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[Marvel] Has Logan even been shown to have conscious control of his powers? For example, suppressing his healing factor temporarily to prevent giving himself away or speeding up the healing of one part of his body over another when he suffers massive trauma? | 54 | He has no control of it, otherwise he'd be wasted 24/7 because the guy's an alcoholic. Also there was that one time he was infiltrating Hydra and he was caught because his beard kept growing out within the space of an hour. | 82 |
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[Star Trek] I'm just a low-tier security officer, but my buddies and I are seriously starting to wonder why the highest-ranking crew members keep going on all the dangerous away missions. Isn't that our job? | 187 | You think Security should make the first contact with new civilizations? That's what the Captain is for. You think Security should investigate strange phenomena? That's the Science Officers job. You think Security should take on the unknown disease that wiped out a spaceship? That's what the Medical Officer is for.
When they need to fight, they're gonna take Security along, don't worry. | 144 |
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What happens if you place Medusa's (decapitated) head face to face with a Weeping Angel from Doctor Who? | and then blink/turn away? | 45 | The weeping angel would be turned to stone, permanently. Despite what other people are saying, Medusa's gaze does not turn people to stone. That is the Basilisk's power. No, gazing *upon* the Gorgon's horrifyingly ugly face is what turns people to stone. As soon as the Angel saw Medusa's face, it would turn into a stone. | 46 |
[Marvel: Wolverine Goes to Hell] Whats up with hell? | So i just read Wolverine goes to hell, and I'm a little confused. Where is Mephistopheles? Why is this hell so different than its other depictions in 616? | 23 | There are many dimensions of "Hell" in the Marvel universe, each ruled by a different "devil". So Mephisto has his own hell, just as Dormammu or Marduk Kurios have their own realm. Wolverine might of have gone to a realm that doesn't belong to Mehpisto. | 18 |
eli5: What about the taste of wine actually gets better with age? Articles online describe flavor can improve over time, but not what about the flavor changes. | 27 | It depends on the wine, but generally red wines get less sharp and less…grape-juicy. They can develop undertones of earth, berries, nuts, truffle, etc. These flavors exist in younger versions of the wine, but they can be less pronounced and harder to find in a younger wine. Again, it really depends on the particular wine in question. Some wines age and don’t really change all that much or even taste worse, but that also depends on how they are produced and ultimately stored…and on the drinker’s preferences.
Flavor in general is a delicate thing, not just in wine. | 29 |
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ELI5: how do they monitor speed by aircraft on highways? | I did a lot of driving recently and saw this sign frequently that says something like Speed Enforced by Aircraft. How does that work? | 24 | There are marks painted on the pavement a known distance apart. The vehicle in question is timed from when it crosses one mark until it crosses the next mark. Divide the distance between marks by the time measured and you get speed.
Then they radio down the details. | 32 |
If the universe was formed in a single event, why isn't it homogeneous? As in, why do stars and planets have vastly different compositions if they originated from the same point? | 19 | The leading theory is that during the period of cosmic inflation, in which the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light, quantum mechanical fluctuations were collapsed and then magnified as they expanded, which lead to the fluctuations that caused galaxies and the like.
Planets and stars have different compositions because they did not originate from the same point. The first generation of stars would have all had the same composition, but once they fused heavier elements (up to iron and heavier in big star collapses) and then supernova'd them into the universe, new stars formed from their remains and so have different compositions. | 18 |
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ELI5: Why does our saliva taste different when we are down with illness? | Like a cold or fever. | 41 | Usually you are dehydrated and have more mucus than usual which will taste different. Also if your nose is stuffed, your smell ability is different. If you have a bacterial infection, there will be an odor from bacteria. And finally, antibiotics and other medicines can give you a strange taste in your mouth. | 15 |
Assuming, as per mainstream consensus, the purpose of urine is to remove waste products from the body - why can't poop just do the entire job? | 20 | > why can't poop just do the entire job?
It does, if you're a bird. Birds eliminate everything through the same hole. But still, they do have kidneys that produce something similar to urine. So, in reality, they just mix it all up, then eliminate the result.
The real reason is that these are two different processes. Fecal matter is the waste product of digestion. It's what comes out the other end of the digestive tube. Urine is the waste product of cellular metabolism throughout your whole body, and it's produced when blood is filtered by kidneys. These are very different things, and of course the results are different. | 23 |
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CMV: If you receive campaign or other money, you should be banned from voting on topics relates to those companies or organizations. | Campaign money and lobbying has always grossed me out morally. Because there is a immediate conflict of interest in whatever you decide or vote upon. I have zero understanding nor trust that any politician will just vote where they receive money rather than what the needs of the people who elected them are.
It is clear when they are voting and acting not in the interest of whom voted for them or set them up, but rather who lined their pockets. If a politician is shown to have received clear money from these individuals they should be immediately banned from all discussion and voting on topics related to those organizations for clear bias on the matter.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | 135 | When *you* donate to candidates, do you then expect them not to enact anything you'd like or are in your interests or even things that are explicitly to your benefit?
In fact, for most people, they expect the candidates to completely ignore their small contribution and yet the candidate still often votes with how that person wanted. Why? Because most people donate to candidates who are already planning on voting on things consistent with the donater's worldview. That is why the person donating chose that particular candidate to donate to in the first place.
What is the point of donating at all, if not to help someone you agree with win so that they pass laws that you agree with. | 24 |
Quantum fluctuations after big bang? | I was just wondering what the actual mechanism of these "quantum fluctuations" that ive read about are. As i am understood they are some how responsible for fluctuations in particle density in the very early universe which caused stars, galaxies etc. to form, and i was just curious what they actually are. Thank you. | 23 | Have you heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? This is the idea that, on extremely small scales, smaller even than atoms, you can't measure things like distance and velocity with exact precision. Actually, the statement is you can't measure *both* of those precisely - the more accurately you measure some particle's position, the less accurately you know how fast it was moving, and vice versa.
You'll usually hear this phrased in terms of position and velocity, but it's a much more general principle of *quantum mechanics*. In quantum mechanics, all sorts of things are subject to uncertainty. When we talk about quantum fluctuations, we're referring to the randomness inherent in that.
In the case of quantum fluctuations after the Big Bang, we mean fluctuations in the *density* of the Universe. In particular, we mean in the density of a type of matter called the "inflaton" which dominated the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, during cosmic inflation. "Density" here means the energy density, how much energy inflatons have in some region of space. It turns out that energy has an uncertainty relation with time. That sounds a bit weird, but it means that the less time you use to make a measurement, the more uncertainty you'll have in your measurement of the energy.
The thing about cosmic inflation is that back then, the Universe was expanding on steroids. The expansion rate was *accelerating*, so that very small things quickly blew up to enormous sizes. Scales which were ruled by the strange laws of quantum mechanics became larger than the observable Universe in an instant.
So let's take some small region of space during inflation. After a very short period of time, it's suddenly of a cosmic size. The density of the patch of Universe contained in that cosmic size depends on the density of the inflaton when it blew up. But because this blow-up happened so quickly, the uncertainty principle tells us that there's uncertainty in what that density was. The actual value that nature picks is then up to random chance.
What you're left with, as you can imagine, is a bunch of regions of the Universe all with different values of the density. Inflation pushes these regions apart faster than light can reach them, so they lose contact. But after inflation ends (still only a fraction of a second after the Big Bang), they slow down and start to come back into contact with each other.
After a while, the observable Universe is made up mostly of gas, and contains a whole bunch of these regions, all with (slightly) differing densities. Eventually, in the denser regions, the gas is pulled together by gravity until it starts to collapse on itself, forming stars and galaxies. This is how quantum uncertainty in the very early Universe is thought to have lead to the cosmic structure we see today. | 14 |
ELI5: Why are local mechanics considered better than corporate? Couldn't a corporate car shop easily have great customer service/care if they wanted? | Jiffylube, Meinke, Midas, Pep Boys, etc are all shit in my experience. Wait time is disgusting and customer service is non-caring at best. Hell before I knew how to change oil myself this one time they forgot to refill it with oil. It's just honestly nothing less than pathetic in the dozen or so times I took my car to a big business.
However, with local mechanics I never have any problems. Price be damned they actually care for your car as if there's something on the line. I just don't understand why there isn't *one* corporate car chain that has consistently good reputation or seems to even try. Maybe AAA? | 23 | Chains are considered mediocre but reliable & have a big corporation backing them if they fuck something up. If they fuck something up, the manager doesn't care because giving you a freebie is just his job.
Private mechanics can be hit or miss and, if you have a dispute about a job or a bill, you're arguing with the owner who has to take the loss out of his own pocket. | 16 |
[DC] What are the goals of the various Lantern Corps? | I generally understand the motivations of the Green Lantern Corps, Sinestro Corps, and Agent Orange; but never quite understood what motivates the Red, Blue, Indigo and Star Saphire Corps.
What are their end goals? | 46 | Now keep in mind, the farther from green the color the more the ring is in charge, but:
Red - is focused on Rage but seems to be leaning toward righting injustices. Rage against injustices being what motivates their founder (like the Guardians killing off a few planets worth of beings) But rage tens to take over.
Blue - They bring hope, that's about it.
Indigo - These rings usually force themselves on psychopaths and force Compassion upon then. Short of reforming some stone-cold killahs it's not clear what they do, although Abun Sur see,s to have something to do with their founding.
Star - The core of Love seemed to run about the galaxy saving people in love from perils. But they have a cadre of Oan Females they all obey. | 32 |
[Watchmen] Why aren't there more people like Dr. Manhattan? | He was turned into a semi-omnipotent being that won wars for the USA and was used as a living breathing nuclear deterrent, all through 'existing' technology (the intrinsic field chamber).
He wasn't special, he wasn't chosen, he was just a guy that got stuck in the chamber when the timer was almost done,
so why didn't the USA, who founded his research facility, tried creating another super being they can more easily control, or at least someone to even him up if he started going crazy?
Or the USSR, for that matter. Or China, or any other country or powerful organization - we know the technology existed because Ozymandias had used some kind of intrinsic field to try stop him.
And while I'm at it, does that mean there's a blue hairless lynx that can control subatomic particles somewhere? | 56 | Jon Osterman was a watchmaker's son. From a very young age he had a complete understanding of time and mechanics and spent many hours disassembling and reassembling time pieces. His brain had been wired to do this so well he could do it blind folded and tell how many micro seconds a watch was off just by listening to it briefly. What happens after the accident could only be described as the quantum entanglement of his life force with what he held dear in this world; Janey. Using his knowledge to reassemble the parts, Jon Osterman slowly but surely reappears as Dr. Manhattan. Certainly, any one could have their intrinsic field removed and become vaporized, but not everyone had the understandings of time, physics, mechanics, and an emotional bond to this world. | 72 |
[Game of Thrones] What difference would the Lannister army have made in the battle against the Wights and White Walkers? | Cersei puts down the wine and realises they all might die, finally sending her armies north to support Winterfell.
Bonus round 1: All the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros unite and ralliy at Winterfell/The North, bringing supplies and food from the South
Bonus round 2: The Free Cities of Essos, realising they might be next, try to play damage control in Westeros and help stop the undead invasion at Winterfell along with the united Seven Kingdoms. Night King doesn't fall for Bran's trap, can the Westeros-Essos coalition win on numbers alone? | 55 | Considering the military feats Team Cersei pulled off in Season 7?
>!Instead of a dumb frontal charge like the Dothraki, the Golden Company cavalry goes on a deep flank and assassinates all the White Walker lieutenants watching from afar. Euron shows up with the Ironborn carrying the Iron Fleet ships 200 miles inland where they spit jets of Wildfire Byzantine-style, consuming the Dead in a green flame. When the Night King arrives on Viserion, Qyburn launches Gregor out of a trebuchet and he cleaves Viserion clean in two with a giant Valyrian steel greatsword forged from Red Rain, Nightfall, and Lady Forlorn. The Night King falls hundreds of feet and does a superhero landing, but he turns around and Euron lops his head off with a giant Valyrian axe. Then Euron pulls the Night King's pants down and mocks the size of his member. | 128 |
ELI5: Why do I have bladder shyness? | Just can't get a stream going in front or around others. Not ashamed of my dick size, people have walked in on me changing or peeing before and I don't freak out, but in front of others peeing is nearly impossible. | 78 | when you are nervous, stress causes your adrenaline glands to secrete adrenaline, creating fight or flight mode. During this mode, your body gets ready for the situation by tightening up the urethra so that you don't accidentally wet yourself in times of crisis. Ergo, cant pee cause your unknowingly nervous. | 37 |
ELI5: Why does salt water help your gums heal after a deep periodontal cleaning? | 62 | Osmosis. During a deep periodontal cleaning, the water jet blasts lots of bacteria and other debris off your teeth and into your gums, creating lots of micro-abrasions in the process.
Salt water creates negative osmotic pressure, which draws water from your blood and lymph fluids through those micro-abrasions and cleans all the junk out of them. Clean wounds heal faster. | 25 |
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[Fallout New Vegas] Does Mr House plan on eventually having peaceful relationships with both the NCR and the Legion, or does he think he can defend his territories against them? | It would be ideal for him to be on at least neutral terms with both groups, but he made an enemy of both of them after he took Hoover Dam. It's very likely both groups will attempt counterattacks in the future. | 74 | House thinks that he, a pre-War genius, can play off these post-apocalyptic tribals easily. He controls the water from Lake Mead and the electricity from Hoover Dam, giving him unparalleled negotiating power against the NCR, and he dangles the threat of the Legion in front of them, offering himself as a buffer state between the NCR heartlands and the savage Legion. His idea of a peaceful relationship with the NCR is economic warfare, wringing out concessions with his clean water and plentiful energy, taking in NCR money through its rich tourists, and wooing them and the best and brightest to his side until he gets what he wants.
Meanwhile, he sees Caesar's Legion as a big threat to the NCR... but as an entity he can manipulate or have few concerns about due to his technological advantage over them. With his upgraded Securitrons, he has such a material advantage in warfare compared to the inferior tribals that they represent little concern to him. Especially because if there is a war, the NCR will be forced to deploy on his side and provide meat shields for his robots since the NCR can not afford Lake Mead or Hoover Dam being ceded to the Legion. His biggest worry is that Caesar will die and that the Legion will implode, galvanizing the NCR to rebel against his wishes.
And most importantly, House thinks that this is the only option. He does not really consider that people will go against his plans, that he has underestimated his foes, or that he has overestimated himself, because he thinks he's the smartest man in the room every time. | 119 |
Will a solid eventually "evaporate" given sufficient time, like a liquid sitting at room temperature will? | I know that the molecules in, for example, room temperature water all have different energies. Some of the particles have enough energy to escape the liquid and phase change into vapour causing the overall mass of the liquid to decrease. Does this also occur with solids, albeit at a dramatically reduced rate? Do solids even have molecules at different energies in the same way liquids do? | 16 | Yes. Solids also have nonzero vapor pressures and evaporate (this process is called sublimation). One example of this can be found in your freezer: ice sublimes easily, so you can probably find "corroded" looking ice cubes and ice crystals/frost that have redeposited elsewhere in the freezer. | 14 |
Eli5: How can YouTubers afford to bend, blend and burn expensive electronic devices? | 16 | A good rule of thumb for Youtube is that 1 million views = $1000. If a phone costs $600, then you only need to get 600,000 views to make your money back.
Many of the drop-test style channels get millions of views, meaning that they make several times that in profit.
The smart ones will also fix the screen and case themselves ($150 ish), and resell the phone as a used product for another $300 profit.
I imagine that companies like Apple probably give a number of handsets out for free for the exact purpose of these videos too. Also some of these videos are done using defective/broken phones. | 19 |
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CMV: People who claim to be Pro Gun Rights, Pro States Rights, Pro democracy, and Pro Choice are are hypocrites when they only support their stance for their particular in-group. | It seems very cut and dry to me that if a US state (Texas) is trying to challenge the authority of a different US State (Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) to make a determination on it's own election, that it would be a pretty egregious violation of state's rights. Why is there not any outcry about this? Being big on state's rights has been a pretty conservative stance for some time... at least i thought it was. Now there's a ton of Republican leaders that are encouraging this. Isn't this hypocritical? They are walking back their ideals because they want their team to win? How can this be? I mean if they have evidence, why can't the show it? If they believe in democracy they should expose the cheaters and let them be tried for treason.
It really sharpens into focus the hypocrisy of situations like when E. Bradford was technically a "good guy with a gun" and was shot by cops in Alabama. Nothing from the NRA, Nothing from Gun's Rights Activists? When Ahmaud Arbery was murdered in the street by overzealous neighbors, how come the Pro Gun Lobby wasn't quick to denounce the actions and distance themselves from letting something like this sully the reputation of firearms? When Kyle Rittenhouse shot protestors, despite the fact that he crossed state lines and had a gun when he wasn't supposed to - why didn't any pro gun group denounce him for not following the law?
How come there was no outcry from the Pro Life when a whistleblower let the world know that hysterectomies were being forced on migrant women held in detention centers - against their will or knowledge. I mean if you're anti abortion, surely you've got to agree that removing a woman's reproductive abilities without her knowledge or consent is horrible and disgusting. But where is the outrage?
It all feels like it's obvious to the point of being cartoonish that when it's someone of opposing politics all of the principles fly out of the window. Doubly so if a person of color is involved. I know i'm kind of harping on conservatives, but I know liberals are just as guilty. Is it really this blatant? | 27 | >if a US state (Texas) is trying to challenge the authority...Why is there not any outcry about this?
There isn't any outcry because this isn't inconsistent with States' Rights. To the contrary, the people who are pushing this lawsuit want to give Texas some additional rights (standing in this sort of case) that it would not otherwise have and does not currently enjoy.
>the hypocrisy of situations like when E. Bradford was technically a "good guy with a gun" and was shot by cops in Alabama. Nothing from the NRA, Nothing from Gun's Rights Activists?
How is this hypocritical? Nothing about the position of Gun Rights activists suggests that they care particularly much about people being shot with guns. Gun Rights is about the right to own a gun and, to a lesser extent, the right to shoot people with it in some situations. It isn't about a right to _not_ get shot.
>How come there was no outcry from the Pro Life when a whistleblower let the world know that hysterectomies were being forced on migrant women held in detention centers - against their will or knowledge.
This doesn't seem hypocritical either. Being Pro-Life doesn't mean that you care about things being forced on women against their will. If anything being Pro-Life means you are _okay_ with at least one thing (continuing a pregnancy) being forced on women against their will, so if they're okay with that, why should they be particularly bothered by other things being forced on women against their will?
>Pro Choice
Your title lists this, but you don't have any examples in your post. Can you explain how being pro choice relates to your view? | 15 |
ELI5: How did languages form? | 27 | Using specific variations of "ugg"s and "grunt"s in different situations. Each family/tribe would apply their own sounds to these situations, eventually meeting with others and mixing together the different combinations of noises. Eventually becoming sophisticated and widespread enough to be called a language | 25 |
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Do irrational numbers "exist"? | We were studying radicals today in Maths session, and this whole unit in maths is about arithmetic and numbers and sequences. The teacher, as a preamble to the contents of the unit, gave us a brief revision over numbers, and laid the foundation for number theory. Previously, I had been told that irrational numbers were numbers that cannot be put into ratios between whole numbers.
As the teacher was explaining irrational numbers, he said that there were only three cases of them. The first is the square root of a number which does not have a square root. The second is the cubic root of a number that does not have a cubic root. The third is when this number is pi, or is some multiple of pi, or is added to pi. Of course, I knew that there were higher roots, and that there existed countless other irrational numbers, such as e (Euler's number). When he talked about the first and second cases, I assumed he meant that it doesn't have a whole, or rational, root, but when I asked, he said it simply doesn't exist. I showed him a value on the calculator, and he said that it was just an approximation to a never-ending number, which I understand. But, I argued, this never-ending number does exist, we simply cannot write it down or give an exact value for it. His counterargument was that, since we can never place for it an exact number, it doesn't exist. The whole class had sided with him, and so I relented, but is this really true? Do irrational numbers not exist, or do the majority of mathematicians agree that it doesn't? | 19 | They exist. Your teacher is wrong. There is no restriction for the digits of a number to be finite.
There is a definition of real numbers using cuts (dedekind cut). And you can see how with this definition we can should that the square root of 2 is a number. | 46 |
ELI5: Why game consoles (e.g. ps4, xbox) are not designed to be used also as a PC? | They have powerful hardware... if they could run windows or linux, people would have more incentives to buy them. | 21 | Sony and Microsoft actually *lose* money when you buy a PS4 or Xbox One. Quite a bit of it. They only sell the machines to encourage people to buy the games. The games are what makes them money.
If they let you use the PS4 or Xbox One as an ordinary PC, then people might buy them to use as ordinary PCs, rather than games machines. That would cost Sony/MS money. | 46 |
[Death Note] Is it possible to kill people indirectly through the Death Note? | Say you want to take out an entire criminal organization. You write:
"Joaquin Guzman gathers all his guns and methodically kills every single high ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel after calling a massive meeting to get those he will kill in the same room. He survives every bullet wound until he kills himself 24 hours later in front of the Supreme Court."
Would it work? | 68 | No. Rule 10.2 of the Death Note states that "Whether the cause of the individual's death is either a suicide or accident, if the death leads to the death of more than the intended, the person will simply die of a heart attack. This is to ensure that other lives are not influenced". | 76 |
ELI5: How does my internet banking secure key and my banking database receive data from each other to allow the code generated to become verified as the active key ? | Slipped upon this thought | 39 | They don't communicate with each other. Your secure key generates a number every so many seconds. It also has a serial number that is associated with your account. When you enter this number, the bank knows the serial of your key, and because of that can generate the same number to validate it.
This is all based on time. Simplified, your key is just taking the current time, mashing it up with the serial #, and there's your code. That way it can be quickly and easily validated. | 11 |
[MCU] If the Infinity Stones did not exist or were otherwise inaccessible did Thanos have any other options available to him for achieving his goal of balancing the universe? | The universe is a big place. So big that that Mad Titan realised he had to make long term plans to acquire the Infinity Stones in order to realise his vision of halving the population of the universe within a reasonable timeframe. Now, if the Infinity Stones had not been an option for him then were there any other practical means available to Thanos or would he be doomed to an endless and practically impossible objective by doing things with his armies the hard way? | 50 | I think that Thanos was hoping Gamora would eventually see the Mad Titan's logic and, once Thanos died, take his place. Thanos could never bring balance on a universal scale without the Infinity Stones. Thanos' only hope would be that his teachings would be passed down by Gamora and the rest of Thanos' children, who would carry on their father's mission to the best of their ability. | 51 |
How do we know what temperature absolute zero is? Could we reach that temperature and find that the true absolute zero is 0.1K cooler? | 19 | By definition, absolute zero is where a system is in its quantum mechanical ground state. Thus, it is a system at the minimum energy it can possibly take - it's impossible to extract any more energy or heat from it.
(Absolute zero is not really "the absence of motion" as many people seem to think - a system in its quantum mechanical ground state can have very large fluctuations in position and velocity. This is still consistent with zero temperature and zero thermodynamic entropy.) | 30 |
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Does a perfect sphere have zero, one, or infinite faces? | Does a face have to be flat? Then it would be zero, right? If not, I would think the answer is one. But if you had an approximation of a sphere, like a polygon but 3d, the more faces you added, the closer to a sphere it would be. So along that line of thinking, infinity faces would yield a prefect sphere. Help. Thanks!
EDIT: Thank you everyone for your answers! Very interesting! | 34 | It doesn't have any faces (i.e., 0) because a face is a part of a plane, therefore flat. Infinite faces would yield a perfect sphere--with faces of zero area--but infinity is not a number, so you can't really get there. If you've the mathematical interest to pursue it further, the concept you're brushing up against is that of a "limit", which is the magic glue that holds the Calculus together.
(B.S., Math '93. Lots of folks who know a lot more will answer more precisely and rigorously.) | 53 |
Why do we launch space-bound shuttles straight up? | Why do we launch spaceships straight up? Wouldn't it take less force to take off like a plane then climb as opposed to fighting gravity so head on? | 539 | It's like in Mario Kart where if you drive off the side into the mud, the drag slows you down. If you drive back to the road in a perpendicular fashion, you minimize your time in the mud, but you've built up no momentum once you get to the road. If you drive parallel and angle yourself gradually toward the road, you maximize your time in the mud and waste a lot of energy, but you get to keep whatever forward momentum you've gained once you get to the road. Depending on the thickness of the mud, there's some optimum angle that describes the most efficient path back onto the road; approaching perpendicular for thicker mud, and approaching parallel for thinner mud.
Now if the thickness of the mud/atmosphere *decreases* as you get closer to the road/space, that optimum path would be a curve, starting at perpendicular and ending at parallel, and that's exactly what rockets do. | 1,990 |
[Westworld] What is at the borders of the Park? | I'm sure that they discuss this in the ~~show~~ Documentary-Series somewhere, or in the the earlier ~~film~~ Documentary, but what exactly stops the Hosts from wandering off? | 62 | 1. The parks are on an island, so the edge of them is ocean.
2. The hosts' programming keeps them from going where they're not supposed to.
3. The hosts have explosives in the base of their spines that will automatically detonate if they somehow leave in spite of the physical and behavioral safeguards. | 54 |
Why don't trees grow in shallow fresh-water lakes or streams? | It seems like a no-brainer; unlimited access to water and zero competition for sunlight (because no other tree are growing there and blocking the sun).
Is the answer just "evolution hasn't taken that route yet"? Or or there something I can't think of permanently blocking plants/trees from growing out of a lake?
Edit: It seems some trees in [areas of the southern hemisphere near the oceans](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_mangrove_distribution.png) do do that a bit, but why not on the inside of continents or in the north? Maybe frozen water immediately kills trees that try that? | 32 | A number of reasons:
- The seed has to get to the bottom soil. Seeds often float.
- Water movement (waves, currents, tides) makes it difficult to take root and can batter those plants which do.
- The sediment isn't necessarily suitable soil, lacking the necessary nutrients, ph, and so on.
- Many trees have roots that require respiration (one of the top reasons why trees grow so poorly in urban environments).
- Water temperature may be either too cold or too hot to foster growth.
- Depending on depth, there may be insufficient light to foster growth. Sediment, erosion, suspended particles, jetsam, and other pollutants can further aggravate conditions.
- Aquatic life may feed on or otherwise utilized foliage. | 19 |
Can you help me understand Camus? | So a while back, I read "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. But I am struggling with the understanding of its message. The main character goes through the book's events in an almost trance like state, and I am assuming that it is to showcase the absurdism of the human existence and the normal world, which we rarely question as normal humans in our everyday lives. But I can't help but feeling I am missing a piece of the puzzle, and I am wondering if any of you can point it out to me?
I do apologize for my any lack in my english, I am not a native speaker. | 29 | Camus is trying to paint the existential perspective that many people feel. The absurdist thoughts experienced in the book, are almost comparable to the platonic cave. Once you come out, it's quite hard to rationalize any true importance for a lot of pieces of one's life. Simply, he doesn't quite care and floats through life. | 21 |
[Star Wars] Why is it OK to bring down lightning from the sky, but evil to shoot it out of your fingers? | 561 | What yoda did was simply manipulating nature a bit. There was already bad weather, a lightning blast is simply nudging nature in a specific way. This is in line with the way the jedi use the force, they dont bend it to their will, they nudge it along.
Force lighting, however, isnt. Its not even natural electricity. You dont create a pathway of ions in the air for the lightning to travel, you dont build up a charge in yourself then fire it out to even out a static buildup.
No, force lighting is hate embodied. You literally shoot *hate* out of your fingers, what you do is that you bend the force to your will becasue you wanna hate your enemy to a painful death. You bend a natural power of the universe to your will to literally hate someone so much they cease to exist. | 673 |
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[Invincible] Why do so many male Viltrumites have receding hairlines, besides Mark, Nolan, Thragg, and a few others? | 212 | I assume because their hair is the least durable part of them, and they keep flying headfirst into things.
It's like humans and constant hot showers. Not enough to do any harm, but over years and years it speeds up hair thinning.
Nolan's hair is clearly stronger than most. Or he's mostly been dealing with Earth-level threats and that isn't as rough on the hairdo. | 143 |
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CMV: The IAAF's new rules regarding female athletes with hyperandrogenism are wrong. | [This week the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) published new rules requiring female athletes with hyperandrogenism undergo medical treatment before they can compete.](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-athletics-iaaf-hyperandrogenism/athletics-semenyas-reign-to-be-ended-by-new-iaaf-gender-rule-idUSKBN1HW27R) Hyperandrogenism is a medical condition that causes individuals to produce an abnormally high amount of androgens, a class of hormones often called "male hormones" that most notably includes testosterone.
The IAAF has defended itself by saying,
>"The sport has a lot of athletes with DSD (hyperandrogenism).
>"It is not just the one or two females you hear about in the media. In elite female athletics, the number of intersex athletes is 140 times more than you might find in the normal female population.
>"As world governing body, we need to ensure a level playing field for all athletes. The research and evidence clearly shows there is a performance advantage in female athletes with DSD over the track distances covered by this rule."
[(Source)](https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/43910794)
While I have no doubts about the veracity of their data or that hyperandrogenism can confer a significant competitive advantage, I fail to see how this unfairness is appreciably different from any of the other inherent unfairnesses in sports.
Take swimming as an example. [The average height of female swimming finalists at the Rio Olympics in 2016 was 69.1 inches.](https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/height-analysis-of-rio-swimming-finalists/) If we plug that height into [this handy little tool](https://tall.life/height-percentile-calculator-age-country/) and compare it to the distribution of female heights for the US, a taller than average country, we're placed into the 97th percentile. That's just shy of two full standard deviations, so it is well into the realm of statistical significance.
Just like hyperandrogenism, height potential is almost entirely genetic. So long as an individual doesn't suffer from pronounced malnutrition for a significant part of their development, they will reach their height potential regardless of any personal training/effort or lack thereof.
I'm not really decrying this inherent unfairness and I certainly don't mean to minimize the efforts and accomplishments of world-class athletes. Genetic potential only gets you so far and competing at that level requires incredible dedication. However, *everyone* at that level is incredibly dedicated to their sport, so that baseline genetic potential can be critically important in allowing one individual to surpass another.
Ultimately, there will always be some level of unfairness inherent to sports simply because humans have variable biology. We have to accept that. This plays into the debate about steroid use. I still support its prohibition because I don't think that we should encourage the use for entertainment purposes of drugs that can have seriously deleterious effects on your body, but I'm not really concerned with how it affects the fairness of competition.
What is ironic is that the medical treatments for hyperandrogenism that the IAAF wants athletes to undergo are fundamentally similar to anabolic steroid treatments, albeit in reverse. Athletes are being instructed to artificially alter their natural hormone balance in order to control their physical development. That's ultimately why I'm opposed to these new rules. I don't particularly care about preserving "fairness" because I don't believe that there's much to start with, but I don't think that we should be forcing athletes to submit to hormone therapy if they want to compete.
What I'm seeing here is a fundamental hypocrisy, but feel free to address any other aspect of this issue that you think is valuable.
I should also mention that I'm aware of the closeness of this issue to the issue of transgender athletes, but I want to keep this discussion specifically on these new rules. The issue of transgender athletes is a much more complex one and I also feel that it builds on top of this issue, so let's settle this one first.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | 24 | I think it's because it would almost encourage and dictate the direction the female sports would grow. Eventually if women with higher and higher levels of testosterone are encouraged or excel at their sport it will be all masculine women getting gold. It would probably also open the doors to all types of cheating since you'd basically be saying certain people are allowed a testosterone advantage. | 16 |
Is the sun capable of running on any kind of material or is it specific to hydrogen? | I've been thinking for my entire life that the sun can only be made out of hydrogen, however, there are a few science articles on the internet stating that the sun can be made out of any material with little to no difference compared to the sun now. This is one of the article btw: http://daleswanson.blogspot.com/2011/03/sun-made-out-of-bananas.html | 263 | The sun is fusing hydrogen to helium right now and has trace amounts of other elements from the original solar nebula. In about 5 billion years so much hydrogen would have been converted to helium that hydrogen fusion will stop and the sun's helium core will collapse under gravity increasing temperature and pressure until helium can fuse to carbon. The higher temperature causes the outer layers to expand into a red giant. The sun is not massive enough to fuse carbon. So, a star the size of our sun can't run on carbon or heavier elements.
More massive stars will fuse carbon and with sufficient mass all the way to iron. At which point the core collapses to a neutron star or black hole, typically with a super nova.
Since, iron has the lowest energy per nucleon element no energy can be produced by fission or fusion, so clearly the Sun cannot run on any material because it clearly cannot run on iron. | 150 |
[BATMAN 1960s] What exactly are the mechanics behind sliding down a pole and emerging at the bottom dressed as batman? | 59 | On the way down the Bat-Pole, \[Name Redacted\]'s lounge suit and flawlessly tied ascot are automatically removed by the Bat-Stripper (little known fact: Strippers, Bat or other, are frequently found in the vicinity of poles, Bat or other) and replaced using the Bat-Dresser, which is of course pre-loaded with the Bat-Suit.
By the time he reaches the Batcave, Batman is therefore one hundred per cent Bat-ready for action. | 128 |
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ELI5: How is 5G going to interfere with weather satellites? | 39 | Some of the frequency bands that are expected to be used for 5G are currently the bands that most weather radar use to detect precipitation feedback in the atmosphere, as that makes the "noise" of different "intensity" to show what we know has a weather radar sweep.
Those frequencies, if used in 5G communication will give false positives on weather radar in areas of high usage (i.e. cities) causing major weather forecasting computer models to spit out bad data that it can't compensate for. | 42 |
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Eli5 why does my band-aided finger feel like it has a heart beat? | 23 | because it does, it has your actual heart's beat. as does just about every bit of you. the band-aid is just putting pressure on it, so it actually becomes noticeable. maybe it's on a bit tighter than it needs to be. | 18 |
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ELI5: Why does an inmate on death row need a medical check before an execution if they're going to die anyway? | 148 | Because the United States feels that when they preform the death penalty, it is important that it is done in a way that is quick, clean, and does not induce unnecessary suffering. The medical check is there to make sure all three of those things can be assured. | 135 |
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None of my internship interviews ask technical questions... Is this a bad sign for me? | On the internship hunt... and during interviews, I'm seemingly asked none, if not very small technical questions. I've had four different interviews, for positions such as Application Developer intern, Software Engineer intern, ect. and technical questions just don't come up. The only questions I've gotten was in one of them, I was asked what SQL does (Manipulates a database) and to write Hello World in Java (Glad my leetcode grind paid off here ya know)
​
Just had another Software Engineering intern interview today, and again just no technical questions. Obviously some questions on some of the school projects and languages I'm familiar with, but other than that they've been purely behavior based.
​
Is this the norm? I've been studying O-O concepts and leetcode grinding like crazy for every interview and I've never been asked anything like this | 38 | For internship and new grad interviews, this is more common. Mainly because not every company does the leetcode-style type interviews since many companies use these moreso to filter out a huge pool of candidates. But also without much experience, candidates are usually screened by just measuring how well this person could be to work with and mentor at this stage in their career. | 29 |
ELI5: why is it when during the winter I have my heater set to the same temperature as I have my AC during the summer, and yet I'm cold in winter and warm in summer? | 26 | To some extent this is a psychological effect. In cold weather you tend to worry about being too cold, and in hot weather you tend to worry about being too hot, and this alters your subjective perception of the room temperature. | 15 |
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Why hasn't another massive meteor struck the earth like the one that killed off the dinosaurs? | 140 | Because Earth getting hit by meteors large enough to cause mass extinctions are extremely rare events. Also, Jupiter usually shields the Earth from incoming ~~meteors~~ comets although sometimes it can also slingshot them in our direction. With Jupiter catching ~~meteors~~ comets and asteroids that come from outside our solar system and throwing them back out again, the timescale for significant collisions between Earth and large objects are millions or tens of millions of years.
EDIT: Formatting and stuff. | 103 |
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ELI5: How do bricks work? | Are they structural to making buildings stay up? Or just an attractive exterior? Are there different types? How tall can a brick building be before the bottom bricks break under the weight of the bricks above them? | 19 | They used to be structural but today most cases they are more for the thermal mass and the style.
Most buildings are wood/steel/concrete structurally today with the brick layer is only an outer layer that provide:
- Mass to help control temperature
- Protection from the elements
- Style
You can identify that a brick wall is of this type because all the bricks will be lengthwise ("wide") across the entire wall (usually).
In older buildings they do have a structural function. In these cases a brick wall isn't just one layer of bricks but several layers stacked and interlocked together. You can identify these because every few bricks in height you will see a row of "thin" bricks. These are bricks layed inward so that the outer layer will interlock with the next layer of bricks.
The total height they can support is based partly on the thickness of the wall (something like a height of no more then 20 times the walls width at the base), though it's fairly rare to see a building of this type taller then 10 stories as it becomes increasingly more complicated to make a brick building taller without another supporting structure. | 31 |
ELI5: Why does wood burn when you heat it up instead of melting? | Not just wood, but many things burn instead of melt, whereas other things melt instead of burn. Can you burn ice? What if you put ice in wood? | 132 | There are two major forces at work here. The first is the chemical bonds themselves. This would be the carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds (among others) that hold a single molecule together. The other force is intermolecular forces, which hold a bunch of molecules together into a cohesive unit. As an analogy, chemical bonds are what make Lego pieces hard to break, while intermolecular forces are what make an entire Lego structure hard to break.
When you heat something, you're putting a lot of energy into it, in the form of vibrations. These vibrations strain against both of those two forces.
If the chemical bonds break first, you get combustion. The individual atoms start flying apart and shedding energy as heat before finding something else to bond with (usually oxygen).
If the intermolecular forces are overcome first, then the thing melts. Molecules start sliding against each other, and the entire structure starts to "flow" like a liquid. | 242 |
ELI5: Why do so many loading screens go to 90% really quick, then take just as long or longer to finish the last 90%? | 171 | Here is one example:
A progress bar shows the total progress of all tasks being done. Each individual task might be different and it may not be easy to determine how long it will take (some recursive functions).
So instead of calculating the progress of each task, it will just move the progress bar forward each time one is completed. So say there are 10 tasks to do:
Task 1 of 10 complete, move the bar to 10%.
Task 2 of 10 complete, move the bar to 20%.
Task 3 of 10 complete, move the bar to 30%.
And so on. Each of those tasks can take longer than the other so the progress bar can appear to jump in some places and stop in others, instead of a smooth transition from 0% to 100%. | 139 |
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[Scooby Doo] How are Scooby and Shaggy thin despite eating so much? | Shaggy and his canine friend, Scooby Doo, can eat insane amounts of food in a single sitting. They don't always eat the healthiest foods. How are they not 300 pounds? | 110 | Shaggy is constantly running away at the speed of Scooby. Great danes can run at 30 mph which is faster than Usain Bolt. Whatever calories they intake are quickly burned away by them constantly running at such high speeds. | 197 |
ELI5: How come standard cars aren't fitted with roll cages to make them safer during accidents? | 262 | Ever wonder why race-cars doesn't have doors that open?
It's the rollcage that's in the way. There's (at least) two massive metal tubes that goes through where the door is.
However, your standard car has a rollcage, of sorts. The chassis is designed in such a way that it acts as a deformable rollcage.
Why a deformable roll-cage? Wouldn't a stiff one (like in the race-cars) protect you better?
Well, yes, and no. A stiff roll-cage makes the whole car very stiff, making you absorb a lot more of any impact. You want your car to crumple as much as possible (without crushing you). That means that you get to absorb less of the energy from the crash. | 220 |
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[MCU] Do versions of Thanos try to enact their plan in the spiderverse's original universes? | If there are different versions of Spiderman, does that mean that there are different versions of Thanos too, and each one has their own infinity war? | 16 | There's no way of knowing unless one of them mentions it, but it's possible. The thing about the Multiverse is that one universe can be **extremely** different from the other. That means that in one universe Thanos went after the Infinity Stones, in another he never bothered with them, whereas in some other universe Thanos doesn't even exist or was killed early on. *Anything* is possible. So, no, it doesn't mean that each universe went through an "infinity war" or similar event, but there are definitely many universes where their Thanos went after the Stones. | 23 |
ELI5: Why did America lose the Vietnam War despite having an overall superior army and economy? | 22 | The Vietnamese were guerrilla warriors all the way and used ingenuity over might. Here are just some of the low-cost tactics they used to defeat the U.S. army:
1) When they discovered that Americans were using "jumping landmines", as in when you step on them they spring up and explode in the air, they had their scouts follow US troops and spot where they were planting them and risked their lives to dig them up...and plant them in the tops of trees to that when US copters flew over the trees, the downward pressure of the rotors would cause the mines to jump and explode at the helicopters.
2) Manipulate curiosity - The VCs noticed that many Americans had a childlike curiosity. So if they planted a Mickey Mouse doll in the middle of the jungle, troops would invariably be like "wow, what's this doing here?", pick it up and trigger a bomb.
3) Insect warfare - Living in the jungle, VCs were accustomed to seeing scorpions and tarantulas all over the place and quickly realized they freaked out Americans. If they didn't have bombs at their disposal, the VC would rig boxes full of spiders or scorpions and a trip wire would bring them down on US troops who would shriek in horror, thereby giving away their position and getting mowed down by gunfire. | 28 |
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How does Green screen work? | 36 | If you want to use a computer to put an image onto a video, you pretty much have to do it frame by frame. Modern software can speed this up a lot but sometimes you just want to change a background or something.
So you pick a colour that you know will not be in your frame, make sure its evenly lit up. Then you have some software that will replace the green in the video with whatever you want. For this, a light green is usually chosen. | 18 |
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CMV: The recent clip of Russian State TV calling for extermination of Ukrainian children should make US Republicans finally stop romanticizing Putin's 'values.' | I've been dutifully open-minded about Putin's perspective on the War in Ukraine. I've done my best to understand the various ways in which US/NATO have threatened or antagonized Putin directly, indirectly, in reality, or in theory. I understand that there is a "Russian Side" to the conflict. I respect the pacifist view of the War. I fear Nuclear war.
However, no matter how bad NATO did or did not screw up, or how hypocritical the US is or has been about our own history of aggression and violence in other countries, the recent [comments on RT by Anton Krasovsky and others](https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1584054018145685504) should put an end to the notion that Putin is being unduly vilified by Western mainstream media propaganda. (e.g. Tucker Carlson: "why should I be forced to hate Putin? Putin never tried to cancel me.")
I don't understand how any body can continue to be sympathetic to this genocidal regime. What am I missing? | 35 | If Republicans don't care enough about doing anything to prevent mass shootings in schools, and they are OK with separating children from their parents at the border (often without keeping track of how to return them later), then why would they care about foreign children dying? | 37 |
[Star Wars] Could Darth Maul use Force Lightning? | He had been training with Sidious since he was a child, so did Sidious ever think to teach him? | 17 | No. He thought explicitly NOT to teach him. Force Lightning is sort of an end-game power. It is the very last thing you learn, something that requires almost complete mastery of the force to utilize. And Sidious had no intention of EVER teaching him that, because Sidious has no intention of furthering the Rule Of Two. Under the Rule of Two, once Sidious had taught Maul everything, Maul would rightfully have killed Sidious and become the master, so Sidious kept his teachings to a minimum. That way, his apprentice could never rise against him. | 22 |
CMV: In 2019, small government is an ideological myth that's hurting American politics. | I've been notified that a better title would have been "In 2019, the idea that we have one small government party and one big government party is a myth that's hurting American politics". My bad.
I want to start this by saying that this post, as partisan as I might get in the comments, has little to do with just bashing the Republican party ideology. I don't have a problem with the party acting in a big government manner because that's just how the world works now. What I take issue with is the lie that there's one small government party and one big government party.
Let's detail some core generalizations of each party's platform. I'll try to be as neutral as possible. And yes, I'm admitting ahead of time that these are generalizations.
**Democratic Party:**
*More Government*
- Keynesian economics (government spending in the economy)
- More social services
- Incentives for green businesses
- Corporate welfare
- Infrastructure upgrades
- Federal preemption in environmental laws
- Gun control
- More taxes
*Less Government*
- Free trade
- Looser immigration laws
- The right for doctors to perform abortions
- One federal education standard versus 50 different state governments making decisions
- Ending the war on drugs
- Less military spending
**Republican Party**
*More Government*
- War on Drugs
- Military spending/foreign wars
- 50 different states making many government decisions on education
- Restrictions on LGBTQ rights (need to be policed)
- Restrictions on abortion (need to be policed)
- More border/immigration control
- Tough on crime
- Corporate welfare
- Infrastructure upgrades
- (For Trumpians) Nationalistic trade policies
- (For Trumpians) Forcing private web platforms to host racist speech as free speech
- Federal preemption in financial and environmental laws
- incentives for green energy
*Less Government*
- State's rights
- Looser financial rules
- freedom to discriminate
- Gun rights
- Looser environmental standards
- Income tax cuts
- Corporate tax cuts
This is in no way an exhaustive list nor is it supposed to be 1-1. What I mean is that **I didn't intentionally put more pro-government stuff on the Republican side to make a point**, it's just what I'm thinking of on the spot. I also don't agree with 100% of the Democratic platform nor do I disagree with 100% of the Republican platform, but I'm not going to say which ones. You might be able to figure it out and it could potentially be a good argument for you if something I said is clearly over-partisan.
Here's the issue -
The Democratic party is shameless about it's big governmentness. They know that they need to convince people *to do* selfless stuff, which is often harder than convincing people that stuff *shouldn't be done*. The Republican party, on the other hand, has perpetuated a lie that it's a limited government party. In reality, both parties explicitly rely on federal power to advance their agendas, the only difference is what exactly each party wants the federal government to do.
Quick Edit: some wording
Second Edit: totally just misplaced one of the points, thank you u/jt4
Third Edit: Subtitle
CMV! | 51 | >More Government - War on Drugs -
the war on drugs is firmly bi-partisan.
> Military spending/foreign wars
the democrats are just as eager for foreign wars when they're in charge as republicans.
>- 50 different states making many government decisions on education
Unless you plan to abolish public education, someone needs to make those decisions. Republicans, by and large, want to make that decision a more local affair.
>- Restrictions on LGBTQ rights (need to be policed)
No they don't.
>Corporate welfare -
No one is in favor of corporate welfare.
Your argument depends on depictions of republican positions that are caricatures, not their actual choices. It's accurate that republicans are not universally in favor of a smaller state at all times, but of the two parties, they are definitely the ones more interested in a state that, if not smaller, is at least no bigger than the current one. the democrats have never seen an expansion of the state that they don't like. | 15 |
How did the evolution that produced the Angler fish work, especially the sexual dimorphism? | If evolution is just a series of small mutations, wouldn't males getting smaller and weaker jaws make them less likely to survive? How did the parasitism even evolve? Did a male angler fish suddenly think, okay I'm just going to bite this female, and somehow they fused? | 24 | So consider the environment most angler fish live in. Most live in dark areas with limited resources. To make things harder they eat living things rather than dead things. Living things are kind of rare, but it's how the angler fish do. The female is the primary producer of children, so in order to produce lots of children you need a lot of energy. This can't happen if you are competing with your own species. So to combat this the males get smaller and require less energy. In addition, males are programmed to seek out the female and attach. Some females in nature (namely geckos) store sperm cause your don't know when the next meeting will be. Angler fish take this a step further and basically collect gonads.
Edit:a word. | 15 |
What's happening in your body when you 'sober up' due to panic? | 31 | Catecholeamine release. Norepinephrine and epinephrine are endogenous sympathomimetics that have a variety of functions but are best understood in the context of the 'fight or flight' response in the sympathetic nervous system. This response primes the body for activity that may be crucial to survival. Effects include increased heart rate and blood pressure, shunting blood away from the gut to the muscles, raising blood glucose levels, and increasing alertness and reaction time. In the setting of alcohol intoxication the effect can be a perceived sense of sobering up, however judgement, coordination, and reaction time may still be impaired. | 40 |
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[X-Men 2] What happened after Xavier almost killed everyone with Cerebro? | In X-Men 2, Professor X is plugged into Cerebro and focuses on all the humans for what seemed like 15 to 20 minutes, causing *every human on earth* to writhe in pain. Did he actually kill any of them?
Then, the President is in the middle of making a speech to the United States calling out the mutant threat, but is interrupted and threatened by Xavier and the rest of the X-Men and is convinced not to.
What does the President say instead? He was already on television making this speech after a world-wide phenomenon which was likely a huge massacre at the hands of a mutant. The President must respond to this outrage, so how does he handle it?
**Bonus:** And speaking of Professor X in this movie, he is capable of time-freezing an entire museum full of people. When he time-freezes the President's office and filming crew, as far as we know, the President's address was still being broadcast. If this speech was live, did X really freeze the entire country during his little intervention with the President? Just how powerful is Professor X? | 28 | 1) Several how were in aircraft or driving died. Otherwise, everyone was ok.
2) He responds by explaining that it was Stryker who did the deed and that Stryker is dead.
3) He only froze the people in the room. Professor X needs cerebro to go much farther than that. He did short out the screens so the US audience didn't see anything. We don't know his limits but in the movie universe he isn't a level 5 mutant. | 12 |
CMV: Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are both heroes and deserve immunity. | Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are both heroes, not just for America, but the entire world. If you don't already know, Edward Snowden is a former CIA contractor and a whistleblower who leaked several NSA documents showing the US government's mass surveillance capabilities. Because of this, people consider Edward Snowden a traitor.
Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks. That's it.
In 2010, WikiLeaks gained international attention because a series of leaked US army documents that contained stuff like the Baghdad airstrike \*collateral murder\* and the Afghanistan war logs. People blame Julian Assange for this and he's been labelled as a "Russian agent" despite there being absolutely no evidence backing that fact.
The thought that Edward Snowden is a traitor, in itself, is a scary idea and proof enough that Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are both morally correct.
I'm willing to change my view on the subject, though. I'm hoping reddit can provide better insight as to why people genuinely have these ideas. The only evidence I've been provided so far is an article stating that Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, and people saying "Edward Snowden put thousands of lives at risk", even though there is NO proof, and even though the Bush, Obama, AND Trump administrations are responsible for way more deaths than Edward Snowden ever will be.
\[Courage Snowden\]([https://edwardsnowden.com/](https://edwardsnowden.com/))
\[Julian Assange Wikipedia\]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian\_Assange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange))
\[Edward Snowden Wikipedia\]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward\_Snowden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden)) | 175 | Alright, let's get controversial here.
I think it's possible for someone to do something that benefits society but for selfish reasons. This does not make them a hero nor a martyr, just someone who used a good cause to further their own ambition.
I think you listed 2 types of people. One who became so overcome by personal conviction that they sacrificed their future and freedom while another used the opportunity to make himself famous.
Assange was a hacker for most of his life. Was their any heroic benefit to him hacking NASA or a small Canadian internet company? No, he did it for other reasons.
Assange's history shows that WikiLeaks wasn't likely done for altruistic reasons but rather because it was every hobbiest hacker's dream job, hacking the US government and uncovering a conspiracy. It was his trophy rather than an honest attempt. | 48 |
Do two waves have to have the same frequency for interference to happen? | I can't find a clear answer to that.
If i understood it right, fourier synthesis lets a bunch of waves with different frequencies interfere to model a complex one. So it should be possible for two waves with different frequencies to interfere, right? | 80 | Waves with different frequencies can indeed interfere. In acoustics, the interference between two sounds of close (but not equal) frequency is known as a *beat*, being perceived as a single tone with varying volume. If the frequencies are a little further apart you can instead get a *combination tone* related to the difference between the frequencies. | 44 |
ELI5: What does diplomatic immunity in the U.S. Grant you? | 16 | It's not just in the US - most countries recognize diplomatic immunity. It basically means you agree not to hold a diplomat responsible for what they do in your country. Instead of charging them with crimes, etc., you just kick them out. It helps ensure that countries don't hold each other's diplomats hostage on some pretense that they committed a crime.
Diplomatic immunity doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. You still generally have to obey the laws of the host country or your home nation will get mad at you. And if you commit a serious crime that's unrelated to your diplomatic position your home nation may try you for the crime itself or waive your immunity. However, diplomats are able to get away with parking pretty much wherever the hell they want without having to worry about the consequences of parking tickets. | 13 |
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CMV: Men are sexualized just as much as women in the entertainment industry | In recent times, there are plenty of groups that always seem to take offense to the way women are depicted in media. Whether it be video games, or movies, or whatnot. Typically the problem stems from their physical attributes. Large breasts, or skimpy outfits seem to be the most common. And as the justification goes, 'it appeals to the male fantasy'. However, the same argument could be made for most male characters.
For instance, let's look at male comic book superheros. A great deal of them are depicted as having perfect body types. They're tall and muscular, and their suits always draw focus to their physique. It's safe to say that their appearance would appeal to most females.
We can also take a look at the cover of any romantic fiction. It's almost certain that the male character will be shirtless while showcasing a perfectly chiseled body. And once again, it's obvious that this is done to appeal to the demographic.
Same for magazines. When is the last time you saw a scrawny shirtless guy on the front cover?
So essentially, there are numerous examples one can provide of sexualized depictions of either sex. In both instances, they can be seen as setting unrealistic expectations for the average individual. However, controversy only comes in one flavor. It's only problematic when it involves a female character, and there's no reason for that to be the case.
Bottom line: Both sexes are frequently depicted in their most ideal form, and if there's protest, it should be against both, not just one.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | 23 | Nah- Not that men are never sexualized, but media definately shows men and women's sexuality differently and disproportionately.
Look at music videos. You see 10 or 20 female back-up dancers for every male one, and the women are in bikinis or other skin-tight clothes probably half the time, but men rarely are. Both male and female artists regularly use female dancers, but pretty much only female artists will use male dancers, and even they (female artists) use female dancers more often than they use male dancers.
Or magazines- best-selling mags for men are Sports Illustrated and Playboy- ie they show nude/semi-nude women. Best-selling magazines for women are Vogue, Cosmopolitan etc, ie they show semi-nude, and sometimes nude, women. There have been a handfull of attempts to launch mags selling women images of sexy men (eg 'Playgirl'), but they tank, because the female market just doesn't buy them (despite female-focused fashion mags dominating magazine sales). The best way to sell sexy, nude images of men, is to other, gay, men (I'll get into the reason for that later)
[And you're right- they don't put *skinny* guys on magazine covers. Just like they don't put old, or unattractive of fat women on them (apart from the recent "plus-size" thing- but that's hardly the norm; probably not even 0.1% of covers). But the main point is that, if there's a magazine cover-model who's just there to look sexy/attractive, probably 80, 90% chance (more, tbh) they'll be a woman, regardless of if the mag sells to men, women, or both.
And as others have said, male comic-book super-heros are about appealling to (mostly adolescent) males- who have always been the primary market for comics.
Not to say this because "evil men forcing women to sexualize themselves". IMO it's more about men and women having inherent differences in how they act (over-all, on average, #NotAll), esp in regards to sex. Men's preferred media of "sexy women" tends to be porn *video/visual images* of hot, nude women. Women's preferred media of "sexy men" tends to be *stories*- rom-coms, erotica, romance novels- where they *talk about* "here's some guy, and he's so sweet and so successfull, and he really loves and desires you (or the you-proxy, everywoman protagonist in the story) etc". Men focus more on visuals, women focus more on story, context, emotional stuff etc (whcih is why nude pics of men sell well to gay men, but not to women). And men and women both try to play to the other's desires- therefore men seek, say, high-status work, or to look socially suave to appeal to women, and women try to be visually attractive to appeal to men.
Look at just about every social manifestation of sex, and it's split unevenly. Prostitution and stripping are overwhelmingly female industries for male clients. Rom-coms and romance novels are overwhelmingly media for a female market, mostly describing men. The stats on Tinder, OKCupid, etc all show massive sex-bias; women recieve messages and men send them.
*When was the last time you heard a guy complain about getting unsolicited vagina-pics? Why is there no male version of 'lingerie'? Why is there no female market for a male version of "Twitch thots" or "Cam-girls"* (well, there kinda is a much smaller number of "cam-boys", but their clients are mostly gay men).
(and ofc there's always exceptions. But we wouldn't call them "exceptions" if it wasn't for the *massive, overwhelming, omnipresent patterns* that we tend not to notice because we're so used to seeing them. They just become "how it is".)
Men and women (like male and female of many species) think differently about sex, especially in terms of how much they focus on visuals. And part of the way this manifests is more visual images of female sexuality in media. | 44 |
ELI5 Why are close shots in older TV far better quality than wide shots? | Just watching Seinfeld and I noticed a marked difference between the close shots and the wide shots. It looks like it might be restored, but why could the close shots be restored and the wide ones not?
My only other thought is there's too much going on in the background for the camera to display at the same resolution, but I think that's been a more recent issue. | 619 | The used stock footage for a lot of the wide establishing shots. It's super noticeable now that you can watch the show restored in 4k from the 35mm negatives.
Most of the 'outside' parts where shot on a backlot which gave them a certain amount of street to shoot on, but by no means everything they would need for every single script.
When the show first aired the crappy standard definition stock footage was mixed in with a standard definition scan of the film negatives, so it was less noticeable of a jump. | 324 |
CMV: Medical professionals shouldn’t be allowed to work if they refuse the vaccine | I wanted to post here to see if there are other views I’m missing that make this a bad idea in any way...
My aunt is a nurse who’s seriously refusing the vaccine, and she helps COVID patients almost every day... on top of that, she wants to fly out of state to visit the rest of my family, who also are refusing vaccines, and they all contracted COVID. Then, she wants to go on a vacation to Hawaii right after she’s done visiting! It’s insane to me that a medical professional of any kind can be allowed to behave this way and put this many people at risk. Who knows who she’s gonna spread it to while on the plane or when she goes to Hawaii or when she comes back. People might hate me for this, but a law should be put in place that anyone who refuses vaccines can’t be in the medical field. It’s unsafe and it just doesn’t make any sense... any other views out there? | 5,926 | I am all in favor of vaccines, but no one should be forced to take them.
Prior to COVID, your aunt and other nurses & physicians were taking care of patients with infectious diseases that they themselves were not vaccinated against or immune to. Chances are you weren’t aware of this because many other diseases aren’t as sensational or sexy as COVID.
This will continue to happen long after every shred of COVID is eradicated from the face of the earth. | 646 |
ELI5:Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria | I have heard a lot about antibiotic resistant bacteria and how dangerous it is. Can anyone explain how we got into this dangerous position and what this implies about the future of bacteria? How possible is a worldwide outbreak pandemonium based on this? | 39 | Basically what happened was that antibiotics were used so often, even for simple stuff such that the bacteria became resistant by natural selection. Once in a while, mutations may create a bacteria resistant to antibiotics. When antibiotics are used, all bacteria not resistant are killed off, leaving only resistant strains to reproduce and multiply, passing on their resistance. Thus, all the bacteria are now resistant to the antibiotics. Now we have to make new antibiotics to combat these bacteria. | 13 |
ELI5: What is it in peoples genetic makeup that makes things like weight problems hereditary? | 51 | For the vast, vast, vast majority: nothing.
Weight problems weren't "hereditary" until the last 50 years or so, and amazingly, they still aren't "hereditary" in the third world. Truly shocking.
Human metabolisms don't vary by more than a few percentage points (accounting for obvious things like sex/height/etc).
Everyone has that one friend who supposedly eats a ton but never gains weight, and they have that one friend who eats "omg so healthy" but looks like a blimp. These are not exceptions. People are just really, really bad at estimating how much they themselves eat, and even worse at estimating how much others eat.
Thyroid issues don't make people obese, either. They usually only account for a ~5% difference if untreated and a 0~1% difference if treated.
The only reason fat parents tend to have fat kids is because they instill bad eating habits and don't teach the concept of delayed gratification to their children. | 107 |
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Why are certain things like knives/swords forged when they could may as well be cut and sharpened from a sheet of metal? | 5,945 | Most cheap knives are either cut and ground or die-forged (a blank or sheet is stamped at very high pressure to smoosh it into shape, then ground to finish). Die forging or stamping is quick, cheap (per unit, not to set up), and pretty efficient use of material. Decent knives are then heat treated to the desired hardness, sometimes differentially (edge is hard to keep an edge, spine is more elastic so it doesn’t snap)
Grinding a thick blank into a sword or knife can be time consuming, lead to spot-overheating and distempering of the metal, and wastes a lot of metal. Small-scale makers will sometimes do this.
Hammer and anvil forging is kind of hipster-y cool but also allows for mixing different steels together and delivers a unique product every time. It’s also hella expensive in terms of time, but doesn’t require a couple million dollars worth of press and dies. Most commercial swords and knives are not hand forged.
There’s a whole spectrum of methods between these - it’s just a quick survey of high points.
Edit: clarity. | 4,824 |
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[Harry Potter] What was the point of the Triwizard Tournament’s first two tasks if the winner is decided entirely by whoever touches the cup first in the third task? | 630 | Spectacle, and advantage in the final task. And this way, they avoid the final task ever being rendered pointless. No matter how poorly a school does in the first two tasks, they *always* have a chance to win the tournament. If the tournament was decided by, say, the point totals of the three tasks, it would be possible to enter the third task with no possibility of success.
Not fun for the participants, the schools *or* the audience. | 596 |
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Why don't cars just have AC outlets rather than "car outlets"? | 81 | Your car's electrical system is run off 12V DC (you know, battery power). Your household current is (probably) 120V AC.
There are some cars that do indeed come with AC plugs installed, but behind those AC plugs are power inverters. It's important to note that whatever is plugged into the AC outlet will still draw the same current; if you have a 100 watt item on household 120, that item will only draw .83 amps. On the other hand, if you use an inverter and plug that same 100W load in you're drawing almost 9.2A on the DC side (100/12V, and assuming 90% efficiency).
Converting AC to DC is simple; you use a diode bridge and chop the waveform to a good DC approximation, maybe with a snubber diode or two for good measure. Converting DC to AC requires taking DC and simulating an AC waveform, which is considerably trickier.
Given that the equipment necessary to invert your car's power to household power and the amperage draw required to run most equipment, it's just not a done thing to install AC outlets in a car (aside from a few exceptions). It adds substantial cost and complexity as well as risk (what happens if an end user wants to run a hair dryer? An 1,800W hair dryer at 120V is 15A; that's 165A @ 90% on 12V DC! That's more than a Honda Accord alternator produces!). Cars that are equipped with AC outlets must be designed to accommodate them, and end users mustn't treat them as they would a common household outlet. | 87 |
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[Star Wars] Why don't force users levitate themselves and fly around? | 28 | Using the force takes a physical toll on the body.
There are examples of things in the EU or Clone Wars that allude to the ability to do things like levitate but greater examples show that using force abilities stresses the body, and mind and can exhaust the Jedi/Sith.
Using energies to float that would be better used in other directions seems like something that would unnecessarily tire/exhaust the force user | 30 |
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Why don't we digest tapeworms? | Our bodies are pretty good at digesting lots of things. How do people get a tapeworm without it being dissolved and used for food? | 20 | It is as simple as them having acid resistant outer skin layer.
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It is the same reason many other things are not digested, for example hair: It simply does not react with anything in the digestive tract. Just like hair, the outer skin of parasitic worms evolved not to react with their hosts digestive secretions. | 28 |
[Mario] How is Mario so superhuman? | If Mario is just supposed to be an average plumber from Brooklyn or whatever his backstory is why is it then can he can stand toe to toe with giant monsters take their strongest hits and hit them back even harder | 19 | I've got two answers for you.
* 1: Mario is like John Carter, in that his everyday upbringing in Brooklyn has given him the power to jump really good once he was transported to a new land.
* 2: Mario has a cape. That's why they call him "Super Mario". | 32 |
[Star Wars] Does anyone think that Anakin would have been a fallen Jedi even without Sidious' influence? | He clearly has a lot of differing opinions from the Jedi, and the Jedi were shown to have stagnated in a way - or perhaps they were out of touch. At the very least I think he would have left the Jedi order like Count Dooku, another disillusioned Master. | 110 | It's really hard to say because Sidious was close to Anakin from his first day on Coruscant. Anything that he did after that could have been influenced by Sidious. Palpatine was able to cloud Yoda's connection to the force, so it is probable that he did the same with Anakin. For instance he could have given him the nightmares about his mother. which led to the first evil act Anakin committed. | 78 |
[Star Wars] Did Vader get a promotion or something between Episode IV and Episode V? | Never really noticed this before my most recent rewatch of the ~~films~~ historical holocrons but Vader seems to take a lot more shit from Imperial officers in ANH. I always assumed Vader was basically 'second in command' since Episode III and he seems that way! ...except in ANH.
What's up with the empire's organizational structure? Are there imperial SBUs and Vader is some kind of mr. dark side consultant? Or has he basically just been the emperor's mailboy until everyone above him blew up in the death star? | 387 | Tarkin and Vader had a... strange relationship. Tarkin's officers (the ones you see giving Vader shit) took it as a sign of submission from Vader, as opposed to respect, so they were quite keen on boarding the (apparent) chide train.
Also, on a related note, the Emperor kept the Empire's command structure deliberately obscure and confusing. It was clear Grand Moffs were big on the chain, but how they relate to Lord Vader or any other rank outside of sector control wasn't clear at all. | 426 |
ELI5 Why do we , and nearly all animals and birds have two nostrils ? | 61 | A) Bilateral symetry caught on very early in animal evolution, so most external shapes are reflected on animal bodies.
B) There is little to no selective pressure for a more complex structure that would create more nostrils. | 106 |
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eli5- Do brain cells (Neurons) divide? | 22 | For the most part no.
They’re produced originally by a stem cell, that divides into another stem cell and a precursor cell. That neuron precursor gets to where it needs to be and then turns itself into a neuron. Once this specialization is complete, the neuron can’t replicate itself.
There’s a lot of production and culling of neurons when you’re an infant, and then the stem cells are mostly deactivated. The neurons can’t replace themselves, and so the brain has very limited repair capacity.
The stem cells are deactivated so that they don’t go nuts later and grow a big tumor. Figuring out how to *safely* reactivate them in a controlled manner is something of a holy grail in bioscience. | 45 |
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CMV: Gender roles aren't socially constructed, they're a result of sexual selection. | I was listening to a podcast about Rojava when one of the female fighters started talking about what was basically feminist theory. She basically said that gender roles were socially constructed by men at the dawn of civilization to oppress women, which I dont really understand. It seems pretty obvious to me that its part of our nature, but maybe theres something Im missing?
In primates (and most mammals in general) males are the indiscriminate sex while females are the selective sex, because males produce sperm consistently at a low energetic cost whereas females produce a limited number of eggs only during certain times and at a higher energetic cost. This means it increases fitness most for men to have as many mates as possible since... they can.... while it benefits female fitness most to select the fittest possible mates in order to give their limited offspring the best chance of survival and reproduction. Males compete with one another for attention of selective females, and therefore more aggressive and dominant males are selected for. Men select for women who are more passive and emotionally sensitive because it makes them more effective at rearing children. Since men are more dominant and aggressive and women more sensitive it kind of follows that men would of course end up being the dominant sex. The sexual strategies themselves are also selected for which is why theres a pretty pervasive social more against women being promiscuous while men are generally lauded for having more sex. | 18 | The fact that they are socially constructed follows immediately from the observation that gender roles vary from time to time and from society to society. If they were part of our nature, then they wouldn't vary on such short time scales, and certainly not do so based on social constructs. | 62 |
How does the body cope with the presence of heavy metals in the circulation? | When I did my Osteopathy undergraduate degree many years ago, I recall learning that molecules with a molecular mass greater than six kilo-Daltons could not pass through the basement membrane of the kidney, which meant that heavy metals such as mercury and lead (and other nasties such as DDT) could not be excreted, and were consequently stored in the liver until death. Yet, in the 19th century, hatters were driven mad by mercury. (Hence, the behaviour of the Mad Hatter in 'Alice in Wonderland.'). For this to happen, I assume at least some of the mercury must have not been stored but have been free-floating in the circulation and made its way to the brain. Can anyone throw some light on this? | 46 | 6 kilodaltons is far, far greater than the atomic mass of any element. Mercury has an atomic mass of 200.6, lead 207.2 (note that one dalton is one atomic mass unit). DDT also falls far below that range, weighing in at 354.5. 6 kilodaltons is in marcromolecular range, which includes things like proteins and DNA.
The reason why heavy metals stick around in the body is because they form very stable coordination complexes with proteins (more specifically, with the amino acid residues in proteins). Mercury in particular forms very stable complexes with sulfur and selenium, which are found in cysteine and selenocysteine respectively. Once it gets in the body, it distributes itself throughout the body and sticks to these proteins. That doesn't mean that it stays in the body forever, though. It does slowly get excreted by the body over time, but this is a slow process. | 12 |
CMV: I think earth hour is dumb and useless | I would expect one hour in a year to be useless in fixing polution.shutting off the lights is useless imo because electric energy can be obtained in a clean way, whereas burning fossil fuels is playing a bigger role in environmental damage, including from extraction. It's a story simmilar to that of reducing the fatty foods intake to not gain weight, where the science shows that fat accumulates from sugar aswell. And so there are many products advocating low fat whilst having a ton of sweetners.so why discredit electricity with the earth hour,when there are so many successfull examples of it being a clean energy resource in the nordic countries for example. | 326 | The thing with the Earth Hour is not about fixing pollution by not spending energy for an hour, it is a cry to everyone who can do something about it. It is a way of showing people what it would when all exhaustible resources are gone. Look at it as a symbol, not a means to an end. | 299 |
How did we ever discover what the speed of light is? | 27 | First attempt was by Gallileo who tried to open lanterns with his assistant really fast on adjacent hilltops. That did not work. The first successful measurement was from Roemer, who realized that the eclipses of Jupiter's moons appeared at different times depending on where Jupiter was relative to Earth. The first accurate measurement was by Fizeau, who repeated Gallileo's experiment with better equipment, sending a beam of light through a notch in a spinning cog, off a distant mirror, and back through the notch in the cog. If the cog was spinning fast enough it would block the reflection, and you can measure the speed of light based on the speed of the cog. | 52 |
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ELI5: 'Death rattles' | I mean the way, in T.V shows where a seemingly dead person exhales, does this really happen? If so, why? | 29 | Usually in medicine we refer to death rattle as the sound most humans make when they are close to death. They will breathe in and it sounds like a rattle due to their lungs filling with fluids. If they take that last breath of air before they die it would make the same sound if they had the rattle before death. | 34 |
CMV: Looks are just as important as personality when dating. (Maybe more?) | I hear so many people saying that you should find a partner based off of their personality and not based off of looks. I've heard people say if you judge a person off of their looks when dating then you are going to end up hating your relationship. Could that happen? Yes and it could also happen if you judged a person off of personality.
**To me** looks are a first impression, rather you want them to be or not (It is literally the first thing I see) When I date someone I want to enjoy looking at them. I have a type and even if they have the best personality in the world I most likely won't find an interest if they are not my type. When I take interest in someone because I like the way they look I still make sure they are a decent person.
As far as what personality even means.. Being nice? Being funny? Liking the same things as me??
I can still date based off of looks and have the intelligence to not form a relationship if the person is mean/rude to me or others. I can still like someone if they aren't funny. I do not care what they like to do or what they find interesting when I'm dating someone. Everyone I've dated in the past has had a fascination with anime and random fighting video games. I don't like anime or fighting games so does this mean I'm not meant to be with this person? To mean that makes no sense. Also I have never dated someone who completely enjoys everything that I find interesting and that has never caused an issue. I'm not looking for my boyfriend to be a carbon copy of me. Plus at the end of the day if you love your partner you can sometimes just do what they like to do not because you like it but because you want to make them happy.
The only thing I care about in a man is: Is he attractive to me? Do I like him? Is he nice to me? Is he nice to himself? Is he financially stable to support himself? If the answer isn't yes to all of these questions then I'm not interested in being with them. | 29 | An apt comparison I’ve heard and found to be accurate:
Looks are the resume, personality is the interview.
So sure, looks will help land you the interview, but if you bomb the interview, you won’t get the job.
So if your goal is landing a long term relationship, personality is more important than looks.
Looks might get you lots of interviews, but if you don’t have a good interview (personality) nothing is going to stick. | 28 |
[Legend of Zelda] So I'm the first male born of the gerudo tribe in a hundred years or whatever, but it turns out the previous guy is not only still alive, but a godlike immortal of immeasurable power bent on conquering the neighboring kingdom. So, like, do I get to be king or what? | 69 | I have to go with what the other guy said. Kick his ass. Buy do it because that's what's best for your people.
Maybe start wearing green, too. It's a good color. Anyway, there's a sword in this temple that should help you out when you actually go on a quest to fight the dude. | 35 |
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[Star Wars] If Admiral Thrawn were to fight the US, would he be more interested in a Ken Burns documentary, or our MCU/The Office/Friends type media? | Bonus; Which documentary would be his favorite? (I think the Civil War) | 15 | I think our music would be more telling than any visual media.
He’d learn that the social outcasts, the despised minorities are the ones more experimental, perhaps more emotional and unpredictable. While those in established social power aren’t risk takers and value conformity. | 17 |
If the universe only contained two hydrogen atoms 13 billion light years apart, would they exert a gravitational force on each other? | 133 | The force between two objects is given by F = G(m1 * m2)/r^2
Where G (6.67×10^-11 N m^2 / kg^2) is the universal gravitational constant, M1 and M2 are the two masses, and r is the distance between the two center of masses.
As the mass of a hydrogen atom is 1.67372×10^-27 kg, and 13 billion light years is 1.23×10^26 meters, the force is between the two atoms is:
F = 6.67×10^-11* ((1.67372×10^-27 )^2 / (1.23×10^26 )^2)
or 1.23×10^-116 N
EDIT: Forgot to square the denominator | 58 |
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ELI5: How do companies like uber startup when they require a large customer base from day one to operate | 68 | They are almost always funded by investors who pay for the day-to-day operations prior to the company turning a profit. That means that, while the startup is still getting set up, they can provide their service/good without making money. Once they do make money, the investor starts receiving a portion of it.
The investor can be either a private individual or a bank. Banks sometimes provide loans to startups but the loan has to be "Secured" against something (i.e. if the startup doesn't take money and the bank wants its money back they could secure the loan against the president of the company's house, then foreclose the house to retake lost money).
That's a pretty basic explanation - it's far more complex than that because there are different ways to secure initial funding. | 43 |
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If there was a planet that lied in the exact same orbit of the earth but on the other side, would we have any way of detecting it? | The sun would be in the way of the object always. This question implies that we can only make observations & measurements from Earth or Earth orbitting satelites (no spacecraft that have moved out of Earth's normal orbitting path). | 89 | We'd be able to see it at certain times of the year because Earth's orbit isn't perfectly circular. It would also be impossible to send spacecraft to Mars and Venus the way we do because the gravity of that planet would interfere. | 114 |
(L4D/L4D2/ any Zombie universe) How does one go about becoming a special Infected? | oops, got my self bit. Not much i can do about in now though but im not one just to off my self, i want to be a big bad zombie with mad skills......cough.....eww blood
any way those Special Infected look kind of cool how would i go about becoming one of them? ahhhh my head hurts, cough i think my tongue is swelling up........Cough | 23 | In Virology, it's estimated that roughly 2% of any population should hold resistance or immunity to any given disease.
For the sake of the "infection", we'll consider by this model , that 2 % of the population are resistant to the infection. Thus, there bodies are not immediately overwhelmed, the brainstem is not immediately suffer from inflammation and the skin does not immediately begin to form necrosis. Sensitivity and normal immunity and homeostasis remains.
In these cases, the infection can begin to cause anomalous behaviour in the Amygdala, resulting in uncontrollable fits of rage, psychosis, paranoia, xenophobia, etc. Then the Hippocampus goes, removing the infected's ability to reason and form and synthesize and rationalize. Finally, the Hypothalmus/pituitary glands begin to go, synthesizing with the infection to form special enzymes.
In some infected, Lipase production shuts down and begins to form large amounts of digestive bile, accumulating in pus mounds and sacs.
In others, Anaerobic respiration of pathogens harmonizes with the body's limbic system, allowing an infected to achieve steroid like performance and recognize terrain features.
In others, estrogen production causes a decrease in melanin production but also dulls the body's nervous system to pain and begins to produce high amounts of systemic adrenaline. Varicose veins begin to blister and burst underneath the eyes, causing a crying effect.
Of course, it's rumoured that amongst these 2%, there's an even lesser percentage of population where the pathogen lies dormant and unresponsive, the immune system forms no antigens and no antibodies to the infection yet the pathogen seems unable to form the proper protein bonds to affect normal cell function. | 22 |
[Pacific Rim] How and why does a Jaeger need two pilots? | 37 | Because they're stupidly huge and the neural link would completely overwhelm a single person. Like how a modern computer has multiple cores instead of one big one, or how a Titan from 40k requires a crew in addition to a hard-linked Princeps. | 88 |
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[Monsters Inc] How did they power the first ever door? | For anyone who is unfamiliar with the film Monsters Inc, It's based in some dimension where monsters are as technically advanced as human's although their electrical system is powered by childrens screams.
To obtain children's screams monsters go through doors into the human world to scare children.
These doors must be powered to work though...
So my question, how did they power the first ever door to obtain screams?.... | 22 | It could be that they had other sources of power but because children's screams are a clean, efficient and potentially limitless source of energy they moved to adopt it across their entire society. After all, there is no reason to pollute if renewable energy is easily available. | 40 |
ELI5: Why are CPUs/Processors so small? Couldn't we double our processing power / GPU by increasing the size of the chips? | I wouldn't mind twice the CPU/GPU size for a gaming PC | 15 | You can improve processing power by increasing the size of the chip, but there are some issues, and you won't necessarily get twice the processing for twice the size.
The biggest issue is cost. Cost of a chip increases faster than the size (due to the higher chances of a defect). So a chip 2x the size costs more than 2x the $$$.
Another issue is the I/O bottleneck. Processing speed can be limited by how fast information can be delivered to or sent from the processor. So to double the amount of processing power, you might need to increase the I/O speed or number of signals, both of which are going to have cost impacts and possibly impact the size of the package.
If you're going to double the size of the chip to get more processing, you're probably going to add more cores (and cache memory). That means that what you are working on must be able to be split between multiple cores efficiently. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it isn't.
Hot hot hot! Microprocessors get hot, and increasing the size of the chip increases the amount of heat you have to be able to dissipate. So the thermal solution used is going to have to be more capable, which usually means bigger and more expensive. Of course, along with the heat comes the power delivered. The power supply needs to be able to provide the required power, and the motherboard needs to be able to deliver it without causing noise or ground bounce issues.
All of these things are problems that can be overcome. All you need is money. | 19 |
What two creatures are most closely related genetically, but look the most different physically? | 103 | This is a little bit of a cheeky approach to your question: the thing most genetically similar to any organism is itself (or its clone/identical twin). A caterpillar is genetically identical to the butterfly it will become, but is vastly different physically. The same goes for any animal with metamorphosis: frogs, jellyfish, crabs, flies, starfish, etc.
Another, more serious answer is tunicates (also known as sea squirts) are the most closely related creatures to vertebrates, but have almost no recognizable "vertebrate" characteristics. They barely have a nervous system, let alone a face. | 95 |
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ELI5: The functional differences between cruisers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes, battlecruisers, battleships, and dreadnoughts. | I believe this was asked around two years ago, but I was still confused even after reading it. Here's what I think I understand:
* Dreadnoughts, which I think includes the German Bismark from WWI, were spiritually succeeded by battleships in WWII. In both cases, these ships were used to bombard land-based installations or garrisons. However, because they only were able to use shells, and with the advent of the aircraft carrier, the battleship became obsolete, as an aircraft carrier could do pretty much everything a battleship did but better.
* Destroyers are fast. They also are primarily used to protect allied ships - so in other words, they mostly go after submarines and aircraft. They've also been recently been able to use guided missiles - hence the "G" in DDG - alongside the AEGIS fire control system to track many potential targets at the same time.
* Cruisers are currently being replaced with destroyers. Cruisers are mainly used to fire missiles, but since the AEGIS system enabled destroyers to use missiles efficiently, cruisers are being phased out.
* Battlecruisers are battleships with weaker armor but better agility.
* Frigates aid merchant ships, and maybe amphibious assault crafts.
* Corvettes are pretty much a spiritual predecessor to Littoral Combat Ships (LCS).
Is any of this right? | 115 | 1. "Dreadnaughts" are a type of battleship. Namely, those patterned after *HMS Dreadnaught*. These are all-big-gun ships. In that they carry a single set of large caliber guns in turrets that can freely traverse through a wide range of motion. Pre-Dreadnaughts generally carried a mixed battery of large guns, in less flexible mountings. The Dreadnaught-style won out because by the 19-teens naval artillery was accurate enough that an all-big-gun ship could expect to kill a mixed-guns ship before the older ship could bring it's smaller guns into range.
2. Destroyers evolved from Torpedo Boat Destroyers. The invention of the powered torpedo was a **big deal** in naval strategy. It meant a small, cheap, torpedo boat was now a threat to a big, expensive capital ship. Destroyers were designed as a fast type of ship with many smaller guns that could effectively kill torpedo boats before they could reach the big ships. They stayed in service after the torpedo boat era because of their usefulness as scouts, escorts, and anti-submarine/aircraft platforms.
3. Cruisers were originally exactly what their name says. A ship designed for long cruises. Big enough to operate independently far from home, and small enough not be super expensive like a battleship. They were your go-to ship for enforcing your policies against local bad-actors if you were a naval power of the 1late 19th and early 20th century. In the late 20th century cruisers and destroyers sort of melded together and differences between them now are basically name only. Destroyers got bigger and more capable, and big-gun cruisers became obsolete so these days "cruiser" just means "big destroyer."
4. Basically spot on. Battlecruisers were envisioned as a big-gun combatant that could keep pace with cruiser squadrons. They sacrificed armor for guns. Fast battleships basically made them obsolete by the 1940s, but they lived on a while as good platforms to cram a lot of AA guns on.
5. Modern frigates are basically smaller, less capable destroyers and are generally considered the smallest ships classified as "major surface combatants." They have a long history back to the sailing era when a frigate was the smallest of the big warships. Not sturdy enough to stand in the line, but big enough to operate independently and overpower any merchant or pirate. Basically the "cruiser" of the age of sail.
6. Corvettes are about the smallest warship that is a warship rather than a patrol boat. They generally mount very limited weapon systems, have a small crew, limited endurance, and are expected to engage primarily in littoral combat. They are a good option if your naval ambitions are limited to defense of your immediate local vicinity. Enough range and firepower to be threatening, cheap enough for smaller navies to have a bunch of them. | 61 |
ELI5 - Why does a stressful day at work make you both mentally and physically exhausted? | 41 | The brain requires energy to work just like your muscles do, it actually uses more energy than any other organ, using up to 20 percent of the body's total. A stressful day at work is going to result in long periods of ~~high~~ brain activity which is going to drain your body's energy as a whole. | 21 |
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Does electricity flow three dimensionally? | I hope that title does my question justice.
When electricity moves it takes the path of least resistance in a straightish line.
Is there ever an instance where it doesnt go from point A to B and just exsists in a space? Conceptually like a ball of lightning I guess. | 20 | The word "electricity" has several meanings. Assuming that you meant "electric current":
Electric current doesn't take the path of least resistance. It takes all the possible paths, but most of it goes through the path of least resistance, a bit less through a path that is a bit more resistant etc.
Electric current is the flow of charged particles. It is possible that a charged particle doesn't go anywhere, but then it isn't electric current. It is possible to have a body that is electrically charged but it isn't electric current. | 29 |
From how high up would an ant have to fall from for the impact of landing to kill it? | 16 | The terminal velocity of an ant (the fastest it can fall (on Earth!), due to the interaction of wind resistance and their weight) is insufficient to harm it, so it can fall a theoretically "unlimited" distance.
I'll google the references in a sec and edit this. | 32 |
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ELI5: What's the difference between one day (single use) contact lenses and regular lenses? | What makes the single uses lenses single use. Why can they not be used multiple times like other contact lenses? | 43 | One day lenses are much thinner and less durable, however since you wear a new pair every day they're usually more sanitary, can't develop buildup that can scratch your eyes, and generally easier for the wearer.
Biweeklys and monthlys are much sturdier, but degrade over the lifespan of the lens. They also require a lot more care than daylies. You're supposed to rinse them for 5 seconds on each side with solution and let them sit in the contact solution for 8 hours, which can be a lot of work. Most people I've heard don't rinse their contacts, just soak them.
Also, everyone's eyes work differently - some people can use the biweeklys for over a month, while other people's contacts degrade quicker. This can lead to either just living with worse eyesight or quicker replacement. Wearing contacts longer than their recommended use period can cause microscratches on the cornea from tiny amounts of buildup. It can be done, of course, but it isn't great for the eye. | 14 |
Why can't we replace hearts and lungs by pumping oxygenated blood though people? | Like they do with bypass surgery.
*Edit* In cases where people are waiting for new organs and such. Why can't it be a long term solution if a replacement isn't available immediately. | 2,775 | I took a master's in biomedical engineering and one of our professors who taught blood compatibility had actually worked on a lot of the early heart and lung machines. The two organs are indeed usually replaced together because the new artificial lung needs a good pressure difference to drive the blood through that you wouldn't want the patient's heart to have to maintain.
He told us about the detrimental effects of the systems and I'll try to summarize. One is that the pumps lyse ("pop") the red blood cells. Another is platelet ("scab") accumulation on the device. Basically, the only thing blood won't try to scab up on is immunocompatible flesh.
These problems can be mitigated by constant fresh blood infusion and swapping out the machine, but infection is also a constant risk. The devices he worked on were used to treat acute, but not chronic, lung failure while the lungs would heal to take the job back over. IIRC, roughly one week. | 1,768 |
[Harry Potter] What if you are afraid of success? What would a Boggart look like in that case? | I have achievemephobia, a fear of being successful.
What would a Boggart look like if I met one? | 16 | Well we know what a fear of failure looks like \- Hermione's boggart was an image of Professor McGonagall informing her that she'd failed her tests.
So we can definitely flip that \- if your fear is success, you'd see your boss offering you a huge promotion, or a professor commending you on a kickass term paper, or whatever form of success gives you the worst anxiety. | 31 |
ELI5: why do some trucks have a pair of wheels that's a bit off the ground? | what purpose does that serve? and I don't think it's necessarily because of the risk of tipping over, because some of these trucks are quite long, and the risk of tipping is very low. | 973 | They do touch the ground, once they are heavy enough, they need to be on the ground to relieve stress on the other axles.
They are then raised when going around corners/bends so that they don't drag.
They are like the raised axles on a transport truck.
| 514 |
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