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How is a mosquito proboscis physically capable of puncturing human skin? | Human skin should be way too dense and strong for something so small and fragile like a mosquito. How is this possible? | 502 | It uses two maxillas to cut its way into the skin so the fascicle can enter while the labium remains on the surface of the skin.
Think two little rotary saws that cut their way into you while a syphon gets slowly lowered down.
Its not even a puncture at the scale the mosquito is working at. | 526 |
[Terminator] How did John Connor start the human resistance in the first timelines? | So, John was born 1984/85, and the first judgement day occursed in august 4 1997. So, when judgement day happend, John would be 12 years old. So, how did a little kid start a resistance? Or, did Sarah survive as well and raised him in the postapocalypic hellscape, and he started it much later? (which would mean less people still surviving) Or did Sarah start anything? | 26 | In the original timeline, Sarah Connor survived Judgement Day. She was killed by terminators in Buenos Aires in 2012, leaving John Connor to fend for himself. John himself was transferred to a work camp in San Francisco and there met Kyle Reese. He rallied his fellow prisoners, taught them how to fight their camp guards and with them form TechCom, the core of the Resistance against Skynet. | 43 |
ELI5: Why do some people like the taste of something but someone else detests it? For example, Coffee. I hate the taste of it but my girlfriend loves it. | 26 | A few major elements play into things we like the taste of.
* There have been studies that what a woman eats while pregnant can affect the flavors that the baby prefers once they start eating solid food.
* From the time we start eating solid food until we're able to reliably walk on our own, we're built to largely trust whatever our parents feed us as being good and whatever that tastes like gets coded in our brains as "good". This is also the phase of life when we'll put pretty much anything within reach into our mouths.
* As a toddler, a general resistance to trying new foods kicks in. Some think this is to keep kids who can now wander off, but don't yet have any good judgment, from eating things that aren't safe.
* There's a general, built-in bias in our taste that treats sweet as inherently good, bitter as unsafe until proven otherwise, sour as a toss-up, but safer than bitter.
* After that point, anything that doesn't make us sick and has caloric value CAN taste good. If you eat something and your body detects good calories afterward, it will associate that flavor as good. This is what we mean when we use the phrase "acquired taste". You can literally make yourself like something by loading it up with calories and choking it down often enough.
So, for something like coffee, if your mom drank a lot when you were in the womb, you might be pre-disposed to like it a bit. Then, if you put enough cream and sugar in it (load it with calories), you might fairly quickly train your taste to disregard the bitter and view it as tasty. This is also the idea behind covering veggies in cheese sauce. Though, the greater our initial dislike of something, the more of this kind of training would be required to start liking it.
In fact, this whole system can be up-ended as well. When calories are supplied to the body without any flavor present (tube feeding for example), the body's appetite shuts down and drops to a really low level.
Because we all have a complicated combination of all of those things, we all tend to like a different blend of things. | 31 |
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ELI5:How does your ping, download speed, and upload speed come together to create your internet experience. | Currently I have 9 ping and 100 download/239 upload speeds. I don't understand why I still have to wait for some videos to buffer before watching them. My previous was set up was 1.5/14/5 yet it felt almost the same in terms of speed.
Edit: I forgot the question mark in title | 20 | Download is the maximum speed that you will receive data, like videos, from sites on the internet. For large files this is the most important quantity.
Upload is the maximum speed that you will be able to send data. For most people this isn't terribly important since you aren't uploading a lot of files. It would affect things like the speed at which you can attach a file to an email.
Ping is going to vary from site to site. It's essentially how long it takes between when you ask for data from a website and when it can start to reply, and it correlates pretty closely with geographic distance to the server. For the most part you can ignore ping, but if you're playing a fast-paced game then it starts to be important.
It's important to realize that these speeds are the maximum that you will see, but you could see lower. It's quite possible that the server that you're trying to download things from is overloaded and can't keep up with everyone at once. If the server can only send you data at 10 MBit/s then it doesn't matter if your home connection will let you download at 100 MBit/s, the same way that attaching a firehose to your kitchen sink doesn't make the water come out any faster. | 15 |
[Sunless Sea] Since hell exists and is a tangible place you could go to for vacation, does that imply heaven is a tangible place as well? Are any religions in universe "right?" | 37 | "Hell" is a colony of bees in human suits that fashions itself after the christian hell for reasons inscrutable to Londoners, not the theological christian hell. They collect souls because >!The judgements think human souls are delicious!<, not to punish sinners.
People don't really die in the Neath, so there's nothing "after death" down there. On the surface, the sun ( a judgement / god) has total control over what happens when humans die. We don't have a canonical answer for what earth's sun in specific does, but an eternal reward is unlikely >!because human souls are delicious. The only functioning afterlife we ever see in game is the Blue Kingdom in Sunless skies, and it's all an elaborate procession towards NOM NOM NOM!<. | 33 |
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ELI5: Why will my phone disconnect from my own personal 4bar wifi and connect to an open 2 bar wifi without being prompted? | 65 | One thing to keep in mind...and this annoys the hell out of me...
The number of bars you have is indicative of how strong the SIGNAL strength to the router is - not necessarily how strong or fast the connection to the internet is. You could be connected to a router that has one bar and will load faster than the router with 5 bars depending on internet speeds the respective router is connected to. | 17 |
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CMV: The conservative movement in America is becoming detached from reality. |
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Right-wingers in the U.S. seem to be drifting further and further into their own alternative version of reality.
They have rejected science for a long time now (evolution, young earth, global warming is a hoax, biodiversity is unimportant etc).
Academia in general is dismissed. Universities are said to have a liberal bias, especially all studies of the arts.
The media is the latest to be rejected. All mainstream media is "untrustworthy" and blogs and youtube are taken at face value, despite the fact that mainstream media actually has fact checking and accountability.
The thing is, if you reject science, academics and the media as sources of information, what are you left with? Your own version of reality, which bears no relationship to the real world. | 49 | Well this is as a pretty liberal guy, both the left and the right are becoming more and more detached from reality. The social conservatives of America are really detached from the realities at play, but the economic conservatives tend to be pretty understanding of business motivations and free market economics. There is a reason most economists tend to lean more right in policy proposals.
But at the same time academia does have a ton of problems going on right now, especially in the humanities and many of the soft sciences. Many of them no longer really aim for objectivity, but pursue political aims. This problem is less prevalent in hard sciences since the scientific method is more valued; but in soft sciences critical theory is more commonly found than critical thought.
The media currently does have problems as well, mainly brought by the 24 hour news cycle and the constant need for views, but it has degraded journalism to talking heads.
So yeah have social conservatism become fairly detached from reality, yeah. But so have some socially progressive movements. So have some parts of academia, so have some parts of the media. Its a problem across society at the moment, and sadly the people most deluded tend to be the loudest. But currently there are movements in the left, and the right, in academia, and in the media trying to bring everyone back to a more realistic basis. | 41 |
[Superheroes] What's the difference between super speed and being able to stop time? | Thinking back on the famous Quicksilver scene in the new X-Men, it really seemed like he had more time manipulation than super speed. It would be one thing if he accelerated and time slowed down the faster he went, but time actually slowed when he was standing still, before he'd even started to move.
Likewise, in Heroes, when Hiro first encounters Daphne, she moves fast enough to not be frozen by him stopping time (and yet she can't outrun a nuclear explosion, but that's a different issue). Once again, this isn't just when she's moving, because she stands around, hangs out and talks with him. | 42 | "Super-speed" is actually a whole series of possibly-related powers. It's kind of vague what it actually means. Some of these powers are best emulated with more general time-manipulation powers. For example, a speedster usually has some or all of:
* Accelerated thought: Speed is useless without the coordination to steer it.
* Super-toughness: The human body can't survive those forces unprotected.
* Super-stamina: Similarly, you need an extra energy source. 2500 calories per day aren't going to be enough.
* Ground anchor: Or whatever you want to call it. The power to make 20G hairpin turns, and neither go skidding across the road like it's an ice rink, nor leave inch-deep footprints in concrete. Related, the ability to run "normally" at speeds where gravity should be almost negligible.
* Super-aerodynamics: Once your speed starts being measured in Mach numbers, you ought to leave some serious whirlwinds in your wake. If your speed's *relativistic*, you might even ignite the air as you pass.
Breaking the fourth wall for a moment, it's hard to come up with a consistent way to make super-speed someone's "only" power. If you can take a raindrop to the face at 20km/s, bullets really shouldn't faze you that much even if you don't dodge them.
Our intuition for how super-speed works means that there are really two basic ways of approaching the super-speed powerset: either as part of a "flying brick" package, with flight and super-strength, like Superman. Or as part of a "time master" package, with a small pocket of accelerated time around the user creating the effect of super-speed, like Hiro. | 51 |
Why is there an explicit line between Phase 3 and roll out of a vaccine? | With the technology of today (ease of internet access, video medicine, and smart watches, etc), Why is there an explicit "end of Phase 3 Trials"? Shouldn't it just be "begin Phase 3a" at whatever rate the vaccine can be produced, and include placebos, continue to add new phase 3a patients at the dose production rate. When the number of cases in the placebo group have become sufficient to determine efficacy and the efficacy is good move to phase 3b, just continue administering doses of the real vaccine and no more placebo, could we have been at about 10 million people vaccinated by now? When your confidence reaches a certain level, discontinue asymptomatic monitoring that requires one-to-one medical staff, and discontinue smart watch requirements, but encourage patients to continue log data if they wish. Also reduce the patient acceptance requirements. For this particular incident, the explicit dividing line between Phase 3 and rollout is costing 1000-2000 lives a day. | 3,254 | The consent process for an approved vaccine is different from clinical trial consent. One is for an experimental product and volunteers consent to taking on this risk versus a product that has had regulatory review and had a full data analysis for safety and efficacy based on the phase 1-3 trials. Also there is the issue of once it’s approved, ideally doses should be distributed equitably and effectively ie in trials they often go to young healthy volunteers whereas once approved many countries are prioritizing elderly/nursing homes etc. There is some flexibility in trial designs in some cases eg combined phase 1/2 trials and open label extensions for some pharmaceuticals but the process of regulatory approval is a safety mechanism to ensure unsafe products aren’t distributed to 1000s of people | 1,277 |
How did Schopenhauer influence existentialism? | Schopenhauer believed that the noumenal, universal Will manifests itself in humans as lower-case will, and because the grand Will has no purpose/way to be satisfied is he saying that humans have no purpose/ultimate satisfaction? Is this how he lays the foundations for existentialism? | 40 | It's less that Schopenhauer himself was an immediate influence on existentialism as much as that he was an immediate influence on a philosopher who was an immediate influence on existentialism: Friedrich Nietzsche. And it's not quite right to describe Nietzsche as merely influenced by Schopenhauer's philosophy as Nietzsche's philosophy, in very real ways, was a continuation, correction, and repudiation of aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy.
Whereas Schopenhauer saw will to live as the driving force of all living things and, as inspired by Buddhism (though important to note *not* the view of Buddhism wrt nirvana), called for a denial of the will; Nietzsche saw the will to power as the driving force of all living things and called for an affirmation of life and will.
It's this register of affirmation in the face of suffering, doubt, freedom, the absurd, etc. that existentialism comes out of. Existentialism is, in an indirect way, a response to Schopenhauer's pessimism. | 30 |
Why do some whales have a hip and others don't? | I was looking at a skeleton of a whale and saw that it had a hip, but when I looked at the same species of whale that was alive it didn't appear to use it's hip | 15 | Hip bones in whales are "vestigial" structures. They are evolutionary remnants from land-based ancestors of whales. As the cow-like predecessors of whales became more and more aquatic and used their hand legs less and less, they shrunk down to make the whale more hydrodynamic. When they got to their current size, there was presumably no further advantage to them being smaller, and so they remain as vestigial organs. | 13 |
[Batman] Does Two-Face use the coin to decide whether or not to wash his hands after going to the bathroom? | 703 | He only uses the coin for what he'd deem to be an important decision, and more specifically, an important decision that he'd have two minds about. Like, drinking water is technically important but he doesn't flip a coin on the matter, he has no conflict about the action. Whether or not to have a snack mid-afternoon isn't very important at all, even if he's conflicted about the matter, so he probably won't flip a coin but will just choose one way or the other like a regular person. | 546 |
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[Charlie and the chocolate factory] Did Wonka plan on the mishaps of the 4 kids? What would he have done if some “traps” didn’t go as planned? Would he have given the factory to the snobby kids? | Those songs do seem very rehearsed and not at all impromptu.
Bonus question: Is Oompa Loompa land real? If so where is it and why has no one else found it? | 46 | To be fair to Wonka, the majority of those accidents involved the kids deliberately circumventing reasonable safety measures. He's still partially at fault, maybe even criminally negligent, but he didn't set out to murder anyone. Also, Violet would have done a better job than Charlie. | 15 |
[Ghostbusters] What would've happened if Vigo successfully transferred himself into Oscar's body? | Let's just say the 'Busters are not let out of the asylum,or NY is particularly pissed that day no matter what.What happens? | 33 | First, he kills Dana Barrett as she would always be a threat to him. He orders Dr. Poha to arrange for him to be adopted by a powerful political family. Using his powers, he creates an army of servants who work to pave the way for his eventual takeover of the world. | 13 |
ELI5: how come food gets utterly obliterated by stomach acid, yet stuff such as bacteria and parasites that cause food poisoning doesn’t? | 22 | Most do, but only a very small number of bacteria need to make it to the intestines to start multiplying again and produce ill effects.
Actually the impressive part is probably how many bacteria your stomach acid *does* blitz every day and how rarely pathogenic bacteria do make it through!
Also some food poisoning (such as from rice) isn’t caused by bacteria, but by toxins which the bacteria have already produced, and which don’t get destroyed in the stomach. | 40 |
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[Star Trek & others] Are there any scientifically plausible situations where 'reversing the polarity' could actually save the day? | 58 | Simple DC electric motors will spin in the opposite direction when you reverse the direction in which current is flowing through them. If your control system uses such motors and the disaster is due to them having spun too far in one direction, just reverse the polarity to set things right. | 49 |
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ELI5: How does shining a specific light on your teeth for a half an hour at a time actually whiten your teeth? | 35 | The LED teeth whitening light will not make your teeth whiter however it will accelerate the teeth whitening gel typically applied before the light is applied. The after effect is the light causes the gel to react quicker when breaking down tough to fight stains. | 13 |
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ELI5:why did older cars and trucks have the high beam switch on the floorboard. | Was there ever an advantage/reason for this? | 328 | The high beam and starter switches use large physical relays that used to be operated directly because they control lots of current and are too heavy to conveniently flip with your fingers.
The invention of solenoid switches made it possible to control high-current devices with much lighter stalk-mounted switches -- the large relays are still present but elsewhere. | 203 |
[Wolverine] If wolverine can heal so fast can he get drunk? | I have always wondered that with such a high metabolic rate, can wolverine get drunk? Wouldn't it wear off super quick? Also where is all the extra tissue coming from when he grows shit back? | 46 | He can get drunk. (or high, or tranquilized, or whatever) It just takes a massive dose and wears off almost immediately. His healing factor makes most toxins just bounce off his metabolism.
He drinks (and smokes) because he likes it, not out of any drug high or addiction, and because it can't hurt him. Downside: coffee doesn't work either, which is probably why he's always so cranky. | 37 |
[Michael Bay's Transformers] Why did the Decepticons give up on trying to extract the knowledge of the AllSpark from Sam's brain? Did they forget or was it not worth pursuing anymore? | Am I the only one who remembers? There was a whole
plot thread in TF2 where the Fallen was attempting to
kidnap Sam Witwicky and get the AllSpark's power and
knowledge from him.
Megatron knew this too, so why did he stop going after him after his leader perished?
The stuttering idiot literally has a blueprint of one of the
most powerful artefacts in Cybertronian history. In. His.
Brain! | 87 | Megatron has his chance in the 2007 events, everything after that he was a lackey to someone else or events were moving too quickly to capture and lobotomize Sam. He was following the Fallen's plan of extracting energy from the Sun using the info inside Sam's head as a lead, but after the death of Optimus Sam escapes - everything following that likely moves too fast to try and capture Sam again before half his face is blown off by an SR71-powered Optimus.
Then in 3 he's sulking in the desert while Spock tries to bring Cybertron to Earth and dies shortly after that. After that, his body is dissected until he's reformed/resurrected using """""Tranformium"""""", but aside from his hate for Optimus its hard to say how much of his memories and such are even left, and Sam is likely dead by that point too | 36 |
[Marvel] Can Bruce Banner claim new clothing as a business expense? | He rips up any clothing he's wearing when he becomes the Hulk and being a superhero is an occupation of sorts. | 17 | Sure it's an occupation of sorts, but not in the ways that matter when it comes to claiming things as business expenses. That is, no one actually pays him to be a superhero. He just randomly goes into rages and coincidentally does good things. | 20 |
Those tree-dwelling cicadas that make such a racket all the time - aren't they basically advertising their location to all nearby predators? How do they survive? | Are there just too many of them? Or they aren't prey for many other creatures? I would have expected that birds, bats, possums, etc. would eat them... | 42 | They get eaten in droves. That's why many species reproduce in intervals based on prime numbers. That way each species explodes at once without interfering with one another. There are simply so many that predators cannot eat them all.
In the tropics (I saw this in Costa Rica) cicadas don't use the prime number burst strategy because there are already so many insects and frogs chirping all the time that there is no need for the prime number years used by temperate species. | 26 |
ELI5: Why is human memory so unreliable? | Inspired by [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/g2csg5/what_fact_is_ignored_generously/fnlesbi?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share) comment by u/squigs, I came here to ask you: Why we can't remember details of things and, in most of the times, we make up things to fill the gaps on our memory.
Why does our brain do this? | 61 | Our brain isn't like a database. For most people and most events, you don't remember the exact details but rather a collection of memory fragments. When you recall a memory, your brain pieces these fragments back together to recreate the memory. Also, our brain loves patterns as it saves time learning each and every new thing when instead you can just fit new information as generalizations into some schema you've already learned.
These generalizations allows us to do a few things. You can imagine things you've never seen which can be fun when daydreaming or acting. But it also has some drawbacks in that we can be influenced to mix memories with imagination in ways that we really believe the memory to be authentic. Perhaps a sibling and you are recalling memories and your sibling injects some detail that wasn't accurate. But if the injection was believable to you, you may very well reconstruct your memory in a way that adds the faulty details, believing it to be true. Or a more sinister example would be of people gaslighting, causing a person to doubt their own memories and work in details fabricated by the manipulative person. Or it can be self-inflicted, telling yourself that something is or is not true over and over, looking for any evidence to support your desired belief and ignoring anything to the contrary until you really believe it. | 37 |
ELI5: Why has the price of higher education skyrocketed in the US, and who is profiting from it? | 1,348 | To add onto jeezfrk's comment:
Price is controlled by what the market is willing to pay. If someone is paying cash, then they usually can't afford to pay that much.
1. In steps the Government, with the best of intentions offering guaranteed student loans and "free money".
2. Suddenly a lot of people can afford the product, demand goes up for a limited amount of product (seats in class)
3. Colleges raise prices to lower demand and increase ~~profits~~ spending ability (stadiums, coaches, etc)
4. G'ment sees that the loans are no longer adequate and increases the amounts they'll loan.
5. Go to Step 2
Of course, we're reaching a point where people are questioning if the product (college education) is worth the cost, and quite a few people are saying "nope!" Depending on the field, ROI is pretty shitty, really.
Same basic thing happened with health costs, Insurance made "free money", so people didn't have to think about what it would cost them and the prices lost their downward pressure.
Edit: Fuuuuuck. So this is what it's like being a top comment... | 743 |
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CMV: I don't think things like sexuality, ethnicity or nationality should be a source of pride because they are involuntary, not an achievement. | You don't things like your sexuality, ethnicity and nationality, so they are not an achievement and therefore nothing to be proud of.
I don't necessarily disagree with events like Gay Pride, because part of the reason it exists is because it is a symbol of overcoming years of homosexuality being illegal or considered morally reprehensible, but I strongly disagree with the mindset of being proud of your sexuality, because it suggests that it is superior to other sexualities, or that it is an achievement and neither of those things are true.
The same applies to being proud of your nationality because if you come from a country with a history of being technologically or politically advanced, it means you are vicariously proud of the achievements of other people.
It would be like saying you're proud of your street because a doctor who has saved countless lives lives there.
EDIT: I do understand people being satisfied with their country of residence and appreciating the good things that come with living there, but that shouldn't equate to pride, and the same goes for sexuality.
| 861 | I think this is a semantics thing. When people talk of being proud to be gay, the essentially mean they are not ashamed, but phrased in an even more positive light. Saying "im not ashamed" acknowledges that in some people's view there might be something to be ashamed of. Saying "im proud" removes that. It doesn't necessarily mean they consider it an achievement. | 674 |
I think any pictures of someone using or possessing a illegal substance (or minors in places like bars) posted to social media should be admissible as proof for them to be arrested. CMV | Any picture posted to social media (FB/Twitter/Instagram, etc.) that depicts someone using an illegal substance or showing a minor possessing alcohol or inside of a bar with drinks in their hands should be grounds for arrest. I constantly see people posting pictures showing off their weed and high school kids inside very popular bars in my town and think it should at the very least be grounds to give a citation/fine or arrest. CMV | 15 | You probably see pictures of 'hand rolled cigarretes' or 'cigars', or maybe 'bongs'. That is no evidence of any illegal substance which may or may not be present. The alcohol is trickier. Maybe the fact that it 'looks like' beer or a 'shot of liquor' is not definitive evidence that there's indeed alcohol there. There is non-alcoholic beer. Unlikely, yes, but provides reasonable doubt nonetheless. | 15 |
[Doctor Strange MCU] Thank you all for stopping me from pledging my allegiance to Dormammu. I still have another question. The Ancient One basically leads a cult where she is unquestionable. Why should I follow her teachings when she herself draws from the Dark Dimension? | 81 | The Ancient One is not unquestionable. It's just that she's usually right about things — centuries (probably) of experience will tend to do that — so people inherently trust her. But if you have a problem with some aspect of her teachings or whatnot, you are allowed to question them.
As for her drawing power from the Dark Dimension, there was little more than a few minute gap between when that issue was revealed and when she was killed — and the only students of hers who knew about it (and weren't already allied with Dormammu) were Mordo, Wong, and Strange. Where are you getting this information? | 46 |
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ELI5 why people call cities in different countries by different names e.g. London -> Londres | Surely it's just London? Or Roma? Or Lisboa?
Why the different names? | 22 | Firstly, the names go back so far that they have evolved in both languages since first usage. London used to be Londinium or Lundinium, and was commonly called Lundin or Londin prior to becoming London.
The first usage of place names was often by mariners, who would convey the name verbally. Londres in French sounds similar to how the English said Lundin. That's the main theory.
Other places you get different spellings to accommodate the common phonetic spelling in various languages. Consider Den Haag / The Hague / La Haya.
Also, sometimes we alter a place name to make it conform more with our respective languages. Lisbon / Lisboa or Milan / Milano. | 21 |
ELI5: How does exercise boost energy levels? | 9,703 | Regular exercise makes your muscles and your heart stronger. When you're stronger, it takes less effort to finish your regular day-to-day tasks. This makes it seem like you have more energy leftover after doing your regular tasks. This goes for intentional physical activities as well as just being alive (I.e. having a beating heart).
It may help to think of this in reverse. If you're in great shape, you get used to doing a lot during the day. If you were suddenly out of shape, you'd have difficulty keeping up with your former, fit self. | 4,854 |
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[Star Wars] Why does the Empire even bother using walkers, when they clearly have hover technology? | So as we’ve seen, walkers (AT-AT, AT-ST) are kind of top-heavy and vulnerable to being tripped. Never mind the fact that the very high profile makes them really hard to conceal. Generally, in contemporary warfare, you want armored vehicles to have as low of a profile as possible.
So why bother even having walkers, when you can just use hover tanks or other vehicles using repulsorlift technology?
The only practical reason I can see for having walkers would be the psychological impact it has on your enemies.
But I cannot imagine that that outweighs all of the serious drawbacks. | 22 | The Empire ruled on fear alone. They had the power to beat a system or two into submission fairly easily, but the Galaxy is made of millions, if not billions, of systems. The idea behind the AT-AT was it was huge and shook the ground as it walked by. Taking out a tank that’s closer to the size of a large speeder doesn’t seem that scary or impossible but having a building size tank bearing down on you would terrify most people. | 49 |
[HP] why did the dead eaters retreat after they saw the dark mark in goblet of fire | In goblet of fire the dead eaters attacked the World Cup. But when they saw the dark mark they retreated.
Like isn’t that their logo? Why would they retreat after seeing it if anything I must have encouraged them. | 23 | Arthur explains (in that same chapter, IIRC) that most of the Death Eaters running around that night were drunk idiots re-living their "glory days." None of them were loyalists, they'd be more terrified than most to come face-to-face with Voldemort. Which is why the individual who conjured the Mark did so: To remind people (and those Death Eaters specifically) that there *were* still loyalists. | 53 |
[ATLA] How were soldiers chosen for Zuko's ship after he was exiled? Were they volunteers who were loyal to him over the Fire Lord? Could they return to the Fire Nation or were they banished too? | 572 | In the hundred years that the Fire Nation had been trying, and failing, to find the Avatar, the search itself became largely ceremonial. Ozai didn't invent this wild goose chase just for Zuko, it was already ongoing and he just made completing it the requirement for Zuko's return. A token force was already assigned to the task, Zuko was just put in charge of it and when his uncle went along his name brought some volunteers who could probably have found a more glamorous posting if they'd tried.
They eventually came to respect Zuko, when he risked his own life to save a member of the crew, but this was after coming to resent him for putting their lives in danger to find the Avatar in the first place. | 334 |
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ELI5: Torque? | Whats the difference between torque & kilowatts? For instance when looking at the power in a car. | 121 | Torque is angular force. It's how hard you can twist something.
Kilowatts is the total power output, which is how hard you can twist something and how many times you can twist it.
For instance, if you were shoveling mud, torque would be how much mud you can lift in your shovel, rpm would be how many times per minute you can lift the shovel, and kilowatts (or horsepower, which is just 1 hp =0.76 kw) is how much mud you can move overall, which is the product of the two. So if your shovel holds 5kg of mud, and shovel it 45 times per minute, your mud output is 225 kg per minute. Or, if your shovel holds 25kg of mud, and you shovel it 9 times per minute, you'd also have a 225kg per minute output. | 99 |
[DC] Can Beast Boy turn into hybrid beings? | Can he transform into, e.g. a liger? What about alien hybrids, like a Kryptonian-Martian? | 44 | Yes. If it exists, and if it's an animal, he can transform into it. That said, it probably needs to be a creature that he knows exists (or once existed). He can't just make up theoretical hybrids and transform into them. So if a Kryptonian-Martian hybrid does exist out there, and Garfield is aware of them, he'll be able to take their form. | 32 |
Can anyone explain the aspect from quantum theory that gives the possibility that if I throw a ball at a wall, there's a one in a gazzilion chance that it will go through the wall? | 43 | There's not really any *single* aspect of quantum physics that could interpreted that way. Rather, there are a variety of paths you can take that lead you to that place.
For example, consider the ball-wall system as a metaphor for a particle on one side of a potential "wall." It's possible, under the right circumstances, for the particle to appear spontaneously on the other side of the "wall." This is called quantum tunneling, and it's essentially the basis of … well, *chemistry,* really. So it's rather a big deal.
Or you can think of the ball-wall interaction as a scattering process. When a particle gets into a situation in which it can scatter off something, there exists a probability that it *won't* scatter, and instead will just pass right by as if the thing weren't there at all. So in a sense, all the particles in your ball could just *fail* to interact with the wall, thus slipping through it like smoke through a piece of cloth.
Then there's the uncertainty principle. The momentum and position of a particle are Fourier transforms of each other. That means when the momentum is highly localized to a specific value, the position of the particle is spread out over all of space. Which means there exists some probability of detecting the particle a squillion miles from where it was one instant ago.
But it's important to remember that macroscopic things — where macroscopic isn't rigidly defined, but instead is really rather circularly defined — don't behave that way. An electron will tunnel readily out of a potential well. A cricket ball will not tunnel through a cricket bat, no matter how hard the batter protests that he *really did* hit it. | 62 |
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[Pretty much everything] Why are bad guys so weak? | I'm a hero fighting some enemies. I'm a freaking one man army and the rare occasion that I'm down I use my immense willpower to rise back up and defeat any threat that I face.
Why is this just me, a few high ranking baddies and most heroes? Why is there no low ranking mook that has the willpower to put up a fight? Why do these low ranking grunts fall like flies if you glance in their general direction? | 26 | Your humility is admirable, but let's not kid ourselves. These guys are in it for a paycheck and they've just been to the 2 day seminar on henchcraft. They got their outfit, they got a nice slideshow about subduing trespassers, but the air con was playing up, people were getting antsy and you never *really* get the full experience without a bit of practical application of technique.
Meanwhile we know you've been training in Loot Bo Den since you were 13, were a collegiate athlete and hold a mean grudge when you get going.
Most jobsworth employees can't stand up to that. They don't want to channel their inner spirit, focus their chi, and take you out. They didn't see you coming, they never saw you leave, they'll stay down and out, pretending to be unconscious, until you leave them alone and they can go rest their battered and weary bodies in a scented bubble bath.
Now people with more of an investment up the ladder, yes, they will give as good as they get. That's where you'll find your real resistance. Prior to that, you're just too well prepared and they're just grunt employees. You're basically wearing your "I want to see the manager" haircut and they're just till staff waiting for the problem to go away. | 48 |
About Schopenhauer’s Opinion of Suicide | A few days ago, I read “Parerga and Paralipomena”. (In Japan, there is a book which focuses on several part of Parerga and Paralipomena, and I read the book titled “On Suicide”)
His narrative was very beautiful and I was very impressed. However, one question remained, “In the end, did he allow people to suicide?”
I wonder whether he thought that suicide should be allowed or not and I cannot sleep well without night. Could you tell me the answer? | 109 | I think he believed that people have the freedom to end their own lives. He even acknowledged that the "terrors of life could reach the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death." He respected that humans could make this choice. But at the same time, he did not see it as anything noble:
"Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment—a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to an answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer." | 125 |
ELI5: Why are dogs so nice? Why do they have an innate tendency to love and play with people/animals? | 21 | Two reasons:
1. We've bred them that way. Dogs are the result of between 15,000 and 100,000 years of breeding by humans.
2. They started out as pack animals, and in breeding we've only increased this instinct. Knowing their position is really important to a dog. Rising up in 'rank' and being the leader is certainly important to them, but inhabiting a safe position is even more important, even if it is the bottom one. So in a normal human - dog relationship, the dog will perceive the human(s) as socially higher up the ladder and therefore to be obeyed and appeased. When dogs bite other people, they will perceive that victim as a threat to 'their' pack. When dogs bite their owners, it is often in defense because their owners are abusive, or because they perceive their handler as weak and challenge their position. Leg-humping or leash-pulling are less severe symptoms of a dog who thinks he socially outranks somebody. Striking a balance between the two extremes - being an authority to the dog but not abusive - is not so hard but you'd be surprised how many people get it wrong. | 52 |
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[Harry Potter] What would have happened if Harry hadn't taken part in the Triwizard Tournament? | I know that it is a binding magical contract, but I can't find anywhere what would've happened to Harry if he decided not to participate? | 20 | We don't know. It's never explained. But given that the entire faculty and Ministry of Magic nevertheless let/forced Harry to participate, we can infer that violation was either impossible or that the consequences for doing so were more severe than anything that could have (reasonably) happened in the course of the Tournament. | 21 |
1 year post-doc with very little to show: How do I recover? | Long story short, after doing my phd in quantitative genetics in EU, I was offered a 3 year contract at a prestigious research institute in the UK. Chance of my life, I took it, uprooted my family to move to a new country, and blew my chance.
After 13 months of research, I have produced exactly 0 results. Various intermediate results and what not, but nothing publishable. My PI put me on a Performance Improvement Programme, which I am not entirely sure what covers, but there is a fair chance I will be made redundant. I have nobody to blame but myself.
All my current research projects were scrapped, and I am temporarily been relocated to another group to do a bit of trivial research. At least this is something I can manage, but current results seem mundane...
If I get fired, I will naturally need to apply for something else. But how do I sell myself? My current PI will not be able to make any recommendations, other than confirming my employment, my faith in myself as a researcher is in absolute shambles, I am not able to conduct research independently.
What should I prioritize for the next couple of months? What can I possible tell a future employer to convince them why they should hire a failure?
A bit of background: If I get fired without any jobs in sight, I will move back to Denmark. Part of the reason I failed my current research was that I did not have the necessary abilities to solve the problem, and due to my family, could not engage long working hours. | 36 | If you are looking for a new position with less than 2 years of postdoc experience, the people hiring you will start off thinking that you and your PI didn't work well together. Could be personality, funding, or research difficulties. You will have to explain it on your next interview.
Failing happens in science. Figure out why:
* Was the project done correctly?
* Was the overall hypothesis wrong?
* Are you able to interpret the data?
* Did your PI sign off on your project? If she did, you both failed together.
If this is a work life balance problem, then you should find another position where you don't have to kill yourself 14 hours a day in the lab as *you don't want to have that lifestyle.*
To sell yourself you should rock the current project you have and see if there is a PI there that can give you a recommendation. | 15 |
ELI5: What is machine learning and how does it work? | 24 | Machine learning is a discipline that develops algorithms to get computers (aka thinking machines) to learn without having to be explicitly taught.
It works very similar to the way our brains work.
When you are born, your brain is a blank slate, and is hard wired to detect common patterns and associations.
You guess at what something is, and that guess is either validated or invalidated.
For example, imagine a 1 or 2 year old learning about animals. She says "What's that" and you say "cat".
Now, anything with fur and 2 ears is a cat, so when she sees a dog, she says "cat!". You say "No, that is a dog". And another piece to the pattern emerge, and the child eventually understands the concept of "animal" versus "cat"
In the same way, machine learning systems are programmed to discern patterns and associations, and essentially learn through trial and error by being given tons of data, images, words, etc, and it "learns" through that process. | 14 |
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ELI5: Why do viruses often kill or weaken their host (humans, animals, etc.)? Wouldn't they want their host to live as long as possible so they could survive as long as possible? | 582 | They're not self aware. They're essentially different codes of RNA that lock into receptors on host cells and produce a negative outcome when that cells processes are messed with by the new code. The bad ones we know about are just "lucky" enough to have won the genetic lottery to where they happened to end up with genetic code that's makes them easily passed on, causing bad symptoms or death, etc. In fact the even luckier ones like herpes do exactly what you said, they last in the host indefinitely without killing it. But there is no malice, thought, or animal drive behind it. They're just tiny complex keys fitting into tiny complex locks and producing horrible effects when they match up with the right lock. | 470 |
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[WH40K] My fellow loyal subjects of The Emperor I ask you, who is our greatest enemy? The Xeno, the Mutant, or the Heretic? | 85 | The Heretic has an always be the greatest enemy. You may ally with the Xeno in dire straights, you may use the mutant who is loyal to the Emperor but the Heretic must be destroyed whenever and wherever they are found before their infection festers and spreads. | 135 |
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Why does a vaccine have to be injected through a needle? | If a virus, like Sars-Cov-2 can enter the body through orifices, why can't preventive medicine like vaccine? Wouldn't it be a whole lot nicer and easier to orchestrate if everyone could just get a nose spray "vaccine"? I'm sure if it were possible the brilliant minds of several scientists would've thought of it, so I know I'm not proposing something groundbreaking here, but I'm wondering why it is not possible. | 8,134 | Lots of reasons:
* The mRNA in the vaccine is much more fragile than the actual virus
* We need to carefully control dosage in order to maximize effectiveness while minimizing side effects. Injection allows much more fine tuning
* Hypodermic needles are cheap and universally available, which is a meaningful factor when trying to vaccinate billions of people quickly
* Nasal-spray vaccines are contraindicated for large slices of the population, especially those with breathing problems like asthma or the elderly—i.e., some of the most important people to vaccinate against COVID-19 | 8,705 |
If a father has cancer (specifically testicular) at the time of conception, does this have any ramifications for the child? | Would they have a higher chance of birth defects or having cancer themselves? | 696 | I came across a research paper investigating this exact question regarding fathers with testicular cancer. According to a study by Barbosa et. al of children fathered before the illness, during treatment for the condition, or after treatment, "no difference was detectable in the somatic and psychiatric status of the three groups, and development was well balanced, corresponding to age... the incidence of anomalies, abnormalities, malignancies, and other diseases was recorded. Incidence was similar in all three groups." (1)
In this sample group, the timing of conception relative to the progression of testicular cancer produced no significant difference in the child's health. This could suggest that aside from any heritable genetic predispositions to cancer that the father may have always had, which could potentially be inherited by the child, the somatic mutations which accumulate in the testicles have no readily identifiable effect on the child's well-being.
1. Babosa M, Baki M, Bodrogi I, Gundy S. A study of children, fathered by men treated for testicular cancer, conceived before, during, and after chemotherapy. Med Pediatr Oncol. 1994;22(1):33-8. | 416 |
[Contact], The Alien Species told Ellie that her trip was only a first step. What do you think the next step was? | When Ellie asks the Alien species if humans can come back for another trip, they say her trip was only a first step, and that's how it's been done for millions of years.
So, putting aside the idea that it was the billionaire all along, what do you think the next step humanity was supposed to take? | 28 | Step two is meant to be the return of humans to the wormhole network. Knowing humans, it is likely to be with either a fleet of ships or a redesigned pod capable of carrying a larger delegation.
The first visit was designed in such a way that it tests not only a society's ability to cooperate and build such a machine, but it tests faith and belief as well. The core concept is that only one person makes the trip and reports back home, with very little evidence.
In the book, the aliens told Ellie about a test *they* had passed when they discovered a pattern in the digits of pi. Apparently, if you calculate pi to some ridiculous number of digits (orders of magnitude more digits than we are currently capable of) a pattern of ones and zeroes appears. This implies that there was an intelligence involved in the creation of the universe, or at least the laws of physics we seem to be trapped within. It was likely the same intelligence that left the wormhole network.
The book also coins the term "numinous" as describing the feeling you get when you behold something greater than yourself. This is supposed to be the same feeling a religious person gets when they feel divine inspiration and when a scientist recognizes that their body is made of star stuff.
The implications are that human society is still in its infancy. We are an "interesting mix" of good and evil. There are also a lot of steps between us and whoever managed to put a binary code in pi. But just knowing that those steps exist could be the motivation we need to start climbing, however long it takes. | 17 |
[DCAU] Does the older Superman we see in the Batman Beyond episode, "The Call", still keep up his Clark Kent human identity? Does he still work as a reporter at the Daily Planet? Are Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen still around? | 55 | I doubt it. As seen in that episode, Superman hasn't aged much. If he was still working at the planet people would be suspicious.
Lois and Jimmy might still be around but they're senior citizens if still alive and not killed by misadventure | 43 |
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Do Iodine tablets prevent radiation sickness? | Saw Iodine being administered in two separate TV shows. Does it really help? How does it work? | 1,862 | Not exactly, a large amount of the radiation dose from a nuclear explosion comes in the form of a radioactive isotope of iodine. You take large doses of safe iodine and that means your thyroid won't absorb the radioactive one, and you'll just piss it out instead of ending up with a radioactive thyroid. | 2,371 |
ELI5: Does soap really clean us or does it just make us smell nice? | Is there such a thing as being truly clean? | 22 | To an extent, yes soap does clean us! Soap, which is called an emulsifying agent, works at a chemical level by breaking up the oil and grime into a more manageable size. They form what are called micelles, imagine a bubble with dirt and oil in it but miscroscopic, that suspend the oils and dirt on the surface of the skin in a way that they can be removed! | 11 |
ELI5: How do sniper rifle scopes work? | What are they made of? How can they magnify so far? | 17 | They contain little pieces of glass called lenses. These lenses take the light that enters the front of the scope and stretch it out. In the process of making the image bigger, the lenses flip the image upside down, so more lenses that flip the light right side up again are also inside the scope. Either a piece of thin filament or a laser etching on one of the lenses creates an image of a cross hair that overlays the magnified image. Some of the lenses are attached to swivels that you can adjust to make the crosshair match up with where the bullet will impact. The more precisely the lenses are manufactured (fewer surface errors, better concave and convex shaping) the more magnification will be possible without making the image fuzzy/dark. That's why some scopes are so expensive, the higher quality materials and manufacturing produce a higher quality image. | 10 |
Why does the government target 2% inflation rate instead of 0% inflation? | Googling this question, I think the common answer is that the government inflates the currency in order to entice us to spend money now, knowing that our cash will be worth less in the future. This apparently is good for the economy. Another answer is that deflation is bad because we will stop spending now if we know prices will drop in the future, and this is also apparently bad for the economy.
I'm not sure I follow. If I need to buy a $25K car, how is the threat of the currency inflating by 2% going to entice me to buy that car any more than my current desire to buy a car?
How will a 0% inflation target lead to deflation? Can't the fed just inflate the currency once this starts? Why would a 2% target not lead to deflation but while a 0% target would?
What other reasons are there for a 2% inflation target? Are there economists who believe a 0% inflation target is better? Do the majority of economists support the >0% inflation target? | 54 | Theoretically, Friedman argued that the optimum rate of inflation is actually negative. The logic of this is quite simple, though it obviously has a mathematical proof. The act of spending cash clearly has welfare benefits, so the goal of monetary policy should be to maximise those benefits, i.e. reduce the cost of cash. The cost of holding cash is very simply the nominal interest rate, which represents the risk-free return rate. But the real interest rate is determined by things like technology and culture, and is positive in the long run. If real interest rates are positive, and nominal interest rates are zero, then the optimal inflation rate must be negative. (Real interest rate = nominal interest rate - inflation rate)
Since then there have been a number of counter suggestions. One of the leading ones is the grease effect suggested by Tobin. Wages are very sticky downwards, if your boss cut your salary despite you having done nothing wrong, you would probably panic. However firms face business disruptions in both directions, so if a firm is underperforming in one year, it has no way to reduce costs short of firing people, which is bad for the firm, the employee, and the entire economy. Consequently, having some inflation gives all firms some flexibility, which creates some level of efficiency.
Another one relates to the zero lower bound. It is not possible to reduce nominal interest rates significantly below zero (yet), so in times of downturn, if your nominal interest rates are already at zero, then cutting them further would be impossible. This would have the effect of making the economy swing back and forth rather than allowing central banks to guide the economy on a stable path. Consequently, keeping inflation higher allows nominal interest rates to be higher, and gives more breathing room to central banks to tweak rates.
In fact, Ball argues that the inflation rate itself is completely inconsequential. As long as the volatility of the inflation rate is minimised, then individuals and firms have a pretty good idea of what prices are going to be like at any future point in time and can make all their investment or purchasing decisions based on that. Consequently, it might be more optimal to just have a reasonably high inflation rate that never changes in any year. | 36 |
ELI5 : How and why dies it rain diamonds on Neptune? | Where do the diamonds come from? What happens when they hit the ground? Do they get sucked back up in a perpetual cycle of raining and sucking? | 7,303 | > What happens when they hit the ground?
Just to answer this bit specifically, there’s no “ground” on Neptune. It’s a gas giant, so it’s mostly gas and then deeper towards the core the high pressure turns that gas into liquid. | 3,216 |
What would take longer: copying 1024 1MB files, or 1 1GB file? | If one of those takes longer than the other, why? | 32 | I'd imagine 1024 1MB files would take longer because you have to fetch file metadata as well as the actual file data. Plus, depending on how much data your buffer can transfer in a single block, you might have unused space in the buffer. | 40 |
[Mad Max Fury Road] Why does Max sound like such a.. Simpleton? | He rarely speaks and when he does it's nonsensical grunts. What's up with him? Have the flashback type things he has left him traumatised? | 162 | He's been isolated in the wastes for years. That, coupled with dehydration, malnourishment, and vivid nonsensical hallucinations has led to him losing a bunch of learned social skills that we take for granted | 292 |
CMV: Porn websites have lots of pedophile elements | Look at most of the actors you'll see on porn sites, they are young women who could pass for children. Absolutely vile.
The sites play into this with the "teen, young" categories. The titles also have shit like "young teen gets...."
It makes me feel ill, I do enjoy porn but this is a deal-breaker for me and the main reason why I'm not watching that shit.
I do feel lots of resentment for the older actors who actively have sex with these young looking women, how do they live with themselves?
Also, its highly likely that at some point, you have masturbated to an underage person on Porn sites. | 61 | > Look at most of the actors you'll see on porn sites, they are young women who could pass for children. Absolutely vile.
Children? Really? The majority of women in porn look like they're in their late teens/early twenties.
You know what actual pedophiles do? Watch actual children get raped on camera. **That's** vile. Equating porn with girls in their late teens who might well pass for below 18 with the people who film themselves sexually abusing children is absurd and takes away from both the real and absolutely vile problem of sexual abuse of children **and** the real problems that plague porn, like the exploitative behaviour of companies like girls do porn. | 83 |
[The Walking Dead] How bad is the zombie outbreak during the winter in the northern states? | Well I was outside shovel snow (again) in the great state of Minnesota and the thought popped into my head "how bad are the zombies here during the winter"? Especially in a year like this one where until recently the average high would be below zero. I know that a harsh winter would be hard on humans as well but because we can think I want to believe many well equipped Minnesotans would survive the winter during a zombie outbreak. | 21 | Zombies aren't easy to kill. If one gets buried, yeah, it'll be gone until it thaws... and then it will be back unless it was crushed. Unless people go around finishing off snow-covered zombies, they'll return later. | 12 |
ELI5: Why does my iPhone struggle to load a 2 min youtube video, but streams Netflix seamlessly? | 37 | There are differences between Netflix and Google/YouTube. One is a paid subscription one is a free ad sponsored site. The subscription based Netflix has all the episodes spooled up and ready to go on each server - they know exactly what to anticipate prior to release. That being said, even their House of Cards and Orange is the new Black etc. on release day are subject to massive peak usage and that's hard to scale. YouTube appears to propagate videos differently. Every time you watch a relatively obscure video, or something that hits the 301+ mark can bring traffic congestion/slow speed serving up an unexpected video.
To cut some people off at the pass, the reason ads are so flawlessly delivered is because 1) Money. Ads aren't free, someone pays directly for them, Google has a vested interest in serving them up quick. 2) there's thousands pre-uploaded ads vs. tens of millions of random user generated videos. Ad servers can be curated much more easily than a user generated dumping ground. | 11 |
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How do you program a programming language? | I.e. How do you get a computer to understand a language? How does it actually make the transition from that language into assembly language? | 42 | First, you define your language. Define its syntax, its semantics, everything.
Then, it comes the hardest part: developing a compiler/interpreter for it.
A compiler is just a translator, it takes source code from the language you defined and pours the equivalent program in another programming language (generally, with a lower level).
For example, the C compilers, read C code and translate them to assembly, them an assembler converts this assembly code into an executable. | 13 |
ELI5: How do Americans (US) pay their taxes and how do they know how much to pay? | Where I live taxes are paid in every item you buy and every service you take. So if you buy an ice cream it's the base price plus taxes. Normal people don't do taxes once a year, only corporations do.
But I've seen in some tv shows, like The Simpsons, that they have to calculate and send via mail their taxes.
I imagine you have to pay certain amount depending if you bought a car, or a house, but I can't seem to understand if you pay taxes for a Snickers bar or a Starbucks coffee, and how do you even remember what did you bought in a year.
Edit: Thanks a lot for all the helpful answers!
So what I saw on The Simpsons as "doing the taxes" was actually (maybe) income taxes that you pay each year, and not sales taxes (that Snickers bar had taxes included in the price).
With each paycheck your employer take an estimate of what you should pay as income tax, and by the end of the period the IRS ask You how much you should be paying for taxes (not an estimate anymore), so if this number is bigger that the initial estimate then you have to pay that extra ammount, and if it's lower than the estimate then they refurb you that extra money.
Anyway you should really read any of the other great answers bellow.
You guys know your stuff really well. I think I now know more about your taxes than I do about mine. | 82 | We don't pay state and federal income taxes on items we purchase. You don't need to remember things like what you paid for your ice cream. Those are local & state *sales* taxes.
The income taxes for most people are fairly simple. You are paid wages. Some of your wages are withheld from you before you get them in order to pre-pay your income taxes. You can opt out of this or determine how much you want withheld.
At the end of the year, you report your gross income and you are allowed to deduct from it certain items. What is left is put through a formula to determine your income tax. From this you subtract what you had withheld from pay throughout the year. Then you can subtract any allowable credits (things that reduce your tax owed as opposed to reducing your taxable income). If the remainder is positive you owe the Gov't more money. If the remainder is negative the Gov't owes you money.
TLDR : we don't pay income tax for purchases. We tally gross income at the end and subtract expenses then determine our income tax. | 48 |
ELI5: What are Quantitative Easing and Quantitative Tightening? | I've been hearing these terms but don't really understand what they mean, when and why are they used by the government and how exactly they affect prices and general standard of living. | 48 | Pretty simple. In QE the Fed buys bonds (and mortgage backed securities) from the market. This increased demand for bonds increases the price of bonds thereby decreasing their yields. This makes bonds less attractive to investors so they put money in stocks increasing stock prices. Increased stock prices cause people to be more likely to spend money. QT is just the exact opposite. | 15 |
I believe that the modern-day large unions cause more problems than they solve. CMV | Hey all!
I'm talking about the really big unions, with hundreds or thousands of local groups and up to hundreds of thousands of members. I'm emphatically not talking about small, independent unions formed to fight for workers.
The impression I've gotten from media coverage is that large unions have a few principal problems that combine to make rather unhelpful organizations:
* Large unions tend, from what I've seen, to have a leadership clique that has its own views that aren't necessarily the views of the majority of workers, often by way of things like the current set of executive nominating the new executive, and having them ratified by a large percentage of workers who will vote the union ticket without much thinking. The result is that over time, the union leadership tends to just be the people who will keep the union going in the same direction. It doesn't help that radicalism sounds sexy, and so the elected leaders tend to be very strongly pro-union. This tendency towards a certain kind of person in charge tends, I think, to encourage the other issues I have with them.
* Large unions seem to love to treat labour unions like an end and not a means. They often give the impression of forgetting that the fundamental purpose of a union is collective bargaining, and instead become large lobby organizations that use their member dues to fight in the political arena. An excellent example is when a union representing some, but not all, workers at a given employer manages to get a deal requiring all employees to be unionized. While this might sound good on the face of it, if the employer (say, a construction worker) also wishes to hire employees in a job that isn't normally unionized (say, HR), this puts a tremendous drag on the employer and ultimately isn't likely to benefit the represented employees.
* Large unions seem to invariably end up in the political arena on things not directly related to their fundamental work. It is entirely understandable for a union of any size to be in the political arena arguing for and against measures that directly relate to its fundamental work of collective bargaining, such as by arguing against a back-to-work bill, or lobbying for anti-scab legislation, the bigger unions seem to often go beyond that by arguing for things that affect "the working-class", such as arguing for lower taxes. On the face of it, this seems like their job, because they represent workers, but in reality, I think that unions should stay out of these debates because it is not their job to dictate the political preferences of their members. They may have members who want to pay more tax and get more public services, and they may have members who want the government to stay out of their lives. They are members of the union for an imminently practical reason and should not be forced into conflict on political grounds. (Even worse, some unions seem to go even farther into the political arena, coming up with positions on things like Israeli-Palestinian relations, which have nothing to do with their members' jobs or well-being)
* Lastly, and probably most importantly, the big unions seem to often be extremely insensitive to the employers' needs, ultimately to the detriment of the workers they represent. The unions get into a narrow state of mind where increased wages and benefits are always seen as good things, regardless of the cost. The most egregious example of this is Hostess Foods, which recently closed its doors because the union refused to come to terms. Ultimately, the union's decision to hold out did not help any of its members; instead, they all lost their jobs because the demands were too steep. For a longer-term example, the auto industry in the USA was done in by increasing union-derived benefits which they had to pay for, draining more and more from the companies until they could no longer support themselves. I'm going to lump things like seniority systems in here as well: they benefit certain workers (the ones who perform less well) at the expense of the employer (who may find great difficulty acquiring competent workers for a position, and accordingly suffer from inefficiencies or worse things). Public sector unions have a special place here in my heart, because the nature of their bargaining position is different than a private-sector one. Almost without exception, a public sector union does not have to worry about accidentally driving their employer bankrupt. Instead, their ultimate failure is political: the government simply legislates a solution that the union can do nothing about. This is politically costly, however, and the unions do their best to make it as costly as possible, so the result can be utter silliness in the public sector. I believe I've been told that the Thatcher union busts were driven in part by a union demand that all children of union workers be guaranteed jobs for life.
I think that unions definitely have a very positive role to play in securing workers against abuses by employers and ensuring fair working environment, and especially have had an important role historically in developing modern workers' rights. But I feel that the game has changed and large unions' modern activities do not always properly represent those they claim to serve, and that ultimately their activities have become more of a negative influence than a positive one.
CMV.
EDIT: Thanks for all the great replies. I'm going to go through tomorrow to reply in more detail than I can tonight. There's at least one delta coming. Please note: I am Canadian, and my opinions are coloured by my experiences here in Canada. In particular, referencing specific laws of the USA is not helpful since they don't affect the unions here. Referencing USA unions, etc. as examples is fine since there's a lot of cross-pollination and general tactics are similar (heck, I did that in my post). | 24 | Using the Hostess situation in this argument is pretty terrible as 90 percent of the union members voted to have the strike, knowing that it might ultimately cause Hostess to collapse. So this is an example of unions working as intended, the management working with it's members and the workers being listened to.
Also, it's still unions working as intended because the workers rather let Hostess go out of business and find new jobs than take another round of wage and benefit cuts while watching venture capitalists take over management, mismanage and destroy the company, and then walk away with millions of dollars. You can't blame the union or the workers in this case for what they did, the problem was the mismanagement and poor leadership of the Hostess Company.
> The unions get into a narrow state of mind where increased wages and benefits are always seen as good things, regardless of the cost.
In the case of Hostess, you're misrepresenting the situation. They weren't asking for increased wages and benefits, they were asking to not see their wages and benefits reduced yet again.
This isn't to say that there don't exist some unions that do this, but you should probably find a better example.
| 18 |
ELI5: If a heart needs itself to beat, how does it start? | 33 | Heart muscle beats automatically.
Each cell will spontaneously trigger to contract on its own. The trick is that in the heart there are lots of cells next to each other. When one triggers it also triggers the ones next to it, which then trigger the ones next, and so on until the whole thing contracts in an even wave.
After a cell has triggered, it has a "dead time" when it can't be triggered. After the dead time, the each cell either waits for a trigger, or if one doesn't come, then it can spontaneously trigger.
During development, the embryo is small enough that oxygen and nutrients can get to the heart cells without the need for circulating blood - it just needs the placenta to be close enough. The heart cells start forming, and start beating at this time.
Eventually, as the embryo grows, the body gets big enough that it needs the blood to circulate, but by that time, the heart is already beating and starting to pump. | 28 |
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[Marvel and AvP] What is the physical gap between Captain America and a Yautja? | * Strength
* Speed
* Durability
* Agility
* Endurence
* Not who would win in a fight, just "Is Cap the closest physical example to a Yautja that humans have?" | 28 | Comics: Captain America is *peak human*. So he can swim with Phelps and run with Bolt.
The Yautja demonstrated no special feats of speed, so Captain America is probably faster. But the Predators have been able to send a man flying 20+ feet from a backhand. This is clearly beyond any human ability, so they are significantly stronger.
Endurance and durability seem to be higher considering the amount of damage a Yautja has taken and continued to fight. But we know humans can sometimes take a lot of punishment too - it depends largely on whether anything vital was damaged. Plus the Yautja medical technology is probably as advanced as their other tech.
MCU: Its not even close. Captain America in the movies is WAY stronger/faster/tougher than he is in the comics. | 18 |
CMV: Feeding your child shitty food to the point of obesity should be considered child abuse | There is no reason why a child should be obese. With the metabolism that children have there has to be an incredible amount of irresponsible meal choices for the m to end up obese. Parents have to be responsible for their children and that includes diet and food. Being irresponsible and feeding your kid shitty food everyday is a concious decision that can have dramatic risks on that child's health. The food you feed your kids should not be left up to a personal parenting decision. It should be left to the law. | 3,777 | >With the metabolism that children have there has to be an incredible amount of irresponsible meal choices for the m to end up obese.
It's pretty well-known that your metabolism is much faster when you're younger. Many kids eat a bunch of candy and sugary snacks and don't become fat.
>Being irresponsible and feeding your kid shitty food everyday is a concious decision
This is absolutely not the case. People don't generally feed their kids unhealthy food to purposely make them fatter. Consider that unhealthy food could be cheaper and more accessible.
>The food you feed your kids should not be left up to a personal parenting decision. It should be left to the law.
There is simply no consensus on what the optimal human diet is. How your body responds to certain types of food varies *massively* from person to person. | 561 |
How can the center of a black hole have an infinitesimally small area even though a Planck area is the smallest area matter can occupy? | 27 | The Planck area is a quantum mechanical description of space, which general relativistic frameworks, like the ones which allow for black holes, are notoriously incompatible with. This is the basis for why physicists are trying so hard to come up with a "unified theory" -- one that would reconcile the quirks between QM and GR. | 22 |
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ELI5: How do bidets save on toilet paper? Don't you have to dry your bum after the wash? | 7,375 | Imagine putting your hands in mud then consider the 2 possible scenarios.
In scenario 1, you wipe all the mud off with toilet paper until the mud is completely removed.
In scenario 2, you rinse your hands off under a hose then dab your hands dry with toilet paper.
Which uses less toilet paper? | 10,145 |
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[DC] Do boom tubes allow travel to another multiverse? | Say a character from Earth-1 has a Mother Box. Can they travel to Earth-2 with it? | 24 | Isn't this what Darkseid did? Use boomtube tech to go to different realities and kill off Earth's heroes after suffering a defeat from the New 52 heroes. That's why we have Earth 2 with Val Zod and Lois Lane as Res Tornado etc. | 13 |
CMV: The Subreddit AmITheAsshole should be changed to DoYouValidate |
I know to a degree there has always been a certain level of "I am great for all these reasons, but i made a decision that on the surface may be unpopular. However here are all the reasons justifying it" But I can't remember the last post on that subreddit that wasn't either a giant circle jerk praising the OP, or everyone parroting YTA and any argument getting down voted to oblivion. As well as seeing the same story every day or two. "I was kicked out for being gay as a teen, AITA for not wanting to see my parents" or "I yelled at someone today, but it was because they were using a racist slur, AITA?" The answer is obvious and the OP's know the answer before they post it. I assume most posts are just fake for Karma at this point.
I am not sure really if there is a way to right the ship so to speak at this point as there is enough people that are happy just to pile on the same opinion as everyone else, but at one point it was an interesting subreddit to go through, however at this point it's just a "Tell me I am right" subreddit. So just change the name to [r/DoYouValidate](https://www.reddit.com/r/DoYouValidate/) | 106 | The first sentence of the description for the sub is:
> A catharsis for the morally frustrated philosopher
I think they are aware that people post to feel good about themselves. That is half of the reason for the sub. Figuring out who is the asshole is only the second half of the point of the sub.
One other thing to consider is what may seem obvious for being morally right to you is not always obvious to other people. A teen who is kicked out for being gay may actually be struggling if it is the right thing to do to not want to see their parents. When you are in a situation where other people don't agree, it can be easy to question and doubt yourself, even if in hindsight it is obvious that you were not the asshole. So while some of those posts are probably karma whoring, keep an open mind that some may legitimately not be aware that they are "obviously" NTA. | 25 |
How do astronomers share coordinates with each other? | Let's say an astronomer notices something worth studying out there.... How do they tell other astronomers around the world, or just record exactly where they are looking at? For instance for coordinates on Earth they'd give a lat/long and that would always be the same place.
&#x200B;
But in space, everything is in motion and therefore relative to the observer. The earth is moving in space, and rotating as is whatever object is being studied. So on any given day, or even time, the object being studying is not going to be in the same 'relative' space as it was yesterday, etc....
&#x200B;
So how are coordinates marked for collaboration or future study? | 145 | The sky has a similar set of coordinates as the Earth - in fact, the coordinates have the same names: latitude and longitudes. You’re correct in that the sky appears to move above us as the Earth rotates, but we astronomers have solved this by specifying a point on the sky that we define as always having coordinates (0,0). So, from the point of view of someone on Earth, the (0,0) point moves as the sky apparently moves above us.
The choice of where we’ve decided (0,0) to be is somewhat arbitrary, but if you’re curious, it’s defined as the position of the Sun on the sky at the vernal equinox (around March 21st). | 155 |
At what point are we going to start losing contact to our furthest space probes? | Just saw [this](http://i.imgur.com/fIDp5.jpg) on [/r/MapPorn](/r/MapPorn). Made me wonder whether we're still in control of missions such as Voyager I and if so, how much longer we will be. | 21 | We aren't really in control of Voyager 1/2 anymore, but they are still transmitting some data. As their powerplants output less energy the probes are forced to turn off various instruments and transmit less data. Barring unforseen circumstances they will keep transmitting until they lose power. I've heard timeframes of 2020-2025, but don't have a source for that.
| 15 |
CMV: Bisexual and Pansexual are interchangeable. | As a person whose attraction to people is not limited by the person's gender, I've been bothered by the question of whether I'm bi or pan. I've looked into it a bit and have found two things: there are multiple disagreeing pairs of definitions, and most of them have no meaningful difference.
Of course natural language being what it is, none of these competing pairs of definitions are necessarily wrong, just perhaps unpopular, so I'll go through the ones that are IMO the most prominent and explain how they lead me to the OP view.
1.. Bi: Multiple (but not all) genders vs. Pan: All genders.
The problem with this one is that it's not verifiable. For instance, if you claim you're pan then you therefore claim that you know exactly how many genders there are, and that for each one there is at least one member of that gender that you have been/could be genuinely attracted to. In the bi case, you're claiming that you know for certain that there exists at least one gender to which you are not attracted. If a blacklisted gender is uncommon then you're almost definitely working off a very small sample size, in which case you're not really in a position to make any conclusions (obviously there are people who are in a position to, but requiring people to acquire a large enough sample size before they could call themselves bi would make the word basically useless). And if a blacklisted gender is common, especially if all of the common genders are blacklisted, then... idk, I feel like that's so qualitatively different to the overwhelming majority of expressions of bi/pansexuality that it probably deserves its own name (kind of like how gay, lesbian and hetero aren't all just called "monosexual"). In effect, it is trivially easy to argue that a bi person is probably pan and vice versa.
2.. Bi: Cis-only/Transphobic vs. Pan: Everybody.
This one actually has a very clear and verifiable distinction. The only catch is that I've never heard of someone identifing as this variant of bi (same goes for variant #1, too). In my experience, the people who use this bi variant use it to refer to other people, in an obviously insulting or otherwise strawman kind of way. And one view of mine that isn't changing any time soon is that people of a certain demographic are the ones that get to decide what that demographic is called. In effect, I don't find this definition to be valid or worth considering.
3.. Bi: Date different genders differently vs. Pan: Date everyone the same way.
I don't think the dynamics of a relationship should be (dis)qualifying of a sexuality. Sexuality is about "who", not "how". Even if a person consistently exhibits different sets of behaviors based on the gender of their partner, being able to say with certainty that the person is bi would require you to rule out literally every other possible explanation for the discrepancy (e.g. what's the difference between a sexist pan and a bi? Are all pan people required to prove that their love life is perfectly egalitarian?). In effect, a claim that a person is pan as opposed to bi is unfalsifiable.
To change my view you would need to show how under a commonly held pair of definitions, aforementioned or otherwise, two typical people identifying as bi and pan respectively are verifiably different from each other.
EDIT: Desktop formatting for the list | 26 | Bisexuality is an attraction to more than one gender.
Pansexuality is being attracted to people without regard for their gender, being 'blind to gender' in relation to attraction.
In practice the distinction isn't huge, but is definitely there. | 20 |
ELI5: How do clothes get dry from being outside or on radiators? | I understand how water molecules become gaseous when heated to 100 degrees, but there is no point in drying when the clothes would get that hot, so how does the water leave the clothes? | 15 | Partial pressure difference. There’s more water in your clothes than in the air surrounding it; water molecules will leave the clothes until the pressure is equalized. Water evaporates from seas/lakes/rivers/oceans at all temperatures, not just at 100C. Adding heat just adds energy that makes it easier for the molecules to detach from each other. Have you noticed how it takes longer to dry your clothes when the day is humid, like after it rains, when there’s more water in the air already. | 29 |
CMV:The US has had 43 presidents, not 44. Grover Cleveland should not be counted as the 22nd and 24th president. | I'll be brief.
If you need a refresher on history, Grover Cleveland served two terms as President of the United States non-consecutively. He lost reelection to Benjamin Harrison in 1888 but ran again and was elected again in 1892. He is often cited as the 22nd and 24th president for this reason, but I think he should only be counted as the 22nd. The fact that his terms were not served consecutively should not count him as a president twice. Therefore, Barack Obama is the 43rd POTUS, not the 44th. CMV
(message to mods: I understand there is a rule that I must contribute to this post within three hours but I am about to go to work. I will try my best to respond on my break, but if I am unable to, I will respond around 9:30 US eastern time. Please do not remove my post if I am unable to respond within the three hours.)
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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!* | 56 | When people say "president", they are often referring to his whole administration, not just the man himself. A presidential administration ends and begins when the old president leaves office/dies, and a new president is sworn in. There have been 44 occasions on which a new president has been sworn in, thus there have been 44 presidential administrations. Yes, you are correct in that only 43 people have held the office.
Is is inconsistent that presidents who serve consecutive terms get counted as one administration, and non consecutive presidents get counted as two? A little bit, yeah. But it's kind of an arbitrary distinction, and for most intents and purposes it doesn't really matter; it's an argument of semantics. | 45 |
How do you keep updated in your field? Especially if you are an independent researcher | I received my master about a year ago and currently I am between gigs (research and some other stuff) until I get a better opportunity. I have research interest in a couple of fields that I plan to focus on for a future PhD. However I don't have relevant groups/peers in this field, and no institutional affiliation too.
I struggle in keeping myself updated. I have subscribed to a few major journals of my interest. I have made sure to check several author's Google Scholar once a while. I also follow them on Twitter and follow other relevant accounts too (conferences, accounts, and so on). I'm still struggling though.
What do you use to keep yourself updated? Maybe RSS feed? Mailing list? Or some other sort of subscription?
Thanks in advance!
Btw I'm in anthropology/media studies/STS | 99 | Google scholar alerts are great. You can set them to a weekly update for your subject keywords. You don’t need to be registered with a university to use it. Online conferences are often free or low cost so you could attend the relevant ones too (if you register they often send you the recordings afterwards so you can pick out the most useful presentations). | 60 |
[Fallout 2] What's the Café of Broken Dreams? | 25 | All those nuclear bombs going off released so much energy at once it ripped a hole in the fabric of spacetime that is at once fixed and also moving. In it several lost wanders from the wastelands have converged to find shelter and slowly gone insane to the point where they think they're nothing more than NPCs from an isometric RPG game. | 16 |
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ELI5: How are dams/structures in contact with water maintained? | How are structures that are constantly in contact with water repaired or maintained? I imagine there has to be some sort of preparation or specific process for this? | 297 | Concrete 100% submerged is significantly less susceptible to deterioration than concrete that goes through wet/dry cycles which would be in shallower depths. For shallow depth repair work, you can install temporary cofferdams around the work area to dewater the immediate area to complete the required work. Also divers can do many repairs, albeit slower/costlier in general. | 180 |
ELI5: Why when there is a medical 'breakthrough' that seems like it will treat or cure a huge disease or illness, does nothing change? | I see things that sound like alzheimer's or cancer has a huge breakthrough that SOUNDS like it is cured or treated but then nothing changes. | 42 | Largely because news stories sensationalize science without fully understanding it.
There is a relevant XKCD comic that has a guy in a lab coat standing over a petri dish with a gun that says, "When you see a claim that a common drug or vitamin 'kills cancer cells in a petri dish', keep in mind: so does a handgun."
So, while there may be "breakthroughs" in curing cancer, that doesn't mean that it's a feasible, applicable solution. | 31 |
Eli5: How is it possible that advancement in USB allows us to transfer larger data in faster speed, yet the diameter of the wire does not change. | 18 | The diameter of the wire was never the limiting factor. Larger wires are only necessary when you’re trying to transmit larger electric currents, but large currents are not needed for faster data transmission. The data limit for USB is basically the speed with which the transmitting device can turn the signal current on and off again, and the ability of the receiving device to distinguish a signal changing at that speed. | 47 |
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CMV: NFT's are a currently, at best, marketed by bad actors trying to get rich, and at worst marketed by corporations to get get richer. | I think my argument is rather simple, NFT's are, least the ones I've seen, are nothing more than digital artwork passed off as "collectable pictures", and other digital goods that claim that you are the owner of. Take for example a picture of Castlevania went for $160,000.
[https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2022/01/17/konamis-castlevania-35th-anniversary-nfts-success/](https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2022/01/17/konamis-castlevania-35th-anniversary-nfts-success/)
I look at this, I can literally download the image, probably blown it up with a AI imagine scaling website, pay like 5 dollars to have it printed out, frame it, put it up for auction and maybe make something equivalent. That makes this picture utterly worthless.
I see this as nothing more than an attempt in a "get rich quick scheme". That has been hyped by frauds, bad actors, swindlers, corporations wanting to get rich(er) and charlatans.
I want someone to convince me that NFT's are something not as nefarious as I make it out to be, perhaps I have my fact wrong and that there is some legitimate usage for NFT's at least down the pipeline
Change my view. | 209 | NFT aren’t just art put to auction but simply (big spoiler!) a non fungible token.
So for exemple you can sell ticket for a concert with NFT in a way that wouldn’t be a scam.
The problem being that you can do it with a simple centralized database so it’s rather useless but at least we can say that, at best, NFT can be a non efficient alternative to centralized database instead of a total scam which is a bit better than your view (well ok not a lot but slightly) | 23 |
[Star Wars] What are the limitations of the healing properties of bacta? | As we can see in Episode 5, Luke was treated in bacta for frostbite after his accident on Hoth, but it seems that bacta cannot regenerate lost limbs, since Luke had to resort to a robot hand after Vader's maiming of it.
Could bacta heal degenerative diseases like cancer, autism, autoimmune diseases or any other diseases that usually carries a death sentence? | 27 | Bacta tanks promote cell growth. Think of it as a big container of stem-cells that target damaged cells and repairs them.
Exposed to a long enough period of time, more delicate cells like brain cells and bone marrow cells might be repaired but bacta isn't cheap. The amount it would take to regrow an arm would be so ridiculously high and that bacta might have been more useful in saving someone's life.
Getting a robotic replacement is a better alternative and is the affordable option for a vast majority of the Galaxy. Just don't get any back alley augmentations done and you'll be fine. | 25 |
How can electricity nearly move at the speed of light if electrons can’t move at such speeds without an enormous amount of energy? | 72 | Waves in the sea move, but the water mostly just goes up and down. Sound travels as pressure variations in air, but the air from a speaker's lungs does not reach your ears. Quickly moving a rope you are holding makes a wave travel along it, but the rope stays in your hands. Like that. The water, air and rope are the medium of transmission in each case, not the signal.
The signal moves through the electric field at the speed light, but the electrons themselves are really just part of the medium. | 175 |
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ELI5: Why are there gravel beaches? In thousands of years of waves crashing on the beach shouldn't all the gravel have become sand? | 6,433 | Sometimes this just depends how old the beach is - some gravel beaches are just less far through that process than sandy beaches: the pebbles have spent less time in the sea rather than on the land (as part of cliffs or rocks, for example) compared to a sandy beach, so they have had time to get worn smooth by the waves but not to be worn all the way down to sand.
However, there’s also different types of sand - some types are formed from worn rocks and some from crushed shells and coral - being softer and usually thinner than rock, shell and coral break down into sand more quickly. In the same way some types of rock break down more quickly than others and you might see a sandy beach where the sand is one colour but the bigger rocks on the beach are a different colour as they’re from rock layers that eroded less quickly. In that case the rocks would often be in long thin stripes through the sand.
And finally, the types of waves on the beach and the shape of the land as it meets the water (how long or steep the beach is, whether there are cliffs that the waves can reach etc) can have an effect too - especially on beaches where there is a mix of sand and stones to begin with.
Some types of waves race up the beach with plenty of energy, carrying sand from the sea bed or an estuary up to the top of the beach, and lose energy as they go - when they lose energy they can no longer carry sand particles as easily so they dump sand on the beach as they recede, and the sand stays on where it’s dropped and over time the beach builds up or forms dunes at the top.
Some waves break at the top of the beach with plenty of energy and pick up sand and smaller stones from the top of the beach which they carry back down to the sea bed or out to sea on a river, but they don’t have enough energy to pick up rocks or heavier stones so the sand washes away and only the pebbles remain on the beach. | 2,934 |
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What are the utilitarian responses to Bernard Williams criticisms of their theory? | If you have specific papers or books in mind, I'd like to hear those as well. | 19 | A lot of Bernard Williams' criticisms are rooted in very fundamental disputes over what constitutes a good theory of ethics and what we should expect out of our moral principles. So at the ground level you're either with him or you're not for some of these issues.
On the other hand, Railton's paper "Alienation, Consequentialism and the Demands of Morality" is a commonly cited response to his accusations that utilitarianism is self-effacing. | 12 |
[WH40k] So... who actually runs the Imperium? | I mean, obviously, the Emperor guides mankind through time and space, as he will for all eternity (the Emperor protects, the Emperor protects) But from what I've been told, he's in no state to directly lead the Imperium, being on life-support and all. Is there a person or group of people at the top who make decisions now, or did the Emperor just account for everything already? | 35 | The Senatorum Imperialis, better known as the High Lords of Terra.
These include the leaders of the following organizations (Adepta):
-Ecclesiarch of the Adeptus Ministorum (Ecclesiarchy)
-Master of the Adeptus Administratum (Bureaucracy)
-Grand Provost Marshal of the Adeptus Arbites (Law Enforcement)
-Paternoval Envoy of the Navis Nobilite (Navigator Houses)
-Master of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica (Concerned with Psykers)
-Master of Adeptus Astronomica (Maintain the Astronomicon)
-Fabricator-General of the Adeptus Mechanicus (Technology/Machine Cult of Mars)
-Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum (Assassins)
-Representative of the Inquisition
These 9 posts are effectively sacrosanct, as they have almost always been a part of the Senatorum. Though, there are 12 total seats for the High Lords, leading to any of the below positions filling the remaining 3 seats:
-Captain-General of the Adeptus Custodes (Emperor's Guards & Caregivers)
-Lord Commamder Militant of the Imperial Guard (Ground Forces)
-Lord High Admiral of the Imperial Navy (Space Forces)
-Speaker for the Chartist Captains (Representative of Imperial merchants)
-Abbess Sanctorum of the Adepta Sororitas (Imperial Nuns)
-Lord Commander of Segmentum Solar (Local military forces of Sol/Terra)
-Chancellor of the Estate Imperium (Record keepers of Senatorum matters)
-Cardinals of the Holy Synod of Terra (High-ranking religious leaders)
Notes: It's worth noting that the Inquisition's representative isn't a permanent position, it's simply whoever a large group of Inquisitors send (since the Inquisition doesn't have defined leaders or structure). Sometimes it's an esteemed Lord Inquisitor, other times it's the eldest Grand Master of the Grey Knights.
The Paternoval Envoy is called such because the actual Paternova never leaves the Palace of Navigators, and the Envoy is usually picked from one of the smaller/less powerful Navigator Houses so that the bigger families don't have a monopoly on power, as they already have the Paternova in a major position.
It's worth noting, that, there is no representative for the Adeptus Astartes on the Senatorum, even though they are perhaps the most important forces in the Imperium. This is because Astartes chapters are quite independent, and it would be absurd to claim that a single Marine could speak for all of them. There are chapters that have deep relations with the High Lords, though, such as the Minotaurs, a chapter that many believe to be the personal 'lapdogs' of the Senatorum Imperialis.
| 41 |
ELI5:How did a 3.5mm jack get universal? | 652 | Short Answer: The Sony Walkman.
Long Answer: The 3.5mm jack was created for use with transistor radios back in the 50s being a smaller version of the 1/4" plug that was common in telephone and audio equipment beforehand due to a simple design and ease of use along with good quality. Sony, in creating the Walkman needed a small, but decent quality jack for their small portable tape player, so they chose the 3.5mm jack. It was somewhat popular already and had already been used in things like their transistor radios so it made sense to use. The walkman of course became incredibly popular to the point a lot of people would just call ANY portable cassette player a Walkman. This led to a ton of clones and headphone manufacturers going out and creating better 3.5mm headphones for use with portable tape players. This continued on with stuff like the discman, MP3 players, home computers etc. Why create a new jack when everybody already had a pair of 3.5mm headphones and it was small enough? | 341 |
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[Batman] Did any of Bruce's female companions ever reveal anything about his playboy image? Surely, some have questioned his whereabouts at certain moments or the scars/injuries on his body? I'm curious if any have ever gabbed about their time with him? | 677 | For scars and injuries, the cover is that Bruce likes extreme sports, and the injuries and scars come from that. And since Bruce is the kind of person to be able to own a slope that he can ski on privately or whatever, nobody questions that they rarely see him skiing or whatever in public. Probably all done on private property. | 553 |
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Why can't we smell our own breath? | I our sense of smell is linked to taste but why does it nullify it? or is that what happens? | 36 | Habituation that is why. We are constantly bombarded by our own stimuli, so it is extremely familiar to us. That is why its tough to pick up on things like your breath. Now farts, thats a whole different ballgame &#3232;\_&#3232;
| 21 |
ELI5: How does event ticketing work, i.e., What economic principles allow Ticketmaster to charge such high fees for such an easy task? | Some questions I have are: Are venues obliged to use Ticketmaster, and if so, why? Why aren't their fees considered an abuse of monopoly power? What are the fees even for? Why are bands and/or venues willing to allow a middleman to screw consumers so badly? Are there any alternatives to the current system? Are there competitors? Who has the power to NOT use Ticketmaster (how could it be accomplished)? | 17 | Basically, ticket master takes the fall.
Ticketmaster makes 4% of the total price of each ticket. The fees and all don't actually go to ticketmaster, instead, ticketmaster takes the blame and passes most of the earnings onto the venue. | 14 |
How is it that the standard time for a PhD in Germany is 3 years whereas in the US it can be as long as 10 years? Are they treated equally? | 125 | German PhDs require you get a 2 year masters first so they’re still roughly equivalent. Very rarely do PhDs last 10 years in the US except in some fields like education. Typically, US PhDs are 5-7 years. Americans consider the American PhD to carry more weight. Not sure of the converse.
Note also there are many European PhDs that don’t require the masters like some British ones but they do tend to last longer | 155 |
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ELI5: Many natural things fluoresce under UV light. Is fluorescence performing a biological function? | 19 | Absolutely. It's not the case that all creatures see the same region of the light spectrum. The way things look to humans isn't the same as the way they look to dogs, birds, or bees. What humans call near UV is just an ordinary color to bees, and they absolutely incorporate that information into their behavior (bee-hivior?). There are plants that have specific invisible-to-humans bee attracting patterns, for example. | 30 |
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What causes the force that results from the Pauli exclusion principle? | I was reading about white dwarf stars in Stephen Hawking's "Brief History of Time", and he states that the only thing preventing a white dwarf from collapsing into a black hole is the repulsive force provided by the Pauli exclusion principle, but for stars with masses past the Chandrasekhar limit, this force is eventually overcome by gravity. My question is where does this force come from (does it have a force carrier) and can it be explained in terms of the four elementary forces? Also as an aside, how can the exclusion principle be "overcome" by gravity? Does the law simply break down with forces that large? | 18 | >(does it have a force carrier) and can it be explained in terms of the four elementary forces?
No. Pauli exclusion doesn't fall under any of the fundamental forces. It would still exist for identical fermions that don't self-interact at all. It's just a lack of available states where any two identical fermions share all the same quantum numbers.
>Also as an aside, how can the exclusion principle be "overcome" by gravity? Does the law simply break down with forces that large?
Pauli exclusion affects the equation of state of the matter in the white dwarf. When you have degenerate matter, it strongly resists being compressed anymore, and ultimately this is due to Pauli exclusion. So the inward force that you need to apply to compress it further becomes too high for the stars own gravity to do so. It's a hydrostatic equilibrium between an outward pressure gradient and an inward gravitational force. | 17 |
Why is it that Africa is the only continent to have kept it's native megafauna preserved throughout the ages while most other continents (Australia, Europe, North America) have lost theirs? | Especially Australia, I read somewhere that nearly half of it (if not more) is virtually untouched wilderness. Has climate change and aboriginal hunting seriously done that much damage? I mean i always wonder why Australia is practically covered by modern kangaroos while *Procoptodon goliah* didn't make it despite the main difference is being just a metre and a half taller than the common red. If there has been settlement in Africa for so long why haven't rhino's, elephants, and hippos died out yet? I write this question with a hint of annoyance that such a unique arsenal of organisms had to disappear. The fact that Thylacoleonids (some of the most unique and powerful predators to have ever walked the earth), as a family are extinct frustrates me greatly because I wish i would've had the chance to witness such predatory prowess, especially when i realise that the Thylacine went extinct less than a century ago! Also, please forgive any present ignorance i have on natural history, I'm only 17 haha.
edit: I understand climate change has drastic effects on fauna, but my main question relates more to the preservation of Africa's megafauna while Australia has lost it's giants despite not experiencing a glacial period since permian times. | 47 | Because African megafauna evolved in parallel with humans. They have had to cope with each other for millions of years, and so are in a kind of balance. Once humans left Africa they found megafauna which was not adapted to humans and human hunting, and wiped them out. This is particularly true of Australia which is a relatively energy-poor ecosystem and did not have large apex predators. Once humans arrived it is theorised that they eliminated various large herbivores, allowing kangaroos to thrive. As a side note these large herbivores were responsible for eating a lot of leaf litter in forests, and when they were gone these areas became prone to bush fire. Aboriginal Australians developed "fire stick farming" (controlled burning) as a way of preventing catastrophic fires as well as promoting habitat for kangaroos, which were a significant food resource. | 23 |
[The Purge] Are murderers still charged? Is violent crime still seen as a bad thing? | The general morality of people (at least Purge Supporters) seems to be really twisted in the world of *The Purge*.
A lot of people seem to think that violent crime is not simply "allowed" on Purge Night, but morally right.
The movies and the series have multiple moments of Purge Supporters going on about how it's "their right" and how "the healing power of violence" will fix them.
As such, what happens to murderers and rapists and other violent criminals who are arrested on the rest of the year?
I would imagine that Purge Supporters on the jury would be like, "What did this guy do wrong? Maybe he deserves a fine for doing it outside of Purge Night, but he didn't do anything morally wrong. Violence is good, and compassion is evil."
Likewise, in general, how is violent crime seen in the general public (at least by Purge Supporters)? I would imagine that mass murderers and serial killers are looked at as pillars of the community in this world and doctors, charities and general good people are looked at with contempt and hatred. | 22 | The NFFA ideology is essentially a reboot of fascism, and follows those trends. The context of this in terms of Purge Night is as both an opportunity to express extrajudicial violence against those outside the NFFA's view of America and as a warning to all society of why the NFFA are their only saviors.
The Purge is used in this way to provide a constant "proof" that danger is everywhere and people are in essence violent killers. This is useful to the NFFA's policy goals in other areas, because if *everybody* is a killer deep down, then there's nothing *more wrong* about one group being violent towards another. Nonviolence is not possible, but dominance is, and so one must seek dominance over all other groups.
Because of this, the time outside Purge Night is and is not like you speculate. A crime by a Counterpurger would be punished harshly, while a crime by a Purger would garner sympathy. After all, both of them are just "being honest", but the Counterpurger is a threat to the safety of NFFA dominance while the Purger is reinforcing that dominance. For the same act, not even necessarily related to a political goal, one is wretched and the other is misguided because of their different relations to fascist dominance. | 11 |
[Harry Potter] Could a camera with a timer and a flash setting capture a boggart's true form? | Nobody's ever seen a boggart's true form because it takes the form of your worst fear, but what if it were trapped in a cupboard with a camera and no people and then the camera took a photo? | 122 | I like to think that it maintains its most recent form until it has reason to change. Mad Eye might have just seen some random thing that would never be in a cupboard and knew it was a Bogart because why would a clown be hiding in a cupboard?
But that's just an assumption. | 104 |
[Star Wars] If the droids had never shown up on Tatooine, what was Ben's timetable to give Luke his dad's lightsaber? | 330 | It's the same plan that he was already following. There's no specific timetable. He'll give it to Luke when the Force says it's time to give it to him. Luke will either come asking about it, or a situation will arise where Luke needs it. That's when Obi-wan had always planned to give it to him. | 359 |
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What would happen if we split a pair of quarks? | What would the energy release be like? Would there be any energy release? Is this even possible? | 16 | If you pull two bound quarks (quark/antiquark pair, really), you will put enough energy in the system to create more quark pairs. So, if you do it slowly, you may end up pulling two "mesons" (bound state of 1 quark and 1 antiquark). What it might look like (the dashes represent that the quarks are interacting with each other):
q--q
q-----q
q--q q--q | 18 |
ELI5: What about Tilt-Shift photography gives it the illusion of looking like toys. | Pictures like [these](http://i.imgur.com/KANFA.jpg), called tilt-shift photography, I know they use special lenses and what not. I'm not curious about how they're taken, but what exactly about the output, the finished product, makes us perceive them as miniature models? How is a tilt-shift photograph different from a normal that gives it that illusion? | 237 | It has to do with *depth of field*, and they way your eye works. When you are looking at something close, your eye has a very shallow depth of field. When you are looking at something far away, your eye has a much wider depth of field.
Pretend you are looking at a long row of dominoes (or if you have some dominoes, set them up in a long straight row and put your eye level with the first one).
If you put your eye close to the first domino and focus on it, the second domino will appear out of focus. However, if you focus your eye on the second last domino in the line, the last domino will still appear to be in focus.
Your brain knows this instinctively. So when it sees a picture of something and everything around it is out of focus, it assumes that your eye must be very close to the thing that is in focus, and thus that thing must be very small.
When everything in the picture is in focus, it assumes that your eye is far away and thus it must rely on other evidence to try to figure out how big everything in the picture is.
| 347 |
[LOTR] Why did the Nazgul/Sauron only first detect the ring when Frodo wore it the first time? What about all the times Bilbo and Gollum put it on? | 136 | In the books, Frodo wore the Ring a bunch of times in the safety of the Shire while Gandalf did his research in Minas Tirith. This is how Merry and Pippin found out about his adventure, they saw him sneaking off to disappear.
By the time Gandalf discovered the Ring was, indeed, the One, Sauron had recovered enough strength to set up shop again and send the Nine Riders out to seek it for him. The Wraiths had some limited detection abilities, but still had to manually search and ask around for "Baggins from the Shire." The Witch-King of Angmar was able to stab Frodo on Weathertop because he could *literally* see him.
Remember, Sam was able to wear the Ring *in Mordor* and kill a bunch of orcs without Sauron noticing. | 138 |
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[General Fiction] My Superpowers gave me my own private dimension. Inside are floating islands and I decided to pull one out in the middle of international waters... I'm now in trouble I think? | So this lady, the top super hero of the world, flew to my island all angry and pissy and shouting about how much trouble I was in. I'm pretty sure I'm not in trouble because I'm way way far away from the nearest possible border but she's making some convincing arguments. Internet, I need legal advice... | 22 | 1) What's her legal argument?
2) it's not about legal problems, super heroes don't enforce laws, they enforce their versions morality. Convince her you don't pose any further danger, are new to your powers and will use them exclusively to help people.
You probably created a tidal wave. Apologize, profusely and repeatedly.
It'll help if you promise not to use your island for evil stuff, and offer to let them take a look around. | 19 |
What exactly are VPN’s and how do they work? | 254 | Imagine you have to do everything by mail, and you don't feel safe sending postcards due to your post office being staffed by your overprotective mother. A VPN is like putting the postcard in an envelope to your buddy who is away at college. Your buddy opens the envelope and resends the postcard. He gets a response via postcard and puts it in an envelope back to you.
Now the benefit to avoiding your snooping mother (who is actually an ISP) is obvious, but you often hear things like "Australian Nexflix has that show, sucks to be in Canada." If your buddy (who is the VPN endpoint) is in Australia, how does Netflix know? As far as they're concerned, they're sending stuff to an Australian address.
As to how it works, it's mainly software in your PC or your router that's signed up for a service that encrypts traffic and sends it to the designated endpoint. One of the less talked about applications is very common in remote work - Companies set up VPNs so you can connect to all the internal tools as though you're on the company network by setting up endpoints within the company firewall. | 262 |
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