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ELI5: Why is it harder to look at something in the dark directly rather than looking to the side of it?
| 1,586 |
Our eyes have different kinds of light-sensitive cells. They're not spread evenly across the retina. Rod cells only detect light or dark, but work much better in low light than the colour-sensitive cone cells.
When it's dark, you are only using your rod cells, which is why when it's really dark you can't see any colour, just black and grey.
There are not many rod cells in the middle of your retina, they are mostly on the edges of the retina, so if you look just *next to* something, in the dark, you are putting more rod cells at the object than if you look directly at it.
The middle of your vision has a higher concentration of the colour-sensitive cone cells instead
| 862 |
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Why is Internet priced by speed, but cell phone priced by amount of data?
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Illuminati? I dunno. Someone tell me.
| 255 |
Different infrastructures. Cell companies incur a lot of costs from power required to pump signals to your equipment. Less data usage, less signal needed, less money spent.
Cable companies incur costs from trunk line maintenance, the faster the speed, the more trunks needed, the more costs incurred.
| 83 |
[Warhammer 40k] was the Chaplin erebus alone responsible for every event of the horus heresy?
| 41 |
He was responsible for Lorgar going heretic. Lorgar was responsible for many of the others going heretic. If the other heretic primarchs didn't listen to Lorgar the Horus Heresy would not have been as catastrophic.
| 26 |
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Eli5: why does my stomach "growl"
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Just laying in bed and my stomach is growling so I figured eli5 could help haha
| 20 |
When your stomach is digesting food, it moves and squeezes in order to move the food around and digest it better. Sometimes your stomach will still do this when you don't have any food in it. If it does, sometimes the air in your stomach will make a growling sound
| 14 |
Why do some materials conduct electricity while others do not?
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I've heard that it is related to the energy levels of electrons or the lattice of the material among other things, but I do not have a good answer as to why some materials conduct electricity while others do not. It is quite difficult to find information relating to electricity on the atomic level.
| 41 |
When you have a bulk material like rubber (insulator), silicon (semiconductor), and copper (conductor) the electrons energy levels of the individual atoms form energy bands when considering the bulk properties of the material. To move electrons through a material you must promote them from the valence band to the conduction band, in an insulator the band gap is large it takes a lot of energy to promote an electron, with a semiconductor the band gap is small taking only a little bit of energy to promote an electron, and in a conductor the valence band and conduction band are touching so only a very small amount of energy is required to promote an electron.
| 15 |
ELI5:Why are Adderall, Ritalin and other medications with side effects used to treat dopamine deficiencies rather than dopamine itself?
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And by that I mean, why use medications that attempt to cause the production and modify the uptake of dopamine rather than using dopamine itself as a medication and directly supplementing a person's dopamine levels? I mean, sure, you'd have to ensure that the release of the dopamine is gradual rather than all at once, but it's not like that's nonexistent technology; patches and a bunch of other things exist to allow for that. And yes, I'm aware there's some talk about whether common dopamine deficiencies are the result of norepinephrine deficiencies instead of dopamine deficiencies, but that leaves me with a nigh-identical question.
| 55 |
Dopamine itself cannot cross the blood-brain barrier. You can shoot someone full of dopamine via an IV all day long, but it will not do anything to affect the dopamine levels in the brain itself. So, the best thing you can do is either stimulate the brain to produce more itself or limit its reuptake.
| 90 |
We know that mass can become energy. Is it possible to turn energy into mass?
| 271 |
Sure -- this is how particle colliders work. The kinetic energy of colliding particles produces new particles with a greater mass than the particles you started with had.
For example, the (apparent) Higgs boson, was produced in a collision of two protons. The mass of a proton is less than 1% of the mass of the Higgs. So how was the Higgs made? The protons were moving very fast and had a great deal of kinetic energy; some of this energy was converted into the mass of the Higgs.
| 208 |
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ELI5 what is the THE GREAT FILTER (Fermi Paradox) ?
| 370 |
The Fermí Paradox is that there are probably billions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone, and yet we don’t see any signs of sentient life up there in the sky. The Great Filter is one possible explanation of that. It goes that while there are many life-supporting worlds out there, there exists some barrier that is killing off alien civilizations before they can get to the scale where they would be detectable from Earth. For example, it could be environmental disasters caused by the civilizations themselves, or self-destructing nuclear wars, or something else entirely that we can’t foresee. The idea is somewhat frightening because humans as a civilization might be fast approaching that barrier.
| 549 |
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ELI5: The difference between advertising and marketing
| 17 |
**Marketing** is a business role that analyzes and/or makes decisions about everything needed to bring a product to market: research, manufacturing, finance, packaging, advertising, sales…etc.
**Advertising** is one piece of marketing: communicating a product to potential consumers.
| 17 |
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ELI5: Why do humans not remember being babies?
| 110 |
infants do form memories. But they forget quickly:
* 6 month => 24h retention
* 9 month => 1 month retention
* 20 month => 1 year retention
So human (babies) remember being babies. But human (adults) dont remember beeing babies.
Baby brains grow fast. From birth to the age of 2 they triple in size. During this change in size, neurons grow, they test connections and prune themselves. The part of the brain "responsible" for storing memories of events keeps making new neurons fast, even far into adulthood (but much slower). by forming new connections with memory circuits, the masses of new neurons may disrupt existing networks of already-formed memories. So babies learn fast, and they forget fast.
| 121 |
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[MCU] Rocket has no idea what a "Raccoon" is, since to his knowledge he's the only one of his species. But Drax mentions that he and his friends roasted raccoons on a campfire as children ("they were quite delicious"). How did Drax run into raccoons on his planet?
| 309 |
Those weren't raccoons. They were completely alien lifeforms that just happen to be identical to raccoons in every way.
Notice that many of the inhabitants of Xandar are identical to humans in every way. That doesn't make them human.
| 313 |
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[Batman]Why hasn't Bruce Wayne ever put his resources to stopping the Batman?
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Isn't he a philanthropist. The batman is a vigilante, and is taking the law into his own hands. Why not devote some resources to try to catch the bat
| 139 |
Because even when what Batman is doing might not be legal, the people of Gotham, across all backgrounds, are shown as generally being divided as to whether or not what he is doing is or isn't right. They usually lean more towards the latter the longer he's been around and proving himself to them.
In Pre-Modern Age comics, Batman wasn't ever really considered a controversial figure. In fact, he spent most of his existence as an officially deputized officer of the law, and was considered a respected but enigmatic member of the citizenry.
By the Bronze Age, it was well known that Bruce Wayne was a friend of Batman, because of their overlapping interests in helping the city and stopping crime. When people needed to contact Batman to ask for his help, they would sometimes ask Bruce to forward their requests to him.
| 134 |
ELI5: why do only some materials work on touchscreen, and what is in touchscreen gloves that makes them work?
| 32 |
The basic difference is conductivity + surface area. A needle will not work because it has very little surface area that can directly touch. A cotton glove will not work because it is not conductive. A glove with a bunch of flexible little conductive fibers WILL work.
| 25 |
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[Harry Potter] does polyjuice potion have an expiration date after brewing and if not what happens if a take a persons hair and make the potion when they’re 20 but don’t drink the potion until they’re 40?
| 30 |
Apparently you can't just brew one big batch or Not-Moody would have done so. Snape said that someone kept stealing his alchemy ingredients and not that somebody had wiped out his stock in a single heist.
| 18 |
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CMV: It's ok to be skeptical about the Covid vaccines
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I'm not an anti-vaxxer and I've done all the vaccines I needed to at a young age, Please hear me out.
A while ago my mom called me on the phone to tell me that a friend I had in highschool died. I didn't keep in touch but my mom still talks with the parents of my school friends. He was studying to be a doctor so he had to do the vaccine. He was 23 and died from blood clot. If my highschool friend was a vaccine skeptic can you really call him out on that? Would he be irrational and inconsiderate for not wanting to do the vaccine?
I'm not against vaccination necessarily but the fact you are not allowed to be skeptical about it it's kind of crazy to me. Some of these vaccines are not even FDA approved yet they are mandatory. 2 months ago if you talked shit about the Johnson and johnson or astrazeneca vaccine you were considered a lunatic anti-vaxxer. Now a lot of countries disapprove of them and not considering them safe to use. Therefor, we don't really know for sure if other vaccines will cause problems as well in the future because we don't have enough data yet.
There are also rumors about new strains of covid. So these vaccines might not solve the problem completely at all. The vaccines are also not 100% effective atm.
Saying that, I do believe that people who are older or on higher risk from covid should do the vaccine as it seems the better option for them. However, I don't see why young and healthy people should rush and do it right now. When they can ensure our safety 100% ofc it makes sense to do it tho. I already had covid twice and didn't even get any symptoms (same with my parents) so am a bit more scared about the vaccine since I know someone that died from it as well.
I'm sorry maybe I'm just the stupid one since everybody seems to jump on the vaccine with no fear. I'm not even saying that the vaccines are bad or anything, I'm just saying I find it very weird that by just criticizing them you are considered a crazy person nowadays.
Edit: Ok you convinced me. No need to comment any more lol. Some of you had some good points (not all of you, some of you were trying to convince that my friend didn't die from the vaccine. Well I assure you he did. He was completely healthy and felt shit right after the vaccine. Then died from blood clot the day after. The doctors confirmed that. Unless his parents lied to me but why would they tho. They were pro vaccine as well. The stats about deaths from the vaccine are not accurate and they re definitely more. But I do agree they still too small and it benefits us more to do it) Btw I never said I was against it, I just wanted to start a conversation. I obvs want for the vaccine to work and things get better. I m aware that doctors have better knowledge of the topic than me and I do trust them. I don't trust the government tho. And I know there are always economical benefits behind For example nobody want to use the Cuban medicines or support them on their research because they are a "socialist" country, but the conversation now goes elsewhere and that's a different topic. To conclude I ll do the vaccine when I can so no worries
| 60 |
I see that vaccines are a very personal issue for you but the way the math pans out, covid is a bigger threat for every age group than the vaccine ever will be. Furthermore, you spread the virus to people around you, creating an even greater threat.
The J and J vaccine and AstraZeneca vaccines are both incredibly safe. In fact, J and J is going to be continued to be injected and AstraZeneca is still being given out. A few deaths in a million is nothing compared to covid, even in healthy young people. The reason they were even stopped was out of an abundance of caution and an attempt to assuage the people who are hesitant like you.
Kinda like fear of air travel, yes planes crash and people die but they are by far the safest form of transportation, safer than cars, buses etc. Not to say the amount of people that have died of the vaccine is even comparable to the number who have died from plane crashes.
By criticizing vaccines you automatically take the side of people irrationally afraid of plane travel. Most people jump on planes with no fear.
| 35 |
This may seem like a silly question, but what is the definition of mass?
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Let me elaborate a little. I'm not an idiot, but what is for example a gram of mass relative to, is it something to do with 1/12 of C 12, or was it just decided that a certain 'weight' would be a mass of 1 gram, like the melting point of water being 0. I feel like such a fool to be asking this question but it's been playing on my mind for a while
| 226 |
>The kilogram is the only SI base unit with an SI prefix ("kilo", symbol "k") as part of its name. It is also the only SI unit that is still directly defined by an artifact rather than a fundamental physical property that can be reproduced in different laboratories.
Specifically, it is the mass of the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK), an object made of a platinum–iridium alloy that is stored in a vault in France.
| 141 |
Could you help me understand this excerpt from "The Myth of Sisyphus?"
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> In its way, suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd in the same death. But I know that in order to keep alive, the absurd cannot be settled. It escapes suicide to the extent that it is simultaneously awareness and rejection of death. It is, at the extreme limit of the condemned man's last thought, that shoelace that despite everything he sees a few yards away, on the very brink of his dizzying fall.
I don't quite understand what's meant by that last sentence. It seems that the shoelace represents a glimmer of hope for the condemned man, but I don't see why.
| 20 |
The condemned man here is the mortal human - in that you are condemned to die at some point in the future the moment you are born.
With that in mind, suicide is confronted and considered by the condemned man, but said man decides instead to continue living until his death with the knowledge that suicide is an option.
So what you have with the shoelace isn't representative of hope, but rather of the recognized but disregarded alternative to the "dizzying fall" that is a life lived until its natural end. There's a sort of human pride associated with continuing on and not taking the shortcut - staring death in the face, as it were.
| 11 |
Why doesn’t the minimum wage increase with inflation?
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I don’t want to argue on what’s an acceptable federal minimum wage, but doesn’t it make sense to increase it yearly?
| 121 |
Because the existing minimum wage legislation wasn’t indexed to inflation 🤷♂️
There’s no particular reason why it is or isn’t currently other than that.
Indexing it to inflation has been suggested with recent minimum wage legislation, but that legislation isn’t getting passed with a 50/50 senate. Maybe it was proposed last time but got cut in order to pass cloture, I’m unfamiliar with how the last one went down.
| 80 |
[Star Wars] Was Vader even worthy of being deemed a "Sith"?
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Darth Vader, at least the few comics I read and the films, never really dabbles or studies the dark arts. The guy pretty much carried over his Jedi experience and now likes to choke people more, that's pretty much it. Is he really a "sith"? Isn't he more like a broken man who's always pissed off and intimidating?
Compare him to Sidious, Sidious seems like the kind of guy who'd be sacrificing younglings to appease some ancient deity. I read in some old comics, probably non canon, but Sidious was collecting holocrons of previous sith lords to gain their dark side knowledge. So I'm wondering, did Vader even care about being a sith? Is he even a pure sith? He's just an....evil Jedi, no?
It's kinda like adopting a religion but never practising it.
| 25 |
Worthy? What's worthy?
Literally the only other Sith in the universe said Vader was a Sith. Mind you this is the guy who wiped out the Jedi, overthrew a thousand year old government, and took over the galaxy. If that dude says you're worthy, you're worthy.
| 53 |
[Rick and Morty] Are Jessica and Morty getting somewhere?
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It doesn't bother me that despite all the surreal things humanity has witnessed every episode restarts like it wasn't that important of a historic event, because it's kinda the nature of the show.
But with Jessica, it feels different, from season one to four it seems like there's a growing relationship between both of them and at the same time in other episodes it feels like they barely know each other...
It should be pretty clear for Jessica that Morty has a crush on her, but sometimes she seems to be completely unaware despite all.
It's every episode is on an alternate reality or is Jessica just ignoring the signs?
| 18 |
In many instances, it definitely is an alternate reality.
In "the vat of acid" episode, we see Morty can not only be placed in alternate dimensions without his knowledge, but that Rick purposely does so to teach him lessons. There's no telling what personal history is consistent from Morty's point of view, and that's not even considering that we may be looking at an alterate-Rick and Morty already.
| 14 |
[40K] Space Marines in Inquisitorial Bands.
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Greetings honorable battle brothers!
I belong to a space marine chapter that has some itinerant traditions that go back thousands of years (mostly our tech marine initiates visiting important forge worlds and Nocturne to pay homage to the Salamanders who once helped us). Anyhow, I was wondering since we seem to have occasional bouts of solitary marines in their travels if one of them ever could temporarily join in an Inquisitorial band during his journey. I know our most honorable brothers in the Grey Knights and Deathwatch assist the holy Inquisition in their duties, but what of individual battle brothers occasionally assisting inquisitorial bands. I do know that occasionally companies and whole chapters will be called on to help, but what of individual battle brothers?
The Emperor protects!
| 33 |
Greetings, Brother /u/jad4400!
While not common, it's certainly not unheard of for small groups of Marines to be enlisted for a good cause.
Commissar Gaunt once was privileged to receive the aide of a single Battle-Brother from three different chapters during a particular mission which was deemed "Suicidal" for mere-Guardsmen, but not worthy of the attention of anything more.
Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn has even had the assistance of Astartes in several of his... dubious escapades as well. Rumor has it, that the old radical himself is even aligning his cause with the treacherous Alpha Legion in recent days. A dangerous thought.
| 13 |
ELI5: What is the purpose behind the common "crescent" shaped ice cube?
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Is it more effective in any way or is it no different from the traditional "cubes" from trays?
| 25 |
Crescent-shaped ice cubes are easy for a machine to remove from the tray. After they're done freezing, a mechanical arm swings in a circle and pushes them out of the tray. Cube-shaped trays are a bit harder to automatically remove the ice from them.
| 15 |
What are the ethics of terrorism? Under what conditions, if any, would just war theorists condone terrorism (inflicting violence intentionally on civilians)?
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edit: To broaden the question: Under what conditions would philosophers and political theorists (not solely traditional just war theorists) condone terrorism?
| 68 |
Just a preemptive warning because we know this has the possibility of spiraling: this is NOT a question about whether YOU think terrorism is justified or when, but rather when various philosophers and political theorists have argued it was justified. Our top level answers require a citation so if you're not able to point to a specific book, article, etc. your comment will likely be deleted.
| 32 |
[Westworld] What's preventing guests from assaulting other guests? or worse?
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There seems to be no rules or boundaries at the park. I understand the guns have tech to prevent guests from getting shot, but what happens when a guest decides to assault another guest with their fists or a knife? What happens when they decide to sexually assault another guest? What even distinguishes the guests from the hosts? Can't a guest confuse another guest for a host and then attempt to harm them? Has this ever happened?
| 68 |
The Hosts, and the constant surveillance of the park administration. Consider when the Man in Black was dragging Teddy all around creation, and had a conversation with Ford, and pulled a knife on Ford. Despite being nearly comatose, Teddy reacted instantly to stop MiB from even threatening violence against Ford.
Same system operates with normal host-guest interactions. A Guest attempting to do harm to another Guest would be stopped by the nearby Hosts. This is, of course, why it's a very bad thing for Logan when William kills all the Hosts near them...
Similarly, Park Security is on-hand for (almost; see the Logan-Billy moment above) Guest-Guest interaction that might get out of hand. In all but the most inaccessible parts of the park, the company has constant perfect surveillance on everyone and everything. Even more than just seeing them, in fact. So it's basically the same thing that stops most violence at, say, Disneyland.
As for a Guest confusing another Guest for a Host, that's generally easy to figure out: Hosts don't break character. Guests are just people having a good time. Being violent with the one is part of the story. Being violent with the other often leads to more violence, and then some nice men in black clothing walking out of a secret door in the wall and tossing you out of the park.
| 85 |
[Watchmen] Why aren't there more Dr. Manhattans?
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Seeing as the accident that converted a normal scientist into a god was highly publicised (at least, according to the movie) why haven't more people, or at least some of Dr. Manhattans colleagues, or maybe even Communist spies attempted to replicate the accident for their own benefit?
| 77 |
They did try, but the circumstance that led to the birth of Dr Manhattan is unique. For one thing, Dr. Osterman had the scientific knowledge, being the son of a watchmaker, and the will to return to his girlfriend, all allowing him to slowly reconstruct himself.
Plus, if the Soviets were in fact feeding people into an intrinsic field generator to create another Dr Manhattan, these "volunteers" wouldn't have all of the combinations of traits embodied by Dr Osterman. They would need to find another guy who was taught the methodological method of putting machines together, have a good background in quantum physics, and an emotional tether. Plus, there might be a completely random element involved that no one knows of.
| 112 |
ELI5 if you tell me your name, I forget immediately yet I remember every lyric to 1000 songs on my Ipod?
| 24 |
You have heard those songs 100's of times and the music helps you remember plus the singer is filling in the blanks helping you remember too.
Where as a name is just one word with nothing for you to connect it to, to help you remember it.
| 14 |
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Please take time to learn how to answer a question
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In response to this front page post, I felt it important to give the other side.
Yes, it is absolutely important to learn **how to ask** a question.
However, no matter how you try, if you're asking that likely means that you need help and aren't really knowledgeable in the area.
So, as long as you aren't asking hard/impossible to answer things like "why isn't my code working?!?", we should assume the best of you.
So, for those of you answering questions, I wanted to create a convenient guide to help those who really are trying their best, despite many gatekeepers making them feel inadequate with how they ask.
1. Assume the best of the asker. They likely don't know any better and need your help.
2. Don't gatekeep. If your intention is to arrogantly come in and say that a beginner should have a mastery of awk and sed, don't respond to the question, you clearly don't have as good of a mastery as you think that you do. I have met world masters in coding and they are as humble as they are smart. Strive to be like them.
3. On that note, if you couldn't teach a child in their terms how to do what you think that know, then you might opt to not answer questions until you have a better understanding and mastery of that given area of programming. A true master can communicate concisely and clearly even to someone with little to no knowledge.
4. Assume that the person has tried their best to solve the problem and has already searched around for help. My best buddy and I have been coding since the early 90s and we almost never ask for help because we focus super intently on solving it ourselves. This is not normal. Assume the best of your asker.
5. Above all else, remember: **If you don't have something useful to say, don't say anything at all.**
6. Remember what it was like when you were there. Also remember that the ritualistic hazing that you went through sucked and was unwarranted. Don't perpetuate that toxic culture.
This is not a comprehensive guide, it is up to you to apply empathy and sympathy or just not respond.
I distinctly remember how terrible and exclusive the bash scripting communities were back in the 90s and 00s and I only succeeded **despite** their jabs and demeaning responses, not because of the
 
Lastly, if you don't like the message in here, look at point 5.
 
^(Who am I to say this? Self-taught Silicon Valley programmer from the 80s-now. I taught myself everything from basic to JavaScript, PHP to python, and so much in between. However, I also teach, and I realize that the community puts the blame on the askers instead of getting better at answering. It is actually both sides that need to improve, with you experts among us needing to humbly lead the way.)
 
Edit: hotfix - this post isn't perfectly worded but the recommendations in it apply to it too. If you're confused, please feel free to ask any questions for clarity. If you just want to showboat or be opinionated, gatekeep or be arrogant, please go enjoy another place. This post is meant to help those who want to be better question answerers. If you don't fit into they category, it's ok, but I ask you to not try to answer questions from new people, they need help.
Edit 2: Two important notes -
1. I apologize for my writing. I was never good with written communication. My strength lies in oral communication and I'd happily do a youtube video in place of this post and comments.
2. I fully agree with you all - learning to adequately ask AND answer is important. That is quite literally why I was quick to put up this post in response to the other one.
Edit 3: Final addendum - looks like my monday morning script ran. I'll come back and clean up the content her so that hopefully it's more clear. Honestly, I bet that with your help we could make matching guides for "How to ask" and "How to answer" that would help a lot of people on both sides of the fence.
Thank you all for the comments, input, opinions, and experience!
| 74 |
> Assume that the person has tried their best to solve the problem
That's a bad assumption. There are many questions on the programming subs where it is obvious the asker has not thought about or worked on the problem whatsoever.
You can usually tell though - so assuming one way or the other isn't necessary.
| 19 |
ELI5: how do lotions that you wash off immediately(in the shower or in the sink) work if they’re on your skin for such a short amount of time?
| 39 |
The lotion is made of two main components: an oily phase and a watery phase. When you apply water, the watery phase will dissolve and wash away while the oily phase will resist the water and remain stuck to your skin, providing the moistness.
| 32 |
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[Star Wars] Count Dooku was the head of state of the Separatist Alliance, and yet he regularly went around the galaxy with a red lightsaber, training apprentices and acting as a Sith. Was the general public aware he was a Sith lord? Why didn't the Jedi Order make this publicly available information?
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Training Grievous (and Ventress and his other apprentice in the Clone Wars tv series), using force powers, giving direct military orders to generals, and so many other things Dooku regularly did seem to make it inconceivable that at the very least, the Separatist leadership wouldn't know he was a Sith. Did they simply not care? How could his relatively open use of the dark side of the force not cause issues for the separatist cause, even in just a propaganda sense?
| 26 |
To the vast majority of the galaxy, "Jedi" and "Sith" are merely two diametrically opposing philosophies about life and the nature of the universe. Think of Christianity and Islam in your own world. They both believe in the same consciousness, whether you want to call it God or The Force, but believe different things about it.
Even if Count Dooku identified himself as a Sith, 99.99% of the galaxy is going to go "meh" and move on. So he follows a hokey ancient religion and holds a certain set of beliefs, who cares? The Jedi certain care, but simply holding a set of beliefs isn't a crime, and Count Dooku could parade up and down the streets of Coruscant while waving his red lightsaber, and the Jedi couldn't do anything about it.
They've certainly tried to defame Count Dooku, and even went as far as to stage a coup against Senator Palpatine because of his beliefs, but that's just what one large religious force did, and it certainly doesn't represent the entire galaxy's views on the subject.
| 26 |
ELI5: Can someone explain the new discovery on how humans respond to oxygen (Nobel Prize in Medicine)?
| 49 |
We already knew that our cells variate their oxygen uptake. These cell biologists now found the protein that measures the oxygen level within our cells (and decoded its structure). Now we can work on manipulating this protein to fight different illnesses like cancer.
Cancer cells as an example need much oxygen because they want to grow fast. If we could now „tell“ the cells around the cancer (by manipulating our new protein) that they have a high oxygen level, so don‘t take up that much, the cancer cells won‘t get enough oxygen by teir surrounding tissue and therefore slow down in growth.
| 52 |
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[Mr Bean] What on earth is wrong with him?
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He is obviously highly intelligent as he is capable of finding novel and effective solutions to certain problems, and apparently gains a pretty good knowledge of trigonometry at one point. On the other hand, he is sometimes vindictive and seems to enjoy upsetting children and sick people, he is obsessive about finishing his mini-golf game and his way of making a sandwich is time-consuming and ineffective. So what's his problem? Why does he have certain blind spots?
| 108 |
Mr Bean is a fallen angel. He has an intelligence beyond humans, but he has odd personality quirks, and his idea of amusement is a bit off. You'll note he has a few 'encounters' in church. He likes to mock God for tossing him out over what he considers trivial matters.
| 133 |
[Lord of the Rings] Why don't the Orcs stab the horses that Aragorn and Theoden King were riding when they were leaving the castle at the end of the Battle of Helms Deep?
| 43 |
At first, because they were moving. A moving horseman is a terrifying thing - even when going slowly, the weight of horse and rider give it massive inertia; impact with any part of them can cause injury even before you factor in the blades the riders were carrying.
(One of those things that Hollywood frequently gets wrong: The whole point of fighting from horseback was constant movement. A moving horse adds immense power to your attacks; a stationary horse just makes you a bigger target)
Once they were brought to a standstill, they should have been dead in minutes or seconds - but the uruk-hai held back, either out of a desire to draw out the joy of slaughter that little bit longer, or out of fear of the extremely lethal warriors on the horses' backs. Sure, the second orc to charge would be able to hamstring the horse and drag down the rider, but the *first* orc to attack would get a sword through his skull.
| 62 |
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ELI5: what is the logic behind letting someone go if you love them ?
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wouldnt you rather have them stay ?
| 22 |
The issue is that if you love someone, and genuinely love them, you want the best for them. Even if the best for them isn't you. You care about them enough that you just want them to be happy, and though it'd make you happy to have them with you, you know that you aren't the one who can give them the happiness and joy they deserve.
True love is putting the needs of someone else above your own. If you really love someone, then you'll make the decision that is best for them, even if it makes things hard for you.
Don't mistake love with infatuation.
| 49 |
ELI5: Why is male circumcision considered okay when everyone would agree that female circumcision is a violation of human rights?
|
Edit:
Here is some additional background for my question.
I was having an argument with my boyfriend about the conflict between cultural acceptance and "integration in Canadian values". For example Canada’s citizenship guide was recently revised to say that the country’s “openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, ‘honour killings,’ female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender-based violence.”
I was trying to argue that it can be difficult for governments to draw the line between what is acceptable cultural practice and what is not (for political reasons, if anything). He believes the line is clear. For example, female genital mutilation is a violation against human rights.
But male circumcision can also be considered a form of genital mutilation, and it is perfectly legal. His response was that genital mutilation was far more dangerous than male genital mutilation -- but is that really why the line is being drawn between the two?
Anyway, that is why I am asking this question. I'm not arguing for one or the other - I just want to know what the difference is and why the ethical differentiation exists.
Also, what they both mean medically, because there seem to be a lot of people who "know" out there without really knowing.
*ninja edit for clarity of questions
| 28 |
Male circumcision generally involves trimming back a portion of skin around the genitals which does not substantially impact their function. The skin involved contains relatively few nerve endings, the procedure is for all intents and purposes cosmetic, and is generally done as an expression of religious identity or for hygenic purposes.
The procedure known as female circumcision generally involves cutting off, severely burning, scarring or mutilating the clitoris, has no hygenic benefits to speak of, and is generally done with the sole intent of permanently destroying the woman's capacity to feel sexual pleasure.
| 13 |
ELI5: Why does taking a warm bath when you have a fever feel so cold?
| 9,628 |
Because - in order to slow down viral multiplication - your body increases the thermostat of your body. So what normally feels comfortable suddenly feels cold.
Update: That's also why you sweat when you're recovering. The body lowers the thermostat back to normal temperature. Everything feels more hot as when you were sick.
| 4,934 |
|
[Punch-Out!!] Is there any trainer, fictional or real, that could fix Glass Joe?
|
Anyone? Man has the heart for fighting a hundred bouts despite losing 99 times but he's just so fragile. Is there anyway someone could improve him?
| 45 |
In the Wii version, he comes back in Title Defense mode with some better training and wearing a helmet. While he is still the easiest fighter of the mode, he is actually somewhat of a challenge to beat this way.
So, canonically, the answer is yes.
| 52 |
ELI5 what is rollback in fighting games and how come it makes it feel like there isn’t really any lag?
| 48 |
When you play online it takes time for control inputs to get from player A to player B and vice versa. In a rollback scenario, player B's computer is constantly trying to predict what input it will receive from player A and animates the game based on the predicted inputs. When correct, it appears lagless. When incorrect, the game basically skips a small amount to correct the mistake.
So for example:
Payer A presses X (punch) at time 0.00s
Player B's computer predicts player A pressed Y (kick) at time 0.00s. So now player B's computer starts to animate a kick.
At time 0.1s B receives the command player A pressed X at time 0.00. Player B's computer "rolls back" the game 0.1 seconds, works out what would have happened if a punch was thrown over those 0.1 seconds, and then skips forward again to adjust the game for the actual input. From player B's point of view, half way through a kick, it changed to a punch. However player B was able to press block, which is equally valid on a punch or a kick, so in this case the incorrect cue from the prediction algorithm was still helpful.
When lag is low (say 30ms) this isn't noticeable, but when high, the quality of the predictions becomes important and artefacts like teleportation become apparent.
To further improve things some games include a small amount of input lag, say 20ms. This lag is always there, and it's always constant so you're used to it. This 20ms input lag gives the game a little window for the game to "catch up" in during a rollback event.
| 105 |
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What's the best response to the problem of evil for Christianity?
|
I'm aware that philosophers and theologians like Augsustine, Leibniz, and Plantinga have offered responses, but are any of their responses (and others) considered strong or satisfactory? What's the best of the bunch? I've read the SEP article but honestly it feels like a paper written from a starting point of 'none of these arguments work, and here's why', rather than any real attempt to defend the counter-arguments.
Also, how does Plantinga respond to the problem of natural evil?
| 19 |
Okay, so the standard argument from evil looks basically like this.
1. If God exists, then there are no pointless evils.
2. There are pointless evils.
3. Therefore, God does not exist.
Standard theodicy approaches will reject the second premise by claiming that there are no pointless evils, i.e. every evil has a point or purpose.
What's popular these days is to take a different, more subtle approach to premise two. Instead of being "atheistic" about pointless evils ("There are definitely NO pointless evils!"), the strategy is to be "agnostic" about pointless evils ("We don't know either way if evils have a point.") This approach is called Skeptical Theism. It basically argues that since we really have no way of knowing whether or not evils have a point, we have no reason to accept the second premise of the argument. The burden of proof is on the atheist to show that the second premise is true.
Now, regarding Plantinga and his free will defense with respect to natural evil, what (I think) he does is to argue that it is possible that natural evils are the also caused by individuals with free will (e.g. demons or whatever). Thus, this possibility is enough to show that the logical problem of evil (i.e. the existence of God is logically incompatible with the existence of evil) is unsound.
| 17 |
ELI5: What is Trust-busting? How is it used?
| 97 |
A monopoly is when a single company controls all of some portion of the economy. For example, one company is the only company that sells oranges. Since they're the only source of that commodity, they control the price. This is generally seen as a bad thing, so monopolies are outlawed.
Having multiple companies creates competition which is assumed to result in lower prices. But if they collude and simply agree to charge higher prices together, they can achieve the same basic effect as a monopoly. This is a trust. It is also a Bad Thing.
The quintessential "trust busting" legislation in the US is the Sherman Antitrust act. It basically said that companies could not enter into anti-competitive agreements with each other and could not engage in conduct that was essentially a monopoly. Doing so would give the US Government cause in a suit against them.
One example is when various railways formed the Northern Securities Company. The US government sued and dissolved the trust, forcing the constituent railroad companies to operate independently.
Another example was against a pure monopoly, Standard Oil. Again the US government sued, forcing it to break up into 34 independent companies.
| 164 |
|
ELI5: If the color white reflects light (and black absorbs it) why does a lighter skin tone easier get sunburned?
|
Why does the body produce melanin to absorb light? Shouldn’t it be possible to just reflect the light and thus avoid getting sunburned?
| 42 |
Dark/black colours "absorb" light turning it into heat. Light/white colours bounce it. That is true.
The sun's visible light doesn't cause that much damage to skin, and heat isn't the concern. Ultraviolet (UV) light damages DNA and that's what really causes a sun-burn. That layer of skin dies and that's why it peels off. That's what you're really protecting yourself against.
| 30 |
ELI5: Is there a difference between types of cancer other than location?
|
Breast cancer, brain cancer, pancreatic cancer, skin cancer, etc... Are they all the same thing just indifferent locations, or are they biologically different? I know different things cause different cancers, but is it exactly the same disease just in a different body part? And if they aren't related like that why are they all called cancer?
| 164 |
Yes. If your body is a company and every cell is a worker, cancer is a worker gone rogue. One day he decides he isn't going to do his job, destroys a part of the company and grabs a gun to prevent being kicked out. Every day, he destroys more stuff (unregulated growth).
If he's a low ranking worker, he doesn't have all the keys so he can only close the doors from where he works (the tumor grows, but it can't invade other organs). That's a **benign** outcome, nuke his division and you eliminate the rogue worker. If he's the CEO, he has access to the whole company. He may decide to destroy the internet servers or the bathrooms. That's a **malignant** cancer, it can invade other organs. If the damage is too big you are screwed. If you catch it early, you may stand a chance.
But that's not all, every worker has a different personality and a different job. The guy from IT doesn't close doors, he likes to put porn on your computer (it secretes hormones you don't need). A janitor won't cause the same damage as the guy from accounting (a tumor in your chest won't cause you the same problems as a tumor on your stomach). One CEO is dumb and writes "THE CEO RULES!" (you have symptoms and can detect it early), but another one is more subtle, he only destroys the rooms nobody uses, but once you realize what's going on there aren't any more conference rooms (you are asymptomatic until it's too late).
Now imagine there's something wrong in the bathroom. With only that information you can't know if it was the janitor (benign) or someone higher up in the chain of command who has access to the bathroom (metastasis: it spread from another sector). So what do you do? A closer scan reveals that the "something wrong" was a computer with porn stuck on the toilet. Now you can safely assume it was the guy from IT, right? But how do you stop him? Since not all workers cause the same kind of damage, the same strategies won't work on every worker (different treatments). For the IT guy, you have to cut his access to computers. For the CEO, you have to carefully reduce his influence and then fire him. For the janitor who only has the key to one bathroom, just destroy the bathroom.
I hope that analogy wasn't too ELI5.
| 86 |
ELI5: Why is bailing(releasing suspects from jail for money) allowed?
|
I think it is a very stupid question, as everyone else seems to understand it, so I posted it here.
I know that the suspects are no released completely, only until the court, but why should the wealthier people get more advantages? Also, do they release anyone, even the most potentially dangerous suspects?
| 17 |
>why should the wealthier people get more advantages?
They don't. The bail amount is set by the judge based on multiple factors, such as perceived danger to others, and possible flight risk. One of those factors is the financial situation of the accused. If you're filthy rich, your bail is going to be much higher.
| 18 |
Based on statistics from countries which currently do not allow legal abortions, if the US were to make abortion illegal, how common would illegal abortion be? What would the health risks be?
|
I'll try to word this in an ideologically neutral way. I might not succeed.
I've been seeing a lot of coat hanger imagery coming from the (American) left as the abortion debate returns to the media, arguing that shutting down abortion clinics will result in dangerous back alley abortions. However, it seems like a visceral/emotional argument, rather than one backed by data.
Since there are currently countries that do not allow legal abortions, can we use those as a predictive model? Do these countries have a high rate of illegal abortion procedures? Are there any statistics on the rate of injury/death resulting from these procedures?
And if there are are statistics available, is it fair to compare them to the US? For example, in Ireland, if it's easier to just travel to the UK rather than seek an illegal operation on Irish soil, would Ireland only be a useful predictor of those parts of the US that are about an Ireland-length away from the Canadian border?
Is there data to support the fear that anti-abortion legislation will result in a rash of dangerous, illegal abortion procedures in the US?
| 23 |
A question to the OP. In countries that do not allow legal abortion, how likely is it that any estimates of the actual abortion rate are reliable and non-noisy?
You are better off comparing states in the US who border each other, where both states had policy X at time t, and at time t+1 state 1 had policy X and state 2 had policy Y, This would be a simple difference in difference , or boundary condition study. Likely, you'd want to have data on abortions per birth or abortions per women for the counties that are on each side of the border (more likely to be similiar demographics)
I would caution using other countries to base predictions on what happens in the US. Wayyyyy to many different rules, laws customs , etc.
| 12 |
Why aren’t home prices crashing?
|
It seems like prices have remained the same since pre-covid. Shouldn’t prices fall?
| 43 |
It takes time to adjust. Especially in a market where transactions are much higher in value and they happen more infrequently. It's just the first month of the slowdown. Home prices going down means that is a sudden surge in offer that can be caused by more houses being foreclosed. But for that to happen, you have to miss the payments for at least a few months.
| 14 |
[Star Wars] Is it morally, or ethically wrong to kill a rank and file Stormtrooper, or a common Imperial Officer?
|
Chances are that they’re just ordinary people, right? Who joined the Empire for a chance at a better life, and way off some backwater, Outer Rim world. Not to take over the galaxy.
| 27 |
It's morally ambiguous. They may be ok people in personal life, but they are a direct part of a military outfit that is directly subjugating entire planets (even planets that AREN'T rebelling, but just happen to have things the Empire wants to take), enslaving other races, razing entire planets for resources. And it isn't a secret either. Everyone knows the Empire it occupying planets, and everyone knows the Wookies, Twi'leks and Bodach'i have been literally enslaved. So the people joining the Empire as troops aren't exactly innocent either. Still killing is killing, it is NEVER blameless. It is basically where to ~~do~~ draw the line in stopping evil...you generally can't stop it by being perfectly good. Hands must be dirtied.
| 38 |
What were the evolutionary steps for the blowhole on whales and dolphins?
|
I'm watching a dolphin show live right now and I'm wondering, that if they're mammals, did they develop from an earlier form of gills? When in the chain of evolution might have it developed and are there any other mammals that have a vestigial remnant of this feature?
| 19 |
The blowhole evolved from the nostrils, which migrated to the top of head and (in some whales) merged to form a single opening. Some whales still have two blowholes, while the sperm whale's blowhole is its left nostril, with the right nostril not having an opening.
| 22 |
ELI5 what the Right to Repair fight is about with Apple?
| 37 |
Imagine you buy a car. Let's say a Chevy Cruze cuz why not. Now, Chevy has all sorts of reasons to want you to only use Chevy certified mechanics and official Chevy spare parts because they can make money from that service and maintain quality control.
On the other hand, you as a consumer wants to find the best deal for repairs that you can and since you own the car, should be able to do so.
Chevy says that they only provide parts to their guys and if you want a repair you're just stuck with a Chevy mechanic, sucks to be you.
The right to repair is basically saying that you as the consumer should have a choice in who fixes your property.
| 33 |
|
Do g-waves attenuate with time(or when they interact with matter)?
|
If they do attenuate, how can we determine the source considering the waves could have interacted with a random number of matter
| 120 |
Gravity waves do not attenuate when they pass through matter; they just deform the matter a little tiny bit and move on.
They also don't attenuate over time, beyond the fact that they get weaker as the spread out through space.
| 25 |
[Game of thrones] where are all the other Giants?
|
Did they just not ally with the Wildlings?
| 38 |
There are probably some still left north of the Wall, surviving in the ice as they have done for countless centuries. They are adapted to survive in those cold climes, but they face other threats - the White Walkers are on the move, as they have not been since the Long Night, and these last few giants may become their first victims.
... Imagine a Wight, twenty feet tall. Unkillable except by fire, and so massive that it can keep fighting for hours even as it burns, bringing fire to all around it...
| 29 |
How Much Of A Difference Is There Between Philosophy Of Religion And Theology?
| 25 |
The primary difference would be that theology operates within the confines of a particular religious tradition, applying many of the tools of philosophy of religion but assuming certain non-philosophical premises.
| 15 |
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ELI5:So we are seeing the Sun as yellow but why are we seeing it's reflection from Moon as white?
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Hey guys, so right now it is an almost commonly known thing that The Sun is white but we are seeing it as yellow. I wonder why this is not happening to the Sun's light reflected from the Moon's surface.
| 28 |
Moonlight actually appears slightly bluish to the human eye due to the Purkinje effect, which basically states that at low illumination levels the eye is slightly more sensitive to blue light. The reflected light however is white, the same as sunlight. The sun appears yellowish due to a combination of its blackbody radiation output peaking around the yellow portion (that is, it emits more yellow light than red or blue light), and various atmospheric scattering effects.
| 21 |
[The Office US] How in God's name has Michael Scott not been fired?
|
From 2005-2007 *alone*, Michael Scott somehow got away with:
- Leaking news of a downsizing
- Telling the entire office they were being closed down before it was finalized
- Carrying on a secret affair with his boss
- Outing a gay employee
- Kicking a ladder out from under his warehouse manager
- Countless insensitive racial jokes
- Countless instances of sexual harassment
- Wasting company time with his weekly "Movie Mondays"
- Vehicular assault of an employee
- Kidnapping said employee
- Firing an employee who had literally just said "I quit," costing the company severance
All of that is just off the top of my head. How in the flaming fuck is this man still employed?
| 28 |
His branch was the highest performing in Dunder Mifflin by a wide margin over Utica and Nashua. He’s extremely loyal to the company and had been working there forever. He was an elite salesman before he became manager, and when he steps into making sales himself he does very well. He never asked for a raise until Darrell came forward and realized Michael, as manager would be making less than him.
All of this causes his superiors to keep him in his position and overlook his shenanigans.
| 37 |
ELI5: Why do the integers up until 12 have no pattern in their words (after which the teens start), but in French the integers have no pattern in their words up until 16 (after which dix-sept, dix-huit start)?
|
In English and German all numbers up until (and including) 12 have different words with no pattern, whereas 13 and upwards follows a pattern (thirteen, fourteen, dreizehn, vierzehn). (Probably due to the value of a dozen. Thank you [/u/Linard](http://www.reddit.com/user/Linard))
In French it goes up to 16 (seize) and then you get the pattern (dix-sept, dix-huit). Why is this?
| 187 |
there is a pattern, its just heavily based on latin.
11 - onze - (**un**decim) - un
12 - douze - (**duo**decim) - deux
13 - treize - (**tre**decim) - trois
14 - quatorze - (**quattuor**decim) - quatre
15 - quinze - (**quin**decim) - cinq (this one is weird yes)
16 - seize - (**se**decim) - six
| 51 |
ELI5: how do car dealerships make money when they claim the markup on new cars is only a few hundred dollars?
| 258 |
They can make money three ways when they are selling you a new car, the dealer markup, and any hidden incentives from the factory.
The second way is what they offer you for your trade in.
The third way is through financing of the vehicle. They secretly get kickbacks from certain finance companies depending on what rate they offer you. Say, hypothetically, you qualify for a 3% rate, but the finance manager will offer you a loan for 4%, so then the dealership gets a kickback of $500, and if he gets you on the hook for 5%, the dealership gets a kickback of $1000.
So the salesperson will usually chat you up and try to pull details about what you want out of the deal, they find out what your "hot buttons" are, and lets say you demand to get $5000 for your trade, when it's only worth $4000, well then they can jack up your interest rate by two percent and make that back up.
Or, lets say you demand a certain interest rate, so they agree to that, but the amount of money they will give you on your trade-in just went down.
Since usually people only have one hot button, it's easy for them to find out what that is and then structure that accordingly.
So it's all a big shell game. You ask for something, they concede, but make it up elsewhere.
| 170 |
|
What happens to a photon after it has been seen by our eyes?
| 74 |
Our eyes "see a photon" through the response created in our visual system by the absorption of that photon (or more realistically a stream of such photons) by the biological dyes in our eyes. Since the photon is absorbed, its energy is transferred to the molecules that constitute those biological dyes, and the initial photon ceases to exist.
| 42 |
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CMV: Poor people shouldn’t have kids
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This is obviously incredibly controversial, but hear me out. I live in South Africa which is one of the most unequal countries in the world, I grew up middle class and started working in unprivileged communities and was blown away by how ill equipped their parents were to parent them and how despite being ravished by poverty by poverty they continued to have more kids.
I’ve done a bit of research on this and it turn out that poverty affects brain development, children’s health and academic success. Poor children are more likely to witness violence and experience it than their wealthier counterparts. Poor parents are generally uneducated and less likely to support their children’s educational development or give them access to better educational opportunities. Poor parents are under more stress and are generally harsher, inconsistent parents and emotionally distant. And poverty is generally transmitted from generation to generation.
I worked in two schools one in an underprivileged area, the other in an affluent area. The kids in the underprivileged area were 12, the kids in the affluent area were 6, and when I tell you that the 6 years olds were able to handle conflict amongst themselves adequately with very little adult involvement, they were able to regulate their emotions.years old. The 12 years old always handled conflict through violence, they were unable to regulate their emotions. The difference was stark.
My mother came from a poor family and she broke the cycle of poverty, so I’m aware there are exceptions to the rule, but I’m also so aware that poverty can lead so many traumatized children, feeling they aren’t in control of their lives, thereby perpetuating the cycle they find themselves in and further entrenching themselves in poverty. So poor people should have kids.
| 139 |
Do you believe non-existence is preferable to a life in poverty? Do you think most poor people would agree it would be better if they had never been born?
Also, do you think that corporations and governments who exploit the poor have any responsibility for the conditions the poor live in? Or does the responsibility mostly lie with poor people’s parents?
| 30 |
CMV: Nearly everything I did in school was a waste of time, money and effort.
|
I'll start by saying that school teaches a few useful things. Driver's ed is one; just about everyone needs to know how to drive. Reading and writing are essential, as is basic math. Some vocational and technical electives like computer programming were useful. However, most of what is required in a typical k-12 curriculum and even in college is not worth the time.
Take chemistry for example. Everyone in my public high school needed to take chemistry in order to graduate. We paid a significant amount of attention to valence electrons. I'd happily wager that hardly any of use remember what valence electrons are now. I can provide a vague definition, but the only time when I needed to know it was in another chemistry class that I took in college.
I took several years of Spanish classes. Today, I don't speak Spanish. I can form a few barely coherent sentences in Spanish; all of them are about extremely simple topics. It's hard to see how I'm better off today because I had conjugation tables in Spanish memorized years ago.
I could list more topics like this, but I trust your ability to see the pattern. I went to school, memorized some stuff, wrote it down on the exam, and forgot it. After forgetting this material, I have not seen it again in a practical setting.
Some people will tell me something along the lines of education being good for it's own sake. The truth is that most people in these classes find the material rather boring and don't care about it. As I said, they will forget it and be no more educated than they were before taking these classes.
One could also tell me that employers reward people for having degrees. This is true. I'd argue that it's because the ability to finish a degree says certain things about you. Employers do not care about the existentialist philosophy course you took to meet the humanities requirement.
I'd love to be wrong about this because it would mean that most of my childhood wasn't wasted. Someone please prove me wrong.
| 34 |
> One could also tell me that employers reward people for having degrees. This is true. I'd argue that it's because the ability to finish a degree says certain things about you. Employers do not care about the existentialist philosophy course you took to meet the humanities requirement.
This is entirely true and it shows why school *wasn't* a waste of time. Economists refer to it as the "signaling" value of education. By graduating from high school, it proves that you can show up on time, follow instructions, complete boring tasks within a given time limit, solve basic logical reasoning problems, and read/write somewhat coherently. Graduating college shows that you have an even more advanced command of these skills and a basic understanding of your major field of study.
It's very hard to prove that you can learn *how* to learn, that you are diligent, and that you are worth the time and money it takes to train and pay you. That's why people with degrees can earn higher salaries on average than people who don't (regardless of the amount of time in school).
| 27 |
[Vampire Lore] why does blood taste so good to vampires? And what is the human equivalent of how good it tastes?
| 66 |
"The blood is the life!" Dracula (1992)
It's like mother's milk for a baby, alcohol for an alcoholic, or cool water for a profoundly thirsty man. It's sweet, it's wholesome, and *it's what you need.*
| 95 |
|
ELI5: What is chapter 11 bankruptcy and how and why would it help Toy "R" Us?
| 29 |
Bankruptcy: You owe so much money that you can't possibly pay it all. Imagine you own a company that's not doing well. It now owes a total of $1 million to various people: rent, electricity, suppliers, employees, clients you've not delivered product to.
Chapter 7 bankruptcy: Everything the company has gets sold, and the people you owe to (creditors) get a piece depending on their priority. They likely only get a part of what you owe them, or nothing. After that your company ceases to exist.
Chaper 11 bankruptcy: You promise that if you're allowed to keep operating, you can get back on your feet and it will do more good that way. Perhaps some event really screwed you over, but if given a chance you could still recover. So you enter a process where you pay who you can, keep operating under supervision, and try to get the company back on track. If it works, congratulations, your company survives. If not, you go to Chapter 7.
| 75 |
|
ELI5: What is happening when a game is loading?
|
If a game can render the scenery and objects as you're moving through the world, what's the point of waiting behind a loading screen?
| 21 |
So imagine a fast food place that can make burgers really fast, on demand. This is like the game when it's loaded and running, it's rendering stuff quickly and on demand.
In the morning someone has to open the fast food restaurant, warm up the grills and get the ingredients out and prepped for rapid burger making. This is the loading screen, when the computers loads up all the information it will need to render at full speed and gets it ready. It does all of that upfront so it can just churn out burgers later without worrying.
| 120 |
I believe any working individual should make a living wage. CMV
|
US citizen here, if that matters.
I've spent the majority of my working life making a wage that put me well below the poverty line. When I was in high school this made sense because I wasn't full time, nor was I in a high-skill position. I'm now a college graduate with a good deal of experience and myself and my fiancee to support. Up until my current job, I never made enough to live on my own. I couldn't even afford a crappy 1-bedroom apartment, much less food or other necessities to furnish it with.
And I certainly don't see myself as a bad case. There are people with multi-child families making less than I was. I believe it's a failure of our system to provide working individuals with the means to support themselves. Now should you be able to support a wife and 4 kids working full time at McDonalds? Of course not. But you should be able to live comfortably by yourself without any outside assistance.
IMO it is a social obligation to provide a decent wage to those that are willing to work. CMV.
| 69 |
The United States establishes a minimum wage of $7.25/hr (higher in some states). The 2013 poverty level is $11,490. Income at that level is tax-exempt.
Therefore, to be above the poverty line you need to work about 30 hours per week. You claim you are "well below" the poverty line -- how many hours less did you work? How many hours should a person work before they're entitled a "living wage"?
Minimum wage at full time provides $14.5k/yr, or $1200/mo. Any medium-sized city or smaller has places to rent for half that or less. Power bills in such places can easily be kept at $120 or below; water and sewage if not included is about $50. That leaves plenty of room for groceries, cheap internet, and an economical cell phone. Or, in other words, it's a living wage.
How long is the "majority" of your working life? How long have you been in the job market? What is your degree in?
| 21 |
ELI5: Why do Hindu dieties have more than 2 arms/multiple faces usually?
| 18 |
Hindu {and some associated with some schools of Buddhism) have multiple arms as a symbol of their capacity for actions (how much more could you do if you had more hands and arms?) and multiple faces/heads to show their all seeing natures.
| 13 |
|
ELI5: How does exercise actually reduce the risk of diabetes? And how does too much sugar in a diet cause a person with no diabetes to get the disease?
| 16 |
Type two diabetes is effectively caused by having a higher than normal blood glucose level for a prolonged period of time.
When you eat, most carbohydrates are transformed into glucose and absorbed into the bloodstream. Simple sugars are digested and absorbed into the blood very quickly, causing large spikes in blood sugar.
Insulin is released by the body to control blood glucose levels, and to enable cells to absorb and use glucose. Higher than normal glucose levels needs more insulin to control it. This ends up causing insulin ineffectiveness/resistance, which means tat your insulin is less able to control blood glucose levels. In response, the pancreas creates and releases higher and higher levels of insulin. This effectively makes the cells that produce glucose run out. Simple sugar is one if the things that causes this.
Exersize does two beneficial things. Firstly, it reduces your blood glucose. It helps you control it without relying on insulin. This reduces the strain on your insulin and can prevent insulin resistance and diabetes. Secondly, exersize makes your insulin more effective. Combined, this reduces the chances of getting diabetes.
| 18 |
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CMV: if you can't afford living in an expensive city, you should move out.
|
Most big cities are becoming prohibitely expensive to live in, making it hard for middle class people to afford a home or even rent. I'm from Canada where this phenomenon is getting progressively worse in cities like Toronto or Vancouver.
And yet I rarely hear of people talking about moving out. I don't really mean the suburbs here (traffic sucks), I mean really moving out. There are tons of smaller cities where housing is affordable and traffic non-existent.
I can see many reasons why some people might chose the expensive city despite their limited budget, but I can't help thinking many people should consider the option of a smaller, more affordable city. I think there's a decent amount of irrational reasoning here, such as "the city is all there is, everything else is just farms and stuff."
Sorry if that make me sound like a smartass. I am biased here because of my own positive experience with growing up in the big city and leaving it for a smaller one. I'm looking at my city friends who have all stayed there and are now struggling with making ends meet and I'm trying to understand their point of view.
| 32 |
Moving is often suggested as the solution for many problems, but the fact is it's an incredibly difficult process for most people, particularly the low-income. Aside from the expenses themselves (moving trucks, etc) looking at available places in other cities/regions means taking time off work, which could be impossible or lead to getting fired.
Also, the advantages of being physically near your network are huge. Not only is it daunting to leave everyone you know behind, family and friends can be resources for favors like childcare. Giving that up is a big task, and puts a lot of strain on people that may not be worth the savings.
Plus, moving to smaller town often means lower wages, and fewer opportunities for career growth. There are exceptions, but generally it might not be fiscally worth it to move to a small town because you're going to start living on small-town income.
| 45 |
[Star Wars] Why do planets tend to only have one enviroment?
|
For example:
Tatooine and Jakku = Desert
Dagobah = Swamp
Kamino = Ocean
Naboo = ~~Lush forest~~ idyllic paradise.
Hoth = Antarctic
There are more examples, I just can't recall their names.
| 356 |
According to legend many of them were terraformed by the Rakata. It's also worth mentioning that just because the area of the planet our heroes visit consists of only one enviroment doesn't mean the entire planet is the same (although that's usually the case).
| 367 |
ELI5: How come I don't see metal ore anywhere when I walk around in the nature, while extracted metal is so abundant and cheap? How did humans even find metal ore and think of extracting metal out of it millennia before what looks like very basic inventions?
|
This one has always confused me. Metal is so omnipresent that you'd think you'd often run into it in nature, I mean, does all the metal I see around me, in my house, my car, really come from deep underground mines? And if so, how did early humans figure it out, I mean, in the New World, somehow, nobody had thought of building something as basic as a *wheel*, but somehow they found metal ore lying around and thought of heating it up at high temperatures to manufacture metal? It's always baffled me.
| 30 |
Early ore was either meteoric or formed in bogs. So this would be on the surface. People would pick up what they thought was just another rock and use it to surround their fire. Tin can melt at fire temperature so they'd find this shiny substance after their fire died. It's not too much of a leap to figure out that certain rocks put into a hot enough fire create metal.
| 24 |
ELI5: Why are egg donors upheld to such strict requirements in order to donate?
| 250 |
Because the people who receive them want healthy eggs to produce healthy children, especially since they're paying for them. Messing up the eggs with drugs, excessive alcohol, and other unhealthy habits isn't fair to anyone involved.
Egg donors may be held to higher standards than sperm donors because sperm are constantly created and replenished, while a woman is born with all the egg cells she will ever have. Once those eggs are messed up, that's it.
| 192 |
|
If the immune system "learns" and "remembers" viruses, how and where is this information created and stored?
|
My understanding of vaccines is that we take "dead" viruses, and inject them into the body so that our immune systems can learn to fight them before we first get them. My guess is that somehow the white blood cells (?) adapt to the virus somehow, but in what way? Do they unzip parts of DNA like cells do when they replicate? What would they even do with these pieces of DNA or whatever information they learn? ie. how does that information help them kill the virus? Do they then go and hide out until later waiting for the next infection?
| 36 |
To simplify greatly, there are immature immune cells present in your body. Certain types have "hypervariable" regions which, for complex reasons, are able to develop with incredible diversity on a molecular level. Enough diversity that virtually any complex protein (which are absolutely essential for life but are incredibly complex and based upon certain patterns) can be matched to a hypervariable region of some small subset of immature immune cells.
When a certain antigen (epitope technically, but antigen is a word most people know) is widely present in your body (like during an infection), this induces the clonal proliferation of immune cells which have hypervariable regions which are able to respond to that antigen. This proliferation has a far greater degree of mutation than normal cell division, which ensures that new cells which are best able to respond to the antigen are selected for. The cells with the best response to the antigen thus reproduce the most.
Most of the cells produced to combat a given antigen die off quickly if the antigen is no longer present. However, a select few remain which do not directly combat infection, but retain the affinity for that antigen. They stick around, and if that antigen is encountered again, they quickly begin clonal proliferation, ensuring a full blown infection will not occur.
| 21 |
ELI5: How did people/society deal with depression, burn-out-like symptoms and therefore an inability to work in times before modern psychology?
| 70 |
Before psychology what we refer to as depression was called "melancholy" or "The melancholy". We understood in general that certain people would feel certain ways and not be able to recover from it. We didn't understand what exactly caused it but we understood that it was a real thing.
Often times it wasn't treated. Many turned to drugs or alcohol to self medicate. The most popular drug was opium as it stimulated the pleasure centers of the brain. It wasn't until 1909 that opium other than for medical use was banned in the US.
| 130 |
|
ELI5:Why do you see shapes/colors when you rub your eyes when they are closed?
| 22 |
You are stimulating your retina and causing the cells in it to send errant signals to your brain, which your brain interprets as bursts of color.
The retina is a complicated structure with cells that basically take light and turn it into images your brain can understand. When you physically put pressure on those cells it can cause them to fire off some image signals to your brain without light.
Those cells also require a lot of oxygen and when you put pressure on your eye you may also be cutting off their oxygen supply for a second or two. The brief lack of oxygen can also cause them to fire off image signals to your brain without light. That's why you often see colors and shapes whenever you get a bout of low blood pressure to your head (e.g., when you stand up too quickly).
| 13 |
|
Has teen acne been around since prehistoric times? Did cave-dwellers have zits? Or is it related to modern eating, exercise, pollution, etc.?
| 713 |
Based on responses here it made me wonder, are there cultures in the world that have more or less acne than others?? Like if you compared the average teen in USA vs the average teen in India, would one have more or less than the other??
| 373 |
|
[RPGs] I just spent the afternoon walking around beating monsters to death with a club but for some reason I seem to have improved unrelated skills like bartering and lock picking... How does that work?
| 16 |
While engaged with monotonous physical activities, sometimes the mind wanders, reflects on past experiences, and explores the possible answers to lingering questions.
I imagine you rehearsed some conversational skills in your head and gave serious thought to the engineering behind popular locking mechanisms of the time period.
| 34 |
|
If dimples on a golf ball increase distance, and denticles on a sharks skin decrease hydrodynamic resistance, why are barnacles bad for ships, aside from weight?
| 35 |
The dimples on a golf ball create turbulence which normally increases drag, but in the particular circumstance of the golf ball, it actually reduces drag. The reasoning is totally not intuitive and easy to explain, but it has to do with the turbulence allowing the air flowing around the ball to detach (stop being laminar flow) early which creates a barrier that allows air outside the turbulent layer to flow more optimally, in the shape of a boattail. This in turn reduces the drag.
This trick of adding additional turbulence to reduce drag only works in very specific circumstances and conditions. You can't add vortex generators to any circumstance and expect it to work better than without.
| 80 |
|
ELI5: Why it's so difficult to make Xbox 360/PS3 emulators for PC.
| 98 |
Well first off an Emulator for a game console is a software that is replicating the hardware that is being used in the console and its operating system.
Old machines we're easy to do this with such as the GameCube and N64 because they we're inexpensive and simple machines.
Microsoft and Sony however have spent money and time protecting their software and hardware and actively do so. This makes it difficult for someone to accurately replicate their safety precautions and encryption data.
Once the 360 and ps3 have lost their spotlight and support, the hardware and software will stop receiving updates and will be easier to replicate.
Also microsoft and sony lawyers won't be so quick to threaten anyone who tries ;)
| 37 |
|
ELI5: How much truth is there to the idea that the United States invaded Iraq for oil?
| 1,188 |
Practically none. Iraq was invaded because the neocons thought they could remake the Middle East into a region of free-market democracies by toppling dictators. The easiest one to topple was Hussein, but the only clear excuse they could all agree on to do so was the WMDs. Everyone thought he had them, even if there was no proof, so they "stovepiped" intelligence - pushing raw, dubious intel up the chain without critical analysis in order to bolster their weak argument - and supported intelligence they probably knew was phony. They believed they would find WMDs, we would be welcomed as liberators, we would reshape the Middle East in our favor (which has too many benefits to list, control of oil being only one), and we would remind the rest of the world that our military is still number one and we can use it where and how we wish to enforce our will (the subtext there is, after the end of the Cold War, the neocons were worried the military-industrial complex would lose its relevance and, therefore, its bottomless well of money).
TL;DR: the money to be made from Iraqi oil is nowhere near as important as the money to be made from the US military-industrial-security complex.
Edit: forgot about Curveball.
| 1,062 |
|
ELI5: What were we actually hearing during the classic dial-up sound?
| 26 |
The modem is communicating over the analogue telephone line, normally used to transmit spoken language.
Computers only speak binary though. What you are hearing is actually pure binary in the form of an analogue square wave, where each "up" is a 1 and each "down" is a 0 (or the other way around, can never remember).
Since modems use standardized "phrases" to identify themselves, shake hands and other steps needed to establish the connection, the actual sound made is generally the same or at least constructed of the same chunks of sound each time you connect.
Typically these "soundbites" start with a slow and easily readable greeting that even superslow modems on the other end can handle. This would be the "beee-booo-bi-beee" part in the beginning. Then, after they have agreed on the maximum speed both parts can handle, it switches to that speed and that's when you instead hear the white noice kind of sound "pschheeoooiiaauuaa...".
Finally, when it's all set up and ready for communication, the modem switches of it's speaker so you don't have to keep listening to the noice. It is however still sending said noice over the line.
| 43 |
|
Crimea should become independent or be joined to the Russian Federation. CMV
|
Look at how much tension has brewed up over Crimea between major world powers. The question is, is Crimea really worth it?
Many people put forward the argument that Russia should 'respect the integrity of Ukraine'. Well, if Russia did take other parts of Ukraine or even Kiev I would agree with you. But historically, Crimea was not part of Ukraine. Even today it retains autonomy from Kiev. The majority opinion in Crimea is pro-Russian, and it seems the locals are opposed to the revolution in Kiev. If the people in Kiev can decide their politics, why shouldn't the Crimeans?
Russia seems keen on protecting Crimea from Kiev. Kiev, supported by many other states, wants Crimea. Troops on both sides are on high alert. Imagine the bloodshed that can occur here in only a few days. Thousands of people if not more could die. And for what? A small, god-forsaken peninsula nobody outside Ukraine even knew about 10 days ago.
I say, if the Crimeans want to be with Russia, they should have it. It's their wish, not Kiev's. Crimea is not worth a large scale West vs. Russia conflict. Let the Crimeans decide if they want to be with Ukraine, Russia, or on their own.
There should be a referendum in Crimea about how the region should be governed. Crimea should not be forced into either camp.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Some sources:
Crimea demographics, most people ethnic Russians: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimea#Demographs
2000 pro-Russian demonstrators protest against the appointment of Kiev governor. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26425274
Multiple pro-Russia protests http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26400276
More protests http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26404661
More than 3000 Crimeans sign up as recruits to defend the region from Kiev http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/27/us-ukraine-crisis-crimea-idUSBREA1Q0YW20140227
Crimeans taking selfies with the 'invaders' http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report-amused-crimeans-take-pictures-and-selfies-with-invading-russian-troops-1966613
Crimean Ukrainian troops join the Crimean autonomy side http://en.itar-tass.com/world/721855
Crimean government declares independence from Kiev and proposes a referendum on the issue http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_02/Crimea-to-seek-larger-than-autonomous-status-at-coming-referendum-parliament-speaker-6096/
| 24 |
Do you realize how much you sound like Chamberlin when Hitler took Czechoslovakia?
"Why shouldn't they take this one piece of land that isn't necessarily not theirs?"
"We don't want war so let's just give them what they want so they will be satisfied"
We cannot allow for a country to be forcefully taken just to avoid conflict because it will only lead to future greater conflict. Instead we must put our foot down and not allow any country to expand without a lengthy process and many votes and elections.
And while Crimea is not worth a large scale West vs. Russia conflict, stopping eastern imperialism is. Both China and Russia are run by small groups that the people have no control over. They have both shown that they wish to expand (China in it's conflicts with Japan, and Russia's current situation).
The real question is where is the line. If you allow Russia to take Crimea than why can't China take some islands?
| 19 |
[LOTR]Why did the technology level of Middle-Earth remained the same throughout the ages?
|
I mean, in 3000 years we evolved from fighting with rudimentary swords and shields to nukes,lasers and drones yet the people of Middle Earth still used the same weapons and lived the same as their ancestors.
| 48 |
Right, but in 200,000 years we went from spears and bows and arrows, to... spears and bows and arrows. Remember, at the point in Middle Earth we're shown, Saruman was just getting around to gunpowder-level tech. So it's probably within reason that sometime after the 3rd Age, they are primed for an Industrial Revolution.
| 72 |
ELI5: Why are so many common philosophical ideas dismissed as Philosophy 101? What concepts are covered at higher levels?
| 25 |
Most common philosophical ideas are common because they can be communicated and understood without an extensive background in philosophy or specialized vocabulary. Think of the plot of the matrix and its idea that the reality we perceive may not be 'real' at all, this is a very expansive concept but it's summarized very briefly and most people 'got' it without too much explanation.
These sort of ideas are dismissed as 'philosophy 101' because they may be profound and interesting ideas but anybody with one semester of logic and critical thinking probably already knows and understands them. They're entry-level concepts, and being able to comprehend and discuss them indicates a basic familiarity with philosophy in general, not some deep, arcane knowledge.
The higher levels can encompass nearly anything, so it's hard to be specific. The distinction is more about methodology than the subject matter, it's like the difference between looking at a bug under a dissecting scope in fifth grade vs. looking at it under a scanning electron scope in college. You're investigating the same subjects, but more advanced methodology requires more advanced techniques and more experience,and the results are more informative but also harder to understand.
| 20 |
|
ELI5: What is String Theory? Has it been proved wrong? Whats the current replacement theory/idea?
| 17 |
There are four fundamental forces in the universe, gravity, the electromagnetic force, the strong force, and the weak force. We can describe so of these forces with two models, general relativity can be used to explain gravity, while the standard model explains the three remaining forces. These theories are immensely successful, however they are both incomplete, and we would like to have one theory which explains all for forces.
Actually combining these forces turns out to be really difficult. For one thing, gravity is incredibly weak compared to the other forces and we have no clue why. Another problem is that if we attempt to describe gravity using the same math as we do for the other three forces we end up with a theory which isn't predictive. We want theories to be able to make predictions, so if a theory isn't predictive this is a pretty big problem.
String theory is one way of having a theory which explains all four forces. However, it's incredibly mathematically complex, and so far we don't have any way to test it using current technologies.
| 10 |
|
Do you also happen to get sad because you simply will never have enough time to get the knowledge you want to?
|
I was wondering if other people also get kind of sad because it is simply impossible to have enough time to learn everything you actually wanted to learn by a certain age/stage in life. Like idk, completing that list of books with important authors in your field which gets longer and longer while keeping up with the recent findings in your field. Or learning that additional programming language or further practicing the one your familiar with. Or learning one more additional language. And all of that on top of the workload you already have.
Sometimes that makes me really sad because there are just so many things I am interested in and curious about but the more I study the things the longer the list of things I want to learn more about gets. Idk if you can relate but I just wanted to share this and I would be really interested to see what you think about this!
| 648 |
I never thought about it but now that you mentioned it... Yess!!!
Its kind of like when you read a review paper and they cite many other original research papers, and you wanna get through all of them but you dont have the time to do so.
When you do attempt to get through them, you find yourself going down a rabbit hole. One paper leads to 10 other papers and each of the 10 papers lead you to another 10 papers... IT NEVER ENDS!!
Then the timer goes off, you gotta run back to the lab to change whatever solution you've got your tissue incubating in. And those papers that you've found will be left as tabs on your browser, never looked at again (but never closed too). Until one day, your computer freezes up and you gotta force shutdown your computer.
| 159 |
ELI5: Why are high powered graphics cards needed in cryto mining?
|
The reason that I am having problems understanding this is because when I imagine crypto mining, I imagine basically an infinite command prompt constantly running. In my uneducated mind I don’t seeing this as a graphics drain I see it as taxing the gpu and ram. I am below beginner in my knowledge of computers. Thanks in advance!
| 45 |
>I see it as taxing the gpu and ram
Assuming you meant cpu here.
The thing to understand here is that computing graphics involves doing loads and loads of the same set of relatively limited calculations. GPUs are optimized for this in their architecture. Think of it as wanting to solve a million simple math problems -- who would complete the total workload faster, a decorated maths professor or several classrooms worth of high schoolers? The high school students win, because despite being less versatile their sheer parallel capacity gives them the edge. That's the CPU and GPU respectively.
It just so happens that crypto also involves loads and loads of the same calculations, so GPUs are very well suited for it.
| 86 |
In a recent appearance on TV, Sen. Warren claims that Glass-Stegall ended the boom-and-bust cycle for all intents and purposes. How true is this claim?
|
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/16/1224220/-Elizabeth-Warren-Reduces-CNBC-Squawk-Box-Team-to-Rubble
| 62 |
She rather claimed that it was a key part in facilitating a jump from a 15 year boom and bust cycle to one that took 50 years in its first iteration. A second iteration didn't happen, but it would seem it was quite effective in that sense.
| 20 |
[The Culture series] What is the Culture's plan for the Heat Death of the Universe?
|
Sure, it's a long way away, but it is guaranteed to happen eventually.
| 29 |
They either sublime, which may shield them from the effects of entropy, or pass through the Grid to a younger universe. The ability to do this has so far eluded them but was demonstrated to be possible in *Excession*.
| 41 |
ELI5:Why are diseases that have been eliminated kept in labs.What if the labs get contaminated and the disease spreads again?
| 97 |
they are kept in case some country or terrorist group has an unregistered secret culture (a viable or dormant preserved form of the disease) that they may use for biological warfare. If, say, smallpox was released to the public in a terrorist act, everyone born after the 1970s when they stopped vaccinating would be susceptible to the disease. The idea behind keeping cultures of these diseases is to allow the quick and workable design of a new vaccine for a hyper-mutated weaponised strain in the event of attack, to eliminate loss of life. However the debate behind keeping these cultures is rife and the potential risks may outweigh the benefit. Basically, they should probably just cook the cultures and be done with it but we can't be sure that someone isn't harbouring the disease in some secret place.
| 73 |
|
ELI5: Where did the ongoing ‘do a good deed and the mayor of the town congratulates you with the key to the city’ in movies & shows come from? Was that ever a real thing?
|
I’m watching family guy & Peter found a missing kid and as a reward the mayor gave him the key to the city (or town hall?).
I’ve also seen this happen in a few other movies.
Was this ever a real thing? Is this an inside joke I’m not aware of?
| 2,573 |
The "key to the city" comes from serfdom, where it was originally called the "freedom of the city," meaning that the honored person was to be treated as a free person, not a serf, while they were in the city. The "key to the city" derives from the custom of walled cities closing and locking their gates up at night; if you wanted to enter, you'd either have to wait until morning or convince a guard that you had an important enough reason to open the gates. However, if you have a "key" to the gates, that meant that you could open them whenever you wished; you had the freedom to enter/exit the city as you desired. Hence, the "key to the city" phrase replaced "freedom of the city".
It is entirely symbolic/honorific. Since serfdom is long gone, there are no privileges or protections to be gained by not being a serf, so getting a "key to the city" is just an indicator that the city government appreciates something you've done.
| 3,486 |
[The Matrix] Where did they get the memories/files/whatever they needed to upload things like kung fu or helicopter pilot to people's brains?
|
Did they have to liberate someone who knew kung fu, or hack the brain of someone still in the matrix? And does that mean that all the free people know the same kung fu, and thus have the same weaknesses that could be exploited?
| 50 |
Since the machines are the ones that truly created Zion, along with the last few iterations of the city, we can assume they provided the new "free" humans with all of the technology needed for them to thrive in accordance with the Architect's design. This includes memory files for Kung Fu and flying helicopters.
All free humans will have the same baseline set of skills, but will be differentiated by the presence of human free will. Something that transcends programming, and unbalances the Architect's equation.
| 51 |
ELI5 Why we have two types of screw heads/drivers?
|
While putting together a piece of furniture recently, I constantly had to switch back and for between a Phillips head screwdriver and a flat head screwdriver. Why do we have two types and not just one. If we could have just one, wouldn't the Phillips be the best?
| 232 |
Flat heads are easy to use by humans, they have 2 downsides. The first is that the bit slips horizontally and falls out of the screw. They tend not to strip very easily, both bits and screws are simple so they are cheap to manufacture
Phillips heads exist because the flat head does very poorly when you have a machine turning the screws. These machines tend to be very powerful and the flat head screws would get over tightened and break. So the Phillips was designed so that the bit would slip out if it reached that point. The down side is that this "feature" works fairly shitty when it's a human doing the work by hand or using a low power consumer drill.
tl;dr The bits exist for different applications.
| 150 |
How do deep-sea fishes not get crushed by the tremendous pressure of the ocean, at the sea floor?
| 259 |
Marine Biologist here!
This is a pretty interesting topic. The reason that us humans cannot withstand the great pressure of the deep sea is simple: the pressure difference between the environment and our bodies. This is why oil rig divers are kept in pressure chambers throughout the duration of their placement - to make an attempt at equalising this pressure, diminishing the effects of depth.
Because deep sea fish have evolved in the deep they have the same pressure inside their bodies as is outside in the environment - this however means that true deep sea fish cannot migrate to shallow waters as to do this would be to comprise the integrity of their cell membranes (which have evolved to contain high levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids to cope with the extreme pressure) and risk the expansion of gas vacuoles, which would essentially cause them to explode (which is why many deep sea fish look kinda funny when you bring them up quickly to the surface).
Evolving to cope with extreme pressure is not much different from evolving to cope with cold or any other extreme environmental conditions - just like you wouldn't put a polar bear in the desert because it's evolved to live in freezing environments you wouldn't put a deep sea fish in surface waters.
Deep sea fish also have a bunch of other adaptions to cope with the harsh conditions of life below 4000 meters or so, such as reduced muscle masses and slow metabolism.
| 207 |
|
ELI5: Why do British singers seem to lose their accent when they sing?
|
For example, the Beatles had a pretty thick accent when they spoke, but their songs don't seem to have that. Is it because they were imitating American blues/rock and roll singers?
| 113 |
Phonetics and Phonology professor here. It happens because what we call an "accent" has much more to do with suprasegmental traits (such as stress and prosody) than with the pronunciation of individual sounds. When we sing, although we utter the phonemes as we'd do while speaking, the melody of music (which is kind of universal) overlays the normal speech melody.
So it's not the case that British people lose their accent while singing. We all do. A British person could say the same thing about an American singer.
| 62 |
ELI5: When Bill Gates makes those adds saying we're THIS close to wiping out Polio but just need more donations, why doesn't he just donate the rest?
| 203 |
There is unlimited demand for funding campaigns. So he spends his money on less publicity-prone projects and asks for world wide funding to campaigns that are simple to understand and close to finishing. Doing this is an effective way to raise even more funding to these campaigns.
| 347 |
|
[Stranger Things]Is it wrong or unhealthy for Mike to try & build a romantic relationship with 11 on foundation that he was the first person she ever met who expressed concern for her for reasons other than her powers or presumed helplessness?
| 131 |
Mike and Eleven are both 13 years old. They're having *young love*, which is an experience every kid goes through as they try to understand and fit all of their new pubescent feelings and thoughts into the conceptual framework of *love* and *dating*. Essentially, they're trying to figure out how to be what they think everyone expects them to be.
Maybe their infatuation will last. Maybe it won't. Maybe they'll learn how to effectively communicate and reciprocate feelings. Who knows? But as long as Hopper is there to be the Dad we all know he can be, nothing bad should happen.
| 193 |
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ELI5: Why do they show flashes of someone's skeleton when being electrocuted in cartoons?
|
This does not really happen in real life does it?
| 51 |
Doesn't happen to people in real life, no.
I always assumed that the cartoon version was a joke along the lines of turning the person into a light bulb and showing the bright bones like the filament of the light, glowing brightly.
| 18 |
[Star Wars] What is the purpose of slave leia' s sexy outfit/sleeping with jabba?
|
Is Jabba sexually attracted to her? Are they genetically compatible? Is there cross species sexual compatability in the star wars universe?
| 84 |
It's a dominance ploy. It's not about Jabba being particularly sexually attracted to Leia, it's about Leia being placed in a degrading/subservient position.
Jabba gets off on having a powerful human reduced to a piece of visual candy / pet at his... uhm... tail.
| 130 |
CMV: News should have a stricter criteria for how they’re able to report on things
|
I remember when breaking news came in it was always something urgent and important. Like there’s an active shooter here, or OJ Simpson is on the run from police, or there’s a tornado about to hit Alabama. I believe it was after 9/11 that news stations began using the term breaking news on a constant basis. Now they use the term breaking news go every little thing sometimes they’re be reporting on the same breaking news for days.
Also the phrasing of things. You can report on anything as long as you phrase it as a question. “Donald trump on cocaine? Find out at 10.”
Then there’s quick reporting over accurate reporting. News stations will try to report on a story first without having accurate information then update it as they go. For example when Kobe’s plane crash happened 5 news stations were reporting 10 different things all changing every few minutes and I don’t even think his wife knew. This was not something that needed to be reported in urgently and it could’ve have waited until the facts were verified
Overall news seems to be less about reporting on facts and more about entertainment, creating emotional content and alarmism and I think this is part of the reason stress is increase in America. Some stations do it more than other (FOX)
While I don’t think the what the news reports on should be censored, how they report it should be better regulated.
| 87 |
>how they report it should be better regulated.
by who?
by the government?
Freedom of the press is an essential liberty. Its a liberty that exists to protect against the risk of tyranny. Today Trump says that all the new media is lined up against him. The more radical people call it a media coup against the president.
And they aren't really very wrong. The media does exist in part to keep the powers that be in check. The president has to answer to NBC's fact checking and ABC's opinion pieces, etc.
Maybe you're a trump supporter and maybe your not, it doesn't matter, if you give the government power to regulate the media, eventually that power is going to be wielded by a person you don't like in a way that you don't like. rules can be selectively enforced. Violations that benefit the rule enforcer can be ignored. Violations that hurt the rule enforcer can be more strictly enforced. Does biden do Cocaine? That's a fair and honest question, the american people deserve to know. Does Trump? That's a gotchya journalize and a violation of the rules.
You don't want the government regulating the thing that regulates the government.
Otherwise you are spot on. If we had a regulatory body that was incorruptible, i'd agree with you.
| 21 |
ELI5: who and how do they determine how many calories are in a particular item of food?
| 29 |
A calorie in your food is the amount of energy that is needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by 1 degree Celsius.
This is done by burning the food in something called a bomb calorimeter. That is a box within a box. A sample of food is put on a dish in the inner chamber of the calorimeter, fill it with oxygen and seal it. In the outer chamber a measured amount of water is filled. An electric spark in the inner chamber ignites the food. As it burns it raises the water temperature in the outer chamber. The amount the water heats tells us how many calories are in the food. If the the temperature of the water goes up one degree it has one calorie.
| 20 |
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If there are billions of stars in the sky and their light is hitting earth, why does it ever get dark?
| 18 |
This is a very good question. Such a good question, in fact, it has a special name. It's called "Olbers's paradox." After a guy named Olbers.
The answer to the question wasn't fully understood until just a few decades ago. It was once thought that (a) there's dust and junk in the way that scatters the starlight, or (b) light is capable of "canceling out" through destructive interference, but both of those are quite wrong.
The right answer comes in two parts: the finite speed of light, and a phenomenon called "redshift."
The universe is infinite in extent; this was suspected basically forever, and confirmed through observation in recent years. Since the universe is also *homogenous* — that is, pretty much the same pretty much everywhere — that means if you draw any imaginary line out from the surface of the Earth, that line *will* sooner or later intersect a star.
But the key phrase there is "sooner or later." In point of fact, a random imaginary line drawn outward from the surface of the Earth almost certainly *won't* intersect a star in less than about fifteen billion light-years. If you extend the line farther than that, yes, you will certainly hit a star *eventually,* but within about fifteen billion light-years, you are not likely to.
Why is that fifteen-billion-light-years figure important? Because points that are farther away from us than fifteen billion light-years *cannot be seen,* because the universe is less than fifteen billion years old. Since light crosses one light-year in a year, light from farther away from us than fifteen billion light-years hasn't yet had time to get here.
Does that mean that if we imagine an impossibly distant future, many hundreds of billions of years hence, the night sky *will* be blindingly bright because the light from those unimaginably distant stars will have had time to reach us?
No, because of the other thing: "redshift." For reasons that are too complex to explain here, light from distant things looks "redder" to us than it would if those things were closer. For *very* distant things, things ten billion light-years away or more, those things are "red-shifted" to the point where we can no longer see their light at all; their light is now in the infrared part of the spectrum, or even farther down into the microwave band.
Even more distant things — stars a hundred billion light-years from here — would be even more greatly dimmed by redshift, even if the universe were old enough for that light to have reached us.
So that's why the night sky is dark. First, because there simply aren't enough stars in the universe that are *close enough to us* to be seen in the night sky, and second, because anything that's really distant is too dimmed by redshift for us to see it with our eyes.
| 23 |
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CMV. I think it's racist and sexist to assume some one is more 'privileged' than other people based off of their skin color and their gender, no matter what.
| 247 |
I think you misunderstand what privilege in this context actually means.
Does it mean the generic straight white upper-class man in the US won't face problems in their life? No, absolutely not. Does it mean a black lesbian poor trans woman will have a harder life than the first person? No, it still doesn't.
But that's not the point. It's not a phrase used to talk about single, individual people. It's meant to talk about the demographic as a whole.
For instance, we could say that white men are privileged over black men when it comes to prison sentences, because statistically, black men get longer and harsher sentences for the same crimes. But that doesn't mean that it is impossible for a black person to get an "easier" sentence than a white person; just that it's less likely, therefore the black person is disadvantaged in this regard.
This holds true for many other situations, and many other demographics. A woman is less likely to succeed in politics than a man. A cis person is more likely to have doctors that understand their problems than a trans person. A white person is less likely to be sentenced to prison than a black person. Does that mean women *can't* succeed? Does that mean cis people *can't* have hard to explain medical issues? Does that mean a white person *can't* go to jail? No, it doesn't mean any of those things. It just means that, in general, as a demographic, some groups of people have it easier than others overall, even if certain individuals don't.
A good way I've heard it explained is to imagine life is like a video game. The straight white rich male is easy mode, and (insert whatever demographic is most oppressed here) is EXTREME ULTRA-HARD MEGA DEATH MODE.
Does that mean the person playing on easy might not have issues with the game from time to time? No. Does that mean the person on the hard difficulty cannot succeed? No. But it does mean that, in general, the person on easy will find life easier than the person on hard.
| 225 |
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[Batman] why doesn't batman camouflage his whole face?
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If stealth and his secret identity is so important, shouldn't he camouflage his jaw? It would make him harder to aim at and obscure his skin tone.
| 16 |
People have given good practical answers here, but there’s another element to it as well: the answer Batman gave to Joker when he asked the same question-“to mock you.”
Batman is supposed to be a terrifying force of nature to the cowardly and superstitious criminals, those who would prey on the innocent and harm the weak for their own benefit. But to those in need, the people of Gotham Bruce is trying to protect, the exposed jaw shows them that he’s not a demon or monster, but a person who wants to help and save those who need it. To Joker, someone who believes in the inherent evil of humanity, seeing this contradiction of punishing avenger and compassionate hero, a dark knight trying to save the city by fighting evil on its own terms, this is a spit in the face to everything he believes.
| 43 |
If a computer runs at 1 Hz, how fast will it count through an empty for-loop?
| 40 |
Assuming 1 Hz is the clockspeed... No clue. That's going to depend on the IPC of the CPU in question.
Most languages the answer would be "none, the compiler optimized the empty for loop into oblivion"
If you managed to remove the optimizations for C, and assume 1 for IPC, the assembly generated would be add and jump statements, so approximately 2s per iteration.
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