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[ "Actually it is because most of people eat that food not so often, so their gut bacteria doesn't know how to digest it, but researches shows that if you eat legumes every day for 21 day your bacteria will adapt and you will get maximum 3% gas more than usual if at all", "For things like beans and greens, the items themselves contain a sugar called alpha-galactose. A certain enzyme is needed to break that down properly, and some people have more of it than others (and levels can vary within a person at times, too). The enzyme you need is called alpha-galactisodase, and if you don't have enough of that, it's left undigested to ferment with gut bacteria, like the other commenter said.\n\nFun fact: alpha-galactisodase is the main ingredient in Beano and is why it works. But any enzyme formulation containing that particular enzyme will help." ]

[ "The decay of false vacuum is a fascinating topic! I think there are multiple mechanisms for this to occur, and I don't know them all. The one I'm most familiar with is nucleation of bubbles of true vacuum.\n\nThat is, at each point in spacetime there's always a non-zero chance of the Universe spontaneously decaying to the true vacuum from its false vacuum state (assuming we're in one). If this decay occurs in one place, then it the decay would begin to propagate outward in a \"bubble\" of true vacuum which, in most cases, expands outward at or near the speed of light.\n\nInteresting factoid: in the early Universe, we expect this may have happened on at least one occasion, and since the Universe then was so energetic, the decay would have occured all over. These bubbles would violently collide, producing gravitational radiation. Some day - several decades down the line, at least! - we hope to observe this background of gravitational waves.", "A number of things. The system would under go some type of phase transition. This is how symmetry breaking models work. You start out in completely symmetric, unstable state. To reach a stable state, which nature tends to do, you must break the symmetry of the system and therefore the vacuum must decay into a lower energy state. This is also how we believe the universe began. Something known as an inflaton field was in a false vacuum state, decayed into its true vacuum, in doing so forced an exponential metric inflation. " ]

[ "The spacecraft re-enters through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds. For an orbital vehicle, it would have to go through the atmosphere from Mach 25 to subsonic speed before landing. Supersonic airflow is heated due to air compression. As the air flow is slowed down tremendously, its kinetic energy is converted to heat. That heat would then be conducted to the vehicle's skin. This is why spacecraft have \"ablative\" heat shields, that is, heat shields that absorb the heat and melt away with the heat. This keeps the vehicle cool.", "Moving through the air or having a fan push the air away from you will get you away from the air you've heated up with your body... The same goes for anything with an engine.\n\nAbove a certain speed (depending on air density) you are generating a lot of friction against the air which is a greater source of heat then the cool air can absorb at the rate it does.\n\nHere's a neat experiment for you. rub your hands together and while doing so increase the pressure between them by slowly pressing harder as you rub. This increase in pressure acts like the increase in air density as an object descends into the atmosphere.", "the reason YOU get cold is evaporation. That only happens because there is moisture on your skin. If that effect was not present, the only temperature change you'd see would be an increase, because of friction. However at any speed you could go, it would be negligible. But when things reenter the atmosphere, they have been accelerating in a vacuum, and have reached speeds many times that of even their terminal velocity. That speed is enough to measurable heat it.", "The answer is actually fairly simple: those two reactions are simply caused by entirely different mechanisms. \n\nYour movement through the air cools your skin because of the temperature difference - specifically, temperature conduction. You are significantly warmer than the air surrounding your body, so this heat is transferred from your body to the air, cooling your skin and warming the air. This reaction happens when you're standing still, too, but moving (or standing in a windy area) ensures a constant flow of cool air to your skin, making the temperature transfer more pronounced.\n\nHowever, the reason objects entering (or re-entering) the atmosphere heat up is, for the most part, not friction (though this is a common misconception), but mainly *compression* of the air in the object's path. Essentially, because the object is moving so fast (even a spacecraft only re-entering from LEO is moving at several kilometers *per second* when entering the atmosphere), the air in its path doesn't have time to get pushed aside by its body, so it violently slams into the front of the object or spacecraft. The vast majority of the generated heat is not friction (though it does play a part), but the sheer energy released by compressing air to such an extent.\n\nSo, in conclusion: The spacecraft also experiences heat conduction, but it no longer cools the craft because of the friction and air compression caused by the craft's speed.", "Well when you're moving fast the air that you're heating up around you is being stripped away and replaced with air that you haven't heated up. There isn't enough friction with the air at that speed to heat you up significantly. However, when an object is going at very high speeds (i.e. falling through the atmosphere) there would be enough friction with the air to burn said object up. As for the second question, I imagine that it would be a line if you graphed it, because if you were already at room temperature, you wouldn't want to move, but if you were far under, you would have to move pretty fast. I'm really not sure about the last one though.", "The other answers in the thread are great but this really isn't a question of physics.\n\nYour nerves feel quickly-moving air as cold because it's cooler than your skin, and if it's constantly moving then there's no warm layer of air around your body.\n\nIf you reentered the atmosphere as fast as spaceships do, you'd burn up too. The heating is primarily caused by compression of the air in front of the falling object." ]

[ "National Sovereignty is a very big deal so anytime a country (especially a country with nukes) starts to reject previously agreed upon borders it is a big deal.\n\nThe reason you should care is that Russia has been for quite sometime trying to maintain some degree of influence over several former Soviet republics. As some of these states move away from Russia, it is going to cause conflict and potentially a full blown war.", "likely to evolve into nothing\n\ncrimea was granted to ukraine as a restitution gift and well over half the population is in favour of annexation\n\nthey already speak russian and maintain russian culture\n\nputin is a total dick but once this blows over they will pay lower taxes to an equally corrupt government and receive additional social benefits\n\nyeah, its a huge problem that a part of a country is essentially being taken over but it hardly sets precedent for speculations of a third world war\n\n" ]

[ "Most helmets are pretty similar in basic construction, actually. They're made of a layer of impact protection (frequently polystyrene) with padding for comfort/fit and a shell to spread out the impact, and to cover and protect the impact layer.\n\nAfter that, the design varies to suit the activity. A motorcycle helmet has to handle more force in an accident than a bicycle helmet, so it's built heavier and stronger to match. On the flip side, a bicyclist is sweating more, and isn't going fast enough for the wind to cool a motorcycle helmet, so they have something lighter with good ventilation and airflow, but sacrificing some coverage (although there's exceptions - downhill riders, for example, wear something similar to a motorcycle helmet)", "They are built for different purposes.\n \nBoth use Polystrene. Polystyrene is great at absorbing impacts but is really only a one time use - try pushing down on some and you'll see it won't return to its normal shape.\n\nA bicycle helmet is made of plastic and some polystyrene. The outer plastic shell will absorb most of the impact from a standard bicycle crash because it is usually quite thick. Anything else will be absorbed by the polystyrene. It does not need to have a large amount of polystyrene because it doesn't need to absorb a huge amount of impact.\n\nA motorcycle helmet has much more polystyrene and uses a thin fibreglass shell. It uses way more polystyrene because in the event of an impact it'll need to absorb much more to keep the rider safe. The fibreglass will barely absorb anything.\n\nThis is why it is important motorbike riders replace helmets after ANY impact. Even if you just drop it from a few feet, replace it - more damage to the polystyrene is more damage to your head if you crash." ]

[ "I don't have an answer, but I *would* like to tack on to the question: would Mars *remain* in a hospitable zone for any length of time? Or would the sun continue expanding at a sufficient rate so that it would simply be within the transition from one inhospitable climate directly to another?", "Mars is already in the habitable zone, the issue is that it does not have sufficient atmosphere to maintain an environment water can stay liquid much less support life. \n\nWhen the sun expands it will likely engulf Mars as well. ", "What is the duration of the transition? I imagine a star \"going Red Giant\" is a rather violent and relatively quick transition - once the fuel dynamics change, the star expands to its new balance.\n\nCan anyone speak on how quickly this might take place? Hours? Days? Decades? The faster and more violent it is, the more chances of disrupting Martian orbit. And less time for sublimated gases to escape Martian atmosphere, though the Solar Wind may decrease.\n\nWith enough gases, Mars may experience an induced magnetosphere like Venus, and retain an atmosphere.", "I've only seen one other person mention the atmosphere of Mars in these answers, and that kind of bugs me.\n\nYou see, to have life as we know it develop, you need some shielding. Shielding like the combination of an atmosphere and a strong magnetic field. The atmosphere will help protect the planet from space debris (along with providing stuff like gas for stuff like breathing or whatever). The magnetic field will protect the atmosphere from the solar winds, and curbing solar radiation a bit.\n\nYes, Mars technically has a magnetic field, like Earth. But that's like comparing a matchbox car to a monstrous dump truck that works in a strip mine. It's not strong enough to retain a good mix of atmospheric gasses, and definitely not strong enough to help protect the surface from radiation.\n\nTl;dr: doesn't matter, Mars' magnetic field is too weak anyways", "I am more interested in the expansion of sun? Thats the first i heard.", "For awhile, yes. But we're just talking about temperature here, which is actually the *least* complicated problem that needs to be solved before people could live on Mars. The lack of air, the radiation, and the toxic soil would still be a problem.\n\nOh. And as Mars warmed up, all that ice and remaining water that people talk about using to support a colony would evaporate.\n\n", "When the sun has consumed all its hydrogen and moves in helium fusion it will expand and become a red giant.\n\nHere's a link discussing it:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIn the link above they say Neptune and Pluto will be in the habitable range but they themselves don't have habitable environments. There a possibility a moon or two of theirs may become habitable.", "Mars is already in the habitable zone (as liquid water used to flow across its surface). The reason it's no longer habitable (while still in the zone) is bc it's iron core solidified, so it lost the vast majority of its magnetic field, and its atmosphere (and therefore water vapor) was stripped away by cosmic rays (the solar wind).", "Mars already is in the Habitable Zone, the issue is it's small size making it unable to hold onto a thick atmosphere and sustain geological activity.\n\nEarth has remained habitable despite the brightening Sun because of a negative feedback mechanism that locks CO2 away in limestone, but about a billion years from now CO2 levels will reach 0 and this climate regulation will stop working. That represents when Earth exits the Habitable Zone. At this point nothing can stop the temperatures from increasing and Earth will become a Venus clone.\n\nAn Earth-sized Mars would be the same. It would have Earth-like temperatures despite being farther from the sun because this climate-regulating feedback mechanism would give it much higher levels of CO2. I don't know the math, but I would guess that an Earth-sized Mars would far enough out that it will remain habitable right up to when the sun starts turning into a Red Giant.", "Temperature isn't the problem for Mars. Mass is. It's low mass has robbed it of much of its atmosphere, with water in particular escaping into space, and it has also robbed it of the volcanism that would otherwise replenish its atmosphere." ]

[ "It's mostly spikes of difference in potential that travels through the nerves. Upon reaching the end of the nerve, at the axone, the difference in potential provokes the release of neurotransmitters. For the muscular nerves, try looking up neuromuscular junction.\nI don't think there's a protocol, in a sense that I don't think there is a symbolic form of communication between muscles and nerves. The basic signal is a bunch of spikes of potential. Signals from neurmuscular junctions of a given muscle add up to provoke muscle's response in a complex way.", "The output of a neuron is a voltage spike along its axon (axon ~ output signal wire). The amplitude and width of the voltage spikes are fixed, so information is generally encoded in the frequency of spiking. \n\nTo drive a muscle to contract, the motor neuron connected to it will fire voltages pulses into it more frequently.\n\nThe protocol for all neurons is roughly the same. For any given neuron, voltage pulses are received as input from some number of other neurons, the cell decides what its output should be, then it sends some output pulses along its output.", "Action potentials are all-or-none and pretty homogeneous across neurons, meaning that the spike itself is just a \"hey!\" signal. This signal is often described as binary, but it's not, quite. In a binary representation, 1 and 0 convey equal information; in a neural system, the presence of a spike conveys a lot more information than the absence of one. The complexity of neural signaling is an emergent property of the network - which neurons connect to which others, how strong these connections are, whether the connections are excitatory or inhibitory, the timing of other inputs onto the same output neuron, etc. It's a complex symphony of chemistry, electricity, diffusion, and molecular dynamics. It's also a highly dynamic system, so a set of inputs that triggers a neuron to fire on Monday may not do the same thing on Thursday.\n\nThis doesn't mean that understanding the nervous system is completely hopeless. We've made a lot of progress over the decades, and at this point have a rough map pretty well figured out. We've also mapped out some specific circuits in detail (for example, we have a pretty good understanding of neural processing in the retina, at least for the frog). For others, though, the way in which information is encoded is still mysterious. For example, we can't easily predict the pattern of activity on the auditory nerve that results from any but the simplest sounds. This indicates, to me at least, that there's no single way that information is represented within the nervous system.\n" ]

[ "The reason is that a camera is basically a array of small sensors elements that detects how many photons (light particles) that collides at each element during. Since the number of photons sent out per time unit is so low you would need to record for a long time to be able to distinguish the actual signal from the noise. However if you ''record'' too long the elements will ''overflow'' and ''leak into neighbouring elements'' (causing so called blloming artefacts which is what you see if you take a photo of the sun). Therefore it is easy to construct a camera that would capture great images of glow-in-the-dark products but it would require you to hold it stable for a long time and be useless in normal lighting since everything would become white due to blooming.", "Are you using a cell phone camera? You need a DSLR, and the trick is to shoot the photo in manual mode with a super slow shutter speed. It greatly helps to have a tripod and a remote control, since slow shutter speeds can make the photo blurry if the camera moves slightly.\n\nIf using a normal point-and-shoot digital camera, you have little control over the functionality, and thus the camera automatically compensates for lack of light by making the shots grainy. And as a rule of thumb, never use flash.\n\n[Here's a photo I took of my glow-in-the-dark LEGO ghost minifigures under a blacklight against a black background in the dark, using a slow shutter speed.](_URL_0_) This was taken with my Nikon DSLR, and with a tripod, a camera remote control, and manual focus." ]

[ "There isn't necessarily a part of our brain that \"records memories\" as memories are all encoded and retrieved in different parts of the cortex. Yet the part of the brain that transfers memories from short term to long term is the hippocampus. I'm assuming that alcohol interferes with the function of the hippocampus and therefore memories are way less likely to be transferred from STM to LTM. ", "Fun Fact: it you get really drunk you can remember everything you forgot from the last time you blacked out. It's a theory known as E=MChammered", "Drunk people will tell the same story again and again, and not necessarily remember it. I don't think it's sleep that necessarily causes it.", "great answers from a previous post: _URL_0_", "There is a deference between being drunk and being blackout (duh), so while I'm not sure about your question, it was explained to me that your brain literally does not record new memories when you are blackout. That is why when someone tells you what you did when you were drunk you might be able to conjure up a fuzzy memory of it, while if you were blackout, nothing will make you remember it.\n\nI think forgetting things while you sleep is just because that happens anyway (like I don't remember all the details of my previous day?) and it is exacerbated by being drunk, making it more obvious." ]

[ "I think being able to interbreed and the resulting offspring is still fertile has something to do with it. When they can't breed and/or the offspring is infertile, they will have separated significantly enough to not be considered so closely related.. I am most definitely not an expert, so take this with every bit of skepticism.", "Try coming at it from a different angle. Imagine you are immortal and you've seen all species branch off from the first ones and expect to see more come and go. For you then, the idea of a species is very fluid, one species experiences transition phases that lead to it becoming two or five or fifty species. Instead of trying to categorize organisms into this species and that species, you simply accept the fluid nature of chromosomes passing from one generation to the next and getting mixed around and resorted. \n\nSo to answer your questions:\n1. The multiple breeds of dogs and the multiple species of wolves are part of a transition phase in the Canis genus that will probably result in multiple easily distinguishable species but who knows, maybe they will merge back together or one will die out leaving only the other and rendering your question moot or the transitional amalgum of different varieties will persist as long as humans.\n2. Well if you dropped a bunch of great danes and a shih tzus in the woods together they probably wouldn't/couldn't interbreed so by some argument even different varieties of dogs are different species.", "The problem here is \"what is a species\"? From a macro-organismal scale, we'd consider any two populations that can cross and produce fertile offspring are simply two subpopulations of the same species. From this definition (despite what Linnean taxonomy would have you believe) dogs and wolves are the same species. (N.B. not all biologists subscribe to this, but this is the most mainstream definition we have).\n\nWhat often allows us to demarcate between species is reproductive isolation. This could be to pre-zygotic effects (their gentitatlia won't match up or sperm-egg fusion cannot occur) or post-zygotic (genetic incompatibilities or overall low fitness in an environment).\n\nAt what point will dogs and wolves stop being able to interbreed? Most of the diversity we see in dog breeds is simply standing variation that exists in wolves--in the relatively short time dogs have been domesticated (approx~30, 000 years ago) there are likely very few mutations that would arise. Dogs just have been selectively bred in a myriad different directions. Dogs of smaller breeds, like chihuahuas, probably are already productively isolated from wolves, just due to their small size. As for medium-sized and larger dogs, it would likely take many, many more generations of reproductive isolation before would prevent a fertile cross between dogs and wolves, likely on the order of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years." ]

[ "[Kuru is a prion disease.](_URL_0_) \nA prion is a a protein that turns other proteins into copies of itself. \nThe proteins that Kuru can work with are usually located in the brain. \nWhen you eat that infected brain, it contains the Kuru prion, which then starts turning those proteins into more of the prion. Then you die. \n \nSo in conclusion, it's something else, though if I had to place it, I'd say it's close to a virus. It's not really a living thing in many senses, but it reproduces itself. \n", "You don't get it from eating any human brain anymore than you get AIDS from just having sex with anybody.\n\nYou get it from someone who is already infected and the way you get it is via eating their brains.\n\nKuru is not a virus or bacteria but a prion diseases. Prions are proteins that are somehow folded the wrong way, the bad thing about them is that they make other proteins also fold themselves up in the wrong way.\n\nAnother disease like it is the mad-cow disease and the related Creutzfeld-Jakob disease.\n\nThe mad-cow likely cam about the same way kuru did, because we were feeding cows (who are normally mostly vegetarians) feed that contained among other things the ground up brains of other cows. This way one cow with the problem became many cows with the problem and by eating those cows and specifically their brains humans may have become infected.\n\nOverall it is not a big problem as long as you don't eat any brains of anything or at least not the brains of anything or anyone who might have acted a little strange.\n\nStill it is healthiest to avoid cannibalism as much as possible." ]

[ "Normally no, however if you try to make a slingshot off an object with very uneven gravity, then it might make a difference. Imagine a planet where half of it is made of something very heavy, and the other half something very light, in such a way that you experience stronger pull when you're facing the \"heavy\" side. If this was the case, then rotation would influence the gravity assist.", "It only depends on the orbital motion, not on the rotation. For all planets apart from Uranus the two happen to be roughly aligned (although Venus rotates in the \"wrong\" direction).\n\nTechnically there is an effect from [frame-dragging](_URL_0_) but it is way too small to matter." ]

[ "actually yes, but its very difficult. To make an optimal antenna you need it to be wavelength/4. For the FM spectrum the wavelength is a meter, so the antenna needs to be about 3/4 of a meter or about 2 and a half feet. Visible light is from 400nm to 700nm so the antenna would need to be from 100nm to 200nm. That is about a hundredth of the width of the smallest human hairs.\n\nThis is actually possible to do though. My professor got his doctorate making NIR (about 1 micron wave length, 2x that of visible light) antennas. The process for making visible antennas is difficult but possible.", "actually yes, but its very difficult. To make an optimal antenna you need it to be wavelength/4. For the FM spectrum the wavelength is a meter, so the antenna needs to be about 3/4 of a meter or about 2 and a half feet. Visible light is from 400nm to 700nm so the antenna would need to be from 100nm to 200nm. That is about a hundredth of the width of the smallest human hairs.\n\nThis is actually possible to do though. My professor got his doctorate making NIR (about 1 micron wave length, 2x that of visible light) antennas. The process for making visible antennas is difficult but possible.", "What you are talking about is basically fiber optic communication. \nThe main limiting factor for visible light communication is signal degradation due to the atmosphere, or simply something blocking the line of sight to the transmitter. if you remove those two factors by shooting the beam of light down a glass fiber, you've got an extremely efficient, and extremely fast form of communication.\n\nRadio frequencies are used for most long-distance communication for two major reasons: Firstly, you don't need to lay cable to send the signal. Secondly, they are both easy and cheap to generate, transmit and receive. Lastly, they are very reliable. Radio waves are one of the few forms of radiation that can pass right through clouds, rain, and many structures." ]

[ "Thats not necessarily the case though. For instance, Pokemon Rumble World has a fairly long loading screen. But for the most part, its because games on the 3ds are not as resource heavy.\n\nI think you can see why [This game](_URL_0_) would load faster than [This one](_URL_1_).", "Not all 3ds games don't have loading screens. Like this Lego marvel avengers game I got it has loading screens. " ]

[ "Try pushing a wall. Harder. No Harder than that. Did it move? No? well just because you didn't actually didn't do any work doesn't mean you didn't exert a force.\n\nForces have nothing to do with velocity. Power cares about velocity.\n\nTo get a large amount of torque from an engine, for starters you need a engine that can put out a lot of power. But if your engine is moving fast, then all the power is being eaten up by the speed and not the force. You can shift the speed down with a gearbox, but that is inefficient. Might as well just design a high power engine that turns slowly so all the power is due to the high torque and not the rotation speed.", "There's nothing intrinsic to torque that limits RPM. Since we generally don't want our motors to blow up, we usually govern or throttle them in some way. \n\nYou are right that any motor with unbalanced torque will continue to spin faster until the forces balance or something gives. This is directly analagous to linear acceleration. \n\nNow let's talk about practical motors. \n\nThe important equation is: Power = Torque * rotation speed.\n\nOne interesting thing that arises from this is that, using gears or pulleys, we can easily convert torque to speed and vice versa. It follows that we can design our motor to deliver a certain amount of power without worrying too much about torque or speed. \n\nAlso notice that they faster we spin our motor, the more powerful it gets. The price is that the motor wears faster and the centripetal forces get very large once the motor gets big or fast. \n\nSo practically, we can take one of two directions to design a motor for a specific output: we can make a small motor that spins fast or we can make a big motor that spins slow. The first motor will have a high power or weight ratio but will be expensive to build, expensive to run and expensive to maintain. In a motorcycle, race car or aircraft, the power-to-weight gains outweigh the costs making this the usual choice. On the other hand, the big motor is very heavy for the amount of power it delivers but is comparatively cheap to build, run and maintain. That makes is the better choice for applications where weight is less important than cost such as trucks, ships and trains.\n\n", "Take a piece of foam. Let's use 'memory foam' they make pillows and mattresses out of, just for example.\n\nPlace a 1 oz. weight on top the foam. \n\nThat 1 oz. will always weight an ounce. It will always applying (due to gravity, in this scenario) one ounce of force against the foam. For ever and ever and ever. Probably won't make much of a dent in the foam, either.\n\nTake a 45 lb. weight (like the kind used in a gym) and place it on the foam. It'll apply 45 lb. of force; forever, and ever and ever. It'll make a bigger dent than 1 oz. =) \n\nThey won't continue to sink over time (assuming the foam doesn't break down or deteriorate). They'll sink initially and stay where they're at. Forever. Until removed. \n\nImagine a cheap battery operated fan. That fan has a little motor. Put a screw driver against a fan-blade and turn the fan on. It won't spin. It may even make noise or break. The amount of force it's capable of isn't going to change. (unless it breaks)\n\nPut a piece of speaker-wire against it and try the same. It'll spin and push the wire out of the way. The wire is weaker than the fan and it's motor. It's a low-torque motor, it doesn't need a lot of force to serve it's purpose. \n\nA cheap \"electric screwdriver\" can't drill through solid surfaces. If it doesn't have enough torque? The engine will stop. \n\nReally good drills will work just fine.. They can be dangerous, too! \n\nSo - a vehicle. A tractor-trailer hauling weight. A truck hauling a camper. An off-road vehicle pulling a truck out of mud. They require more torque than a fan. The engine requires strength and force. It has a purpose. Rotating speed (or RPM)? Maybe it's high, maybe it's not. \n\nDesigning an engine (engineering, lol) requires resources. Sure, you can make a bus really really fast. Give it a few jet engines. That's not practical tho. \n\nTorque requires energy. More torque, more energy. (think, kinetic energy). More energy, more gasoline. A race-car isn't hauling a boat. So, it makes more sense to take the energy used up by excess torque and use it for speed, instead. (different topic)\n\nSO, high torque engines do not have super high rotation speeds because they typically serve a purpose & don't need high rotation speeds. If the purpose is torque, the energy used to obtain a high rotation speed is often shifted (during the design process) to create torque. \n\nOk - applying more force but not increase the rotation speed. Torque is a measurement. It's constant. When an automotive engine creates torque? The measurement of torque is more comparable to an 'ability' - it 'CAN' create 'X' amount of torque. \n\nIf you turn the engine off, it gets no gasoline and there is no torque. Feed it gasoline... and depending how much gas and how quick? That will determine how much torque it will 'force' or 'create'. The amount of torque it creates is variable. (think: volume switch. a decibel measures the pressure of sound, but, an amplifier can create it & control it ...).\n\nSo, applying more force without increasing rotation speed is kinda a combination of [how the engine is designed] and [how the engine is operated]... \n\nBack to your question. Let's consider the foam. Place that same 45 lb. weight on a piece of concrete instead of foam. It's not making a dent and it's not doing so quickly. \n\nAt the end of the day, the missing variable, I think - is a consideration to how an engine is 'designed' ---- based on decisions made by a person. \n\nGREAT QUESTION" ]

[ "The British Pound Sterling is their official currency. The current exchange rate is 1 British pound per 1.45 us dollars. Quid is just a slang term for a pound. 1 pence is like a penny. Theres 100 pence in a british pound. It has the same name as the unit of weight because 1 pound of silver used to be a standard of currency.", "What about \"Bob\" then? Bob cratchitt only made fifteen Bob a week and he raised a family on it. But what was/is it?" ]

[ "Yes they do, the speed is based off of how fast we measured light to travel. Our current most accurate measurements would suggest that speed to be 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum. ", "Yes. Light, being massless, is uniquely sensitive to the *structure* of spacetime itself. In particular, it's sensitive to the conversion factor between space and time.\n\nOkay, that's a bit abstract. What does that mean? When we talk about time being the fourth dimension, of course we don't mean that time is literally, straight up, another dimension, because it doesn't even have the same *units* as space. Spatial distances can be measured in things like miles or meters. Time \"distances\" can be measured in things like seconds or years. So in order to compare time and space - and talk about time as a fourth dimension - we need to multiply time by something which converts time units into space units. That something has to have units of distance divided by time, which turns out to be the units that a speed has.\n\nAll massless particles - light particles, or photons, included - know that speed, and travel at it. For that reason we call it the speed of light!", "No, the speed of light in a medium other than vacuum depends on the wavelength. This is why prisms work in the way shown in the iconic Pink Floyd logo.\n\nThe classical answer is this. The quantum answer is more complicated, and involves the successive absorption and emission of photons. But I do not feel that the quantum answer is any more correct. In a nearly homogenous medium, the answer given by classical EM is extremely precise, and even works in the ionosphere of the earth.\n\n" ]

[ "He has a majority government despite having less than half of the popular vote.", "[These are a few reasons](_URL_0_)\n\nEDIT: Just noticed they changed the front page of that website, to see \"shit harper did\" click the tab at the top right", "Aside from most of Reddit (mostly liberal demographic) and Quebec, I don't personally see or know of many people who really dislike Harper. In fact, many are quite pleased with the job he's done so far.", "he raised retirement age to 67, made ei harder to get, wants ppl on welfare to have drug testing, cut daycare and childcare funding, cut healthcare funding, cut funding to single mums and low income families, cut funding for the arts, cut funding to public schools. when he isnt cutting funding to essential programs for our kids and our health heis planning to put a giant oil pipeline through very sensitive ecosystems in bc.\n\ngenerally his policies are bad for the environment, healthcare, education but they cater to the babyboomers coming financial needs so he got the vote. because we had two liberal parties running in the election (NDP and liberals) it was split. Last time the liberals were in power they created huge national debt so many people voted NDP a previously smaller party- but it ended up splitting the vote.\n\nSomeone else pointed out that redditors are younger and the youth in canada tend not to like harper. this bias is true. im 27 my bf is 25 we live in vancouver. our friends range from 21-45, i only know two people that voted for harper. and they voted based on economic policy, they both think he is a douche.\n\ncanada has gotten a lot of flack this year in the media because of the harper admin. Called out on human rights violation for a canadian citizen in guatanamo bay who was supposed to be extradited in oct of 2011 but the government wont acknowledge. He was called out for being \"un-canadian\" at an international environmental conference in rio earlier this year for some of his new policies: like shipping espectice (sp) to india so canada dosent have to destroy it as by first world standards its a bio-hazzard. ( it creates a rare and incurable lung cancer) The enbridge pipeline is a massive backstep in canada's economic policy. Harper was also called out at a recent g20 gathering for being the only country to agree w. russia and vote to open a trading route through the very sensitive eco-system of antarctic waters. \n\ni could go on at length, but you get the jist.\n\nIf you want to know about a canadian politician we did like, check out jack layton. He was the leader of the ndp party but lost his battle to cancer after the election. This has memorialised him a lot he is most remembered by some with his farewell letter: _URL_0_. Not everyone loves layton, but many people saw his platform as \"canadian.\"", "I understand that Reddit is very liberal, but I'd like to try to be a little more unbiased here. \n\nProbably the best answer I can give you is that a majority of Canadians are too liberal for Harper. In the last election, the Conservatives got roughly 40% of the vote with the remaining 60% going to left-leaning parties (the NDP, Liberals, BQ and Green). Having a (small-c) conservative government in a relatively (small L) liberal county will not win you the affection of the population.\n\nIf you want more specifics, many people (i.e. the 60% who votes liberal) do not like his dismantling of our environmental policies, his disdain for the democratic process in Canada, his unabashed support of Israel, his scrapping of the long gun registry and his omnibus crime bill.\n\nThat being said, not many people deny that he has managed the economy fairly well through the recession for the most part with a minority government.\n\nNow I don't think you will be hearing much good from anybody about Vic Toews. He introduced Bill C-30 which will allow police to force ISPs to give up our browsing information without a warrant as well as a couple other things. He was also very reluctant to fight for Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay where by all rights, he should have fought for the guy", "He's developed the oil sands by butchering the fishery act removing the need for environmental assessments and artificially inflating the dollar by not factoring the future costs of clean up\n\nHis tough on crime bill will put far more minor offenders away for madatory minimum sentences and simply antagonize an already broken system\n\nWe we're lied to about the cost of the f-35 being purchased\n\nin order to get Canada into the pacific free trade agreement he essentially threw away any bargaining abilities we had which may force us to adopt several internet freedom destroying laws\n\nWhile he has increased funding to R & D science he has slashed budgets in all other scientific areas including shutting down the Experimental Lakes area\n\nThere are a number of other reasons but these stick out to me personally" ]

[ "The 'h' in history wasn't always emphasized, so 'an' made more sense than 'a', (possibly in England) and the practice hasn't completely ended. Different sources have different views on the correct form, but generally either should work.", "Basically put, if a person emphasizes the h, it should be a history. If a person omits the h, or says it only very softly when they pronounce it then 'an 'istory is the correct form.", "It enrages me, too. \"It is an historic day...\" Aaaaargh.\n\nAlso, in early high school, I got into a big argument with a friend about it. Somehow she ended up insisting that it's correct to say 'an house'.", "The rule is use \"an\" ONLY if the SOUND of the first letter starts with a vowel. That is why...\n\nIn \"an hour\" hour is pronounced \"our\", \"o\" is a vowel so \"an\" is used.\n\nIn \"a historic\" historic is pronounced \"historic\", \"h\" is not a vowel so \"a\" is used.\n\nThe exception to this rule is when your local dialect pronounces it that way. So if you're a cockney Londoner who drops the \"h\" sound from the front of some words (including historic) then saying \"an 'istoric\" is perfectly OK.\n\nIT PISSES ME THE FUCK OFF IT'S SO WIDESPREAD ON TV. THE SCRIPT WRITERS ARE FUCKING MORONS. You are aggravated because you (like me) appreciate that flagrant breaking of rules is generally a bad idea. And it's such a simple fucking rule too. Urgh." ]

[ "I know that the brain, when it practices certain things repeatedly, will reinforce the neural connections that were created when the person is learning. So in a sense, yes, the brain does differ on a physical level after acquiring and practicing knowledge. But you can't artificially implant a skill in someone, nor can you determine what that knowledge is just by looking at the brain.", "Yes, yes, and yes.\n\nThe brain learns by, essentially, changing its shape - the shape of the neurons, or of their dendrites, or of their membranes (i.e. how many of what kind of receptors are there in this part, or that part, or etc). All these kinds of changes can be observed.\n\nIn principle and in practice, if you had data in all the right places, you could tell \"whether or not\" something in particular had been learned. It would also be theoretically possible, but far more difficult (or practically impossible), to blindly decode the information content of any observed change in the brain.\n\nFinally, yes, you could (again in principle) adjust or create synapses so that the brain/person now 'knows' something they didn't before. In practice it is hard to even imagine how it could be done, so I would again vote \"practically impossible\"." ]

[ "If you're paying attention to the road you're constantly aware of small sources of light - these could be the headlights or taillights of other cars, reflective stickers on lane markings or guardrails, road signs, stopped cars, or the flashing light on an emergency vehicle. You're also pretty constantly looking ahead, to the rear, to both side view mirrors, and over your shoulder into your blind spot. Having a much brighter light right next to your eye while you're trying to scan for much dimmer lights at the limits of your vision is really shitty. I don't think of this as an experience/inexperienced driver thing, though... maybe you just haven't don't much night driving yet? Or you only drive on roads that you're very familiar with?", "The pupils of your eyes constrict (get smaller) as opposed to dilate (get wider) when enough light is available. At night, you want your eyes dilated so you can see the road. ", "By 'experienced' drivers, I assume you mean drivers who are minding the road and their surroundings. If you are minding the roadway and your surroundings, you will definitely notice that your ability to do so at night is diminished, possibly significantly, by interior lights. I do hope that you can make it to 'experienced' status. ", "I prefer to even turn my dash lights almost out when I drive at night, less eye strain that way." ]

[ "How is the sperm of whales collected? Is it done in the wild or post-mortem?", " > wouldn't the whale sperm have to swim more\n\nNo, because the whale penis and volume of ejaculate are also very large.", "I may be treading dangerously, but can someone tell me why there are always so many posts deleted/removed in r/askscience threads? It seems as though every time I come here half the comments have been deleted.", "On a side note, [fruit flies](_URL_0_) have the largest sperm.", "Keep in mind that sperm are just cells. They should be approximately the same size for any organism. Whales are huge because they have many more cells, not because their cells are bigger.", "Bigger organisms aren't bigger because of bigger cells. They just have more of them. Therefore I would say that the size of an animal doesn't have much impact on the size of it's sperm cells.\n\nThough I think the egg cells are a different story.", "According to an episode of QI that I recently watched.\n*The fruit fly has the largest sperm of any organism, with an uncoiled size of around 20 times its own length (5.8 cm).\nTangent: The sperm is the smallest cell in the human body, and the ovum is the largest.*\n\n_URL_0_", "That depends, are you talking about a sperm whale?", "Revelant Pun _URL_0_", "get some target sperm" ]

[ "So, I wrote my masters thesis on the evolution of Indo-Pakistani relations, in the context of Kashmir. This will be a pretty long answer, but below I have pasted some of the most relevant pieces of my thesis. I haven't touched it since 2012, so there is nothing in there post-12. If anyone is interested, I will gladly share the entire thing. \n\nYa, so this is pretty long, and goes into the 1st child comment. The format sucks but I don't feel like spending an hour getting it to look good for a Reddit comment. \n\nThe beginning of the conflict:\n\n > Prior the partition of India, the Indian subcontinent consisted of British administered\n > provinces and more than 560 princely states.28 These princely states, though they recognized the\n > supremacy of the English Crown, were largely internally autonomous. Upon the partition of\n > India, these princely states were given the choice to accede to either India or Pakistan. The\n > overwhelming majority of these states chose to join the new nation that corresponded to their\n > internal religious demographics; however, some were swayed by other means. Most of these\n > princely states were demographically Hindu, so the great majority acceded to India. However, as\n > India was quickly expanding its territory with the incorporation of these states, Pakistan made\n > securing the few majority Muslim states, specifically Kashmir, its key policy goal in its early\n > existence.\n\n > Kashmir or, at the inception of the new nations of Pakistan and India, the princely state of\n > Jammu and Kashmir, was asked to join one of the new nations. However, the Maharaja, or king,\n > of the princely state, Hari Singh, was very reluctant to make a decision.29 There were several\n > reasons for Singh’s reluctance. First, Singh was a Hindu and his state was largely Muslim.\n > While logic would suggest that Singh favored accession to Hindu India, this was not the case;\n > Singh’s ultimate goal was for Jammu and Kashmir to emerge as an independent nation, or at the\n > very least a part of either India or Pakistan with a large degree of autonomy.30 Further, the\n > Maharaja was very skeptical of Indian socialist intentions of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India; he was also skeptical of the possibility of Pakistan greatly diminishing his\n > power.31\n\n > When the question of accession was initially posed, the people of the Poonch region of\n > Jammu and Kashmir became very visibly active in their favor of joining Pakistan, holding public\n > forums and debates, as well as lobbying the Maharaja. Though the Poonchis activism began\n > peacefully, the Maharaja responded with a strong hand. Singh ordered a large contingent of his\n > Hindu troops into Poonch to halt the activism.32 The largely peaceful protests soon escalated to\n > violence as the Maharaja’s troops, in early August 1947, fired upon a peaceful protest.33 This\n > gave rise to a widespread armed conflict, between the Hindu troops and the Poonchis. On 27\n > August 1947, Poonchi rebels attacked and took control of a police station.34 This caused Singh\n > to send in nearly all the troops under his command into the Poonch region, escalating the conflict\n > into all out civil war.\n\n > Though the conflict itself began in Poonch, it soon expanded beyond, with many\n > Kashmiri Muslims taking up arms against the Maharaja’s troops. In the midst of this civil war,\n > Pakistan saw an opportunity to achieve its goal of incorporating Kashmir. It seemed, to the\n > Pakistani leadership, that a small push was all that Singh needed to accept the accession to\n > Pakistan.35 Therefore Pakistan began to arm the rebels. Further, Pakistan set into motion a plan,\n > several months in the making, to invade the region. The plan materialized on 22 October 1947,\n > when more than 2,000 irregular Pakistani troops—consisting of former soldiers, tribal militias,\n > and a dozen or so plain-clothed Pakistani officers—crossed the border into Kashmir, and joined\n > with the already active anti-Maharaja Kashmiri militias.36 These irregulars, after several days,\n > began to close in on the capital of the state, Srinagar.\n\n > With the Pakistani-Kashmiri militia closing in on the capital, India dispatched a\n > delegation to persuade the Maharaja to join India. On 26 October 1947, the Maharaja signed a\n > letter of accession to India, on the basis of India’s promise that it would send troops to halt the\n > rebellion.37 This letter still remains at the core of the Kashmir conflict. Pakistan holds that the\n > letter was illegal, and “India’s continued refusal hold a plebiscite on the question of accession\n > denies the Kashmiri people their right to self-determination.”38 Further, Pakistan argues, the\n > letter was illegal as the Maharaja of Kashmir was not a heredity ruler, but rather was appointed\n > the British colonists.\n\n > Legality aside, once the Maharaja agreed to accede to India, Indian troops were airlifted\n > to Kashmir.39 Once arriving at the end of October 1947, the Indian forces quickly secured the\n > capital. By the end of November 1947, the Indian army had taken over the war effort, which at\n > this point was strictly defensive in nature, from the Maharaja’s troops.40 With the introduction of\n > the Indian regular army, the Pakistani-Kashmiri effort faltered. This was due to an array of\n > circumstances. First, the Pakistani-Kashmiri militia was highly disorganized and unprofessional.\n > Often the actions of the various Pakistani and Kashmiri tribes, which made up a large part of the\n > Pakistani-Kashmiri militia, were dictated by tribal elders who, more often than not, were focused\n > on pillaging and looting villages. Officers were unable, to a large degree, to coordinate their\n > actions against the Indian army.41 The difficulties in coordination of the Pakistani-Kashmiri\n > militia were compounded by the fact that the Indian army, as a result of the division of assets,\n > was highly professionalized and utilized the most modern military equipment.42 The Pakistani-\n > Kashmiri militia was, on the other hand, “a rag-tag force equipped with outdated rifles or homemade\n > weapons in the gun factories of the Frontier province.”43\n\n > As the winter months of 1947-48 came on, the war ground to a halt. This lull gave both\n > sides a chance to reevaluate their strategies and goals of the conflict. Jawaharlal Nehru, at the\n > coaxing of his British advisors referred the issue of Kashmir to the UN. However, Nehru and his\n > military advisors began to work on a contingency plan for a major offensive.44 Though this first\n > step towards working with and through international institutions was involuntary, Nehru would\n > eventually come to embrace these institutions, and they would in fact become the core of\n > Nehruvian international thought which would come to guide the Indian approach to Kashmir in\n > this first phase. Pakistan, during the lull, began to shift its strategy away from the offensive.\n > Once it became clear that the Pakistani-Kashmiri militia was greatly outmatched by the Indian\n > army, the new strategic objectives were to make the expulsion of the Pakistani-Kashmiri militia,\n > which Pakistani strategists had begun to see as the eventual scenario, as difficult and expensive\n > for India as possible, to hold as much of the gained territory as possible, and to stop the Indian\n > army from entering Pakistan at all costs.45\n > \n > 28 Ian Copland, “The Princely States, the Muslim League, and the Partition of India in 1947”, The International\n > History Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 38-69. P. 38-9.\n\n > 29 Praveen Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947-2004, (New York:\n > Routledge, 2007), P. 15.\n\n > 30 Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its army, and the Wars Within. (Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press, 2008). Pp. 40-42\n\n > 31 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, P. 15.\n\n > 32 Ibid, Pp., 42-43.\n\n > 33 Ibid, P. 43.\n\n > 34 Ibid, P. 43.\n\n > 35 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, P. 15-16\n\n > 36 Ibid, Pp.18-22.\n\n > 37 Nawaz, Crossed Swords, P.49.\n\n > 38 S. Paul Kapur, “India and Pakistan's Unstable Peace: Why Nuclear South Asia Is Not like Cold War Europe”,\n > International Security, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 127-152. P. 136.\n\n > 39 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, Pp. 21-23.\n\n > 40 Ibid, P.22.\n\n > 41 Ibid.\n\n > 42 Ibid, P. 22.\n\n > 43 Nawaz, Crossed Swords, P. 50.\n\n > 44 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, Pp. 22-23.\n\n > 45 Nawaz, Crossed Swords, P. 57.", "I simply wanted to thank the mods for another exemplary job in this highly-partisan discussion. I had minimal info of this situation going in, and I feel more informed about the issue. There was little inflammatory rhetoric and plenty of substance throughout. Thank you once more,as a reader of this sub. " ]

[ "This is the reason that the [twin paradox](_URL_0_) is called a paradox. The astronaut on his journey will see time progress slowly on earth- however, when he turns around to come back to earth, he changes his frame of reference. When he changes frame of reference, many of his coordinates get relabeled. In a sense, he sees the earth experience a whole lot of time at once.\n\nOf course, there's nothing discontinuous about what the astronaut actually -observes-, when we write 'sees' we mean that the astronaut corrects his observations based on the speed of light. The astronaut -observes- time passing faster on the earth when he travels back towards it, because he's travelling into the oncoming light beams. When he corrects for the distance between him and the earth, however, he finds the same thing he found on the way out, that time is passing more slowly on the earth than for him.\n\nThe wikipedia link has more material about this under the 'resolution' section.\n\nEdit: It seems I was beaten by an equivalent explanation. Perhaps I shouldn't write responses while travelling close to the speed of light.", "Ah this is the classic [twin paradox](_URL_0_).\n\nSpecial relativity states that reference frames that are uniform are equivalent. i.e. they are either traveling at a constant speed or stationary. \n\nThe thought experiment is: if you are on a bus that's traveling at a constant speed, it is indistinguishable from if you are stationary. You can construe yourself as being stationary and the whole world is moving backwards at the constant speed.\n\nBut the moment the bus accelerates or decelerates, you will be jolted forwards or backwards (this leads to general relativity, beginning with the equivalence of accelerating frames and gravity). \n\nSo in this case, the astronaut has to accelerate out, decelerate *and then* make a round-about change in direction. The people on Earth stay stationary relevant to the astronaut and experience no such accelerations/decelerations/change of direction. The two reference frames are no longer equivalent.\n\nThis proves to be an simplification - more details are provided in the link above.\n", "This is the reason that the [twin paradox](_URL_0_) is called a paradox. The astronaut on his journey will see time progress slowly on earth- however, when he turns around to come back to earth, he changes his frame of reference. When he changes frame of reference, many of his coordinates get relabeled. In a sense, he sees the earth experience a whole lot of time at once.\n\nOf course, there's nothing discontinuous about what the astronaut actually -observes-, when we write 'sees' we mean that the astronaut corrects his observations based on the speed of light. The astronaut -observes- time passing faster on the earth when he travels back towards it, because he's travelling into the oncoming light beams. When he corrects for the distance between him and the earth, however, he finds the same thing he found on the way out, that time is passing more slowly on the earth than for him.\n\nThe wikipedia link has more material about this under the 'resolution' section.\n\nEdit: It seems I was beaten by an equivalent explanation. Perhaps I shouldn't write responses while travelling close to the speed of light." ]

[ "For most products, the price you pay at the store has a lot more to do with what people are **willing** to pay than what the product costs to make. If a company can make more money by charging more, because people are willing to pay that much, they will. If raising the price too much costs them sales and profits, then the price will go back down.", "The term processed gets thrown around a lot, and can mean different things. It's not always about adding chemicals. Now, more processing would normally mean work and therefore more cost, but not always. \n\nFirst, it's not always more expensive. King Arthur whole wheat at Walmart is the same price as Unbleached. \n\n- [Whole Wheat Flour](_URL_1_)\n- [Unbleached Flour](_URL_0_)\n\nWhen there is a difference, there are a lot of factors. There's no single one answer. \n\nIn the case of sugar, its due to the ingredients used. Pure cane sugar is more expensive than \"normal\" sugar. Why, \"normal\" sugar has sugar derived from beats which is more available in the US than cane which grows better in the tropics. \"RAW\" sugar, while less processed is still processed to some degree. It's centrifuged (I don't know the full technique) but something does happen to it. It's also often organic and comes mainly from HI (for those in America), both of which drive the price up. \n\nAnother reason is that sometimes refined foods are cheaper for some reason. White rice has a longer storage life than brown rice for example. Also, canned fruit lasts longer than fresh, and is cheaper than frozen. \n\nFor other products, a lot of it is that many natural products aren't just less processed, but also premium grade. You don't just pay more at whole foods because it's healthy, you also pay more because they are a higher grade product. The same effect happens in other stores. You can get store brand refined product, but if you want the natural stuff, you might have to buy name brand, driving up the cost. \n\nFinally, it can be good old supply and demand. There's a lot of supply of the processed stuff, and less supply of the non processed stuff. This could change over time as our tastes as a culture change. ", "I suspect that shelf life has a lot to do with it. Whole grains have oils that can go rancid, fresh fruit doesn't last nearly as long as canned, etc. So the processing, while it adds costs, allows the item to be on the shelf a whole lot longer and reduces waste, lowering the cost per item that can be sold.", "Supply and Demand.\nEconomy of Scale.\n\nSupply and demand is simple. More people want white sugar than unrefined. Lets pretend that unrefined sugar earns one dollar profit. \nWhite sugar only earns 75 cents, because of processing. Pretend the price is the same to buy.\n\n100 people buy unrefined. That earns 100 dollars.\nTen thousand people buy white. That's 7500 dollars\n\nEconomy of scale comes next. \nEverything in manufacturing has 2 main costs. \"Fixed\" and \"Marginal.\" \nFixed costs are what you pay up front to start making something. Lets say it's a donut machine. That costs ten thousand dollars. This is a fixed cost because it never changes. After making a million donuts, the machine only really costs 1 cent per donut, and as you keep making them, the share of cost goes down, making each donut cheaper to make.\n\nMarginal costs are what you have to pay every time you make something. This is usually materials (like plastic), but in our case, it's ingredients. They cost... 20 cents per donut.\n\nNow, it doesn't matter how many donuts you make, they all cost you 20 cents. Fair enough.\n\nNow, you want to make Waffles. A waffle machine will cost... ten thousand dollars. But only 1% as many people want waffles!\n\nSo you only make 10 thousand waffles. Each one costs you $1.20 to make. Those popular donuts? Cost 21 cents.\n\nEven if the donuts need more processing... so many are made that even after the processing, they still come out cheaper.\n\n", "In a similar vein, I've always wondered why buying a grilled flake at the fish and chip shop would cost more than a battered one. Surely adding batter takes more effort?", "By the same token, why is diesel more expensive than petrol? It is also less refined.", "Little business lesson for you. Price isn't determined by cost. Price only has to be higher than cost. The price is higher because there are people who value unrefined products more than refined products, therefore they will pay more for them.", "It isn't always cheaper to give your customer less. \n\nImagine you have a hamburger stand. You have a well tuned assembly line of employees, each specialized in they task who can turn a patty into a burger in seconds.\n\nSo when someone says hold the pickle, it disrupts the whole process. Now you have to add overhead to track the special burger through the system and get it to the right person, more overhead than a few pickles cost. You could make a second assembly line for pickle free burgers, but there is not enough demand to justify it.\n\nThe same is true for sugar. It might be cheaper to make unrefined sugar, but it is more expensive to set up a supply chain that does *both*, especially when there is a much smaller demand for one." ]

[ "I read in a dawkins book that there's just no way the DNA could survive so long. Even enclosed in amber and mosquito bodies.", "I highly recommend watching the TED talk by Jack Horner: [Building a Dinosaur From a Chicken](_URL_0_)", "Did you even see Jurassic Park?! THATS WHY. It was a documentary.", "Because dinosaurs… uh… had their shot. They had it, and it was… uh… 65 *million* years ago. Trying to throw humans and dinosaurs back together… well… the kind of control that would take, drunkenAmoeba… it's not… uh… it's not possible. Chaos theory… which shouldn't take much explanation if you're five because… uh… when you're five… well… *everything* you do has unexpected consequences… heh… says you can't because if you do then *velociraptors will eat your face.*\n\n(As I think about it, explaining things to a movie audience isn't actually much different from explaining things to a five year old in the first place.)", "To create clones you need to take the nucleus of a cell of one animal and place it in an egg without a nucleus of the same species. This is then given to the female and is grown in the normal fashion. Blood (in human's certainly) tends not have cell nuclei, hence it wouldn't be possible for humans. Even if you were able to get the cell nucleus from the blood of an animal trapped in sap for millions of years you wouldn't have an empty egg to put it in, nor would you have a mother capable of hosting it for long enough to harden and form a foetus.\n\nIn 5 year old speak - imagine you have one of those cars that you pull back, let go and they shoot off into the distance. You could take out the little motor of that car, but you'd need another little car that was almost identical to put it in to make it work. Not only that, but you'd need the exact same colour of carpet to pull it back on for it to work too.\n\nIt's been a while since I was 5.", "I read in a dawkins book that there's just no way the DNA could survive so long. Even enclosed in amber and mosquito bodies.", "I highly recommend watching the TED talk by Jack Horner: [Building a Dinosaur From a Chicken](_URL_0_)", "Did you even see Jurassic Park?! THATS WHY. It was a documentary.", "Because dinosaurs… uh… had their shot. They had it, and it was… uh… 65 *million* years ago. Trying to throw humans and dinosaurs back together… well… the kind of control that would take, drunkenAmoeba… it's not… uh… it's not possible. Chaos theory… which shouldn't take much explanation if you're five because… uh… when you're five… well… *everything* you do has unexpected consequences… heh… says you can't because if you do then *velociraptors will eat your face.*\n\n(As I think about it, explaining things to a movie audience isn't actually much different from explaining things to a five year old in the first place.)" ]

[ "Leaders don't want to start justice-fuelled conflict because it's expensive and won't get the people on side because the war crimes are kept a secret anyway, so the public don't see them as a problem. The thing you've got to remember is, nothing in international politics is humanitarian. ", "There is no global government, and what we call international law is not really law and not really that enforceable. International law is a bundle of treaties, and for lack of a better word orders issued by the powerful nations. These can only be enforce if a country chooses to use their economic or military might to enforce them. \n\nCountries that are not important due to location and what resources they have tend to be ignored as using up time and resources to force compliance is not worth it to much of the rest of the world. \n\nOn the other hand countries that are powerful enough cannot really be forced to do anything. To try and use economics against them tends to hurt the countries who stop doing business with them more, and since they tend to have the stronger militaries using war or threat of war against them is normally useless. " ]

[ "Also, while you shouldn't ever cite Wikipedia, their references can sometimes be helpful and a jumping off point. ", "The fact that in death Crassus lost the standards of his legion to the Parthians had serious political ramifications. Recovering the standards was a major foreign policy point and when Augustus wasable to have them returned it was a major motif he used in propaganda.\n\nFor example,you can see the return represented on this coin: _URL_0_ as well as several others on that site.\n\nThe return is also depicted as the central image on Augustus's breastplate in the famous Prima Porta statue. So, basically Crassus's death was a political debacle that had to be recovered." ]

[ "because you are effectively booting up a computer each time you turn the TV on. What doesn't help is that you are used to analog style tvs, which just needed their components to heat up to effectively start working. modern tvs have parts the need to effectively boot to start working enough for you to see a picture. Some are better optimized than others. I know my Vizio tv will take a while to load, no matter what, but my Samsung tv can load live tv almost instantly, but loading other items seems to take a few extra cycles. ", "Not sure if you meant first turned on in the context of a hard shutdown or new out of the box experience, so I’m putting both in the ELI5:\n\n**First turned on**: You were just born. You have to set everything up from scratch. Install a language into your brain, install the movement system, fine tune the vision system etc. before you can become fully functional. \n\n**Turn on after a full shutdown:** You just woke up after a great night’s sleep. You’re a bit groggy so you have to take some time to wake up. Eat breakfast, drink your coffee, then go to work. \n\n**Turn on from standby (like most modern consoles)**: You just took a power nap. You’re up now but your faculties are still with you, you aren’t groggy and you’ve already eaten, so you are good to get back to work. ", "Because they're running a real operating system like Linux or BSD on the cheapest hardware available. They're a computer with a slow disk, crappy CPU and not enough memory, running a shitty, cut-down operating system that will just about run.", "Imagine if someone woke you from a sound sleep and immediately started asking you to do math problems. It would take you some time to get yourself in the right frame of mind to add, subtract, multiply and divide, right?\n\nThat's basically what's happening inside the device, it's getting into the right frame of mind before it can respond to your demands." ]

[ "A percentage of Christians is too concerned with appearing to be more Christian and caring about Christian things to stop and actually think about what they're doing.\n\nWhich is something that happens with every group of people. They're too busy being [subgroup]y to stop and consider what, exactly, it means to be a part of that group.", "They may not have always represented Christmas, but they do now. Christmas, being a Christian holiday, has come to be a pawn in the fight between people who feel that America is too Christian-centric and intolerant of other cultures, and people who feel that Christianity has made America what it is as opposed to say, what the Middle East is. As often happens in these political battles, both sides demand everyone pick a side, and now Starbucks is entangled in it. They picked the politically-correct side, presumably on the basis that that's the side more of their customers are on so they'll lose less business, and now the other side is mad at them." ]

[ "Have you ever had to \"Ctrl-Alt-Delete\" on a fake news site because of the 456 billion ads spamming and freezing your computer on each page?", "Ads.\n\nAdvertising models mean clicks= views= ad revenue.\n\n > I mostly see them in facebook.\n\nIf you click the hyperlink, the web page it brings you to will have ads on them. It's a similarish idea to Buzzfeed- have sensational title, people share it, people see the title and are tempted into clicking to see what the fuss is. You now have eyeballs you can monetize with ads.\n\nThen those new people share it, new eyeballs, more money, etc etc\n", "Advertisements.\nThe advertisement companies run advertisements on their website and then the company hosting the ads get paid according to multiple values, mostly just how many clicks it gets them. \nGoogle runs an advertisement company called Adsense, where the site puts a piece of code in the side of the website. \nIt generates advertisements and Google pays them based off of how many people viewed the page, and how many people clicked it. ", "Advertisment is not the only answer. Its no secret anymore that russia (and others too) is heavily funding media outlets that produce fake news in order to create a politicsl climate that benefits them. For example, RT (russia today) is a government owned tv channel. It ran massive pro-Brexit campaigns in Britain prior to the vote because russia is ultimately gaining from any separatist movement (weak unions means weaker opponents). Theyre actually the biggest sponsor of the Calexit movement (california exiting the US). " ]

[ "I work in oil and gas at a large plant so I'll answer you what it PROBABLY is, though without knowing the details it honestly could be anything. First of all, shuting off machines cost industry HUGE money, in chemical processing plants like those used to refine and process oil and gas, if one machine goes down, often times an entire segment of the plant that goes down, every thing that feeds into that machine has to stop, everything that machine feeds into has to stop. If you only have 3 concurrent units running, that means that if 1 critical component goes down, 1/3rd of our plant goes down, 1/3rd of our production is down, you make 1/3rd less oil and make 1/3rd less money until that machine is back up. If fixing that methane leak involves taking something critical offline (probably true) then they will do their best to wait until that area of the plant enters a PLANNED outage so they can get a lot of their scheduled maintenance done at the same time that the plant is out anyway, they still lose money, but they get a lot done during that time. In the mean time they likely pay a daily fine for the leak, but that fine is far less than the revenue they would lose if part of the plant was down (for us, each 1/3rd of the plant is responsible for about $5 million dollars of revenue per day, if one is down they are losing 5 million per day, so you can imagine that the fines are a pittance in comparison. ", "What would happen if we ignited it? Serious question haha. ", "As a petroleum engineer, I can comment. I can't find all of the details, but they need to drill a relief well to intercept the original well and plug it off with cement. \n\nThey can't flare I believe because the leak is uncontrolled and flaring could be dangerous. A fire would not travel down into the reservoir. \n\nThey likely can't rig up on the problem well itself to run cement because of the leak. Flammability around big machines. \n\nThey should be able to reach 8500 feet in ~10 days but intercepting a small diameter pipe could slow that down significantly. I don't have direct experience with that portion. Then there's the plugging operation to pump cement down the relief well and into the problem well. At each step there's engineering and regulatory work needed that also can take time. In sure there's plenty of parties involved that can add a lot of red tape. \n\n", "Permanently preventing a gas influx at a low depth is a challenging procedure. Conventional well control involves having a hydrostatic pressure greater than the pressure of the gas. This is typically done by controlling the liquid's weight, more weight = more pressure. Gas's hydrostatic pressure gradient is quite low; think of air pressure difference between Denver and Los Angeles (1 mile of vertical height) is the equivalent pressure of 5 feet of water. \n \nA typical gas well, are designed like telescope, larger shorter (in depth) outer pipes and smaller longer (in depth) inner pipes are cemented together. There is likely a leak between the deeper inner pipe to the more shallow outer pipe. So a high pressure is occurring at a low depth, which cannot be matched from a weighted hydrostatic fluid. \n\nDrilling a \"relief well\" is no easy task. Drillers are attempting to drill a 8000 foot well and hit a 7 inch pipe. Imagine standing on the top of a 30 story building, while holding a 300 foot piece of spaghetti trying to hit a Cherri-O on the sidewalk. So drillers need to go slower than normal to be sure not to go off course. Determining where the drill bit is at needs to occur more often. Also I believe they are restricted to working only day light hours, normal drilling operations are around the clock. At 8000' the hydrostatic pressure will overcome the gas pressure, which would allow a better chance for the cement to 'set up' properly. \n \nTurning everything 'off' doesn't work like you'd want. With well integrity concerns, the gas might find a new way out, by means of breaking different parts of the well/ground, if it's constricted at the surface, which would only complicate the problem. Solving the problem properly at 8000' is more important than a temporary minor mitigation. \n\nLuckily the gas well is isolated, about a mile from people. Even so, natural gas and the gas that gives natural gas it's unpleasant odor, are not harmful. ", "Californians are exotherms (ie: cold blooded). They stop working when temperatures drop below 60^o F.", "why dont they just drop a nuke on it? the nuclear fission will burn off any gas and seal the hole. ", "We have a methane leak?", "Because people are ignorant to methane. They don't care that it is worse for the climate that CO2, or that we produce a shit-load of it :P \n\nPeople just think methane smells bad, and that's what it does. No harm no foul. ", "Grew up in Porter Ranch, and still have family there. SoCal Gas and Sempra Energy have operated for 30 to 40 years in Porter Ranch with zero accountability. Local and state politicians have been and are more concerned about contributions and re-election than actual safety (otherwise Sempra's normal operations before the gas leak, which involved Sempra releasing tons of methane regularly into the air) would have been curtailed or stopped. Environmental companies are ineffective in preventing a catastrophe like this, and more geared towards capitalizing on donor sources, media attention, and compromising with big polluters, than dismantling the industries that cause such disasters. Finally, the justice system is a self-serving, corrupt, and wasteful mess (example, BP's spill, largest oil spill in history, resulted in a MISDEMEANOR, and closer to home, the Exide battery recycling plant took decades to close down, and the structured deal protected the shareholders more than anyone else.\nAlso, SoCal Gas covered up the enormity of this industrial disaster, and are only acting because the residents of Porter Ranch (and local grassroots SavePorterRanch) have been holding community meeting and rallies, which are finally getting media attention.\nFinally, natural gas is invisible. If this was more cinematic, like lava flow or a hurricane, it would have received national media attention immediately.\n", "[Why don't they just nuke it?] (_URL_0_) ", "What people are having physiological reactions to is called mercaptan. Which is added to the natural gas so people can smell a leak (methane is odorless).\n\nMethane is lighter than air and most of it is rising in the atmosphere, while mercaptan is a heavier molecule and is highly odorous (on order of 1 ppb).\n\nThe leak is over a mile from residential neighborhoods. The question that should be asked is why a residential neighborhood was allowed to be developed by local government close to the largest natural gas storage facility west of Mississippi...", "This sucks, I live in the area. They are relocating 2500 families for 6+ months. It's affected my business so I know it's hurting a lot of businesses along with the families of course.\n\nWe've already lost out on just over $1k of monthly income due to this and the number is increasing.", " > Uncontrolled build-up of methane in the atmosphere is naturally checked by methane's reaction with hydroxyl radicals formed from singlet oxygen atoms and with water vapor. It has a net lifetime of about 10 years, and is primarily removed by conversion to carbon dioxide and water.", "I live in Porter ranch and it's gotten so bad a young girl was in the ICU. Some residents' pets have gotten sick as well. Sadly, SoCal gas doesn't put much effort into trying to solve this issue. The rumor was they tried to cover the smell by using some kind of odor-neutralizer, which failed. Now, mind you, this is in the end of the valley on top of hills and mountains. There are homes practically right by it, very close, actually. So I hope it gets fixed asap but the most we can do is to file a complaint and have the gas company pay for our hotel fees. Several residents weren't getting covered for this at first, so they moved out with their own money. It sucks because generally, this is a nice neighborhood. Average income is highest in the valley and all of LA right after Beverly Hills and has really nice people here. But it's definitely not worth living in this nice neighborhood when shit like this happens.", "California is desperately trying to show the world how environmentally friendly they are and that's why they've fucked shit up once again. It is taking a while to fix things because they aren't used to solving problems, only talking about or causing them. They're basically the west coast version of Florida with more nonsense" ]

[ "[Here's a great thread on this topic, which includes an answer from yours truly.](_URL_0_)", "A non-exhaustive list:\n\n1. Norway 1940: the British and French fail to hold Norway against a fairly light Wehrmacht force, despite maintaining a hold on the important port of Narvik for some time.\n\n2. Greece and Crete 1941: stripping forces from the armies that had just trounced, but not finished off, the Italians in North Africa, Wavell and Churchill attempt to defend Greece from Italian and German attack. The defence is a farce against strong German mobile- and air forces and an undignified evacuation ensues. The Germans then attack the island of Crete with an air-mobile force. Allied mistakes and weakened air power (because of losses associated with Greece and the refusal of the British high command to allow quality Fighter Command units to leave Britain) see this very close-run battle turn to victory for Germany. The German force did however suffer heavily though in the ensuing evacuation the Commonwealth army and naval units suffered heavily as well. \nThis represented a regrettable waste of forces that could have been useful in...\n\n3. Malaya/Singapore/Burma 1941-2: A large Commonwealth force, given time to prepare and what should have been ample resources, is trounced out of the Malay peninsula by a much smaller Japanese force. Two British capital ships, which could have stopped the seaborne component of the attack and against which the Japanese had no available comparable ships, are sunk. The highly defensible island of Singapore is easily accessed by the Japanese army.\nThis defeat is probably Britain's greatest ever, and represented the end of British, and indeed European, power in Asia forever. The Japanese force rolled on into Burma where they defeated the Commonwealth armies present, stiffened with forces sent in response to the initial attack. A counteroffensive in the Arakan Peninsula in 1942 made no progress whatsoever, took heavy casualties, and the British forces had to evacuate precipitously to avoid being encircled. \n\n4. Philippines 1941-2: While the British Commonwealth forces in Asia were suffering their calvary, US Forces under Douglas MacArthur were attempting to defend the Philippines. Warned, prepared and well-equipped (like the British, this refers to resourcing in general, in both cases the forces were not balanced and much equipment was not good enough), MacArthur's inept leadership, bad luck and the skill and detailed planning of the Japanese saw the US-Filipino force routed from their best positions and driven down the Bataan Peninsula.\nMacArthur's propaganda machine was so effective in making ordinary Americans believe in his skill and tenacity that Roosevelt was unable to slate to him responsibility for ultimate failure (FDR was probably also happy to have MacArthur 'busy' in the Pacific, rather than plotting against him at home).\n\n5. The Channel Dash, 1941: after a raiding cruise in the Atlantic, three German heavy ships retired to the French port of Brest, where they were held by a British blockade. Here, they were bombed repeatedly by British aircraft and although Bomber Command was not very effective in 1941, occasional hits were obtained. \nIn early 1941 the Germans executed a plan to sail the ships *straight up the English Channel* to safe harbours in northern Germany. Due to good luck and British ineptitude, all three ships pulled off the escape without suffering a scratch. \n\n6. Dieppe 1942: A mostly Canadian force was landed on the French coast at Dieppe in 1942 for a sort of large raid. The idea was to test attack and the German defence of a coastal port, expand on the commando raid technique, and probably to placate the Soviets' demand for a Second Front. \nCo-ordination failures, rapid German response, and a multitude of small failures (for instance many tanks simply couldn't advance on the beach, which consisted of small, smooth stones) led to something of a disaster. The sheer difficulty of the mission was known, and was also a factor. Many of the lessons were applied to the D-Day landings.\n\n7. The Dodecanese Campaign, 1944: Churchill was obsessed with Greece, and was the impetus behind this plan which landed Allied troops on Greek Islands. The British command failed to rapidly secure Italian co-operation, losing the chance of gaining support from the large Italian garrison. Also, the US government refused to take part, denying the support of American units including, crucially, long-range fighter aircraft.\nOut of range of meaningful support, especially air support, and with other higher priorities the Germans were able to marshall strong forces including paratroopers with lavish support by otherwise-obsolete Stuka dive bombers, to smash the British (and Greek loyalist) units, which had no hope of evacuation. The famous, elite Long Range Desert Group was squandered in this operation.\n\n" ]

[ "What if you're on the high seas and:\n\na.) your ship is not registered to any country. You built it yourself. \nand \nb.) you have legally renounced your citizenship. You're a man without a country.\n\nWould you be autonomous and untouchable? Somehow I doubt it..\n", "Interpol would get involved if the crime was serious enough. They can be requested by a member country to investigate a international crime.\n\nFor example Viktor Bout, who the movie Lord of War was based, was investigated by Interpol.\n\n_URL_0_" ]

[ "The traveling twin will be younger upon returning to earth. As I recall there are different interpretations on what the 'paradox' should be, but one often confusing point is why it is the twin in the spacecraft who will be the younger, since from his frame of reference the twin staying on earth is the one doing the traveling - so why is he not the younger one? The answer to this is that one of the twins is in an inertial frame of reference, and the other undergoes acceleration (neglect the fact that the earthbound twin is affected by gravity). The formulas are valid in an inertial reference frame, and altered when this is not the case - therefore it is the twin in the spacecraft who will be youngest when he returns to earth.", "The travelling twin is always younger. If the twin accelerated to a certain speed and stayed there, you couldn't really say who was the younger twin. When the return to the original rest frame is factored in, every inertial reference frame will actually agree the travelling twin is younger. Really, since each frame agrees time has slowed for the traveler, we can accept it.\n\nThe best way to visualize how all of these rest frames agree, is to picture a space station moving away from earth at .8c . This planet passes earth as the twin's rocket ship launces away from earth at .8c. For a while, the space station sees the rocket ship as a stationary object right along side of it. The earth, however, is moving away at .8c . The space station's clock and the rocket ship's clock appear to move at the same speed. The earth's clock moves slower.\n\nBut then the rocket ship reaches alpha centauri, and deccelerates to the earth's speed. At this point, there is a disagreement (between the earth and the space station) about whether the twin's clock ran faster or slower... but the rocket ship isn't done. It has to return to Earth. \n\nThe space station sees the twin's rocket going much faster than .8c. To the space station, the earth is moving at .8c, and the rocket ship is gaining on it. Not only that, but the space station calculates that it will take a long time to catch the earth. The space station sees the twin moving at .9c+, but that is still only .1c faster than the earth. \n\nSo, what ends up happening here, is that even in the space station's point of view the twin is moving with a very high time dilation. All the math balances out, and despite the different rest frames, everyone thinks the moving twin experiences more time dilation." ]

[ "Be careful with the language. An electromagnetic *field* is different from an electromagnetic *force*. A *field* occupies space like a [vector field](_URL_0_). An electromagnetic force is associated with a specific object, and can be pictured by a singe vector originating from the object to which the force is being applied. \n \nThe difference is illustrated by the image of the earth's magnetic field versus the force/pull/tug felt by a compass' needle. ", "I just picture classical field lines.", "Be careful with the language. An electromagnetic *field* is different from an electromagnetic *force*. A *field* occupies space like a [vector field](_URL_0_). An electromagnetic force is associated with a specific object, and can be pictured by a singe vector originating from the object to which the force is being applied. \n \nThe difference is illustrated by the image of the earth's magnetic field versus the force/pull/tug felt by a compass' needle. ", "I found that the best solution is to stop trying to visualize stuff like electromagnetic in terms of what you already understand, because they are not like something you already understand. You should ofcause gain knowledge of how they work, but i like to rely on the equations and try not to reason to much about anything other than the math.", "I just picture classical field lines." ]

[ "I would think it is just a learned behavior. As children we see swearing from our parents, the media, and our peers and some of us develop the desire to swear because it's new and often times forbidden. Usually because of the new and forbidden nature of swearing most children become EXTREMELY foul mouthed but break themselves of that habit as they grow. But years of repetively swearing on a whim or swearing when we are subjected to negative stimuli just become habit. Habits take work to break. \n\nFrom personal experience I used to swear like a sailor (as did many of my friends) but I was forced to cut back (A LOT) because I joined the work force and obviously that's not appropriate in a professional setting. For instance, after working with kids for 3 years I've found that these days if I stub my toe or cut myself I don't yell, \"FUCK!\" I yell, \"Ouch\" or \"Shucks\" or \"Crud!\" lol\n\ntl;dr I feel it's just habitual and habits are something that take work to break oneself of. I'm not qualified to say on a psychological level though.", "Screaming out obscenities or 'bad words' relieves stress, anxiety, and even pain to a limited extent. We say these words in moments of heightened stress to do just that.", "It's primal. It even spontaneously erupts in primates taught how to do sign language back in the 1970s:\n\n*A small doll placed unexpectedly in Washoe’s cup elicited the response “Baby in my drink.” When Washoe soiled, particularly clothing or furniture, she was taught the sign “dirty,” which she then extrapolated as a general term of abuse. A rhesus monkey that evoked her displeasure was repeatedly signed at: “Dirty monkey, dirty monkey, dirty monkey.”*\n \n*Occasionally Washoe would say things like “Dirty Jack, gimme drink.” Lana, in a moment of creative annoyance, called her trainer “You green shit.” Chimpanzees have invented swear words. Washoe also seems to have a sort of sense of humor; once, when riding on her trainer’s shoulders and, perhaps inadvertently, wetting him, she signed: “Funny, funny.”*\n\n--a selection from \"Dragons of Eden,\" by Carl Sagan" ]

[ "In some areas you can get estrogen in the form of birth control pills over the counter. In many areas you still need to visit a doctor though.\n\nAnd the reason why these hormones aren't really available over the counter (barring, again, birth control in certain areas) is because they are not harmless fun drugs. They have their purposes, sure, but they also come with loads of both short term and long term side effects, which means that any use of them should be examined carefully to make sure that whatever benefit you want to get from them outweighs the long term effects.\n\nTestosterone, for example, increases the risk of sleep apnea, increases the risk of blot clots, stimulates non-cancerous growth of the prostate (and growth of prostate cancer if already present), has effects on sperm and testicles, and might contribute to heart disease. Which are all very good reasons to sit down with a professional first to determine if hormone therapy is anything you need. If you have a very good valid medical reason for taking it, you will be prescribed it. If you wanna take it for shits and giggles, the doctor is right to deny you. ", "Oestrogen is a far less dangerous drug, with the main risk being blood clots. It is also far less likely to be abused, unlike testosterone which has significant physical changes relevant to athletics.\n\nThe only people who generally take oestrogen without a prescription are transgender people self-medicating HRT. And while this is dissuaded by Doctors to be doing so unmanaged (because of the inherent risk of blood clots), it's actually fairly safe to take orally if you're not in a risk group.\n\nThe second factor is that oestrogen is a component of \"the pill\", which is a widely used form of birth control, and being the sensitive topic it is, putting needless restrictions on who can get birth control (you still have to see your doctor where I'm from) would be counter-intuitive, since we want birth control to be as accessible as possible." ]

[ "While the supported operation had a lot of issues to put it mildly, the deception plan for Wacht am Rhein (the German operational title for the Ardennes winter 1944-45 counter offensive) was quite good.\n\nThis should not be confused with the various infiltration attempts using US uniforms or disguised equipment, those largely failed but still accomplished some modest friction inducing outcomes, but rather the efforts at concealing that the Germans were going to attempt a major counter offensive were very successful.\n\nThis broadly fell into two categories of \"success\" the first of which would be German actions, namely effective operational security (keeping the plan need to know, strict radio discipline) and some deceptive operations (false radio transmissions, emphasizing highly visible defensive measures and actions). \n\nThis was also paired with having a good understanding of what the Allies were thinking. The Allies did not anticipate a significant German counter-offensive, believing to some degree the German Army was beaten to the point it was incapable of such things (to some degree, they were right, the Winter fighting basically left the German forces all but destroyed in the west), and also that the Ardennes would remain a quiet sector due to the limited mobility through that area.\n\nThe result was that the American forces in front of the German offensive were almost totally surprised as the Germans had managed to conceal the signature of a major build up, and attacked at a time and place the Americans (and really the rest of the Allies) did not believe to be a likely event. \n\nOf course, the Germans also greatly underestimated how strongly the American forces would resist, and how capable they were, which led into the whole offensive going off the rails very quickly. But at the least the deception plan worked!", "During the North Africa campaign the Germans had broken a cipher which gave Rommel a strong advantage. The cipher was the Black Code used by the US military attache, Colonel Feller, in Cairo who gave detailed reports to Washington on what the British were doing in North Africa. \n\nAlso due to a lack of radio discipline and lack of code discipline the Germans made quite a lot of successful intercepts which gave them great insight in the strength and movements of the British armed forces.\n_URL_0_\n " ]

[ "Because this is the season where Americans are the least likely to travel in general. Also this is the least likely season when Americans travel overseas; even if they go travel they will still be able to watch their American shows. ", "During the summer, it is light out later, and people are more likely to be aware from home, or in the case of farmers, working. Also, children were out of school, so people would travel or engage in other family activities outside of the house.\n\nOnce school started, the days got shorter, and the harvest was in, people were more likely to watch TV in the evening.\n\n > And does this imply that non-fall premiered shows are of lower quality?\n\nA little.\n\nSometimes they intentionally delay premiers for strategic reasons, but on the broadcast network, a non-fall premier usually means a mid-season replacement series...shows not quite good enough to break into the fall lineup, but they keep them around in case other shows fail.\n\nAnd if a show premiers in the late spring, it is a summer replacement. They are typically even lower quality, and the network is basically saying \"what the hell, maybe someone will like it\". " ]

[ "nice try dr evil", "No. But we can destroy our civilization easily. That is to disrupt chains of resource extraction,process and distribution. A full scale nuclear & biological & chemical war in 80-th would have resulted in reduction of population to 100 -200 millions of people. ", "I submit [mass asteroid bombardment](_URL_0_) might work if a person was determined.\n\nEdit: summary for those who cannot open the file:\n\nWith some patience, waiting perhaps a month or two, suitable\nasteroids could be routinely found that would produce weapon\neffects equivalent to nuclear weapons with yields ranging from tens\nof kilotons to many megatons. With some effort, they could be\ndiverted to weapon using technology (and extensive supporting\ninfrastructure) similar to that for exploiting lunar materials,\ngenerating solar power with satellites, or defending against asteroids.\nHowever, at best, it would take months after a decision to use one as\na weapon to reach the desired conclusion. Because much cheaper,\nmore responsive weapons of mass destruction are readily available,\nthis one is likely to remain safely in the realm of science fiction.", "Not life on Earth, but [this site](_URL_0_) does a good job at illustrating how difficult it would be to outright blow up the world.", "a mix of biological weapons could certainly put a damper on life, possible destroying all or most complex life, but I think it would be impossible to sterilize the earth", "I'm going to go against the grain and say yes. The [Teller-Ulam design](_URL_0_) for a fusion weapon is, in theory, scalable up to any size one desires. You'd want to build probably at least a million teraton-sized devices, distributed evenly over the Earth's surface (this would release enough energy to at least vaporize the oceans, which would be a good start).\n\nObviously, we don't have anywhere near the infrastructure or industrial capacity to do this, but if we really wanted to do it, it should be possible with current technology.", "Cobalt Bomb. \n\n_URL_0_\n", "Putting aside nuclear weapons, don't we have the capability to engineer biological weaponry that would kill most everyone ?", "Really the only way to kill off all life is to remove the crust of the planet completely. An event like what created the moon could do it but I don't think we've got technology to do that.\n\nMount a few thousand MeV scale ion engines on the moon to slow it's orbit enough that it crashes into the earth is the only way I can think of to do it with current levels of tech.", "Nope. Complete saturation with nuclear weapons wouldn't come close to wiping out bacteria and many small animals will keep on going. Life is persistent." ]

[ "hi! could you specify which country you're referring to? thanks!", "I don't feel like this is a history question at all. Really a cursory google could answer this:\n\n > Theft of milk crates, as it turns out, is an issue taken very, very seriously by the dairy industry. The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA), which runs a whole website devoted to public education on the issues of milk crate misuse, estimates that dairy companies lose 20 million milk crates a year to theft. At about $4 per crate, that’s an $80 million loss per year. That represents just a fraction of a percent of gross national fluid milk sales — in excess of $20 billion in 2012 — but dairy profit margins aren’t huge, and $80 million is $80 million.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAlso:\n_URL_1_\n\nThink about it, they are a great size, and incredibly sturdy therefore they are desirable. The practice in the industry is to place the empty ones outside so the worker can take them with them.\n\nI've acquired a few myself." ]

[ "My wife would be *pissed* if I told her to move out.", "Yes, normally people are ashamed of living with their parents so they try to get good apartments they can't afford and split it with someone else. They would both live together and also there are roommates in college because if everyone had their own room it would be too much.", "College dorms in the US typically consist of a single room with two people sharing that space. Typically as one progresses throughout school they move into new dorms more like you described or simply move off campus.\n\nIn the US independence is a very big concept. Culturally it is seen as a failure in ones personal and professional life if one does not move into their own home shortly after college. While living with ones parents is very financial sound, it gives the impression (especially if older) that they can not take care of themselves. In order to afford a place to live many younger people will simply find roommates to split rent with until they settle down with a significant other and are making enough money in their career to buy an actual home. ", "It's common in the UK as well. And in the UK people have *flatmates* instead. \n\nIt's just cheaper to share a house with five people. It makes financial sense. ", "A lot of it has to do with housing, where I went to college, the apartments were pretty underwhelming, but you could rent a pretty awesome four bedroom house with kitchen, garage, living room, dining room, yard, etc. and have it be much cheaper than a solo apartment. A lot of people can't stand apartments, myself included, and would way rather share a nice household with a group of friends. I've done it most of ny life and it's great. People tend to have problems when they room with immature people or strangers.", "Some have cited high housing costs and underemployment as the cause of this, but I don't think that's accurate. While these problems are real, they are often exaggerated (and upvoted) on reddit because reddit is disproportionally full of people experiencing these problems (young people bored at work). Regardless of the frequency or severity of these problems, it isn't what drives people to want roommates.\n\nHaving roommates just makes sense. Regardless of the housing market, the cost per person decreases significantly when you share a living room and kitchen. Even housing is cheap in your area, having roommates will save you a few hundred dollars a month, and in many cases allows you to live in a house instead of an apartment, which gives you more privacy from neighbors and other benefits.\n\nSome people move back in with their parents after college, but I think most people try not to. In many cases (maybe because the US is so spread out) that isn't an option because recent grads need to be close to their job and in most cases that's at least a few hours away from mom and dad. ", "Americans call people they share apartments or houses with roommates, English people call them housemates or flatmates. ", "Also people often use \"roommate\" to mean \"housemate.\"" ]

[ "Because it is just supposed to alert other officers of the crime so they will arrive. If someone’s life is at stake it is much more important to get the situation under control prior to figuring out the entire situation,", "Once upon a time, radio was an analog medium. There was static, and the longer the sentence you said, the more likely part of it would be cut up. So, they made the \"ten code\", with the most common messages. It's really called, Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials Project 14 Aural Brevity Code, an awesome example of sarcasm, a code about being brief with a long name.\n\nIt wasn't ever completely uniform, and then radio became digital and you could actually hear what people were saying. There is still communication discipline pressure to keep messages brief, the spectrum assigned is a limited resource, but pirate codes aren't seen as the solution." ]

[ "Companies have security measures commensurate to their perceived risk. Sure, some GoT scripts leaked, but that's not going to keep people from watching.\n\nHBO can't afford the sort of IT that would be more hacker resistant. Even the NSA has insiders who leak stuff, that's a much harder threat to deal with that simple hackers.", "At your house, you have a security system. One of your windows is not covered by the security system, but you don't know that. It's something overlooked.\n\nYou're out at the movies. If someone went through that window and took a photo of your stuff (didn't take your stuff) and then left by that window, and closed the window, when you came back from the movies, would you notice? Is there any way to know someone took a photo of your TV?\n\nIf your security system was working on that window, there would be a record of \"activity\" and then you have to assume what happened specifically. \n\nThe big deal about information security is that only one thing needs to be missed (or not getting properly watched). And this could be something that was working fine before, but some employee wanted to stream game of thrones from somewhere and opened up a hole in security that went unnoticed. IT departments at large companies are like cat herders. It's incredibly difficult to make sure the employees aren't unintentionally sabotaging the company by responding to phishing emails or doing something \"innocent\" by going to a website." ]

[ "Like most names, they died out when people stopped liking them and using them, e.g. when the family ceased to exist. Some cases, they're just no longer in a recognizable form thanks to linguistic mutations. In others, they fell out of fashion and were replaced by those that were more popular. In Frankish Gaul, for example, we can watch a \"de-romanizing\" start to occur as we find more and more Germanic names in the record. And from what we can tell, people with \"Germanic\" names may have been ethnically Frankish or Roman (i.e. Romans adopted Frankish names), but those with \"Roman\" names were always Romans (i.e. Franks did not adopt Roman names).\n\nThis isn't really a field English-language scholarship cares about a lot, but the Germans love it! Sadly, this means the default reference works are in German. In this particular case, the work to read is Ernst Förstemann's cleverly-named *Altdeutsches Namenbuch*.", "Hi! You may be interested in this related post from the other day \n\n* _URL_0_" ]

[ " > The energy for the battery comes from the chemical change in the zinc (or other metal) when it dissolves into the acid. The energy does not come from the lemon or potato. The zinc is oxidized inside the lemon, exchanging some of its electrons with the acid in order to reach a lower energy state, and the energy released provides the power. \nIn current practice, zinc is produced by electrowinning of zinc sulfate or pyrometallurgic reduction of zinc with carbon, which requires an energy input. The energy produced in the lemon battery comes from reversing this reaction, recovering some of the energy input during the zinc production.", "It is my experience that the metals used in the potato clock leave the potato tasting nasty. I think zinc is actually poisonous, too. Don't eat the potato or orange or whatever you use." ]

[ "First thing to understand is that Left and Right are to do with economic views. Left being lots of government control, right being complete market freedoms. The second part of the scale is Authoritarian vs Libertarian. Authoritarian being that the government tells you how to live, who to marry etc Libertarian being complete freedom for anyone to do what they want.\n\nOnce that is understood then it becomes much clearer. Old School left believe in both Left economic policies (regulation by the government etc) and Libertarian policies, equality between men and women, free healthcare and the like.\n\nNeo Liberals share the Libertarian views, free healthcare, equal rights, gay marriage etc but do not share the economic views. They often are far more in favour of free market capitalism and deregulation and privatisation of many industrial sectors.\n\nA good example of this is what happened to Labour in the UK. When Labour went from a traditional Left party, to a Neo Liberal party and re branded as New Labour in the mind 90's. Their policies were actually very similar to the previous Tory government in terms of economic policy. Now we are seeing a shift back to traditional Labour economic policy under Jeremy Corbyn.\n\nEdit: Realised I didnt actually answer the question. The reason that they have beef with each other is that they disagree on the economy. And that its actually not really a good idea to lump the two groups together as on the left, because in reality they arent on both on the left. As you said the Neo Liberals tend to be more centrist progressive than left progressive (using progressive to mean Libertarian). Again Labour in the UK is currently going through a big change as the Neo Liberals are now losing ground to the Traditional Left within the party itself, and if it wasnt for Labour doing well in the recent election, no doubt they would be trying to turf Corbyn out.", "From a European perspective, neo-liberalism is a right-wing policy, promoting pro-corporate measures like privatization, tax cuts for big business and limiting regulation that place consumer, environmental or similar interests above corporate ones. Pretty much the opposite of what the left does.", "The reason is that Liberalism and the left-wing politics of Socialism represent fundamentally different and incompatible philosophical, academic, political and economic perspectives on the nature of society and human progress.\n\nSometimes Liberalism is grouped in with left-wing politics, or one is used as a synonym for the other, but this is both a) an Americanism and b) incorrect. \n\nLiberalism is the ideology of capitalism. Liberalism is the belief that all human beings are rightfully free from coercion, and are endowed with fundamental rights that allows them to act without interference from the powerful. A critical aspect of this freedom is the free market, or the view that trade and economic activity is best carried out without interference from the government (the principle of \"*laissez-faire*\", or \"let [it] go\").\n\nThis was the case for many centuries, with little government interference in the economic affairs of individual people or private companies. However there was always social pressure for reforms by which the government could help improve the lives of society's poorest and more vulnerable, which came to a head in the early 20th century.\n\nAfter the 1930s and 40s, many countries in the West began to move away from the *laissez-faire* model. Instead, they expanded the level of government spending to create jobs and fund welfare safety-nets for people, and introduce regulations on businesses designed to protect the environment, stop unsafe or exploitative work environments, prevent the sale of unsafe products, etc. This is a brand of Liberal politics and economics known as *social democracy*, and was the norm (\"the post-war consensus\") until the 1980s.\n\n**Neo**liberalism emerged as a reaction against the high-tax, high-spend policies of social democracy. The election of the likes of Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in the UK marked an attitude change in favour of the principles of *classical* liberalism, emphasizing and expanding the role of the private sector in everyday life. Neoliberal policies have focused on privatizing industries that were previously ran by the government, cutting regulations, opening up new markets in foreign countries and enacting fiscal austerity (cutting the level of money spent by the government on society and lowering taxes on corporations and the rich).\n\nSocialists and Liberals are, in fundamental terms, ideologically and practically opposed. The conflict between Liberals (\"neo\" or otherwise) and the left makes perfect sense when you understand that Socialism rejects the idea that capitalism can still bring long-term progress to humanity. While capitalism did advance human civilization, Socialists identify that it also created tremendous economic - and, therefore, social and political - inequality, as the ruling class in society grew rich from the profits made by other people's hard work. Socialists believe that, as capitalism concentrates ever greater percentages of global wealth and power into the hands of fewer and fewer people, eventually the system will collapse, and give way to a Social Revolution that will end the capitalist era.\n\nSocialists see capitalism as the ultimate root cause of inequality and social injustice, and oppose neoliberal policies that have given unprecedented economic and political influence to private companies and unaccountable individuals. Socialists believe that this power is used by the ruling class - the tiny minority of people who now privately own all the tools and resources of economic production - to profit from the exploitation of everyone else." ]

[ "Cyanide is painful and inhumane compared to the current injections.", "Is a morphine overdose considered cruel?\n\n8th amendment protects against cruel and unusual punishments (which is why states stopped using the gas chamber)", "Morphine doesn't work very reliably as a poison. Many people take huge doses regularly for medical or recreational purposes without dying. To use it for an execution you'd need to have a large amount available (awkward to run to the morphine store halfway through an execution). Since it's not just a dangerous drug but also a drug of abuse, you'd need to make sure you had extra safeguards in place to secure the supply and prevent diversion by those in charge of it. The mechanism of death or produces could be argued to be cruel, as well. Going to sleep and forgetting to breathe doesn't sound so bad... ... Choking to death on vomit does. Both could happen.", "Additional to the other good thoughts here, I would imagine a drug like morphine, with high demand for those not on death row, would be better used as intended. Some for executions to make the process more humane makes sense too. I'm not saying they shouldn't be given any, just that priorities for important drugs likely dictate responsible usage is elsewhere.", "If you want to know the most efficient and humane way to kill a human being, then you can watch the BBC Horizon documentary done by Michael Portillo, \"How to Kill a Human Being\". \n\n_URL_0_\n\nPortillo thinks he has found the perfect solution.", "Why don't they just use propofol and then chop their head off?", "if someone would just OD me with Morphine and then also shoot me ~5 minutes later that'd be ok with me", "People who like the death penalty don't want the condemned to experience euphoria at execution.\n\nPeople who don't like the death penalty don't want morphine to be a work-around of their humanitarian argument.\n\nThere's no lobby for it.", "Some states use Dilaudid (Hydromorphone) in their lethal injection cocktails. Typically along with a Benzodiazapene.", "Why don't they use a carbon monoxide chamber to put the victim to sleep with 0 pain and then they eventually asphyxiate?", "People have suggested Nitrogen asphyxiation as the most humane, cheap and effective way to carrying out the death penalty; problem is that you get a high from Nitrogen and many people were unhappy that murderers get such a humane death." ]

[ "Well the Coulomb barrier is the same, but the Q-value for DT fusion is over 17 MeV while the Q-value for d(p,γ)^(3)He is only about 5 MeV.", "The reason is because deuterium-tritium fusion has *by far* the lowest triple product of *any* fusion reaction. The triple product is a quantitative statement of the necessary conditions that are required in order for the reaction to reach ignition (self sufficiency). In its most common form it is the product of the temperature, density, and confinement time of the plasma. The larger the triple product, the greater the temperature, density, and confinement time have to be, and the more difficult the reactor will be to design. \n\nDeuterium-proton fusion has a far greater triple product than deuterium-tritium fusion. When you say that both reactions experience the same Coulomb force (electrical repulsion), you are correct, but you have to take into consideration the mass of the particles experiencing this force. A tritium nucleus is 3x as heavy as a proton, which means that if both experience the same force the tritium nucleus will only decelerate at 1/3 the rate of the proton. If it takes 3x longer to slow down, its much easier for the two reacting particles to \"crash\" and fuse. Of course, fusion is very much a quantum phenomenon, but the intuition given by this classical physics holds. Additionally, deuterium-proton fusion produces less than half the energy per reaction, meaning that more reactions have to take place to compensate for heat loss from the plasma (which is roughly the same in both cases). This drives up the triple product of the reaction substantially. \n\nIf you really want to do aneutronic fusion (fusion that does not have a neutron as a product), then the best candidate is deuterium-helium-3, since it has the lowest triple product of all a-neutronic fusion reactions. It is still an order of magnitude above deuterium-tritium though (which means it is at about 10x more difficult to achieve)." ]

[ "Mass market daily newspapers, in the late Victorian era, developed sports pages to increase their circulation numbers. This increased interest in professional sports among the general public. However, it was the advent of television that allowed the massive increase in revenue to professional sports leagues. Pete Rozelle became the commisioner of the NFL in 1960. Pete really capitalized on the suitability of his sport to television, and he was directly responsible for the explosive growth of television revenue to the National Football League. His great success was noticed and copied by the International Olympic Committee, FIFA's World Cup, Formula One Racing, and to a lesser extent the National Basketball Association, tennis and golf. Baseball and hockey have much lower television contracts and those two sports depend on ticket sales to earn more than half of their revenue. \nSources: \"The Business of Sports\" edited by Brad Humphreys and Dennis Howard is a three volume encylopedia of all the major sports, around the world. \"Rozelle: Czar of the NFL\" by Jeff Davies is a much smaller book that only looks at Pete Rozelle. ", "Modern international sporting got its start in the late 19th century, pushed largely by french governments chomping at the bit to cleanse the national shame of 1870. " ]

[ "I've always been curious about Queen Victoria's strong aversion to feminism (\"Feminists ought to get a good whipping\"). Was there some specific identifiable group of feminists she was reacting to, or did she generally really just hate anyone who advocated for women's rights? Did she have any interactions with feminist groups or feminist writers at the time?\n\nAlso, I understand Queen Victoria felt strongly that women should not be in a position of power. How did she reconcile that with her own position as Queen? I believe I read once that she said she didn't consider herself really a woman, but was somehow blessed with the brain of a man. Towards the end of her reign, did she ever soften her stance towards feminism or concede that other women might have the same abilities that she had?", "Could anyone explain it to me why my question was flagged with this flair (or whatever it's called)? How can I not flag my question with \"feminism\"?" ]

[ "most vehicles don't oversteer from the factory, that's a dangerous thing for the average driver\n\nundersteer makes the driver realize they are going too fast and they react by slowing down, especially with audible feedback from the tires. for an average driver understeer is much safer and easier to control", "There's no such thing as generic understeer or oversteer.\n\nWhen people say a car has understeer what they really mean is that it has understeer *under certain conditions* - usually going fast round a track.\n\nGenerally speaking said car probably hasn't been designed for those conditions - it's been designed for going to the supermarket, or taking the kids to school, where cornering ability at speed isn't as important as how many seats it has, or how fuel efficient the engine is.\n\nOr if it has been designed for those conditions, the manufacturer has had to make design compromises which contribute to understeer, like making it cheaper.", "N3rdi is correct. There is no car that doesnt do one of these, infact all can be suseptable to both. AWD cars actually have pretty bad understeer, however new technologies make them often times a bit better than RWD or FWD.", "If you could create a car that has 100% perfect traction 100% the time, you've won yourself the adoration of every manufacturer and race team except Formula D.\n\nThey do the next best thing, make a car that predictably does one thing or the other when it loses grip.", "_URL_0_ \nQuality is terrible but the logic, well that is flawless." ]

[ "Space has no pressure, so the maximum pressure difference is going to be 1 atmosphere (between sea-level and the vacuum of space). Underwater you get an extra atmosphere of pressure (so 2 atmospheres) when you go down as little as 10m, so exploring deep involves a LOT of pressure.\n\nEdit: quick google for a pressure calculator suggests 100 atmospheres by the time you get down 1km, which makes sense given that it's a relatively linear thing", "In space, there's no pressure because space is basically a vast empty void with nothing in it. So, as we travel out of the atmosphere the pressure tapers off until it gets to zero. Underwater however, the deeper you get the more pressure you have, from all the water above you pushing down. It can get up to a thousand times more pressure than we get on the surface. So, that's one of the reasons why it's so hard to explore the oceans, because past a certain depth you need to build ludicrously reinforced vessels to resist the insane amounts of pressure. That also means things like windows, which are weak points in the vessel, need to themselves be ridiculously reinforced and it becomes very difficult to see out of them. The ocean is also dark. Light doesn't travel far, so unless you know exactly what you're looking for and where to look, it's basically a crapshoot as to what you're going to find. Finally, the only things of interest (that we know of) in the ocean are living creatures, which have a tendency to move. So, we either have to find a place where lots of these creatures congregate, hope we find stationary creatures, use lights to attract them, or sit there and hope they come to us. None of these methods are exactly fool proof and it's extremely likely that we miss out on a lot of goings on down in the deeps because of it.", "Pressure is dependent upon depth/height, the density of whatever material you're in, and the gravity that's present. The main things contributing to these two pressures are gravity (for water, that of the Earth, and for space, a very weak mix of whatever objects are near) and density (water has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimeter, and the gaseous mixture of space is nearly zero). Those factors combined mean pressure underwater is much greater than the almost zero pressure of the vacuum of space. It's a lot easier to build a craft to navigate pressures closer to what we experience, which would be space as opposed to the ocean's adding pressure per small increase in depth.\n\nIn regards to light, you get more sunlight in the solar system that you would going deep into the ocean. Of course the Earth's atmosphere filters out most of the sunlight that's harmful (higher frequency, more photons per second), so spacecraft also has to be able to properly handle that effect as well which given our large materials based research boom is more simple than getting a really good and hardy flashlight on a submersible." ]

[ "This isn't my specialty, but my understanding is that the fusion reaction occurring in a star resists the inward pull of gravity. When a star has run out of matter to fuse, collapse can occur. Depending on the mass of the star at this point, a number of things can happen (black hole, neutron star, white dwarf).\n\nIt largely depends on the conditions of the star. A good place to begin is here: _URL_0_", "The book [Death from the Skies!] (_URL_0_) by Phil Plait explains this and other related questions with a good mixture of layman and expert language that is easy to understand. Although your question has been magnificently answered by iorgfeflkd and cx91, you might want to read up a bit more on what they explained." ]

[ "I've written about this [here](_URL_0_).", "From what I can gather reading this article you would freeze on the \"surface\" then get blown away by the 200 mph winds and then get incinerated if you made it to the core. \n\n_URL_0_", "We'd stop a couple feet down and be crushed by the pressure of the gas, agonizing pain overwhelmed any sensory input as the lung collapses. Maybe if you lie down but then there'd be only methane to breath.\nIce is at the centre, with immense pressure under gravity the methane gas deposits.", "In theory at some point buoyancy would be achieved, but it would be quite deadly for humans. \n\nWe don't know for sure what's at the center of Jupiter. Jupiter does have a strong magnetic field which implied there is some sort of metallic center, like earths molten iron and nickle core, however some scientist believe it may not me heavy metals, but [metallic hydrogen](_URL_0_) that's at the center of many gas giants." ]

[ "If the country they are flying to doesn't want them there, and figures out they are there", "Nothing really. However if you get caught without a visa you will get deported. You could do it if you lived completely off the grid" ]

[ "All the other reasons here are basically true. But I think there is one big thing they left out. The reason such a small amount of CO2 or methane can make such a huge difference is because there is SO MUCH energy from the sun striking the planet every day (over 12,000 gigawatt-hours, more than 20,000x what the human race consumes) that even a very small change in how much gets absorbed can lead to a significant temperature change.", "You know your favourite food fish fingers? Well, there are tiny tiny amounts of something called arsenic in there. You don't notice because it's so small but if you increased the amount of arsenic it would make your tummy very unhappy and you would go to sleep for a long time. It would still be a tiny part of your fish fingers but some things have a powerful effect even when they are small relative to everything else around it. CO2 is like that too. A small increase won't effect the climate very much but doubling it will make the earths tummy very upset and it will get a temperature. ", "It doesn't. There are many other things in the atmosphere which trap heat better than CO2 like water vapor and methane for instance. However, since removing water from the atmosphere is a sysiphian task and we kind of need it for weather, it's cheaper to curb CO2 emissions. \n\nThe earths atmosphere used to have lots of CO2 in it and little oxygen before plants came along. The plants and algae over billions of years reduced most of this CO2 by using it to build their bodies with the carbon, while freeing the oxygen, and they take the carbon with them when they die. Just as long as they don't decompose or get burned. \n\nSo the coal, wood, and oil we use for fuel is billion year old carbon compounds that used to be our ancient atmosphere, got converted to plants which died, got buried over time, and now re-join the atmosphere again when we dig it up and use it for fuel. \n\n", "First, a small increase can make a bigger difference than it might seem by numbers alone, here's a good demonstration:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n\nNext remember that our atmosphere is about 300 MILES deep (_URL_0_). Yes it gets thinner the higher you go but even at 30,000 feet (over 5 and a half miles) there's more than enough for a huge plane to easily and efficiently get lift. So even if you are only slightly increasing the chance of a beam of light interacting with some CO2, over the course of the traverse through the atmosphere that still piles up to a lot of opportunities for interaction.\n\nFinally as \\u\\ex_stripper said, theres a LOT of energy coming from the sun. So if you increase the amount of energy absorbed by a tiny tiny percentage, it turns into a lot of energy relative to the norm.", "Congratulation, you've discovered a cascading effect. These are some of the most amazing things to study and there are areas of expertise for studying them in almost every field of science (Bio, Medicine, Computer Science. Cognitive Science, just to name a few)\n\nThere are lots of things like this, where a small move one direction or another can change things massively.\n\nexample: imagine that you stabbed your 3rd grade teacher with a knife. They survived, and only suffered a small scar. Do you think this small change would have a dramatic effect on your life 10, 15, or 20 years later? Of course. We have an intuitive sense about how large connected systems (like the flow of our life, with one act leading to the next) can be greatly impacted by small changes at specific points.\n\nThe same is true for the very connected system of the climate. A small change in how much heat is trapped at the polls causes more ice to melt, causing there to be less snow, which now is no longer reflecting the sun, causing more heat to get trapped. These sort of chains are easy to understand in isolation, but can feel almost magical when viewed as a group.\n\nWhy are do they feel 'magical' as a group? Humans are really bad at understanding compound effects. (This is why people don't intuitively understand interest rates) I've never heard anyone claim they know why this is the case, but it is. So you are in good company. ", "CO2 (as well as methane and water vapor) is just really good at absorbing energy from the sun that would otherwise just hit the surface and reflect/re-emit back into space. Basically, it keeps more of the sun's energy for a longer period in earth's atmosphere, hence it increases the temperature.\n\nHere is a graph that shows absorption spectra of atmospheric gases: _URL_0_\n\nYou can clearly see that nitrogen(dark green) does not absorb much at all and oxygen(dark blue) also just has 5 relatively discrete absorption lines. CO2(red) absorbs a much wider spectrum in infrared and with 1,000-1,000,000 times the intensity. That way 0.04% CO2 absorbs (more) energy (than) equivalent to 40-40,000% oxygen. \n\nYou can see methane(yellow) and especially water(light green, responsible for 50-75% of greenhouse effect) do absorb a lot of, too, but methane concentration is much lower (about 1/500) and cloud cover actually reflects a lot of energy. Also, water is more of a passive factor/not (directly) caused by humans and levels vary a lot in the atmosphere.\n\nEDIT: Oxygen and nitrogen do absorb most of shorter than visible wavelengths but that accounts only for a very small fraction of the sun's output." ]

[ "You are confusing Crimea with South Eastern Ukraine. \nCrimea is Russia. It was Russia, and it is once again Russia. It's a done deal and there is no going back. \n\nAs to South East Ukraine, IMF/World Bank/EU would only continuously loan money to the Ukrainian government if they maintain control over South East. That's because most of what remains from the Soviet-built production plants and industrial capacity is located there. That's basically the collateral for the loans and the hope for future repayment. \nIf they stop getting the loans, they won't be able to feed the population, and there will be another revolt. \nSo as far as the new Ukrainian government is concerned, Ukraine needs to keep SE no matter what. It doesn't matter how many people die. \n\n", "The main difference is the independence referendum was allowed by Indonesia (albeit with outside pressure, but that doesn’t matter). Essentially, a region can't just decide for itself that it's allowed to leave its mother country; it has to be allowed to do so by the mother country. \n\nFor example consider Scotland leaving the UK versus Texas seceding from the US. In the UK, due to the history of how it united, it is built into the legal framework that Scotland can leave the union. Additionally the UK government itself said it would respect the referendum vote. Therefore, if they vote to leave, this will be recognized as legitimate on the international stage. On the other hand, if Texas suddenly decided to secede, this would not be, since there is no legal framework in the US for a state to secede and the US government likely wouldn’t support such a referendum. \n\nTherefore, since the Ukrainian government didn't support the referendum it has no validity outside Russia. \n\nIf you just willy nilly allow people to ‘self determine’ what country they want to belong to in any arbitrary division of land it would allow for some particularly nefarious tactics. For example, would you think it right, if America sponsored people to move to some relatively uninhabited part of Russia, become Russian citizens, and then force a referendum since now a large portion of the population wants to be part of America? Should such a vote be legitimate? After all the popular support supposedly wants to be American no?\n\nNote, the above is only relevant to referendums. \n\n\n(Also, note that there’s a few things you’re misrepresenting by saying that the entire population of Crimea want to be part of Russia, but since it’s a moot point for your original question I decided not to address this). \n\n\nTL;DR; The current federal government of the region must endorse the referendum (even if they don’t like it) for it be acknowledged internationally. \n" ]

[ "Terminal velocity for a human falling in a face down position is about 54m/s (120mph). In a head-down or upright position, it can be much faster. The exact figure will depend on the jumpers weight, body shape, and the clothes they're wearing.\n\nAssuming quadratic drag and a terminal velocity of 54m/s, the following table is obtained:\n\n|Height| Velocity *with* drag|Velocity *without* drag|\n|:--|:--|:--|\n|5m|9.8m/s|9.9m/s|\n|10m|13.8m/s|14.0m/s|\n|20m|19.2m/s|19.8m/s|\n|50m|28.9m/s|31.3m/s|\n|100m|37.8m/s|44.3m/s|\n|200m|46.4m/s|62.6m/s|\n|500m|53.05m/s|99.0m/s|\n\n\nFrom this you can see that you won't get near terminal velocity from a 20m fall - at that height, you can safely ignore air resistance entirely. It doesn't become a significant factor until around 50m and you don't get close to terminal velocity until you've fallen several hundred meters. And that's assuming you're falling face first - if you dive head first, it'll take longer, and the final velocity will be significantly higher.\n\nI don't know if there is any record of someone surviving an impact with water at terminal velocity. The world record for the highest jump into water currently stands at [59m](_URL_0_), which is very high but not terminal. There have been cases of people surviving falls from aircraft - if you can survive such a landing in a tree or on a snow, I don't suppose it's impossible that you could survive such a fall into water. Your chances are very slim, however - I would not recommend trying it.", "Terminal velocity is the fastest speed something can achieve. The speed at which the accelerating force, usually gravity, and drag/friction equalize. We usually think of terminal as meaning deadly, but in this case it does not." ]

[ "We barely have powerful enough equipment to observe our own dwarf planets, let alone those orbiting other stars. \n\nWe don't know if other star systems are like this, but there's no reason to think they aren't. Our solar system isn't special in any way as far as we can tell. ", "You may be interested in this paper which compares the properties of our solar system to the statistical properties of observed exoplanet systems: _URL_0_\n\nThis sentence in the abstract most directly answers your question:\n\"The two characteristics of the Solar System that we find to be most special are the lack of super-Earths with orbital periods of days to months and the general lack of planets inside of the orbital radius of Mercury.\"\n\nBasically, it is very common for planetary systems to have lots of planets quite close to the central star (inside the orbit of Mercury), especially \"Super Earths\": planets that are about ~10 times as massive as the earth, and which are (probably) rocky with a reasonably thick (1-10% by mass) hydrogen atmosphere. The fact that these planets are common holds up even after you take into account that these planets are the easiest to find (\"selection effects\"). The solar system is somewhat unusual in that it does not have any planets like this." ]

[ "There are only so many positions for each notch. Multiply them and you get the possible number of combinations...\n\nWhen I first moved into a gated community all the houses looked the same... Went to the door turned the key... Something looks different... Im in the wrong house.", "Basically, on the standard house lock there are five pins of varying sizes which are assigned a number 0-9, giving you a number such as 71432 for each key/lock combo. I don't have any idea how to math the probability that you will find a random lock that has the same number pins, but I can tell you that if you go to your local home improvement store and look at the boxes they come in batches with the same combination for people who want to redo their whole house without rekeying so there definitely are \"overlaps\". " ]

[ "Yes, it's different between games.\n\nModern hardware (GPUs) include ultra-specialized circuits sometimes called \"shaders\". The idea is to figure out how brightly (and what color) a surface glows based on the angle light hits it, the color of the light, the color of the surface, etc. This can be *super* efficient, partly because they're doing the same operation over and over, and don't need new instructions, just new numbers to crunch. This hardware might not even have the **ability** to receive instructions, it just does one thing very efficiently.\n\nRaytracing is a technology that follows light as it travels, and accounts for light hitting one object then bouncing to another... also, if a surface isn't shiny it might not produce a perfect reflection, but light may come off it in some general direction. Raytracing is good at figuring these sorts of details out, and takes a lot more computational power as well.\n\nThere are many points between these techniques that trade appearance for efficiency. One example would be to assess objects which are illuminated, and treat them as light sources that in turn illuminate other objects. The actual calculations how bright everything looks may be very simple in this example, but it would produce a higher degree of realism. ", "There's quite a few types of lighting, but it sounds like you want lighting from a point source.\n\n3D models are made of polygons. Think of those diamond commercials where you get a close up of the flat cut faces, those are like polygons on a model. Every polygon has a direction vector made of 3 numbers, called the \"normal\". It's the same thing as in physics, just the direction perpendicular to a surface, pointing outwards. Direction vectors in graphics all lie on a unit sphere, a sphere of radius 1 (you may have heard of a unit circle from trigonometry, it's a similar concept). The 3 numbers of a direction vector are the *x*, *y*, and *z* values of a point from the unit sphere. So if you start from some position and move to the end of a direction vector from that position, you will be 1 unit from your original position. If you have a polygon laying flat on the ground facing up, the normal is (0, 1, 0), the very top of the unit sphere. If you rotate it a bit around the *x* axis, the *z* and *y* would start to increase or decrease depending on which way you rotated it, but the length of the direction vector will remain 1.\n\nSo if you have a 3D model in a computer, it's made of a bunch of points connected by lines to form polygons, each of which has a 1 unit long normal pointing outwards. If you rendered the model and drew all the normals from the center of each polygon, it would look like a porcupine. To light up the polygons, you need a light position. Then, you go along to each polygon and increase the color values of its textels (texture pixels) depending on how close its normal is to \"towards the light\". To get the direction towards a point, you calculate like so:\n\nTowards Light = (Light Position - Your Position)\n\nThen, you get the length of that vector with the Pythagorean theorem, and divide the vector by the length of itself to create a unit vector. Now, taking into account how close the polygon's normal is to \"towards light\", how close its position is to the light source, and how bright the light is, you can increase/decrease the RGB values of that polygon's textels. RGB is just 3 numbers from 0-1, (*red*, *green*, *blue*), with all 0s being black and all 1s being white, so polygons of identical color but facing different directions relative to the light will end up with different RGB values greater or less than their original values.\n\nThis is close to what actually happens, but pretty much everything in graphics is done with matrices, which are big blocks of numbers that are easy for GPUs to work with, and there are many different lighting methods and algorithms. The process I explained here wouldn't give you shadows from other objects, for example. You also wouldn't get diffuse lighting from nearby objects. (a bright red metal wall makes everything around it slightly red, etc) There's also a slightly better looking lighting algorithm which lights polygons based on the points of the model. You give each point of the model a normal by taking the average of the normals of each polygon the point is a part of, then light those polygons based on how close that normal is to towards the light.", "In today video games, dynamic lighting is done in the old ways. You need to compute a shadow and specular effects.\n\nShadow can be:\n\n- a simple directional halo or blur\n- a geometric projection of the object geometry on the ground / wall\n- a geometric projection of the object on other objects (including itself!)\n\nSpecular is computed from the normals and make the object look shiny. It follow the classic law of reflection.\n\nMost of the high quality lighting today is thanks to precomputed light + dynamic projection of the light in either a low resolution texture (great for soft shadows) or an extruded geometry (great for hard shadows).\n\nThis is all tricks and white powder until we finally have proper ray/cone tracing!", "That's a very broad topic, but it sort of comes down to this:\n\n* For each object in the scene, figure out which parts of that object are showing, and which pixels of the screen they occupy\n* For each of those pixels, figure out which light sourced affect that pixel; this could include ambient lighting, point lights, shadows from other objects in the scene, and so on\n* Determine how each of those lights affect each pixel\n* Draw all of those pixels\n\nAs you might imagine, drawing each pixel requires a lot of math... and rendering a full 1080p screen is 1920x1080 pixels, or just over 2 million pixels in total. If you're rendering at 60fps, that means your GPU is drawing out over 120 million pixels per second. That's why GPUs are so specialized -- they have many processing cores which are specialized in this exact sort of math, which allows them do a lot of these operations in parallel (all at the same time).\n\nThe CPU tells the GPU what to draw. Objects in the scene, textures and shader programs to apply to those objects, a lot of spatial math to position those objects, and logically updating everything in the scene. Assuming we're still at 60fps, all of those updates have to happen in less than 17 milliseconds per frame.\n\nA lot of development work goes into streamlining this process in order to maximize efficiency and draw more cool stuff with less overhead. For example, a process called \"frustum culling\" will determine objects which are definitely outside of your view, and skip all of the effort involved in drawing those objects. Another process called \"occlusion culling\" will try to skip objects which are behind walls or otherwise blocked from view.\n\nThere are also \"post-process\" effects such as color correction, motion blur, depth of field, lighting bloom, and so on. These are a whole separate process on top of everything else.\n\nThere's a lot more to it than that, of course, but that's a somewhat decent summary." ]

[ "Firstly you're wrong, in expensive situations sound reduction between rooms is a major concern and building codes exist to maintain some amount of sound reduction. It's a bigger deal in apartment buildings and condos but you still see it in homes. \n\nSecondly sound proofing is incredibly expensive. It amounts to building a room inside of a room and have special insulation, air ducts, doors and windows. \n\nThirdly, you don't really want a sound proof room. Someone could break into your house and rob you blind, and you would never hear it. ", "This is the reason that a good architect will suggest having the master bedroom on one side of the house and the other bedrooms on another side at a distance. Loud sounds can still be heard, but a good amount of privacy is maintained. ", "It's extremely expensive. The other points about not being able to hear stuff outside the room are secondary. To *completely* soundproof a moderately sized bedroom, you're easily talking $10,000-15,000 or more. Median home price in the US is less than 200k. No sane home builder is going to sink 15k into a house for a feature that only a small fraction of people will actually appreciate, because it won't result in a higher purchase price - it just results in the builder losing money.\n \nIf someone really wants to, they could retrofit an existing bedroom to make it totally soundproof, but again, it's going to be 10-15k. I guess if you're loaded and it's a priority for you you might go for it, but realistically the number of cases when it would apply are exceedingly low. ", "A truly sound proof room is actually very unsettling, claustrophobic like. Most people want some natural white noise, it's what we're used to over millions of years of evolution. \n\nSound reduction between walls is very nice tho. " ]

[ "Taxi services are licensed. Uber is not. The government collects money for these licenses and in return ensures that the taxi services are safe. If you endanger people, steal their money, or otherwise run a corrupt service, your license can be revoked and you can't operate as a taxi service anymore. \n\nUber doesn't have any of these safeguards. The person picking you up could be a deranged rapist for all you know... there's no safeguards to ensure that they are on the up and up. ", "I'll tell you what also, UBER drivers do not always end their trips when you get out, an extra five mins circling the block means more cash for them and uber, how many of you actually check?", "Can't speak to the situation in the US, here in Germany, there is a law that sais you have to have a special license to transport people. \n\nUber drivers do not have that license - > illegal. Either get a license for all your drivers, or change the law through lobbying.\n\nI wonder though, what do you mean by \"better service\"? I only ever heard it's cheaper.", "Why Uber Is Better: GPS, cell phone based. You don't need to know your address, nor to negotiate with the driver. Additionally, you rate the driver.\n\nWhy Uber Is Cheaper: Less overhead, both in the form of dispatch and other components of the traditional taxi process (like 10 taxies waiting at a taxi stand), and less taxes. Uber verifies the drivers aren't asshats, but there is no government monitoring program like with taxies.\n\nWhy Uber Drivers Make More Money: Less down time waiting. And more per mile, due to less regulation and bureaucracy.\n\nWhy Taxi Companies Try To Ban Uber: Wouldn't you? Uber is taking the best drivers and the best fairs -- of course they are attempting to get it outlawed. ", "When something bad happens, people get sad. They want to make sure it never happens again. If enough people are sad, then they try to get the government to do something about it. They don't care if the government really can not do anything about it, they just want the government to try. They don't care how much it costs, or how many bad people may misuse the program, they just want something done. Politicians who want people to like them and vote for them say \"we will make sure this never happens again\" and they create a law to stop it from happening.\n\nSo if there are 10 million cab rides a day, and in one of those rides something bad happens, people get sad and ask for help from politicians. Politicians make licenses so that all the cab drivers will be tested, and everyone can feel better about being in a cab.\n\nNobody ever really looks to see if that law actually made a difference. Nobody ever looks to see if bad guys pay politicians to not pay attention when they break the law. Nobody wants to do this because people may not feel safe if they know that those cab drivers might be bad people because the license department man took money not to look to hard at people.\n\nAs more and more of these laws come into being, more and more money is wasted on bad politicians and bad government just so people can feel safer. Nobody ever talks about this because they want you to be happy.\n\nNow I am going to tell you something important. You are the best person to keep you safe. You need to look both ways to cross the road even when the walk sign is on, because even though there are laws against driving through a red light, people will still do it. If you just trust everyone will follow the law, you may get hit. No matter how good those traffic laws are, they still may not protect you, and you still have to take care of yourself.\n\nNow most drivers in Uber are normal people like your mommy and me. They own their cars and take good care of them because they own the cars. They know if they give you a bad ride, you will rate them poorly with the smartphone application, and nobody will want to ride with them again. So they work very hard to make your ride good. A taxi driver has no smartphone application where you can rate them, so they can be rude, drive crazy and scare you. Their company pays good money to politicians and the government, so the politicians and the government protect the taxis against ride sharing services like Uber. Uber drivers don't pay the politicians and government money, so the politicians and government do not protect them. Most people who use Uber get rides faster, have a more pleasant ride, and pay less. Most people who use it are happy. \n\nIf everyone uses Uber, then the taxi companies do not make money, and can not pay the government and the politicians money. So they don't want you to use Uber. They say scary bad people will take you away if you use Uber, so you will not use Uber. The people who are scared are the taxi companies and Politicians.", "The controversy behind Uber is that it runs skew to human intuition.\n\nUber is a perfect example of just how powerful the law of supply and demand is.\n\nSay it's new-years eve and you wanna get home from a party at 2am. You *really* want to get home and you *really* do not want to walk through your neighbourhood for fear of meeting your ex-husband.\n\nIf you want a cab you gotta wait for hours and you might even not get one.\n\nIf you go to Uber, you can show how much you want to get home by offering a large amount of money for a ride.\n\nOn the other end there is a person who really do not want to get out of bed at 2am on newyears eve. But if a sufficiently large amount of money is at stake, they might be convinced otherwise.\n\nYou get a ride, they get enough money to deem getting out of bed worthwhile. Everybody wins.\n\nHowever, there is an age old problem of what to charge for necessities. If you have cancer and I've a cure I can sell it to you for arbitrary amounts of money up to and including everything you own: you won't be needing it if you die of cancer, will you now?\n\nThis situation of overcharging is unfair. However, on a busy night Uber isn't an overcharging scenario: people with more money just get serviced first.\n\n*But stupid non-economists think that Uber is overcharging in the same way and therefore: controversy.*\n\nIt isn't unfair, but it looks that way.", "I will never use a taxi service again if I can help it. The dispatchers seem to be universally rude and dismissive. Something as simple as asking them to call when they arrive so I don't have to wait outside is met with bewildered shock, as if I asked for a fucking blowjob. I hope every fucking one of them loses their jobs in the near future. I have not used Uber yet but it seems to negate all of the complaints I have with taxis. It's not surprising that an authoritarian state like Germany would try to ban an objective improvement to society.", "I live in a city where Uber and Lyft are currently undergoing legal fights. And I have worked as a cab driver in the recent past in that same city.\n\nThe controversy with both is that they perform the same role/service as a taxi or cab, but both companies refuse to admit that and follow whatever local regulations may be in place for cab companies. This upsets some cab operators as allowing a competitor to operate without the expense of following the rules that govern all of the existing operators gives them an unfair advantage.\n\nSome of the specific issues that come up, or at least have come up around here:\nlicenses. In many cities, each cab needs to be licensed by the city. In some cities, the total number of licenses issued may be limited. But even in cities like mine where an unlimited number of cabs are allowed to be licensed, it is still a significant expense. Uber and Lyft have decided that as long as they claim to not be cab companies, they are not required to pay those expenses.\n\nInsurance. Both Uber and Lyft are quick to point out that they provide insurance coverage for the drivers. But as I understand it, their insurance is supplemental to the driver's personal insurance policy. And most people's personal insurance does not cover for profit operation. Many expressly state that they will not cover a driver who was using the vehicle for work purposes in the event of an accident. So there is a very real risk of situations arising where a drive may find that neither their insurance or Uber/lyfts is willing to cover an accident. \n\nIn Madison, there are laws in place which limit the fares that cabs can charge. And those fairs must be posted on each vehicle. And those fares are not allowed to change without prior approval. Lyft and Uber have the option of changing the rates for calculating fares at any time depending upon demand.\n\nAs for why Uber drivers make so much more, in part they have to. They are putting wear and tear on their personal vehicles and should be paying for higher insurance coverage. So they need to earn more per fare/hour just to cover their expenses." ]

[ "We use the right hand rule because of how cross products work. It matches what we see in nature. If you have one vector pointing left and one pointing forward, mathematically, the third will point up. This is also what we see in nature where cross products are observed.\n\nWe don't use the left hand rule because it's applications in nature are limited to instances where we've inverted one dimension (like electron current vs conventional current. You use the left hand rule in that case.)", "\n > a rotating object (which I assume is symmetrical)\n\nA rotating object is not necessarily symmetrical. It's rotating in a plane, and the torque is just the direction perpendicular to the plane.\n\nGet a coin with a thick edge (like the nickel if you're in the US). You can:\n\n- Roll it like a wheel. Basically you grasp it by one point along the side, then sort of \"pitch\" it underhand, almost like a bowling ball. The torque is in the direction perpendicular to the plane of the coin.\n\n- Spin it by pushing Thomas Jefferson's nose away from you while you pull the back of his head toward you. The torque is pointing down toward where Jefferson's body would be.\n" ]

[ "Disregard anyone who tries to give an explanation with \"more synapses\" or \"this brain part is larger\" etc. I think the only safe answer we can give now is we don't know yet. If there was a physical trait you could look and find in brains that defined intelligence then you'd have scientists working round the clock studying it to find out how to induce it, but last I checked that wasn't happening.\n\nThis is not exactly the only problem with the question either. You seem to use the word objective, can you please define what your definition of objectively intelligent is? Would a [brilliant physics professor who still falls for a scam and smuggles drugs ](_URL_0_) still be considered objectively intelligent? Would people who have exceptional memory but are severely stunted socially that they can only perform in night clubs considered objectively stupid? It's not an easy question to define, leave alone answer. ", "The studies I am aware of have found weak correlations between intelligence and 1) brain size (r = .3-.4) and 2) neural efficiency. Brain size refers to the volume of white and grey matter in the brain, while neural efficiency is the amount of glucose consumed to perform a given mental task. So more intelligent people have slightly larger and more efficient brains (meaning they need less glucose to solve X problem). But these correlations are fairly small so they don't really explain why some people are so much smarter than others. The truth is we don't know, this is an active area of research.", "A decades-old article is still relevant:\n\n* Neisser, Ulric, et al. \"[Intelligence: knowns and unknowns](_URL_1_).\" American psychologist 51.2 (1996): 77.\n\nNot mentioned in this thread so far ... conduction velocity in the brain nerve pathway is correlated with intelligence, i.e., as with computers, higher velocity leads to faster processing:\n\n* Reed, T. Edward, and Arthur R. Jensen. \"[Conduction Velocity in a Brain Nerve Pathway of Normal Adults Correlates with Intelligence Level](_URL_0_).\" Intelligence 16 (1992): 259-72.", "I think the first thing we have to look at here with this question is what is \"objective intelligence\" and \"objective stupidity\"? How do we measure these things and make the claim that someone is either intelligent or stupid? IQ tests? When we watch a co-worker or friend mess up a simple task? When someone can't grasp calculus or maybe someone else can't grasp algebra? It's hard to define. IQ tests seem to be the best overall measure we have, but even then they are not perfect. A good predictor, but can miss the mark on both ends of the spectrum. Psychologist W. Joel Schneider of Illinois State University talks about it [here](_URL_0_) in the Scientific American. Mr. Schneider has an interest in evaluating evaluations (Wrap your head around that). Another indicator seems to be the ability to learn and apply information quickly, or lack thereof of the ability.\n\nIf we want to we can look at an average person and someone with a disease or disability that affects their brain function, like someone with Down Syndrome or similar. There are severe and mild cases with varying levels of performance impact, of course, but lets assume a moderate case. \n\nAs others have said, the current belief is that cognitive function relies on circuits in the brain. An interesting hypothesis from UC San Diego School of Medicine's Neuroscience department states that if there is some sort of dysfunction in normal brain function, then there must be some sort of disturbance with these circuits, as they are responsible for all cognition. These circuits are made of neurons and their connections, so there must be a problem with either the neurons or the connections. Normal function requires normal excitation and inhibition between neurons, so too much and you have a problem, too little and you have a problem. They engineer mice to have the equivalent of human Down Syndrome. and find that the mice's synapses (in a basic sense the things that allow the excitation and inhibition of neurons) are structurally and functionally affected. They and their \"spines\" as they call them, are enlarged and this inhibits normal function. They state **\"The most important finding to date is that excessive inhibition leads to an imbalance that compromises circuit function. When the brain circuits do not fire as actively as they should, learning and memory are impaired.\"**\n\nThis is a specific case with a specific disease with tests done on mice, but I think it gives good insight. Here is the page from the university if you want to read more, which I encourage you to do. [UC San Diego School of Medicine basic research page](_URL_1_) ", "Sorry if this is against the rules, but I wanted to link to a comment reply I made deeper in this thread where I basically argue that it's not actually of that much value to talk about vague intelligence.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHowever, I will add that there was a fascinating study done of Taxi drivers in London cited in Dr. Ericsson's book \"Peak\" that talks about certain mental skill sets and correlating brain changes (the streets of London are particularly illogical and complex and things shift around a lot due to construction work and limited space). Here's some of the text from page 31:\n\n > Maguire found that a particular part of the hippocampus—the\nposterior, or rear, part—was larger in the taxi drivers than in the other\nsubjects. Furthermore, the more time that a person had spent as a taxi\ndriver, the larger the posterior hippocampi were. In another study that\nMaguire carried out a few years later, she compared the brains of London\ntaxi drivers with London bus drivers. Like the taxi drivers, the\nbus drivers spent their days driving around London; the difference between\nthem was that the bus drivers repeated the same routes over and\nover and thus never had to figure out the best way to get from point A\nto point B. Maguire found that the posterior hippocampi of the taxi\ndrivers were significantly larger than the same parts of the brain in the\nbus drivers. The clear implication was that whatever was responsible\nfor the difference in the size of the posterior hippocampi was not related\nto the driving itself but rather was related specifically to the navigational\nskills that the job required.\n\nMaguire did also follow prospective students through completion or dropout to ascertain that it wasn't simply that people with bigger hippocampus (es?) are more successful at being taxi drivers but that the brain actually changes as a result of the skill sets learned. In essence, the brain is WAY more malleable even in older ages than we have traditionally been taught (or thought). Really, only physiological things are blocking points. Like you have to start ballerinas by around age 10 so that they can literally start the work of altering how their bones grow and join before they get too old (also covered in the book Peak). It is certainly harder to learn certain things later in life, but so far almost nothing has been found impossible (someone even recently debunked that idea that perfect pitch had to be learned as a child).", "There are some known brain abnormalities that very strongly correlate with low intelligence.\n\n- [Hydrocephalus](_URL_2_), a condition in which there is expansion in fluid filled chambers within the brain, will generally cause mental impairment if left untreated. Generally believed to be due to loss of gray matter (neuronal cell bodies).\n\n- A variety of disorders producing autistic phenotypes have been found to be associated with an abnormally high or abnormally low number of local cortical dendritic connections (increased/decreased synapse number) ([source](_URL_0_\nshow)). Two pertinent examples are [Fragile X syndrome](_URL_5_), which has been associated with cortical hyperconnectivity (too many connections), and [Rett syndrome](_URL_6_), which has been associated with cortical hypoconnectivity (too few connections), among other things ([source](_URL_1_)).\n\nFinally, intelligence has been found to correlate significantly in a number of studies simply with the volume of certain brain regions in humans ([source](_URL_3_)). Across animals, relative brain size measured as [encephalization quotient](_URL_4_) is an objective measure that can predict to some extent the intelligence of an animal (which, is admittedly somewhat subjective).\n\nUnfortunately, all of these measures are correlative in nature. There are definitely exceptions to the above mentioned examples. We do not currently know much regarding the specifics of how 'intelligence' manifests itself within cortical circuits.", "I have read most of the comments and didn't see this question so I'll ask it here, sorry if it is repetitive. \n\nWhat is \"objective intelligence\" and what is \"objective stupidity\" in the first place? Are we defining it simply by biologically superior brain structure, behavior expectations, or something else? \n\nIn his book renowned Neurologist Oliver Sacks notes several of his patience who we would term \"objectively stupid\" because of their social behavior, however, they possessed abilities which we would consider \"objectively intelligent\" and to a high degree. \n\nI am referencing the \"Twins\" from the final chapter of this book. \n\nSacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. New York: Summit Books, 1985. Print.\n ", "I completed my master's in general/experimental psychology in 2012. I don't do research on intelligence, but I'm going to share my own interpretation of what I learned from my professors. First, I am a die hard advocate of Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. Basically, he divides intelligence into different domains so there is linguistic and mathematical intelligence but also visual-spatial, musical (temporal), kinetic, and social intelligences. This just makes sense given that different areas of the brain are specialized and that in some people, certain areas are going to be more \"developed\" than in others. I think this is apparent in a puzzle game like Myst where you have to suddenly solve, say, a music puzzle. I also picture an autistic savant that can barely function in society but has some insane computational power in a particular area or have near perfect memory for some subset of information. I'm not personally aware of what makes people more intelligent biologically, but it makes sense to say either there are just more connections between neurons in those regions, the glial cells help make those neurons more conductive or efficient (such as having more myelin, or fatty insulation, around those neurons), and/or the connections BETWEEN brain areas are more developed, leading to some form of synesthetic enhancement. \n\nOn a bigger scale, our large cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, is what differentiates the human brain from other, less intelligent primates. The prefrontal cortex in particular is seen as important for planning and decision making, so this is where the most attention should be paid. However, I firmly believe that it's the integration between brain systems that's the most important determinant of functional/fluid intelligence. The other areas of the brain that specialize in attention span, memory encoding and retrieval, language and symbolic representation, time perception, visualization, and emotions (which are integral to learning and motivation) are all necessary for good problem solving skills. Furthermore, it really is hard to understate the importance of creativity, which is theoretically distinct from intelligence, but good luck making a major breakthrough in science or technology without it. ", "I do research in applied cognitive psychology and particularly multi-tasking. While of course there are multiple intelligences, it turns out that measuring 'working memory' gets you [pretty far](_URL_0_).\n\nWorking memory capacity can be further related to [executive control](_URL_2_), which is more or less a mind's capacity to elegantly switch between tasks and coordinate cognitive activities. Imagine you are driving and trying to text your friend- if you have high executive control, you will probably be better able to switch back and forth without losing either thread. It also relates to your capacity to exhibit selective attention -IE ignoring things you want to ignore and maintaining focus on desired mental activities.\n\nNow, neuroscience-wise, what is executive control? I don't recall the details, to be honest. But it relates to the activity of the prefrontal cortex. I know that some people have higher baseline levels of activities in certain PFC areas, indicating that their brains are having to work harder to exhibit control over attention and ongoing cognitive tasks.\n\nSo, from what I understand, you can explain a certain amount (below 50%, see below) of 'intelligence' by measuring working memory, which is itself highly related to executive control functions. Some people have more capable PFC regions that handle executive control. However, the construct of the 'central executive' is quite possibly not something that can be [limited to a brain region](_URL_1_). Something like this is difficult to isolate.\n\n(important takeaway from the first paper I linked):\n\"The meta-analysis reported in this article clearly demonstrates\nthat WM measures are significantly correlated with measures of\nintellectual abilities, in terms of broad content abilities (verbal,\nnumerical, and spatial), with general and specific content-based\nreasoning abilities, with PS and ECTs, with knowledge abilities,\nand with g. However, even when the measures are corrected for\nunreliability, in no case did the estimated true-score correlations\nbetween WM and ability exceed a value of .653, indicating a\nmaximum shared variance of 42.6%\"", "I have background in artificial intelligence systems which I think gives me somewhat of an interesting take on this whole question. My primary area of interest is the use of evolutionary algorithms in developing artificial neural networks. \n\nAn artificial neural network (ANN) is a mathematical model of a brain made up of many neurons/nodes and their inputs/outputs. Think of each neuron as a simple function like log for example. One neuron might take x as an input, and output log(x) to all its output neurons. In addition, we generally give each neuron a set of parameters for tweaking its mechanics. So in the previous example we might take x, and output c*log(x)+b for some constants a and b.\n\nSomething to notice here is the difference between hard/structural and soft/parameter choices in our neuron. While it's kind of hard to tweak things like our input and output connections or the choice of log, it's not hard to tweak c and b. What I mean is I can't change my choice of log a little, what does that even mean? But I can easily change c and b a little. In fact given all my hard choices there exists many algorithms to find \"good\" choices for all of the parameters. IE once a ANN exists it can learn to do a task to the best of its ability (limited by all the hard choices).\n\nA \"smart\" ANN is a combination of good structural choices and a good parameter set. To find good hard choices many people have tried to mimic evolution. Picture the hard choices of a graph as being its DNA. One way of finding a good set of a hard choices might be to take two good ANN's and let them produce a child by swapping a bit of DNA with each other. We can even take this as far as to have entire ecosystems of ANN's competing with one another, then letting the successful ones mate and produce offspring. Doing this many times will usually yield a good set of hard choices.\n\nSo I guess my point here is that it's relatively easy to tweak the way that some neurons talk to each other but it's usually pretty difficult to tweak the overall structure of an ANN. So from this perspective I'd say an intelligent ANN (or brain) is one who's connection/cell types are organized in such a way that after you tweak its soft parameters its extremely good at doing a task.\n\nTLDR: Your brain is probably made up of soft/tweakable characteristics that are learned and hard/structural characteristics that are inherited or difficult to change. A set of good hard traits is what I'd consider an intelligent brain to be. \n", "A theory, not currently universally accepted, but generally thought to be a promising explanation and, to my knowledge, not contradicted by any observations, is that the performance on IQ tests correlates with the volume of the \"wiring\" of the parieto-frontal network, as measured by VBM. \n\n_URL_0_" ]

[ "Well I first thought it was about giant robots killing aliens but apparently that's just a silly side plot of no consequence.", "shinji is troubled.", "No one understands Neon Genesis Evangelion.", "*spoilers, obviously* I really want to summarize this as best as I can but I'm busy...will edit more in later:\n\nAnytime you see GEHIRN just think ''old-NERV\", and whenever you see SEELE, just think ''the secret club that runs NERV\"\n\nSeele goes about social-engineering an end-world scenario in order to initiate the human instrumentality project which would essential skyrocket humanities evolution to it's ultimate peak. The whole point is to return every humans souls to the giant black egg of lillith, so they would all swim together in one consciousness.\n\nThey discovered this after the second impact, which the public believes to be a meteor that crashed into the planet, was actually from a ''contact expirement'' when Humanity interacted with Adam, the first angel, Adam created a devastating anti-AT field which created a massive explosion that melted the ice caps when humans poked him with a stick (See lance of longinus) \n\nSometime after this the world becomes devastated and NERV works tirelessly to cover up the story and to work on their super secret evangelions. They know that angels are going to be showing up at somepoint. Enter the 14 year olds, only the 14 year olds can pilot these evas and they go about saving the world from angels a couple of times. One of the pilots, Shinji Ikari, is an awful human being with some really messed up social issues. Because he is the one, blablabla, he becomes the sole chooser on the fate of humanity.\n\nHere's where it gets fun and the plot splits. \nIn the original episodes one could argue that Shinji chooses human instrumentality and every soul living and dead join together at the end of episode 26 because Shinji no longer feels the need to isolate himself from others.\n\nIn End of Eva (which is the much better ending) Shinji rejects human instrumentality and instead decides that a world of pain is still better because fleeing from reality already brought him pain. They mention something about the strongest souls returning and that's why Asuka is there right next to him.", "This'll do it for you:\n\n_URL_0_", "I'm still really really confused so I might as well watch the show...", "I love this series intensely, and I feel like /u/valarauca is really fucking up the explanation. if anyone wants to really get it, check out some of the exposition from your own site's /r/evangelion, or look to the ultimate compilation of canon, _URL_0_.\nI'm not trying to be a hater here, it's just cringe-inducing how bad and half-assed his explanation is. \"whats his name\" is not a reasonable misnomer for a main character, which was Kaworu by the way.", "TIL: There is no way to explain NGE for a 5 year old... ", "I am by and large a lurker, but after seeing this sort of question being brought up again, and a continued lack of proper information given out, I thought I'd try a hand at clearing things up. Took quite a while, and I hope I'm posting this right.\n\nThe Origin of Life:\nIn Evangelion, the seeds of life were brought to Earth and spread across the entire galaxy by an ancient alien race. Two types of seeds are known to exist: the White and Black Moons. In each Moon is the material necessary to bring about life in vastly different ways. In addition, each Moon contains a fail-safe to prevent the progeny of a Seed conflicting with the progeny of a second Seed in the event that a planet accidentally be seeded more than once.\n\nThis is ultimately what happened on Earth.\n\n“First Impact”\nWhile a White Moon was the first to reach Earth, a Black Moon also managed to reach Earth before the White Moon could begin progeneration. The arrival of the Black Moon, in an event that coincidentally resulted in the formation of the actual Moon of Earth, is the event known as “First Impact”.\n\nIn most cases, the fail-safe protocols in the Black Moon would have rendered it dormant. But this fail-safe was damaged during First Impact, which resulted in the White Moon becoming dormant instead.\n\nThe Black Moon eventually released it’s contents, the primordial soup of Ancient Earth, which was the source of all eventual life on the planet. Humans were the ultimate result and became the dominant lifeform.\n\n“Second Impact”:\nSometime during the 1990s, the White Moon was discovered in present-day Antarctica by the Katsuragi Research Team. This team was sent out some time after the discovery of the Black Moon beneath the city of Hakone, Japan. While the Black Moon’s presence was made public, referred to as “the Geofront” structure (though its contents remained classified), the existence of the White Moon is never made public.\n\nGiant entities are eventually discovered within both structures: Adam of the White Moon, and Lilith of the Black Moon.\n\nExperiments are initially carried out by the Katsuragi Research Team on Adam. While exact details are unknown, it is revealed that it involved contact between an undisclosed source of human DNA and Adam. This resulted in two subsequent events: the birth of Kaworu Nagisa and the awakening of Adam.\n\nDuring the team’s experiments, they removed Adam’s fail-safe, an object dubbed “the Lance of Longinus” (depicted as a large, red spear). The combined acts of removing the Lance and physical contact awoke the being.\n\nNow fully aware again after millennia, Adam attempted to reclaim earth by eliminating any and all competing progeny of the Black Moon (the offspring of Lilith, man, often referred to as the Lillin), effectively leaving it a clean slate to begin the process of building life itself.\n\nThe Katsuragi Research Team attempted to stop Adam by use of the Lance, but it was too late and the event known as “Second Impact” began. This resulted in the death of much ocean life and the destruction of Antarctica, the subsequent mass flooding causing havoc across the planet.\n\nIn the end, while the team failed to stop Adam entirely, their efforts still managed to subdue Adam eventually. Adam was reduced to an embryonic state, his “soul” removed, and newly “created” Kaworu Nagisa became a vessel for this “soul”.\n\nWith the exception of young Misato Katsuragi, and key individuals who conveniently left the research site just prior to the event (specifically Gendo Ikari), the research team was killed during Second Impact.", "This video does a pretty good job: _URL_0_" ]

[ "It's an educated guess. Survey random populations, extrapolate to generalized population. Cost is even more nebulous. You can add or remove parameters. For example, someone could assume that black market laborers work for less than legit laborers. The displaced legit laborers can get government assistance, or might lose buying power, so you make guesses as to the impact.\n\nBottom line, when anyone quotes the estimated population, it's probably reasonably close. The math and methodology can be verified. \n\nThe cost is another thing. That will depend on what the people dosing the survey deem as costs, and it is entirely unverifiable. \n\nThere is typically a very wide margin of error. Those who wish to maximize the supposed impact will choose the extreme end of the possibilities as will those who wish too counter them. ", "Majority of illegals in the US are people who came to the country legally on visas and then stayed and disappeared once their visas expired. With that information of who stayed it's very easy get a starting number. Then you factor in lots of other variables and you get a more accurate number.\n", "They pay a lot of taxes too which actually counts as revenue for the country, not to mention the labor that gets done" ]

[ "Studies have shown that masters don't usually see any further ahead than strong amateurs. Both are capable of following a line of play several moves ahead.\n\nWhat separates masters is the ability to pick which lines of play are the best ones to analyze. They recognize certain patterns in positions they know will lead to certain kinds of opportunities.\n\nAlso realize that strong players study an practice hours a day for years to get as good as they are. Being able to read a board isn't terribly different than an expert tracker reading subtle signs on the ground others would miss. ", "Hi. Not a grandmaster (not even close) but quite a strong chess player here. When I'm analyzing a chess position, I'm considering moves on a number of criteria that help me to work out which lines I should examine. For example. Are my pieces threatened? is there anything protecting them? Do I have any unprotected pieces? Can I swap off an opponent's piece with better positioning than mine? Is my opponent about to take 3/4 of the center squares? Can their knights fork any of my pieces? Can their bishops skewer any of my pieces? Are there any open files (collumns with no pieces/opponent unprotected pieces only on) that I can take? Which of my pieces are they pressuring? Does making this move give them an option they wouldn't have had prior? \n\nGames at a higher level can take up to 3 hours total. Close games will typically take up 3/4+ of that. It's not a case of seeing moves in advance, it's about following up the lines that advance my position. If I can make my ruse complex enough, and infalliable enough that my opponent won't spot it, that's how games are won or lost." ]

[ "The radio spectrum wasn't empty before humans started transmitting. There are several sources of naturally occurring radio signals. One of them is cosmic microwave background noise, which can be heard as a hiss, or seen as static, on a radio or TV. Another is pulsars, which are rotating neutron stars. There are quite a number of things in space that will emit radio signals. [Check this out.](_URL_0_) Also, look at [radio astronomy](_URL_1_).", "In addition to the various astronomical sources, there are a few terrestrial radio sources. [Lightning emits a radio pulse,](_URL_0_) for example, and I think the magnetosphere emits some signals also.\n\nThe Sun and Jupiter also both emit a fair amount of radio noise.", "A changing magnetic field creates a changing electric field. Any object with a magnetic field which is also spinning generates an electric field. An electric field is 'radio waves' in common parlance. So, the Earth spins and has a magnetic field and generates radio waves. So does the Sun, which also generates electric fields (radio waves) by ejecting plasma. So there are vast EM fields pretty much from 0Hz on up and there always has been.", "The important thing to take away is that radio waves are just a part of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum. Visible light, x-rays, a bunch of stuff are all [electromagnetic radiation](_URL_0_). So then, if you shorten the wavelength of visible light, you could get X-rays. The things that make up light (photons) are the same particles that make up radio waves.\n\nSo then, what makes photons? As it turns out, *a lot* of things do, but mostly big, bright, celestial bodies. If a giant thing in space emits visible light, it probably makes radio waves too. So for Earth, the largest natural source off radio waves would be the Sun." ]

[ "Basically, your body is very weak when you haven't eaten for a long time. Certain foods require more effort for your body to handle than others, so to avoid risking you hurting yourself by eating foods that your body doesn't have the energy to safely handle, they try to ease people who haven't eaten in a while slowly back to health with softer foods until they build up their strength. ", "When you have starved for a long time your body becomes dangerously low on various minerals including phosphorus, magnesium, calcium, potassium, etc. \n\nWhen you start refeeding a person who has been starving, the body engages in anabolism (building of tissue) which further depletes the already low levels of phosphorus, magnesium, calcium, potassium, etc. This results in an extremely low level of these minerals which results in death. It'd be like if you had $5 in your bank account but then decided to renovate your bathroom, you would rapidly deplete whatever minor stores of money you had left. \n\nSupposedly giving someone half their daily caloric intake via milk as well as a multivitamin for the first few days before feeding them calories above maintenance is a good way to avoid this problem. Milk is high in potassium, phosphorus, magnesium and calcium. So that'll replenish stores a bit and make anabolism less dangerous. " ]

[ "Every state and country does their own thing. Some are sequential, some have multiple sequences (Texas has five, six, and seven digit sequences), some have a digit indicating the county where it is registered (Indiana has traditionally done this, as does Germany by city). Some places have a letter or number indicating the year of the car (heard of an \"R\"-reg car in the UK?).\n\nSome states start with one pattern and then change when they run out (for example, North Dakota has been AAA ### for decades, Texas just recently adopted AA# A### for standard issue plates).\n\nIf you want to know how a particular state works, just say the state and maybe someone will help.", "I can't speak for other states, but here in Alabama, the state-issued (non-vanity/special interest plates) are mostly randomized. However, the first number corresponds to the county you're registered to. 1, 2, and 3, are the three largest counties, and then the rest are assigned a number based on their alphabetical standing.", "I don't totally know how it works, but I know a few things:\n\nIt does vary state-by-state how the plates are chosen. (combination of numbers/letters, length, etc). \nEx. California is 1ABC234 (number, letter, letter, letter, number, number, number).\n\nThey DO go in some sort of order, usually ascending, depending on how your state does it (ex. NH plates are all numeric (except vanity plates)).\n\nSome states have other 'things' that determine plate numbers. Ex: in MA the last digit (or letters for Nov + Dec) in your plate is the month that your registration expires... ", "Every state and country does their own thing. Some are sequential, some have multiple sequences (Texas has five, six, and seven digit sequences), some have a digit indicating the county where it is registered (Indiana has traditionally done this, as does Germany by city). Some places have a letter or number indicating the year of the car (heard of an \"R\"-reg car in the UK?).\n\nSome states start with one pattern and then change when they run out (for example, North Dakota has been AAA ### for decades, Texas just recently adopted AA# A### for standard issue plates).\n\nIf you want to know how a particular state works, just say the state and maybe someone will help.", "I can't speak for other states, but here in Alabama, the state-issued (non-vanity/special interest plates) are mostly randomized. However, the first number corresponds to the county you're registered to. 1, 2, and 3, are the three largest counties, and then the rest are assigned a number based on their alphabetical standing." ]

[ "Coax and HDMI serve different purposes.\n\nCoax carries signals as waves. So it worked well for analog TV and now, digital, too. This permits coax to carry multiple channels, because each channel is a different frequency and the TV's tuner can decide which frequency to \"listen\" to do display the particular channel you want to watch. But the information for each channel must be highly compressed, using \"lossy\" compression algorithms that can make the picture you receive less accurate than the original. And if a cable company wants to add yet more channels, the compression gets worse. An HDTV picture carried on cable can look worse than one broadcast over the air because of the additional compression the cable companies use.\n\nHDMI carries signals as *data*. The ones and zeroes of computer binary code. This makes it better for carrying picture and sound from a disk player or set-top box with great accuracy. But HDMI is limited to shorter cable lengths than coax. And the uncompressed, accurate data an HDMI cable carries can only carry one \"channel\" at a time.", "HDMI is fundamentally a copy protection scheme. The reason for its existence is the desire of content creators to maintain control over their product. Since they cannot control where the signal goes with coax, they needed to replace it with something new that had content control built-in, but could be sold to the public as \"better\". \n\nWith a coax connection (if it was available on new devices) you could send a video to a recording device and make perfect digital copies. Because all HDMI devices conform to content protection standards, there are no commercial recording devices that will allow you to record that signal. Put simply, they only include an HDMI connection to keep you from copying the content.\n\n" ]

[ "Because stock value is often related but not actually determined by the assets, cash flow, or profits of a business. When someone buys stock in Sears, they are buying a (very) small ownership stake in the company and speculating that their ownership stake in the company will increase in value in the future. \n\nThe people currently holding/buying stock in Sears might believe (based on new leadership, a new product or policy, new markets, market position, or any theory they might have) that the company will eventually correct course and rise in value, at which point they can sell the shares they are holding for a profit. Less optimistically, they might recognize that there would be some value to Sears competitors to buy the company out (an immediate infrastructure for expansion, an outlet for new brands they are invested in etc), and be betting that a competitor will offer them more per share if a takeover or buyout occurs. Here the price of the stock isn't based on the return the company can make for itself or pass on to shareholders directly, instead the price would be influenced by the value a sale of the company could bring to a buyer.\n\nIt is also possible that the stock price is based on other factors that are more valuable than store profit. For example, Yahoo was recently assessed by most industry experts as having an almost worthless core business, but they had made significant investments in Alibaba (basically the Chinese Amazon) and other companies which were performing very well. In that case, the value of yahoo stock was based more on it's holdings in other companies than in its direct ability to turn a profit.", "There's a certain amount of value in the names alone. Well, in the Sears name, anyway. Even if the company is liquidated, someone would want to buy the rights to the Sears company, and perhaps relaunch the brand.\n\nThe news won't necessarily report on some upstart store brand. The news will absolutely pick up stories about the \"new Sears,\" and free press and good will has value." ]

[ "Moving both of your eyebrows independently is determined by your frontalis muscle; this sheet of muscle is responsible for raising your eyebrows and wrinkling your forehead. In those of us that can raise one eyebrow, our frontalis is split, meaning we can control its contractions separately. \n\nHowever as far as I am aware, tongue-rolling and ear-wiggling can be 'learned' once the correct muscle use is identified.\n\nEdit: Grammar\n\n", "Tongue-rolling is apparently subject to both genetic and non-genetic effects. That is, they've found genes they think are directly linked to the ability, but it's not unheard of for people to develop the ability when genes dictate otherwise. Additionally, identical twin studies show that these genes aren't fully deterministic - there are cases of identical twins (who have the same genetic material) having dissimilar tongue-rolling abilities. My source is a Genetics and Molecular Biology class from earlier this year." ]

[ "A well suited sub reddit I suppose", "At that age, they have no sexual tendencies. And usually, the other sex is interested in different things (girls might prefer barbies and boys like toy cars). That makes the other sex really boring. There isn't much more to it. Also personally I didn't find girls gross when I was young. That is because I had a few friends that were girls that I played with. So I couldn't have disliked them if I had fun playing with them.", "They start noticing the other sex is different, in a immature mind different=bad.\n\nTake ten kids aged 4 years old , use face paint to make nine of them blue and one red.\n\nThe red one will be made fun of.\n\nI see a lot of people talking about \"implicit social cues\" and such , but its just a phase young children go through , they assume that everyone is the same and are disturbed by people who are different." ]

[ "Firstly, you're off by 100 years. But, still...there are many advantages for the U.S.\n\n1. it was able to learn from european development, but not sit atop the burdens of it. It was a tabla rasa of sorts, allowing a leapfrog.\n\n2. it had an absurd amount of natural resources, and these resources become immensely important during the industrial revolution. \n\n3. The aforementioned natural resources were uncontested. Compared to other geographies, the U.S. spent a remarkable little energy securing borders, haggling and fighting over who owned what resources etc. This is partly because of the military advantage over native americans and partly because of the distance from other militaries who might otherwise have been able to contest ownership of said resources.\n\n", "1. Oceans to protect us from enemies.\n\n2. Weak neighbors. Neither Canada nor Mexico pose any threat to us.\n\n3. Substantial natural resources, especially coal.\n\n4. Independence. We were free to develop our economy during the 19th century while most other countries were under colonial rule and not in control of their own economies.\n\n5. Never losing a significant war at home and being destroyed. We came out of WW2 as the unparalleled world power, with an economy worth *50%* of world GDP and not being utterly destroyed by bombs like Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, China and the USSR are were. " ]

[ "We put them in stables and on soft roads and tracks and stuff. Their lives are pretty cushy with us.\n\nSo those hooves don't get worn as much as a wild horse's do, and we have to artificially trim them to make up the difference.\n\nAdd to this that the horses prolly live a lot longer than they would have in the wild. A recent Reddit thread compared the expected life span of a domestic versus a feral cat. Likely the same with horses, so they don't get as long to grow out.", "In addition to what /u/slash178 said domestic horses are kept with horseshoes on to help support the weight of riders or loads and because they don't tend to run over rough terrain as much their hooves do not harden as much. Wearing horseshoes their hooves don't get worn down so they are trimmed when they are reshod.", "Ever seen tribal or nomadic people who live and dress their native lifestyle, can walk around the sands of a desert, or through the dense brush of some forest completely barefoot? You or I get blisters just by walking a lot in the mall. Worse if we go hiking on a rocky trail, ankles and knees complain a lot.\n\nDifference is, we're not used to walking very much, a few feet from the parking lot to the store, and a bit around the office. \n\nSame thing with modern horses that pretty much stand around in a pen or a small pasture somewhere, where they lazily walk around. Wild horses, or horses that were used people a century ago were on their feet all day long, carrying a rider or gear. Or running with the herd to avoid wolves, walking long distances to get to food or water, and so on. Horses back then that developed foot problems became wolf or vulture food.\n\nSo modern horses don't really get a chance to grind down their hooves by walking around, hence the need for a human with clippers and files." ]

[ "Because \"university\" is not synonymous with institution of higher education. While there are many different types of higher learning institution and several predate the university, the university has its origins in the High Middle Ages.", "As has been said before, a university is not the same as a school of higher learning. Because nobody stated explicitly what qualities designate a university, I will give a short definition:\n\nI quote Walter Ruegg, wo paraphrases a university as \"_[...] a community of teachers and taught, accorded certain rights, such as administrative autonomy and the determination and realization of curricula (courses of study) and of the objectives of research as well as the adward of publicly recognized degrees_\" [[volume I, page xix]](_URL_0_).\n\nInstitutes in the Islamic world did e.g. not adward degrees, hence they can not be considered a university. This doesn't devalue the quality of their teaching though! Calling an institution \"university\" is more a question of nomenclature and terminology.\n\n\nSources: The four volume History of the University, Hilde de Ridder-Symoens and Walter Rüegg (eds.), Cambridge University Press, between 1992 and 2011" ]

[ "I'm not sure that dad is strictly a shortening of father, more a parallel evolution. Words for parents tend to come from the first syllables that babies work out how to say - mama, papa, dada. In Latin you have pater and mater, which ended up as father and mother because Germanic languages weirdly changed a lot of p's to f's when stealing Latin words (or at least getting them from the same root).", "It's thought that it may have entered the English language from Welsh, the Welsh word for father being *tad* (pronounced with a long a, in case you're wondering).\n\nInterestingly, the Welsh for mother is *mam*, which is also tantalisingly close to mum, mom or just mam as used in various English dialects.", "Simply put, English is a creole -- a language that emerges when populations with different languages mix over long periods. Put Celtic, Latin, Danish, German, French and a few others in the Cuisinart, let it run for a couple of thousand years, and you have English.\n\nYou think \"mom\" and \"dad\" are inconsistent? Try \"tattoo\". It has two meanings in English that came from different cultures and are totally unrelated.", "There is also a lot of evidence across many languages that these are naturally easy words for children to articulate. Mama, papa, dada, etc. are easy to articulate because they don't involve complicated vocalizations and they are located at points of articulation that are easily seen by infants (the lips and palatal ridge). The phonemes that are used during the babbling stage tend to be 'pa', 'ba', 'ma', 'ta', 'da'.", "Because if u called your father \"fat\" instead of dad it probably wouldnt be appreciated by him" ]

[ "Yes. There is a process known as [Room Calorimetry](_URL_0_) which directly measures the energy output of a subject, which can then be compared to a controlled energy input.", "Fat provides roughly 9.0 Kcal/gram, Carbohydrate 4.0 Kcal/gram and Protein the same.", "Yes. There is a process known as [Room Calorimetry](_URL_0_) which directly measures the energy output of a subject, which can then be compared to a controlled energy input.", " > (food) Calories represent the amount of energy stored in the food, not the amount we get after metabolizing it. \n\nNo, food calories you see on labels and such are calculated based on the energy of what you actually take up. Otherwise they'd hugely overestimate the amount of energy there. E.g. pure cellulose fiber would have about the same chemical energy as the same weight of starch or sugar, but is completely indigestible (unless you're a cow or other ruminant).\n\n", "Fat provides roughly 9.0 Kcal/gram, Carbohydrate 4.0 Kcal/gram and Protein the same." ]

[ "Oh here we go this is my jam, I'm a civil engineer technologist who designs asphalt.\n\nSo as somebody else said asphalt cement is oil, I live in Canada and that oil sands in Northern Alberta is a very good source of asphalt oil. To make asphalt concrete you mix together aggregate(rock), manufactured fines or MF(finely crushed rock), a blending sand which is just sand, and asphalt cement. This mixture together is asphalt concrete which is usually done through either a Marshall Mix Design or SuperPave Design (SUerior PERforming asphalt PAVEment). Basically you're designing to have the right amount of air in the mix and these two design methods both do that, SuperPave is probably more similar to real world applications but marshall designs are the most common, at least where I am.\n\nSo to get to why the road turns grey, it is constantly under stress and strains that are weathering the surface. If you think of the forces being applied to road there's the weight of the vehicle pushing down, the acceleration moving it forward and the normal force pushing up on the road. Every time a vehicle moves over the road it's helping degrade some of the aggregate and stripping some of the oil from the rocks on the surface on a very tiny scale. Combined with weather like freeze and thawing or rain over time this changes how to road looks and performs, think of ruts that appear from cars constantly driving in the same spot.\n\nAnother thing we do to make design is reuse old roads that are milled up, this is called RAP(recycled asphalt product). The rap is always a lot more finely graded material due to the weathering of the aggregates from being driven over. It also has a lower oil content than what it would have been originally paved at.", "Also skid marks and acceleration marks (burn outs) are from the tire heating the tar in the asphalt and pulling it to the surface and not from the tire rubber. Which is why tire marks are rarely seen or extremely faint on Portland cement concrete.", "The \"black\" is a bituminous coating, which wears off due to trafficking, weather and oxidisation.\n\nThis is part of the design life of the road surface, as this wearing action exposes the rough surface of the aggregate (crushed rock), and as such provides skid resistance (stopping power) to the tyres.\n\nThe exposed aggregate maybe grey, or red, depending on which quarry the stone comes from.\n\nIf you are interested further, bitumen can be distilled from crude oil but more interestingly also occurs naturally, in lakes...\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nMy team lays 100's of tonnes of this every week :o)", "Does a worn road or newly paved provide better grip for cars? Assuming both roads are clean" ]

[ "They are, but when you have a big emergency you tend to have a lot more cops than you currently have the facilities for. Now you're trying to cram a lot more people in that police station while setting up a HQ where officers can come to provide updates, be briefed, set up local roadblocks and inspections, post new BOLOs, and dispatch officers as necessary.", "They get swollen when they’re having to be more active. Using your analogy, it’s like if day-to-day your police department has small patrol shifts of like 10 officers out at a time. Then something happens and they’re on a manhunt, suddenly you’re going to see like 30 officers out on patrol at once. Your lymph nodes are taking care of daily business without spending much extra energy, but when you’re suddenly fighting something off they have to double down on the effort. ", "Your immune system causes inflammation. It's how your body fights off bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens. It means it's working correctly. If your body doesn't get inflammation, it might mean you have a suppressed immune system (e.g., you have AIDS, are pregnant, are taking steroids). Sometimes there's too much inflammation, but usually it's a good thing." ]

[ "Agreed with the other answers here, but allow me to explain why. Psychology as a field is heading increasingly toward medicine, with a medical model underpinning it. As it gets closer to medicine, it will distance itself from theory and move closer to evidence based practice. As this happens, psychologists' theories from the past who dont have the credible evidence to show for their findings, will lose their potency.\n\nCounselling as a field does not require so much evidence for its practice - that is why counselling therapists utilise a wider variety of therapeutic lenses from which to work with. Counselling is the closing in on the gap - becoming more prevelant and popular.\n\nI believe Jung and Freud are probably more revered in counselling therapists as opposed to clinical psychologists.\n\nHope this helps!\n\nRay", "I would have considered him as a Psychoanalyst rather than a psychologist. Throughout my psychology degree his name has not been mentioned once (and Freud has taken up 4 lecture slides).\n\nWhen we are talking about Psychology from a psychologists perspective, it is concerned with the Scientific study of Humans, behaviour and cognition, how these develop and what they translate in social situations\n\nAs Carl Jung did not scientifically study human behaviour he is NOT considered a Psychologist. \n\nHowever, he would be considered an important pioneer of sparking the interest in human psyche AND definately a pioneer in psychoanalysis theory. " ]

[ "For the same reason that the top rock stars and top athletes make insanely more than other people in their field: what they can do is extremely rare.\n\nAs far as greed, I am curious if someone offered you a starting position for 12.5 million per year, would you turn it down, stating it's too much, give the money to starving people in other countries? The fact of the matter is no matter how many people claim \"yeah I would share it\", statistics show that just about everyone shuts up and takes the money. You don't see NFL, NBA players claiming their pay is too high, give it back to the community. You see them complaining that OTHERS (taxation) should do this, but they usually give very little of their pay.", "CEO's add far more value to the firm, have a far more demanded skillset, and people who can do the job well are in far shorter supply than the average person at their firm.", "Here is a secret about how people get paid in business. People get paid based on how much money they *make* for the company, not on how hard they work.\n\nAn assembly line worker is making the company a portion of every part/product they produce. It is hard for this person to make the company more money, so this worker is locked at a certain level of income.\n\nA CEO can make a strategic decision that makes a company $100 million dollars. They have a salary that reflects this. \n\nNo matter what the assembly line worker does, they cannot do anything to make the company $100 million *more* dollars. They cannot do anything to make the company another $1 million dollars. They probably cannot do anything to make the company an additional $10,000. All they can do, by nature of their job, is keep production consistent. \n\nThis is the reason why there is such a difference in compensation. ", "Another factor I don't see anybody mentioning is potential corruption, not that high level corruption doesn't exist but larger amounts of money are harder to hide.\nIf somebody was responsible for making multi million decisions you dont want him also worrying about where he is going to find an extra 1500 bucks for his kids school fees.", "No, no, and no. Turns out it’s a fluk of regulations and the economic factors, and little to do with an individuals performance. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n", "I built a company with my SO. He is the current CEO.\n\nHe actually does not draw a salary yet (although he could, if he chose to.), but to answer your question:\n\n1.) They work a lot. My SO works approx 14 hours per day, 7 days a week. He hasn't had a day of in 5 months.\n2.) The skill sets needed to build and successfully run a multimillion dollar company are extremely valuable to investors, who often agree to large salaries in order to see significant return.\n3.) They work for themselves; meaning that they are extremely motivated to work endlessly with little to no financial return for extended periods of time. \n4.) A CEO is in the perfect position to take advantage of any side deals that come up, and has the experience and legal resources to negotiate high royalties for them." ]

[ "* The speed of light is *c* to all observers everywhere, no matter how fast the observers are moving relative to one another. This is like, the major tenet of relativity.\n* When you get to relativistic speeds, velocities no longer add up straightforwardly. .9c + .9c does not equal 1.8c. Kindly do a search for an explanation of this as it has been asked 11ty billion times.", "Galileo introduced relativity in regards to mechanics, which in short said that the laws of mechanics (moving bodies) are the same for observers in uniform motion relative to each other. \n\nLater Einstein expanded this concept to also include electromagnetism, thus stating that all the laws of physics are the same for observers in uniform motion relative to each other (special relativity). \n\nTo make this work, light must travel at speed C regardless of the frame of reference.\n\nBefore this key concept of relativity, it was thought that light moved relative to a medium called the \"Aether\".\n\nAlso, I want to point out that relativity says that no frame of reference is special, so it makes not much sense to talk about \"a moving object\", because there is not absolute motion.\n\n", " > Is there some \"fabric\" to space that is stationary on which the speed of light is based?\n\nThis is essentially the concept behind the [luminiferous ether](_URL_0_), which was the dominant theory of light at the end of the 19th century. In 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley conducted an [experiment](_URL_1_), designed to determine the relative velocity of the Earth through the luminiferous ether. What they found, much to their astonishment, was that the answer was 0! In the following years, a number of different versions of the Michelson-Morley were conducted, to test the possibility that the ether was somehow being dragged along by the Earth, or similar effects that might explain how it could be that we didn't seem to being moving with respect to the ether at all. The eventual conclusion, and *the* critical component in Einstein's theory of special relativity, was that the ether doesn't exist at all.\n\nThe reason Einstein's theory is called \"relativity\" is because it posits that the laws of physics, including Maxwell's equations, from which we can derive the speed of light, are exactly the same in any inertial reference frame, i.e., *relative* to any inertial observer. If there were a particular frame in which light traveled at the speed c, and not in other frames, the laws of physics would have to be different depending on what frame you're in.\n\nAll well and good, but if light travels at the speed c in one frame, how can it possibly being traveling at the same speed in a different frame, much less *all* possible frames? The answer is that relativity comes with a number of counter-intuitive results. The most well known are time dilation and length contraction. Less well known is the formula for velocity addition. Remember that velocity is displacement divided by time. Since both displacement and time are affected by a change of reference frame, velocity is as well, *beyond how it would normally be affected*. The math is somewhat complicated, but the result is that the velocity addition formula for relativity is\n\n v' = (v + b)/(1 + v*b/c^2 )\n\nwhere v is the original velocity, and b is the amount you're \"boosting\" it by. For comparison, the same formula in classical mechanics is\n\n v' = v + b.\n\nIf the original value of v is c, then the new value after *any* boost will be\n\n v' = (c + b)/(1 + c*b/c^2 )\n = (c + b)/(1 + b/c)\n = c*(1 + c/b)/(1 + c/b)\n = c\n\nSo if the original velocity is c, we necessarily find that the velocity will be c in *any frame whatsoever*. To answer your question, then, light travels at the speed of light in every single frame of reference there is.", "It seems to me that the speed of light is practically the way people define distance.\n\n1 unit of distance === how far light goes in 1 unit of time.\n\nSo it's not so much \"relative to what\" it's \"that's what it's defined as\".", "An observer in space, in the path of one of the lasers would still measure it as moving at the speed of light. However if they observed Laser A, the velocity of the Earth would cause the beam to be blueshifted, and if they observed Laser B, then they would observe the beam to be redshifted by an identical amount.\n\nSo option 1 is closer, but still not quite right. They would look identical in Earth's reference frame and different in space, just that their frequency would be what differs and not their velocity.", "Don't make it so \"funky\"\n\nTry this instead: Two laser pointers travel through space, paralell to eachother, at > almost < the same speed. One is catching up to the other and at the moment of passing it would look like this.\n\nLets paint:\n\n=-------------\n\n=-------------\n\nSee those laser pointers? You can't tell which one is moving faster from the light emitted, because it would be the same regardless of the speed of the source. You can point one backwards and the speed of the lights would still be c, when measured. Not \"c+speed of source\".", "On a side note, where is RobotRollCall? I miss her ;[", "* The speed of light is *c* to all observers everywhere, no matter how fast the observers are moving relative to one another. This is like, the major tenet of relativity.\n* When you get to relativistic speeds, velocities no longer add up straightforwardly. .9c + .9c does not equal 1.8c. Kindly do a search for an explanation of this as it has been asked 11ty billion times.", "Galileo introduced relativity in regards to mechanics, which in short said that the laws of mechanics (moving bodies) are the same for observers in uniform motion relative to each other. \n\nLater Einstein expanded this concept to also include electromagnetism, thus stating that all the laws of physics are the same for observers in uniform motion relative to each other (special relativity). \n\nTo make this work, light must travel at speed C regardless of the frame of reference.\n\nBefore this key concept of relativity, it was thought that light moved relative to a medium called the \"Aether\".\n\nAlso, I want to point out that relativity says that no frame of reference is special, so it makes not much sense to talk about \"a moving object\", because there is not absolute motion.\n\n", "The whole point of stating that the speed of light is a constant is that - well - it's a constant (in vacuum) in all reference frames. It is not relative to anything, and it is always moving the same speed, no matter where you look at it from.\n\nDoes it sound illogical? Yes, it does, but non the less its true.\n\nImagine this: You are in a (very) high speed train with your laser pointer and somehow your friend is standing outside and watching you drive by. You are sitting in your first class seat and it doesn't feel like you are moving at all. Now you want to point at something on the wall at the end of the train wagon which is about 15 m away from you with your laser pointer. How long does it take for the light to reach the wall?\n\nThis is a simple calculation. The light moves around 3*10^8 m/s and the wall is 15 m away, so it takes around:\n\n(15 meters) / the speed of light = 50.0346143 nanoseconds (directly from google)\n\nCool, so far so good. Now, I said you friend was standing on the ground - outside the train - and watching you go by. Since he has very good eyes he sees you turn on your laser pointer, and he sees the laser hits the wall. These are both facts non of you can deny. He measures the time it took, and can see how far you were from the wall.\n\nHowever, like in the [classic paradox with the turtle and the hare](_URL_0_), when the light has moved 15 m, he can see the train has moved a little bit as well. No much, but a little bit. So when the light hits the wall it should have moved 15m + \"a little bit\".\n\nThis obviously sounds like a paradox, but its one of the exact problems the special theory of relativity solves. The solution is, as you might know, that the train actually gets shorter when it moves (fast) so your friend does not think you are 15 m from the wall - instead he measures the distance to be \"15 m - a little bit\" in order to make the facts match up. \n\nWhen you are dealing with special relativity it is important to remember that the speed of light is *always* constant. No matter what. The solution to peoples paradoxes is *alway* that the distance or time has changed from one observer to another.\n\nSo back to your original question. Both lasers are moving at the speed of light, no matter how you look at it. If you sit on the earth and look at them the light will move at the speed of light, and if you sit at the sun the light will still move at the speed of light - not \"speed of light - speed of earth\". As I said this sounds like a paradox, but its not, because every single experiment you make up in order to show us there is a problem we will just keep answering that there is no problem because the distance or times changed - not the sped of light. The parameter you need to change in order for you experiment to look the same to all observers is never the speed of light (it's always the same), but always, time or distance.", " > Is there some \"fabric\" to space that is stationary on which the speed of light is based?\n\nThis is essentially the concept behind the [luminiferous ether](_URL_0_), which was the dominant theory of light at the end of the 19th century. In 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley conducted an [experiment](_URL_1_), designed to determine the relative velocity of the Earth through the luminiferous ether. What they found, much to their astonishment, was that the answer was 0! In the following years, a number of different versions of the Michelson-Morley were conducted, to test the possibility that the ether was somehow being dragged along by the Earth, or similar effects that might explain how it could be that we didn't seem to being moving with respect to the ether at all. The eventual conclusion, and *the* critical component in Einstein's theory of special relativity, was that the ether doesn't exist at all.\n\nThe reason Einstein's theory is called \"relativity\" is because it posits that the laws of physics, including Maxwell's equations, from which we can derive the speed of light, are exactly the same in any inertial reference frame, i.e., *relative* to any inertial observer. If there were a particular frame in which light traveled at the speed c, and not in other frames, the laws of physics would have to be different depending on what frame you're in.\n\nAll well and good, but if light travels at the speed c in one frame, how can it possibly being traveling at the same speed in a different frame, much less *all* possible frames? The answer is that relativity comes with a number of counter-intuitive results. The most well known are time dilation and length contraction. Less well known is the formula for velocity addition. Remember that velocity is displacement divided by time. Since both displacement and time are affected by a change of reference frame, velocity is as well, *beyond how it would normally be affected*. The math is somewhat complicated, but the result is that the velocity addition formula for relativity is\n\n v' = (v + b)/(1 + v*b/c^2 )\n\nwhere v is the original velocity, and b is the amount you're \"boosting\" it by. For comparison, the same formula in classical mechanics is\n\n v' = v + b.\n\nIf the original value of v is c, then the new value after *any* boost will be\n\n v' = (c + b)/(1 + c*b/c^2 )\n = (c + b)/(1 + b/c)\n = c*(1 + c/b)/(1 + c/b)\n = c\n\nSo if the original velocity is c, we necessarily find that the velocity will be c in *any frame whatsoever*. To answer your question, then, light travels at the speed of light in every single frame of reference there is.", "It seems to me that the speed of light is practically the way people define distance.\n\n1 unit of distance === how far light goes in 1 unit of time.\n\nSo it's not so much \"relative to what\" it's \"that's what it's defined as\".", "An observer in space, in the path of one of the lasers would still measure it as moving at the speed of light. However if they observed Laser A, the velocity of the Earth would cause the beam to be blueshifted, and if they observed Laser B, then they would observe the beam to be redshifted by an identical amount.\n\nSo option 1 is closer, but still not quite right. They would look identical in Earth's reference frame and different in space, just that their frequency would be what differs and not their velocity.", "Don't make it so \"funky\"\n\nTry this instead: Two laser pointers travel through space, paralell to eachother, at > almost < the same speed. One is catching up to the other and at the moment of passing it would look like this.\n\nLets paint:\n\n=-------------\n\n=-------------\n\nSee those laser pointers? You can't tell which one is moving faster from the light emitted, because it would be the same regardless of the speed of the source. You can point one backwards and the speed of the lights would still be c, when measured. Not \"c+speed of source\".", "On a side note, where is RobotRollCall? I miss her ;[" ]

[ "Globe and mail alluded to this today\n\nOlder, longer: The super-aging of Canadians has taken everyone by surprise\n\n\n\nAnd longevity continues to increase. The fastest-growing age group in Canada is centenarians. There are more than 10,000  them today, three times the number in 2001, and there should be about [40,000 ] mid-century.\n\nOver the same decades in which longevity has increased, the fertility rate has decreased. Today it sits at [1.5](_URL_0_), half a baby short of the 2.1 children per woman, on average, needed to keep a population stable. If it weren’t for this country’s high immigration intake, Canada’s population would eventually start to decline, just as it is declining or about to decline in dozens of countries around the world, from China to Japan to Italy to Russia.\n\n\n\"As a result of increasing longevity and decreasing fertility, Canadian society is aging rapidly. In 1982, [the median age in Canada was 30]. Today it is 41. There are now more people 65 and older than people 14 and younger in Canada, and that will widen in the years ahead.\"", "I use Total Fertility Rate to talk with my students about having children. It calculates how many children each woman has. Here is a GREAT site with some graphs: [_URL_2_](_URL_2_) \n\nYou are right that in the US the trend is down. We are having fewer children and waiting later to do it. The population of both the US and most European countries will shrink without immigration.\n\nOne cause is the education and career opportunities available to women. Women have dreams and aspirations aside from just raising children. Another is the increased availability of medical care. You don't need to have 5 kids when you know they will all survive and you can have as much sex as you want with prophylactics. \n\nAs far as just wanting kids, the Macleans article is good. Research has consistently shown that having kids makes you less happy overall, **but** delivers occasional highs: [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)", "The global birthrate has been steadily falling since its peak in the early 1960’s.\nOver population is almost completely fueled by increased longevity not the birth rate.\nThe current us birthrate is below replacement level and there is every indication that rate will continue to fall. \n\nWhy does this concern people and why do countries like Italy and Finland give financial incentives for people to have more children when humanity is over consuming resources at unsustainable rate?\n\nAs longevity gains continue to out pace birth rates humanity is facing a global shift toward a majority population of old people. As this population grows and ages it will become more and more dependent, physically, financially and socially, on an increasingly diminishing pool of young people. This is a big problem for young people who will be forced to contribute more and more to the well being of older people. It’s also a big problem for older people who’s quality of life is almost certain to diminish as the pool of young workers, caregivers, innovators and family gets stretched thinner and thinner.\n\nThe current math on demographics has some unfortunate consequences for modern life. Even if people did suddenly decide now to have more kids we are still facing a quite a population knothole in about 30 years. Also creating enough children to support the glut of people becoming elderly seems irresponsible given the climate crisis. We’re going to have to be creative about how we handle this thorny situation as it developed along side the climate crisis or a lot of people are going to suffer. \n\nHere’s a link to the World Bank’s data on the global fertility rate that breaks it down by country so you can see it for yourself \n\n_URL_0_", "It has become more common in countries where women have achieved the capacity to have a professional career. I'm sure you will find a trend if you analyze the relationship between number of childless couples and number of companies headed by women or with women in the board", "Populations with low infant mortality, women's education, and birth control drop to replacement levels across all cultures -- we are now below 2.5 children per couple worldwide and the population will stop growing at 10-11ish billion around 2100 (when all the current people have replaced themselves). That means some couples still have lots of children, some couples have none. The stability across all demographics is impressive.\n\n_URL_0_ \n(22 minutes in is where we see why we have 11 billion from zero population growth today)", "the birthrate is definitely falling...an interesting article with their view:\n\n\" As for what's behind the negative sentiment among people of childbearing age, Myers cites the current political turmoil and a gloomy outlook for America's future. Not a whole lot of things are going good,\" he says, \"and that's haunting young people in particular, more than old people.\"\n\n\" Many current or would-be parents also responded to the report Wednesday, using social media to list a string of obstacles to having kids in the U.S., from the frustration of finding child care to high insurance costs and a lack of parental leave and other support systems. And they note that while the national economy has done well, workers' paychecks haven't been growing at the same pace.\n\nAs Elena Parent, a state senator in Georgia, [wrote on Twitter](_URL_0_), \"Parents know why the birthrate is falling. Kids are expensive & time-consuming & our society doesn't make it easy.\" Another factor, says sociologist Sarah Damaske of Penn State, is job security — even in a time of low unemployment. \"\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOur society is fundamentally changing in terms of both attitudes and economics. The 'gig economy' is a problem for job security. Obamacare was an attempt to decouple healthcare somewhat from the \"good old days\" of long term corporate healthcare, but that is faltering in the new political climate." ]

[ "We should be praising goats and not eating them! Would you eat your dog? No. Or your cat? Nope goats are intelligent, carefree, adorable animals. I'll eat the hell out of bacon but never consider eating a poor goat. ", "Why did people on the American frontier choose to graze cattle on the Western Plains instead of something else, like goats?", "Not sure if this is allowed as a top level comment, but there was a very similar thread but for lamb instead of goat. I'd assume the reasons are similar if not the same.\n \n_URL_0_", "To anyone with the knowledge to fully answer this interesting question, how did chicken become so widespread and globally popular?", "This is a complicated answer, but I'll do my best to answer. There are multiple reasons:\n\n1. Domestic goats are not native to North America. Breeds such as Oreamnos americanus (mountain goat) and Ovis canadensis (bighorn sheep) are too large and aggressive to domesticate. As a result, native populations did not develop cuisine which featured goat or sheep meat. While neolithic hunters would have undoubtedly killed and eaten the aforementioned animals given the chance, these spontaneous opportunities were too few and far between to form the basis of a cultural norm. When white cultures began to dominate North America, there were no goat dishes to appropriate. \n\n2. Food taboos are notoriously powerful, particularly those associated with meats and other animal-based proteins. Insects, for instance, are a fantastic food source: plentiful, easy to breed and control, versatile, and nutritious. However, most Westerners shudder at the idea of slurping down a wriggling grub or crunching on a grasshopper. Meanwhile, the natives of Papua New Guinea happily and eagerly seek out sago grubs as a delicacy. The reason is simply that humans are uncomfortable consuming unfamiliar food items, regardless of their taste or nutritional benefit. Goat is an excellent lean meat, but those unaccustomed to thinking of goats as food are hesitant to consider the possibilities. \nConsider cow's milk in North America - it's consumed in the extreme, and while goat's milk has a niche market, that's as far as our \"milk adventuring\" will go. We'll create plant based \"milks\" - almond, soy, rice etc - but sheep, camel, donkey, horse, yak, or reindeer milks are considered varying degrees of disgusting to hilarious. \n\n3. In regards to Latin America's familiarity with goat dishes despite having no native population: goats were imported from the old world. For instance, the Bhuj goat of Brazil originates from an Indian Kutchi breed of goat. During European Colonialism, it was commonplace for animals to be imported to the new colonies for various reasons (food, companionship, hunting, etc). Spain and Portugal had more domestic species in their regions than did England and France, and this is reflected in their choices of animals selected for importation. ", "In North America, when settlers moved west, the government promoted an \"open range\" concept for grazing cattle and sheep, as much of the land was entirely unsettled [by whites]. Sheep and goats both crop the grass at a lower height than cattle, and thus render the ground less usable for a longer period of time. This means that the sheep directly compete with cattle for grazing ability; in a time that cattle quickly became an American favorite, sheep herders had little clout in land disputes what court system there was. So begins the range wars fought throughout the midwest, comprising most notably Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Colorado. These \"wars\" tended toward skirmishes between families rather than actual wars, but still with deadly conclusions. Some went far beyond family arguments with weapons, and in the case of the [Johnson Country War](_URL_1_), an outright manhunt for 70 with orders to \"hang or kill on site.\" This particular war was in fact, between \"Big Cattle\" and the small time herdsman; it didn't even involve sheep. This simply outlines more, how much power the large herd owners commanded.\n\nCattlemen would fence off private and public land to maintain an adequate food source for their livestock, where sheep herders would advocate for open range and free grazing. Disputes peppered the West, and found its way into the Supreme Court in [OMAECHEVARRIA v. STATE OF IDAHO.](_URL_0_) I couldn't find the eventual aftermath of this ruling which seems to divide land fairly.\n\nWorth note, in Texas of all places, there is an annual goat festival in Brady, and they take it very seriously. \n\nI'm not a historian by definition, but I am a farmer, studied ruminant behaviors, ecosystem impacts, and Texas history. \n\nMods, please let me know if I have not met the qualifications for this post. I regard this sub with the highest esteem, and do not wish to taint it with my informal background; but everyone else's responses have been removed." ]

[ "To piggyback off this question, how (if at all) did the Sherlock Holmes canon influence the way people outside of the law-enforcement profession *think* about police investigations? Was there an equivalent to the [CSI Effect](_URL_0_)?", "what happened ?", "From \"Bloody Buisness: An Anecdotal History of Scotland Yard\", by H. Paul Jeffers: \n\np95-103 describes the relationship between Doyle, Sherlock Homes, the public, and the London Police in great detail. \n\nThe first bit describes the city of London's situation when Doyle first went there as a child, and shows possible inspirations for portions of the later Sherlock Holmes works in murders and scenes Doyle was exposed to. The book quotes a biography of Doyle written in 1976, saying that the failure of the police to solve the Ripper murders left people unsatisfied, which left a perfect environment for stories of a fictional detective. \n\np97 begins to go into the police attitude towards the books, which can generally be summed up as hostile; Doyle presented the Yarders as blatantly incompetent - while the Yarders felt the character got to avoid the worst end of policing, such as breaking up bar room brawls, public contempt, and getting paid the same as folks who dug ditches. \n\nDoyle was also an advocate for justice, and in at least two cases was deeply involved in acquitting people from crimes they were accused of - in one case, the description of the case Doyle became involved in looks very much like police railroading getting derailed by Doyle being persistant and logical. This did not contribute to a warm feeling from the police towards the writer or his detective. \n\nThat said, in 1974 the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was a guest speaker at the Sherlock Holmes society annual meeting, and said that while the police tend to regard the Holmes stories with derision, you could ascribe to the stories the first instance of the public seeing the investigation of crime as a respectable job, a good versus evil with the investigation on the side of good; and that the police had been able to benefit form that change in public attitude. \n\n\n\n \n\n", "There's been a few books that delve into the forensic science of Holmes that breaks down what he's doing as well as the good and bad science used.\n\n\nthis is one from 2007:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAs for Holmes changing forensics and police, yes I think he had a profound effect. Not that it changed over night, but it really pushed the science aspects of evidence gathering, evidence destruction, and the need to prove the perpetrator beyond a \"j'accuse\" level of proof. I've read of police forces around the world reading the books if not for the \"how to\" element, but to provide inspiration on how to approach crime and evidence. Right from the first book, Holmes was showcasing just how the police themselves messed up a crime scene and that still goes on to this day, especially in developing countries where the police can be incompetent and even the forensic staff can buy credentials." ]

[ "The oldest reference I've heard is from a song...\n\nBirds do it\n\nBees do it\n\nEven educated fleas do it\n\nLet's do it\n\nLet's fall in looooove!\n\nAnd perhaps from there it just became a useful euphemism that most people were familiar with.", "It's one of those things that have been lost to time. From what I've read there's some hints to it having come from a Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem that read:\n\n > All nature seems at work . . . The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing . . . and I the while, the sole unbusy thing, not honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.\n\nCole Porter has the oldest written example which is quite explicit in the comparison between birds, bees, and sex:\n\n > When the little bluebird \n\n > Who has never said a word \n\n > Starts to sing Spring\n\n > When the little bluebell \n\n > At the bottom of the dell \n\n > Starts to ring Ding dong Ding dong \n\n > When the little blue clerk \n\n > In the middle of his work \n\n > Starts a tune to the moon up above \n\n > It is nature that is all \n\n > Simply telling us to fall in love \n\n\n > And that's why birds do it, bees do it \n\n > Even educated fleas do it \n\n > Let's do it, let's fall in love\n\nBut no one is really sure where the phrase comes from.\n\n[Source 1](_URL_0_)\n\n[Source 2](_URL_1_)\n\n[Source 3](_URL_2_)\n\n[Source 4](_URL_3_)", "i was pondering this expression in English. In Swedish, we use the expression \"Blommor och Bin\" - \"Flowers and Bees\" to describe sexual interaction, which in my mind made *a little bit* more sense - the bee pollinates the flower etc. Birds and bees always sounded odd to me, since bees and birds don't really interact intimately, except when bees are getting eaten.", "[It actually comes from here.](_URL_0_)\n\nThe song was famous, and everyone in the Western World conflated 'birds and bees' with sex. This was right before the Hays Code too, so they needed a euphemism for for the word." ]

[ "Even something that is as fluid as gas still contains mass. When you you have something as big as Jupiter, that is a lot of mass. The greater the mass of an object the greater the influence, that we call gravity, it exerts on other objects. Gas planets can exert enough gravity to cause other objects to remain in their orbit.\n\nAdditionally there is ongoing debate on whether gas giants like Jupiter actually contains a solid core or not although it is generally accepted that there is a mass of heavy elements near the center.\n\nEdit: Added some stuff.", "Stars are made of gas too. You just have toget enough of it in one place. Besides, gas giants do have molten rocky cores." ]

[ "Neuroscientist Psyche Loui talks about this on our podcast episode - worth checking out if you're interested in the neuroscience behind why our brains like music.\n\n_URL_0_", "I never have experienced this in my entire life, while my wife gets it all the time. How much of this is hardwired, and how much of it is personality?", "Some people are also susceptible to something called an autonomous sensory meridian response. It's a feeling that starts near the scalp or the neck and travels downwards and it's caused by certain \"triggers\" or sensory stimuli that translates itself as other sensory feelings. Most commonly, it's a noise that manifests as a physical feeling described at the beginning.\n\nThere are videos of \"ASMR\" triggers on Youtube, that I actually only discovered recently. I didn't know what it was before I saw a video and I don't know how I even happened upon it, but while I was watching the video I was very confused as to what I was watching and what was going on because they do very intentional actions that generate certain noises that can cause some people to be \"triggered\", essentially. \n\nIt's really weird, it doesn't work as well as when I hear a really good song, but it's interesting and it might work for you. I don't know if the two are related in any way, but they seem to work differently for me, so maybe not so. ", "Could having this happen often be damaging? I can make this happen on command, though not usually as intense as having it naturally occur. Wondering if I'm weird or if I'm doing something harmful.", "I've always gotten this reaction with music and never knew what it was called. I always termed it a soundgasm. There's usually a tingling/electric sensation that starts at the crown of my head and moves down my neck and spine then gives me goosebumps on the back of my neck and all down my arms. Sometimes I'll breathe more heavily too. \n\nI keep a mental catalogue of all the songs that do it for me consistently. There are very specific songs, or parts of songs, that elicit the response every time without fail. Usually it's songs with some gradual build that comes to a crescendo. I also find that, like a regular orgasm, the ease of having one can change based on your body's hormone levels. I've gotten one while driving once and had to pull over. Now I can't listen to Sigur Ros in the car." ]

[ "Loaded question is loaded. \n\nBecause the terrorists in Mexico (for the most part) stay there. They aren't an active threat to us. ", "The US has a large financial and strategic interest in keeping the Middle East stable (ish). Mexico isn't that much of an issue, as the cartels don't really threaten any huge industries in the level of oil.", "Let's be clear: Mexico is a *failed state*. But it's *our* failed state and we love the little guys for it.", "1 Mexico is a sovereign state. \n2 The cartels are criminal organizations, not terrorist, google the difference. " ]

[ "_URL_0_\nToilet humour has survived. I think this is because it's funny :)", "There was a special about jokes on the BBC a while back after they discovered that tablet with the oldest written joke.\n\nThe oldest joke: \"There has never not been a woman who didn't fart in her husband's lap\". I honestly don't remember much more than that except the discussion about how the French used to think roasting a sack of cats over a bonfire was hilarious.", "One of Vietnam's national-treasure type poet was a woman from the 18th century who wrote poems that read simultaneously like other classical poems on mundane subjects (the jackfruit, eating a snail, playing chess, crossing a mountain pass) and some really raunchy double entendres. Too bad competent English translations of her poetry are scattered in anthologies. The one dedicated book reads like it's translated by a first year student with a dictionary in hand.\nedit: Her name is Hồ Xuân Hương", "Joke theory is a major part of my dissertation this year, so maybe I can help you out. As far as there being a lot of work, the short answer is not really. It depends what you are looking for, but I don't know of any sort of comprehensive study of humour over time. I don't even know how one would go about that, given that humour is so incredibly dependent on socio-cultural context. You might want to try Mary Douglas' \"The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception,\" which is fascinating and might put you on the right path. If you're interested in sociological/anthropological approaches to the issue I could dig up a bibliography which may have some useful sources for you. Depending on your interests, you may also want to take a look at some of the work done on Aristophanes (or maybe even just read Aristophanes, but how much you understand would depend on your knowledge of contemporary culture). \n\nBasically, the theory goes that humour is fundamentally rooted in social and cultural experience, and especially in subverting that experience to create something unexpected which still remains a parody of something known. In order to figure out if something was funny in first century Palestine (or whatever time and place I'm looking at, maybe second century Corinth) I like to turn the potential joke into a contemporary example and pose it to a friend. If the contemporary version is funny, it's likely that the ancient version was also amusing to a contemporary audience. \n\nHope that helps somewhat! " ]

[ "It represents the electrical activity of a group of neurons. Neurons transmit information through chemical or electrical reactions. When information is passed a reaction occur and a tiny electrical current is created. Which can be measured.\n\nWave only means the electrical current oscillates at a given frequency.", "/u/adoarns, /u/albasri, and /u/kindmidas2020 have both posted very informative replies. There is a bit I would like to add, however.\n\nA discussion of \"brain waves\", however, should perhaps also include local field potential (LFP) oscillations, which are essentially the same thing as EEG signals but measured in a more direct (also more invasive) and more local way. LFPs are recorded by inserting electrodes into brain tissue. LFPs can be recorded form areas that can't really be investigated using EEG, and a recording electrode can pick up electrical oscillations from small groups of neurons that might be undetectable via EEG. In animal experiments with LFP recordings, researchers have found evidence of very highly localized LFP activity in a huge variety of different brain areas.\n\n**TLDR 1:** There are oscillatory signals (aka brain waves) happening all over the brain, and when you try to pick them up with an EEG, they all kind of blend together, so that you can only detect the really big signals and you can't tell the weaker signals apart.\n\n\nAnd that brings us to the **most important misunderstanding** about 'brain waves': The idea that brain waves reflect *what overall/global state the brain is in.*\n\nYou might read that a person's brain exhibited \"increased theta waves during meditation\" or something like that, but that line is misleading. It doesn't just matter what oscillations are happening, but WHERE they're happening, and also whether they are synchronizing with oscillations in a different brain area.\n\nIn fact, our brains are CONSTANTLY abuzz with localized neural oscillations, in a thousand different places, performing a thousand different functions.\n\nFor my money, I do believe that the \"communication through coherence\" hypothesis is among the best explanations for what purpose this synchronized activity serves: If group A tends to be most active all at the same time (like a group of people who all tend to go out for coffee around 1 PM), and group B tends to be most active all at the same time, but it's a DIFFERENT time (e.g. B is a group of people who all go out for coffee around 5 PM), they won't communicate that much, but if A and B become synchronized, then there will be a lot more communication between groups happening. Thus, synchronizing or de-synchronizing the oscillations of two groups of neurons provides a mechanism to quickly turn communication between those groups 'on' or 'off'.\n\nIt is also worth noting, however, that there is another role that synchronous population oscillations may serve: The generation of precise temporal codes.\n\nThere is some research to suggest that sometimes neurons send messages not just by whether they fire or not, or how fast they fire, but by the exact *pattern* of spikes they produce... Sort of like Morse code. The same number of spikes, arranged in different temporal patterns, can have different meanings, e.g...\n\n--$--$$$---------$-$$$----------$-$$$-- might mean one thing, and...\n\n--$--$--$--$--$--$--$--$--$--$--$--$-- might mean something different, even though they have the same overall firing rate.\n\nAdding a synchronous subthreshold input to a population of neurons can improve the precision of spike timing in response to a time-varying input.\n\nIn other words, having a rhythmic/synchronized input might help neurons precisely time when they fire, so that they can generate specific patterns of spikes.\n\n**TLDR 2:** Brain waves might be something different brain areas use to communicate, and it also might be part of a way for neurons to send more information by generating temporal codes." ]

[ "It doesn't for everyone. About 18-35% of people are affected by this; it's called [photic sneeze reflex](_URL_0_).", "The optic nerve takes all the light information from the eyes to the brain. \n\nThe maxillary nerve causes the sneeze reflex. \n\nThese two nerves run next to each other for part of their course. When there is lots of electrical activity going down the optic nerve, then because they are next to each other, this activity can \"leak\" onto the maxillary nerve and push it over the limit, causing a sneeze. ", "No one really knows. \nSome scientists say it's caused by confusion in the nervous system. Since all senses are linked, the pupil dilation response to light is translated to a nasal irritation and causes a sneeze.\nOther scientists suggest it's evolutionary, a trait that helped our ancestors survive in primitive life. (Clear the nose of smoke/other smells after leaving a cave to help smell threats/food sources).", "As someone who does this, I've noticed that squinting your eyes moves the sinus cavity. I imagine this affects the process as well", "I actually have the same thing. Strangely enough it can apparently it can be passed down. At least my mom has it and apparently my grandmother did as well. It's kinda annoying but only because the sneezes come on so quick that I can't see what I'm going and have to pause. ", "I shit you not, there is another name for this condition that is way better than photic sneezing. It's Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst Syndrome. Or ACHOO for short :)\n\n[Proof](_URL_0_) ", "It's actually called the \"ACHOO\" syndrome or some such nonsense... \n_URL_0_", "This is known as [photic sneeze reflex](_URL_0_) caused by a genetic mutation that results in some sensory inputs to become \"crossed\" for example sudden bright light can be interpreted by the brain as nasal irritation.", "I was told that looking at the sun/light normally involved looking up, which opened your airways. And that was why it helps you sneeze.\n\nNo idea how true that is, though I've noticed it has the same effect in a dark room as when I'm outside. ", "I have this condition. Also, if i am clogged in the nose my wife plucks my eyebrows. It has the same effect and quickly clears up my nose. Lots of sneezes ensured.\n\nOften when we come out after being in a dark building my wife says \"Wait for it..\"", "I read somewhere that the nerve that controls your pupil dilation is in close proximity to the nerve that triggers a sneeze. When you look at a bright light your eye contracts and causes the nerve to fire. This can activate the nearby sneeze nerve." ]

[ "Horses are difficult to treat and expensive to keep. A horse with a broken shoulder would be very hard to have recover at all, and even if somehow it survived it would never be able to race again. So why spend huge amounts of money on obtaining an old, lame horse?\n\nI know the desire to keep animals alive but most people don't have a million dollars to throw at such a task.", "Horses can't heal very easily. A shoulder injury like that would probably need the horse to not use that leg for the length of the healing process (to prevent it from damaging the shoulder more). Horses can't walk on 3 legs, it puts too much strain on the other 3 and causes a lot of pain for the animal.\n\nThey also can't just lay down. Horses are far too big to do this for very long. It would start causing a bunch of pain, nerve damage, and a whole host of other issues for the horse.\n\nIf there's any damage to the bone that's also an issue. Horse bones tend to shatter far more than our bones do, making the healing process more difficult, and the chance for compound fractures much greater.\n\nThey're just all around not designed to heal through a lot of injuries well.", "Healing is often not possible. \n\nThe legs of a horse have no muscles below the knee. Instead they have high tension tendons and ligaments that are controlled by muscles in the upper leg. This means that when they break the bones tend to shatter rather than just fracture and are often so damaged that they cannot be knit back together. But assuming they can be knit back together the lack of muscle means less blood-flow to that part of the leg which means slower healing. This slow healing can cause a lot of problems. \n\nMost Horse breeds are so heavy that they need all 4 legs to support their weight and can only stand on 3 or 2 legs for very short periods of time. So they cannot stay off the leg long enough for it to heal and you have to immobilize the horse in a sling of some-kind to support the weight normally put on that leg. This immobilization is dangerous though as horses who lay down or do not move for too long are prone to developing colic which is a twist in their digestive tract that is often fatal. It is also very expensive to immobilize and tend to the horse during this kind of treatment. So most horse owners choose to not spend the money on something that has a very low chance of actually healing so they just put them down quickly. \n\nA broken shoulder, while likely to heal faster depending on the type of break still has the immobilization issues, risk of colic, and expense of care so with a racing horse being a business investment and not a pet few would ever try and treat such a severe injury. " ]

[ "A couple million years worth of evolution to specifically adapt to solar radiation. Nothing else magical besides the fact that we are biologically used to it, and so are all the plants we eat.", "The sun is essentially a resource that cannot be depleted, unlike coal or gas.\n\nAlso, many scientists have come to the consensus that the use of many nonrenewable resources, such as the aforementioned fossil fuels, cause undesirable side effects like climate change, which is where certain gases reflect infrared radiation, warming the Earth's climate." ]

[ "Because some people browse without an account", "A lot of visitors aren't registered users, a lot of users post/comment rarely if ever.", "1% of users have an account, of that 1% only 1% vote. There's a reddit blog that says something to those lines.", "I like how everyone is talking about voting when the question says \"posts\".\n\nThreads that large become virtually impossible to meaningfully participate in toward the end / usually devolve into the *reddit armi* types who only look at top posts posting the same 5 memes and jokes, really." ]