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ELI5: How did the new and old world create and use the same technology? Such as the bow and arrow. How could two different parts of the world create the same technology without coming into contact with each other? | I can understand both parts of the world creating the spear and other simple technologies. But how could something more complex like the bow and arrow be created by two sides of the world without making contact with each other at all? | 1) Many technologies are invented multiple times independent of each other. This is particularly true of our early technologies.
2) Arrow and spear technology was in use before the Ice Age man entered North America. So they brought it with them from Asia. | 80 | 138 |
[DC] Can aquaman drown? | I know this sounds silly but bear with me.
Fish technically can drown, but not in the same way we do. They breathe by having water move across their gills, but if the gills are damaged or water cannot move across them then the fish will suffocate.
Would Aquaman face a similar problem, or would his Atlantean biology save him? | Fish breathe water by filtering oxygen out of the water that passes through their gills. In theory you could take all of the oxygen out of the water and he would suffocate just as any human would when there's no oxygen in the air. | 21 | 21 |
[Power Rangers] Are the rangers, powered by magic or science? What is "The Grid" and how does it function? | Are the enemies they fight magic or science based as well? Rita seems to be a sorceress but Zordon seems to be some type of techno mage, at least the rangers seem anyway. I understand some rangers are also more mystical in nature, but magic clearly seems to play a part in the universe as evidenced by the movie and other times in the series.
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What are the Zords? | The Morphing Grid is a universal energy field that draws upon the life force of all living beings. Some ranger teams use magic to draw power from it, others use technology to draw power from it. But all Rangers use the Morphing Grid's energies to transform into superpowered beings, summon weapons and zords. A "Morpher" is a singular device that generally uses a powerful item, be it magical, or technological, to jump start the connection to the Morphing Grid. The Power Coins used by the original Mighty Morphin team, the Zeo Crystal shards.
A morpher's specific energy signature manifests as a color, with bright primary colors being the easiest to align to. A specific team of Rangers will be using the same type of morphers, and operate on a similar wavelength of energies from the Grid, but each with a slightly different connection to it. It is very difficult, but not impossible to have two Rangers with almost identical color-wavelengths, such as the Red Time Force Ranger and the Quantum Ranger. That required futuristic technology.
As the Morphing Grid is aligned to life force, many Rangers use animal avatars as a ways of focusing their power.
Zords are giant robots, or magical constructs powered by Grid energies. Some Rangers are able to use the Morphing Grid to summon them, or teleport them directly to their location. Others have to pilot them to a location from a docking bay or other dimensional pocket realm.
Basically, Power Rangers are heroes who draw from the same energy source, and thus have similar powersets, but conjure and manifest those powers in different ways. | 72 | 58 |
During graduate admissions, would you choose a candidate with an amazing research project, and references, but a okayish GPA, or another with an okayish research project, good references, but excellent GPA? | What's the protocol? | Amazing research project and references, as long as the GPA is still "good". It depends what you mean by okayish.
If the GPA is "bad" then they'd probably be screened out before anybody even looks at the other stuff. | 217 | 154 |
Logistic Regression, does y need to be 0 or 1? | Not sure if it fits this subreddit, but was doing some Logistic Regression with Python and had some errors. At the end I think I fixed it.
I first had y to be values of 2 or 4. I believe these did have a meaning. When I changed them to 0 and 1 my ROC Curve made more sense.
My question is, does the y (what you want to predict) need to be 0 and 1, even if you only have 2 possible values (like 2 and 4)? And if so, why? | Logistic regression models two groups which are **arbitrarily** labeled 0 and 1 for mathematical convenience --- it models a Bernoulli variable. Sometimes the groups are signified by -1 and 1 and the formulae becomes slightly different.
Whether or not you can recode to 0 and 1 depends on the meaning of your 2 and 4. If they are just arbitrary codes, then it is fine. If they convey something else, it might not... | 15 | 15 |
ELI5: CRISPR and how it'll 'change everything' | Heard about it and I have a very basic understanding but I would like to learn more. Shoot. | Geneticist here! CRISPR (or CRISPR-Cas9, if you want the full name), is a big improvement in how we genetically modify organisms.
All organisms, from single-cell bacteria, to plants, to animals, to humans, have long molecules inside of them, called DNA. The pattern of different molecules in this chain of DNA, called the *genetic code,* provides instructions for building those bacteria/plants/animals. Tiny little machines inside those cells read the genetic code and use those instructions to make every part of the organism, so that it can grow and reproduce!
Now, one of the really cool things about DNA is that, because it's the "blueprint" for making an organism, we can make changes to the DNA and see the results in the resulting organisms! For example, if we insert the instructions for producing a green fluorescent protein (called GFP for short) in a bacteria's DNA, that bacteria will make the protein, and will glow green under fluorescent light!
Unfortunately, inserting a new chunk of instructions into DNA isn't as easy as making a change to a set of blueprints. We can manipulate DNA when it's isolated from an animal, on its own, but there's no way to build a new organism around that naked DNA. If we want to change an organism, we need to get at the DNA inside the cells, without killing them.
In addition, cells don't like getting random chunks of DNA shoved at them. They see this as a threat, and will destroy that DNA. So in order to get a chunk of DNA to stay in a cell, we need to incorporate it into the cell's own DNA - merge it in, like glueing a new sheet into the blueprints.
In order to add a chunk of foreign DNA, we need to add our chunk inside the cell, break the cell's own DNA somewhere, and then get the cell to fix its DNA by sticking our inserted chunk into the gap. Three tasks.
**Task 1:** getting the foreign chunk of DNA into a cell, can be accomplished by using electricity or soap to temporarily "pop" the cell's membrane. Obviously, this doesn't work well on adult humans, but it works great on bacteria and single cells.
**Task 2:** Breaking the cell's DNA somewhere. This is the really tricky part. Using certain (very nasty and dangerous) chemicals can make the DNA break in random places, but this is dangerous; what if we break the DNA in the middle of a gene that we need? Our cells will die!
This is where CRISPR comes in. CRISPR is a combination of a scissor-like protein and a DNA guide that lets it only cut at very specific chosen locations. Unlike old methods, we can be very precise with where we cut the cell's own DNA. We can cut to turn off a gene, or cut at a place where there's nothing but junk so that we can insert our own foreign DNA pieces!
**Task 3:** Close the DNA back up, fixing those cuts - with our inserted chunk inside. Fortunately, cells have the machinery to repair DNA cuts on their own! That was easy!
******
**So, CRISPR is a molecular pair of scissors that cuts DNA in very precise locations.** There are still big challenges with genetic engineering - it's tough to get these scissors into a cell, the foreign chunk of DNA doesn't always get inserted, and the CRISPR scissors can still miss and cut in the wrong places. But this is a huge advancement in making more precise cuts, a very important part in creating an organism with new abilities.
Feel free to ask questions! | 605 | 926 |
It's a common fact that fascists misappropriated Nietzsche's work to fit their worldview. Are leftists who were inspired by him also guilty of misrepresenting or misinterpreting his work? | Fyi, I'm definitely not equating fascists and leftists, but I've recently discovered that a lot of french post-modernist thought, which was IMO were mostly dominated by left-leaning people who were inspired by Nietzsche. Also, I found out that numerous leftists whom I admire were also inspired by him. | There's quite a difference between finding inspiration and agreement in some aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy to the minimization or exclusion of other aspects and then just getting Nietzsche's philosophy, or even just aspects of it, wrong in basic ways.
Everyone, whether to the political left, right, or center, engages in the former because Nietzsche's philosophy doesn't neatly fit into any existing broad political camp and his philosophy in general is pretty inconsistent as well as incomplete at the time he stopped writing.
Everyone, whether to the political left, right, or center, is *capable* of the latter - that is, just getting Nietzsche wrong in basic ways. For whether anyone does misrepresent Nietzsche, we'll have to look more specifically at individuals rather than broad categories like 'leftist.' | 73 | 68 |
Why can't objects be seen if they are smaller than the wavelength you are using? | Is there a physical visualization that can help reinforce this? I'm not seeing the relationship between the wavelength and physical object size.
The wavelength of light is continuous, and describes the E/M vector at a point. So if we have an atom at some position X, and we shoot an infinitely thin beam of visible light (wavelength larger than atom's size), the light must travel and hit the atom at position X because the light is continuous. It's not like the lightwave just skips over position X. So the atom should interact with the visible light, somehow. If it were to reflect the visible light back to us, then why can't we see the atom? | If you want a really far but easy way to see it, try to find where a grape ( in reality a bacteria) is on a table using a toothpick (electrons), a carrot (visible light), an apple (infrared) and a watermelon (radio).
As long a the wavelength (diameter) of the tool is smaller than the object you want to resolve, you have no problem defining where the object is and even details of the contour ( that is the toothpick).
When the wavelength of the tool is comparable you can still see that something of that approximate size is there (that is the carrot).
When the wavelength is larger, best case you may see some faint scattering that tells you there is something different about the area where the grape is (with an apple), and at a certain point it is unlikely you see anything at all (watermelon). | 654 | 674 |
How does sleeping work? I close my eyes and go unconscious. How does brain do that? | Edit: thanks for the response :) /u/CaptainMcSpankFace has a very good answer that explains why we need sleep.
Title is wrong. I meant to say how does the brain do that? | There are tons of articles out there describing how brain wave patterns change, neurotransmitters regroup and memories consolidate, MRI's do exciting things and REM sleep oscillates.
In truth, we don't know for sure and there is no complete "theory of sleep". Neither are we sure why we sleep, or even what the sleep actually is.
We know that we die if we don't sleep for too long, so it is necessary, but why?
We also know that animals sleep including insects and worms. Plants and even bacteria experience states of periodic dormancy that are as close to sleep as you can get without a nervous system, but we have no clue why they are doing it.
Your guess is as good as any.
Oops. Thank you, whoever that was! | 175 | 407 |
Are numbers themselves "real"? | They are certainly real as symbols in our language of math, but if there were no sentient beings in the Universe, would "7" still exist in abstraction somehow?
Does science account for this by accepting that non-physical "things" such as numbers and mathematical truths are just as objectively "real" as things made of matter? If so, what non-physical yet real things does it affirm exist other than mathamatical truth itself? | They exist in the same way other descriptors exist.
Take brown for example. Brown doesn’t exist on its own, but something can *be* brown. Even if humans didn’t exist, the word brown didn’t exist, the fact that an object reflects the combination of wavelengths that we call brown is still true.
Numbers exist in the same way, as quantities of things. Suppose there are two trees. Even without humans and language there is still the property of two that applies to this pair of trees. | 43 | 41 |
ELI5: Why is meat sold at supermarkets dated for up to 10 days, but when you open it at home you only have two days to eat it. | Especially something like family packs of chicken breast, that aren’t vacuum sealed | Bacteria breed in food, but it requires a couple of conditions. They need both oxygen and warmth to reproduce.
If you vacuum seal a product, you limit the amount of oxygen the bacteria will get. However, any imperfections in the vacuum seal (like a big pocket of air in a cavity of the meat) will significantly reduce this effect. Any supermarket that cuts their own meat on-site will not open a primal or subprimal until they are ready to butcher the whole thing. In the event that they don't, they have access to much higher grade vacuum sealers than most people do at home.
The second factor is temperature. Essentially, once you get below a certain temperature, the reproductive rate slows down a lot. However, it doesn't completely stop. If you bring the meat up to a higher temperature for a while (like, for instance, between picking it off the counter and putting it in your fridge), then the bacteria have had a chance to reproduce during that time. Even though you put it back in the cold, you're starting with a higher bacteria load than if it had just remained in the cold that whole time. | 469 | 648 |
[Legend of Korra] How is Zaheer so enlightened despite clearly being a psychopath? | Don’t get me wrong. Zaheer is definitely enlightened, and unlike the other villains, he doesn’t use his ideology to justify amassing power and control. However, he’s a psychopath, and arguably a little sadistic.
Zaheer has likely killed a lot of people over the years, but there are 3 incidents that distinguish him as extra sadistic and remorseless.
[Exhibit A: That one time he threw a guy who betrayed him into the Fog of Lost Souls](https://youtu.be/mp27sp3MYGo)
If Zaheer had just killed him that would have been one thing, but the Fog of Lost Souls is basically hell. He definitely went overboard there
[Exhibit B: That time when Zaheer laughed as soon as he thought he killed Korra](https://youtu.be/PreU8RaRxiI)
Do I even need to elaborate? Fine. He just brutally murdered a teenager in front of her father and then laughed about it. Even if Zaheer was 100% justified in killing her, that’s just needlessly cruel. This is further reinforced by
[Exhibit C: That time when Zaheer jumpscared Korra and laughed at her for being scared of him](https://youtu.be/EikWHCIVZig)
He’s laughing. He basically triggered Korra’s PTSD that he gave her by almost killing her, and he’s laughing
Now you’re telling me that out of all the airbenders in the thousands of years since Guru Laghima, this asshole is the only one who was enlightened enough to fly? | To be enlightened is to see the material as the meaningless place it is in the face of higher aims.
Ironically, this means being a psychopath might actually help you out here (an idea at least nudged at in many occult traditions, with "the wisdom of madness"). If you *already* don't care about things, that's a good third of the way there. | 55 | 33 |
ELI5: Why does a sudden shift from warm to cold lead to a runny nose? | When warm, moist air hits something cold, you get water droplets appear on the cold surface. (Think about the windows steaming up in your kitchen when you cook)
The same thing is happening inside of you. You have warm, moist air inside of you, and when your nose gets cold then water droplets are formed that makes your nose runny | 22 | 39 |
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ELI5: How does tobacco cause cancer? | Several ways. Nicotine speeds up cell growth, and decreases tumour suppressant chemicals in the body. Then you have all the other stuff they add to the tobacco to control burn rate and so on, like acetone, formaldehyde, lead, arsenic, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, and carbon monoxide, none of which are good. | 19 | 15 |
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CMV: We should abolish the electoral college | As you probably already know, we don't vote in the president directly but rather through the electoral college. There are actually 50 presidential election for who the electors are. On December 14, the electors cast their votes and the new president is chosen.
I am going to list my reasons for opposing this system:
**1. It's undemocratic**
A lot of people say that the US is not a democracy but rather a republic. However, that just means that we vote for people to make laws on our behalf. Directly electing the president would not change that. The founding fathers wrote about their fears of democracy but we've come a long way since then. Back in the day, only property owners could vote. Over time, suffrage was expanded to other groups like women and non whites. This is actually an argument against ballot measures, not for the electoral college.
**2. Winner take all**
Probably the most commonly cited reason in favor of the EC is that it protects states with smaller populations. It does not do that.
Roughly half of Americans live in 10 states. In a worst case scenario for a national popular vote, 10 states would get half of the attention. In the 2020 election, 12 states got 96% of the attention
[https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/map-general-election-campaign-events-and-tv-ad-spending-2020-presidential-candidates](https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/map-general-election-campaign-events-and-tv-ad-spending-2020-presidential-candidates)
This was actually worse in previous elections in which just four states would receive 2/3 of the attention.
Every state except Maine and Nebraska allocate their electors on a winner-take-all basis. This means that regardless of margin, the winning candidate gets every single elector. It's even worse than that when you remember that we live in a first past the post voting system, meaning that you don't even need to receive a majority of the votes to win every single elector. Perhaps the reason why Trump won the EC but lost the popular vote was because of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Trump didn't win a majority in any of those three states but he still got more votes than Hillary.
Because of this, presidential campaigns are incentivized to focus a lot of attention on what are referred to as swing states. This means that for whatever reason, the state switches sides every so often. Safe states are ignored because no amount of attention will change them or it would be a waste of time. It's either a guaranteed win or a lost cause. You don't really need to spend time convincing your supporters to actually turn out unless they live in swing states. This has a few implications. One implication is that candidates often seek to court the midwest because that's where a lot of swing states are concentrated. This means promising to bring the manufacturing jobs back in an era of globalization. Another implication is keeping the Cuba embargo because Cuban Americans (who tend to support it) are clustered in Florida (a swing state). Back in 1835, there was a minor skirmish between Michigan and Ohio over a disputed region. President Andrew Jackson personally sided with Michigan but ultimately remained neutral because Ohio was (and continues to be) a swing state.
Swing states ultimately make the EC less equitable than a simple popular vote
**3. So what**
A big deal is made over the possibility of a popular vote leaving out small states like Wyoming and Vermont. Our current system already does this but that's beside the point. The argument seems to rest in the idea that states are people and representing some states over others is unfair. The purpose of government is to improve the welfare of its citizens. If more citizens live in one state, it makes sense that it would receive more attention. If all men should have an equal voice, maybe 10 states getting half of the attention wouldn't be such a bad thing after all.
Land doesn't vote, people do.
We're also presuming that the president has absolute power and we're completely ignoring Congress which is made up by people from every single state. |
>The purpose of government is to improve the welfare of its citizens. If more citizens live in one state, it makes sense that it would receive more attention.
This is the main problem with all the "abolish the electoral college/senate" views. It fundamentally misunderstands why the government is structured as it is. The states already serve the purpose of enriching their citizens. They have significant power to legislate within their own borders. That power should then be more restricted at the federal level such that other states can preserve their power to do the same. | 90 | 173 |
ELI5: What is the difference between sievert, roentgen, and gray? Why is radiation measured with different units? What other units are used to measure radiation? | These aren't direct measures of radiation, but measures of impacts of radiation. The roentgen is a measure of how much gamma and xray radiation ionises air, but isn't a measure of anything else. Gray is a measure of how much energy is absorbed by a thing, and is useful in measuring doses of radiation (different things absorb radiation in different amounts, so will receive different doses of radiation even when the amount of radiation you fire at the thing is the same for each). Sievert is a measure of the health effects of radiation, ie, how much damage this much radiation does to people. They're different units because they measure different things. | 46 | 33 |
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ELI5: modernism, post-modernism, and meta-modernism | Edit: preferably in relation to literature, art and cinema, but a handrail overview of the associated values would be cool too | Modernism was an era circa World War One where the emphasis was on form, beauty, minimalism, truth, kind of like getting to the bottom of what things Mean in the World. It also deals thematically with the fall from Grace “crisis of modernity” brought about by WWI and the beginning of mechanized war and the emotional fallout on that generation. Modernism de-emphasizes the creator/author and says you should consider the work on merits rather than through the lens of the historical context of the work and the author. Examples of literary modernism are Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, TS Elliot, Great Gatsby. Think about Gatsby as kind of an archetype of modernism.
Postmodernism, by contrast, was more historical and self-aware than modernism as a movement. Postmodern art references itself in a tongue in cheek way, like Lichtenstein’s cartoons or Andy Warhol’s pop art. Postmodernism is “in on the joke” in a way that modernism isn’t.
I don’t know what meta-modernism is! I’m not an expert in this stuff, just took a couple college classes in it. | 11 | 18 |
ELI5: How does overall wealth actually increase? | Isn’t there only so much “money” in the world? How is greater wealth actually generated beyond just a redistribution of currently existing wealth? | When we convert raw materials into other resources, the value increases.
Raw steel and rocks isn’t that useful, but build a building and you can house people/do commercial activities. Wood isn’t useful, but you can print knowledge on paper and books are more valuable than raw wood.
This concept extends to ideas, not just physical materials. A new technology like self-driving cars increases the value of the economy. A new app that allows you to easily order food delivery also adds value.
As Long as economic activity exists, humans are constantly transforming resources, and value will increase. | 190 | 227 |
Any good statistics book suggestions to learn the theory behind the statistical techniques? | So basically i want a book that can explain to me, why does sum of squared standard deviations follow a chi squared distribution (goodness of fit test), logic behind gamma and Gaussian distribution etc. Searching on the net works but its really annoying to find a good article or video that explains well that too for so many topics. So i would like to know some statistics book that can explain the logic behind such concepts. | * Elements of Statistical Learning II-Hastie, Tibshirani, Friedman
* Introductory Statistics (9th edition) -Weiss
* Analysis of Messy Data - Milliken, Johnson
These are all good to start with, Good luck! | 20 | 26 |
ELI5: What instrument/equipment is disrupted by my active cellphone when flying on a modern airplane? | None.
Aircraft instrumentation may have been possibly affected by early cell phones and walkmans etc., **but now they're designed with cell frequencies and interference in mind.
No, the reason why they want you to put your devices away is so you're _paying attention._ Paying attention to the safety briefing, paying attention as the airplane takes off. Otherwise you're the asshat who can't open the emergency exit because he didn't read the safety card, or noone can get past you in your seat because your tray table and Macbook pro are blocking the seat.
edit: and as /u/hvarzan points out, cabin crew don't get paid enough to determine which devices DO vs. which ones don't, so the rule blankets ALL. | 117 | 76 |
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Are there any philosophers that argue an infinite regress of essentially ordered causes can exist? | Spinoza
>Whatever has been determined to exist and produce an effect has been so determined by God (by Ip26 and Ip24c). But what is finite and has a determinate existence could not have been produced by the absolute nature of an attribute of God; for whatever follows from the absolute nature of an attribute of God is eternal and infinite (Ip21). It had, therefore, to follow either from God or from an attribute of God insofar as it is considered to be affected by some mode….But it also could not follow from God, or from an attribute of God, insofar as it is affected by a mode which is eternal and infinite (by Ip22). It had, therefore, to follow from or be determined to exist and produce an effect by God insofar as it is modified by a mode which is finite and has a determinate existence…and in turn, this cause or mode…had also to be determined by another which is also finite and has a determinate existence; and again…and so always (by the same reasoning) to infinity. | 13 | 24 |
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I believe that driving is a right and not a privilege. CMV | As we have had drilled into our heads by every cop, judge, teacher, politician and grumpy old fuddy duddy since the industrial age began. I believe it is one of those bullshit lies that civic leaders thought up one day long ago as a way to generate more money into the system and has been repeated so long and often that it's become truth, however I raise 2 important arguments.
1: The roads, infrastructure, police patrols and everything else to do with them are paid for with my taxes. How are you going to force me to pay for roads then tell me I can't use them? How are you going to force me to pay sales tax on my vehicle then say I can't drive it? How are you going to force me to pay for licences, registrations, insurance, tags, road paint, blacktop, street signs, stop lights, crossing guards and every bit of minutia that goes into public roads then tell me I am not allowed to use them? I'm "public" enough to pay taxes but not "public" enough to use what I paid for?
2: Driving is a necessity in almost all areas that are not inner city. Employment, shopping, medical care, etc., all revolve around you reliably being able to get to them to survive. To deprive someone of their ability to earn a living is a violation of the all three aspects of the basic right of Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness.
Certainly jail or fine those who abuse, cause harm, damage or death with their vehicles but I don't feel stopping that person from being able to make a living is helping anyone in the long run except for the courts to extort more money into the system. Having a drunk driver in jail or prison will certainly stop his bad driving a lot more effectively than taking away his licence.
EDIT: My view has been changed. /u/joetheschmoe4000 gave a very compelling aspect I had not thought of before regarding privately owned roads and highways. And /u/mehals totally blew it out of the water with his/her excellent counterpoints. I salute them both and thank the others who participated. | Do you believe that blind people should be allowed to drive? He's done nothing wrong, has no driving infractions, and just nailed the written exam. Why should we deny his right?
As for your points
1-Tax dollars pay for lots of things that you aren't allowed to use. You're not allowed to fly fighter jets without training, you can't climb Mt. Rainier without a permit, you can't enroll in school if you're of a certain age, etc.
Furthermore, roads benefit you even if you can't drive on them. They result in improved commerce and lower goods prices, so that's the benefit you receive.
2-Iagree that driving is a necessity in many parts of the country, and that alternative forms of transportation like buses and bicycles don't quite make up for the difference. However, this seems like an argument for doing a better job of funding transit rather than issuing default licenses to people who haven't proven that they can't drive safely.
Mind giving us some examples of what you think are rights vs privileges? What's the inherent difference? | 10 | 15 |
Why does covering the eyes of a person impede our ability to identify them so much? | Like when they put a black bar over a person's eyes in a photo to conceal their identity. Most of the face is left untouched and yet it is hard for the human brain to identify the person. Why? | There are a *lot* of variable features about eyes. They can be different colors, wildly different shapes of the overall socket, the eyebrows are distinct, single-lid/double-lid, how deep the indentation is, the relation of the forehead to the eye opening, the shape of the actual opening of the lids, the expressions the person typically makes using their eyes... there's just a lot more variation in the eyes and surrounding area than other areas of the face. | 36 | 78 |
ELi5: Why do credit and debit cards have an expiration date? | To protect from fraud. Firstly it just adds another data point to check when paying online or remotely. Secondly it prevents really old or forgotten cards from being used if someone else discovers them.And lastly, the components break down and over time, so after more than several years they can't guarantee that the card will still work. | 370 | 176 |
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Is fair to call Superman a hero when 99% of the time he he puts himself at no risk by saving people? | He usually bears some cost--time and effort--and it seems natural that those who bear costs to help others are heroic even if they don't risk being harmed themselves (e.g., a person who spends her life assisting the poor and downtrodden). | 60 | 92 |
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Wanting to read all or most of the works of important philosophers. Need help organizing. | Hello Reddit.
I'm trying to do what the title says, but I can't organize a route to follow. I've started reading all the works from Plato and then I want to go with Aristotle, but from there I don't know where to go.
I find more appealing the takes of more modern philosophers i.e Kierkegaard, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre. But everyone recommended to have a strong foundation of western philosophy before reading some of them. So I decided to start a journey to have a strong grasp on it, but I also don't mind some eastern philosophy in between.
The problem is, that I don't know how to lay the path ahead to do so. What will be your recommendation on that? A list of the philosophers I need to read will work fine, I can then dig on my own how to approach them.
Sorry if this is too much to ask or for any grammatical errors, english is not my main language.
Also thanks in advance for anyone that takes their time to help me.
UPDATE: Thanks a lot to everyone that has commented. After reading all your comments I came to the conclusion that I can read whatever piqued my interest and that reading that much beforehand is not something mandatory. This started when I wanted to read some Nietzsche, but I saw recommended in a lot of posts to have a strong background to grasp it correctly. | The typical advice here is usually the opposite, start with a philosopher you’re interested in, and you can use secondary literature to helpfully give you precisely the background you need to understand them rather than waiting decades to start reading what interests you. Usually you can ask for a specific philosopher if any of their works are easier to start with or if any secondary literature is more highly recommended (or just use the search bar on the side as these questions get asked a lot and there’s tons of good advice already that you can access immediately). | 50 | 79 |
What happens to the photons that are 'blocked' by a polarizer? | When light passes through a polarizer, some proportion of it passes through (taking on the polarization of the polarizer) and some proportion is blocked.
What happens to the blocked photons? Are they absorbed and scattered? Converted into heat? Into kinetic energy (pushing the polarizer)? | Absorbed, usually. That'll have two effects: pushing the polarizer and heating it slightly. Conservation of momentum requires the former, conservation of energy the latter.
It is possible to polarize light using reflection or refraction techniques, but that often depends on angles and/or wavelengths, so that is usually only used in specialized cases. In those cases, (almost) none of the light is absorbed or blocked but is either reflected or bent differently to create two polarized beams of light. | 18 | 19 |
Eli5: why do the lights on planes flash instead of remaining illuminated like car headlights? | It makes them easier to spot visually.
Planes have several types of lights. The navigation lights (solid red/green on the left/right wing tips, and a solid white light on the tail) help pilots determine which way an airplane points. The red beacon light is a red rotating or pulsating light to warn people on the ground that the aircraft is running or about to start. Solid taxi/takeoff/landing lights illuminate what's ahead so pilots can taxi/takeoff/land safely. And the white flashing strobe light allows pilots to pick out an airplane at great distances and track it. | 118 | 61 |
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ELI5: What exactly is the issue with bees right now, why are people concerned about them? | The bug/insect, just for clarification. | Bees are *very* important in the process of pollinating plants and crops. They do it on a constant basis, as a process of living. It's the easiest form of "free labor" you can have. There's been a big issue in recent years where bees have been dropping rapidly in number, which can cause a huge dent in the farming industry and in nature itself. | 78 | 183 |
Why are cameras so inferior in low light compared to our eyesight? | I'm not even talking about extreme low light. For example, at home in the evening, I have a few lamps on. I can see everything clearly. Yeah, it's dim, but by no means dark. I whip out my DSLR, and even with a 1/60 shutter speed, a ginormous aperture of 1.8, and a very noisy ISO of 1600, images are very dark.
What is it about sensor technology that is so inferior, and what are possible technologies that could replace what we're currently using? | There's a -lot- to it but the overly simple answer is that you're not really seeing the 'light' but your minds reconstruction of the data provided by your eye. This is why we see in the dark so well, your mind is really, really good at filling in the blanks. | 177 | 161 |
CMV: I don't believe there's any inherent morality in dressing modestly nor do I believe there's any inherent immorality in dressing immodestly. | I've never understood why society seems to think that dressing modestly automatically makes you a better person and wearing revealing clothes automatically makes you a bad (or at least less good) person. I think behavior determines morality, not how you dress.
I'm sure the modesty issue stems from our slut-shaming culture, but regardless of whether you believe promiscuity is wrong, judging a person by their clothing still doesn't make sense to me. Any person could be promiscuous whether they dress modestly or not.
Another problem here is defining and setting standards for modesty. I once heard someone define dressing modestly as dressing in a way that does not encourage sexual attraction. If that's the case then in order to dress modestly, one would have to cover every part of his or her body that could possibly be sexually attractive to someone else. There are only a few cultures/ religions that require this and most people in contemporary society would agree that wearing clothing to cover every part of the body is overkill. So if you don't cover everything then how do you decide what is morally right to cover? Boobs but not legs? What if you have a flat chest but really long, sexy legs? How is a woman showing her sexy legs but covering her flat chest considered more modest than a woman covering her legs but showing cleavage? I feel like society arbitrarily chooses which parts of the body should be covered and even those rules aren't consistent. Standards of modest dress continually change over time. Actual prostitutes in the American 1800's wore clothing that covered substantially more than what we would consider modest clothing today. If there were inherent morality in dressing modestly, wouldn't that mean that those prostitutes were morally better than "decently dressed" people of today?
I think modest dress is highly subjective and thus shouldn't be used to judge the morality of other people. CMV.
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Most people believe that modesty, or lack thereof, should be with respect to current standards. They would hold that the prostitutes of the 1800s were just as immodest as, say, a stripper working a club would be today because they're not judged on a static scale. Instead, their modesty is held to what is considered sexual or immodest during that time period.
In some cultures breasts aren't sexualised at all, so it would be silly to accuse the women there of being immodest by showing them. However, if that culture sexualizes, say, hair, leaving one's hair out *would* be immodest with respect to that culture.
| 13 | 62 |
ELI5: Why do computer screens make ripples when I put my finger on them? | I have always been intrigued by the water-like ripples created by touching computer screens. Why does it happen? |
LCDs, use liquid crystals, which were first discovered in 1888. These crystals are actually liquid chemicals that align perfectly when subjected to electrical fields; when they're properly aligned, they allow light to pass through them. LCDs use this property by using electrical currents to align the crystals and allow varying levels of light to pass through and create the desired images and colors.
To be more technical, the liquid crystals are sandwiched between two pieces of polarized glass ("substrate"). The fluorescent light source, also known as the backlight, emanates light that passes through the first substrate. The electrical currents then cause the crystals to align, allow varying levels of light to pass through to the second substrate. The end result is what you see onscreen.
LCDs can use either active-matrix or passive-matrix structure. Most LCD monitors, along with LCD TVs, use active-matrix.
Any discussion regarding LCD monitors won't be complete without the word "pixel". A pixel is a single point in a graphic image, and stands for "picture element". Each pixel on an LCD monitor comprises of three cells -- one for the color red, one for green, and the last one for blue. Electric currents are used to straighten the liquid crystals within each cell so that light is not bent at this level. An active matrix thin-film transistor is used to activate each cell. | 13 | 15 |
[Mass Effect]How could the Turians justify firing on the Human ships at Relay 314? | Citadel law states that opening a Mass Relay is forbidden due to the fear of making contact with a Rachni level threat. However, how can a race that has had no prior contact with the Citadel be expected to know about said law?
Also, why did the Turians not face harsher punishments due to their not only firing on a race that was unaware of the law but trying to conquer them without even telling the rest of the Council about it? | Humans were one of the first species since the Asari to master the tech needed to use the relays on their own. No one had any idea who they were. And since the last species to achieve this were the Rachni they weren't taking any risks. Especially when the first thing to come out of that rely unannounced were warships
As for punishment who is going to try? The Council's Army? It's all made of Turians. | 26 | 21 |
Why does water vaporize under 100 degrees Celsius in some cases? | Why does water vaporize under 100 degrees Celsius, for example in oceans before forming clouds? | The molecules have a spread of amounts of energy handy. Occasionally, a molecule just happens to have enough energy to beat all the counteracting forces (hydrogen bonding, pressure from atmosphere above) and happens to be at the surface interface so it breaks free.
True of all materials, not just water. The boiling point (in a hand wavy fashion) just describes that level of energy where all the molecules will have enough energy to break free and go to gas. | 11 | 16 |
CMV: Nearly everything I did in school was a waste of time, money and effort. | I'll start by saying that school teaches a few useful things. Driver's ed is one; just about everyone needs to know how to drive. Reading and writing are essential, as is basic math. Some vocational and technical electives like computer programming were useful. However, most of what is required in a typical k-12 curriculum and even in college is not worth the time.
Take chemistry for example. Everyone in my public high school needed to take chemistry in order to graduate. We paid a significant amount of attention to valence electrons. I'd happily wager that hardly any of use remember what valence electrons are now. I can provide a vague definition, but the only time when I needed to know it was in another chemistry class that I took in college.
I took several years of Spanish classes. Today, I don't speak Spanish. I can form a few barely coherent sentences in Spanish; all of them are about extremely simple topics. It's hard to see how I'm better off today because I had conjugation tables in Spanish memorized years ago.
I could list more topics like this, but I trust your ability to see the pattern. I went to school, memorized some stuff, wrote it down on the exam, and forgot it. After forgetting this material, I have not seen it again in a practical setting.
Some people will tell me something along the lines of education being good for it's own sake. The truth is that most people in these classes find the material rather boring and don't care about it. As I said, they will forget it and be no more educated than they were before taking these classes.
One could also tell me that employers reward people for having degrees. This is true. I'd argue that it's because the ability to finish a degree says certain things about you. Employers do not care about the existentialist philosophy course you took to meet the humanities requirement.
I'd love to be wrong about this because it would mean that most of my childhood wasn't wasted. Someone please prove me wrong. | > One could also tell me that employers reward people for having degrees. This is true. I'd argue that it's because the ability to finish a degree says certain things about you. Employers do not care about the existentialist philosophy course you took to meet the humanities requirement.
This is entirely true and it shows why school *wasn't* a waste of time. Economists refer to it as the "signaling" value of education. By graduating from high school, it proves that you can show up on time, follow instructions, complete boring tasks within a given time limit, solve basic logical reasoning problems, and read/write somewhat coherently. Graduating college shows that you have an even more advanced command of these skills and a basic understanding of your major field of study.
It's very hard to prove that you can learn *how* to learn, that you are diligent, and that you are worth the time and money it takes to train and pay you. That's why people with degrees can earn higher salaries on average than people who don't (regardless of the amount of time in school). | 27 | 34 |
What are the differences between the empirist (Locke, Hume, etc.) and pragmatist (Peirce, James, Dewey) conceptions of experience? | There are a lot of differences, but the most significant is in approach. That is, they want to analyze experience for different reasons and think experience does different work.
For the early modern empiricists (including skeptics) an analysis of experience is important as a way to get into important metaphysical and epistemological questions about how to ground various inquiries (ex: Hume on Causation) whereas the classical pragmatists resist much of the second step.
Whether this is a difference in quality or a difference in kind depends on the degree to which you think the Pragmatists are committed against metaphysics and the degree to which you think they individually succeed in their avoidance of it. | 11 | 28 |
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CMV:People with major genetical diseases should not procreate. | I know, this will sound very radical and i might get very disliked for it, but i just had to say it somewhere.
People that procreate while knowing that they have a genetical disease that will impact the life of many of their offspring throughout multiple generations, disgust me.
I know, it's not right to rob a human of their right to procreate, but only through eugenics with that, can we defeat these diseases.
Keep in mind, i'm not talking about minor things, like colour disabilities or something like that, but diseases that **will** kill you.
I just find it irresponsible that you could willingly put the same curse on your children that you had to suffer, even if it's only a 20% chance.
I'm open to all discussion, and ready to change my view if you people present some good arguments :)
*keep in mind, english is not my first language, so the occasional error here and there should be ignored*
EDIT: i'll be out of the house for roughly 4 hours now, i'll try to continue the discussion when i'm back. Till then, remember to keep it civil.
EDIT 2: I'm back and ready for some answers. Some other answers were mildly screwed up by the autorcorrection of my phone, so sorry for that.
EDIT 3: Someone went through the majority of my comments and downvoted them all. Instead of downvoting everything, write a comment and tell me why you don't like my views and reasoning ;) hooray for integrity
EDIT 4 (possible last edit): It's almost 4 am in the morning in germany, and I'll quit for today. My view was changed, though not too much, at least towards the fact that enforcing these this is far from right and lawful and that genetics is more complicated that i thought. Thanks for all the answers and arguments, it was a pleasure writing with you :)
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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!* | Within agriculture, selective breeding attempts to produce better crops by only keeping the seeds of the crops that have qualities that we prefer. Unlike natural selection which responds to changes in the fitness landscape, what is "good" and "normal" is artificially defined and locked in.
As a consequence to this happening over successive generations, there is a positive feedback loop that increasingly reduces the genetic and phenotypic diversity of the crop to create something called a **monoculture**.
This has become a major problem in agriculture, because while it has allowed us to travel down a path to greater harvests, our crops become more and more similar, sharing all the same susceptibilities to new diseases, abnormal weather, and changes in climate. The likelihood of a virus or major ecological change wiping us out grows as our diversity shrinks.
**See, what you are missing is that those "genetic diseases" are simply a natural consequence of our species continuing to evolve.** A great example of this is sickle-cell anemia, which came as a result of a genetic change that made humans resistant to malaria.
Given enough time, humans might have evolved beyond this horrible genetic disease while retaining immunity to malaria, which then would have propagated through the species. By attempting just to prevent those with risk factors from reproducing, we eliminate this possibility from occurring. | 19 | 39 |
ELI5: Why does giving birth hurt, even though it harms reproduction? why was it not removed through natural selection? | don't give me stories about the first woman eating a weird fruit please. | Human reproduction is limited by two of humanity's most useful advantages: We stand upright and are very intelligent.
Standing upright requires a relatively narrow pelvis. Being very intelligent requires a relatively large brain, and therefore skull. Yet the skull must fit through the pelvis at birth! So a middle ground is found and we are adapted to have babies born relatively undeveloped, so their skull bone plates are not fused yet and their brain is smaller. It hurts, but pain isn't a limiting factor on reproductive success.
A consequence of being born undeveloped is that human children are vulnerable and delicate. They need constant care and protection to survive, and so have frequent cries that their parents are biologically wired to respond to.
So we have covered why childbirth is painful and babies are annoying little shits. | 88 | 37 |
How can I combine programming and economic science? | Now I'm studying science economic in my university, And I study programming alone at home.
and wondering how can I combine these two areas, please Give me some ideas and advice. | What exactly do you want to know about?
There's plenty of programming in economics once you get into doing research or an economist job. Typically stuff like R and Python are the "scientific languages" although stuff like Java might be common as well in some jobs. | 15 | 16 |
When making a clone of an organism, is it possible that different genes get expressed? | Or are they always 100% identical? | For the standard nucleus transplantation method, all the genes should be expressed the same, but the conditions of gestation and early life can mean that there are differences, so the organism is unlikely to be completely identical even with identical genes. There's also slight variation used with the donor egg, which contributes the mitochondria for the new organism, and any random mutations that may arise either by complete chance or due to differences in the environment.
| 51 | 158 |
CMV: Being Trans is not inherently mental illness | Prior to about 1 or 2 years ago, I was of the opinion that all Trans people are mentally ill, due to the fact that they tend to have gender dysphoria. However, I've found a few points of reason that make me lean towards believing that Trans people aren't mentally ill, however I'm still not convinced of one or the either. Still, this culminated in a post on a gaming Facebook group where I learned a lot just reading journal article after journal article so I could source them. Below will be mostly a copy-paste from this post. I fear that I've delved too deep into bias, so I would be interested in seeing where my arguments here were fallible, as nobody in the Facebook group could do so.
​
To begin, it's important to point out that many studies have found structural differences in the brains of biological males and females. These develop several months after the gonads develop when the SRY Gene becomes active on the Y Chromosome and inhibits the gonads from developing into ovaries. This serves as the basis as to why so many claim sex and gender have to be separated. Any abnormality in the development of the brain after gonad development can be traced back to this window of time. This makes sense considering only 0.6% of people are transgendered to begin with. As a note of opinion, the whole trans movement is about accepting trans people for who they are in much the same way you wouldn't shame a physically disabled person.
Sources:
Brain difference between sexes- [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3896179/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3896179/?fbclid=IwAR3PwD1NolQuEn-8hiVIH7WsTv6yCyqw17S9mEm0QbwgQRe98zA3an70ovM)
Brain development vs Gonad development- [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4350266/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4350266/?fbclid=IwAR1JdeldqyiIGRU9BSHPcAlgKRMNi-dtaDGpD8wuBywbqrtPYG8beQIwTxc)
Study on Sex vs Gender- [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21334362](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21334362?fbclid=IwAR1D_L6dRpZ9zVgRfaR7Wr9OmnWeozafpJHOc_OfdK-oqMJrtU2ErkNRhbc)
​
Regarding claims that Transgenderedness is a mental disorder, that's not entirely true, at least it would seem. The WHO took away that classification, not to mention the DSMV only classifying Gender Dysphoria. Gender Dysphoria is the feeling of depression or anxiety that comes from not being the gender your brain most feels comfortable as, at least by DSMV definitions in a nutshell. Those that transition are typically relieved of Gender Dysphoria, according to many psychologists and clinical psychiatrists. It might be important to also not that you won't be suicidal as a trans person without Gender Dysphoria, unless you're subject to normal depression and anxiety. It would be commonly believed that those that are Trans and commit suicide are experiencing Gender Dysphoria (uncured) or abuse from an external factor.
Sources:
[https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria](https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23398495](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23398495)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5178031/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5178031/)
​
The third thing I'd like to bring up is that there's multiple upon multiple papers showing how the brains of trans women (XY genetically) are much more like normal female brains, and vice versa. No paper says that the brains are entirely like the other, however, which actually only strengthens the idea that something we don't fully understand yet is occurring between the development of sex and gender. If I had to take an educated guess, there are many factors that determine sex and gender other than Testosterone and the SRY Gene, and a change in one of these genes (possibly by a crossover event between the X and Y gene) might create an incomplete/non 1:1 sex and gender relationship. Also regarding genetics, something I learned that's new to me the more I read is that there's plenty of evidence that this incongruity is passed down generations, strengthening my hypothesis. A trans person is likely to have a trans biological relative; a little like the genetic patterns found for gay people. There's even evidence for a specific gene being involved, CYP17, though it's only found to be valid for female-to-male and not male-to-female so it's no smoking gun. However, that still furthers my multiple factors hypothesis I suppose.
Sources:
Brain similarities of Trans people and felt gender (Notice how this is a paper from 1995 calling it Trans-sex, which is different from Transgender as we define today. A testament to how new all this is and how neuroscience is still evolving. We, after all, don't know much about a LOT of things)- [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7477289](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7477289?fbclid=IwAR3-jUYTQ2qHmS2ZF2Yv1bVzxKrenwkgYtUAbuHeuIrVKOrtHQELZVoarsk)
Further brain similarities study- [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22941717](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22941717?fbclid=IwAR0Vmg7mfwHE_B5e3VIc4DWV5RrIhxxnxWj7_Gr029ExXXI0ZTUQ1xB_lC8)
Further brain similarities study- [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4037295/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4037295/?fbclid=IwAR2Dc_KQTGAPkQiIPYNtinCcBILaatzgSrFiSsCkjge6ScugdwYmX96DT-Y)
Genetic link of Transgenderedness implied by Transgenderedness in family trees- [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10983252](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10983252?fbclid=IwAR2RUyEb48nQXC0oxT5g8CQsTEZPdH1EOo7raUARkRn69hWjRoBMoyfRpXk)
Polymorphism of CYP17 gene- [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17765230](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17765230?fbclid=IwAR1dLBCDqUVY4FVh-3570kODydpqz-0bapDYR0aMYM9sPAO7C9zh0fgXdZI) | How would you define "mental illness"?
For example, here is the definition from the Australian Department of Health site (first result from google)
>A mental illness is a health problem that significantly affects how a person feels, thinks, behaves, and interacts with other people. It is diagnosed according to standardised criteria. The term mental disorder is also used to refer to these health problems.
Having a female brain in a male body for example, is still a health problem that affects how a person feels, thinks, behaves and interacts with other people.
As such, it would seem that all your arguments more or less support trans being inherently a mental illness unless of course you have a differing definition. | 18 | 16 |
ELI5: Why is marriage important or is it still relevant? Why does the state give lots of "perks" to married people? | The state has an interest in raising the next generation of well adjusted children, and believes that occurs best in the context of marriage.
Also, many homes still have the breadwinner/homemaker structure, with one spouse focused on work, and the other focused on caring for the family. The homemaker takes on a serious financial risk, as they are sacrificing their ability to make a living to support someone who could leave at any time. Marriage enforces this commitment, and provides for the homemaker should the marriage dissolve. | 29 | 33 |
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CMV: The FDA does not need to ban the word MILK from soy and almond products. | My primary thinking here is that the term "MILK" is not exclusive to dairy.
https://www.treehugger.com/green-food/fda-looks-reward-dairy-industry-exclusive-use-milk-term.html
FDA looks to reward dairy industry with exclusive use of 'milk' term
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some other factors in my current thinking that a ban is unnecessary:
* We should not be so dependent on the government for making our choices. People should do more thinking for themselves.
* This reminds me of the over labeling problems caused by lawsuits.
https://www.creators.com/read/john-stossel/06/16/warning-labels
Warning: Labels
By John Stossel
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I am truly open to having my view changed on this matter,
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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!* | Milk - an opaque white fluid rich in fat and protein, secreted by female mammals for the nourishment of their young.
What would you like to change the definition of milk to?
>We should not be so dependent on the government for making our choices. People should do more thinking for themselves.
Do you think we should get rid of all food labeling laws and requirements?
​ | 22 | 29 |
How do you move past "Its subjective" in conversations about art & music? | "Its subjective" or "that's just your opinion", are common answers that come up in conversations about music where disagreements occur.
How do you move past it in your dialogues? | You don't. This is the topic of Kant's third critique. The idea is to shift the frame of the question: aesthetic judgment is precisely that specific arena in which individual experience is the final arbiter. This nonetheless doesn't exclude characterizations of aesthetic judgments (e.g. the sublime) and it's arguably the first appearance of subjectivity _per se_ in philosophy.
The point is that subjective matters are still real and communicable. If they weren't, we would have a problem. | 24 | 26 |
ELI5: If an object is in a shade that we can't see like infrared, what color would it be to the naked eye? | So this question seems like it has a really simple answer, but like how a leaf is green, some objects have got to be in an infrared shade, because there is a giant spectrum of color that we can't see, so if we were to look at the object without any visual help, what would the object look like color-wise? | An objects color is the sum of the colors of light it reflects as opposed to the light it absorbs. So a leaf is colored green because of chlorophyll which absorbs red and blue light well. This leaves green light to get reflected back.
If there were an object that absorbed all frequencies of light except those in the infrared which it reflected. That object would appear black, because no light we can see gets reflected.
| 42 | 28 |
ELI5 - Do your ears make adjustments to listen to sounds from different places nearby? | I was listening to a podcast when I started listening to a nearby conversation between people a few feet away from me without adjusting the volume in my earbuds. Every time I switched my focus it’s like the other voices just faded away, how does this work? | It's not exactly your ears making adjustments, but your brain.
What exactly those adjustments are is complicated, but it probably involves:
Beam forming: by adding up the sound coming though your right and left ear with a slight delay, you can boost the signal to noise ratio of sounds coming from a given direction (though with only two ears it'll be a sort of conical donut shape).
Reverb analysis: your brain has been trained from birth to recognise how the shape of your ear (and the rest of your body for that matter) bounces around sounds coming from different directions and can use this to focus on sounds coming from a specific direction (or more often tell which direction sounds are coming from).
Frequency analysis: if you're listening to two (average, young) women talking to each other, you can ignore all the frequencies not related to human speech or too low for (most) women to use.
Pattern recognition: if you're listening to two people speaking a language you know, your brain can use your knowledge of that language to predict what's most likely to be said next given the context of the conversation so far, and pick whatever word fits most closely to the raw sound your ears are reporting.
At least those are the methods used by computers to do the same thing. Except for the reverb thing, that's still really hard to do for computers while the human brain is absolutely fantastic at it. | 20 | 28 |
ELI5: Why is it safe for some species to consume certain foods raw that humans must cook? | Parasites and bacteria that affect humans. Either worse than other animals or just at all. Most other animals have stronger stomach acid to kill the parasites and bacteria that could survive in humans | 66 | 107 |
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ELI5: In movies and TV shows, when actors and actresses snort a substance (cocaine, heroin, etc.) what are they really snorting? | I’ve seen some really close-up shots of the actors/actresses snorting something and it really looks like they’re doing it. I was wondering what white powder was safe to Hoover up their noses because it really looks like they’re doing it for real. | It depends on what they're doing with the substance. If it's just going to sit on a table or get cut into lines, they use a mixture of corn starch and baby powder. If it's going up a nose, they'll use powdered lactose instead (or vitamin B powder if they're lactose intolerant), and they might coat the inside of the straw with Vaseline (because the powder will stick to it instead of actually going up their nose). They'll use slightly different mixtures and add different innocuous powders to get different colors if they need different drugs. | 45 | 34 |
Sometimes water decreases friction (like when ice gets wet), and sometimes it increases friction (like using a damp towel to open a sticky jar lid). What determines the direction of this effect? | Water always decreases friction between two solids, the effect increases as more and more water is added. It only starts to reverse when the water itself becomes a source of friction (imagine wading through water).
I imagine what happens with the damp cloth is you are allowing the material to become more flexible and therefore form a better fit with the jar than a dry cloth would have.
For what it's worth I've only ever used a dry cloth to open jars and never had a problem. | 11 | 16 |
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[Science] How long does it take to actually understand papers and journals. | I'm a second year undergraduate student in Biomedical sciences. On my course, we are constantly told to read papers in journals like Nature and Cell to expand our knowledge.
The issue is, I feel like they're in a different language. I'm not sure whether its common for us not to comprehensively understand these papers, or whether I am a poor student. Any ideas?
I am hoping its that these papers are just categorically more advanced then people at my stage of education are ready for. | As an analogy imagine you wanted to read a paper about classical Japanese poetry. The main questions are "do you know anything about Japan?" "Do you know anything about history?" and "Do you know anything about poetry?"
If you know about all three things then the paper will make a lot of sense. Say you know about history and poetry and nothing about Japan then some of the ideas will make sense to you but a lot will be obscure. Say you know nothing about those three subjects, then the paper will be unreadable.
So it's more about pre-requisite knowledge than some kind of ability.
Having said that the best thing to do is to work slowly. So get a paper and try to read the introduction. As soon as you get stuck stop and go and read about what you don't understand. So if it says
"This paper studies a specific protein in fox embryos"
then you want to check, "Do you know what a protein is?" "Do you know what a fox is?" "Do you know what an embryo is?" and then when you have all these ideas sorted the paper will make sense. If you are lacking in one or two of them it will start to make no sense.
It is likely that
1. You are a very good student (because you are worried that you might be a bad one and really bad students just don't care) and
2. You have been praised a lot for your intelligence in the past and so doing a task you find genuinely bewildering is a new experience.
Basically at school they spoon feed you but in the real world knowledge is very scattered and crazy and it's important to learn how to confront things you have no idea how to think about.
Don't worry. Trying something hard is a good character trait, not a bad one. Maybe this week you can only read 1 line of the paper but next week maybe you'll be able to read 2. Over time you'll get more background knowledge and then things will get easier.
So to answer your question, yes you will probably understand very little of these papers but yes it will help you to grapple with them, both as a person and in terms of your knowledge. Don't think of this like a test where you need to get an A and it is worrying you that you can't do it. Think that you are just going to put some time into figuring out how to do better at this thing, that's how successful people think.
Hope this is helpful :)
| 55 | 27 |
How many cell's distance is the average human tissue cell away from a capillary? | I get that it's a broad question and it would probably be different in bone vs muscle, but I'm assuming not every cell is directly adjacent to a capillary. Roughly how many cells would or could be between 2 capillaries and still get adequate O2, waste removal, etc? Thanks! | In general the maximum distance between a cell and a capillary is approximatively 20-30 microns (more less 2-3 cells) to enable the exchange of molecules and gases in less than 1 second (more than that could be detrimental for the cell). So between two capillaries there could be 5-6 cells. | 16 | 21 |
CMV: in terms of utility, reward, and cost, there is no better hobby than cooking. | It's all there in the topic. Learning to cook is useful every day, allows you to save money and improve your health through a good diet, and gives you a skill that is transferable to truly every walk of life. While there are many great hobbies out there, cooking is by far the most practical. Since you can use it every day, and in the process gain enjoyment both from the act and from the product, it's also likely the most enjoyable.
Note that for the sake of simplicity I'd consider stuff like pickling and related food preservation hobbies to be cooking most of the time.
About the only possible counterargument I can think of would be in time investment. However not only does that apply to all hobbies, but also a skilled home cook can often prepare home food using slow cookers and pressure cookers and things to take as much or less time than simpler meals.
Edit: gotta go chop some holes in my floor and then make dinner. Loving the conversation though, will be back in a bit. | Exercise is even better -higher utility as measured by longevity and well-being. Similar cost. And of course you can get all the benefits of a cooking hobby by living with a cook but nobody can exercise for you. | 117 | 332 |
ELI5: How is it that glass is hard and solid yet totally see through? | The light you see is a kind of electromagnetic radiation and different types of radiation can pass through different types of objects.
For the type our eyes see, we created a type of object where that radiation just goes right through.
A wall blocks your visible radiation but lets your WiFi radiation through for example.
How radiation goes through some things and not others is to do with how photons interact with different kinds of atoms | 69 | 124 |
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What happens to a person dying of thirst if they drink seawater? | If a person is dying of thirst on a raft adrift in the sea, they'll likely be tempted to drink seawater even though they know it won't help.
What will happen to the person once they consume some seawater?
I know they will eventually die, but I'm curious as to how. Specifically, what happens biologically and psychologically?
Biologically: What happens to the body.
Psychologically: Do they still feel thirsty? Do they feel any pain? | Our bodies maintain a very narrow range in concentration of sodium and chloride inside (intracellular space) and outside (interstitial space) cells. The only way to maintain this is through the diffusion of water down the concentration gradient. So as soon as the salty water hits the blood stream, your body will move water from the interstitial space into the blood, then water will move from the intracellular space into the interstitial space in order to equilibrate the concentration. This can have deleterious effects on your kidneys as it now needs to remove the excess salt by producing urine, which requires water. So it will further dehydrate you. Your body will also try to compensate from losing all these fluids by constricting your blood vessels to maintain blood pressure which is further damaging your body. Eventually you can go into organ failure, coma, and death. | 187 | 126 |
ELI5: Why do both coffee (stimulant) and alcohol (depressentt) both make the human body sweat more than usual? | Coffee increases heart rate and blood pressure by stimulating the central nervous system, which in turn stimulates sweat glands. Alcohol dilates (widens) blood vessels which makes the extremities/crevices of your body much warmer, which stimulates sweating to cool you off. | 13 | 15 |
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ELI5: How do objects exposed to radiation become radioactive themselves? | After reading [this phenomenal ELI5](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lv4fy/eli5_what_is_radiation_and_how_does_it_kill_you/), I went on a Wikipedia splurge and ended up reading all about radiation and the Curies' discoveries.
I eventually read that Marie Curie's original lab notes are still so radioactive that you would need to wear protective clothing to consult them. So my question is, how does a non-radioactive material like paper become radioactive from exposure to radiation? Can all materials exhibit this induced radioactivity? Can a radioactive material become more strongly radioactive through this mechanism? | Two mechanisms. Contamination and activation.
Marie Curie's notes are contaminated with the radioactive materials she was studying - which were dangerous enough that they killed her (such as radium). Basically, you have her non-radioactive paper notes, but stuck in between the paper fibers are bits of radium or other things that she was studying.
Quite often, contamination can be removed by washing, wiping, or removing the surface layer (stripping paint or sanding). In the case of something delicate and valuable like her lab notes, decontamination would likely ruin them.
The other, more interesting phenomenon is activation. This is where a stable atom can be made radioactive. Lets use cobalt as an example. All stable cobalt is cobalt-59. This means that the atom's nucleus has 27 protons (this is makes it cobalt) and 32 neutrons (for a total mass of 27 + 32 = 59).
If you expose the Co-59 to neutron radiation, then the nucleus may absorb a neutron. If it does, it will now have 33 neutrons, and be called Cobalt-60. Co-60 is very radioactive. You have taken a thing that was stable and made it *inherently* radioactive, and this cannot be removed like with contamination.
We sometimes do this on purpose. Co-60 is famously used in cancer treatment, and is produced by exposing cobalt to a neutron source. It so happens that cobalt is really really good at absorbing neutrons, so we often use it for control rods in nuclear reactors. After a few years, when pull out a rod to replace it, we can cut up and sell the old one for use in cancer therapy.
Lets compare with curie's notes. Instead of radium, lets say she was working with a reactor and her paper was absorbing neutrons. If some of the carbon in the paper were to absorb two neutrons, it would become radioactive carbon-14. Unlike the radium contamination which could in theory be removed (but would ruin the notes), this would be activation of the paper itself, and could not ever be removed no matter what. | 38 | 29 |
Programming becomes boring and repetitive? | I'm a 1st year CS bachelor, programming since HS 2nd grade. This hit me after I moved from competitive c++ to learning how real world apps work.
Programs mostly are built with frameworks (Spring, .Net, Laravel...). They force their way of doing things. In one hand, this is good: it stops you from writing bad code, forces you away from bad practices, built-in authentication, authorization, security, ORM, template engine...
On the other hand, isn't it boring when you have to write an app step by step how somebody else imagined? First time it's definitely fun, second, third... is it really? Where is the fun in programming? It all seems kinda repetitive. Almost all web apps can be done in the same way.
I'm well aware of [this](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/71758/how-to-explain-to-non-programmers-that-programming-is-not-a-repetitive-task), but all they say is that **it is not repetitive/everything else is**. Can someone help me see programming from different perspective, share some tips as well? I don't want to constantly jump from backend to mobile to frontend or from language to language (framework to framework). | Lots of programming is repetitive. This is why you should create templates that you can reuse. Reusability is an essential part of modern-day programming and creating your “toolkit” that you can pull from will help you avoid this feeling of repetitiveness. It’ll help you focus on creating new and unique code snippets, which you can then make new templates from!
Yes, frameworks are opinionated. However, they take a majority of the heavy-lifting that we would otherwise have to do by hand. This gives us a head start on some of the basics!
The fun in programming comes from being creative and implementing your own original ideas using those templates and frameworks. **Use the tools that you have so that you can focus on the non-trivial problems!** | 44 | 46 |
How should a layperson decide whether to trust a psychology study? | The question obviously applies to all fields of science, but I was particularly interested in psychology studies after having looked at [this paper](http://neuron4.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/528Readings/SimmonsNelsonSimonsohn2011.pdf) demonstrating that you can actually become younger after listening to a Beatles song. I was prompted to look at the study because of [this article on Daryl Bem and his ESP studies](http://redux.slate.com/cover-stories/2017/05/daryl-bem-proved-esp-is-real-showed-science-is-broken.html).
The idea behind the paper and article is that there are problems with how these kinds of studies are done. As someone outside of the sciences, I have no tools to evaluate whether or not I should take this kind of work as being relevant or trustworthy.
Where should this leave a lay audience, who will see a link to a peer-reviewed journal article and then assume that there's evidence to back up an assertion? | I'd recommend trying to find the original article and checking their reference section to see if they site other papers that seem to come to similar or congruent conclusions. Just reading the article titles can be enough to get a good sense.
I would rarely trust a single brand new article finding something entirely novel that no one has ever seen before, remember that at a .95 confidence interval we expect 5% of published articles to be wrong (at least), and popular media coverage will preferentially draw your attention to the most 'surprising' findings.
If your career doesn't depend on staying up-to-date on the literature, you can afford to wait for someone to replicate before believing it.
| 20 | 38 |
ELI5:Why does hair know when to stop growing | Can anyone please explain why the hair above my neck (eyebrows excluded) keeps on growing but all the rest grows to fixed lengths. | Hair growth happens in a 3-step cycle - the anagen phase, catagen phase, and telogen phase. The **anagen** phase is the growth phase, the **catagen** phase is the 'stopping' phase - where your hair stops growing and the hair follicle shrinks, and the **telogen** phase is the resting phase. At the beginning of a new anagen phase, the old hair is pushed out (what we call "shedding"), and the new hair grows in its place.
Different hairs grow to different lengths because the anagen phase lasts for different lengths of time on different parts of the body. It's also the reason why some peoples' hair grows very quickly, and other peoples' hair grows very slowly. Where, on your hear, the anagen phase can last for up to 6 years, on your arms or eyebrows the anagen phase will only last a few months. | 24 | 18 |
Does Flash Really Damage Paintings? If So, How? | Photons are massless so how do they affect paintings. | Their spectrum reaches into the ultraviolet. UV can interact with electrons in molecules and can cause reactions. Such reactions can bleach out some pigments. You can see that on paints or coloured plastic bleaching when left in the sunlight. | 50 | 17 |
[DC/Marvel] When superman visits other worlds to try and save them, how can the aliens and superman understand each other? Is there a universal language? | Most of the Galaxy speaks Interlac, a common language designed for trade and commerce. It's simple to learn, and thus most planets learn it as a second language for dealing with outsiders. It's like a Space Esperanto that actually works.
Superman learned it. Green Lantern Rings have an automatic translation feature. Other heroes who go to space either use Interlac, or automated translators. | 18 | 15 |
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ELI5: How do trees transfer water and nutrition to its leaves ? | How do hundred-meter trees transfer water and nutrition to its leaves, despite gravity ? | Do you know how a dry paper towel will absorb more water than a wet paper towel? Roots do something kinda similar to make water get in them all the time. They will control their substances to make what's called osmosis keep water going in.
Then, they have very thin channels that go up the tree. Have you ever noticed how water tends to go up ever so slightly when it touches a cup or glass? That's called capilarity. Trees have channels so thin that water simply goes up, up, up.
But there's a limit how high water can get this way. So there's a third way. When sunlight hits leaves, some of the water evaporates. When one drop of water evaporates on the top of the tree, it creates a bit of pressure that makes one drop of water go up the same channel to the top of the tree. Almost like a very weak vacuum cleaner.
Along with the water, also salts and other nutrients the roots absorbed go up, too. | 29 | 32 |
ELI5: How do mind-controlled prosthetics actually work? And how do they "feel" when worn? | Mind controlled prosthetics work the same way your current limbs work - actuators respond to signals sent by the brain.
Normally, your actuators are your muscles and tendons. Starting out, you have very, very poor motor control(babies), and as your grow your brain gets better at sending signals to your muscles and tendons to do increasingly complex tasks.
Now replace muscles and tendons with servo-motors. Your brain is still sending out signals to the now missing limb; through a combination of electronics interpreting those signals and the brain re-training itself on what signals to send to achieve a given motion you gain the ability to move a prosthetic. The electronics may be taking measurements from muscle groups further up the affected limb, they may be reading brain waves, hell they may be taking readings from an implant in your brain.
The better the electronics interpreting the existing signals are, the better you will be initially at using your replacement finger/hand/arm/foot/leg, but like everything you have ever learned to do practice is needed to improve function - just like babies learning to use their hands etc.
as for how they feel when work - most of them don't offer any kind of feedback loop - if you aren't using some sense other than touch to realize your hand is squeezing a bottle too tightly, you don't know how tightly you are gripping. Some prosthetics do attempt to provide some kind of haptic feedback where prosthetic meets flesh to indicate resistance in a particular joint etc.
There have been some interesting clinical results though, where people have had direct brain implants and have reported being able to feel through their new limb. | 14 | 23 |
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A Kant inspired thought experiment | I have been reading Critique of Pure Reason, and as I am trying to understand the transcendental aesthetic I thought of a scenario that seems to support Kant’s ideas of space and time. The scenario goes like this:
I imagine myself floating somehow with absolutely nothing in my line of sight. Therefore all I am seeing is blackness. Even though I have no way to sense anything, I still have some sort of understanding that I am HERE at THIS moment. Therefore time and space do seem to be pure a priori intuitions.
What are the issues with this thought experiment that I could be overlooking? Am I fundamentally misunderstanding the idea of a priori intuitions?
Edit: it appears I misunderstood Kant. If I truly had an idea of space without any external representations, then I would be experiencing space in itself, as an objective thing, but this contradicts Kant’s claim that space is simply our pure external intuition. So without any external phenomena, space would lose its meaning to us, and we would be left with internal intuition only, namely time. | In this thought experiment the problem is that you are presupposing that you are floating and that you have a line of sight - i.e. you are presupposing space and time. It might work better to say that you can't *not* presuppose space and time (but that's not what this thought experiment seems to prove - it just seems to prove that once you have *already* presupposed space and time they exist).
What Kant says is that the fact that you have this understanding that you exist, this automatically and necessarily presupposes things such as the subject, and therefore the object, and the objective, and therefore the idea of separation, and space and time. The transcendental unity of apperception itself implies unity through time and in space.
He does have similar(ish) lines of argument to yours, though. The one that comes to mind is where he argues that we simply cannot imagine a lack of space. We can imagine a lack of things *in* space, but not a lack of space itself. | 40 | 64 |
How does the protein p21 "know" to bind to G1-S Cdk preventing its uptake of cyclin, when DNA is found to be damaged? | Also how does the cell know to produce this protein? I guess "know" isn't the correct term but i just can't fathom how the cells chemistry regulates all of this, is there a constant system checking the DNA for damages? | When DNA is damaged, the cell automatically tries to fix it by performing one of several repair mechanisms (base excision repair, mismatch repair, nucleotide excision repair). During these repair processes, single stranded DNA is exposed. Sensor proteins, such as the ATR kinase, recognizes these abnormal single-stranded DNA stretches, becomes activated, and phosphorylates the N-terminal domain of p53, preventing its usual degradation. When p53 is phosphorylated, it in turn is activated and can go to the nucleus to stimulate the expression of several genes, one of which is p21. When p21 is expressed, it is free to bind to CDK1/CDK2 to stop the cell cycle. So in short, p21 "knows" when to bind to CDK because it is selectively up-regulated in the presence of DNA damage.
So from that, you can imagine that in cases where p53 is mutated (like in cancers) it no longer has the ability to drive the expression of regulatory genes such as p21. This therefore abolishes any protective cell-cycle checkpoints and allow cancers to grow and accumulate more and more DNA mutations. | 16 | 18 |
ELI5: Why do we use Latin for scientific names? | Back when this scientific name thing started with genus and species, Latin was the language of the educated and academic class. So they used Latin. Keep in mind, there was a time in Western Europe when people spoke lots of languages, but only wrote in Greek and Latin. | 29 | 23 |
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ELI5: Why is the immune system so fast to respond to allergens, but take days to fight off a legitimate infection? | Your immune system fights off most germs as quickly as it responds to allergens.
Our bodies are invaded by germs constantly. Every breath you take. Every bite of food. Every cut in your skin brings germs into your body. Nearly all of these germs are killed within minutes or hours by immune cells that respond instantly.
It appears to us that infections take days to fight off because we only notice the ones that get out of control, but the overwhelming majority are so quick and painless we never even know the germs were there. | 2,876 | 5,367 |
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[Marvel] Why in the Marvel Universe does Earth not have intergalactic space flight capabilities? | Why with all this alien tech being destroyed on Earth, Tony Stark being a genius, etc. etc. is Earth limited in having advanced technology used only by certain people (avengers)? Even in the comics and such Marvel super heroes are always interacting with extra terrestrial beings and even beat them in some cases but why is Earth's technology so primitive in comparison to the Kree or Scrull or whatever aliens there are?
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In the cinematic universe wakanda has technology to the extreme, even beyond something Stark can muster, so is FTL technology really that far out of their reach? | Well, for starters, it's probable that few if any of the neighbouring star empires have the technology for easy or reliable intergalactic travel. It's not something you need, when a single galaxy is as large as it is.
Earth does have the technology for interstellar travel, but it's prohibitively expensive. Earth is surrounded by the aforementioned empires, none of which have any need of anything Earth can offer, and most of which are scared of and antagonistic towards Earth, on account of all its superhumans and its history of punching above its weight in interstellar politics. This is why pretty much all of them voted to turn Earth into a maximum security prison a few years back.
Of course, Earth does have enough technology to defend itself, and various governments have come together to form SWORD, and then to re-orient Alpha Flight, as planetary defence forces. These organisations have their own spaceships, and can visit alien worlds as necessary, but since we have no trade with them, and diplomacy is limited to "Earthlings fuck off, we don't want you conquering or destroying *our* empire, thank you very much", there's very little reason to do so. | 37 | 37 |
eli5: How do fish know where to stay in the ocean? Or all species of fish all together in one big ocean? (e.g do hammerhead sharks and great white sharks stay away from each other or are all of them together and know no boundaries to their “territory”?) | Just like land animals, ocean animals live where their food lives, where temperature allows, at the right depth, and where their migration/breeding areas are.
Whales and great white sharks are both known to cover absolutely huge territories. Whales migrate thousands of miles up and down the oceans, and great whites often wander without a particular home.
Small animals, like fish in a coral reef, don't travel very far. They have what they need nearby and they encounter lots of other fish who live the same way they do.
Depth is also important. Ocean animals can't go into water that's too deep or too shallow than the habitat they evolved in. | 77 | 114 |
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ELI5: If a CFL bulb is rated at 2700k, how would it still emit blue light? | The color temperature refers to the peak of the frequency output of the light. In actuality it outputs a wide range of other frequencies, otherwise it would appear like a laser or extremely filtered light source of a single color. | 12 | 18 |
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Regarding the meaning of life and suicide. | I realize this is a sensitive topic. But I have spent so much time mulling over these issues recently, and I would like to hear other's opinions regarding my own. I would also like to preface this by saying that these thoughts and statements are made on the pretense that god doesn't exist. I am not looking to argue that particular subject but any discourse is good discourse, I suppose.
I believe that life has no purpose. At one point in time, I felt that was a freeing statement. Life only has the purpose we give to it. But lately I have started to feel as though it is actually the opposite; that it is what imprisons us. If I decide that I have no purpose, then perhaps my real purpose is simply to exist. Existence itself should come with the pursuit of knowledge. But a life as a human is flawed. I feel that as humans we all suffer a deep irony. We are intelligent enough to be sentient, but we are not intelligent enough to be omnipotent. And because we are also too intelligent to be ignorant of our human condition, we suffer in the middle between greatness and obliviousness. There is nothing inherently good about being human. Being human means wanting power. Wanting to reproduce. Wanting to live. In fact I would say being human is the source of all wants, of all desires. A truly rational being would want nothing. Why would it desire anything at all? The source of all wants (some of which are driven by human needs) is being human. I think a being of infinite intelligence, would actually do nothing at all. Being human is not only the source of all desire and fear, but also the source of all pleasure and pain. Emotions are merely distractions we evolved into to aid our survival. From a pure intelligence standpoint, emotions do nothing except cloud our vision. Love and hate are nothing but constructs our minds have created for us. Our innate desire for perfection is merely so we can have the power to nurture our loved ones and also to crush our enemies. Without emotion, without being human, I have no reason to want anything from this world. Which is why I view life as a human as inherently flawed. The most I can do to overcome this is to try and think as though I had none of these desires. And in turn, the more I try to push these concepts of emotion from my mind and view life objectively, the more I realize that life is nothing but an act we carry out to realize our primitive desires. I feel the only way to truly live a happy life is to live without realizing this truth. Because now all I desire is to be something better than human, or to not exist at all. But what's the point, anyways? I only want these things because I am human. Before I just wanted to live. But if you view life without the lenses of emotion given to us from birth, then things quickly devolve into what I have written here. I no longer understand why I should exist. My only other possible path to an existence without knowing this pain is to forget. Perhaps this is why mind-altering substances are so popular. I can forget everything for small periods of time. I can be blissfully unaware before reality comes crawling back and with it self-awareness. The only time I feel I can truly be happy is when life is so busy or hectic that I forget what a facade it is.
I can't get these thoughts out of my mind. I've been thinking on this for weeks now and I believe I've said all my main points.
If you read this or reply to this, thank you for sharing your time with me. | You're essentially describing Nietzsche's ubermensch and transvaluation of all values. In his view, man is a bridge species to becoming the kind of powerful, rational being that can actually shape reality based on how you want it to be shaped. The transvaluation of values is to take us from the value systems of a race of beings that is in the condition you describe, sentient enough to understand their situation but powerless to change it, to value systems that match up to what we could be: ubermensch.
Something you should be aware of though is the omnipotence paradox: Omnipotent beings can create rocks they themselves can't lift, but then they are no longer omnipotent. Think of it like having one magic bullet: its possible that with a lot of work, dedication, etc. you could change any one thing in the world you wanted to change: but you can't control what all of the consequences of that change or what the price to create that change will be, because those are determined by the world of many agents and not just your agency.
And even if you are short of the level of pure omnipotence of a god, or the above described level of omnipotence of an ubermensch, there are probably still many things it is within your power to change, and it is both your opportunity and burden to decide what changes are meaningful enough for you to work for, ever mindful of the prices and possible consequences. To understand the price, the change, and its consequences well enough requires the pursuit of knowledge, and to actually pay a price and make a change requires a pursuit of power (and willingness to spend it).
Lastly, you're wrong when you say life is a facade. For it to be a facade, the meaninglessness has to be the "real" or more important side of the coin. But in an absence of things to give meaning, the reality lacks any means to truly distinguish itself as more important than those things that only act like they do have meaning. This is what existentialists point out when they are talking about absurdity: that really "acting like" is as good as "being" meaning that a surreal, romanticized, or any other "unrealistic" view is just as real as the cold meaningless starting point.
Lastly, if we are truly living on an empty stage in which we can act out any absurdity we wish, enact any change we desire enough, then we are free to choose to become something different than we are now by the act: think of the actor who learns from their character, or the writer who wants to see where their creation will go. We are the playwrights as well as our own audience, and it would be incredibly boring to do nothing but sit on stage and wait for stage directions that won't come. So the question to ask yourself is, at the very least, what kind of life would you like to watch? | 13 | 21 |
How efficient is chlorophyll in converting sunlight to energy compared to our best solar cells? If it is more efficient, why don't we copy what those cells do in designing new solar cells? | Presumably we know how plants convert sunlight to energy, so I was wondering if they do so more efficiently than we do with solar cells. Then I got to wondering that if they do, why we don't have some type of artificial chlorophyll that we could use for solar energy. | >Presumably we know how plants convert sunlight to energy,
Plants convert solar energy into chemical energy with an efficiency around 3-6% depending on the species and other environment factors. Generally, our problem is that this chemical energy is not readily useful to us unless we first convert it into thermal energy (by burning it).
Solar photo-voltaic cells convert solar energy into electric energy with efficiency ranging from 6-45%. The high end of that scale are from experimental designs and may not be mass producible or cost effective. Solar cells in the 15-18% efficiency range are easily acquired on the market.
Solar thermal systems convert solar energy into steam which is then converted into electricity (typically with a steam turbine). A steam turbine in such a system is ~40% efficient but higher system efficiency can be achieved with multi-stage turbines. Environment factors like dust and mirror damage (which is used to focus solar energy) will reduce overall efficiency. | 22 | 52 |
ELI5: Why are humans attracted to certain color combinations over others? | Why do we like complementary colors so much, but not really other color combinations? For example, we seem to be drawn to green/red often.
I understand that the color wheel is the source of complimentary colors, and how they're appealing to the eye. But *why* our eyes are so drawn to these combinations versus others?
My best theory is that when we were hunter-gatherers, contrast meant a meal (berries, animals, ect.) | The eye evolved to be sensitive to things that were beneficial to our ancestors survival. Spotting a ripe red fruit in tree full of green leaves, for example.
People actual preferences are developed over the course of their lives, but at a certain level it comes back to the eye having evolved to spot certain kinds of things, mostly related to food. | 24 | 39 |
ELI5: Why is 2.71828183 so important it's known as e and not just 2.71828183? | Like, why 2.71828183 as opposed to 4.5549867549867837432? | It so happens that **e** is very important in trigonometry, probability, statistics, and differential calculus. It's also not 2.71828183 -- it's actually an irrational and transcendental number, like pi.
Why is **e** so important? That's hard to explain in LI5 terms. But it shows up everywhere, kind of like pi.
One of the more famous equations in mathematics is this one:
**e^(i * pi) + 1 = 0**
This relates the 5 most important constants (e, i, pi, 1, and 0) in a single equation. | 90 | 110 |
ELI5: Why do some fabrics get softer when they're washed a lot, while others get rougher? | It depends on the textile. With wearing and use, some materials relax and become softer and looser because the thread is bent, pulled, and twisted through mechanical motion, much the way that crumpling a sheet of notebook paper over and over makes it very soft. Wearing the clothes often contributes more to this than the washing by itself.
However other materials may contain oils, waxes, and other materials naturally present in the fiber such as lanolin. Washing, and especially bleaching, removes these soft, greasy, fatty substances which can make the fibers dry, scratchy, or cause them to begin to fray or lose their water proofness. The primary purpose of fabric softeners, is to help replenish these substances, but it's always a downhill battle short of soaking the clothing in lard or oil.
Lastly, some synthetic cloth can become brittle with use, similar to the way that bending a plastic spoon back and forth in the same spot will cause it to snap. The fabric begins to get creases and folds in it that don't come out with ironing. They don't exactly get scratchy, but they become stiff like folded paper, and don't bend and take the shape of the body as well.
As fibers wear and break and tear, it has an effect of reducing thread count. Thread count is the number one thing for comfort up close to the skin, with higher thread count cloth feeling softer and silky versus lower but thicker thread count like a knitted sweater which can feel rough. | 2,414 | 8,777 |
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ELI5 if spider silk is multitudes the strength of steel, why isn't spider silk farmed to any degree? | If it is so much stronger, why hasn't it been farmed in any significant way? Surely we can see the benefits of it over steel. It's bio renewable, non invasive and requires very little upkeep for the silk. | The tensile strength of spider silk is greater than that of steel, but there are other aspects of materials that matter too, such as rigidity, heat and cold resistance, resistance to abrasives and chemicals, etc.
Besides, do you want to run a farm with thousands of spiders? 🕷 | 135 | 46 |
How does a compass work on my smartphone? | With a device called a Hall Effect magnetometer, which is a solid state device that produces a voltage proportional to the strength of a magnetic field (such as the Earth's) along a particular axis.
By having two sensors at right angles, the phone can determine its heading/direction relative to the Earth's magnetic field. | 7,873 | 8,720 |
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Is luck actually a real thing or is it something we make up when in a worse situation to try to stay positive? | I’ve been thinking about it recently and people seem to always say; “man you’re so lucky, I wish I had…”
The thing is, most of what I have is not so much due to luck and more about skill, research, and ‘playing your cards right’. It got me thinking, I would love your thoughts on this | You could use a possible worlds analysis to see whether a given success was a result of ‘luck’ or personal achievement.
If in the majority of nearby possible worlds in which you behaved the same, you also obtained the success, it is likely the result of your own achievement. By contrast, if in many of those worlds you did not obtain the success, then it was likely ‘luck’, i.e. causally explained by contingent factors unrelated to your behavior. | 43 | 48 |
ELI5: The theory that the universe is a hologram. | All the holographic principle means is that the information contained in a volume, can fit on it's boundary. To try to ELI5: If you had a sphere filled with particles, the state of all those particles will fit on the surface of the sphere. Thus you don't "need" the 3-dimensional sphere, all you need is the 2-dimensional surface to describe the state of the system. | 10 | 21 |
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Solution for combating eye-strain? | On Friday I read over 100 abstracts and just about killed myself. What would you suggest to help combat eye-strain?
​
I'm trying to work in eye-breaks, but it's tough when I'm "in the groove". A friend suggested LASIK to keep me from being dependent on my glasses. I also thought a new laptop with a higher resolution screen might be better. Do you have any tips that you would like to share?
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Thanks.
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Edit: wow, A lot more responses than I thought there would be! Thank you!
Edit2: Since there's been some disagreement about blue light contributing to eye strain, I found some research:
Rosenfield, M. (2016). Computer vision syndrome (aka digital eye strain). Optometry in Practice, 17(1), 1-10.
>"It has recently been suggested that the blue light emitted
>
>from digital displays may be a cause of DES, although there
>
>is no published evidence to support this claim. " (pp. 5)
(Though to be fair they cite a recent study with positive reported effects for a "blue filter" as they call it, but the study has no control; so it's not conclusive) | Let me suggest to you:
- Install F.lux
- Every 30 min make a brake, move you body and look at distance
- have small external source of light thats not your monitor. Buy lamp with option to dim the light, have light in different colors
- put antiglare coating on your glasses
- put cotton wool soaked in tea from chamomile on your eyes
- If you plan reading and writing a lot, buy big monitor 27-32 inch mat finish, noflicker, IPS and 2k resolution.
- If you plan reading a lot lot more then buy big eink reader 10 inch or more. KindleDX or Onyx. | 44 | 40 |
ELI5: What's so bad about allergens that your body would rather kill you than let them enter? | I know allergies are really common, but I don't quite understand what's so bad about pollen, peanuts, etc. that you body would rather shut down your airways entirely than let them enter. What exactly would happen if they did get in? | Your body has defenses against stuff. In the most simplistic terms: first it identifies a threat, then it takes it out.
Stuff enters your body all the time. Sometimes it's food, sometimes it's viruses, sometimes it's bacteria, sometimes it's mold, sometimes it's cancer cells, sometimes it's other junk like dust or fiber or pollen.
When harmful stuff gets in, and it starts damaging your system, the white blood cells get to work destroying it. Some set things on fire (histamine and inflammation) and call in the troops. Some assassinate the cells that are harboring the baddies. Some eat the baddies up (macrophages).
**Your immune system finds out what's a threat through trial and error.**
Often this is good - the flu builds a home in your cells, then you build antibodies to the flu to wipe it out and your system remembers what the flu looks like to mount a response again later before it gets too cozy.
Sometimes this process goes awry - pollen, food proteins, or your own cells can look like threats and set off the white blood cells to come destroy everything to get rid of it.
The histamine response is basically locally setting everything on fire when a threat is detected. Great for wiping out bacteria and viruses. Awful when it's something stupid like pollen or tree nuts (allergies) or your own cells (autoimmune disease). But your immune system, as effective as it is, doesn't know the difference. | 134 | 116 |
ELI5:If I were to sell my pounds £100 to Dollars $120, the Dollar increased in value to $150, then I sold back to pounds, where has that money I've earned come from? | Currently trading is a zero-sum game- where does the cash generated come from? | It comes from the amount of investment and total wealth that a currency represents.
If you trade pounds for dollars, and then the pound collapses, then more people will want dollars(because they aren't losing value). This increase in demand makes the dollar worth more compared to the pound. At the same time, the pound is losing value, so it is worth less as well.
The total amount of wealth in the world stays the same(in this example), but one currency becomes worth more and another worth less, making it seem like the dollar gained value when it really just took value from somewhere else.
When there are many currencies in play, like there are in the world today, any currency can affect the market as a whole. So if the rupee collapses and lots of indian people rush to get american dollars, then the dollar goes up in value from the increased demand, your pound stayed the same value, but you still see that difference when you exchange pounds for dollars. | 47 | 138 |
ELI5: How does Eye color work? How does one group end up with Hazel, Blue and Green eyes while another is mostly Brown and Black? | How does inheriting these colors work? | It's more complicated than basic genetics. So, there are two genes that matter for eye color. Both genes come in two variants. Gene one is brown and blue, gene two is green and blue. Brown is dominant. In your body you have two of each gene, and each gene can come in either variant. So, if you have one brown copy of gene one, regardless of any other copy, you have brown eyes. So, it doesn't matter if the other copy of gene one is blue, and if both copies of gene two are blue, your eyes are brown. So, brown is very dominant. If you have a brown gene at all, your eyes are brown. Now, green isn't as powerful as brown, but it dominates over blue. So, if both copies of gene one are blue, then if one or both copies of gene two are green, you have green eyes. So, if you only have blue and green genes, your eyes are green. So, the only way to have blue eyes is for every copy of both genes (so, four genes total) are blue. Blue is completely recessive.
So, to answer your original question, a group will have mostly brown eyes if you have lots of brown copies of gene one in your population. Remember, the other genes don't matter if you have a brown copy, so having lots of brown copies ensures most people have brown eyes. If you don't have the brown genes floating around, gene one is totally blue. So, gene two takes over, and you either get mixtures of green and blue eyes (like with Ireland for example) because you've got that green gene floating around, or nearly everyone has blue eyes, because blue eyed people are pretty much only going to have blue eyed children.
It's actually somewhat more complicated than that, because there are also shades of color, but that's the basic idea. | 14 | 27 |
If I shine a white LED light through a prism, would I see a spectrum, or would I see a red line, a green line, and a blue line? | I've been thinking about this since I got some of those little window hangers that put shine little rainbows into your room by ~~refracting~~ dispersing(?) sunlight, but I don't have a white LED light bright enough to actually see anything if I shine it through. | You'd most likely see a strong blue line, with a broad spectrum covering the other colors (on the long-wavelength side of blue).
The reason is the typical white LED is actually a blue LED which lights up a phosphor that produces the other colors. But the phosphor can only produce colors with lower-energy photons than the blue that excited it.
ETA: It's also possible to make a white LED by combining blue, red, and green LEDs, in which case you'd see 3 distinct lines in the output spectrum. | 3,695 | 5,445 |
Do my thoughts feel like they come from my head because I know that's where my brain is? | Or have inner monologues always felt like they're in our head? And of that's the case, isn't it obvious that your brain is the originator of thought? Why did it take Alcmaeon of Croton to come along and tell us all the brain is where thought comes from?
I asked this question yesterday on another sub, but I feel like this sub might be more appropriate. | your eyes and ears are in your head, so everything you see or hear is naturally referenced to your head position (you also, of course, have a feeling of where your head is);
it follows, then, that your visual and auditory imagery (imagining images or sounds) will be referenced to your head position.
so whatever thoughts you have that are composed of sounds or images, it makes sense that they'd feel like they are in your head.
beyond that, it's more guesswork - why do abstract thoughts, e.g. mathematical or emotional thoughts - feel like they're in your head (I think they do)? probably, i think, because they often involve visual/auditory imagery, even if they don't *necessarily*.
there may be more to it than this, but i think that's the simple answer: because that's where your eyes and ears are, and vision and audition are crucial to human thought.
i don't think it's cultural or historical or whatever - there may be examples of philosophers etc believing that the mind/soul is in the heart or the belly or whatever, but i don't think there are clear accounts of some widespread belief in such cultures that thoughts felt like they were in those places. rather, those philosophers were trying to explain/understand things following some empirical rationale. e.g. we can see that if heart stops, person dies; but if head is cracked open, person lives a while but dies of illness. soul must have been in the heart. | 46 | 194 |
ELI5 : how did people in the past ensure that a building/structure will be structurally sound? | They basically knew from experience in what way to build buildings for them to be sturdy. To the modern eye, the surviving ancient buildings are massively over-engineered (which is likely one factor of why they are still standing). Like, today we would build the same kind of structure using much less of the same materials. As the saying goes, anyone can build a bridge that stands, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands. In this sense, all modern buildings “barely stand”, that is, they are as sturdy as is required plus a safety margin, but no more than that. | 6,942 | 5,179 |
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ELI5: How does a company like "Open Office" make money if they just give their product away | Most not for profits have a part of their company which focusses on support for those products, providing the knowledge which comes with having created a product to large companies who want it setting up, maintaining or custom functionality.
Some companies also have a basic and a professional version, they give away the software, but the more powerful and extensible parts are charged for (such as Unity3D, for example) | 26 | 40 |
|
[Wall-E] After the captains die are they chosen from the passengers or is their a certain unseen human worker class that are promoted? | It would be unusual for AUTO to pick a passenger if they are a paying customer descendant. | Children receive an education and undergo aptitude testing. Likely candidates are offered further training to become crew members.
The best of those qualify for the position of captain when the old one retires. Usually the captain chooses his successor based on observation over years of faithful service.
Like all things on the ship, AUTO is able to manipulate the captain and candidates. | 458 | 650 |
ELI5: Why is it that beef is relatively cheap but leather is so expensive? | Leather requires more treatment and preparation, even more so when made into a garment of some sort. And cow skin is more likely to be damaged than meat during the course of the cow's life, due to fences, predators, fighting etc. | 14 | 19 |
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CMV: Political posts like Health Secretary, Education Secretary etc should only be held by academic experts in their field. | In the UK every few years the government's 'cabinet' has a reshuffle and the minister in charge of, for example, education moves job to become minister in charge of transport.
Surely it would be more sensible if every few years elections were held where academic experts in each relevant field (each nominated by one party) competed for the position?
The current system where a career politician can go from being a local MP, to being in charge of the entire Education system then suddenly switch jobs and be in charge of the nations Healthcare the next week makes absolutely no sense to me - CMV.
edit: By academic I meant something along the lines of 'A recognised subject matter expert with relevant experience' rather than implying only university professors could hold office. | Why would it make more sense for a secretary in the given field to be an academic expert in the area? You are assuming that knowledge of a subject makes someone a more effective political operative for their given position.
The MPs all have academics that they consult when their personal knowledge is inadequate, but the actual office requires little know-how or research experience. Rather, it needs a competent political official who can work with other secretaries and the larger body politic to get funding/achieve objectives. | 24 | 188 |
ELI5: If Bandura's Bobo doll experiment proposes that aggressive behaviour can be learnt via observational learning, how come there are no stronger links between violent games/movies and violent behaviour? | So, social psychologist Albert Bandura performed a couple of experiments in the 1960s, and he proposed that aggressive behaviour can be learnt. Basically, in experimental group he had kids watch an adult physically and verbally assault a Bobo doll. Kids in control group watched an adult play with other toys while the Bobo doll was left untouched. Then, kids from both groups played with some toys from a different room, until they were no longer allowed (this was done to build up frustration). Instead they were offered to play with toys in a room, where the Bobo doll and some other toys were. The results concluded that kids in experimental group showed more aggressive behaviour towards the Bobo doll. In a different experiment he also concluded that aggressive behaviour can be learnt trough cartoons or movies. [Here's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobo_doll_experiment) a link to a more detailed explanation.
So my question is, how is it possible that there are apparently no newer and stronger links between violent games/movies and violent behaviour, especially since games/movies are getting more realistic? | Of course there is a connection, but is it important? All Bandura showed was that it was possible. Hardly anybody expected something else. Children are often seen play acting things their parents do.
However, when thousands of people play a violent video game almost all of them do not become violent in real life. Something is "different" in the people who become violent, and it's not the game. | 19 | 20 |
Why does water tend to follow the path of a nearby object instead of going straight down? | For example, when pouring water from a mostly-full glass, it will cause the water to follow the side of the glass instead of fall perfectly down. Also, a sink will do the same to your arm, or finger. | I believe you are referring to the force of *adhesion*, water has a tendency to adhede to other dissimilar surfaces. There is no one theory as to why adhesion takes place, but rather it is thought to occur by multiple mechanisms, including: chemical, mechanical, electrostatic, and dispersive forces. Materials with high "surface energy" tend to have strong intermolecular forces, drawing water to the surface with such energy rather than the air, which has no surface energy for our intents and purposes. Not sure if this explains the phenomena you're referring too, but it's what came to mind. | 19 | 15 |
ELI5: Why are cells living? I know they’re the building blocks of life but what defines living? Are plants a different type of “alive” because they have a different cell structure? | The current definition of life simply states that for an organism to be considered living, it has to maintain **homeostasis**, which is the technical way to say "it has to maintain itself through its metabolism".
A cell maintains itself by breaking down resources to extract the energy and elements it contains, making up complex structures to achieve survival and reproduction. From bacteria, to protozoa, to algae, to plants, to fungi, to animals, we observe this behaviour, regardless of the cell type.
In a sense, all lives are the same, they're just living - and have been living - under different circumstances that greatly affect how they "express life". | 32 | 44 |
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ELI5: Why is water a liquid at room temperature, yet hydrogen and Oxygen, which are the elements water is made of, a gas at room temperature? | Hydrogen and Oxygen are both positive, but oxygen is more positive. Therefore the oxygen atom in water holds onto the electrons most of the time. Because of this, the water molecule looks little bit like a magnet, with the oxygen side being more negative (as it holds onto more electrons) and the hydrogen side being more positive.
Because it is slightly magnetic, water molecules will be more strongly attracted to each other, and so it takes more energy to keep them apart. More energy means it takes a higher temperature before they become a gas.
This idea of hydrogen holding onto less electrons and becoming positive is called hydrogen bonding.
Interestingly enough, this is also why ice is less dense than water - When water freezes, because the molecules are like little magnets, the water molecules want to arrange in a specific way, which takes up a large volume. | 11 | 16 |
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ELI5: How is stainless steel made, and why is everything metal not made of it? | If it does not rust, then why are cars, tools, everything else that may rust not made of it? Is it a cost issue? | Stainless steel is a group of steel alloys with high chromium and low carbon. This makes them significantly more resistant against corrosion but the low carbon content means that it's flexible and not very strong
We often use high carbon steel for items that we want to heat treat and make extremely hard.
There are other alloys that are really magnetic or not magnetic at all.
There are about a thousand alloys of steel, each excels in certain areas and is preferred for certain tasks. With the variety of alloys out there, why pick one to use for everything rather than picking the perfect one for your application? | 104 | 76 |
ELI5: How do celebrities keep their cell numbers and personal emails so locked down? | I know it really doesn't matter, but how do they give out their numbers or emails and how hasn't a privacy issue happened sooner? | Usually a combination of two ways:
1) Multiple phone numbers and e-mails. One would be strictly for personal use that they only give to close friends/family. Another would be for business matters and so on. The same way that you probably have more than one e-mail address -- a general e-mail that you give to companies/websites for accounts, spam, etc., and another for more personal business, like school or work.
2) Managers/agents. They handle all the business-related calls. If, say, a director wants to get in touch with an actor, they'd call his/her agent or representative. The agent would then relay the information to the actor's personal phone/e-mail. This is mainly why agents gets paid. They work out all the details and present the information to their client so they don't have to sort through it all. | 1,949 | 2,929 |
ELI5: Why is seawater green in some places, and clear/blue in other places? And why dont these colors mix? | Green sea water is usually the presence of floating algae, diatoms and other plankton that feed on the nutrients in the water. Green water has more stuff alive in it, usually colder water. Colder water can hold more dissolved oxygen in it. Often colder because of upwelling of deeper nutrient rich water that's being pushed to the surface by underwater geological features.
Tropical water tends to be clear/blue because it's warmer and therefore has less oxygen and have less nutrients, therefore less microscopic aquatic life. | 89 | 70 |
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How do imported commodities affect GDP? | Hi!
I'm new to economics, and still don't have a grasp of some of the basic concepts.
If a Norwegian store sells clothing for 10,000$ a month, but all the clothes are produced in Bangladesh, and the store imports them for $2000$ a month, what is the store's net contribution to Norway's GDP?
Thanks in advance! Feel free to ELI5. | GDP = Consumption + Investments + Government Spending + Net Export (Exports - Imports).
Since Consumption would increase with $10,000 and Net Exports would decrease with $2,000, the change in GDP is +$8,000. | 23 | 34 |
ELI5: Why is it easier to pull than to push? | There's a lot that contributes to it. When you push, you lean into the object and you tend to be applying force into a partially downward direction, increasing the resistance of friction, while you lean away and tend to lift up a bit when you pull, lowering said resistance. Due to that same tendency, pushing with that downward force takes some of your weight off of your feet, decreasing traction. The upward force of pulling makes you push down on your feet harder, increasing traction. Basically gravity is the enemy if you're pushing and your friend if you're pulling. | 48 | 23 |
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ELI5: Amino acids | I've started taking supplements lately because it's summer now, and I have more time on my hands, so that means more training. Im currently training 7 times a week, training 2 times a day twice a week, and having two restdays (thursday and sunday).
I've started taking some fast carbohydrates (maltodextrin) and protein powder to gain some weight and muscle. Either way, I recently came across this supplement called Amino acids. What is it? I know it promotes muscle growth but isn't that just what protein powder does? And what is BCAA? What is the difference between protein powder and amino acids, and can they be used together?
Thanks! | Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, like lego blocks, except molecular.
When you eat protein, your digestive tract breaks it down into amino acids, which are then used by your body to build its own protein. | 36 | 67 |
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