post_title
stringlengths 9
303
| post_text
stringlengths 0
37.5k
| comment_text
stringlengths 200
7.65k
| comment_score
int64 10
32.7k
| post_score
int64 15
83.1k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
ELI5: How do scientists know the exact number of protons, electrons and neutrons present in an atom? | Before any concept of subatomic particles, people knew about atoms and elements via a wide array of experiments (which could be detailed, but isn't really relevant to this story). When you have a purified sample of an element, you can determine how much an atom of it weighs, and so we start with knowing a bunch of elements and their atomic weights.
Enter Dmitri Mendeleev. He notices that if you arrange the elements by increasing weight, you end up with repeating groups of elements that are chemically similar. This was nice, except people knew something wasn't quite right with it, because you had to do a couple tricks to make similarly-acting elements end up in the right groups (such as swapping the by-weight ordering of tellurium and iodine or cobalt and nickel). Once this was done, the elements gradually got numbered using their place in the table: 1 is Hydrogen, 2 is Helium, etc. The numbers didn't mean anything to anyone, they were just useful identifiers, and they were called atomic numbers.
Later, Joseph J. Thomson is working on figuring out what is going on in electric discharge tubes. He discovers that tiny particles are being discharged from the cathode in those tubes, and he managed to measure the ratio between their charge and mass. He calls those particles electrons.
Next we go to Ernest Rutherford. He had an experiment where he fired a bunch of positively-charged particles at a thin sheet of gold leaf, and he noticed that the vast majority of them made it through without interacting with anything, but a few of them got deflected. This led him to hypothesize that atoms had a dense central core of positive charge (the nucleus) and then a diffuse cloud of electrons around it. Since atoms overall usually have neutral electric charge, the number of electrons and the charge of the nucleus had to be equal.
Following on from this was Henry Moseley. He measured the wavelengths of X-rays sent off by various elements in a particular kind of experimental setup, and he determined that the wavelength was proportional to the square of the atomic number. That indicated that the atomic number actually indicated a physical quantity, which was then hypothesized as the amount of charge in the nucleus. One of the neat things this did was conclusively show where there were gaps in the periodic table: elements that should exist, but hadn't been discovered yet. In the course of time, all those gaps were filled in, once people knew what to look for.
Back to Rutherford again, a few years later. He succeeds in experimentally stripping out everything but the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, which has a charge of 1 and a weight of 1. He calls what he ends up with a proton.
Finally, we need to discover the neutron. We already know that the nucleus has a positive charge of the atomic number, and thus there are that many electrons as well, but the problem is that most atoms have a much higher weight than their atomic number, so something more than protons had to be in the atomic nucleus. A leading theory was that there were a bunch of extra proton-electron pairs just hanging around in the nucleus, but that was shown to be impossible. Enter James Chadwick, who shot a weird kind of radiation others had discovered at paraffin and other substances and measured what happened, and concluded that the radiation was in fact made up of neutrally-charged particles that had about the same mass as a proton. He's discovered the neutron.
So, now that we know everything, we can gather up our data on elements. The number of protons in an atom is the atomic number of that element. That's also the number of electrons, since atoms are neutrally-charged. Finally, the difference between the atom's weight and the atomic number is the number of neutrons. | 627 | 731 |
|
The university that I teach at (NYU) has gone remote because of the coronivirus. I teach two classes of over 100 students and give multiple choice exams. Is there any possible way to stop them from cheating on the exams? | You can't stop it but you can minimize it. Assuming you will offer exams on your LMS (e.g. Blackboard):
1. Set the time for the exam in such way that it is 35-45 seconds per question. This makes it harder to Google or look up the answers. Advanced: Google your questions to make sure the answers are not readily available. If they are, restructure the question.
2. Make questions appear one at a time (not the entire exam). This makes it harder for one student to print out the exam and have others work on it.
3. Randomize the order of how questions appear so there is no way to create a solutions key with question numbers.
4. Make the exam available only at the same time as the on-campus exam time so everyone takes it at the same time.
5. Do not provide the correct answers or the student score immediately, you can release those after everyone has taken the exam.
Hope this helps, good luck! | 638 | 359 |
|
Why does an TLS private key need to be thousands of bytes long, when 16 is more than sufficient for a password? | As I understand it, it's not safe anymore to use a 512-byte encryption key for TSL. They're too easy to crack.
On the other hand, a 16-byte random password is more than enough to foil any modern attempt at brute-forcing (that's ~ 10^29 possible ASCII passwords).
Why is it so much easier to crack TLS encryption than it is to guess a password? | Increasing the length of a password increases the number of possibilities exponentially (your search space is the number of possibilities for each character ^(length of password) )
Public/private key encryption is based on the principle that if you multiply two large prime numbers together, and give that number to someone else, it's hard for them to figure out what the original two numbers were.
While there isn't a direct way to determine the factors of say 391, you only need to make 7 guesses to break the encryption(the space you have to search is limited to the prime numbers that are less then the square root of your "key" , but if this was a numeric password that had to be somewhere between 0 and 391, you'd have to make an average of 196 guesses to break the password. That's why the public key has to be longer. | 13 | 15 |
Do dissolved substances in a solution affect the density or volume of it? | Ab-"solute" ly :)
A great example - water + salt = salt water and salt water has a higher density than water alone. The volume is also affected but not necessarily in a 1 to 1 manner (1 ml of salt + 1 ml of water != 2 ml of salt water) | 21 | 15 |
|
ELI5:Why does salty water come poring out your eyes when you hurt yourself physically/emotionally ? | The salty water reflects light which can be seen from short distances. It is a way to communicate to comrades close to you that you are injured and require protection, but not big and dramatic enough so that predators can see from far away. | 15 | 47 |
|
What inspiration did early christianity have from greek philosophy? | I heard they took some ideas from stoicism and platonism. And apparently aristotle's metaphysics? | There was an important social and cultural shift that occurred in the Roman empire during the third century. Prior to this shift, Stoicism was more or less dominant in the philosophical culture of the empire, whereas after this shift, neo-Platonism became dominant. Christian writings from this period often show significant debts to the dominant philosophical culture of their time, so that the earlier Christian writings often show the influence of Stoicism, while those after the third century often show the influence of neo-Platonism.
Aristotelian metaphysics was a significant influence on neo-Platonism, which was not just a return to Plato but also to a considerable extent a syncretic reflection on the Greek philosophical tradition broadly, so that the early Christians received their Aristotle through the broad tradition of late antique Platonism, which included Aristotle as the second great thinker of the Greek classical period. But often when people speak about Aristotle's influence on Latin Christianity, they have in mind the particular influence that becomes prominent in the 13th century, much later than the period of early Christianity, following the Latin reception of Islamic Peripateticism. | 16 | 17 |
Work-life balance (No I’m not joking) | After finishing my undergrad, I took a full time RA job in a research lab for 1 year, ending this fall. In the fall I will begin my masters program in a non academic field.
I feel extremely anxious in my current position. I should be happy to have a good job and be working with amazing people. But I see other people working nights and weekends and on holidays and I worry that I will be branded the lazy one or the dumb one. The PI of my lab works 24/7 and is always pushing to get projects (that I help coordinate) up and running as quickly as possible. I don’t want to be like the people in my lab who seem to have no limit on how much they will work. I know these issues are common in academia, but I have no desire to be a part of it.
My university has a union for RAs with a list of holidays and I have PTO, but I noticed people in the lab don’t use their days off. I would like to use mine because I’m a human being who has a life.
I get emails nights and weekends. I have been trying not to check my email during times I’m not at work but it feels like everyone else does and I don’t want to annoy my boss or seem inflexible.
I’m currently managing a project that eventually might require some evenings and weekends. I’m scared once it’s up and running I won’t have a life anymore and I will be expected to work whenever my PI decides. Can I set boundaries an explain my hours are full time and not more? I need help!!!
| What about if you need to be in the lab in the evening or weekends, taking time off during the day to compensate. Full time doesn't have to be M-F 9-5.
If you are already leaving academia, then don't feel bad about doing the hours you are paid for. Many people work more to get ahead in academia, hoping the more hours will make later success more likely.
You do need to sit down with your PI and explain your position and make sure what their expectations are and how you can balance that. | 38 | 64 |
ELI5: How do the mental processes of people with Down Syndrome differ from people without it? | (serious) | People process their environment using their I.Q. and their emotional intelligence. Language skills are particularly important. If someoneone doesn't have a word for something, they can neither process nor remember it. (This is why you cannot recall your infancy. You did not yet have an active vocabulary to categorize and process the things you were seeing and experiencing.)
Typically, a person with Down Syndrome has an I.Q. aproximating that of a child 8 years of age or younger. This means that they also have the vocabulary and reasoning ability of a very young child. Also, much like young children, Down Syndrome people may not have a clear division between the two hemispheres of the brain (as a normal adult does). This inhibits their ability to distinguish between fantasy an reality, between the truth and a lie. The creative side of their brain and the logic center do not correctly categorize information. Also, the transference of learned information from the short term memory to long term memory is compromised in Down Syndrome people. This is why they have difficulty learning new information and skills, and may not recall things like family vacations or certain birthdays unless something unusual happened that would act as a "place marker" to assist in categorizing the memory. | 18 | 26 |
ELI5: What happens when digital money is stolen? How is it moved to a different bank account? And more importantly why can't some hacker just "create" money instead of moving it? | As asked by someone, by "digital money" I mean the financial report kept in a bank, not cryptocurrencies. | Creating money is much easier to spot if the banks are running their systems properly. Banks don't just create money (disclaimer; sometimes they kind of do) - so whenever they have money going into an account it must have come out of an account somewhere.
Even if you are paying in physical cash to a bank, the total cash brought in can be compared to the total 'digital' money added to make sure they are the same.
So if you have created money there will be an error somewhere when the bank 'reconciles' its records. Which means the bank knows quite quickly that something has gone wrong and may look into it.
It it much easier to create fake payments, so move money from one account to another account. That way the bank doesn't know anything wrong happened - the only person who can tell is the other account holder, and it is on them to prove they didn't authorise the payment.
---------------
As to where it goes [disclaimer; not a bank thief]; yes, you'd move it into a different bank account. Ideally then into another bank account, maybe at another bank, maybe move it through joint accounts or mixed with other money, trying to 'launder' it as much as possible, and hopefully get it to a bank that is in a different jurisdiction to the original one and has strict rules on privacy (the classic "offshore bank accounts" or "numbered accounts" where not even the bank has records of who owns the account).
The idea is to get the money either somewhere it can't be 'traced' (either practically or legally) or get it out of the banking system before anyone spots that it has been stolen. | 148 | 279 |
ELI5: Why do wolves & dogs wag their tails when happy and hold them still when agitated, and why do cats wag their tails when agitated & hold them still when calm? | Different species use different ways of communicating their internal states (e.g. their feelings and emotions). Dogs and cats, while both domestic animals, share little else in common. They are not closely related evolutionarily and therefore it is quite logical that those groups or even species within those groups develop different ways of communicating with each other. Thus cats and dogs have different ways of communicating to us. | 20 | 50 |
|
ELI5: How did we create non biodegradable things like plastic from what I'd assume is biodegradable materials? | Plastics have properties which make them resistant to biodegradation.
Firstly, plastics are water resistant. Without moisture, bacteria/fungi cannot grow on it. Also, any digestive enzymes released by these organisms will be repelled from the surface.
Secondly, producing plastics is very energy-inefficient compared to biological cellulose or other biomaterials. So nature has never bothered to evolve plastics and the enzymes to digest plastics.
Also, plastics are very similar to wood (cellulose). When wood was first evolved, there were very few organisms capable of digesting it. This led to dead trees piling up everywhere and filling the earth with wood, which all eventually became coal. This period of earth’s history is the Carboniferous period, where almost all coal on earth came from this pile of dead trees.
If plastics become as widespread as wood was, something will evolve to digest the abundant source of energy. | 57 | 61 |
|
What are the low hanging fruits in philosohpy? | First I have to state that I have no formal education in philosohpy at all and no intention of getting one. That does not mean that I'm not interested in the subject but it means that I'm not prepared to struggle through any arcane books that I have very little prospect of understanding.
I learned about Hume and the problem of induction a few years ago and it has completely changed my outlook on life. I was brought up in a scientistic environment and have since become much more open to more 'obscure' ideas.
I am constantly looking for similar experiences but also a bit lazy and easily scared when it comes to complicated texts. So what are the easy pickings in philosophy? The concepts that might not be obvious but that are easy to grasp and have the potential to change one's life?
Edit: I must add that I'm a bit bored with the analytical tradition would like to understand continental philosophy. So far all my attempts have come to very little or nothing...
| There are a couple of books, like The Pig that Wants to be Eaten, which are full of philosophical thought experiments and a are a great way for someone to get a taste of the kinds of things philosophers think about without being overwhelming. | 10 | 24 |
Hydrophobic Effect? | Hello r/askscience,
Studying for my biochem exam and this has been bugging me all semester. Why does the hydrophobic effect exist? More specifically, what are the physical and chemical reasons that hydrophobic substances are soluble in hydrophobic solutes and not in hydrophilic ones, and vice versa? I've taken orgo and gen chem, but have never really asked why this occurs. | In a solution of both water and a hydrophobic substance, which, for the purpose of this discussion we will call hexane because it is a liquid at room temperature, there is a clearly defined phase boundary. There is an interesting thermodynamic argument made for this feature of hydrophobicity. If we want to analyze the entropy of the water, we need to look at it's hydrogen bonding in the liquid phase. In pure H2O, the hydrogen bonds are the strongest of the intramolecular forces but they are by no means covalent. In fact, hydrogen bonding alternates among varying molecules of H2O in solution very quickly; thus, there are many states available to each water molecule per unit time. This is a high entropy state (remember, high S is good). However, if we introduce our non polar, hydrophobic molecule of hexane, this hydrogen bonding is disrupted and the water molecules that are bounded by the hexane molecules are not able to alternate hydrogen bonds as quickly as before, thus creating an ice-like state of water at the phase boundary. The entropy of this system is much lower, and thus is entropically disfavored as per our gibbs free energy equation. In order to minimize this hydrophobic interaction, the lowest energy form for a water and hexane mixture is that with the linear phase boundary that we see in real life. If we shake up the mixture, it returns to the same stratified mixture that we started out with because the transition to this state is a spontaneous process with a negative value for dG due to the maximization of the TdS term in dG=dH-TdS. | 11 | 35 |
Eli5: What does improve in ones body when training cardio ? | Cardiovascular exercise improves the heart's ability to pump blood efficiently. The body wants to expend the least amount of energy to meet its own metabolic needs, and the heart takes a lot of energy to pump rapidly.
Repeated cardiovascular exercise has the effect of stretching out and strengthening the heart tissue, enabling it to pump more blood in less time with less beats while still meeting the body's metabolic demands. | 16 | 15 |
|
ELI5: Gas prices have been on the decline for a while, but why have food prices not dropped, since they were originally raised (in part) due to high transportation costs? | I understand that it takes a while for the industries to adjust to fuel costs, but shouldn't we see some effect on consumer goods and consumables? Or are they just enjoying the extra margin? | Companies are always quick to pass on rising costs to their customers, but slow to pass on savings. This is especially true when there are multiple companies the product has to go through (farms, transportation companies, processing companies, supermarkets) before it gets to you. | 56 | 87 |
If a gay person believes in a religion that forbids homosexuality, is it a moral failing of the church or the person? | Let's assume that the person truly believes in a church that forbids homosexuality, yet the person still practices their sexuality. Regardless of whether homsexuality is wrong or not, outside of any religion, would the person be committing an immoral act by practicing their homosexuality?
Has there been any writing on this subject (I guess a moral general question would be is it okay to act against one's beliefs)? | That depends very strongly on whether their beliefs are right or not obviously. That's kind of the cornerstone of how to determine what things are immoral, yet your question deliberately says to answer as if this didn't matter. Some theories will say that it is wrong, probably especially virtue theories to do what one believes is wrong. But the picture changes based on whether the act itself is. | 10 | 19 |
If there is a nothingness that is beyond imagination, wouldn't all attempts to define it lead to a paradox? | Wouldn't it be like writing down a description of a blank piece paper using that same paper? The blankness would be effortlessly self-explanatory and any effort made to write a description, no matter what symbols you use, would work against you. The more symbols you write on that paper the more you have to look past them in order to see the blankness they move upon. Or just erase them all together.
Or what about in terms of sound and trying to talk about silence? Wouldn't it be best to just be silent? Even if you do try to define silence, again it doesn't matter what language you use, whatever you say breaks the silence and moves you away from what you're trying to define. Wouldn't I be better off just ignoring everything you said and waiting for the sounds you made to move on?
Well what about if I was trying to imagine nothingness? Wouldn't it also be best explained by not making no effort to imagine it? And wouldn't anything you imagine about it would just obscure the nothingness that the imagined image moves upon? | It sounds like you might want to look into Ludwig Wittgenstein. In particular he has some ideas concerning, "saying" vs. "showing" in that, some things can't be said, only shown. Also, in his line of thinking, your question might be considered nonsensical, in that it's our lack of understanding of the grammar of our language that allows us to even form questions like "what is the good" or "something beyond thought" (to paraphrase your question). Since for something to be "beyond imagination" suggests that it cannot be conceived of at all. Given that state of affairs there would be no way to describe it with language since that would require a conception of it on our part. Check out a summary of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, it might provide some insight into your question. | 12 | 19 |
[Zombies]Why are zombie plagues almost always apocalyptic? | Why do none of the world's governments manage to mount an effective resistance before it's too late? | Many universes involve a parabolic increase in infections. Ever played Pandemic? Even with random mutations of the virus it's easy to spread infections across countries before countries are able to mount an effective resistance. This is doubly true with viruses which enable the infected to violently infect others, and even more so when you consider that closing a border is almost impossible to hordes of ravenous animals | 18 | 20 |
ELI5: Why do we get sleepy on rainy days? | Your brain uses certain colors of ambient light to keep track of daytime/nighttime, and to maintain your normal 24 hour rhythm. Most significantly, intense blue light - similar to that of the sky - stimulates the brain to stay awake.
When it's rainy and overcast, you're getting less of that normal daytime light, and your brain interprets this as a sign that it's time to go to bed. | 26 | 18 |
|
ELI5: Why is it that Home advantage in most sports is a seriously considered factor. Example soccer where teams are notorious for not loosing at home regardless of opposition. | There are few factors that give a team home field advantage:
1) No travelling - When you play at home, you do not require to travel a large distance to get to the game. You get to stay at home with your family and friends. This generally allows the players to be more rested.
2) Field dimensions - In soccer, the size of the pitch does not require to be an exact size, but just with certain parameters. So, some fields are skinnier while some are longer. This can give you a large advantage. Depending the team's strategy, you can adjust your field dimension to give you the advantage. Teams with fast wingers for example might prefer a longer, thinner field.
3) Climate - Sometimes, teams withing a league play in very different climates, especially for American football. Teams the practice in the heat will play better in the heat. So if a team that is used to colder weather comes to play in hot weather, then they have the disadvantage.
4) The fans - The fans do play a part in the game. Some plays in the game work better for the players if there is silence. So naturally, when the away team comes to a critical play where they need a bit of silence to communicate and concentrate, the fans make as much noise as possible. Also, in soccer for example, the fans sing a lot of chants. These chants may sometimes distract the opponents and they can inspire the home team.
EDIT: Another factor is the influence of refs. Refs are human and sometimes their decisions are based on the reactions of others, especially the fans. They may be more willing to make a call if they hear 50000 people shouting at them to do so. | 16 | 15 |
|
ELI5: What is the Riemann Hypothesis and why is it important? | I hear about it all the time in different book/show references but Wikipedia wasn't helpful. Why is this problem so famous/important? Also if there is an explanation for the Riemann zeta function that would be great as well. | The Riemann Hypothesis is basically that there is some link between the prime numbers. As far as we know currently, the sequence of primes is totally arbitrary, but if we can find out what truly links them, then that gives immense power in mathematics. A lot of systems are based around primes, so knowing more about them could give us the key to these systems. | 88 | 178 |
Why is microeconomics useful, and what are the most important concepts one should understand? | First year undergrad student here just questioning a lot of the material that I’m learning. | This question is a bit too broad. Microeconomics is very basic in all economics, to the point that one can't really do much without its concepts. One important concept, for example, is that of a utility function. What does it mean to have a utility function? Is this a testable hypothesis? These are all micro questions.
From a more practical standpoint, anything that involves analysis of a firm will involve microeconomics. For example, questions of antitrust or taxation. | 41 | 40 |
[Star Wars] Once joining the Rebellion, did members still have a civilian life or were they stuck living on bases or the fleet? | Would they be arrested immediately if they appear in public/go home in a civilized system? | It really depends on what their role is and where they are.
There will be members of the Rebellion whos entire role is " Just keep minding your shop but keep this rug over your basement and if someone says "Hoth is surprisingly warm this year" then let them take shelter", guys who are X wing pilots but go back to their homes afterwards because they haven't been ID'd and its safer than having your eggs all in one basket , and ones who cant even leave the base without getting shot on sight by imperials.
If the Rebellion was just a bunch of dudes in bases it would get bery little done | 121 | 106 |
Eli5: what is happening when I don't receive text messages all day then receive them all at once later? | I've had this happen sporadically on various carriers over the years and can't find a satisfying answer | in order for a txt msg to be sent.
1. sender phone sends it to their network
2. their network sends it to your network
3. your network sends it to your phone
there could be a delay at any of these stages. if you're getting txts from different people, most likely there is a delay in #3. your network could not send it to your phone, so once it has signal it sends it all at once. | 40 | 115 |
ELI5: What happens to inmates serving life sentences when they become too old to look after themselves in a prison? | There are a couple of scenarios that can play out. They may just spend the rest of their lives in the prison infirmary, or they can be granted a compassionate release if they are terminally ill and death is imminent. | 108 | 145 |
|
What causes mosquitos to be super attracted to some people, and completely ignore others? | Mosquitos attack me with a vengeance, but they won't touch my sister.
I am 25. My sister is 23. If we both go outdoors and play a sport for 2 hours and wait until dark, mosquitos still do not touch her. It doesn't matter what I've done, mosquitos are on me like hummingbirds to nectar. I can even wear bug repellant, doesn't help much.
I've heard similar stories from friends and acquaintances. | There are various physiological factors that determine your likelihood of getting bitten.
* Blood type: Several studies have found that individuals with blood type O are at a greater risk, much more so than individuals with type A, B, or AB^1,2.
* Higher production of carbon dioxide will also attract a higher number of mosquitoes. In fact, traps are often equipped with CO2 tanks to be more effective^3,5.
* Production of certain acids on the skin such as lactic acid will contribute to one's attractiveness^4
**Citations**
1) Wood, Corrine Shear, and Dore, Caroline. 1972. “Selective Feeding of Anopheles gambiae according to ABO Blood Group Status.” Nature 239: 165.
2) Yoshikazu Shiraia, et al. 2004. "Landing Preference of Aedes albopictus (Diptera: Culicidae) on Human Skin Among ABO Blood Groups, Secretors or Nonsecretors, and ABH Antigens." Journal of Medical Entomology 41(4):796-799.
3) Dekker , T. and Takken, W. 1998. "Differential responses of mosquito sibling species Anopheles arabiensis and An. quadriannulatusto carbon dioxide, a man or a calf." Medical and Veterinary Entomology, 12: 136–140
4) Steib, Birgit M., Geier, Martin, and Boeckh, Jurgen. 2001. "The Effect of Lactic Acid on Odour-Related Host Preference of Yellow Fever Mosquitoes" Chemical Senses 26: 523-538.
5) Geier, Martin, et al. "Odour-guided Host Finding of Mosquitoes: Identification of New Attractants on Human Skin." 4th International Conference on Urban pests. (Oral Presentation). | 60 | 45 |
ELI5: What's the difference between Vector Graphics and Pixel Graphics? | What I've read online says that Vector art uses math to make the image scale better but isn't 'math' used in Pixel art in, say, Photoshop as well? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how the math might be different when creating a line in Photoshop vs Illustrator for example. | Raster art (pixel-based graphics) stores image information as information about pixels. 'This pixel in this place is this colour', basically, over and over again to build up the whole file. Vector art stores image information as vectors - basically lines with thicknesses and curves and so on. That means it can be scaled without becoming fuzzy - the computer just redraws the line. A raster image has no information about 'lines'; it's our human brains that figure out where the lines in it are - so when it's zoomed in, the computer program has to either make each pixel bigger or try to guess at what the pixels 'would be' if there were more of them. | 26 | 20 |
Can plants "inbreed"? Can they experience genetic issues like generations of inbred animals can? | Many plants can self-pollinate, that’s how we get lab-strains for research as well as many of our monoculture crops. There’s still natural diversity due to heterozygosity (more than one of each chromosome, combining in different ways each generation) and of course mutation and natural selection.
However, there are some plants that have mechanims to prevent inbreeding, called “self-incompatibility”. The actual mechanisms can be vastly different for different plant species. For example, mustard species have molecular mechanisms to recognize cases of self-pollination and can activate pathways to prevent this from happening. It’s an advantageous trait that has evolved in many plants. | 552 | 745 |
|
[Fullmetal Alchemist] What would an Alchemist see if they were to use a fully-formed, perfect Philosopher's Stone to pay the toll at the Gate? | The Elrics' share of the Truth was limited by eqivalent exchange- would going into the process with a Philosopher's Stone as your toll permit you to actually understand Human Transmutation without losing anything about yourself? | A perfect philosophers stone is payment enough for everything beyond the gate.
But knowledge is infinite. If you were to pay such a price, your reward would be infinite too.
You would never walk out of the gate. | 35 | 23 |
ELI5: Why does paper yellow with age? | I was originally going to post something to the cooking subreddit about old recipes on old, yellowed notecards.
But.. I don't know how old they are and assumed they where old because of their yellowed, stiff feeling. Then I realized I didn't know why paper yellows at all.
Is it like wood aging? | There are two main components to wood. Cellulose structures which make up the cells, which is what most paper makers are after, and lignin which is what makes trees rigid. Lignin basically glues the tree's cells together. Some paper is made by just grinding up trees and bleaching everything. Other types of processes use chemicals to dissolve the lignin to keep only cellulose as the final product.
Anyways, lignin is prone to oxidation, and especially with paper grades like newspapers, yellow over time. | 52 | 133 |
CMV: Music is completely subjective. There is no possible way to prove that one piece of music is better than any other, this will always lead to subjective opinions or extra-musical ideas. | If music WERE objective this would be fantastic for musicians. I would have a concrete set of guidelines to refer back to when composing, I could then measure these qualities in my own music as a standard for how 'good' my piece is.
This is clearly not possible. Any judgement on what makes music good can always be contradicted with a piece of music that doesn't fit that standard.
'Good music must be catchy' 'Good music must be emotional' 'Good music must be melodic'
There will always be musical examples of things generally considered 'good' that don't follow these guidelines.
So if anybody can tell me what objectively makes music good, it would be very useful for me to know! Everybody always acts like they know. | Keep in mind that the inherent subjectivity of interpretation doesn't mean that every interpretation is equally supportable.
There is no such thing as "objectively" good music, but there are many agreed-upon criteria based on centuries of study, comparison, and analysis.
| 34 | 61 |
[Pacific Rim] Why were the Jaegers constantly surrounded by a swarm of helicopters during a battle with the Kaiju? | It's shown time and again in the documentaries of the Kaiju War that whenever a battle between a Jaeger and Kaiju is going on there seems to be several large helicopters just kind of flying around shining spotlights on the fight. Are they the ones filming? Just watching? Running some kind of interference? It seems like a mighty dangerous place to be flying around without a good reason... | There are a variety of tasks the helicopters could assist in. For example, during the battle against Otachi, when the Kaiju was hiding among the skyscrapers, Gipsy's pilots called upon the helicopters to help search for the monster.
Other possibilities include rapid evacuation of the Jaeger pilots in the event that the Jaeger is disabled, aerial transport of the Jaeger over terrain that the Jaeger itself can't navigate, collection of video and other data from the battle for later analysis, etc. | 105 | 95 |
Why do dogs walk in a circle before they lay down? | There are a couple of theories ranging from circling behaviour intended to pad down grass to be more comfortable, to circling in order to judge wind direction and lay nose facing the breeze. There's little conclusive agreement on the true reason however. | 501 | 746 |
|
ELI5: Why are there different types of blood? | On top of that, how can some people's blood be universal? | Evolutionarily speaking, diversity within the gene pool is good. Imagine a virus developing that is fatal to everyone with blood type A. Having B and O blood types allows the human race to survive.
As far as different blood types being universal, think of blood types as keys. Type B keys don't fit into Type A locks, nor vice versa. Type AB locks can accept either key. Type O is like a master key that can fit in every lock. | 15 | 20 |
What is causing the price of so many goods and services to skyrocket? | Lumber is up, Proctor and Gamble is about to raise prices on diapers, gas is going up, etc.
Is this literally just because of Covid? If so, can someone provide more detail than just “it’s a pandemic” - aren’t most of these goods manufactured in China? It’s my understanding they’re past the pandemic (or so they say) so exporting goods shouldn’t have any effect no?
Thanks everyone for your knowledge. | It's a complicated question. A short answer might includes things like:
1. Supply chain hiccups in various intermediate components and raw materials during the pandemic leading to shortages in finished goods, driving up prices
2. Poorly managed health risks in workplaces and reduced availability of things like suitable child care have reduced the available labor pool of people willing to work for lower wages; this hasn't seemed to raise wages yet but reduced labor availability can lead to reduced output and shortages
3. (controversial/dubious) stimulus payments and increased UI benefits may have reduced the opportunity cost of not working, further reducing labor supply
4. demand spikes from relaxed restrictions
5. aggregate effects of stimulus policies reaching markets for consumer goods
6. it just might *seem* like prices are skyrocketing now just because inflation has been so low for so long
And FWIW, most lumber is produced domestically or in Canada, and most to all of P&G's diapers for the US market are produced domestically too. The recent gas spike is likely at least partially a result of the Colonial pipeline cyberattack causing supply shortfall and uncertainty. | 154 | 92 |
ELI5: Why do video game soundtracks lack dynamics (variability in loudness and softness)? | In many JRPG and platformer video games, dynamics in their soundtracks seem to be completely taken out of the equation. Why is that so? | Games can tailor the volume of the sound track to the events within the game. Look at the most recent Doom game and you can see that the metal music is synchronized to the player and will change due to their activity. In the games you reference they may desire to increase or decrease the volume based on the scene but not know where in the soundtrack it will be at the time. | 20 | 21 |
ELI5: What happens in your brain when you don't understand something at first and then suddenly get it? | This is related to hiw we learn in general, and is a fascinating subject!
The short answer is that we're making neurological links between different pieces of information in our brain.
The LONG answer is basically the subject of an entire free online course through Coursera, called Learning How To Learn. Neat stuff, you should check it out. | 162 | 474 |
|
Are economic classes dependent on the type of jobs available? More specifically, to maintain a middle class, do certain types of jobs (manufacturing for example) need to be available. | It’s a very vague question so let me explain. Politically, the issue of a “shrinking middle class” has been a hot one in the US for a long time. I’m not sure if that’s actually happening or not but because it’s a mainstream political concern, let’s assume it’s true. The decline in middle class jobs is often attributed to the decline of industry either through globalization/outsourcing or dying businesses(coal mining for example).
What I hear as a common solution to this is to simply create middle class jobs. I hear two different ways of getting their that varies in implementation across political ideologies:
1. “Bring jobs back” or reevaluate trade agreements with other countries to support domestic production and, by extension, employment.
2. Create middle class jobs out of new and growing industries, such as renewable energy production.
These discussions, in my belief, forms a narrative that a middle class is difficult to maintain without something in between unskilled, low-valued labor that anyone can do but simply doesn’t pay very much, and high skilled labor that pays beyond middle class but isn’t accessible to everyone. | The relative pay of a job is dependent on the supply and demand of that job.
Despite what politicians will tell you, there is no way to "bring jobs back" from other countries because most jobs were replaced by technology and capital, not sent over the border. Domestic production is coming back, not because of protectionism or trade agreements but because the technology to fully automate the production of many simple products has become cheaper than even the cheapest labor available. This isn't going to bring back any blue collar manufacturing jobs, just highly specialized technical jobs to maintain the machines.
The problem isn't that there aren't enough 'middle class jobs', it's that the education system isn't keeping up with the economy and giving people the right skills to get the jobs that pay a middle class wage or higher. | 18 | 63 |
ELI5:Game Theory | Game theory is just a formal way to figure out what the optimal response to a situation between multiple people(ie, a "game") is.
For example, you have 2 people, but only 1 slice of cake left. Do you eat the cake, or share it? The answer can depend on a lot of things (one important- will you ever see the person again? Are you friends? It might make sense to be selfish to a stranger you'll never see again, but if you have to repeatedly interact with them, maybe you share the cake now and bet they will be more likely to share/help you later).
Writing it down formally (and sometimes mathematically) allows you to approach it in a more rigorous way than "well i would just do this". It allows us to be more critical than just what our intuition tells us, especially in the cases where our intuition is wrong. You might also be able to find patterns that you wouldn't normally see at first glance. | 21 | 32 |
|
eli5: why is x⁰ = 1 instead of non-existent? | It kinda doesn't make sense.
x¹= x
x² = x\*x
x³= x\*x\*x
etc...
and even with negative numbers you're still multiplying the number by itself
like (x)-² = 1/x² = 1/(x\*x) | Let’s look at powers of 2:
2¹=2
2²=4
2³=8
2⁴=16
2⁵=32
So to get the next power of 2, you just multiply by 2 (2×2=4, 4×2=8, 8×2=16, …). Which means to get the previous power, you need to *divide* by 2. So 2⁰ should be 2¹/2=2/2=1. | 4,990 | 1,803 |
Eli5: Why do companies put caffeine in soaps? | Does your body absorb it somehow? Does it help as a moisturizer? | There have been a few studies, according to a "board certified dermatologist at Modern Dermatology in seattle" - “Topical caffeine is best known for its antioxidant properties. With topical antioxidants, you can decrease the harmful effects of free radicals created by environmental pollutants and UV radiation, which are what cause fine lines and wrinkles.” He goes on: “Caffeine has been shown to constrict blood vessels when applied to the skin. It is thought that caffeine may temporarily constrict these tiny blood vessels, somewhat masking the darkness under the eyes. Furthermore, caffeine-enhanced skincare products can decrease inflammation and irritation. They may reduce swelling and feel ‘soothing.’ ” | 71 | 78 |
Why has the War in Ukraine effected gas so much in the US if Russia only supplies ~3% of our daily consumption? | Firstly - 3% is still enough of a market supply difference to create a large price movement, particularly for something like gas where demand is fairly inelastic (I.E. it’s a required product and so not many people/companies can just go ‘oh it’s too expensive I’ll do without’).
But to add on to that - there are other countries where Russia supplied more than 3% of their gas who are now looking to source their supplies elsewhere. So yes, the US isn’t getting that 3%, and that would have a bump on prices even if the US was facing that in isolation, but Russia is the 4th largest gas exporter/supplier globally and so those other countries now not using Russian gas are competing to purchase the non-Russian gas supplies that the US also wants - which drives a far higher impact on prices. | 150 | 140 |
|
Advice from professors or students that have experienced similar? | I am a first year PhD student and this last spring semester has been brutal for me. I had a really hard time due to numerous surprise ‘events’ taking place in my life (family member cancer, death, suicidal friend, the list goes on). I had already been slipping a bit but was able to talk to my professors about it and they have been great. All this to say, around the second week of may I was confronted with my friend’s suicidal thoughts and behavior ramping up again and it completely shook me. I haven’t been able to look at text messages or emails for a month and now I am scared to reach out to my professors again. I don’t even know how to begin. I’m always a bit chaotic (adhd, they also know this) but I feel I’m in too deep with avoidance and I know it is so disrespectful its eating me. I developed anxiety around turning in my work, it’s done, I literally cannot bring myself to press send. I was present in class all semester minus when I had covid, and have a good relationships with people, but I’ve never felt so stuck it’s so dumb.
Any thoughts on how I can respectfully approach reaching back out to my professors? Thank you so much. | I’d say frame for yourself very well with what you would “reach out to them.” You sound overwhelmed, and not really clear in your path. What are you going to ask them? What exactly, and what might they say. Frame the full range of their responses, and assume they are going to give you what you need. When you ask them believe they will give it to you. | 22 | 22 |
CMV: Most of the times that people describe someone they disagree with as a "narcissist" or "lacking empathy", it's not even remotely accurate and it's cause they can't accept the fact that other people just disagree with them. | Example.
Person1: I agree with anti-homeless benches. The less homeless people in this area the better.
Person2: You are such a narcissist! I can't believe you're so lacking in empathy!
​
Let's assume for a moment that Person1 isn't a sociopathic serial killer and has a more realistic motivation. Let's say that Person1 thinks that homeless people are generally a detriment to the safety of a given area, and that the safety of the general population is more important than the comfort of homeless people.
​
Is Person1 lacking in empathy? Is this thinking narcissistic?
Obviously not. Person1 is just empathizing with a different group that Person2.
​
However, Person2 likely BELIEVES in the validity of their statement. Despite the factual inaccuracy.
​
Since I see this sort of scenario play out hundreds if not 1000s of times a day on Reddit, this is why I believe in the validity of MY OWN statement.
​
People call each other names because they can't accept the fact that other people just disagree with them.
​
Change my mind. | Clarifying question about your example:
Would you agree that Person 1 lacks sufficient empathy *for the homeless people*?
Would you also agree that is almost certainly what Person 2 means by their statement about empathy?
I'd agree that's an inaccurate use of "narcissist" without additional information not in evidence. | 26 | 43 |
How are photons created? If I am in a dark room and turn on a light, where do the photons come from? | Photons are generally created/destroyed when the energy of an electron changes. In general, electron+photon=more energetic electron. So if you hit an electron with a photon, you would "excite" the electron and make it more energetic. Likewise, an energetic electron might be unstable and become non energetic by releasing a photon. You have to keep in mind that photons are not some sort of conserved quantity and don't have mass, they are simply a particle that only transfers energy and momentum. | 74 | 220 |
|
ELI5: Why do cringing memories from the distant past remain so persistent? Do we know what triggers them instead of other memories? | Was just reading in another sub about this, and it seems fairly common for memories of cringing moments of your past to float up to the forefront of your mind when you're trying to get to sleep. They can also trigger an avalanche of similar memories. Why is this? What could be triggering it? | Your sense of self, and who you perceive yourself to be are extremely important psychologically.
You're probably familiar with cognitive dissonance - when you hold two conflicting ideas in your head. This is somewhat unpleasant.
I'd suspect that it's your mind still trying to reconcile why you aren't a cringer, despite the fact that you have done a cringe-worthy thing. | 10 | 18 |
When you drink water, how is it distributed around the body? | Once water is absorbed through the GI tract, it enters the bloodstream as plasma volume and is carried throughout the body. There is no specific distribution (eg the body does not route water specifically to an organ), but the flow is just determined by the circulatory dynamics. From there, water follows a general distribution guided by the **60-40-20 rule**. Typically your body's water weight is 60% of your mass. From there, 2/3 (or 40% total body mass) is intracellular water. Of the remaining 1/3 (or 20% total mass) that is extracellular, about 3/4 (15% of total) is contained in the interstitium around your cells while the last 1/4 (5%) is contained in the vascular system.
When you take in fluid, **where it goes within those compartments depends very heavily on the osmotic characteristics of the fluid**. This comes into play a lot with intravenous fluid administration in terms of deciding the right choice of fluid to give. Giving isotonic water with dextrose results in a even distribution of 2/3 going to the intracellular space and 1/3 staying in the extracellular space, as the dextrose is metabolized and the water is evenly distributed by volume space. However, giving normal saline (0.9% NaCl) results in most of it staying in the extracellular space because the salt creates an osmotic pressure keeping the fluid from entering the cells. In patients who have pathologies resulting in increased loss of vascular fluid through extravasation (eg bad edema from heart failure) we'll sometimes give an albumin solution as that is thought to favor keeping fluid within the vascular compartment. | 2,430 | 2,502 |
|
ELI5: why do you need to bring your temperature down? | I read somewhere that the reason our temp rises when we are sick is to help out immune system. if so, why try to lower it | Up to a point, having a fever is a good thing when you're fighting an infection as in the case of sepsis (infection in the blood). Many pathogens don't fare well in even a degree or two of average raised temperature, while your body is much more resilient. It's still a pretty serious condition on its own, and sepsis is frequently fatal regardless of the not only the body's attempts to fight it, but with medical intervention.
The problems in general however, start when the fever is too high, or just high for too long. Your body will release something called chaperone molecules that help your proteins fold correctly, but there will still be errors and it's more energetically expensive. This chaperone molecules also have limits, and past a certain point your body fails on a number of levels.
For one, a lot of what your cells do is interact with, transport, and produce proteins. The function of a protein is determined by its three dimensional structure, and it gets that through a process of folding. This is a process which can go wrong, and heat makes it far more likely to go wrong. Past a certain point critical proteins will start to unfold (denature) as in exposure to cooking methods. Needless to say, this does you no favors.
For another, most fevers are not in response to something like sepsis (outside of admissions in a hospital at least), they're the result of either the disease-causing organism (pathogen) releasing molecules which cause your body to develop a fever (pyrogens) or an immune response by your body. In the former case the magnitude of the infection can cause a release of these molecules so great that your temperature-regulating system is utterly overwhelmed. In the latter case your body's inflammatory signaling systems can go haywire, causing runaway inflammation and fever; this is called cytokine storm and it's a potentially fatal condition. Ebola is often thought to kill as a result of cytokine storm, in humans at least.
So you need to manage a fever, first and foremost by identifying its cause and treating it appropriately. This will inevitably take time, and the sicker the patient the more time it will take. During this time you could develop cardiac problems, your metabolism could be seriously disrupted leading to many bad side effects, and you could suffer lasting brain damage from seizures, even coma or death. As a result with a bad enough fever you treat the infection, modulate the immune system response if necessary/possible, and then just try to bring the temperature down. Alcohol, cold water baths, and even infusions of cold IV fluids can all be used.
tl;dr Unless you're septic, it isn't generally helpful for your immune system to suffer under a fever, and it can cause organ damage, damage to the blood, damage to the brain, and even death. | 68 | 94 |
ELI5: How does radiation poisoning kill you? | for example how does drinking contaminated water or being exposed to contaminated air actually kill you? | Ionizing radiation, the dangerous kind of radiation, can damage your body's cells all the way down to the DNA, which is what controls the whole cell.
It's like replacing your kindergarten teacher with another 5-year old. No one would do anything they were supposed to and chaos would ensue. Eventually the principal would come and get you all in trouble. | 28 | 28 |
ELI5: What is honey? I know honey comes from bees, and I know honey is delicious on toast, but what is honey, and does it harm the bees we harvest it from? Can you trace back a batch of honey to the hive it came from, or is all honey the same? | Many flowers secrete nectar as part of their biology. They lack the ability to move pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers so they entice bees and insects with nectar with the hope the while the bees collect the nectar they also move the pollen around allowing for the fertilization of the plant species.
Honey bees have a special compartment in their body to hold nectar. This compartment (called the crop or honey stomach) is designed to allow the bee nectar storage while it is foraging. When the forager bee returns to the hive she passes the nectar to a receiver bee who puts it in a wax comb cell for ripening. Nectar has a high moisture content, perhaps 40+%, but the bees want to store the honey for future consumption. They regulate the humidity in the hive via wing flapping over fresh stored nectar and move air in and out from the entrances. Once the honey is at 17/18% moisture content it is ready for capping. The bees cap the cell with wax and that honey will stay in storage until they need it.
If the season goes well, the colony may collect for example, twice the amount of honey they will need for winter. The beekeeper can take that extra and this harvesting does not harm the bees at all. | 286 | 556 |
|
[I Robot] If a human is hurting/killing another human | If a human is hurting/killing another human, how will a robot behave using the 3 rules? | According to the law priority structure, a robot will prevent harm to humans at a higher priority than obeying them. In addition, even within the parameters of the First Law, robots will use force to prevent one human from harming another, as long as it's preventing more harm than it's causing. Sufficiently complex robots could even kill a human to, say, prevent him from killing 100, as long as the robot saw no other way to save them.
However, positronic brains are not designed to withstand such robo-moral conundrums, and a robot forced to act this way would likely shut down forever shortly thereafter. | 44 | 30 |
Why does commericalisation tend to make things bland? | Sorry for the vague question, but it's just an inkling I have rather than a fleshed-out idea.
​
It seems there is often a trend where something starts out niche and interesting, and then business spots an opportunity, but in the process makes it bland. The web is one example - it used to be common to come across interesting sites by people with a particular passion. Now things seem to be consolidated into a few big media and tech companies. Another example is music - the most popular music tends to be bland in comparison with more niche music.
​
I'm wondering if there is any social scientific work on this phenomenon - whether it's real, what might cause it, etc. | Companies work to capture the largest percentage of the market. They do this in two ways, established products seek to differentiate themselves from other products to maximize customers, new products seek to replicate established products to take away their customers. It is obvious why replicating other products makes things bland, but I'll give an example of how differentiation can too.
​
Imagine two established chocolate companies names Coke and Pepsi. People have a preference for what percentage of cocoa they want in their chocolate. Coke starts with 20% coca, Pepsi starts with 80%. Coke realizes if they make theirs with 79% coca they'll get all the people who like less than 80% cocoa chocolate. When this happens, Pepsi starts losing money, but realizes if they make 78% cocoa chocolate they'll get almost as much of the market as Coke had from moving to 79%. This continues back and forth until they end up at 50% and 51% cocoa, where no one can get more of the market by changing their product. | 22 | 46 |
How common is it to take your lab stuff with you when you move to set up a new lab at a new institute? | Antibodies, surgical instruments, pippetes etc....things you bought with your own personal grant. If you are moving to a new institute to take up a PI role, it seems pretty common to take your things with you but it feels like one of those things that's in a very grey area that people do without actually asking permission. I've even see people take a 20k+ piece of equipment from their old lab to their new institute. | It is entirely dependent on the funding mechanism used to buy the equipment and university rules. For the most part equipment/materials purchased through granting agencies such as NSF/NIH/NASA are the property of the University not the PI/Lab. Some private granting foundations can be more flexible, especially with smaller grants.
Universities will also have there own policies and sometimes there is a value threshold above which certain inventory rules come into effect. PIs can sometimes negotiate to bring equipment with them when they move, but again this is all entirely dependent on agency/university rules. | 29 | 23 |
ELI5: How are electronics "grounded" on spacecraft? | ...and what happens "electronically" when 2 spacecraft dock? are the isolated from each other? | "Grounding" in electrical circuits just means a reference point, to which everything else can be connected.
For example, in a car, one side of the battery is connected to the car's body/chassis. This provides a convenient way to complete an electrical circuit. So, if you want to connect a headlight. You don't need to connect 2 wires - one taking current from the battery to the bulb, and one taking the return current from the bulb to the battery. Instead, you can just use 1 wire to take current from the battery to the bulb, and the return current can go via the car's chassis.
The same principle is used in marine craft, aircraft and spacecraft. The metal structure serves as a convenient method of connecting multiple things together to allow circuits to be completed. If two spacecraft need to dock, then the bodies can be electrically connected together to form a single "ground" zone covering both craft. Each craft retains its own electrical system, but the two systems share the same reference point.
For land based stationary applications (buildings), then the ground itself (which is electrically conductive) can be used as a convenient reference point, and as a failsafe method of carrying current in the case of an electrical fault. The ground itself isn't a very good electrical conductor, so it isn't usually used to carry current under normal conditions for energy efficiency reasons (but this is sometimes used in very rural areas, where a remote house or farm needs a long power line, but only a small amount of power, making it too expensive to run 2 wires on the power poles - in this case, you can just run a single wire, and use the ground as the return path). | 84 | 126 |
ELI5: Why do people often find a physically "unattractive" person, more attractive the more time they spend with them? | First you have to understand attraction.
So, the reason people are attracted to others is based around chemicals in the brain. You see a physically attractive person and your brain goes "I like that, here's some drugs, keep looking that way."
Now when you spend time with someone, perhaps they make you laugh, perhaps they smell good, perhaps they're very stimulating in other ways, your brain will release the same drugs. Even if you're not physically attracted to the person, you can still develop an emotional attachment.
Emotional attachment isn't immediate and takes time to develop while physical attachment is immediate. | 47 | 42 |
|
ELI5: Why zero factorial (0!) is equal to 1. | I understand that 1!=1, 2!=1x2=2, 3!=1x2x3=6, etc. But why does 0! equal 1? Is my understanding of factorial numbers a simpler but not exactly correct way to determine them? | One way to look at it would be that factorials are a way to represent combinations of arranging a set of numbers.
1! = {1} = 1 arrangement
2! = {1,2}, {2,1} = 2 arrangements
3! = {1,2,3}, {1,3,2}, {2,1,3}, {2,3,1}, {3,1,2}, {3,2,1} = 6 arrangements
So, thinking about it that way:
0! = {} = 1 possible arrangement of the empty set
Make sense? | 114 | 36 |
ELI5: Why is milk chocolate made in North America so vastly different from milk chocolate made in Europe? | I have eaten milk chocolate from Hershey and milk chocolate from some strange Swiss chocolatier and they were so different. I cannot even describe how much so. The Swiss chocolate was not even a 'name brand' there like Hershey is here in the states so I did not even get high quality chocolate. Their low quality chocolate tasted better than our average/mid quality.
I went onto Wikipedia's entry for chocolate and it turns out that the US and Canada and Europe consider milk chocolate to mean different things in regards to how much milk fat, 'milk solids,' and chocolate 'liquor' are present.
Can anyone explain in simple terms what this means? And why do these areas have such different standards? | Money, and regulations. European chocolate, by and large has much stricter rules about what passes for chocolate, while American chocolate has had the cost of ingredients driven down by commercial interests. | 337 | 436 |
ELI5: How come plants in AeroGarden don't get root-rot? | Hello,
In an AeroGarden, the roots to a plant are submerged in water pretty much 24/7 (unless you let your Garden run dry which is a no-no). Yet I've never had a plant get root-rot.
Yet when you over-water stuff in a plant-pot, the plants are very likely to suffer/die from root-rot. Why?
Thank you! | The fungi that cause root rot thrive in high moisture, low oxygen environments. This is why overwatering causes issues; you remove the air pockets that are in normally watered soil.
Hydroponics consistently aerates the water. This removes the lack of oxygen issue associated with root rot. However, if the water isn't aerated, you can absolutely end up with root rot. | 133 | 123 |
Could somebody explain the difference between Subjective Idealism and Absolute Idealism | Hi all, I've particularly been reading about various schools of Indian philosophy (Advaita Vedanta, Shunyavada, Kashmir Shaivism, and Vijnanavada, to be specific) and I've found many references to schools of Western philosophy to which they are compared. While I do have interest in Western philosophy as well, I'm kinda tripped up over the distinctions they make between the schools of Subjective Idealism (which I have heard is associated with the likes of Berkeley) and Absolute Idealism (which, if I'm not wrong, is Hegel's philosophy). If interested, feel free to comment on their connections with Eastern philosophy as a whole. | Like most -ism words, "idealism" means a lot of different things to different people. Most western philosophers will associate it with Berkeley-style idealism. By reputation at least, this is the view that what we experience is purely mental, not anything real that exists independent of the minds of those who experience it.
The other two famous idealisms, (Kant's) transcendental and (Hegel's) absolute idealism, have nothing to do with this, and are explicitly opposed to it. For Kant, the word "ideal" doesn't mean "fake" or "purely mental", it means something closer to how the word is used in ordinary english today: the ideal is a standard or goal that you strive for, which striving organizes your activity and gives it sense. Kant argued that many important metaphysical concepts were not concepts of objects, but were ideals in something like this sense. We never have knowledge of traditional philosophical objects like the universe as a whole or the nature of the good, but instead those concepts serve as ideals, and our unending striving to get closer to knowledge of them is that in light of which the rest of our knowledge makes sense, even if we can never actually get there.
Hegel accepts this basic structure but argues that it's wrong to think we never get to knowledge of those ideals. On the contrary, self-consciousness itself *is* knowledge of those ideals; we cannot help but know them insofar as we know anything at all. The best contemporary articulation of a view like this is Sebastian Rodl's *Self-Consciousness and Objectivity*. | 15 | 41 |
Can you submit an abstract to a conference that is identical to an abstract from your manuscript? | Here is the situation:
My supervisor wants me to submit some of my research to a conference that will also publish accepted abstracts in their affiliated journal. However, I have recently submitted a research article to another journal with the same abstract. Is this ok or is this against the rules?
In addition, is it ok to submit the same abstract to more than one conference?
| People often do conference papers that are substantially the same as journal articles. But it's not particularly good form to leave the wording of the title and abstract the same. Just reword it so that it says the same thing in different words and give it a slightly different title. It's a meaningless distinction really but it means you'll be able to say that they're different pieces of work (even if they're about the same thing with basically the same conclusions). Otherwise you'll look lazy. | 11 | 15 |
CMV: any privately held belief is fine as long as it doesn't affect your behaviour towards others. | This view is based on a conversation I had on this sub.
My view is that as long as people behave with kindness and respect towards others it doesn't matter what they think on the inside.
We'll literally never know for sure what someone else may truly believe, only their actions/behaviour matter as that is what affects the external world.
Thought crime, as in the crime of thinking a certain way, like prejudice based on race or religion, is meaningless unless it causes someone to act on those beliefs. It is the act, not the belief that we punish when someone commits a hate crime - the crime itself is not hating, its hatred fuelling a criminal act.
If your external behaviour is pleasant to everyone including those you hate then what difference does it make?
I can truly believe in my heart that eating meat is morally wrong, on ethical grounds of cruelty and environmental grounds. That's a meaningless thing to believe if I still eat meat.
My behavior is what matters, not the belief.
If someone hates animals and the environment but still doesn't eat meat then the end result is the same! | I agree in an ideal scenario, but let's be honest, how often does someone who holds the view that say, black people are lesser, not allow it to affect their actions in some capacity? Even if you aren't conscious of it you can still be unconsciously effected by beliefs you have as well. | 115 | 141 |
ELI5: Why is it seemingly easier to converse with someone face-to-face than it is with someone you can't physically see (for instance, over the phone)? | We are very visually oriented and facial recognition is important in bonding and socializing. We also tend to relate to things that look similar to us more easily and without something to look at and remind us of our similarities, socialization becomes more difficult. Besides that, phones slightly distort the sound compared to face-to-face conversing, so you feel even less bonded and less like socializing. Body language also contributes as it allows us to read between the lines, as it were. We can figure out where we stand socially with others by their mannerisms and movement. Without these cues, socialization is further impeded as you become less sure of yourself and your standing with the person. | 23 | 25 |
|
ELI5: Why do some people have to pay their ex-spouses after a divorce because they're "accustomed to a certain lifestyle"? | I think the terms for what I'm referring to is 'alimony', but I'm not entirely sure.
I just don't really understand the argument that someone should be forced to pay their ex because they're accustomed to a certain lifestyle. I mean... Doesn't that give me a disincentive to keep my wife's quality of life relatively low? If I were rich, and I spent a ton of money buying my wife nice things and then we got a divorce, she could claim money from me because she got used to being treated that well. However, even if I was rich, if I was very stingy with buying her things, then she wouldn't be "accustomed" to a nice lifestyle, and I wouldn't have to pay as much.
Am I misunderstanding this? It just seems like such a moronic non-argument. You don't give kids at school varying lengths of timeouts depending on how long their timeouts are at home, so why is this argument one that seems to hold up in our legal system?
What am I missing, here? | Now that most households have both parents working a job, it does not make quite as much sense as it used to, but consider this: You get married at a fairly young, but still responsible enough age, say 25. You have a college degree, but you and your spouse decide that they will work and you will stay at home and take care of the house, and children when they come around. Let's say you are okay with that, as it is something that is very commonly done by people and you don't mind.
10 years go by, you have a couple of kids, and you stay at home taking care of them. But things aren't working out with your spouse. You decide to get a divorce. Your spouse has a job and can maintain a healthy lifestyle, and you will share the kids 50/50, but what about you?
You haven't had a job in 10 years, if you ever had one. The job experience that you may have had means almost nothing. Your college degree is equally worthless or even moreso. That combined with your age and kids (employers can't ask you about that, but if they know somehow it won't help your case), makes you about the bottom of the barrel in terms of people they want to hire. You will be lucky to get a job being paid a few dollars over minimum wage.
If you had had a job for all that time you might be a top quality hire, but you gave that up for your marriage, in a mutually agreed upon decision. It didn't seem like a bad idea because marriage is supposed to be for life. The situations could easily have been swapped around -- your spouse could have stayed at home and you could have gotten a job, and then they would be in this predicament. And maybe it wasn't even your fault that the divorce happened -- maybe your spouse was abusive, or you just realized that you weren't in love with each other anymore.
It's probably not fair that you are now being made to live a much poorer life for a decision that could have easily gone the other way. And it's hard for courts to determine what *could* have been if the marriage arrangement had been different, so they err on the side of making things equal just in case. Sometimes people get help maintaining a lifestyle they deserve, sometimes people get a free ride to a lifestyle they never would have had if they hadn't gotten married in the first place. All in all it is seen as fairer to take a certain part of someone's money (while allowing them to still live a nice lifestyle) to help another than to tell that person to go fuck themselves when it might not be their fault at all. | 115 | 124 |
How exactly does having lots of people visit a website all at once, crash the website? | Responding to a request for your website takes some amount of time, during which some amount of resources on the computer(s) responsible for serving your website are used for that purpose.
Eventually the computer(s) run out of resources and are unable to respond to any more requests. Hence the website crashes. | 30 | 43 |
|
[MCU] How does the general human population deal with the knowledge that they are not alone in the universe? | In Avengers the world saw a hole open above New York City and an army of aliens flooded in. In Infinity War they saw these strange circular ships. What do they make of all this? How has humanity moved on since learning that? Are scientists looking for the origin of that life? Has it changed their perception of organizations like NASA or SETI? Does it have any bearing on culture?
How come the people we see interact the most with aliens treat it like it's no big deal? Bucky barely registered that he was talking to a sentient racoon, Cap kind of just nodded at a talking tree...no one seems to react. Why? | To address the first point, The films seem to imply that people in general seem to be taking it well (are neutral to the implications). We see from Homecoming and others that it's not like the presence of aliens changed the way most people acted (In stark contrast to the DCEU where the world is actively debating the nature of aliens and exist a whole spectrum of responses). It seems to be like "Everything is normal, panic during attacks, go back to normal".
Also, that brings up a good idea, I'd love to see the MCU make a film looks at how society, culture, economics, religion, education has been impacted by the existence of Superheros, Gods and Aliens for 10 years.
2, Well Cap and Bucky know that Thor and Norse Gods and aliens and like the Chutari exist so a talking tree and raccoon aren't that much of a stretch at this point. | 27 | 26 |
What social and economic changes made fast food companies (like McDonalds, Whataburger and Burger King) so successful? | A good place to start is the *McDonalization of Society* by George Ritzer. Currently in its 8th edition. The four main findings are predictability, calculability, efficiency, and control.
Whilst the book has McDonald's in the title, it not really about it, but applying these aspects to other businesses and society at large. | 23 | 38 |
|
ELI5: How can every cell phone carrier claim that they have the nation's best coverage? | I see ads for both big and small carriers saying that they have the largest coverage and are most dependable in the U.S. Are these claims actually investigated? | The way that networks test for reliability can be different. These tests depend on the phone used, the places tested, the method of testing, etc.
After all that, you still have the subjectivity inherent in the word "best." How do you define the most reliable network? Is it the least number of calls dropped in a specific area? Is it the area of their coverage? Is it the strength of their coverage in a city?
All major carriers have a test that considers them "best." The claims are worded such that they're legally ambiguous and you'd have trouble claiming that they're not the "best" by some metric. | 20 | 21 |
ELI5:Why did human toddlers evolve the need to put everything they can in their mouths? Wouldn't this risky and deadly trait be weeded out through evolution? | I have to stop my 11 month old boy from choking to death on something about once a day. Babies are quick to shove anything they can in their mouths. This seems like it would easily kill our ancestors. How did the ones who did it not die out? How / why was it passed down? What benefit is it to us? | Babies are sensory seeking. Its good for their development. Makes them smarter.
When a baby is not putting things in their mouth and showing interest in the environment thats when you should be concerned and get help.
We cant catch everything but parents catch enough to keep the species alive. Lots of things kill babies, weather, illness, starvation, cars, parents, small objects, sids...and so on. Its not a big enough dip to kill us off. A few of the factors above applied when we were a smaller species but we also had less stuff. Keep the baby away from rocks? Done. Keep baby on back while looking for berries? Done. They weren't trying to multi task on five things and take care of a baby.
Edit: Spelling | 147 | 243 |
ELI5: Why are fleas the size of a speck of ground pepper but they can jump so high? | Part of the answer is the relationship between size and mass. If an animal is half the size, it's one-eighth the weight - so the smaller an animal is, the stronger it is in relationship to their weight. This allows very small animals to perform relatively amazing feats of strength.
Additionally, fleas have a special adaptation for jumping - rather than flexing their muscles to leap into the air, they repeatedly flex their leg muscles to put tension on a "spring" made of elastic protein. Then they release that tension all at once to jump. | 15 | 25 |
|
ELI5: Why were dinosaurs so much larger than animals today? | Was it because there was a lot more oxygen in the atmosphere? | One of the theories was due to the higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air. Plants in carbon rich environments grow very well but actually have less nutrients then if they grew in an environment similar to what we have today. So animals needed to eat a lot of plants just to get enough energy to survive. They developed larger stomachs to handle more food and grew bigger to carry a bigger stomach.
Some Sauropods maxed out the food eating stat and are basically walking stomachs, they have a long neck so they can eat everything in front of them in a large swath without having to walk anywhere. Moving that much mass requires a lot of energy so they stand still and swing their necks around eating everything they can reach. When all the food is gone they just take a few steps and now they can reach a ton of new food.
With plant eating dinosaurs getting bigger, the carnivores needed to get bigger to be able to take them down. You needed to be big to kill a giant dinosaur, but if you did, there was more than enough meet in one kill to sustain a heard of carnivores.
End result, everything keeps getting bigger and bigger. | 621 | 755 |
ELI5: How do people can make a game console emulator and how they extract game files from physical cartridge to digital files ? | First up: emulators
An emulator takes the machine code on a cartridge and either interprets it - that is, translates it piece by piece as it runs, or uses JIT compilation to translate it. The second one is much more complicated, but often more efficient.
They can translate like this as often the CPU is not custom, and the GPU is either simple (for older consoles) or is not too far from industry standards, as this makes it more likely for developers to make games for the console. The switch, for example, runs on almost the same processor as the nVidia shield tablet.
As it is being translated, it also runs on the computer. This is the main reason that emulators for new consoles need so much more power than the actual console - they need to translate the code as well as run it.
Second: Game files
This is usually done with an adapter, it will be detected as storage by a computer and copied across in its entirety. If necessary, it can then be adjusted slightly for use with an emulator.
Of course, nobody would *ever* distribute such a file, as that would be a breach of copyright law. | 85 | 76 |
|
What are the first specialized cells created in an human embryo, and what is the mechanism for proper relative positioning of different types of specialized cells? | This explanation may a bit too general. Anyways, Cells start to specialize during gastrulation when the blastula (hollow ball of cells) gets this dent. This divides the embryo into 3 “germ layers”. Each of which will specialize into specific body parts.
One mechanism for cell positioning is as simple as cell migration. Cells migrate toward some chemoattractent to get into the correct anatomical position. For example; cells of the peripheral nervous system migrate outward to eventually innervate the various organs and tissues of the body. | 11 | 55 |
|
Eli5 why finding the same gas etc on another planet is potential for another life form | There was some gas found on Venus that penguins have in their gut, which scientists are excited about because it means there's potential for a life form. But in an environment that is SO different to ours, why is it that the scientists think that life forms will need the same form/nutrients/gas etc as us? Would it not be that life forms as known on Earth, and maybe Venus Mars, every other planet would be unique and completely different to other planets, bc how different each atmosphere and environment is?
Edit: Thanks heaps for all the comments! It's more fun than googling. And also thanks heaps for my first award! | There are certain molecules that only (or usually only) come into existence by certain processes. If we find a molecule that is only generated by biologic processes, then it's a good sign that something is living in there. We could be wrong, and that molecule ended up being generated in a non-biologic way, but that's why we need to investigate further. | 41 | 24 |
What’s the best route to learn a solid foundation on economics? | Assuming someone who knows very little on economics, what’s the best route for them to learn?
Is there a sort of general economics topic/book that would be best to give a foundation, then move on to micro/macro, then move to more of those “opinion” style books?
Or is that not really a realistic path? Is there no general economic books and it’s only macro/micro, “opinion”?
Really appreciate some advice on going from basics to more detailed topics. | The best way would be to go to university/college and get a degree in economics if that's where your interest is. However, that isn't realistic for most people. Your next best option imo would be to get a copy of a first year introduction to micro and macro textbook, and go from there. Used and older copies can be found online, and generally the newest copies don't have any new information, they're just laid out a little bit differently.
Another option would be "Economics for Dummies". The For Dummies books in general are really well done, and are written well for people who have little to no knowledge on the topic. They're cheap as well, which is a big plus.
Either of these will give you a decent base level of knowledge, and if you still want to take it farther, you can also look for higher level textbooks as well. I've found that there isn't a whole lot of economics learning outside of a school setting, like you would find with learning programming for example. So for this reason, upper year textbooks would be your best bet. | 62 | 113 |
Why does fever happen? | So I had a major infection two weeks ago and spent 4 days in a hospital, during which I had fever of 40 degrees celcius, that's why it stroke me, ¿what purpose does this body reaction serve?
Thanks in advance for responses. | Fever is an awesome topic as well as the constellation of things that happen during "sickness" or "acute phase response". A few things are at play during a fever.
1. Most human pathogens proliferate poorly above 39C. Almost none of them will die at this temp but their growth rate will be slowed.
2. Neutrophil activity and mobility increase
3. interferon production increases
4. cytokine release (that helps to maintain pyrogen release)
5. DECREASE in plasma iron concentrations. All microorganisms require iron uptake, the body starts sequestering as much as it can to reduce the availability to pathogens.
6. increase in triglyceride levels. Things like VLDLs are good at binding bacterial enterotoxins
7. increase in sleepiness. The sick need to sleep.
8. Decrease in appetite. Paradoxical since the basal metabolic rate needs to increase to produce a fever. Thoughts are lowered intake may be to reduce iron absorption and possibly from an evolutionary standpoint because resting animals usually survive predation.
How it happens, complex but cool...
1. your immune system produces signaling molecules (pyrogens) that travel to the brain in the blood when they encounter things like bacteria, viruses, etc...
2. a few small spots in the brain are not protected by the blood-brain barrier so they can "taste" the chemical makeup of the blood. One of these (organum vasculosum of the lamina terminalis for you anatomy nerds) areas lets neurons in the hypothalamus bind with the pyrogens. These neurons fire when your body goes above 37C so when we turn them off the signal that we're hot is now not as vigorous, our new "set-point" temperature will be higher...
3. Not the whole story though. Fever usually sets in about 30 minutes before pyrogens reach your brain...If you block the vagus nerve this 30 minute early onset doesn't happen. Most likely the vagus is stimulated in the liver and signals the onset of the fever while the pyrogens continue to maintain the new set point until the immune system's activity returns to normal. | 15 | 15 |
Would indexing corporate taxes to state poverty rate persuade companies to take actions towards lowering poverty? | Why would companies start up in states that have high poverty rates?
Why would companies that already are in poor states stay there?
Seems like it would be easier to move than “reform” your community, so the incentive would backfire. | 29 | 27 |
|
[Star Wars] Why was Tatooine so diverse? | Tatooine seems to be a desolate planet mostly covered with deserts, yet as we saw at Mos Eisly it appears to hold countless races. Did Jabba the Hutt as a crime lord bring in a diverse cast? Or is Tatooine just weirdly diverse? | Well, you have to remember that Mos Eisley is a spaceport, so you are naturally going to attract a wide variety of individuals from various places. Yes, some of them work for Jabba, but many others were just traveling and were currently stopped at that port. | 43 | 22 |
Do I have a moral duty to be well informed about current events which I can't possibly influence? | Edit: please refrain from giving answers that are too specific to any particular event, this is not a question about Ukraine, but rather about all events of this kind. Thanks. | I think this question might be ill-posed, because it assumes that you are able to accurately tell whether or not you are able to influence some set of events without being informed about that set of events. It is very possible that determining whether or not some particular set of events is influence-able by you itself requires that you be informed about those events. Any time this is the case, if you assume that you have a moral duty to be informed about events that you can do something about (take your pick of any ethical theory to justify this assumption), then it follows that you have a moral duty to inform yourself about all events at least insofar as doing so would allow you to ascertain whether or not you are actually able to influence them to some extent. | 98 | 203 |
[ELI5] Why does gas cost 3 times more in Most asian countries compared to the US? | I know gas prices in general are higher in Asia than in the US and quite alot too. From my past calculations, prices are anywhere from1.5 to 3 times as high as US counterparts.
US is probably farther away and the middle eastern countries dont like the US, so why such a big price difference? Is it due to the sheer difference in quantity? | So there are a few things to keep in mind:
Gas is a commodity and there is a fixed global price. There are however several factors which cause that price to vary from country to country. Shipping costs are one major factor. However the commodity price is varied by the following:
1. Government subsidies. Most oil producing countries (the USA and Canada do not do this) provide cheap gas to their citizens through government subsidies. Some asian countries (notably china) have also worked out exclusive supply deals taking oil from venezuela directly as repayment on hard currency loans. Whether the chinese government passes this savings on to its citizens is another matter. The important thing to note however is that US gas prices are not subsidized and in fact are inflated due to taxation. We do however benefit from being close to where the oil is refined and so have lower shipping costs.
2. Taxes. Many countries tax gas highly. Gas is often seen as a luxury or "sin" item and is taxed accordingly in many places. Europe and Canada both tax gas signficantly more than the united states. Every country in asia will have its own taxes.
3. Real Estate. Gas storage and distribution takes up a lot of real estate which has to be paid for with the profits of the business. In Hong Kong for example land is worth so much that typically buildings have to be skyscrapers to the space inside them affordable. Gas stations however have to be built on the ground level in the open air meaning they take up a huge amount of valuable real estate and so have to have very high profits. Thus gas prices are dramatically higher than just the cost of the fuel.
4. Popularity of cars. Not every country or area is going to be rich enough that the average person can afford a car. A gas station in north america makes a huge chunk of its profit by selling candy bars and coffee to drivers as they pass through and use the gas as the draw to get junk food sales. In asia some countries have cars - but not in the same way north americans do. So station operators need to make their money on the gas sale itself which in turn raises prices.
5. Other economic and political factors. In a lot of asian countries governance just isn't as good as it is in north america. This means extra costs. Your country's currency is inflating: you need a higher profit margin. Your country has corrupt cops: you need a higher profit margin. Your country has poor court systems: you need a higher profit margin. We have done a lot of things "right" in the western world that allow businesses to operate on narrow margins but that isn't going to be true the world over. A lot of places there is so much instability and uncretainty that unless you are turning 30% a year profits on a business it isn't even worth doing. | 43 | 98 |
Given our present understanding of molecular phylogenies, isn't taxonomy completely obsolete? | My kid is learning about Linnaean taxonomy in school (Kingdom/Phylum/Class/Order etc). It occurs to me that this is a gross oversimplification of molecular phylogeny, enough so as to be be fairly worthless. Is it still widely used in the scientific community? | Well, *kind of* is the simple answer. In most cases these classifications actually represent the true relationships. Species are more related to each other species within a genus, genera within families, families within order, and so on. That being said, there are some paraphyletic groupings still around for poorly resolved taxa but taxonomists are working diligently to resolve them properly. So, they're not worthless since they do represent some level of relationships,... but they exist as simple clades with no real context, timing, or (almost always) ancestry.
The real problem here is our idea of species concepts and what a species actually is. That's something where evolutionary biologists, ecologists, and taxonomists generally disagree on. You may read Coyne and Orr's book on speciation (I think it's called 'Speciation') for more insight here. | 12 | 19 |
How do Parallel SEM Avoid Interference Between Parallel Electron Beams? | Today I learned that companies like Zeiss have electron microscopes that have parallel electron beams, to increase scanning rate.
However, given that electrons are negatively charged, how/why do the parallel electrons path's not become distorted? Do computers do the math to correct for distortion caused by electrostatic repulsion? | You could look up beam currents, typical separation of the beams and calculate the effect size based on that, but there is a much simpler approach: Compare it to the effect of the beam on itself. The electrons in a beam repel each other. They are *much* closer together so their repulsion is much stronger. That is something to keep in mind with larger beam currents, but it doesn't stop electron microscopes from working. Beams separated by far larger than the beam width will have a much smaller influence. | 17 | 40 |
Why can't human cells use anaerobic processes to create ATP when in an atmosphere of no oxygen? | I know that some single-celled organisms are capable using fermentation to catabolize glucose and other sugars to create ATP in the absence of oxygen, so what prevents humans from being able to do the same? We have the enzymes necessary and use anaerobic fermentation at times of high exertion, so why can't we use fermentation at times of low exertion to keep the body alive when in the complete absence of oxygen? My best guess is that the body isn't able to use fermentation to create ATP at a rate that matches the body's energy needs, but I'm hoping it's a little more interesting than that. | The majority of ATP resulting from respiration is generated through a process called "oxidative phosphorylation" which involves using an electron transport chain to generate a gradient of hydrogen ions outside of the inner mitochondrial membrane and then allowing it to flow back in through a molecule of ATP synthase which is basically a molecular turning engine embedded right into the membrane. The ATP synthase "turbine" can't function without the gradient of ions, and the gradient of ions can't be created without the electron transport chain, and the electron transport chain can't function without an oxygen atom to serve as the final electron acceptor.
The best we can do in the absence of oxygen is lactic acid fermentation. Fermentation involves only the initial step of respiration, glycolysis, which produces four molecule of ATP but uses two in the process for a net production of only two molecules of ATP for every molecule of glucose consumed. Not very efficient when compared to aerobic respiration, which can produce up to 32 molecules of ATP for every molecule of glucose consumed. | 19 | 20 |
[Mage The Ascension] How powerful is a Master Rank mage? | Master Rank mage who has achieved 5 dot mastery in one discipline, or even all of them. Do they even compare to oldest vampires? | A mage who has achieved master rank in all Spheres is effectively a god to most supernatural beings- there are few statted up beings that can rival them in the world of darkness. One who's achieved mastery in just one is still very powerful, especially since they likely have high dots in other spheres
The main issue is that a dot in a sphere buys a *lot* more then, say, a dot in a discipline or a gift or an arcanoi or what have you. Most supernatural powers give you one specific power. For example, a vampire with one rank of dominate can give a one-word command if they look into your eyes. A lot of possible uses, but still one concrete power.
Conversely, a mage with one dot in the Mind Sphere can sense mental traits, scan auras, read emotions, see the near umbra, detect lies, protect their own mind from influence, absorb data at a superhuman rate and boost their own intelligence. And that's just as sample powers.
This continues: our Ventrue has, at 5 Dominate, 5 discrete, fairly focused mind-controlling powers. Our Ecstatic with 5 Mind, meanwhile, has just a laundry list of abilities to sense, alter, boost, degrade, control, destroy and create minds. And that assuming they can't combine it with other spheres for even more abilities, which they likely can. A mage increases in power *massively* more quickly then anything else in the world of darkness.
This is a real problems with crossovers. With the exception of the real heavy hitters like Antediluvians and Incarnae, there are very few beings in the world of darkness that can stand up to a mage of equal "level". They simply get too versatile too fast. | 11 | 16 |
ELI5: When and why did the US military change their camouflage to the more "pixelated" design that soldiers currently wear? | Was it just a stylistic decision or does it serve a more pragmatic function? | The objective (and it can be argued whether or not it was met) was that the new uniform be functional in more environments. The older uniforms were good for Woodland OR Desert. The newer uniform was meant to work in Woodland AND Desert.
The digital pattern was meant to help achieve this pattern. If you remember the older uniforms, there were large blobs of color, and large blobs don't usually happen in nature. The digital patterns are more broken up and help to achieve a more natural camouflage. | 129 | 242 |
CMV: The secrecy of the U.S. military and intelligence services is mostly harmful. | The culture of secrecy in these sectors encourages waste, fraud and abuse. This can be seeen anywhere from [Trailblazer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project) to everyday overspending in every aspect of military procurement. Letting the public see how its money is spent might not solve these problems entirely, but it would help.
Government organizations should not be allowed to use national security and the state secrets privilege to [cover up embarrassments](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege#Executive_abuse_of_the_privilege_to_conceal_embarrassing_facts) that have little to nothing to do with national security, yet they do all the time.
It is necessary to conceal some operational matters - I don't want anyone to leak the proverbial nuclear launch codes. The government should have the ability to keep secrets, but only so long as the public knows what is being kept secret. Concealing names and passwords is useful; concealing entire programs is dangerous.
Removing widespread secrecy would make the job of the military and intelligence services more difficult. It might lead to soldiers dying or terrorists succeeding. However, I believe the risk of this happening is small, and the costs much less than the costs to freedom of leaving secrecy unchecked.
I am entirely aware of the political difficulty of cutting back on secrecy. I'm not making any practical suggestions about how to do this; I don't know how. I'm arguing that it's a worthy goal.
EDIT:
I should give some examples of where I think the line should be drawn on secrecy.
The military should tell us who they've targeted with drones, but only once they're dead or no longer targeted. The military should also tell us who they've actually killed with drones.
The NSA should reveal the nature and budget of all of their programs. They should not the specific personal data they've collected using those programs. The NSA should provide the amount of data they've collected in a moderate amount of detail - e.g. they've collected the email communications of N Americans and M Iraqis, and searched the email communications of K Americans, obtained warrants for J Americans, etc. They shouldn't reveal who specifically they're investigating until after the investigation and then only to the person being investigated.
The CIA should tell us that they've spent $N arming the Free Syrian Army and what they hope to achieve by doing so, that they're spying on the governments of whoever they're spying on (everyone probably), and so on. They shouldn't tell us the identities of their undercover agents or the particular methods they're using to spy on a particular person.
If any of these agencies engage in corruption, fraud, or any other sort of embarrassment, it should immediately and fully be brought to the public's attention. If the agencies are understandably reluctant to do so, whistleblowers should be praised and any who attempt to stop them should be condemned, as is the case when private industry engages in unethical conduct.
Again, this is a moral argument more than a practical one.
EDIT 2:
Some dangers of government secrecy are:
* the widespread violation of Americans' privacy by programs like [Room 641A](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A)
* corruption and waste in projects like [Trailblazer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project)
* abuse of secrecy to cover up waste and abuse and persecute [whistleblowers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Andrews_Drake)
* [torture of innocents](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_El-Masri)
* abuse of secrecy to cover up torture
* the risk that people like [J. Edgar Hoover](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover) will subvert democracy
_____
> *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!* | In many cases the mere fact that the military is aware of a potential vulnerability and actively working to exploit it *is* the secret that needs to be protected. For example, the fact that the Allies broke many enemy codes during World War II was kept secret by setting up seemingly large and sophisticated radio direction finding operations to provide a cover for their ability to consistently detect enemy movements. If accurate budgets had been publicly available it would have been obvious that the code breaking project was the real focus, and the Axis powers might have gained a significant advantage by putting more effort into adopting better codes. | 33 | 107 |
[Star Wars]How would a Jedi fight non-lethally? | So, Jedi. Mystical Monk Knights of peace. Lightsabers kill or maim.
Let's say a Jedi Master runs into... hm... some rowdy rioters. If left unstopped, property damage and looting is guaranteed, there are good chances injury or accidental death, but they probably don't deserve to be slaughtered.
How does this Jedi Master subdue them? | 1. Ask them to stop.
2. Impede their efforts to do damage and harm.
3. Lead them somewhere less vulnerable and incapacitate them.
4. Annoy the shit out of them until they become frustrated and go home. Being insufferable is right up there with arrogance as a common Jedi trait. | 62 | 45 |
ELI5: How is it technically possible for a country that's billions or trillions of dollars in debt to give billions of dollars in aid? | This isn't an ideological question (as in, why should they), but more of a "how is this possible?" question. | Simple, they collect taxes, spend some paying interest on loans, and spend the rest on programs and on aid.
In a simple way It's the same way you can go out to dinner even if you have a 120k mortgage you would take 30 years to pay off.
(This isn't really a great example, your personal debt is not really that similar to the national debt, so don't try to take the analogy to far, because it doesn't work). | 21 | 29 |
Is There An Ethical Argument For Meat Consumption? | And into politics
Mainly, The Veganosphere/Vegetarianosphere.
When dealing with the topic, the most prevalent issue with animal product consumption (to my knowledge) is the ethics behind the slaughter of Animals.
The sentience argument of veganism is roughly that plants aren't sentient enough to feel pain, and ergo are fine to consume. Animals, do. But, I find this generally assumes that sentience is only possible with a mammalian nervous system, despite plants reacting just as much to "painful" stimuli as animals (without moving, obviously)
There are other ways to process information that don't include nerves, eyes, ears, etc. and whenever someone says "plants don't feel pain", the only accurate way I can come to interpret that is "they don't feel pain in the way animals do".
Which leads to the quandary: Is the Plant version of a 'pain response' as valid as the Animal one?
I don't know how heavy/sticky this topic is, especially in regards of rule 4, but I thought I'd try here to start a discussion without angry arguing back and forth | One could argue, and some do, that since our only evidence of conscious life in the universe is our own internal experience, the more similar another entity is to us the more likely it is to be sentience, and thus the greater the imperative to not do them harm. Conversely, the more distanced another being's _external_ presentation is from our own, the less likely it seems that they'll have an internal awareness like our own, and thus the less the worry about doing them harm.
An extreme example of this is the Catholic moral doctrine on the matter -- since animals do not have immortal souls, they do not have moral agency or weight in the same way humans do, though cruelty against them can still be a sin. | 50 | 121 |
ELI5: If 3 people pee into a cup and it's analyzed for DNA evidence, what does the analysis say? | ~~I need this for a trial~~ Will it be the person with the most pee in the cup? A mixture of all 3's DNA? A complete profile for each of the 3 people? Etc | I can't go into detail at the moment, but a lot of the other commentators seem to be mistaken as to how DNA analysis works.
The most common type of analysis used in the criminal context does not isolate whole DNA and analyze that. Instead, it looks for lengths of repeated segments of "junk" DNA found at certain points in specific parts (loci) in DNA. Everyone has these repetitions, but in different lengths and in different places.
The chemical process to separate DNA necessarily would split all the cells open, spill out the DNA and mix it together. Then, the DNA is broken up again by a different process into little segments, which are color coded by a third chemical process. The color marks the different target loci. Each tiny piece is sucked through a straw and is hit with a laser to detect it's color, and its length is measured (by the amount of time it takes to be sucked through the straw.)
The machine prints out numbers indicating what lengths were found of each loci. Here's where it gets hard. Maybe two people have a 7 length at a certain loci and the third peer has a 13. The machine wouldn't print out 7,7,13. Just 7 and 13.
You end up with a bunch of numbers. Pretend there are only three loci. At A, you get a 7, 5 and 22. At B, 8, 4 and 11. And at C, 15. If you're an A5, B4, C15, it's possible you peed in the cup. But it's also possible that actually an A7,B4,C15 and an A5,B8,C15 peed in the cup and you didn't at all.
This is why contamination can be such a problem. Certain lengths at certain loci can be shared by multiple people. Is the 23 at loci X the defendant's 23 at loci X? By measuring multiple loci, if they mostly match the defendant, an expert might say it's LIKELY that he's the guy. Or more precisely, that he can't be excluded as the guy.
In the case of three people peeing in a cup, it would be hard to say with certainty that any one individual peed in that cup if we only had one individual's DNA to measure against. However, if we had someone's DNA and some of their loci lengths weren't in the cup at all, we could be certain that they didn't pee in it.
| 25 | 20 |
ELI5: in chemistry, what's the difference between "-ite", "-ide", and "-ate"? | AFAIK they're all salts, but what is the significance of the different suffixes? | -ide is typically nonmetal compoundes (sodium chlorIDE). -ate is an ion with the largest number of oxygen ions, while -ite is used for a smaller number of oxygen ions (NO2 = nitrite NO3 = Nitrate)
For more fun, lets look at chloride:
Cl = Chloride
ClO = HYPOchlorITE
ClO2 = chlorITE
ClO3 = ChlorATE
ClO4 = PERchlorATE
EDIT:
A silly way to remember this is that the hungry hippo -ATE the one with more oxygens (substitute any rediculous animal to assist in making a mental image) | 81 | 122 |
CMV: Gender roles aren't socially constructed, they're a result of sexual selection. | I was listening to a podcast about Rojava when one of the female fighters started talking about what was basically feminist theory. She basically said that gender roles were socially constructed by men at the dawn of civilization to oppress women, which I dont really understand. It seems pretty obvious to me that its part of our nature, but maybe theres something Im missing?
In primates (and most mammals in general) males are the indiscriminate sex while females are the selective sex, because males produce sperm consistently at a low energetic cost whereas females produce a limited number of eggs only during certain times and at a higher energetic cost. This means it increases fitness most for men to have as many mates as possible since... they can.... while it benefits female fitness most to select the fittest possible mates in order to give their limited offspring the best chance of survival and reproduction. Males compete with one another for attention of selective females, and therefore more aggressive and dominant males are selected for. Men select for women who are more passive and emotionally sensitive because it makes them more effective at rearing children. Since men are more dominant and aggressive and women more sensitive it kind of follows that men would of course end up being the dominant sex. The sexual strategies themselves are also selected for which is why theres a pretty pervasive social more against women being promiscuous while men are generally lauded for having more sex. | The fact that they are socially constructed follows immediately from the observation that gender roles vary from time to time and from society to society. If they were part of our nature, then they wouldn't vary on such short time scales, and certainly not do so based on social constructs. | 62 | 18 |
eli5: How exactly do photographs work? | How can you freeze an image of reality onto a tangible surface? | There are certain chemicals that are sensitive to light. When exposed to light they change colors (specifically get darker).
To make a picture with film, you first have transparent plastic that is coated with a chemical that burns depending on how much light hits it. When you expose that film to light for a fraction of a second the parts that were brighter in the image turn darker on the film. And the parts of the image that are darker reflect less light and so the film remains more transparent.
You then process that film thru chemicals that freeze the light reacting chemicals and prevent them from continuing to react. Now you have a sheet of semi transparent film that is an inverted image of the image you wanted to capture.
If you project light thru that film. You can project it onto a sheet of paper that is coated with similar chemicals that react to light (the parts exposed to more light will darken more). If you do this for a few seconds and then use chemicals to freeze the light reacting chemicals again then you will get an image that is an inverse of the inverse of the original image, in other words it looks like the image you took.
This explanation implies a black and white photo. But color film works similarly it just has has chemical that react to different colors of light when they darken.
Digital cameras are kinda similar. The lens, shutter, and aperture can all work the same as film except instead of projecting the image onto a sheet of film it projects it onto a square of a bunch of light sensors in a grid. Each sensor measures exactly how much light hit that spot and records it on a defined scale, for this example from a range from 0 to 255. 0 if it saw no light at all, 255 if it saw the maximum amount of light it is able to measure. For most cameras, each pixel has a filter on it that only allows it to see either blue, red or green light. When you group the data from 3 (or usually 4 with an extra green) pixels that are all right next to each other you can get a value for that tiny square of the image that is recorded like: red = 200, green = 40, blue = 220, which would be a pixel that is a shade of purple.
And when you add all of the millions of light sensors’ data to gather you can get a list of what every dot in the grid (a pixel). Some image file formats are literally a list from left to right for each row of pixels of how much light each recorded. So when a display needs to show the image it just shows a light with that color hue at that brightness in the location that the sensor recorded it. | 26 | 24 |
Why does a room go dark when you turn out the light - what happens to the light? | The light emitted by light sources such as lamps is absorbed by the objects in the room. We see these objects because they reflect part of the light that hits them, but every time they're hit a significant part of the incoming light is absorbed. If there's no active light source, it takes no more than a microsecond for almost all the light to be absorbed.
The absorbed light is turned into heat, so the objects in the room are heated up very slightly by a light source. | 7,759 | 5,850 |
|
I want to start reading philosophy books what’s the 1 book I should get to start philosophy? | I'd recommend starting with some of the more introductory books on philosophy, like Bertrand Russell's "The Problems of Philosophy." It will give you a good overview of a variety of philosophical problems. | 27 | 31 |
|
Social Darwinism: What's that all about? | Okay, so I've seen the phrase a few times on Reddit and all over the web, and while Wikipedia gave me a pretty good idea, I'm having some trouble understanding what exactly it's about. These are specific questions I have:
1. Social Darwinism is applying Darwin's theory of evolution to sociology and politics to find so-called laws of society; true or false?
2. Why do most people hate it/why the negative connotation?
3. Why is it linked to things like fascism or nazism?
4. Is there more of a misconception about it, or is there genuinely immoral ideas inside of it?
5. What more can you tell me that is relevant or very interesting or both?
Thanks, I know a lot of this is more opinion questions, but if you can answer them in an unbiased manner, I thank you. If not, thank you for your opinion on the subject. | Social Darwinism is linked primarily to the thinker Herbert Spencer, and his particular way of interpreting and analogizing Darwin's thought.
Darwin's 1859 work *Origin of the Species* put forward a basic concept of natural selection as the mechanism for evolution. In describing how natural selection functioned, Darwin drew a great number of his metaphors from the language of international relations and war. He also talks of the "struggle for life" and the "dependency" of the bird feeding on the insect. His language is somewhat suggestive of war and conflict.
Herbert Spencer coins the term "survival of the fittest" in 1864. Strictly understood, this is a misreading or misunderstanding of Darwin's "natural selection." For Darwin, it wasn't the "fittest" that survived. It was really any species that was even barely adequate would survive to reproduce, while certain mutations would provide advantages to certain species in certain contexts (even as those mutations in a different context would be neutral or a detriment to survival and reproduction). So Spencer's interpretation is a bit of a reversal of Darwin's thought when he puts emphasis on the fittest.
Second, whereas Darwin puts emphasis on competition between species in relation to each and the environment, Spencer and other Social Darwinists applied this idea of struggle to socio-economic classes, nations, and entire races. By focusing on the notion of the "fittest" and applying it to groups for which there is no scientific basis for differentiation on a biological level, Social Darwinism was a powerful ideology legitimating oppression, wars of conquest, racism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and eugenics.
It should be noted that these ideas were widespread in the late 1800s and early 1900s, across the political spectrum. Conservatives *and* progressives found elements of Social Darwinism appealing in justifying the perpetuation of a certain socio-political order (domestic aristocracy or oligarchy, militarism) or as justifying certain means for improving and civilizing humanity (colonialism, eugenics).
It is linked to Nazism in general due to the consonance of ideas: celebrating a certain select ethnos as the fittest (Aryans), legitimating ethnic cleansing of inferior races (Jews and Slavs), and justifying wars of conquest to secure the place of the Aryans among the inferior peoples.
There's a more specific link to Nazism through the German school of geopolitics (*Geopolitik*) and the "organic state theory" that differentiated it from the Anglo-American geopoliticians. Here's a brief history of this concept:
* Adam Muller was a German state theorist who wrote *Die Elemente der Staatskunst* in 1809 arguing that the organic nature of the state is revealed in war and competition, and that war is as natural as peace.
* Carl Ritter, a geographer and one of the founders of the discipline of geography as we know it today. Argued that the state could be understood as the unity of its organic whole, and was controlled by its own laws (differentiable from an individual's morality).
* Friedrich Ratzel, coined the term 'political geography.' Was trained in zoology and Darwin's thought. Wrote *Der Staat als Organismus*. Borrowed a term from British political economist Thomas Malthus, "living room," to describe the space required for national development. Translated to German, "living room" is *lebensraum*.
* Rudolf Kjellén, Swedish student of Ratzel. Coins term 'geopolitics.' Writes stuff like, "geopolitics is the study of the state as a geographical organism," "territory is the state's body," the state is a "biological revelation, a living being," "a country's organic nature never stands out more clearly than in war." Wrote *Staaten som Lifsform* in 1916.
As you can see, the organic conception of the state, and the necessity for struggle for survival, and the close link to war are all intertwined in this group of thinkers.
The link to the Nazis comes through German geopolitician Karl Haushofer. Ratzel was friends with Haushofers father, and Haushofer read Kjellén's work. He also subscribed to the organic state theory in all its bellicose implications. He had a direct but unclear influence on Hitler. Haushofer's student was Rudolf Hess, Hitler's secretary. Haushofer visited the two about 8 times when they were imprisoned in Landsberg prison following the failed Beer Hall Putsch. He gave Hitler lessons on geopolitics and on Clausewitz. This was the period when Hitler was writing *Mein Kampf.* The word "lebensraum" appears 11 times in the text of *Mein Kampf*. Although a comparison of Hitler's thought with Haushofer's writings on geopolitics indicates that Hitler actually drew very little specifically from Haushofer's thoughts and plans, Haushofer's terms were used by Nazis as public slogans.
Social Darwinism is generally held to be immoral because it dehumanizes whole classes, nations, and races, and legitimated or justifies inhuman acts of oppression and imperialism against them. It is a very nakedly "might makes right" way of viewing the world, which is generally found to be a morally repugnant doctrine. | 22 | 19 |
ELI5: why do most electronics, like controllers and remotes, need two batteries instead of one? | Modern electronics operate off of semiconductors. Diodes and transistors. This includes LED's. These are electronic devices which do almost nothing below a set voltage. Only above this voltage do they become active.
While the exact voltage can vary, this would usually be near or above the voltage of one battery (1.5 v). So, to get some function out of them, the voltage must be raised a bit. The easiest way to do this is to add a second battery. | 25 | 35 |
|
How do world powers develop new nuclear weapons/warheads/systems if testing has been banned since 1996? | Countries like the US and Russia have enough knowledge and data that they can be pretty confident a design will work just from models. Testing isn't just to make sure a bomb works. They gather scientific information from it to improve future designs.
They can also do sub-critical tests, which can test part of a warhead without actually causing a nuclear explosion. | 29 | 26 |
|
[Mad Max] How does Imperator Furiosa's arm work? The mechanical workings would be easy enough to design, but she would need some sort of computer interface in order for her nerves to send signals to the prosthetic | Older prosthetics use muscle contractions in other areas to trigger movement. Shrugging the shoulder to close the hand, etc. Hers is likely that style. Her nub of a forearm offers options that greater limb loss would prevent, as she still has a functioning elbow. Note that it extends well up her shoulder. | 52 | 36 |
|
[The Culture/Multiverse] Somehow, a Mind figured out how to get pass the Grid and hop to the next Universe over! What would happen? | Think of any fiction you think of that would be interesting for the Culture to deal with that won't end up in Gridfire everywhere. What would happen socially, politically, etc... for both the Culture and the natives? | It would spend some time exploring, figuring out just how different that universe is from its own. The laws of physics, biology, all of that stuff. It could conceivably spend centuries just poking around.
After that, most Culture Minds are of the opinion that the Culture should be extended to pretty much anyone who wants it, so it would find some civilizations and see what it could do to help them. Some would reject that help, and the Mind would shrug and go on its way. Others would welcome that help, and become semi-immortal, body-agnostic hedonists with drug glands and swappable genitalia.
There are entities that would try to capture and exploit the Mind, like the Borg, and entities that would try to destroy the Mind just because they (think they) can, like the Daleks, but as you said, Gridfire everywhere. You would have to be *really* high up on the pecking order to pose a challenge to a Mind.
The Q actually could, but the issues that "our" Q accused Picard of have been largely solved by the Culture. If anything, the Q would probably want to know why the Culture hadn't sublimed yet. The universes are much cooler when you don't need to worry about physical reality.
It might, however, keep a civilization or two in its pocket as a control group. That's what the Culture did with Earth in the seventies, after all. | 34 | 35 |
Why don't bugs fly in straight lines? | Every time I see a fly or a moth try and go somewhere, they tend to do a more zig-zag pattern rather than making a straight shot for it. | Unpredictable flight patterns make it difficult for predators to target insects. Survival, evolution etc. There may be addition reasons as well. Evolutionary adaptions often serve multiple functions. | 33 | 85 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.