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ELI5: Why is it scary when kids sing or laugh or say nursery rhymes in horror movies/games? | 50 | Generally, it's done in a minor key where the tune is altered, so anything can be spoopy when done that way (Have you seen the Teletubby episode in black and white that plays a Joy Division Song over it?).
Also, one of the early films to do this was Nightmare on Elm Street where kids are jumping rope and singing 1-2... | 59 | |
Why is Nietzsche so often dismissed as the angsty 14-year-old's philosophy | I am trying to get into reading more philosophy, and by chapter 1 in 'Beyond Good and Evil', I'm attempting to keep up with his densely compacted writing. Interesting ideas abound, regardless of their real world applications.
Why is he dismissed so quickly?
| 41 | I think that there are two main reasons for Nietzsche being popular with 14-year-olds:
A: His strong, emotional, flamboyant, visual style of writing. Not many teenagers would continue reading Kant's works beyond the first three pages of any of the books. Nietzsche's style is appealing to young boys.
B: On a superfici... | 14 |
[Undertale] Spoilers for cannon/true pacifist ending | A young child is the ambassador of the humans.
A young child who has shown powerful skills of diplomacy and a skill for thinking on their feet.
BUT... The underground isn't as large a place or complexly political.
If Frisk chose to go with Toriel is she accused of kidnapping? Does that sour negotiations?
They a... | 18 | If you pay attention to the credits, you can see that one way or another, it worked out. Sans and Papyrus got a car. Toriel opened a school. Mettaton went on tour. And that's how it is when you have a lot of determination and a little caring. The how isn't always important... but there are worse methods than to start b... | 11 |
[WH40K] How do the Tau have emotions and personalities if they lack a strong connection to the Warp? | 43 | You sort of have it backwards.
It isn't that your emotions and personality are a consequence of the Warp, rather, the Warp is a direct consequence of those emotions. Just because someone has emotions does not necessarily require a strong Warp presence. Blanks/Pariahs have literally no Warp presence and they are still ... | 71 | |
ELI5: Why do Atomic Fusion stops at Iron? | Hello,
i look at many cool Videos about the fusion processes inside of Sun's.
A Sun begin's to die when she can't fuse elements anymore.
This given Element is Iron, but why? | 44 | When you fuse small atoms, like hydrogen, it releases energy. This is how the sun works for example. But doing it in reverse (splitting helium to hydrogen) takes energy.
When you split big atoms, like uranium, it releases energy. This is how nuclear reactors work. But again, doing it in reverse (combining xenon and st... | 56 |
[war of the worlds] if the Martians studied planet earth for a million years before launching their invasion, why didn't they know about germs? And why didn't they attack before humanity had built defensive capability? | 59 | - Interplanetary war is hard, you put it off for as long as possible. The Martians were waiting until the moment when humanity could possibly pose a threat to them,
- Humans have advanced more in the last hundred years more than they had in the previous hundred thousand years. That exponential growth took them off ... | 39 | |
ELI5: Sharks, crocodiles etc. When they eat in the water their prey, where does all the water goes when they swallow? Do they somehow filter meat from water or do they just swallow it all? | 9,630 | I feel like the question was "Does it gulp a lot of water into it's stomach along with the food and does the water stay there or does it somehow get pushed out. And the reason this is an interesting question would be, does gulping large quantities of water mean that the shark is always ingesting way more water than foo... | 4,543 | |
[Marvel MCU] How big the asatru religion is now that Thor casually walks around and saves the planet? | How many millions have converted to asatru since Thor and Loki first appeared on Earth? Thor is not only literally the god of myths but he is a hero who has saved the planet countless times.
​
I would personally convert to any religion whose god in question walk on a weekly basis through NYC. | 19 | I would too, except Thor discourages it. He does not want the responsibility of an individually active deity. Our ancestors believed, but he gets no benefit from worshipers, and he is not really a god, but a powerful alien with a conscience. | 22 |
Is this correct about Boolean? | Boolean just means that the output will end with a true or false statement, right?
But then I see things like AND/OR/NOT operators called Boolean too. What's going on there?
And I see Boolean Conditional statements. Would that just mean that when there is an "If ... Else ..." code that the answer would be true or fa... | 24 | a boolean isn't something that *ends* with `true` or `false`. it IS either `true` or `false`.
AND, OR, and NOT are boolean operators. Kinda like add, subtract, or negate, these operators let you create larger boolean expressions that either resolve to `true` or `false`.
with an if-else code block, you'd have a boole... | 20 |
ELI5: When you've been critically injured, EMTs will often tell you to stay awake. Why is being conscious important in these situations? | Serious question. Would passing out lessen your chances of survival? Why? In what situations does this apply?
Thanks! | 3,394 | Losing consciousness isn't inherently harmful, but your ability to not lose consciousness is very important diagnostically. You're not being told to stay awake because if you don't, bad things will happen. You're being told to stay awake because if you can't, that's important information for your treatment. | 4,664 |
[General] If I chop the human part of a centaur off would a coroner be able to tell it wasnt human or are all the appropriate human bits in the top half? For example when a centaur breaths is it filling the human lungs in the chest or the horse lungs in the body? | 1,068 | The cardiovascular and pulmonary systems, including the lungs and heart are kept in the centaurs human chest, though they are much larger than a normal humans. This causes the digestive tract and reproductive systems to be pushed further down, into the horse part. Performing an autopsy on just the human half of a cen... | 680 | |
ELI5: When you drop an apple and it bruises, what's happening? | 17 | The once rigid cells are ruptured by the force of impact, resulting in a mushy soft spot. As for the discoloration, the impact compromises the integrity of the skin and allows oxygen into the apple. The oxygen also causes more cellular degradation and eventually rot. | 19 | |
ELI5: How does a multinational company pay it's taxes? | 41 | Things obviously get a bit more complicated than this, but at the basic level, they usually have separate subsidiaries operating each country (though we may consider the EU a single country for this purpose). Each subsidiary then has its own separate profits that it earns in the country it operates in, and it pays taxe... | 27 | |
[Warhammer 40k] Surviving copies of the Star Wars series is discovered by an Inquisitor, and they decide to watch them. What do they think? | Surviving copies of every Star Wars movie/series are discovered by a curious Inquisitior one day. They have been translated into Gothic and are in pristine condition on whatever media format the 41st millennium has. What are their thoughts on this strange, ancient series from before the Dark Age of Technology? | 21 | It's heresy and must be purged. The force is obviously the result of warp chaos and the destruction of an empire too dangerous to be allowed to foment discontent in the imperium. But they do ask the mechanicus on the feasibility of building a death star for making exterminatus orders more efficient. | 30 |
[Marvel] Why doesn't Professor X use his mind to make his legs move? | Earth-1610 via Marvel Wiki: http://marvel.wikia.com/Charles_Xavier_(Earth-1610)
>Telekinesis: Xavier is capable of a low-level form of telekinesis, it is unknown how much weight Xavier is capable of lifting with his telekinesis. It is known however that he is capable of lifting himself and his wheelchair up a fligh... | 53 | That's ultimate universe Xavier, for the record. Most other Xaviers can't.
To answer your question... why would he? It would require a substantial amount of effort compared to just using his chair for very little effect-- he can already pick his chair up to move himself up stairs or rough terrain. | 70 |
[MCU Infinity War] How did Thanos turn the Aether (Reality Stone), a liquid, into a stone? | 21 | On its own, it flows into different shapes and states, altering reality because that's what it does. Sometimes it's a liquid, sometimes solid, sometimes particle cloud, etc.
Once you have it, reality can be whatever you want it to be. You can fix it in any state you desire. | 47 | |
Can we use soap and water to clean everything instead of using disinfectant? |
They have explained to us that we should wash our hands with soap and water because the soap rips apart the outer lipid / fatty layer of the virus and destroys it.
So why do we need lysol, Clorox, multi purpose cleaners, alcohol, bleach etc. if soap and water are so effective at destroying the virus?
I do understa... | 29 | The reason is speed and convenience. With an alcohol wipe, you clean a surface in seconds. With soap and water, you have to scrub, rinse, etc. and it can leave a soapy residue behind - plus, some surfaces cannot withstand water (for instance, if you use water to clean your computer keyboard, you are asking for trouble.... | 45 |
Eli5: Why is it that there are multiple copper wires inside an electric cable and why are they coiled? | 69 | It's good to have a thick wire, so electric current can easily flow through it. But if it was just a solid chunk of copper, it wouldn't bend easily.
Putting multiple copper wires in close proximity makes the cable easy to bend while also letting a lot of current through. | 119 | |
I believed quotas for more women in higher management are pointless and discriminating, CMV | **(Sorry for the mistake in the title, of course i mean believe not believed)**
I believe that quotas for women in higher management will do a good job at getting more women into higher management, because it will be illegal to do otherwise, but that does not change the situation for the better, here's why:
At first,... | 62 | People just aren't that rational. Can we agree on that? Some large part of job recruitment relies on the subconscious judgements we make about people, which is a problem because it creates a self-perpetuating loop. If we're used to seeing men in management positions, then our idea of what a 'management' type looks like... | 28 |
[Tron Legacy] Why did that one program suicide to prevent being sent to the games? | I get that lots of programs de-rez in the games, but what made certain deresolution preferable to a chance at living in the games? | 28 | The way the games are wired up, with programs like Rinzler using a non-regulation spare disc in a disc fight and Clu descending into the play field with his private goon squad, the Games seem less like a fair shake and more like a brutal public execution. Might as well die fast and certain rather than let the lions mau... | 34 |
ELI5: Why doesn't the United States have similar population issues as India and China? | 15 | Being rich, and womens' rights.
Poor people have more kids, this is a well known fact. People working on farms in rural India don't have tractors, they need as many people as possible to help work. They don't have social security, so they need lots of kids in the hope that at least one will be able to take care of t... | 38 | |
ELI5: Why do Cuban-Americans despise Castro and Guevara, yet Cubans in Cuba worship them? | 28 | They are totalitarian leaders, speaking out against them would mean punishment, torture, even death.
There are many loyalists in cuba, yes, who believe that the conditions they live in now are far better than before the revolution, and who can blame them? Instead of a mud hut, they have a solid walls, a doctor on the... | 18 | |
CMV: Celebrities are absolutely not “normal people like the rest of us” | There’s a rhetoric of whenever a celebrity/high profile athlete etc. display any form or basic human emotions people say “these guys are just like us” but these people aren’t like us. Just because you seen them walking around in pajamas or getting upset doesn’t mean much when they have access to elite privileges that a... | 175 | You're saying that celebrities are not like us because of their privileges; and that therefore, whatever painful emotions they feel are invalid and it's okay to dismiss those feelings as meaningless and not deserving of respect or empathy.
But, if you apply that same logic to someone in an impoverished country with no... | 123 |
AskScience Cosmos Q&A thread. Episode 9: The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth | Welcome to AskScience! **This thread is for asking and answering questions about the science in *Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey*.**
If you are outside of the US or Canada, you may only now be seeing the eighth episode aired on television. If so, [please take a look at last week's thread instead.](http://www.reddit.co... | 62 | The animation of continental drift over a very long time period appeared stuttered: the directions of all continents would suddenly shift simultaneously, and regularly. Are these sudden changes real, or is the appearance just an effect of some kind of interpolation in the animation? | 16 |
How do snakes move around? | VERY late edit: I just realised that I didn't put ELI5 in the beginning. Sorry. | 36 | Snakes are very strong. They have over 4,000 muscles in their tiny body. We have only 600 muscles, so imagine how powerful a snake can be!
Their are four different ways a snake can move:
-By curving their belly scales slightly outward to push off of the ground and forward. Pretend to do this by laying on the ground a... | 43 |
CMV: Parker Rice and Levi Pettit deserve no sympathy, at least in my own eyes. | 18 | It's the hypocrisy of the situation that makes me if not sympathetic, then not as judgmental as you.
All sorts of folks at Oklahoma and SAE are "shocked, shocked!" that someone would say such a thing. What a crock of shit. They learned it somewhere, they were taught it somewhere. None of their frat brothers chewed ... | 16 | |
[Riddick] - What is the nature of the Underverse and how did it give the Lord Marshall his Powers? | 40 | In this verse, life is antagonistic to the natural state. Here humans in all their various races are a spontaneous outbreak. An unguided mistake. The solution lies in another verse. A verse where life is welcomed and cherished. A ravishing ever-new place called Underverse... but the road to that verse crosses over the ... | 26 | |
COVID-related hiring freezes? | The university in my hometown (USA) announced that it will be instituting a hiring freeze in the near future to help make up for COVID-related budget shortfalls. Has anyone else heard something similar about their institution?
Personally, I'm planning on going on the academic job market this fall, as I'm sure many oth... | 28 | We're going into a hiring "chill", as it's been cleverly been dubbed. Basically, we're not stopping all hires across the board, but we're only going forward with hires the President and Provost agree are priorities.
EDIT: Very large state, USA | 23 |
ELI5: How are surfing competitions judged if surfers don't always get the same waves as each other? | 38 | As a surfer, you have to pick the wave that best suits the tricks you want to perform. That's part of the skill, being able to read the wave. Just like how fishing competitions rely on the fishermen picking the best fish to keep, not just catching fish. | 24 | |
If electrons behave as waves when they’re not observed and behave as particles when observed at microscopic scale, how can they behave as waves observed at eye scale? (Young experiment) | 3,375 | The concepts of particles and waves evolved in classical physics, however as quantum physics was developed, we discovered that those ideas were simply approximations. An electron isn't a particle; it isn't a wave. What is it?
We can understand electrons only in terms of a new construct, something we might call a parti... | 1,837 | |
ELI5: Why are there so few blue foods in nature? | Luke Skywalker's aunt gave him blue milk. Where's our blue food? | 134 | Blue food is a rare occurrence in nature. There are no leafy blue vegetables (blue lettuce?), no blue meats (blueburger, well-done please), and aside from blueberries and a few blue-purple potatoes from remote spots on the globe, blue just doesn't exist in any significant quantity as a natural food color. Consequently,... | 54 |
ELI5: How does cross-eyed 3D work? | Here's what I mean - http://www.kula3d.com/how-to-use-the-cross-eyed-method.html
When I googled "How does cross-eyed 3D work", all the results pointed to how you can achieve this effect. None of the results spoke about the science behind this. | 74 | All 3D "technologies" work the same way. In real life, you see depth because your two eyes see things from two slightly different positions. 3D imagery mimics that by using two different *pictures* taken from slightly different positions (e.g.: two cameras side-by-side).
One of those pictures is presented to only one... | 17 |
What is the theoretical maximum size of a terrestrial planet? | 1,698 | If you keep adding terrestrial planetary material (mostly iron, silicon and oxygen) to a planet eventually it will resemble a white dwarf star. The radius will peak at only a few times that of Earth, depending on the exact composition, then start decreasing again. When you reach 1.44 times the mass of the Sun, or about... | 1,234 | |
Why does your ping go up if it's only using a few kilobytes playing, downloading a game in the background? Shouldn't it be the same? | 41 | When the network is used at its maximum bandwidth, your router queues the data packets to be sent/received until its their turn to be processed.
When you are downloading a game your bandwidth will usually be saturated because your connection is weaker than than what the game servers can serve you. However your game on... | 36 | |
ELI5: what actually causes genetic issues if breeding pair are for example siblings? | i guess we've all seen the whole 'little hickville town with mutated villagers' horror scenes in series and movies. would human beings (or other mammals) actually mutate into barely recognizable as humans like that if for example siblings had babies together for several generations?
from the very little i've read, i ... | 74 | Our DNA has redundancy built in: it comes in two halves.
Each half can potentially bear faulty copies of a bunch of genes - but so long as there's a working copy in the other half, you're fine.
Think of two pieces of paper, each with a random set of holes in it. Put them together, and so long as none of the holes li... | 77 |
[DC/Marvel] If someone like Thor decided to start fighting street-level crime, would they face opposition from street-level heroes? If so, why are street-level heroes so insistent that only they should deal with it? | One day, Thor decides to start raining godly justice upon the criminals of Hell's Kitchen. Would Daredevil tell him to cut it out, even if Thor manages to (in the short term) eradicate crime? If so, why wouldn't street-level superheroes want such relief? Is it pride? Or is there a rational explanation? | 95 | Thor in the beginning of his comic run would occasionally fight street crime, though he usually faced more esoteric threats.
Theoretically, the reason is because most street level superheroes deal with organized crime like gangs and mobs, problems that can’t simply be beat by going in there and beating everyone up. Es... | 82 |
ELI5: How come fat isn’t distributed evenly across the body but instead is in specific places? | 28 | Fat is insulation. It protects important areas. It also cushions us. So like for example, your butt. Your bones wouldn’t be good to sit on, so this is the solution. Your abdomen has many of your most important organs, and doesn’t have a rib cage to keep them safe.
Your sex hormones are a huge determining factor in wh... | 27 | |
[The Matrix Trilogy] If the Matrix was an iterative, virtual construct designed by the machines — Why didn’t the machines, wholly aware of the impending “One” and the 1% expected to reject the construct, just either disable connection to the Matrix and/or just “boot” them out of the platform? | It’s been a hot minute since I’ve seen the Matrix trilogy but was an instant fan since the first.. so excuse the gander if it’s already addressed or if I missed the answer, but never felt was properly addressed within the story… | 28 | It is briefly addressed by the architect. The One serves his purpose by rebooting the matrix whenever it reaches and unsustainable level. Same as Zion being a controlled point for the rejects of the matrix being allowed to exist. Once the machines determine the matrix and Zion are at a fail point they confront the one ... | 41 |
is the spread of COVID typical for a respiratory virus | i understand that there's no respiratory virus for which we have so much data as COVID 19, but what do we think: is this global pandemic pattern, with the virus and the Deltas and the Omicrons and etc etc and the rapid spikes in infection rates etc, something that happens all the time with your everyday harmless sneezy... | 26 | Flu follows a seasonal wave pattern. It spreads mainly in the winter. To make the vaccine and produce it in time we need to guess which flu strains need to be in it 6 months in advance. We do that with a worldwide network of scientists studying flu. We trace it as it bounces from northern hemisphere to southern hemisph... | 21 |
[Hobbit/LOTR] How would things have played out if the orcs never showed up at the BotFA? | (spoilers ahead)
Let's say that for one reason or another the orcs do not show up to Erebor after Smaug was killed and instead of the Battle of the Five Armies we get the Battle of the Three Armies(dwarfs,men,elves)?
Everything else is the same, the Elves want their heirlooms, the men of lake town want their "share"... | 45 | The soldiers of laketown probably didn't have any weaponry that could penetrate Dwarven armor at all, they would have been a non-issue in the battle.
The elves were gracefully assembled on the field of battle, not hidden behind fortifications or atop mountains with bows where they would be most effective. They were t... | 37 |
[Star Wars] What happens to force users that are not accepted into the jedi order? | 153 | They work as, essentially, farmhands and laborers in various agri-worlds to provide for the jedi and local communities.
Or they join the Sith because even though they're powerful enough they're too old, become a dark jedi, hunt down a regular jedi, then repent. Presto! Welcome to the Order! | 137 | |
If the moon's spin is tidally-locked so that it's synchronized with it rotational rate (causing it to almost always look the same from Earth), once humans colonize the moon, will the lunar inhabitants experience "day" and "night" on the moon? | I was thinking earlier if lunar colonization might cause there to be a need for lunar time zones, but then I started thinking more about how the same part of the moon always faces us. So, I got to reading about how the moon spins on its axis, but the tidal bulge slowed it's rotation to eventually make it look like it'... | 4,051 | The Moon's rotation is indeed synced with its orbit, which is why it always faces Earth with the same face. But that still means that it is rotating! It takes the Moon about a month to rotate about its axis, relative to the Sun. So if you're on the Moon, you do have a day/night cycle, it's just about 2 weeks of dayligh... | 4,008 |
ELI5: What's the difference between US and UK language settings? | I see these different English settings on devices and sites all the time but I never could tell what the difference was. Is it just some words spelled differently or is there something I'm missing? | 19 | Depends on where the language settings are used.
It could influence any of the following:
* Language selection (English vs US English)
* Keyboard layout (UK QWERTY vs US QWERTY, different placement of special symbols mostly)
* Date formatting (the UK uses sensible dates, the US uses garbage)
* Default currency select... | 58 |
ELI5: How do stealth planes work? What makes them stealthy? | 40 | When they talk about stealth, they mean via RADAR.
A quick breakdown of RADAR: Pretend it works like a dolphin's or bat's echolocation: we shoot radio waves in a direction and then those waves bounce off stuff and if the waves bounce back toward us, we can "see" whatever the radio wave bounced off of.
Stealth planes... | 56 | |
What is the force that drives light to move at the speed that it does? Or to put more simply, what propels light? | I understand that light travels really fast. I know that is an understatement but anyway, what is it that propels light forward to move at the speed that it does without ever slowing down? | 2,309 | There is no propelling force behind light. From a classical perspective, light is two perpendicular waves in the electric and magnetic fields. The changing electric field induces a magnetic field and vice versa, so the wave is constantly perpetuating itself. Waves do not accelerate, they propagate at a constant speed f... | 3,642 |
Is it really possible to "steal" electricity from high voltage lines via induction? | I've heard anecdotes about people doing this. I know it's possible. But I wonder if it could be done in any practicable way. | 20 | depends on what you mean by practicable, if you want a reliable and safe source of power you'll need a lot of expensive equipment, if you just wrap a coil around the line you'll receive low power high voltage wich is very hard to work with and electrocuting yourself in the process of assembling your construction is lik... | 10 |
[40K] "Necrons... and so rather face and be destroyed by the Eldar and the various psychic hazards unleashed during the war, they retreated to the safety of millions of Tomb Worlds and entered a deep hibernation." HOW IS HAVING A NAP A GOOD DEFENSIVE PLAN? | This seems like the equivalent of hiding under the blankets to escape a monster. It's established that the old ones had an "insurmountable mobility advantage" in the war due to their webway, so it seems intragalactic travel was relatively trivial, so what's the go? How can you go from fighting a battle to extinction to... | 185 | It's a little more complex than that. First, there was the Enslaver Plague. The use if emotionally charged psychic warrior-races during the War In Heaven caused the development of the first Warp Entities. Some were cultivated, like the Eldar Gods, others were unfortunate side effects, like the Krell. The Silent King ho... | 110 |
ELI5: How can your body's feet be ice-cold when the rest feels warm? | I sometimes find myself in my house and it's too warm to wear a sweatshirt but my feet will be ice cold. I heard that warming the torso area helps to warm extremities but I have been on the verge of sweating with ice-cold extremities. Please explain how this is possible? | 25 | They aren't getting as much blood flow as the rest of your body due to being so far away from the heart. Plus when it's cold your blood vessels tighten up to keep core temperature and minimalize heat loss.
Its why you shouldn't drink alcohol when it's cold because it dialates the blood vessels. You'll feel warm while ... | 31 |
Why does sexual intercourse consist of a stimulation through going in and going out (friction?)? Also why do we need to be stimulated in order to reproduce? | 16 | Sexual intercourse isnt exactly friction. In a normal intact male and a normal intact female there is very low friction. The penile sheath rolls over the glans and stimulates both partners in the in and out motion.
As to why do we need to be stimulated to reproduce, someone else will have to answer that. | 11 | |
[General] If humanity had to live in one giant city, where would you put it? | Assume some sort of science-fiction shenanigans are going to make most of the uninhabitable, but humanity knows this is about to happen and has time to prepare. They can choose a spot and keep it habitable, anywhere on the planet. They'll essentially need to build a mega-city to house as much of the world's population ... | 15 | Africa, we have the technology to make it work, but it has the largest deposits of all the stuff we make technology out of.
We can grow food anywhere, we can get water anywhere, and it would be best in all but the worst ice ages. | 21 |
[Black Panther] How is wakanda so wealthy and advanced despite exporting only tiny amounts of vibranium? | 96 | Is this Comics or MCU?
In the MCU it's alluded that the world thinks of Wakanda as goat-herders and not wealthy (but they've hidden the fact they're sitting on a mountain of vibranium).
In the comics though they dont like selling vibranium, they are extremely technologically advanced - using vibranium tools and mani... | 110 | |
[Lord of the rings] is Gandalf the White now supposed to wear only white robes for the rest of his life, What if he wants to wear a black robe and dye his hair brown? | 809 | We've seen it in the films in particular, where Gandalf maintains the pretense that he is still "the Gray" when he enters Rohan. Gandalf the White is both rank and title, and it's a fine tool to maintain a consistent appearance to ensure he is recognized (since he doesn't have a driver's license or other ID), but when... | 620 | |
ELI5: How is the sound of a blinker made? | A tiny speaker? A sound chip? Something mechanical? | 16 | It used to be a relay that was purposefully noisy to remind you it's on.
I would say in the last 5 years it has been mainstream that all lights are controled by a computer so now the sound is from a speaker and a computer decide if the blinker sound should ring or the safety belt warning or the door open or other warn... | 24 |
ELI5: How do speakers at rock concerts not blow out due to the sheer volume of sound they're outputting? | I was at a heavy metal concert last night (Five Finger Death Punch/Breaking Benjamin for those wondering) and the amount of sound that was coming out of the speakers at that concert seemed like it was going to blow them during the opening acts (Nothing More and Bad Wolves were opening. Great bands all around) and then ... | 38 | The only answer is that they are designed not to. They are very expensive and made of very high grade materials that can withstand the vibrations and stressors they are put under.
The loudest speaker in the world is capable of producing 165db of volume. That is louder than standing directly in front of a jet when it... | 75 |
Question about pointers in C | I'm learning pointers right now and I have a question
What does "int *ptri = (int *)-1;" mean. Does negative 1 mean, it's a pointer to a constant (negative 1)? I'm really confused | 16 | Makes `ptri` point to whatever address -1 is converted to by the cast, which is very unlikely to be an actual valid address that can be dereferenced.
Edit: best guess is that it's meant to signal an error from a function where returning a null pointer is an expected possibility. | 15 |
Can the gravitational effect of the moon on the displacement (weight) of a 100,000t ship be calculated at it's strongest and weakest all other factors remaining equal? | 159 | Let's find out -
For gravitational force, we have
F = GMm/r^2
The radius of the Earth is 6.370×10^6 m, the distance from the center of the earth to the moon is 3.844×10^8 m, the mass of the moon is 7.348×10^22 kg, and 100,000 (metric) tons is 10^8 kg. The minimum distance then, is 3.844*10^8 m, and the maximum is ... | 39 | |
[Harry Potter] Why wasn't the magic used in making the Maruader's map expanded upon? Make a mass grid of map that can keep tab on the whole wizarding world? | So it kinda bugs me that the Maruader's map reveals everyone in their true form (such as Pettigrew) yet it wasn't a widespread form of magic. Why don't we see basically EVERYONE have their own map? Can't be that hard to make right? It seems like something one should keep to know everything about where someone is. I cou... | 49 | It is possible that it was tied directly to the magical flows of energy that go through Hogwarts. Like... imagine that it was using Hogwarts' own internal security spells and charms to get the information it needed. The map is useful, but unless many other witches and wizards hadn't been building the detection charms a... | 58 |
If 44M Americans have filed for Unemployment in the last 12 weeks, why isn't the unemployment rate 33.7%? | [I was reading an article on Huffpost.com today, and here's a screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/YZguUQu).
When [I check out statista.com](https://www.statista.com/statistics/192356/number-of-full-time-employees-in-the-usa-since-1990/#:~:text=This%20statistic%20shows%20the%20not,on%20a%20full%2Dtime%20basis.&text=Th... | 158 | I believe the huffington article is discussing how many people applied for unemployment insurance (UI), which is not entirely related to unemployment rates. UI is calculated by state department of labors whereas the bureau of labor statistics calculates unemployment rates based on survey analysis.
If they are talking... | 40 |
Why do companies need to have such substantial growth rates? Why can’t a company say “we’re happy with the profits we made last year”? | Maybe it’s a better question for r/nostupidquestions, but this feels like a fitting sub. If a company makes its shareholders Xthousand dollars this year, why do they need to make 10% more the next year? This growth, in many well established companies/industries is not organic and is predatory, unsustainable, and often ... | 101 | >If a company makes its shareholders Xthousand dollars this year, why do they need to make 10% more the next year?
Well, it depends.
You don't necessarily *need* to grow. Especially in well established industries, you could chose to be perfectly fine with your spot in the market and don't aim for (much) growth.
O... | 88 |
We are four Stanford students looking to improve academic publishing and we want to hear from you! | We are four students (incl. three MBAs and two PhDs), all of us fed up with academic publishing and embarking on a project to improve the process. But before we start building anything, we want to hear from as many scientists as possible. We'd love to hear your thoughts on what the biggest issues are. (The amount of ti... | 49 | Anonymous submissions and a transparent review process will improve accountability and reduce editorial decisions based on factors beyond the quality of the work. EMBO has taken great strides towards this end by publishing reviewer and editor comments. | 23 |
[General] What is the largest animal in fiction? | The largest thing I can think of is the Space Slug in Empire Strikes Back is the Giant worm thing in Gears of War 2. | 15 | It’s a cat in a show within the Simpsons. The spoof of lost called Stranded ends with it zooming out and showing the entire universe being a single grain in a cat litter box.
Average cat is 10 inches tall (254mm) and a medium sized grain of litter is about 2.2mm diameter. That makes a cat about 115 grains of litter ta... | 43 |
Is a human being morally more valuable than other animals? If yes, why? | As a naturalist, I see no reason to believe a human life is intrinsically worth more than the life of a dog or an elephant. I’m writing about this subject and I’d be very interested to see why someone would disagree (without appealing to supernatural beliefs). | 18 | Just look for anything distinctive of humans that someone might reasonably think is morally significant. It doesn’t have to be totally absent from non-human animals, just more developed in humans.
So, intelligence, imagination, artistic capacity, language, and so on. | 23 |
[Avatar, Wall-E] Which is a better investment: RDA or Buy n Large? | 17 | RDA got kicked off Pandora by big blue space indians. Buy n Large successfully managed multiple enormous colony ships, and seemed to control the government and economy of the entire Earth before they were forced to leave. I'd stick with Buy'n Large. | 23 | |
[MCU] What do Iron Man/War Machine do during transoceanic flights in their suits? | In Iron Man one of the first things he does in the suit is fly from LA to Afghanistan, which would be a 10 hour flight if he went MACH 1 the whole time. Then he spends like 20 minutes there and flies home. what is he doing while flying in the suit for 20+ hours? | 142 | As career Air Force Rhodey probably enjoys directly piloting the armor in flight. Plus his suit isn't as advanced so it's likely that he has to be a more active pilot.
As for Tony, he might use it to catch up on sleep or business. He might even take the time to remote pilot another armor to do other tasks if the fligh... | 181 |
Why are ratings always skewed towards the high side? | The mean of all ratings on IMDb is 6.9. not 5. The mean rating of freelancers on Upwork is not 2.5 but near 5. The mean rating on Amazon is not 2.5, the mean rating on glassdoor is not 2.5 and the list goes on.
Does this have some statistical explanation or people just are biased towards positivity? Does this mean we ... | 22 | There is no purely statistical explanation, social science is rough. But most of the time you can concoct stories as to why ratings tend to be right-skewed. If we consider IMDB some examples could be:
\- Most individuals decide to watch a movie and series, consequently, you would expect each individual to generally ha... | 18 |
ELI5 Why is it preferable to ask for someone's resignation rather than just fire them with cause? | Recent National Security Advisor resignation got me thinking about this.
Also the US president's penchant for firing people before he took office would lead me to assume he would rather fire people | 91 | It's less of a hassle, less paperwork, and less conflict. A person who *signs* a resignation letter even under pressure is less likely to stir up a shitstorm afterwards, because the administration / company could always say that *they* resigned and deny any pressure if necessary (arguably not in the Flint case, but in ... | 68 |
What is the material basis for a recession if any? | Just wondering what actually physically causes a recession? Is it a matter of production and/or consumption changing? Is it an entirely psychological phenomena where investors lose faith in the economy? Or a mix of both or something else? | 25 | When consumers forecasts of future incomes will be lower than initially expected, they consume less
When producers forecast that future sales will be lower than initially expected, they will invest and/or produce less.
This causes recessions. It's all about expectations, and expectations changing. It's uncertainty | 26 |
CMV: We should always subject presidential nominees to a mandatory battery of cognitive and psychological tests and publish the results in detail. | I'm not saying you'd have to pass any certain threshold on these tests to be eligible to run, but with so much spin, truthiness, and genuine uncertainty about candidates' mental capacity and psychological profile, some HARD DATA would be nice.
I mean, aren't debates and speeches just an unscientific way to try to figu... | 157 | While psychology is of course a legitimate science, it is often far more subjective than many other fields of science/medicine. You don't take a single test, and get a diagnosis, there is a lot more involved that goes alongside those tests. And those tests are very much not designed to be used this way.
To make matter... | 31 |
Why do electrons fill up orbitals when atoms bond? Why are atoms more unstable without full orbitals? | I would like to know what actually causes electrons to act in this manner. I know all about how an atom 'prefers' to have a balanced amount of electrons orbiting it. But why do the electrons 'oblige' and become shared? It seems strange and I can't come up with an answer, nor can my chemistry teacher. I'm not really sur... | 28 | Short answer:
Quantum Mechanics
Long answer:
Electrons don't have a an exact position as it were, as you might well probably know. Instead they have a wavefunction. These wavefunctions, due to electrons being fermions, must be anti-symmetric and when the wavefunction of two electrons overlap (like they do in ato... | 12 |
[Asimov] I live in a sketchy neighborhood, but I want to lease a robot to take care of my household chores, how do I prevent it from interfering in my neighbors' affairs. | I saved up some money, and I want to lease a robot for a few weeks so that I can focus my energies elsewhere. but where I live, my neighbors are always getting into fights, or are injured for some reason or another, I know there is active drug trade nearby, and altercations with the armed peacekeepers. that often end ... | 15 | It's an interesting question.
We do know that while the three laws are hardcoded into the basic design of the positronic brain, *they are not absolutely unchangeable*. The public has been told this, but it isn't true. They can be made more important or less important to the robot, or even modified directly. It seems t... | 13 |
[NES/Arcade Games] I tend to die a whole lot in these games. Does this mean the villain wins in most timelines? | I mean, a lot of games do not show you reviving any way. You just die, and appear somewhere else like nothing happened. This is especially true with Game Overs. Does this mean that out of the millions of people that played Super Mario Bros., an overwhelming amount of those timelines just feature Mario getting a Game Ov... | 80 | Yes, of course. Mario is a single man, albeit a particularly high-jumping one, and Bowser is the supreme leader of one of the world's largest and most powerful industrial-military empires, not to mention a giant fire-breathing monster with a mastery of dark magic. It's amazing that Mario wins in *any* timeline. | 66 |
ELI5: With one eye you have no depth perception, so why is it when I cover one eye I can still tell distance? | 32 | Stereoscopic vision is only one component of how we perceive depth, and not even aparticularly good one! Because our eyes are closely spaced, it's only really good for close depth perception. Combined with convergence (How much our eyes have to look towards one another to focus on a close object) these "binocular" meth... | 22 | |
Marcus Aurelius cites Socrates, Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras as great philosophers of the past. How much more would Marcus have known about Heraclitus and Pythagoras and their teachings than we do today? | 222 | For one, the Pythagorean’s cult might have still been active at the time. Conceivably, he could read the handwritten book Heraclitus wrote and left at the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Heraclitus’s book, On Nature, burned down along with the temple and all we have today are fragments. | 85 | |
What is the scientific definition of temperature? | I have been googling this and having a great deal of trouble finding definitions that don't seem circular. In particular, the following is bothering me. Temperature seems to be defined by internal energy (u = 3/2RT) for an ideal gas. Internal energy can be theoretically defined (velocity + vibration + rotation, etc). B... | 30 | Temperature is defined by:
1/T = (∂S/∂E)*_V,N_*.
That means that the inverse temperature is equal to the partial derivative of the entropy with respect to the energy, with the volume and number of particles left constant.
In other words, it's how much the entropy changes when you change the energy a little bit, leav... | 38 |
(Star Wars) So... Time Travel. Is it a thing? | By this I mean are there any recorded instances of time travel. Be it accidental or intentional? | 18 | Yes, there are multiple instances of time travel in the Star Wars universe, mostly by freak accident.
Some absurdly powerful Force users can appear to travel back to the past, but they're just viewing events and cannot interfere. | 17 |
If we suppose that one were to be completely devoid of their five senses (yet still alive), would they still be capable of self-consciousness? | In addition, have any philosophers in the past dealt with this question? | 28 | This is basically the point of Avicenna's 'Flying Man' thought experiment, which was also discussed by a large number of subsequent thinkers. His answer was yes. You might want to start by looking into that. | 19 |
In what sense is what Norway did with its oil different from what Venezuela did? why is the former welathy and the ladder destitute? | 195 | Resource wealth when badly managed is an easy way to destroy your own economy. This occurs due to something called Dutch Disease. When your economy is too reliant on a single commodity, then you become very volatile, and exposed to major swings in prices / supply / demand of that commodity. When oil prices are high, yo... | 117 | |
ELI5: Why are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco all supporting CISPA when most of them vehemently opposed SOPA? | Source: http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/13/4220954/google-yahoo-microsoft-technet-cispa-support/in/2786603
edit: Thanks for the response everyone! Guess its true they'd rather protect themselves than you, tough to blame them for that | 1,628 | Also, it gives them legal safe-harbors for giving your info to the government. Without CISPA, they were stuck in a nasty place between not appeasing government requests and some liability for not treating your information properly.
Souce: various Techdirt articles. Warning: good blog, but they definitely have a point ... | 496 |
ELI5 - Why don't we tax the same rate across the board? | I don't make that much money and am probably in that 48% that doesn't actually pay income taxes in the end (because my tax return gives me everything back that I paid - I have 2 dependents and own a house). Anyways, I always wondered why everyone wasn't just taxed at the same rate. I would assume even 3-4% of every one... | 23 | Our tax rates are designed to reflect disposable income. Disposable income is the income we have left over after purchasing food, rent, education, and other necessities. After spending money on those items, poor people have a much smaller share of their money left over than the rich. That's why we tax them less. | 19 |
ELI5: How do amputees move their prosthetics? | I never understood this, please ELI5. | 34 | I know the most about leg prostheses, so I'll talk on that.
Leg amputations come in two main types: above the knee, and below the knee. The prosthesis starts with a socket. This is the part that connects the residual limb -- or the part that is left after amputation -- to the artificial knee and/or ankle joint. So t... | 16 |
[Star Wars] does Vader think the rebels don't have radar? | In Empire, Vader kills an admiral because he "alerted the rebels to their presence by coming out of lightspeed too close to the system."
But wouldn't that not matter? Surely the rebels have every kind of radar so even if the Empire came in way far out they'd eventually see them. Would that admiral have been killed for... | 46 | Ships give off Cronau radiation when they exit hyperspace. It's possible Vader wanted them to exit hyperspace far enough away that the Rebels couldn't detect the Cronau and would have to hit them with a more traditional radar that would be harder to detect them as early. | 59 |
ELI5: How do hard shutdowns work even if device is frozen? | If a device is completely locked up and not accepting any inputs, how are we able to force it to shut down without physically removing power to get the device to start accepting inputs again? I'm talking about holding down the power button on computers, holding down power + home on an iPhone, power + volume on an Andro... | 172 | Outside of the parts of the device that can 'freeze', there's a simple switch. This switch cannot be activated easily, as one would reset or turn off the device too often. Instead it's a simple mechanism that's activated by a combination of pressing a particular button for long or combining it with another button.
On... | 125 |
Can water be compressed to a solid? | The 'normal' solid form of water is crystal, leading to a lot of 'negative' space and the common trivia about ice being more voluminous than liquid water.
It seems like though, the crystallization is almost just getting in the way of what could be a more normal (to other molecules) solidification process.
So is it ... | 18 | Keeping it at room temperature, you'd have to compress it to a pressure of about 10,000 atmospheres before it solidified. It wouldn't form regular ice, it would form something called Ice-VI with a different structure. | 31 |
How does anti-venom work? | Does it attack the venom somehow or neutralize it via protection of the affected area? Both?
What is actually taking place on a cellular level? | 328 | Anti-venoms are just antibodies against a particular venom. So you are getting injected with antibodies that your body would have produced normally. Antibodies do their thing against the venom, binding to it and neutralizing it, but they don't reverse whats already been done.
This is a form of artificially acquired p... | 119 |
ELI5: How come when my stomach hurts, it feels like a wave of "I gotta s**t right now" and few moments later it's as if nothing happened? | 570 | Imagine your bowels as a ship.
Normally, a bit of water will get into the ship and it's pumped out without any effort (the large intestines/colon reclaims the water from the food we eat). However, if a huge amount of water gets into the ship (from disease or the body's response to flush your digestive tract), it can c... | 408 | |
ELI5: Why are fluorescent colors special and why did they not seem to exist before the 80's? | 366 | Other people have addressed your comment about the timeframe.
Here's why they are special:
Normal colors reflect the color you see and absorb anything else (a blue shirt absorbs red, yellow, green, etc. but reflects blue). This means that if there light hitting the shirt has 100 brightness units, the shirt can reflec... | 516 | |
CMV: The fact that you go to hell for all eternity means that God doesn't believe in rehabilitation. | Let's say you are a horrible person. You tortured many people, you killed some of them and you never kept the door open for someone. This doesn't mean you can't change after death. I agree that you have to be punished, but eternity is a couple of years too much. During our lifetime we can forgive someone if we see genu... | 64 | If we accept the premise of the Christian God and afterlife, we accept the premise of an all-knowing God.
An all-knowing God would know whether you were capable of retribution and worthy of the good place or whether you weren't and deserved the bad place. | 30 |
[General Sci Fi] Why isn't gravity weaponized? | In many sci fi series, the ships have artificial gravity. If they could replicate gravity itself, then wouldn't someone be able to easily manipulate the gravity generators into becoming a super weapon that could implode planets? (This may have happened in some show, but I'm not sure). | 119 | That's what they did to Malachor V in Knights of the Old Republic, basically. gravity-cracked the planet with the entire Mandalorian army on it, plus a decent number of Republic troops.
The obvious excuse to why it doesn't happen is that it'd be absurdly energy intensive to do such a thing and would likely require an ... | 103 |
ELI5: Why does orgasm immediately end sexual desire in men but not women? | 1,909 | Evolutionarily, it's to increase chances of having a baby. If a man continues to engage in intercourse after ejaculating, he risks inadvertently pushing the semen out of the way, making pregnancy more difficult. For a woman, if she orgasms first, she needs to stay interested until the man is done in order for there t... | 2,194 | |
ELI5: How do they fit 6.9 billion transistors on a 7 nanometer chip? Additionally, how do they connect them up correctly? | Edit: I think Apple means 7 nanometers apart? Either way, can someone please ELI5? | 30 | 7 nanometer technology refers to the smallest feature they can make.
As for how they can be made they are produced through a process called lithography. Individual layers are made and projected onto the material with light, interacting with chemicals to either stay put or wash away to mask areas so other material can ... | 22 |
(Physics) If a marble and a bowling ball were placed in a space where there was no other gravity acting on them, or any forces at all, would the marble orbit the bowling ball? | Edit: Hey guys, thanks for all of the answers! Top of r/askscience, yay!
Also, to clear up some confusion, I am well aware that orbits require some sort of movement. The root of my question was to see if gravity would effect them at all!
| 3,970 | That depends on the initial speed of the marble with respect to the bowling ball. If they start out stationary with respect to eachother, the marble will simply fall towards the bowling ball (and vice versa). In order for the marble to enter orbit, it needs to have sufficient sideways velocity (where "sideways" is defi... | 2,888 |
What about the atomic structure makes gold or copper their trademark colors but leaves most others a shade of gray? | Just what is it about those numbers of protons that makes such a drastic difference? | 137 | Well, gold, silver and copper make for a good comparison here, since they have the same electronic structure (same group in the periodic table). So you might expect them to have the same properties with each other at least, if not with the other metals. But they look quite different.
Most metals don't absorb strongly ... | 206 |
CMV: there is no legal or moral argument against allowing incestuous marriage that hasn't been thrown away in pursuit of gay marriage. | To start: **I am *not* saying that homosexuality and incest are the same thing.**
However, any arguments I would normally use against allowing incestuous marriage have been declared void. For example, you can't simply say it's disgusting, because a lot of people find homosexuality disgusting, and society has decided t... | 466 | The biggest problem with incest is the danger of family members being sexually abused or exploited or seduced or stalked by other family members who live in the same household. For that reason there's a strong social taboo regardless of any genetic consequences.
Marrying cousins, even first cousins, who didn't grow... | 286 |
[Pokemon] when a new Pokemon is discovered how is it’s type chosen and do you think there has ever been a large disagreement over classification | Example Charizard being fire/flying and not being fire/dragon despite clearly being a dragon | 21 | Different types have different strengths and weaknesses. When a new Pokemon is discovered it'd just take a bunch of battle tests against different types of moves to determine what the Pokemon is strong and weak against, then comparing the results could be used to figure out the Pokemon's type.
So with the Charizard ... | 29 |
[General Fantasy] Vampires cannot enter private human homes unless they are invited in by the owner of the house. What happens if a burglar drags an unconscious vampire in? | 104 | Depends on the universe. In some, the vampire will die/burn up upon entering the house. In others it's like there's a physical forcefield and the vampire cannot physically enter the house no matter what. In a few it would cause the vampire great pain/discomfort but will be able to do things inside the house/leave. And ... | 119 | |
ELI5: Why do humans like pillows to support their heads when they sleep? | Other animals don't need any sort of head support, and if museums are correct, humans have sought out sleep-time head-supporting objects for millennia. | 3,350 | The spine of primates is curved to support standing upright, so it does not do as well lying flat on our back or stomach. We can do so, but it is not as comfortable as lying on our sides.
Primate shoulders stick out past our head, so when we lay on our sides our heads are not lying flat on the ground (unlike dogs o... | 2,523 |
ELI5: Where does the worm in the tequila bottle come from and what does it mean? | For Cinco De Mayo I guess. | 38 | I was told it was used to test the tequila. If the worm didn't die by the time it sank to the bottom then the tequila was a bad batch. You might think this is bullshit but we know that if this is upvoted enough it has to be true. | 27 |
ELI5: Do spiders get stuck in the webs on other spiders? | For example, would spider species A get stuck in the web of spider species B? I know bigger spiders eat smaller ones, but how does the stickiness vary between types of spiders? | 35 | Spiders thread non-sticky threads into their webs that they use to traverse the web safely. Other species and even members of the same species can get stuck in the web. They can get stuck in their *own* webs if they fall or get startled, but will chew their way free. Spiders eat their damaged webs to recycle the pro... | 37 |
[general] Villain here, seeking to do a redemption arc without dying. | So, i'm a pretty average villain.
I've been the rival of the hero while serving under an evil overlord, and have done many terrible things in order to bring the hero down.
Thing is, im starting to have second thoughts.
At this point, a redemption arc seems to be inevitable, eventually. But i'm not stupid. I know ... | 25 | Be snarky, brooding and wear a leather jacket. Have lots of sexual tension with the hero (Bonus points if your both dudes). Have a pretty awful childhood and/or have your old love interest be killed by angry civilians and/or be enslaved by the evil overlord. Something sympathetic.
Do all these things and you might d... | 34 |
[Dragonball Z] Why didn't the Gohan from future Trunk's time line ever get angry and transform into Super Saiyan 2 like he did against Cell? | 76 | He never had the extra training from his father to help him refine his powers. It's likely that what should have triggered his SSJ2 form was only the trigger for his SSJ form, since his father was not around to train him to be a SSJ and refine his control over the form. | 71 |
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