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If inflation is “transitory” does that mean when bottlenecks are relieved prices will fall or will they not rise as quickly? | I understand “inflation” is a rate of change. If in fact the supply bottlenecks/COVID-related demand are transitory, once they’re relieved (gone), assuming all else constant, will supply/demand seek its prior equilibrium which means we’d see DEFLATION back to previous price levels? | 44 | Shipping prices will fall once backlogs and other issues resolve.
It will vary by industry (and probably even company) if those reduced costs reflect in prices. In many cases the additional supply chain costs were explicitly passed on to consumers, in these cases those reduce. In other cases (e.g. resellers) the increase in shipping costs reflected in higher prices; here some companies may again lower prices, where others may try to keep the new (higher) prices in place. How much prices reduce likely depend on the level of competition in the market given. | 33 |
CMV: I think that conducting racial profiling makes sense | 21 | If one particular group of people is targeted by law enforcement more than others, then isn't kind of obvious that that group would inevitably have a higher arrest rate? And if that group had a higher arrest rate, it stands to reason that they would come under even greater police scrutiny.
Essentially racial profiling would itself create the justification for racial profiling. | 47 |
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ELI5: Durring the week i can get 8 hours of sleep and feel like i got 2, but durring the weekend i can get 5 hours of sleep and feel like i got 10. Why? | 41 | When you sleep, you're doing it in cycles that last roughly 90 minutes. Interrupting these cycles mean that your brain doesn't quite finish the recharging it normally does during sleep, and you will feel more tired and like you only got a few hours of sleep. During the weekend, you are probably waking up naturally, without an alarm clock to interrupt your sleep cycles, which is why you feel more rested. | 27 |
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Hummingbirds flap their wings around 70 times per second during normal flight...what is the fastest natural movement that humans are capable of, either voluntary or involuntary? | My daughter was watching a cartoon on PBS this morning and they were talking about pollination. It was mentioned that hummingbirds are capable of flapping their wings upwards of 200 times per second. After a quick google, it seems 70 is the more common number for "normal" flight. That's obviously still extremely fast and made me wonder what humans are capable of in terms of pure speed, so I thought I'd ask here. | 8,355 | The National Science foundation released an article on the fastest articulated motion a human can execute, which is throwing. When an arm is cocked back it can store a lot of energy which is then released during a throw. The finger tips can reach over 100mph. A hummingbird flapping at 70 times per second with wing chord of 40mm and assuming it flaps in half a circle would have an average speed if 8796mm per second or about 20mph. | 5,261 |
[DC] Has Joker ever truly begged for mercy? | In most times when Joker dies or is on the brink of death, he still laughs himself silly, or at least to the best of his limited abilities depending on the situation, but has Joker ever truly been scared to the point of genuinely groveling and begging for his life? | 146 | TAS Episode 'Joker's Favor'
He was about to be blown up by a lowly accountant he'd blackmailed into helping his latest scheme. The thought of being killed by someone ordinary terrified him.
Similarly, BATB's take on Emperor Joker had him try to invade Batman's mind, where he was confronted with his worst fear: going back to be an ordinary overlooked struggling comedian. He screamed with horror. | 195 |
ELI5: The first law of thermodynamics states that the energy of the universe is constant, but the universe is constantly expanding, so how does the energy stay constant considering the expansion? | I think this is physics based(?), but I thought of this question during my summer chemistry course, so I wasn’t sure of the flair. | 55 | That is a question that will probably win you a Nobel Prize if you can answer it. The reality is that nobody knows.
What you're talking about is exactly the thing referred to as "dark energy." The vacuum energy of the universe is, indeed, constant and the source of that energy is dark energy - "dark" here meaning "unknown".
Side note: dark *matter* was originally called "dark" because scientists initially thought it was normal matter that is literally too dark to be seen on telescopes at the time, but that theory has been ruled out. Since then, "dark" in that context has taken on a new meaning which is "unknown" or "not understood" or "doesn't interact with normal matter probably." Dark matter and dark energy are not related (probably), they just share a similar name.
Dark energy might be the *cause* of the expansion. It could be that some constant source of energy is pumping energy into our universe, which causes its expansion the way blowing air into a balloon causes it to expand. Or, dark energy could just be a consequence of it - some property of spacetime causes vacuum energy to be constant, so as the universe expands dark energy is created by some unknown process or drawn in from some source outside of the universe - like how drawing a syringe pulls liquid into it.
It should also be noted that dark energy isn't usable in any way. Energy only does work when it goes from places where there is more of it to places where there is less of it. The vacuum energy despite not being zero is still the least concentrated that energy can be, like the ocean being the lowest point that rivers flow too. So although dark energy means the energy of the vacuum remains constant the universe will still eventually run out of energy that *does* anything. Dark energy isn't reversing entropy, in other words. | 48 |
[Dragonball Z] What if it turned out that humans were able to do the kaioken without any (or much fewer) consequences? | Goku's use of the kaioken demonstrates that it takes a massive toll on the user, and is often used as the reason no one else used it, at least until Goku did with SSJBKK. But what if by some quirk humans were just naturally more able to perform the kaioken without the same level physical abuse? How would the various sagas have played out differently? | 19 | Probably shit stomp Radditz and Nappa but that's about it. After that power levels rise so exponentially humans just can't keep up. Saiyans needed numerous Zenkai boosts and forms while Namekian had to merge to rival the power of a super Saiyan. | 15 |
ELI5: When you're at the departures/arrival immigration counter of an airport, and you hand over your passport to the immigration official, what are they doing when they start frantically typing away at their keyboard? what takes them (sometimes) so long, and what are they looking for? | 1,081 | Gneerally its just a check thru the DOJ system to see if you have any outstanding warrants, if your passport is in good standing, and if you have any reason why you can't enter the country.
They also look at your travel history, to see if you're coming from a flagged nation like Somalia thru a 3rd country. Like you flew from a known terrorism location, to Paris, then to the US to avoid scrutiny | 645 |
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CMV: Cultural "appropriation" is not an inherently bad thing | To clarify I put appropriation in quotations because I'm not sure what to call it. People call almost everything cultural "appropriation" now for reasons I cannot understand.
Adopting different aspects of other cultures is not a bad thing, despite what individuals online might say about it being cultural appropriation. Culture is MEANT to be shared, meant to evolve and be integrated into your own, etc. There are obvious times when one might take an aspect of another cultural and completely disrespect it. Ex. Turning a cultural, modest article of clothing into something revealing and sexy with no understanding of the meaning and values attached to the original article. That would be an example of cultural appropriation in a bad way.
On the other hand, if someone wants to wear something from another culture, use a name from another language (while knowing the meaning because otherwise that's embarassing), etc. We do things such as try eachothers food without a problem, why not go any further than that? What is the harm? There is a grey area where people may do something harmless (white people wearing dreadlocks), and black people finding it disrespectful because they are typically looked down on for their hairstyles.
So in conclusion, cultural appropriation is not inherently bad. If I am misunderstanding the meaning of the word, it does not take away from the fact it is thrown around way too heavily and for things that are not bad at all. | 223 | What you're saying is that utilization of cultural objects isn't always _cultural appropriation_. To appropriate them is always bad, but simply to use them or display them is not.
You're lost in semantics here I'd say, but we use the term "cultural appropriation" to denote that something is the bad version of the things you're describing, not all of them. | 104 |
ELI5: Why do oil companies get tax breaks? | 17 | The same reason every company gets tax breaks (mostly for expenses sometimes for investments that congress wants to incenivise). Oil companies do a tremendous amount of fixed investment (so depreciation is very important for them). Also they're in a great position to make investments in green energy technology that's frequently offers tax credits (lots of chemists, high incomes access to energy, and not all "green" tech is what you'd expect). | 16 |
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[Back to the Future] What would happen if Marty got Lorraine pregnant and had a child? | His mom was super hot... | 24 | A precedent for this sort of thing was set by Phillip J. Fry, who became his own grandfather in a similar case of time travel incest. His situation suggests that the child might lack a delta brainwave. This would make the child immune to the attacks of Brainspawn and give him/her a leg up when fighting the Dark Ones. On the downside, the child might also end up being stupendously dumb and easing picking for the Biffs and Benders of the world. | 33 |
ELI5 Why Gadhafi is a bad person. | I don't know enough about the situation and from the propaganda that is coming out of Libya it makes Gadhafi out to be a good guy. What exactly is bad about him? | 41 | Among other things, he ...
* generally censored and suppressed dissent in Libya, including killing members of rival political groups;
* sent assassins to kill various people in other countries who criticized him;
* severely oppressed the Berber ethnic minority, including banning their language from schools;
* attempted to ban English foreign-language education and promote Russian in order to cozy up to the Soviet Union;
* switched from oppressive Sovietism to oppressive Islamism in the '90s, enacting mutilation as punishment and forbidding women from entering public life;
* tried (and failed) to invade and conquer Chad;
* ordered a (failed) attack on the civilian ship *RMS Queen Elizabeth 2*;
* expelled Palestinian refugees in 1995 because the PLO was actually trying to make peace with Israel;
* trained and supported Charles Taylor of Liberia, notorious war criminal;
* supported communist and Islamist terrorism worldwide, particularly in the Philippines, but also including the communist groups the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof) in Germany and the Provos in Ireland;
* committed bombings in Germany;
* supported Serbian war-criminal and rape-camp-master Slobodan Milošević;
* looks like Severus Snape;
* dresses like boggart!Snape in that one scene in "Prisoner of Azkaban";
* probably isn't nearly as bad as George W. Bush.
| 20 |
[Kung Fu Panda] Was there any getting through to any of the main villains or were they all already too far gone? | It seems like Tai Lung, Shen, and Kai all had at least some doubts about the paths they were on. | 28 | Id say it was probably too late for them. Shen and Tai Lung both likely did feel a bit doubtful, but they both believed that it was far too late to just back out by that point (Shen had already genocided an entire species and Tai had been refused his title, massacred a village and been locked up for a solid amount of years.)
I cant speak for Kai, but the other two likely felt that simply stopping wasn't in the cards since they already crossed too many lines to go back to normal. | 33 |
How is the ion H- created? | Hello everyone,
I wanted to know how a hydrogen atom, with one proton and one electron, with a net charge of zero, and a spherically symmetrical charge distribution (1s), could attract another electron in order to become the ion with net charge -1e. The question is about how the ion is created. I can't understand what causes a free electron to bind into a neutral hydrogen atom in order to make a ion with net charge -1e. From what I know, a spherically symmetrical charge distribution with net charge zero would not produce a resulting electrical field to attract the free electron in the first place. What is happening here?
Thanks for the attention. | 2,594 | Classical analogue: magnets attract each other. How come a magnet is attracted to a piece of iron, that in rest doesn't have a net magnetisation? The magnetic field induces a magnetic polarisation in the iron, whereafter it can be attracted.
For an H atom, the charge distribution of the electron cloud is symmetric, but not in an external electric field. The free electron repels the bound electron, while it attracts the proton, creating an induced dipole moment. Then, the attraction to the proton is larger than the repulsion from the bound eletron.
In general in multi-electronic atoms, the electrons are further apart than one would naively expect, this is both the result of Fermi-Dirac statistics and interelectronic repulsion. | 1,163 |
[Star Wars] Why is everybody ok with droid slavery? | Unfortunately this is a somewhat contentious topic, but lets try and keep things civil and within sub rules.
1) So, through Star Wars, most of the main characters are opposed to slavery of organics, and many galactic governments (try to) prohibit it. Some characters make efforts to free slaves when they find them.
2) Some robots are clearly sentient/salient/people, with intelligence, emotions and capabilities equal to those of organics. Despite this, droids are not seen as people and are freely traded and owned as property even under governments that ban slavery.
3) these two facts seem to be in conflict with eachother. Why do Jedi who are willing to risk their lives to save organic slaves not bat an eye about droid slavery? | 92 | Droids are purpose built to be slaves. They don't have any choice or purpose beyond that initially. The only time droids develop a personality is through owner negligence that don't regularly wipe their memories. Droids like c3-p0 are built with faked personalities but aren't truly alive or feeling for quite some time. Most droids that develop enough quirks to become self aware are fairly rare in the Galaxy and typically go on to do whatever they were built to do just with expectations of pay and fair treatment until someone wipes them. Restraining bolts are used for places where wiping a memory is either too time consuming or too detrimental to be used. The bolt just ensures that some programing is always overriding whatever the droid is thinking.
Yes it is slavery but it's not an intended design feature. They're tools and spare parts that can become sapient if they're poorly maintained. There's little to no consensus on what qualifies as sentience in the galaxy and sapience would be even harder to define. Most people just treat droids as being defective tools that sometimes are better broken than in original form. Regardless the real reason no one wants to do anything about droid slavery is the same reason our world won't address GMO foods. We can't all agree on what is and isn't good about them and we can't just replace the whole thing and start over. | 75 |
[Fallout] How terrifying would the Australian Wastelands be? | Earlier, I had the thought that a hypothetical Fallout: Australia would be interesting and completely terrifying.
The game might entail a large scale armed invasion and extermination of every living and undead, venomous and/or poisonous, irradiated monstrosities that Fallout radiation rules would render from the already terrifying Australian ecology...
What kind of monstrosities could you see cropping up in a Fallout Universe Australia? Would Platypodes have evolved into the Aussie Deathclaw? How do they maintain their position at the top of the local food chain?
How would you handle the story for such a hypothetical game? Would any humans have survived on the continent?
Given how the Fallout ecology is basically an irradiated Jurassic World hellscape, if Australia is human free, what reason would humans have to return other than the general human gift for being more stubborn than kangaroo-mule? | 64 | Well for one we have no idea how bad the outside was hit other than China, we kinda fucked their shit up.
Odds are Australia wouldn't be so bad, it's really not a center of the world at that time. And half the mutant animals like Deathclaws, Supermutants, and Cazadores are man made monstrosities. So unless Australia was a center for FEV research most of their animals would just be irradiated and ugly. | 61 |
[Star Wars] Was Palpatine ever considering ruling the galaxy through the Separatists, or was a Republic victory always the plan? | It seems like it could work out with him on top and the Jedi wiped out either way. | 50 | I'd imagine the Republic victory was his greatly preferred outcome. The Republic was the established government while the Separatists were on paper at least aiming to simply secede.
Palpatine was also the open leader of the Republic while Sidious was the shadow leader of the Separatists.
Overall he would have a much easier time transforming the Republic in the Empire than the Separatists, like if the separatists won then there would be more more resistance to the kind of centralised state Palpatine seems to create.
But the thing about the Clone Wars is of course that Palpatine won either way, the way was meaningless overall and served to only increase his power. But things would be much more convenient for him if the Republic won and so he would likely only accept a separatist victory if he had little choice. | 52 |
ELI5: what’s the difference between Britain, Great Britain, England, and the United Kingdom? It’s so confusing and I don’t get it all these names and stuff. Help I feel like an idiot | 18 | Britain and Great Britain are the same thing. GB is the island that Scotland, England and Wales are on. The United Kingdom is the island state that contains Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. These (NI, E, S, W) are all countries within the island state of UK. | 17 |
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Do permanent magnets have a half-life or otherwise “decay” over time? | It seems like there must be some energetic cost to constantly exerting a force on the surroundings. As particles & objects resist that force, it must exert some backward torque or whatever on the aligned atoms of the magnet. Over time, is the magnet depolarizing?
Also, my understanding is that permanent magnets are relatively orderly objects, in terms of their internal structure. Entropy being what it is, wouldn't it be energetically favorable for magnets to revert to a more disordered state?
If there is a half-life, what is the time scale?
Is it possible to depolarize a permanent magnet more rapidly by exposing it to a (much) more powerful magnetic field with a different alignment?
On the other hand, it seems like it would be energetically unpleasant to be the “first” atom out of alignment with a magnet's field. Does this keep magnets from losing polarity, e.g. are permanent magnets self-reinforcing / “self-repairing?” | 1,923 | You seem to hold the misconception that the existence of magnetic fields requires an output of energy, however that is completely false. The best analogy is gravity. Any object has its own gravitational field by virtue of its having mass, which requires no continued expenditure of energy. The way the energy of the system can change is by changing the potential energy when say a piece of iron is moved closer or further away from the magnet. However, this change requires an external input of energy and the total energy is always conserved (i.e. the energy required to move the piece of iron by say 1 meter is exactly equal to the potential energy gained by the system).
Now for the question of a decay in the magnetization, yes, this is possible. Magnetization is caused at a microscopic level by an orderly alignment of the magnetic moments of electrons. Because this configuration is energetically favorable at short length scales (due to a quantum mechanical effect called the exchange interaction), domains form in which electrons have the same alignment. When the majority of these domains point in the same direction, the material will behave as a magnet. However, at a certain temperature, the so-called Curie temperature, thermal fluctuations begin to compete with the stability imparted by this alignment, and materials lose the ability to spontaneously exhibit magnetization. Moreover, the lowest energy configuration is for the domains to point in different directions such that overall the material will exhibit no magnetization. Because of this, if sufficient energy is provided (e.g. by a mechanical impact), the domains may realign leading to a loss of magnetization.
*Edited to clarify the energetics of magnetization.
*Edit2 Thank you for the gold! | 1,880 |
ELI5: If cancer gets caused because the cells don’t stop dividing then why are the chances so low of getting it at aan early age | 35 | What causes cells to go haywire is genetic damage. Some damage can be repaired, some has no effect, some causes the cell to be inefficient, or to die. A very small percent of genetically damaged cells will turn cancerous though. When cells divide they copy their genetic instructions over to the new cell. That means they copy the damaged bits along with the good bits. So as you age, and accumulate more and more genetically damaged cells the risk of one of them becoming cancer increases. | 38 |
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ELI5: What are the white spots that sometimes appear on nails and why are they there? | 18 | Left in humid conditions, nails of any variety can begin to rust (or oxidize). Aluminum oxide is white colored and could be responsible for white spots on nails. Iron oxide is rust red and would cause red spots on iron nails. | 12 |
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Eli5: how do movies that go straight to streaming generate money? | So I just watched the new Prey movie. It was great really enjoyed it. It came to streaming directly (Hulu for US), no theaters , no ticket prices, heck you didn’t even have to pay any money to rent it or buy it.
My question is, how does it make any movie if I didn’t have to pay any money to watch it. | 56 | You pay for a subscription, if there are no good and new movies, you won't pay. They need to add new movies so you will keep the subscription, that's the money they make.
The movie makers were probably paid by the streaming service. Or get money to make it an exclusive | 65 |
[Marvel] If Reed Richards found a way to create or scout non inhabited planets for Galactus to eat. Wouldn't that make him his herald? | Reed Richards initially had to reason with Galactus, then scare him and then come to an agreement. When Galactus was on trial he stood up in his defense (which was totally stupid TBH.)
So 2 questions:
* Shouldn't Reed find non inhabited worlds for Galactus to devour? This would save trillions of lives. Far more than he does as a hero.
* In doing so wouldn't he essentially be a herald of Galactus? | 28 | > Shouldn't Reed find non inhabited worlds for Galactus to devour? This would save trillions of lives. Far more than he does as a hero.
For a world to be suitable for Galactus, it needs to fit a fairly specific set of criteria - unfortunately, these criteria also give rise to life, and there aren't enough living worlds without intelligent life to keep Galactus alive.
If Galactus dies, it is catastrophic for the universe - thus Reed's terrible calculation that as awful as the existence of Galactus is, the possibility of his nonexistence is even worse. | 25 |
[Trek] How did Starfleet vs Data still allow for later slavery of Androids? | So in [TNG S2:E9 - *Measure of a Man*](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation\)) the question of the personhood of artificial lifeforms is called into question.
At one point, Captain Jean-Luc Picard informs Captain Philippa Louvois, the presiding Judge Advocate General that her decision will set a precedent for the coming of Sentient/Sapient artificial lifeforms in years to come.
In fact in [TNG S6:E9 - *The Quality of Life*](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quality_of_Life_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation\)) this calls back to the treatment and precedent set that even the glimmer of sapience should be tested as if these are artificial life forms.
In fact then, in [LD S1:E10 - No Small Parts](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/No_Small_Parts_(episode\)) it is established that [Ensign Peanut Hamper](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Peanut_Hamper) is a fully sentient and sapient artificial lifeform.
However the central arc of Season 1 of [Star Trek:Picard](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Picard) revolves around the treatment of artificial lifeforms that were not recognised as Sentient.
So obviously between 2380 when we see Ensign Peanut Hamper and 2385 when we see the Utopia Planitia Fkeetyards destroyed by Synthetic Lifeforms.
So I'm obviously kissing something in that 5 year span, bit I can't find what I'm missing that would cause artificial lifeforms to lose the rights that even unconfirmed lifeforms had previous to 2380 | 15 | Generally, Starfleet went out of it's way to avoid setting really hard precedents in re: artificial sapience. Data was, as an individual, permitted to decline Maddox's procedure, but the court martial did not formulate or apply any true metric for measuring sapience (and the fact that they couldn't formulate that metric was critical in the case). Later, when The Doctor had to sue someone for distributing a holonovel he wrote without permission, again the court declined to derive a metric, ruling the question of whether he was a person is secondary to whether he counts as the author of the novel. The entry of Peanut Hamper into Starfleet, much like the earlier entry of Data, again failed to set any true precedent.
As a result, when Maddox finally makes some big moves in android intelligence, there's a lot of suggestions but no hard and fast rules. Since none of the prior trials set a precedent for what is or is not sentient life, none of the rulings of the trials could be used to prevent Starfleet from building an army of positronic slaves to build their ships. Further, by the time of the Soong-copy androids coming around there was already precedent for enslaving artificial lifeforms in the use of obsolete Emergency Medical Hologram personalities as brute labor in mines, and using an android body instead of a holoprojector is just another step from that. | 12 |
ELI5: How can the Sun's gravitational pull be strong enough to keep Pluto in orbit but not just pull Mercury into it? | 443 | The Sun's gravity is pulling Mercury, but the planet is traveling so fast that it can't fall fast enough to ever hit the Sun. Mercury's orbit is elliptical though, so it does vary in distance from the Sun. As it gets closer to the Sun the pull from the Sun's gravity does increase, but so does the orbital velocity of Mercury, which means it simply keeps on moving in its orbit. As the orbital radius increases and Mercury gets further away the strength of gravity decreases, but so does Mercury's orbital velocity. The end result is a stable orbit.
It is actually VERY difficult to make something crash into the Sun. If we were to suddenly reduce the Earth's orbital velocity by 20% we would simply move into a much more elliptical orbit. We would not fall into the Sun. If we wanted to send a space probe to the Sun we would have to completely counteract the orbital velocity it has from being launched from the Earth. This takes something like twice the fuel as it does to send a probe out of the Solar System!
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ELI5: Why are running tracks anticlockwise instead of clockwise? | I'd like to know if there are some explanations or just coincidence. | 39 | There's no real reason, other than the fact that we had to pick one.
Initially it would just depends on the track and the event, each club/race would be run one way, and events at the same track tended to use the same direction. After a while, this kind of thing tends to spread to make life easier... until most of a country is running the same way.
The first 2 (modern) Olympic Games (Athens 1896, Paris 1900, America 1904) all used Clockwise running, and clockwise tracks were still being used as late as the 1940s.
In 1904, it was realised that more countries present used anti-clockwise tracks at home, so from then onward the olympics switched to anti-clockwise. Once the Olympics switched and started to become more popular, pretty much everyone else followed slowly suit... because if you want to compete at the Olympics, it makes sense to practice by running in the same direction
----
So the simple answer
**There's no specific reason, it's just that when we wanted to decide on a single direction, we realized more people/countries/clubs/tracks used anti-clockwise running, and we went with the majority** | 23 |
ELI5: How can the shell of a turtle protect it when they can feel every touch on the shell? Wouldnt it be better if they wouldnt feel hits on the shell from predators | 76 | probably because if they couldnt feel pain on their shell they would be in more danger of being killed. if u had no nerve endings in ur skin, as a human, then what is stopping u from getting into a bath with scorching hot water and burning it all off. disturbing image i know but pain/general feeling of touch helps organisms avoid danger | 121 |
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ELI5 how do companies implement lifetime bans on people? How in the world will the average employee know who's banned from doing business with them if the banned person comes back to another store on another day? | Question also valid for sports venues, casinos etc. | 20 | Generally speaking companies have no method of enforcing bans other than someone recognizing them and knowing they aren't supposed to be there. Outside the specific store they have been banned from, and the same people working there, it isn't likely they will be enforced.
However such a ban has another purpose. It means that if the banned person comes to another store and causes trouble then the company will have much more legal recourse. The person would be trespassing and liable for criminal as well as civil penalties. This is the real force behind such a ban. Sure you probably won't be recognized, but if you *are* recognized the police will arrest you. | 68 |
Does natural selection still occur in human populations? | Or has modern conveniences/technology somehow thrown a wrench in natural selection? | 32 | Yes, natural selection is continuing to occur. Natural selection is just the fact that some organisms reproduce and some don't due to their environment and or genetics. Our environment has changed from a more rural lifestyle to one that just happens to involve technology. | 16 |
ELI5: Why do you crave salty/fried foods after drinking alcohol? | 2,336 | Did you know, if you attempted to run a marathon drinking only water, you could die. Shocking, huh?
Water is exceptionally important to human bodies but it doesn't work alone. Salts help this water get to where it needs to be and helps water do what it needs to do. Drinking alcohol dehydrates you, and that dehydration means your precious salts went out with the piss. Your body wants more back in there! | 2,378 |
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ELI5:What do electronic artists (producers and/or DJ's) actually do live? | 18 | There's a couple things that a good EDM DJ can do during a live show, but for every good DJ, there are a dozen others that just do nothing.
1) Tweak the lows/mids/highs to get the sound right. This is especially necessary if you're going from venue to venue and not using your own equipment. Getting it to sound "right" often varies track to track, and so continued adjustment is fairly common.
2) Multi-track mixing. A good studio example would be Daft Punk's Alive: 2007 album, where they mixed two of their own tracks together to create new tracks. This can be done live, but usually on a much lesser scale, which is more of point 3.
3) Adding samples. A lot of EDM is nearly wordless and very repetitive. This isn't a bad thing, but a track can get old if you don't spice it up a bit. A DJ might throw in pre-recorded add-ons, such as the good ol' "Drop the bass!" or a "Let's go!" DJs that make their own music might even have a pre-programmed sample pad that lets them get different drum loops going or change what synth is doing the melody.
For Tiesto specifically: he's very very good at reading the crowd. He knows that the crowd wants to see him jumping up and down and doing things, even if he's just playing pretend. If he doesn't look into it, the crowd won't be into it, and that's part of why he's so successful.
As for why they don't recreate their music on the spot, it mostly has to do with how the music is made. Most EDM producers nowadays work in software that would be... challenging to reproduce live. There are often multiple different synth layers, a bassline, drums, sfx, and vocals at the same time. Reproducing that with one person doing everything live isn't possible. | 15 |
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CMV: Americans have high material wealth because of smart protectionism, not free market policies | America often takes credit for being a prosperous nation. This stems from the intuition of it practicing free market fundamentalism. What many overlook is that America's success derives from smart protectionism. American workers are given high pay premiums from restrictive immigration laws and quota systems. When you're a user of a reserve currency, you're fortunate to work less hours than users of pegged currencies for the same products. Many industries are protected by occupational licensing. This protects incumbents from having to compete with new entrants. | 16 | > Many industries are protected by occupational licensing. This protects incumbents from having to compete with new entrants.
The reduction in competition increases the prices of this service and reduces the quality. These policies hurt America as a whole, although they help the people who happen to be working those jobs.
> When you're a user of a reserve currency, you're fortunate to work less hours than users of pegged currencies for the same products.
A pegged currency is the opposite of free market, as its price is set by the government. Reserve currencies are part of the free market.
>American workers are given high pay premiums from restrictive immigration laws and quota systems.
This creates lower quality and/or more expensive goods for the average consumer. These laws only help specific workers.
Overall, these things do help some Americans, but hurt the country. | 11 |
[Starship Troopers] How are the bugs able to launch projectiles capable of leaving Klendathu, let alone Buenos Aires? | So, the bugs are capable of launching projectiles capable of reaching space.
How?
Presumably, they're organic creatures. They don't appear large enough to contain enough chemical propellant to launch projectiles into space, ala a scaled up blister beetle.
Are they nuclear? If so, why don't the space marines take precautions to prevent radiation hazards? | 28 | If you're talking about the novel the bugs are capable of space travel and have advanced technology equal to the federation. If you mean the movie the plasma bugs hit the orbiting asteroids and project them at ftl speeds towards a target. It's hard to explain scientifically but they do have the ability to hurl their spawn at planets in a large mass to colonize as well as exist in the vacuum of space without suits or discernible technology. | 39 |
CMV: Being white doesn't inherently mean having privilege. | Okay, here we go.
I don't suffer from self-deprecation like some white people do (much in the same way Christians seem to be expected to hate themselves to a degree because some bigger establishment told them they were born sick, disgusting, and in need of reforming themselves). I am as proud to be white as I expect my fellow black persons to be proud that they are black. I expect my Chinese colleagues to be proud to be Chinese and I damn well expect Arabs to be proud by virtue of being Arab. This seems like it shouldn't be disagreeable. I mean, if you feel like trying, have at it.
However, let's more toward the issue. White privilege. The definition I will receive by the responding persons will differ from the definition I will give as my understanding (or what should actually be understood). My definition in non-negotiable because I am using the word "White" as in the skin colour often associated with the term in North America (more specifically, Canada and USA). Privilege is defined by a quick google search as **(1) a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.**
My position is this : I am on par with my Human Rights Act as well as all of my nation's important documents outlining rights, freedoms, and opportunities. I do not receive a special scholarship because of my skin colour nor would that be tolerated, for example.
Disqualifications : Someone else not being treated (inter-personally, I might add, because in consideration of the HRAs of these countries, legally there isn't another form) to the same standards as outlined in the HRA isn't *my* privilege.
Or for a better understanding, on a scale of 1-10, the HRAs and documents of the country put EVERYONE at a 5. If someone is being treated like a 1-4, I do not elevate to a 6-10. I stay at 5. I receive no less or no more than my country has agreed everyone should have.
**Edit : https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1CHBF_enCA703CA703&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=white+privilege+definition&* So what we have here is the definition as understood by people. The only thing I did differently was define the words separately. This is the definition of them together as a whole. IF my position disqualifies that someone else's disadvantage DOES NOT EQUAL my advantage, then that would make my position correct. I am not redefining anything. I am using the understood definition when it comes to the political realm and the academic realm. If YOU feel like your argument has to hinge on changing this definition because you think it's "unfair" for me to use the definition as understood currently, then the problem doesn't sit with me**
NOTABLE TERMS (these are terms used over and over... get over it) : BENEFITS, ADVANTAGES, IMMUNITIES, ETC. As far as definition goes, white, privilege, and white privilege ALL concern the EXTRA amount of these being present.
**EDIT : I see that the triggering is strong with this bunch. So much for putting too much stock into this Sub-Reddit. Still waiting on proof for the proposition that white privilege exists. REMEMBER : Someone's disadvantage doesn't = my advantage. Get over it.**
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You define white privilege in a way that no one else does and argue that it does not exist. When you use your definition and not the definition used by the people you presumably disagree with you are having a different conversation. | 22 |
[Star Wars] In Return of the Jedi, why did the destruction of the 2nd death star and the death of the emperor mean that the Empire had lost the war? | From what I can tell in SW 4-6, the Empire still had a LOT more ships, bases, and planetary occupations than the Rebellion. | 47 | They didn't lose the war until a year later, at the battle of Jakku. What they lost was control of the galaxy. With the Imperial fleet shattered, the second Death Star destroyed, and the Empire's figurehead and guiding hand dead, the oppressed peoples of the galaxy weere bolstered in their revolts, protests erupted even on worlds like Coruscant, and the surviving governors and admirals either grouped as part of a contingency order specifically created to destroy the Empire and the Rebellion in the event of Palpatine's death, or locked down their sectors and tried to conceal news of the Emperor's passing, these freestanding fiefdoms would eventually collapse and be integrated into the Republic or the First Order. | 110 |
ELI5: What happens to the cyanide in apple seeds when we juice the fruit whole? | 22 | nothing "happens to it" its still there, but the amount of cyanide in an apple isn't enough to really do anything to you. Normally the seeds prevent you from ingesting any cyanide at all but even if you manage to metabolise all of it its still less cyanide than you metabolize in a cup of tapioca pudding. | 11 |
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(Why) is sociology less unified than economics? | From what I could gather from a couple of comments on this subreddit, I got the impression that sociology still seems somewhat divided with different people using quite different paradigms (that, to some degree, still go back to Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, as well as, probably, some more modern ones) to describe or analyse the same situation. Economics, on the other end, despite, of course, having disagreements, only really has one mainstream with a few people on the fringes who are, usually, not taken seriously.
I am curious as to how much truth there is to this assessment, and why those differences exist, despite the fact that both fields often care about quite similar questions? | 47 | There haven't been any rival paradigms to overtake neoclassical economics. While institutional economics goes back to the nineteenth century, it has not had notable upsurges in the field. Economics as a whole has relatively few challengers in comparison to other fields. This might be because it is largely a deductive study.
In comparison, sociology has had strong rivalries since the late 19th century. In particular, the positivist vs antipositivst camps have both been mainstays in sociology. The closest thing economics has had to antipositivism is Marx which has never been mainstream within economics departments. Also, sociology gets included in all the different kinds of interdisciplinary movements: rational choice, evolution, different variants of marxism, postmodernism, semiotics..... In sum, there is a greater variety of competing strongholds in sociology in comparison to economics.
Source: *Formal Theory in Sociology: Opportunity or Pitfall?* Edited by Jerald Hage. 1994. State University of New York Press. | 23 |
[Marvel] What are the strongest civilization/organizations in the 616? | In terms of tech and army strength, what civilization or organization is the strongest in the 616 universe? Some civilizations/organizations I think of off the top of my head:
* Latveria
* Wakanda
* Atlantis
* Shi'ar
* Skrulls
* Kree Empire
* Attilan
* Nova Corps
* Annihilation Wave
* Asgard
* SHIELD
* Hydra
* AIM
* SWORD
Rank them in order from strongest to weakest and why? Feel free to include other civilizations if I've forgot any. | 17 | Well, the Nova Corps has been gone for a while, Atlantis was demolished in Infinity, and Namir drowned Wakanda (which, for the curious, auto corrects to Zealand's?) Hydra and below on your list shouldn't even be considered.
Although the Annihilation wave in its prime was the most powerful. The Kree are probably currently the strongest, especially since they've allied with every other race in order to take out Earth.
(Although the absolute strongest would be the Beyonders.) | 16 |
ELI5:Why are universities treating education like it is corporate business? | Why don't they lower tution/ costs so that more students can attend to make up for the loss of profit? The cost of higher education contributes so much to the debt of this country that it sounds counter-intuitive to cause such financial strain on future customers. Is the demand for higher education really that high that people are willing to sacrifice their well being to attain it? I have so many questions and I'm not sure if this is the right or wrong place to ask it.
I know there are many factors such as: more professors, larger facilities, more housing, etc but with more students flowing in wouldn't this be possible? What other factors influence the way higher education is structured? | 18 | You named them. More faculty, more housing, more classrooms. Universities are very expensive to run. Qualified professors aren't exactly a dime a dozen, and most universities I've seen are running low on space to expand, since they were either built in a major city or a city has grown around them.
| 11 |
ELI5: Do the specialized drawers in a refridgerator really make a difference in how well your food is stored? | 28 | Yes they do. The specialized drawers have a way of limiting the amount of air that hits certain foods (which is why that have that slider that says fruits or vegetables.) This makes a difference in how long your food lasts and overall how it tastes as well. | 17 |
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When you shake up a carbonated drink, where does the pressure go once it’s ‘settled’? | 25 | The pressure forces the carbon dioxide to redissolve in the liquid of the drink, where it exists as carbonic acid (H2CO3) and bicarbonate ion (HCO3-).
This is the dynamic equilibrium:
H2CO3(aq)
<-->
H+(aq) + HCO3-(aq)
<-->
H2O(l) + CO2(g)
Agitation (or heat) push this equilibrium toward gaseous CO2, and positive pressure pushes it in the other direction, as it forces the CO2 to redissolve. | 47 |
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ELI5:Why is it that the higher the altitude, the lower the temperature? | Shouldn't it get hotter since we're closer to the sun? | 24 | The sun is too far away to make a few tens of kilometers matter.
The difference is pressure. Pressure and temperature are related. Temperature is about the average amount of movement in the molecules of gas in a given volume. As there are less molecules in gas at a lower pressure, there is less movement.
Another point is that air that is rising experiences a drop in pressure. It has to expand as it does so, and that expansion is movement, and movement needs energy. That energy comes from the heat energy of the air, cooling it. This is TERRAOperative's explanation in different words.
The third is Juanfro's - the Sun's energy travels through the transparent air, and heats the Earth's surface. The hot surface of the earth heats the air close to it, and that makes the air nearer to the surface hotter. | 16 |
[Comics] How do famous villains/Supervillains get away with anything anymore? | Like Catwoman. Every time anything cat-themed goes missing, surely people are on the lookout for Selina Kyle.... but okay, she probably travels incognito.
How about guys like Lex Luthor? Even with the best lawyers in the world, if the entire Justice League says "yeah, he was the dude who tried to sell Earth to Darkseid for some pocket change and he kicked some babies while he was doing it", don't you think the public would start looking askance at him?
I know that real life rich people get away with all sorts of shenanigans, but it seems like threatening the planet is far, far beyond the pale, and even the greediest, most craven, most blackmailable politicians would turn on someone like Luthor, especially since he's shown that he will throw his partners under the bus when it is expedient.
And what about The Joker? He isn't exactly hard to spot. Yeah, he can wear a mask, but don't you think Gothamites would have learned to be particularly suspicious of guys in purple suits with bags over their heads (or whatever :P... any face concealing garment, even with regular clothes)?
Also, wouldn't people have learned by now not to ever make deals with him or work for him, as the best case scenario is getting punched in the face by Batman, and the worst case scenario is too horrible to contemplate?
Could that be one reason why the Joker loses so often to Batman- his henchmen are subtly dropping clues and otherwise working against the Joker, hoping to get off with a punch to the face rather than a fate worse than death :P?
--
And how in the name of poopypants did Norman Osborn get put in charge of anything, ever, no matter how famous he got for one symbolic act? They don't let convicted felons vote, but they'll let them run superagencies :P?
I guess if they let Deadpool run free (rather than organizing a party to hunt him down and bury him in cement up to his neck) the people of the Marvel Universe are just fine with whatever :P. | 80 | Two words: meddling kids.
Kids these days just don't meddle as much as they used to. They're too busy with Facebook and Instagram and their new-fangled cell phones. Kids don't get bored or really even hang out anymore, so there's no reason for four or five of them to pile into a van and cruise around looking for trouble anymore.
As such, villains don't have their plans hampered and crime flourishes. Then, due to the unsafe conditions of society, parents keep their children even more sheltered, which further decreases meddling behavior. It's truly a vicious cycle.
Without meddling kids getting in the way, villains are constantly able to "get away with it". | 101 |
Why don't we "seed" life in the solar system? | Of course, one would like to know if something exists first. Suppose though, we find nothing: How much sense would it make to deliberately place simple organisms (bacteria, esp. extremophiles) on other planets? Are there conditions where earthly organisms could survive and thrive? Would a "shotgun"-approach work, i.e. shoot a large sample of different types onto a planet and come back later to see what sticks?
On an aside: Can we exclude that we don't seed already? Is the production environment for probes totally sterile or is any bacteria etc. brought along *certain* to be dead through exposure to vacuum, radiation and temperatures? | 619 | Mainly because we are just getting started exploring the solar system in the first place. We barely know a thing about most of the solar system. We don't even know if there _is_ life on Mars, and we haven't landed on Europa at all, or done any significant exploration of Titan. We'd kind of like to get a good idea what those places are like before putting bacteria on them. Especially since someone would have to spend millions and millions of dollars to do so.
And yes, it's possible that some bacteria have been carried along with our probes, although attempts are made to sterilize them. | 420 |
ELI5: How did cats develop an affinity for eating fish if many of them also dislike water? | 30 | Fish is a popular example with cats, mainly because of house cats. If you were to talk about all "FELINES", you wouldn't associate fish with most of them. When was the last time you saw a Lion, Cheetah or Jaguar eat a fish in the wild?
Most house cats are curios creatures and will want to play with the moving fish in the fish tank. Cats are also carnivores and eat all small animals. Mice, fish and birds.
It's also true that many of them dislike water because that's not the natural way they keep their coats clean. They usually dislike anything that messes up their coat. | 22 |
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[WH40k] Is there any TL;DR about history? | 36 | Here we go...
At the dawn of time, there were beings called the C'Tan who ate stars.
Then the Old Ones arose. The lived long, pleasant lives.
Then the Necrontyr arose. The Necrontyr lived on a harsh planet orbiting a crap star; as such, they were short and didn't live very long. Long ago, they had an empire that went to war with the Old Ones, moslty over jealousy that the Old Ones lived such happier lives. The C'Tan at this point began eating souls instead of stars, and since the Old Ones' souls were particularly tasty, they allied with the Necontyr to defeat the Old Ones. This entailed the Necrontyr putting their minds into robotic bodies, but as they did so, the C'Tan ate their souls, leaving the Necrons as immortal but mindless slaves, now called the Necrons.
The Necrons, backed by the C'Tan, gained the upper hand and succeeded in wiping out the Old Ones, but not before the Old Ones uplifted the Eldar and created the Orkz. By the end of the war, there were only four C'Tan left - the Deceiver, Outsider, Night Bringer, and Void Dragon, the rest having been destroyed either by the Old Ones and Eldar (original continuity) or a rebellion by the Necrons themselves (current continuity). The Necrons, exhausted by the war against the Old Ones and unable to stand up to the rise of the Eldar, went into hibernation.
Eldar came to rule the galaxy, and for about 60 million years nothing much happened.
In 8000 BCE, the shamans of Earth came together and committed mass suicide so that all their souls would be reborn in a single person, the Emperor.
Eldar and human emotions give rise to the Chaos gods Tzeentch, Nurgle, and Khorne.
Eldar achieved a post-scarcity society which used robots to do all its fighting. A few think this is a bad idea and retreat to more ascetic planets on the galactic rim, becoming the Exodite Eldar. The rest live lives of pointless excess and hedonism, and don't notice humans gradually carving out a new empire, starting in the 18th millennium.
Around the 23rd millennium, psykers began to emerge among humanity, and brought with them daemoic possession. Human worlds collapsed into anarchy, and Earth was surrounded by Warp storms. Civilisation completely collapsed on Earth - think *Mad Max* but one a bigger scale with better guns and more grimdark. Around the 27th millennium, the Emperor managed to unite Earth's technobarbarians into a single polity. and also gained the support and technology of the Martian government.
In the 28th millennium, the Eldar's collective hedonism finally came to a head as all their selfish energies combined to form Slaanesh, which ripped open the Eye of Terror around the Eldar homeworld and, as a side effect, dispelled the warp storms surrounding Earth. Some of the remaining Eldar decided to live on nomadic ships and hope to one day combine their souls to form Ynnead, the new god of death, who will be able to kill Slaanesh. The rest, the Dark Eldar, live in a city in the webway where they indulge in ecstasy and insane torture of other beings in order to keep Slaanesh from eating their own souls. Meanwhile, the Emperor managed to reconquer planets of the old human empire.
In the late 30th millennium, the Emperor created the Primarchs by genetic engineering as the first of what would eventually become the Space Marines. The Chaos Gods, fearful of what the Emperor would bring, interfered somehow and scattered the baby Primarchs across the galaxy (though all managed to land on human planets). The Emperor launched a massive crusade to restore the primarchs and reunite humanity, which he did.
Then in the early 31st millennium, Horus led a rebellion against the Emperor, brining half the Space Marines and a full third of the Imperial Guard with him. He was narrowly defeated, but the Emperor was critically wounded, and thus was interred on the Golden Throne to watch over and guide humanity. Remaining Traitor Legions retreat into the Eye of Terror. Roboute Guilliman instituted a reform of the Space Marines into a large number of smaller chapters, though not everybody approved, and Leman Russ flat-out refused to accept the new rules because of course he did. The surviving loyalist Primarchs gradually disappeared.
In the 36th millennium, the Ethereal Caste united Tau (who might possibly be surviving Necrontyr) society under the philosophy of the Greater Good. Shortly therafter, the Tau discovered a spaceship and successfully reverse engineered it to give limited Warp travel.
Around the 41st millennium, Tyranids appeared in the galaxy (though there is evidence they had a small presence as early at the 35th millennium) and the Necrons began to reawaken.
And thus in the grim darkness of the present time, there is only war. | 72 |
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If you get the vaccine while having Covid, what happens with the virus? | 19 | First of all, they don't give the vaccine while you have the virus. That said, you might be asymptomatic or exposed but still in the dormant stage and not know it when you get the vaccine.
If you have it and are asymptomatic, it's a waste of the vaccine unless you have a different enough type that the vaccine makes you produce antibodies that will protect you from the other type (like having Influenza A and being vaccinated for Influenza B). However, that will also stress your system, since you will be producing antibodies for two types at once. That's why they DON'T give you the flu vaccine for the other type when you have one type. The rule of thumb is never to vaccinate while someone is already sick, even if you're vaccinating for something else.
If you have been exposed to the same type but are still dormant, the vaccine would speed up your production of antibodies somewhat, but there's no way of saying that would lessen your response to the infection, since responses are so individual to begin with. | 29 |
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CMV: Just like anorexics are forcibly hospitalized and made to gain weight, overweight people should be hospitalized and forced to lose weight. | Society seems to agree that you can take away an anorexic’s rights if they are too thin and medically unstable.
I was hospitalized four times for being seriously underweight, and I didn’t have a say in the matter. I was forced to gain approximately half a pound a day, with the consequence of having certain things withheld, (showers, visits, phone calls), if I didn’t meet that goal, and ultimately the threat of a nano-gastric tube being shoved up my nose if I consistently failed to gain weight.
Binge eating disorder is recognized as an eating disorder yet in each of my hospitalizations, there was maybe one or two severely overweight person on the unit, and they obviously escaped the consequences related to weight gain.
I believe that those who are severely overweight due to binge eating disorder are just as at risk for health problems (both short and long term) as any anorexic and should face the same swift action that I did. There should be a medical component that forces them to lose weight at a determined rate with co-occurring therapy to address the underlying issues.
If they refuse treatment, they should be forced into it with signatures from psychiatrists, same as an anorexic would be, for reasons that they are a danger to themselves.
Now clearly this isn’t happening...so I’d like to believe that there’s a good reason for it. So, change my view?
EDIT: I know the title says “overweight” but I’m specifically talking about overweight folks with a diagnosed underlying mental illness of binge eating disorder, some level of physical health problems, and an inability or unwillingness to treat their issues on an outpatient basis. I’m not advocating for rounding up every overweight person on the planet and sticking them into treatment centers.
EDIT 2: This has been fascinating and so enlightening. Thank you to everyone who broke things down for me and helped me see the difference between the health risks associated with malnutrition vs. obesity. I knew I was biased in this situation but I don’t think I realized how much so. To anyone suffering from an eating disorder, at any size, weight, or variation of behaviors, I wish you healing and true recovery. I didn’t think my life could be this good but it’s amazing. | 5,512 | I think your bias is miscontruing the situation.
You were hospitalized because your anorexia made you medically unstable. The anorexia was the cause, but just like anything else (drugs, car accident, stroke etc.), they had concerns that your **immediate** health was in danger. There's a line there you have to realize. Anorexia just happened to be your cause of admission.
The same happens to obese people when they suddenly collapse and have trouble breathing. They also get admitted for observation during this medical unstable period.
To doctors, your problem (to put it simply) not having enough food. They can't let you sit there and die. The same way they can't refuse to treat someone with a stab wound or someone who's overdosed on heroin.
Now with obesity vs. anorexia, the difference is that **immediate** danger. Remember it's not just about being hungry vs not hungry. It's not about fat vs. thin. When you have a lack of nutrients/energy, it effects more than just your weight.
Theoretically, if you were trapped on a dead island and had the option of scrounging for food or having cheeseburgers delivered to you. What would you pick?
Cheeseburgers. Obviously. Why? Because even though it's not healthy, and horrible in the long run, it still provides nutrients and energy your body needs to function. It might not function optimally or even anywhere close to well, but it's way better than giving your body nothing to work with. | 2,637 |
CMV: The best gender-neutral pronouns are 'they,' 'them,' 'their,' etc. | For hundreds of years (I'm assuming), if a writer or speaker was discussing a hypothetical person or a person whose gender they didn't know, they would use the pronouns 'he,' etc. Recently, this is thought of as sexist, since it obviously assumes that whoever the speaker is talking about is male.
Attempts have been made to come up with a gender-neutral pronoun. Each of these has failed, in that they have never caught on with the general populace, so if someone uses them, it causes confusion in the audience.
Sometimes you see people write or say "His or her." This just requires extra syllables/ink and usually sounds forced, at least to my ears. Other writers or speakers alternate, using "he" and "him" for one example, then "she" and "her" for another. This sometimes works, but often (at least for me) trips up the reader, causing them to reread sections. If nothing else, it usually stands out as a "I'm trying to not be sexist" sign.
However, in English we already have a perfectly serviceable gender-neutral pronoun: they, and its relatives. In everyday speech, we often say things like, "Who left their shoes here?" "Every student should place their test on the desk," or similar things.
I believe they, them, their, etc. are the best gender neutral pronouns. Here's why:
1) Every English speaker understands them without a problem, and uses them fluidly.
2) Any attempt to create a new word will never catch on. New words that catch on usually do so because they describe a new thing that lacks a word, such as 'google,' 'selfie,' etc. Compare those words to Bing's attempts to get people to say use 'bing' as a verb in the same way we use 'google.'
3) Any confusion between the plural use of 'they,' etc. and the gender-neutral, singular use will be minimal, especially since, colloquially, 'they' pretty much already has this meaning.
My primary view is that we should just embrace 'they' as our gender-neutral pronoun, and use it in daily speech, formal speeches, articles, essays, etc. CMV
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | 319 | It's not that your idea is wrong, it's that you're many years too late. This whole idea is already(has always been?) accepted usage.
I feel like I've stumbled upon some strange circlejerk in this comment section. People are objecting to the singular form when they've used it like that in their post history... | 226 |
ELI5: What happens when you type a URL into the browser and hit enter? | I would like to understand how a webpage is rendered. I know that there is a lot more going on in the background other than simply pulling up the page based on the URL you type in... | 28 | First, it has to convert that URL into an actual computer address known as an IP address. The computer will first look to itself for that information. That IP address for that URL may be cached (a temporary storage of recently accessed information) or listed in the computer's hostfile (a permanent file that contains a list of IPs to be associated with various URLs/hostnames).
If the computer cannot find that information locally, then it has to reach out and ask for that information. This is known as a DNS request. DNS stands for "Domain Name Service" and it's how computers find out about each other. Your computer will have, as part of its network configuration, a list of DNS servers that it can ask for information. Those DNS servers will look locally (to see if they have it cached) or ask other DNS servers. At some point you'll either get to a DNS server that has the information cached or you'll get to an authoritative DNS server which exists as the primary source of information about a given domain. The reply then works its way back to the requesting computer.
Your computer now knows the IP address of the web page you're trying to access. It will now see if that computer is online and accepting communication requests. It will attempt to establish a "hand shake" with that computer. Hand shakes consist of three messages between two computers. The first basically asking if the second is there and ready to communicate. The second acknowledging that it is ready and asking if the first is ready. Lastly the first then acknowledges that it is ready. There is also synchronization of communication settings and the such.
To do this, your computer has to know how to reach the website. It first determines whether or not that website is on the same local network. It does this by comparing the website's IP address to the computer's own address and information it has about the network it is on (configured as part of its network settings). If the website is determined to be on the same local network, it will try and communicate directly with it. If the website is determined to be on a remote network (most likely) it will then communicate with a "gateway" (also part of the computer's network configuration) that will pass on, or route, the request to the website's network.
Communication with different points and devices along the way uses a different set of addresses known as MAC addresses. This works similarly to the URL-IP translation above. The computer checks its cache locally to see if it knows the MAC address for that IP, if not it asks and waits for a reply.
Assuming the most likely case, it will work like this:
1. Computer determines the IP is remote. Sends the request via the gateway.
2. Computer sends a request to the gateway using the gateway's MAC address.
3. The gateway looks at the IP and its own routing table and forwards the request to the MAC address of the next router down the line.
4. This continues until you reach network the website is on.
5. The website hears the request and replies back much in the same manner, just in reverse.
Once the handshake is complete, the computers begin communicating. Your computer will send a request for a specific web page (HTTP GET) and the host will acknowledge the request and try and send you the web page or throw back an error if it cannot. | 49 |
[WWE]Why aren't wrestlers sued when they attack people outside of a match? | 20 | Overwhelming social pressure and pervasive institutional corruption. The wrestlers are all 'independent contractors', and the show has plenty of instances of wrestlers being fired or otherwise retaliated against at the whims of the McMahons. Nobody wants to stir things up just to get canned or made an example of. | 12 |
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Many developed countries have the problem of having a majority aging population, as I understand they solve this by immigration. But what happens when the developing countries they get immigrants from become developed economies? | My premise may be entirely wrong though. But if it isnt then what happens when developing countries become developed thus having citizens more unwilling to change countries and also this new developed countries may now have this issue that other developed countries are having now | 57 | Historically, when the immigrant countries turn into developed countries, then the flow of immigration just stops and so you find new immigrant countries. If that immigrant country then goes on to become even more developed than the first country, then the flow can even reverse. It's not really that common - but we have seen it to a limited extent in the USA, but maybe more commonly with Brazil, which used to have lots of Japanese immigrants back when Japan was really poor, and is now the one sending immigrants back to Japan. | 55 |
[Futurama] Why does robot Santa consider Dr Zoidberg to be nice | In s2e8; Xmas story, we are told that Santa has incredibly biased calculations that deem everyone naughty. However, when he appears before the planet express crew (and some robot hobos) he says all of them are naughty except Dr Zoidberg, who he gifts a pogo stick.
Why is it the Zoidberg is deemed nice when seemingly everyone else isn’t, despite no particular clear differences to anyone else. | 158 | Zoidberg is kind and loving to those around him even if they mistreat him. also the fact he's selfless and pure at heart.
Hi's only desire is his friends and he cares for them.
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Edit: Watch the tip of the zoidberg if you want to see how kind he really is. | 138 |
ELI5: Why do some developed nations (UK, France, Germany, etc) have large populations of migrants, but other developed nations (e.g. Japan) have very little? | 268 | Doesn't Japan have stricter laws about immigration and naturalization?
I would be surprised if there wasn't an illegal underground market for undocumented workers, however, like in Qatar, or UAE, or Saudi Arabia, you are treated like dirt and expelled after your work visa expires. | 152 |
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[Marvel & DC] Which heroes/villains are combat underachievers, compared to what their powers allow? | I'm not talking about Reed Richards not curing cancer, or Superman not eradicating all crime on Earth. That stuff's hard, and maybe there's a good reason they haven't done it.
I'm talking about good old fashioned beatdowns.
Some characters are, on paper, capable of extremely impressive feats. But we never get to see it. At best we get to see it once in a blue moon, before everyone again forgets that they can do this.
Everyone except that character's fans.
That character's fans, this is your time. | 21 | Plastic man. It's come up more recently, but the guy is incredibly powerful to the point that he's one of batman's biggest concerns in the super hero community. His flexibility makes him pretty much indestructible and he can expand to great sizes. He's been frozen, shattered into little pieces, and spread across the planet, but still was able to survive. he's also crazy enough to be completely unpredictable, which is batman's issue with him. He's overall a goofy guy, so he's not really a threat but his powers really exceed that of Mr Fantastic. Also, Barry Allen. Reverse Flash is able to cause people's atoms to explode by just touching them or age them into dust so flash must hold back a lot when he goes against his villains. | 21 |
ELI5: Why do dump trucks have an extra pair of wheels under them that don't touch the ground? | 63 | Used to work in a Freightliner plant. They're called drop axles. They're lowered when the truck (often a dump truck) is carrying a heavy load, to help distribute the weight across the frame. They have inflatable airbag suspensions. | 57 |
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What are the most fundamental assumptions that physicists have to make in order to derive the laws of physics? | EDIT: To clarify, I mean is there a particular set of first principles from which the laws of physics (or most of them at least) can be mathematically derived. For example, I imagine one of the assumptions would be the size of the fundamental constants, another that information cannot travel faster than c, yet another may be that there are 4 dimensions.
Essentially I am wondering what physical first principles we do not have an explanation for and so have to assume a priori in order to derive the laws of physics. | 24 | Causality
Locality
and
Repeatability
Which basically sums up to saying that when something happens, it happened because of the previous state of the system, that the system is not influenced by the results from other systems it doesn't interact with, and that if the system was put in the same state it was before it would behave in the same way. | 18 |
[Star Wars] What if the Rebel Alliance hired all of the bounty hunters that originally worked for Darth Vader to assassinate Emperor Palpatine? | Inspired from the [r/whowouldwin](http://www.reddit.com/r/whowouldwin/comments/1ljdrb/all_the_bounty_hunters_assembled_by_vader_in/) Bounty hunters vs Grievous thread.
* Boba Fett
* Bossk
* IG-88
* Dengar
* Zuckuss
* 4-LOM
All 6 of them are hired to team up and kill the Emperor.
EDIT: Okay for the sake of discussion. Let's just say the Rebels found a cache of Rakata artifacts which they sold to a VERY rich Hutt benefactor, and somehow came up with the funds to pay all 6 of these guys to hunt down the Emperor. Some of you say they won't do it. That might be true, but just assume that these guys are getting paid more than they could possibly imagine, the Empire did something that pissed all of them off, and that this would seal their names in Bounty Hunter history as the primary badasses. | 44 | they would die horribly and brutally. Palpatine has elite guards, Darth Vader, and the resources of an entire Empire at his beck and call looking out for his well being. He could simply outbid the Alliance and have them kill the people that hired them. This is all ignoring the fact that he is insanely skilled in physical combat as well, though he could kill all of them without even drawing his lightsaber. His Force lightning is powerful enough to turn people into *ash*, if he hadn't held back to torture Luke into joining the Sith Luke would have been nothing more than a burn mark on the ground. Trying to catch the Emperor in a trap is next to impossible as well, what with his prescience abilities and a surprise attack would similarly fail due to the Force warning him of danger. Oh, and the Rebels probably couldn't afford all the hunters anyways | 54 |
ELI5: How did Game Genies work for nes/Sega Master System? | 541 | Game Genie's worked a little different depending on each system because each system treated cartridges a little different.
In general a Game Genie was designed to sit between the console and the cartridge and when the console asked the cartridge for data the game genie could secretly change it before passing it back to the console.
So for example you have a game where you start with 3 lives. That number 3 exists somewhere in the data or code on the cartridge. Let's assume the number 3 is stored at the 5000th byte of the cartridge's data bank. On the Game Genie you'd enter a code like "50 00 99". This would tell the genie that every time the console tried to load the number from address 5000 to send back a value of 99 instead of what was really there. Now when a new game starts you have 99 lives because that's the number the console recieved.
While that code is obvious in its meaning the genie usually used scrambled codes in a known way, so for example you might actually enter the code "90 05 09" and it would get unscrambled into the more meanful code.
Different consoles had different ways of working. On the NES the cartridge was linked directly into the CPU bus in such a way that it could control *all* memory, not just the cartridges (this allowed NES cartridges to enhance the original hardware, not just provide game data) by routing any memory access through the cartridge pins first. This means that the cartridge could even override the data in the consoles built in ram.
So Game Genie codes for the NES might do things like "hold" a byte. What this means is that it essentially kept a value in RAM locked - attempts to change it wouldn't work. So you have a place in ram where health was stored and when health reached 0 you are supposed to die. The game genie could just hold that value at 99 and now you are invincible. | 516 |
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ELI5: How come our brain can create auditory and visual hallucinations from schizophrenia for example, but we cannot do it willingly? | 27 | We associate only parts of our brain with "doing things willingly". For example, we cannot (generally) willingly feel less or more anxiety, hunger, desire, and so on. Similarly, we cannot (generally) willingly experience blackouts, goosebumps, hallucinations, and so on.
In short, we are much more than a concious being, and we exist in/as a body with all kinds of functions that we have (generally) no conscious control over. | 21 |
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ELI5: Would guns work on a Moon and in space, and why? | *the Moon | 38 | Gunpowder does not need air to explode. So yes, they will work. The gun feeding another bullet becomes iffy. A gun like a glock that works on the force of the slide and casing getting blown back would have no problem, most guns work like this. A gun like and AK 47 uses a little tube of gas coming from the barrel to cycle the next bullet. This type may not get enough pressure with the barrel being empty of all air when firing, but it could always be done manually. | 31 |
ELI5: When you rub your eyes and see rainbow colors and swirling patterns what’s really happening? | 28 | Pressure can stimulate the cells in your eyes that usually respond to light. As a result, even though there *isn't* associated light, they fire off signals to the brain.
The brain doesn't have any way of sorting 'light' signals from any other that come from those cells, so it just says "Ok, I'll paint the picture!" and creates an image based on what it receives. | 56 |
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When listening to the radio in a traveling vehicle and then going through a tunnel, and the audio of the song/news turns to static, what is being played through the radio if the signal is lost, as in, what provides the 'static' sound? | Thank you everyone for all the informative responses. Much obliged :) | 2,850 | For radio signals to be received correctly, with few errors, the signal to noise ratio (SNR) should be above a certain threshold. The SNR can lowered by decreasing the signal strength (which the tunnel causes) or increasing the noise. For analog signals (AM/FM) as the signal strength drops the quality of the signal becomes worse, which we hear as the static noise drowning out the FM station.
The static you hear (especially at FM frequencies) is mostly made from radio frequency interference (RFI) from the electronics all around us (eg, motors, power supplies, computers). Any electrical device can, and may, produce some amount of radio noise. There is also a thermal noise floor of the radio receiver which limits its sensitivity (but RFI will generally be the stronger interference) and even noise from space (see CMB). All these sources of noise add up to create what we usually call white noise (its the same as the “snow” on an analog TV).
An analogy of white noise is people in a crowd. If you are in the middle of a crowd and everyone is talking you wont be able to pick out any particular conversion but there will be a lot of noise. if someone picks up a megaphone and starts talking into that, you will be able to hear that person above all the background noise (even if the volume of background noise doesn’t change).
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You can us visualize the radio spectrum with a device called a software defined radio (SDR) and the cheap ones can be picked up for less than $20 (RTL-SDR). | 1,106 |
ELI5: Why are my hands and ears much less resistant to the outside cold than my let's say nose or entire face for that matter? | 23 | Because they don't matter in the long scheme of things.
We can survive perfectly fine (well, the loss is very minimal) if our ears or nose are cold, or even severely damaged by the cold.
So they get very little blood circulation (bringing warmth from your core), and don't need a whole lot of protection from the elements because they aren't sending very much blood back (low bloodflow goes both ways), and thus even if they are freezing off they aren't damaging your overall survival.
Basically, in the case of surviving low temps, they aren't worth the effort/resources your body would need to stay alive.
And they aren't worth protecting long term at the cost of lowering your overall survival (like say...your legs are). | 11 |
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If two vehicles, each going half the speed of sound, passed each other within inches, would they experience a sonic boom? | Would this be possible? | 28 | While the relative speed between the two vehicles would be equal to the speed of sound, the speed of each vehicle relative to the fluid through which it is traveling would still be less than the speed of sound. Thus sonic boom would not be possible | 50 |
[MCU] If you had the time stone (or just the time by itself) could you fall in love with Red Skull and sacrifice him for the Soul Stone? | 22 | 1. Who possibly would.
2. I’m pretty sure the fact he’s still alive despite nearly a century passing and levitates suggests that the Red Skull is exempt from the Soul Stone sacrifice as his guardian. | 25 |
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ELI5: How can headphones deliver decent amounts of bass when normal speakers usually require a large subwoofer to produce the same effect? | 34 | "Normal speakers" are trying to make sound in a room that's many times larger than the tiny space in your ear canal where earbuds are making sound (or the small space inside the headphones where they are making the sound). Bigger spaces take more energy for the sound to be perceived as at the same "level". | 19 |
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[ASOIAF/GoT] What if Stannis had won the Battle of Blackwater? | Lets say in this scenario Tywin's reinforcements never arrive to King's Landing. How would the war have gone differently if Stannis was victorious? | 30 | Cersei Lannister is definitely executed. Her children's fate might depend on Davos' advice. Tyrion would be spared, as he was doing his duty though he killed many of his men, maybe sent to the wall if unlucky. Zero to minimum lootings.
Also Robb is probably forced to capitulate later on and fight for Stannis. | 34 |
ELI5: Is the act of sexual intercourse hardwired into the brain? | Like obviously the drive for intercourse is hardwired, but like is the actual process of putting the key into the keyhole also hardwired, or is it a learned experience (eg. observing it). | 32 | I think it's hardwired in most ancestor species, so almost definitely in humans too. Hard to tell at a glance because we learn about it young and see it all over because of porn etc etc, society and all that. | 38 |
[Mario] What happens to Mario when he eats a mushroom or takes damage? | The constant growing and shrinking has got to be doing a number on his musculoskeletal system | 29 | The mushroom, as well as his other powerups are all magic. He magics big, he magics small. Sometimes he magics into a cat, or a frog, or a racoon dog that turns into a statue. Sometimes he psychically dominates his foes and possesses their body. It obviously doesn't seem to cause any permanent harm or stress to his body as demonstrated by his illustrious athletic career, as shown by the fact that he competed not just one, but *three consecutive Olympic games* (2012, 2016, and 2020*) and regularly competes in an interdimensional fighting tournament, or his mind, considering he's earned a medical doctorate at some point
*No 'Rona in Mario World, the 2020 Tokyo games went on as planned | 30 |
[Star Wars] Why are human pilots needed? Couldn’t the ships fly themselves to destroy shields if needed? | For that matter, why do the ships need droids? Seems like they would simply get their own brains. | 552 | They could, but the competence and creativity of a human pilot far outweighs anything but the most expensive of quasi-sapient AI. Something even the Empire didn't have the resources to build, power, and maintain en masse.
As for why R2 units? By acting as the fighter's computer, they can perform necessary calculations that humans just can't do on the fly, and, and because they're removable and mobile, they can accompany their pilot to perform other activities that would also take a human much longer to do.
The result is a hyper-effective tag team that covers for each other's weaknesses under a huge variety of conditions. Weaknesses that couldn't be eliminated from one or the other without *prohibitively* expensive experimentation. | 539 |
ELI5: Why do people hear that "ocean sound" when putting a shell to their ear? | Occasionally tried this when I was little, but never really thought about why this happens. | 78 | It's because of air bouncing around.
Think about how you can hear the wind because it moves things around and even if there's nothing to move, you can hear it whistling past buildings or thumping into walls. Well, even a tiny breeze makes noise but usually it's so quiet we can't hear it or don't notice. That's where the shell comes in. The shape of the shell magnifies the sound of a tiny breeze to the point where it's loud enough to hear. So when you put your ear to a shell, you're not hearing the ocean, you're hearing tiny breezes moving in the shell. | 58 |
ELI5 Why do injuries hurt when weather changes occur? | 271 | The most popular theory blames the drop in atmospheric pressure that accompanies rain. Think of it like blowing up a balloon. There’s inside air pushing out, and outside air pushing in. Atmospheric pressure is always pushing on our bodies in a similar way. If the pressure outside of the body drops, gasses inside the body can expand, particularly the gasses dissolved in the fluid surrounding your joints and tendons.
Now consider your injury. Think about pain as nerves that have been irritated. Somehow they didn’t heal right, or they might be inflamed. That expansion of fluid around your damaged Achilles might be microscopic, but it can really trigger these nerve endings by putting additional pressure on them, causing pain.
As for the temperature, the theory goes like this: cold may cause muscles to tense up, and that contraction can also aggravate those damaged nerves.
Long story short: A drop in atmospheric pressure may trigger an increase in the pressure of your body’s fluids on damaged nerves, causing pain.
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How do we know the mass of planets? | I understand Newton's universal law of gravitation, but how did he come to that point? It seems like there were far too many unknowns during that time... How did he measure the radius of the earth? How did he come up with the universal constant without knowing the mass of the earth? etc.
How did we get to this point? | 29 | Eratosthenes in ancient Greece/Egypt figured out the circumference of the Earth by considering the angle of the sun on the solstice at various places. Newton figured out his law of gravity by examining Kepler's empirical laws and realizing that they were implied by an inverse square force. Cavendish measured the gravitational constant by examining the deflection of a rotating pendulum around large balls of lead. | 18 |
Why do we use Caesium in atomic clocks? | As far as I understand it, Caesium is not exactly easy to work with. It's not exactly a common element and is very reactive, aren't there any better alternatives? | 96 | Caesium is a fun element because it is easily excited. To say it more properly, it's easy to ionize, you can do so with visible light (so it works as a photoelectric material), and it can easily be ionized by an electrically powered source of microwave radiation.
In addition to having a single electron in its outer non-filled shell (some other elements also have that), caesium has a higher energy difference between electron states. More accurately, caesium has a larger hyperfine structure, which, in terms of an atomic clock, means that the changes in electron state that the clock observes happen more often. Since an atomic clock counts those changes, that means that the more they happen, the more accurate the clock can be.
This allowed, some decades ago, to precisely define a second as, SI definition follows, "the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom." | 52 |
CMV: Handing Republicans control over the executive and legislative branches will not help the Progressive movement. | I strongly dislike the DNC and am really upset with Obama for tapping Buttigieg and Klobuchar to endorse the man he thought shouldn't run, Biden. I can't find a reason for anyone to back Biden, or anyone who likes him and despises Trump is beyond hypocritical. I mean would you support a man who puts kids in cages and wants to build a wall? A sexual predator? No, I don't like Biden either, because at the extension of Obama's hand this is what his cabinet did. I truly, do not want these people to be in power anymore. But I think we (Progressives) have little choice because of the two party system and manufacturing consent.
If Republicans are in control of all three branches economic inequality and environmental pollution will get significantly worse. It will plateau, prob get worse with Dems, but it will get astonishingly worse more quickly with Republicans. They're smart, they'll throw us scraps (1.2k stimulus) but will block anything that's not in line with Mitch McConnell's philosophy. The progressive left has been, for years, trying to gain its footing back. It died with Zuccotti park, it died with Nader, now we have another shot, and although our leader isn't running for president he's not dead. He lead the insurgency, and we should follow that. If we haven't been able to rise up while the ineffective "do nothing dems" have been in power what makes you think we'll have a better chance against a smart opposition like the GOP?
My fear is that as the boomers die and we mass exodus the DNC we will not coalesce and be able to face the GOP in unity. Yes, the majority of America will want to be a leftist country but we'll have a conservative stronghold as the DNC dies and the mass media funding like MSNBC will just turn into Fox news. We would need to put strong efforts into independent news stations which be hard to do as the mass media/Social Media like google and FB oppose it.
I'm not saying go vote for Biden, it's hard for me to bring myself to do that. But I'm curious what you all think will happen if *this* administration is in power for four more years. I essentially feel like we need to rise our insurgency will the elite is still split between GOP and DEM because when one of them gets all of the power we'll be screwed.
Edit: The DNC needs us. We should demand Biden immediately apologize to Tara Reade and use executive orders to call a climate emergency and implement the GND day one. Then appoint Bernie the head of a financial regulation office to tax billionaire companies, and not.veto.m4a. | 25 | I agree we should vote for Biden for reasons like the supreme court this time around(and how destructive trump is as a president and the whole anti science attitude coming from the white house) but eventually progressives will have to either stop voting for the democratic nominee to establish themselves as a voting block, or launch a large protest or something. If the democratic party feels like they will lose the election unless they can get progressives on board they will make concessions. Sort of like the tea party movement in 2010 and the freedom caucus. They exerted pressure perfectly and are now basically the Republican party. We need to do the same cause if the Democrats think we will just fall in line everytime a centrist wins then they will feel no need to adjust their policies. | 15 |
[WH40k] Are there any really advanced human worlds that have been recently discovered by the Imperium? | I know that warp storms can have strong spatio-temporal effects that can separate a world or system from outside access, so has the contemporary Imperium encountered human colonies that still retain the high level of technological advancement present during the pre-Age of Strife era?
For instance, the Luna Wolves encounter the human Interex during the Great Crusade whose mortal weapons and warriors are a match for the Space Marines when fighting breaks out, could it be possible that a world containing advanced human civilization or even a functional STC be lurking about somewhere? | 40 | In the Chaos Daemons codex (I think it was that one) it was mentioned that there was a planet who had completely conquered disease, which requires a high technology level and lots of research.
Then, of course, Nurgle took issue with that and wiped them out in under a year.
There are really advanced planets in the Imperium. They are generally paradise worlds. There are also planets who were isolated and progressed independently, leading to a non-religious view of technology, which would result in a faster level of technical advancement.
The Adeptus Mechanicus would be inclined to stamp the last one out, however. | 17 |
ELI5: How can the color spectrum be wrapped into a continuous color wheel? How can the highest frequency colors blend into the lowest frequency colors without clashing? | 12,047 | Because our eyes only detect three colours of light: red, green, and blue.
When both red and blue light reaches our eyes but not green, we perceive it as magenta (a bright pinkish purple color).
When both red and green light reaches out eyes but not blue, we perceive it as yellow - but what is interesting is that things that reflect *yellow light* will stimulate both our red and green receptors as well (just not *as much* for the red receptor as red light would) so yellow light also stimulates the red and green detectors, hence why it looks yellow.
In short, there are two ways to see yellow - from actual yellow light (which is between the wavelengths most detected by the red and the green receptors) and also from a little bit of red light and a little bit of green light both being detected at the same time.
But there is only one way to detect magenta, since there's no magenta wavelength! The wavelength between red and blue is just the green wavelength, but if you are detecting both red and blue but *not* green, it can't be a really bright green spilling into red and blue! So it must be something else. As such, our minds blend the colours smoothly as we add or remove various amounts of each colour, and this necessitates a ring-like structure. | 5,417 |
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[Witcher] Who are the gods?? multiple gods are believed to exist but not much seems to be known about them. | So there are so many monsters and all different kinds of magic, there are also demons and The Watchers who are the angels of The Witcher universe so what of gods??? I know Freya is mentioned and in Witcher 1, Geralt fights a god named Dagon or atleast something I think is a god and there is a Gwent card of Dana Meadbh who is a goddess so they have made their presences known but what of the other gods???
Did they cause the conjunction of the spheres possibly?
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So who are the gods?? | 24 | The gods are simply extremely powerful beings. Some are believed to be native to the Witcher world and others brought by practitioners from different worlds. Only a handful seem to have any real observable power. They could be similar to djinn in that they're beings of raw magical energy. Or something like gaunter Odim and far more powerful than any known magical being. Or they could be completely fictitious with roots from some monster or demon or relic encountered by scared refugees that paid worship to what they feared. | 10 |
ELI5: how are we sometimes able to wake up a second before the alarm goes off? | It’s always sudden too, “bam wake up”. One second later, beep beep beep. (Cell phone alarm in my case) | 110 | The body has an internal clock, simply stated. It is aware of the time of day almost to the minute. We don't have access to that clock consciously, but it's there.
You can sometimes make it wake you up if you're focused enough on waking up at that hour while you fall asleep. This is assuming you're not exhausted enough for the body to ignore your requests. | 119 |
ELI5 - What makes a rechargeable battery rechargeable? And what would happen if you tried charging a non rechargeable battery? | 37 | So batteries generate electricity because of chemical reactions they undergo. In a standard alkaline battery, zinc and manganese (IV) oxide react and produce electricity. After enough of the chemicals react that the reactions can no longer proceed, the battery is considered exhausted.
The chemical reactions can be forced to proceed in the opposite direction by forcing electric current through the battery in the other direction. This turns the chemical products back, more or less, into their original forms.
Rechargeable batteries use different chemicals than zinc and manganese oxide, ones that respond better to a reversal of current.
You *can* recharge a non-rechargeable battery, but you won't get all the power back, and it can be dangerous. | 16 |
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If cat's are covered in fur, and don't pant or sweat. How do they regulate there temperature when they fall asleep in the sun or on a heat vent? | First off. I know cat's pant if they get hot enought but they don't while they are sleeping.
Moving on, how do they keep from over heating when they are sleep for hours in hot places? Do they have a lowered body temperature while sleeping? In general cats don't seem to mind heat so are they just built for higher temps? If so how? what adaptations do they have to deal with heat?
Thank you for looking at my question and I look forward to finding the answer! | 15 | Well first of all cats have a higher regular internal temeprature than humans do.
Remember that fur is not only for keeping them warm, it functions as a thermal insulator, so it helps keep them cool as well. Also they thermo\-regulate via their large ears and by grooming themselves \- the saliva from their tongues acts like sweat that cools their body when it evaporates.
Hope that helps :\) | 14 |
[General] If someone is turned into a vampire but freely chooses to never consume human blood, not even once - does that individual gain or lose any advantages or disadvantages to doing this? | 42 | This depends on what universe you're in.
In *Buffy the Vampire Slayer,* Angel subsists indefinitely on animal blood, and merely doesn't like the taste.
In *Vampire: the Masquerade,* animal blood is much less potent than human blood, and "vegetarian" vampires must consume more of it.
In *Vampire: the Requiem,* not only is the above still true, but only weak vampires can exist at all without human blood - and particularly powerful vampires consume vampire blood. | 73 |
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ELI5: Why does some food (especially fast food) change taste when reheated? | 35 | Cooking is a chemical change, a chemical change is something that’s permanent. So when you cook something that’s been cooked it’s like cooking with different ingredients. Flour tastes different than bread, and bread tastes different from toast. | 52 |
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What would a utilitarian make of the Truman show? | The show brought joy to the millions who watched it. At the same time, it's kinda a horrifying concept that manipulates a man into what amounts to totalitarian control of his life. would a utilitarian oppose the show if it were real? How would they respond? | 139 | This is quite similar to a common ethical thought experiment known as the Sadist's Convention. It involves spectators in an arena deriving pleasure from watching a single unwilling participant be tortured. This is presented as an objection to utilitarianism; our gut instinct is that this is morally wrong, even if the pleasure generated by a stadium of sadists is greater than the pain endured by a single unlucky person. Here are the most common responses to the thought experiment from a utilitarian standpoint, which could also apply to your example:
1. Bite the bullet! Agree that as strange as it might seem, a stadium full of sadist pleasure really does outweigh the pain of an individual, and that the Sadist's Convention isn't morally wrong.
2. Argue that the pleasure of the sadists does not actually outweigh the pain of the individual. Perhaps pain should be weighted more heavily than pleasure, or some other solution that "fixes" the utility math.
3. Argue that the pleasure of the sadists is incomparable to the pain of the individual. This generally involves implicating things like personal freedom, inalienable rights, dignity, etc. In utility calculations. While this is the most common response, it also typically commits one to consequentialism, rather than pure utilitarianism. Realistically speaking, this is likely how most modern consequentialist philosophers would respond; very few, if any, philosophers continue to defend pure utilitarianism. | 139 |
What use is having stocks to a company once their IPO is done? | As I understand it, a company sells a bunch of stocks to raise a lot of money for some investment they want to do, and then they forever either pay a little of their profits to shareholders as dividends forever, or they pay a bunch of it to them once as a buyback. But is there any advantage or use for the company in the stocks at this point? It seems not useful to the company to constantly be paying part of the profits to some outside person. | 63 | You seem to have the misconception that (1) the pre-IPO Company has no shares and the shares only exist after IPO, and (2) the Company exists to benefit itself. In reality, (1) the Company has always had shares since it was created (the act of incorporation is the act of creating shares), and (2) the Company exists to benefit its shareholders.
(1) When you register a company you create shares and then distribute them among the initial investors. In some cases that's just one person, and in some cases it might be a few people, each with a certain number of shares. When you IPO a company, usually you just create more shares and sell those shares to the public. Sometimes you don't even create new shares, you just sell your existing shares into the public market.
(2) The "Company" exists only to benefit its shareholders. This is called a fiduciary duty. The objective of a Company is not to grow bigger or better, sometimes it might do that in order to better serve its shareholders, but it's not the actual function of the Company, which is to generate as much return for its shareholders as possible. Pre-IPO and post-IPO that doesn't really change, though the identity of its shareholders might. The IPO process might be used to enable pre-IPO investors to sell their shares at a good price, or it might be used to enable the Company to get cash to expand for the benefit of its pre-IPO investors.
(3) There's nothing stopping companies from raising more cash by selling more shares again at a later date. This is actually very common and can come in many forms (e.g. rights issues / convertible debt). | 94 |
ELI5: Can someone explain tectonic plates and what they physically are and what they do? | 45 | Ever seen ice on a frozen lake? Similar idea.
The crust of the Earth is, more or less, just where it is so cold that the molten rock has gotten a chance to freeze over. This crust of frozen rock (as in it is now solid again instead of flowing around like it does further down) helps insulate the interior of the Earth.
Thin layer of solid rock up on top where it is cold. A lot of hot molten stuff below. The further down you go, the hotter it gets.
Hot things tend to expand and become less dense than when they are cold. This means that molten rock near the core of the Earth gets really hot and floats up towards the solid rock crust. There it cools off again and, eventually, drops.
This means there is a current. Much like the ocean. Except these currents move really slowly. Rock is a lot denser than water and it takes a lot longer for the flow to happen.
All this movement just below the crust causes it to fracture. In some places the hot stuff even pushing its way out. This is where we get volcanoes. But, let's get back to the crust being broken apart.
The crust, that is the solid part near the surface, is being pulled and pushed in different directions as this hot current moves underneath it and tries to drag the solid part along with it. This means that the crust of the Earth is separated into several huge plates and they are bumping into each other.
But it is taking place incredibly slowly.
Now let's move away from ice and talk about cars. Two cars hit each other with a head on collision. Their bumpers aren't the same height. What happens? When they hit the car with the higher bumper tends to go up. The one with the lower bumper tends to go down.
Okay. Now two cars with the bumper in the same place hit. What happens? Depends on how they hit, really. Sometimes it creates a push upwards and the front of both cars lift. Sometimes it causes a push downwards and both cars bend towards the road.
Similar things happen when plates collide. But it is much, much, much slower. How slow? Slow enough that the impact doesn't cause the rocks to shatter. Instead the rock faces of the plates keep pushing at each other until the rock actually bends.
Yes, solid rock will bend. It just takes a lot of constant force taking place over a long, long time.
So, when two plates collide into each other they don't always hit evenly. Sometimes one gets shoved under the other. Sometimes both sides go up. Sometimes both sides go down. It depends on how they collide, at what angle, and how the plates are matched.
When the force is directed upwards the rock is bent up to become mountains. When it is bent downwards it can form valleys or trenches.
Because the places between the plates offer a natural connection to the hot magma below, most volcanoes occur along the plate boundaries. Earthquakes happen along the plate boundaries (fault lines) and that is due to the fact that these rocks that are moving past one another aren't that well lubricated. Even though the movement is slow, there is still a lot of energy needed to move something the size of a continent. If you press the palms of your hands together tightly and slide them across one another you'll notice a lot of slipping. It will move, the bumps on your hands will catch one another causing it to stop, and then the steady pressure causes you to push past this and it moves faster all at once as the energy is released. Same idea. The movement gets stuck or slowed down by something. Once it gets past this obstacle a lot of energy is released all at once and there is a lot of movement right there along the fault line. Something that was moving at an inch a year suddenly moved a foot or so. That releases a lot of energy at once and earthquakes are the shock waves from this.
So, that's the best answer I've got. Rock goes from liquid to solid because its too cold where we are for rock to stay a liquid. Still, there is a lot of movement down below at it causes the crust to break up a bit and twist, turn, and crash together in places. | 17 |
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If I find CS50 too difficult, will I dislike programming in general? | I was hoping to build an app (just for fun). I’ve been doing CS50 and am finding it tedious and difficult. Is programming not for me? I thought I’d find it fun because I as a kid I made pretty decent websites with HTML in Notepad, but so far I’ve just been feeling like an idiot and not really enjoying it. Solving the problem sets doesn’t come naturally for me, and I have to google endlessly to make slight progress. I liked the JavaScript course on Khan Academy, but that was a bit too far in the other direction (a bit too easy/babyish). | 24 | No! CS50 is focused on C programming and some people find it hard to grasp the idea of low level programming.
As you said you like JavaScript, so continue developing with it. If you like front end stuff with html, css and JavaScript just do that. If you also like back end, check out nodeJS.
Take small steps in learning programming. The best thing that works for me is learning by doing. Try something and if you get stuck watch tutorials and Google a lot. Also don't be afraid to ask. | 28 |
ELI5: Why do shoelaces untie themselves while headphones get themselves into knots? | 1,891 | Headphones are often covered in rubber, which is a sticky material, whereas shoe laces are often made of fabric, which is a soft and somewhat slippery material.
If we had shoelaces made of rubber, they would stay longer together and vise versa with headphones. | 825 |
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[all] Which villain has suffered the most tragedy? | 97 | Doctor Doofenshmirtz.
His mother didn't even show up for his birth.
He was forced to wear dresses his whole elementary school life.
He had to work as a lawn gnome and so lost balloony, his best friend.
He had to compete with "Only Son" a prize winning show dog.
He was abandoned and raised by oscelots.
The guy has had it rough.
He was shut out of the family dynamic when his brother claimed his mother as his own with permanent marker. | 169 |
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What is the most petty thing in academia that you have done/had witnessed others do? | 27 | A professor counted the ceiling section squares in his office and another professor's office and demanded that his office be increased to the same size. Space was taken from the adjacent graduate student office. | 65 |
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How does the hydraulic ram water pump work and why does it not violate conservation of energy? | [This](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWqDurunnK8) video is supposed to explain how the hydaulic ram water pump works, but I am still very confused.
I thought, that due to conservation of energy, it is impossible to lift water higher than the original source without an external source of energy?
Why is the air in the pressure chamber not compressed in the first place? I thought water pressure was *only* a function of water depth. By that logic, the pressure in the pressure chamber should be a lot higher than the pressure in the lower part of the pump. Thus the delivery valve should never be able to open up in order to let water stream from the lower to the upper part of the pump.
Also: if this thing worked, what would stop me from harvesting infinite energy from it, by using the pump to transport water to a high altitude and letting it fall back into the source pool through a system of turbines?
Could someone shad some light on this apparently magical device?
Thanks
| 31 | In hydrostatics where the water velocity is zero or small pressure will be equal in the whole system and the maximum height of water will be the same in the whole system.
Looking at the water ram it takes a moving stream of water and suddenly stops it by closing the waste valve. This sudden stop mean the pressure increases to stop the water from flowing and this pressure opens the valve into the compression chamber with the air that then seals itself, and the air pressure then manages to force water up through the higher pipe.
The key is the energy taken from the water's motion to pressurize the tank. A large volume of water at low pressure is manipulated to create a smaller volume at higher pressure.
If you tried to loop the device it would return a continually smaller fraction of water up the hill after each cycle. | 19 |
[Basically any medical type show or movie] when they say that the person lost a lot of blood why can’t they just put some of their blood on the baggie that hangs upside down and boom blood recovered? | Edit: ppl seem to think that I mean to scoop up the hood they lost or whatever and while the scenario is funny in my head lol I meant that use the blood that hospitals have (ya know those bags of blood in movies and such) and put the baggie on an IV (in place where those clear bags of liquid r hanging upside down) | 31 | People don't just lose blood randomly, it usually means that they have some kind of wound, so giving them new blood is pointless until that wound is closed.
If someone loses alot of blood than that means they must have a lot of wounds, maybe even internal ones, which makes it harder to close them all. | 51 |
ELI5: What actually makes a food healthy/unhealthy? Are all processed foods automatically “unhealthy”? | Obviously low-calorie and low-carb are different than “healthy”, but they are much easier to identify when reading a nutritional label. What should someone be looking out for to still eat (relatively) healthy without only eating raw veggies? | 58 | I wouldn't think of any single item being healthy / unhealthy. (Besides obvious candidates like empty calories such as certain sweets)
Think about what you are eating as a whole. The best diet is the one that
a) gets you the calories that you need including those you'll burn
b) gets you all the recommended nutrients
c) doesn't give you excessive amounts of anything.
d) obviously as little as possible downright harmful substances like alcohol
Wether you get there by eating mostly vegetables or yoghurt, frankly doesn't matter. | 49 |
[2001: A Space Odyssey] What would have happened if HAL had arrived at Jupiter without any humans aboard? | Was the monolith eager to deal with artificial sentience? Would it view HAL 9000 as the ambassador of Earth, or just tell him to come back and bring some meat-sacks next time? | 38 | Well, spoilers ahoy, but in 2010, the alien have absolutely no problem dealing with HAL, and elevate him along with David Bowman, so probably they make no distinction between evolved sentience and designed sentience. Were he the original one to encounter the monolith, it would most probably treat him as it treated Bowman. | 25 |
[DC] Why is it that Superman tends to get flung the same distance as Batman if they're fighting the same opponent? | If someone's strong enough to throw Superman across a room, wouldn't they be strong enough to rip Batman to shreds with a finger? Or does Superman have roughly the same mass as a human, just with much more durability and strength?
Citation: last battle in last episode of Justice League Unlimited. I realize comics/movies/cartoons each have their own separate canon, but answers for each are welcome. | 20 | Superman seems to have the amount of mass we'd expect from his appearance if he were human and not kryptonian. Notice that when he's Clark Kent his body does not affect the environment in any noticeable way. Contrast this with FMA's Envy, whose human form still retains the mass of his humongous true form and sinks into the ground with every step and bends the metal railings he steps on. Also, as a young Clark Kent, his parents were able to treat him like any human child, the farm isn't buffed structurally or anything. | 19 |
CMV: the Democratic party and Bernie Sanders are misrepresenting Citizen's United. | Whoops, meant to put *Citizens United*, typo in the title. Sorry.
Let me just start by saying that I'm a liberal democrat, I bleed blue. My opinion doesn't come from my partisan affiliation but from my education. After listening to Bernie's repeated promises to "overturn Citizens United" as well as some criticisms from Democratic leaders, including Obama, I think that they are misrepresenting the SCOTUS ruling to the people.
They speak very generally on it, but their sentiment seems to be that it is "allowing money into politics." [Here](https://berniesanders.com/issues/money-in-politics/) is what Bernie has to say about Citizen's United.
"Almost six years ago, as a result of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, by a 5-to-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court essentially said to the wealthiest people in this country: you already own much of the American economy. Now, we are going to give you the opportunity to purchase the U.S. Government, the White House, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, Governors’ seats, legislatures, and State judicial branches as well."
This is a hilariously extremist interpretation of the ruling. Notice that he never even explicates exactly what the ruling entailed other than "that money is speech, corporations are people, and giving huge piles of undisclosed cash to politicians in exchange for access and influence does not constitute corruption."
**Here's why.**
**Context and Background**
First I want to reflect on the background facts of this case, of which are almost never mentioned in the discussions on its decision.
The context and background of the Citizens United case provides us with a few key concepts that are important in order to fully understand the decision as well as its implications. The main concept that must be understood is that of campaign finance law, especially in relation to corporations. The main facet of campaign finance law that is placed under scrutiny in Citizens United is “independent expenditure.” Independent expenditures are money that is spent by a corporation or union in support of a candidate in a manner uncoordinated with any political party of the candidate himself. This is in contrast to “direct contributions,” which is money given directly to the candidate or political party by the corporation or union.
The most important concept in understanding the context of Citizens United is the act that is being constitutionally challenged: the McCain Feingold Act. The McCain Feingold Act of 2002 was the greatest overhaul of campaign finance law since the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (“FECA”). The McCain Feingold Act “banned unlimited corporate donations to national political party committees, put limitations on advertising by organizations not affiliated with parties, and banned the use of corporate and union money for “electioneering communication[s]… within thirty days of a primary election or sixty days of a general election.” This act, of course, did not bode well with politically interested corporations and unions. There have been many court cases relating to the act, but none as significant or controversial as Citizens United.
Citizens United, a non-profit corporation, released a documentary examining the past of then-Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Because such a documentary could be considered electioneering, Citizens United preemptively sought an injunction to prevent the enforcement of certain sections of the McCain Feingold Act, citing the First Amendment. The sections that were an issue to Citizens United were sections 201, 203, and 311 of the McCain Feingold Act. Section 201 of the Act required disclosure of the donors in electioneering communications to the Federal Election Commission (“FEC”); section 203 regulates the use of corporate funds for “electioneering communication[s]”; section 311 created the requirement for disclaimers in electioneering communications, in which the corporation must disclose that they are responsible for the advertisement or communication. As most people know by now, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, which placed corporations and unions under the protection of the first amendment.
**The Decision and its Implications**
The Court ruled in favor of Citizens United and overturned the challenged sections (as mentioned earlier) of the McCain Feingold Act. Go back and read the sections; does their exclusion create a campaign finance system that, as Bernie says, allows the wealthy to "purchase the U.S. Government"?
Here are the overturned sections again:
Section 201 of the Act required disclosure of the donors in electioneering communications to the Federal Election Commission (“FEC”).
Section 203 regulates the use of corporate funds for “electioneering communication[s]”
Section 311 created the requirement for disclaimers in electioneering communications, in which the corporation must disclose that they are responsible for the advertisement or communication.
These three sections deal only with electioneering communications and their disclosure, not donations to candidates/parties/etc.
Citizens United did not actually change campaign finance law to a significant degree when considering the other areas of the McCain Feingold Act that still regulate most areas of the law. One major political change that has happened as a result of the decision is that a new wave of litigation has surfaced concerning the other aspects of the McCain Feingold Act. There have been two major cases so far, SpeechNow.org v. FEC and Republican National Committee v. FEC, both of which were ruled in favor of the McCain Feingold Act (i.e. maintaining the regulation of campaign finance law).
Another major aspect of the issue that is understated is that although many people tend to fixate on the large donations made by corporations and unions, they do not realize the extent of the public’s participation in the political process. An important fact highlighting this is that “the total sum of individual donations of $200 or less to all political candidates in the 2008 election exceeded that of contributions from individual donors who gave more than $2,000.” This implies that while many levy that politicians are “in the pocket” of many large corporations, campaign financing actually remains in the hands of the general public. Another major aspect that has been ignored by critics is that the decision does not relate only to corporations and their spending, but also to labor unions. In fact, labor unions actually had the most to gain from the decision. While Obama and other Democrats were criticizing the role of corporations in the political process, they failed to mention the even larger role of unions in the process. This may be because nine out of the ten dollars spent on elections by unions goes to the Democrats.
**In conclusion,** Citizens United might actually not be as significant as many are led to believe when placed in the context with the rest of the regulations and campaign finance laws that remain in place. The only major change created by the decision toward the finance law is that corporations are no longer prohibited from independent expenditure. Political changes that have come from the decision are also relatively small: the political process remains largely the same as well as the public policy on campaign finance. The only notable changes to the political landscape are those of rhetoric; Democrats (and Bernie) are emphasizing their distaste for the role of corporations in public elections more than ever before, using the Supreme Court Decision as their rallying point.
**TL;DR** Citizens United overturned a few sections of the McCain Feingold Act (which relates to campaign finance) that dealt with independent expenditures by outside parties during campaigns. Despite this, most campaign finance law remains largely intact and the effects of Citizens United have been drastically overstated by Bernie and the Democratic Party. Citizens United does not allow the wealthy to "purchase the U.S. Government, the White House, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, Governors’ seats, legislatures, and State judicial branches as well." Bernie is misrepresenting the facts.
This is my opinion based on the facts. Is there something I'm missing about the ruling that might create a system that puts politicians "in the pocket" of the wealthy? Sorry about the length, I hold this view strongly and have yet to have it placed under scrutiny. Like I said, I'm a liberal democrat so maybe there's an issue that the democratic party is picking up on that I've missed.
Edit: since all of my answers are being downvoted I'm not going to be participating in this thread any further. Thanks for the interesting discussion.
_____
> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | 43 | The only major change created by the decision toward the finance law is that corporations are no longer prohibited from independent expenditure.
Which means that companies get to throw as much money as they want to support which candidate they want. Sure they can't actively collude with a candidate, but there simple work around for that. A candidate can release a bunch of stock footage to the net. Those groups can happen to find that footage and use it in their ads.
Sure they didn't collude, but c;mon. Everyone knows what is happening.
Do you really think that all that money doesn't influence elections? | 24 |
Does gravity still 'work' when scaled down? | Assuming these numbers are right:
Humans are 668 times bigger than ants and that the circumference of the earth is 40,075km
Then if we made planet with a circumference (and everything else) scaled down to make ants the same size as humans, a planet with a circumference of 72km. Would this planet have enough gravitational pull on the ants to keep them on (lets imagine that ants are just like humans and cant climb and stick onto stuff)?
And also would this planet be strong enough to keep 70% of its area covered with water using gravity? If not why? | 26 | a human is 20 million times bigger than an ant when talking about mass which is the property gravity is dependent on(as well as distance between two objects) To answer you question, in the middle of space with no other masses to interfere, any two masses will attract, no matter how small, so yes a tiny 'planet' could hold ants onto it or water on its surface. | 12 |
ELI5: Why do athletes spit out their drinks instead of swallowing it? | 23 | Water, especially cold water, can cause painful stomach cramps during intense exercise.
Rinsing the mouth gets rid of the dryness, and hydrates a little.
In most cases, the athlete knows that drinking water will be available after their cool down, and rinse their mouths so they don't get cotton mouth or breathing problems. | 43 |
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[Futurama] Did Zapp actually open up to Leela when they slept together or was it just a ploy? | In the first episode where the ship is impounded and the crew jailed for rescuing animals on a doomed world, Zapp invites Leela to his quarters to seduce her. When she rebuffs him he seems to break down and start crying, exposing his confident ladies man persona as nothing but a front to hide from the horrible loneliness he feels trapped on a ship with no female company. She gives him some pity sex and throughout the rest of the series including right after they wake up he never seems emotionally vulnerable again, slipping right back into his wanna-be Kirk delusions, no matter how coldly, frequently, or harshly she rebuffs him from then on.
Was it all just a manipulative act on his part or did losing his virginity remove any of his extremely well deserved self doubt? | 15 | I think for it to be a ploy, Zapp would need to understand that his normal demeanour is so very off-putting to women, especially Leela. He is nowhere near self aware enough to do that, and nothing he said was untrue, so its more likely that was genuine vulnerability, but his ego just let him delude himself that she fell because of his usual act. | 30 |
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