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ELI5: How is a global economy based on the requirement of constant, infinite growth sustainable in a world with limited, finite resources? | 76 | Well it depends on what you mean by finite. Technically the energy provided by the sun is finite as it'll burn out in however many billion years from now.
The truth is that the resources on earth, while finite, are still tremendous. There's far more of them than folks make out.
Nothing, not even habitation on this planet, can last indefinitely. When asking questions like this it is important to define what you mean by sustainable. For how long? If you literally mean "Forever" then no, it isn't. If you mean "Until technology allows us to tap other resources" then yes, it is. Because there's more of these finite resources (and even more alternatives to them) then you'd ever imagine. | 38 |
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Does the rate of gravity change from place to place? For example at higher altitudes does gravity get weaker? | And if it does, does NASA use a localized rate of gravity for their equations, or is the difference so negligible that it doesn’t matter? | 16 | Yes, slightly.
There’s a common misconception that astronauts on the ISS experience no gravity. This isn’t true, they’re experiencing nearly the same as us, they “float” because they’re constantly falling back towards earth.
Technically your head experiences a weaker gravity than your feet, so your feet age more slowly than your head. The closer you are to a massive object the more slowly time passes. | 21 |
ELI5: what prevents the flame on a gas stove from igniting the gas that’s in the supply line and blowing everything up? | 9,132 | Fuel + oxygen + heat = fire
The gas line is full of fuel, but no oxygen or heat. So no fire.
As it comes out at the burner, a constant outward flow of gas blocks oxygen from backfilling the gas line. So it should never be a problem as long as it stays under pressure and has no leaks. | 7,165 |
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What are the best philosophies for education? | Hello!
I'm in a philosophy of education course, and we are studying all the philosophies that have contributed to education. Now I am trying to figure out which ones work best when attempting to apply them to modern public education, K-12 and postsecondary. Below is a list of the few I find most important, along with brief explanations about why they work and perhaps why they also may not. Please let me know what you think by commenting below.
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**Utilitarianism**
Bentham's theory is probably most important for public education because we are attempting to provide an education for the masses. Therefore, we put into practice what works for the greatest number of students. The drawback with this approach is that we may disregard underserved populations.
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**Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory**
Building on the critique of utilitarianism, it is important to recognize that modern education practices may serve to disenfranchise and constrain or impede certain demographics, namely people in poverty, people of color, and people who are in the minority. These theories, when applied properly, may empower students to change society for the better because it takes acknowledgement to effect change. Also, curricula and lesson plans must involve CRT components to assist positive change, such as when textbooks highlight systemic racism, etc. Of course, the problem with applying these philosophies is deciding which areas to focus on, how much to focus on them, and how precisely. Many people disagree vehemently on these aspects.
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**Pragmatism**
Perhaps the philosophy that characterizes modern postsecondary education best is pragmatism. Higher education is particularly concerned with churning out students who will be able to find jobs. The pragmatic approach may help protect some students from getting degrees that are unsuitable, and thus these students may avoid unnecessary debt. However, the problem is that many students are sacrificing a very important broad and general education for one that is very specific. That way, we are not providing a traditional liberal arts education for people to become holistic participatory citizens.
In K-12, pragmatism can be seen when schools spend a great deal of time reading, writing, and learning mathematical concepts. The hypothesis is that every other discipline is grounded in these basic skills, and that students must learn the three "R's" well enough to excel later. There is research showing that students who read well also perform well in math, history, and other areas, so this argument is persuasive. On the other hand, perhaps more reading, writing, and math could be pragmatically taught within the context of the other disciplines. That way, the negative side to the K-12 pragmatic approach of the three R's would be mitigated because not too much time would be spent only on the three R's, and more time would be spent on learning other important information.
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These are three main philosophies I think apply most to K-12 and postsecondary education. Please comment below and let me know if you think there are others that are equally or more important! Thank you! | 44 | I think you might be using pragmatism differently than most philosophers. It's not an ethical framework, but an epistemological framework emphasizing prediction of future events over trying to model reality or capture absolute truth. The confusion is understandable, however, as Dewey was both instrumental for pragmatism and an influential education theorist in the early 19th century. | 18 |
ELI5: Why do we get dark circles around our eyes when we don't sleep enough? | 32 | Arround our eyes and especially right under. Is the least thickest skin on the body. If you don't sleep your skin dehydrates making the skin more transparent and the blood vessels are showing. Blue-black collor. | 19 |
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What are some areas of science that can still be added to by a hobby scientist a la Sir Isaac Newton? | If someone had a strong scientific/ technical background but wanted to pursue research as a hobby rather than strictly a profession as the "gentleman scientists" of yore did.
I know of the DIYBIO movement, etc. If you were going to attempt to contribute some meaningful scientific knowledge to the world, what area of science/technology would you immerse yourself in purely for enjoyment? What skill sets would you want to develop?
| 63 | The area a single hobbyist is most likely to contribute to (IMO) is anything computational.
It seems limiting, but you can work in almost any field via computing. You can work on computational physics problems, simulate chemical reactions, model infectious disease, analyze the human genome, mine behavioral data using search engines, etc.
The beautiful thing about computing is that computers are dirt cheap and there are an unbelievable amount of resources for programmers, for free, on the internet. | 37 |
[Ghostbusters] How, exactly, was the Stay-Puff Marshmallow man supposed to end the entire world? | I mean, I understand if he could destroy one or two cities, but I don't see him having the durability, speed, or destructive powers that would warrant an end-of-the-world scenario.
| 117 | Ray said he the only thing he could do was think of the most harmless thing imaginable, and Gozer had no choice but to take that form.
Ray did the only logical thing he could do. It's impossible to think of nothing, so he thought of the most innocent thing possible. And he saved the world doing so. | 87 |
ELI5: Has vision deteriorated significantly with advancements, or could most full grown adults just not see well before the 1700s? | Virtually every friend and family member I have has corrected vision. Mine's not horrible, but I couldn't perform simple functions without correction. Is this a new phenomenon, or did people just wander around with blurry vision? | 18 | Sight deficiencies are not a lot more common today than historically. However, you do have to keep in mind that throughout history and throughout most of the world, people did not read, and in fact mostly did farm labor. That removes quite a lot of the need for glasses in the first place. | 22 |
On the subject of stars, is there a definable split between what could be called land and atmosphere in the structure of a star? Like what we see on earth? | And if so, does the "land" portion have hills and valleys typically? Or is it one perfect spherical core? | 49 | No, stars are spheres of plasma - essentially ionized gas. The visible "surface" of the star is called the photosphere, and it's not solid. It's not even very dense; the density would steadily increase as you went deeper into a star, but you would have to sink pretty far to even get to density equivalent to water on earth.
Stars do have huge convection cells, which could be viewed as equivalent to "hills" and "valleys", but they are closer to bubbles in a pot of boiling water than land features, and they ebb and flow.
tl;dr stars are not solid and have no equivalent to landforms | 18 |
ELI5: How chroma subsampling works | I found only one post about this dated 10 years ago with only one reply. The Wikipedia page and other webpages explain it similarly but I still don't understand it completely.
For JPEG, it uses 4:2:0 subsampling scheme but I don't fully understand how it works or what happens.
Do the Cb and Cr channels get smaller? Or is it as the [image](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f2/Common_chroma_subsampling_ratios.svg/1920px-Common_chroma_subsampling_ratios.svg.png) shows and it copies the chroma values to the adjacent pixels (remains the same size)? | 22 | For 4:2:0, a 100×100 image is made up of a 100×100 luma (grey scale) image and two 50×50 images supplying colour information (Cb and Cr). In other words, each 2×2 block of pixels uses the same colour information but has 4 separate luma values. | 13 |
[Marvel Comics] "Everyone comes back except for Bucky and Uncle Ben." That used to be a common saying amongst comic book fans until Bucky came back. Has Uncle Ben come back ever in any continuity in the Marvel Universe? | 469 | In Spider-Verse there's an Uncle Ben who got bit instead of Peter.
He became Spider-Man, and was trapped in a fallout shelter for years, his whole world had been irradiated and his family killed.
Man, being named Ben in Marvel is a raw deal. | 426 |
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ELI5: Wormholes | Also, now that it's been proven that the speed of light is the "speed limit" of the universe (source: http://digitaljournal.com/article/309525), are wormholes still theoretically possible? Or are these two subjects not related? | 42 | Okay so here's the deal.
Wormholes are a product of Einstein's theory of relativity so to accurately explain one you have to understand the other. Think of our universe as folded, like a book or binder. Let's say the milky way galaxy is on the front cover of the book and Galaxy B is on the back of the book. If you wanted to travel from our galaxy to Galaxy B you would have to travel across the entire front cover, over the spine, and then across the back to get to Galaxy B. Wormholes are essentially super shortcuts that have the ability to slingshot you across long distances; in this case through the center of the book, as opposed to having to travel across the covers and spine. This is where relativity kicks in.
Let's say Galaxy B is 100 million light years away. Because light travels at a set speed, when you look today from Earth to that Galaxy B, you will not see it as it is today, but rather as it was 100 million years ago. This is because light took 100 million years to travel all that distance. But if you take a journey inside a wormhole from Earth to that galaxy, you would reach that galaxy today. So when you reach it today, you will see it as it is today, not as it was 100 million years ago. So if you use a wormhole, events at that galaxy (your destination) would appear as if in fast forward (from 100 million years ago till today).
Edit: Wormholes are still possible. It doesn't have to due with the speed of light but rather if we can manipulate space in such a way that allows wormhole formation. If your interested read up on the 11 theoretical dimensions of our universe (String/M-theory). | 22 |
ELI5: How to gaming companies miss big bugs and glitches even after test runs? | 63 | The biggest part is simply scale.
Blockbuster games sell tens of millions of copies -- GTA 5 has sold something like 55,000,000. Say that the average person spends 25 hours on a game (for some games, this is a high guess, but for others it's very low -- people often spend 100+ hours on COD or GTA during their ownership). That's 1.3 billion hours. Say that your testing department has 15 employees and that they work for 1 year, full-time, testing your game. For every 1 hour you spent on testing, the customers spend 43,333 hours on playing. When so much time is spent doing stuff in the game, the customers are *bound* to encounter bugs or glitches the testers didn't.
This is especially true when games are very large or complex, and have a long list of possible situations. Even in 30K hours, the testers couldn't test *every single possibility* in the game. Did they test what happens if a car explodes while upside down on a rock at night in the rain while the player is in the middle of the bike-mounting animation? Did they test what happens if you're in the middle of reloading a gun when a building collapses in mission 17 when your hand is supposed to cover your face, resulting in a weird animation glitch? Did they accelerate to mass speed while manipulating the camera with the mouse on its highest sensitivity but the aiming inverted? There are some bugs that only happen if you did one thing in one part of the game and another in a separate part 10 hours later -- if they were testing chunk by chunk (the usual situation), maybe they never saw that combination.
But even when they do catch things, they don't necessarily get fixed. Development time is finite, decisions are made about which things are important enough to spend it on. Super-glitchy games are usually games that were rushed to meet a tight deadline, or which had small budgets, meaning it just wasn't possible to spend valuable developer time fixing bugs over adding features that have more impact on sales. Then even when you do allocate time to fixing a bug, some are easier to fix than others. Some bugs exist because of tiny oversights in physics engines, and are very hard to track down. Sometimes, the bug exists in a licensed engine and the developers don't even have the ability to fix it, they have to get the engine's developer to try and fix it and that might not be done in time for the game's release. | 61 |
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[ELI5] In the dark, why can we see an object when using the peripheral vision, but looking direcly at it we can barely see it? | 16 | There are two types of light receptor in the eye: rods and cones. Cones are colour sensitive but aren't good in low light conditions, and they're concentrated around the centre of your field of view in order to give you good colour vision during the day. The peripheries of your eye have mostly rods in them, which are much more sensitive to light, so in low-light conditions you'll see better at the edges of your vision than directly ahead. | 20 |
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What is the moral imperative to preserve a racial group? | I think culture is different from race- a black American has more in common with a white American than he does with a black Nigerian. So this question is separate from "multi-culturalism".
There are people who believe white people won't exist in a couple of centuries- not because of genocide but because of interbreeding with other races. Is it bad for our great-grandchildren to be neither white nor black nor Asian but something that's all of those and neither? Apart from the aesthetics of "I like how white people look", what's the moral imperative to prevent voluntary miscegenation of races even if it leads to what we'd describe as "white" not existing anymore? | 62 | I don't know any contemporary Philosophers who want to preserve particular racial phenotypes. If you want to know why people on the internet care about this, either ask social scientists, or just ask th3em. | 76 |
ELI5: Why did the US specifically target Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons? | Ok, essentially the US hit Japan to force them to give up the war but why were Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically targeted? Did they hold any strategic significance or was the US basically trying to cause as many casualties as possible? | 39 | Nagasaki was the original primary target but was hidden by cloud cover on August 6, 1949, so Hiroshima (the secondary target) was used.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima were chosen due to thier military value. During World War II, the 2nd General Army and Chugoku Regional Army were headquartered in Hiroshima, and the Army Marine Headquarters was located at Ujina port. The city also had large depots of military supplies, and was a key center for shipping.
Nagasaki was a center of heavy industry. Its main industry was ship-building, with the dockyards under control of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries becoming one of the prime contractors for the Imperial Japanese Navy, and with Nagasaki harbor used as an anchorage under the control of nearby Sasebo Naval District. | 33 |
How would you fund consumers in a post-jobs world? | Imagine a future where robots and AI have surpassed humans in their ability to perform jobs. They're stronger, more precise, more creative, more empathetic, more flexible - name a skill, and the robot beats the human at it. Let's dodge for the moment the hairy question of whether owning a robot like that constitutes slavery (assume ownership works like today, humans and companies can own robots and AIs). Assume also that robots are long-lasting and power efficient so the marginal cost of running them is minuscule. Long story short, the market value of labor drops to near zero, as robot labor outperforms human labor on every metric (except for branding/excentricism, e.g. to show off your human butler). Historically, labor displaced by automation has found new jobs, that they could still perform better than machines - but imagine in our scenario, that we've finally run out of those, the robots now beat us at everything, there's no job we can come up with where the robot isn't already superior.
How do you maintain the purchasing power of consumers in a scenario like that, in order to maintain a market economy? Most consumers get their money by selling their labor, but the market value of that has just tanked. Sure, goods are cheaper as well now that they are produced, transported and sold by robots (production costs are now basically energy + raw material costs), but as long as they are just cheap, rather than free, then that's no use to the majority of people who are now unemployable.
If your answer is Universal Basic Income, then how do you fund it? Most of taxation currently comes from taxing labor, and in our scenario that has now mostly disappeared. We might increase VAT, but can that ever be enough to fund the "stipend" from which the VAT will be drawn when spent? (that doesn't seem to add up, some of the money flowing to the corporation would need to eventually make it's way back into the hands of a consumer, like it currently does via salaries). Since all these corporations that own all these robots are now massively profitable without employing anyone, maybe we can tax all this economic activity that is still going on there? But Amazon and others have shown that you can basically defer corporate taxation indefinitely by continuously reinvesting all your surplus cash and thus never actually making a profit. Do we start taxing them on revenue instead? Or do we tax the owners of the corporations? We've recently learned that stock owners can basically defer realization on their stock gains indefinitely too, by taking out loans instead of cashing in. So do we tax them on gains annually whether they sell or not? Or do we tax them on wealth instead of income?
Could some combination of these actually be enough to fund a UBI in scenario like that? If yes, how would it affect the economy if all these things that are currently taxed relatively little compared to labor were taxed a lot more? If no, do we need to be thinking in some completely other direction, to still make a market economy work in a scenario like that?
Edit 1: by using the phrase "market value" I seem to have implied that robots are already completely deployed everywhere in the market - I didn't mean to imply that (sorry, I'm an engineer, not an economist). I'm asking about the scenario where they exist, but might not have been made widely available yet (i.e. I don't want to assume everyone has a robot, because IMO that would be jumping the gun to assume that will come to pass).
Edit 2: to clarify, minuscule power draw is compared to a human. Assume servos, batteries, cpus and such with a power draw similar to what we know today, not magic perpetual motion machines. So the cost of running these is small (especially compared to a human) but not non-trivial (at least no more trivial than the running of other well-made machines). | 44 | >How do you maintain the purchasing power of consumers in a scenario like that, in order to maintain a market economy?
Purchasing power? You are describing post scarcity!
If what you are saying is true then these machines can be created at no cost and run at no cost and perform duties better and more energy efficient than any human ever could. That is post scarcity and the only thing we would need is figure out how to distribute land and trade seasonal perishable foods. | 30 |
ELI5: How do cinematographers do forced perspective while keeping everyone in focus? | I've heard of this technique before, where you place one actor much farther from the camera than the other to make them look much smaller by comparison. It makes perfect sense to me except for the question in the title.
Wouldn't having one actor near and one far require the camera to focus on the nearer actor leaving the far away actor blurry and out of focus, or vice versa? | 86 | By using a higher f-stop (smaller camera aperture) and raising the amount of light.
The reason things get out of focus, and the reason we need to focus in general, is because light bouncing off the same object comes into the camera from all different directions and we need to focus that into a single point on the film/sensor. The smaller the hole that the light passes through, the fewer possible directions it can be coming from and therefore the less the lens needs to focus the light. Small holes mean less total light getting in though, so you have to turn the lighting up really bright to compensate. | 65 |
Is it pure coincidence that the rotation rates of Mars and Earth are both 24 hours (-4 & +39 min)? | And maybe this isn't the same question, but: Is there such a thing as non-coincidental rotational resonance between bodies not orbiting each other? | 129 | It's just a coincidence, with a large enough set of known planets you could say if it was an uncommon speed. But as you point out, their days are only roughly 24 hours, it's your choice of unit and rounding that creates the illusion if a pattern. | 76 |
ELI5:Why do people sound like their respective gender even if they have a high/low voice? | Of course there will be exceptions, but when I speak in a lower voice I still sound like a girl.
edit: Thank you for the replies :) This started with a shower thought where I wasn't sure why men could pull of falsettos but its normal for women. So thanks again for clearing up my question | 554 | A low piano note doesn't sound like a low trombone note, either, even if they have some comparable qualities. The *timbre* of a sound is about more than just pitch, and the construction of the male and female vocal tract (and between individuals of the same sex) tends to be different enough to make each recognizable. | 433 |
Is an MA in Medieval Studies a waste of time and money? | Hello and sorry for the long post. I would like to get some fresh insight about whether it's worth following an academic path in Medieval Studies in the UK. I hold a BA in English and I absolutely loved doing my dissertation on medieval literature and I got a First too. I've been thinking to follow an academic career for a while now and I now hold 2 offers to do an MA on Medieval Studies or Late Antique/Byzantine Studies in two prestigious unis in England. But the thing is that the tuition fees are ridiculously high and I would need to take a loan which really puts me off given that these degrees aren't exactly sought after. I had hoped that for the second course I would get a scholarship but the history department said they wouldn't release any scholarship this year, which was frustrating because they received millions of pounds from some foundation and some of it was supposed to go to scholarships.
Anyway, I was told that to land an academic post (especially a permanent one) is super hard, unstable and a lot depends on luck too. If I don't land one then I'm not sure what else I could do with such niche qualifications and a lot of debt... Plus, I would need 4 years to get my MA and PhD and by that time I would be 31-32. I take it that while other friends will have started building their lives, I would be moving here and there in short-term contracts (which aren't even certain). But even that would be fine if there was at least some guarantee at the end. My old supervisor said that those who are good and determined always make it at the end but then again he landed a permanent post two decades ago.
How do you see the situation for medievalists in unis? Is it really that grim as been presented to me? If one can't get an academic job, what else do they end up doing even remotely similar? I can't decide whether I should follow this path or just get an industry job and pursue my scholarly interests in my free time. I was reading some old essays of mine today and I got emotional knowing that I might not do literary research again but then again maybe I could become an independent scholar or write articles? I'm just worried that I might shoot myself in the foot while building castles in the sky. | 22 | A lot of people will give you similar advice:
- Only you can make the final call about pros and cons
- There are no secure jobs, unless you are exceptionally talented AND lucky AND well-connected. Or unless you are prepared to go work at unis in Asia or the Middle East (which can be a nice career for those who are suited to it).
- If you do it, have a realistic backup plan. Accept that you will be starting at the bottom of the ladder in your early 30s.
- Don’t pay to go to grad school. Especially, don’t get in debt for it. If you break this rule, know that by following your dreams you will be sacrificing your future security. If a department thinks your research field is important, they should be willing to pay for it.
- Only go to grad school if you literally can’t see yourself being happy doing anything else. | 24 |
ELI5: How can "foreign workers" be cheaper for corporations like Disney to employ? (Can/US) Minimum wage, labour laws, etc. don't decrease based on the worker's nationality, so why? | 73 | A few reasons:
1) Lower wages. Sure you can't charge below minimum wage, but local workers have this tendency to want more than minimum wage, while people from poorer countries are more likely to be happy(er) with minimum wage
2) Benefits. Native workers are more likely to want/demand benefits: full-time work, health care, etc. Foreign workers, again less so.
There's plenty of other reasons too.
And with the recent Disney news, the workers being replaced weren't minimum wage workers: they were tech workers. Native tech workers often expect $60-80 K/year as a minimum, and experienced tech workers are often payed well over $100K/year, plus benefits in the form of insurance, time off, etc. For those jobs, paying foreign workers $40K/year as a starting rate is a huge savings, and still more than companies in India are likely to pay; mostly because it costs a lot less to live in India. | 37 |
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ELI5: How did the iPod Shuffle charge from a 3.5mm headphone jack? | I never see any articles mentioning how they charge, everyone is just concerned for it to BE charged.
I mean, it would be lit if I could charge my phone through a headphone jack...
How does it work? | 37 | For charging a battery you just need two connections. The headphone jack always has at least two (sometimes more for microphones)
It is not common to charge via headphone jacks but nothing restricts you to do so. Apple has built a charger to transfer the electrical energy from 5 Volt DC to whatever the shuffle needs. | 15 |
[Animorphs] Did the Animorphs really represent a credible threat to the Yeerk invasion or were they only a nuisance at best? | 667 | They started out as a nuisance. They were barely surviving themselves and never actually win other than barely maintaining the status quo most of the time. That's why their goal was always to stall time to wait for the Andalite cavalry.
They won in the end because the Ellimist stacked the deck like the Drode said. They had Visser One's host's son, and that played a part in the power struggles between Visser One and Visser Three. They have someone who is empathic and intuitive enough to start rebellions in the ranks of the Yeerks and the Taxxons, without even realizing she is doing it. Elfangor was put on Earth for years and allowed to father a human son, to give him incentive to even thought of giving humans morphing powers in the first place. Of all the Andalites they could have ran into, they had Elfangor's younger brother, the only one who wouldn't have just killed them all when he found out what they were, because he trusted his brother's decision.
With those connections they were able leverage forces that they shouldn't be able to by their morphing powers alone. | 355 |
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[Game of Thrones] Which regions keep supplying men to the Wall during Jon's time there? | 17 | All of them most likely. Except for maybe Dorne. Certain brothers were entrusted to collect recruits for the wall. They'd visit dungeons and jails across the kingdoms collecting anyone that rather live in the frozen ass end of the world than visit the executioners block or spend years in a dark cell. And the kingdoms were happy to ship the criminals away so long as they never left the wall. While the show makes it appear as a rather formal affair it's probably a bi yearly routine with little if any fanfare from the visiting brothers accept to ask permission to visit the cells. Only political prisoners or the truly vile were excluded from taking the black by their jailers. | 25 |
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ELI5: How does public school wifi block sites without using software? | My school blocks websites on their computers and on my phones/laptops, even though I clearly didn't install any software to block websites. How exactly does this work? Does the school wifi use an ISP block or something similar? | 22 | The trick is that the school controls the entrance/exit to the Internet. With software processing the traffic that glows in/out they can control what you can actually connect to and sometimes replace the responses your computer received with their own.
This is usually implemented as with a firewall (control what you can actually connect to), DNS injection, and transparent proxying. | 51 |
What is the electromagnetic equivalent to the graviton? | I get that the graviton could be necessary to transmit gravitational force in certain models, even if I don't quite get how a particle travelling in one direction can transmit attractive force in the opposite direction.
But... assuming gravitons exist... I wonder what corresponding particle would be used to transmit electromagnetic attractive force. The Wikipedia article on [Fundamental Interaction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction) implies this is the photon, but that doesn't make sense to me. I realize all bodies emit thermal radiation, so I assume that's what's supposed to be regulating the attractive force, but that can be reflected while the attractive force still remains -- or so I assume.
So what is it? What particle causes a positively charged particle to attract a negatively charged particle and vice-versa, and how does this particle interact? | 58 | It is indeed the photon.
Ok, how about this: it's really the electromagnetic field itself, which is a quantum mechanical vector field that permeates spacetime. These things called photons are propagating *excitations* of the electromagnetic field. They are also a computational tool for calculating things in QED that don't seem like they have to do with light waves flying around (pew pew). Instead of doing calculations with the electromagnetic field itself, it is easier to split up the field into plane waves (this is no longer a local description like using the field), each of which looks like an individual photon. Then once you integrate over all of those "particles" (which are really just components of the electromagnetic field), you will find the result you're interested in -- say the scattering of an electron off of another electron.
Note that while it might seem that the repulsion of an electron from another electron has nothing to do with radiation, it *definitely does*. Those particles have to accelerate in order to push each other apart, and accelerating charges radiate electromagnetic waves. | 59 |
[Black Panther] What if T'Chaka had taken his nephew home? | So throughout the movie it's suggested that a lot of this could have been avoided if T'Chaka had taken his nephew home but really? I mean he killed Erik's father, wouldn't the story have instead been Killmonger destroying the country from within, kind of like Loki? | 80 | He grew up with no contact with Wakandans, so his mind warped them into the worst boogeymen. Had he grown up under their love and guidance he would have seen them as real people. He would have formed bonds and attachments, making 100% betrayal very difficult.
Wakanda also probably has decent mental health care in the event he was a total psychopath. They could have detected it early and treated him. | 84 |
Askscience: What is it going to take to capture the energy in a lightning strike? | We can target with reasonable accuracy where the lightning will hit, on an average.
What sort of storage techniques are at our disposal that could contain the energy in the strike. Giant capacitor? Fast charging batteries (I don't think our technology is up to it)? Could we directly convert to heat and vaporize water for pressure storage?
How about setting up multiple stations in close proximity to dissipate charge?
It seems to me we're really missing out on a lot of potential here. | 31 | Big problem: the lightning channel wastes all the energy! It's like a big fluorescent bulb. Don't forget, the electrical energy is moving inwards into the lightning channel. Energy doesn't race along the channel. Same with hot wires in an electric heater: the energy starts out in the surrounding e-field, then dives inward into the wire.
So if lightning struck a 10ft tower, you could only intercept 10ft worth of the energy in the miles-long lightning bolt.
To gather much lightning energy, we'd really need a 10KM tower that sticks up into the thunderstorm. | 21 |
How do dogs perceive their heightened senses of smell and hearing? Do they have any process to prevent information overload due to overlapping smells and sounds from far away? | I thought about this on my German shepherds walk yesterday while he was in a very energetic mood. He wanted to sniff everything and I couldn't help but wonder how he manages the fact that he can smell the tree, the dogs who peed on the tree, the trash can, the food in the trash can, the squirrels, the footprints of other people, ect. How do they manage all the information they get from their senses? | 22 | The dog brain has a significantly more developed olfactory area than the human brain, and essentially acts more as a vision compliment than you would imagine it based on your experience. The wet nose even serves to detect the direction of wind, allowing stereoscopic smelling.
So basically, "how do you manage all that information from your eyes?" The same way, just different. | 16 |
[Star Wars] Why didn't the Republic just EMP blast the droid army any time there was a battle? | Nuclear EMPs would shut down anything electronic, I understand nuclear technology might not be in the Star Wars universe but I'm sure something similar could've been made. In the Clone Wars series the troopers use EMP-like grenade, why don't they make that to mass scale? | 63 | They have shields that repel super-duper-heated plasmas and gas projectiles, metalworking that resists superheated stable solid-light plasma (or whatever the hell lightsaber beams are), and an entire planet covered in city-to the point where oceans are kept in storage tanks. EMPs are probably childs play in Star Warfare, something that might have worked back in the days of the ancient Old Republic but by the time of the Clone Wars they probably had a fix for that, some sort of anti-electromagnetic field or circuitry that wasn't vulnerable or even the metal they were built from was enough to shield. | 79 |
When batteries start to lose voltage do they produce less current? | So when a battery starts to lose voltage does it produce less current and therefore the object that is connecting to it can produce less power from it. If so is there like a minimum amount of power objects can run on and when this threshold is not longer obtainable the battery is considered dead? | 17 | It depends on the load. If the load is ohmic, then less voltage will produce less current by V=IR. If the load has some sort of active power regulation, then less voltage will actually cause it to draw *more* current, because it needs a constant power, and P=IV. | 38 |
ELI5 How do toilets flush without overflowing on water and still have water left over in the bowl? | 94 | The pipe from the bowl to the sewer forms a bend that traps air/gases behind the water in the bowl. When you flush, the water in the bowl rises above the bend in the pipe and pressure moves the water into and around the bend. The water is now falling down the pipe, creating a vacuum behind it, pulling water from the bowl into the pipe. Once air reaches the bend in the pipe again, the falling water will now pull air into the pipe instead of the water in the bowl, leaving enough as it refills from the tank to trap another pocket of air in the bend, ready for your next flush. | 83 |
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CMV: Being vegan or vegetarian has no real impact on the meat and dairy industry, therefore being meaningless | Everyone has heard of the terrible conditions cows, chickens and pigs go through in slaughterhouses (Watchmen *Okja* on Netflix to know a bit more), and movements pro-veganism and what not.
While I agree that meat production in an industrial scale is an awful thing, some people not eating animal products wouldn't change a thing. Corporations don't go meatless options because they care about the animals, it's because some people are willing to buy It.
And for every vegan, there are 10 more people who eat meat normally. If a couple of people don't buy beef out of a whole city It won't really matter.
I'm not sure the text was able to trully express my idea, english is not my first language.
| 27 | A. the numbers are increasing. It's a steady battle.
B. Personal morals
You also have to note that the meat industry, especially the cattle industry, *relies* on government subsidies. It's not naturally a booming business. There are many angles to it. People against it often also take political action. They raise awareness to the conditions. etc. It's not fair to define vegans as people who simply refuse to eat meat. Many are activists or at least talk about it to people. | 31 |
ELI5:why is kosovo not part of albania | 72 | The territory of nowadays Kosovo had been under the rule of Serbian Kingdoms since the slavic invasion of Balkan in the 6th century regardless of it's ethnic composition. Then came the Ottoman invasion of the Blakans for 500 years . When they got defeated the Great Powers (Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Italy) in 1913 London Conference assigned Kosovo to Serbia as a war triumph regardless of it being mostly inhabited by ethnic albanians .
Kosovo started getting a form of autonomy from Serbia during Communist Yugoslavia since 1945 but ethnic tensions were always in the air despite the fact that the Yugoslav leader Tito tried to oppress any form of nationalism . Well Tito died and in the early 1990s nationalism exploded in Yugoslavia with 2 main rivals being the Serbs vs the Croats . In charge of Serbia came the infamous Milosevic who tried to centralize the power of his country by reducing the autonomous status out of Kosovo which only increased the need for independence from the albanians of kosovo . Yugoslav countries split one by one and Kosovo was the last after the 1998- 1999 War which resulted in NATO bombing Serbia after violence and ethnic cleansing attempts by Milosevic's government over ethnic albanians on Kosovo . Nowadays it is an independent state which is struggling to find recognition by other countries of the UN ( so far 110 recognize it ) . Even though uniting with Albania is something most of them want it has never been even a proposal since it would complicate things even more. | 13 |
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ELI5: how come modern phones and tablets don't require touch screen calibration the way older Touch devices used to. | I remember on my old pda I would have to calibrate it once a week by touching targets on different parts of the screen. | 28 | They use different technologies.
Older touch screens measured the electric resistance at various points around the screen to check if you were touching them. This method requires calibration so that the software knows what resistances measured at which points correspond to specific parts of the screen being touched.
But modern touch screens measure the capacitance, rather than the resistance. This type of screen does not need calibrating. It's also better at detecting more than one finger, and it can respond to "touches", rather than having to be pressed. | 23 |
CMV: The idea of choosing your own pronouns is intrinsically wrong. | Language is how we think, it is how we comprehend every piece of information we obtain. When you are thinking silently to yourself, you are thinking using words. Even now, as you read this post, I am transferring thoughts from my brain into yours by using words. That being said, trying to tell someone which words they can or cannot use, or trying to control their use of language is like trying to control how they think.
Let's avoid the transgender topic for a sec, and let's think of a different scenario. Imagine you are sitting at a bar, having a drink with a few friends, when a guy pulls up on a big, loud, motorcycle. A Harley, or a chopper, (I don't know bikes) and this guy looks like your stereo-typical biker. He's got the leather vest, the bandana on his head, sleeves of tattoos, a chain hanging from his back-pocket, and this guy comes walking into the bar, swinging his shoulders, thinking he's the meanest, toughest sumbitch that ever stepped foot in that bar.
What sort of thoughts would you have about that particular individual? They could range from:
"Oh he looks tough. Don't fuck with him!"
to:
"Pfft... dude looks like a pussy. He's a poser hiding behind his tattoos."
But no matter what your opinion of the biker is, and no matter how different it might be from his own opinion of himself, he does not get a vote. He does not get to decide what you think of him. All he can do, is present himself however he chooses, and let everyone else form their own opinion of him.
Imagine how ridiculous it would seem if this biker tried to demand that people refer to him in a specific way. If I said to him:
"You look like a pussy."
and he responded with:
"No! I'm a badass! And you have to refer to me as a badass! Stop oppressing me!"
If he did that, no one would take him seriously. Right?
I want to clear the air a bit (because I know I'll get backlash for this) and say that I have no problem with transgendered people. If a boy/man decides that his secret to happiness is by dressing like a woman, acting like a woman, and generally living like a woman in every way, then by all means, go for it. Gender norms are a societal idea, and we are under no obligation to follow them. But just because he sees himself as a woman, doesn't mean that I do. And when in contact with transgendered people, I will choose to use whatever pronoun I see fit, because the image of that individual in my head is determined by my own interpretation, not by their wishes.
TL;DR: Everyone has the right to present themselves however they choose. But **no one** has the right to decide how others perceive them. | 23 | First of all, pronouns are a *really* arbitrary linguistic category. Some languages don't specify gender in pronouns at all. Some have a "neuter" pronoun. Some have different pronouns that the speaker chooses based on the formality of the situation. So, there's nothing strange about choosing a pronoun to project a certain "image." In Japanese, for instance, there are over 15 words for "I" that you can choose from depending on your self-image and the situation, and the most common words for "he/she" don't specify gender at all. Choosing pronouns is a conscious choice in *many* languages. Gendered pronouns are really just a little quirk of English, not some kind of universal concept.
Language has a powerful ability to shape perception. The words people use can project their desired image, and the words you use to describe others can shape the way you think about them. Chances are that if you make an actual effort to refer to a transgender person by their desired pronouns, you'll start to see them as their desired gender. If you stubbornly cling to the pronouns that match their chromosomes, you'll probably *never* accept their new gender no matter how much they've changed physically. When you force the wrong pronouns onto someone, you're essentially saying that you don't acknowledge or respect their identity, and you never will. | 39 |
Why do we still have daylight savings time? | Wasn't it created for farmers? Can't farmers just set their alarm clocks to match the sunrise? | 25 | As society became more industrialized, things like the beginning of school, work (for those with non-agrarian jobs), and public transportation were all synchronized by times, which were constant year round. For farmers who traditionally worked based upon sunrise and sunset, this caused their schedules to become mismatched with everyone else's at certain times of the year, so DST was proposed to alleviate that
That's only one of the reasons originally proposed for DST, though. Another was that adjusting the clocks so that it stayed light into the later hours of the day would reduce the need for artificial lighting and save electricity. This may have been true initially, but with the introduction of air conditioning into housing, more recent studies have shown that any electricity saved by reducing the need for lights is offset by needing to run the air conditioning later into the evening.
Finally, some people just argued that it made sense to have an extra hour of sunlight in the evening, after people had finished working, rather than to sleep through that hour in the morning. | 11 |
[Batman] Is Batman a cunning linguist? | How many languages does he understand? How good is he at debate? | 79 | The Bat is a polyglot, speaking at least a dozen languages fluently, and probably a dozen more conversationally.
Also, consider some of the partners with whom he has practiced his cunning lingualism.
The Bat dated Zatanna for a while, and she would have taught him how to use his cunning linguistics forwards and backwards, in order to achieve almost magical effects.
The Bat also data Diana of Themyscira. Diana is herself a noted cunning linguist, from a nation of cunning linguists. The Amazons are such cunning linguists that you could almost say they *invented* cunning lingualism, and Diana, as their crown Princess, is likely one of the most cunning linguists on the planet; she would be an ideal teacher.
Diana also possesses the god-tongue, or the all-tongue; her cunning lingualism extends to *every* human language, as well as alien languages such as martian and kryptonian. The Bat couldn't possibly ask for a more qualified teacher to instruct him in the ways of cunning lingualism.
Now, Selina Kyle is a mortal woman, and there might be some issues with the Bat practicing his cunning lingualism with her; Zatanna might have taught him to speak too quickly, or Diana might have taught him to speak too forcefully.
However, the Bat has also practiced his cunning lingualism with a number of mortal women. Talia al Ghul is an obvious example; as the Daughter of the Demon, she would know dozens of languages herself, and possesses strength of mind and spirit roughly on par with Catwoman. The Bat has also practiced his cunning lingualism with Vicki Vale, who, as a world-renowned photojournalist, would certainly be familiar with a score of languages.
And remember: the Bat is always prepared. There is no task too difficult, no technique too obscure, for the Bat to master. He will seek out the best trainers, gather the most insightful advice, and practice until he is a world-class cunning linguist ... because that's what heroes do. | 186 |
ELI5: How do "active cultures" get into yogurt? | 16 | To make yogurt, milk has to be inoculated with bacteria. Typically Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, Lactobacillus acidophilus, and Lactobacillus casei.
With out those bacteria, the milk would never be converted into yogurt. Active cultures mean that the factory did not kill the bacteria in the yogurt, so they're still alive when you eat the yogurt. | 12 |
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ELI5: Why does alcohol burn on open wounds? Like what chemical process is making our pain receptors go off? | 136 | Alcohol has a strange property where it causes the receptors for heat in your skin and mouth to become more sensitive.
These receptors (VR1) normally trigger at around 42C, but alcohol causes them to trigger at around body temperature.
So the heat you are feeling is actually your own body temperature. | 146 |
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ELI5: How are laws against monopolies actually enforced? Is it a company's fault if they just simply have an uncompetable business model? | 634 | Having a monopoly is not illegal. Creating a monopoly on the other hand is illegal and the government will try to prevent them if they think it will cause problems. Thats why you often hear of government needing to confirm large business mergers. | 339 |
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[Star Wars] why is there no advertising? | I see no brand names, billboards, holographic commercials or anything that seems like an ad in a capitalist culture. My thought is that the empire strictly controls the economy but my real thought is that it takes away from the medieval future reality in the films. | 19 | There absolutely is advertising. It's all over the place in the lower parts of the city on Coruscant, like where Anakin and Obi-Wan caught the shapeshifter assassin.
But for real, most of the characters we follow are in places where advertising is unlikely to be profitable. | 40 |
ELI5: Why are young children generally fussy eaters? Shouldn't they be biologically wired to eat anything and everything for strong growth and development? | 999 | Kids are wired to eat the stuff that used to be most important to surviving: high-calorie stuff, fatty stuff, etc. They're also more sensitive to bitterness than adults are (bitterness, evolutionary, tends to mean "bad for you"). So when you put a kid in front of a slice of pizza and a brussel sprout, the kid's naturally going to prefer the slice of pizza. | 759 |
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ELI5:Do people perceive colors the same way? In other words, is the red I see the same as the red everyone else sees? | 45 | Everything we've tested thus far suggests that we do. We all use the same light-sensitive molecules, which send the same nerve signals. Sure, it may be different at a brain level, but there is nothing to suggest anything other than an extremely similar experience. | 16 |
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[Harry Potter] Voldemort regards Trelawney as a quack and completely ignores her prophecy. How might events play out if he doesn't attack Potters to get rid of Harry? | Instead, he continues his regular plans of terrorizing/subjugating the wizarding world. | 17 | Had Voldemort not attacked Lily Potter, he would rule the world. Even if he'd "chosen" the Longbottom boy, Voldemort's power would unquestionable.
Severus Snape was a brilliant man. He was a wizard (almost) unrivaled, an extremely powerful duelist (even inventing spells and jinxes that only he knows to counter) and a gifted tactician. He's one of the strongest occlumency masters of his era, and is probably the single greatest living potions master. He knows the Dark Lord's dark heart, and *still* Snape asked for Lily to be spared. Snape begged for her.
And how high was Snape in Voldemort's esteem? Such that Voldemort offered Lily an opportunity to stand aside. Her choice, her *willing sacrifice* is what empowered Potter to defy him.
Had Voldemort gone after the Longbottoms, had one of his generals not put in a word for them, he'd have blown through the house like the force of nature he was. There was no reason to leave witnesses to the event. Had he not gone after anyone, the results would be no different.
In either case, Snape would have remained loyal. With such an ally, Voldemort would be unstoppable. The Order would not have known Voldemort's plans. They would have been sundered, and Dumbledore's few allies broken like reeds.
edit: accidentally a wrod | 37 |
Eli5: how can money lose value? | So ive always sort of understood the idea of inflation and that the dollar loses value, but ive never understood how? Like the more money in the market, the lesser the value, but correct me if im wrong in saying that money is an idea used to unify selling and spending in a quanitative way so people can fairly access what they’re purchasing/selling and its worth? So why not just make the amount of the currency whatever you want? It just seems like currency is an arbitrary number rather than something of actual significance and ive never understood that? | 42 | Let's say your family household is the nation's economy. Dad's making middle class income, you get $5 for doing chores, but buying a new $1,200 GameBox is expensive for the family.
Then Dad gets a raise. He's providing more value to his company, and in turn they're paying him 10x more! Now, the family can buy the new $1,200 GameBox without thinking about it. That's **good inflation** because while money is worth a little less to the family it's not because the dollars are worth less outside the home's economy. There's simply more money to go around, and anyone can spend more of it outside the household (read: foreign economy).
In another universe, Dad got his pay cut for being bad at his job. Now you're only getting $1 for the same chores because that's all the family can afford. You have to do 4x as many chores just to squeeze an extra $1 out of Mom. That's **Bad Deflation**, because the dollar's value outside the economy hasn't changed, but within the household the scarcity of dollars has made them worth more.
Turns out, Dad works for the US Mint printing dollar bills. He feels really bad about cutting your pay for the same work, so he prints himself off an extra $5000 at work and brings it home. Now the family can buy the $1200 GameBox because money isn't an issue, but they aren't providing any extra value to the global economy. That's **Bad Inflation**, because if Dad keeps doing it, GameBox will have to up their price to $12,000 because the dollar isn't worth as many chores as it used to be due to all the extra dollars going around.
**Good Deflation** occurs when the Mint fires dad and starts collecting all those extra bills Dad printed. This brings the GameBox price back down to $1,200 and prevents all the other global economies from riding a crazy roller coaster while they try to balance themselves again. Another example of Good Deflation would be when GameBox needs to stimulate their own economy and lowers the price to $500, so you don't need to do as much work to buy what you need because the dollars in your house are now worth more to GameBox's economy.
When trying to understand the Macro Economics of a nation that can print it's own bills, you'll go crazy trying to make all the numbers add up. It's best to imagine that every dollar given to the US Treasury/Federal Government (taxes, etc) is immediately taken out back and burned, removing it from the economy (Deflation). Then imagine every dollar spent by the Federal Government (roads, army, etc) as one that is freshly printed (Inflation).
This is why the US Congress doesn't have to actually balance their budget to zero expenses vs income. They literally print an infinite amount of new bills to pay for every program, and balance it with an estimate of what will be burned out back each year in taxes/fines/literal fires. Very smart people analyze every program and advise Congress how much a new program will inflate or deflate the dollar.
So, something like the COVID Stimulus prints a shitload of money, inflating the dollar, but giving us a short-term boost that helps people not starve. The theory is that we'll recoup it with taxes or stimulate some new industry that directly competes (and wins) with another country like China or Mexico, forcing them to lower their prices. | 50 |
Do transporters kill you and create an exact copy of your body in another location? | 15 | > "So, what's a transporter?" Cochrane asked, no longer caring how out of touch he seemed. Information was information, and he'd always been a quick study.
>
> "Matter-energy conversion," the ensign answered. She shifted her arm, apparently trying to find a more comfortable position than the sling would allow. "Converts you to energy, beams you to a new location, reconverts, and there you are."
>
> Cochrane felt his stomach drop out of him, and it wasn't the turbolift. He stared at his hand. It *looked* like the same one he'd been born with.
>
> "Are you all right, sir?"
>
> "That's terrible."
>
> "What?"
>
> Cochrane was appalled. Had human life become so cheap? So meaningless? "each time you're converted to energy, you're killed," Cochrane said. "What comes out the other end is just a duplicate that thinks it's the original."
>
> The ensign gave him a wide-eyed look that she might have reserved for a child. "You're thinking about old-fashioned matter replication, sir. In replication, the original is destroyed so that duplicates can be reconstructed at any time. But the transporter process operates on a quantum level. You're not destroyed and recreated; your actual, original molecules are tunneled to a new location. You're still you, sir. Believe me. We do things differently these days."
-- *Federation*, Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens | 22 |
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[Halo] I, an enlisted UNSC Marine, had my stamped and serialized rifle taken by a seven foot tall super soldier and replaced with a Covenant Plasma rifle. My CO is about to come by and inspect my gear, what do I tell him and what do my repercussions look like? | 1,380 | Whatever your mission was, it's secondary to whatever brought the Spartan there. You (and your CO) don't have the clearance to know more than that. ONI will come collect the plasma rifle and you'll be issued a new weapon. You may even get a commendation for your contribution. | 1,391 |
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[Game of Thrones] Why Jon Snow decided that it was morally justified to hang a kid that was manipulated by adults into intrigue that he didn't really understand due to his immaturity? | He could just send him to Shadow Tower or other castles.
Sometimes I think that Sandor Clegane could be right when he said to Sansa that it was lie that Eddard Stark didn't enjoy killing deserters and traitors, and maybe it applies to his children | 257 | I mean this is a medieval setting where modern concepts like immaturity and accountability are secondary concerns at best. This is a world where kids get their hands cut off for stealing bread, and even a "child" becomes an adult at about 14-15 years old that will be executed like anyone else if they're involved with treason.
And that's what happens in the more civilized parts of the world, conditions are far more brutal at the Wall. The Lord Commander can't afford *any* mercy for conspirators, or else they can just go ahead and start a new conspiracy against him. Olly won't be a kid for long, and it would be fairly easy for him to start gathering new conspirators at the Shadow Tower, hundreds of miles away from Castle Black.
Lastly, this wasn't just a case of Olly getting wrapped up in events beyond his control. He didn't just stand aside when they came for Jon or helped them in some indirect way, Olly looked his Lord Commander right in the eye and stabbed him in the heart. No sane lord or commander would ever allow that kind of traitor to live after that. | 526 |
ELI5: Why do counties have different names in different languages? | Example: Deutschland is Germany in English. Why dosnt everyone just call a country by the name it gives itself? | 49 | Translation into other languages, including mispronunciation and physical inability to pronounce certain sounds.
1) Translation: countries like the United States are just words. You can directly translate them into a different language. In Spanish, it's Estados Unidos. The words just happen to have pretty direct translations.
2) Mispronunciation: Turkey in Turkish is pronounced probably closer to the spelling Turkia. It's not that hard for an English speaker to try saying. But they didn't. Keep in mind, too, that country names can be very old. So at some point, the mispronunciation is simply the way you say it in that language.
3) Inability to pronounce certain sounds: language is interesting. We're born being *able* to learn and produce all phonetic sounds of any language. But at a very young age, you lose your ability to say sounds that aren't familiar.
In English, R and L are very different. In Japanese, they're very similar. You actually lose the ability to even *hear* the difference if you aren't exposed to it as a child. In Hindi, there are 3 different ways to pronounce the letter D. It's really hard as an English speaker to even tell any difference between them. And this is proven by experiment: if you slowly transition an R to an L step by step with computer programs, English speakers have a clearer threshold where R becomes L. Japanese speakers have a lot harder time having a consistent threshold of detecting which is which. Same thing for English speakers and the D's. | 46 |
[MCU] Grand Master's melting stick | Can it melts Thanos just like the peasant alien? | 16 | Maybe? No certain reason why not. The only feat that would suggest he could no-sell the stick is holding the power stone in his fist with little to no permanent damage
We know Stormbreaker can cut him, though, so sufficiently advanced tech/enough force/energy can definitely fuck him up.
The real problem is actually getting the chance to hit him with it | 24 |
ELI5: When fasting to promote Autophagy; how does the body know that they should go for the damaged and senescent cells first instead of healthy cells? | 46 | Healthy human cells have a protein called MHC 1 on their outer surface. When they are damaged, they tend to lose this protein. Your immune system uses natural killer cells to destroy this type of cell, and activates when your body needs to reclaim materials. Ntcs are active always, but increase activity when called. They search for cells without the MHC 1 protein and kill those first. If there are no more unlabeled cells, the body enacts stricter measures that will target healthy cells as well.
Hope this helps.
Source: just studied this in school | 15 |
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ELI5: Why are surgeries and operations usually held in early mornings? | Whenever I hear about someone going into surgery or when I myself had an operation, why is it that it's always early in the morning (around 5-7am)?
EDIT: Thank you everyone for your answers c: I didn't really expect this to be #1 on ELI5... | 2,927 | Edit: Thanks for the gold!
Early morning surgery is mostly about a condition called ileus.
Other commenters have pointed out that fasting compliance is greater before breakfast. While having an empty stomach for anesthesia induction is important (mostly to prevent stomach contents from going places they shouldn't -- like the lung) and likewise not having a lot of blood flow to the gut while maneuvering there is also good those are generally minor considerations (you can drain stomach contents fairly easily if required).
One of the more serious potential side effects of surgery and anesthesia is this condition called ileus, it is essentially when your intestines stop working because of surgery. This disease is caused by surgery and can be diagnosed as soon as the anesthesia wears off. While many cases resolve on their own (watch and wait), cases that don't have potential to cause serious harm to the patient. And because of how the gut works and the post-surgical medicines, by the time a patient complains of their symptoms, serious harm may be done. But what does that have to do with morning surgery?
Essentially, after you have completed surgery and recovery (which takes some time), your surgeon can then start to examine you for ileus (using a stethoscope to listen for activity, observing passing gas or a bowel movement). With early morning surgery, patients start recovering between lunch and dinner when their gut is primed for activity which when combined with the water (which can trick the body into starting the digestive process) makes the condition much easier to detect. Having the patient recovered from anesthesia also gives some 'lead time' to allow the disease to resolve itself (many cases of ileus resolve themselves within ~4 hours) before making decisions about whether to keep the person overnight. If you are doing a surgery starting at 2pm, by the time the person is out of recovery, they are already shutting down for the night, harder to hear whether ileus is present. (Another consideration for early morning surgery, is to avoid unnecessary drowsiness when out of anesthesia)
So with early morning surgery, you make the disease easier to find and prevent (at least some) people from staying overnight if they don't have to. There's lots of other more minor considerations and factors that make life easier, but the ileus is the big factor and why surgeons almost universally start surgery early.
Tl;dr: After recovery, fart for your surgeon, it will be music to their ears. | 1,056 |
ELI5 How come it took ~8 hours for Soyuz to reach the ISS which is about 250 miles from Earth, yet the Apollo missions took about three days to reach the Moon, almost 1,000x farther away? | In light of the recent Soyuz launch | 45 | docking with the ISS is a very delicate procedure, you dont want to come in too fast. they approach it much more slowly, whereas the Apollo missions, they had a trajectory and blasted off towards it at full speed and slowed down at pretty much the last second. ISS is also moving quickly and so catching up to it, approaching, and docking is a delicate, slow procedure that takes a long time, compared to shooting off as fast as you can towards a target a long distance away. | 19 |
Understanding Lacan's object petit a and anxiety as 'lack of the lack' | Ok, so in trying to understand the ins and outs of Lacan I am going through a variety of texts, which tbh, just leave me more confused than when I started.
So this is what my texts seem to be suggesting
\- object a is formulated as 'lack incarnated'
\- object a is 'the Real - the symbolic = more or less a fraction of the Real'
\- but this fraction of the Real is also the surplus which is jouissance.
**Question 1**: I have one text differentiating jouissance from desire, as the former goes 'beyond the pleasure principle' and I have one text stating that it is jouissance *cause desire*. If both right, how are these combined?
Furthermore:
\- One text states that object a, by 'not being there' allows for fantasy to cover and secure the lack (driving desire)
\- However, anxiety is mapped out as a 'too close proximity to the object cause of desire' (object a), which erases the necessary lack - thus hindering fantasy, hindering desire = anxiety (too close to the Real)
**Question 2:** If object a is 'lack incarnated' - how does the 'too close proximity' to it cancel out the lack necessary for desire? Because the above reasoning seems to suggest that removing object a would cure anxiety, but object a cannot be removed from the equation, right?
I feel like I am missing a vital step /component, but at this point, all texts are muddled and I can't detangle these questions on my own. Help is much appreciated!
And this might be baby-level Lacan, but what I am trying to get at is how anxiety is 'the failure of the fantasy' (fantasy as a compass and organiser of meaning for the subject and the connection to the Other and the symbolic order etc.) | 47 | I think the main issue with those concepts is that the meaning will depend on the period of Lacan we are talking about. In fact, object a is different if it's object a, object (a), or object *a*
I would recommend to take a step back and first tell us why do you need to understand object a, so we can point to what text will answer better that particular issue.
PS: Try to read Bruce Fink's translations, it tends to be much clearer than any other. | 15 |
ELI5: If a company or website gets hacked, why does it matter how strong my password is? Isn’t it more important that I don’t re-use a password? | If a site gets hacked, am I at any sort of advantage by having a complicated password, or does it not really matter at that point? | 33 | Any company worth its salt will store your password in a form called a hash. This is you password scrambled up and reduced in size with math, so it’s near impossible to get your original password back. The standard practice for hackers once they get the hash is to do the same math at all sorts of different passwords to see if your hash comes out. This is the reason you have complicated passwords. More possible different passwords make this so much more difficult.
So once they plug the hole in their security, the hackers won’t be able to just log in using your password. They wouldn’t have figured it out. | 41 |
CMV: It's preposterous to assume that we should have discovered alien life forms by now. | First, a quick timeline.
1. The universe is theorized to have begun 13.8 billion years ago.
2. About 10-17 million years after the Big Bang, [Abraham Loeb](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014IJAsB..13..337L/abstract) speculates that primitive lige might be in princile have appeared during this window.
3. Our solar system is about [13.6 billion years old.](https://www.space.com/263-milky-age-narrowed.html)
4. The modern human race is estimated to be about [200,000-300,000 years old.](https://inews.co.uk/news/science/how-old-human-race-age-homo-sapiens-conflict-with-scientists-821239)
5. Through modern science, we have been exploring outer space [since roughly 1899](https://www.worldcat.org/title/ufo-encyclopedia/oclc/26211869)
Given this timeline, we have had even the faintest ability to detect alien life form for 120 years out of ~13.8 billion years of possible life form's existence. That number is 8.69565217e-9.
Given the almost 0 amount of time that we have been looking, it seems damn near impossible that we would have found anything during that timeline. What am I missing that would make me think that we could have possibly found life by now?
edit: lot's of people are wondering why I'm bringing numbers into this. My main point is that we have been around for such a short amount of all time. species may have come and gone one million times over the past 13.8 billion years. We've only been around for thousands of years. It's more likely than not that we've not knocked on someones door yet, or that no one has knocked on ours. Imagine being given a lifetime to find a needle in a haystack the size of texas. If i've been looking for 3 minutes, It's preposterous to have expected me to find the needle at that point. | 1,011 | The assumption here is that we are the only ones looking outward and that the other species from other planets are not also looking to contact us.
Given your timeline, what happens if a species developed long before us? In terms of earth, what happens if the asteroid doesn't kill the dinosaurs and one of those species evolves into the dominant intelligence on earth (giving a several million year jump forward on development).
While our reach is limited, given the massive size of the universe and the probability that in one of those corners a species did not have the same catastrophic setback, there is good reason to assume that there is a more developed species able to conduct the kind of contact you are referring to. | 235 |
[ELI5] what does it mean when an abandoned car on the highway has a white bag or object hanging out from the window? | 169 | There are certain laws pertaining to cars left on the side of the road. After a certain amount of time the car is considered abandoned and will be towed off the road.
A white object (like a shirt or towel) is the the sign that you will be returning to the car and are not just abandoning it.
| 61 |
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ELI5: How do ticks expand so much despite having an exoskeleton? | 101 | If you look at them way up close, using a scanning electron microscope, you can see that their exoskeleton is folded, finely corrugated, so that it can expand to what seems like a huge size. You can often see clusters or patches of bacteria on the exoskeleton, and it seems obvious that when a tick breaks open, as they sometimes do, the bacteria could easily mingle with the blood meal. That is especially bad because ticks can heal themselves when they’re torn open. When you squeeze one, trying to get it off of your skin, you can then easily inject those bacteria into your wound. | 89 |
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ELI5: How did Unidan (and other people) get caught manipulating votes? | 15 | There's probably a bot that tracks which users upvote which topics from which IP adress and it found a pattern of Unidan starting a topic and specific accounts with specific IP's immediately upvoting all those topics. | 15 |
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ELI5: Why do oil rigs at sea have a constant flame burning on top of them? Natural gas? And why couldn't it be collected as well instead of wasting it? | 40 | Yes it is natural gas. Oil reservoirs usually come with an associated pocket of natural gas. It could be collected if they wanted to but often its not economical to build the additional infrastructure required to capture and transport it so they just burn it off. | 36 |
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CMV: Even if I'm a pro - DIY stands for "Do-It-Yourself" so as long as I did it myself, it's a DIY. | The title basically, I was joking with my friends about a new car I bought. It happened to be from my company and a model I actually worked on. So I called it a DIY jokingly. My friend got all prickly and said that it's not a DIY since I am a professional.
Obviously, it's NOT a DIY in that particular scenario since I didn't build the entire car myself, but the "pro" argument is what stuck with me. ~~That makes no sense. DIY stands for "Do It Yourself", how does professional experience have anything to do with it? If I'm a general contractor and I decide to build my own patio... well nothing about that sentence changes the fact that I did it myself which is what the word means literally. I mean it's in the name...~~
Update: One of the commenters below has tweaked my view a bit - would love to keep the conversation going on this adjusted premise.
*How you execute the project and with what tools determines DIY-ness.. not my status as a professional?*
IE :
||Professional|Amateur|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Professional Equipment|Not DIY|DIY|
|Amateur Equipment|DIY|DIY|
​ | 75 | Words and terms are rarely literal and rarely match an exact dictionary definition.
"DIY" stands for "Do-it-yourself", but it also implies a sort of amateurism and custom/impromptu workmanship to it. A totally standard job, done to professional standards, that just happens to have been done at the contractor's own patio rather than a client's, does not necessarily meet the spirit of DIY even if that person literally Did It Themselves. Similarly, if you had bought a kit car and built it in your professional shop, it'd be kind of odd to call that a DIY, but if some rando bought a kit car and assembled it in their garage it'd be a lot closer to the spirit of DIY. | 61 |
Do veins grown in the same pattern in every body or is it unique like fingerprints? | 9,668 | Both kinda. There are veins in roughly the same spots in everyone but they are also slightly different and different veins are more pronounced in different people. With arteries more than veins, but somewhat with veins. this is why it's important to check the functionality of other vessels in the area before procedures etc to make sure blood is still able to circulate if a vein is taken for a graft or an artery is occluded temporarily | 5,158 |
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ELI5: Why when taking a photo on your smartphone is there a clear difference when you're using zoom, even though the quality hasn't visibly changed. | 22 | Smartphones generally^1 have only what is known as "digital zoom".
This is as opposed to "optical zoom". Optical zoom is when the lens moves or changes in some way, enabling you to get a close-up of the subject, still with the same high resolution (i.e. lots of megapixels).
Now, imagine that you take a photo without zooming at all. Then, you cut out the edges of that photo leaving only the middle bit (and obviously fewer megapixels), but you make it so that the remaining middle bit takes up the whole of the screen by zooming in on it with your computer.
This is "digital zoom". When you zoom on your smart phone, it literally just ignores the edge part of the picture, and gives you the middle part, and that obviously has fewer megapixels in it than the whole picture did.
Is this a problem? Almost certainly not if you're only going to show the picture on a screen (e.g. upload it to Facebook), but fewer megapixels makes it less suitable for printing, especially if you want to print at photo-quality.
^1 Note that some smartphones now have started to include a form of optical zoom, for example the iPhone 7+ uses two different lenses so that one can be adjusted in the factory for normal photos and the other for fully zoomed photos. Then, for something in between, it uses software to combine the two images. This is a relatively new feature, though, and doesn't apply to most smartphones. | 13 |
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[Transformers] Why does Megatron put up with Starscream? | The dude’s openly insubordinate and not particularly competent. Why hasn’t Megatron killed him? Or at least fired/demoted/imprisoned/literally anything other than keeping him around. | 47 | Starscream keeps Megatron on his toes - if he didn't have to watch out for constant murder attempts, he'd lose his edge.
It's actually the general policy among Decepticons - if someone beats you to take your job, they're probably more deserving of it anyway. | 63 |
[Bioshock]Could Andrew Ryan have done anything, made certain ideological compromises, to keep his "utopia" from crumbling into chaos? | Instead of, y'know, allowing bastards-take-all, laissez-faire, dog eat dog market forces to determine literally everything. | 47 | Could he have? Probably. Would he have? Almost certainly not. Andrew Ryan was so convinced of the perfection of his system, that he didn't even recognise it crumbling around him. What did he do when people started getting jacked up on super-mutagenic-slug-juice? Ensure a more stable, and more profitable supply. Even in the end, it wasn't his vision that caused Rapture to collapse, it was others trying to compromise it. At least in his eyes. | 45 |
Do stars that are about to go supernova cause any visual cues before it actually happens? | Hello,
as title says do stars that are about to go supernova create any actual visual cues in them when they are getting close to going supernova like lets say when they enter into iron fusion phase (or any other phases such as silicon) or area about to enter into it and yes im aware that stars cannot fuse iron. Besides them dimming would observer notice any noticable difference in their orbit in it such as sudden colour change, more violent shedding of their outer layers or are visual cues too slow to rise from core that they do not have time to make it into surface before star goes supernova? Would i notice something different in orbit rather than light-years away such as case in betelgeuse dimming?
What about sudden tempature changes or any other noticable differences before supernova or moments before it? Would i really see star rupture in half if i could see it in slow motion enough? Thank you in advance for answers. | 15 | Towards the end of central carbon burning, the core evolves too rapidly for the envelope to respond, or more precisely the nuclear timescale of the core becomes shorter than the thermal timescale of the envelope. At the temperatures required for advanced burning stages, neutrino losses become increasingly important and completely dwarf other losses by the time carbon is centrally depleted. In order to support itself, energy generation in the core has to exceed these losses, so fuel is burnt through increasingly rapidly.
In addition, the large neutrino losses mean that energy generated in the core cannot go towards supporting the envelope. This is instead achieved by energy generation in the hydrogen and helium burning shells outside the CO core.
Both of the above factors mean that evolution of the core is effectively decoupled from that of the envelope sometime during carbon burning, so there will not be any visible changes on the surface beyond the typical (and usually quite significant) variability of evolved massive stars. The first electromagnetic signal we will receive is therefore the appearance of the supernova itself. Note that core-collapse precedes this by hours and is detectable as a burst of neutrinos if near enough. A detectable gravitational wave signal should also be produced. | 11 |
[Mario Bros] How good are the Mario Bros plumbing services? Are they affordable? I feel like I never hear anything about jobs they do from clients - so maybe they're a front for drug running or something? | 28 | They’re very good. You’re unlikely to be able to hire them though, they’re on contract with the Mushroom Kingdom at the moment and have an impeccable record at removing Koopas and Goombas from the pipes. | 25 |
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Are there strains of HIV that aren’t detectable by modern testing? | (Edited to meet guidelines)
Hello all,
Are there any cases where an individual might test negative (outside of the window period) using HIV RNA PCR & antibody/antigen testing despite actually being positive?
Is it possible that someone might have some weird/rare mutation that causes the HIV RNA PCR test to not detect any HIV despite it being present?
If so, would that mutation also impact the HIV antibodies to where they are also not detectable?
Thank you for your time. | 81 | The tests don’t look for single places; they check for a wide range of HIV components, and HIV effects. For a virus to avoid all the components that are tested for, it would no longer be a functional HIV. | 39 |
ELI5:Why hasn't wikipedia gone to an ad based model yet if they are losing money? | Almost annually Wikipedia asks for money to help support their costs. I don't see how the one time a year they ask for money solves anything and it's only a matter of time before they go to ads. | 52 | Because they really don't want to. Wikipedia has always been ad free and user supported. People donate year round, not just at the donation drive. They start the donation drive when money gets thin. So far, its always worked. As long as they only have to pester you for a short time out of the year, they see that as far more ideal than having ads year round. One of the big tenants of wikipedia is also neutrality. The many wikipedia pages are (usually, and if not they get fixed) written in a manner so as not to support any one side, but remain factual. Having ads on wikipedia would be inherently not neutral. | 80 |
In the U.S., if the polio vaccination rate was the same as COVID-19, would we still have polio? | 10,955 | Yes. Polio's estimated r0 is 5 to 7. You would need vaccine coverage of at least 80-86% to even begin to reach herd immunity. Which means you would more realistically need 95+% coverage to really keep it knocked down. | 6,884 |
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[The Legend of Zelda] It seems like nearly major tragic event that is prophesied throughout Hyrule is prophesied happen to a Zelda. Why does the royal family continue to name their daughters Zelda? | I mean, yeah, there's a chance that *this* Zelda *may* end up not being the one that will be captured and forced to entrust the defense of her kingdom to a green-hatted twink, but why bother taking the chance when this has happened dozens of times before and seemingly only to those named Zelda? | 35 | It began as a way to honor the first Zelda, who was the Goddess Hylia in human form. At this point, while Zelda was a common name for the princess of the Hylian Royal Family, it was not the only name used.
Generations passed, and a Zelda was born to a King of Hyrule. This King also had a son, The Prince of Hyrule.
For reason unknown fully, the King did not pass the entirety of the Triforce to his son. While The Prince was given two pieces of the Triforce, the third was hidden away.
Only Princess Zelda knew the location of this third piece. A Magician working for The Prince tried to interrogate her, but she would not relinquish the secret. In his anger, the magician cast a spell that put Zelda into an eternal slumber.
The Prince, grief-stricken at the loss of his sister, codified the tradition. He put into law that all the daughters of the Hylian Royal Family will be named Zelda, as to never forget the tragedy and the foolishness that led to it. | 32 |
CMV: Living with your significant other is not a good idea. | I'm pretty liberal with just about all my social views but on this one I'm more conservative. I do not feel this way for religious reasons. Here are my reasons:
**1) It sets a bad frame.** When boyfriends/girlfriends live together, it almost always seems to not end well. Lots of people justify it by saying, "if we get married, we should probably live together first to see if we are compatible this way. After all, if we get married we'll be doing this for the rest of our lives." But this is the wrong frame for approaching marriage.
It's like you're "trying each other out" before committing. Like "well, let's give this a shot to see if I can commit to you." It's like you're just seeing if you could cohabitate with a person you LOVE. As the cheesy saying goes, you know that person is "the one" not because you think you could live with him/her. It's because you know you CAN'T live without him/her. In other words, simply cohabitating is very minor in comparison to the other factors that make a marriage work.
It seems like your mindset is "let's see if we can do this" rather than "I love you and we will make it work together."
**2) It makes marriage almost pointless.** Marriage is an enormous life decision. I agree, some people rush into it too quickly (trust me, I'm from the south- I see it happen all the time). Marriage is not easy- you and your spouse will fight, you will need some alone time, everything becomes "we" rather than "I".
You start a life together. Part of starting a life together means moving in together- sleeping under the same roof, paying the bills together, maybe having kids.
When you're already living together, it's like not much really changes. It sort of devalues the big life change that marriage brings. It's like after the honeymoon, you say "well that was fun" and now you just have a nice ring to wear.
Also, we all know couples fight. It's life. You and your SO will probably fight over petty bullshit that comes with living together. Turning the heat on too high, leaving dirty dishes out, being untidy, issues involving family, partying too much, whatever. Fights happen. Sometimes these fights get nasty and both people need some alone time. I for one LOVE some alone time. Yes, this happens in marriage too, but the thing is, when you get married, you go into it knowing that. You know shit will happen but you COMMIT to one another to love each other no matter what. When you're simply cohabitating, that commitment isn't necessarily there, which brings me to my last point...
**3) It can either end badly or continue on to marriage.** I don't see much middle ground here. And to be honest (apologies to those I offend) I do not have faith that most marriages following cohabitation are healthy. Also, I've heard story after story of unmarried couples living together... then a breakup happens... then months of awkwardness ensue. They have to share a bed (or one sleeps on the couch) while one of them searches for other places to live in the mean time. If it's a really nasty breakup one moves out while still paying half the rent and finding a way to move their shit out of the house/apartment.
One girl I knew who used to live with her boyfriend- her BF's parents owned the apartment and after the breakup she slept on the couch. I went over there once after the breakup and while she and he were at least on talking terms, it was still uncomfortable. He had his friends over and she had hers... and it was like there was an invisible wall in the house. She told us how she was looking for new places and had X weeks to be moved out, etc. etc. etc. It was very strange and just reaffirmed how I never want to do that.
Change my view.
**Edit: Pretty much all of my responses have been downvoted. You're entitled to disagree with me, but grow up and tell me why I'm wrong rather than hitting the downvote button. It doesn't change views- it makes this sub seem like a circlejerk. It's for weeding out posts that don't contribute to discussion.**
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | 16 | It seems your view is built upon a very specific vision of marriage itself and as the natural continuity (end ?) to relationships rather than cohabitation itself. You seem to portray marriage as both a *very* important milestone, when, really, it should be the least important and strict positive, when there's no reason to believe that.
> 1) It sets a bad frame.
This is only true if you think marriage is the logical and necessary end of any serious relationship and not an additional milestone on a non-linear progression chart. If you don't see cohabitation as a "marriage preparation", that issue is non-existent. Additionally, when you start living together, you'll face the exact same issues married or not. Marriage, in this case, is simply an additional level of awkwardness. Marriage won't make it work better. Quite the opposite in fact.
> 2) It makes marriage almost pointless. Marriage is an enormous life decision.
Same thing here. If marriage is such a big deal, you're already doing it wrong. Marriage doesn't, or rather shouldn't, change who you are or the way your relationship function. If you expect it to do so, you're not doing relationships properly. If you think you need to love and be fully committed to each-other before marrying, therefore fixing any following issues, there's no reason not to apply the same reasoning to cohabitation.
> 3) It can either end badly or continue on to marriage.
It can also continue exactly as it is, just like marriage. Besides, by your own mindset, that's true for *everything* in a relationship. Some people live together for *decades* without ever getting married. Marriage is *not* necessary. It's not a relationship failure to not marry. | 44 |
eli5 Anti-Aircraft guns. WW1/WW2 era | How did soldiers control the altitude at which anti-aircraft ammunition (flak) detonated? How could they know if the flak rounds would go off at 5000 feet, 10,000 feet etc? Were they magnetized somehow to detonate near aircraft? First post. Please be kind. Lol. | 45 | Early shells were detonated by a simple timer. Slight changes to the time meant explosions at different heights. Flak was a random shot in the dark, not very efficient.
During WW2 the British developed a rugged vacuum tube that could be used to make tiny radio transmitter/receiver. When close to metal aircraft, the radio signal would be reflected back to the receiver, triggering the explosion. This was the first proximity fuze. | 62 |
[Avatar TLA/Korra] What if I'm the next Avatar but I don't really care about it? I just wanna stay in my peaceful village and live my normal life? | I have great mastery of all the bending of element, I've even had visits from a few emissaries from other nations telling me to come with them...but I want to stay in my village with my mom and dad, so I humbly declined. I don't really care about being some great being. I never asked to be the Avatar, it's great I have these powers but I'm not obliged to do anything and the problems of the world are not mine to fix. Can I just live my life like a normal person? Will I attract trouble? | 71 | That's exactly what Aang wanted, and he tried to run from being Avatar as a result. The end result was the world got totally fucked up.
It's a heavy burden, but trying not to fulfill it has dire consequences. You're job is to keep the world in balance. You may argue you have no obligation to do it, but the world literally depends on you performing that duty. | 133 |
How do scientists discover new ways of combating diseases? In other words, how do scientists determine how and what to start looking for to cure diseases like HIV/cancer/etc.? | I understand the scientific method, medical studies, and that sort of thing to determine whether a particular method of combating a disease is effective. What I'm having a harder time understanding is how we even begin to figure out that 'such and such' virus or bacteria or antibiotic or whatever is actually really specifically useful in getting rid of another particular kind of bacteria/virus. | 33 | The major challenge in finding a new way to combat a disease is understanding the biology that underlies the disease itself. The approach to finding an answer to a biology question is rarely clear, and depends on the question being asked in the first place, so your question can only really be answered on a case-by-case basis. When we're looking for ways to treat a disease we therefore usually only have a partial/incomplete understanding of a disease, which tends to come back and bite us in clinical trials. Still, since it will be an extremely long time until we will be able to say that we 'fully' understand any disease, and we need treatments now, the show must go on. In pharma, there are two major drug discovery approaches: High throughput screening and rational drug design.
You can run a high throughput screen without even understanding very much about the etiology of the disease you are trying to combat. All you need is a decent model for your disease that you can grow quickly and at a small scale--if you are fighting a bacterium, you can use the bacteria you are trying to fight. If you are looking for a molecule that affects cancer cells, you can grow cancer cells in plates. Then, you can take a big library of different molecules (think: millions of different compounds at a big pharma company) and just try them all at a very small scale to see if any of them work. If you have a good model you can run these screens efficiently enough so that the effort is worthwhile. Taxol is a great example of a blockbuster chemotherapeutic that came out of a high throughput screen. The major drawback to running a high throughput screen is that your compound library is often untargeted, so you have no way of knowing if you are even barking up the right tree unless you work out a lot of the biology surrounding the disease first. Also, even though the sheer number of compounds in some of these libraries is very large, they often are biased towards compounds that are easy to make from a synthetic point of view, and therefore often do not cover as much 'chemical space' as the big number might lead you to believe.
Rational drug design requires a bit more knowledge about what molecular mechanisms underlie the disease in the first place. If you know that stopping the function of some protein would prevent your infectious microbe from being viable, or mitigate the growth of your tumor, then you can use your knowledge of chemistry to design a drug that will simply bind to that protein very tightly and stop it from functioning properly. This is a lot easier said than done--it is pretty tough to predict how a molecule will bind to a protein, and most of the computational models that we have to help us out are barely coming into their own. This approach has still been very successful though; Gleevec is the poster child of rational drug design and a quick read of its development history will probably give you a better idea of how rational drug design works.
| 14 |
[Star Wars] Are non-force sensitives immune to the Dark Side corruption? | It is often shown that some Sith artifacts and holocrons have a corrupting influence on Jedis, slowly turning them to the Dark Side.
But would a normal person, with no force sensitivity whatsoever, be immune to this influence? And if not, would said person gain any power along with the corruption? | 46 | > But would a normal person, with no force sensitivity whatsoever, be immune to this influence?
So this can be taken two ways. Either they are not gifted like Jedi/Sith are or are outside of the force (ie Yuuzhan Vong). They have different answers, so I'll address them both.
1. They are weak in the force: Because the force still flows through them, they can and will be corrupted by the dark side. There's cases where entire villages, up to even planets, have been under dark side corruption so long that it actually twists their bodies as well as their minds, going so far as to turn them into different species.
1. They are outside the force: Yes, they're completely immune to the Dark Side, but for some reason this tends to have a negative effect on their mental state if they are part of a species that once was force sensitive.
> And if not, would said person gain any power along with the corruption?
For the people that can get corrupted, not really. The ones that turn into beasts do gain strength, agility, etc, but at the cost of their faculties. It's like the One Ring from Lord of the Rings, only Gollumn is actually an ideal outcome, because at least you have some measure of freewill. | 26 |
Do some languages have more mature compilers and therefore produce better binaries? | C has existed for a long time and is still in use in high performance situations.
Go is fairly new.
If I write a substantial program in both languages (using only the intersection of features), will the C program have more advanced compiler optimisations and therefore run faster? | 48 | Potentially, but not necessarily. Some features of the language give it implicitly more speed. For example, Golang has garbage collection which is inherently slower than manual memory handling like what is done in C.
Sometimes this is a double-edged sword, as Go makes it easier to do complicated things at scale consistently, whereas having a minor memory issue in C is more likely and it could slow down the application. | 35 |
[Pokemon] Hey I'm looking for a pet pokemon for my son and I have a few questions | My son is turning eight in a few months and he's been begging me for a Pokemon. I never had one growing but I think it would be a good experience for him. Let me be clear: he wants one for a pet not for fighting. Honestly, my wife and I aren't even sure if we feel like Pokemon fighting is ethical. Seems a bit cruel. My son is a bit obsessed with Pikachus but I'm afraid of him getting accidentally electrocuted by it. I also hear Growlithes are popular but I'm also afraid of him getting set on fire. So we were leaning towards a normal type like Meowth that should be less dangerous. Or are we overreacting? My wife's grandfather, who used to be a gym leader, says we're coddling him too much and there's nothing to worry about. So what Pokemon should I get my son as a pet. | 31 | Honestly, typing isn't as important as temperament. Of the three you mentioned, Meowth is the most temperamental and if your son is super young it's not the wisest pet to get since the claws will come out if your kid pulls its tail or something. A Pikachu on the other hand, when upset, is more likely to let out a static shock than anything dangerous. Growlithe are easy to train and very friendly, but can be very aggressive towards strangers. They're police Pokemon for a reason. | 30 |
[Pinocchio] Could Geppetto have been rich if Pinocchio didn't turn into a real boy and he can infinitely sell firewoods using his infinitely growing nose? | 66 | Gepetto was already rich by the standards of the day. He owned his own business, could afford to send his child to school, could head off on an adventure trying to find his lost boy, etc.
Infinite firewood isn't that big a deal. The stuff already grows on trees. | 86 |
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CMV: r/fragilewhiteredditor should not be allowed to exist on this website. | Title says it all. That subreddit is a veil used to discriminate against people of a specific skin color. How is this not racist? I’m confused, why is discrimination against people of lighter skin apparently acceptable but any other form of discrimination is abhorrent. It is a double standard and riddled with fallacies. The subreddit should not be allowed to exist if other subreddits were removed for far less. I’m sure I’ll get PMs or comments accusing me of being a fragile white redditor. Be that is it may, discrimination in any form is wrong and the double standards present on this website is infuriating.
Edit: thank you to the people who engaged in civil dialogue with me. To everyone else, think about how you are approaching people with opposing opinions. We need to be able to have conversations like these without jumping to conclusions. I am not racist, never really have been. Just don’t believe discrimination against an ethnicity in any form is acceptable. Thanks y’all.
2nd edit:
Thanks for alll the messages calling me slurs such as “mayonnaise monkey”, “honky” and a “nazi”. Very telling. | 145 | White fragility is a real thing and it doesn't mean that white people are snowflakes by some genetic inferiority. It's simply the phenomenon that conversations about race tend to be uncomfortable for white people for a variety of reasons.
This makes "fragility" an entirely different form of "discrimination" than anything else. It's not an offensive stereotype. It's an observable phenomenon. It's not a put-down. It's an important sociological phenomenon that people need to understand.
As a white person, understanding white fragility has been amazingly helpful for navigating conversations involving race. That's something that can't be said for a simple insult like you seem to understand "white fragility" to be. | 34 |
ELI5: How have beauty standards changed so much throughout the years? Wouldn't what humans find attractive be genetically ingrained into our heads and not really allow standards to change over time? | 63 | A lot of the things we find attractive are not physical attributes but does have different physical manifestations depending on technology and culture. For instance we are attracted to wealth. Previously wealthy people were fat and sat indoor all day as opposed to poor people who were skinny, fit and dark as they worked outside on the fields all day. But as times have changed poor people started working inside and the current symbol of wealth is to have time to exercise and have a nice golden natural skin color. | 70 |
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ELI5: why do I feel like I hear people when I'm listening to music with headphones on when no one is actually calling me or saying something? | 20 | I answered this question few times before. It's called voice pareidolia, your brain is always looking for patterns he is familiar with, because from evolutionary standpoint it's very good for your survival. | 11 |
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[MCU] What would Vision be like with a different Infinity Stone in his head? | 137 | I think the reason stark and banner were able to create vision via the mind stone in the first place was that the mind stone is "programmed" in a way that it can read,create and is generally related with the concept of mind.
So a different stone may still be a good source of power for vision(power stone) , and his body,but he needs to already have a "mind" in order to be called human.Also a different stone needs a different way to harness it's power for sure. | 127 |
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ELI5: Why does Kim Jong Un always have a following of military officials? | It looks like he's part of the League of Doom, but using the buddy system to not get separated... In every picture I see of him, he's always inspecting something with a bunch of military officials following him around, either taking notes or just standing there. Why? | 26 | Both previously posted answers are not answering OP's question. It's not about Kim inspecting military units, it's about the entourage following him around, even when he is visiting apparently Civilian facilities.
There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, even apparently Civilian projects like the infamous ski resort, many factories and other projects are managed and run by the military, which controls large parts of the economy - or what's left of it. So some of those people following Kim around on his visits (or "guidance tours", as the North Korean propaganda calls it) are actually just in charge there and are expected to immediately enact any changes Kim suggests. That's the reason for their note taking.
Secondly, some of those officials are simply members of the inner circle. Un's uncle was very often participating for example. You have to imagine North Korea's elite around Kim Jong-Un traveling around the country via train and helicopter, visiting military units, farms and factories in an attempt to appear close to the people. Those visits are not just visits. Kim Il-Sung, Un's grandfather, was painted as a genius among men by the propaganda and with it comes the expectation that he's infallible and an expert in every field. His son and grandson have "inherited" this quality. The idea is, as previously mentioned, that they are giving crucial advice to the people during their visits.
Of course, this is mostly bogus. There are a few dozen farms, factories and shops specifically created for propaganda purposes and those facilities receive a majority of those visits - while producing nothing or very little. Sometimes foreigners are shown around there and most quickly realize their real purpose. | 11 |
[Watchmen]Has anyone tried to replicate Dr. Manhattan's transformation? Any success? Why not? | By transformation, I'm referring of course to Jon Osterman's death and reemergence as Dr. Manhattan. | 30 | Jon's force of will and knowledge of watchmaking (making tiny parts work together into a much bigger, more intricate thing), in order to re-assemble himself are probably more important than the equipment... | 42 |
CMV: We live in a society designed for "Morning People", but this system should be abolished and replaced with one that favors "Night People". | The idea that individuals have circadian rhythms that determine their sleep behavior is [well studied](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17936039). For the purposes of this CMV, I'm assuming this phenomenon is at least semi-accurate for most of the population. I am also assuming we live in a society that is based around the sleep patterns of morning people.
However, my view is that society would be better off if it catered to so-called "Night-owls". Night owls are shown to be more intelligent, more personable, and more productive than morning people. [However, there is empirical evidence that they suffer from a kind of "social jet-lag" that results in less happiness, less white matter in the brain, and more self-reports of feeling tired](http://www.medicaldaily.com/night-owls-smarter-new-study-suggests-late-bed-late-rise-leads-greater-workplace-success-244753).
My hypothesis is that Night owls show increased aptitude *despite* suffering through unfavorable conditions. If presented with favorable conditions, such as a societal system of late-to-bed, late-to-rise, we would see an even more pronounced productivity and success from these people, which would benefit society as a whole.
We no longer live in a strictly agrarian society. "Business Hours" as they stand are arbitrary, and in an increasingly international business world, strict hours become even less reasonable. We have lived under the tyranny of morning people for too long. Their antiquated and inefficient system must be abolished. Long Live the Night Owl. Long Live the New Flesh. CMV.
Edit: Added more sources to support some of my assertions: [One](https://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/paid2009.pdf) [Two](http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Morningness%E2%80%93eveningness-and-intelligence-early-to-bed-early-to-rise-will-likely-make-you-anything-but-wise.pdf) [Three](http://marric.us/files/CSTA_learnjournal.pdf#page=76) [Four](http://cordis.europa.eu/news/rcn/30721_en.html) | 32 | How is society designed for morning people?
Aren't we just sticking to working in daylight because it makes things easier (e.g. construction work during the day vs. the dark night) and sleeping when the sun is down because it easier to sleep in the dark? | 33 |
[John Carpenter's The Thing][The Blob] Which would hurt worse: being assimilated by the Thing or being eaten by the Blob? | 27 | I feel like the Blob is probably more painful. Its pretty much grabbing you and digesting you, so an acid or something like it is pulling you apart on a molecular level. When the Thing assimilates you, id imagine it takes over your nervous system, slowly dulling the pain until you cease to exist. | 27 |
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ELI5 how does nausea work? Does the level or degree to which you feel nauseous have anything to do with surface area of your stomach? Or what mechanism determines how nauseous you feel in a given situation? | 6,678 | Nurse here. Part of our brain (known as the medulla oblongata) senses substances (or chemicals) that tell our bodies they are sick or under extreme stress. When these substances are detected it triggers a warning to stop whatever you’re doing eating, spinning around fast, etc. That warning is nausea. There is a second part in the same area of the brain that gets triggered and causes the muscles involved in puking to contract and cause you to vomit. Vomiting is the body’s way of expelling something potentially harmful from inside you.
Vomiting can have lots of triggers including illness, driving in a car, slow movement of food through your stomach/intestines, certain smells, hormones, exercise, anxiety, drugs, etc.
Some people’s systems are more sensitive than others simply just because we are all unique individuals. Also, since the brain is part of your nervous system having an overreactive nervous system or certain medical conditions can make you more prone to nausea/vomiting. | 3,991 |
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ELI5: Why have we only just discovered Proxima Centauri B, despite discovering thousands of other exoplanets hundreds of light-years away? | 18 | Because it is relatively small and most of those other exoplanets we've found are supergiants. Planets so big they significantly block out the light from their star, or even shift their star in space, are much easier to find than a smaller planet even if it is a lot closer. | 10 |
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ELI5: How come you can't really taste the food that's in your mouth if you don't breathe through your nose? | 126 | Much of what we think of as taste is really smell. Your tongue can only sense a small number of flavours (salt, sweet, bitter, sour, umami and perhaps fat) but your nose can sense hundreds of smells. | 54 |
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Is it possible to create a device that acts like a mechanical nose to determine what a certain smell is made up of? For example when you notice a familiar scent but you can't explain what it is. | 2,684 | Yes, those devices exist, and there are several types, but the most common of them is called a gas chromatograph. The principle of operation is fairly simple. A sample that you wish to analyze is injected into a long, narrow column that is packed or lined with absorbent material. An inert gas, usually helium, is flowed through the column to carry all the materials through until they reach a detector at the exit of the column. If you injected a mixture, those different molecules will flow through the column at different rates, allowing you to separate complex mixtures.
If your detector is coupled to a mass spectrometer, then you can often determine exactly what molecule came out of the column at each point in time. By doing this, many materials, not just smelly ones, can be identified. | 1,260 |
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ELI5: Why is Venezuela so destroyed at the moment? | 36 | Venezuela is like that kid you knew in high school who was SUPER irresponsible but had rich parents. You know the kid who's parents bought them a new car and then totaled it within three months? You know the kid who got bought $300 designer sneakers and then "lost" them that weekend? You know the kid who has all sorts of nice shit that is completely broken and banged up because he didn't take care of it? That's Venezuela.
Their government is STUPID, CORRUPT, EVIL, LAZY, and UNCARING but they had rich parents (oil revenue) and could cover all their failings up by just buying more and more stuff. However when oil prices dropped suddenly not only could they not afford new stuff, they discovered that all the stuff they had previously bought was worthless because they didn't take care of it, or sold it for weed money, etc. | 52 |
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Why does the ticking of my clock mess with the display on my TV? | I have an analog clock hanging on the wall about 4 feet away from my LCD HDTV. My TV is connected to my laptop via HDMI when I use it, as I don't have cable. If I don't have a video or music playing on the TV (i.e. if I just have Facebook open), there is interference on the display of the TV in time with the ticking of the clock. The interference kind of reminds me of the horizontal lines that used to happen when you played a VHS tape. What is causing this interference? Thanks! | 43 | Battery powered clock? Usually those use a pulsed electromagnet to advance the gearing once per second. They create a small "EMP" electromagnetic pulse. Tune an AM radio between stations, and it may pick up the one-second pulse as a click sound.
But this shouldn't affect your TV unless it has a poorly shielded (bad) video cable. | 12 |
[Daredevil] Does Daredevil has some sort of healing factor? | The man constantly walks off broken ribs, puncture wounds and concussions. Does he have some sort of minor healing factor or am I meant to believe he's really good at ignoring pain? | 40 | Technically no, but Stick did teach him several chi and life force healing techniques, so he can heal faster than normal. It's not genetic or chemical based, so it's not a 'healing factor' in the strictest sense. In theory anyone could learn them in the Marvel comic book universe if they had the force of will, time and training. | 75 |
What would happen if I swallowed a ball bearing and went for an MRI scan? | 329 | ## Do not try this.
Its fairly likely that as you enter the MRI room that the metal detector would go off, and you wouldn't get anywhere near the magnet. (At the ~10 MRI machine rooms I've been to, all have had a metal detector surrounding the door that will go off if you are wearing any metal it detects -- usually they are very sensitive).
Now, the response of the metal ball bearing to the magnetic field will depend on what the ball bearing is made of -- specifically its magnetic susceptibility. If its made of Iron/Nickel/Cobalt/Manganese or a ferro/ferrimagnetic material, they'll be a very strong response, if its made of something that's only paramagnetic/diamagnetic like aluminum or titanium its will likely have next to no response to have a minimal response to the field. (The force on an iron ball is roughly 100 million times stronger than on an aluminum ball due to the difference in susceptibility.)
Now the F = gradient (M . B) -- where M is the magnetization (the magnetic field induced in the material which is basically dependent on the magnetic susceptibility and the field it is in), B is the B field, and gradient basically points in the direction of maximum change and is greatest when things are changing the fastest. That is the greatest force will not be when the ball is in the center of the magnet (there the B field will be pretty uniform so the force will be almost zero, until you try moving it out), but when the ball is entering/leaving the magnet. Again, modern MRI machines work with a superconducting electromagnet that is always on (except the very rare shutdown when the magnet is quenched and the current turned off).
Finally, while the response to entering the MRI's magnetic field is the main danger (with the metal ball getting ripped through your body), there is also the danger of the metal absorbing the radio frequency (RF) pulses during the actual scan. (Roughly, an MRI works by sending RF pulses to excite the nuclei's magnetization to decay at different rates based on the tissue its in.) You know how its bad to put metal in a microwave as it heats rapidly and can cause arcing, because it absorbs electromagnetic waves so well? Its similar for the RF pulses of an MRI -- it absorbs the energy very well and can cause severe burning of the surrounding tissue. So even if you swallowed a non-magnetic ball that's still a decent conductor, your stomach could get severely burned during the MRI scan. | 636 |
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ELI5: the difference, if there is one, between oral herpes (HSV-1) and genital herpes (HSV-2) aside from the fact that one virus grows in the oral area and the other around the genitals. | If oral herpes (HSV-1) can turn into genital herpes (HSV-2), does that mean the genital herpes (that was originally oral herpes) is the same as the one that was always genital herpes? and vice versa
i've read that you can get genital herpes if someone with oral herpes who is having an outbreak -without specifics- was around your genitals, and vice versa you get oral herpes from being around someone with genital herpes' genitals if they had an outbreak. what i want to know is if this is true, and if it is, are they the same exact virus except living in different spots?
sorry i hope this isnt confusing because it is to me | 15 | Oral herpes is herpes on the mouth. Genital herpes is herpes on the genitals.
Either virus strain can take either form. It's just a question of where the exposure takes place. Thinking that HSV-1 is specifically oral herpes is a common mistake. | 13 |
[The Simpsons] How come nobody recognizes the Be-Sharps? | So I was watching the [NASA press conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut1bw6E_gcw) on TV today and they just revealed that 2 'average' Americans will be becoming astronauts... But the two people they had on stage were Homer Simpson and Barney Gumble from the Be-Sharps. I don't understand what's going on, nobody else has noticed. Why does nobody else think this is worth mentioning? | 232 | Maybe some people did. But a NASA announcement of that magnitude is of a significantly higher priority than the participant's past music career. It would also be several years before everyone had regular access to internet-based communication, so people who *instantly* recognized Homer and Barney would have to wait until long after the press conference to make their opinions heard. The journalists on hand were all united in asking if it was a joke, which means some of them might have wanted to word their question as "why are you planning on sending washed-up singers into space?", but were shot down.
And also, let's be honest. The whole mass-market barbershop quartet thing was merely a fad from the 80s, and best left forgotten. Like the late-era disco albums and B.A.D. Cats starring Michelle Pfeiffer . | 101 |
[Star Wars] Do traditional bullets/gunpowder exist in the Star Wars universe? If so, why aren't they used -- seems to me that they travel faster than blaster shots and might be better against light sabers. | 39 | They do. They’re called slugs, fired from slugthrowers. And the reason they’re rarely seen is that, for every day use, blasters are superior in every respect. Slugs are heavy, and the capacity in a given magazine can be limiting; tibanna gas can (depending on your source and mag size) be good for hundreds of rounds or be functionally limitless. Slugs can be easily stopped by duracrete, durasteel, and can be affected by the weather; blaster shots are only fully stopped by things specially designed to stop them.
There ARE some trade-offs, like the comparatively slower speed and the much shorter effective range for handheld weapons, but for everyday use a blaster is going to be hard to beat. | 66 |
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