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CMV: Classes on the meta topic of strategies for learning should be a requirement. | After graduating I took a class on learning how to learn, it was fantastic and becoming a skilled practitioner would have been immensely valuable to me as a student. The current technique, at least in the California state universoty system, is to encourage meta learning skills, but never to seriously engage this topic. We are told that the undergrad degree is where you learn how to learn, as if we could not have focused on this specifically to build better academic technique. This is a change I would like implemented: at least one serious course on study techniques with mandated practice and demonstration.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | What did you learn in that class that you didn't already know?
Adding a new class requires cutting an old one out, so there's a high burden of proof. Meta-learning class merely be somewhat useful; it needs to be more useful than the classes on the chopping block.
And if your answer is to point out that you think some class that currently exists and should be cut, bear in mind that replacing a useless class with meta-learning ALSO trades off with replacing it with anything else, so it also must be superior to other class proposals not currently in the curriculum. | 14 | 73 |
ELI5: How does your body "get better" when you practice things like holding your breath? | when you do something repeatedly, the relevant parts of your body at first improve functionally, e.g. the muscle fibers coordinate better to improve general strength without(!) growing or increasing their size number when you start lifting. Only after some time does a change in their size/shape/number occur, leading to what is referred to a morphological improvement.
Examples are hearts/lungs of endurance athletes, which are way bigger than those if regular people. These morphological changes take time and practice - the functional improvements happen way more quickly.
functional improvements - happen quickly, no morphological changes
morphological improvements - take time and practice, change your body | 11 | 19 |
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CMV: Harvard getting sued over discriminatory admissions criteria is a good thing and will serve to create a precedent for more fair practices in the future because race should not now or ever be a part of admissions criteria. | From my understanding, here's what's happening: Harvard is being sued by a group of Asian-Americans because they feel that the university weighted race too heavily during their admissions criteria effectively discriminating against students because of their race. Whether or not they're right, I don't know. But what I'm arguing is that if two equally qualified students come to you and you disqualify one of them because they were born in a different place or the color of their skin, you are a racist.
Affirmative action was initially created to make things more fair. Because black and other minority students tended to come from backgrounds that were non-conducive to learning the argument was that they should be given a little more weight because of the problems they would have had to face that white students may not have. But it is my belief that while the idea for this policy arose from a good place our society has changed and we need to think about whether we've begun hurting others in our attempt to help some. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian\_quota](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_quota))
I propose that all admissions should be completely race-blind and that any affirmative action that needs to be applied should be applied based on family income rather than race. In fact, there is no reason that the college admissions process isn't completely student blind also. Back when I applied to college (four years ago), we had a commonapp within which I filled in all of my activites, my ACT, AP scores, and GPA. All of my school transcripts, letters of rec, and anything else got uploaded straight to the commonapp by my school. There was even a portion for a personal statement. It even included my name and other identifying information (age, race, etc) so there was no information about me in there that any admissions committee would feel was inadequate to making a decision. So why not just eliminate the whole identifying information bit. Ask me for anything you need to know about why I want to go to college, where I come from, who I am, but know nothing else about me. This way if I feel that my being the child of immigrants is important it can go in my personal statement or if I felt that my being a boxer was that can or maybe both. But without knowing my race it can neither help nor hurt me.
If affirmative action is applied based purely on how much money your family has then we can very fairly apply it to people who did not have the same advantages as others growing up and may have had to work harder without access to resources without discriminating against people who didn't have those things but were unfortunate enough to be born the wrong race. This way rich black people are not still considered more disadvantaged than poor Asians. But poor Black people and poor White people or poor Asians or anything else will still be considered equal to each other.
​ | Can you talk about what you think the college admissions process is supposed to accomplish? Suppose that we (through some magical means) had the ability to compare two different admissions methods side-by-side. How do we decide that one is better or worse than the other?
One of the things that's happening is that different people have different ideas about the role that universities are supposed to play. As a student, you see it as a stage of your own development, and as a means to achieve things in your life. So, on some level, you probably want admission standards that help you (or people like you) get in. Someone else might see universities as institutions that shape society and would want to see admission policies that promote some social agenda. A third person sees the university as a business, and wants admissions policies to maximize profit.
Different people have different ideas about how qualified individual applicants are and different ideas about how to measure the university's success, but if you start by talking about "two equally qualified students" you're, more or less, already assuming that everyone agrees about how to decide whether people are qualified.
| 24 | 129 |
ELI5: What is Spacetime and Curvature of Spacetime ? | I googled, but they were too hard to understand. So please explain like I'm five ... | Space has 3 dimensions. Objects can move up/down, left/right, forward/back through space and we can describe their motion. Similarly objects can move in time, and we can think of time as a dimension as well that objects can move through. Spacetime is simply the combination of these two concepts. It is a 4 dimensional 'space' with 3 regular spatial dimensions, and 1 time dimension.
Imagine now that you're a bug on a flat metal disk. The temperature of the disk changes but the disk itself is flat. You also have a metal ruler with you so that you can make sure that you're travelling in a straight line. As you walk across the hot disk your ruler will heat up and expand which means the lengths on it will change. If you're relying on your ruler to help you walk in a straight line you'll end up walking in a curve because your ruler has heated up slightly and you're now no longer able to measure distances with respect to a standard unchanging ruler. This is analogous to spacetime curvature.
When you move through a gravitational field your 'ruler is heating up' so to speak. Your path through the gravitational field will look straight to you but it will 'actually' be curved according to observers.
| 10 | 23 |
ELI5: What are the leading theories attempting to explain "Deja-vu"? | The prevailing theory is that the sensory input is stored to memory as it is being "experienced" as a live event by the brain. But sometimes, signals get delayed, and the input gets put in memory a tiny fraction of a second before it gets experienced.
When your brain is processing what you see and hear as something happening "now", it is constantly searching your memory to see if this has happened before, because our brains are wired for pattern matching as a survival mechanism.
But if what you see and hear gets to memory before your brain starts to search for similar events, then the brain gets a trigger -- "Hey, this is in memory! This might be important!" And then, the brain starts to search through its memory for the details of when this happened before -- but by then, the timing issue has resolved itself, and it can't find anytime when this happened before, except of the memory of it happening just a moment ago.
So what you are left with is the sensation of recollection without any details of what you're recollecting -- and that's exactly what deja vu is. | 10 | 19 |
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ELI5: Why hasn't there been another "Einstein" yet? | There have been many great astrophysicists and cosmologists since Albert Einstein, but none that were on Einstein's level. We currently have better worldwide conditions (e.g. education, nutrition, healthcare) than was present during Einstein's time. Also, we have a MUCH larger educated population in the world now than during Einstein's time. | Einstein and his contemporaries, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, lived in a very special time in which technology allowed for them to bump into a revolutionary change in how we understood the world. A collection of geniuses of the time worked together, in an almost accidental, ad hoc manner, to first stumble upon, then begin to unravel, and finally to develop quantum theory.
It completely crashed against the so-called classical physics. It made us reevaluate the very nature of reality. It was a big deal. The biggest deal since Sir Isaac Newton invented physics in the first place!
Even at that time there were many brilliant scientists, some, such as Wolfgang Pauli, were even brighter than Einstein. Einsten possessed a very powerful intuition and creativity, those were his skills. As a mathematician he was subpar ( relatively of course, and no pun intended) and even used assistants to test the math on his theories.
So why don't we have other Einsteins?
We have many many many brilliant scientists working right now, changing everything right now. Look at how quickly technology has developed in this century. This is unprecedented in the history of mankind. We went from steam trains to the B2 Stealth Bomber in a little over 100 years.
We have our Einsteins, but there are so many of them, and we are so alienated, we don't even realize it.
Meanwhile people continue worshiping Steve f'ing Jobs.
Eh. | 130 | 52 |
If blood rushes to your head when you are upside down, why doesn't the blood rush to your feet when you stand straight up? | Human Body | There are valves in your veins and arteries that prevent incorrect flow of blood. Think of it like a backflow preventer in a piping system.
Your heart pushes blood up toward your brain on the upbeat, then on the downbeat the valves close up to prevent blood from dropping due to gravity while the heart fills up again. Because this happens quickly, we don't really notice the changes unless we do something like check our pulse.
If you turn the veins and arteries upside down, then gravity allows the valves that should be closed to stay open and the valves that should be open to stay closed. This causes a relative draining or pooling of the blood compared to a proper state.
Arms and legs, which "normally" face down to the ground, get slightly less blood at the extremities, while your head, which normally faces up, gets more. | 34 | 40 |
ELI5:What feminists mean when they say "empower women" and how "empowering women" will lower rape rates. | There are a number of stereotypes about sexuality in women in modern society, and many of them are problematic. The major one when it comes to rape, is that a woman’s value lies in her genitals, and that sex is an object or ‘treat’, that a woman can ‘give’ or ‘grant access to’. To say it as simply as possible (minding that it is more complex than this), if someone believes that they are ‘owed’ sex (whether it be because they have been dating someone for a while, because they are married, or even just because they were being flirted with), and they are sufficiently violent, frustrated or mentally unstable, they may try to ‘take’ the sex that was ‘owed to them’. The ‘empowerment’ idea comes from reinforcing the idea to women (and men) that women are not objects, or gate keepers to sex, but muti-dimensional **people**. Who have choice. And the choice to say no is one that they are entitled to.
(Subnote: Not all rape occurs in a dark alleyway with a stranger. A lot of the time, it is someone known, or dating; where the woman is either too afraid/feels unable to say ‘no’, or the man does not listen to that ‘no’.)
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How does the body generate heat? | Whenever you get an infection, the body turns up the temperature, which we call a fever right? So how exactly does it generate this excess heat | Many chemical reactions in your body are exothermic (produce heat as a byproduct). When you have a fever, it’s not necessarily because you’re creating more heat (though many inflammatory processes are exothermic). Your fever is actually achieved because your body’s thermostat (the hypothalamus) is set to a higher temperature, allowing your body to reach a higher temperature (retain more heat) without activating cooling measures. Your body controls how much heat is retained or expelled mainly by controlling dilation/constriction of your blood vessels close to your skin. (As the vessels dilate, or get wider, the blood moves through the vessels slower and more blood touches the surface area of the vessel allowing more heat to transfer out of the vessel and dissipate off your skin. The inverse is true, that as the vessel constricts, the blood moves through it faster and retains more heat.) | 205 | 163 |
How do things dry? | Let's say I spill a glass of water on my wooden floor. After a while, it's just not there anymore. Where does this water go? | A puddle dries by evaporation, which is when the water molecules get enough energy to turn into water vapour.
Now, on a normal day you would think that the water isn't warm enough to boil and evaporate, which is true. However water doesn't need to boil to evaporate. As the water molecules move around and bump into each other, they are constantly giving or losing energy to each other. So when a molecule is lucky enough to just keep getting more energy, it will eventually have enough energy to break free from the puddle and turn into water vapour (steam is just hot water vapour). Eventually, all the water molecules will have gotten enough just energy from bumping into each to evaporate. | 14 | 18 |
[Independence Day] Why do the aliens like to get the landmarks? How do they identify the landmarks? | We tend to build landmarks where we have a lot of people concentrated in a relatively small area, and where we concentrate political and economic power. The aliens just wanted to destroy the centers of such power, and they had heckin' big bombs with which to do it. The destruction of highly-recognizable structures was entirely incidental. | 24 | 20 |
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ELI5: Why do DVR TV ratings matter so much if people recording shows are likely to just skip the commercials? Shouldn't the more prominent ratings be focused on the people actually watching the ads? | They track both -- live viewing, same day viewing, next day, three day and so on. And yes, higher live ratings are best, but DVR ratings are important too, and some ads can still work with DVRs. Have you noticed that movie ads have the name of th film bannered across the top during the whole ad? That's so the name of the movie is visible during fast forwarding. | 17 | 31 |
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ELI5: If everyone is so against racism, why do we label races, offer benefits and scholarships to certain minorities, and expect certain ethnic groups to like certain politicians just because of their ethnicities? | In many ways, minorities are still at a disadvantage in the United States. The idea that racism would no longer be an issue if we stopped talking about it sounds good, but it relies on everyone not being racist/prejudiced, which is simply not the case. The programs you speak of are imperfect ways of dealing with the fact that there is absolutely no way to put everyone on even ground. | 150 | 226 |
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ELI5: How does Google/Apple Maps accurately measure traffic on every single road to predict trip time from origin to destination? | In addition to amount of traffic and trip time, how do they know if an accident occurs? I assume it has something to do with satellite imaging and/or tracking individual user’s location that are using the app on their phone. | There are quite a few sources of data. Crowd sourced information is very fast and high precision, but can be messy (is the traffic bad, or is this person just driving slow?). This kind of data comes from anonymized reporting while your phone is using its GPS. For example, while you’re using the turn by turn directions, you’re also reporting your own location data (anonymously) which gets combined with other people’s data and turned into one component of the traffic prediction.
Another source of data is simply highway patrol. Different states (and countries) have different methods for determining and reporting traffic on major routes, but they almost always have something. This data is very curated and accurate, but sometimes lags behind a bit and only covers major roads. Despite the lag, it can still be a valuable tool for training the predictive model to better understand the more variable patterns produced by the GPS data.
And finally of course you have accidents and construction, which are usually reported very quickly, again to highway patrol, and these usually have a comparatively predictable effect on traffic. They can’t be used to give high precision predictions on their own, but taken together with the rest of the data, they’re very valuable. | 134 | 221 |
ELI5: The Verizon workers going on strike | My understanding is that it is an economic strike. So I asked a friend of mine who works at Verizon "why not just quit?" They have hired temps to fill those positions and I could be wrong but because of the nature of the strike when it's over doesn't mean they also have job security. I was told clearly I don't understand picketing or collective bargaining. Although isn't picketing or strike a result of collective bargaining not working in the first place?
Edit: thank you all very much for clearing that up for me. | The issue is the value of a temp worker who can fulfill a task over the short term, and the striking workers who have training and experience in their jobs. While Verizon (or any company, really) can simply fill-in for striking workers with temps, or by pulling from other divisions of the company, the replacement workers won't be as good at their jobs as the striking workers. Or, at least, that's the principle.
The idea behind a strike is, at its most basic, to convince a company that they need the employees, and need to meet the employees' requirements to continue effective operations. So no, a strike isn't a result of collective bargaining not working, at least not in the sense you may have meant it - its a tool to make collective bargaining viable. | 10 | 15 |
ELI5: How is medicine equally effective at the same dose despite vast patient weight differences? | For example - a 110lb woman can be prescribed the same dosage of any given medicine as a 220lb woman. How is it possible that the medicine will remain equally effective at the same dose with 100+ lb weight difference? | Most drugs have a minimum effective dose and maximum safe dose. As long as the spread between those two are large enough, doctors can just perscribe a standard dose that falls between those two for all weights and still get the desired effect without much risk. This greatly simplifies both the doctor's and the supply chain's work.
Not all drugs are perscribed like this often things like chemo have to be specially prepared for people based on many factors including weight and liver function | 18 | 18 |
PhD interview | Hi everyone, just looking for some advice please! I have an interview via Skype next Thursday for a potential PhD in the social sciences.
Does anyone have any advice? I have no idea what to expect! | They already know your credentials, background, and goals.
What they're looking for here is ease of command. Be easy to talk to, friendly, respectful. Be able to talk easily (but passionately!) about your topic. Practice the 'elevator pitch' of your work.
They're interviewing people that they're going to be hanging out with for the next 5+ years. Show them you're that person.
I knew a guy who made it to the interview round at the top Anthro departments in the country. This was a dude who, while *incredibly* accomplished, was also condescending and patronizing. He bombed ALL of his interviews. Don't be that guy. | 24 | 15 |
[Superman] How is there so much kryptonite on Earth? Isn't it only exclusive to Krypton? | There's a few explanations that I've heard (or at least a few examples that I've seen) that I'll list here.
- Random stray bits of Kryptonite fall to Earth in the form of meteorites.
- Superman's baby ship brings some and it is scattered upon impact
- Supergirl's ship brings hundreds of tonnes of it (see Batman/Superman: Search for K)
- Some people can create artificial versions of it
- Space exploration brings some back
- Fellow Kryptonians bring it to Earth accidentally | 181 | 163 |
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Help us fight for net neutrality! | The ability to browse the internet is at risk. The FCC preparing to remove net neutrality. This will allow internet service providers to change how they allow access to websites. AskScience and every other site on the internet is put in risk if net neutrality is removed. Help us fight!
https://www.battleforthenet.com/ | We can already see the effects of restricted content on academia through the paywalled publishing practices of most journals. The high cost of institutional licenses or large-scale purchasing of individual articles can be an overwhelming expense for new companies or smaller universities. Science relies upon the free flow of information and knowledge between persons and institutions around the world. Ending net neutrality puts that at risk. | 3,014 | 83,139 |
Countries that developed after political liberalization? | Are there any countries that developed after political liberalization - i.e the modern, rights-oriented democracies that we have today. China, South Korea, Russia and Singapore had either repressive dictatorships or "soft" authoritarianism. People could argue about Japan but one of the most important component of development - human capital and education- was developed prior to that. Like Germany had its infrastructure destroyed but thanks to human capital was able to spring back up. Other countries that escaped the middle income trap- Israel and Taiwan, don't fit this either because of one reason or another. Britain didn't bring much of liberal reforms (like wages/work conditions) until after significant gains from the industrial revolution and colonialism. Same can be said for USA, but I'll be looking for more recent examples preferably. What's remaining is probably countries that leveraged a scarce natural resource (OPECs, Nauru, etc), I don't know a lot about them but it doesn't seem to be the case among these either.
So, any examples? | You're going to have to clarify what you mean by bit development and liberalization; neither are binary concepts, and both seem to assume a linear path of progression for all countries.
For instance, labour laws are not the same as liberalism, and in fact are a newer form of the imposition of state power.
Colonialism and trade did create wealth in both the US and Britain prior to, say, the American Revolution, but then that was true for the ancient Phonecians and Greeks. Certainly, those societies were still mostly agrarian, and would not be developed by our standards. | 10 | 17 |
CMV: Confidence does not comes from within. It comes from external validation and success. | First; just logically it makes no sense that confidence is a choice. If it was as easy saying, “Ok I’m going to be confident” there would be no self doubt, self esteem issues, or insecurities.
Looking more at this, confidence is a result of factors such as self esteem. Self esteem is internal but often it is shaped by outside experiences. A person who has for the last 15 years of his life been told he’s ugly is not going to have a good view of himself. Even if he’s able to accept being ugly, it’s still highly likely that he won’t have that self esteem.
Now let’s say someone is physically attractive from childhood. This person gets attention from the preferred sex even as a child and this continues into high school and college. Do you think this person’s confidence in say dating would be a result his inner thoughts or the validation he received all his life.
Another example would be a job. A person who has worked on their craft for years and had multiple accolades is going to be confident. But what about a person who’s work constantly has errors And they are constantly reprimanded. Not as confident.
When you’re given praise or attention for something you will feel more confident in it. Confidence come from outside in, not inside out. | Confidence is the result of a process - of having the courage to do something you've never done before or are not good at doing, but are willing to practice at until you get better. The reward for this process is what we typically refer to as confidence.
No one is born a naturally amazing public speaker, or pole vaulter, or comedian.
When people say confidence is a choice, they really mean the choice to give it a try, knowing you might fail or do badly, but that the outcome is that next time you'll do it a little better.
People who are so scared of failure that they don't even try generally view confidence as a commodity that some people have and some people don't, rather than for what it is - the end result of making a choice. | 19 | 27 |
ELI5: If medical research papers aren't available for free, how does med schools teach their students?Does it mean that different med schools are using different study materials based on the medical papers they have access to? | The libraries at large universities will have vast collections of academic journals that they subscribe to. Important studies will get published in the big name journals that should be available in every school.
Even in med school, you're not really going to be focused on learning about cutting edge research but building up a strong background of commonly accepted practice. There's a big gap between the time a paper on a subject gets published to the time it gets reproduced & becomes common knowledge. | 35 | 41 |
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What is the next form of governance beyond nation-states? | Right now, the world is divided into nation-states yet this was not always the case.
Before this, the world was ruled mostly by monarchies and their colonies. There was a time when city-states held a lot of power. Before that, feudal states held sway in much of the world.
Way back there were empires which arose, held power, then fell.
Is anyone writing about what the next phase might look like? Ideas? | There was a push of this type of inquiry in the 60s, with neofunctionalists like Ersnt B. Haas, for instance his book "Beyond the Nation State". The argument of neofunctionalists is largely that while states create international/regional organizations, those organizations bureaucracies take on a life of their own and expand their functions and powers; the assumption further is that these organizations are more effective and efficient than wars and conflict for solving disputes and thus states will continue to surrender powers upwards.
More contemporary work on international integration exists, and much of it focused on the emergence of the European Union...but that has been called into question by the various challenges facing the EU the past decade or so. Intergovernmentalism is the other major strain of thought there, and while still advocating for regional-level integration between states, tends to assume states retrain more power and control over these arrangements than a functionalist would. | 30 | 29 |
[Ben 10/General Sci-fi] Which other universe would the Omnitrix be most useful in combat? To promote peace and understanding across alien cultures? Or maybe just most interesting overall? | For those who didn't watch Ben 10, the Omnitrix is a device that allows the user to transform into other aliens, assuming their physical and mental features. | This will work for any universe that has a massive disparity between human abilities and alien abilities. Star Trek might work due to alien relations. Star Wars, not so much (because everyone's used to non-humans' presence in the Galaxy). Warhammer 40k would result in heresy and death.
Doctor Who might get immense use out of the Omnitrix to adapt to inhospitable worlds. Might not be the best idea, since the Ben 10 Omnitrix works for 10 minutes and has a shitty recharge timer.
Valerian (or Laureline) might get use out of the Omnitrix. Laureline and Valerian are a pretty good team, so the Omnitrix will definitely come in handy for situations that require delicate diplomacy.
Marvel will get a good use out of it (transformation into a Titan, or possibly even a Celestial, although Alien X is pretty much that). As will DC (imagine turning into Brainiac's species).
| 19 | 30 |
Why is ductility often listed as a separate property of a material from malleability? | To my understanding, malleability is a material's ability to be shaped (as opposed to being brittle and failing) and ductility is a material's ability to be drawn into wire. Is drawing into wire not simply a certain way to shape something? Are there materials that are malleable, but not ductile? Are there materials that are ductile, but not malleable? If these materials exist, why do they behave the way they do? | They refer to doing the plastic deformation using different methods.
Namely, ductility is the ability to be plasticly deformed under tensile stress, whereas malleability is the ability to be plasticly deformed under compressive stress.
Lead is an example of a material that is very malleable, but not very ductile. It gets deformed easily under compressive stress, but trying to draw it into wires will result in shearing. | 31 | 50 |
ELI5: Why does water climb up into tissue? | Why when you put a piece of tissue into contact with a droplet of water does the water droplet climb up into the tissue? | Because of the capillary effect. The water molecules have a tiny amount of attraction to particles of other materials. Other substances have that too, it’s called adhesion, but it’s particularly strong in water. The range f this force is very small, though. But in tissue paper, or very thin tubes, the distance from each water molecule the the next non-water particle is small enough for it to use the adhesion force to „climb“ up.
At some point the weight of the water column that travelled upwards becomes larger than the force pulling it upwards and the climbing stops. The thinner the space is that the water travels through, the higher it can go. | 38 | 65 |
How much have we evolved as a species over the past 100, 200 or 500 years, in contrast to how much we have evolved over the past 200,000+ years? | We've certainly changed over the past few hundred years. Per Wikipedia, our anatomically similar ancestors came into being 200,000 years ago while we reached full behavioral modernity about 50,000 years ago.
Is the rate of our evolution changing, either slower or faster? Rather, are we evolving at an exponential rate?
Cheers, folks. | There is a whole lot of debate among anthropologists how much it's appropriate to apply evolutionary theory right now.
Some evolutionary-minded folks want to recode all of anthropology and history in evolutionary terms; they say everything's "evolution". Ideas, people, ethnicities, etc.
As for actual physical evolution - it's pretty hard to say on such short time scales. There's more intermixing of different previously-separate groups, that's for sure. | 17 | 50 |
How much weight should I give the NYT-ranking for a graduate degree in Philosophy? | Of how much relevance is this NYT employability ranking ( http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2012/10/25/world/asia/25iht-sreducemerging25-graphic.html ) for me choice of grad school in Philosophy. Obviously I would love to stay in academia, but I know that my chances are (very) grim. Given this premise, is it a good idea to give this ranking a relevant voice in my choice of school?
Thanks in advance! :)
| Hard to tell out of context, but that looks like it is for undergrad degrees and employability in the business world.
So, assuming you want to be a professor it isn't relevant, and even if you want a non-academic job with a grad degree probably not too relevant.
Just some related advice though, the job market for tenure-track professors is extremely extremely competitive, especially in the humanities. If you're serious about it, go to the best school with the most famous professor you can get, spend a lot of time teaching and developing new courses and doing undergrad (or at least undergrad-friendly) research. | 16 | 19 |
How does omniscience interact with randomness? | What are the implications of God's omniscience for randomness? For example, could God create a truly random number generator, such that even He doesn't know what number it will generate? I know nothing about quantum physics, other than that it's supposed to be probabilistic rather than determinate; in this case, does he know the outcomes of quantum events (I am using that phrase not really knowing what that means; I apologise if it's completely incorrect to use it!)? | What you've stated is essentially an articulation of the classic Omnipotence Paradox, but restated to be about knowledge (omniscience) rather than power/ability (omnipotence). There are a variety of responses to these kinds of challenges, but common answer is that omnipotence only covers that which is *logically* possible.
The existence of *truly* unknowable numbers is logically incompatible with a God that knows absolutely everything. Therefore, either the numbers aren't truly unknowable, or God isn't truly omniscient. | 81 | 108 |
Why does plastic turn white at the creases when folded/bent? | Plastic is a polymer, meaning that it is a long chain of molecules bound together forming a structure. Now when you bend or fold plastic you are stretching out those chains, which then trap air in the gaps. That air distorts the color forming the white creases you are describing. | 39 | 28 |
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CMV: Strict parents raise children with low self-esteem | My parents are really strict, and i grew up following their rules. If i don't follow what they say, i usually get scolded. I did not have many friends because i was too focused on my academics. My parents get angry when i don't get grades above 90. Growing up, i was used to seeking their permission first whenever i do something. Yes is a yes, no is a no. When school was getting hard and i was losing friends. Never in my life did they thought of cheering me up. I mean, i never heard even just a simple "everything will be alright". I always felt alone and afraid of making decisions. Interviewed some people that has strict parents and said they experienced the same thing. Children with strict parents are not as social as other normal children too.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Whether self esteem develops depends on the justice of the rules the parents are being strict about, not on the strictness itself. If the rules are good rules that are understandable and are fair, then mastering them gives a child a set of principles and a sense of confidence and place in the world. If the rules are arbitrary or unfair, then they can't be a guide rail delimiting where a proper sense of self-esteem can be gained, the child has to find it elsewhere. The other option is no strictness at all, and then the rules are made up by the child's whim and they grow up with an overblown sense of entitlement, and this can be just as unhealthy if not more so. (The child of strict parents with arbitrary/bad rules at least has a struggle against external pressures in which true self esteem can be found, the brat without such pressure might end up forever ruled by their own emotions). | 21 | 31 |
How do we know the point where species truly divide to the point that they can no longer breed with each other? I was under the impression from biology class that to be a different species that means they can no longer breed with other species. | So looking at large cats and the equine family you can see that some members of the species can breed with each other.
Some examples include mules which are sterile. We can also see ligers as well as other crossbreeds the feline family. So two questions: if two species within a genus can breed together why are they considered separate species? I thought that goes against the definition that defines each member within the taxonomy.
Askscience: what is the defining factor to make a species distinct if it isn't the inability to breed with another branch of the same family? | Defining a species can quickly become problematic so we actually have a few different 'species concepts' to try to accurately describe the relationships between closely related species. The concept that you're referencing is called the biological species concept. According to this idea, two organisms are conspecifics (the same species) if they can interbreed *and produce fertile offspring*. So the horse and the donkey are not conspecific because the mule is infertile. The same thing is usually true for the lion and tiger hybrids.
But that concept doesn't cover a lot of things and there are some things that would be really hard to fit into really any concept. For instance, the biological species concept can't very easily define asexual species. And there's something called a 'ring species' which confounds all definitions. In that species complex there is a kind of gradient where any apparent conspecific can freely interbreed their neighbors over a large geographic range, but two individuals at the extremes of that range will not be able to mate.
Other species concepts attempt to group less obvious species using their ecology, morphology, phylogeny, etc.
As an example, the polar bear and the grizzly bear can produce fertile offspring and very rarely they do so in the wild. But they occupy very different habitats and the two populations are only very rarely in contact with one another; so even though they would fit the biological concept, they are different species because of their ecology.
Mallard ducks can hybridize with around 50 other species of ducks and around 20% of the offspring are fertile. But again, because of ecology they are not likely to mate, or because of genital morphology they're just usually incapable of physically coupling.
So to answer your question of what is the deciding factor, it really depends on why there is even a question. No one ever looked at two white tail deer and wondered if they were the same species, so it's never really been a problem to try to fit them into a 'species concept'. But asexual species can often only be distinguished by their ecological niches or with molecular genetics.
So it really depends on the animals in question. | 24 | 22 |
What books should I read if I want to read books that reconciles/combines and charts out the differences between western and eastern philosophy? | I have read eastern philosophy and to some extent it has always made me feel that the major difference between EP and WP is about the goal of life and the ideal life. EP is not bothered with material developments at all. It just wants people to live simple lives with very less needs. Whereas WP tries to advance mankind. This difference might also have to do with the the role of religions in respective regions. Eastern religions like Hinduism, Buddhism were/are extremely liberal and did not have insitutional control at all. Ideas freely flourished. But in West people had to break themselves from the shackles of Christian institutions and the religion itself. This is my current idea of it I might be wrong, but I would love to explore this thought more deeply.
The books should not be about history of western or eastern thought. Rather it should work a bit on conclusions and universals.
I would also love if you guys provide books by both Western and Eastern philosophers. As it would help me see the point from many angles and perspectives.
Thanks in advance. | I think it would be interesting to study Greco-Buddhism, for example the T.W. Rhys-Davis translation of the Questions of King Milinda. There is a false mental model that West and East developed separately, which overlooks the stark historical fact of Alexander crossing Persia, Afghanistan, and eventually the Indus river; and the political interaction and cultural exchange that continued in the wake of the campaigns of Alexander. In addition, although it does not discuss the Alexandrian exchange, Seth Segall's book Buddhism and Human Flourishing: A Modern Western Perspective (2020), which explicitly attempts to compare and to some extent accommodate Buddhist and Aristotelian cosmology and ideals of the good life, is a useful resource. | 31 | 100 |
ELI5: Why do businesses such as grocery stores have cheaper prices for "members" when membership is free? How do they benefit from that? | Most retail locations have a membership program that is free, giving them access to cheaper prices. How does the store gain from that? It seems like all they're getting is my phone number and e-mail address. | Customer Loyalty programs ensure that customers keep coming back to your store. It's like a sandwich shop that has a "buy 10 get 1 free" deal.
These days, it also helps them collect data about who is purchasing what. Getting your phone number gives them a single unique identifier so they track your purchases and get better information about what people are buying.
Beyond that, grocery stores used to offer sales *all the time* without a rewards/loyalty number. These days, they just require a membership to get the sales they used to have *without them*. It's not costing them anything extra. | 58 | 32 |
Do defenders of Kant's political philosophy of 'right' have anything to say about the striking coincidence entailed in the fact that pure transcendental reason turns out to support political institutions and values which began to pop up around the time Kant was writing? If so, what do they say? | Generally the idea is that the Enlightenment is around the time some European governments began to cotton on to the idea of individual rights in any serious sort of way, so we should expect that to the extent these things found their way into government they would align with Kant's philosophy of right. Certainly much of what Kant said was critical of existing institutions so obviously he wasn't just reifying what was already there. | 12 | 33 |
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ELI5:What is "bridge mode" on a router, and when it is useful? | It can mean different things. A home router is often a router and a modem combined, but the router part tends to be pretty crappy.
Bridge mode basically disables the router part, allowing you to use the modem to connect a second device directly to the Internet.
The downside is that you can only connect one device this way (usually). Hence, it is usually used to connect a second, better router. The upside is that the slow and buggy built-in router goes out of the way.
Then there's also bridge in the context of WiFi, which was already explained. | 1,410 | 2,996 |
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ELI5: has any civilisation of any size not come up with the concept of names for individuals? | You specifically mentioned a "civilization" which has certain requirements; one of the criteria to be a civilization is that there must be a language system. So, in that regard no; all civilizations have names at some point in their history.
As for any human tribe or colony, we don't really know. It's hard to prove a negative in this sort of case because most of what we know about early colonies comes from written records, which always have names.
We think even in the most primitive of human tribes, names were created. A particular cry or shout would be someone's name before complex language existed. This can be seen in multiple other species of animals, including dolphins. Hope this helps!
TL;DR: Probably not. | 34 | 50 |
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10,000 word chapter in 10 days - doable? | As per title. PhD introduction for a Confirmation review. I am already familiar with the literature, and have the ideas down pat. I have been unwell and also a tiny bit of procrastinating (I am likely ADHD but still waiting diagnosis), but now it’s getting close to a deadline (13 Nov) and I think if I left a decent time to fine tune and get close academic friends to read it it will be ok (so finish by 3 Nov). What are your strategies for managing long words in short times? Has anyone had any tips for managing tight deadlines like this? (Please no shade - I know I have cooked it, but I am determined to push through and get it done; so productive answers would be great) | If you know what you want to communicate, 1000 words per day are quite doable. (A paragraph is 100-150 words. Write a paragraph in an hour and you will get it done.)
If you don't have 10,000 words in your brain to let out, you are in more of a problem... | 166 | 73 |
Why is it that you can only make memory cards with powers of base 2? (eg.128,256,512,1024 etc.) | The short explanation is that to be able to recall the information, the memory needs to be accessed. This is done by putting a signal on certain wires and 'strobing' the chip. The strobe is the signal that tells the chip to put the data on the data signal wires.
The memory is arranged on a grid. Every time you add a wire to the grid, you increase the size of the grid by a power of two. | 43 | 63 |
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CMV: There is very little reason for most tests/exams to not be open note/calculator | As the internet has become an increasingly more important part of our lives, we’ve reached a point where rote memorization of facts for most subjects has become more or less unnecessary. Everyone carries what is the equivalent of a calculator, dictionary, atlas, encyclopedia, and any number of other resources in their pocket at all times and sites like Wikipedia that compile knowledge about hundreds of different topics are accessible to everyone. There is almost no situation where either in everyday life or a more specialized career would you have to solve a given problem or otherwise apply knowledge without access to these resources.
At this point, the skills that should be taught and reinforced far more than memorization are application of that knowledge and problem solving. I find it far less important that a student on a math or science exam be able to recite an equation or formula from memory than making sure that they’re able to use that formula to solve a given problem and determine what formulas they would need in a given instance to find the desired result.
As someone who’s a college student who is currently attending class online, I’ve had several professors, especially in history or social studies courses, allow students to use notes, textbooks, and in some rare instances even google on exams, but to compensate they have asked more questions in a shorter amount of time to discourage people from spending too much time researching, and I think this is a much more sensible approach. My math, physics, and engineering courses have been slow to adopt this kind of policy (aside from one physics course that has allowed access to physical notes and limited digital resources like lecture notes and Wikipedia). The most egregious example is a programming course I took in person before the pandemic that required us to write code with a pencil and paper without access to any other resources whatsoever. From all of my experience writing code outside of classes a major part of it is researching different methods of solving problems and that entire aspect of the skill is completely lost in this type of test environment, forcing students into an extremely contrived situation that they would never be in under normal circumstances.
Aside from exams like the SAT and standardized tests (and perhaps even those too), I see very little reason to continue using this outdated testing methodology as it forces students to waste time memorizing information that they could access within seconds in a realistic situation when that time could be used to further improve their problem solving skills.
EDIT: Added paragraphs to improve clarity.
I also wanted to stress that I don’t think students should have unlimited resources and unlimited time. I think the idea should be to make the time limit short enough and have enough questions that students will mostly want to have the information memorized but are allowed to quickly check a few things if they really need it and have the time. I also think that this mostly applies to higher level education, and that for basic skills like arithmetic and basic algebra students should need to learn how to do that by memory. I’m mostly referring to more advanced subjects like physics, chemistry, and higher level math like advanced algebra, statistics, and calculus, and for certain things like squares of numbers and unit circle trigonometric calculations students should be encouraged to memorize that information. I remember having quizzes specifically on those two things and I think for that type of quick knowledge that students will want to know offhand they should be tested on that in the traditional way. | In life you are still going to need to know some things intrinsically. If you think about a doctor in the middle of a surgery, you'll need be able to calculate of how medication to provide in an IV on the fly.
or think about a meeting at work, poeple are going to want to ask you questions about things you know, and you can't always run back to your computer to look it up.
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If anything, kids these days are being coddled by easy access to information and being conned into thinking that they know something. As a former computer engineer, it was staggering how lost some people could get in a project without there being a tailor made answer on Stackoverflow. | 13 | 42 |
Is it just me that 20 something undergrads need a lot more these days? | I'm just 33, but I'm beginning to feel like the newest crop of students needs a lot more handholding than I did when I was in school. I'm in a graduate program in counseling at a decent state institution in the midwest. We spend at least 20 minutes a class talking about how to do assignments that have fairly straightforward instructions.
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I don't want to be "kids these days," but is this a common problem? | There are a lot of valid points in this thread, but you have to remember that you--currently a grad student--probably weren't a typical student in undergrad. So comparing your students to how you remember feeling isn't necessary the most accurate comparison. | 226 | 120 |
ELI5: Why is it possible for people to understand a language but not speak it | Listening/hearing is a passive skill, but speaking is an active skill. A passive skill is something you are able to do without any real effort. This can include reading and learning, or listening to a language. All you do is collect the information. An active skill is something you physically have to do, which requires a bit more effort. Instead of reading a book, you have to write a book, or write a speech about what you read. Talking is an active skill. It requires thought to mouth co-ordination. Some foreign languages require sounds not pronounced in your mother language. You know what the sound sounds like, but it could be too difficult to maneuver your mouth and tongue to pronounce it. When you listen, the correct syntax and form is given to you. When you talk, you have to think of the syntax and put it into practice. In other words, when you listen, the other person does the thinking for you, but when you talk, you have to do the thinking.
I dare say that confidence also plays a role. Some people know a language, but are a bit too timid to speak it because they are afraid of sounding stupid. In that case, they avoid talking, or claim that they cannot. However, they do have a fair grasp of the language, so they understand it okay. If a person who thinks they can't talk is forced to do so, then they usually adapt and end up talking without too much issue. | 15,412 | 20,862 |
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[Fullmetal Alchemist] What's stopping a State Alchemist from tattooing themselves with dozens of different transmutation circles? | Surely that would open up their battle options a lot more than just having one circle on a glove? | Merely the amount of time to study all those different types of transmutation.
It also limits the changes you can make to your transmutation circles as your knowledge grows.
And it also makes wounds more serious. If you lose part of that tattoo you've lost your primary weapon.
I think the best solution is Armstrong's and Mustang's . Objects that can be more easily changed or replaced, and that you can keep on yourself relatively unnoticeably. | 95 | 92 |
ELI5: Why does bitcoin fluctuate so heavily? | Like, the prices of this crazy thing that isn't real (because it can't be real when our money isn't real) is nuts. Plus, in 2 months it HALVES it's value?
What kind've hyper inflation shit is going on? | Traditional currencies trade based on economic factors about the country they are tied to. The factors to look for are well known and traders have a good idea how new data will affect the price. This is why currency values are relatively stable.
Bitcoin's value is based almost entirely on speculation. Speculative asserts are more volatile.
The same reason why a deck of playing cards will always cost you the same, but how much a friend wants for a Pokemon card can vary wildly. | 32 | 30 |
ELI5:Why are humans so prone to creating and following routines? | What benefit do we get from sitting on the same seat on the train every day? Or walking the same path to work? What purpose does it serve? | In general, if you find a way to solve a problem, repeating the steps to solve that problem again will often end up in similar results. If you are satisfied with the results, then there is no good reason to pick an alternative method for solving that problem. This is valuable for highly important tasks, and it doesn't hurt us much when we apply the same logic to trivial tasks, so it's evolutionarily advantageous for us to follow routines. | 16 | 19 |
ELI5: Blood Types | on your red blood cells you have markers called antigen.
There are 2 Different markers, A and B.
your body recognises the markers you are meant to have as self, and will react to those which it doesn't recognise.
What you have on your red blood cells:
* If you are blood group A you have 'A' markers
* If you are blood group B you have 'B' markers
* if you are blood group AB you have A and B markers
* If you are blood group O you don't have any of these markers on your red blood cells
If you are given the wrong type of blood the immune system will react to the red blood cells and destroy them.
O blood can be given to anyone as there are no markers to identify the cells
A blood can be given to those who are type A or type AB
B blood can be given to those who are type B or type AB
Type AB blood can only be given to those who are type AB
If you are type O, you can donate your blood and anyone can use it, but it also means that you can only accept type O blood. | 262 | 310 |
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ELI5: What is the difference between programs and algorithms? | An algorithm is just a collection of instructions to do something. But that's pretty abstract, it's not tied to the specific way its done. For example there's a maze solving algorithm that goes like this: "Whenever you reach an intersection in the maze, take an unmarked path at random if available, then mark it. If no unmarked paths are available, take a path with a single mark at random and give it a second mark. Do not follow any path marked twice." This is an algorithm, but its not a program, how you perform it, or how a machine performs it will be different, but you can still all perform it.
However if you take that algorithm and you write it up in a programming language, to perform that algorithm on a piece of hardware, on a system that can execute that code, then you have a program.
The algorithm is the logic, the program is how its implemented. | 326 | 204 |
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Why is it important to "prove" mathematical conjectures/hypotheses? | For example, the Rieman hypothesis. What is the benefit to proving it over simply assuming it is true/false and seeing what the consequences of that are?
After all, mathematics rests upon any number of axioms and posulates that are accepted as true, and new branches of math can arise from flipping that around (e.g. discarding the parallel postulate).
Obviously, there may be novel math involved in solving these theorems, so this question is about the value inherent in the solution existing, independent of the how it was discovered. | Based on our assumptions, how will we know if it is true if we don't have a proof? We can't just add a new axiom that says the Riemann Hypothesis is true or false, because the axioms we have now already determine if it is true or false. A collection of axioms must be consistent with each other, that is, we are not able to prove true=false using them. If the Riemann Hypothesis is false and we assume that it's true, then we get true=false. A proof is the only way to know if it is true.
That being said, it has a $1,000,000 reward because we expect it's proof to give us new math. Though, it is a common assumption in Number Theory to prove things under the assumption that it's true, if it is false then thousands of results will be affected. | 44 | 45 |
ELI5: how do doctors/scientists determine if a tumor is benign or malignant? | By its behavior, location, cellular markers, and/or appearance. It really depends on the cancer.
Just to frame, the difference between a benign and malignant tumor can look like this:
First, a cluster of cells arises that will now divide outside the normal pattern (e.g. keeping one side of the environment in one direction, etc.) Oh, but it can't form a cancer because it still responds to the immune system.
Next, it develops a mutation that expresses an immune-inactivating surface ligand. Now it can both divide in the wrong orientation, and it can deactivate the immune response to itself. Oh, but it runs out of blood supply quickly as the tumor grows.
Next, it develops a mutation that lets it release molecules that signal new vascularizaiton (e.g. veins). Now it has a fresh blood supply and plenty of nutrients to continue growing. Oh, but it still only knows how to divide within this specific tissue environment in contact with other like cells.
Next, it develops a mutation that allows it to divide without any contact. It is now a metastasizing tumor, and can spread to many different tissue types (this is usually where the host dies).
The path from normal tissue --> benign tumor --> malignancy is a spectrum. Some cells have to go through ~8 major mutations, others only have to go through ~2. There are a wide variety of tumor-promoting mutations in skin cells, for example, that are benign unless you go through a long list like above. | 26 | 38 |
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Can bacteria or single celled organisms sense how many others of their kind are around them? | Yes, through quorum sensing. Bacteria can secrete quoromones. The more bacteria, the higher the concentration. Using a two component regulatory system, the cells can sense the quoromones in the area to sense the cell density.
An environmental signal (quoromone) binds to a sensor kinase on the cell, activating the sensor kinase by phosphorylation. Then the response regulator is phosphorylated, which can then turn on or off the genes involved. | 24 | 24 |
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How do you increase the amount of information a picture can hold? | I was watching a gif zooming in on a high resolution picture and I am curious how some pictures can hold more information (detail) than others. Also: how does resolution measure this? | You can increase the amount of information by increasing the resolution, or in the case of lossy formats, decreasing the compression.
Most of the images you see are raster images, which are made up of little squares known as pixels, short for picture elements. In a completely uncompressed bitmap, it stores the color of each pixel. In the compressed ones, it's more an algorithm to calculate the colors of each pixel, but the end result is the same. A picture with more of these squares is more detailed.
Also, there's vector images, which store the image as all the equations for curves that make it up and that sort of thing. The resolution for them is just a guideline on how big to draw the image. You can zoom in as much as you want. | 18 | 26 |
Question about Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche | I've heard it said that to understand Nietzsche you need to read Schopenhauer. To understand Schopenhauer you need to read Hegel. To understand Hegel you need to read Kant. And to understand Kant you need to understand Hume. (Possibly back to Aristotle, but I'm not sure).
Are all these references in regards to their metaphysics? What is being said with this idea? | Nietzsche takes Schopenhauer's notion of The Will and develops it, and it helps to know where he's coming from in that.
I'd disagree that Hegel is necessary for Schopenhauer, because he wholesale rejects Hegel and all the other post-Kantians. But knowing Kant's system is essential and he even says as much in *The World as Will and Representation*.
And to fully understand Kant it does really help to understand the context of the problems he's trying to solve. He's coming after a seeming impasse between European 'rationalist' thinkers and British 'empiricists' (Of whom Hume is the major figure), and Kant's system tries to overcome with deadlock. Kant himself says it was reading Hume which woke him from his 'dogmatic slumber' as he says. | 21 | 25 |
ELI5: How did people originally plan out origami designs? | Maybe this is a question for a different sub but I'm not sure where else to ask it.
Historically, how did people know what folds would result in a crane or a koi or whatnot? I guess another way to phrase this question is: Is it mathematically calculated, step by step, to obtain the final design, or is it more trial and error? | By folding the paper in half diagonally and horizontally, and then further bisecting the resulting angles, you arrive at a handful of standard forms ("bases") with a certain number of flaps (which can be formed into the wings or limbs of whatever animal you're trying to represent). The crane base has four long flaps (from the four corners of the paper) and one short one (from the center of the square), and those form the head, tail, wings, and back of the traditional crane. A folder who knows this base might decide to use it to make some other kind of bird, or a dragon, fish, etc. Other traditional bases have other numbers and arrangements of flaps that suggest other animals. | 35 | 140 |
ELI5: What is a probability density? | Would anyone please explain what a probability density is and what is its use?
Thank you all very much in advance
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Edit:
Hi everyone. a huge thank you to all of you that generously helped and provided thorough explanation. I really and I mean it, really enjoyed reading all of your answers,
and each one of them make it more clear for me. it was as if all answers complemented each other :)
I sincerely thank you all and wish you the best.
Thank you all very much:) | You can divide random variables into two types: discrete and continuous.
Discrete random variables have precise values that they can be. For example, the roll of a 6 sided dice can be any integer value from 1 to 6, so you'll never get 2.5 for instance.
Continuous random variables can have infinite possible values that they can be. Some things that can be considered continuous variables are height, weight, time...
If you want to know "What's the probability that a person weighs exactly 100 kilograms" then the probability is zero, because they can weigh any value from 0 to (lets say) 1000 kilograms. There's infinitely many values in that range.
Now, if you can define an interval instead of a single value, then it makes sense talking about probabilities with continuous variables. Using the same example, if a person was 1kg off, maybe it's close enough for your purposes. So if you consider everyone weighting between 99kg and 101kg, now you can look up at your probability density function and multiply (or integrate) it in this interval.
The probability density function has higher values for more likely events. So still using the last example, the probability of finding someone between 99kg and 101 kg is much greater than finding someone between 399kg and 401kg, even though both intervals are the same size | 22 | 18 |
[Jumper] I seem to have developed an ability to teleport at will, and a capacity to teleport things with me(~ a car's worth if I'm exerting myself). What's the most efficient way I can get rich while drawing the least amount of attention to me? | Ideally I would not want to be questioned by the IRS too much, but if there's a discrepency that can't be plausibly explained except by "teleportation" I'm willing to exploit that some given the unlikelihood of someone jumping to that conclusion.
How do I live comfortably? | Start a nature walking podcast thats just you going for walks. Doesnt matter how popular it becomes. Just you going for walks in nature. Wide variety and some not close to home. Keep it going for months.
Have a shack on land that you personally own. Expensive but not impossible.
Wear a full body disguise.
Teleport somewhere to get a lot of gold. Doesn't matter from where just dont leave any DNA or show any identifying traits.
Get rid of identifying marks on the gold. Hit anything that looks like a stamp with hammer. Gold is soft it will deform this way.
Bring it to shack in the woods on the land you own. Wait for a big snowstorm to pass or some other kind of inclement weather to pass. Then kick in the door and make a make shift little fire either inside or right outside. Make it look like someone used it as emergency shelter.
Today your going for a walk on the land you own to show your followers the area around your house.
Now you have a legit reason to be recording some random video of yourself and no one will be suspicious as to why you have a random recording of yourself taking a walk. Then someone must have left it for some unknown reason after they left your shelter. But you don't even have to come up with a reason. That's the beauty of it. You after all did not leave it behind so it's not on you to explain why that's the part that trips other people ip. "Dunno just found it" is all you have to say.
"Find" the gold in your shack on your podcast video freak out a bit when yop first see the cabin with a kicked in door, practice this it has to be authentic.
Dont upload the video.
Bring gold and video to local police. But leave a fair amount out that you stole. You dont want to show up to the police with the exact amount that went missing. It sucks but even a few bars is millions.
The video proves that you stumbled across it and no one is suspicious as to why your recording when they see your a nature walk podcaster on land that you own.
Wait the allotted amount of time for someone to "claim" their lost property.
Its going to take a while but no one can prove its the stolen gold.
Boom you legally own the gold.
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ELI5: What do pharmacists do? Doctors write the scripts, big pharma manufactures the drugs, what's the pharmacist do other than select a bottle from the shelf and dole out the pills? | Genuinely interested, sorry for belittling an entire profession. | A pharmacist is basically a specialist in medication, meaning they probably know more about medicines than some medical practitioners. They do so much more than dispense medicine, they also offer consults on use and dosage. They are also the last line of defence when it comes to drug interactions, especially when a patient is treated by numerous practitioners. And last but not least, they deserve a medal for being able to translate a practitioner's handwriting. | 355 | 166 |
[Star Wars] Why does the the republic/empire change the look of there troops/ships/fighters so often? When other factions rarely (or never) did, like rebels and the trade federation. | Seems like they are always changing up troop armor and star ships. Changing out millions (billions?) of troop armor and thousands of star ships can't be cheap. Does the republic/empire lease and not buy? | Evolving requirements.
The initial launch of clonetroopers came from and were at least in part trained by -- or had their training regimens shaped by -- Jango Fett. Their armor bears many similarities to his own armor, no doubt due in part to the nature of what he was accustomed and trained to do.
Fast-forward over the course of the Clone War and the initial launch of the clones has now had time to identify field-tested flaws in the original armor design. In order to ensure maximum effectiveness of its troops, the Republic continually refines the armor to account for these deficiencies and also to build-in new features that troops may find useful as the war progresses.
During the Imperial transition period, purpose-grown and designed clonetroopers saw decreasing use in favor of somewhat more conventionally sourced and trained stormtroopers. The Clone War was over; the stormtroopers' purpose wasn't fighting a massive symmetric war, but rather peacekeeping and asymmetric warfare against guerrilla resistance forces. This calls for different equipment, too. War armor doesn't provide what stormtroopers generally need. And, to be clear, what we see in documentary footage is fairly *atypical* of the usual stormtrooper assignments; the Rebellion was *tiny* in comparison to the breadth of security responsibilities the Empire faced.
The same is largely true for ships. A space superiority fighter you purpose-build to fight droid fighters just doesn't have the same requirements as an all-around, quick-deployment, high-mobility fighter. That exact same purpose mismatch travels all the way up the chain to the star dreadnought super ships like *Executor*. | 56 | 51 |
CMV: Increasing gun control (e.g. banning assault rifles) will not significantly (if at all) reduce the amount or severity of mass shooting rampages. | This is not a belief I hold because I'm a conservative or libertarian or Republican or whatever (I don't like labels, anyway). I live in Canada, and don't own a gun, so I have no personal interest in this. This is something that occured to me when, in the wake of the recent Oregon shooting, I was researching various mass shootings, noticed something interesting. Especially after the Sandy Hook shooting (for which an assault rifle was used), the conversation was not only that of mental health (which is great and all), but even more so a practical discussion for gun control. Specifically, many talked of banning civilian semi-automatic assault rifles and "high-capacity" 30-round magazines. It makes sense, but here's what caught my eye:
The deadliest mass shooting of all time was the 2011 attack committed by Anders Breivik in Norway, on the island of Utøya. In the span of one hour, he managed to kill 69 people and wound 110, 55 of them seriously. This was all done with a .223 Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic carbine and the 9mm Glock 34 semi-automatic pistol.
Similarly, the deadliest shooting in America was the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, during which Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 17 more. This was all done with just two pistols: the 9mm Glock 19 and the .22LR Walther P22. Note that the [.22LR round is tiny compared to the 9mm round](http://www.prep-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/22lr-9mm-556.jpg), and so a .22 caliber *pistol* would probably be the last gun banned if we were to ban all guns.
Columbine High School, 1999. 13 killed, 21 wounded. 9mm TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol, 9mm Hi-Point 995 Carbine, Savage 67H pump-action shotgun, and the Stevens 311D double barreled sawed-off shotgun.
The biggest takeaway is probably the Virginia Tech shooting. It's remarkably deadly considering its humble arsenal. It seems that the type of weapon used has little effect on the outcome of the shooting, with circumstance and police response being more important factors. I mean, if people planning to shoot up a school want guns, they'll get them, legally or not. Even a complete ban of all guns for civilians would do little to curb the black market for guns considering their pervasive use in law enforcement and military alike.
I'd appreciate it if someone were to show me some facts and statistics to prove me wrong with regards to the effect of gun laws on mass shootings and gun violence in general. Thanks in advance.
> *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!* | "Gun control" can have many different meanings outside of simply banning certain *types* of weapons (see, e.g., firearm buyback programs, restrictions on who can buy firearms, restrictions on ammunition, restricting when and where people carry guns, etc.). It sounds like you're assuming that gun control simply means disallowing "assault rifles," which is not the case. | 141 | 244 |
Are the theories put forth in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" widely accepted by science? | I'm just curious. Jared Diamond seems to be making a lot of assumptions about the reactions of the minds of centuries old civilizations to technology such as guns, mounted horsemen, etc. I think the theory seems really clean and solid, but I keep wondering if all these little assumptions are true for certain. | It would be helpful if you could be more specific about what theories or maybe some examples.
Diamond's main thesis is that the course of civilization was influenced by the starting conditions of geography and ecology. The idea that there are more easily domesticated animals in Eurasia and that the east-west orientation of the continent facilitates technology dispersion is generally well accepted. These two facts resulting in all geopolitical history up till now is more contested.
The reactions in the minds seem fairly unimportant for the larger theory. The psychological impact of seeing a mounted rider was probably less important than lacking the knowledge to fight a mounted rider. | 208 | 458 |
ELI5: Bacteria become resistant to antibacterial products but why not bleach and alcohol? | I understand that some of the bacteria survive the antibacterial products and the ones that survive are more resistant, however why doesn't some bacteria survive alcohol or bleach and become more resistant to those products?
For example, if I swap my skin with alcohol even if the bacteria under the swab are all killed when there be some on the edge that would survive but get a partial dose of alcohol? | Imagine a bacterium as a big factory, with the bacterium's membranes and cell wall being like the factory's walls and ceiling, the enzymes like the factory's machines and the DNA like a big book of instructions for building the factory.
An antibiotic is like sending a saboteur into that factory - maybe to break a critical piece of machinery, or to blow up a structurally important support pillar. The factory could counteract that sabotage by, say, positioning guards that could catch the saboteur (similar to how bacteria may become immune to an antibiotic by mutating an enzyme that can break down the antibiotic.
Bleach or alcohol (or also heat) are more like carpet-bombing the factory until just a pile of rubble remains - they damage a bacterium in many different places at once, and in a much cruder manner. That is also why you cannot use them internally to fight an infection - they would cause too much collateral damage to your body's cells. | 146 | 55 |
If gender dysphoria is not a mental illness, what do we make of body integrity identity disorder? | Background: the [DSM-5](http://www.dsm5.org/documents/gender%20dysphoria%20fact%20sheet.pdf) revised their previously held stance on gender identity disorder, no longer considering it a mental illness. Another example of this shift in attitude comes from the [NHS](http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Gender-dysphoria/Pages/Introduction.aspx), which states the following:
>Gender dysphoria is a recognised medical condition, for which treatment is sometimes appropriate. It is not a mental illness.
I'm posting this to askphilosophy instead of askscience because this strikes me not as a shift in medical understanding, but as a politically-motivated shift (towards "inclusivity") that rests on questionable assumptions.
To bring out these questionable assumptions, I'd like to compare gender dysphoria to [body integrity identity disorder](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_identity_disorder) (BIID). In both cases, a person suffering from these disorders does not properly identify with their body; in both cases, a person suffering from these disorders may seek out reconstructive surgery. If gender dysphoria is not a mental illness but instead a mind-body disconnect, why wouldn't BIID *also* be classified as a mind-body disconnect? And if BIID is indeed a mental illness, why wouldn't gender dysphoria *also* be a mental illness?
EDIT: There is absolutely no reason for this post to be downvoted. It's sourced, it's civil, and while it's contentious plenty of political philosophy is contentious. I'm actually a bit embarrassed philosophy students would rather bury questions that conflict with their political beliefs rather than engage them. | What constitutes and what does not constitute an illness is subject to (historical) change.
Broadly speaking an illness is a state of physical or mental constitution that differs from some agreed upon normal state in such a way, that this difference is socially considered to be detrimental to the person exhibiting it.
So we have two parts to this definition of illness:
1.) There is a norm for the human condition.
2.) Differences from this norm can be valued as detrimental.
Both of these statements are not necessarily true. They are true only in reference to a specific social background, they have an individual historicity.
So whether or not we label gender dysphoria as an illness is based on whether we think it lies outside of our agreed upon social norm and, if yes, whether or not it is detrimental to the person in question.
What NHS and other similar bodies are saying, is that there is not (or that there should not be) any societal interest in policing the gender of trans people. It is basically mirroring a societal shift where different forms of gender fluidity are slowly becoming "normal" or are, at least, no longer valued as detrimental to the person.
For some reading on the historicity of illnesses and sexuality I'd recommend Foucault, especially *Madness and Civilization* and *The History of Sexuality*.
*edit*: Fixed some typos. | 11 | 32 |
ELI5:The difference between "president" and "prime minister" and how come certain countries have both. | Why are they some times called prime ministers, and some times president? Is there a real difference to their actual role? And why do countries like Russia and Ukraine have both a president and a prime minister? | So democratic governments are divided into 3 branches, the legislative (i.e. congress, tasked with writing and passing laws and budgets), the executive (the cabinet and the various governmental agencies like the FBI and FDA, tasked with enforcing the laws) and the judiciary (the Courts, tasked with determining if the laws are constitutional).
The prime minister is the head of the legislative branch, and the president is head the executive branch. Essentially, the prime minister (and congress/senate) determines what the country SHOULD do and how much money it should spend doing it. While the president (along with the governmental agencies under his command) determines HOW they should go about doing what congress ordered. The judges are on the side, trying to decide if the prime minister and the president are allowed to do what they are doing in the first place.
Constitutional Monarchies generally do not have a president, as the executive branch is headed by the king/queen. But as the monarch is purely ceremonial, the usually executive powers devolve to the prime minister. | 41 | 97 |
what are the economic effects of curbing Union power? (as Thatcher did) | In the late 70s UK, many had become scared about union powers dragging the economy down. Thatcher was elected in as a result of much of this fear, and proceeded to curb union powers via making closed shop agreements illegal, ensuring ballots had to be cast before strikes could be called and ensuring union leaders had to go through elections every 5 years. This has often been characterised as 'democratising unions' by her supporters and as destroying the empowerment of workers by her detractors. My question is, where these measures beneficial to the UK economy? If not then what was the best course of action at the time?
Any corrections on UK history is much appreciated as I'm certainly no expert. | There are several problems in answering this question objectively:
* The labour law reforms were only one part of Thatcherism, other parts included bringing down inflation (economically costly in the short term), improving government finances (beneficial mainly in avoiding future fiscal crisises, which are terrible for the poorest, but it's hard to measure something that doesn't happen, particularly when numerous other countries are making similar reforms), privatising industries and reforming the tax system towards a broad-base, lower rate approach.
* Numerous other things are changing in economies all the time, e.g. changing demographics as the baby boomers move through the workforce, new technologies working their way through (once 95% of every factory has been electrified or you've gone from 20% of the population being to high school to 95%, the gains from that area are gone). There's been a worldwide fall in productivity growth since the 1970s which may be just the result of the new inventions of the Second Industrial Revolution having played themselves out. Other countries' economies can also change.
* The whole topic was and is politically controversial.
I will say that one thing to bear in mind is that many of the poorest and most marginalised in society live in households where no one is earning a market income, often due to health problems or caretaking responsibilities. Therefore those households don't benefit directly from higher wages, the effects of unions matter to them through the effects on prices and goods/services availability. Any analysis of the distributional impact of reforms that focuses solely on workers is missing an important part of the story from both equity and distributional grounds. | 21 | 18 |
How do we know the second law of thermodynamics is a law and not merely something we've never seen broken? | Keep in mind that the second law is an inherently statistical statement. There's always a non-zero probability that some process won't obey the second law. It's just that when you have macroscopic numbers of particles (on the order of Avogadro's number, say, 10^23) the probability that heat flows backwards is effectively zero (like, 10^-100 or less). We'd have to wait a very very long time (several times the age of the universe) to be able to observe such a thing happen spontaneously.
(Then, right after it happened, the system would go back to thermal equilibrium and no one would ever believe you.) | 43 | 29 |
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ELI5: Confirmation bias, what occurs on the neurological level, and why humans do it even for depressing beliefs | Confirmation bias is the tendency for someone to interpret or recall information in such a way that is in favor of previously held beliefs. Basically, people will see what they want to see.
It's difficult to say what exactly is occurring on the neurological level, but we do know that it's easier for confirmation bias to occur in relation to emotionally charged topics or memories. Building off of this, there is limited evidence pointing to reduces stress levels through the use of confirmation bias. Stress hormones are influenced by the levels of the cortisol neurotransmitter in the brains.
As for why humans do it with depressing beliefs: That's what anxiety and low-self esteem is. You're always subconsciously telling yourself something even though it might not be true. It's a self-harming form of confirmation bias that's classified as a cognitive distortion. Once you have enough cognitive distortions or a badly developed one, it then may be diagnosed as a disorder. Also food for thought: There is evidence pointing to the fact that people subconsciously go back to depression and depressing thoughts because it's familiar. | 10 | 41 |
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Where in Einstein's field equations (or other equations if needed) does gravity propagate at the speed of light? | Obviously c is in the equation but it's in the denominator of a term, and it's to the fourth power. How does this translate into gravity propagating at the speed of light/causation? (Relatedly, is it significant that that term has 4 radial rotations about the circle in the numerator and c^4 in the denominator?)
Is gravity's speed just assumed? Is it part of the stress-energy tensor and I just need to study that more closely? Am I looking at the wrong equation entirely? | Let's first answer your question about the significance of c^(4) in the equations. The Einstein equations can be written as
> R*_μν_*-(R/2)g*_μν_*+Λg*_μν_* = (8πG/c^(4))T*_μν_*
The terms are R*_μν_* = Ricci tensor, R = scalar curvature, g*_μν_* = metric tensor, Λ = cosmological constant, T*_μν_* = stress-energy tensor.
The metric tensor is, strictly speaking, a dimensionless quantity. The components of the Ricci tensor are obtained via second derivatives of the metric, which means that the Ricci tensor has units of (length)^(-2). Hence *R* and Λ also have units of (length)^(-2) if the left side of the field equations is to make sense. The units of the stress-energy tensor is that of an energy density, or energy per unit volume, or (energy)(length)^(-3). The left and right sides of the equations must have the same units. Hence the constant multiplying T*_μν_* on the right side must have units of length per energy, or (length)(energy)^(-1). The unique combination of the gravitational constant *G* and *c* that gives those units is G/c^(4). So there really is no significance to the constant other than that of units.
(The factor of 8π, however, cannot be deduced by dimensional analysis, and it does have some significance. If the field equations are to reduce to Poisson's equation in the limit of Newtonian gravity, then we need the factor of 8π.)
---
Now for your question about gravitational waves. The standard way of describing weak g-waves is to write the metric tensor as some fixed background metric plus a small perturbation. For the type of wave that was discovered by LIGO, the simplest choice of background metric would be the flat Minkowski metric. Symbolically,
> g*_μν_* = η*_μν_*+h*_μν_*
with |h*_μν_*| << 1. This has the effect of ignoring all terms that are at least quadratic in *h* when we calculate the components of the curvature tensors, Christoffel symbols, etc.
There is a bunch of math at this point where you substitute this form of g*_μν_* into the field equations to get some set of equations for the perturbation h*_μν_*. There are some mathematical subtleties here. For one, the decomposition of g*_μν_* is not unique: there may be many coordinates systems in which g*_μν_* takes the form of a flat background plus a small perturbation. This freedom is related to a so-called *gauge freedom*, and there are several choices one can make. A particular convenient choice is the *Lorenz gauge* (similar to the one used in classical electrodynamics). If the wave is far from any sources, then we can instead impose a so-called *transverse traceless* gauge. But, whatever, those details are not important for the purpose of answering your question.
You stick this form of the metric into the field equations after choosing an appropriate gauge. The equations that pop out take the form
> (-∂*_tt_*/c^(2)+Δ)h*_μν_* = -(16πG/c^(4))T*_μν_*
(Strictly speaking it's not *h* that appears here but rather the trace-reverse perturbation, but that's not important.) Hence each component of the perturbation satisfies an inhomogeneous wave equation. You can read off the source term as the corresponding component of the stress-energy tensor. You can also read off the speed of the wave, which is just the number that multiplies *t* in the time derivative part of the wave operator. In this case, that number is just *c*. It is well known that solutions to this wave equation may be interpreted as signals that propagate at the finite speed of *c*.
**In summary, (1) write metric as FLAT+SMALL, (2) substitute into the field equations, (3) obtain wave equations for the components of SMALL, (4) note that the speed of the wave is just *c*.** So it's not completely obvious from the general form of the field equations that gravity waves travel at *c*. For one, there is quite a bit of machinery that has to be developed just to define what we mean by BACKGROUND+SMALL. But, to answer your question, no, the speed of gravity waves is not defined or put in by fiat. The fact that gravity waves even exist (i.e., are predicted by the theory) is something to be discovered, as is their speed. | 22 | 31 |
[Warhammer 40k] What do space marines do in their free time? do they have hobbies? | For the most part, they train, meditate and maintain their wargear, beyond that, it depends on the Chapter.
The Salamanders return to Nocturne, and live amongst their human families and communities, serving as leaders and judges.
The Space Wolves drink, hunt and engage in sport.
The Blood Angels are known to engage in artistic persuits, such as portraiture, sculpture and poetry.
The White Scars raise horses and race.
The Dark Angels sot in the dark and listen go Depeche Mode. | 60 | 38 |
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Why are some published work not followed up by more publications by authors? | Hello. I will try to clarify my question, as I could not find a way to describe it properly within a title's length.
I am starting a PhD in the fall and am currently doing a literature review of my topic, looking for where to start with my own research. I came across a handful of journal articles which presented interesting work, with lots of potential for future work, however they were not followed by any subsequent publications (that I could find by tracking papers citing the aforementioned work).
So I was wondering, since there could be many reason for a researcher to stop working on a project, how does one know if the idea was a dead end or if the project was aborted for a different reason?
I hope my question is clear and relevant, I am still discovering how academic research works and am not aware of how everything works in this world. | One of the main reasons is that much research is done (meaning: the legwork part of the research) by graduate students and postdocs with temporary positions. When they move on to a new position or leave academia, they tend to work on different things. | 55 | 30 |
What makes vegetables edible when compared to simple grass and bushes? | It's the content of usable sugars, proteins, lipids, and vitamins. Things like blades of grass or most thin, non-succulent leaves are primarily made up of cellulose with very little nutritional value outside of dietary fiber. We can't digest cellulose, so eating things high in cellulose and low in everything else actually burns more energy than it provides. It's not that they're inedible so much as non-nutritive. | 23 | 16 |
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How is the same species of moose native to both Eurasia and North America? | With the Columbian Exchange, species like horses, pigs, maize, tomatoes, potatoes and others became available on both continents. Moose are native to both continents, but are also the same species, which seems odd to have not diverged in however many millions of years.
I would be very surprised if early European explorers successfully put moose onto ships to bring them to another continent, without even beginning to discuss why they would try that. At least horses are useful and domesticated. | Many animals that range into cold climates were able to disperse between continents when sea levels were lower during ice ages. A great many large mammals in the northern part of the northern hemisphere did this (including humans). although many have since gone extinct in one hemisphere or the other. | 29 | 15 |
If a magnet attracts something, it uses up some of its energy, right? Can you completely "de-power" a magnet by attaching ton of things? | Magnetic fields are produced by circulating electric charges in the magnet's material. The power for these charges can be added from outside (as in an electromagnet), or can come directly from the atoms in the magnet themselves. The strength of the magnetic field is determined by the amount of alignment of the spins of the atoms in the material. Some materials find it quite easy to line up all or most of their atoms, and take a very long time to become demagnetized. Others (like those in an electromagnet) fall out line almost completely when the current is removed.
So, about your original question: When a magnet attracts something, it does work on that object. As soon as the object touches the magnet, no more work is done and the object will actually decrease the magnet's tendency to demagnetize; **increasing** the magnet's 'life.' This isn't really the heart of the question yet. The key is that while some amount of energy does come from the particles in the magnet, the majority of the energy used to exert a force comes from the energy YOU put into the system.
Magnetic fields have potentials- a fixed amount of energy capacity which depends on the configuration of the field. Any work you put into the system (i.e. moving a magnet to a piece of metal or a piece of metal to a magnet) is simply transformed or stored.
Tl;dr you CAN de-power a magnet by having it attract a bunch of things, but the magnet does not lose energy, it loses the cooperation of its atoms to line up the same way. | 19 | 38 |
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Why are non-linearities essential to machine learning? | I understand why every other hyperparameter is necessary except the non-linearities like ReLU are needed | A different view to /u/mmm_toasty on why non-linearities are important:
A Neural Network can be desrcibed as a series of alternating matrix multiplications and non-linearities. If you remove the non-linearity between two matrix multiplications, you could just replace those two matrix multiplications by a single one since they are associative. If you remove all the non-linearities in the network, you end up with a single matrix multiplication (also called a linear model). | 17 | 15 |
ELI5: Why are we referred to as carbon-based life forms? | When we're 70% hydrogen and oxygen molecules? | Carbon can make 4 molecular bonds, oxygen can make 2, and hydrogen can make only 1. While oxygen and hydrogen have their place in many processes, carbon forms the backbone and structure of all complex organic molecules.
Imagine trying to make a marshmallow-and-toothpick structure where each marshmallow could only have one or two toothpicks attached to it. You couldn't make anything more complex than a ring or line. Now try it where you can have some marshmallows with 3 or 4 toothpicks. Now you're getting somewhere. Now you can make all sorts of things. That is why we are considered carbon-based. | 40 | 22 |
ELI5: How do spiders initially connect the first couple of threads to surrounding objects? | Specifically, I've seen spiders with threads connected to a street sign > to a tree > to another tree, etc.
Does the spider crawl along the ground? Wouldn't the original strand become tangled? | Usually they will attach the line at one end, drop down, then walk across and up, extending silk all the time. Then they'll attach a new line at the other side, and eat the first line up while using it to get back across the gap, extending the new silk at the same time. In this way they create a line with the correct tension.
They will then usually travel back along the line and drop a vertical one down to the ground from the halfway point to make a Y shape. The rest of the web can then be built around this.
Some spiders make a sticky 'kite' of silk at the end of a line and float it across a gap until it sticks at the other side, then proceed as above. | 46 | 44 |
I need to hire a Java developer but I know next to nothing about the language | I'm not sure if this is the correct subreddit to ask this, but as the title says, I need to hire a Java developer. The issue is that I know next to nothing about Java. I was hoping you guys can help me figure out some questions (and answers) that I can ask during the interview process to help me assess who actually knows the language, so I do not get mislead. | In your situation, I'd lean on experience. More than technically quizzing somebody (which is often pointless anyway).
If you're after a single Dev then you need someone who can develop the full range of what you require, and be happy with releasing that and supporting it in a production environment. | 15 | 16 |
ELI5: How do you doctors diagnose bacterial/viral illness? | I.E. Ebola etc. | Clinically, some bacterial/viral illnesses have very distinguishing features that give you a hunch towards what the disease may be caused from. Symptoms such as a certain rash, whether there is a fever, whether there is any pus, etc., point you in the direction of viral, bacterial, or even fungal infection.
If you think it's a bacteria, or fungus, you can sample it (from blood, urine, wound, etc) and allow it to grow or "culture". From there microbiologists can perform different tests on the bacteria that grow to determine which species it is and which antibiotics/antifungals are best for fighting them off (known as determining the bacteria's sensitivities).
If you believe it's viral you often don't need to pursue it any further (especially if we're talking about a respiratory or sinus infection) as you often just treat the patient's symptoms until the virus resolves. However, there are a few instances in which you need to determine the exact virus for treatment. In those cases, you would also similarly sample it (blood, CSF/fluid around your brain and spinal cord, cervix, etc.) and perform fancy biochemical tests to determine what type of viral strain it is. | 18 | 31 |
CMV: I think disallowing visible tattoos and piercings at a workplace only prolongs the prejudice that tattoos and piercings are for delinquents. | At every job I have worked at, part time to full time, one is not allowed to have any piercings (this includes clear studs) or visible tattoos. Ear piercings are allowed, however, any other piercing is to be taken out which I also believe to be rubbish and prolonging the negative judgment behind piercings that are not on the ears. I understand if the context on either the tattoo or the jewelry have an offensive image on them, but if there is not then there should be no problem to show them at the work place. I believe the rejection of showing them only prolongs the idea that tattoos and piercings are for immature, wrongly rebellious and unprofessional citizens. | Every job has a certain expectation of professionalism. This includes code of conduct, and usually some kind of dress code. The dress code for most jobs reflects the image the business is trying to protect to its customers or clients. Piercings and visible tattoos affect the perception of an employee (and therefore, the business) as much as clothes do. It is reasonable for employers to enforce a dresscode which includes piercings and tattoos.
You acknowledge that a stigma exists against those with visible tattoos. Whether this stigma is fair or not, why is it the responsibility of employers to counter this stigma? Why should they put themselves at risk to lose business when they can simply enforce a dress code? | 23 | 43 |
ELI5: When we are drunk, why is it easier to focus with one eye instead of the two? | Both eyes need to be able to coordinate to function. Coordination goes out the window with alcohol leading many to cross their eyes or have a bit of a lazy eye when they normally wouldn't. Some may even have pro lems with eyes not focusing at the same time or at the same focal length, making things seem blurry or out of focus.
The brain is not only trying to interpret these mismatched images as one image, but also trying to make sense of the world at all through the alcohol.
By closing one eye, you remove one image from the data and your brain is left with only one feed to work on. Now you don't have two uncoordinated eyes, but one trying to get information to an uncoordinated brain. | 21 | 16 |
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Does anyone have any suggestion for how a PhD student can protect thier research but still collaborate with others? | * Type up your work as you go in a version control system, such as git. Commits are timestamped, and tied to a username, so it's clear who wrote the thing and who to attribute credit.
* Keep a trusted mentor (ideally your PhD advisor - if you don't trust them, you have bigger problems) up to date on your progress, preferably in meetings that include your collaborator. If your collaborator tries to pull a fast one, your advisor can step in if they have an idea as to who did what | 87 | 83 |
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I read something that seems odd in a supreme court opinion...Does liquid change its weight based on its temperature? | I am in a tax class and was reading Tank Truck Rentals Inc. v. Commissioner. http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/356/30/case.html. In that case Justice Clark describes a trucking company who receives a fine for "several unintentional violations, such as those caused by temperature changes in transit" He is describing tank trucks transporting liquids, and the fine is based on the trucks being overweight.
Doesn't the mass of liquid in a closed container stay the same despite the temperature? If so, wouldn't the weight of the truck and its contents be the same?
On a side note, is there any liquid or gas that would change weight? | A liquid could change its density through changes in temperature, and you could measure a certain volume, say a cubic centimeter within a barrel, and that cubic centimeter of water would weigh less when the barrel is hotter and more when its colder, but that's really only because the water expands and contracts, changing its volume within the entire barrel. So, could the entire barrel full of water change its weight based on temperature changes? No, it couldn't. The mass of water within the barrel would not change, it would remain the same mass of water - just might take up a little more or a little less volume. | 15 | 40 |
ELI5: Why is it that some parts of the ocean are clear as glass, some is really blue, and some is like cloudy green? | The blue color of water is actually intrinsic to water molecules themselves. Vibrational transitions in the molecules have a weak absorption for red light, so the reflected light appears blue. Filtered/clear water will have a natural blue tint. It's very weak though, so there has to be a large volume for the blue color to be apparent. That's why oceans appear blue while a glass of water will appear clear. Keeping this in mind, the deeper the body of water, the stronger the blue color and the darker the water will appear. Bodies of water that do not appear blue have their natural color altered by things like sediment, algae, and micro organisms. These "impurities" can also cause the water to be cloudy as opposed to its natural clear state. | 13 | 38 |
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samples of lead may have slightly different relative atomic masses depending on their sources. why? | Because of varying isotopic abundances.
Lead (Pb) has four stable isotopes: ^(204)Pb, ^(206)Pb, ^(207)Pb, ^(208)Pb. The relative abundances of the four stable isotopes are approximately 1.5%, 24%, 22%, and 52.5%, combining to give a standard atomic weight (abundance-weighted average of the stable isotopes) of 207.2.
That's just an average though lead samples from different sources around the world all have their own distribution of the relative proportion of these isotopes, which can differ (slightly) from the average percentages given above. For example, a lead sample with more ^(208)Pb content (and therefore lower content of the lighter isotopes) will have a slightly higher relative atomic mass than the global-avg 207.2. | 37 | 78 |
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How did the first single celled organism come into existence? | Had this question thrown at me today in a Religious Studies class (essentially philosophy and ethics) and I couldn't answer it. But I know there has to be someone out there with a good idea of the current theories surrounding this issue. Thanks! | The name of what you are looking for is abiogenesis. The short answer is: with out a time machine, we would never be able to re-enact that specific historical event. However, we know about half a dozen processes that each could have created initial replicating proteins, and its probable that some combination of these did the trick, as they are not mutually exclusive. | 17 | 19 |
ELI5:Why pain feels higher when it's cold out? | When a part of your body is cold, the blood vessels will automatically constrict to limit heat loss from the flow of blood to that area. This constriction also constricts the pain receptors, making them more sensitive.
In addition, the cold will make the area slightly harder and more brittle compared to normal. Striking something hard has a higher chance of breaking or transferring the energy inside than if it was absorbed by something more flexible/softer. | 69 | 129 |
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ELI5: Why do almost all creatures prefer sexual reproduction? Surely being able to reproduce at any time you like without a mate would significantly increase survival odds? | Genetic diversity. Sexual reproduction is a roll of the dice to decide the traits passed on from the two parents. Over many generations, better traits win out and less desirable traits die off. This natural selection leads to higher probability of survival for the species. | 105 | 34 |
|
What can I do to better understand the concept of higher dimensional space like hyperspheres? | I am trying to understand hyperspheres but every time I think I understand what I am reading/hearing I realize I don't. I can do hypothetical ideas like quantum mechanics but these things seem to much for me to grasp. | Stop trying to picture it. There's a reason mathematicians use symbols and equations to talk about this stuff: It's really powerful and can be intuitive.
Learn about Linear Algebra, which can be visually explored in 2-3 dimensions. Here, things like orthogonality, projection and distance are all immediately intuitive, but you start working with them in terms of equations. Instead of orthogonality meaning "A right angle", it means x*_1_*x*_2_*+y*_1_*y*_2_*=0. Instead of a projection meaning you draw a line straight down onto another, it's a function p(x) satisfying p(p(x))=p(x). Instead of distance being the length on a piece of paper between two points, it's any function d(x,y) satisfying certain things like d(x,x)=0, and d(x,z)<=d(x,y)+d(y,z). You switch your pictorial intuition about geometry, which is limited to <=3 dimensions, into an intuition about equations which can be any finite dimension. With this more sophisticated language, you can understand more sophisticated things, like higher dimensional spheres.
This would be just one part of the attack on understanding hyperspheres. Multivariable calc and its generalizations is also useful, and then there are even more abstract fields of math that really get into the gritty of how these things work. There's a lot we don't understand about them and spheres can actually be really difficult when you get to that level. One of the Millennium Prize Problems was about hyperspheres.
But trying to imagine things in your head will just be limiting, give yourself a headache and you'll leave with a lot of misconceptions, since 3d visual intuition does not have to generalize to 4d or 5d intuition. Equations fix all of these problems. | 41 | 23 |
CMV: eSports are legitimate sports | In my view, a sport must:
1. Have a physical component
2. Be competitive and have an objective win\-lose condition
3. Require skill
I'll assume most of my opponents disagree that eSports are sufficiently physical. I'd like to draw a distinction between something being **physical** and something requiring extreme **physical exertion**. Football requires a lot of physical exertion. Your heart rate is high. You're sweating. You're burning lots of calories. At times you're running as fast as you can, pushing as hard as you can, and jumping as high as you can.
But is that the only type of physical component to a sport? I don't think so. Darts, curling, bowling, fishing, and billiards all require physical mastery, but don't \(necessarily\) require you to be strong, fast, or sweating.
eSports are the same way. It certainly depends on the game, but for this discussion I'll focus on **first person shooters** like Overwatch and Counterstrike. Aiming your weapon is one example of a skill that requires physical coordination. The skill is focused on your hands and doesn't require the rest of your body, but I see no reason that makes the game less of a sport. Many sports require extremely specific muscles and mechanics, but are nonetheless still considered legitimate. Not every sport is a full\-body sport. By my definition, you need some physical component, and aiming a weapon in grandmaster level eSports is extremely physically challenging.
I'd like to point out that **I don't think any trivial physical action makes something a sport.** You have to move your piece in chess, but you're not going to gain a meaningful advantage by physically moving faster. It's about thinking faster. Similar deal with poker. Pushing your chips in with your hands is not a meaningful physical differentiator in the game.
I'd also like to briefly touch on 2 and 3 in case they come up:
I mentioned 2 because something like a battle of the bands, while physically demanding and certainly requiring skill, doesn't have an objective win\-lose condition. The judges may pick a winner, but I don't believe that's sufficiently objective. If a sport's win\-lose condition is based on judging \(e.g., boxing, figure skating\), the parameters must be very well defined and can't be based on something peripheral like art. With eSports, there are very clear win\-lose conditions.
I mentioned 3 because I don't believe anything that is entirely based on luck \(e.g., competitive scratch off scratching\) is a sport, no matter how physically demanding it is to scratch that quarter. There is some luck involved in every sport, but this isn't an issue with games like Overwatch and Counterstrike any more than it is with baseball.
tldr: eSports meet the core definition of sport, even if you're not sweating. CMV.
*note to mods: I've seen this CMV before, but with the opposite stance, and I think a CMV with the starting view flipped will lead to a new discussion.* | Generally in English, we distinguish games \(in the game\-theoric sense\) of pure physicality from those that are significantly assisted through technology \(such that most of the physical action is indirect\) .
A perfect example are **motor sports** such as NASCAR or Formula\-1 racing. These include far more physical action and physical risk than eSports, yet they are not considered "pure" sports because most of the physical action is indirect. | 21 | 20 |
CMV: The Army Should Not Make Their Fitness Tests Different for Each Gender | I read a story today about how the army is considering making their fitness tests different depending on gender. They found that women were not passing at the same rates as men, so they are considering lowering the bar / changing the tests that women do. I feel like this is a bad thing for 2 main reasons.
1. The fitness test getting easier means less fit people in the army which means a less qualified army, could lead to more deaths. I have no evidence of this, just seems like it would happen.
2. Everyone should be on an even playing field. If it's sexist to say that women are not as fit as men, it should be sexist to propose lowering the bar for women too, right? I'm not sure if I'm sexist for saying women should take the same tests, or sexist for saying they should take an easier one.
So they had two options from what I can tell; either accept that not as many women will pass as men (which might lead to really bad PR when some news outlet 'exposes' the military for letting men in more than women) or lower the bar (which might lead to really bad PR when some news outlet 'exposes' the military for suggesting that women need different tests).
I'm not sure there's a good option here. IMO they should keep the tests the same.
Talking about the Army ACFT fitness test here.
I maintain a belief that for specific roles where we need to set a bar for the safety of everyone, that bar should be the same regardless of gender. I'm not sure if there's any specific tests for specific roles that have different standards for men and women.
Edit 3: common points people keep making. "those tests aren't important for the job they are doing" - then stop testing for that in the first place. "doesn't matter how many pushups you can do to fly a heli" - then don't test for pushups! Not changing my view with that logic.
"they have different strengths that aren't in the tests and are important for their role" so include tests for those things that effect their score.
"fitness means something different for everyone, it's relative" - they apparently already account for body differences and adjust scores accordingly, at an individual level, for fitness. No issues here.
EDIT AGAIN! Removed some outdated stuff in the post now that I've learned so much thanks folks!
My view is now like this:
Testing for health / fitness? Test the individual while accounting for their body weight / size so that you get an accurate sense of how healthy they are. Not man vs woman, test on an individual level though.
Testing for a specific role? One, universal bar that is the same for everyone, because reality doesn't care about why you can't do something. Regardless, don't split it up between two sexes (sorry about saying gender when I meant sex so many times). | Military fitness tests are a complicated issue.
On the one hand, ideally you want every soldier to meet the high physical standards required by frontline combatants. Any soldier *might* end up in actual combat, even if their job is something else, and if that happens, you need to be able to depend on them to perform. If they're not fit enough, bad consequences can happen.
On the other hand, if you *really* hold everyone to those standards, the results can be even worse. Some extremely competent and talented support personnel are simply not going to be able to reach that level of fitness, and if you end up kicking the support personnel out for failing those tests, then the remaining soldiers will suffer even more without backup.
While you want to push everyone to meet the physical standards required for combat, pushing too hard can create more problems if you're forcing out too many skilled soldiers. | 690 | 8,988 |
Eli5 - Why can't we draw what our brain tells us to? | Your mind and thoughts aren't very good at being precise. They don't need to be. Comprehension of ideas and recognizing patterns for example are bigger priorities and the focus there is abstraction over precision.
You can apply this to both the main processes involved in drawing something that you have in mind:
The actual act of visualizing what you want to draw doesn't have a lot of detail to it. Even when you think it is, your brain is only holding a few details in mind and you are perfectly content with it.
The act of physically drawing a detail that you can visualize is also difficult. It takes a lot of practice to get good at art in general. Imagine you literally had a picture in front of you and you wanted to copy it in your own sketch. You don't have to use your imagination or memory any more, and yet someone untrained might not be able to do a very good job. | 192 | 327 |
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ELI5: How come photons have no mass (0.000...), don't interact with the higgs field, but are caught by black holes? | Gravity isn't just an attraction between masses. it's also a bending of the fabric of space. So even though a massless photon is traveling in a straight line, gravity's effects redefine what "straight line" means.
In the case of a black hole, if that straight line path takes it past a black hole's event horizon, the path is so bent that it never comes back out. | 142 | 205 |
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Why is computer emulation so difficult? | Let's take the example of SNES emulation, why is it so difficult to get it accurate? | If you want to translate a newspaper in another language that you don't know anything about, what do you do? (Can't use Google Translate!!)
You take a French-English dictionary. Every time you see a word, you have to look at the correspondence in the dictionary and write that down on a piece of paper. It will take a while, but you will eventually know what it means and can somewhat read it. It's not gonna be perfect though, because the grammar will be all wrong.
You have to do the same thing with programs meant for a different computers. You can easily translate instructions to one another, but you have to fake what's supposed to happen in that CPU since they don't work the same way. You have different registers (temporary places where you can put a value for the computer to use), flags, interrupts, etc.
There are even some bugs on a CPU that you have to emulate. Those bugs are not necessarily well documents in official docs, but you have to program them in your emulator because otherwise the program will behave differently than on the original CPU.
Emulating instructions and changing the internal state of an emulate CPU is really complicated. One is a simple instruction and a SNES might be a couple hundreds instructions on a Intel CPU!
Add to the fact that a CPU register is inside said CPU, it is very quick to read and write to. When you have to emulate that register, it will sit in the RAM memory, which is much slower, so your emulations will be much slower because of that too.
Also, if a program is optimized for a SNES CPU because of certain quirks it has, that optimization is most likely lost in the emulation process too.
Emulators sometimes take shortcuts so they can run faster, but in that process, they lose correctness. If you don't see much of a difference when you play a SNES game, then it doesn't really matter for the end-user if the CPU is not perfectly emulated.. | 22 | 22 |
Why do anti fungal toe medication have the ability to impact kidney functions when they are an external application? | Do all anti fungal toe medication impact the kidneys or just some? | The skin is not really any different than the lungs or stomach when it comes to permeability to certain chemicals
The more blood vessels there are close to the surface, the more easily things that touch it can get into the bloodstream. If they get into the blood, they find their way to the organs like the kidneys
There's a rather famous case of a group of teenagers rubbing tube of icy hot or tigerbalm or similar pain-relief-heating medication on their genitals as a game, and ending up nearly dying from it because it was absorbed far too fast and in too high a quantity - 2 hospitalised, one critical and only saved at the last minute because their friend admitted what they'd done. Similarly people have died from nicotine overdoses through nicotine skin patches which were overapplied on an airplane as the person was trying to 'get through the flight' without a smoke... they applied too many and they were hidden under the clothes so were not removed
Always read the directions on the leaflet that comes with your medication. Apply the correct dose, and apply in the correct area. If you don't you are risking your health, it's just as possible to accidentally overdose on something topical and externally applied as it is to accidentally overdose by taking pills or injections. If you take too many pills you might be sick, but if you put on too much cream it's going to be difficult to get it off if you start becoming unwell, especially if the doctors at the hospital don't know you've done it
edit: If you apply medication to someone else (that is for them), like a child or an elderly person, wear gloves | 1,441 | 1,915 |
ELI5 : If we die after roughly 3 weeks without eating, why do eat 3 times a day? | I know you wouldn't spend 3 weeks very wealthy or you would lack energy, but still, it seems it's some sort of waste. | Eating three times a day is actually a modern invention (modern in terms of human history as a species). It wasn’t uncommon, or even unhealthy to eat once a day, or sometimes skip a day every few days. It still isn’t unhealthy to do that today, you are just so used to eating three times a day that it would be difficult.
We die after 3 weeks of not eating because we are healthy and well nourished. If you ate rarely and were malnourished you would die much quicker. We eat daily to make sure we are in top health.
| 111 | 79 |
What is the difference between refuting an argument and explaining away an argument? | I'm having trouble understanding this distinction. For ex, I'm reading a paper that says Dennett does not refute X, but explains it away. | For the purpose of the distinction, refuting an argument addresses the claim and its points, explains why they are wrong, and likely does so with some sort of counter-argument.
Explaining an argument away does not address the argument or its claims, instead it claims that the problem that the argument seeks to deal with is not really a problem and that we were mistaken to think it was. | 27 | 18 |
If rent control is unintentionally counterproductive, how can we keep rent from rising faster than people's wages? | I'm piggybacking off this thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/gcoxw3/why_the_hell_do_we_have_rent_control_in_various/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share | Increase supply.
There are a bunch of factors that limit supply. Building codes. City Ordinances. Tax incentives. Labor costs. All of those trade offs effect supply.
For example: You have a high rise building in Manhattan with a beautiful view of central park. The building in front of it wants to add another hundred floors, obscuring the view. What do you do? You try to block the construction via the city. That limits supply, that drives up rents. | 176 | 121 |
ELI5: Why does it seem like all Caribbean islands (Jamaica, Bahamas, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, etc.) seem to be third world countries, with terrible economies and infrastructure? | This is not meant to offend anyone from these countries, its just the impression I get being American.
Someone I know just got back from a service trip to Jamaica to teach first aid and CPR to villagers and describes a place where everyone is poor, and there are no jobs and no place to go.
Are there any particular reasons, historical or otherwise, for this trend? I have been to Bermuda and the Bahamas and even in the high traffic tourism areas you can tell how poor the people are and how sadly hopeless their situations seem. | Historical and geographical reasons.
Most of those islands were colonized by Spain in the 16th and 17th century and used to produce sugar and tropical fruit crops. The colonial government had little interest in improving infrastructure, education, or standard of living and many of the residents were slaves.
When the Spanish empire started to unravel those islands found themselves suddenly self-governing with little experience or resources.
Since then they've struggled with corrupt governments, meddling from cold war superpowers, and the simple lack of resources on an island.
| 116 | 134 |
ELI5 what is dynamic programming? | I’ve been encountering problems lately where the solution requires a dynamic programming solution, but I can’t wrap my head around how that works. Can some ELI5 it? | Dynamic programming is a way of breaking problems up into repeated subproblems, then solving the subproblems from the bottom up, reusing any answers that you’ve already figured out.
Consider a naive recursive Fibonacci function:
```
fib(0) = 0
fib(1) = 1
fib(n) = fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)
```
I’m on mobile so I’ll use notation “fn” to mean `fib(n)`.
f5 = f4 + f3
f5 = (f3 + f2) + f3
Now I’ll expand the f3 calls.
f5 = ((f2 + f1) + f2) + (f2 + f1)
Now I’ll expand all the f2 calls.
f5 = (((f1 + f0) + f1) + (f1 + f0)) + ((f1 + f0) + f1)
Now let’s look at how many times fib got called.
- f0: 3 times
- f1: 5 times
- f2: 3 times
- f3: 2 times
For f0 and f1, this isn’t a huge deal. But we had to calculate f2 twice more than necessary and f3 once more than necessary. This is ok for `fib(5)` but it won’t be ok for `fib(100)`.
Since the nth Fibonacci number builds on the last two, and this logic will unroll all the way down to 1, we should only need to calculate fx once for each x less than n.
```
fib_dynamic(n):
if n is 1 or 0 return n
fibs = [0, 1] // fibs[x] represents the xth Fibonacci number
for i from 2 to n, inclusive:
fibs[i] = fibs[i - 1] + fibs[i - 2]
return fibs[i]
```
Try out fib_dynamic(5) on pen and paper and see the difference.
With this method, we don’t have to repeat any work because we saved the intermediate answers to be used again.
There exists another technique very similar to dynamic programming, called *memoization* (yes, that’s how you spell it), where you essentially save the results of each function call, then the next time that function is called with the same arguments you can return the saved version. This is often a little bit easier to implement because you don’t have to change your algorithm to go bottom-up, the stack will do it for you.
```
cache = [0, 1]
fib_memo(n):
if cache[n] exists, return it
cache[n] = fib_memo(n - 1) + fib_memo(n - 2)
return cache[n]
```
Try this one out on pen and paper too, see how it compares to the other two. | 67 | 60 |
CMV: Psychedelic drugs should be legalized | In my opinion, psychedelic drugs such as mainly LSD, psilocibin mushrooms, DMT and Ayahuasca, but also other psychoactive drugs with a potentially positive effect, should be open for everyone to explore without legal consequences.
A lot of people still seem to be irrationally afraid of those drugs, even though by now there is good evidence that they can be used to help the treatment of depression, anxiety, PTSD (in the case of MDMA) and many other mental conditions. Psychedelic drugs are a very interesting and unnecessarily stigmatised area of research, and the legal prohibitions make it very hard for scientists to explore this field of research.
Some of those drugs have been used for thousands of years by indigenous cultures for spiritual purposes.A majority of people that have used those drugs argue that if those drugs are explored in a save environment, there is a lot of potential to explore one's own conciousness, which seems to me to be one of the key areas of spirituality.
I think that legalizing those drugs will decrease the violence surrounding them, because they can be sold by companies, not only on the black market. It would also make sure that the quality of the drugs is tested, which would reduce the amount of people that get hurt using them. It would also make education around this topic way easier, we could teach in school how to SAVELY use them, because telling the children NOT TO USE THEM AT ALL is probably not going to work anyway.
Now, thanks for reading my arguments, and CMV, guys :)
| All of the situations where these have been used responsibly in traditional cultures and experiments showing their usefulness have been in *highly* controlled and professionally guided environments.
Pure legalization would encourage highly irresponsible use, including by people that really have no business messing with their already fucked up brains.
So... legalized for medical use, like Schedule 2/3 in the United States, instead of their current "always illegal" Schedule 1 classification? Sure...
Without more evidence of safety for the general population in uncontrolled use, it's a really, really, bad idea to legalize powerful psychoactive substances more generally. | 10 | 18 |
Why does the ocean appear darker in color as the depth increases? | The shallows appear almost translucent, while the deep ocean appears dark blue to almost black... I just want to know what causes this since the ocean is made up of the same kind of atoms (H20), and light should reflect off them the same way, right? | Light gets absorbed by water, and the more water light passes through the more gets absorbed. It's *roughly* 50% every 150 meters (so 75% every 300 meters, etc). It gets absorbed more strongly at higher wavelengths, so red is the first to go: if you take a coke can down SCUBA diving, it will appear magenta. | 73 | 66 |
ELI5: How closed-source applications can exist. | Shouldn't it be possible to reverse-engineer the source code of anything? How can computers execute code that they can't see? | Think of a program as being like a house. A house needs to be built from a blueprint so the people working on it know how to built it. However, even if they've seen a similar house before, they don't necessarily know how to build it just by looking at another one, even if it's exactly the same as the new one is supposed to be.
A source code is the blueprint of a program. When it goes through a process called "compiling", the computer turns the source code into an executable program much like how the construction workers change the blueprints into a house. However, the executable doesn't look just like the source code, as the source code is built to be a human readable code equivalent to what the computer can read while the executable is what it looks like after it is translated to the computer's own language. This makes it so other programmers don't know how to reproduce it just by looking at the executable program.
Reverse engineering is theoretically possible with anything, but it isn't always easy, as you are trying to build a blueprint based on looking at the final product. It's kind of like figuring out the instructions on a piece of furniture that you didn't get assembly instructions for: possible, but it'll take some time to figure it all out and you probably won't get every step worded exactly like the original instructions. | 43 | 20 |
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