post_title
stringlengths 5
304
| post_text
stringlengths 0
37.5k
| post_scores
int64 15
83.1k
| comment_text
stringlengths 200
9.61k
| comment_score
int64 10
43.3k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
Nuclear winter is always mentioned as a consequence of nuclear war. Why did the extensive testing of nuclear weapons after WWII not cause a nuclear winter? | Does it require the detonation of a large amount of nuclear weapons in a short period of time (such as a full-scale nuclear war) to cause a global climate change? | 1,226 | You've got it exactly right.
When any big blast goes off, a certain amount of debris is thrown up into the air and takes a while to settle back down.
The idea of a nuclear winter is that enough blasts throw enough stuff into the air to block out the sun.
The weapons detonated for testing purposes did not throw up enough debris and they were separated in time, so most of the debris from blast A had settled before blast B was able to throw up it's debris. | 773 |
Eli5 My three year old boy wants to know why do trains whistle? And different times in there journey? We hear train whistles from our house. | 297 | They usually whistle when entering populated areas and go over level crossings. It’s an added security measure because many times trains are not very loud and can « sneak up » on you. The whistling makes it very clear they are coming. | 310 |
|
If action X is not immoral when it is carried out against animals because "animals are inferior," does that mean that if an advanced alien species committed action X against humans, then that would not be immoral, either? | 48 | It *could*.
You may want to read up on utilitarianism's utility monster, because the problems seem quite similar and could probably use parallel solutions.
For a quick summary of the situation: Utilitarianism relies on a utility calculus to determine right and wrong. If some utility monster came along that would always get more utility per resource (and the resource could be, for instance, human lives), we would be morally obligated to give everything away to said monster (which could mean our death). One way to resolve this if one felt that conclusion was wrong would be to refine the utility calculus, perhaps by building in some sort of maximum.
For your situation, you seem to posit a "superiority monster". So, depending upon your "superiority calculus", it could work out either way.
Edit: /u/too046 also has a good response. Read it if you haven't. | 18 |
|
what's all the extra noise in a diesel engine? | I've driven both kinds of cars. I understand that diesel fuel is made up of longer hydrocarbon molecules. I think. But is the engine shape really that different? What a racket? What is it exactly that's making such a louder noise than a petrol engine? | 78 | Higher compression and knock.
In diesel the combustion is closer to detonation. In otto cycle it's deflagration.
In the old days you could hear car engines knocking under high load/hot temperature/low octane fuel. | 17 |
CMV: I support welfare even if some people abuse it | Hey guys! A lot of Conservatives say they don't support welfare (want to cut it/abolish it) because they think they're giving money to moochers. Personally I don't agree with this, I support welfare even if a few mooch off it. My view is that while even if some people abuse social services, the majority (like >85%) make good use of it, people abusing social services is unfortunate but in my opinion the true tragedy is hard working folks not getting the help they need and making sure they do is worth the possibility of one or 2 people managing to scrape "on the government's tit". Please CMV! | 346 | If welfare is a good scheme for helping people out of poverty, why is it that we have to keep spending more and more on it? If the programs were successful, shouldn't less people need them as time goes on? | 53 |
ELI5: Is there any science behind epsom salts efficiency as a pain reliever? | My friends have told me, and I've read online, that epsom Salt apparently is a very good pain reliever; however, I also see many other bs products promising similar stuff so I don't know what to believe. | 15 | Yes, it's function is as an astringent. Osmosis and water solubility work the same in our body as in a test tube. Introduce very impure water to something with purer water in it, and the water seeks equilibrium by moving from the area of greater concentration and purity, to lesser concentration and purity.
When you soak in epsom salts you are surrounded by very impure water. So much so, that the water in your body is more pure, and the salts will pull water out of your body. When you injure yourself the pain is often caused by swelling of body tissues as blood flows to the area and tries to heal it. The epsom salts help draw water away through the skin which reduces swelling and provides some relief.
Many pain killers like Ibuprofen and Naproxen also relieve pain by reducing swelling, rather than by directly suppressing pain transmission like an analgesic would (tylenol)
Gargling with salt water when you have a sore throat is using the same action to try to draw water out of your swollen tonsils and throat, there by reducing swelling and providing some pain relief.
In science class a lot of students have done the experiment where you take a slice of something like a potato, and you put one slice in very pure water, and another in salt water. The pure water has a greater concentration than the water in the potato and so it moves into the potato, causing it to swell in size and become very crisp and stiff. The salt water has the opposite effect and draws water out of the potato making it limp and droopy.
When we want to cure something so it won't spoil we often use salts as they both kill many bacteria and fungus, and they also help to draw water out of the food helping it dry. | 13 |
ELI5: Why does Euler's Number (e) have so many unique applications? | I am a CE student who is graduating soon. I use e every day for so many different applications, but they usually boil down to modeling exponential growth and decay, modeling complex sinusoids (which seem unrelated to me but somehow e applies to both through Euler's Formula), and transforms such as the Laplace. Could someone explain how the properties of e all fit together to make these applications work? The best answer I can come up with on my own is that Euler was a dark wizard who caused nature to revolve around e. | 294 | I like your dark wizard theory, but the answer is, sadly, much simpler.
Imagine that you draw a curve on a coordinate system - never mind the equation right now, just draw the line - which has the peculiar property that, for any value of x, the y-value of the line is also equal to the slope of the line. That would be a pretty interesting line, wouldn't it? Among other thing things, if the y-value is always equal to the slope, it would have the interesting property that f(x)=f'(x). Then you can imagine that you would want to use this function as a sort of fundamental building block to build *other* functions where some part of the function remains the same after integration or differentiation.
Are you following so far? Do you see where this is going, or should we push it a little further? | 103 |
Would masses of 1kg and 0,5 kg of the same radioactive material take the same time to decay? | First of all, is it even possible for something to decay 100% via radioactive decay, since half of half of half... seems like a convergent series with the decayed mass approaching one, but never really getting there... But then again, you eventually would get to one atom, and that atom (given that it's radioactive) has to decay sometime, right? That, I guess, would take an incredibly long time, but since this is purely theoretical it doesn't really matter. My brain already hurts, but lets continue...
So the intuitive thinking would be that the 0,5 kg mass will obviously decay faster, because it has less mass, duh! But I thought about it for a bit and came up with this scenario: you have a mass of 1 kg; lets say it takes a billion years for it to fully decay. Then you split that mass into 2 pieces of 0,5 kg. It would still take a billion years to decay, nothing has really changed, has it? I don't suppose it has to do anything with mass/surface ratio, does it? So now, you have two masses of 0,5 kg which will take the same time to fully decay as the 1 kg mass, a million years.
Now, I know that half-life is purely probabilistic, meaning that in theory, a radioactive material could retain 100% of its original mass after a billion years, even if its half-life is thousands of times shorter. That, of course, has such an astronomically small chance of happening, that it's basically impossible. So, how does radioactive decay and the whole half-life thing work when the number of atoms becomes low enough for our predicted function of mass over time starts getting significantly inaccurate?
Because each atom has a 50% chance of decaying in the half-life of the element, it's all fine while we have ~10²⁴ atoms because the higher the sample size, the more accurate the results. However, when we get to a smaller number of atoms, the amount of mass over time starts to deviate from our perfect-50%-each-period-of-half-life assumption and basically, we're lost, right? I'm guessing that as the mass approaches the really small numbers of atoms, the course of the decay could go either way. It can go slightly faster, it can go slightly slower. But, if we did this 1 and 0,5 kg masses experiment an infinite amount of times, the average time of full decay would be exactly the same, right?
So, I obviously want the question in the title answered, but I also want someone to clear radioactive decay and the half-life thing a bit. Please correct me on anything that is incorrect in this post, cause I'm still in highschool and have a pretty basic understanding of physics, with a bit of youtube videos and such on top. I tried to get some of this answered by googling but its all so basic and doesn't really get to explaining my question. Also, I didn't really try wikipedia because shits like me with a highschool understanding of physics can and do write all sorts of unimaginably incorrect things on topics they once read half and article about. Thanks. | 23 | Logically, the 1kg mass will take one half-life longer for all of the original atoms to decay.
After one half-life, it will have the same number of atoms as the .5kg mass, and will clearly decay at the same rate as the other .5kg mass did originally.
However, at the end of the decay period, we are talking about individual atoms and probabilities, so it really isn't possible to say exactly what will happen.
A thought experiment - divide the first mass in two parts at the start of the experiment. Then you have three identical masses. They will all decay at the same rate, correct?
Where will the last original atom be? With two thirds probability, in one of the masses that was originally part of the larger mass. How long will that atom take to decay? Hard to say :) | 22 |
CMV: The availability of credit is bidding up the cost of so many important things in the US. | And some consumers are so financially illiterate that they only think of what the “note” will be, so they just buy things they can’t afford.
The most obvious example is phones. Do you know how expensive smart phones are? $1,000 is the new normal. And the smartphone sellers’ response: “don’t worry, you don’t have to pay it up front. If you choose a 2 year plan your payment is only $50!
Been to a car dealer recently? New cars are more expensive than ever before. $30,000 in 2019 gets you what would have been $17,000 in 2004. But no worries. You can just do a 10 year payment plan. Heck, make it 15.
Homes were the first example of this. Banks used to turn people away who couldn’t put down 20% and do a 15-year fixed mortgage. Now homes are twice what they should be, but you can do a 30 year variable rate with no money down. Now all consumer products are turning to the mortgage model, which has been just a bottomless gold mine for financial institutions.
Meanwhile people like me who want to take a Dave Ramsey approach, are left paying huge sums out of pocket. Because the consumers are screwing themselves by permitting the industry just raise prices forever. And this is all without mention of student loans. Maybe it would help our economy to teach people in school not to use debt. Or maybe some regulations to help the consumer.
Is there any real reason apple can’t sell their top iPhone for $500? Or is it just a matter of “why would we?” | 170 | What you are describing is certainly true for housing lots, but it's not quite true for cars or phones or for housing structures. Credit isn't straight up making them more expensive but is moving people to more deluxe models. The 2019 car is safer and less polluting than the 2004 equivalent. The iPhone is more powerful than a $300 phone would be. If not for easy credit the price would be lower but so would the features. For a phone you are probably actually benefiting because you can easily buy a cheaper commodity smartphone. For the car you aren't because the law mandates the better safety/cleanliness. | 38 |
CMV: Overpopulation is the single largest concern facing humanity | I'm pretty firmly convinced that overpopulation is pretty much the root of all evil. Resource depletion, environmental degradation, etc. all seem to come back to the sheer number of people we have on the planet. All of the "ecological footprint" calculations state that *given a current population*, we would need x # of planets to sustain ourselves. Usually the logic flows to "so we need to be more sustainable", but I think it's at least partly "so we need to severely limit the number of humans on this planet".
Even where I live (one of the least populated per sq. km by country), I think we're overpopulated.
Yes, it's possible, theoretically, that if everyone became a vegetarian or whatever, we'd all buy ourselves some more carrying capacity - but this isn't likely to happen. What could happen though, is education/reproductive rights/euthanasia/cancelling of tax credits for having children. | 53 | Overpopulations is not a problem. Birth rates are at an all time low and are still dropping, populations are expected to peak at about 10 billion before starting to drop a little. Thankfully the planet earth can easily sustain much more than ten billion people and the solar system as a whole can sustain many trillions of people.
The solution is urbanization and industrialization. Compact cities are significantly more efficient and free up even more land to be used to farms and factories.
Ten billions isn't significantly bigger than the 7 billion we have now and we have a lot of space to improve in efficiency. | 49 |
CMV: I believe that many university professors today are unable to debate on their research with others because they are too attached to their findings. | As a third-year student at University, I have gone to many lectures and office hours. One thing that my friends and I have noticed is this attitude amongst professors. They complained that there is always this one professor in a meeting that "Loves the sound of his/her own voice" meaning that they do not listen to other points of views. However, at times in class and office hours, these professors exhibit a similar attitude when they dismiss studies whose findings do not match their stance.
I think this is because they gain status through publishing new results and validating their theories. Ironically, scientific advancement comes from breaking paradigms and fact-checking theories. I think the current system is problematic. There needs to be a better way of breaking this stigma/attitude (?), incentivizing people to collaborate and cross-check their studies. I also think there needs to be a mechanism that exposes researchers and professors to practice hearing and engaging with opposing views/theories (CMV for scientists) so that we might have more scientific discoveries and more accurate theories.
Today it is more important than ever to get out of your own echo chamber. Professors should be another role model of this to university students.
_____
> *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!* | 169 | Don't assume that just because they dismiss challenges to their views brought up by students, that they dismiss all challenges to their views.
It would be surprising if a student knew something that an active expert in the field did not, therefore it would be surprising if a challenge from a student was valid. We should expect a perfectly rational, fair-minded expert to dismiss *most* challenges from students, because most of them will be wrong. | 34 |
I believe anyone who generally opposes background checks for gun purchases is a moron. CMV | Sorry for the inflammatory title but that's essentially how I feel. To clarify:
I do not mean any specific piece of legislation ever proposed or passed, I mean the general idea that the background of aspiring gun owners should be looked into to ensure that guns are not being sold to those convicted of violent crimes (or whatever other criteria law sets for gun ownership).
I would understand the opposition if it was the case that people were afraid that the government could use the effectiveness of the checks to impose much stricter criteria for gun ownership. So let's just assume I understand this and let's also assume for the sake of argument that somehow we could ensure that such criteria would not become unfairly strict.
It seems to me, that if the only group that were prohibited from legally purchasing guns was people who have been convicted of violent crimes, opposing background checks only serves to aid individuals who have proved to be violent in their search for weapons with which they can do more harm to society.
Unless your position is that all ex-convicts have reformed themselves (some do, most don't) or that violent offenders should still be allowed to buy guns there seems to be no good reason to oppose background checks in general. (Again, I'm avoiding the subject I mentioned earlier, that background checks would allow for stricter gun laws. This is obviously true and a valid reason to oppose background checks, but I've always been under the assumption that there was something more to it.) | 28 | I think (in general) that the background checks people are opposed to are not criminal records checks, but rather broader checks, like mental health or hey, why not tie your credit score into your gun purchase?
e.g.
* Low credit rating? You're probably buying this gun to rob a liquor store!
* You had depression in High School? No gun for you maniac!
Also, background checks (in general) don't really stop criminals from getting guns, even if you have a national firearms registry, guns are one of the most stolen pieces of property, and there are umpteen million guns already on the black market, so what do background checks change?
Sorry for being a moron. | 14 |
[The Walking Dead] What has happened to the Nuclear power plants and Silos? | Why hasn't there been a melt down if they plants are abandoned? | 22 | There won't be a meltdown at silos. Missiles aren't continuously going through a nuclear reaction.
As for nuclear power plants, either they were shut down during emergency procedures, or they had auto-cutoffs for one reason or another.
| 24 |
ELI5: "Cracking" a game | While reading threads about the new Arkham Asylum fiasco, I kept running across comments of people saying "just torrent it," followed by others saying the game couldn't be cracked yet. Why not?
What exactly happens when someone "cracks" a game? How come some "cracks" are preferable to others and more stable?
EDIT: You guys have been awesome both in explaining and in not being condescending. Thanks so much! | 909 | Some games come with code that makes it hard to run a copy by just possessing the data for it. For instance, it may make you enter a serial number. You copy the CD fine, install it, and it asks you for the number. You don't know it, so the game refuses to work.
Well, somewhere inside the game there is logic like this:
1. Ask user for serial number
2. Perform some operation to check the number. For instance, all digits should sum up to 9.
3. If the answer is right, continue
Cracking is just interfering with this logic. You can modify the code to jump past the verification step. You can make it still ask for the serial number, but accept any number at all. You could flip the logic around so that it accepts only invalid numbers. Etc.
This was the early era of cracking. Then the companies started making things more complicated. The program may be encrypted and self-verifying, so not only you need to break the encryption and make the change, but also find how it checks itself and defeat that as well.
Some are more devious and don't make it obvious that they know something is wrong. Instead the game runs, but breaks something subtly in such a way that the 5th level becomes impossible to finish.
Any kind of protection is breakable, but with enough effort it's possible to make something that requires considerable thought and time to get around, and it's quite possible that if the protection is good enough the game will remain uncracked for months.
| 690 |
ELI5: How are coding programs coded? | I'm currently self-learning how to code / program (Python) - but how are these different systems programmed in the first place?
| 77 | They use another programming language to code up that one.
And they use another language to make *that* one.
And it goes on further and further back, until at some point they're writing the first text based programming language by putting punch cards in a machine.
But what reads the punch cards? Go further back and they're programming by flipping switches on a big room sized box.
And what reads those switches? Go further back, and they've **hard coded** the programming language directly into the computer's construction, like, the specific connections between the vacuum tubes are the programming language. This, of course, a very, very simple programming language. | 68 |
[DC] If it was looking for a fearless champion of justice, why didn't the alien give the Green Lantern ring to Superman or Wonder Woman? | 31 | The ring doesn't really take power into account when look for a new Lantern. It looks for candidates that have incredible willpower and that can overcome great fear. Hal Jordan, despite not being as powerful as Superman or Wonder Woman, was the best candidate capable of using the ring to its fullest. | 50 |
|
ELI5: why do our bodies produce tells and signals when we lie? | 26 | Lying is stressful!
Not only are people conditioned by society not to lie, but the situation that you feel requires a lie (whether that be a small lie such as “you look great in that dress” or a big one like “I did not kill that man”) is generally a stressful one. Furthermore, you’re often thinking about what will happen if you’re caught in it.
In other words, they’re not lie signals at all- they’re stress signals. And humans are social creatures for whom stress signals form an important part of social signaling. | 28 |
|
[Star Wars] How were Anakin, Obi-Wan, and the Separatist High Council able to breathe on Mustafar? | A thought occurred to me while watching a video discussing the surface conditions on the planet Venus, basically, if Mustafar is an entire planet covered in constant lava flows, much like our Venus in its apocalyptic one in half a billion years global subduction event...shouldn’t the air be filled with chemicals that are fatally toxic to humans and most living things in the Galaxy? I accept the Mustafarians being able to exist because the Galaxy has a wide array of both carbon-based and silicon-based life, however most inhabited/inhabitable planets seem to have at least Earth-like conditions which is why most can harbor a wide arrange of life, but the conditions of Mustafar should mean it has air quality comparable to Hadean Earth at best if not Venus at worst yeah?
In fact how are so many species able to breathe on so many different planets to begin with? | 35 | Residual atmosphere from before it was all on fire, probably helped with a little terraforming or some kind of atmosphere-in-a-bubble set up.
In Legends Mustafar was once a lush jungle planet, home to several Jedi Temples. The Sith attacked, and the battle affected the local planet's rotations in such a way that Mustafar became transformed into a fiery hellscape.
It's also worth mentioning that the materials that are being mined on Mustafar are considered to be incredibly rare. So the atmospheric makeup may not be what one would expect from a lava planet, and besides that, there's probably quite a bit of money in keeping the planet usable, if not necessarily habitable. | 33 |
[General Sci-fi] How accurate is the flickering lights and sparks flying everywhere when a spaceship is under attack? | In Sci-fi (specifically Battlestar Galactica and the Stargate series), whenever a spaceship is under attack, inside the ship there are giant explosions of sparks and smoke and flickering lights. How accurate is this? Would this happen to a real spaceship? Isn't this bad for the ship? | 44 | It depends on the weaponry, in the event of high-energy weapons, this could cause not-critical uninsulated electrical items to surge (I.e. lights) and cause arcing of high voltage low amp sparks between surfaces.
So while it looks bad. All the critical systems are well insulated from the surges. | 29 |
eli5: How do Horses in the wild deal with trimming their shoes? | Saw this post ([What happens when you don't trim your horse's shoes](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/k0wn7m/what_happens_when_you_dont_trim_your_horses_shoes/)), and it got me wondering. How did/do wild horses deal with their continuously growing shoes? Are they ground off on rough terrain? do they break off on rocks? Is the crazy growth we see something that only happens in domesticated horses? | 25 | Wild horses don't have shoes. The OP titled their post incorrectly - those would be the horse's hooves, not their shoes.
Hooves just keep on growing, because they are made out of keratin (The same stuff your toe and fingernails are made out of.) Wild horses keep their hooves trim by walking on hard surfaces, bashing their hooves against rocks, etc. A human owned horse that only ever walks on grass and sand won't be able to keep its own hooves trimmed, so the ferrier will file their hooves down when he changes the horse's shoes. | 55 |
[ELI5]: How do calculators find out the square root of a number? | 23 | Depends on the calculator, but here’s one approach, illustrated for square root of 100
1. Make a first estimate (eg half it, your calculator might make a better guess though) = 50.
2. Add that guess to your target divided by that guess, and halve. So (50 + 100/50) / 2 = 26. That’s your next estimate.
3. Continue until the difference between succeeding estimates is small (again depends on your device).
50 -> 26 -> 14.9 -> 10.8 -> 10.03 so it’s getting there very quickly.
Edit: as the other poster said, the actual algorithm used by any given calculator may be a lot more sophisticated. | 18 |
|
[Legend of Korra] What changed random non-benders into airbenders? | From everything I've seen, there was no trigger or reason given for why these random people became benders. Supposedly Korra opening the portals created the new airbenders, but that seems like a random/non-sufficient explanation. Did specific spirits do it? What cosmic force was responsible? Was it specifically the portals that caused it, or did the portals just allow something else to affect the physical world? | 86 | Opening the portals was like a pressure release valve releasing spiritual energy back into the world- this is also why plant growth expanded significantly. The influx of spiritual energy remedied issues of balance, in particular, people who had ancestral Airbender blood became conduits for Airbending to return to the world. | 77 |
Karl Poppers critiques of Marx | I’ve seen someone say that if any Marxist read Karl Poppers critiques of Marx they would stop being Marxists. I’ve only seen strawman critiques of Marx from most liberal thinkers. Could someone inform me on what Karl Poppers critiques of Marx are is there any merit to them? | 125 | Although Popper does address Marxism specifically, much of his work focuses on the Hegelian idea of Historicism which heavily influenced Marx.
His two most widely-accepted books (The Poverty of Historicism, The Open Society and Its Enemies) offer a number of scathing rebuttals to Hegel. There are too many to name here, but here are a few.
Historicism has less predictive value than Hegelians like to believe. Past historical events can’t be proven to predict future historical events and many of its tenets aren’t really falsifiable (Popper saw falsifiability as the hallmark of the rational scientific process since causal relationships are impossible to prove). Beyond this, there is simply too much information to be examined in any given society, resulting in a selection bias that can’t account for societal changes or the ways that future scientific developments will shape societies. Finally, Historicism can’t consistently predict at which point historical trends cease or change.
Popper is a very serious philosopher and among the greatest of the 20th century. His critiques are generally accepted to have merit. | 121 |
My fiancée passed away on the 1st and she was going to come to my PhD program with me. Is deferment bad? I'm at a loss and I don't know what I should do anymore. | I got into my dream PhD program in January and my fiancée and I were making our plans to move there soon. However, my fiancée passed away unexpectedly on the 1st of this month and I've been a total wreck. I can't concentrate on my last semester of undergrad and a huge reason I chose this school was because she would love the area/things to do there. I want to still get my PhD but now I'm feeling lost and scared about moving forward.
I contacted the school and they said I can defer up to a year and keep my RA-ship offer and everything and my current university is offering me incompletes to finish over the summer, but I don't know what I should do. My parents have taken me back to my childhood home and they are trying to "get me over" the death of the love of my life. They want me to finish my undergrad on time (by May 1st) and start grad school on time (June 1st), but I'm having trouble just typing this let alone thinking about math.
My end goal is to become a professor at a PUI. Would deferment be looked at negatively? Does anyone know how I can transition back into my life/school? Is it okay to not be able to do any work right now?
I'm also feeling guilty to move on with my life without her. Does anyone have any advice? I'm only 22 and my lover has already passed away.
Thank you for any advice. | 476 | Take a year off to grieve. Moving away from your support systems and starting grad school is really hard even when you aren't going through something else impossibly hard as well. No one is going to know you deferred outside of that program and even if someone else found out, they'd assume you took a gap year which is really really common and not seen negatively at all. Just take it day by day. | 530 |
How do we know days were shorter in the past? | 165 | Geological tidal records show the daily/seasonal deposits of silt. Which show that the hours in a day during the reign of the dinosaurs was about 21 hours
The moon is the cause of the elongated days. Slowly slowing the Earth down.
Edit: Just to clarify, the tides aren't the only contributor to the slow down of rotation of the Earth. Angular momentum and the tides contribute.
The main relation the tides have in regards to OPs question is that they have left behind evidence.
| 72 |
|
ELI5: Why is the nuclear power plant in Fukushima still not under control? | 26 | You need to define "under control"
Since a few moments after the seismic detectors felt the earthquake and shut down the reactor, the nuclear fission reaction has been completely stopped.
The problem with certain types of nuclear power, is the radioactive waste in the core keeps producing large amounts of heat for a long time and needs cooling.
The cores are cooled down to non-boiling temperatures and are 'under control'. They have been for a couple months and are working to clean up the radioactive contamination and decommission the plants. | 19 |
|
ELI5: Why isn't it mandatory for people to retake their drivers licence test every 5/10 years? | Aside from the potential hassle, I feel like so many more accidents could be avoided that it would be worth the trouble as it would force people not to develop bad driving habits. | 21 | It's assumed that if you haven't gotten any major speeding tickets, been in any major accidents, etc. that you don't need to be retested.
The hassle of retesting everyone would be an enormous hassle. Look at how crowded DMVs and DriveTest Centres are already.
It's a cost-benefit kind of thing. If 1% of drivers are bad enough to have their license taken away, then is it worth the hassle of testing 100% of drivers? | 19 |
[Hancock] why hasn't the government tried to apprehend Hancock by any means necessary | I was just watching it yesterday and I was thinking wouldn't the government desperately want to subdue and bring in Hancock, not only for the public's safety but to also do tests on him to see if they can benefit from it in any way. Instead he just lives like a homeless drunk and everyone knows him as some loser with powers, he's treated like some b list celebrity. Wouldn't the government take him serious as a huge threat because of his powers mixed with his behavior and alcoholism?
Ig all I'm saying is I'm surprised at the government's lack of interest in Hancock in their verse | 28 | It could be that they have already tried to already and failed enough times that they gave up. Theirs only so much that they can do before Hancock gets tired of them bothering him that he decides to fight back against them. | 50 |
ELI5: Why are commercial airplanes all sub-Mach 1? | 34 | The faster you go, the harder it is to push through the air - and the relationship is not linear. So, going a little bit faster needs a LOT more power which means more fuel, bigger engines, more noise, etc. etc.
Put your hand out of the car window at 30mph - easy. Now try 60mph - wow, the air is a lot more forceful! Now try 120mph (OK, don't really) you can't hold your hand up, the air is like a brick wall. At 600+mph you can imagine it's not easy!
If you look at Concorde, it's a tiny cramped thing that burns massive amounts of fuel, which makes it expensive to run and you can't fit many passengers on it.
Additionally, stuff happens the faster you go - stuff heats up, shockwaves happen, the whole airplane has to be made to withstand the extra forces & strains, lifespans of components get shorter, stronger stuff is heavier and bigger, etc. etc.
*Please don't put your hand out the window and then sue me because you hit something* | 39 |
|
ELI5: Existentialism | 18 | This question has been asked many times already, so search for more explanations.
The basic principle is that "existence precedes essence." This means that you're a blank canvas when you're born. No values. No meaning. No sense of what's beautiful and not, or what's right or wrong.
There's no inherent meaning to existence. Your actions and experiences in the world will help you paint your canvas and craft your own essence, *i.e.* your identity. You draw upon these experiences in the world around you. That's why everyone is different because everyone has different experiences.
Some people are afraid of this process though. Realizing that there's no inherent meaning and that you have to create your own is scary. That's why some anxious people retreat to the morality outlined by religion or by some other figure. They don't actively create meaning; they just copy it. They aren't subjects; they objectify themselves. This self-objectification and inauthenticity is called bad faith. | 18 |
|
[Superman] could Krypto the Superdog kill the Superman the way a normal dog can kill a normal man? | 75 | Theoretically, if they had the same amount of sun exposure, then yes it should be possible. He's to Superman what a regular dog is to us. But he hasn't had nearly as much exposure and not as much time to acclimate to his powers, so at base Krypto probably couldn't even leave a dent in Clark. | 52 |
|
ELI5: What are REITs(Real Estate Investment Trust)? | 29 | So lets say that you are an investor, and you would like to purchase a Skyscraper or a Shopping Mall but you either don't have the millions of dollars it would cost to buy one or you don't want to spend the millions of dollars required on just 1 building.
A REIT is where you and other investors can get together and pool your funds to purchase either a single building that you would otherwise not be able to afford or to invest in a range of properties that you would otherwise not be able to afford.
There are 2 other important advantages to REITs:
1) They are liquid - once you buy a shopping mall or even just a single residential investment property they can be very difficult to sell. It can take a long time and cost a whole lot of money. Often REITs are listed on Stock Exchanges so they can be easily bought and sold just like a stock in a company.
2) REITs are professionally managed so you don't have to worry about personally managing the property. | 10 |
|
Actual ELI5: If dogs have such a good sense of smell, why do they stick their noses up our butts? | 34 | Dogs have a scent gland in their behinds that can tell a lot about a dog. It can tell the sex, their general health and the dog's temperament. So, it's instinctual for a dog to smell another dog's behind. This extends to humans because we're part of their pack. | 24 |
|
Why do Virologist use Vero(Monkey Kidney) cells to culture respiratory viruses and respiratory tract cells? | Edit: *And not Respiratory tract cells* | 30 | Think of vero cells as the factory to make virus in vivo. It doesn't need to be the perfect target for infection, it needs to make more virus.
Vero cells are an established immortal cell lines. You can grow them (nearly) indefinitely and keep a stock going all the time. They grow dense and have good yields of viral products. Respiratory tract cells are more specialized and a little harder to keep going and die before producing a lot of virus. Respiratory cells are also hard to scale up for large production runs because they need more space in the flask. | 22 |
CMV: Praying for things to happen doesn't make sense as it presumes that you can and should question God's plan. | And that God might potentially change his plans based on an individual's wishes. This isn't a question of whether god exists or not, I just don't understand the logic of asking an omnipotent omniscient creator to change things and divert from it's plan for you or your family. Say you have a family member that is sick, and assuming you're all perfect Christians, it doesn't make sense that God would decide to heal the family member if you asked for it and not heal them if you didn't. Would he not look more favorably on those who didn't question his plan already in place? I just don't understand the logic of it and I'd be happy if someone could expand my view on it and have it make sense to me. The specific thing that would most change my view is if you could explain to me why it could be logically consistent to have some sort of expectations that your requests matter and might impact the decisions of a God who set the entire universe in motion. Especially if he knew what your every request would be before you were even born.
This isn't about praying in general as I perfectly understand it's spiritual benifits to the well-being of a person, so if your response is something like "while it might not effect God's decisions it makes the person feel less helpless which is valuable" it wouldn't change my view. | 86 | CS Lewis has a quote about this:
I suppose the solution lies in pointing out that the efficacy of prayer is, at any rate no more of a problem then the efficacy of all human acts. i.e. if you say “It is useless to pray because Providence already knows what is best and will certainly do it”, then why is it not equally useless (and for the same reason) to try to alter the course of events in any way whatever — to ask for the salt or book your seat in a train?
In other words, God already knows what you want and need, and that stuff is part of God's plan. But you should still ask anyway, because the point isn't to accomplish something direct, necessarily; it's to connect with God. | 40 |
ELI5: How can people demand constitutional carry yet not be a member of a well regulated Militia? | The Second Amendment states (in full): "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
People are demanding constitutional carry (mainly in Texas), but few if any of them are part of a militia like that State or National Guard. | 59 | The stated reason is a militia, but it is the right of *the people* to bear arms. The right is not assigned to the militia. The right is assigned to the people. Militia is formed from the people at the time of need, not before, and when that time comes the founding fathers thought the people should already be armed and familiar with the use of their weapons.
Is the militia needed to secure the free state against outside invaders or against abusive leadership of the state itself? Does it matter? | 45 |
[Star Wars] Was there a period BBY in which seeing a Jedi/Force wielder was rare? | 21 | All through it, honestly. A lot of the stories may focus on Jedi, but remember this: There are thousands of worlds. Only a few hundred, maybe a few thousand, Jedi at any given time. There are TRILLIONS of beings out there who were born, lived, and died without even seeing a Jedi Knight or a Force Sensitive. | 42 |
|
ELI5: How did Galileo manage to calculate the moon's mountains' height ? | 1,516 | Put a stick in the ground.
As the day goes by the sun rises and sets.
Now watch the shadows the stick casts.
As the day goes by the shadows change.
If you know the angle the sun is at , you can use that to calculate how tall the stick is from the changes in the shadow.
Galileo did that with the mountains.
As the month goes on the angle the sun is shining on the moon changes.
Galileo knew that angle.
He then tracked how the shadows of the mountains and craters changed and calculated their relative height. | 1,228 |
|
ELI5: why did western nations bail out their banks? What were the consequences if they had not? | 115 | The bailout of 2008 was premised on the notion of Keynesian economic theory, which basically means that economic cycles can last longer than human lifetimes hence government intervention into capitalist systems are necessary in the "short term".
At first, the administration toyed with the idea of allowing the banks to fail, then letting the system repair itself. That's why Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers weren't bailed out at first. It's important to recognize that shareholders were screwed anyway; in a bailout you basically dilute all your equity. So a bailout was less of a handout than a genuine rescue of the economic system.
However, the intertwining relationships between banks and major financial "too big to fail" entities like Fannie Mae or AIG meant that allowing one bank to fail would mean a cascading domino effect across the board. The way it works is like this. Many banks work essentially by taking short term debt (deposits, money instruments, etc) and investing it into longer term debt (mortgages, bonds, etc). Loss of confidence would spark a liquidity crisis much like a global bank run on US financial entities; and with many banks reliant on each other to pay back their loans, one big default could mean everyone would fall like dominos. This was because their assets were marked to market; in layman's terms, they were worth whatever the bond market thought they were worth, so overnight they could become "worthless" and therefore bankrupt, even if nothing had changed in one day. (fundamentally, they were supposed to be bankrupt in an orderly fashion a long time ago)
Hence the immediate bailout response (TARP) was more of a liquidity measure rather than a fundamental rescue (there was nothing to rescue anyway) to give confidence to the international pension fund and institutional money managers, so they didn't do a "bank run" on the US economy. This allowed for a slower, more controlled release of the pent up financial panic, and gave some breathing room for the government to come up with a solution.
The next order of bailouts that the general public is more familiar with, Quantitative Easing, is basically the same thing but on a much grander scale. Essentially, nations themselves can become over leveraged with debt, although in a slightly different meaning as they also can print money. But the basic idea was that the US economy as a whole had far more credit in the system than was represented by the productivity of its population - which means some lenders had been suckered and weren't getting their money back.
In order to "deleverage" the economy as a whole, you had to remove the debt in the system. This was done by buying up toxic assets from aforementioned financial entities and retiring them, using printed money since the government unlike most financial entities can print money. Governments have a host of options available to them that goes beyond the scope of this topic, but generally speaking the idea is the same. Remove debt so that the amount of credit in the system more closely matches actual productivity.
As there is just way too much debt accumulated over decades (started since around the 80's), there is no easy solution. Going against the Keynesian model and doing things the traditional way by letting the economy fail and correct itself had actually been done before - following the Great Depression of 1929. This had disastrous results for everyone, sparking mass suicides and social unrest, and the economy languished for over a decade and would have continued to do so for who knows how long had it not been for massive war spending. As Keynes himself put it, "in the long term, we're all dead anyway." This formed the basis for the bailouts, justified by the premise that it was the lesser of two evils.
To the common man on the street, the main thing you should be taking away from this is that the bailouts were necessary, but things aren't going to get much better soon. Adjust your expectations lower, as this will be the new normal going forward, at least for 10 years or so. | 65 |
|
What does a hot shower do for your health? | 103 | It really depends what you're taking the hot shower for. Let me address your concerns first. Hot showers will not give you wrinkles. Wrinkles are a result of aging, and have more to do with hydration levels and collagen breakdown.
Hot showers also won't kill more bacteria. If the water is hot enough to kill more bacteria, it's hot enough to burn you pretty badly. That's why we have to boil water to kill bacteria. In fact, the way bacteria gets off your skin is from the "bubbly" action of soap that lifts the bacteria off our skin, and the water flushes it away. *ASIDE* this is why antibacterial soap is not doing anything but creating superbugs. The antibacterial soaps would have to be left on your skin for so long to kill bacteria that it wouldn't be reasonable to use.
Hot showers are great for relaxing muscles that are chronically tight. Don't use heat on acute injuries, it will only increase the inflammatory response. Using heat on chronic muscle stiffness or soreness will be effective though.
As far as what it does for your skin, not a whole lot. Hope this helps. | 50 |
|
[Star Wars, but most Scifi] Why are ship engines always going? | From Warhammer 40K to Star Wars, despite the fact that there is no drag in space, those engines are always blaring full blast. My question is why? | 41 | Because the universe is not a vacuum in these universes. The reason a starship in real life is able to fire its engine to get the desired speed, and then coast forever at that speed, is because there's no force acting upon it to stop it.
This is obviously not the case in star wars or warhammer 40k, or starship troopers, or most space movies, really.
So what's in space, if not a vacuum? Well, luminiferous Ether. Just like waves travel in water on the ocean, and just like sound travels in air, light travels in luminiferous Ether. It also interacts with matter though, and it applies drag to starships, forcing them to maintain their engines on at all times, lest drag bring them to a halt.
It also explains other things from Star Wars and consorts. For instance, in real life asteroid fields don't look like that at all. The asteroids are so far apart from each other that you'd need a good telescope to see one from the other. If they were that close, they would coalesce into a planet very rapidly. That is, if they were in a vacuum. Because luminiferous Ether is slightly viscous, it hinders the movement of asteroids and prevents them from making contact with each other. An asteroid field is kind of like bread, where the asteroids are the bubbles and the luminiferous Ether is the bread.
It also explains strike fighters banking to turn, they have wings that have specially designed coatings and or electromagnetic properties that make them interact very strongly with the luminiferous Ether, which allows them to use it to turn harder, much in the same way that an aircraft uses the air to do banking turns. | 44 |
If I took a picture of a sunrise over the ocean and a sunset over the ocean, is there anyway for someone else to tell which picture is which? | 37 | Not for certain, but you can often make a good guess.
Over the course of the day, the sun heats the air and evaporates water, creating clouds and fine suspended water droplets. The humidity, and droplets scatter blue light, making the sunlight that reaches your eyes redder. At night, the water condenses and the air dries and clears.
So sunsets tend to be redder and cloudier, sunrises more yellow and clear. But there's enough variation in daily weather that it's not a sure thing. | 14 |
|
CMV: Referendums are almost universally a bad idea. | I've had several discussions with friends and online in recent months around this. Obviously more recently due to Brexit, but also due to the discussions around a referendum in Canada on changing our voting system (FPTP to something else).
My view is that referenda are almost always a terrible way to decide any significant change that any government is interested in making. I really only believe that superficial decisions (change of flag or similar) are appropriate for a referendum.
I think that most decisions put to a referendum are too complicated/nuanced for most people to understand to a point of making a knowledgeable decision. What generally ends up happening is both sides of the decision spend a lot of time/money to convince the voters of their position and generally have no reason to do so with facts. Mostly they appeal to voters emotions and fears (regardless of the topic) and this means that many people will vote based on lies and misinformation.
Also (at least in Canada/UK) we vote for local representatives that make up the government. These members of parliament are paid to work with experts in whatever field to understand these complicated topics and make decisions that are best for everyone. Obviously that is the *ideal* situation and those politicians are not necessarily always doing things in everyone's best interest, but I do believe that that system (which we use to decide most things in our democracy) has a better chance of coming to a beneficial decision over a referendum.
CMV!
_____
> *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!* | 40 | Referendums can be great when the legislature is dragging their feet about something the people overwhelmingly support. For example in Massachusetts we decriminalized marijuana through a ballot initiative. People collected enough signatures to add a ballot question to the election and we passed it. We also passed medical marijuana that way, and will likely pass full commercialization this year in the same way. All this while representatives generally have no interest in working on the issue at all. When used well it gives an extra degree of representation.
Brexit is a bit of a different thing. If Cameron hadn't called a vote it may well not have happened. It seems like he thought remain would have a clear majority and UKIP would have the wind taken out of their sails, hopefully putting the issue to rest for the time being. Clearly that isn't what happened.
Referendums are great when it comes to social policy and the like. It's a good way to make life better for people whose representatives aren't in touch with their life experience. It's a terrible way to sort out economic issues and international relations. | 28 |
[star wars] let's say obi wan grabs Anakins nub body before he burns up on mustafar. Can he rehabilitate/save him and bring him back to the light? | 40 | At that point? No. Anakin was in too deep, that was the whole point. He saw Obi-Wan as the centerpiece of all of his problems, which is why when Obi-Wan showed up on Mustafar after Padme did, Anakin immediately choked her.
Obi-Wan represented all the things that Anakin hated and resented. He wasn't ever going to be able to rehabilitate Anakin, no matter how hard he tried. | 44 |
|
I believe infantile circumcision is wrong in almost all cases, and hence should be illegal. CMV | Infantile circumcision is a breach of a child's bodily autonomy, since the child has no say as to whether he wants the action performed. There are certain medical occasions where it may be necessary to perform an operation, which is acceptable to my mind. However, the two most common justifications for non-medical infantile circumcision are "it's part of my religion" and/or "it's my identity, I was circumcised, and I want my son to be too".
The first point relies on am assumption that religion is a legitimate ground for action. However, most holy books have parts which believers adhere to, and parts which are deemed morally wrong in today's society, and so are disregarded. The idea of autonomy is key to Western society; it was key in abortion rights, in the removal of military service (for much of the West). Why is such a violation overlooked as "fine"?
The second point, similarly, ignores the move to bodily autonomy and personhood. The argument that "it's ok because it happened to me" is perpetuating an "eye for an eye" mentality, where you can violate your child's bodily autonomy because yours was similarly violated. How is this a justification in any way?
If any group ritually cut someone's body without their consent, it would be illegal without question. Why should circumcision get treated differently in this respect? | 77 | The argument from the point of autonomy is invalid, as a parent's entire function is to make choices on behalf of their children. Children also get no say in whether or not they get immunizations, vegetables, or an education.
You can make the point that circumcision isn't as demonstrably beneficial as those other things, but the point remains that a parent's job is to make decisions that they feel are in the best interest of their children, and in the absence of any conclusive evidence that shows circumcision is truly "harmful" to the child, you can't make the case that the kid should have the choice. | 17 |
Why does my nose get watery when I eat something really spicy? | 986 | Your airways are constantly producing very large glcyoproteins (proteins covered in long chains of sugars) called mucins. These are very sticky, water-binding molecules that function to protect the airways. Mucins are generated by specialized cells in little "bubbles" in the cells. These bubbles are prepackaged and stored. When mucus is needed, the "bubbles" are transported to the cell surface where they fuse with the plasma membrane and dump their contents out into the airways. The quantity and type of mucins released depends on where you are in the airway, and the physiologic state (irritated, infected, inflamed, etc) of that region of airway.
But these are very thick, viscous proteins. If they are released by themselves, you would get a very thick and viscous goo. So, packaged in these "bubbles" along with the mucins are other molecules that stimulate the release of water into the airways. The water functions to dilute the mucus. The quantity of water is also regulated.
So you have two parts to mucus production: The release of mucins and the release of water.
The function of mucus is to keep the airways clear of foreign material. So, as you might imagine, one of the things that will cause localized increased mucus production is the presence of a physical object (e.g., a speck of dust). This response is mediated (in part) by nociceptive (damage-sensing) sensory neurons.
When these neurons fire, they stimulate the specialized mucus-producing cells to release those little "bubbles." This stimulation is regulated, and will only occur in the region where the object has been detected by the sensory neurons. This results in the release of mucins and the release of water into the airways.
Capsaicin has the ability to "short-circuit" these neurons, making them fire.
This is essentially a drug effect; you are taking a drug that causes your body to respond in a way that it normally wouldn't.
There are two main differences in the capsaicin response and the "normal" response. First, capsaicin will not be a localized effect. When you eat a chili pepper, some of the capsaicin is aerosolized and gets spread over a relatively large area of the airway. Second, capsaicin is kind of oily...it is more soluble in fats than it is in water. So, when you try to wash it away with a water-based rinse (like mucus), it is not cleared very rapidly. Therefore, pushing water through the area where capsaicin is won't do much to clear the capsaicin. So the effect is prolonged.
So capsaicin gives you a longer-lived response put over a larger area.
Mucin is hard to make. It's a big protein, and making big proteins takes time. Pushing it out is quick. The molecules that stimulate water production are small and easy to make, and often stored in very large quantities. In fact, one of these molecules is ATP (yes, the same ATP), and the cells have huge quantities of that in reserve. You deplete the mucin relatively quickly. You don't really deplete the water secreting part.
The end result is that you get a sudden depletion of the mucin component of mucus, but the water secretion keeps going....and you get a thin, watery mucus. | 802 |
|
[Harry Potter] Why didn't the weaslys build a bigger nicer house? | Why not use magic to build a really nice house? | 124 | They kind of already did... the house was built by Mr and Mrs Weasley from the ground up and mostly held together with magic - they loved it and the location, and expanded it as they saw fit. Obviously they where not architects so if they did decide to build again it would probably have the same ramshackle appearance.
Also the size of the place wouldn't have been an issue if Molly swallowed. | 115 |
ELI5 What’s the difference between white noise and red noise (and other color noises)? | 18 | White noise is equally intense at all frequencies. Red noise is more intense at lower frequencies, blue noise is most intense at higher frequencies. The colors basically say where on the spectrum the peaks of the intensity are. Then there's grey noise, which *isn't* equally intense at all frequencies, but sounds like it is because human ears aren't equally sensitive at all frequencies. | 22 |
|
[Marvel/DC] Just how aware is the average human on Earth of alien life and the interstellar community? | Say I'm a 9-5 fast food employee in a small town in semi-rural Nebraska. Just what do I know about aliens, gods, heroes, and supervillains? Do I know there are other planets full of life with advanced technology? | 51 | In the 616, as long as you have a TV you'd know about quite a bit just from the news and stuff. First of all, you're living a state away from Asgard. You may not know names besides Thor, but you'd know they exist. You'd also know about Captain Ultra, Gadget, and Paragon, heroes stationed in Nebraska for the Avengers Initiative program.
Everyone around the world probably knows about the Skrulls due to Secret Invasion. Same with the Phoenix. It might be vague knowledge, but AvX was worldwide.
| 29 |
[The Simpsons] What if Bart and Lisa had never exposed Sideshow Bob? | 26 | Krusty would go to jail and likely stay there. Sideshow Bob would complete his takeover of the show... only to find the average American child isn't looking to sit down in front of the boob tube and watch his high-brow presentation. They don't want culture and poetry, they want to watch a cartoon cat and mouse butcher each other.
If he plays his cards right, he might be able to transition to more mature adult audiences, branding himself as the "thinking man's clown" (ironically, positioning him in a broadcast niche comparable to what Frasier occupied among 90s sitcoms), or the program will crash and burn. Either way, the merchandise gravy train Krusty represents comes to a stop; no one is going to be apt to buy their kids an entire room full of Bob merchandise. | 46 |
|
How does anthrax as a type of bacteria exist in spore form? Are there other types of bacteria similar to anthrax and can they be weaponized too? | 23 | A bacterial endospore is basically a very, very tiny cell. It consists of preserved DNA an the means to transcribe proteins stored within an extremely resilient shell to protect it. So when the bacteria dies, this tiny spore remains safe and dormant until they reach the ideal conditions, similar to how a seed won't sprout until it has access to water and nutrients.
And pretty much any bacteria in the *Clostridum* genus is capable of producing endospores. Bacteria like *C. defficile,* (cause of C. dif infections) *C. botulinum,* (source of Botox toxin) etc. are common sources of human diseases. You probably could weapons them, but they're already an existing problem.
Ex. *C. dif* is an infection commonly seen in hospitals and is a life threaning infection, especially in immune-compromised people, and *C. botulinum* is the source of the most lethal toxin to human beings on the planet, and commonly is sourced from food thought to be sterile, like canned goods, preserved meats, and honey. | 22 |
|
ELI5: Why is it frowned upon to overcook steak? | It is an accepted fact that well-done steaks are for low-brows, but I might be a low-brow and I have been secretly wondering why there is such judgement in the steak community. | 19 | Much of the taste of a good steak comes from the taste of rare beef. This taste disappears when the steak is heavily cooked. If you only like the taste of well-done beef, you are wasting your money buying a good steak. | 23 |
If time slows the closer to the speed of light someone travels, what is the effect on an airline pilot over the course of their career? | Of course, we'll have to do some assumptions her, and I'll start.
1. The pilot has a 50 year career.
1. The average speed of the pilot over their career will be 300MPH.
Any more assumptions and I'll edit them in with an asterisk.
*And please show the reasoning behind it, so that I can further understand the concepts. | 49 | Since you asked for a step-by-step approach with actual numbers, I'll try to break this down a bit.
The easiest thought experiment here is to imagine a laser-clock that is defined by two mirrors `A` and `B`, separated by a distance L:
mirror A mirror B
| |
|--------»|
|«--------|
| |
|(---L---)| # mirrors separated by distance L
The clock ticks once every time a laser pulse leaves A, hits B, and returns to A. From the point of view of someone watching the clock when it is at rest relative to them, how long does it take the clock to tick once?
Before we answer that, let's answer a slightly simpler question. You roll a ball towards a wall that is 10 meters away at 4 m/s. The ball bounces off the wall and rolls straight back towards you. How long does it take the ball to return?
Well, if the wall is 10 meters away, then the ball traveled a total distance of 20 meters. And if the ball travels at 4 m/s, then that means it took **5 seconds**, since `20 m / 4 m/s = 5 s`. In other words, we can use the simple kinematics expression of
distance / speed = time
to decide the answer. Likewise, with our mirror clock, the light pulse travels at `c`, and the distance is `L`, so the stationary observer measures the clock's period as
t_0 = 2 L/c
A moving observer, however, sees something different. This time, the observer moves at a speed `v` parallel to the observer's frame of reference.
mirror A mirror B
| |
X |-- |
| -- |
| -- |
| --»|
W |(---L---)| Y
| --|
| -- |
| -- |
Z |«-- |
| |
This time, the light traced a longer path, from `X` to `Y` to `Z`. Clearly, this is a longer route than `2L`. What is the total distance it traveled?
Well, we see that `X`, `Y`, and `Z` form a triangle. Let's call the distance `XY` (which is the same as the distance `YZ`) `h`. Notice that `h` is the hypotenuse of the right triangle `XWY`. Now `h` is easy to calculate. It's just:
h^2 = XY^2 = WY^2 + XW^2
h^2 = XY^2 = L^2 + XW^2
h = sqrt[L^2 + XW^2]
So, similar to before, the light takes `t' = 2 h/c` for a moving observer. But what's XW^2 ? Well, if we moved with speed `v`, then this is `1/2 * v * t'` -- half the distance covered by our movement at speed `v`. So we can express `h` as
h = sqrt[L^2 + (1/2 * v * t')^2]
If we substitute this into `t' = 2 h/c` and solve for `t'`, then we get the time dilation equation, which is
t_0
t' = --------------------
sqrt(1 - v^2 / c^2)
Since the denominator here is a number that will be less than 1 for `v > 0`, a moving observer will observe that the clock ticks more slowly relative to the stationary observer's measurements.
Now, onto actual numbers. Let's pick some nice round numbers so the math will be easier. Also, by picking extremely generous numbers we'll wind up with an convenient upper bound.
So, to be extremely generous, let's say you're a spaceship pilot who travels at a constant 250 m/s for 50 years. Relative to a stationary observer, how much time has passed? Let's crunch the numbers:
t' = t_0 / sqrt[1 - v^2 / c^2]
t' = (50 years) / sqrt[1 - (250 m/s)^2/(300,000,000 m/s)^2]
Right away, we can see that 250 m/s divided by the speed of light is not a very big fraction, and so will not have a very big impact on the difference in time the two references measure. Let's keep going:
t' = (50 years) / sqrt[1 - 6.944 × 10^-13]
t' = (50 years) / 0.999999999999652777...
t' = 50 years + ~5 × 10^-4 seconds
In other words, a stationary observer would measure about **an extra 500 microseconds** of time relative to your own clock if all you did was travel at airplane speeds for five decades. To put that in perspective, 3,000 microseconds is roughly the time it takes for a housefly to flap its wings once. Sorry! Relativity's a bummer sometimes.
-----
Perhaps a more satisfying answer to the question would come if we reworded it a bit. What if we wanted to know how fast you need to go before there was an appreciably large difference in times measured? Let's say that we want to have a time difference of at least one year. How fast would our pilot need to travel?
51 years = 50 years / sqrt[1 - v^2/c^2]
Rearranging this equation and solving for v gives us
v = ~59,000,000 m/s, or about 0.0002 c
The fastest rocketships we have can go about 15,000 m/s, so if you had one that was about 4,000 times faster, you would be able to gain an extra year after traveling for 50 years. | 227 |
ELI5: How do baseball sized hails stay supported in culumonimbus clouds long enough to form that mass before they fall in hailstorms? | 142 | The hailstones travel up and down inside the thunderhead, gaining mass and size on each leg, cycling up & down several times. They are trapped in the updrafts, and at some point get so heavy that they fall to the ground. The updrafts in those storms are very powerful, and provide a lot of lift. | 105 |
|
[The Fifth Element][Marvel] How does the "Evil" from Fifth Element stack up against Dormammu or Galactus? | There are a thousand and one Dormammu vs. Galactus threads....but hardly anything about the Fifth Element's 'Evil'.
I know 'Evil' doesn't have many feats, but do you think it/he compares to the Marvel Cosmic Threats?
Are there other entities from other IPs that are similar? | 51 | Inconsequential.
The big E from 5th Element is a minor player compared to Galactus or Dormammu.
Sure he might have destroyed humanity but Dormammu and Galactus are galaxy wide extinction events.
THe things that scare Galactus are things that can unmake reality, Dormammu has enslaved countless universes and stopping him required one of the most powerful objects in the universe.
Big Evil was stopped by a lady wearing toilet paper, a radio DJ and future John McCLane | 43 |
ELI5: The backstory of Suge Knight | 15 | He was born in compton and he 1st made a company that published music and though that company he met the people that became NWA. He then caused the destruction of that group by threatening the groups manager unless he released Dr.Dre. After destroying N.W.A he made his own label, Death Row Records which signed all went to shit after Tupac (the labels best artist) was killed. Interestingly enough Suge Knight was next to Tupac in the car when he was killed. Anyways since then he has been like the voldemort of rap because by all accounts he is a violent jackass and was recently accused of murdering someone after he hit them with his truck | 15 |
|
[Stand Still, Stay Silent] Will the Finns be able survive long term? | Based on what information is given on the four surviving nations (found primarily on this map: http://www.sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=66), Finland is the least populous, with a little more than half of its people living in Saimaa, a military installation that now functions as a fortress town. The rest of its people live in small island villages scattered throughout the country's inland lakes, and it's said that another village is lost every few years to disease.
So I guess the question is: is approximately 10,000 people enough (in terms of both manpower and genetic diversity) for the Finns to survive as a distinct people for the foreseeable future? If not, what options do they have? | 36 | It's certainly enough for population survival, though it might require some directed pairing. Diversity is gonna take a hit, the future of their world is (presuming they really are the only population center on Earth) invariably white and mostly blonde or red-headed.
As to whether they can survive in the long run, isn't that a core question of the series? | 13 |
ELI5: When you have a cold, why does your nose stop running while asleep? | 220 | Sometimes it doesn't, people have been known to wake up with snot all over the pillow. When it does stop it is normally because the nasal passages swell which prevent both snot and air from going through them. The nasal passages tend to swell completely shut when you are laying down. When you treat a cold with advil + sudafed you are dramatically reducing the swelling in the nose so you can blow the crud out of your nose more easily. | 135 |
|
If white blood cells are constantly dying and being replenished, how do new ones “know” what antibodies to produce? | How does that “memory” work?
This comes from a friend asking whether the protection from a COVID-19 vaccine would be diluted somehow by a blood transfusion from an unvaccinated person. | 16 | When a T- or B-cell is activated by it's associated antigen, it proliferates, and those daughter cells differentiate into effector cells (helper, cytotoxic, regulatory for T's, plasma cells for B's) and memory cells. When the immune response is complete, the memory cells go dormant in your lymph nodes. If they are presented with a previous antigen and reactivated, they proliferate, and differentiate back into those same effector cells. | 15 |
ELI5: How do fruits ripen after they are picked from the trees? | 21 | There are two kinds of ripening, climacteric & nonclimacteric.
Nonclimacteric have seperation issues and can't grow unless they are connected to their parent because they are too lazy to produce their own sugar.
Climacteric don't have seperation issues instead they like to get high off of a hormone called "ethylene" which activates enzymes which break down starch into sugar. So basically they can produce sugar on their own without a parent tree.
Hope that helps. | 21 |
|
ELI5: Why does a room being kept at 70 degrees via air-conditioning feel colder than a room being kept at 70 through heating? | 21 | Human's perception of temperature is relative. You can only tell if something is hot or cold relative to something else. The air-conditioned room will feel cooler because you're comparing it to when the room was warmer. The opposite is true for the room being heated.
There is a simple experiment you can try to prove this.
Line up three bowls that your hands can fit into. Put very warm water in the bowl on the left and put cold water in the bowl on the right. Put room temperature water in the bowl in the middle. Now stick your hands in the left and right bowls and keep them there for a few minutes. Now stick both hands into the bowl in the middle. All the water in that bowl is the same temp but one hand will feel cold and the other hand will feel warm. Pretty shocking if you've never tried it before. | 43 |
|
ELI5: Why does Japan have such an affinity for baseball? | 24 | Baseball has been popular in Japan since the late nineteenth century. It certainly was not something first introduced only after World War II. Since the 1920s there's been regular baseball championship games among Japanese middle schools and universities. Babe Ruth visited Japan in the 1930s to great acclaim. Even during World War II, colleges held farewell baseball games for students drafted into the military, right before they shipped out to fight Americans in the Pacific. Incidentally, baseball is also popular in Taiwan, mostly because it was introduced there by the Japanese during colonial times.
| 22 |
|
ELI5: Limited Slip Differential | How would one describe this and the advantages it brings? | 24 | A differential is used to allow the wheels on a car to turn at different speeds. A basic differential goes from no difference (both wheels moving at the same speed) to maximum difference (wheels spinning in opposite directions).
The problem with a basic differential is that it requires both wheels to have traction. If one slips, then all the power from the drive train will go to that wheel. If you jack a car with a differential up on one side, and then run the engine, then the lifted wheel will spin in the air, while the car stays in place. This is bad in muddy or snowy environments where it's easy to lose traction on one wheel and get stuck.
A limited slip differential limits the difference between in speed between the wheels. This allows the wheels to move at different speeds as required by the turning radius of the car, but does not allow one wheel to spin freely while the other wheel stays still if one wheel loses traction. | 10 |
[Star Wars] I'm Palpatine. I've just told Anakin I'm a sith, he is going to the temple to tell on me. Right after he is gone, Kamino sends me a message that due to a malfunction clones won't follow any order integrated in them except, coincidentally, the one that disposes of me. | Can I still turn things around? | 78 | Of course, its just going to be much harder. First off, bad you for not verifying that the integrated orders worked properly.
First off, the Jedi are arrogant. Except for Mace Windu, you can probably take 3-4 Jedi Masters at a time. Windu is going to be a problem though, but if you've got Anakin convinced that Padamame? Panda Bear? whatever her name is, that she is still going to die he'll turn at the last minute.
Next you got to lay on the Senate HARD. The Jedi's attempted a coup, that still happened. You can use that. Don't send Anakin to kill the Jedi in the temple, 'rescue' them instead. Get them somewhere safe where you can 'protect' them. Issue the order anyway, but expect many of the units not to follow it. Though some of them still will, or will capture the Jedi instead.
Then its just playing the blame game. If you can get Yoda out of the way, everything should till be clear for you to go full empire but its going to be much more challenging to keep it intact. Instead of a hard decade and then a few easy ones you are going to have a monster of a reign.
You might want to keep the war going for more time. Build up Anakin more now that he's your apprentice. Try to get the other Jedi to anchor to him instead of the traitor Jedi. Worth a shot. | 83 |
[Lord of the Rings] Why is Shelob hurt/blinded by the Phial of Galadriel? | So after learning more about LotR lore and how Shelob's mother, Ungoliant, fed off the light of the Two Trees, why does the Phial of Galadriel affect her if it contains the same light Ungoliant fed on.
Is it because she is not from the Void and just a daughter of Ungoliant or is it something else? | 97 | Ungoliant eating the trees did two things - empower her, and remove their light from the world. When she ate them, her hunger overcame the pain she endured bathed in their light.
Shelob had been living in darkness for some time at the time of her confrontation with Sam, she was probably just taken by surprise and not willing to stand up to the light injured as she already was. | 90 |
[HP] Can you just Avada Kedavra a horcrux? | The killing curse "strikes at the soul" ^(or some drivel like that) and leaves the body intact. A horcrux is a soul without a body locked in an object.
So: Can you avoid all the "bathing of ancient artifacts in the venom of slain monsters" business and just AK the damn things? | 17 | Not normally. The Killing Curse separates body from soul, but a horcrux is part of a soul already separated from the body. To unmake a horcrux, it must be damaged beyond all magical repair-- however since there is no repairing death, if the horcrux is a living thing, like Nagini or like Harry himself, then yes. | 18 |
[Lord of The Rings] Would Sam have been a better ring-bearer than Frodo? | This is based off the movies. Haven’t read the books yet.
I’m doing a marathon of the trilogy right now and it seems like the ring doesn’t have much of an effect on Sam.
Would he have been a better ring-bearer? At first I figured he wasn’t effected much because he wasn’t wearing it like Frodo was but throughout the movies it shows that Boromir, Faramir, Gollum, Bilbo, and I think even Galadriel at one point tried to take the ring from Frodo.
Was Sam immune to the effects of the ring somehow? | 15 | Hobbits in general aren't very susceptible to the ring's effects because the ring works by promising you a lot of power to do whatever it is you want to do and hobbits aren't typically super ambitious or very powerful to start with. Gollum was only as corrupted as he was because he had the ring for centuries. Also, it was by and large safe in Gollum's possession. He didn't really do much with it. Bilbo was a similar case. He lacked ambition and didn't do much with the ring. He was able to actually give it up eventually, and he attacked Frodo after the ring had been wearing him down for decades. In the books, Frodo had the ring for 17 years before embarking to Rivendell.
So Sam would probably be about as good a ring-bearer as Frodo, maybe slightly better. (I think the ring might have tempted Sam with the ability to turn all of Middle Earth into a garden or something like that?) On the other hand, Sam seemed to me to have a more proactive personality than Frodo did so maybe he'd be a little worse.
But Tolkien was a Catholic and according to the Christian understanding, people can't defeat evil on their own initiative, only divine intervention can help. So nobody could really decide to cast the ring into Mount Doom by themselves. There *had* to be a "coincidence" (wink wink) that meant the ring fell in. | 21 |
[WH40K] I'm a human servant of the Chaos Gods and I have been tasked to travel to Terra and assassinate the Emperor. How would I do this? | I am a very influential politician from a major fortress world. Money is not an issue and I can rely on the generosity of the Gods to help me with this undertaking. I have not yet been to holy Terra but I have several contacts there. | 31 | Give up. The Dark Gods don't want the Emperor assassinated as the current state of the Imperium benefits their survival.
The mission is impossible anyway. Let's say you managed to scheme your way into the Palace, you cannot reason with the Custodes, and you certainly cannot fight them (and live).
And your lack of any hope of success only proves you aren't supposed to win. If Tzeentch were omniscient, why would he send you on an impossible mission? Because you're not supposed to succeed, merely to die and provoke the Imperium. | 54 |
ELI5 How do we know what percentage of marine life/insects/mammals/etc we've discovered if we dont know how many there could be overall? | 161 | Let's say we discovered 500 new species of large fish between 1800-1850, 400 between 1850 and 1900, 300 between 1900-1950, and so-on..
We can then model that we're unlikely to discover more than ~50 new species in the future, so the discovery rate is about 97%.
Of course, in real life, data is messier, but the same sort of general analysis can be made to estimate how many species we'll discover, based on how many we have discovered so far. | 79 |
|
ELI5: What part of an explosion is the deadly part? The fire, the shock-wave hitting your body, or the shrapnel it creates? | In tons movies and TV shows (Sons of Anarchy being the one that made me think of this) people are killed from explosions, but they are usually far enough away where the heat itself doesn't touch them and they just get thrown in the air about a foot. So what actually killed them? The shock-wave, the blunt force of hitting the ground, shrapnel, or something else? | 16 | The shockwave is typically the deadliest force, especially with large explosions. However, the shrapnel will also be quite lethal, and small explosives such as IEDs often incorporate extra metal bits to extend the lethal range beyond that of the shockwave. | 18 |
Do I deserve to be proud of this small accomplishment? | So I started really learning how to code in python only a couple days ago, and since then I decided to code something up in my own time. The problem was that someone posted a large .txt file of something that i'm sure no one would take the time to parse through by hand. I decide to write a program that looks for word occurrences and matches them to a specific string in the .txt file. I'm sure that it is easy for many programmers, but I just started this and I was able to write something I felt was decent. As a beginner, should I be proud of writing something small?
​
I'm also looking for ways on how to make it a better program; Maybe write the program so that you can search certain strings by category? Also, should I post it to github? | 33 | Who is to say what you can and can not be proud of? If you are proud of yourself, take the win!
Also, the size of the code base is unimportant. If you set out to solve a problem and succeeded then of course it's a win.
As for github: why not? There is no harm in keeping it and it may be useful again someday.
good job :) | 35 |
[star wars] Why didn't Yoda and Obi Wan team up against the Emperor first and deal with Vader later? | They would've probably had a better chance of defeating Sideous together. Without Sideous Vader would've had no direction. Yoda and Obi Wan could've taken Vader easily. | 62 | I say that if they had managed to kill one the other would have felt it through the force and become aware of an imminent amount of whoopass coming their way and would have been a lot more difficult to kill.
Besides as yoda says obi was not powerful enough to make a dent in the emperor. | 41 |
ELI5: What is happening in my brain when I'm trying to remember something and I feel myself getting close? | I was trying to remember a song lyric. Typically I take moments like these as a challenge, refusing to look it up until I'm absolutely frustrated. When I get close I can often sense that I'm right on the edge of remembering. What is happening cognitively? Or am I just weird? | 2,615 | Memory is really complicated and we still don't really fully understand the process.
To our knowledge what is happening is, when your brain receives a cue it will pull out information relating to that cue that it received. When you get something "on the tip of your tongue" it is usually due to an inadequate mental cue to retrieve the information you are looking for. | 1,630 |
ELI5: How did we come to agree that working 8 hours a day for 5 days a week is the norm? | 56 | That's all thanks to unions - before people started unionizing, there weren't really rules on workers' rights - people could be worked until they collapsed, every day... or maybe with Sunday off for church.
Once industrial workers started unionizing, they had enough pull to work out a deal that's mostly held up ever since: two days of rest, 8 hour days. The 8 hour days because things could be easily split: 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, 8 hours for whatever else you want to do. | 36 |
|
What happens to a bee that is transported a long distance? Can it find its way home? | We're on a cross country road trip, and found we had a stowaway bumblebee. We got it out of the car maybe 100 km away from where we likely picked it up, but if it hadn't been noticed it would have been taken a good 700 km away. Assuming it made it out of the car okay, what would a bee do in these circumstances? Would it try to find his way back to its hive? If so, would it even be possible for it to make its way back?
If there's no way for the bee to get back to its own hive, could a beekeeper integrate it into a new hive? | 19 | Bumble bees are often solitary creatures, without hives or anything like what we normally associate with bees. Assuming it was unharmed when it got out, it's entirely likely that it went on with it's bee life as though little had changed. | 14 |
ELI5: Is there social/psychological reason for people trying to bait you into asking a question? | I work with people that are particularly guilty of this, and it's something that sometimes I find rather frustrating, so I'd like to try and understand it better.
I sometimes find that people will try to get you to ask for an elaboration, rather than just coming out with what they want to say. For example someone might get off the phone and say something along the line of "Well that was a funny phone call", or "This is a stupid question".
| 110 | There's a similar tactic in sales. You lead with just enough to get them to ask you a question.
The reason is when people ask a question they're more likely to listen to the response than if you just came out and said something.
| 22 |
[Fallout] Which timeline is more advanced: Our timeline vs Fallout timeline? | I am not that familiar with Fallout timeline and events. But what I have seen of the series and the games is that Fallout universe seems rather retro and primitive compared to our own. How advanced do you think the fallout timeline pre Great War 2077 is compared to our own? | 58 | They simply took a different path of advancement. While we have focused on miniaturisation they focused on bigger and more complicated. So while they don't have smartphones they do have advanced A.I, laser guns, fully realised virtual reality and mass produced robots. | 103 |
[Star Wars] Since Chewbacca fought alongside Yoda during the Clone Wars, did he ever get into arguments with Han Solo over the existence of The Force? | 463 | Probably not. Firstly because fighting about politics or religion is a great way to end relationships once thought solid. Second, Chewie seems to respect people's beliefs whatever they are. Besides, Han is much younger than Chewie and spent most of his formative years in a very different galaxy. If Han heard anything about Jedi in his youth, it was that they were crazy religious nuts who tried attacking the chancellor that one time, and that's about it. He might have even thought the galaxy was better off without them for a time, at least until he met Luke.
Chewbacca knows what he saw, but so does Han. Besides, in the grand pre-Yavin days of their adventures, it was pointless to talk about it. The Jedi were long gone, and the smugglers had much more important things to worry about. | 318 |
|
[Harry Potter] During some scenes in Harry Potter we witness that Dumbledore can tell that Harry is there using the invisibility cloak. Like the time in Hagrid's hut. That is something even Death could not do according to the legend. Is Dumbledore more powerful than death? | 25 | That whole Death thing was a childrens' story. The Deathly Hallows are just three particularly powerful artifacts. There are multiple examples of the Cloak being seen through, Moody could see through it. It's special not because nothing can see through it, but because of how durable it is. Most invisibility cloaks tend to break down and need to be reenchanted. Likewise, the Elder Wand passes on to who ever defeats it's wielder. It being defeatable is right there in its design. | 45 |
|
[Mario] So I'm pretty this guy prescribing me antibiotics is my plumber - where did he get his medical degree from? | 29 | Listen, not everybody gets life handed to them on a platter by their rich parents. Some people have to work their way through med school, doing whatever jobs they can. If the price of a career saving lives by prescribing massive quantities of hastily yet carefully positioned pills is spending a few years crawling through pipes, unclogging drains, and kicking tortoises to death, then we regular folks just buckle on our kicking boots and crawl into the sewers. | 39 |
|
[Warhammer 40k] Are there any democratically run planets? Does the Imperium allow this? | 28 | Yes. There are even democratically run sub-sectors. In one of the Eisenhorn novels he mentions the election of a new governor for the Helican sub-sector.
Individual worlds are actually given a lot of autonomy. As long as they pay their tithes and don't fall in with Chaos planetary governments can pretty much run their worlds however they want. In practice this usually means the rich and powerful take control, but democracies are not unheard of. | 57 |
|
ELI5: Why is it said that milk is good for heartburn if milk is acidic? | 15 | While milk is acidic, it's only very slightly so and while you're experiencing heartburn it could reduce the acidity level.
However, milk is actually **bad** at treating heartburn. It *temporarily* reduces the symptoms, because the stomach acids have something to attack for a while, but it actually causes your stomach to *increase* acid production in the long run. So, in effect, milk will make heartburn *worse*.
| 12 |
|
How does socioeconomic class affect environmental behavior? Would a "War on Littering" replicate the social targeting of the "War on Drugs"? | 16 | A relevant idea to consider here is the oft-cited "Broken Windows Theory," a controversial concept that refers to norm-based behavior, namely behavior responding to cues of urban decay. Really the only empirical study (if you can call his work empirical :P) was by Stanford Prison Experiment creator and noted social psychologist Phil Zimbardo (1969), though the idea was first introduced by political scientist James Wilson and criminologist George Keller.
Equal parts social and environmental psychology, the broken window theory (not to be confused with the broken window fallacy) essentially states that environmental evidence of urban decay: dilapidated and abandoned buildings, broken windows (for which the theory was named), and litter act as social cues that seems to influence crime.
Zimbardo tested the theory this way: he parked and abandoned two cars (both used, but in good condition) in two separate locations in California and New York.
Of the car parked in the Bronx:
>”Scott Fraser, a social psychologist at New York University, was one of
the observers who kept round-the-clock vigils over the car for 64
hours. What surprised him was that most of the car stripping took place
in broad daylight. All of the theft was done by clean-cut, well-dressed
middle-class people. Furthermore, the major theft and damage was always observed by someone else. “Sometimes passersby would engage in casual conversation with the miscreants,” says Fraser.
>By the end of the first 26 hours, a steady parade of vandals had removed
the battery, radiator, air cleaner, radio antenna, windshield wipers,
right-hand-side chrome strip, hubcaps, a set of jumper cables, a gas
can, a can of car wax, and the left rear tire . Nine hours later, random destruction began
when two laughing teen-agers tore off the rearview mirror and began
throwing it at the headlights and front windshield and into the Carriage.
>Eventually, five eight-year-olds claimed the car as
their private playground, crawling in and out of it and smashing the
windows. One of the last visitors was a middle-aged man in a camel's
hair coat and matching hat, pushing a baby in a carriage. He stopped,
rummaged through the trunk, took out an unidentifiable part, put it in
the baby carriage, and wheeled off.
The car in Palo Alto was a bit different. The car was left to its own devices and remained unscathed for nearly a week until Zimbardo himself broke one of the windows. The car was quickly stripped after.
Understand that urban decay, litter, and vandalism have little to do with socioeconomic class, but more to do with sense of community. One of the most important observations of the experiment were that most of the vandals were well-dressed and appeared to be middle-class. Urban decay can signal that the bonds of responsibility that bind communities together have weakened. The ensuing apathy results in a sense of environmental anonymity.
Think of the destructive behavior that follows as an extension of the same kind of diffusion of responsibility that causes crowds of people to ignore screams for help. We don't do well with anonymity. We know anonymizing individuals increases aggression, so it makes sense that anonymizing settings (i.e. removing the sense that the setting is cared-for by participants in that setting) would be prone to more crime.
So why was the Bronx car stripped without the broken window, and stripped so quickly where the Palo Alto car stood unmolested for FIVE DAYS? According to Zimbardo, anonymity. Palo Alto was a small community relative to the Bronx. The larger community offered more opportunity for social anonymity.
The question isn't whether or not socioeconomic class affects environmental behavior. The question is how environments affect environmental behavior.
***References***
Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., & Akert, R. M. (2013). *Social Psychology (8th ed.)*
Kelling, G., Coles, C., (1995). *Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities*
Zimbardo, P., (2007) *The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil*
Zimbardo, P. (1969). Diary of a Vandalized Car. *TIME*.
| 11 |
|
[DCEU] In the movie 'Shazam' (2019), what powers did the other siblings get, exactly? | Fred got flying, but just flying is not enough
Darla got super speed, cool
That green t-shirt wearing guy get super strength
video game guy got electricity manipulation
what did Mary get?
Did they get multiple powers?
Is everyone Shazam, but each only specialises in only one? | 142 | I was under the impression they all got the same basic powers that Billy got but each of them intuitively knew how to use a different aspect (to use a real world example one kid may find it easier to understand and use maths while another may be better suited to languages). | 155 |
Why do I see all these beautiful app designs online, but in the app store, no app designed so beautiful. | 58 | it's easier to make a jpeg than an app.
I don't mean this to say that designers work less hard or do less than devs in any way, but if you have to both design something and then get a team to build it to spec, that's a whole other level of work vs creating mockups | 60 |
|
How do we know what the magnitude of earthquakes was before the Richter scale was a thing? | I was printing and binding an environmental impact report for a customer today, and one of the pages that caught my eye as I was flipping through had a [table](https://imgur.com/a/STrTFSx) of "Significant historical earthquakes in Northern California." All but three of them occurred in 1906 or earlier, including the three largest; a 7.8 in 1906 (the one that decimated San Francisco, I'm assuming), a 7.4 in 1838, and a 7 in 1868. The Richter scale wasn't invented until the 1930s.
So how do we know what magnitude they were, even if it's an estimated range like they show on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_California) for some of the more notable California earthquakes rather than an exact number? | 3,212 | These earlier magnitudes are estimated based on a variety of methods, including historical records ( people reporting damage, shaking intensity, building collapses etc, how far it was felt) and by measuring physical evidence available today of the earthquake impact e.g. sediment slumps, fault offset, tsunami deposits, landslides, etc.
In short, by measuring effects from modern day quakes, you can start reconstructing older quakes | 1,531 |
For those of you in highly interdisciplinary fields, how do you appreciate the fundamentals of the fields you weren't actually trained in? | As an example, my background is in psychology and behavioural neuroscience, and now I'm working in a field that combines clinical pharmacology and pharmacoepidemiology. But I also do cognitive work (tying in my psych/neuro background) and even some clinical chemistry. (For context, I'm a second-year PhD student.) | 22 | Interdisciplinary work requires a team approach. You have team members with the areas of expertise that you need. Aa a second year PhD student, you should be working in teams mostly, while your primary/thesis project should be in your own area. | 10 |
ELI5: Why do people in the UK/CA and many other places say "in hospital" instead of "in the hospital" yet, they don't say "In library" or "in supermarket?" | 432 | I live in the UK and never thought about this.
Trips to hospital imply a long term event but a trip to a shop is more temporary.
I guess it's because you can be hospitalised but not libraryised or supermarketed. When you are being educated you say you are in school not in the school.
Essentially it's our language and we will do whatever the bloody hell we like with it (joking) | 529 |
|
What gives narcissists moments of clarity? | And can it possibly be replicated? | 51 | Through therapy, more so than normative life experiences, someone with NPD could derive insight from understanding the cause of their problematic behaviours and begin to see how their actions hurt others. It’s a tough nut to crack because part of NPD is lower empathy for others, but in theory truly seeing the pain of others that’s been inflicted unintentionally by the person with NPD are the moments you’d hope to find in therapy that may promote change. | 39 |
CMV: It should be illegal to run ads for prescription drugs on tv | Prescription drugs almost always say to “ask you doctor about xxxx.” This results in people asking and potential pressuring their doctors to prescribe them something they might not need, or might do more harm than good. Doctors went to medical school, and they don’t need the opinion of someone who saw a one minute ad telling them how to do their job. Additionally, these ads must work since I keep seeing ads for random drugs on cable tv and drug companies would air them if they didn’t work, so people really are getting their doctors to give them drugs that they wouldn’t otherwise have prescribed/are not necessary, which would do more harm than good. | 421 | I think you’re over-estimating how difficult it is for a doctor to say no and explain why when confronted with demands for a particular drug. You’re also over-estimating the proportion of drug demands that relate to TV ads.
The vast majority of “I want drug X” involves antibiotics where they aren’t needed, narcotic analgesics, “my friend has these symptoms and took X and it helped”, and things like that. These are drugs that aren’t advertised on TV these days. Using good clinical judgement before prescribing is a necessity, and would continue to be, even if TV ads stopped existing. Doctors that capitulate to pressure from patients (no bueno) will continue to do so for drugs not seen on TV. Eliminating those ads solves a minority of drug demand scenarios, and fails to address the core issue: a drug being prescribed to appease patients is first and foremost a failure on the doctor’s part, not the patient’s, not the pharma company’s, not the advertisement’s.
On the other hand, people asking about a drug often opens the door to an issue they didn’t realize was abnormal or treatable. For tons of the drugs you see on TV, there are established treatments for the condition that are cheaper, comparably effective, preferred for 1st-line use, etc. Usually people asking about a drug don’t actually want *that drug,* they want treatment for an issue and that drug they heard about is the only thing they know of that treats it. Explaining your reasoning behind your clinical decision is usually enough. A good doctor can take advantage of the pharma’s spending to advertise a drug as a means to get patients appropriate treatment for issues that might have otherwise been ignored. | 24 |
ELI5: Is being Jewish a religon or is it a race ?? | 22 | You can be Jewish (religion) by birth or by choice. You can be culturally Jewish , but not religious if you have a Jewish mother. Racially there are Jews of all nations. Most think of European Jews (Ashkenaz), but there are Black Jews of Ethiopia, Indian Jews (Menasha tribe), North African (Sephardic) and even Chinese Jews from the time of Marco Polo.
| 20 |
|
ELI5: What is so significant about a 'brick pizza oven' that it necessitates being mentioned whenever possible? | 72 | Brick ovens allow a very, very hot fire to be built with charcoal - think like 700f.
The brick floor also heats up - allowing the pizza to be placed directly on it.
Very hot - even distribution of heat = yummy. | 56 |
|
[Star Wars] Can Sith have friends? | I was debating this with my friend. She says, at best, Sith consider everyone else to be expendable tools. I think everyone needs a friend. Case in point: Vader and Tarkin. Who’s right? | 21 | "Proper" Sith as Darth Bane would have them see everyone and everything as tools to be used, rivals to be destroyed, or too weak to be noticed.
With that in mind, Darth Vader is kind of an oddball Sith, since on some level he respected the stormtroopers that served under him, probably because they reminded him of the clones he served with during the war. And you mention Tarkin, Vader clearly looks at him as an equal, or at least within the same order of magnitude of himself, again because of the times they worked together during the Clone Wars.
And what ties it all together is that the Emperor never intended Darth Vader to be a proper Sith anyway - he replaced Bane's Rule of Two with his own Rule of One - that he would become immortal and rule the galaxy forever. As such, he probably never bothered instilling Darth Vader with the proper old-school Sith mindset. He just taught him how to use dark side force techniques, taught him to channel his rage, resentment, and frustration, and set him loose. | 44 |
[Star Wars] How did Obi Wan and Luke escape from Vader by hiding out in his home zip code? | When Vader fell to the Dark Side, it was imperative that he never find his children. Leia makes sense; she was hidden under a false name, with a powerful family, on a planet unfamiliar to Vader, and left unaware of her own ancestry.
Luke on the other hand...
Out of the huge vastness of the galaxy, Obi Wan hid Vader's son with Vader's only surviving relatives, under his own original surname, in the same geographic area of the same planet where Vader himself grew up. Then, Obi Wan "hid" in roughly the same area, not even bothering to change his own last name, and doing such a bad job at keeping a low profile that the local farmers know him as the spooky old sorcerer Kenobi.
How did they manage to not get found right away, if not by Vader himself, then by the agents of the Emperor? Surely the ever-scheming Emperor should have thought to keep an eye on Vader's surviving family. | 43 | It's the classic "last place he'd look," move. There are three planets in the Galaxy that Vader wants absolutely no part of anymore, due to their connections to his history. Naboo, naturally, which will always remind him of his "ooops killed ya" wife. The second is Mustafar for fairly obvious reasons. The last is, of course, Tatooine. He loathes that place at every conceivable level - so much so he doesn't even accompany the troops pursuing the stolen Death Star plans. Obi-Wan was very aware of Vader's feelings towards the place, and knew his hatred and shame (over failing his mother) would cloud his vision where Tatooine was concerned. As far as the Empire finding out - The Hutts ran the planet far more than the Empire ever did, and the troops kept fairly close to "town" except when they explicitly had to. Even with Ben coming into town for supplies and a drink every now and then, he's only a few easy mind tricks away from total anonymity. Honestly, it's perfect. | 82 |
Schopenhauer's critique of Dialectic | I have a few doubts/issues regarding Schopenhauer's essay "the art of controversy":
​
On his use of the word Dialectic:
I'm probably wrong on this one, but to me it seems that he is equivocating (using Aristotle's definitions) Dialectic with Rethoric (he's really against the latter), as Aristotle talks about how Dialectic is the counterpart to Rethoric, the former of which which is about theoretical clarification and definitions rather than practical affairs. In Aristotle's words, Rethoric is "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion". Isn't this exactly what Shopenhauer talking about and critiquing when he says:
>To form a clear idea of the province of Dialectic, we must pay no attention to objective truth (which is an affair of Logic); we must regard it simply as the art of getting the best of it in a dispute, which, as we have seen, is all the easier if we are actually in the right.
In that same essay he talks about how Aristotle defines the object of Dialectic as disputation that involves the discovery of truth. Is he trying to argue that there is no such thing as Dialectic as defined by Aristotle?
​
I guess my question is, **why not call it Rethoric? Isn't this definition of Dialectic the same thing?**
​
A more general question I have is, **if according to** **Schopenhauer** **there is no such thing as truth in Dialectics (just victory), why bother with it in the first place**? (maybe he's being ironic and that's his point) | 44 | He is calling it rhetoric. In one of his footnotes (mind you the essay was never published and there are multiple (3?) manuscript editions of it) he cites Aristotle's **division between** Dialectic & Rhetoric (whose aim it is το πυθανον, to convince) **and** Analytics & Philosophy (which is aimed at getting to the truth) (diogenes laertius iii,48). Furthermore he cites Topics I,1 which, again, divides between logics (apodictical reasoning from true premises) and dialectics (reasoning from accepted premises).
In the essay he also acknowledges the medieval tradition (footing on Cicero and Quintillian) of using dialectic and logic synonymously (claiming it is getting into fashion again) juxtaposed to Immanuel Kant defining "dialectic" merely as "the art of sophistical disputation".
>Dieser Gebrauch der Worte Logik und Dialektik als Synonyme hat sich auch im Mittelalter und der neuern Zeit, bis heute, erhalten. Jedoch hat man in neuerer Zeit, besonders Kant, Dialektik öfter in einem schlimmen Sinne gebraucht, als »sophistische Disputirkunst«
He is more on the side of Immanuel Kant appealing, amongst other things, to the etymology: Logics comes from 'to overthink, to calculate, word and reason' whereas Dialectics is derived from 'to converse'.
>Es ist Schade, daß »Dialektik« und »Logik« von Alters her als Synonyme gebraucht sind, und es mir daher nicht recht frei steht, ihre Bedeutung zu sondern, wie ich sonst möchte, und » Logik« (von λογιξεοθαι, überdenken, überrechnen, – von λογοσ, Wort und Vernunft, die unzertrennlich sind) zu definiren als »die Wissenschaften von den Gesetzen des Denkens, d. h. von der Verfahrungsart der Vernunft« – und » Dialektik« (von διαλεγεοθαι, sich unterreden: jede Unterredung theilt aber entweder Thatsachen oder Meinungen mit, d. h. ist historisch oder deliberativ) als »die Kunst zu disputiren« (dies Wort im modernen Sinne). – Offenbar hat dann die Logik einen rein a priori, ohne empirische Beimischung bestimmbaren Gegenstand, die Gesetze des Denkens, das Verfahren der Vernunft (des λογοσ), welches diese, sich selber überlassen, und ungestört, also beim einsamen Denken eines vernünftigen Wesens, welches durch nichts irre geführt würde, befolgt. Dialektik hingegen würde handeln von der Gemeinschaft zweier vernünftiger Wesen, die folglich zusammen denken, woraus, sobald sie nicht wie zwei gleichgehende Uhren übereinstimmen, eine Disputation, d. i. ein geistiger Kampf wird. Als reine Vernunft müßten beide Individuen übereinstimmen. Ihre Abweichungen entspringen aus der Verschiedenheit, die der Individualität wesentlich ist, sind also ein empirisches Element.
The Dialectic was, when he was writing the different editions of this essay (1830), an extremely fashionable word due to it's use by Hegel and other German idealists. By reducing it to mere rhetoric he is taking a jab them: **'why do you bother with it in the first place, guys?'** | 11 |
What causes the bend in a banana? Why don't they grow straight? | 1,332 | It's believed that Bananas grow out and then bend later due to negative geotropism (growing against gravity). They bend upwards after growing for a certain period of time. Here is a quote from the Banana growers council (it's a thing apparently...)
"Bananas start life very, very straight but as the bunch emerges from the top of the plant and the bracts roll back (bracts are the leathery purple things that separate the hands of bananas) and fall off, the bananas begin to spread out and turn upward.
They do this because bananas are negatively geo-tropic. This means that they grow away from the pull of gravity, as opposed to turning upward toward the sun.
Because the Cavendish bunch is quite large and hangs almost straight down, the bananas generally have an even bend in them all the way round the bunch.
However Ladyfinger bunches sit almost at right angles to the plant and the bananas on the top side of the bunch grow straight upward while the bananas on the bottom side twist right around. Though there is no difference in the fruit the twisted bananas from the bottom side of the bunch generally don't make it to market, which is one reason that Ladyfinger bananas are more expensive because not all the bunch can be marketed." | 837 |
|
[Marvel] Why are criminals not more scared of Spider-Man? | In all the Spidey adventures I’ve read, it seems the criminals never take him as serious as they should with a hero of his status, both early and later into his crime fighting career. They just call him “web head” or “insect” and try to crush him like the bug they think he is. Why are criminals not scared of him like they are of other heroes, like in other universes like Batman? Sure, he wears bright colors and jokes and quips during battle, and Batman using fear is apart of his whole shtick, but still, Spidey would be scary asf to encounter in real life. If I was an NY criminal and was thinking of robbing a bank, and there was a possibility that I would come face to face with the resident super human who can move fast as lightning, kill a full grown elephant with one super strong punch, and string up my broken body from the highest buildings in the city while simultaneously flinging out brutal insults, I’d think twice about it. | 41 | I think they talk down to him because (1) they're bad people and (2) they know there won't be consequences. Spider-Man's going to stay jovial and just web them up regardless. He isn't going to knock someone's teeth out for being looked at the wrong way, let alone insulted. So, the bad guys take liberties with their choice of words and talk down to him. | 48 |
[Hearthstone] Why does the Violet Teacher wear blue and not purple? | 47 | Her description has nothing to do with how she dresses. She is a mage and the mages of the Kirin Tor have a thing for using the word "violet" in names.
Examples are "Violet Hold" "The Violet Eye" "Violet Stand" "Violet Rise" And the list goes on. Violet teacher is her rank not her name or a description of clothing. | 40 |
|
ELI5 why do humans need to eat many different kind of foods to get their vitamins etc but large animals like cows only need grass to survive? | 34,298 | In addition to the 'efficiently breaking down grass' thing, and the 'they eat a variety of plants' thing, there's also the fact that species typically evolve the ability to make vitamins that they can't get easily in their diet. For example, humans make vitamin D because there aren't many food sources of it, but we can't make vitamin C, but can find it in food. But other species can make their own vitamin C.
It's a trade off between needing to find a variety of food and not needing the cellular machines to make more stuff. | 13,781 |
|
Serious question: when did pooping become taboo? | Yes, some may consider this puerile, but I'm genuinely curious. Animals poop all the time with no regard for decorum. Yet we, as a species, have developed huge, special boxes so that we may poop privately. There are unspoken rules in bathrooms (avoid eye contact, etc) that reinforce the notion that pooping should be a very private function.
We avoid talking about it in 'proper' settings and yet many of us joke about it in more informal settings. It's considered an offensive (or at least inappropriate) topic by many and yet it's one of the very few things that literally every human on the planet has in common with one another.
I believe every (or nearly every, at least) culture has the same basic privacy standards around pooping, so it doesn't appear to be culturally influenced, but rather something more endemic to human nature.
So -- why are we so uptight about pooping when all other living organisms on the planet seem to not give a rip? Were we always this way? | 91 | I Could point you towards Norbert Elias's *The History of Manners (The Civilizing Process, Vol. 1)* in wich he does, on a typical eliasian faishon, a sociogenetic analysis of the Manners on French and German society.
Tracing black to the development of the idea of *kultur* and *civilizacion* right at the begginning of the modern era, he also finds where our actual "good manners" come from. By developing a society where the bonds of interdependence are much tighter and because of that, the levels of scrutiny the higher strata of society puts between themselves are much higher, starting by their manners, shitting included, of course.
He explicitly says in the book that the reacionário of disgust these societies developed to shitting comes from that era where "the civilizing process" was pressed against the top layer of society, and adopted by the classes below them in an effort to emulate their practices, hence their power. | 25 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.