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ELI5: Why is it scary when kids sing or laugh or say nursery rhymes in horror movies/games? | 50 | Generally, it's done in a minor key where the tune is altered, so anything can be spoopy when done that way (Have you seen the Teletubby episode in black and white that plays a Joy Division Song over it?).
Also, one of the early films to do this was Nightmare on Elm Street where kids are jumping rope and singing 1-2 Freddy's coming for you, 3-4, better lock your door.
In this case, it's contextual. Freddy Kruger was a child molester and murderer, so it's about dead kids, and the context makes it spoopier. | 59 |
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Why is Nietzsche so often dismissed as the angsty 14-year-old's philosophy | I am trying to get into reading more philosophy, and by chapter 1 in 'Beyond Good and Evil', I'm attempting to keep up with his densely compacted writing. Interesting ideas abound, regardless of their real world applications.
Why is he dismissed so quickly?
| 41 | I think that there are two main reasons for Nietzsche being popular with 14-year-olds:
A: His strong, emotional, flamboyant, visual style of writing. Not many teenagers would continue reading Kant's works beyond the first three pages of any of the books. Nietzsche's style is appealing to young boys.
B: On a superficial level Nietzsche's work is exactly the stuff that rebellious teenagers want to hear. "Fuck the system!"
With many teenagers reading Nietzsche while not understanding everything properly, there will eventually be a whole lot of remarks made about him in discussions or on the internet that are very emotional, "rebellious", and rather incorrect and skewed in terms of what Nietzsche himself had in mind. People will see this flood of comments made about Nietzsche by angsty 14-year-olds and therefore connect Nietzsche with angsty 14-year-olds. | 14 |
[Undertale] Spoilers for cannon/true pacifist ending | A young child is the ambassador of the humans.
A young child who has shown powerful skills of diplomacy and a skill for thinking on their feet.
BUT... The underground isn't as large a place or complexly political.
If Frisk chose to go with Toriel is she accused of kidnapping? Does that sour negotiations?
They all took off without actually contacting any specific leader. How would humans react to the monsters? Is the history of monsters v humans widespread? Or are people caught unawares? Are Alphys, Undyne, Papyrus and Sans fated to finding only violence? Certainly Sans and Undyne are clever and Alphys is brilliant. Papyrus has confidence but.. really.. Little else. Right?
The king is quite optimistic, kind, and powerful. And.. naive. Does he truly think everything will be fine with them all running off? How naive is he and what danger will he most likely face?
Frisks first goal ought to be to find family and then political leaders. How will they respond? How long has Frisk been away from home and how positively will leaders respond to the arrival of monsters and the return of a child?
I beat the game with smiles and tears. Laughed even. But... I really do think that there are few positive things facing this happy crew.
| 18 | If you pay attention to the credits, you can see that one way or another, it worked out. Sans and Papyrus got a car. Toriel opened a school. Mettaton went on tour. And that's how it is when you have a lot of determination and a little caring. The how isn't always important... but there are worse methods than to start by sharing an incredible tale of courage and friendship.
Frisk doesn't have any home or family to go back to. They were so alone no one cared if they lived or died. That's why they went to Mt. Ebott: to disappear. That's why within minutes of meeting Toriel, they started calling her "mom." And that's why they let her adopt them in the end.
Frisk's friends were just the first wave; if you go back and talk to the other monsters once the barrier is broken, they are nearly all preparing for their exodus from the underground. | 11 |
[WH40K] How do the Tau have emotions and personalities if they lack a strong connection to the Warp? | 43 | You sort of have it backwards.
It isn't that your emotions and personality are a consequence of the Warp, rather, the Warp is a direct consequence of those emotions. Just because someone has emotions does not necessarily require a strong Warp presence. Blanks/Pariahs have literally no Warp presence and they are still capable of having emotions.
Our emotions feed INTO the Warp. That is how the entities we know of as Chaos Gods came to be in the first place. They didn't already exist, exerting force on the sentients of the galaxy. Instead, they came to be as a direct result of the emotions of those sentients. | 71 |
|
ELI5: Why do Atomic Fusion stops at Iron? | Hello,
i look at many cool Videos about the fusion processes inside of Sun's.
A Sun begin's to die when she can't fuse elements anymore.
This given Element is Iron, but why? | 44 | When you fuse small atoms, like hydrogen, it releases energy. This is how the sun works for example. But doing it in reverse (splitting helium to hydrogen) takes energy.
When you split big atoms, like uranium, it releases energy. This is how nuclear reactors work. But again, doing it in reverse (combining xenon and strontium into uranium) takes energy.
Iron is the crossover point between the two, where fusing it goes from producing energy, to consuming energy. So most stars stop there. | 56 |
[war of the worlds] if the Martians studied planet earth for a million years before launching their invasion, why didn't they know about germs? And why didn't they attack before humanity had built defensive capability? | 59 | - Interplanetary war is hard, you put it off for as long as possible. The Martians were waiting until the moment when humanity could possibly pose a threat to them,
- Humans have advanced more in the last hundred years more than they had in the previous hundred thousand years. That exponential growth took them off guard. Also, while humanity didn't pose all *that* much of a threat to the Martians. If it weren't for the germs, we'd still have been soundly stomped.
- Something in the way life evolved on mars meant micro-organisms weren't an issue at all. It's hard to look for something like that when you don't even know it could be a problem. | 39 |
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ELI5: Sharks, crocodiles etc. When they eat in the water their prey, where does all the water goes when they swallow? Do they somehow filter meat from water or do they just swallow it all? | 9,630 | I feel like the question was "Does it gulp a lot of water into it's stomach along with the food and does the water stay there or does it somehow get pushed out. And the reason this is an interesting question would be, does gulping large quantities of water mean that the shark is always ingesting way more water than food? And does that affect how it has to eat. | 4,543 |
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[Marvel MCU] How big the asatru religion is now that Thor casually walks around and saves the planet? | How many millions have converted to asatru since Thor and Loki first appeared on Earth? Thor is not only literally the god of myths but he is a hero who has saved the planet countless times.
​
I would personally convert to any religion whose god in question walk on a weekly basis through NYC. | 19 | I would too, except Thor discourages it. He does not want the responsibility of an individually active deity. Our ancestors believed, but he gets no benefit from worshipers, and he is not really a god, but a powerful alien with a conscience. | 22 |
Is this correct about Boolean? | Boolean just means that the output will end with a true or false statement, right?
But then I see things like AND/OR/NOT operators called Boolean too. What's going on there?
And I see Boolean Conditional statements. Would that just mean that when there is an "If ... Else ..." code that the answer would be true or false? But then with things like Arduino/Electronics don't all conditional statements end with a true/false statement because the switches are being turned on and off?
Thank you! | 24 | a boolean isn't something that *ends* with `true` or `false`. it IS either `true` or `false`.
AND, OR, and NOT are boolean operators. Kinda like add, subtract, or negate, these operators let you create larger boolean expressions that either resolve to `true` or `false`.
with an if-else code block, you'd have a boolean expression in the `if` expression.
if (myBooleanVariable) {
doStuff();
} else {
doOtherStuff();
}
you `doStuff()` when `myBooleanVariable` is true. If it's not true, then you `doOtherStuff()`
​
Also, not every expression returns true or false! Many functions return all sorts of values! like a function `getTemperature()` would return a number like `56` or something. Those, however, can be made into boolean statements by evaluating the value in a way that returns a boolean value
for example, say we use the `getTemperature()` function again and we want to get a jacket if the temperature is too cold. We could do a comparison operation to figure out if the temperature meets a criteria for us to get a jacket.
if (getTemperature() < 45) {
getJacket();
} else {
console.log("It's not even cold!");
}
even though getTemperature returns a number, we used it to create a boolean expression. It's a powerful way to help our code make decisions! | 20 |
ELI5: When you've been critically injured, EMTs will often tell you to stay awake. Why is being conscious important in these situations? | Serious question. Would passing out lessen your chances of survival? Why? In what situations does this apply?
Thanks! | 3,394 | Losing consciousness isn't inherently harmful, but your ability to not lose consciousness is very important diagnostically. You're not being told to stay awake because if you don't, bad things will happen. You're being told to stay awake because if you can't, that's important information for your treatment. | 4,664 |
[General] If I chop the human part of a centaur off would a coroner be able to tell it wasnt human or are all the appropriate human bits in the top half? For example when a centaur breaths is it filling the human lungs in the chest or the horse lungs in the body? | 1,068 | The cardiovascular and pulmonary systems, including the lungs and heart are kept in the centaurs human chest, though they are much larger than a normal humans. This causes the digestive tract and reproductive systems to be pushed further down, into the horse part. Performing an autopsy on just the human half of a centaur would reveal two enormously giant lungs, and a huge heart, but little to no other organs or systems. | 680 |
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ELI5: When you drop an apple and it bruises, what's happening? | 17 | The once rigid cells are ruptured by the force of impact, resulting in a mushy soft spot. As for the discoloration, the impact compromises the integrity of the skin and allows oxygen into the apple. The oxygen also causes more cellular degradation and eventually rot. | 19 |
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ELI5: How does a multinational company pay it's taxes? | 41 | Things obviously get a bit more complicated than this, but at the basic level, they usually have separate subsidiaries operating each country (though we may consider the EU a single country for this purpose). Each subsidiary then has its own separate profits that it earns in the country it operates in, and it pays taxes on those profits. It may then send post-tax profits to the parent company or some other subsidiary. | 27 |
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[Warhammer 40k] Surviving copies of the Star Wars series is discovered by an Inquisitor, and they decide to watch them. What do they think? | Surviving copies of every Star Wars movie/series are discovered by a curious Inquisitior one day. They have been translated into Gothic and are in pristine condition on whatever media format the 41st millennium has. What are their thoughts on this strange, ancient series from before the Dark Age of Technology? | 21 | It's heresy and must be purged. The force is obviously the result of warp chaos and the destruction of an empire too dangerous to be allowed to foment discontent in the imperium. But they do ask the mechanicus on the feasibility of building a death star for making exterminatus orders more efficient. | 30 |
[Marvel] Why doesn't Professor X use his mind to make his legs move? | Earth-1610 via Marvel Wiki: http://marvel.wikia.com/Charles_Xavier_(Earth-1610)
>Telekinesis: Xavier is capable of a low-level form of telekinesis, it is unknown how much weight Xavier is capable of lifting with his telekinesis. It is known however that he is capable of lifting himself and his wheelchair up a flight of stairs, shunting Magneto into Earth's atmosphere and exploding the ball of metal which Magneto was (presumably) contained within, and levitating a Sentinel.
------------
Feel free to correct me on any of this information | 53 | That's ultimate universe Xavier, for the record. Most other Xaviers can't.
To answer your question... why would he? It would require a substantial amount of effort compared to just using his chair for very little effect-- he can already pick his chair up to move himself up stairs or rough terrain. | 70 |
[MCU Infinity War] How did Thanos turn the Aether (Reality Stone), a liquid, into a stone? | 21 | On its own, it flows into different shapes and states, altering reality because that's what it does. Sometimes it's a liquid, sometimes solid, sometimes particle cloud, etc.
Once you have it, reality can be whatever you want it to be. You can fix it in any state you desire. | 47 |
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Can we use soap and water to clean everything instead of using disinfectant? |
They have explained to us that we should wash our hands with soap and water because the soap rips apart the outer lipid / fatty layer of the virus and destroys it.
So why do we need lysol, Clorox, multi purpose cleaners, alcohol, bleach etc. if soap and water are so effective at destroying the virus?
I do understand that hand sanitizer is necessary for the times when we do not have access to running water BUT why can’t we just clean our countertops, floors and other surfaces with just soap and water?
Why can’t we spray soapy water onto surfaces to destroy that outer lipid layer and destroy the virus then wipe it away?
Thanks | 29 | The reason is speed and convenience. With an alcohol wipe, you clean a surface in seconds. With soap and water, you have to scrub, rinse, etc. and it can leave a soapy residue behind - plus, some surfaces cannot withstand water (for instance, if you use water to clean your computer keyboard, you are asking for trouble. Alcohol, on the other hand, evaporates in seconds and poses much less of an electrical hazard.) | 45 |
Eli5: Why is it that there are multiple copper wires inside an electric cable and why are they coiled? | 69 | It's good to have a thick wire, so electric current can easily flow through it. But if it was just a solid chunk of copper, it wouldn't bend easily.
Putting multiple copper wires in close proximity makes the cable easy to bend while also letting a lot of current through. | 119 |
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I believed quotas for more women in higher management are pointless and discriminating, CMV | **(Sorry for the mistake in the title, of course i mean believe not believed)**
I believe that quotas for women in higher management will do a good job at getting more women into higher management, because it will be illegal to do otherwise, but that does not change the situation for the better, here's why:
At first, I think it promotes wrong standards of who should be promoted, if someone does better, works better, or fits better in the team, they should be promoted based o what they do, not whether they are female or not. Especially in companies that have few women right now, they might be forced to choose any women over better suited men.
secondly, I think it is discriminating against women and will reduce productivity, the women who got into higher management might be reduced to being a women, thereby encouraging sexism rather than fighting it.
I also think the owners of a company should be free to select whoever they wish to run the company, because they have to trust that person and know the necessary qualifications best, any quota, whether for women, men, or immigrants, or any ethical group are a restriction to that choice.
lastly, I think its more of a cultural problem than just higher management, I think instead of quotas, focus should be on equal salaries and better ways to integrate work and family.
The higher management issue might as well go away from time only, because by now there are more women who are academics who have better grades and are eager to pursue a career, but it takes time for them to reach higher management, which is currently controlled mostly by people born in the 50s and 60s and some 70s | 62 | People just aren't that rational. Can we agree on that? Some large part of job recruitment relies on the subconscious judgements we make about people, which is a problem because it creates a self-perpetuating loop. If we're used to seeing men in management positions, then our idea of what a 'management' type looks like is to some degree (and I'd argue a high degree) more 'man'. That bias has been hanging around for thousands of years without any change; surely you can agree that outside intervention is needed to change it? | 28 |
[Tron Legacy] Why did that one program suicide to prevent being sent to the games? | I get that lots of programs de-rez in the games, but what made certain deresolution preferable to a chance at living in the games? | 28 | The way the games are wired up, with programs like Rinzler using a non-regulation spare disc in a disc fight and Clu descending into the play field with his private goon squad, the Games seem less like a fair shake and more like a brutal public execution. Might as well die fast and certain rather than let the lions maul you in front of a live audience. | 34 |
ELI5: Why doesn't the United States have similar population issues as India and China? | 15 | Being rich, and womens' rights.
Poor people have more kids, this is a well known fact. People working on farms in rural India don't have tractors, they need as many people as possible to help work. They don't have social security, so they need lots of kids in the hope that at least one will be able to take care of them when they get old. They don't have insurance, so they need daughters to marry off to men in other villages (with different weather patterns) to support them during droughts.
Secondly, womens' rights. Everywhere in the world, the rise of rights for women leads to a decline in fertility rates. As women can work and earn more money, the opportunity (EDIT: opportunity *cost*) of having another kid increases. | 38 |
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ELI5: Why do Cuban-Americans despise Castro and Guevara, yet Cubans in Cuba worship them? | 28 | They are totalitarian leaders, speaking out against them would mean punishment, torture, even death.
There are many loyalists in cuba, yes, who believe that the conditions they live in now are far better than before the revolution, and who can blame them? Instead of a mud hut, they have a solid walls, a doctor on the premises often, school, and even a pretty reliable source of food. | 18 |
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CMV: Celebrities are absolutely not “normal people like the rest of us” | There’s a rhetoric of whenever a celebrity/high profile athlete etc. display any form or basic human emotions people say “these guys are just like us” but these people aren’t like us. Just because you seen them walking around in pajamas or getting upset doesn’t mean much when they have access to elite privileges that a minuscule percentage of the population can ever have access to. Many celebrities who are high profile are out of touch with what reality is for us “normies” some have never thought of the issues and problems we go through every single day. Simply showing emotions that nearly every human is capable of doesn’t mean that they are “just like us” the reality is that they live vastly different life styles than most of us do and the fact that people need to point out that they’re just like us proves that they aren’t. Why would we have to point out the humanity in someone if not to find the most minute way possible to relate to them because the only thing that we have in common is that basic things every human has in common. So I ask, how does having emotions and feelings, make them “just like us” | 175 | You're saying that celebrities are not like us because of their privileges; and that therefore, whatever painful emotions they feel are invalid and it's okay to dismiss those feelings as meaningless and not deserving of respect or empathy.
But, if you apply that same logic to someone in an impoverished country with no food security, no clean water, no stable government and no electricity. People that don't hold **your** privilege. You can apply the same argument and the result is that whatever painful emotions **you** feel are also invalid and it's okay to dismiss them as meaningless and not deserving of respect or empathy.
---------------
So by your logic:
* Only non-privileged people's pain is deserving of respect and empathy. And that means that **you** don't deserve it. Only the impoverished people do.
* Or............You can hold the belief that all human pain is deserving of respect and empathy.....Both yours, the impoverished people, and celebrities.
You cant say that your privilege is okay and your feelings still matter, but celebrity privilege isn't okay and their feelings don't mater without contradicting your own logic. It's either your pain does not matter, or everyone's pain matters (including celebrities).
..........We are all 'just like us' Or you yourself are excluded, and you are not 'just like us' | 123 |
AskScience Cosmos Q&A thread. Episode 9: The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth | Welcome to AskScience! **This thread is for asking and answering questions about the science in *Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey*.**
If you are outside of the US or Canada, you may only now be seeing the eighth episode aired on television. If so, [please take a look at last week's thread instead.](http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/245c6w/askscience_cosmos_qa_thread_episode_8_sisters_of/)
This week is the ninth episode, "The Electric Boy". The show is airing in the US and Canada on Fox at Sunday 9pm ET, and Monday at 10pm ET on National Geographic. [Click here for more viewing information in your country.](http://www.reddit.com/r/Cosmos/wiki/aspacetimeodyssey/episodeguide)
**[The usual AskScience rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/wiki/index) still apply in this thread!** Anyone can ask a question, but **please do not provide answers unless you are a scientist in a relevant field.** Popular science shows, books, and news articles are a great way to causally learn about your universe, but they often contain a lot of simplifications and approximations, so don't assume that because you've heard an answer before that it is the right one.
If you are interested in general discussion please visit one of the threads elsewhere on reddit that are more appropriate for that, such as [in /r/Cosmos here](http://www.reddit.com/r/Cosmos/comments/24qdad/cosmos_a_spacetime_odyssey_episode_9_the_lost/), [/r/Space here](http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/24qhwe/cosmos_a_spacetime_odyssey_episode_9_the_lost/), and [in /r/Television here](http://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/24qh91/cosmos_a_spacetime_odyssey_episode_9_the_lost/).
Please **upvote good questions and answers** and **downvote off-topic content**. We'll be removing comments that break our rules and some questions that have been answered elsewhere in the thread so that we can answer as many questions as possible! | 62 | The animation of continental drift over a very long time period appeared stuttered: the directions of all continents would suddenly shift simultaneously, and regularly. Are these sudden changes real, or is the appearance just an effect of some kind of interpolation in the animation? | 16 |
How do snakes move around? | VERY late edit: I just realised that I didn't put ELI5 in the beginning. Sorry. | 36 | Snakes are very strong. They have over 4,000 muscles in their tiny body. We have only 600 muscles, so imagine how powerful a snake can be!
Their are four different ways a snake can move:
-By curving their belly scales slightly outward to push off of the ground and forward. Pretend to do this by laying on the ground and pushing yourself forward using nothing but your toes. You're curving your toes to move! Snakes have special muscles to move these scales, so it's much faster than you on your toes.
-By throwing their bodies forward using their strong muscles. Pretend to do this by crouching down and leaping forward. Everywhere you go.
-By throwing their bodies forward following their head. Much like the previous one, except the snake is "striking" every time it moves! Pretend to do this by crouching, but only moving when you jump out to bite something. This is useful for the sidewinder, which cannot move otherwise on sand.
-By flexing off of obstacles, such as rocks and sticks. Pretend to do this by laying down, and launching off of your bed, bookshelf, etc. to propel yourself. This method prevents snakes who move like this from moving on slick surfaces at all! To propel themselves in this method, they move in diagonal motions, so they can launch themselves in the opposite direction every time they land, moving in a straight path. This gives the appearance of a serpentine, "S" shaped path.
Hope this helps! | 43 |
CMV: Parker Rice and Levi Pettit deserve no sympathy, at least in my own eyes. | 18 | It's the hypocrisy of the situation that makes me if not sympathetic, then not as judgmental as you.
All sorts of folks at Oklahoma and SAE are "shocked, shocked!" that someone would say such a thing. What a crock of shit. They learned it somewhere, they were taught it somewhere. None of their frat brothers chewed them out because it wasn't cool.
Yes, what they did was bad and shouldn't be tolerated, but they weren't the cause, they were a symptom, and it's a little disingenuous to let those responsible "tsk tsk" and let these morons take the fall. | 16 |
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[Riddick] - What is the nature of the Underverse and how did it give the Lord Marshall his Powers? | 40 | In this verse, life is antagonistic to the natural state. Here humans in all their various races are a spontaneous outbreak. An unguided mistake. The solution lies in another verse. A verse where life is welcomed and cherished. A ravishing ever-new place called Underverse... but the road to that verse crosses over the threshold.
When you look up to see a group of shooting stars it is already too late. What you are seeing is an army, an army unlike any other... crusading across the stars toward the UnderVerse, their promised land - a constellation of dark new worlds. Necromongers, they're called. And if they cannot convert you, they will kill you. Leading them, the Lord Marshal. He alone has made a pilgrimage to the gates of the UnderVerse... and returned a different being. Stronger. Stranger. Half alive and half... something else.
| 26 |
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COVID-related hiring freezes? | The university in my hometown (USA) announced that it will be instituting a hiring freeze in the near future to help make up for COVID-related budget shortfalls. Has anyone else heard something similar about their institution?
Personally, I'm planning on going on the academic job market this fall, as I'm sure many other folks in this sub are, and I'm wondering if I can keep my expectations any lower than they already are.
Stay well, everyone! | 28 | We're going into a hiring "chill", as it's been cleverly been dubbed. Basically, we're not stopping all hires across the board, but we're only going forward with hires the President and Provost agree are priorities.
EDIT: Very large state, USA | 23 |
ELI5: How are surfing competitions judged if surfers don't always get the same waves as each other? | 38 | As a surfer, you have to pick the wave that best suits the tricks you want to perform. That's part of the skill, being able to read the wave. Just like how fishing competitions rely on the fishermen picking the best fish to keep, not just catching fish. | 24 |
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If electrons behave as waves when they’re not observed and behave as particles when observed at microscopic scale, how can they behave as waves observed at eye scale? (Young experiment) | 3,375 | The concepts of particles and waves evolved in classical physics, however as quantum physics was developed, we discovered that those ideas were simply approximations. An electron isn't a particle; it isn't a wave. What is it?
We can understand electrons only in terms of a new construct, something we might call a particle-wave or a wave-particle. It isn't a wave; it isn't a particle; it has some properties of each, however, the mixture is awfully bizarre. It moves through space like a wave; it responds to measurement like a particle; it's a wave that can carry mass and electric charge. It can spread, reflect and cancel itself, just as noise-cancelling headphones cancel sound waves. However, when you detect it, the event is generally sudden, abrupt. The detected electron continues to exist, however, the wave function has been decisively altered. If you detect it with a small instrument, the previously large wave function instantly becomes small.
The ”duality” of wave-particle duality reflects the fact that if you persist in understanding the true nature of the electron in terms of particle and waves, then you have to consider it to be both. However, in reality, it's neither, it's something that is new (if you can apply that word to an over 100 years old idea). | 1,837 |
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ELI5: Why are there so few blue foods in nature? | Luke Skywalker's aunt gave him blue milk. Where's our blue food? | 134 | Blue food is a rare occurrence in nature. There are no leafy blue vegetables (blue lettuce?), no blue meats (blueburger, well-done please), and aside from blueberries and a few blue-purple potatoes from remote spots on the globe, blue just doesn't exist in any significant quantity as a natural food color. Consequently, we don't have an automatic appetite response to blue. Furthermore, our primal nature avoids food that are poisonous. A million years ago, when our earliest ancestors were foraging for food, blue, purple and black were "color warning signs" of potentially lethal food.
Most plant life contains a combination of chlorophyll, keratins and anthocyanins in some combination (plus other things, of course). Chlorophyll makes things appear green. Keratins make things appear red, yellow or orange. Anthocyanins have a wider scope and can reflect back reds, purples, yellows, magentas and blues. Pretty much, how an anthocyanin displays colour depends on the pH of the soil/air around the plant. | 54 |
ELI5: How does cross-eyed 3D work? | Here's what I mean - http://www.kula3d.com/how-to-use-the-cross-eyed-method.html
When I googled "How does cross-eyed 3D work", all the results pointed to how you can achieve this effect. None of the results spoke about the science behind this. | 74 | All 3D "technologies" work the same way. In real life, you see depth because your two eyes see things from two slightly different positions. 3D imagery mimics that by using two different *pictures* taken from slightly different positions (e.g.: two cameras side-by-side).
One of those pictures is presented to only one of your eyes, and the other one is presented to the other eye only. And your brain interprets that as real-world depth.
With cross-eyed 3D, what you're doing is forcing your eyes to look at those two different pictures "together." | 17 |
What is the theoretical maximum size of a terrestrial planet? | 1,698 | If you keep adding terrestrial planetary material (mostly iron, silicon and oxygen) to a planet eventually it will resemble a white dwarf star. The radius will peak at only a few times that of Earth, depending on the exact composition, then start decreasing again. When you reach 1.44 times the mass of the Sun, or about half a million Earth masses, the planet/star will collapse, nuclear fusion will ignite and the resulting type 1a supernova will completely destroy the planet/star leaving no remnant. | 1,234 |
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Why does your ping go up if it's only using a few kilobytes playing, downloading a game in the background? Shouldn't it be the same? | 41 | When the network is used at its maximum bandwidth, your router queues the data packets to be sent/received until its their turn to be processed.
When you are downloading a game your bandwidth will usually be saturated because your connection is weaker than than what the game servers can serve you. However your game only sends a few hundred packets per second. This means that when your computer sends your player position, the router will queue it until all the downloading game data that was queued before is finished being processed. This might be millions of packets that block your multiplayer game for at least a few dozen milliseconds. That is noticeable especially for a FPS game.
There are features to avoid this, namely QoS (quality of service) but you gotta configure it, and only if your router is compatible. Good QoS infrastructure allows you to prioritizes some services' packets over others. | 36 |
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ELI5: what actually causes genetic issues if breeding pair are for example siblings? | i guess we've all seen the whole 'little hickville town with mutated villagers' horror scenes in series and movies. would human beings (or other mammals) actually mutate into barely recognizable as humans like that if for example siblings had babies together for several generations?
from the very little i've read, i just came to the conclusion that inherited health issues would be more likely to manifest themselves but beyond that and the whole social stigma thing the offspring would be relatively normal. if i'm wrong, what causes it? | 74 | Our DNA has redundancy built in: it comes in two halves.
Each half can potentially bear faulty copies of a bunch of genes - but so long as there's a working copy in the other half, you're fine.
Think of two pieces of paper, each with a random set of holes in it. Put them together, and so long as none of the holes line up, you effectively have a complete sheet.
When two organisms breed, they take half the DNA from each parent - one sheet of paper each in this analogy.
If the two parents are only very distantly related, it's a pretty good bet that they'll have few or no faulty genes in common - any holes they have will likely be in completely different places, and so won't line up.
If the two parents are very closely related, however, those two pieces of paper will have a very similar pattern of holes, so at least some of them will very likely line up, and the offspring will get two broken copies of the gene. If they're lucky, this doesn't make a whole lot of difference.... but if they're not, really important stuff can get fucked up. | 77 |
[DC/Marvel] If someone like Thor decided to start fighting street-level crime, would they face opposition from street-level heroes? If so, why are street-level heroes so insistent that only they should deal with it? | One day, Thor decides to start raining godly justice upon the criminals of Hell's Kitchen. Would Daredevil tell him to cut it out, even if Thor manages to (in the short term) eradicate crime? If so, why wouldn't street-level superheroes want such relief? Is it pride? Or is there a rational explanation? | 95 | Thor in the beginning of his comic run would occasionally fight street crime, though he usually faced more esoteric threats.
Theoretically, the reason is because most street level superheroes deal with organized crime like gangs and mobs, problems that can’t simply be beat by going in there and beating everyone up. Essentially, he would be no more effective than Daredevil or Spider-Man even though he would be much more powerful.
Also, Daredevil, Spider-Man, and others have skills outside of fighting(science, law, connections) that would make them better suited for fighting street crime than Thor would be. | 82 |
ELI5: How come fat isn’t distributed evenly across the body but instead is in specific places? | 28 | Fat is insulation. It protects important areas. It also cushions us. So like for example, your butt. Your bones wouldn’t be good to sit on, so this is the solution. Your abdomen has many of your most important organs, and doesn’t have a rib cage to keep them safe.
Your sex hormones are a huge determining factor in where your body stores it’s lipids. Different fats in different areas have specific receptors for hormones. Hormones signal important pathways in your body!
Fatty acids are what we get when we break down lipids. They are by far the most energetically favorable thing for your body to break down. It doesn’t take nearly as much energy to break them down, compared to the cellular energy we get out.
Some lifestyle choices, like smoking, poor diet, etc., can determine some of where we store our fat. However it is mostly genetics. | 27 |
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[The Matrix Trilogy] If the Matrix was an iterative, virtual construct designed by the machines — Why didn’t the machines, wholly aware of the impending “One” and the 1% expected to reject the construct, just either disable connection to the Matrix and/or just “boot” them out of the platform? | It’s been a hot minute since I’ve seen the Matrix trilogy but was an instant fan since the first.. so excuse the gander if it’s already addressed or if I missed the answer, but never felt was properly addressed within the story… | 28 | It is briefly addressed by the architect. The One serves his purpose by rebooting the matrix whenever it reaches and unsustainable level. Same as Zion being a controlled point for the rejects of the matrix being allowed to exist. Once the machines determine the matrix and Zion are at a fail point they confront the one and have him choose a certain number of men and women to start over with. The rest are killed or plugged back into the matrix and all memory is erased except for the one who leads his chosen few to Zion to rebuild. It's all carefully constructed to give the illusion of choice but that choice has already been decided by the machines to control humans. | 41 |
is the spread of COVID typical for a respiratory virus | i understand that there's no respiratory virus for which we have so much data as COVID 19, but what do we think: is this global pandemic pattern, with the virus and the Deltas and the Omicrons and etc etc and the rapid spikes in infection rates etc, something that happens all the time with your everyday harmless sneezy colds?
Followup question to 'yes' responses: are there other viruses that are following a similar pattern *right now* to COVID, like, are the infection waves etc correlated? | 26 | Flu follows a seasonal wave pattern. It spreads mainly in the winter. To make the vaccine and produce it in time we need to guess which flu strains need to be in it 6 months in advance. We do that with a worldwide network of scientists studying flu. We trace it as it bounces from northern hemisphere to southern hemisphere and back and make educated guesses about what strains to include in the vaccine for the next year.
Respiratory Syntactyl Virus (RSV) is a respiratory virus that many people get. Mostly it acts like just a minor cold unless you are very young or very old. It's one of the leading causes of hospitalizations for infants however. During the lockdowns for COVID the things we did almost eliminated RSV transmission. As we relaxed the non-medical interventions, lockdowns and such, RSV made a big resurgence.
The reason COVID's waves are so dramatic is that it's a new virus. The population was immunologically naive to it i.e. nobody had had it before. That's the situation you can have explosive growth in viruses. Back before the chickenpox vaccine came out schools would have little epidemics of kids catching it. Chickenpox is more infectious than even omicron (R0 \~12 is usually quoted. Some of the high end estimates for omicron put it's R0 at 10). Since the older kids and teachers were immune the size of these epidemics were small. All viruses have waves anytime there are large enough groups of people who are succeptiable.
Our "back to normal" with COVID is when it starts acting more like a flu. It will probably start causing waves every fall and winter (much smaller ones than the ones going on now). Since most people will have either had it or been vaccinated it, these waves almost certainly won't be as dangerous at that point. People will still die, but we won't be risking the collapse of our healthcare system because of the load. | 21 |
[Hobbit/LOTR] How would things have played out if the orcs never showed up at the BotFA? | (spoilers ahead)
Let's say that for one reason or another the orcs do not show up to Erebor after Smaug was killed and instead of the Battle of the Five Armies we get the Battle of the Three Armies(dwarfs,men,elves)?
Everything else is the same, the Elves want their heirlooms, the men of lake town want their "share" of the treasure(I do have to agree with Thorin that he shouldn't have to hold to his word to repay the people of lake town after all he says "what choice did we have but to barter our birthrights for our freedom?")
And the dwarven army shows up all the same, except there is no threat of orcs to force everyone to come together.
What happens? Do they fight or come to terms? If they do fight who wins, by how much and at what cost?
Can the elves take on the dwarfs? It was kind of hard to tell who had the greater numbers since the dwarfs are naturally smaller and seemed to have tighter formations than the elves. We also see the "soldiers" of laketown taken aback when they were faced with an actual army of dwarfs, they were confident when it was them and an army of golden elves against 13 dwarfs but once they thought they might have to fight rather than just get in on that group experience/free loot they got behind the elves.
Bonus question: The Heirlooms Thranduil spoke of, was it just the necklace we see Thorin pick up or was it also the pile of jewels he threw the necklace on? And as Thranduil says "The Heirlooms of my people are not lightly forsaken." implying that at one point there were in his possession so why did the dwarfs have them? Not sure if I am right but I figured they were at one point his wifes, while being nice they weren't inherently special and she had given them to the dwarfs as a gift, but once she died and there was nothing left of her he wanted them back to remember her by. | 45 | The soldiers of laketown probably didn't have any weaponry that could penetrate Dwarven armor at all, they would have been a non-issue in the battle.
The elves were gracefully assembled on the field of battle, not hidden behind fortifications or atop mountains with bows where they would be most effective. They were there as a show of force to try to intimidate Thorin's party into surrendering, not deployed in a sensible military formation.
Dain's forces were allowed to walk right up to the Elves, further eliminating the problem of their lack of mobility compared to the Elves and Men.
Finally, the Wood Elf king was a bit of a coward.
Result? It would be a slaughter. The Elves would retreat, most of the men would die (either in direct combat, or starving to death in the winter afterwards) - and the Dwarves would keep the mountain.
| 37 |
[Star Wars] What happens to force users that are not accepted into the jedi order? | 153 | They work as, essentially, farmhands and laborers in various agri-worlds to provide for the jedi and local communities.
Or they join the Sith because even though they're powerful enough they're too old, become a dark jedi, hunt down a regular jedi, then repent. Presto! Welcome to the Order! | 137 |
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If the moon's spin is tidally-locked so that it's synchronized with it rotational rate (causing it to almost always look the same from Earth), once humans colonize the moon, will the lunar inhabitants experience "day" and "night" on the moon? | I was thinking earlier if lunar colonization might cause there to be a need for lunar time zones, but then I started thinking more about how the same part of the moon always faces us. So, I got to reading about how the moon spins on its axis, but the tidal bulge slowed it's rotation to eventually make it look like it's the same part facing us. Would that experience be the same on the surface of the moon? Forgive my ignorance. My one regret about my education (I'm 48) is that I never took physics or astronomy. Thank you in advance. | 4,051 | The Moon's rotation is indeed synced with its orbit, which is why it always faces Earth with the same face. But that still means that it is rotating! It takes the Moon about a month to rotate about its axis, relative to the Sun. So if you're on the Moon, you do have a day/night cycle, it's just about 2 weeks of daylight, followed by 2 weeks of night. The Sun will rise, move across the sky, and set, over the course of 2 Earth weeks. However, the Earth will always be in the same fixed position in the sky, and will only move if you move to a different position on the Moon (if you're on the far side of the Moon, the Earth is always "underground" from your perspective).
This is actually what causes the phases of the Moon. When the Moon is a crescent or half moon or "gibbous" phase, this is because part of the Moon that is facing the Earth is in night-time, and is too dark to easily see from Earth. This isn't the Earth's shadow on the Moon - we only see that when things line up just right during a Lunar Eclipse - this is the Moon's shadow on the Moon.
Hope that helps! I'd also recommend setting down some tennis balls or whatever and moving them around, as seeing things laid out like that can help things to click sometimes. | 4,008 |
ELI5: What's the difference between US and UK language settings? | I see these different English settings on devices and sites all the time but I never could tell what the difference was. Is it just some words spelled differently or is there something I'm missing? | 19 | Depends on where the language settings are used.
It could influence any of the following:
* Language selection (English vs US English)
* Keyboard layout (UK QWERTY vs US QWERTY, different placement of special symbols mostly)
* Date formatting (the UK uses sensible dates, the US uses garbage)
* Default currency selection and formatting
* Paper sizes for printers (really! A4 vs US Letter)
| 58 |
ELI5: How do stealth planes work? What makes them stealthy? | 40 | When they talk about stealth, they mean via RADAR.
A quick breakdown of RADAR: Pretend it works like a dolphin's or bat's echolocation: we shoot radio waves in a direction and then those waves bounce off stuff and if the waves bounce back toward us, we can "see" whatever the radio wave bounced off of.
Stealth planes use a combination of angular shapes and reflective materials to bounce RADAR off of the plane, but not back towards the "listening" location. Imaging a dolphin trying to look for fish with clicks, but every time a sound hits the fish, the sound bounces up or down instead back to the dolphin, making it so the dolphin doesn't detect that particular fish. | 56 |
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What is the force that drives light to move at the speed that it does? Or to put more simply, what propels light? | I understand that light travels really fast. I know that is an understatement but anyway, what is it that propels light forward to move at the speed that it does without ever slowing down? | 2,309 | There is no propelling force behind light. From a classical perspective, light is two perpendicular waves in the electric and magnetic fields. The changing electric field induces a magnetic field and vice versa, so the wave is constantly perpetuating itself. Waves do not accelerate, they propagate at a constant speed from the time they are emitted to the time they are absorbed. That speed is determined by the permittivity and permeability of the medium, and in the case of a vacuum this gives the speed of light.
From a quantum perspective, light consists of massless particles called photons. In special relativity, a massless particle *must* travel at the speed of light. | 3,642 |
Is it really possible to "steal" electricity from high voltage lines via induction? | I've heard anecdotes about people doing this. I know it's possible. But I wonder if it could be done in any practicable way. | 20 | depends on what you mean by practicable, if you want a reliable and safe source of power you'll need a lot of expensive equipment, if you just wrap a coil around the line you'll receive low power high voltage wich is very hard to work with and electrocuting yourself in the process of assembling your construction is likely at 380kV (european high voltage line) | 10 |
[40K] "Necrons... and so rather face and be destroyed by the Eldar and the various psychic hazards unleashed during the war, they retreated to the safety of millions of Tomb Worlds and entered a deep hibernation." HOW IS HAVING A NAP A GOOD DEFENSIVE PLAN? | This seems like the equivalent of hiding under the blankets to escape a monster. It's established that the old ones had an "insurmountable mobility advantage" in the war due to their webway, so it seems intragalactic travel was relatively trivial, so what's the go? How can you go from fighting a battle to extinction to being safer by unilaterally deciding nap time?
i.e. What made their Tomb Worlds safe?
Unedited quote from here https://1d4chan.org/wiki/War_in_Heaven "Necrons weakened, and so rather than face (and likely be destroyed by) the Eldar and the various psychic hazards unleashed during the war, they retreated to the safety of millions of Tomb Worlds and entered a deep, sixty-million-year-long hibernation." | 185 | It's a little more complex than that. First, there was the Enslaver Plague. The use if emotionally charged psychic warrior-races during the War In Heaven caused the development of the first Warp Entities. Some were cultivated, like the Eldar Gods, others were unfortunate side effects, like the Krell. The Silent King hoped that the Old Ones creations would be distracted long enough for them to basically either lose the scent (the galaxy is a BIG place) or lose interest.
Second, there is the goal of the Necrons. Apotheosis, or at least some variant of it. Under Sandrekh's last edict, most Necron factions seek a means to regain organic form, and their souls. For this, they need access to living things to study. And at the time of the War in Heaven's conclusion, easy prey was rather limited.
And then there is Time. The Necrons knew (or at least believed) that their enemies weren't immortal. Eventually, the universe, cruel as it was, would bleed them out. Only the Necrontyr were eternal (heres the ego kicking in). They would wait until their enemies had faded, and the galaxy had regrown, and then they would regain their souls and rule once more. | 110 |
ELI5: How can your body's feet be ice-cold when the rest feels warm? | I sometimes find myself in my house and it's too warm to wear a sweatshirt but my feet will be ice cold. I heard that warming the torso area helps to warm extremities but I have been on the verge of sweating with ice-cold extremities. Please explain how this is possible? | 25 | They aren't getting as much blood flow as the rest of your body due to being so far away from the heart. Plus when it's cold your blood vessels tighten up to keep core temperature and minimalize heat loss.
Its why you shouldn't drink alcohol when it's cold because it dialates the blood vessels. You'll feel warm while you freeze to death. | 31 |
Why does sexual intercourse consist of a stimulation through going in and going out (friction?)? Also why do we need to be stimulated in order to reproduce? | 16 | Sexual intercourse isnt exactly friction. In a normal intact male and a normal intact female there is very low friction. The penile sheath rolls over the glans and stimulates both partners in the in and out motion.
As to why do we need to be stimulated to reproduce, someone else will have to answer that. | 11 |
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[General] If humanity had to live in one giant city, where would you put it? | Assume some sort of science-fiction shenanigans are going to make most of the uninhabitable, but humanity knows this is about to happen and has time to prepare. They can choose a spot and keep it habitable, anywhere on the planet. They'll essentially need to build a mega-city to house as much of the world's population as they can.
Where would you put such a city and why? | 15 | Africa, we have the technology to make it work, but it has the largest deposits of all the stuff we make technology out of.
We can grow food anywhere, we can get water anywhere, and it would be best in all but the worst ice ages. | 21 |
[Black Panther] How is wakanda so wealthy and advanced despite exporting only tiny amounts of vibranium? | 96 | Is this Comics or MCU?
In the MCU it's alluded that the world thinks of Wakanda as goat-herders and not wealthy (but they've hidden the fact they're sitting on a mountain of vibranium).
In the comics though they dont like selling vibranium, they are extremely technologically advanced - using vibranium tools and manipulations they surely can build superior end-products that themselves have no vibranium within them. | 110 |
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[Lord of the rings] is Gandalf the White now supposed to wear only white robes for the rest of his life, What if he wants to wear a black robe and dye his hair brown? | 809 | We've seen it in the films in particular, where Gandalf maintains the pretense that he is still "the Gray" when he enters Rohan. Gandalf the White is both rank and title, and it's a fine tool to maintain a consistent appearance to ensure he is recognized (since he doesn't have a driver's license or other ID), but when he wants, he can go incognito. As far as rules, the wizards are left to their own discretion in pretty much all things, given just a goal instead of strict rules, so there's nothing binding him to a particular presentation, or even the mission as a whole; as of the end of the books, he was the only wizard who stayed the course, not falling to darkness, fucking off to pursue their own agenda, or just plain vanishing. | 620 |
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ELI5: How is the sound of a blinker made? | A tiny speaker? A sound chip? Something mechanical? | 16 | It used to be a relay that was purposefully noisy to remind you it's on.
I would say in the last 5 years it has been mainstream that all lights are controled by a computer so now the sound is from a speaker and a computer decide if the blinker sound should ring or the safety belt warning or the door open or other warnings. | 24 |
ELI5: How do speakers at rock concerts not blow out due to the sheer volume of sound they're outputting? | I was at a heavy metal concert last night (Five Finger Death Punch/Breaking Benjamin for those wondering) and the amount of sound that was coming out of the speakers at that concert seemed like it was going to blow them during the opening acts (Nothing More and Bad Wolves were opening. Great bands all around) and then they still were able to turn it up during 5FDP and BB and nothing seemed worse for wear. How are they able to do this? | 38 | The only answer is that they are designed not to. They are very expensive and made of very high grade materials that can withstand the vibrations and stressors they are put under.
The loudest speaker in the world is capable of producing 165db of volume. That is louder than standing directly in front of a jet when it takes off at 25m and more than loud enough to rupture your eardrums. The rock concert speakers are no where near that volume | 75 |
Question about pointers in C | I'm learning pointers right now and I have a question
What does "int *ptri = (int *)-1;" mean. Does negative 1 mean, it's a pointer to a constant (negative 1)? I'm really confused | 16 | Makes `ptri` point to whatever address -1 is converted to by the cast, which is very unlikely to be an actual valid address that can be dereferenced.
Edit: best guess is that it's meant to signal an error from a function where returning a null pointer is an expected possibility. | 15 |
Can the gravitational effect of the moon on the displacement (weight) of a 100,000t ship be calculated at it's strongest and weakest all other factors remaining equal? | 159 | Let's find out -
For gravitational force, we have
F = GMm/r^2
The radius of the Earth is 6.370×10^6 m, the distance from the center of the earth to the moon is 3.844×10^8 m, the mass of the moon is 7.348×10^22 kg, and 100,000 (metric) tons is 10^8 kg. The minimum distance then, is 3.844*10^8 m, and the maximum is 3.908×10^8 m. So the maximum force, F_max, and and minimum force, F_min, are:
F_max = ~~1.74094×10^-12 N~~ 3430 N
F_min = ~~1.72944×10^-12 N~~ 3210 N
This is a difference of 220 N, which is about 50 lbs.
Edit: Fixed typo when calculating forces. | 39 |
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[Harry Potter] Why wasn't the magic used in making the Maruader's map expanded upon? Make a mass grid of map that can keep tab on the whole wizarding world? | So it kinda bugs me that the Maruader's map reveals everyone in their true form (such as Pettigrew) yet it wasn't a widespread form of magic. Why don't we see basically EVERYONE have their own map? Can't be that hard to make right? It seems like something one should keep to know everything about where someone is. I could see Death Eaters having them, or maybe utilize it in fighting Voldemort, knowing their next step. Basically it's like Google earth but you can see person, who WOULDN'T find that useful?
So my question is why wasn't the map expanded to form sort of like a network that lets you spy on EVERYONE? Kinda like that cell surveillance thing from Dark Knight that Lucius fox makes. | 49 | It is possible that it was tied directly to the magical flows of energy that go through Hogwarts. Like... imagine that it was using Hogwarts' own internal security spells and charms to get the information it needed. The map is useful, but unless many other witches and wizards hadn't been building the detection charms and spells over centuries, it wouldn't be possible to use. | 58 |
If 44M Americans have filed for Unemployment in the last 12 weeks, why isn't the unemployment rate 33.7%? | [I was reading an article on Huffpost.com today, and here's a screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/YZguUQu).
When [I check out statista.com](https://www.statista.com/statistics/192356/number-of-full-time-employees-in-the-usa-since-1990/#:~:text=This%20statistic%20shows%20the%20not,on%20a%20full%2Dtime%20basis.&text=The%20number%20of%20full%2Dtime,20%20million%20people%20since%201991.), they show that we have 130.6M employees, and if 44M have filed for Unemployment benefits, this means that the unemployment rate is 33.7%.
Why is the official Unemployment Rate only around 13%? | 158 | I believe the huffington article is discussing how many people applied for unemployment insurance (UI), which is not entirely related to unemployment rates. UI is calculated by state department of labors whereas the bureau of labor statistics calculates unemployment rates based on survey analysis.
If they are talking about BLS calculated unemployment rate numbers, that could potentially be because a few populations are not included there, including agricultural workers, business owners, part time workers, and gig economy workers. Also, the unemployment rate is not calculated as the number of unemployed/number of employed. It’s the number of unemployed divided by the size of the workforce, which also includes those who are actively seeking jobs. Hope that helps | 40 |
Why do companies need to have such substantial growth rates? Why can’t a company say “we’re happy with the profits we made last year”? | Maybe it’s a better question for r/nostupidquestions, but this feels like a fitting sub. If a company makes its shareholders Xthousand dollars this year, why do they need to make 10% more the next year? This growth, in many well established companies/industries is not organic and is predatory, unsustainable, and often downright cruel. So why is it such a standard outlook on business operation? | 101 | >If a company makes its shareholders Xthousand dollars this year, why do they need to make 10% more the next year?
Well, it depends.
You don't necessarily *need* to grow. Especially in well established industries, you could chose to be perfectly fine with your spot in the market and don't aim for (much) growth.
On the other hand, in some industries, this might be necessary. If your industry moves so fast that if you don't innovate and stay competitive you fall behind and lose more and more market share. Nobody would buy a smartphone from a company that hasn't changed since 2010.
That said, companies actually owned by shareholders usually have an obligation to make a profit (at least eventually), because from a shareholder perspective, that's the point and that's how you profit from owning a company.
>This growth, in many well established companies/industries is not organic and is predatory, unsustainable, and often downright cruel.
What do you base that on? Companies have grown at a decent pace just fine and there have always been high and low growth industries. Sure, some companies are "bad" or unsustainable, but to suggest that's a significant portion doesn't really make much sense. | 88 |
We are four Stanford students looking to improve academic publishing and we want to hear from you! | We are four students (incl. three MBAs and two PhDs), all of us fed up with academic publishing and embarking on a project to improve the process. But before we start building anything, we want to hear from as many scientists as possible. We'd love to hear your thoughts on what the biggest issues are. (The amount of time it takes? The opacity of peer reviews? The Elsevier racket?)
Please leave your comments below, or PM me to arrange a short interview. | 49 | Anonymous submissions and a transparent review process will improve accountability and reduce editorial decisions based on factors beyond the quality of the work. EMBO has taken great strides towards this end by publishing reviewer and editor comments. | 23 |
[General] What is the largest animal in fiction? | The largest thing I can think of is the Space Slug in Empire Strikes Back is the Giant worm thing in Gears of War 2. | 15 | It’s a cat in a show within the Simpsons. The spoof of lost called Stranded ends with it zooming out and showing the entire universe being a single grain in a cat litter box.
Average cat is 10 inches tall (254mm) and a medium sized grain of litter is about 2.2mm diameter. That makes a cat about 115 grains of litter tall. If the known universe take up the entire size of the grain, then one piece of litter is about 93 billion lightyears. If the cat is 115 of those then the cat is about 10,737,000,000,000 or 10.7 trillion lightyears tall. A flea moving at light speed would take 542 times the age of our universe to make it from the cats feet to its ears. | 43 |
Is a human being morally more valuable than other animals? If yes, why? | As a naturalist, I see no reason to believe a human life is intrinsically worth more than the life of a dog or an elephant. I’m writing about this subject and I’d be very interested to see why someone would disagree (without appealing to supernatural beliefs). | 18 | Just look for anything distinctive of humans that someone might reasonably think is morally significant. It doesn’t have to be totally absent from non-human animals, just more developed in humans.
So, intelligence, imagination, artistic capacity, language, and so on. | 23 |
[Avatar, Wall-E] Which is a better investment: RDA or Buy n Large? | 17 | RDA got kicked off Pandora by big blue space indians. Buy n Large successfully managed multiple enormous colony ships, and seemed to control the government and economy of the entire Earth before they were forced to leave. I'd stick with Buy'n Large. | 23 |
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[MCU] What do Iron Man/War Machine do during transoceanic flights in their suits? | In Iron Man one of the first things he does in the suit is fly from LA to Afghanistan, which would be a 10 hour flight if he went MACH 1 the whole time. Then he spends like 20 minutes there and flies home. what is he doing while flying in the suit for 20+ hours? | 142 | As career Air Force Rhodey probably enjoys directly piloting the armor in flight. Plus his suit isn't as advanced so it's likely that he has to be a more active pilot.
As for Tony, he might use it to catch up on sleep or business. He might even take the time to remote pilot another armor to do other tasks if the flight is long enough, similar to what he did in Homecoming. | 181 |
Why are ratings always skewed towards the high side? | The mean of all ratings on IMDb is 6.9. not 5. The mean rating of freelancers on Upwork is not 2.5 but near 5. The mean rating on Amazon is not 2.5, the mean rating on glassdoor is not 2.5 and the list goes on.
Does this have some statistical explanation or people just are biased towards positivity? Does this mean we should consider 3/5 as a negative review instead of neutral? | 22 | There is no purely statistical explanation, social science is rough. But most of the time you can concoct stories as to why ratings tend to be right-skewed. If we consider IMDB some examples could be:
\- Most individuals decide to watch a movie and series, consequently, you would expect each individual to generally have a positive bias towards that specific genre/style of movie and series (something their mean rating likely doesn't account for).
\- As time progresses movies generally improve and cater better to viewers and thus deserve higher ratings. Naturally, raters are expected to adapt their rating, but as ratings are a function of 'all' past movies, raters' beliefs will trail movies producing a right skew.
\- Similar to the above, those who produce movies with high ratings are increasingly able to gather funding and exposure for future movies reinforcing the loop, leading again to a right-skew. | 18 |
ELI5 Why is it preferable to ask for someone's resignation rather than just fire them with cause? | Recent National Security Advisor resignation got me thinking about this.
Also the US president's penchant for firing people before he took office would lead me to assume he would rather fire people | 91 | It's less of a hassle, less paperwork, and less conflict. A person who *signs* a resignation letter even under pressure is less likely to stir up a shitstorm afterwards, because the administration / company could always say that *they* resigned and deny any pressure if necessary (arguably not in the Flint case, but in general).
It's also supposed to be a good practice because it allows both sides to keep face. The resignee does not get the stigma of being fired, and the employer does not get to field questions on why that person was fired. | 68 |
What is the material basis for a recession if any? | Just wondering what actually physically causes a recession? Is it a matter of production and/or consumption changing? Is it an entirely psychological phenomena where investors lose faith in the economy? Or a mix of both or something else? | 25 | When consumers forecasts of future incomes will be lower than initially expected, they consume less
When producers forecast that future sales will be lower than initially expected, they will invest and/or produce less.
This causes recessions. It's all about expectations, and expectations changing. It's uncertainty | 26 |
CMV: We should always subject presidential nominees to a mandatory battery of cognitive and psychological tests and publish the results in detail. | I'm not saying you'd have to pass any certain threshold on these tests to be eligible to run, but with so much spin, truthiness, and genuine uncertainty about candidates' mental capacity and psychological profile, some HARD DATA would be nice.
I mean, aren't debates and speeches just an unscientific way to try to figure these things out for ourselves (in just about the least reliable of test environments)? It would be nice to know that X is the more empathetic candidate while Y is more able to grasp abstract concepts.
It would also help people learn what traits they look for in a leader (i.e. "Wow, Spacial Reasoning skill is a really good indicator of who I prefer, why is that?") and help prioritize mental health and wellness in general.
Maybe it's too easy to cheat these kinds of tests though? | 157 | While psychology is of course a legitimate science, it is often far more subjective than many other fields of science/medicine. You don't take a single test, and get a diagnosis, there is a lot more involved that goes alongside those tests. And those tests are very much not designed to be used this way.
To make matters worse, many of those tests require the subject not have prior knowledge of the test materials and scoring. This would be a huge problem in your proposed context. Surely we can't have presidential candidates graded on a secret test. It would need to be a widely used and trusted one, and the public would need to have the right to dig through all the details to convince ourselves that the test is legitimate. But in so doing, we would not only ruin the test for future candidates, but for anyone else in the public who looked at it.
The tests just are not designed for this type of use, nor could a test easily be created for it. | 31 |
Why do electrons fill up orbitals when atoms bond? Why are atoms more unstable without full orbitals? | I would like to know what actually causes electrons to act in this manner. I know all about how an atom 'prefers' to have a balanced amount of electrons orbiting it. But why do the electrons 'oblige' and become shared? It seems strange and I can't come up with an answer, nor can my chemistry teacher. I'm not really sure if this is worded correctly, but I am extremely curious, and would rephrase as best I can if the question isn't understandable. | 28 | Short answer:
Quantum Mechanics
Long answer:
Electrons don't have a an exact position as it were, as you might well probably know. Instead they have a wavefunction. These wavefunctions, due to electrons being fermions, must be anti-symmetric and when the wavefunction of two electrons overlap (like they do in atoms) the total wavefunction must describe the positions of both (they must be indistinguishable). This is harder than one might think, considering you suddenly have an n-body problem on your hand with the introduction of 2 electrons and 1 nucleus or 1 electron and 2 nuclei (stable He and and H2+). When considering H2+, we often keep the two nuclei at a given distance and then derive the waveform from there with the two potential wells. With the stable He, we consider one potential well, the individual electron wavefunctions must be anti-symmetric and the total waveform should be symmetric (two fermions can effectively become one boson) and different terms from that arise (using perturbative theory). One such term is what is called the "exchange integral". This generates an attractive force by (more or less) exchanging the positions of the electrons.
**tl;dr** The exchange integral gives an attractive boost between pairs of electrons. | 12 |
[Asimov] I live in a sketchy neighborhood, but I want to lease a robot to take care of my household chores, how do I prevent it from interfering in my neighbors' affairs. | I saved up some money, and I want to lease a robot for a few weeks so that I can focus my energies elsewhere. but where I live, my neighbors are always getting into fights, or are injured for some reason or another, I know there is active drug trade nearby, and altercations with the armed peacekeepers. that often end in injuries.. and even the occasional death
But I read that according to the first Law, A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Any robot that I will bring in will definitely hear the fights and try to prevent them. or at least go outside and try to help via medical assistance, also if it hears on the news about some crisis somewhere on the other end of the globe, what is preventing it from running off to save the people over there?
I just want my house cleaned, I don't want to pay for a vigilante robot on a humanitarian spree | 15 | It's an interesting question.
We do know that while the three laws are hardcoded into the basic design of the positronic brain, *they are not absolutely unchangeable*. The public has been told this, but it isn't true. They can be made more important or less important to the robot, or even modified directly. It seems to be more accurate to say the design might require *three laws*, but not those *specific* three laws. We see a few times where people tried tweaking them. In the *I, Robot* collection of stories, for example, in the short story *Runaround* we see them design a robot with an *enhanced* third law, to prioritize itself-preservation more.
More interestingly to your question, however, is the story *Little Lost Robot* in the same collection.
The military needed robots to work in a factory that had a persistent radiation danger. The radiation was fatal to humans with an extended period of exposure, but was safe in small doses. However, it caused almost immediate destruction of a positronic brain. When the factory first started, their robots kept destroying themselves by running into the radiation to try to "rescue" the humans who were in no real danger, because *potentially* the humans could be in danger if they didn't leave the exposure area in time.
The solution was kept secret from the public: They built robots without half of the first law. Instead of "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm", the Nestor series robots only had "A robot may not injure a human being." They were free to let a human die, unless ordered otherwise.
Soooo...
Maybe if you knew someone high up at US Robotics, they could get you a Nestor series robot? If you knew to ask, anyways, which of course you don't, because as far as you know the three laws are inviolate. | 13 |
[NES/Arcade Games] I tend to die a whole lot in these games. Does this mean the villain wins in most timelines? | I mean, a lot of games do not show you reviving any way. You just die, and appear somewhere else like nothing happened. This is especially true with Game Overs. Does this mean that out of the millions of people that played Super Mario Bros., an overwhelming amount of those timelines just feature Mario getting a Game Over and Bowser winning? | 80 | Yes, of course. Mario is a single man, albeit a particularly high-jumping one, and Bowser is the supreme leader of one of the world's largest and most powerful industrial-military empires, not to mention a giant fire-breathing monster with a mastery of dark magic. It's amazing that Mario wins in *any* timeline. | 66 |
ELI5: With one eye you have no depth perception, so why is it when I cover one eye I can still tell distance? | 32 | Stereoscopic vision is only one component of how we perceive depth, and not even aparticularly good one! Because our eyes are closely spaced, it's only really good for close depth perception. Combined with convergence (How much our eyes have to look towards one another to focus on a close object) these "binocular" methods of depth perception are really only effective out to about 10 metres.
Monocular methods of depth perception that don't depend on having two eyes include:
* Parallax - things move relative to one another as out point of view changes
* Relative size - smaller things are further away, example in a field of cows
* Familiar size - Ships are big, dogs are middle sized, insects are small. We know this.
* Perspective: Line converge to a point which indicates the size of an object.
* Occlusion: If one object passes in front of another, blocking our vision of it, we have perception of their relative size and so distance.
* Defocus Blur: As our point of focus shifts, different "depths" are resolved in and out of focus by the eye. This gives important depth information.
* Distance to horizon. In a natural landscape, the closer something is to the horizontal horizon, the further it is away. This is a function of our elevation above ground level.
There are more...
So, as you can see, our depth perception is NOT limited to "stereoscopic vision". We use many subtle effects to judge depth. One of the reasons 3D cinema can be nauseating or confusing is because it uses simple binocular effects to "brute force" our perception of 3D, which is uncomfortable when other queues are mis-placed in the footage we're viewing. | 22 |
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Marcus Aurelius cites Socrates, Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras as great philosophers of the past. How much more would Marcus have known about Heraclitus and Pythagoras and their teachings than we do today? | 222 | For one, the Pythagorean’s cult might have still been active at the time. Conceivably, he could read the handwritten book Heraclitus wrote and left at the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Heraclitus’s book, On Nature, burned down along with the temple and all we have today are fragments. | 85 |
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What is the scientific definition of temperature? | I have been googling this and having a great deal of trouble finding definitions that don't seem circular. In particular, the following is bothering me. Temperature seems to be defined by internal energy (u = 3/2RT) for an ideal gas. Internal energy can be theoretically defined (velocity + vibration + rotation, etc). But specific heat capacity increases with temperature for a real gas, meaning there is more energy per degree of temperature increase. How can there be more energy increase per degree if a degree is literally defined in terms of the amount of energy increase?
Does temperature actually only depend on particle velocity, and other effects just happen to be negligible at normal temperatures? What gives? | 30 | Temperature is defined by:
1/T = (∂S/∂E)*_V,N_*.
That means that the inverse temperature is equal to the partial derivative of the entropy with respect to the energy, with the volume and number of particles left constant.
In other words, it's how much the entropy changes when you change the energy a little bit, leaving the volume and number of particles constant.
This is a totally general definition of temperature, which applies to any system in equilibrium thermodynamics (although technically if you have other extensive quantities in addition to V and N, they should be held constant as well).
This definition becomes equal to 2E/3k for a classical, monatomic ideal gas. This may have been how you defined the temperature in introductory courses, but it's not really a suitable definition for when you're dealing with systems that aren't classical, monatomic ideal gases. | 38 |
(Star Wars) So... Time Travel. Is it a thing? | By this I mean are there any recorded instances of time travel. Be it accidental or intentional? | 18 | Yes, there are multiple instances of time travel in the Star Wars universe, mostly by freak accident.
Some absurdly powerful Force users can appear to travel back to the past, but they're just viewing events and cannot interfere. | 17 |
If we suppose that one were to be completely devoid of their five senses (yet still alive), would they still be capable of self-consciousness? | In addition, have any philosophers in the past dealt with this question? | 28 | This is basically the point of Avicenna's 'Flying Man' thought experiment, which was also discussed by a large number of subsequent thinkers. His answer was yes. You might want to start by looking into that. | 19 |
In what sense is what Norway did with its oil different from what Venezuela did? why is the former welathy and the ladder destitute? | 195 | Resource wealth when badly managed is an easy way to destroy your own economy. This occurs due to something called Dutch Disease. When your economy is too reliant on a single commodity, then you become very volatile, and exposed to major swings in prices / supply / demand of that commodity. When oil prices are high, you have hyperinflation but people live like kings; and when oil prices are low you have deflation and your economy collapses. At first this may be sustainable, but over time the rapid boom-bust cycles destroy the ability for your economy to do anything else except react to oil cycles. No business can really survive for very long, and over time your economy becomes singly focused on oil extraction. Eventually, you cannot even afford the infrastructure spending during busts required to effectively extract oil during booms either.
The solution is something called a stabilisation fund. Natural resource rich countries establish sovereign wealth funds, whose purpose it is to own that oil wealth and release it gradually to the people via government spending, low taxation, pension schemes, and sometimes dividends. All the successful oil countries have one, whether it's Norges Bank, Qatar Investment Authority, Kuwait Investment Authority, or Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.
Some countries, influenced by pressing political situations, decided not to do that. Venezuela had a Chavist socialist agenda that tried to rapidly distribute all of that wealth so it became incredibly rich for several years and then immediately collapsed under the weight of low oil prices and sanctions. Venezuela is not the only one. The most famous case is actually Nauru, a tiny island country in the South Pacific who had huge deposits of seagull poop. Without a stabilisation fund, the country collapsed when demand for seagull poop went to nearly zero after improvements to chemical fertiliser technology. | 117 |
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ELI5: Why are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco all supporting CISPA when most of them vehemently opposed SOPA? | Source: http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/13/4220954/google-yahoo-microsoft-technet-cispa-support/in/2786603
edit: Thanks for the response everyone! Guess its true they'd rather protect themselves than you, tough to blame them for that | 1,628 | Also, it gives them legal safe-harbors for giving your info to the government. Without CISPA, they were stuck in a nasty place between not appeasing government requests and some liability for not treating your information properly.
Souce: various Techdirt articles. Warning: good blog, but they definitely have a point of view. | 496 |
ELI5 - Why don't we tax the same rate across the board? | I don't make that much money and am probably in that 48% that doesn't actually pay income taxes in the end (because my tax return gives me everything back that I paid - I have 2 dependents and own a house). Anyways, I always wondered why everyone wasn't just taxed at the same rate. I would assume even 3-4% of every ones income would be more than what is paid now. Seems more fair to me. I have no problem paying taxes for the roads I use, the police and fire I depend on and the schools my kids go to.
So if someone makes 250k a year - they would have to pay 10k (at 4%). If someone makes 10k - they would have to pay $400.
So, why isn't every single worker taxed at the same rate? Wouldn't it be fairer and bring in more taxes?
**Edit**: I would like to add that I meant "in total". Instead of money going to social security, income, and capital gains - I mean we ONLY pay a small percent and then it's divy'd up on the IRS's end.
~and~
Companies as well - why don't they just pay a flat percentage of their profits? | 23 | Our tax rates are designed to reflect disposable income. Disposable income is the income we have left over after purchasing food, rent, education, and other necessities. After spending money on those items, poor people have a much smaller share of their money left over than the rich. That's why we tax them less. | 19 |
ELI5: How do amputees move their prosthetics? | I never understood this, please ELI5. | 34 | I know the most about leg prostheses, so I'll talk on that.
Leg amputations come in two main types: above the knee, and below the knee. The prosthesis starts with a socket. This is the part that connects the residual limb -- or the part that is left after amputation -- to the artificial knee and/or ankle joint. So this leaves us with two joints that would need to move: the knee and the ankle.
Robotic knees and ankles exist. In fact, they've just come on the market as consumer medical devices. Generally though, the knee joint is 1) a simple hinge, 2) a hinge with a damper (like those things on doors) 2) a magnetorheological fluid that changes its damping depending on if you need to swing or not, or 4) a fully actuated robotic knee.
Ankles are similar, but they don't come as simple hinges because the joint does not move as much. for ankles you have 1) a spring 2) a fully actuated ankle joint that mimics what your calf muscle does.
It's important to note that we are not able to have neurological control of any prostheses in a permanent way yet. We've been doing research in it, and have prototypes, but nothing commercial. The closest thing is called targeted muscle reinvervation, and it's particularly used for arm amputees. The nerves of the brachial plexus (arm nerves) are stuck into the little muscles on your chest muscles just below the collar bone. The nerves grow into the muscles, and we can put electrodes on your skin near those muscles to read what the nerves are doing. It's pretty cool, but that's where we are at.
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edit: magnetorheological spelling. HT: Shapeshift1 | 16 |
[Star Wars] does Vader think the rebels don't have radar? | In Empire, Vader kills an admiral because he "alerted the rebels to their presence by coming out of lightspeed too close to the system."
But wouldn't that not matter? Surely the rebels have every kind of radar so even if the Empire came in way far out they'd eventually see them. Would that admiral have been killed for coming in too far since the rebels would've put their shield up as soon as they saw them? | 46 | Ships give off Cronau radiation when they exit hyperspace. It's possible Vader wanted them to exit hyperspace far enough away that the Rebels couldn't detect the Cronau and would have to hit them with a more traditional radar that would be harder to detect them as early. | 59 |
ELI5: How do hard shutdowns work even if device is frozen? | If a device is completely locked up and not accepting any inputs, how are we able to force it to shut down without physically removing power to get the device to start accepting inputs again? I'm talking about holding down the power button on computers, holding down power + home on an iPhone, power + volume on an Android phone, etc. | 172 | Outside of the parts of the device that can 'freeze', there's a simple switch. This switch cannot be activated easily, as one would reset or turn off the device too often. Instead it's a simple mechanism that's activated by a combination of pressing a particular button for long or combining it with another button.
On an iPhone the lock and home button are both connected to the hardware, and both have distinctive functions. But they are also connected to another switch, one that is not affected by the rest of the device, and a simultaneous long press will lead to the battery briefly being disconnected for a moment. No matter how stuck the device is, the switch operates in a separate circuit, and will therefore always work (unless this particular switch also breaks.. which could happen, and one would then need to screw open the iPhone to physically disconnect the battery). | 125 |
Can water be compressed to a solid? | The 'normal' solid form of water is crystal, leading to a lot of 'negative' space and the common trivia about ice being more voluminous than liquid water.
It seems like though, the crystallization is almost just getting in the way of what could be a more normal (to other molecules) solidification process.
So is it possible to either compress water until it's solid, or cool it in such a way that its viscosity increases to solid? | 18 | Keeping it at room temperature, you'd have to compress it to a pressure of about 10,000 atmospheres before it solidified. It wouldn't form regular ice, it would form something called Ice-VI with a different structure. | 31 |
How does anti-venom work? | Does it attack the venom somehow or neutralize it via protection of the affected area? Both?
What is actually taking place on a cellular level? | 328 | Anti-venoms are just antibodies against a particular venom. So you are getting injected with antibodies that your body would have produced normally. Antibodies do their thing against the venom, binding to it and neutralizing it, but they don't reverse whats already been done.
This is a form of artificially acquired passive immunity, similar to when the mother passes her antibodies to her fetus, but that is an example of naturally acquired passive immunity. Passive immunity doesn't last as long as a active immunity, because you aren't producing your own antibodies. An example of active immunity would be getting a weakened flu virus as a vaccine, where your body would produce antibodies against that weakened flu. | 119 |
ELI5: How come when my stomach hurts, it feels like a wave of "I gotta s**t right now" and few moments later it's as if nothing happened? | 570 | Imagine your bowels as a ship.
Normally, a bit of water will get into the ship and it's pumped out without any effort (the large intestines/colon reclaims the water from the food we eat). However, if a huge amount of water gets into the ship (from disease or the body's response to flush your digestive tract), it can create a bit of panic for everyone on the ship.
Yet, if the water pumps are fully capable of pumping out that water, then the feeling of panic will subside and things will go back to normal. | 408 |
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ELI5: Why are fluorescent colors special and why did they not seem to exist before the 80's? | 366 | Other people have addressed your comment about the timeframe.
Here's why they are special:
Normal colors reflect the color you see and absorb anything else (a blue shirt absorbs red, yellow, green, etc. but reflects blue). This means that if there light hitting the shirt has 100 brightness units, the shirt can reflect up to 100 brightness units back.
Fluorescent colors are able to absorb energy from beyond the range we can see (UV) and then re-emit it in a color we can see. So a fluorescent blue shirt could reflect up to 100 brightness units back of blue, and absorb another 100 brightness units of UV and emit them back as blue light, giving off 200 brightness units of blue in a room where everything else is only giving off 100. | 516 |
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CMV: The fact that you go to hell for all eternity means that God doesn't believe in rehabilitation. | Let's say you are a horrible person. You tortured many people, you killed some of them and you never kept the door open for someone. This doesn't mean you can't change after death. I agree that you have to be punished, but eternity is a couple of years too much. During our lifetime we can forgive someone if we see genuine remorse for quite a lot. From my point of view the fact that you go to hell for all eternity means that you will not change after death and that you can't evolve in the afterlife. Which is a scary thought by itself. I think this idea makes God appear as a deity which is not moral. And also makes the whole argument that religion is moral a whole lot weaker. | 64 | If we accept the premise of the Christian God and afterlife, we accept the premise of an all-knowing God.
An all-knowing God would know whether you were capable of retribution and worthy of the good place or whether you weren't and deserved the bad place. | 30 |
[General Sci Fi] Why isn't gravity weaponized? | In many sci fi series, the ships have artificial gravity. If they could replicate gravity itself, then wouldn't someone be able to easily manipulate the gravity generators into becoming a super weapon that could implode planets? (This may have happened in some show, but I'm not sure). | 119 | That's what they did to Malachor V in Knights of the Old Republic, basically. gravity-cracked the planet with the entire Mandalorian army on it, plus a decent number of Republic troops.
The obvious excuse to why it doesn't happen is that it'd be absurdly energy intensive to do such a thing and would likely require an entire flotilla of extremely specialized and likely quite fragile ships. Planets aren't small and gravity generators (depending on the setting) don't seem to cover more than the ship itself, if that. | 103 |
ELI5: Why does orgasm immediately end sexual desire in men but not women? | 1,909 | Evolutionarily, it's to increase chances of having a baby. If a man continues to engage in intercourse after ejaculating, he risks inadvertently pushing the semen out of the way, making pregnancy more difficult. For a woman, if she orgasms first, she needs to stay interested until the man is done in order for there to be a chance of pregnancy. Because of these evolutionary needs, men have long "refractory periods" (lack of sexual desire after orgasm), whereas women either don't have them or have really short ones. The exact cause of the refractory periods in terms of body chemistry is still up for debate. | 2,194 |
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ELI5: How do they fit 6.9 billion transistors on a 7 nanometer chip? Additionally, how do they connect them up correctly? | Edit: I think Apple means 7 nanometers apart? Either way, can someone please ELI5? | 30 | 7 nanometer technology refers to the smallest feature they can make.
As for how they can be made they are produced through a process called lithography. Individual layers are made and projected onto the material with light, interacting with chemicals to either stay put or wash away to mask areas so other material can be deposited.
Think about making art on a wall by masking things off with tape or paper, then rolling or spraying paint on the wall to stick wherever isn't covered. Then you take it off and repeat again many times to make complex pictures. With chips they can actually be 3D structures as each pass lays down a tiny layer of metal or other material. | 22 |
(Physics) If a marble and a bowling ball were placed in a space where there was no other gravity acting on them, or any forces at all, would the marble orbit the bowling ball? | Edit: Hey guys, thanks for all of the answers! Top of r/askscience, yay!
Also, to clear up some confusion, I am well aware that orbits require some sort of movement. The root of my question was to see if gravity would effect them at all!
| 3,970 | That depends on the initial speed of the marble with respect to the bowling ball. If they start out stationary with respect to eachother, the marble will simply fall towards the bowling ball (and vice versa). In order for the marble to enter orbit, it needs to have sufficient sideways velocity (where "sideways" is defined as perpendicular to the line connecting the two objects). | 2,888 |
What about the atomic structure makes gold or copper their trademark colors but leaves most others a shade of gray? | Just what is it about those numbers of protons that makes such a drastic difference? | 137 | Well, gold, silver and copper make for a good comparison here, since they have the same electronic structure (same group in the periodic table). So you might expect them to have the same properties with each other at least, if not with the other metals. But they look quite different.
Most metals don't absorb strongly across the visual spectrum (but do reflect) so they have a shiny grey appearance. The energy difference between the lowest unoccupied energy level of its electrons, and the highest occupied ones, is in the ultraviolet range in silver. In gold, that difference is shifted down into the blue range of the spectrum, so gold absorbs blue light, reflects the rest, and appears yellow.
The reason for that shift in gold is actually Special Relativity. As things go faster, they acquire relativistic mass. The faster an electron 'orbits' the nucleus, the heavier it becomes (from the viewpoint of the nucleus or some outside 'stationary' observer like us). The more charge the nucleus has, the more attracted the electrons are to it, and the electrons are located more closely to it. In quantum mechanics, the more confined an electron is to a region of space, the higher its kinetic energy is. So heavier nuclei have faster-moving core electrons, and when you get down to heavy elements like gold, they move so fast that their speed gets to the order of the speed of light, and the effects of Special Relativity start to make themselves noticed. So they gain relativistic mass, and this in turn affects their motion as well. Which in turn also effects all the other electrons as well.
It's special relativity here that causes this shift in the levels; we know this because you can do the calculations on that energy gap without taking special relativity into account, and then you get the result that gold would indeed be silver-colored. So the yellow color of gold 'proves Einstein right' - which is pretty remarkable considering how far removed it is from the original phenomena Einstein was looking to explain.
Copper is a bit of a different story, and can't be given a simple explanation as easily. The reason there is that it has a bit of a 'special' status by virtue of being in the first row of its 'block' in the periodic table (the d-block). The thing about that, is that the _outermost_ (valence) electrons in that case are closer to the nucleus, compared to the ones in the rows below it, for quantum-mechanical reasons (technically: the 3d orbitals lack a radial node). This, too, shifts the levels and causes it to absorb visual light. It also gives copper a 'second' oxidation state (Cu+ and Cu++) compared to Au and Ag, which only have Au+ and Ag+.
The reason these colored metals occur in that group (and not others) is because of the specifics of their electronic structure. Most metals are in the d-block of the periodic table, meaning they have 1-10 electrons in the 'd' sub-shell. Scandium's group has 1 and Zinc's group has 10. But Copper's group _also_ has 10 d-electrons, and instead one less s-electron (which is the sub-shell that's usually lower in energy than d). It's energetically 'better' for it to have a filled d-subshell than a filled s-subshell. | 206 |
CMV: there is no legal or moral argument against allowing incestuous marriage that hasn't been thrown away in pursuit of gay marriage. | To start: **I am *not* saying that homosexuality and incest are the same thing.**
However, any arguments I would normally use against allowing incestuous marriage have been declared void. For example, you can't simply say it's disgusting, because a lot of people find homosexuality disgusting, and society has decided that people's rights shouldn't be inhibited by the disgust of others. Incestuous couples are more likely to have deformed children, but marriage is not about reproduction. Maybe there's some psychological affliction behind it, but homosexuality used to be classified as a disorder as well, but psychologists realized the error of their ways as it became socially acceptable. Of course, any religious objections are right out.
So with the last defenses against gay marriage dismantled, I'm left without any good reason why siblings should marry each other. CMV
Edit 1: Added emphasis.
Edit 2: Stepping away for a bit. I'll be back in a few hours. (8:45pm, GMT)
Edit 3:
Deltas awarded to:
/u/SquirrelPower for pointing out that there is a legal difference between types of classes. /u/the-friendzoner made a similar argument, that the sexual attraction of incest is different than an orientation.
I don't consider these sufficient reasons to continue the ban, but they are distinct from the reasons given for banning homosexuality, so they fulfill the terms of my post.
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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!* | 466 | The biggest problem with incest is the danger of family members being sexually abused or exploited or seduced or stalked by other family members who live in the same household. For that reason there's a strong social taboo regardless of any genetic consequences.
Marrying cousins, even first cousins, who didn't grow up with you isn't nearly as creepy as marrying the step sister or adopted sister who was raised in the same household with you from infancy. And why is it creepy? Because underage children shouldn't be worried about sexual advances from their brothers and sisters, it's just too complicated if you are already living in the same house. And the same goes double for parents, under no circumstances should underage children have to deal with sexual advances from their own parents.
So if you want to argue for marriage between first cousins, fine, that's already legal in many places. But the social taboo regarding closer family members is there for a good reason, and it's not going anywhere. People don't even want it to go anywhere. There's no social movement to change it. | 286 |
[Pokemon] when a new Pokemon is discovered how is it’s type chosen and do you think there has ever been a large disagreement over classification | Example Charizard being fire/flying and not being fire/dragon despite clearly being a dragon | 21 | Different types have different strengths and weaknesses. When a new Pokemon is discovered it'd just take a bunch of battle tests against different types of moves to determine what the Pokemon is strong and weak against, then comparing the results could be used to figure out the Pokemon's type.
So with the Charizard example, a ground-type move does no damage to Charizard due to it being half Flying-type, while it would do damage to if it was half Dragon-type. | 29 |
[General Fantasy] Vampires cannot enter private human homes unless they are invited in by the owner of the house. What happens if a burglar drags an unconscious vampire in? | 104 | Depends on the universe. In some, the vampire will die/burn up upon entering the house. In others it's like there's a physical forcefield and the vampire cannot physically enter the house no matter what. In a few it would cause the vampire great pain/discomfort but will be able to do things inside the house/leave. And in yet others, the rule is just them following tradition/being polite so it wouldn't do anything to them. | 119 |
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ELI5: Why do humans like pillows to support their heads when they sleep? | Other animals don't need any sort of head support, and if museums are correct, humans have sought out sleep-time head-supporting objects for millennia. | 3,350 | The spine of primates is curved to support standing upright, so it does not do as well lying flat on our back or stomach. We can do so, but it is not as comfortable as lying on our sides.
Primate shoulders stick out past our head, so when we lay on our sides our heads are not lying flat on the ground (unlike dogs or cats for instance). The larger the primate the bigger the gap (monkeys have tiny shoulders and are very flexible so they can usually just shift their shoulder out of the way). Therefore to support our heads we need something to fill the gap between our shoulder and head.
Google "ape sleeping" and look at the pictures. You will see that apes also sleep on their sides with their arm under their head. | 2,523 |
ELI5: Where does the worm in the tequila bottle come from and what does it mean? | For Cinco De Mayo I guess. | 38 | I was told it was used to test the tequila. If the worm didn't die by the time it sank to the bottom then the tequila was a bad batch. You might think this is bullshit but we know that if this is upvoted enough it has to be true. | 27 |
ELI5: Do spiders get stuck in the webs on other spiders? | For example, would spider species A get stuck in the web of spider species B? I know bigger spiders eat smaller ones, but how does the stickiness vary between types of spiders? | 35 | Spiders thread non-sticky threads into their webs that they use to traverse the web safely. Other species and even members of the same species can get stuck in the web. They can get stuck in their *own* webs if they fall or get startled, but will chew their way free. Spiders eat their damaged webs to recycle the proteins.
Spiders are generally cannibals and will happily take care of any brothers and sisters that stray into their web. | 37 |
[general] Villain here, seeking to do a redemption arc without dying. | So, i'm a pretty average villain.
I've been the rival of the hero while serving under an evil overlord, and have done many terrible things in order to bring the hero down.
Thing is, im starting to have second thoughts.
At this point, a redemption arc seems to be inevitable, eventually. But i'm not stupid. I know that redemption equals death more often than not. And i don't exactly wish to die just yet.
So i ask you. How can i pull it off while being guarenteed to survive this? Heck, im fine with becoming the hero's lancer or even a third party if need be. | 25 | Be snarky, brooding and wear a leather jacket. Have lots of sexual tension with the hero (Bonus points if your both dudes). Have a pretty awful childhood and/or have your old love interest be killed by angry civilians and/or be enslaved by the evil overlord. Something sympathetic.
Do all these things and you might die in your redemption quest but the sheer power of this concept called fangirl rage from beyond a thing called the fourth wall will give you a very high probability of coming back to life. | 34 |
[Dragonball Z] Why didn't the Gohan from future Trunk's time line ever get angry and transform into Super Saiyan 2 like he did against Cell? | 76 | He never had the extra training from his father to help him refine his powers. It's likely that what should have triggered his SSJ2 form was only the trigger for his SSJ form, since his father was not around to train him to be a SSJ and refine his control over the form. | 71 |
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