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ELI5: Why is there more diversity in hair/eye colour of caucasions compared to darker coloured people? | Why is it so uncommon for darker coloured people to have anything but brown hair/eyes and what varies when it comes to caucasion people? | 222 | ELI5: People need different traits for different climates. The genetic mutations that made it possible for people to have lighter skin in colder areas with little light, made it more likely that genetic mutations would occur in other coloring (such as hair and eye color). It was never beneficial for people in warmer/bright climates to have lighter skin, so they do not have the genetic mutations that make it possible for it to occur.
In cases where a blond person has children with a brunette, the genes for darker coloring are dominate so the brown eyed/brown hair parent has a better chance of passing their coloring to their child. Since people with darker skin usually don't have those light coloring mutated genes hanging around their gene pool, it makes it even more likely that light coloring won't occur. | 55 |
CMV: The Superhero genre is really just centered around spectacle and the creative exploration of superpowers, but there is no real depth to it in general. | WARNING: There is a spoiler for the Marvel film Civil War ahead.
The writer Brandon Sanderson once said, "What your magic *can't* do is more interesting than what it *can* do."
When I heard this phrase it really made me appreciate how true that is. Soon after I watched the Marvel movie Civil War, and realized that basically, all superheroes are mary sues, and they all have equal "power levels". While watching it, I got the sense that they were all just made of Invincibilium, and the fighting didn't mean anything. Nobody was going to be permanently injured, much less killed. When they are killed, it's always built up and has an obvious subversion of the rules of the "universe" up until that point. When Don Cheadle's character was crippled by falling from the sky I almost laughed out loud. Here we have a movie full of high-powered superheroes fighting each other, and yet the only significant injury is from a guy falling and hitting the ground. It's pretty absurd, really.
So why I think this shows that the films aren't meant for a post-juvenile audience is that, when you're a kid, all you care about is how awesome the superheroes are. You don't want them to have weaknesses. But once you reach a certain age, things change. In movie reviews for other genres you'll often read the critic espousing what a well-rounded and human character so-and-so is, and that almost always involves their flaws as well as their strengths. Because we understand that this is what an interesting character is.
The heroes' journey almost always involves a person who is mediocre, weak, or somehow not as good as they could be. The story is about them growing, improving, maturing, whatever - and eventually coming out a better, stronger person on the other side. Superheroes don't really follow this arc. Often they start off normal or whatever, but then they just skip straight to becoming powerful and never stop.
I've noticed this in the "Arrowverse" tv shows also. Very often a plot will revolve around a superhero either killing or not killing, and the *internal struggle* of this. I think this is often a point in the story because once you have a mary sue superhero who is unkillable, the drama can only come by them choosing to utilize their power to its full extent, or not. To me, this is very boring. It's kind of like taking something immature and trying to contrive it into something more mature. Like Vincent Adultman on Bojack Horseman. ^^Okay, ^^that ^^was ^^a ^^bit ^^of ^^a ^^stretch
I've heard people say try to defend the superhero genre but I feel like this is kind of indefensible. I mean, don't get me wrong, I think superhero movies speak to a very real part of us all, the part that thinks people with superpowers are fucking *awesome*, which they are, but that's only because you don't care about the things that end up being more important in fiction. We just love the spectacle of it.
Strangely, I think the only really potentially interesting characters in the superhero genre are **villains**. They are vulnerable, obviously - they're always defeated by the superheroes - and the potential is always there for a compelling and humanistic backstory. The Batman series does this well, probably some others too. However, I think there aren't enough interesting villains like this to vindicate the genre as a whole, as often it's acceptable to just have the villains be fairly one-dimensional.
EDIT: This has gotten a lot of attention so I guess I'll address a couple quick things.
I acknowledge that characters can change over time despite being invulnerable.
The Dark Knight and Watchmen are two good examples of superhero movies that subvert many tropes of the genre, true. I'm a fan of both. In Batman in particular though, I think the villains are equally as interesting as the hero, if not more so. And Watchmen is a unique spin on the superhero genre, almost more like an indictment of it than a part of it.
Another moment I remember from when I was younger that opened my eyes about superheroes is this speech from the film [Angus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgIv6KoJw_A). Superman is not brave - Superman is invulnerable.
| 1,731 | Have you ever read the graphic novel "Watchmen" or watched the anime series "One Punch Man?" If not, I'll refrain from elaborating further for fear of spoiling them, and instead suggest that you take a look at them if you're interested in something that defies your expectations of what the superhero genre is. | 248 |
ELI5: When looking straight at a light, why does the shape of it stay in your vision? | 49 | When we see light, it enters through the pupil and shines onto the retina, the light-sensitive lining at the back of our eyes. If a bright light shines on the retina long enough, the part of the retina it’s hitting becomes somewhat desensitized to light, so when we look away, the desensitized part doesn’t immediately respond to the new input it’s receiving. This causes us to perceive a negative space in our field of vision that’s in the shape of the bright thing we were just looking at until the affected part of the retina becomes sensitive to light again. | 43 |
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ELI5: how does money enter circulation? | I know that money is printed but how do they get it into circulation? Who gets the free money? | 98 | Newly made money in the US is handled by the Federal Reserve. Large banks already have reserves of cash and branches of the banks are supplied the money from there. When demand for cash increases banks will "purchase" or lend more money from the federal reserve bank. When demand is low cash is returned to the Reserve Bank where it will be destroyed if it is past its lifetime and replaced with the new bills/coin | 30 |
ELI5:How does so much dust accumulate on fans? why isn't it just thrown off? | 95 | Fans are electrically powered moving surfaces and so they contact a lot of dust in the air, way more than a non-moving surface like a wall . That movement also helps them build up a static charge that causes dust to sometimes stick to them harder than the wind that they generate can blow off. Eventually that dust can built up into a bit of a mat that isn't really smooth, and that just makes it easier for more dust that it encounters to lodge itself into place.
And fans that might be close to a kitchen or really dirty area might also hit suspended oil droplets from that fish someone fried, or other forms of slightly greasy dust that act like glue and really cement stuff on. | 54 |
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[LOTR] If Aragorn and Boromir were planning to head to Minas Tirith after reaching Gondor, why did Elrond not choose 11 people for the Fellowship so that there would be 9 people going to Mt. Doom? | Also was there any reason why 9 were chosen for the fellowship other than it sounded like a good number because the Nazgul had 9? | 35 | It wasn't clear at the time exactly what path the Fellowship would take. It's possible they would have all gone to Minas Tirith, but obviously circumstances changed significantly by the time they reached Gondor. For all anyone knew at the outset, there still would be 9 people going to Mount Doom even if they went via Gondor.
No, there is no other obvious reason for that specific number. Elrond says "the Nine Walkers shall be set against the Nine Riders." As for why they didn't form a larger company, the smaller numbers would have given them an advantage in terms of speed and stealth. | 27 |
ELI5: What is being transgender, and how can there be more than two genders? | I'm confused, do transgenders consider themselves to be another gender? I also saw people on tumblr saying how stupid it is to think there are only two genders. Thanks for the help! | 17 | I'll attempt to provide some info on the second point. There's a difference between biological sex and gender identity. Your biological sex is assigned at birth based on biological characteristics, male or female. This is in most cases a binary, except in the case of individuals born with ambiguous sexual characteristics, often termed "intersex" individuals because their biological sex falls somewhere between simple "male" or "female".
"Gender" is socially constructed, meaning that we as societies and individuals determine what it means to be male or female. Behavior, appearance, dress, speech, all are examples of gender norms. Gender roles change over time and space, meaning that what it means to be a woman or a man means different things in different places.
People referring to there being more than 2 genders may be in reference to the idea that gender is fluid, or is kind of like a spectrum. People express their gender identity in shades- for instance, some women wear dresses, some women wear pants, some men are masculine, some men are less masculine- there are thousands of ways to express gender.
| 13 |
ELI5: Why do sharks expose their top fins above the surface? | I was watching a documentary on sea lions, and they would see the shark fins and be alerted of there location, what are these fins purpose?
Thnaks | 48 | Sharks -- most species, anyway -- are true predators. Many of those predators hunt air-breathing species... seals, sea-lions, turtles, etc.
The shark would prefer to be far below the surface, as it is a true fish. However, the air-breathers that they prey upon, quite naturally spend a lot of their time at or near the surface. A shark's "topmost" posture in the water exposes its dorsal fin and part of its back to the air above the surface.
Sharks don't expose their dorsal fins on purpose, it's just a natural function of the shark operating as high in the water as it can. | 57 |
[Pokemon] How does team rocket repeatedly survive falls from incredible height after "Blasting Off"? | 18 | Don't they always have Pokemon that can float?
James started with his Koffing, correct? All he needs to do is release it, and they grab onto it, and it floats them down. Its as simple as using their pokemon. | 26 |
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(Star Wars: Clone Wars series) why does Sidious seem OK with all the attempts on Skywalker's life by Count Dooku and the Separatists? Is Dooku in the know at all? | Additionally, does Dooku know that Sidious is just using the Separatists? | 16 | The Sith take a very Darwinian view of apprenticeship. Why coddle Anakin when the whole point of cultivating him is to make him grow stronger so he can rule by your side? If Anakin was weak enough to be taken out by Dooku or the Separatists, Sidious would view that as evidence that he wasn't actually Sith material in the first place. | 44 |
Eli5: How can spacecraft determine their speed once out in space? | 23 | There are a number of ways, but one is by measuring the frequency of the radio signal it receives from Earth. The signal is sent at a precise frequency, but because the spacecraft is moving - normally away from earth - the frequency is 'doppler shifted' down - because between each peak in the radio wave and the next, the craft has travelled a little further away, so it takes a little longer for it to arrive. From this the craft can calculate the speed with respect to Earth, and as it knows, from its programming, where and how fast the Earth would be at this time, and the orbit it is in and what direction it is travelling, it can calculate its speed. | 22 |
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If you are not an organ donor (by choice), you should be at the end of the list for transplants if you need one. CMV | A lot of people I know are not organ donors because of reasons like "I want to keep my body when I'm dead" or other, rather honestly, tenuous reasons.
I believe if you actively choose not to be an organ donor, you should be considered last for transplants if you need one. Why should someone else's sacrifice go to someone who wouldn't be willing to do the same?
Note I said by choice. I'm under the impression that if people won't donate because of religion (although I disagree with this, but this is besides my point at this time), that they would not receive organs for transplantation as well. In addition, people who are not legally capable of making this choice are not subjected to the title (children, for instance).
Now I'm not trying to generalize my experiences I've had with people who would not register as an organ donor, but I feel like it will still provide an interesting discussion otherwise. | 79 | It is not for the medical community to decide who should live and who should die. There is nothing that you can do to make yourself less worthy of medical treatment.
Now, because resources are limited and important resources like organs, the people in charge of distributing those resources may sometimes have to decide who *can* live. That requires them to decide who will get the most use out of the resource, they must judge who's health will likely be most positively effected.
But doctors and transplant boards are not judges and juries. They do not judge whether you deserve an organ, just whether you're likely to get a certain level of use out of an organ. | 25 |
ELI5:How does communication between two languages initially develop? | 59 | Usually via description of similar objects. For example, Dog in English is Perro in Spanish. Even if an English person didn't know any Spanish, and vice versa, they could both learn and establish that this furry four legged creature currently wiping it's ass all over the rug because it has worms, is known as dog/perro.
Source: Goddamnit we just had Stanley Steamer over last week. | 74 |
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ELI5: Why do the bottom formula1 teams perform much closer to the top teams when it’s raining? | 18 | It’s less about the cars when it’s wet and more about the individual driver skill. So when the lower teams have great drivers like Fernando and Seb, then those guys will rise to the top. Rain is a great leveller as top speed and ‘slippery’ cars don’t matter. | 29 |
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ELI5: Is the volcano eruption in Chile and the earthquake in Nepal connected? | 134 | The easy answer: Definitely not.
Compared to the size of the earth, these two events are insignificant, and very far away from each other. There is no possibility that the eruption in Chile caused the earthquake in Nepal, or vice versa.
You could argue that both events are the result of plate tectonics, and therefore somehow connected, but this still does not imply that one event caused the other at all.
Credentials: Bachelors in geophysics, PhD in himalayan geology/geomorphology
TL;DR: No | 242 |
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[MCU] I'm a Skrull hiding out on Earth. How concerned should I be that Blue Man Group are Kree in disguise | 29 | You should not be concerned by them. Kree aren't just blue, they can also take all human skin tones as well. If you're scared of Kree, the people painting themselves blue are less likely to be Kree than *anyone else*. | 19 |
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Given an infinite time, what's the predicted end state of the universe? Will it be full of super-massive black holes? | My knowledge and understanding of physics beyond the Newtonian is negligible. I'm just curious if all stars eventually end up in a black hole will the black holes eventually combine due to their gravitational pull to reform the primordial atom?
Maybe this is a stupid question but I've just always wondered if the Big Bang is just the start of a really long (in human terms) cycle that's going to keep repeating.
Also, if anyone is interested - are there any scientific theories on where matter (the pre-big-band atom) originated from? | 214 | The ultimate fate of the universe is still very much an open question. There are a few models that commonly considered and which of these models will come into play depends on the large-scale properties of our universe, such as its curvature, it's density and the presence and quantity of dark energy.
The most commonly assumed ending is the "heat death" of the universe, where it will continue to expand at an increasing rate and where at some point all the light elements that facilitate fusion in stars has been used up. With objects moving apart at increasing speeds due to the expansion of the universe, black holes will eventually evaporate due to Hawking radiation and the lack of new material to "consume". Eventually a cold and empty void will be all that is left.
Another alternative, which sounds much less bleak but is just as deadly, is the "big crunch". If the mass density of the universe is sufficiently high, gravity will eventually slow down and reverse the expansion of the universe and it will collapse back in on itself. As the universe contracts, objects interact more and the universe will heat up.
What happens after such a "big crunch" is speculation at best. | 105 |
ELI5: Why a Guillotine's blade is always angled? | Just like in this Photo [HERE](http://imgur.com/HHHB9nk). | 3,661 | so it slices, rather than chops. The angle blade makes it so that the blade slide across the neck, rather then just having a flat edge chop down.
If you have it just chop down, you stand a much better chance of just crushing the neck rather than having the head get cut off. | 4,025 |
CMV: You don't owe anything to people who care about you. | I came across a conversation wherein someone told me how much they cared for me but all I felt was I do not owe you anything just because you care for me. Be it someone who's your parent or partner enquiring how you are or someone who's an acquaintance asking how are you doing. Just because they care about you doesn't mean you owe them anything. Them caring about you is out of their emotions towards you and you necessarily need not reciprocate to it. Is there an other side to this that I have missed?
Edit: I have been receiving abuse on my PM questioning my morality as well as my mental well being when all I looked for is an introspection into a questionable thought of mine. Request you all to keep it civil. | 2,105 | Mostly agreed, but you can take this argument only so far before you end up in strange, if not unethical, places.
The key here is to realize that all people have a right to basic human dignity - meaning the right to not be hurt, harmed, or be considered of low to no worth if they don't do anything to hurt, harm, or degrade you and others outside the scope of *reasonable and/or proportionate* levels of defense, retaliation, and punishment. In this case, you don't have the right to take advantage of their open-heartedness toward you. That's exploitation for one's unnecessary gain. You also don't have the right to impose psychological harm against them by telling others they are through-and-through worthless outside the said scopes and beyond the said extents. You also don't have the right to toy with their heart even for so much as cheap amusement. What you do owe them is an honest but polite, carefully-worded assessment of the personal relationship between you two - meaning be honest but impose as little hurt on them as possible or reasonable. Yes, they may be hurt, but minimizing the pain imposed will create a lot less bad in this world. | 928 |
[Assassin’s Creed] Which assassin from the Assassin Creed series has the highest kill count and why? | 198 | Shay Cormac, before betraying the brotherhood, caused tens of thousands of deaths when he unwittingly caused an earthquake in Lisbon.
If we're talking target kills, probably Ezio. He was actively assassinating from 17 to well into his 60s.
If you're looking for direct kills, target or not, then probably Edward, who spent many years pirating the West Indies. | 234 |
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Do women with larger breasts have a greater chance of developing breast cancer? | Also curious about other similar scenarios, like does a morbidly obese dude with a large surface area have a greater chance of developing skin cancer? I don't fully understand what cancer is or how it develops, but at a base level I think it has to do with cells mutating or growing out of control, so if there's more of a given kind of cell in someone's body, like breast tissue or skin cells, are they at a higher statistical risk for that mutation taking place? Is a 7 foot tall person more likely to develop cancer than a 5 foot tall person since their body has more mass? | 43 | The tissues in the breast are mostly fat. While a number of cancers have been attributed to the accumulation of lipid soluble cancer causing chemicals in fatty tissues, women with "dense" breasts are usually considered higher risk of dying of cancer. Dense in this sense is interpreted as being more muscular than fatty. Typically then, "dense breasts" would tend to be smaller rather than larger. The cause of this correlation is not settled science. Some argue dense breasts are harder to compress in the mammography machines and result in lower quality images for interpretation. The basic argument there is women with smaller, dense breasts get cancer at the same rate as others, but the cancers grow longer before being detected, resulting in a higher death rate. Other's argue the higher percentage of muscle tissue in the breast causes a different hormone profile in the breast tissue that does in fact cause a higher cancer rate for women with smaller, dense breasts. Bottomline, there are theories that would suggest large breasts might be more vulnerable to cancers due to greater opportunity for cancer causing agents; but there are alternative theories that suggest the opposite. | 24 |
ELI5: Why can’t our devices simultaneously connect to 2 WiFi networks to provide an even faster internet connection? | 92 | Fundamentally there is only the hardware available to talk on one frequency at a time. It can be adjusted to hop between channels but at any given time it needs to be on only one.
Conceptually you could use two sets of antennas and associated hardware to communicate over two separate channels at the same time, but you would need to use the same router to coordinate the transmission of information otherwise you would just be duplicating your effort. At this point we are proposing a heavily modified device on both ends of the process and it probably isn't even helpful because it is rarely the limiting factor in connection speed anyway. | 39 |
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[Farscape] Just how fast is a starburst? If peacekeepers were successful at having starburst-capable carriers, would they dominate the galaxy without needing wormholes? | 37 | >Starburst is able to increase the rate at which vast distances are covered by moving the Leviathan into one dimensional space-time. This changes the Leviathan's linear three-dimensional speed into an exponential one dimensional speed where by the distance covered during Starburst is a function of the time spent in Starburst. Starburst is extremely inefficient for short movements under a light cycle (the distance a beam of light travels in one cycle). Beyond a light cycle, the distance covered by Starburst increases rapidly. Unfortunately, the more time that is spent in Starburst, the more energy that is used. A Leviathan cannot generate energy fast enough to maintain Starburst, so energy is stored as low-energy (visible light) photons in the amnexus system for use during Starburst. Also, the direction in which a Leviathan travels depends on its entry vector into one dimensional space-time, but the information that makes up the entry vector is converted into a scalar value in one dimensional space-time, thus making the exit vector a completely random value. Because of this random exit vector, reverse navigation is not as simple as turning the ship around and Starbursting again. The ships pilot must replot an entirely new vector based on their current and previous navigational positions (the latter of which can often be pure speculation and intuition on the pilot's part). Lastly, the very high speeds which Starburst achieves makes it impossible to track a Leviathan through Starburst, due to Heisenberg Uncertainty. A pursuing ship only has the option of searching along the Leviathans last known vector, but without a precise knowledge of this vector, the track could be millions of metras off the Leviathan's true trajectory. This makes Starburst an effective and non-destructive defense mechanism.
I guess technically its more of a teleportation than it is ultra high speed.
But yes, one of the main points is getting this kind of tech into their war machine. | 31 |
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CMV: George Carlin used circlejerking more than he used comedy. | I'm not against vulgar humor. I love Louis CK (and I know that Carlin was a big influence for him), but I find Carlin's routines to be very lacking in comedy. It's like he just wanted to drop what he percieved where truth bombes and people applauded.
I know comedy isn't supposed to be nuance, but his take [on religion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r-e2NDSTuE) is especially egregious. He spouts so much fucking nonsense but every time he attacks religion the whole audience cheers. This is common in the routines I have seen him do, people seem to cheer him instead of laughing. His take on [death penalty](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDO6HV6xTmI&t=212s) suffers from the same issues, where he had to stop several times to let the crowd cheer. Ditto for his [video about rape](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwMukKqx-Os). While not as bad as the other two examples he falls for the same things.
Obviously comedians use social commentary all the time, but Carlin goes beyond that and barely makes any jokes and just has a circlejerk while talking.
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Carlin was actually annoyed by what you would call the "circlejerk" because he was there to perform. Its obvious in almost every recording of him doing stand up, that when the crowd starts cheering, he's happy at first but quickly wants them to quiet down so he can continue. | 90 |
[DC Comics/Watchmen] How would the various members of the Justice League react to Ozymandias' plan? Would they expose it or go along with it? | Let's say the Justice League just did what Dan, Laurie, and Rorschach did in the comic, and confronted Ozymandias and found out they were too late to stop his plan. Staying true to the **main universe** versions of their characters: How do they react?
My take:
Least likely to compromise: Batman, Green Arrow
Could go either way: Superman, Wonder Woman
Most willing to compromise: Aquaman (being a king of a nation who probably understands the occasional need for moral compromise regarding people's lives in a geopolitical context)
No idea how they would react: Everyone else | 43 | Wonder Woman kills him on the spot, so there's that.
Superman is all about *truth*, justice, and all that stuff. Keeping Ozy's secret would go against everything he stands for: that people can become better, if they're only shown the way.
Batman is used to working in the shadows, and loves to keep information from people "for their own good." He would feel no burning need to tell the world what really happened, but won't be upset when the rest of the league does so. He's just not a PR guy.
Green Arrow is all about liberal democracy, and you can't have liberal democracy without an informed citizenry. He tells.
Aquaman probably tells just so people don't blame him for failing stop an aquatic threat. Dude's only power is talking to fish, and he still managed to fuck that up? His pride will make him spill the secret.
Booster Gold lives for publicity. He would be in front of a camera as fast as he could. Blue Beetle, no idea.
Green Lantern knows what it's like to have the city you love wiped off the map. He feels the pain of the people who lost their loved ones, and will want them to know what really happened.
Cyborg, no idea.
But all of this is kind of beside the point. In the main DC universe, alien invasions happen every couple of weeks. Doomsday wrecked Metropolis, killed the Man of Steel, and probably murdered hundreds, if not thousands, as collateral. Mongol destroyed a large chunk of California, and drove Green Lantern crazy. A giant starfish shows up every once in a while and makes entire cities its thrall. And then there's Darkseid...
The point being, Ozymandias' plan simply wouldn't work in the DC universe; the people in DC are too acclimated to crazy shit happening for the squid to have the desired impact. That means the League really has no reason to keep quiet. | 57 |
Eli5: how does electricity travel so far on power lines? How do companies sell off electricity to other countries if they're on the same lines? | If the power plant is very far away how do they get electricity to run without resistance?? From the lines to eventually drop volt/amps?
I dont understand the magic that is electricity I guess. Lol | 35 | There is resistance. And the lines do lose power. By using big cables and higher voltage (lower current for the same power), they can lose less power in the lines, but it's still a significant amount- about 5% of power generated in the US is lost in the transmission lines. That's why we have power plants all over the place instead of powering the world from a giant solar farm in the desert. | 33 |
[DC] Who pays for Superman's property damage? | 28 | The insurance company if not you yourself.
Crazy shit happening is why insurance companies exist in the first place. Accidently burn your house down? Talk to the insurance company. Get in a car accident? Swap insurance info. Die unexpectedly? Hope you had life insurance for the family. A genius megomaniac took out his insecurities on the town? Sick the insurance company on him.
It's not like collateral damage by superhero is uncommon in the DC Universe. Same applies to Marvel. And like any other case, if insurance doesn't pay for it, you get to foot the bill.
That said, you can always sue the hero in the same way civilians sue each other over property damage. Ambulance chasers are a dime a dozen these days.
Oh and LexCorp probably has stakes in these insurance companies if they don't outright own them. So you at least have going for ya. | 25 |
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I believe that modern, mass media is biased, corrupt, and is only concerned with getting views. CMV | It has always seemed to me that the media is only concerned with views rather than giving it's viewers the whole truth, or any truth at all. I believe their selection bias makes people think this world is an awful place because they only choose to show the horrible/disastrous things that happen in the world. I always read stories about how some poor man's car was stolen or how two neighbors had a disagreement got in a fight yesterday, yet I hardly ever read about a that car being found and returned to it's owner or a neighbor helping another neighbor out. I believe this is because the the "happy" stories aren't very exciting to read and don't get very many reads or views. This is why I believe modern mass media is completely corrupt. If it makes any difference, I am from California. I would love for this not be the case, so please change my view! | 182 | The problem isn't that the media wants "views". What else would media ever want? The only reason to broadcast *anything* is if you want a lot of people to see it.
The problem, if it exists, would seem to be that the media wants to get *paid* for views. But that's been the model of media pretty much for as long as it has existed.
Any time you get something for free on the internet, you are not the consumer, and what you're seeing is not the product. *You* are the product, and what you see is the means of production of that product. You get something nice, for free, because someone wants to pay someone else to buy your attention.
And any problem we have with the media showing us what we want to see is a problem with *us*, not with the media. You're complaining about the wrong actor in this play. | 46 |
CMV: Retail work is not bad enough to warrant the level of complaints from its workers | Having worked physical labor, retail, and engineering jobs over the years, I think the negativity surrounding retail work is overhyped to the max. The level of complaints about the work do not match to the difficulty, stress, or physical demands of it.
The complaints about poor holiday time (although they all get extra pay for working those days), health insurance, and lower wages are justified. That's somewhat expected for an unskilled labor job though. I'm not saying they get an adequate wage for the work they do, but it would be unreasonable to expect to be at the mean wage when they're not at the level of mean work in terms of experience and education required. **Note: I do NOT think this last point justifies the fact that retail is not paid a living wage (it should be), but I do think it should be paid less than other wages because it requires the least qualifications.**
–-In retail, if a customer is mean to you, you can just deal with them and then they're gone, you probably never see them again. In engineering or business, if your boss or a customer is mean to you, you NEED to fix it because they’re not going away. Nobody in retail gets fired for a customer complaint, but they do elsewhere.
---No physical labor, unless you count standing. Try working construction, or landscaping, or pulling docks out of lakes all day at the end of summer. You're not going home hot/cold, wet, sore, sunburnt, and dehydrated from your work. In retail, you work indoors.
---No risk of injury or personal danger. In any labor job, in any factory job, in any job involving a laboratory or workshop area, there’s a perpetual and very real risk of injury. In retail, the most dangerous encounter you can have is if you’re exceptionally poor at using a box cutter.
–-In a salaried engineering position, you often work just as poor or worse hours as a retail worker (I know several people in finance that are on 60+ hr weeks with weekend travel during this season) and during the spring I consistently work 50+ hour weeks as an engineer
–-In retail, if you have a bad day, or are sick, or are hungover, and you don't get some critical stuff done, the world doesn't end. You get yelled at or are told to stay a bit late to fix it and it's no big deal or you just pass it off to the night shift to clean up your mess. In other jobs if you miss deadlines you literally do not get the work and the company loses tons of money.
–-If you work in food, you smell like grease and food for the rest of your day after work. You also have to deal with the lunch/dinner rush and equally poor management/wages. I think it's worse than retail in every way.
**In the words of George Carlin, “Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.”**
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | 43 | I think you're conflating the content of a complaint with the reason for it. A retail worker might complain about a rude customer or having to work holidays, but the root cause of the complaint is most likely has more to do with low pay and social devaluation.
You might be able to point out ways that other jobs you've worked are harder and more demanding than working retail, but you acknowledge that working retail is the worse deal overall by simple virtue of the fact that you're no longer working retail. | 40 |
[Justice League Dark: Apokolips War] Why did Darkseid feel the need to do this? | Darkseid beats the Justice League and kills a lot of the heroes. For those that survived he dismembered their bodies and transformed them into cyborg organism made to serve him as an enforcer. For example, wonder woman entire lower body, forearms, part of her face and upper torso were all taken out and replace with machine parts.
Now, darkseid did not have to do this. He was perfectly able to brainwash batman into being his servant and kept him 100% organic, so why then would he transform these heroes? Logically, they would move better and more accustom in their original body that the cybernetic monstrosity he turned them into. Also, wonder woman durability i wager in her old body was probably better than her new body (assuming its made out of the same material used by parademons for their armor). | 16 | As banal of an answer is it sounds, Dude just likes making cybernetic monstrosities.
He's a sadist, he's pretty unambigiously won, every major threat is crushed and he still has a massive army if something goes wrong. Why *not* make heroes into cybernetic monstrosities? | 34 |
Friends always want to debate, use me as a human metric | I'm wondering if anyone has had a similar experience to mine.
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I'm in the last year of my doctorate. Throughout my experience I have found it increasingly difficult to hang out with my friends. It seems that they always want to debate things, mostly political stuff, and use me as some sort of human metric to gauge their own "intelligence". It's insanely draining. Most of the time it's fine, and we move on (after a lot of prodding to stop by me), but I've lost a few friends who always seem to be at odds with what I think, even when I agree with points they've made in the past. It's almost as if some people are contrarians for the sake of obtaining some sort of validation from me, it's weird. It makes me question if hanging out with some people is worth it in the end, from an energy stand point, and it's made me more isolated. I have to note that I in no way consider myself more intelligent than any of them (intelligence is relative).
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TL;DR people from my past feel the need to get into incessant debates with me about everything for what seems like their own need for "intellectual" validation. | 22 | Well, at least this is not the first OP today who needs reminding that this is /r/askacademia, not /r/relationships
> It makes me question if hanging out with some people is worth it in the end
If your friends are being assholes to you and you feel that being friends with them is not worth it, stop being friends with them. | 18 |
How much can boiling a pot of water raise the humidity in a building? | My question is because at my cabin that is heated by a wood stove it gets very dry and we always put a pale of water on the stove to counter act the fire. With out the water every time you walk around and you touch something you get a static shock. With the water on the stove it stops. I'm just wondering how much change a small bucket of water can make in a whole cabin. | 22 | It takes a small volume of water to substantially increase the humidity of a reasonably sized room (ignoring losses of water to condensation etc.).
Example: to increase the humidity of a 20 m^(3) room by 50% at 20^(o)C, you'd only need to boil approximately 170 ml of water.
Of course the volume of water needed increases when the temperature of the room increases. For example, at 30^(o)C you'd need 300 ml of water. | 19 |
ELI5: Why does Paper get transparent if you rub it with fat? | 392 | This is because when fat is absorbed into the paper's pores, the grease-stained part of the paper—which is normally white due to the scattering of light that shines through it—allows less scattering, and the light passes through it, appearing darker in color and translucent. | 311 |
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ELI5:Why do I see articles daily practically saying we have found a cure for things like cancer, yet no cure actually exists? | 1,814 | Scientist here.
We haven't cured cancer, but we have cured MODELS of cancer.
Scientists will often use MODELS of cancer, because there are so many types of cancer. For example, we will take a biopsy of a live person's breast cancer tumor, throw it in a dish, and do crazy stuff with it to make that cancer able to live forever in said dish.
This is now a "cancer line". For example, a cancer line of triple negative breast cancer. Specific cancer to find a specific cure.
Nowadays how this starts is we analyse this "cancer line". We look at all of its DNA to find that it lacks "gene x" or "protein y" compared to normal healthy cells. We find a target that is very different (or totally absent) in the cancer, and a target that we like, and think, "hey, if we fix that one thing, can we fix the cancer?"
So we find a drug or a genetic treatment and target it to fix this problem.
Many times, this "gene x" or "protein y" that is wrong in the cancer cell is so important, that fixing that one little thing out of 100,000 other things can save the cancer.
So anyways, we take this cancer line, and take an inbred mouse family with a real shitty immune system. We inject the human cancer cell line into this mouse and make sure the mouse's shitty immune system is too weak to fight off the cancer. If the mouse can 'get' the human cancer, and the cancer spreads and kills the mouse, success!
Then we give the mouse this simple treatment to restore 'normal' function to our target gene or protein. And lo and behold, the mouse is cured of all cancer!
This is a lousy way of curing human cancers, which are all unique and merely follow trends, however it gives us more insight into these trends, as well as understanding of how exactly the cancer is spreading and killing people.
It also cements our classifications of cancers. When we find 'treatment X works in this model of brain cancer but not that one', then we can know in real life those patients need to be treated differently.
tl;dr scientists do it with models | 1,369 |
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How do you get different elemental properties from slight variations in the amount of electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus? | I never intuitively understood how you go from atoms to the actual elements, with all of their specific properties. How can the amounts of electrons in an atom determine the color, shape, conductivity, fluidity, etc. of an element? | 21 | The electrons are the outer shell of an atom, and other than nuclear forces, the main thing that interacts with other atoms. Based on how many electrons make up the outer shell determines how many electrons it tries to interact with other atoms to get to a stable configuration. How many holes it has to fill will determine how reactive it is to rip up other chemical bonds and create new ones, or how much energy needs to be added to make that happen.
Color is going to be determined by molecule size (or clusters) compared to visible light. That size will be determined by the attraction of the electrons to the nucleus, and the electron pairings shared. | 14 |
ELI5: Why is all soap foam white, regardless of the color of the soap? | 111 | Color can be made a few different ways. When sunlight goes through colored glass, some of the light doesn’t get through and the color we see is the stuff that did get through.
A colored bar of soap is that color because when light hits it, some bounces off but not all of it, and we see the combined colors that did bounce off.
Soap bubbles work slightly different to both of these. Rather than absorbing any of the colors, they just sort of bounce the light off equally in all directions and that just looks like white. The surface of the bubble is mostly made of things in the soap that aren’t colored, and some water. So you’ve got barely any of the colored stuff in the bubble, and the way the bubble itself behaves with the light makes it look white. | 71 |
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What is a 'Scientific American' equivalent in Economics? | Hello all,
I am a grad student in Physics/Computer Science and while many in my field might hold a dim view of Scientific American, I think it is a good resource for lay persons that might be interested in science, but might not be scientists themselves. It is good outreach aimed at smart adults, and for the most part stays away from 'popular science' mush.
What would a rough equivalent be in Economics? I recently bought myself an early Christmas present in the form of an annual subscription to The Economist, but do you guys have alternative recommendations? Perhaps I should elaborate, my principal interests lie in Econometrics and modelling, not personal finance and investment. Thanks | 42 | Unfortunately there isn't.
The Economist and Financial Times come close, but still maintain a focus on business and finance (like if scientific America only covered engineering).
The Journal of Economic Perspectives is for an advanced undergrad or not field specialist audience. That may come closest to a discussion of state of the art to someone who isn't a PHD in economics.
The top journals in Econ are hard to digest without training. Econometrica, American Economic Review, QJE, REStud, etc. | 36 |
Could Spiderman effectively wield a lightsaber? | Can his spidey senses be a substitute for the force? | 82 | Well With proper training his enhanced reflexes would let him be a skilled swordsman.This applies lesser to any regular being though since there's nothing about a lightsaber besides it's inherent dangerous edge that prevents anyone from wielding it. General Grievous post-modification is a good example of this.
The difference where he'd lose out to a force user in combat though is his reflexes are limited to his natural senses. A force user is able to "feel" the world,emotions and energies around them in a way nothing else can replicate. So along with giving them enhanced natural reflexes they simply have more ways of being aware.This means against a properly trained Jedi/Sith he'd be heavily outmatched, and most likely lose. | 51 |
ELI5: What is Fascism? | 21 | Fascism comes from the Latin word *fasces*, which is a bundle of sticks. While a single stick is easily broken, a bundle of sticks is much stronger.
Using the same line of thinking, fascism is a form of government which says "if our people unite into one group, like the sticks, we will be unbreakable." Usually, the people unite through nationalism (which is pride in their particular homeland).
Unfortunately what this means is that differences between the people are unacceptable because in order to be a good bundle of sticks they must all be the same. If you are from a different race, religion, political ideology, etc., you may be tagged as an enemy of the state because according to fascism, diversity is weakness.
Instead of democracy and voting, dictators easily rise to power in a fascist society because it's the government's job to tell its people what is wrong and what is right. | 27 |
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Why are FM radio frequencies always listed with odd decimals (.1, .3, .5 etc instead of .2, .4, .6)? | 126 | The RF spectrum was divided up into various bands for various uses by the FCC. The band for FM radio transmission is 88 to 108 MHz.
From there there's a limit to how much information you can carry in an FM channel of a given band. It turns out that having channels that are 200 KHz wide gives a good tradeoff between having lots of channels and having good quality, so that's what is used.
To divide the spectrum up into even parts without wasting any you start with 88.0-88.2, then 88.2-88.4, and so on. This means that they're all even-to-even decimals.
The carrier wave in an FM transmission should be the center of the band, so for 99.6-99.8 you'd choose 99.7. Since all bands run even-to-even the center is always an odd decimal. | 181 |
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[Alien] For a universe with sentient androids indistinguishable from humans, long-term space travel, and off-world colonies; why do computers in the far future look so primitive compared to computers in 2020? | 23 | Reliability and ease of manufacturing.
Energy is cheap and plentiful, and ships built by the lowest bidder have an operational lifespan measured in centuries. Things are built so that they will function continuously for *decades*, without regular maintenance or human intervention. | 45 |
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[Harry Potter] In the regrettable event a deranged wizard goes on a public rampage, killing a significant number of Muggles before they can be stopped could such a major incident be suppressed? | 30 | If you'll recall, Sirius Black was framed for the massacre of a large group of muggles by Peter Pettigrew. The Ministry memory charmed all the witnesses and covered it up as a gas main explosion. Likewise, dragons and other highly dangerous magical creatures get loose all the time. They're usually caught before they can do too much damage, usually. Memory charms are a powerful asset in Wizarding secrecy. | 27 |
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[Mad Max 2015 game] what are your theories about where the oceans went? | Is there canon? The films could be set inland, so the freshwater could be gone but the seas remain, but in the game you clearly are driving around on the ocean floor, now turned desert.
Did the indo-australian tectonic plate get raised above sea-level? If so, how?
Did an a runaway type of technology convert the seas into something else, like hydrogen for fusion? Does that mean there's high-tech societies hidden out there like The Institution in Fallout 4?
Did aliens just suck them up because they're zany aliens?
Is mad max actually set in a mythological location, like purgatory?
What's going on?? | 45 | Legends state the ocean dried up, but that's literally impossible. The world apparently is just in the midst of a rampant greenhouse effect, but if it was hot enough for it to boil away we wouldn't be here.
As the legend of Max went on society became more and more tribal and isolated. The story of Max is somewhat limited to the remote Australian Outback, where many if those people have never seen the ocean. To them, under the incredible oppression of the desert sun, it feels impossible for a large body of water to exist. Since many never left their homes around the oasis and slave settlements many just assumed either they never existed or dried up. In reality the oceans are still there, the people of Australia's interior have never been able to get close enough to see it. | 36 |
ELI5: How come animals tend to fall asleep relatively faster than humans do? | 29 | A lot of factors affect human sleeping patterns, of which animals don't experience.
* stress
* smart phone / computer screen affecting the brain
* caffein consumption near sleep time
things like that, you can even include existential crisis episodes while in bed, and the embarrassing shit your brain won't let you forget. | 17 |
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CMV: I don't think factchecking matters a lot since the majority of voters don't seem to care about facts | The rise of political liars --use any example you want but I'm particularly upset at figures like Trump and Boris Johnson-- and the public's refusal to hold them accountable for their lies makes it clear to me that the majority of voters simply don't care about facts. I don't think that's surprising but it does call into question the value of the work that sites like [Politifact](http://www.politifact.com/) or [Factcheck.org](http://www.factcheck.org/), among others. It seems to me that the media only cares about the horse race and that voters care little about facts and just back their own horse. Obviously, I think it's a shame, and a little depressing, that people abandon their intellects in favour of tribalism. But since we're now in a post-fact world it seems the norm and a repudiation of the value of facts and factcheckers. | 21 | But there are some voters who do bother to educate themselves on the issues and on the candidates' views. It's important for those voters to be able to get the most accurate information they can to allow them to make informed decisions. Without fact checking, most votes would be unaffected, some would be worsened, and none would be improved. | 11 |
CMV: Drawing comparisons between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US led War on Terror is ridiculous and disingenuous. | It's apples to oranges.
Seems to be happening a lot on reddit lately and I'm at a complete loss as to how anybody can do this.
Whataboutism has always been popular, but in this instance - there really isn't a leg to stand on in my opinion. Russian forces are brutally murdering civilians by the thousands in deliberately targeted war crimes.
There are indeed some limited instances of war crimes carried out by individuals during the War on Terror, but almost all of them have resulted in prosecutions.
The only incident that comes close to the mass murder of civilians that Russian forces have undertaken is probably [the Kandahar massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandahar_massacre), the individual responsible for that was taken into custody **the very same day** and was later sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Even that, whilst horrific and despicable, was nowhere near the level of massacre as those we've already seen in Ukraine.
You can freely criticize US foriegn policy and the War on Terror in particular all you want, but you can **not** use it as an example to deflect from what is happening in Ukraine or compare it to Russian aggression as if it's remotely the same.
CMV?
Edit: Having to drop these so often I might as well just post them here -
[https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/04/21/ukraine-russian-forces-trail-death-bucha](https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/04/21/ukraine-russian-forces-trail-death-bucha)
[https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/05/18/ukraine-executions-torture-during-russian-occupation](https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/05/18/ukraine-executions-torture-during-russian-occupation)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War\_crimes\_in\_the\_2022\_Russian\_invasion\_of\_Ukraine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine)
u/goBerserk_ has summed it up the best in this thread:
>**By saying they both have their share of war crimes you are either drastically downplaying what Russia is doing or greatly inflating what the US did or both. More war crimes were committed in the first month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine than in 20 years of the war in terror.**
​ | 1,009 | It's not disingenuous in the sense that the US genuinely invaded a sovereign country on false pretences. That much is true. If your point is that invasion and conquering wasn't the aim, and that American soldiers are better behaved and trained, both are likely true. But it still doesn't detract from the main point they should not have been doing things like that in the first place. | 596 |
ELI5: How can cgi be used to cast objects on thin air like they do in football matches without the need of a green screen which is used in movies | My understanding of a green screen is that the green screen defines the cast space on which an image or a video is cast on. Any space which isnt green isnt detected as cast space. However in football they just cast stuff on thin air without the use of a green screen. How does that work..... cause movie makers spends LOADS making entire green rooms. | 31 | The purpose of chroma keying is preserving the foreground. The things that go *in front of* the screen are preserved and the shot being composited in goes behind them. In compositing overlays for sports broadcasts and such the overlay is *supposed* to be the "topmost" thing in the final shot. That's what it's there for. | 15 |
If I was drunk, and got a full blood transfusion, would I be instantly sober? | Say I had a BAC of .25, and decided to get an entire blood transfusion to sober up, because the new blood would have a 0 BAC, would I sober up instantly? | 658 | Some of the alcohol would be in your tissues, particularly in your brain which would be what was actually making you drunk. Some of this would leach back into your blood, and the stuff in your brain would take some time to re enter the blood, get to the liver, and get totally filtered out.
But yes, basically you would sober up a lot faster. Except for all the issues that would be caused by a total blood transfusion | 474 |
ELI5: why do faces get oily but no other skin like our arms and legs suffer the same greasy fate? | 17 | A couple things
1) Face skin is different than arm or leg skin. Skin doesn't have the same uniform characteristics over the whole body.
2) Usually our bodies are covered in clothing that absorbs some skin oils. Usually our faces aren't. | 10 |
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Surviving a volatile coauthor | TL;DR: My coauthor thinks I am trying to force her off of a paper, and nothing I say/do at this point will convince her otherwise. About 50% of our meetings are coauthor telling me what a bad coworker and bad collaborator I am, and me trying to pacify her. How am I supposed to finish an assigned paper like this?
Long post, sorry. This post is half vent, half call for suggestions. I am in an academic STEM wet lab. I was assigned to write a review along with a coauthor, who is a few years my senior. As such, she was assigned the role of lead author. To make a very long story short, coauthor has accused me early and often of trying to take over the project and force her out. These accusations started almost immediately after the first meeting with the PI. Before that meeting, I wrote out a rough outline of several possible sections/topics that we could cover in the review, along with the affiliated references.
As it turns out in our later meetings, coauthor RESENTED the fact that I had made an outline at all. She brought it up multiple times as evidence that I was trying to just do things without her, despite the fact that I had placed it on a shared file that she was authorized to edit. She even said things like "well you just went and wrote the whole thing already" and "maybe we can't work together. that's disappointing, I was hoping to prove that we could". I was so confused. I thought we were butting heads a little bit, and she thought that we were in an nearly un-resolvable conflict. During one meeting, she told me "you write YOUR section, and I write MY section, do not dare do anything on my section. Not everyone writes from an outline." Of course, it's very hard for me to write "my part" and stay away from "her part" when she refuses to use an outline...
Things deteriorated. In one meeting, she exploded at me and berated me for wasting her time, for having too much free time myself, for being a tyrant, and for manipulating her to not be involved in the work process. Things got better for a while, and then she chewed me out, in front of several people, for a trivial reason. This was a blessing, because for once I got someone to take me aside and say "Don't worry, everyone knows that you aren't doing anything wrong" which was very helpful to convince me that I am NOT some manipulative bastard that coauthor viciously insists I am. It also helps that someone else who worked with her on a similar project told me "yeah... we've all been there before with her." The level of antagonism is starting to become comical. Recently, she sent me an email with snarky criticism of my writing style. Honestly, my first thoughts when I saw that email were "OK, that you might be right, let's see what changes you made to fix it". She had made some minor word and phrasing changes. The email she wrote criticizing me was longer and more extensive than the actual edits she made.
I don't know how much longer I can keep working like this. I don't think anything I can say at this point will change her narrative of how I have been plotting to take over this paper from her since day one. About half of our meetings are just a string of accusations. I also have no idea if she is feeding this narrative to my PI, and if I need to take defensive action to protect my reputation, or at least warn him that she pulls this shit sometimes. From a distance, it looks like total author amateur hour, and I am not happy to have that be the first thing my PI sees me try to produce. I know I am not perfect, and perhaps could have done certain things differently, but I really think this situation is past the point of reasonable behavior.
Edited for length, and to make some details intentionally vague. | 31 | Keep the emails. Keep your head down, follow the lead of the lead author, and get the paper out.
Once it is over, bring in some of the emails and the draft attached and ask your PI how you could write better. It is imperative that you bring this to your PI as a learning moment for you but also allows the PI to know how the lead author treated you.
As a new scientist, you need honest feedback on your writing as it is the most important thing we do. Your coauthor is not able to give you that lesson so find someone who will. | 31 |
CMV: Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by the FBI | Pieces of evidence in favour of this view are as follows:
* The FBI has murdered black activists before, notably Fred Hampton
* The alleged killed (James Earl Ray) recounted his confession as illegitimate
* The gun used as evidence against him did not match the bullets found in MLK
* The FBI had sent letters harassing MLK, including one encouraging him to kill himself
* The black police were pulled from protecting him for an unknown reason and the one who refused received threatening phone calls that only stopped after MLK was killed.
All of this adds up to a strong case of him being murdered. But, I'm open to changing my mind. Go for it! I got this evidence from the Wikipedia page, but I'm happy to see alternative pieces of evidence or exposure on how my evidence is bad. | 20 | Are you saying the FBI is competent enough to kill MLK and keep it a secret for 52 years but they’re not competent enough to blame the right kind of gun? Or did they say it was the wrong gun on purpose so that people could figure out that they were lying? Doesn’t make sense | 21 |
Why is it that low-level languages like C are capable of dealing with system processes and higher level languages, like javascript, are not? | Forgive me if 'system processes' seems a little vague, I do not exactly know what the proper terminology is from an OS standpoint other than 'process'.
For example, Node.JS has http_parser built into it, which is written in C. In fact, Node.JS is built with both C/C++. As I understand it, this is because Javascript, native to the browser, is not easily capable of dealing with system processes, like reading files.
But then it turns out we need C to parse / request things via HTTP, something which is directly related to web-browsing, so why isn't Javascript capable of handling this itself?
Generally speaking, I am having difficulty understanding why some languages are capable of doing some things with your system and others are not.
I do understand some languages are by design much closer to machine code, but what I do not understand is why this merit gives them 'privileged' access to certain system processes and data.
Obviously I am not very familiar with computer science, any sort of ELI5 would help. | 23 | Many operating systems are written in C/C++ or similar languages. If C/C++ could not do everything you wanted (and this doesn't mean doing things is easy), then no language could those missing things.
Javascript is meant for operating in a specialized environment (web). There isn't a theoretical reason why the language couldn't do special systems things.
The big divide is really if the language has a concept of native assembly language. If the language can't generate native code, then it must have native code generated for it (a runtime environment), which limits the language to the capabilities of that code. | 21 |
ELI5: What is the job of the air mashal? It seems most planes in movies have one, is there one on every flight? | 209 | Air Marshals are basically the police on airplanes. Most planes don't have one. You (probably) won't know if they are on your flight or not.
I've been told that it is really a grueling and boring job. Marshalls fly on average 2-3 flights per day, and the majority of the time they are never needed or called upon. It's not what most people who signed p to be marshalls had in mind. | 122 |
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ELI5: Why was the gold standard abandoned by the US (and many other countries)? What was wrong with it? What benefits did we get from the new system of currency (I believe it's called the Fiat system)? | 16 | Tying the value of a currency to a fixed resource (such as gold) is inherently dangerous because it doesn't allow you to control the value of your currency.
Consider what occurs in the classic banana republic. The government prints too much money and the value of that money collapses. This creates a huge incentive for people to spend money immediately - if you don't spend it, it's value vanishes under an avalanche of inflation.
The reverse happens with the gold standard. It encourages extreme frugality. Because the amount of gold isn't changing (much) but the quantity/quality of goods and services is increasing, the gold standard tends to create *deflation*. This might sound good, but when everyone is clutching their money as tightly as possible commerce ceases - which is also a big problem.
Through trial and error, we've determined that the best system tends to be slightly inflationary. You're giving people a bit of a nudge to spend their money, but not enough of a nudge that they never invest in anything. But to keep your currency in this ideal mildly inflationary zone, you can't link it to an unrelated commodity. | 11 |
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Do you have an example of something you can prove is immoral? | https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/336j4b/what_evidence_is_there_that_god_exists/cqix184
So I was challenged on this, and I'm a philosophy laymen. Are there any examples?
Now my understanding is you can make a deductive argument for an objective standard on multiple things, then show that doing something can be immoral, and not doing it is thus moral, right?
Again, total layman, just felt the arrogance in the linked comment with the presupposition that it can't possibly be answered is absurd, but I can't quite answer it myself.
Not looking to have the debating done for me, but I'm also genuinely curious. | 19 | It seems that most ethicists think that something like how you describe the matter is correct. The PhilPapers survey suggests that 56% of philosophers (or 56-63% of philosophers working in one of the major fields of ethics) are moral realists and 67% (71-82%) are moral cognitivists--though these are terms of art, and not quite getting at what we want here, but it's at least a rough indication of where considered opinions are falling on such matters. Certainly, formative figures throughout the history of the discipline have defended a view like the one you suggest--we can think, for instance, of Aristotle, Aquinas, Hutcheson, Kant, and Bentham.
There are two sorts of questions implied by what you have asked. The first is the "meta-ethical" question regarding the nature of moral judgments--for instance, are they just subjective opinions, or do they report facts? The second is the "normative ethical" question regarding what specific basis there is for judging a certain case moral or immoral--for instance, are the morally relevant factors the consequences or the intentions? In many of the classical positions, such as those listed above, it seems to me that these two questions are interconnected, though ethicists recently have been more inclined to treating them separately.
So it's possible to have a dispute on either of these issues. Thus, while two people might agree that there are objective moral distinctions reporting moral facts, they might still disagree about what those facts are.
In any case, if one wished to argue, as /u/brojangles does in that thread, that there cannot be an objective moral distinctions, since morality is just an expression of opinion, they would be defending a position that is relatively unpopular among people who study these issues, but it's still an argument which one may wish to make, and it's still a position that has some significant defenders, if they are in the minority. The obvious problem here is that /u/brojangles never gives any meaningful argument for this position: he just insists that it's correct, and, having taken it as correct, thereby dismisses any alternative as nonsense. This is, of course, straight-forwardly begging the question. Since it's straight-forwardly fallacious, one needn't defer to any authorities to see why this isn't a compelling argument.
Or, perhaps /u/brojangles means to imply that there isn't any dispute on this matter, that the considered view on the matter is unanimously in his favor, that no significant alternative is on offer, and this is why he needn't give any substantial defense of his opinion. If this is the case, referring him to a relevant scholarly resource--as you have already done, and which I've added to in this comment--should suffice to remedy him of this misunderstanding. | 19 |
ELI5: How are the heights of mountains measured? | Before people had satellites and electronic methods. | 17 | It's called surveying. You stand in a spot, measure the angle of inclination when looking at the top of the mountain, the angle of decline looking at the base, and know the distance from it. Using trigonometry, you can calculate the approximate height. If you are far enough away you can use the curvature of the Earth when you cannot see the base (for explorers sighting things in the distance). | 16 |
ELI5: how do finger prints know to grow into the same shape | A bit of back story: I cut off most of the skin on the top of one of my fingers including about 85% of the finger print. I noticed as it grows back layer by layer that the new skin is having no trouble regrowing the original design of my finger print.
It made me consider that finger prints are probably encoded into DNA but it strikes me as such a chaotic shape to grow back as easily as it does. How does the body handle that, especially as easily as it does? | 20 | Fingerprint are not in your dna. They're in a fat layer under your top skin layer. If you cut your finger deep enough to damage the dermis layer, your new skin will not have your old fingerprint.
Fingerprint aka the fatty layer pattern are set in place in the womb when the fetus is developing. The random fluid movements in the amniotic fluid cause the fat layer to deposit in a random way just like if you threw a handful of sand on the ground.
Fingerprints are random, not unique. | 24 |
[The Matrix] Aren't Neo and Trinity killing innocent people? | I watched *The Matrix* years ago and started to watch it with my son the other night. I was in and out and didn't see the whole thing so I don't know if there's an explanation and I missed it, but when Neo and Trinity storm the building to rescue Morpheus, they kill a whole bunch of ordinary security guards, then SWAT personnel. Aren't those regular people in their little battery cocoons thinking they're security guards and policemen? The agents are AI, I understand that, but aren't the non-agents regular people? When they get shot and thrown off buildings, they think they're dead, don't their actual bodies then die in real life?
In that same regard, the homeless man in the train station is "possessed" by Agent Smith, then presumably killed by the train. Smith walks out of the inside of the train, having jumped to another body. Since the homeless man believes he was killed in the matrix, isn't his body now dead in real life? | 74 | Everyone answered your question, but here is a quote from Morpheus which addresses the issue as well:
“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.” | 126 |
ELI5: If all people openly know that most our top leaders are corrupt, why don't we just get rid of them and get new ones? | Every day you hear someone widely making a comment about the corrupt Government officials just making all the money and leaving the rest of us like crap, and we just accept it. With this information being so open, why don't we do something about it?
In every country this is true. It's even the butt of most jokes that all politicians are liars and thugs. Again, if everyone in the world knows this, why is it so hard to straighten them out?
(I know my post seems redundant but I really want to reiterate how it's a common topic of conversations. Before you answer, do you trust all the politicians?) | 30 | It's important to remember that in a democracy, we are almost always putting our politicians in no-win situations.
Spend too much time in Washington? He's a "Career politician and Washington insider." Spend too much time at home? "He's missed X votes this year. Why isn't he doing his job?"
Also remember that if an issue becomes a political issue, that means there are two sides to it. If there was only one obvious side to an issue, it would be resolved quickly and quietly. Which means that for every single issue that reaches the government, ***there is a built-in constituency that is going to be opposed to it no matter what you choose***. No matter what, every vote by every politicians on any sort of notable issue is automatically going to piss off 30-50% of the people.
We expect our politicians to think about the nation as a whole but also for the constituents. Can't reconcile the two? Out ya go!
We don't want career politicians and want to limit their terms...but when new, young politicians get elected we call them extremists.
Only scientists should be making science policy? Great, then, let's only elect politicians who hold multiple simultaneous degrees in science, medicine, accountancy, bioethics, social services, law, and psychiatry. Good luck finding 535 people who exist like that and also willing to do that for 150 large a year.
We expect our politicians to work 14 hour days and never take a vacation, while maintaining two residences and spending half their time away from their families. Oh, and for a salary that is a fraction of what they could be making anywhere else.
Basically, due to the very nature of democracy, we automatically hate our politicians. And that's OK. If you aren't criticizing your leaders, there's a pretty good chance you're living under a dictatorship. | 11 |
[Batman, Sa] What would Batman do about Jigsaw? | *[Batman,Saw] | 18 | Jigsaw leaves recordings of his voice somewhere at the scenes of his crimes, not to mention the meticulous setup each "game" requires. The world's greatest detective would find his identity within a single night.
What might likely happen is that he finds the underling/acolyte responsible for the setup and get them to talk. It would be no problem for Oracle or his own computer to connect all the evidence together with hospital records to find Jigsaw's real identity.
Jigsaw's games require ridiculous amounts of preparation, so all of the materials for his crimes will need to be bought or stolen from somewhere, most likely a hardware store. It would be easy to track all of the purchases or reported thefts of the specific hardware used in the latest murder and find out where he had them sent. Jigsaw would likely be at that location, tinkering and setting up another murder.
He has traps and warnings set up for normal police and regular police procedure at his hideouts. Such things would also stop any regular person trying to sneak in for revenge. He would be woefully unprepared for the Batman, and would be taken down by a single punch. | 32 |
Why are the blades on wind turbines so long? | I have a small understanding of how wind turbines work, but if the blades were shorter wouldn’t they spin faster creating more electricity? I know there must be a reason they’re so big I just don’t understand why | 4,528 | A wind turbine doesn't really care how fast it is spinning as far as the power output is concerned. For example if you take a small electric motor, it will probably require 1% of a horsepower to spin at several thousand revolutions per minutes (rpm). A container ship engine rotates only at a few hundred rpm but outputs tens of thousands of horsepower. The power output is only proportional to the rotation speed for a given design.
A longer blade means that you can harvest more wind energy. The power is basically dependent on the area of the disk covered by the path of the blades. So making a blade twice as long increase the energy output roughly by 4.
Moreover wind turbine blades are essentially wings. And wings are the most efficient (the least drag) when they are as long as possible. At the tip of the blade there are all sorts of turbulences that reduces blade efficiency. | 4,409 |
Could billionaires eventually team up and legally "buy" countries to run them? | E.g. Greece went bankrupt a while ago. Since the country can't just disappear like a company, is there a possibility that billionaires will eventually give out private loans or even buy the country to run it? | 162 | No. Countries are not companies.
It's certainly possible that a billionaire could fund a coup or other illegal means to seize control of power, but there is no legal mechanism to buy control of a country. | 195 |
ELI5: It is understandable that English is related to German, Dutch, Spanish, French and so on, so they fall in the same language family, Indo-European. How did Russian, Polish, Hindi, Persian and so on fall in the same group? Is it because of geographic location or something else? | 17 | All Indo-European languages are descended from a single language which linguists have named Proto-Indo-European (PIE) which was spoken 4500-6500 years ago. Linguists first came to the realization that these languages were related in the 18th century, when Sir William Jones noticed that Sanskrit (and ancient Indian language and the ancestor of modern Hindi) bore a strong similarity to Latin and Greek. It is now widely accepted that a group of people (today called Proto-Indo-Europeans) migrated from the Caucuses outward to Europe and into Persia and eventually India. The same group of people also brought their religious beliefs (Hinduism/Greco-Roman religion/Norse religion/etc. all being derived from the same proto-religion)
The Indo-European languages all share similar grammatical features, as well as many cognates. | 18 |
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Why is there a trail of red light lagging behind a moving red laser? | Hey! So I was playing with my cat (of course), and noticed when I was moving his laser around quickly, there was a "trail" of light behind it. Why is this? | 74 | This has to do with the eyes having a limited time resolution (a frame rate, if you will, but not literally) and not with the laser leaving a trail. Light from different locations (along the dot's path) is reaching your eyes faster than they are refreshing. | 68 |
[Star Wars] When the Republic became the Empire, did Corusant citizens still have parties at nightclubs like in Episode II? Or did Clone/stormtroopers arrest everyone who was rich or having fun? | 124 | I think you have been listening too much to New Republic propaganda. And lack some common sense.
Trade, business and manufacture were still very much the same as the Obsolete Republic before. People need food, clothes, and more, and that needs to be moved to where it is needed.
The Corporate Sector remained untouched, too.
Cracking down on fun would be huge waste of resources, and very bad PR. Especially when they are celebrating you. Not to mention impossible. Coruscant alone has over a trillion Citizens, after all. | 175 |
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ELI5: Why don't people feel the urge to swallow gum? | Since most pieces of gum are bite sized, it seems like something that people would swallow more frequently. Are we just trained not to swallow it? That's why people are more reluctant to swallow gum? Because I have to try to force gum down. | 24 | Yes, we are pretty much trained not to swallow gum. If you give young children gum, they will swallow it. They need to learn not to swallow it. And eventually the idea of not swallowing gum becomes so integrated in your mind, that you start finding it hard to because you are going against everything you learned. | 16 |
ELI5: Why amblyopia (lazy eye) cannot be surgically or anyhow treated at adulthood? I know that if treated properly at childhood that eye can function normally, but why is it hard to develop it later? | 35 | The brain is naturally ~~lazy~~ efficient. If it's getting bad information from the opic nerve in the lazy eye, it'll choose to ignore and favor the good eye. As a person gets older, the brain may completely cut off information from that nerve, even if the lazy eye is fixed surgically.
You want to treat the lazy eye early before a person ages enough that the brain cuts off signal from the lazy eye. | 44 |
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What happens to a non-diabetic when given a shot of insulin? | I get asked this question regularly so I was wondering if anyone can point to an answer. I would think they would be able to decrease the amount of insulin produced by their own body but this is just a guess. | 30 | It would depend how much was given and under what circumstances. Insulin is produced in response to detection of elevated blood glucose, there is no feedback based on the level of insulin itself.
A few units of short acting insulin given to someone who just ate a meal with carbohydrates would have no problems. The injected insulin will lower the blood glucose and the pancreas will make more if needed or none if the glucose level is too low.
What if you gave a few units of short acting to someone who hasn't eaten all day? In that case you might drive the blood glucose low enough to cause brain damage or kill them. The brain is one of the most glucose sensitive organs, and damage occurs quickly if it gets too low. Low glucose in starvation is different in that there is some ability of the body and brain to switch to tolerate lower glucose by partially using other metabolic pathways. Switching take time though, so fast drops in blood glucose are dangerous.
Long acting insulin could do the same thing as giving short acting insulin to a person with low blood glucose. Eventually the food they ate is digested, but the long acting insulin sticks around and blood glucose will continue to decrease until they get into trouble.
The low glucose (hypoglycemia) causing brain damage and coma is one of the reasons killers sometimes use insulin to kill people. Usually diabetics that they switch the dosing on so it looks like an accident.
Too high a glucose level is actually short term pretty safe. That's one of the reasons why unconscious people get intravenous glucose with electrolytes. Too low is much worse than too high, and the lost time to check can make a difference in recovery. | 17 |
ELI5: How did the U.S. rise to a global superpower in only 250 years but counties that have been around for 1000s of years are still under-developed? | The U.S. was a developing country for *maybe* only 100-150 years. After that, the U.S. became arguably the largest economic, military, academic, manufacturing powerhouse the world has ever seen.
Yet, countries that have been around since ancient times are still struggling to even feed or house their population.
How is that possible? | 21,851 | Progress over time isn't guaranteed. A devastating war, plague or simply bad leadership can set a country back decades, and these things can happen over and over again.
The US has incredible potential for building a superpower - the geography is nothing short of amazing. It has lots of natural harbors in both the Pacific and the Atlantic, enough arable land to feed itself many times over, vast resources of all kinds - oil, minerals, gas, you name it. It was too remote to be in any real danger of the other great powers of the time, and its only two real neighbors are weaker states that pose no threat.
It had all the resources and living space it needed to grow into a superpower and all it really needed was good leadership, good institutions and enough time to grow, and that's what it did, with relatively few setbacks while other countries have been perpetually ravaged by wars, famines, disease and tyrants. | 9,812 |
I've read several times that particles and their corresponding antiparticles are constantly being created and annihilated. Why doesn't that violate the conservation of matter? | 17 | By the relation E=mc^2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared).
For instance, you may hear of a positron annhilating an electron. What actually happens is that when a positron and an electron meet, they give off two gamma rays (which are photons, and as such have no mass), and a lot of energy. If you take the energy generated and divide it by the speed of light squared, you will get the missing amount of mass.
In everyday calculations, it's convenient to say that mass is conserved, since very few things in our everyday experience give off enough energy to change mass significantly. However, it is really energy, and not mass, that is being conserved.
Edited for Science! | 17 |
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[ATLA] Could a firebender use lightning to restart a heartbeat, or the ability to manipulate the heat of an object to create ice? | Jeong Jeong claims that firebending is an element that can only destroy; however, could a firebender use controlled bursts of lightning to restart a heart like a defibrillator? I feel like that would actually be a pretty helpful use of the power.
Additionally, could a firebender create ice through their ability to control heat. We see early on firebenders can make stuff hotter, but also in the scene where Roku and Sozin fight a volcano we see Sozin extract the heat from a volcano until its magma turns back to stone. Could you do something similar to that on water, to remove the heat until it became ice? or even just cool an area until condensation and ice formed? | 20 | The elements are all connected, so it's a blurry line. We've seen waterbenders remove the life and water from plants, animals and other humans, and since water and fire can learn from each other it's not out of the question. The only thing stopping someone is probably their talent. You'd likely need someone on an Avatar level to really and truly cause that degree of a change.
Also, there's nothing really stopping the lightning thing except medical science. You probably couldn't start a heart with lightning but an expert bender able to redirect their own charge could stabilize one. | 24 |
Is there any correlation between the frequency of left-handedness in a population and the population's writing system being read right-to-left? | I've always assumed most of the languages I encounter are read left-to-right and top-to-bottom due to the majority of the population being right-handed, therefore avoiding smudging when writing. However, when I take into account the fact that many languages are read right-to-left, this connection becomes more tenuous.
Are writing systems entirely a function of culture, or is there evidence for biological/behavioural causes? | 839 | Are there even any instances of abnormal amounts of left-handed populations in history? Probably not many (if any), and definitely not enough to be instrumental in developing writing systems. Remember “writing” didn’t start on paper, so throw out the whole notion of writing being easier one direction or another because of hand dragging and ink smudging. | 298 |
ELI5:Why do some people look "good" fat, and others look "bad" fat? | Kind of a strange question, but I feel like some people get fat and look okay, whereas other people get fat and look terrible.
Does it have to do with the allocation of where the fat is stored? Does it have to do with the person's natural looks?
I'm asking because I'm a decent looking person, but I feel like when I gain a little weight I look terrible. Then when I see people who are visibly fatter than me they don't look too bad. Is this all in my head?
Thanks in advance.
| 16 | Confidence goes a long way in this respect. If you feel less confident when you gain weight, you'll feel like you look less attractive. As for others, the ones that look good to you are likely not only confident but also dress for their body in a way that is flattering. Personal grooming goes a long way, too.
Different people have different body shapes, too, and society has deemed some more attractive than others. For example, there's the classic female hour glass that is largely considered the sexiest of female shapes because bigger hips are a sign of fertility. For men, even if they have a heavier midsection, having muscular arms and shoulders tend to make them more attractive because it is a sign of strength. That attraction is partly influenced human nature (the desire to survive and reproduce) and partly by traditional gender roles, but still very present today in determining what society deems attrative.
In the end, it's all about working with what you've got. | 10 |
Nietzsche said in The Genealogy Of Morals, published in 1887, "it's clear that tortured states of minds are a disease, we have no doubt about it, but it's a disease like a pregnancy is a disease". What did he mean with this exactly? | 163 | He is saying that even whilst the tortured state of mind is stressful... from it new ideas can be born.
Here pregnancy is used, because whilst it is a burden from going through the burden a new thing is born.
So with the stress and burden comes potential. So it is not strictly speaking negative to be burdened or face disease/suffering. | 176 |
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Why do we forget dreams so easily? | 55 | The hippocampus is a part of the brain used to transfer information from short term memory to long term memory. During dreaming, the hippocampus is suppressed so that you will not form long term memories of your dreams. | 17 |
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ELI5: How did Germany survive through 2 World War losses with billions in owed reparations? | 390 | Well... they kinda didn't, which is why we had World War II. Reparations from WWI devastated Germany, all but guaranteeing it would spend it's future crushed under the debt of reparations and preventing any economic growth - it created a lot of resentment among the German population and gave rise to angry populist movements... namely the Nazi party. The Nazi's didn't rise to power on a 'We hate Jews' platform, it gained popularity because it tapped into a sense of national pride that was (in their eyes) being attacked and degraded by an organized world-wide effort to keep Germany down.
There were ~~no~~ (edit) minimal reparations from World War II. Instead, there was the opposite. The Marshall Plan was visionary for its time that instead of penalizing the losing side, it instead poured billions of dollars into re-stabilizing the defeated countries, creating an economic incentive for playing nice with the rest of the world instead of fighting it. | 401 |
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ELI5: Why do striped clothes go crazy on cameras? | 36 | It's called the moiré effect. It's a bit difficult to explain but it happens when the stripes on the clothing is as fine as the pixels on the cameras sensor. The stripes of the clothing doesn't hit the sensors pixel dead on but it's a bit of. So the camera can't make a right stripe of it. And so when the person or the camera moves the lines seems like they are moving because sometimes the sensor sees them the way they are and the next picture it's just off again. | 31 |
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ELI5: the duggars scandal | What's going on that is getting them canceled? | 19 | One of the family, Josh Duggar, was found to be molesting his younger sisters while they slept; it began when he was 15 and continued for several years, while the victims were as young as 4. Jim Bob, the family's father and leader, knew about it, but declined to do anything at first. A year later, he found out that Josh was still doing it, not only to family members but to unspecified other girls in the neighbourhood; he took Josh to church, where he and church leaders decided to punish him with 3 months of working construction on a friend's home. He then had his friend, a state trooper, give him a talking to about what would happen if he continued.
As a state trooper, this friend was what's called a mandated reporter: he had a legal responsibility to notify the police about child abuse he knew of. But he didn't do this; he was later caught himself for possessing child pornography, was convicted, paroled, and then re-convicted again for possessing even more.
4 years after Jim Bob first found out what his son had done, the family were due to appear on Oprah, but an anonymous source called the police and Oprah herself to say that Josh Duggar had raped or abused her. Police looked into it, but Josh only confessed to the incidents in 2002; under Arkansas law, you have 3 years to prosecute child rape or abuse after a law enforcement figure is alerted. Because Jim Bob's friend in the state troopers had been told years earlier, this time limit had expired, and nothing could be done.
Pieces of testimony and allegations have circulated since 2006, but no one had evidence until this week, when the police report and other details came out and Josh publicly confessed. The incidents took place when he was 14 to 18 and involved him fingering and licking girls aged 4 to 11 while they slept.
TLC don't want to run a show starring Josh, nor his father who has come under criticism for not reporting events, exploiting statute of limitations laws, and for keeping a known child molester in his home with a dozen other children, where they continued to be abused for years. Additional condemnation has come from the fact that Josh Duggar is a representative of the Family Research Council, who has gone on the record stating that gay people should not have the right to adopt because they are sexual perverts who will likely molest children. | 39 |
[Bioshock] How Andrew Ryan found enough money to build Rapture? | The creation of an underwater city seems very expensive, even by the standards of Ryan, who is stated to be a wealth businessman after WW2. Also, he built the city secretly, without the government's knowledge or funding, opposed to Columbia which got a massive money budget by the Congress. So, how did Ryan found enough money to create an underwater city(and sustain it for 10+ years)? | 85 | He pooled his money together with other like-minded individuals to achieve a free thinking Utopia. Andrew Ryan was already very wealthy, and an active member of the scientific community, so he was able to create such a place when using the funding of similarly wealthy scientists.
The entire location was made to be self-sustaining from the onset, and had a very small, fixed population, so making sure that Rapture could survive on its own was at the heart of the original construction. | 71 |
Why don't the Na'vi follow the same body plan as the rest of the Pandoran animals? | Most of the animals visible on Pandora have a hexapodal layout. The horse-analogues, the wolf-analogues, and the jaguar-analogues we've all seen in the reference files the company provided us all have six limbs. And then even as far as those dragon things I've seen videos of, they have breathing vents at approximately their collarbone.
The Na'vi don't though. They look so much like us, while the rest of their environment does not.
I mean I'm all for convergent evolution, it's clearly easy to be on top of your planet's food chain if you're bipedal with two arms for manipulation like both the Na'vi and humans, but at least we appear to have animals with the same descendants as us.
Apes for example, we both have four limbs, our organs are more or less in the same places, we even have the same muscle groups. Other animals like mice still have a nose for breathing, and a quadripedal layout.
Can any bio-techs answer this for me? | 53 | At this point it seems to be a genetic anomaly. Current theories are suggesting that this life form may not be a native species at all, but may have been genetically engineered and introduced to Pandora. By whom and for what reason is obviously unknown.............................Look, basically, the guys upstairs don't give a fuck, so us lab boys are given next to no funding to study this stuff. Since the uprising we've been getting our asses handed to us, we don't have time to worry about why they're different. Besides, the all that genetic information is locked up tight behind their patents and copyrights. We don't have the clearance to see the whole sequence, just the parts we're hired to work on. | 38 |
ELI5: Helicopter autorotation | How does it work that helicopters can do all their regular flight/landing when their engine power is cut? Does it involve the kinetic energy of the blades? | 45 | Helicopters use what is known as collective pitch, long story short this means that the rotor blades can have both negative and positive pitch and can thus blow wind upwards (negative) or downwards (positive). When a helicopter enters a autorotation the rotor is disconnected from the power source (to allow the rotors to freely rotate) and the pilot adds negative pitch to the rotor blades, this causes the blades to speed up as the helicopter moves through the air towards the ground (this energy will be used later). At a certain distance above the ground the pilot adds positive pitch to the rotor blades, the causing them to blow wind downwards and thus slowing the descent of the helicopter and enabling it to land safely | 46 |
ELI5: Is whiskey dick an actual thing and if so, what causes this to biologically happen? | 17 | An erection is caused by restricting blood flow out of the penis by muscle action. Alcohol is a nervous system suppressant and so would tend to reduce the ability of the body to direct such actions, which usually result from the parasympathetic nervous system. | 28 |
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What is aftertaste? | Some foods and drinks have an aftertaste (a taste that's different after you've swallowed it). What's going on chemically that makes a particular taste more prevalent after it's left your mouth vs while it's in your mouth? | 50 | Aftertaste can be different for two reasons:
Smell- The sense of smell has a lot to do with the perception of taste. Once the original food is gone you no longer have that intensity telling you what it is you're eating.
Digestion- Some things actually wouldn't taste the same if they weren't being digested in your mouth. Saliva contains amylase and lipase which break down starch and fat respectively. With the food you just chewed up chemically changing, different tastes and odors will be present. | 18 |
What happens if you repeatedly melt glass? | If you have glass and you melt it, then allow it to cool and harden, then melt it again and repeat a few times, will the glass become brittle? What change will happen to the glass? | 19 | Glass is already tremendously brittle.
But to respond to the substance of your question: glass doesn't have a memory. It doesn't remember that it's been melted 50 times before in the last 24 hours instead of 1 time. So the parameters that affect the properties of glass are simply those of the most recent melt/solidification cycle. | 39 |
ELI5: I believe it is impossible quickly "de-radioactivate" something that's (highly or otherwise) radioactive. If that's true, what makes that so? | 54 | It depends on the thing.
If you're talking about a lump of uranium or another material that decays then no because it's nuclear decay is a part of its natural existance.
If you're talking about an object that's been sitting in the fallout area of a nuclear weapon or disaster, then thoroughly cleaning the item will remove most of the nuclear radiation. | 27 |
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ELI5: Why do I feel compelled to pick at a scab instead of letting the skin under it heal and have it fall off naturally? | 51 | I wouldn't say compelled, but maybe just out of boredom really. You don't spend your time picking a scab while you are on the field playing football, you do it while you are in the middle of a lecture in your Psych. class. You pick at it because it's something to do, and its something abnormal on your body to pick at. | 27 |
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ELI5: Why are the new army uniforms pixelated? What's the logic behind that? | 546 | It's not pixelated. It's a type of camouflage called "disruptive pattern." Basically the sharp angles and contrasting colors make it very difficult to discern outlines, making the wearer difficult to see. | 448 |
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[Marvel] Venom's powers are influenced by Spider-Man, but what if another superhuman had been the 1st host? | The Venom symbiote & its decendants (Carnage, Toxin, Scream, etc.) All display variations of Spider-Man's powers such as webbing, wall crawling, Spider sense as well as enhanced strength, speed & agility)
If Venom's first host had been a different superhuman would it have different powers? Would Carnage & Toxin be different as well? Would its personality be affected? | 87 | The personality would always be somewhat similar. Obsessive need to re-connect with the host, with maybe a bit of the host's personality, ie, Venom's haphazard vigilantism and lethal protector schtick that tore up the East Side throughout 2008. The powers, on the other hand, would be different. Let's say, by chance, it hooks up to Captain Marvel at first when she's out fighting in space as she's well to do.
Maybe instead of webs, it gains the ability to absorb energy like she does? It's still addicted to the thrill of her flying, it's still aggressive like she is (to the degree she's aggressive, Carol likes to punch things.)
But what of Captain America? Would it have that same sense of morality that Captain America has? Would it have no real special abilities beyond augmenting strength and endurance? Who can say.
We just know the Venom suit is like a jilted lover towards Spider-Man after he abandoned it about ten years ago. It *really* wanted to re-connect with him at any cost. | 47 |
[Predator] how would a Yautja react to an immortal? | If a hunter came across an individual that couldn't be killed , what happens? Do they keep going after the immortal, or do they call off the hunt when they realize they have no means to kill the individual? | 40 | Beat it in a fight collect a trophy and move on. No matter how immortal they are you can trap or at least temporarily defeat them. Once that's done a Yautja can consider itself the better combatant. But that all assumes the immortal is worth hunting. Someone like a highlander that fights constantly is a worthy immortal. An immortal that doesn't fight is gonna be ignored by the Yautjas | 47 |
Does the 1.9 mile Klystron Gallery have to account for the curvature of the earth during construction? | Aside from walls (e.g. the Great Wall of China), the Klystron Gallery is listed as the longest man-made structure. Given its length, are there special engineering considerations that needed to be taken to deal with the curvature of the earth, or is the curvature not a significant factor at 1.9 miles? | 90 | The main accelerator is a linear beam projector buried 30ft under ground which is straight as a laser beam. The building above it is probably a series of connected, traditionally built facilities which conform to the ground. If they didn't take into account the curvature the buildings at the ends would have an inclined floor. | 20 |
[Marvel] How many time machines can you find in New York City and who owns them? | 76 | The Fantastic Four definitely have one, if not more.
Pretty sure the Avengers have one, either Stark tech or more likely captured from a villain like Doom or Kang.
There *might* be one hiding inside the Latverian consulate. | 83 |
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ELI5: Why do we put ress at the end of some words, like actress, mayoress and murderess, but not for others like doctress, accountantress, or teacheress? | 12,655 | Your question has mostly been answered, but interestingly, words ending in -tor like doctor used to get -trix (yes doctrix) for the feminine form. It has mostly fallen out of use but you still see it in words like dominatrix and executrix (when drawing up a will). | 7,994 |
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[The Office] I own a business and am looking for a paper supplier. I know Dunder Mifflin provides more personal service than the big box stores, but how does that concretely benefit me? And why do I have to pay for your downtown NYC headquarters, too? | 47 | The main difference is that, assuming you're in Scranton, if you have an issue at any time, someone from their office will be there in person that afternoon to find out what went wrong and how they can make it up to you. With the big suppliers, you'll be lucky to get anything even after several hours on the phone with customer service. They're also more responsive if you need to change your order or if you need to make a special order.
That said, it is just paper. If your business depends on having a wide variety of types and weights on hand at all times, go with Dunder-Mifflin, but otherwise you probably won't care about the difference. | 44 |
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Why do rivers like the Nile and Amazon not form large canyons like the Colorado river did with the Grand Canyon? | Are they just newer than the Colorado river? Or is the ground underneath the rivers not as conducive to erosion? | 179 | Deep canyons tend to form where the land is in a state of slow, steady uplift where a river runs through it. So it's not so much that the water drills down into the earth, rather the earth is rising up around an existing river. | 68 |
Since wifi has trouble going through walls, does it have as much trouble going through a wall of glass than a wall made of bricks? and what would the best material for wifi to travel through is the best? | 24 | Clay bricks are no problem for wifi, and neither are glass bricks.
Concrete is a huge problem, as the water and steel absorbs/blocks the radio waves.
From memory the ideal material for radio transparency is zirconium. So zirconium bricks would be the way to go. | 19 |
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[Rick & Morty] A question about Cop Morty | Is he aware of the irony of his anti-Morty sentiment?
He talks about how Mortys are "raised to be sidekicks", and calls the Mortys in Mortytown "poor Rickless bastards". But he doesn't have a Rick, and when the other Mortys suggest that he's a sidekick to his Rick partner, he goes ballistic.
Is he self-hating, or does he consider himself somehow unique? | 91 | He's pretty much the Uncle Tom of Mortys. He is self-hating and idolizes the ideal of Rick; that Ricks are superior and Mortys are morons. He's bitter because he's barely smarter than the average Morty; he knows what a Morty will do all the time. He's a Morty, after all; an insufferable idiot who thinks he's sort of okay when in reality, a housefly will beat him in a game of chess. But a Rick will know so much more, so much more than what Cop Morty can even think of dreaming about.
He also has an inferiority complex; he lashes out against stereotypical Morty behavior, hates his own guts, has low-self esteem (like all Mortys), and thinks like a Morty (which he hates and uses to his advantage in his line of work). He hates being a Morty; he hates that he's pretty much a slave to a self-loathing sociopath, hates the undeniable truth of the circumstances of his existence. There's no way out of being a Morty; only death will solve that. But he can do something to prove to Ricks that he's on their side. That he's more Rick than Morty; that his knowledge of being a Morty will make him a worthy agent for the ultimate Rick agenda, whatever that may be (since he probably won't figure out what that is anyway).
But that just makes him all the more of a subservient and proudly stupid Morty; he knows it and he *hates* it.
| 140 |
ELI5: What's the difference between a sports jacket and a suit jacket? | 49 | A suit jacket is part of an entire suit, meaning it has pants made of the same material and color. It's a matched wardrobe.
A sport coat or blazer is a stand alone garment that is meant to be paired with any pants that can match, whether or not they are the same color or material.
Generally, the suit is more dressy and the sport coat is more casual or business casual. | 54 |
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[All Fields] We (non-scientists) like to think of science as, well as an exact science. What is something that is contested in your field, and where do you stand on it? | I guess pretty much what the headline implies: In your field of study, are there any points (even better if they're widely accepted, but still fiercely debated) that there still isn't a solid general consensus on? I don't so much mean "Evolution vs Intelligent Design", but more just "We're really not sure how $THING works, but this is what I think based on $EVIDENCE" | 54 | Tissue Engineering. Not really any debates there, but many people both inside and outside the field call it a "voodoo science". There aren't too many underlying principles, and its really just a bunch of labs trying to throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks. We take the principles of cell biology, and try to make an organ or a tissue out of it. Sometimes we get lucky, most of the times, we don't. Sometimes we discover something new that relates to actual cell biology along the way. Fun stuff all the same.
| 24 |
Why are the motions of spiral galaxies so regular and predictable, as opposed to chaotic billion-body problems? | I know that systems of bodies linked by gravity are chaotic in the majority of cases for n>=3. Why is it that galaxies (in particular spiral galaxies) appear to have regular patterns in their stellar movement? Shouldn't it all be a jumbled mess of billions of bodies interacting chaotically? | 17 | For the same reason that the air acts fairly predictably, even though a litre of air contains *many* more molecules than a galaxy has stars. A galaxy is sort of a (pressureless) "gas" of stars. Although the individual paths of stars might be hard to predict (although easier than predicting the paths of molecules, because stars don't often have close encounters), the general picture is not too difficult. You have a big ball of millions of stars, with such and such a distribution of velocities, then you can predict if it'll collapse or expand or whatever.
*However* things can be a bit chaotic. We can predict for instance that a galaxy will form a bar or a spiral, but we can't predict exactly when it'll appear and what angle it'll be at etc. This is because the random motion of every single star actually matters here, and that's impossible to measure accurately.
Edit: Ooh also, for disc galaxies, they form from gas which can't have extremely large scale chaotic motions, because gas bumps into gas and changes its momentum until that stops happening, so the gas has to have a nice circular orbit to not hit anything, and so when it collapses into stars the stars end up with a fairly circular orbit too. | 18 |
Why do people love to hate popular things? | 18 | people love popular things, that's what makes them popular.
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SOME people want to differentiate themselves from that which is popular for any of a great number of reasons, some BECAUSE the thing is popular, others for practical reasons.
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QUERTY is a pretty bad system for keys on your keyboard, DVORAK is much better but much less popular, some people like DVORAK because it's an objectively better system.
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justin beiber is super popular, but i don't like any of his music, i prefer lhasa de sela who is much less popular but has a much more expressive voice and doesn't use auto tune.
some other people might dislike beiber because he represents pop music and they want to be known for their love of small independent bands. | 11 |
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