however, doesn't actually know what this code means. Instead, the code first needs to be translated to "machine code", which the computer does understand, but is very difficult for humans to read and understand. This process is known as "compilation". When you download a game, the game's executable files are already in machine code, after the compilation process was done. This means that you can't really understand how the game works just by looking at the files. However, if you have the original source code, it means that by looking at it you can figure out how exactly it works. | 4,381 | 4,216 |
What is the science behind wanting attention from a specific person? | Like because _this event cause that brain chemical to do that hence attention is needed from this person etc.._ Or some rational science supported explanation on the phenomana of wanting attention from a specific person. | What do you mean when you say "science?" Do you want a neurobiological explanation? A social psychology explanation? A developmental explanation? There's no "one true explanation" -- just different flavors of describing what is happening. | 37 | 44 |
Is Ludwig von Mises well respected in the field of economis? | Ludwig von Mises was respected as a teacher in his lifetime and he famously advanced the critique of socialism known as the socialist calculation problem. His critique, though not always cited explicitly, has been generally accepted by economists.\*
Furthermore, he generally put together the theory of the Austrian business cycle, although he was certainly inspired by Wicksell.
That said, more generally, the Austrian position in terms of theoretical foundation - e.g., praxeology - and their general theory of the business cycle is not widely accepted.
Therefore, one can say that some of his contributions are respected and that some of his other contributions, while not accepted, are viewed as notable contributions within overall literature of "history of economic thought."
**It is best to say that his contribution regarding the socialist calculation problem is "respected" but the rest of his work, not so much.**
\* An example of its uncited impact is the second half of Schumpeter's book *Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy*, which is, in effect, a barely concealed attack on socialism which basically is making the same point as Mises (though sarcastically). This book is widely viewed as one of the most important works of economics. | 39 | 33 |
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ELI5 Why can't we just make an incredibly good microscope that can almost see atoms? Why is there a limit | Why can we not just put enough microscopes together to see molecules or atoms in real time? | Light moves as a wave and has a property called *wavelength* which is the distance between peaks of the wave, like between crests of ocean waves. We can only see things that are bigger than the wavelength of light; atoms are smaller than this, so light can't reflect off individual atoms only off the surface they make up. This means it is physically impossible to see atoms with light, no matter how good the microscope is.
**However**, there are things called electron microscopes which work by shooting electrons at a material instead of light. Because electrons travel with a shorter wavelength than light, they are in fact capable of "seeing" atoms.
**Edit:** electrons are particles that carry electric charge, like photons are particles that carry light, for anyone who didn't know. | 71 | 52 |
I believe Schools do not have the purpose to raise kids. CMV. | This CMV was inspired by a recent discussion threat you can find [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1wx6wh/whats_something_you_think_they_should_start/).
I think the main purpose of schools is to provide education in the following senses:
1. Teach critical thinking and critical reading.
2. teach kids to express themselves through language and text.
3. Teach Logic and Maths
4. Teach the basics of how the world works, such as science, economics, social and political science.
This is essentially what I would boil it down to when it comes to mandatory courses, but I encountered lots of people who want to go far beyond that, teaching anything in school from doing taxes over vehicle maintenance, cocking, personal finance, buying a house to cleaning and managing the household.
However, I believe those things should be taught by parents since they are responsible for raising a child. Putting all those things into the curriculum would be a huge waste of time and money for things that are not in the schools responsibility.
When I say these things should not be taught I don't say that they are completely off the radar. For example you should learn about the consequences of bad hygiene, drugs and unhealthy eating in Biology (as part of how the world works), but that does not mean that you teach techniques of cleaning. You just imply that not cleaning will be bad. Furthermore, schools are free to create extracurricular activities that deal with those topics, like personal finance or job application, for those interested.
In the end I believe raising children is still the job of the parents and schools should not teach every trivial thing about live, but instead focus more on providing education to create well informed critical human beings. | Parents should teach their children critical thinking as well. And language/expression. And basic logic. And how the world works.
What's special about those that isn't special about, for example, home economics?
Frankly, that latter is probably going to be *more* useful to the child than most other things taught in school.
If we need school at all, it's because parents suck at teaching children the things they need to know in order to be healthy productive citizens. All of the things. | 11 | 16 |
Are there any non-detrimental effects resulting from climate change? | I recently read that due to climate change, certain plants will start growing again in areas that could not have grown for thousands of years. Are there any other effects that could be seen as objectively positive in regards to diversity of species, species populations, or other misc. factors generally regarding the "health" of the planet?
Btw; I am not trying to bait a "is climate change real" debate here; I believe in climate change and that we should avoid it, I just want to learn more about the side effects. | There will likely be a lot of changes, probably many that are good locally, probably lots that are bad locally and globally. Human civilization has adapted to the present climate conditions, so any significant change, good or bad, is likely to disrupt a lot of things, especially food production. Disruptions in food production leads to famine, which leads to war and mass human migration. Which disrupts stuff elsewhere.
For example, it has been postulated that nordic countries will experience longer, warmer summers and milder winters, which can be considered good regionally. However, if somewhere else millions of people have to relocate, the same nordic countries begin to seem like a paradise to climate refugees. If they then descend en masse to these countries, their societies may collapse from the massive demographic shift.
Eventually humans will adapt to whatever the new climate is once stabilized, but the transition may be catastrophic. | 27 | 32 |
ELI5: What makes a great conductor great? and conversely what sets them apart from a random high school band teacher? | It's important to keep in mind that a conductor is nearly always the leader of the orchestra, too. So for weeks and months before you see him/her waving a baton around, they were in charge of auditioning band members, selecting the music, organizing rehearsals, making artistic changes or interpretations to the piece as it goes, and directing each section and musician. So there was a hell of a lot of behind-the-scenes work that we don't always think of.
As far as actual performance, a good conductor is giving a dozen instructions at once. Speed, volume, and style are all communicated by single movements. Are his beats large, waving motions, full of drama? I'll bet there'll be horns blaring long, sonorous notes. Are they short, tight, precise movements, close to his chest? You're almost definitely going to be hearing soft, short staccato notes. Is he facing the trombones, pushing one hand down while conducting with his other hand? He's asking them to play softer - maybe the acoustics in this room aren't what they're used to, and they're overpowering the rest of the band more than expected. There are a million little adjustments that will go on in any given performance, and a good conductor can make them on the fly in very clear ways.
And of course, all of that body language goes to the audience too. When you see that person swinging their arms in big, wide arcs, you'll get excited, even as the music begins to swell. And when you see them sweep their arms in, you'll lean in, straining to hear the soft parts of the music. The conductor is a visual cue to you to tell you what your ears can expect. | 749 | 805 |
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Are expensive high end toothbrushes actually worth it? | I will say that toothbrushes with a timer aid in proper brushing technique. The American Dental Association recommends 2 minutes of brushing each time with 30 seconds on each quadrant. Very few people actually brush for that long unassisted.
Using a toothbrush that tells you how long you've been brushing for (and preferably alerts you every 30 seconds to move onto the next quadrant) is useful for most people.
I wasn't really able to find research on this topic that wasn't sponsored by Oral B or Crest or whoever. | 67 | 225 |
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[Harry Potter] If a Wizard chooses to craft their own wand, will it always choose them? | The wand chooses the wizard, but what happens if a wizard makes their own wand? Will the wand they made always choose them, or will there be a situation where you've made a wand, but it doesn't accept you as its master? | The traits a wand favours depends on its materials and length/flexibility.
Even if you made a wand, if you dont match the traits it favours then it's not going to choose you. Though obviously you could still use it. | 40 | 40 |
ELI5:FXAA, SMAA, and other anti-aliasing options | OK, so i know what anti-aliasing is. But what does it mean by '8xAA' or 'SMAA' or all those other options? | There are 2 main kinds of AA.
The first uses sampling (which is why it's called SAA), which basically means that it calculates what colors the pixels would be if you were at a higher resolution, and then averages them to find the color the actual pixel should be. The edges are technically still jagged, but it's harder to tell because the color is blended. The number is how many extra pixels are being calculated before averaging them out. 8xMSAA means each pixel on an edge is broken down into 8 pixels, those colors are calculated, and then averaged back into the pixel you actually see.
There are different kinds of SAA which do this in different ways (FSAA and SSAA do this for every pixel on the screen while MSAA only does it for edge pixels, which takes less processing power but sometimes misses things).
The other type of AA is a type of post-processing (effects added after the image is actually created, but before it's displayed on the screen). MLAA and FXAA do this by finding edges of contrasting colors and blurring them together with the next pixel over, which reduces jagged edges by a lot. However, it does this to everything on the screen since it can't actually tell what's truly and edge and what isn't, so everything can end up blurry.
Then we have SMAA, which is post processing AA that uses similar edge calculation as MSAA, meaning it can have light performance requirements like FXAA while not blurring the entire screen. If you want a balance between performance and looks, go with this.
Something cool that most don't know is that you can often apply post processing AA from your video card, outside the game. This means you can do stuff like combine as much MSAA as your system can handle, then add on a small amount of SMAA (very low performance cost) and end up with AA greater than the sum of it's parts. | 17 | 37 |
ELI5: What is matching? (Clothing) | Sometimes my GF will ask me to pick something out for her to wear. I am so bad at it, everything I suggest gets declined. Is it me, or is it because it's me? Sometimes feel that even if I picked out exactly what she wore last week it would get declined. Help.
What is matching. I just don't get it. | Matching is just putting things together without clashing colors or patterns. Now the harder part- what clashes and doesn't . Starting with colors, generally things on opposite sides of the color wheel- (just search it) will go well together. Those next to each other on the color will as well. Those in some other position may not. You shouldn't put the same color on all the clothes because then it's just too much of one hue. As for patterns, usually only either the top or the bottom can have them as an easy way to stay out of trouble.
(There is a lot more like accessories which can add third color to make it more interesting but you are just trying to survive here not become a fashion designer)
Now for the easiest way: just use opposites.
Well if you start with the bottoms, let's assume no pattern just color. The easiest is black or white because nearly everything will match with it as a top. So black pants, white top. White pants, black top. If something has to have a pattern- choose only the top or bottom and the other is a plain color.
Oh and tell your gf - pick your own damn clothes out next time too
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ELI5: If incest is shunned due to the risk of birth defects, why isn't elderly procreation, which has the same problems? | Seems like a bit of a double standard. The only thing I can think of is that incest limits genetic variation, which is apparently problematic, but procreation of the "golden aged" (40+) demonstrates a massive rise in birth defects as well, further increasing with age, so why isn't there a similar stigma? If you told someone you messed around with your sister/brother/cousin, even without intent to create life, jaws would drop, but I've never heard of negative reactions following a 40+ couple having a kid. If anything, I would expect that to be rationalized as "good for the couple for taking the time to live it up first." | Nature kind of solves that problem. Not many women popping out kids at 50+. The window from 40 -50 is an overlap, but as age and potential defect rates increase in that window, the number of candidates also decreases.
However the incest stigma is more than just a medically driven custom, it also places a social control on those of the younger end of the reproductive spectrum where impulsivity, and access to only relatives, would be more pertinent. | 18 | 24 |
[Ghostbusters II/Harry Potter] So how exactly did an object that looks one hell of a lot like a horcrux end up in a muggle museum? Shouldn't there be someone in charge of preventing that kind of thing? | If you're referring to the portrait of Vigo Von Homburg Deutschendorf, it's a rare example of seventeeth-century Carpathian portraiture, and it belongs in a museum where it can be appreciated by future generations rather than moldering in a private collection. | 21 | 15 |
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Is doing a PhD worth it if I want to work in industry? | I am a molecular biologist and i knnow I want to work in industry. But I've been debating if doing a PhD is worth to then progress later on in my career in industry to higher positions. Is it worth doing a PhD for industry? Does anyone have any experience with that?
I've heard very mixed reviews.... | In molecular biology the higher positions are mostly PhDs. Once you do a PhD you will find out how little you know. So, worth it, yes, but not without cost. Your pay will be low, you will go through rough periods and supervision is often bad. Afterwards you will be more mature and that is exactly what is good about it in the end. Pick a topic or technique that is relevant in industry. | 46 | 19 |
ELI5: What are flys doing when just darting around the middle of the room? | They are looking for food/water/someone to reproduce with. There is nothing more to it. They are not smart enough to know that they are flying around the middle of the room, they are just flying around mostly aimlessly until they stumble upon (usually by smell via their antennae) something delicious or sexy. | 20 | 23 |
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If I think a professor is doing an outstanding job, and feel they deserve recognition, who should I talk to? | I've had a professor for the past couple of semesters that has had a very positive impact on my studies and after talking to my fellow classmates they seem to be in agreement. I've made sure she knows how appreciative I am of her but is there anything more I could do to help her maybe get some more recognition? Maybe discuss her performance with the head of the department or something? She is a visiting professor so is it even worth letting her superiors know when she'll be gone in a year anyways?
I'm not entirely sure what is considered appropriate to be discussed regarding a professors performance and who it would be appropriate to discuss it with, or if anyone at the university, like her superiors, would care what I have to say. I just think, from the perspective of a student, that not enough positive feedback gets back to the professors.
I'd appreciate any advice/recommendations. | I think the department head would like knowing that. It’s kind in person but probably more helpful in a letter that can be used for promotion or an award nomination. You could talk to the head and offer to write a letter for a teaching award for that faculty. And thanks for doing that. Teaching has its rewards but it can be challenging and it is easy to feel undervalued or unappreciated. | 41 | 38 |
Why doesn’t anybody want to find more stable isotopes of existing elements? | With all the talk about discovering new elements, other elements are just left behind. Take astatine, for example. While it theoretically has a stable isotope, it’s still heavier than any isotope discovered or created. It’ll surely be easier to add more neutrons to astatine than try to make element 119 or 120. With the many, possibly unique properties of the those near the end of the periodic table, it seems like a no-brainer to try and look into those as well as discovering new ones. | We are very interested in discovering new elements, and new isotopes of already-discovered elements. And people are actively working on doing this in labs all over the world, every day.
However, it's unlikely that there are any yet undiscovered nuclides which will be stable. | 48 | 30 |
[general]Would telepathically telling kids very difficult concepts like general relativity make them understand? | Imagine humanity that can communicate telepathically without the need for language. Now children are not taught a simpler version of concepts like Newton's gravity rather than Einstein's gravity, but telepathically fed with the highest version of reality we understand? How properly would kids make out a proper representation of reality? Or would that not work and they would need to be fed simple concepts and give incrementally build up on it? | The difficulty with higher order concepts isn't transmission, it's understanding. Children under two aren't even able to understand humor, and can't grasp sarcasm until they're five or six.
Humans are born with incomplete minds; the brain continues to develop until we're about twenty-five, and we experience changes to personality and cognitive ability the entire time.
There are prodigies that can understand advanced concepts at a very young age, and telepathic transmission would probably allow them to learn faster, but beaming the theory of relativity into a typical child's mind wouldn't allow them to understand it any better than trying to teach me to perform cardiac surgery in Esperanto. | 40 | 67 |
[Star Wars] Can regular people learn how to control the force, even on a lesser degree? Or do you need to be born with the affinity? | With extreme concentration, years of dedicated practice, and fully devout belief a person born without force abilities can feel a slight tugging pull of the force on their destiny. It's nowhere near the weakest and most untrained of force sensitives but it is possible. It'll require a lifetime of dedication and perseverance for a very miniscule return that isn't guaranteed. Learning magiks and other lesser extensions of the force are easier to learn but being born with the affinity will always be superior to learning it without the prerequisite genetics. | 24 | 21 |
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How are nerve agents such as Novichok so lethal? How does such a small amount of vapour spread in the body? | Some molecules, like some gases, have fairly unrestricted diffusion through the body.
Toxins often have fairly tight binding to their targets, and what looks like a small amount is actually a considerable excess of molecules compared to the number of their targets in specific organs. | 43 | 52 |
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eli5 how do bugs stick to walls??? | Like spiders, or ants, or just anything that can stick to walls?? Lizards too!! How?? | They all have their own variation of surface-area increasing adaptations that allow them to stick to walls. Like lizards have a bunch of tiny ass hairs on their feet that allow them to stick to walls and ceilings. Suction cups, tiny hairs, and claws are the main adaptations that allow tiny animals to climb shit. | 19 | 16 |
ELI5: Why is a password managing program recommended for extra password security? Doesn't that just give a hacker a single place to get all of my passwords at once if they get through? | Password managers are useful because they can allow you to use much more secure passwords as opposed to passwords that are easier to remember and, probably, easier to guess. It means that when as password database gets stolen, it will take significantly longer for brute-force methods to get your password.
It's safer because when people are looking to break into accounts they generally don't care which accounts they get. They just run the whole list looking for people who did use easy passwords and then seeing what they can steal from the related accounts. They're not targeting you directly. Someone who is targeting you directly and get can get access to your computer (either physically or via the internet) with enough access to do something like steal your password manager file will probably be able to circumvent any passwords you chose anyway.
Even if they do get the file, most password managers use *very* robust encryption. For example, 256-bit Twofish (like is used in Password Safe) is essentially impossible to break on any meaningful timeline even with massive computing resources. | 2,326 | 4,576 |
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ELI5 how do we keep people alive during heart transplants? | In other words when there's no heart attached to the body to pump blood how to we keep the brain and other organs functioning? Also bonus if someone explains how a working heart stays working when moved to another body. | During an operation the circulatory system will be put onto a bypass machine which circulates and oxygenates the blood.
Your heart has its own internal electrical conduction including little natural pacemakers called nodes. If you restart this current the heart and give oxygen to the cardiac tissue the heart will beat again at a constant beat. | 17 | 17 |
ELI5: How is it some people can consume whatever they want and still be lean? | I used to be fat and then I started working out and eating health. I work hard to look the way I do, nutrition is a big part of that. I have friends who can eat whatever they want and they are still fit/lean. Obviously eating pizza and donuts is not health but I am not asking whether it is health or not, just the physical aspect. Most of these guys rarely workout and they have poor diets however, they still maintain a single digit body fat or pretty close to it. With fitness they look even better while still eating like sh*t. | While there must be some natural variation in the degree to which people process and metabolise fat-- in fact, genetic markers for predisposition to weight retention have recently been identified-- it always comes down to the amount of calories ingested relative to the body's needs and ability to metabolise fats, carbohydrates, etc. It's very easy to under- or over-estimate how much a person is truly eating; a small amount of junk food, while likely poor in nutrients and nutrient-quality, will not enable a person to gain weight as much as an excessive amount of healthy food. Since you're not talking nutritionally, from a purely physical standpoint it's literally all about caloric intake. Regardless of what foods are being consumed, if the calories are there, the body will build muscle and store fat. If the calories aren't available, then people stay slim. | 22 | 19 |
[Mass Effect] How is Commander Shepard considered the greatest soldier in the galaxy? | At least that's what fans say.
I have yet to see ANY evidence of that, both canon, or gameplay wise. Are there any specific quotes from the trilogy that supports the theory? Because at the end of the day, she/he is still human, and I doubt he can compare to centuries old Asari Commandos | In terms of raw skill, tactical knowledge, the ability to command or a million other skills? Of course there are people who are better than her. Asari and Krogan with centuries of experience, or Turians who graduated top honors from the best academies all have more education, knowledge and practical skills than a 30 year old human.
But how many Krogan have gone up against a rogue Specter, unbound by even the few rules that shadowy organization, and come out on top? How many Turians have gone to the center of the galaxy and survived? Can you point out an Asari that stared down a Reaper **on foot** with nothing but a laser targeting system slaved to the guns of an entire fleet and then WALKED AWAY?
Plus, it was Shepard alone who ended the Reaper threat once and for all. Nobody can dispute that fact. She may not have been the fastest, strongest, smartest or most brilliant soldier to have ever lived, but Shepard did the literal impossible multiple times, and deserves to be remembered and honored. | 45 | 21 |
[Warhammer 40,000] Would a chapter serf worship the Emperor? | I know that it's considered unusual for brothers of Adeptus Astartes chapters themselves to worship the Emperor as a divine figure: "Grandpa, not God", as a guy in my gaming group put it. My question is, would a *serf* of a chapter likely share this belief due to the "command environment", or would they probably still believe in the Emperor's divinity the normal Imperial way?
RP question for a chapter serf PC in a *Dark Heresy* 2E game my group is doing this weekend. Voidborn origin (a Strike Cruiser), I kitbashed the Imperial Navy background with GM permission: altered the lore skills to Common Lore (Imperium) free, and paid for Scholastic Lore (Adeptus Astartes) to reflect training as an implant surgeon (Chirurgeon role). | In most cases, serfs who are brought into a chapter are also inducted into their specific customs. Since most marines do not hold the Emperor in a specifically divine light, their serfs also hold the same belief. Although given that serfs are unaugmented humans walking amongst the Emperor's finest servants, they could very likely hold the Emperor in higher regard than the marines they serve. Some might privately hold beliefs in the Imperial Cult, but they might not speak of it openly.
On the other hand, some chapters might be lenient enough to allow their serfs to believe in the Emperor's divinity even if the marines themselves do not. So long as the work is done and done properly, the serfs can refer to the Emperor however they wish. | 18 | 17 |
Why has there been a big effect in commercial real estate market one year into the pandemic..with all the closures and work form home situations? | So I find it a bit strange that one year after the start of the shutdowns, the commercial real estate market isnt in deeper trouble.
.I understand many tenant's have longer leases etc.. but if they haven't been paying our went out of business (like many restaurants did) , the lease length is likely irrelevant. ..
I would have assumed financial issues, but looking at popular commercial real estate REITS they seem to be going up with the market.. what gives? | I work in CRE and can help answer this. A few things:
1) Lending standards are much more strict than they were in 2008, so you are seeing less defaults
2) certain asset classes (mostly hotels and big box retail/malls) have been impacted badly.
3) the effects of the pandemic have been localized. Commercial real estate in Florida is performing much better than in NY. Because Florida’s economy has been more resilient due to lighter lockdown policies. You can see this in Texas or Arizona vs the west coast. In short, the covid recession has been more regional level, than it has been nationally. Look at SL Green’s stock (New York office REIT), they are down 20+% since pre-covid levels. Now look at MAA’s stock (southeast/sunbelt multifamily), they are well above pre-covid levels. | 25 | 135 |
why in programming languages we need constants? | I mean, to a newbie like me it seems insignificant to tell that a value IS CONSTANT, when I can just declare as a variable and give it a value and then not change it at all during the process, I'm quite sure that I'm wrong but I couldn't find someone that can make that clear to me. | Most things aren't really NEEDED in programming, it's all about organisation and showing your intent so that it can be maintained easily.
For example, we just as easily could have everything in one file. There's nothing really stopping us right? But we still bother to separate everything out into separate files so that it is easier to maintain. The same applies to constants. They are showing our intent (that the value should never change), meaning that if someone is reading our code they understand this.
As a side note, it can also be useful for the compiler for doing some things (where it actually becomes a necessity). | 40 | 19 |
When standing on a frozen pond or lake is it the intramolecular forces of ice or the buoyancy of the ice on top of the water that are supporting you? | *intermolecular thanks u/WeepingSeepage | Intramolecular forces are what hold the atoms within the molecules together – you're thinking of intermolecular forces.
The intermolecular forces are what keep you above the water, because they're what stop the ice from cracking. The bouyancy is what keeps the ice from sinking with you on it.
As a result, you need both of them to stay above the water – if the intermolecular forces are insufficient, the ice breaks and you fall through. If the bouyancy is insufficient, the ice sinks and so do you. | 36 | 20 |
ELI5: A single tree might shed thousands of seeds a year, but most of these won't grow into anything. What starts the growth of a mighty tree? | If you look closely, many trees are surrounded by saplings. Most won’t make it to maturity because there isn’t enough sunlight reaching them under the canopy of large trees. Sometimes, an old tree will die, allowing some saplings to grow until they become mighty and take the place of the dead tree. This type of “growth from death” happens in many ways. For example, some pine cones only open up when they get extremely hot during a forest fire. The fire revitalizes the nutrients in the soil and opens up the canopy, allowing light to reach the ground and new trees to grow. | 1,198 | 2,022 |
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[Star Trek]why Ferengi never invent fiat currency? | it's my understanding fixing money to a hard finite commodity, like Latinum, makes it really hard for governments to do anything about stuff like recessions? | It's important to remember that the Ferengi system isn't just a lifestyle - it is quite literally a religion, and one of holy texts of said religion is The Rules of Acquisition. The Rules very clearly state that "Nature decays, but latinum is forever". | 53 | 32 |
Is a human being morally more valuable than other animals? If yes, why? | As a naturalist, I see no reason to believe a human life is intrinsically worth more than the life of a dog or an elephant. I’m writing about this subject and I’d be very interested to see why someone would disagree (without appealing to supernatural beliefs). | Just look for anything distinctive of humans that someone might reasonably think is morally significant. It doesn’t have to be totally absent from non-human animals, just more developed in humans.
So, intelligence, imagination, artistic capacity, language, and so on. | 23 | 18 |
x-post from /r/academia. Has your mentoring approach changed since your were assistant professor until you became associate/full professor? If so, how? | I have moved from telling people what they should do, to asking questions in such a way as to make them think more carefully about what they can do, and to see possibilities for their own work that they did not see before. | 31 | 62 |
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CMV: religion in many cases is abusive to children | It’s not fair to tell a child that something bad will happen to them if they don’t believe or do what you say. If I told a child that if they didn’t clean their room, a serial killer would come to the house and kill them in such an excruciating way that they will suffer more than they could even logically comprehend- you would think I was a monster. If I believed it, the child would most likely eventually be removed from my care, because regardless of what I believe, it’s still abuse. A child believes in Santa and the tooth fairy and will believe in hell if you tell them it exists. They don’t have the cognitive function to do anything but. Therefore, whether you’re telling them about the good or bad parts of your religion, they inherently believe it. To act as if you gave the child some choice in the matter is absolutely ridiculous.
I have seen first hand the indoctrination of children, trust me there is no choice. These kids even go to schools that further propagate the beliefs and deny access to education that might contradict them. I sat in a room full of kids, at a “prestigious” school, as they watched a video talking about how the Cambrian explosion disproves evolution. A class of 18 year olds had no idea when the dinosaurs went extinct and made fun of me for knowing. They spent hours a day in chapel, listening to people tell them kissing your boyfriend or girlfriend is a sin. They used emotions and not logic, they had full classes to teach why other religions and especially atheists are wrong. They made secular a bad word. And science was an absolute joke being taught by someone who told kids the dinosaurs were a hoax and the great flood really happened.
I understand that parents think they’re doing the right thing, but maybe education should be held to a certain standard. I don’t think it should be ok for a parent to remove a child from a place where they’re denied access to information, science and reason, or basic observable truths. As far as the hell aspect of this, I guess that’s harder to stop. But if society made this less acceptable I feel that it would help. I know that people say that To kids because they really believe that their baby will burn in hell. That’s awful, and I wish people would try harder to change that narrative (one I frankly find ridiculous) instead of chalking it up to, it’s none of my business, I have to respect their beliefs. Not all belief deserves respect. A child cannot process something as complex as the idea of eternity, full stop. I could say if you give me all your money you’ll live forever. That claim should be equally as ridiculous to any rational, thinking person. | I think that it's important to recognize that many education systems utilize "appeal to authority" as their primary means of educating people.
Citing religion is an appeal to authority.
Citing law/government is an appeal to authority.
Citing science is also an appeal to authority, unless you happen to personally be a scientist who is actively testing and experimenting with the world. | 16 | 123 |
How important is it to have a Bachelor’s in a related field to the master’s? | Hello vsauce, throwaway account here. So I am a student in a US state university studying science education but do not want to get a master’s degree in the education field. A master’s degree in biological sciences is what I am looking at but I have no idea if my chances of being accepted are good enough because I will not have a “solid” background on biology because my degree focuses more on the education aspect of things. I have a 3.7 GPA currently and have some research experience though no publications. My question is if I want to have a future in being in academia for biological sciences, should I change my undergrad major to biological sciences? I am very interested in teaching and doing research. Also, is it usually a requirement to have a bachelor’s related to desired master’s degree or does your bachelor’s not matter as much for choosing a master’s?
Any help/advice is appreciated!
Another question, if I decide to attend a university in a different country (the UK specifically) are they less lenient on who is able to apply to their graduate programs? | Your undergrad is still relatively related to biology so you’re not too far off the mark or even off the mark at all in terms of graduate programs.
If you have time to change your major without impediment on your graduation date then by all means go for it, if it is what you truly need. To supplement your education and bring attention to your biology skills take and do well on the GRE and do well in relevant courses. Take the biology GRE subject test as well and get good letters of recommendation from people in your biology department. If you have time read the research published by your university and faculty or the faculty of a potential school. Use that to judge the gaps in your understanding and pinpoint where to improve
And in all honesty, your biology education experience, whether you change your major or not will definitely benefit you and set you apart from other applications. Grad students are not just “students.” They are also members of faculty with responsibilities to undergraduates, labs, and courses with educational goals as well as research goals. Your experience with education can be used to show the department how you can benefit thier department. Your own knowledge and potential is great but getting into grad school is also about how well you fit into the departments needs and wants | 13 | 28 |
Why time slows down if you travel at very high speeds? Is there a way to intuitively understand this? | It's very easy to understand gravity once we imagine space as a fabric, and heavy mass bodies as iron balls on the fabric bending it when we hold the fabric stretched out. It's very intuitive to understand the concept of blackholes this way, and why light cannot escape from a blackhole. Is there a similar example to understand special relativity? | One way to think about it is to remember that time is a dimension just like each of the three dimensions of space are. Even if you're at rest in space, you're still travelling through time. In fact, it turns out that:
a) Your speed through time is, in some well-defined way, the speed of light, and
b) Even when you're not at rest, your total speed through spacetime is again the speed of light.
Let's say you start moving through space. Your total spacetime speed still has to add up to a constant speed (the speed of light), so your speed through time drops. What this means technically is that, relative to an observer at rest, your clocks will tick more slowly.
Side note: As long as you're travelling at a constant velocity, this situation is symmetric. You will claim to be at rest, and that your clock is ticking normally, while the observer who sees you moving looks to you to be themselves moving, and to you *their* clocks seem to be ticking more slowly than yours. | 28 | 15 |
Why does squinting improve eyesight? | I personally wear glasses and I've always wondered why squinting helps out when I'm not wearing them. How does squinting work, and how does it improve focus temporarily? | Squinting is helpful for people whose eyes are not perfectly shaped. The lens of the eye works to collect light over a larger aperture and focus that light in phase to a point on the retina. When the eye is not properly shaped, the rays coming in from the exterior portions of the lens do not add perfectly on the retina with the light from the center of the lens. (In fact, there IS generally a point where these rays add coherently, the problem is that this point occurs in front of or beyond the retina.) Squinting helps by cutting out the days coming from the extrema of the lens, which without correction, are only serving to blur the image sensed by the eye. However, there is a price associated with this. First, you're reducing the total light which can enter your eye. Even if the resolution is slightly enhanced, this technique will fail you in a dark environment where light intensity was low to begin with. Second, squinting also strains your muscles and slightly deforms the eye, which can lead to fatigue and headaches after a while. | 14 | 30 |
Do bigger ears mean better hearing?( applied to every animal not just humans) | When i ask this i mean does something like a pigeon with no ears hear better or equal and why, or does a bat hear better because of their big ears and are not just for echolocation. | You need to first quantify what is meant by "better".
I'll give you an example with humans.
Ears are really multipart systems with external and internal components, which work in concert with our brains. Pigeons have ears, but their external components aren't pronounced. This may help them hear when they're flying because there's less air turbulence.
All animals hear best within a given range of frequencies. For humans that frequency range is centered around the output range of vocal chords. We prioritize speech, but most of that optimization (in the ear itself) is realized in the number of neurons dedicated to detecting those frequencies, attached to hairs which vibrate at those frequencies, and a system whereby your brain can actually change the tuning of the ear to focus on a narrower/broader range of frequencies when you're struggling to make something out.
The external ear, with it's funky pronounced ridges and cavities primarily helps to locate the directions of sounds, and increase our ability to process them precisely in general. Imagine you had a flat ear like a pigeon. Someone hits a drum from your 3 o'clock which produces a sound wave vibrating around 90 Hz or so. If you have a flat ear the actual waves, after bouncing around a bit, are going to span some range around 90Hz, coming in at slightly different times. Those differences are largely modified by the things in your environment.
Your funky ridged human ear has a specific pattern for how it changes the timing and frequency of the sound waves it collects, from different directions. When you were a baby your brain learned that sound waves coming from various directions are modified in those ways, and uses that to localize where sounds originated from.
This is also very helpful with "the cocktail party problem". There are other systems involved, but essentially correlating the movement of lips, **the direction in which you're facing**, the specific frequency of the person you're speaking with, tuning the physical properties of the inner ear to be more sensitive to that person's frequencies: your brain is better able to pick out the voice of the person you're speaking with in a crowded cocktail party. This is extremely difficult for Robots at the present time. Consider how often siri/alexa get activated for no reason.
Edit: it's also more difficult for people with ADHD because of the sustained subconscious attention required, but that's a whole other ball of wax | 27 | 23 |
ELI5: How can physicists spend years on solving a single equation ? | Why is it so hard, and what does it entail? | It's not about solving the equation, it's about finding the right equation. It's like finding out (without a cooking book) how a cake is made, it takes trial and error to find out that you'll need eggs, flower, butter, etc but even more time how to prepare it. | 24 | 23 |
ELI5: How can helium be a liquid at absolute zero, if absolute zero is the point where the molecules stop moving (theoretically)? | The answer requires accepting that according to quantum mechanics, atoms and molecules can only have specific energies, called energy levels. You can be in energy level 0, 1, 2, etc, but higher energy levels require the atom to take in energy from the surroundings such as from heat. At absolute zero there is no heat, so every atom or molecule will be in energy level 0 at absolute zero (we call this the ground state). But the funny thing about quantum mechanics is, it teaches us that everything has what is called "zero-point energy". This is the energy of the ground state, and you can never have less energy than this. For a very light atom like helium, the small amount of zero-point energy is actually enough to make the atoms move around a lot. This is called zero-point motion. (All things experience zero-point motion, but for bigger atoms or molecules these motions may be too small to make any noticeable difference). For helium, these zero-point motions prevent the atoms from coming close enough together to solidify, so even at absolute zero it exists as a liquid.
However, if you compress the liquid helium enough, you can form a solid, but only at pressures above about 25 atm (25x atmospheric pressure) for helium-4, the most common isotope. Even in the solid form there are still large zero-point motions, so it doesn't behave like a classical solid where every atom has an exact fixed location. Because of this, solid helium is referred to as a quantum solid.
Source: 5th year graduate student using quantum calculations to model solid helium. | 495 | 824 |
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ELI5: How did ancient people know that the earth was round? | The two major arguments known to the ancients were these:
* Observing that if you travel northwards or southwards by any specific distance, the angle of the North Star above the horizon will also change by a specific predictable amount, implying that the Earth’s surface has a consistent curvature, like a sphere.
* Observing that the shadow the Earth casts on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is always a circle, and realizing that the only shape which always casts a circular shadow is a sphere. | 135 | 34 |
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CMV: Androids in Detroit:Become Human are not alive | I played this game a few days ago and I hold the belief that Androids should not be given the status of a living being and/or should not be granted any rights. My reasons are as follows -
1) They are human made in labs from scratch. They don't occur in nature.
2) If some rewiring is done or some components are removed from them, they will become emotionless no matter how much one tries to "Awaken" them. This is based on the fact that a certain amount of advancement (technologically) is needed in that android for it to have all the things it's needs to Awaken. Otherwise, they're just as inanimate or lifeless as a toaster, and no one can Awaken a toaster.
3) Yes, Androids can die and their memories can be formatted, which is seen in other living beings too, but they can also upload their memories in its entirety to another server and if at all they "die" they can be brought back to life via fixing. That cannot be done to any other living being.
For the time being, these are my reasons, if I get some comments, I will clarify further if needed.
EDIT - There's so many responses and all of them delve deep into the subject that it'll take me some time to read, think about the points presented and analyze it. And after that, after researching further, I'll provide my answer, out of respect to all the people who have invested their resources in this post of mine, so I might not post answers immediately, and it might take some time.
Also to everyone present here, I am having a very really great experience engaging in such a stimulating debate with all of you, as I'm getting to see many different arguments and getting a chance to educate myself further. So thank you for taking your time out to comment on this post 😄 | 1. Humans make other humans from scratch, without humans there wouldn’t be humans made, the materials needed to make a human or an Android are all completely natural. Furthermore, humans use IVF to “make” babies in labs. And we’ve also created sperm from stem cells independently from someone having sex and the same can be done with eggs. It seems to me that there isn’t much difference between a human being created in a lab and an Android. If we do reach a point technologically that we can create human babies completely independently from people then would you consider those humans to not be “alive”?
2. An analogue to rewiring an Android to erase emotion is the lobotomy in humans, and we certainly are capable of damaging someone’s brain enough to render them without “agency” over their actions and thoughts. This happens too when a human recieves serious damage to the brain like in a car crash or concussion.
3. This cannot be done now, but just like seemingly “sapient” androids it depends on the technology. It might be accomplishable, we just aren’t advanced enough yet. | 36 | 27 |
Could you sequence the dna of cancer cells and then compare it to the persons healthy cells to locate the genetic mutation and then edit the dna of the cancer cells causing new cells to just be normal again? | Yes and no.
Yes, as in technology to alter genes exists. It works quite well. We also know from most cancer species what genetic cause there is. So in theory you could alter the gene back to normal.
HOWEVER
The alteration of live human genome is not yet proven to be safe enough. You could cause other, maybe worse, random alterations.
Also, most cancer species build up a lot of different mutations over time to actually become cancerous. You would have to change a lot back to normal.
In addition, tumors have a lot of cells. To actually get to alter ALL of those cells is a challenge. Tumors are also quite heterogeneous so not every cell might need the same alteration to go back to normal. If you leave a couple of cells untouched the tumor may come back.
The now most researched option for gene editing is to cure hereditary forms of cancer. Then you have a gene alteration that already exists in your primal cells, which is easier to alter because there are way less cells you need to treat. You also don't have cancer yet, so there is likely only one mutation that needs to be "fixed". So that will be more in the field of embryonal selection and gene editing. | 18 | 21 |
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Does Earth get energy from stars other than the sun? | I know the sun is our biggest source of energy on Earth, but do we also get some energy from all the other stars out there? We can see them so we're at least some light is getting here, but are they contributing any even remotely significant amount of energy to us? | If by energy you mean light and heat.
Then essentially yes as being able to see the stars at night is there light (which is a form of energy) reaching us. But in the main way earth 'uses' the Suns energy, photosynthesis other stars do not contribute at all really. Could go far more in depth but not really sure if this is what you mean. | 22 | 50 |
ElI5: How is it that binoculars magnify things only when viewed from one direction, but both sides of a magnifying glass are magnifying? | Optics confuse me. | Binoculars line up two lenses (one pair for each eye), plus might have some mirrors in them to adjust light path length. One of those lenses on either side is large to gather lots of light, the other is small to focus it for your eye. So it's not symmetric, meaning you can't flip it around and the light will work the same way.
A magnifying glass is only one lens, and it IS symmetric. So you see the same image from either side if you flip it. | 12 | 61 |
How do computers transform 3D models using matrices? | I know that computers store the vertices of a 3D model. However, are they stored as vectors in 3-space or 4-space? I have seen texts showing 3D transformations using 4x4 matrices but I don't understand what advantage will it have over just using 3x3 matrices (what's the advantage of using matrices anyway, aren't there other methods of transforming objects?). | The difference is that with 3x3 matrices you can't do translation. With a matrix you basically do a weighted sum over the elements in your vertex. If you wanted to translate your vertex, say the adding the vertex (0, 1, 0) to your base vertex (0, 0, 0). It is impossible to do this with a normal 3x3 matrix since all values will be multiplied by 0.
So what is done is adding a 4th dimension which is set to 1. Any translation you want to do can just be placed in the fourth column of your transformation matrix. The base vertex would now be (0, 0, 0, 1), and the translation can be accomplished by the matrix:
&#x200B;
|0|0|0|0|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|0|0|0|1|
|0|0|0|0|
|0|0|0|1| | 14 | 18 |
ELI5: Why is the United Airlines CEO testifying before the US Congress? | I'm curious what the US government has to do with the dragging incident. | Airlines are subject to all sorts of regulations and policies enacted by laws Congress creates, enforced through the FAA, etc. When incidents like this occur, then Congress wants to investigate what happened and why, and see if they need to clarify existing rules & regulations or add new ones to prevent similar incidents. | 31 | 32 |
ELI5: Can we strengthen our immune system like our muscles? If so, is there a limit to how strong our immune system can get? | We can and do strengten our immune system. We do this simply by getting ill, when we do our body creates the antibodies to fight that illness and then it store the "memory" of how to make them so next time we get that illness we can fight it off quicker and easier. (this doesn't work for flu because the flu virus is always changing so every winter it needs different antibodies) | 34 | 58 |
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ELI5: Why aren't humans of different races divided into different species? | There's a brown bear, a white(polar) bear, a black bear, and a bunch of other bears in between. They are all their own individual species. There are three different species of gorillas, all of them look marginally different from each other, and yet humans, who happen to look marginally different from each other, are all one species. Is it a race issue? Were scientists afraid that KKK members and the like would look down on races other than white as "not people?" Is there something else that separates bears and gorillas, and not enough of that thing to separate humans? What defines a species? What is enough to make one species of animal classified separately from the rest? | Two animals are considered to be of different species if they can't produce fertile offspring. This isn't the case for people of different races. Furthermore, race is not considered a particularly meaningful category in biology. | 52 | 41 |
Why do cells have a copy of the whole genome instead of only the genes they need? | It isn't energetically expensive to copy ALL the DNA when the cell undergoes mitosis? Neurons use a very different set of genes than, for instance, hepatic cells, or muscular cells. Why not just have a copy only of the genes they need? | First of all, since an organism evolving multicellularity would already have a mechanisms for silencing genes in response to it's environment, these mechanisms are probably the easiest way for different cell types to evolve. This is what we see when we compare the silencing mechanisms in say yeast, to humans. Yeast have only one cell type, but the systems they use to turn off say, their sporulation genes, are related to what we use to switch off brain genes in our muscles. Elimination of DNA would require some complex, reliable targeting mechanism not present in single cells. No sense evolving wings from scratch if you can just repurpose your arms.
It's also worth noting that some ciliates (single celled organisms unrelated to plants animals or fungi) DO eliminate some of their genome, when they create a second, larger 'Macronucleus' (this nucleus does most of the work in the cell, but is never replicated. they have a second smaller germline nucleus which is used to reproduce).
This mechanism hasn't evolved in complex organisms, and one could speculate that a complex organism has too much to lose by re-arranging it's DNA. Broken DNA can lead to random re-arrangements and deletions, so one slip up could lead to a cancerous cell and kill the whole organism.
Remember as well that the DNA exists in only 2 molecules per cell -replicating it might not offer a large energy saving compared to maintaining a complex system of proteins to do the genome elimination.
Also note that genes can get re activated - such as when amphibians regenerate lost limbs. Simpler animals are even better at this, so it may have been important even if humans have lost it.
It's possible of course that if we could run evolution on again a few thousand times we'd end up with complex genome eliminating organisms some or even most of the time. Evolution just builds on the first solution it hits. This isn't necessarily the only solution it could have hit, or the best possible.
| 26 | 117 |
CMV: the current conversation about racial statistics and policing is misleading and will make society less safe | During President Obama's remarks about the recent shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile he cited several statistics about how black Americans were more likely to be pulled over, searched, and shot than white Americans. The implicit argument being that we should strive for a society in which all races are pulled over, searched, and killed by police at a ratio equal to their proportion in the general population. The other implicit argument being that any disparities in policing by race are due to bias against those races and not disparity in criminal activity by race.
This way of thinking is completely backwards in my opinion and focuses too much on the outputs of the system and not the inputs. Let's say we achieve a hypothetical situation in which all races are policed at the percentage of their makeup in the general population. Would this be a just system? If you believe that all racial groups are committing the same level of crime it would be, if not then it would be an unjust system. What kind of policies would need to be enacted to support this type of policing? Should police departments stop policing certain races once they hit their quota of traffic stops for the month? I believe that officers will be less likely to police minority groups due to fear of racial bias. This will make society less safe.
Things that could change my view are statistics that certain races are being targeted by police disproportionatly to the amount of crime committed by that group. Or an argument on how a society could be just by achieving racial equality in policing statistics as an end goal.
Personally I believe that the problem is misuse of police power and excessive force independent of race. I think that the racial component is divisive when we all have an interest in effective policing.
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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!* | Using racial statistics and data focuses on a lot of different issues regarding being black in America then just the output. It raises the question of why a young Black man is so much more likely to be pulled over, searched or shot by the police, and a thorough answer will focus on racism of course, but also poverty, poor educational opportunities, drug prevelance and even the likelihood of a less stable home growing up. Ignoring racial statistics ignores a racial problem. And while we are talking about the output than does not mean we are ignoring the input. In fact, the biggest alleged culprit is department-wide police racism (Philando Castile) and failing to follow procedure already in place (Freddie Gray). These are definitely inputs that would change the statistics without plundging the metaphorical thermometer into ice water. | 13 | 86 |
What would far left and far right platforms look like if they were well informed by objective economics, but still had their normative values? | What would far left and far right platforms look like if they were well informed by objective economics, but still had their normative values?
To what degree is neoliberalism normative?
Can it be separated into objective factual believes, and fundamental moral believes? | I can't answer, sadly — but great question. I'll be following closely to see if someone qualified can answer.
Two clarifying questions, though:
* Can you give an example of a far-left platform that you think isn't, or may not be, informed by objective economics? Are we talking Bernie Sanders or Nicolás Maduro — or do you mean really far left; Mao and Stalin?
* What do you mean by "far right"? Are we talking Neo-Nazis or do you just mean free-market, small-state economics taken to its furthest extreme, without necessarily any nationalist component?
EDIT: I'll also be interested to see what economists make of whether or not economics is objective. | 23 | 73 |
eli5 Why do camera lenses need to focus on something? Why can't they just render an image in which everything is clear? | Or maybe only some types of lenses work like that? | Every type of lens works like that, including your eyes.
Lenses take light rays entering them and force them to converge at a single point. Exactly how far this point is from the lens depends on the angle of the light rays entering the lens, and so it depends on how far away the source of the light is from the lens.
The image sensor in a camera is a single flat plane, and so only light sources from a single plane are ever in focus, if the light source is further away then the light gets focused in front of the sensor, if it the light source is closer than the focus distance then it gets focussed behind the sensor.
There is a caveat to this in that while only one distance away is perfectly in focus, there is a range of distances which are close enough that they are indistinguishable from if they were in focus. The size of this range is the Depth of Field (DoF). Lenses with very narrow openings have a very deep DoF, lenses with very wide openings will have a very shallow DoF. The reason for this comes from the idea of a pinhole camera, if you force light through a small opening it will naturally become focused due to the restriction of possible angles. | 248 | 281 |
When a tree (or other land plant) is immersed in water, what does it die of? | Let's pretend the water only just covers the tree/plant, so light is still available. Does it suffocate due to lack of oxygen? Does the water leach essential chemicals out of leaves? Both? Does the water just block enough light it starves? | Plants need oxygen to metabolize the sugars they have produced all day. They do proportionately more of this at night to put the stores energy to growth, and maintenance. Unless they are adapted to aquatic life, they can’t access the oxygen their mitochondria need. | 14 | 19 |
How much does your PhD supervisor’s reputation impact how others view you and/or your job prospects? | I am a PhD candidate co-supervised by 2 professors (one senior, one very recent assistant prof) who work very closely together and have divisive reputations. I would describe them as “radical.” Some people adore them, while others find their highly non-traditional approaches (e.g. kind of rabble-rousers, intentionally publishing in non-academic journals, pushing the limits of the system) off-putting. Two (!!) committee members actually left the committee due to internal disagreements. It’s been a little difficult logistically for me as a student, but I’ve learned a lot and at this point I’m almost done.
I admire and respect what they do, but am more mainstream. As I go on the job market, how much will hiring committees automatically associate me with them? Just curious if I should even bother applying to more conventional departments where their research might be seen as antagonistic.
TIA! | For jobs at research-focused, PhD-granting institutions, probably a moderate amount, but entirely dependent on how much your work looks like theirs. At all other institutions, probably doesn't matter at all unless "outside the mainstream" means controversial at the level of public discourse, i.e. racist, sexist, or dubiously ethical methods.. | 37 | 46 |
ELI5: what makes different blood types different? ie; O neg. and A pos. | Different blood types are based upon things called antigens, these are found on the surface of the blood cell and help your body know the cells are your own. There are two different (major) blood cell antibodies leading to four different (major) blood groups - A, B, AB, O - A blood group has A antigens, B blood group B antigens, AB blood group has both A and B antigens and O has no antigens. The compatibility of blood groups is based on antibodies (the things that show that your antigens are your own). A antibodies attack A antigens and B antibodies attack B antigens. blood group A produce B antibodies, B produces A antibodies, AB produces no antibodies and O produces both A and B antibodies. This means that any blood group is compatible with itself as well as meaning that O is a universal donor and AB is a universal acceptor. | 13 | 18 |
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Is String Theory an actual scientific theory? | Just got into a discussion with someone who didn't understand that a scientific theory was not just a guess. In trying to explain this, we got to String Theory, when I realized I was under the impression that was something that wasn't agreed upon by the scientific community. | So the problem is that even in science there are two definitions of a theory. There's the one you're probably thinking of - The theory of evolution and so forth. Things that are supported by a lot of evidence. And then there's the theoretical physics definition, which is something like "A Lagrangian and its properties", or more simply, "A theoretical framework that allows you to calculate things". As there is no evidence for string theory yet, it falls into that latter category. | 25 | 31 |
[LOTR]What do underground dwarven cities, like Moira, do for food? | Dwarven cities are often built deep underground, sometimes in very inaccessible locations. Importing enough food for everyone would require a massive infrastructure, both underground as tunnels and above ground as roads. Erebor had the lake nearby, but how did a city like Moira feed its people? I don't recall seeing any large roads nearby, and the main entrance isn't very large. | They probably had small farms that grew everything they needed for staple foods and imported more exotic luxury foods from the surface. The dwarves are very pragmatic and stubborn so eating a diet of largely dark dwelling foods like tubers and fungus wouldn't be a major issue. And they possessed enough light sources and engineering know-how to keep something akin to hydroponics and greenhouses viable. | 27 | 15 |
ELI5:How do historians or linguists decode and translate an ancient language that hasn't been spoken in a long time? | I just don't even know where one would start. | I suppose it depends on what the circumstances are. In cases like Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, there wasn't anything that could be done until we got our hands on the Rosetta Stone.
Basically, we have two options depending on how ancient it is and if there is text surviving from it.
If we have some sorts of texts from the language, they are compared to languages that are children of that ancient language. We can see residual words, phrases, sounds, and grammar from the children that can be compared to the parent language. We can then piece together different translatable portions so we can use context to determine other portions. It's certainly a very difficult task, and it's near impossible to make a full reconstruction without something like the Rosetta Stone in which a language still in modern use (sort of) is directly translating the unknown language.
The more challenging alternative is reconstructing an ancient language with no existing language data. In this case, the only thing that can be done is reconstruct a theoretical proto-language since there is nothing existing that can prove anything. It involves painstaking analysis of data on words, sounds, and grammar of languages born from that hypothetical language.
It becomes a game of "what words seem to look similar in most of these languages? how can we reconstruct a proto-form from the similarities in those similar words (fake example: wodar, wuter, woter= possibly woter?)? how can we explain places where not all languages share a similar pattern/word for something?"
Proto-language construction is seriously a headache, and requires a lifetime dedication to something that can't be proven and may never truly be complete.
Re-construction translation is also quite challenging, but fruitful and enriches our understanding of history in a big way. It's very similar to cryptology, since it's about decoding a system of coding (turning ideas/words in your head into words out loud/on paper) through puzzle-solving and looking at related codes to draw out similarities (which is why Navajo was such an uncrackable code during WWII...they couldn't draw on past codes' characteristics since it was built on nothing we were used to in codes OR in language grammar in real languages)
TL;DR: Very patiently, with luck and a very problem-solving oriented mind. Also, wall of text. Apologies. | 38 | 83 |
[Avatar TLAB] could an air bender condense a gas into it's liquid state? | If they could would they still be able to bend it? | In order to turn oxygen into its liquid state, you would need to do one of two things:
1. Make it colder, but only water and fire benders seem to be able to change the temperature of their elements.
2. More likely: they'd need to increase the pressure of it. Essentially, they'd have to take air and squeeze it into a tiny ball, but it would take a very large amount of energy to compress air to the point of it turning into liquid. At that point, they would need to focus all of their energy on compressing the air, and wouldn't really have any leftover energy or momentum to do anything with the liquid oxygen. Plus, once they bend it and (for example) throw it at someone, the pressure will be released and it will go back to being a gas almost instantly.
*Edit: forgot about lava benders. Vibrating the molecules in earth fast enough would turn them into lava. Still less energy than point 2.* | 48 | 53 |
If diamonds are the hardest material on Earth, why are they possible to break in a hydraulic press? | Hydraulic press channel just posted this video on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69fr5bNiEfc, where he claims to break a diamond with his hydraulic press. I thought that diamonds were unbreakable, is this simply not true? | Hardness is a separate property to Strength and Toughness.
Hardness is the measure of how resistant solid matter is to permanent shape change when force is applied.
Strength is a measure of the extent of a materials elastic/plastic ranges.
Toughness of a material is the maximum amount of energy it can absorb before fracturing.
If you were to look at the bottom of the press you would see scratches left by the diamond, because it is hard.
The diamond breaks because it has low toughness. | 3,678 | 3,581 |
Are there any strong reasons to still consider logical monism or a “One True Logic” in light of all the non-classical logics that have been developed? | I know there has always been some debate concerning whether or not a certain logical system (like classical logic) is the correct one, especially when it comes to propositional claims about the external world we inhabit. The Philpapers survey from 2009 shows a clear majority (51.6% classical : 33.1% other : 15.4% non-classical) in favor of classical logic (I'll assume the question refers to which logic they believe to be correct when it comes to reasoning, but there are really [several different interpretations](http://lemmingsblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/philpaper-survey-classical-or-non.html) of that particular question, which may have influenced the results).
I would also consider myself a proponent of classical logic as the correct logic when it comes to evaluating the world as it is (though not necessarily how it relates to reasoning, especially when it comes to the inconsistent beliefs many individuals hold). I would say that my philosophical worldview (there is a mind-independent external reality that operates on some deep, fundamental principles) heavily influences this, as I don't believe in any inherent fuzziness that might be amenable to a multi or many-valued logic, and I certainly don't believe in true contradictions (whatever the hell that would even mean).
With that being said, what are the best avenues one could take if they wanted to show that classical logic (or [some other logic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Ross_Anderson#Philosophy_of_logic)) was "better" than all the others when applied to uncovering the nature of reality? In addition, has any progress been made when it comes to the program of [Universal Logic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_logic), which would uncover the foundations or similarities between every logical system conceivable?
Any input on this is greatly appreciated. | Well, here's a way of putting some pressure on the way these debates usually go. Logic is usually seen these days as an investigation of what follows from what, or logical consequence. This helps non-classical logics get off the ground: in many circumstances, ideal reasoning practices don't seem to operate according to the laws of classical logic. We can thus say that there are a variety of formal systems which work well in different applications, and say that there's no one true logic.
However, not everyone in the history of logic has thought of logic as a model of our ideal reasoning practices. Some (such as Kant and Frege) have thought instead that logic is best understood as the form of thought, and that logical laws are constitutive of thought itself. If that's true, and there's a unity of thought in virtue of which is has a form, then it would seem that there could only be one true logic (though what makes it a "true" logic turns out to be something quite different from how we tend to think of it these days). Granted, nothing I've just said requires that the form of thought is classical logic, although it's worth noting that many of the people who held this view were also proponents of classical logic.
Anyway, I'll be doing an r/philosophy discussion on this stuff (with more detail) in 5 or 6 weeks. | 10 | 30 |
ELI5: How does trade work between the 28 members of the European Union internally and (more importantly) as a group with the rest of the world? | Who contributes which goods/services and how much? Who makes proposals and agreements and who can shoot them down? how is the income divided? How are resources pooled between the 28 countries? Would a war between one of the 28 and another nation (say spain/argentina) effect how the other 27 trade with either? | Trade for the most part is not between nations but between companies and people.
Governments don't really get all that much involved much at all on trade inside the EU anymore than US states would be involved in intrastate commerce in the US.
The EU as a whole negotiates deals with other countries or unions of countries. for the most part those aren't deals like selling a certain quantity of some product, but setting down the rules by which corporations and people in the countries can trade with each other.
Agreements are between the EU and foreign countries are negotiated as a whole because there is strength in numbers.
The EU collects due from its members and uses that money for various projects in the EU. The poorer countries in the EU mostly get more money invested into them locally by the EU than they pay into it.
As for defence, the majority of EU nations are also in NATO and the EU treaty itself has mutual defence clause in Article 42.7. If a member country gets attacked and invokes this article the rest of the EU would support them. A war that was waged offensively by an EU member would more ambiguous but also far less likely.
There are currently movements in progress to further unite and integrate the militaries of the countries with one another. | 47 | 154 |
ELI5: Is eating food off the ground in any way beneficial to your immune system? | I'm sure we all know the type: someone drops part of their sandwich on the ground, picks it up, eats it, then claims that they are, "strengthening their immune system" by deliberately exposing themselves to whatever was on the floor.
Is there any truth to this? It seems to logically follow that giving your immune system targets to work on will keep it 'up tondate' and active. But do people who do this get sick less than people who don't? | your immune system is like the borg. it is very adaptable. once it encounters one enemy, it'll be able to adapt to it and fight it off next time (assuming, that you survived the first encounter).
being exposed to germs, bacteria, and viruses invoke your immune system. once your immune system is familiar with a certain pathogen, it can fight it. but your immune system needs to survive the exposure. there is a "general strength" of your immune system, the more pathogens it's familiar with, the stronger it's overall response (ie a higher white blood cell count, which is basically your soldiers)
so someone who has lived in a very dirty environment will likely be much more able to fight off a new pathogen vs someone who's immune system has never been invoked (ie living in a clean room.).
one way to artifically strengthen your immune system is by vaccines, which are basically the pathogen but in a much weakened state so the average immune system will have no problem fighting it. | 26 | 23 |
Does six minutes of sun exposure 10 times throughout the day provide the same tanning (skin damage) effect as one continuous hour? | There are two things going on when you tan:
UV-B, high-energy UV light, induces DNA damage (the formation of pyrimidine dimers). Skin cells sense this and upregulate the production of melanocytes.
UV-A, lower-energy UV light, strikes melanin and oxidizes it. They also can produce reactive oxygen species (ROS), which can also cause DNA damage.
There are three phases of tanning:
* IPD - immediate pigment darkening. This is the result mostly of redistribution of melanosomes (the organelles that hold melanin, the human skin pigment). This clears up in a few minutes or days and is transient.
* PPD - persistent pigment darkening. This is the result of oxidation of melanin, which makes it darker. This also clears up in a few days, once the modified melanin is cleared.
* DT - deep tanning. This is the production of new melanosomes, which persists for weeks or months (depending on the individual and how stable their melanosomes are).
The first two will depend only on the total dose of radiation you encounter, since they don't involve any synthesis; they are the product of direct chemical action. The latter, since it involves upregulation of the gene pathways involved in melanogenesis, is likely to respond to acute dosage, since transcription of RNA has a half-life - more damage encountered over a short period will result in a robust upregulation of the relevant pathways, while a low level of damage over a longer period will probably not. | 128 | 460 |
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Do neutrons bound to stable atoms decay the same way protons do over long timescales? | As in do the protons in an atom have to decay first untill the atom becomes an unstable isotope, making the neutrons decay into protons, and then the newly formed protons decay again. Or can neutrons decay into elementary particles directly in a similar way protons can?
I know that the existance of proton decay is not confirmed, and some scientist may even say its unlikely. But does the hypothesis also include bound neutron decay? | A nucleus containing protons and neutrons fills two sets of quantum states, one for neutrons and one for protons. You then calculate the total energy for that configuration.
Now you check what would happen to the energy if you fill the same quantum states with one more proton and one less neutron, plus an electron and an (anti-) neutrino. If the total energy is less than what you originally had, one neutron will beta decay to a proton.
It is the total energy of the system that decides if the system is stable or not, not the properties of the individual constituent particles. | 58 | 492 |
ELI5: Given its once immense popularity, how did Latin become a 'dead language'? | Latin evolved into the other romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc). So in that respect it had the same the fate of almost all human languages, which is that they evolve over time into new languages.
But second, Latin was also *kept alive* in its original form. This is a lot more rare, and only happens to languages that are especially prominent for some reason (in Latin's case, as the language of learning and religion for much of Western Europe).
So you get this weird dichotomy where the language still exists (classical Latin), but nobody speaks it - instead they speak its children and derivatives. | 23 | 17 |
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What's the point in creating new elements? Would anything further in the periodic table be stable? | The point is to learn more about how atomic nuclei work. Some people are not interested in this, some are. Generally there can be practical applications of synthetic isotopes, like in radiation therapy for cancer, or as catalysts in the nuclear industry, but generally not the superheavy ones.
It is thought that there may be an "island of stability" possibly around element 126, but these would likely still be unstable, just more stable than other 100+ elements. | 14 | 20 |
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Why does the ice in my ice cube tray sometimes climb upwards as if on an invisible wire? | This has been happening for years and years, different ice cube trays and different freezers. I will pour water in my ice cube tray and let it freeze and when I come back one or two of the ice cubes will have a stick of ice about 3cm coming out of the top, a little stick of ice. Is it climbing an impurity somehow? This has always struck me as odd. I have a photo but I'm not sure if I'm supposed to post those here.
Edit 1: I use cheap plastic ice cube trays and I have no idea the strength of the blower in my freezer, I have always rented so I just get whatever random freezer I get, but it's always happened.
Edit 2: All I have ever used for ice is unfiltered tap water.
Edit 3: Tanks for shiny silver! | The ice first freezes at the surface, and can result in a small "hole" of liquid at the surface, through which interior water is forced as more ice forms. The water so expelled forms the spike as it freezes. | 2,444 | 4,068 |
How did nature evolve insects that look like sticks, or leaves, or even snakes? Am I to understand that was just random mutations and natural selection did all the work? | Bear with me here. I'm trying to learn the ins and outs of evolution as it was taught only sparingly in my high school biology classes. I'm just about to finish Richard Dawkins' *The Greatest Show On Earth* and what I feel the entire book is explaining (in between the impossibly frequent and often meaningless tangents) is that random gene mutations and natural selection are pretty well all that has driven the shaping of all modern organisms from our one common ancestor.
So for example, is it true then that nature has, by purely random happenstance, mutated an insect to look more and more stick like over countless generations, thus making them more able to camouflage themselves and survive, that has given us our modern day stick bug? I've seen them look virtually identical to real sticks, which absolutely astounds me.
Now I don't believe in intelligent design after reading about plenty of evidence that smashes it to bits, so I guess I'm just asking if I'm understanding this correctly? (The aforementioned book has not been the greatest, in my opinion.)
But if that is how it's done... then touché, nature. Mind = blown. | Yep, natural selection was the guiding process for the development of the amazing camouflage and mimicry abilities within the insects you are referring to. Mutations occur sparingly within a population, and most are detrimental to the organism. However, there is the rare occurrence that a mutation will boost the reproductive success of an organism. This beneficial mutation will spread to the following generations until the entire population acquires this trait. Keep in mind that insects have been on this planet for quite some time. There has been ample time for organisms to develop some pretty crazy attributes. | 18 | 25 |
What are some examples of two philosophers arriving at the same conclusions based on different methods, arguments, premises and means? | I've always found this idea interesting, that two people can agree on the same conclusion yet arrive at the said conclusion by completely different means. Moreover, not only can the conclusions be the same despite different premises, but at times the interpretation of the conclusion, that is to say, the significance of it and what we should learn from it, can be different. | Schopenhauer showed that the whole world was essentially one through Kantian (and Western Philosophy) means independently of how Eastern Thought arrived at the solution.
It is a clever little argument saying that if there is a phenomenal (world of appearances) and noumenal (world as it is) realm, and there exist different entities in the noumenal realm (say, noumenal_1, noumenal_2, ...), then how could it be possible for noumenal_1, noumenal_2, etc. to be different?
Would they be different in space? No, space only exists in the phenomenal realm, different in time? No for the same reason. Different in causality? Same reasoning. And since individuation of phenomena only exists in space time and causality is thus follows that if there is a noumenal realm it must be in some sense "one". | 17 | 30 |
Why are there fresh and salt water varieties of most aquatic life, but no freshwater cephalopods? | There seems to be at least somewhat-analogous pairings in fresh and salt water for most types of aquatic life, but there doesn't seem to be a single cephalopod that lives in fresh water. Why are there no freshwater octopuses or squids? | osmosis.
Freshwater dwellers have salty blood relative to the water around them. Without a mechanism in place to control it, osmosis would equalise salt concentrations between the animal and the water surrounding it, pumping salt out of the body and flooding it with freshwater. A sodium pump, like that found in freshwater fish species, uses chloride cells on the gill surface to actively absorb sodium and potassium ions from the environment. Any excess water taken in at the same time is excreted as urine.
Marine dwellers have the opposite problem, and need to conserve fresh water while expelling salt. Cephalopods pump seawater through their gills and use their kidneys to filter out fresh water from the ocean. Salts and waste water are channelled through the funnel.
ie, they never developed a sodium pump that would help them cope with osmotic change in freshwater.
www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/16/3670198.htm
| 250 | 469 |
CMV: Employees SHOULD describe in as much detail possible what they didn’t like about their old job while interviewing for a new one. | Employees SHOULD describe in as much detail possible what they didn’t like about their old job while interviewing for a new one.
This question was inspired by a post I recently saw in /r/askreddit.
To begin with, let me state that I’m well aware that the general guideline is that an interviewee should not complain about his or her old job, manager(s) and pay. Don’t tell me, “Well, at my job…” Yes, I know there are exceptions, but that is widely regarded as standard by many in the interviewing process.
As an interviewee, if I’m leaving my current job it’s always certainly because I am dissatisfied with it in some regard. I may want better pay. I may want a position with more responsibility and opportunity. I may see my chances for advancement at my current employer as poor. I may dislike the culture of the company I work for. I may personally dislike my manager and his or her management style.
Each of those is profoundly relevant as to whether or not this new hypothetical job for which I’m interviewing may be a better fit for me than my current one.
As an interviewer, hearing what people dislike tells you every bit as much about them as what they do. If a candidate says they hate their job because their current boss is a micromanager, and you yourself are an extremely hands-on manager, you may want to consider someone.else. if a candidate complains about “drama” at their current workplace, you can be fairly certain they’ll bring a fair amount of it to yours, too. If they say they didn’t like the culture at their current place of employment, you can ask them to clarify and assess how it compares to yours. And there are countless others.
Therefore, I think interviewees should tell and should be asked what they absolutely loathe about their current place of employment, managers, and so on.
| That's great from the employer/interviewer's perspective, but the goal of the interviewee is to get the job. Why would they want to risk shooting themselves in the foot? You can talk about "fit" but it's better from the interviewee's perspective to have multiple job offers and determine fit on their own, rather than being stuck with what someone else thinks would make for a good fit. | 59 | 80 |
[Star Trek] Is the policy of allowing families to serve with Starfleet personnel on board starships seen as a general success? or do you think the policy will be abandoned? | Allowing for a family life aboard a research starship is important for boosting morale and allows for some of our brightest minds to research and explore for years at a time. After all, these are not warships. | 19 | 22 |
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Does psychology overstate early childhood experiences as the primary cause of mental illness because psychological intervention can change maladaptive behaviour but not biology? | Just to clarify, I’m not asking a broad ‘nature vs nurture’ question. I’m wondering if in your view psychologists and therapeutic modalities as a whole have a tendency to overstate early childhood experience because behaviourism is efficacious and biology is complex and difficult to treat. | Changing maladaptive behavior is changing biology. The mind and body are one thing. Changes to how you think are reflected in neuroplastic changes.
Experiences matter and earlier experiences matter more because the brain is more easily influenced earlier in life. It used to be thought that childhood was the only time your brain was plastic at all.
A person never exists independently of their experiences. Epigenetics is the science of how experiences impact genetic expression.
Psychological modalities are about treating problems that are best treated through subjectivity. It is work on the part of the patient to treat something like a personality disorder or trauma, a patient has to participate in their own healing. In many cases, due to the materialistic worldview that is currently fashionable patients resign themselves to something like biological determinism. | 78 | 65 |
[MCU Doctor Strange] Why is combat magic so limited? | Ok, in this universe magic can defy gravity, create portals, heal nerves, travel between dimensions, and so on.
Yet, even when we see two masters go at it, the combat magic is mostly punching with some glowy orange light effects. | Casting and maintaining magical spells requires intense concentration and focus. Witness how simply opening a portal with a sling ring, for example, took Strange months to master. Most of the more impressive feats of magic were done during relatively calm periods, when the practitioner had the luxury of being able to completely focus on the task at hand.
If someone's punching you in the face, it becomes much harder to maintain such concentration. Therefore, in combat, magic is primarily only used to create weapons and/or make alterations to the battlefield to try to find an advantage. No one tries to make a sling ring portal in a fight, for example, because the intense focus and visualization required is almost impossible in the heat of battle.
Ergo, when someone's punching you in the face, you really can't spare the time or effort to try to fight back magically. The best you can hope for is to punch him back, supplemented by your magic as best you can. | 54 | 51 |
What makes a philosopher a philosopher? | What I'm asking is, what is the difference between a philosopher and a layperson?
Also how can a layperson become a philosopher without formal education in philosophy? | An academic philosopher requires a PhD and/or a job at an academic institution and/or publications in academic journals. This is a job with entry qualifications and specific teaching/research tasks.
Laypeople have better or worse philosophical thinking abilities, e.g. clear and critical thinking, comprehension of ideas and arguments, argumentation skills, etc. That makes some of them more philosophically inclined than others, so in a sense they are better at philosophy than others. More engagement with the subject is required though to make them philosophers.
Sometimes people have musings about life, the universe and everything, but their way of thinking about these things is not necessarily philosophically robust nor do they engage with other philosophically works. They may think of themselves as philosophers but that may be overreaching. | 21 | 28 |
[MCU] It's been established in the MCU that the 9 realms are just different planets. But then how did the convergence happen? | The Nine Realms are connected by naturally occurring cosmic phenomena, structures along which wormholes can naturally form. The Asgardians exploit these interstellar tendrils with the Bifrost, which allows them to force open wormholes between these cosmic branches, and travel from world to world.
During the Convergence, all these wormholes in-potentia started opening up. Ultimately just a weird natural cycle that we happen to be in the middle of. | 29 | 30 |
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What created matter? | I would like to know what theories there are regarding how matter was created. | There are many layers to the question, and many open questions as well.
The matter we know was created after a period which we call reheating. During the first instants of the universe, it went into a very fast expansion called "inflationary period". Once this expansion ended, the energy that drove this expansion was converted into kinetic energy and mass of particles.
These very energetic particles were in some sort of very homogeneous plasma, and as the universe was cooling down progressively, this plasma started forming bound states - neutrons, protons.. and during at time which we call recombination, the electrons combined with neutrons and protons to form atoms. | 44 | 58 |
[Spider-man] Can spider-man dodge an attack from the Flash with his spider-sense? | Always when I read his comics in most times when his spider-sense activates either thanks to his advanced reflexes or his increased speed allows him to dodge almost anything.
Now my question is if Flash, being one of the fastest sprinters, could try to attack him, what do you think would happen? Does he hit the blow directly or thanks to his spider-sense would he manage to dodge it? | Pre-cognitively/instinctually detect, as in "sense"?
Yes.
React, to consciously avoid? Not if the Flash was trying to hit him. Spider-Man has been tagged by regular people/debris/slow-than-flash forces plenty of times. | 49 | 18 |
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