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CMV: There is no way that a U.S. Constitutional Amendment could pass in today's political environment
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**EDIT**
While discussing this, I realized that one of the main subtopics that support my view is that Republicans and Democrats are simply not living in the same reality right now. For example, take [this poll](https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/594128-36-percent-in-poll-think-biden-didnt-win-election-legitimately/) from a couple months ago out of Texas: 91% of Democrats say that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, but only 22% of Republicans do. That is simply two groups of people living in different realities and basing their political opinions on differing - many time mutually exclusive - "facts".
It is going to be difficult for me to change my view without addressing that obstacle. Even if there is something that everyone *should* logically agree on, how will that happen if different people are using different "facts"?
**END OF EDIT**
In order to a U.S. Constitutional Amendment to become effective, the following need to occur:
1. Two-thirds of the House of Representatives (290 of 435) need to vote in favor of the amendment.
2. Two-thirds of the Senate (67 of 100) need to vote in favor of the amendment.
3. The amendment must be ratified by three-fourths of the states (38 of 50). In order to do this, the House and Senate (or their equivalents under different names) of each state need to pass a bill to ratify the amendment as written. The requirements for passing the bill would vary from state to state based upon their own legislative process, but, at a minimum, would require a simple majority of each legislative chamber to vote to ratify the amendment.
It would be incredibly challenging to find something that both (a) necessitates a Constitutional Amendment and (b) would have sufficient universal agreement to pass. Realistically, I'm not sure anything could even achieve one of those three requirements. But my view is that there is nothing that could meet all three. (At least nothing that would even reasonably necessitate an Amendment. So, no, deltas will not be awarded saying that an amendment stating that "grass is generally greenish in color" could pass).
| 1,544 |
You're forgetting (or unaware) of the other (civil) option: an Article 5 Convention of States.
This would remove Congress from the equation (because they are the roadblock) & allow the States to directly vote on Amendments. The last time this got close to happening, Congress (scared of being shut out of the process) lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.
| 448 |
[The Purge] Why haven't other countries tried to imvade the US during the Purge? Would their invasion and take over technically be legal and accepted by other nations?
| 103 |
We know that important infrastructures like hospitals or police stations are still protected during the Purge so Military infrastructure is probably also protected an ready to go.
Also the Purge is just a way to get poor people to kill eachother, it doesn't have to be consistent in it's rules.
| 181 |
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[Fallout] Are the Mr. Handy robots sentient /self aware?
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When you meet codsworth after your 2 century disappearance in fallout 4, you can ask him why he is acting strange, and then starts telling you about how lonely he is and almost starts to have a mental breakdown.
This, along with some of his actions and comments about things, makes me wonder if they are somehow alive, or just the products of some very sophisticated programming.
| 28 |
Past experiences with robots says yes. Yes they are. They aren't typically recognised as such, but certain ones do exhibit characteristics which would mark them as both sentient and self aware. EDE, for instance.
| 33 |
I think that standardized tests are a waste of time and resources. CMV.
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Please note that I am not referring to the SATs or other tests of that nature because I can understand why they exist for the purpose of college. I am also American so I am mainly referring to american tests as I don't know much about standardized tesing in other countries. I am mainly referring to the tests issued by each state (soon to be the country) to public schools across the USA.
Curriculum in American schools is heavily based on these tests. So much time is spent in classroom preparing for these tests and teaching kids things that they have already learned, are not ready to learn, or are learning at a good time for themselves. I just think it distracts from learning and more time should be spent in making sure each student learns at their own pace.
Maybe if standardized testing was based on the learning capabilities of each student and not their age, then I would be more open to it.
| 34 |
Standardized tests allow for easier comparisons between schools, meaning that if schools perform poorly then it shows them what subjects they aren't teaching well. Without tests that need to be administered by every school, it would be very difficult to determine how well schools are teaching their students.
| 12 |
Thoughts/questions about quitting PhD
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My apologies in advance for somewhat of a rambling post - I'm a 31/m, have a wife and 2-year old with plans for a second child currently on hold because of financial constraints. I'm currently in the 5th year of a upper mid-tier history PhD program and am juggling quitting. I've lost most all passion and drive for academic research and writing, and the thought of having to finish writing my PhD looms over me and infects every part of my life. It makes me sad, because I have an exciting topic in contemporary European history and have essentially gathered enough sources and interviews (with some unique finds) to complete writing. It's modern and "sexy" enough that I would very likely be able to find a publisher for the manuscript afterwards. But I am miserable.
Once upon a time I was a very social person, always positive and optimistic, likeable and outgoing, but the isolation of writing has turned me into a cranky recluse with zero interest in keeping up with friends and family. I used to spend free time with hobbies like music writing, biking, auto restoration, but now I spend my free time finding ways to shut my brain off, which usually means having a few drinks and sitting in front of the tv pretending to watch something while my mind wanders. I view hanging out with friends and family now first and foremost as a good excuse not to be working, instead of genuinely enjoying their company. I still have that intellectual curiosity and genuine interest in knowledge that started me on this track, but I can't bring myself to pick up any new interesting book, because I instantly feel guilty for investing mental energy into something that is not my dissertation.
Doing a PhD seems to have brought out the worst in my personality in terms of not handling the stress of a large, looming project and letting it overtake my life, poor time management, constant confusion and disorganization and inability to ever be fully "present" when spending time with others etc. I was never one to shirk from work before and always considered myself to be a hard worker and someone happy to put in the extra time and effort to ensure something was done right the first time. I used to be sharp, on the ball and reliable, now I come across as not very bright, disorganized and overall not someone you would want working for you in any job capacity.
I confidently feel that deciding to do a PhD was the single worst decision of my life. I no longer like who I am, and I feel like the strengths I used to have (confidence, social skills, empathy, ability to read people extremely well) have been eroded to the point where I wouldn't even know where to start looking for an alternative job, especially with half a PhD and zero work experience outside academia or teaching for the past 8 years.
At this point, I am only holding on with the hopes of landing a teaching gig at a lib arts college or something similar, as teaching is the only aspect of my professional life right now I still feel rewarded by. Teaching is really something I get passionate about, but I realized early on I didn't want to teach in high school for a variety of reasons. I was very close to quitting my PhD during and right after comps, but I landed a year-long research fellowship and took that as a sign I should stick with it. Now I am still hanging on with the hopes that my persistence will be rewarded with a college teaching gig. Or that my PhD will perhaps help me in landing a decent government job (the US gov. recognizes grad education as a substitute for experience for many positions). I would jump all over virtually any alternative job opportunity that presented itself to me right now, but of course nothing is going to just fall in my lap if I'm not actively making it happen.
I guess I'd like to know how common it is to feel this defeated during a PhD. How bad was it for those who made it through? Would it be dumb to make it this far and stop, or dumb to waste another day of my life being this unhappy? When I signed up for grad school I made the decision to forgo immediate fun (I was teaching abroad and traveling a lot) in order to secure a career and future, and that has been my motivation throughout this, especially the "light" at the end of the tunnel of teaching 15-20 hours a week and having significant schedule flexibility to be a better family man. But are the prospects of a career in the field so slim that I would be crazy to continue doing this to myself for the off chance I land a fleeting academic job?
I'd really appreciate any advice, suggestions or observations. I've been running around in circles between quitting and sticking it out for months now and I'm reaching my wit's end.
edit* In case any one was wondering, I've brought it up with my wife before, though not recently, and she's always been supportive. I'm 100% sure she would back me up in whatever I decide.
| 24 |
1. If you put your nose to the grindstone, how quickly do you think you could finish your degree?
2. If you dropped out tomorrow, what would you be doing instead?
3. If you dropped out 6 months from now, what do you think you could be doing and how likely is it that would occur?
| 17 |
Can a planet have a moon the same size orbiting it?
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What would be the consequences both on the inhabitants and the two bodies?
If it isn't possible, why not?
| 3,146 |
Neither would be a moon. They would be orbiting a point between them. (Like how pluto and charon orbit a point in space between them, but much closer to Pluto).
They would probably be tidally locked (same face facing each other, like the moon is tidally locked with Earth).
| 4,455 |
cmv: Taxation in a highly corrupt society IS theft
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Take my country. An eastern European country that shall not be named.
It is a country where the taxation is at insane levels. Almost 60% in tax per minimum wage.
Public employees, who do nothing, are hired on nepotism, relations and influence.
Private sector workers PAY for these leeches who in turn treat them like garbage.
Public sector pay is 200% that of private sector pay. Inflation is driven by these people too.
Roads are a mess and there are almost no highways or high speed rail. In fact rail speed is SLOWER now than it was 100 years ago.
Hospitals are a mess. Doctors do not have tools.
Judges, police and armed forces are allowed to retire at age 40, with pensions that are higher than the income of the EX PRESIDENT OF THE GODDAMN UNITED States (Obama).
Is it too much of a stretch to say in this case Taxation *IS* theft??
Yes yes I know, anCaps are idiots, right, right. But God dammit I am fed up fattening rich corrupt assholes.
And this coming from a leftist!
| 16 |
Well yes, if the money is being embezzled or misused, then that is when it is being stolen.
That doesn't mean taxation is *inherently* theft, which is what the phrase "taxation is theft" is meant to convey. If you can say that taxation is sometimes theft, but sometimes not theft, depending on the way it's used, then you would not agree it is *inherently* theft.
| 28 |
Is there a reason the angular size of our moon is almost identical to the angular size of the sun? Or is it coincidence?
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Assuming there is intelligent life on other planets, and that we do communicate with them at some point, will we be able to brag that we're the only folks who can see both a complete solar eclipse and complete lunar eclipse?
| 101 |
It is a coincidence. They both get bigger and smaller from our perspective throughout the month/year, so there is some overlap in their range of sizes, rather than both being the *exact* same angular size all the time.
In many billion years the sun will be bigger and the moon will be farther away, so this won't be the case any more.
| 52 |
[Dragon Ball/Z/Super] What determines the color of a specific energy attack? Is it something the user can choose at will?
| 71 |
It seems tied to specific techniques.
Generally people seem have their own Ki energy, but people with similar styles/training share the color.
Turtle School / Kamahameha : Blue Energy
Kaio-Ken : Red
SSJ Ki: Yellow
Since Ki is just a manifestation of the users energy in DB, it's most likely just focused in a different way or perhaps amount resulting in a different appearance.
| 41 |
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AskScience AMA Series: Hi! I am J.R. Skok. I am a planetary scientist with the SETI Institute and a Space entrepreneur. I am working with SETI and NASA to develop future missions to search for life on Mars, AMA!
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Hi! I am [J.R. Skok](https://www.jrskok.com/). I am a planetary scientist with the SETI Institute and a Space entrepreneur. I am working with SETI and NASA to develop future missions to [search for life on Mars](https://www.madeofmars.com/), map out the minerals and geologic history of that planet while leading expeditions to Mars analogs around the world, including Antarctica, Iceland, Hawaii and more. As a Space Entrepreneur, I founded the company, Made of Mars, to develop the technology and economics needed to build things from the materials we can find on Mars, the Moon and asteroids throughout the solar system and share that journey with you!
Proof: https://i.redd.it/vi9rdud0p0t11.jpg
I will be on at 10am PT (1 PM ET, 17 UT), AMA!
| 2,200 |
Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.
What is the greatest challenge your company faces in finding life on Mars and elsewhere in our solar system? How can we use what we learn on Mars to investigate some of our more promising moons, such as Europa? There will surely be different challenges
Thank you again for doing this AMA. This is a very exciting topic!
| 61 |
If you were to scream in the vacuum of space, would you be able to hear your own voice through the vibrations in your head? Or would you just hear silence?
| 314 |
Barring the other physical consequences of being exposed to space vacuum unprotected....if you had air in your lungs to exhale and 'scream' with, the vibrations from your vocal chords would propagate through your bodily tissue/matter and you'd 'hear' it--just like you already do in an atmosphere (except you probably 'hear' more of your voice projection/reflection vs. internal conduction). Of course, if you didn't have a nice lungful of air to exhale in the first place, there would be no vibrating of your vocal chords because they require the pressure from the air in your lungs to vibrate.
| 194 |
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CMV: Limiting my privacy rights won't really affect me personally
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Ok, so this isn't exactly the typical "If I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care." Even though I don't really do anything illegal/weird on the internet, I understand that if the government wanted to, they could definitely find stuff out about me that would sufficient in sabotaging my reputation, if not incriminating me. **However, my main point is, even though the government could find stuff to take me down with, why would they?**
Sure, if they specifically targeted me, they could do a lot of damage, but there's no reason for them to target me over 300 million other Americans. If the government wanted to abuse its power, I have faith that they would target many many people before targeting me. So I personally wouldn't really be affected.
Yes, there is the argument that even if my life wouldn't change, it's still something that I should argue for, but that's not what I'm talking about in this post. But even then, I feel like the backlash for privacy is kind of disproportional compared to some of the other political issues at hand.
_____
> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!*
| 16 |
There is no way for the government to access that data without leaving open loopholes that anyone can exploit. The government its self may not cause any problems through this, but people trying to access financial information through loopholes like this have caused problems to millions of individuals
| 15 |
[Jurassic Park] Why did the Velociraptors have so much trouble searching for Lexi and Tim in the kitchen?
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Lexi and Tim were making a total racket; scuffing their hands and feet on the floor, bumping into metal cupboards and worktops, spilling cutlery, shrieking and breathing loudly etc. How in the hell did the Velociraptors take such a long time to spot them? Couldn't they be heard in what was an otherwise eerily silent building? What about their sense of smell too? That one Velociraptor could smell enough food residue on that chef's spoon to lick it off but she couldn't smell Tim literally right in front of her?
| 30 |
They had to cope with all the unfamiliar stimuli of an artificial environment. Their ears weren't used to all the echoing of hard smooth surfaces, and their noses were still coping with all the new scents, including the lingering scent of hundreds of previous humans permeating everything.
| 69 |
ELI5: How can we estimate the age of a star based on its size?
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I have a homework problem that boils down to this: globular clusters have stars of a certain size in them, and when you plug that size into a formula, it says they are about 30 billion years old. (The universe is only 14 bil) I just don't understand the entire concept of getting a star's age from its size... why couldn't the stars be made yesterday just because they are a certain size?
I get that a big star dies younger and therefore couldn't be more than x years old etc, but how on earth could we know when a star was "born" just based on how big it is, outside of setting a limit on how long the star could have lasted?
| 57 |
Well you can't estimate the age of a star by its mass alone and if you are getting a value greater than the age of the universe you obviously went wrong somewhere.
You can use the size in combination with its luminosity to estimate its age, because stars get brighter as they age. Obviously bigger stars give of more light than smaller ones so we have to account for that too. We can say things like: a star of this size should be this bright when it is young and that bright when it is much older.
This does not work for all star though. There are different types of stars that age in different ways.
| 10 |
ELI5: If someone we're to step onto a gas giant planet would they just sink to the core of the planet? What would happen?
| 44 |
Assuming you somehow lived through all the fun things that would happen to you while falling?
Eventually you'd hit a layer that had been compressed enough to be denser than you are, and you'd stop there.
Realistically, other things would kill you before you got that deep.
You run into a 1000kmh cross winds, pressure will crush you, it'll get hotter the lower you get, and its radioactive.
| 43 |
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How does RSA generate the two prime numbers used for encryption so quickly when its security is based on the difficulty of finding primes?
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When I generate an RSA key, it takes a very short amount of time to produce the key, and thus to produce the two primes. How does is RSA secure when these primes are found so quickly? I guess there are two fundamentally-linked questions here.
(1) How does RSA produce two primes so quickly when cracking the primes would take a petaFLOPS computer 10^1210 years to crack it (RSA-4096)?
(2) How is RSA secure if primes can be produced so quickly?
| 21 |
It is an asymmetric problem. It is computationally easy to test whether a number is prime and easy to multiply two numbers together. However it is computationally hard to factor a given number.
So, you pick two large prime numbers (easy), multiply them together (easy) and tell people their result. If they want to break the code, they need to factor the result (hard).
| 15 |
ELI5: Why does raw poultry potentially go bad after 1-2 days in the fridge while raw steak may last for 5?
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Info from http://www.rd.com/health/healthy-eating/how-long-can-you-store-meat-in-the-fridge-or-freezer/ and http://www.foodsafety.gov/blog/meatinrefrig.html but I'm just wondering why bird meat can go so fowl (so sorry) so fast.
| 43 |
Poultry is not as dense as beef. Bacteria can permeate poultry easier and faster than beef. This is the same reason why you have to cook poultry at least till medium and not rare, which can otherwise be done with beef.
| 23 |
Are left-handed people more common in countries that write from right to left?
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Seems quite obvious, but: if that would be the case, do right-handed people suffer from the same problems as left-handed people in languages that write from left to right?
I don't know if this is a part biology, human body or linguistics....
| 27 |
Everything I've ever read indicates left-handedness is a stable 10-12% of the population around the world, despite the various social pressures put upon us. I've wondered about righties in right-left writing systems having the same smudging problem as I've always lived with, but perhaps the writing positions in those languages are different and minimize smudging.
| 23 |
[MCU][Endgame Spoilers] What's so special about the Soul Stone?
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So, who knows where these things were originally, but the earliest appearance of the Space Stone is in some viking temple in Norway, not some weird non-Euclidean spatial configuration.
The Reality Stone is just a weird pool of goo and all you have to do to get it is touch it, apparently. You don't have to pierce the veil and see through an impenetrable illusion or something.
We don't know where Thanos originally got the Mind Stone, but there's no indication he had to solve an impossible riddle, and if he did, no one else had to after that.
I could go on, but there's no indication that any of the other Infinity Gems have *one weird trick* that you have to use to get them, but the Soul Stone can apparently only be obtained by sacrificing the thing you love most, and it apparently even has the power to enslave a former wielder of the Space Stone as a tour guide. So what makes the Soul Stone so special that it gets its owner creepy guardian and fancy rules about how to get it?
| 17 |
No one had to go through a non-euclidean test of sacrifice and death in order to get the Soul Stone *after* it was removed from Vormir, either. Just grabbing it worked just the same as with every other stone, once it was "out of the box".
Vormir and the "Drop One Loved One For Access" puzzle was just where the thing had been hidden for so long that no one remembered where it had been put. Similar to how the Reality Stone was in a gap between space and time for a very, very, very long time, and the Space Stone was buried in the Arctic ice pack for a few years there.
| 24 |
ELI5: Why poop is brown
| 37 |
We just learned this in biology! So, some of the bile from your liver is sent to your digestive system to break down and emulsify fats. The bile has a characteristic green color. Once it enters the digestive system, the bile pigments change colors and eventually become the characteristic brown color of feces!
| 27 |
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What is the maximum theoretical efficiency of an air turbine and how close can we get to it with current technology?
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The maximum theoretical efficiency of an open air wind turbine is defined by Betz's law to be 59.3%. But if instead the turbine was inside a circular tube of constant diameter, and had a pressure drop of so many pascals across it, how would an ideal turbine behave? As in what would the air flow rate through it be, and how much energy would it extract from this flow? (Given a certian air density) How close can current technology get to that figure?
edit:
This is in the context of a solar updraught tower. There is negative pressure at the bottom of the tower due to the buoyancy of hot air in the tower (stack effect) compared to outside. If there were a turbine in the tower, how much energy could it generate?
My situation is as follows: the tower is 20m diamater. The negative pressure generated by the stack effect is 630Pa. If there were no obstructions in the tower, roughly 7500 cubic metres of air per second will flow up the tower. Since the air density is 0.938 kg/m3 and the air is rising at 24 ms^-1 , one cubic metre of air will have the kinetic energy of 270J. There are 7500 of these per second, so the total kinetic power is about 2*10^6 watts.
That is for an open tube with no restrictions. A turbine will act as a restriction for the air (like a resistor in an electrical circuit), so the flow rate will be lower. I was just wondering if there was a rule-of-thumb equation or number concerning the flow rate through an ideal turbine given a pressure difference (or how much it will impede the air flow stated above), and how much energy will be captured by it.
By "efficiency" I mean the proportion of the kinetic energy in the rising air captured by the turbine.
| 103 |
Modern multiple stage bladed turbines typically reach 60–70% efficiency, while large steam turbines often show turbine efficiency of over 90% in practice. Volute rotor matched Tesla-type machines of reasonable size with common fluids (steam, gas, and water) would also be expected to show efficiencies in the vicinity of 60–70% and possibly higher.
| 17 |
ELI5 - How can oases exist in deserts? Where does the water come from? How come they don't just vaporize? And where do trees and plants there grow from?
| 84 |
Oases exist where groundwater comes to or near to the surface. This usually happens in low places, where all the underground water flows end up. The water itself comes ultimately from rains, which, however rare, occur in every desert. The water then seeps down through the ground until it reaches a barrier made of impermeable rock, and then flows down along that barrier towards an oasis, where it accumulates. This way the infrequent rainfall over many thousands of square kilometers of desert can support a single small oasis in the low place of the area.
| 143 |
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ELI5 What's happening in my head when sound gets drowned out while falling asleep and then a minor disturbance "opens" up my ears?
| 301 |
Your brain differentiates between expected and unexpected noises. So the hum from the fridge or the music you left on is expected, but broken glass or some other noise is unexpected and your brain wakes you up.
| 213 |
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I've been introduced to so many softwares in my Bachelors program that I don't even know which one is helpful, any help ?
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Basically the title, I've worked on R, Stata, Matlab, Python and C.
I want to pursue a career in economics, maybe research, I like environmental economics and econometrics and would really enjoy working in either of those fields, even if I know that econometrics is more a method than a field.
I will start my Masters degree next year and by speaking to 2nd year students in that program I learnt that among all existing softwares, R or Python would be the best/most useful, can anyone confirm/deconfirm or even recommend some other options ?
Thanks
| 20 |
For the private sector R or Python are the two languages most widely used for applied statistics/data science work.
Stata is used by a large number of academic economists so if you are interested in academic research you need to be at least somewhat familiar with it because you will have coauthors who will use it.
Matlab is popular in macro and engineering but is less common than R/python in a private sector setting.
| 27 |
ELI5: ELI5: how does odor transfer through plastic? And does it mean the object giving off the odor is technically penetrating the plastic?
| 54 |
Yes, any time you smell something *actual pieces of that substance are going into your nose*. Smell is physical contact between molecules and sensory cells in your nose.
If you smell something through a wrapper or bag, yes, the odoriferous molecules are penetrating through the plastic. The molecules we smell tend to be pretty small and light (hence they are able to come off the substance and float in the air) and plastics are quite permeable compared to say, glass.
| 17 |
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Why don't dinosaur exhibits in museums have sternums?
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With he exception of pterodactyls, which have an armor-like bone in the ribs.
| 3,374 |
First of all: pterosaurs aren't dinosaurs.
Second of all, laziness probably. The sternal elements in most dinosaurs except ankylosaurs, *Limusaurus*, dromaeosaurs, troodontids, jeholornithiforms, and pygostylians are unfused, which makes them more difficult to mount. This is also why the gastralia are often missing.
| 1,398 |
ELI5: Trump declared bankruptcy a good few times, yet managed to retain most of his wealth. How?
| 113 |
Trump companies declared bankruptcy. That's not the same thing as personal bankruptcy. Companies are created, in part, to limit the liability of the owners/shareholders should the business suffer a downturn.
| 144 |
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[DC] Doomsday's Limit
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Somebody in r/whowouldwin recommended that I post this here.
Doomsday isn't able to be killed but he can be defeated, and with the way his abilities work he becomes more powerful than anyone who defeats him so he could just come back and kill them afterwards, right? I haven't read many comics, especially DC and I generally don't get involved in comic threads because I just don't know, but I have read Death of Superman and Doomsday is a character that I really like. So my question is; does Doomsday have a limit, is there a point where his ability to become more powerful would stop working or is this power infinite? If he lost and tried again could he beat a god-like-character like the Spectre or Galactus or even stronger than that or would it just stop when he starts fighting enemies with high-tier matter manipulation?
| 45 |
So, Doomsday is the result of a Kryptonian scientist's research into evolution.
Here's how it works: Doomsday can die. And he has. A lot of times.
But then he gets better.
Doomsday evolves to ensure that he can never die **the same way** again.
Doomsday gets burnt to death, and he develops a the ability to resist extreme heat. He drowns, and develops a way to breathe underwater. So on and so forth.
There may be a limit, but it hasn't been reached yet.
Perhaps the Spectre could permanently smite Doomsday's soul, perhaps not.
Spectre could kill Doomsday, sure..... but would it last?
| 45 |
[Star Wars] why doesn't R2-D2 have speech capabilities?
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you would think it would be pretty simple to do given that he already seems capable of thought and has a personality etc.
| 25 |
Same reason all cars don't have bluetooth capabilities. It's not their primary function and it costs the manufacturer money. R2-D2's main function is to communicate with computer systems, such as those among ships, and to maintain and repair them. Speech is not necessary. Would it be helpful? Sure. But not necessary.
| 33 |
[Doctor Strange] why didn’t Master Hamir use magic to grow his hand back is it possible for him to do that given that magic can heal the body in ways it normally can’t or can magic not be used to grow back limbs
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Wouldn’t this imply that there is a limit to the amount of damage one can heal from using magic
| 38 |
Well they also said the paralyzed guy was only able to walk because he was channeling the magic directly through his spine. Not that he was able to heal his spine. So there's definitely a limit to the magic's ability to regrow physical parts.
Edit: And that strange could "fix" his hands by doing the same thing, but he'd never be able to progress with the magic studies passed that.
| 37 |
[Werewolves] So in fiction when people turn into Werewolves, does the Inner Beast have a mind of its own? Is it sentient? Is it intelligent and capable of rational thought? Is it kinda like a demonic possession?
| 22 |
Generally speaking its mindless hunger and animal ferocity. It's smarter than an average animal but still driven by instinct. Some imprint of the human psyche remains leading to targeted attacks against rivals from the human side or ignoring love interests.
And in others it's just a normal human intelligence within a beasts body. Hunger and rage seem to be heightened to extremes but they still reason and think like a person.
| 23 |
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[MCU/616 Marvel] Assuming Kilgrave was raised right and wasn't a sociopath, how would his powers work out as a hero?
|
Is he street level? SHIELD agent? Avenger?
| 29 |
He is probably a high level street tier. He is the ultimate hostage negotiator, a perfect crime fighter (they just surrender) and able to deal with most street level criminals.
He has the potential to go above that by breaking the will of Super Villains and using them to fight against supers that he can't take on directly, but that becomes a huge moral issue.
He would be a great leader for a questionable squad like the Thunderbolts since they would obey him unquestioningly.
All of that said, his powers really don't lend themselves to hero work. Controlling others is an inherently invasive and painful thing to do to another human being. We jokingly refer to telepaths mind raping people on here, but that comes from a pretty big kernel of truth. Mind control is really tough to justify as it is completely taking someone else's free will and turning them into a puppet.
| 40 |
When you're sick why do symptoms seem to get worse at night?
|
Right now I've got a cold and during the day I feel somewhat okay and my nose is fairly clear, but right now as I'm getting ready for bed I'm feeling really achy and my nose is all stuffed up. Why do the symptoms get worse at night?
| 229 |
Your symptoms probably get worse because of circadian rhythm effects. Your immune system is more active at night - you get higher concentrations of inflammatory cytokines and the like - leading to more pronounced symptoms as your immune system combats infection "with more fervor". In the specific example of inflammatory cytokines, the greater degree of inflammation promoted by their elevated levels is likely the thing leading to your feeling achy.
| 402 |
CMV: A total ban on guns won't work in the United States.
|
Criminals won't abide by the law, and making more won't stop them.
The only reason we have mass shootings is because of people being screwed up in the head ie: parkland girl admitting to bullying the autistic foster kid, saying he deserved it and it's the guns fault that the school got shot up.
The state of mind in the United States means we will never have a ban on guns, or we will have an American Viet Cong on our hands.
I'm all for having "mental health checks" on current gun owners, however if we are to do what the high school kiddos are suggesting and confiscate all "fully semi-semiautomatic high capacity 30 round clipazine assault rifle 15's" then things wouldn't be pretty.
| 49 |
You're kind of all over the place here.
A total ban cannot happen because of the second amendment.
What can happen, and did in the 1990s, is a limit on the more military-style weapons.
As for your criminals argument - the state has a monopoly on force and could allow cops to have any guns they need.
| 33 |
Why does it feel warmer when it's snowing?
|
Is it actually warmer? Or am I just imagining the difference in temperature?
| 20 |
It can only snow within a certain temperature range, if it's too cold there won't be any moisture in the air. A warm front bringing moisture in will warm the air up some and lend enough moisture for snow to form.
| 19 |
ELI5: Why does it take so long to close a frozen program with "End Task" in task manager, yet killing a process is instantaneous?
| 317 |
End Task relies on sending a signal to the program telling it to die. That requires the program to respond and terminate, which it wont if it's really stuck. After some time the option to try and force close is made available.
Killing a process just outright stops giving it resources so it instantly is removed from the process tree, stops calculating, etc.
It's preferable to have the program kill itself where possible so it can perform any needed cleanup, but sometimes a program is so stuck it can't.
| 205 |
|
[Star Wars] how is no one ever burnt by climbing through fresh glowing hot holes in the floors/ceilings cut by lightsabers?
|
Sometimes they even directly touch the glowy orange melted metal and don't get burned. How?
| 56 |
Metal in ships and floors of the universe aren't like earth metals. Under extreme heat or pressure they'll emit an orangish red light but not heat itself. They rather marvelously dissipate heat as well throughout the whole of itself. This leads to stronger building materials that are heat resistant but also indicate where too much stress can be causing issues on the structure while building.
Not based on anything just trying to make sense of something that's nonsense.
| 57 |
Can you delete specific memories by removing specific brain cells?
|
If a surgeon, say, uses a scalpel to scrape some cells out of the temporal lobe, would the patient wake up missing certain memories?
| 41 |
It's not that easy.
Memories are stored distributed around the brain and can't be said to be stored in any specific cell or set of cells. Such a "scraping" procedure -- if it affected memory at all, instead of some other function -- might disrupt certain memory connections but it's hard to defend the idea that the memories would be completely removed from a small-scale injury.
If you want to get down to sci-fi, theoretically speaking, since there are a finite number of synapses in the brain, there must be a finite number of cuts necessary to remove all connections involved in a certain memory. That says nothing to whether it would be possible to surgically remove SPECIFIC memories without otherwise disrupting normal functioning, nor does it imply there is a way to determine which neurons and synapses are particular to a specific memory.
| 26 |
[The Matrix] Would the Matrix have kept its deal with Cypher, or just kill him?
| 57 |
I would imagine not. Cypher wants to go back to how it was before, and before, he *chose* to leave the Matrix. He can be rich, famous, everything he asks for, but he'll have that nagging question returned to the back of his mind.
And from Cypher's point of view, there isn't much material difference to him being mindwiped and put back in, and just being bumped off. Either way things go dark and some other guy comes out the other side, alive or dead.
| 53 |
|
ELI5: What is energy?
|
What technically is energy, not how it is measured, used, or converted into different forms. I am looking for what energy actually is.
| 27 |
Energy is the capacity to do work. Many forms of energy can't be used to do work we would think of as practical (like low temperature differences and low heat), but energy is just that element of physical reality that is the capacity to do work.
| 16 |
Eli5: why isn't the british army called the "royal army"
|
Royal Navy, Royal Airforce, even Royal Mail.
Why doesn't the army get to be royal?
| 56 |
Historical reasons. The army is allowed to exist by order of the parliament, whereas the navy was personally controlled and raised by the monarch. The army exists, legally, because parliament allows it to.
The distinction is less relevant today than once it was, obviously.
| 43 |
ELI5: Why is the glass on our phone screens more slippery than the glass in windows?
| 66 |
The glass in your phone has special coatings to make it slippery. You drag your finger across it constantly so it needs to be slippery.
Window glass need to be glass. That’s it. Were you to make windows out of iPhone glass they would be prohibitively expensive.
| 104 |
|
[Star Wars] Why did Leia think it remotely plausible to claim they were on a diplomatic mission?
|
She tells Vader they were on a diplomatic mission. He doesn't believe her. Then in Rogue One we find out why. Because he literally followed her from a battlefield.
How did she think this defense would be even remotely plausible?
| 104 |
They aren't the only Corellian Corvette in existence and it's not like they have license plates. She was basically denying that they were the one on that battlefield.
Yeah it was a weak excuse but a weak excuse is better than none and she wasn't even trying to convince Vader but rather was threatening to cause trouble for him with the Senate.
| 146 |
If I am trying to model one single electron (or one hole) delocalized among a small number of molecules, is it appropriate to use a Fermi-Dirac distribution or a Boltzmann distribution for temperature dependence, and why?
|
Please let me know if any clarification is needed to answer my question.
| 358 |
Recall that the Fermi-Dirac distribution is the grand canonical ensemble, and the Boltzmann distribution is the canonical ensemble (your terminology is correct, the other answers are confusing "Boltzmann distribution" with "Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution"). So, if your system cannot exchange electrons from elsewhere (either your heat bath or the molecules), and your delocalized energy levels are all unoccupied (and therefore accessible to the electron), then you should use the density matrix diag(e^(-E_n/kT)/Z) in the energy basis. However, if you're trying to look at one electron in the system which also happens to contain many other electrons, you need to take statistics into account with the degeneracy of each level, and it's far easier in Fermi-Dirac (number fluctuations *should* be small for enough particles).
For the other answerers: the assumption that the system is exchanging heat with the environment means that this **is** a system + heat bath of a large number of particles. OP is just focusing on the subsystem (i.e. we are not in the microcanonical ensemble). This is totally standard when modeling a non-interacting state - the multi-particle partition function simply decomposes into its one-particle partition functions.
| 1,426 |
ELI5: How do companies such as Arm & Hammer make a profit off of baking soda when sodium bicarbonate is the only ingredient in a non-proprietary formula with off-brands offering the same product, cheaper?
| 291 |
I worked at an Arm & Hammer factory where they bottled laundry detergent. They would run a batch of the name brand stuff and then a batch of the cheap stuff. Same machine, same ingredients. Different bottle, different price. They have both markets cornered because they are their own competition.
| 177 |
|
Is it possible to transform martian soil into fertile soil through bacteria and fungi?
| 43 |
You’d have to find a way to thicken the atmosphere first. If we had bacteria or fungi that could function in a near vacuum. Add to that the problem that water boils at about 10c on Mars, and you’ve got a bit of a problem.
| 26 |
|
ELI5: How can lightning strikes cut trees in half, but whenever it strikes a human you don't usually hear about losing limbs?
| 629 |
The tree splits due to the pressure of the boiled sap inside it, not due to the lightening chopping or physically striking the tree.
This happens in a tree because there is enough resistance to the flow of electricity. When there is enough oomph, like a lightening strike, the electricity is able to overcome the resistance but this creates heat and a lot of it.
There is a lot of moisture in trees aside from the normal sap and this will boil into steam when heated up.
Steam takes up much more space than the liquid it used to be and because it cant escape this will cause the tree to rupture, split, or explode.
Edit: Unrelated cause but trees will also explode in the winter if enough of their moisture/sap freezes. Water -> ice takes up less space than water->steam but still more than the water itself.
| 281 |
|
I think there is such a thing as child pornography which does not involve child abuse or exploitation. CMV
|
The expression of my opinion does not in any way attempt to minimise the harm that is caused in the creation of images of child abuse or exploitation, but is simply to suggest that the definition of child pornography is broader than those two things.
**Before reading on please keep in mind that my opinion is concerning child porn images and videos and is not about the distribution of the images or the wider issue of sexual offences committed against children. If you wish to attempt to change my view please do not attempt to bring in wider issues that do not relate to the view that I express.**
For the sake of simplicity I am going to immediately point out that hand drawn or computer generated images depicting children engaging in sexual activity is classed as child porn but as no real children are used in it's creation it cannot be said that it is either abuse or exploitation.
In relation to images of children that do involve real children, I would like to remind anybody reading this that an image is considered child porn if it is sexual and involves any person under the age of 18. The law applies equally as much to sexual images involving a 4 year old child as it does to a 17 year old child.
At this point I would like to ask that you take a second to think about what is meant by the terms abuse and exploitation.
When the prohibition was first introduced in the 1978 (UK) it was at time when child pornography was filmed alongside adult pornography and sold openly - albeit under the counter in sex shops. The primary concern of lawmakers was to protect children from being exploited by pornographers.
Amid a wider public debate about indecency and exploitation it was decided that the limit would be set at 18 because at 18 a person is an adult and is able to decide what to do with their own body.
At this point I would like to say that I would agree that any person under the age of 18 is at risk of being exploited by pornographers if it were legal for them to feature in pornography. They would be at risk of being exploited because children under the age of 18 are generally not very good at making rational decisions. This is due to the under-development of the [pre-frontal cortex](http://www.hhs.gov/opa/familylife/tech_assistance/etraining/adolescent_brain/Development/prefrontal_cortex/) and is true not just for children under the age of 18 but also adults up until about 25 years of age.
Images that are described as depicting sexual abuse will depict acts of sexual activity with children either masturbating or engaging in sexual activity with other children or adults.
The discrepancy between the age of consent in the UK (16) and the age at which a person can be legally photographed engaging in sexual activity (18) means that it is illegal to photograph a consenting child who is engaging in sexual activity. Because a child of 16 is legally considered old enough to consent, images of them engaging in sexual activity might be exploitation (depending on the circumstances) but would not automatically be considered to depict sexual abuse. I think that I should illustrate that although I say that images of a 16 year old child might be exploitation (if for example they were being made for a pornographers financial gain) it is not necessarily the case (for example a teenage couple photographing themselves while engaging in sexual activity).
There is one last category of child pornography which I believe falls outside of the scope of being the result of sexual abuse or exploitation and I believe that this category of images constitute the largest proportion of child pornography in existence. Due to the way that it is created I do not believe that this category of images is among the vast majority of the images being circulated around the internet in child porn distribution networks, but I do believe it constitutes the largest category of images. I am referring to images that are taken by children on smart phones and sent to other children. It is no secret that 'sexting' is a common practice among young teens and for all intents and purposes it is child porn.
These images are not depictions of child abuse as they are of either nudity or acts of masturbation carried out by the child themselves. It is true that these images can be the result of exploitation if an adult (or even another child) was to manipulate the child into producing the images. That being said, it is possible that a sexually driven child (which, [according to research](http://www.scribd.com/doc/139124304/The-Magical-Age-of-10) could be from the age of 10) might take images of themselves in an attempt to use them in exchange for images from other children (or adults) for their own sexual gratification.
I have personally observed this happening with young teenage boys in the gay community. The youngest child I have seen attempting to engage in this sort of activity was 12, with a considerable number of children between 13 and 18 actively looking to exchange images of themselves with other people.
It might be argued that anybody (whether it be another child or an adult) who pro-actively engages in this activity with a child is exploiting them due to the under-development of their pre-frontal cortex and the fact that they are likely to make bad choices at a young age. I would argue that the exploitation in commercial pornography is the paying of money in exchange for permission to take images with the intention of selling them for other people to see.
The unfortunate decision of a young adult with an under developed decision making part of their brain may come back to haunt them in the future as the images will exist long after the money earned has been spent. This guarantee of distribution or sharing of the images is not automatically the case with this category of image as the primary factor in the creation of these images is sexual release rather than money. It is possible that an adult might groom children for images and then redistribute them on child porn distribution networks but this would not be the case for two children or a child and an adult who both have a sexual motive and where neither party distributes the image any further.
**tl;dr:**
1. **Cartoon and cgi child porn is not child abuse or exploitation**
2. **Images of a couple engaging in sexual activity featuring children above the age of consent are not child abuse because there is consent and is not exploitation unless the images are being taken for commercial pornography or is the result of any other form of manipulation by a third party.**
3. **Images taken by children of themselves are not sexual abuse because they feature sexual acts that the child is doing to themselves and is only exploitation if they are being taken for any purpose other than the child meeting their own sexual needs.**
| 25 |
1. Completely agree. Good point.
2. Perhaps the children have been negatively influenced and commit the sexual act as a result. This negative influence would constitute exploitation or abuse.
3. Again, the same as in 2.
| 10 |
ELI5: In light of the article about the 19 year old female lifting the truck off of her dad to save his life, how is it physically possible for a human to do that even with the high amount of adrenaline that is present?
| 129 |
The human body is incredibly durable and much stronger than we normally assume, this is because when we're calmly exerting ourselves (like in the gym) we're aware of the stress the load puts on our body, and as such we are cautious to avoid injury. With massive amounts of adrenaline that awareness fades to the background. It allows a person to use the upper limit of their capabilities, possibly damaging themselves in the process. Another factor is just how much was needed. Most people picture superman lifting the car over his head, when in reality even a fraction of an inch can give the needed escape room to survive.
| 128 |
|
Inflation is 5% so why are prices going up more than 5%?
|
In Canada inflation is 5% now. A 5% increase on everyday goods isn't too noticeable, but Often prices are going much higher than a 5% increase. Why is this?
| 118 |
5% inflation does not mean that every good’s price is going up by exactly 5%. It means that an average of the price increases is 5%—but some goods will have larger price increases, and some will have smaller.
| 171 |
[ATLA] How did no airbender's escape and or survive when the fire nation attacked?
| 45 |
air nomads were by far the smallest of the 4 nations, there entire people could be housed in 4 temples, which while large compared to real world temples were still smaller then most citys , there simply were not many of them to begin with
the surprise nature of the attack combined with being boosted by the comet and the air nomads non militarized nature also meant the initial assault would be devastating , the general selflessness of the air nomads also likely worked against against them, as many of them who had a chance to flee would instead turn back to attempt to help others
the handful that did survive would have been relentlessly hunted down(and except for the kids they all had an easily identifiable mark making disguises impossible, it only works for aang because noone around is familiar with air nomads ), combined with the fact they werent exactly the kind of people super interested in reproduction, means that while there were likely some survivors of the initial assault they did not make it to the time aang was around
| 54 |
|
[Dragon Ball] How can Fortuneteller Baba be centuries older than her brother, Master Roshi ?
|
She began her fortune-telling around year 250, but Master Roshi was born in 430.
| 21 |
I see several possibilities
* Adoption
* Spiritual brother/sister
* Brother/sister in arms
* Some friends are like family.
* The origin of those dates could be from filler which is not canon.
* Time Shenanigans.
| 31 |
Why do we "Weigh" things in kg,g,and mg, if grams are units of mass? If I've got some powder on a scale and it reads 40mg, is it actually calculating the weight and then dividing it by 9.8 to tell me the total mass of the powder on the scale?
| 21 |
> Why do we "Weigh" things in kg,g,and mg, if grams are units of mass?
We measure mass by exploiting Newton's 2nd law: F=ma. The acceleration due to earth's gravity at its surface is about 9.8 m/s*^2*, so we can measure an object's mass by measuring the force gravity exerts on it and then dividing by 9.8 m/s*^2* (using F=ma --> m = F/a). If you know the force on earth's surface (ie weight) then you know the mass, and vice-versa.
> If I've got some powder on a scale and it reads 40mg, is it actually calculating the weight and then dividing it by 9.8 to tell me the total mass of the powder on the scale?
Yes.
| 13 |
|
ELI5: What would actually happen if a Junior Mint fell into an open body cavity during surgery and then sewed back in?
|
Let's say the seinfeld scenario actually happened.. would it actually hurt the patient in any way?
| 65 |
Assuming the junior mint wasn't sterilized (not sure if one can be), the patient would almost definitely develop sepsis. If something isn't done about that soon, the patient will die.
If you could actually sterilize one, what would probably happen is the patient would be in pain for some time and not know why. The junior mint would be melted by body heat pretty quickly, then the various ingredients absorbed.
| 24 |
[Star Wars] Why did the Rebellion never use the Death Star tech?
|
My wife brought this up yesterday. The Rebellion had access to the Death Star technology. They got the blueprints for both the Death Star 1 and Death Star 2.
We also know that the Death Star's laser can be changed from anywhere to 1% power as seen on Scariff to 100% as we saw with Alderaan. The DS2 was also able to accurately fire a correct burst into a ship in RotJ to destroy a Rebel Corvette. That was no where near 100% power, as only that single ship was destroyed by that shot.
We also know the tech can be miniaturized, as shown in The Last Jedi. According to Finn, the First Order's bunker buster laser was "Miniaturized Death Star Tech."
Why did the Rebellion, after having the schematics from both the DS1 and DS2 never miniaturize the weapon tech for themselves and put it on their own Corvettes? It didn't need to be the planet destroying kind, but certainly could have had uses for ship-to-ship combat, or hell, X-Wing to AT-AT combat.
I don't think it could have been a lack of resources, as the Rebellion/New Republic seems to take over a large portion of the galaxy after the defeat of the Empire.
| 28 |
The empire needed the resources of several planets to build the Death Stars. They had research facilities on dozens of others and it took those facilities to miniaturize the technology.
Yes it absolutely was a lack of resources that stopped the Rebellion from using any of that technology. They were barely able to function not spend time and energy on research, development and overblown technology that didn't pan out.
After the rebellion the New Republic wouldn't use it because of the negativity associated with it. The Empire killed some 2 billion innocent people on Alderaan with the technology. The Republic didn't want anything to do with that.
| 53 |
Java projects that would look impressive in an entry-level interview?
|
I'm applying to an entry level software developer apprenticeship program, and the final step of the admissions process turned out a lot more intimidating than I expected. The last 8 minutes of the final interview will apparently be reserved for me to show off a project I'm proud of. The logical solution is to dig up some of my old college projects, but aside from group projects, I wasn't exactly the best at commenting back then and many of them were from when I just started programming, so I'd probably have to rebuild from the ground up anyway.
The direction I was given was that the project should be "complex, but within my ability to explain". Though admittedly, I don't have the best grasp of what's considered "complex" for an entry level position. Maybe I'm actually overqualified, or maybe I'm in way over my head, I just don't have much frame of reference.
The projects I can remember off the top of my head are *Battlecode*, *Hunt the Wumpus*, *The N Queens Problem*, *Game of Life*, and *Sudoku*. I'm worried that since all of these are really famous programming exercises, it would make anything I present look mediocre, if not inherently suspect. I'm probably worrying for nothing, but that's just in my nature. Can anyone spare any advice on what kind of project would probably be ideal for an interview like this?
| 21 |
If it’s a backend role, maybe stand up an api and attach it to a database with some dummy data and do something cool with it?
If all you have to fill is 8 minutes you could probably fill the time with a smaller project of that scope.
| 11 |
[The Witcher] Why don't Witchers traditionally use ranged weapons or shields?
|
It seems to be more of a stubborn show of pride much like the medieval British in refusing the crossbow rather than a practical decision. I get that training for a decade or longer with Witchers who *also* refused ranged weapons and shields will teach you to opt for the standard dual swords/bombs/potions/Signs combo, but surely as monster slayers rather than proud warrior clans the Witchers must have seen the benefits of ranged weapons and shields? Sure they've managed alright thus far and can cope with what they have, but wouldn't it be made much easier if they could snipe a cyclops from a distance with a longbow? Or defend themselves from dragonfire with a heat-resistant shield rather than attempting to dodge the attack or withstand it with Quen and potions? After all, Witchers only wield one sword at a time and could wield some sort of shield on their non-sword hand (potentially strapped to the wrist to allow smoother Sign usage). Is it still about breaking tradition like Geralt suggests when Vesemir hands him a crossbow?
On a related note, would a Witcher who found themselves in a modern setting utilise our firearms and explosives, or insist on typical Witcher methods still?
| 117 |
Monster 3 times your size is trying to hit you, do you want to dodge it, or do you prefer to give up your arm and try to block the blow with the shield.
Shield is a hindrance, instead of using both hands to make the swings hitting harder, you have one hand blocked, and in most cases you can't even use the shield effectively. Learning to use your speed and powerfull blows is strictly better than rely on a small chance that you will be able to use shield in the fight.
Bows and crossbows takes 2 hands, meanwhile you can shoot fire and telekinetic blasts without having to put away your sword, using one hand to form signs.
Igni is always better than any arrow could be.
| 129 |
[The Mandolorian] Antigravity seems to be ubiquitous and cheap to the point of disposable - Yoda-baby's floating stroller was dumped as garbage. How's it work? Is it how ships reach space? Can you stack gravity plates? Turn them off?
| 17 |
Yes, gravity's a solved problem. Go back and watch Star Wars and pay attention to the speeders. Even when they're parked, they stay in the air. Even Rey's hunk-of-junk popsicle bike on Jakku. Antigravity is so trivial in Star Wars that someone as poor as Rey was doesn't bother turning off their repulsorlifts.
| 29 |
|
Is the left/right, creative/logical divide of the brain an outdated simplification, or a useful model?
|
I don't know where I've got this thought process from, but I think I learnt that the brain maps the 'yin and yang' of creative logical in a much messier way than simply left right? What is the current understanding of the brains functioning areas please?
| 29 |
The logic versus creative seems to be out of favor and kind of had left a bad taste in the mouths of researchers based on how it was popularized. But there's a researcher (Iain McGilchrist) who had proposed that the division is more like "big picture work" versus "details". The left hemisphere handles the really detailed stuff, the right the bigger ideas. He has a book, _The Master and His Emissary_.
| 15 |
Thoughts on the Mount St. Mary's situation?
|
Not-in-the-US academic here, wondering about folks' views on what's happening at Mt. St. Mary's regarding a tenured professor (Naberhaus) getting fired for "disloyalty."
[Link to the WAPO] (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/02/09/the-controversy-at-mount-st-marys-goes-national-after-professors-are-fired/)
[Link to IHE] (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/02/09/mount-st-marys-president-fires-two-faculty-members-one-tenure)
| 34 |
I think we are soon to reach an age in the US where tenure doesn't really mean anything anymore...perhaps we already have.
This is exactly what happens when boards vote MBAs into president positions. They start talking about numbers, targets, and customers. It's stupid and reflects a really reductive view of what universities can offer students.
Eventually the system will look even more like Wal Mart.
| 30 |
What is the difference between Hulk's, Wolverine's and Deadpool's healing abilities?
| 51 |
Hulk draws mass from another dimension to fill his wounds and his healing is enhanced by gamma radiation. It's the fastest of any of the trio. It combats absolutely everything.
Wolverine simply generates tissue rapidly to heal. His is the slowest of the trio, blocked in part by the adamantium in his bones. His healing factor comes naturally, and is the only one to do so. It combats most everything.
Deadpool's healing factor is a mere copy of Wolverine's and, while not the fastest, is extraordinarily efficient. It combats everything except his pre-existing cancer.
| 42 |
|
Reading Discipline and Punish casually. What's Foucault's definition of "power"?
|
It seems like it's something outside of the usual definition, but I can't place what he means by it. [michel-foucault.com](http://www.michel-foucault.com/concepts/) isn't especially helpful in conveying clearly what it's supposed to be, so I'm wondering if anyone here could help elucidate?
| 23 |
For Foucault (in that text), power is **productive**, not just repressive. We often think of a person with power as saying, "no, put that cookie down!" But for Foucault, power is not merely a suppression--it helps to produce that person's desires. To take a really crude example, imagine the school teacher who says, "don't stick out your tongue at me." The very fact of making the prohibition might create the desire for a student to do exactly that action--the student had no inclination to do so until it was prohibited.
Also, power is **relational** and not possessed by any one party. In the parent-child relationship, we usually think of the parent as having power and the child as not having it. Foucault makes the point that this power only makes sense if both parties are there; a person in a room alone has no parent power. This relational quality of power is goes hand-in-hand with the idea of power being productive.
Also, power is not found in a limited set of relationships. We often think of the government as having power over citizens, the kind over subjects, etc. For Foucault, that is true, but there are other, more subtle power relations in society, too. In other words, power is not only official.
I think the first point is the key one to take away from Foucault. He was responding to a naive view of human nature that saw all people as wanting to flourish, but they can't because of society, capitalism, whatever. Foucault argues that this is not so simple--that the very desires we have are, in various ways, created by power.
| 14 |
eli5: Why do intrest rates fall while average living costs increase?
|
I live in Germany and my interest rates plummeted over the last 10 years. I always thought, that interest rates existed to level out inflation. But I did some research and found out, that inflation rates are actually pretty stable. Meanwhile average living costs increase. How does all this fit together?
​
Sorry for bad english :)
| 22 |
Interest rates are controlled by central banks and are used as a tool to meet Government policies to manage the money supply and the tradeoffs between inflation and economic growth. Interest rates are however only one influcence on either of these factors and are not the core reason why costs rise or fall.
It's not simple to Eli5 but Inflation is a result of the herd behaviour of a complex web of billions of human interactions where the price / value of millions of goods and services are constantly changing. When everyone expects prices to rise they adjust their behaviour according. In this way Central Banks have a role to guide these expectations as well as to intervene to control inflation by using interest rates to affect a change in behaviour.
What is relevant to OPs question is that almost all central banks have a Government mandated policy of targeting a low positive annual inflation rate e.g. this is 2% for the Bank of England. This is because a low positive rate has been determined to produce the best conditions for long term sustainable economic growth
Ever since the financial crisis of 2008 intrest rates have been kept near historical lows as central banks used low rates to prop up demand and support the economy....by making money cheap it is easier to invest. It was also not seen as a good thing to raise interest rates too quickly following an economic crisis and during a period of repaying debt. It is also a matter of many debates whether they should ever return to previously higher levels. There has also not been a trigger to do so in major economies such as a case of runaway inflation or boom that would have caused Central banks to raise them quickly to act to dampen down excessive inflation.
TLDR Interest rates are a tool to control inflation..they are not it's route cause. It is possible that they may move in either direction at the time of higher/lower inflarion in response to wider economy wide issues.
| 10 |
Is there a maximum frequency sound that air can support? What happens beyond that point?
| 1,080 |
In air, molecules go 68 nm between collisions on average. The speed of sound is about 330 ms^-1. Dividing gives 4.8 GHz. That's the absolute limit though; you're not going to see practical transmission anywhere near that high.
| 334 |
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Is there a reason why the more dangerous frequencies (UV, X-ray, gamma) and the "harmless" frequencies (radio, IR) on the EM spectrum are separated by the visible wavelengths?
| 36 |
Try not to think about it like the two regions are "separated" by the visible light region. Saying like that kinda puts the cart before the horse.
Those frequencies aren't inherently visible. Our vision evolved to be sensitive to those frequencies that are highly abundant from the sun. The fact that there are two regions on either side of it, one bad one harmless, is a coincidence.
| 55 |
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[MCU] If they could successfully extract Vision's stone, would he have had any powers? If so, what powers would he have that were independent of the stone?
| 533 |
Without the stone he'd sbe on par with Ultron: strength, flight, durability, intelligence, internet connection. Though his mind stone specific powers (phasing, shooting energy beams, changing his appearance) would be gone.
| 460 |
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ELI5: What happens to America when it can no longer pay off its debts?
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Obviously America has insane amounts of debt like in tens of trillions and increasing constantly. Not sure if it is possible to ever pay that amount off, what can be done about it? if anything?
| 202 |
When a country wants to borrow money, it does so by selling bonds...buy a $100 bond today, and you can redeem it for $105 in a year.
That's who the US owe it's money to, whoever holds the bonds. Most of the bond holders are US citizens and businesses...the US basically owes all of this money to itself.
If the US wouldn't pay it's debt, that would mean when a holder tried to redeem their bond, the US says, oops, sorry, no can do. This is called defaulting. If the US defaulted on all of its debt, a few things would happen:
* The bonds would become worthless - everyone, from China to a personal retirement account to a school district's investment fund, would lose the money the put into bonds...mostly Americans
* The US couldn't borrow money anymore - if you default on your debt, people don't lend you money again...not being able to borrow greatly harms you economy
* The US dollar would devalue - since the US couldn't borrow, the only way they can get more money is by printing it
* There would be rampant inflation - so not only would American's lose their bonds, the value of their savings would shrink
* Foreign investment would leave the country - why get paid in US dollar when their value is shrinking
This is basically what happened when Argentina defaulted in 2002, and they still have a lot of trouble borrowing money and attracting foreign investment.
| 205 |
[General] Has any villain "legally" taken over the world?
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Like convince all the governments and people of the world that they are the best person and making them hand him/her authority with their own free will
| 554 |
Norman Osborn the Green Goblin in the Marvel universe after he very publicly killed the queen of the Skrulls during Secret Invasion. He was made the Director of HAMMER by the US government as a replacement of SHIELD, and he even has his own Dark Avengers and Dark X-men composed of mostly villains taking on the legacy titles of those heroes.
The cosmic-cube-altered Hydra-sleeper-agent version of Captain America managed to manipulate the public and the government into making him the Director of SHIELD and the leader of Earth's defense against alien threats, with supreme political powers. And then manipulated events to cause an alien invasion to happen to activate those powers, and also trap most heroes outside of Earth to fight that invasion, allowing him to legally turn America into a Hydra dictatorship.
And in other universes, how can we forget the most famous example, Senator Palpatine in the Star Wars universe who incited a civil war to cause the Galactic Republic to vote to make him the Emperor with absolute power.
| 641 |
ELI5: The differences between atomic, nuclear, and hydrogen bombs.
| 68 |
Short version: "Atomic bombs" use nuclear fission (the splitting of atoms) to make a pretty big explosion. "Hydrogen bombs" use nuclear fission _and_ nuclear fusion (the combining of atoms), and in theory can make explosions without any upper limit. "Nuclear weapons" can mean either.
Elaboration:
"Atomic bombs" derive their energy exclusively from the fissioning of uranium-235 or plutonium-239. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, for example, involving one piece of uranium-235 being shot into another with conventional explosives. This created a supercritical mass, starting a nuclear fission chain reaction. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki was of a different design, one where specially-created explosive "lenses" of a TNT-like explosive were used to spherically compress a ball of plutonium to very high density. This too created the supercritical mass and subsequent explosion. The latter type of bomb, the implosion bomb, is the most common type of atomic bomb. The largest pure-fission bomb ever created by the USA was around 500,000 tons of TNT equivalent. (The Nagasaki bomb, by comparison, was about 20,000 tons of TNT equivalent.) There is an upper-limit on the yield due to the fact that having too much fissile material (uranium-235 or plutonium) in one place is dangerous.
Hydrogen bombs derive their energy from both fission and nuclear fusion. Basically they work like this: an atomic bomb (of the implosion type) sits at one end of a heavy container. At the other end is a lump of fusion fuel (a material made of very light atoms, usually an isotope of hydrogen or lithium). At the center of the fusion fuel is another lump of fission fuel, and the fusion fuel lump is wrapped in a heavy material (e.g. depleted uranium or lead). When the atomic bomb inside the casing explodes, it first releases a burst of X-rays and gamma rays. These are reflected off of the inside of the casing, and end up compressing the fusion fuel. As it compresses, it starts another fission reaction at its center. Pushed from both the outside and the inside by essentially two atomic bombs, the fusion fuel starts to undergo nuclear fusion. This releases a lot of energy, and a lot of neutrons. These neutrons can then induce fusion in the casing around the fusion fuel, if it is fissionable material (like depleted uranium, which normally doesn't fission, but under such conditions can). The result can be a very large explosion — many millions of tons of TNT equivalent. In most modern hydrogen bombs, about half of the yield comes from fission, and half comes from fusion. All of the weapons in the current US arsenal are hydrogen bombs developed to fit into a very small space, so the warheads are only about the size of a trash can but they have an explosive yield of 200,000-400,000 tons of TNT. In theory, you can make hydrogen bombs as big as you want, because fusion fuel has no maximum limit (unlike fission fuel), and you can "chain" such bombs together, one bomb setting off the next. The only limitation is practical size. The largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated had a yield of 50,000,000 tons of TNT equivalent, and was about the size of a school bus.
"Nuclear weapons" is a category for the above that doesn't really distinguish between the above two major types. It became more popular in an era (the late 1950s onward) where people stopped really caring about whether fission or fusion was present in the warhead or not. It is, strictly speaking, a more accurate team, as "atomic" is not really specific (electrons are part of atoms, too, so chemical reactions are just as "atomic"; it is the nucleus that makes nuclear reactions stand out). The term "thermonuclear" is used when it is intended to indicate that fusion reactions are taking place, without using the "hydrogen bomb" notation.
| 61 |
|
CMV: If humanity has a future, it must settle the cosmos.
|
Humanity faces many threats on Earth, some of which have threatened our survival knowingly or unknowingly for thousands of years. In 1969, we proved that we have the ability to go to other worlds and survive and with the construction of the International Space Station we have proved we are able to survive living in space for over a year at a time with no gravity and exposure to higher levels of radiation.
Earth, love her or hate her isn't going to last forever, much less with 7+ billion of us living on it already and with over 10 billion predicted by 2100; all of us living in ways that produce extreme amounts of waste, environmental impact and constantly competing for ever dwindling resources that will continue to deplete faster with our growing population. Population growth can lead to increased chances of disease, lack of food and other resources; some of these factors can lead to a less stable society which can lead to millions of deaths through violence, starvation and other means.
Another threat looming over our world is random events such as asteroid collisions, gamma ray bursts, polar shifts, solar radiation storms ( the last two being more likely). We cannot predict these events nor prevent them with any reasonable confidence.
Our world is also currently filled with millions of individuals that have dangerous ideologies that simply cannot be changed or phased out within a reasonable time frame. Examples include Neo Nazi's, KKK members or sympathizers, Radical Islamist extremists, westboro baptist church types etc. Those that hold these ideals and others like them often times wish the deaths of others for no reason other than their beliefs. A new society on other worlds could limit the spread of these ideologies by establishing their society on a basis where the society comes before any personal beliefs that any individual may have. Such a society does not exist in our world. The US for example, while attempting to be religion neutral has a powerful basis in christianity, with phrases commonly used such as "In God we trust" and the fact that homosexual marriage was not permitted for much of its history in favor of christian values. All of this being said, you CANNOT force people to believe what you want, and you shouldn't because that would inhibit free thinking and compromise values of freedom. Rather such a society on new worlds should encourage people to be inquisitive and to find evidence for the things they believe. For example, although people may believe that humans did not evolve from apes and were the creation of God, they should at minimum accept evolution as truth because of the evidence behind it or at the very least question the evidence of their own beliefs. I believe that doing so could potentially create a more stable society than anything we are currently capable of with existing populations on Earth who's minds cannot be changed easily and who pass on their ideologies to their children for generations.
Earth's climate is also failing, and while i strongly support measures to save our planet i do not believe it should not prevent us from expanding to other worlds. Mars for example is an insanely inhospitable world, one that scientists would likely attempt to alter to make more habitable. I believe the research and technology done to make Mars more habitable can be used back here on Earth when the methods to do so are proven to work rather than dangerously experimenting with our only planets ecosystem.
Lastly, this is more of a belief rather than an argument to support my thesis, but i believe that it would be ridiculous for humanity, the only sentient life in a universe billions of light years across with trillions of galaxy's stars and planets should forever be confined to a blue spec in a sunbeam doomed to live out its final days or moments violently never to be seen or heard from again because of it's own ignorance when the solution to our continued survival is insanely plentiful among the stars if only we had the willpower to do so. We have spent 4.6 billion years getting to where we are here, we shouldn't stop now ;)
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| 30 |
The human species would do better to solve all the problems on Earth rather than use Earth's resources to travel to other planets which are way more inhospitable and way more dangerous - and if they succeeded in surviving there, they would establish a society which would manifest the same problems as we have here, due to human nature.
It has happened throughout human history - every time a new land is discovered, we over populate it, we pollute it, we divide ourselves into groups and kill each other - and there is no reason to believe it would be any different on another planet.
| 12 |
[General SciFi]I want to build a spaceship. How would I go FTL
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I know that a Warp Drive might work, just as anything including Wormholes. My question is: Is there anything else which might not be widely known and just as or even more possible?
EDIT: I'm serious! I *really* need to get off this planet!
| 32 |
The Traveller RPG has a different take on warp drives. Every warp jump lasts the same amount of time (approx. 1 Earth week). However the more powerful your drive is the further you can travel in that time.
| 27 |
[Harry Potter] What do wizard born children do before they go to Hogwarts?
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So if you're a wizard or a witch, you'll get your letter from Hogwarts when you're 10 or 11 years old. Muggle born will of course study at a regular school until that, but what about the ones raised in the world of wizards? They have to learn basics like writing, reading, mathematics and so on, right? But from who?
| 46 |
A wizard or witch, born into the community at large does not tend school. They stay at home and learn the basics of the wizarding community from their family, and help out around the house. It is an ancient system. The magical society does not accept change very easily. It might sound strange to keep your children at home for so long, but if you roll back the clock a century (or so) in the muggle world, you'll find that children didn't ever attend school. They grew up helping around the house, (farming, cleaning, sewing, or whatever needed to be done) and when they were old enough they entered into an apprenticeship... generally with either their father, or somebody in the local town. The average age for apprenticeship was 13 or 14, so when you view it this way, the magical community is actually fairly advanced (in the grand spectrum) for providing a full rounded education for their children at the tender age of 11.
| 40 |
[Worm/Marvel/DC] What power classifications from Worn would DC and Marvel characters have?
| 29 |
You are casting a super wide net here... Any particular characters you are interested in? The power levels in DC tend to be significantly higher than that of Worm. Superman would have multiple 10s for example.
| 15 |
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[Game of Thrones] What is the state of religion in Westeros given all the recent happenings?
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I'm a lowly Northern Westerosi farmer and I'm having a crisis of faith.
Short weeks ago, we were bundled into Winterfell and witnessed an army of undead kill half of our population. I overheard that the only reason we managed to survive was thanks to some 'Lord of Light'? There was a red priestess who set the swords of all those foreign riders aflame, and she was the one to light the trenches too. I had never heard of the Lord of Light but he seems definitively real so I thought maybe I should be praying to him now.
But then there's the Bran Stark guy, or sorry, the King Stark guy. I heard he has weirwood vision or something like that. I hear that the leader of the undead army was specifically trying to kill him, and that he has vision of all things past, present, and future. Maybe we should pray to the Old Gods? Maybe we should pray directly to this demigod King?
Then there's the Seven, those Gods they worship in the south. I hear their grand Sept was destroyed a few years ago. And now Kings Landing has been completely destroyed, alongside thousands of their devoted followers. It sounds like they might not have any power, maybe they're not even real.
edit - then there's some drowned god the Iron Born like right? Sounds like BS to me but has there ever been evidence that its a religion worth following? With so much in flux right now, I'm willing to keep my options open.
So who should I be praying to at this point? Who is everyone else in this country praying to now?
| 118 |
Some smallfolk in the Riverlands have seen the Light and now follow the Lord of Light. Whether this has anything to do with the rumoured "Brotherhood without Banners" is unknown. The Old Gods have protected the north for millennia, and belief in their power still runs strong in the North. The Faith of the Seven still remains strong in the Reach and other distinctly southern Andal regions, as the Faith relocated to the Starry Sept and continued its operations with the support of the Hightowers. The Drowned God is something the Ironborn believe in, but according to them, only the Ironborn can receive his blessing, so not much point trying to pray to him.
| 56 |
ELI5 how does active noise cancellation works and is it more harmful to your ears than normal headphones or earphones
| 289 |
Sounds are moving air. Active cancelation uses a microphone to listen to the sound, and then make an "opposite" sound by pushing air in the other direction. These opposite sounds are added to the music coming through the headphones.
By the time it gets to your ear, the combined air from the original (ambient) sound and the opposite sound created by the device cancel out (mostly), so you hear more of your music with less outside noise.
The music quality is a bit less because the music has extra sound added on top, but there's no more danger to your ears than listening to regular music.
| 377 |
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CMV: Police officers not shaking hands with people is a dick move and is part of the reason public perceptions of officers are so negative.
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Police officers not shaking hands with people is a dick move and is part of the reason public perceptions of officers are so negative. It serves to reenforce an "Us vs. Them" mentality. The main reason for not shaking hands with the public is safety, as it would put the officer in a vulnerable situation. However, is that not the point of a handshake? Offering you empty hand to a stranger shows trust and a mutual respect. Soldiers shake hands with civilians for this very reason. If an officer is so bad at threat assessment they will not shake hands with anyone who is not an officer, they should find a different job.
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| 15 |
Are you saying that police don't shake hands now, or that it would be bad if they didn't? what examples are there of police refusing hand shakes? Are they specific or widespread cases? Can you show any departmental doctrine saying either way?
| 13 |
ELI5: Why do doctors have such long shifts, when they know most about the perils of sleep deprivation?
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My friend often works 30 hour shifts, sometimes with only 3 hour breaks in between. It's easy to imagine doctors messing up under those conditions, and it also isn't healthy for the doctors themselves.
| 18 |
The standard of shifts was established by a hospital chief medical officer who regularly did cocaine back when that was legal. As such he was able to do extremely long shifts and expected it of his fellow doctors. Since then it has become industry standard and changing it is slow because of cost. Doctors are salaried positions and so working longer than a normal 8 hour work shift does not cost the hospital more money, so they hire as few doctors as possible and work them as long as possible. This practice in reinforced with the fact that there tends to not be enough doctors in all but the largest cities to hire many more.
| 29 |
Have there been any studies on IQ differences since the dawn of the internet and, specifically, the 'Google generation'? Are scores trending in any way in the last ~15-20 years?
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I was born in 1980 and when I was 6 I was lucky enough to get a FULL hand me down set of Encyclopedia Britannica from 1979. They were 7 years out of date already but they were all my family could afford. I know a lot of kids that had much less than that for reference materials.
Now, anything a child wants to learn about is available to them. Every resource imaginable. Everything you could ever want to know.
Does this instant access to information somehow trend the IQ scores one way or another?
| 22 |
Iq scores, by definition, can't trend. A score of 100 is defined as average for your age group peers. Above 100, above average. Below 100, below average. Ergo, if the average "intelligence" changes, so does the scoring. That being said, even the developer of the IQ test thought it was not useful for determining intelligence as there are many different facets to intelligence.
| 16 |
[LOTR] What benefits could friendly relations with orcs bring to society?
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Maybe the Orcs could bring medical advancements such as the medicines they use in the Uruk-Hai chapter of The Two Towers.
"Uglúk thrust a flask between his teeth and poured some burning liquid down his throat: he felt a hot fierce glow flow through him. The pain in his legs and ankles vanished. He could stand."
"Seizing him roughly Uglúk pulled him into a sitting position, and tore the bandage off his head. Then he smeared the wound with some dark stuff out of a small wooden box ... He was healing Merry in orc-fashion; and his treatment worked swiftly. When he had forced a drink from his flask down the hobbit’s throat, cut his leg-bonds, and dragged him to his feet, Merry stood up, looking pale but grim and defiant, and very much alive. The gash in his forehead gave him no more trouble, but he bore a brown scar to the end of his days."
| 35 |
Orcs are by nature corrupted in the process through which Morgoth created the first of their species by kidnapping newly awakened elves and twisting them.
They will always through their twisted hröa tend towards violence and destructiveness. Mistrusting and hating other races and each other, and in the depths of their hearts, they even hate and fear their creator Morgoth as well. As such any long-term and constructive cooperation between orcs and other beings is basically impossible.
They can and are intelligent, they are crafty engineers and their tunnelling technology is on par with that of dwarfs, although they never create things with esthetics in mind and would rather force others to do labour rather than do it themselves. As for their medical methods, elves seem to have similar and more advanced abilities and Men of the West that remained faithful can also show similar feats, healing with elvish words and simple herbs.
The only cure an orc can hope for is that once their body is dead their fëa can leave its corrupted hröa behind and be reborn in the Halls of Mandos as the elve they were meant to be.
| 38 |
CMV: If you are playing a game fairly within the defined rules, you cannot act unethically/immorally as it regards to play.
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As a small preface, this discussion mostly pertains to MMORPGs that have a competitive auction house system in place. However I feel that my view does in fact extend to all games in general.
If you are playing a game by the rules as outlined by the person who created the game, you cannot act unethically or immorally. For some reason, a lot of players in MMOs tend to apply a weird idiosyncratic idea that auction house prices have some external room for interpretation. Usually this applies to people getting frustrated with undercutting and whining about "destroying the market." My argument, is that because the rules are defined, and require an implicit agreement between any two players as to how they function it is impossible to then be unethical or immoral, because what is moral/ethical in this case has been quantitatively defined as X rules.
I'd like to see a position that maybe I'm not considering in how this view could be incorrect. It does seem pretty cut and dry to me, but it's not so self-evident given how upset people get. (My ultimate point being, that it's pretty dumb to get mad when everyone is otherwise playing fair) I suppose that could just be video game culture at its finest but you don't usually see it manifest in not competitive titles.
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| 44 |
Look into hawk/dove games and other models of human cooperation.
What you should understand is that calling someone immoral/unethical *is a strategy within the game*, because it makes people want to cooperate with them less, and potentially makes them feel bad about themselves, thereby making that 'immoral' strategy less effective overall because of the negative consequences to your reputation.
Labels like 'immoral' and 'unethical' serve *exactly the same game theoretic purpose* in our everyday, real lives.
Therefore, since the meaning of 'immoral' and 'unethical' acts is really just 'acts that other people wish you wouldn't do and will refuse to cooperate with you in the future if they see you doing', then those terms are just descriptions of certain types of strategies in the game, and are perfectly applicable and reasonable labels.
It's not dumb to get mad when someone acts unethically in the game. Getting mad at them is *precisely* the best strategy to undermine their strategy and make them less likely to use it in the future. It is a perfectly rational strategic response.
| 47 |
[Vampire Romance Novels] Help! My teenage daughter has fallen in love with a tall, dark and brooding denizen of the underworld, should I shoot on sight, or is there a way I can tell her to break it off?
| 18 |
The only way to stop this is to find an equally tall, dark and brooding vampire hunter . When the two of them fight she'll interpret it as the two of them competing for her love. The Vampire Hunter will win and then one of two things will happen.
1. The Hunter will go the classic man with no name and say that his life is too dangerous for her to tag along in. She'll get over it within a few months.
2. The hunter decides to stop their life of danger and settle down. You can now shoot that person because they are not undead and thus are susceptible to any type of firearm.
| 38 |
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ELI5 : What is the significance of the new pictures of Pluto and why are scientists so excited?
| 63 |
We have never gotten any good pictures of pluto. It was discovered 85 years ago and the best we ever saw of it was a few fuzzy pixels and we're about to get great high-quality images of both it and it's moon.
| 54 |
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What is the space time continuum?
| 54 |
Imagine a completely empty square room. One corner has a black dot in it, just so you can distinguish it from the other corners, and then the 3 walls that meet at that dot are colored red, yellow, and blue. Now you can place a ball *anywhere* in the room, and then measure it "x-feet from the red wall, y-feet from the blue wall, and z-feet from the yellow wall" and that will give you the coordinates of the ball.
Now imagine if you took the same ball and threw it around the room. In order to locate the ball now you don't just have to say where it is, but also *when* it is there. "x-feet from the red wall, y-feet from the blue wall, z-feet from the yellow wall, and t-seconds after you threw it".
So really, space-time is just a way of locating objects in the universe by both their location related to other objects in space and their location related to other events in time. The term space-time-continuum is just a way of saying that when doing math about predicting where an object will be you have to treat time somewhat like the other dimensions in order to give the location of an object.
| 136 |
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CMV: OnlyFans should change their age minimum to 21 and not 18.
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A lot of people see OnlyFans as more similar to Instagram than to a cam site or other selling sex sites.
Influencers are promoting their OnlyFans on Instagram to their millions of young followers and with the popularization of sex positivity being equated with being liberated, (which it definitely can make people feel liberated), a lot of young teens will see these influencers shamelessly joining OnlyFans because they make thousands of dollars from it. I have no problem with this, but as they influence on other things, they will influence others with this action as well)
Teens will think that once they turn 18, they can take the easy way out and make thousands on OnlyFans too. But it won’t work that way for them. It is difficult to build a fan base on any social platform, even if you’re showing your booty.
There are millions of young people who are making next to NOTHING on OnlyFans and you don’t see them. All you see is Bella Thorne, Trisha Paytas, and Bhad Bhabie making millions from it.
So. To my CMV. When I turned 18, I got unwanted attention from older men who were waiting for me to turn 18. Now that was a small group of men but still, a lot of (women especially) can relate.
I left high school knowing two things: that men wanted me for my body/sex/the way I look, and that a lot of hobbies I liked as a teenage girl were ridiculed. Like Twilight, One Direction, (which I kept quiet about because I saw other teen girls get made fun of for liking) and even video games because I must be a “fake gamer.”
It’s overall difficult for teen girls to have high self-esteem when they feel like their hobbies and interests are lame but they can gain attention through their looks.
I AM NOT REFERRING TO EVERY TEEN GIRL THAT EVER WAS BUT IT IS A LOT OF TEEN GIRLS’ PERSPECTIVE DUE TO SOCIAL MEDIA WITH ITS FILTERS AND OVER SEXUALIZATION.
When I was 21, in University, with a job, I had brand new hobbies and new career goals then when I was 18, I shiver at the idea that I would have ever considered a “sugar daddy” or selling photos online as it doesn’t align with my values now.
Back in the day, some sleazeball 25 year old would show up to a high school party and start talking to 17-year-olds to try and get them involved in porn once they turn 18. Things have become A LOT more influential since.
The internet is forever and thinking of a teen who wanted to try their luck at OnlyFans at 18 later regretting at age 21 because there are naked or suggestive photos of them online forever. There is now a looming fear that these photos will cause problems for future jobs.
I would love to live in a reality where your boss can’t choose to hire you because they find out you were once on OnlyFans, but that’s not reality. They will judge you for it.
Social media is making teens built to be insecure and they are exposed heavily to the idea that “sex equals easy money” it’s all a lie. Most of these influencers who just post ass shots are escorts. They make little money from paid promotions. But teens don’t see that.
Will OnlyFans ever change their policy, probably a big NO. But my view is that it would help save some teens from regret. If someone has had a few years of adulting and they then choose to post on OnlyFans, that’s cool, but let’s give them a few years to think about it. I believe it would make a great change in allowing young people to find out who they really want to be, a chance to see what the world has to offer them and what they can offer back.
I AM IN NO WAY BASHING SEX WORKERS OR TRYING TO SAY THEY SHOULD BE LIMITED IN THEIR WORK. I JUST THINK ONLYFANS SHOULD CHANGE THEIR POLICY BECAUSE OF ITS CLOSENESS TO SOCIAL MEDIA AND HOW IT IMPACTS TEENS WHO WILL WANT TO TRY IT TO MAKE A QUICK BUCK.
(Also didn’t even get to the users of OnlyFans, but that’s for a different day, so I’m just speaking on the posters)
Also I know that there are so many reasons why this would never happen, but it’s just my view of what I would like to happen. They can’t just kick out all these 18-20 year old all of a sudden I know. Maybe it can be a new policy for new joiners.
Ok that’s it! Let me know what you think :)
| 89 |
To summarize, your view is that the minimum age should be raised because 18-year-olds are more susceptible to pressure than 21-year-olds? If that's the case, what made you decide that 21 is the age at which the influence of external pressure is low enough to be acceptable?
| 35 |
Are there materials that are good at conducting heat but not electricity or vice versa?
| 21 |
Actually there are materials that are designed to do exactly this for use in thermoelectric generators - they're called 'phonon glass electron crystals' or PGECs.
Other guy isn't wrong they are very much intrinsically related (it's called the wiedemann-franz law). Overall THERMAL conductivity is the sum of contributions from the vibrations within the material (phonons) and the motion of electrons. But what you can do is minimise the former without really affecting the latter, for example by having lots of layers of different material (therefore introducing interfaces that scatter phonons) as a kind of composite. You've then significantly reduced thermal conductivity without sacrificing electrical.
| 26 |
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[LOTR] How did allying with Morgoth further Sauron's plan?
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Doesn't Morgoth want to destroy everything and Sauron wants everything to be in perfect order through force? How was Sauron going to prevent Morgoth from destroying everything once the First Age Noldor elves were defeated?
| 121 |
Sauron was originally attracted to Melkor because of his awesome power and his ability *and will* to effect his designs on the world quickly.
There’s also a strong argument to be made that Melkor originally wanted control and subjugation of Arda before slowly falling into a nihilistic pursuit of total destruction. His goals were aligned enough with Sauron at first for them to find plenty of common ground in their vision of Arda. It’s even stated that Sauron admired Melkor so much that his ultimate goal while being the Vala’s lieutenant became to see Melkor’s ambitions come to fruition.
After Morgoth is finally defeated in the First Age, Sauron is ashamed to return to the Valar for judgement - he resented the idea of going from the second most powerful being in Middle Earth to a repentant prisoner for eons. No, Sauron had already chosen his side and began to pursue his own original goals.
| 126 |
CMV: Having 'Cheat Days' Will Make Sticking With a Diet More Difficult
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It is not that it is detrimental to your health, one day out of many where you eat less healthy food won't ruin your health. But it is the worst way to motivate yourself and will make sticking to a diet more difficult.
In having a cheat day, you are attributing bad food with a reward and therefore good food with a punishment. You are eating salads for lunch not because you want to, but because you promised yourself some ice cream on the weekend (at least, that is a part of your motivation)
Doing this is not just going to be detrimental to your chance of sticking with a diet, but your mental health too. It shouldn't have to feel like every spoonful of salad is going in your mouth against your will. The experience needs to be framed in a way that makes it enjoyable. So it's a change in perspective you need, not a reward/punishment system.
People who naturally gravitate towards healthy foods aren't forcing themselves in this way, they eat healthy food because they want to, it makes them happier. The healthy food is the reward itself, there is no need for reliance on extrinsic motivation.
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| 22 |
This depends entirely on the willpower of the person pursuing the diet. If you have the willpower to continue the diet without cheat days, agreed. They're only harmful.
If, however, you're like most people who really need a diet and don't always have the willpower to resist temptation, completely cutting all unhealthy foods out of your life at once can lead to failure and return to your previous habits.
I like to look at it the same way I'd look at quitting smoking. You're breaking a long-standing habit through a combination of willpower and better living. However, most people who quit smoking cold turkey just aren't able to quit long-term.
If you don't have the will to quit all at once, cheat days can be a big help in keeping you motivated to follow through with the lifestyle change in the long term.
| 12 |
ELI5: Why do cars make a ticking sound for a few minutes after turned off?
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I'm a car guy myself, and even I don't really know the answer to this.
| 1,247 |
It's contraction of the various metal bits that were heated by combustion, and are now cooling. Sometimes that contraction causes an individual piece of the car to exist in either tension or compression, which is only alleviated when the force gets to great and something slips marginally. That slip produces the popping sound you hear.
You'll notice the same kind of pops if you have an oven range with resistive heating elements.
| 536 |
ELI5 why is white rice cheaper than brown rice if it's the processed form of latter?
| 12,620 |
White rice is just brown rice with the bran removed. The bran has oil in it which can be extracted to form another product, rice bran oil. By splitting the cost of production between two products a lower price can be provided for the white rice.
Another factor is that the oil in the bran means that brown rice can spoil more easily than white rice. Shorter shelf life and more costly transportation means brown rice pushes brown rice to be more expensive.
| 11,618 |
|
ELI5: Why we needed a consitutional amendment (the 18th) to ban alcohol rather than just a Federal law
| 216 |
At the time of prohibition, it wasn't widely accepted that the federal government had the authority to ban substances. Since then, we've come to take it for granted. Early anti-drug laws started out by finding loopholes in the law. For instance, the government would impose a tax on a drug, requiring people to purchase a stamp for it to be legal. Then they wouldn't sell any stamps. They also tended to be fueled by public outcry and anti-minority or anti-immigrant sentiments. Nowadays we pretty much take it for granted that the federal government can ban substances due to the commerce clause.
They had to ban alcohol the hard way, by constitutional amendment, because alcohol use was far more widespread by the voting population than other controlled substances.
| 204 |
|
Does the existence of fermions in a black hole violate the pauli exclusion principle?
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If you had a large number of fermions enter a black hole and all merge at the singularity, it would seem that you would necessarily have multiple fermions occupying a single state, but this would violate the pauli exclusion principle. My knowledge of black holes is very limited so I would appreciate if someone could explain the flaw in my reasoning
| 82 |
The flaw is that you assume both general relativity, and quantum mechanics (through Fermi statistic) to be correct. Near the classical singularity, what actually happens is still completely unknown, and you would need a proper theory of quantum gravity to figure it out.
| 39 |
ELI5: Why videos don't load continuously, smooth way and load in small 'jumps'
| 22 |
Imagine you're at a buffet selling only m&ms (in this case, bandwidth) with only one guy handing the candy out to people.
some people will go up to the man with an empty bucket and ask for m&ms, instead of filling everyone's bucket to the top he will put in only a big handful, topping them up as they need. this is useful in many ways.
Some people wont eat all the m&ms and what you've given them would go in the bin and be a waste of resources.
Sometimes there will be many people at once asking for m&ms and it will be faster to partially fill everyone's bucket up rather than totally fill everyone one at a time. this way everyone can start eating and continue getting topped up when they're running low.
This also frees up some of your own bandwidth and computer resources to use on other stuff while watching the video. i guess the analogy here would be carrying around a lighter bucket
| 26 |
|
Does the brain invert the image percieved back upright if you wear inverted goggles for a certain period of time?
| 20 |
Yup! Some cool research done on this over a century again (G Stratton, if I’m remembering the name correctly). The brain adapts to prism glasses and similar input shifts relatively quickly. It also adjusts back (and if you changed back and forth over time, your brain would get quicker at “switching gears”.
Similar thing happens with changes to sound input. In a study they put molds into the pinna (outer ear that’s the visible part) which is the part that usually helps us determine up-down directional info from sound that we otherwise couldn’t figure out from inter-aural timing/volume. People sucked at localizing sound for a while, got good at it over time, but then upon removing the molds, the brain seems to shift back into “old mode” and was quickly able to properly and accurately determine location from the normal input.
| 21 |
|
Eli5: How did AutoCAD become the industry standard for drafting when it is horrendously buggy and prone to crashing?
|
I’ve used a lot of post-2010 versions of AutoCAD over the years in a variety of offices and at home. It’s the buggiest program I’ve ever used by far. Even sometimes something simple like editing a text box makes the whole program crash to desktop. Looking around on the Autodesk website and other forums shows me this is well known about AutoCAD. How did it become the standard over other CAD programs despite this huge cost in productivity?
| 31 |
I used the Autocad 13 version in the early 2000s at school. It does not matter how buggy it is if it is the only program available, or the program that managed to get into the school. It was one of the first digital drafting programs to gain any kind of success, and they cut a lot of price deals to get into schools meaning that they got firmly established before their competitors could. Once a school is dedicated to a program ecosystem it is not easy to switch, even if it is buggy.
And while it was buggy for us, it was better than the other option which was drawing by hand.
| 19 |
ELI5: Why do people write C.E. instead of A.D.? Why not change the calendar?
|
It doesn't make any sense.
| 61 |
CE means Common Era, AD means Anno Domini (year of our lord)
CE is more accurate, because it's arbitrary. Whereas the year of Jesus' birth is up for debate, usually being 3-5 AD (Doesn't make much sense does it).
We don't change the calendar because there is nothing wrong with the calendar, it works the same as ever. It's off by one day every 8000 years, considering 8000 years ago we had no calendars and 8000 years from now we will have a better system, it's fairly good. The only different is that CE is secular.
Edit - extra info
| 150 |
CMV: There was no “SJW” mob demanding Mr. Potato Head to be gender neutral
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There was no one banging on the front doors of the headquarters of Hasbro yelling “YOU MAKE THAT POTATO HEAD GENDER NEUTRAL RIGHT NOW, GOD DAMN IT!” They did this all on their own volition as a marketing scheme to get woke points to boost sales. Yeah, you risk pissing off some consumers, but the likelihood is those people will fall for this bullshit narrative that’s currently pushed that this angry group of people petitioned to make Mr. Potato Head gender neutral, which re-directs the anger at “people being too easily offended these days” The reality is that no one actually gave a shit about a plastic potato in the first place.
| 1,879 |
There's one thing you get wrong: Mr. Potato Head has not been made gender-neutral. He is still a male potato, and Mrs. Potato Head is still a female potato. The only thing that's changed is that they now belong to the "Potato Head" line of products rather than the "Mr. Potato Head" line of products, since one is male and one is female.
| 1,129 |
ELI5:Why are basketball officials so much more touchy than football officials?
|
Is there an answer beyond "That's just the way it is?"
Football coaches yell and curse at football officials routinely without flags being thrown. Yet when a basketball coach or player vehemently questions a call, even without cursing, an official will often call a technical foul.
| 17 |
Part of it is the courtside experience is a core part of basketball both for the image but also for a very important set of clientele. Also, since Allen Iverson, the NBA has worked very hard to sanitize their image and shy away from "street ball."
The refs can take it, but it's very much against the rules.
That's commenting more on the attitude and cursing than questioning calls. The latter is probably due to delay of game being a very real threat in Basketball where in football most of the game time the ball is not in play.
| 11 |
Would shooting down a nuclear missile result in a nuclear explosion?
|
Regarding a successful missile defense system, intercepting a nuclear missile launch.
| 32 |
No, detonating a nuclear bomb requires a fairly precise set of conditions. The fissionable materials in the device are stored in a subcritical state. That means that on their own, they're not dense enough to cause a chain reaction.
The actual detonation involves pushing the fissionable materials into a supercritical state, where a chain reaction occurs naturally and this causes the actual explosion (and in the case of a thermonuclear bomb or H-bomb, this also sets off the fusion reaction that amplifies the total explosive power). There are multiple mecanisms to achieve this, but they all rely on rather precisely controlled explosions of conventional explosives.
If a nuclear missile is shot down or otherwise blown up in a way that doesn't trigger the conventional explosives in the right way, then the nuclear reactions won't take place. However, there may still be fallout from the radioactive fissionable materials in the device being spread out over the nearby area.
| 58 |
ELI5: Why is the comparison of the necessity for balancing our federal budget to balancing my personal budget flawed?
|
I know economists all think this argument is overly simplified and ridiculous, but I do not understand why. Why is it more efficient for the government to run a deficit, whereas I am better off not running a deficit?
Thanks
| 33 |
Here is why:
The US Federal Government is one of the largest sources of stimulus for the greater US economy. There are times (not 100% of the time) when it is better for the Federal Government to run a deficit, notably during periods of economic recession, because:
* Constraining the Federal Government to running in the black during periods when tax revenue is depressed is illogical. Tax revenue will bounce back eventually, and many government programs can't be stopped and started on a whim.
* The spending *by* the Federal Government helps stimulate the economy, pulling us out of that recession.
Now, in comparison, *your* personal finances do not, in fact, stimulate the economy, at least not nearly as much. Perhaps one three-hundred-millionth as much? Moreover, your revenues (your wages) are **not**, in fact, going to bounce back. You might not get another job. You might be 80 years old and not going to live a whole hell of a lot longer.
And, if you decide to say "FUCK YOU" to your creditors? Well, really, nothing happens. Aside from your credit rating tanking, nobody cares if you default on your loans. The US Federal Government, on the other hand, is considered to be the most unassailable, stable, rock-solid debtor on Earth. The US is the Lannisters: They always pay their debts.
This means that while the US Federal Government takes out their loans at the most attractive possible interest rate (1-Year T-Bills currently at 0.13%; No, that's not a typo) while you pay about 4.5%, and that's only *if* you put up collateral (the house you're taking a mortgage on).
So it's a hell of a lot cheaper for the US Federal Government to run a deficit, it's a hell of a lot more beneficial, and it's more practical than it is for you to do so.
| 35 |
ELI5: Why did Germany lose World War I?
|
I've only recently developed an interest in history, and this is probably really basic, but it still confuses me - what led to Germany conceding defeat when they did? They'd beaten Russia and Belgium, occupied large chunks of France, created puppet states in the east, and their allies had all held on. What made them surrender in 1918?
| 79 |
Once the French held through the initial German attack, Germany was already in trouble. Their whole plan for the war was based on defeating France before the British Expeditionary Force could become established on the continent to off-set the German numerical advantage against France. Now Germany faced their long-time nightmare scenario, a sustained two-front war.
Four years later the British blockade had pretty effectively isolated Germany from international trade in that time, and this was crippling them economically. The Allies meanwhile could still trade over the sea because of the superiority of The Royal Navy. Germany's Navy failed to starve Britain the same way (though the UK still struggled), and their policy of unrestricted submarine warfare only brought the US into the fray.
Even with the the influx of troops from the east in the German spring offensive of 1918 (codenamed MICHAEL), it was a pretty much a last-ditch effort of an exhausted Germany. When the Allies and newly arrived Americans stalled the offensive, it was only a matter of time. The Germans could no longer replace (or feed) their troops anymore, while the Allies would only become stronger. When Germany completely lost the momentum to the Allies by fall 1918, they decided it was time to throw in the towel.
| 50 |
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