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Is the passage of time different at the quantum level. In other words if you or I were the size of an atom would we experience time differently? | 25 | The passage of time has little to do with size for non massive objects (such as planets, which is where gravity affects it significantly according to general relativity).
However, molecules and atoms tend to move quite fast.
The mean speed of Helium at 25 degrees celcius around 1000m/s, which although fast is about ... | 11 | |
ELI5: When we are drunk, why is it easier to focus with one eye instead of the two? | 16 | Both eyes need to be able to coordinate to function. Coordination goes out the window with alcohol leading many to cross their eyes or have a bit of a lazy eye when they normally wouldn't. Some may even have pro lems with eyes not focusing at the same time or at the same focal length, making things seem blurry or out o... | 21 | |
ELI5: How do the anti-theft systems at store exits/entrances work? | 18 | There are little tags inside the devices that emit a reply radio signal when they’re subjected to another, higher power radio signal on the correct frequency.
If you shoplift an item, this tag is still active and the sensors you walk through can detect it.
When you check out, the cashier runs your item over a devic... | 10 | |
[Star Trek] In TNG, could any of the bridge crew be speaking another language, and we wouldn't know it, due to the Universal Translator? | I was just wondering this. Could Picard be speaking French through the whole show? Could Counsellor Troi be speaking Betazoid or whatever her home planet language might be? Or, do you think English became the universal language of Earth and diplomacy at that point? | 21 | Standard military protocol would call for all persons onboard to speak a single language while on duty.
This will ensure that, in the event of an issue with the translator, communication will not be hampered. | 25 |
[The Mist] Is it a good idea to send the army into the Mist World? | One type of Mist Creature that our scientists have studied (a giant, centipede-like predator) turns out to secrete a type of fluid that can instantly heal all human diseases and infirmities.
The folks above me want to send the military into the Mist World and hunt a few of these enormous man-eaters and bring back thei... | 15 | We know very little, if anything, about the "mist world". We have seen done maybe the equivalent of an alien species opening a doorway to the arctic and killing some bears, and we have as much chance of figuring out how safe the alternate dimension is as those aliens do of figuring out earth.
Is the other dimension e... | 20 |
Why are red and purple "next to each other", if they come from different parts of the EM spectrum? | So, we can make colour wheels [like this one](http://www.pricingengine.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Color_Wheel.png), and red and purple are next to each other. How can this be so if they are on opposite ends of the visible light part of the EM spectrum? | 455 | the problem is that your premise, "if they come from different parts of the EM spectrum" is incorrect. color does not come from wavelength in any meaningful sense. color is something that happens in your brain (in the visual part of the brain), while EM wavelength is a property of light, out in the world, outside your ... | 260 |
ELI5: Why does my mouth literally feel like it's on fire after I eat something really hot? | 27 | There are no tastebuds on your tongue for spicy foods unlike sweet or salty. Spicy is the reaction of nerves in your mouth to capsaicin which makes stuff spicy. The nerves in your mouth are there to react to heat, knowing when stuff is too hot to eat. These nerves react to capsaicin in the same way. Basicly these nerve... | 16 | |
[Purge/Everything] How would the purge play out in various fictional universes? | 19 | To the Punisher, Christmas has come early.
Batman has to work overtime in Gotham.
Any Predators get a lot more trophies than usual.
Skynet started the whole thing as a way to increase Sarah Connor's chances of being murdered.
Xavier's mansion gets a lot of attacks by Friends of Humanity. | 21 | |
How do animals know to avoid eating poisonous animals? | I know that animals have been known to associate colorful animals as being poisonous but how did this come about? I would find it hard to believe that the animals would be able to figure out that the colorful frog or whatever is what caused them to be sick or die and then also be able to pass this information onto othe... | 15 | Consider two birds, one which will happily eat any color of frog, and another which has some strange aversion to red frogs for some unknown reason. He doesn't avoid red frogs because he knows they're dangerous, or for any other rational reason, he just doesn't like them. We'll assume that these preferences are heredita... | 10 |
ELI5: The discovery of 7 Earth-like planets. TRAPPIST-1 is a star 39 light years away. And scientists found 7 planets the size(ish) of Earth orbiting it? Or am I completely lost? What am I missing here? | 70 | You got it right. 7 planets roughly Earth-sized (+ or - about 25%), 3 of them in what they think would be the habitable zone for life like we have on Earth. The star is an ultra-cool red dwarf, which is about 8-11% the size of our Sun, and has a surface temperature about 41% that of the Sun.
Because of how close the... | 42 | |
How is it that you can compress TBs of data into small easy to move zip files? Shouldn't the data take up the same amount of memory all the time? | I don't get how you can make data take up less space even though it is the same amount of information. | 18 | Imagine you had a file which consisted of a 4TB long string of "1s". You could compress that file into the following line:
"This file consists of a 4TB long string of 1s"
Basically compressing a 4TB file into something under 50bytes.
It's a silly example, of course, but the idea is that compression algorithms look f... | 20 |
I believe that Pope Francis is a PR tool and does not represent any real change in the direction of the Catholic church. CMV | Let me make clear that I believe that Francis himself is **NOT** a fraud. He seems sincere in his desire to do good things in the world. He seems like a truly kind and Christ-like man, and it's good to see that there's still a place in the high levels of church leadership for someone who is evidently not a hypocrite.... | 634 | The Catholic Church is incredibly cautious in what it says about faith and doctrine because its words become the beliefs of its members. This is especially true where their policy leans more liberal. If they make a mistake in being too conservative with their doctrine, then they can always lighten up, but if they are... | 225 |
[LotR] Would I turn invisible if I ate the One Ring? | 233 | The ring is in constant physical contact with the outside of the ringbearer's body and does not turn invisible unless specifically worn in the way a ring (that kind of ring any way) is designed to be worn, on the finger. The same should apply if it is touching the inside(s) of your body. | 186 | |
Why do we (generally) love when stories come “full circle”? | Hello all,
I teach a college writing course, and when I teach students to write personal essays, I advise them to reincorporate an aspect from earlier in their essay into their conclusion.
For example, if a student brings up a metaphor/symbol (e.g. a rubik’s cube) early in their writing, I advise them to invoke it ag... | 47 | We like it when "we are in on it". It's a sense of being a part of the group. We are deeply deeply social animals. It's why children will watch a show over and over again because they like to be "in on the know." | 23 |
ELI5: How is oxygen (O2) odorless but ozone (O3) smells and is hazardous? | 20 | O2 and O3 have different chemical structure (bond angle, length, spatial orientation etc) which give them different physical and chrmical properties.
Just like graphite, diamond and fullerene are pure Carbon but have drastically different properties. | 39 | |
[General Vampires] Can a vampire just ask for permission to enter at gun point? | As in tap on your door/window jab a gun in your face and demand you let me in.
The same technique could be done for windows. | 82 | I know people love to rules-lawyer this kind of thing, but you're looking at the wrong set of rules.
Vampires are missing their reflections. It's not about how their undead skin reflects light, or silver...it's because they're a cursed and unnatural *thing* with no place in the world. They don't show up on cameras b... | 48 |
[Avatar] Is Ba Sing Se self-sufficent? | Do they rely on any kind of imports? A city that size one would think relies on all sorts of resources to import, food, wood, metal, fuel for fires, etc. Do they need anything or does everything come from within the outer walls? | 24 | Surprisingly, the answer is yes.
You might notice that the outer ring of Ba Sing Se is almost rural, with expansive farmland, mountains, and regional features like Lake Laogai. These resources allow Ba Sing Se to be self-sustaining. | 48 |
Has there been any refinements to existing theory or new hypotheses since the Higgs mass was found to be 125 GeV? | 36 | The mass is a free parameter in the Standard Model (SM). We now know this parameter more precisely - you could call this a refinement. It also has an influence on other processes which we can now predict with better accuracy.
Some models beyond the SM had quite clear predictions for the mass of the Higgs boson, these ... | 12 | |
[Spiderverse][General Multiverse Scifi] I'm Tim, a file clerk. I fall into one of those dimension-collider doohickeys like from Spiderverse. Are there a bunch of other "themed" versions of me from different realities? Is there Noir Tim and Anime Tim and Cowboy Tim or whatever? | 564 | Yes, absolutely.
Noir Tim might not be a detective. He's probably still a file clerk. But he's a probably a file clerk in a fedora and suit that talks about dames unironically.
The tims of the multiverse might not be as cool as the spidermans of the multiverse, but they'll have the same variants as everyone else. So ... | 488 | |
I believe black history month is unnecessary and should not be officially recognised. CMV | There is no denying the contributions and sacrifices black people have made to building society in the countries that celebrate BHM. However, black people are (and have been for a while) subject to exactly the same laws as all other nationalities.
I'm not saying that their troublesome past should not be taught. I simp... | 425 | Black History Month isn't about elevating black folks and that's where this goes wrong. It's only about recognizing a marginalized and oppressed group of people who continue to feel the legacy of formal systems of racism. The whole idea of BHM is to make sure that black people's plight is not forgotten so that we can e... | 236 |
[Hellraiser] "It is not hands that call us..." According to Pinhead, they ignored Tiffany since she solved the box but didn't call them, Channard did. Is there any way of solving the Lament Configuration and not being dragged to Hell? | During one scene in the second film, Dr. Channard handed one of his patients at the mental institution he ran, Tiffany the Lament Configuration since he knew from her disorder that she would be able to solve it. But when she did so, the Cenobites turned on him instead since while Tiffany solved the puzzle it was ultima... | 427 | If you want to stay out of Hell, your best bet is to be as boring as possible for the Cenobites. Tiffany wasn't rejected because she was innocent, but because she was nearly catatonic and wouldn't be able to appreciate the divine suffering they offered.
The original Chatterer was a child, and in the comics they've ta... | 225 |
[Star Wars] What did Palpatine and the Jedi think of other force sensitive groups? | Were there even any? Did the Jedi mind if other groups existed that studied and used the force? Did Palpatine want to destroy them? This is a question about both canon and EU. | 39 | There were hundreds of known other traditions. Mostly they didn't bother each other (as most traditions are far more localized - most of them present really only in a single system or even just on a single planet - than the Jedi and Sith), though in some instances there was some resentment between groups regarding recr... | 49 |
Why is it that when cats have different breeds, they all kind of have the same body type, but when it comes to dog breeds they have much more drastic differences? | 40 | Dogs have more drastic body size/shape differences than any other mammalian species. This is because as human's oldest companion, they've been bred and domesticated for whatever purpose humans wanted for millennia. So you have farm dogs, guard dogs, pet dogs, hunting dogs...all carefully designed by humans over thousan... | 44 | |
[Thor movies] Isn't Odin really quick to toss Thor out and strip him of his power? | Thor messed up bad. Asgard doesn't want a war right now. People are going to die because of his recklessness.
That being said, kicking out your son (and most powerful weapon) on the eve of major war when you're about to literally pass out.
Odin is many millennia old. He should have known better. Is he just a s... | 101 | Odin was pretty quick to lock up Hela, too. Loki spent time in prison as well.
Asgardian justice is swift.
But regarding Thor, he was useless to Odin at that point in time. He was too quick to rush into battle, too unconcerned about the potential consequences of his actions, and willing to jeopardize the health and w... | 125 |
[Star Wars] How did Yoda and Obi-Wan think that Luke could defeat a supremely powerful Sith Master and Sith Lord? | 37 | I think it was more a case of therr really is no one else left to even try. Obi-Wan was dead, and beyond Giving some advice, unable to do anything really. And Yoda was at the end of his life, while very knowledgeable and wise, at his weakness point ever.
Frankly, they didn't have any other options. | 64 | |
What is the difference between magnetic and electric fields? | What exactly is the difference between magnetic and electric fields? I’ve got the impression it’s basically the same thing accept electric fields are produced only by electricity and magnetic fields are produced by magnets
(and electricity?). Could someone just explain it simply, preferably without using too complicate... | 16 | They are closely related, and even transform into each other under changes of reference frame. But there are some important differences.
Assuming static fields (ones that don't depend on time), electric fields are sourced by **charges**, while magnetic fields are sourced by **currents**. (If you allow time-varying fie... | 35 |
CMV: Custody of a child should be defaulted to 50/50 legal custody regardless of marital status. | In the US, If the couple is unmarried, legal and physical custody of a child is defaulted to the mother, and a father has to petition the court for custody and pay thousands of dollars to prove he should be allowed to be a part of his child’s life. Regardless of whether paternity is already established or he’s on the b... | 26 | As long as paternity is established this isn’t true. The father has just as much right as the mother to take the child and refuse to return it. If the father did that the mother would have to petition the court for custody, just like the father would if the mother refused to give the father visitation. | 21 |
Which programming language is recommended for novice? | Hello, I am a 40 year old man, in midlife boredom. I always wanted to learn a computer language but never got time. This year, I decided no matter what, I am going to learn a computer language. However I am too confused about it. Please help..
[edit] Thank you all kind redditors for giving such wonderful advise. I am g... | 26 | I would say python.
Would strongly recommend against Java as the first one. It's very verbose and the static typing is only an advantage when you get a bit more advanced.
Alternatively JavaScript, later add on Typescript but it's optional. | 23 |
Since radioactive material is constantly decaying will there be a day in which there is no more radioactive material on earth? | Excluding artificially enriched radioactive isotopes. | 508 | **Short answer:** Certain isotopes will go extinct, but others are constantly being replenished.
**Long answer:** For example, the uranium in the earth is left over from when the earth formed, and the amount of U-235 is decaying with a half-life of 703.8 million years. Admittedly, you'd have to wait a really really l... | 193 |
ELI5: Why can't we save the North Korean people? | I was just thinking, the UK and USA have intervened in Other situations where there has been worry about the lives of people in that country. Is it really all about oil? Do they really not care about the people suffering there?
Edit: thank you all for you're brilliant explanations. I understand why we won't interfere,... | 27 | Because North Korea has the largest artillery force in the world scattered along its border aimed at Seoul. It's probably the most credible and effective deterrent in the world next to the US and Russian nuclear arsenals. Any military action would result in the destruction of a densely populated city that is one of the... | 38 |
ELI5: What causes the jumping feeling in your stomach when you go down a quick hill while driving? | 15 | Your innards/gut is used to gravity. It doesn't have the normal sensory nerves that your skin has.
Upon traversing a sudden drop/hill, for microseconds you experience a "less than 1g" environment.
Your body reacts but bones and muscle react differently than inner squishy, liquidy guts.
They probably rise a bit and r... | 11 | |
ELI5: Why do white people have so many different hair colors (blonde, red, brown, black) while all other races all have black hair? | 220 | Because the genes that cause dark skin and dark hair easily override toe genes that don't produce as much melanin.
White people, practically by definition, don't produce as much melanin, therefore allowing hair color traits that require less melanin to be visible to show up. | 126 | |
ELI5: how does bug spray kill bugs? | So when the pest exterminator comes to treat my house on a quarterly basis, he sprays this liquid sparingly on the outside parameter of my home. Sometimes (not often) I will find a roach inside my house BUT IT’S ALWAYS DEAD! How does the pest spray work? The pest spray can’t be wet when they walk through it because I f... | 16 | It depends on the specific chemical, but a lot of them are some form of insect-specific nerve agent. There are a variety of modes of action, but the most common (afaik) is inhibition of acetylcholinesterase, preventing nerve signals from turning off. This is the same mechanism of action as sarin gas, but the chemicals ... | 11 |
How are stocks basically at an all-time high when the economy is still so sluggish? | Pretty much all indices are showing the value of stocks at an all-time high, yet economic growth is minimal and forecasts are equally bleak.
Is that kind of relative growth inevitable, regardless of economic performance? In 30 years, even if we are in the midst of a recession again, will the new base level for the ... | 65 | Stock prices are based on what people think the future of the economy is like, not the present. The price of a corporation's stock is determined by the expected value of its future profits.
This doesn't mean that people's expectations about the future, as reflected by stock values, are right. Stock owners might be ove... | 36 |
[Star Wars] How much did Savage Opress's intelligence decrease after being transformed and why was that acceptable? | Wouldn't a smarter assassin be more useful? | 34 | Opress wasn't a tactical assassin, he was a lethal weapon. Point him at the threat and watch him bulldoze through it.
His raw strength and ability to overpower most resistance was something Dooku was heavily interested in, which is why the Night Sisters used him for their plan. If he was smarter he might have conside... | 20 |
[Mad Max] From the perspective of the people telling the stories of Max, is the wasteland more stabilized and less terrifying now? | I know the Road Warrior has the narrator imply things were way worse in Max's time | 38 | It depends. Got better for some people but Max is just one dude and Australia is a big place.
Besides nothing lasts forever, there will always be another toe bitter or another master blaster or another immortan joe. | 28 |
[LOTR]How would a leader of Men actually use the One Ring to try to defeat Sauron or other enemies if all it does when putting it on is make you invisible? | Say the Fellowship changed their plan and Boromir was to use the Ring to save Gondor and defeat Mordor, like what Sauron thought Men would do. How exactly would he try to do so? Does he put it on his finger or keep it off when leading his troops? Does the simple act of him having it increase his army's morale? | 70 | The Ring is a tool of domination. A sufficiently powerful being can use it to dominate the wills of others, especially those others that are wearing a Ring of Power, but also those that are not to a lesser degree. If Boromir brought it to Gondor and either he or Denethor successfully used it in the war, it would allow ... | 68 |
Is there any proof that a computer from the 21st century can allow a socialist, centrally planned economy to work? | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards\_a\_New\_Socialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_New_Socialism)
The book outlines in detail a proposal for a complex planned socialist economy, taking inspiration from [cybernetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics), the works of [Karl Marx](https://en.wikiped... | 70 | The problem that markets solve is "What is this thing worth?". Central planning fails because it can't set prices because it doesnt know what things are worth. Putting a computer on it just makes it a faster, more efficient, super central planning that still doesnt know what things are worth. | 171 |
Rail gun technology for space travel... | Not to get *into* space. But would it be possible to utilize rail gun technology *in* space?
Say we had a large system orbiting the planet a la ISS. Would it:
a) be possible to use the technology to "fire" landers/orbiters towards other planets/moons? Manned crafts?
b) if it is possible, would there be any benefit ... | 33 | Would it be possible to? Sure. Not with the current ISS, though. The issue is Newton's third law: it takes a lot of energy to get something to the Moon, and the launch platform is going to lose that much energy in the process (because of the way orbits work, you can't fire it so that the ISS would gain energy, either).... | 27 |
How do Dogs Tell Real People's Voices Apart From TV Voices? | For example, my dogs. They bark pretty much at the sound of an unrecognized voice. They don't have to see the person, they just hear someone unfamiliar and start barking and run to them. But then when the TV is on or something, and someone is talking on the show, they don't even bother. Why is this? Does it sound diffe... | 46 | Televisions use a frequency range for human ears. The range that usually comes from your TV will be between 20Hz to 18Khz, well within the human hearing range of about 12Hz to 20Khz. These items were made for our ears.
Dogs, however, have a much wider range of roughly 40 Hz to 60 kHz. This is beyond a human range in b... | 40 |
Was Nietzsche really so bad? | So my philosophy teacher started talking about Nietzsche lately. And she is hating him hard. She even boiled him down to 7 Anti's:
Anti-Democratic, Anti-feminist, Anti-Socialist (which is bad apparently), Anti-intellectual and another 3 "Anti" that she didn't talk about yet.
The way she puts it is just dripping with di... | 47 | Was Nietzsche, the human being who lived in Germany and was born in 1844 those things? The signs pretty much point to yes. Is the Nietzschean *philosophy* necessarily opposed to all of those things? That's a question with a much longer and more complicated history. A lot of people thought the answer was yes in the earl... | 46 |
How can I as a layperson get better at judging whether a scientist is
trustworthy? | What parameters are important when judging a scientist's trustworhiness?
There may be a better word than trustworthiness. By trustworthiness I mean what it says in the first two lines of the Wikipedia article:
"Trustworthiness is a moral value considered to be a virtue. A trustworthy person is someone in whom you ca... | 27 | 1. Are they an actual research scientist? Put their name into Google Scholar. They should have many publications including some that have been cited dozens or hundreds of times.
2. Are they actually talking about their field of expertise? A nuclear physicist is not trustworthy when talking about disease resistance.
T... | 29 |
What subfields of Economics is most used in Economics Consulting work? | Can someone tell me which subfields in Economics are need or most used in Economics Consulting work? | 23 | I interviewed and got an offer at Compass Lexecon, one of the best economic consulting firms, and have talked to many seniors who work in the field.
A lot of the work in economic consulting involves dealing with competition authorities, e.g. evaluating the impact of a proposed merger, or clearing a company accused of... | 24 |
If rabies is virtually 100% fatal and humans have a vaccine, why is it not common practice to give every human a rabies vaccine? | 64 | The rabies vaccine has a pretty high rate of side effects, and for most people it's really not needed. The only people who are vaccinated as a preventive measure are veterinarians, spelunkers (risk of rabid bats), or people traveling to areas where rabies is a problem. If you don't have an imminent need for the vacci... | 108 | |
CMV: We should all stop using the word "hot" when we mean spicy! | We've somehow allowed ourselves to take the word hot, which tells you that something has a high temperature, and allowed it to take on the secondary meaning of being spicy.
There's hot wings, hot sauce, hot peppers, the word has become too ambiguous for us to use it conveniently anymore.
How often have you had this... | 34 | it's because the nerves triggered by spicy things are the same as those triggered by temperature.
> The burning and painful sensations associated with capsaicin result from its chemical interaction with sensory neurons. Capsaicin, as a member of the vanilloid family, binds to a receptor called the vanilloid recepto... | 21 |
Why are protons and electrons not pulled together by each other? | 61 | They are, that is why atoms form: The electrons become bound to the positive charge of the nucleus. This happens because opposite charges attract. Now, they don't crash together because quantum mechanics restricts what kinds of orbits are allowed. Though take the word "orbit" lightly as electrons don't orbit in the sam... | 92 | |
ELI5: If cooking raw meat kills the bacteria how come cooking food that is spoiled still makes you sick? | 46 | In some cases it does not, for the reason you cite. However, if bacteria or mold have been growing for some time, they may have been excreting toxic waste products. These just sit there being poisonous, even if you kill the bacteria or mold. | 63 | |
Why does ice form on the surface of spaceships right after launch? | Is it even ice?
Edit: thank you for the kind responses! You guys and girls are great! | 349 | The ice layer does not form *right after launch* but *shortly before...*
This typically and only happens with cryogenic stages, which are filled with liquid hydrogen and/or liquid oxygen propellants shortly before launch. Extreme cooling down of the stage's outside surface makes air moisture condense and freeze on th... | 140 |
How do we determine the age of the universe? | My understanding is the oldest light we can see is 14+ B years old...
Since the universe is expanding, is it possible "older light" than the oldest light we see has already moved beyond a cosmic horizon, forever too far away?
I'm sure there is an answer to this but I am curious.
Thanks! | 30 | We can see as far back as light has had a chance to travel. The CMB is the cosmic microwave background noise of the Big Bang which happened everywhere in the universe at once. So we can literally “see” how oldish the universe is.
However, there is definitely more universe than we can see. But anything farther than wha... | 17 |
Why does a half dozen eggs cost almost as much as a dozen? | 44 | Two potential reasons, which may be interlinked.
1. The marginal cost to extra eggs is very low therefore moving from 6 to 12 eggs costs little in terms of extra materials or transport costs
2. Supermarkets overprice the half-dozen eggs to induce customers to buy the dozen as it's better value.
I'd bet it's more li... | 70 | |
[MCU] Was death of Odin the real cause why Thanos finally decided to actively look for Infinity Stones? | 83 | No, despite being a popular fan theory there is nothing in-universe to confirm that Thanos was waiting for Odin, Ego, and/or the Ancient One to die first. All three of them were still alive when Thanos sent Loki and his army after the Tesseract in 2012 (at which point he already possessed the Mind Stone) and in 2014 w... | 122 | |
Why do galaxies collapse into disks, but stars and planets collapse into spheres? | 15 | One way to answer your question is that stars *don't* collapse into spheres. Stars collapse from a cloud of gas and dust, and while most of that goes into the central spheroid (the star), there's a lot left over which collapses into a disk, and it is from this disk which planets are made.
The difference between the sp... | 14 | |
If the world's population were half of it's current number, would the average person be wealthier? | Would the average wealth increase, as there would be less people to distribute things to? Putting it in an other way, would decreasing the population actually help us? | 54 | If you would snap your finger and cut the population in half, there would be a somewhat brief period where there is more stuff to go around.
But at the end of the day, you can only consume what you produce, cutting production in half cuts consumption in half, but of course because we also cut people in half, the per c... | 84 |
Why does the shadowed part of the moon appear to be invisible even during the day? Wouldn't we see some faint part of it? | 85 | If you look closely at the moon at night, you may be able to see the circle be completed by a faint glow. That is earthshine -- sunlight that has bounced off the earth, illuminating the shadowed (night) side of the moon.
During the day, however, our atmosphere scatters so much blue light at us that it all but drowns ... | 51 | |
ELI5 : How is "corrected vision" is tested and why isn't it always 20/20 if it's corrected? | Okay so I am researching a health regulation for a friend of mine and it says your corrected vision needs to be less than 3 diopters. Now considering that a 20/20 vision would be 0 diopters, how can even a corrected vision could be less than perfect? Why is it considered "corrected" even though the patient can't see pe... | 24 | It’s tested with those letter charts, to see if you can read the finest lines as well as someone with 20/20.
Some people with horrifically bad 20/200 vision are just too far out from normal to be corrected completely through any traditional means, but bringing them down to 20/40 will improve quality of life considerab... | 34 |
[General] Why is it often said that if a hero kills a villain, they're every bit as horrible as the villains themselves? | I'm fairly certain most would say that there is an obvious and massive difference between villains who massacre countless innocent people for kicks or in pursuit of selfish gain, vs heroes who kill villains to keep such mass losses of life from happening. | 198 | Generally, there's four reasons. Descide for your self if any have merit.
One- some people do think killing is always wrong, no matter what. You can disagree, but some people do think that.
Two- often, this comes up when the villain is, at least temporarily, defeated or immobilized. Hence, it's no longer killing a th... | 263 |
ELI5: How did they fit open world games like Zelda and the original Final Fantasy into NES cartridges | With some basic Googling It looks like that the max size was around 512 KB. How is this even possible to fit games of this size onto such little memory? What is this magic?
Edit: Wow, this absolutely blew up. Thank you everyone for the detailed answers. Several people have linked the Morphcat Games video which I w... | 11,754 | The game is a grid. Legend of Zelda is 16 screens wide by 8 screens tall. And each screen is a grid of 11x16 tiles. Now let's say there are 16 different types of tiles, then you only need 4 bits of information for each tile, which means the entire overworld of zelda is only 11kb.
But 11kb is a lot in the 1980's. T... | 6,616 |
If we shot Jupiter and Saturn into the sun, roughly how much longer would the sun undergo fusion before turning into a red giant? | Both Saturn and Jupiter are composed primarily of hydrogen and hydrogen is the main element 'used' by the sun to sustain fusion. If both Saturn and Jupiter were shot into the sun and they were 'absorbed' cleanly by the star, how much longer than normal would the sun undergo fusion before it turns into a red giant?
I'm... | 35 | You've got it backwards. You want to take mass *away* from the sun to make it live longer. The more massive a star is, the shorter its lifetime. This happens because the extra gravitational pressure from added mass increases the rate of fusion in the core a lot, so even though there's more hydrogen/helium, you burn thr... | 52 |
ELI5: Why is it when you touch the metal part of a plugged in phone charger you don’t get shocked? | I’m confused why when I touch the tip of my plugged in my phone charger it doesn’t shock me. | 13,446 | Because it's an absolutely tiny voltage--the charger is probably only providing about 4V, which isn't much more than the batteries in a torch, which similarly wouldn't be able to give you a noticeable shock. (Even the more potent 9V batteries won't shock you if you touch the terminals with your skin--your tongue, on th... | 5,762 |
CMV: Bounty hunters at their current iteration should be outlawed. | In a lot of states the training requirements for becoming a bounty hunter are laughable. Their purpose entails that they will be in contact with people who already took steps to evade law enforcement, therefore, are more likely to be dangerous than the general public. I'm not against having bounty hunters that are held... | 140 | Bounty hunters are not Law Enforcement. They, for the most part do not carry firearms.
They're not really bounty hunters anymore, they're a bail bondsman.
They are individuals hired by a bail company to find people that skip out on bail bonds issued by that company.
I think your understanding of what bounty hunters... | 106 |
ELI5: How is holding your pee (which is considered bad) any different from when you're sleeping and your body does that for you? | 60 | Your body doesn't (typically) hold your urine to dangerous levels while you're asleep automatically. That's why you wake up needing to pee. Or some people piss themselves. Holding your urine an excessively long time isn't comparable to going to sleep. It's comparable to waking up when you need to pee, then holding ... | 52 | |
[Harry Potter] A highly contagious disease that affects only wizards and is incurable by magic afflicts the wiziarding community at large. At what point would they set aside their own fear and pride and seek out the assistance of muggles in curing their affliction? | 19 | How would muggles be able to help if it only affects wizards anyway?
The wizarding community would surely do the logical thing and put their faith in alredy existing institutions like St. Mungo's, who have several hundred years of experience in treating injuries, instead of introducing completely unknown variables ... | 25 | |
ELI5 How does ant intelligence work | are the individual ants smart or is it the queen or do they like combine intelligence or something | 16 | They don't really have a "hive mind" like you might read about in fiction. Or at least, it's not psychic powers.
Each individual ant is really just a machine. It's like they're running a program. This isn't unique to ants, all insects are basically just machines in terms of their intelligence.
That program makes the... | 32 |
ELI5: should cleaning products be applied directly to the dirty surface, or to the cleaning impliment? | Like windex and a towel for example. Mostly I spray it on the window, but does it work better if you spray it on the towel? Same thing for dish soap, should you put it on each dish, or will applying to the sponge be enough? | 22 | It’s better to spray the cleanser upon the surface to be cleaned.
The cleaning implement is absorbent. So applying cleanser unto it does not guarantee that all the applied cleanser will touch the surface to be cleaned. That amount of cleanser will be wasted. | 11 |
[Daredevil] why is everyone a martial arts expert? | 4th wall I know that it makes for good fight scenes but I was wondering if there's an in-universe explanation. | 37 | The characters displaying prowess in the MCU Daredevils series are either members of the Hand, an elite shadowy ninja faction, <stuff that will be revealed in the Iron Fist series>, or were trained by Stick, a dude with serious beef against the Hand. | 22 |
CMV: God is a horrible being | Im, going to talk about the Christian God in this post. Obviously there are many different gods and many different religions but this is the one on the most educated on.
So some of the dick-headed things that God has done:
He has wiped out all of his people for not being dedicated to him *multiple times* in horrib... | 17 | Your post is predicated upon your imperfect, human understanding of god.
By definition if god does something it is *the definition of the nature of the universe.* If famine happens and god says "It's not dickish" then by definition of existing as is it's not dickish.
The issue stems from the fact that your entire ca... | 12 |
ELI5: How can fire close wounds, and how does fire/heat disinfect? | 17 | Cauterization is not like it is in movies or TV. Yes, heating an *instrument* can sterilize it by physically destroying infectious pathogens from intense heat.
In the body, the intense heat can stop bleeding by physically burning the tissue and clotting the blood. This causes *extensive* tissue damage.
When done by a... | 33 | |
ELI5:Why you can put in the recycling bin same files with the same name but you cannot do that in any other folder ? | 60 | The recycling bin is a "virtual" folder that shows a list of deleted files that can be undeleted. Deleted files aren't actually *moved* in to a different folder: they stay where they were, they're just *marked* as deleted. The recycling bin is a "view" that lets you see all the deleted files in one place. | 89 | |
[Jurassic Park/World films] We have footage of several unfortunate people being swallowed whole by large dinosaurs. How long did it take them to die? | Throughout the various documentaries showcasing the disasters at Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, we see several instances of humans being swallowed alive by enormous dinosaurs. How long did it take those poor people to die? Would they still have been alive when they reached the creatures' stomach? | 26 | It depends on how much chewing a dinosaur would do before swallowing. Anyone who got eaten by a T-rex or their equivalents probably died before reaching the stomach.
The poor assistant who got over killed into the pleaseeasaur if she didn't break her neck from the pterodactyls probably survived until hitting the stom... | 25 |
[Star Wars] Why do X-Wings even have hyperdrives? | X-Wings are equipped with hyperdrives, and yet they are supremely un-equipped for long trips. Hyperspace travel isn't instantaneous, it can take days or longer (despite--and so sorry for breaking the fourth wall here, but can't help it--what Episode V would make you think). The fighters are not equipped with any kind... | 77 | X-wings are medium range fighters meant to be able to execute missions independent of a mothership.
The hyperdrive allows them to jump in, commit an attack as a squadron with no other support and jump out. It's the perfect craft for a rebellion whose main strategic attacks will be hit-and-run raids against a superior ... | 164 |
[Mass Effect] How would you defeat or stalemate the reaper threat? | Imagine current day humanity discovers that the reapers exist and are going to start another cycle, cleansing our galaxy of all space faring species, including us. What can we possibly do with the following years to prep?
25 years
50 years
100 years
200 years
500 years
1000 years
Would we attempt to build stupid... | 19 | In the games, there's a news article about a species that had just gotten roughly 20th Century Earth equivalent space travel (ie, maybe a trip to the moon or two, probes in their solar system, that's about all), but lucked into first contact. They had just been invited to send an ambassador to the Citadel when the Reap... | 38 |
ELI5: Why are the psychological symptoms of autistics so heavily reinforced through accomodation when many other psychological disorders are dealt with by trying to normalise the sufferer, such as vehimently contradicting schizophrenic delusions? | 29 | Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder, not a psychological disorder. They are accommodated in the same way as giving someone with paralysed legs a wheelchair is accommodating them: it's the only thing that works to improve their lives. Of course there are therapies that can help someone with autism to improve their q... | 48 | |
I keep hearing more and more about solar flares/ storms - Are they a legitimate concern? What more can you tell me about this? | A friend sent me this story today....Solar storm headed toward Earth may disrupt power
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SCI_SOLAR_STORM?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-03-07-11-31-52
so I guess it kind of made me worry? | 24 | Solar storms are only worrisome to electronics and communications. A severe enough storm can disrupt the power grid, burn out sensitive components in satellites, etc.
The only thing you should worry about is where to go to get the best view of the amazing and beautiful auroras they can produce. | 12 |
A short text for freshman students to read… | Any idea for a short, accessible text to read with freshman humanities students on their very first week? I’m just starting out as a lecturer and looking for something that can provoke discussion among students about how university education/learning may differ from their prior education, what are the goals of higher e... | 29 | I don’t have a specific suggestion, but ideally whatever they read will including helping them recognize that learning the material is *their responsibility.* and privilege. I’ve got way too many classmates who simply don’t understand this. They haven’t made the switch, and no one is forcing them to make the switch, fr... | 20 |
ELI5: why does every element want to be iron? | I was just reading about how the sun isn’t “burning” so much as constantly exploding and sucking in more hydrogen to explode more. In the article is said that every element wants to be iron, so when an element is higher than iron, it goes through fission, and when it’s lower than iron it goes through fusion. Up until i... | 19 | Light elements release more energy when they fuse than is required to fuse them, and heavy elements release more energy when they split than is required to split them. Iron is in the middle of that.
If you keep fusing elements on the core of a star, you eventually get to iron, but then the process runs out. Similarly,... | 30 |
[Marvel] how can doctor strange see all the possible alternate realities where thanos wins/loses if the TVA keep the timeline the same across every universe | If there is a flaw in my knowledge please let me know | 33 | It’s worth noting that the TVA is mostly concerned with Variances that lead to changes regarding the eventual birth and rise of He Who Remains. They’re not concerned with *every* variable, just the ones that interfere with the so-called Sacred Timeline.
Variable events which do not ultimately affect the existence of H... | 36 |
[Star Wars / The Mandalorian] A question about Boba Fett? | Why is Boba's armor much thinner than the other Mandalorians in-universe?
Also, does it provide enough protection just like Din's? | 17 | We presume Din had pure beskar while Boba Fett and other Mandalorians have Durasteel/beskar combination. It makes sense given Din’s cult are serious on the Mandalorian way and probably think pure beskar shouldn’t be mixed with impure materials. It is also shown that other Mandalorians are killed by blaster bolts in the... | 26 |
Why do we feel warranted stepping into the middle of conflicts halfway around the world but we won't intervene in Mexico and the tragic drug wars? | I've been wondering this for a little while now and I haven't come up with a good answer. I'm far from an expert on foreign policy, so I could use some insight.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the top answer will be "oil", but I'm not sure.
Edit: It's come to my attention that we are somewhat involved and since ap... | 293 | Intervene how?
We're already funding anti-drug efforts, sending agents down, providing weapons and training, etc.
The problem is that the cartels have tens of billions of dollars a year, and a ready supply of weapons being smuggled across the border. (Not small guns; heavier munitions that the US makes in its war ind... | 72 |
[40K] Won't the tau eventually win due to their level of advancement? | 17 | Technology means nothing. Not in a galaxy of magic, soul consuming demons and galaxy devouring bugs.
The Tau lack numbers, resources and the necessary mindset to 'win'. Their expansion and unity is dependent on the Ethereals, and we've seen that they quickly fall apart without the oversight. As it stands, if they dre... | 31 | |
How would our solar system change after the sun goes into its first red giant phase? | The Earth would be swallowed up most likely, and Mars would become insanely hot, but what about the gas giants? They are adequately far away, yet they might be close enough for some or most of the gas layers to boil away. Would the small rocky cores become new planets, rather large, and with very heavy gravity? Woul... | 338 | Not exactly on topic but since you brought up atmosphere boiling away. When humans consider our cosmological impermanence it is widely known in popular culture that our sun will one day become a red giant and either destroy or render our planet inhabitable wiping out everything we currently know. Even though this is ... | 218 |
CMV: Assuming You Have Access To Internet, There Are No Good Reasons To Get Cable Television | I just did the math. For roughly $75.00 a month, I am able to gain access to Netflix Premium, HBO Max, Disney +, Hulu (No Ads), ESPN +, Amazon Prime, and The Criterion Collection. Again, only $75.00 a month. My monthly fee for a service like DirecTV would be $65.00 a month, but it would increase to $97.00 a month after... | 293 | if you're a big sports fan & regularly watch games from multiple leagues, cable is still superior in this realm. some leagues have decent options for streaming, but then there's a lag & you get spoilers from twitter & your group chat. sometimes they're unreliable and crap out during a big game. and if you h... | 56 |
ELI5: What makes Small caliber rounds like .22 calibers uniquely deadly? | 242 | They aren't "uniquely deadly". .22LR is one of the most underpowered rounds available. If you're referring to the "most deaths from gunshots are from small caliber rounds" thing, it's because small caliber firearms are cheap, the ammo is cheap, and they are widely owned and used. More people shooting them means more ne... | 477 | |
cmv: The Finnish siding with the Nazis to defend themselves from the Soviets was completely justified | The Finnish were invaded by the soviet union for refusing to trade territory, and no countries helped. Imagine the situation: Your country gets invaded by one of the most powerful nations at the time. You are winning during the start, but that's simply because of a minor flaw in your enemy's camouflage, which will be f... | 174 | Why do you want to have your view changed on this? What makes you think this is something that you might be open to changing your mind on? What kind of evidence or perspective would have to be shown for you to consider changing your position. | 53 |
Weaknesses of Chinese Economy? | Hello,
Can someone help me outline the weaknesses of the Chinese economy in modern day? I have to write a paper on this and economics is not my forte (so all articles I am reading are making my head feel scrambled) so I would appreciate any points that you could tell me about! | 17 | China's biggest problem right now has to do with its debt. China's been relying on insane amounts of leveraging to finance its economic growth - China’s total debt load (that is, both private debt and government debt) jumped from less than 150% of GDP in 2008 to more than 250% in 2016. 250% of GDP actually isn't that f... | 24 |
Professors: Would you allow an interested person to sit in on your class? | I am currently a master's candidate in a non-STEM field as a US citizen at a US university. My fiance is also a master's candidate, but in Pure Mathematics at a university in Germany (he's German). His English is excellent and he can certainly participate at a graduate level in mathematics where language is concerned, ... | 52 | It's reasonably common, at least at some schools, for people to do that; I've let students do that a number of times. Whether or not it will be allowed will depend on the school (some schools do have policies against this) and the individual professor, but it's certainly a reasonable question. | 59 |
ELI5: Why do dogs live a shorter life than humans? | 102 | Let's say that a species is being successful if it can continually create viable offspring and replace it's individual organisms at least as fast as they are dying.
There's multiple paths to this in terms of reproductive strategies. One strategy, is to maximize the number of offspring, even if that reduces the chance... | 53 | |
[MCU]When did T'Challa become the Black Panther? | So when Civil War starts, T'Chaka is still king of Wakanda, was he also still the Black Panther, or was T'Challa already Black Panther at this point. After Zemo set off the bomb and killed T'Chaka, did T'Challa have to go back to Wakanda to get the heart shaped herb? | 25 | T'Challa was likely already the Black Panther for some time before the bombing. The role of Black Panther is that of protector, but you don't have to be the King to be the BP, and vice versa. His father was aging and likely turned over the role to his son some time before the events of Civil War | 45 |
cmv: the best way to fix the injustice in US court systems is to make the victim and the accused person anonymous to the judge and jury. | CMV: People say justice is blind, but for some people, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Discrimination based on appearance and gender can often distort justice and harm the nation as a whole.
As such, the best way to combat this discrimination is to not let the judge know anything about these people other than the cri... | 4,944 | interesting idea.
why even hide the victim though? the victim is simply another fact of the alleged crime. would you seek to mask or simplify any other fact of the alleged crime?
after all, criminal matters are always the state vs the charged, not the victim vs the charged. | 654 |
[Harry Potter] What purpose did it serve for the Ministry to initially deny Voldemort’s return? | 24 | I think mostly they just didn't want to believe it could be possible and therefore denied it. In their minds widespread belief that he was back would cause panic and upset across the wizarding world. Also it could have caused people to come against the Ministry for not doing more to keep him away. To them it was in eve... | 28 | |
How much randomness is there really? | Our universe obeys causal physical laws. Do entirely random events actually occur or is deeming something random just our inability to understand the causes? | 19 | >Our universe obeys causal physical laws
Nope. Only *most*, the overwhelming majority, of physical laws *appear* to have causal relationships. But there are exceptions. Radioactive decay of particles through the weak force is the classic example. If a particle can reduce the mass-energy of itself or a system of par... | 19 |
ELI5: If polls say America is leaning towards marijuana legalization, why do states keep failing to pass reformed legislation? | As I got the news that Ohio (Pennsylvanian here) failed to legalize I was pretty disappointed. I keep reading that America is, for the first time, pro marijuana legalization. I hear numbers from 52-66% that are pro-pot. Why does it it fail in nearly all states?
Thank you to everyone who answered, I got a lot of inform... | 767 | It doesn't fail in nearly all states. About 20 states have legalized medical marijuana, and four have legalized it for recreational use.
In the case of Ohio, a large number of people who would normally vote for marijuana legalization opposed the ballot measure because it would enshrine an oligopoly in the state const... | 533 |
Does COVID viruses stay dormant in your body after you recover? | Hi all, just wondering can COVID viruses stay dormant in your body even after you have recovered from it? I know cold sores & chickenpox can stay in the body for long periods of time without being activated, and I was wondering since all of these are all categorized as a viral infection, could this apply to COVID a... | 15 | Not in the same way. SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus. It has to keep replicating to stick around. So it's not dormant. Chicken pox and wart virus can splice their genome into our genome and just wait. Later the virus genome is activated and starts replicating again. | 13 |
ELI5: why do stomachs make noises when were hungry? | 370 | It’s actually your intestines breaking down food and moving gasses along. They are always making noise, it’s just when the stomach is full you can’t hear it, as the full stomach is smothering the sounds. | 222 | |
Why does the Nordic countries have such a high standard of living? | As measure by one of the Happiness indexs and other tests. I don't really know much about how the tests are done at all.
I've seen lots of contrasting info online. http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2005/04/the_scandinavia.html
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/sweden/
http://www.libsdebunked.com/socia... | 74 | Maybe not on point re your question, but those sources you point out don't seem very objective, to put it mildly. On a page named libsdepunked.com you'd expect posts to have some political agenda that disagrees with the concept of a welfare state. | 14 |
ELI5: Does one person have to lose wealth for another person to gain wealth? | Does the money that one person makes have to come from someone else's pockets? Is there only so much money to go around, or can we as a world create more wealth by working harder as a whole? | 87 | There's a huge difference between money and wealth. Take an example: suppose there are three people in a village, and each of them starts with $2. So there's $6 total in the village.
John is a lumberjack and fells a tree. He sells the wood to Karen, for $1.
Karen is a carpenter and makes the wood into a chest of dr... | 83 |
ELI5: Why are there so many different programming languages, and what's the difference? | C, C+, C++, C#, Python, ruby to name a few, surely there can't be that many differences or something you can do on one that you can't do on another? | 45 | This is because everybody is free to develop a programming language. Besides that everybody has his own taste and requirements. There are languages which are for example more suited for web or standard applications, others may be more low-level to build more specialized stuff.
Languages can evolve or fork into differe... | 28 |
[DC] Why is Arkham still running when it was proven multiple times that it's beyond easy to break out of it? | All of Batman's rogues have broken out multiple times but Batman still puts the most dangerous criminals there. Why doesn't Gotham do anything about it? | 51 | Because Arkham still offers the best chance of isolating super-criminals like the Joker. Even though it seems Arkham seems easy to break out off, it's only because it takes several months of planning and coordination from outside sources to assist criminals in breaking out. The Riddler took several months to convince G... | 97 |
[Dune] Is the "Known Universe" really the entire known universe? Or is it just the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies? | We know that Shaddam IV, Paul Atreides, and Leto II Atreides were Emperors of the Known Universe, and that Arrakis is the center of it. However, is it really the entirety of the known universe? Or is it just our home galaxy plus its satellite galaxies? Is there an explanation on how big the Known Universe actually is? | 85 | By "known", Imperial types usually mean "actually surveyed and catalogued by one of the Proper People(tm)"
IOW, they automatically exclude whatever they don't already own as being "unimportant enough to count".
So, it's not even the whole galaxy. It's a few hundred lightyears around Earth, maybe a few thousand. It do... | 115 |
Which alternative medicines/therapies are most backed up by science? | This question was asked 3 years ago, but perhaps since then, there has been more research. What therapies are "probably helpful", "harmless", and "harmful"? While there may be many things under the banner of alternative medicine, some that I have heard of include: Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Massage Therapy, Sacral - Cr... | 48 | If it is backed up by evidence, then it's is medicine, not alternative medicine. Asking for "alternative medicine" backed up by evidence is self contradictory.
Look into ethnopharmacology, it's a field which takes folk remedies finds the actual basis for them working and then develops drugs based on that. | 120 |
[Star Wars] how often does sidious bathe while he’s the emperor | That mf look like he stinks | 20 | Seeing how Force-strong the guy is, he probably simply lifts particles of filth out of himself, thus staying clean and odorless all the time.
Alternatively, he might rely on the Dark Side so much that he no longer needs for his body to perform usual functions. | 23 |
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