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ELI5: If I take a complete daily vitamin every day, could I essentially live off of bread? | There is a lot of poor information in this thread.
The short answer is YES. The long answer is: depends on the kind of bread and your desired quality of life. Bread has all the macronutrients your body needs and let's assume the vitamin has the RDA of all the micronutrients. If you eat 2 loaves of Wonder White Bread you'll consume 2600 cals, 30g fat, 480g carbs, 10g fiber, 80g protein. You will feel like crap this way and likely become fat and malnourished. If you eat two loaves of Bodhi's Sprouted Spelt bread you will consume ~2100 calories, 34g fat, 252g carbs, 112g fiber, 151g protein. This is probably better than most Americans actually eat! | 246 | 296 |
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ELI5: Why is it recommended to not sleep for a while when diagnosed with a concussion. | Was diagnosed with concussion yesterday, have been several times before (sport-related). When I tell people, they often tell me to make sure I don't go to sleep for a while. Where does this come from? Is it based on any actual medical advice? | A concussion is a functional injury, which means you'll have difficulty operating at 100% for varying amounts of time. Sleep is the best way to heal said concussion.
Staying awake right after a concussion is helpful in assessing if there is also physical damage, such as swelling or bleeding in the brain. But if you have no issues walking, or holding a conversation, and neither of your pupils is dilated, rest is your best option for healing the concussion. | 52 | 46 |
Is writing efficient code even a thing in the real world? | Hey there,
Last year I have just finished a university course and for the last 5 months have been working in a junior development role (full stack developer if it matters).
Before this time recruiters would ask technical questions where you had to try find a solution with the best algorithm and complexity you can. I always enjoyed problem solving and doing stuff like this.
Now that I am **actually** working the reality seems to be different. It feels more like i'm encouaraged to go with the dumber solution or brute force solution more often. I have discussed some solutions that might be more efficient with my senior only to be told we should go with the brute force one since it will be good enough and is easier to understand and easier to maintain.
So far I have never had to use any advanced techniques like dynammic programming, complex structures like binary trees, etc.
So I ask, is efficient code even user if ever? Why are these concepts drilled in and endlessly practiced on sites like leetcode if the dumber solution is preferred? Or is this just my experience?
Thanks | You optimize for efficiency the application's hot paths, but those are often down in the core of things. A *lot* of code isn't actually called that often, and in those places, it usually makes more sense to optimize for maintainability | 63 | 52 |
CMV: Affirmative action is inarguably racist (or in broader strokes discriminatory), regardless of whether it is in fact a net positive for society (in a utilitarian or otherwise perspective), and society should fully recognize this fact and determine whether it should continue to be a practice. | Affirmative action is the theory and practice of favoring racial minorities that have historically been discriminated against, so society can, to an extent, offset the damage that has been done socially and economically to these people over generations of discrimination. Nowadays, it may also generally encompass similar movements for other minorities (women, LGBT, etc.) The two main theaters you see this practiced is in higher-level education admissions and jobs.
I concede that this practice may have net benefits for society. In fact, personally, I believe that it does. It is an important part of breaking down cycles of oppression and lack of opportunity that continually affect people for generations. In the United States, where I live, there is much historical reasoning for it too. After the Civil War, when many African slaves were freed, they still faced discrimination preventing them from getting jobs or educations to advance in society and leave their past behind. Reconstruction was an attempt by the government to even out these challenges. However, ultimately, Reconstruction failed and many blacks became stuck in a cycle of being unable to improve their standings: a good education can get you a good job, which can afford you a good living, which can allow you to live in good neighborhoods with good schools, where your children can get good educations and so forth. A system against you which prevents you from getting jobs or education can make all of this unattainable for one generation... then the next and so forth. Affirmative action can provide minorities in these situations with the opportunity to beat the odds that society has stacked over time against them, even though the institutional shackles that originally put them there (slavery, legal discrimination) are long gone.
However, regardless of its benefits, which is subjective, and can be argued for or against, affirmative action is inarguably racist. And when I say racist, I don't necessarily mean in the hostile way as in "this is an outrage, it's so racist and discriminatory", but rather in the dictionary definition where one group of people are being favored/suffering simply due to their race. I point this out because a lot of the people I've discussed this with have argued that affirmative action isn't racist because the benefits that racial minorities receive through it are offset by the discrimination they face elsewhere in life and society. Therefore, they claim, it cancels out to result in a situation where minorities have a more even playing field with everyone else.
My argument is that if society were to fully recognize the fact that affirmative action is indeed racist in the definition of the word, we as a group might be encouraged to seek more effective and universal solutions to minority disadvantages, due to the fact that systematically, affirmative action also has its pitfalls: it can't help everyone who is caught in the cycle of poverty and discrimination; it inadvertently ends up discriminating against other minorities as well, namely Asians; and lastly and perhaps most importantly, it doesn't solve the root problems of the issue and instead seeks to mitigate its effects. Because at the end of the day, how can a society that is progressing towards social equality after overcoming obstacles like slavery and legal discrimination still have institutional practices such as affirmative action?
With that out of the way, know that this post is not about whether affirmative action is beneficial for society. You could argue it is, you could argue it isn't. You could argue that it is society taking steps in the right direction, or you could argue that the only reason it exists is because of white guilt. However, in this situation, arrguing that it is good or bad as your **only** point will not change my view. | The dictionary definition of "racism" isn't "one group of people are being favored/suffering simply due to their race," but "the belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others" or "discrimination or prejudice based on race" (American Heritage Dictionary). It could be argued that affirmative action is a form of discrimination (more on that later), but with respect to the other aspects of the definition, not only is affirmative action not racist, it's explicitly *anti*\-racist. That is:
* Its pupose is to compensate for generations of past and present workplace and academic discrimination based on alleged racial differences and alleged white superiority.
* It's meant to counteract the effects of racial prejudice by forcing employers and admissions departments to consider candidates who might otherwise be disqualified by biased criteria.
Is it discrimination, in the sense of treating people differently based on arbitrary distinctions? In the most technical and literal sense, yes. But to characterize this kind of discrimination as "racism," you have to look at it in the context of the entire history of race in the United States. To wit:
* For all but the most recent decades of its history, America has operated under a de facto racial caste system, with "white" Americans on top. Admission to "whiteness" meant being granted the privileges of this status; exclusion from "whiteness" meant being subjected to inferior treatment, fewer opportunities and, often, outright abuse.
* There has *never* been a time in American history when any other group had the ability to deny social approval, economic opportunities or the protection of the law to white Americans. Even affirmative action can only exist because a large enough subset of white Americans has given its blessing to the concept. It isn't and never has been something imposed on whites by nonwhites.
* Racism isn't simple bigotry. It's the creation of entire systems of exploitation and abuse (political, social, economic, educational) *motivated* by bigotry. Affirmative action is a step toward the dismantlement of those systems, not a step toward creating an alternative set. In no way is affirmative action motivated by a belief in the inferiority of whites, or in a desire to deny them opportunities.
So yes, it's discrimination, it's even racial discrimination, but it's not *racist* discrimination. And given the facts above, while we usually take for granted that discrimination is unfair, we have to ask whether it might in fact be a case of *fair* discrimination.
In support of this hypothesis, let me give you a scenario: Say you've been systematically screwed on your paychecks for months. Every single check you've received since you began working has been $40 short of what you actually earned. You've repeatedly brought this fact to your superiors' attention, and eventually, they finally acknowledge it.
Are you going to be satisfied with their assurance that every paycheck you receive from now on will include your full earnings? Of course not! You're going to expect your back pay, and if you took the matter to court, you'd be entitled to claim it.
Similarly, suppose that you'd applied for a number of promotions for which you were fully qualified, in many cases more qualified than your fellow applicants, and you were passed up every time. Your superiors have finally acknowledged it, and the next time a promotion comes up, they say, your qualifications will be evaluated neutrally alongside your fellow applicants' qualifications.
Is this good enough, given all the opportunities you've been denied? No! You'd have every right to say it's *your* turn to receive a promotion, given all the ones you were passed over for, and your fellow applicants will just have to wait for another to come along.
Metaphorically speaking, white Americans have been "sued" for systematically denying economic and academic opportunities to other groups on the basis of race, and the court of history has found us liable. Affirmative action is the form in which we're paying compensatory damages to the groups we've discriminated against in the past. So while it may be literally true that affirmative action is a form of discrimination, it's simultaneously a remedy for past discrimination that was wholly racist in both intent and effect, and that caused a whole lot more damage to a whole lot more people. And since affirmative action can't exist without white Americans' consent, it can't be honestly construed as an instance of racist discrimination by other groups against whites.
You might argue that while white America as a whole may be guilty, *individual* white Americans may not have done anything wrong and thus don't deserve to have anything taken away from them. Hey, I've got this really nice watch! I'll sell it to you for $300. Don't ask where it came from. Oops, turns out it's hot. Did you steal it? No! You paid for it, fair and square! Nevertheless, that watch is stolen goods. You're not entitled to keep it, even though someone else stole it. Them's the breaks.
Whether we like it or not, white Americans, *as a whole*, enjoy a certain amount of wealth, status and opportunity that came at the expense of other groups who were discriminated against. We didn't steal them, but they were stolen, and so we're obliged to give a small measure of them up in the name of justice. | 29 | 39 |
Looking for a way to preserve a website | Hi,
My grandfather passed away recently. He was an avid blogger, and kept an online journal on his own website for almost two decades. It's mostly his thoughts on books he had read, photographs he took, and just small snippets of everyday life.
I would like to try to preserve this website, or at least save the contents before it's all gone. The website doesn't need to remain online, I would just like to save the content (the texts and images). Is there any easy way to save everything from a website at once? | Ask your question over in r/DataHoarder and they will definitely be able to help.
If you're able to find out what the original log in details were then that will certainly make things substantially easier for you as well | 10 | 22 |
CMV: A country shouldn’t require its young people to fight in wars. | Most people would agree that going to war and killing other people often has profound and lasting negative effects on people. Many countries, including the U.S., can institute a draft that requires young people to serve in the military.
Most often, the people making the decision to go to war are not the ones who actually have to go fight. If they did, it’s safe to say they might rethink their decisions.
The ages when most people serve in the military are arguably the years when they are most susceptible to propaganda, and not mature or experienced enough to question the reasons for war.
I can imagine some people would say that in a democracy, we are in some way agreeing as a nation to go to war and send soldiers to fight. However, in practice, there will still be many who are opposed to it and still are required to sacrifice their life or their sanity for this cause.
I can also see how someone might say that in some cases you can be a conscientious objector. I would argue that for many young people, the pressure against that and the stigma associated with it are far more persuasive to the young people at an impressionable age than they are to older adults.
One stated purpose of going to war is ensuring freedom and safety for its citizens. It is contradictory to send a large number of its most vulnerable citizens to war, where it’s neither free nor safe.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | There's two fundamental questions here: Can a country force its citizens to fight and if so, who should it pick first?
Young people make the best soldiers, as generally they are best able to meet the physical requirements. If you're going to do a draft, draft young.
Now is there ever a reason to draft? In America, we don't really have the trouble with our neighbors that European and Asian countries do. But imagine a country like Taiwan, which does have mandatory military service. Why? Because there is a very real chance that China will attack their island. Living a free and happy life is a luxury precluded on a strong defense. | 17 | 36 |
How does air get inside pumpkins? | Also, is the air composed of the same gases as atmospheric air? | All plants take in air via respiration, and they do create air sacs which are normally composed of air with a higher-than-normal level of carbon dioxide. Air travels through and between plant cells in very minute amounts. They do so by absorbing air through lenticles, small extrusions of respiratory tissue along plant stems (They are larger and more visble in fruit trees such as Apple and Cherry, which have prominent horizontal lenticles up the trunk). These lenticles help provide oxygen to the plants for growth.
Hope this helps :) | 114 | 134 |
What is so special about oxygen that almost all life requires it? | Is there another chemical that could replace oxygen? | Oxygen is useful to life because it's the final electron acceptor in reactions.
That is... Oxygen is the key to unlocking energy stored in food.
There are other compounds that can do this for certain organisms.... Sulfur, which is under oxygen in the periodic table, can do this for certain organisms. :) | 30 | 30 |
How are cancer rates going up when we've made regulations on regulations to control carcinogen use? | as the title says, it just seems like cancer rates are going up, but we've made tons of regulations, warnings and other things to show, limit or stop use of carcinogens. to me this means cancer rates should trend down. but they're not?? what would cause this in modern society??? are genes less healthy?? is our food worse?? are products really not that clean?? | A few things
1) less people dying of other things before they can get cancer - the longer you live, the more time you have to accumulate mutations that can lead to cancer and the less good your cells are at repairing them
2) we're better at spotting it. Lots of small, easily treated tumours get found early that contribute to the number of cancer cases reported but would have never been found before the technology got good. They might not ever have developed into something dangerous but we spot them and count them anyway. | 555 | 305 |
What makes Venus is the most shiniest planet of the solar system? | Is it the chemical composition of Venus atmosphere or its weather phenomena what generates the shiny optics phenomena? What is the physics process of this phenomenon? | I am going to assume you mean brightest rather than most reflective (but it is both)?
The brightness of a planet is determined by a few factors, and one of them is that is the most reflective (shiniest). Astronomers measure reflectivity with something called albedo, the ratio of reflected to incident light. Venus has an albedo (0.75) that is more than double the next most reflective planet - the outer planets are all around 0.3 and Mars and Mercury are around 0.15. Venus' high albedo is due to the clouds being light coloured as opposed to dark rocky surfaces of Mercury and Mars or the darker clouds of the outer planets.
The distance between Venus and the Sun is also important, the closer a planet is to the Sun the more incident radiation there is so there is obviously also more reflected radiation. Venus is almost as close to the Sun as Mercury. This follows what we call an inverse square law, a planet 3 times further away will have 9 times less incident radiation, the outer planets therefore have very low incident radiation compared to the inner planets.
The next major factor is the distance between the Earth and Venus, while Mercury is on average the closest planet to Earth, when Venus is on our side of the Sun it has the closest approach to the Earth, this will coincide with the times where Venus is exceptionally bright in the sky. This is also an inverse square law, so if a planet is 3 times further away from us, it will be 9 times less bright.
The last factor is the size of the planet, a planet that has three times the radius will have 9 times the reflective area. The outer planets are much much larger than Venus so despite being much much further from the Sun, much much further from the Earth, and having lower albedos we can still see Saturn and Jupiter brightly throughout much of the year. Venus' relatively small size is more than made up with though by its distance to us (but only for some of its orbit, it is quite faint on the far side really).
So basically a confluence of the distance to the Sun, its size and its reflectivity and, most importantly, its distance to us all make it appear bright to us. | 186 | 274 |
CMV: The easiest pathway to net neutrality is through local governments, not the FCC/Federal government | With all the talk about Net Neutrality in the last year, I have yet to see why or how the FCC is the correct place to start net neutrality discussions. I think it's far easier and more effective to start at the local municipal level, where your voice and votes have significantly more power than on the federal level.
I hold this view because I, like many others, am extremely annoyed at the effective monopolies that carriers like Comcast and Spectrum have in certain areas, and dislike paying as much as I do for my internet service. But I look at the services that consortiums like [ECFiber](http://www.ecfiber.net/) (edit: with whom I am completely unaffiliated, so this isn't some veiled advertisement or anything) can offer to rural areas, and the price they can offer it at, and it seems far more effective to start local and grow out.
Further, I worked as a network engineer at a smaller ISP that is Comcast's only "real" competition in my area for a few years, and have seen and experienced firsthand just how much the FCC regulations, even the reclassification, have done nothing to effect change in the industry. The only places where I saw real change in business models and real competition were in places that de-regulated the telecom pole space in their towns, allowing dark fiber to be run by a company that didn't actually provide internet service, but rather just the physical plant.
So, reddit, CMV. I see the FCC being far less effective than the local towns that changed their laws to allow new, carrier-neutral, fiber to be run.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | The Constitution contains the supremacy clause (Article 6, Clause 2) which establishes the Constitution, Federal laws and treaties under Federal authority constitute the supreme law of the land (paraphrase but wicked close).
For that reason alone, working from the Federal level is the easiest pathway to net neutrality.
Conversely, both the Federal and State governments can invalidate local laws through a process called preemption. This is where there is a compelling national interest in having uniform rules. It would be a gigantic barrier to commerce if there were 50 different FDA's with 50 different standards to sell a pharmaceutical.
Local broadband initiatives might 'feel good', power to the people and all that. However, there are thousands of municipalities/localities. It is easier to fight once (even if you temporarily lose) rather than to have 10,000 mini-fights that create a patchwork of rules for an international company like Netflix and Google to navigate. | 112 | 667 |
CMV: If the U.S. Government denies student financial aid based on parental ability to pay, the gov't should provide a mechanism to force the parents to pay it. | In the US, until the year a person turns 24 years old, the parents' financial information is required to apply for financial aid for school. If your parents can afford to send you to college, the government will refuse to give you financial aid or subsidized loans.
However, problems arise when the family *can* afford to assist with college costs but *won't*.
There is very little recourse for a student who themselves is broke but whose parents' have money. The student will be judged based on their parents' ability to pay, not their own, until they year they turn 24.
When the parents refuse, the child must take loans with MUCH worse interest rates, with no opportunities for subsidized loans or grant money. Alternatively, they can put their lives and careers on hold for up to 6 years while they age out of this rule.
If I can be refused the same loans and interest rates as other people equally as broke as me simply because my parents have money, the government should provide a mechanism to force them to assist, or alternatively, allow me to apply for financial aid based on my own finances', not my parents'.
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Every family should have the right to decide how best to spend their money. They may decide that a new roof or a trip to Hawaii is more important than their kid's education. In the case of the trip to Hawaii - it seems logical to expect the government to force the parents to pay for the kid's education. However, in the case of the new roof - it seems unfair to expect the family to necessarily value a new roof less than their kids education. It seems like a personal decision.
Accordingly 3 situations arise:
1. **Government forces Parents to Pay**: If the government gets into the business of forcing parents to pay for tuition-- you then have parents forced to pay for tuition but not roofs and you effectively have homeless parents.
2. **Government looks at what is being paid for**: If the government looks at every decision and decides - should the parents have paid for the roof, but not the hawaii trip - most people would consider than an invasion of privacy since a bureaucrat is suddenly second guessing their own personal decisions. Almost no one would like that.
3. **Government looks at ability to pay, but doesnt second guess**: This is the current situation. Its not an invasion of privacy, but its extremely inconvenient. Its hence the best of a bad situation. | 16 | 91 |
ELI5: Why do citrus fruit have segments? | 1. Segmentation inside the citric fruits are due to its development from the ovary, as each of the segment is evolved from the ovary locule, the number of segments varies according to species
2. *Citrus* fruits are segmented because it's an ancestral trait and that's just how they evolved. Breeding is irrelevant and has made no difference to segmentation, except some are easier to separate than others.
3. There are other segmented fruits, such as durians, pomegranates, mangosteen, bananas, cucumbers, watermelons, cantaloupes, tomatoes, bitter melons, and so on.
4. All *Citrus,* Durians, pomegranates, mangosteens, bananas, cucumbers, watermelons, cantaloupes, tomatoes, bitter melons, and so on, are only one of those things, because they are segmented not citrus fruits. Segments may be either loose, semi-fused, or fused. Pineapples, blackberries, and raspberries are aggregate fruits.
5. finally there is debate if having seeds within segments aided the dispersal of seeds as the consumer was less likely to break the seed within a segment | 42 | 60 |
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Do poorer people have larger social networks? | I read a lot about sociology and poverty. And one thing that pops up frequently is how poor people with kids call on their parents or sisters or cousins to watch their children. Among my college-educated friends with children sometimes the grandparents watch the kids but it's not this endless list of relatives who hang out with their kids. It made me wonder if being poor gives you more options for a social network when it comes to your children? | Ruby Payne talks about this a lot in her book, *A Framework for Understanding Poverty*. She writes that people in poverty rely on social networks for survival. Middle class people rely on social networks for social capital, and wealthy people rely on social networks for connection to power. Because poorer people rely so closely on their social connections for survival and managing life, they tend to have closer and more codependent relationships. You work nights, so your mom takes the kids to school, your aunt picks them up and takes care of them until you wake up, etc. Family and friends are built into the fabric of day to day existing, where as a middle class or wealthy person doesn’t need to rely on social networks in the same way. | 47 | 90 |
Is there a maximum length that a human hair can grow to? | The maximum hair length is determined by the length of the *anagen* (the period when hair growth occurs). This is different for each individual. Longer hair is possible only for people with a longer anagen. Typically this period lasts between 2 and 7 years. For some people it's longer. When the anagen period is over, the catagen or transitional phase begins. This lasts for about two weeks after which the telogen or resting phase begins. After the resting phase is over (after about one to four months) the hair will fall out. This is considered normal hair loss and you probably notice it every day.
So to answer your question, yes, there is a maximum, but it's drastically different from person to person. | 625 | 897 |
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eli5 How does the process of throwing up work? | I was driving about 20 minutes ago and I could feel myself about to throw up. I was less than a minute away from home and so I tried to hold it down but despite my best efforts it came up anyway and I had to open the door just seconds before spewing my guts out. Why aren't we able to hold it down? How does that bodily function work? | Your stomach is like a bag of fluid and mashed up food. It is surrounded by muscles that "squeeze" the bag. They usually just mash food around to help with digestion.
With throwing up, your body decides that it needs to get rid of your stomach contents (more on that later). It has all the muscles around your stomach squeeze hard. Picture a small Ziploc bag of water with a tube coming out the top, then you squeeze the bag hard in both hands. The contents has to shoot up the tube.
Why can't you stop it? Evolution has "decided" that over all when the situation is dire enough that you need to vomit (which is usually because you are being poisoned by something you ate), getting the poison out ASAP is more important than being able to choose where that happens. You can wash out your car or your carpet if you don't make it to the bathroom - but not if you're dead from whatever you've gone and eaten. | 25 | 15 |
The question about the age of the Earth lead me to wondering how we figured out the half lives of some of these isotopes? | Another post here about how we find out about the age of the Earth lead me to questioning how we figured out the half lives of some of these super long decaying isotopes, that will not decay during our life times or haven't decayed during even the entirety of the existance of our understanding of science. Like how did we come to know that this element will decay into this other element in like a quintillion years? I know we know mathematically but like how does one figure this out? | You measure the decay over a given time period and extrapolate from that.
Of course, for super long half life isotopes only a tiny % of atoms will decay in a practical timescale but we are assisted by the fact that there are many billions of atoms in a sample and a tiny % of a huge number is still a big enough number to work with. | 231 | 283 |
IAMA Economic Geographer. Ask me Anything! | Hi everyone. I'm an Economic Geographer whose currently finishing his PhD. My dissertation research looks at how the interaction of local and global economic and social forces affects entrepreneurship in Canadian cities, but I've also done research on innovation, clusters, and the geography of the financial crisis.
I'm just sitting here, waiting out the hurricane and reading about the influence of the American oil industry on Calgary, so I'll try my best to answer all the questions I can! | How do you think fair trade policies has influenced the growth of local economies in developing countries? Do you think that fair trade policy is an efficient way to influence development, or do you think that the majority of gains from the fair trade label go towards the businesses that market them? | 10 | 69 |
Why does the wormhole theory exist at all? | When two of my friends were talking about wormholes and i told them there is no evidence at all for wormholes they started talking about how multiple scientists claim they do exist. We all proceeded to look it up and I was correct however I do not understand where the theory even came from. Is the theory that black holes are wormholes and if so how would something that simply has an unimaginable mass in a small space make you transport to a different place in space. Also what made scientists think about such a theory was some anomaly in space observed that suggested the existence of them? Thank you for ur help! :) | Principally, the reason is this:
wormholes are allowed by a very naive presentation of our theory of gravitation, general relativity (GR). As solutions for GR, they have been thoroughly studied and have been found to result in bizzarre consequences, such as time travel.
It is now understood that these weird effects should not (and do not) happen and this class of exotic solutions (wormholes & co.) should be excluded in some way. During the study of this type of solutions however it was also found that to *produce* then you always need some initial conditions that are "pathological" or at least unrealistic. In particular it was determined that pathological solutions are generated only when you violate sets of conditions known in general as positivity conditions.
We understand positivity conditions are satisfied in our Universe and GR should be supplemented with them, so that pathologies (including wormholes) do not happen. It can also be verified independently that positivity probably cannot be violated. Therefore while everyone understands wormholes or time travel are impossible, it is interesting and relevant to GR to study why and how they are impossible.
Also, these pathological features might become possible/important in the quantum gravity regime, this is not to be excluded. But that's for another time. | 27 | 16 |
CMV: Pulling yourself up by your boot straps is survivor bias | A common argument I've seen against issues is the "I did it and if I can do it, everyone can do it". This is commonly applied to groups of individuals within a wider system such as immigration, minimum wage or achieving educational success.
To be more specific, you will only hold this view if you have already achieved success. For example, if you tried to get a higher paying job but after 10/20/30 yrs of truly trying and you have not achieved any form of success, you cannot believe that you just need to try harder. To highlight, I believe you can have this view regarding immigration if you have never tried the immigration process.
How can you change my view? Provide an example of how to believe in "I didn't achieve success despite trying, however everyone can if they just tried harder".
Alternatively, explain how pulling yourself up by your boot straps isn't just survivor bias.
General thoughts;
- No delta for getting me on an incorrect definition of the above. You will get an upvote if I you identify a better term for my view.
- Delta if you can show a logical viewpoint. No points for, "people are crazy and truely believe".
- A delta if you identify that survivor bias is the wrong fallacy.
- A delta for the first person to inform me of the fallacy where you believe you are an average person and are a perfect representative of a greater population. Upvotes for every person after. | How could someone *truly try* to achieve a higher paying job over the course of 10-30yrs, and not succeed, even marginally, if they were actively pursuing things to help them in that process?
In that case, I’d say their lack of success would be largely driven by *trying* in the wrong ways or being inflexible (not willing to move) or unwilling to take risks that could lead to success. | 58 | 135 |
ELi5: How does fostering kids work? | I always hear about how foster kids are sometimes abused and I want to know what the foster system works. Is it a job or do people get chosen like they do for jury duty? Is it volunteer work, and if so, why are there so many people volunteering to abuse these kids? | You sign up. Social services does some routine investigations to qualify or disqualify you. Then then place a child with you...and you get a monthly stipend of $600-800/mo plus some amount of foodstamps to feed the kid.
Theres a caseworker assigned to you that has waaay too many foster kids to pay proper attention to each case. When theres a complaint or problem they respond and evaluate whether there is an actionable issue or not.
Abuse happens sure. BUT most foster parents take good care of the kids they foster. Most kids in foster care are a lot better off than they would be in group homes. Like anything you hear more about the failures and flaws than the success stories. | 19 | 26 |
ELI5:How did cartographers make maps back in the day? | How did they know what the shapes of the continents were without satellite imagery looking down on the planet? | If you have a way of figuring out latitude and longitude of points where you are (doesn't require a satellite network) you can sail along a coast and take readings every so often. The same thing is true if you just have a way of measuring directions reliably (e.g. if north is 0 degrees and we go counterclockwise 90 degrees would be west you would need to be able to give the direction in degrees to a certain level of accuracy) and distances. | 12 | 37 |
What makes a university good? | This is a very broad question. If you look at undergraduate institutions, what sticks out as a defining characteristic of a good university? I know there are many factors, but what really makes a university stick out? | Speaking as a person who went to a liberal arts college that only had undergraduate students, here are some things that helped to make it an excellent education for me:
-Low student to faculty ratio / faculty are very involved (e.g., provide thorough feedback on papers, foster class discussions, etc.)
-Research opportunities for students
-Opportunities to learn outside of the classroom and lab
-A culture that values learning and academic inquiry | 18 | 16 |
ELI5: What is the difference between Visa, Mastercard and a credit card and how do the way of payments differ? | Visa and Mastercard are both companies that facilitate electronic payments between consumers using a card, merchants, and banks. Mastercard issues credit cards (a card that works like a small loan, that you normally pay off by the end of the month or accrue interest) and also debit cards (a card that works more like cash, in that it immediately takes the money out of your bank account). VISA technically does not issue cards, but rather licenses their name to financial institutions like your bank or credit union, and facilitates the transaction.
| 23 | 20 |
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Why would people who could afford higher education take out loans to pay it off over time? | I understand this is slightly political.
But if I were to take the idea that rich have more student debt than poor people at face value, what financial benefits are there to paying extra interest over time? | If interest rate on a loan can outweigh alternative investment returns (+ tax benefits of loan if any). This is very common with home loans.
Also not everyone has 50-60k cash lying around every year for a nice private school. It may be easier to get a loan just to smooth cash flow. | 45 | 16 |
ELI5: Why do all of my electronics have an FCC interference statement? | You can find the following statement on nearly all electronics. Why does the FCC require this?
This device complies with part 15 of the FCC rules. Operation is subject to the following two conditions: (1) This device may not cause harmful interference, and (2) this device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation. | It proves that the device has passed a certain set of tests, designed to ensure it will not affect nearby devices. All electronic devices emit radiation to some degree, and its important when designing them to ensure the radiation isn't going to affect the operation of other devices. An example is that when you switch on a microwave oven, the WiFi signal to a PC will be interfered with. Without the FCC limits, companies could sell cheap, terrible microwaves which could wipe out WiFi networks for a block around, which would cause chaos.
Edit: and it also ensures your WiFi card won't be destroyed by a microwave oven nearby | 22 | 26 |
ELI5: I see many people are using the term "natural selection" lately, but i never understood it (fyi i am not a native speaker) to me it just seems like people are just trying to act smart by mentioning this term (with no context). Please, explain like im 5 | Natural selection is the basic process of evolution broken down into a generational perspective.
Basically:
Each individual is different. Some are stronger, faster, smarter, whatever.
In the wild, the individuals who are least suited to survive are the most likely to die off.
Whatever is left is "naturally selected" to pass on their genes to the next generation, allowing for more of the species to possess the beneficial traits that help them survive. | 49 | 27 |
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If a person/a brain, was somehow born without being able to receive stimuli from the body through the 5 senses, would it still have consciousness? | Not sure if this is the right sub, but I'll explain what I mean by the question a little more. I was thinking the other night after recently reading some articles about how nothing exists until we look at it. This got me thinking, that our consciousness only exists because we have outside stimuli that created that perception. If I was born without the ability to feel, see, hear, taste, and smell. How would I be able to form a thought? Or would I be able to? Would my mind create some other way to perceive the world around it? | I think for the purposes of your question and the answers you hope to receive, it is important to establish that for Humans, *there are many more than 5 Senses.*
By some estimates, there are 30-70 "senses" through which the Human body can perceive. Examples include the sensing of: Balance, Temperature, Pain, Familiarity, Time-passing, and dozen and dozens more.
More important to your ability to think, is *Language*. If you have a limited structure of language, you will not be able to "think" as you understand it. Humans think with an "inner-voice."
Language is integral to the inner-voice. For example, with an absence of a spoken language, deaf people "think" by signing in their minds and turn it into a voice to drive inner-thought. Without a vocabulary and grammar to create a condition for thinking and the platform from which to build thoughts, thinking just wouldn't be possible.
It has been demonstrated that a poorly educated person who possesses a limited vocabulary and a limited understanding of grammar often cannot verbalise the ideas of more complex topics, and as such, wouldn't have the ability to deeply consider its nature and effects it may have on them given the limitations of their inner-voice to provide a language for understanding and complex thought. A rich vocabulary is therefore an integral part of the system required for complex thought.
The senses, all of them, play a lesser extent to the process of *thought*, per se. Should you have a complete language in your mind, you can lose all other senses but still maintain rich and complex thoughts.
Nevertheless, we are all brains in vats. :) Drink up.
| 10 | 22 |
Is the formula for perimeter of circle a derivative of the fomula for area of circle? | d/dr [пr^(2)] = 2пr
Can someone explain this in terms of physics or practice?
Thanks. | If you increase the radius of a circle a small amount, its area increases by adding a thin strip around the outside. If you "unroll" this circular strip to make it straight, you can see that its area is equal to the small change in radius times the circumference of the circle. Hence dA = C*dr, or dA/dr = C. | 539 | 627 |
[Harry Potter] Are there any wizards outside Earth? | It seems like an easy task for them, they can magic away all the engineering challenges muggles must face to get out of Earth's atmosphere.
I'm thinking a wizard city on Mars would be a great thing as they wouldn't have to hide anymore and will live free from muggle influence. | It's not clear that it is an easy task. A firebolt can go from zero to 150 mph in ten seconds, which sounds like a lot, but it's only 0.68 g (as in gravity, not grams). And if it's accelerating horizontally, then combining that with the lifting force is 1.21 g. Either a top-of-the-line broom is only 21% better than a super cheap one that can barely fly, or they're using a different system for hovering. If it's the latter, then whatever system that is will probably stop working if they're too far from the ground, and using a firebolt's usual acceleration isn't even enough to hold it up.
They've talked about bubble-headed charms, but just covering your head isn't enough for space. Can it be extended to your whole body? And they've *never* talked about radiation. Maybe the last wizard to go to space got sick and died and nobody knows why.
Don't get me wrong. Getting to the moon with magic is *much* easier than getting to it without it. Even something as simple as using aguamenti to constantly add water to the engine would both keep the engine from overheating and significantly increase the efficiency, exponentially increasing the delta-v. Or adding a firebolt could give it acceleration for better than an ion engine with unlimited range, so long as it's already in orbit. But it's not clear that it's something a small group of wizards could randomly do, and it's not something that major magical governments decided to put a lot of effort into.
Also, some fanfiction theorizes that magic doesn't work in space. | 67 | 99 |
ELI5: Difference between swamp, marsh, bog, pond, fen and other wetland terms. | It's based on plant life, water source, flow, and level, and soil composition mainly.
For an ELI5
Swamp has trees. It's basically a really wet forest with water on the ground.
Marsh has less trees more grasses
A bog has typically has peat and the ground is a mire (water/soil mixture) but it's raised up above the other terrain, fed by rain.
A fen is like a bog but it's on sloped or flatland and usually fed by underground water. | 65 | 128 |
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How to effectively follow the publications in my field? | As a graduate student, I'm wondering what is the best way to follow the new publications in my field. There are maybe 10 or so key journal that are likely to publish science relevant to my own research. We don't have the physical subscriptions of most of these journals, so I'll need to do this online. Should I just periodically check the journal webpages, or do most journals or big publishers (like Elsevier) offer some kind of a subscription-based service, such as RSS feeds or even e-mail alerts? | Most journals offer e-mail Table of Contents alerts on their homepages at the publishers' website. You can also set up rss feeds that will alert you to new articles that match any search you set up in many databases. Talk to your local subject librarian for help. | 11 | 19 |
Why does an alternator turn slower, or resist turning more when under load? | I noticed this in my car when I would activate something that draws electricity like window motors, the engine RPMs would drop slightly until I let off the window motor button. Is this a stupid question and I'm totally wrong about what's actually happening to cause the engine RPMs to dip while there's an electrical load? Thank you for any useful input!! | There's different levels you can look at it from. The simplest is conservation of energy. If it didn't turn slower under load, you'd have more energy when you give it a load than when you don't. It could be creating energy, or it could be destroying it when you don't use a load, but either way that's not conserving energy.
But looking at the underlying physics itself, it's because when it's under load, you have a magnet moving through coils to generate electricity, and the electricity moving through those coils generates a magnetic field in the opposite direction. | 16 | 15 |
Why does a french horn need valves? | If the french horn pitch can be controlled by producing a faster or slower "buzz" with the lips, why do we then need the valves also to change the pitch? Could you not produce all 12 semitones and every note in between with just different buzzing speed? | The way brass instruments work, is there are certain frequencies they are resonant with. This depends on the size and shape of the horn. You can "lip up/down" to bend notes, or get sounds close to whats resonant, but they tend not not come out quite as clearly as on-pitch tones.
The valves change the shape/length of the horn, which changes the resonant frequencies, aka the notes the horn produces. This is all the same with trumpets or any valved instrument.
Trombones use the slide to physically make the pipe that the air is going through longer/shorter. Valves basically do that same thing, but in discreet steps. | 1,434 | 1,105 |
how to learn statistics if you're really, really dumb? | The question says it all. :( I have one brain cell, and I really want to finish my masters thesis using logistic regression, but I am absolutely lost and even youtube videos aren't helping me. | If you just want to finish this thesis rather than "learn statistics", and if your school has a statistics department, you could ask them for help with it. University stats departments often have programs for stats students to help other graduate students with their thesis stats. | 45 | 40 |
ELI5:What is Monsanto? | Monsanto is a agricultural biotech company which has been around for around over 100 years. Today, they are mostly known for two things: Genteically modified crops and strong pesticides. You may be familiar with the weed killer "Round-Up", they make that.
Here's where it gets interesting: They modify the crops in various ways: to make them grow larger, in less than ideal conditions, and to specifically be resistant to Round-up and other pesticides. Farmers can then douce the crops in round up to kill pests and the crops will not be affected. | 15 | 18 |
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When astronomers refer to distances between galaxies, do they mean the distance as we observe them or as they are now? | For example, if astronomers describe the distance between two galaxies in a supervoid that is a billion light-years away to be 150 million light-years. Is that distance representative of what we have observed (essentially an image from a billion years ago) or as it is now (accounting for the expansion of the universe)? | It'd be distance at the observed time in the past. We sometimes use "comoving units" which do take into account the expansion of the universe. If two objects are a kiloparsec apart back when the universe was half its current size, then they are "two comoving kiloparsecs apart".
But additionally, galaxies are moving around and interacting with each other, so we typically can't just tack on the expansion of the universe factor and get the right present-day distance. We might see two galaxies on a collision course in the distant universe. By now, they would have merged and probably formed an elliptical galaxy, and maybe had other interactions too.
So we use the distance that's observed in the past because that's all that we can really know about. | 70 | 86 |
ELI5: When you turn down or up the volume on devices with either a wheel or button, what actually happens that allows it to sound quieter or louder? | A volume knob or wheel is an example of a device called a *potentiometer*, which is a device that adjusts the voltage going down a wire by increasing or decreasing the electrical resistance.
If the resistance increases (if you turn the volume knob down), then less voltage makes it to the speaker, the cone vibrates less intensely, and the sound is quieter. The opposite is true if you turn the volume up. | 6,685 | 7,552 |
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CMV: I secretly think religion is a crutch for weak people. | Title sums it up for the most part. To clarify, I don't have any problem with religious people in general. (so long as they aren't annoying me by trying to proselytize or trying to harm me in some manner.) As long as their religious views don't affect me negatively, I do not care about nor mind them being religious. I won't try to convince them otherwise, I won't insult them for being religious, I am totally happy to peacefully coexist without a second thought.
But on the inside, I can't help but think that religion is just a fundamentally false way for people who can't accept the way the world actually is to keep from falling apart. They can't accept that the world entropic, sucky, and unfair, so everything has to be part of some plan by some mystical being which is in their best interest. They can't accept that this life is all that we have to live, and that death is the end of everything for us, (and I will admit that is a hard pill to swallow) so they have to believe in some magical paradise of an afterlife to feel better about it. They have to believe that *their* way of life is the only correct one, so they place themselves in an echo chamber that reinforces their views and says that it is not they, but everyone else who is wrong.
The thing is though, I don't *want* to go about my day judging people like this. It's just a waste of energy, but unfortunately my brain just defaults to thinking like this. So please, CMV.
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | It sounds like you are speaking more specifically about Christianity, rather than religion in general.
For example, Judaism doesn't really have the concept of heaven, and is inconsistent about whether there is an afterlife - but if there is, all people go to "the Abyss", Sheol.
The Jewish God doesn't have a grand plan that's all for the best - instead, he's just God and who the hell are *you* to question him. (Seriously, read the Book of Job to see what a dick He can be).
And despite that, he's given Jews a huge list of rules to follow, not because you win a prize for following them, but because God told you to - and He's God and you aren't.
So, really, being a Jew is more of an added burden than a crutch.
Now, let's get back to Christianity. There are a lot of variants, many of which don't fit your story either. Calvinism, for instance, offers little comfort.
So, let's focus on the more "comforting" variants. For some, the reality of God is a simple fact. It's not a choice they make. He is real and He impacts their life. A serf in the Middle Ages may never see their Lord, but they know he is in control of their lives, has the power of life and death over them, and can make their lives happy or miserable. That's simply a fact of life - so it is with many people and God.
So, that leaves those who bought into St. Paul's excellent "carrot and stick" marketing of Christianity. Humans are social animals. We need leaders, we need to feel our packs are safe. Some turn to philosophers, poets, songwriters or authors; others to God. But we all strive to find some meaning, some justification for battling through hardship. Does that make it a crutch? If so, then, don't we all use them? | 26 | 51 |
Question about Orientalism and Said. | From what I understand of his thesis, Edward Said believed that the "East" and "West" could never really interact objectively, due to a power disparity facilitated by colonialism, and that this power disparity and ensuing ignorance leads to abuses in the Muslim world by Western imperialists.
What I don't understand, though is how that can be true when European colonialists seem to hold Arabs and Berbers to a higher regard than they did any other non-European peoples. While I don't mean to downplay the oppression of 20th century Algerians, they were generally treated much better by French colonial overlords than the Vietnamese were. And the policy of cultural supremacy was not very different from that imposed upon non-Parisian French peoples, like he Bretons or the Occitanians.
The Spanish and Portuguese, despite viciously discriminating against Muslims and Jews during the Reconquista, and snatching up small parts of North Africa, never treated those people as poorly as they did Africans. To the best of my knowledge, Arabs have never been enslaved by Europeans in the way that Africans have. In fact, the Portoguese and Arabs collaborated heavily in the African slave trade, and Transatlantic slavery was dependent on an existing slave market.
The British seem to have been more benign to the Arabs in the empire than the Indians or Africans. I do not know of any policies as suppressive as the anti-Mau Mau mass torture conducted in Egypt or British Iraq, and I don't believe [any famines occured](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943) in the Middle East due to British failure.
So, why is the Middle East considered an area that is particularly abused, when every other region of the world (except perhaps non-Chinese East Asia) was subjugated by Western Europeans more brutally? | You may want to follow up with a reading of Franz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci on Hegemony. Said's contention is that the observation and understanding of the Orient is self-serving to the Occident, so though it may seem like there is equality, actually it's about the preservation of power and the exercise of it. Fanon explicitly tackles this in Black Skins White Mask , where he talks about how the different parts of the French colonial empire relate to each other and how the stratification is a reflection of how the Orient is seen and how the Orient sees itself. | 11 | 21 |
Does skin color affect the darkness you see when you close your eyes? E.g. is it darker for people with lighter skin color because more light is reflected by the eyelids. | I believe that dark skin is more opaque, and light skin more translucent. Thus the light absorbed by dark skin is stopped and actually absorbed by the material, where light skin allows light to pass through. Similar in effect to viewing through clear glass as opposed to welders goggles. | 15 | 44 |
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Just as light is redshifted by relative motion of source and observer, can gravitational waves also lose energy depending on reference frame? | Gravitation itself is a cause of light to redshift, but could there be an analogous energy reduction for traveling gravitational waves/gravitons which depends on the relative motion of the source and observer (for example by them being separated by "dark energy")? Why or why not? Thank you. | The logic that leads one to derive that light is redshifted or blueshifted due to changes in reference frame, can be equally well applied to gravitational waves, and any type of waves at all, for that matter. So the answer to your question is "yes." If you want to understand why, then look at any derivation of redshift/blueshift, and note what assumptions are made. Generally there is no assumption that the waves must be electromagnetic in nature, only that they are moving at speed c (which gravitational waves do). | 21 | 157 |
Would forcing large companies to pay tax really scare them away? | By which I mean is the threat of them basing themselves in other countries due to tax an actual problem? | Just remember that the United States is an offshore location for a lot of non-American institutions as well.
The Economist had a very good article on this in their end of February issue. It was a special report on Offshore Finance. It's actually *several* articles. It points out offshoring globally as well as regionally, and correctly points out Delaware as an interstate "offshore". | 19 | 48 |
Are there any socially conservative post-structuralist or postmodern philosophers? | In his influential analysis of these developments, Habermas distinguishes between (i) what he calls the "anti-modernism" of a group he calls the "young conservatives", which would include the figures normally thought of as post-structuralists; (ii) the "pre-modernism" of a group he calls the "old conservatives", of whom he names in particular Hans Jonas and Leo Strauss; and (iii) the "post-modernism" of a group he calls the "neoconservatives", of whom he mentions Daniel Bell, Wittgenstein's early work, and some of Carl Schmitt's work. You could find social conservatives certainly among the latter two groups. Daniel Bell's work is probably the most notable, on these issues. | 13 | 18 |
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ELI5: Why are labor unions viewed negatively and what are their biggest problems? | Everyone I've asked has always had a very negative opinion on labor unions but they have never really been able to give me a good reason why. | Unions often suffer from the same problem that most large organizations tend to have. After a while, the organization efforts drift from whatever their original goals were, and instead start to focus on justifying and prolonging their own existence.
Say a bunch of workers have valid demands about workplace safety, or salaries, or whatever, and so they start a union. After a few years, a small strike or two, and a lot of negotiation, the union helps win some raises as well as significant changes that make the workplace much safer. So what happens next? The union probably isn't going to disband. The union heads probably aren't going to just give up their jobs. So the union has to find new things to fight for to make itself seem relevant enough that the employees will keep paying union dues.
But there's not really any strong, valid worker complaints left. So the union starts raising a stink about things that aren't that important or valid. They might demand continued salary increases beyond what the company can realistically provide. They start defending anyone who gets fired, even if they honestly deserve to lose their job. They start to reflexively oppose any sort of change within the business, even if those changes are in response to real and significant changes in the marketplace. They can sometimes destroy a company's ability to effectively compete.
It's a lot like politicians, in that union leadership can often end up doing things because they think it will help them keep their position, rather than doing things because they're the best thing to do for the employees. And of course, especially in bigger unions, there's a lot of money involved in the system, so it's often ripe for corruption.
| 89 | 58 |
ELI5: Difference between functions and procedures in C++? | Is it okay to say that in C++ all procedures are void, and all the rest (whatever returns a value) is a function? | Procedures and functions are pretty much interchangeable terms. The proper C++ terminology is "function", and the term "procedure" isn't used (a function which has a void return type is still a function).
Other languages (like Pascal) differentiate between procedure and function, just like you asked. | 12 | 23 |
Does pressure affect the way atoms bond? Are there any compounds/reactions that are not possible at NTP but could be if the reactants are placed in a chamber with a higher/lower pressure? | We all know how pressure affects intermolecular forces, but how about *inner* molecular forces? | This might not be quite what you are looking for but there are actually many fancy materials that you can form at high to extreme pressures.
For things achievable on earth a common example would be diamond. Less well known would be the various different types of ice (like ice V, VI, VII, XI).
More theoretical and possibly existing inside of gas giants like jupiter would be metallic hydrogen. Something infamous for being a bit of a holy grail of material science.
At ridiculously high pressures things start becoming exotic theoretical physics research such as the neutron pasta matter inside of neutron stars and other strange degenerate forms of matter. | 19 | 27 |
What happened to herd immunity? | In the beginning of the pandemic there was lots of talk about reaching herd immunity but as the delta variant ravages throughout the world, it seems that all talk about herd immunity has ceased. Why is that? Or am i just misconstruing the situation? | The proportion of the population that is needed to reach herd immunity is proportional to how effective the virus is in spreading. With Delta the threshold is much higher.
Keep in mind here immunity is not a fixed number. It really means that there are not enough opportunity for the virus to sustain itself. Localized herd immunity in a community that generally interacts at a distance and outdoors (or infrequently with each other) is going to be different than one where this is frequent close contact and a lot of mixing (all else being equal). This means things like local culture can, and will, have an impact.
Edit: removed “inversely” from first sentence. | 4,534 | 3,946 |
ELI5: why do people with amnesia not forget their primary language? | Language and memory are stored in different parts of the brain. That's why some types of brain damage can leave you unable to speak without affecting your memory.
Other things unaffected by amnesia are muscle memory and learned skills that don't require memorization, like critical thinking and empathy. | 333 | 213 |
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is there a correlation between the Sun's activity and Global Warming? | The temperature where I live (Ontario, Canada) rose 16 deg. C higher than average for this time of year. This corresponds directly with the solar flare activity reaching earth. Can this be coincidence and can it explain why global warming is occurring?
Edit: Thank you all for your answers. | There are several effects that solar activity might have on Earth's climate.
First, of course, is direct luminosity changes. If the Sun's energy output varies by even a fraction of a percent then that could still have a significant impact on the Earth. In general the long term average of solar energy output is fairly stable (other than the regular variations of solar cycles) though it does fluctuate a little over longer time periods and the difference between normal sunspot activity and "maunder minimum" periods appears to be significant.
Second, solar activity specifically in regards to the solar wind will impact the cosmic ray flux at Earth, which will affect cloud formation. The effect of cloud cover on climate is still poorly understood but definitely significant.
Overall we can discount short-term effects such as what you have observed as merely random correlations, there's no plausible mechanism for significant temperature changes due to solar flare activity.
Over long time periods there is some evidence that the Sun's activity has an effect on climate, but ultimately we just don't know. We don't have good records of Earth's weather and the Sun's activity to make any firm conclusions. What evidence we do have seems to indicate a correlation between "maunder minimum" sunspot lulls and climatic cooling, but even that is rather tenuous. | 11 | 24 |
Nothing is unnatural. CMV | Everything in the universe is nature (meaning it is part of the physical world). Anything produced in the universe is natural. Genetically modified organisms were produced or engineered by humans, who are part of the universe. You can't say something is unnatural or unnaturally occurring, unless you're talking about something supernatural. Also, something that is "man-made" is still natural since humans are part of nature. I really can't see how this can be disputed. In day to day life, when people refer to something unnatural, they are making up their own definition or using their own parameters for determining whether something is natural or not. Instead of using the word unnatural when talking about man-made things, shouldn't people be using "man-made"?
EDIT:
The definition of natural:
>Existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind.
Humankind is part of nature so doesn't the definition contradict itself? It's like saying:
>Existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by nature.
Shouldn't the definition be:
>Not made or caused by humankind. | Technically, you are correct, but this would render the words 'natural' and 'unnatural' useless, so we have a kind of loose definition for the purpose of conveying information
For examples: ''This shirt is made of polyester and this one is made of natural fibres'' or ''This woman has dyed her hair blonde and this woman has naturally blonde hair'' | 31 | 30 |
The Fourier Transformation or the Fourier Series | Lots of phenomena in our day to day life are made up of waves. There are, of course, the waves that you see at the beach, but there are also waves of pressure in the air that make up sound and other waves made from electromagnetism that make light and radio.
If we wanted to describe, using math, what the waves are like at a beach, we'd have at least a couple of choices. We could record every second what the height of the water or how far the water has gone inland. This is the 'time' domain: we would form a graph of how far the water went inland versus time. But it is also possible to analyze the time between different waves and phenomena in order to understand them in the 'frequency' domain: a correspondence between how often something happens and its intensity. There is also phase information needed to fully represent the signal: even if we know there is a wave every fifteen seconds, we need to know if they start on the first second or the tenth second, etc, of the minute.
In the case of the beach, there would probably be several distinct phenomena we would see on a frequency domain plot of the waves: individual ripples and eddies of the water forming high frequencies (these things happen often/quickly, so they are high frequency), the waves rolling in at a fairly consistent pace, and then things at slower/lower frequencies: patterns that emerge every few times a wave hits the shore, and at very low frequency the effects of the solar and lunar tides.
It is possible to perform the fourier transform numerically (on a set of numbers we've written down); computers often use a variant called the fast fourier transform to convert audio, image, or radio signals to the intensity and frequency of waves that are present. This can be used to separate multiple radio stations to allow one to be tuned, or to identify the notes that are present in the song, or to compress information so it takes less space. But it can be performed, using college level math, by manipulating the symbols of any integrable function. Fourier proved a theorem that shows this can always be done.
One funny thing about waves is the superposition principle. The superposition principle means that the effect at any place is the sum of all the individual waves that are present. This allows us to break up the different phenomena that are present-- little eddies, the large waves at the beach, and the tides-- into individual functions and then combine them when we wish to analyze the entire system. It also is used in audio and image compression. Audio compression often finds all of the waves that are present in sections of music, and then throws away the "unimportant" ones that we wouldn't hear. This list of waves is then combined in order to reproduce the music when the compressed audio is played back.
In addition to the time domain and the fourier frequency domain, there are other transformations we can look at signals and functions with. For instance, there are the wavelet transformations, which consider short, individual wave-like impulses, instead of infinite continuations of waves like the sine in the frequency domain. | 22 | 36 |
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I read that astronauts DNA can be “shattered” by cosmic rays, what does this actually mean? | My question came from reading an article about our Sun going blank and maybe heading toward a 'solar minimum'.
Which causes cosmic rays dangerous to astronauts, article link here: http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/the-sun-has-gone-blank-twice-this-month-this-is-what-it-means/news-story/d775ecf894ab68415ed0108ced31a4e2 | Cosmic rays have a chance to either pass right through you or be absorbed by your body. If absorbed, they can ionize an atom in a molecule of your body (i.e. knock an electron off). The electron, or another free one, might simply fall back into place, or the ion might form a different bond, changing the structure of the molecule it's a part of. For many molecules that won't make much difference but, if that molecule happens to be a stand of DNA, and if the damage is in just the right place, the cell that the DNA molecule is in might start replicating out of control (i.e. the astronaut would get some form of cancer).
If it sounds like random chance is involved, it is. Getting cancer is a bit like winning the lottery. Being in orbit during a solar minimum does mean you're buying an awful lot of lottery tickets though. | 38 | 41 |
What branch of psychology would be ideal for me? | So I am considering the field of psychology. I'd really love to make a difference in the lives and minds of others, and teach and lead people who are struggling with life and their mental health. Ultimately I want to transform the lives of others. However, I do not want to be tied to a desk, in an office, with the same routine day-in and day-out. I'd really like the opportunity to have frequent travel, but I'm not sure travel psychology is right for me either, as it seems to focus more on the psychology behind travel itself rather than aiding suffering minds (if I'm wrong about this, please correct me.) So that said, do you have any suggestions for me? Thanks. | Working as a school psychologist could be interesting. You would not be stuck behind a desk and would get to work with students one-on-one. Low-income schools are particularly in need of school psychologist because their student population suffer through lots of complex trauma.
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Also, to accommodate your need for travel, you could look into an NGO that travels to other countries where disasters or other traumatic events have occured. Often there are populations who need counseling for things such as genocide, natural disasters, or war.
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Let us know if these are jobs you are interested in or steer us in a better direction if you are interested in other ideas besides treating trauma. | 13 | 16 |
Do the beneficial microbes that live inside me have an "easy life" where they have unrestricted access to everything they want, or do they have to compete for resources like most other life forms on earth do? | I just want to know if I'm being a good host. | They compete for resources with each other. For example, a person with c dif infection may have come about because the c dif out competed the natural gut flora for resources after an antibiotic killed off the less harmful gut bacteria.
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ELI5: Why do we get a sore throat after being in the cold for a while? | Well it depends on what kind of cold. But often the air is very dry when it is cold, meaning a low humidity. This means it is easier for water to evaporate into the 'dry' air. What you should also know is that water evaporates at all times but the speed at which this happens differ depending on temperature and humidity. Higher humidity meanind lower evaporation and vice versa, and also a higher temperature gives a higher evaporation and vice versa. Now to why you get a sore throat. Your body is around 37C on the inside and every time you breathe out some water from your throat is evaporated and taken with the air, removing it from your throat. Normally this evaporation happens at a speed that your body can keep up with by 'refilling' the water that's lost. However when the air is really dry, like with cold weather, the evaporation happens at a faster speed and your body can't keep up. This results in your throat quite literally drying up and gives you the sore throat feeling.
Also this process happens faster when you breath through your mouth, so to prevent this happening as much as possible try to breathe through your nose. As there is more resistance that way which will recapture some of those water vapors. | 163 | 355 |
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ELI5: What is Quantum Entanglement and is it important to know what it is? | What is Quantum Entanglement and is it important to know what it is? | On a technical level, two systems are entangled if the wave function of the whole system cannot be written as a product of the wave functions of the separate systems.
Practically, entanglement means, that certain measurement results of two or more particles are correlated.
For example, if two two electrons are entangled in a certain way, their spins will always yield different measurement outcomes (up or down) when measured with respect to the same axis.
This happens, even though both electrons are not in a defined spin state up to the moment of measurement. That means, before the first measurements, both electrons are in the "up" and "down" state simultaneously. And yet, when one spin is measured, the other wave function instantaneously collapses in the other state through a "spooky interaction", no matter how far the two systems are apart. This interaction is not limited by the speed of light. It is, as far as we know, truly instantaneous.
This fact does not violate the theory of relativity, however, since no information can be transmitted through entanglement.
Why is it important to know this? On a fundamental level, gaining insight in the mechanics of our universe is always desirable.
On a more applicable note, entanglement may lead to quantum computers that will revolutionize certain fields of computation like encryption. | 14 | 44 |
[Futurama] How did 25 cent suicide booths come to exist? | In the very first episode of Futurama we see Bender and Fry try to end it all at a suicide booth for only 25 cents. What were the legal trials that had to happen for these booths to officially pop up in New New York? What changed from the 21st century to the 31st century for this to become acceptable in every day life? | Easy access to high quality medicine with high costs. They can literally cut off your head and put it in a jar if you can't afford to repair your body with terrifying robots that haul you off to an unknown fate once you hit a certain age. Some people rather opt out than face that kinda future. Also there's the ever present fear of alien invasion and severe overpopulation and career chips. Say you hate your job well you're stuck with it for your entire life unless you got 25 cents rattling around | 66 | 72 |
ELI5 Why Internet Explorer is (supposedly) so "horrible". | The internet has a set of standards for people writing websites. The languages they use (HTML, javascript, whatever) have well defined rules that are agreed on and set by a central body. This means that anyone can write a program (a web browser) to receive a website and interpret the code following those rules.
Unfortunately, IE broke those rules in a big way, and still does, though it's much better thanks to the competition of recent years. This was originally simply a nasty business practice of value to MS. By breaking the rules, they forced everyone who wanted their sites to work in IE to break the rules when writing their code. This meant that they had to write lots of things twice, once for IE, and once for anyone else that wanted to see them, but that took much longer so many people just wrote it once for IE. This pushed out IEs competitors because websites simply didn't work for them any more.
Over time, IE became the dominant browser, through a combination of easily reaching many users by being preinstalled in windows, and by the above deliberate standards breaking. At this point, it promptly stopped innovating and everything simply stagnated for several years before firefox came along with tabbed browsing and other new things that made things competitive again. During and after those years, IE continued to make things difficult, with its inconsistent, non-standard and poorly documented behaviour that website designers had to work around.
This all leads to a range of reasons that people don't like IE:
* It's hard to write websites to work in it, because it deliberately broke standards in order to try and be anticompetitive.
* It's often lagged behind supporting new things, or tried to break those standards as well, making everyones web experience less good.
* It's simply less powerful and featureful than its competitors. This is becoming less true, but it has been for many years. For instance, when firefox first appeared, it included revolutionary things like tabbed browsing that IE hadn't come up with in *years* of internet dominance.
Again, this is all less true than it used to be, but IE carries an enduring legacy of hate because of just how incredibly it messed things up for everyone. To put things in perspective, IE attained complete market dominance somewhere around 2002, and began losing significant amounts around 2006-2007. Between those dates, around 4 years, almost *nothing* changed and the only way people used the internet was IE which was objectively poor. Now, look at how much things have changed in the last 4 years, how many more things your browser can do, and how fast it is now! Even changes in the internet itself, new technologies like google docs and facebook chat, are partly driven by the capabilities of the browsers that have to display them. Imagine using the internet from 4 years ago, and *then* you can see just how much IE crippled things, and understand one of the big reasons people dislike it. And that's without even looking at the reasons IEs technical backend was terrible. | 48 | 24 |
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[Halo] Is the fact that the UNSC fields mixed gender forces remarked upon as novel by the Covenant? | In the UNSC both men and women serve together in the interstellar armed forces (including direct combat arms like the infantry as well as the SPARTAN forces) and it's not seen as a particularly hot-button issue like it was in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Covenant forces, particularly Elites and Brutes, seem to be universally male (save for species without distinct sexes like Hunters and Engineers) and what we know about civilian populations of the Covenant seems to indicate very entrenched gender roles (as well as other weird stuff like the Elite's hatred of doctors). They obviously come into close contact with our forces and I'm curious if they think it's weird that humans seem to less socially uptight about that sort of thing. | The Covenant seem pretty far-reaching in their exploration and familiar with many sentient species. It probably wouldn't seem that weird to them that humanity is composed of two genders and that both genders are capable of combat. | 25 | 29 |
CMV: Capitalism is not a political philosophy, but is a natural/perennial part of human society |
At its core, Capitalism is not a “worldview” or even a “philosophy”, but rather the natural state of human transaction. Certainly since the 1700s in western Europeans come have come to revere this phenomenon, and naming it “capitalism” as opposed to feudalism, communism, etc. Markets, pricing, value, and risk have always been present however, whether whether or not they have the blessing of the regime of the day.
* Ancient Africans bartered services in exchange for goods (or cowrie shells) under numerous kingdoms/tribal regimes
* The silk road that crossed Eurasia was essentially a free market, with various marginal restrictions on commerce depending on which kingdom you found yourself in
* Even in restricted command economies, people will trade goods/services in black markets. Where prices vary based on value, risk, scarcity, etc
* Markets are not a human invention, rather they are a natural phenomenon of how people interact with their material world and each other
Any talk of Capitalism as a philosophy assumes that it is a trend which was invented recently, and can one day disappear/be repealed, or molded.
Maybe I’m confusing “markets” with “Capitalism”? But a world consisting of goods and services exchanged for a variable price is a natural feature of human life. | >Markets, pricing, value, and risk have always been present however, whether whether or not they have the blessing of the regime of the day.
Well, that depends on what we're considering under the ambit of "capitalism." Certainly "trade" has always existed, but is "trade" (which occurs under any economic system) the same thing as "capitalism"?
If so, capitalism doesn't stand opposed to mercantilism, socialism, or even communism. As all of those involve trade, markets, pricing, value, and risk.
But if capitalism is the specific system of free markets, ownership of land and production by individuals, and potential ownership of private (as opposed to personal) property, capitalism is no more "the" natural state of humanity than any other economic system.
You're basically treating capitalism as "existence of markets or trade." But the technical definition even at a cursory level involves private ownership of those markets and industries.
So, for example, the existence of trade in hunter/gatherer societies would not really be capitalism because there was no private ownership of the land/animals/whatever which people used to create their tradeable goods.
The gold and salt mines of Mansa Musa were not capitalist (despite there being a *huge* market for it), since they were state owned and operated.
>The silk road that crossed Eurasia was essentially a free market
The market for sale? Potentially (though you seem to be underestimating just how much restriction on trade was instituted at various times) but you're ignoring that the actual silk production was wholly state-run and considered a national security secret.
Under your definition, communism (which still involves the trade of personal property, and even markets for goods produced under publicly-owned means of production) is still capitalism. At which point the term capitalism just describes the existence of trade, rather than anything more specific about the nature of ownership which is the definition of capitalism.
Capitalism isn't about whether good produced in a factory are sold, it's about who owns the factory. | 206 | 256 |
How to think like an Economist? | It might seem dumb but how do economists think about things, the world, economic problems?
What is the thought process you use when you consider an issue. Thanks. | Economists have a whole lot of theoretical models they know in their heads. Each one is designed to explain something specific under a certain set of conditions. When you ask them something or they talk about something, they reason from whatever model is appropriate to explain the economics if the subject at hand.
Economists will also be aware of where these models don't apply and any shortcoming or failures of the models that have been shown in empirical work and will usually mention this if appropriate "it may not work like this and instead as has been found in.... " etc.
So to think like an economist you need to learn the models. That means reading theory in textbooks
Often in /r/badeconomics users who don't understand economics are taunted with the question "what's your model?" when they make economic claims, because the taunter understands the person knows no relevant economic models, or that the relevant ones don't imply what was said, or the person may not even know what the taunter means when they ask that. It's basically another way of saying you should back up your claims with established theory, not pull claims out your butt | 21 | 21 |
ELI5: Why was lead (Pb) so widely used before people discovered it was toxic? | What properties of lead make it so useful that it’s in paint, glassware, pipes, etc.? | It's very common in nature, easily mined, easily processed, very malleable - easy to make things from.
On top of that, it has chemical properties that make it useful in various applications, which were discovered by trial and error over time. | 656 | 453 |
ELI5: Why does glue not get hard and stick to its original container? | Often it is the case that water is acting as a solvent, so as to prevent the glue from solidfying into a self-stuck mass. The amount of air inside the container is insufficient in the short term to evaporate that water.
Once you've applied the glue to some surface, it can more readily interact with the air and lose its water content. | 74 | 113 |
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How can a microSD card be so compact? | I have a 32GB microSD card in my phone right now and that fact just amazes me. I did some calculations, and assuming there is 3 bits stored per transistor like in the TLC NAND that is used in the Samsung 840 SSD, that means there is 32 billion x 8/3 = 86 billion transistors in this tiny little piece of silicon.
My question is, how the hell is that possible? An Intel Core processor has upwards of 1 billion FETs and a GPU has like 4 billion, but those take 200+ watts to run. Am I missing something here, or do microSD cards really have 86 billion transistors in them? | Very interesting question with a complicated answer:
* In a CPU/GPU, there are a lot of transistors that are designed to do calculations, you need different types (PMOSFETs,NMOSFETs), different logic gate structures (NAND, etc), as well as non-transistor parts (capacitors, metal lines, etc), which means that the density (amount of transistors per unit area) is actually very low compared to a memory chip that you can find in microSD cards.Let's back that up with some data: most advanced node in transistor manufacturing for CPUs is 22nm (3D-trigate Ivy Bridge from Intel), the size of the die (where the active silicon is, the rest is just packaging) is 160mm^2, and about 1.5 billion transistors. That's an average of 0.1 um^2 per transistor.
* in a memory chip like in memory cards, we're talking about NAND Flash.They are damn small, as in 64 Gb in 120 mm^2-small. They are actually smaller than Intel's, because to make NAND Flash you don't need fancy logic gates, just an array of cells that are all the same. Plus, as you said, there is multiple bits per cell, that helps so that's about 30 to 10 billion cells (depending if it's 2- or 3- or more bits per cell) for 64Gb. In a 32GB memory card, there would be 4 64Gb chips, so the 80 billion transistor figure doesn't look far off. Each cell in a NAND Flash is not really a transistor identical to the ones used by Intel, but let's forget that, that puts the estimation to about 0.01 um^2 per cell.
So, in terms of density, flash memory in your compact micro SD card is actually 10 times more dense than the best CPUs around, and there really are 20 times more transistors in a memory card than in a CPU.
Another side of your question is the power consumption. Power consumption in CPUs come from computation: In order to switch on and off the transistors, you need power, lots of it. In memory, you don't switch on and off the memory cells all the time. The card can stay unpowered and still keep the memory inside, that's what's interesting in Flash memory. The only power consumed is when writing or reading. And that power is small: you don't change all the memory at once (you're limited by the bandwith of the writing/reading as well as the interface to the computer). So, overall, the power consumption of chips is not a fixed amount "per-transistor", you assumed that a CPU consuming 100W with 1 billion makes a 80 billion chip consuming 8kW, when in fact the flash chip consumes far less, the "per-transistor" power is much smaller than in CPUs.
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ELI5:Why is Africa still so poor and underdeveloped after decades of western world help? | We have been sending aid in numerous different ways for decades (starting from the 80's?) **billions** of dollars, many teachers, etc.
I'm starting to think that it should show up in someway after all this time.
Just a thought because i see the same fundraiser for africa every single year raising millions of dollars (euros). | Many African countries have and continue to have astonishingly high growth rates, but it's important to remember just how poor a lot of these countries were at independence.
the Democratic Republic of Congo had a population of about 15 million at independence. Among those 15 million, 16 were college graduates. | 84 | 53 |
How can SmartWatches measure the blood pressure? | And how accurate is it? | I do research on hemodynamics, which uses some of these same principles.
The smart watch estimates blood pressure based on something called pulse transit time, which is a calculation of how much time it takes between the heart squeezing and the wrist getting more blood flow.
The optical sensor can measure changes in oxygenated blood vs deoxygenated blood, and it can measure pulsatility of blood.
Ideally, you want an EKG to tell you when the heart contracts, and a device that measures the pulse. The longer the time between the two, the more relaxed your blood vessels are.
But smart watches don't have an EKG, and they don't know when your heart contracts. So it looks at the shape of the pulse curve, looking at kurtosis (how narrow the curve is) and skewness (how much the curve clumps to the right or left). A stiff blood vessel or a system with a lot of resistance will have a quick peak in pulsatility and a steeper slope.
These data are combined with estimates based on your age, sex, height, and weight.
The result is slightly better than a wild guess. The principles are correct, but the smart watch is uncalibrated, so it's not accurate. It could probably reliably detect when your blood pressure increases or decreases, but not give you an accurate number.
Ditto for its ability to detect oxygenation. The best devices rely on transillumination (like light going through your fingertip, rather than reflected illumination.
TLDR: smart watches are not accurate for blood pressure. It guesses how tight your blood vessels are based on the contour of pulse changes in blood flow, incorporating general demographic data. | 3,601 | 3,588 |
Responsibility of reviewer to include grammar corrections? | Hello!
I have a question regarding peer reviewing for journals. I find when I am reviewing that I want to comment on every minor grammar/sentence structure infraction, but obviously this is time consuming and I'm honestly not sure if it is a responsibility of the reviewer. In addition to comments on the science/experiments/etc., is it appropriate to include blanket statements regarding grammar/sentence structure? For example, "There is a general over- and mis-use of the word 'the', as well as instances of tense disagreement throughout the manuscript which should be addressed for increased clarity and readability." Is a blanket statement better than pointing out specific instances, if there are many? Or visa versa? Or are those comments more of an editorial responsibility than reviewer responsibility?
TIA for your insight! | Your job is to review the clarity and 'correctness' with which the authors have expressed their work. That to some extent - includes language. Where theres a few scattered errors, I'll pick them up. Where its systematic I'll note the first one or two and add a comment like you suggested. | 33 | 17 |
ELI5: Why does it require energy to hold something heavy in a stationary position? | In physics today we were going over how work done (or energy) is equal to force multiplied by distance moved, but our teacher was unable to explain clearly why it requires so much energy to hold something stationary. If the object isn't being moved what is the chemical energy being converted to? | The physics class should also cover force diagrams. That heavy object has a downward force from gravity. To hold it above the ground requires an equal force upward. If you're holding it, this upward force is exerted by your muscles and skeleton. Your muscles require your body's energy to maintain that force. So while you may not be doing work by how physics defines work, you're still using energy to apply a force. | 17 | 16 |
CMV: People walking/biking in public places should adhere to the same "rules of the road" as when they're driving cars on public roadways. | As the title states, I have believed all my life that when walking in public areas, especially those with heavy foot traffic, we should behave with the same actions as if we were driving cars.
if you drive on the right side of the roads, you should walk to your right on the sidewalk, same goes for if you drive on the left side of the roads, you should walk to your left. Or not stepping out in front of other people that are clearly going straight, look around corners before stepping out into the main isle of the super market, look over your shoulder to see what's behind you before coming to a dead stop ect.
The sheer mindlessness and selfishness some people exhibit in public has bothered me for my whole adult life and I'm starting to think that I have the unpopular opinion here. | I’ve always been taught to walk on the opposite side of the road, if no sidewalk, so that way you can see when someone is coming especially if the road is close to the curb/walk space.
People not paying attention is a huge problem. Some are like me and look at their phone because they don’t want to be seen. Much less accidentally look in someone’s direction. | 27 | 49 |
Why did we stop inoculating against smallpox? | I understand the amazing human achievement that the disease was eradicated. That said, we have an effective method against keeping people from getting sick from any possible accidental or other recurrence of the disease, so why don’t we continue using it widely just in case? I’ve also seen that it is/was effective in suppressing other “pox” diseases (eg, monkeypox), which seems like a big benefit.
So why did we just…stop? Were there major costs and/or side effects that made it not worth it? Or is it kinda just a big victory lap that we might regret? | Basically, every medical procedure has risk of something going wrong, and some benefit. If the benefit doesn’t outweigh risks, it’s not recommended.
For smallpox, it’s eradicated; it doesn’t exist in the population. So inoculating against it gives no benefit. So even though vaccines are low-risk, there is some risk. Infections, adverse reactions, and mishaps with needles can happen, even if they are excessively rare. So despite the low risk, no benefit means the smallpox vaccination isn’t necessary. | 3,924 | 2,401 |
Could there be a civilization just as technologically advanced as us in another planet whose science has a totally different content than ours? | Meaning: they have all our technological prowess but their theories 'parse' the world in a completely different way. | The way our scientific method developed was contingent upon cultural/societal circumstances from different times and places, so the alien civilization in question could have developed theirs differently or in different stages than we did.
The goal of science is to uncover the true nature of reality. So long as they have the same goal and reside in the same universe as we do, they would be observing, identifying, classifying the same phenomena and laws that govern them as us.
That said, the criteria by which we classify and group phenomena are chosen by us, and while we have good reasons for the way we do it, it could be done differently. So in this way an alien civilization could develop a science with results different from ours.
Finally, the way we are biologically geared to perceive the world plays a role in how we practically divide and classify different aspects of the world. There's no doubt that this alien civilization is biologically geared differently than we are, and so they will likely perceive the world differently than we do which will impact the way they would divide and classify. Science, however, is supposed to transcend the subjective experience of reality.
Great question! | 76 | 59 |
ELI5: How can Hooters hire strictly female servers without getting into some kind of legal trouble concerning discrimination? | I know this might be sort of an odd question, but if a male applied for a waiting position at Hooters (or a similar restaurant), what legally allows the restaurant to deny them the waiting position due to their gender? | There's a provision in the law which says
>Notwithstanding any other provision... it shall not be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to hire and employ employees... on the basis of his religion, sex, or national origin in those certain instances where religion, sex, or national origin is a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise
(1964 Civil Rights Act, Title VII, Sec. 703(e)(1))
This means that you're free to use sex discrimination, if your business model *requires* people of a certain sex. The business model of Hooters is "boobs selling you chicken wings"; people without boobs can't do that. | 71 | 46 |
ELI5: how we detect water in the atmosphere of a planet 110 light years away. | We use super-powerful telescopes that can look out into space in a wide range of spectrums of light.
So when we start looking for potentially habitable planets, what we often start with is finding planets that are orbiting around a star in the "Goldilocks Zone". This term is a play on the Goldilocks story, where the perfect bowl of porridge is "not too hot, not too cold". So when a planet is too close to its sun, it's too hot for life to exist (as far as we know) and so hot that any water it might have had would just evaporate away. And when it's too far from the sun, it's too cold for life (as far as we know) and any water it might have would be frozen solid. So the Goldilocks Zone is where a planet is just the right distance away from the sun to have 1. Liquid water, and 2. Potential life..
So once we find a planet at the right distance from the sun, we can look at it through these powerful telescopes. Now the specific planet we're talking about here is much too far away for us to see it in detail, so through a telescope it kind of just looks like a little dot. But what we CAN see is the sun going dim each time the planet passes in front of it as the planet orbits. It's almost like seeing a little mini solar eclipse. Every time the telescope sees the sun go dark for a second, we know the planet has just passed in front of it.
Ever more cool is that the scientists can then look at the color of the sun's light as it passes through that planet's atmosphere. Like imagine if you had a pink balloon and you filled it with blue water. If you just hold the balloon in your hand all you see is the pink rubber. But if you hold the balloon up in front of a really powerful lightbulb, that light will pass through the balloon and shine through the blue water, and we can see the blue through the thin pink skin of the balloon.
So when we watch the planet, and we see the light of the sun filtering through its atmosphere, we can tell what that atmosphere is made of, because different gasses and substances show up as different colors. And by analyzing the colors we can tell that there's a great deal of water vapor in that atmosphere. We can't tell exactly how much water, but we can see that it's there, and that's a big deal.
Now, just because a planet is in the Goldilocks Zone and it has water, that doesn't automatically mean that we could just land on it and live normal lives. It's too far away for us to see the surface so it could be covered in evil man-eating slime monsters, or it could be a planet that has water but absolutely no life at all, or there could be weird gasses that would kill any life form we know of. But finding water is a good start, and as technology advances we'll be able to see more and more. | 64 | 39 |
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Why does a muscle get stronger? | I know *what* happens when a muscle gets stronger. Buy *why* does that happen?
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This question was asked by my father who, for years, has been unsatisfied with the answers he's been getting. Can someone finally answer him?
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Edit: Thanks guys! He finally got an answer he was looking for! I can't reply to everyone and thank you, I didn't expect to get this many responses, so thank you all, on both his and my own behalf! | Enhanced strength, either through thicker muscle fibers or increased neuromuscular efficiency, is the body's natural adaptation to having a certain stimulus, or stress, placed on it (in this case a heavy load or resistive force). The body adapts to be more ready for that same level of stress, should it happen again. In order to continue getting stronger the body must be progressively and consistently stimulated with an appropriate amount of stress. Loads of different magnitude, moved at different speeds, over various durations of time, can cause a wide variety of muscular and neuromuscular adaptations. Strength is only one of them. | 108 | 221 |
ELI5: The Glass-Steagall Act | I've seen some reports in the news in the past week that Elizabeth Warren and John McCain want to bring back The Glass-Steagall Act.
Can somebody explain to me like I'm five what the act included, what it did, and what effects it would have today?
Thanks a ton. | The Glass-Steagall Act prohibited commercial banks from engaging in investment banking and securities activities. To understand what this means, you need to understand the three core activities that banks engage in: commercial banking, investment banking, and securities brokerage and dealership.
They are as follows:
* **Commercial banking** is the taking of deposits and the making of loans. A traditional commercial bank borrows money in the form of deposits that pay a lower interest rate and lends the money to consumers and businesses at a higher interest rate. It makes money on the spread between the two rates.
* **Investment banking** is the underwriting of securities. Consider when a big company does an initial public offering. It wants to sell $1 billion of stock to the public. An investment bank agrees with the company that the investment bank will buy the shares from the company and market them to the public.
* **Securities brokerage and dealership** is the facilitation of the trade of securities in the secondary market. After the company in the above example does its IPO, its shares will trade on the open market. Securities houses facilitate these trades by acting as brokers and by holding an inventory of the securities for sale.
The latter two activities, call them "securities activities," are generally considered more risky than traditional commercial banking. The idea behind the Glass-Steagall Act was that commercial banks, the holders of America's savings, needed to be kept separate from those risky securities activities. Some people think the repeal of the Act contributed to the financial crisis. | 19 | 15 |
films/tvshows/books about academics working | On those days when preparing lectures, reading articles or doing other "academia stuff" seems like the most boring thing ever, I like to read or watch something with university lecturers in it just doing their jobs (preferably in awesome-looking offices and libraries). I find it quite motivational. The problem is that most lablit reading lists or wikipedia collections mention things that actually have very little to do with what academia looks like. Professors lecturing to rapt audiences about forensics and then taking off to the Maldives in a government helicopter to fight crime, or impossibly goodlooking postdocs saving the world from deadly viruses... Indiana Jones, Da Vinci Code, Guilt etc. To say nothing of when rival academics kill each other for the royalties from co-written books. Eyeroll.
**Can you think of any books, films or TV shows that feature lecturers and academics doing normal everyday things?**
Some that occur to me are Still Alice, or the beginning of the new Discovery of Witches that is more about doing research at the Bod than dating vampires (that goes downhill quickly though). Some bits of Unabomber are quite good. As for books, I find Elly Griffith's series about Ruth Galloway has a lot of realistic moments about class prep and teaching. | In Contact, a lot of time is spent waiting, a lot of time is spent unsuccessfully begging funding agencies for money, a lot of time is spent trying to navigate bureaucracies you don't understand.
It has some more fantastic elements, of course, but it's pretty obvious it was written by someone from the academic jungle. | 16 | 15 |
[Deadpool Movie][Spoilers] Why does Ajax appear to have super strength/durability? | EDIT: Sorry, the title should say [Deadpool Movie][Spoilers] Why does *Francis* appear to have super strength/durability?
I remember ~~Ajax~~ Francis saying that he had the same treatment as Wade, and as a result, got his nerve endings fried and his reflexes enhanced. However, that doesn't explain how he appears to have super strength/durability. In the beginning, he picks a guy up by the throat with one hand. He'd at least have to be fairly strong for that. Then, he survives the explosion at the end and tackles Deadpool when he's celebrating. Does ~~Ajax~~ Francis have super strength/durability and didn't mention it, or because of his fried nerve endings, he doesn't feel pain so he can push himself further without worrying? | The human body is actually capable of many things, like a mother lifting a two-ton car to save her kids. Pain limits the body so that it doesn't overextends itself beyond recovery. Francis seems to be more of the latter than the former. | 21 | 17 |
ELI5- Why, in the 21st century, do politics still seem to be a matter of opinion? Does mankind simply lack the means to make objective decisions about the running of our nations governments, based on cold hard facts and numbers? | Politics is about the relative weighting of various interlocking value judgements, and those are rarely if ever possible to sort out in anything like an objective manner. You can make better or worse arguments about the relative merits of defence spending vs education (or whatever), but only rarely can you objectively define one as better than the other.
So we are stuck with subjectivity here. That's politics. | 12 | 21 |
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ELI5: What makes C++ a better language than C? Or in other words, what are all the advantages of Object-Oriented Programming? | My main hurdle is that I don't understand *why* it's beneficial to combine data with code. I'm having a hard time understanding why a programmer would want to make the paradigm switch and what the advantages are. I have a small background in C and every explanation I've heard for C++ leaves me scratching my head. | Object-oriented helps keep track of things in a logical, reusable, and extendable structure.
Think about a video game. In a video game, there are plenty of characters on the screen. Every character has a model and a location in the world. With classes, you can make a "character" class that holds all that character-specific data in an easy-to-use template.
**TL;DR 1:** It's like keeping all the contact information for your friend in a single contact card on your phone.
Every time you create (aka, "instantiate") a character in the game world, the class constructor will automatically fill in all the data and keep it together in a single, logical object. In C, this same data would probably be stored in one or more arrays. While that works most of the time, if there's a logic bug in your program, you might find yourself reading the wrong data (off-by-one errors) or possibly reading a location that isn't real data at all (reading a character's location after it was already removed, for example). These bugs can be nasty and hard to find. With objects, the data for each character is contained in a single object, so all the correct data is in a single place, and only exists if the object still exists.
**TL;DR 2:** Since the entire contact card is displayed at the same time, you won't accidentally dial Taco Hut when trying to call your friend.
Secondly (and this is very important for large projects), it helps keep code organized. You might know where all the arrays and variables that keep track of a character's inventory are, but unless he worked with you in designing it, Steve might not. If Steve has to make a change to your code to add his code for equipping larger backpacks, he'll have to hunt down all the inventory code or ask you to explain it. While proper code organization can prevent problems like that, object-oriented code *forces* you to write it organized in smaller logical chunks, making such techniques less necessary.
**TL;DR 3:** By it's very nature it keeps your contacts organized, so when you loan your phone to a friend, they can always figure out how to navigate the contacts screen easily.
Finally, techniques like inheritance and encapsulation promote code reuse and more general solutions. Instead of writing code multiple times for chests, characters, and vehicles to all store items, you can write a single "inventory" class and extend it. That gives the three very different objects a common interface that the item team can rely on when they need to add or remove an object from an inventory.
**TL;DR 4:** It promotes common, generic formats. You can add an email field to a contact card and your email program will be able to recognize it, regardless of whether it's a phone contact, an email contact, or something else entirely.
Basically, it's a layer of organization on top of the base code that helps keep track of things, especially in huge projects. It's also easily extendable, allowing you to reuse a lot of code rather than re-typing it all. | 10 | 17 |
ELI5: Ocean phytoplankton and algae produce 70-80% of the earths atmospheric oxygen. Why is tree conservation for oxygen so popular over ocean conservation then? | Trees are more familiar, and humanity’s effects on them are more easily understood. You can imagine 100 acres of rainforest being cleared for ranch land or banana plantations a lot more easily than a cloud of phytoplankton dying off. Just the simple fact that trees and humans are on land, while plankton and algae are in water, makes us care about them more.
Also, the focus on tree conservation does far more than just produce oxygen. In fact, I’d say that’s pretty far down the list. Carbon sequestration, soil health, and biological diversity are all greatly affected by deforestation. | 7,261 | 13,688 |
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CMV: Telling an underrepresented group in any media (games/movies etc) to go "make it their own stuff" is a completely valid option. | Asians underrepresented in media in the West? Well they got Korean, Chinese, Indian and Japanese cinema/media. Not only that but these became global phenomenons and attracted tons of interest to the respective countries. We have all heard of K-Dramas, K-Pop, Bollywood, Anime, J-Dramas, J-Pop and various martial arts movies like IP man etc. In fact Asian cinema has been attractive for western born Asian actors, with many of them choosing to go back to their home countries for career opportunities and even being noticed by Hollywood AFTER landing it big there.
Secondly, why would one group want another group to attempt to represent them properly? Only to get mad when they make mistakes? The logic behind that makes no sense to me. We’ve seen it time and time again in gaming and movies, where minority/underrepresented groups demand representation from white guys who don’t really know anything about them. There’s no way they’d be able to accurately depict these things, even with help, because many “experts” in the cultures don’t agree with each other. A good example a game that recently came out called Detroit, the writer for the game changed things up this time and stepped back a bit and took input from a lot of sources. Even with that quite a few gaming journalists had complaints about being misogynistic, demeaning civil rights movements etc. For a more western successor story with regards to this, look no further than Marvel’s Black Panther, which boosted a mostly African American cast as well as director and did well. A lot of the reason behind this success was that many people found that aspect appealing.
So yes, I definitely think that "go make it yourself" is a completely valid option, please attempt to CMV.
| > Secondly, why would one group want another group to attempt to represent them properly?
They are Americans. Those K-dramas and Bollywood are representing Koreans and Indians, not minority groups in America.
> For a more western successor story with regards to this, look no further than Marvel’s Black Panther, which boosted a mostly African American cast as well as director and did well. A lot of the reason behind this success was that many people found that aspect appealing.
Which was spearheaded by Marvel. This is the opposite of 'make your own stuff'. | 18 | 28 |
ELI5: Why do we pay ISPs for "up to" a certain speed of internet with no guaranteed minimum, while we would never pay $10 for up to a sandwich? | Access to the Internet is a service which can face disruptions due to forces outside the control of the ISP, such as weather, acts of God, or even just the number of people simultaneously connected. The ISP can't reasonably offer a guaranteed minimum (except maybe in special cases of dedicated lines for businesses and universities). If you are consistently receiving speeds well below the advertised maximum, the company should try to refund you or give you freebies to make up for the poor service.
Physical goods like sandwiches are countable, so the phrase "up to one sandwich" is almost meaningless since you can't have a fraction of a sandwich. (Granted you can cut a sandwich into pieces, so a better analogy might be something like a coffee maker: you can't have a fraction of a coffee maker.) Instead, businesses might use phrasing like "while supplies last," meaning they'll continue to sell you a sandwich until they can't make any more whole sandwiches. | 59 | 287 |
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ELI5: Howcome English text is used so frequently in countries such as China Japan and Korea? | Something like a billboard for McDonalds, it would have English text saying "Fast Food". Why is this? | English-speaking cultures are extremely powerful in the world if you haven't noticed, to the point that people involved in international business are going to learn English as a necessity. Once this is known people can communicate even if neither has English as a first language; a Japanese businessman might speak to an Indian businessman in English because they both learned in order to also do business in American markets.
The result is that English is also very important as a tourist language. Americans traveling will want to understand the sign but also visiting businessmen will be looking at such signs as well. Since both probably speak English it makes sense to have such a translation. | 19 | 16 |
Why does blue light travel slower in glass than red light? | I understand that blue light slows by more and therefore refracts by more, but I'm not entirely sure why blue light travels slower in, say glass, than red. | The two parameters that govern the speed of light are the electric permittivity (epsilon) and magnetic permeability (mu) of the medium the light is traveling through. You can loosely think of these two parameters as describing how much the medium resists changes in the EM field. The vacuum permittivity and vacuum permeability are not dependent on wavelength, and so the speed of light *in vacuum* is also not dependent on wavelength.
**However**, when light travels through a material, the speed of light *does* depend on wavelength (though we should really be thinking in terms of frequency, with the understanding that wavelength and frequency describe loosely the same attribute of the optical wave). Materials are made up of charged particles which can interact with the optical wave that is traveling through the medium. Remember, electrically charged particles have their own electric field and will be pushed around by the electric field of the optical wave, this impacts the electric permittivity and magnetic permeability of the material, so the speed of light in a material will be different than the speed of light in vacuum (since there are charges that the EM wave can push around as it travels through the material). You can think of each electron as being attached to springs - the incoming EM field can then interact with the electrons, pushing them back and forth. Continuing with this analogy, the speed of the EM wave depends on how 'stiff' the 'springs' are. In reality, the 'stiffness' is simply the electric permittivity and permeably of the material. These two parameters depend on the material, as well as the frequency of light - that is, a low frequency wave will drive the electrons back and slowly while a high frequency wave will try to drive the electrons back and forth faster (sometimes so fast the electron's don't follow the EM field very well).
The index of refraction of a material is related to the permittivity and permeability of that particular material. More commonly, we use the index of refraction to describe how fast light travels in a material. The phenomenon you describe in your question is called *dispersion*, which is essentially wavelength dependent index of refraction. All materials have a dispersion curve which shows the index of refraction as a function of wavelength for a particular material. | 55 | 230 |
Why does our skin not turn gray with age? | As we get older, the melanin in our hair dies out, and gray hair starts to grow in place of colored hair. Since skin has melanin in it too, why does the same thing not happen?
Edit: Thanks for all the replies, guys! | Genes that regulate skin pigment are different genes from those that regulate the melanin in one's hair. Also, it has been suggested that hair follicles have “melanogentic clocks," which slows down or stops melanocyte activity (the things that produce melanin), and therefore decreases the pigment in one's hair. (loc.gov) | 34 | 111 |
Why was Wittgenstein concerned about meaning and language at all? Why is it even a philosophical problem? | Sounds straightforward to me? | Language, or rather misuse of it, isn't just a philosophical problem for Wittgenstein but the root of all philosophical problems. Philosophical problems, by his view, are pseudo-problems which are dissolved when we straighten out our use of language. | 27 | 22 |
My teacher ghosted me and now I need someone to interview who works in the general field for my final project | TLDR;I need someone to answer the questions at the bottom
So for my class we need to interview someone in the general field of what we wanna do in the future. Now I don't know computer programmers so I asked around and found out my school has a programming teacher. Anyway I messaged him, three days later I got a reply and after a week of this I finally set up a date and time that works with both of us. Except he decided to ghost me on the day of the interview (yesterday). Anyway this portion of the project is due tomorrow afternoon and my only programmer is gone.
​
So basically I turn to the only large group of programmers who might answer this so I can pass my course.
1. What kind of skills are required to become a computer programmer?
2. What would you say the hardest part of being a computer programmer is?
3. Could you give an example of a difficult problem you struggle with often in this field
4. How would you say success is measured in this field?
5. When starting a new project what do you usually like to start with first, organizing how everything is going to be or diving straight in?
6. What advice would you give to people who are interested in pursuing this career?
Also please include a pen name of some sort cause I have to cite a person
Thanks in advance. | 1. Programming, version control systems, time management and teamwork. A lot of teamwork.
2. Social skills for most of them. Programming can be taught but tough luck if noone wants to work with you.
3. imposter syndrome and thinking about work outside of office hours
4. Id say you cant really say success. Programming is a skill, like math and reading, it’s a neverending journey of learning new things. The succesfull ones understand that it’s about always learning new stuff.
5. Organizing is a way it should be done
6. Learn how to work with people! Really! Developers work isn’t about being a code monkey hidden in a dark lair alone. Also, study a bit about mentatl health and work/life balance.:-)
Robin Sherbatsky | 31 | 54 |
ELI5: How did they determine the weight of the Earth, and other bodies in the Cosmos without a scale? | The weight of the earth was determined by first measuring the force of gravity between two 1-kilogram weights (Henry Cavendish performed this experiment in the 18th century). From there, you can measure the force of gravity on any object to determine the mass of the Earth, and if you know that, you can calculate the mass of the Sun from it's gravity, which lets you calculate the mass of the other planets.
For other stars, it's just estimation. If they're close enough to another star, you can use the observed gravity to calculate one or several possible answers for their masses. You can get an idea of what a star is made of and how dense it is by the light it emits, so with enough examples it's possible to get pretty good estimates just based on the size and color of the star. | 72 | 136 |
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[Harry Potter] What classifies a creature as being 'magical', and why does the Ministry of Magic bother to hide harmless creatures like flobberworms from Muggles? | Magic is something that can be detected, a creature is magical if it has magic, which is known because it either exhibits clearly magical traits or is otherwise detected as having magic.
Magical creatures are kept apart because of the statute of secrecy primarily, and protection of muggles somewhat.
Imagine what would happen if they weren't kept separate and a magical disease made the leap across from one to muggle creatures and due to them not being kept separate or monitored at all it went widespread? It'd be havoc, the statute would be screwed pretty much due to the whole you need magic to counter magic thing that is so prevalent within the setting. | 42 | 61 |
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CMV: People should not be able to change the sex on their birth certificate | I really want to give people some deltas so please try to change my view.
I’ve been watching a lot of trans youtubers mention changing their sex on their birth certificate and I get very confused.
Obviously unless you do prenatal testing, no one actually knows the chromosomal sex of their baby by just looking at them. Their approximating via the doctors looking at genitals. But sex is still what they are approximating.
I know there is sex on IDs, and I see why having the birth certificate changed can facilitate changing it on legal documents, but couldn’t we just have gender on all legal documents and sex with gender for medical documents?
I guess I’m confused as to why sex needs to be changed when almost all transgender people don’t dispute their biological sex | Suppose you're trans and you have to deal with someone that needs to see your birth certificate among other legal documents, but is very hostile to trans people - say a foreign country (but also some schools and rarely workplaces). Since they can see what you look like now, giving them access to a birth certificate with a sex that doesn't match your gender can be inconvenient or even dangerous to you.
I think the correct option is to remove sex from all newly issued official documents and keep medically pertinent information in your confidential medical record, but as long as it's there, you need to be able to change it. | 80 | 104 |
Is it viable to bring a large number manufacturing jobs back to the US? | If not, what conditions would be needed to make it so? | Always want to point out that there is a lot of manufacturing in the US. And that manufacturing is broad. Think of it this way, when we perceive "manufacturing" we perceive small widgets in an assembly line. Manufacturing however can be broad, advanced, high tech, and touch on ton of different things from minerals to food production.
With that being said again there is a lot of that already here. It's just advanced or higher end. We have commercial space and aerospace, lithium ion battery, and plenty of high end garment manufacturing throughout California. It's the lower end manufacturing that we do not have as much of, that went to abroad, and because people want to work in the higher end, which we have.
We had that lower end and we moved beyond it. The countries we now import products from from that lower end are trying to achieve the higher end we have and the diversity of manufacturing sectors that encompass it. | 10 | 20 |
What is preventing human-caused climate change from being a widely accepted theory? | This semester I took an environmental ethics course (I go to a purely engineering school, the course is one of our only required liberal arts classes), where we discussed topics like mountaintop removal, GMOs, etc. When I studied the factual evidence behind climate change (not to mention the enormous support from the scientific community) it seemed obvious that human-caused climate change was occurring.
Is there sufficient evidence to suggest that human-caused climate change is not occurring? And if not, what other aspects, be they political, economical, etc., are preventing climate change from being accepted to the same extent as other highly supported scientific theories? | I took a class on climate change and society, the professor mentioned 4 major social components as to why climate change is challenged in the media (it does not reflect the scientific consensus that its is happening), and how this shapes and affects public opinion.
1. Religious views
2. Vested interests - Lobbyists and special interest groups which own media outlets and buy out politicians/senators/presidential candidates to spread their message of "climate change is not real or climate change is not man made".
3. Fear of government regulation on industry, especially in the U.S.A. where capitalism is all about the free market and small government.
4. Fear of a one world government - the UN controlling what the USA can or cannot do. (This is a conspiracy theory)
Also, in journalism - journalists are taught to report a fair and balanced article. To get both sides of the story. So most climate change ariticles have one scientist who actually is a climate scientist working on climate studies saying "climate change is real, it is bad and it is man made" and then they have another "expert" (often a scientist from a unrelated field, with few or no piered reviewed articles, or who is payed off by these interest groups) who says "climate change is not real, or climate change is not man made..."
It makes it seem like in the scientific community there is a lot of scepticism and arguing - but in reality 99% of climate scientists (and those in related fields) find that by looking at the data, the trends and the models that climate change is occurring. Also media outlets need ratings, what better way to get ratings then to exaggerate and spew out fear mongering tactics - THE OCEANS WILL RISE 100meters!!! - well no, thats not true - at least they wont rise that much in the next 500-1000 years. In the next 100 it will be closer to 7m. Media just gets the facts wrong, reads the studies wrong or exaggerates the findings. Go to the source, the studies and the scientists. Avoid the media its no good at reporting science. | 21 | 19 |
ELI5: Why do doctors try to stop the swelling of an injury if the body's healing-reaction is to create swelling? What do we know that our bodies don't? | In some cases the swelling can pose a risk of further complications, like cerebral edema. In other cases it may simply be for the comfort/convenience of the patient, as swelling, while part of the body's natural response, can still lead to pain and immobility. | 24 | 15 |
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CMV: Bringing the Ebola Patients Back to the US is a HORRIBLE Idea. | I think that bringing back the Ebola patients is a horrible, horrible idea. Look, I'm all for caring about each individual person. The people who are infected should be cared for as best as possible... and they also need to be isolated. This isn't SARS, MERS, or AIDS... it fucking kills you in a horrible manner at a very high rate (60-70% I think). Our best defense right now is not letting it reach our shores.
I'm just afraid that bringing the victims here will infect others working with them, no matter how hard they try to be safe. Once Ebola gains a foothold, we're fucked. Is there anything we can realistically do better here to combat the disease in these patients? I could be wrong, but I don't think so.
Maybe I'm just being paranoid... CMV.
_____
> *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!* | Ebola may be deadly, but simply following basic hygienic protocols reduces the risk of infection to close to zero.
Ebola requires direct physical contact with an infected or an exchange of bodily fluids for a successful infection. It is not airborne or anything.
| 48 | 63 |
Eli5: Is there any explanation why when we sleep it seems like time is so fast? For example, ive been asleep for 9 hours but it feels like just a minute. | Time passes inconsistently based on how aware of it you are. Five minutes doing something unpleasant feels a lot longer than five minutes doing something you love, because you are keenly aware of the time passing when you're waiting for it to reach a certain point.
When you're asleep you aren't counting the time, and therefore it doesn't have the slow down effect. | 8,885 | 16,753 |
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Would it be possible to link a telescope on Earth with one on Mars to see farther and more clearly the same way that telescopes in different locations on Earth can be linked? | Yes, but there's a lot of things that make it tricky.
Firstly, you need to know the distance between telescopes down to a precision that scales with wavelength. So if you're doing radio frequencies, you need to know the distance down to like 10s of cm or tighter. That's doable even even across the entire diameter of Earth if you're careful, but from Earth to Mars it gets tricky, especially as the distance is changing over time (this makes combining the signals a lot more complicated as well!) For visible light we're talking like 100s of nanometres, which is doable on-site for telescopes physically next to each other, but is tricky to do across the Earth, let alone from Earth to Mars.
Secondly, you need to combine the signals somehow. For low frequencies, you get data slow enough you can save it to disk and combine the signals digitally. But even with all our modern infrastructure, this can be too much data to send through the internet. For the Event Horizon Telescope, they literally shipped the hard drives around the world to combine the data, because at that scale it's the most efficient and least error-prone way to do it ("Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway"). So getting that much data from Mars to Earth is a genuine problem. It's even worse in optical and infrared wavelengths, because the frequency is so high that it's just not practical to save that much data, so instead we physically combine the actual beams of light, which isn't really doable beyond telescopes on a single site.
Finally, resolution isn't everything. We actually have ground-based infrared interferometers with much higher resolution than the James Webb Space Telescope. Having a big collecting area is also really important, as that gives you high sensitivity. Also, interferometers only give you resolution in the direction between the telescopes. You'd get very high resolution along the Earth-Mars axis, but low resolution at right-angles to that. Basically, each "pixel" would be extremely long and thin - basically you're getting a high-resolution 1D image of some object (although as Mars and Earth move relative to each other, you could build up a proper 2D image over time). | 59 | 49 |
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What makes treeline altitude (highest trees can grow) vary from place to place? | In Colorado it's about 10,800'. In California it's about 8,500' in places. | Water and heat availability. In general, a you get higher, both become more scarce until it's too cold and dry for any trees to grow. Of course, a mountain in the desert will hit the dryness limit sooner than one in the tropics, and one in Canada will hit the coldness limit sooner than one in Florida. | 10 | 19 |
What about a lack of oxygen makes a cell die? | Why does a lack of oxygen kill a cell? What is changing that causes this? | Basically, oxygen is required for the formation of ATP in cells. ATP, in turn, is responsible for most of the energy requiring functions that a cell performs. And life, to the extent that it can be meaningfully defined, might be considered the development and maintenance of homeostatic conditions at temperatures, ionic concentrations, and electrical potentials that are inconsistent with the environment that surrounds them, resulting in the ordered information that is capable of self-replication. (Note, though, that a duracell battery meets many of these criteria.) All of those differences from the environment require energy to generate and maintain. Without that energy, the cell will lose its instructions and generally whittle down into a non-functional bit that will hopefully be engulfed by a neighbor. Otherwise, it might explode, damaging nearby cells
(not good) | 25 | 25 |
[DC/Marvel] How do superheroes routinely invent things that outpace far more advanced civilizations? | This is mostly a Marvel question. Earth is a relatively unadvanced civilization compared to, say, the Kree or the Shi’ar, yet it seems like humans constantly invent things that these societies haven’t. Dr. Doom has a time machine. Reed Richards has an entire multiversal council of his alternate selves. At the very least, Iron Man-caliber armor should be standard issue among alien soldiers, as should a Captain America-esque super soldier serum. In the MCU, Kang/He Who Remains discovered multiversal travel and basically became a time god… had no one else in the universe, even from more advanced civilizations, discovered this yet?
DC has this problem to some extent. Earth is a galactic backwater compared to, say, New Genesis, but Batman is consistently creating shit that can damage New Gods, Kryptonians and whoever else the plot needs him to beat.
I know the actual answer is just “the plot is on Earth and the main characters are human,” but what is the in-universe explanation for why such insane scientific advancement is coming from such a small group of people at this specific point in time? And why haven’t more advanced alien civilizations beaten them to everything they’ve invented? | So much like our current continuity, most species’ development is cumulative in nature. First comes the basics of math and physics, then comes nuclear mechanics, then relativity and so on. Breakthroughs are rarely isolated; for every Einstein there were years of other brilliant minds laying the framework for their advances. Newton is one the few cases where someone did most of the heavy lifting themselves. Most species in other universes follow this model, albeit further along that axis of development.
Compare this model to Marvel and DC Earth. You have many, many Einstein and Newton level or beyond geniuses all working simultaneously on multiple fields, building and improving upon each other and stealing stuff from other more developed species along the way to boot. This is very unusual and has proven to be dangerous at times as new inventions are tested and found too late to be volitile or have unintended side effects. | 285 | 451 |
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