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Is it normal to still make silly mistakes as a postdoc?
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Started my first postdoc position three weeks ago. It's a bit of a shift for me; my PhD was in protein-RNA interaction biochemistry and crystallography, very in vitro, and I'm now shifting to a cell culture and bioinformatics lab. Well, I was doing great, but yesterday I made such a DUMB mistake...
I generated six CRISPRi knockdown lines, and I was subculturing at the end of the day when I mixed two of them together in the same flask. So now I pretty much only have four CRISPRi lines for downstream experiments. I have lentivirus in the -80 so I can just reinfect and have the two lines ready within the upcoming week. But I just feel so dumb and so awful. I haven't told my PI yet as this happened Friday evening, I definitely will let him know on Monday.
I don't know him that well and he is a little bit intimidating, which he is aware of and told me not to be intimidated by him. But I just feel so stupid and so scared to tell him. I know that he won't yell at me or anything, I just feel like he might regret hiring me.
How bad is this?
| 147 |
Everyone makes mistakes and this one wasn’t a big one, but they can have serious consequences and the key is to develop processes and procedures so that they do not happen. This is a new area for you and you are going to make some mistakes. The right question now is how you are going to ensure that this one never happens again.
| 155 |
CMV: Banning people on the No Fly list from buying firearms is a horrible civil rights violation
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To be clear, I support gun control and don't care about the second amendment. I oppose the bill because the No Fly list is an awful, immoral concept and the bill gives its use further credibility.
I know people on the no fly list. They have Arabic sounding names, "similar to those of known terrorists", and there's nothing they can do to clear their name. If you're charitable, you can call this gross incompetence, if you're not, you can call it racist.
Plus all the ridiculous cases in the news of, say, toddlers on the no fly list.
The No Fly bill doesn't just deny a right to someone, which I don't necessarily have a problem with, it does so in a way that's unfair, oftentimes arbitrary, racist (intentional or not), and non-transparent.
I believe the liberals supporting this are betraying their values by promoting this bill.
I will not change my view on an appeal that the lives saved from gun violence outweighs those are inconvenienced unless you can address my other points. I am aware that my views are based on anecdotal evidence, however, so if you could show me that these cases are rare and/or being addressed, I'd be open to that. Thank you.
| 189 |
I think the basic problem here is that there's barely any meat to any of the discussion about how this would be implemented.
I mean, if there's no due process, you know that the courts will rule it unconstitutional. The politicians know it. Everyone that knows anything about American politics knows it.
So one of two things is true:
1) The intent is to create due process for the list, at which point your entire argument evaporates.
2) The intent is to pretend to do something about gun violence for political reasons, while knowing that it won't withstand a court challenge. At which point it's not a huge civil rights violation, it's a cynical political maneuver that will have zero practical effect.
| 52 |
CMV: If I support Bernie Sanders, and I live in a state that is guaranteed to vote Republican in the general election, then I should vote for Bernie, even if Hillary wins the DNC nomination.
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I'm from South Dakota, a state that has voted for a democrat something like 2 times in the past 100 years (and even THOSE times were in years where >85% of states were also blue). Thus it is guaranteed that my state will put its 3 delegates toward the Republican. Since I support liberal policies, my vote is effectively silenced due to the nature of the electoral college. More than in other places, my vote does not count (This is one of my big issues with the Electoral College system. Why should one person's vote matter more than another's?). Thus, voting for Bernie isn't "splitting the vote", and it's not "throwing away" my vote, since either way my vote wouldn't have mattered. But if I vote Bernie, then I'm sending a message (no matter how small), saying "I am dissatisfied with the option given to me (HRC) and am still in favor of the policies of this alternative candidate". If my vote doesn't matter for choosing the President, maybe it can matter in the sense of sending a message.
Something just FEELS wrong about this logic, but I can't figure out what. It seems like there has to be something I am missing. So reddit, please change my view.
_____
> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!*
| 108 |
You should vote Green party instead. It sends an even stronger message because if the Green party reaches 5% of the vote, they get the same federal funding that the Dems and Repubs get come next election. Plus, as a Bernie supporter, I'd be willing to bet that you would agree with Jill Stein on many of her positions.
| 82 |
Star Wars is far more interesting than Star Trek CMV
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I have always been a Star Wars fan since I was little, I've watched all the movies and played almost all the games. Its story line is emotional and I find it interesting how the galaxy is so extensive. The different planets and different races fascinate me and how you can kind of compare it to our world. I know Star Trek has similar qualities, but their movies never intrigued me as Star Wars has. Can anyone CMV?
EDIT: To be more specific: SW's technology far out powers ST's (Death Star, Star Destroyers, AT-ATs, etc. Not to mention Jedi and Sith who can manipulate the force and wield light sabers). It also has much more extensive stories than just the story lines from the trilogies. The galaxy as a whole has more in-depth explanations. It is much more political and geographical than Star Trek.
2nd EDIT: Even though I said Star Trek has similar capabilities, I feel Star Wars has it MUCH BETTER than Star Trek. Everything I previously stated I felt was carried out much stronger in Star Wars than in Star Trek (the emotion, the techonology, and storyline etc...).
| 18 |
Imagine the worst racism isn't just allowed, but considered very necessary. Imagine seeing white/black/brown people in groups, and they'd rarely ever speak to anyone else.
Imagine women are a joke. Such emotional creatures! They're like a sexier, more unstable, Peter Griffon. Many will be the first to assure you that all of this is true.
Imagine older white men (30 and up) are considered the shape of God. Imagine a world where they are the only face of true power.
Imagine a world where to even admit sex for pleasure exists, is to be censored. You may even be arrested.
Imagine the war on Terror was against an enemy every bit the equal of the United States. Imagine the terrorists had nukes. Imagine all that surrounds you might be erased.
Now imagine the balls it took to create the first episode of Star Trek, in this world. There's a second in command who is a woman without emotions. NBC was so offended that they killed the character. No arguments allowed.
The story is about illusions. It very strongly hints that there's an alien race who wants to watch sex. Fortunately, even back then, censors wouldn't know how to read between the lines, and getting shit past the radar was a fun game for everyone.
When Roddenberry created his new crew, he included a likable young Russian...you know, the scary bad guys who could erase all of us? He also created a universe without money, where nobody lacked for what they needed. It's like he was daring the suits to fire him.
And there was a black woman (he compromised by making her 4th in command, which made a fan out of Martin Luther King Jr.) and an Asian man.
And as for the hints of sex? It's like watching Hugh Hefner's barely edited wishlist.
Oh, and just for the final fuck you to everyone in charge, there is no God. Everyone is an atheist.
How the hell did he even get that on the air?
To put it in terms you can relate to (due to the envelope being harder to push), imagine someone had the balls to make a sci-fi show with a heroic ex-Taliban soldier beating up an evil empire, and they included full penetration sex.
And they put it on the Disney Channel.
| 72 |
[Forrest Gump] Could Forrest cook good shrimp?
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Forrest's entire fortune was built upon the foundation of shrimping, even if other factors are what made him a millionaire/billionaire. His best friend besides Jenny told him pretty much everything there could be known about shrimp.
So was Forrest good at cooking it or did he just harvest and sell it?
| 38 |
Forrest is incredibly good at following directions. Forrest also became friends with Bubba's mother who worked her life as a maid/cook who was good at cooking shrimp (you see her as one of like a dozen people who attended Forrest's wedding). It's very likely she at some point showed Forrest how to cook shrimp and he would have followed her directions and recipes perfectly.
| 49 |
[The Defenders] How did Daredevil completely dominate his fight with Danny Rand?
| 45 |
Danny is skilled, but so is Daredevil - maybe not to the same level, but skilled enough that he'd be able to tag Danny at least. Daredevil has extensive fight experience in real, life or death scenarios, much more than Danny, which makes a big difference. Daredevil's enhanced senses also give him better indication of what Danny is going to do, an advantage that Danny isn't experienced against, and maybe isn't even aware of.
​
A small enough skill gap, meets extensive fight IQ/experience, meets 6th sense, it spells disaster for Danny at sackerfice.
| 66 |
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Does sweating empty the bladder?
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Let's say you have a full bladder, but you hold it. If you sweat a lot, will your bladder eventually empty? Can some or all of your urine go back into your body to hydrate you?
| 27 |
Nope. Once you're dehydrated the kidneys will be producing urine that is more concentrated (and lesser in quantity). But the urine that has already been produced and is being stored in the bladder will not get reabsorbed.
| 33 |
ELI5: Why is coconut oil considered healthy, even though it is so dense with saturated fat?
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I hear so many people say that coconut oil is healthy, but when I look at the macros, this makes no sense to me. Can someone ELI5?
| 163 |
The saturated fats in coconut oil are in the form of “Medium-chain triglyceride (MCT)” - this basically means your body burns the saturated fats found in coconut oil in the same way it burns carbs.
Carbs (and the sat. fats in coconut oil) are used directly for energy rather than being stored as fat in your body. However, just like carbs, if you eat more than your body is able to burn then the excess will indeed be stored as fat.
| 155 |
ELI5: what the difference is between the 7 types of twins
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there was a post today about there being 7 types of [twins](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin#Fraternal_.28dizygotic.29_twins) but I would like someone to explain this in terms I can understand.
| 42 |
As the wiki article states, the 3 most common types are all *fraternal*. This means that the mother's ovaries released two eggs instead of one, and both were fertilised. The three types of fraternal twin are male-male, male-female, and female-female.
The next most common type is identical twinning. This occurs when one egg is fertilised but it splits into two embryos. The resulting twins thus share the same genes and so are identical.
Finally, there are the very rare half twins. These occur when two sperm enter one egg. The egg splits, and one sperm fertilises one part of the egg and the other sperm fertilises the other part. This means both embryos will have genes from the egg, but each one will have genes from only the one sperm that fertilised it.
| 15 |
CMV: Mandatory voting is a good thing.
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I've seen a couple of posts discussing this, but I'd be interested to see answers in the current context of Brexit and the upcoming US election. From my perspective, if you want the right to have your views as a people represented and implemented (i.e. democracy), you should have the responsibility to vote on them.
In both the EU referendum and the upcoming U.S election I've seen a lot of talk about issues along the lines of "only X percent of young voters, who were supportive of cause Y came to vote". The campaigns of politicians are about getting people that already support them to bother to vote rather than convincing the general populace of the righteousness of their cause.
One of the most common counterarguments I've come across is that it impedes freedom, but I think that its quite bizarre because many people have given up freedom for far less important causes (e.g. copyright/privacy), even where freedom is best marketed, in the U.S. It has been equivocated to good. Absolute freedom would be anarchy. Even if this is untrue and freedom is sacred, it seems that it is more sacred than democracy. Specifically, your freedom to not vote is more sacred than the government acting on behalf of its people.
Another point I've come across is that it stops people who are too uneducated or disinterested from voting. The problem here is that there is always someone less or more informed than you, and you could go with that point to separate even groups of those that do vote. You don't know where to draw the line, you don't have the ability to and nor should you. It is certainly a flaw in democracy that sometimes it can just be determined by 'mob rule' where the public is generally misinformed, but if you have a problem with that with everyone voting, you will certainly have a problem with it with fewer voters, as people don't necessarily decide to vote based on how informed they really are.
As an Australian, I recognize that my upbringing has certainly helped this bias, but it's hard to see the other perspective given these points. Democracy is a flawed system, and sometimes it doesn't produce the best results, or those you want, but it has done a lot of good, and much has been done to maintain it. To throw it away for a trivial bit of freedom or because of some misplaced sense of elitism seems like a waste.
| 143 |
Anyone who doesn't want to vote is someone who shouldn't.
Most of them would vote for a joke candidate or the one with the most advertising budget. These are people who don't understand the ramifications of voting or don't care.
A better idea would be to have a bit of political studies in high school to raise awareness.
| 51 |
ELI5: why does exerting pressure reduce pain?
| 27 |
There are a couple things like vascular compression and limiting air contact, but the biggie is your brain's input threshold. Think of it a little bit like math. You have lots of different nerves that all give your brain info, but your brain can only pay attention to so much total info from the nerves at a given moment (lets call that number 10). So if you add another sort of nerve signal from pressure it competes with the ouchy signal. If you only have the ouchy to pay attention to it would be 10:10 of what your brain gives attention to. But if you add another strong feeling (pressure with a value of lets say, 3) then the total pain your brain can notice is now only 7:10 and pressure of 3:10.
| 59 |
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ELI5: some states in the us require alimony from people who are listed on the birth certificate, regardless of paternity. What's to stop people from listing rich or well known males as father?
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Read a couple of stories. seems retarded
| 24 |
Alimony is spousal support. What you mean is child support.
What happens is that when you list a father, he gets notified of this. If he then feels this listing was incorrect, he can fight it / prove he is not the father. If this is done within a certain period of time, it gets erased from the birth certificate and no child support can be demanded. With the stories you hear, generally this procedure wasn't followed somehow (either they claim they weren't notified or they objected outside of the required time frame.)
Of course there is also plenty of registers that are going to refuse to list stuff they know is incorrect.
| 15 |
Why does our brain perform complex tasks such as object recognition and language within an instant, but trivial tasks such as 9.342^2 require longer to perform?
| 16 |
We have hardware for object recognition and language, but no math hardware, so we have to do it slowly in software.
On the flip side, computers have hardware for math, but object recognition and language have to be done in software that we don't even understand how to write.
| 30 |
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[Archer] How does Archer perceive Dreamland? Is he watching the whole thing from a third person perspective, or is he participating in it?
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The latest season of Archer is taking place in his head, but how does he perceive it? Does he see everything, or just what Dreamland Archer sees?
| 49 |
It's like a dream state... when he's "present" he's living the scene. When he's not in the scene, he's a disembodied observer who can't act or retain knowledge of events he's witnessed.
Dreams are weird, man. Coma-dreams are even weirder.
| 23 |
ELI5 How we can sleep in a position that causes debilitating pain when we wake up, but don't notice at all while we sleep?
| 1,989 |
While your body sleeps, it alternates between REM (Rapid Eye Movement) and non-REM cycles. REM sleep is where you dream and the body essentially recuperates from being awake. During this cycle. Your body is paralyzed, which prevents you from feeling pain or discomfort at all, so if your body is at an awkward angle moving into this cycle, you will not wake from the pain, but when you move out of the cycle the pain will likely wake you up.
EDIT: just wanted to say thank you to all the people for the awards, and to remind everyone that every person is completely different, so your personal body very likely does react differently while sleeping, and thats 100% ok!
| 831 |
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[Batman] How much does Alfred get paid?
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Was watching an episode of *Batman: The Animated Series* (S1e4, "The Last Laugh"), and at the end of the episode, Bruce said he would doc Alfred's pay for a few years to pay off a "priceless Ming vase."
So I wondered how much Alfred was being paid that he would be able to pay it off in just a few years?
| 62 |
Only Alfred knows. As butler, Alfred is in charge of all matters pertaining to the domestic staff of Wayne Manor, including payroll. Bruce Wayne sure doesn't have time to look into it.
Let's just say that Bruce Wayne is still a rich man. Or at least he thinks he is.
| 66 |
[Fallout] Given the progress/recovery demonstrated across the timeline of the existing games, to what extent could the world be restored closer to its former self in the long-term; how many years would certain achievements take? What features could NEVER be restored?
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(The title should contain everything that needs to be established here)
| 22 |
With fusion becoming popular the energy crisis of old won't be a problem. Civilization can learn from its old mistakes and move forward.
House was planning to leave the planet within the span of 200 years. With the rate the NCR and East Coast Chapter have been restoring it's not unlikely humanity will find a world mostly recovered in a few centuries.
| 15 |
[Star Trek]If you find a starving child in the woods you don't leave them because it is "natural". That would be monstrous. The Prime Directive is incredibly cruel. As a private Federation citizen, am I bound to follow the Prime Directive, will I be arrested if I start rescuing primitive planets?
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The Prime Direct is inherantly selfish and monstrous. We don't force every person who is sick to personally rediscover the entire history of medicine. We give them the medicine. No person in a society truly knows the basis for how anything works, society is an arrangement of specialists standing upon the shoulders of those who came before. If you see a person in a motor vehicle accident, their vehicle on fire, do you leave them to die so they can feel a sense of accomplishment, or, if you are brave, do you pull them out?
The Prime Directive serves a purpose. A selfish one. It protects the Federation from the resource burden of dealing with primitive species. They suffer from disease, starvation and other evils which can be fixed with technology. Nothing in it is to the benefit of primitive species. They suffer countless woes and harms which widely available technology can help. So we should help!
As a private Federation citizen with a star ship, a replicator and a universal translator, will the Federation lock me up if I contact a primitive culture and introduce them to advanced technology?
| 472 |
The Federation does not lack resources and it is absolutely not about burdening the Federation. The Prime Directive is there to protect alien cultures from being exposed to a technology before they are ready. A society that achieves techonological growth before its culture can adapt can easily cause irreparable harm from which it can never recover.
Starship captains trained in cross culture diplomacy and with great experience struggle with the Prime Directive. Some in their missions can still leave unintentional marks on a civilization often for the worse. Or to continue your metaphor what if you try to save someone only to make a horrible mistake and hurt them more or kill them?
An civilian with nothing more than lofty ideas and technology can cause more unintentional damage. What if you accidentally support a tolitairan dictatorship giving them greater technology with which to conquer their fellows? What if you get captured and your ship gets take apart and analyzed? The engine and fuel of a ship can easily be retrofitted to make weapons of devastating power. Those lives lost will in the ensuing wars will be on you.
Put the replicator and ship down. Good intentions without understanding or context will cause more harm than good. At least get some training and learning so that you can make informed choices
| 340 |
What happens to photons of light that only penetrate the open ocean so deep? Why don't they hit the seafloor?
| 22 |
They are absorbed by the water molecules, and as a result the water heats up. If you want to look at it on a photon level, each has a probability of getting absorbed as it propagates, and the probability that it does not get absorbed approaches zero as it propagates deeper and deeper. Multiply this by a bajillion photons and you have a very very small number reaching the bottom.
| 20 |
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How can fish be so active in cold water when other cold blooded animals like reptiles and amphibians need the Sun to warm up?
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I have two fish tanks one half full of water with a turtle. The turtle needs to bask in a heat lamp for at least half the day to have the energy to go "hunting" around his terrarium. In a different cold water tank I have some very active and energetic fish that seem to swim non-stop and only have to eat every other day.
| 19 |
hi, fishy researcher here. there are sooo many adaptations that allow for these behaviours. one is that fishes have a network of veins and arteries called the rete mirabile. the rete regulates blood flow which in turn allows the fish to thermoregulate! in addition, this thermoregulation allows for adjustment of metabolism which affects feeding! i should mention, these are species dependent as other fishes will utilize other adaptations such as natural “antifreeze” proteins and other enzymes.
| 20 |
ELI5: How do sex scenes in movies work?
| 329 |
They don't really stick it in if thats what you want to know. Its a lot like wrestling, they don't really punch. They kiss and grope but they usually cover up the female genitals, there are lots of way to do that, stringless panties for example.
Body doubles are sometimes used if an actor or actress is not hot enough or if they are not willing to or have too many tats and so on.
Usually on a set, there are lots of people standing around, so its not as romantic and hot as it may seem in the actual movie.
| 240 |
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How does the water supply network still remain liquid in cities even at very cold temperatures? Why don't the pipes freeze?
| 282 |
They are buried below the frost line which is a depth where the temperature of the earth doesn't go below freezing. Here in Chicago it's about 48", so.ewhere like Minnesota is more like 55" so it varies by climate. Occasionally in really bad will they will get below freezing but it's really hard to freeze moving water so you're still ok.
Tldr: bury then where the ground stays warm.
| 266 |
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What does it mean to say that waves in the electric field move perpendicular to waves in the magnetic field?
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The pictures in my textbook show them as two transverse waves, but that doesn't quite make sense to me. Which way is 'up' to the electric field?
| 19 |
The fact that they're transverse just means that the electric and magnetic fields are perpendicular to the direction of propagation. So the electric field, the magnetic field, and the momentum of the light wave are all mutually perpendicular vectors.
| 11 |
What does it mean when physicists refer to several additional "small" dimensions?
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I've just reread a couple of Hawking's books, and I can't figure out how to conceptualize additional dimensions. Three spacial dimensions plus time as a fourth seem straightforward enough (though obviously not always easy to visualize), but what does it mean to speak of additional dimensions that are "small" or "curled up"? How exactly are they different from the 4 space-time dimensions?
You can measure a particle's relative position or velocity in space-time. Does that particle have a coordinate in each of the other existing dimensions as well?
If dimensions are "small", does that mean they are local, or do they exist throughout spacetime?
| 20 |
>but what does it mean to speak of additional dimensions that are "small" or "curled up"? How exactly are they different from the 4 space-time dimensions?
What we mean by "small" is that the symmetry groups describing translations in those directions are "compact." What compactness means is that if you go far enough in a compact direction, you get back to where you started. Rotations of solid bodies form a compact group, because after rotating by 2*pi you're back where you started. Similarly, directions on the surface of a sphere are compact: if you travel for long enough in a given direction, you get back to where you started.
So the thought to stringy or Kaluza-Klein models is to consider (an) extra dimension(s) which fields or strings are allowed to propagate in, but their "size" (how far you can move in those extra directions) is smaller than around 2*10^-19 meters (1 TeV^-1 ).
>You can measure a particle's relative position or velocity in space-time. Does that particle have a coordinate in each of the other existing dimensions as well?
Classically yes, but from a quantum mechanical standpoint, these other dimensions are so small that particles are kind of smeared through this entire other dimension. In KK models, for example, typically there's an infinite number of ways they can be smeared out, each having a different amount of energy, which would look to us like, for example, an infinite number of excited electrons each with higher mass than the last.
>If dimensions are "small", does that mean they are local, or do they exist throughout spacetime?
They would exist throughout spacetime, in the same way that the three spatial dimensions we know of exist throughout spacetime.
EDIT: unrelated, but can anyone tell me how to cancel superscripts without putting a space in?
| 20 |
ELI5:Why do politicians use religious grounds for policy making when there is a separation of state and church in the U.S.A.?
| 56 |
Separation of Church and State means that the government cannot establish a State religion, and that the government cannot prevent a citizen from practicing their religion. Since religious people use their religion as a primary component in how they form their morality and ethics, and morality and ethics are how lawmakers make laws you cannot ever fully separate the two. What you can do is prevent religious law from directly influencing our secular law. Banning religious people from holding office or forbidding them from using their personal morals in their law making would be illegal and violate the constitution as our law makers are US citizens.
| 28 |
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[Star Wars] Orders to TIE fighters deployed after the Millennium Falcon's escape from the Death Star
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Since the Falcon was supposed to escape so it could be tracked to Yavin, what were the TIE pilots told to do when pursuing the Falcon? Did they know it was a suicide mission and if so, why were they OK with it?
| 78 |
No. They were likely sent out with orders to disable or destroy the ship, just like you'd expect in that situation.
However, there were fewer TIEs deployed than were really appropriate to that kind of mission, and it was expected that the Falcon would be able to escape anyway. They pilots weren't told that, because they didn't need to know the grand scheme. They only needed to know their specific mission.
| 62 |
[Watchmen] Would it actually hurt to be vaporized by Dr. Manhattan?
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Of course the death LOOKS painful (and extremely gory), but would it actually hurt? If your molecules were ripped apart in the space of a second or two, if you felt anything at all I would assume it'd be shock and not pain. All that pain sensory information would be too sudden for your body to process in the very short time it has left.
| 35 |
It'd be instant death. The span of time between your nerves realizing they're being torn apart and the electric impulse needed to reach your brain is too short. Unless he vaporizes you in pieces instead of a whole you'd be dead and scattered over a square mile before you could process a single thought.
| 53 |
ELI5: If we left earth and went straight down or straight up, would we eventually arrive at another solar system?
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Edit: Assuming up means traveling a route up perpindicular to earths orbital plane thanks for pointing that out /u/demonspawn79
| 75 |
There is no "down" or "up" in space, so I'll rephrase your question.
If we left Earth and traveled on a route perpendicular (up or down) to our orbital plane, would we eventually arrive at another solar system?
To which I'd respond with another question; if you closed your eyes and shot a gun into the air, would you hit a bird?
Chances are, probably not.
| 100 |
ELI5: why did android 3.0 honeycomb never gain much market share & popularity?
| 65 |
Honeycomb was developed for the tablet architecture only, but was quickly replaced by the follow up release for the general Android development Ice Cream Sandwich, 4.0, which was designed to specifically create a universal OS for android no matter which architecture standard was being followed. What that means was Honeycomb was quickly abandoned due to the fact that it limited application support to only those apps which met the 3.0 requirements, where as a 4.0 app can run on a tablet or telephone, along with any app developed for the previous versions of android, this included those apps developed on 3.0 for tablets only, giving a much wider range of available apps to the android devices using it.
| 47 |
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Do subliminal messages really work?
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I just downloaded a program called "Subliminal Messages."
It claims that by flashin text too fast for me to read it can help me do things like quit smoking, have more confidence, etc.
Is this true?
| 73 |
Almost certainly not. Subliminal messages are just messages that fall below the human threshold for perception.
People often connect them with their sub-concious, which is wrong. They have no more effect on your subconscious that any regular message you come across. If it did work, it would almost certainly be in commercials, like every other way of subtly manipulating people is.
| 56 |
Can a dwarf planet become a moon?
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I was noticing that Eris’s orbit bring it close to Neptune’s orbit. If the timing lined up would Eris be close enough to become a moon of Neptune? Are there any other dwarf planets that scientists think may become a moon? Lastly are there any know current moons that are theorized to come from the Kuiper belt?
| 20 |
Eris is too far away from Neptune to be affected by it much even when they are as close to each other as is possible. Even at the point of least separation, there's still something like 8 AUs distances of separation between the two.
To compare: Earth and Jupiter get to about 4 AU of separation, Jupiter is more massive than Neptune, Earth is more massive than Eris, and half the distance means four times the force of gravity, so the fact that we aren't a moon of Jupiter right now is pretty solid proof that Eris won't become a moon of Neptune any time soon.
However, what you are describing probably happened once! Neptune's largest moon Triton (slightly smaller than our own), is very similar in composition to Pluto, and rotates in a different direction than all of Neptune's other moons. For this reason, we consider it highly likely that it's a captured Kuiper Belt object.
| 21 |
ELI5: How does anti-venom work, and is it available for every type of venom?
|
Just wondering how a paralyzing or flesh eating venom can be stopped in it's tracks with a simple anti venom. Does it just teach our bodies how to deal with it or eradicate it?
| 16 |
It binds with the venom and allows it to be eliminated from the body safely.
Venom works by interacting with certain receptors and causing them to either stop functioning or be overstimulated.
By binding with the venom, it prevents it from binding to those receptors, and since the venom is now stuck to the antivenom, it just floats around in the bloodstream until it reaches the renal system, where it is removed from the blood and then from the body itself.
Antivenom are antibodies cultivated in animals exposed to small amounts of venom; enough to cause an immune response, but not enough to harm them. There are some venoms that have no antidote because the lethality of the venom is so high that it's not possible to safely produce an antivenom.
| 19 |
Is it possible to quantify the impact of Wikipedia the world economy?
| 77 |
Sure, but probably it can't be done well. Probably, the most reasonable approach to doing something like what you may be asking about would involve sorting out the following:
1. How valuable is Wikipedia to people as a consumption good? That is, how much is it worth as a thing people browse and look things up in for fun or for their hobbies or whatever else?
* How value is Wikipedia as a capital good? That is, how valuable is it to businesses, governments, researchers, etc. strictly as a tool used to help people do work stuff? Probably a good idea to make these calculations net of time people waste browsing it at work.
* How much does Wikipedia cost to create? Think server costs, but also time spent by people editing it.
You can probably do a pretty good job of getting at the cost side of the ledger here, at number (3). But (1) and (2) are the hard part: you can make your own assumptions, you can survey people about what they think they'd pay for Wikipedia if it wasn't free, you can extrapolate from whatever you learn from the select circumstances where you can nail down an answer (e.g. maybe you can run an experiment in some country with limited internet/wikipedia access and randomly give some businesses access to Wikipedia and others not, to see whether / by how much wikipedia recipients perform better), etc. But ultimately, you probably can't get the true number.
For an added layer of complexity, there is the question of Wikipedia vs what. Realistically, you can't credit Wikipedia either all of the benefits or costs of its existence. It is probably true that Wikipedia has displaced some purchasing of encyclopedias and made things tough for at least some information provider / encyclopedia companies. But what that means is that some people and companies receiving benefits from wikipedia probably would have received similar benefits from the encyclopedia britannica, or whatever other company. And, on net, some of the labor we've devoted as a society to making wikipedia has freed up labor that otherwise would have been spent on making encyclopedias for some other company. So, this adds a bonus layer of irritation to efforts at quantifying wikipedia's impact, however defined..
| 31 |
|
[Harry Potter] Is Hogwarts (and the wizarding world in general) ready to admit disabled students? Would wizards even be able to adapt to such a student?
|
Since I was a child I have asked myself. They can't cure disabilities: Harry, Dumbledore, and other characters still wear glasses and there are people with rudimentary prosthetics.
The books and study materials are written on parchment, which I don't think works for braille. The stairs change places, another nightmare for a blind person. And I doubt anyone knows that sign language exists. Plus there are no ramps, so someone with a wheelchair would have to float. Not to mention mental disabilities, as I understand wizarding society is very, er, old-fashioned.
| 59 |
I don't see why not. There are blind people in the Wizarding community and they will adopt Muggle developments if it's low-tech, truly innovative and there's no better option.
They may have braille books but they are specialty orders. Blind people can have spiritual guides who can direct them via words (and since we know ghosts make things colder around them, maybe even silently direct them with a chill on each shoulder to direct them when to turn). Dumbledore is implied to be fluent in several languages so he'd be able to speak BSL, and there are magical quills that can be directed to write for the spoken word so they could be adapted to understand BSL (and a floating notepad, like Looney Tunes cartoons).
And Dumbledore wouldn't turn away students who were less-than mentally stable if it would help them - one, because he knows the dangers of a mentally-abused student and out of regret about what happened to his sister.
| 36 |
Why do we design vehicles to be aerodynamic (laminar?) while dimpled golf balls are designed to create turbulence to get them to travel farther?
|
Wouldn't inducing turbulent flow on a vehicle reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency?
| 59 |
The dimples on golf balls were added after golfers noticed that the smooth balls they used went farther after getting cuts and scrapes in them. The uneven surface creates eddies around the ball that act as a cushioning against the air around it while flying.
If you want to get deeper into the aerodynamics, there are two types of flow around an object: laminar and turbulent. Laminar flow has less drag, but it is also prone to a phenomenon called "separation." Once separation of a laminar boundary layer occurs, drag rises dramatically because of eddies that form in the gap. Turbulent flow has more drag initially but also better adhesion, and therefore is less prone to separation. Therefore, if the shape of an object is such that separation occurs easily, it is better to turbulate the boundary layer (at the slight cost of increased drag) in order to increase adhesion and reduce eddies (which means a significant reduction in drag). Dimples on golf balls turbulate the boundary layer.
**TL;DR:**
Vehicles are designed with laminar in mind because laminar flow has less drag overall, while golf balls have dimples that act as a symmetrical turbulent creator that has less drag initially.
| 49 |
Why are train rails usually built on gravel?
|
Is there any particular reason for this or is it just cheaper than asphalt/concrete/whatever?
| 55 |
The material that forms the trackbed upon which railroad ties are laid is known as **track ballast.** It is packed between, below, and around the ties. It bears the load from the railroad ties, facilitate drainage of water, and discourages vegetation growth that might interfere with the track structure. It is typically made of **crushed stone**.
Track ballast typically rests on a layer of smaller crushed stones: the sub-ballast. The sub-ballast layer gives a solid support for the top ballast, and reduces the seepage of water from the underlying ground.
The shape of the ballast is also important. Stones must be **irregularly cut**, with sharp edges, so that they properly **interlock** and grip the ties in order to fully secure them against movement.
In order to let the stones fully settle and interlock, speed limits are often lowered on sections of track for a period of time after new ballast has been laid.
| 141 |
ELI5: Why can't we use materials with lower boiling points to generate power?
|
My understanding is that water is commonly used in coal-fired power plants and the like, and that water has a rather high boiling point. Wouldn't using something with a lower BP like acetone produce the same amount of energy at a lower temperature, making it easier to generate with heat sources like the sun or geothermal? I also understand that according to thermodynamics more energy can't be gotten out of a system than is put into it, but shouldn't the turbines spin just as fast no matter what gas is being passed through them/what temperature that gas is?
| 131 |
Water's volume expands 1600-1700 times when it turns to steam. That increase in volume allows the pressure it creates to be used for mechanical motion.
Acetone doesn't expand that much, so it is not as efficient or useful. Acetone is also quite dangerous when heated while water is not.
| 113 |
eli5 what does "gain" mean in regards to audio and recording?
|
Basically just looking into external mics for my phone and all the reviews for the different products I'm looking at are talking about "too much gain" and "not enough gain" and I have no earthly idea what that means. I tried looking it up, but it's confusing as hell for someone with no know, who just wants to record concerts to listen to again later
| 26 |
AFAIK (not an audiophile), but gain refers to the amount of sound energy the microphone translates into signal for recording or re-processing through the remainder of the audio equipment. Take your voice as an example and keep your personal volume exactly the same at each attempt. Turn the gain up too high and the mic will pick up your breathing, the compression of your lips when you close your mouth or even your beard hairs jiggling against one another. Turn the gain too low and you'll sound like you're at the other end of a large room (or worse, not be detectable at all)
| 51 |
ELI5: Why do little kids like/want to hurt each other
|
I just realized how mean some kids can get and I just want to know why
| 16 |
Empathy, like all human traits is developed over time. Because children obviously haven't had much time on this earth, they also haven't had much time to refine their sense of empathy. You know which other groups of people have under-developed senses of empathy? Sociopaths and serial killers.
The other big part of it, is that children require constant stimulation for their little cold-hearted brains. So kids will do things, just to get any sort of response. They don't quite understand that they are causing another kid agony, but they do understand that they are able to cause an effect on the other kid.
| 17 |
ELI5: 20 Years ago there was a lot of fear about the effects of China having too many men because of sex-selective abortion. Shouldn't we be seeing the brunt of that now?
|
In the 1990s and 2000s there was a lot of fear mongering about China having too many men. Because of the one child policy there were a lot of sex-selective abortions to be rid of girls so families could have their male heir. There was a lot of "what does a nation do when they've got 30,000,000 unmarried adult men but go to war!?!" and similar talk.
Well... it's been 20 years. Those men are grown up now and looking for wives. What's going on with that now? Shouldn't we be seeing the brunt of 30+ million unmarried and unable-to-be-married (forever alone) men?
It seems like no one is talking about it... but it, whatever it may be, should be happening now, right?
| 256 |
there have been much talks about it. China is the leading male-female disparity country for the young generation age group. by 2012 census, there are 40 million more males than females. additionally most people in the under 30 age group are only childs as well.
there already a big gap of unmarried males because of unable to find a partner, whereas almost all females in the 20-30 age group are married.
| 176 |
[superman] Why does Luthor's armor not have a helmet?
|
So there are a few iterations of Lex Luthor's warsuit, but all of them have his face exposed:
http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/b/b4/Lex_Luthor_004.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20060106181022
http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/injusticegodsamongus/images/e/ee/LEX.PNG/revision/latest?cb=20130130002303
http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/dcuo/images/3/35/Lex_luther_power_armor.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/2000?cb=20100813035934
It seems like you could beat him by just punching/shooting him in the face. This is the biggest tactical oversight since the thermal exhaust port.
| 16 |
Pride. He wants Superman, or whoever he's fighting, to know who defeated them. Not a suit of armor, but a man. Just a human, who now defeated a god. He wants everybody to know for damn sure who that was.
| 41 |
[Civilization 5] What happened to the civilization that all the ruins belonged to, before they were ruins? Why did that civilization fall?
|
Do barbarians have anything to do with it?
| 170 |
Old City-States that have collapsed from war, famine, migration or other means. No doubt those who didn't have much success finding new homes were forced into the warlike barbarian factions that dot the lands. Without the stability of an established city with the proper infrastructure for sustainable life people would often resort to raiding others in order to survive and so that is why the barbarian villages seem so desperate.
| 128 |
I'm about to see a therapist for the first time due to grad school stress/anxiety. Have you seen a therapist for academia-induced issues? What was your experience like?
| 50 |
First, congratulations. Making the appointment is the hardest part.
If you're in a college town, your therapist probably sees lots of stressed out grad students. This is good. Try not to rush to judgment after the first session. Go a few times and see if your therapist has the right "feel" for you. Not every therapist will be the right match and that's one of the toughest things to figure out.
The experience is personal for everyone so it's hard to say if anyone's experience will be just like yours. Go with an open mind and the idea that this is supposed to help. Good luck!
| 22 |
|
ELI5: How can some Medicine (for example Tilidin) give me nightmares as side effects?
| 56 |
Let's use the analogy of food. Pizza (drug) for instance would solve your desire to satisfy your hunger (condition). You eat the pizza and feel full (desired effect). You eat pizza for a few days and notice that you have upset stomach from too much acid building up (side effect) but you still feel full (desired effect). To make more sense, another analogy, So sometimes meds can affect the regions of the brain that are part of the highway of neurons (brain cells) to give the intended effect, but, that highway down the road has an exit for dreams too.
Hope 5 year olds know what highways and acid are haha
| 23 |
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ELI5: Why are furniture stores always "going out of business"?
| 44 |
because you rarely (once every few years) shop for furniture and have no idea what furniture stores are around until you start to shop. The going out of business sale creates a sense of urgency and the feeling that you are getting a good deal.
| 41 |
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CMV: I feel people should be given the choice to participate in scientific studies that would normally be considered "not ready for human trials" for scientific research.
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This CMV was inspired by [a thread](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2rydxd/if_ethics_were_forgotten_what_scientific_advances/) currently on the front page.
I don't mean donating your dead body to science, I mean giving yourself *alive* for scientific research. Today, human trials are only available once other trials have concluded and have been approved for humans.
The following conditions could apply in such a scenario:
1. The participant must have a terminal issue and only have so long to live, as verified by a doctor
2. The participant must be alert and able to communicate satisfactorily
3. The participant must sign an agreement
4. If available, the immediate relative(s) (one or all of the following: mother, father, brother, sister) of the participant must also sign an agreement
5. The participant will be able to voluntarily cancel testing without question **only after** an in-progress test has concluded **or** there is a lull in an in-progress test and a cessation is possible
6. Those performing the tests cannot cause the participant unnecessary pain **unless** the participant agreed and a second agreement was signed
7. In the event of **accidental death** due to testing, the family will be compensated with a previously agreed on sum of money or other form of reparations
~~8. If a test involves the suspension of life **with an eventual awakening**, the participant and immediate family members involved must agree~~
~~9. If a test involves the suspension of life **with a possibility of death**, the participant and immediate family members involved must agree to waive their compensation~~
I'm sure conditions could be added/changed, but those above are just off the top of my head.
_____
> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!*
| 189 |
The principle reason such tests are labeled as **not ready for human trials** is because medical professionals whose life has been dedicated to understanding the human body consider it to be such a risk that no one should be submitted to treatment with current knowledge.
A layman may think the research is phenomenal and should be tested, but a layman doesn't have all the information to make an informed decision.
There is a general ethical problem with allowing people to make a decision with which they cannot give informed consent.
Edit: People may be allowed to submit themselves to high-level radiation therapy in lieu of chemo and it would certainly help, but it's generally agreed that it'll give the patient radiation poisoning and kill most individuals, regardless of the potential benefit of their cancer being in remission.
Edit 2: It's also more expensive to conduct tests on humans. If nothing else, it'd be considered a waste of valuable research funding.
| 60 |
When we eat meat, it has cells which have the animal's DNA and RNA. What does out body do to them once they've been digested and broken down into nucleotides? Do our cells use these nucleotides when replicating DNA or making mRNA?
| 113 |
There are enzymes which degrade DNA and RNA (RNAases and DNAses) in our intestines, along with all other enzymes, to degrade various forms of food such as proteins (trypsin), carbs (amylases), fats (lipases). Then the constituents are taken up by the body.
| 64 |
|
[Star Wars] How come, at 900 years of age, Master Yoda still hasn't got the hang of Galactic Basic sentence structure?
| 178 |
In Fate of the Jedi (Allston), Ben Skywalker explains Yoda's speech pattern as
> "After nine hundred years, he (Yoda) was sick of hearing the same old things the same old way. Use the same old cliché phrases too long and people stop hearing the message."
I think that is the best explanation, because even though he speaks in subject-object-verb most of the time, he also splits verbs, and switches whole phrases around; but on other occasions he speaks with the correct syntax - which supports the idea he speaks the way he does for effect!
| 199 |
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ELI5: Why does some smartphones get slower with time? Is it a hardware or a software problem?
| 25 |
Both
On the software side of things not only are newer programs typically more demanding, but newer operating systems are designed with newer/more powerful devices in mind.
As for hardware, the only real thing that degrades over time is the battery. As they age, and go through more charging cycles, batteries tend to be able to store less charge. What's more important for performance though, is that they also can provide less current. As electronics are under more load they draw more current, and if the aging battery isn't able to keep up then that effectively puts a speed limit on the device as a whole.
| 24 |
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CMV: Superman is too perfect and because of this his stories aren't compelling
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I *know* this is an unpopular opinion, but I don't like Superman. For me, he is literally too perfect, and as such, he doesn't have a personality. I find this to be a huge character flaw, and I just want a character that actually has weakness inside of him. Yes, I realize his "weakness" is Kryptonite, but he has no mortal weakness besides his love for Lois Lane, and that's not a very interesting weakness in the first place. I just want someone to show me how imperfect Superman is and that he actually has a spectrum of emotion.
| 73 |
Superman is interesting precisely because he is so powerful. In Superman stories the drama rarely comes from whether or not Superman can punch some other guy harder, or fly faster or whatever.
It's much more likely to be about how this God-like being finds his way in the world. He loves humanity, and in many ways is a human at heart himself. It's about him doing his best to act as a role model for us. To help us but not control us. To make us the best we can be on our own through his inspiration, instead of lesser beings forced to grovel at his feet.
Also, while he is very very capable, and very powerful, he's not omnipotent or omnipresent. Every moment he decides to take time for himself he's allowing dozens, sometimes hundreds to die. Imagine enjoying a walk through the park, a date with your love or just closing your eyes and enjoying the sunshine while you can hear the final screams of those dieing horribly in a fire across the globe (don't question the physics of it, but many iterations of Superman can hear across the globe).
Superman has the power of a God, but he's ultimately still a man, who has to make his own choices and live the life he decides.
Those are just a few of the reasons why he's an interesting character.
| 34 |
Why isn't a zip code enough when entering an address, why must I give my State, City AND zip code?
| 609 |
I'd assume it's a 2nd check for incorrect zip codes... IE: If you're sending a letter to Scruff McGruff in Chicago, IL 60652, and accidentally mix up your 5's and 6's and send it to Scruff McGruff Chicago, IL 50562, (Which is the zip code for Mallard, IA) they can say "Chances are, it was meant to go to Chicago, rather than Mallard, Iowa." And would therefore reduce "return to senders".
| 497 |
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ELI5: In a high-smog area, how is staying inside any safer than going outside?
|
Isn't it the same air? Wouldn't I be breathing in about the same amount of smog in my house as the air directly outside my house?
| 100 |
As mentioned by others there is HVAC filtering, but the big reason is that it keeps people from driving and using other polluting forms of transport.
Also, if people don't go to work at construction sites there is less dust kicked up and if they don't run factories that produce particulates at full capacity that also cuts down.
So it's not just staying inside but all the other downstream effects of people not doing things to add more particulates to the atmosphere.
| 71 |
[Star Wars] Why did the Separatists use piloted tanks?
|
Almost every member of the Separatist army is a droid, the B1s, B2s, Vulture droids, Hailfire droids, crab droids, ETC. Why do the AATs require pilots? This leaves them open to hijacking by enemy humanoids.
| 26 |
I assume they weren't built specifically for the droid army, but were a standard design built with organic pilots in mind which the Trade Federation just used with droids. Same reason the battle droids used blasters instead of having guns for arms. Using simple droids able to manipulate tech made for organics allowed them to use all the resources that were already available, as well as making the individual droids more modular.
As time went on and the Clone Wars began we see that the Separatists do adopt a more droid centric approach, from super battle droids with built in weapons, to autonomous vehicles like Hailfire droids, but during the pre-war era when they were blockading Naboo they were just using a cobbled together army of what they had on hand.
| 51 |
CMV: I believe that satire has encouraged a "cool to hate" mindset in social media that is damaging society.
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**Note:** Let me preface by saying that I realize this viewpoint has been discussed on this subreddit before, but I don't feel like it expanded the discussion enough. In any case, those threads are dead and difficult to revive. There are new points that I would like to bring up.
For the most part this concept is only discussed in politics, but I would like to shift the discussion away from politics as much as possible. I think this problem exists in social media on a complicated level that we haven't fully defined yet. I really hope someone here is able to put what I am attempting to describe in better words than I can, or help me understand if I'm missing something.
The definition of satire is: "the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues."
TV shows such as SNL, The Colbert Report, and South Park use excessive satire, usually to prove a point that is part of the creator's belief system. Let me point out that satire is a beautiful thing that helps us understand others beliefs in an entertaining way, but I think it has gotten to a point where it is more damaging than progressive.
TV shows like South Park and The Daily Show have been on air for nearly 20 years. Children of the late 90s and early 2000s have been subjected to heavy amounts of satire from childhood and into adulthood. As a result, I believe that satire has become so heavily ingrained into the brains of emerging adults, that it is having very negative side-effects.
These side-effects are making it "cool to hate". I see so many examples of this throughout social media. For some reason (and I don't know why), it is considered cool to hate the actor Nicolas Cage. Through social media and online memes, these strange ideas have spread. Suddenly, many people of the younger generation decide to bash Nicolas Cage and claim he is a terrible actor with complete ignorance or reasoning. We see the same thing happen with many other celebrities as well.
But okay, Nic Cage is just a celebrity and it shouldn't matter, right? But I can't help but see this blind hate emerging everywhere. It extends itself to stereotypes as well, and this is where I draw the line. I believe it has gotten to the point where it becomes cool to hate women. It becomes cool to hate hipsters. It even becomes cool to hate different websites such as Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter.
The reason I believe this is a problem is because it promotes a lot of ignorant and aimless negative thought. And I understand that it has always been "cool to hate" in one form or another, but nowadays we are subjected to it 24/7 in our Facebook feeds, on our mobile phones, in our music-- everywhere. This hate surrounds us so much that it becomes such a normal part of our day and is accepted as "okay".
The worst part about it all is that it doesn't promote healthy and thoughtful discussion. If someone is accused of satirical slander, it's easy for the accuser to avoid defending themselves by ridiculing or saying "it's only a joke, calm down." There is truth in all jokes, and I don't think it should be taken lightly in the world we live in today.
Satire is manipulating truthful, original, and thoughtful discussion. The reason I posted here in the first place is because I know this subreddit doesn't tolerate the "cool to hate" mentality. It is all about progression and original thought.
I'm afraid I may be discussing two separate issues, and I encourage others to help organize my thoughts. I'm very interested in getting down to the core of this issue. I sure as hell hope someone can change my view, because it's leading me down a rabbit hole and I'm seeing a dark and passive-aggressive future ahead of us.
_____
> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!*
| 33 |
You haven't convinced me that this is a new phenomenon. In the '80s everyone hated HEAVEN'S GATE, ISHTAR and HOWARD THE DUCK. In the '70s it was disco music. In the '20s it was Fatty Arbuckle. In the '30s it was Herbert Hoover. In the '40s it was Communism.
You'll find that for all the Nic Cage haters, he is still /r/onetruegod. The idea is, these "cult personalities" that are both beloved and reviled for their cheesiness (see: William Shatner) and enter into pop culture as someone we love to hate. Few people seriously *hate* Nicolas Cage.
Satire is also literally thousands of years old and is in no way more prevalent now than it has been in the past.
| 15 |
What was the very first post-Newton experiment that hinted the universe wasn't as it seemed?
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I suppose that Special Relativity was the big point where physics took a sharp turn away from Newtonian physics. But what was the very first precursor observation that suggested that the universe wasn't really just a "box containing lumps of mass that attract each other", and didn't behave in a way that common sense would suggest?
To put it succinctly, what was the first "weird" observation?
| 24 |
The Michelson-Morley experiment was important, but there were some earlier hints. The Fizeau experiment of 1851 was what influenced Einstein, more than the MM experiment. Thompson in 1881 noticed that it was harder to move fast charged objects than slow ones. The orbit of Mercury was realized to be anomalous in 1859. The discovery of x-rays in 1895 is often considered the start of modern physics, because it was one of the first hints that there was way more to be discovered, rather than just fine tuning and precise measurements.
| 23 |
[Avatar] Realistically, how long could you survive if a waterbender froze you in ice?
| 22 |
Without the power of the Avatar State to help you, or a fire/water bender's resistance to extreme temperatures?
Not very long at all. Frozen up to your neck, you'd be suffering frostbite and hypothermia rather swiftly. As your core temperature dropped, so would your heartbeat. Shivering wouldn't help you, as you couldn't move enough to generate any muscle heat. You'd be lucky to escape unharmed if you were thawed after a few minutes.
It would also be hard to breathe, as the ice would prevent the expansion of your chest to gather air.
| 23 |
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CMV: people who live in Europe and claim to have visited 20 countries, all of which are inside the EU are no more adventurous than people in the US who have visited 20 different states.
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I get annoyed when I see this, I just don't really see the difference, both you aren't really leaving a place of safety, the cultures are all relatively similar, if compared to how new Mexicans are like people from Maine for example, complete opposites, or how Alaska is nothing like California, how north Dakota is nothing like Hawaii and so on. I'd argue actually going from France to Germany is far less adventurous/"seeing new things" than going from somewhere like California (southern) to Oregon, which makes me kind of find it hypocritical when Europeans say Americans never travel and things like that, but then they also generally remain inside the EU when they do travel (there are obvious exceptions to both, like the Canada and Mexico are to the US, as places like Turkey and Russia are to the EU). but what do I know, and I'm here to get my view changed so send it at me :)
​
note for background to make it easier to respond: I've visited 41 countries and am from both the UK and US
| 167 |
>I'd argue actually going from France to Germany is far less adventurous/"seeing new things" than going from somewhere like California (southern) to Oregon
I mean, this makes sense, Oregonian is a much trickier language to learn than German
| 224 |
[Terminator 2] How strong is the T1000 in comparison to the T800?
| 27 |
Roughly equal. It might be able to produce slightly more force, but it has less mass and therefore less leverage. When they wrestled in the mall, it was a fairly even back-and-forth.
The T1000's real advantage is its polymorphic ability. The T800 sustained damage piled upon damage, whereas the T1000 was at full capacity until the liquid nitrogen caused more systemic trauma. Toward the end of their fight, the T800 was a malfunctioning wreck of a combat engine, but the T1000 was still a corvette.
| 36 |
|
I just found out that while mars has about 1/10th the mass of earth it has 38% of the gravity. This suggests a non-linear relationship between mass and gravity at the surface. What causes this effect? [Physics]
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Follow up question: Does this effect mean that the gravity on the surface of planets that are significantly larger than earth would be survivable for humans?
| 17 |
Gravity is a function of both the mass of the object as well as the distance to it. The force of gravity is proportional to the mass, but falls of with the square of the distance.
In the case of a planet (or spherical body in general), the "distance" refers to the distance to the center of the planet, so for something on the surface this would be the radius of the planet.
If 2 bodies are made of the same materials and therefore have the same density, then the mass scales with the cube of the radius: M ~ r^(3). So gravity scales with the cube of the radius divided by the square of the radius: F ~ r^(3) / r^(2) or F ~ r.
If you'd take the average density of the Earth and made a new planet with half the radius, but the same density, then this mini-Earth would have 1/8th the mass but still half the gravity of Earth. Note that Mars has a radius that's about half of the Earth's radius. The relative figures for Mars' mass and gravity are fairly close to those of our hypothetical mini-Earth. The discrepancies are caused by the fact that Earth has a higher density than Mars.
| 61 |
ELI5: Why is cyanide such a deadly poison?
| 44 |
Poisons are toxic because they interfere with the body's biochemistry.
Cyanide's toxicity is because it interferes with the way energy is used and generated within the cell. It binds permanently to one of the cells' most important enzymes, preventing it from doing its job in using sugars in the cells. Without energy, the cells cannot do their jobs, and will eventually die.
| 40 |
|
ELI5: how does a private prison operate differently from a state or a federally funded prisons?
| 20 |
Private prisons have an incentive to cut corners in order to pass the savings on to their investors. This often means less experienced, less-well-trained security personnel, worse food, higher prisoner to guard ratios, less ability to accommodate special needs of prisoners, less maintenance, less investment in prisoner reform programs, less ability to investigate and address crimes committed within prison, etc..
Prisons are already a system which encourages dehumanization and the pressures of doing more with less make it even easier to treat prisoners less humanely. This results in greater harm to people serving time, greater risk to those supervising them, and greater risk of ex-prisoners committing new crimes when they leave.
| 16 |
|
ELI5: Hyperreality.
| 15 |
There once was a king who hired a team of cartographers to undertake the most exhaustive survey anyone had ever created; he wanted the most detailed map of his empire possible. The map he had the cartographers make was so detailed that the map's scale had a ratio of 1 to 1; the map itself spread out over the actual land that it was meant to represent.
Eventually, this empire began to decline, and so did the upkeep of the map that covers the entire empire. As the map rots away, it intertwines with the actual object it was supposed to represent. What is left is neither the object, nor the symbol that represented it, but something entirely else.
This is hyperreality, when the symbol of an object ends up redefining the object itself. Probably the biggest example of a hyperreal space is Las Vegas-- hotels that are themed to represent different environments that end up influencing how we see those environments.
| 11 |
|
I think parents who don't vaccinate their children should lose their child and be put in jail. CMV
|
Everyone is aware of the vaccination conspiracy theory hysteria that has caused parents to choose not to vaccinate their children.
Now more than ever are we beginning to see the results of this: erradicated diseases are coming back and taking lives.
This is neglect and abuse on such a level that I would let pedophiles get away more easily than these parents.
I do not give 1 modicum of fuck that they are dumb, brainwashed and "just want the best for their children".
They are ruining lives and influencing others to do the same.
Lose children, get 20 years in jail. Case closed.
| 45 |
It's one thing to punish the parents, but what about the child? Either you don't care about the child's well-being and are okay with sacrificing them to make an example, or you're grossly underestimating the damage inflicted on the child's psyche and well-being by removing them from their family.
| 26 |
[Groundhog Day] After escaping the time loop, what does Phil Connor’s life look like?
|
He made it back to a normal life, but he still possesses unnatural amounts of knowledge about the town and everyone in it, as well as having mastered more skills than a normal person could in their lifetime. Does this make the rest of his life notably different, especially since he expressed desire to remain in Punxsutawney with Rita?
| 46 |
He now possesses a nearly perfect knowledge of every single person that was in Punxsutawney on Groundhog's day.
He is master of many different skills, such as Piano playing.
He has lived the equivalent of 50-100 years in a single day.
He probably continues to date the girl he was with, and visits the town every year. He, however, has been humbled by the experience. He lives every day like he'll live that day over and over.
| 53 |
ELI5: What really happens when people die of "old age" or "natural causes" ?
| 2,637 |
what happens is the family and doctors agree it is not worth determining what the actual cause of death was.
actual cause is often heart failure, but frankly could be almost anything that isn't blatantly obvious from an external inspection.
edit: stroke is another common cause. may actually be even more common that heart attack for "old age" deaths, as it can hit suddenly with less obvious symptoms.
| 2,830 |
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eli5: What is soil, technically?
|
Are soil and dirt one and the same, and is it possible to run out of either? Hypothetically speaking, is there a set amount of soil on Earth? How does more soil get generated?
| 147 |
Soil is a mixture of ground up rock and decayed organic material.
Soil is continually created, as part of the great cycles of life.
Ground up rock is created as a result of erosion, with rocks being weathered by water, wind, ice, physical erosion by animals etc.
(and new rocks can be formed over time by sediments being glued together by minerals and compressed, or by magma cooling into new rocks)
New organic matter is created by leaves falling from trees, fruit rotting, animals pooing, animals dying and rotting, insects and fungus rotting wood etc.
It all just goes around and around.
| 260 |
[Superheroes]What martial arts would be the most practical for a vigilante to learn?
| 38 |
The killing type of vigilante, or the non-killing type?
For the killing type, enough judo to put people on the ground long enough to shoot them in the chest and head, plus a solid foundation of boxing for footwork, endurance, and to become accustomed to the sensation of hitting and being hit in return.
For the non-killing type, a stick-based martial art like escrima if you're cool with crippling people, or police-style baton work if you'd rather operate via pain compliance. A similar boxing foundation would also be useful.
Also, for both, a shit ton of cardio. On a good day, it'll improve your ability to deliver an ass-whooping at the end of a foot chase. On a bad day, it'll give you a better chance of getting the hell away when things go wrong.
| 41 |
|
ELI5: Why do our eyes “click” in place when we look around? (ex. looking at a wall and tracing it left and right)
| 14,768 |
That's called saccadic masking. When you move your eyes to look around it's less 'real time camera' and more 'individual photos stitched together to make a panorama'. As your eyes move from point A to point B, your brain switches off image processing, making you functionally blind (for up to an hour a day IIRC). Your eyes take a picture of point A, then point B and merges them together, to create the illusion you saw the whole panorama.
Fun fact: you can observe this temporary blindness by looking in a mirror and trying to watch your own eyes move.
| 8,446 |
|
Why does an oasis in a desert not just evaporate?
|
I don’t see how it can flourish so damn well.
| 16 |
It does evaporate. It’s just that more ground water keeps flowing in to replace it. Bodies of water at the Earths surface can get water from the mantle (via volcanic venting), from rain, from rivers (really mostly rain), and from groundwater. In the desert, water from rain and rivers is minimal. If there’s no volcanic vent, then the water for the oasis must be coming from groundwater flow.
| 15 |
[DC] How the hell is Lex Luthor of all people consistently able to get into the Oval Office?
| 22 |
Lex has good PR. He managed to make the American public focus on the times where he's helped save the world, such as during the Final Night where his scientific skill assisted Earth's heroes in dealing with the Sun Eater that threatened to extinguish our son. He's also managed to blame many of his misdeeds on others, such as his long-lost son Lex Jr. (Who was actually a clone Lex created.)
So for many people, they'd heard reports of him being relatively bad, but with no concrete proof that he's done anything awful personally. Meanwhile, he's charismatic, and was able to convince the American public that he'd bring his business expertise to running the country, a change of pace from politics as usual.
| 55 |
|
ELI5: Why do balloons make such a loud noise when they pop?
| 12,864 |
A balloon is essentially a vessel of compressed air. When the balloon pops, all of the air inside is released instantly and forms a pressure wave as it disperses to return to atmospheric pressure. You perceive the pressure wave as a loud noise when it strikes your ear drum.
| 16,456 |
|
Why do some programmers use multiple devices while coding?
|
I have been into coding for some time now and I couldn’t help but notice that some programmers use multiple devices while coding. Does it provide any advantages/disadvantages? And how does it work?
| 18 |
Probably they testing that their code is adaptive to devices and work across multiple devices, at some job they'd provide me with Mac and pc, at current job they didn't, me personally would use all devices at hand to check adaptivity and cross browser support
| 34 |
How do tree rings form?
| 17 |
When the Treestump grows, it becomes thicker too. Now because that takes a long time this process has to happen throughout a lot of seasons.
In winter there‘s less energy for the chemical reaction that is used to grow wood, which leads to a slower growing process, this is where you can see a dark „ring“ on a tree stump.
That is also the reason why counting the rings lets you determine a trees age. It basically lets you count the amount of winters that the tree has grown through! Im sorry i cant go further into the chemical process, but if youre interested there are probably a lot of articles on the internet about wood and treestumps that can explain it better than me :)
| 12 |
|
Aside from all the deaths, what were the long term health effects of the 1918 pandemic?
|
I recall reading somewhere about long term morbidity dipping for decades but can't find a source now. I'm curious if there were other documented effects like lower IQ scores or poorer academic achievement. I assume it might be hard to differentiate some of that signal from the great depression effects so would appreciate **sourced** answers.
Thank you in advance!
| 20 |
There was a high risk of heart disease. They said people had 25% more heart disease, increased risk of diabetes.
They also had increased neurological issues. Depression, neuropathy, neurasthenia, meningitis, degenerative changes in nerve cells, and a decline in visual acuity
| 10 |
ELI5: Why are ancient historical ruins (for example Ancient Roman structures) situated dozens of feet below the current "ground level"?
| 48 |
They aren't always, but generally the reason is that before the 19th century we didn't really feel this need to preserve our past, so we built on top of ruins. People would abandon a settlement, then when conditions changed and the area could be repopulated they tended to build a new settlement on the same spot (usually because the original inhabitants chose that spot for a reason, like close to water/food). Multiply this cycle by a few thousand years and there's your answer.
| 16 |
|
ELI5: why does it feel like there is a lump in your throat when you are in the verge of tears?
| 29 |
When you are sad, scared, or stressed out, your body can enter into a "fight or flight" response. Your body is preparing either to throw some punches or run for the hills, and this causes your muscles to tense up. Since your muscles need lots of oxygen to fire, your brain will tell the muscles near your vocal chords to open up and stay open. As you cry, you likely need to swallow more as your nose starts to run. Each time you swallow hard, you are fighting the muscles keeping your throat open and this tension may build into the feeling that there is a "lump" in your throat.
| 35 |
|
I don't understand "Nuclear Radiation". How does it work and what separates it from other forms of matter/elements in our world that seem to make it so much more dangerous?
|
I understand that it's 'bad', is most closely related nuclear power plant meltdowns and atomic bombs. But I don't understand HOW it works. Are there different types of radiation? Is the radiation our phones give off the same exact thing, except at a much lower level?
What is happening to our body when radiation gives us cancer? Why do we use radiation therapy to cure cancer when it also gives us cancer.
It also seems a property of it is that you can't really stop it - it seems like putting up walls or barriers is not effective unless they are ridiculously thick, and even then it seems like we just do that because we don't really know what else to do and it's better than nothing
Basically just looking for Nuclear Radiation 101 explanation.
| 103 |
Regular matter is made of atoms. And every atom has a nucleus, made of protons and neutrons. Some nuclei are *unstable*, meaning that they decay. When a nucleus decays, it emits radiation.
There are different kinds of nuclear radiation. Some examples are alpha particles, beta particles, gamma rays, protons, neutrons, conversion electrons, fission fragments, clusters, and more. These are generally *ionizing* radiation, which means that the particles have enough energy to break chemical bonds or knock electrons out of atoms. This is the kind of radiation that can cause cancer. The radiation emitted by a phone or a WiFi router is **not** ionizing.
>What is happening to our body when radiation gives us cancer?
On a very basic level, ionizing radiation damages your DNA. This causes mutations which can lead to cancer.
>Why do we use radiation therapy to cure cancer when it also gives us cancer.
Ionizing radiation can be used to kill cells. If you point your beam of radiation at cancerous cell, it will kill them. We have sophisticated techniques to specifically target the cancerous tissue with beams of radiation. The treatment kills cancerous tissue while delivering a much smaller dose to the surrounding healthy tissue.
>It also seems a property of it is that you can't really stop it - it seems like putting up walls or barriers is not effective unless they are ridiculously thick, and even then it seems like we just do that because we don't really know what else to do and it's better than nothing
You can't stop radioactive nuclei from decaying, but you can certainly shield against radiation. Different types of radiation are easier to stop than others. For example, alpha particles are very easy to stop with a piece of paper, or even just a few inches of air. On the other hand, fast neutrons are much harder to stop.
| 73 |
If light emits a significantly minute force, how much light would it take to crush a human?
|
Or maybe throw them around.
| 3,129 |
The main issue is that any light is intense enough to push a human would literally vaporize someone. For a 100 pounds force, you'd need roughly 130 gigawatts focused on someone. A 1-watt laser is enough to cause burns.
| 2,821 |
What does Foucault mean when he says “everything is a prison”? Does he even say that or is that just a meme?
| 104 |
Broadly, it's a perspective on power, where power is less directly possessed by people and groups than it is distributed through institutions and their logics of flow. Bodies and statements are organized, shaped and channeled by power, the example of the prison demonstrating how bodies are materially organized into spaces (individual cells, counted and checked, allowed to flow under constrained conditions), with accompanying, collectively-observed expectations for talk and behaviour (defer to the authority of guards, don't talk to each other, etc.). On the meme side of things, the prison example leads people to miss his point here that power is not just oppressive as a result, it's PRODUCTIVE..
Yes, the prison is repressive on the terms of this combination of bodies and statements, but you can analyze a classroom in the same way: materially, bodies are organized in individualized desks, for x number of minutes a week to listen to a lecture, chairs are oriented towards the front of the class. And in terms of talk and behaviour, students usually speak much less than the lecturer, and there's a shared sense that the latter is more authoritative than the former. In other words there's an asymmetry of roles, akin to the prison guard and prisoner.
But in this case students and lecturer each get something out of it, eventual credentialing and knowledge and other things that contribute to driving the productive regimes of a given society. So it's less that "everything is a prison" and more that "every institution has a power diagram that organizes people and things and statements in certain productive ways, and let me use the prison as an obvious (but potentially misleading) example."
| 87 |
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Is it possible to construct a trampoline or net that is capable of saving a person from free-falling from 553m (top of CN Tower) ?
|
If someone were to jump from the top of the CN Tower, is any material durable enough to break the fall at ground level so that the individual could survive?
| 249 |
Well, let's engineer as if we're falling in vacuum for added safety margins. A fall of that height would take 5.3s leaving the person moving at 52 m/s (116 mph or 187 kph). Now a human can take 10gs or so safely for short periods of time, so we need to slow them down never exceeding 10gs. (Technically humans can survive much higher, 214gs being the record, but keeping it under 10 minimizes the risk of injury, especially as peak g-force may still end up considerably higher) This means the shortest amount of time it can take to slow them down is 0.53s. Now, assuming deceleration of the full 10gs, the person would travel 13.7m while decelerating. So assuming a good springy material/net... the net would need to be able to flex 13.7m, or approximately 3 stories tall.
Bungie cord has a recommended stretch limit of 50%, so a net stretched horizontally. So a net stretched 38.8m horizontally with 13.7m clearance underneath with the jumper aiming for the middle should do the trick. Obviously one would want to add to this a bit for safety margins. Then you just need to tune the thickness of the bungie used based on the weight of the person.
| 250 |
Why has there been a big effect in commercial real estate market one year into the pandemic..with all the closures and work form home situations?
|
So I find it a bit strange that one year after the start of the shutdowns, the commercial real estate market isnt in deeper trouble.
.I understand many tenant's have longer leases etc.. but if they haven't been paying our went out of business (like many restaurants did) , the lease length is likely irrelevant. ..
I would have assumed financial issues, but looking at popular commercial real estate REITS they seem to be going up with the market.. what gives?
| 135 |
I work in CRE and can help answer this. A few things:
1) Lending standards are much more strict than they were in 2008, so you are seeing less defaults
2) certain asset classes (mostly hotels and big box retail/malls) have been impacted badly.
3) the effects of the pandemic have been localized. Commercial real estate in Florida is performing much better than in NY. Because Florida’s economy has been more resilient due to lighter lockdown policies. You can see this in Texas or Arizona vs the west coast. In short, the covid recession has been more regional level, than it has been nationally. Look at SL Green’s stock (New York office REIT), they are down 20+% since pre-covid levels. Now look at MAA’s stock (southeast/sunbelt multifamily), they are well above pre-covid levels.
| 25 |
ELI5: how are different types of cheese made?
| 42 |
All cheese goes through the same basic process. A starter bacteria is introduced which consumes the lactose and shits out lactic acid. The rise in acidity causes the two proteins in milk to separate -- the casein and the whey. Then rennet is introduced which further solidifies the casein and voila you have your curds. What you do with those curds next is what will determine what kind of cheese you're making. Fresh cheeses like cottage cheese and ricotta have nothing done to them. They're salted and most of the whey is drained. The little chunks are the curds and the liquid is the whey. Whether you cook the curds, how fine you cut them, how hard you press them, as well as if you introduce any extra mold after they're pressed all determine what kind of cheese you end up with. Softer cheese keep more of their moisture and are made from larger curds, where as hard cheeses are drier and are made with smaller curds. Stinky cheeses usually have special molds added to them after this process.
| 12 |
|
Is there any language which is truly (or almost completely) gender free?
|
One for which there is no modification of adjectives for gender (like there is in Romance languages), a single gender pronoun, and no assigning of gender to nouns (not only lacking masculine and feminine nouns, as there are in Romance languages, but also lacking nouns which specify for gender, ie, having a single word for "sibling" instead of "brother" and "sister").
If there is, has there been any speculation as to how this has affected the development of gender and sexuality roles in the society?
| 31 |
The Uralic languages (which include Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian etc.) have very little gender-related grammar. No gendering of nouns, pronouns or adjectives.
Finnish does have gendered kinship terms: sister/brother, aunt/uncle, mother/father and so on. Additionally, there is a feminine suffix *-tar/tär* for certain nouns that refer to people: *kuningas* 'king' > *kuningatar* 'queen'; *tarjoilija* 'waiter' > *tarjoilijatar* 'waitress'; *perijä* 'heir' > *perijätär* 'heiress'. The suffix is, however, very formal in style and no longer particularly productive. It mostly occurs in existing formations only, and indeed words like *tarjoilijatar* appear quite archaic to most speakers.
That's about it, though.
| 19 |
Why are realistic CGI movies so expensive to produce?
|
Why do movies like avatar, where it's heavily CGI'ed, cost so much to produce? It's much more expensive than movies that use physical props. Where do the chunk of the budget go into? Animators? Actors?
| 23 |
As with most things expensive; it's difficult, it takes time and it requires a lot of resources.
For one scene of CGI it might be months of work behind it, with everything from motion capture actors (so you need to do everything you would need to actually film the scene but with even more things needed than normal), scrubbing of the motion capture data, creating all the 3D models, painting or creating textures and mattes, staging it over and over again until it's to everybody's liking, hours of rendering and then painstakingly handcrafted finishing polish to create the last touches.
| 14 |
[Harry Potter] Harry used three wands to stun Greyback with a triple spell. If that works, why doesn't everybody use many wands? Were the spells each as strong as a single wand would've produced, or did Harry just split the power of one spell into thirds?
| 328 |
Harry was 17 at the time, and had never paid much attention in his classes. He had three wands available, so he gave it a try, but the number of wands didn't change anything. One wand or three, a spell is only as powerful as the wizard or witch who is casting it. Otherwise, wandless magic would be impossible.
However, since Harry didn't know that, he likely believed that the spell would be stronger. Any student with an OWL in Charms knows that the more you believe in a spell, the more force of will you exert on your magic, the stronger the spell will be.
So it was not the wands that gave the spell triple power, it was Harry, using triple the power that he would otherwise have used.
| 325 |
|
[Star Wars] Why didn't Palpatine just stop zapping?
|
In both III and IX, Palpatine's own force lightning was being deflected back at him and he didn't stop despite it causing physical harm.
I get that dark side powers are caused by—and cause—strong emotions so he was probably blinded by his own anger/hate while using lightning, but he was also dying and iirc Sith don't believe in an afterlife. Wouldn't the threat of dying force him to try something else?
| 492 |
The Dark Side of the Force is a positive feedback loop - powerful emotions fuel it, and it fuels more powerful emotions. The strongest Sith lords are constantly riding the line between being world-shatteringly powerful and being torn apart by that same power.
When a Jedi loses control, their power just stops working(see Luke in the swamp). When a Sith loses control, their power runs wild.
| 340 |
ELI5: Why do airlines throwaway single containers of liquids containing 100ml or more of it?
| 1,324 |
In 2006, a group of Muslim terrorists planned to blow up seven long-haul flights from London to the US and Canada using liquid explosives in 500 mL beverage containers. The plot was intercepted and thwarted by Metropolitan Police. For a short time, passengers were not allowed to bring any liquids on airline flights - in some cases, even in checked baggage - before the 100 mL rule became the global standard.
| 1,762 |
|
[Star Wars] in A New Hope, why were the Admirals so dismissive of The Force?
|
In the scene where the Admirals were discussing what course of action to take after the Death Star plans were stolen, why did they so easily dismiss Darth Vader's statement about the power of The Force? They were so patronising to him by referring to him as a "sorcerer" when there are extensive records of his extraordinary feats using The Force in combat and most of them likely served under Jedi before the formation of the Empire that have also likely engaged in extraordinary feats using The Force. Also, it probably wasn't the first time that they've seen him Force Choke a guy out right in front of them, so you'd think they would know not to piss him off.
| 151 |
Vader did kind of antagonize them. The admirals weren’t just insulting Vader randomly. Vader outright said that the Death Star, the most powerful weapon in history, which many of them have dedicated their entire careers either to building it or fighting to get a posting on it, is irrelevant compared to Vader’s ability to lift rocks and swing a laser sword. Of course they’re going to react badly.
| 224 |
ELI5: Are dogs and other domestic animals susceptible to mental illnesses such as things like Down syndrome and Autism?
| 20 |
Neither Down Syndrome or Autism are mental illnesses. Could you clarify what you mean by this question? Do you mean disorders such as Down Syndrome or Autism, or mental illnesses, more along the lines of depression or schizophrenia?
| 11 |
|
Eli5, how is the abbreviation for number 'no.' ?
| 82 |
It comes from the latin NumerO, meaning number
it's kind of weird that the it's the first and last letter rather than just the first two letters which would be more expected nowadays, but that's how "number" was abbreviated for centuries
| 134 |
|
[Star Trek] A question about starship design
|
What was the point of the saucer/body [design](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/54/USS_Enterprise_%28NCC-1701-A%29.jpg) of the Federation Crusiers? Is it a simple design aesthetic or is there some purpose to it?
| 15 |
Originally, this design of saucer - hull - nacelles was the optimum for generating a warp bubble around the ship, while still keeping the crew safe and the Gravity and structural integrity fields from interfering.
| 22 |
ELI5: Why are most weigh stations on US highways always closed? And what is their intended function in the first place?
|
I'm curious as to why these are always closed, compared to toll booths/rest stations.
| 22 |
Truck driver here,
Weigh stations are there to make sure that commercial vehicles such as semi trucks are not over weight for the roads that they are traveling on because an over weight semi would not be able to stop as fast as normal, they may blow tires, and/or may cause other parts to break under pressure also it could cause damage to the road ways or piping under the road ways
As to why they are mostly closed is because lack of funds to keep them operating, such as paying the operators or keeping the scale in operating condition
| 35 |
CMV: I should not be solely responsible for putting the seat down.
|
I have noticed my significant other REALLY hates when i do not put the seat down. I understand i am also the one that picks it up.
The problem here is that i am actively working towards a goal that we both benefit from: no piss on the seat. Granted, it is nice for both of us to not have to sit on the seat that might have piss on it. But at the same time i am expected to do the work of picking up AND putting down the seat when the ratio of me sitting down to her sitting down is very small, most likely 1:3.
My point here is that if I am actively working for a goal for both of us, especially one that she enjoys 66% more, I should AT MOST be responsible for 50% of the effort.
In order to change my view on this matter, you must convince me that it is justifiably my responsibility to both pick up and put down the seat. This, or any points you think may sway my opinion.
Thank you!
| 59 |
We are not talking about an all else being equal scenario.
You don't have to use the bathroom standing up, you want to use the bathroom without having to sit. She cannot use the toilet with the seat up. She has no other options. You are making a choice to do something with the seat that is specifically for your benifit of which she derives no benifit.
Given that you are doing something specific to you of which she derives no benifit, something which prevents her from doing what she needs to, it should be you who puts everything back into order.
What you're asking is like for her to do your dirty dishes because she also uses dishes sometimes. She cannot derive any benifit from the dirty dishes unless she addresses their dirtyness, while you gained the benifit of their use without setting them back to a place where they could be used again.
| 77 |
[SCP Foundation] How powerful is the Foundation, exactly?
|
We see the Foundation effectively going up against nigh-omnipotent entities, hyper-infective diseases and all other manners of extradimensional entities practically daily at this point. Is there anything the Foundation *couldn't* contain?
| 33 |
The designation "Apollyon" is the designation given to the few anomalies the Foundation have absolutely no power over and can simply do damage control. SCP-2317 for example.
Beyond that they also have unfortunately come across several nasty antimemes that have totally wiped out their antimeme division as its very comprehension will trigger mental deterioration.
Lastly SCP-2718, otherwise known as [DATA EXPUNGED] is currently uncontsined and currently present in XXX% of subjects.
| 30 |
[Elder Scrolls] I'm an Argonian fortune seeker. Is there anything sunken worth searching for in Skyrim?
| 21 |
Plenty of ships have sunk around the coast near vardenfell but you'll want to be warned of the frigid waters and vicious wildlife that are found there. Best just to travel to solsthiem and help dig out the raw ebony or if you're fourth era then dig out the ruins of ash
| 24 |
|
Why does smoke from incense or cigarettes not (usually) set off smoke alarms?
| 131 |
Fire Alarm / Smoke Detector Manufacturer here.
Household smoke detectors (excluding Heat and CO) fall into two catagories, Ionisation and Photoelectric.
Ionisation smoke detectors (the detectors with the radioactive symbol on their label) are designed to detect sub-micron particals of combustion (different to thick smoke). Examples of sub-micron particles are cooking vapours (released from opening a hot oven, for example), vehicle exhaust, birthday candles, lighters, etc. Basically smoke that is the result of something burning, but you can't see. Ionisation smoke detectors in the house react well to fast, flaming fires (flash flame from a pot of oil on the stove, for example).
Photoelectric detectors simple use an infrared transmitter and receiver in a chamber in the detector. As thicker, visible smoke enters the chamber, it blocks the light and the detector registers this change. When the smoke obscures the light to a certain level, the detector goes into alarm. Photoelectric detectors react well to visible smoke (cigarette, burning meat, smouldering natural fibres, etc).
To answer your question, it's very likely you have an Ionisation type installed, and it is not detecting sub-micron particulate in the air (as cigarette smoke is greater than one mircon and the ionisation detector cannot see it).
Please read this: The majority of household fires are caused by smouldering fires (burnt out motors, rats chewing electrical wires, cigatette left on bed or couch). These fires do not immediately show flame, but smoulder away and generate smoke for minutes (sometimes hours) before flaming. In this case, Ionisation detectors are not effective in providing early warning. Photoelectric detectors are far more suitable for this purpose. Please, when you check your battery next, check it's type. If it is a ionisation detector, please consider purchasing a photoelectric as a replacement.
TL;DR - Ion detectors (ones with radioactive symbol) can't see visible smoke. Photoelectric type detectors (stated on product label) do.
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ELI5: Why do frogs sing/croak when it's raining?
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There's a thunderstorm outside and I can hear a lot of frogs croaking very loud/long. Is there a reason why they do that?
| 148 |
Croaking is usually a mating call, and frogs like to stay wet. Usually this means they're normally by a pond or stream, but when it rains they can move about on land more freely. So, you get more frogs wandering about on a rainy evening looking for mates, and so croaking more
| 64 |
ELI5: Why does yellow food coloring look red when it's concentrated?
| 16 |
A dude named Beer made a law about it. It's called "Beer's Law", oddly enough.
Here's the way it works. Say you have a rainbow and a very special pair of filtering glasses. Without the glasses, you see every colour in that rainbow. But the glasses make the lower part of the rainbow a little bit hidden more than the upper layers. So with them on, you see lots of the upper part (which is reddish) but not quite all of the lower part (which is bluish)... and yellow's in the middle so it's a tiny tiny bit missing but most of it's there.
Now, put on another pair of those glasses so you look quite dorky with two pairs of glasses on. Now almost all of the blue is gone.. and quite a bit of the yellow's gone too.
Now put on a third pair of glasses so you look super dorky. Blue's pretty much not there, yellow's about all gone... and so you largely see red.
The more layers of dorkiness-causing glasses, the more red shows through and the less yellow does. Well, Beer's Law is kinda like those glasses when it come to the liquid in food colouring. The thicker it is, the more it absorbs yellow light and only shows red light, even though the base colour of the food colouring is yellow when diluted.
In very simple terms, the more layers caused by more concentrated liquid that the light passes through, more and more of the reflected light off of it that you see shifts toward red because all of the blue and almost all of the yellow gets absorbed.
But water that food colouring right down or mix it in icing so there's just a tiny tiny layer of light-reflecting stuff at the front, and the yellow now shines through because it's not really absorbed at all.
| 20 |
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Speed of light = maximum speed of information?
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As far as I can understand, it follows easily from special relativity that you can't accelerate anything to >c, because as you get closer to c you need to spend more and more energy for each incremental increase in speed, and the total grows to infinity. Maybe this is also true for energy propagation - I haven't seen it derived, but I'm willing to believe it can be done. But when physicists claim that *information* cannot propagate faster than c because that would "violate causality", I get confused because physicists also theorize about the existence of [closed timelike curves](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve). If it's a postulate that you can't "violate causality", then you can't send messages faster than light... okay... and also CTCs are impossible by fiat, so why study them? But if the thing about "causality" is only a hypothesis, then you can't use it as a postulate to prohibit FTL signaling in a freshman course. Am I missing something?
| 21 |
The issue here is one of Local structure vs. Global structure.
Remember that, in General Relativity, space-time is modeled as a four dimensional surface: one for time, and three for space. The theory (specifically Einstein's Field Equations) describes how the the curvature (i.e. local structure) of this surface is related to the density of matter/energy. The restriction on faster than light travel is a local one: it applies a priori in a small neighbourhood of any given point. You can draw a "cone" around any given point which bounds the causal effect of that point, but this is only guarenteed to be valid if you stay sufficiently close to that point.
Whether or not this local constrain can be translated into a global one depends on the topology of space-time. For the sake of simplicity, let's consider an imaginary universe with only one spacial dimension. Then, locally, space looks like a line, and space-time like a plane. Now, if you pick a point and start drawing the light cone from that point, different things can happen.
First, suppose that our space-time actually IS a plane. Then when you keep expanding the light cone away from your base point, it will continue to look like a cone. In other words, for this space-time, the limit of c on causality propagation holds everywhere.
Now, consider a space-time in which the spacial dimension is still a line, but now the time dimension is a circle. So the space-time as a whole looks like an infinitely long cylinder, with time corresponding to looping around. This is really trippy: It means that if you stay in one spot and just wait (i.e. move forward through time), then you will eventually end up back WHEN you started! This is essentially the simplest example of what a CTC is.
Anyway, pick a point as before, and start building the light cone from that point. What happens? It starts off as it did before, but once you wrap around the cylinder once, it starts to look different: you can now cover points with the same time co-ordinate as your base point, but which are spacially separated. In fact, any light cone you draw on this cylinder will cover the entire surface. Think about what this means for Causality: Any point in space-time can have an effect on any other.
These two examples demonstrate opposite extremes: In the first, local causality restrictions can be extended so that they hold everywhere. In the second, the local restriction becomes trivial when you try to extend it to the whole space-time. By picking space-times with different topologies, you can get all sorts of effects in between these two. A slightly more complicated example would be to take the planar model, and simply fold it so that two distant points touch. This would be a wormhole.
Hopefully this clarifies things somewhat.
| 14 |
Why do higher resolutions require more power?
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Stupid Question and this might be more related to hardware: Why are things more intensive when you change the resolution? For example, if you have a 1920x1080 monitor, then your screen is constantly showing 2073600 pixels right (unless there's a letterbox)? I don't get how changing the resolution affects the amount of power the monitor needs (or GPU).
| 18 |
Because the complexity of basically every single rendering algorithm (2d/3d rasterization/3d Ray traced) is a function of the amount of pixels being drawn. The RGB value of every single pixel needs to be set (and calculated) independently by the GPU. If you want to draw a green triangle, a function has to be run for every single pixel to find out wether or not that pixel is inside the triangle. The more pixels, the more times this function needs to be run.
Note that your GPU calculates hundreds/thousands of pixels simultaneously (and does other calculations by mass parallelisation). Still, it can't calculate all the pixels in parallel. The more pixels, more time the GPU will take to calculate their color values.
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