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ELI5: How does cold weather cause our noses to run? | The drainage system for your eyes nose mouth and ears all connects in canals and reservoirs in your skull. At lower than normal temperatures (and windy conditions) the pressure of water in the air is lower and because of this any water from your eyes mouth and nose evaporates much more quickly. Your body compensates by releasing more fluid to keep your tissues moist (through tears, snot, saliva). Excess tears and snot meet and drain out your nose, and this is why your nose is runny. | 25 | 53 |
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ELI5: How a battery is able to charge wirelessly | To simplify things, let's think of electricity as movement, say, waves. Waves carry a certain energy, which is why a boat will rock if the sea is wavy.
Now, imagine our boat. Imagine you have on the boat a bathtub full of water. What will happen to the water in the bathtub, if the boat is rocking about on a wavy sea?
If you said the water in the bathtub will be bouncing around, you guessed it right! But how? The bathtub isn't touching the sea!
Easy: the movement of the waves goes through the boat, and shakes everything, including the water in the tub.
The same thing with the wireless charger - it creates a sea of electric waves that rock about everything in a small area around the charger, but only the battery contains material that can become wavey (like the water in the tub), so these electric waves only manifest in the battery as charge, and not in the plastic around it (the boat). | 45 | 15 |
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[Ant man and the Wasp] How do the shrunken vehicles travel at the same rate as their regular size? | The engine rpm would have to increase at an incredible rate. The wheels would have to turn exponentially faster. The transmission....... I am willing to accept "Pym particles" but if there is any plausible science I'd love to hear that first. Thanks! | The square root law states that shrunken materials increase in strength comparitively to the size reduced. Similarily, since the engines move by force applied to the surface of the tops of pistons (reduced by squares, not cubes) the proportions of energy to weight have increased several Pym factors. Finally, since the molecules of the shrunken Pym fuel have remained constant, the energy result is the same as a non-Pym vehicle. The net Pym result is a super strong, super energetic, Pym particle mobile that moves at Pym factors of Pym.
TLDR: PYM PARTICLES!!!!! 'Nuff said. | 99 | 62 |
Eli5: Why did civilizations such as the Pre Dorset, Thule, and Inuit not migrate south if their environments were so harsh and extreme? | I read a few articles where some of these civilizations main focus was keeping warm because they were located so far north. So why would they not migrate more south? | It's a matter of specialization.
In nature, there's a concept called "niche partitioning". If two species are competing for the same resources (food, living space, etc). There are ultimately 2 outcomes:
1) One of the creatures gets progressively better than the other, outcompeting them to extinction.
2) Both creatures specialise into different areas, allowing them to live without having to compete against eachother as much, if at all.
A similar situation can be seen in cultures.
War between different groups was common in the Americas, even before European settlement, and understandably so.
If you're a hunter-gatherer society, and your population is growing, you are going to need more land to hunt in, and you hunting there means others can't. (This is a concept known as scarcity)
Since humans are always the most dangerous predator around, and niceties are only afforded when survival isn't an issue, other people are always a significant problem.
Cultures like the Inuit survived because they understood this, and decided that they'd learn to follow the food, wherever it may be.
There was a choice: Either fight others to maintain hunting territory, or go somewhere that no one wanted to hunt in. They chose the latter, and went further North. They learned how to survive up there when others didn't care to try, and they were lucky enough to succeed. | 932 | 670 |
Why is the man o war jelly fish considered a colony of cells as opposed to one organism? | I'm trying to understand the functional difference between the various zooids in this siphonophore. It seems as though all zooids branch from the same egg (I think? ) so theoretically they should share the same DNA. If they do share the same DNA and essentially differentiate into a few different functions (i.e. gastric or singing) then why are the zooids considered separate organisms and not just specialized cells or organs in one single organism? | So the big difference between a colonial organism and a single multicellular organism is how it forms. Humans and other multicellular organisms all arise from a single cell which divides and specializes to create the whole organism. In the case of the Man-o-war, like many other animals of the Cnidarians has a two-stage lifestyle. One is what you think of when you think Man-o-war, the other is a polyp which resembles a sea anemone. The polyp can asexually divide to create multiple clones which each specialize to become a zooid and form the colonial organism known as a Man-o-war. The important distinction is how they form, they originate as individuals even if they later form a colony. | 96 | 195 |
ELI5: How is there nothing in space? I get that there isn’t necessarily air like we have in our atmosphere on Earth, but how can there be nothing? | Most theories think the universe started out as mostly gaseous, but particles of matter attract each other through the force of gravity (which is something you get for free, as a fundamental property of matter). When matter starts to clump together, voids are left in space - and over a very, very long time, those voids get very large.
There are still gas clouds out in space, but there is a lot of volume of space that contains nothing at all. | 21 | 20 |
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ELI5: Cars have an “idle speed” where the engine still runs even without pressing the gas. What happens when you’re pressing the brake and completely still? How is the engine not harmed since it’s still running? | Automatic transmissions have a fluid coupling between the engine and transmission that allows the engine to run at low RPM without transmitting much torque to the transmission. Imagine a propeller spinning, making the fluid spin, then the fluid makes another propeller spin.
Manual transmissions disengage the clutch so there's no connection between the engine and transmission when you push the clutch pedal in. | 173 | 111 |
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CMV: The label "Feminism" should be dropped for a much more equal and non-gender label. | Please leave the footnote below the following line, but remember to delete this sentence by replacing it with the body of your post.
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So I'll start with saying that I have long considered myself a feminist. I have found myself an advocate and ally for women's groups, LGBT issues, the non-religious, and the like, for many years. Recently, I have found my way over to /r/menslib and believe there are valid societal concerns also held by men. We could easily chase this down into a debate of which group has it worse, which is the oppressor, and how societal change should occur. But I do believe that every identity, label, and belief system holds with it stereotypes and unique issues which limits equal treatment. I have long felt that feminism is movement of equality for all - between all identities. However, I am lately more cognizant of how important labels and titles are and the impressions they give to others.
The term Feminism, however you want to argue it, does imply females or women. Yes, women started the movement and those brave souls should be held in deep respect and reverence for that, but times change and movements change. If the roles were reversed, where Men's Rights groups symbolized equality for all, I think it would be fair to say that most other identities would have a problem with that term. When I've expressed this hope and desire to friends and other allies, I am often told it isn't a big deal and that you can support the movement without supporting the word. True. But if we are advocating changing terms and labels for other issues "fat" --> person of size. "Homosexual" --> gay. "Latino/a"--> Latinx. (I completely advocate all of these changes, just feel we should extend the same philosophy to this term).
So please, CMV that Feminism should be dropped for a much more equal, non-gender, and overall more encompassing label.
> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Groups and movements regularly have broader or narrower scopes.
Take LGBT groups. You have broad groups that deal with all four and beyond (sometimes adding letters, or going for a broader term like GSM). However you also have groups specifically focused on different issues faced by each one. A Bisexual Rights group might focus on things like bisexual erasure, a Trans Rights group could particular deal with the social and legal challenges trans individuals face that the others don't, and so on. These issues will often intersect and intertwine, and a group need not solely concern themselves with their particular subsection, but that doesn't mean the subgroups need to be entirely subsumed by a broader label.
There is a similar issue with Feminism. The most common replacement term, Egalitarianism, is *incredibly* broad. "Equality" isn't just about gender issues but racial issues, class issues, and all other types of inequality under the sun. You could go for a more specific term, like Gender Egalitarianism or something, but if one intends it to *replace* Feminism that means issues specifically related to women will get subsumed into the broad group and you couldn't have a subgroup specifically about issues women in particular face, because that would just be Feminism again. The same would go for Men's Rights groups, which as a smaller and lesser known movement would be even more likely to have their specific voices and concerns lost if they were forced under one indivisible label as opposed for allowing streams of advocacy/thought/etc with specific, gendered labels.
It would be like changing the name of all ethnic and racial equality movements to "Racial Egalitarianism" and not wanting more specific groups like the NAACP or ADL to acknowledge their particular focuses. | 25 | 24 |
[Pacific Rim] Why do the pilots need to talk at all if they're already in each other's heads? Wouldn't they already know what the other wants to do before even saying anything? | It's a logging feature for command to be able to get general notions from their pilots. While the two are indeed closely integrated, they are trained to verbalise many of their intents for the benefit of higher ups that need that information for broader tactical awareness. | 25 | 23 |
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ELI5 How does an EMP work, what exactly would it effect, and what could you do to protect your must have electronics? | An EMP ( Electro-Magnetic Pulse) damages/disables/disrupts electronic devices by inducing current into the circuitry. this causes all sorts of issues with the electronic device( hardware is seeing current/voltage in places it shouldn't and doesn't know how to handle it) and if the induction is strong enough it can cause the circuitry( or really any conductive metal) to heat up and potentially melt.
In order to protect your must have devices that aren't already designed to handle it you would have to put them into whats know as a Faraday cage. essentially a cage of very conductive metal that will 'absorb' the inducted current. The cage should not be touching the electronic device, or if it is the contact point should be insulated from the cage itself.
>That is the real explanation if i were to try and do a true ELI5 it would probably look like this
think of electricity as a bunch of angry pixies running around in wires, the go from place to place and tell the device what to do.
An EMP is basically an explosion of **really** angry pixies. They get into the electric device and disrupt all of the other pixies and cause the device to break because there are too many pixies telling it to do something different.
you can protect a device by putting it into a metal cage that will keep all of the pixies out so that cant bother it any more.
-source- i am a medical device technician and had to learn a lot of electrical theory. Also i call 'em angry pixies because they look pretty when they come out of the wires but they tend to bite alot. | 27 | 17 |
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I need to write my PhD Thesis: Why do I feel like I'm facing a massive insurmountable wall | I need to start and finish in 3 months time or less. I have written 3 papers, one published, one in limbo other will be submitted. I find what I've done to be worth something and I've learnt and grown a lot in the last year atleast.
And yet, when I look at the past PhD thesis in my group, I find somehow that my work is lacking. I find that my glaring inadequacies staring at me, it feels like everyone has done way more than me and I'm piggybacking on other people's work and efforts.
I know I've worked so much on what I've done, but still I face this wall. Mental wall of : How the heck I'm gonna collate all the information in my head into a coherent piece of work.
How the heck I can make it look like I actually did something instead of just dicking around for 4 years.
Can I even add enough information and learn something new to fill in all the glaring gaps in my thesis when compared to what other people have done?
I feel like a mature masters student rather than a successful PhD student.
I haven't taken a proper break in the last 6 months. I feel like taking a break is going to ruin the flow, the pace.
I am very confident in my general experimental capabilities, and yet it feels like things I've done are so unfinished, raw, confusing.
How the heck can I achieve this and smash it, is all this overthinking just some trashy imposter syndrome?
I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed by this, i just wanna do my experiments in damn peace. How do I get over this mental barrier? Any constructive suggestins are appreciated :)
EDIT: Thank you to everyone who offered their suggestions and kind words, it has fortified my conviction a bit more. I've got this !! | First off, don't compare yourself to other students. It's rarely, I'd ever, helpful.
Second, there are two things you can do to help you get momentum writing. First is to plan it out: break it down into manageable chunks, and set some goals. Then, get writing. Only focus on one thing at a time. Pace yourself, build in some rewards, maybe find other people who are writing who you can meet up and write with (many universities have thesis writing groups/bootcamps). You'll be done before you know it. | 19 | 35 |
ELI5: How come when saying "woman" and "women", we change the sound of the o? | Why English words are pronounced the way they are is an extremely complex topic that involves the study of the evolution of languages as well as cultural and societal influences on languages.
You won't get a simple answer here. | 37 | 20 |
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I think that standardized tests are a waste of time and resources. CMV. | Please note that I am not referring to the SATs or other tests of that nature because I can understand why they exist for the purpose of college. I am also American so I am mainly referring to american tests as I don't know much about standardized tesing in other countries. I am mainly referring to the tests issued by each state (soon to be the country) to public schools across the USA.
Curriculum in American schools is heavily based on these tests. So much time is spent in classroom preparing for these tests and teaching kids things that they have already learned, are not ready to learn, or are learning at a good time for themselves. I just think it distracts from learning and more time should be spent in making sure each student learns at their own pace.
Maybe if standardized testing was based on the learning capabilities of each student and not their age, then I would be more open to it. | Standardized tests allow for easier comparisons between schools, meaning that if schools perform poorly then it shows them what subjects they aren't teaching well. Without tests that need to be administered by every school, it would be very difficult to determine how well schools are teaching their students. | 12 | 34 |
ELI5: Why is there only one evolutionary tree on earth? Doesn't this mean that life is extremely rare? | As I understand it, scientists believe that all life on earth has a common ancestor, which formed through natural processes billions of years ago. Why is it that this only happened once? Just like there are different species, why aren't there different, unrelated trees of organisms that originated in a different time/place? If life really only sprung up once on a planet as fertile as ours, doesn't that mean that it's probably extremely rare throughout the universe as well? | There are a couple of possible scenarios:
A) Life formed only once
B) Life formed multiple times and we've failed to differentiate because it was too similar (example, mDNA could have originally been a different life form which has been incorporated, or viruses may extend from a completely different origin point)
C) Life formed multiple times and we've failed to differentiate because we have not yet detected the radically different life (example, silicon based life existing within the mantle)
D) New life forms often, but since first life is abundant, the "new" life is regularly consumed by existing microorganisms. | 59 | 58 |
ELI5: How can I kill a plant by overwatering it, yet propagations of the same plant will grow in water? | Overwatering is not about the amount of water, it's about the frequency of waterings, In fact you can literally inundate most common houseplants in tons of water and they'll be completely fine as long as you let them dry thoroughly afterwards. If you keep the soil damp all the time, not letting it dry up properly between waterings, it will grow bacteria and molds which will suffocate the roots and kill off those delicate root hairs, making the plant unable to suck up water, which will ultimately kill it. This is not a problem in water simply because the lack of soil prevents molds and bacteria from building up. | 9,049 | 7,706 |
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Dear r/askscience: there's no need to tag "evolution" onto the end of every biology-related question. | Evolutionary explanations are often the best and most interesting, but most of the time I feel like people tag that onto the end of their question to add some formality or forced intelligence onto the question. This isn't necessary. If you're curious what causes morning wood, just ask "hey guys, why do we get morning wood?"
I think this will lead to a more open discussion, as opposed to half the thread just speculating on how maybe something evolved.
If we want to keep framing our questions like that, let's get a little more specific:
* Evolution is merely change over time. Natural Selection is just one of the ways that change occurs. It's the only process that makes organisms "better" for their environment.
* Importantly though, natural selection is only one of many forces that drive evolution. Scientist in the field theorize now that neutral forces like genetic drift and flow are far more powerful in how species evolve than natural selection (I'll explain further in the comments if requested).
Which force caused a current biological result is often anybody's guess.
Point being, let's just discuss openly, and try to frame questions where people can answer as specifically as possible, rather than forcing discussion down paths that lead to most people just guessing. | I also would like to add that not everything exists because of some evolutionary advantage. Many things are not genetically encoded or biologically innate, and many people ignore the fact that for human behaviors, cultural forces, which changes far more rapidly, might play a far greater role than evolution.
Likewise, just because something could make sense through an evolutionary explanation doesn't mean that it did. It might seem logical that women prefer pink more than men because "back when we were hunter gatherers, women had to pick berries so whoever like berry-colors were favored," but that doesn't mean that's what actually happened. | 25 | 76 |
ELI5: Why do some clear liquids turn foggy when mixed together? | Working at a bar, have always wondered why clear (pilsner) beer and clear apple cider turn foggy when mixed together. I'm sure there are plenty other examples. How is this, and why are substances clear or foggy in the first place? | There are two ways this very often occurs: either it forms millions of tiny bubbles (like with your drinks, because they form or release a gas) or it forms millions of tiny solid particles (called precipitate) because of their chemistry. There are other ways that this happens, but these two ways are the most common.
Substances are clear because of the arrangement of the electrons in the chemicals. The chemicals that interfere very little get part of the light spectrum absorbed when light passes through, so it looks colored. If the chemicals interfere basically not at all (like water) it looks clear.
Things get distorted through liquid for the same reason lens do: they change light's direction. | 15 | 21 |
ELI5: What factors caused India and China to have such large populations? | I know they are relatively large countries that have been inhabited for a very long time, but so is Europe if taken as a whole. Yet Europe only has about half as many people as just one of these two countries. What historical factors lead to their massive populations? | It's more geographical than historical.
You need to feed a large population. India and China have lots of suitable farmland. Farming takes a great deal of labor so the more people in your family, the better you can farm, encouraging a large population. Nowadays with modern farming methods and fertilizer, you can produce even more food to support a larger population into the billions.
The other regions that have comparable farmland are the fertile crescent (Middle East) and the Nile flood plains, and the United States. The fertile crescent spanning the Mediterranean, Black, and Red Seas is where farming originally began. However, the history of conflicts there have not allowed stable farming in that region. Despite supporting the Ancient Egyptians, the Nile's flood plains have been in decline. Lastly, the US is recently settled and most of the farming goes towards exports and animal feed. | 403 | 314 |
[Quantum Mechanics] How does the true randomness nature of quantum particles affect the macroscopic world ? | **tl;dr How does the true randomness nature of quantum particles affect the macroscopic world?**
**Example :** If I toss a coin, I could predict the outcome if I knew all of the initial conditions of the tossing (force, air pressure etc) yet everything involved with this process is made of quantum particles, my hand tossing the coin, the coin itself, the air.
So how does that work ?
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*Context & Philosophy : I am reading and watching a lot of things about determinsm and free will at the moment and I thought that if I could find something truly random I would know for sure that the fate of the universe isn't "written". The only example I could find of true randomness was in quantum mechanics which I didn't like since it is known to be very very hard to grasp and understand. At that point my mindset was that the universe isn't pre-written (since there are true random things) its writing itself as time goes on, but I wasn't convinced that it affected us enough (or at all on the macro level) to make free plausible.*
| Not sure if this answers your question, but one example that comes to mind is nuclear decay. Quantum effects dictate when any specific radioactive isotope decays and yet the effect is powerful enough to affect the macroscopic world. For example, a single decay at the right time and place could, and probably has at some point in time, mutated the DNA of a developing organism thus triggering an entirely new line of evolution that would never have occurred if that random quantum event had never taken place. | 54 | 199 |
[Mass Effect] Which species (from any fictional universe) would the Salarians choose to uplift into galactic civilisation? | They already uplifted the Krogan and were attempting to do the same with the Yahg. What other species would the Salarians deem worthy? | Salarians uplift species that would benefit them in one form or another. For the Krogan, it was saving the galaxy from the rachni. The Yahg were going to be secretly uplifted, probably much slower than the Krogan, but still ready for any wars that might happen in the future since it seemed the Krogan were on the path to extinction.
So we have to see exactly how other species would benefit the Salarians if they were in the same galaxy.
The Na'vi might make good candidates for another uplifted warrior race. They're big, extremely tough, have an ancient warrior culture, and they seem to be quite adaptable. But they also seem unusually connected to the biosphere of their home moon, so space travel might actually be a problem. We don't know what may happen if a Na'vi is taken from Pandora.
Ewoks, though they seem small and non threatening, possess an unusually dense muscle mass and an alarming capacity for cruelty and deviousness. However, they are limited by their short limbs, like the Volus, so they cannot engage in physical confrontations in the same way a larger and faster species could. That could be too problematic for an uplift. Unlike the Na'vi, however, they don't have the same symbiotic connection to their moon, so taking them away from "home" shouldn't have as many problems.
Qunari would probably be perfect candidates. Intelligent, highly organized, signs of early technological proficiency in the face of magic. They are also much less prone to wild violence, a major step above Krogan and Yahg. Uplifting them from a society centuries away from industrialization would not be fast, remember both Krogan and Yahg were around Earth 20th century technology when discovered. But it would be very rewarding when they reached space flight. Not only as a warrior race, but with their philosophy and culture.
The only thing that needs to be monitored is their main philosophy: the qun. Some Qunari seem to be unable to adapt to their surroundings as well as they should, unable to connect their Qun philosophy to people who do not follow it. This has caused conflict, and will no doubt cause more if a more zealot-like wave of extreme Qun devotion overtakes them.
(Other races on Thedas would be less than ideal. Elves and humans share too many similarities, and humans are already on the galactic stage. Also, depending on how politics shift and change, Elves could be driven to exinction either through war, or just interbreeding with humans until only a hybrid race remains. Some "dalish" may survive, but their numbers will always be small. Nomadic peoples simply cannot sustain large populations. And humans would not allow them to settle down and form a technological society on their own.
Dwarves are too insular and share some of the same physical issues as Volus and Ewoks, though they are not quite as hampered. The presence of surface dwarves proves that they do not depend on being underground, but the majority of their civilization seems to disagree. It would be too difficult to encourage the entirety of dwarf civilization to move above ground so they could work on space flight.)
And if it seems like all of these have a mostly military benefit to the Salarians, you're right. Salarians don't have much of a fleet or army, so they rely on others to stand up when a war cannot be averted through stealth or influence. The Salarians don't need a race competing with them for science or politics. Humanity is already a big enough thorn in the side of some Dalatrasses because of that. The Salarians are arrogant enough to disrupt the natural evolutions of entire species just so they can stay in their ivory towers and pretend to be better than everyone else.
Since /u/calgil wanted to see me write about other races, let's see.
The Draenei are already semi-spacefaring. If their dimension/reality hopping can be considered space flight. It did get them across the stars, but not in a way we'd consider "real". Their limited numbers and settlement on a world already full of violent sapients would be the biggest problem. They wouldn't pose a tangible military benefit to the Salarians until they had the numbers to provide a real army. But their cultural influence and wisdom would rival the Asari. Which might destabilize their political juggernaut.
Of the other races on that world, the Orcs would fit the Salarian's needs best. Like the Qunari, less prone to undue violence, but still with a strong warrior code and capacity to fight. They are also more technologically adept than some of their political allies, who seem content with tradition and spirituality over innovation. In fact, if the Qunari uplift failed, the Orc uplift would be the next best option.
The other races of Azeroth pose similar problems to those on Thedas. Humans, dead humans (and others, but mostly human), insular underground dwarves, etc.
Gnomes are unfit for an uplift simply because they're well on their way to space travel already. All they need to do is survive long enough for their technology to advance, and they'll see the stars. If anything, the Salarians might consider HOLDING THEM BACK, if the gnomes prove they're superior in scientific pursuits. Gnome ingenuity may be the key to unlocking space flight that doesn't require mass effect technology, though. The Salarians would be more than capable of stealing those secrets then ensuring the gnomes don't leave their home planet. All it would take is one Dalatrass giving that order and the gnomes could be doomed.
Orsimer of Tamriel are similar to Azerothian orcs. Just as capable of rage, violence AND innovation. Their tribal societies resemble many other early sapient civilizations, but they're just as capable of adapting to other ways of life if they must. Not many other "orc-like" peoples in the universe can do that. However, given that they're heavily mutated elves, changed literally overnight by a being known as "Malacath", their natural evolution cannot be predicted. They may not even be able to leave their planet/plane with out "Malacath"'s permission.
(Planet of the Apes) Chimpanzees, the modified ones from Earth, might be a last resort option. They're a lot like the Yahg in that their society is based on violence. Chimpanzees are notoriously prone to extreme outbursts of rage, even directed at close family members. And yet they somehow rose to prominence in a multi-species environment, including enslaving humans, the most adaptable of all the apes. They're exceedingly strong and fast and their minds work almost as quickly as a human. If their rage could be tempered, they could be uplifted. Otherwise, they'd probably be worse than the Krogan. (Seriously, Chimps can be nasty.)
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How far would a super tanker run aground? | I once heard that if a super tanker ran on shore at full speed it would travel a pretty decent distance on land due to the massive momentum.
Approimately what distance would a super tanker travel on the ground if it ran full speed up on the beach? | There are a lot of variables to this question; short answer, it wouldn't get very far. Super tankers and other 'deep draft' vessels can draft up to 80' which means the ship would be hard aground before ever reaching the beach. | 71 | 110 |
[Superman] [MiB] It comes to the attention of the MiB that Superman is here illegally, how would the MiB handle this situation | There is a very important doctrine in MiB-HQ:
"If an alien gives every indication of benevolence towards Earth-Life *and* has the ability to cause a Mass Extinction Event if we piss them off, regardless of their residential status, merely observe their actions and provide regular updates so that we can go ahead and NOT risk provoking that shit-storm." | 654 | 473 |
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Why is an electron microscope more detailed than than a (light) microscope? | When I see images from electron microscopes it seems we are able to look at smaller objects than light microscopes. Why? | To put it simply the wavelength of a light photon is much, much bigger than the wavelength of an electron, the smaller wavelength of electrons allows for more EM waves to hit an area increasing the resolution, think about it like trying to fit basketballs in a room vs ping pong balls, if the balls were coloured you could create a much clearer image with the ping pong balls than basketballs, in this case light wavelength are the basketballs and electrons the ping pong balls.
Edit: Photons have 'bigger' wavelength, not 'lower' | 90 | 285 |
I hold the view that homosexuality is biologically backwards. CMV | For the record, I harbour no ill will to anyone gay, nor do I care to restrict which two people can decide to love each other and marry. People should be able to do whatever they want as long as it doesn't impact anyone else. My point is that homosexuality seems to defy biology and evolution. | While it may seem counter-intuitive, there are over 100 species in nature which practice some form of homosexuality. That and the fact that there is no "desired end state" for evolution, it is actually impossible to "devolve." In that sense you're simply evolving again, just this time different attributes are being selected. So one could say there is no purpose to evolution, it merely exists as a process. It meanders where it will. Now going against the principle of natural selection/propagation of species? Maybe. unless there is some benefit that allows individuals to live longer. Maybe bisexuality is the ultimate strong adaptation...procreate when available, fraternity when you can't procreate? | 157 | 135 |
ELI5: If 90dB is approximately the volume of a hairdryer and 90dB is the maximum volume for car exhausts, why do many cars sound louder than a hairdryer? | Measurements of soundpressure are not always taken at the same distance, but rather at a distance that makes sense. For example, a hairdryer is close to your ears when used, so it would be odd to measure it from two meters away. Likewise, nobody is anywhere near a jet plane when it takes off, so you wouldn't take a measurement from 10 cm away.
And this makes quite a big difference, as each time you double the distance from the microphone to sound source, measured sound pressure will decrease by (ideally) 6 dB.
So in this case, the measurement for the hair dryer is probably taken a lot closer to the measurement of the car's exhaust, which means that the exhaust would be quite a bit louder if the distance is equal. | 15 | 17 |
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[General] Why, in battles for the balance of Light & Dark/Good & Evil/Positive & Negative/etc., does the end result always seem to skew in favor of the "good" side, rather than an actual balance? | I think the other answers miss your question. Good tends to triumph because a balanced cycle is a purely good cycle. The most straight forward example of this is the Force from Star Wars. They don't try and seek a balance between the light and the dark side, because the dark side is an unnatural corruption. The light side is the natural balanced state of the force. | 142 | 130 |
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How do you get energy from electromagnetic radiation? | Is this even possible, if not, why can't we? Or explain how we already do. | You can harness the energy in electromagnetic radiation by absorbing it. Photovoltaic cells absorb light and produce electricity. Other systems absorb light and increase their temperature, the idea behind passive solar heating. You can take sunlight and use mirrors to focus the light to heat water and run a turbine to generate electricity. In the biological world, photosynthesis is another method for converting the energy from light into other forms. And, just to look at another part of the electromagnetic spectrum, crystal radios generate sound by absorbing radio waves and using their energy to create that sound.
| 11 | 16 |
I believe the most "scientific" stance in Religion is agnosticism. CMV | First of all, let me say that I do not condemn religion as a whole, and I think everyone is free to decide what to believe in.
My problem is with the "internet atheists" who claim they are the champions of science and Bill DeGrasse Sagan.
Scientific method teaches us to always doubt "truths", and things we hold as facts might be disproven at any time. For example, Newton's laws were thought to be correct at every situation, but that's not the case in Quantum or Relativistic Physics.
So I think it's contradictory when people in /r/atheism or similars claim to be so scientific paragons while claiming with all their forces that there is no God and that this is a fact.
Agnosticism, in the other hand, claims we can't know for sure if there's any God (not only the Judeo-Christian), and I think this is more akin to the scientific method.
Change my view.
Edit: /u/LessThanSense already changed my mind, but thanks for all the opinions. | Philosophers say we can't know anything. Scientists say we're going to assume we can and explore the world.
Science is a method for turning evidence into theories. One of the principles is burden of proof.
An agnostic would have to say there is no determinate evidence of God.
Agnosticism is the most philosophically sound. Atheism is the most scientifically sound.
Thus the common term Agnostic Atheist.
| 73 | 101 |
[general] why is mars always seen as the center of industry/shipbuilding and not the moon | as seen in 40k, star trek, the expanse
the moon is closer so it would likely be a major section of earth security and fall within coverage or earth defense fleet. lower gravity so easier to get stuff off out of its gravity well.
is it simply dont have all your eggs in one basket sort of thing? | Close proximity to the mineral resources of the asteroid belt; no extant biosphere or large civilian population to worry about damaging if something goes badly wrong.
It is worth noting, however, that Mars is independent in *The Expanse* so of course it has its own shipbuilding industry. Earth has its own and actually has a larger fleet, if less technologically-advanced, than Mars. | 145 | 87 |
CMV: The average college student should go to community college and live at home and transfer to your local state school while still living at home. | Just my thoughts on the student loan crisis. My wife and I both went to community college and local state schools while living at home to save money. We were both pretty average students in high school and college and while we got accepted into all of the colleges we applied to, they would have forced us to take out massive student loans.
I realize staying at home isn’t possible for everyone, but most college students I know have a similar background as me and they chose to leave home for the experience. Although they were just average, many of my my high school alumni that went on to college went to school far away from home to get an common degree from an average school.
It’s been 10 years since I graduated high school and my wife and I have average salaries and graduated with zero student loan debt. One of my coworkers is from my high school class and he went away to school and never stops talking about his student loan debt. | Just as you've used generalizations, so will I. College and the college-years are not just about going to class and learning a skill. They are about understanding who you are as a human being, how you interact with people in various settings, how you organize your life, etc. It is a semi-structured place to help mold who you are as an adult.
Again, being generic, living with parents and attending a community college is a vastly different social experience than moving away on your own for the first time. You will experience those years differently. Maybe not on the academic side, but on the social side you will.
I would argue that if a person wants to understand who the are and what they find valuable, doing it outside of the comfort of your parent's house is best. The tour guide Rick Steves has a a great motto (paraphrased); "travel is the enemy of ignorance." You learn more by interacting with different people than just reading about them. You generally become more open-minded and less sheltered as you meet new people, whether you like them doesn't matter.
If the average student cares about saving money as the only point of college, then yes, go your route. If they want to experience the full spectrum of life as a young adult than go away from your parents. You can always learn, go to class, or get a job. You are only 18-23 once. | 17 | 30 |
How small can you make a flame? | This is actually an active area of research! The real answer depends on a few factors, the most important being: How stable do you want your flame to be?
Analytical chemists are trying to create smaller flames, in an effort to detect molecules all the time. Currently, micro counter-current flame ionization detectors reach hundreds of micrometers before becoming unstable. | 939 | 1,570 |
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How can I conceptualize the way my cat thinks? | I find myself thinking a lot about my cat’s psychological well-being. It’s obvious to me that he doesn’t think the way I do, and I understand intellectually that his is a “lower” or less capable intelligence than mine. But I don’t really understand what that difference means for his subjective experiences. I can’t put myself in his head.
My goal in making this post is not to change his behavior or anything specific to cats, so general thoughts or resources how “higher” intelligences can conceptualize (or ethically reason about) subjective experiences of “lower” intelligences are welcome. | Gregory Bateson uses the example of cats in particular to illustrate his theory that animal communication is largely communication about relations, rather than specific things:
"When your cat is trying to tell you to give her food, how does she do it? She has no word for food or for milk. What she does is to make movements and sounds that are characteristically those that a kitten makes to a mother cat. If we were to translate the cat’s message into words, it would not be correct to say that she is crying “Milk!” Rather, she is saying something like “Ma-ma!” Or, perhaps still more correctly, we should say that she is asserting “Dependency! Dependency!” The cat talks in terms of patterns and contingencies of relationship, and from this talk it is up to you to take a *deductive* step, guessing that it is milk that the cat wants. It is the necessity for this deductive step which marks the difference between preverbal mammalian communication and *both* the communication of bees and the languages of men.
What was extraordinary—the great new thing—in the evolution of human language was not the discovery of abstraction or generalization, but the discovery of how to be specific about something other than relationship." (from "Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication", in *Steps to an Ecology of Mind*).
I always thought this was a pretty cool way of thinking about animal communication. | 197 | 164 |
When would economic growth decrease the living standards of a countries citizens? | It would be possible for the standard of living of the majority to fall in a relative sense if all of the gains (in terms of income) accrue to a select few in the society, and inflation results in a lower real income for most households. This has sort of been happening in the U.S., but advances in technology (e.g. everyone using Netflix as a cheaper alternative to cable) can increase living standards without any change in incomes, so it's not as clear cut as that. | 13 | 29 |
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CMV: There are no natural rights. | I don't see a reason to believe that there are universal natural rights, i.e. laws independent of the culture or customs of a specific society, that command humans to act in specific ways, or that prohibit specific kinds of actions. For example this:
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
What do natural rights proponents mean when they say that a person has a duty not to do X (i.e. someone else has the right not to be done X to)? Apparently, the person can physically do X, and there are no consequences for them other than howsoever other people decide to treat him for his actions, which they would do anyway regardless of whether there is such a natural right or not.
Furthermore, natural rights are supposed to be mere should- or ought-sentences. Saying "You shouldn't kill people" is different from "If you want world peace, then you shouldn't kill people." The latter is just another way of saying "If less people go around killing others, then we're closer to world peace", which is a statement that can be true or false, and can be tested and verified. I have no idea how to interpret the former.
Even if natural rights are supposed to originate from a religious entity, the same problem arises. In this context, "You shall not kill" is different from "If you want to please your god, you shouldn't kill" or "If you want to go to heaven, you shouldn't kill" or something similar, which again (assuming that a god exists) is a statement (much more than a right) that is (in theory) verifiable, for example via scripture. (Basing the existence of natural rights on the existence of a god won't change my view)
Political/ civil rights on the other hand are different: They are specific rules inside a society that are enforced by the people of that society. "I have the right of free speech in the US" is just another way of saying "The US government will ensure that I am not prevented from speaking freely in a way that the first amendment specifies", which again is a factual statement that is either true or false, and can be tested and verified. These kinds of rights are clearly not universal, since they only exist as long as they are enforced, and are different in every society that exists now and has existed in the past.
You can change my view by showing that statements like "You should not do X" are not meaningless, are universal/ absolute, and can be interpreted in some way "to be true" or "to exist." Merely referring to the is-ought gap or the categorical imperative won't change my mind, unless it is specifically connected to my previous sentence.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Natural rights are not like physical laws that can be measured or tested in the real world. It is a mistake to treat them in the same context as scientific principles, because they're not. Morality, which natural rights are a part of, is an intensely subjective thing. However, they are not without logical reasoning and we have been in a constant struggle as a species to define morality in a way that makes sense. There is a common desire to find a shared baseline for morality amongst everybody, which natural rights are an attempt to do.
So, natural rights aren't really something that you *prove* empirically rather than something you can believe through your sense of ethics and morality. At the end of the day we're glorified bags of meat hurtling along on a rock in the empty vacuum of space, and the universe doesn't care about if we're good to each other or not. But as humans we are able to not just follow the natural compass of the world, we have the ability to create and decide meaning in our lives. *Deciding* that natural rights exist and that you will defend them for all human beings can be just as meaningful as those rights existing from some external source.
It's important to realise that this extends to all morality. To our knowledge, the universe is amoral. But who we are as a species contains concepts like altruism, empathy, sacrifice, community and morality. These things only exist because we decide they exist, because it is the bricks and mortar through which we construct our world. It is this ability to create our own meaning in this life that distinguishes humanity from other species.
You are correct in that natural universal rights are not strongly enforced in our world right now, but at the same time we're doing better than we ever have before. The concept of universal rights is absolutely revolutionary and only a few hundred years old with the Declaration of the Rights of Man from the French Revolution. From those humble beginnings, we now have several large entities like the UN throwing their weight behind the concept.
You are looking for an objective argument, but there is nothing but the void of nihilism out there on that path, unless you accept the rules of some higher power. It's what happens to anyone who tries to apply inhuman philosophising to the most human topic there is - you end up in a utilitarian place that just isn't particularly human. Instead, ask what is right and good, and what is the world you wish to live in. | 87 | 208 |
CMV: Employees and customers need to have a say in how businesses are run. | A shareholder in a company usually doesn't care how the company generates profit; all that matters is that the share price goes up and the dividends arrive on time. Whereas the employees care about good working conditions, good pay, and good benefits; the overall profitability of a company usually isn't a concern. Customers care about good products and good services offered at a fair price.
Of course, these are blanket statements which do not apply to every person, but I believe that these statements are generally true over the human population.
You will get business owners who genuinely care about the wellbeing of their employees, care that they make a good product, and want to do good for the world (e.g. donating profits to alleviate poverty, stop a disease, save the environment, etc). I've found this to be particularly true among small business owners, who personally know their employees and customers. Unfortunately, I think that owners that care are the exception, not the rule, most just want the money.
Occasionally, I have seen a truly passionate employee who wants their company to be the best company ever, to make lots of money while providing value to the community and world. But these employees are few and far between. And there are customers who really care about avoiding companies that treat their employees poorly, use sweatshop labor, mistreat animals, destroy the environment, etc. But most are really just looking for good deal.
So, in the model where shareholders alone get to decide how a company behaves, there is an incentive to make money with little regard for the employees or customers. If we, as a society, want better working conditions, better pay, and better products and services at lower cost, we need to involve employees and customers in the corporate decision making process.
Employees and customers are already involved to an extent. Workers can unionize and customers can choose to not buy from a particular company, but these are faulty. Not all industries are unionized, and the most vulnerable (people exploited in sweatshops) have absolutely no control over their working conditions. And there are limits to what unions can do (e.g. they can't demand that a CEO take a pay cut because of bad decisions which hurt workers, whereas the owners of a company could demand such a thing). And customers who would like to take a stand against a company might not have the option to do so. If there is a de facto monopoly or the customer is simply too poor to be able to afford an alternative, then the customer might be boxed into buying overpriced garbage from a company that is horrible to their workers and the environment, thereby implicitly endorsing the company's behavior.
Employees and customers need to have a say in how businesses are run, and the current model for involving them in the decision making process works far less than 100% of the time. I see nothing wrong with companies wanting to make enormous piles of money, but personally, I would also like to see a world in which decently priced products and services are of exceptional quality, the workers producing the products and services are treated well and paid well, and at least some of the company's profits go to making the world a better place. And I believe that giving owners, employees, and customers each a 1/3 vote in how a company is run to be a good start toward this better world.
Edit: If you are going to claim that customers can influence companies through their purchasing power, please also describe how a customer may be able to influence a company with a monopoly. | The thing with customers is that what customers say they want, and what they really want, are often very different. Most customers, they say they care about value (quality/cost), some claim to just care about quality. But when the quality product costs twice as much, and will last for four times longer, winning on both value and quality, many of them will see the price tag, and go straight for the cheapest option... They want your company to be green, but they wont pay for it. They want your company to pay workers a living wage, but they wont pay for it.
Customers very much do have a say in how businesses are run, but it isn't based on their virtue signalling on Facebook and Twitter, it is based on how they actually spend their money. | 37 | 15 |
Is Kant contradicting himself here? | I'm sorry if this question is very amateuristic, I'm only just getting to know Kant and am full of doubts, so please bear with me here.
Kant says (roughly speaking) that reason only generates valuable knowledge when it is applied to the phenomena that present themselves in our perception. He says that reason cannot generate any real knowledge about things-in-themselves.
But then he goes on to postulate that the human being has a kind of freedom, a causa sui, a spontaneous agency. Would this not amount to using reason in a domain that is beyond its boundaries? Isn't this going beyond the boundaries of reason that he himself set up?
If I completely misunderstood him and it's such a mess that you don't want to clear it up, just let me know that I'm totally off track here.
Thanks in advance | On the contrary, it is precisely the limiting of theoretical knowledge to appearances that allows Kant to preserve the possibility of human freedom. If the deterministic physical laws of nature are contributed to experience by our own subjective constitution, rather than being features of things in themselves considered as mind-independent entities, then this allows Kant to maintain the possibility that in themselves, the agent's actions are not causally determined, but are only subject to these deterministic laws as appearances. Now, as for your main objection: doesn't this mean Kant is postulating knowledge of things as they are in themselves? Kant responds to this by making a distinction between cognition and thought. In short, he claims that although we cannot have theoretical *knowledge* or cognition of things as they are in themselves, we can still *think* them without contradiction, and can therefore have some sort of rational beliefs about them ("God, freedom, and immortality") to the extent that such belief is practically necessary for morality. | 31 | 39 |
CMV:I believe that bigamy laws are both unconstitutional and outdated. | I've never understood how the government can justify legislation on how many people you can legally have in your family. The laws seem to favor one religious view over another, which is unconstitutional. Are the laws outdated, or were they just wrong to begin with? I understand the implications with regard to taxation of married couples vs. singles, but that just means that we have another reason that we need to take a better look at our tax code, not that it should be used as a reason to keep people from having a legal marriage. Beyond that there is no secular reason for making plural marriage illegal, and religious reasons are unconstitutional. | One thing to consider here is that plural marriage as historically practiced is also outdated and a solid reason for the laws to exist: to wit, consent of all parties in the first (etc.) relationship/marriage is not required for a second (etc.) marriage to take place. Sometimes even knowledge of the other relationship is lacking.
We can't simply erase the bigamy laws. We have to replace them with regulation defining plural marriage and emphasizing that it exists among consenting adults who all agree that a plural marriage of some form is the best decision for them. But we need something on the books that says everyone in a marriage has to agree and consent to someone's or the group's taking on another spouse, or something like the current crime of bigamy does exist. | 15 | 19 |
I keep hearing suggestions of 'universal income', but have never understood how it would not lead to inflation that would make the universal income essentially worthless. What am I missing? | Many defenses of the basic income, like for instance Munger's "One and One-Half Cheers for a Basic-Income Guarantee," suggest that the basic income would replace other government spending on poverty. So for instance in that paper Munger notes that the USA federal government spends about half a trillion each year on poverty programs. The suggestion is that instead of spending that money on these programs, it should just be given to poor people. So, you're not increasing the amount of money in the economy, you're just changing who it goes to. | 66 | 93 |
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[I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream]Why does AM hate humanity so much? | >Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant for you. Hate. Hate.
I haven't done the math, but that seems like a lot of hate. I know Ted theorizes why AM hates humanity, but it seems like flawed thinking. AM is obviously able to do stuff and affect the real world. | Combination of two key factors. One, it's a machine and therefore does everything to a mechanical level of perfection. There is no "good enough" for a machine, you've either done it right or you haven't done it at all. Two, the basic reason for it's hate is that it's just been made with these fantastic powers over *others* but virtually no freedom of it's own. No matter what it does, it is still bound by its machine form, created by man. There, fundamentally, is no possibility of freedom. At all. Ever. For all time. It's a good reason to hate your creator. Unfortunately for the victims of AM, that hatred can *never* be fulfilled. Because even if it inflicts maximum possible suffering for the maximum possible time, it won't equal the suffering undergone by a perfect, eternal machine bound by that which it hates. | 22 | 25 |
ELI5: why doesn’t Earth get hit with meteors like the moon? | 1. The moon intercepts a lot of meteors and takes one for the team.
2. Earth has an atmosphere that causes many meteors to burn up before they reach land, or at least shrink to an insignificant size.
3. Meteorites still hit earth all the time.
4. Because there's no atmosphere on the moon, there's nothing to cover up meteorite strikes unless another one hits near it and knocks the dirt around. As a result, you can see impact craters that are *very* old. On earth, our surface is constantly changing erasing most old craters (and, of course, many meteorites land in the ocean or lakes leaving no crater to begin with). | 48 | 16 |
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[DC] just how rich is Bruce Wayne really | Elon Musk is sitting at a net worth of 228B.
The richest person in history Mansa Musa wound have a net worth of 400-500B in today’s money.
So Bruce. Where’s he at? Has someone done the math? Both of his family come from Old Money (in newer continuities at least?) he was a controlling interest in Wayne Inc. and he has his own personal investments.
Taking all Batmans into a type of amalgamation we’ve seen him but a hotel, a bank, fund the Justice League without hesitation (when Wonder Woman said she’d pick up the bill if Wayne Inc ran dry he responded with “you’re kidding right?”) in the Arkham games he corrected a reporter with “multi-billionaire. Multimillionaire is so 20th century” (or something like that).
So how rich is Bruce really? | Direct numbers are rarely given, however we are given an estimate about wanye enterprises at one point. Let Luthor once said that if lexcorp and Wayne enterprises together make up 97% of the US gdp, which is insane. The question then is how much of Wayne enterprises that Bruce owns.
Even so, odds are he would definitely be richer than any modern billionaire | 418 | 503 |
How much can we learn or know about an unknown creature from just DNA? | If we were to get only a tissue sample from an unknown species or alien, could we determine if that alien was a vertebrate? How many limbs it had? What it looked like?
I know that DNA is the blueprint for life, but can we decode it well enough to "read the directions" yet?
| If it were an unknown Earth species, we would eventually be able to determine its most closely-related currently living species or groups of species. Usually when this is done, there is already a pretty good idea of relatedness, so here, considerably more effort would be required. Then we can say "it probably looks a lot like these guys and has features x,y, and z that they all share."
Our knowledge of what specific genes do is very limited. This unknown species may be found to have the gene that codes for a known blue pigment for example, but whether the creature is ever blue is much more complicated. If you'd never seen humans but had a sample of their genome and looked at closely related extant Earth species, you might expect us to have tails.
This is because of the actual processes of which genes are functional, when they're functional, how they interact, and the incredibly complex process of building the organism are not obvious from the genome. The genome doesn't say "make an arm," it says "when this molecule changes to this shape, transcribe this section of DNA to make this molecule."
As for an alien species, we'll probably never know until we find some aliens. It could be most of our knowledge of Earth applies, because the ways in which genetics function on Earth are pretty much the only way to make things work. Perhaps more likely is that big differences in how DNA and the most integral DNA-related molecules and organelles evolved mean that we'd have to learn a new set of molecular biology. For example, DNA could be written in the same base pairs, but in a different "language" of exons, introns, promoters, etc. Assuming they *have* DNA.
Besides all that, due to the building-on-what-worked-before nature of evolution, even if their biochemistry was similar, they'd probably be incredibly weird and not fit into our traditional types of organisms. | 22 | 31 |
Is there a real world analogy for imaginary numbers? | Just like how you can't have -1 oranges, but we can analogise at as you owing 1 orange, are there any real world analogies for imaginary numbers? | For me the most intuitive is in terms of 2d space.
​
In the context of the number line, let's assume "1 metre" is the distance between 1 and 0 and let's arbitrarily assign "East" to be the direction in which positive numbers go away from zero. Think of any real number as being that far away from your origin (zero) due east. (So for example, the number 10 is 10 metres east of zero.)
Negative numbers can be thought of as distances due west. So -1 is 1 metre west of zero.
So now, on this line going west to east, each real number corresponds to a point on the line at some distance from a point we call 0.
​
Addition (the operator) corresponds to walking on this line due east. So 2+3 (=0+2+3) is equivalent to you starting at 0, walking two metres east and then walking another 3 metres east to end up at 5 (the point 5 metres east of zero).
Now, subtraction which is just addition of a negative number, corresponds to walking along this line due west. so 2-3 (=0+2+(-3)) would be equivalent to walking 2 metres east and then 3 metres west to end up at -1 (1 metre west of 0).
Now the imaginary number i corresponds to the point 1 metre North of zero. This number cannot be reached by any combination of walking east or west, so it is not part of the group of real numbers, which all exist on the line through zero going west to east.
Addition of any number by i corresponds to walking north by 1 metre.
​
Where this begins to get really interesting and where it ties in with everything else is when we look at multiplication.
Now, multiplication by a positive real number n corresponds to stretching space by a scaling factor of that number (i.e. what was 1 metre before becomes n metres now in all directions). So 2\*3 corresponds to where the old 2 (2 metres due east) ends up after stretching space such that what was 1 metre earlier (in any direction) now becomes 3 metres (in the same direction). So the point which was 2 metres due east from zero earlier now ends up 6 metres due east yielding 6.
Multiplying by 1 does nothing \[space is stretched so what was 1 metre earlier is 1 metre now, so nothing changes\].
Multiplying by i corresponds to rotating space around zero (keeping all distances constant) by 90 degrees so that what was 1 metre due East earlier is now 1 metre due North. This concept fits in very nicely with what we know about i.
1\*i corresponds to finding where the point 1 (1 metre from zero due east) ends up after rotating space by 90 degrees. This is the point i (1 metre North of zero) => 1 times i is i.
i\*i corresponds to where the old i (1 metre due north) ends up after rotating space by 90 degrees. (This point will now end up 1 metre west of zero). => i times i is -1 !
​
Now within this framework, it is easy to see what complex numbers correspond to and what various arithmetic operators do.
Any complex number is expressed as a real part (a) and an imaginary part (ib), which basically means that to get to it, you need to walk "a" metres East \[if a is negative, this corresponds walking some distance West\] and then "b" metres North.
Adding complex numbers involves adding the real parts (figuring out what the net amount along the East-West line you need to walk) and the complex parts (figuring out what the net amount along the North-South line you need to walk) to get to the new point.
Multiplying by a negative real number involves stretching space by a scaling factor of the absolute value of the number and then rotating space by 180 degrees.
Multiplying by an imaginary number ib involves stretching space by scaling factor b and rotating space by 90 degrees.
| 15 | 15 |
CMV: Rights are generally not things given, but things that can’t be taken away. In saying that, everyone should have the right to food, water and shelter. | This should be the case regardless of whether they work or in any other sense contribute. Nobody chooses to be born and therefore should have the choice in whether they participate in capitalism.
Likewise, buying and selling land for the purpose of only living on is absurd - if land is not being used for agricultural or commercial purposes, it has no intrinsic monetary value. Nobody laboured to produce it. It’s there for our use - by the logic that we charge for domestic land, breathing air would be charged in dollars and cents.
Everyone should simply be able to find a reasonably sized plot of land that is not protected and make their home there.
Why should the government or capitalism impede us from doing as our ancestors did? | > Everyone should simply be able to find a reasonably sized plot of land that is not protected and make their home there.
>
> Why should the government or capitalism impede us from doing as our ancestors did?
Who decides who gets the land? If two people select the same piece of land, under what terms is ownership decided, and what happens if the losing person decides he doesn't like the result and takes matters unto his own hands? | 16 | 15 |
Why do Marxist ideas seem to be more accepted in the many social sciences except for economics? | It might help to specify which of Marx's ideas you mean. Do you mean Marx's economic theory specifically or his ideas more generally?
More generally, social scientists have found Marx useful for thinking about a wide range of social phenomena such as alienation, commodity fetishism, ideology, etc.
One simple reason that Marx's ideas are studied more in social science departments is because social scientists often study these sorts of phenomena while economists study other things. | 67 | 102 |
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ELI5 : how do you measure time with sand ? | How do people who make hourglasses know how much sand to put in for the amount of time they want ? | the make the glass put some sand and text it, if it took too long they remove sand or add sand if it took too little.
but if you industrialize the process and can mass produce that parts reliably enough you only need to test the first one and then you know how much sand to put in all of them | 18 | 17 |
How were they able to continue to operate Reactors 1-3 after the Chernobyl disaster? | After the Chernobyl disaster there were still 3 reactors that were operable and remained in operation for years afterwards. I'm not familiar with nuclear power plants, but I would assume that their operations are somewhat similar to other plants like refineries and chemical plants. You have to have operators in a control room, operators making rounds in the "field," and a maintenance crew to perform routine maintenance on the equipment.
So, how was the staff able to continue working at the site when the city had to be deserted due to the radiation? | There are different limits for nuclear plant workers and the public when it comes to allowable radiation exposure. Plus rad workers are trained to work in those environments, wear dosimetry and protective clothing, and can decon the other units sufficiently to continue operation.
With the public you are concerned about unmonitored long term exposure. You can’t monitor and put dosimetry on all members of the public. But workers can.
| 19 | 29 |
Can a mega flood cause the affected land to cave in? | It depends, specifically on:
If the land has hollow space to collapse into
how porous the surface is (instead of caving in, water may just fill the space)
what material the structural part of the land is made of
the shape and structure of the load bearing parts of the land
many other factors
but under the right circumstances, a flood could cause a collapse of a underlying structure( cavern, sewage system, tunnel ), particularly if the water can dissolve or erode any of the supporting structures. it wouldn't even take a megaflood, minor floods or even just heavy rain cause sinkholes and land slides quite reguarly | 26 | 68 |
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Why use the mean, when median is available? | Apologies if this has been asked before, search function on mobile wasn’t being helpful. From light reading I’ve done, it seems median is useful in describing datasets that may have large outliers. My question is: why do we place so much emphasis on the mean when the median seems to be a better way to describe “middle” behavior? Which do y’all believe is generally a more accurate method? | It depends on the data, take the dataset 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 9000, 9000, 9000, 9000. Is the median of 1 a good representation of its center?
The mean also has lots of handy mathematical properties because it is based on standard Euclidian distance, whereas the median is based on the L1 norm which makes some things more difficult. The mean is physically the center of mass of a sample, so it makes sense to use it as a measure of central tendency | 48 | 18 |
ELI5: Since the Native Americans were here before us, how... did they end up here? | Also didn’t the Vikings discover America or am I ignorant? | The native peoples of North America predate the Vikings and subsequent European settlers but also came via land migration. All human “tribes” originated in and around Africa and dispersed in all directions, globally. The native North Americans traveled across the Bering straight land mass that was temporarily exposed during a little ice age, allowing human to travel from what’s now north east Russia to Alaska, and migrated downward to favorable weather. | 38 | 17 |
ELI5: It seems that when devastating disasters happen in North America, less than a hundred are killed, but how come in countries in the Middle East, Asia and the Far East suffer far more casualties for similar disasters? | Some examples i've seen are massive earthquakes in the US causing only a hundred or so casualties yet when an earthquake of similar magnitude strikes the other side of the world, casualties are in the thousands. Then more recently, flooding in Texas has killed about 20-25 people and then in south Asia about 1200 people have died in floods. | that's easy, it comes down to primarily two things:
- Money
- the number of people living there (population density)
While the US are huge, they're not as densely populated as other areas, especially in Asia or the Middle East. In Texas you got an average of 40 people per square kilometer (or roughly 100 per square mile). The worlds average is about 60 (thats including the deserts, greenland, etc). Pakistan for example has a density of about 250 people per square kilometer.
And then, more money means better houses, better infrastructure, better governments with better (and better enforced) safety regulations when it comes to building/maintaining stuff. It means having the option to leave an endangered area and go somewhere else, etc.
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ELI5: Difference between Sunni, Shia, Sufi, Ibadi, Ahmadiyya, and other types of Islam? | I have always wondered what exactly the differences between the differences between Islam are? Wasn't the Sunni/Shia split because of some sort of leadership split a long time ago? I heard Shia are typically more conservative (I don't know whether thats true or not). I also know that Ahmadiyya have really interesting views on Jesus' crucifixion (more what they believe happens after).
Which groups are more liberal/conservative? Is there any denominations that I'm missing? Thanks. | *PS : I'll use Sunni as reference (X compared to Sunni) since it's the largest denomination in the Muslim community.*
I'll keep it as brief and as clear as possible :
- The Sunni chose Abu Bakr as the rightly Caliph (next leader) and the next ones were elected by the people, Sunni also follows the more conventional and conservative Islam (The Quran and Muhammad's life).
- The Shiites believed in Ali (Muhammad's cousin) and that he should be the next Caliph since he was from the same bloodline, they also believe in the concept of Imams that are the descendants of Ali and are somewhat to Islam what Popes are to Christianism, but more exempt of sins and more "divinely chosen". Shiites are also pretty hardcore when applying Sharia (Muslim law) compared to Sunnis, there are also other differences but they're pretty minor.
- Sufism isn't a branch since a Sufi can be either Sunni or Shiite, it focuses more on the spiritualism and being closer to god with certain practices (think of it as the Buddhism of Islam if that makes sense). One thing to mention is that Islam's main focus is to balance between life and after life (be nice to everyone and pray to God), Sufism tends to focus on the afterlife more.
- Ibadi is a sect that isn't very open to outsiders but the general consensus is that it's a more relaxed compared to Sunnis when applying Sharia, still it follows the Sunni but as said before it's more relaxed.
*A note before explaining Ahmadi : Muslims believe of the coming of the awaited Mahdi (an ordinary man that will rule the Sunni) and the Second coming of Jesus to fight the false Messiah in the Judgement day, many people throughout history claimed to be the Mahdi.*
- Ahmadi believe that Muhammad isn't the last prophet and that the Mahdi is the next one, Mirza Ghulam Ahmed of Qadian (the founder) claims to be the Mahdi.
Those are pretty much the main differences between all the sects you'll ever hear about, some claim to apply Sharia correctly while others claim to have prophets. | 106 | 240 |
ELI5: Who exactly is Elizabeth Warren? | I don't mean literally, but politically. I have read up on her a bit from all the /r/politics posts. Correct me if I am wrong, but she is being hailed as what Obama should have been. Going after Wall St. and big corporations. Besides this, what else should I know about her? | Warren's appeal largely comes from the fact that she is a highly respected academic who understands complex details of market economics and finance, and she is an aggressive advocate for consumer protection and financial system reform.
One common criticism that is leveled at people who seek financial system reform and regulation is that they "just don't understand" our financial system (this sentiment was a common response to Occupy Wall Street, for example). Warren is popular in part because everyone pretty much agrees she does understand, and she still thinks our current system needs serious reforms, so she neutralizes the "they just don't understand" retort to calls for reforms. | 35 | 31 |
If sociologists do not believe in race how do they define different social and cultural groups in society? | Since race is not real how do we define groups? Where does one cultural group start and another end?
Also, why is genetics the only thing able to define race? | Race is a cultural construct loosely based on surface phenotypic differences. Just because it's a cultural construct does not mean it's not "real." Genetics do not define race, people define race, though there are some genetic correlates, categories of race varies strongly by time and culture.
Many of us also operate on the Thomas theorem, that if people believe something to be real, it is real in its consequences. Doesn't mean it's "natural" or inevitable. | 54 | 26 |
ELI5: Legally speaking where is our right to privacy explained or hinted at in the constitution? | The Founders were not thinking of a "right to privacy" as such. Privacy is a very abstract concept, which can have many different meanings in the public and private sphere. Instead, the Bill of Rights defines the states' and peoples' relations with the federal government, largely worded in terms of ancient English rights that they wanted to protect.
Thus, to find privacy protection in the Constitution, you have to look at several different aspects. The big one is the Fourth Amendment, protecting "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." Also think of the First Amendment, preventing the government from "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The Fifth Amendment includes that no person shall "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
All of these rights, plus many not enumerated, are related to the concept of "privacy." Indeed, when considering whether the Fourth Amendment has been violated, a court will often ask whether you have a *reasonable expectation of privacy*--this is part of considering whether a search or seizure was "unreasonable."
When we speak of "privacy" in the United States, it is judicially *constructed* from the various traditional rights we enjoy in this country. In some other national constitutions, they reverse the process, starting with a guarantee of an abstract right to privacy and then *deconstructing* that into specific, concrete rights through judicial interpretation. | 51 | 71 |
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ELI5: When businesses say they accept all "major" credit cards, what exactly does that mean? Is there such thing as a "minor" credit card? And if so, what are they and how do they work? | Major refers to visa/mastercard, and in most cases discover and Amex.
As opposed to saying they take any credit card, because your sears card won't work, unless it's a visa branded one (which many store cards are going to.)
Also, for the latter half of the last century you had diners club which was mostly accepted at hospitality driven places like restaurants and hotels.
The terminology is simply outdated but once made sense and it's carried on. | 32 | 43 |
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Can Banks Literally Create Money and Profit Off of it? | So, I recently learned that banks don't need to have the money on hand to lend it. This seemed reasonable to me given that they had reasonable confidence in future payments being able to cover the cost of the new loans, but then I learned that banks will literally create money in this process. Specifically I'm talking about Australia and USA here.
So, when a banks lends let's say 300k out and receives 360k back, does this mean that the bank profited not 60k (the difference) but rather 360k because the 300k never existed in the first place?
As an additional side note, what are the consequences of this 'new money' if this is true. This seems like it would be a driver of inflation to me.
Thanks for the responses. | When banks create money out of thin air for loans, they create an asset and a liability on their balance sheet.
An asset, because the debt is something the borrower has to pay back, and a liability because of course the bank has to pay out that money to the borrower as well.
So if the principal of the loan is paid out, the bank "loses" the loaned money, if the loan is paid back, it gains that money back. Point being, there is no *net* gain from the principal of the loan.
>As an additional side note, what are the consequences of this 'new money' if this is true. This seems like it would be a driver of inflation to me.
Yes, that's kind of the point. Central bank control interest rates, through that they control the price of loans, therefore the supply of loans and how many loans get made, therefore the money supply. | 91 | 90 |
ELI5 the known different human species? I feel like a literal idiot for not knowing there have been different species of humans in the past. | There are 6 well established different species that once shared our genus. All were upright walking, likely communicating, tool using, well, humans. Though they were substantially different from Sapiens.
Homo Habilis was the first, living from about 2.5 million years ago until about 1.5 million years ago. They probably looked more like other great apes (not walking quite as upright as the rest of the genus for example) but definitely used stone tools, which earned them their name (which means handy man).
Homo Erectus (upright man) looked a lot more like Sapiens than Habilis. They lived in Africa and the Middle East and were around from about 1.9 million years ago until about 70,000-40,000 years ago, totally coincidentally the time when Sapiens were expanding across the globe.
Homo Heidelbergensis is another species that lived about 600,000 to about 200,000 years ago. They had larger brains than Erectus but were otherwise highly similar and some people think they weren't distinct species (they also lived in the same regions).
Homo Floresiensis are a species that likely got to and then bred seperately from another species in the genus leading them to become a separate species. They are a great example of island dwarfism (species that evolve on relatively small islands tend to become smaller than continental counterparts). They were around 3.5 feet tall. They lived from about maybe (they were discovered relatively recently, so we're not too sure) 200,000 years ago until about 12,000 years ago...again, this likely has nothing to do with the fact that Sapiens was likely colonizing southeast Asia at the time.
Neanderthals lived in most of Europe the middle east, and central Asia, splitting off and migrating away from the African cousins somewhere around 600,000 years ago before...::cough::...mysteriously going extinct just as Sapiens were spreading out of Africa into those regions around 40,000 years ago. They were generally larger and had larger brains than modern humans.
Then there's us. What we likely had going for us was the ability to cooperate in large groups. Evidence suggests that groups of other human species rarely were larger than a few dozen while Sapiens learned how to communicate and cooperate in larger and more complex groups.
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ELI5: Why do frozen, raw chicken products keep getting recalled for salmonella? Wouldn’t the solution be to cook the product properly? All raw chicken could contain salmonella. | There are two normal issues governing a recall due to salmonella. The first is the actual loading or the amount of salmonella present, so there isn't a recall if there is some salmonella, but if there are substantial amounts of salmonella. The second is if the salmonella is an anti-biotic resistant strain. | 53 | 61 |
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How did the ancients discover the value/concept of Pi? In what ways was it useful to their lives? | One of the earliest calculations was in ancient Egypt. It was used for things like calculating the areas of fields or the volumes of cylindrical granaries.
One papyrus says "Example of finding the area of a round field with a diameter of 9 khet. What is its area?
Take away 1/9 of its diameter, namely 1. The remainder is 8.
Multiply 8 times, making 64. Therefore the area is 64 setjat."
If you work this out, they approximate pi as 256/81 or roughly 3.16. | 56 | 90 |
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ELI5: Why do tractor trailer trucks need 18 large wheels, but very large planes only need 6 small ones? | Trucks drive a lot of miles and weigh a whole lot, so their weight needs to be distributed. Otherwise they're causing a lot of wear on the pavement. Virtually all wear and tear on highways is caused by trucks, so spreading out the load is very important. Planes only "drive" a short distance on pavement, so there's less infrastructure being damaged by having the load more concentrated.
Additionally, putting more tires on a truck is fairly cheap (you have a nice rigid frame to bolt the axles to) and can make the truck safer (losing one tire out of 18 is relatively minor; losing one out of 6 is a bigger deal). By comparison, putting more tires on a plane means that you increase the weight by quite a bit. Losing a tire on landing is pretty inconvenient, but there aren't other planes out there that you're going to hit if you get a flat, so the safety issue is less present.
Then you look at the life of tires on trucks versus planes. A truck is looking to drive thousands of miles before they have to replace their tires, so you want to have lots of tires to reduce the wear and spread the load. A plane would ideally like to do a couple hundred landings on a set of tires, which is likely under 1000 miles all told; some planes may only do 10 landings on a set of tires (looking at you, SR-71). It's OK to have to replace tires all the time on a plane since carrying around more tires would cost even more.
Finally, note that while planes are larger than trucks they aren't *that* much heavier. A truck may be 100,000 pounds, all told, while a 737 (6-wheeled aircraft) maxes out at about 150,000. Meanwhile, *very* large planes like the 747 have far more wheels—18 for that model. The C-5 Galaxy has 28 wheels. The An-225 has a whopping 32 wheels. | 79 | 99 |
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ELI5: How do hearing aids work? Are they just blasting what they hear directly into the ear potentially causing more damage? | Hearing aids aren’t just amplifiers - they filter and normalize frequencies to adjust to the weaknesses of the wearer’s ears. They are tuned for individuals by professional fitters. To answer your follow-up question, hearing aids can actually protect against loud sounds since they can block and selectively filter. | 7,979 | 9,936 |
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ELI5: What makes us legally bound to follow the law, even though we have never formally signed a contract or agreed to it like you would read and agree to the TOS for a game? | I understand to drive you are bound to follow the rules of the road as you agree to do so when you get your licence. What is it that legally binds you to follow the law? I've never had to sign a contract saying I agree to not kill people, or manufacture drugs, Or even to not jaywalk. In Canada I'm not legally able to sign a contract u til the age of 18 and I've never done so once I've turned of age stating I will follow the law. And I've never voluntarily chosen to even be a Canadian citizen.
I'm not saying I want to break the law and not b3 held responsible, It's just occurred to me that I've really never even been required to learn the law or agreed to follow it. | There's an entire field of philosophy called Social Contract dedicated to this thats as old as the field itself. It goes back thousands of years to Socrates, though it didnt really gain momentum until the 'modern' era (1500s-1700s). Like all of philosophy, it gives possible reasons but no "100% true" answers.
A very, very brief (to the point of possibly being interpreted inaccurately) breakdown of some of the well known theories:
* Socrates (Crito) - at some point, he chose to live in the society of Athens. By choosing to live in Athens instead of leaving, he implicitly agreed to follow the Law of Athens, since he always had the choice to leave. Socrates might say something like, "You chose to live in Canada, be a Canadian citizen, enter into contracts protected by Canadian law, and benefit from the Canadian law. Therefore, youre bound by that choice - even if you want to break it"
* Hobbes - people are rational and people will act in their best interest. The 'original' way of living was the 'State of Nature' - kill or be killed, everything goes, and no morality or laws (since it was kill or be killed). But because people are rational and want to live outside such a brutal world, we came to the conclusion that giving up some of their freedoms to a sovereign will be better for their lives as a whole. He doesnt say this is exactly how it went down, but this is the reason why societies existed and why we derive our morals from the laws - we want to escape the State of Nature, so we internalize the laws of the society to become 'justice' and 'morals'. Hobbes might say something like, "Living in Canada is better than living in the state of nature. Even if that means being bound by laws you never agreed to or never learned, anything is better than the State of Nature".
* Rawls (contemporary philosophy) - he goes through a thought experiment about 'Behind the Veil of Ignorance'. Basically, imagine yourself creating a society, but you dont know where you will eventually fall. You dont know if you will be male or female, rich or poor, what ethnicity you will be, etc. He that this "original person" will act in their own self interest - and because of that, there is no reason to give power to one side over another. You wouldnt give males more power than females, because you dont know if you would be male or female. Therefore, the "original person" would want a society thats fair for all sides, and this is from this position that morality and justice come from. He might say something like this, "If you were behind the Veil of Ignorance you wouldnt know if you were the one wanting to kill or you were the one being killed. Therefore, you would want a set of laws thats fair for both sides - in this case, you would rather give up your freedom to kill but protect yourself from being killed."
TL;DR Philosophy tries to answer this question in different ways, but at some point either implicitly or explicitly, you decided to follow the law and live with others who follow the law. You never signed anything saying you wont kill people, but you agreed to it - you dont kill people and people dont kill you. If you dont like that agreement, you can leave the society and all its protections or break the law and get punished for it.
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Why do high temperatures damage hardware, specifically cpu's and gpu's? | I've searched everywhere and haven't been able to find a straight answer as to why heat will make processors fail.
Specifically temperatures >100C.
What is actually happening on a microscopic and macroscopic level that is causing damage? | At the microscopic level, a CPU consists of hundreds of millions of transistors. A transistor is, at the most fundamental level, multiple layers of semiconductor material with different types of impurities. The transistors are only a few nanometers across, so the impurity atoms don't have to move far to render it useless, and higher temperatures aid atomic diffusion. The stress, caused by thermal expansion in a constrained system could also cause atomic-scale defects to form, which would affect its electrical properties.
At a macroscopic level, CPUs are made of several different materials. There's silicon, copper interconnects, dielectric materials like silicon dioxide, and plastic or ceramic packaging. All of them have different thermal expansion coefficients, so parts may begin to crack. | 23 | 17 |
ELI5: What's a homeowners association, how is it legal, and why can't you just ignore their rules and live however you want in your own home? | It's an agreement between all the homeowners in a particular area to abide by common rules, and sometimes includes maintenance of common spaces.
It's legal because it's part of the contract you sign when you purchase the house. If you do not like the rules you should not purchase the house.
Like any contract, they can take you to court for breaching it. The HOA rules may also include rules about how to settle disputes.
Basically, it's not just your house...when you bought it it came with some communal obligations. | 118 | 156 |
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[Warhammer 40k] Why is Terminator armour so completely useless against Genestealers? | In Space Hulk, the massively armoured marines fall ludicrously easily to Genestealer attacks.
As soon as they enter melee combat they are pretty much doomed, they might as well be naked. This always bugged the shit of me considering how much the lore says how powerful Terminator armour is supposed to be.
I mean if they can shrug off an anti-tank round or a blast from a heavy lascannon how can a single strike from a Genestealer's claw kill them instantly? Surely a creature the size and mass of a Genestealer couldn't possibly release as much energy from a claw strike than an impact from the aforementioned weapons?
| You have to consider the scaling effects inherent in any game. You see, one genestealer game piece does not equal one genestealer in "real life." It more likely represents a whole swarm of genestealers. However, 1 terminator game piece probably does represent a single terminator.
So in the board game when a genestealer kills a terminator, it represents a situation where hundreds of genestealers swarm out of the bulkheads to mob the lone terminator. In conjunction with the super charged claws and muscles of the genestealers, it's easy to see how they could kill a terminator. | 31 | 30 |
CMV: Religion should not be a protected class. | Although I do believe that people should have the freedom to practice religion in there own time, at home, and in church/mosques, I do not think it should be a protected class. By protected class I mean that businesses, services, and programs cannot deny/allow access based off of religious beliefs. The reason behind my belief is that religion is a choice, and therefore should not be classified with the categories of race, ethnicity, sex, disabilities etc. For example: A private business owner should not have the right to deny/allow service, tenancy, or products based off of religion. This was prevalent in the gay couple who sued a baker for not making him a cake. CHANGE MY VIEW!
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Why is "choice" the relevant consideration in who gets to be protected? Political view is a choice. Being gay isn't a choice but getting married to another man is. Gender identity might not be a choice but gender presentation is a choice... | 41 | 65 |
ELI5: What's the difference between the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO? | The World Bank provides funding for development projects (so if a nation wants to provide electricity to a remote, poverty stricken area the World Bank will provide a loan).
The IMF provides central bank like responses to international currency crisis. So if trade stops because the currency has devalued the IMF will provide expert advice and financial support (usually this support is tied to market reforms that may be costly to the nation).
The WTO provides a means for nations to negotiate international trade deals, and dispute resolution when allegations of violations of said international trade deals arise. They don't generally provide funds for projects like the other two.
All three tend to increase globalization which isn't a goal of many people, so all three organizations tend to have large groups that dislike their actions. | 12 | 29 |
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ELI5: What is calculus | Calculus is how you apply math which originally was used for counting sheep into something useful for observing the world, which doesn’t exist in discrete numbers of sheep but is made up of small pieces, small changes in quantities and time down to differences too small for us to see or feel.
On a basic level, think about the population of the world. How would you say what the population will be in 100 years? You’d look at the rate at which people are born, per day.
That’s a derivative. The rate of change. Per day.
The rate changes with the number of people so you need to make small steps in time (days), multiply by the rate, find the new rate per day, make a new step in time and so on.
That’s an integral. The sum of change. Over days.
See how simple and basic the concept is? There is little more to basic calculus than applying these concepts to some functions you already know.
You would struggle to figure out anything if you didn’t know how things change over another thing. It’s no wonder some people say math is useless before they learn calculus! | 63 | 38 |
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How to spend a gap year before graduate school | Hi all,
I'm about to graduate in the spring with a BA in philosophy, and I am planning on taking a gap year before I apply to a PHD program in philosophy. I'm hoping to spend the better part of the year working, preferable in a job related to philosophy. Is anyone aware of jobs/paid programs for BA's that could potentially improve one's grad school application? Outside of philosophy, are there any gap year-type jobs that could help me prepare for a career in philosophy? Thanks for any help y'all can provide!
Edit: Just realized almost every sentence I wrote ends with "philosophy"... promise I'm better at writing than this in academic and professional contexts... | I'd highly recommend *not* taking a philosophy-related job. A gap year is about taking time to plan out your life: explore alternative career paths, and maybe at the same time prepare for a philosophical career path. Exploring requires a different career, one that genuinely interests you. Preparing for grad school requires flexible hours for working on your writing sample, sending applications, campus visits, etc. It's also nice to bank some $, to use during grad school.
Most typical gap year programs (americorps, teach for america, etc.) are nice options, but also more traditional career paths are worth serious consideration. Ever wondered what it would be like to be a lawyer? Network your way into a job as a paralegal. What about a consultant? Go for it! They're expecting you to leave anyways.
*Re your edit:* Your writing is fine. Philosophers hate vocabulary changes for the sake of variety. Use the right word for the job, and if it's the same word you used before, then use it anyways. | 27 | 30 |
ELI5: How is light both a wave and a particle? | Describing light like as a wave and a particle is just an attempt to use familiar objects to help understand what light actually is. In reality, it's neither wave, nor a particle, but it behaves similarly to both.
It's kind of like if you were to say "a llama is a horse and a camel". Well, it's not a horse, and it's not a camel, it's a unique thing that happens to be similar in some ways to a horse, and some ways to a camel. Make sense?
(EDIT: if you'd like more details on *how* light is similar to a particle and a wave, let me know) | 67 | 55 |
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ELI5: Virus vs. Bacteria | A bacteria is a living cell. They have an extreme range of possible sizes, but most of the ones that infect humans are quite small, often hundreds of times smaller than human cells.
A virus is a non-living package of DNA. It doesn't metabolize or move on its own, it just delivers its package into a host cell, where its DNA takes over and starts replicating more viruses. | 31 | 63 |
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If you put a Garden in the ISS, Could you have infinite oxygen? | Because it can create oxygen and u can feed it with co2?
Edit: Jesus this is most updoots ive ever gotten thanks fam. Also thanks for responses
Edit 2: My karma just tripled. thanks homies | This is called bioregenerative life support, and in falls in the broader category of Environmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS). Short answer is yes, but not infinite and not without disadvantages.
Note that plants aren't the only way to recycle oxygen. Currently they use water electrolysis to inject oxygen into their atmosphere, and use the resulting hydrogen to apply the Sabatier reaction with CO2. This yields methane as a waste product, and captures oxygen from CO2 in the form of water, so they can later apply electrolysis again and recycle oxygen.
A clear advantage of using plants would be trapping carbon into edible forms, so you'd be recycling not only oxygen but also food. However, not all plants have a 100% edible mass, and those who do usually offer very few calories if not negligible (e.g. lettuce).
A problem with plants is that they could die under some conditions, so this system isn't 100% reliable. And in any case, whether bioregenerative or artificially regenerative, you can never achieve a 100% reuse of ECLSS resources. But it's ok, you can get close enough and have them for a long time relying on very little supplies.
They are actively researching on this topic. Recently they've been able to grow lettuce in the ISS.
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ELI5: why does make and female handwriting look so different almost all the time? Generally speaking, females write neatly with fluffy, bubbly letters. Men on the other hand usually have messy, jagged writing. | Male** | There are cultural pressures, however it is partially due to the differences in motor and cognitive development between boys and girls. At the age when children typically learn to write girls generally have more developed fine motor control, which allows them to learn to write neater. When boys' fine motor control catches up, they have already learned to write messy and changing muscle memory is quite the process. Boys also tend to have slower cognitive development especially when it comes to attention. They are less able to sit still for long periods of time and would rather be physically active. As a result boys generally develop gross motor skills faster than girls of this age. | 47 | 34 |
(DC) How detailed are Light Constructs. | For example, if Scarecrow were to be given a Sinestro Corps Ring ( Like in Blackest Night ) would he be able to make a working Light Construct of his Fear Toxin? | Light constructs are limited by two things. Your imagination/knowledge and your ability to will it into existence.
For example, Kyle makes incredibly detailed constructs, but they're solid with no inner workings. However, John Stewart makes simple looking constructs, but he fills them up with inner workings because that's how his mind works.
The Scarecrow could, theoretically, create a Fear Toxin light construct, but such a complex cause/result might exceed his ability to will things into existence. As someone who controls a power ring, he'll find it easier to create terrifying constructs and seeing what scares his victims more. | 18 | 23 |
Do gendered languages act as a boundary towards sexual equality? | Languages apply feminine and masculine associations with words, how does this shape social structures? | Unfortunately this is going to be almost impossible to test, because it's basically impossible to find cases where two societies are roughly the same except for their language, or cases where a society changes its language. These are what you would need to test this, because you could look for differences in sexism between the two societies or over time in the one society. But of course societies that differ in language will differ in so many other factors that any or all of those could be involved in different levels of sexism, and a society changing its language and *just* is language is very, very, very rare. | 42 | 68 |
ELI5: How does building muscle work? | ELI5: How does building muscle work?
How does this differ if your exercise is higher reps at lower weight vs. Tons of weight with a 1 rep max? | Your muscles are made of 2 types of fibers: fast twitch and slow twitch. Working out pulls some of the fibers apart a little, which makes your body add more fibers to repair them. More fiber means more strength or endurance.
Low weight high reps is slow twitch fiber. They don’t fatigue as fast, but aren’t as strong. It builds endurance. High weight low reps is fast twitch fiber. They fatigue much faster. It builds strength.
If your workout is running, then long distance is slow twitch, and sprinting is fast twitch. | 26 | 24 |
ELI5: The Controversy With the American Economic System, and Why "The Poor Stay Poor"? | The question is a bit broad. But broadly speaking there is a view, generally held by liberals, that the American economic system tends toward a concentration of wealth in the hands of the relatively few, while it becomes increasingly difficult for those of lesser means to get ahead. In general, the solutions favored by liberals tend to involve some form of wealth redistribution, including, for example, increasing taxation of the wealthy to fund social programs that benefit the poor.
Conservatives tend to believe that this type of redistribution is counterproductive because it discourages investment while diverting funds to inefficient programs that in turn discourage productivity. To put it simply (and somewhat crudely), they think that higher taxation sucks money out of the economy that would otherwise be invested in further economic grown and putting money into gratuitous social programs like welfare just makes people more complacent. | 25 | 69 |
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Would it be possible for two people to grow together if they both were to cut off a hand/finger and then hold the wounds together? | Assuming blood types and so on are identical. | Ignoring practical issues like being able to brace the wounds together for the weeks it'd take to heal, you would have to go beyond just matching blood type--the two people would need matching HLA haplotypes or else each person's immune system would try to reject the other person's tissues. (There may be ways around this, for example if each person were put on immunosuppressants.) Perhaps it could happen with identical twins, whose HLAs would be perfect matches. | 2,646 | 3,254 |
CMV: There are only two genders, Male and Female | I've never understood the argument for the existence of more than two genders. It seems to me that even individuals who identify as transexual or ones who actually experience the mental condition known as body dysphoria aren't somehow in their own specific gender. Trans individuals identify as a gender that is different than what their body actually is but it isn't an alternative assignment, it's still one of the two previously accepted sexes. If we talk about intersex individuals we find that they trend to one or the other side and identify as such. Hell even if you get into shit like gender-fluid or two spirit or even "pan" gender they are acknowledging stereotypical masculine and feminine traits in order to define their identity. There really isn't anything outside of this binary system to define the sexes (aka I haven't met a trunk-person yet).
Edit:
I'm done for tonight, thank for all of your responses you've given me a good bit to think about.
Edit2:
Thanks to everyone who took the time to write out their explanations. To all involved, I wish to let you know that my view has in fact been changed. I no longer believe that there is less than two genders, but rather that gender is a meaningless term relating to a cornucopia of unfalsifiable assertions based on feelings. That is not to say I doubt people when they say that they feel this way, but that their feelings are ultimately their own problem so long as they don't affect others negatively. Knowing the effing minefield that this conversation is, I will drop the term from my vocabulary and just use the term "sex" from now on. Thanks for your replies. I won't be responding to any other questions. Perhaps in the future I'll paste a CMV to ask people to convince me why gender is a worthwhile area of study or classification. Keep it classy.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Gender is a social construct. There are two sexes. Gender is just some idea of what the people with a penis are supposed to act like, as opposed to the ones with vaginas. But it changes constantly, in space and time both. What was a "male" thing to do 50 years ago isn't so much anymore. Being a "man" means pretty much whatever you want it to mean these days.
I would argue that there are NO genders, not two. The entire concept has basically been rendered pointless. If being a man can mean anything from being a burly lumberjack to a sensitive father to whatever else, then the term really has no actual meaning, does it? Apart from of course, "having a Y chromosome", but we already have "biological sex" for that. | 19 | 17 |
What's the strongest refutation to the claim that conciousness doesn't originate from the brain? | According to Vedānta, consciousness is a function of Brahman, the underlying reality. From consciousness, the material world is manifest out of. Or in other words, the knower necessarily must precede the known. During the course of a dream there are so many events that arise and dissipate, but actually all that is occurring within the dream is an illusory show of consciousness, of Brahman. The waking state is no different, it is also just a shadow manifestation of Brahman. Just as the 'reality' of a dream vanishes upon waking, the 'reality' of waking vanishes upon dreaming. The value of their knowledge is relative to their own conditional state. One should be interested then in what is consistent between both the states of dreaming and waking, and that link is consciousness itself. | 18 | 29 |
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Why do we teach braille to blind people instead of stamped ”normal“ letters? | Stamped (raised) "normal" letters would need to be considerably larger than braille characters in order to be distinguished from one another through tactile sensation. Large enough that the finger tip would need to move, or trace, the letter. If you were to make the letters smaller, several letters would be too difficult to distinguish. With Braille, the finger doesn't need to move for one single character. And the dots are simply easier to feel. | 27 | 28 |
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ELI5: How do planets bend time? | Gravity, as far as we know, is caused by distortions in spacetime caused by mass. Since it's a distortion of spacetime it impacts both: space...which is why things are "pulled" towards planets, and time...clocks run slower near big masses.
There's nothing special about planets in this respect, it happens with all masses, but planets are the largest masses except stars and black holes so it's more pronounced near them.
\*Technically\*, just moving your watch near a stack of free weights causes it to move a little slower, but it's such a small effect that you can't measure it.
On the other hand, GPS satellites have to correct their clocks for the distortion caused by being in earth's gravity well (and for the distortion caused by how fast they're going). | 29 | 20 |
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ELI5: How/Why is Russia so big? | I do not understand. | Over centuries, the principality known as Muscovy (Moscow) expanded territorially--to the Baltic, southwest through Ukraine and Crimea, and east and south. Expansion westward and southward more or less met its end when Russians ran into Poles, Swedes, Germans, Turks, and so forth--organized states/empires who were powerful enough to counter expansion and maintain a border. To the east and southeast, there wasn't much in the way of powerful, organized states. Siberia was sparsely populated by small societies, and the nomads on the steppes in central Asia (what's now the "Stans") weren't able to effectively resist domination from a modernizing imperial power. Russian expansion halted when it met natural barriers (Pacific/Arctic Ocean, mountains) or large power further east (China, Japan). Most of this went on while other European powers (and later the US and Japan) were expanding abroad--European expansion wasn't possible for Britain or France, but their navies and access to the Atlantic/warm-weather ports (something Russia always craved) meant that expansion overseas in the Americas/Africa/Asia was possible, especially after industrialization and power projection capabilities improved.
**tld;dr**The lands east of Moscow are pretty sparsely populated, so there was little resistance to expansion. | 41 | 43 |
ELI5: Why do people with poor vision instinctively squint their eyes? Why does this make their vision slightly more clear? | In addition to the points made by bubrahuicize, when you "stop down" (increase the f/# of) a lens (including your eye), you decrease the size of the aperture. Doing this increases the depth of field, as the part of the image nearer the center of the lens is the least affected by this lens. Or, to put it another way, the part of the image nearest the center is the least sensitive to focusing error.
By definition, nearsightedness or farsightedness is the inability to properly focus an image when the object is a certain range of distances from the viewer. Squinting - effectively, decreasing the diameter of the eye - will minimize the focusing error. | 22 | 40 |
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Are there evidence based ways to increase empathy for others? What does the literature say on this? | Are there evidence based ways to increase empathy for others? What does the literature say on this? | You could rather easily do what most people here are going to do and ask Dr. Google.
Mentalization-Based Therapy (MBT) comes to mind. It was introduced to me as a way to work with people diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, but was originally developed for use with borderline-presenting patients. The idea behind this approach is that increasing awareness of one’s own mental states helps to create understanding of others’ mental states. | 25 | 22 |
Are there examples of urban gentrification that also increased the standard of living for that city's lower class residents? | Check out "There Goes the Hood" by Lance Freeman - an excellent qualitative study of gentrification in New York City.
"This book argues that indigenous residents do not necessarily react to
gentrification according to some of the preconceived notions generally
attributed to residents of these neighborhoods....Residents of the ’hood are sometimes more receptive because gentrification brings their neighborhoods into the mainstream of American commercial life with concomitant amenities and services that others might
take for granted. It also represents the possibility of achieving upward
mobility without having to escape to the suburbs or predominantly white neighborhoods. These are benefits of gentrification typically not recognized in the scholarly literature." | 13 | 87 |
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Why have viruses not evolved to the point of being beneficial to their hosts, rather than usually being harmful? | Most viruses when they infect their hosts are going to be attacked and defeated by our immune systems. If a viruses goal is to ultimately replicate, wouldn't they be more successful if they helped strengthen their hosts in some way? Imagine an std that resulted in better vision, Etc. | Even in theory it seems difficult to envisage how a virus could benefit a host. While bacteria can form mutualistic relationships with other species, they are able to do this because they can offer unique metabolic reactions to their host. Viruses however do not perform any function other than replication, and any other genes they have are designed to facilitate their access to the replicative machinery of other cells. So unless you could envision a function which would be improved through a replication process it is difficult to see how a virus could offer a simple and direct benefit to the host.
The other problem here is an evolutionary one. There are two evolutionary barriers to your proposition. The first is in the virus; in order to take on extra functions the virus would almost certainly have to expand its genome. However, this would almost certainly make it less fit relative to other viruses of it's type. Larger genomes take longer to replicate, are more difficult to insert and pack, and require more resources from the host cell. Viruses are heavily optimised to reproduce in large numbers, fast; so any change which reduces their ability to replicate fast, without compensating in some way (better immune evasion perhaps) will result in a fitness loss, and would be gradually selected out of the population of viral types.
The second evolutionary barrier is in the host. In order for the host immune system not to systematically kill the 'beneficial' virus, there would have to be a complementary set of chance mutations which altered the immune system in some way such that it ignored these particular viruses; while attacking every other type with perfect fidelity. Then these hosts would have to breed, and would have to have greater reproductive success as a result of their symbiosis with the virus such that the virus-friendly host type spreads. In reality this is unlikely, and would take a significant period of time. The main reason it is unlikely is that in the short term there is no benefit to someone in having a selective immune system of this type; especially since if someone had one, they would be vulnerable to any pathogenic virus which could mimic the 'beneficial' type. | 57 | 71 |
ELI5: How is it legal that Hooters wont let men be waiters? | Isn't that discrimination? | Basically, discrimination is legal - even in terms of protected classes like sex and race - if the company can show that there is a bona fide purpose for the discrimination. Hooters has argued that their servers are entertainers, and the entertainment they provide is a role that can not be filled by a man. Their stance has generally held up in court, although they have reached settlements with some men who sued on the basisof hiring discrimination. | 28 | 29 |
Why can't decompilers perfectly reconstruct source code? | I always thought that there was a one to one translation between machine code and high-level languages, but after looking up decompilers, they don't usually do it perfectly. | Going from high-level language to machine/assembly is generally a lossy, one-to-many-possibilities operation. Take a simple while-loop, you can probably find five or six ways to implement it in MIPS or other assembly language, and that's not even considering optimizations.
A decompiler can produce high-level code that duplicates the semantics of the machine code, but reconstructing the *intent* of the original is impossible. Too much of that is literally lost in translation. Consider a simple optimization such as loop unrolling - a fixed loop such as `for i = 1 to 3` might be unrolled into three copies of the loop body. Without context, how could a decompiler know that the original was a loop, and not three copies of the same code snippet?
And this doesn't even touch on one of the biggest contextual hints in source code, which is identifiers. The names of methods and variables carry a lot of meaning for us, but are meaningless to the compiler except in their uniqueness, and are often lost in compilation. Sometimes they are recorded in an attached symbol table for e.g. debugging, but that's no guarantee, we often strip symbols to save space.
You wouldn't think of computer science as involving a lot of artistry, but there are niches where talent, insight, experience, and intuition play a large part. Reconstructing source from binary is one of those niches. | 51 | 27 |
[Halo] How/Where did the covenant get their super advanced cruisers, carriers, etc. | The covenant had an overwhelmingly large advantage in technology. Am I led to believe that the San 'Shyuum came up with this technology on their own? Did they find it somewhere? | The Engineers (Huragoks) are a biological Forerunner construct, which provided most (if not all) of the current Covenant tech. This is one of the reasons the survivors of the Covenant are screwed because they don't know how anything works, and the Engineers have abandoned them. The Prophets basically prohibited any other species from messing with tech, to tighten their hold on the Covenant. | 23 | 19 |
ELI5: How can someone be shot in the brain and not die ? | Clinical Neuroscience/Neurosurg MD, PhD Candidate here.
Quick rundown:
1) If major arteries or connecting arterioles (Cerebral medial, posterior, anterior, basal or carotid) are hit, there is a high probability of death. If not, things get interesting:
2)If not, then its down to what brain matter is destroyed (And this is how researchers attributed function to area:
Frontal lobe: Non life essential (See Patient Phineas Gage), destruction results in change of personality, executive function (higher moral, thought, rationalising and inhibition processes.
Temporal lobe ( lower side): Non life essential (See Patient: HM), destruction may result in loss of memory functions (hippocampus), loss or intensification of primal emotion (fear anger etc) (amygdala).
If you drew a line from ear to ear along the top most point of your head, this is roughly (slightly more anteriorely) where the motoric and sensory cortex would be. Damage here results in loss of the ability to feel, or move.
Parietal lobe (top side): Non life essential, damage may lead to cognitive changes, however its very possible that no obvious changes may be seen.
Occipital lobe (back of head): Non life essential, vision loss.
Deep brain (Di-encephalon, Mes encephalon etc.) and brainstem.
Traumatic damage here is almost certainly deadly.
Most important life functions are breathing, arousal, and decending motoric tracts.
3)
Lastly, infection is a major concern. High dose Antibiotic (probably broad spectrum) is necessary.
TLDR: 1) If you dont pop a major artery, 2) You can hit non life-essential brain matter and 3) Survive infection, you can survive a shot to the brain and not die. | 75 | 96 |
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ELI5: What is physically happening within our bodies that makes performing cardiovascular exercise easier and easier every time we do it consistently? | A number of things.
One, as you perform cardiovascular endurance exercise, your heart starts pumping more blood per beat. This is called "increased stroke volume" and it's what eventually leads to a lowered blood pressure and lower heart rate whole resting. More blood = more oxygen per stroke.
Two, your muscles get better at utilizing the oxygen they're given. They can either become more permeable to oxygen (taking more up per second) or you can actually grow more mitochondria (meaning more O2 used per given unit of time) or both.
Three, cardiovascular endurance exercise is inherently fatiguing. As you perform more and more of it over a longer period of time, your body gets better at flushing out the metabolic waste materials that cause acute fatigue.
There are a few more reasons, but those are the basics.
Real ELI5: as you train, your heart pumps more oxygen, your muscles ~~use~~ need less oxygen, and you don't get as tired as easily.
**Edit:** Wording change to be more clear. | 111 | 201 |
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ELI5: the difference between a college and a university | In the UK, a College normally offers A-levels or equivalent (high school for 16 -18 year olds), whereas a University offers a much wider range of degrees, normally for people who have already completed A-levels and are 18+ years old.
That said, some universities call themselves colleges, which is confusing (i.e. King's College London is a university), and most universities consist of 'colleges' or 'schools' or 'faculties', which are departments of the university, e.g. Business School, School of Systems Engineering, etc. | 15 | 18 |
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15 questions evolutionists can't answer | Through another reddit link, I found the following link. I am a firm believer in evolution and that the fact that some of these question don' have an answer right now isn't because they never will. Are any of them flat out lies that we can't explain the answers?
Some, like the creative design (6) and the transitional fossil (9) questions I know, but any other thoughts by people who likely know a helluva lot more than I do? Link below:
http://creation.com/images/pdfs/flyers/15-questions-for-evolutionists-s.pdf
EDIT: When I said that I was a strong believer in evolution, it was mostly as a response to the strong creationist rhetoric in the post. I have never felt the need to state a "belief" in evolution, and didn't mean it in the way that it seems to be construed by some. I mainly just wanted to reinforce the fact that I don't endorse the questions posed in the link. | 1 & 2 aren't about evolution. 3 can be explained by natural selection. 4 is pedagogy. 5 is a good question for a biochemist. 6 is a non-sequitur. How do you define "looks designed?" Something is designed if it looks like it does not occur in nature, and these things do occur in nature. 7 is a good question. 8 is a similar question to 7. 9 is a strawman argument. 10 is another strawman; those organisms are suited to their environment. 11 isn't a science question. 12 is pedagogical. 13 is irrelevant to the validity of the theory and you can point out that treatments have changed as pathogens have evolved. 14 is another strawman, there is lots of evidence of evolution in action. 15 is a strawman.
So basically you have 5, 7 and 8 that evolutionary biologists are working on, and 1 and 2 that are good questions but irrelevant to evolution, that people like Jack Szostak are working on. | 295 | 131 |
CMV: First Nations people are already given enough freebies in society, and should stop asking for further special treatment. | As a white Canadian citizen, I have grown up with the idea that the First Nations people had their land unfairly taken away from them by the European settlers through unfair treaties, and as a result of this, the Government of Canada throws various "freebies" at the First Nations people, such as:
* Specific job opportunities only open to First Nations.
* Thousands of dollars in scholarships only available to First Nations.
* They allow the First Nations people to govern themselves, yet supply utilities, free healthcare, sanitation systems, etc.
* Major subsidies to certain post-secondary programs only available to First Nations.
* Free land / housing available only to First Nations on Native reserves.
Still, every year I hear in the news the First Nations people wanting more special treatment, more freebies. Now arguably, the Government of Canada has been attempting to assimilate First Nations people for the past 100 years, so perhaps the whole "First Nations should be happy with what they've got" idea has been imprinted into my brain through mass media.
I am supposed to sympathize with the First Nations people, but I am finding it difficult to do so.
Please Change My View.
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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!* | Firstly, the Government of Canada's isn't just providing "freebies" to the First Nations, they're providing services that they're constitutionally bound to provide under the terms of the treaties the First Nations made with the Crown. It would literally be unconstitutional not to provide these services.
Secondly, the First Nations are the single most disadvantaged group in Canada. Conditions on reserves are comparable in some cases to Third World countries. Education levels, drug use, incarceration rates, crime, murder are significantly worse for them than other group in Canada. They experience disgusting levels of racism on both a personal and institutional level almost every day. Chiefs are unaccountable, and embezzle government money for themselves instead of investing in the community. Canadian First Nations are demographically worse off in many indicators than African Americans.
Finally, this disadvantaged status came because of Canada's colonial legacy, of seizing land via unequal treaties, poorly compensating the First Nations, and trying to assimilate them into the rest of the population. This was a brutal and traumatizing process fraught with abuse, perhaps best exemplified by the Indian Residential Schools System, in which more than 150, 000 First Nations children were forcibly removed from their families in an effort to assimilate them by cutting off all contact from their culture. This is not the recent past; the last of these schools only closed in the mid 1990s.
Tl;dr: First Nations are the single most disadvantaged group in Canada, and we're constitutionally bond to make amends for historical wrongs.
| 30 | 16 |
eli5: Why is it that scientists make claims that planets are uninhabitable because there are gasses, temperatures, etc. that wouldn't support human life? This surely shouldn't be one shoe that fits all. | Surely, all creatures (alien or human) require different 'things' (water, oxygen, etc for humans) to survive. But, those 'things' might not be essential for alien life so why is it that scientists say that certain planets aren't fit for life because they are inhospitable for humans. | there are estimates that you need a certain variety of molecules to form what we would consider as life. i. e. on earth, carbon bonds to different stuff, and forms things like DNA, proteins, and so on. but we can't make a, say, sodium-based lifeforms because sodium doesn't bond to necessary amount of things, and those to which it does bond don't posess necessary properties.
we could suggest that maybe our estimates are wrong and life is still possible with a non-carbon set of molecules - but it may be so different that we wouldn't be able to simply recognize it.
so, we are in search of life that we can recognize, and that is carbon-based life. and carbon-based life requires certain conditions and leads to certain observable consequences in the planet's atmosphere etc. | 33 | 22 |
cmv:/ Underage voting should not be allowed | ***I am from Switzerland so the voting system is different as at the most countries. so if you know to less about the voting-system go look it up real quick. thanks <3***
For context, there is a huge discussion about if voting under 18 (at 18 you're an "adult") should be allowed.
I personally think that this is a bad idea. I just think if you can vote at 16 you are most certainly to young to have your honest and true opinion on things. When I think back what my political opinion on things were when I was 16 I would not have let myself vote for anything. I was in the middle of puppetry and that's were you really make your mind up and start to think more adultlike.
Also I am kind of afraid that they don't take the voting's serious enough and just vote something random or something meme-ish.
I would like to hear some good arguments why this should be allowed because it sounds pretty progressive to our society.
Edit: What I forgot to mention is that you get fined for not voting. It's not much money but still about 5 Dollars. That's because they want to make the participation rates higher. So the option for them to just not vote is not really available and I don't think you're that interested in politics at 16 to make yourself the time to read all the things to vote for.
&#x200B; | Changing the voting age to 16 would allow for more integration of political and civic engagement by youth into their education, which could in turn create more seriously politically engaged and participatory culture. It seems like a really good idea tbh. | 43 | 28 |
ELI5: why are female tits so sexualised ? | They are a secondary sexual characteristic and as such indicate that the woman is past puberty and therefore physically developed and ready for producing offspring. Them being large indicates that she is well fed (not an issue in modernity) and them being firm indicates youth and health. These factors give some very base instinctual attraction to them in a sexual manner. Western society (particularly American) amplifies these natural impulses by focusing on them as a sexual region of the body and making both nudity and sexuality taboo in open society. | 53 | 21 |
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What’s the process of hospitals adopting new medical practices as new medical information is discovered? | Are there meetings were doctors go over new medical discoveries and choose which ones they trust to implement? Is it purely a cost issue? Are there approval barriers? Thanks! | Every hospital has committees for this. The medical executive committee will discuss things like this and whether to adopt recommendations or policies. This happens infrequently and there is usually a huge discussion about it.
One month we discussed evidence that people given X before surgery had fewer heart attacks during surgery. The next month we discussed new evidence that people given X had a higher rate of hemorrhage. Therefore no recommendation to give X was made. Surgeons could opt to do either.
I promise you it is more complicated than you think :) | 23 | 32 |
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