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ELI5: How is an EMdrive thruster supposed to work? | I saw the article about how it's more successful than they expected, but it doesn't explain how it works. | 15 | Normal rocket engines work by forcing stuff out in one direction very fast. The problem with rockets, is that you have to life the fuel, along with the spacecraft. So if you want to go faster, you need more fuel to burn longer, or you burn fuel faster for shorter. But more fuel means a heavier spacecraft, which needs more fuel.... rinse and repeat.
An EMdrive, in theory, does not need fuel. You're converting electrical energy directly into force, without throwing mass away in the other direction.
So, if your engine does not need fuel, then you can run the engine forever, as long as a nuclear reactor holds out. So even if the engine has low thrust, it doesn't matter.
The issue with the current EMDRIVE is that the physics behind why it is supposed to work are shaky, and the amount of 'thrust' is still within experimental error.
Supposedly, the engine manipulates quantum fluctuations on one side of the cavity wall. There are virtual particles that pop in and out of existence, and if you can make more of them pop in and out on one side of a wall then the other, there will be a net 'push' on the wall.
But, in a previous experiment, they intentionally 'broke' the engine and it still worked. Which means it's doing something, just not what people think.
So, it could be either the greatest revolution in modern spaceflight and physics we have ever seen, or a bad experiment setup. Time and rigour will tell.
| 11 |
[Avatar TLAB] could an air bender condense a gas into it's liquid state? | If they could would they still be able to bend it? | 53 | In order to turn oxygen into its liquid state, you would need to do one of two things:
1. Make it colder, but only water and fire benders seem to be able to change the temperature of their elements.
2. More likely: they'd need to increase the pressure of it. Essentially, they'd have to take air and squeeze it into a tiny ball, but it would take a very large amount of energy to compress air to the point of it turning into liquid. At that point, they would need to focus all of their energy on compressing the air, and wouldn't really have any leftover energy or momentum to do anything with the liquid oxygen. Plus, once they bend it and (for example) throw it at someone, the pressure will be released and it will go back to being a gas almost instantly.
*Edit: forgot about lava benders. Vibrating the molecules in earth fast enough would turn them into lava. Still less energy than point 2.* | 48 |
[Star Wars] Which was objectively the better fighter? X Wings or TIE Fighters? | If two equally skilled pilots got into one of each, who would come out on top? Seriously, I keep Googling X wing vs TIE Fighter, but I keep getting links to the video game instead. | 41 | TIE fighters were cheap and fast. They had no shields or hyperdrives, and were mainly just easy to mass produce. They're better in numbers.
X-wings were tanks, though not as slow. More guns, shields, hyperdrives, etc., etc.
A single x-wing vs a single TIE with pilots of the same skill? The x-wing is by far the better. | 60 |
Can a person test negative for COVID, but still be contagious? (Assuming that person is in the process of being COVID positive) | 7,928 | Yes, if you test too early and your viral load is too low you may not test positive. In addition too this, there is also always the chance of a false negative or false positive with any test. No test is 100% accurate and incorrect results could come from things as simple as mislabeling of a specimen or some other human error. | 6,059 |
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ELI5: How close are we to curing cancer as a fundamental illness? | 18 | You can read "The emperor of all maladies" to get an idea about the development in medical science re cancer. Out of 1000's of different types of cancer, we can fully cure 2-3 types; however, we are able to lengthen the life of pretty much any and every patient with cancer, so there is some progress. Out understanding about cancer is primitive, we cut it (surgery), burn it (radiation), or poison it (chemotherapy). All three treatments do harm to good sells along with cancer cells. In short, our most advanced medical treatment consists of killing cancer cells before we kill our patients; unfortunately, we often do kill our patients. | 17 |
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Can Nuclear Fisson occur without uranium? | 16 | Yes. Nuclear fission can occur for numerous elements. Fission occurs in all actinides along with the super heavy elements. Spontaneous fission can occur for elements that fit the equation Z^2 /A>=47, where Z is the atomic number and A is the atomic mass. This is a rough equation, but it is fairly accurate. It is theorized that some light elements like molybdenum may even spontaneously fission. | 15 |
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[Captain America - all media] So....when is Cap going to get a promotion? | Surely he has enough experience and a history of being a great commander to be a general by now. What gives? | 23 | In the zombie universe, he's a colonel.
Aside from that, 'Captain' appears to be an honorary term. During WWII, Steve Rogers was actually a private, albeit one tasked with secret counter-intelligence operations. In the modern age, Carol Danvers is known as 'Captain Marvel' even though she's a colonel. As such, we may conclude that 'Captain' is simply part of Rogers' codename, regardless of his actual rank. | 20 |
ELI5: how do the rich use shell companies and off shore accounts to hide money? Can’t the government just follow where they invested? | 57 | They can and it doesn't change anything.
Laws apply only in the country you're in. Meaning that if you manage to get the money out of the country, they can't do anything. And it's most often very legal.
An example: They create a shell company in a tax haven. They pay the shell for service (whatever they can find. Most easily consultancy. ) It's legal because they're paying for a service. Since they're spending the money and not keeping it its not profit but spending so it isn't taxed in the original country. The money is now legally out of the country and in another shell company. The original company will not pay taxes on it because it wasn't profit. Only the shell company will pay taxes but to the tax haven with incredibly low taxes.
Most likely, the tax haven will also not care if you literally pocket 99% of the profit to your account rather than follow regulations like in other countries. They still get their 1% of tax, and since they're staying that way solely to attract the filthy rich, they're not gonna change anything.
TL:DR, Pay shell company for whatever, shell company transfer to bank account. Original company don't pay taxes on spending, shell company is barely taxed. | 73 |
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What determines the speed of us thinking? | Basically in the title, what determines the speed at which we (our brains) process information and act? | 227 | What you ask in the title and the question are two different things. "Thinking" implies we are consciously aware of it - that it has reached our neocortex. That determines the speed at which we think. The more you've done something, the more efficient that neuronal pathway for that thinking occurs, increasing the speed at which you "think".
The limiting factor of that speed, is the speed of an action potential (.31-.75milliseconds) times the amount of neurons needed to create that thought (an unknown variable).
For reference, when you see a face, your brain detects you're seeing a face with an event related potential called the N170. 170ms in, your brain has detected a face. However, for you to consciously realize that, it may take a second (EDIT: this is an overestimation, significantly longer is more accurate, the actual number is closer to 400-600ms). Your brain has to put that "face" in context - basically the area that deals with faces (Fusiform face area among others) has to communicate with the neocortex and that takes the most time and is therefore the rate-limiting factor. | 61 |
[Toy Story] Do all new toys think they are the real thing and not a toy. | So it's clear that all new Buzz Lightyears believe they are the real Buzz . But if there was a brand new Woody made, would he think he was part of woodys roundup? Same with all the other toys. | 52 | Unlike most toys in Andy's collection, Buzz takes batteries.
All the others had the experience of being in a store, being bought, etc, to guide them to the belief that they are toys.
Buzz, however, doesn't activate until he is turned on. His box is designed to look like a spacecraft and Andy literally crash lands him on his bed. From Buzz's perspective, he's woken on a new alien planet.
This implies that until they interacted with other toys, Woody would have thought he was a sherrif, Pig, that he was a real pig, etc. | 55 |
[MGSV: Phantom Pain] What are they feeding poor D. Horse to cause his poop to be slippery enough for cars to skid out of control? | So, in MGSV you can make D. Horse poop on command if you get his loyalty up enough. I could understand infantry and Walker Gear possibly slipping on it, but i have hard time believing that normal horse poop would be slippery enough to do it for cars... | 16 | Its the stress, not the feed. He is constantly being ridden in firefights, transported via crazy ballons, run over, and otherwise terrified or injured, all while running around stopping biological weapons and all kinds of parasites. Horses tend to react poorly to all that, and intestinal issues are common in high stress horses. | 16 |
Why is it that, if you add any sequence of numbers like this (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 7 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1), the sum is always the square of the largest number? | I was doodling around with my calculator in trig during high school several ago, and found this pattern. I forgot about it entirely until I was nodding off to sleep last night, and now I must know. | 4,181 | A single line break will make it obvious that it's N times N:
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 +
7 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
+ + + + + + + 8
7 6 5 4 3 2 1 | 5,475 |
What is physiologically happening when a cat purrs? | 82 | Scientists do not know what causes purring. However, one leading theory is that vibrations in the Aorta (largest artery of the heart) are amplified by the way cats align certain muscles and the throat which causes the purring sound. This is still just a theory. | 25 |
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ELI5: How do websites know when you are using an adblocker? | I remember a few years ago, I would be able to use my adblock without getting any pop ups telling me to turn it off, but as of late I see an increasing number of websites telling me to turn it off before proceeding? How do they know? Isnt an adblocker only on the client's screen? | 9,042 | In simple terms, they attempt to create an object which adblock blocks, then they run a script to detect whether the object exists or not. If they can't find the object they know you are running a blocker. | 8,617 |
[DOOM 2016/DOOM Eternal] Any particular reason were given why there were no mass nuclear retaliation towards the invading demonic forces? | In a Codex entry in Doom Eternal, it is considered that complete nuclear annihilation was considered to destroy the Super Gore Nest. However, there seems to be no particular reason on why it isn't enacted on early, what gives? | 82 | The invasion of Earth was extremely rapid. Literally hours after the end of 2016 campaign. Samuel Hayden tried to rally the leaders of earth prior to the invasion but it wasn't until nearly all of earth had become overwhelmed that he was given total authority over the arc forces. Nukes were deployed but had little effect on larger demons and didn't stop the spread at all. They threw everything they had at the super gore nest and failed miserably. Before they could regroup or capitalize on the first hell priests death demons began attacking the arc headquarters and everything was dedicated to holding onto the tenuous foothold humanity had left on earth. | 62 |
CMV: I believe all these new people moving to America should learn to speak Algonquian. | The Atlantic coast of the Americas is full of these new pasty white immigrants. We have lots of land so it wasn't a big deal at first, but trading is difficult when they speak this strange language called English. You're in America now people, so speak the language of one of our many tribes, not the language of some small island in Europe. We recommend Algonquian, so we may understand what you're saying when you point to our lands and hand us blankets.
(Translation provided by translate.google.com)
_____
> *Hello, people of the past. This is a footnote from the moderators of this 'internet forum'. I'm afraid to say that some wannabe scientist, while looking into time travel, has caused a temporal distortion field. It should dissipate in the next 24 hours. In the mean time, feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)*** *about a view you hold while you're visiting the present, and remember to have a look through* ***[our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. | 352 | Algonquian, please! The ones that brought white warriors with them are deep in Powhatan country, they need to learn Powhatan! And they will if they have respect for our people. I'll bet they feel pretty stupid not being able to understand us!
(Translation provided by translate.google.com) | 54 |
[Star Wars] What was the importance of the Hoth base? Wouldnt it have made sense to stay mobile with no permanent structures? | 265 | Ships need maintenance and crews need offship time. A lot of the ships in the rebel fleet are medium sized. They're small enough you don't want to spend excessive amounts of time in space aboard one and aren't built for extended voyages, but at the same time they're too big to reasonably fit into your standard starship hanger.
Sure, Home-1 or the other really big capital ships might hold them, but those ships are rare and you don't want to be filling fighter hangers with freighters just so you can perform your waste disposal system's regular maintenance.
A planetary base is perfect for this sort of ship. They're already intended to land and takeoff, and on a planet you're not limited by volume as much. Finally, most humanoids in the alliance are accustomed to working in gravity. Zero-g work is just much more time consuming for them. And that's all not to mention it gives more room for your personnel. Hoth contained a sizeable amount of infantry as well, and you don't want your military men stuffed into a freight hull for too long, they get bored and out of shape. Morale and effectiveness will plummet fast.
So really, there's a lot of good reasons to have a planetary base. Hoth was selected because it seemed like a good one. Way off the beaten tracks and not someplace you'd ever expect anyone to *want* to live. Vader's willingness to indiscriminately plaster the universe with probe droids despite the cost just turned out to be a good counter. There's some that say he was guided by the dark side of the force to the location as well. | 305 |
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[Harry Potter] Why does money even matter in the Harry Potter universe? | They have magic. It's already been established that you can produce water straight from the wand. You can transfigure something into something else. Oh no, the couch broke? Better transfigure this thumbtack into a brand new couch! The Weasley household was always described as cramped, but in the fourth book Mr. Weasley is able to use magic to make a small tent into essentially a huge tent-castle. So why does money matter if they can just do anything with magic? | 50 | The same reason money exists everywhere else, to procure goods or services from other sources that one might be unable or unwilling to procure by their own means.
Not everyone is good at everything, some people specialize in areas and it's worth it to have them do it instead of you. For example: Bob is good at potions, and Sally isn't. Sally needs Potion X - she could try brew it herself which might take a long time and/or result in disastrous consequence, *or*, she could pay Bob to do it.
Some things you are *able* to do, but don't *want* to do if you don't have to: Jessica is an able potionist, but is also an avid researcher of dragons. She needs a flask of Potion Q; however, it takes several months of careful attention to brew the quantity she needs. Jessica *can* create the potion but doesn't *want* to take the time to do it. She'd rather be out in the field studying how what phase of the moon an egg hatched under affects temperament in juvenile Hungarian Horntails (or something like that), so she pays Bob to brew it for her so that she can go do other stuff.
The tent's an example of this: Mr. Weasley didn't enchant the tent himself. Someone good at enchanting somewhere else at some other time enchanted the tent, which was bought by Mr. Weasley's coworker, which was lent to Mr. Weasley. | 58 |
[Star Wars] How come Aayla Secura was killed in a much more brutal manner than the other Jedi shown in Revenge of the Sith? | All the Jedi were shot a couple times except her who was shot for a long time after she was already dead. Why was her execution so violent compared to the others? | 55 | Think about the jedi we saw die. Plo Koon was blown out of the sky and his craft was incineratef in a fireball, doesnt leave a lot of room for doubt. Mundi was shot by like 20 of his guys, camera cut away before it showed anything else. Basically, people can survive being shot, especially jedi. The clones were just making sure they were dead. | 86 |
[Disney's The Little Mermaid] Why didn't Ariel just write to communicate while she was mute? | So, Ariel obviously understands English (or Danish, or whatever) and understands what's communicated to her. She signs her name on the contract with Ursula, so she's familiar with writing utensils and with writing itself. Why doesn't she just carry a pen, inkwell, and notebook with her? Or chalk and a blackboard? Why didn't she communicate through text? | 58 | One theory I've always held is that even though the audience is shown Ariel speaking in the same language as humans, it's more logical to assume merfolk have their own language. So while she may have learned English from constantly spying on humans, she would not be able to write in it, having never studied their symbols or literature. | 86 |
[MCU] Possible WanadaVision Spoiler; so I'll just ask my question below... | Without going into too much detail, it appears that when people were "un-snapped" (or un-blipped), they re-appeared at the same position they were in when the blip happened... if they were running down a hall, they were unblipped into still running down a hall. If they were sitting in a chair, they were unblipped into a chair. And I'm pretty sure that [Nick Fury unblipped saying "..ucker" ](https://youtu.be/UURGdZl_CHg?t=73)
What about all the people who were currently in some state of travel? Easiest example would be those travelling by air. The TSA data shows that the average amount of people who travel by plane per day is about 2 million. Even if we were to say at that specific time there were only 100k people currently traveling by plane, that would mean that there would be roughly 50k people currently falling from the sky, right?
The people at sea? The USN? Are there sailors littering the ocean right now?
Did people unblip in the middle of busy highways?
Besides the logistical nightmare of the population doubling overnight (food shortages, housing crisis) the emotional toll that is being placed on everyone who survived and has moved on (possibly remarrying and starting new families)
I’m starting to wonder if Tony‘s wish of not resetting the time, just undoing the blip, is a bit selfish.
Thoughts? | 26 | All these complications are supposedly accounted for by the Infinity Stones obeying what the user actually mean, and not just obeying a single command to the letter. It is theorized by some people that the Mind stone allow the user or the Stones mental capacity to account for all that logistical problems of re-appearing in mid-air and set them a safe locations.
It is not selfish for Tony to do that, because he and Pepper aren't the only one to have children or found a new life after the snap. It would be unfair for Bruce Banner to have all his hard work spent integrating his multiple personalities to get to where he was, just as it would be unfair to anyone who else who had improved in the five years since. It will be unfair not only to Tony's daughter, but also every other millions of children born in the five years in between. So Tony wouldn't be just thinking about himself, but speaking for tens or even hundreds of millions of people whose life will be ruined or made non-existent if time was simply reset. | 61 |
ELI5: If you've lost blood, either by a severe cut or donating to a blood bank, your body can generate new blood to replace it. How does your body know when it needs more, and how does it know when to stop so you don't end up with an excess amount? | 826 | There is a hormone produced by the kidney called erythropoietin. That hormone makes the blood marrow produce more red blood cells.
When there isn’t enough oxygen reaching the kidney (because of the lost blood), it produces this hormone so more blood is made.
TL;DR: the kidney tells the blood marrow to make more blood | 742 |
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ELI5: How can Newtonian physics be technically "wrong" , but still mathematically explain many natural processes? | 18 | It is less wrong, and more of an incomplete approximation.
For example, you have a farm in Kansas that is 5 miles by 5 miles. You have exactly 25 square miles, right? Area = side * side, after all.
That would be wrong. You have slightly more than 25 square miles, because the earth is roughly a sphere. That doesn't mean the formula for area is wrong, it just doesn't take into account spherical surfaces. It is also very accurate over small distances.
Newtonian physics is the same way. It isn't wrong, it just doesn't take relativity into account. And for speeds that aren't a significant fraction of the speed of light, it is quite accurate.
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[DC] How Superman can hear someone's call for help on the other side of the globe and save them if the sound that reached him was originated hours ago? | Due the sound speed, if he hears something 2,000 miles away it took almost 3 hours to reach his ears. | 318 | I believe it’s been hinted a few times that Superman’s “x-ray vision” is really a kind of clairvoyance that lets him look through things. Maybe Superman’s “super hearing” is a kind of psychic hearing or telepathy? | 234 |
ELI5:When I get "butterflies in my stomach", what is actually happening inside my body? | 31 | When your body goes into fight-or-flight stress response, it is preparing to fight a physical threat or run away from it. To help you do this, your heart rate and breathing speed up, you sweat, and blood flow is diverted from non-essential systems to the major muscle groups. Digestion is a non-essential system, so when stress hormones are in your blood, your digestion slows way down. The weird feeling in your stomach is the reduction of blood flow to your digestive organs, so that the blood can go to your arms and legs instead. | 24 |
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[Chronicles of Narnia] What is the mental state of the four main characters after they turn back into children? | Do they remember being adults? If so what's it like for Edmund and Lucy who are pre-adolescent? | 60 | They eventually forget all of their time in Narnia, thinking of it as having been a game they played together as children, rather than actual events that happened. The older they get, the more they're sure it was just make-believe.
Susan gets hit with this especially hard, becoming unable to return to Narnia for the Last Battle because she has become too old, and stopped believing it ever existed. | 58 |
Why are longitudinal studies done on the general public and not inmates? | I was reading about the observation of diets and the outcomes after 3, 6, and 12 months and one of the concerns was a self-reporting bias with people and simply forgetting what they ate. Thought about which environments a person has their diet and exercise almost 100% controlled and is almost guaranteed to be in the same place after 12 months.
If they were fed above the state or country dietary minimum for prisoners, wouldn't they make a better sample? | 18 | Science dealing with humans has a number of ethical rules, some of which have been made into law. One of those is that you can't experiment on prisoners simply because they are convenient- you can only study them if you are specifically doing a study of the prison experience or something like that. When you want to do a study it must pass a human subjects ethics board review (IRB) and they would never allow a study such as the one you describe.
In order for scientists to effectively do research on humans we need their trust, and experimenting on prisoners is not a great way to gain that. Apart from that is one of the very basic ethics rules, which is that participation in science experiments must be voluntary, and prisoners cannot be said to be giving voluntary consent because of their situation. | 30 |
ELI5: How does pure alcohol have calories, yet it doesn't contain sugar, proteins or fat? | Will I get fat from drinking large amounts of pure alcohol? | 164 | Alcohol is what is produced when you take sugar and remove as many calories as you can from it without involving oxygen. As a result it still contains a lot of the calories that the initial sugar had. | 106 |
ELI5 - how doesn’t iron burst through blood vessels during an MRI? | There are metals in the body such as iron. Even tiny bits of iron ripping through vessels and organs I would think would do major damage to the body. How does an MRI not cause this to happen? Or does it? | 26 | What makes iron magnetic is that when iron is in a crystalline form (what you think of as iron metal), the electrons in the individual iron atoms align themselves in a way that interacts with magnetism. (Basically electrons (and many other subatomic particles) have a property called spin, when a bunch of electrons are spinning in the same direction, magnetism happens.)
Iron in blood is not in a metallic form - it takes the form of a molecule called hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is essentially a tangled chain of other stuff, with pockets holding single iron atoms throughout. Because those iron atoms are isolated and tangled up in this hemoglobin structure, they can't align like they do in metallic iron. As a result, hemoglobin isn't magnetic at all, and as such is not pulled around by MRI magnets. | 107 |
[Superman] Earth not Krypton was destroyed. A baby was sent to Krypton via an experimental rocket. Would that baby have super powers like superman? | I admit I don't know much about Superman but what if things happened in reverse? Would a human gain powers under their red sun much the say Superman gains powers from our yellow sun? Or is it something fundamental about their biology? | 49 | The effect that grants Superman his powers is a product of his Kryptonian biology and not the sun itself. Superman essentially metabolizes radiation and, while the degree to this is true varies from depiction to depiction, his "enhanced" state as seen on Earth is actually more akin to a Kryptonian's natural healthy state. The sun of Krypton was simply malnurishing to the population's evolutionary adaptations in that respect. Yellow suns are a literal super food for their biology and unlock their maximum safe potential.
Likewise, green kryptonite is harmful to kryptonians because it essentially lets off poisonous bands of light.
Humans lack that type of adaptation so they wouldn't experience any kind of strengthening or weakening when exposed to a different sun. | 77 |
ELI5: How come you can never get crappy toys in cereal any more? | 19 | Boy, as a kid, shreddies always came with something inside.
I think its to do with safety. The toy might end up being eaten by a child. They might choke and die, leaving a massive lawsuit against the cereal producer.
I also think US government regulations affect this. There are prize-containing candies called Kinder Surprise that are made in Europe, but are banned in the US due to safety regulations. | 12 |
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[Doctor Who] Why did the Doctor's TARDIS allow the master to fly it? | The TARDIS is sentient, and apparently very loyal to the doctor, to the point of love perhaps (the doctor's wife). So why is the master able to pilot it (Utopia et al)?
I know he was only able to travel between two points, but that was the Doctor's interference. Shouldn't the TARDIS itself have said 'screw you dude, we're not abandoning the doctor here' and put the brakes on? | 23 | A timelord would know how to force a tardis to go where he wanted. She is still, when it comes down to it, a vehicle, and in the end its not her choice, if someone wants to force her, he can. The master might be better then the doctor at flying a tardis, so he might know how to force her when the doctor does not (he did however force her to go to trenzalore, so he can probably do it) | 17 |
[MCU Punisher] What allows Castle to fight at full strength even when injuries received would prevent some muscle movement or could even be lethal? | On several occasions Castle is able to fight while dislocating his arm, having his feet destroyed by a drill but is able to move said body parts even though they are severely damaged. Also how is he able to fight let alone stay alive when he has injuries that could kill most people? | 22 | The Punisher has a level of sheer unbreakable willpower that would make Green Lantern jealous. In the comics, it's established that he doesn't use any sort of painkillers unless his injuries are so severe that he is no longer physically capable of fighting. He chooses not to take them because he's unwilling to take the risk of an enemy getting the drop on him while he's not 100% clear-headed.
It's this level of willpower that enables him to not only *survive* injuries that would cripple or kill most people, but to *continue fighting* despite them. He's too stubborn and hateful to just give up and die. | 29 |
[Star Wars]What kind of food can allow the more than 30,000 crew members of the Star Destroyer to live in the Star Destroyer for 2 years? | There are more than 30,000 crew members in the Star Destroyer, and the consumables they carry can allow them to survive in space for 2 years. If it is conventional food, the daily consumption is very large and takes up a lot of space. Although the Star Destroyer is very large, the building occupies a large part of the entire Star Destroyer, so the place for food storage will not be very large. The food that can provide the crew members to live in space for 2 years should not be ordinary food. Then, what kind of food can make more than 30,000 crew members of the Star Destroyer live in the Star Destroyer for 2 years? | 212 | They use rations and nutrient packs in addition to smaller standard food storage that needs to replenished regularly. The ration packs are the size of a cigarette pack but can feed a human adult for a week easily if not comfortably. The packs have a shelf life of a few decades but have been known to survive for longer in optimal conditions though no one will eat them if given an alternative choice. They're cheap and contain the bare minimum of nutrition in a compact size. With appropriate rationing a few thousand pounds of packs could feed several thousand personnel without taking up more than a cargo container or three in the ships hold. | 235 |
CMV: Can anyone show me a rational reason as to why this specific example of incest would be immoral? | **DISCLAIMER**: I'm *not* endorsing incest.
**The following context is what I cannot come up with a rational reason as to why it would be immoral:**
* Two orphaned siblings after years of separation meet again (both aware that they are each others siblings):
* One sibling is a man who is 30 years old.
* The other sibling is a woman who is 32 years old who has had a hysterectomy and is sterile.
* They reconnect after 12 years of separation and decide to date and have sex.
**The common arguments against incest are the following which do NOT apply to this situation:**
1. Increased birth defect rates (impossible without a uterus)
2. Power dynamics, as in a parent and a child (these are siblings that are close in age)
3. Pedophilia and exploitation (again these are siblings close in age who start their relationship well over the age of consent)
4. Should the relationship terminate it can lead to the collapse of a family system (in this situation these two siblings have no other family members than each other and have been living separate lives independent of each other for awhile)
**Additionally the following answers are not acceptable:**
1. Religious reasoning (not objective, not to mention many religions have non-condemned incest in them)
2. Using the fallacy that illegal things must be immoral
3. Simply saying it's gross or "feels wrong" without explaining why that would make it immoral is not sufficient.
I must admit I personally am not comfortable with the idea of incest, but I can't actually come up with a rational argument as to why it is immoral. I simply just "feel" it is. | 20 | Playing devils advocate:
Encouragement.
If its ok for those two, another couple of siblings that doesnt fit your special parameters might see them, and think that it is not so wrong after all.
Of course if you dont see anything wrong with incest that is a moot point, but since you are constructing this special example im assuming you do see something wrong with incest in general.
Basically they cant have nice things, because it would ruin it for society. | 12 |
ELI5:Why do shadows tend to be attracted by other shadows ? | I was in the bus today and whenever my shadow got close to another one, it would stretch to reach the other. I never paid much attention to it before now. I know it probably is something about light, but I'd like to know the exact reason of this phenomenon. | 21 | Imagine two equally tall mounds of sand on a flat surface.
Now, push the two mounds towards each other. You will notice that where the two mounds touch, the sand will combine and rise higher.
The same occurs for shadows. A shadow's edge is never completely sharp due to diffraction, a property of light that blurs the edges. The farther away the shadow is from the object blocking the light, the more blurred the edges become.
When two shadows come close together, in the overlapping regions, the light gets blocked twice, once by each shadow. The amount of light blocked must be considered separately per shadow. Imagine that the blurred part each blocks 50% of light. Then one shadow allows 50% of the light through and the second shadow blocks 50% of that. Therefore, the total blocking is 75% which is why it appears darker than each individual shadow, much like how the sand in the two mounds rises higher than the original mounds as the mounds come closer and closer. | 19 |
[Star Wars] How much punishment could the Death Star withstand if it was being directly attacked? How many ships would the Rebels have needed if they wanted to go "toe to toe" with the Death Star? (assuming unlimited resources) | 18 | More firepower than the Rebellion could bring to bear at Endor.
The Death Star was massive, dwarfing any capital ship. Concentrated fire might be able to do serious damage to a couple decks, but you're not going to disable a Death Star with turbolaser batteries, not before Imperial backup arrives. | 32 |
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CMV: James Damore, who wrote the essay about diversity at Google, cited science that proves some women do not choose roles in tech due to differences in their biology. His sources show that gendered personality differences lead some women to choose non-tech jobs. | This whole thing has been blown out of proportion. What Damore wrote should be considered sound research since he included plenty of sources.
It seems like the media is intentionally lying about this in order to push their leftist narrative.
Specifically, I think the science he references is sound and supports all of his conclusions.
I doubt anyone here can change my view, but it's being discussed every day with many people on both sides of the argument, and I'd like to hear some thoughts outside of the major threads, which tend to swing one way or the other. | 18 | Cherry picking a bunch of scientific facts to support a theory you have is not sound research. It's called confirmation bias.
There are a few scientists who have come out and said some of the individual facts in his memo are correct, but there are far more scientists who have debunked his entire premise about there being any significant biological differences between men and women that would make one or the other better suited to tech work, or to choose or not choose tech work.
More importantly, this entire issue has nothing to do with scientific fact. It is in the people skills, human relationships domain.
No adult with any common sense expects to say something like:
"Blacks are on average [insert negative here]"
or
"Jews are on average [insert negative here]"
And to be able to keep their job at any sizeable company.
Harassment and intimidation of other employees has zero relationship to whether or not something is factual. How would you expect *any* woman at Google to feel comfortable getting a peer review from this guy after having read "Women on average have more neuroticism" and that's why they aren't as well suited to tech jobs? | 25 |
ELI5: If people can build their own computers, what is stopping people from building their own smartphones? | I have not put a computer together myself, but my boyfriend recently built me a PC from two old machines and the idea of building a smartphone came to mind. | 67 | Individual components that make up a smartphone are not as easily available or affordable as PC components. They are highly proprietary to each manufacturer and smartphones don't follow a single form factor the way PCs do. | 56 |
[Fifth Element] How did Korben's neighbor end up being impersonated by Mangalores? | Wasn't that the same face? I haven't seen the Fifth Element in years and every so often out of nowhere this question creeps out to bug me. | 23 | When Cornelius arrives at Korban's apartment, he switches Korban's business card to another door. Later, when the police arrive, they spot the name card and bag the neighbor (literally) because they think he is Korban.
Then the Mangalores show up and blast the police who they think have arrested Dallas, so that's the face they use when they try to board the flight. | 34 |
ELI5: What is physically happening that causes the inside of a cpu to heat up? | 17 | Electrical resistance. Just as light bulbs get hot because of the current flowing through a tiny filament, CPUs heat up for much the same reason. CPUs can draw 100W or more these days, and virtually all of that power is converted to heat. | 21 |
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[Star Trek] How did/would other people attempt the Kobayashi Maru, like Riker? Janeway? Seven? Etc.? | 475 | I still find Sulu's answer the one that fits him well. He has the internal conflict - and orders his ship to NOT go into the neutral zone. While the comm plays out the sounds of the crew of the Kobayshi Maru getting killed.
It may be the safe call, but he called it a trap - and a violation that could trigger a war with the klingons, and he was right. Some Heros have to know when to not go cowboy. | 433 |
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ELI5: What would our vision be like if we had a third eye at the back of our head? | 22 | Do you mean how would 'what we see' appear? That would depend on how our brain had evolved to use that third eye and represent it to us mentally. Since this is necessarily different from how our brains function today, there's no definitive answer to give you other than 'we could presumably see behind us, at least if we cut our hair.' | 23 |
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ELI5: How does fire destroy stuff? | This is hard to properly express my question, but what does fire do to destroy things? Like how does it burn a whole house down leaving ashes on the ground, and why aren't the ashes destroyed? Probably some obvious answer I'm overlooking but it is what it is. | 36 | Fire is the process of transforming something chemically into something else. It usually happens in two stages. First, for complex stuff like wood or paper, you take something and heat it up, and that heat destroys the chemical bonds in that substance. The big molecules in it that are very long and solid and lock its parts into place break into smaller molecules. So cellulose cracks into gases like methane (a very light form of gaseous fuel) and leftover stuff like carbon (which is what makes char black), and the wood appears to disintegrate.
Then the heat causes the gasses to combine with oxygen and combust - change into carbon dioxide + water molecules - and give off more heat, making a self-sustaining "fire". When they're gone, it works on the little bit of carbon that's left to turn that into gas - carbon dioxide - too.
What's left is a tiny amount of solids that are made of molecules in traces of wood that don't turn into gas when combined with oxygen (for example, potassium), stuff that's already oxidized (for example, dust from sand - silicon dioxide - blown into that wood from a nearby beach) and stuff that doesn't burn at the temperature of the fire (for example, the copper piping in your house). | 35 |
Job Interview questions | I posted this question in academia and didn’t get much response so thought I’d ask here
Humanities disciples: As someone who will be going on the job market this fall, and a first-gen Phd, can you please share a question that popped up during your interview process? Maybe a question important to the process but weren’t expecting, a question that stumped you, surprised you, etc
And if you can, would you share what your answer to the question was?
Thanks very much.
I’m feeling excited but nervous about the whole thing and would like to know what I’m getting into. Feeling underprepared. | 15 | The question that you will always get, in one form or another, is " tell me about your research". Top tips for answering that:
1) talk about your dissertation's major contributions to the field, and do not only talk about your dissertation: your research is one big project, but you want to show that you have plans beyond it and you're already thinking about it.
2) talk about your dissertation in the past tense (even if you have not defended yet)
3) do all of the above in a maximum of 4-5 minutes and structure the answer with a clear intro, middle and a summary sentence at the end.
They will ask you what would you/could you teach and this is where you have to show them that:
1) you've done your research on what courses they offer and where are the gaps that you can fill
2) you have teaching experience that is relevant for them -- don't dismiss your TA experience as 'just TAing'
3) have one undergrad and one grad course ready to talk about. Have a few major books that you will read in those courses and try to come up with one cool assignment for each of them.
They will ask you if you have any questions: always ask at least one, and ask a question whose answer cannot be easily found on their website.
Hope this helps and good luck! | 19 |
Where does anxiety come from? | What's the evolutionary reason for it? Why does it get worse as you get older or why does it come out of nowhere? Is there a scientific proven way to get rid of it forever? | 32 | >What's the evolutionary reason for it?
Well, it helps to keep us safe by warning us away from danger.
>Why does it get worse as you get older or why does it come out of nowhere?
It doesn't necessarily get worse as you get older, although it does kind of build on itself over time, so the more uncontrolled anxiety you experience, the worse it becomes. It seems to come out of nowhere because it's a very fast-acting physiological system that, because of associative learning, can get triggered by seemingly innocuous stimuli.
>Is there a scientific proven way to get rid of it forever?
Sadly, no. | 50 |
[X-Men:Days of Future Past Spoilers] Did Wolverine just kill himself? | The timeline for X-men goes as follows Wolverine grows up and goes through the events of X1, X2, X3 and the Wolverine. He then goes back in time into his younger body, the events of DOFP play out here.
At the end of DOFP Wolverine's mind snaps back to the future where everything is now nice and not filled with mutant killing robots. He remembers all the events of the previous timeline but not this new one. Presumably his body has been running around with it's original personality, experiencing life, etc, unaware of what happened to his body (as demonstrated when Wolverine's past personality appears after he looses control when he sees William Stryker.)
But as soon as Wolverine snapped back into this body, that entire life, the memories and personality that would have developed with the other wolverine, was gone, as Wolverine clearly has no memory of this new timeline post 1973.
Did Wolverine just kind of kill another Wolverine when he snapped back? That Wolverine doesn't seem to exist anymore, as the previous timeline's Wolverine seems to have "overwritten" that Wolverine.
Maybe Charles could help Wolverine "remember" with his powers, but still, that was the other Wolverine's memories. | 20 | Yep, the wolverine that existed between 1973 up to now died. Maybe charles can help him unlock those memories, or fill him in about what happened, so he might not be entierly lost. i#ll bet we see a logan with conflicting memories in the next movie. | 35 |
CMV: The active opposition to gay marriage in America cannot be accurately considered a religious belief | Background: I'm a vocal atheist who was born and raised Christian for the first couple decades of my life.
Even when I was religious, I didn't understand the intense opposition to gay marriage that so many Christians have. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of different commands and moral "goods" and "bads" in the Bible. Homosexuality is mentioned something like two or three times in it. It is, at best, an absolutely incidental belief. Shaving and eating shellfish are also mentioned in the Bible as sins, but almost all Christians have done away with that.
Likewise, the Bible commands or condemns several actions that modern Christian America (as a whole) have totally ignored. For example, Jesus straight up commands people to feed and clothe the homeless, and yet I'd bet my next paycheck that most Christians in America have never volunteered for the homeless. Also, many people use their churches as simply a means to make money (as discussed recently by John Oliver), and there's a **radically** lower outcry from Christians about that.
I realize that courts have historically been cautious about examining a religious belief. But there is simply no justification for calling this outcry a "firmly held" or "central" religious belief. These same people take a very, very significantly more passive stance on actual central tenants of their religion. If they are unwilling to stand up and act similarly for their relevant religious beliefs, then the lesser ones (like homosexuality) that they react differently towards cannot realistically be religious beliefs. This difference is significant.
Nowhere in their actual religious texts is there even the slightest justification for the way that Christian America is reacting to gay marriage, and it is inconceivable that Jesus, the central figure for their religion, would do anything but condemn that waste of time and money that could have gone to help someone. Therefore, there is simply no argument that the active opposition to homosexuality can be considered religious in nature.
These people are acting on a personal belief, and hiding it behind the veil of religion.
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The comparison to shaving, eating shellfish and other Old Testament commandments is a bit misleading. Exactly which of the Old Testament laws Christians/Gentiles had to follow was a big source of disagreement in the early church. Most churches reference Acts 15 on the issue, which is written in response to the question of whether Gentiles had to be circumcised. Basically, the council decides not to force Gentiles to get circumcised or follow other laws, except (Acts 15:29):
>You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. Farewell.
Since most interpret homosexuality as being in the class of sexual immorality, this applies as one of the few laws to hold over from the OT. | 153 |
ELI5: How do scientists know that the moon was formed from two planets colliding? | and how do they know how long ago it happened? | 64 | The reasoning goes like this:
The Moon missions brought back Moon rocks, which when studied, revealed that the Moon is primarily compromised of a kind of rock also found on Earth. Hence, scientists believe that the Moon's material came from Earth at some point.
They also know that when Earth was formed, the material comprising it was mostly homogeneous. It wasn't until millions of years later that the different types of rocks and materials began to stratify, or organize themselves by density (dense things sank to the core, while lighter things were displaced). Since the Moon's material is not only identical to the rocks on Earth, they are also mixed. This tells scientists that the event which created the Moon happened *before* the layers had a chance to properly layer themselves, as we see now.
So essentially we know that there is a timeline of de-homogenation that began shortly after the Earth was done, and careful analysis of the Moon rocks can show us where about on that timeline the material came from. | 33 |
[DC] Zatanna Zatara uses magic by speaking English in reverse; what happens if she says something palindromic? | 24 | She has done magic with palindromes as a way to combat someone who was reversing time to thus un-reverse her backwards speech. "Egad! No bondage!" to break free of a trap, "Nurses run!" to conjure a horde of nurses to trample him, and then crushing the villain with "Stack cats!" to create a massive pile of cats on top of him. "Ogre, flog a golfer. GO!" and "Puff up!" finished the job. (She admitted that the Ogre one was really bad.)
Basically, it's an option she can do, but rarely does because let's be honest, there's not many palindromes that make sense as spells. | 38 |
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[D&D] If a mace (the weapon) were to brought to life and then be destroyed would it have an after life? | A drunk half Orc was telling me of his adventure into a volcano and said one of his party's mace was alive at one time then tossed into lava. I asked him him he he thought it went to a better place. All he said was 'Thok not know' | 52 | Depends on how it was "brought to life". If it was simply the Bestow Sentience spell, then no, as that spell basically is only good for golem level intelligence, and shouldn't have any personality beyond servitude, which means making another mace with basic intelligence would be a trifle for any level 9 sorceror.
From there it gets... iffy (read: Depends on DM/story). If a soul was bound to the thing, by some sort of binding, I'd assume it would either finally escape into the mortal realm if it was bound there due to being very powerful, or be free to die properly if they were being forced to serve. In the case of the latter, you could probably find it in the underworld, just probably not very happy to see you and be a mace again. Or maybe the spirit has to fly off to join to the first host it sees. Or it may rejoin the powers of whoever summoned it. Spirits are usually somewhat immune to the physical side of this world, so presumably the lava would do little to that part of it.
All that aside, to properly answer the question. No, the mace wouldn't have an afterlife, unless there was some hitherto unknown species of sentient weaponry hanging around, but it's very likely the spirit that (presumably) lived IN the mace has had something happen to it since then. | 31 |
[Star Wars] What happened to all of the Battle Droids after episodes 1-3? | Why were none integrated into the Empire's army in episodes 4-6? Surely they weren't all destroyed, and any additional soldiers would have been useful.
Droidekas would have been a nice addition as well, and would have given Luke and Obi-Wan some trouble. | 133 | A droid army is a relatively inflexible and single-use tool compared to even clone or recruited forces, but still has significant upkeep costs. When the Clone Wars ended and the need for such a massive standing force was no longer felt necessary, the droid army was viewed as the least useful tool and most were scrapped or deactivated and put into storage. Some escaped immediate destruction on varying conditions:
- Some separatist holdouts fought on; notably Gizor Delso's insurrection on Mustafar which reactivated a significant droid force stored there.
- The Empire did use some droid units in limited roles for suppression of Seperatist holdouts, but these were increasingly replaced with equipment more suited to the Empire's new missions of enforcement and hunting rather than large-scale open warfare. These included the most successful CIS units, such as IG-100 Magnaguards and DSD-1 Dwarf Spider Droids, the latter of which went on to serve with the stormtrooper corp.
- A more wide-scale usage of ex-droid armies was as an opposing force for training new Imperial troops. Notable droid types used here included B3 'Ultra' and LM432 Crab droids.
- Droidekas would remain a feared battle droid type, used by the Empire as fixed-location guard or special Jedi-hunting units; pirate groups sometimes rolled out half-functioning Droidekas for the intimidation factor alone. Tyber Zann's underworld consortium would also seize and make use of a refined version of the design.
- Similarly, the early Rebel Alliance sometimes made use of old Seperatist caches. These were increasingly phased out as they became outdated and hard to repair.
- A few droid units had been outfitted to act independently or otherwise failed to respond to the shutdown order. Some these would act as independent units during Imperial rule, often growing distinct personalities as droids were known to do if not memory-wiped often. Examples included a unit of B2 battle droids that fought for nearly half a century after the clone wars ended or a squadron of aquatic droids that acted as contracted guards for native Quarren on Mon Calamari.
Ultimately however, the limitations of a droid army were well apparent by the end of the Clone Wars. With few types of battle droid able to independently reason and thus ill-suited to the Empire's mission of rule and pacification, there was little reason to pay for the upkeep such a massive force. | 143 |
Why should I read the 40K? What is it about? [40K] | I've been hungry for more Sci Fi after finishing the Thrawn trilogy.
Edit: Thanks for all the responses, I guess I'm into 40K now. | 23 | 40k is Grim dark. If you're looking for a happy ending, look else where. A battle may end nicely for someone but the galaxy will never be free of war and no one will ever win. In spite of that they keep fighting and we keep rooting for them.
Multiple races have a claim to rule the Galaxy and others are quintessential species and forces that want to kill everything and ruin the fun for everyone.
Eldar: the crumbling remains of a once great empire that ruled the Galaxy. Their lust and hedonism birthed the chaos god Slannesh into existence and they've been running ever since so that she doesn't eat their souls.
Orks: Innumerable fungus men that love nothing more than to fight and kill. The breed by being killed and are near impossible to exterminate from a planet, let alone the galaxy. Plus, what they believe becomes true to some extent. Want to go faster, just paint your truck red because red goes faster, duh. Or paint yourself purple and become invisible because "who's ever seen a purple ork?"
Tau: The new up and comers who are making extraordinary technological leaps in a galaxy that is otherwise stagnant in tech. They have one goal, The greater good! Join us to achieve it or prepare to die!
Necrons: sold their souls in order to win a war millions of years ago and now are husks of their former selves. They are automatons that slept for millennia and now that they are waking up, they thirst to kill every last living organism. Even down to microbes.
Tyranids: Xenos arriving from another galaxy. They are basically bugs attracted to psychic activating like a porch light. They eat absolutely everything; stripping a planet completely of all biomass and leaving an unlivable rock. They are heading straight for the astronimcan on Holy Terra.
Imperium of Man: Billions of planets, each with billions of humans across the galaxy are lead by the greatest psyker to ever exist, The Emperor, and are in constant battle to exterminate the galaxy of all filthy Xenos and place humanity in their rightful place as rulers of the Milky Way.
Astartes: The greatest warriors at The Emperors disposal. Super engineered human warriors that can fight for days on end, have multiple organs, can sustain multiple injuries and barely flinch or hold back, live for upwards of ten thousand years and much more. They lead The Emperors Great Crusade across the stars.
Chaos: the basic force created parrall to our universe by all sentient creatures emotions. Deep within its bowels reside the four Chaos Gods. Knorne The Blood God thirsts for blood and murder. Nurgle the Plague Lord is the god of death, disease and plague. Slaanesh the Prince of Pleasure feeds off of all desire, pleasure, sensation and lust. Tzeentch the Changer of Ways is the god of Hope, fate, change and Sorcery and weaves the fates of the universe for his own pleasures. At their disposal to reek havoc on the matterial universe are Chaos Daemons and Chaos Space Marines (Astartes who have fallen to Chaos to obey and adore one or all of the Chaos gods). | 38 |
[LOTR] Removing the ring from one of the nine? | Is it possible?
* Would it "kill" them like Sauron?
* Would they be able to come back?
* Bonus:
What would happen if someone else would put it on afterwards?
Wich power would you have(excluding the power of vintage-fashion)?
(I'm always confused by the term "power" in the tolkien universe.) | 22 | The Nazgul weren't wearing their Rings at the time of LotR. They had simply worn the Nine Rings for too long and 'faded' into invisible wraiths whose spirits were bound to the Nine Rings. Sauron held onto the Nine so that he could fully control the Nazgul even without the One Ring. If the Nazgul were to put their Rings back on, presumably they would regain the powers they had while they held the Rings and their robes would become invisible. | 32 |
ELI5: Why do we think we sound better when singing than we really are? | I know I suck at singing, but only after recording myself. Problem is, in my head, I think I sound good.
Why? | 42 | Because of how we hear our own voice is actually not like how others hear your voice. Your voice sounds different to you than to others.
The voice originates in you and the sound going out from your mouth doesn't go straight to your ears, but by bouncing a lot. Not all sound actually goes out of your mouth, it also makes your mouth vibrate, which makes your head vibrate, and then the stuff you hear with vibrates and you hear the sound.
Sound is actually just vibration of material, be it air or your head. Your head vibrates differently from air, because they are different materials. Water also vibrates differently, which makes sounds in water sound funny. Also, this is why there is no sound in space, because there is no material (air) which would vibrate so that the sound from place A would go to place B. | 15 |
[MCU] If Vision were to remove the Mind Stone successfully without destroying himself, would he still have the powers he had access to when he was first created? | 22 | Probably yeah. Every other stone-empowered character (Captain Marvel, Scarlett Witch, Quicksilver) retains their powers after losing their stone.
He might lose the power to shoot energy beams out of his forehead, since that seems to specifically come from the stone. | 28 |
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ELI5: why does squinting improve vision? | At least for me, I notice that when I squint, my vision becomes sharper. I don't know if this is a common thing, but I'm curious as to why it happens | 110 | You’ll experience trouble seeing things far away in the first place if your iris has trouble closing to focus the light onto your retina. Glasses do this for those of us who have that problem. Squinting sort of replicates what a pinhole camera does, and at the cost of some light not coming in, helps focus the light from the object you’re looking at correctly. You can make some rudimentary ‘glasses’ by taking your index finger and curling it up against your thumb so that just a little bit of light comes through, then look through it. It takes a little practice to get the hole the right size and to find the distance it needs to be from your eye (pretty close though) but that will give the same effect. | 95 |
CMV: Spirituality or ways of living should not be considered a part of physical activities like Yoga or Sports. | I was reading through the comments on [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/4xer5w/egyptian_judoka_refusing_to_shake_hands_with/?ref=share&ref_source=link) on the Egyptian Judoka refusing to shake hands with an Israeli Judoka after their match. It's clear that this is bad sportsmanship but in the comments many people were saying that he showed that he didn't understand Judo. They claimed that he ignored Rei which is the mentality and etiquette attached to Judo.
I find it hard to consider Rei a part of Judo, at most it seems to be a tradition that is followed by many practitioners. Judo is a sport where you attempt to defeat another practitioner by following the rules of the match. If you can defeat your opponent while following the rules then you have won the match and you are a better Judoka. It is a sport not an evaluation of personality/ dogma. You could argue that there are penalties in scoring for unsportsmanlike behavior in the match but that seems like an effort by organizers to dissuade it from happening rather than it being a core part of the sport.
The same for Yoga. Yoga often has a spiritual element attached to it. You can find many examples online of Yogis talking about how you have to get on the spiritual journey of yoga to get the full benefits of the practice. It seems to me that anyone who practices the stretching techniques and forms found in yoga is a yogi and gets the exact same benefit from the movements. That is not to say that the mental journey they talk about doesn't have value on it's own, simply that it is separate and not necessary for yoga.
I can find other examples in various martial arts and other hobbies of this type of thinking. I do find it more often in hobbies originating in Asia, where concepts of energy movement / spirituality are more prevalent.
I don't think that the mental / spiritual aspect should be considered a part of these activities. They can be beneficial, and they can often correlate with the activities. But they are not necessary to perform the activities nor compete in them so they are not really a part of those activities. | 18 | Yoga is a sanskrit term which comes from a similar root to our English word "Yolk" (not the egg kind) and has been a religious practice for millenia. Yoga outside of modern Western interpretations is entirely spiritual. Banning spirituality from Yoga is turning Yoga into "stretching".
I am 100% atheist but you're argument is like saying "take spirituality out of buddhist meditation". | 12 |
ELI5: Why do we shiver when we pee? | Had a substantially huge shiver whilst urinating today, and I thought that Reddit would be able to enlighten me on this. So... why? | 41 | Pee Shivers, also known as "post-micturition convulsion syndrome" (PCMS) Post meaning "after", Macturition meaning "Urination" or "peeing" and Convulsion meaning "Shiver" or "Shake" so basically the "After Pee Shakes"
No one is quite sure what causes them, they happen mostly in males (boys) and sometimes even females (girls). There is little actual research into it's cause. Most theories are just speculation and assumptions (Their best guess) based on our understanding of how the body works, but since no research has been done specifically on the "Pee Shivers", it could be any of the theories floating around.
The most common theories are:
* Sudden loss of warm fluid. A large volume of body temperature fluid leaving the body triggers a sensory drop in body temperature though nothing may have changed.
* Exposing an area of your body usually covered, to the air colder than the body. Shivering burns energy creating heat in an attempt to warm up.
* Comedian George Carlin thought it was a primitive method to shake the dribbles off :)
* A quirk in our brain as you relax muscles that are usually tense. These muscles keep you from peeing yourself constantly, telling them to relax while you pee sends conflicts to the brains desire to keep them shut. Then when you stop peeing they get the go ahead and close up again. You shiver while your brain sorts out these conflicts. A similar quirk is why you kick yourself awake while falling asleep... but that's for a different ELI5 | 29 |
ELI5: If a fever is part of the way your body naturally combats viruses/bacteria, then why is it recommended to take medicine to lower your body temperature? | 21 | Because the immune system sometimes goes overboard and can hurt you.
We often think of the immune system as an army taking orders from the body, but it's better to think of your immune system as a bunch of colonists, living on the land, which is you.
Usually, the colonists are actually helpful. They keep the pest population in check, and their regularly rotated fields are way easier for you to support than the random tangle of trees and shrubs that used to grow in much of the island.
But, one day, you notice there's a problem. A new kind of pest has shown up that the colonists are having trouble dealing with, some kind of weird fly that is causing trouble. To stop it, they have started setting fires all over to kill the fly breeding grounds.
The colonists don't realize this, but the fires are actually burning too wide and too hot. With the heat and charring of the soil, the colonists are killing off all the things that make you, the land, sustainable. If you don't take some steps to rein them in, they may well kill the flies, but they will kill you with them. | 62 |
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If genetic mutations are random, and only later sorted according to the advantage or disadvantage they yield during the struggle to reproduce, why don't we see more functionally neutral traits? | A thumbnail sketch of evolution might go as follows: Sexual reproduction throws up genetic mutations which result in random variations in the resulting offspring of two organisms. If these random variations give the organism a slight advantage, it is more likely to survive and pass on its genes; if they do not, it is more likely to perish before reproductive age and therefore fail to pass on those unfit genes.
We might summarize this still further by saying with Dawkins that reproduction is a sort of "combinatorial lottery" upon the results of which survival on earth exerts a selective force. But in that case the rules of the game are, “Anything goes,” followed by, “If it works once it’s here, it stays; if it doesn’t work, it's out,” with nothing to account for the conspicuous absence of functionally redunant attributes.
To put it slightly differently, if the above outline of evolution is valid might we not expect to see more animals with traits that offer NEITHER an obvious survivalistic advantage NOR a disadvantage? But looking at any particular organism on earth, one is impressed by how amazingly streamlined and efficient it is. You can say, “The spinal cord is poorly ‘designed,’” or else, “The optic nerves of the eye whorl back rather uneconomically through the pupil,” or whatever. But nevertheless, there seems to be zero fat or shoe-leather on Earth's organisms in that every trait, organ and feature serves a particular, easily identifiable and necessary purpose.
What I am struggling to express and understand, to conclude, is that the mechanism of evolution allows for the emergence and persistence of functionally neutral traits but that these are rarely if ever seen.
As an example, let's imagine that twenty-thousand years ago a dragonfly is born with a larger mandible that enables it to consume a more varied died—but this trait is randomly paired with a nodule on its back. The advantage of an increased jaw size offsets whatever energy is squandered growing the nodule and so a selection bias emerges for the paired traits. But millennia later scientists will face a conspicuous feature of dragon-fly anatomy with no identifiable function.
I'm a mere artist and this is no doubt a crude example but it is easy to extract the basic idea and imagine the rich variety of traits of neutral functionality that might exist if evolution were random and the only selection force the advantageousness or disadvantageousness of the resulting variations because *there is no selection force operating upon functional redundancy.* | 24 | Most mutations are neutral. (This is sort of a trick, most are going to be silent. They are neutral because they don't change any morphology.) You are confusing traits with sequence. Traits are things like arms. It does not really make sense to talk about a trait being neutral, neutral is in comparison. All traits help the organism, having something is expensive. Most *changes* are in fact neutral. A small number are positive, some of those make it to fixation (stick around), a larger number are negative and far fewer of those make it to fixation.
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[MCU] Is Spiderman stronger than Captain America? | If he isn't right now, would he be if he bulked up to match with Steve's buffness? | 23 | Spider-Man is physically stronger and more durable by far. He was able to lift who knows how many tons of cement and steel off of him in homecoming after having it fall on him. He is able to “stop a bus with his bare hands”, he is shown catching a small car in motion, he survived a plan crash, he was able to catch Cull Obsidian’s weapon effortlessly and got the Infinity Gauntlet off of Thanos’s hand for a split second before Quill went crazy.
I know this isn’t part of the question but in a fight, right now Cap would probably win because he is much experienced and skilled in hand to hand combat. But with that said, I’m not sure if it’s the same in the MCU but in the comics, Spidey really holds back. | 38 |
ELI5: How can 2 different CPU’s of the same model have different overclock potentials even though they have the same architecture? | 18 | There are very slight variations between chips, both a benefit and a detriment to the way they're produced. Obviously every chip that makes it into a package has probably tested to be able to run at the rating on the box with no problems. Those that fail get tossed. But there are some where there are less imperfections or whatever, where they are (at least in theory) capable of working at a higher speed.
The box rating is just the absolute baseline of What constitutes a sellable CPU, and is what is proven to be completely stable. | 20 |
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If we are creating super bugs by over using and incorrectly using antibiotics, are we doing the same by cleaning our hands and disinfecting surfaces etc? | Out damn spot. Is this an issue at all? | 76 | Here is one way to look at it: it's easy to kill bacteria outside your body. Animals can't evolve perfect defences to the broad range of ways they can die out in the open.
It's incredibly difficult to find ways to narrowly target foreign organisms within our body using kill mechanisms that don't interact with our own cells.
It's the difference between an invading army and terrorists inside your country. You probably don't care so much if the army knows you're watching them. But if you tip off the terrorists they could easily change their tactics and disappear. | 43 |
CMV: Extraversion does not equate to social competence | It seems in today’s society being extroverted is equated to having good social skills. There is definitely a bit of a fetish for and bias towards being extroverted and it is generally seen as a good thing while introversion is not.
I would argue that the most socially adept people are actually those that are best at balancing between extrovert and introvert traits. being loud and having a “big personality” all the time is quite maladaptive and actually a sign of poor social skills.
I can see the responses already arguing this is not how people see it, but I am not debating whether or not society does see it this way or not because at least in American culture its is painfully true that extrovert=good social skills. There is an extreme a fetish for extroverts in the west. | 51 | I agree that people often see it this way, but loud or "big personality" isnt even what extravert means. Some extraverts have quieter personalities, but are energized by being in a group. Some introverts enjoy groups and can be the life of the party but need some time to recharge alone. Some introverts are loud BECAUSE they're so uncomfortable in a group setting and that's their coping mechanism.
I do think that on average, folks who are energized by groups tend to spend more time in them and become better at navigating large group situations via practice. But there are many exceptions (both competent introverts and less competent extroverts) and introverts may become better at navigating smaller group or one-on-one situations, which are also a part of social competence.
So it's really a lot more complicated than the commonly held view of extrovert = loud, introvert = quiet. | 23 |
Why, when you continue to burn ash, do the ashes eventually change from black to white? | Whenever you burn wood, plants, or other organic material, the residual carbon becomes black ash. However, if you continue to burn that material, eventually the ashes will turn white. What are the mechanisms involved in further combustion of the material that result in the ash changing from a compound which essentially absorbs all photons in the visible spectrum making it appear black, to a compound that largely scatters light in the visible spectrum appearing white?
Thanks! | 617 | If you have something black during a combustion process that‘s not ash but the remaining carbon. The carbon reacts with oxygen in the air to form carbon dioxide, a gas. Ash is the product of oxygen reacting with everything not containing carbon: calcium, magnesium, and a few other metals. The oxides of those metals (reaction products with oxygen from the air) are usually white in color and do not become gaseous at usual combustion temperatures. That is why this is what‘s left at the end of burning something and why it is white. | 687 |
ELI5: Why certain things catch fire and others don't | 95 | Suppose you have a marble on a flat piece of carpet. You push it and it rolls to a stop. It doesn't matter how hard you push it, it's on a flat surface and eventually it'll stop.
Now imagine your carpet is shaped like a volcano: A bowl of carpet, atop a mountain with steep sides. It's comfortably sitting still in the middle of the bowl on top of the mountain, but if you push it hard enough, it will roll up the slope of the bowl over the edge, and continue rolling down the side of the mountain.
Fire is all about putting enough energy into your marble (or in reality, a bit of paper or wood or gasoline) to get it to roll up and out of the bowl. This is called activation energy. To get something burning, you have to push it out of its "bowl" by adding heat. Then, once it is out of the bowl, it burns and releases energy by "rolling down the mountain". If the mountain is tall enough (known as "stored energy"), the marble will have enough energy to knock another marble out of its own bowl when it gets to the bottom of its mountain, and you've got a chain reaction of each marble freeing other marbles: Fire.
So why does wood burn but glass does not? They're on different shaped mountains. Wood has a low activation energy and high stored energy: It is sitting in a shallow bowl atop a tall mountain. It's easy to push the marble out of the bowl, and the marble has plenty of energy on the way down the mountain to push a few more marbles out of their own bowls.
Glass, on the other hand, is like a hole in the ground. You can add a bunch of energy to push it out of the hole, but there's no mountain to roll down (high activation energy, very low stored energy). In other words, you'll never get a reaction with glass to sustain itself in the form of fire.
This metaphor expands in both directions. TNT, a high explosive, is like a marble balanced on a pin at the top of a huge mountain. Just a tap is all it takes and it will shake all the other marbles off their pins and they all fall down the mountain together in an explosion. Noble gasses (xenon, neon, argon, etc) are like wells in the earth. No amount of shoving will even get them out of their bowls, and even if you did, they wouldn't go anywhere.
Hope that helps a bit. | 113 |
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What is the distinction between Avoidant Personality Disorder and Social Anxiety/ Phobia? | After reading on both of these, I find it hard to understand the key differences between them both. There is a lot to compare between them. I've seen a lot of articles comparing and contrasting them but many of the contrasting traits were either broad or unclear. I am wondering how do psychologists know when someone has AVPD instead of social anxiety/phobia and vice versa?
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Thank you! | 25 | Here is an overview of the two disorders.
Social Anxiety disorder - fear, anxiety, avoidance in social situations. SAD isn't typically a manifestation of extreme personality traits, the symptoms can come and go and are often environmentally triggered and situation specific.
AVPD - thought of as a maladaptive pattern that is stable across time, characterized by social inhibition. We also see a preoccupation with criticism with AVPD.
An okay way to distinguish them is SAD is associated with performance-related anxiety, AVPD is associated with difficulties forming relationships in which to perform in the first place. So forming vs. performing, but this isn't always the case and we do see some individuals with SAD experience anxiety in social situations where they aren't required to perform (E.g., sitting in a lecture hall).
There is an ongoing debate in the treatment community as to whether AVPD is a more extreme or more stable variant of SAD, and we don't have nearly as much research on AVPD, as they are difficult to find and avoid volunteering for research studies. Even our thinking about the stability difference is challenged in a recent study which found that the disorders are equally stable across time, so it can be quite difficult to distinguish them. That same study concluded that they *are* distinct constructs. There is a lot of overlap, but enough is different to classify them as so, and the treatment strategy should vary depending on which disorder is presenting. | 10 |
ELI5: why does ground beef / chicken breast cost less than red peppers? | Currently a pound of grapes costs more than a pound of boneless chicken breast at my local supermarket. Why do things my food eats eats cost more than my food? | 40 | **TL;DR: Lots of reasons.** *Certain fruits and veggies are highly seasonal and light for their weight and require careful handling and importing from outside the country. Meat's easier to keep growing through the winter using local government-assisted jobs so grocery stores can access massive quantities and sell it at a reduced price.*
Fruits and vegetables don't grow outside in colder weather, and many have very limited growing seasons coupled with limited shelf life. So you either have to grow them in a warm climate that's far away and then invest in rapidly shipping them in a temperature-controlled container until they arrive, or grow them in a regional warmed greenhouse or hydroponics farm. Both options are expensive and add to the cost.
A lot of fruit and vegetables bruise very easily and are filled with air (peppers are a good example). So you have to ship them in protective containers that don't really contain much weight compared to their volume. This adds to their cost compared the small volume for each pound of, say, pork that comes in.
There are no seasonal limitations on growing many meats. Pig sties and chicken farms run throughout the year, feeding their animals through locally grown crops that keep really well like dried corn. Do it right and you can get several harvests of chicken each year. However, strawberries and asparagus really only grow once per year in a certain season. Getting those products out of season usually means they've been shipped from far overseas.
Stores put on sales according to supply and demand. In your chicken versus grapes example, they were able to buy a massive quantity of local chicken at a cheap price, and they were willing to let it go at less of a profit per package because everyone's buying it and then buying other things in their store too. There's no massive quantity of grapes being routinely harvested in winter, so there's no sale on those and the store's getting full profit on each bunch they sell.
And finally, as someone else mentioned, sometimes regional governments interfere in the price-setting elements of "supply and demand", charging tariffs and taxes on imported good while subsidizing locally produced ones.
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[General Fantasy] I've been sprinkling some chili powder into all my potions, are there any negative effects? | I like my potions to have a little extra kick, ya know? Makes sure people *know* they're working. | 51 | Well the elf has diarrhea, the half-orc is raging, the dwarf demands seconds, the Halfling is critiquing you for not using a proper balance of flavors, the gnome is trying to drink the lake, and the tiefling and dragonborn can't tell the difference. The warforged, however, believes that they can make an aerosol weapon out of it, and begins to draft some diagrams. | 66 |
[Borderlands 1, 2, TPS] Ecology of Pandora and Elpis | It seems that all the native wildlife on Pandora and Elpis all appear to be omnivorous but despite the ample sunlight there appears to be little vegetation.
Similarly, on Elpis, there's no Energy food chain at all to support Torks, Shuggaraths or any of that. So with exception of feeding on Scavs and human flesh, what supports all these ecosystems? What are people eating? How does Sanctuary feed it's population? | 42 | In the beginning, food was largely imported from agri-worlds, and those shipments are still going on - they're all that's really left of Pandora's economy, because everyone has to eat. Remember, even *scout* ships in the Borderlands are the size of cities; a proper *commerce* ship can set down entire grain silos to feed a city of millions for a year before moving on.
With cheap food, people move out, forming settlements all over Pandora. But when the mines dry up, the cheap food dries up. Offworld food becomes a luxury good, because supply and demand dictate as such (limited supply, meeting intense demand). Then, the Vault sets up its meme broadcast and it's all over for commerce for the greater portion of Pandora. People rob the trains, if they're lucky, or trade for it if they're not. A few farmers try to eke out an existence - the few farms you stumble across in Borderlands 2 - but what few things grow well grow *underground*, away form the scalding sun. Coincidentally, this favors creatures with huge claws to dig for them - thus, the bullymong, the skag, those tentacle-based creatures that pop up at the worst possible time.
As part of his greater plan to become the richest, most powerful man in the history of ever, Jack was trying to change that. The Wildlife Exploitation Preserve used domed ceilings to turn away baking sunlight and high walls to prevent windblown erosion - and within, it could easily be called an arable paradise, where captured moisture eventually returns to the soil to help things grow. And the city of Opportunity was going to have ag-domes - feeding the populace *fresh* fruits and vegetables, not as a rare once-in-a-lifetime treat but as their daily bread and butter, emotionally making them dependent on Jack. Jack's plan was a lot like Luthor's - buy the rights to land (Lex bought extraterratorial seascapes, Jack bought dead mined-out planets) nobody wants, make it valuable overnight (Luthor using kryptonite to create solid land, Jack using dropships of hyperion loaders to digistruct walls and farms), and call it a day. (And oh - by controlling the Warriors, he had a way to *make* planets become land that nobody wanted. Gotta love playing both ends!) But in the end, we all know what happened to those ag-domes once the Vault Hunters came into town.
So get used to potatoes (key calorie source), beets (sugar source), parsnips, rutabegas, and carrots; they're the only edible things that grow well on Pandora itself. If you do well, your diet will be supplemented with offworld grains, with the occasional dropship offloading luxury canned fruits and vegetables. Even Tina's beloved crumpets are made of potato flower. | 25 |
[Warhammer 40k] What is an average day like for a human citizen on: Chaos, Imperium and Tau controlled planets? | 69 | On an Imperial world, the fundamental truth is bureaucracy. Citizens work 16 hours a day, every day, for the sake of the Emperor. The most common group who don't spend day and night in the factories are gang scum, who function as much as a replacement for the woefully insufficient police as anything else. The monthly payment to the hab block is the foremost concern. Falling deeper in the hive is the daily fear.
On a Chaotic world, the fundamental truth is power. Citizens are often slaves, and if they are not they likely have slaves themselves. The most common group who don't spend life in bondage are cultists, the more successful of whom are the only demographic excepted from the normal struggles of power for the sake of their blessing by the Neverborn. There is no need for social control. Do as thou wilt. The satisfaction of one's lord, be that of flesh or of warp, is the foremost concern. Angering the powers that be is the daily fear.
On a Tau world, the fundamental truth is ideology. Human citizens vastly outnumber the Tau ruling class, and the Tau are not blind to the risk this presents. The methods of labor are as much for indoctrination into Tau concepts as they are for material purposes. Together they will gather, expressing their struggle towards the Greater Good, drones watching on. The most common group who don't accept their role as Gue'vesa are the Imperial underground. The Tau wish to win them over more than they wish to fight them, and so they are likely to have an unprecedented level of infiltration. Social control is provided by human auxiliaries under the command of Fire Caste. Growing in social rank is the foremost concern. Coming to be seen as an alien who has reached their limits in the Greater Good is the daily fear. | 50 |
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How are electrons generated from magnetism? | Spinning a copper wire in a permanent magnetic field will generate electric current, indefinitely. So if electric current is the movement of electrons carrying their charge to the opposite charge, and you have a load in between which converts the current to heat/light/etc, where do more electrons come from?
Edit: Thanks for some great explanations!
So electrons are neither created nor destroyed, they're just moving around, but what about a case where there is a load in the circuit that generates heat. Heat in this case is essentially lost energy but what is actually lost? The magnetism doesn't degrade and the electrons aren't lost. The only other energy is the force required to rotate the copper wire. So does that force equate to the heat energy? | 17 | You aren't creating electrons, you are moving them around, just like when a river flows down a hill you aren't creating water, you are just moving it downhill.
(And if you never move it uphill, you will eventually run out of high-energy water, and the flow will stop, just like if you never recharge your batter, you will eventually run out of high-energy electrons and the electricity will stop.) | 16 |
ELI5: Why eating Sushi is healthy and safe and why other raw meats can't achieve this. | I was always curious about this. Anyone care to help? | 17 | It all depends on the likelihood of parasites and how the meat was handled. There's nothing wrong with raw beef, for example.
The problem with raw chicken is that it's often contaminated with salmonella and raw pork can have trichinosis. Cooking is necessary to kill those pathogens. They could theoretically be okay if not contaminated (but that's a very risky and nasty if).
On the other hand, some fish are not always safe to eat raw either. Swordfish can have parasitic worms and must be checked thoroughly. | 11 |
Does light inside a black hole have no energy? What is light without energy? | I was reading past threads about light, mass and black holes, and the consensus seemed to be that since E2 = (mc2 )2 + (pc)2, light was therefore affected by gravity since it had 'p' (momentum) even though it was massless.
If that's the equation, then does light in a black hole have no energy because it's without mass and without momentum? Would light still exist as a massless, energyless thing? | 18 | > If that's the equation, then does light in a black hole have no energy because it's without mass and without momentum? Would light still exist as a massless, energyless thing?
Why would light inside a blackhole carry no momentum? | 10 |
ELI5: why do people get annoyed? What’s triggered in the brain to feel irritated and why do we have pet peeves? | 15 | Annoyance is essentially a stress response in your brain and body, which causes the release of hormones and neurotransmitters to help you respond to that stress.
Some annoyances cause this reaction because they make things more difficult for you (annoyances like being made late, being hindered toward a goal, anything that means you have to do more work, do something differently than how you were planning to do it, do something faster than you wanted to, skip doing something etc).
Some annoyances cause this reaction because they cause something called "cognitive dissonance." This is basically when your brain is getting input that is different from what it knows, which it does not like, as a rule. This would be annoyances like someone acting hypocritical (doing something that you know to be wrong, that they know is wrong, but they are acting like it's not wrong - this generates cognitive dissonance), or annoyances like people disagreeing with you on something you're passionate about.
Some annoyances cause this reaction because they present potential physical danger (or something that your brain thinks might be danger). Examples might be a loud irritating noise, or an internal problem like hunger, lack of sleep, pain, etc.
These and many other triggers make up the concept of "annoyance," and the stress response causes you to feel less relaxed and more vigilant (that feeling of being on edge), and somewhat blocks the transmission of certain relaxing neurotransmitters, like seratonin and dopamine.
As to pet peeves and other individual differences in what people find annoying, this depends a lot on the learned pathways on your brain. If something has presented more serious issues for you in the past, or something frequently presents problems for you, it's more likely to annoy you more strongly because the pathways in your brain relating to that thing have gotten more "exercise," so to speak. Also, some things may cause stronger cognitive dissonance in some people than others, based on their unique set of thoughts and beliefs, causing greater annoyance when they are violated. Lastly, some people's stress responses are more finely tuned to be triggered by certain things, while others are more numb to the same thing. You can imagine how, if you grow up in a really noisy household, your stress response will probably not be as sensitive to noise as someone who grew up in a really quiet home, because you will be more used to it, and your brain will have learned that it is not really a danger or a hindrance. | 15 |
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CMV: Trying to "solve" global warming is unrealistic, and plans should only be made to survive it | First off, yes, I think that global warming is real. But from what I have seen of how factories work and how resources are used, I think it is unfair to blame corporations for "ruining Earth". Sure, yes, they are causing environmental problems, and yes, there are researches into how to produce with less harm to the environment, but I think that whining that corporations are purposefully prioritizing profits over the environment is kind of misunderstanding the point of corporations. They are an organization created to make more money, that's their job. Expecting corporations to take hits and cause their shares to fall because of some moral imperatives is like expecting a banker to do a fireman's job. They are already doing the best they can realistically do, and to do any more would simply destroy the economy. The issue isn't what people are doing, but because of how the world is. The Earth is a shitty, sensitive system that breaks too easily. I feel like people these days seem to think that all problems originate from people being jerks, without realizing that sometimes reality is just limiting. If living normally and expanding human civilization causes the Earth to be affected this badly, then I highly doubt it would be possible for us to fix that problem and still remain as a species that is growing. The only way out of this is to just utilize Earth's resource to the best of our abilities, and live with the consequences, because there is no way for us to stop consequences from happening without stopping production.
EDIT: I should also add that I think that trying to impose too much regulations on corporations will only serve to hurt ourselves, and make the world as a whole "poorer".
EDIT 2: In light of the main thing seeming to be the question of mitigating global warming VS mitigating the effect of global warming, I think I should lay my cards on the table. I think something that would convince me would be arguments on why it is more efficient to mitigate global warming itself, rather than mitigating the effects it would have on us.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | 41 | That entire argument presupposes that money is more important than the environment in which we live. Surely you could just as easily say that the economy is a shitty, sensitive system that breaks too easily if simply not destroying the planet is enough to bring it to its knees.
Consider that there are already costs involved with manufacturing that go beyond the bare basics needed to make something. They have to pay the workforce at least a mandated minimum wage. They have to correctly dispose of industrial waste and not emit harmful substances into the environment. They have to maintain a safe environment for their workers.
It has been argued in the past that introducing all those things would have been prohibitively costly to implement, and yet they were forced onto corporations and the predicted economic disasters never eventuated. In some cases, the economy was actually helped rather than hindered. For example, it turns out that having a cashed-up workforce is actually good for the economy because the general population can buy more goods and services. You could even argue that the trickle-up effect may be greater than the trickle-down effect that our politicians like to talk about.
Similarly, converting to sustainable energy sources and energy efficient processes can result in lower power costs. So while there is a short-term cost in changing systems, the long-term gain may prove to be beneficial to the corporations. If it was just one single business that had to reduce their carbon emissions then it would be unfair, but if everyone has to do it then nobody is particularly at a disadvantage. That is why it is so important that the entire developed world all commits to the Paris agreement. As soon as one major country pulls out then they will all fall like dominoes unless the countries start implementing tariffs on non-complying countries. | 35 |
If increased per capita wealth=increased consumption=inflation that cancels out increases in wealth, how did per capita wealth ever increase in developed nations? | This is an argument that seems to come up every time a program that offers some sort of wealth redistribution like increasing the minimum wage or student debt forgiveness is discussed. The idea that if consumers get more money, the inflationary effects will cancel out their increase in wealth/income.
But the entire history of industrialization and the middle class seems to disprove this concept.
Am I missing something? | 22 | What matters is the supply of real goods and services, like food and housing and medical care and Netflix TV shows. We talk about economic growth in $ terms (or £ or € or whatever) because it's impractical to talk about all these goods and services individually, and money is the only way we have to aggregate them all.
Luckily, we can control (albeit Imperfectly) for changes in prices that don't reflect changes in the real goods and services. Modern day statistical offices put considerable effort into this, and economic historians have calculated long time series of incomes and GDP controlling for inflation for a number of countries.
So we can talk about things like "real Income growth" and "GDP in volumes".
So how can real incomes increase across an economy? Technological progress is one, increased efficiency of operation (e.g. well functioning price system, relatively uncorrupt government, not having a civil war), labour force, like healthier, better educated, higher proportion of working age, returns to scale (a large part of why foreign trade is valuable), etc.
Redistribution can increase the amount of output of real goods and services, e.g. childhood nutrition and vaccines can pay off in multiple areas. Redistribution can also support civil peace. Conversely redistribution can also discourage this, e.g. higher taxes meaning reduced work effort, or more resources spent on tax avoidance and trying to stop tax avoidance. Some redistributist policies can have negative impacts on social peace, e.g. why cancel student loan debt but not debt a, say, plumber might take on to start their own business? Some redistributionist policies can create problems like moral hazard, etc.
And, finally the more complex policies are, the more likely they are to interact in unexpected and undesirable ways, which is where things like poverty traps where as people's market incomes go up they can lose actual disposable income come from.
TL:dr: what matters is real goods and services, not the money. | 35 |
Does toasting a loaf of bread alter the nutrition levels? | 726 | Food technologist here just finished with university.
The short answer is more or less no, the nutrients will not change significantly. You'll get somewhat less water content, but that's not really a nutrient in a technical sense.
The long answer involves a short trip into the delicious realm of food chemistry.
Why is toast so tasty and awesome compared to boring sliced bread? Well, amino acids (aka protein building blocks) will react with reducing sugars (sugars with an aldehyde group) to produce all sorts of yummy flavour compounds. This is called the Maillard reaction, which occurs at pretty much any temperature for many foods, but its most obvious above 150 degrees Celsius or so. These compounds tend to have a brown colour due to their structure.
The flavours produced are highly dependent on the components available. That's why the brown stuff on toast tastes different to the brown stuff on your steak.
In bread, the gluten (protein) and starch (glucose, i.e. the sugar) are degraded. But the quantity that's decayed is very small relative to your whole bread slice.
Nutritional fortifications in bread (commonly folic acid, iodine) are pretty heat stable, so that's not going to change much either.
Finally, a possible carcinogen known as acrylamide may form in starch-rich foods when exposed to high temperatures. However, there has never been any cases directly linking the chemical with cancer in humans. If you're worried, don't be. The chances of you dying from this are so low there's probably tonnes of other stuff to worry about in your life instead. | 381 |
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What is the matchstick's head made up of ? And how does the chemical reaction proceed in lighting the match ? | 321 | The mechanism is usually based on the reaction between potassium chlorate and phosphorus. The specific details depend on the type of match. For example, in some matches the heads are made of potassium chlorate, some form of phosphorous (e.g. phosphorus sulfide) and a binder. When you apply heat to this mixture (e.g. by rubbing the match head against a rough surface), potassium chlorate (a strong oxidant) reacts with the sulfur and phosphorus in a violent way, hence the fire. Because these matches have all the active ingredients in one place it doesn't really matter what surface you use to strike them as long as it's rough. For this reason such matches are often called "strike anywhere."
However the convenience of having all the active ingredients in one place (the head of the match) also poses a safety concern. So called "safety" matches are safer because they separate the two ingredients. The match head only contains the potassium chlorate along with some additives and binder. The box of matches then contains a striking surface that contains tiny glass shards (to provide roughness) and red phosphorous. When you strike the match some phosphorous mixes with the potassium chlorate and the heat causes the two to violently react to create phosphorus pentoxide and potassium chloride. | 444 |
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I believe most if not all actions are inherently selfish, and that the vilification of the concept of selfishness is a negative aspect of our culture CMV | In today's society it is generally accepted that acts of selflessness or altruism are, by design, morally acceptable actions, whereas the logical antithesis, selfishness, is generally considered immoral and less valuable. My argument is two fold:
1) An act of altruism is almost, if not completely, impossible based on current definition of the word, and that it's value has been inflated due it's usefulness as a concept in a religious context, and
2) Selfishness is both an inherently good trait and is almost always the underlying determinant made by conscious humans when a decision must be made, because unless a decision is completely arbitrary for the individual (you just decide without even briefly considering your choices), there must be an personal mental drive to justify one decision or another.
A caveat: I do not consider selfish acts at the expense of another's human rights to be morally acceptable, but that is due to the action, not the reason behind it. For example, a man who murders hundreds of innocent people because he believes in X religion is not an evil person because he believes in that religion, but because murdering hundreds of innocent people is violating their right to live.
CMV | 32 | The problem is you're using a much, much stronger definition of selfishness than most people are when you talk about it, then applying your definition to what other people are saying.
Being selfish, as it us usually understood, means something along the lines of this:
> lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.
Whereas selfless means:
> concerned more with the needs and wishes of others than with one's own
That is, if you are doing something good for others because it makes you happy you are not being selfish. You are acting in a way that considers the wants and needs of other beings, even if you considered their wants and needs out of rational self interest (i.e. because it makes you happy). That still is not enough to consider that action selfish. | 21 |
According to the Hubble constant, the Universe is expanding at around 70 km/s. Does this mean an advanced civilization could go past the 'end' of the Universe, and if they waited, see everything start coming towards them? More ?'s inside. | I just watched [Everything](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXliM19h6YI) by BBC and am left a bit dumbfounded, and actually have a few questions to ask and things to clarify. I've most likely interpreted things horrible wrongly, so forgive me.
Light moves faster than 70km/s, so is it possible for light to reach the 'edge'? If so, does it just disappear? I would think that it cannot, since you cannot create or destroy matter, but if it somehow rebounded then the whole universe would be filled with light, correct? And that doesn't make sense. So why can light not reach the 'edge'? (Sorry for contradicting myself but I don't understand.)
How can it be that objects are still expanding outside of our observable universe? It makes sense that objects moving faster than the speed of light after the big bang would not be seen, but I'm confused on how objects can still be moving outside of our observable universe. If we could see that light earlier, how can we not see that light today?
If you were on an object at the very edge of the entire universe, would you only be able to see your observable universe's light from one side of the object, and the other side would be completely black?
At the end of time, big freeze, whatever you wish to call it, will anything still be near where the big bang occurred? Will any atoms exist there? Or will literally everything have expanded far away from the 'center'?
These questions are a little out there and will probably be hard to explain, but if anyone has knowledge on this subject I would love to learn!
| 19 | The metric is expanding at 70km/s *per Megaparsec* (a megaparsec is a unit of distance). At higher distances, the metric expands faster. At shorter distances, it is slower. Points at the edge of the observable universe are receding from us at the speed of light. This is why it is called observable - light from outside could never reach us.
The universe (which is different from the observable universe) is believed to be infinite, with no edge. | 16 |
[Diamond Age, Deus Ex] why would anyone want a skull-gun? | a buddy of mine has been looking through catalogs for skull guns lately and to be honest i just don't see the point. to be fair i'm not really entirely sure how the procedure works. is it visible at all? how powerful is it? how do you aim the thing? | 28 | It depends on whether or not the weapon in question is based in your oral cavity or your ocular cavity.
With decent technology, your cyber-eye should manage a small, single-shot gun without issue or anything to give it away to a *casual* inspection.
Your basic oral gun is a better chance, though. More space for ammo, retractability into the roof of your mouth, storage in your nasal cavity... You might manage a full six shots, if it's a small caliber. You might lose a chunk of your ability to smell, but that's a small price to pay for a, ah. Disarming smile.
Either way, you're still talking less than 9mm rounds here. Think closer in size to derringers. They'll kill a man, if he's close enough, but it's really a weapon of last resort. Still, if you want a nearly undetectable surprise weapon that's stealthier and cheaper on Essence than, say, an implanted shotgun in your arm, then that's a pretty good choice for you. And, on the plus side, no one will have the balls to say 'If looks could kill' around you. | 21 |
what is the maximum number of moves possible in jenga? | provided it is optimally stacked, how many moves could a game of jenga last. | 15 | Jenga begins with 18 rows of 3 blocks each. The last possible configuration would be a stack of alternating perpendicular blocks 54 blocks high.
The first step would be to convert all 18 rows into 18 single middle blocks, which would take 36 moves, though you are now left with 12 full rows of 3 blocks on top of the original 18. This takes another 24 moves, which produces 8 new rows to clear.
Clear 3 of these with 6 moves (down to 5 full rows) produces 2 new rows (up to 7 full rows). From this it can be seen that every 6 moves will remove only one row. This is the same pattern as above which is reassuring. This pattern will continue until you are left with 1 full row at the top, after (17 rows)*(6 moves to reduce the number of rows by 1)=102 total moves. You can pull two blocks from this top row, creating a row of only 2 blocks above. Pull one of these to finish the stack, at 105 total moves
I am assuming that you must place a block on the top row unless it is full, in which case you start a new row. Also you may not pull a block from an unfilled row unless there are no other moves available; this will not matter until the very end.
edit: TL;DR 105 moves from beginning to end | 24 |
ELI5: When physics says that information can never be completely destroyed, what is this "information" it talks about? | 40 | Think about it like this. If we knew exactly where everything is right now, we could follow it back to find out anything we wanted to about the past. As such, the present must contain the information needed to describe the past.
However, if randomness exists in the universe, then information *can* be created. We can figure out the past based upon the present, but we cannot perfectly predict the future from the present. | 18 |
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[LOTR] What if Bilbo found one of the lost dwarven rings in the cave instead? | 35 | Not much would be different for Bilbo up until his 111th party, and after the party he would probably keep the ring.
However, the bigger question is where the One ended up. It would either remain lost (in which case Sauron takes over), or be found and get to Sauron (in which case he takes over even easier). The chances of someone else finding the ring and it ending up being used against Sauron (and failing) or being destroyed would be pretty much slim to none. | 42 |
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ELI5: When you get badly burned does your muscle "cook" like when you fry a chicken breast? | i.e. Change irreversibly from normal red/pink muscle to white meat? | 18 | If you took a human muscle and pan fried it in animal fat it would behave much like beef or other red meat. It would not look like white or dark poultry because mammals generally have a different type of muscle tissue. | 11 |
CMV: it is not unethical to pray for someone without their permission | It has recently come to my attention that many people strongly believe that it is unethical to pray for others without their permission. While I myself am not religious, I absolutely do not understand how it could be unethical top pray for others without their permission or even against their express wishes. After all, where would the line be? If it's unethical to pray for someone without their permission couldn't one carry that argument out and equally argue that it's unethical to briefly think a kind thought about that person. I don't like clinging to a personal belief that contradicts the wishes and rights of other people, but I cannot ration how praying for anyone could be harmful. CMV? | 31 | It all hinges on idea that these people belief that praying has an real world effect. They believe that it will influence their lives in some meaningful way.
If you believe that something will effect you (or in this case even your afterlife) then it would be unethical to do something to someone else without their consent. | 29 |
Would the big rip scenario be able to overcome even the binding force of a black hole, and if so, what sort of energy would be released when breaking the bond in a singularity. | After reading A Universe from Nothing a few months ago I had been curious as to the fate of the universe whenever the expansion of space was accelerating exponentially and I came upon the big rip hypothesis.
Upon thinking more about this recently I began to wonder if the atomic bonds breaking during this process would be releasing energy akin to nuclear fission, and it also occurred to me that beyond everything else I had thought about breaking apart during the big rip black holes hadn't once crossed my mind.
My question is essentially, should a big rip scenario occur in a short enough time frame for black holes to still remain in the universe would the expansion of space be able to achieve such a rate as to break apart a singularity, and what sort of energy would be released in this situation. | 22 | All black holes are expected to evaporate over time by emitting Hawking radiation. So realistically a singularity shouldn't persist over time even if nothing close to a Big Rip happens.
Ignoring that, though, then a Big Rip still wouldn't "rip a singularity apart." The thing about a cosmological solution like that in a Big Rip is that it describes the growth in the separation between two otherwise stationary points. But this sort of model is never going to cause two objects at the *same* point to suddenly become separated. Since the singularity is, at least according to classical theory, confined to a single point, this wouldn't be breakable.
If the singularity is actually not a singularity but is smeared out somehow on a quantum level, then might cosmological expansion be able to rip it open? Possibly, but physics is nowhere near ready to describe such an event! | 10 |
ELI5 - How diet soda is zero calories | 34 | Soda's only source of calories, the sugar, is replaced by an artificial sweetener that is designed to fit within and act on your sweet taste buds, but won't be digested.
Sucralose, used in most "X" Zero sodas is made from sugar and replaces some of the hydrogen atoms with chlorine atoms. This lets it act on your taste buds the same way sugar does, because the molecules are very similarly shaped and taste is more mechanical than chemical, but the sucralose won't break down in your body, giving you calories. The chlorine atoms make the sucralose more efficient at sweetening, because it gets stuck on your tongue for a bit longer than sugar, so less needs to be used. | 24 |
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OOP (Object Oriented Programming) is snake oil. CMV | Whenever I press my fellow developers for a definition of OOP, they all give different and often demonstrably wrong answers. I've heard things like, "OOP is interfaces" and "OOP is encapsulation", which aren't unique to OOP whatsoever. I've heard "OOP gives you code reuse" and the usual answer to my followup is inheritance. It seems to me (and even many OOPers) that while inheritance can provide code reuse, it's often a terrible idea in the long run.
People claim all sorts of benefits from OOP, but all I can see that it provides is inheritance (brittle relationships). CMV | 19 | What you're criticizing is exactly the *point* of OOP. It allows people to do interfaces, encapulation, and code reuse without needing to have a formal understanding of those things, just like C-level imperative programming allows you to issue commands without needing a formal understanding of registers and stack pointers. There's lots of value in that, even if a few smart individuals don't require it.
If you don't see how the abstraction is valuable, tell me this. What is your non-OOP solution to dependency management? | 11 |
[Avatar] Is there a reason the avatars follow a cycle? | Why does the avatar cycle follow the order of the season fire, air, water and earth? Does it matter? Theoretically couldn’t Raava just choose whoever she wants to be the next avatar and it would essentially make no difference? What gave her the idea to go in this order in the first place? In ATLA it works out because Aang is the last airbender but imagine the next avatar is an earth bender but there are only 1 waterbender left wouldn’t it make more sense to simply skip earth and go to water and thus preserve the knowledge? | 15 | Fire, Air, Water, Earth.
The order Avatar Wan was granted the elements by the Lion Turtles.
Coincidence? Maybe.
But Raava is the spiritual personification of Order. It's possible bonding with her forces Wan's natural reincarnation into a more orderly pattern, each nation in turn. | 32 |
How do two particles "become" entangled? | I've been trying to understand entanglement but I fail to realize if the link between two particles is locked at random or if the particles need to originate from the same source (i.e:sub-particles of the same particle) to be entangled. | 36 | usually, it's in the "creation" of the particles. A spin zero particle decays into two spin 1/2 particles, and conservation of angular momentum tells you their spins must be opposite, for instance. Or a photon passing through a crystal that splits it into two photons, one will be polarized one way and the other polarized the other way. | 18 |
How does carbon dating accurately work considering all of the molecules likely come from beyond ancient supernova? | I'm just confused. | 259 | Don't worry about supernova and the formation of the earth. Carbon dating is waaaay simpler than that.
High energy cosmic rays are constantly bombarding the earth from space which convert a little bit of the Nitrogen-14 in the atmosphere into Carbon-14. That carbon-14 is radioactive and decays away slowly, with a half-life of about 5700 years.
What this means is that there is an approximately constant fraction of the carbon in the world which is this radioactive carbon. It gets taken from the air and used in photosynthesis by plants, and so all living things should have this same fraction of 14C in them as long as they are alive and actively exchanging matter with the environment. When something dies its 14C begins to decay away and by measuring how much 14C is left in some dead thing (either by counting the decay rate with a Geiger counter or running it through a mass-spectrometer) we can measure how long ago it died.
| 204 |
CMV: The rioting in Baltimore is inexcusable, but shouldn't be glazed over as 'just rioting' - there's a social message to be derived here. | First off, let me clarify that I do not support the riots in Baltimore, or riots anywhere. Rioting is criminal and destructive in nature, and does nothing good for anyone. It ruins communities, uproots lives, and presents a huge burden on society, on the police, and on the people who are trying to get legitimate social messages across through peaceful protest.
However, I do *understand* why rioting occurs, especially in this case. If we look at major instances of rioting throughout history, two main factors are always present - anger, and volume. When you amass a large number of people together in one place, and all of those people are angry about the same thing, it immensely increases the probability that one person will start vandalizing property or disobeying the law in an unruly and ecstatic manor, and that sets off a rapid chain reaction that results in other people doing the same, resulting in a riot. For example, the Vancouver riots were triggered by crowds out in public watching Game 7 of the Stanley Cup, and the subsequent loss of that game enraged fans who were so close to winning their first title that they ended up rioting for the rest of the evening.
Hence, we get to Baltimore in the last few days, and the social message is clear: **black communities in America are fed up of being killed and abused by the police.** At this point, I don't think it even matters if the victim was armed, or if he was committing a crime, or what have you - black men are being killed by the police and in police custody at higher rates than other demographics in the US, and I would imagine that black people in the US are starting to get fed up, hopeless, and most importantly, angry over their situation. It doesn't seem that peaceful protests such as the Black Lives Matter movement are working, because no matter how much communities protest, change still doesn't seem to be occurring within police forces themselves. Again, I'm not saying that peaceful protest shouldn't be pursued, but I can certainly understand why someone would choose to riot above protesting - even if you get on the news for being a hooligan, the world is still paying attention.
I think that if everyone in the US, including the President, is so disgusted by the riots, then they ought to actually **do something to prevent these kinds of riots from happening in the first place**, by making firm, widespread, and massive changes not just to the way policing is conducted in the US, but how police are disciplined for killing prisoners and criminals, and how legal justice is administered to blacks compared to whites (because the disparity is huge). If you improve people's living situations, they will have less reason to be out in the streets at all, and frankly, I don't see a disadvantage to improving human rights in a country that's claiming it's #1 all the goddamn time.
**TL;DR:** While the Baltimore riots are certainly ugly behaviour, they shouldn't be looked over as a bunch of hooligans, as doing so avoids talking about the reason these riots are occurring, and hence doesn't prevent similar riots from happening in the future. The appropriate response to rioting isn't to denounce the rioters, it's to fix the socioeconomic problems that are causing rioting to begin with.
**EDIT1:** I'm off to bed for the evening, but all responses are being sent to my inbox, so if you respond to this thread, I'll have an answer for you some time tomorrow. I look forward to hearing more arguments!
**EDIT2:** Wow, top of the subreddit! Thank you to everyone so far for your inputs, I so far understand and agree that peaceful protests take time to make change, albeit this change hasn't come about for years, and is likely to come about anytime soon, so that is a legitimate argument against rioting in the long term. However, I still remain unconvinced that the Baltimore riots themselves have no social value, especially given that many rebuttals admit that protests are generally less effective to raising the issue to the public eye. I'll be checking up with this thread throughout the day, happy debating!
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Rioting immediately places the rioters, and unfortunately the communities of which they're a part, as antagonists of the rest of the public. They make themselves an *other* in the minds of people who worry about social disorder, and that shuts down the possibility of trying to assuage the underlying cause. | 240 |
Why are large physics detectors like LHC and Super K buried underground? Is it because they are dangerous? | 16 | I can only answer this question for the LHC, but the main reason is simply that the device is too big to economically build above ground.
The LHC reuses the tunnel previously used for the LEP (Large Electron-Positron collider). It has a diameter of 27 km and building such a large structure above ground would require the purchase of large amounts of land and/or building the device in a very sparsely populated region. Now, the ring can run underneath several towns and is centrally located in Europe, making it easy for scientists and engineers to visit (note that many scientists working at CERN / LHC do so on a temporary basis and frequently travel between Geneva and their home institute).
An additional benefit of underground construction is some extra screening from outside interference. Cosmic rays can interact with the detectors and cause anomalous readings. In its current setup, cosmic rays were used to help calibrate the detectors after they were brought online but before actual collisions in the pipe had started. Even 100 m below ground, cosmic rays caused noticeable events in the detectors. Had it been above ground, this would've increased considerably. | 29 |
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ELI5; Years ago (like in the nineties) all computers were beige. Was there a reason for it? | 20 | At the time the color (technically called "putty") was intended to blend in with any office decor. Most filing cabinets were also putty, and it was a standard color for other accoutrements. It was meant to be unobtrusive (which is also why the "loud" IBM Selectric Typewriter colors like electric blue and red didn't sell very well). | 28 |
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ELI5: Hacking | Can someone tell me the basis of computer system hacking? Like where the hell do these people start learning this stuff? | 24 | Hacking is using any piece of technology to obtain information and/or complete tasks for which it was not designed to do. Mainly by having a higher understanding, thinking outside the box or by chance occurrence. | 33 |
ELI5: Why does water temperature matter when washing clothes? | Visiting my parents, my mom seems disappointed to find me washing my clothes in cold water, she says it's just not right but couldn't quite explain why.
I've washed all of my laundry using the "cold" setting on washing machines for as long as I can remember. I've never had color bleeding or anything similar as seems to affect so many people.
EDIT: I love how this devolved into tutorials on opening Capri suns, tips for murders, and the truth about Australian peppers | 8,928 | Once upon a time, detergents didn't work so well in cold water. Washing machines had cycles like "Cotton 140F" and "Delicates 100F" and that was how your mom grew up. If you washed in cold water it didn't work well at getting your clothes clean, and it didn't rinse well either.
Since she grew up there have been huge improvements in detergent efficacy and you can wash really well in cold water, which is much cheaper for your energy bill and better for the environment too. Far from doing something wrong, you're doing it right! | 7,378 |
[Star Wars] Are Star Destroyer second in commands allowed to make major urgent decisions while the captain is asleep? | Say a nearby system is under Rebel attack and the captain is asleep. Can the awake senior officer order hypering to the battle and start engagement while captain is woken up and briefed on the situation? This would save Imperial lives/limit damage and increase chance of catching Rebel Scum before they hyper away after the raid. | 50 | Any military worth its salt allows subordinates some leeway in making decisions; however, in this scenario the very first action the officer of the deck (or whatever they call it) will take is to wake up the captain via phone or runner, and if possible get his guidance and intent. In the intervening minutes until the commander arrives on the bridge, said officer of the deck would take "appropriate action in the absence of orders" such as sounding the general quarters alarm, radioing nearby commands, etc. | 58 |
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