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In Halo 1... | when the Chief and Cortana blow up the Pillar of Autumn, shouldn't the section of the ring that gets blown off move away from the ring? | 29 | Sort of! That is, the ring is in orbit around a planet, while the orbit may deteriorate, it seems unlikely that the Pillar of Autumn would change the ring's momentum enough to fly off somewhere else. At least not right away. | 19 |
[Fullmetal Alchemist] [spoilers] What's so secret about 'the secrets of Flame Alchemy'? | So in Brotherhood, there's a lot of buzz about the **Secrets of Flame Alchemy** and **Nobody must Ever Know** and **I Have the Secret Tattooed on my Back** and all that pizzazz. But the so-called 'secrets' basically just amount to 'flint glove - transmutation circle - transmute the air - snap fingers.' What's the big deal? | 72 | The specific alchemical formula to make that chemical reaction and manipulate the result. Mustang doesn't just make things combust, he can control the size, power and field of his flames. Remember when Mustang instantly incinerated dozens of zombies without harming Ed? Power and control on a massive scale, whenever and wherever he wants, at the snap of his fingers. He could single-handedly wipe out an entire army. It's an extremely deadly weapon that only he possesses. Like, imagine if you were the only guy on earth who knew how to make and use gunpowder, that'd be a big fucking deal, even though it's just a bunch of charcoal and sulfur. | 104 |
ELI5: When my blood donation reacted during a test What is it that's reacting and what does this mean? Also why can't my blood donation be used? | So I received a letter from my local blood bank and after a few rejected donations I was told that my blood donations continue to give a "reactive result" They perform these tests on every donation and I won't be eligible to donate any more.
Apparently these reactions are quite common and nothing to be worried about.
What exactly do they test for? (apart from the obvious diseases and infections) and what is it that gives this reactive result?
| 54 | They test blood for all diseases that could be transmitted through a blood transfusion.
Some people have antibodies that cross react (don't have the disease, just have an antibody that binds to the site that causes the test to be reactive)
The first tests are incredibly sensitive, but not very specific, so when they get a reactive, they do a confirmatory test, which is very specific, but very expensive, which is why they don't do them on the whole lot. Confirmatory tests also take a long time to complete.
If the confirmatory test is negative, then you don't have the disease, but the FDA says that the blood still cannot be used. | 16 |
[General] How long does it take to build an ecumenopolis? | In sci-fi, we see plenty of examples of city planets, such as Coruscant and Trantor. How long would it take to build one of these planet-wide cities? | 22 | Safe to say that these worlds generally take more than a regular human lifetime, usually at least centuries. This is hugely dependent on a number of different factors, however. Coruscant for example didn't start as an ecumenopolis, it started as a regular planet but over millennia built up to the world we see in the prequels, as levels kept getting added and the natural ground disappeared beneath the foundations of the megastructures. | 15 |
ELI5: The Darknet Plan | Based on the subreddit /r/darknetplan. I go there to learn about it and feel stupid every time. | 26 | Imagine that every time you mailed a letter to Santa, the post office would open it to make sure you weren't asking for any toys your parents said you couldn't have.
Now lets say you really wanted a BB gun, but your parents said you couldn't have one. If you mailed your letter to santa, the postmen would read it, see that you asked for a bad present, and tell your parents (who would ground you differently depending on where you live).
To prevent this, instead of mailing it, have everyone just give it to their next door neighbor until it gets to the north pole. This way, Santa gets the letter, but the postmen don't know about it. Additionally, you don't have to pay postage fees this way.
After reading thie above explanation over I've decided it's only helpful if you already know what it is, so here's an addendum of ELI20: *The Darknet Plan* is a plan to link everyone's wireless routers together in a special way to make a worldwide network of computers that corporations and governments wouldn't be able to monitor or bill. This mega-network would function in the same way as the internet but would never require ISPs (Internet Service Providers, i.e. Comcast). It's a sort of "by the people, for the people" type solution.
**TL;DR: Free worldwide internet** | 36 |
[John Wick] Why would Perkins think breaking The Continental’s rules to kill John would be worth it? | The High Table had her executed almost immediately after the incident where she killed Harry (the mustachioed African-American guy that John had kept watch over her). And a few days later The High Table hunts John to the ends of the earth to execute him after he kills Santino. Aside from stupidity and ridiculous amounts of greed, I can’t think of any reason Perkins or anyone else would think the 4 million is worth it. Especially since John mentions that “Mrs. Perkins doesn’t get out of bed for less than 3 (million)” so she must get jobs in that pay grade fairly often unless John is exaggerating. | 84 | She thought it would be easy money and misread the politics involved.
Good chance she also thought that killing Wick would give her a massive amount of street cred as well as bring her allies should someone come after her.
Wick had far more enemies than allies, including ones at the High Table. | 61 |
ELI5: Why Do Your Ears Pop When the Altitude Changes? | 27 | There is air inside your ears and a tiny tube called a Eustachian Tube that connects them to the back of your throat. When you go up, the air in your ear expands and escapes, making it pop. When you come back down, the air shrinks and air rushes back in, also making it pop.
Technically, it’s just due to a pressure differential between your middle ear and the ambient pressure, but thinking of the air expanding and contracting due to Boyle’s law is the easiest way to think of it | 20 |
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AskScience AMA Series: We're compression experts from Stanford University working on genomic compression. We've also consulted for the HBO show "Silicon Valley." AUA! | Hi, we are Dmitri Pavlichin (postdoc fellow) and Tsachy Weissman (professor of electrical engineering) from Stanford University. The two of us study data compression algorithms, and we think it's time to come up with a new compression scheme-one that's vastly more efficient, faster, and better tailored to work with the unique characteristics of genomic data.
Typically, a DNA sequencing machine that's processing the entire genome of a human will generate tens to hundreds of gigabytes of data. When stored, the cumulative data of millions of genomes will occupy dozens of exabytes.
Researchers are now developing special-purpose tools to compress all of this genomic data. One approach is what's called reference-based compression, which starts with one human genome sequence and describes all other sequences in terms of that original one. While a lot of genomic compression options are emerging, none has yet become a standard.
You can read more in this article we wrote for IEEE Spectrum: https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-desperate-quest-for-genomic-compression-algorithms
In a strange twist of fate, Tsachy also created the fictional Weismann score for the HBO show "Silicon Valley." Dmitri took over Tsachy's consulting duties for season 4 and contributed whiteboards, sketches, and technical documents to the show.
For more on that experience, see this 2014 article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/computing/software/a-madefortv-compression-algorithm
We'll be here at 2 PM PT (5 PM ET, 22 UT)! Also on the line are Tsachy's cool graduate students Irena Fischer-Hwang, Shubham Chandak, Kedar Tatwawadi, and also-cool former student Idoia Ochoa and postdoc Mikel Hernaez, contributing their expertise in information theory and genomic data compression.
| 2,073 | * What specifically differentiates genomic data vs typical data? More specifically, is genomic data not ergodic?
* What similarities does reference based compression share with Slepian-Wolf (or Wyner-Ziv) coding?
* Since there has been a large push towards machine learning, could you elaborate on the role you foresee information theory playing in the future machine learning? | 104 |
Why do houses have sloped roofs while commercial buildings are flat on top? | 86 | roofs of houses are sloped in order for not letting rainwater or snow build up. Commercial buildings however generally have a much bigger surface and sloped roofs wouldn't be feasable, so you need to implement other means to let rainwater run off. | 55 |
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[LOTR] Why was Sauron so easy to defeat when he had the ring of power? | A sword to the finger did the trick? Why was it such a big deal if he obtained the ring again? (I only watched the movies and it has been awhile.) Let me know is this is not a fitting post for this subreddit. | 55 | Narsil (the sword of Elendil) had great power in itself; it was forged by Telchar, the greatest smith of Nogrod, in the First Age. In fact, Telchar was probably the greatest smith of all Middle Earth save Feanor (smith of the Silmarils, jewels of unimaginable beauty, and other wonders) and Celebrimbor (smith of the rings of power-the seven of the dwarves and the nine of men with the help of a disguised Sauron, and the tree elven rings on his own). So that explains the first question-it wasn't *just* a sword to the finger, it was one of the most powerful weapons in Middle Earth to the finger.
As to the second question: one of the purposes of the Rings of Power was to enhance and extend the powers of the wearer. The Nine Riders would be simple wraiths without their rings; Gandalf's ability to rouse passion and hope in the hearts of men would have been much less without Narya (corrected thanks to zedlx), the elven Ring of Fire. Sauron's ultimate goal was to dominate the other rings of power, and through them, all the peoples of Middle Earth. In order to do so, he created his own ring of power, the One Ring, by pouring his own fire and spirit into it; thus the Ring is both part of and an enlarging of his own power. With the ring, he is a force nearly invincible; remember it was only Isildur's luck and Sauron's hubris that lost him the ring in the first place. Without it, it took him hundreds of years to regain the power to merely create a body for himself.
Regaining the ring means he becomes as powerful as before, but this time with the people of Middle Earth in disarray with petty squabbles between them. There would have been no great alliance of elves and men; only hatred, domination, cruelty, and darkness. | 115 |
[Star Wars] Why are the holograms so grainy, monochrome and flickering in a galaxy far far away where even Light speed Travel is not a big thing? | 51 | That's like complaining that your radios are crackly and hard to make out when you have planes that take you all over the world. Many times it's not worth squeezing out every last ounce of performance and then improving it further. Often you just get it to 'good enough' and call it a day.
And hell, communications break down after a long distance. Bounce a signal for 50,000 light years and honestly it's amazing you can keep real time communications.
If you isolate your comms to the best possible frequency and block anyone else from talking to you, you'll have great service and the holograms will be sharp. But since EVERYONE in the galaxy is talking to each other, well, that's just not practical. | 84 |
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CMV: French food is overrated. | Right off the bat, I need to make clear that I don't mean to say that French cooking is *bad*. I can think of several French dishes which are highly delicious. French cuisine, like most national cuisines, is very good when done well.
But the reputation of French cuisine goes beyond that. Rather than just being one of a mosaic of national culinary traditions that has its own unique charms, French food is commonly held up as a kind of culinary gold standard. I've seen several posts on r/cooking, for example, about the 5 French "mother sauces" that every chef should master. In fiction, the best chefs are often French. People travel to France mainly to sample the food, and French restaurants are probably the most expensive style of restaurant you can find in most cities. I'm not saying that everybody takes their view of French food to this kind of extreme, but there does seem to be an attitude that it commands more respect than most other national cuisines.
Of course, how good French food actually is is purely subjective. But some elements of French cuisine are, I would argue, kind of boring. The 5 mother sauces I mentioned earlier are all just based on flour and fat. The use of spices or bold flavours is sparing at best. There is something to be said for subtlety, of course, but France isn't even the only country that does that well. Take the much-maligned cuisine of England, for example. It also tends to be based on subtle flavours, but a well-made steak-and-ale pie is as good as anything I've had in a French restaurant.
I think the reason why French food is seen this way probably has to do more with the fact that the French were the first to invent the concept of a [restaurant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restaurant#The_birth_of_the_modern_restaurant_-_Paris_in_the_18th_century), meaning that they got to stamp their national brand on fine dining from an early date.
I think if we let go of that historical baggage, then French cuisine is just one of a number of great national cuisines, each of which has its own charms. French cooking is not inherently any betteer than Italian, Indian, Korean, American, or even English cooking. I think one can be an excellent cook without knowing how to make any mother sauces. Instead you might master a marinara, a green curry, or a great barbeque sauce, to take a few examples.
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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!* | 23 | The fact it appears so boring is the lasting influence it already had on western cuisine. It's been considered "standard" for so long that it's now all but indistinguishable from "food" for most westerners. In comparison, ethnic cuisine often seem so exotic and dashing. A good example of this, is you building an argument around french gastronomy, which is certainly a subset of french cuisine, but certainly not the whole of it. The five mother sauce, for instance, are very simple and have many derivative that will enable you to build almost any kind of sauce. They're quite versatile and extremely present in typical western cuisine.
| 21 |
ELI5: If you were unaware of any language or writing, what would your internal thoughts be like? | 1,175 | You would be thinking of your actions. Which you already do more than you realize. When your hungry a lot of times you'll think of going to the fridge, but you don't actually say in your head "I should go to the fridge." Sometimes you do, but often you just think of the action itself. | 717 |
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CMV: I am a woman and I think the Suffragettes are going too far. | They're basically extremists who deserve their imprisonment. They're not 'political prisoners'; they're domestic threats. Why, just the other day I heard they dug their message into the green of a golf course. A golf course! I dare say such displays of emotion have no place in political discourse. And hunger strikes? Ha! They look like they could use one of those. I'm looking at you, Ms. Stanton.
That's another thing: these actions are decidedly lower-class. I don't hate poor people or anything, but I do believe that people have a place. Our natural state is that of purity, and a REAL lady wouldn't sully her reputation by sewing discord. Why do these women think they need a democratic vote when they reign supreme in the domestic kingdom? Easier to grab the ear of my husband than that of a representative, especially if he values this tranquility I've heard so much about. The only reason they want this right is because they're too ugly to get a husband.
I mean, it's just biology.
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> *Hello, people of the past. This is a footnote from the moderators of this 'internet forum'. I'm afraid to say that some wannabe scientist, while looking into time travel, has caused a temporal distortion field. It should dissipate in the next 24 hours. In the mean time, feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)*** *about a view you hold while you're visiting the present, and remember to have a look through* ***[our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. | 121 | Think of it this way: women's suffrage gives two votes to every respectable house. After all, we all know every good wife will vote their husband's wishes. Unmarried people living in sin, well, to be honest this is a simple fad for them. Once the shine wears off they will forget it ever happened and succumb to their listless apathy as always. Women's suffrage, therefor, is a vote for families. | 37 |
eli5 Why do we mix the liquid and the dry separate when we baking | 16 | Typically you only do this for doughs that use an acid-base reaction to produce air bubbles, like muffins. The reason you do it is because you're using baking powder (which is a powder containing both acid and base in it,) and when you mix baking powder with liquid it causes an acid-base reaction, which creates CO2. You want to trap that CO2 inside of the finished baked good as much as possible, so if you spend a lot of time mixing the dough before baking, you'll vent most of your CO2 out of the mixing bowl.
Keeping your wet and dry ingredients separate and then only mixing as much as it takes to get an even mix is a good way to ensure that you don't lose all that CO2.
It's not important with other kinds of baking, like yeasted breads - you can just dump your flour, water, salt, and yeast in the same container and mix them all together and it's no problem. | 34 |
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ELI5: How do E-Cigarettes work? | So I fell for an ad that a company ran on reddit (vapornine). And now I haven't smoked in 3 weeks. But I just don't get how vaporizing works. I understand that it turns the liquid into vapor (but I don't know what this means) and then I inhale the vapor. But I when I exhale, the vapor looks like smoke. Shouldn't it have cooled enough in my lungs to not be vapor?
And yes this looks like a shameless plus, but I've already saved a lot of money and improved my health. | 86 | Imagine this. You have a piece of paper, and you have a really hot light. You move the paper close to the light but it doesn't touch the light. The heart from the light causes the paper to burn, thus releasing smoke.
The E-Cig is essentially doing the same thing although instead of paper you have some sort of liquid type stuff. And when that gets hot instead of releasing smoke it releases thick vapor (not water vapor, which would cool in your lungs as you said) that vapor contains some nicotine in it as well as some flavor. When you exhale there's more in it than just water vapor so that's why you see it.
Hope this helps | 31 |
Why are faces easier to scan than words? | When I look through photos next to text, the faces are easier (or take a shorter amount of time) to put together and recognize than text. I would *think* that faces would take longer because of the complexities of facial structures whereas text is not as complex, but that's not the case. Why is that? I could be looking too much into it, but I'm curious. | 15 | There is a brain region dedicated to facial-feature recognition (fusiform gyrus in the inferior temporal lobe [usually right hemisphere]). Even infants can discriminate between [upright] faces and scrambled facial features (showing activation of the fusiform gyrus when exposed to the upright face). This is a process thought to be evolutionarily and genetically pre-programmed within deeper [evolutionarily older] brain structures, and has become a very SUBCONSCIOUS process that happens automatically.
Text on the other-hand requires a bit of processing and decoding. Words themselves, once sight-word phonics is established, require that a symbol be decoded before it is processed and understood. This process is not nearly as ingrained and is a LEARNED behavior that takes practice. You've probably noticed that you've become much better at recognizing words as you've practiced. The eye stops on each word for approximately 1/4th of a second, and conceptualizes it as a picture (sight-word reading, and phonetic awareness [eg. Nonsense words are able to be read such as: "hathcampter" << that requires some processing, but you're able to associate the sounds that these letters will make when combined). For exmalpe, tihs is not extmrely dififlct to raed, becuase yov'ue estbalshed sgiht-wrod reocgniiton alraedy, and each wrod deosn't need to be decdoded indvidually anyomre. So reading words is faster than it once was, but you've been able to "read" faces since you were an infant and developed sight.
All-in-all, recognizing text is actually more complicated than recognizing faces. | 12 |
[Marvel] How far reaching were Hank Pym's failures to turn the world against him? | Hank Pym seems to be known more as the guy who created Ultron and hit Janet than for all the feats he has done since then to redeem himself.
Just how bad are the consequences of hitting Janet and making Ultron that made Hank Pym so reviled? Are they really that far reaching and bad?
And why do other heroes like Tony and Reed that also have made mistakes still get praised for their intellect, heroism and contributions to mankind while people like Pym (and Bruce Banner) are seen as menaces? | 21 | Hank Pym isn't considered a menace; that's mostly just a meme. People talk shit about him about as much as they do to Tony Stark. Hank just takes the criticism harder than Tony does. If anything Hank is considered incompetent.
Bruce Banner turns into the fucking Hulk. | 23 |
Does the surface tension of water affect the rate of evaporation? If so, would adding a surfactant speed up evaporation? | 1,891 | Evaporation is basically describing the statistical probability that a molecule has enough kinetic energy to escape bonds with its neighbors. As the temperature increases, energy is added, so statically more molecules escape. At its boiling point, most molecules in the gaseous state have enough energy to prevent forming bonds and re-entering the liquid state.
To answer your question, surface tension is a property of the intermolecular bonds.However, adding a surfactant would cause boiling point elevation since it forms its own bonds with the water.
Edit: Fixed some autocorrect weirdness | 381 |
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ELI5: How in the world do maps from the early 1500s have reasonably accurate depictions of (known) continents, given there was no satellite imagery at the time? | I can't be the only one who thinks this is an incredible feat of cartography, given the limited technology available at the time: http://imgur.com/zFyNmBA | 104 | Ever since there's been open sea travel, the question of "where the hell am I?" has been really important. Latitude (north/south) turns out to be pretty easy to figure out, since stuff in the sky, like stars, will be in different positions depending on where you are. Longitude (east/west) is harder, especially before reliable clocks were invented (accurate time + position of the stars = your longitude), but you could use a combination of your speed and your latitude to have a guess at where you were.
Combine that knowledge with good record-keeping, and you could get a decent map of where land is. | 59 |
[Attack of the Clones] There are instances of Anakin showing temptations to the Dark Side even before Palpatine manipulated him. So what were the factors that actually made Anakin so tempted to the Dark side so easily? | Seeing the second movie again makes me realise that Anakin showed behaviours that are typical amongst those who are corrupted by the Dark Side even before Palpatine got to him.
We see anger, arrogance, pride, jealousy and passion. At times, showing behaviours of domination, superiority and controlling behaviour.
Things that the Sith code embraces.
Whether or not these are good or bad is left to the audience because at times, we see these instances that they are quite human like Anakin being angry when his mom died or when he is talked down by a superior.
But how come he was so tempted to these things even before Palpatine came into the scene? How come the Jedi Council did not foresee this?
Were the Jedi just as arrogant and prideful as Anakin said they were like in certain instances in the film ('if it is not the archives, then it does not exist')
Was it their fault for not letting Anakin come to touch to his sense or not teaching him the proper ways of the Jedi, regardless of whether their teachings were adequate or not? | 46 | Anakin was tempted by these things because he was the Chosen One (and treated like it), and because he started training so late.
Anakin was an exceptional Jedi for his age and he knew it. He was constantly reminded of his status as the Chosen One, but also denied any special privilege for it despite the higher expectations. His fellow padawans made fun of him and chastised him for using emotion in battle (even calling him a *slave* to his emotions). This was all magnified by Palpatine playing the role of the supportive father figure and telling him he was better than everyone else and they were simply jealous, etc.
Another big factor is that Anakin was brought into training when he was 9, unlike his fellow padawans who were taken as babies. This left Anakin with many attachments and, as far as when dealing with the force, character flaws. No amount of training can make someone give up their emotional attachments, that’s something Anakin would have had to learn to do on his own. | 54 |
[Star Wars] Did any Clones get kidnapped or killed by someone in the Galaxy that had beef with Jango Fett? | I’m sure Jango had a few enemies and while word of his death would travel eventually, he must have had a few enemies, especially in the Outer Rim. | 29 | The Clones immediately became the front and center of Republican Propaganda so everyone knew that they are not Jango.
Also the First Battle of Geonosis was highly publicized and probably help to get the news of Jango's death around. | 32 |
Assume someone had a tight bracelet put on their wrist when they were young. What would happen as they grew up? | Would the wrist stop developing? Would flesh actually grow around the bracelet? | 23 | I think it was in the news a few months ago about a man who was chained by his wrists for extended periods of time. In the end, his flesh grew around the chains and there was constant infection, pus, etc. Nasty | 19 |
[Clone Wars Series] If the planet Quartzite is so highly pressurized that ships implode why doesn't the transport tube get crushed? | 48 | Well, to paraphrase a certain professor, spaceships are built to withstand atmospheric pressures anywhere between zero and one.
In other words, they are designed with the idea of keeping a standard amount of pressure in the ship, not for keeping a high amount of pressure out of it.
The transport tube, on the other hand, is purpose built to resist high external pressures, and so can do so much better than a starship can. | 66 |
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If I have a device powered with 2 AA batteries, and the device is at 50% battery life, but I only have 1 AA battery left; would switching only one battery increase the battery life of the device? | i.e. I have an xbox controller that is powered by 2 AA batteries. My controller is almost dead, at 20% battery life. If I switch out only one battery for a new one, does that increase the battery life of my xbox controller? Or does it remain at 20%? | 17 | It increases it, but not as much as you'd think because the new battery winds up charging the old battery, so energy is lost to heat that would otherwise be useable energy. You could actually damage the batteries doing this unless they are rechargeable batteries. | 11 |
CMV:I think Google is the most powerful company in the world. | IMHO Google is the most powerful company in the world.The data in its repositories can pretty much affect the world if they press delete button or like publish all the usernames and passwords they have of any account in any of their service.Google has a lot of accounts of people and if the details are published bank accounts of lot of people can be affected.Important documents are shared using google services which would be directly affect a lot of individuals or firms,which might have the ability to shake the world drastically.
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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!* | 119 | * Google is very powerful, but it's stuff is used mostly in the US and in English speaking countries. People in places like China would largely be unaffected.
* If Google search went down, Baidu, Bing, Yahoo, and many other search engines would still work.
* Gmail is popular, but only 425 million people use it. 1.2 billion people use Facebook monthly.
* Google has less than 50,000 employees. If they went down, many of those employees are highly skilled and could find jobs elsewhere. Walmart has 2.2. million employees, about 44 times as many.
* Google tends to be involved in consumer goods (phones, email, search, etc.) They are less involved with business goods, which means that they wouldn't start as much of a domino effect of damaging other businesses. End users can easily switch to iPhones, Bing, Yahoo Mail, etc. There are competitors for Google in all of their markets.
* Large banks are much more powerful than Google simply because they loan out money to other large and powerful organizations. If they go down, they can affect many other businesses and people, and destroy the world economy like in 2007-2008. | 108 |
Why does Covid-19 affect your taste and smell? | 395 | The olfactory support cells, which surround the neurons and help them function, are susceptible to the coronavirus. It is believed that the virus causes the olfactory epithelium to lose the cilia that detect smells. | 257 |
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ELI5: Why does my nose clog and block my air passage ways? | I'm not allergic and its not exactly pollen season, why does my nose clog up and making sleeping hard and annoying? Why does the body even have a process that blocks nasal passages and sinuses? It just seems counter productive.
Edit: Thanks people, I learned a good amount about my nose today. Holding my breathe after pushing the air out of my lungs did help my nose open up a bit but I'll be mentioning my nose to a doc next time I see him just in case. | 192 | The inside of your nose, sinuses, and the nasal passage is covered by something called a 'mucous membrane'. Think of it like a wet carpet that has miniature water sprinklers, if you will. The function of such an arrangement is to make sure that the air reaching your lungs is not dry (which would in turn make your lungs dry, which is dangerous), amongst other things.
Come winter, and a large number of viruses find it a very conducive environment to harbour themselves in your nasal mucous membrane. These in turn cause the glands secreting the mucus (the miniature water sprinklers) to work overtime. The purpose of this is to wash out the virus, broadly speaking. But as a result of this, mucus is produced in excess. When you're awake, this dribbles down the back of your throat due to gravity, not making its presence felt for the most part. When you're asleep, it becomes difficult for this to happen. So, it accumulates and dries up. This is why you get a clogged nasal passage.
Another reason is that the miniature arteries carrying blood to the mucous membrane dilate themselves in response to the infection. This swells up the mucosa, giving you a sensation of a stuffed nose.
Not exactly the most comprehensive explanation, but hope it helps. | 178 |
[Star Wars] If I had a pair of Lightsabers attached to separate pistons and directly facing each other perfectly head-on, then ignited and drove them towards each other what would happen when they make contact and keep pushing together? | 25 | What keeps the lightsabers blade shape is a magnetic field that loops around the plasma of the blade.
If you would force the two blades against each other you would eventually deform the field, causing it to brake down completely or at least partially at some places. The plasma of the blades would start leaking out uncontrolled and use up its energy in a short time. | 29 |
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If natural fruit juices contain large amounts of sugar, why do we only seem to refine sugars from a select few plants (sugarcane, sugar beets) instead of from fruits in general? | I understand that there's differences in the sugar composition (sucrose as a disaccharide vs glucose/fructose as monosaccharides, and that fruits contain more fructose), but I don't understand why "alternative" sugars like HFCS seem to be a relatively new thing, and limited to basically just corn so far as I'm aware.
In theory, humans have had access to fruit pretty much forever, so why do we only use a few dedicated sugar crops to produce refined sugar, instead of more regionally accessible fruits?
Is it simply a matter of economics, or is there some inherent difference that makes refining fruit sugars impossible? | 200 | Cost and consistency. You know exactly what compounds need to be removed from beets or cane every time to produce the same sugar. Strawberries or apples will not yield the same product through the same process (flavours, non-sugar compounds, inconsistent seeds/pulp), and both have (IIRC) lower - and more inconsistent - sugar content than both beets and cane. | 83 |
CMV: If we cannot judge current Islamic societies for the oppressive origins of the Hijab, we cannot judge the Southern people for carrying the Confederate Flag | **Wikipedia defines Cultural Relativism as "**[**the idea that a person's beliefs, values, and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture, rather than be judged against the criteria of another.**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism)
**"**The [Hijab](https://en.qantara.de/content/playing-cat-and-mouse-with-irans-morality-police) is a head covering worn by Islamic women. It is a mandatory fashion statement **required** [by law](https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2015/01/28/saudi-arabias-dress-code-for-women) in Saudi Arabia (for Muslims), Iran and the Indonesian province of Aceh. Wearing a Hijab is supported by the [Quran](https://www.al-islam.org/hijab-muslim-womens-dress-islamic-or-cultural-sayyid-muhammad-rizvi/quran-and-hijab) on the basis that it is a separation between men and women. The original meaning of Hijab [refers not to women's clothing, but rather a spatial partition or curtain](https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/beliefs/hijab_1.shtml#h1). [Mandatory wearing](https://medium.com/@megapad/the-myth-of-the-feminist-hijab-7ea9866c5bcd) has often paralleled the [oppressive](https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/01/30/saudi-arabia-10-reasons-why-women-flee) Islamic governments of the [middle east](https://ips-dc.org/women_in_the_middle_east/). For example, in Iran [before the Islamic Revolution](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-47032829), women were free to dress as they pleased, However, after the establishment of a [new theocracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution), the Hijab became [compulsory for all girls over the age of nine](https://exmuslims.org/forced-hijab-a-brief-overview/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMImtrpuo-M6gIVTD6tBh3B4QGEEAAYASAAEgKZPvD_BwE).
Many [defend the Hijab](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/the-real-roots-of-sexism-in-the-middle-east-its-not-islam-race-or-hate/256362/) saying that it means ["Power, Liberation, Beauty, and Resistance”](https://en.vogue.me/culture/ilhan-omar-first-somali-american-hijabi-congresswoman/). It would be fair to argue ["women adopt the hijab for complex reasons tied to politics, fashion, entertainment and religion, not simply because they embraced extreme strains of Islam"](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/08/17/what-westerners-get-wrong-about-the-hijab/) Some might even say that it serves as a way to["Assert Identity"](https://theconversation.com/why-do-muslim-women-wear-a-hijab-109717) Regardless of how one feels about the Hijab, the point of this post isn't to discuss the [historical sexism tied to the Hijab](https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/06/do-non-muslims-help-or-hurt-women-by-wearing-hijabs/wearing-the-hijab-in-solidarity-perpetuates-oppression) or how the discuss the [religious reasoning behind the Hijab](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2016/01/19/the-right-to-choose-to-wear-or-not-hijab/). [Symbols have different meanings to different people at different times.](https://www.grunge.com/54005/famous-symbols-originally-meant-something-completely-different/)
So why did I spend so long finding sources about the history of the Hijab and it's origins? Because the point is this, [People defend the Hijab](https://www.upbeacon.com/article/2017/04/meaning-of-the-hijab) on the basis that it is a [cultural practice](https://www.eiu.edu/historia/Slininger2014.pdf). While it may or may not have sexist origins, people ought to be free to express religious or cultural symbols without fear of [retribution](https://www.aclu.org/other/discrimination-against-muslim-women-fact-sheet) or punishment. [When a Woman was fired for wearing a Hijab, there was outrage.](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-fired-hijab-virginia-fairfax-dentist-cair-anti-muslim-discrimination-a7172531.html)
[**The argument is essentially that people ought to be free to express their culture without outside judgment.**](https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/society-and-culture/culture/a/cultural-relativism-article)
The problem arises when you apply this same logic to the Confederate Flag. [Despite obviously the racist history of the confederate flag](https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/confederate-flag), it has been [a fixture](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/americas-simple-minded-obsession-with-the-confederate-flag/261236/) of [Southern Culture since the Civil rights era](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_display_of_the_Confederate_battle_flag). For many, [the confederate flag wasn't necessarily a symbol of Racism](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/6pnc1k/why_do_people_fly_confederate_flags/), it was simply a flag affixed the top of the [General Lee on Dukes of Hazzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Lee_(car)) or [something waved at a Lynyrd Skynyrd Concert](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/lynyrd-skynyrd-inside-the-bands-complicated-history-with-the-south-629080/), to them it was just simply a Southern motif. Symbols have different meanings to different people at different times. ["Georgia police officer fired for flying Confederate flag; says she didn't know people find stars and bars offensive"](https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/georgia-police-officer-fired-flying-confederate-flag-home-article-1.2728714)
**One could argue that because Cultural Relativism, Southern people ought to be free to to express their culture without outside judgment.**
Applying the same logic used to defend the Hijab (Namely, that it is a cultural symbol which means different things to different people) means that you cannot critique those who wave the confederate flag.
**Cultural Relativism is a slippery slope and if you want to argue that we cannot criticize other cultures for their sexist or racist beliefs, it has some profound implications for who you are able to criticize.**
If you want to make the argument that people within the South have criticized the confederate flag, you must also [accept that people within Islam have criticized the Hijab.](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/muslim-woman-veil-hijab)
I want to conclude by saying that I am personally opposed to both the oppressive natures of Hijabs and Confederate Flags. If you are truly opposed to oppression, you must be opposed to it in all circumstances, **especially when ideologically inconvenient.** You do not get to pick and choose when oppression is bad, it simply always is. Our standards of right and wrong should apply equally to everyone.
I make this argument not out of bigotry or hate toward any one group, but simply to hopefully cause people to examine their own biases.
Change my View | 144 | The argument you are making doesn't work because it fails to be parallel. In the first prong, you are talking about "Islamic societies" while in the second you are talking about "Southern people." What makes it justifiable to judge a society and what makes it justifiable to judge a person (or a people) can be entirely different, and so there is a gap that would need to be bridged to make the same logic necessarily apply. But your argument doesn't bridge that gap. | 65 |
[DC And Watchmen] So does Manhattan "need" his body, to operate? | So in another thread I read that he's a disembodied consciousnesses, and that he makes hismbosy just because he wants to. What I'm asking is if he could still interact with things, with literally no body at all. So to be truly invisible kind of.
Also, are his gestures even necessary if his body isn't? Like when he hand waved and [Spoilers] made Rorschach explode. [/spoilers].
One more thing, I get that he's truly free, and whether his body is necessary or not, why be naked and buff? He can Generate a guise of clothing for himself, so why not just for the sake of people who aren't used to seeing a naked man. As for his body, it could have just been a normal easy to maintain human shaped body, or even an entirely smooth dummy like body. Maybe a stick figure, or just a sphere of light.
Edit: so the questions are as follows.
Does he need a body, to interact?
Are his gestures important?
Why be naked?
Why be sexy, or even anatomically accurate? | 48 | If you could would you turn into and live you life as an ant? It might be fun for a bit, but it's too much of a hassle.
The same concept applies to Manhattan and humans. He could appear however he wants, it's obvious his body isn't needed nor is he limited to it. He appears as he does because that's the form he thinks suits him. | 29 |
[Breakfast Cereal] What exactly happened that is preventing people from simply going to the store to buy cereal? | Did the economy collapse?
Have all foodstuffs besides cereal disappeared?
Are the kids chasing Lucky so they can eat, or for his magical powers?
Is the Trix Rabbit just a kleptomaniac, or is there something more to it?
Did the Cookie Bandit get arrested for his crimes (and that's why we don't see him anymore)? Does that make cereal theft illegal to the point that we never see the criminals again once they're caught? | 38 | Cereal used to be abundant and available. But things went bad when Sonny went coo coo for cocoa puffs. He couldn't get enough. He alone consumed the cocoa puff plant to the point of extinction. He was lost for months in the rain forests of south america, eating the rare plant in it's raw (and most potent) form. When it was all gone, he emerged, and went beyond bonkers. He couldn't deal with withdrawal, so he moved onto froot loops... He slaughtered Toucan Sam and his nephews while they slumbered and ate the entire supply. Without his rainbow nose, froot loops were now gone. He moved onto others... the cheerios bee was an easy kill, count chocula offered a greater challenge, and so on and so forth he went. Sonny came home with a vengeance. Eventually, cracked out on a sugar high, and suffering from advanced stages of type 2 diabetes, the chocolate loving bird collapsed in a pile of self shame, feces and vomit. His reign of terror was over, but the wages of his war still lay upon us. Those few who are fortunate enough to have cereal are reluctant to share their part of a complete breakfast... especially with other anthropomorphic animals who are a little too crazy about the stuff. We all remember Sonny.
The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is Lucky... if we can manage to catch him, and harness his powers, we should be able to once again return shitty bowls of carbs and sugar to the modern world. Those easily distracted children who chase him nonstop are heroes. One day, their efforts will be remembered. | 38 |
ELI5: What is going on in a woman when she's having "cramps"? | My girlfriend is cuddled in a ball on the couch claiming that she's dying and asked me why her cramps hurt so bad. She just got her period (nice) and literally right after the cramps started. Now I have no answer to her question. Please hurry and god speed | 23 | She doesn't want an answer, she wants comforting.
"WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME" is an expression used when somebody is suffering & don't feel they 'deserve' it, not a literal request for information.
Get her some ibuprofen & chocolate ice cream. Some sort of heating pad (or microwave a sock filled with rice) can help, if you have one around. | 33 |
How does a non-cancerous tumor develop? Isn't the abnormal growth/multiplication of cells the definition of cancer? | 283 | The abnormal growth/multiplication of cells is hyperplasia, which is not the same thing as cancer. Many non-cancerous conditions result from hyperplasia, including skin conditions like psoriasis where you see abnormal thickening of the skin due to excessive growth of skin cells.
Cancer is a multi-stage process, which may begin with hyperplasia. This is what is often used to screen for 'pre-cancerous' tissue. These abnormally thickened lesions may remain as they are, or acquire mutations down the line and progress to full-blown cancer. In order to do so, they have to gain the ability to ignore the normal regulatory controls that prevent them behaving differently from other cells in their tissue of origin - many checks and balances are in place to, for example, stop cells from growing once the field has enough cells in it. This ensures that all cells are well-supplied with nutrients and oxygen required for healthy tissue function. Cancer cells learn to ignore these signals and consume resources at the expense of surrounding cells.
The next step happens once the cancer cells grow to the point where nutrient delivery becomes a problem. The centre of new tumours can become very low in oxygen and nutrient-poor due to poor blood supply, which limits the growth of many cancers. This limitation is sometimes overcome when cancer cells gain the ability to recruit new blood vessels to the tumour. With fresh blood supply, the tumour can rapidly expand in size.
At this point, the tumour is still confined to its tissue of origin. If this is an epithelial tissue (like the skin surface), the cancer is not yet life-threatening and can often be completely removed by surgical excision. Sometimes the physical location of the tumour can cause problems - head and neck tumours can interfere with speech or swallowing for example - but the real danger lies ahead. Once tumour cells gain the ability to leave their origin site and spread through the body through blood or lymph (metastasis), the likelihood of survival drops significantly. Metastasis is the reason why cancer is so feared - instead of a localised tumour that can be monitored and/or completely cut out, the cancer is now everywhere in the body where it can potentially interfere with critical organs like the brain and lungs. This is also why early screening is so important. If a tumour can be diagnosed when it is still relatively benign, the individual has much better treatment outcomes then if the cancer is discovered after it has already spread.
TLDR: Cancer progresses through multiple stages, including many which would be considered 'benign' or 'non-cancerous'. Some non-cancerous tumours may remain as such while others progress to full-blown malignancy. Screening is important for early diagnosis! | 178 |
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I believe the US drinking age should be lowered to 18. CMV | Coming from an obviously biased opinion as a 19 year old college student hanging around with mostly 21 year olds, I do not see why the drinking age is 21 when someone is considered an adult at 18. Prohibition didn't work for the population when it was in place, and this is basically prohibition for a segment of the adult population. I know that the federal government offered more incentives for highway construction or something like that to states that changed, but I'm curious what the actual effect was after the age was raised.
To show my bias, here's what recently sparked my fury. Spring Break road trip with my friends to Colorado. Late at night on a day of constant driving (through scenic Nebraska no less) those of us who already took our driving shifts decide to have a couple beers. Driver gets pulled over for speeding. Cop smells booze and asks to see IDs of everyone. Whelp turns out if your over 18 but under 21 you have to go to jail for drinking in Nebraska so I get arrested and it is a non-waiverable offense, meaning I am legally obligated to go to court to in all likelihood end up with a simple ticket. Which for such a small crime, is ridiculous as it requires me to get time off work and pay for a lawyer and a plane ticket as I live in the midwest just because I didn't want to wait two years to have a couple beers? Please don't waste your time telling me if I can't do the time, don't do the crime. I'm an adult. I go to college. Have a job. Pay my bills and taxes on time. And I drink responsibly. While that may not be true for everybody my age, it sure as shit isn't true for everyone older either. Maybe there should be some sort of licensing program like driving, but for drinking so that those of us who can prove we can responsibly drink aren't punished because of those who can't. While I got some attention, on an unrelated note, anybody know who I should talk to about my circumstances if I'm looking to get someone to do something about this? County judge maybe?
Anyways, try to convince me why 21 makes sense as the drinking age. | 52 | First: *Get a lawyer now.*
If we are going to live in a country with as many rules as the US has, we are going to break most of them. It is useful to learn how/when to do so, and alcohol provides an excellent gateway. By putting 18-year olds in a situation where they will drink illegally, we are teaching them how to keep order without the police around and govern themselves; how to distrust silly rules; etc. However, this argument only applies to states where the drinking age is enforced lightly.
Your specific situation is obviously extremely distressing, since you were prosecuted with a heavy hand. You were not caught drinking: you were a passenger in a car, and something about that car smelled of booze. You didn't have to show ID since you were not driving, but you did, so now they are charging you.
I don't know what they are charging you with, but if you pay a ticket you will be pleading guilty to it. This can affect your job search, depending on the details. Get a lawyer, fight the ticket hard if it will show up on your record, because you don't want to check off a crime every time you apply for a job. Before you go with the cheaper option (pleading guilty, pay the ticket), make sure you know what the ramifications will be. | 16 |
[Hollow Man][The Incredibles] If an invisible person is underwater, would they still be invisible, or would it look like a human-shaped air bubble? | Both of these have been depicted in movies. For example, it's a bubble in _Hollow Man_ ([here's a screenshot](https://goo.gl/images/cgSZ6x)), but in _The Incredibles_, it's still just invisible.
(There are many movies with invisible characters that have their own made-up rules, but I'm looking for a realistic/scientific answer.)
If you ask me, I think _Hollow Man_ got it right. My logic is that air is completely transparent, but water isn't, or only kinda is. So an invisible person or object would be more transparent than the water around it, and the displacement of water would look like an empty space. But let me know if I'm wrong. | 35 | Air is completely transparent. Water (if clean) is also completely transparent. But you can see an air bubble in the water because they have different refractive indices and the light bends and reflects in a way that you can make out the shape. Pick up a perfectly visible ice cube, and drop it in the water. The ice cube becomes invisible because it's the same refractive index as the water, the light moves through it the same way, and you can't see it. (Unless the ice cube has air bubbles in it)
So how does it fit with Violet Parr's invisibility power? If she just became the same refractive index as air, then we should see a human bubble in the water. But if her invisibility worked like a mind control trick, or was able to actively match the refractive index of her surroundings, or bent light around her without redirecting the light, then she would be invisible underwater. | 42 |
Why does light move? | Light moves faster than almost anything in the universe, so how does it always move that incredibly fast regardless of what its being emitted from?
Is the speed of a light particle/wave always constant?
What is the mechanism through which light is emitted from something at light speed, why is it always emitted at light speed?
Thanks, looking forward to the answers. | 46 | Light is composed of an electric and a magnetic field both oscillating sinusoidally. Ampere's and Faraday's laws say that if an electric or magnetic field changes, then the other kind is generated and also changes. It turns out that a sinusoidal change in an electric field will generate a sinusoidal change in the magnetic field. Then the sinusoidal change in magnetic field creates a sinusoidal change in the electric field and the process repeats indefinitely thus creating a light wave.
There are two properties of the universe called electric permittivity and magnetic permeability. These values affect how resistant an area of space is to a changing electric/magnetic field. In a vacuum, these properties have characteristic values which we have empirically measured.
Permittivity and permeability work together to restrain the propagation speed of light by resisting light's changing electric and magnetic fields. In fact, the speed of light can be derived as simply equal to:
**sqrt(ε0 * μ0)^-1**
Where ε0 and μ0 are permittivity and permeability of the vacuum respectively. So, the speed of light in a vacuum is due to the values of these universal constants. | 28 |
[Game of Thrones] Finale megathread! | I guess this is the big day, huh? Please keep your questions about the GOT finale confined to this thread for now. | 54 | 1. Why are the lords accepting an upstart sellsword as their new liege? All the major houses of the Reach can formulate a good claim on the region. Most notable the Florents (who for basically the entire Targaryen period were maintaining they had a stronger claim to the Reach then the Tyrells) and the Hightowers (who possess a large, unmolested army).
2. How is Gendry, who has now knowledge on how to run a kingdom, supposed to govern the Stormlands?
3. Why would the Faith ever accept a heathen witch as ruler of Westeros?
4. With the North granted independence just like that, why won't the Iron Islands and Dorne follow within days?
5. Why would the Westerlands tolerate a known murderer and kinslayer as Hand of the King?
6. How is Bran supposed to hold onto the Vale that could basically at will close the Bloody Gate and thus de facto secede?
Or in short, why wouldn't the realm descend into further chaos within literally months? | 44 |
[MARVEL] What is the relationship between S.W.O.R.D. and S.H.I.E.L.D.? Do they work together? What incidences do they each get involved in? | 828 | In the comics, SWORD stands for Sentient Worlds Observation and Response Department. They deal with issues involving alien races - interplanetary diplomacy, defence of the solar system, stuff like that. Historically they have worked closely with the Wakandan and Canadian space programmes and the X-Men; currently, SWORD is mostly mutant, and closely associated with (although fully independent from) Krakoa.
They work with SHIELD when necessary, but there's no direct overlap to their respective official remits. SHIELD is all about what happens on Earth.
There's also a third body - ARMOR, which stands for Alternate Reality Monitoring and Operational Response. They deal with alternate reality stuff. | 699 |
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ELI5:Why don't Americans have the lowest medical costs in the world... is it a failure of the free market or government intervention or something else? | 137 | Back during World War II some regulations were put in place regarding wages and salaries.
But the short version is that a lot of companies over time started offering health insurance as part of the benefits package, essentially to pay workers more without actually increasing wages or salaries.
Over time this became more and more the system, and now most people in the US get their healthcare from their job.
Now, this doesn't have all negative consequences. For instance, the reason people will still say: "The United States has the best health care in the world, if you have insurance" is because when you're on the company policy, in many cases when you get a heart-attack you're treated just the same as if your CEO had a heart attack. Flown to Seattle, put in a fancy hospital with top-rate doctors and surgeons. etc.
And while the "*if you have insurance* caveat seems like a real catch, it's actually not so horrible. The "chronically" uninsured in the country only constituted about 12 million people in the country (pre-Obamacare).
But anyway - one of the bad parts of this system is that it *separates payer of cost from receiver of services.* It's really not even this system specifically, but the *"full-coverage"* style of the insurance that's common to the system.
We now have an ingrained 3-party payment system for our Healthcare. It used to be that you go to the Dr. Office with a spranged ankle, and he says: *"That's a spranged ankle. Stay off it for 2 weeks."* You pay him $50 and you go on your way. But the Doctor is worried about being sued if it was something worse than a sprang, so he says: *"I think it's just a sprang, but I'd like to do an MRI."*
MRI's are covered by your insurance, so you say: "Sure!" and go get an MRI. It doesn't cost you any extra.
And then every doctor and every patient does this, and so insurance rates go up. Rinse, lather, repeat.
It doesn't change how much you pay if you get no medical treatment or open-heart surgery. Your doctor doesn't gain or lose customers for what he charges, because that's paid by the insurance company. Your insurance company just sees you as one part of a company, so it doesn't target or charge you specifically. The end result is that nobody has any direct incentive to be efficient about medical services, or demand lower rates.
It is very much worth noting that Lasik eye surgery, and cosmetic surgery, are not covered by most any form of insurance. And they're the only medical procedures to *drop* drastically in price over the last two decades.
If you want medical costs to go down in a free market, you need to make sure that the signals money sends out get received by the actors making the decisions. Higher deductibles and less-full coverage would make be cognizant, discriminating shoppers for the services, and you'd see prices drop as a result. At the moment there is no competition or incentive to reduce costs by anybody. | 66 |
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How, on a physical level, do transistors/vacuum tubes work, and how do they produce logic gates? | 58 | Electrons are charged particles, and in a vacuum tube, they are the only particles available to move. If there is a positively charged plate, the negative electrons will move towards the plate, the electron movement is called current. the Tube is now conducting.
If the plate is then charged negatively, the negative electrons will be repelled, and no electrical energy will flow, as the electron movement has stopped or reversed. the Tube is now off.
this effect allows current to flow only in one direction, selectively allowing current to flow based on the charge on the plates in the tube. Diodes achieve the same selective effect. transistors, working off the same principles, will allow the control of when to allow current, injecting electrons into a region which would allow conduction based again on the polarity of the regions surrounding.
This creates a switching mechanism, which allows implementation of very complex functions build from individual switches turning on/off.
edit:formatting
A simple OR gate can be implemented with two diodes. Modern gates are implemented with CMOS as it uses much less power. If your interested further the book microelectronic circuit design by jaeger takes you from simple circuits to RAM memory. | 20 |
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ELI5 how baby teeth grow in straight but adult teeth grow in any way they want? | 70 | Dental hygienist here; usually adult teeth come in crooked because there's not enough space for adult teeth. If you look in a kids mouth you'll notice that there are usually gaps between teeth. Since kids don't lose all their teeth at once these gaps provide the extra space for the larger adult teeth. When these gaps aren't present, the erupting adult teeth will shift to fit in the available space. So if you look in your kids mouth and there's no spaces between the baby teeth your kids has a high chance of needing braces in the future. | 20 |
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ELI5: Why do your feet sweat more while wearing shoes without socks than with both socks and shoes? | 191 | They sweat the same but the socks help absorb the sweat, disperse it across the sock and evaporate quicker because they have a lot of breathable holes for the air to get through.
Shoes aren't made to absorb the sweat so much, especially the sole which is normally a rubber and pvc so really doesn't want to absorb | 251 |
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How does Alzheimer's Disease lead to death? | I understand (very basically) the pathophysiology of the disease with the amyloid plaques developing, but what happens when the disease progress that can be the underlying cause of death? Is memory essential to being alive (in strictly a scientific definition of the word) | 1,130 | There are secondary problems that arise in Alzheimer's that you wouldn't immediately think of, like dysphagia, which often lead to death. The loss of the ability to swallow (this is what dysphagia is, in case you didn't recognize that word) without choking leads to them not being able to eat, and accidentally inhaling food/etc. on a pretty regular basis. Pneumonia, secondary to dysphagia, is how most with Alzheimer's end up dying.
Rarer deaths come from dementia itself, like wandering into traffic or getting lost in their backyard or even their bathroom, and forgetting to drink or eat for days till they pass.
Memory itself isn't essential to living. | 727 |
ELI5: Why does every Xbox One game need to download/install 1GB+ "updates" every time I buy a new game? | Why can't I just put the disc in like consoles used to be? | 504 | because games are more often than not being released before they are ready. it takes a few months to manufacture and distribute all those game disks to meet a release date. so they put whatever is ready at the time to manufacture the disks and then just release the remaining as a day 1 patch. in some cases, the day 1 update have been basically the entire game that needs to be redownloaded.
in the past, there was no ability to issue online updates. so what was ready at the time, had to be the final version. | 424 |
ELI5: What is exactly happening when we zone our eyes out and make everything blurry? | 55 | Your eyes have lenses that can adjust to focus on objects at different distances, exactly like a camera does. When you do this, you're setting your lenses to focus at a different distance than the object you're looking at. | 18 |
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CMV: Biological sex is given at conception, and not "assigned at birth". | To keep this CMV brief, I have noticed that the phrases *assigned male at birth* and *assigned female at birth* is becoming increasingly used online for referring to people who are trans but have certain biology crucial for certain examinations (for example, prostate exams in transgender women). Anywho, outside of intersex conditions, traits of biological sex are present in the fetus in utero. Things like genitals, gonads, and hormones are present prior to birth which makes being "assigned male at birth" for me for example kinda missing the point of the fact that these biological traits are present prior to birth.
ELI5 speak: If I had my penis and testes prior to my birth as a fetus, then my biological sex was given at conception and not "assigned at birth". | 1,133 | The point of this statement isn’t to simply state ones biological sex…
A person is assigned either male or female at birth. The sex may be determined beforehand, like via an ultrasound (which is hardly definitive) but it’s finalized at birth.
Birth is when the birth certificate is made…when the name is given, and the sex is declared on a document that will be used officially by the government and follow that individual around for life.
So it’s a definitive point in time when their sex was “declared”, and legally binding. But this is only ONE aspect of why this term is used.
Stating one’s agab also helps quickly convey information about a person’s experience….both biological experiences and social expectations…like if they had to deal with having a period and be told to wear dress, or experience their voice drop and be told to “be manly”…
At no point for any of these does the fact that the person was already male or female before birth have any relevance….but the MOMENT that their sex was officially documented in their permanent records does play a significant part in their life story… | 877 |
ELI5:Why do deli meats like turkey and roast beef taste so much different when thickly sliced vs. thinly sliced? | A quarter inch of thinly sliced turkey tastes completely different than one quarter inch thick slice of turkey. What's up with that? | 3,763 | The more surface area to mass, the more air hits it. The more air "mixed" with the product, the better the taste. Hence the slurping when tasting wine "properly".
Edit: Clarification
Correction: *more* surface area to mass | 2,487 |
ELI5: Presidential term limits in cases where the VP becomes president. | How do the term limits imposed on the US Presidency affect those Presidents who were not elected in for their first term? Prime example being Lyndon Johnson following the assassination of JFK. Does the two term limit in LBJ's case include the term he served following the assassination, or would his first term be the term would be re-elected (non-American so I can't recall if LBJ was actually re-elected)? | 32 | The exact text of the 22nd Amendment:
> No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.
So if the Vice President serves more than 2 years of the previous term, it counts towards the 2 terms and they can only serve one more term. If they serve less than 2 years, they can still be elected twice. | 19 |
ELI5: Why Don't Airplanes Have Interior Cameras Like Buses, Trains, Etc? | I was reading the article about the pregnant woman getting kicked off her flight because her son was being unruly. Her story is completely different from the flight crews. It made me wonder something pretty simple:
Why don't commercial airlines have interior cameras like you see on buses, trains, subways, etc. Considering all the random events that could happen, seems like it would be a cheap and effective way to know what really happened. | 731 | I think that the cameras on buses and trains are mostly to be used as evidence if someone on the vehicle commits a crime, like theft, and then leaves. No one can leave the airplane mid flight and there is extensive security screening to get onto the plane so it seems sort of pointless. | 211 |
If the body can naturally dissolve blood clots formed in blood vessels on their own, how some people still suffer from DVT? | I heard the body is able to dissolve blood clots on their own, if thats possible then why do people still have long lasting blood clots/DVT? Cant the body just naturally get rid of if?
Update: Thank you so much to everyone for answering this question, very much appreciated! | 2,991 | DVTs happen when your clotting ability overwhelms your ability to break down clots (see virchow triad above). This is why we put patients on blood thinners to treat DVTs (heparin, lovenox,
DOACs) - these blood thinners don’t actively break down the clot, but slow down your natural clotting system so the clot doesn’t get bigger. The goal is try allow your body‘s natural breakdown system to catch up. This is how people who have DVT‘s can ultimately get rid of them. Sometimes these clots can can cause chronic scarring of the veins- the veins then can’t help propel blood back to the heart- and that can lean to lifelong clots and swelling.
Source: I’m a vascular surgeon
Edited for clarity regarding the chronic scarring | 2,179 |
ELI5: Why do we get "bags" under our eyes? | I'm talking in the sense of dark skin color under the eyes, rather than old age and skin sagging. | 22 | Lack of sleep makes skin more pale.
Skin more pale means it contrasts with the dark areas.
In other words, your skin near your eyes is always dark (the skin near your eyes is a little bit see through, and you can see the darkness of the blood behind it). However, when your skin is pale due to lack of sleep, it that see-through darkness seems even darker compared to your lighter skin, so it looks like you have dark circles there when you don't sleep enough. | 41 |
What does true silence sound like? | I'm not sure about you guys and I'm no biology expert but even in "silence" I still hear a slight tone. Are humans unable to hear true silence? Is it just me? | 38 | Something similar comes up in the story of John Cage's inspiration for *4'33"*:
>In 1951, he visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard University in order to hear silence. "I literally expected to hear nothing," he said. Instead, he heard two sounds, one high and one low. He was told that the first was his nervous system and the other his blood circulating. | 47 |
How might Camus respond to this smbc comic about him? | http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-01-29
This comic turned me on to a point I didn't consider about Camus's argument, and I was curious if anyone has written a more in-depth exploration of this point (or anything similar). If you have any personal opinions or ideas I'd be interested in hearing them as well. | 16 | I wonder why the writer of the cartoon thinks that immortality somehow provides an escape from the problem that Camus poses. Seems to me it does the exact opposite. Camus is pointing out the meaninglessness of life; endless life is endlessly meaningless. Without the promise of death, there wouldn't even be the dignity, honor, or simple sheer interest of dealing with mortality. Life would be insipidly meaningless, instead of interestingly meaningless.
| 18 |
CMV: It would be impossible to upload a persons mind to a computer or artificial brain. | I see this in science fiction and sometimes discussions about the future of human evolution. Sometimes it's presented as a digital afterlife.
I think it is impossible no matter how far we advance technologically for the following reasons.
1) Consciousness is an emergent property of our brains. I realize that the nature of consciousness is still a big philosophical and scientific question mark but we do know that changing our brains deliberately or accidentally can also change things like personality, perception, just about anything that we may think makes us our selves.
2) the only thing that would behave exactly like a specific neuron is that specific neuron. A simulated neuron or artifical neuron would not be able to behave **exactly** the same way. Perhaps a reasonable approximation would be possible but over time the behaviour of that artifical neuron would diverge from that of the original.
3) Based on 1 and 2 a brain composed of simulated or artificial neurons would be have differently over time from the original brain. This would result in a similar but essentially different person.
4) Even if it were somehow possible to overcome these obstacles you would essentially be making a copy of yourself that would go on living/thinking regardless of whether or not the original person was destroyed in the process.
I would like my view changed because I love some of the ideas I see but can't imagine a way we could overcome these problems.
Edit: It's been three hours and I'm more than a little overwhelmed getting very burnt out, some of my views have changed and I will try to respond to everybody that has posted already, thank you all for giving me so much to think about and different perspectives, lots of really awesome and thoughtful responses here :) | 20 | Point 1 is kinda the whole thing that makes this all a difficult conversation. We do not know how it works, so we can't really answer the question. Whether or not we need the neurons to function in the specific way they do (point 2) is unanswerable because we still don't know how or why consciousness happens. We don't know if it's can be replicated, but we're kind of assuming it can be.
points 3&4 then lead into an entirely different set of unanswerable questions about identity and personhood | 11 |
Uluru is listed as the worlds largest rock. Is it truly an “individual stone” or is it attached to bed rock? How was it formed? | 19 | Its not a sole rock sitting on top of 'earth' as such. Its a sedimentary layer that has been uplifted by 90degrees and this end pokes out. One end of the rock used to be 'down' and the other was 'up' and much newer. Its believed that the rock layer curves down 6-7km and then re-emerges some way away as The Olgas, another interesting rock formation. | 10 |
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CMV: Teleportation is objectively the best superpower | You can fly by just teleporting into the sky for a while. Though you'd have to set up a momentum nullifying device. Maybe an EXTREMELY large waterslide which you can afford because:
You are rich. you can teleport into bank vaults.
You can teleport immediately into any politicians office to slap them in the face
You'll never be caught
You could instantly transport large crates of food/water to wherever they are needed.
You could charge anything you like for the fastest transport service in the world
So many applications!
Discuss | 82 | Why wouldn't mind control be better. No running or hiding necessary. Tell Warren Buffett to give you $50 billion and tell Rihanna she loves you.
Edit: Better yet, what about the ability to see into the future. Among many other things, you could look hundreds of years ahead and advance humankind to reap the benefits of innovation right NOW. | 59 |
What is gentrification? Positives/Negatives of it? | I've never really fully understood what it is and why it is undertaken. Thanks reddit. | 85 | Let's say we have a kind of poor, working class (that means the people who work in the area aren't earning a whole lot of money from their jobs) neighborhood in a city. The people there are mostly minorities, sometimes immigrants.
Now, some artistic, creative people find that the hip neighborhoods in the city are just too expensive. They can't afford to live their and have space to do their creative things. So they start moving to the working class neighborhood, where rent is cheap and there's a lot of space. At first, this is okay. They get along with the people there, add some interesting things to the neighborhood (they open a coffee shop in a previously empty store, turn an empty lot into a garden, open art galleries, etc.).
Suddenly, though, the people with money from the hip neighborhoods start hearing about all these cool things opening up in the working class neighborhood. They start traveling there to visit the restaurants, see the art galleries and music shows.
This makes the neighborhood look more attractive, and soon people who aren't creatives, but like being around creatives, move in. With all these new people moving in, they cause the rents to go up, and more and more "hip" stores and places opening up, and the minorities/immigrants who lived their originally find that they no longer can afford to live there. Eventually, the neighborhood becomes so expensive that even most of the artistic types move out, and our previously working class neighborhood has now become another hip neighborhood.
The positive side of this is that it does make neighborhoods nicer. There's businesses where there used to be nothing, often brings down crime rates, and can be a more effective way to "renew" a neighborhood than government efforts.
The negative side is that it doesn't really get rid of poverty, it just displaces it. The working-class of the neighborhood don't become rich, they just move somewhere else, often farther out from where they live. Which means they have longer commutes, often high pay higher travel prices because they're using more gas in their cars, and so their quality of life gets worse. It also can remove the "character" of a neighborhood, the things that make it unique. It just turns it into a copy of all the other "hip" neighborhoods. | 116 |
[The Thing] How long would it take for animal cells to reproduce to a pound? | I'm working on a The Thing game, and I was gonna have a biologist mention that a sample of Thing tissue has grown an abnormal amount since being brought back from Outpost 31. I was gonna say that it grew half a pound in four hours, but I didn't think that was actually abnormal. I then switched to a full pound, but still don't feel like it's good enough. The Thing has incredible cellular growth. What would be an abnormal(but small) amount of mass that could be gained in four hours? | 20 | Depends on how much mass you started with and how abnormally fast a growth rate you want. Under proper conditions, E. coli can make around a lb of biomass in half a day from a tiny bit of cells. And e. coli doubles every 20-30 minutes, while human cells take much much longer, doubling maybe a couple times a day. So a lb in 4 hours is within the bounds of biological limits depending on how much you start with, but wildly fast for human tissue. But that's assuming every cell has all the nutrients it wants in optimum conditions, while a chunk of tissue in a petri dish, even if it's sitting in a pool of prime nutrients, would grow much slower (e. coli growing of agar in a petri dish might grow only a couple grams). So a lb of growth would be a wild amount of growth, or maybe reasonable, depending on exact conditions and what you define as 'abnormal'. | 10 |
(Star Wars original trillogy) What was the Jedi's plan for the Emperor? | It seems like Obiwan and Yoda's plan for dealing with the Empire was to take out Vader using Luke.
However, this still leaves the ultimate figure head of the Empire still alive and in power. It just happened events turned out as they did and Sidious was killed. Did they hope somehow the Rebellion would get lucky, or would Yoda come out of exile for a rematch?
Hell I don't know, did they have a plan for the Emperor? | 41 | They probably intended for Luke to kill him after killing Vader. Luke was part of everyone's plan.
Vader's plan was to turn Luke and then team up against Palpatine. Palpatine's plan was to take Luke as his new apprentice, probably killing Vader in the process.
Everyone wanted a piece of the Luke pie. | 62 |
[Warhammer 40k] Everyone decides to get along. Will the chaos gods change in any way? | Let's assume that one day, every major faction decides to live in peace. Necrons lose their hatred of organics, Eldar find a way to repopulate, Dark Eldar rejoin their craftworld Brethen, Tau lose their fanaticism, the Imperium loses its hatred of Xenos and religious fanaticism, Tyranids find a way to get food without killing life on inhabited planets, and the Orks creators appear to rein them in. Will the Chaos gods change in any way? | 21 | No.
* Necrons don't have a warp presence.
* Eldar fucking = Slaanesh
* Dark Eldar = Slaanesh
* Tau don't have a proper warp presence
* >imperium
* >lose hatred for xenos
* They still have a warp presence, and love fighting themselves anyways.
* 'nids don't really do warp but if they stopped fighting, Khorne might be mad.
No, Chaos exists whether or not there is war and grimdark. It existed before it and exists now. Well, it actually came about because of a lot of killing but it survived and the gods awoke during a relative down time - when Humanity is basically right now.
* Tzeentch is Tzeentch, he will not give a fuck if everyone stops fighting.
* Nurgle don't care, disease gets you anyways
* Slaanesh probably gets more powerful.
* Khorne might get mad. | 19 |
ELI5: why are countries like Panama, Cyprus ideal for laundering money? | 112 | To understand how countries facilitate international money laundering you have to understand a peculiarity about how EU countries treat their citizens in regards to foreign investigations. Which is to say, EU countries will not investigate their citizens at the request of foreign countries, nor will they extradite their citizens.
For a long time this meant that if you were a French citizen you could cross the border into Germany and commit as many crimes as you wanted. As long as you made it back to France without being caught by the German police, you were essentially immune to prosecution for everything that you did because France would neither investigate nor extradite you since you were a French citizen. This system obviously didn't work when the EU was formed.
EU countries didn't abandon their blanket refusal to investigate or extradite their citizens when the EU was formed. Instead, they just decided to treat requests for investigation and extradition from other EU nations to be "domestic" requests. So nowadays France will extradite you to Germany, regardless of whether you're a citizen of France, because Germany is in the EU and so France considers Germany to be part of France for the purposes of extradition requests.
But lets say that you're a French citizen who commits a crime in Egypt. Egypt is not a member of the EU, so France considers it to be "foreign" and will not extradite you since you have French citizenship.
How does this relate to Cyprus? Cyprus is a member of the EU but it considers other EU states to be "foreign" for the purposes of responding to requests for investigation or extradition. That is to say, if Germany asks a Cypriot bank to investigate money laundering involving a Cypriot citizen, the Cypriot bank will tell Germany to get an order from a Cypriot court. The Cypriot court will refuse to grant that order, because it considers Germany to be a "foreign" nation and the investigation concerns a Cypriot citizen.
Both legally and philosophically the EU has had a difficult time reconciling why EU countries are allowed to refuse to investigate or extradite their citizens on behalf of some countries but not others. Because of the contradictory nature of the EU's position on this, they haven't been able to pass anything binding on Cypriot banks. They have tried to apply pressure by threatening to reduce EU funding, but every time they do so Cyprus just agrees to "do better in the future" and then does nothing.
And the EU has even less of a basis to try to ask a non-EU country like Panama to comply with EU money laundering regulations, at least as to Panamanian citizens.
So if this only affects Cypriot/Panamanian citizens then why is it a big deal? Both Cyprus and Panama sell citizenship. Its not unusual for a country to have a visa program that allows for someone to invest a certain amount of money in the country and to then gain permanent residency there. But that requires you to *invest* the money into some productive business, not just stick it in a bank. And the path from permanent residency to citizenship typically takes quite a long time and requires that there isn't any suspicion that you're an international criminal.
That isn't the case in Cyprus or Panama. You become a citizen of either of those countries as soon as you stick enough money in one of their banks and they don't care who you are, what you do, or where the money came from. So if you're an international criminal who wants to launder money through one of those countries then you just stick it in one of their banks and, viola, that money is now clean as far as the EU is concerned.
This leaves the US as really the only country that can enforce money laundering rules on international banks - which the US goes to great lengths to do. But the US only really goes after banks that are interfacing with the US banking system or providing services to a US citizen.
Cypriot and Panamanian banks only interface with the EU banking system. This means that the money can really only be used in the EU, and even then only for very limited purposes. But if you're a European drug lord or a Russian oligarch that's probably fine for whatever you want to do with it.
Cypriot and Panamanian banks are also very careful not to allow US citizens or anyone who even has US residency to bank with them. Again, if you're a European drug lord or Russian oligarch this doesn't impact you at all.
Because of this, money laundering through those countries is a distinctly EU problem, and its one that it can't really resolve because of how most of the EU's member states have decided to deal with their own citizens vis a vie requests on behalf of "foreign" law enforcement. | 109 |
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CMV: the term “Karen” is used way too much to describe basic social misbehavior, and should be reserved for extreme cases to protect its purity. | #hearmeout
I get it. Ever since that first Karen stepped out of the woodwork, haircut and all, asking to immediately speak with the manager over some ridiculously minute issue thing while mistreating the the hardworking, we’ve all been on high alert for this behavior.
However, now I’m seeing the word Karen everywhere, and now for just basic conflict “Oh this Karen doesn’t want me to walk my dog on her property” I’m putting my Karen high heel down and being Karen like myself to say Think about it. Karen is a term that should be reserved for the truly deplorable behaviors that make the working public hate their job. Overusing it takes away from its meaning. | 623 | I dissagree on the simple basis that the train has left the station.
Once things like this gain traction there's no putting the genie back into the bottle. It's the same for either rather benign words or sayings like "ok boomer" being used against 30 year olds or less benign terms calling people nazi's or hitler because they pour milk in the bowl before their cereal.
There's a kind of bell curve to these kinds of terms.
The pop up somewhere, gain traction, become widespread. At this point the meaning might get dilluted or lost, followed by overusage and a drop in effectiveness. This is where we are now. It's already to late to save the term.
Women now will probably face being called Karen now for the tiniest of reasons, even if they were in the right, because it can be used against them. A'd at the same time it'll lose it's sting, so in a couple of months, or years being called Karen will just be shrugged off again. | 115 |
ELI5: What exactly happens in the moment from being awake to falling asleep? | 23 | The answer to this question lies in the pre frontal cortex. The pre frontal cortex controls a few different things. Controlling breathing & body temp, maintaining a circadian rhythm, and sending out pain singles through our IMS.
The maintenance of our circadian rhythm controlled by the pre frontal cortex only happens if our pre frontal cortex recognizes it is time for sleep. When it is time for sleep the body sends neurological S.L.E.E.P (solproxeenep) signals through our IMS and the body slowly turns to auto pilot basically. You begin getting lost in your thoughts and suddenly your so deep into them you can’t move.
From that stage you forget what your thinking about as you think it and by this point your in deep sleep and the only thing that can wake you up is a memory of you shooting a basketball and you violently jump sideways in your bed and get so mad that you just fell for it again the 5th night in a row. Goodnight | 26 |
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What are some arguments refuting the notion that empirical evidence is the only source of truth or facts? | A popular line of argumentation on reddit is that empirical evidence is the *only* source of truth or facts. Or that it *should or ought* be only source of truth or facts. Or that it is significantly "better"/more reliable than non-empirical evidence.
Then, based on these arguments, of course, they tend to lead to unremitting scientism. E.g. if the only worthy truth seeking is empirical in nature (which is the domain of science) and thus everything not science is not worthy.
What are some arguments against this line of thought? | 22 | >it should or ought be only source of truth or facts.
What is the source of *that* truth?
Also, mathematics is a good counter-example. It is clearly *a priori*. Scientistic types will then have to appeal to formalist or analytic theories of mathematics in order to account for mathematical knowledge. But we know, after the foundational crisis in mathematics, that they are false.
Things that don't seem to be susceptible to empirical investigation, but we still think are factual, include:
1. Normative truths: moral obligations, epistemic obligations, etc. (E.g., "You ought to believe what you have net evidence for" or, "If you believe X, and you believe X --> Y, then you ought to believe Y." Indeed, if you are a defender of reason, logic, etc., as scientistic types take it that they are, then this essentially commits you to the objectivity of these kinds of normative facts which, incidentally, cannot be known on the basis of empirical observation or measurement.)
2. Modal truths
3. Mathematical truths
________________
See:
* BonJour, *In Defense of Pure Reason* (1998). (This is one of the most rigorous and comprehensive defenses of rationalism.)
For a brief primer and easier discussion, you can also take a look at Huemer's *Approaching Infinity* (2016), particularly *Ch. 7, 7.3 Synthetic a priori knowledge*, ... and relevant sections after that. | 17 |
CMV: I am of the strong opinion that capital letter should not be required at the start of a sentence. | capital letters fulfill their purpose in acronyms/initialisms and proper nouns. a name like Mark requires a capital to differentiate it from the regular word. capitals are not required to show a reader that a new sentence is beginning. the entire point of punctuation is to end a clause. a comma or semi-colon is not followed by a capital, because people are able to understand the with the punctuation alone that the ideas are separate. there are some debatable uses, like capitalizing titles.
TL;DR: capitalization has some uses, but starting a sentence with a capital is unnecessary, and should be left behind. | 24 | Capital letters fulfill their purpose in acronyms/initialisms and proper nouns. A name like Mark requires a capital to differentiate it from the regular word. Capitals are not required to show a reader that a new sentence is beginning. The entire point of punctuation is to end a clause. A comma or semi-colon is not followed by a capital, because people are able to understand the with the punctuation alone that the ideas are separate. There are some debatable uses, like capitalizing titles.
You may have a point. But which style was easier to read...? | 50 |
ELI5: Why does the need to have a bowel movement sometimes pass if we don’t choose to sit on the toilet at that very moment? | 15 | The need for a bowel movement happens when stool passes into your rectum. This is a chamber just above your anus. When the rectum is stretched, because stool is inside, you get the urge to poo. However, if it's not a suitable time to do it, it would not make much sense for us to have the constant need to go. So we have evolved in a way that if we don't go within a certain amount of time, the stool is pushed backwards into your colon again and your body will try again later. | 16 |
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[ASOIAF] Why are the Seven Kingdoms afraid of the prospect of a Dothraki invasion when they outnumber them twenty to one? | It's mentioned in A Game of Thrones that Viserys Targaryen wants to invade Westeros with an army of "ten thousand Dothraki screamers". These are all light cavalrymen, of whom a single Westerosi knight, Ser Jorah Mormont or Barristan Selmy (who are very skilled, I'll concede) can make short work in single combat. While knights are a minority in Westerosi militaries, House Tyrell alone can muster 100-120,000 men, Lannister 60,000, House Stark several tens of thousands and so on, and all these militaries are sophisticated and diverse, with access to fortifications, advanced tactics, superior technology and ranged capability and so on. So why would such a massive, well-supplied war machine be afraid of such a comparatively small force of Dothraki, when even a single Great House seems like it could easily repulse an invasion, especially on their home turf? | 33 | Simply put, Viserys is wrong. He vastly overestimates his own abilities as a leader. Right after Dany tells him what Viserys says, Jorah Mormont snorts and says and says that Viserys "would not be able to sweep a stable with ten thousand brooms". There might be a few Lords that would join a Targaryen returned but even with their help it's all pretty much a false hope at that point.
So not many people in the Seven Kingdoms are afraid of a Dothraki invasion. The Dothraki have never attacked by sea and most people don't know there's even Targaryens still alive. Viserys dreams big but he's really just insignificant in the grand scheme of things. He's not smart enough, charismatic enough, or skilled enough to make his visions a reality. | 40 |
[MCU] In Endgame, after Thanos punches Captain Marvel with the power stone, why doesn't he slam his fist with it in the ground and destroy the earth? | Like how the celestials destroyed planets using the power stone. Is it because he needs a weapon to store the infinity stone to use it or because it would kill him in the process and not allowing him to wipe the slate clean for the universe? | 243 | This Thanos has only just acquired the power stone for the first time. He isn't used to using it, but he is used to fighting with fists and blades. His mind likely went with what it was used to rather than with optimal choices. He may also have been holding onto the mindset of a battlefield commander who wanted to preserve his forces rather than as a pseudo-god who could remake his forces at will.
In general, Thanos does not seem to gain anything like a 'cosmic awareness' with the stones that would let him know the precise best choices to make. | 267 |
[Resident Evil] Who is this Umbrella Corp. and what is their end game? | Forgive me for my bad english. I saw on the tele earlier that a massive outbreak and infected people happened earlier in the US. Government telling this very bad. Why do they diseases that make dead people no longer dead? I also heard rumors of giant monster things and a man who move very fast. Are they want to sell to military? | 38 | They're great people. You use dishwasher detergent? Their labs made it. Those drugs keeping your grandpa alive? Designed by Umbrella.
Umbrella is filled with good people, like you and me. These ugly newsbites are just some terrorist group playing sick jokes. | 25 |
Dear askscience: Developing a nuclear fusion reactor so we can ... heat water to generate steam to spin a magnet inside a copper coil seems like caveman overkill. Is there really no better way to generate electricity? | 1,689 | Turbines are easily the most cost efficient means of converting heat into electricity that we have. A supercritical water turbine can reach an efficiency of 50%. In comparison, even the most efficient high-tech solar cells we have only get about 40%, with your typical solar panel at 10%. In principle Stirling engines can get a higher efficiency, but it's expensive to build Stirling engines rated for a large power output.
What makes turbines so useful is that they scale extremely well, allowing you to relatively cheaply build a large device with a high efficiency. It is also relatively straight forward to optimise the turbine's properties to make it as efficient as possible for a given power plant.
As a bonus, the turbines can be made to spin at a rate which matches the AC current used in most electric transmission lines. This frequency is important because it determines how much energy is wasted through capacitive losses during transmission. Changing the frequency of an AC current is difficult to do efficiently, so if your generation scheme can create the right frequency to begin with, it simplifies things considerably. | 1,438 |
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How deep into the earth have humans explored? | Is the Marianas Trench the deepest we have explored? Is there any caves deeper on land? | 632 | The deepest we have dug is the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia which went about 12 km deep. There have also been some oil wells that have gone similarly deep.The deepest known cave is the Voronya cave which is about 2 km deep. | 267 |
ELI5: What's the reason behind asian people's eye shape? | 16 | There is no complete evolutionary explanation for the apparent slant of the eyes common to Asians. The configuration results from a fold of skin of the upper eyelid, the epicanthic fold, which tends to cover the inner corner of the eye.
Dr. Frank Poirier, a physical anthropologist at Ohio State University, says the classical explanation of epicanthic fold depicts it as an adaptation to the tropical and arctic regions where many Asians live. The fold is described as a sun visor protecting the eyes from overexposure to ultraviolet radiation or as a blanket insulating them from the cold.
According to Poirier, the problem with this theory is that a substantial portion of the Asian population evolved in areas outside of the tropical and arctic regions. In addition, he says epicanthic fold is not limited to Asians. ''John F. Kennedy had a variance of the fold and it is found among Europeans, especially the Irish,'' he said. ''It`s just less prevalent.'' The fold is also found among infants worldwide. Poirier attributes the fold to pleiotropic genes--single genes that control more than one characteristic or function--but he has no explanation for its origin. | 35 |
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[Indiana Jones] Does the provable existence of the Jewish god have any effect on the world aside from killing some Nazis? | 83 | Not really- the proof was seen by 2 people, was swiftly covered up, and can't be replicated without risking the death of everyone who sees it. The average man on the street knows nothing about this.
As for the "Top men" who do know about it, note how big that warehouse is, and how Jones has *also* found proof that Christianity is true, that Hinduism is true, and that "gods" are just advanced aliens. There's something more complex going on here, and they know it. | 102 |
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[Doctor Who] what determines if a point in time is fixed or not? | 17 | Fixed Points in time are enormous, tumultuous events that set in motion the broadest strokes of history, and causality itself depends on them to function. They are, oddly enough, an entirely natural phenomenon.
While the fine details surrounding such an event can change, and often do, the outcome will *always* remain the same, even if an attempt to change history is made -- we see this in The Waters of Mars. | 15 |
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ELI5: How does the needle of a record player ‘read’ the music on a vinyl? | 36 | It vibrates. The needle is held at the base, while the tip is allowed to ride in the groove of the record. That groove causes the needle to vibrate (up and down, not side to side), and that vibration is picked up by whatever amplification method is used by that particular record player. In mechanical players, that amplifier was a big horn that acoustically amplified the sounds, while today the stylus (what we call a needle) is held by a cartridge that either has a piezoelectric element or actually has a small coil and magnet setup to turn the vibrations into electrical energy, which can then be amplified. | 29 |
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ELI5: If insider trading is illegal, how are CEOs allowed to trade shares of their own companies? | 100 | Most executives are governed by rules regarding insider trading, which are set by the company through bylaws or individual agreements with the executives. Normally, they state the times when you can and cannot trade in reference to when certain pieces of information are about to be released. For example, you are probably not allowed to trade a certain amount of days before financial statements are about to be published publicly.
If they're caught violating these laws, they'll be fired from the company (most likely), and the SEC will likely have some words with them as well.
Edit: To clarify, the agreements restrict their trading, usually, before and after major company events. Often times, executives will clear it with the Board of Directors for any large trading in their own company. By being candid in their intent to trade, they're helping to cover themselves from being accused of insider trading. | 40 |
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Is space continuous? And if is it then why do we have Planck Length? | I have always wondered if space can be quantized or not. We have always been told that space is continuous. But if that is the case then why does Planck Length exist? | 32 | It's a common misconception that the Planck length is the "smallest possible distance" or any similar property related to the quantization of space. The physical significance of the Planck length is still a matter of theoretical study and it's not excluded that it has some significance, but this is as of yet unknown.
Anyway, where then does this Planck length come from and why is it relevant? Well, the Planck length is part of a system of units called Planck units (or natural units). You're probably familiar with different unit systems already, since the most famous example is the distinction between the imperial system used in the US (with miles, feet, pounds, etc...) and the metric/SI system used pretty much everywhere else (with meters, grams, liters, etc...). Both systems express the same things, just rescaled. You rescale both measurements, but also some constants of nature. For example, the speed of light has a different value in km per hour than it does in miles per hour.
Planck units are another way to rescale things like distance, mass, etc... The scale is chosen in such a way that some important natural constants (including the speed of light and gravitational constant) are exactly 1. This is very convenient for a lot of physics, since it makes the equations much simpler. An additional argument in favour of this system is that it is more "natural" as the scale is based directly on natural constants, rather than the somewhat arbitrary definitions of things like meter, gram, foot and pound.
The Planck length is simply the unit of length in this system. Instead of meters or feet, distances are measured in Planck lengths when using Planck/natural units.
Finally, there is no evidence either way regarding the quantization of space (or time). There are various hypotheses, but the question of whether space is discrete or continuous is still open. But if it turns out that space is indeed discrete, then it isn't necessarily linked to the Planck length. Though it might. Who knows? | 44 |
Eli5-What does a “stack overflow” mean? | 856 | Stack is a data structure. Think like a piles of dishes, you can only add more plates to the top, or remove the top plate (we call it LIFO: Last In, First Out), but in this case, the dishes are actually data in the computer memory.
In theory, we could add as many data to a stack as we want, but memory is finite, so we set a limit to the size of the "pile of data". When you try to add data to a stack that is full, a stack overflow happens. Depending on the implementation of the stack, either the program will prevent more data from being added, or the data will be added to an unexpected location of memory, leading to all sorts of unexpected problems. | 1,537 |
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[Star Wars] Was there any clones that were against Order 66 and ideas of Palpatine and Vader? | 18 | The true answer is "most of them."
The vast majority of the clones never would have willingly fired on their Jedi commanders (I say 'most' because there were a few notable exceptions, specifically Pong Krell, whose soldiers mutinied against him on Umbara long before Order 66 happened). The clones were outfitted with inhibitor chips in their heads that could override their free will and make them kill the Jedi regardless of their wishes...which is exactly what happened,>!as we were just shown on the newest episode of The Clone Wars (which covers Order 66 from Ahsoka Tano's perspective during and immediately after the Seige of Mandalore)!<.
These chips have been known to malfunction, setting off the Jedi-killing order prematurely (in the case of Tup), and at least one clone (Fives) learned about the chips' true purpose but was framed and shot before he could reveal it to the Jedi and the Clones at large. But largely, neither the Jedi nor the Clones were aware of the chips, their ability to override the free will of the Clones, or the orders contained on them; if they were aware of the chips, they were told that they "supposed to prevent you from being aggressive, like your source, Jango Fett" and that "Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas instructed us to implant them during your growth cycle." Neither of those things were true, but the Clones that knew and asked were given that answer.
Since Order 66 was issued by the Chancellor, the supreme commander of the Republic armed forces, due to their inability to disobey the clone troopers carried out the Chancellor's command. Though a small percentage of clones successfully ignored the order and some fought against it >!(we see Captain Rex, Anakin's second-in-command, actively fighting the compulsion before he gives in and tries to kill Ahsoka)!<, the vast majority of the clones executed their unsuspecting Jedi commanders without question; though Order 66 apparently applies mostly to "Jedi leadership," in practice Palpatine's order was an order for the genocide of all Jedi, including Padawans, initiates, and younglings (one of the more notable examples being the murder of Depa Billaba and the narrow escape of her young Padawan, Caleb Dume). | 36 |
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[Dwarf Fortress] Why do dwarves and goblins even hate eachother? | Think about it. They keep slaves. We enslave animal men and force them to fight in the arena.
They consort with demons. We dig into hell and then weaponize it by opening the tunnels against invading armies.
They are warlike and slaughter other races. We turn the slaughter of caravans into an industry.
Why do we hate them besides pure racism? We should be bros. | 17 | When the world was made, Armok determined that all races should be bound to their creed, marked by holy men in the symbol [ETHICS]. While some dwarves, in periods of questionable judgement, have strayed from these, they have all remained true to the core concepts.
Dwarves shall not butcher and eat intelligent beings. Goblins think this is a personal matter.
Dwarves shall not torture. Goblins think this is acceptable.
Dwarves shall not murder other dwarves, break oaths, keep slaves. Goblins do not punish these.
Dwarves shall not commit treason. On this, goblins agree. With that as their only real common ground, is it any surprise dwarves and goblins hate each other?
Then realise what goblins do. They send out raiders, looting and killing dwarves. They send out kidnappers, stealing the future of the dwarven people from desperate mothers. And they lay siege, attempting to destroy everything that has been built over many years. When did you send out an army to aid the dwarven legion? When did you ever war in a way that wasn't about defence? You kill caravans, but you may be surprised to learn many dwarves don't (and do you really think your caravan killing has been morally correct?). And you may think making prisoners fight is slavery, but when have you ever successfully controlled a truly intelligent prisoner to do anything more than fight? You haven't. They don't become slaves in the arena. They die, or they become survivors. | 15 |
Why do gravitational lenses sometimes result in Einstein-crosses rather than full circles? | In what way can the light be "bent" by a gravitational lense so that an observer sees two (or more) copies of the object rather than seeing a full circle? E.g. in Einstein-crosses you see 4 copies spaced evenly around the center. What about the spaces between those 4 copies? Why does the light not take these ways?
(Btw I asked this several times in different places now and never got an answer, sometimes I just got downvoted - I hope this sub is the right place) | 41 | Not all gravitational lensing happens around objects that can be approximated as spheres. Some objects that can lens, like galaxies, can be quite elongated. Additionally, you would only expect to see a ring in the object being "lensed" was very close to directly behind the object. If it is off center, you would not see a ring but two images(in the simplest case). As you pointed out with the Einstein cross, this is an example where both of these factors are in play. The object lensing is an oblong shape, and the object being lensed is not directly behind it from our vantage point. | 26 |
Currently, is there anything a mobile (Android/iOS) app can do that a website can't? | I say currently because I do understand that the mobile-friendliness of the web has evolved very dramatically over the years, and that of course when many apps began their lives years ago, there were a great many things a standalone app could do that a web page within a browser app could not - not least, to take the most obvious example, the kind of complex interactive animations which were for a time off-limits to the mobile web when Flash was dying and yet web standards hadn't fully caught up to replacing all of Flash's main functionality.
However, today, in 2022, is there anything an app can do that a website can't? We now have web programming that can take into account swipe gestures, websites can send push notifications, websites can ask for location permissions and access to contact lists, etc, etc, etc. And most websites now offer the choice to add a web shortcut to one's mobile home screen - which functions similarly to an app, in that when you tap on it, it opens the website in question.
There are a few reasons I ask this (not least because what I call AppSpam, "download our app to use this or that feature", is becoming increasingly irritating and I wonder if it's ever actually necessary!) but primarily I ask more out of a social/cultural interest - Over the last few years as the internet has become increasingly politicised, one major flashpoint has become the gatekeeping of mobile app availability by app stores, particularly in the context of devices which, unlike traditional desktop devices, restrict end-user ability to install applications to those approved by the device or OS vendor. Within the last week, for example, it's been widely speculated that the ongoing changes taking place at Twitter could soon cause the company's mobile apps to slam headfirst into content moderation requirements imposed by Apple and Google for the App and Play stores respectively, which result in apps being removed when they do not impose such rules. Other social networks designed to provide platforms for users banned from mainstream ones have previously been banned from app stores - with news articles citing these incidents as "the death knell for this or that social network".
Does this *really* matter though? Is any actual functionality lost by having one's app removed from an official store (apart from visibility) when there's a mobile website which can seemingly duplicate all of its features, and the ability to add such a website as a home screen shortcut which, for all intents and purposes, is able to behave (at least on the surface) exactly like an app - notification bubbles, location services, etc?
Tl;dr, in 2022, is there *really* much of a functional difference between having an app through which mobile users access your platform (that they access on desktop through normal web browsers) and simply having a website that is accessed through a mobile web browser and associated shortcuts? | 30 | Yes, native apps, besides being written for a native UX (assuming developers take advantage of native development workflows and patterns, rather than shipping an Electron / React Native app), can use native APIs which result in better apps, both in terms of developer productivity, and app capabilities and features.
For example, on Android, a wealth of APIs are available through Google Play Services and the Android OS:
- Powerful location APIs
- SafetyNet / Play Integrity APIs
- Android Keystore
- Native authentication APIs, including biometric
- Ability to register intents, handlers, app actions (e.g., to allow integration with voice assistant) + run in the background
- Much more powerful notifications that users can interact with
- The granular permissions model of the OS, which enables access to all these
- Ability to provide widgets
- ML Kit, providing on-device, performant APIs to run common ML workflows like vision, natural language processing, etc. that's actually performant and won't kill your battery
- gRPC
iOS has its own suite of capable APIs that native apps can integrate with.
> And most websites now offer the choice to add a web shortcut to one's mobile home screen - which functions similarly to an app, in that when you tap on it, it opens the website in question.
That's called a progressive web app, and they're not at all the same in terms of performance or capabilities. | 22 |
Why are there no predators with "hooves"? | I seen on a nature show before that there was a prehistoric predator that had hooves, and is distantly related to common sheep.
Why has evolution surpassed this feature for present day predators?
**EDIT** I should have made it more clear that I was thinking more of Carnivores and not Omnivores. (which doesn't necessarily disregard anyone's answers) | 283 | Paws and claws are the superior weapon. Being able to grab and dig into prey is a huge advantage. When life gives you lemons you make lemonade. When it gives you a fist full of knives you get stab happy.
It's also an example of convergent evolution. Mammals, birds, and reptiles all have predators with claws/talons. Species that go after prey which can struggle need a way to hold on and finish the kill. Unless you have a hell of a bite like a crocodile it's difficult to hold on.
| 287 |
[Vampire the Masquerade] Can a Kindred feel the effects of alcohol or any other drug? Or ingest alcohol or any drug for that matter? | So, after I got permission from my local Camarilla Prince to sire some prospective female. After the embrace I was telling her the ropes of Do's and Dont's for being a Kindred. Now, I already know that all Kindred should not even attempt to eat regular human food, that just isn't a fun time, but what about a drink like some Whiskey? Would me, or my Childe be able to process that without the usual side effects? I know that the taste wouldn't be the same compared to Vitae, but just for future reference if I ever find myself hunting around a bar. The same applies for taking things like Aspirin. I've never tried it, and I don't want to tell the neonate wrong information. | 17 | Some Kindred do have the ability to hold down liquor, but that ability applies to food as well. They don't get any nourishment or effects from it though. If you wanna get drunk with your Childe, pour the whiskey down a human's throat and then drink them. Same goes for drugs, just feed or inject them into the human, and drink the infused vitae. | 11 |
ELI5: How is it that Air Force One can cost well over $200000 an hour to operate (as is claimed), when commercial airlines must obviously operate 747s at a small fraction of this cost? | 19 | Because the articles that say that are being intentionally misleading. It costs $200,000 an hour to operate air force one because they are dividing the entire cost of the air plane, the crew, and service by the number of hours it will be in use.
Air Force One is a very expense air plane that gets used very infrequently. It if was used more often, it would cost *less* based on that calculation. | 35 |
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ELI5:Why can an alcoholic die from withdrawals if they quit cold turkey? | 33 | Alcohol affects various neurotransmitters, the chemicals that your neurons use to communicate with each other. In serious alcoholics, some neurotransmitters are under produced, because the alcohol makes up the difference. But if you quit cold turkey, the body can't quickly respond to make more of that neurotransmitter, so the neurons don't fire correctly. This leads to seizures and sometimes death.
In short, if you're dependent upon alcohol and you quit immediately, your brain won't function right. | 21 |
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[Star Wars] Why do vaporators and binary load lifters share a language? | Isn't this like making a forklift compatible with a dehumidifier? How is that not a colossal waste of money? | 15 | Not really. Both are electronic devices. you might want a dehumidifier that you can program, and a forklift can be tuned to be more fuel efficent, or at the very least have a radio.
No point in reinventing the wheel by making a New computer Language, or making something entirely mechanical because... we got money to waste i guess? | 26 |
[Star Trek] In a post scarcity society with no such thing as "money", how are court cases decided that traditionally would have been resolved with monetary settlements? | I just got burnt by my Space coffee from Space McDonald's. The hospital and treatment were obviously free, so McDonald's doesn't have to pay that. Do they just get off free and clear? | 106 | Just because there's no money doesn't mean the Federation has no legal system. If space McDonalds is guilty of negligence, those responsible can be be given what we would call "community service", reassigned to a less prestigious job, or incarnated in extreme cases. | 75 |
ELI5: Why does there have to be poor and rich in an economy? Will it ever be possible for everyone to be considered well off? | 15 | * Some people will always be stronger, faster, smarter, better looking, or luckier than others, and will be able to use those to their economic advantage.
* Rich and poor are relative...the poor in the US generally have enough food, shelter, and protection...this makes them among the richest people in human history. | 19 |
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ELI5 Wormholes, what they are, and how they work | 119 | In short it is a tunnel through spacetime that connects 2 distant points. Imagine that the Universe is an apple and we live on the outside skin of it. Our entire reality exists on that skin, we can go in any direction and never reach the meat on the inside or the outside world. Those are in other dimensions. Now imagine that we managed to punch a hole through our spacetime (the skin) and all the way to the other side of the apple. What we have created is a wormhole which is a shortcut to a faraway place through spacetime itself. Otherwise we would have to travel all the way around the apple to get to a point on the other side. While wormholes as a concept are not impossible according to our current mathematics and understanding of physics, the likely hood that natural wormholes exist would be incredibly small. It is predicted that too much energy is required to break spacetime. | 30 |
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Why is it that when talking about Philosophy, people often come accross as arrogant? | Also, how can this be avoided? | 41 | I've noticed a general attitude on the part of non-philosophers that because philosophy concerns topics which everyone ostensibly cares about and even talks about to some degree (the nature of right and wrong, what's the true nature of reality, etc.) that expertise in the actual discipline of philosophy doesn't necessarily qualify you as knowing more than the average person. Therefore philosophers tend to be perceived as arrogant much more than, say, hard scientists, or even social scientists, where the general public seems to tend to assume that the expert actually *is* more qualified to speak about these particular topics than them (generally speaking). | 91 |
ELI5: What is equity and why is it important? | I'm trying to acquire some financial literacy and I've looked around for the meaning but for some reason I can't quite catch it. I feel like I need a better example from the reddit gods | 23 | Say you borrow $100k to buy a house.
At first the bank "owns" the house as you haven't made any payments yet.
But after a few years you have paid it down to where you only owe $50k now.
You have paid off half, so you now have 50% equity.
It's important because it represents *your* percentage of ownership.
| 27 |
ELI5: How come sticky things (like spilled coke) can stay sticky for days or weeks? Shouldn't they dry up relatively quickly and lose their "stickiness"? | 25 | No. They will stay sticky from their sugar content. When things dry up it’s because the water in them has evaporated, but when something sweet spills the water evaporates and leaves the sticky, sugary mess behind. Hope that helps! | 34 |
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How do doctors get the blood pressure of patients with amputated limbs? | 18 | We can measure BP with an automatic cuff on either arm or either leg, so long as there isn’t significant peripheral vascular disease which may skew the readings. I’ve taken care of plenty of amputees but never a quadruple one, even then you can measure on the thigh. Alternatively, we can also measure BP directly by placing an arterial line. This is a catheter typically placed in the radial artery (in the wrist) and allows for direct, real time BP monitoring.
We can also use clinical markers and our physical exam to make educated guesses on BP. | 12 |
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Why does the ocean appear darker in color as the depth increases? | The shallows appear almost translucent, while the deep ocean appears dark blue to almost black... I just want to know what causes this since the ocean is made up of the same kind of atoms (H20), and light should reflect off them the same way, right? | 66 | Light gets absorbed by water, and the more water light passes through the more gets absorbed. It's *roughly* 50% every 150 meters (so 75% every 300 meters, etc). It gets absorbed more strongly at higher wavelengths, so red is the first to go: if you take a coke can down SCUBA diving, it will appear magenta. | 73 |
[Jessica Jones] Could Kilgrave use a go between to relay his commands to someone under his influence? | Like if I met someone under Kilgrave’s control and said “Kilgrave wants you to give me your wallet”, would he comply? | 16 | Kilgrave's powers work because his skin produces psychoactive chemicals which must be absorbed by the victim via touch/smell. So, in short, no, unless Kilgrave could find a way to get those chemicals to victim #2, via victim #1. | 23 |
[Star Wars] Why was Obi Wan sent to battle Grievous in ROTS? | I know it was because he had the best defense in the order but that's no guarantee to be enough to best the droid general. Wouldn't it be smarter to send Yoda or Mace Windu who were considered to be the strongest Jedi at the time to face Grievous? | 82 | Because realistically they weren’t considered stronger. Obi-wan might have answered to them both and considered them his betters but insofar as skill goes Obi-wan was pretty much their equal.
It’s also not so much as just having better defence, it’s literally that the Soresu fighting style Obi-wan mastered in was pretty well picture perfect to counter Grievous | 78 |
[Terminator] How did the resistance win the war against Skynet? | The resistance against skynet seems to be incredibly outclassed in nearly every engagement, and even when the resistance does win battles they usually sacrifice valuable personnel and equipment to do so. How could the resistance ever win in a drawn out war against the machines? | 60 | Reese tells Sarah Connor that Skynet's "defense grid was smashed" and that the Resistance had already won when it decided to send the first Terminator back in time.
The implication was that they took it down with brute force, probably throwing everything they had at the *literal* defensive fortifications surrounding the Skynet mainframe. This was only possible because John Connor started liberating concentration camps, allowing the Resistance to build up an army of humans significant enough to eventually overwhelm Skynet's defenses. (That's why Connor was so important. If it was just some kind of virus or computer attack that allowed the Resistance to win, Connor wouldn't have been as crucial.)
If you want to take it further, it's likely that Skynet didn't actually have a very large army of Terminators, HKs, and other equipment before John Connor started ruining their shit. Why would they need it, when all they were doing was cleaning up a weakened, radiation poisoned population of survivors? Skynet probably didn't *predict* there to be a Resistance at all, and so it was taken by surprise.
| 47 |
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