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[Harry Potter] Voldemort placed a jinx on the Defense Against the Dark Arts position at Hogwarts so that no teacher could last a year....When he "died" and the teaching position was still cursed, did nobody put 2 + 2 together?
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I'm right in thinking the magic dies after the caster does, confirmed by reading [This](http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Jinx_on_the_post_of_Defence_Against_the_Dark_Arts_teacher) which states " The jinx will be lifted once the caster is dead". What do you guys think, was it a secret? If anyone would of known it would've been Dumbledore and I'm pretty sure the thought must have crossed his mind....
| 187 |
I don't think it was ever blamed on Voldemort, and it wasn't even a confirmed curse, otherwise nobody would take the job or they'd try to break it. It was just some rumor that the DADA position was cursed, not taken seriously by the staff.
| 170 |
[Dishonored/Dishonored 2] A theory. Is the "Heart" lying to you? The large overwhelming majority of people it talks about have done REALLY despicable stuff far worse than most people ever do. Is it doing this to taunt you to kill them?
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Not simply guards or "bad" people. The "common" people too. Almost everyone seems to have either done something REALLY, REALLY bad or is plotting to imminently do so. I can't believe that most people in the world are that evil. Because uh, society would implode, beyond human nature not being that dark.
The Outsider talks a lot about not spilling human blood. Is the heart lying to you, telling you the world is worse than it really is as sort of a test? Or perhaps the Outsider is just toying with you?
| 26 |
The point is, society *is* imploding as much as it ever tends to... but not even because of that much evil. The point of the Heart is that there is evil in virtually *everybody*, especially in a world as hard to live in as Dunwall or Karnaca. It doesn't have to lie to you, because the idea that "everybody is good" is a lie you already told yourself. It hurts you with the truth, and the hope that you can learn the lesson from it:
Being good has nothing to do with being innocent, and whether or not there is darkness in one's heart shouldn't be the sole deciding factor as to whether or not they deserve mercy. It's what is in *your* heart that makes that choice.
| 35 |
[Marvel] Would the government of a pantheon of extradimensional gods, like Asgard or Olympus, be considered a monarchy or a theocracy?
| 43 |
Asgard would be a monarchy/meritocracy, since the people who are ruled over don't necessarily worship Thor and Odin and all the rest. They venerate them as heroes and leaders, but they don't seem to have any particular religious practices.
Never forget that it was we humans who decided to worship the Asgardians as gods.
| 40 |
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[Star Wars] Could you play "Tennis" with two lightsabers and a blaster bolt?
| 677 |
Blaster bolts can maintain their composition after bouncing off of several objects, for example pretty sure that's what happens when Chewbacca shoots the door of the trash compactor in ANH. But the plasma would fizzle out eventually.
Edit: Han fires the shot, not Chewie.
| 473 |
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[Ben 10] can ben 10 watch use a human DNA?
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If so how would he look like? What is his power level tier? Peak human? Would that add up some interesting story element?
| 28 |
The Omnitrix already contains Human DNA, specifically Ben's own DNA. And someone else using the Omnitrix to transform into a human would just become a copy of Ben.
> Would that add up some interesting story element?
Not really? That kind of thing is already explored through Albedo as character.
| 25 |
CMV: McGregor does not deserve a title shot vs Khabib
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There is no reason why McGregor should get a title shot against Khabib after his performance vs Cerrone for a multitude of reasons. This is in response to Dana White saying that Conor will fight Khabib next.(https://www.espn.com/mma/story/_/id/28513964/conor-mcgregor-vs-khabib-nurmagomedov-fight-make-dana-white-says)
1. McGregor showed no indication that he could hang with Khabib in their first fight. He had a couple moments but was controlled the majority of the fight and was even dropped on his feet where he supposedly had a clear advantage (still believe he does there but clearly not as much as we thought). Title rematches like that should only be given that quickly after the first have been reserved for very very close fights that went to a potentially controversial decision or when a long time champion loses (ex. Whittaker-Romero, Aldo-Hollaway, Stipe-Cormier, etc). Conor was neither the incumbent champion nor did he display the ability to hang with Khabib through the entirety of the fight.
2. A win over Cerrone is not that impressive (the way he did it may have been tho) and clearly hasn't been impressive to the UFC in the past. Justin Gaethje the man who just beat Cerrone prior to this fight and has had 3 1st round KOs in a row including Cerrone and the UFC didn't give him a title shot or even discuss it. He has done much more in the lightweight division in the past 3 years than Conor's 0-1.
3. This fight wasn't even at lightweight and yet it somehow allows Conor to completely jump the line of absolute monsters at lightweight (Poirier, Gaethje, Hooker, Ferreira, etc). He should have to prove himself against AT LEAST one of these guys before he is considered for a title shot. I believe he should fight 2.
When considering Conor and Cerrone's recent fight history, the precedents the UFC has set for itself, and the depth of the LW division, Conor does not deserve the title shot.
DISCLAIMER: this is assuming (as Dana did in his statement) that Khabib wins against Tony. If that is the case, Tony should be included in the long list of other LWs Conor should have to first prove himself against before getting a title shot.
Edit: A lot of you are mentioning the fact that he brings in the most money and is therefore deserving of a title shot. The thing is there are plenty of fights that would be just as big if not bigger money for the UFC (ex. Masvidal, Colby, Usman, Dustin, and a ton of other big name fighters in LW and WW).
| 49 |
I can think of one solid reason, ***money.*** UFC is a business and has never truly cared about the integrity of the sport. Case in point, Jon Jones is still fighting.
McGregor is easy cash, especially if it's a title shot he doesn't deserve since it drives press and he will also play against that given his personality. It's a brilliant promotion move.
| 35 |
Eli5: How do we know that dinosaurs were likely reptilian/avian but not likely mammalian?
| 38 |
Species that are closely related to each other will share certain anatomical features in common, which they both inherited from a common ancestor.
Other species that are not descendants of that common ancestor — and therefore are more distantly related — won’t have those same anatomical features.
For example, on the one hand, all mammals have three tiny bones in their middle-ears (called the malleus, incus, and stapes), and no mammals have hallow bones that connect to their respiratory systems.
On the other hand, neither birds nor dinosaurs have those tell-tale three little bones in their middle-ears, but they both do have hallow bones that connect to their respiratory systems.
From these and other similar anatomical comparisons, we conclude that birds and dinosaurs must be more closely related to each other than either of them are related to mammals.
| 74 |
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[Terminator] The machines succeed in wiping out Humanity from the face of the earth, Now what?
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so they kill all them humans, now what are they going to do, reach out to the stars and spread, or create the perfect earth, what will happen to all the Machines whos soul purpose was to kill?
| 37 |
Skynet was designed for war, one would assume that it is still bound by this. With no enemy left to fight it would probably go dormant.
Of course, Skynet knows the moment the war with Humanity ends then it completes its purpose and becomes irrelevant, so it would attempt to prolong the war as long as possible, utilising the less advanced technology to give Humans a chance but ultimately underestimating them, allowing them to win.
In every timeline the machines only send a terminator back in time when it is on the verge of defeat and that terminator will lead to Skynet's creation. So in every timeline the machines lose?
| 39 |
[Avatar: TLAB/LOK] I am a firebender. I want to enhance my firebending as well as dabble into nonbending fighting arts. How can I incorporate the two into one form?
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I’m a firebender and I’m currently in high school right now. I’ve been attending firebending classes for my entire life ever since I could create a tiny flame and, according to my friends and teachers/mentors, I’ve become a great firebender and a decent fighter (I’ll be honest, when I was still in middle school, I use to get into my fair share of stupid fights. Grew out of it though).
Anyway, while some may say that I’m a great firebender, I want to be better. I’ve been researching about this ancient form of sword fighting that’s been around for over 3,000 years called [Krabi Krabong ](https://youtu.be/UZt4OVHn-Bk). It’s extremely fascinating and I’d love to incorporate my firebending into this sword fighting form (doesn’t hurt that Lord Zuko, while traveling in the Earth Kingdom during the 100 Year War, also used duel swords and personally, he’s a hero of mine).
So how would my firebending translate towards and be enhanced by Krabi Krabong? What are the advantages and disadvantages of combining the two? What should I keep in mind when combining these two distinct fighting forms/arts?
| 19 |
You're well aware of one of the most shining examples of this. As a young boy Zuko was a mediocre firebender. Learning to use broadswords greatly improved his skills.
Remember your fundamentals. Breath control and directed aggression are key techniques for firebending, you will have the best results studying fighting styles that emphasize the same.
| 25 |
[DC/Batman] How does Batman dodge bullets by just leaping back and forth?
| 20 |
Moving targets are hard to hit. Especially when they're hard to see and moving quickly, while you're scared shitless and about to be very unconscious.
Batman also does his best to never be in a position where he needs to charge a gunman. There's much safer and smarter ways of taking down an armed thug.
| 54 |
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Why do we work everyday What are we trying to produce everyday
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Productivity has increased a lot why are we still working everyday has it become just a formal thing so we do unnecessary work
I know people like to work on passion projects but most people are doing work just to earn money
| 113 |
>but most people are doing work just to earn money
That's kind of the point, isn't it.
Anyway. This is called the "labor leisure trade-off". People, on average, prefer to work a little less and mostly have higher incomes instead if their incomes go up. Basically, they prefer to be richer to having more free time.
Working hours are falling in most developed countries, they just do so slowly.
| 88 |
[Star Trek] How do phasers work?
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Phasers are unique because they're a kind of do-everything weapon. On low settings in can render someone unconscious, or knock them over, I've even seen crewmen using them in art work on stretched-canvas. On high settings, I've heard them talk about how supposedly they can take out a small building, or a neighborhood block if you overload them. The only time I've *seen* a hand phaser destroy anything that big was the TNG episode Ensigns of Command (se3 ep2), wherein Data destroys an aqueduct with his Type II phaser.
Another thing they do is they seem to be able to target objects very specifically. Such as how they can vaporize a person without causing an explosion, or damaging any surroundings. The aqueduct I mentioned earlier is also an example of this btw. When Data fires, the energy seems to follow the aqueduct all the way to the horizon without damaging anything else. So could an unscrupulous crewman for example, program his phaser to shoot the clothes off a woman to see her naked?
What kind of energy does a phaser shoot that can do all of this stuff from one hand-held device?
| 98 |
They're not energy weapons, they're particle weapons. A phaser fires a concentrated stream of nadion particles.
They have a settable power level which allows for such a large degree of utility. Starfleet favors them over other types of weapons (including projectile weapons) due to this versatility.
As for why vaporizing things doesn't mess up the area around them, phaser power settings aren't just for intensity, they also adjust things like the wavelength of the beam, which allows for vaporization of materials without affecting the surrounding stuff. This is achieved much like a disruptor, simply releasing molecular bonds with a minimal amount of waste energy (some is redirected into the disintegration reaction).
As for your "clothing removal" setting, no. The settings aren't that precise. The settings that would disintegrate clothing would likely affect skin in the same way.
| 63 |
So I have a theory, but I don’t know if it would actually work…
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While studying Econ, and learning about the increasing economic inequality in the US as well as the massively growing gap between classes, I have always heard the same argument on how to combat it: tax the rich.
Now, I understand the sentiment and why that would seem like it would be a good idea. If you can afford to buy a third home in Nantucket, you should be able contribute more than John down the street who lives off of raw ramen noodles and spare change. But, in practice there is no way to guarantee all of the upperclass pays their “fair share” so to speak. Whether it is through net loss re-works in your books, or foreign bank accounts, or tax havens, there will always be a way for a tax-savy accountant to find a loop hole for the wealthy when it comes to income taxes.
Whenever we increase income taxes, intending on getting more from the higher groups, it is always the middle class that pays the most and we repeat this cycle over and over and over again.
So, now for my theory. What if we got rid of the income tax all together? Instead, we switch over to a purely sales based program? There would be a flat 10-15% tax on everything anyone purchases (exempting things like food, and utilities.) There’s no loopholes to skirt through, no accountant to pay off, just a simple: if you buy more you pay more.
There would be no way around it, and we wouldn’t be suffocating the lower classes with high tax rates.
Is this a stupid idea? Or am I onto something here. Let me know if I’m being naive or missing the whole point here.
| 29 |
Sales taxes tend to be regressive (takes proportionally more from the people with the least to start with) because people with lower income spend a lot higher percentage of their money just to live. A middle class or poor person can spend 100% (or more) of their income while a wealthy person might spend, for example, 5% of their income just to stay alive.
The other thing is, part of taxes is about incentives. Without an income tax, you have to lean a lot more on this new, big sales tax. How badly do you really want to disincentivize people from spending? Do you really want to apply friction to every act of money changing hands? Not to mention the gigantic amount of bookkeeping it would introduce, and the incentive to take markets underground.
| 37 |
How do serotonergic hallucinogens(LSD, Psilocin, DMT) increase brain interconnectivity?
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Obviously it's not literally rearranging neurons. That would probably be really destructive to the brain.
| 16 |
It seems to allow brain activity to be more “point to point” rather that “hub and spoke” , bypassing the default mode network ( the collection of structures that create our ego or sense of self.
See Dr Robin Carhart-Harris’ work and check out Michael Pollens newest book “How to change your mind”
| 12 |
ELI5: How do non-English speaking programmers write code?
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Are there translations for popular languages or do they simply memorize what the English words do (like print, for, loop, etc.)
| 335 |
We code in English using the English keywords but it's common to see things such as method names declared using a mix of words in two languages:
E.g. English and Portuguese:
* 'getContaCliente' instead of 'getClientAccount'.
* 'ClienteDAO' instead of 'ClientDAO'
* 'ContaFactory' instead of 'AccountFactory'
* 'Codigos.getInstance()' instead of 'Codes.getInstance()'
Also note that while valid, accentuation is actively discouraged and almost never used (except in code comments):
* 'Códigos.getInstance()' is irksome
| 400 |
If our body temperatura is 36ºC shouldn’t we only be hot above it?
| 48 |
This is a common misconception and gets asked often. Our bodies are at a temperature of 37 Celcius, but we are also constantly generating heat from the biochemical reactions taking place in our bodies. That heat must be dissipated to the environment. As the ambient temperature rises, it becomes more difficult to radiate that generated heat. We have methods to increase the efficiency, such as sweating. Sweat takes advantage of the high heat of vaporization of water, and as the water in sweat evaporates it takes much of that generated heat with it. Evaporative cooling is one of the most efficient ways human have to cool themselves.
| 82 |
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[MC/MCU]What is it like in the soul stone?
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Is it different in both continuities? Is it ever explained? Do they just not exist?
| 21 |
In both universes, it’s a pocket dimension that doesn’t contain *every* disembodied soul in the universe/afterlife, but the Gem/Stone can acquire or steal souls individually.
In 616, Soul World creates a bizarre “physical” environment and allows trapped souls to interact with each other (Adam Warlock took a sort of leadership role when he was in there). Escape is possible, as Warlock manages to get himself and others out in time for “Infinity Gauntlet”.
In the MCU, Soul World is far emptier, but that may be because fewer people have interacted with it. The only known terrain is a “ground” covered in shallow “water”, and a structure resembling architecture from the home world of Gamora (Soulworld’s only known inhabitant at the time). The only confirmed souls within the Stone are those sacrificed on Vormir, and they are permanently taken in. Victims of the Snap/Blip either did not become residents of Soulworld or retained no memory of it upon returning to life, because Blipped beings did not perceive the passage of time between their being erased and returning.
| 26 |
ELI5 the Exact Job of a Hollywood Movie Producer
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Just how much shit do they have to go through and why is it that they seem to get a lot the credit for the film/musical?
| 54 |
Simply put, a producer, like Scott Rudin (who has produced No Country For Old Men, Greenberg, The Social Network, etc.), is the person who first reads the original screenplay, decides it's good enough to be made into a film, gathers up funding from various production houses and investors, and recruits the director and other very important figures to work on the film. Basically, the producer is very often the jumpstarter of the film, helping to bring everyone together to create it.
| 31 |
ELI5: Why does the US give so much in foreign aid but so little to failing US towns and cities?
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You could ELI25
| 29 |
The US federal government disperses FAR more money to states/towns/cities than to other countries. They only give about $50 billion in foreign aid total in a year. In comparison that's about how much was spent on missouri,about 15 states received more or much more than that.
| 38 |
Do you keep your old/unfinished projects on github?
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Pretty much what title says. I was wondering whether you guys keep the old projects on your github(or any similar site) or you keep it clean and only have the ones you're proud of?
​
Personally i actually do keep most of the projects i've worked on ever since i started programming (\~6 years) and even though some of them are terrible (in terms of readability/architechture etc.) for some reason i don't want to remove them (i lie to myself i will update them).
​
I wonder if it can be harmful in a way, i.e. recruiter would see old project and would judge my skills based on that.
| 71 |
I’m not suggesting unfinished projects or projects you create early on when learning a language are necessarily bad, but you can choose to create new projects as private and then only make them public when you are happy with them.
| 53 |
Take last minute offer or leave academia in the midst of a pandemic?
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**UPDATE: It didn't work out.** The position was advertised as teaching 3/3, mainly intro focused but with courses in my area. I was asked about the above in interviews, emphasizing large intro sections. They asked me to give a teaching demo on an intro lecture. After getting an offer, I probed for the exact conditions given my situation below. They wanted at least 2 new preps and in-person teaching, with no intro sections for fall, nothing planned yet for spring. Most of their courses on the schedule I could see were online. All dept meetings were to be held remotely. I said I would accept and teach whatever they proposed if I could also do so remotely, and report in for anything else needed but had to decline otherwise. (The fallout from COVID seems inevitable, so the burden of courses, multiple format preps, covid risk etc in person seemed to be too much). They accepted my refusal.
\-----
I was just offered a position at a school about 2.5 hours away whose semester starts in 2-3 weeks. I planned on leaving academia this year but since the pandemic hit all my plans went haywire.
The job is decent with a starting contract of 3 years (not tenure track but potentially renewable with contracts up to 5 years). It's well within my expertise and the dept seems good. The work itself seems doable.
Cons are I'd have to move quickly but I also have pets and a partner to move with, and I only have 2-3 weeks to move. This is possible but given that I was thinking of leaving academia anyway, I don't know if I should risk it. I'd have to dick over my landlord to do that also as I'm on the brink of signing a new lease but haven't yet.
This is also a rust belt city I'd be moving to with harsh winters and a relatively high crime level (midwest). I also haven't visited in person due to the pandemic, so I might try to go sometime soon but otherwise I have no firsthand experience of the location. DOn't know where I'd go with pets in such a short timeframe that isn't a step down in quality of life/cost. It also is not particularly clear to me how secure the position is given the losses schools are facing and what may happen in the future. That said, I don't know how good my options look otherwise. I miss the security and environment I find in academia, but the life-work balance was terrible. I think it will be better in this position except that I have to move everything else in my life around to get there and in a very short time, without tenure possibility in a pandemic.
I'm really stuck and I have no time to decide. This may be my last chance to stay in academia- (I'm not sure whether I could attempt another year of applications given my last two were visiting positions (1 and 2-year stints) and I'm only "employed" by title currently- a nice gesture from my last school but which would fall apart on any investigation). I was ready to give it up anyway but the position is close to what I was looking for and I'm not making any money now. I've interviewed for about 3 positions outside of academia (in research and consulting type positions) but none panned out. I have another this week but no idea on whether it would deliver. I'm also wary of what it would like to continually work in grant funded positions or whatnot, or whether permanent work outside of academia is possible without switching content paths.
If anyone's been in a similar situation or care to comment, feel free. I'm mostly asking because none of my friends/family etc can understand this situation fully. What would you do?
| 64 |
If you are ok with leaving academia, then you can take the job and leave whenever you want. You don't need to stay 3 years. If you dont care for academia, who cares if you burn a bridge?
Go drive there tomorrow and look around. Go see a couple of apartments. Then give them your answer Monday. Its the only way to make a semi informed decision.
Your landlord is not your spouse. You need to prioritize family, not an acquaintances feelings.
| 129 |
Why does glass crack like a spider web?
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Like when phone screens break and such.
| 33 |
Glass is actually a very strong, hard, and (if very well-made) not very brittle material. The reason glass is often brittle is because of microscopic cracks within, and on the surface of the glass. When materials undergo a 'brittle failure', the applied stress causes the material to deform slightly, especially where these cracks are located; (mechanical stresses tend to concentrate wherever changes in a specimen's geometry exist). This deformation at the cracks causes the cracks to grow. The amount they grow depends on the magnitude of the stress and the size of the cracks. They can grow so much that they meet up with other cracks. When glass shatters/spiderwebs, this occurs because one of the cracks was sufficiently large, and enough stress had concentrated around it that it grew rapidly, combined with another crack, grew even more rapidly, combined with another crack, etc. This phenomenon is called 'crack propagation', and it is also a cause of fatigue failure in materials, (even materials that aren't ductile). The reason why the cracks don't propagate in a straight line through the material is because they are randomly distributed throughout the material, and the exist in different directions.
| 17 |
ELI5: Why is it often political suicide to "flip-flop" or change one's opinion based on sound argument, evidence, or voter opinion?
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It seems like every election cycle this is a negative phrase used by one candidate to the other (both sides being guilty of this). I can think of several times that my personal opinion has been swayed by sound argument, evidence, or strong social movements that I would otherwise not be aware of.
Thus, changing a political ideology or belief seems like a good thing as it would appear the individual is: a.) listening to arguments and building a sound opinion; b.) listening to the voices of the people and representing the population; c.) has new information on a topic that sways his/her opinion on previous established beliefs. All of these reasons seem to give a person a unique perspective of both sides and allows for civil discussion and debate to continue to occur. Why is this seen as such a negative thing to voters?
| 15 |
There are a few aspects to this. First is that people like politicians with strong internal principles that they agree with. Bernie, for example, has been hammering the same points for 30 years. You can find old clips on YouTube from the 90s that are almost identical to his campaign speeches. Having strong principles is a selling point.
As a corollary, the worry with politicians changing their mind is that it means they can change their mind about anything for any reason. And there are a lot of bad reasons out there. How do people know you weighed the evidence and came to a reasonable conclusion when you could have just as easily been given a lot of money by a lobbyist or realized there were a few thousand votes to be gotten for a small policy shift?
It's a fine line. We want politicians that can be swayed by new evidence, but we don't want ones that will cave to anything resembling pressure. But since it's easy to make an ad about flip flopping and hard to convince people that you really did change based on evidence, this is what we get.
| 12 |
Why is a frozen and thawed banana so much sweeter, and how does this change its nutritional value?
| 8,206 |
Putting together the information here
One of the main processes in bananas (and all fruit) ripening is the amylase dependent conversion of savoury or flavourless starches in to sugar (specifically glucose). Amylase is a common enzyme (also present in your saliva) which converts starch to sugar and is an important part of your digestion.
There are essentially 2 ways something will taste sweeter.
1) There is more sugar present
or
2) Your tastebuds can access the sugar more rapidly
Freezing and then defrosting fruit essentially lets both of these things happen. Freezing causes water in the fruit cells to crystallise and expand. This destroys the cell walls and is the principal reason defrosted fruit is soggy and limp. However it also means that the cell contents (all those sugars) are now in the juices that are running off the fruit and if you taste the juice you'll find it is very sweet. You can experience this at the most extreme if compare the difference in sensation between holding a mouthful of orange juice in your mouth or holding a slice of orange (without chewing). In the case of a banana there isn't much excess of liquid to run off so those exposed cell contents will largely stay within the fruit pulp/body rather than running off.
The other thing that happens while the fruit is defrosting is that all the amylase and starches in the cells are now able to diffuse (a little) through the defrosting fruit pulp. The amylase is no longer confined to the cell it started in, where it may have completed its starch converting job, and is free to find any remaining starch that may have come out of other nearby cells. This means that some of the remain starches will be converted to some extra sugars.
| 2,534 |
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How does auto adjusting focus "know" when focus is correct?
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With our eyes it makes sense, we focus on something and then our brain says "Ok, we are good here" so focus is done. How is that kind of "verification" achieved with automatic means?
| 84 |
It typically uses contrast to figure it out. When neighboring pixels in the auto-focus area have the most difference between them is when it assumes focus is maximized. This is why you'll find your camera has a hard time obtaining focus when aiming at something without any contrast-y details in it, like the sky.
| 76 |
[Terminator] I'm a T-800 model sent back from the future. What is the weakest weaponry that can destroy me?
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Assuming I'm just a standard model, what's the weakest thing that can destroy my impressive metal body?
| 31 |
I think it’s mostly a question of what part of a Terminator would have to be damaged in order for the Terminator to be nonfunctional. So the question becomes, “What weapon could penetrate the Terminator skull and damage the chip there beyond repair?”
In the first two movies, we saw a Terminator be severed with a home made pipe bomb, limbs torn off with industrial machinery and run through with an iron bar by the strength of a T-1000. Reece’s shotgun was essentially ineffective and the police were not able to stop the T-800. It would seem that the Terminator’s skin likely serves as some level of protection, if for no other reason than the true nature of what you would need to hit in order to damage the Terminator... the police were aiming for the body, which essentially does nothing to affect the functionality. But in Genysis, we watched someone who knew what a T-800 was destroy one with a sniper rifle.
This is all evidence to say: If you knew what the T-800 was, a powerful hand gun, especially one with armor piercing bullets, would likely be sufficient, so long as you hit the right place.
| 31 |
ELI5: What is death row? Why does it often take so long for someone to be executed?
| 33 |
Death row is the placed for prisoners who have been sentenced to death. However, due to the justice system's automatic appeals for people under such a sentence, a case can take a long time to go through the courts until final permission is given to kill someone.
| 17 |
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[Star Wars] I am a Sith Lord who's apprentice has surpassed me in every way. Still, though, he refuses to kill me. Even when I initiate combat, he merely incapacitates me, pats me on the head like I am senile, and goes about his business. What should I do?
| 641 |
Congratulations, neither of you are Sith lords, your incompetence has cost the ancient order of the Sith to die. You are not a lord for you have not trained your apprentice in the ways of the dark side correctly. Your apprentice isn't a sith lord, he's a pile of wasted potential that you as a lord should have seen as the failure he should become and ended him when you had the chance.
| 784 |
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[Star Wars] "Execute Order 66." - Was that just a secret trigger phrase, or did it have to come from Palpatine himself to work?
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When Clone Order 66 was programmed into their inhibitor chips, was Palpatine banking on nobody else possibly knowing about the command, or is it baked into the instructions of the Order that only Palpatine can issue it?
How would a Clone respond if the Order was issued by someone other than Palpatine? Would the effect kick in anyway, like the MCU Winter Soldier's trigger words? Would they just stand there confused as to what it means? Would they attempt to arrest the unauthorised speaker?
| 23 |
As of right now it appears that it *can* be triggered by others, but the only other one who activated it required using the Force to do so, whether that's actually a requirement or needed to in order bypass another requirement (e.g. being Palpatine) is unknown.
| 25 |
What do software engineers do once an app/website is built?
|
Realize the absolute ridiculousness of the question to those of you in tech. Just wondering as a casual outsider. Like, once the app/website is built isn't the heavy lifting basically done? What do all the engineers at Facebook/Twitter/Instagram actually work on all day? is it just refining the code? fixing errors? or preparing the website/app to work as the web, OS, and other things evolve?
| 45 |
Fix all the problems you created in the initial implementation that you didn’t find during normal testing.
Add features that are necessary to sell to more users or make the boss happy.
Find and fix performance issues or security vulnerabilities.
Build internal tools to make the lives of your coworkers easier and more automated.
Depending on type of work you might even assist in helping onboard high value customers.
There is no “done”
| 98 |
CMV: Modern psychology is horrific. Still at the "let's bleed out the excess blood with leeches" level of healthcare.
|
Everything about the way it approaches diseases is wrong, starting with classification and extending to diagnosis and treatment.
##1. Classification
To draw a parallel: cancer, like almost every other physical condition in existence, is defined by its root cause.
> [Cancer] is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body.[*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer#Prognosis)
All of the DSM mental "illnesses" are names given to common clusters of *symptoms*.
> [Major depressive disorder] is a mental disorder characterized by a pervasive and persistent low mood that is accompanied by low self-esteem and by a loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities. [*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_depressive_disorder)
This is horrifying to me. Can you imagine if we categorized physical illnesses the same way? "Coughing disease is a disorder characterized by a persistent and violent racking cough. Coughs must be present for at least four days and significantly interfere with quality of life. There are many treatments for Coughing Disease, including steroid inhalers, antibiotics, and breathing in steam."
All of the "illnesses" in the DSM are like this, as far as I'm aware.
## 2. Diagnosis
If you think you have cancer, what do you do? You get a biopsy, and based on their understanding of the body, doctors can run the tissue sample through a slew of tests and definitively tell you whether or not the cells in your tumor are reproducing at an abnormal rate. If they are, you have (some kind of) cancer, a disease caused by fucked up cell reproduction that can cause some horrible symptoms, including death.
But the symptoms are not the diagnostic tool here. Because that would be horribly inaccurate. Thousands of diseases have similar symptoms, it's almost impossible to tell them apart. For example: pneumonia, bronchitis, and sinus infections can all cause coughing, phlegmy lungs, and trouble breathing, but each of the three has a different cause and treatment.
If you think you have a depression, you take a survey and talk to a professional about your feelings. One of the most subjective methods of information gathering possible, an open ended survey. It has to be subjective, though, because there is no way to test for depression objectively. And how could there be? We barely know anything about the brain, and we have no definitive cause of "depression" (probably, in my opinion, because there are dozens of neurobiological and pathological issues that all cause similar clusters of symptoms).
## 3. Treatment
I'm just going to quote a [TED Talk](
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_anderson_your_brain_is_more_than_a_bag_of_chemicals) by David Anderson, a neurobiologist, on this one. It's a long block, but worth reading:
> These drugs have so many side effects because using them to treat a complex psychiatric disorder is a bit like trying to change your engine oil by opening a can and pouring it all over the engine block. Some of it will dribble into the right place, but a lot of it will do more harm than good.
> Now, an emerging view that you also heard about from Dr. Insel this morning, is that psychiatric disorders are actually disturbances of neural circuits that mediate emotion, mood and affect. When we think about cognition, we analogize the brain to a computer. That's no problem. Well it turns out that the computer analogy is just as valid for emotion. It's just that we don't tend to think about it that way. But we know much less about the circuit basis of psychiatric disorders because of the overwhelming dominance of this chemical imbalance hypothesis.
> Now, it's not that chemicals are not important in psychiatric disorders. It's just that they don't bathe the brain like soup. Rather, they're released in very specific locations and they act on specific synapses to change the flow of information in the brain. So if we ever really want to understand the biological basis of psychiatric disorders, we need to pinpoint these locations in the brain where these chemicals act. Otherwise, we're going to keep pouring oil all over our mental engines and suffering the consequences.
Would love to have my view changed on this.
**Edit**: Some posters have correctly pointed out that I'm using the term psychology incorrectly here. What I mean by "psychology" in the title is "mental healthcare as a general whole," which includes psychology the academic study, therapy as a general practice, the DSM, and psychiatry. Point 3 is specific to psychiatry. This is my bad for using the terms wrong, apologize for any confusion.
It's going to take me some time to read and respond to all these responses because of some IRL responsibilities, but I'll get back to the thread as soon as I can.
**Much later edit**: Recently came across some writings from experts in the field of psychiatry that agree with my view, at least in regards to symptoms being a terrible method of diagnosis. [Most notably, Thomas Insel, director of NIMH](http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml).
_____
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| 584 |
Just checking in to point out that your title specifies modern "Psychology", and yet your entire post is actually about modern Psychiatry. Psychiatry is a branch of medicine, psychology is a social science. Of course, they are heavily related, but clinical psychologists do not treat with medications, which is all of point 3.
Now, to take issue with point 2. There is a large body of research on neurological markers for a range of psychiatric disorders. For example, Depression is characterized by differential functioning of the default mode network (the wiki article on this is good, and talks about a few disorders which are linked with DMN function). It may not be standard practice to diagnose via fMRI, but progress is being made.
Finally, there is one very large difference between cancer and depression, and this effects classification, diagnosis, and treatment. Cancer is a very physiological disease with very physiological consequences. And, while depression, for example, does have significant physiological consequences (see above), people don't seek treatment for depression because "my default network is hyperactive", they seek help because of how it *feels*. Because depression is more about a subjective feeling state than a set of physiological problems (such as cancer), it makes sense to use the most significant symptom (emotional dysregulation) as a jumping off point for diagnosis.
| 378 |
eli5 What exactly is Globalism?
|
I always hear people calling eachother globalists as an insult but I've no clue what it even is
| 70 |
Globalism, without any context, is the idea of countries around the world working under an integrated political and economic system. It would stand in contrast to Nationalism, which would be the advancement of one country's political/economic interests, without regard to any effect it has on others. So if "globalist" is used as an insult, it starts from a place calling someone disloyal to their own country's interests, or implying that someone's bowing to international pressure.
However, in modern usage (especially coming from modern right-wing sources in the US and Europe), it often comes with an undertone of anti-Semitism, and is usually considered a dogwhistle referring to the Jewish people. The implication there being that the Jewish people are considered disloyal to their own country, and instead working to advance Jewish interests, often going as far as to suggest Jewish control over the world and its systems. At its most extreme, these accusations of "globalism" suggest the existence of a "Cabal" of wealthy Jews who are secretly controlling world governments. So it's a term often thrown around by conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and anti-Semites, which sort of muddies the original meaning of the word.
| 152 |
Why did Plato write dialogues?
|
Why did Plato write dialogues? And why did he choose Socrates as the main character in those dialogues?
| 42 |
Plato thinks philosophy happens in conversation. We can't be there to talk with him, so he gave us examples of good conversation.
However, Plato also opposed *writing.*
Plato strongly believed that philosophers should not write down doctrines. He states this in the *Seventh Letter* and *Phaedrus* most explicitly. Basically, Plato believed that written doctrines could fall into the wrong hands and be abused by sophists. They could also be used to attack the writer in their absence. One cannot anticipate questions, objections, etc., and a person could intentionally distort your written document to attack you or others.
A written doctrine, more importantly, cannot speak in its own defense. Plato speaks about this quite often. One cannot question, say, Parmenides to see what he really meant (and in fact, Plato talks about people abusing Parmenides' text for this reason; cf. *Sophist*). Likewise, when someone gives their doctrines in a poem or prose (reciting them as a speech), the audience listens, but doesn't ask questions.
Furthermore, Plato believes that a philosopher should approach each person differently, knowing like a doctor the right "medicine" for a person. Just like drugs in the hands of a non-doctor are dangerous, written texts or speeches taken out of context are dangerous for the soul (cf. *Phaedrus*).
The dialogue genre accounts for these problems by "inserting a interlocutor," someone who can ask questions for us (since we cannot be present for the actual conversation). The conversation can be tailored for this person's ears, thus allowing us to watch the process of education at work for the interlocutor.
This also subordinates the writing to the original speakers, where we placed at a distance from the "doctrinal, dogmatic" content, and instead have to infer the philosophical content from what Socrates talked about with so-and-so at such and such a place.
To put it briefly, the dialogue genre gives a context for the specific things said. Written doctrines have no context, lending themselves to abuse.
The whole thing, basically, is a clever way to prevent "Plato" from ever becoming "Platonism."
Unfortunately, Aristotle tells us what Plato's unwritten doctrines were, letting the cat out of the bag.
| 74 |
ELI5: Since the human body is covered in pores, why is acne mostly concentrated on the upper body?
|
I'm doing some reading of my biology textbook for homework and the current chapter is the integumentary system (skin, hair, nails, etc.) The book says the body is covered in pores, and then goes onto explaining what acne is, how pores get clogged, etc. But it doesn't explain why acne is (for the most part) concentrated on the face, neck, shoulders, back, and chest. Like, I've had one zit on my lower back near my butt and that's it. The rest of it is chest up. I get that if it's hot out and your forehead gets sweaty, obviously some of that sweat will be reabsorbed into the skin and become part of blackheads and whiteheads. But my feet are sweaty in my socks and shoes all day, even when I'm just sitting in class. Shouldn't my feet be covered in zits too? Just struck me as really odd.
I know this isn't NSFW in the sense that it's not about sex or anything, but if I saw one of my classmates reading this, my first thought would be "WTF are you reading?" Figured I'd rather be safe than sorry.
Edit: I don’t understand how this is almost to the point of my root beer comment. I wasn’t looking for awards or updoots, like I was genuinely curious about the concentration on different parts of the body, but thanks I guess haha.
| 4,549 |
Sebum is an oil produced by sebaceous glands. You have a concentration of these glands in your face and on your head. If they produce a little too much oil, your pores get clogged with oil/dead skin cells and you get acne. So, you can get a clogged pore anywhere but it happens more often where you have more sebaceous glands due to oily buildup.
| 3,510 |
Why do soybeans curd? Why don't other legumes curd?
|
I was looking for alternatives to make tofu. My grocery store doesn't have soybeans. All of the alternative legumes, that can be made into "tofu", are made into a milk, reduced to a paste, and then chilled. Tofu with soybeans is made like mozzarella (when using unpasteurized milk). The soybeans are made into a milk, heated, curdled with vinegar, drained, and then pressed. Only soybeans can be curdled with vinegar. Why?
| 2,335 |
Curdling is a result of proteins being denatured by acid and clumping together. Soybeans have a significantly higher protein content than most legumes. If you evaporate enough water from other legume milks, you could increase the protein concentration enough to curdle. High protein legumes like split peas and lentils would be good options.
| 1,812 |
How does an 8 ounce glass of red wine have more calories than an 8 ounce glass of grape juice?
|
I did a little research and found that an 8 ounce glass of red wine has a range of between 160 and 200 calories. The same volume of grape juice has about 140 calories. What process leads to the increase in energy in the conversion of grape juice to wine?
| 227 |
Former Brewer here. The juice that wine is made from (called must by vintners), has a much higher sugar content than regular grape juice. The sugar content (Brix) of regular grape juice would make a relatively weak wine in comparison to the must of wine grapes.
More sugar = higher alcohol (in most cases)
| 182 |
[Supernatural] On the origin of the species
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Did the species that live on the earth evolve naturally? If no, why do earths scientists think they did? If yes, what the fuck did god and his angels do for billions of years?
| 28 |
At least once Castiel has stated he preferred Neanderthal poetry. They were around in one form or another.
The evolution was probably nudged along in the direction they wanted it to go, but it seems like not everything was by their design.
| 25 |
Best books on logic and reasoning that will increase my ability to analyze news articles for falsehoods
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Like the title says I want to know the best books that will catch me up to speed on being able to identify falsehoods in news articles and video feeds of the media. I want to be able to find the false comparisons, break downs in logic that will highlight where rhetoric is being used in place of truth and reason.
| 42 |
These seem like two different questions to me. Identifying a false statement is different from spotting illogical reasoning. The first is fought with fact-checking, the second is developed differently.
Are you perhaps referring to wanting to be able to discern when an article is using devices like appeals to emotion rather than straightforwardly stating facts?
| 21 |
CMV: Schools create too many leaders and they do it by making the leadership less about leadership.
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So hello everyone, today during my school assembly I realized that everything is being called a leadership now. During my years of changing schools and attending different events I saw people started using word leader more as a good person, but not the definition of it like a person who leads people after them. The principal calls a girl who played on piano a leader even though she worked only with herself not with other people.
I think that this problem comes from children being awarded on anything, even something as simple as breathing (exaggeration).
Edit: In this contest I use word leader as the person who leads and control people in some way by using effort to do so.
#changemyview
| 19 |
Do you mean leader as in "one who leads" or "one who is in a position of authority"?
Someone who leads by example, like the piano player, is a leader. She encourages others to develop new skills.
Alternatively, she isn't in any position of authority, so the isn't a leader in that sense.
| 11 |
[General] Would one timeline diverging into two timelines that later converge back into one timeline make sense?
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In my story, the actions of the villain end in two outcomes, one where he annihilates the main cast and wins, and one where he wins but doesn't completely dominate everyone. The story would follow both timelines, the one where the antagonist completely demolished everyone would follow a new set of characters, while the latter timeline revolves around the surviving characters.
Eventually the characters from the former timeline would meet the characters from the latter one, and help them hunt down the antagonist and avenge everyone.
| 15 |
Kind of. There’s actually a concept from the Elder Scrolls called a Dragon Break where linear time breaks down so multiple timelines are all happening at once. Eventually the timelines merge back into one but everyone still remembers the other timelines happening. To use an example from the Elder Scrolls at the end of the Battle of Red Mountain everyone remembers the battle going a little differently. Some believe that Dumac Dwarfking was killed by Nerevar, some saw him killed by Wulfharth, some by Dagoth Ur. Some remember the Orcs and Nords fighting for the Dwarves and some against. All of them happened but eventually only one of them happened.
| 21 |
CMV: It is inconsistent to oppose both White Flight and Gentrification at the same time
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White Flight is understood as the racial or socio-economically motivated departure from urban centers to suburbs by moneyed whites. It is opposed because a shrinking tax base and programs that whites demand impoverish the urban centers.
Gentrification is understood as the purchasing of the now low-cost residential and commercial properties in urban areas and refurbishing them to target moneyed whites and their higher incomes. It has the effect of raising adjacent property costs, and therefore rents, and is seen as negative because it forces low-income (and often minority) residents out of the gentrified areas.
I don't see a way of reconciling an opposition of both of these trends. Do we want whites and their tax money and programs in the cities, or do we not? Is there a way of navigating this that I don't see?
_____
> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!*
| 29 |
Both of those are ways to to keep white people and black people separate. In white flight, the white people leave. In gentrification, they force out black people. In both of these examples, all you are doing is moving rich people around. There is no growth, you are just cutting the pie up in slightly different ways.
The best long term economic circumstance would be if rich white and poor black people lived together. The rich white people would pay taxes to support infrastructure like education. In the long term, the poor black people would become more skilled and earned higher salaries. The pie physically grows larger meaning everyone gets more.
Ultimately, this is a form of game theory. It's kind of like if you want to be popular in school. If you hang out with the nerds, you won't be cool. If you hang out with the popular kids and exclude the nerds, you'll have higher social status. But if you are the rare person who makes friends with the science nerds, the jocks, the band geeks, and all the other 80's high school stereotypes, you'll be the most popular kid in school. In that third situation, everyone is better off, but it takes a lot of effort and social risk. It's much easier to just join the cool kids and exclude everyone else.
| 16 |
ELI5: Why is it legal to drink 1 beer and THEN drive, but illegal to drink 1 beer WHILE driving?
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I understand that you aren't "allowed" to drink beer while driving due to the "open container" law, but what is the reasoning behind this? You'd have just as much alcohol in your system either way.
| 26 |
I always figured it was because it's not very practical to pull someone over and ask,"Is that your first beer? Okay good, just checking. Have a nice day."
Easiest way to enforce that law is to have a 0 tolerance policy on open containers/drinking & driving.
| 25 |
CMV: Referring to a white person as "Colonizer" is a racial slur
|
First of all, let me start by saying *of course I am white.* That's why this issue has been bothering me.
A few days ago a woman of an unspecified race referred to me as "colonizer" in public. I instantly took offense, I know how horrible the acts committed by those who colonized the world were, and it was clearly being used in a derogatory way. She wanted to use the actions of my ancestors to somehow shame or degrade me, when she actually has no idea about my familial history.
Dictionary.com refers to a "racial slur" as the following:
a derogatory or disrespectful nickname for a racial group, used without restraint
"Colonizer" is a derogatory and disrespectful nickname for white people. And recently, I have certainly seen it used without restraint.
After being called one, over the next few days I saw and heard the word used as a racial slur in mainstream media and here on Reddit.
In the film Black Panther, the head scientist Shuri refers to Martin Freeman's character as "colonizer". (I watched the movie yesterday and really appreciated the message, this line just stuck out to me as out of character for one of the "good guys")
This post on /r/blackpeopletwitter, currently sitting at almost 4000 upvotes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/8j3wya/not_today_colonizer_not_today/
You can call me a "butthurt whitey", you can call me "colonizer", you can call me whatever you want. I just want an explanation for why this particular racial slur is getting a pass, because as far as I can tell it's only because it's directed exclusively at whites. I have never been financially well off, and yet I still recognize the privileges I have as a white person in America. But this word just seems like a hateful slur and a way to divide us.
Please help me understand. CMV.
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| 339 |
It might be helpful here to examine why racism is wrong.
What makes racism morally wrong is the substitution of the individual for the archetype. She saw a white person and made assumptions.
That's prejudiced and quite possibly racist. But that's not the same thing as a "racial slur". It's an accusation. One that is wildly unfounded and bigoted. There are colonizers. She assumed your one because of your race.
It would be like calling a Mexican person a "gangbanger". There are gangbangers. Assuming a person is one from their ethnicity is prejudiced. In order to be a slur, by your own definition, the word would have to be in reference to your race not an accusation of a behavior (which she prejudicially assumed described you because of your race).
| 93 |
ELI5: How is it possible for Netflix to crack down on all VPNs/Proxies in an effort to curb users accessing content outside their countries?
|
Netflix has announced plans to restrict users' access to content outside their home country (http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/14/10767982/netflix-blocking-proxies-vpn-country-restrictions, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35320436), which has upset many international viewers because their content selection can be very limited.
How is it possible to even do this? There are so many IPs from all the available Proxies and VPN services in all the various countries where Netflix is available. Wouldn't Netflix have a Sisyphean struggle to constantly identify offending IPs while having to avoid interrupting legitimate users' access?
Furthermore, how can they possibly determine that a VPN endpoint is being used by a user outside that endpoint's country of origin or by a legitimate user who happens to actually live in the same country as the server being used?
---
Edit: To clarify, some commenters seem confused about the nature of VPNs. These services are used to intentionally obscure the end user's identifiable information, regardless of whether the intent of the user is legitimate or not. Because of this, it's inherently flawed to assume that Netflix can discern whether a VPN endpoint that connects to their service is being used for the legitimate purpose of avoiding ISP snooping, for example, or for the stated illegitimate purpose of circumventing geographical restrictions.
Compounding this factor is the fact that VPN nodes can switch IP addresses at any given time, meaning Netflix would engage in a game of cat-and-mouse if they intend to fully block access from blacklisted IPs. It's kind of like saying, "We found drug dealers on your street so now no one in this area can loiter." The drug dealers will just move to the next block and innocent residents are unjustly punished.
| 77 |
They can never be 100% effective. Hulu has been doing this for years.
Basically they maintain a blacklist of known VPN IP addresses and forbid them from accessing Netflix.
It's fairly easy for a VPN provider to just get a new IP address, so it will never be completely effective, but it can significantly reduce the amount of traffic not originating from the country of that region's Netflix catalog.
It's pretty annoying because Netflix has generally looked the other way to VPN and proxy use. Because of weird licensing rules they have to license titles separtely in different countries and territories.
It seems like with their recent expansion to almost every country, content providers are most likely being more difficult regarding geo-blocking.
| 37 |
CMV: it is not possible to have an entirely "non-offensive" existence.
|
You can please some of the people all of the time.
You can please all of the people some of the time.
You cannot please all of the people all of the time.
Offense is sometimes given/intended, and sometimes taken/unintended.
It's possible to go through life and deliberately choose to not engage with things you know will give/have intentional offense to an individual or group.
It's not possible to make every possible consideration in every possible way in order that nothing you ever do or say or be can ever be unintentionally offensive, or that someone can take offense from it where no intention is there.
If you change your behaviour to match one groups expectations you may be causing offense to another, and vice versa. There is always someone who can find issue with something.
The only option is to be your own compass, make your own decisions, and accept that some people may not like that. It doesn't mean to change for them but accept that there is no pure choice that leads to entirely accepted results.
| 15 |
Isn't this just a subset of the paradox of tolerance?
The very act of being non offensive is offensive to some, see just admitting the existence of LGBT. And that's ok.
Who is seriously proposing an existence where you offend literally noone?
| 14 |
[Harry Potter] Why was the Half-Blood Prince so much better a teacher than Snape?
|
Based on how much Harry improved when given the Half-Blood Prince's notebook, AND also how poorly other students, including Hermione, do in Snape's class, it seems clear that Snape is a terrible potions teacher, and worse even than the Half-Blood Prince.
What happened? Why is the teacher so much worse than the student he once was?
| 164 |
The Half-Blood Prince's textbook was basically a cheat sheet. It didn't "teach" Harry any potions knowledge per se, it just gave him some answers and tips for how to make specific potions. As demonstrated by the exercise to make an antidote for the blended poison, Harry's potionmaking abilities were not significantly improved by his possession of the Prince's book, because he didn't understand any of the fundamental theory.
Put another way, both Snape and the Prince were terrible teachers. Snape was bad because he didn't care about imparting knowledge upon his students, and the Prince's textbook was bad because it imparted the wrong things.
| 224 |
[Star Wars] Anakin is a second too slow and becomes a red smear on Darth Maul's bitchin' hoverbike. What happens now?
| 46 |
* No Anakin means the command ship isn't destroyed, as none of the other pilots are aware of just how good a trick spinning truly is. The droid army defeats the Gungans, likely killing Jar Jar Binks in the process, before returning to Theed to drive out Padme. The Trade Federation win the day.
* Meanwhile, the duel with Maul likely plays out the same way. Qui-Gon dies and Maul gets bisected, though this time there is no dying request. Obi-Wan will have to figure out his future by himself.
* With the Gungans and Naboo security forces thrashed, Padme will be at the mercy of the Senate for aid, who are in no rush to oppose the Federation. This is going to be very awkward for Palpatine, and he'll definitely have to revise his original plans to account for a Federation victory, likely relying on more manipulation of Gunray as Sidious. Assuming he can get things back on track:
* As Padme is not a senator, Palpatine has no reason to attempt to assassinate her in the lead up to the Clone Wars. This means Obi-Wan doesn't find out about Jango Fett ahead of schedule, or the clone army, which in-turn means Dooku and the droid factories on Geonosis remain hidden. The Separatists likely start the war on their own terms at a greater advantage. Sidious may have to go out of his way to deliberately weaken them if he still wants a Republic/Imperial victory.
* Dooku likely still ends up betrayed in favour of someone younger e.g. Ventress, Krell, Offee etc., who is likely more loyal but less powerful compared to Anakin. Mace Windu is likely never informed of Palpatine's identity and so there is no duel between them. Sidious likely keeps his unscarred appearance and the masters survive to see Order 66.
* Beyond here it's anyone's guessing without Luke or Leia existing.
| 52 |
|
CMV: Eating fast food to gain weight is not bad
| 19 |
**IIFYM!!** (if it fits your macros)
However, if you are eating in a caloric excess to purposely gain weight, you should be doing some sort of resistance training (/r/fitness, /r/bodybuilding, /r/bodyweightfitness, /r/powerlifting, /r/weightroom, /r/weightlifting)
If you do not do some sort of resistance training, almost all of the weight you gain will be fat.
You will go from skinny, to skinny-fat. And if anything that is less desirable
| 18 |
|
How did English become the international language?
|
There are easier languages and there are languages with more native speakers, so why is English the language that everyone in the world is expected to know?
| 17 |
Historical accident. In the past, other languages like Latin and French have served as the "international language." It just happens that we've had two successive English-speaking nations as the most powerful in the world - first Great Britain, then the United States.
At the height of British power, it was literally true that the sun never set on their Empire - they had significant holdings in places all over the world and on every continent. Furthermore, they were a major mercantile nation, and English traders could be found almost anywhere. English was a highly useful language to learn for this reason.
As American power eclipsed that of Great Britain, people didn't have to learn a new language to deal with the new power - Americans spoke English, too. So English's position became more entrenched.
Meanwhile, the world became smaller as transportation in the British/American age eclipsed what came before it. In less than a century, trips that took weeks or months by ship could be made in hours by airplane. In this environment, anyone could theoretically go anywhere - and the best option for many of them was to go to the rich Western countries, many of which were Anglophone, for education. Thus, English again was reinforced as an international language.
| 22 |
CMV: if your friend texts while driving you should pressure them to stop
|
Wikipedia gives the overall impression that it's as bad or worse than driving while intoxicated.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texting\_while\_driving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texting_while_driving)
One time in college my housemate came home from a work shift and gleefully mentioned that he had driven home drunk. Everyone within earshot replied with unambiguous condemnation.
If your friend admits that they constantly text while driving, it is an underreaction to not express strong disapproval. For comparison, think of what reaction is appropriate if you find out that someone is stealing bikes or scamming old people on craigslist or abusing their pets or knowingly transmitting STDs--hopefully one wouldn't just laugh and forget about it.
If you text and drive, you might kill or paralyze a kid that you otherwise wouldn't have. This should be treated as high risk and morally reprehensible behavior. We don't have to just sheepishly accept that everyone does it, like leaving out dirty dishes or eating too much sugar.
Things that might change my view include alternate calculations of risk vs reward, alternate interpretations responsibility, evidence that peer-pressure does not work well for norm enforcement, evidence of unintended consequences, reasons why I should shift emphasis from "don't harm innocents" to "don't put yourself at legal risk", or reasons why I should save my breath for something more important.
​
(Background: yesterday it occurred to me that I don't know how frequently I interact with people who have caused auto fatalities. It's not something that ever comes up in conversation. I guess those people just walk around with an emotional albatross for the rest of their life, and this is part of their punishment. Seems like the punishment does not lead to much deterrence though. Hence the need to be more proactive about disincentivizing bad behavior.)
| 1,567 |
It's a fine line to walk. People often think that pestering someone constantly and being a huge dick about it = the most effective method to "help them".
In reality, those people often are not only reinvigorated by your disaproval "you think your better than me?", or may enjoy it annoys you.
It's kinda how over-protective parents don't let their kid do anything, because they don't want to take the risk that something bad may happen. The results might be not what you wanted.
It's obvious that you mean that "you have a moral imperative to try to help people not making this grave choice". But what you are really saying is : "It's okay to be dick, if it's for a good cause".
That's not true. Your goal should be to persuade people, not to pressure them, or pester them, or anger them. And achieving the exact opposite result. People should be seeing you as credible source of information. Not as an annoyance that will be constantly arguing with you over every stupid little thing. Google some good persuasion techniques. None of them involves pressuring, being forceful, being agressive, etc...
| 217 |
ELI5: Why does heat alter our perception and create a "wavy" effect.
|
For example, the area above a strong heater.
| 759 |
Heat changes the refractive index of air (due to expansion), and as currents and eddies of air pass through a heater – or over a desert – there's an uneven heating effect, causing slight but visible waves of differing refraction.
| 284 |
Is there like a guide on programming languages? As in what works best for what kind of project?
|
I have a somewhat solid understanding of some programming languages, but I’m having some trouble which language might be better for a type of project. As in like, is python better for a simple chess game than Java.
| 50 |
As always with any “Engineering” question which is what this is, the real answer is, it depends.
Most answers should be “go with what you know best” so if you know python then use that.
Thinking about your project up front can dictate what technologies you use including language.
Is a static type system important,
Will you want functional programming and/or Object oriented programming.
Will you follow a design pattern or grow the program organically as you add features.
There’s a bunch of options and bunch of trade-offs to consider.
In terms of languages they are all Turing complete which means (loosely) any program can be written in any language.
Obviously certain languages are geared towards different things like where/how they are deployed, or performance etc.
| 24 |
[Star Wars] Could Palpatine have just eroded the Jedi council's political power while working to disillusion the younger generation of knights instead of purging them from the Galaxy?
|
Obviously, his plan worked, so it's hard to argue with the results. But it seems as though Palpatine's plan was needlessly convoluted. I imagine that discrediting and undermining the council probably would've been easier and more full proof than starting a war that you're running on both sides, trusting that an entire army is brainwashed enough to carry out your orders, and banking that one guy would switch sides in such a way as to convince an entire galactic Senate to cede it's power.
| 108 |
Palpatine didn't want to slowly wither away the Jedi, he wanted them to be eradicated in one violent, fell stroke. He wanted to see death and destruction. He wanted them to feel betrayed by those they thought closest to them. And above all, he wanted to pull it off in a way that proved he was the master manipulator. Remember Luke correctly surmised that Palpatine's greatest weakness was his overconfidence in his power. Hubris was always a core part of Palpatine's actions, and ultimately it would lead to his downfall, but he couldn't see that. That said, his plan was the only one he would tolerate because it was the plan that he came up with and stoked his ego the greatest, anything less would be unthinkable in his eyes.
| 100 |
[God of War/Mirror universe] What would the mirror Kratos - the one *without* the goatee - be known for?
|
Would he still play a part in the Titanomachy?
| 15 |
I think mirror-universe Kratos would just be a standard Greek hero. He hits most of the checklist:
* Tragic background
* Divine parenthood
* Supernatural abilities
* Great warrior
* Weapons bestowed by a god
So basically, he'd slaughter everything evil instead of just everything.
| 23 |
[Star Wars] Okay, Palpatine was an evil bastard, but wasn't he correct that the Republic needed to centralize power?
|
Obviously not to the extent of making it a theocratic dictatorship like the Empire, mind you, but the Republic before Palpatine's reforms was clearly to brittle and fragile, and would not be able to weather crises effectively. Palpatine intentionally worsened these problems to gain power, but they would have still existed without him.
I'm just saying, there's got to be an in-between state besides "*laissez faire* confederacy" and "military dictatorship."
| 15 |
Lasted for a thousand years, and it still took most of a generation to bring down from within by a concerted conspiracy involving several actors all with immense power within and without the Republic.
The centralization of power is largely *what brought about* the crises that were ultimately leveraged to kill it. The system worked fine for a very long time.
You want a *laissez faire* confederacy, take a look at the post-Empire Republic. One planet and a fleet destroyed, and it's tits up, organizationally. The pre-Empire Republic *was* the in-between state. Which is why it weathered an entire millennium.
| 32 |
ELI5: Why are ALL (except equestrian) Olympic events single sex?
|
I understand, I think, events like swimming, gymnastics, weight-lifting, etc. Why do events like fencing, badminton, archery, even basketball, have to be single-sex only?
| 18 |
Because men and women are built differently and have different athletic abilities. So to keep things 100% fair men compete against men and women against women so that the only X factor is skill, not gender differences.
| 15 |
LI5: Can someone explain what's allegedly happened with Murdoch's phone hacking scandal, and why it's so important?
|
All I can gather is something about the integrity of newspapers and such. What's going on exactly?
| 32 |
Police were investigating a girl's murder. One small detail of the case was that her family insisted she was still alive (possibly run away, kidnapped, whatever) because phone records showed her voice mail was still being remotely checked regularly and some messages were even deleted.
It turns out a News of the World (one of Murdoch's companies) employee was the one checking the voice mail as a way to get story leads. Messages were deleted so the voice mail box wouldn't fill up, blocking new messages. Deleting those messages is destroying evidence and is terrible because even the tiniest clue can catch a murderer.
This catches the public's attention, more investigation is done and it comes out that this has happened several times before. Most notably, another Murdoch employee allegedly tried to grease palms with September 11th first responders to get info from cell phones in the same vein. This REALLY catches the public's attention.
So, the debate, if we can call it that, is whether or not it's ok for reporters to illegally access your phone messages, delete the ones that could possibly catch the person who murdered you, etc. And, that's only the thing they were *caught* doing.
| 25 |
Why do we keep trying to find new heavy elements if they only snap into existence for milliseconds?
|
Would these super-heavy elements have some use? Is it self-assurance?
Thanks for the help, I'm only a sophomore in high school, but I'm super interested in this kind of science so try not to use to big of words, I think I have a somewhat basic understanding though.
Again, Thanks! :)
| 4,176 |
Science isn't always about finding applications. There have been many discoveries throughout history that didn't have practical applications for decades or centuries.
These super-heavy elements won't have applications because they're too short-lived. But they're useful for testing our current theories on nuclear physics.
| 3,457 |
ELI5: what happens to the water used to make concrete?
|
Can the concrete degrade, until the water escapes?
| 30 |
Concrete setting is a complicated process and depends on the materials used. But part of the process is the hydration of the ingredients. The water actually becomes part of the ingredients. The water remains but is part of the chemical components. Concrete is also produced which will set under water. The Romans understood how to make concrete including underwater concrete. It is part of how they were so good at construction.
| 24 |
CMV: Nonbinary people are not trans (a trans pov)
|
I'm a trans woman who transitioned from male to female 13 years ago socially and 8 years ago medically (my family prohibited it, so i had to wait). Ive had "the surgery". I pass as a natal female (regardless of makeup/clothes/hair/etc.) 100% of the time (to where i live my life stealth). And genuinely this is because i want to blend in so have done everything humanely possible to do so.
Transition was an incredibly hard thing to go through and there were lots of challenges in school, home/family, street harassment, etc.
I 100% dont relate to nonbinary people, who for the most part seem to:
* Be uniformly aligned in politics (almost like its a political ideology)
* want attention / to not blend in. They take pride in being non binary and being "trans"
* Rarely if ever undergo medical transition (and the ones who do medically transition usually switch to being mtf/ftm after)
* Far more likely to play the victim / call people out on "transphobia" when its really just someone asking an honest question
* Far far more likely to have some serious deviation in sexual proclivities from societal norms (e.g. polyamory, bdsm, furries, etc. - again not that any of that is strictly bad)
* Usually advocate for demedicalizing transition (which is taking away the whole reason why insurance companies and plans are starting to cover trans related surgeries and hormones)
* Rarely if ever actually experience gender dysphoria (and if they do then usually they end up with mtf/ftm as their label eventually).
* Have no care for nuance in debate over issues related to identity
* Hold radically conflicting ideas/identities (e.g. not identifying as a woman and then claiming the lesbian label)
* Forcing people to use pronouns and often neopronouns (even going so far as to try to criminalize misgendering)
When i started transitioning nonbinary wasn't really a thing. And actual trans people made up the figureheads of our communities activism. In the last 4-6 years (but especially the last 3), nonbinary people have hijacked the movement and advocated for policies that actively hurt real trans people.
The core trans experience (imo) is wanting to blend in - regardless if you are a trans man or a trans woman. Its why while i dont get the desire that trans men have to appear as men, i understand the underlying motivation (i.e. dysphoria) and can relate in that way.
Whereas, nonbinary people seem to have nothing in common with me or the other trans people irl that i know. And worse they seem to be intent on hurting the most vulnerable people in our communities by advocating for policies that directly harm us.
Im not going so far as to say that nonbinary people are just making up new genders, because i don't think that's my place to argue that. But certainly they should be their own community separate from the trans one. And definitely a different label.
**Tldr: dyeing your hair, changing your name, and waving a trans flag does not make you trans. It makes you an asshole trying to misappropriate an identity and harming other people in the community.**
---------------------------
Ive been told that im an asshole by the "trans" community for stating and believing the above. (Many others in our community have too - this has led to a mostly internal debate between 'truscum vs tucute' ideology). Im curious to get an outsiders looking in perspective. And im also hoping to get some nonbinary people in here to actually argue their points and not hide behind overly zealous censors/moderation.
I want to be wrong, help me see that im wrong please?
| 42 |
I think it’s more so that Gen-Z just has a different experience of being trans.
For a long time, for Gen-X and older millenial trans people the ultimate goal was to be stealth, to blend in perfectly amongst cis people and to not have anybody know that you are trans.
Gen-Zon the other hand, due to growing up in a time when trans acceptance is a much more visible issue than ever before, are more interested in gaining acceptance for who they are, they want to be able to be out as a trans person, to not have to pass perfectly in order to avoid persecution. Additionally, Gen-Z have also been much more interested in challenging gender norms and perceptions of gender than Gen-X or millenials.
I don’t think that someone else’s experience of gender and transness being different than yours is any reason for it not to be valid.
| 22 |
Everyone says to not write a csv parser from scratch. But if your language doesn’t have one, how do you do it the right way?
| 34 |
>Everyone says to not write a csv parser from scratch
Everyone says to not write a csv parser from scratch if your language already provides a decent one.
FTFY. If you need or want to write one for yourself then just write it to parse your particular delimited file. If you want to create and publish a library then find a popular one in another language with a decent test suite and mimic it. It should address all the edge cases that make it universal.
| 32 |
|
ELI5: Why is it recommended to drink lots of milk after swallowing bleach ?
| 22 |
There is a protein in milk, one protein structure called lactase (kind of like a microscopic arm made of legos) is responsible for making bleach less harmful when swallowed.
This protein "lego arm" binds onto the highly reactive chlorine atom and the highly reactive OH (hydroxide) molecule in the basic bleach, when it does this it, the protein transforms (like a transformer, except its final form is shitty ...and turns into sort of a "homo gangbang" ... i.e.: homogeneous cluster of protein). The protein molecules then combine and coagulates with the above dangerous stuff... This allows your body to SHIT it out rather than being absorbed into your system.
So milk helps by having its lactase bind onto the "bad" particles and allows you to shit out the homo. gangbang of lego arms.
| 27 |
|
ELI5: how do ants in ant colony know what’s their role? Are they trained for these roles (soldiers, farmers, etc.)? Are there ants that go through “career changes” and switch roles?
| 52 |
Some roles are just based on body type. A soldier is never going to become a queen. But others do actually change roles. Ants communicate through chemicals and if an ant in one role goes awhile and doesn’t encounter much of a chemical associated with a role, it can change to that role. So, imagine half the foragers get eaten by an anteater. Other ants slowly notice they’re not encountering enough forager chemicals and might switch roles. That eventually restores the balance.
| 39 |
|
ELI5: why are people harder to pick up as "dead weight" as opposed to when they're letting you lift them? they don't really change weight
| 53 |
They don't change weight, but they do shift and support their weight to make it easier for you to grab and maintain balance.
That's also why a 45 pound block of wood is easy to lift but a 45 pound bag of water is a nightmare. You can't grab or balance the water and its center of gravity is constantly shifting as you fumble with it.
| 129 |
|
ELI5:If a piece of food beings to rot, is the whole thing bad or just the spot where it spoiled? Can I just cut that spot out and eat the rest?
| 38 |
The reason molds/fungi/bacteria are bad and that you dont eat the food they have colonized, is not because those organisms are necessarily pathogenic to you, its because the byproducts of their metabolism of certain things are highly toxic to you. Take Clostridium botulinum for example, its not the bacterium that harms you when you eat contaiminated food, its that it metabolizes that food and yeilds a powerful neurotoxin that is deadly to you in mere nanograms.
TL:DR you probably could, but the potential risks of you doing so include death
| 19 |
|
Parents doing a PhD, what does your schedule look like ?
|
Hi !
As a parent of young kids ending my first year of PhD, I'm turning to you for inspiration on what are your routines, tools, or else that helps you stay on top of things ?
Either studying method, note taking, food planning, etc.
Thanks !
​
EDIT : Thanks all for your replies. This is really encouraging. Knowing we're not alone, and having some tools. I already use GanttProject, but will plan more. Bullet notebook seems great too. As for social media... it's hard ! ;-)
| 83 |
Treat your PhD like a job. Regular hours. 8am to 5pm. You are in class, at your desk or in your lab working. Set those expectations early with your adviser. Reading papers? That's to be done at work, during work hours. Class assignments? Done during work hours. Grading papers as a TA? In the office during work hours. Only break that wall if absolutely necessary and unavoidable.
You will see and hear people talk about their long and crazy hours. Most of the time that's because of poor structure and planning. They are "working" 12 hours a day, but a lot of it is wasted or down time. They can afford to do that without any consequences aside from missing social activities. With proper planning and a structured day/week, you will get much more done in 8 hours (please take a decent break + lunch, don't work 9 hours straight).
| 239 |
Why can't you ever have truly monochromatic light?
| 22 |
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The wavelength of light is related to it's momentum, and quantum objects (such as light particles) cannot have their momentum defined with infinite precision. That's why a photon cannot have one exact wavelength, instead it has a range of possible values for it's wavelength.
| 12 |
|
[Marvel/DC] What would happen if various superheroes got shot in the chest?
|
Assume:
* Their powers are functioning properly.
* They're wearing their standard gear.
* They're immobilized or taken by surprise (regardless of how implausible this is) so they can't use shields, weapons, wristbands, etc. to deflect the bullet..
I know the really obvious ones. Bullets bounce off of Superman, and they just pop out of Wolverine's body and the wound heals. What about Thor? Hulk? Spiderman? Wonder Woman? Does Batman's suit deflect bullets? Etc.
| 30 |
1. Thor laughs
2. Hulk smashes the offending shooter into the ground
3. Wonder Woman shrugs it off
4. Spiderman has a hole in his chest
5. Batman has serious bruising and may have internal injuries depending on the caliber of the gun
6. Iron Man shoots back
7. Capt. America has a hole in his chest
8. Bucky Barnes has a hole in his chest
9. Black Widow has a hole in her chest
10. Hawkeye has a hole in his chest
11. Wanda Maximoff has a hole in her chest
12. Vision shrugs it off
13. Star-Lord has a hole in his chest
14. Drax starts beating the shit out of the shooter
15. Gamora starts beating the shit out of the shooter
16. Rocket Racoon has a hole in his chest
17. Groot shrugs it off
18. Aquaman laughs
19. Cyborg shrugs it off
20. Buster Scruggs drops dead
21. Robin drops dead
22. Nightwing has a hole in his chest
23. Red Robin has a hole in his chest
24. Starfire has a hole in her chest
25. Raven has a hole in her chest
26. Beast Boy has a hole in his chest
27. Luke Cage shrugs it off
28. Daredevil has a hole in his chest
29. Jessica Jones has a hole in her chest
30. Danny Rand has a hole in his chest
31. Dr. Doom beats the shit out of the offending shooter for marring the perfect armor of Doom.
32. Mr. Fantastic shrugs it off
33. Invisible Woman has a hole in her chest
34. Human Torch melts the bullet
35. The Thing shrugs it off
36. Green Arrow has a hole in his chest
37. Green Lantern shrugs it off
38. Flash has a hole in his chest
39. White Siren has a hole in her chest
40. The Atom shrugs it off
41. Citizen Cold has a hole in his chest
42. Vixen has a hole in her chest
43. Constantine has a hole in his chest
44. Heatwave has a hole in his chest
45. Firestorm converts the bullet into nuclear material
46. Dr. Manhattan pontificates about the futility of life
47. The Comedian drops from a 50 story apartment
48. Night Owl drops dead
49. Silk Spectre drops dead
50. Ozymandias drops dead
51. Rorschach drops dead
etc, etc.
| 69 |
ELI5: How can we measure, define, or even estimate the surface area of something like activated charcoal when the coastline paradox makes the length of a nominally 2D surface difficult to reckon? What about less regular surfaces like intestinal lining?
|
I imagine it's derived indirectly by comparing the physical and/or chemical properties of unprocessed and processed samples, but what about other microscopic structures, like intestinal lining, that don't have as straightforward properties to test?
And more to the point, what do we mean when we say "surface"? Where's the cutoff for various standards (chemical, biological, or architectural) where surface ends and interior begins?
| 42 |
Despite what some have said, when defining the surface area of a porous surface like activated charcoal, you absolutely do run into something directly akin to the coastline paradox. One measures the surface area of a porous surface by essentially covering it in molecules of a known size and shape. The amount of molecules needed to cover the surface tells you how much surface you have. The size of the molecules determines how small the corners and crevices are that the molecules can cover. That is, if you use a big molecule to measure a surface with a lot of very small crevices you will under estimate the total surface area.
There are materials with surface areas of several thousand square meters per gram of material. This is much larger surface than you would predict by simply counting up the surface of spheres.
| 33 |
ELI5: Does touching bones(for example if I had a deep cut or a bad break that exposed bone) hurt?
| 24 |
You can literally palpate your bones through your skin. Does it hurt when you do this? No. Any sensation is the nerve endings in your skin. With that being said, once you enter the bone, you can feel pain. In certain emergency situations, the inside of the bone has to be accessed in order to administer life saving medications. The person does not usually react to the puncturing of the bone, but they do experience severe pain when saline and/or medications are pushed into the bone marrow.
| 31 |
|
Eli5: What causes that feeling in your stomach when you drive quickly over a steep bridge / go down a steep drop on a roller coaster?
| 19 |
It's literally your stomach moving up in your torso. Our organs aren't rigidly held in place; they're more floating in your torso, anchored by ligaments here and there. Usually you don't notice it, but a sharp change like what you describe can cause perceptible movement.
| 22 |
|
[Nintendo/Kirby] What is Kirby?
|
I'm told he is bar far the most powerful Nintendo character and regularly fights and defeats galaxy ending events as part of his norm. What is he? Why is he so powerful? What's MetaKnight?
| 65 |
Nothing confirmed, but what I've gleaned from /r/kirby's spoilers for Star Allies, it's speculated Kirby's a positive outgrowth of the Void that permeates dimensions. No confirmation on a link between Void Termina, Kirby, and the Knight entities, but given that Meta and Kirb have the same face/body structure, it looks like they eventually stabilize into more specialized forms over time.
| 41 |
[BSG] If the Twelve Colonies possessed FTL jump drives that were capable of crossing significant portions of the galaxy, why didn't they expand further before the Second Cylon War?
|
I understand that jumping long distances is dangerous, but surely they sent explorers or surveyors to new planets at some point?
The colonials have been spacefaring for at least 2,000 years after all.
| 133 |
The Colonies were extremely unusual in that they were several habitable worlds in really close proximity to each other. In contrast, it took weeks of searching further out from Colonial space than they had ever gone for the Galactica to find ONE barely habitable planet.
Calculating jump parameters is also an involved process which has some inherent risks. You can jump to nearby stars using telemetry gained from ground and orbital telescopes, but it lacks exact precision and most stellar bodies are almost impossible to detect, such as asteroids small planets, comets etc. This seems to be the type of recon Raptors were designed for, but they lack the sensitive viewing systems to extensively survey entire systems.
Basically, it seems to be a measure of time... They'd have to calculate reliable jump-coordinates from telescopes, send a Raptor to do a cursory sweep and determine safe coordinates for a larger jump, then send in heavier survey equipment both to survey the system but also to collect data for further jumps. That type of work is time consuming, and rather expensive.
This wasn't so much an issue for the Galactica, since they largely threw caution to the wind for the sake of survival, but the Colonies wouldn't have been so desperate. In fact, between the First and Second Wars they seem to have become increasingly arrogant and bureaucratic.
| 106 |
Why did the moon lander vehicle look like it was wrapped in (golden) tin foil?
|
Re-watching Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and in other media, it's always shown like this, but it looks rather flimsy and easy to peel...
What is it?
| 15 |
That's actually a thermal insulation material called multilayer insulation (MLI). It just looks ruffled because of forces in transit and landing. The way out looks may also have to do with how it wraps around the contour of the lander components.
| 11 |
ELI5: Why do all soda companies have the same size and shape of can/bottle?
|
Wouldn’t companies have variance between products? Or is there some sort of standard that causes all of these cans and bottles to be manufactured the exact same way? There are some other examples of this but soda is just the first that comes to mind.
| 20 |
While it is true that a different company takes care of the packaging, this doesn't stop them from requesting different sizes and shapes. Or even building their own packaging facilities.
However most soda companies would try to stick to the standard. That's party because they don't want to lose potential sale from things like vending machines. Or stores that can't be bothered to handle logistics on storing and handling a specific container shape, while every other brand is easier because they're similar.
| 20 |
ELI5: Everyone in the world raises their arms/fists to represent success and victory. Why is that?
|
Every culture (to my knowledge), every country, and every civilization that all developed independently of eachother, and yet everyone raises their fists or arms up in the air to proclaim 'yes!' or 'victory!'.
Why is that?
| 94 |
It is just a human reaction. Recently, saw a video on TEd talks about body language. It said there was a study done and when someone who was blind and has always been blind won a challenge they raised thier hands up in the air, in victory. Even people who have never seen that done, react that way.
| 63 |
How can the universe have a single age?
|
According to wikipedia, the universe is estimated at 13.3 to 13.9 billion years old, but I haven't been able to figure out what exactly that means. If you take two objects and ask them how long ago an event they both witnessed was, you would get two different answers depending on gravitaty and velocity. Objects that have been trapped inside of a star since the big bang would say the universe is much younger then an object free floating between galaxies. What is the age of the universe measured relative to, and what's the significance of that age over any other given age?
| 33 |
When you zoom out to the cosmological scale, where anything smaller than a galaxy is too small to resolve, it turns out that nothing moves very fast. It's true that the proper time in a moving reference frame will differ from the proper time in a notionally stationary reference frame, but unless the relative velocity between those reference frames is large, it doesn't differ *much.*
Cosmologists consider a special reference frame in which the cosmic microwave background appears, *and always has appeared,* isotropic. That is, there's no significant difference in the frequency of the microwave background radiation coming from *this* direction and the radiation coming from *that* direction. This gives cosmologists a reference frame to work from.
Conveniently, Earth is in this reference frame, within certain limits. The dipole anisotropy we see in the sky indicates that the Earth is moving relative to the background at about 600 kilometers a second, a velocity so small that to a cosmologist it rounds down to zero.
So any two clocks in reference frames in which the CMBR is fairly isotropic will agree within an acceptable margin of error.
Considering the error bounds on the age of the universe encompass something like *half a billion years,* "close enough" is, indeed, close enough.
| 30 |
ELI5: If fires go out when oxygen is removed, how is the Sun burning?
| 23 |
Short answer: the sun is not burning. It is too hot to burn.
The sun is a nuclear fusion reaction (mostly hydrogen into helium), which is far and away a higher energy than simple oxygen combustion.
| 103 |
|
[Halo] How the hell did the Home Fleet with 200 S-MAC guns fail to destroy the Fleet of Sacred Consecration during the First Battle for Earth?
|
You are talking 100+ ships vs 15 (13 cruisers + 2 CAS carriers), now, lets say for a moment that the 100 ships ain't that good, the SMAC's alone should have torn the entire enemy fleet to shreds, an SMAC can put a round straight through 3 covenant capital ships.
During the fall of reach, there were 20 SMAC's, and they managed to destroy a third of the Covenant fleet (which numbered 314) and they only got to fire a few times before their ground control station went boom.
Why did it require the master chief to destroy one, and why did the other one manage to get to the surface? those ships should have been obliterated the moment they got into the kill-zone.
| 15 |
I believe the storyline of the first mission is that they aren't in the killzone, they're staying outside of effective range and launching boarders. If most of those SMAC stations were destroyed without firing a shot, it would explain how Regret's carrier made it past.
| 23 |
ELI5: When eating food like mashed potatoes, and you swallow a big bite causing it "sticks to your ribs", what is actually happening? Why does it feel like I'm suffocating when the food should be on its way to my stomach, not caught in my air pipe?
| 54 |
Your air pipe has soft tissue and firm tissue that makes it up. Cartilage rings in your air pipe (which keep it from collapsing when you inhale) are shaped like the letter C, with the open part of C facing the back of your neck. There is obviously not an opening in the back of your air pipe but the tissue back there isn't as firm and can be pushed in/out easily. This "weakness" in the back wall means that something can push in from behind, narrowing your air pipe and making it feel harder to breathe. Your food pipe just so happens to run behind your air pipe.
This is a guess as to what is happening. If it was your epiglottis closing, you literally wouldn't be able to breathe instead of just having mild difficulty.
| 40 |
|
[Fallout 4] I used to live in the Capitol Wasteland and had to run regular maintenance on my gun. Now I live in the Commonwealth and the gun never breaks. What gives?
| 16 |
One of the first things the Institute created were maintenance nanites. They can repair minor damage at a molecular level, keeping things running longer without the need to tedious maintenance. But, they aren't self replicating, and if something suffers too much damage, they 'write it off' and focus on something else.
*Non-canon. The more realistic answer would be, you still have to preform semi-regular maintenance on a firearm. But the system previously used required WAAAAAAY too much maintenance, and doing it realistically wouldn't really add anything to gameplay (you clean your handgun every day. It works fine for 20 years without so much as a missfire) so it's just assumed you do it and its in the background.
| 25 |
|
[ATLA/LOK/Harry Potter] I am a fully realized Avatar who has been given a regular old stick disguised as a wand. How many spells can I preform using only my bending abilities and no magical knowledge?
|
Essentially, how many HP spells could be replaced by bending to achieve identical effects without the magical world discovering my true identity?
Assuming I have access to all bending subsets.
| 377 |
That depends heavily on who you're trying to fool. A well trained wizard would recognize that you aren't actually performing magic. Magic has a distinct feel to it that you can't quite recreate with bending.
As far as recreating the effects of magic, firebending should be your go to. It's easiest to direct and shape in a way that would seem to be controlled by your "wand" (just be careful it doesn't catch on fire) Earth Bending is probably off the table entirely. It's too physical to really go unnoticed as a something different, unless you're capable of telekinetic bending. Other than that, freezing water, combustion bending, and maybe some quick lightning should help you pass to most wizards.
| 211 |
ELI5: Why does the taste of something diminish rapidly? Example, swirling a fruit yogurt drink around the tounge quickly becomes tasteless, yet swallow and immediately take another sip and it is bursting with flavor again. How is the taste sucked out?
| 17 |
It's called neural adaption. You are sensitive to changing stimuli. Constant stimuli are filtered out by your nervous system. All of your senses have this quality. For instance, your eyes constantly move even when you're looking straight ahead in order to negate this. Otherwise, your vision would fade just like the taste of your yogurt drink.
| 11 |
|
ELI5: Why are torrent sites and it's torrenters not being attacked/arrested?
|
I've always wondered why nobody, such as the federal government hasn't really cracked everyone down including its users
I am aware of he takedowns of megaupload, the pirate bay and also demonoid (which I'm sad to see go down right now since I'm an avid user)
ELI5 please :)
| 17 |
Regularly going after individual users doesn't really make sense, because it costs a lot more to prosecute people than the damage you do just by downloading. But going after the *providers* isn't likely to work; torrent sites get all the protections that search engines do, which means that as long as they don't actively try to get people to violate copyright there's not much of a case against them. So there's just not all that much the government can do about it.
| 10 |
ELI5: The science behind "Red skies at night: sailors delight. Red skies in morning: sailors take warning."
| 737 |
It wholly depends on where you live, in tropical regions this makes no sense at all but in temperate climates weather systems move predominantly west to east.
Red skies are usually caused by sunlight reflecting off the underside of cloud cover. If there's red sky in the morning, the sun is shining from the east hitting cloud cover coming from the west, i.e. there are clouds on the way. Red sky in the evening is exactly the opposite, clear skies to the west and clouds departing to the east.
| 559 |
|
How does this work? Water floats?
|
Water and sound? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uENITui5_jU
| 32 |
It's due to the syncing of the sound frequency (24 hz, or 24 oscillations per second) with the frame rate (24 frames per second). This is essentially the same effect as you get when propellers or car hubcaps appear to be stationary on film footage.
| 33 |
ELI5: How is it that homework help websites such as Chegg and Coursehero are somehow able to remove all other answers from the internet?
|
Before these sites were around I would have no trouble googling my problem and finding help on a solution. Now, all of these answers are behind a paywall and rarely seem to be able to find anything anywhere else.
| 350 |
It is nearly impossible to remove something completely from the internet. Your answers are most likely still there. If they're not it could be because the hosting Website is no longer online.
What's most likely happening is that pages like Chegg and Coursehero have a higher rank on the search engine and thus being displayed first. The "old" pages are being pushed further down as their rank isn't as high.
Another explanation might be that those pages pay the search engines to get displayed on the first page (think of it like ads).
Try to alter your search query in a way that it looks less like a homework related question. That increases your chances of getting to free answers. You can even try advanced search queries to exclude those homework pages from the search results.
| 285 |
[Blade Runner 2049] How many real humans exist compared to replicants/non-humans?
| 22 |
Almost impossible to tell.
Off planet who the fuck knows. On planet it might be as high as 10%
The real issue here is how much "behind the scenes" labor is done by replicant.
It looks like Batistsa at the beginning was hiding as a human on the giant farm. If we assume everyone there was human it might be dramatically lower than 10% since humans are doing a lot of the dirty work.
| 21 |
|
[Elderscrolls] What are the Khaijit's views on cat ownership?
| 20 |
The Khajiit aren't that big on Ownership in general. Culturally, things are largely shared with no direct individual control, which is why Khajiit typically get a bad rap for being thieves. They take what they need, regardless of who 'owns' it.
There is a bred of Khajiit, the Afliq, which is almost indistinguishable from a House Cat though. like the Senche, the Khajiit view them as siblings, not as domesticated animals, because, in a very literal sense, they are.
| 34 |
|
ELI5: How are we able to hold and engage in conversations, seemingly without thinking?
|
When someone strikes up a conversation we are able to respond quite fast. There's usually not much of a pause when it's the other person's turn to speak. Is this just reaction? Every conversation is a bit different, yet no deep thought ever seems to cross our mind when engaged in conversation.
| 135 |
You _are_ thinking, deeply and intensely, when engaging in conversation. But this thinking is something your brain is innately wired to do. It's as natural a human behavior as walking, or looking out on the world and recognizing what you are seeing, or using a tool. All these are really intense and difficult problems that we tackle automatically and easily, because we are adapted for doing just these things.
Contrast this with doing algebra or playing chess. These are things we have no innate ability to do, so we have to do it the "long way" by applying our general-purpose conscious intelligence to the problem. Holding a pencil and writing out 124 + 139 = 263 is a _vastly_ more difficult problem than solving the equation, but most people could accomplish the writing without "thinking", while the math problem takes some thought, since the motor-control and visual recognition are things the brain is primed to do, unlike addition.
This threw a lot of early AI researchers, who originally expected things like machine vision to be easily solved on the way to conquering big problems like chess and advanced math. They learned it was much easier to make a computer beat the world champion in chess than to make one engage in a sensible conversation. Which gives you an idea how difficult it is.
| 77 |
CMV: College students who had their classes moved online do not deserve tuition refunds
|
Students at my university and many others are petitioning to have their tuition reimbursed because the quality of their education has dropped due to classes being moved online. I think this is downright silly, and it makes us all look extremely entitled.
First, we are still getting units for our work, and these credits still count towards our degrees. This is essentially what we are all paying for in the first place, and there are no changes on this front. Yes, we are also paying for a quality education, but (at least in my experience) the quality has not dropped to such a point that a refund is merited.
Second, this petition neglects the fact that professors, TA's, and other faculty have worked tirelessly to make this transition work. Asking for a refund at this point completely disregards the hard work that they have put in to help continue our education. It just comes across as disrespectful IMO.
NOTE: This does not apply to other campus fees that no longer serve a purpose (student fees for gym memberships, etc.). It also doesn't apply to students where in person instruction is completely necessary (art / theater schools).
CMV
| 35 |
There are international students who live in dorms that have been shut down that have no alternatives of living in the country. A peer's girlfriend was essentially required to move from the United States to Japan. She may not have internet at her home. How is she not entitled to a refund if she cannot complete her classes?
I have working poor peers who relied on library internet to complete their online classes. Internet they no longer have access to, and while many ISPs have made free internet available for 60 days, if you don't live in an area with coverage you just lose out.
Do those people not deserve refunds? If they do why are you qualifying refunds instead of just offering them to everyone. It's bound to be more cost effective to offer it unilaterally to offer it to everyone than to start a highly specific qualification process for refunds on an administrative cost basis.
| 62 |
[Avengers] What happens when Hawkeye runs out of arrows?
|
It can’t be possible for his quiver to hold more than fifteen arrows. Some of the battles he participates in take hours. And I’m talking about the pre-*Endgame*, non-Ronin Hawkeye, with no sword to also use as a weapon. So, does he just stop fighting altogether? Does he use his bow as a melee weapon?
| 782 |
He did run out of arrows, in the first *Avengers*. He scavenged more arrows from the corpses of his enemies, used his bow as a staff, and acted as a spotter for the others. He's also really good with a sword.
| 960 |
[Marvel]What are the least friendly and the least neighborhood versions of Spider-man?
| 206 |
An alternate-universe comic had a guy who was bitten by the spider going completely off the deep end - he became a psychotic monster who devolved into a giant spider-monster, engaged in cannibalism and impregnated his girlfriend with spider eggs, which ripped her apart and devoured her body.
Morlun shows up at the end and kills him, devouring his soul.
| 191 |
|
ELI5: Why do ears start bleeding if a person is in a free-fall in a plane?
|
What I'm referring to is this article https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/travel/2018/07/passengers-ears-bleed-as-depressurised-plane-plummets.html
What's the process behind this?
| 58 |
Your ear has an enclosed ear space between the ear drum and the inner ear. This is known as the middle ear, and it contains 3 small bones that transfer vibrations from your ear drum to the vibration detection hardware in your inner ear. There is a small passage between this space and your nose to balance pressure, but this passage is normally closed, only opening when you yawn. If a person has a head cold, then this passage can be completely blocked by thick mucus.
If the pressure in a plane drops rapidly, this passage may not allow air out of the middle ear fast enough. The weakest point in the middle ear is the eardrum, which can rupture. This causes bleeding.
| 54 |
CMV: The United States should base the elections solely on the popular vote.
|
The claim that the electoral college was set up to avoid populists winning elections may have been true, but it was set up in a time where political parties weren't a thing in the US and frankly, it also makes it seem like it was set up due to fear of the average person's stupidity. All the electoral college has done is allow populists *within* political parties to win elections.
There is also the concern that if the electoral college was removed, candidates would only campaign in New York or California and disregard the rest of the nation, but what people don't realize is that this *already happens* but instead of highly populated states, it's swing states. Candidates spend majority of their resources campaigning in these swing states and they typically get to elect who the next president will be. Only in those states does everyones vote truly matter.
If the electoral college was abolished, this would actually make candidates campaign all over the country far more proportionately. Millions of republicans don't bother voting in California or New York because their vote essentially doesn't matter. Millions of democrats don't bother voting in Texas or Georgia because their vote also essentially does't matter. If the electoral college was gone, people who previously didn't vote in these "for sure" states would have an actual reason to vote, this will cause candidates to campaign in states that they previously wouldn't even bother with and not only focus on a select few swing states. Voter turn out would also increase dramatically. In turn, the president that actually gets elected is far more representative of the people. States are a lot more "purple" than people think.
And probably the most important reason is that the electoral college allows for the less popular candidate to win presidency. There has never been a president that lost the popular vote that was well received by the public, **there is a reason they LOST the popular vote**. Majority of the time, the popular vote typically aligns with the electoral vote anyways, so it won't be such a major change. Only now the hiccup of when the less popular candidate wins will be eliminated.
| 39 |
The whole point of EC, is that you vote for electors - not for President. The assumption was that the populous was too stupid, too busy, and too uninformed to make a decision about the Presidency, and that they would vote for a local town elder, who would then go to Washington DC and meet the candidates and decide on their behalf.
Under EC, there shouldn't even be a popular vote, and people shouldn't be voting for President indirectly through electors - but rather directly voting for electors who then make the decision on behalf of their community (not unlike how Congress works).
It is the fact that we have essentially abandoned this model, which is why EC looks so bad - because no one knows their electors, and no one has faith in their electors, because they have become merely in-betweens. The EC would make a lot more sense, if Presidents stopped directly appealing to the public, and Electors made a substantially bigger push on the local level.
But as long as Presidents directly appeal to the people, and not to the electors - yeah, we probably should just switch to popular vote.
| 29 |
CMV: Businesses do not have the right to manipulate online reviews
|
I once saw a therapist who had an extremely detrimental effect on my mental health. I decided to leave a brief online review on Google Business about my experiences with the therapist. "Mysteriously", the honest review somehow got deleted, restoring her to a five-star rating... thanks to a flawless review authored by her co-worker.
I reposted my review again, and she had the new review deleted. I decided to leave detailed reviews on various health care provider review sites. In response, she essentially threatened that I did not remove the reviews, or if I were to ever post another negative review about her in the future, she would sue me.
We undeniably live in the age of the internet. Customers look to online reviews before spending money. Therapy is expensive, and a huge time/emotional commitment, so if my therapist was able to get away with editing her online reviews, I can imagine that other companies, especially those with more money than my therapist who charge less for their services/products, can get away with this kind of manipulation as well.
I believe that for any business, online review manipulation is dishonest, highly unethical, and, in the United States, in violation with the First Amendment. Thus, companies do not have the right to edit their reviews and/or otherwise silence those that speak out against their services.
**EDIT:** As some posters have rightfully brought to my attention, sometimes companies need to remove reviews that consist of spam, illegal content, etc. I read over Google's guidelines for acceptable reviews, as far as I can tell, my reviews passed them. I don't know how my reviews got deleted, but I have seen third-party companies online that can help manipulate online reviews for a fee. Some would argue that businesses should be able to manipulate their reviews if they pay for it and can get someone else to do it. However, I believe that no business has the right to remove content that is merely unflattering and not objectively bad.
| 22 |
>I believe that for any business, online review manipulation is dishonest, highly unethical
The flip side is highly unethical too though. The general public manipulates reviews all the time. Usually this is for product releases and not services, but the point stands. Businesses have a right to protect themselves from undue bad press. Especially when the product or service is inherently political. What's more you are making a vendetta out of this negative review. It's clearly more than a *just* a review for you.
>in violation with the First Amendment.
It is in no way a violation of the first amendment to control the release of information about your business in a way that is currently legal. The first amendment protects citizens from the government. Not citizens from private businesses.
The threat of the lawsuit is foolish from her. Keep doing what you want. If she sues you she'll lose, because she would't be able to substantiate damages and you are just commenting about your honest experience.
| 11 |
Eli5: If heat from the sun is radiated onto Earth, doesn’t that mean multiple layers of air are being heated up? If so, why isn’t the top layer really hot and the lower ones cold?
| 11,687 |
Air is not good at absorbing radiation, which is evident from the fact that you can see very clearly in the air. This is possible because light waves pass through the air with little interference. The same is true for infrared radiation, which is what heats up Earth mostly. Rather than being absorbed by the air it’s absorbed by the Earth’s surface. The surface, in turn, heats up the layer of air next to it. This down-to-surface air then rises up, because warm air is less dense than cold air, making that colder upper air settle down somewhere else. This process causes most of what we call weather, by the way.
| 10,835 |
|
ELI5: They said "the water doesn't have an expiration date, the plastic bottle does" so how come honey that comes in a plastic bottle doesn't expire?
| 19,891 |
Whoever said that is wrong.
The FDA and IWBA can't find any evidence that age matters to plastic water bottles. The FDA has ruled that there is no limit to the shelf life of bottled water, and no company has even insinuated that the expiration is related to the plastic.
In 1987, New Jersey passed a law requiring all bottles of water to be stamped with an expiration date 2 years after the bottling date. Since you can't identify which bottles will wind up shipped to NJ, companies just stamped all bottles with a 2-year expiration to ensure compliance.
They never passed that law for Honey, which is why plastic honey bottles don't have an expiration.
Although the law was repealed in 2006, companies had figured out people will throw out "expired" water and buy more, it actually increases sales, so they kept printing it "voluntarily".
| 14,345 |
|
ELI5: What's the difference between ©, ® and ™?
| 944 |
When you make something creative (a book, a website, a painting), you get something called *copyright*. This means that you have a right to determine how people copy it; if they want to make a copy, they have to ask you for permission. The C-in-circle symbol means that the thing it's printed in/on/whatever is copyrighted.
When you sell stuff, you have certain words and phrases that are connected to your advertising for it. This includes the name of whatever you're selling, but it can also cover things like taglines and memorable characters from your ads or something. This is called *trademark*, and the TM means that the phrase right before it is trademarked.
Now, you can *register* trademarks with the federal government; prove that you've been using it for a while, and that people associate the trademark with you, and it goes on the official list. When you do this, other people get less leeway in using your trademark, and it's a lot harder for you to lose the right to it. So when a trademark is *registered*, people use the R-in-circle instead.
| 589 |
|
Why do whales breach? Is it to draw attention to themselves or to a certain area?
|
I never understood why they do that. It just seems like it takes a lot of effort on their part to do a “bellyflop”
| 20 |
The best guesses are that it's done in relation to hunting for food or attracting mates (some species have been observed to breach more frequently during mating season)
It's also very likely it's a simple form of play and they do it because it's fun
| 43 |
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