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ELI5:What is causing this specific version of the Galaxy Note 7 to have so much trouble? | and why couldn't they fix it after recalling the device and issuing new phones? | If we knew the answer to that question, the problem could be addressed. Given that Samsung has suspended manufacturing it seems likely that they don't know, or cannot fix it.
As for what is burning, the battery is a very high energy storage device. Getting energy out to power your phone needs to be a strictly controlled process. Burning happens when the process gets out of control. | 10 | 15 |
How did Rutherford bombard the atom with alpha particles when discovering the nucleus in the Gold Foil Experiment? | I’m confused of how Rutherford 1. isolated an alpha particle, and 2. How did he even know what an alpha particle was or even measure it?? If they hadn’t discovered the nucleus yet how was it possible for him to know to shoot 2 protons and 2 neutrons at the atom? I’d really appreciate if someone could explain this as I haven’t found anywhere that explains these details. Thanks for your help!! | Rutherford's early work was on different types of radiation. Radioactivity had already been discovered several years earlier, and what Rutherford and others did is categorize it. They found that radioactive substances gave off three distinct rays that they called alpha, beta, and gamma. They understood that alpha rays were positively charged (because they could be deflected in a magnetic field), and that the rays had considerable mass relative to other forms of radiation. Because it seemed to have about four times the mass and twice charge of a hydrogen atom, he figured it was a helium ion, and later that was shown to be the case. Later he and his students and collaborators developed a way to measure how many alphas you had by relying on the fact that they would ionize a gas in a tube, and you could measure that electrical current (a Geiger counter).
The alpha particles they were using for the gold foil experiment were provided by a radium source. If you want a stream of alpha particles, you build a little metal box, put the radium source in it, and put a tiny hole in the side of it. Only alphas traveling in the direction of the hole will be released, so it acts like a little gun for alphas.
The experiment consisted of shooting alphas at a very thin gold foil. Most of the alphas went right though. But some were reflected backward at a very sharp angle. By measuring this angle and the number of alphas, he was able to conclude that these were basically bouncing off something very hard and very small. From this he then extrapolated that most of the atom's mass was in a hard nucleus, and could show (through the math) how small the nucleus had to be if it was reflecting the particles at the rate and direction that it was. It is a very elegant experiment and interpretation.
(This experiment was performed by Hans Geiger and his student Ernest Marsden, but Rutherford interpreted the results and used them to show that the nuclear model of the atom was most likely. Rutherford was in contact with Geiger and helped him plan the experiment, which was one of a series of experiments Geiger was doing on alpha particles.)
Lastly, he didn't know about neutrons yet. Those would come later. There were still many unknowns. He didn't even really know about protons — he just assumed, after finding evidence for the nucleus and understanding that different ions had different charges, that they must have positive subatomic particles in them. Rutherford's idea of the atom was one step along the way to our modern understanding of the atom; it wasn't the final step. | 35 | 15 |
[General] What would humans look like if a higher life form bred them like humans breed dogs? | Think the mid way point between us and a Great Old One. A creature that views us as pets rather than ants, and takes an interest in Human-Fancy, breeding us into weird, freakish things almoat totally divorced from us our origins.
If a higher life form bred us to aid them in tasks, for companionship, or for weird freak shows, what would we look like? What features would they focus on, or try to breed out? | That... kind of depends entirely on the higher life form and what they want to use us for?
If they bred us for tasks, they'd presumably breed us to be better for whatever task they had in mind, if they bred us for companionship they would breed whatever features they find desirable in companions and if they bred us for weird freak shows they would focus own whatever features they find weird and freaky. | 25 | 15 |
ELI5: Why is Europe considered to be a continent and not just a peninsular of Asia? | Continents are largely a cultural concept; they have never been very consistently defined by geography alone. After all, North and South America are attached, and Africa is attached to Asia as well.
Europe is traditionally considered a separate continent because it has been culturally, economically and politically distinct from Asia for most of its history, and this arises from geographic borders like the Ural Mountains and climate of central Russia. | 59 | 43 |
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ELI5: Why emergency room visits are so expensive? | Bonus points if you can tell me why everyone casually does their job with no real hustle. I feel like they take their time and just gossip while you wait in the room. | As a doctor in other countries you make a risk assessment and only use the expensive diagnostics where needed. In the USA if you miss something the hospital will be sued for silly amounts. To stop the people from suing the are very protective and rule nearly everything out. If people stopped suing healthcare in the USA would be MUCH cheaper. | 14 | 20 |
ELI5: why can you move one eye inward independently but not outward? | "Moving one eye inward" uses the same movements as focusing on a point very close in front of one eye. You don't actually need to move your eyes "independently" to do this; so long as the focal point is in front of one of them, that eye will appear not to move, but it can still be tracking a point together with the other eye.
Moving one or both of your eyes *outward* can't be done by focusing on a point. | 12 | 68 |
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ELI5: How chroma subsampling works | I found only one post about this dated 10 years ago with only one reply. The Wikipedia page and other webpages explain it similarly but I still don't understand it completely.
For JPEG, it uses 4:2:0 subsampling scheme but I don't fully understand how it works or what happens.
Do the Cb and Cr channels get smaller? Or is it as the [image](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f2/Common_chroma_subsampling_ratios.svg/1920px-Common_chroma_subsampling_ratios.svg.png) shows and it copies the chroma values to the adjacent pixels (remains the same size)? | For 4:2:0, a 100×100 image is made up of a 100×100 luma (grey scale) image and two 50×50 images supplying colour information (Cb and Cr). In other words, each 2×2 block of pixels uses the same colour information but has 4 separate luma values. | 13 | 22 |
How do we know the composition and mass of some planets/stars ? | In terms of composition. We're looking at a technique called spectroscopy. Basically, for any chemical element (or larger structures like molecules but when you're talking about stars it's too hot for molecules), the electrons can only have specific energies.
For each chemical the gaps between the available energies will be unique, this means we can identify a chemical by the gaps between its energy levels.
But how do we know what the gaps in energy level are? Good question. Electrons move between energy levels by either absorbing or emitting energy. One of the ways this can happen is by photons (light). Because the gaps between energy levels are specific sizes only specific energies of photons can be absorbed or emitted.
When it comes to photons their energy is also proportional to their frequency (because photons have wavelike properties as well as existing as distinct particle like things) and the frequency of light determines its colour.
Either we put in light at a range of wavelengths and see what's absorbed or look at the light being emitted. This works for both stars and atmospheres of planets.
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[Marvel/DC] Why do some villains only want to take over specific cities? Is their goal to simply be a non-democratically elected mayor? And how would this new leadership work within the context of a state and federal government? | There are a lot of supervillains who want to take over cities but I genuinely wonder what their ultimate goal is and how it would really make sense. Does "taking over" a city mean you become the mayor? And the villains who want to simply be a king of a city, how would that work in regards to the larger state government and federal government? | Think of it like expanding their territory they start of with some small amount of control their "neighbourhood" where they are the boss and the most powerful person around and they are looking to expand that area as far as reasonably possible. Taking over a city is a large undertaking and once you take it over it's a hard job to make sure rival gangs and upstart wannabe bad guys aren't doing jobs without your knowledge or planning to dethrone you. Even on a city scale that's a monumental amount of work it would be impossible on a world wide scale so they shoot for a reasonable goal. As for what their responsibilities are they run the underworld of the city they get a cut from things done on their turf and have to be consulted if anything big (bank heist, major robbery, political decisions, etc) goes on so it can be approved. They don't usually aspire to be a pencil pusher or a mayor more a figure head that is in charge and needs to be consulted in all important matters but doesn't need to do the other work. | 209 | 431 |
Can privacy be considered as a social institution? | Hello, I wonder if privacy can be considered as a social institution, maybe you have some bibliography to suggest me? Thank you in advance | I think it's fairly easy to argue that the concept of privacy fits the classical definition of an institution, namely, "stable, valued, recurring pattern of behaviour". Is this what you mean by your question? | 12 | 45 |
Better one statement with all calculations are multiple statements with easier calculations? | I'm learning c# and working on a little project i have been thinking about for a while. In it variables are influenced by different inputs and calculations. I was wondering for running more smoothly, is it better to update the variable in different lines of code with easier calculations, or to have one line of code that combines all the influences and combinations?
ex1: variable1 = variable1 + variable2\*3.1415;
variable1 = variable1- math.pow(variable3,2)
variable 1 = ...
​
ex2: variable1 = variable1 + variable2\*3.15-math.pow(variable3,2)... | Readability should be your first priority, especially when creating the first version and debugging. Once you have it working *then* think about optimising the details\* of the calculations if they are running too slowly for your needs (and ideally actually profile them, since the compiler will be optimising behind the scenes anyway).
One other thing to consider is how the order of your calculations affects precision. In floating point (a + b) + c may not equal a + (b + c), especially if the numbers have a wide range of exponents. A classic example is:
(1 + 1e20) - 1e20
1 + (1e20 - 1e20)
\*you should obviously think about picking a good *algorithm* before you start, but that's a different issue to optimising individual operations. | 26 | 19 |
What evolutionary advantage does a virus have if it kills the host? | Traits that evolve do not necessarily have to have an evolutionary advantage. Biological effects often have unintended consequences. The fact that an effect that kills the host can evolve from the properties that allow it to spread successfully is an accident and has no evolutionary disadvantage as long as it's still capable of transmitting itself to more hosts that can spread it before it kills them. | 88 | 31 |
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CMV: If a woman has a unilateral right over deciding if she wants to abort or not, a man should not be forced to pay child support if he doesn't want a child. | A strong argument can be made that no one else should have a say over a woman's choice to get an abortion or not. But that considered, then if a woman decides to keep a child against the wishes of the father, then the father should not be forced to financially support that decision.
1. A common argument i hear is, if a man is given a say over a woman's right to choose, then he has rights over her. Thats an argument i completely agree with. But a lot of people (at least in my circles) disagree with this argument when applied in reverse. If a woman decides to keep a child against the wishes of the father, then doesn't she have a right over him, if he is forced to support her choice financially?
2. Abortion gives women the ability to opt out of parentage. But any ability to opt out of parentage for men is completely in the hands of the mother. This isn't equal treatment of the sexes.
Caveat:- The ability for men to opt out of parentage should only be available as long as a women is legally allowed to abort a child, i.e, a man cant deny a child once its born or its too late to abort.
EDIT:- I quite foolishly assumed the following information was a given. I am making this argument from the context that conception has already taken place (accidentally), due to unforeseen circumstances, such as a condom break. | Child support is not for the woman, child support is for the child.
He is only forced to support his choice financially- if the child exists, it has a right to financial support from both its biological parents. If the child exists it exists because of the choices and actions of BOTH it's biological parents and BOTH of it's biological parents are held legally, financially responsible for it.
Child support is not for the mother or her choices. It's for the child due to the choices of both the parents, and is a duty of both the parents.
Edited to add:
>But any ability to opt out of parentage for men is completely in the hands of the mother.
Vasectomies, withdrawal, making sure to use a condom, discussing things with the woman before having sex, not having sex with people you don't trust, etc. are all in the hands of the mother? | 57 | 40 |
[General Sci Fi] If most planets were habitable, how important would security of an interplanetary facility be? | Suppose space travel is possible, and I'm making a top secret lab on a remote planet in the middle of a random galaxy. How much of my budget should go towards security measures? | Security measures as in keeping people from finding the planet or facility or keeping it hidden when people are living on the planet?
How cheap or common is space travel? Would your average space trucker Larry own his own ships? | 12 | 20 |
[kaiju movies] why are the militaries so stupid? | Whether it be bombing their own city, wasting time building giant mechs, or giving a nuke to creatures that feed off radiation, the military messes up a lot in these movies. Why?
Bonus points if you can figure out the three movies I’m referencing. | Modern militaries are extremely intelligent and make decisions based off of real-world facts that they've carefully gathered and tested over the course of decades or centuries. Faced with a single giant creature the answer is obvious: overwhelming and direct force to stop it as quickly as possible. A single downtown core can be sacrificed if it means protecting the larger metro area and wider economy.
* The first step is always small arms and tank rounds. HEAT and depleted uranium penetration rounds should cause massive damage to anything living. Period. Military generals not only *know* that, but base all of their core decisions off it.
* Ground penetration bombs and directed munitions can level an entire city block if necessary, and are the next obvious escalation of power.
* Given that those don't work, you now need something big enough to mount something more powerful but still mobile enough to quickly engage the enemy (which is where mechs come in)
* Finally, nukes are horrifically devastating. Especially the modern ones. Launching one at an enemy is a last desperate act to make sure NOTHING survives at ground zero. Every test that modern military generals have seen says that a modern nuke will destroy whatever it needs to.
Sadly, what military leadership doesn't understand and refuses to grasp (rightfully so, given how they got into their chair in the first place) is that Kaiju **don't follow laws of physics**. If you put a sack of flesh, muscle, and bone the size of a Kaiju leg in a testing field it couldn't stand up on it's own, let alone protect against directed fire of an M1 Abrams division. The fact that it can is baffling, and leads to more and more desperate plays that ignore moment-to-moment learning that they might gain from individual engagements.
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If the stories track long enough, the military either collapses from these failures, or learns how to fight asymmetrically against the physics-defying might of a kaiju. It just takes them a while to abandon the beliefs that got them to where they are now. | 56 | 28 |
Public schools should not offer sports or athletic programs to students at all. CMV | Athletics cost schools thousands of dollars because they often entails hiring sub-par teachers for the sole purpose of coaching a school sport (at least at my high school and in my area), taking up more property than necessary for facilities and fields which require maintenance and construction, and most importantly providing athletes with unfair treatment and the sense that athletics are more important than academics.
Furthermore on a collegiate level, class spaces are occupied by athletes whom solely made it to college through athletics and are paid to take up space in classes where many students must pay more because of the price of athletics and scholarships.
Basically, school athletics are a huge waste of money and drag down academics at the same time. | First of all "academics" are not the sole purpose of school. School is to turn you into from little kid to a mature adult. Sports are a great way to built character, teamwork, and a work ethic, that no amount of school could give you. They help you form bonds with your team-mates and provide entertainment for the community.
Now to address your money concern, HS sports often make enough money from ticket sales and fund raisers to not only fund the athletics program but to ALSO help fund the academic facilities. This even more true on the college level.
Also as people have already pointed out, with obesity and health such a huge issue, we need to give students as much motivation as possible to get active. | 34 | 19 |
Knowing what you know now about your specific field, how far do you think a person could go following a self-learning path? | Are there things self-learners will have a difficult time compensating for even when you consider the wealth of resources we have today? | If you're going to succeed in academia (past a masters or so), you NEED to be able to teach yourself things. By the time you're done with your PhD, you should be the world expert on the topic of your thesis. That means that during your PhD, you've had to learn things that other people just don't know (and thus teach yourself).
Every step of the way after that, you're expected to learn new techniques, keep up on the latest literature, and think critically about everything. Tests are essentially meaningless after a masters - even your phd defense is going to be determined by how well you answer questions about the underlying science of your thesis, not about how well you can recall biochemical pathways. | 14 | 17 |
Real life applications of paradoxes? | I'm not a philosophy major, but I love the subject and thus I have subscribed to this wonderful subreddit.
One of my favorite concepts to think about are paradoxes. I'm particular to the Paradox of the Heap because I find it very applicable to many real life situations.
I'd like to learn about more paradoxes that can be applied in practical arguments, from politics to otherwise.
So I suppose the tl;dr of this post is to ask:
What's your favorite paradox to reference in real life situations? | I once heard a conference talk in which someone explained the following "paradox" concerning expert consensus:
Three experts are brought in to determine what should be done about a situation where a well has been potentially poisoned. Each is asked the following two questions: 1) If the toxicity level is above X%, should we then close the well? and 2) Is the toxicity level above X%? The three experts answer as follows...
Expert 1: 1) Yes 2) No
Expert 2: 1) Yes 2) Yes
Expert 3: 1) No 2) Yes
If we take the majority decision on each question, it seems that the expert "consensus" is that we *should* close the well if there is X% toxicity, and that there *is* X% toxicity. Therefore, we should close the well.
*HOWEVER*, if we don't take the most popular expert opinions on each of the two questions, but instead ask each expert if the well should be closed, it would seem that the majority (on pain of violating *modus ponens*) would say that we should *NOT* close the well.
Two seemingly equally respectable approaches (with prima facie innocuous differences) to assessing expert opinion yield opposite results.
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Something I never quite understood from high school biology: What determines whether or not a gene is dominant? | For example, I have a parent with blonde hair and a parent with black hair. I'm pretty sure that, despite being blonde myself, blonde isn't -always- dominant over black. I guess I'm trying to figure out if the dominance is something that is simply inherent, or if there are other factors that drive it. | It's usually related to the nature of the protein that the gene encodes for. For example, genes coding for structural proteins are often inherited in a dominant fashion because an error in just half of those proteins is sufficient to produce a change in phenotype. On the other hand, genes coding for an enzyme are more likely to be inherited in a recessive manner because often half the protein expression is sufficient.
(This is a simplification since there are a ton of other factors that come into play, but that's the gist of it.) | 17 | 55 |
ELI5: How was the first operating system created if there were no other coding languages at the time? | Edit: holy shit this blew up | Coding languages were around long before operating systems. An operating system was added primarily to manage memory use between multiple programs. A coding language (assembly/machine code) can be run without an operating systems (and typically is in embedded systems, google 'bare metal') | 176 | 352 |
ELI5: Why the encryption strength will not increase when an encrypted message gets encrypted again? | If you use 2 different kinds of encryption, it will strengthen.
If you use 2 layers of encryption that works off the same algorithm, instead of requiring 2 passwords to solve (as you would expect), there is actually a third password that will solve both encryptions at once.
Pretend you encrypt a message that shifts every letter 5 letters over in the alphabet. Then you layer a second version of that that shifts all letters 3 letters over in the opposite direction.
Instead of decrypting by having to shift 5 forward and then shift 3 back, you could just shift 2 forward and unencrypt the message. | 44 | 81 |
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What causes the EMP in a nuclear explosion? | My next question would then be: If a nuclear bomb was detonated in a vacuum on Earth, would it still cause the same EMP?
Thanks! | A magnetic field is generated when there is a changing electric field. A nuclear blast releases a lot of electrically charged particles, and it accelerates them very rapidly. Rapid release of charged particles as well as their violent motion creates a massive magnetic field.
On the same token a changing magnetic field generates an electric field, so for simplicity you can think of the blast generating a ring of powerful magnetic field around the center, which in turn generates an electric field a little bit further away, which generates a magnetic field a little further away...
Your question asks if it would create the same pulse if it was detonated in vacuum. The answer is yes there will be a pulse, but no, it would not be the same. If the blast is in vacuum, the pulse is due only to the material in the bomb that is ionized and accelerated. If the blast is not in vacuum, the blast will not only ionize material from the bomb, but it will also ionize material from whatever medium it is in. Additional charged particles appearing as well as being accelerated means bigger electromagnetic pulse.
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Why are CPU frequencies so much higher than GPU frequencies? | Most CPUs can reach 4.8+GHz easily, whereas most GPUs struggle to get 2+GHz, why is that? | They're optimized for different tasks.
CPUs need to compute stuff in order, and to get that fast, clock speed is needed to some extend. CPUs will then try to get common operations really fast, and just take some more cycles for complicated stuff.
GPUs on the other hand are built to compute lots of independent things in parallel, and also must do quite a lot of these expensive operations that would take longer than a 4GHz cycle anyway. So they have their own sweet spot for clock speed, but more than make up for it by having more parallel units. | 32 | 18 |
CMV: I don't value the lives of children more than the lives of adults. | I see appeals to sympathy all the time using the lives of children. Somehow, something is worse or more worthy of caring if it primarily affects the lives of children.
I see no reason to value the lives of children over an adult. Logically I think it makes sense to value *adults over children*. Adults are much more likely to have accomplished something in their lives, they're more likely to be skilled in a particular field and more likely to be able to benefit society *right now*. They have had more time to build meaningful relationships with a larger number of people, and their relationships will be much more than just "they're a child/family, so I automatically care about them"
I know this is an extremely unpopular opinion. I get extremely strange looks IRL anytime I even suggest that I hold this view. So... CMV!
***Edit:*** Thanks for all the replies everyone. I can't get around to answering everyone, but I see a lot of common ideas so I want to address them here.
First of all, for clarification, the whole part about adults logically being "worth" more was more of a counter to people valuing children more. Personally, I think that all lives are equal regardless of any other factors.
The main arguments I see in this post are economic, utilitarian and biological.
Let's get biological out of the way right now. I think nature, in general, sucks. Nothing is as heartless as nature as a whole. It gets the job done, and that's about it. The argument that "we evolved to irrationally care for our young because it was/is needed to survive", while true, does not resonate with me at all. It may explain why so many people care about children more than adults, but it does not change ***MY*** view on the matter.
The utilitarian argument makes a bit more sense to me. From a strictly utilitarian perspective, people who are past their prime and are no longer "contributing" to society directly don't serve a strict purpose anymore. Likewise, a child/teenager/young person has all sorts of time ahead of them to accomplish tasks. The utilitarian argument also states that a child has more life ahead of them, so more value is being lost. I can see where this argument is coming from, but for whatever reason it doesn't seem to compel me to change my view. Something about utilitarianism being applied to human lives seems... wrong.
The economic argument was the most moving for me. We as a society spend all this time and money raising children, feeding them, educating them. If they die before they get to "repay" that investment back to society, it seems like a huge waste. Now, it still feels wrong to view people in this lens, but I deal with training employees on various topics IRL. This economic argument resonates with me quite a bit. When we spend time and money training an employee only to have them quit or get themselves fired, it's a huge bummer.
Thanks for all the new perspectives. I'm not sure that the core of my view has changed, but I certainly understand and respect the opposing argument now. It's definitely possible that upon further introspection, I'll come to change my view completely. I'll still be here replying to as many as I can if y'all still want to have a conversation. | > Adults are much more likely to have accomplished something in their lives, they're more likely to be skilled in a particular field and more likely to be able to benefit society right now. They have had more time to build meaningful relationships with a larger number of people
I think that this is *why* so much emphasis is placed on the lives of children compared to adults. Adults have already had the chance to become accomplished and to build relationships, but children that die prematurely are getting that opportunity taken away from them, which is why they garner that sympathy. They're missing out on all of life's biggest milestones. Also, we've come to expect that adults die fairly commonly but deaths of children are still relatively rare, which is why they receive extra attention. | 583 | 1,213 |
ELI5: What is the difference between computer science and computer engineering? | Computer engineering is primarily about designing computer hardware.
Computer science is primarily about the theory of how computers work and what they can do. It also tends to include "how to write computer software," but that's really a separate field usually labeled software engineering. | 22 | 42 |
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CMV: The fact that people come out of high school not worth eight bucks an hour is proof that the educational system needs to be reformed | In these times of poverty, people often talk about financial issues, minimum wage, the whole "rich bad ceos bad", and whatnot -- all fine and good, but there is one big problem that I've seen so few people, and almost no leftists, talk about.
The education system.
Right now, high school graduates -- after *twelve* long years of government schooling -- are not worth eight bucks an hour (I say eight because the fed. minimum wage is 7.25 and I'm just roughly rounding it up because very few of them are at that level). Just think about that. Have you ever thought about it before? *Twelve years* of government schooling is not enough time to make someone worth the minimum wage.
And that should be enough evidence to start a reformation of government schools so that people come out of them with long-term, high-quality, *employable* skills that can make them worth more money than that.
So frankly, instead of just talking about boosting the minimum wage (which I have problems with and am considering doing a CMV for in the future), we need to talk about changing government schools. I'm inspired by videos like Suli Break's and Prince Ea's on the educational system's fallacies if you know what I mean.
We need to make it so that experience and knowledge in a valuable, modern-day job set is what high school graduates come out with. Have hands-on training in a modern-day field (i.e. IT, construction etc.) be required to graduate from high school. Make paid experience mandatory to graduate from a university for fields that you need to go to university for (i.e. engineering, etc.). This system of leaving high school graduates unskilled, and forcing them to go to super-expensive universities to expand their knowledge, isn't working.
So instead of talking about the minimum wage, we need to look at reforming the education system. Instead of being content with the education system that is putting out people hardly worth 7.25 an hour, why not we put the greatest minds of our time together and figure out how to make high school degrees (which are worthless nowadays) meaningful and indicative of high experience?
And make it so that high school graduates can be worth twice the minimum wage, leaving high school students to work those minimum wage jobs?
**EDIT**: To clarify, when I say that these people are not worth $8 an hour, A, I understand that there are exceptions (i.e. people with really good networking skills, something schools should also be mandatorily requiring experience in to graduate), B, I was not saying that *all* of them are not worth that, and C, I am referring largely to the youth unemployment rate and the high school graduate unemployment rates. Not worth 8$ an hour doesn't mean no one will hire them; it's referring to how they are so much less likely to be hired, have harder times getting jobs, have higher unemployment rates, etc.
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | The issue is that the overwhelming majority of adults looking for work have a high school education. That makes that level of skill very easy to find. This is an issue you'll find no matter what you're teaching in school. Schools could focus on what is currently a high wage field, like tech fields, and you'd run into the same issue. When 88% of those over the age of 25 all have the same training there will always be a lot of people able to do anything that requires that particular degree. | 13 | 81 |
ELI5: How can certain foods change the flavor of a guy's ejaculate? | The things you consume affect you. They affect they way you feel and the way you look. More relevant to this, they affect the way you smell and the properties of anything you excrete.
Think about how your urine or faecal matter changes with your diet. Semen is no different. | 14 | 15 |
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CMV: Corporate Personhood should be abolished | Elizabeth Warren wants to amend it, first time I've seen a politician approach this issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accountable_Capitalism_Act
I would go further, I do not see why shareholders and directors should not be held personally liable for a company's debts, crimes, or other behaviours. I see why this has been so appealing for so long, but when companies go bankrupt/administration etc their debts are picked up by the state and the taxpayer, but the shareholders and directors walk away with all the assets.
Why shouldn't it be abolished? A company is a vehicle, if I hit someone with my car I my car isn't responsible for the accident I am. If my car is faulty or was sabotaged I can reduce my responsibility for what I have done, but its not like my car can assume the entire responsibility or liability for what I've done.
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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!* | Corporate personhood means corporations can enter into contracts and be parties in lawsuits.
Should a person be able to sue a corporation? If you answered "yes", congratulations, you support corporate personhood. | 48 | 40 |
ELI5: Why do blacklights make white stuff glow? | Ok so our eyes can only see from red to violet (red,orange,yellow,green, blue and violet). The rest, either we cannot see or we see black.
A black light produces what we call ultraviolet light. Ultra goes for what's over violet in the electromagnetic spectrum.
What you see thanks to a black light are **phosphors**. Basically a phosphor is anything that emits **visible light** in response to some sort of radiation. So a phosphor will "convert" the energy in the UV radiation from the black light into visible light (from red to violet).
The general phenomenon is called **Luminescence**. And in this case, it's called **Fluorescence** or **Phosphorescence**.
The difference is that Fluorescence occurs so **quickly**, you can see the material glow when the light is on and stop glowing when the light is off. While Phosphorescence is **delayed**, the black light (UV) absorbed by the material can release light **seconds, minutes or even hours after exposure**. | 24 | 33 |
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CMV: Our Society is Asleep. The AI/Robotics/Automation Train is going to hit HARD. | Here's a short video that dives deeper into how we are not properly preparing for the explosion of exponential technology (AI, biotech, neurotech, blockchains, space, etc.) into our social fabric and what we can do to collaborate in preparation: https://youtu.be/nsStGQ9QyFw
Many people including myself are very open to reasoning that we are prepared and there will quickly be other jobs populated that will replace those being displaced. There are lots of ways to take this and I'm very excited to help roll this conversation through.
If we don't prepare, regardless of the speed & severity of the impact, there will be additional unnecessary suffering inflicted. May as well get better global collaborations in place to reduce revolutions in social fabric. | There is one single trait that has enabled the human species to be the single most successful species on the planet.
Adaptability.
There has been a thousand things in the past that were going to cause *terrible suffering* and whatnot..
Some cause a bit, most don't.
The end of slavery was going to destroy society... the creation of many machines was going to destroy society... revolutions were going to destroy society...
Hell... the discovery the the earth *wasn't the center of the universe* was going to destroy society...
If we looked back and had better language... fire was probably going to destroy society...
| 38 | 70 |
CMV - Screws are superior to nails in every way. | I'm hardly a carpenter, but every single time I have to build or assemble something, I find myself disappointed with nails. They don't hold as well, and although they are less expensive, I typically have to use twice as many to complete the same task. I'm so concerned about this that when I do build something, I have no faith in anything that uses nails. The only downsides I find to screws are the price and possibility of splitting the wood. As for price, being able to use fewer screws offsets that, and pre-drilling holes for screws resolves the issue of wood splitting.
Now, much of this may be my inexperience in the building trades, but nothing I have made with nails has held up, while everything I've made with screws has been ridiculously solid and outlasted my use for it.
Screws are superior to nails. CMV.
Edit - My view has been partially changed. Good arguments are abundant in this thread, but these seem to be the best ones.
Shear strength - I truly had no idea nails had better shear strength. I can see specific applications where the nail would in fact be better.
Easier to use - This is a valid point. Putting hammer to nail is often easier than drilling, especially if one only has a manual screwdriver. That would suck.
Crates - It would be insane to screw crates together.
Moulding - I hadn't considered this because I use construction adhesive on all my moulding. I know that's uncommon, but even seeing the slight imperfections from finish nails irks me. No, I don't have OCD. I'm just weird and particular.
Time - Yes, nails are faster, especially with a nail gun. This is quite a valid point, but if I'm paying someone to build something and screws would be stronger structurally, then they had better not use nails to save time.
So, currently I'm revising my statement. Nails have their purpose, but most of the time, screws are superior.
Oh, and one more thing I like about screws. I'm a night owl. Most of my building occurs in my work shop between 8pm and 2am. Screws are much much quieter. However, that's just a little personal quirk, so I won't use it to support my argument.
Please keep it coming! I have already learned a great deal from you all, and though screws are still my preference, I can see the benefit of nails in some applications. I'm probably going to bed soon, but I will check back in tomorrow. :)
Edit 2 - Now that I've gotten some sleep and am conscious again, I've handed out deltas. My apologies for the delay, as I was half asleep during my last read through of the thread and my brain was already taking a nap.
Thank you all for the great feedback and information today. I really appreciate it, and I hope some other carpentry novices like myself learned a thing or two as well. :) | Advantages of nails:
* Significantly cheaper (as you mentioned)
* Any type of hammer will work with any type of nail
* Nails cannot be stripped
* It is faster to nail than screw
* 1 step process; no drilling required
* Electricity is not needed
* You can correct the angle of a nail when driving; which you can't do with a screw
* They provide a more finished look than screws, due to the lack of drill bit slot and/or rounded head.
| 208 | 300 |
Job Interview questions | I posted this question in academia and didn’t get much response so thought I’d ask here
Humanities disciples: As someone who will be going on the job market this fall, and a first-gen Phd, can you please share a question that popped up during your interview process? Maybe a question important to the process but weren’t expecting, a question that stumped you, surprised you, etc
And if you can, would you share what your answer to the question was?
Thanks very much.
I’m feeling excited but nervous about the whole thing and would like to know what I’m getting into. Feeling underprepared. | The question that you will always get, in one form or another, is " tell me about your research". Top tips for answering that:
1) talk about your dissertation's major contributions to the field, and do not only talk about your dissertation: your research is one big project, but you want to show that you have plans beyond it and you're already thinking about it.
2) talk about your dissertation in the past tense (even if you have not defended yet)
3) do all of the above in a maximum of 4-5 minutes and structure the answer with a clear intro, middle and a summary sentence at the end.
They will ask you what would you/could you teach and this is where you have to show them that:
1) you've done your research on what courses they offer and where are the gaps that you can fill
2) you have teaching experience that is relevant for them -- don't dismiss your TA experience as 'just TAing'
3) have one undergrad and one grad course ready to talk about. Have a few major books that you will read in those courses and try to come up with one cool assignment for each of them.
They will ask you if you have any questions: always ask at least one, and ask a question whose answer cannot be easily found on their website.
Hope this helps and good luck! | 19 | 15 |
Are there still things we could learn by experimenting on humans but haven't because the methods are seen as immoral? | Yeah like raising children together with no adult contact and seeing if they develop language.
Or breeding two olympic weightlifters together and then giving the kid steroids from day one and seeing how strong it is when it grows up. | 23 | 23 |
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Many developed countries have the problem of having a majority aging population, as I understand they solve this by immigration. But what happens when the developing countries they get immigrants from become developed economies? | My premise may be entirely wrong though. But if it isnt then what happens when developing countries become developed thus having citizens more unwilling to change countries and also this new developed countries may now have this issue that other developed countries are having now | Historically, when the immigrant countries turn into developed countries, then the flow of immigration just stops and so you find new immigrant countries. If that immigrant country then goes on to become even more developed than the first country, then the flow can even reverse. It's not really that common - but we have seen it to a limited extent in the USA, but maybe more commonly with Brazil, which used to have lots of Japanese immigrants back when Japan was really poor, and is now the one sending immigrants back to Japan. | 55 | 57 |
ELI5: if google fiber is far superior and not a substantial amount of money more than regular old broadband they should have no problem getting people to sign up so why isn't it available everywhere yet? | Laying down the infrastructure and planning the implementation of the fibre optic network takes a lot of time and money. It has to be built around the needs of the city and the existing infrastructure (pipelines, roads, power etc) | 19 | 15 |
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ELI5: what’s a rectifier and what is it used for? | There are two types of electrical current:
Alternating Current (ac), where electricity goes back and forth between two leads and
Direct Current (dc), where electricity goes from one lead to the other.
A rectifier changes ac into dc
An inverter changes dc into ac | 171 | 102 |
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ELI5: How do people come up with math formulas or equations by just observing the world around us? | So, there's a bit of a mix of looking for patterns, knowing what certain relationships look like, and thinking about how stuff relates. Let's take a basic example.
Suppose you have a bunch of square tables. Each table can fit four chairs round it, one on each side. But now you join two tables together. If they were separate, you'd get 2•4=8 chairs. But together, you can only get 6. You keep adding more tables in a row and seeing how many chairs you get. 3 gives 8 chairs, 4 gives 10, 5 gives 12, and so on. What about 100 tables?
One way to look at it and just spot the pattern. It goes up by 2 chairs every time. You could keep counting up by 2 and see where you get. Another way is to think about what's going on. Each table basically gets two seats. Plus, we get an extra two seats, one at each end. So if t is the number of tables and c is the number of chairs, we get that c=2•t+2. Then for t=100, c=2•100+2=202.
There are other ways to look at it. If you plot the first few numbers, you'll see it's a straight line. You can use something you maybe already know, the formula for a straight line (y=mx+c). Maths and physics are all about spotting this sort of pattern. Maybe you throw an object and realise the movement follows a parabola. You maybe also know different rules about parabolas, so you can apply them and see if the pattern fits. | 19 | 17 |
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At what point along their evolutionary chain is an organism considered to be a new species? | If you trace back the genetic lineage of human ancestors, how far back could you go and still have an organism that is homo sapiens? What is the "dividing line" and how is it scientifically defined? | It's like asking where one color on the spectrum ends and another begins, or where one ocean ends and another begins, or where space ends and the atmosphere begins. Even when there are clearly two categories, there's not always a specifically identifiable point where they transition. You can put in an arbitrary one, but it's still pretty arbitrary. | 10 | 16 |
What exactly is meant by "quantum information cannot be destroyed"? | It means that given the current state of the universe, if you knew every piece of quantum information there is to know, you should be able to perfectly reconstruct the entire history of the universe from this information and the laws of physics alone. If it was possible to destroy quantum information, this would not be possible, because there would be information that has existed in the past but doesn't exist anymore, so there would be no way to recover the lost information from the current state of the information. | 177 | 195 |
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Are the shapes of galaxies we see distored by the light from different parts of it getting to us later than others? | Given that a galaxy is thousands of light years wide wouldn't the light from a nearer part of it reach us sooner than light from a further part of it? Why aren't the images of galaxies smeared sideways sometimes because the galaxy is moving sideways across the sky relative to us? Or are some of them like that? | The key number that determines how strong such smearing or distortion effects are is the ratio of the velocity of the object/material to the speed of light. The higher this ratio, the more the material moves in the time it takes for the light to travel, and the more the image we see (from the light emitted at a given time) misrepresents the current position of the object.
Let's calculate this ratio for galaxies. The typical velocity of material inside a galaxy (the stars and gas orbiting around the galactic center) is around maybe 200 km/s or so, depending on the galaxy (how big it is, where in the galaxy the matter is, etc). The bulk motion (how the galaxy is moving as a whole, separate from its internal motion) is also typically at the level of a few hundred kilometers per second (e.g, the Andromeda galaxy is moving towards us at 300 km/s).
The speed of light is roughly 300,000 km/s. The number of zeros is giving us an immediate clue how this ratio is going to go. The ratio of 300 km/s (for the sake of nice round numbers) to 300,000 km/s is 0.001, one part in a thousand.
So that's the level of distortion we might expect: one part per thousand. In practice, it's generally not even this significant. In a particular image of a galaxy, individual stars will have moved by one part per thousand in the image, but the overall shape and pattern of a galaxy won't really have changed by that much -- the stars at some location will have moved to a new location, but other stars will have moved in to take their place. It largely balances out. Features like spiral arms in galaxies (which are not a fixed collection of stars and gas -- stars move in and out of spiral arms naturally over the course of their orbits around the galactic center) turn out to have even lower velocities than the stars themselves. The pattern velocity of spiral arms, going from memory, is something like 3-4 times slower than the motions of the stars, so the spiral shapes we see in galaxies are even less distorted.
An alternative calculation we could perform, to check this answer, is this: the linear size of a large spiral galaxy is something like 100,000 light years -- i.e., it takes light 100 thousand years to cross from one end of a galaxy to the opposite side. Let's consider those sides as the 'back' and 'front', from our perspective as outside observers. The typical orbital period for a star around a galactic center is of the order of 100 million years. So we can consider the ratio of these two values: in the time it takes light to cross a galaxy, the stars will have moved roughly 1/1000th of a full orbit. The stars in the 'back' of the galaxy will truly be 1 part in 1000 further in their orbits, compared to the stars at the front, in the images we see of the galaxy. | 22 | 15 |
ELI5: Why do bees become less aggressive/fall asleep when beekeepers pour smoke into their hives? | Bees communicate using chemicals called pheromones. The smoke blocks the pheromones so communications between bees are essentially cut. While it does calm the bees, it can also set hive production back a day or two until the smoke wears off and communications are restored. For this reason, some beekeepers prefer to spray their bees with sugar water. It keeps the bees busy licking it off one another and since it is a food source, hive production isn't interrupted very much. | 147 | 142 |
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If I wanted a sword made from materials that represent the pinnacle of modern materials science,what should it be constructed from? | Most of the time, I hear about the value of swords being made in traditional ways, such as Damascus steel. It got me wondering what Nasa might come up with if they were tasked with designing the ultimate samurai sword.
First time on the frontpage!
Here are the responses I've gotten so far:
Steel seems to be the best choice because of it's ability to be tempered differently in different parts of the sword. There are suggestions for L6/Banite, 4130, 300M. I don't know enough to say which is best.
[Metal Glass looks like the best future prospect, but I don't think it is available for consumers yet.](http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-01/new-metallic-glass-toughest-strongest-material-yet)
Graphene has some support, but it doesn't have many of the properties needed for a sword.
Also, [this.](http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ge6qm/using_modern_materials_and_metallurgy_what_would/)
Thanks, rboymtj.
| Steel.
A sword needs to have several properties - hard, so it can cut. Flexible, so it can absorb the shock of impact without shattering. Toughness, so it can take repeated impacts without fatiguing and breaking. And it has to have enough weight to provide momentum to the cut, without being so heavy as to be difficult to swing.
It is very tough to find all these properties in a single material.
But steel has a property that allows it to combine several (normally) mutually-exclusive properties in a single part: it can be heat-treated by heating it up to the transition point and then cooling it. Steel that is cooled very rapidly becomes very, very hard - but brittle. Steel that is cooled very slowly is soft, springy, and tough. Though the process of differential hardening, one can make a steel part that is very hard on the outside, but stays springy and tough on the inside - perfect for a sword.
Then on top of that, modern steels can be made very, very pure and can be alloyed with other metals (like chromium, molybdenum, nickel etc) that further alter the properties of the steel without losing the ability to be heat treated. In many cases, the tensile strength of the alloy steel is increased, which allows you to make a thinner part with the same strength. Something like 4130 or 300M can be made very strong indeed.
And finally, modern coatings can be used to add further properties like corrosion resistance and self-lubrication. You can apply friction reducing coatings like Teflon to the non-cutting portion of the blade to help keep the blade from binding.
Steel is the material you want.
DG | 597 | 869 |
Why can a console run exclusive games better than an emulator with better specs? | For example; Wind Waker on a Dolphin Emulator with specs that definitely exceed a GameCube, yet runs perfectly on the GameCube. | Lets say someone tried to teach you how to understand Japanese by giving you a book with all the rules of the Japanese language and all the words. Every time you needed to understand something in Japanese you would have to look up in that book and determine what it means in your own language. It would take you a lot longer to understand a simple Japanese sentence than it would be if it were said to you in your own language.
An emulator for a computer is like that book. The Gamecube has a different processor than your PC and so it needs a translator (the emulator) to translate the Gamecube games into a language your computer understands. There is a lot of overhead processing your computer has to do to understand the Gamecube programing so it takes a lot more effort for it to emulate a Gamecube game; the same way it would take you a lot longer to understand Japanese by having to look it up in that book. This is why it takes a significantly more powerful computer to emulate something technologically weaker in specs. | 193 | 92 |
How much of an impact does it make to complete your PhD in the US versus Europe/Oceania/etc? | I have read a few times here that US institutions prefer people who hold PhDs from the US in hiring, and I'm not sure if a similar idea holds for other countries/areas. I'm not sure if it'd be more difficult to be accepted to a grad program as an international student or a post-doc position as an international early-career researcher. Whilst I'll probably spend at least part of my career in the US due to how many research groups are there, I don't intend to live there permanently if I have an equal choice elsewhere. I may change my mind on that in the future.
After completing my undergrad + honours in Australia (in Physics, focussing on Astrophysics), I am also concerned that the "method of delivery" for the US PhD won't suit me. I'm already used to being pretty independent in research and am not looking to sit in heaps of courses anymore or do rotations; I'd prefer to identify a project and start research on day 1, if not earlier. So on that front alone, it seems like the PhD style for Australia + Europe (and maybe elsewhere) would suit me better, but I'm aware that there are other benefits for drawing it out over longer and getting more teaching experience.
**Is there any, even incredibly slight, advantage in the long term to taking either path in terms of an academic career?** There are places (and academics/groups) that I want to apply to all over the world, but the GRE requirement and processing fees for most US institutions are expensive, and I need to cut down the pool of places to apply to. Of course, I'm skimming over details for visas, funding, maybe language barriers, and even getting accepted to begin with, but those will largely have to be taken into account on a case-by-case basis. | Go to a school with a department that focuses on something you're passionate about that has funding and faculty interested in the same thing. Write interesting and relevant papers published in credible journals. Network and meet people in your field and collaborate with the best and most active people you can find. The US vs Europe thing is small potatoes vs this stuff. Chances are if you are relevant, you'll know people in Europe while working in the States, or visa versa, and those will be the contacts that hire you after you graduate. If Dr. Awesomesauce at Cal Tech likes your work, he'll hire you no matter where you go. So go where you can do the best work. | 31 | 18 |
ELI5 What is Non-Euclidean Geometry? | Euclidean geometry is based on 5 unprovable truths called Postulates. In basic modern English, they are:
1. You can draw one straight line between any two given points.
2. You can infinitely extend any given line segment in a straight line beyond either end.
3. You can draw a circle given a center point and a given radius.
4. All right angles are equal to each other.
5. If two lines cross a third, the two lines, if extended, will eventually cross each other on the side of the third line where those two lines make angles smaller than right angles. (Or, two lines that cross a third at right angles are infinitely parallel.)
Non-Euclidean geometry discards or alters at least one of these 5 postulates. Usually the 5th.
Elliptical geometry, like that on the surface of the Earth, allows for parallel lines to cross. You can see this by looking at a globe. Any two lines of longitude are at right angles to the equator, but cross at the poles. | 550 | 406 |
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Why is high-frequency sound easier to block than low frequency sound? | I noticed that if you are standing far away from a sound source, that the high freq. notes tend to dissipate more rapidly than the lower freq. notes. Also, if you play music and step outside the room, only parts such as the bass guitar carry through the foundation. Why is this?
I remember reading somewhere that sound attenuation is quadratic with frequency, but I don't know why. | Low frequency means longer wavelength.
High frequency means shorter wavelength.
To block an oscillation, you need an obstacle (a screen, a damper, a block) that is larger than the wavelength, otherwise the wave will simply go around it by the phenomenon of diffraction. If the obstacle is much larger, diffraction gets smaller and smaller until it becomes unimportant.
Even if there is no diffraction, as in a cork in a pipe, it's still a good idea to make the cork bigger than the wavelength, otherwise it gets pushed and pulled by the wave and keeps bobbing back and forth with it. If the cork is larger than the wavelength, the wave gets reflected or absorbed more easily (the obstacle doesn't move as a single unit with the wave, but instead it starts to absorb it internally).
Sounds complicated but there's a simple way to visualize it: An ocean, the water is pretty calm, small waves. A cork floating on it. An aircraft carrier floating next to the cork. Ocean waves are much bigger than the cork, but are much smaller than the battleship. Which object deflects the waves, and which one lets them pass unscathed?
However, during a huge end-of-the-world hurricane, the waves are so large that become comparable with the carrier, which then cannot deflect them anymore.
Please note that the analogy is not perfect. Large ocean waves carry more energy compared to small ones, whereas long acoustic waves carry *less* energy than short ones. Yet both small ocean waves and small acoustic waves are deflected or stopped by larger obstacles. This shows that the main factor here is not the energy, but the wave length.
When you go outside the house, you keep hearing the bass because the wave is so big, the whole building is moving with it as a single unit, so the wave just goes through it like an arrow through paper. But the high frequencies are much shorter than, say, the wall thickness, so the wall doesn't move with the wave as a single unit - instead, the wall starts to compress and expand internally, under the force of the wave, and so the wave is dissipated inside the wall.
There's also reflection on the walls inside the room, and the idea is basically the same.
TLDR: Wave physics. | 16 | 26 |
How do scientists across the world accurately repeat experiments that use very fine weight measurements when the force of gravity isn't consistent across Earth? | For the majority of experiments, the variations of the Gravitational Field are small enough that any affect on the results are minimal, and quite often not relevant.
If the experiment relies on a more accurate measurement of the force of gravity then any weights are re-weighed extensively and for very important experiments a local value of g can be calculated.
Often though, more relevant errors come from other sources which can contribute a lot more heavily to inaccuracies of results. | 14 | 27 |
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[Communication] Term for managing relationships by way of not making oneself a threat? | I can't think of a way to describe this - so I'll give an example or two.
1) Intentionally downplaying your experience to prevent an employer from believing you to be "overqualified", and not wanting to hire a "flight risk".
2) Intentionally downplaying yourself in politics so as to not appear a threat to leadership.
3) Intentionally downplaying your intent to seek office to prevent incumbents from organizing against you.
Essentially, taking action to reduce risk/threats. Wondering if there is a term for this in communication so I can look up literature/do some research. If not I think it might be interesting to research generally!
Interpersonal threat management or interpersonal risk management would come to mind but the latter deals with being rejected and the former did not turn up anything.
Appreciate replies in advance! | The international relations term for this is "assurance" or "reassurance." It plays a role in alliance politics and the security dilemma. The main authors to read on assurance in alliance politics would be Jeffrey Knopf and Glenn Snyder.
I often find that diplomacy and alliance management literature is relevant to personal relationships… | 12 | 35 |
ELI5:What makes something transparent? | ex. What is it exactly that enables us to see through oxygen but not silver? | **Simple answer:**
The gaps between the atoms is large enough that lights can pass though. (This is the incorrect answer though, but easy enough to know)
**Headache answer:**
Many people thinks that the reason light shines through transparent materials is because the atoms are spread apart enough, but that is not true. Even in very dense solid like lead, the spacing between atoms are still very large when compared to a light photon.
The reason you don't see a light shining through your solid silver plate is because the energy from the photon is absorbed. The electrons in the silver plate gets excited to a higher energy level when light shines through it, and it will be able to absorb some light photons. Oxygen lets light pass through because their electrons in oxygen need more energy to get riled up. The light is able to pass through because the electron is not absorbing them.
**ELI5:**
Imagine light is a girl in bikini running through a crowd at extremely high speed. If in front of her is another bunch of (straight) girls, the crowd moves apart letting the bikini girl run through to avoid a collision. This is oxygen.
Silver is however a bunch of sex-crazed (straight) men. They get very excited to see a bikini girl running towards them and will do all they can to stop the bikini girl in her tracks.
Substances that reflect light are a bunch of sex-crazed (gay) men. They don't want the bikini girl to ruin their party so they will do all they do to stop bikini girl in her tracks and to push her away. | 27 | 23 |
What actually is consulting? | I often hear stories about people who left academia to go into consulting. Recently a colleague told me that consulting is his plan B in case he can't get tenured, but he couldn't really answer when I asked what the hell consulting actually is. It honestly feels like some kind of an academic meme at this point.
I'd love to hear different experiences from people who have left or are considering leaving academia to go into consulting, especially regarding what a job like that actually involves. | Quick problem-solving, usually for businesses. Academics (well, those who aren't socially awkward) tend to be good at this type of thing: you absorb and analyze a ton of information in a short span of time and devise a solution.
Alternately, some big companies hire long term consultants to help with designing user experience, usually social scientists.
Non-profits very occasionally consult economists to develop for program evaluations.
Consulting is just a catchall term for "experts" who do the thinking and offer an outside perspective. It means different things to different fields. There are image and fashion consultants, but they probably aren't from Physics. | 74 | 82 |
[Star Wars] why couldn't Palpatine be sensed as a Sith by the Jedi? | Throughout the original movies Darth Vader, Luke, and Obi Wan can all sense each others presence. Vader senses Obi Wan on board the Death Star, and Luke and Vader both sense each other in Return of the Jedi. Basically all jedi and all sith can easily tell when they're nearby.
So in the prequels how come none of the Jedi have any idea that Palpatine is actually the extremely powerful Darth Sideous? | One of the first skills taught to him by his master was to mask his presence in the force. At one point they tour the Jedi Temple to show how blind the Jedi can be to what is right in front of them. Remember, when it's 2 vs. many, stealth is vital. The Jedi in their arrogance also believed all the Sith to be destroyed, and never anticipated that the Sith could have risen so high in the galaxy | 53 | 24 |
Why should laypeople trust scientists? | Perhaps one reason to trust scientists is that the institution of science is self-correcting, according to its ideals. In other words, if a scientist publishes incorrect information, another one will come along and correct it, because correcting wrong information is just one of the things science does. Let us see if that sort of reason is still a good reason when applied to another social role.
According to employers, wage discrepancies are self-correcting. If one employer sets wages which are unfair, another employer will come along and offer fair wages to attract all the good employees. So we should trust employers to set wages, because setting fair wages is just one of the things that employers do.
I do not want to get into a protracted argument about economics, socialism, and the like. I would however note that a large number of people definitely do not trust employers to make all wage decisions unilaterally, and that is part of the reason labor unions exist. And yet there is no corresponding laypeople’s union to collectively defend the public against possible abuses by scientists. Why is that?
Perhaps another reason to trust scientists is that they do not claim any inherent authority, and insist that if you do not believe them you can always see for yourself. Let us set aside whether “you can see for yourself” is really true. There are some reasons to doubt it, such as the fact that often scientific publications are not readily available to the general public, research data is not always published with findings, scientific writing often uses highly specialized terminology and statistical techniques that require a great deal of specialized training to understand, and of course some scientific investigation requires access to special equipment not available to the general public.
Again though, let’s set all of that aside and focus on “seeing for yourself.” Suppose a politician says, “In order to reduce traffic congestion, we are going to raise taxes to fund public transportation. You do not have to trust me on this, because everyone can see for themselves whether it really works. If it doesn’t work, you can vote me out of office and reduce the taxes again.”
This is a similar sort of claim to the scientist’s claim. This politician isn’t claiming to be the ultimate authority on traffic, they are just pointing toward evidence which everyone can judge for themselves, namely whether the increased transit funding really reduces traffic congestion, and whether it is worth the cost. But there is an important difference between this case and the case of the scientist. In this case, I can vote. Perhaps my vote doesn’t have a great deal of influence, but the system does offer me the chance to vote.
In the case of the scientist, I do not have any sort of vote. If I “see for myself” and disagree with what a scientist says, my only option is to become a scientist myself and publish a rebuttal. But that could take years of effort. I think it is fair to say that politicians are afraid that if they do something really wrong, the public will vote them out of office. But are scientists afraid that if they publish incorrect research, the lay public will train as scientists in order to refute them? I do not think so. I think the truth is that they are concerned almost exclusively about the reactions of their peers -- other scientists.
But then we are back to where we were before. Why should laypeople trust scientists to self-correct, if employees do not trust employers to self-correct? Let’s try one more possibility. Suppose we consider the fact that the whole purpose of science is to find out the truth, so success in science is defined by how much truth the scientist can find. In other words, we should trust scientists because they have an incentive to find the truth. This contrasts with employers, whose incentive is to make money for themselves.
Again by analogy let us consider the case of professional baseball players. The whole point of baseball is to score more runs than the other team, so we can trust players to play their best. Let us set aside the scenario in which a player is paid by a gambler to lose, just as we will set aside the scenario of a scientist being paid by a company to publish incorrect or misleading information. Both things have definitely happened, without any doubt. But let us charitably assume that such things are rare.
So we are going to assume that our baseball player and scientist are going to try to do well, according to the standards of their profession. But do we trust them not to cheat? Well in the case of the baseball player, there is a whole separate profession who judges the game. For example, we do not trust the catcher to decide whether the pitcher threw a ball or a strike. Neither do we trust the batter. That judgement is made by an umpire, who is not a baseball player, not on either team, won’t be playing against any of the players in any upcoming games, etc.
Returning to the case of scientists, a scientist could cheat by p-hacking for example. Who is the umpire? Well there isn’t one. The institution of science relies on peers to judge how much credence should be given to anyone’s work. There is not any separate profession of people who only judge scientific work and do not do their own research.
We keep returning to the same point. No matter what reason we give for trusting scientists, it seems to amount to the fact that we trust other scientists. That isn’t a very good reason, because it is circular. So if laypeople should trust scientists, what is the reason? | You make valid criticisms of the "industry" that has arisen around science, and in a way you are right that we should not "trust" scientists without some form of skepticism, but that is only an extension of the skepticism we should all have for all things.
But you are also right that we cannot take it upon ourselves to test *everything*. It's simply not possible.
So we have no choice but to trust some form of authority. And so we are forced to decide whom to trust, and we do that by looking at the historical trustworthiness of the authority.
That is the main reason people don't trust either employers or politicians. Their groups have simply not shown themselves to be worthy of that trust in the general case. The accepted theories in science, in contrast and despite your criticism, are still largely verifiably correct to the best of our collective knowledge and technology.
And, perhaps more important, when new information becomes available the theories will change to accommodate it. Not immediately to be sure, but at a speed that far outstrips any other philosophy or religion. | 29 | 41 |
ELI5: What happens in an Embassy on a day-to-day basis? | Surely in most countries there can't be that many 'lost-passport' issues that need solving, so what else do they do? (please be more detailed than 'diplomatic stuff')
Especially interested in remote countries that don't have a lot of connection with the Embassy's home country! | A lot of things, though it varies depending on the country.
The "lost passport stuff" refers only to the "Consular" office of the embassy, which deals with lost passports, any citizens who get arrested, etc. as well as issuing visas to any foreigners who want to visit the embassy's country. If it's a big country with lots of business, there can be more than one consulate - so, for example the U.S. in Italy has consulates in Milan and Naples, in addition to the "consulate general" at the embassy in Rome. On the other hand, if there's little or no business for the consulate, they can share between several countries (there is only one consulate among a smattering of small Caribbean countries, for example, and one of the officers travels around, doing one day per week in each of the countries covered).
The actual "Diplomatic stuff" is the non-consular officers, who generally maintain all of their home country's relations with the host. This can vary greatly, depending on the country. If it's an ally, there will be some military personnel monitoring any joint missions and all military cooperation more broadly. There are people who help companies do business in that country (the US department of commerce has a whole diplomatic division, called the Foreign Commercial Service, who are posted overseas to help US companies that import/export to/from the host country). There are treaties and international agreements that need to be negotiated/updated/monitored/maintained/renewed. There are politicians from one country who want to visit the other. Anyone from a visiting university researcher up to the President will pass through the embassy to find out background info, get paperwork help, get in touch with the right people locally, etc. And then the home country wants to be kept updated on what's going on over there, so there are a lot of memos to write back to Washington (and yes, sometimes there are spies).
But again, the scale varies widely depending on the links between the two countries. The largest embassies have hundreds of diplomats and many hundreds more local staff; while I've once met a guy who was stationed at the Irish embassy in Egypt, which had 3 people. | 61 | 153 |
Why is taxation/subsidies a better method of adressing externalities than price controls/min wages/price ceilings ? | In an ideal situation, taxes and subsidies simply shift a supply or demand curve and cause a change in equilibrium while price controls just force a restriction on quantity supplied or demanded by setting a price.
In reality, there are times when taxes may or may not be more useful, and price controls may or may not be more useful for a desired economic outcome. | 14 | 26 |
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Too late for a mid-life career change to statistics? | Hey y'all - was blocked from asking this on r/statistics due to low karma, apologies if this is breaking any rules here.
B.S. Business Administration - Marketing, turning 30 this year, work experience mostly in sales which I don't love. Had a community college professor that got me really interested in her stats/calc1 classes and at one point even hired on as the tutor for those classes - I wasn't the strongest math student historically but I found it really interesting and intellectually stimulating, enough to catch up in my math skills and get A's in both classes. Unfortunately, my business degree didn't require any more math (beyond occasional one-off classes like quantitative business analysis) so I didn't get to deep dive into it.
From what I've read, most people wouldn't suggest a second bachelor's, instead suggesting to get a masters in stats or data analytics. I've toyed with the idea for a couple of years now - obviously it's a large commitment, financially and otherwise.
I haven't taken a math class in roughly 10 years - is it too late to consider going back to school for this? If not, any advice to ensure this is the right path / how to find the right masters program / how to prepare? | Not too late, but you’ll need some more courses in math before going into that. You’ll need to get through multivariate calculus, and you’ll also need a course in linear algebra. You might be able to get in without a calculus-based upper-level undergraduate Mathematical statistics course, that’ll probably depend on the program. But you’ll absolutely need multivariate calculus and a course in linear algebra.
There’s no reason why you wouldn’t be able to do those courses though | 13 | 21 |
AskScience AMA Series: I was NASA's first "Mars Czar" and I consulted on the sci-fi adventure film THE SPACE BETWEEN US. Let's talk about interplanetary space travel and Mars colonization... AMA! | Hi, I'm Scott Hubbard and I'm an adjunct professor at Stanford University in the department of aeronautics and astronautics and was at NASA for 20 years, where I was the Director of the Ames Research Center and was appointed NASA's first "Mars Czar." I was brought on board to consult on the film [THE SPACE BETWEEN US](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x73-573aWfs), to help advise on the story's scientific accuracy. The film features many exciting elements of space exploration, including interplanetary travel, Mars colonization and questions about the effects of Mars' gravity on a developing human in a story about the first human born on the red planet. Let's chat!
Scott will be around starting at 2 PM PT (5 PM ET, 22 UT).
EDIT: Scott thanks you for all of the questions! | Do you think there are compelling reasons to eventually build large scale settlements on Mars, or will human presence there be limited, like on Antarctica?
If you think colonization is realistic what do you think will motivate a large number of people to move to Mars? | 254 | 3,572 |
Why can I see star clusters better when they’re in my peripheral vision? | I oftentimes find that I can see clusters of stars (sometimes just a couple slightly larger ones) better out of the corner of my eye. But tonight I observed what I’m assuming is part of the Milky Way better when not directly looking at it. In fact, when directly looking at it, I really couldn’t make out many stars.
Why might this be?
Edit: this has been super informative, thanks for all the insightful answers!! | There are 2 types of photoreceptor cells in the eye: rods and cones. Rods are more sensitive to light than cones, and they are more concentrated on the edges of the retina. Thus peripheral vision is more sensitive to faint lights. When you look straight at the stars the light falls on centrally located cones which are less sensitive to light, and you can't make out the stars. | 2,238 | 3,881 |
How (un)healthy is it for one to work nightshift? | I used to work a few weeks of nightshift at a time and always wondered what psychological and physiological affects it has on ones body? | Working night shifts has the many negative affects on the body. It changes gene expression, protein levels including hormone levels in many organs, including the heart. The processes that happen in your body at night and during the daytime are very different. During the day you are more active, need to eat, etc, this includes higher blood pressure and heart rate during the day, but when activity levels are low during the night the heart rate and blood pressure decrease. By staying awake during the dark, you are forcing your organs to work harder when they are used to working lower, and they aren't particularly flexible in that way. Eventually, cardiovascular diseases develop as well as depression. This field is termed circadian rhythms. | 32 | 25 |
How does a moving charge produce a magnetic field? | I've been learning about magnetism, and was taught that a moving charge creates a magnetic field? How does this happen? Why does this happen? What does a charge have to do with magnetism? | It can be shown that a combination of coulombs law, special relativity, and the principle of charge invariance "explain" magnetism.
Given two stationary charges q1 and q2 at positions (0,0,0) and (x1, y1, 0) respectively in a reference frame (R2). The electric force on q2 is F2=(q1*q2/(r2^(3/2)))(x2,y2,0) where r=(x2)^(2)+(y2)^(2).
Now suppose frame R2 moves at constant speed v in direction (1,0,0) with respect to frame R1. Now the two frames are relatable via the Lorentz transformation.
Skipping a long derivation we find that the electric force measured in frame R1, F1= [(gamma)(q1q2/(r1^(3/2))](x1,x2,0) - [(gamma)(v/c)^(2)(q1q2/(r1^(3/2))](0,1,0). Note that here r1=((gamma)*x1)^(2) +(y1)^(2).
We notice that in frame 1 there is an additional term in the expression for force that's in the y direction. Further examination shows that the term on the right is actually equal to the cross product of the velocity (v(1,0,0)) with the vector [(gamma)(v/c^(2))(q1/r1^(3/2))](0,0,1). This vector is our magnetic field.
This is consistent with our understanding of electromagnetism. We have derived the expression for force on a moving charge F = q( E + (v x B)).
What we have shown is that a magnetic force can be equated to an electric force in a moving reference frame, which gives us a better understanding of the fundamental relation between electricity and magnetism that maxwells equations cannot offer. This examination also helps us gain an understanding of the cross products we see in maxwells equations which are pretty weird thing.
| 12 | 43 |
CMV: I blame myself for being assaulted. I've been told I shouldn't. | A few months ago I was assaulted on a public bus by a bunch of thugs. They stole my phone and wallet and it left me traumatized in in the weeks that followed. I often found myself asking myself why it happened and I've always placed a little of the blame on myself.
For context, this was in Newark, New Jersey. High crime rate, buses are known to be target for robberies at night, the police are woefully underfunded, so much so that gang members handed out t shirts commemorating the day of the budget cuts.
I blamed myself because I knew there was a possibility of getting jumped and didn't take measures to lower that possibility. I was at the back of the bus, on my phone with earphones in, with my head down. I didn't even notice I was surrounded.
Now, it was pointed to me that I should not blame myself for the same reason a rape victim should not blame themselves for being raped. I personally think you can't compare a mugging to rape but they share similarities in that we don't live in a perfect world and the event is largely by random chance. There's always bad people looking to do bad things and it's up ourselves to lower that risk.
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Look every event happens because or a combination of circumstances. Everything bad that happens could have been stopped if the victim did something different. Your choices did contribute to the event, and you can take more precautions in the future, but that doesn't mean you should blame yourself.
You did nothing wrong, that alone means you aren't to blame for being mugged. It does not mean that you took the best course of action - it just means you did nothing wrong, nothing more or less. | 86 | 161 |
ELI5: To demonstrate the sensitivity of owls' hearing ability, we've been told that owls can hear mice running from hundreds of feet away. How do other sounds not muddle with the sounds of the footsteps? | If someone combined the voice of my friend with hundreds of other voices, it would sound like a glob of noise. How does this not happen with owls. Surely leaves rubbing together make the same amount noise as mice running, so there must be a lot of interference. How do they separate the different kinds of noise? | Different frequencies, mostly.
Ears are physically tuned to certain frequencies. In an owl, it's the higher frequencies -- the frequencies little mice make. They literally hear them "louder" than other frequency sounds.
The brain also has a way of mentally tuning in/out sounds. (Ever heard your name called in a crowded room despite hundreds of other voices?) | 679 | 1,300 |
Where does the energy to break a frozen bottle of water come from? | If I put a bottle of liquid water in the freezer, the freezer takes out heat energy in the water down to about -18 deg. C. But in the process the water expands and breaks the bottle. If the heat energy was taken out by the freezer, then where did the energy come from to break the bottle?
Is it just that some of the heat energy was converted to kinetic energy, and the freezer only took out the rest of the heat energy?
Bonus question:
How can I calculate the energies/forces involved? i.e. if 1 L of liquid water is encased in a bottle, and taken from +1 deg C down to -18, then how much force can i expect the expanding water to exert on the bottle?
Thanks!
| The way to think about this (and indeed most problems involving energy) is in terms of relative energy and relative stability.
Everything in the universe "wants" to be in as stable a state as possible. That means systems lose energy in favour of stability if they can.
Something that is suspended above the earth is in a high energy but low stability state - it would "rather" exchange its energy for stability by falling to the earth. The same is true of both nuclear fusion and fission: small elements fuse and large elements split to lose energy and gain stability by becoming more iron-like (iron is the most stable element). The same is also true of water when it freezes - it exchanges the high energy liquid state for the lower energy (high stability) ordered structure of ice. The difference in energy between the two states is called a "driving force" and determines the direction of processes in chemistry (a and b react to give c, but c does not spontaneously split into a and b), physics and biology. The driving force has the potential to do "work". An example of this would be the huge explosion that results from a nuclear bomb.
The energy lost by water when it freezes is similarly converted into work. As ice is less dense than water this work takes the form of pressure being exerted on its container as the water expands - if enough work is done, the container will break. | 21 | 30 |
Is there a scientific system for describing various patterns of bird flight (e.g. the equivalent of terrestrial 'sprinting', 'walking', 'running', etc)? | With horses you have galloping, trotting, etc., but I can't seem to find anything about bird flight. | Some common types of bird flight are hovering, gliding, thermal soaring, dynamic soaring, diving, undulating, and bounding. Not all birds are capable of all types of flight though and it is more common to classify birds by wing type than flight type. The four common wing types are elliptical wings, high speed wings, high aspect ratio wings, and soaring wings. | 137 | 448 |
How Much Of A Difference Is There Between Philosophy Of Religion And Theology? | The primary difference would be that theology operates within the confines of a particular religious tradition, applying many of the tools of philosophy of religion but assuming certain non-philosophical premises. | 15 | 25 |
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CMV: If oil and gas execs on Trumps council are prone to conflict of interest; so is Elon Musk's on alternative energy. | So let me be clear up front - I love Elon Musk as a Trump advisor; I think its good to have technology leaders as council and he seems to be all around excellent - I dont want him to leave and I am all for him giving his opinion - thats his job after all; I do not need convincing there. I guess I am trying to find a thought process where it isn't hypocritical to criticize and someone with an oil/gas background (Rex Tillerson perhaps) supporting (what he thinks is good for the country) a pro energy deregulation for conflict of interest but not think the same for Elon Musk. My thoughts being Tesla has obvious ties to electric/renewable and he has major financial stake in that.
I will not be swayed by any argument along the lines of: they want money - Elon wants whats best for the country - since its basically impossible to know intent. Perhaps both want money; or think both policies are best for the country.
I do not want to debate policy - I just think that Elon Musk supporting alternative energy is basically the same as any oil and gas exec supporting big oil. Please CMV (for my own piece of mind.)
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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!* | There is a difference between having someone be an advisor who is specifically supposed to provide informatino from a certain perspective, vs being a _decision maker_ within the government. Trump hasn't hired anyone from the renewables world into his cabinet or high positions. He has given decision making and policy making authority to people from oil & gas. | 59 | 97 |
ELI5: What’s the difference between a 32 and 64 bit processor and why we can’t just jump to a 128 but processor? | Having more bits means that a processor can work on larger numbers and allocate larger amounts of memory.
32-bit processors are limited to about 4gb of RAM while 64-bit processors can theoretically address up to 16 exabytes of RAM.
32-bit means that a microprocessor can execute 4 bytes of data in one instruction cycle while 64-bit means that a microprocessor can execute 8 bytes of data in one instruction cycle.
The reason we haven't designed a 128-bit processor is because there is no practical reason for doubling the basic register size. At this time we don't need that much more RAM or instruction size.
So we totally could go to 128 bits, but there's no point because would have no practical purpose for it. At least not yet. | 49 | 22 |
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How can maggots eat rotting flesh and not suffer from the microorganisms present? | If a human were to a slab of chicken that had been left out for a few days they would surely get food poisoning. yet maggots live entirely on dead and rotting flesh, how do they not get ill? | Maggots possess a wide array of bactericidal or bacteriostatic agents in the lower regions of their digestive system that are effective against both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria (such as E. coli, Salmonella, MRSA). These molecules include:
* Antimicrobial peptides (e.g. defensins)
* Proteolytic enzymes
By the time the food is fully digested, what is excreted contains relatively little bacteria at all. For more detailed information, check out Mumcuoglu, *et al.* 2001. | 54 | 112 |
Eli5 Aircraft radar not working at low altitude | I have been playing Grand Theft Auto V story mode again, a yearly tradition of mine, and a new pc built this year. There is a mission where you have you have to chase a jet owned by a private militia called Merryweather. The company is cleared for US operations, so the air force base in game will protect them if your private plane is spotted on radar, until you and their jet fly far enough away from the USAF base. Also, there are side missions where you traffic guns and make drops to buyers by air; sometimes, you need to stay at low altitude because local lawmen might be monitoring air traffic
It has me bamboozled why the radar will not detect planes at low altitude or on the ground? If it happens in real life at all | Primary Radar works by bouncing radio waves of objects and "listening" to the reflection. That works great on the sky where there isn't a whole lot of stuff aside from planes.
However if you are very close to the ground the waves will also get reflected by stuff like houses, trees, large rocks or mountains. This makes it hard/impractical to use primary radar to detect aircraft very close to the ground | 32 | 28 |
[DBZ]How do they enforce the gates of hell? | Sorry maybe my question is answered in some of the anime, my only knowledge of dragon Ball is from the manga. Also, I hope that names I'll use are correct for you, I read them in French and I know some of the names are different:
When Goku dies his first time, while fighting Radditz, he meet King Emna, who decides who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.
He tells Goku that he sent Radditz to hell obviously and even if he put up a fight, he handled him.
Goku is impressed and actually wants him Emna to train him but God tells him that Kaïo is stronger than Emna.
Kaïo seems to me to be powerless against Vegeta, let alone Freezer. If Emna is not that strong, how does he forces strong bad guys to go to hell?
I remember something about people in hell not having their old body, but Emna also says something to Goku about him being foolish to risk go to on the "snake road" when he can go to heaven. What I get from this is that people keeps their bodies and strength before being sent to hell. | We have some examples of how the afterlife handles this, most of them are noncanon though.
- King Kai is able to train Yamcha, Tien, and Chaotzu to the point where they're able to effortlessly handle the entire Ginyu squad in an anime filler segment. This implies he's either a lot stronger than He lets on, or he's able to train enforcers to be strong enough to handle just about anything. Remember, at this point the Ginyus are the strongest non-Freeza fighters in the galaxy.
- Even if that doesn't count, Tien puts up a pretty good fight against imperfect Cell in a canon encounter. This implies he's strong enough to solo just about anything short of an SSJ by this point, and King Kai's training is the only reason that makes sense.
- in one of the movies, a concentrated evil called Janenba shows up and starts wrecking hell. The gods enlist Goku and Pikuhan who were fighting in an other world tournament at the time for the title of strongest. Goku was around SSJ3 at this point, and Pikuhan was on the same level, so it implies the Gods are pretty routinely training warriors up to this level, and will enlist them when evil fighters show up and start wrecking the place. | 24 | 16 |
If your goal was to be a well-rounded programmer, and were granted perfect fluency in 5 languages, but only those 5. Which would you pick? | You are not able to read any different languages from these 5, but can read derivative languages as much as you would be able to anyway (i.e. PHP -> Hack, and vice versa) akin to real life
*You cannot, however, write in the languages that you can read* | You can read derivative languages? Cool.
* C
* Perl
* Classical LISP
* ML
* Smalltalk
And that covers basically every language as a derivative, as long as nobody shows up with COBOL or Forth code. | 30 | 31 |
How does the human body generate heat? | At the chemical level, most body heat comes from the hydrolysis of ATP. ATP is the primary molecule used to fuel all the useful reactions in a cell, and about 60% of the energy from ATP hydrolysis goes to heat rather than to the reaction. | 18 | 18 |
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ELI5: If all chemical reactions are the result of creation/termination of bonds between the electrons how is it that the number of protons identifies the chemical properties of an atom? | Number of protons decides the electron configuration of atoms. And so has the most significant impact on it's chemical properties.
But different isotopes (same proton number different mass) can have an impact but usually it just effects speed of reaction etc not major chemical properties since isotops share the same electron configuration. | 10 | 35 |
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CMV: The income-inequality arg claims that the top 1% doesn't pay their fair share. A common counter arg to this claims that the top 1% pays about 50% of all taxes. From what I can tell, this counter argument doesn't add up and only convinces me further that the top 1% isn't paying their fair share. | In recent years, and especially with the Bernie uprising, many people have made the claim that the top earners in the US are not paying their fair share in taxes. Claims include that they hide money overseas, find legal loopholes, or pay politicians for tax breaks, etc.
Example: http://www.americansfortaxfairness.org/issues/
A common counter claim I keep seeing is that the top 1% pays 45-50% of all taxes, while the bottom 50% pays almost nothing in taxes, and for this reason we should be inclined to think that the upper class is being successfully taxed at a higher than appropriate amount.
Example: http://taxfoundation.org/blog/top-1-percent-pays-more-taxes-bottom-90-percent
But this is not convincing to me because it assumes the wealth distribution is somewhat linear.
To simplify my argument, I'm going to use a toy population of 100 people. In this first scenario we will picture a distribution where each person makes 1 dollar more than the person below them. So one person makes $1, one person makes $2, etc...and 1 person makes $100. If you assume the wealth distribution is like this (it's certainly not), and for a simple upper bound we use a flat tax where everyone pays 35% of their income, we should expect the taxes paid by the lowest 99% to be sum(1..99)*0.35 = $1697.85. The top paid person making $100 would thus pay $35. In this distribution, one would believe it fair that the top 1% should pay 35/1697.85 = 0.02, or %2 of taxes.
(One can see that if we were to apply tax brackets, we would expect the top 1% to pay a bit of a higher ratio than this, but we're not trying to show that they should pay more, so the flat tax upper bound is satisfactory for this argument.)
But we don't live in a society with a linear income distribution. Let's adjust it to be a distribution where everyone makes $1 except for one person who makes $100 (which is not a correct distribution, but this is to get you thinking about how the math changes for a distribution with dramatic income inequality). If we recalculate using the 35% flat tax upper bound we see that the bottom 99 people pay 0.35*99=$34.65, while the richest pays $35. So the top 1% ends up paying basically 50% of taxes. Again, we would expect this ratio to go up if we apply tax brackets, but we're not interested in showing they should pay more.
Yes this is a toy distribution, but it's to illustrate a point that the counter argument seems to stem from the assumption that we live in a society with a reasonable income distribution. So am I missing something? Can anyone make the math of the counter claim work out so that even in a society where the top 1% makes orders of magnitude more than the bottom 99%, they shouldn't be expected to pay about half or more of taxes?
**Edit: Some clarifications**
"Fair" in this case means "what the law says they should be paying". I'm not interested in debating "what people say the law should say they should be paying".
It all seems to boil down to this: [Given our current marginal tax brackets](https://www.dinkytown.net/java/TaxMargin.html), and our current income distribution [(17.5% of income goes to the 1%)](http://www.wid.world/), calculate how much we expect the top 1% of income earners to be contributing to the total amount of taxes collected from all earners. I am trying to do this myself but I haven't crunched numbers like this in a while and I would like someone to double check me.
If someone can show me mathematically that under current marginal tax laws and given our current income distribution we project the top 1% to pay less than 45% of all taxes paid, then I will award a delta. If it turns out we expect them to be paying between 45% and 50% of all taxes, then no one should be surprised, they are paying their fair share, and I will award a delta. And if it turns out we expect them to be paying more than 50% of all taxes, then I am right, they are not paying the taxes we expect them to be paying, and no deltas will be awarded. | You have to compare what they earn to what they pay. In your example, the top 1% paid half of all taxes because they earned half of all taxable income. In reality, the top 1% earn 20% of all taxable income. Paying 50% of all taxes is 2.5x what you would expect under a flat tax. This is much higher than the rest of the population, but whether it is fair is an arbitrary opinion. | 11 | 36 |
ELI5: How does shining a specific light on your teeth for a half an hour at a time actually whiten your teeth? | The LED teeth whitening light will not make your teeth whiter however it will accelerate the teeth whitening gel typically applied before the light is applied. The after effect is the light causes the gel to react quicker when breaking down tough to fight stains. | 13 | 35 |
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CMV: Depression, anxiety and other mental health issues especially among Gen Z and Millennials, has began to be treated lightly and too often thrown around & glorified/romanticized. | Purely from my observations especially on social media, so many people within the Millennial-Gen Z age range have been treating topics of mental illnesses like depression & anxiety too lightly.
I have no intention to say them saying they have depression/anxiety/other mental illnesses is not valid, especially those that are actually clinically diagnosed. I'm talking about memes like "I have crippling depression" or "I need serotonin" & self-diagnosis.
(Although I think self-diagnosis is helpful to see what you COULD have, it should not be tantamount to an actual professional diagnosis.)
To some degree, I also think this has made a culture of glorifying/romanticizing being mentally ill because it has become part of mainstream media. Take 13 reasons why and its fans & how they defend characters within it, even though the show is flawed in how it depicts mental illness.
Or manga and anime as well - most protagonists are loners or outcasts and are described "anti-social", due to this, these personality traits have become revered and associated with someone that is "cool" or "smart", making it desirable even though it just leads to more isolation which inevitably leads to sadness.
I do not think this is inherently their fault or they are "doing it to get attention", but I do think that it is a fault in the sense that they don't think any deeper of the effects their claims have on other people that might actually be experiencing symptoms of clinical depression/severe anxiety, and it begins to be treated too lightly or not thought of as something serious.
What I'm saying is - it becomes a personality trait, or worse, a passing "self-deprecating" joke.
It feels too shallow of an understanding of mental illnesses, but I do know that I am also not an expert and there are various forms and ways of experiencing their symptoms and not everyone can be diagnosed.
Would like input on this; this has been a view I've held for a long time and I've started to notice my own prejudices getting the best of me - like thinking my friends are "exaggerating" or not thinking critically about their problems and just turning to emotional responses (like being sad, complaining, crying, etc.) even if their problems seem like they could be easily fixed.
Another thing I want to discuss: what draws the line between experiencing depression (like literally being physically and mentally hindered from moving/going forward) and simply avoiding to fix your problems even when it is easily fixed? | If it leads to more people being willing to admit it and get help, does it matter? Shouldn’t the stigma around mental illness evaporating be looked on as a good thing?
Also, if you’re avoiding your problems and refusing to fix them, you obviously have some mental issues that you need to work out. | 153 | 1,059 |
ELI5: Why do animals make/understand eye contact if most of them don’t have a wide array of facial expressions and rely more on body language? | EDIT: I got the answer I was looking for but if you think you have a better one be my guest :) | Lots of animals use sight as an important tool. For instance, hunting. As such, being aware that something is looking at you can be important. Whether it is to know you are attracting the attention of a predator (freezing when a cat looks at you), or getting noticed by prey (like a cat pausing in its stalk). Even though it isn't being used to necessarily convey an expression, it contains important information, like "danger!" | 62 | 243 |
[Futurama] If the Planet Express ship moves the entire universe around it instead of moving, what happens if they build another one and both work at the same time? | When ship A is moving it treats ship B As part of the rest of the universe, and when ship B starts moving too, then ship A ' s stationary position relative to a universe in motion is treated by ship B as a vessel that is for all intents and purposes in motion.
So even if they start moving at the exact same time that same principle should apply: they treat eachother as part of the rest of the universe. And when either ship is moving the universe around itself (or when both ships are) the other treats it like it would treat a ship in motion.
It's a matter of redundant relativity. --or rather i should say a *principle* of redundant relativity; because matter of redundant relativity causes itself and a sizeable portion of the universe to implode... like those poor poor Osmonds... | 83 | 103 |
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ELI5: Why do countries follow the rules of war? | How can something be internationally illegal if you are at war? For instance, why couldn't Germany kill PoWs? What's stopping them?
EDIT: or, for instance, choosing not to destroy certain types of buildings? There are many more | Countries generally follow the rules of war out of a desire to protect their civilians and prisoners, out of a moral desire to avoid unnecessary loss of life, and out of an ethical commitment to upholding treaties they've ratified.
A nation actively involved in a war also possesses strategic reasons to follow the laws of war. A nation that violates the laws of war might provoke the international community to clamp down on that nation, might provoke neutral(s) to intervene, or might just provoke horrors if that nation loses the war.
Really, though, everything is situational. During WWII, some nations did violate the rules of war -- because why not? There was no international community, and everyone was already at war. Nothing to lose. Of course, a lot of those folks ended out being imprisoned/executed for violating the rules of war, but had the Axis won the war, they'd probably have gotten off scott free. | 22 | 31 |
ELI5 How exactly does ADD/ADHD affect the brain? | I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD for about 8 years now, and have been curious about it for a while. I know the symptoms (unfortunately), but am wondering what causes them directly. | The part of your brain that is responsible for executive-centered tasks such as organization, prioritization, focus, and attention, is chemically under-stimulated. It is said people with ADD can not focus; this is totally wrong! We can absolutely focus, but we can not choose what to focus on. We are slaves to whichever channel our brain flips to in that moment. | 236 | 305 |
[Diary of a Wimpy Kid] What's the worst thing Greg Heffley has done? | Book not movie version.
My knowledge is sketchy but I want to say throwing apples at Peggy; since in the books she didn't do anything to deserve it and it's just plain battery/assualt. Plus he's hitting a girl.
He probably did worse; but that's the best example from my limited recollection. | In terms of overall effects? I'd say dumping the deviled eggs in the Snellas' potted plant. It literally causes them to move out of their house after a few months because they can't find the source of the smell. | 21 | 15 |
ELI5 If the US raises the minimum wage to $15/hr, what's keeping inflation and/or cost of living from skyrocketing? | The fact that every other raise in the minimum wage has resulted in the price of goods increasing by $0.10-$0.25 on average for every $1 the wage was increased. There will be some inflation, but it is more than offset by the new purchasing power of those getting the increase.
Now if you were to suddenly double the pay everything would be in chaos and all but the big stores with large volumes of business would not be able to keep up with labor costs as there is a lag between when you start to pay people more and that money gets spent on things. But if you ease into it with say $0.50-$1.00 increase a year you will not run into that trouble. | 928 | 2,103 |
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ELI5: When I stare at a glow-in-the-dark object in the dark, it appears dim, but if I adjust my eyes so that the object is in my peripheral vision, it appears much brighter. What gives? | Very confused | You have two different kinds of light receptors in your eyes - rods and cones. Half are good in the daylight (and see colours), half are good at night (and see black & white).
You have more rods (the B&W night time receptors) on the outskirts of your eyes, whereas the cones are concentrated in the centre - hence at night, it can be easier to see things when they're in your peripheral vision. | 19 | 31 |
ELI5: why are humans the only ones that require cooked food/water when most other species can eat/drink and be merry? | Cooked food “preprocesses” it for our digestive system allowing more of the nutrients to be extracted, thereby reducing the amount we have to eat and getting more benefit from what we do eat. It’s likely this contributed to the increased size of human brains vs what existed prior to cooking. This likely started over a million years ago. You could say cooking food was required for humans to evolve to what we are now. | 66 | 16 |
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ELI5: If the average human heart beats 72 beats a minute. How can athletes have a resting heart rate of 40? | Please explain why/how does an athlete have to be calmer within? | Athletes have very high aerobic capacity, because they regularly work out at a very high exertion level. As a result, their very fit hearts can pump all the blood their resting body needs at only 40 BPM.
It's not a calm/Zen thing, it's a fitness thing. | 34 | 16 |
Is philosophy dead? | In 2009 Stephan Hawking said "fundamental questions about the nature of the universe could not be resolved without hard data such as that currently being derived from the Large Hadron Collider and space research. “Most of us don’t worry about these questions most of the time. But almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead,” he said. “Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics."
In the given context, is metaphysics still relevant? Also, would it not be better if philosophers tried to explore epistemology more - considering we live in information epidemic and it is of immense importance - to know what is knowledge and what is not? | Philosophy and sciences are interrelated, and Hawking fails to recognize that (many) scientists take for granted many basic assumptions (epistemology/ontology) that actually are the result of philosophical development. Mario Bunge has great texts about this, and illustrates well how bad philosophy leads to bad science. | 111 | 73 |
CMV: Voting for the lesser evil is a better option than voting for a third option | There's always two parties or two party coalitions in elections and lately it seems everyone I know keeps voting not for the option they support, but against the option they don't want to win.
The emphasis in public discourse seem to be about absolutely not letting the other side win.
This of course is a reasonable thing to do as it can prevent an abhorent option from winning the elections and then ruling the country into a worse future.
But I've seen people say we should instead ignore that and just vote to support the option we want to win, even if it has no chance ... which will certainly take votes away from the lesser evil option that could win - effectively handing the victory over to the greater evil! | suppose you have a small group of issues you vote upon, like environmentalism or gay rights or feminism or racial equality.
It makes sense to threaten voting for a third party because then the core parties need to cater to your whims or they'll lose your votes. You also need to vote for them if your core parties refuse to cater to you, or your key issues won't be met.
Of course if they compromise to you then you should change your vote but with no competition for your vote then the two parties can just ignore you. If you think your issue is very important you may be willing to take a loss to send a message. | 240 | 782 |
ELI5: how does salt/a salt water rinse help mouth ulcers or a sore throat? | I understand that it can help, but I don't understand why it helps. Could it be used for things outside of the mouth and throat? | Water follows salt, and bacteria need water. After they get pulled out of the infected area by the salt in the water, the salt pulls out the water inside the bacteria too, and that's how they die. To answer your second question, yes it can be used in other areas. In medical situations there's something called *normal saline*, which is water that has just a tiny bit of salt in it, and this is used most often to clean wounds and dilute liquid medicines for use in IV preparations. | 15 | 15 |
ELI5: How is it possible that steel has a scent? | Some metals produce volatile compounds when binding with oils from the human body, such as when they are handled. These can produce a taste or smell (the familiar taste of pennies for instance) even if the metal itself does not have much of either on its own. | 21 | 34 |
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How do brazil nut trees absorb so much selenium from the soil? | Also how does Amazon rainforest soil have so much selenium? | I actually studied selenium phytoremediation during grad school. Selenium is primarily found as selenate in the soil (but can also exist as selenite and other forms). Selenate is taken up through sulfate transporters due to its chemical similarity. Once taken up by the plant, selenium is converted into different forms including the amino acids seleno-cysteine and seleno-methionine, as well as other organics. Brazil nut trees may have a sulfate transporter in the roots (SULTR1;1 or SULTR1;2) that has a higher specificity for selenate over sulfate, or may have other enzymes in the selenium metabolism pathway that show up-regulation compared to other plants, allowing it to pull more selenium out of the soil. | 2,127 | 4,165 |
ELI5:When a bullet hits a bone and shatters it how does modern medicine fix it? | With people getting shot in movies and TV shows all the time I wonder what would happen if it hit a bone. I can't grasp my head around how a doctor can repair something like that | Osteopathic med student here. Very complex situations with bone fractures will usually result in a bone graft. A surgeon will take a section of bone from somewhere else, one place would be from a donor. A shattered bone is referred to as a comminuted fracture, or when the bone is in *at least* 3 pieces. The main objective is for the surgeon to piece the bone back together. In the rare instance that they can't and the body isn't able to execute healing properties, some very important decisions have to be made. It's important to understand that very rarely is a surgeon unable to piece together a bone. | 31 | 41 |
ELI5:Why are some pale skinned people able to tan easily but others just burn and peel? | The color in skin is from a pigment called melanin. Melanin protects the skin from UV rays in sunlight. Too much UV causes a sunburn. Depending on your genes, you make a mix of eumelanin (brown color) and pheomelanin (red color). The brown blocks UV best. The red can actually make the UV do more damage. Fair skinned people all look pale, but those with more pheomelanin will burn more. | 5,319 | 9,786 |
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ELI5:How do physicists use complex equations to explain black holes, etc. and understand their inner workings? | In watching various science shows or documentaries, at a certain point you might see a physicist working through a complex equation on a chalkboard. What are they doing? How is this equation telling them something about the universe or black holes and what's going on inside of them?
Edit: Whoa, I really appreciate all of the responses! Really informative, and helps me appreciate science that much more! | Imagine you have a box with two holes. You can't see inside of the box, so you're limited to interacting with it through the holes. But you want to learn about the box.
You see that if you put a marble in one hole, half a marble comes out of the other. You notice that if you put eight marbles in one hole, four marbles come out of the other.
You get lots of observations and eventually you start to find a pattern. You'll write something like
*MARBLES_IN = 2 x MARBLES_OUT*
That's basically how science works. We can't see inside black holes, but we know how matter interacts with it, and we can measure the light and radiation coming from it. So scientists can write equations outlining its behaviour with the outside world.
But we want to learn more about *what's inside black holes*, even though we can't actually see inside. So let's take another look at our box.
We know that only half of the marbles we put in actually come out. So we think about other stuff we know and realize that nothing really disappears. Like Bob might tell you your pokemon card disappeared, but you know that he's really hiding it somewhere.
Most likely, the box follows the same rules as the rest of the world. (We assume the basic laws of physics hold constant everywhere in the universe). So therefore, the other half of the marbles must be hiding in the box (like your Charizard card was hiding in Bob's backpack).
So we write *MARBLES_IN = MARBLES_HIDDEN + MARBLES_OUT*. Therefore, we can combine this with our last equation to get *MARBLES_HIDDEN = MARBLES_OUT*.
That's exactly how scientists work with black holes. We know how gravity works outside of black holes, as well as heat, light, and lots of other things. We also have equations describing black holes. So if we put the two together, we can learn about the black hole on the inside. (For example, if the equation for the gravity of black holes looks like the equation for the gravity of Earth, maybe there's some similarities going on). And anytime we make a model, we check it with observations to make sure it's accurate | 1,979 | 1,306 |
Why does birth control fail? | If a woman takes it exactly as prescribed, or has an IUD, then how can they get pregnant? Why is it only 99% effective? | A full answer to this would be extremely long and involve a lot of "we don't know."
There are a lot of mechanisms geared towards reproduction, and biological mechanisms aren't precisely engineered. They have some tolerances built-in, and these vary from person to person (and from cycle to cycle!).
The combined oral contraceptive contains progestin and estrogen. These work to inhibit ovulation. When the pill was first released, the dose was four times higher than it is now, which wasn't safe, long-term. The dose was decreased. Estrogen is still a risk factor for clots -- but so is pregnancy. So we have it at a tolerably safe dose with a significant reduction in risk of pregnancy.
Let's get more specific: the most effective form of birth control we have is Nexplanon. When Merck was replacing their previous contraceptive implant, Implanon, with Nexplanon, they did a study on all the causes of failure in Implanon.
Again, this is the most effective contraceptive we have. It is 99.9%+ effective. It is more effective than tubal ligation.
Of the 127 causes that they found:
* 84 were a failure to insert implant -- one of the biggest changes between Implanon and Nexplanon was a package redesign to make it much harder to neglect to insert the device, plus changes to protocol to require the provider to check that the device is present in the needle prior to insertion and absent after insertion.
* 19: incorrect timing -- that means that the patient was either already or imminently pregnant at the time of insertion, or became pregnant in the first week after insertion.
* 8: interaction with hepatic-enzyme-inducing meds -- progestin is digested by a set of liver enzymes that some other medications up-regulate.
* 3: expulsion -- the device came out because it was poorly-inserted.
* 13: product/method failure: as in, unexplained.
There were some theories that those 13 unexplained cases may have been related to obesity, because fat tissue is hormonally active and increases the volume of distribution of the medication.
---
For IUDs, it's also the case that most failures are due to the IUD not actually being there, or placement being poorly-timed. | 1,121 | 2,261 |
Does any other social science major have this problem? | I become extremely frustrated when I try to discuss current issues or politics with laypeople. Someone who studies a natural science would never be questioned because they are seen as experts in their field. Whereas people always disagree with me on established facts that I have studied at university, and think they know everything better without having done any research on this topic. Especially in psychology, laypeople tend to think that they are all "intuitive psychologists" but actually, studies show that they are not. They lack empirical knowledge about this subject. For instance, I'm a European Studies major and so I've studied European history extensively, and yet my parents, who never even went to university, claim to know everything about European history much better than I did (and they graduated from high school around 25 years ago).
This frustrates me to no end..why do we social science majors not get enough respect? | I think a lot of it comes from the fact that people have personal experience with the substance of many social sciences. Not so with hard sciences, at least on any meaningful level. The perception that social sciences are "easier" means they're not thought of as rigorous enough to keep layman out, and everyone can have a valid opinion.
Because social sciences affect us so directly and transparently, you hear a lot more from talking head social scientists on the news - historians, psychologists, economists. Talking heads disagreeing over issues where people have deep seated beliefs, which make them more likely to reject a particular perspective. When was the last time you heard to geologists debating something on the news?
I think the perception is you can talk yourself through a social science, so every opinion is valid, not realizing the type of work that goes into real studies. Regarding economics, many people think of it as pundits predicting the future (or disagreeing about the past) for macro or business generally, rather than a descriptive behavioral science. Other disciplines have similar problems with a prescriptive v. descriptive misunderstanding.
tl;dr: people think social sciences are easier, and people have more experience/interaction with social sciences | 42 | 58 |
ELI5: Why is darker skin an adaptation to more sun if dark colors absorb more heat? | ELI5: The darker skin is the result of more of a pigment called melanin. The melanin helps to absorb sunlight, and heats the body, rather than causing damage to our genes.
ELI20: The darker skin is the result of more of a pigment called melanin. The melanin helps to absorb the UV radiation, and heats the body, rather than causing mutations in our DNA which link thymine together into pairs called dimers. Our body can either utilize blue light to break apart these thymine dimers in a process call photoreactivation, or the bad portion of code can be clipped out, and a proofreader DNA processor (polymerase) can read the opposite strand of DNA to restore the code in a process called nucleotide excision repair. Sometimes this repair process fails. If too many mutations accumulate, a skin cancer can manifest. Basal cell carcinoma is the most common and is caused by chronic sun exposure. Melanomas are less common, but more deadly, and they are associated with acute sun exposure (like a bad sunburn). White people have evolved to allow more sunlight to penetrate cells, thereby synthesizing enough Vitamin D even in winters at northern latitudes where a black person would not thrive without supplementation.
ELICaveman: Arrfhh. Black good sun. White good snow. Arrehghdg. | 1,843 | 684 |
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[Independence Day] Was Russel really abducted by the aliens? | Russel famously was...sexually...abused/probed by aliens, or so he says. He certainly seems to believe it, since he announces "I'm back" when he destroys the first ship.
Were the aliens really conducting programs of this kind prior to the invasion? And would they return someone they'd abducted? Why? I got the impression that they arrived - and attacked - rather suddenly. I know one crashed at Roswell - was that part of the science program? An advanced scout? | The novelization explores some of this. At first, Casse doesn't recognize the aliens. Later he realizes this is because of their exosuits, as they look exactly as he remembers them once they are out of the suits. | 63 | 85 |
CMV: the “gatekeeping” of trans healthcare is completely logical and should stay as is |
I saw a post on a different subreddit about how much gatekeeping there is in the trans community and it’s difficult to transition, while I do understand where they are coming from (it’s taking me 3+ years to even begin to transition) but it’s for safety reasons, because if you have made a mistake and end up not actually wanting to transition after you’ve taken hormones, it can real cause some serious damage, and like a famous case that’s come up recently, that person could go and sue the gender clinic and then make it even worse for trans people | The concerns you mention also exist for a host of other medical procedures, yet we do not apply similar standards to them.
Regret rates for hormonal treatment and surgical reassignment are very low, and the evidence indicates that cases of desistance are more often about social backlash or medical complications, than because the person was initially misdiagnosed.
With that information in mind, why should transgender related medical intervention face this disproportionate scrutiny? | 48 | 114 |
ELI5: Monsanto Protection Act | I've read other ELI5 regarding why Monsanto is bad, but I don't get the Monsanto Protection Act. What is it? All the articles I read are saying it's bad but don't explain what it is in an understandable way. | Genetically engineered crops are regulated. Once they get approved, farmers can grow them. However, if someone screws something up (like the environmental assessment), the approval can be revoked. This means farmers might be in the position of having crops that were legal when the planted them but illegal now. The thing everyone is up in arms about right now allows farmers to request that the USDA, if they deem it fit, to allow the planted crops to be grown as normal that season and not be destroyed until the GE crop in question can be officially cleared for cultivation again.
td;dr This thing isn't to protect Monsanto, that's just sensationalist nonsense, it is to protect farmers. | 51 | 25 |
ELI5: Why are hypotheses used when doing research? | If the point of doing research is to figure something out, then why does the scientific community care about your guess before you ever do any experiments? | Let's say you want to figure out what makes grass grow.
How are you going to do that? What should you measure? There are a billion things you **could** measure, and billions of experiments you **could** run, but which ones should you focus on?
If you have a hypotheses (such as "I think grass needs oxygen to grow") you can easily design an experiment, test it, and either validate or reject your hypotheses. That is scientific progress.
If you don't have a hypotheses, you are likely just doing random stuff and it's hard to *learn* anything. ("I added blue confetti, and the grass still grew") | 56 | 15 |
My gym professor in high school told us that after a hard running session, your pulse calms better if you walk for a bit after running, rather than stopping completely for a rest. Is there any truth to this? | Sorry if my question is poorly worded, English isn't my first language. | While you are running, the contracting muscles in your legs help the heart circulate blood through your body. Once you stop, that assistance is no longer available. That makes the blood pressure drop as blood begins to pool in the legs and feet. That's why some people get dizzy after an abrupt stop. Unless you keep moving to help the heart circulate the blood, blood pressure may get so low you can actually pass out. Although there doesn't seem to be any medical evidence that a cool-down walk will help your heart rate recover faster, it's still a good idea to do so to keep from passing out. | 310 | 344 |
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