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Photographic memories as you know them don't exist. In fact, everyone has a photographic memory because everyone can think in pictures. It's just used for people that happen to have above-average memory skills

I’m going to disagree with others’ advice here and say that it would be most effective for you to take an intro to programming course. This is because although you can learn most coding by working on a project and googling, even knowing what to google (keywords etc) is challenging for complete beginners. Taking an intro course gives you the mental representation and vocabulary to become self-sustainable and helps you progress much faster. There are many free ones offered on Edx/Coursera etc, and since Python is probably the most useful and beginner-friendly language, perhaps start with that. It’s going to take a while. For me it took around a year of frequent coding to become comfortable and two years to become relatively fluent for research purpose.

Husserl and especially Heidegger are notoriously difficult. If you don't have both a general familiarity with philosophy and also particular familiarity with the German tradition Heidegger is responding to, you're going to find *Being and Time* a rather rough slog. If you want to read the big-name phenomenologists in their own words, the most accessible is probably Merleau-Ponty. The long introduction to his *Phenomenology of Perception* is a good place to start, and will give you a general framework for the way he's going to argue. If you really want to start with Husserl/Heidegger, the standard starting place seems to be Husserl's *Cartesian Meditations* and/or *The Idea of Phenomenology*. Neither of these are easy books, but they're at least a manageable size, so you can wrestle with them more practically than you could wrestle with *Being and Time*. There's nothing wrong with deferring to secondary scholarship. Cambridge has a massive series of "Cambridge Companion to [such and such]" which are often good starting points, and there are companions to Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre (the other most well-known phenomenologist), and Merleau-Ponty, as well as one just on Heidegger's *Being and Time*. Or for general introductions, consider Cerbone's *Understanding Phenomenology*, Grossman's *Phenomenology and Existentialism: An Introduction*, or Moran's *Introduction to Phenomenology*.

There are a lot of Americans who want to adopt a baby. In fact there is a shortage of babies. If you want to get rid of your child immediately after it is born the process is very easy. When at the hospital people can just ask the doctor and s/he can set it up for them or get someone else to do all the work Children in foster care were born to parents who planned to keep their baby but couldn't. Meaning they were either take away or the parent passed. It is rare for a newborn to go into foster care.

It isn't really about "what the animal sounds like", it's just teaching children how to make different sounds and about our culture. As a quick example, in most English speaking countries, the cat goes "meow", but in Dutch it's "miauw", and in Greek it's "miaou", and in Japanese it's "nyan nyan" or "goro goro" (for purring). Each word and sound are particular to the culture, and learning these differences is key to forming a relationship with your child and your culture; which is always an important step in childhood development.

Yes, most diseases are more dangerous for obese people. The chances of having other health issues such as heart or breathing problems increases with weight gain. As we cannot guarantee to have diagnosed everyone who actually has a heart condition or other illnesses it is safer and more cost effective to treat people who are statistically at high risk as if they actually have the condition. When you are unwell it puts a strain on the body. This includes the heart. If getting flu would put too much strain on you then you would be hospitalised. It's cheaper to give you an injection that have you in hospital for even a minor problem. Also it's better for you if you don't have a heart attack. This is all based on statistics. A healthy person, with good cardiovascular abilities, a strong heart, no lung problems, low blood pressure and a BMI way over 40 would probably not be at great risk from the flu. It's just hard to test if people are very healthy and obese so you play it safe in terms of health and cost.

Lack of autobiographical memory is not at all the same as lack of learning. You probably don't at all recall learning to speak, but the effects of early exposure to your native language are still burned into your brain and reinforced by a lifetime of daily use.

It's true that this game is aimed at children, but that's exactly why it's important to include the possibility of same sex marriages. In a modern, western society we accept homosexuals and give them the possibility to marry, because we view all those couples as equal. By not including same sex marriage in the game, Nintendo isn't relaying this message. They're not necessarily saying that they disapprove of same sex marriage, but they're implying that same sex marriage is abnormal. And that implication will be taught to or 'absorbed' by the kids that are playing. Nintendo would greatly contribute to a more progressive society by allowing same sex marriage in Tomodachi Life, by showing kids that love can exist between two of the same genders. > This element would be lost with the addition of same sex marriages (small factor, but still). And this element isn't present in real life gay marriages as well, so it would be weird to include it in same sex marriages. The game isn't supposed to be social commentary, ofcourse, but it still will influence this generation's children, and it would be wise to include these messages.

Well the existence of a market implies that there is at least one civilization worth of piggies, probably both little and large. So it's entirely likely that there are thousands if not millions of little piggies out there. Though in the story we only get to meet 5 of these piggies.

They refer to doing the plastic deformation using different methods. Namely, ductility is the ability to be plasticly deformed under tensile stress, whereas malleability is the ability to be plasticly deformed under compressive stress. Lead is an example of a material that is very malleable, but not very ductile. It gets deformed easily under compressive stress, but trying to draw it into wires will result in shearing.

Well for one a railgun doesn't need magnets. In it's simplest form you have two parallel rails and a conductive projectile. A railgun passes huge amounts of current through one rail, into the projectile as it slides forward, and out the other rail. The huge current combined with the sliding contact is the single biggest problem. The rails themselves erode from arcing under millions of Amps of current, and a gun that fires 5 shots isn't exactly acceptable. Of secondary concern, because they are somewhat solvable problems with the careful application of money and existing technology: The rails themselves are pushed apart with the same force that drives the projectile forward. Consequence of the design. So you need a hella beefy set of rails and mounts for them. Heat generated from a shot needs bled off with cooling so your whole gun doesn't melt after a few shots in a row. Lots of current means lots of heat in the rails. (Adding material increases heat capacity to an extent, but you need surface area, like a radiator to actually remove it long term) You need a crazy amount of current dumped near instantly which means big high power capacitor banks and beefy low resistance cables. You need to recharge said capacitors which also means that they can only go onto new generation ships with big powerplants.

The non blackhole side. There are several hundred billion stars in a galaxy, the lightest of which have a mass of around 1/10th of our Sun, overall the total mass of our galaxy is nearly a trillion times the mass of our Sun. In comparison, the supermassive blackhole at the center of our galaxy weighs only around 4 million times that of our Sun. The smaller blackholes around the galaxy don't significantly affect the balance of mass much. The same overwhelming ratios of mass hold for other galaxies as well.

It's tough to remember smells, much less describe them, but growing up in Hawaii I've smelled lava several times. It doesn't have a really strong odor on its own, it's like ... well, hot rocks. A bit like hot metal, say a soldering iron or a hot stove, a bit like regular stone, say a pile of dry gravel or concrete mix. Sometimes, especially right near the vent, there's sulfur gases mixed into the lava, in which case there's a strong sulfur smell, like overcooked hard-boiled eggs. But most of the time I've been near a lava flow, it's just a clean hot stone smell.

There are two levels of reality in Disney. At the higher level, Mickey and Donald, Jiminy Cricket, Bambi, and all the other characters exist as actors working for a studio. They are aware of the audience, and in the olden days Mickey would sometimes have conversations with Walt. Everyone is aware of everyone else. At the lower level of reality, it’s whatever makes sense for that story. Generally the only human characters who are aware of talking animals are the princesses, but that’s not absolute. To everyone else, the group of mice trying to assemble a dress just look like regular mice. The humans don’t see the clothes and don’t understand the squeaks. Disney princesses tend to have a greater connection to nature magic (or whatever) and can see the wondrous things that exist in the world. Everyone else simply fails to see what is really happening.

Wii u upconverts to HDMI. It technically has better output than your HDMI dongle. Virtual console, which probably not get ported to the switch in It's complete state. Nintendoland won't get ported. No more Wii fit u. Smash is still several years away. As are most of the ports you mentioned. Do you think Nintendo will canabalize the sales of Odyessey by releasing a 3d Mario one year later? No way. Most of all, you shouldn't sell it because you don't want to. This should be the most compelling factor. You have a connection with the system and that nostalgia is more valuable than the few bucks game stop will give you. You'll be lucky to see $100 trade in.

I reject premise (b). The goal of government is not to maximize individual happiness. The purpose of government is large scale coordination of activities limited to enacted laws. Side notes: its irrelevant if suicide is legal. there can be no consequences for a successful suicide.

No, there are no photos of the moon landing site taken from Earth.The equation for determining if a telescope can resolve a feature is called the Rayleigh criterion. It says that in order to resolve a feature with a telescope you need a lense with a diameter 1.22*(wavelength of light)*(distance to object)/(size of object). So in order to see a 1 meter feature on the surface of the moon you would need a telescope with a lens 250 meters in diameter. The largest optical telescopes in the world are about 10 meters so it is basically impossible take a photo of the site from Earth.

I’d say because it sends signals to your brain that distracts - similar to how if you bump your knees for example, vigorously rubbing that area makes it “feel better” because it sends a distraction signal

For a possible parallel, look at alcohol. Some people in rural areas still distill and sell moonshine, both as a sort of "Screw you" to the government, and also because it's strong and cheaper to buy with no taxes attached. However, bootlegged liquor is many, many orders of magnitude less popular than it was during prohibition, and the confrontations between moonshiners and the law are normally restricted to the odd standoff between a few people and a few cops or forest rangers out in the woods, rather than constant drive-bys with automatic weapons in urban areas (which we saw during Prohibition). So yes, there'd still be a smaller trade in illegal drugs, but the demographics would probably change drastically. Instead of powerful foreign-based cartels moving weed over the border by the bale, for instance, you'd probably have survivalist types and anarcho-libertarians growing it, illegally due to bypassing regulations, in the woods here and there, because "it's the principle of the thing".

Because football is less affected by torrential weather than baseball. While the passing and kicking game is *impacted* by heavy rain, you can still play a somewhat functional game of football no matter how heavy the rain is. Baseball, however, is simply not playable if rain is too heavy. For one, pitchers can’t grip the ball, and fly balls can’t carry at all. Puddles in the infield make grounders unplayable. There is really no way to adjust for these things.

The most intrinsic problem is that Newton's second law (F=ma) is actually only a low speed approximation. If you are thrusting in the direction of your motion, the force is actually: F = (1-v^(2)/c^(2))^(-3/2) ma When v is much less than c, that first term is basically 1 and you get F=ma. But as v gets closer to c, the first term gets bigger and bigger, and starts to asymptote towards infinity. This means that the faster you go, the more force you need to get the same amount of acceleration. And the force you need ends up increasing so rapidly as you approach the speed of light that you can never beat it, and never reach the speed of light. (Side note: it used to be taught that your *mass* increases as you approach the speed of light, but we generally prefer to say that *force for a given acceleration* increases instead, because the required force actually depends on the direction of the force, and it's more weird and confusing if your mass depends on what direction you're being pushed from) But as a secondary point, space isn't *entirely* empty. There is a thin medium of ionised gas throughout the Milky Way, containing clouds of denser "molecular" gas. Even though the density is extremely low, as you approach the speed of light, you are going so fast that you are smashing through a pretty large volume of space every second, and you do indeed feel a drag force from smashing into these interstellar plasma particles (mostly protons). And not only does this slow you down, over time these high energy protons are going to cause significant damage to your ship!

The various shapes of noses appear to be tied to adaptations to climate. The nose must properly heat and humidify the air that you breathe. In a cold climate, it's advantageous to have a narrower nose. That's so that when a person inhales, more air comes into contact with the mucosal surface of nose, which provides moisture. The narrow nose maximizes the surface area.

It's because most topical antibiotics work by mechanisms that bacteria can't build resistance to ie they rip cells open. They're too toxic to use systemically but resistance isn't really a problem. Plus to be honest anything you can "treat" with a topical antibiotic probably doesn't need to be "treated" in the first place.

Depression isn't sadness. Depression isn't being worried about the state of the world. Depression is being unable to leave your bed all day due to extreme lethargy. Depression is hanging out with your friends and being unable to enjoy yourself like you usually do. These things have nothing to do with your perspective of the world or whether the world is a scary or disappointing place.

This question can't be answered at this time. We have only a very small amount of isotopic compositions of meteorites, and they pretty much all appear to be the same. When we DO find some other meteorites with a different isotopic composition and a fair sampling of what that frequency is, we might know something. We do NOT have an isotopic composition of the asteroids, of mars, Venus, and the moons of the other planets, either. Those are where the answers may be. If those are all very much alike, isotopically, then we will know we came from one regional source, but we cannot know if it was from one supernova or many. That would require knowing the isotopic compositions of many stellar systems, which we must first sample physically, to see of those are different from our own, as they are likely to be. It's possible to know the elemental composition of stars by comparing their spectra to our own sun for heavy and ferrous metals. But this doesn't give much of a stable standard to compare with, either. So, from 1 SN, or several, we can't know at this time.

For ELI5: Imagine a dollar bill folded zig-zag, standing on it's edge on a table. If you are very careful, you can put a brick on the dollar bill and it will hold it up, because the paper is strong if the weight on it is exactly up and down (vertical). You know that if you poke the bill sideways, you'll make a crease and the brick will come crashing down. If you don't touch the bill, then you hope it will hold even more weight so you start adding dominoes to the brick. However, nothing is perfect, so some of the force isn't exactly vertical. Because of bumps on the brick or wrinkles in the bill the brick will cause a tiny bit of force sideways on the parts of the bill. Eventually you add enough weight that the sideways forces from an imperfect bill and imperfect brick cause the bill to crease and rapidly collapse. The point where that happens is buckling. Even in 'perfect' vertical loads, imperfections or non-uniform parts in a beam will eventually cause buckling with increased load.

The same way they actually were picked up, just with considerably less shooting and explosions. They'd land, Lelu (or the Mondechiwans themselves) would explain the ruse, and they'd fly out to Floston and pick them up from the Diva. Remember the Diva wasn't surprised to see Lelu there, from her perspective it was all going according to plan until she got shot.

1. Everyone deserves respect. Aretha Franklin wrote a song about it. 2. Elder people have earned respect throughout their lives by raising the next generation of humans. Building and maintaining a society and literally creating our generation is worthy of respect on it's own. 3. People in positions of authority deserve respect by virtue of attaining and maintaining that position of authority. It takes hard work and dedication to get and keep an authority position. That's built into the very definition of the word. 4. You are adopting a very "what have you done for me lately" approach to respect. If you have demonstrated your reliability throughout your life, it's insulting to have to demonstrate it again. Elders and authority figures have earned their respect. The only catch is that young people weren't alive while they were doing it.

He does for the pathfinder trip. It ends up cutting his recharge time from 13 hours to 12 hours. For the trip to the MAV, he has the RTG inside a plastic bag, in a tank of water. Not a very attractive situation for wiring. Also, over a day the RTG would only produce 2.46 pirate ninjas of power.

I studied chimps for several years. One big issue with teaching them how to cook is you must first teach them how to make fire. Making fire would likely prove a bigger obstacle than actually learning that cooked food is better than uncooked. Chimpanzees have been demonstrated to have a capacity to understand cooking and even prefer cooked food to uncooked food: Cognitive capacities for cooking in chimpanzees. Warneken & Rosati. Chimpanzees have developed and use intricate toolsets to get to termites, honey, hunt galagos. Unless provided with human technologies (ovens, stoves, etc.) chimps would be unlikely to learn how to make a fire but even if the skill was learned, the act of fire-making would be difficult if not impossible due to the morphology of their hands. (They have tiny thumbs)

Attempted murder isn't necessarily always whether the doctor can revive the victim. It can also be a failed murder plot. It's like the difference between the different degrees of murder and manslaughter. Premeditated murder is punished more severely than provoked murder. Because premeditated murder means there was intent to begin with, provoked murder doesn't necessarily mean the person intended to do any harm, maybe it was due to an emotional state like walking in on your cheating spouse. Just as manslaughter is when you kill someone by accident as in vehicular manslaughter. You didn't mean to run down that pedestrian, but you did. unsuccessful muder could have been a muder of passion like walking in on your cheating spouse, but you failed to kill the person. You would be charged with attempted murder, but likely sentenced to a lighter penalty than actual murder because at most you commited assault with intent to kill. It's all about three things: Intent, Circumstance, and Result. Was it planned or in the heat of the moment? Was the intent to kill or just harm? Was the result death or injury? Or was the entire thing an accident thereby renduring it manslaughter?

Because, no matter what movies and TV shows teach you about hackers, in the real world we have redundant servers and offline backups to prevent what you're talking about. Sure, it's remotely possible to delete all of that data at an institution -- but just for a few hours. Then they restore it, and you get 10 years in prison and the bank is just inconvenienced.

This issue is entirely job specific. Some careers are completely unavailable without the degree (doctor, nurse, lawyer, psychologist, social worker, engineer) while others put very little weight on a degree (sales, assistant). You've essentially taken a hard stance on an issue that is completely continent on the situation and is entirely not true in some situations and entirely true in others.

Capital is a big part of it. Other crime lords slowly amass power and wealth through crime, then use that power and wealth to attract more, but their wealth is derived from criminal activity, will always be criminal, carries a lot of risks, and can easily be lost in a second. Fisk has an incredible amount of legitimately earned clean money. Fisk doesn't need to rob banks to raise money for stealing the Super Mega Death Ray, he can just buy it via a shell corporation. Working for Fisk means you're just as likely to be doing a legit job as you are a criminal one. There's also the stability that comes from that. If other crime lords are arrested and charged their assets are siezed, they go to jail, there's a power vacuum, and things get messy real quick. The organisation now has no leadership and no money. If Fisk is arrested... he posts bail, he hires the best lawyer money can buy, if the worst comes to the worst he does some jail time and has one of his lieutenants take over while he's indisposed. The money he legitimately has doesn't get seized, wages are still paid, and for your average goon way down the ladder nothing actually changes.

Just because you close your eyes, you don't "shut off" that sense. You're still very much able to see the light that get through your eyelids. Furthermore, eyelids were not evolved to turn off your sense of vision, but to protect them from different stuff that can get in to them and damage them, and keep them moisturised so they don't dry out.

1. Being head of state gives you an impressive amount of medical care. The leading factor with disease is wealth, and the Reich would go to extreme lengths to avoid their Victorious Leader dying of an overdose in a back alleyway. Even in the 40s and 50s, we had enough medical tech to keep him alive. 2. The leading factor for *drug addiction* is extreme stress, and here hitler is no longer fighting a losing war against the entire planet. Basically, barring major incidents like a world war, world leaders live a long time. No-one can fight the reaper forever, but people with an entire state dedicated to keeping them alive can do pretty well.

Doctor Strange would be horrified to learn that the only people protecting the biggest source of magical turmoil from overflowing into the normal world was a group of teenagers and a middle aged librarian.

A fully charged battery will be at a certain voltage. As the batteries energy is depleted the voltage will drop. A fully depleted battery will have a voltage of zero. By monitoring the battery voltage the device can estimate available battery power.

Where humans feel cooling (or heating) based on the rate of heat transfer from/to their body, thermometers typically measure the actual temperature, rather than the rate of heat flow. Take for example the mercury thermometer. This device functions using the fact that mercury expands when it heats up. This property applies to pretty much every material, but mercury has properties that make it especially suitable for use in a thermometer (amount of expansion as function of temperature, liquid state at the entire range of everyday temperatures, etc...) At high temperature, the same amount of mercury will be less dense and occupy more of the volume inside the temperature. When it's cold, the mercury will occupy a smaller volume. Through calibration, one can put readout markings along the tube of the thermometer. In any case, it is the absolute temperature of the mercury that determines the amount of volume it fills. The only thing that wind might change is the speed with which the mercury comes in thermal equillibrium with the surrounding air, and therefore the speed at which the temperature reading is adjusted after the air temperature changes. In everyday applications, you probably won't notice this effect. You might see a small difference between a calm and a windy day if you take the thermometer out of a well heated house into the freezing cold outside. If it's windy, the temperature reading should drop more quickly as the wind helps the mercury to shed its heat more rapidly than if the wind wouldn't have been there.

Other commenters have commented on the chemical compounds within tea leaves, but there are also the important elements of heat and hydration. So even drinking warm water without tea leaves (sometimes with honey and/or lemon, or even just plain), can provide immediate relief for sore throats because: - **heat** reduces muscle tension, so warming up the throat helps throat muscles relax which can reduce soreness. Think about how having a hot bath or shower helps bodily muscles relax. The reason heat relaxes is because it encourages blood vessels in the area to dilate (widen) so that circulation improves. - **hydration** is an important general treatment for illnesses that often cause sore throats, such as viral or bacterial infections. These illnesses often cause dehydration because the immune system's response is to try to expel the pathogen from the body through processes like coughing, sneezing or even vomiting or diarrhea. All of these processes cause the body to lose fluid. So rehydrating is an important priority.

Note: time=/=effort Sasuke is a gifted learner. When he puts in X effort to his training, he sees Y reward in his abilities. Naruto is not a gifted learner. When he puts in X effort to his training, he sees <Y reward in his abilities. In order for Naruto to increase his abilities at a rate similar to Sasuke, Naruto must put in more effort to his training. This is why the idea that "Naruto works hard, training comes easy to Sasuke" is true.

I cant give a list but characters like Static, Braniac 5 and that scientist who created Firestorm (Name escapes me) would probably place on the list as a starting point. The problem with many of the Smart people is that there skills are not transferable or broad enough, e.g. while Bruce Wayne is smart at business and being Batman he probably cant come close to Mr Terrific in the physics department, even though most people say Bruce is smarter. Also (No Disrespect just making a observation) New 52 superman is pretty stupid, he hardly thinks his movements through and while he's by no means dumb, his recklessness and lack of knowledge show he isn't the Super smart guy he was pre-flashpoint.

Engineers do what they do generally speaking because they like to solve problems. Engineers design better things, fix broken things, make things more efficient. Making an engineer work in government would essentially be putting him into some sort of engineer-specific dante's circle of hell.

As i recall Apocalypse once didnt have enough to chip in for the sampler appetizer and clearly ate most of it and Juggernaut changed his shared netflix password and didnt talk to him for like three weeks.

When a share owner is lending a share out like this, they are being paid a fee for it. Not a very big fee but... That is still more than getting nothing during that same period from the share just sitting in your account.

Imagine a big ken doll that's built like a Mack truck coming at you. It's human from a distance but too big to be normal unless a weight lifter and doesn't act human except to say a few phrases. If it were sent back instead of a t 800 it'd be spotted pretty quickly and be involved in a massive shootout with police since the 600s were slower and bulkier than 800s and could barely trot. For reference watch the scene in salvation where marcus gets attacked by a 600 that was on patrol in the city. And the skinless 700 the new 800 rips apart at the end of the film.

nobody knows, and anyone who has seen the rest of the world never survived a return trip, even the fastest ship takes months to get from Dorne to Quarth, and King Brandon Stark who sailed west with the most of the Northern fleet to find new lands, was never seen again. in this new age of dragons and the resurgence of magic, new discoveries are bound to occur.

There's one medical issue that actually collides with masks: Trigeminal neuralgia. Patients with that condition can't wear one since the mask itself would cause them immeasurable pain. But those patients know how to handle the issue and how to behave/handle their daily tasks including going outside. And they're the last to complain or rant in public about it.

What we mean when we say that someone is mature is that they have developed a certain set of capacities. These capacities can be a number of things, including things like the capacity to drive a car well. But the most important type of capacity we tend to associate with maturity is rational capacities. The reason that we don’t punish children as much when they commit the same crime as adults, or that we don’t let them vote, is that we feel they don’t have sufficient rational capacities to fully understand what they are doing. Rational capacities seem especially important for assigning moral responsibilities to people. The problem is that there is no clean line we can draw where before the line someone lacks rational capacities and past the line they have them. Further, it’s possible that there exists some very mature 15 year old who has developed sufficient rational capacities, and that there is also a very immature 25 year old who does not have these capacities. The law draws a line at a certain age because of pragmatic considerations. It is simply impossible to go case-by-case and decide whether each person is currently rational enough to take on the full moral responsibilities of an adult. So we draw a somewhat arbitrary line that we decide is good enough, but not perfect. Philosophers don’t have to draw such a line, so there’s no age that a philosopher is going to tell you that someone is an adult outside outside of the political community they’re in.

You think you can just up and decide you're a dark Jedi and that troops, ships and doomsday devices will just fall into your lap? Fuck off grasshopper, Papa Palpatine worked his entire life to build the Empire. Either you take it, or your don't. There are no handouts.

Astronomer here. Almost all telescopes (JWST included) have a peer reviewed proposal process. We write proposals for using the telescope, explaining what scientific goals we have, how it impacts the rest of astronomy, why we really need JWST, and how it extends work we have already done. These are scrutinized by specialized panels of other astronomers and ranked in order of their merit. In most cases even if your proposal is good, you may not get time because the telescope is oversubscribed. The regular peer review process takes place about 6 months in advance and only once or twice a year. A small fraction of the time is kept as director's discretionary time, which is used for urgent new observations (e g. A new, unexpected supernova nearby). The director sends out the urgent proposal to senior astronomers in the field to do a quick peer review and decides on whether to grant the time.

The ability to ignore wounds like that was a significant evolutionary advantage: in general, getting wounds means that you're probably in danger. There are very few kinds of danger for which sitting around immobilised by pain and screaming is a good way to get out of the danger, but an awful lot where not having to worry about the pain and carrying on as you were is helpful.

When you hyperventilate you blow CO2 out faster than you can make it. The issue with this is that your body uses CO2 levels to judge if you need to breathe or not. If your CO2 levels are low it thinks you don't need to breathe and you pass out. To prevent this you basically need to maintain your CO2 levels by breathing in the air you're expelling, which is where the bag comes in.

Talent agent here... they get paid multiple times in various ways. There's the lump sum upfront guaranteed money (ie We'll pay you $10M dollars to do this film), royalties (plus 2% of box office sales, TV broadcoasts and DVD sales), and bonuses/incentives (plus another $1M if you do a publicity tour in Europe, with another $500k if we do $25M in box office sales there), plus numerous other ways depending on the particular movie. The timing of how each of those is paid out (1 giant check vs regular payments) is completely negotiable, and varies from deal to deal based on what the actor prefers... some need money asap, some want scheduled payments to make taxes/finances easier to manage. Even who gets to hold the money before it's paid is negotiable (is it put in escrow, or does the studio get to hang onto it?). There's no one answer unfortunately... every last bit varies every single time.

Moles are basically a tumor. The unusual cell cluster pushes on the follicle, making it grow hair faster than usual. They're darker because of the extra melanin in the area from the mole. It's actually a good thing if your mole grows hair because that's a sign it's not cancerous. I copy/pasted it from another ELI5 from a few months ago, credit goes to PurpleOrangeSkies.

In 2009 Brazil was one of, if not the best, country in the world in terms of projected growth. We were just coming out the 2008 crash and Brazil was basically unaffected Also, you have to take into account hosting the games in a 3rd world country is great for the Olympics committee. In Brazil billions were invested in the Olympics, if the UK hosted the games, barely anything would have to be done. That's not really good business for the organizers, it's much easier to sell the event to sponsors when the country has to basically buy all the infrastructure needed to make it bearable

This might not be quite what you are looking for but there are actually many fancy materials that you can form at high to extreme pressures. For things achievable on earth a common example would be diamond. Less well known would be the various different types of ice (like ice V, VI, VII, XI). More theoretical and possibly existing inside of gas giants like jupiter would be metallic hydrogen. Something infamous for being a bit of a holy grail of material science. At ridiculously high pressures things start becoming exotic theoretical physics research such as the neutron pasta matter inside of neutron stars and other strange degenerate forms of matter.

In the HP universe, time is fixed in the sense that the modifications done due to time travel have always happened- there is no changing established events since time travel becomes part of established events. So if Voldemort dies, he dies, end of story- time travel is not going to change that. Any attempts to do so have already been attempted and failed.

They are trying to look like a branch or leaves waving back and forth in the wind, instead of like a walking chameleon. If they just strolled along then their prey would spot them and they would starve, or predators would spot them and they would be eaten.

Hardwired phone lines are part of the Matrix infrastructure. When someone hacks into the Matrix, encryption prevents them from leaving. So you need to get to a connection that is not being encrypted to get back out.

Some people still listen to AM radio but not nearly that many. The reason is actually pretty simple. AM can't sound as good as FM. I'll explain why later. AM is good enough to listen people talking but it isn't really good enough for music. AM is mostly for talk radio like news or opinions. People dont listen to that as much as they used to. People mostly use the radio to listen to music now. AM sounds worse than FM because the channels are closer together. Let me explain what that means. Radio waves are actually a kind of light. We can't see them because we can only see a small part of all the different kinds of light. Light is a wave so it has a frequency, the number of waves that happen per second. Compared to light we can see, radio has a very very low frequency, very few waves per second. Frequency is the number that we see on our radio tuner. When you see 91.5fm that means 91.5megaherz or 91.5 million waves per second. When you see AM870 that means 870 kiloherz or 870thousand waves per second. Fm stations are separated by 0.2MHz or 200 thousand waves per second. AM stations are separated by 10KHz or only 10 thousand waves per second. Since there is 20 times more space separating FM, they can use 20 as many frequencies to transmit the sound. FM has 20 times the band width. That is why FM can do music well but AM can't. FM has so much more that it splits the bandwidth into two channels so you can have stereo sound, left and right. If AM tried to do that it would sound even worse. Stereo is more important for music than for voice. Edit: Thanks /u/rocknrollunicorn for the tip about stereo.

I think its possible.... but insanely unlikely. There would have to be some heavy shit go down for an Eldar to feel bad about anything non-Eldar. A human childs corpse in the corner torn to shreds is meaningless to a dark eldar. Do you ever get home and see an ant corpse in the corner of the room and have a life changing epiphany? Even if for some reason they do decide to repent they are bent beyond recognition and are basically coming down off the most intense high the universe has to offer, including some real actual highly addictive drugs... Once an addict always an addict. They might try to clean up but they will always know the feeling on flaying a human keeping them alive for days so they can sleep to their screams while pumping drugs and god knows what into their bodies so they can maintain a prehensile erection for 3 months. You dont just go home after shit like that. >Thought for the Day: Do not ask, "Why kill the alien?" rather, ask, "Why not?"

It's a stereotype that originated in America. In the early parts of the 20th century, aesthetic dentalwork like braces and teeth-bleaching became absolutely required for Hollywood actors, in the classical era where the studios cultivated an image of glamour and perfection -- Hollywood being America's cultural representative to the rest of the world -- and as such they became pretty common for even ordinary middle-class people. By the 50s, it became just assumed that if your teeth were crooked, you'd get braces to fix it. Fixing crooked or stained teeth became a medical issue to Americans. This didn't happen in the UK, or in fact in *most* countries. As you said, the British actually have quite good oral hygiene. But British actors and celebrities didn't cultivate the same Hollywood image of glamour, and so the aesthetics associated with that culture didn't become standard. People went to dentists to fix cavities and infections, but braces and bleach were considered a part of the *aesthetic* field, akin to botox or collagen in modern times. While the Americans were mocking the British in their comedies for having crooked teeth, Britons and Australians were mocking Americans in theirs for being vain and effeminate enough to bleach their mouth and don braces. Both of these things have faded in recent years, both as Britain started consuming more Hollywood culture, and as less-glamorous aesthetics like rock, punk, and hiphop music and gritty realistic cinema became the new hotness in the 70s and beyond.

I suspect anybody in good physical condition could ride in a balloon and jump out. The thing is you need somebody who can do that in the worst possible conditions. What if his parachute got damaged in the balloon ride? Would you be able to repair it or even tell if it's repairable? What if some technical gear failed? Would you know when to pull your cord if your altimeter wasn't reading correctly and the parachute failed to deploy? What if the chute failed? Could you cut free and open the backup correctly? There would be a lot of training that a regular guy would need to get to the skill level where Felix already was with his parachuting background. So it was easier to just pick a pro and build from there.

FMA Brotherhood Kimbly had a real interesting moral code. He hated people who claimed to believe in something but then acted otherwise. If you couldn't walk the walk, he had nothing but contempt for you. &#x200B; Kimbly himself liked murdering people, and slaughtered hundreds. &#x200B; But he had more respect for surgeons who risked their lives saving innocents caught in war, than for fellow mass murderers who chickened out once they were in danger of actually dying.

To answer what you're probably more concerned about, the only way they could really prosecute you for just looking is if any of the pictures are of someone when they were under 18, and honestly even then it's probably way too much trouble for the authorities to track down and load up the court systems with everybody who checked them out, given it sounds like hundreds of thousands have seen them. Now, for who they can prosecute: * The guy who hacked the iCloud accounts or whatever to get access to the pictures. Assuming they can find him and he's in a jurisdiction that would give a damn (lots of hackers are from places like Russia and China where the authorities don't really care to cooperate with US law enforcement), there's a lot they can charge him with, like unlawful access of a computer system (or some similar term), as well as lawsuits for harassment, copyright violation, etc. * People who distribute the images may be less targets for prosecution and more for lawsuit for copyright violation and harassment, but there's probably some kind of actual offense they can charge under. Here they'd probably only go after people who make a really big effort to distribute them, like people who maintain mirrors in the face of takedowns, if even that. Most likely they're going to focus on the guy who nabbed the pictures. One thing that recent history has shown is that people who try to take stuff off the internet tend to get huge blowback. Also note that in the US at least it's a pretty widely-held doctrine that you can't get in trouble for publishing something regardless of how obtained, except obvious things like libel/slander or classified information that you know is classified. So it's unlikely anybody distributing would get charged at all, and probably lawsuits wouldn't go anywhere either.

>Are they constantly supplied with food and provisions? Yes. >Given that there is a need for a supply chain, why not just use that chain to transmit the messages? You act like there's constantly a line of people from Gondor to the beacons. It's just like one dude with a cart who goes by once a month and drops off supplies. But even if there was people going to the beacons daily, or even more frequently than that, they'd still deliver the message slower than the speed of goddamn light.

Thanks to the dark side of the force, Palpatine and Vader were able to rise to positions of power where they are now able to tell the guy with the planet killing weapon what to do. That's what Vader means.

It all has to do with how selective the females are for mates. Typically in mammals, the reproductive process involves really significant resource expenditures by the females. Plus, the amount of offspring produced in one birth event is relatively low. Cats will have maybe 4-10 kittens in a litter, dogs will have 5-10, and humans will have 1-2. Contrast that with a turtle who will lay 20-100 eggs depending on the species or spiders that lay hundreds. Mammals expend far more resources, time, and energy to produce fewer offspring, so the females are going to be very selective with the mates they choose. When competition among males for females is intense, the larger males will win the fight. As a consequence, animals with reproductive tendencies like mammals (high female selection, social animals, and extensive parenting), tend to have larger males than the females. As a contrast to that, animals who produce tons of offspring over a short period of time, expend less resources, and have low levels of parenting will have the females larger than the males. In these types of species, so many offspring are produced that there's little incentive for the males to compete with each other for females. Every male can get the chance to reproduce. Without a selective pressure for them to be large, they will be just large enough to survive to breed.

None of those would do anything (other than destroy all life on the planet). Momentum is conserved, so assuming no debris from the explosion can escape Earth's gravitational pull entirely, the Earth must continue on its path.

She's too powerful most likely for the net or the obedience disks to work on so she'd most likely just try to find a way back to Asgard. She would probably go to the Grandmaster and ask for passsage to Asgard. If he refused she'd lay waste to the place. Remember Grandmaster thinks Hulk is awesomely strong Hela can wreck Hulk easily. Valkeryie probably goes out suicide by Hela trying to get revenge.

That's not how the Amish choose what tech to use or not use. They didn't 'stop at year xyz.' They evaluate technological innovations amongst their communities and determine what technologies are considered useful enough, and what technologies are too disruptive to their way of life. Some use cars, some use phones. Each community has its own rules on technological usage, and the determining factors tend to be the protection of the family unit and guarding the self against sinful excess, sloth, greed, and the like.

Venom is like a bunch of evil LEGO pieces that are designed to fit into critical spots on your cells (nerve, blood, etc). Antivenin is a collection of antibodies, which physically attach to the venom molecules like sticking more LEGO to them. The result is that the venom can no longer fit into the spots in your cells it must to have its devastating effect, and your kidneys filter the mess out for you to piss away.

Nuclear submarines can produce oxygen by using electric power to electrolyse water. Spacecraft can do that too, and in fact that's how the ISS produces its oxygen, but spacecraft aren't surrounded by water so it needs to be sent up on rockets anyway.

It isn't our bodies. It is the illness. The cold and the flu are actually tons of different rapidly evolving viruses. You do actually become imune to a particular cold strain once you get it... but there are a few hundred more waiting to get you next. As to why the flu and cold viruses adapt faster than the chicken pox virus, i don't know.

The word "tensor" is overloaded in mathematics, statistics, and computer science. In this context (TensorFlow, and data science more generally), tensor usually just refers to an array of numbers (which may be higher dimensional than a vector or a matrix, which are 1- and 2-tensors, respectively). This is similar to the way that "vector" is often used to mean "a list of numbers", even though the word has a more technical meaning in mathematics. The mathematical meaning is more complex, and is a bit hard to motivate if you're not already working in a field that would have use for them. A high level conceptual view would be that a tensor is a function that eats vectors and spits out a number. These generally arise in situations where you have a space, along with some kind of geometric structure, and the tensors themselves encode some kind of geometric information about the space at each point -- that is, at any point you have a bunch of vectors (which may describe e.g. the dynamics of an object, or some other kind of information), and the tensor takes those vectors and spits out a value quantifying some feature of the space. One very common example is given by objects called Riemannian manifolds, which are essentially spaces which locally look similar to Euclidean space, but globally might have a very different structure. At each point, these spaces can be "linearized" to look like the vector space Rn, and they come equipped with a dot product that takes two vectors and spits out a number. This dot product in some sense defines the local geometry of the space, since it determines when two vectors are orthogonal, and allows us to define things like the length of a vectors and the angle between two vectors. This "thing" is called the metric tensor.

Maybe, but it would be an immense effort and Father had better things to do. Sloth can dig the hole in a reasonable timeline without much trouble, and that gave Father plenty of time to work on the rest of the plan. In addition, an alchemical work of that magnitude is very likely to be noticed. Having someone dig a large hole isn't go to set off whatever alchemy detection methods are out there. Plus, why not? He didn't need Sloth working on a different project, so might as well put him to use.

In the universe, dream realms are actual distinct realms of reality that you can travel to physically. Some say they're the home of the Great Ones. They tend to be made be the Great Ones for humans who call out to them; The Hunter's Dream was made for Gehrman when he was "retired" by the Church and felt purposeless, the Nightmare of Mensis was made when Micolash and the School of Mensis used an Umbilical Cord to contact a great one, the Hunter's Nightmare (the DLC) was made when the the inhabitants of the Fishing Village that Gehrman and Maria "violated" called to a Great One for vengeance. So long as your spirit is tethered to the Hunter's Dream, you can project yourself out into the Waking World and die over and over. Micolash's body was dead in the Waking World, but his spirit was kept in the Nightmare of Micolash (when you kill him, he screams that he's "waking up," and that he'll die for good now). The One Reborn is a mass of corpses from when Micolash and the School of Mensis attempted to communicate directly with a Great One, which resulted in "the stillbirth of their minds" and sent Micolash into a Nightmare. It was reanimated when the Red Moon descended and the veil between realities broke down. Rom is likely an old associate of Master Willem's school at Byrgenwerth who was the subject of an experiment to ascend humans into Great Ones (as once happened in Pthumeru). Rom became almost a larval Great One, lined with eyes and granted a new form and new powers, but wasn't a true Great One. Yes, in their own way. Willem's school focused on using Insight to slowly and methodically expand one's understanding of reality, while the Healing Church and its affiliated groups used mainly large amounts of blood transfusions to try and accelerate the process. The results were mostly beasts, though the Choir succeeded in creating the Kin of the Cosmos, the smaller child-sized beings you find around the upper Cathedral Ward (and behind Iosefka's clinic in the woods). They could commune with the Great Ones, but weren't on their level. The player character is the only one who can truly ascend, through a combination of both insight and blood. The Ashen Blood, iirc, was a poison that the Healing Church put in Old Yharnham's water to give themselves an excuse to try large-scale blood ministration. The Beastly Scourge came about as a result of their blood ministry; when the Red Moon descends, the line between men and beast was blurred, and the beasts broke out. It's either that or the Ashen Blood was the name that they gave to the poison's symptoms. *edited for phrasing/content

normally, sand sinks to the bottom of water because it is more dense,a dn it settles against other sand, which it catches against (close up, sand is lots of little jagged pieces of rock) Quicksand is formed by water pushing up through a layer of sand- this pushes the sand apart so that the jagged pieces are forced away from each other and act more fluid. When pressure is applied to the sand, it forces the water out from between the sand particles and they lock up as they start touching each other again. If the pressure stays on the sand, though, the sand starts to push out from under you as the sand further down is not effected as much by the pressure and stays fluid, allowing you to sink.

The Paladins were another name for the Twelve Peers-- basically, like the Knights of the Round Table, except there were only 12 of them, and they worked for Charlemagne rather than King Arthur. The name itself derives from the Palatini, the guards of the Roman Emperor's personal palace of Palatine hill. Like the Knights of the Round Table, the Paladins were famous for their feats of heroism (especially in battle against Moorish invaders from Spain) and their piety. As to the Paladin in fantasy, it came through D&D (like so many standard fantasy tropes), through Poul Anderson's novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, about a World War II resistance fighter, Holger Carlsen, who travels to a parallel, high-fantasy universe where the legends of the Twelve Peers are real, and turns out to be that universe's version of Ogier the Dane, one of the Paladins. Other important D&Disms that come from that novel include trolls that regenerate their wounds and Law and Chaos as forces that exist in opposition like Good and Evil.

"*Kramer* goes to a fantasy camp. His whole *life* is a fantasy camp. People should plunk down $2,000 to live like *him* for a week. Do nothing, fall ass-backwards into money, mooch food off your neighbors, and have sex without dating. *That's* a fantasy camp." Kramer always has some scheme going on. Coffee table book, J. Peterman tours, recycling cans, tons of business ideas an inventions. He practically has a new one every week.

It's mostly down to timing. For one most schools start back up close to the start of fall. Schools are great places for things like colds to spread. Kid brings cold to school, spreads around class to class. Those kids bring them home, infect parents and siblings, who take them to their schools and work. Rinse repeat. Vacation times (Thanksgiving, Christmas, spring break, summer in the US for example) give people an opportunity to travel and mix with new people and pick up things (and pass other things) and bring them back home with them. Then they go back to school or work. Many of these conveniently fall around changing seasons. Cold weather also tends to bring lower humidity, which may help certain viruses take hold. This may be due to thinner mucus and drying, cracking of the nasal mucus membranes. There are several studies showing some cold and flu strains spread more readily in winter vs summer. Also in spring pollen and mold counts spike causing people with allergies to have symptoms. Some people don't realize they even have a reaction to pollens or mold and may assign the symptoms to a mild head cold. Edit: word fix

I can imagine one particularly disastrous scenario - if you just "blow up the Moon", ie, blast it into dust, you'll create a gigantic ring around Earth composed of moonrock. That moonrock will be reflecting an enormous amount of sunlight. It'd be clearly visible throughout both day and night, from every place on Earth. Every werewolf will transform permanently. Anyone bitten will rapidly succumb, overdosed on "moon rays" as it were. You could spark the very werewolf apocalypse you hoped to avoid. I'd advise against this risk, all other dangers aside (climate effects, meteors, etc).

It's made of the same extra durable Thor-matter as the rest of him. There's no reason to assume that a creature who's body is able to withstand direct exposure to a star, won't also have really tough hair.

It's been tried! But nuclear generators are very heavy, especially with the kind of shielding that you'd need to actually protect your crew from being irradiated. If you're in the ocean, that's a lot easier since added weight just makes you slower, it doesn't change what you need to stay aloft. For a plane, you gain the benefit of being able to stay powered almost indefinitely, but with the tradeoff of losing a lot of your capacity for crew and cargo.

The Executor was in the process of a maneuver to better accommodate the approach of Rae Sloane's star destroyer, the Vigilance, so it could have a covered flank, the other flank protected by its extremely close proximity to the battle station itself. While its engines were firing (hence the order to intensify firepower rather than move the vessel. Remember the Executor's shields were down after sustained Rebel bombing), the primary bridge was destroyed and command couldn't be evacuated in time. Nor could backup command be restored before the maneuver continued to push it directly into the Death Star. Alternatively, the engines pushed it into the Death Star's gravity well. And since the ship was in a state of total chaos at the time, no one had the authority or foresight to save the ship before it crashed.

It has some protein, yes. Nutrition facts are essentially rounded, though: that's why you can have things with "0 calories." They still have calories, but if it's like .4 calories, they can say it has 0. A serving of mayonnaise is very small since it's a condiment, so if it has like .3 grams of protein or whatever, they have to list it as 0.

I think the body would evolve to discourage that. The only way to scratch that kind of itch is going to harm you. Consider the reason for an itch evolved in the first place... it's to get you to brush off bugs and other critters. And for this it's better to have false positives. But bugs don't tend to get inside you. And if they do, no amount of scratching is going to help.

In biology, where a species is either widespread, or for some other reason, counting individuals exhaustively is too difficult, numbers are calculated from exhaustively surveying a set area of habitat then extrapolating based on area of known territory. E.g. A bird species has confirmed sightings in 10 different areas that correspond to its known habitat. The combined area of these 10 sites is 1000km^2. Biologists sample 10km^2 and find 20 individuals and so the population is estimated at 2000 individuals.

I know a few people with the same problem. It's called vasovagal syncope. "You faint because your body overreacts to certain triggers, such as the sight of blood or extreme emotional distress. It may also be called neurocardiogenic syncope. The vasovagal syncope trigger causes your heart rate and blood pressure to drop suddenly. That leads to reduced blood flow to your brain, causing you to briefly lose consciousness. Vasovagal syncope is usually harmless and requires no treatment. But it's possible you may injure yourself during a vasovagal syncope episode. Your doctor may recommend tests to rule out more serious causes of fainting, such as heart disorders." -source, Mayo Clinic

It's also irrelevant. Sauron was winning by attrition, no one could stand against his forces in any drawn out conflict. Destroying the ring was the only way to win, hiding the ring, especially in ways which safely seal it away for long periods, do nothing to inconvenience his plan

When reading *The Principles of Newspeak*, it is tempting to say it's referring to the Party in the past tense, but that would not necessarily be an accurate deduction. Instead, the passage only goes so far as to refer to Newspeak in the past tense. Admittedly, Newspeak was such an important aspect of Ingsoc that it's hard to see how one could continue to exist when the other does not, but remember the Party is not a monolithic, immutable entity, no matter how much it would like you to think so. The Party *does* change, it *does* adapt, and it *does* make adjustments and accommodations based on the current situation. For example, witness how Newspeak was gradually introduced to the populace over a period of decades, in a series of editions. Each edition was produced based on observations and feedback from the previous one. For another example, is Oceania at war with Eastasia or Eurasia? Therefore, the possibility that Oceania would abandon Newspeak and leave it in the past tense is not altogether unthinkable. Perhaps they replaced it with a newer version of Newspeak, one with such different grammatical and conceptual rules that it deserved its own title, eg Newnewspeak or Truespeak. Perhaps the Party managed to suppress speech entirely. Ultimately, the nature of the Party, where they control the present ergo control the past ergo control the future, make it so that accurate historical records are by definition impossible. Therefore, while it's certainly *possible* that the Party is no more, we cannot say for certain that this is the case. And if the Party truly does not exist any more, it is also impossible to say for certain what the causes of its downfall were. Oh, and as an interesting final note, *The Principles of Newspeak* was written in Oldspeak. Apparently someone managed to preserve the old tongue long enough to write this tract far in the future.

For some medications it's because they come in both micrograms and milligrams so they make one of them slightly off so people don't accidentally take 1000x the usual dose. Baby Aspirin comes in 81mg because it's 1/4 as much as normal Aspirin which is "5 grain" or 325mg.

What about when your friend is going through a bad time? Let’s say they just lost a family member to an early death. Surely they need you to support them extra for a while with no expectation of reciprocity. To turn friendship into a scoreboard watching game means friendships end when they are needed most.

>proving financial records would be even more difficult This is thoroughly untrue. Every bitcoin transaction is very public; it's the most fundamental part of the protocol, really. It would be good for you to read up more on exactly how it works.

We already don't *really* use grand juries to indict. The grand jury is a puppet of the prosecutor. It's set up in a way that allows the prosecutor to get indictments (or non-indictments) pretty much at will. Imagine if you had a trial where only one side was allowed to present evidence and the threshold for guilt is "is there any evidence at all?" That is pretty much what a grand jury is, and the prosecutor's sole ability to present or withhold evidence from it is why it's basically the prosecutor's puppet.

It's based on math. You need two dimensions to determine the location on a piece of paper, or plane. You need three dimensions to determine the position in space. the fourth dimension you can determine the position in space at any given time. What will blow your mind is getting you head around the fact that some scientist believe their are even MORE dimensions.

>It is true that periods and pregnancy reduce a person's productivity and value as a worker, but so do migraine, horniness, being fat, insomnia, having too many kids etc. So a person who thinks that women's periods and pregnancy should be taken into account when deciding their pay This is where you're missing the point. There aren't any employers going "Well, we just hired Kate and Eric, but Kates probably going to get pregnant eventually, so start her off at 10K less" The wage difference comes from choices made in the career field, such as taking the time off during/after pregnancy, making sacrifices in ones career for family, etc. If Kate and Eric have been at the same company for 5 years, and Kate took a few months off after having a kid her second year while subsequently adjusting her focus to accommodate that child (not staying late, doctors appointments, less travel, etc.) you'd be hard pressed to come up with reasons why she deserves promotions or merit based pay raises compared to Eric, who either does not have a child or doesn't have to make the same sacrifices.

It's static electricity. You're seeing the sparks from the discharges, they should look blue/white colored. If you have a carpet or fuzzy jacket you can make your own "lightning shows" in the dark by building up voltage and discharging it with another object.

I presume you've already found Marcel Mauss' 'The Gift' and/or Marshall Sahlins' 'Stone Age Economics' for more general theory? Are there specific contexts/situations/societies that you are looking at?