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[Tolkien] Why did Aragorn's family not reclaim the throne before the events of Lord of the Rings? | If it was always known that Aragorn's line was the line of Isildur, what was stopping Aragorn's father or grandfather from doing exactly what Aragorn did? Why did they wait until that generation? | 54 | They did, or at least they tried to. Ancient Middle-earth history time!
The original High King of Arnor and Gondor, Elendil (the leader of the "Men" half of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men; the one who died in battle with Sauron) had two sons, Isildur and Anarion. The descendants of Isildur became the kings of the ... | 54 |
ELI5: Why is the purity of precious metals measured in karats rather than just using percentage? | 233 | Carats were/are a measure of weight, not purity. In olden times they thought carob seeds didn't vary in weight much, so they used them on balance scales as a unit to measure weight. At some point, there was a gold coin (there's debate about which, though most think it was a Roman solidus) that was pure gold and weighed... | 98 | |
eli5: Why do regular batteries last for so long whereas rechargeable ones have to be recharged so frequently? | 280 | Some hold less energy but also the chemicals in rechargables produce a lower voltage (1.2v instead of 1.5v) lots of devices will detect rechargables as less than full battery even when fully charged since the voltage is lower. On top of that the voltage might drop below operational threshold sooner since they start low... | 144 | |
Are swimming pools breeding chlorine-resistant organisms? | Like the overuse of antibiotics. Are we breeding super microbes through the use of pool chlorine? | 1,448 | If you think of microbial resistance in human terms, it makes more sense. If you send out a plague that kills a lot of people, some will survive and will likely be more resistant. The plague is a very specific, complicated way of killing an individual. Now if instead, you threw every human in lava, nobody would surv... | 1,613 |
ELI5 Benghazi, the controversy, and the hearing that took place | I would love a brief description of what happened and why it remains in the news. Obviously it's a divisive issue, so nonpartisan explanations or an explanation of both sides would be fantastic. Thanks | 20 | So, basically what happened is this-
There's some question of what exactly was being run out of the compound- House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence cast doubt on this alleged U.S. involvement and reported that "All CIA activities in Benghazi were legal and authorized. On-the-record testimony establishes t... | 14 |
What's your favorite statistics interview question? | What are your most **interesting** / *appearing to be hard but* **easy** / *appearing to be simple but* **complex** statistics interview questions?
Please feel free to add questions you've come across or even thought of that can test conceptual understanding.
Let's make this thread an invaluable source of quality st... | 21 | > What's your favorite statistics interview question?
*When can you start?*
TBH I've never been asked a stats question interviewing for a stats-related job. I've had conversations about statistics though, or talked a bit about some specific topic. | 30 |
ELI5: When you get skin indentations from clothing or leaning on something, what's happening on a cellular/biological level? | Not the kind of long-lasting indentations from actual skin disorders (which is all that google search seems to turn up). Just the normal marks that anyone gets when leaning against a textured wall or accidentally resting your arm on your headphones cord, which go away after a while.
It changes the surface of your skin... | 45 | Physiologist here: Your body is a bag (skin, tissue) that contains a bunch of smaller water-filled bags (cells) that are surrounded by more water (what is technically called interstitial fluid).
Pressing a textured pattern against the skin causes higher forces to be imparted on the skin by raised surfaces - resul... | 13 |
Why does silver have a really high coefficient of friction with itself, but low when it has friction against other materials? | 1,136 | Silver is relatively soft and has a low strain hardening coefficient (deforming the surface doesn't make it very hard). At the same time, it has a relatively high adhesion with many metals, a low cohesion (self bond strength), and a low melting point.
The combination of all these properties results in a thin trans... | 394 | |
ELI5: Why do all of my packages from China get shipped as a "gift" even though I paid for it? Also, how do they get away with shipping a sale as a gift? | I believe everything I've ordered so far from an unnamed site with most of their suppliers shipping from china gets shipped with the label of "gift." Why is that, and how do they get away with it if it is some sort of workaround to something? | 31 | It's a customs / import duty thing.
In some countries, if you're bringing a gift into the country, the recipient isn't eligible for import duty or extra taxes, whereas they are for items that have been purchased. | 12 |
ELI5: If water is better at conducting electricity than air, why do static electricity shocks happen more often in dry air? | Every winter I get zapped with shocks by static electricity whenever I touch something metal, or another being. Why does this seem to only happen in the dry winter months and not in the humid summer months? | 172 | You have almost answered your own question. You get static shocks when the air fails to connect you electrically with the things around you, so when you finally touch them, any electrical difference is resolved very suddenly. Ouch. When the air is moist, you have a constant though very weak electrical connection with ... | 139 |
If space is ever so expanding, do we seen new/farther everyday we take photos of the outer edges of space? Do we add on to “observable universe” everyday too? | 15 | Kind of.
So, the universe as a whole does not have a boundary. The expansion of the universe is not the expansion of the *edge* of the universe, but rather everything getting further away from everything else - it's not expanding at the edges, it's expanding *everywhere*. In fact, the evidence is somewhat pointing tow... | 26 | |
CMV: Predators using advanced technology to hunt comparatively primitive species is not a good test of skill | Predators consider themselves the greatest hunters in the galaxy, and test their skill on the most dangerous people of other planets. But they have developed incredibly advanced hunting technology that many of these species either a) have not discovered or b) do not have equipped during the hunt.
Stock car racing puri... | 31 | Hunters generally use unfair advantages all the time.
eg; lions use ambush and group tactics, most big cats use speed and claws.
Thats why they are predators - its not a competition or a sport whereby its equal footing for all combined. So they can still show skills its just a different set of skills. | 17 |
ELI5: Why is vaping nicotine supposedly better for your health than smoking cigarettes? | 25 | Forget the nicotine, that is not what is bad about smoking. smoking is bad for you because of the chemistry that happens when you burn stuff. It's why people die from smoke inhalation during house fires. Smoking causes you to ingest all sorts of toxic chemicals. Not because they are put into cigarettes, but because the... | 41 | |
CMV: Every fine should be income based, no exceptions should occur | This is the only fair way to financially punish someone, whether you should do that in the first place is a topic for another day.
The only way you can make sure rich people won't just shrug and metaphorically throw a moneybag at every policeman who wants justice is to make them pay a percentage of their monthly salar... | 15,613 | I hear what you're saying. That being said, we shouldn't be determining a person's punishment based on their wealth. Imagine if we handled prison sentences like that: should someone who is wealthy get a longer sentence just because they're wealthy? Linking fines to wealth makes plenty of sense until you realize that yo... | 543 |
ELI5: Every country seems to know how terrible Kim Jong Un is and how oppressed the people of N. Korea are. How come the worlds more powerful nations haven't "taken him out" by now, Either overtly or covertly? | 93 | 1. Not every nation cares about North Korea all that much. As much of a headache as North Korea may be to Russia and China (the only non-Western nations with the power and reach to affect North Korea), they've generally not cared at all when dealing with foreign nations no matter how reprehensible their governments are... | 89 | |
When you see weightlifters lifting hundreds of kilos at a time, how close are they to breaking their own bones? | I've seen them rip muscle off the bone. Is it even possible to break your own bones with the strength of your muscles? | 28 | Weightlifters that you see in competitions are lifters whove been lifting and perfecting their form for years. If their form wasnt perfect, they wouldnt have reached the strength level that they are today. Perfect form involves eliminating all sheer forces on the bones in our body. The only forces at play are compressi... | 13 |
When I bashed my head as a child I cried; as an adult I get angry and swear. When did the change occur and why? | Bashing my head still *really* hurts, as do other injuries. But as a child I would burst into inconsolable tears now I stamp my feat, shout "fuck" and I'm moody for a little while. Has my perception of pain changed? | 39 | Crying from pain is pretty damn useless if not to alert adults that a child is hurt. Anger on the other hand causes adrenaline and endorphin levels to rise significantly, which is useful both in suppressing the pain and dealing with any potential threats.
Crying helps to relieve anxiety; it helps when we are distressed... | 21 |
ELI5: Why do we say "Shhh" when we want someone to be quiet? | 487 | I would assume it's because a shhing noise is what we hear in the womb, and it calms and soothes babies when you loudly shush them. I've heard that mothers across cultures all "shush" their babies when they are little. Maybe it is ingrained from us very young to continue using the phrase on adults. | 588 | |
ELI5: Why does the stock market exist, and why is it such a big deal in our economy? | Woah, first page. Didn't expect that. o.O | 396 | Well, before explaining the stock market, we need to understand stocks. Thankfully, it's not that hard. To start a corporation, a group of people each put in the initial money. Each of these persons gets a number of stock shares proportional to the amount of money they put in. Owning shares of the corporation means... | 143 |
Finished my PhD, then ruined my life. Former advisor's advice is awkward, but it couldn't hurt, could it? | I finished my PhD three years ago, left academia for an industry career. Realized I hated it, left it, now I’m scraping by with part-time teaching gigs. Sat down with my old advisor to talk about where / how to publish my dissertation, and she said, in a concerned way, that if I wanted to get back into research, I shou... | 76 | What is your degree in, because this seems like odd advice to me.
I would suggest leveraging your industry experience to sell yourself as a great manager and start talking to professors looking for postdoc or bench professor jobs. You can help run the research and begin to bolster your publications. | 80 |
ELI5: Why are there so many varieties of apples yet other forms of produce may only have 2 or 3 varieties (or none at all)? | If I go to the grocery store I'll see multiple bins with different types of apples, but if I look at the banana section it's just a bin of same variety bananas. Why? | 15 | In apples there are a variety of varieties that folks use for different things.
Just like you have white onions, yellow onions, sweet onions, green onions.... Or red peppers, orange/yellow peppers, green peppers, mini peppers, jalapeño, habanero, Serrano.... Or russet or Yukon gold, or baby red potatoes.... Or Roma to... | 15 |
Russia has great incentive to downplay economic damage caused by sanctions. What are some indicia of declining economic activity that are hard to conceal or fake? | We're already seeing evidence that the [ruble is being propped up, quite possibly at the cost of the real economy,](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/opinion/russia-ruble-economy.html) because it's a metric with visibility to outsiders and it's in the interests of the ruling party for sanctions to look impotent. What ... | 91 | Imports/exports can be tracked using other countries’ data. You could see if domestic economic activity has waned using satellite data to track light emissions from the country- theoretically, if many businesses are shutting down then you would see that it’s darker at night. However, that would probably require pretty ... | 16 |
Are there "deserts" (vast areas that don't provide any life-sustaining resources) in the ocean? | There are many nature shows that talk about how life in the oceans is in so many ways different than that on land and adapts to extreme conditions - depth, temperature, non-iron-based blood, etc.
My question is, are there large areas in the ocean devoid of what is needed to sustain life in any form?
As a follow up, i... | 1,788 | I'd like to point out that actual deserts are not without "any life-sustaining resources". They do in fact host various ecosystems. Therefore, answering your question becomes a bit problematic. Do you mean:
1. Nutrient-poor environments in the ocean (like a desert) that only specialized species can exist? or,
2. "larg... | 671 |
[ATLA] Did each of the four nations only have benders of their respective element? Ex: Were there any earth or water benders living in the Fire Nation legally? | If so, why didn't they aid in the war? Earth benders with allegiance to the Fire Nation would have been very useful in breaching the wall around Ba Sing Se. | 87 | Bending is as much genetic as it is spiritual, so some of the nature of bending passing between generations is up for debate. But yes, it seems like benders of one specific type congregate and have bender children of that type within the confines of their nations.
Cross-bender migrations and contact happened before t... | 71 |
[Monsters Inc.] Why do monsters think that the touch of a human child can kill you? | Where did the myth come from? Why is it so pervasive, even though dozens of monsters regularly enter the human realm? Shouldn't they have noticed that all those scarers have come and gone from kids rooms nightly for decades without ever dying? | 17 | It could be deliberate propaganda. Since powering the monster world depends on terrifying and traumatizing human children, they can't risk scarers empathizing with them. Look what happened when Sulley scared Boo after getting to know her. He was heartbroken.
So, the monster government, the CDA and the higher-ups of t... | 36 |
Are there any philosophers that write about the perceived conflict between a seemingly random universe and our causal and determinant perceived reality? | This is a bit specific to a train of thought I've been nursing for a while so I might not be explaining it well enough for a third party. So I'll elaborate if you don't mind. I apologize for my BS background too.
PRESUMPTION: that the universe's smallest structure, quantum interaction, is the 'original' \(genesis defi... | 32 | Not sure how specific you are looking for but Wilfrid Sellars' "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" seems close enough.
If you're cool with swapping out quantum phenomena for the *thing-in-itself*, then Immanuel Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason*. | 16 |
Will getting the Johnson and Johnson vaccine impact the efficacy of future gene therapy treatments? | Given that the Johnson and Johnson vaccine and many gene therapy treatments both use adenoviruses as a vector, could getting the J&J vaccine limit your options or decrease the efficacy of gene therapy treatments later in life? I was wondering if your body might recognize the gene therapy virus as the J&J vaccin... | 15 | We don’t know. It’s possible, but it’s more likely that the immune response to the adenovirus vector will be so low, and so short-lived, that it wouldn’t impact subsequent exposure. Remember that the adeno component doesn’t replicate or amplify itself whereas the antigen passenger (spike protein) is driven by a powerfu... | 10 |
eli5: how do paint rattlecans work? | 16 | The contents of the paint can are under pressure. Some form of gas (usually nitrogen or carbon dioxide) is in the can, as well as liquid paint. The amount of gas greatly outweighs the amount of paint, likely at a 10:1 ratio or greater.
When you shake the can, you're agitating the paint so it's suspended among with the... | 25 | |
[Warhammer 40000] I'm a Rogue Trader who turned a few eldar soul stones into magical dust and decided to snort them over the ass cheeks of my mistress. What's going to happen to me now? | I mean we all want that ultimate high and it was really good. Like I don't think I've ever had such a high before. | 427 | You absolutely did not have a real Aeldari spirit stone. The psychic energies contained within their crystalline structure is immense, and breaching them has been known to cause massive damage to the nearby area. A space marine named Trythos once smashed one with his power axe, and was flung several meters backwards in... | 367 |
What are the mutations in the Omicron COVID variant, and what is it about these particular mutations that make scientists worried about it? | 4,430 | The multiple mutations are centered in the spike protein, and according to WHO increases the risk of reinfection and thus continuous spreading with this viral strain.
However, please remember that these are only preliminary findings, there is still a lot not fully investigated with this virus strain yet. | 3,450 | |
ELI5: Why do teeth consistently grow crooked, but other bones don’t? | 28 | Jaws of modern humans are too small to accommodate the teeth. Our jaws grow in based on genetics and the food you eat. Modern foods are too soft so your jaw doesn't grow to it's full potential causing overcrowding in your mouth. | 41 | |
ELI5: How can aliens listen to the golden record on Voyager 1 if they ever found it? | Assuming that someday they find it, how can they have the technology to play a record or understand it works? | 15 | The record comes along with the device intended to play it, as well as instructions that are decipherable as long as they understand basic scientific concepts (which, if they are a spacefaring civilization, they likely will). | 21 |
ELI5:Why can't shows like Mythbusters show brands in their TV shows? | They always put tape over it or cover it in some other way, I've seen this done in a lot of other shows as well (DigitalRev) | 21 | The presence of one brand may piss off one of their advertisers, who may produce a competing brand of the same product.
i.e. They are seen using a Coca-Cola product and now Pepsico refuses to advertise on a show that promotes their competition.
| 46 |
[Harry Potter] How big is the student body at Hogwarts? | 47 | Well there's 6 Gryffindor boys in Harrys year. If we assume that is standard, there's 12 Gryffindors per year, so 48 students per year. That's 336 students overall and makes sense with the number of named characters. But remember that we're seeing a generation of children born from the survivors of a war. There may usu... | 41 | |
ELI5: Why are some U.S. cities, like NYC, designed in a nice grid-system while others, like Boston, look like something a drunken toddler with a magic marker drew on his parents' walls? | 187 | Some cities' roads were planned in advance - SLC and Chicago are good examples. They laid out the streets in a grid BEFORE people started building roads, houses, etc.
In the case of Boston (and many old cities in New England, Europe and elsewhere) the cities were not really planned in advance. The roads at the time... | 94 | |
[Star Wars] What if Obi Wan throws a little force push down the hill before walking off on Mustafar. | You know, because Anakin is slowly burning to death, and Obi-Wan doesn't seem the torture type, and because he wants to make sure the job is done properly, he makes sure Anakin actually dies by pushing him all the way in to the lava.
How does the rest of time play out with no Vader? Can they train Luke and Leia to the... | 34 | Let's ask why Obi Wan *didn't* finish off Anakin.
Obi Wan faced his own former pupil and best friend, who had spat in the face of everything Obi Wan ever taught him and became one of the monsters they were both sworn to fight. Just as importantly, he was facing a fully defeated opponent. To finish off Anakin under tho... | 47 |
ELI5: Been watching cooking shows lately, is there a reason why chefs choose to forego measuring their ingredients? | Edit - Oh and I forgot: It is in shows like Iron Chef America, Cuttthroat Kitchen, Beat Bobby Flay, Chopped, Kitchen Nightmares if that helps. | 16 | if you are cooking and not baking, then measurements are pretty irrelevant. You season food to taste not to any specific measurement. You add an onion because you have an onion, it doesn't matter if it is 1 cup or 1.2 cups it will still taste good. Things like that. In the end if you taste your food and adjust accor... | 33 |
When a star runs out of fuel and collapses, does it happen all at once or does is slowly “deflate?” | 16 | Yes and no. In the grand scheme of things, it is very fast. But it still takes such a long time that a person living on a planet around it would hardly notice what was going on.
From the point where the star begins expanding to the point where the core is left as a white or black dwarf, it can take a few billion years... | 11 | |
[Raimiverse/MCU] Why was there artificial intelligence in Doc Ock's tentacles to begin with? | In Spider Man 2 and No Way Home, it's explained that Doc Ock's tentacles had their own artificial intelligence, and so Ock had to invent an inhibitor chip to prevent the AI from taking over his mind, which it did when the chip was destroyed by the electrical discharge of his fusion experiment, and MCU Peter Parker had... | 42 | Without that it would take forever to program it to take full advantage of the flexibility offered by the design, and it would probably always have been clunky.
Controlling them directly with his mind would probably have lead to some other, similar form of psychosis. You really don't want to be the test subject for t... | 75 |
ELI5: Why are there so many Islamic extremist groups in the world even though the Qur'an explicitly promotes peace regardless of beliefs, race, or nationality? | In the same breath, is the amount of Islamic extremists in the world a misconception propagated by Hollywood and the news media? | 33 | The real cause of conflict is rarely a religion. That's just used as a justification and to produce fanatical combatants.
The actual cause is usually one of the following:
* lower standards of living in one place (grab those riches or resources from next door)
* a threat to ones own leader's power (including percei... | 76 |
Why brakes lose their braking power once they get hot? | 54 | Its basically because the friction material on the brake pad begins to break down and produce gas after a certain temperature. This cushion of gas stops the pad touching the disk/drum and braking efficiency is lost | 22 | |
[Fantasy] What creates bottomless pits? | My name I don't remember, though I am from Ohio. I had a wife and children and good tires on my car. What took me from my home and put me in the Earth was the mouth of deep dark hole I found behind my barn.
We chucked in garbage since I don't know when. We threw everything, dead chicken, tractors that broke down. Afte... | 82 | Pits were invented in early antiquity, in order to make kicking people more dramatic. This technology stagnated during the middle ages, until the pit-bottom was invented by William Pitt (no relation) in 1756. While building codes have ensured most American pits built after the 1930's have bottoms, bottomless pits are s... | 113 |
do atoms experience changes in vacuums? | do atoms experience changes in space Atoms have relative atomic mass, though mass isn't effected by gravity do the forces holding the atom in place shift due to being in a vacuum, space for example? This might make me sound so stupid but i just had to ask | 15 | No, not really.
You can build a formal, quantitative description of an atom that includes an outside gravitational potential, but that potential will provide an immeasurably small perturbation under all but the most extreme conditions, so it can generally be ignored entirely.
This isn’t a dumb question, though, and I... | 11 |
CMV: Institutional racism and racial prejudice are different things, and our focus on prejudice not only is a waste of time, but it can make it more difficult to discuss the more important realities of institutional racism. Please, CMV. | I think it is important for everybody to understand the difference between racial prejudice and institutional racism. I also think that discussions about institutional racism are far more important and interesting than discussions about racial prejudice.
**Racial Prejudice:**
I'm defining racial prejudice as the kind... | 48 | Part of the institutional racism is that hurtful racial slurs are normalized and viewed as less damaging than they actually are.
So while, technically, your point might have some validity, in practice, fighting overt racism *is part* of fighting institutionalized racism, because it's part of institutionalized racism.... | 12 |
[DC/Batman] What are some examples of Riddler having actually clever riddles? | I know he's capable of a good riddle. I've seen him dispense a few coins from a payphone to Batman's hands and Batman had to figure out Riddler was at the police station.
But most of the time... they ought to call him the Joker cause he doesn't have riddles, just jokes. (What question can you not say 'yes' to? Are you... | 15 | **Arkham: Living Hell**. Riddler is being snotty during an interview with one of the Asylum's doctors. They mention another doctor who usually treats him, and Riddler patronizingly says "Yes, how is the deer girl?" \[sic\]. This is actually a clue to something going on at the asylum that nobody on the staff was aware o... | 22 |
[War of the Worlds] What was an average day in the life of a Martian like? | 76 | There isn't much. But from the original source only, it is believed that they once resembled and functioned like Humans do.
But they are much evolved, they are octopus like with much large cranium, they do not digest foods directly instead are transfused with all they need, and on earth this is witnessed by blood trans... | 38 | |
ELI5 How an oversupply of solar energy could lead to a blackout | I live in South Australia where 35% of households have solar panels. Some of these panels were temporarily switched off recently in order to avoid a "state wide blackout". How does an excess in energy to the grid cause a blackout? | 34 | Traditional power plants (except hydro) can't switch on/off instantly, it can take hours or days and costs $$. And obviously solar can't generate during the night, so those power plants have to be on and generating at night. But they can't stay on and generating _as well as_ all these solar panels unless there is deman... | 29 |
ELI5: why does sugar help a burn? | My friend burnt her finger and her son said to "put in in the sugar." She did and felt immediate relief. We looked online and found that sugar is indeed used to help burns, but nothing about why it helps. | 29 | There's a couple ways it's beneficial.
Primarily, sugar absorbs water really well. This sucks up all the water in the wound, inhibiting the growth of bacteria that proliferate in wet wounds. This also has the effect of reducing swelling in the area.
Additionally, cells use sugar for energy. When a burn occurs, the n... | 36 |
[MCU] Can anyone with sufficient strength wield Stormbringer? | We never saw anyone put the “May he be worthy” enchantment on Stormbringer like Odin did to Mjolnir. Can anyone potentially wield Stormbringer if they’re physically strong enough? I know we also saw Captain America recall Stormbringer from afar but I don’t know what to make of that. | 29 | Indeed, Stormbreaker has no worthiness enchantment. So as long as you're physically capable of holding it, you can use it. Not only did Cap briefly summon it, but Thanos almost killed Thor with it before Cap proved he was worthy to wield Mjolnir. | 44 |
ELI5: why does a Geiger Counter have that distinctive sound when detecting radiation instead of just beeping the intensity? | 28 | Radiation particles striking a gas filled vacuum tube create a "spark" (keeping it simple for a 5 year old). The tube is hooked up directly to a speaker so you're hearing the actual noise. By not introducing another layer of circuitry to transform the no3ose into a beep, you keep the cost and complexity down. First Gei... | 41 | |
[Dark Knight Rises] Where was Joker? | In the Dark Knight Rises, Bane liberates all prisoners from Blackgate, which means that the Joker should’ve shown up in the movie, so then where was he?
I’ve seen it argued that he was sent to Arkham after the events of TDK, but that’s not possible. The Dent Act that was passed in that movie denies the insanity defen... | 58 | Joker wasn't sent Arkham. He had escalated his antics to domestic terrorism and no longer fell under the jurisdiction of Gotham police or their courts. Somewhere between the two films he was transferred to bell reves or whatever the name of the supermax that is shown in suicide squad is. They're better equipped to hand... | 87 |
At what size of a particle does classical physics stop being relevant and quantum physics starts being relevant? Why? | 125 | Classical physics starts deviating significantly at the molecular level, so on the magnitude of ~10^-8 m. There is no clear boundary between classical and quantum mechanics, it's more of a continuous transition.
With that said, quantum mechanics can be used to predict phenomena on a larger scale, it's just that class... | 66 | |
[Marvel's Spider-Man] What do Daredevil and The Punisher think about Spider-Man's work? | In the beginning of the PS4 game, Spider-Man helps the police take down the Kingpin. Wilson Fisk is also known to be an enemy of Daredevil and the Punisher, so how would they react to the news of his arrest at the hands of Spidey? | 440 | Daredevil approves, as a backpack item you collect is a business card for his lawfirm. Murdoch had approached Peter in his civilian identity and offered his services in case they were ever needed on Spider-Man's behalf (this seriously shocks and confuses Peter).
In all honesty, Punisher would be disapproving of Spider... | 411 |
[Metal Gear Solid 3] Without saying the words nanomachines or parasites, why did The Fury explode into a fireball with a face that followed Snake and screamed at him? | 19 | The Cobra Unit members were able to harness certain supernatural abilities through very advance tech and expert skills(i.e the fear: controlling hornets with a device that emits pheromones and or a certain frequencies, the fear: using octocamo and very skilled acrobatics) also each member had small microbombs on their ... | 12 | |
Did Derrida write in an obscurantist way? (asking for people who have studied him) | I have a hard time understanding him. I'm not trying to insult him by asking this question, but I am genuinely curious. Sometimes I feel like he's trying to seem profound with convoluted sentences, but I'm probably not smart enough to understand. Can someone who has studied Derrida deeply share their thoughts? | 31 | I think a better way of considering his writing style is that it is confined to sometimes odd constructions by the way he thinks language works. He is also frequently mobilizing an entire contextual knowledge of a thinker (and sometimes implicitly—in these cases *maybe* it is fair to critique him as obscure, or unclear... | 35 |
[Pokemon] If Humans are "normal type" pokemon, could you catch a human? | 21 | Humans are not a normal type Pokemon. Humans aren't really Pokemon, even if humans and Pokemon have a common ancestor. Mammals and birds have a common ancestor too and they're both warm blooded vertebrates but we don't say that mammals ARE birds, we understand that there was divergent evolution.
Humans aren't Pokemon... | 18 | |
ELI5: what is the difference between a proposition and a proposal | 29 | "proposition" is a word with a lot of meanings.
It can mean proposal (especially in a political or business setting). But in an academic setting it's an opinion/judgement.
Generally the difference is that a proposition is a "This is how we should do it" while a proposal is "This is how we could do it" | 53 | |
ELI5:why can i read reddit for hours but can't focus on doing schoolwork or studying? | 268 | Quickly changing topics keep you interested because your brain is always "expecting the next thing to be even better". Delving deeper into a single topic is harder to stay interested in because your brain expects the next thing to be harder to understand. | 227 | |
[Neuroscience] Why can't we use adrenaline or some kind of stimulant to wake people out of comas? Is there something physically stopping it, or is it just too dangerous? | 11,181 | Adrenaline, cortisol, and other stimulants are like an alarm. They're a chemical signal that can quickly travel around the body.
People fall into comas for many reasons, but generally increasing the 'wake up' signal won't do anything. It's like a ringing alarm clock for a deaf person.
Most comas are caused by drug ov... | 11,721 | |
[ Marvel Comics ] Why don't king Tchala end the African poverty or at least hunger? | 40 | Because of a large variety of reasons, mostly because they were extremely isolationist - a depiction that carried over into the MCU. They were so isolationist that they weren't even allowing their own citizens to leave to other countries for education - T'Challa was legitimately the first Wakandan to study abroad. | 72 | |
Is there a fundamental and consistent difference between fields that follow the inverse-square law and fields that follow the inverse-cube law? | Inverse-square: gravity, electrostatics, etc.
Inverse-cube: magnetic | 97 | All three of the forces you mention are “fundamentally” inverse square forces, meaning that point sources produce 1/r^(2) fields.
All of these fields can be expressed in terms of potentials, and the potentials can be expanded in a multipole expansion. The multipole expansion is an infinite series consisting of monopol... | 109 |
CMV:Gender Studies is a Pseudoscience with a deep ideological bias and shouldn't be taught in publicly-funded Universities. | I freely admit that I have never taken any gender related course in university or any other education environment, so there will be things I'm not aware of.
But what I am aware of paints the picture I described in the title. For one, gender studies seem to be based in large part on Freudian psychoanalysis (this is acc... | 21 | In order for it to be a pseudoscience, Gender Studies would need to claim (wrongly) to be a science. Gender Studies departments by and large do not do this, both because it would be inaccurate (Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary field) and would be insulting to the non-scientific members of the field (such as thos... | 50 |
ELI5: How is an economy "stimulated", what does it mean to stimulate an economy, and what leads to inflation? | This might've been asked before but it's something I've never understood, so thought I might as well ask. | 34 | Two methods: fiscal policy (government decisions to tax more/less or provide more:less subsidies and payments to businesses or people) and monetary policy (a central bank managing interest rates). These days the big one is the latter.
All interest rates in a country (eg your interest rate on a line of credit, persona... | 22 |
ELI5: If electricity moves so fast, why does it take so long for phones to charge? | 189 | Because batteries do not store electricity.
They store chemicals. And when those chemicals react they MAKE electricity to power your phone.
Plugging your phone in doesnt fill your phone with electrity, its using the electricity to move the chemicals back to where they were.
And when that happens, the battery is able... | 566 | |
[The last of us] Is Ellie going to grow up fine anyway? | So Joel chooses to save the kid, yay him. However, it seems to me that what Ellie has is more of a resistance than an immunity. That wound wasn't healing, and looked pretty manky. And the fireflies found some spread of infection in her brain, just not as aggressive as normal, or enough to impair her faculties.
Yes, El... | 63 | The 'infection' in her brain is what's actually causing her complete immunity. It was caused by some kind of anomalous genetic interaction that occurred right after she was bitten. That's why the wound looks kinda gross - it's because the wound *did* fester for a bit before the mutation in her brain kicked in and gave ... | 50 |
CMV: Disability wage gap is a more serious and less mentioned topic than gender wage gap. | Disclaimer: I am not downplaying the importance of gender wage gap, I am merely stating that disability wage gap seems to be more serious --- if anything intersectionality would imply that different sorts of identities compound onto its social impacts.
​
I am a person with multiple chronic issues and have ... | 24 | Any studies on that topic would need to find and correct for some factor for the reasonability of "reasonable accomodations". Because disabled people not getting jobs that they just can't reasonably do isn't an serious failing of employment practices, just reality.
Did those studies you find do that? It seems like tha... | 33 |
ELI5: Why does feeling or hearing certain things, such as rubbing your nail on sandpaper, literally send a shiver down your spine? | 1,192 | Human hearing has evolved to be much more sensitive at certain frequencies (in particular the 1-4khz region). This is so that we can more clearly distinguish things like human speech, crying babies etc.
As a trade off of this, certain sounds that have their root frequency (lowest and generally loudest frequency in the... | 375 | |
ELI5: Why aren't electrical prongs hot when they're removed from an outlet? | If high amounts of energy are being conducted through these prongs, shouldn't prongs be glowing hot when they're removed? | 147 | Heating occurs when there's a significant amount of resistance.
Significant resistance can occur if the material you're using is a poor conductor, or if you're using a conductor that's physically too small.
In the case of the prongs of a plug, they're both made of metal (good conductor) and fairly large in size. Ther... | 224 |
[MCU] how many powered people are there in the MCU? | We know there’s enough for there to be a dedicated prison for them so presumably there are at least several thousand just in the US even with a relatively high rate of incarceration. Do we have any indication or guesses as to the total number of people with powers in the MCU both worldwide and in the US? | 38 | No way to know for sure. The phenomenon is widely enough known that people immediately understand when they encounter someone who is powered, but rare enough that it's still a surprise.
A couple of government agencies were tasked with cataloging them all. One terrorist organization specifically targeted them. At lea... | 26 |
Does the recipient of a heart transplant inherit the resting heart rate of the donor? | 59 | Only sort of. After a transplant, the heart is generally not connected to the nerves that regulate rate. But cardiac muscle is not like skeletal muscle, in that the nerves do not directly initiate contraction, they just speed it up or slow it down. The heart itself has autorhythmicity. Not connected to those nerves... | 24 | |
[The Midnight Sky] What the hell happened? | There aren’t many clues for this one but radiation is steadily advancing outwards from all the major urban centers on the planet. It’s so hopeless that the staff of an Arctic observatory is flying home to be with their loved ones for the end.
The radiation is projected to reach the Arctic station about 15 days after ... | 18 | It's Nevil Shute's *On The Beach* updated. Nukes probably, lots of 'em apparently, don't dwell on sciencey shit. The end of the world is just a MacGuffin for the story.
>!Two parents and a child on a fresh planet is still extinction.!< | 11 |
ELI5: Who or what determines a road's speed limit? | 1,283 | Who sets it, and puts up the roadsigns? Typically whatever governmental body is responsible for the roads in that area. In the U.S. most highways are managed at the state level, and local roads at the county/city level.
Sometimes there are laws that determine default speed limits; other times the relevant Dept. of Tra... | 421 | |
ELI5: how do animals with extremely acute hearing not get bombarded with loud noise all the time. | with my only frame of reference being my own hearing.. I struggle to grasp how this works. If you can hear a whisper across the room.. Shouldn't every sound in your immediate vicinity be blaring loud? Any insight would be appreciated. | 17 | Animals like dogs & cats have 'directional' ears, so if a sound is uncomfortably loud they can turn their ears away from the sound to help. They will also have ears that can 'adapt' to the ambient sound level better than ours. | 12 |
CMV: There is nothing wrong with non disabled actors playing mentally disabled characters. It’s actually essential for certain movies. | Sometimes I hear from comments online and even YouTube videos dedicated to the subject, that it is offensive for non-disabled actors (example: Daniel Day Lewis, Tom Hanks) to play disabled characters. Instead we should have disabled actors play these roles because they truly know what it is like- that is the argument. ... | 2,763 | Is it actually essential, or are studios just unwilling to provide accommodations for disabled actors because of the perceived cost?
The issue people have with non disabled people playing disabled characters is that there are so few opportunities and representation for actually disabled actors, and when a movie about... | 711 |
ELI5: How does a gun silencer work? | 431 | Ever open a soda can quickly and hear a pop? If you have, then you've no doubt tried opening it slowly and noticed that it's a lot quieter -- it just sort of hisses.
This is fundamentally how silencers work. The barrel in the silencer has a bunch of little holes that bleed gas into the body of the silencer. Inside ... | 516 | |
CMV: The left (particularly on reddit) should be universal in unequivocal condemnation of tankies and should reject them from all leftist spaces and movements, with no exceptions. | I've been on a pretty plodding journey to the left over the course of the last year or so, and one of my biggest hangups has been the left's acceptance of tankies.
For those that don't know, a tankie is an authoritarian leftist, often a Stalinist or Maoist, who sees the most abominable acts of the most abominable lef... | 46 | I think you just need to disengage a bit from the internet. I’ve been involved in left wing politics for 20 years and this is the first time I’ve ever heard the term tankie. It seems more like an internet comment phenomenon more than a real element of politics. | 39 |
ELI5: Why shouldn't you put hot water from a tap into your kettle to boil? | 16 | Hot water heaters hold water for long periods of time, and as such they often have buildup of various sediments and other contaminants that you really don't want to be ingesting on a regular basis.
Also, it fouls the flavor of the water. Especially if you have scale issues.
Take two cups. Fill one with hot water, fil... | 34 | |
CMV: I’m not happy with the political party I mostly support. I shouldn’t donate a dime to anyone until I am happier. | I am approaching this from a non-political perspective and I feel like this could be party agnostic, but I’m really not happy with the political party I have supported in the past. They are awful and disappoint me at every turn. Every election, they induce a “most important election of our lives” narrative, but don’t r... | 51 | If you wait until the general election to support candidates, you are too late to make any real change to your party. Changes to the party happen during the _primaries_, where multiple candidates within the party compete for the main nomination. _This_ is where new ideas are introduced and the party moves further lef... | 40 |
How does a vine searching for and object to climb “know” not to wrap around itself? | I’ve seen a time laps video of a climbing vine and as it circles around searching for something to climb it seems to run into a chute from itself. Upon interacting with itself it simply disengages and continues its search for another object.
How does it recognize itself? | 19 | There are surface proteins which sense when the vine is touching something. When it does it sets off a signal cascade which causes growth/elongation on the opposite side of the vine.
There are a number of processes at work, almost all of which are poorly understood and heavily researched. They also vary between orga... | 11 |
CMV: YouTube Kids should be based on a whitelist of approved channels. | You might have heard about the controversy associated with YouTube Kids, which has [frequently suggested bizarre and often disturbing and/or violent cartoons for children and parents.](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/9/16629788/youtube-kids-distrubing-inappropriate-flag-age-restrict) Very many of these cartoons show i... | 2,631 | I don't understand how your point about copyright is relevant. Whether or not something violates copyright (and whether or not the creator actually tries to get it taken down) and whether or not it's child-friendly are two completely unrelated things.
| 226 |
[TF2] in meet the heavy it's stated that the mini-gun cost 200 thousand dollars to fire per minute. is this just hyperbole or is the TF2 universe economy just super inflated? | 54 | Gray Mann has so much money he uses it as fuel for his robot army. The other two most influential CEOs in the world have decided to prioritize a massive stalemate for worthless pits of gravel. FDR perfected the modern staircase after losing his legs rocket jumping. It's safe to say people with influence over the eco... | 63 | |
ELI5: What makes a fake smile different from real one? | 68 | Humans are extraordinarily good at picking up very minute changes in facial expressions. Most of it happens unconsciously, that is to say automatically. Same kind of thing happens when you display emotions on your face. Tiny tiny muscles arrange the skin bits in very particular order to display an emotion, say a happy ... | 85 | |
ELI5: Why are bright white LED lights allowed on cars for use at night when white light reduces your ability to see in the dark? | 176 | Hm lots of misinformation here. First, the DOT doesn't approve headlights. There are SAE tests for legal headlights. If your product passes the tests, it is DOT compliant and can have the lettering on it. As far as LED headlights, they're just vastly superior. AAA just put out a study which showed you could see almost ... | 43 | |
[Harry Potter] Why keep certain creatures a secret from the non-magical population? | Why do wizards keep the existence of unicorns, dragons, hippogriffs, etc. a secret from the muggle population? Why aren't they just normal animals to humans? | 23 | Many of these animals have magical properties (unicorn blood's properties being the most obvious, but also dragon's breath, the fact that hippogriffs probably fly at least partially by magic since their actual proportions are impossible, etc.) and if muggles were to witness these magical properties, they would try to a... | 42 |
[Marvel] Can commands from The Purple Man/Kilgrave override someone’s physical disabilities? | If he orders someone to stand and they’re in a wheelchair, what happens? They can’t do it physically but is there something magical about his powers to force that person to find some fucked up way to stand? | 51 | No. His powers only work on the mind. So, if he tells someone in a wheelchair to stand up, they will attempt it and fall out of their wheelchair. However, he could tell them to abandon their wheelchair and crawl everywhere, which he would probably do because he’s the Purple Man. | 70 |
What would happen if I stuck a really long pole into a black hole? | Would the part that is in the event horizon break off if I pulled back on the pole? Would it get sucked in instantaneously or would it take time? | 23 | So here's you, chillin', hanging out *by some witchcraft* at rest relative to the black hole.
And not just any black hole, right? A *magic* black hole. A black hole that is not boiling and seething with a highly energetic stretched horizon.
You begin lowering your pole. Unseen by you, the stress on the pole begins to... | 46 |
How often do cancer cells develop in our body that self-terminate or are caught by the immune system before doing any harm? | 25 | We can estimate each parent line experiences cancer cells within 10-100 generations, depending on the cell type and risk factors. With each variable generation speed, you're looking at between 4,000 to 40,000 new cancer cells every day. | 23 | |
I would have thought that by now the optimum spout-shape (as on jug or kettle) is longsince known - that is, 'optimum' in terms of water falling cleanly from the spout & not dribbling back along the underside of it: so does anyone know whether such an optimum spout exists? | And if so, then why it's not so that _absolutely all_ spouts are made that shape.
I don't think such a spout-shape could be _calculated_ ... so I'm not asking for a _mathematical equation_ for the curve of it (unless it be a _parametrised empirical_ one). Also such a shape, if it does exist, has possibly been known f... | 51 | I suspect that an 'optimum pouring' spout might be impractical, since 'not dribbling back' can probably best be achieved with a sharp edge (fluids flowing along a smooth surface tend to adhere to it, whereas a sharp corner can break the adhesion). Depending on the material the container is made of, this would liable to... | 15 |
ELI5: How important is dust removal and how dangerous is room dust? | Aesthetics aside, how important is it to remove dust?
Since I was small, I was always told by my parents, that one has to remove the dust, because, of course, it looks cleaner, but also because othewise it's unhealthy.
How true is it though? I get that it might not be very healthy for the lungs to directly sniff in t... | 29 | some dust can be very dangerous, for example if you're doing renovations or construction and end up pulverizing cement, you should wear a mask because the dust fucks up your lungs. but regular household dust is harmless, it just looks bad | 18 |
CMV: I've seen a claim that calling out DUI checkpoints helps "deter" people from driving drunk. This makes no sense to me. | For the app description of one "Mr. Checkpoint" service (which has over 60k twitter followers and relays reports of checkpoints, DUI or otherwise), they claim that it helps to "deter DUI and promote public safety". I've seen people call out check points plenty, but this is the first time I've seen a dedicated service ... | 26 | I think the idea is that if there's a DUI checkpoint in the area that someone is planning on drinking in then they won't bother to take the risk of driving in that area in the first place instead of trying to avoid the checkpoint. Getting a DUI can be extremely harmful to someone's life (aside from the fact that drivin... | 18 |
CMV: Piracy as a "demo" is morally justifiable as long as you buy it or stop using it in a 'timely fashion'. | Pirating a game to see if you like it. Pirating a new version of Windows to see if you like changes. Download music (ok, you could just go to Youtube, but bare with me) is all morally justifiable if you're using it as a "demo" version and buy/uninstall it.
Many people claim that you're taking someones work and not c... | 49 | But what is a "timely fashion"? In the past, if you wanted to play a game, you had to buy it. Now you still have to, but if you want to try it out you can pirate it. You are still reaping the benefits of the labor of whoever made the game without compensating him/her... supposing you decide you're done with it after yo... | 16 |
[Star Wars] Was Darth Vader still attracted to women after the Mustafar incident? | He might still long for Padme but if he sees an attractive woman, would he check her out? | 46 | There's an instance in the Vader comic that's the closest we've seen to Vader getting presented with a romantic situation. Darth Vader is a guest at a planet's ballroom dance. There's a royal guy who keeps insisting that Darth Vader dance with his daughter. Darth Vader gets annoyed and says "I'll just dance with you br... | 77 |
ELI5: Why can metal go into commercial microwaves in restaurants but not my microwave at home? | 42 | SOME metal is microwave safe - Most is not. Rather than try to have home microwave users differentiate between good metal and bad metal, they just say don't use any metal, because the potential risk far outweighs the potential benefits of using metal in the microwave.
In professional kitchens, there are some metal ... | 34 | |
ELI5:Do donated organs age according to the donor´s age or do they adapt to the age of the new body? | 7,366 | Organs are made of cells, like pretty much the rest of your body.
A transplant procedure just hooks up the organ to the new body's blood supply (veins and arteries), so that the cells inside the organ can have oxygen and food, and basically survive and do their jobs. That's it.
There's no "adapting", the cells in ... | 6,435 | |
ELI5 What's the difference between page.site.com and site.com/page? | It seems like both are ways of having a sub-part of a website, but I'm not sure (from my non-web-savvy POV) what the difference is. | 23 | page.site.com is a subdomain. It acts like a top-level domain and can point to different web servers than other subdomains (for example, page1.site.com and page2.site.com can be on different servers).
site.com/page represents a directory (page) on the site.com server. So site.com/page1 and site.com/page2 are both on t... | 33 |
eli5: Why do humans find dangerous/deadly animals cute? | How is this explained biologically/psychologically, | 19 | Human beings have evolved to find babies cute. This makes us love babies and want to protect them, which leads to babies growing up with the support and help they need to become successful adults and have their own babies.
We recognize baby features as cute. Babies have big heads (in relation to their body size) and b... | 42 |
ELI5: How do smart watches and fitness trackers know when you've fallen asleep? | 17 | You don’t move much anymore and your heartbeat goes down. Both metrics such a device tracks.
It tracks your heartbeat over the day and thus knows your “at rest, but awake” value and the sleep value typically is even lower.
Possibly it also notices that you are laying down, which is another clue for sleeping.
So t... | 26 | |
[The Walking Dead] About the walkers they "kill".... | Whenever the group stay in places for a while (e.g the prison or more recently Alexandria) Would it not be a more viable option to spread corpses/walker blood around the walls? Haven't we learned that by covering yourself in walker blood and guts that they show absolutely no interest in you, why don't they cover their ... | 21 | The prison is big, way to big to cover all the outer walls (casue i assume you dont want the inner walls covered in blood), duye to lack of enough walkers and lack of time. Also, who would wanna go around, dragging zombie corpses (or harvesting them for blood) and paint the walls with rotten blood. The blood would rot ... | 26 |
ELI5: Why are carpet floors so ubiquitous in some countries? Are they worth all the extra hassle? | For an equivalent price, carpet brings more headaches than tile: stains are harder to clean, carpet wears down, fungus or other stuff can more easily grow in it, vacuum cleaning is mandatory—cannot just sweep a broom over it, cannot wash it with a mop.
Coming from a country where tile/hardwood is the absolute norm, I... | 36 | I'd say the main two reasons are warmth and comfort. It's much more pleasant to walk on without shoes/slippers because it's soft, and warm. It also keeps your room warmer since it helps further insulate the air from the cold ground (unless you have underfloor heating, of course). Lots if people also find it a makes for... | 46 |
[Star Wars] Why do the ion cannons on the Malevolence and the one used during the Battle of Hoth look so different? | 15 | One was built for use through an atmosphe and had to withstand frigid temperatures and snow, the other in the vacuum of space.
Additionally, the ground-based one had a steady power source while the ship-based one had to be charged.
Same tech, completely different environments. | 27 |
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