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ELI5: What is emulsification and how does it work? | An emulsion is when two liquids that don’t mix or dissolve in each other (immiscible) are put together and then mechanically mixed so that even though they remain separate at a small level, they’re still pretty well mixed.
The most familiar example is probably oil and water. Oil will float on top, and stirring a little doesn’t change it. If you stir and shake a lot, the two liquids form droplets that can be all randomly jumbled together. | 34 | 31 |
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Are professors in Europe hired mostly behind the curtains? | I asked a friend who did a PhD and a postdoc in Europe why I see so few professor jobs for my field in websites like Euraxess. He told me that based on his experience, it seemed that European professors are initially informally offered a position based on personal connection, and then they post an ad for that position exclusively on their university website just because that's a formal requirement, and then they formally hire the person they had in mind. Is this how it works most of the time? | There is no answer to this question. European countries differ vastly in hiring practices. What you describe certainly isn't true for most (or even all) of the countries with open academic systems (i.e., the ones in which a foreigner might get hired). That's places like the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc. But even some of the countries with mostly closed systems have strong internal competition among candidates (e.g., Germany). What you describe might be true for some of the closed systems that suffer from nepotism; Italy struggles with that, for example. | 113 | 86 |
Could there exist a planet made completely out of water? | *Liquid* water? No.
To keep water a liquid requires a few constraints:
1. The pressure has to be high enough to keep it from all evaporating. This generally requires an atmosphere to keep pressures at least above 1 kPa (1/100th sea level pressure), though a fair bit higher to maintain a reasonable range of temperatures where water remains a liquid. We could imagine our proposed water planet evaporates enough water vapor off the surface of the ocean to maintain a water vapor atmosphere to prevent this.
2. The pressure has to be low enough to keep it all from freezing. This requires that, at depth in the ocean, the pressure climbs no higher than about 2 GPa (20,000x sea level pressure), or else we start forming exotic crystal structures of ice, even at high temperatures.
3. We need the right temperature, but let's assume we can play with the planet's position to maintain the right distance from its star.
Suddenly we find ourselves playing a very careful balancing game here: if our planet is too large, then the lower layers will have a pressure that's too high and start freezing. On the other hand, if our planet is too small then there won't be enough gravity to hold on to the water vapor atmosphere, and the whole thing will just evaporate out into space.
So let's start crafting this planet...we want to start by defining the escape velocity, which we'll do by first considering the average velocity of a water molecule at room temperature:
v = sqrt(2kT / m)
v = sqrt[2 * 1.38x10^-23 * 293 / (18 * 1.66x10^(-27))]
v = 520 m/s
That's pretty fast - about 1000 mph - so let's make sure our planet has a high enough escape velocity to prevent a molecule moving that quickly from escaping our planet. In truth, we want an escape velocity quite a bit higher than that since 520 m/s is only the *average* molecular velocity - other molecules could be moving quite a bit quicker. Let's say 8x that so our planet will at least stick around for a while. (By comparison, Earth's escape velocity is about 8x hydrogen's mean velocity, and while we do leak hydrogen into space, we can hold onto it on million year time scales.) The equation for escape velocity is:
v = sqrt(2GM / r)
We know we want v = 8 * 520 = 4160 m/s, and since our planet is liquid water which is pretty incompressible, the density = 1000 kg/m^(3), defining the relationship between mass and radius as just:
M = 1000 * 4/3 Pi r^3
r = (3M / 4000Pi)^1/3
We plug that back into our escape velocity to find:
4160 m/s = sqrt(2 GM / r)
= sqrt[2 GM / (3M/4000Pi)^(1/3)]
= sqrt[2(4000/3 Pi)^1/3 G M^(2/3)]
M = (4160 / sqrt[2(4000/3 Pi)^1/3 G])^3
M = 7.22 x 10^23 kg
...and plugging back into our radius equation...
r = (3 * 7.22 x 10^23 / 4000Pi)^1/3
r = 5560 km
That's big, but not too ridiculous...a bit smaller than Earth in terms of radius, but about 8x lighter in terms of mass, which makes sense when you consider this planet is much less dense.
So what's the central pressure of this planet? Well, to first order we can use the following equation (though a more thorough treatment would use an integral):
P = G * M * density / r
P = 6.67 x 10^-11 * 7.22 x 10^23 * 1000 / 5.56 x 10^6
P = 8.66 GPa
...or about 80,000x sea level pressure, which is already well above the freezing point of water at extreme pressures. In other words, this thing has to have an ice core.
**TL;DR**: In order to have a liquid water planet large enough that it doesn't evaporate away into space in less than a million years, the core must have a pressure high enough to become ice. | 353 | 247 |
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[DC] What could Superman discover about the planet that we don't currently know? | There isn't much of the Earth left unexplored but the places humans can't go pose no problem to Superman. He could find out what is at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and what the core of the planet is really like. What else could he find out that remains a mystery to us? | As you've said, most things on Earth are already explored, so Superman contribution would be about the same that unmanned probes can do - like discovering some extremophile life forms in extreme environments, carving up eternal ice in Arctic and Antarctic to see what's beneath, etc.
Of course, in DC, Earth has a hole on the pole, where there is a passage/portal into the Skartaris, supposedly the place at the Earth's core, so there's that to discover too. Well, for the public to discover - adventurers of all kind have visited the place for ages. | 18 | 20 |
[Star Trek/The Culture] The Federation has a proven track record of hating AIs. How would the Culture deal with this if they encountered them? | I've written at length about this, but I'll just quote [my most recent comment here](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/6rxq94/starships_and_emergency_ais_why_doesnt_starfleet/dl9ea70/):
> 1. Starfleet has ordered Data to be vivisected, insisting that as an artificial life form, he has no right to resign from Starfleet to avoid this fate. To pour salt onto the wound, they ordered one of his commanding officers to prosecute their case.
>
> 2. When Wesley accidentally creates life as a homework assignment, they almost eradicate it, despite knowing that it's a sentient life form.
>
> 3. When the holodeck accidentally creates a self-aware entity because of a verbal slip-up, Dr. Moriarty, the best solution that Captain Picard, one of the most liberal and empathic high-ranking officers in Starfleet comes up with, is indefinite imprisonment without a trial, and without even letting the accused know of their fate.
>
> 4. The EMH Mark II, after being considered inadequate as a back-up physician, is forced into slave labor cleaning plasma conduits. To be fair, they were never active as long as the Doctor on Voyager, but the Doctor's experience certainly backs up the fact that any AI system, allowed to run long enough, becomes a sentient being - and these are sentient beings that are literally slaves, and thanks to the Doctor's novel, are very aware of it.
>
> So: any AI becomes self-aware if allowed to run long enough, a high-school-equivalent student can create conscious life accidentally, and a holodeck on a Galaxy-class starship is powerful enough to do so as well. The only reason the Federation can possibly overlook this is through willful disrespect for non-biological life.
>
> The Federation hates, fears and kills - when it can't enslave - artificial intelligence.
>
> Frankly, I'm surprised Dr. Soong bothered to work under the Federation ageis, instead of running to a more liberal government likely to treat his creations as sophonts - someone like the Vulcans, who would at least give Data an honest trial before trying to split him up for parts.
How would Contact and Special Circumstances deal with this bias, given the Federation's otherwise fairly liberal outlook and mission statement? | Contact would proceed Introducing safe and productive AI agents into the Federation via clandestine and seemingly native means, slowly acclimating the Federation to the idea that AIs are truly sentient and sapient, and that they won't necessarily turn rogue and attempt to kill all humans.
Dr. Soong may well have been a contact agent, or inspired by one serving as a stealth tutor helping him design the first federation positronic brain, for example.
I don't think Special Circumstances would get involved. The Federation has its issues, but is nowhere near the level of depravity that would compel the more self-righteous elements of the culture to act unilaterally. | 12 | 16 |
[Emperor's New Groove] What does Yzma normally use her llama transformation potion for? | Are there a lot of practical uses for turning people into llamas? | Animals are excellent for intelligence gathering. Who pays attention to a bird, or a squirrel, or a beetle hanging out nearby? Given that people apparently retain their mental capacity when changed into an animal of any size, there are a lot of possibilities. Once you know that it's possible you'll want to keep several different kinds on hand in case you need to grab a specific animal quickly.
Then, if you have the free time and inclination (or compulsion), you might as well see how many different animal extracts you can create.
Alternatively, Yzma was trying to create a potion of youth and animals were the best she could come up with. | 86 | 93 |
ELI5: How does "turning it off and back on again" fix such an array of different problems? | Programs work by following really long lists of instructions. When something goes wrong it's often because programs get stuck in little loops, or several programs conflict, or something failed to load, etc. By turning it off and back on again, you start over. It's a bit like if you were counting sheep and suddenly got really confused. If you took a deep breath and started over, you could try again. | 27 | 23 |
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ELI5: Is any one race easier to distinguish using facial recognition software? There are many stereotypes of "white people all looking the same" or "Asians all look the same", but when it comes to facial recognition, are they all the same? | No. While it may not be perfect, a good facial recognition program uses far more data points to identify a face than the ones we associate with 'race.'
Shown two black men, the software will be able to identify between them as easily as between two whites. | 53 | 70 |
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How do you handle financial stress as a grad student? | I just posted in /r/personalfinance, but maybe this sub is more appropriate.
I'm nearing the end of a master's program in evolutionary biology (August). I've been monitoring my finances throughout the program (no loans, paying out of savings with small grant assistance - also no stipend), and I am on track to be at < $1,500 when I finish this program. I'm 25, and I will have no savings (not even emergency fund) outside of that amount.
There's no field I'd rather be in than academia. I will work industry if I have to do it, but I don't want to further delay starting a phd/postdoc/etc. I'm considering working a weekend job or doing some kind of freelance work/tutoring, but I don't know how well I can manage those hours on top of my current thesis project.
Anyways, I'm not necessarily looking for specific advice (though that would be welcome). I'm more interested in just hearing about how other people have managed it. Even if I do get accepted into one of the phd programs where I applied, my salary would only bump from $0 annually to $20-25k post-tax until I'm at least in my 30s.
How do people manage buying a car/house, starting a family, doing any kind of traveling (outside of conferences) or really just having an entertainment budget in general? I'm not even going to let myself think about retirement funds/investing... How do you manage the financial stress of worrying about whether you can afford rent in 6 month's time? I welcome stress - I wouldn't be in this career if I wasn't expecting a lot of it - but I was expecting it to come from frustrating research results, difficult students/mentors, writing publications regularly, etc, not from the budgeting side of things. STEM was supposed to be the "safe" career choice...right? | > How do people manage buying a car/house, starting a family, doing any kind of traveling (outside of conferences) or really just having an entertainment budget in general?
ime unless they have family/spousal support or some extraneous source of personal savings/income, they don't. depending on where and how you live, $25k should be enough for entertainment and maybe vacation, but you shouldn't expect to make big-ticket investments until you're out of grad school.
> STEM was supposed to be the "safe" career choice...right?
leave academia, and this will be true. | 50 | 29 |
[WH40k] Is there anyone with enough fincnaial wealth and personal elan to gain access to the Golden Throne? | Short version: No, the Custodes wouldn't let you in no matter how rich or impressive you are.
Longer version: Yes, but not directly.
Basically, if you're rich and powerful enough - and we're talking owning multiple gigantic spaceships, and possibly one or more worlds - and also smart enough, you could theoretically get in with the Inquisition. If you can persuade an Inquisitor to make **you** an Inquisitor, then you can petition the High Lords of Terra for an audience with the Emperor. But you'd need a very good reason for them to let you in.
Alternate route: Bribe the right people and have them slip you in with the regular tithe of psychics who are sacrificed to keep the Throne functioning. You'll die pretty much instantly, but the last thing you will see is the Throne. Probably not the part with the Emperor on it - it's a massive device housed in a building the size of a small country - but you'll be closer than the billions of pilgrims who will be crowded outside. | 29 | 19 |
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What impact does it have on my chances of getting a PhD if something I'm working on gets published first? | I've spent the last 6 months combining a novel neural network architecture with computer vision as part of my computer vision PhD project. (I have no CS background a lot of this time has been spent learning how to do software engineering properly) and the other week I saw a publication that had the same idea as me and had implemented it and it seems like it may end up being high impact. The implementation also smashed a bunch of benchmarks which I myself had recently achieved with my own work.
Does this mean my work no longer counts? I'm pretty bummed out about this and I'm concerned it means I've wasted a significant chunk on my PhD doing work that won't help me even if it was publishable. While I understand the publishability of my work has gone down to independant reviewers / viva givers give you credit for coming up with a good idea just slightly too late like this? | Not gonna answer your question directly, but if you had a research idea dreamt up and implemented in 6 months, had to learn the skills to get it done, and had it validated by other researchers who were already experts in the field... you’re gonna have more ideas and you’re gonna be just fine.
Ask your PI about strategies for making the best of what you’ve already finished, and don’t let the bummerness of getting scooped slow your roll | 91 | 77 |
Why is there only one species of human? | There are a variety of reasons, but here are two:
1: Due to our technology and general intellect, humans around the world have been able to live in far more similar conditions than another, equally distributed species.
2: We are a relatively young species . Since the migration from Africa and the general distribution throughout the world, we didn't have enough time to develop to many unique genetic traits in various isolated populations. Now that the world is so much smaller due to technology, that will never happen.
It should be noted that various groups did undergo independent evolution leading to changes in skin colour, sand slight changes to things like bone and muscle structure, certain desease immunities and other minor differences, some of which we were directly responsible for, such as lactose tolerance which is more prevalent among populations who historically milked cows. | 18 | 36 |
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ELI5: Why does the hair on our head keep growing, while eyelashes and eyebrows, etc, stop? | This has been asked a lot so try searching for more explanations.
The short answer is all hair follows the same cycle. It grows to a certain length, then falls out as a new hair starts growing. The length it grows to depends on what type of hair (head hair tends to grow longest) and genetics. So yes, your hair would reach a maximum length if you stopped cutting it; it wouldn't go on forever. The reason you don't notice hair missing when long hairs fall out is that they all fall out at different times so you don't really notice/miss the ones that have fallen out. | 12 | 24 |
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Why do we continue to give high-stakes tests, especially when they are counter-productive to both students and professors? | While this may seem like a cringingly naive question to ask this, however, the consequences of colleges that continue to unquestioningly to give hair-pulling exams aren't. It becomes more costly to the school and to the student to retake a class and postpone their graduation date, and extensive grading of these exams take away research time from professors and graduate students trying to get their foot in the door, and not to mention that even the most well-motivated students can succumb to life-tragedies in their semsters that cause them to bomb the exam entirely, thereby repeating the first sentence. | The language around high stakes testing didn't originate around finals, but rather achievement/qualifying exams like the SAT, ACT, and GRE.
Midterms and Finals in college courses are excellent assessments but not the totality of assessment. When paired with other forms of assessment and designed well, they offer a way to gauge student performance in one of the environments best suited to mitigate cheating.
For that reason, they are unlikely to ever go away. | 132 | 140 |
If energy can't be created or destroyed, does that mean it has always existed? | This question seems to have one of two possibilities, either energy can be created and was in the big bang or the universe/existence is infinite, reality has always existed in some way and always will? | Conservation of energy holds upon certain conditions.
We are not sure at all that the energy was conserved at the Big Bang, or even for the universe as a whole.
In the first case we don't know the physics involved, and in the second is an open question in general relativity | 30 | 45 |
How to obtain energy gain or loss of chemical reactions? | Chemical reactions either take or release energy.
So this "energy" must be on either the reactant or at the product side.
What specific chemistry concept is this?
I assume that I need specific computations for getting the energy of all reactants and products as well, how do I obtain this "energy" value as well?
what formulas and table values do I need to use? | I believe you are looking for reaction enthalpy, often also called "heat of reaction"
Roughly, there's an energy associated with sticking a molecule together. This is related to the bond strength, and atoms involved, etc. This is the enthalpy of formation, or heat of formation. This can be measured, or in some instances modeled and calculated, although the specifics get nit pickey iirc.
Once you know the heats of formation, you can use the chemical reaction to calculate how much heat will be released or absorbed.
2A + B -> 3C
A: 5 j/mol
B: 7 j/mol
C: 10 j/mol
2A + B = 17 j/mol
3C = 30 j/mol
∆ = 13 j/mol (correction. See below for explanation.)
So this reaction absorbs 13 j per mole of reactions. | 23 | 48 |
ELI5: How come the human genetic code can fit roughly in ~1.5GB of data yet we turn out such complex organisms? Furthermore, the code that separates us from other mammals can fit on o floppy disk. | A few key differences between the genetic sequence and a computer sequence:
1. Computers run in binary. Genes run in quaternary (4 types of nucleic acids). That immediately increases the amount of data you can store exponentially. One step further, gene sequences build amino acids. There are 21 total amino acids that can form thousands of different proteins.
2. People are made of matter. Matter is comprised of 120-something (the number keeps changing) different elements, each with unique interaction with each other and interactions with groups of other elements, which is even more information than a simple quaternary system. Electricity, on the other hand, is not matter.
There are various theories about coding data in different voltages or currents or whatever to allow electricity to provide more than a binary system, but we don't have the technology yet (and it may not even be possible). | 11 | 16 |
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CMV translating place names is pointless and causes unnecessary confusion | It is common practice to translate names of places, cities and countries instead of using the original names or the names the country chose for them. It is harmless most of the times like Berlin/berlijn or London/Londres (but this also makes it really pointless). But it can get very confusing with examples such as Küln/Cologne, Pays-Bas/Netherlands or even the weird Deutschland/Germany confusion. I live in Europe and since there are so many languages present at any given moment, it can get really confusing if everyone is familiar with their own languages version of place name. And just smth dumb that annoys me, it takes up too much space on signs. But anyway, I really haven't come across any good or any argument FOR doing this. So I think it's unnecessarily confusing and really pointless. | There are valid linguistic and historical reasons for why place names are translated. If a place name features sounds or spellings that someone who speaks a foreign language could easily mispronounce, the translation of that place name will usually do something to fix that, like in your first 2 examples. In the examples where the translated place name is completely different, the translated names almost always have a historical reason for being that way. The reason that Germany has so many different names in European languages (as an example) is due to this reason; the name for Germany in each language group was adopted at a different time in history and based on different words, either from German or the other language itself. This is particularly the case for Germany as the country has existed in so many different forms over millennia, but happens with lots of other places too. And once a translated name becomes the official name for a place in a certain language, it becomes hard to change it. This is why these odd translated names stick around when more logical ones are available. They may cause confusion, but it is not unnecessary confusion, as it makes sense for linguistic or historical reasons. | 186 | 869 |
I think humanity should genetically engineer itself, once it is able to do so effectively. CMV | Not thinking that much about designer babys and more about things which can be objectively improved, mainly: physical condition and cognitive abilities. I don't know how far away we are from being able to do so, but I think when we are, we should absolutely do it. Evolution is quit a slow process and if we could accelerate that, while sticking to nearly unarguably good stuff like thinking faster, have better memory etc. I don't see why we shouldn't do so. A two-classes community (directly translated from german, hope you get it) might or will probably be a temporary result and I realize it sounds a lot like some of the things people tried to do which had quit a bad influence on our history, but once we know enough about it and use it with responsibility, well why not?
People I talked about to this didn't really like it, let's see what reddit has to say. | The big issue here is this: how do we know when we're responsible enough? Is it responsible to create "super soldiers" for our wars? Is it responsible to create people designed for a certain task or role in life (i.e., someone designed for manual labor vs someone designed for high-end technology creation)? Once we have control over how someone is born and how they develop, we would almost have to do these things since such specialisation would not longer be chance and up to nature. Is it *right* to essentially strip someone of their freedom to choose? | 27 | 94 |
How long after the big bang did the heavier elements necessary for life form? | Just musing in relation to the Fermi "where is everybody?" paradox:
My understanding is that it takes several generations of supernovae to generate the various heavier elements that are necessary for life as we know it, and it took 4-5 billion years on this planet to get around to intelligent life. The big bang was 13.7b ago, but for how much of that time has there even been the possibility of planets with the necessary elements? | This is the topic of possibly the most famous scientific paper of all time, "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars" by Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle - nicknamed the B2FH paper. Just search around a bit, especially under Fred Hoyle's name. | 24 | 86 |
Is Aristotle begging the question? | So I (just) started reading Aristotles politika, and really haven't got far.
For me, it seems like he makes the following claims on why humans group in a state or polis:
Humans nature is being in a community, or a polis.
Polis forms because humans communicate about values, morals etc.
Therefore, human society or community is a neutral state.
My problem is, doesn't that make the argument "humans nature is to form a society, and that society is natural because it is humans nature to form it"? | You could also start with Nicomachean Ethics as well since Eudaemonia (flourishing) is the key for Aristotle, and that can only happen within a state or polis. Understanding Aristotle’s philosophical outlook gives a good contextual framework when trying to understand his political philosophy. | 26 | 53 |
ELI5: why does sugar help a burn? | My friend burnt her finger and her son said to "put in in the sugar." She did and felt immediate relief. We looked online and found that sugar is indeed used to help burns, but nothing about why it helps. | There's a couple ways it's beneficial.
Primarily, sugar absorbs water really well. This sucks up all the water in the wound, inhibiting the growth of bacteria that proliferate in wet wounds. This also has the effect of reducing swelling in the area.
Additionally, cells use sugar for energy. When a burn occurs, the normal distribution network of our skin is disrupted, cutting cells off from the nutrients they need to live. There's evidence that sugar can act as an energy source for those cells when it's absorbed into the blood- keeping cell death to a minimum while the wound heals. | 36 | 29 |
Since light takes time to travel how many stars in our night sky don't actually exist anymore? | The stars you can see in the night sky are all pretty close -- tens or hundreds or, in a few cases, thousands of light years. Stars have lifetimes of millions to billions of years. So probably they all still exist. | 30 | 20 |
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ELI5:Why were some very toxic substances formerly thought of as medicinal? | This question was inspired by [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/3g7689/deadliest_rocks_in_the_world/) post, which included information on the rock [stibnite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stibnite) which is toxic but was formerly used as medicine and material for utensils.
I understand that even now many medicines have terrible side effects but how were substances like mercury ever thought of as good medicine? | Most of the "medicine" back then worked by trial and error. If your medicine "cured" the sickness by placebo effect without poisoning the patient that was a success (there is a reason most doctors had a seriously bad rep in the old days). | 15 | 26 |
ELI5: What is the purpose of having baby teeth that fall out after a few years? Why don't we just keep the same teeth for our whole life? | And also, why do we only grow two teeth in our life? Why not more like sharks and other animals? | There's several ideas why. A child's jaw isn't large enough to fit a full set of permanent teeth. Also, baby teeth may serve as kind of a placeholder so that there will be enough space on the jaw for the permanent teeth to grow in. The baby teeth save the spot of its corresponding permanent tooth until it's developed enough to replace it. Children that lose a baby tooth early might experience problems with overcrowding of their permanent teeth. | 31 | 74 |
ELI5: Why do all animals have natural animal instincts that allow them to nurture a child but humans need parenting classes and support when raising a child? | In traditional village (or nomadic) living conditions, children frequently see nearby parents raising other children. They learn by watching, and—when they are asked to help—they learn by doing. Often they were helping with their own younger siblings, or maybe with cousins, or maybe even the children of their older brothers and sisters.
In modern society, with people having kids much later, and living in their own isolated houses, this kind of learning by doing is much less available.
In other words, modern society has broken the cultural system that allowed earlier humans to successfully raise children, and parenting classes are a poor substitute. | 46 | 25 |
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ELI5: Why does contrast increase/decrease when looking at a monitor from an angle? | LCD work by shining a bright white light (actually a combination of every color, ever see a prism?) from behind the display, then controlling how much of each color can pass through each pixel.
This is achieved through multiple stacked layers which have these light and color filters embedded for each pixel. When a pixel is white, it allows most of the light to pass through. When it's black, most of that light is being absorbed or reflected back into the monitor.
If that light moves sideways, it bleeds to neighboring pixels and lowers contrast by mixing different colors and blurring edges. This is ultimately stopped by putting "prism" walls around each pixel. When viewed head-on, the walls look the same as the pixels. From the side, you see the different mix of color the walls are redirecting at that angle. As you lower your view angle, you also see more of the walls and less of the pixels. This is why active parts of the display change color when viewed from the side, and why black sections mostly look the same.
Edit: Just wanted to add that with older and large format displays, discoloration was instead mostly a result of polarization angle. However, modern high density formats required a shift to extremely thin layers or a curved format to prevent this from occuring at either side of a display you were looking at head-on. Thinner layers introduced problems related to irregularities in thickness, which are generally solved by optical separation.
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ELI5: Why was there so much hatred towards Armenians in the late 1800's/early 1900's? They were victims in two notable massacres/genocides resulting in the deaths of roughly 1.8 million Armenians. | Sort of like the Jews, they were the trader and merchant class in the Ottoman empire. So they were everywhere in small numbers, dealt in money, and were involved in a lot of other transactions. Poor peasants resent the more urban merchants (a classic trope), plus they were Christians in a Muslim empire. Armenia also used to be its own country, so as nationalism rose in the late 1800s, there were Armenians talking about getting their own country back.
When the strain of WW1 was destroying the Ottoman Empire, they were an easy scapegoat. In smaller towns, they could be attacked in order to take their money. And on the larger level, the Turks could blame the Armenians as the 'enemy within' (and also push them out of their homes and take their money) | 280 | 616 |
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I believe that if you know exactly what you want to study in college, then gen. eds should not be a requirement. CMV | This is a bit of a rant since I am just very up set with having to take gen. eds that have no relation to my major at all, but here it goes. There's also a TL;DR at the bottom for those who'd prefer it.
Ever since high school I knew I wanted to study Audio Engineering, more specifically, live sound. I got into the perfect school for this and it has excellent live sound classes that I love taking. I was actually upset when my first live sound class was over for the day, because I was enjoying it so much. However, I feel like I'm loosing potential knowledge and experience by having to take gen. ed courses. I'm a Junior in college and I'm still having to fulfill gen. ed requirements because there are so many. Thankfully after this semester I will be done.
I've had to take Math, Physics, Religion, Philosophy, English, Government, Political Science, History, Phys. Ed, & Psychology. I feel that all of these classes were simply a waste of time to me. I could've been taking classes that were related to my major instead, thus better preparing me for my career.
I know it's a good thing to be well rounded and what not, but College is the time when you figure out what you enjoy doing and you study that in order to be better prepared in finding a job in your career path. I took almost all of those courses in high school already. Why do I need to repeat them? Why do I need to know pre-calculus, calculating the friction of a box or about Plato's beliefs? They have no relation to my major. (And no, my physics course hasn't even covered anything remotely close to audio engineering, i.e. sine waves. It's all kinematics and forces)
I'm terrible at these things, but I'm good with live sound and audio stuff. Why should I be forced to waste my parents and my money (I help pay for college too) on courses that will not better prepare me for a job in the audio engineering field? A potential employer would not look at my college transcript and say "Even though you got straight A's in all of your Audio Engineering classes, you didn't do well in Religion, so I'm sorry but you don't have this Live Sound job."
Lastly, I understand that gen. eds are put in place to allow students to possibly find what they want to do as far as a career, and I think that's great for students who are unsure of what they want to do after college. However, I feel that it's unfair to those of us who have already found our passion and just want to take as many classes about our major as we can to better prepare ourselves.
TL;DR Bullet point version:
* Loosing potential knowledge, because one isn't able to take as many classes related to their major.
* A waste of money because gen. eds do not relate to one's major or provide help in it.
* College is about finding what you want to do and focusing on that career. It shouldn't be a repeat of high school.
* I shouldn't focus my time and energy on making my weaknesses go from "suck" to "not as bad", when I could just make my strengths go from "great" to "Best".
* Gen. eds are in place to assist those who are unsure of what they want to do, but they hurt those who have already found their passion and just want to learn as much as they can about it.
EDIT: Thank you all for the wonderful new perspectives. While I still don't like gen. eds. my view on their purpose has been changed mostly. I guess I'm just wishing I could take more audio classes, because I always have fun in them compared to gen. eds.
For those who've been harping me about not knowing what a Liberal Arts degree entitles; I had honestly never been told what the different degrees were or what they meant. No one in high school talked about them, no one at college visits talked about them, my parents never talked about them, I'd never really heard the term before. How could I have asked what I didn't know? | 1. Employers who are hiring audio engineers are going to be primarily concerned with your grades in relevant courses - your grades in gen ed courses will not be as much of a factor. So don't worry so much about that.
2. Gen ed courses can indicate your strengths or weaknesses regarding various important skills or abilities. Science and math courses may be used by employers as indicators of your intellect. English, History, and Philosophy courses may indicate your proficiency with basic level writing - an important skill for any working adult. Comparative Religion, Government, and Political Science can indicate that you are capable of understanding how adult society works, and that you are capable of thinking about things from other people's perspectives - which is an important skill when trying to resolve conflicts with coworkers, subordinates, clients, etc.
3. You have wanted to be an audio engineer since high school, but many people think that they "know" that they want to be, and end up changing careers. Many people change jobs and/or entire careers. Having an exposure to a broad array of classes gives college students a broader perspective on career paths - including career paths that may have been previously unknown to the students. In other words, without mandatory exposure, some people would never discuss a career path that would be very good for them. | 37 | 49 |
ELI5: How do we know water is made of two hydrogen atoms and not just one? |
How do we know that, for example, H2O, is infact H2O and not just one hydrogen? Further more, how do we know that anything is made of specifically these elements and not something else? And what makes molecules stay together (like in a human)? | You can take pure oxygen and pure hydrogen and combine them to form water. By measuring how much oxygen or how much hydrogen is left over after all the water is formed, you can deduce the proportions that were used to make the water. When we do this, we can tell that two parts of hydrogen are used for every one part of oxygen.
What makes molecules stay together are things called intermolecular forces, of which there are a variety and rather complicated to explain. But basically there are attractive forces between the molecules that keep them together rather than just flying apart. | 443 | 314 |
ELI5: as someone from the UK, I have no idea why obamacare has been getting so much hate. explain. | I really just have not clue. | Obamacare mandates that you buy healthcare insurance, or apply for free coverage from the government if you're poor enough or old enough to qualify. It gives subsidies based on income.
Long story short, there are a lot of Americans who think that the free market is the best solution to all problems - healthcare included. They view Obamacare as evil for two reasons: 1) it forces you to purchase something against your will, and 2) it runs contrary to free market principles.
Many (most?) of these people also tend believe that healthcare in the US is significantly superior to that which exists in the UK/Canada/Switzerland/etc.. Thus, any move toward a European model is viewed as a degradation of current services. | 510 | 655 |
ELI5: Why does everyone hate flash and why are they happy that it's "going away"? | You know how the Olympics have two official languages, English and French, right? This standardization allows everyone (athletes, judges, organizers, and watchers) to have one of two languages in which to communicate. Moreover, for the sake of this analogy, imagine that English and French are easily-accessible languages (that is, there are many many schools that teach the language, and many resources for learning them).
Now, imagine that, say, the Russian gymnastics team _insists_ on using only Russian to communicate. They are such an important part of the Olympics that the International Olympic Committee has no choice but to allow them to do so. Finally, imagine there are virtually no resources for learning Russian: either you grew up speaking it, or you didn't, but it's very hard to find a way to learn the language later. This situation would be totally disruptive to the idea that everyone should be able to communicate with everyone else at the Olympics.
(note: not picking on Russians here, they're just a great example of an indispensable country for the Olympics to keep its character.)
This is what happened with Flash - the open-source web standards of HTML, ECMAScript, CSS and so on were designed from the beginning to be open, accessible, and understandable to people _and other computers_ using the Internet. They were open, and standards-based, which means whole teams of people could support their development and stability. Then Flash came along, which had lots of nice features (like streaming video), but it was closed source, buggy, fickle, and completely opaque to the tools and people involved in using it. The result was that we had a split between the easy-to-understand, debuggable, and standards-based technology with a fickle and unpredictable prima donna that had a tendency to crash, taking down the whole browser. | 16 | 17 |
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[Pokemon] How are gym leaders and elite four decided? | Gym leaders simply develop enough of a reputation that people start traveling the world just to challenge them, and they eventually take on followers and build a gym for those people to hang out and build their skills. Eventually the Pokemon League recognizes that gym as official and issues them a badge to hand out.
As for the Elite Four, they're specially scouted by the Pokemon League. Some of them are former champions, former Gym Leaders, or just people who fit the criteria of being "elite". | 46 | 33 |
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Is it possible for meteoroids carrying microorganisms from Earth to travel to another planet, such as Mars, and seed life onto them? | And if possible, how likely is a situation like this to occur successfully? | What you're asking is basically the panspermia theory, that says life can spread between habitable planets when carried by meteors. Research has been done about this by taking extremophiles into space and exposing them to vacuum, radiation, extreme temperatures and direct sunlight. Survival rates were good enough.
The weak link in the theory is atmospheric entry. When the meteor burns up, any lifeforms it carries would be vaporized and destroyed. A possible exception is that lifeforms are carried in very deep a crack in the rock that isn't reached by the hot air outside. ESA has discussed experiments about atmospheric entry in these conditions but none have been performed yet.
| 25 | 17 |
CMV: It is hypocritical to advocate for cancel culture and a rehabilitative justice system at the same time. | I believe there are mainly two types of cancel culture that we see today. The first type is just cancelling someone from the platform where they committed egregious behavior on. If you act like a piece of shit at a bar, the bar can cancel you from stepping foot in their business in the future. If you are harassing people and being racist on Twitter, Twitter can ban you.
The second type of cancel culture is advocating for the person's cancellation outside of just the platform where they committed egregious behavior. I've seen people go as far as getting people fired from their jobs, getting people kicked out of college, getting people evicted, etc. This is the type of cancel culture that I am focusing on in my CMV.
To be clear, I would consider myself on the left politically. However, I am against the left's embrace of this second type of cancel culture because I find it very hypocritical. How can you on the one hand laugh at someone for losing their job for saying something racist or insensitive online, then on the other hand advocate for a more rehabilitative justice system where even murderers should have a path towards redemption and a normal life?
I see this all the time where the same people that ridicule a white person for getting fired from their job or kicked out of college will go around saying that a black guy involved in gang violence should be offered rehabilitation. Either both should be extended a path to redeem themselves, or both should be subject to retributive justice. Having one position for one type of person and another position for another shows that you are ideologically motivated, have no principles, and are hypocritical. CMV | I think it’s important to remember that they are two radically different systems. One is a set of consequences of free trade and social interaction and the other is a designed justice system enforced by the societal monopoly in violence and backed up with the threat of state violence.
It makes total sense that they be treated differently. | 1,060 | 5,020 |
Why are we colder when wet? | Our sensation of being cold (or hot) is strongly affected by the rate at which we exchange heat with the environment. When we're wet, the water is almost always colder than the 37 C of our body. That means that heat flows from our body into the water on our skin. And since water has a considerably higher heat conductivity than air, the body loses heat more rapidly when it's covered in water.
Next, the water will evaporate, which lowers the average temperature of the water that remains, causing further heat flow from the body to the water on the skin. Essentially, this is the same as sweating, except that sweating is a beneficial process that the body initiates when it is too hot.
So when we're wet, we lose heat more rapidly than when we're dry. This causes a stronger sensation of feeling cold, even though the water on our skin may be warmer than the air. | 3,928 | 4,996 |
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If my speed is relative, not absolute, and the speed of light always appears the same no matter my reference frame, how is a statement like "I am travelling at 99% of the speed of light" meaningful? | It's true, this statement should be always be followed by "with respect to some reference frame." If you're carrying a cup of tea in your spaceship, the cup of tea doesn't care that some guy on the moon is measuring your speed at 0.9999c. | 52 | 57 |
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ELI5: How differently does the body process sugar alcohols vs regular sugars? | I've been trying to reduce my overall sugar intake in recent months, and I've notice one option is foods that substitute sugar with sugar alcohol.
I have a baseline understanding of chemistry, and from what I can gather sugar alcohols are basically sugar molecules with an -OH attached somewhere.
This seems like enough to fool the tastebuds into thinking that its regular sugar and send "this is sweet" signals to the brain, but I'm curious to how the body actually processes these molecules in the gut.
If the body ends up breaking down the molecules like regular sugar molecules, that doesn't seem very advantageous unless you're a food manufacturer trying to skirt around nutrition labels.
If the body ends up breaking down the sugar alcohol differently than sugar, how does it breakdown, and what are some advantages and disadvantages of sugar alcohol over regular sugar? | >If the body ends up breaking down the sugar alcohol differently than sugar, how does it breakdown, and what are some advantages and disadvantages of sugar alcohol over regular sugar?
The body processes sugar alcohols a little differently, yes. Specifically, the human body can absorb a little over half the caloric content (2.6 calories per gram versus four), and sugar alcohols also don't cause blood sugar to spike as hard. Sugar alcohols also don't contribute to tooth decay.
As you note, their chemical structure is similar enough to sugar to fool our tastebuds. However, it's not as potent, meaning more sugar alcohol would be needed to make something taste "as sweet." Because 2.6 is 65% of 4, as long as the sweetness of the sugar alcohol in question is 65% or more of straight glucose, you come out ahead in a 1:1 swap.
One downside that should be noted is because the body doesn't process sugar alcohols completely, you can end up with gastrointestinal effects like gas and diarrhea. | 474 | 1,171 |
Should I put an anarchist/anticapitalist organization on my resumé when applying for research internships? | I've been part of Food Not Bombs at various locations since last June. It's become a large part of my life, and I feel that it's contributed significantly to my personal and political growth. And I'm proud of what we do. But of course the politics of FNB run counter to the norm, and other volunteers have gotten into clashes with the authorities in the past. On the one hand, that connotation might scare recruiters off. On the other, though, I feel that omitting it would provide an incomplete summary of myself, my life, and my accomplishments. For what it's worth, I'm in linguistics/computational linguistics. | Depends what jobs you're applying for, and how much else you have on your resume. Don't forget that you can have two versions of your resume, one with and one without, and send the appropriate one to each job. For example, if you're applying to work at the federal government, maybe don't include an anarchist group. But if you're applying to work for a charity, do. | 159 | 109 |
[Dune] The Sandworms are said to have caused the desertification of Arrakis turning what once was a lively green planet into a barren sandy wasteland. How did the Sandworms manage to prompt such significant ecological change? | There are two main causes.
1) They thresh Earth into sand sand as they 'swim' as shared by esteemed colleague /u/Poorly-Drawn-Beagle. The destruction of soil is a major contributor to Arrakis desertification, but is also a secondary result of the planet's nearly-nonexistent water-cycle.
2) Sandworm larva, i.e. 'Sandtrout", consume vast amounts of water, removing it from the Arrakis water-cycle, and contributing to the desertification of Arrakis. It's believe it's implied that consuming large amounts of water is what allows the humble Sandtrout to grow into a mighty Shai-Hulud over the course of millennia. | 129 | 115 |
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[MCU] How did both Red Skull and Shield use the Space stone to make so much energy? | Both Hydra in the 40's and Shield on modern times managed to use the tesseract/Space Stone to create energy to power their inventions. How is that possible from whats basically a giant teleportation machine? | All six Infinity Stones have their main function and also the side function of producing a massive amount of energy due to their connection to the Big Bang. The only exception is the Power Stone, for which harnessing and releasing energy is the main point.
You can see an example of this with other Stones wgen Vision uses the Mind Stone to shoot beams of energy from his forehead and Loki uses it to emit concussive blasts from his scepter. If they used this aspect of the Stone to its maximum potential, they could potentially make bombs like Red Skull did, but the Mind Stone being arguably weaker than the Space Stone may explain why we only see relatively minor energy output from it on screen.
If you really want an explanation specific to the Stone, it's possible it harnesses zero-point energy from empty space, which sort of means it's tapping into a perpetual motion machine. Or perhaps Dark Energy, which may simply be a basic property of space rather than a separate phenomenon, is the source of its energy output. | 75 | 79 |
ELI5: What is the difference between the best, high-pay lawyer and an average or so-so lawyer? | You always hear phrases such as "We'll get you the best lawyer in this country".
What makes a great lawyer compared to a good or average one? | It helps to think of it like a car mechanic. The best mechanic for you is one that has experience fixing the problem you have at a reasonable price. But the top mechanics in the world have experience solving highly specialized problems in exotic cars. | 13 | 19 |
CMV: Work from Home is a benefit in almost everyway for everyone! | I really feel work from home should be a culture everywhere in the world and that's how people should actually work! Let me tell you why I say this.
* Work from Home actually makes people more productive because when someone actually has to submit a deliverable they will sit and finish their work and maybe can get an extra hour of sleep the next day. People can take a break in between when they need it and not when during the allotted break time.
* Companies can reduce the costs heavily. They can reduce the renting space which will save them loads of money on rent and electricity! There are lots of other things that company can save costs on!
* Number of negative incidents that happen to people at night when travelling back home from work alone will be significantly reduced.
* This will bring better cheaper and better quality Internet for everyone. This could also bring a lot more investment to better Internet security for everyone.
* With people spending on average 20% of their lives travelling this can really give them more time to work when they have to and make use of our life in a better way.
* Following the previous point, this will also save tons of air, water and noise pollution as there will be less traffic everywhere and which will also help us travel faster when needed.
* We can spend a lot more time with our family! Better quality of life!
* Nature can heal itself like it is doing now during lockdown all over the world.
People can go to office when they need to. When they do not have the necessary hardware to do a work they can go there and get it done. Work can be done at home every other time.
I know a lot of places have work from home culture. I say its not enough.
Every company in every country where possible should make their employees work from home.
All these things were just off the top of my head. I bet there are a lot more benefits to working at home for everyone. | There are several disadvantages of home working:
- you need an office to concentrate, not everyone has a closed room, comfortable, ergonomic and productive where you can keep family out
- home power usage goes up, and homes are usually less efficient than office buildings in heating, cooling and lighting, impacting both consumption and the environment
- many jobs have informal knowledge and communicatuin paths to get things done, such as tribal knowledge, look and learn practices and visual signs that are lost remotely
- at home it's easy to overwork, leadingto burnout
- work facilities have a considerable impact on productivity, so companies spend a lot of time thinking about this. with employees at home they lose a tool for one they have no control over
Overall there are many benefits from working from home, but it's not all benefits. | 64 | 62 |
[X2]How did Magneto switching metal plates in the recreation of Cerebro change its search function from mutant to human? | Cerebro works as a mental energy resonator, enabling the professor to amplify his power to a world-reaching scale. The plates look plain on the outside, but on the inside they hide highly sophisticated circuitry. Their geometric arrangement specifies a certain "frequency" of mental energy; by default they're arranged to be tuned into mutant minds, but they can be switched around to tune them into non-mutant minds. | 44 | 76 |
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ELI5: How does the emotion of fear lead to the emotion of anger? | Emotions are like shortcuts to certain behaviors that are meant to help you deal with the situations that trigger them.
Fear helps keep you safe in potentially dangerous situations by encouraging behaviors meant to extract you from those situations.
Anger is a response to unresolvable problems that can help you break through whatever barriers are in the way preventing you from figuring out a solution to the problem, which is why people are often more motivated to act in general and more likely to resort to reckless or violent behaviors when angry.
If you are unable to resolve the situation that is making you afraid, this can result in an anger response. | 46 | 52 |
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[DC] While Batman is high tech, the DCU is so much further ahead that he should be far more advanced. Why isn't he using reverse engineered alien tech or at least not using Wayne Enterprises to research as much of it as possible to adapt for humanity and himself? | Based on Batman's let's say...proclivity for planning and control, he likes to reduce unknown variables. Sure he might be able to reverse engineer an alien device and integrate it into his arsenal but there's always the chance he may miss something. You don't want to be in the middle of a fight against Man-Bat and randomly have your alien powered tech stop working due to some unforseen extraterrestrial stack flow error. Batman needs to be one with his arsenal of tools to preform at his peak, and to him that includes end to end control of his gadgets from R&D to implementation. | 65 | 79 |
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By what method do humans generate random numbers? | I mean attempt to generate random numbers, since what they generate isn't very random. | With numbers in general (not necessarily random numbers), we remember numbers based on availability. If you're around a certain number more often you're more likely to think of them first. The numbers that would pop into your head are numbers that are more available to you at the time.
This follows a general pattern in retrieval of information from long-term memory into working memory, in that we retrieve information based on their associations with other information. You are more likely to remember information you learned in the same surroundings you learned it; you are more likely to remember something if you are primed with something related to it.
[Speculation warning] Perhaps we associate certain numbers with being "random". Given that we are primed to think of random numbers, we remember those numbers associated with being random (rather than creating a novel set of numbers from scratch.) | 24 | 65 |
ELI5: How does a multinational company pay it's taxes? | Things obviously get a bit more complicated than this, but at the basic level, they usually have separate subsidiaries operating each country (though we may consider the EU a single country for this purpose). Each subsidiary then has its own separate profits that it earns in the country it operates in, and it pays taxes on those profits. It may then send post-tax profits to the parent company or some other subsidiary. | 27 | 41 |
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A gallon of jet fuel burned creates 21 pounds of CO2. How can that be when jet fuel only weighs 6.8 lbs per gallon? | There should be an r/nostupidsciencequestions subreddit out there...
I never took a chemistry class, so maybe I'm missing something basic. Using the numbers from here: [https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2\_vol\_mass.php](https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php), I see that burning a gallon of jet fuel creates 21.1 pounds of Co2. But a gallon of jet fuel only weighs about 6.8 lbs/gal. I would think that the act of burning fuel and using the heat and pressure of the combustion would result in less total byproduct, not more than triple it. What am I missing? | A carbondioxide molecule consists of 1 carbon atom and 2 oxygen atoms. The carbon is provided by the fuel, while the oxygen atoms come from the surrounding air. Carbon has an atomic weight of 12, while oxygen has an atomic weight of 16. With the 2:1 ratio of oxygen to carbon in CO2, that means that ~73% of the mass of a CO2 molecule comes from oxygen.
In contrast, the mass of jet fuel comes primarily from carbon. The composition of jet fuel is not just a single molecule, so exact estimates of the fraction of mass attributable to carbon is difficult, but a large part of the mass comes from molecules that have a carbon-to-hydrogen ratio of something close to 2:1. With the atomic weight of hydrogen being 1, that gives us a very coarse estimate of about 92% of the mass in jet fuel coming from carbon.
So, to conclude: While jet fuel has almost all of its mass coming from carbon, the combustion product, CO2, has its mass dominated by oxygen. And this oxygen is supplied externally (typically from the surrounding air), which means that the mass of the combustion products of jet fuel can easily exceed the mass of the jet fuel itself. | 52 | 24 |
CMV: Mass unemployment created by robots replacing humans in the not-to-distant future may be positive for the general public | People are often voicing their concerns about robots making human workers largely obsolete, a scenario seen as beneficial for individual businesses but devastating to the population which may largely become unemployed. (/r/DarkFuturology is filled with these concerns for example.)
Generally the replacement of humans leads to increased efficiency as robots are more precise, don't need breaks etc. This means that theoretically the availability of resources and products should either remain or increase. In a socialised country with pre-existing welfare (or better yet, universal basic income), the population should still be able to maintain their current standards of living but with a decreased workload.
I can't imagine a future where every job within a country is replaced by robots, as some can only be done by humans (such as the arts, teaching, scientific research). These remaining jobs could be distributed amongst people in a way that only requires most people to work a few days a week. With proper governmental control, people can keep living as they do now but with less time spent working and more time relaxing, spent with family, engaging in hobbies etc. This may ultimately create a happier and healthier society within countries that can properly guide this shift.
tl;dr robots replacing most jobs is not dystopian but rather could create a happier society where people have to work less | I agree with the outcome of a Utopian society where people work at what they wish, have machines to cater to their every need, and be a generally happier and healthier society. However, the issue is getting there.
I believe there are two scenarios: one as you explained is a peaceful transition to this, the other is less peaceful.
Right now rich/powerful people rely on poor people both to produce things for them, and also keep them safe. What if we invent autonomous security which can defend your entire estate with lethal force, without the need for humans? You would care less about placating the poor people, because you are safe. If we achieve full-autonomous production and security, there is a real risk that the rich/powerful may choose to not share their wealth and instead exterminate the poor who are ultimately leaching off of them in the form of tax/UBI. | 29 | 62 |
CMV: The sexual aspect of bachelor parties should be considered unfaithful behavior in a traditional, monogamous relationship. | I am perfectly okay with the idea of a potential future fiancé going out with close friends to have one last wild weekend and am all for that. What I don’t understand is how other women are so accepting and open about the sexual nature of what happens at bachelor parties in the views of a traditionally monogamous relationship. Even if the bachelor doesn’t specifically have sex with another woman while away (which I would absolutely consider cheating), it seems like the traditional lap dance should be considered unfaithful behavior as well (within the confines of a monogamy).
I believe most people would say it isn’t unfaithful because
A) the dancer is simply doing her job
B) the man usually isn’t allowed to touch the dancer himself.
This seems like an awfully thin line to draw between having fun and being unfaithful. The man is certainly still being physically pleasured here. If a guy in a relationship were to go out and have another girl grind on him, it would generally be considered cheating even though there is no emotional involvement. Why is a lap dance any different? I admire women who can be so okay about. Personally however, I would feel hurt thinking about the man I am about to marry receiving such sexual pleasure from another woman especially since sex is so important and special to me in a relationship.
I also want to acknowledge bachelorette parties in this argument. To me, the sexual aspect of bachelorette parties (male strippers) seems more trivial. I imagine it’s more like entertainment and about the performance. I don’t feel that there is nearly as much sexual pleasure derived from watching male strippers or even the bachelorette getting a dance.
Lastly, it seems like people also rationalize the behavior because it’s “the last time to have some fun before you’re stuck with one woman forever”. To me, this just seems like a terrible and sad mentality to have right before entering married life. Perhaps I’m wrong and this isn’t really the mentality behind all bachelor parties especially when the engaged man is (hopefully) very happy to be getting married.
Although I have never been engaged (I’m in my early 20s), I’ve been in several happy and committed relationships and don’t generally consider myself to be insecure or “the jealous type”. I’ve never felt irrationally possessive about my significant other. This is just me thinking ahead and imagining my self in the fiancée position wondering what it would be like. I’d like to hear your experiences.
| At the end of the day, faithfulness is keeping the trust and agreement of your partner. Unfaithfulness is breaking that trust. If a person's partner doesn't consider a lapdance cheating, then within their relationship, it isn't.
Some couple's consider looking at pornography to be cheating. Some are open to their spouse having sex with other people. Everyone draws their own lines. | 48 | 60 |
CMV: "Feminism" shouldn't be used when talking gender rights, "Equalism" should be used. | So, hear me out on this one, I am a little biased being a guy but I think its wrong to use Feminism when talking gender rights, it feels less inclusive to men and other people who don't identify as man or woman, I don't have any problem with gender rights, in fact I love what its being done in many places and couldn't be happier, but, the word feels more like an empowerment to just women when it should represents everybody, it is suposed to promote same opportunities regardless of gender and empower equal treatment. With gender roles in current society and double standards, disavowing the word in favor of Equalism in today's society is seen as ignorant and sexsist by some people. I just feel like its a bit hipocrtical to say its everybody when the name only features part of the people. I hope I don't come across badly its just what I believe in.
| Feminism comes from the stance that women are typically the most disadvantaged gender in society, and while gender equality is the goal, the focus to reach that goal is mainly raising women up to the same level as men. It's not quite "Equalism" or Egalitarianism as it's usually referred to, as the overall fight of Feminism is against issues described to affect women- access to sexual health clinics, abortions, birth control, domestic violence, rape, hiring, wages, etc...
The reason you get backlash to referring to egalitarianism rather than feminism, or MRA's etc... is because women are seen as the disadvantaged class of people in society, and discussions of issues which even if credibly do affect men are seen as distractions from the more pressing concerns affecting the more disadvantaged people. You can argue the merit of that, and whether arguments can go on concurrently, etc... but it does mean that distinctly Feminism and Egalitarianism approach the same issue of equality from potentially different perspectives. | 50 | 65 |
[Star Wars] What does Emperor Palpatine do all day? | You know besides crushing the rebels, exploring the dark side etc. | Most of the top-level daily business of the Empire is taken care of by the Imperial Ruling Council, who are His Majesty's most trusted advisors. Some members of the council, like Sate Pestage, were aware of his dual identity as Darth Sidious since long before the Jedi found out.
It's still a big galaxy, though. Palpatine from time to time will tour his domain examining regional issues, which always has a magnificent effect on local military morale and productivity. He may also seek out the most sacred sites of historical Sith to taste their power, and bask in his victory at fallen Jedi temples. More than once he's gone off on a secret trip for no reason other than to mess with Vader.
During his downtime, he has a harem of concubines, and often gets rather rough with the short Twi'lek girl he calls "my little green friend". | 94 | 77 |
[Post-Doc] Would it be bad to leave a lab before fellowship is awarded? | My PI wants me to submit a grant in a few weeks that, if awarded, would cover my salary for the next two years. However, I have been miserable and I'm searching for a job right now. Would it reflect poorly on me to submit this grant and then leave before its awarded? | I don’t have answers, but some questions that might help you think through this...
* Would the grant follow you to a new location?
* If it does, would it require you to keep working with your PI on this project?
* Could you write the grant so it let you stay at the current place but didn’t require you to include your PI?
* Have you looked up rules about withdrawing your grant application?
* Edit: If the job would be changing careers (leaving academia), would it even matter if it looked bad to withdraw the grant application? | 14 | 22 |
ELI5: How do sports stat sites calculate odds to win? | I see these graphs on sports stat sites that calculate the odds that the Golden State Warriors will go 73-9. How are these odds calculated? | Though historic analysis of the teams, situation, and betting patterns. These are payouts, and the job of the odds setter is to set the payouts do there is the same amount of money on both sides. That way regardless of who wins, the book collects the vig or fee for placing the bet. As bets become lopsided on one side, the payouts will move to induce more betting on the other side. You'll often see this recorded as where the book opened and where it is now. | 11 | 36 |
ELI5: How come an individual's appearance seems to "change" depending on your feelings towards the said individual? | Eg. When you fall in love with someone, they seem to look prettier/more handsome than how everyone else perceives the individual, and then they return back to "normal" once you're over him/her. | Attraction is more than just finding someone to be physically beautiful. As your desires in a mate mature the non-physical criteria start to carry more weight. As you get to know someone deeply you become aware of all of their various qualities in a way that outsiders do not. Ideally you are very attracted to many of those qualities. | 20 | 85 |
ELI5: How do we make water safe to drink? (Including removing the chemicals used make the water "clean") | Several ways:
Desalination: turn water into steam. Salt and dirt doesn't become steam. Steam is clean. Turn steam back into water. Water is clean and not salty.
Reverse osmosis: force water through a tiny screen. Dirt and germs are too big and stay behind.
Distillation: pretty much the same as desalination except you start with not-salty water. Minor differences that a 5 year old won't grasp.
Filtration: similar to reverse osmosis except use a can of charcoal and other stuff instead of a tiny screen. Minor differences that a 5 year old won't grasp.
Chemical treatment: kill the bad stuff by adding bad-stuff poison.
Boiling: kill the bad stuff by cooking it. | 35 | 21 |
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Le Chatelier's principle - How do the reactants "know" that the concentration of products has changed? | If you get rid of product as it is made, then the equilibrium will shift to further favor products, right? Why does having lower concentration of products make the reaction more likely to happen? | No given molecule "knows" anything - you're right about this. The thing is that every molecule in a reaction has a probability of being in the first or second state.
When you reach equilibrium, that's when the probability of forming the reactant or product (state 1 or state 2) balance. Molecules in state 1 have a probability of converting to state 2, while molecules in state 2 have a probability of converting back to state 1. When these rates balance out, the system is at dynamic equilibrium.
This doesn't mean that interconversion isn't happening, but that it's happening at balanced rates and the *net change* is zero.
Le Chatelier's principle addresses what happens when you remove molecules in state 2 from the solution. This can be by many means, a common one being by a phase change - molecules in state 2 are much more likely to evaporate or precipitate into gas or solid.
If you remove a bunch of molecules in state 2, then you still have just as many molecules in state 1, which have the same probability of converting to state 2. But you now have *less* molecules in state 2 that can convert to state 1. As a result, you get a **net** conversion towards state 2. If you continue to remove state 2 molecules, more molecules will convert to state 2 until they are at the concentration where conversion back from state 2 balances the probability of conversion from 1 to 2.
This works in reverse as well, if you add a bunch of state 2, and have more state 2 molecules than are normally generated by conversion from state 1, you will have a net production of state 1, pushing the equilibrium toward the production of more state 2 to balance the rates of conversion again. | 10 | 16 |
ELI5: Why does my dog pick up sticks in her mouth and carry them around? | Doesn't it taste bad? | When dogs were first domesticated a long, long time ago they were primarily used for hunting for quite some time. After a few millennia of evolution we bred a lot of hunting based instincts into them, one of those being retrieving prey for their master. Basically, when your dog brings a stick to you it's simulating bringing a hunted animal to you. If the dog wants you to throw it, it's mimicking it's natural impulse to chase after prey. If the dog wants to play tug of war with it, it simulates the prey fighting back or something trying to steal it away. (Fun fact, if your dog ever violently shakes it head back and forth it's trying to break the prey's neck) In summary, playing fetch or tug of war mimics the actions we selectively bred dogs to accomplish and gratifies them. | 73 | 57 |
ELI5: What algorithms do programmers use to produce "randomness" | I know that it is impossible to make something truly random, but what algorithms do most people use to do so? | There are different possibilities: There are so called "hash functions". You put a number in, you get a number out. The important thing: if you put two close values in, you get two vastly different outputs. If you use now the system time, you can get pseudo-random numbers.
Another way is that your Operating System helps you. A computer can "gather" randomness by user input (what does the user type? how fast? how does he move the mouse?) and hard drives (how long does it take to read?). This is much better randomness, as it can't be predicted by software how you type. Then, when the randomness is gathered, the Operating System allows programs to extract random numbers. | 13 | 25 |
[Harry Potter] Why does the Wizardkind organize itself along modern muggle nation-states boundaries? | (TLDR at bottom just in case).
So, why exactly does Wizardkind do this? We see it in their governments, education systems, even sports. For starters, there aren’t there many of their kind, or at least who end up integrated in their society (Hogwarts has 1000 students at any given time in a country of 60 million), so they're condemning themselves to a lack of critical mass for many activities by dividing themselves that way.
In any case, it appears strange given how dismissive even the most tolerant Wizards are of muggle affairs that the Ministry of Magic appears to have some allegiance to the muggle British government. I guess I could be convinced that with "English" or "British" being national identities which have existed for centuries, that muggle-born Wizards have sort of pulled their magical society in that direction. But other examples are not as easy to explain.
I mean, we see a Wizard President of Germany in the latest Fantastic Beasts film. Why the hell would Wizardkind arrange their institutions around such a "recent" muggle country? Shouldn't there be centuries-old Prussian, Bavarian, etc. organizations unlikely to disband due to muggle wars? Would the Magical Congress of the United States sensibly identify with the United States, while simultaneously having an African-American female leader in the 1920s? Why not call themselves the "Magical Congress of North America"?
Perhaps the most egregious example is seen in the Quidditch World Cup in the Harry Potter series. There we can see the flags of Uganda, Kenya, and other recent post-colonial states. I just can't imagine the pre-existing magical societies of those lands identifying with these states. Why isn't there a Baganda Quidditch team or a Bantu Quidditch team? There apparently was an old Flanders team, why would it care to merge with Belgium? There is apparently a modern Moldovan team, why would it ever separate from the Romanian team?
TLDR: It's almost as if Wizardkind looks at United Nations and FIFA member states countries to periodically reorganize their institutions. | It’s just easier and make sense. Remember that wizards and witches used to live with non-magical folks side by side before they made their own world so, for example, England has been a thing for thousands of years. To make something different from that would just make things complicated. Kinda how when the US became independent and rather than rename English things, they were like, “well, it been working so far….” Also, it’s easier to govern as they do have to work with their non-magical political counterparts in matters of security. | 57 | 80 |
Do any philosophers challenge the idea that an argument that's both valid and sound is necessarily true? | One of the first things I learnt in philosophy was that *validity* means the conclusion must follow from the premises, and *soundness* means an argument is both valid and that its premises are true, but I want to know if there are any philosophers who accept that an agument can be valid and sound and yet, in some sense, not true.
I suppose I'm thinking along the lines of Gettier problems and those who think that you can have a belief that is both justified and true, and yet still not have knowledge. Do any philosophers think something analgous to this exists for validity and soundness? It doesn't seem plausible to me, but then there's a lot of philosophy that also doesn't seem intuitive to me and yet still seems to be right.
Thank you, lovely people. | I don't think so since, in a sense, validity and soundness are technical terms within the field of logic. They aren't broad concepts like "justice" or "goodness" that can be interpreted intuitively, they've been defined in a very specific way for a very specific purpose. Let's take the definition of soundness:
*An argument is sound if and only if it is a valid inference with premises that are true.*
This means that the conclusion of a sound argument is true by the very definition of soundness. There's no wiggle room in that definition; if we don't think it's right then we have simply changed the definition of soundness or the concepts that comprise it. | 133 | 113 |
Are there polynomial equations that are equal to basic trig functions? | Are there polynomial functions that are equal to basic trig functions (i.e: y=cos(x), y=sin(x))? If so what are they and how are they calculated? Also are there any limits on them (i.e only works when a<x<b)? | It's possible to express these functions as Taylor series, which are sums of polynomial terms of increasing power, getting more and more accurate.
(working in radians here)
For the sine function, it's sin(x)~=x-x^3 /6 + x^5 /120 - x^7 /5040... Each term is an odd power, divided by the factorial of the power, alternating positive and negative.
For cosine it's even powers instead of odd: cos(x)~=1-x^2 /2 +x^4 /24 ...
With a few terms, these are pretty accurate over the normal range that they are calculated for (0 to 360 degrees or x=0 to 2pi). However, with a finite number of terms they are never completely accurate. The smaller x is, the more accurate the series approximation is.
You can also fit a range of these functions to a polynomial of arbitrary order, which is what calculators use to calculate values efficiently (more efficient than Taylor series). | 564 | 891 |
Writing while you read | Currently I am writing my master thesis and am struggling to make progress, I have been told its best to write while you read but I have never really understood exactly how you do that. I guess it means plugging related info into the various chapters as you find them useful but to do that you really require some sort of outline for what it is you are doing in those various chapters. It is here where I continually find myself in a dilemma, because how does one construct an outline when the sense of what it should entail is still unclear? | What has worked for me is to not think of the writing as having to go into your thesis. It's more about reflecting upon what you read and writing down the things about the text that you find important (ie a summary of relevant parts) your own (critical) reflection of it, and any connections you can make to other texts you've been reading as well as your own topic. It helps you navigate the literature that exists and get some (critical) thoughts in line that make it easier to understand where your own work is going. A lot of that writing might never end up going into your thesis! But a lot more than you initially think probably will, because writing helps you process what you're reading and develop your thoughts/ideas, which in turn helps you understand where your thesis is going to go. | 21 | 21 |
ELI5: Churches, chapels, cathedrals and basillicas- what's the difference between them all? Is it denominational? Architectural? Size based? | A church is a place of Christian worship. A cathedral is a type of important church where you'll find a bishop, who is in charge of many priests. A basilica is a Catholic church which has been granted that title by the Pope because it has some special historical or architectural significance.
A chapel is a smaller place of prayer which is either part of a larger church, or which is attached to some non-religious institution: for example, a place of worship on a military base is a chapel, and the cleric in charge of it is called a chaplin. | 31 | 24 |
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CMV: Hard-shell tacos don't make any sense | Here are the problems I have with crunchy tacos:
* I have to turn my head sideways in order to take a bite without spilling the ingredients.
* It inevitably falls apart, meaning I have to have a plate ready to catch the filling, and then I have to either use a fork or pick up the loose ingredients with my fingers.
Am I missing something? Is there some trick to eating them? Do crunchy tacos have some appeal that overcomes these shortcomings?
If given the ingredients to make a hard-shell taco, I can't think of any reason not to break up the shell and make a salad instead.
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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!* | They make perfect sense, if you're a chain restaurant owner or grocery store owner in the 1940s or 1950s. Better shelf life, more convenient to fill quickly, and people do seem to like the crunch, which is why the authentic Mexican restaurants started deep-frying the corn tortillas in the first place.
If decent preservatives haven't been invented yet, plastic-sealed food packaging hasn't been invented yet, there's no sizable Mexican community near you (and thus nobody making large quantities of tortillas locally), and you're trying to run a restaurant that serves tacos? Good luck getting enough fresh tortillas to keep your doors open.
Why do they persist? Some people like the crunch. Plus, they're still cheaper. | 488 | 1,127 |
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. | I've been reading a lot of physics books recently out of curiosity and interest in physics (I'm a compsci major). I was wondering if anyone could explain to me the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I get what it's saying about how if one property is measured to high precision the others can't be. I'm confused as to why this is true.
**Edit: Thanks for all the explanations. They have made things clearer for me.** | There are multiple ways to approach this.
The most intuitive approach is you ask how you would simultaneously measure both for some quantum system (where this principle becomes important). E.g., if you want to measure an electron's position, how do you do it? You bounce photons off of it and measure the photons locations in a detector. Well to measure its location to a very high precision, you need photons with very short wavelengths, and those impart higher energy/momentum to the the electron (for a photon shorter wavelength means higher energy), making you uncertain of its momentum.
Now, the physicist approach is that the mathematical underpinnings of quantum mechanics have it as such that position and momentum are conjugate variables of each other. E.g., there's position space and its Fourier transform is momentum space. From this foundation you can derive the uncertainty principle (e.g., momentum is equal to the derivative the wavefunction in position space with respect to position (p ~ d/dx); and position is a equal to the derivative of the wavefunction in momentum space with respect to momentum x ~ d/dp; hence they don't commute and in the minimum uncertainty they can have (sigma_x sigma_px = hbar/2 is if the wavefunction is Gaussian shaped).).
Now that may sound nonsensical if you don't have the math background, but that's how physicists think of it (in the framework of QM which explains lots of phenomena and has been very well tested). To simplify to non-mathematical language, when we have a particle (like an electron), before measuring its position or momentum, it doesn't have a definite position or momentum. It has a continuous probability function for both that are related by a transformation (e.g., the function might tell us it has a 10% chance of having a position between x=1cm and x=1.1cm, and and 20% chance of having a momentum if measured between p=0 kg m/s and 0.1 kg m/s). These transformation will take particles with very narrow probability range for having a momentum in a small range and make it so they have a wide range of position. | 13 | 16 |
[General Fantasy] What are the defining characteristics of humans in comparison to other races? | Elves are wise and stuffy, dwarves are skilled and extroverted, orcs are strong and combative.
What are humans? | In most traditional fantasy, humans have wider areas of expertise, and are more prone to adventure.
Dwarves, for example, are great at stonework and forging, while Elves are great at arts and arcana. Humans aren't the *best* in any of those areas, but you have humans that are excellent stone cutters, excellent smiths, excellent artists, and excellent mages.
D&D represents this by giving humans a +1 to every skill, while the other races get a +2, but only to certain skills.
Humans are more prone to adventuring, as well. Tolkien's Hobbits like to live quiet, content lives in their Shire, Elves will fight to protect their lands, and Dwarves will fight to protect their mines, but adventuring for the sake of adventure is rare in all three races. Humans, on the other hand, founded the Rangers.
This is also true in *Star Trek*. The Federation is comprised of thousands of species on hundreds of worlds, but humans make up the bulk of Starfleet's exploratory missions.
Humans are typically short lived compared to other species. Elves will live for a millenia, dwarves for centuries, and humans for eighty years, give or take. In fantasy, this often manifests as an urgency to wring as much as possible out of the short lives they've been given.
It also makes humans more reactionary. If a Big Bad Evil Guy sets up shop in the town next door, an Elf might shrug and wander off for a decade or two until the whole thing blows over. Humans don't have that luxury. | 73 | 53 |
ELI5: Why do American high schools put so much emphasis on extra curricular activities? | Because getting into colleges -- especially if you're looking at specific programs, really prestigious schools -- is a competitive progress.
Let's take Harvard, for example. You're this massive ivy league school with endless in applicants. Let's say 10,000 of them have 4.0 GPAs (the highest grade you can get without honors classes/weighted GPAs). Well, you can't accept 10,000 students as an incoming class of freshmen. So how do you differentiate the students? By the stuff they did outside of school. Do they show motivation and interest in succeeding outside of the classroom? What of your character can you see but what they've been doing? Who has already proven to some extent that they can be successful out in the real world? | 153 | 194 |
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ELI5: how are hot-air balloons navigated? | Aviators weather reports will provide anticipated wind speed and direction at different altitudes, so to some extent you can control which prevailing wind you are in by changing altitude. In general though, you are entirely at the mercy of the wind, so ballon journeys are hops in a single direction planned in advance in accordance with the wind direction. | 28 | 24 |
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How in love do I have to be with my dissertation topic? | Coursework is complete. Working on the first draft of my dissertation proposal. Finally admitting to myself that I am not crazy about the topic. But I have support from my advisor, who I trust and who wants me to succeed.
I feel like I need to just think of this as an assignment and get it done so that I can get to the next stage of academia. Is that what most people do? | You don't have to be head over heels, but the subject should interest you enough to keep you digging deeply over the course of several years so that you produce original research that makes a contribution to your field. This is not so much an assignment as a topic that is intended by your advisor to give you room to flourish, and if you don't foresee that happening, you should definitely talk to her/him before the proposal goes any further. Keep in mind that your dissertation will be the area in which you become the expert, and on which you will build in the following stages.
Also, if you don't love the topic now, you may end up hating it in the coming years. Writing a dissertation is a long slog that requires persistence, and it's best if you find the topic inspiring so that the low moments are few rather than frequent. | 45 | 49 |
CMV: News Sites Should Be Banned From Using Clickbait Headlines | Very simply, it's annoying reading a headline that overstates or clickbait's its reader into reading an honestly boring or mundane story. In a perfect world, a news headline would work like a name for a thesis paper; a rough amalgamation of all the important details. If you're writing a paper about some new climate change research, have the research company in the name, and a summarization of their findings. For example: Climate-Initiative has recorded a new world-record temp. of 140 Degrees in Death Valley. Boom. If you want to know more about how they recorded the temperature or death valley's history with high temps, you read the article.
The only issue I see with this is that, at least in the U.S., due to the first amendment, you would have to be very tricky in how you handle it. | >you would have to be very tricky in how you handle it.
This is the main issue. How do you differentiate between "clickbait" and not clickbait? You'd need some sort of mechanism for deciding this which would inevitably be abused. Alternatively, you could use our current legal system, but that would take a lot of time and energy to manage. | 29 | 38 |
In multiple linear regression, how is it possible that multiple predictors are strongly correlated with the dependent variable but not with each other? | This is very counterintuitive to me. If X and Y are the independent variables and Z is the dependent, then we know that X strongly tends to move together with Z, and that Y also strongly tends to move together with Z, yet somehow X and Y don't move together at all?
In my mind this automatically leads to multicollinearity, yet clearly my thinking is wrong since this doesn't happen in practice. | Another example. On a dating app, you want to know how much one person will like the other one. You have date of the eye color and the age. Both are very important, but they age and eye color are not correlated at all.
And actually, this is a behavior you want! This will mean they completely add new information that explains the dependent variable, meaning that there is no repetition of information. If to the previous variables we add to the eye color and age, if they are above 18, this does not add any information at all and it is a function of the age. | 20 | 29 |
ELI5: Without the context of the English language/alphabet, is there any meaningful distinction between "short vowels" and "long vowels" phonologically? | If so, what is it? And if not, how did English vowel letters end up working the way they do now? | There is a linguistic concept called vowel length, which refers to vowels as being long and short, that has to do with duration of the vowel sound (or, really, the perception of the duration), but that concept is entirely different from the English gradeschool concept of long and short vowels.
In English, long and short vowels are really just two distinct sounds that happen to be represented by the same letters. There are rules (often broken) that imply which sound a letter makes in that context, but the terms "long" and "short" themselves don't seem to have any particular basis. | 20 | 19 |
Why should getting a health insurance ever be a profitable decision for the consumer, when the profitability of all insurance companies depends on paying less on claims than whatever they bill in premiums? | I get the value of insurance for farmers and merchants because it amortizes breakage over millions of people over decades, so one sunk ship or one bad harvest don't drive people to bankruptcy. But health insurance seems different.
For me to benefit from health insurance, I should get more in healthcare value than any dollar value I lose in my monthly premium. But for the insurance company to benefit from my subscription, they should deliver less healthcare value than the dollar value I pay to them + overhead + profit margins. And that's assuming all insurances companies act in good faith and pay what they promise and in time. And if you count the penalties against pre-exsiting conditions, it seem like health insurance can only pay off if you will suffer from unexpected health conditions after signing the contract, which is a really poor way of "turning profit".
So why should insurance ever be more affordable than paying out of pocket? It seems like insurance is a gamble. You bet you're going to get sicker than what you pay for, and the insurance company bets you're going to be healthier than what you pay. Being that any bet the insurance company makes against you (anything they quote you is bet they feel confident making) is backed by more data and analytics than you will ever be able to match them. Sure some people can profit, but in practical terms, the house always comes out on top. So why is it ever beneficial to have a health insurance? | Consumers are assumed to be loss-averse, so their utility from losses and gains are assymetric, as such they're willing to pay a premium to avoid the possibility of a loss.
Let's say the expected value of your annual health-care costs are $1,000, but could be zero or could be $100,000. Depending on the shape of your individual utility function, it could be reasonable to pay $1,200 per year to avoid the possibility being bankrupted by the $100,000 bill.
The problem with health insurance though, is you have asymmetric information, leading to adverse selection i.e. if you're healthy and unlikely to claim, you're less likely to buy insurance than someone who knows they're sick. Insurance companies respond by pricing the insurance to cover the claims of sick people, which makes insurance even less attractive for healthy people, setting off a vicious cycle.
In order to function effectively, insurance markets need the probability of buying insurance to be independent from the probability of a claim. Hence, auto insurance works fairly efficiently, as it’s mandatory, as does property insurance, where there isn’t the same degree of asymmetric information. | 118 | 138 |
[Deathnote] If you had a Lifenote which was the polar opposite of a Deathnote, what would it's rules be, how would it work and what could you do with it? | **Rules of the Life Note**
1. The human whose name is written in this note shall not die *from a particular cause of death.*
2. This note will not take effect unless the writer has the person's face in their mind when writing his/her name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected.
3. If the cause of death is written within the next 40 seconds of writing the person's name, it will *not* happen.
4. If the cause of death is not specified, the person will simply be restored to perfect health.
5. After writing the cause of death, details of the death should be written in the next 6 minutes and 40 seconds. | 35 | 42 |
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Eli5 How does text to speech work? Do they get the people voicing the "speech part" to say a lot of words or is it a different way all together? | Depends of how advanced the text to speech is. In the early days of text to speech they only recorded sounds like "Ch" and "ee" combining them to make the words, The result was sloppy. These days they voice whole words by getting the voice actors to read whole sentences, like from a book and put that into an AI. The voice actor for Alexa spent weeks to months reading out loud and recording it. The voice actors try to read with little to no emotion yet still fluid speech so when the AI does need to chop up a word it can without it sounding strange. | 21 | 29 |
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[Spider-Man] How are superheroes like Spider-Man so strong without also having muscles that would allow so? Shouldn't Spider-Man with his strength be at least five times the size of a normal human from a biological view? | The molecular structure of his body is slightly altered to increase it's strength. IRL, the average person only used around 25% of their full muscle strength because using any more on a regular basis would splinter their bones. Spidey not only had his bones strengthened to allow him to tap into his full strength, but his muscle fibres also adopted a stronger structure, giving him much greater strength and durability than he would have otherwise. | 55 | 37 |
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ELI5: Discrete Cosine Transforms | When you want to compress a series of data (say, a sound recording) you can look for patterns in the data, and just record the patterns instead of the original measurements.
DCT describes data as the sum of a series of waves (cosine functions) vibrating at different frequencies. This turns out to be a great way to describe sounds using just a small set of numbers. So it's used in audio compression. It's also used in video compression, since pictures also tend to have patterns. | 15 | 80 |
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What happens to breast implants after you die? So they decompose with the body or will they last with your skeleton for thousands of years? | The materials for medical implants are chosen because they are inert and non-biodegradable. They will not decompose when the biological parts of the body do.
Future archaeologists who excavate our graveyards will find many bodies that still have pacemakers, artificial hips, titanium plates, and, yes, breast implants.
Modern saline implants have a valve, which could leak and let the fluid out, but the silicone implant capsule itself would remain. | 46 | 53 |
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ELI5: How come when you crack your knuckles underwater, it is incredibly loud, but when you try and scream underwater, the sound is muffled to a whimper? | Water transmits sounds quite well, so if an action vibrates the water to make a sound, you'll be able to hear it clearly in the local area. However, sound does not cross mediums very well. When you're trying to talk (or scream) underwater, the sound is being generated by vibrating air in your vocal chords. When this hits the water just outside your mouth, only a little of that energy is transmitted into producing underwater sound waves. The rest is lost, reflecting back into your mouth. | 121 | 57 |
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Why is it that the smaller and less intelligent something is the less we value its life? For example people would spare a wolf before they spare 50 beetles. | Ik the basic answer to this question but if someone could give a good in depth answer that would be great!! | Some utilitarians, such as John Stuart Mill, make qualitative distinctions in the ability to suffer that affect the ethics of an action. Since wolves can suffer to a greater extent than beetles, aggregate suffering would be greatest if an equal number of wolves were harmed as if the same number of beetles were harmed. | 68 | 195 |
ELI5: What causes the temporary burn mark left in the eye after looking at a bright light? | Cells in your eye are responsible for reporting light to the brain through changes in pigment. If they receive too much light, they use up all the pigment and need a moment to reset to their natural state. During that time period, they report inaccurate information. | 14 | 18 |
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In diagrams where massive objects bend spacetime, what is depicted on the hight axis? | Take for example this picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/63/Spacetime_lattice_analogy.svg/1260px-Spacetime_lattice_analogy.svg.png
What is on the hight axis (z-axis) How should one interpret such a graph? Secondly, in animations like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GhkWuIDzpc, spacetime seems to bend "The other way"? what implications does that have? | These kinds of visualizations are meant to give you a rough idea what's going on, but shouldn't be taken too literally. In general relativity, spacetime is modeled as a curved manifold. A manifold is a space, roughly like the sheet in your picture, but it need not (and really should not) be thought of as existing inside some larger, ambient space. It can be defined purely in terms of the set of points it is comprised of, and the distances between these points. This information alone is enough to define notions like curvature, and (with some work) to build up the entire theory of general relativity.
Now, due to our cognitive limitations, it is difficult to visualize a curved manifold existing independently, so it is often useful to imagine it as living inside a larger space. For many purposes this is useful, but it can also be misleading. For example, take a piece of paper and bend it into a U-shape. It now appears to have curvature, but this is really an artifact of the way it is "embedded" in flat, three dimensional space. One says that it has "extrinsic curvature" due to this embedding, but "intrinsically" it has no curvature; it is flat. In general relativity, since we don't talk about embeddings, only the manifold itself, only the "intrinsic curvature" is important.
A rubber sheet, like in your picture, does a little better - since the distance between points on the sheet can stretch, its "intrinsic curvature" can be made non-zero, and so one can really think of this as an example of a two-dimensional curved manifold. But the precise way in which it is embedded in three dimensions (and in particular the "height axis" you asked about) is basically irrelevant to its intrinsic curvature, and does not play a role in general relativity. | 387 | 1,461 |
What is the difference between proof and evidence? | Is proof always deductive and evidence always inductive? Or is it something else? | Context always matters, philosophy talks about a large amount of different topics, so if in doubt you should always try to figure out how a specific article or book use words. But if nothing else is specified there, a standard way to use those words is to say evidence for X if we mean anything that provides us with *some* reason to accept X, and proof for X if we mean something that establishes the truth of X.
On this account it makes sense to weigh evidence for and against X and it's completely intelligible to have evidence for and against X - some reasons to think X and some reasons to think not-X. However, it usually doesn't make much sense to speak of proofs of X and disproofs of X at the same time.
> Is proof always deductive and evidence always inductive? Or is it something else?
Neither evidence nor proofs need to be arguments, so no. | 13 | 23 |
Why are we only looking for life, on planets with water? | What if there are forms of life which don't rely on water, that have adapted to completely different conditions
| Because water is one thing that is proven to be instrumental in the creation and survival of life. There could be any other compound-based life, but we're not sure. We ARE certain that water with the right situation can harbor life, so it just narrows down the search. We accept that life could form without water- we just don't have the time or resources to extensively study every single terrestrial planet for life. | 48 | 21 |
ELI5: What is the big deal about Google's privacy? Is it safe/smart to use? | Google provides a huge number of services for free. In order to do this, they make money by showing relevant ads when you search, check gmail, watch YouTube, etc. People are more likely to click ads relevant to them, so Google collects information about you when you use their services. For example, they might use your IP address or phone's GPS radio to figure out where you are, then show you ads for local businesses.
In fact, if you have an android phone and opt-in to Google Now, they will try to learn all sorts of things like where you work, where you live, what you search for, what sports teams you follow, what stocks you own, what flights you are about to take, and all sorts of things. They use this information to show you relevant information in Google Now before you ask for it, like automatically showing scores for a local sports team or telling you what gate your flight will be departing from.
People freak out about all this because it feels like a company knows way too much about them. While it's true companies like Google or Facebook collect data about everyone who uses their services, there isn't a human being sitting down and reading it. All this information is used in aggregate to make Google more money by providing you with more relevant information.
This isn't "unsafe" by any means, but if you are paranoid about companies knowing about you, don't use Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's been reported that Google and Facebook never search through people's personal information to look for illegal or suspicious activity. The only way these companies release their information to other people is if law enforcement forces them. Google has publicly stated they are just as concerned with organizations like the NSA snooping on their data, and have started encrypting more and more of their services. | 18 | 31 |
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CMV: White Supermacy/Privilege should be called Colonizer Supermacy/Preivlege. | * It's not a precise enough term(s). A more precise term would be colonizer supremacy or colonizer privilege. Those who find themselves within the power fueled privileged system are typically of colonizer descent.
* The current racial construct is outdated & broken. Yes race is a social construct, the latest data shows we are to genetically similar to be considered separate races.
The effects and experiences caused by the social construct are very real but there will be inherent negative effects if it was on a weak baseless foundation to begin with. Using the racial concept only upholds the the racial construct.
Yes those who colonized & their descendants enacted a system to maintain power based on human phenotype variation. Suffering stemming from the system still reverberate through society. Several routes have been taken to maintain power but we can not get stuck in these roads as they all lead back to the system.
* Power is not static. Many of those considered "white people" will be a minority in the not to distance future, will they still have the power? If there is unequal opposing forces power can work in the fashion of a pendulum. Power will not vanish it will transfer. Supremacy and privilege is not exclusive to color/phenotype/image so why focus on that?
An example would be the conflict in the Middle East.Through the centuries it's been 'Muslim privilege/supremacy or Jewish privilege/supremacy or whoever happens to take over and occupy the 'system'. This happens in a pendulum fashion.
* Using the term 'white' is just divisive, misses the point and takes focus off dismantling systems that can create supremacy & privilege.
Mark my words, if we don't meet these issues in the not to distant future you will be hearing calls of 'black/POC/latino/ Supremacy/privilege'.
This is about human equality and systems that impede it.
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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 privilege experienced is not because one can see in a split second that you are a colonialist or descended from colonialist. The privilege is experienced because one can see in a split second that you are white. White is the more precise term.
Minority status: There are many areas where whites are in the minority already, yet still retain or have retained power. Obviously apartheid in South Africa is a historical example. One very, very contemporary example is Ferguson, Missouri, which is two-thirds black, yet the police force is 90 to 94 percent (accounts vary) white. | 17 | 30 |
ELI5: Why do "bugs" or "glitches" happen even when accomplished and successful studios develop a video game? | EDIT:
Perhaps I should've asked the question differently.
I totally get that people are imperfect and make mistakes. I'm more interested in understanding *why* a glitch happens, even when professionals do the coding.
Is there something that is just inherent in coding that creates glitches?
Do different parts of the code conflict? Why is it so challenging to identify those glitches, even for professionals? | Imagine code like a set of rules.
Lets say that you run a business, and you decide to upgrade your security/employee-management. You put finger print locks on the doors, so your building is more secure, and also so you can see when employees arrive and leave based on when they used the fingerprint lock on the front door. Now things will be so much easier!
A week later, you notice one of your employees has missed every single day of work. You demand an explanation and he swears he was here, and his co-workers attest to that.
So what happened? Well, it's because there is a ***bug*** in your system. He carpools to work, and walks in with is co-worker. His co-worker had been opening the door with the fingerprint lock, and he walks in behind them.
You failed to take that situation into account when making your rules, and so, your system had more employees in the building than you thought. This is a bug.
___
But no matter, easy solution! Just add a new rule that each employee must open and shut the door individually. Bug fixed!
Another week goes by, and you notice that for one of the employees the numbers don't add up. He entered the building more times than he left. Well that doesn't make sense at all. What happened?
You look at the security footage and see that on two separate occasions, he opened the door to enter, but before going in he realized he forgot something in his car. He let the door shut, went to his car, and then came into the building. That means the records show that he opened the door from the outside more times than he opened it from the inside, explaining why the numbers don't match.
Your mistake here was assuming that just because an employee opened the door, that they went through it. That oversight caused a bug.
___
As you can imagine, there are a lot more rules in a videogame, and thus the potential for a lot more bugs. A lot of situations that you should have realized would happen, but failed to, creating a bug. And with games the faulty information caused by one bug can cause other bugs, which can cause even more bugs, which can hide where the problem started. And sometimes you get a bug once, can't figure out what you did to cause it, and so you don't know what rules need fixing. You know it's there, you saw it happen, but as hard as you try you can't recreate it.
**TL;DR** Bugs happen when a programmer fails to account for every possibility. | 258 | 182 |
ELI5: How is it that when multiple animators are making something, they all have the same style? | The clone wars for example, all the episodes have the same style, with the only change being effort/time spent going up. | The same way classical musicians can play the same Beethoven piece in the same style—they’re pros who are good enough at their craft that they can form their art into whatever is necessary.
Computer animation is another step away, as there are literal computer animation algorithms that perform actions for characters. The “animators” in this sense are quite literally programmers who are assigning commands to the animation software.
Even still, “Style” and “form” are constantly monitored during the animation process, and always double-checked to conform to creative standards. | 25 | 34 |
If surface area doesn't effect friction, why do racing cars have fatter tires? | "Although a larger area of contact between two surfaces would create a larger source of frictional forces, it also reduces the pressure between the two surfaces for a given force holding them together. Since pressure equals force divided by the area of contact, it works out that the increase in friction generating area is exactly offset by the reduction in pressure; the resulting frictional forces, then, are dependent only on the frictional coefficient of the materials and the FORCE holding them together. "
Affect* | Friction is approximately independent of surface area for two hard, smooth surfaces. However, this is not the case for the interface between rubber and asphalt, where a fat tire will indeed give you greater friction. | 27 | 21 |
[Star Wars] What are some typical middle-class jobs in highly developed regions of the Republic? | I want to know more about the structure of everyday life for normal civilians. How is health care governed? Is there social welfare, minimum basic income? Are there 'sentient-being' rights of some kind? What does the economy look like (for instance on Coruscant)? It's hard for me to imagine what a civilization with droids needs from people/aliens in terms of employment. | If by "highly developed" you mean mid-to-upper levels of Coruscant, from current records we can assume that it's fairly similar to metropolitan life throughout history. Although solar mirrors around Coruscant provide ample supplies of power and fresh water (from melting glaciers), most sentients still need to work for a living. Some middle-class individuals work in hospitality or the restaurant business; pilots of all kinds ply the hyperspace lanes, working in bulk shipping and transport, and others found gainful employment in the Republic's civil administration and intelligence sectors.
The Holonet also allows for wide dissemination of millions of news programs, dramas, and other programming employing many in media and production. Although some complained about the rise of mega-corporations during the late Republic, a fear made manifest during the Clone Wars, the Commerce Guild, Techno Union, and their ilk employed legions of bureaucrats, engineers, and other functionaries as befitting a robust society. Of course, massive variance existed due to the wide array of species and cultures present in the Republic era. | 27 | 39 |
I believe a Country should always be called by its native name. CMV | For example:
I believe the word "Japan" should not exist. Instead it should be called by its name it Japanese, but written phonetically. "Nihon."
I think this would make inter language communication a whole lot simpler. | Names are a method of communicating an idea to others. We should use whatever name is understood by the population of people we're talking to. There's nothing intrinsically better about referring to Japan as Nihon, and if a good portion of the population doesn't understand what you're referring to than you're making communication *harder*. Why is having different names for countries in various languages any worse than having different words for anything else? | 16 | 24 |
[MCU] Do other relams have "tech" like bifrost bridge ? | Specifically Nine Relams. | It really depends on how "like" you're looking for.
We still don't have a clear answer for where sling rings come from, do they count?
The Guardians (and presumably most interstellar craft) use some form of portals/warp points for quick space travel
In *Thor: Love and Thunder* we see that >!Zeus' lightning has the ability to transport people great distances.!< That's probably the most Asgardian-esque "tech" that we've seen so far. | 33 | 16 |
ELI5: Why is a high IQ score directly correlated to a propensity for alcoholism/drug addiction? | Imagine looking at a painting of a flower, where everyone sees the flower, you see every brush stroke, every meaning behind each brush stroke, feel what the artist felt when painting it. Sometimes, it's too much. You dull things, you escape the fact that everything around you is both mundane and complex at the same time. You try to shut it off, escape, become closer to your peers by not being better than them. | 176 | 62 |
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ELI5: Why can't I focus blue LED light? | You know how a prism can spread white light into all the bands of visible light?
This is caused by chromatic aberration where different colors (wavelengths) of light interact differently when going through the prism. If the prism was switched to a single lens, chromatic aberration causes different wavelengths of light to focus at different distances from the lens.
Your eye is an optical element as well. Due to chromatic aberration, blue light is just slightly out of focus on your retina while other colors may focus perfectly. | 13 | 24 |
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ELI5: Why do NBA teams draft highschool players so high? I know Lebron, and to a lesser extent, Kobe ended up working out, but it really seems like a huge risk to spend a high draft pick on a guy who really has only played against other high school students. | Pretend you're a high school engineering teacher. Your students are tasked with building miniature model bridges, and your student Ann brings in a bridge that you can immediately tell is going to do well. It's built from the best quality materials, has structural integrity, has no obvious flaws, and the craft represents someone who knows what they're doing. You test it, sure enough, it wins the best grade in the class.
Then you remember your own college bridge tests, that had advanced engineering principles, and you realize this bridge might pass those tests, too, even without Ann having gone to college. You look them up, you submit the bridge to those tests, and sure enough, it does really well with the college tests too.
Then you remember some advanced software -- used by corporations and contractors that build bridges -- that will test if this bridge will actually do well in the real world. Now, the real world presents all kinds of different challenges, like wind pressure and direction, erosion, materials expansion -- that extend beyond just the model. But every bridge has to start with a model, and the data provided by this software can determine if this is at least worth a corporation's time to scale up. Sure enough, Ann's bridge does exceptionally well in many of the simulations.
The thing is, Ann hasn't graduated high school, gone to college, interviewed at a company, or even have any work experience. BUT -- it turns out, a good bridge doesn't need any of these things, it just needs to have some key fundamentals down in order to succeed as a bridge.
Likewise in the NBA, even with an abundance of variables that can cause failure, the model for success is the same: a 6'10" guy with a sturdy frame, long arms, quick hands, great basketball understanding & vision, excellent defense, professional work ethic, and a wicked shot (KD, KG, LbJ...). This model comprises the vast majority of successful NBA players, regardless of age or experience (note: experience offers some improvement, but isn't a replacement for the above qualities). There is no age minimum or maximum in that list, there is nothing holding back a 17 year old from playing the exact way an NBA star would -- it's just really uncommon. When these players do surface, there are numerous professional tools that a team can submit the player to that can indicate the player's future performance from a statistical perspective. Even a scrimmage with current NBA players is telling. But, as is with all NBA players, every contract is a gamble -- there are numerous ways for them to fail. So then why not look for the recipe for the ones that do succeed, and hire them, no matter what age they are? | 35 | 24 |
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ELI5: why do hormones make women moody/sad and does this ever happen to men? | Hormones are chemical messengers that travel through the blood and cause long term (on the order of hours to years) changes in the body. These hormones can directly influence the brain, or can cause other things to happen and influence the brain indirectly.
Also, you can't just say "hormones". Some hormones makes you happy. Some make you stressed. Some don't do anything at all.
Men can and are equally affected by hormones. Hormonal mood swings are associated with women because the menstrual cycle has some hormones flooding in and then disappearing throughout the cycle, while males don't really have an equivalent. | 22 | 30 |
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ELI5: How does the heat of the sun reach earth even though space is a cold void? How does it reach us through space? | There's three ways heat can be transferred. Conduction, which is heat traveling by contact. Convection, which is heat moving around as hot fluids rise. And lastly radiation, which is heat transfered through light. Light has no problem going through a vacuum.
Radiation is how the sun heats the earth. The entire spectrum heats the earth including infrared and ultraviolet, but the sun peaks it's output in the visible light spectrum (by no coincidence really).
It's no different than you sitting by a fire and feeling the heat on you. That heat isn't because of the air between you and the fire, that's heat from the radiation (light, though not necessarily visible, fire emmit more infrared). | 45 | 24 |
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ELI5: How do TV game shows tax people who get cash on the spot? | I see game shows like How too make a deal give away cash on the spot. Are these people taxed? I know if you win showcases etc taxes are collected on items, but what about cash handed on the spot? | Any cash prize (including lotteries) is generally considered income in the eyes of the IRS (or similar entity for other countries).
The person/entity giving the money will report the transfer of money to the IRS (and in some cases, offer to withhold the expected taxes) , and it becomes the responsibility of the recipient to submit a payment of the expected owed taxes in a timely manner and to report the earnings when the time comes to file taxes for the year. | 46 | 56 |
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