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ELI5: how do we know dating something is accurate? If the materiales from which something is made are millions of years old, what difference does it make once it’s made into something? | 69 | The radioactive isotopes that are checked for with radiometric dating exist naturally in the world. The acts of molten rock churning in the Earth, or the waters mixing in the oceans, or animals eating plants, and even breathing, all increase the amounts of the isotopes found within the body.
Once the thing is no longer moving, eating, or breathing, it is no longer adding the radioactive isotope into itself, and it begins to decay.
The most common form of radiometric dating is carbon dating, which is most useful for recent (within a few tens of thousands of years) artifacts made of living material, like cloth or pottery. That carbon isotope is generated by sunlight, which replenishes the amount found on the planet. | 34 |
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Why does basal cell carcinoma so rarely metastasize? | Biochemically/genetically speaking. | 69 | I believe you are implocitly comparing BCC to melanoma - they are derived from different cells and the epithelial cells are much more terminally differentiated and more committed than melanocytes which easily restore their mobility which enables metastasis.
Short answer is that melanocytes migrate during embryogenesis and provide pigmentation (defects in this process are observed in many animals where they are unpigmented at terminal sites far from the neural tube origin like peripheral limbs - white socks and ventral surfaces in cats and dogs). Because melanocytes migrate in to the highly differentiated epithelial tissue, these melanocytes are then the most easily transformed cells when it comes to oncogenic mutations. Because they migrated through other tissues they are also less dependent on the local environments.
A cancer cell needs to acquire mutations that revert its differentiation so it can move, adhere to other sites, ignore local signals, and replicate independently. The more stem-like a cell to begin with the more easily it is able to acquire this phenotype through mutation. In their terminally differentiated state melanocytes are much more stem-like than basal epithelial cells. | 20 |
Why does hitting the top of a bottle of beer with another bottle of beer create that much froth? | 12,151 | it momentarily cause the bottom of the bottle to move away from the beer faster than the beer can move. this creates lots of tiny vacuum bubbles. the beer then rushes into this gap. each of those becomes a nucleation site for the dissolved carbon dioxide to form dozens of small bubbles. this basically turns all the beer contacting the bottle into foam. fun fact if the original hit is just right the vacuum pressure can cause the beer to slam back into to bottom of the bottle so hard it blows out the bottom. | 8,790 |
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[WH40K] What would happen to an alien race that started worshiping the God-Emperor and declared their allegiance to him? | Would they be seamlessly integrated into the Empire or would they remain second-class citizens at best? How would the citizens of the Empire view them? | 110 | Filthy xenos betrayed us once, to trust any of them again is heresy of the highest order. Burn them all, if they have truly earned his forgiveness he will greet them with open arms and their souls will be spared the warp. | 118 |
CMV: Identity based on accidents of birth is stupid and toxic | r/chezdor suggested I put this up, so I will. :) Be careful what you wish for. ;)
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> Identity is stupid. Having a sense of self grounded in accidents of birth is a great way to ignore what matters most - our values and actions. It doesn't matter if I'm a man, woman, or a transgender albino unicorn. What matters is if I am honest, kind, and willing and able to help you change your tire when you get a flat on the highway.
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Essentially, this idea is grounded in the fact that as human beings, we struggle to comprehend a reality that is literally beyond our ability to perceive in its entirety. In some ways, we are too close to it to get the full picture of it all, because we are a part of it. In other ways, we are so far separated from reality, that some parts of it might as well not at exist.
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If the best definition for reality is, "All that is, as it is." then by definition, we are a PART of reality. We aren't all of reality of course, we are just a piece of reality. This is true in the same sense that your pinky is a part of you, but is still a part of who you are. You are the entity that has that pinky.
Or that does not have a pinky. You get the idea.
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But to say that we are all fragments of reality says nothing about who YOU are. Your sense of identity is about what makes you UNIQUE and DISTINCT from the REST of reality, which includes the rest of humanity, and what makes humanity distinct from the rest of all of the forms of life of which we are both aware and unaware of.
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And so begins what Bhuddists would describe as, "The illusion of the self." For, we do not always wonder who we are. There are times when we simply are, without the awareness of our uncertainty of what it means to be "distinct from all that which we are not".
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As far as questions go, "Who am I? What does it mean to be me?" I suppose these can seem quite profound. Frankly, I don't see the point. I am who I am, and who I am only matters in relationship to my preferences, and those preferences, like reality itself, are constantly shifting. Change, in a sense, is the only constant. While I may always feel like myself, I am always changing. Hell, every 7 years you have an entirely NEW BODY, right down to the "invisible" changes in your DNA. You are constantly acquiring new ideas, emotions, experiences, and skills. So if you feel the same when everything down to all of the possible thoughts and emotions and genes are constantly changing... who are you?
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But perhaps more importantly, how do we answer the question of "Who are you" in a way that is USEFUL?
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I have my own ideas about that, but that's not what this CMV is about. This CMV is about what answers to that question I categorically reject.
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And "Accidents of birth" are at the top of the list.
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Accidents of birth include:
1. Race
2. Gender
3. Sex
4. Ethnicity
5. I.Q.
6. Biological and cognitive limitations
7. What people think or feel about accidents of birth
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The above list is not exhaustive.
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But the reason anything which can reasonably be added to this list under that category is a stupid and toxic basis for one's sense of identity is, in my opinion, straightforward.
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You do not have a choice about how you were born, who your parents are, or how people decide to treat you. No matter how unfair, how irrational, how hurtful, how toxic, how angry it makes you, or how happy your misery makes others, you do not have a CHOICE regarding these things.
These things exist, and you are absolutely powerless to change them right now.
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And besides, these things may be true about you, but they are not who you ARE. They are not you, anymore than your pinky is you. So, why identify as your pinky, or your eye color, or you skin color, or what genitals you have, or what sort of food and language your grandparents' grandparents preferred? How does that matter for what is arguably most important...
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**Loving yourself unconditionally, and always acting as if you hope you can be even better than you are, because you always want to be the best version of you possible.**
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I am not claiming I know what this looks like for everyone. Maybe it's different, or maybe it's the same. The world is a big place. If success is a destination, we all start somewhere different, and so how we get there is going to be very different, and whose to say that it's only one place on the map?
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I'm not sure that anyone WANTS to be a failure. I'm not sure that anyone WANTS to hate themselves. I'm not sure that anyone WANTS to be the worst versions possible of themselves.
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But I'm very certain that if I am wrong about what is important, I don't WANT to be right. At least, I can't imagine it at this moment. Hence why the CMV makes sense, I suppose.
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In order to falsify this premise, I feel like you'd need to demonstrate at least 1 of the following.
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1. Accidents of birth are inseparable AND fundamental from identity.
2. "Loving yourself unconditionally..." and all that jazz are not what is MOST IMPORTANT for living a fulfilling and meaningful life
3. You can choose how you feel.
4. Control is not an illusion (Control being defined as "Perfect Influence").
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I definitely left some stuff out - this is a CMV, so I'm happy to unpack more, but I think this adequately summarizes my position. I am VERY open to changing my view on this, because the answer ultimately should only lead to a way to me leaving a more fulfilling life than I am currently living. I just can't IMAGINE it being different than this. I feel, in a way, like I'm describing that "water is wet," but if you don't challenge your most deeply held views, you are doomed to dogmatism. So here I am.
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And here we go.
​ | 58 | >or how people decide to treat you. No matter how unfair, how irrational, how hurtful, how toxic, how angry it makes you, or how happy your misery makes others, you do not have a CHOICE regarding these things.
>These things exist, and you are absolutely powerless to change them right now.
The problem is, like it or not, these social identities *are* important and *will* impact you whether you want them to or not.
No, social identity is not the same thing as individual identity, but the limitations of human experience require that generalizations be made, otherwise we would not be able to navigate in the social world at all.
Not one gets to *choose* those identities (assuming that "choosing" really means anything at all... it's quite likely that most of our "choices" are purely consequences of our brain and external stimuli, and that the common notion of "free will" is scientific nonsense).
But the fact that you don't choose them doesn't mean you aren't impacted by them. You don't have to fit the stereotypes (and indeed, no one will exactly), but you absolutely *cannot* ignore them.
If humans were actually islands that didn't have to interact with society, none of this would matter, that is true.
But we aren't, and it does. | 40 |
ELI5: Why do mattresses always have a weird stiching pattern on them? | 56 | The practical reason is that it keeps the stuffing more evenly distributed around the mattress after several hundreds of nights. This is similar to the box patterns that are usually sewn into comforters.
The less practical reason is that it's visually appealing for the showroom floor. This is similar to putting pretty patterns on the inside of shoes. | 29 |
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ELI5: What is the difference between a checking and savings account? And why do we have both? | 31 | Different purposes, different properties.
Savings accounts typically have a relatively high interest rate, but charge some money per transaction. This means it is in your best interest to stuff cash into the account; saving.
Checking accounts typically have a lower interest rate, but charge less (or free) for transactions. It is used for more frequent transactions. | 21 |
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ELI5 why a fractal has an infinite perimeter | 6,882 | Benoit Mandelbrot, his name is on that famous fractal, asked the seemingly foolish question, "How long is the coastline of England?" It's hard to imagine a more well-mapped coastline, right? Mandelbrot stated that the coastline of England is infinitely long.
It turns out that the length of that coastline depends on the length of your yardstick. If you use one half a mile long you get an answer. If you use one a yard long you get a longer answer, because you follow a much "bendier" pathway around the coast, in and out of much smaller details than you could with the longer stick. A much shorter stick and you get a much longer answer because you are down to going around yet smaller and smaller details. As the length of your stick gets closer to infinitely short you get closer to the infinitely long answer according to Mandelbrot.
You've never seen a picture of the famous Mandelbrot set, it isn't even possible to create one, the best you can get is an approximation. The set has more details in its perimeter than can be displayed on any monitor. A monitor will show what appear to be tiny little "mini-mandelbrot" satellites all around the main set but it is a mathematically proven fact that all elements of the set are in fact connected. They are all within one perimeter, the connections are just smaller than the limit of your monitor's resolution.
No matter how many times you zoom in on any portion of it there will always detail beyond the limit of your resolution. Every time you zoom in you'll still face the same problem *because* the perimeter of the set is infinitely long.
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ELI5:Why do your dreams seem longer the less you sleep? | 279 | Generally you forget almost all of your dreams. You go through multiple REM cycles (Rapid Eye Movement) in which you dream.
Over the course of the night, you dream, forget and dream. If you sleep less, that means less dreams for you to remember and the more you'll remember about these dreams.
This is why when you smash your alarm for another five minutes and scream into your pillow until you collapse asleep, you can dream what seems like an entire lifetime. | 85 |
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[Star Wars] Why did Luke waste so much time at Jabba's palace, when he could have walked in there with his lightsaber and free Leia and Han | It's not like Boba and a couple of guards could have stopped him. | 119 | I always attributed to the fact that Luke didn't want to go all violent on everyone and would have preferred a diplomatic solution. Except Luke has absolutely no diplomatic or negotiation skills so he tried to alpha Jabba out of the palace's prized collections.
Except that Jabba has had to deal with arrogant crooks and scum for years and doesn't intimidate easily. How much street cred would Jabba lose if some shmuck with a robe and a fancy weapon from a dead Jedi was able to intimidate him? The Jedi were extinct and this dude just happened to find a lightsaber from an old battlefield?
Luke just has shit people skills. Not unexpected from a moisture farmer who grew up on a dirtball planet. | 219 |
[Stargate] Because of their services to the Galaxy, would key members of SG-1 be offered a chance to ascend over death when they reached old age? | 40 | Probably not. The only one (that we know of) helping humans ascend in the Milky Way was Oma Desala. Unfortunately, she's occupied with keeping Anubis busy until the end of time. The Others aren't keen on interference of any sort. | 22 |
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ELI5: How do we know gravity actually affects time? | 25 | Einstein first described it in his theory of relativity, and since then it's been directly observed using atomic clocks in orbit. In fact, in order for GPS to stay accurate, the clocks on the satellites used for GPS have to be occasionally corrected. | 28 |
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ELI5: Why are foreign movie posters often depicted with art that has nothing to do with the movie? | I just saw the Soviet Union posters for Star Wars, but I've also seen other foreign posters for movies that have characters or art that has nothing to do with the movie. Why is that? | 35 | I can tell you about why Eastern European countries did this with a degree of certainty — because under communist governments/for a while after them, censoring imported cinema was the norm. When foreign movies were played in these countries, they were often modified to the point where the end product was significantly different from the original film, and this drove foreign cinema into becoming a niche unto itself.
Promoters don't want to waste too much money advertising a movie they don't expect theatre-goers to care about. Either because of the stigma attached to foreign imports, or because the quality of films was reduced by cuts to their contents, the quality of *promotion* also fell along the way. Artists hired to design these posters weren't so much seizing the opportunity to illustrate the film (it was quite common for artists to have only had the plot *described* to them, or in some cases only have the name of it to go by when designing its poster). They were seizing the opportunity to make art that would be widely seen by the public, in a time where art was heavily monitored too.
Of course, the sheer absurdity of the end result without that context can be hysterical. | 18 |
ELI5: f-Stop and Aperture | 98 | Aperture is one of the things that determines how much light reaches the sensor on your camera.
Think of it as a hole in a box. Inside the box is a kid drawing with crayons. (Don't worry, he's being fed.) The bigger the hole (the larger the aperture), the more light that gets in, the more the kid can see his paper to draw what he sees through the hole. The size of the aperture is measured in f-stops. The smaller the f-stop, the larger the aperture, or the larger the hole in the box, or the more light that gets in.
Shutter speed is also important: how long does that hole in the box stay open to let the light in? The longer the shutter speed, the longer the hole stays open, the more light that gets in. That's one reason why some pictures are blurry: the subject moves while the hole in the box is still open.
Sports photographers use very quick shutter speeds (which requires smaller f-stops to let more light in) so they can capture motion without blur. If the aperture was not large enough, and the shutter speed too fast, the photo would be too dark because the settings did not let enough light in to accurately capture the image to the sensor. | 32 |
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ELI5 : phones that take sd cards, why is there a limit on how big a card they can take, why cant it be the biggest available | 20 | Because there are different standards of information for encoding on larger SD cards. This is because larger SD cards required entirely new technologies in order to be able to create.
This means that larger SD cards effectively write and speak in a different language, so a phone has to have some way of adapting to that in order to use them. Many phones can be patched to do this, but really old phones might not even have that ability. | 14 |
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[Alien] Something bothering me about the Alien franchise - Why are Weyland Yutani so obsessed with the xenomorph when they could have just reverse engineered the Space Jockeys ship instead? | So, in the Alien franchise, Weyland Yutani are obsessed with getting a xenomorph specimen presumably so they can try to turn it into a bio-weapon (and inevitably fail)
What bothers me in this franchise is Nostromo crew finds a massive alien ship with a dead alien (the space jockey) on it and it seems very much brushed over. The space jockeys corpse is proof of alien life and the crashed juggernaut is likely a treasure trove of reverse engineerable tech. You'd think that the Nostromo crew would have reported back about the space jockey and once confirmation of an alien corpse / tech on the world was found, Weyland Yutani and all of these other corporations would be scrambling to get their hands on the ship, not the xenomorph. Confirmation of alien life seems like a pretty big deal for all humanity.
Then between Alien and Aliens which is like 67 years (?) or something they haven't really done much except set up a colony on the planet with normal people and screwed them over to try to get more xenomorphs.
It seems kinda dumb. I love the Alien franchise but I kinda feel like Ridley Scott is just making it up as he goes along. I would be very skeptical to think that when he made Alien in 1979 he had any ideas about the themes shown in Prometheus and Alien Covenant and while I like some of the ideas introduced in the new movies they just feel a bit... all over the place
Also, its pretty stupid that they try to get the alien through all this subversion and deceit in every movie when they could have just sent 1000+ marines and a clean up team to LV-426 right after Alien and had the ship sterilised with flamers, probably could have gotten their specimens \*and\* the space jockey ship too.
Anyone got any ideas on this or is it just one of those things that Ridley Scott probably didn't even think about? Somehow, I fear the latter | 35 | Well, to be fair, that crashed ship was there for thousands of years in a very hostile environment. Whatever technology is left is likely useless at this point, aside from archeology experiments. There might be something to grab, but those eggs technically could be stashed pretty easily onboard and brought back.
Edit: As far as sending a Division of Marines... Weyland-Yutani was *not* the military. They got a single squad and ship assigned for an *emergency* mission after repeated attempts at contact failed. And even then they had plans to see all the Marines dead as a cover up to get their specimen back. If they had found a way to send a larger force, sure that would likely have done it, but then the *Marines* would have the specimens, and that means the Government. Weyland-Yutani loses out on the research and profit options, probably has to pay out indemnities to the families of Hadley's Hope for needlessly risking their lives (and ultimately getting them all killed). Not to mention that the Government is then going to look very closely at the first mission and how much WY knows about these things.
Depending on how much of the prequels is canon as opposed to the Dark Horse comics and Universe, that goes from "CEO resigns and WY pays out a huge government penalty" to "the entire corporation is destroyed, senior executives executed for gross treason, and most employees black listed for being accomplices in one way or another."
And then of course some other Corporation steps up and fills the gap perfectly. | 32 |
ELI5 how is it we build a tolerance to spice? | 16 | Assuming you mean the heat from peppers. The chemical in peppers mimics the sensation of burning, but does no actual burning damage. Eventually your brain understands that you won't actually be hurt, just tricked into believing it was hurt. The mild irritation can then become pleasurable. | 20 |
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ELI5: Why does it feel so good to rub your eyes when you're tired\sleepy? | 145 | Your eyes tend to dry out when you get sleepy because of reduced tone in the sympathetic nervous system. Normally, your eyelids are subconsciously kept open by the superior tarsal muscle, which is an involuntary smooth muscle activated by your sympathetic nervous system. However, when you get tired and sleepy, reduced sympathetic tone causes this muscle to relax, making it more difficult to keep your eyes open. You are still able to open your eyes but this requires a concerted effort and voluntary muscle contraction, as anyone who's ever been very drowsy can attest to. In any case, when it becomes difficult to keep your eyes open and the muscles keeping your eyes open begin to fatigue, your blinking frequency decreases correspondingly. The decrease in blinking reduces the distribution of tears over the eye surface, which is the reason your eyes also become dry when you are sleepy. This mild irritation is alleviated by rubbing your eyes because rubbing reflexively stimulates the release of tears from your lacrimal gland. The rubbing also stimulates a small amount of local sympathetic tone, making it temporarily easier to keep your eyes open, which means you blink more frequently and keep your eyes moist more easily.
coluv101 has a really good point though... | 95 |
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ELI5: If liquid water turns to gas at 212ºF, how does water evaporate at room temperature? | Edit: Thanks for all the help, science and scientists! | 141 | Have you ever jumped on a trampoline with two other people? Sometimes, semi-randomly, two people will land at once, and the third will go flying. Evaporation is sort of the same thing.
Every molecule of water has heat energy, and is in motion. As a liquid, the molecules move somewhat freely in and around each other. They constantly collide with one another, and like those Newtonian bouncing balls they always show in movies, the molecules transfer energy to one another. Sometimes they collide in such a way that lots of energy is transferred to one molecule, it is near the surface, and its direction is such that it doesn't collide much with any other molecules. If, in this case, it has enough energy to become a gas, it will escape the liquid water. This is evaporation.
When you heat water, you increase the *average* energy of all its molecules. This just increases the rate of evaporation until you add so much energy that molecules even deep in the water turn to a gas en masse, and you wind up with boiling. | 183 |
ELI5: why is it considered disrespectful to wear a hat during the national anthem in America? | 30 | Fundamentally goes back to Christianity as practiced years ago.
When praying or prophesying, men were to have their heads uncovered. Women were to have their heads covered in the same circumstances.
Thus, the removing of hats when someone died in westerns, etc - you were praying, and thus removed your headgear. Likewise, the hats you see in depictions of African-American women (most famously) in church - same basic thing.
So, by extension, removing your hat became a sign of respect for men. Hasn't translated into secular terms quite the same for women for whatever reason. | 26 |
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Why is it that natural remedies occur so often in plants, but rarely if ever in animals? | 16 | Consider the chief difference between plants and animals. Animals can move, plants can't. If an animal needs to defend itself, it needs to move faster, or have more muscles, or have teeth and claws and so on. How does a plant defend itself? It can't run away from a predator. It can't bite or claw at an enemy.
So how does a plant protect itself? Aside from maybe some thorns, they use chemicals. There is much more pressure for a plant to synthesize new chemicals that can be used to defend itself, making for a vast array of chemical compounds that may potentially have use in human medicine. There is not the same pressure in the animal kingdom to synthesize unique chemical compounds.
Consider the smell of cut grass. Why does it smell that way? It's the smell of trauma. The grass is basically sending out a distress signal, a category of compounds called "green leaf volatiles". One effect these compounds can have is to lure bugs that eat caterpillars, which like to eat grass. | 15 |
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[Marvel Comics] Will the Punisher go to Valhalla when he dies? | He is undeniably brave, a skilled and disciplined warrior, he is addicted to fighting, and yet has strong convictions when it comes to noncombatants. Also, Thor overall seems to respect him. | 78 | No. The Cosmic Ghost Rider, which was an alternate Castle was taken to Valhalla as an exception. Technically some people can go to Valhalla if they qualify (by dying with a weapon in hand) and if a valkyrie is nearby to take them, but for the most part Valhalla is an exclusive club.
People don't like to talk much about it, but Frank already died once or twice, and forces of Heaven have already laid their claim on him, so likely once he dies, he'll go back to a celestial Doomguy, shooting demons with angelic guns forever. | 102 |
ELI5: How exactly does the brain store information? | 43 | Information and stimuli comes into your brain trough your senses: smell, sounds, vision, etc. Most of this if filtered before you even realise it. The relevant stimuli then comes into the working memory, which contains information you are using right now (like when you are calculating, the numbers are in your working memory) and is fairly limited. You can only hold 4-7 'chuncks' of information in there. When the information is repeated or you pay more attention to it, it will go to the short term memory. For example, you repeated a phone number a few times, so you can put it in your phone. Most of this information is discarted, but some will go to the long term memory. This is mostly information you pay attention to and repeat often, which is important to you or which you relate to stuff you already know. That is why, for example, you remember a name of a person better if you relate it to a fact you are familiar with.
How we store it, we don't know. Some say pictures, some say words, some say something abstract, certain nerve patterns, to name a few. | 19 |
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ELI5 How come certain creatures' stomach acids can dissolve bones and flesh but don't dissolve the stomach lining itself? | 17 | Your stomach acids could dissolve your own flesh, as well as your stomach itself, so the stomach defends itself by constantly supplying a layer of mucus on its inside. The stomach can also produce some basic chemicals that can neutralize the acids.
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ELI5: What's the difference between patriotism and nationalism, and why is the line so blurred in the U.S.? | 32 | Patriotism is having a sense of pride about your society in as much as you identify with the basic values of the society. An American 'patriot' for example likely identifies with the concepts of democratic representation and justice by rule of law as defined by the rights granted in the constitution. A patriot recognizes that society pursues the fulfillment of these ideals but acknowledges that society often falls short, and works to fix it. Patriots don't think that their society is objectively better than others, they just subjectively identify with the way their society is (or could be) organized.
Nationalism is based on exceptionalism and essentialism. They think that their society is exceptional, often this is intertwined with some concept of divine involvement. They also believe that to be a member of their nation you must have essential characteristics such as race or ethnicity. Because they believe that their nation is exceptional and essential they view other groups that lack their essential characteristics to be objectively inferior.
Obviously there is a huge amount of gray area in but in a simplistic sense this is what separates the two things. The lines blur, especially in the US, because it is a natural logical fallacy for humans to think of their group as most important because they are part of it. This is especially true in a relatively insulated society like the United States where language etc are relatively constant over a large land mass as opposed to Europe where the interaction of diverse peoples forces the issue of thinking critically about other people's societies. Even still Europe produced the most famous and destructive nationalists so it's not a cut and dried type of thing.
Edit: finished the answer | 21 |
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ELI5: What is 'burning man'? | I've read about it and seen tons of pictures, but I don't get what exactly it is. Can you elaborate? | 26 | An annual mating ritual where hippies congregate to spread STDs and take drugs. The hippies with the brightest colors are able to lure their mates back to their tents where they proceed to ingest ceremonial mushrooms and talk about the universe. Once they have reached extreme levels of intoxication they are made immune to the music of the womp, the songs of their tribe. They dance, barter more drugs and slap eachother with dreadlocks until the sun goes down and they are ready to mate. Only the strongest men with the most stamina are able to maintain an erection while on opium and Molly thus their species is able to survive and carry on the gene pool. The ceremony lasts a week or until the drugs are gone and afterwards they pack up their tents and Berkenstocks back into their vans to return to their positions as servers in the restaurant industry. They have also had their annual exfoliation and are now clean enough to pass as normal people. | 20 |
Why do black people have white palms/soles of feet? | I really don't understand why. Can some one help me? Is it for any evolutionary reason? | 32 |
the palms of the hands and soles of the feets have no pigments in the skin, and therfore no melanin will be there to create darker skin pigments from the sun, same with lighter skinned people e.g caucasians, the rest of the skin may tan but not the soles of their feet nor the palms of their hands, its not just people of black skin colour, its for people all over the world, south america, indeginous north americans, arabians, asians, aborigines etc | 18 |
ELI5: Why is Reuters considered to be a very valid news source? What makes it any different than MSNBC or Fox News? | 179 | Reuters is a news agency that sells articles to other people, so that they can publish it and make money. Since Reuters wants to sell their articles to both MSNBC and Fox News, and both of their online sites, and both conservative and liberal newspapers, they make their articles as much of "just the facts." that you can get.
MSNBC and Fox News are both offering political spin on news. It is in their favor to deliberately push an agenda, because that's what their viewers want. | 216 |
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Opinions welcome: justifying academic salaries by the amount of "training" someone is receiving. | I just had a conversation with two PI's about how a post-doc is a professor-in-training position, and therefore their salary is appropriate because they are being "compensated" with training on top of their salary.
Surely the explanation of the post-doc salary is actually something along the lines of supply/demand for the position, but that is not typically the response you get from academics about *why* lab personnel salaries are what they are. At some level isn't any job in any industry a training position for the "next step"? I'm not trying to argue whether or not post-docs should be paid more, just that when we start discussing WHY they're getting the salary they are, things devolve very quickly (ie some post-docs are not aiming to be professors, so should you increase their salaries because they are not receiving the training that justifies the salary?).
Have you had frank conversations with your colleagues about salary justifications? | 72 | “They’re getting training!” is and always has been a poor excuse for exploitation of entry-level workers. It’s no different than trying to get a discount on graphic design work by offering “exposure” as payment, it’s taking a necessary byproduct of the transaction and repackaging it as part of the compensation. The postdoc is largely a fabricated component of the academic career trajectory designed to generate a large number of desperate research staff in career limbo so they can be underpaid. It’s a disgrace. | 120 |
ELI5:Why is the 4.0 GPA scale used? | It seems like the 4.0 GPA scale isn't exactly reflective of a students academic ability.
For example, let's say 90-100 = A+ = 4.0 and 85-89 = A = 3.9.
Student A gets 100 in 4 courses and 89 in 1 course, resulting in a GPA of 3.98.
Student B gets 90 in 5 courses, and ends up with a GPA of 4.0.
I don't know about you, but to me Student A has a better academic achievement than Student B, but their GPAs say otherwise. So why is this scale used? | 22 | >For example, let's say 90-100 = A+ = 4.0 and 85-89 = A = 3.9.
I've never seen that scale before. I've always seen something more like:
97-100 = A+ = 4.33
94-96 = A = 4.0
90-93 = A- = 3.67
87-89 = B+ = 3.33
etc.
Thus Student A has a GPA of 4.08, and Student B has a GPA of 3.67.
| 13 |
If the universe is 13.7 billion years old, how come the observable universes edge is 46-47 billion light years away? Should it not be 13.7 billion light years away? | 113 | Because the universe is expanding "faster than the speed of light can cover spacetime". Imagine the earth was the universe and it is expanding at a high rate (getting bigger in scale). If you were living in New York and China was some light years away, the earth is now expanding faster and faster (growing in size) at a rate that increases distance between NY and China so fast that even if you were travelling at light speed, you will never be able to reach China. So effectively, it's expanding "faster" than the speed of light can keep up, even though technically the countries are not travelling at any speed at all.
EDIT: So to put everything together, light now has to travel 47 billion years to reach us even though it's only 13.7 billion years old. because now we are so far apart. | 58 |
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Is there any significance to the color of the wizards in the Tolkien universe (Grey, Blue, Brown, and White)? | 38 | No. If White has any significance it is because Saruman was "the White". White came to designate the head of the order because Saruman was chosen to lead. Saruman did not lead because he was "the White".
Saruman eventually came to dislike the White in favor of Saruman of "Many Colors". This only became known after his open betrayal to Gandalf, though his true betrayal started hundreds of years beforhand.
Gandalf returns as Gandalf the White (now enhanced by God in power and wisdom) because he is Saruman "as he should have been". | 28 |
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ELI5: How does my clothes dryer’s lint catcher get so full, yet my clothes don’t fall apart? Where does all this lint come from? | 1,591 | As you wash items, they lose particles (lint) which is collected in your lint trap. If you weigh the lint you’ll see that it is a small percentage of the (dry) washed items.
As an interesting aside - laundry and linen companies (e.g., Aramark) often have a weight cut off for when they inject new linen. For example, if Aramark provides uniforms and the dry uniform loses 25% of its weight or more, it is retired from circulation.
Edit: Injection is a term used in laundry & linen to mean a new item is put in (“injected”) to circulation. When an item is retired - which can be due to weight, but could be caused by any other number of issues like rips, tares, stains - they are no longer in circulation, which means they won’t be cleaned and supplies back to the client. Syringes and other injection devices are not involved in laundry injection. | 862 |
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CMV: Some cuisines don't have much to offer for either people interested in food or cooks | Some cultures have a complex and varied cuisine that offers constant discovery and might take a lifetime to experience, or if you are a chef, a lifetime to learn. While other cuisines seemingly just heat up raw ingredients and throw it on a plate. Some examples might help.
Let's take a simple Chinese dish like tofu, onions, and peppers with black bean sauce. This is far more than just raw ingredients being heated up. The tofu itself is the result of a complex process of extracting and then coagulating the "milk" of soybeans. It involves a natural chemical reaction. Another essential ingredient is the black bean sauce. This requires fermenting black beans with a particular fungus that gives the sauce its distinctive flavor. Added to the sauce will be rice wine (the product of another complex process), soy sauce (another complex process), and the sauce might even be thickened using something like sweet potato starch or corn starch.
I could give similar examples for Thai, Italian, French, Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and Lebanese cuisines.
Now let's look at Portuguese or Costa Rican cuisine. A typical meal in Costa Rica is cooked rice with beans, maybe topped with an egg, and then a piece of meat from the grill. I don't see anything new a chef could learn, no history, and for a foodie what is there to talk about or discover?
I'd think it's also interesting to compare Japanese cuisine. While the most stereotypical dishes like Sushi and Tempora could be seen as just raw ingredients, there is a great deal of skill and tradition involved in getting it right. And you do find some complex ingredient prep again: soy sauce, wasabi, dried seaweed, and so on.
Please change my view and help me discover why Portuguese or Costa Rica cuisine has more to offer than appears. Or if you agree with me, please help me grow my list and tell me which cuisines you think have little to offer and which are the great cuisines of the world. Due to CMV rules, you may have to wait for someone to challenge my view before doing so.
EDIT: In order to leave my original post as-is, I'll add to this list below as I remember great vs. less interesting cuisines. Please feel free to challenge me on any of these. If you convince me to change my view, I'll move cuisines around. For example, Chilean moved from "less interesting" to "re-evaluate".
Great: Thai, Italian, French, Spanish, Indian, Mexican, Lebanese, Japanese, Ethiopian, Modern American, Modern British (I know this one is controversial, but I think I can defend it).
Less interesting: Canadian, Brazilian, Costa Rican
Re-evaluate: Chilean, German, Swedish, Portuguese.
EDIT: Changed the "boring" category to "less interesting". I think "boring" borders on insulting, and I don't think the food in those countries is bad, and I don't want to insult someone's cuisine. Just that there is a lot less to explore or learn compared to the countries in "great".
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | 70 | I think you're privileging complexity over perfection here, which is a mistake when evaluating food. A serious chef approaching even a "simple" cuisine, like a Chilean asado for example, will be seeking not so much complexity as absolute perfection. This will involve not just work in the kitchen, but in husbandry and horticulture. You see this trend with almost every top chef in the world now. To seriously advance their cuisine they are concerned with every step of the food process, not just preparation in the kitchen. Further, even in the kitchen, compositionally basic foods like sushi still require, as you point out, an enormous amount of skill to make *perfect*. There is no reason to think that the skill involved in perfectly preparing meat in a Chilean barbecue would be any less rigorous than the skill required to perfectly prepare fish and rice for a Japanese omakase. | 42 |
If fusion power was as widespread as fission today, what would the worst case "meltdown" scenario be and how bad would it be compared to fission meltdowns? | If fusion power was as widespread as fission today, what would the worst case "meltdown" scenario be and how bad would it be compared to fission meltdowns? Why? | 79 | Since fusion reactions take place only under very specific conditions (very high temperature and pressure), any disruption in the operation of the reactor would cause the necessary conditions for fusion to disappear, which would halt the reaction.
Unlike nuclear fission, which in many cases can be self-sustaining and needs active intervention to be slowed down (in the form of control rods, for example), a fusion plasma takes a lot of work to be kept in the right state. Except of course when it is so large that its own gravity does the trick, like in stars. But that won't be the case for earthbound fusion.
So if there is a catastrophic incident in a hypothetical fusion reactor, the reactor and surrounding building could be destroyed and the high energy particles could irradiate some of the debris. But that's about the extent of the damage. Unlike the unmitigated meltdown of a fission reactor, the damage would be very localized. | 123 |
ELI5: how come in movies when the cameraman is filming the actor looking in the mirror, you can't see the camera even if the camera should logically be reflected in the mirror? | This question has been plaguing me for more years than it should have. | 24 | It's a little known fact, but there are a group of vampires in hollywood who are recruited a bit like stunt doubles but for cameramen when they need to film scenes about mirrors.
There are also several alternate techniques that people who don't believe in vampires usually employ.
First and by far the most common, the director takes advantage of the angle of reflection. Light reflects off a mirror in the same way a tennis ball bounces off a wall - that is, it only comes straight back at you if it hits perpendicular to the wall. For something to be seen in a mirror, light first needs to bounce off the object (in this case the cameraman), then bounce off the mirror straight back into the camera. When the camera is off to the side though, the light bounces in the opposite angle, so the camera doesn't see the camera in the mirror. This is why most mirror scenes are filmed at an angle, rather than directly behind the actor in question.
Secondly, you can not have a reflection at all, and construct the entire reflected scene in CGI.
Thirdly, a technique done in Terminator when they wanted to do a panning shot around a mirror. They used a wall of glass instead of a mirror, put the actors in a duplicate of the set on the other side of the mirror then used dummies on the "real" side. | 63 |
Need help getting over a particularly nasty review :( | Hi there! Thanks in advance for reading my post.
I submitted my first manuscript to a journal in my field sometime in July, and the editor recently got back to me with the decision to reject my paper without an invite to revise and resubmit. Reviewers 1 and 2 raised several points for clarification and very helpful suggestions to reframe the paper. Reviewer 3 was obviously triggered by the paper, and was acrimonious in tone and general attitude toward both myself and the paper..
To give some context, in my paper I challenged a very established paradigm in my field, that has inspired and continues to inspire many studies. Many researchers, the seasoned and prominent ones as well as those still making their way up the ladder, are highly invested in this particular paradigm, and are known to react defensively when people challenge its validity. Reviewer 3 was obviously one of them. The cruelest part of their review said that I was "anti-Science, ignorant, and prone to dishonesty," instead of requesting further information about the control conditions as the other two reviewers had (I have a reasonable explanation, and would be open to including the materials as supplementary info but Reviewer 3 jumped straight to the assumption that I was deliberately concealing something that would discredit an alternative model I proposed), and made several snide remarks about "ignorant people without academic credentials who want to comment on real science" and how they derived great pleasure in seeing such people shamed within their academic community on Facebook. This is rather frightening, because I wouldn't want to be negatively "marked" or maybe boycotted by fellow academics in my field.
I fully acknowledge the limitations of my paper, and agree that the editor was justified in rejecting the paper on grounds of insufficient evidence. I am thankful to Reviewers 1 and 2 for their advice, and moving forward, I will make major changes and improvements to my paper. Yet it has been really hard to shake off Reviewer 3's nasty comments, and my confidence is entirely crushed to the extent that I have serious doubts as to whether I am fit for academia. Also, experiencing firsthand the "political" (pertaining to academic politics) nature of my paper and the strong reactions it could incite, I am starting to regret and feel really sorry for my 6 years of work on this topic, and there's also the fear and panic that I wouldn't be able to submit my thesis in time since everything needs reworking... sigh:( | 114 | I would suggest revising principally according to the comments from reviewers #1 and #2, and addressing any *substantive* points raised by reviewer #3. Broadly ignore the personal attacks, try to rework the paper to be as good as it can be, and submit it elsewhere.
You don't *need* to do anything regarding this reviewer, but it would not be out of place to send an email to the editor privately commenting on the abusive nature of Reviewer #3's comments and how poorly they reflect on that journal and the experience of submitting a paper to them. It might go nowhere, or depending on the editor that reviewer may not be invited to review for that journal in the future which hopefully will improve the quality of future reviews by that journal. It's not much, and it won't help you in the short term, but it might be worth doing out of altruism and/or a sense of catharsis if nothing else.
Unfortunately, some people are shitty and academia is not immune to this phenomenon. Try to shrug it off, realize that this is not a unique "political" phenomenon to academia (you'll meet shitheads in every field, no exceptions), and keep chugging forward. | 153 |
Why are Pigeons so well adapted to living in cities? | Why is it that there are so many of them compared to other birds (except maybe Seagulls at the cost) and have they always been well adapted to city life or is it something that has evolved alongside cities? | 54 | The urban pigeons are rock pigeons, they originally nested in cavities on cliffs, big rocks, etc... The urban environment is quite similar to these, with vertical structure, holes everywhere, and other features. Add the abundance of food due to human garbage and the pigeon's adaptive diet and you get the perfect urban bird. | 46 |
How does brain differentiate between factual vs fictitious memories ? | 32 | It doesn't, and generally the only thing distinguishing it is your own contextual awareness. Memories are altered very easily, both by people embellishing as time goes on without realising and because the emotional state both at the time and years later has a significant effect on how you interpret that memory in the first place. | 46 |
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[Power Rangers] With an entire planet to conquer, why does Rita Repulsa always attack Angel Grove, California? | 182 | Because she knows the Power Rangers live there. Rita's plan is to destroy the Power Rangers because they are pretty much the only obstacle towards her conquering Earth.
And most of her attacks are psychological, meant to throw the Power Rangers off their game by messing with their personal lives. It's not necessarily the best or most effective tactic, but you try telling a millennia old witch that she's being impractical, and see what kind of response you get. | 211 |
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Is it possible we’ve permanently eliminated some strains of colds and flu with the year long quarantine? | 255 | Yes, maybe. There are a couple of strains that there have been zero reported cases of and scientists think they may have gone extinct. Which is good news for flu shot makers because they just hope they are right about which strains they develop vaccines for months in advance of flu season. Fewer types of flu strains means they will have higher likelihood of picking the correct strains to vaccinate against. | 189 |
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ELI5: How the US came to be a current world superpower | 20 | As others mentioned, the USA has had a wealth of land mass and thus natural resources that helped propel its growth and progress since its founding. The influx of African slaves and Chinese railroad workers also played a significant part in this.
It was a series of events starting after the First World War and the ensuing Great Depression and culminating in the end of the Second World War and the dawn of the Nuclear Age. USA's isolationist policies from 1918 up until their entry into WWII helped focus all efforts to post-Depression recovery internally.
After being forced into participating in WWII following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the industrial machine of USA was a huge asset to their war efforts. Not only that but winning the race to become the first nuclear nation meant not only militarily, politically and symbolically a resounding global victory, but also a big boost for USA's scientific progress. Of the world's most powerful nations preceding the War - Germany, Japan, Great Britain, USSR & USA - only USA emerged from it unscathed, since they were the only nation of the 5 who did not fight any battles on home soil (apart from Pearl Harbor, of course).
The League of Nations - set up after WWI by the USA - now became the United Nations and under its resolutions, both the German and Japanese military forces were prevented from rebuilding and their economies were crippled in such a way to ensure this. USSR, belonging to the "winning" side of WWII also profited from the victory and annexed huge swaths of territory reclaimed from the Nazis' spread throughout eastern Europe, and set up the Iron Curtain.
The entry of USSR into the exclusive group of nuclear nations meant that they and USA dictated not only military but also economic policies around the globe for decades to come. | 15 |
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[Star Wars] If Luke had killed Vader and become the Emperor's new right-hand man, would it have affected anything? Wouldn't Lando and Wedge have still blown all of them up 20 minutes later? | 76 | If, in the original story, Luke had enough time to drag Vader’s cyborg-armored ass to the ship, have a heartfelt goodbye, and escape, I’m assuming that they would have just gotten the hell out of there before the Death Star blew. | 98 |
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ELI5: Why do both coffee (stimulant) and alcohol (depressentt) both make the human body sweat more than usual? | 15 | Coffee increases heart rate and blood pressure by stimulating the central nervous system, which in turn stimulates sweat glands. Alcohol dilates (widens) blood vessels which makes the extremities/crevices of your body much warmer, which stimulates sweating to cool you off. | 13 |
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[Star Wars] Why did the Separatists join with the Trade Federation? | One of the reasons for the Separatists, from what little info about their motives I could find in canon, is that the Republic was corrupt and unwilling to protect outlying star systems from megacorps, and that the invasion of Naboo in Episode 1 was an example of that. In a Clone Wars episode, they even highlight how, unlike the Republic, they don't work with the megacorps.
But it was the Trade Federation that was responsible for the corruption in the Senate and invading Naboo, and that same Trade Federation built the battle droids they used. Did the Separatists at no point worry that they were joining with their oppressors?
To use an analogy, it would be like if Hawaii got mad at the US for not stopping Pearl Harbor and then joined Japan. | 60 | They didn't. The Trade Federation was (supposedly) neutral. While they did provide resources to the Separatists, they also had a seat in the Galactic Senate of the Republic, and publicly denounced Nute Gunray's invasion of Naboo.
As for why the Separatists were ok with this arrangement, it's actually pretty simple; They needed the money. Both the CIS and the Republic drove themselves deeper and deeper in debt to the Trade Federation to win the war. If the CIS wasn't willing to set aside their ideological battles they would have lost the actual ones. | 63 |
Why are there so few elements that are liquid at room temperature? | 118 elements and only two are liquid at room temp... what makes the liquid state so rare? | 149 | Because in order to have a 'room' you need to have solid elements?
More seriously, this should be seen the other way around: life has developped on earth because Earth has a good balance of solid/liquid/gaseous elements.
Additionally, the liquid phase can be seen as an intermediate between solid and gaseous phases. The temperature limits for liquids are bounded by the melting and boiling points, while gaseous states are not bounded in high temperatures and solid states only bounded by the absolute zero. | 108 |
CMV: The current crash in oil prices is not some genius "political play" by the Saudis and we should stop giving them credit for it. | So I've just been reading through the /r/futurology thread about OPEC and the rise of electric cars, and it seems that a lot of people credit the Saudis with reducing the global oil price "to hurt Russia/ISIS/US Shale/Carrot top/and so on..."
The problem is that I'm not sure this belief has any basis in reality. Production in a few key regions has shot up substantially, in an environment of weak demand from China and massively reduced US imports (due to increased US production). Giving the Saudis credit for the current glut in my opinion ignores the major drivers of current high production, like:
1- [US production](https://marketrealist.imgix.net/uploads/2015/12/US-production.png?w=660&fit=max&auto=format). Break-even prices for much of the shale production in the US is above current prices *but* the technology is getting cheaper rapidly.
2- [Massively expanding Iraqi production](http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Iraq.jpg). Not only has Iraq's production leapt up, it has the potential to go higher. This is being kept in check somewhat by Daesh etc, much to the advantage of SA...
3- The end of Iranian sanctions. Iran just signed a deal with China to export >500k barrels per day. Iran's production has the potential to increase significantly from its current levels.
Look at where we were before this crash; shale production in the US was climbing rapidly, Iraqi oil production was and is climbing rapidly. Given another 12-18 months we'd have reached this same level even with lower Saudi production. Since then Iran's coming back and increasing production in a big way as well...
For all OPEC's talk of spare capacity and such, basically the entire production increase over the last year within OPEC came from Iraq and Saudi Arabia. [I'm not kidding, this is what production looks like without them](http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/OPEC-less-Saudi-Iraq.jpg). I'm not convinced that many of the OPEC members *have* any spare capacity but that's another story...
Saudi Arabia's total increase in production since the famous OPEC meeting last year has been about 700kbpd. That's it.
US production up until the end of last year was growing at about 1mbpd *per year*. If Saudi Arabia had kept production where it was, then it seems exceedingly likely that shale production would have added much of the capacity itself, and prices would have fallen anyway, particularly with the end of Iranian sanctions and the Saudis would end up in an environment of low oil prices anyway.
Indeed, prices were already falling before SA increased production.
So why do we give them credit? Why do we maintain this idea that the Saudis have this situation under control? This situation is much larger than they are.
Change my view, Reddit :) | 93 | The Saudis have enormous influence over the price of oil and they always have. That's because of the quality of their oil fields and the high well pressures. Their well pressures are so high that increasing production rates is literally a case of opening up the taps.
For that reason, Saudi Arabia has traditionally been the world's swing oil producer. They can increase/decrease supply swiftly, easily and at little cost, so they they are able to both balance the supply of oil and keep prices stable. And most of the time that's done for the benefit of and at the request of the entire market.
There have been numerous occasions when SA's ability to increase production has averted a crisis - for instance when Iran's oil production tumbled. Had the Saudis not acted as the swing producer in those times, prices would have gone through the roof.
And there have been other times when the Saudis used their influence in a less friendly way - remember the oil shocks of the 70s? The Saudis cut their production rapidly and the whole world felt their power.
In the current climate, the Saudis don't need to increase production to wield power. All they have to do is refuse to act as the swing producer by reducing output, which is exactly what they are doing.
But if they wanted to, they could easily open their taps a bit more and add a couple of million barrels per day to the supply in fairly short order. If they did that, the price per barrel would crash further. A lot further.
Just because they aren't increasing production, doesn't mean they aren't in control of prices. | 31 |
[Injustice] How bad do things have to get before Wonder Woman realizes that maybe she made a mistake somewhere down the line? | 60 | Probably the moment Clark kills her she may feel a little remorse. She's beaten several villains that were nigh god like, brought world peace, ended so much suffering and pain for others. She willingly fought clark to the death and was willing to lose just to make sure he continued with their goals. It's not love it's not spite or ambition driving her. It's utter devotion to the ideals of the regime. She's spent decades watching politicians and world leaders undo every good deed done by the JLA when the winds change for them. She's seen refugee camps obliterated by militaries she's been unable to stop because of her morality code. The regime has made numerous mistakes and is a tyrannical authoritarian dictatorship but it's accomplished so much for the people that wonder woman has watched suffer that it's a fair trade off in her mind. Even Clark going public executions and murdering shazam wasn't enough to shake her faith in what they're doing. So long as clark stays the course wonder woman will stay beside him. | 54 |
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ELI5: How are employment agencies not regulated more? You can be a "temp" for years....how? | I am 34 year old male from Ontario, Canada. I am not sure what it is like in other parts of the world but right now a large portion of employment opportunities are only available through these "Emplyment Agencies". Or as I have always called them, TEMP agencies. Because that is what they were. Someone you can call for a temporary employee.
A few years back I obtained a position making car parts for Honda at a company called "TRW Canada" through a "temp agency". Upon getting this job i was told there was a 3 month probation period and then that company can "possibly" hire you on full time. Through the agency i was getting paid 12 dollars canadian per hour. However, this is not how much the agency was being paid. They were being paid 15$ per hour for my labor. So taking 3$ out of my pay for...finding me a job? Keep in mind that this same company, TRW has 15-20 temp workers PER SHIFT at any given time.
This all went on for a year at which point i told TRW Canada to hire me or fire me. I was tired of being a "temp" worker. They didnt hire me so i demanded the temp agency find me another placement where i have a chance to be hired on full time. They responded quickly with another factory job again making car parts for honda at a company named "Fleetwood Metals". Without dragging this out anymore, long story short....The EXACT same thing happend. Worked a year, they refuse to hire me on fulltime.
None of this just happens to me. This happens to hundreds of thousands of people across the country. You cannot get a manufacturing position these days without going through temp agencies. And they are NOT temp agency's anymore. They are permanent positions with a middle man taking 20% of the money.
So my question is...Why are they not regulated? The Agency i worked for was called "The People Bank" How fucking slave like is that? They do nothing for you, take 20% of your paycheck and allow for employers to avoid labor laws. Since you are always a "temp" they can get rid of you whenever they like. And when they do, guess what? Your employment insurance doesnt kick in because they dont "lay you off". It's criminal what these agencies are doing to the hard working lower class folks who are absolutely necessary for society to function.
What i truelly dont understand is how nobody talks about it. Its a major major problem. When i was originally looking for work i hit the pavement and traveled around handing out resume's anywhere i felt i could succeed. Probably 80% of the places directed me to their employment agency of choice.
Edit#1:
Thanks for all the responses! A few things to note: I am not a bad worker. I have never been let go from a job i have always chosen to leave. I worked in construction for nearly 5 years as a general contractor and built over 150 commercial stores across Canada and have in fact utilized employment agencies when tight deadlines needed to be met. But that is what they were....temp workers. I have always been a hard worker so please dont accuse me of being a poor worker. If i was a poor worker these employers would get rid of me and bring on another "temp". But they choose to keep me indefinitely, i have always left on my own.
Currently i am very happy. I have a full time position making 28$ an hour in a manufacturing plant with full benefits and paid vacation days. My current job is also very secure! I am in the best financial state of my entire life. This post is more for the people who are still going through what i went through. Funny tidbit: The company i currently work for never used employment agencies when i applied. They have since been sold to an American company and management has shifted and they now only bring on temp workers. So i see it happening first hand where i currently work. I am just on the other end of the spectrum.
| 40 | You're misunderstanding what a "temp" agency is. Temp agencies are businesses that basically collect workers for use in deployment for larger companies. You can be a full time temp at a temp agency with no benefits. That's kind of exactly the work you're going into.
Temp agencies are designed to connect workers with businesses on a contractual basis. As a business this means that you're the product they want to sell. You can't just make more people to magically fill up the temp agency instantly. So instead you rent out these employees and then collect them later for redeployment at another place where you continue collecting on their paycheck.
Or, as per ELI5; You do a job for a little bit all the time so you can go back and do another job for a little bit again at a later time. This makes the guys getting you temporary work more money because you're always there.
As a personal aside, no it's not right. Yes it should be changed. Write your legislature / start something and spread the word. Maybe something can happen, as is temp work is so low key no one bothers because it's seen as a low level job.
Wish you the best of luck in future endeavors. | 12 |
Why would you scrape a webpage with beautiful soup when Pandas read_html tool is way easier? | I'm learning Python right now, and after getting through a MOOC on the basics, I moved onto another course for Webscraping and I found it challenging and frustrating. The furthest I got was getting the header row for a web table, which was all smooshed into one string. It would have taken some regular expressions to make it usable, so I gave up and went back to a data analysis course. In this course, I've been learning the Pandas package, and it's awesome. All I had to do was take a url and use read_html and it printed a really complete table that was almost ready for analysis. So why was I wasting all that time time trying to use BS to do the same thing Pandas could do in 2 lines of code? What advantages does BS have? | 19 | Probably because pandas only works on tables that specifically use <table> html elements, whereas beautiful soup is more general purpose and more finely controlled to search and extract what you want. | 23 |
ELI5: How come when I'm stressed or worried my stomach becomes physically ill and gives me diarrhea? | 3,283 | When your stress levels are too high, you body goes into fight-or-flight mode. This is where you body redirects energy to the muscles so that you can fight something really well or run away from something really well.
However, in stressful situations you might not actually be able to run away, but your body still redirects energy to the muscles. One of the places that no longer works receives much energy is your digestion system.
Digestion takes a lot of energy to carry out, and we can make ourselves a lot stronger by using that energy to punch/sprint. When digestion stops, your stools will become either very hard or very soft. Diarrhoea is caused by digestion stopping, but fluids in your intestines still moving towards the bowel, which means you poop out a lot of fluids. | 1,736 |
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Why was the Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) outbreak of 2002-2004 not worse? | I'm curious why that Coronavirus outbreak didn't become worse/affect greater numbers. From reading about it, it doesn't seem as though the early reaction to it was much different than the early reaction to SARS-Cov-2 (Covid 19). Was it less contagious? Was it just luck? | 102 | One reason:
It’s much harder to contain SARS-Cov-2 because there are so many asymptomatic people and people with minor symptoms spreading the virus.
SARS-Cov-1 was easier to contain because if you had it, you were likely pretty sick. Plus, you had to be showing some symptoms to spread it. You didn’t have a bunch of asymptotic people running around spreading it all over the place. This is why asymptomatic spread has been such a big deal with SARS-Cov-2.
It’s much easier to contain a virus when it’s clear who has it and who doesn’t. | 179 |
[It Always Sunny in Philadelphia] How come all the crimes the gang did haven't caught up to them yet? | Kidnapping,drugging,blowing up a guys car(terrorism), operation a sweatshop, making terrorist threats, assault,robbery,burning down a building, breaking and entering and many more. Why isnt the gang locked up already? | 495 | Because every bad consequence and karmic turn that should hit the gang gets absorbed by everyone else around them.
That's why Rickety Cricket, Bill Ponderosa, the McPoyles etc all have progressively more miserable as the shows gone on | 627 |
Is Double-Slit Experiment about measurement limitations or nature of the light? | Hi,
I was reading about Double-Slit experiment lately and Complementarity. Can we say that:
The act of "**observing**” affects the electrons/photos but this doesn’t mean that the reality was not there. We don’t have a way to measure our system without changing the information in it. This is still more a **measurement limitation** for me than explaining the nature of the light.
Is Double-Slit Experiment and Complementarity about measurement limitations or nature of the light? | 69 | "Observing" mean the the light interacts with macroscopic objects, such as the slit, barrier, and the screen. The experiment is about the nature of reality. It's not a technological limit on our human measurements. A full discussion would include the concepts of local hidden-variables, and Bell's theorem (look them up). | 53 |
[GoT/SPOILERS up to S4E1] Why is the magical stuff becoming more powerful during this time? | Does it co-incide with a long winter coming?
When Danaerys was in Qarth, the House of the Undying guy said that his magic is only strong thanks to the presence of the dragons. So without them around the powers of practitioners like him might be diminished from what they once were.
What Melisandre can do seems to be something that is not known about and wouldn't be believed if not seen.
Certain kids discovering they have the ability of wargs. It seems like everything magical is gaining power at the same time. | 43 | It's not because winter is coming, it's because *change* is coming. The Warlock in Quarth was wrong, he can't use magic because the dragons have hatched, they're both because there's a change in the world. This change is also what's causing more White Walker and Whight activity, and it's what is allowing the priesthood of R'hollor to do more than parlor tricks, and what's leading certain people to inadvertently discover their Warg or Greenseer abilities.
What exactly the nature of this change is is uncertain. Maybe it actually is the dragons, but this is unlikely, maybe it's a certain someone's awakening Greenseer abilities, maybe the machinations of an old god, or maybe something else. We've not been told yet, and might not be.
| 32 |
ELI5: Why do some consider autism to be part of the neurodiversity, instead of a disorder/pathology? What, then, are the implications for other mental disorders? (eg, mood disorders) | 27 | Because in many cases the line between "neurodiversity" and a disorder is a line drawn by society. Consider homosexuality. It was once considered to be a disorder, and is now part of the spectrum of human sexuality. Its removal is due mostly to social activism and protest from, and advocation for, the homosexual communities.
Technically, the only thing that should be a disorder is something that, in some way, results in harm to the individual or others, or otherwise significantly impairs their ability to function in society. But even that has subjective elements. While "harm" is somewhat clear-cut, "ability to function" is not so. Going back to the homosexual example, if you define a person's ability to function in society around a family model - that a person's goal is to find a mate of the opposite sex and produce a family - then you may assess homosexuality as an inability to participate in a significant purpose of society. | 10 |
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[ASoIaF] Why did the dead direwolf get so far south? | In the beginning, Ned and co. find a dead direwolf, and then adopt it's cubs. What was it doing there? It died from a deer antler in the throat, but why did it move so far south? | 67 | Wildlings, giants, other animals and else are fleeing the march of Winter from the north - why not the wolves? Just because they're extinct south of the wall doesn't mean they aren't possible visitors.
This one being pregnant would be seeking warmer and more fertile lands for its cubs. | 55 |
CMV: Attempted crimes should be treated identically to their completed versions | **I believe that attempted crimes** (attempted murder, attempted rape, attempted kidnapping, etc.) **should not exist, but rather should be charged, prosecuted, and sentenced as their completed versions** (murder, rape, kidnapping, etc.).
Implicit in the very act of an attempt is the intent to commit the crime, and I believe that that is the only thing that should really be considered in a criminal justice system. A person's intent is what informs our knowledge (at least in part) about their willingness to commit the crime, their commitment to actually carrying it out, their remaining danger to the public, and their likelihood for successful rehabilitation. It also implies that the crime was premeditated; there needs to be purpose and intent for there to be an active attempt. Completion of the crime does not inform or imply any of those things in a way that simply a criminal's intent alone does not. Because of that, I don't believe that *succeeding* in the crime should be a relevant factor to the criminal justice system - but I am open to having my view changed on the matter, so **explain why I should CMV, Reddit!** Note that I am in the US and am thinking specifically about the American legal system, but am totally open to examples/points/reasoning/etc. from other countries' legal systems.
*Things that I can already tell you will not change my view:*
* Trying to convince me that this is a pointless discussion because the US criminal justice system is broken/isn't fair/is biased/etc. I agree with that statement as well, but that's not what I want to discuss here, and I think that this discussion is an important part of any other criminal justice reforms we could talk about.
* Any argument specifically related to Trump and/or the current impeachment proceedings. Yes, the whole "well he only *tried* to bribe Ukraine" defense is why this is on my mind so much right now, but for a wide variety of reasons, I don't think that any case study specific to the current president will make a compelling argument as to why my viewpoint is right or wrong *in general,* and I don't want this to be some sort of partisan bickering.
Also, you may intuit that this is part of a broader viewpoint of mine that retribution should have no place in a criminal justice system. I'm certainly willing to discuss (and possibly have my view changed) on that as well, but I wanted to pose this more narrow problem to make the scope of the discussion a little more manageable. | 27 | I agree mostly with this but have one concern.
When guilt or another change of heart causes a person to stop before committing the crime and hands themselves in. This should definitely be treated as a different case for determining punishment as they have already made the realisation it’s wrong, so the punishment is simply the next step, while someone who gets caught hasn’t decided to stop they were stopped so they should be held accountable as if it had happened entirely. | 20 |
[Stargate]Suppose Ra somehow found out when the Romans banned the worship of him in the 4th century AD. do you think he'd do anything about it, or had he totally lost interest in Earth by that point? | 20 | Oh he'd absolutely do something. He's very egotistical and responds violently to undermining his authority- he tries to nuke earth as revenge for them defying his rule after millenia passed.
If he knew it, he'd be furious humans would undermine his worship. If he could get to earth at that point, the romans wouldn't be in for a very pleasent time | 18 |
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A common symptom of severe radiation exposure is nausea and vomiting shortly after. What biological mechanism is affected by the radiation to result in these symptoms so soon after exposure? | This is a well-known effect of severe exposure to radiation. I've been searching online to find out what specific biological process is disrupted by the radiation to produce this effect, but I haven't found anything.
I can understand the biological origin of the many longer term effects due to tissue damage, like hair falling off and diarrhea, due to the damage of the rapidly reproducing cells. But it is unclear to me why nausea and vomiting would have a much quicker onset (minutes in some severe cases recorded) via the same mechanisms. Is a destruction of the cells in the stomach lining really all there is to it, and we're just more sensitive to it?
What kind of biological mechanisms induce nausea/vomiting, and how are they affected by radiation? | 52 | Vomiting is caused by the rapid death of cells in the lining of the GI tract. The sudden loss of stomach lining causes vomiting.
The reason this occurs is because the cells in the GI tract lining replicate very quickly and have one if the shorter life cycles of any cell type. Cells that have their DNA damaged by radiation, though, can’t replicate properly. This process is accelerated by apoptosis of heavily damaged cells. When that happens, the stomach lining degrades quickly, leading to vomiting.
A similar process is responsible for the loss of hair, flaking of skin, and aplastic anemia after acute exposure. Rapidly replicating cells show the effects of DNA damage sooner than cells that replicate slowly. | 54 |
[Destiny] How many of them are there?! | I'm an average and rather exasperated Guardian and I know for a fact that many of us are busting our asses. The leaders of the Vanguard are telling us all about how crucial our victories are and how much of a difference we are making. Even with all the "progress" we are making every time I'm on patrol I see the same amount of enemies, I have over 16,000 kills by myself not including the Crucible and I'm a typical Hunter. I know they are thousands more of us and many of them are much stronger than I amand have much better records so why the fuck haven't we eradicated the Fallen, Vex, Hive, Cabal and Taken? | 46 | You are battling against interstellar forces, and in the case of the Vex, interdimensional ones. The Fallen are likely the least numerous, and probably still number in the tens of millions. For the Hive of the Moon alone, they undoubtedly can call upon billions of Drones. | 22 |
[LOTR books] In the Fellowship of the Ring, the night before entering Moria they fight with a pack of wolfs. But they vanish at dawn and Gandalf mentions that they were not normal wolfs. Why was that? | 20 | They are Wargs - evil wolves of Wilderland. As Gandalf says, they are not simply a hunting pack of normal animals.
There is no explanation given for how they disappeared. Not in LotR, not in Tolkien's private letters, nor in the published draft versions of the story we have in *The History of Middle Earth*. | 32 |
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ELI5 - Why when steaming/foaming milk (like for lattes and cappuccinos) does the milk taste sweeter then normal? | 65 | Imagine your mom buys you one of those toys with the different shapes that you have to match to their corresponding shaped holes. You’re excited to start testing your hypothesis that maybe the cylinder one would fit into the star shaped hole but there’s one problem. To save money, the manufacturer left all the pieces connected with the extra bits of plastic from the mould and you have to separate them before playtime. Even though you’ve figured out that the cylinder mostly fits in the round hole, it just won’t go in because it’s connected to the square with that darned piece of plastic.
The shapes are simple sugars you can taste. The holes are your tastebuds. The heat is the scissors your dad will eventually use to separate the pieces
Milk has a sugar in it called lactose. We can’t taste it just like we can’t taste starch in potatoes but the heat from the steamer breaks down the lactose into simple sugars that are very sweet: glucose and galactose, those fit our taste receptors just right. | 131 |
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ELI5: Brexit and what's so bad about it? | 16 | Without getting into the "it's good" or "it's bad" politics of it:
Britain has been a part of the European Union for a long time. The European Union is an extensive agreement between all its member nations allowing for greatly increased and deregulated international travel, immigration and trade. Their economies are heavily intertwined - kind of like a couple that has been married a long time and have a lot of joint purchases and accounts together.
Brexit is Britain's recent decision, made by the majority of voters, to leave the European Union. They now have a few years to sever most of their attachments to the rest of the European Union, like a messy divorce. | 21 |
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ELI5: Why isn't it possible for hackers to downgrade the operating system of iphones? | Fundamentally, a phone is just a little pocket computer. So why can't hackers just wipe everything and install any type of operating system they would like (ie android on an iphone)? How exactly do apple prevent this from being possible? If they can find exploits allowing them to jailbreak the phone, can't they use those to flash other operation systems or older versions of ios? | 16 | They absolutely can, there just isn't enough of a demand for many of those types of hacks. For example, OpeniBoot is a project for an open source version of iBoot (the Apple bootloader) that makes it possible to install Android, or many many other OSes, on your Apple device. But because not enough people are interested in doing that, only very few Apple devices are supported because they don't have enough people working to figure out how to make it work on more devices. | 11 |
Why does the Moon's gravity cause tides on earth but the Sun's gravity doesn't? | 10,465 | The Sun's gravity actually *does* cause tides! They're just weaker than the Moon's tides.
The Sun's gravitational force on the Earth is stronger than the Moon's, but its tides are weaker. This is because tides decrease with distance more quickly than net gravity does.
Tidal forces are caused by the difference in gravity between one side of the planet and the other. Gravity drops off with distance, so one side of the planet gets pulled a bit more than the other. This causes the planet to get stretched a little bit, which is the tidal force.
If you're close to an object, gravity is dropping rapidly, which means that the tidal forces are extra strong. They're strong because the net gravity is strong, but they're extra strong because the gravity is dropping fast with distance. This is what makes tides decrease more rapidly with distance than net gravity, because there are, in a sense, two effects to make it stronger when you're close.
So the Moon ends up dominating our tides, even though we orbit the Sun. | 9,249 |
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if pi = circumference/diameter and if the circumference and diameter are whole numbers, then doesn't pi=p/q? then how is it considered irrational? or is this just an approximation? | 31 | If the diameter of a circle is a whole number, the circumference cannot be. If the circumference of a circle is a whole number, the diameter cannot be. You will never find a circle where both the diameter and the circumference are both whole numbers. | 76 |
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ELI5: What is the difference between a military, a paramilitary, a militia, and a private army? | 18 | * Military: In context to the question and in modern parlance, a military nationally funded and controlled fighting force, accountable and fully funded by its national government. The purpose of a standing military is as a defense to external threats. Typically, a standing military does not carry actionable authority within a country's borders.
* Paramilitary: A paramilitary is a militarized police force, often partially funded by semi-local taxes. Unlike a standing military, a paramilitary stands only semi-accountable to its national government, and serves as both an enhanced police force and and as a force against both external and internal threats. A paramilitary carries actionable authority within and outside a country's borders.
* Militia: A militia is a body of volunteer citizens, both organized and unorganized. Militias tend to be self-funded and self-organized. Militias are accountable to civilian law, including local, state and Federal statutes. The militia carries actionable authority within a country's borders, where authority is granted to do so.
* Private Army: A private army is a military force which operates independently of governmental structures, and receives its funding from a private source. The purpose of a private army is to extend force for a person or group of people, and a private army's authority is within the funding and scope of a private interest. | 23 |
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The self in Buddhism | Apologies if this is not the right forum for this question, but could anyone explain how in Buddhism there is a belief of no-self, yet also a belief in reincarnation? What is being reincarnated if there is no self? | 18 | What Buddhism is rejecting is that anything can be regarded as a self.
How is this specifically understood? Most clearly, the problematic conception of selfhood has these qualities: temporal extension (hence the argument from change in the *Anātmalakṣanasūtra*), agency over the different mental and physical components of a person (hence the argument from control in the *Anātmalakṣanasūtra*), self-sufficiency (i.e., part of our mental world which *has* our other mental states but isn't itself *had* by anything), and lacking parts (because Buddhists in general are reductionists when it comes to mereological dependence, hence the famous chariot analogy).
But rebirth does not require something of this sort. It merely requires that some aspect of the basis onto which this mistaken concept of self is imputed be continuous between one life and another.
In Buddhism, this aspect is held to be what Bhikkhu Anālayo, in his book *Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current Research*, calls "the process of being conscious." Basically, what rebirth actually means is that a given continuum of mental events, or "process of being conscious," remains continuous even though the physicality appropriated by it is discontinuous. But this continuum of mental events doesn't have the properties of the problematic conception of selfhood. So there is rebirth without a self.
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This is why, when Buddhists historically argued with opponents who argued that Buddhism must be false because there is no rebirth (such as followers of the Lokāyata school), those opponents didn't say "you're right about selflessness but thus you must reject rebirth." Instead, understanding that Buddhists believe it is *mental continuity* that underlies rebirth, Lokāyata thinkers tried to argue that rebirth is impossible because mental properties are caused by arrangements of certain material objects. They argued for this, and then pointed out this means physical discontinuity entails mental discontinuity, since the mental causally depends on the physical, and hence one's continuum of mental events is cut off with the breakup of one's body. | 22 |
Do the other 8 planets have a necessary effect on keeping Earth in the "Goldilocks Zone"? | This question stems from a conversation I had with my SO, that ended with the following: "If all the planets in our solar system suddenly magically disappeared, what would happen to Earth?" What are some other similar scenarios and how could they play out? | 19 | If Jupiter wasn't there the earth would be hit much, much more often by large asteroids. Jupiter's gravity tends to slingshot asteroids out of earth's path. Many believe that we wouldn't have survived long enough to evolve of it wasn't for Jupiter's gravitational help | 24 |
[Mary Poppins] What *is* Mary Poppins? A benevolent witch? A guardian angel? A domesticated Fae? | 44 | I think she's a god. As in the New American Gods, where they are formed from a combination of belief and ritual. Mary Poppins is British. Like, *literally* the god of British. The rituals are cleanliness, respect, tea, and a reserved but sincere form of fun.
She is basically the result of the collective consciousness of "Britishness" given humanoid form. | 88 |
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CMV: Arguing with bigots online is not a waste of time. | Let me preface this post by saying I'm a practicing Muslim, and for years I've been trying to educate people on what Islam is and what Islam is not. That involves breaking stereotypes, correcting people's misunderstandings and factual errors. I'm not here to have a conversation on Islam right now or argue politics.
I've spent a great deal of time over the years trying to fight against bigotry and ignorance by confronting it head-on. On reddit and elsewhere I see someone post a racist or bigoted comment and address it. I try not to be nasty, I try to show data or info that shows they are wrong to make that kind of judgement. Few people actually approach me for a good-faith discussion, but I persist anyway, and sometimes by disproving one of their claims (eg. "90% of the rapists in Europe are Muslim", or "the Quran requires you to convert or die") they realize their mistake and take it back. Other times people will be stubborn and closed minded and dispute the evidence in favor of their dubious sources or block/downvote me or change the topic. I learn from others as well, and retract claims that I learn to be incorrect. For the most part I'm debunking the worst stereotypes and leaving the finer points of religious debate for someone else.
This work actually has a harmful effect on me. There's just too much hate, too many ignorant people, too much to debunk. My job performance is suffering because I spend hours arguing the same topics with people. It's making me deeply cynical of people, getting hate mail from strangers who have decided in their mind that I am an evil monster who is part of the conspiracy and secretly a terrorist. But I cannot stop, because while I do this I see in my news feed the swell of hate crimes, people being killed by strangers not far from me for looking Muslim in public or "revenge for Iraq" whatever that means.
I think I'm alone in this endeavor. There's other Muslims online, and plenty of people in my communities who share the same opinions as me, but none of them speak up on forums. Some of the top comments on stories in major subreddits are copy-pastes of stereotypes against Muslims and Islam. They've been long debunked (and if we tried to use this logic on Jews or christians people would be rightly outraged and create a flood of replies), but they don't stop. I can argue with 5 or 6 people and debunk it, but the next day it comes back. I think my success rate is somewhat low, rarely do people admit they made a mistake, and many wind up clinging to their hateful ideas even harder. At the same time, I've had some genuine success stories of people who admit they were wrong and fell into a belief they didnt get into by reasoning or truth.
My Muslim friends tell me not to bother, to leave it alone. I don't think I can, because it gives bigots the floor. People read these unchallenged claims and assume they must be true since nobody has disproved the stuff. In my lifetime I've seen 30% of Americans believe Islam is violent and hateful nearly 20 years ago and now nearly 60% today. I can't sit back and let that happen without trying to do something, but I seem to be alone in the matter. Muslims write their own blog posts and comments to social media, and religious leaders make youtube videos trying to give their own explanations of religion, but nobody is challenging this dangerous ignorance directly. I think they hope that others who bother to look will find the facts they need.
Well, folks? Could I be doing this wrong? Should I be doing more of this or less
TL;DR Am I wasting my time trying to argue with every bigot I meet online? | 128 | Arguing with bigots *who are acting in good faith* isn't a waste of time. They might learn something and observers might learn something.
But many, many bigots online are NOT acting in good faith. They're only interested in 'gotchas' ("You're the REAL bigot!") and their actual arguments are impossible to pin down, because they change moment to moment.
The important thing here is learning how to tell the difference. | 79 |
[General] Will a genie grant wishes through a third party? | Let's say I can't use a genie, like I already got my 3 wishes and want more. Can I just grab a random person, put a gun to their head, and force them to ask for wishes on my behalf? Is there anything a genie can do to refuse wishes made under duress? | 28 | I think the answer is yes, the genie would grant the wishes, *but* your plan wouldn't really work if the random person has even a modicum of sense about them. They just have to use their first wish to eliminate whatever threat you're making, and then they've got two more wishes.
I think the better business model here isn't to force people to make wishes under threat of harm. Instead, you *sell* people wishes. You'll let them use the lamp for whatever they want at the cost of one of their wishes. They get two wishes, but they have to use their third one for whatever you tell them. | 34 |
How can BBC, Sky, Channel 4 etc. show programmes and ads on my TV but say their content isn't available in my region when I try to view it on their respective web players? | To clarify: I live in Ireland. These are British TV networks.
Ive heard similar situations of people in Canada having American networks on their TV and are told that the content also isn't available to their region. What is the reasoning behind this? Is it a smart move in terms of business and ad revenue ?
Thanks. | 66 | It's worth pointing out that the BBC doesn't show ads.
As for the other channels, it's a licensing issue. They pay for programmes to be shown at a certain time, and then to be hosted online to be available for X amount of time. For example, BBC3 shows Family Guy late at night, but is **not** allowed to put it on iPlayer.
Hope this helps a little. | 24 |
ELI5: Why armies just stood in front of each other and fired? | While watching the movie The Patriot I keep seeing major battles where the 2 armies just stand in front of each other and fire. Why did they do this? This seems like a very stupid way to fight a war causing the most deaths possible | 40 | Because the accuracy and firing rate of their weapons was very poor. Keeping your men together and organized allowed them to fire in a more organized way that allowed them to fire volleys in succession and en-mass, that allowed for more hits on the enemy. If everyone hid behind cover separately, and fired sporadically at individual fleeting targets that were also hidden behind cover, then no one would ever hit anything. So, you sacrificed your own concealment in an effort to actually inflict damage consistently. | 60 |
[Fullmetal Alchemist] [spoilers] Could Ed learn alkahestry? | At the end of the manga/Brotherhood, Ed gives up his ability to use alchemy. Does this prevent him from using alkahestry as well, or could he theoretically learn it? | 41 | Alkahestry differs from alchemy in that they use different power sources, the former 'the chi flowing trough the earth' ^((whatever that is supposed to mean)^) and the latter the tectonic shift as well as the power of the Homunkulus' philosophers stone.
They still get channeled the same way, through the gate of the respective practitioner, and so Ed probably can not do it. | 28 |
What does mean sea level mean if you're thousands of miles from the sea? | As I understand it, Mean Sea Level is defined by taking the time-averaged effective gravitational potential of the water-air boundary averaged over the world's oceans. Since sea levels are rising globally, we choose some datum and stick to that. This seems reasonably unambiguous.
If the summit of Everest is 8848m above MSL, does that mean it's 8848m directly above a point within the crust on that same equipotential, or does it mean it's on the equipotential defined by the average of all points 8848m directly above the sea? Or does it mean something else?
How much difference would there be?
*To rephrase the question: if you hollowed out Everest and made tunnels (sealed against groundwater) connecting that cavity to the oceans, would the water find a time-averaged level 8848m directly below the summit?* | 25 | Sea level is affected by gravity/mass (hence the moon causing tides and so on...). Therefore mountains affect the sea level. Currently, sea level is calculated by assuming the entire earth is covered in water, but the mass from the mountains is still there (hard to imagine, i know). Then the water "bulges" in some places where there is a lot of mass (also tectonic plates and such play a role), in these places sea level is "higher". To answer your rephrased question: yes (assuming that the tunnels do not measurably change the mass of Mt. Everest). | 12 |
ELI5: Why do pirates use strippers to get 4k content? | Why do pirates use strippers to get 4k content of streaming websites? Why don't they just get a 4k screen capture service and record the screen while playing the video? | 18 | If you merely capture screen, you will only get pixel by pixel data. Saving pixel by pixel one hour of 4k video would take tremendous space
4k denotes 3840*2160. That is the number of pixels on screen on a single frame, or in other words, that's 8 million pixels per frame. Each pixel should have color information tagged on it as well, and usually you have 16 or 24 bits to denote color of a single pixel. So that's at least 120 million bits per frame. At 60fps, each second has 60 frames, bringing us to 7 billion bits per second, or 21000 billion bits per hour. That would be equivalent of 3000 billion bytes or 3 terabytes.
3 terabytes for a hour-long video is quite a lot.
How this works is that videos are actually highly compressed. Compression algorithms however lose information(unless you deal with lossless algorithms, but those are significantly less effective at reducing size down from that 3 terabytes). If you capture 3 terabytes of video, you then need to start deciding where to trim it down, and how to have something of usable size to produce end result similar to the video you captured.
But the 4k video you were watching was already compressed, and if you could just tap into that, you would directly have usable video file of very small size, and you wouldn't lose any video data on re-compression. | 22 |
CMV: I believe people who volunteer for admin/moderator positions are power hungry and get satisfaction in controlling other people. | CMV: People who volunteer in admin/mod roles in an organization are power hungry and like having power over others.
The statement is obviously not true for everyone, but I find that a good number of people who volunteer for these positions (and sometimes the paid ones too) just get off on having power over others no matter how small or inconsequential.
Examples: Home owners association admins who drive around looking for homes to scrutinize even when it’s a small infraction; server moderators who threaten removal of content or removal from the server when someone doesn’t respect them to the degree they want; and channel moderators who screen everything to such a minute level that they end up hindering free speech.
I find it pathetic and a good sense of character when the power is abused.
I was just recently threatened to be banned on a different subreddit, because I questioned a decision they made—one they made with little evidence to back it up.
Change my view. | 15 | Moderation is something you only notice when it's done badly, either because its obnoxiously strict or because a forum is a disaster because it isn't being moderated at all. You never notice the moderators who are keeping things reasonable and dealing with all the unreasonable people who want to cause trouble. | 11 |
[Star Wars] How differently would galactic events have gone if Qui-Gon had made it through the blast doors in Episode I? | So let's say that in [this scene](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OTHjSG61SI) (relevant part at 6:00) the destroyer droids do not make it in time to force Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon away from the blast doors and they get in. What happens next?
Bonus: With the possibility of them meeting Anakin far later in the series does this make Anakin less or more angsty? | 70 | The blockade of naboo was simply a tool for Sidious to force a crisis. His end game was creating a war where the republic would be willing to cede senate control to Palpatine or a puppet of his.
If the blockade had failed because Qui Gon had entered into (aggressive) negotiations with the trade federation, Sidious would have found some other way. He's patient. | 67 |
ELI5: Why are our dreams so easily forgotten? | I often feel that I have the most vivid and elaborate dreams but as soon as I wake up, my recollection of the dream is completely wiped from memory as if it never happened. What accounts for this strange phenomena? | 41 | The ability to remember dreams changes from person to person although studies have shown that more than 95% of us are like you and completely forget our dreams.
Basically we have short term memory and long term memory. Dreams are a sort of stream of consciousness that pass rapidly through your short term memory and you won't remember it unless it's passed into your long term memory as soon as you wake up.
Nothing has been 100% proven but among the most plausible reasons put up by scientists are:
* Neuro-chemicals in our brain are different when we are asleep and when we are awake. For whatever reason, they block dreams from your memory. Dreams help us process unconscious information absorbed throughout the day. It's possible that the brain understands it's all a bit gibberish and decides for us that it's not necessary to remember it.
* You can't "purposely try to remember" dreams while asleep so you're not passing the dream information into your long-term memory.. It's the same for people who sleep walk.. they walk around, cook food, cross roads.. but pass none of the information into their long term memory to "remember" later.
That being said, there *ARE* some things that you can do to help you remember your dreams. Research has shown that the biggest difference between people who remember their dreams better than others is just that they are more interested in dreams in general, or place more importance on the significance of dreams.
People with poor dream memory are a lot less likely to be good at tasks that involve their visual cortex (eg. they are shown a picture of a fruit bowl and are then given the fruit and asked to arrange it all in the same order as in the picture they were shown)
If you keep a notepad and pen next to your bed, and write down what you remember of your dream as soon as you wake up, you are, in part, training your brain to remember dreams (because you are placing importance on them and in writing it down, passing it to long term memory) and bit by bit your brain should adapt and start to better remember your dreams! (As best it can anyway, given the potentially nasty neuro-chemicals that are trying to make you forget ;p)
HTH
(EDIT for formatting) | 24 |
[ELI5] Why does aperture size effect depth of field? | Why does a wide aperture blur the background while a narrow one keeps it in focus? | 26 | Imagine a light ray emitted/reflected from a specific single point on an object. If your aperture is infinitely small, there's only one position that ray can ever end up after going through the aperture. Do this for all rays emitted from said object, and since there's only one place for each ray to end up, which is related to where it was emitted from, you get an exact replica of the observed object.
If your aperture is bigger however, you could have two rays coming off the same single point on an object, leaving at slightly different angles yet still going through the aperture. Since that single point somehow gets represented in two places after passing through the aperture, blur happens. | 57 |
ELI5: why do the effects in older movies (some not even 10 years old yet) seem so cheesy now yet back when the movie was released it seem so real! | 170 | When we haven't experienced something that much, we pay less attention to the details.
If we ate bacon for the first time, we'd get blown away by the taste no matter how it was cooked or where it's from - it's unique, delicious and memorable. After eating it every day for a month, we might develop a preference for how it's cooked (less crispy etc). After eating it for a year, we might start to prefer specific cuts of bacon or bacon from specific farms etc.
Movie effects that are 'groundbreaking' at the time won't hold up later because we'll have seen it over and over again in other movies since and we will notice the flaws that couldn't be noticed before.
Also, if you watched that effect originally as a kid, you've experienced a lot more life in general and you're more likely to scrutitise what you see in any context. | 127 |
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ELI5: The difference between AMD and Intel? | Thankyou all so much!! | 74 | For the most part, you can think of them like competitors in any other market -- e.g. Honda and Toyota.
Both car manufacturers make cars -- some that are super gas efficient, some that can hold a lot of people, and some that are sporty. One company might develop some cool new technology, and the same with the other. At the end of the day though, they still make cars that travel down the same roads and use the same basic principles (e.g. gas engines, four wheels, etc).
Well AMD and Intel are similar in that regard. At the end of the day, in order to be able to use their chips in a computer, they have to be able to do a certain specified set of things. How they accomplish it can vary as long as at the end of the day they get to the same result. | 32 |
ELI5: How do people measure statistics of things like what state has the most human trafficking? | 49 | Very hard. In general, data on this and similar issues comes from multiple sources, some of which include official crime statistics countries report to various international organizations such as Europol, Interpol, UNOCD etc. Depending on the editor/user of data, some will be evaluated and supplemented by other sources - for example drug exports from and drug imports into etc/arrest statistics/cross border data for immigration offenses and others. | 13 |
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If one recovers from COVID 19, does the body become immune to the virus? Or is there a possibility of contracting the disease again? | 95 | From an interview with Dr. Fauci he says that with it having low mutation rate it's unlikely to become reinfected with another strain, and although they haven't confirmed or ruled out anything it's most likely we develop an immunity to this virus after contracting it. So unless thing's are really crazy with this virus, we will have immune memory cells for it as normal. | 117 |
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ELI5: Why does the same water feel a different temperature to your body than it does to your head? For example when in the shower? | 8,025 | Fun fact: you can’t actually sense temperature; not in the way we usually think of it.
Instead, you sense the transfer of heat into or out of your skin. If different parts of your body are different temperatures, they will feel the same temperature differently.
There are a couple of experiments you can run to illustrate this:
1. Get three bowls of water, big enough to stick your hands into. Fill one with icy-cold water, one with hot water, and one with luke-warm water. Put one hand in the cold water and one in the hot water, and hold them there for a minute or so. Then put both hands in the medium water at the same time, and notice how each hand reports the temperature of that water differently.
2. Leave a block of wood, a piece of metal, and a plastic object in a room for a while, so they end up being the same temperature. When you feel them, they will feel different temperatures, because the different materials transfer heat more or less efficiently. | 6,022 |
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Does your body still "recharge" at all if you are just lying there, eyes closed, not moving, but not sleeping? | Wondering because I've heard that if you are trying to nap, but can't really fall asleep, you're still benefitting. Would love to know the actual science behind this, if it exists. | 60 | Yes, to a certain extent.
The body's systems are not usually just "on" or "off". There are gradients and different levels of activation of each system in the body. Even within the context of sleep, there are different kinds of sleep, with some biological processes occurring at different rates.
Several of your body's recovery mechanisms are always active. They are constantly fighting against the damage inflicted on your body over time. Resting just reduces the damage being inflicted, causing the effect of the recovery mechanism to be more pronounced. Other mechanisms will increase or decrease based on your activity level.
There are some mechanisms that kick in only when you're actually asleep, so resting is never going to be "enough", but you definitely get some benefit. | 29 |
What would happen if a nuclear bomb went off on a gas giant planet? | I'm curious as to what could possibly happen to planets like Jupiter, Saturn, or Uranus with the hydrogen content of their atmospheres. For this, let's assume something like [Tsar Bomba](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_bomba) is sent, what would happen to a gas giant? What if five, ten, or twenty Tsar Bomba-like bombs?
Edit: Thank you for the answers, everyone! | 49 | Nothing would happen. When the fragments of comet shoemaker-levy 9 impacted Jupiter, one of the impacts released as much energy as 6,000,000 megatons of TNT. At worst the explosion would leave a dark mark on Jupiter. | 45 |
Why do mRNA vaccines use mRNA in order for the body to create the covid spike protein? Why can't we just create the spike protein and make a vaccine using that (eliminating the intermediate step)? | 39 | Since a single copy of mRNA produce many copies of the spike protein, it’s easier and more efficient to have your body produce the spike protein without having to worry about stability of the spike protein in solution, the spike protein forming aggregates, etc. it’s just much cleaner to inject the stabilized mRNA and let your body take care of the rest. | 74 |
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How are plants and animals thriving in Chernobyl? | My understanding is that humans won't survive long, especially if they eat things from the ground. Why are the wolves, moose, bison, birds, trees, grass, and bushes fine? | 16 | Because radiation isn't some super-lethal force that destroys all life. We are constantly exposed to radiation from the ground, air, and space. It turns out humans are far more lethal to plants and animals than the radiation levels within the exclusion zone. So in the absence of humans, wildlife is thriving. | 29 |
ELI5: Why is thigh skin so much thinner than skin on other parts of the body? | I was looking up why thigh chafing happens so often, and apparently one reason is that thigh skin is so much thinner than skin on other parts of the body. Why is this? | 35 | Most people in our evolutionary past were normal weight or underweight and for them this was probably never really an issue (especially when you consider that they didn’t have clothing (or at least not shorts and trousers) for most of that time). So having thick, robust skin on the inside of your thighs was probably never selected for. | 12 |
[Undergrad] Allowed acquaintance to base her homework off mine, got accused of plagiarism. | **Background:**
I'm a 3rd year computer science student in Canada, taking a Theory of Computation course. I've been accused of plagiarism.
**What happened:**
A month ago we had an assignment due into which I put a lot of effort. After I had finished, an acquaintance of mine asked me for help at the last minute before the due date, so we went to the library and she looked over my copy, and asked me questions from time to time. I never looked at her answers, but she acted as though she changed hers sufficiently.
This is the kind of class where answers end up pretty diverse, so the TA grading the assignment realised all of her answers were similar to mine and accused us both of plagiarism. No formal action has been taken yet.
**Now:**
On the recommendation of my friend, I plan on going to the school law clinic to get advice, but I'd also like yours. How can I get out of this mess without a notice of plagiarism on my permanent record? If at all possible, how can I not receive a zero on this assignment that I worked so hard on?
Thanks in advance for any responses! | 17 | So, based on the details in the post, it sounds like your classmate is guilty of plagiarism (passing off someone else's work as their own), but you're guilty of _academic dishonesty_ (of which plagiarism is one form), since you facilitated your classmate's plagiarism/dishonest submission of work. | 45 |
[Dragon Ball Z] Why didn’t Cell ever use the Kaioken when he was losing a fight? | He should be able to, more than Goku even, because of how durable his body is and how he never runs out of energy. If he did that, he would have won damn near every fight he was in. | 180 | Does cell know about kaioken?
If he does, it may be a technique that requires proper training under a teacher compared to something like the kamehameha, which seems be learnable by seeing it in person. | 132 |
ELI5: How does pool cleaning work? Surely, even if dissolved, all that crap is STILL in the SAME water? | 79 | It depends. A lot of the material settles out of the water and collects on the bottom or floats to the top where it can be removed mechanically. Some of it do end up in the filters in front of the circulation pumps for the pool which can then be cleaned out. However some of the algae will dissolve into smaller molecules that dissolves in the water. And yes, the crap is still there just in the form of various protein, sugars and fat dissolved in the water. Eventually though they break down into simpler molecules like carbon dioxide, nitrates, salts and water. Some of these do leave the pool in the form of gas. But the rest is pretty harmless. | 151 |
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Humans see in color, pigeons see millions of hues, dogs see in black and white, snakes can sense heat, and flies have millions of lenses in which they perceive the world. How then, do we know what the world actually looks like? | 33 | It doesn't "actually" look like anything. "Looking like" is something the world does in various ways to things that perceive things visually. There's no "actual" version of it that isn't relative to things doing the perceiving. | 57 |
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ELI5: Why are there so many planes crashed in the Rocky Mountains, East of the Continental Divide? | I'm curious about the science of why the altitude or this specific area was so difficult as well as the social/political/whatever climate that made this happen. | 76 | Pilot here with mountain-flying experience, I'll try to answer the question as completely as possible without getting to science-y.
There are a two main reasons why this happens:
* **Altitude**: In the same way that your car produces significantly less power at higher elevations, small aircraft produce less power at higher altitudes (this is because the engines of both require oxygen to create power, and there is less oxygen at higher altitudes). If pilots aren't trained or prepared to handle the (significant) lack of power in the mountains, they can easily get themselves into trouble by selecting a too-short runway, flying into a valley they can't climb out of, etc. This also explains why airplanes don't just fly higher: small aircraft generally don't have enough power to fly much higher than 10,000 feet.
* **Winds**: Mountain winds are typically strong, and strong winds are always a challenge for small planes close to the ground. But the real problem with mountain winds is that they often contain *downdrafts*, which are wind drafts that do exactly what they sound like: travel downwards, not just side-to-side. These downdrafts can easily overpower a small airplane (which is already underpowered enough), and it is nothing new to hear about a small airplane that wars literally sucked down into the side of a mountain by a downdraft. Because the east side of the Rockies is the lee side (which means that the wind generally travels from west to east), downdrafts are particularly abundant there.
I'll be happy to go into more detail if you'd like. | 49 |
CMV: The Purge would cause more issues than it would solve. | The Purge (an event where all crime is legal in the film series *The Purge*) would undoubtedly cause more issues than it would solve.
In the movies it is touted as a beneficial thing. That crime has greatly been reduced and homelessness almost eradicated.
Allowing all crime to be legal for just one day would cause horrific repercussions that the country would not be able to recover from quickly.
The county would be paying for the cost of the Purge months and years after it happened.
1) Damage to bridges, roadways & runways. People could easily blow up vital paved pathways for air and ground commerce and transportation. That would have a negative effect on millions of people.
2) Attacking coal plants, oil pipe lines, nuclear power plants, wind farms, solar farms and so on… the means of how we power the county could be majorly crippled causing millions to be without power for an extended period of time. Then on top of that… think about if you didn’t have road ways to properly get the parts and people to the areas where the energy sources needed to be fixed.
3) Attacking financial institutions, stealing identities and intellectual property. People could physically or digitally steal money. Causing several people to become destitute. They could ruin the stock market, hack it, plant viruses that cause chaos among the general public. Possibly cause a financial collapse later on.
4) Burn forest or burn fields of crops. They could have people fighting fires months later and cause a food shortage.
5) Poison food supplies or water supplies. People could die days or weeks later due to tainted food.
There is so much more people could legally do to cripple the country in just a day… it’s not just about people’s blood lust. | 52 | yeah i mean the movies are pretty anti-purge for many reasons. they don't go into the points you bring up necessarily but like the whole point of the movies/series is that the purge is bad morally and ineffective practically for its purported goals
EDIT:
>In the movies it is touted as a beneficial thing. That crime has greatly been reduced and homelessness almost eradicated.
the *villains* of the movie say this and plot of the films bears out that they're lying to the people | 55 |
[LOTR] Is there a biological reason Boromir was able to fight despite having three arrows in his chest? Or was it just a matter of push-ups, sit-ups, and plenty of juice? | 631 | Arrows are only super lethal when they strike the heart or brain. Anything else is death by bloodloss or internal injuries which takes longer. Boromir is full up on adrenaline and righteous fury so he's ignoring the pain and pushing through until shock and death set it. | 855 |
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ELI5: Why do redheads have a different reaction to anesthesia? | 15 | Scientists are actually a little unsure. But in redheads there is a mutation in the gene that governs the release of melanin which causes tans and darkens hair. Broken gene means no melanin and you get light skin and red hair.
By sheer evolutionary coincidence this same gene is also reused in pain reception. There's lots of genes that have multiple functions like this.
So basically the pain signals are harder to shut down and pain related nerves are a bit overactive. End result is anasthesia doesn't work as well (by about 20%) and redheads can be more sensitive to pain. | 26 |
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