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How to get "invited talks" as a postdoc? | I am a postdoc in biomedical sciences and I am in the final stage of training. In preparation for the job application and to get my name and my research more exposed I have been going to conferences and giving short talks. However, I see in the tenure-track job applicants typically list many invited talks in their CVs. It seems to me that these invited talks increase one's exposure to more experts of the field, and it also looks great on the CV.
How should a postdoc get more invited talks, such as departmental seminars or alike? Would you email the departments/professors in different schools and "self-invite" yourself, or ask about the possibility of giving a talk?
Many thanks! | 1) Have friends at other institutions.
2) Do interesting research.
3) Get a campus invite for a job interview. (semi-joking on this one)
All in all, invited talks don't really do a lot for your CV or career potential. They reflect your larger involvement in the field, though, since invitations usually mean other folks acknowledge your expertise and research as something interesting to present to a larger audience. | 27 | 28 |
ELI5: When saving a document on Microsoft Word "A file name can't contain any of the following characters: \ / : * ? " < > |". Why? | Windows uses these symbols for searches, command-line instructions, and the paths that define file locations. If you save using one of these then Windows does not know whether that is the file name or should be performing some other action. | 32 | 24 |
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Is Plato's Republic a Serious Political Proposal? | I was recently listening to the Partially Examined Life's episode on Plato's Republic and later on in the episode one of the hosts had mentioned that in academia, some treat Plato's Republic as a straightforward political proposal while others treat as a metaphor for the soul and other abstract answers.
What is the general consensus regarding what Plato meant? | In *A History of Western Philosophy*, Bertrand Russell says the following which if accurate gives some credence to the idea that it could have been a serious model:
> Plato's Republic, unlike modern Utopias, was perhaps intended to be actually founded. This was not so fantastic or impossible as it might naturally seem to us. Many of its provisions, including some that we should have thought quite impracticable, were actually realized at Sparta. The rule of philosophers had been attempted by Pythagoras, and in Plato's time Archytas the Pythagorean was politically influential in Taras (the modern Taranto) when Plato visited Sicily and southern
Italy. It was a common practice for cities to employ a sage to draw up their laws; Solon had done this for Athens, and Protagoras for Thurii. Colonies, in those days, were completely free from control by their parent cities, and it would have been quite feasible for a band of Platonists to establish the Republic on the shores of Spain or Gaul.
Unfortunately chance led Plato to Syracuse, a great commercial city engaged in desperate wars with Carthage; in such an atmosphere, no philosopher could have achieved much. In the next generation, the rise of Macedonia had made all small States antiquated, and had brought about the futility of all political experiments in miniature. | 12 | 19 |
ELI5:What is the difference between Jews, Christians and Muslims when it comes to the soul and afterlife? | If the goal is to be a good person and you get to live forever with god in heaven, don't they all agree? They all believe in a soul that lives forever don't they? | There are distinct differences between each. For a Jewish person, they will certainly get to "heaven" (there is no concept of hell) and because of this, they thank G-d by obeying him. Christianity is similar; although Christians do believe in hell for non-believers, the rationale is because God has forgiven you and you believe, you no longer want to disobey. Conversely, Muslims are the most action-based believers, as they strive to obey the laws set by Allah as there is a real threat of going to Jahannam (hell) if they do not. However, it is still greatly faith based with the first pillar being the Shahadah, a declaration of faith. | 65 | 145 |
CMV: After a person has earned a certain amount of money in a year (say, north of £5,000,000), they should be charged at a tax rate of at least 80% | About half of the world's wealth is currently held by the top 1% in society, a significantly higher tax rate for the very top earning members of society will both prevent more money being hoarded by them, reducing the wealth gap between the ultra-wealthy and the poorest people in society, and it will mean that billions more will go towards tax which can also be used to build up the economy and help the less fortunate people.
When someone has passed a certain threshold (not necessarily £5million, but that seems like a reasonable number in my opinion) they will not really need that much more than that, they wouldn't really be able to spend that on anything other than things that people would never really need. Plus, why should people be able to have millions that they can spend on extravagant items when some people cannot even afford a roof over their head, or food to feed themselves/their family. | What you're missing is the presumed link between productivity and compensation.
Elon Musk is responsible for PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX, right?
What if after PayPal the government told him "Alright there Elon, you've made enough money, we're taking the rest from here on out"? Even if he's not the kind of guy motivated by money, that means he'd have no resources to fund those other projects. Those other companies wouldn't exist because we decided to stifle innovation.
Some people make a thousand times more than others because they're doing a thousand times more for society. | 22 | 26 |
If I'm standing flat on a scale and swing my arms forcing my body down, where does the extra "weight" come from? | Newtons third law of motion, which basically says that for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So lifting your hands/arms up, pushes the rest of your body down, which is recorded on the scales as a momentary increase in weight.
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Why is it difficult to see yellow on a white background? | Assuming normal human vision, what is it about the human eye or the color yellow or both that makes yellow inherently more difficult to distinguish on a white background than other colors? | Perception of yellow and white relies on overlapping mechanisms in the retina.
Simplifying a bit: yellow is sensed by "opponent" neurons that are excited by medium (M) and long (L) wavelength cone receptors, *and* are inhibited by short (S) wavelength cones. So, when the stimulus has a lot of long/medium wavelength content but little short wavelength content, those neurons respond and you see "Yellow".
The "white" (or really, "brightness") signal comes from neurons that simply pool the L and M cone inputs (but not the S! - or maybe a little bit of S, sometimes). Call these L+M cells.
So, if you have a long/middle wavelength light mixture, it will look yellow *and* bright, since you're exciting both the opponent cells and the L+M cells. But then you can mix S wavelength light into it, and it won't get brighter but it will look white (since those opponent cells are now being inhibited).
Since both colors have such common neural architecture, they are perceptually very similar.
Meanwhile, blue and yellow look extremely different, because they excite almost completely complementary neurons, starting in the retina. | 35 | 27 |
During the carboniferous period, the oxygen level was ~35%. Now it is ~21%. There is less oxygen in atmosphere now. Where is that oxygen now? | During the carboniferous period, the oxygen level was ~35%. Now,the level is ~21%. There was a 41.5% oxygen decrease in atmosphere. Considering the fact that the level of CO2 were always negligible - at the beginning of the carboniferous period was only 7000ppm (~0,7%),now it is ~0,04% . Where is that oxygen now? I understand that breaking down lignin was difficult and it became coal but coal is mostly carbon. This explains the fact that carbon is trapped as coal but where is that oxygen trapped now? | Oxygen gets locked up as CO2, which can be in the atmosphere (minor), or in plants, or dead plants and animals in the ground. This includes a lot in bacteria. Another major sink is capture by rocks, as in iron and silicate oxides. | 1,268 | 2,359 |
ELI5: We breath the through the lungs. The air goes in and out of our lungs. So why is it that most of the time it's our stomach that inflates rather than the chest? | Your body can expand the lungs 2 ways, the ribs can stretch out to expand your chest, or the diaphragm under the lungs can expand into your gut which pushes your gut outward. You have probably been breathing with your diaphragm. | 54 | 40 |
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Square-Cube Law? | This law dictates that a titanic animal or creature could not exist because the bones could not support its weight, it would take longer for signals to reach the brain and other obvious problems, but this is confusing for me and the law seems really flimsy, wouldn't a creature of that size be designed to thrive like that? With bones, nervous system and organs specifically made for that mass? It seems like the law is literally taking a common animal, multiplying the size of it and saying it couldn't exist which is blatant, since its made for the conditions it in. Is there anything that would actually prevent a massive creature from thriving? | Its based on principles of physics. As an animal increases in size (say, "x" times as large), its mass would increase by x^3, but the cross section of muscles, bones, trachea, etc would increase by x^2 (since the cross section is 2 dimensional, but an animal is 3 dimensional). That means that proportionally, the animal needs to drastically increase the size of these structures. This is why a cow does not look like a big mouse, and an elephant is not a big cow. There comes a certain point where further increase in size can no longer be matched by an increase in bone/muscle mass, and the animal cannot reasonably exist.
The same idea with nerves. Blue whales are really big, and there is a significant lag in the time it takes signals to reach the tail. At a certain point, that delay becomes adaptive, and the animal doesn't get bigger.
Could, in theory, someone design a more efficient animal? Make muscles that are stronger per unit size, or nerves that signal faster, or bones with more strength? Sure. But that isn't how evolution works. There are advantages and disadvantages to becoming a big animal, and at some point the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. The major reconfigurine of bones and muscles and whatnot that would be needed to survive is too big of an evolutionary leap to make, especially when there isn't much advantage to getting bigger. | 113 | 164 |
Why is the amount of work required to accelerate a body from 10m/s to 20m/s three times the work needed to accelerate a body from 0m/s to 10m/s? | The kinetic energy of a body moving at 10m/s is 50\*mass and the kinetic energy of a body moving at 20m/s is 200\*mass. The work required to accelerate the body from 10 to 20m/s is 200-50=150\*mass, or three times the 0-10 acceleration. This seems really counterintuitive because it would seem that as the body gets faster it is harder to accelerate it further i.e. you would need to do more work. What does the force acting on the body care about the speed at which the object is moving if it just wants to accelerate it another 10m/s? What am I missing here?
(I know that the formulae say that it behaves this way but I just can't grasp it.) | Say you want to accelerated an object by a certain speed v, you can do that by applying a constant force, for a given time. So, if the body weights 1 kg and you apply a force of 1 N for 10 seconds, the object would speed up 10m/s, independent of the original speed. This is probably why your intuition syas it should be equally 'hard'.
The problem is that the amount of work is not the applied force integrated over time, it is the applied force integrated over distance. So if you apply the same force for the same period of time, speeding from a larger initial speed will take more work becouse the distance travelled is larger (greater speed, equal time -> longer distance). | 1,689 | 2,675 |
I've recently heard about people who identify as "spiritual but not religious." Is there a philosophical sense to this (in essence, philosophers who would hold such a stance), and if so are there philosophers who identify as "religious but not spiritual." | This seems better suited for social scientists on the clarity of defintions in surveys— but, to take a stab at it, 'religious' might imply a sense of organization around belief or dogma; whereas 'spiritual' can just mean having a sense of enchantment or enthusiasm.
In general I'd say philosophers tend to describe 'spiritual'as not necessarily religious— for example, Charles Taylor describes 'spiritual' as meaning ethics in the most broad sense in *Sources of the Self*. | 20 | 27 |
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ELI5: How can eu countries have different inflation rates when they all use euros? Do euro have different value in each country? | Edit: Thank you all for the answers. | Inflation rate is based on what you can buy with a given amount of currency (or, equivalently, how much cost a given item).
For example, if in NY a pint of beer went from 6$ to 8$, that's a 33% inflation rate on beer in NY. If, meanwhile, it went from 6$ to 9$ in SF, that's a 50% inflation rate on beer in SF. Even if they both use the same currency.
"THE inflation rate" is based on a selected cart of items that represents basically how much all the prices of stuff you need (incl. rent, utilities, gas, food, etc.) got higher. Since prices are and change differently in different places, inflation can be different even if everyone involved uses the same currency. | 1,048 | 1,067 |
ELI5: Why are there huge numbers of Africans and Asians living rough trying to sneak into the UK from France? Isn't France a similarly wealthy country? | France has national ID cards which are necessary to do anything involved in living an ordinary life i.e. open a bank account, get a job and so on. Britain doesn't have these, and also has a larger black economy because it doesn't aggressively pursue and punish the use of off-the-books labour to the extent that many other European nations do. There is also the fact that most of these migrants, excluding a few from Francophone Africa, are likely to have better linguistic survival skills in English than in French, and certainly than in Italian or Greek or whichever nation they landed in. Contrary to popular perception in Britain, asylum claimants are actually not especially well-catered to by the British government but they may receive a paltry amount of cash and/or food vouchers each week and be given hostel accommodation if it is judged that they have the right to have their claim heard. While this is very little it does still compare favourably with France where they get no assistance or accommodation except from the charitable sector, and are living outside exposed to the elements. It's these factors that create the popular perception among the migrants that they'll be better off in the UK. Some have through word of mouth sadly acquired delusional notions of making their fortunes here easily, others know that realistically they'll still be outside society and just existing, but under better enough conditions than France to make the last leg of the journey worth trying. | 17 | 20 |
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What's the difference between the vitamins you get from foods to those of supplements? | Are the vitamins you get from food better than the ones you get from supplements? Say you have two clones, one who gets all of their vitamins from food and the other who gets all of their vitamins from supplements. Hypothetically, who would live longer, assuming they both have identical lifestyles? | >Are the vitamins you get from food better than the ones you get from supplements?
Assuming you're comparing apples to apples, there's no difference in vitamins obtained from supplements as compared to vitamins from food. They are usually identical substances. It's definitely the case that vitamins from supplements will be more concentrated (usually they contain 100% RDA of each vitamin). However, as long as you're on a normal diet (eating veggies, fruit, grain, meat), you don't have to take a supplement. You can very easily get all of your vitamins from diet alone.
>Hypothetically, who would live longer, assuming they both have identical lifestyles?
I don't personally think vitamins have a lot to do with longevity. They generally function in the body as cofactors for essential processes, and in either case (from food or supplements), the vitamins won't be limiting. | 12 | 16 |
CMV: Nothing that requires action or work or money on the part of others can ever be a "right." | A "right" is a legal claim of entitlement for something. In America, the Bill of Rights are very carefully worded as *negative* rights--meaning no one needs to do anything to secure them besides leave you alone. For me to have free speech, no one has to give me anything, do anything for me, pay for anything, or otherwise act in any specific way. The government just needs to **not** arrest me or imprison me for something I say. This holds true for every single one of these rights. Equally important are the words "endowed by our creator" because they certify that these "rights" are something with which we are born and are not things that are given to us by any person or entity. They exist by virtue of the fact that *we* exist. If I move to a place with zero infrastructure and wish to live amongst the trees, my freedom of speech still exists. And if I live in the most populated place in the country, surrounded by people and infrastructure 24 hours a day my freedom of speech still exists.
Over the last few generations, the word "right" has been tied to social justice movements because of its implications. Something a person is legally entitled to is a hard thing to argue against. But the things being advocated by SJWs and other activists can never truly be rights because they rely on the actions of others to happen.
The last few years has seen news stories of doctors, pharmacies, drug stores, and other health care providers making the decision to not accept Medicare or Medicaid or other local forms of taxpayer-funded payment. They've made these decisions largely because payment to them from the government has been unreliable and takes too much work to get. If the scenario is played out to where *no* doctor accepts Medicaid, then Medicaid couldn't possibly be a right since no one accepts it. And the same can be said for literally **anything** that requires work or money or action on the part of anyone besides yourself.
**Any** government program that is funded by tax dollars falls into this category and can never truly be a right because it relies on the work of others to provide--work which is not *illegal* to avoid. If enough people stopped working and decided to live off the land, grow their own food, live without electricity, etc, their tax dollars would cease to exist and the government couldn't fund the programs for which people currently believe they have a "right." And since the government can't imprison you or punish you for doing this, there would be no way to continue to fund the program in question.
So, anything that is a right can only *be* a right in an environment where the "right" exists independently of any action on the part of others.
Change my view.
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | The word "right" clearly has several different usages, not all of which are strictly legal in nature. When someone asserts that you have a "right" to free health care, they generally don't mean "the Bill of Rights of the US constitution states that we should get free health care." They mean something like "It is a moral imperative for each individual to receive health care, regardless of their ability to pay for it or contribution to society."
Obviously, you are perfectly free to disagree with that statement if your moral intuitions don't line up with it. But it's rather beside the point to say it's not a "right"- "right" a common term in moral dialogues, and the moral concept of a "duty" is linked to rights. It makes sense to say we have a moral duty to rescue a drowning child (a positive action) so we might coherently say that someone has a right to be saved by someone if that comes at no cost to the savior.
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Changing your name after marriage? | Hi folks,
I'm in the first year of my MA psych program and I got hitched (yay!!) in October.
Under my maiden name, I have been second/third author on two published chapters, and have presented about 5 posters at local & international conferences.
My question: will changing my name legally negatively interfere with my academic life? There will obviously be some discontinuity in my CV, which I'm not super worried about. I'm more wondering about perceptions of women in academia who change their names to take their husband's last name.
Also - is it possible for me to legally change my name and use that socially whilst still publishing and working under my maiden name?
Any input is appreciated :)
Thanks! | You can change your name and publish or work under your birth name. You will need to tell HR for legal/tax reasons, but tell them you’d like to maintain your original name within the directory, email, etc. Also tell whoever maintains your department website to keep it the old way.
If you’d rather change it professionally though, in your CV’s publications list, bold your name wherever it appears (whether old or new name), and you can also check with the journal editors of your publications to see if you can change your name on the publication.
I suspect there are guides out there for changing your name for academics, aimed at academics who take a married name, and/or at trans academics, they can likely help you make decisions on what to change and then how to do it. | 47 | 54 |
ELI5:Why can't fish that live in salt water survive in freshwater? | Osmosis is a process in cell membranes under which water goes from areas of low solute concentration to high solute concentration.
Organisms generally can't live with lots of salt inside them, so saltwater fish have low levels of salt inside themselves, but are surrounded by water that has high concentrations of salt. So they are constantly losing water through osmosis. As a result, they are built to constantly "drink in" more water (and have their kidneys filter out the salt).
Freshwater fish generally have a higher level of salt inside their bodies than in the surrounding water. They are constantly taking in water through osmosis. They are therefore built to constantly "pee" out excess water.
Since most saltwater fish are built to deal with osmosis in a way that is *opposite* from the adaptation they need, they cannot survive in fresh water. They do not have the same adaptions to rapidly get rid of water from their bodies, since they are used to water naturally leaving their bodies through osmosis. | 20 | 31 |
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ELI5: Why do some countries still struggle to make nuclear weapons? | We hear pretty often than Iran is attempting to enrich uranium and make nuclear weapons. The same has been said of some other countries and there are countless other nations that would like nuclear weapons but can’t make them.
How is this the case when this is 80 year old technology at this point? If we could make them in 1940, shouldn’t even technologically behind the times countries be able to make their own now? Was 1940 America really more scientifically capable than large African or middle eastern countries are today? | It’s not a matter of scientific difficulty, the process is well known and you can look it up online.
The difficulty is mostly in procuring the materials and equipment against the will of the international community.
You need enriched uranium and a large number of centrifuges to refine it to weapons-grade, but these aren’t easy to come by.
When your geopolitical enemies embargo these items and dispatch spies to disrupt the process, you’re forced to procure equipment through other unsavory channels and try to do this work in secret.
Iran has a lot of very powerful enemies and very few friends, and they can’t just go buy nuclear weapons equipment. | 40 | 24 |
ELI5: Why do bacteria build resistance to antibiotics, but not to things like alcohol, bleach, and boiling? | Why is nobody worried that a new chlorine-resistant bacteria strain will show up? | Antibiotics work to stop a particular bacterial process - say making proteins or building a cell wall. This is very specific to the bacteria in question, and will not harm you when you take them. But that means the bacteria can invent ways to become resistant, such as pumping the antibiotic out of their cells or producing a protein that breaks down the antibiotic outside the cell.
Alcohol, bleach and boiling are non-specific. They destroy multiple systems in the bacteria. They also destroy your cells. So they are not as safe as antibiotics, even though bacteria cannot become resistant to them. | 34 | 53 |
ELI5: When bacteria die, for example when boiling water, where do their corpses go? | When you take a close look at a bacteria, it's just a little bag of chemicals with a protective skin around it, plus some other stuff like hairs that can help it move. The chemicals are mostly water plus electrolytes and a few complex carbon-based molecules.
If the bacteria is placed in boiling water, the pressure inside rises and ruptures that skin, and then the chemicals inside leach out and dissipate into the water, while some get changed into other chemicals in the same way stuff like an egg changes when it cooks. But it's such a tiny amount of material and it's dispersed so thoroughly through so much more water that it's not noticeable or harmful or anything.
Baking or frying it does the same thing, rupturing the skin, except in this case there's no water to carry the chemicals away, so after the fluid in the bacteria evaporates you have a itsy-bitsy stain. RIP bacteria. | 530 | 598 |
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Why can we effectively fight off bacteria but it seems like modern medicine can't help at all against viruses. Why are we still helpless against viruses? | Viruses and bacteria are inherently different things. Bacteria are simple prokaryotic organisms and with that come with a variety of ways you can destroy them (based on their cell wall type, etc.). Viruses are a little bit more tricky because they aren't "alive" in the traditional sense. They are a bundle of DNA/RNA in a protein capsid that utilize a host to propagate themselves. Depending on the type of virus, it can either be lytic and explode the cell with newly formed viruses (it utilizes the mechanisms that a cell would normally replicate itself while inherently destroying the cell) or be lysogenic and incorporate itself into the host genome for generations until it is ready to become lytic.
With this in mind, you can't simply destroy a virus in the same way you can bacteria because they are very different in composition. A lot of things that would destroy a virus would also destroy the proper functioning of a cell, so you'd have to find other mechanisms to fight it off (such as using an inactivated virus to teach your immune cells to recognize it and fight it off i.e. a vaccine). | 33 | 77 |
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proficiency of math required before starting philosophy of math | hi everyone, im an undergraduate interested in philosophy of math. but im not sure what level of math i should be proficient in before being able to take phil of math classes. i know that set theory knowledge and how to write proofs are probably necessary but im not sure about the rest.
aside from these, im planning to take calculus (1-4), linear algebra, complex variables and abstract algebra for the next 4 years. would these be sufficient in learning more about philosophy of math?
bonus last question: what areas of math is most relevant to philosophy? eg. number theory, probability, topology, etc.
any answers are greatly appreciated! thank you! | Hi
It depends entirely on the course. If it's an introductory course, sometimes no background information is relevant at all.
Learning formal logic will be far and away the most beneficial for you, though sometimes this is offerred under philosophy courses. Number theory which you mention in turn is very relevant to formal logic. Logic is really what you need though. | 20 | 28 |
ELI5:Why is it that when flies land on our LCD/LED screens, they don't get affected when we move windows or make some rapid movement which results in some colour change in the screen? | Fly fear responses are based mostly on air currents and visual stimuli from above the fly, because that's where predatory threats come from. They don't have much in the way of general intelligence, and escape responses are hardwired so they can be faster, so random visual stimuli from unexpected directions don't really register.
If you want to see something funny, though, put a little jumping spider on a computer screen. It _will_ follow the cursor around like a cat after a laser pointer, because jumping spiders are incredibly visual and keyed to look for prey running around on surfaces. | 38 | 61 |
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Life outside academia | I am a graduate student, and I always thought I would like to pursue an academic career. However, throughout college, I met many phd student, post-docs and professors; I have some real doubt that I want to have the life they have, in particular because it means dedicating -almost- your whole life to it.
I would like to have some insight on how it is or not possible to conciliate an academic life with other activities, such a a family, political activity, sport activities, musical activities, etc.
Practically, I would like to know what is you position, how much time you dedicate to your academic career, and how much free time you can chose to allocate to whatever you want.
It would be really helpful to gain insight from here, cause I have the feeling people may tend to speak more freely here than the academic people I meet in real life.
Thanks! | Very field dependent and personality dependent too. Academics who gave their lives to the job are probably addicted to some aspects of it, either those zen 'flow' moments when doing research or getting their highs from the admiration of students. And there's never a ceiling for those since it's not a 9-5 job. You could always chase the next high and do more research, collect moar pubs. There's always some new pedagogy tricks that maybe, just maybe this time gets you a glimpse of that look in students' eyes and those small nods when they become enlightened by something you said on stage. Why would you *want* a life outside academia? | 58 | 73 |
What is the benefit of using telescopes outside of the visible spectrum? | What information can you gather by observing other celestial bodies in radio/microwave/xray etc. that you couldnt in the visible spectrum? | All normal matter (ie not dark matter or dark energy) emits radiation all across the electromagnetic spectrum, and the visible spectrum is only a tiny part of that! The distribution of intensity across different wavelengths tells us a lot of important things about what we observe, and that information is not limited to visible light. There are also plenty of interesting things that are brightest outside of the visible spectrum, if not totally invisible, for example the cosmic **microwave** background, **x-ray** pulsars, **gamma ray** bursts. Looking at longer wavelengths is also essential for observing the most distant objects, since expansion makes distant galaxies that emit visible light appear redshifted down to the infrared and microwave range. Radio astronomy is also very useful because radio waves are easier to use in interferometry, allowing us to make very high-resolution observations like the recent image of a black hole. | 15 | 16 |
Why does squinting slightly improve vision? | Squinting limits the directions from which light enters your eyes, which limits the number of rods and cones that activate. It also limits the amount of light entering your eyes, which can be helpful if you are in a very bright area (creates less strain on your eye muscles and receptors). If you have abnormal vision, squinting can reduce the confliction of different receptors firing in the back of your eyes, which can lead to clearer images.
Try this: take off glasses/contacts if you have any, and curl your fingers so that only a small hole exists in the center of the curl. The hole should be very small, like a pinhole. Then, look through that hole, and you should be able to see very clearly. This works because light is only entering your eye from a small number directions and does not activate as many receptors. Your brain only has to interpret the image from these receptors, and not try to synthesize a large number of images from many receptors, as would be the case with an unaided eye. If you have impaired vision, these images normally become confused in the brain, creating blurry vision unless corrective glasses or contacts are worn.
Squinting works by reducing the amount of light entering your eyes, which both **reduces strain on muscles and receptors** and **limits conflicting images of the world**.
EDIT: Grammar. | 39 | 20 |
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Is it possible to come up with a scientifically perfect diet for optimum human function? | No. There is too much genetic variation in the metabolism of certain compounds to develop a single perfect diet. It is possible to develop personalized diets once we have a firm grasp on the above mentioned metabolic variations. But where's the fun in that? I'd rather have a steak than a bowl of goop :) | 10 | 16 |
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ELI5: Why's there still a "share" button for internet porn videos despite there being zero demand for it? | Three possibilities:
1) Someone out there actually uses the porn sharing function, so websites continue to use it.
2) Its a default option in the web video program that porn sites use, and removing it would cause some issues with the playback.
3) Web developers have a weird sense of humor, and have programmed it in the hopes that people click it on accident. | 70 | 105 |
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[Star Trek] How do Combadges work? sometimes someone presses them before talking but other times they just speak a name into the air and they reply? | Combadges can detect when someone intends to communicate with another officer, so speaking into the air will generally automatically activate it. However, tapping it manually activates it, and most officers presumably prefer to do that to make sure it activates. | 25 | 33 |
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I believe that calling yourself a "feminist" implies that you only recognize socio-economic issues as they relate to women, and give no regard to issues regarding men, otherwise you would call yourself a Humanist before a Feminist. Please CMV | I think this is a big reason that people like myself don't take feminism seriously, even though we care about women's rights. I want to feel like I actually support women's rights and feminism, but there is something in my head that makes the idea fall flat on its face straight out of the gate.
**CLARIFICATION**: I may not mean Humanism literally, but I think you catch my drift. Just being an advocate for humans rights. Humanism has a lot of definitions and I don't want anyone to get too focused on that. | I believe calling yourself an "oncologist" implies that you only recognize health issues as they relate to cancer, and give no regard to health issues regarding other maladies, otherwise you would call yourself a general practitioner before an oncologist. | 22 | 16 |
CMV: Americans have high material wealth because of smart protectionism, not free market policies | America often takes credit for being a prosperous nation. This stems from the intuition of it practicing free market fundamentalism. What many overlook is that America's success derives from smart protectionism. American workers are given high pay premiums from restrictive immigration laws and quota systems. When you're a user of a reserve currency, you're fortunate to work less hours than users of pegged currencies for the same products. Many industries are protected by occupational licensing. This protects incumbents from having to compete with new entrants. | > Many industries are protected by occupational licensing. This protects incumbents from having to compete with new entrants.
The reduction in competition increases the prices of this service and reduces the quality. These policies hurt America as a whole, although they help the people who happen to be working those jobs.
> When you're a user of a reserve currency, you're fortunate to work less hours than users of pegged currencies for the same products.
A pegged currency is the opposite of free market, as its price is set by the government. Reserve currencies are part of the free market.
>American workers are given high pay premiums from restrictive immigration laws and quota systems.
This creates lower quality and/or more expensive goods for the average consumer. These laws only help specific workers.
Overall, these things do help some Americans, but hurt the country. | 11 | 16 |
ELI5:Why Doesn't the government tax churches? | The idea is that religious institutions (e.g. Buddist temples, Christian churches, Jewish organizations) benefit society, so they should be assisted (or at least not hindered with taxes).
For example, people that attend Christian churches are bombarded with these messages every week:
* You must help the poor, elderly, widows, and sick.
* You must forgive those that have wronged you.
* If you kill, lie, cheat, steal, or provide a false witness you are in serious trouble.
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ELI5, what does junk food actually do to our bodies that’s so bad? | For example Mc Donalds. I know can cause cardio vascular diseases, fatty liver disease and cancer, but why?
What does it actually do to my body that’s so damaging? It’s easy to say it’s bad for you but without knowing how it’s also easy to forget. | LOTS of different things
High sodium foods increase blood pressure by increasing sodium content in blood, which draws more water into the blood to balance it, straining your blood vessels
High calorie foods lead to increased body fat, which stresses joints, and the heart because it has to work harder to support a larger body
High fat/cholesterol literally leaves deposits of fat in your arteries which can clog them
These foods also lack many nutrients you need, leading to a deficiency in vitamins and minerals | 54 | 46 |
What factors cause/increase the chance of rain? | I am a student studying software and im playing around with a simple machine learning library. I want to create a small program that can predict if it is raining or not by looking at a list of numerical attributes that may suggest rainfall. Im dont have much knowledge of meteorology, what atmospherical attributes am i looking for? (things such as high humidity % or high pressure)
&#x200B;
thanks | Sure, there's a bunch of factors which produce rain: I'll start with three.
1. Humidity / dewpoint. Air itself can hold a certain amount of air. You can inject more and more water into air and it'll absorb it. However, once you reach 100% saturation, then it'll precipitate out, in the form of liquid water — rain!
2. Cooling / lapse rate. Air cools as you go up in height. The atmosphere's air is heated by the hot earth surface after sun heating. Rain can only come from clouds' water vapour. Another way to condense water is to cool the air, as cold air can hold less water (think, tropics = humid). So, rain formation can also be expedited if the cooling is quick - or, if the temperature drops faster with height.
3. Particulates. If air is saturated, it'll only form water droplets if they have something to 'cling' onto, so things like dust, smoke, etc. are the sort to promote this.
Hope this is helpful! | 31 | 75 |
Why does it take so much longer for the eyes to adapt to darkness than to brightness? | When going from dark to light, all your eyes have to do is constrict the pupils to restrict the incoming light to a range that allows proper vision.
When going from light to dark, 2 things need to happen. The fast step is (like above) dilation of your pupils to their maximum size to allow as much light in as possible. The slower step is regeneration of rhodopsin (what the other commenter called visual purple), the light-sensitive protein in your retina, which takes 30-60 mins. | 27 | 22 |
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CMV: Your tip shouldn't change depending on the cost of the meal | I don't really get why tips are typically thought of in terms of percentages rather than absolute dollar value. Like--it's not substantially more work for the server to bring you a sixty dollar bottle of wine than a five dollar shot, so why would the former substantially increase how much they get paid and the latter have a negligible impact?
What i'm proposing is that you should work out an amount of money that you typically tip that more-or-less equals the average dollar amount you'd be tipping on meals, and use that as the baseline rather than 15%. Like if your meals on average cost around 30$, you should have a baseline tip of 5$ whether you're getting a 15$ meal or a 45$ meal. (That's if we accept that 15% is an appropriate baseline tip--i know there's a push in some areas for that to be higher. i don't have a strong opinion either way but am probably vaguely supportive of people tipping more if they can afford it.)
You might still have reasons to adjust that tip up or down. I don't necessarily think you should always pay servers the same--if you're staying for a long time, or having multiple courses, or have a large/disruptive party, or are going to a place with very good service or strict regulations about how the servers can act, i think those factors should increase how much you tip. And some of them are loosely correlated with expense--but I don't think that correlation is strong enough to really justify using expense as a proxy instead of tipping more specifically when those factors apply.
Advantages of this:
\-increased income stability for waiters. it's still contingent on how many tables you get and whether they're generous tippers or not, so hardly ideal, but now at least it's not about whether the table ordered a 100$ bottle of wine or a 20$ round of shots
\-more equal for waiters at cheap places. it doesn't seem right that waiting at a place with high prices is a way better-paying job than waiting at a place with low prices, all else being equal. it's possible that the place with high prices is a more demanding job, but it's also totally possible that it isn't.
\-doesn't require constant recalculation. You'll probably only need to work out how much you should be tipping every few years as your income changes and you start being able to spend more--the rest of the time you can just give a steady dollar amount, with more for good service. Obviously I don't expect you to exactly calculate the average, just give a good enough estimate that you probably aren't paying less than you otherwise would overall. This is a comparatively minor issue but, well, rule of threes y'know?
The only real problem with this that I've been able to see is that it bucks social convention so you'd seem like a dick whenever you get an expensive meal and leave a comparatively small tip, even if you're actually being more fair overall. But it doesn't seem right to continue tipping unfairly just to look good/fit with social norms.
Incidentally, i'm also down for abolishing tipping as a practice, but what I'm proposing here is more of a best-practices when you go to a restaurant--I think it's pretty obvious that the way to get rid of tipping is to put pressure on the restaurant owners, not to screw over the wait staff. (Not very interested in debating this part of the post though)
EDIT: I'm not advocating for a flat-rate tip. I'm fine with tipping more for things like good service, expertise, or having labour-intensive orders. Also, in my system, different people will have different baseline tips, depending on how much they can afford to spend. I'm saying that I don't think the cost of the meal itself should change how large a tip is left, not that nothing should. | >What i'm proposing is that you should work out an amount of money that you typically tip that more-or-less equals the average dollar amount you'd be tipping on meals, and use that as the baseline rather than 15%.
...
>-more equal for waiters at cheap places. it doesn't seem right that waiting at a place with high prices is a way better-paying job than waiting at a place with low prices, all else being equal. it's possible that the place with high prices is a more demanding job, but it's also totally possible that it isn't.
Do you think a server at Denny's goes through the same training or is held to the same expectations as one at a fancy Italian joint? | 32 | 92 |
[MCU] What happens if Ant Man drops an enlargement disc into a pool of water and activates it? | Does the volume of water increase, do the water molecules get bigger, or something else? | It would increase the atomic distance between the atoms of Hydrogen and oxygen in the molecules only for the molecules that were touching the disc. So there would be a few million really big water molecules. | 19 | 15 |
ELI5: why even when you’re dehydrated, do you sometimes have to wake up to urinate in the middle of the night? | Dehydration is your body not having enough water, that doesn’t mean that your body does not have any water. So you can still drink water, have you body ingest the water, and urinate even if you’re still dehydrated.
Your body urinates all liquids you drink regardless of whether your dehydrated or not because dehydration is the result of an amount, or unable to reach that amount. | 13 | 17 |
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[Jojo's Bizzare Adventure] [Stone Ocean] So can Whitesnake only remove Stand abilities specifically, or can it remove any "Ability" | In the Heavy Weather arc Pucci used Whitsnake to remove his eyesight. Does this mean he can remove more mundane and non-stand related abilities and implant them into other people? | It is implied that his ability is more general, and can remove abilities and somewhat abstract concepts. We see whitesnake remove sight from Pucci, and we see him insert abstract commands into people. It does seem like the ability is limited to living creatures though. | 15 | 16 |
[40K] What happens to wounded Imperial Guardsmen? | Hey there. So I was doing my Guardsman 'thing' and defending a Forge world from horrors so dark that to contemplate them shrivels my will to speak forwards. Anyways. My Lasgun literally exploded in my hands, and my arms required double-amputation. I am now an armless bastard, writing this via dictation to a servo skull.
What's going to happen to me? I get to go home, right?
Edit: If the Imperial Guard is just *handing* cybernetics out, then how come I never see any cyborg infantry? | They tend to have trained people, imperial guard medics and field chirurgens who have advanced healing technology and bioscanners, and so they tend to be very good at patching up injuries and handling poisons and infections.
But no, you don't get to go home. You're not very highly ranked, and so, unless you did awesomely against chaos or your commander really likes cybernetics, you'll get some crude cybernetics to help you hold guns, and will be sent back out to hold the line.
See Gaunt's Ghost series for an example. A guy gets his arm blown off and it's replaced with a crude cybernetic arm that can't rotate quite right.
Or you might get lucky, and get a top of the line limb better than your own. | 43 | 30 |
ELI5: Why is so much food packaged in plastic? I understand it's probably cheaper than using wood or metal or other forms of packaging but it's just so wasteful. I think people would prefer more "premium" packaging materials as well. | Not only is it lighter than metal and more durable than glass, many types of plastic packaging also extend the shelf life of perishable foods, which reduces food waste.
Before modern packaging and refrigeration a lot of food was wasted because it didn't survive being transported from the farms to cities. Also, people used to get food poisoning more frequently because of food spoilage and poor sanitation.
For instance, a head of lettuce will wilt very quickly after it's picked. If it's put in a completely sealed container it won't wilt but it will start to rot after a couple of days so you need lots of holes for ventilation. Plastic clamshells keep the lettuce at just the right humidity plus they prevent the leaves from being crushed.
Meat packaging is similar. Vacuum sealed plastic bags keep oxygen away from the meat, which keeps it fresh longer and plastic wrapped trays are often filled with nitrogen or carbon dioxide to displace the oxygen for the same reason. Paper wrapping isn't airtight and wouldn't work the same way.
From a producer's perspective, if $50 worth of plastic packaging means an extra $1000 worth of food gets sold instead of rotting in the truck or on the shelf, it's worth the price.
Right now about 80% of people live in cities and there just isn't enough room in and near cities to grow enough food for all those people. Food has to be transported from the places that have enough land and water to grow it to the places where people live. And without a good market for their food in the cities, many farmers wouldn't be able to stay in business. Making transportation more efficient means a lot more of that food gets eaten instead of being thrown away.
Source: Ag major in grad school. | 12 | 15 |
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How seriously is the golden rule taken in modern philosophy? | I ask as someone who's never quite been convinced by deontology, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics. All of them make ethics seem too abstract, as almost otherworldly Ideals pressing down on us and demanding our attention. Forgive me, but it all seems a little mystical. More realistic, it appears to me, is the notion of reciprocity: I won't harm you if you don't harm me, I will treat you respectfully and fairly if you treat me respectfully and fairly, I'll help you if you help me etc. If we universalise these ideals within a group, community, or society, it appears to me we have a pretty solid, even objective source of ethics; essentially, if people wish to live well in a society, those people ought to agree to treat each other well. Or have I just argued myself into contractarianism? | I think Kant views his ethics as an explicit development of The Golden Rule, in the Critique of Practical Reason he says as much.
>It is a very beautiful thing to do good to men from love to them and from sympathetic good will, or to be just from love of order; but this is not yet the true moral maxim of our conduct which is suitable to our position amongst rational beings as men, when we pretend with fanciful pride to set ourselves above the thought of duty, like volunteers, and, as if we were independent on the command, to want to do of our own good pleasure what we think we need no command to do. We stand under a discipline of reason and in all our maxims must not forget our subjection to it, nor withdraw anything therefrom, or by an egotistic presumption diminish aught of the authority of the law (although our own reason gives it) so as to set the determining principle of our will, even though the law be conformed to, anywhere else but in the law itself and in respect for this law. Duty and obligation are the only names that we must give to our relation to the moral law. We are indeed legislative members of a moral kingdom rendered possible by freedom, and presented to us by reason as an object of respect; but yet we are subjects in it, not the sovereign, and to mistake our inferior position as creatures, and presumptuously to reject the authority of the moral law, is already to revolt from it in spirit, even though the letter of it is fulfilled.
>With this agrees very well the possibility of such a command as: Love God above everything, and thy neighbour as thyself. * For as a command it requires respect for a law which commands love and does not leave it to our own arbitrary choice to make this our principle. Love to God, however, considered as an inclination (pathological love), is impossible, for He is not an object of the senses. The same affection towards men is possible no doubt, but cannot be commanded, for it is not in the power of any man to love anyone at command; therefore it is only practical love that is meant in that pith of all laws. To love God means, in this sense, to like to do His commandments; to love one's neighbour means to like to practise all duties towards him. But the command that makes this a rule cannot command us to have this disposition in actions conformed to duty, but only to endeavour after it. For a command to like to do a thing is in itself contradictory, because if we already know of ourselves what we are bound to do, and if further we are conscious of liking to do it, a command would be quite needless; and if we do it not willingly, but only out of respect for the law, a command that makes this respect the motive of our maxim would directly counteract the disposition commanded. That law of all laws, therefore, like all the moral precepts of the Gospel, exhibits the moral disposition in all its perfection, in which, viewed as an ideal of holiness, it is not attainable by any creature, but yet is the pattern which we should strive to approach, and in an uninterrupted but infinite progress become like to. In fact, if a rational creature could ever reach this point, that he thoroughly likes to do all moral laws, this would mean that there does not exist in him even the possibility of a desire that would tempt him to deviate from them; for to overcome such a desire always costs the subject some sacrifice and therefore requires self-compulsion, that is, inward constraint to something that one does not quite like to do; and no creature can ever reach this stage of moral disposition. For, being a creature, and therefore always dependent with respect to what he requires for complete satisfaction, he can never be quite free from desires and inclinations, and as these rest on physical causes, they can never of themselves coincide with the moral law, the sources of which are quite different; and therefore they make it necessary to found the mental disposition of one's maxims on moral obligation, not on ready inclination, but on respect, which demands obedience to the law, even though one may not like it; not on love, which apprehends no inward reluctance of the will towards the law. Nevertheless, this latter, namely, love to the law (which would then cease to be a command, and then morality, which would have passed subjectively into holiness, would cease to be virtue) must be the constant though unattainable goal of his endeavours. For in the case of what we highly esteem, but yet (on account of the consciousness of our weakness) dread, the increased facility of satisfying it changes the most reverential awe into inclination, and respect into love; at least this would be the perfection of a disposition devoted to the law, if it were possible for a creature to attain it.
>* This law is in striking contrast with the principle of
private happiness which some make the supreme principle of
morality. This would be expressed thus: Love thyself above
everything, and God and thy neighbour for thine own sake. | 53 | 101 |
Essential texts on ethics | Hi all,
I have been tasked to create ethics rules of judicial conduct for my country (yes, I absolutely want to brag) and besides the rules I am to produce also a commentary. I have pretty good idea about the rules themselves and how to spin them off of some legal concepts, however for the commentary I would like to support them by some more philosophical rather than legal reasoning. This is where I fall short, my philosophy education reached only to some "legal" philosophy like Plato, Rawls and Radbruch (and some Wittgenstein because lawyers are weirdly into that) and some Nietzsche and Camus during my angsty teenage years. This is definitely not enough for what I am looking to do. Can you please provide me with tips for essential texts to study, be it the works themselves or some text-book styled general overview things.
Great many thanks to you all | 'A Theory of Justice' by John Rawls is one of the most influential works of political philosophy and ethics of the last 50 years. 'On What Matters' by Derek Parfit is probably the most influential recent defence of objective morality. 'What We Ough to Each Other' by T.M. Scanlon is a highly regarded recent defence of contractualism. | 46 | 72 |
ELI5: What is a think tank and what do they do? | In political news stories you often see mentions of "think tanks" that lean either left or right. I'm curious what exactly a think tank is. How are they formed? How are they funded? What do they do? | Think tanks are a specific kind of lobbyist organizations that advocates for certain things by employing university level academics to write white papers, policy documents and model legislation. These documents are, of course, the same documents that governments themselves prepare as part of the legislative process, and think tanks contribute their documents to relevant governments free of charge in the hope that the government will adopt the think tank version in whole or in part, rather than writing their own version.
Obviously, as a type of lobbying organization, they may be general purpose and lean towards a broadly leftist or rightist agenda, or they may be single issue or specialist focus in which case they may not really align fully with either party. But they will almost certainly have some viewpoint that they are pushing for.
Like all lobbying organizations, they get started by various people or organizations that want to lobby for a particular viewpoint and who like the think tank model. They are also funded in a whole variety of ways, some by various industries, some by various individuals or foundations, some by political parties, and some are even partly publicly funded. | 29 | 36 |
If a human were to have a blood transfusion with a blood type that was not their own, what would happen? | Because of the way the body recognizes the proteins on the erythrocytes (red blood cells), it depends. A simplified way of looking at it is purely using blood types.
Let's say person 1 has type AB blood. That means their blood cells have protein A and protein B on them. If you were to give them blood without those proteins in it, person 1's body wouldn't see anything amiss, as there are no recognizable foreign pathogens.
Person 2, on the other hand, has type O blood. that means their blood cells lack proteins A and B. If we give them blood that is their own type, nothing happens. But if we give them blood with proteins A, B, or both A and B, their body raises its defenses, because it sees these strange new contaminants that it has never dealt with before. So the body attacks anything with these new proteins A and B, "rejecting" the transfusion and causing some serious medical problems.
A similar thing happens with Rh- people receiving Rh+ blood.
That is why people with blood type AB+ are known as universal receivers, and people with O- blood are called universal donors. | 476 | 848 |
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Is it normal to still make silly mistakes as a postdoc? | Started my first postdoc position three weeks ago. It's a bit of a shift for me; my PhD was in protein-RNA interaction biochemistry and crystallography, very in vitro, and I'm now shifting to a cell culture and bioinformatics lab. Well, I was doing great, but yesterday I made such a DUMB mistake...
I generated six CRISPRi knockdown lines, and I was subculturing at the end of the day when I mixed two of them together in the same flask. So now I pretty much only have four CRISPRi lines for downstream experiments. I have lentivirus in the -80 so I can just reinfect and have the two lines ready within the upcoming week. But I just feel so dumb and so awful. I haven't told my PI yet as this happened Friday evening, I definitely will let him know on Monday.
I don't know him that well and he is a little bit intimidating, which he is aware of and told me not to be intimidated by him. But I just feel so stupid and so scared to tell him. I know that he won't yell at me or anything, I just feel like he might regret hiring me.
How bad is this? | Everyone makes mistakes and this one wasn’t a big one, but they can have serious consequences and the key is to develop processes and procedures so that they do not happen. This is a new area for you and you are going to make some mistakes. The right question now is how you are going to ensure that this one never happens again. | 155 | 147 |
How often do cancer cells develop in our body that self-terminate or are caught by the immune system before doing any harm? | We can estimate each parent line experiences cancer cells within 10-100 generations, depending on the cell type and risk factors. With each variable generation speed, you're looking at between 4,000 to 40,000 new cancer cells every day. | 23 | 25 |
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Can someone explain leveraging debt. | I’m mostly interested in how governments use their debt. Also what’s equity? | I am assuming you are talking about investment finance here. Equity means shares in companies. Leveraging debt means borrowing money (paying interest on it) and using the money to invest (in shares maybe?) and hopefully getting a much higher return than the cost of the interest of the money borrowed.
This is not usually the language used for governments and they would not normally borrow money with the intention to invest it to get a higher return - and would be ill advise to do so. Nevertheless while not trying to do that, government capital spending can be modelled in that way. Governments typically borrow and have national debts while at the same time building roads or sewers which have a long term return. | 37 | 35 |
How is real-time traffic determined with applications such as Google Maps? | Departments of Transportation have traffic survey systems. You can see them while driving around. Usually you see pairs of magnetic pickups in each lane, or a CCTV video camera pointed at the highway. By timing how long vehicles take to pass from pickup 1 to pickup 2 you can detect the traffic's velocity. Average out the velocities and frequencies of detection and you can figure out how crowded the traffic is and how traffic is moving. They also take police/fire reports of accidents and plot them.
Traffic information services pull data created by the DOT and other traffic indicators like how many cell phones a cell tower placed by a highway sees. This is fed to whatever subscriber system requires it.
Aircraft and Ships actually transmit their positions, and anyone with the right equipment can pick that information up. | 45 | 145 |
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Watts, Voltage, and Amperes What are they? | The title is a bit misleading as I do know what they are but I don't entirely understand them. I have a test in Science class soon, however, taking a look back at my notes, I feel like I overcomplicated everything and am feeling confused.
I understand that Watts is the outcome of power or J/S.
I know that electrons actually move slower than snails but what we generally mean is the voltage drop.
I know that Voltage*Amperes=Watts
I'm not sure what volts (or voltage) are.
I'm not entirely sure what a voltage drop is, is it a constant burst of energy or is it just electricity moving?
Are watts per second?
If I left a 20W lightbulb running for an hour and I have to pay 18c per kWh, how do we figure out how much money that costs?
**EDIT:**
Thank you to everyone who helped, I read everyone answers. I do feel I have a bit more of an understanding and could definitely relate this back to my notes. I do still have one more question though, is voltage constant? | The easiest way to understand the relation between the Volts, Amperes, Joules and Watts is using an analogy that, while not accurately representing the physical situation, provides a decent insight into how these quantities interact.
Imagine an electrical circuit as a road with trucks traveling on it. On this road, there's a truck depot that serves as both the start and end point of the road, as well as one or more stops along the way.
At the depot, the trucks are loaded with cargo and they will drive the entire road, unloading some or all of their cargo at each stop they encounter so that when they reach the depot again at the end, all cargo has been unloaded.
The stops along the road are the places that use the cargo and they determine how much cargo is needed. There are two ways to manipulate the amount of cargo being driven around on this road: Either by changing the number of trucks that depart from the depot or by changing how much cargo each truck is loaded with.
The total amount of cargo that this network uses per second is then equal to the amount of cargo on each truck multiplied by the number of trucks leaving the depot every second.
Now, back to electricity. Using the example above, the amount of cargo loaded on each truck represents the Voltage. The voltage is a measure of the difference in electric potential energy between the start and the end of the circuit. In simple circuits, that is between the + and - pole of the battery / power source. This quantity is measured in Volt (V).
The number of trucks leaving the depot per second represents the Amperage. The unit Ampere (A) is a measure for the amount of current flowing through a (specific point in a) circuit.
The power, measured in Watt (W), is computed as the product of the voltage and the current. This is represented in the example by the amount of cargo delivered per second. Power itself is a quantity that expresses energy per second. The unit of energy is Joule (J). But rather than always speaking of J/s (Joules-per-second), we use the shorthand term quantity Watt, where 1 Watt is equal to 1 Joule per second.
So if we have a device that uses 20 W, that means that every second it uses 20 J of energy. In one hour, that means it uses 60 * 60 * 20 = 72,000 J of energy.
Since these quantities can become rather large quickly, we often express an amount of energy in a different way, namely as kWh or kilo-Watt-hour. 1 kWh is, as the name implies, the total amount of energy used by something that uses 1 kW of power and runs for 1 hour. 1 kW of power means 1,000 J of energy per second, so running that for 1 hour or 3,600 seconds means that 1 kWh is 3,600,000 J of energy.
The aforementioned 20 W device uses 0.02 kW of power. That means that in 1 hour it will use 0.02 kWh of energy.
Note: The trucks/cargo analogy is not an accurate representation of the underlying physics of electricity. As you remarked, the charge carriers in an electric circuit, electrons, move rather slowly and it is not the case that you have electrons racing around the circuit dropping their energy at devices ("stops") along the way. To make things more complicated, if you use alternating current, the direction of the electron flow changes rapidly (50 or 60 times per second depending on where you live) and that obviously doesn't translate very well to the truck/cargo analogy. However, the analogy does clarify the relation between the various quantities reasonably well (at least for simple circuits) and can be used to gain an understanding as to how these things relate to eachother. | 37 | 22 |
ELI5: How does weed relieve pain? Does it work like ibuprofen or aspirin? | How does marijuana relieve pain? Does it work like ibuprofen or aspirin? | Ibuprofen/aspirin, opiates, and marijuana relieve pain in different ways. Ibuprofen and aspirin interfere with the production of prostaglandins, which are hormones that help transmit information about pain and cause inflammation. So ibuprofen stops your body from swelling and transmitting pain at the site of the injury.
Opiates bind to opioid receptors in the gastrointestinal tract, spine, and brain, and prevent pain messages being passed through those channels.
I don't think we fully understand how marijuana relieves pain yet (there haven't been as many studies done due to its legal status), but the research so far shows that it doesn't reduce pain intensity, but rather it helps people ignore the pain or cope with it. So you might say "yeah, that stinging sensation feels like it's stinging just as much, but it's easier for me to not care about now." That different mechanism of action is one reason why it has promising medical benefits. If a patient in chronic pain doesn't respond to other treatments, then marijuana offers another way for them to get relief.
| 16 | 17 |
What physical properties make an object sharp? | There are a few things that contribute to this.
The first is simply how the force is distributed. The reason the blade of a knife cuts better than the side of your hand is because the area over which the force is applied is much smaller. This makes the pressure on that small area very high. (Pressure=Force/Area) This high force over a small area leads to a localized mechanical failure.
Another contributing factor is hardness, which is a way to quantify a material's resistance to persona the deformation at the surface level. If you take 2 different rocks or metals and scrape them against one another, you will notice that one is often scratched and the other no (or significantly less). Knife blades are usually made of harder steel and then either heat-treated or given a surface finish to make them harder (and more scratch resistant). This also means they will scratch other (softer) materials better. When applied in a sawing motion, you can visualize scratches stacked on top of one another which makes the cut deeper with each action.
Is this what you were asking? | 13 | 23 |
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Why did they opt for an mRNA COVID vaccine as opposed to using said mRNA to generate the viral antigens and inject those instead? | I'd figure the viral antigens themselves would be a lot more stable than mRNA and maybe not need to be stored at such extremely cold temperatures.
Since everybody is getting the same mRNA and thus generating the exact same viral antigens, why not just produce the antigens in situ (or in vivo with COVID-infectable animals), purify the viral antigens, and ship those as the COVID vaccine? | The immune system responds to a foreign protein in the context of self. It doesn't just respond to free floating stuff. It has to be internalized by a cell and presented on the surface of the cell to be recognized by the immune system. Manufacturing mRNA is much easier and cheaper than manufacturing a complex protein. Also, some proteins require post-translational modification such as the addition of sugar molecules or changes in the three dimensional conformation of the molecule. Letting the cell do this naturally is more accurate than trying to do it in a bioreactor. Further, there's a much smaller contaminant profile that has to be cleaned up if you're not having to remove partial protein fragments, etc. | 2,565 | 4,119 |
eli5:Why is one side of our hands lighter than the other? | This is easier to see in POC. | Here’s the ELI25 version, with an ELI5 at the bottom:
The layers of the skin go (from outer to inner): the stratum corneum, the epidermis, and the dermis. The stratum corneum is the outer most layer of skin and consists of dead skin cells (they've lost their nucleus). The epidermis is where the melanin is produced/stored. The BEST defense against UV damage is a thick stratum corneum, the second best is increased melanocyte concentration.
The skin on the palms of the hands and feet have thicker stratum corneum, compared to other regions of skin, and so does not require a large melanocyte concentration.
ELI5: There are two types of protection against UV radiation. The first is melanin, which makes the skin dark. The second is a thick outer layer of skin. Since palms and the bottom of our feet naturally have a thicker outer layer, that means they don’t need as much melanin. | 15 | 15 |
ELI5: What exactly is MSG and why does it have a bad repuatation in foods. | MSG is mono-sodium glutamate, a salt of glutamic acid, which itself is a naturally occurring amino acid which is essential for life.
MSG has a bad reputation because it is used widely in Asian cuisine, and became an easy scapegoat for customers feeling unwell after eating Asian foods. After all, a strange white powder from a different culture with a chemical name can’t be good for you, or so the logic goes.
There are countless studies which show MSG has no negative effects if consumed in moderate amounts. There are negative effects if you take 3g of MSG without food or water, but that’s not realistic. | 66 | 27 |
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CMV: Want a world with more trees? Use more paper. Want to keep endangered animals from going extinct? Turn them into food. | It really just seems to come down to supply and demand. Just about all of our paper comes from privately owned forests called "managed timberlands," where trees are grown specifically to be pulped for paper production. No need for paper? No need for the trees. So the question is, do you want to live on a planet with more trees, or less trees? If you want more, then use as much paper as possible. Boosting demand will boost supply, and, voilà! More trees!
Same goes for endangered species. You don't see cows going extinct any time soon, do you? Why? Because we eat them. Where there's a demand, there is (or will soon be) a supply. So if McDonalds started selling a McBengal patty melt, POOF! No more looming Bengal Tiger extinction.
I'm not actually suggesting that we start eating every endangered species, or that we go around wasting paper. But it makes sense on paper. What am I missing?
EDIT: Thanks for all of your responses! This was really more of a showerthought, but I wanted help vetting whether or not these ideas held any water. The verdict: they don't, haha. But I appreciate everyone taking the time to give me a lot of solid reasons not to go around telling people they should waste paper and eat tigers. Cheers ^_^
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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!* | Economic viability is important for businesses, and these plans won't provide the outcomes people want once that is taken into consideration.
The trees in tree plantations are often a monoculture instead of a mixed ecosystem, so they all grow at the same rate. They may not even be from the area, as things like "growing quickly" will be favored over "local type." They are not allowed to become old growth forest with the associated ecosystem, often being cut down after only a handful of decades (which may seem like a long time, but isn't for a forest). Finally, the easiest land to build one is an existing forest which could be cut down to make space if it was economical to do so, which increased paper demand would do. The net effect would likely be maybe a few additional trees, but less forests.
Eating endangered animals, on the other hand, has totally different issues. Most animals are wildly unsuited for mass production. For example, anything that is endangered because it doesn't breed well in captivity is a no-go. Similarly many take far too long to grow to a useable size, or require more expensive food (for example, predators and meat), will fight if kept together, or are extremely dangerous. You could theoretically try to start a farm for McBengal meat, but unless everyone is cool with paying $10,000 a burger and you can sell enough of them it isn't going to be economically viable. | 39 | 24 |
ELI5: Why does the stock market respond to falling oil prices with sell-offs? Shouldn't every sector that uses energy to make and ship their products see increased profits? | I have a lot of money in the stock market right now, and I'm getting frustrated with the constant nosedives the DOW and S&P keep taking being blamed on low oil prices. I get that low oil prices hurts Exxon Mobil and BP, but energy is only 5.9% of the US economy:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/217556/percentage-of-gdp-from-energy-in-selected-countries/
The other 94.1% of the economy *purchases* energy in order to manufacture and ship goods. Cheap oil should do wonders for the profit margins of the vast majority of the economy. What's more, cheap gas means more consumer spending in every other sector. When 20 stocks are trending upward for every one that crashes, my stock ticker should be bright green. Why is it red? | If you need financial issues explained to you on ELI5, you just *shouldn't* be following the financial news. Your stocks will rise in value over time if you invest them in a diversified, passively managed index fund. Your job as a responsible investor is to only put in money you don't need right now, and not check the balance of your brokerage account for another decade.
Flooey's answer isn't *wrong* - in general, higher oil prices can be seen either as a sign of rising costs of production *or* as a sign of strong global demand. Which side of the equation is more important for assessing future economic growth is a complicated analytical question. But more importantly, *the financial sector has tried to predict both of these effects long before you even thought about them*, and changes in the market reflect a difference between recent information and pre-existing predictions, not between recent information and older information. A price of oil that is lower than last year's price could be either higher or lower than *what analysts were predicting for this year's price*, and that difference is what is likely to move markets. But it gets even more complex than that - the market is anticipating rate hikes from the Fed, which will cut economic production. Good news for the economy tends to push the Fed towards rate hikes, which are (in the short term) bad news for the economy. So current faster-than-expected economic growth can be good evidence that economic growth will slow within a few months. And there are even stranger interconnections between stock prices. Famously, when Russia defaulted on its ruble-denominated debt, the difference between the price of Royal Dutch and Shell (which are the same company, but listed separately as a British and a Dutch stock) spiked. Why? Because a huge hedge fund that was betting Russia would never default on ruble-denominated debt without also defaulting on dollar-denominated debt was *also* betting that Royal Dutch Shell would never pay a dividend to the Dutch stock without paying a profit to the British stock, and when they lost money on the default they had to unwind their position in Royal Dutch Shell, too, selling Shell and buying Royal Dutch.
If it's not your job you shouldn't waste time thinking about it. Stay diversified, don't pick stocks, invest for the long term, keep money you need in the near future out of risky assets. | 36 | 134 |
ELI5 - If electrons are constantly losing energy while being in an atom, why don't they fall to the nucleus? | So our physics teachers asked us this question and I found many different answers to it, here and on different sites. It doesn't fall into the nucleus because it is in a state where the kinetic energy equals the potential energy, but that wasn't an enough answer for him. He said the electron is still losing energy, but he is getting it back somehow, how? I tried finding an answer but nothing seems logical enough or clear enough :/ | Big objects, like the sun, planet, and baseballs, behave how you're describing. They would lose energy spinning in circles. Electrons though are too small. They don't obey classical laws. They obey quantum laws. (Quantum means really small.)
Electrons aren't really spinning around the nucleus. They're doing something else that we can't really describe classically. We sometimes think of it in probabilities. Sometimes it's in one position and sometimes it's in another and the shape can look like a ring around the nucleus.
As for losing energy, we have to talk about "quantum numbers". When we put an electron in a potential (like a nucleus) we restrict what energy it can have. In a very very simple case, (the 1D infinite square well) electrons could only have energies if 1,4,9,16, and so on. An electron of energy 9 "spinning" around a nucleus can't lose 9 energy and crash into the nucleus, it can only lose 5 or 8. | 15 | 37 |
CMV: I believe cheating on your taxes is not immoral | I'm self-employed and make a six figure income. However, I have worked my ass off for many years to get here. I served in the military out of high school, attended a cheap state school (first in my family to graduate college), and have been self employed for the last seven years.
I find taxes to be extremely frustrating on a ideological basis. I currently pay more in taxes than the average US family makes in a year. Clearly, I've been very blessed financially and I absolutely want to give back to society and to help others with that blessing, but beyond a certain level (more on this later), taxes are simply theft. They're simply one group taking money from another group because they can.
I often hear a lot of moralizing about how someone is a "tax cheat" and they should be ashamed, etc, etc. I'm curious as to how we got to this point where merely being born and making a living means that a large group of people can get together, decide to come and take your stuff (by force if necessary), and they demand that you tell them exactly what you've got so they can decide how much to take. And if you don't participate fully, you're an immoral person??
So what's the proper level of taxation? I'm not sure (maybe zero, at least for taxes you can't really choose to pay), but surely we can agree that if government officials were taxing all of us at 90% (regardless of income level) and then using that money to buy themselves mansions, it wouldn't be immoral to skirt those rules (and try to change them obviously), would it?
But looking at the federal budget in the US, a huge portion of the things my taxes go to are things I absolutely don't agree with. From a huge military conducting stupid adventures all over the world (which I've seen up close), to the NSA spying on us all, to social security, medicare, medicaid (programs I'm not a fan of, particularly at the federal level). Yes, money goes to build roads and inspect meat and clean energy and space research. But come on, those things are like 9% of the budget. Why should I feel morally obligated to give my money to these people to do mostly terrible things because a group of people decided that I should?
Despite all of this, I am meticulous about paying my taxes, because I fear the consequences of getting caught. However, I do absolutely exploit every single tax incentive that I can find to not pay one single penny more than I have to. The risks of getting caught are the only thing that keep me honest here, and there's definitely a level of taxation where the cost of paying everything is too high. At that point I'll either leave the US or break the law by cheating on my taxes.
And I won't feel the least bit guilty. CMV.
EDIT:
Multiple people have made the argument that because I choose to live in society, I must live by its rules. While I think this can be taken too far by using it to justify horrible laws, I see the point. And yes, I could choose to leave. But I don't, so maybe that's enough of an argument that I feel the taxes I pay are worth living in this society. I'll ponder this more.
I also want to clarify that I'm not against all taxes, but I find income taxes particularly problematic. It's like taxing intelligence or hard work or compassion, or anything else that we want more of in society. We should tax things we want less of. But I digress.
Thanks for the discussion!
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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!* | You clearly benefited from government services such as public education, military (potentially GI bill), state schools, all the regulations and infrastructure surrounding businesses, etc. Do you think that you benefited from the government (directly and indirectly) more or less than the average person? | 29 | 17 |
Why aren't linked lists and other data structures built-in to Javascript? | I've googled as much as I can to find the answer, but every result I come across is just "*Datastructures Basics! How to make a singly linked list!*", but my question is more about the *why*. If linked lists, stacks, queues, trees, binary trees, etc. are used so often and are even an expected skill to demonstrate in tech interviews, why aren't they a standardized data structure in languages like Javascript?
From what I've read, *some* of these structures are available in other languages (JavaScript is the only language I'm very comfortable with, so please correct me if I'm wrong). Is it merely a preference thing from the core devs? Does it include an unnecessary overhead? Are these data structures just not used enough to matter?
Thanks! | There’s a lot to unpack in the question so let’s start at the beginning:
Why doesn’t JavaScript have a bunch of data structures built in?
I think there are two factors here: first, JavaScript wasn’t originally built with its current uses in mind. The goal was to give people a way to add some interactivity to otherwise static documents. JavaScript was around for a long time before websites started to move away from being documents with some interactive elements and toward being full fledged applications. Even when that transition was first happening, there was an attitude that the browser should implement all of the interesting things, and JavaScript existed merely to automate using functionality the browser supported. Internally the browsers use plenty of sophisticated data structures, but for a long time nobody really thought about JavaScript as a language for building sophisticated software.
Eventually people did start to see JavaScript as a language for writing real programs, but by that point the momentum was behind using packages and frameworks. JavaScript itself never got much of a rich general purpose standard library because other projects stepped in by the time anyone realized it could have used one. Now days it’s just cultural- if you need a data structure just add a dependency to your project, for better or worse that’s the JavaScript way.
So that explains JS, but why don’t other languages implement these data structures? Often they do, to some degree or another.
JavaScript is at one extreme as a language with basically nothing built in, but all languages need to decide what to include and what not to include by default. There’s no right answer only trade offs, but the major focus is trying to write things that are generally useful to a lot of users. It’s not a good use of time and resources to invest in building fancy data structures that nobody will use.
That brings us to your last question - does nobody use these?
Fancy data structures are used less often than you might think. Most of the time you can get by with lists, arrays, and dictionaries. When you do need a fancy data structure, it’s often because you have a very specific use case in mind, and in those cases your often better implementing it yourself so that you can tune it to your specific needs. Even if the language provided a general purpose library, it wouldn’t be tuned for your exact needs so you’d still write your own. | 50 | 21 |
If, during the month of January, you were to transplant a deciduous tree from the northern hemisphere to a location with similar seasonal conditionals in the southern hemisphere, would it be able to adapt to that instant 6-month change in weather conditions and survive? | Also, which would be more favorable - going winter to summer or vice versa? I'd imagine the best time to transplant it would be in spring/fall due to similar temperatures. | Ignoring any complications with transplanting, could a deciduous tree adapt to immediate seasonal and temperature changes?
I believe it could. Deciduous trees take cues from temperature, day length (amount of light), or drought stress for when they should drop their leaves and go into a hibernation. When those stressors are removed, the tree should regrow leaves and begin photosynthesizing again.
I would think going from winter to summer would be easier to handle. There are preparation steps that deciduous plants go through to handle the hibernation stage in winter. | 12 | 30 |
ELI5: How do tax havens (like the Cayman Islands) benefit from allowing corporations to register there? | As far as I can tell, countries/territories (like the Cayman Islands) levy absolutely no taxes on corporations thereby gaining nothing from the corporations being registered there. Meanwhile corporations save billions not paying taxes in the countries they actually do business in. Seems like a bit of a one-way relationship. So what do the tax havens gain from allowing these companies to register there? | It's work for lawyers and bankers in the country.
And it's money in their banks.
And many "tax havens" actually charge a very small tax. 5% of billions is still a lot of money. It's better for the country than a high percentage of a tiny amount of money. And it's better for the company than paying a "normal" 20%+ tax. | 59 | 57 |
What are the biggest obstacles in 3D printing human tissue or organs? | Complexity of structure. An organ consists of multiple different tissues arranged in very specific ways. Tissues themselves have their constituent fibres and/ or cells arranged in specific ways too. It’s not just this homogenous thing.
Because in physiology structure= function, even if we can figure out how to tell stem cells how to differentiate, we then need to tell them how to organise. | 18 | 30 |
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ELI5: How do master keys work? | How come Key A can open Lock A. Key B can open Lock B. But not lock A. And key C can open all the locks? Doesn’t that mean A and B should be able to open each other? | A master key only works on the locks it's designed to open
When a key is inserted into a lock normally, it raises pins to specific points where they no longer stop it from turning, and most locks have different heights the pins need to be at to unlock making other keys not work
A master key works by each lock having an additional point made on the pins that they can be raised to that also allow it to be rotated, so although they still work individually with their specific keys, a secondary key (the master key) works on them all as well | 611 | 738 |
ELI5 why does sugar turn brown when melted? | Sugar is a molecule made of a particular arrangement of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms. When you heat up the sugar, this adds energy to the system that can be used to fuel chemical reactions that rearrange the bonds between these atoms. Some of these compounds are dark brown in color and add caramel flavors to the sugar. Similar reactions occur in meat when you cook it and get a tasty brown crust. | 3,279 | 5,470 |
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[Harry Potter] How do Dementors sense souls? | If they couldn't "see" Sirius Black's soul while he was a dog, how do they know when there's a human soul in front of them for them to slurp? | Dementors feed on the positive emotions experienced by people, and therefore recognize humans as walking food reservoirs. Because animals have much less developed senses of "self," as well as hazier memories and obscurer emotional experiences, Dementors receive little to no benefit from interacting with them, and largely ignore their presence. | 17 | 26 |
ELI5: the difference between dementia and Alzheimer’s | Dementia is a collective term for disorders marked by progressive decline in cognitive abilities such as memory in a way that interferes with daily life. Alzheimers on the other hand is a type of dementia. It's kinda like heaches vs. migraines. | 2,243 | 2,421 |
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Where do I start with Karl Marx's writings? | I'm interested in familiarizing myself with Marx but I have no idea where to begin. Should I start with The Communist Manifesto? Or Grundrisse? | You could start with *Wage Labor and Capital* and *Value, Price, and Profit* because those are short and outline Marx’s mature economic thinking. But these won’t replace reading *Capital*. If you want an introduction to Marxist thought, a common way in is actually Engels’ short pamphlet *Principles of Communism*. | 34 | 43 |
How do you keep updated in your field? Especially if you are an independent researcher | I received my master about a year ago and currently I am between gigs (research and some other stuff) until I get a better opportunity. I have research interest in a couple of fields that I plan to focus on for a future PhD. However I don't have relevant groups/peers in this field, and no institutional affiliation too.
I struggle in keeping myself updated. I have subscribed to a few major journals of my interest. I have made sure to check several author's Google Scholar once a while. I also follow them on Twitter and follow other relevant accounts too (conferences, accounts, and so on). I'm still struggling though.
What do you use to keep yourself updated? Maybe RSS feed? Mailing list? Or some other sort of subscription?
Thanks in advance!
Btw I'm in anthropology/media studies/STS | Google scholar alerts are great. You can set them to a weekly update for your subject keywords. You don’t need to be registered with a university to use it. Online conferences are often free or low cost so you could attend the relevant ones too (if you register they often send you the recordings afterwards so you can pick out the most useful presentations). | 60 | 99 |
ELI5: What determines whether or not someone is a naturally good singer? | Physically speaking, being a naturally good singer means you were born with a good "instrument". Your vocal cords would be more elastic and flexible, and this would make your voice able to produce more overtones, or the right mix of overtones which sound pleasant. Overtones are basically sound waves on top of sound waves which have wavelengths that overlap on the original wave, e.g. half the wavelength, one third the wavelength, and we can tell the difference between a trumpet and a piano or a sweet and a shrill voice largely by picking up on the differences between the mixtures of overtones.
Besides that, being naturally coordinated would help controlling the muscles which keep a steady pitch or vibrato or volume, being naturally gifted in pitch and tone differentiation would be important(good ear, perfect pitch), and because IMO natural abilities get a little too much credit with the general public, a natural patience, memory, intelligence, passion and persistence would all be very important when it comes to learning and practicing. Because no one comes out of the womb singing. | 115 | 287 |
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CMV: The Dickey Amendment banning gun research by the CDC should be removed from future budgets | The [Dickey Amendment][1], orginally added to the federal budget in 1996, effectively prevents the CDC from doing research on gun violence. Specifically, the wording of the amendment says,
> none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control
Effectively, this prevents the CDC from doing any major research on gun violence, because they can't predict the results of their studies before they do them. Imagine for a moment if the CDC could conduct a unbiased study to answer questions such as "Does increased gun ownership reduce crime?" or "Does reduced access to guns actually reduce the suicide rates?" Depending on the results of each study, they might promote gun control, or they might give clear evidence that gun controls are ineffective. However, since the CDC can't predict results in advance, they are effectively banned from conducting this type of research.
I believe that we would be better off if we had clear, unbiased, well researched studies answering these types of questions, and thus the Dickey Amendment should be removed from future federal budgets.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment_(1996)
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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!* | Clear, unbiased research is never a bad thing. But the reason the Dickey Amendment exists is because the CDC has been caught conducting research and publishing it in a very biased way in previous studies on gun violence. | 10 | 34 |
Why does the sun look orange closer the horizon, but white in the sky? | During sunset, the light from the sun has to travel through a thicker slice of the atmosphere to reach your eye than it has to during midday.
As the white light from the setting sun travels through the atmosphere, red orange and yellow light is allowed to pass through with little interference. But blue indigo and violet light is scattered more (which is why the sky is blue).
Why are they scattering? Our atmosphere has Nitrogen and Oxygen molecules and these guys will scatter blue, indigo and violet.
During sunset, the light is travelling through more of the atmosphere, so the scattering is more pronounced and you see red-orange sunsets.
If you were in space, it would still be white. | 19 | 25 |
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ELI5: Why is it that cytotoxic drugs can be consumed but has a label to advise to avoid physical contact? | Wouldn’t it do more damage if absorbed into our blood? | The pharmacists have done lengthy studies on how it is appropriate to administer every drug in the safest and the most effective way as they all have side effects to the body.
Cytotoxic drugs basically attack all cells in your body. With the proper administration they will be much more harmful to cancer cells than to your body because, for instance, your healthy tissue regenerates faster than cancerous tissue. Exposing those drugs to your skin will just unnecessarily damage your skin tissue which might lead to complications. | 10 | 19 |
What is the source of fundamental electric charge in leptons and quarks? | *sips coffee | The laws of physics are invariant (unchanged) under a transformation called U(1) gauge invariance. To get this invariance, individual fields have to transform in well-defined ways under this transformation. The way a field transforms tells you its electric charge. We don't know why we have fields with the particular transformation properties they have. | 17 | 23 |
[MCU] Captain America's shield absorbed a full strength hammer smash from Thor leveling the woods around him in the first movie leaving cap unscathed, yet Ultron got knocked away by a casual hammer swing by Vision in the second movie. | The shield and Ultron are both made of vibranium, why did this happen? | Vibranium can be applied in different ways for different purposes. The difference between the solid vibranium (alloy?) frisbee and a complex machine made up of individual vibranium components was a matter of purpose. The shield was designed to be a solid plate of metal that can withstand a hit. Ultron designed his final form for mobility and sarcasm. | 379 | 268 |
ELI5 why was leprosy such a big issue hundreds of years ago? | I remember watching a documentary about a Greek town where they would send people with Leprosy. Why was leprosy such a big deal if 95% of people are immune to it? | Before the cure for leprosy was discovered it was common throughout most of the world. North America was largely spared but the US did have it's own leper colony in Louisiana. If you contracted leprosy you were sent there to die. Ancient sources tended to call every skin disease leprosy, even what we now call leprosy today is actually three different diseases with different origins. | 71 | 52 |
Struggling to give life meaning | 30yo male here.
Struggling to find my meaning of life. I find Stoicism very appealing but mostly to deal with personal things. Meanwhile I'm floating to and fro, from feeling a deep sense of civic duty and desire to be active in politics to hedonism or nihilism.
I'm hoping to find a balance and to find an answer (that is satisfying to me, at least) as to how much I should/can care about 'the world' while maximalizing my own happiness. Or perhaps personal happiness isn't paramount relative to the good I can do for others. Or when speaking of happiness, what is the right balance between short-term gratification and making life less pleasurable in the short term in return for (potential) deeper happiness down the line?
At any rate, I'm sure these are questions all of you have had and seem like babby's first ponderings to people who actually occupy themselves with philosophy. So any suggestions of reading material that could give me more insights or understanding of the problems I deal with, or writings that have spoken about this topic, will be appreciated.
**Edit:** I've gotten a good amount of comments with a lot of effort behind them. A number of you have also messaged me. I'm going to take my time reading all of it on the few moments I have 'me'-time. You guys are great, I really appreciate it. | For a philosophically informed self-help take on such matters of finding a balance, you can take a look at Edith Hall's Aristotle's Way. Not a work of philosophy, but it's written by a respectable classicist who appears to love Aristotle.
For Aristotle, virtuous activity includes, among other things, finding the right balance between extremes (which are vices). The more you develop these excellences of character (which is what virtues are) by practice, the more habitual they become, and the happier you get, or, perhaps, the more your life becomes a life worth living. And human beings are political animals who can flourish only in a good society, so there is no fundamental conflict between your well-being and the good for the society. So in this sort of account, there is no fundamental conflict between engaging in political activity oriented towards the freedom of society as a whole and your individual happiness. The good and happy life requires political engagement and solidarity, but of course, in a balanced way.
If you want to pursue your interest in stoicism, you could take a look at Pierre Hadot's works, The Inner Citadel, and Philosophy as a Way of Life.
If you want something less philosophical, and more popular self-help, Massimo Pigliucci is a philosopher of science who has a recently developed interest in trying to apply stoicism to modern everyday life. He has books, blogs, videos. Just keep in mind he is not a scholar in that area. | 13 | 42 |
ELI5: How is it decided which gene is dominant and which is recessive? Does each gene have some sort of "score" and the highest one between a pair is expressed? | Let's say a gene is responsible for making a certain protein. The gene has two alleles - one that makes the protein and one that doesnt. Producing the protein causes a certain trait to be expressed. This makes the trait dominant - if you have one copy of the allele that can produce the protein, then you will have the trait.
On the other hand, let's say there's a trait that is expressed only if you don't have that specific protein. This means that the trait is recessive, because you need both alleles that can't produce the protein in order to have it. | 35 | 33 |
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How do doctors get the blood pressure of patients with amputated limbs? | We can measure BP with an automatic cuff on either arm or either leg, so long as there isn’t significant peripheral vascular disease which may skew the readings. I’ve taken care of plenty of amputees but never a quadruple one, even then you can measure on the thigh. Alternatively, we can also measure BP directly by placing an arterial line. This is a catheter typically placed in the radial artery (in the wrist) and allows for direct, real time BP monitoring.
We can also use clinical markers and our physical exam to make educated guesses on BP. | 12 | 18 |
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ELI5: How do governments assess private companies for estate tax considering they are not bought and sold and thus the shares to not have a price? | Based on an discussion i had with friends, if its a large private company, but one which is not valued by the market how does the government assess it for inheritance tax purposes? cant i just sell/assess the shares for 100 dollars total even if its worth 100 million? | In the US private companies are assessed for the total value of their assets. The land, the building, every single peice of equpiment and furniture has a value assigned to it and they are taxes for it all. The longer that they have had the equipment the less taxes they pay on it, but for companies which have to stay up-to-date with their equipment that can be an issue. | 21 | 20 |
ELI5 how rigor mortis works. Why does the human body get locked up in 6+ hours and then get flaccid again? | You’re muscles use a molecule called ATP to function, specifically it binds to muscle fibres and allow the connections in them to be broken, which allows the muscle to relax and the tension be released.
When the body dies the muscles can no longer produce this ATP and so it runs out, leading to the muscles being unable to relax and thus rigor mortis.
The muscles later become flaccid when the muscle fibres themselves begins decomposing and the connections are severed mechanically. | 63 | 44 |
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ELI5 radiation causes cancer, but radiation therapy is used to beat cancer? | Radiation causes DNA damage.
DNA damage causes mutations.
Mutations *can* cause cancer... but usually trigger apoptosis; cell suicide.
Tumors are a concentrated mass of cancerous cells.
In radiation therapy, *many* relatively weak beams of radiation are aimed at the tumor from all angles. They are aimed so that they ***only*** converge on the tumor; this means that the target tissues are affected tens of times more powerfully than the non-target tissues.
Essentially, you irradiate the tumor with such an absurd dose of radiation that the DNA damage goes beyond the realm of mutations, and into the realm of, "What the fuck is that molecule anymore? Certainly not DNA."
This kills the cancer cells. | 154 | 61 |
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[Warcraft] How does magic work? | From a spellcasters point of view how does magic work for the "wizard" classes (i.e. mage, warlock, priest, druid to an extent).
Shamen seem to be granted their magics from spirits of nature, druid's have a similar deal going on, but the balance discipline seems to veer into wizard territory.
But of the 'wizard' classes how does the magic work? They shape their mana into spells and release it, but where do these spells come from? Are they incantation based? Is there a "weaving" of their mana into spells? What's the difference between a warlock casting Incinerate and a mage casting Fireball? How do the elements of fire, frost, arcane, holy and shadow relate to the same mana resource innate to the caster?
Is it simply usage that separate a mage, priest and warlock, or are they distinct magic systems? | The literary examples of how Magic works indicates its something like a circuit. Magic users basically take energy (Arcane being the base, natural magical source. Everything else is a variation of it)and through a combination of gestures and sheer will, shape it into patterns which elicit particular results.
Different types of magical energy (basically wavelengths) have different reactions when harnessed in the same way, and depending upon what they are used. Fel and Holy tend to cancel out violently, somewhat like Matter and Antimatter, while Holy and Shadow only nullify each other.
In terms of general practice... Most spells are simply memorized patterns that a magic user can easily put energy into, and eliciting a predictable effect. More complicated spells require more time and effort, often using physically reagents and focus points in complex circuits (generally referee to as the Spell Matrix) but incantation is rarely, of eger necessary. It can help novices focus, mind you. | 22 | 26 |
ELI5: What is the difference between Marxism and socialsim? | Is Marxism the ideological premise for it? Then socialism is the actual economic structure? | Marxism is a sociological principle created by Karl Marx. Basically, it's the idea that there are two classes, the proletariats and the bourgeois. In his theories, it is the bourgeois, who own the means of production, who actively exploit workers and reduce their standard of living. Marx thought that when the proletariats, who greatly outnumber the bourgeois, would awaken a class consciousness and rebel, collectively seizing the means of production and establishing a completely egalitarian society. Meanwhile, socialism is an economic and political system in which the public owns a great deal of property, especially the means of production, and the government has an active role in the economy. Modern European democracies like Denmark are good examples of socialist nations. | 10 | 17 |
ELI5: why do words start to look unfamiliar or misspelled when you look at them for a long period of time? | It is called *semantic satiation*.
If you look at a word long enough, you stop seeing the word, and start seeing letters, which have nothing to do with the word. The is nothing about the letters c, a, and t that connects them to a cat, so they start losing that meaning.
If you look longer, you stop seeing letters, and start seeing squiggly shapes that have nothing to do with what the letter means, further alienating you from the word. | 22 | 19 |
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CMV: High school GPA should be compared the persons z score. | If you are unfamiliar with a z score, all it measures is how many standard deviations from the mean a score is. So if the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 15, a score of 115 would have a z score of 1 and 85 would be -1.
Colleges should evaluate high school GPA by finding the z score of a particular student. This would help to identify high schools that artificially inflate their GPA by making courses too easy, as a 3.8 may really have a Z score of .1 if everyone else's GPA is inflated. Likewise, someone with a 3.1 might have a z score of 2.25 if their school is really hard or disadvantaged, allowing schools to better identify skilled students in disadvantaged settings. | That might be useful for bigger schools but any small school might have problems with sample size. A 30 person class is not gonna be ideal when it comes to finding means and z-scores. Plus, most colleges already use class ranking, which approximates this data anyway. If you're the valedictorian with a GPA of 2.8 they're gonna know that you're the cream of that school's crop even without a z-score. | 30 | 46 |
ELI5:Why is vagrancy a crime? | and why are poverty and unemployment illegal if both having no money and no taxable employment aren't necessary to support one's self without impeding on those who have both money and a taxable income? | Vagrancy, poverty, and unemployment are not per se crimes, however the law creates additional problems for people in such a condition.
The reason urban areas tend to crack down on homelessness people is because they create burdens for the city and produce nothing in return. This is unfair of them to do, but it is perhaps equally unfair to jail or fine them for it.
It is not a crime to go rambling in the forest or to homestead. But these tasks are harder than panhandling. It is entirely possible to chose a life of homelessness or poverty without running afoul of local laws. But its increasingly complicated and it's practically beyond the means an d skills of the typical destitute person. | 19 | 20 |
ELI5: Why do black widow spiders have such strong venom, when they only eat insects? | In nature, it's often advantageous for predators to minimize the time it takes to kill their prey so as to minimize harm, i.e. the longer the prey is allowed to struggle and fight back, the greater the possibility of injury to the predator. Therefore, many predators develop stronger and stronger venom. | 23 | 20 |
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Does Mass directly generate Gravity? Or is Gravity simply correlated with mass? | I'm working on understanding the concepts of Relativity and how Gravity works. I've googled a little but the results I get are usually above my head. I don't need the math or formula's as much as an understanding of the concepts at this point.
So... Do we know that Gravity is created by things with mass or is Gravity an observed correlation of Mass? | Einstein's field equations can be explained in a single line:
Where is curvature = Where is massenergy
On one side, you have curvature, this is what a straight line means in our universe. For example, straight lines on a basketball surface are curves. As an *approximate* example, mirages happen because light refracts through different density air, so you see patches of sky just above hot asphalt on the highway, the light has followed a curved path. Now take those ideas and melt them together to be curvature of spacetime. The other side is stuff. It doesn't matter what stuff, it could be mass, heat, light. Just anything with massenergy content.
Now where is gravity in this picture? Gravity *is* the curvature.
>So... Do we know that Gravity is created by things with mass or is Gravity an observed correlation of Mass?
Much like electromagnetism, GR has self propagating vacuum solutions. This is the prediction that gravity waves can travel without any connection to stuff. While technically these waves have energy and therefore *self gravitate themselves*, they do not need to be "attached" to traditional matter in the universe, much like how once emitted, light has little to do with flashlights anymore. | 10 | 16 |
ELI5: By what mechanism does the body force you to take another breath after you've held it for a long time? | O2 levels in the blood fall. CO2 levels rise. Acidity of blood rises. Hypothalamus in the brain can detect this change, notifying the brain the O2 levels are getting dangerously low. Instincts kick in, and forces the diaphragm to take in another breath.
Correct me If im wrong please (I might be) | 21 | 26 |
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Tax Loopholes: Fact or Fiction? | I've heard my entire life, from every direction imaginable, that the "Rich take our money, and find loopholes to keep it!" Never ends. Sometimes new or more explicit phrasing, but typically always the same vibe.
On taxfoundation.org it states that the top 1% of American earners paid more than the bottom 90% combined. https://taxfoundation.org/summary-of-the-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2020-update/
So, with this in mind, were there "loopholes" that the wealthiest of Americans took advantage of to pay even LESS, or not at all, even if the other wealthiest took up the slack? Do these loopholes even exist? And if so, could the AVERAGE american ever take advantage of them like the wealthiest Americans can? Can I get in on some of that sweet sweet tax evasion? Or do I need what people tout "Some fancy lawyer" to do some law magic for me?
Genuinely curious. Try to keep this as apolitical as you can, please. | Yeah there are quite a few loopholes, and you typically need to be really rich to access them. They mostly start from (1) a genuine need to lower tax on some front to benefit the economy, and (2) a legal requirement to treat all people the same, even rich people.
Carried interest is one of these loopholes. If you run a private equity fund, your salary isn't paid to you as salary, instead you co-invest in your fund, and are paid a certain outperformance fee or "carry". Legally, this carry is a return on your initial investment, so rather than income tax, you pay capital gains tax.
Another loophole is a share-based loan. Let's say you have some shares in a company, but you don't want to sell them because it triggers capital gains tax. You still want cash though. Instead you take a loan from the bank, pledging your shares as collateral. The bank is satisfied that this is a safe trade and gives you a very low interest rate - you've now monetised your shares without triggering tax!
There's quite a lot of different ways to do this stuff, but they generally require (1) a lot of money, and (2) a good banker / lawyer. | 13 | 15 |
[Marvel] How strong is Captain America? | This is something that a lot of people have trouble pegging down and Marvel's never really given an official word on it.
He seems to be beyond regular "peak humans" in the Marvel Universe. Ed Brubaker and Mark Gruenwald have said that he's the peak of "human evolutionary potential", meaning that he's the next step in human evolution and not bound by what human biology is capable of today. Frank Miller depicted him as being multiple times faster and stronger than Daredevil, who is peak human and Winter Soldier (who is a peak human) stated that Cap is at least twice as strong as him.
He's been shown bench pressing 1,200 pounds while holding a casual conversation and showing no signs of strain, so I'm hesitant to put that as his limit even though the Marvel Handbook says that's his max lift. The Marvel Handbook isn't exactly too reliable (it has Cap at the same durability rating as freaking Black Bolt).
So how strong IS Cap? I want to try to come to at least some sort of consensus about his max lifting strength.
Here's two impressive lifting feats:
http://i.imgur.com/butRPnR.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/LtxXNBd.jpg
With those two as a basis, can anyone estimate Cap's lifting strength? How much would that statue or that tree weigh?
| Caps strength and other abilities vary depending on universe. On Earth 616 Cap is defined as having the maximum of Human potential, meaning he is as strong as any human could possibly be (which considering the extreme strength normal people can display under duress is nothing to scoff at), with endurance, dexterity, intelligence, and charisma to match. Now what a normal human is capable of in that universe seems to be much greater than here on Earth 1218, seeing how the likes of Tony stark and Frank castle have survived injuries there that would have instantly killed anybody here.
Now the cap of Earth 1610 (and earth 199999) is a full blown superhuman. He can bend steel with his bare hands and lift around two tons. He can sprint 75mph and has a 12 foot vertical, and keep going at full speed for hours before tiring. Not to mention he can heal broken bones in days as opposed to weeks and is immune to diseases and poisons. | 29 | 47 |
ELI5: Why do economists always discuss nonfarm employment? What's wrong with counting farmers? | Farms are highly seasonal jobs, like fishing. They're called "agricultural jobs". Because they can last as short as 2 months, but rarely year round, the industry isn't a good way to gauge the economy or employment numbers | 47 | 23 |
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I believe the cloud industry is destroying the very principle that made the internet so powerful in the first place: distributed organization. CMV! | Now, while your data is theoretically safer as you 'distribute' it into the figurative cloud that is the vivid internet itself, here is the catch: Even if you think you are spreading your data over the 'whole' internet by placing it into cloud data services, you are still putting all your eggs into one basket.
By which I mean: it is true that you might be distributing your data on a technological layer, BUT you are still giving it into the hands of a SINGLE company. On a corporate layer, this constitutes a **single point of failure**.
Recent news are the best example, as virtually all your data can be looked into with just a few back doors into the current major cloud data storage services. Imagine if we kept all our data on our computers, properly downloaded our email like in the "good 'ol times" and used many different companies, each specialized for their respective task (i.e. not use google for everything!), how (iilegally) obtaining a full picture of a single person becomes exponentially more difficult.
I think we should revert to saving our music and pictures on our own machines, use email or IRC instead of facebook and promote setting up servers for personalized, private cloud services and distribute the information that we are willing to publicize about us over as many services as possible.
The Internet was designed from ground up to be distributed so that a single failing node would not even cause a disturbance in the whole network. Now, it is falling into the hands of a few corporations, obtaining the power to divert traffic like the some internet police. Imagine if google suddenly fell for some odd reason how it would literally take the internet with it.
Even on the internet, too big to fail to too big to allow... I think. And by allow, people need to naturally loose interest and search for alternatives to maintain a balance of power. CMV!
EDIT: I want to share a quote about RSS on this issue, from a link in post (http://adactio.com/journal/6291/) made by sigbhu below: "It will dip and diminish, but will RSS ever go away? Nah. One of RSS’s weaknesses in its early days—its chaotic decentralized weirdness—has become, in its dotage, a surprising strength. RSS doesn’t route through a single leviathan’s servers. **It lacks a kill switch.**" | People are less worried about security, and more worried about accessibility and cross-compatibility. Which is why the cloud suits them. Apart from the people who are less worried about the latter, and more worried about security. Who don't use the cloud. The strength of the internet that it caters to both groups. | 23 | 77 |
Where to go from Foucault's biopolitics? | From the birth of biopolitics, are there any texts by either Foucault or anyone else that can be recommended? Be it a contemporary extension or some fundamental text that influenced the man | You could read up Giorgio Agamben's writings on the state of exception and camps- specifically his concept of bare life. It's an extension of bio politics as it specifies how governments construct their subjects as both political animals and bare humans, the latter of which is used to justify indefinite detention of terrorists (e.g. at Guantanamo). | 14 | 35 |
CMV: Other people are never the CAUSE of your emotions, only the stimulus. | Hi folks! This is something I just thought up, and I want to see if there are any holes in my logic. If that’s not appropriate for this subreddit, please feel free to report/delete.
**TL;DR: Other people only stimulate your emotions. The cause of your emotions is you having and recognizing a need that hasn’t been met. [Edit: This concept is MORE useful and beneficial for thinking about emotions in everyday situations than the concept that other people directly cause your emotions, because it allows you to take responsibility for your emotions and to get your needs met in ways that are less likely to cause harm.** If I could edit the title, I would include that statement.] And I’m going to be writing up some examples to demonstrate this.
[Edit: My use of the word "stimulus" has been very unclear. I define "stimulus" as a *less direct, less immediate* cause than the "cause". I would just go edit every instance of "stimulus" in the post to "less direct cause", but I can't change the title....]
I’m starting with the assumption that all emotions follow the law of cause and effect. I lose something, I valued that thing, I feel sadness. I lose some*one*, I valued them, I feel grief. I perceive a threat, I want to live, I feel fear. I *expect* a threat, I feel anxiety. I perceive a threat and my own vulnerability, [on top of another emotion, I feel anger]( https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-entitlement/201812/the-function-anger-and-resentment). We animals evolved emotions to be able to respond to situations and fulfill needs. And although emotions are not *objective* and are *irrational* in the sense that they are influenced by [many](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias), [many](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias), [many](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error) [different](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias) [biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-justification), they still follow the *logic*, the rule of cause and effect.
Disclaimer just in case: I’m mainly referring to neurotypical emotional reactions, and not situations like giving someone a concussion that gives them emotional regulation problems, or other psychological illnesses such as bipolar disorder.
To simplify these scenarios, we’re also going to say that I trust and respect you, and you taking my pen isn’t any sort of disloyalty or disrespect or insult. In other words, I’m fine lending you a pen when you need it.
**Scenario 1:** You take my only pen --> I no longer have a pen --> I need a pen --> I feel sad/disappointed
This is the baseline we’re working with. I think many people would believe that “you taking my only pen” *caused* my sadness, and I used to think that too. But I will show that it’s not the case. First, consider changing the cause:
**Scenario 2:** I lose my only pen, or I break it, or I accidentally throw it away --> I no longer have a pen --> I need a pen --> I feel sad/disappointed
Okay, so other causes can lead to my sadness. But you might say, that doesn’t necessarily mean Scenario 1’s “You take my only pen” *didn’t* cause it. Maybe all of those are just different direct causes. So let’s see what happens if we change something in the middle instead.
**Scenario 3a:** You take my only pen --> I no longer have a pen --> Right now, I **don’t need** a pen --> I feel **neutral**
**Scenario 3b:** You take one of my many pens --> I no longer have *that* pen --> I need a pen and I can just use one of my other ones --> I feel neutral
This is the crux of my argument. If you take my pen, but I don’t *need* it, then I won’t feel sad. Therefore, my feeling of sadness in scenario 1 wasn’t caused by you taking my pen, but by *me needing it*.
**Other people only stimulate your emotions. The cause of your emotions is you having an unmet need.**
Going even further:
**Scenario 4:** You take my only pen --> I no longer have a pen --> Right now, I don’t need a pen --> I feel neutral --> **Later**, I need a pen --> I realize I don’t have my pen --> I feel sad
At the time of you taking my pen, because I don’t recognize that I need it, I’m not sad. But when I do, *that’s when I feel sad*.
Last one, making the same point:
**Scenario 5:** You take my only pen --> I no longer have a pen --> I need a pen --> I **think** I have another pen somewhere --> I start looking for it and feel neutral --> I **realize** that was my only pen and I don’t have it anymore --> **Now** I feel sad
So in this one, my pen was taken, I need a pen, but because I think I have another one, I don’t *recognize* that I need *the pen that was lost*. Only when I recognize the need do I feel sad.
**The cause of your emotions is not just you having an unmet need, but you recognizing that unmet need.**
All of this still holds even if the recognition is only subconscious: “Why am I feeling X? I shouldn’t be feeling that…” Well, your subconscious is incredibly powerful, and it can hold a lot that you’re not currently bringing up to conscious awareness.
------------------------------
[Edit: It has come to my attention that my actual point is in this woefully incomplete short blurb at the end of my post, and I should have explained the connection more thoroughly.]
“Okay, great, so other people don’t cause my emotions. I cause my own fricking emotions. What am I supposed to do about it?” Well, this recognition in and of itself will help you react better and less emotionally, rather than a way you might regret. Say your significant other ignores your birthday, and you (understandably! justifiably!) feel angry. Well, that anger is telling you that right now, you need them to love and appreciate you just as much as you do them, and you’re so hurt that you’re not getting that, you want to do something about it *right now*. If you can hold *that* in your mind, then maybe you can go take a walk, take some deep breaths, cool off, and then when you’re calmer go fulfill that need. Go talk to them about your feelings. And it’ll be so much better than yelling at them.
[Edit: There is a *massive* difference between "You ignored me on my birthday, so I felt angry and yelled at you," and "I felt hurt and angry because I love you and enjoy your company and I wanted to spend time with you on my birthday, so I yelled at you." The concept I described helps facilitate this way of thinking. From my comment reply giving a delta: **My true view is not that A is literally not a cause, but that seeing A as a less direct cause and B as the more immediate/proximate/direct cause is a useful and beneficial way to look at the situation. This is because looking at B lets us be more attuned to ourselves and what we can do to change the situation, whereas focusing on A often serves to justify C to ourselves, absolve ourselves of responsibility, and, in turn, (indirectly) cause an emotional response in the other person.**]
This whole process, this self-awareness, is what people mean by *mindfulness*.
It’s simple. But that’s not to say it’s easy. It’s hard. It’s fucking *hard* to pay so much attention to yourself, especially when you’re not used to it. We’re used to pushing down our emotions and ignoring them. We’re taught to do so by society, we’re taught to praise logic and rationality. But in doing so, we *forget* how much of our lives and thoughts involve feeling emotions.
-------------------
So, CMV—on *any* part of this! | If A causes B, and B causes C, it is still reasonable to say that A causes C.
If other people cause us to realize something, and that realization is what causes the emotion, then other people still caused the emotion.
Perhaps you mean other people are not the proximate cause or the direct cause, but so long as something is a part of the chain of causality, they are a cause.
A stimulus, is a cause. A stimulus causes the response. | 15 | 22 |
ELI5: Why do you feel more awake after not sleeping for an extended period of time? | Like if you stay up overnight you start to feel really drowsy at around 24 hours of no sleep, but then after that initial drowsiness you start feeling awake again. | So there are two independent systems that influences your sleep/wake cycle.
One is the circadian rhythm which controls not only sleep but also your hunger, how much urine you produce, body temperature etc.
The other one is Adenosine, which is a chemical in your brain which creates that sleep pressure you feel when you are sleepy. The amount of Adenosine increase as the number of hours awake increase. This is only recycled from the brain when you sleep.
The key thing here is that this two system do not influence each other, so whether you sleep or stayed up all night your circadian rhythm will still continue as if nothing happens. In a normal circadian rhythm you peak in wakefulness at around noon, so even though your brain is full of Adenosine (which makes you sleepy) you feel awake when your circadian rhythm reaches it's peak.
You feel more tired early in the morning because your circadian rhythm is at low wakefulness and there is a high Adenosine level. | 55 | 52 |
ELI5: Why does it hurt more to pinch or hit parts of your body such as fingers when they’re very cold? | Our body uses some of the same pathways for sensing cold as it does for pain. So when our skin is cold, the sensory nerves have a heightened sensitivity to pain stimuli.
Interestingly, this might be a protective mechanism- allowing us to sense pain and detect injuries despite the numbing effect of the cold. | 40 | 34 |
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ELI5: What does the NSA do exactly and why is it so bad? | I always hear about the NSA but I honestly have little knowledge about the group and what they do. | It's signals intelligence - i.e. they are concerned with the content of communications between parties of interest - which traditionally means other intelligence agencies, foreign governments, enemy combatants etc. When you get mission creep into routinely snooping on the private communications of ordinary citizens without any particular justification, that's when people don't like it. | 12 | 21 |
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