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<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: What stops people in the patent office fron rejecting an idea and patenting it for themselves?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant If they patent it themselves, aside from the difficulties they would have in explaining it to others or higher ups at the office, the original claimant can present his receipt and dated file that shows exactly how and when he came up with the idea, the implementation, and the submission date/time. These two would be more than enough for the immediate firing of that clerk.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: In high school, why do teachers make you do projects but give you the determiner "Only 2 of the x resources you use can be from the internet?" Small backstory, I had to help my niece do a science project for high school. She had to quote sources for a specific physics problem and her solution and how she got there. I found all of the sources online in 5 minutes and she got her project done in around an hour. However we then had to spend 4 hours driving to various libraries to "prove" she did not get the sources from the internet. TL:DR I got sources for my niece's project from the internet and spent 4 hours driving to various libraries for library reference cards for the books I found online.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Because the teacher wants some way to ensure that students know how to get information from books or other printed materials. The internet is a phenomenal resource, but it's important to maintain some small ability to locate information without the internet, like at a library.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user CMV: if you can't afford living in an expensive city, you should move out. Most big cities are becoming prohibitely expensive to live in, making it hard for middle class people to afford a home or even rent. I'm from Canada where this phenomenon is getting progressively worse in cities like Toronto or Vancouver. And yet I rarely hear of people talking about moving out. I don't really mean the suburbs here (traffic sucks), I mean really moving out. There are tons of smaller cities where housing is affordable and traffic non-existent. I can see many reasons why some people might chose the expensive city despite their limited budget, but I can't help thinking many people should consider the option of a smaller, more affordable city. I think there's a decent amount of irrational reasoning here, such as "the city is all there is, everything else is just farms and stuff." Sorry if that make me sound like a smartass. I am biased here because of my own positive experience with growing up in the big city and leaving it for a smaller one. I'm looking at my city friends who have all stayed there and are now struggling with making ends meet and I'm trying to understand their point of view.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Moving is often suggested as the solution for many problems, but the fact is it's an incredibly difficult process for most people, particularly the low-income. Aside from the expenses themselves (moving trucks, etc) looking at available places in other cities/regions means taking time off work, which could be impossible or lead to getting fired. Also, the advantages of being physically near your network are huge. Not only is it daunting to leave everyone you know behind, family and friends can be resources for favors like childcare. Giving that up is a big task, and puts a lot of strain on people that may not be worth the savings. Plus, moving to smaller town often means lower wages, and fewer opportunities for career growth. There are exceptions, but generally it might not be fiscally worth it to move to a small town because you're going to start living on small-town income.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user How does the body 'learn' from immunosuppressants to keep an autoimmune condition in remission? For autoimmune conditions where the treatment is immunosuppresants to get the condition into remission, it would seem intuitive that the moment you stop taking the immunosuppresants the condition would return/flare up. But in some cases remission is maintained even when you stop taking the immunosuppresants, which seems counter-intuitive. How does the body 'learn' to stay in remission without the drugs?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant For the sake of clarity this is may be a little oversimplified. In the normal immune system, your body essentially has two broad ways of avoiding autoimmunity and eliciting immune responses to harmless substances. The first is central tolerance, in which developing lymphocytes that turn out self-reactive are killed, made anergic (inactive), or induced to become central T regs (which inhibit immune responses rather than activating them). Lymphocytes that make it through development without recognizing self-antigens are able to go out into the body and carry out their functions. However central tolerance isn’t perfect and numerous harmless substances, particularly those that come from the environment, can still be recognized by our immune system. Therefore we have a mechanism of peripheral tolerance in which our already developed and functional lymphocytes can be removed. The oversimplified explanation of how this works is that if a lymphocyte recognizes a substance in the absence of “danger” signals that come from pathogens or tissue damage, it will be killed, made anergic, or induced to become a Treg similar as in central tolerance. So going back to your question, it is speculated that SOME immunosuppressants (depending on their mechanism of action) may be able to allow SOME people to build peripheral tolerance to SOME graft/self antigens because the antigen is present for long periods of time without any danger signal. Edit: it’s also worth mentioning that autoimmune/host-vs-graft responses pretty much inherently lead to release of “danger” signals via the tissue damage they cause. So it’s a bit of a self-perpetuating cycle that immunosuppressants help interrupt, as mentioned by another user. By turning off the immune response, you reduce the presence of danger signals, which may be more conducive for peripheral tolerance induction<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: why are new programming languages always being created? It seems like there are new languages "out" every year or two - what do the new ones do that old ones couldn't?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Programming languages are changing in two dimensions over time: abstraction and specialization. Computers, when you get right down to it, can't actually do much: just basic logic and arithmetic. Back in the day, "programming" was writing down a series of these basic instructions that would do something useful, like calculate a logarithm. But what's truly useful about that program is that anybody can copy and use it. Instead of writing your own instructions to calculate a logarithm, you just use the instructions someone else already came up with. Now nobody writes the code to calculate a logarithm themselves (outside of programming exercises). Modern computer languages just let you type something like "log(x)," and they do the rest of the work. Over time, we built up a bigger catalog of useful stuff computers can do and also had new ideas about how to best organize and implement all of it, so those ideas are periodically incorporated into new languages (or major updates to old ones). Also, using someone's off-the-shelf code is sometimes inefficient relative to writing something from scratch that is optimized to your particular application, but as computers get more powerful, there are fewer and fewer use cases where this is a concern. All of this means that modern programming languages are thus much more abstract (and also generally easier to use) than old languages like C or BASIC. The other dimension is specialization. Someone working with data and statistics is likely to use tools like SQL, R, and SAS. Someone working on a website is likely to use tools like HTML and PHP. These languages/software come with built-in tools that make them easier to use for certain tasks. You maybe could build a webpage with R or a database with HTML, but it would be incredibly difficult. Other languages, like Python and Ruby, are much more general, and with the right add-ons can approximate many specialized tools, but finding and learning those add-ons is often not worth it (relative to just using a specialized language) for someone whose job only involves one specialty.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5 If high blood pressure is caused by your heart overworking itself, why does exercise which force your heart to work harder lower blood pressure? EDIT ADDING INFORMATION Thank you all so much for the responses. I learned alot and got more clarity about blood pressure. I'm 32 years old with Ortho-Hypertension (one doc told me). I seen multiple cardiologists, pulmonologists, PcPs, and neurologist and gotten plenty of CTs, MRIs of almost every part of my body, multiple stress and echos., and all types of blood work. My blood pressure at rest could get as low as 120 or as high as 140/80 but slight movement would cause it to jump to 160-180/105. I take 2 medications on for but I had a ton of allergic reactions to them so it's hard to dial in on what I can take and what's causing the issue. While I do exercise I think I will put more time into it, I was just concerned that putting more work would cause it to climb. Thank you all sooo much!! Wish I could express my gratitude as I been fighting this situation for the past 5 years.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant High blood pressure is more complicated than that. You might think of blood pressure like body temperature, where there's a set point that your body is trying to keep. We want enough pressure that every organ gets good blood flow (especially your brain, since you have to pump straight against gravity to get from heart to brain) but not so much that we over-stress the system or burst a vessel. A lot of things go into what your blood pressure is at any moment, and all are regulated different ways: \How much volume is in your arteries and veins. From a pressure point of view, blood is basically saltwater. Plenty of salt and water live other places in the body, so this can vary more than you'd think. \How blood is being pumped. The heart can vary both its rate and how hard it pumps. \How hard arteries are pushing back. Arteries aren't just dumb tubes like the plumbing in a house. They're lined with smooth muscle which can relax or contract, decreasing or increasing pressure. Chronic high blood pressure is what we worry about. Because the body is normally so good at regulating blood pressure, having chronic high blood pressure generally means that slow processes over time have altered that set point. This can involve changes in the stress response system, the kidney systems that regulate salt/water volume, changes in the lining of the blood vessels, and changes in the heart. Exactly why high blood pressure happens is a huge area of research and gets really complicated (and a little controversial, especially when we talk about salt in the diet.) We do know that regular exercise is part of keeping that healthy regulation of blood pressure normal. Exercise can indeed briefly raise blood pressure (for accurate blood pressure measurement, we like to have people sit quietly for five minutes.) But our goal isn't to bring down blood pressure immediately. We want to slowly bring it down over time and keep it down. Exercise has positive effects on the heart, the blood vessels, the brain, the stress response system, and much more. Humans are meant to get exercise, and not getting exercise is probably a huge part of why many people get high blood pressure to begin with. TL;DR: Exercise may raise blood pressure short-term but improves control over the long term. Bodies can't regulate blood pressure too good if they sit all day.*<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user How does exercise reduce your resting heart rate? Does it make your cells physically need less oxygen? Does it make your heart more efficient, how?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant The ventricular walls will also thicken, increasing the contractility of the heart. This increased power in turn leads to a greater stroke volume (amount of blood pumped per contraction). The cardiac output is further defined as heart rate x SV: hence functional cardiac output can be maintained at a lower heart rate with increased stroke volume.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5:How is it that the US's economy is doing well, but paychecks are growing at a "record low pace?"<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Production per hour of labor is increasing, but the increased income from that productivity is mostly going to the shareholders and company executives. This trend will continue as long as people are willing to work for the same low wages as before. And before people start pushing for higher wages, the unemployment rate has to decrease. It's hard to ask for a raise when you know that there are 100s of people to replace you at your current wage or below.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user Eli5 Why can’t cancers just be removed? When certain cancers present themselves like tumors, what prevents surgeons from removing all affected tissue and being done with it? Say you have a lump in breast tissue causing problems. Does removing it completely render cancerous cells from forming after it’s removal? At what point does metastasis set in making it impossible to do anything?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Some cancers can be, but the surgeon has to balance getting all of the cancer and none of it breaking off and not damaging the rest of the organ where the cancer is which may be keeping the person alive.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: water storage in aquifer. Is it possible to put water back into a natural aquifer for storage? As it sounds as though we are draining many basins, but also building new water storage projects, can we not just use existing aquifers?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Yes, this is possible and being done in many areas. In Portland, Oregon, for example, large pumps in the Columbia River inject water into a shallow aquifer during winter high flows which is used for the city water supply in late summer. Several factors govern the feasibility of this storage method: the depth of the aquifer, the porosity of the geology, the rate of water withdrawals, etc. if the aquifer is deep below ground, pumping costs may be prohibitive. If the geology isn’t porous enough, the recharge rate may be too slow to store much water in the near-term (natural recharge of aquifers can take hundreds - thousands of years in many cases). In many areas, water withdrawals from aquifers are so large that it is impossible to replace the volume of water removed. These are ‘overdrawn’ aquifers where the water table drops every year with associated pumping cost increases. Eventually, water quality and volume degrades to the point it is no longer worth pumping.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user Essential cultural theory texts? Hi Askphilosophy I have recently been accepted into my masters programme in Modern Culture, and would like to get a head start on reading during the summer, since i have quite a lot of time on my hands. Unfortunately, the reading plan for the semester wont be available until late august. Does any of you with experience in the field have some texts, books or articles that would be considered essential on this topic, or that would put me on the right path? I have a background in Communication Studies for those interested. Thank you so much<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant You should probably check out the Frankfurt School and Bourdieu as they are major sociological figures In the study of culture. Two books stand out for me as classics on the subject, Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Distinction by Bourdieu.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: How does dust affect the computer? Additionally, why does it seem like the performance increases when I clean the dust out of my PC?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Dust makes the system hotter, both by directly insulating the cooling surfaces and by restricting airflow. If you remove the dust, the cooling system can run more efficiently, which lets the CPU boost its clock rate. Dust literally makes your system slower.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Why do drug stores have tons of reading glasses in varying intensities (for farsighted people), but no pre-made glasses for nearsighted people?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant If you are nearsighted, you can see close up but not far away - so to do something like driving that requires good vision means that you need an accurate pair of glasses to fix your far vision. If you have the wrong strength of glasses this means that you won't be able to see correctly at distance. As you may not be able to always change the distance between your eyes and something far away enough, the prescription needs to be perfect to see (think about trying to look at a landscape where everything further away than 50m is blurry because your prescription isn't perfect). Being farsighted means you can see things far away, but your eyes get worse looking at objects close up. If your eyes are such that you can see well a meter away, but cannot read a book sat on the table on front of you, a pair of reading glasses will correct your vision so that you can clearly see something that is closer to your eyes. The differing strengths will alter this distance to different degrees, so a weak pair of glasses will allow you to read 20 cm closer, a stronger pair 50 cm closer, and a pair that is too strong may adjust your eyes too far and make them worse. With something like reading however, you can easily adjust the distance between your eyes and the object you are reading - so while a pair of glasses that are slightly wrong may not allow you to read something 30 cm from your eyes (such as a book laying in bed), they may adjust your eyes just enough to read a book 40 cm from your eyes, so you can just hold the book 10 cm further away to compensate. So if you find you need reading glasses, it is not so necessary to have a perfect prescription, and you can happily use glasses from the pharmacy (which are typically sold in half steps of strength, where prescription glasses can often be sold in far, far greater accuracies - steps of 0.01 rather than 0.5) An optometrist will test you and prescribe reading glasses properly too, just this accuracy costs money and many people will happily make do with store bought generic glasses. One other thing to mention is how people wear glasses and how easily damaged they will be - short sighted people tlypically wear glasses permanently, so when you put them on in the morning you wear them for the day. Far sighted people however will only wear glasses when reading, and will take them off when using distance vision (such as driving). Because they are taking them on and off regularly there is a far greater chance of losing then, forgetting them, or sticking them in a pocket and breaking them. If you have to replace them regularly then the cost of prescription glasses will add up very quickly, so cheap generic glasses will save your a lot of money. For a near sighted person that will often wear the same pair for years at a time without losing them the cost is far more justifiable.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Why does wood burn when you heat it up instead of melting? Not just wood, but many things burn instead of melt, whereas other things melt instead of burn. Can you burn ice? What if you put ice in wood?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant There are two major forces at work here. The first is the chemical bonds themselves. This would be the carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds (among others) that hold a single molecule together. The other force is intermolecular forces, which hold a bunch of molecules together into a cohesive unit. As an analogy, chemical bonds are what make Lego pieces hard to break, while intermolecular forces are what make an entire Lego structure hard to break. When you heat something, you're putting a lot of energy into it, in the form of vibrations. These vibrations strain against both of those two forces. If the chemical bonds break first, you get combustion. The individual atoms start flying apart and shedding energy as heat before finding something else to bond with (usually oxygen). If the intermolecular forces are overcome first, then the thing melts. Molecules start sliding against each other, and the entire structure starts to "flow" like a liquid.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ElI5: Why do you ‘double over’ or hunch over when you have a stomach ache or have eaten too much? Why do you hunch over when you have a stomach ache or have eaten too much? And why does groaning kind of make your stomach feel better when it’s aching? Could you be hunching to take pressure off of it or something..? But then wouldn’t groaning put that pressure back on??<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Your body's natural response to pain is to contract muscles. On the same token, your body also compels you to apply pressure to injured areas because of survival instincts telling you to reduce bleeding. It turns out that entering the fetal position 1) allows you to contract your muscles without needing to stretch them and 2) applies pressure to painful areas by contracting your muscles. Your body works in a strange way where your nerves are very easy to saturate with a signal, so your best bet when in pain is to apply pressure because the pressure can essentially help to reduce the pain that you feel. The fetal position is just a natural response to apply as much pressure as possible to your groin/stomach area.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: How does your DNA know where it is in your body and which body part to grow into?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Some parts of your DNA are regulatory genes. They don't build anything used for tissue or enzymes or anything like that. Instead, they build proteins that activate other parts of your DNA. So, say your DNA is trying to build an eyeball. It doesn't immediately start making an eyeball. Instead, there's a gene for "build an eyeball" and that gene turns on another gene that says, "build a retina" and that gene turns on another gene that says, "build a nerve cell" and so on. Those regulatory genes are activated by any number of chemical signalers. Some of them turn themselves on and off. So for instance, to build fingers there is a signal that both turns on the "build a finger" gene and turns off the genes that build itself. So the more of this signal there is, the less of it will be made. So you end up with pockets of high levels of this signal, but they fall off really quickly. So your body builds a finger where those signals are strong, but not where none exist. Similar signals pervade your body. Signals turn genes on or off which turn on or off other signals, which turn on or off the genes that code for the actual "stuff" that you're made out of. Every type of cell tells every other cell what kind it is, and affects which parts of their DNA is activated, which feed back to that first cell and tells it what DNA to activate. Before your cells even start to differentiate, when you're just an embryo barely starting to form, the cells still started with some signals that affect the growth of the cells from that point forward so they do begin to differentiate.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [Comics/Dr. Strange] Can Dr. Strange heal himself and others? Should he? In marvel comics we know that magic can do a variety of things for a variety of different effects and this varies wildly depending upon the abilities of the user, the type of magic that is being utilized, and the intention. But there seems to be a persistent issue when thinking specifically about Doctor Strange and how he relates to healing physical injuries for example. We know in the comics that Doctor Strange initially sought out magical counsel in order to heal his hands and through a series of misadventures ended up doing something else entirely, my understanding being that he either deemed fully healing his hands an unworthy utilization of his talents or He is for some reason unable to do so because of either some great magical cost that it would incur or simply because no spell exists that can do that. I’m curious why this is the case if he can do any myriad of seemingly impossible things like raise the dead or travel time. Surely healing his own hands would be child’s play I suppose the questions that I want to pose are: 1. If he could and did have the ability to heal his hands back to the original state should he? Would it be right or appropriate for him to do so Given that there are many other people in the world with much worse disabilities or injuries who do not have access to magical means of healing? 2. Further if he has the ability to magically heal his own hands or any aspect of his body that was ailing for himself at will would he not then be bound by his Hippocratic oath to do the same for others? 3. If you think he should heal anyone who requested it it is obvious that he cannot heal everyone everywhere. Would it be morally permissible to teach others on a grand scale how to do things like magical self healing? It doesn’t make sense to make magic an exclusive art, many evil characters already know magic (Dr. Doom, Mordo etc) and many heroic characters already know some level of mystical healing abilities. Why not teach it to anyone who wants to learn?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Your question is an interesting and well thought one. It’s tempting to utilize the common limitations held by magic but to me that seems intellectually lazy. Those common arguments against Strange healing himself being: 1. He is simply uninterested in doing so, having morally evolved as a person 2. There is no reason for him to do so, magic does not require well functioning hands or is indifferent to disability to work properly 3. The magic required to do such a feat is deceptively complex and would require a Faustian bargain of some kind that Strange deems unworthy of the cost It is quite clear given his ability to do feats that would well dwarf something so simple as healing his hands are things he does with some manner of regularity, I.e. battling demons, traveling between dimensions, flying, teleportation and conjuring among many other things. The simplest rationale that answers all your questions would be perhaps that he does not heal either himself or others because he deems such to be an abuse of his powers or he would not find it morally feasible to heal some people but not others, assuming charitably that such healing would come with no undue repercussions<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELi5: Why are Prince Rupert’s drops so indestructible? I’m very curious.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Might be a bit off the ELI5, but I'll try: Due to rapid cooling of the outside of the drop it shrinks. (insert human analogue) Not only does this shrinking occur all the way around (more or less) at once, it also means that the material has no where to go. Cold and hard on the outside, still hot and expanded on the inside; that puts it quite under a bit of - not only existential - stress. And then the goo on the inside starts to cool down and contracts, wanting to pull the rest in. The rest that is already cooled and would love to move but can't due to being cold. What have we then? Stuff on the inside that pulls in all it can. Stuff on the outside that gets smushed together because someone couldn't stand to let it relax. And now you, with your puny hammer, start smacking around. You just don't bring enough energy onto this table of high and unlovely mechanical stresses to throw those molecules out of order. Get a bigger hammer or grow muscles, puny human. Well, that is until you start to attack the weak spot. The tiny tail that is so fragile, the whole thing explodes. Same thing actually, but here your puny human-arms are strong enough to overcome the residual stresses. You monster. We do the same thing for high pressure pipes btw. (e.g. common rail injection) We blow them slowly up to a controlled pressure way beyond the future operational goal so that the inside starts to deform a bit. Then, after relieving them of that burden, they feel a bit weird, with all that pressure gone and the residual compression stress still there after the plastic deformation. So, when the actual operation pressure comes along, they just laugh it off because they've seen way worse and won't give in without a fight. That completely unrelated thing is called: autofrettage<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5 Why is finding water on other planets one of the most important things for us to look for in the case that there is life there? I get why it could be important but nothing else seems to matter when looking for life.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant So life needs chemistry to take place to exist. For chemistry to take place chemicals have to come into contact with each other. A chemical sitting on one rock and another on another rock won't react with each other. So they need to mix in something. This best place for chemicals to mix is in a liquid. Of all liquids water is the best for this to happen in since water can dissolve more chemicals in it than any other liquid. Hence, they look for water.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user How do you avoid being convinced by every philosophy book you read? I find it hard to not being convinced when I’m introduced to a new philosopher idea, even more if it is about a subject I don’t know much or if it’s really complicated or if it is hard to read. How do you usually approach this new ideas and how do you avoid being too closed or too gullible to them? Is this a common thing?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Good philosophy has the effect of being convincing. If you feel like you're too convinced by an author and you want to know more about whether or not they're right/if you should feel so convinced, try to find criticisms of the author's position(s)<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [ELI5] When staring at any object in the dark, the small details on it seem to look distorted and move around. What’s the explanation behind this?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant The way that vision cells (rods and cones) work in your eyes is that if a photon interacts with a chemical substance within them, it causes a chain reaction which causes a nerve signal to be sent to the brain. The more often this happens per second, the brighter it seems to us. This is a random process though, and if there's just very little light to see, the chain reaction happens so rarely that things can randomly appear brighter for a split second. The distrtion comes from the fact that in the center of our field of vision, there are mostly cones, which can see color but aren't that sensitive to light. On the outside, there are mostly rods, which can't see color, but are much more sensitive. So if it's dark outside, the cones in the middle become fairly useless, and you see mostly with the rods on the outside. The distortion comes from our brain trying to make sense of an image with a black hole in the center.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user CMV: whoever leaks the Mueller report or Trump's IRS filings would be committing career suicide and going to prison, but would become national hero(es) by letting the American people know what they deserve to know. >"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." - Mark Twain Anyone who does not expect and demand scrutiny of the government are not patriotic. The biggest patriots to the USA are the ones who shine a light, even at great personal risk, on the parts powerful people want kept dark, probably because they have something terrible to hide. To deflect such scrutiny is not patriotic, and is only the work of stooges in an unjust system or blind followers in a cult. The topic is obviously partisan but that's part of the problem: issues of law abidance are partisan nowadays. It should never be a partisan question. Love Trump or hate him he should not be above the law. If you are willing to rationalize why or how Trump does not deserve the same scrutiny as anyone else in his position, then you are part of the problem because he obviously owes us that. Anyone in power does. And when we make the law a partisan issue, we all lose, because it shows that power is more important than playing fair. When people see those in power as illegitimate, social stability is the victim: why do I have to follow the rules if the guy with power and money doesn't have to? For those who take the cynical view that it has always been that way, then they are simply admitting America is not a meritocracy. But should be. And those who really love this country and its principles are those who make that so, by divulging what the powerful want hidden, no matter how large the personal sacrifice. Which makes them the greatest kind of national hero, by definition.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Have you considered the question of admissibility of evidence? Suppose there is evidence contained in the report / returns that could lead to criminal charges. To make those charges stick, there needs to be a proper court process, where defending lawyers have an opportunity to review prosecution's evidence. Admissibility of evidence needs to be discussed, and decided in closed court hearings. Now, suppose the report / returns are leaked. One consequence is that some inadmissible evidence is now known to the public, and will sway any potential jury. It provides additional avenues for the defense to argue for delays, and makes it harder for the prosecution to convict the guilty. &#x200B;<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user CMV: A college education is not a right it’s an investment. I hear lots of democrats saying that a college education is a right and therefore should be free. However I think that it is a privilege and that the taxpayer should not be paying for it. A right is something that is essential to life, e.g. Freedom, right to thought, right to religion. My first point is that 70% of Americans do not have a college degree but still manage day to day life and to earn an average salary of $28 000 a year. More than enough to live on. My second point is that it increases potential income dramatically and therefore should be considered an investment. The average college graduate makes $51,000 a year and clearly can pay off their student debt. If the taxpayer paid for it we are essentially paying for other people to make more money.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Well, it's an investment, but the real question is who should be making that investment, because individuals are not the only ones that benefit from that investment. In a country with decreasing need for unskilled labor, and increasing reliance on higher skilled labor, it is a worthwhile investment for that country make to have a higher percentage of their citizens have a college degree. At that point, the question of "rights" comes in, because there are a lot of ways that social problems create inequalities in who gets to benefit from that "investment", whether the investment is primarily individual or primarily societal. Having equal opportunity to benefit from the investment in college educations seems like a very important "right" that we should protect.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [Kaiju movies] Why does the Air Force insist on dogfighting with monsters? Why does the Air Force insist on dogfighting with monsters that can slap down planes? I understand the need with the first kaiju in history, good old King Kong: World War I biplanes could do nothing but shoot straight going for the target. But now wouldn't it be time to update the doctrine? Modern flying gunships (such as the famous AC-130) can safely hit a target the size of a building while standing thousands of feet above the ground, unreachable by even the most gargantuan kaiju. Not to mention missiles. Is it possible to find a Watsonian explanation for this inexplicable suicidal aspiration of fighter pilots in kaiju-movies? Translated with [www.DeepL.com/Translator](https://www.DeepL.com/Translator) (free version)<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant The short answer is that once they fire all the missiles, start lighting into it with the guns, and realize they're accomplishing squat, a pilot can do one of two things: A) say "fuck it" and go home, leaving the ground-pounders and civvies to die or B) start buzzing the monster, because the two seconds it wastes swatting at your plane is two seconds more that the folks below have to run, hide, or dig in before the monster resumes it's grim work. Getting close enough to swat is hella dangerous, but it could save lives and risk-adverse people don't tend to become fighter jocks to begin with.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5:How do we know how certain battles took place? I just watched the newest HistoryMarche video and it got me thinking. How do we know the details of a battle so thoroughly that we can make a video and present it? Like what flank collapsed, what flank held on. &#x200B; I understand primary sources, secondary sources etc. but how would someone know. Was there a guy just interviewing the survivors after the battle, sitting on the hill watching and noting the battle?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Depends on the battle. For more recent conflicts like the colonial wars of the 18th century and later there is often meticulous note-keeping by commanders on both sides. During the imperial age nations understood the immense value of detailed understanding of your army, your opponents army, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. Military leadership tasked officers with this specifically, and commanders filed post-combat reports detailing their actions and thoughts. As a result, we have extremely detailed records of battles in conflicts like the US Civil War and WWI, right down to the exact number of men and what time of day things occurred. Once you get into pre-industrial conflicts the record quickly gets a lot spottier. Records are sparse, lost, incomplete, and/or heavily embellished. Many medieval and classical battles are known only from a single secondary source and some archaeological evidence, and the numbers and details some guy wrote about 45 years after the fact are deeply suspect.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: With one eye you have no depth perception, so why is it when I cover one eye I can still tell distance?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Stereoscopic vision is only one component of how we perceive depth, and not even aparticularly good one! Because our eyes are closely spaced, it's only really good for close depth perception. Combined with convergence (How much our eyes have to look towards one another to focus on a close object) these "binocular" methods of depth perception are really only effective out to about 10 metres. Monocular methods of depth perception that don't depend on having two eyes include: * Parallax - things move relative to one another as out point of view changes * Relative size - smaller things are further away, example in a field of cows * Familiar size - Ships are big, dogs are middle sized, insects are small. We know this. * Perspective: Line converge to a point which indicates the size of an object. * Occlusion: If one object passes in front of another, blocking our vision of it, we have perception of their relative size and so distance. * Defocus Blur: As our point of focus shifts, different "depths" are resolved in and out of focus by the eye. This gives important depth information. * Distance to horizon. In a natural landscape, the closer something is to the horizontal horizon, the further it is away. This is a function of our elevation above ground level. There are more... So, as you can see, our depth perception is NOT limited to "stereoscopic vision". We use many subtle effects to judge depth. One of the reasons 3D cinema can be nauseating or confusing is because it uses simple binocular effects to "brute force" our perception of 3D, which is uncomfortable when other queues are mis-placed in the footage we're viewing.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: What's the biggest/tallest a humanoid creature(giant) could get on Earth and why? I've heard that giants the height of mountains are impossible because of something to do with blood circulation? Just wondering how tall they could actually get.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant It depends a lot on how much leeway you allow for the whole humanoid part and how long you want them to last. The human body-plan is pretty much optimized for the range of sizes that humans actually get. There are a couple of medical conditions that can induce people to grow taller than normal, but those usually come with an early deaths. Even normal very tall people tend to have all sorts of risk factors and health issues and lower life expectancy than shorter ones. Robert Wadlow is the tallest confirmed human at 2.72m but it basically killed him at age 22. In the past there existed a species of primate called Gigantopithecus which may have grown to up to 3 meters tall. Neither Wadlow nor Gigantopithecus really had the same body plan as a normal human. Wadlow was incredibly think and strectched looking and Gigantopithecus would have likely looked more like a scaled up orangutan than a human (we did not find enough bones to be really sure), but both still count as humanoid. Scaling it up beyond that is difficult because of the cube-square law. If you take an object (like a human) and scale it up so that it is twice as tall it will have increased in volume by factor of 8 and in surface area by a factor of 4. Since lots of things that make a body plan work depend on the ration of for example skin-surface to total mass being right, you end up with problems. If you make things too small or too big the body will either loose too much heat or too little. Objects will risk breaking under their own weight if you scale them up because the mass increases with the cube while the ability to carry it only with the square of the scale up factor. There are lots of other factors that end up not working if you scale it up too much. Think of the way a toddler can easily deal with running stumbling over their own feet and falling flat on their face. They will cry but mostly come away from the experience with no big harm done. An adult making a similar fall flat on their face from standing up straight will be at far greater risk of injuring themselves. Scale a human up to the size of a building and falling on their face will basically be a death sentence. This keeps us from having to worry about giant ants or giant spiders but also keeps us from having giant humans. Anything much taller than the tallest NBA players is basically not healthy and you would need to redesign the human body to get much taller than 3 m.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [Lord of the Rings] Boromir gets the One Ring and somehow manages to use it to fight Mordor without getting corrupted, exactly what powers does he get? I don't want to delve deep into the personalities and corruption, i just want to know what powers would he get that are useful in the war against Mordor? Would his size increase? Would he become stronger? Stuff like that, what would he get? Because the movies make it seem like you only become invisible and enter the world of wraiths<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant It enhances your native charisma and ability to exert influence and even dominate the wills of others. It shifts you into the wraith-world (if you don't already exist there) and grands you supremacy over the other lesser rings of power. But Boromir would get corrupted. Even if he could contest Sauron for supremacy over the ring (which he couldn't) he would still turn to evil and seek domination over the world.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user CMV: "You create your own meaning" is not a valid response to "Everything you do is meaningless" The insignificance of everything we do really cannot be understated. Even if you're the most important person on the planet, there will exist people more skilled and more hard working than you, who would easily fill your shoes if you weren't there. If the human species goes extinct, there are lots of other planets with suitable conditions for life, and those under the right circumstances are probably teeming with evolving organisms. Plausibly, there exist an infinite number of other universes with different fundamental constants, laws and other variables that result in radically different universes to ours. There is nothing inherently special about anything, it is all a product of randomness and stochasticity. So after being presented with the view that everything you do is meaningless and that no matter how significant, important or meaningful you think that something is, it isn't - people usually respond with "You create your own meaning". Which doesn't make sense to me. It's like telling someone that imaginary friends cannot exist in reality, and them replying that you create your own imaginary friends. It's obvious that we create them, but our mind's creations and the truth can be shown to be incongruous. For the record, I have nothing against people with imaginary friends or people who choose to create their own meaning, I do as well. I just accept that I'm a hypocrite. And to be frank, nihilism often serves as a coping mechanism when things don't go the way I desire.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Consider what it means for something to be "meaningful." To be meaningful is, by its very nature, a subjective thing because nothing matters unless it matters to somebody. To say that something is meaningful is to say that it means something to somebody. So it's perfectly appropriate to respond to the claim that everything is meaningless by pointing out that you create your own meaning. If something is meaningful to you, then it's not meaningless. If you're talking about something being meaningful apart it meaning anything to anybody, then you're talking incoherently.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Scientists studied remains of a kilanova (when two neutron stars collide) and measured one of the neutron stars to be 12.4 miles in diameter. How could they have known it was 12.4 miles in diameter just by examining the explosion aftermath? I saw this on “How the Universe Works” but they never explain the reasoning.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Basically they are able to estimate the masses of the two neutron stars based on the gravitational wave signature. Since we know the density of the stars (they are made of nuetronium, the densest substance in the universe, or what we theorize anyway as we haven't ever created it) we can calculate the volume of the star and then the radius. As other users pointed out, the actual estimation is 20km, and the conversion to 12.4 miles implies a presision that is incorrect, it would probably be more correct to say something like 12-13 miles in radius.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user Why do houses have sloped roofs while commercial buildings are flat on top?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant roofs of houses are sloped in order for not letting rainwater or snow build up. Commercial buildings however generally have a much bigger surface and sloped roofs wouldn't be feasable, so you need to implement other means to let rainwater run off.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user Why are the Great Basin, Mohave and Sonoran Deserts considered distinct? Looking at a map, these three deserts look like they are right next to each other. Why wouldn't they be known as one big desert?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Mostly because of distinct plant life and weather. In the Sonoran desert you have several varieties of cacti that are not present in either the Mojave or Great Basin desert. The Sonoran also has two rainy seasons, summer monsoon and winter rains while the other do not. Also separting the Mojave and Great Basin is temperature. The Great Basin is considered a cold desert, whereas Mojave is a warm desert. There are also varieties of plant life, such as Joshua Trees which are plentiful in the Mojave but rarely occur in the Great Basin. Even though they are close different weather patterns cause a division of plant life in them and separate them.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user I do not think it makes sense to tie the salary of a university president to the salary of the lowest paid worker. CMV There was a recent story about how St. Mary's College is considering a policy that would limit the salary of the president to ten times that of the lowest paid worker on campus. While this sounds nice in theory, it does not make sense from a practical standpoint to keep the college competitive, and for larger and more prestigious colleges (nothing against St. Mary's) it would be a major mistake to implement this. Why should the president of a large university make a million bucks? Because it keeps them at the University. Private sector businesses can pay a lot more for skilled managers, and while working at a university should not be just for the money, having a reasonable financial incentive to attract the best presidents makes sense. If you are not offering somewhere in the neighborhood of what these people would be making elsewhere (or even at another university), you are going to lose your prestige and edge (which is really what most universities care about the most).<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant This assumes that salary is the only possible motivator for skilled managers (or skilled labor). Doctors without Borders doesn't pay well, yet still attracts top-tier talent. Similarly, contributing to a center of higher learning and being of service to the academic community is often held in high regard by society. For many skilled managers, the privilege of serving, especially at a well-regarded institution, more than compensates for the lost income. This also includes skilled managers who do not enjoy the private sector environment, or are attracted to the academic world. This principle applies to many government workers as well. There are some very, very intelligent and skilled workers on the government payroll, who could earn a large chunk more in the private sector. However, because they enjoy the work they do, they do not require the additional financial incentive. Indeed, it could be argued that these workers are even more desirable; offering a lower or capped salary might weed out "mercenary" CEOs or University Presidents who really don't give a crap about education or the University, only the metrics that determine their paycheck. The kind of CEO or President who would leave if a higher paying offer came along is a liability, and only as good as the targets the board sets. A mission-driven University president will work because they truly enjoy it, and may be much more productive and effective as a result.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user What exactly is Particle-Wave Duality of Light? I have read a little bit about Quantum Mechanics and this is a bizarre phenomenon(for someone who didn't take GCSE Physics) that I've come across that isn't explained very well.. So I was wondering if someone can perhaps provide me with a more comprehensive explanation with suitable analogies so that I have a better intuitive understanding of the subject.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Waves and particles are concepts that have quite different properties. The following are simplistic representations of some of the classical properties of waves and particles: Waves are considered to be entities that don't have a single position, but are instead spread out over an area. In addition, two waves can interfere with each other and depending on the conditions, this interference can amplify the wave or even extinguish it. A wave can even interfere with itself, for example through it's reflection (throw a pebble in a body of water and you can see the interference of the wave with it's reflection off the edge of the water). A particle is a discrete unit. You can count them. They have a single, well-defined position and direction. While different particles may interact, they do so in an intuitive way, according to classical mechanics. A good analogy for particle behavior and interaction is a pool table, with the balls (particles) moving around and bumping into each other and the walls. Whether light consists of particles or waves has been a back-and-forth matter in science. In the 1800s it was discovered that light is a form of electromagnetism and through the work of Faraday, Maxwell and others, light was established as a wave phenomenon. However, in the early 20th century quantum theory reignited the notion of light as a particle phenomenon. Work by Einstein and later Compton revealed that light had properties that could be explained through particle theory, but not with wave theory. Eventually quantum physics evolved and the differences were reconciled with the conclusion being that light exhibits properties of both waves and particles. Depending on exactly what you're looking at, you'll find light behaving like a classical wave, like a particle or like something that's neither of those two. For example, in the dual-slit experiment, a light source is directed at an opaque surface with 2 parallel slits in it. The light passes through the slits and is projected on a surface behind it. Doing this reveals interference patterns that are consistent with classical wave theory, but can't be explained with pure particle theory. On the other hand, in some instances, light can be measured not as a continuous wave, but instead as discrete units of energy, as if they were separate particles. One instance of this is the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon where certain materials emit electrons when exposed to light. This phenomenon was first explained by Albert Einstein (for which he won the Nobel prize), by considering light as discrete "quanta" of energy. So there you have it. Particle-wave duality of light means that light behaves as both particle and wave, depending on the situation. However, classical particle and wave theories are insufficient to completely describe light, which is where quantum mechanics comes in. And as an encore: It's not just light that exhibits particle-wave duality. It's everything. The aforementioned dual-slit experiment also works with electrons, for example. In general, the heavier/bigger something is, the less pronounced its wave aspects are, which is why we don't have to consider the wave properties of macroscopic objects at all.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: How can something have no calories? What does the body do with this calorie free food?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Calories are a measurement of energy, which comes from breaking bonds between atoms — mostly, carbon atoms. Just like the gasoline your car uses that makes it run (gasoline is primarily carbon and hydrogen). When your body breaks down things like sugar, fat, and protein, it breaks the bonds in it and releases energy that it uses to do various things. Food has varying amounts of sugar, fat, and protein. A bag of Skittles is almost all sugar. A slab of meat is mostly protein, with some fat. All of those things have calories that come from those compounds, which your body breaks down. Some foods do not have anything that your body can break down. Water, for instance, has no carbon. It goes in and most of it goes out (in your pee or your sweat). Some foods, like diet soda, have carbon compounds in it, but they are designed so they can’t be used by your body (they create the taste of sweetness but can’t be broken like normal sugar, hence no calories). And other foods have carbon, but it’s also in a form you can’t use — like celery, for instance, which is mostly fiber. It has substance, but (mostly) not a kind your body can break down and use. If your body can’t use it, there’s no energy to gain from it and therefore no calories. Also, if you consume extra calories that your body doesn’t need at the moment, it uses that energy to make things to store and use later. One of those things is fat (your body can make fat). Then, if you go a while without eating, it will break that fat down and use it for energy. You don’t need to eat fat to make fat. Your body can use anything with calories (energy) to make fat. That’s why you can get fat even if you eat a fat free diet but eat a ton of sugar.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [Comics General] How do I falsely convince a court that I was framed by a supervillain with mind control or illusion powers? I robbed a bank and was arrested, but they never found the money. How do I convince the court that I am being framed by a super villain who used either mind control or illusion power to make it look like I did the crime while they got away with the money? Who would be the best villain to scapegoat? Would claiming I was under mind control work? Would claiming it was all an illusion work?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant A lot of jurisdictions have an insanity defense by which you have a pretrial hearing to determine whether you were capable of understanding the nature of your crime/your actions at the time (or whatever their applicable insanity defense entails). So I'd say that's where you start. Presuming there are well known mind control villains in your universe, you'd probably present as much evidence that you could that you were in contact with them around the time. Even if not, your best bet would be to at least fall back on a traditional insanity defense and claim you were essentially legally insane for all intents and purposes.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: how come if I have a watercooling loop in a computer, it will grow algea even though there's no food or light. What do they survive on?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Heat and micronutrients in the water. Also there is likely some light getting in too (or at least off of LEDs in your computer, it doesn't take much). Think of algae growth in covered swimming pools and water coolers. I would recommend using distilled water or a water and glycol mixture to prevent biological growth. This is commonly used in residential and industrial heating and cooling systems. Have a great day!<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Why do most predatory animals choose not to eat humans? I know it happens, but the vast majority of animal / human attacks never end up in with the human actually being eaten unless there are some dire circumstances involved. I've seen and heard many examples of a person being attacked and then the attacking animal just leaves inexplicably. For example, many shark attacks are simply the shark "tasting" its "prey" when they realize its human they take off. Why is this? Do we taste bad? If so why? Or do animals just know that its a bad idea to attack the most awesome predator thats had ever lived on this planet?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Through evolution, predators become specialized towards particular prey or categories of prey. They develop hunting patterns that take advantage of their prey's behavior patterns (e.g. stalking vs ambush vs pursuit), and learn to recognize certain types of animals as efficient sources of food. Most of this is pattern-matching instinct, built up over generations of trial-and-error selecting the most effective instincts. Animals that tend towards more-efficient prey succeed. Predators that adapt to specialize towards humans, don't last very long. We counter-adapt on the order of years instead of generations so animals are always behind the curve in terms of efficiency. We also counter-hunt predators for our own safety, meaning that succeeding in predating humans is actually maladaptive, and will be selected against. Most modern animal attacks are not specialized predation. Often they are self-defense, which means that the animal is not inclined to eat the remains. Hunting humans for food generally happens out of desperation. There are also some instincts that are not specialized towards prey, like the sharks nibbling--I assume that there's a second step where they specialize hunting behavior based on the first bite, and they have no developed response for us.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Why do humans like music so much?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Multiple explainations. Simplest one is that music is an excellent bridge between the 2 halves of our brain. The emotional and logical portions. Music has an intrinsic mathematical component to it. We recieved "feel good" sensations from interpreting that mathematics into pattern. On the other hand, the creativity required to process music as something more than just noise required use of our emotional processing system. To simplify, Music pleases both parts of our left and right brain.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user How do we have elements on the periodic table that we dont know the form of in certain temperatures? Are these just theoretical and we have never actually physically seen it?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Any element placed on the periodic table by IUPAC has been formally discovered, meaning that at least one isotope of it has been observed/produced, so its existence is experimentally verified. However just discovering an element doesn’t necessarily mean that we know anything about its chemical properties. Especially for the superheavy elements, where we produce them using particle accelerators, and they decay in less than a second. There’s not enough time to do much chemistry there to study their chemical properties. We have to rely on theory to predict their properties.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: What is a savant, and what percentage of the world's population is considered to be savants?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Typically, people who are considered to be savants excel dramatically at one thing, such as painting or writing. However, they also tend to have difficulties in other important areas, such as social interaction. Often, savants have learning disabilities such as Autism Spectrum Disorder. A good example of a savant is Daniel Tammet, who is an Autistic Savant - Daniel is able to count pi to over 22.5 thousand decimal points using only his brain.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [The Culture]Are the inhabitants of universes simulated by the Minds considered Culture citizens with all the rights and protections thereof? I know very little about this universe, but I understand The Culture is supposed to be this benevolent utopia. But I understand the Minds like to create simulated universes, and I wonder how this works if it would mean allowing the intelligent inhabitants of those universes to suffer.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant This is discussed at length in Surface Detail and to a lesser extent in The Hydrogen Sonata. The short version is that it's very mixed, and left to the discretion of the individual minds performing the simulations. The majority of minds consider simulated life to be at the same level of moral consideration as all other forms of intelligent life, and will elect to minimize suffering as much as possible, and will prefer to keep simulations they have created running indefinitely rather than all all of those simulated lives to die. On the flip side, most biological denizens of the Culture do consider simulated life to be slightly lesser than biological life. Surface Detail describes a war that is fought entirely by mind-copies in a simulated battlefield, with one character having at least a dozen copies of himself fighting side by side on the front lines. This is considered to be preferable to a "hot war" because its entirely a simulation. Although at least one character argues that this is preferable because everyone fighting has actively chosen to take part in the hostilities, and there are no innocent bystander casualties, and not because simulated life is less worthy of moral consideration. To add more to the mix, other non-culture civilizations who discover mind-uploading technology have decided to use it for imprisonment and punishment purposes. A few religious civilizations have actually gone so far as to create virtual hells, and have uploaded the minds of criminals and heretics into hell so they'll suffer for eternity, just as the good book says. The cause of the war in Surface Detail is that certain factions of the Culture find this to be so reprehensible they're willing to fight a war to force those civilizations to stop it. >!The driving conflict of the story is that someone is attempting to drag the simulated war kicking and screaming into the real world, where the Culture would have much more of an advantage.!<<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Schrodinger's Cat<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Quantum mechanics can be said to describe reality, but not in the concrete terms with which you can describe the fall of an apple from a tree. Descriptions of the quantum world come in the form of probabilities. Schrodinger's cat is an analogy which is meant to point out a basic absurdity in this idea. In his model, the cat's death relies on the subatomic: if a radioactive atom decays, the cat dies. Since the subatomic can only be described in terms of probability, the cat can only be described as a probability. This means quantum mechanics ends up describing an impossible situation, in which the cat is equally alive and dead. His point: "That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality." Pretty straight forward, after all.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [Harry Potter] Why are there any students still alive at Hoghwarts? Why are there stills students alive at Hogwarts? I mean the casualties of teaching magic to kids mast be massive for example: > "Never forget Wizard Baruffio, who said 'f' instead of 's' and found himself on the floor with a buffalo on his chest." One letter? Seriously? And this isn't an advance class or anything this is a quote from the first book their first lesson in charms. And they are being encouraged to practice after classes without supervision! Envision that scenario. Kids who most of them never went to school before are tired after a day of classes and go in to there common rooms to practice magic. One slip in the wording, a bust up lip because someone got in a fight and you have an 800 kilogram beast raging the room. The student who summoned it is dead, simply crushed under the weight, anybody else still in live danger until some organised 5th year comes along and makes it disappear or stuns it. The human body needs about 2-3 minutes to bleed out of major vessel, god forbids a big artery is damaged cut that time down to 1,5 minutes. Madam Pomfrey is a 5 minute run away at best which makes any medical help arrive in 10 minutes top. I would say we are looking at 5-8 dead student. In the first week. From one spell. By one student. Transformation must be even more deadlier. Switch up a word or make a wrong wand movement and you suffocate because you just closed up all your orifices. Potion brewing - a mistake by ONE DROP made an acid strong enough to burn through an iron pot in seconds. I won't even imagine how much lung damage everybody in that class got. And stealing ingredients isn't difficult at all since there is no control who takes what for most ingredients and the rare ones too(seeing as a second year manage to do it) or it shouldn't be problem to order them by owl to Hogwarts seeing as the one person without magical knowledge or abilities does the package checking. Eddit: words! grammar! punctuation! ~ me nemesis<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Madam Poppy Pomfrey is a highly skill medical technician, versed in a vast number currative incantations, potions and artifacts. She has practiced medical magic at Hogwarts for over 25 years. This provides her unfettered access to the foremost medical texts and continuous, practical experience. Lately, Madam Pomfrey has had a ... higher than average rate of challenges, but from tasting Dementor exposure to regrowing bones, Poppy has meet every challenge with alacrity, competence and skill. Something as silly as a buffalo upon the chest pales in comparison to reversing the effects of a failed Polyjuice Portion. I bid you a good day.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Does lowering your fever using pills make your body fight less against a virus? I'm on my fourth day of what the doctor thinks most likely is mononucleosis (I only went to the doctor yesterday and haven't got blood results yet) and I got some 600mg ibuprofen to take the worst away since I had a fever of 40,1C (104,18F). This just helped me quite well through a night but got me thinking - did I just delay my recovery by another night or does the body still fight when you synthetically lower the temperature? *edit: spelling<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Fever is one of the responses of the body to infectious agents (and all other kinds of widespread inflammation for that matter). Fever can sometimes be useful to fight off the infectious microbe but the truth is that it's not always the case: fever definitely helps fighting off many bacterial infections (bacteria are small foreign cells that can live on their own) because the higher teperature disturbs the bacteria life processes and slows down the speed at which they spawn. But fever won't contribute that much in the fight against a viral infection (viruses, for example mononucleosis, must take control of our very own cells to spread the infection and do not have their own life processes) because the damage inflicted to our bodies during viral infections is mostly done by our own immune system (in the vast majority of virus types). Moreover, it is clear that when fever rises beyond 40°C the risks it entails for the body are much more dangerous than the small advantage it could provide in fighting the microbes. Therefore: if you suspect something bacterial in origin and have a high fever, you'll take some drugs that don't hinder your immune system activation very much but at the same time that can lower the temperature: the chief drug is paracetamol (also called acetaminophen, depends on wich part of the world you live in). If you think that there's something viral going on, then the best strategy is to tell our immune system to "stand down" and not overdo it against the virus, therefore you'll be given some medicine that simultaneously lowers the body temperature AND halts the furor of the immune cells: one such drug is for example the ibuprofen you took. N.B,: in any case, these drugs do not lower your body temperature directly: they just shut down the transmission of the fever signal inside of our brain: you'll never get too cold :)<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: How do hospitals evacuate everyone in the event of a fire? Hospitals often have patients who are bed-bound, wheelchair-bound, comatose, or even in surgery. When the fire alarm goes off, how do staff evacuate all patients quickly?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Hospitals are designed so that in the event of a fire, doors will close and will prevent the fire from spreading until firefighters can deal with it. The doors are rated, usually by number of hours, for how long they will hold back a fire on the other side.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: What is the point of cutting up cancelled credit cards? Unfortunately, I got my wallet stolen, but I was able to retrieve it back two days later with nothing taken (yay). The only annoying thing was that I had to call all of my credit card companies to cancel my cards the moment I found my wallet missing and request new cards to replace them. In the midst of disposing my cancelled cards, I was thinking to myself what is the point. The cards are cancelled, so wouldn't it be useless if someone were to copy the information off these cards anyways? The best thing they can copy is probably my name, but it's as generic as John Smith. I cut up all my old cards properly in the end, but I got curious: Is there a good, credit-threatening reason to cut up cancelled credit cards, since they are obsolete and shouldn't even work anymore?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant It can be used to establish an identity, for one thing. For example, a bank account requires two forms of I.D. (in the U.S). A credit card with printed name is an acceptable secondary form of Identification. Also, IIRC, the magnetic strip still contains the information on your account, and many identity thieves have machines that can read/manipulate the magnet strip. The machines with the power to do so are sold on the free market.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user How does inflation work, and what are some of the ways inflation can increase? I have a hard time understanding inflation. When I was a child, I would say the government has all the money in the world, they can just print more of it. My father would reply by saying that would cause inflation. What did he mean?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant In very basic terms, the value of money just represents all the things in the economy you can buy. So let's say you have M=money and G=goods(and services). In the short term, it's just G=M, so if M becomes a higher number, and G stays the same, more money is necessary to buy the same amount of goods. That's inflation Another example, let's say you have 10 money and 10 goods, every good is worth 1 money. If you double the amount of money, you can still just buy 10 goods. So every good is now worth 2 money.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user CMV: The fear of illegal immigrants taking all of the jobs in America is illogical. Since the beginning of this fine country immigrants have come to make a better life for themselves, and this has made America better as well. After a period of time, however, the people who have lived here for a time have begun to feel as if we are letting too many people in, and these people have always complained that the jobs would run dry, and the people who are here already will suffer. We survived the surge of Irish immigrants, we survived Reagan's amnesty, and we will survive (in my opinion) the new onslaught of immigrants. The next complaint is that they already have committed a crime by crossing the border. Well, if my kids were starving, and I knew of a place I could better feed them I would jump the fence or swim the river in a heartbeat. Additionally, they may not have to come illegally if it was easier to become a citizen. I am a conservative in most other ways, but Change My View...<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Part of the problem is that as more immigrants enter the country, they drive down the cost of labor; when before, a company may have had to pay it's employees 10$ an hour, now they can hire illegals to do it for 5$. The nationals who used to be making 10$ now have to work for five as well if they want to compete with the illegals, so all labor takes a pay cut.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: How can asking a sample size of 1,003 people give an accurate view of over 250 million people?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant It assumes that you have a properly random sample of the population. Suppose you have a (very large) bag full of millions of balls. You draw out 1003 without looking, and get 600 reds. How confident would you be that close to 60% of all the balls in the bag are red?<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: When someone experiences memory loss, do they also lose all knowledge acquired during the periods of memory that are missing?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant They might lose their memories of events, but they can retain skills learned during that time. There's a well studied man who got herpes in his brain, it destroyed his short term memory. He forgets who he's talking to, what he's talking about, within seconds. Bit he can still improve his artistry and learn other skills.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Why do credit cards have expiration dates?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant When modern-style credit cards were first introduced in the 1960s, running a credit check on an individual was a lengthy and complicated business. Although major financial institutions each had their own basic computer systems, there was no interoperability and no way for them to automatically verify an individual's bank account details, lending history, and so on. This all had to be done pretty much by hand, involving much sending of real snail-mail letters. So this meant that after agreeing that someone was credit-worthy enough to own a card, the card issuer couldn't do continuous rolling credit checks to ensure the cardholder was still good for it. Instead they generally made each cardholder reapply for the card after two or three years. This is why expiry dates were first introduced -- it provided a guarantee for both the cardholder and the merchants that the relationship would get re-checked every few years and so there could be some confidence about creditworthiness. Obviously if you were starting from scratch these days that wouldn't be the case. But for these historical reasons cards keep expiry dates, it also provides a little extra security in that if a fraudster were to get hold of a card number, then without the matching expiry date that's still useless to them.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user What would happen to a poor country, if it sets the retirement age to 55? Will this country succeed in brining down unemployement and stimulating the economy by injecting millions of new workers (customers) into the economy? or will the pressure imposed on the retirement system be much hard to handle?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Could you clarify what you mean by "set the retirement age to 55"? You mean that the government mandates that no one older than 55 works? Or that it lowers the pay-out age of it's social security program (many poor countries don't have these) at 55?? Or something else?<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user CMV: Gender as a social construct should be excluded from identification, and the law should not prohibit misgendering. I know something like this has been posted before, but the user is often arguing against gender being defined as distinct from sex. I am not here to make that argument. While I think the distinction is largely overcomplicating things, words are defined by collective agreement of meaning, which makes the redefinition valid. I want to make that clear. That being said, I am fundamentally opposed to legislation that would legally require a person to acknowledge the distinction. There should be no law prohibiting misgendering. The only repercussions should be social. Also, gender should not have any place in identification for obvious reasons. Gender is not an identifier, since if we agree it is subjective. This is especially true if we acknowledge gender-fluidity. There is no way to confirm someone's gender, therefore it has no place on identification. There are definitely ways to confirm someone's biological sex, however. EDIT: I have decided that private entities should have legal requirements to not discriminate, in which case the law would prohibit misgendering. Well, more specifically it should be included in anti-discrimination laws. But fair enough. I have changed my mind. Edit 2: A lot of this has led me to question whether sex on ID is helpful anyway. I think ID is usually to confirm your identity at a glance, and the photo is clearly enough for that. The rest is secondary and largely unnecessary. Which means I'm likely not responding to new comments. My mind has officially been changed. I'm really thankful for all you guys participating Cheers!<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant The ways you check for bio-sex is to look at genitals or test Chromosomes. That is not acceptable for identification in public, or quick reference for ID. The Gender that someone displays is the factor that is useful for the vast majority of ID usages as it is some clerk making sure you are the person on the ID when you are buying something controlled (weapons, medication, alcohol, tobacco, etc) or when the police are checking you out (looking for you as a suspect, or running your ID for a violation such as speeding).<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: On what do our eyes focus in pitch dark? Like if it is pitch dark, do the eyes focus on the dark "wall" directly in front of them? Or are they just indefinitely trying to focus on something? Or are they idling because it is dark? :) Thanks!<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Optometry student here. Your eyes have several stages of accommodation including tonic and proximal accommodation. When your eyes have nothing to focus on they will relax to tonic accommodation which is the point where muscles rest with minimal nervous innervation. If you suddenly hit a wall, your eyes will accommodate to the proximal distance of that wall based on previous life experience. Edit: Accommodation is where the lens in your eye (imagine a magnifying glass) changes power to help bring a near image into focus. Edit2: A few of you are curious about relaxing your eyes and accommodation to relieve eye strain. You can use the 20/20/20 rule: every 20 minutes stare at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. Edit3: Accommodation is fully relaxed at 20 feet (6 meters) which is why you're tested at this distance when at the optometrist's office.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Would it be feasible to make enough solar panels to generate enough electricity for the whole world? [This](http://boingboing.net/2014/06/12/the-total-area-of-solar-panels.html) popped up on my dash recently and I wanted to know if this is or will be possible. This size of the square is pretty damn large though.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant The key thing to know about the energy market is that the total supply of electricity at any one time has to match the total demand for electricity. One of the problems with solar power is that it generates electricity only when it's sunny, and even then only during the day, whereas people tend to use most of their electricity during the evening or at night. That means you need a way to store all the energy that's generated during the day and used later that evening, and storage of electricity is currently quite inefficient and expensive.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [Various animes] In animes where it is a worldwide known thing that there are individuals out there that can take down armies all the way up to crack planets, why are people not more skeptical when a 11 year old jumps in front of an army/group of baddies they not more cautious?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant There are multiple reasons: 1) First Contact Scenario: In some worlds this is the first time it happens. Using DBZ as an example. Nappa was the first time this was demonstrated and shown large scale. Flying ki users who were any destroyers were rare, see teen Goku against the Red Ribbon Army. But, he had problems with mechs and mostly took on infantry. Nappa was the first to show Earth a ki user could take on and destroy naval fleets. 2) Rarity: Such beings are unlikely. In DragonBall Z there are only six humans that could destroy the Earth if you count the two mutants. Then you have four, or three depending on Kami's status, aliens who are leagues above humans. Then they begin breeding and this doubles the world nukers. Expecting this one individual to be a powerful as you say is almost nil. Hercule is strong. He makes most humans look weak. He is a one in how many million? These one man armies are to Hercule what Hercule is to us. So rare and reclusive that over time the world thought the last time they showed up on camera was a hoax.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user How do modern nuclear reactors avoid service interruptions due to slagging/poisoning? Was reminded of a discussion I had with my grandfather (~WW2 era nuclear science engineer) about how problematic reactor poisoning was in the past and especially slagging. I believe more than a few of the US fleet of commercial reactors are at or are already surpassing 60 year total runtime licenses, was it just better designs or something else?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant There are two cases a reactor or core designer has to deal with, steady state operation and transient operation. In general, poisoning is dealt with by having a large amount of hot excess reactivity so that you have xenon overrode capability. This means having sufficient hot excess reactivity to overcome any poisoning effects. Large light water power reactors are designed to run for up to 2 years continuously so they are loaded with a large amount of excess fuel to support that. In steady state, the whole poison process balances out with excess reactivity and isn’t an issue. For transient conditions, like sudden drops in power or a scram, unit’s have xenon override capability based on their design. For bwr plants, at full power you have a large amount of voids in the core producing negative reactivity. After a scram these steam voids collapse as the reactor shuts down, returning that reactivity and making it available for restart. Xenon may complicate ramping the unit back to 100% after the restart due to thermal limits, however bwrs always have xenon override capability and can start up in peak xenon at virtually any point in the cycle. PWRs have xenon override until they are in the end of their cycle in coastdown with most of all of their boron diluted. For a pwr, you reclaim a small amount of reactivity as the reactor cools down to hot standby after a trip, but you rely on the hot excess reactivity to overcome peak xenon. For CANDU plants, these units have very little hot excess reactivity, and can easily be poisoned out. The plant is designed to only do a full reactor trip when absolutely necessary, and in other cases runback to 60% or 2% based on he situation. At 60%, you have enough neutron production to prevent poisoning from shutting the core down. At 2% you have a time window where if the problem condition clears you can ramp back up to 60% before xenon catches up to prevent a xenon peak from poisoning the core out. Hope this helps.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5:How does an LED bulb work? How is it different from fluorescent?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant A fluorescent bulb works by using electricity to excite gas within the bulb, which releases photons (light particles) which then excite the bulb's coating which causes it to release photons in the visible spectrum. An LED is a light-emitting diode. It's a little complicated to explain, but essentially there are two electrodes, one with an abundance of electrons, and the other with a lack of electrons. When you apply a potential across that it it allows electrons to flow from the material with abundance to the material with a lack of, which in turn causes photons to be emitted.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [General] what are some good military tactics for large-scale, ground based, superhuman combat? with flight, enhanced speed, enhanced strength, and other abilities, what better strategies are there than an all-out brawl?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant questions a bit to vague, exact powers would be needed to formulate any sort of plan, if there just flying bricks the battle strategy wouldent change much beyond higher scale collatoral damage and being able to extend it upward worm is a an excellent read if you want examples of powers being used very creatively and with actual strategy<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user eli5 Why do devices still briefly have power when unplugged? Say you unplug your tv, the standby light will remain on a few seconds before going off?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Electronics use components called capacitors to regulate voltage. These capacitors act like little, short-life batteries - which still hold a charge when the power source is disconnected. The stored power then drains out and keeps other components powered for a short period of time.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Why do sparsely populated areas tend to vote Republican/Conservative? You can see this on a state level: http://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/results If you zoom into any red or blue state, the sparsely populated counties usually end up red. Is there a simple reason why?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant It's all about population density. In an urban area, having a lot of people around is the norm. This has benefits and disadvantages. It means help in any number of ways is usually nearby (police, fire, you need a jump from your neighbor, etc). It also means that other people's behavior can adversely affect you because you live in close proximity to them. If your neighbor constantly plays loud music, this can greatly impact your quality of life, so you need to rely on local government and society to regulate that person's behavior (noise ordinances). In both cases, whether trying to get help or prevent other people from negatively impacting you, government has the power to make your life a lot better because you and all your fellow city dwellers are concentrated in one place. Compare this to the rural lifestyle. Your nearest neighbor might be 10 minutes away by car. In this case, you would regard a noise ordinance as anything but helpful. Your neighbor couldn't buy speakers loud enough to bother you, so of course you'd take umbrage to some cop hanging around your property line telling you to turn your music down all the time when it hurts no one. Similarly, government benefits are of reduced value to you. The average area that must be covered by the local fire department might be hundreds of times bigger than your average city precinct. Even if you do call for help, logistically, you realize it could be a long time until they get there. So naturally it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to rely a lot on government services that require you to be relatively close. All of this adds up to: rural areas tend to be more self-reliant and mistrusting of government, while urban populations tend to be willing to rely much more heavily on government services and regulation. But: only when locality matters. What does that mean? Well, note that rural areas are perfectly happy to rely on government services when those services can be rendered at a distance. For instance, farm aid. Washington DC can cut a check from thousands of miles away to help a farmer grow crops. In these cases, rural areas tend to like government regulation when it benefits them. So what "big govt / small govt" is really about is which population is better able to extract utility from government. This is why Republicans tend to favor government involvement in things like farm aid even though that's inconsistent with their "small govt" core message.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: What is the slow motion effect we experience during car accidents or other traumatic events?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant I've read that it's not really about increased perception, it's about increased memory formation. While adrenaline does create a heightenbed state of awareness and alertness, time really only seems to slow down in your remembering of the event, since your body created detailed memories of every instant of it (a snapshot every quarter second, as opposed to one every second, for example) to help you learn from it and increase future survival chances. thus the density of memories you have of the event makes it seem in retrospect like time was moving slowly.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user CMV:I think you don't need to go to college in order to have a good career and or job I was born in Khartoum,Sudan.My family and I moved to the US about 5 years ago, I'm currently 15 years old.My dad has a degree in engineering and my mom in accounting.I personally think that people have been brainwashed to believe that you need to go to college in order to be successful in life, which I think isn't true at all.I don't think that college isn't good but I believe it isn't worth all the debt that most students have to pay off after graduating and also most of the people I know that have gone to college don't even have a job in their field of study or at least not as soon as they graduate.CMV about college.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Highly depends on what you want to do. If it's anything STEM then you're going to need a degree and advanced education in order to be successful. However if you're satisfied doing low-tech or low-skill jobs or go into the trades then no, you don't need a traditional degree. Plenty of people go into business for themselves and ascend through the ranks with very little education and become successful.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5 Why is it that poison ivy can be spread by scratching but you don't get it on your finger tips?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Tolerance, thickness, etc. Your hands are really sensetive, it helps us use them better, but they're also very tough, because we use them so much. So you can get poison ivy on your fingertips, but the poison isn't strong enough to damage you through the strong skin on your fingers, but then you spread it to other, more sensetive and weaker areas of your skin<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5 How does Google photos separate photos into such specific categories without them being labeled manually.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant With machine learning. A computer program has looked at many many images that _were_ labeled, and it learned from them what sorts of labels to put on other photos. It learned by looking at an image that people had labeled but not looking at the label, guessing a label and then comparing the result with the label given by a human. Then it made a note of whether it was right or wrong. Doing this many times with many different images it learned to label automatically.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: How do they determine statistics like “8 million people in the US have __ disease and another 1 million are undiagnosed”? I work in healthcare and there have been multiple times where I’ve seen disease prevalance statistics that include “undiagnosed cases”. If they have not been diagnosed then where do they get those numbers from?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant By reliably measuring rate of infection in smaller populations then extrapolating the results to larger populations, researchers compare the extrapolation against reported cases. The difference between these quantities becomes the assessment of undiagnosed cases, which is always subject to some measure of error.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user CMV: There are only two genders Yeah, I know that it's a meme at this point with the whole Change My Mind thing. But, I still never understood how there are more than two genders. With the exception of a few rare genetic disorders, people are born with either XX or XY chromosomes, which determines their gender. I know that there are people who truly feel that they are some third/non binary gender, but that doesn't change the science. Why is different than someone who truly believes they are a duck? I think the science is more important than what people feel. But, I'd like to hear reasons why gender is fluid and can be non-binary. Change my view Edit: I don't think I will change my mind, and I'll probably stop responding to this thread now. I am going to address some common arguments here. "You are confused between sex and gender. Sex is based off of chromosomes, gender is simply how someone identifies themself within the rules society places." Gender and sex are synonyms. Modern gender theory says otherwise, but that's exactly what I am arguing against. How someone feels is not the determining factor in their sex, it is their chromosomes. "People can identify with 'non binary' or something else because they do not believe they fit neatly into either man or woman." People can say they are whatever they want. This doesn't mean other people should or should be required to adhere to this. Other people determine your identity. Hitler thought he was a reasonable person. We do not call Hitler a reasonable person, because we determine his identity, not him. "You can't exclude intersex because they are different and/or rare." I am not excluding them because they are different or rare. I think that we can all agree that people with XXX or XXY are exceptions to the general population, and do not fall neatly under male or female. "You are going against science and academics by not accepting modeen gender theory." There are qualified people who believe that there are only two genders, like Dr. Jordon Peterson. I understand that most of you are not fans of his, but he is an example. Besides, even though I acknowledge I am not the most qualified person to talk about this, a layman can still have an opinion that goes against a consensus. Like how people used to use Darwanism to "prove" that blacks were inferior to whites. They called that science. Also, I know that I have offended people who are trans or identify as nonbinary. I do not express my view to be offensive, and I'm sorry to those who may be offended. But, science should not be based on what people feel. It should based on fact, even if facts may be offensive. Still, thanks to everyone who tried to change my view.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Try this: Gender isn't sex. Gender is a set of stories we tell ourselves about our identities as persons. This set of stories does include stories about our bodies -- but it's not limited to stories about those bodies. I'll prove that claim -- What gender is Optimus Prime? Optimus Prime does not have sex. He has no chromosomes and no sexual anatomy. But he does have gender. We identify him with a set of cultural narratives that have to do with physical power, strong leadership, fatherly guidance, a deep booming voice, etc. We exempt him from the "penis" stories because those are not important to who he is. There are more than two genders because there are more than two sets of stories about our identities as people. Other cultures already have such sets, like the Native American Two-Spirit people, and the Bugis people of Indonesia with five genders. And now in Western culture we have people constructing new sets of stories for new genders. How successful these new constructs will be in the long run remains to be seen -- they could fade and be forgotten if they don't take hold in our culture. But they do exist.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user If I have two blankets of different materials, does the total insulation change depending on how I layer them? for instance, I have a cotton sheet and a polyester blanket. Would having one on top trap heat more effectively than the other way around?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Thermal mass can have an impact if there are changes in temperature involved. Having the denser layer on the inside keeps the temperature more constant. NZ's building code, for example, requires that new buildings built with concrete blocks have them within the insulation layer, not outside. Other effects that could have an impact are wind and water. Many types of insulation get significantly less effective if full of water, and also perform better without airflow, e.g. glass-wool batts.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user CMV: Affirmative action/positive discrimination should never be used Honestly, I see affirmative action (as you muricans call it) is both an unjust and ineffective way to solve problems in society. Firstly, the morality of it. I think justice should always happen on an individual basis. While this isn't strictly a 'punishment', it certainly feels like one. I live in the UK, I'm not white English, but I would never dream of demanding an unfair advantage over those who are. It is obviously not the fault of either of the affected individuals that such a problem exists, so why should we make them be affected, sometimes negatively, by it? Why should people be made to suffer for something they didn't have any part in doing? Shouldn't people be selected on ability and competence? If most of the people who are best at a particular job are white, so what? Who cares? They're the best people there are, they should do it. It also tries to simplify really massive trends. Imagine some researchers calculate white people earn 10% more than black people, on average. So, the government decides white people should pay 10% more tax. Nice, isn't it? Well, sure, maybe on average, but that white family struggling to feed its children are not gonna be happy, but the black billionaire might. I know these are cherry picked examples, but still, some people are going to screwed over by it. Finally, I don't think it's the best thing to do. Sticking to my above example, why should we help people based on race, and say "we'll help everyone who's black, because they could be poor" instead of just "we'll help everyone who's poor, in which black people make up a proportionally larger amount"? Why are we supposed to be helping people because the colour of their skin might disadvantage them, instead of people who are actually disadvantaged? It makes 0 sense to me. So, there's my long ramble. Please, don't call me a racist :) _____ > Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to *[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules). If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* *[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)*! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our *[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)* first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to *[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview). Happy CMVing!<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant > Shouldn't people be selected on ability and competence? Yes, and the underlying premise is that they aren't necessarily, all things being equal. Most people can agree that, in a world entirely free of prejudice, the best candidate will win by merit alone. The argument here is precisely that the "best candidate" isn't determined by merit alone; that the decision is tainted by various biases reducing the chances of minorities. Also, if some classes are advantaged over others for some time, there's a good argument to be made about this comparative advantaged not simply fixing itself. Getting access to the best schools and then the best jobs for generations will create a structure where some classes will always* appear to be the best candidates. On the one hand because they might be, but also because they had much better chances to be. While they very well might be, there's nothing wrong with trying to even out the equation by inserting variety into the pool. This way, you can try to diminish the comparative advantage and lead to greater diversity, which addresses both problems on the long run.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [Alien] If xenomorphs inherit traits from their hosts, what, if anything, do they get from humans that other hosts don’t give them?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Nothing in particular. The traits they inherit are just for adaptation to the prey's environment and appropriate size for hunting them. If it's grabbing a human host it wouldn't make a sense for the resulting Xenomorph to be the size of a rat or an elephant when it wouldn't be able to hunt more humans effectively. The other adaptations are more minimal but regarding how it's senses are tuned for different atmospheres and light levels. Overall the xenomorphs Rea only concern themselves with how big or small they need to be or if their prey is adjusted for living in extreme conditions. Eventually these traits are shed as more pure xenomorphs are molted out of the younger ones that don't hunt as much.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user Why wouldn't crossing an event horizon mean instant death? As I understand it, once inside a black hole all paths lead towards the singularity, no matter the properties of the matter that falls in, so I assume bodily functions like blood flow would fail immediately because it would require some small motion away from the singularity. I have also read that in a supermassive black hole one could survive crossing the horizon (radiation aside) until very close to the singularity. Is this true, and why?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Blood can flow to different parts of your body while still getting closer to the singularity. Consider when a person is flying on a plane traveling at hundreds of kilometres and hour. All the parts of his or her body are always traveling in the direction of the plane with respect to the ground (and so are always getting closer to the destination). Nevertheless blood can flow towards the back of the plane by flowing slower with respect to the ground than other parts of the body.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [Update] Prof claims first authorship for a paper I wrote 75% of. Hi everyone, [Previous Post] (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/comments/4kywje/prof_claims_first_authorship_for_paper_that_i/) Thanks for the great responses to my previous post. They really helped, and made me feel less alone and bitter. Lol. Anyway, loads happened in these couple of weeks. I thought I'd give a brief update for anyone who is interested. 1. I found out that Prof didn't even write the 25% I thought he did. He copied and pasted big chunks of paragraphs from the collaborator's papers (we're framing the study based on collaborator's theoretical framework). How did I find out? Well, the first time I realized, I was reading the collaborator's unpublished manuscript out of interest. I felt that some parts were uncannily similar to certain sections of our paper, checked back, and confirmed that they were exact to word. Second time, the collaborator's student alerted me to it and sent me an unpublished paper from his lab. Same process of discovery, I read the paper and identified another twin paragraph. By this time, I am pretty sure that most of the stuff Prof "wrote" was a patchwork of paragraphs borrowed from collaborator. I don't know what to think. In my undergraduate years, I was taught that this constitutes plagiarism. My work ethic and values about writing and research are in distress. 2. I found out that the collaborators thought Prof was doing most of the work - the analyses, writing, additional analyses, and edits (> 20 drafts of the paper) based on their numerous email exchanges. What actually happens is that Prof copies and pastes the requested edits in his email to me, asks me to finish by the next morning, and sends it off after dropping me a word of thanks. I never saw any of the edits he claimed to have done, and he has never handled anything related to the writing or analyses of this paper on his own. Hmm....... Redditors of AskAcademia, what do you make of this?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Contact the right administration department and let them know your concerns. Between the authorship claim and plagiarism, your PI isn't fit for academia and you can find a bettor mentor. Change labs (maybe even departments).<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user I don't think anyone should get extra time in an exam. CMV. This may not exist in some exams, but in the high school exams that I took (the IB), some students were allowed extra time for things such as: dyslexia, ADD, etc. Now before you think I'm a complete ass for essentially harming people with those conditions' future by not allowing them to perform to the "best" of their abilities (quotations will be explained later), here are my reasons for thinking as such: In my view, an exam should assess a person's ability to absorb and process information in a manner suitable for the exam (for example: in math or physics exam, to be able to solve problems quickly and correctly). I think the exam should be used to distinguish between candidates for university, or a career. As such, I think that the time allocated is a rather large factor: if you have more time to absorb or process the information, you may eventually get it. But the point is to distinguish between person A and person B for a position. Given an infinite amount of time, I would say more people would be able to get 100% on an exam, which then defeats the purpose of taking one unless your aim was just to have a confidence booster. Now, I also think that when applying (let's take the example of applying to university), these conditions should be considered: the admissions officer should know that your exam result may not be completely reflective of what you could do given a lot more time. But in the context of an exam, I don't think its about measuring your best abilities when given infinite time. The rate at which a student can absorb and process the information should be compared. This is why I put quotations around ""best" of their abilities". Of course they could do better with more time, but so can everyone (a generalization, I know: I recognize that I cannot say that all can answer every question correctly in an exam). Now the reason I care is that the exams are graded on a curve. If you compensate for a student's difficulty in reading by providing them extra time to raise their grade, it will (if enough are given more time) affect everyone's grade. It also doesn't tell the admissions officer what you can do in the time given normally in an exam, compared to another student. It defeats the purpose (in my opinion) of a standardized exam. As well as this, I am a little skeptical as to the ability of the examiner to determine exactly how much more time would make the exam "fair". Yes, it sucks that a person has this condition. Yes, I think it should be compensated for, or at least considered. No, I do not think that giving extra time in a standardized exam graded on a curve is the way to do so. I think it's like having a race between Pistorius and Bolt on the 100m, and giving Pistorius extra time. Then, taking that result into account as an average to determine who is the fastest runner. Again, I'm sorry for Pistorius to have a natural disadvantage (although I do not claim to be an expert in whether this provides disadvantages but I just compared best running times), but I don't think he should be given extra time due to his condition. TL;DR: I think extra time in an exam is like giving a legless man a head start in a race with Usain bolt until he almost beats him, then considering this a good comparison. PS: Let me know if my explanation isn't that good, or is missing some logical connectors. I'll try and clear it up to show exactly what I think. Edit 1: Wow this has become bigger than I expected! Thanks so much for all the contributions: it's fascinating to read these comments. A common theme I'm seeing among the answers is now the disagreement on what exams test (which I should have clarified earlier): Some, like Sabazius, Dr_Wreck, and sarcasmandsocialism, seem to say that exams usually should not include how fast you can answer, or rather, as Sabazius said "the quality being tested was a student's ability to perform in a given amount of time". I actually do think so. In this case, as many explained better than me: the condition does affect a part of the aptitude being tested. So giving extra time does not level the playing field, but rather distorts results (which was what I tried to explain earlier). In this case, how does my opinion hold up? Edit 1.5 (super quick added edit): Another thing I've noticed is people pointing out that I seem to be not thinking outside of the school world, and not taking into account the fact that exams aren't perfect for demonstrating how good someone would be in the real world. This is partly true (I do sometimes get a little stuck in the school world) but I also think that exams both do a fairly good job at emulating the real world in a period of time, and at the moment seems to be the only viable way to compare aptitude(and realistic: ideally one would interview each person for a long time to figure out how apt they are but that's a bit time consuming/expensive). Yes, they aren't perfect, but I don't think that extra time improves the system.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant The primary purpose of testing is to see if a student understands something, not to see which student can answer fastest. If a student has dyslexia and takes a long time to understand the questions, limiting them on time means that the test is no longer measuring their subject comprehension, it is measuring their reading speed. The reality is that subject comprehension is far more valuable for most jobs than the ability to provide written answers to standardized, written questions while sitting still for a specific amount of time. In real life, there are many ways students with ADHD or dyslexia can adjust their environment to increase their productivity, but those are impossible in the artificially controlled testing environment. tl;dr Tests should primarily measure subject comprehension, not the ability to take a written test.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: How is it possible for dinosaur footprints that are hundreds of millions of years old to exist at the bottom of a riverbed without being eroded away by the water? Many parts of Texas are experiencing severe drought (though not quite as severe as the b\tch that was the 2011 drought). As a result of these exceptionally dry conditions, a certain riverbed in Dinosaur Valley State Park has run dry, exposing previously undiscovered dinosaur tracks that are roughly 113 million years old. How is this possible—like, how have they not been eroded by the river? Water is pretty excellent at eroding rock, especially over the course of 113 million years. On the one hand, I do understand that most likely the river has not been there as long as the dinosaur tracks have been, but on the other hand (1) we actually don't know this for sure, and (2) even if it has been there for less time than the tracks have been, there certainly has still been ample time to erode them away. What am I missing here? [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjWsazb4t\_5AhXRk2oFHVUIBawQvOMEKAB6BAgGEAE&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F2022%2F08%2F23%2Fus%2Fdinosaur-tracks-discovered-texas-park%2Findex.html&usg=AOvVaw2co9awHFuiD-qAeMOP5DNk](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjWsazb4t_5AhXRk2oFHVUIBawQvOMEKAB6BAgGEAE&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F2022%2F08%2F23%2Fus%2Fdinosaur-tracks-discovered-texas-park%2Findex.html&usg=AOvVaw2co9awHFuiD-qAeMOP5DNk) EDIT/UPDATE: Aha! It now makes sense. It turns out that these particular dinosaur tracks were first discovered in 1908, when a layer of rock that had been covering the tracks broke up and washed away due to a flood. In the time since then, there have been multiple paleontological excavations that have revealed even more of the tracks. And the most important thing to know here—the thing that ties it all together and makes everything "click"—the River* *has* been eroding the prints ever since the first tracks got exposed in 1908. It's just that obviously on a geological timescale, the 114 years between 1908 and now are just a tiny, minuscule blip in the grand scheme of things... nowhere near long enough for the tracks to have been eroded. So it all makes sense, knowing that the river has only been eroding the tracks for 114 years instead of 113 million years. Source: [https://www.nps.gov/.../nature/making-dino-prints.htm...](https://www.nps.gov/dena/learn/nature/making-dino-prints.htm?fbclid=IwAR3MZ-SQHiJg8uZ7LEjeSZTNgE705yDE4x54VFmrHZgGdySHhI5kLdXgcO4#:~:text=When%20dinosaurs%20walked%20through%20the,where%20people%20can%20see%20them)<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant 1) Step in soft mud to leave a footprint 2) Footprint in soft mud dries into kinda hard clay 3) Kinda hard clay gets covered by other soft soil. Lots of soft soil. 4) Soil compacts for a few million years and and the kinda hard clay turns into very hard rock 5) A river shifts and begins to erode an area. 6) Erosion takes away any soft and kinda hard stuff, exposing the footprints that are now in very hard rocks.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user Humans can easily identify other humans using their faces alone, but we generally can't easily distinguish one member of a species from another by face alone (e.g. a lion from the others). Do animals have the same ability to recognize each other (same species) from face alone?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Good question, some animals are capable of face recognition, such as Chimpanzees. To humans most chimpanzees look the same, although chimpanzees can distinguish each other by seeing each others faces most of the time. Some other common methods animals use to distinguish each other are by smell and sounds.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Why does the US have a high gun ownership rate and a high gun violence rate and the Swiss have a high gun ownership rate and a low gun violence rate?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant The Swiss also have mandatory military service and a relatively low income gap, with universal health care and a more robust welfare state. So less of the desperation that leads to violent crime combined with knowing everybody has a gun and knows how to use it would logically result in in a low violent crime rate.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Why aren't there many engineers or scientists in congress/politics/government? I get that people think differently but why isn't there an effort for this? I DO believe there are SOME issues that engineers would solve/attempt to solve better than current politicians.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant 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.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Why are judges given discretion in deciding penalties for crimes?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant In theory, to make sure the punishment fits the circumstances surrounding a crime. If someone robs a convenience store because their kid needed lifesaving medical treatment and the person genuinely appears to feel terrible about it, yes he still deserves to be punished. But, most would argue he shouldn't serve the same sentence as someone that did it because they're a sociopath, and generally acted like an unremorseful dick. It's basically impossible to codify all the potential variables in a case into law, and the law's complicated enough as it is.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5:There are warnings on my microwave that say not to run it while empty. Does anyone now why or how this damages the microwave?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant The walls of the oven are designed to reflect the microwaves, intending for them to eventually be absorbed by food. But with no food, they will just keep bouncing around, eventually being reflected back at the magnetron, heating it up. The excess heat can damage it. Best case is that it blows a fuse, rendering the microwave inoperable until it's replaced. Worst case is it gets so hot to cause something like the insulation to burst into flames.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user CMV: Successful people from humble backgrounds have had to work harder, and so deserve more respect than those with well-off families. In my view, people who were born into well-off families, and who subsequently become successful, for whatever reason, don't deserve the same amount of respect as successful people who come from more humble backgrounds. It's always struck me that most of the time, that former type of person has never really known, and likely will never know, hardship - and even more likely, won't have had to work as hard to get where they are as those whose families have less. Let's illustrate this idea with the current US President, and his 'small loan of a million dollars' from his dad (which, with inflation, would be more like $70 million nowadays). He wouldn't have got where he is today without his family's fortune. He's had a silver spoon in his mouth all his life - how can he truly understand what Americans who are struggling are going through? Speaking more generally, let's compare their childhoods. The majority of well-off families are going to want to send their kids to the best schools they can, and good for them: after all, most parents just want the best for their kids. Said well-off families are also going to be able to pay for extra tuition if their kid is struggling, music lessons, and so and so forth. Meanwhile, the less well-off families, who in many cases will also want the best for their offspring, would no doubt want to try and get their kids into good schools - but for various reasons (catchment areas, financial barriers, rigorous entrance tests) that just isn't possible. Same goes for the extracurricular stuff - unless it is subsidised, for many working-class families, that sort of thing just isn't feasible. It's the same story at university level (a.k.a college, if you're American): kids with rich parents are able to take full advantage of uni life; for example, they won't need to take a part-time job to fund studies/living costs (on a side note, in the UK, our student loan is basically a graduate tax which is written off after 30 years, so it's not quite as bad as in the States). They'll probably be able to pay for textbooks/study materials, foreign trips and all the rest of it. Conversely, the poor kid is going to struggle to pay for a lot of this without a job and/or significant financial assistance (in the UK, at least if you're dirt poor, I understand the latter is actually quite decent for students). Then what about those who move to big cities (London, NYC, LA, etc) to try and 'make it' in whatever industry (i.e. the media/showbiz, finance, creative industries, to name but a few)? The rich kid is inherently going to be at an advantage, because their families can financially support them; meanwhile, the poor kid is at best going to have to take a job in order to cover (if they're lucky) the high living costs in such cities. The rich kid can take unpaid internships, some of which are necessary for certain industries (the media is fairly notorious for them in the UK); for the poor kid, these are basically off-limits. Just how is that fair? This is why I have so much respect for those who have made it from nothing - as trite as this may sound, they've had to go the extra mile in order to get where they are; meanwhile, someone at a similar level who had many hands up in their life hasn't had to work nearly as hard (even if, in their minds, they've worked exceptionally hard). What have they done? They've had help from Mummy and Daddy all their lives. It seems like nothing they've done has been entirely off their own backs. They were born rich and will probably die rich, never truly understanding the struggles of those worse off than them. I realise much of this post will likely come across as inverse snobbery, and to be fair, it probably is. It is also, however, a view I have held for some time, albeit one which I realise could do with being challenged. TL;DR: Successful people from more humble backgrounds deserve much more same respect than successful people from well-off background, because the former will have worked much, much harder to get where they are; meanwhile, the latter will usually have had a lot of help from their families.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant You’re right people from humble backgrounds have most likely seen more hardship and worked harder. But why does where you’ve come from decide how much respect are given? What if successful person from a humble background has children, maybe their hard working attitude rubs off on the kids and they achieve success too. It may have been easier for the children than the parents but is that really a bad thing? It doesn’t mean they didn’t work hard or try their best or that they deserve less respect for what they’ve achieved. Does that mean no one who plans on having a family should strive for success so that their children can learn about hardship? IMO respect should be more about how people treat other people than the career they have and just because someone came from a more privileged background doesn’t mean they don’t share the same values in life or deserve the same amount of respect.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user Advice on how to include or document code into a dissertation Hi, the core of my dissertation is not coding. However to do all the studies I had to write a series of scripts to handle the data for either visualizations or any sort of analysis. For the niche group of researchers in this topic, we consider these pieces of code could be useful. So, besides including a github repository with mys scripts, could anyone share tips on how to include this type of work? Is it an appendix the best alternative? Or is this worth a chapter?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Apart from the appendix, which is a good idea, you can also create project for your dissertation on Open science foundation or Zonedo and link your GitHub repo, to make it more visible for researchers.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user First time giving a long (45+ minutes) presentation on my research - What to talk about? Hi everyone, having been a graduate student for quite a while now, I have given quite a few 20-30 minute papers that give a general introduction to my research. What I normally did (I am a graduate student in history) for these short talks, is to first shortly introduce what my topic is, talk about the past literature shortly and what is new about my research, then discuss the themes that run through my dissertation and then focus on the most important aspects in terms of content that I focus on, before closing with the conclusion. However, in a few weeks I will have to give a longer talk about my research for the first time (I was asked to speak for between 45 and 50 minutes) and I am not too sure what to focus on. The audience will be rather general, so not specialists in my field. Currently I am thinking of keeping the structure of my talk, but extending the last part (the content bit) further with a few more stories and by going a little more deeply into what I do in my dissertation, mainly as I always felt that I wanted to say more about that in previous talks and because I think that would be of greatest interest to the audience. But I am wondering what other suggestions people might have as to how to structure a longer talk about one's research? Thanks.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant When you're speaking to a more general audience, you can / should spend some time elaborating on the context in which your research takes place, and also a bit more time explaining why what you did / found is important within that context. So expand on your background discussion to help people unfamiliar with your subject gain enough familiarity to follow your research, and then spend a bit more time near the end explaining why that work is important, and why what you found is relevant within the context that you established during the earlier part of the talk. Also remember that slides should be pictures, not text. Text bores the shit out of general audiences. Find good-quality pictures, or create good-quality graphics, or both, that emphasize your points and give people something to focus on when you're talking.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user How did academics do literature review before the internet? My first thought was libraries, but that still sounds crazy<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant There's a great book by Umberto Eco about how to be successful in grad school - he wrote it for his own graduate students because he was tired of giving them the same talk every time a new cohort started. He describes going to the library, going through the catalog and writing down the bibliographical reference for the texts he wanted on individual note cards. Then he'd go find all the texts, take his notes on the note-cards and then keep them in an ever-increasing collection in his office. &#x200B; So - yeah, as everyone else said. Libraries. And note-card collections.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [Zootopia] Why isn't Officer Hopps concerned about the buying of fur rugs... in a world where animals are sapient? After the question about her continued association with people who have a murder pit, I realized this-- the skunk butt rug bit was played for laughs, but... it's still a fur rug in a world where animals are sapient! Isn't this like selling someone a rug made from human back hair instead of scalps? What poor skunk had his butt taken for the rug? And why isn't Officer Hopps concerned about this?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Animals can provide their fur and wool to be used in clothing and furniture. High-end wool, like from alpaca or angora, can be sold for top dollar. Most other animals have to settle for bargain rates and so usually only the poor resort to selling their fur. And then there is the bottom of the barrel hair, like from muskrats or skunks. Those with undesirable fur have to donate it because no one will purchase it willingly. Charitable organizations will take donated fur and weave it into useful textiles to be given away or sold at discount rates. A welfare recipient or college student might be desperate enough to pick up something like a skunk-butt rug, but most Zootopians can afford better.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user Learning Philosophy vs reading Philosophers Is reading philosophers important at all? And if so, how much? In context I ask because if we want to learn philosophy and use it as a way of figuring things out and thinking about the world better then how important is reading philosophers work as opposed to just learning philosophical skills. For example I am interested in the idea of personal identity so I find it interesting to read David Hume and Buddhist works but are these for me to use philosophical techniques and neuroscience etc to try and figure out the concept of personal identity and whether it even exists at all? We study logic so that we can spot whether an argument is valid or invalid, and if valid is it sound. But we don’t need to read any philosopher to learn this skill, except for the one who wrote the curriculum. The skills of philosophy allow you approach any subject better, whether philosophical or not. So if someone is interested in learning philosophical skills as a way to approach things then how important is reading the works of philosophers?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant So you want to learn to philosophize, or more exhaustively, you want to learn how to use the tools and methods for reasoning to arrive at generalized statements of some truth value, about topics that empirical study won't yield meaningful results. How do you do this? By practicing these skills in some manner. People have been doing this for ~2300 years already, though. Do you set out on your own, and build up your skills from the ground up, or do you take advantage of the fact that there is ~2300 years of work on this subject to use as a guide? If you try to build your own system from the ground up, you'll probably make some mistakes and errors, and the chance is that someone in those intervening thousands of years made those same mistakes. So learning to philosophize by learning about the theories of past philosophers is beneficial for at least three reasons: you get to see examples of philosophizing done by experts, you can correct certain errors and pitfalls you would have made on your own by seeing how past thinkers have run into those problems and corrected them, and you can see how not to do things, based on errors or holes in their reasoning they did not correct. Many subjects are taught like this. In art you study and copy works by the masters before you can break the rules and forge your own path, in music you learn the compositions of great composers before you can compose your own pieces, etc.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [Portal] Aperture Markets their products to Modern-Day Earth! This deviates from canon slightly. We're going to have Aperture be founded somewhere in the 1990s instead of in the Half-Life universe during the 40s, as well as Cave and Caroline being alive and GLaDOS never being built. Fact: Aperture is the best damn applied sciences company on Earth and it's testing program is a huge success. Fact Two: Aperture is an inefficient and expensive company that has such craziness like packaged turrets and panels being unwrapped within minutes to be put in chambers. But what could they do to improve this? Simple - Gain some competence. Take their many technologies, fix some of their safety problems (like the Portal Device being prone to implosion, energy pellets being agitated by alarms and hazard lights, and repulsion gel not liking the skeleton) and start selling them for multiple uses including industry and recreation. There's a big stack of liability waivers still on them, but I'm sure they all have SOME use to the people of Earth. *Aperture now sells the following technologies in stores globally.* Propulsion and Repulsion Gel Two easily washed-off gel substances. One increases speed immensely, the other causes things that touch it to bounce off. Repulsion Gel can also be safely walked across if you brace your landing or walk onto it rather than falling from a height. Conversion Gel A third, special Gel that lets Portals be placed on surfaces that usually do not accept them. Expensive due to using Lunar Basalt in it's mixture and dangerous for people allergic to Moon Dust. Storage Cubes, Companion Cubes, and Edgeless Safety Cubes Cubes. Well, one of them is a sphere. You can presumably, well, store things in them. Compatible with most Aperture Tech as well. The Handheld Portal Device It's a 'Portal Gun' that creates two completely safe physics-defying holes in spacetime and works best on flat surfaces painted white or made of tile or concrete, or lunar soil. Bundled with Long Fall Boots for safety reasons. Panels Infinitely variable 4ftx4ft Robot Arms that can completely transform a room. Excursion Funnels Turbines that produce a gravity-defying tractor beam of liquid. Their polarity can be reversed. Aerial Faith Plates Catapults for rapid propulsion of objects. Also sold with Long Fall Boots. Hard Light Bridges Bridges made of solid natural light. Require a massive array of solar panels and engines, but work reliably. Personality Cores Arguably alive sentient eyeball bot with many uses. Comes in an array of personalities. Thermal Discouragement Beams Lasers. Hot to the touch but can be used for industrial cutting or for powering objects. Comes with a Discouragement Redirection Cube, which lets the beam point in different directions. *The following are also sold, but to global military powers under a defense contractor sub-brand.* High Energy Pellets Powerful plasma orbs that can be used to power things but are dangerously lethal to any organic matter that makes contact. Have a short lifespan. Sentry Turrets Egg-shaped Fusion-powered Robots that fire a seemingly endless supply of NATO cartridges out of an ammo box at a high rate of speed. Presumably programmable not to shoot at certain individuals. *What are the global short-term and long-term effects of Aperture products being sold in stores?* Bonus: The same scenario but with no Portal Device or Excursion Funnel.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Both short and long term? The global economy crashes from Portal tech due to the elimination of need of the logistics to move freight across the globe. Middle East breaks out in war as the oil nation economies collapse. Russia invades EU as to starve off its inevitable collapse from losing oil income. USA deploys the national guard as millions of truckers, sailors, and others riot from the job loss. [Spoiler: The Handheld Portal Device](#s "Only works on moondust, which were what the panels were painted with.")<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5 How did they manage to get big ships docked before the invention of motor engines ?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant The first thing to do is wait for the right weather. You anchor outside the harbour or sail around until the wind is of the right strength and direction to allow you to get in. The next thing to do is take on a pilot, this is someone who knows the harbour intimately and so where to turn, where to avoid shoals etc. You pick them up out at sea where there is space to do so. Then you sail into the harbour and up to a quay. You need to control your speed by adjusting and taking in sails so that you berth slowly. This is quite within the capability of a skilled skipper and well drilled crew. Then if you need to move the ship to another basin, another quay, turn it around etc then you warp it around, which basically means pulling it about using ropes. You might have mule teams to help, certainly you use capstans on the ship and ashore. Steam tugs were used long before ocean going cargo ships were powered by engines. They could help manoeuvre the ships into tight spots, or tow them into harbour in calm weather. All of the same techniques are used in modern shipping with modern ships, in fact modern ships are arguably harder to dock given how much larger they are.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user Dear scientist redditors, does decanting wine actually do anything? I got a wine aerator for christmas and have failed at blind test to see which glass was aerated. Though it usually tastes different to me when using a decanter, i realize this might just be confirmation bias or the placebo effect. Please help me, am i wasting time/dishes by decanting, or am i just not skilled enough yet to tell the difference?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Not all wines will be dramatically affected by decanting, but those with a significant amount of tannins will change in flavor very significantly. The decanter increases the surface area of the wine, allowing it to be aerated much more quickly. The aeration causes the tannins in the wine to become oxidized, which changes the astringency and aroma of the wine. Again, not all wines are improved by decanting, but very few are damaged.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user Do all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum travel at the same speed? I keep hearing speed of 'light'. This made me wonder if it is visible light that is being referred to or just any type of electromagnetic radiation?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Many of the answers so far correctly state that the speed of light through vacuum does not depend on wavelength. In materials, however, this is not the case. In matter, different EM wavelengths will propagate at different speeds, this effect is called dispersion. The two parameters that govern the speed of light are the electric permittivity (epsilon) and magnetic permeability (mu) of the medium the light is traveling through. You can loosely think of these two parameters as describing how much the medium resists changes in the EM field. The vacuum permittivity and vacuum permeability are not dependent on wavelength, and so the speed of light in vacuum is also not dependent on wavelength, and so all colors of light travel the same speed in vacuum. However, when light travels through a material, the speed of light does depend on wavelength (though we should really be thinking in terms of frequency, with the understanding that wavelength and frequency describe loosely the same attribute of the optical wave). Materials are made up of charged particles which can interact with the optical wave that is traveling through the medium. Remember, electrically charged particles have their own electric field and will be pushed around by the electric field of the optical wave, this impacts the electric permittivity and magnetic permeability of the material, so the speed of light in a material will be different than the speed of light in vacuum (since there are charges that the EM wave can push around as it travels through the material). You can think of each electron as being attached to springs - the incoming EM field can then interact with the electrons, pushing them back and forth. Continuing with this analogy, the speed of the EM wave depends on how 'stiff' the 'springs' are. In reality, the 'stiffness' is simply the electric permittivity and permeably of the material. These two parameters depend on the material, as well as the frequency of light - that is, a low frequency wave will drive the electrons back and slowly while a high frequency wave will try to drive the electrons back and forth faster (sometimes so fast the electron's don't follow the EM field very well). The index of refraction of a material is related to the permittivity and permeability of that particular material. More commonly, we use the index of refraction to describe how fast light travels in a material. The phenomenon you describe in your question is called dispersion, which is essentially wavelength dependent index of refraction. All materials have a dispersion curve which shows the index of refraction as a function of wavelength for that particular material. Edit: if you treat each electron as a harmonic oscillator being driven by an external force, you see that the motion of the oscillator depends on the frequency of the driving EM field. Since the electrons are being driven by the incident wave, they themselves create an EM wave. In fact, using this model, the incident wave is absorbed and the wave that propagates through the medium is a result of how the electrons move - which is frequency dependent (it's also dependent on the shape of the potential well the electrons find themselves in due to their neighbors).<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user [Economics] Hypothetical: The dollar crashes on Monday. What happens? I'm interested in deep analysis of this, though obviously a hypothetical is always speculation. * What's the likely time scale? * What would the government do to try to mitigate? * What happens to the average family in the US? (middle class, specifically but upper and potentially lower class too) * How does daily life change? Like would we potentially be in danger of losing utilities and creature comforts like power, running water, internet, gas, phones, etc? * What happens with other nations? Thanks in advance for the insight. Edit: In response to the valid point / question that /u/ALoudMouthBaby brought up [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/1c61kz/economics_hypothetical_the_dollar_crashes_on/c9ddqux), it is highly dependent on what caused the crash. Of course nobody can know the answer to this; but just state your assumptions in your answer.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Time scale for what? And all of these are pretty heavily dependent on what caused it. A theoretical like this is kind of ridiculous though since it would take a massive global crisis for the dollar to actually crash. It's not like it's BitCoins.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user I believe capitalism is a detriment to society as a whole. We will never be a thriving society with it in place. CMV Capitalism is the primary reason for the lack of advancements in energy, medicine, housing, poverty, world peace, the drug war, ect... It causes a "me vs. you" mentality, resulting in crime committed by, desperate people trying to survive or the sociopaths who are allowed to use there viciousness to succeed in the corporate world. It induces insane greed in those who succeed with it, causing CEO's and others to put profits before humanity and nature. And it is so out of balance these days that small businesses, mostly, don't stand a chance of success against the marketplace titans. It is a broken system and it's literally killing us. Convince me otherwise. Edit- I'm writing "edit" this because I guess I wasn't too clear in my argument. (forgive me, I am new to the debating type subreddits) Okay, so it would take a long long time to cite every occurrence for the detriment reaches far and wide but I will speak from my observations and cite a few things. - We no longer have products that last a life time because disposable shit make a company more money. - L.A., California lost it's effective subway system to oil, tire, and car companies(look at the smog problem) - Monsanto destroys some farmers who do/and most farmers who do not buy there products. - Walmart destroys small businesses buy providing similar product for cheaper by buying shit products from overseas. - Most medicine (physical and psychological) is based on systematic cures rather than fixing the root of the issue. - Hemp can solve a lot of issues and why is that not being used? (timber, oil, pharmaceutical, ect companies) - We(the US) are constantly caught instigating conflict in other countries for profit(directly or indirectly). - Collecting rain is illegal in some places and so is seed trading among farmers. - ect ect ect I believe a socialist democracy with community service based incentive programs would work. If you want more you work towards your community and receive more. It's a very raw idea. I can go more into detail if ya'll would like. How many times throughout history have we been stifled because the rich used their power to prevent an advancement in the name of profits?(like with tesla for example) The only reason we are advancing nowadays is because humanitarians are able to put their contributions into the public without relying on mainstream media to promote it. Corporations/central banks run the world and it's because they are given the format to do so. We have had people attempt to come up with alternatives to the whole, you need us for this, and they are snuffed out by big business. And do I really have to cite all the times big businesses have poisoned the environment because it was cheaper? The format of business is corrupt and demands a dog eat dog mentality that makes it so you have to take advantage of any one weaker than you or you don't survive. Do you really think I have no argument? There is something very corrupt about how this system works. It always comes down to the whole idea of the strong overtaking the weak. "Oh, but they need us." What the hell happened to self-sufficiency? It was eliminated by big business's good friend, advertising. I may come off like I have a blind belief but I pay attention. Most everything that we have available to us today, we only have because someone found it profitable. Edit- Also, we have more people than jobs. So much so, that we literally have to make shit up so that people can make money to feed their families. And because we can not make enough jobs for the people who need them... People starve. Why don't we automate to stupid stuff- trash, retail, grunt level factor work, ect, and eliminate the, work or die structure. I do not believe people will cease to be inventors, police, doctors, teachers, ect. The important jobs are mostly done by people with passion. For those who aren't, would you really want a doctor who's in it for the money to be put in charge of finding the best chance of curing your disease or or the guy(or girl) who decided at a young age that they wanted to help people? This question applies to all the important occupations. Capitalism does not allow humanitarianism. It defeats it. How will we have non-corrupt globalism? Please tell me how will we thrive in the future when corporations and central banks own everything?(oh wait...) Edit- I am convinced. My issues are valid but the cause is not Capitalism as a system. And socialism certainly is not the answer. Corrupt government and lack of regulations seem to be the major issues here. Ya'll changed my view. Deltas will be appropriated later, as I am currently headed out the door.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant What lack of advancements in energy, medicine, housing, poverty, world peace, crime? We have lots of advanced energy tech, houses, ways to address poverty, the world has never been more peaceful, crime is dropping.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: Why do certain drugs make your pupils change size?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Pupil change is due to two muscle groups-- the iris sphincter (contraction) and the iris dilator (expansion). The sphincter response is linked to the parasympathetic nervous system, activated when we are in a relaxed state. The dilator response is tied to the sympathetic nervous system, involved in the fight-or-flight response. Drugs which activate these systems will cause their typical impact on pupil size. For example, when someone consumes MDMA they are activating their sympathetic nervous system, which triggers the iris dilator to widen the size of the pupil. In contrast, a drug like heroin, typically known to cause a relaxed state, will activate the parasympathetic nervous system, thereby triggering the iris sphincter to contract the pupil.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user ELI5: How can someone wake up from a brain injury and suddenly be able to speak a foreign language? I just read this article about a man who was in a car accident and when he woke up he could fluently speak French. How does that happen when he didn't speak any french at all prior to the incident?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant When this has been reported, what is often glossed over is the fact that these people could always speak the language. The brain learns and stores your first language differently to your subsequent languages. So it's possible for the first language to be lost or suppressed independently of other languages by certain brain traumas. When this happens the first language will usually eventually return. "Woman wakes from coma speaking French" is much more dramatic than "Woman who could already speak both English and French wakes from coma having difficulty with English but French is ok but the English comes back in a day or two." Believe nothing you read in the Huffington Post.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user CMV: It is invasive, ineffective & condescending to determine the validity/relevancy of a person's views based off their sexual inclination, sex or gender I am going to try to be as clear as I can. I'm having trouble finding the best words for my thoughts & feelings. Broadly speaking among some left/progressive leaning individuals (aka "peeps") there is an idea that being part of a certain group can make your opinion more or less valid depending on your relation to that group. &#x200B; I think biological sex & the way people self-identify gender wise is a good example. If there is an issue affecting LGBTQ (& whatever else may be recognized) people it's common for "peeps" to say lgbtq voices should be "heard the loudest" or that cis/straight people should be more accommodating/lenient in conversations or debates about the topic. &#x200B; Now I follow the logic of those most affected by something would have a good insight on it but usually that isn't implied inversely, just because someone isn't directly affected by something doesn't mean they can't have an insight into it. Minimizing voices of people not directly affected by something could lead you to very suboptimal results than you would have otherwise had. &#x200B; The line of thinking these "peeps" follow also forces the hand of people who aren't "out" or "public" if they disagree with the current view being advocated for by the let's call it the "general public opinion held among the most notable or vocal of a group" . If the "peeps" assume based off the non-public/out person's appearance &/or demeaner that they aren't part of the relevant group they will dismiss or downplay the opinion of someone they otherwise wouldn't. Further limiting possible contributors to a solution. &#x200B; I would be happy to expand on anything obviously but I think if I try to give more examples I'll just muddle it up too much.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant >If there is an issue affecting LGBTQ (& whatever else may be recognized) people it's common for "peeps" to say lgbtq voices should be "heard the loudest" or that cis/straight people should be more accommodating/lenient in conversations or debates about the topic. What this really stems from is really that there's a lot of history of, for instance, straight people telling gay people what being gay is like. Straight people telling gay people what they should or should not find offensive, if they have or have not been discriminated against, how they should or should not feel or what they should or should not want. In all these types of situations, LGBT voices should definitely "be heard the loudest", because they are normally the ones who actually know better. A straight person telling a gay person what it's like to be gay is rather absurd, after all, as is trying to trivialize or outright ignore what they've gone through. Obviously there are some cases where this line of argument gets abused ("If you're not gay you are not allowed to have an opinion on this topic") which is of course absurd, and no one can pretend that this does not happen. But those types of "shut down" arguments exist on all sides - this is hardly worse than straight/cis people attempting to declare that LGBT people are mentally confused and that society should not indulge in their lunacy. Threads about that pop up here pretty frequently, even. More often than people are told to shut it because they're straight, probably. So in essence, yes what you are saying does happen, but it's not more common or worse than the same type of invalid/bad arguments made from other sides or groups in any other context. If you, as a straight/cis person is faced with such an argument, it could be pretty good to take a step back and consider if you aren't actually putting words in the mouths of LGBT people, saying incorrect things about them or anything like that. By all means, if you think that your argument is still perfectly valid and should be made, then go ahead. But there are a lot of situations where these arguments do make sense.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user CMV: the American presidential election would be a lot more fair and reasonable if we voted based on policy rather than people. Title kinda says it all, but elections are generally popularity contests. Prior to the last several elections (and the current one), videos came out where voters were questioned on how they feel about certain issues; gay marriage, welfare, corporate bailout, taxes, trans rights, etc. Several people said they agreed with one set of views, then said they were voting for the candidate that represented the opposite views. If the polls said a list of issues rather than a list of names, people would vote for what they believe in rather than for a personality or for an "image." I understand the idea of having a specific person repping the country on the world stage, and one can even say that's half the job. But that could be offset by including foreign policy on the polls.<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant The results of the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19 will be one of the biggest factors by which it’ll be judged. Did we ask Hillary and Trump their policy preferences for pandemic response? Would there have been any difference in their answers (e.g. “over 180k deaths”)? That’s why you have to look at the person — both to understand how their values will guide their response to unforeseen disasters and to judge the level of competence they’ll bring to that response<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user The income gap between white people and African Americans has not changed since 1983. What are possible ways to reduce this gap? [Using this as reference](http://blog.metrotrends.org/2013/08/racial-wealth-gap-wide-1963-remains-large-today/), what are proposed methods of improving the standard of living of black people?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant If you're going to talk about an income gap, you should also talk about cost of living as that varies across locations, as does location of persons by racial identity. Talking about an income gap when you do not account for cost of living doesn't contribute anything meaningfully. In standard urban models of population location and migration, wages, rents,and amenities are included (see Rosen, Roback, 1982 1989) and following literature.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user CMV: I think the modern-day American working lifestyle is a never-ending cycle of unneeded stress and needs to change. I really can only speak as an American citizen who works in corporate from 7-5PM. From what I can tell, and this is not a new sentiment, however daily life for the average middle class working person is monotonous and habitual. You wake up early to go to work; sit in an office where a good chunk of the people are actually just being as minimally productive as they can be to get by, just to go back home on their hour commute. 2-3 hours to yourself only to sleep 8 hours and do it all over again. The working culture that I have been a part of makes sense. I can understand that with people that are actually utilizing their work schedules with full productivity and enthusiasm, it's the reason our GDP and economic standing is where it is. However, I know too many people in my office alone that absolutely dread going back to work. Or are stressed out too much. Or just really don't like the system in which we address work here in this country. Of course maybe if they worked doing something they loved it would be different (That's the goal and ideal) however in reality many people don't do what they want. Just off of the top calculations too. So at least 40 people on my side of the floor have 1 hour+ commute to work. Here is how many hours they spend in their car just commuting in a work year. (25 working days per month x 12 months) - 10 vacation days = 290 working days in a year 290 days x 2 commuting hrs (to and from) = 580 hours spent commuting = 24 days commuting Meaning people spend a little less than a whole month in their car just driving to work. WTF. Maybe it's a necessary evil in the eyes of a productive company, but shit I don't want to waste 41 months driving in my car until retirement. Fuck. Not trying to complain. I think we should take a look at how other nations address their workforce and find a happy medium in-between working hard and playing hard. I like the sentiment, however I know too many stressed out coworkers. edit: I think I've seen articles looking at European countries with a really good work-life balance, however I believe their populations are not comparable to the US' in that they are way smaller. Maybe the US has such a high population that consumer demand drives the work force, however does anyone have a proposal on how to address this? edit: So I am not alluding to whether I am happy/unhappy at my job; I am just noting on the general mood and concensus of work culture I have had conversations with other co-workers, aquaintances, etc. I am perfectly content with what I am doing right now, however I believe that there's an inherent problem with how society views work here. Anyways, holy shit just came back from moving out my current apartment and I have a lot of things to mull over. Hopefully you guys can CMV. _____ > Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to *[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules). If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* *[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)*! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our *[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)* first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to *[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview). Happy CMVing!*<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant Why would the total population of a European country have a difference in whether their economic systems can work in the US? Many European countries are considerably more populous than the average state in the US, and surely each employee would be hired based on the number of customers they would have to support or number of items they would have to produce. Having a larger population means the US also has more potential workers, and with a lower average age that goes even further. I think, more than just commuting, it's the length of the average work day and the very small amount of vacation time. Most advanced countries have a legally guaranteed minimum four weeks paid vacation for full time labourers. They also generally have a lower number of hours needed to reach full time status (35-38) have more generous benefits for parents, have benefits for students, have benefits for health care and so on. This is a very big web of social development and it more or less demonstrates to you why a more developed country has a higher standard of living. Development should take some of the burden off of an individual person's shoulders and mane it more collective. This allows every individual to live a happier more fulfilled life, which leads to them better specializing their career to their talents and interests, having less stressed in that career, and being more productive overall. The reason the US has such a dominant economy on paper is because we became extremely hyper capitalist to the point that the main value the average person places on a corporation is to deliver profit rather than to improve society. We pay people as little as possible, while demanding as much as possible, as quickly as possible. We also have some allergy to having high enough tax rates to ensure we have fully funded and competent social programs. It creates a lot of money in the hands of those who own the means of production, but leaves very little for the rest as the very wealthy horde their obscene means in a parallel economy of rich people investing in other rich people's ideas. That money never gets back to the community level and produces effectively a reverse robin hood effect.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user Why does the Planck length exist, and why is it that specific size?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant The Planck length is a length you get when you multiply certain constants together in physics, why it is exactly that number is not known, just as it is not known why the speed of light is the number it is or why the charge of the electron has that certain value. You may have heard that the Planck length is the smallest length possible, but this is not so. It is simply at this scale that we would need to have a functioning theory of quantum gravity to understand phenomena.<\|im_end\|>
<\|im_start\|>user If all material is eaten, are cooked vegetables less nutritious than raw ones?<\|im_end\|> <\|im_start\|>assistant For various plants, for example broccoli, many of the nutrients are locked within strong cell walls, made of cellulose. Humans do not digest cellulose too well, and a lot of the nutrients in the cells are not available as a result. Cooking these foods weakens or breaks down these cell walls to allow for more complete digestion. But overcooking can break down other nutrients. So cooking enough to weaken the cellulose walls without destroying these other nutrients is optimal.<\|im_end\|>

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