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[X-Men] How many kids has wolverine had? How many mutants might be his descendants? | Assuming of course that he's fertile. | 46 | James Howlet, the mutant famously known as Wolverine, had many children during his long life before his recent final (/s) death.
First, there was Akihiro, the son of Itsu, James' Japanese wife. Akihiro was born in 1946. He possesses some of Howlet's abilities : enhanced senses and bone claws, most notoriously. He also has an uncanny ability to manipulate his pheromones. You might know him under his alias, Daken.
In the Savage Land, there is someone, named Erista, who is claimed to be the son of a man named Wolverine and the leader of a tribal group. Not much more is known about him.
William Downing is an human, son of Dolores Dowing and James Howlet. William Downing took the name Gunhawk, and became part, and later led, a mercenary group. This mercenary group, called the Mongrels, had an interesting membership :
* Downing, as previously mentioned
* "Saw Fist", son of Howlet, mother unknown
* "Cannon Foot", son of Howlet, mother unknown
* "Shadowstalker", daughter of Howlet, mother unknown
* "Fire Knives", daughter of Howlet, mother unknown
All the members of the group known as the Mongrels were killed by James Howlet, unaware at the time that it was comprised entirely of his children.
You also need to take into account Laura Kinney, code-named "X-23", created from the genetic material of James Howlet. Another clone, about whom not much is known, is Avery Connor. Both those clones manifest a set of powers very similar to the mutant James Howlet.
Those are only his known children and clones - given his very long life, it may be possible that he has multiple other children, unbeknownst to him. | 39 |
[Batman] Why didn't Batman call backup during Knightfall? | From anyone in the Batfamily, or Justice League? | 42 | Batman had just gone through a crisis of faith in himself and his abilities. Black Mask had really shaken his confidence after a pretty nasty scheme and then getting away with it. A few other villains showed up right after, making it impossible for Batman to take even one day off to recoup and re-focus his mind. He got run so hard and so brutally even before Bane arrived in Gotham that it made Batman succumb to a minor sickness.
Of course, Bane's first move in Gotham was to break EVERYONE out of Arkham, which made a shaken and rapidly worsening Batman to capture them one by one.
Batman wasn't in a state, mentally or physically, to even think about calling for backup. On top of his natural affinity for working alone, the sickness in his head and body made it worse and worse until he could barely stand, which is when Bane struck. | 34 |
[neuroscience]Is there any limit as to how much information that the human brain can hold? | Is there any theoretical limit as to how much information that the human brain can hold?
What would happen if someone reached that limit? | 38 | Ultimately the brain has limited amount of material for data storage so it can store limited amount of information. It is impossible to store infinite information to finite possible entropy. However the brain also does not store the information in quite the same way than a computer does. Information in the brain often needs refreshing and unimportant things tend to fade in memory. Probably because same "circuits" are used to store other things too.
Think of it like in artificial neural network classification in machine learning. You can teach it to classify a class but if you then stop showing it that class and feed it data about other classes the network might get modified in a way that the first class is no longer reliably recognized.
I am not aware of anyone hitting the limit of their memory capacity though. And it's good to remember that even the most informed answers you get in the neuroscience field involve a lot of "informed opinions" instead of hard fact. | 25 |
[SCP] Has anything useful ever come out of studying SCPs? | Like, have the studies done on contained SCPs ever produced tech or other advancements beneficial to humanity? | 407 | Well, there is that one *thingy* that has allowed them to "reset" reality after world-ending catastrophe on a couple of occasions. That seems pretty useful, but the vast majority of artifacts are more dangerous than useful. | 277 |
Why does the relativity energy, mass, and momentum relationship form a right triangle? | So in relativity there is an equation that links momentum, mass (rest mass), and energy together. It is:
E^(2) = (PC)^(2) \+ (m\*C^(2))^(2) (with E = energy, P = momentum, m = rest mass, and C = the speed of light)
One thing that stands out immediately is that it is the form of the pythagorean theorem. Namely, that Energy is the hypotenuse and the sides are PC (momentum times the speed of light) and mC^(2) (the classic old E=mC^(2) energy.) I know many physicists have a "shut-up and calculate" type of approach to these type of questions, but what does this relationship actually mean? Is there a commonly accepted interpretation of this? What does this imply about the world? To me this seems like a deep and interesting relationship, but I can't find anyone or anything really talking about it online aside from calling it "Einstein's triangle" or just pointing the relationship out.. The [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy%E2%80%93momentum_relation) shows a [picture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy%E2%80%93momentum_relation#/media/File:Einstein-triangle-kinetic-energy.svg) which illustrates the relationship and calls it "Einstein's Triangle", but not really anything explaining what it actually means.
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If I squint my eyes and handwave a bunch, to me it seems like PC is the spatial energy component and mC^(2) is the time energy component and since they are orthogonal they form a right triangle. But why is the total relativistic energy the hypotenuse? I know one way of "seeing" relativity is that you and everything is always "moving" around at the speed of light, we just "move" more of our time energy and "velocity" to spatial dimensions. In which case, I could see a type of constant hypotenuse like relationship similar to if you are always walking around one step at a time, but just in different directions. The X and Y movements would change, but the hypotenuse is always one step. However, I still don't see why that would imply energy as the hypotenuse? Why can we look at this in a euclidean like way?
IDK, I may be rambling and not saying anything close to right here, but I am very curious about this. It is bugging me and I am hoping someone can clarify this or at least point me to something I can read. I may be missing something totally obvious, so go ahead and tell me why I am dumb, it would be much appreciated. | 16 | Yes, it’s very similar to the Pythagorean theorem, but not in the typical Euclidean space.
A more illustrative way to write it is:
(mc^(2))^(2) = E^(2) - (**p**c)^(2).
This is the “Pythagorean theorem” in spacetime, applied to the four-momentum vector.
Let’s back up and go through the Euclidean case in more detail. In Euclidean space, the distance between two infinitesimally-separated points is
ds^(2) = dx^(2) + dy^(2) + dz^(2), which is also just the inner product of the vector d**r** = (dx,dy,dz) with itself. The inner product of two vectors is rotationally invariant. So even if you make a change of coordinates via some rotation, that equation for ds^(2) doesn’t change. So the relevant transformations are *rotations* (and translations too) and it’s the ds^(2) between two points with is the *invariant* quantity.
But in relativistic physics, time has to be treated on the same footing as space. And to be consistent with our observations of nature, it turns out that spacetime has to be non-Euclidean, and there’s a crucial difference between space and time — a relative minus sign.
In Minkowski spacetime, the “spacetime distance” between two infinitesimally-separated events (an event is just a specific location and a specific time) is given by
ds^(2) = c^(2)dt^(2) - dx^(2) - dy^(2) - dz^(2) = c^(2)dt^(2) - d**r**^(2).
This looks a little different than the Euclidean case, but the structure is still the same. The individual terms in this equation form the components of some kind of vector, and some kind of inner product between those kinds of vectors are invariant under some set of transformations. The components (c dt,dx,dy,dz) form the components of a four-vector, and the definition of the inner product in this space comes with that crucial negative sign. So the inner product of that four-vector with itself is just c^(2)dt^(2) - (dx^(2) + dy^(2) + dz^(2)). And inner products of any four-vector are invariant under a broader set of transformations. You can see that the spatial part still looks exactly like the Euclidean equation given earlier, so the spatial part is still invariant under spatial rotations (and translations), and those don’t effect time, so the whole thing is still invariant under the transformations that the Euclidean metric was. But now you can also include transformations which mix space and time coordinates in a certain way. These are *boosts*, and they correspond to changing your frame of reference, or “boosting” the velocity of an observer in some way. These are given by the Lorentz transformation equations, and they turn out to leave the spacetime ds^(2) invariant. The total symmetry group ends up being the Poincare group, which includes all space/time translations, spatial rotations, boosts, and compositions of them all (as per group closure).
But this isn’t just specific to the spacetime position four-vector, the same invariance under “spacetime rotations” holds for the inner product of any two four-vectors. If you’ve studied relativity much, you know that energy and momentum form the components of the four-vector: the four-momentum. So we can do the same thing and take the inner product of (E/c,**p**) with itself, and we get
(E/c)^(2) - **p**^(2)
But that’s just equal to (mc)^(2).
So geometrically, the “length” of the four-momentum vector is mc, and any boost/rotation transformations leave that invariant, even though the energy and momentum can individually change under those transformations. The very important negative sign that we’ve been carrying with us makes it hard to visualize this in a meaningful way as a triangle. But aside from that, the geometrical ideas of having some quantity representing an invariant “distance”, and expressing it as the inner product of a vector with itself, are exactly the same. | 31 |
Why do some shows like Dexter, Game of Thrones and Sherlock "look" like movies whereas shows like The Big Bang Theory or Friends do not look like movies? | I am talking about the "look" and "feel" of the images in the show. I do not mean the content or the storyline of the show. Does it have something to do with the framerate at which they are shot? Is the video technology used for shooting these shows very different? | 205 | American sitcoms like the ones you listed are typically shot in front of a live studio audience with a multiple camera set-up and a higher frame rate than films. They shoot with several cameras at once so they can get all the shots they need from a single performance of a given scene and that also means they have to light the whole set evenly, which doesn't look natural at all.
It's more like recording a play than making a movie. | 157 |
How do small birds survive sub zero temperatures with such little body mass? | I understand the concept of hollow, thus insulating, feathers, but it just amazes me that these little creatures are still flying about. It's been below zero for several days where I live. Their bodies are so small, they cannot possibly produce much heat. | 571 | MS in biology here...not sure about that specific species of bird, but usually keeping warm is going to involve a few things, 1) maintaining body heat through the expenditure of energy, so metabolism needs to be supported by adequate food consumption, and 2) preserving that body heat through insulation such as fat and feathers. They may/will also have behavioral adaptations such as huddling together, or being able to find the warmest places in their immediate environment to find shelter. | 89 |
ELI5: Why are there flat head and Philips head screws and screwdrivers? Are either better than the other? | 86 | Each has it's own advantages. Flat heads have the advantage that they're simple to make, and in a pinch can be worked with other flat metal objects.
Phillips heads screws are specifically designed so the bit slips if too much torque is applied. This is especially important for electric drills, so that if a screw gets stuck it doesn't damage the motor. | 56 |
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Eli5: If water can't be compressed under normal conditions, then how does water pressure work? | 17 | Water is compressible, just not by very much. For example 4 km under the ocean, water’s density is increased by just 1.8%. This is so small that saying water is in-compressible make for a good approximation.
Pressure does not depend on how compressible a substance is. It just depends on the total weight per unit area of all the substance above, pressing down. | 49 |
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Are problems with inbreeding faced by humans mirrored in other animals? | Inbreeding I know is linked to higher rates of mental disabilities in people, but is the same true for fish, birds, and other mammalls? | 18 | The problems in humans are very minor, relatively speaking; laws and social mores greatly limit the amount of linebreeding/backcrossing/inbreeding.
In domesticated animals, these techniques are how humans create different breeds.
Specific examples:
Dogs: hip problems in German Shepherds, severe breathing problems in brachycephalic dog breeds, or the semi-retardation of many Irish Setters and Golden Retrievers.
Chickens: Cornish Cross are too stupid to do much beyond feed themselves, and many Polish/silkies/breeds-with-a-head-poof need to be trimmed so they can see.
Pet ferrets are so severely inbred, just keeping them alive can be a tricky proposition. | 11 |
ELI5: Why is glass the dominant window material, as opposed to higher-grade plastics? | I understand why car windows should be glass, given the high speeds, and potential benefits in a crash. For home windows or buildings, I would guess that plastics might be more durable, longer-lasting, and potentially cheaper. I assume I'm wrong and someone must have put far more thought into this than me, so I'm curious to hear what that is. | 41 | Glass is far more durable than any plastic, most significantly it doesn’t degrade due to UV exposure.
It also does not let UV through which protects the interior. Items in plastic conservatories will bleach much faster than in glass ones. | 70 |
CMV: Talking about CEO compensation as a socialist is an incoherent and harmful distraction | People on the left, including those who call themselves socialists, often complain about the pay gap between CEOs and low wage employees. The reason some employees are paid too little, the story goes, is because the CEO is paid too much. This is a harmful distraction from the true nature of the situation under a socialist world view, which is that employees (labor) are paid too little because the *owners* (capital) are paid too much.
I will start this by assuming that every socialist who complains about CEO compensation being too high actually knows what a CEO, or chief executive officer, is. I don’t necessarily think this is a reasonable assumption, but in the interest of making the complaints seem as coherent as possible, I think we have to start with a baseline assumption that everyone is operating in reality. A CEO is an employee who is hired to make the management decisions of a company. That’s it. The CEO is not the owner. The CEO is not the founder. The CEO is not capital in general. The CEO, unlike the owner, does not take distribution in the form of excess rent leftover once labor is paid. The CEO earns a salary for his or her labor. The CEO is on payroll like any other employee. Bottom line: the CEO is simply a highly paid employee.
It is important for socialists to draw a distinction between capital and labor. Labor are those who make money from mental and/or physical and/or emotional acts of work, and the term “labor” most explicitly refers to those employed by an employer. Capital are those who make money from their ownership of the means of production. This distinction between people who earn money through working and people who earn money through ownership underlies all of socialist thought. And it is important in a practical matter because the inequality and other negative aspects of capitalism do not result from people who work too much and add too much value through their labor. Those negative aspects result from people who own too much and extract too much rent through their ownership.
Socialists should view CEOs as a member of the labor class. Under a socialist world view, the “working class” is not so much an income level as it is a way to make money. If you make money from working, you’re working class (or at least you’re a member of labor rather than capital). Terms like “middle class” and “upper middle class” only seek to divide the people who earn money through their labor. If I could articulate the socialist world view with two examples, it would be this: a landlord who owns one rental property and makes $12,000 a year from it is a capitalist. A surgeon employed by a hospital who earns a salary of $500,000 is a laborer. To say this is not to villainize one and lionize the other. It is simply to acknowledge the coherent world view that earning money strictly through ownership is different from earning money through labor.
Now you may think that “CEO” is simply a stand-in for capital in general. And I admit that “the owner” is a hard concept to pin down. For most large companies, it’s the shareholders, and there are plenty of large companies where the CEO is in fact the sole owner. But the way people talk about it suggests that they know the CEO is an employee, and legislative definitions make it very clear that what people are talking about is highly paid employees. The Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, for example, defines the pay gap as the gap between the highest compensated employee and the lowest compensated employee. In placing a limit on this value, the Act would place upper limits on the amount a highly-paid employee could receive but no limit on any distribution to the owners.
This type of messaging is harmful because it sends the message that any labor fight is between employees who are paid too much and employees who are paid too little. It never even acknowledges the rent extracted by the owners of the company. That distribution is taken for granted. The owners will get their share, and then the employees can fight over the rest. If a janitor is not making enough money, it’s because the CEO or their manager took too much.
It also works to divide the labor class the other way. If you go into any hospital and ask any doctor “who do you have more in common with? The cleaning crew of the hospital or the CEO” the doctor is going to say the CEO. That’s true for plenty of “middle class” laborers. They relate more to the highly paid managers of the company than they do to the low-wage employees. So if some regional manager of a department store thinks he or she isn’t making enough, they’re going to blame the low wage employees. They’re going to see any complaints against the CEO and other highly paid employees as attempts to take their own money. And this perception wouldn’t even be that unreasonable in many cases. In fact, in the hospital example, the CEO may not even be the highest paid employee. In other words, it’s likely that the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, if implemented, would limit a doctor’s salary.
I want a world with class solidarity. That means the *entire* labor class, no matter how well compensated. From the janitor to the doctor to the regional manager to the CEO—anyone who earns their money through labor, whether they went to business school or not. I’m not sure how to do that, but a good start would be to acknowledge the concept of economic rents and stop using the CEO as some boogeyman who is hogging the entire payroll. That is not what socialism is about. It is not a fight between employees who are paid too much and employees who are paid too little. There’s more money to go around than focusing entirely on employees would have you believe. And there’s nothing the owners love more than watching the employees bicker with each other over who is getting paid too much. | 18 | >which is that employees (labor) are paid too little because the owners (capital) are paid too much.
In most cases, the owners are shareholders.
>The CEO is not the owner.
The CEO almost always is a shareholder and is, therefore, an owner. You even concede the CEO is sometimes the "sole owner." Can you even given an example of a CEO who has no ownership of a company? How exactly can you separate the CEO from ownership if not? The CEO makes decisions about compensation. They decide how little to pay everyone else to boost the value of their ownership. | 23 |
ELI5:Athletes seemingly get better every decade as we learn more about nutrition. Does this mean we truly don't know the capabilities/limitations of the human body? | 158 | There's so much more to learn about the human body. No question.
Just consider the amount of conflicting studies re: nutrition and sport-specific training. In the 80s, carbs were good. Now, carbs are bad. In the 90s, fat was bad. Now, it's making a nutritional comeback with a vengeance. | 47 |
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If I had a super precise weighing scale, would my weight change as I breathed in and out? | 187 | Yes, water leaves our lungs as we breathe out, also we breathe in O2 and breathe out CO2. You would lose weight for both reasons.
It wouldn't however be an up and down cycle, for reasons others have posted. It would be a slight drop with each exhale. | 77 |
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If I shine a white LED light through a prism, would I see a spectrum, or would I see a red line, a green line, and a blue line? | I've been thinking about this since I got some of those little window hangers that put shine little rainbows into your room by ~~refracting~~ dispersing(?) sunlight, but I don't have a white LED light bright enough to actually see anything if I shine it through. | 5,445 | You'd most likely see a strong blue line, with a broad spectrum covering the other colors (on the long-wavelength side of blue).
The reason is the typical white LED is actually a blue LED which lights up a phosphor that produces the other colors. But the phosphor can only produce colors with lower-energy photons than the blue that excited it.
ETA: It's also possible to make a white LED by combining blue, red, and green LEDs, in which case you'd see 3 distinct lines in the output spectrum. | 3,695 |
ELI5:Why did the U.S. win the Korean war but lose the Vietnam war? | Or perhaps put in another way: why is there a South Korea, but there isn't a South Vietnam? What made South Korea possible when we just barely made it out of Vietnam before Saigon fell?
EDIT: I was specifically trying to avoid getting into the semantics of "win/lose" in both wars with my comments above. I fully understand that the Korean war is not officially over.
EDIT 2: Apparently, no one read anything I typed above :(
| 16 | They're not very good comparison candidates, they're 3,000Km apart with vastly different terrains & political situations. It's also arguable that the USA did not win the Korean war, given the existence of North Korea it would seem to validate the claim that the USA only partially succeeded. Vietnam was much more a war of the USAs own making than something the locals wanted any part of. | 24 |
[DC] I'm Chemical King! I speed up or slow down chemical reactions! What does that mean? | So, I'm Condo Arlik from the planet Phlon. I'm a mutant with the power to be a catalyst, I can slow down or speed up any chemical reaction! Now I'm Chemical King, a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes! Mainly I just make things rust. Sometimes I can make things burst into flames. Brainiac 5 says I have the potential to do way more with these powers, but is too busy in his lab to explain anything to me. So, what sort of things can I do with the power to slow down or speed up chemical reactions? How can I save the galaxy? | 20 | Get into medicine, and speed up the time spent mass producing medicines. You'd be astonished how long certain medicines take to make, and that's just the chemicals slowly combining in the right way for ages. Or perhaps get into engineering, by speeding up chemical reactions you can decrease time spent slowly building things like nanotubes. The thing you must remember is that practically all of existence runs off of chemical reactions of a sort. By speeding up these chemical reactions, you can speed up life. You can slow it to a stasis, even. Slow down a humans chemical reactions enough and they become basically inert. They can't move, the chemicals needed to power them just can't activate fast enough. Alternatively, increase chemical reactions in a human, and they become faster.
There's more here than just controlling how fast chemicals react. You're creating a very specialized time field, one that can accelerate or slow down reactions. Put some study into chemistry, get a degree in that stuff. You would be astonished how much more you can accomplish the more you understand what you're able to control. | 22 |
ELI5: Why is it that the stool is always the same brown color (almost) regardless of what we have eaten, and same thing with urine. But if we eat beetroot both feces and urine becomes red? | All day one eats food of different colour but the "outcome" is always the same, except in this case. Why is that? | 42 | The red coloring in beets (betanin) isn't digestible. Mostly, though, the color of waste products is mostly not based on what you eat - it's a product of the breakdown of red blood cells. Specifically, urine is colored yellow by urobilin and feces are colored brown by stercobilin, urobilin, and bile (a liquid produced by the liver which helps digest fats). Stercobilin and urobilin are byproducts of the breakdown of hemoglobin. Since your red blood cells are recycled at a set rate, there's relatively little variation in the color of excretion. | 32 |
How is it possible that the Haskell compiler is itself coded in haskell? | Hello, as the title indicates I am a little confused by the fact that the haskell compiler is coded in haskell. I suspect there are other languages as well, but I wonder how in the early days of haskell the creators did to run the first Haskell program ? | 26 | It doesn't start in Haskell. Say you design a language, and it compiles to executable code. You write your first compiler in python, because it's easy. As your language matures, it can understand more concepts and has all the features of a "full language". Then you write a compiler in your language, compile it with your old compiler. Now you have a compiler written in the language it compiles. For funsies, you then recompile the compiler using the new compiler, and now you're self hosting. | 47 |
[Star Wars] What is the deal with the Anti Jedi sentiments? | There is something that I had been wondering about since the prequels, why are some individuals critical of the Jedi? I know there aren't the Jedi weren't perfect and they made careless mistakes especially with Vader and Exar Kun but the Jedi had been peacekeepers for centuries and they kept order throughout the galaxy. The Sith are obvious but why do some people hate the Jedi? | 36 | Not everyone likes "peace."
Let me borrow a quote from a different part of the universe:
> “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.”
Throughout the galaxy there are people who see injustice. Maybe it's that the Hutts are in control of your planet. Maybe it's that the policies coming out of the Senate have left you at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to trade with your neighbors. Maybe you think its abhorrent that sentient beings can keep sentient droids as slaves, wiping memories as they see fit.
Hell, maybe you're just an asshole who thinks that what belongs to others should, by violence if necessary, belong to you.
To the extent the Jedi are keeping the peace, they are the faces of the system that prevents you from achieving your version of justice. And so, in turn, you dislike them in proportion to your grievance. | 56 |
Is the carbon that makes up a tree the same actual molecules that are taken by the tree from airborne carbon dioxide? | Does this mean that trees literally make themselves out of thin air? | 88 | Yes, the functional enzyme, called RuBisCo, is one of the only proteins which can take free CO2 and "fix" into a chemical that biological specimens (such as trees) can use. Once fixed, this carbon either goes into structural elements (such as plant tissue/cellulose) or into glucose that gives the plant energy when the sun is not shining.
It is interesting to note that RuBisCo is the most common protein on the planet, owing partially to extremely low catalytic turnover rate. | 36 |
[Dragon Ball Super] Does Frieza have the potential to be the strongest fighter in the Multiverse? | In Resurrection of F we see that Frieza can, at least for a time, go toe-to-toe with Super Saiyan God Goku after 6 months of training. In essence he went from being slightly weaker than a Super Saiyan to just as strong as a Super Saiyan God in six months. Based on that period of progression, is it unreasonable to assume that if Frieza kept training he would be able to best Beerus in a few years, if not Whis? It seems like Frieza's race in comparison to saiyans and humans is ridiculously OP. | 55 | Yes, with a few caveats. Freeza's entire race is bizarrely powerful, he comes from a family of natural prodigies, and is himself a prodigy even by the standards of his family. He was, for a time, the strongest non-god in this universe, without even bothering to train. If he actually took training seriously, he would be able to match Beerus in a few years.
However, he won't take training seriously. Even *dying* only compelled him to train until the bare minimum breakthrough he thought he'd need to defeat Goku. If he'd won that fight, he would have gone right back to sitting on his ass, administrating an army of space pirates. He doesn't fight for the joy of fighting, and strength is only a means to an end for him, so he'll never reach the level he potentially could.
Also, he's an ass, so Beerus would probably just destroy him before he became a threat. Goku, in comparison, is more of a useful pawn / worthy successor, hence why he gets favored treatment. | 50 |
[MARVEL] Can characters like Doctor Strange or Reed Richards reach alternate universes like DC or our reality? | Are there any hints that the multi dimensional heroes are aware of or can access the DC universe, our universe the MCU and so on? | 30 | There have been crossovers, so it's at least theoretically possible. The question is if they have the raw power (or backing) to get it done.
First, let's define terminology. A universe is one continuity, like 616 or the MCU.
A multiverse is a collection of universes: 616 *and* the MCU, as well as universes for each TV series. DC and Marvel each have their own multiverse.
The Omniverse is the collection of all multiverses. Marvel, DC, WH40K, Telletubbies, and so on.
Crossing over into a new universe is difficult enough. It generally involves very special circumstances, like Doom killing a guy who happens to be a multiversal singularity, or Superboy Prime punching the barrier between worlds. Strange can (sometimes) pull this off, because his patrons are powerful enough to make it happen. Richards can (sometimes) pull it off, because his tech is insanely advanced.
Crossing over into a new multiverse is an order of magnitude harder. Strange can't do it by himself, because his biggest patrons are still multiversal entities. Galactus can't even pull it off, and his tech is more advanced the Richards', so Professor Stretchypants is probably out, too. | 32 |
[Avengers: Endgame] I know he had no other choice, but using the whole Infinity Gauntlet with all of it‘s stones was way too overkill to snap away Thanos‘s army. Which stones would‘ve actually been enough to kill off Thanos and his army? | 335 | In that moment? No way to know. Technically you could use the Space and Mind stones (anybody that is on Thanos’ team gets warped into the center of the sun) or Power and Mind/Soul to turn them to dust, mind stone and power(?) to change their allegiances, power and time to reverse everything that had happened- Any combination could likely have done it.
But.
Tony had to be sure. He couldn’t risk any of them taking the gauntlet if he’d died using just one (Quill is a demigod and almost died with just one.) and failed in eradicating all of them.
It’s one of his first lines we see- “I prefer a weapon you only have to fire once. That’s how dad did it, that’s how America does it- And it’s worked pretty well so far.”
He couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t die no matter what he did- Might as well be damn sure and take them all out then and there. | 447 |
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[Dragon Ball Z] So what would've happened if Vegeta hadn't killed Nappa? | Could he have adapted to Earth culture.... or at least as much as Vegeta did? Would Frieza have been an easier fight if they had 4 Saiyans fighting instead of 3?
Would Ghost Nappa have become so popular?!?!? | 24 | Nappa was raised in the Saiyan Culture far longer than either Goku or Vegeta. Vegeta himself said he only knew violence and destruction. Odds are he would have rejoined Frieza's army instead of turning on him because he simply didn't care.
Goku and Vegeta both spent a massive portion of their life on earth. They made friends, fell in love, and had a proud fighting spirit none could rival. They also had a deep hatred of Frieza and the emotion and pure hearts to go Super. | 18 |
[Skyrim/Elder Scrolls] The Dragonborn is a vampire, what's stopping him from using the White Phial to become self-sufficient? | Bob or whatever, the Dragonborn, is a vampire lord. He's tired of hunting for blood. He views such activity as time-consuming, inconvenient and risky.
However, he now possesses the [White Phial](https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:The_White_Phial_(item)) and a [potion of blood](https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Potion_of_Blood).
What's stopping him from putting the content of the blood potion into the White Phial to create a eternal self-regenerating meal? What's stopping him from no longer needing to hunt?
A potion of blood [feeds](https://i.imgur.com/bIOF3se.png) vampires just like human blood does.
The White Phial is a magical phial that somehow [replenishes](https://i.imgur.com/X1EB3po.png) its content everyday. The phial have the ability to create from [nothingness](https://i.imgur.com/pjSXVfl.png). This has been tested and [proved true](https://i.imgur.com/d1Mw7ar.png) by Quintus. | 205 | There is nothing stopping them at all. It's an excellent way to ensure they never starve to death from a lack of other food sources.
However, the fact that the phial replicates the exact same potion every time could mean that it eventually starts tasting bland to the dragonborn. Uninteresting.
Mortals can provide a much larger variety of flavors in their blood, and that could become tempting in the long run. Even if the Dragonborn finds the act of hunting to be less than pleasant, they might feel encouraged to seek out a novel experience rather than be confined to bland routine. | 144 |
ELI5: Why does powdered baby formula dissolve perfectly in water, but protein powder (or even chocolate for chocolate milk) usually clump up? | 221 | Baby formulas only like 10-15% protein by weight. They're about 50% sugar by weight (mostly lactose). Most protein powders are going to be 70-90% protein by weight. Lactose dissolves into water much easier than proteins. | 306 |
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Without any hype or hyperbole, how exciting is graphene actually? | I've seen three threads in the past two weeks make the front page of r/science, and I wanted to know exactly how exciting and revolutionary this material actually is. Could someone give a laymen's explanation of what is actually unique about it? | 72 | This was asked just a few minutes ago. The tl;dr is that it is an excellent conductor and has a high tensile strength; orders of magnitude more conductive than copper and stronger than steel respectively.
Of course with anything like this it is usually the serendipitous discoveries that are the most important, so who knows what the future holds, but the UK is certainly investing in research in this area following the recent ~~Noble~~ Nobel prize win. | 21 |
ELI5: Why does our sense of taste generally prefer unhealthy things (pizza, burger etc.) over healthy ones (broccoli etc.)? | If I were a body I would make my soul eat more healthy things. Soul: "pizza vs broccoli?" Body: "Go for broccoli dude!" But no, our sense of taste just tells us to get Pizza. Why? | 54 | We evolved as wild creatures where crucial nutrients like fat, salt and sugar were hard to find, so we crave them.
Now due to modern technology/agriculture they're everywhere, but our urges haven't changed. | 64 |
Why does a wound itch when healing? | 261 | Cytokines and histamine make you itch. They're released by the body in areas of injury and promote healing. The itching is a by-product. Also, as the wound begins to heal, the new skin cells and collagen sort of entrap the small pre-existing nerves as they grow, which is perceived as itching. | 180 |
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CMV: After 90 years of age, the default resuscitation status of patients admitted to the hospital should be "Do Not Resuscitate" with an option to opt-out. | After working in the hospital for several years, I have noticed that families of elderly patients often elect full-resuscitation measures for their loved ones. I understand the decision, and I respect each and every decision a family member makes. However, in my opinion, and this is just an opinion, elderly patients above an arbitrarily set age, say 90, should be by default, "Do Not Resuscitate" unless the family wishes to opt out. Here are the reasons why.
When a patient's code status is set to "Do Not Resuscitate/Do Not Intubate" (DNR/DNI), many families falsely assume that doctors withdraw all care for the patient and do not assume appropriate treatment protocols. This is not true. Doctors treat the DNR patients with the same standards of care as all other patients, with the only difference being - in the event that their heart stops beating or the patient stops breathing, doctors let the DNR patients pass without any intervention instead of beginning CPR and advanced cardiac life support, and inserting a breathing breathing tube. The majority of DNR patients are treated and leave the hospital healthy. The difference comes into play only in the event their heart or lungs stop functioning.
Resuscitation measures include:
-Chest compressions
-Shocking the patient when the heart rhythm is appropriate
-Medications to restart the heart
-Inserting a breathing tube that connects to a machine to mechanically ventilate a patient
-Inserting a central line (long IV) into the neck to give further medications that maintain blood pressure
When CPR is performed, the frailty of a 90 year old body frequently results in multiple ribs being broken during chest compressions. Survival is usually accompanied by severe trauma to the body - many of these patients do not survive to hospital discharge.
The success rate of resuscitation is inversely related to advancing age. The following article provides a good overview of this:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cpr-survival-elderly/for-elderly-hospital-patients-cpr-often-has-poor-outcome-study-idUSKBN0DP1IH20140509
It states, "The researchers found that about 40 percent of the patients had successful CPR, or ‘return of spontaneous circulation,’ but more than half of those patients ultimately died in the hospital. For patients aged 70 to 79, the rate of survival to discharge was about 19 percent, for patients aged 80 to 89, the rate was 15 percent and **less than 12 percent of patients over the age of 90 were eventually discharged."**
Less than 12% of everyone over 90 survived until hospital discharge. Nevertheless, one must also consider quality of life after resuscitation. Yes, we can restart the heart and keep a patient alive - however, at what cost? Often, the patient stays in a vegetative state supported by blood pressure-maintaining medications and a breathing tube, never officially regaining full consciousness. Some patients that do regain consciousness and survive until discharge ultimately end up going to end-of-life care at nursing homes, they end up neurologically damaged due to the lack of blood flow to the brain during the resuscitation, they end up in significant pain, and they are no where near capable of performing their daily activities as they were prior to hospitalization.
That said, I bring this discussion back to my original opinion. I respect patients and their families who want everything possible to be done to keep their loved one alive. However, sometimes (and often), a patient does not have family when admitted to the hospital, or they are unable to be reached in the heat of the moment, and many times these elderly patients on the brink of passing are mentally incapable of making their own medical decisions. Currently as the law stands, everyone is "full code" until a DNR order is signed. I argue that it is for the benefit of patients to instate an opt-out option for patients above 90. I would like patients above 90 without any goals-of-care paperwork signed to be by default "Do Not Resuscitate" unless they are able to make their own decision to opt out, or if their health care proxy chooses to opt out and keep the patient "Full Code."
Let me hear your thoughts!
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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!* | 29 | One problem with this approach is that the patient (or their proxy) may not be aware of this change. Most people probably assume that medical staff in a hospital will do everything they can to keep them alive unless instructed otherwise.
I think it would be better if hospitals (and perhaps insurance providers) encouraged patients to make an active choice before they end up in a hospital. This can for example be done by making it easy to register their choice and giving them a small discount if they do. | 16 |
ELI5: Why is prostitution illegal? If both parties are consenting why is there an objection to those that sell their bodies for sex and those that pay for it? | 355 | short answer. prostitution is illegal because the governing body of a locality (aka government) deems it illegal.
long answer. most governments are rooted in religious background and just haven't caught up to modern times. there is also the issue of human trafficking or forced sexual servitude, by making prostitution illegal, you [un]successfully prevent/reduce those crimes as well. | 230 |
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Are tritium illuminated watches truly safe to wear when bremsstrahlung is considered? | Manufacturers of these GTLS (gaseous tritium light source) watches love to claim that they are completely harmless because the beta decay of Tritium cannot penetrate intact skin. They never mention the X-ray emission caused by bremsstrahlung - the reaction between the phosphorus and tritium.
Having an always-on low energy x-ray source strapped to your wrist can't be safe... can it? | 16 | The Q-value for the beta decay of ^(3)H is only 18 keV, so that's the maximum energy that the beta particle can possibly have for each individual decay. That means that the maximum energy of a bremsstrahlung photon emitted by one of these beta particles is 18 keV. Both 18 keV electrons and 18 keV photons are very strongly attenuated in condensed matter. So it's not really a worry. | 42 |
ELI5: How do people with amputated Appendages (Arms mainly) control prosthetics to the point where they have control of the prosthetic fingers? Awesome technology, seems it's only getting better, but was wondering how the connection is made when they attach the prosthetic like a glove. | 24 | A robotic neuroprosthetic (a prosthetic that you can move with your brain) works by implanting electrodes in the brain on specific locations where your brain will activate when you are trying to move the missing limb.
Your brain has a designated “motor centre”, where the signals to move come from. When you move, your brain sends a message from this part of your brain down your spine to the nerves in the body part it wants you to move. Those nerves activate your muscles, and they contract, which moves your body part.
When you lose your body part, you do not lose the accompanying part in your brain that was able to move that body part. It’s like having a remote without the television.
The prosthetic is attached in place of the natural limb, and the electrodes are attached to your brain. These electrodes are able to sense your brain sending those messages. The electrodes are activated by the brain’s messages, and the prosthetic moves. | 25 |
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Do astronauts need to clean the outside of space station windows? | 4,598 | There's not enough "stuff" in space to dirty the windows of the ISS naturally. However, departing and incoming shuttle thrusters give off enough particulate to dirty the windows over time. Back in 2015, the Russians on the ISS did an EVA to clean the windows.
So yes, but very slowly. | 3,542 |
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ELI5: That moment you feel more awake after staying up late for hours. | I'm tired, it's getting late, around midnight. I know I should go to bed, but I press on and continue browsing web pages/ TV channels.
Fast forward it's 2am. I'm physically and mentally exhausted, my eyelids are heavy, I start dozing off, but I force myself to stay awake.
3am. I decide to go to bed. However, I can't fall asleep as easily as I anticipated. Almost as if I missed my window of opportunity to fall asleep. Now I lay awake, unable to rest my eyes. Am I the only one? | 18 | Don't confuse tiredness with sleepiness.
Your body releases sleep hormones in a particular rhythm. The interval is these releases about 1.5 hrs, and the window is about 10 minutes. If you do go to sleep during that time, you'll probably be out almost as soon as your head hits the pillow. The very worst thing to do when you feel this sleepiness is to go "ok, I'll just finish this level/chapter/email and then go to sleep."
Actually, reading in bed is a good way to find that sweet spot. Once you start losing focus and the letters start floating a bit, it's lights out. | 10 |
ELI5: How do TV torrent uploaders capture, edit, encode and upload their files so fast and consistently? | 479 | Automation.
They use a TV Tuner to record the program. Then use utilities such as dvr-ms toolkit (for windows) to edit the recorded TV (calling routines like "ComSkip" to cut out commercials) and re-encode to more friendly formats (MKV h.264, etc).
From there, it depends, but likely, they have a script that is called when the above processing is done to create and upload a torrent to a tracker of their choice.
I used to do all of this, minus to torrent stuff, and it's very nice once you've gotten it setup and working. | 275 |
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If it takes ~365.256 days for the earth to travel around the sun, shouldn't we, in addition to leap years, add an extra day to the calendar every 1000 years? | 28 | We do. Every fourth year is a leap year, *unless* that year is divisible by one hundred in which case it isn't, *unless* that year is in turn divisible by four hundred in which case it is.
That's why 2000 was a leap year, while 1900 wasn't.
That scheme gets us accurate to within one day about every 5,000 years or so, which is more than we need since the precession of the equinoxes is not perfectly predictable that far out anyway. Assuming we're still using the same calendar in the year 7,000, we'll have inserted ad hoc adjustments as needed by then. | 79 |
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[Mathematics] If Euclid derived a formula for finding a prime higher than all the other primes, why is us discovering a new prime so important? | For example... Euclid said there are infinitely many primes because you can multiply all the primes you know together, add one, and that number will also be prime. So can't we just use that method to get more primes easily? | 49 | You've misunderstood the proof; given the first n primes, it is not, in general, true that multiplying them together and adding 1 will give you a prime number. For example, the first six prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13. If you multiply those together and add 1, you get
(2\*3\*5\*7\*11\*13) + 1 = 30031,
which isn't prime since 30031 = 59\*509.
What Euclid's proof really says is that *either* that number is prime *or* there is a prime, call it p, that divides it. However, p can't be any of the primes you started with, because that would imply that it divides 1 (take the number above and subtract the product of the primes). Thus, there is a prime not on the list.
Note also that if you take some arbitrary collection of primes, you can't even guarantee that the "new prime" you get will be bigger than all of the ones with which you started. | 71 |
With the talk of possible habitable planets, Could the human body withstand a world with twice the amount of gravity? | I made a post [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hxfkd/eli5_with_the_talk_of_possible_habitable_planets/) and someone suggested to ask here.
Lets say somehow, someway we manage to make it to an earth like planet and it can support life but it has twice the amount of gravity than the earth, would humans be able to safely travel around the planet?
(I pretty much have no clue what I am talking about so if this question makes absolutely no sense, please inform me! It's super interesting!)
To add a little more information that I've read is that the human body can withstand two/three times gravity of earth, but for how long? long exposure sounds like it would be bad.
edit: I guess I should have phrased the question slightly different. The question should been something along the lines of "With the talk of possible habitable planets, Could the human body withstand more gravity for a long duration on another planet?" | 862 | If we look at known effects from weighlessness and invert, it can be imagined that the increased load on the body structure would prohibit movement at first and then cause growth of muscle possibly beyond what the body can comfortably accomodate. The increased strain on the bone structure could lead to increased density to cope.
What would concern me most is the effect on internal organs. First of all, the heart would need to work harder to get blood around and it would likely grow. The extra pull on all the organs, that don't have a strong structure themselves, would be a probable source of complications but someone with more medical training would have to comment on that. | 278 |
ELI5: Why am I hungry before I sleep, don't eat, then wake up not hungry anymore? | 82 | Hunger isn't just the feeling of an absence of food in your stomach. Hunger is a sensation caused by your brain when it detects that your immediately available energy (a chemical called glucose) doesn't match up to how much it thinks you need for your current activity rate.
When you sleep, you aren't very active, and your body can get by on reserves of energy (a chemical called glycogen, stored in the liver) that take longer to convert into useful energy. Immediately after you wake up, you're still in a restful state, so your brain doesn't think it needs to tell you to get more food.
Once you've gotten up and started your morning routine, you might find that you begin to feel hungry again as you become more active, and your brain starts to realise that you will soon be needing more energy. And then it's time for breakfast :) | 77 |
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The solar system completes an orbit of our galaxy every 240 million years. How do we know we won't pass through a region of our galaxy with hazardous conditions and how could we possibly look ahead to forecast something like that? | Obviously the Milky Way is massive, can we look ahead and extrapolate the orbit of our solar system to see if we are going to pass through a region of space that is unfriendly to life as we know it? Also, does this orbit bring us closer to anything of interest in the galaxy that allows us to get a better view of and or study? | 465 | The Milky Way is a disk galaxy. All the disk is rotating together and our sun is mostly just following along in that rotation. That means that as we rotate around the Galaxy the environment around us is also rotating along with us. So it will look more or less the same in 100 million years. | 217 |
[Star Wars] If the Dark Side, as Yoda said, is quicker and easier, then how is it not more powerful? It's so much quicker an easier that a 60 year old Sith defeated an 800+ year old Master Jedi? Doesn't that make it more powerful by virtue of its quickness? | Also, Yoda was known or being exceptionally strong with the force naturally, even without his 800+ years of experience. | 156 | Legends, but one quick example - a lone mediocre Jedi who happened to be in the right place and the right time was able to single-handedly hold off an entire army of extragalactic invaders and brought down the entire building that Yoda and Palpatine had dueled in. Ganner Rhysode went from being a brash, aggressive, and overconfident Jedi to a god of the Yuuzhan Vong. How? By finding within himself, in one crucial moment, the perfect state of being that the Jedi preached and dedicated their entire lives to discovering.
The ideal of the Jedi (which the Order of Yoda's time arguably fell far short of) is that they devote themselves to the will of the Force entirely, such that the Force can act through them - the Force using a Jedi to accomplish a task, rather than the other way around. In such a state of oneness with the Force, the entire concept of "more powerful" is irrelevant; the Jedi becomes merely a conduit for the cosmic power that surrounds and binds all life in the universe.
No Sith could ever hope to match such an event, as they would be fighting against the very power they are drawing from. Not the person, not the Jedi, but fighting against the Force itself made manifest. | 188 |
ELI5: What do seniors with no savings do if they have no family? | Where to elderly folks who depend fully on social security go when they can no longer care for themselves if they have no family? Are there state funded nursing homes that take in residents? | 36 | They live off of a combination of SSI income ($700/mo), food stamps, and there are many senior-specific services designed to help them stay in their homes as long as possible (that is both better for them, and cheaper for the fed govt). Some such programs do home repairs, home dr visits, and there are programs to drive sr's to dr visits. also community senior centers for fun little things to do for cheap/free.
Medicare pays for nursing homes. They aren't good ones. | 19 |
eli5 / How do we know the half life of (or even that it is radioactive) Bismuth-209 when it is literally longer than the age of the universe by several orders of magnitude | 212 | You can calculate the half-life of a substance by measuring the rate at which it decays. Bismuth-209 decays by releasing alpha particles, which is a Helium nucleus - two neutrons and two protons.
In 2003 scientists at Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in France took a sample of Bismuth-209 and connected it to a very sensitive detector, and measured how many alpha particles it released over the course of 5 days. If you know the mass you started with, you know how many atoms you had, and if you know how many alpha particles were released, you know how many of those atoms underwent decay. You can extrapolate from that to know how long it would take for half of the atoms in the sample to decay, and that's your half-life.
In the case of the Bismuth-209 experiment, they had something like 128 alpha particles, total, from 100 grams of the substance. Considering that's like 3x10^23 atoms, and only 128 of them underwent decay in 5 days, that's an extremely tiny fraction of the sample. Hence it having a half life of 10^19 years. | 384 |
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Have people claimed "the end of history" before Fukuyama? | He seems to say "we've reached the best form of organising society", which seems like it would have been said before | 25 | It's an updated version of the old "Conservative/Right" Hegelian belief that 19th century Prussia was the end of history as far as organizing society goes. To what extent Hegel himself believed anything like that is highly disputable.
In any case it's born out of his theory of history being primarily motivated by the conflicts between ideas. Marx took a similar line but saw class-conflict as being the primary motivating historical force. Once classes are abolished and Communism established or we've reached the Absolute Understanding then history proper can be said to have ended. | 30 |
ELI5: What is happening when our eyes "glaze" over? | 373 | Check out Brain Games on Netflix, it has a lot of info on these types of things.
Your brain uses 30% of its energy processing vision. When your eyes gloss over, your brain has realized what you are looking at isn't needed information in conjunction with what you are thinking about and has reallocated some of that 30% energy to another thought process. Temporarily. | 187 |
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[Mad Max] Max was a cop before the apocalypse and Furiosa's backstory implies she was born after the apocalypse. But they appear to be the same age. What gives? | 287 | Mad Max doesn't have one specific, instantaneous apocalypse.
- Things were already going down the drain long before 1, with oil shortages resulting from a Gulf War that blew up to be much larger than it was in reality leading to economic collapse, government instability, and lawlessness in many areas. Furiosa may have been born in an area that had already effectively experienced the apocalypse, with supplies no longer being delivered due to fuel shortages.
- At some point between 1 and 2, secondary fuel sources like coal and lower-grade oil were cut off as well. It's important to note that the wells did not absolutely run out; rather, large-scale distribution systems broke down. Water becomes scarce as filtration and pumping systems cease to operate without power. Some areas with more local fuel sources may have clung on during this time, as planes were evidently still flying.
- Between 2 and 3, a global nuclear exchange occurred between governments trying to control access to the last remaining oil supplies. This results in the state of affairs we see in 3 and Fury Road. | 274 |
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[Star Wars] Spoiler question in post re: fleet chase | Not sure how best to do the spoiler but desperately want to know the answer.
The Supremacy can take out the Raddus easily by itself, assuming no fancy suicide hyperspace attacks. The rest of the First Order's fleet can damage or outright destroy the Raddus without the Supremacy.
THE ENTIRE FLEET CHASES THE RADDUS IN SUBLIGHT FOR HOURS - WHY DID THE FLEET NOT JUST JUMP TO HYPERSPACE AHEAD OF THE RADDUS!?!?!? IT WOULD HAVE TAKEN LITERALLY SECONDS!
Phew. Sorry. Thank you kindly. | 68 | Because you should never fight a battle when you can win just by waiting.
The First Order fleet had all the time in the world: the Resistance fleet was burning through its fuel and if they tried to jump again, they could just follow them (and the Resistance would have wasted even more fuel in the process). Any alternative to just waiting until the Resistance ships are out of fuel and dead in space is the poorer one. | 90 |
ELI5:How can I only be allergic to a specific berry and seemingly no other ones? In my case I'm only allergic to strawberries. | EDIT: I just found out that a Strawberry is not a berry. However, it is the only thing I know of that I'm allergic to. So why could someone be allergic to Strawberries and not other similar foods that are of its class.
Can someone be only allergic to apples and not other fruit?
Can someone be only allergic to carrots and not other vegetables? | 34 | You can be allergic to anything that has a unique antigen, which is just a protein tag on the surface of a cell. Your body sees an antigen that doesn't belong and sends an immune response after it. If the tag is found in multiple food items, like glutens of various forms for people with severe allergies, then you will be allergic to all of those things. If the tag is unique, then it will only be triggered by a specific food item. | 10 |
"This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest," Watson & Crick's famous understatement in their 1953 cover letter to Nature. Does anyone have any further such examples? | Science writing has been typically passive with the utmost care not to overstate; let the results speak for themselves and all that. So I was wondering, from the most famous or influential papers ever published, what single lines or short passages boil the entire discovery down into such brevity. Would love to read through further examples, if anyone has any. Thanks! | 47 | Ronald Fisher:
>"The value for which P=.05, or 1 in 20, is 1.96 or nearly 2 ; it is convenient to take this point as a limit in judging whether a deviation is to be considered significant or not.". | 23 |
eli5 What is a Candidate Key? [Normalisation Process] | I know it's a basic question but I can find a simple answer.
Is it just multiple primary keys? | 20 | It is a key which is eligible to be a primary key, it is also unique. There maybe multiple candidate keys in a table out of that we select one as the primary key, which is the most suitable for a particular table. For an example in Employee table there is employeeId and passportNo, both are unique so they are eligible to be primary key so they are called the candidate key. But out of that employeeId is the most preferred to become the primary key since it is the Employee table. | 12 |
[Star Trek] How the heck do you burn food when using a replicator? | One of my buddies who was stuck on Voyager during its extended trip in the Delta Quadrant always tells stories about during potlucks the great and powerful Captain Janeway always managed to burn food that she made with replicator. How in the world did she manage that? That said apparently the burnt food was still better than anything the chef Neelix made. | 20 | You can specify what temperature you want your food to be. Janeway could be setting it too high, so the food burns after it's been made.
It's also possible that replicators can toast food after it's been replicated. Some present-day microwaves can do that. Maybe the interface is fiddly, or Janeway is an indifferent cook. | 12 |
ELI5: Why does sugar get viscous (form a syrup) at high concentration but salt doesn't? | I just had a flash back to trying to thicken something as a kid with salt but it never got syrupy. The sugar isn't forming polymers is it? What is it about about sugar that can make a syrup but salt cannot? | 42 | Firstly, they are very different chemicals. When salt dissolves in water it breaks apart (dissociates) into sodium and chlorine ions which are individually herded (conjugated) by water molecules. Sugars are much larger, complex molecules which do not generally break apart when interacting with water.
Because sugars are carbohydrates, they can participate in hydrogen bonding which increases viscosity and surface tension. Each molecule's "heads" try to stay close to their neighbors' "butts". Because they are larger and are mostly planar they can more strongly interact through van der Waals forces (this effect is small compared to the hydrogen bonding in solution) | 16 |
ELI5:Why do couples so often experience a decrease in sex drive shortly after marriage? | 34 | There isn't one good answer for that because for one, it isn't the same with each couple and two because it doesn't necessarily always happen.
One common reason though is simply time. A married couple will most likely spend their days working and by the time the day is done, sleep sounds like a much better idea than sex.
Another reason is that after a while, a couple's sex life tends to become a little bit boring. When you first start having sex, you're both willing to try different positions and other stuff to please yourself and your partner. After a while, you figure out what works and it becomes more relaxed and not as exciting.
Third, as you get older, your libido drops simply because that's how your body works.
But really, tons of married couples still have plenty of sex drive, but they often have to actively "spice things up" to keep their libidos up and continue to make sex exciting. | 21 |
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ELI5: When humans aren't to blame, How do animals go extinct? | 64 | This is a great question, and it lets us really sink our teeth into some basic biologic concepts. First of all, though, there are two basic types of extinctions: Mass extinctions, and isolated extinctions. Mass extinctions refer to vast numbers of species going extinct over relatively short period of time (usually meaning over a few millennia). These are rare events - five mass extinctions have occurred in the history of the world (some consider us to currently be in a mass extinction event - the "Holocene extinction" - which is largely human-caused.) These events are caused by natural disasters, such as the most recent asteroid collision at the Yucatan peninsula, which is believed to have driven the dinosaurs extinct. Earlier in earth's history, large volcanic eruptions were responsible for blocking out the sunlight, affecting plant life, and temporarily changing the climate enough to drive species extinct on a mass level.
Isolated extinction is much more common, and is happening all the time. Some of this is simply the result of evolution. As a species evolves, the older version of the species can be said to be "extinct". The definition of a species is somewhat arbitrary. There's not always a perfect division between two species. For example, wolves and dogs are genetically similar to the point that they can interbreed. However, they are considered different species due to other factors - wolves tend to have a very characteristic appearances, and a well-established behavior such as pack formation with a complex hierarchy, hunting techniques, howling as an important means of communication, etc; dogs have a lot more variation in their appearance, and are characterized by domestication, interaction with humans, loyalty to their adoptive families, barking more than howling, etc. Dog and wolves don't naturally interact and under most circumstances would regard each other with hostility, and so they are considered other species. Wolves in general tend to be more "pure bred". But, if wolves bred more and more with dogs, over time, the offspring would stop being wolves, and start being more mutt-like. If this happened enough, the wolves would disappear, not because they were killed off, but because the things that defined them as a species disappeared. This process is called Genetic Pollution.
Disease is another major cause of extinction. A nasty virus that affects a plant could wipe out and entire colony of plants, for example. This could lead to downstream effects, as the animals that feed on that plant might then die off.
Finally, animals can hunt each other to extinction as well, particularly invasive species that arrive in a new ecosystem and eat faster than they are eaten.
EDIT - crappy grammar | 45 |
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ELI5: why is 12 the magical age for drug store medicine? | Every time you read the back of a medicine box the age is always 12 when you are considered an adult. Why is this? | 1,365 | Children have underdeveloped immune systems, at around 11 years old the metabolism of the body begins to change in preparation for/as part of puberty. So children 12 and older have a better way to regulate body temperatures, develop specific immunities, and process toxins, all of which make it so that they are closer to adults and can take medicine differently. | 809 |
ELI5:How exactly do Saline pools work? | How does a saline pool system work compared to a chlorine system? Is it as effective? | 25 | Salt water pools still use chlorine, the difference is that the chlorine is produced through electrolysis using the salt as the base material. The advantage is that the salt electrolysis process creates free chlorine ions (the type of chlorine that kills bacteria) and burns off chloramines (the type of chlorine that burns your eyes and smells like strong bleach). As long as they are maintained they will work just as well at killing bacteria, and people tend to find them less irritating, especially if they have sensitive skin. The salt system also has the benefit of "softening" the water. They tend to have a higher initial setup cost though, and saltwater is more corrosive than freshwater so you have to keep an eye on the internals and plumbing of the filtration system. | 16 |
[The Thing/Terminator] Can the Thing assimilate the living tissue of a Terminator? | 25 | I think it would be able to digest and absorb the tissue, but would find it functionally useless once it broke down the tissue and reached the machine components below. The Thing is intelligent enough to build a spaceship (at least, maybe, after it has assimilated with multiple people) and to use deception, so it would likely be aware enough to realize that there's no survival advantage to merely disguising itself as the living tissue surrounding an otherwise inorganic being. | 19 |
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[Star Wars] Does Luke misuse the Force when attacking the Death Star? | Under Obi-wan's guidance Luke switches off his targeting computer and uses the Force when firing torpedoes into the Death Star, killing millions of people.
Yoda says that the Force should be used for knowledge and defense, never for attack.
Obi-wan should be aware of that teaching, so what's up with Obi-wan telling Luke to use the force when attacking the Death Star? | 16 | No. He let the Force guide him, which is inherently how the Force is supposed to be used.
And Yoda was speaking about directly using it to attack, choking people and lightning and throwing people around. | 29 |
Can someone explain to me how Bitcoin is in a bubble? Will it be a legit currency or is it just valuable for people putting money on it? | 66 | It’s purely a store of value/speculative asset, and it’s price is mostly dependent on speculation of future price appreciation since it’s not useful for exchange. Think of it like gold, but without physical real world uses and no actual value, so it’s current value is purely a function of the expectation of its future value.
It’s a bubble because the actual value of the of the asset is based purely upon the projection of value rather than an income stream IMO | 90 |
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ELI5: Why is it acceptable to wait an hour to see a doctor when you have an appointment? | It's 52 minutes passed and he just started with the guy ahead of me. | 137 | Because we understand that while nobody likes to wait, doctors aren't making you wait because they are reading cosmo and taking the fun quizzes. You have to wait because sometimes emergencies happen and doctors have to attend to that. Or because people make an appointment for something they believe is a tiny issue which then turns out to be not so tiny. | 154 |
ELI5:how is boxing scored | Why is floyd mayweather winning when he isn't taking initiative or throwing more punches? How do they decide each round and how do they decide the overall winner? | 69 | Boxing is most commonly scored with the winner of a round being given a 10 and the loser a 9. A draw gives both a 10. Any knockdowns mean another point is deducted from that boxer. Once that score is established, any point deductions for fouls called by the referee are calculated in, so that if the winner has a foul called, the score becomes 9-9.
Examples:
X wins a round over Y: 10(X) - 9(Y)
X wins a round, knocking down Y twice: 10(X) - 7(Y)
X wins a round, knocking down Y, but also committing a foul: 9(X) - 8(Y)
The winner of a round is basically determined by who landed more "clean" punches. Shots that just graze the body or get blocked are "worth" far less than a clean punch to the body or head. It's better to land a few solid punches that to be continuously throwing misses or into guards. | 18 |
ELI5: Why, in humans, are males generally larger than females when it is the opposite in most other species? | 16 | Humans, like most non-human primates, have sexual dimorphism in which the males tend to be larger than the females. Some primates (like chimpanzees and bonobos) see the males almost twice the size of females. Sexual dimorphism appears in body size, muscle mass, canine teeth, craniofacial structure, and even sometimes deepening voices.
There are very few primate species that have reverse dimorphism (females larger than males), so it appears to be "normal" that humans display the same dimorphism that other primates "typically" have. | 36 |
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[Fallout] Are there any operating educational institutions (other than the Institute) and where are they? | In fallout there is an emphasis on science and technology and a lot of characters are experts in these subjects. Some even have the title of “Dr.” Do the doctors of the fallout universe actually have degrees? Where did they learn all that they know?
Side note: there’s a guy in New Vegas who convinces the NCR to hire him because he has a theoretical degree in physics. Fun joke, but it suggests that degrees are obtainable in the post apocalyptic world. | 18 | Most doctors and scientists are more apprenticeship style learning where assistants learn their craft from former masters. There are also groups like the Followers of the Apocalypse who provide education for a wide variety of subjects. In places like the NCR there no doubt they have universities and colleges. | 18 |
CMV: Adopting kids is better than having them. | I know some people want to have kids they gave birth too and all that, but I feel like the stakes of child birth are too high. Wouldn't it be easier to just adopted a kid(s) thats already been through enough, instead of giving birth to something? I understand, raising a kid that's from foster care is tough. Really tough and time consuming, but isn't the same for giving birth to a child???
Don't know why anybody would want to put themselves through that. On a scale to 1-10 child birth is like a freaking 9! a 9....
I just don't get it, please explain. | 40 | > . Wouldn't it be easier to just adopted a kid(s) thats already been
Not even close. Having sex is much easier than all the red tape to adopt. It’s also much cheaper.
And most people want to experience their child’s whole life, beginning at infancy. There are far more people wanting to adopt a newborn than there are newborns that go up for adoption. | 41 |
[Lord of the Rings] What was Sauron's endgame? | So say Sauron got the ring, conquered Gondor, Rohan, etc. Say he won everything there was to be contested. Then what? Would Sauron have commanded the Orcs to build spaceships and start invading other worlds? Waged war on some higher plane, perhaps? Yes, I just recently watched the trilogy again. | 68 | At the end of the First Age Sauron was offered a chance at redemption. He would have to prostrate himself in front of the Valar and perform some sort of penance. He was too proud to bear the shame and hid on middle earth. While its impossible to fully know his mind. His goal appears to be that of his old master Morgoth... To stand apart from the Valar and their lord, to be free of their influence, and to shape the world according to his own desires. Sauron being of a lesser order cannot hope to truly shape middle earth in the same way that Morgoth was able to, but what he can do is reverse the out come of the War of Wrath, to stand apart and rule unchallenged by the Valar or Mortals... Some might say... to be free. | 83 |
[Men in Black] What becomes MIB's role on an Earth where humanity meets an alien race after becoming a spacefaring species? | So I work at MIB headquarters, and it may have been brought up in orientation, but I can't recall what the protocol is in the event of humanity's ascension to an interstellar species. Do we go public with our existence, do the aliens already living here shed their disguises. | 23 | Exodus of experienced MiB to trading companies, manufacturing licensees of alien technology, arts organizations, cultural sensitivity training providers, and universities.
Also bodyguards.
Given this expectation, writing a post-contact protocol is viewed as fanfic. | 18 |
[MCU] Question about Killmonger's plan | I know it's been ages but something has been bugging me since watching the movie and a few days I figured out what it is: According to [this scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtepp-acYOY) (Which is awesome btw, this movie has the best music in the MCU hands down), Killmonger states that he'll send out Vibranium weapons to his spies across the world, and they in turn will distribute those weapons to oppressed black people... is that it? No training? No building together an army or guerilla forces? Just hand out guns like candy and hope for the best?
Why is this a threat the movie expects me to take seriously, exactly? Imagine walking up to some random white dude, handing him a futuristic looking gun, and saying "Rejoice, my brother, for now you have the means by which to overthrow your oppressors!" His reaction would probably be something like [this](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/036/356/limmy.jpg). I have no reason to believe a random black guy would react any differently.
Note it has been a while since I watched the movie and there may be more to his plan that I missed or something.
Edit: I've been temp banned for making a stupid comment so I can't really engage but I do really appreciate the conversation around this topic, I haven't seen this really discussed before, keep it up! | 217 | He probably meant to use the spies more like green berets of America. Bring in equipment and training for local groups and turn them into an effective guerilla force. He wasn't just handing weapons out on the street but probably trying to foster a revolution through groups that shared similar goals as him. Something that would take months or even years to get going instead of the implied idea of it being tomorrow. | 268 |
ELI5: why sometimes when you put food in the microwave you hear lots of sparking sounds, then take it out, and your food is still cold/warm | 11,245 | Microwaves don't really heat food itself, they mostly heat the water *inside* food. But microwaves don't heat the water evenly. It gets heated in little sections, and those hot parts spread heat to all the cold ones. That takes time though. When food snaps but doesn't get hot its because the water in those hot parts started boiling (that's the sound) but it hasn't been long enough for the heat to spread out (that's why its cold). This is why packages say to let the food sit for a few minutes after cooking. Or you can run the microwave a few seconds on and a few seconds off to spread the cooking time out, which is the same exact thing the "power" setting will do. | 3,516 |
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Number of citations? | In a science field (edit: AGU journals, IEEE journals), I was wondering about the different 'citation scores'. If an author (as lead author) has 5 papers with over 100 citations, is that something that is really good?
There is not a lot of papers, so the h-index and i10 index are not all that impressive. Is there an i100 index? | 21 | It is something that is really field dependent, and even community-within-field dependent. There's not really a great way to generalize this! Some fields love conference papers, others journal papers, others books and so on and so forth. | 37 |
[ASoIaF/GoT] Could Barristan Selmy have succeeded in cutting his way through the Kingsguard? | 19 | Doubtful.
Barristan Selmy is an incredible fighter but there is a few things to consider.
1. It's 1v5. This might not be so bad if it's Selmy in full armour against a group of random peasants, but he's up against five capable fighters in full armour. Robert's Kingsguard were poor in comparison to Selmy's former brothers, but they're not pushovers.
2. Selmy is about 63 at this point. Once again, he's an incredible fighter, but age doesn't discriminate. He's up against five men who are 20-30 years younger than him.
3. Not only are there five other Kingsguard there, but there are also the Goldcloaks and Sandor Clegane present as well. Starting a fight against them all would be suicide.
It's more of a boast brought on by the heat of the moment, and it's also him venting his frustration at the state of the Kingsguard. This is a man who served besides Arthur Dayne, Gerold Hightower, Oswell Whent, Jonothor Darry, and Lewyn Martell. He's basically seen the Kingsguard go from the best it could possibly be to rock bottom in the space of fifteen years. | 34 |
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ELI5: Hobbes vs Rosseau debate | Came across this while watching Crash Course Big History, and now I'm interested. But most stuff on google requires a great deal of prior understanding of the subject. Could someone explain this for me like I'm five? Thanks | 16 | Well, there's a lot of ways that they differed in their philosophy, but probably the most clear distinction is where they both came down on the relationship between what they conceived of as the "natural state of man" and society. At the time, one of the big questions in sociology was what people would be like if society didn't exist. What was the state of the "natural man" outside of civilization? (Modern sociologists basically reject this idea entirely, arguing instead that society is itself innate to human nature, but anyway.) Hobbes takes a rather pessimistic view of human nature and argues that without the laws, expectations, and morals of society, humans would live in a state of natural war and brutality, because people are naturally selfish. There's a lot more to say here, but this is the most important way that he differs from Rousseau, who, by contrast, argues for a "noble savage" idea. Rousseau answers the same question by arguing that all the wants and desires that people have which make them selfish and violent are actually unnatural, and are imparted by society. In a natural state, without society telling us what to want, humans would want for nothing and thus live in natural harmony.
So to summarize - Hobbes = people bad, society good, because it restrains people; Rousseau = people good, society bad, because it corrupts people. | 30 |
[Dark Souls] Why are all the animals in Lordran so huge? | 16 | The rats are large because they feed on humans. Their humanity empowers the rats. In the depths there are still small rats scurrying around. The crow is (maybe) an avatar of the god Velka, so that explains that one. What other animals are big? | 12 |
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ELI5: Why has evolution favored external testicles for temperature regulation of sperm rather than just favoring sperm that flourishes in any body temperature? | I would imagine that the natural selection process would originally just favor the sperm that's able to survive in harsher environments rather than developing a whole dangling contraption that's prone to injury and environmental influence. | 55 | Because the natural selection process does not necessarily favor the *best*; it favors what works *well enough*.
Having a dangling contraption may be an inelegant, imperfect solution, but it worked well enough to keep us around. | 71 |
Semi-faculty position in top uni vs postdoc in lower ranked uni | Hi, I'm now deciding between two offers and would like to hear your opinion. I'm in my first year of postdoc in an Asian uni with a world ranking of 20-30. Very recently I've been offered a research assistant professor position in my same lab, and a postdoc in oxbridge. For those not familiar, RAP is a new academic rank between postdoc and assistant professor (or lecturer in the UK).
I try to analyse the pros and cons of the two options:
Postdoc in Oxbridge:
- prestigious
- access to international datasets (I'm in public health and this potentially affect the research output)
- explore and learn in new environments
- more focused in the research area that I'm interested in
- higher degree of freedom
RAP in the original lab
- a step ahead in the academic track
- more than a double of salary than the postdoc in oxbridge
- staying with family and SO
- familiarity with research environment and the requirement of different research funding, etc
- eligibility for applying research fundings
I don't seem to see which options to be better than the others. What do you guys think? Thanks | 22 | > RAP is a new academic rank between postdoc and assistant professor (or lecturer in the UK).
I thought RAP was basically an NTT researcher position (from which you can't progress to PI). Like, what you get after postdoc if you can't land TT. | 24 |
ELI5:Was there ever a "wood age"?What do we know about wooden(and other perishable) tools? | 66 | No, there was never a point in human history where we could use wooden tools but not stone tools.
The "stone age" is just a term used to describe when we used tools that were naturally occurring.
We used fire hardened spears and flint knapped with stone.
Edit- Flint knapping not flint mapping. | 47 |
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[Star Trek] If a human doctor wants to join Starfleet, how many different species' physiologies do they need to study? | I mean, obviously the Tricorder helps with a lot of stuff, but if they were caught without one would McCoy, Bashir, etc. be able to perform invasive surgery or even prescribe an indigestion cure for a Vulcan or a Klingon? How about for something more unusual, like a Kelpien, or a Jem'Hadar? Is Starfleet medical school more like veterinary school? | 477 | Due to our common ancestor, most humanoid species in the galaxy are similar enough to cross-breed; So it's reasonable to assume there's a lot of medical overlap between them, enough to generalize medical training.
​ | 331 |
[Pacific Rim] More practical alternatives to the Jaegers | Why did the world governments see giant monsters coming out of the see and say "Giant robot"
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I get the plasma shots.
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But why didn't they just use plasma turrets around the city.
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What about nuclear options do those work.
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Why not use satellites that would just cook the monsters from space. | 123 | The short version is that they used Jaegers because Jaegers worked.
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For the long version, let's run through your suggestions in no particular order:
They actually *did* use nuclear weapons; in fact, the very first kaiju (Trespasser) was killed in Oakland, CA, USA by three nuclear missiles. Nukes are pretty bad options, though, strictly weapon-of-last-resort - they're horribly messy. Sure, you kill the kaiju, but you also destroy and irradiate everything around it, and everything downwind of the blast. It works, but badly.
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Plasma turrets around the city would require a *lot* of plasma turrets, around every population center, enormous energy infrastructure, and some way to keep the kaiju away and targetable until the turrets could do the job. And the moment you lose a few turrets, your defenses are wide open and the kaiju can just waltz on through. This isn't an awful design, and you could protect a few key locations like this, but it doesn't scale well and it's extremely inflexible.
Worse, plasma turrets are only usable if the kaiju comes near the city. You don't want the kaiju to come near the city, they're toxic. Sometimes you'll *have* to fight them there, but if possible you want to kill the kaiju as far away from a city as you can.
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A satellite solution would require even more infrastructure than the plasma turrets. You can't just have one - you'd have to have a whole big network of them, all spread out across the globe, all engineered to be powerful enough to fire down into Earth's atmosphere and still have enough energy left to cook a kaiju. And you'd need to maintain them. And if you ever need to adapt or improve them, you'd have to be sending up new space missions. And kaiju aren't going to just stand there and be hit - you probably can't cook them while they're underwater, and on land you'll be trying to hit a relatively small, fast-moving target from a long, long, long way away. Maybe you could do this with infinite resources and a lot of space-based infrastructure, but it isn't practical.
(If you knew where the kaiju came from, and it wasn't protected by a whole lot of energy-dissipating water, you could maybe position one over the breach and snipe kaiju as they arrive - but that's not really an option for how things played out.)
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So let's re-examine our problem, here, and our needs: We have big, combat-ready monsters showing up at initially unpredictable times, in unpredictable locations, on unpredictable terrain. We can't build a wall around the whole world, but we need to kill these things before they can do too much damage, and ideally before they get too close to us.
We need war machines that can respond and deploy quickly, handle all kinds of battlefields, armed and armored to the teeth. We need to pilot them *extremely* well to keep up with the likes of the kaiju, and since each kaiju is different we need to be ready for the unknown. We need enough weapons to act as a rapid-response team, but a small enough number to be maintainable and upgradeable as tech becomes available and our understanding of kaiju grows.
We need super-tanks. That's really all a jaeger is - a manageably big all-terrain armored combat platform. Since we have the technology to pilot them in part by human brain, to make them more responsive and effective in the field, it's easiest to make them also physically resemble people so that the brain can make better sense of the input and output. So: big, armored, heavily-armed human-shaped robots.
The details, of course, are up to whoever makes the things - their priorities, their resources, their pilots, their tests & upgrades. But the basic idea, the fundamental platform, was tried, worked, and rolled out as a solution - short term or long term, depending on who you asked, but a solution none the less. | 197 |
Completely New To Programming | Hello all. I’m currently on my 2 week in Intro to CS and I quite possibly may be having a panic attack :)
It seems I’m either of below average intelligence, or my professor assumes coding is an innate concept for most. If anyone could link me a programming tutorial that an actual 5 year old could comprehend, would be appreciated. Thanks.
Edit: Removed a word | 44 | Two weeks isn't enough time to understand much of anything, give yourself some grace. Most CS ***grads*** say they feel like they know virtually nothing when starting their first job so it's unreasonable to expect someone to be confident and competent in their very first course. The fact that you are digging into outside documentation to understand something is proof that you could succeed. | 38 |
ELI5:why chocolate chips don't melt in a chocolate chip cookie but they do if they're alone in a bowl | 52 | They do melt in the cookie, but the density of the dough around them prevents the fluid chocolate from spreading out. When the cookie cools and hardens the chocolate becomes a 'chip' again. This is why when you eat a chocolate chip cookie when it is freshly baked, the chocolate is gooey and warm. It is already melted. | 68 |
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ELI5: Why does birth control make you gain weight? | Does it increase your appetite, therefore making you eat more and gain weight? Or do the hormones affect the way your body processes calories? How does that happen and why? | 27 | For starters, almost all forms of birth control DO NOT cause weight gain! It's a widely held misconception, but when compared to a control group, women on birth control gain the same amount of weight.
That being said, there *is* one form that causes weight gain: Depo Vera (the shot). In fact, about 25% of patients experience weight gain!
There's not a whole lot known as to *why* this happens or if it's a change in appetite or metabolism, but it's probably related to progesterone. | 33 |
What exactly is a laser composed of and what are the differences between different types of lasers? | I understand that lasers are light (focused?) and that's about it. Lasers fascinate me. You can buy a pointer at pretty much any corner shop and those are very fun to play with. What interests me more are those lasers that cause damage. The ones that cut through metal and can disintegrate fabric/paper. What is the difference between a basic laser pointer and a laser capable of cutting through six inches of metal like a knife through butter? Is it simply the intensity of the light? And if that's the case, through what means do we control the intensity? I apologise if this question seems overly basic but, generally speaking, I am not a man of science. Thank you in advance for your answers and I look forward to being educated further on the topic. | 16 | A laser is a source of highly monochromatic (one wavelength) and coherent light, which means that all the peaks and troughs in the emitted wave match up perfectly. They’re basically tools for creating really well controlled streams of light.
Lasers broadly can be categorised into two types - pulsed and continuous beam. It’s the power output (amount of energy per second) of the laser that determines whether or not it can cut through things, typical laser pointers that you can pick up from a shop will be around 1 mW.
The colour of the laser is determined by a thing called the gain medium; if the medium is a mixture of helium and neon then the laser will be red, and if the medium is neodymium yttrium-aluminium-garnet, then the laser will be green (after a process called frequency doubling). You can effectively combine lasers together using a process known as laser pumping, which combines properties of laser outputs to generate the sort of light you require.
The most powerful lasers are typically pulsed, and they emit a very high amount of energy in a very short amount of time. | 13 |
[DC] Why is Batman (almost) always portrayed as a/the hero in elseworld stories? | Likewise, Superman is usually turned/is evil. Personally, I find it far more likely that Batman turns evil. Or, at the very least, another powerful hero like Martian Manhunter/Wonder Woman being evil. | 46 | Because that is Batman character. He is someone who walks that very thin line and refuses to budge and has sacrificed so much of his humanity to do so. It's his greatest strength as well as his biggest weakness. The others have more of their humanity and therefore are more susceptible to becoming their greatest fear.
I also don't know what you mean when you say Superman is usually turned evil. That only really happened in Injustice and the general consensus is that it's a pretty crappy portrayal of Superman despite it being a good story. | 36 |
ELI5: What is 'cultural appropriation'? Haven't cultures been influenced by one another for-ever? | 17 | 'Cultural Appropriation' is when one wealthy, famous, and politically influential culture co-opts another culture's practices in such a way that it ruins the other culture's ability to connect with it.
The most famous example is Rastafarianism. You'll see a lot of young stoners with pictures of Bob Marley in their rooms talking about pot and God who would have no idea who Haile Selassie was or what the Coptic church was all about. It permanently associated the spiritualist practices of the Rastafarians with general stoner culture, and made it so that people look at ordinary Ethiopian religious practitioners like they were a bunch of stoners. You have ruined it for them by making the wrong meaning or a very small part of the meaning the only meaning that people think of when they see it.
It's not cultural appropriation to wear an Islamic ring in a Viking culture. But let's say that they wore it, looked for a few minutes into 'halal' and decided it meant having multiple wives, and then wore it as a symbol of their wife-swapping viking sub-culture. Then they've 'appropriated' it, because people who see actual muslims wearing that style of ring will assume they support that sub-culture. Cultural appropriation creates misunderstanding and ruins practices. Just wearing a ring is just wearing a ring, but beware associating someone else's culture with your sub-culture.
Because of the cultural appropriation of the Rastacap (for example), an old monk who truly believes that the second coming of Christ appeared in Ethiopia preaching anti-colonialism and a whole host of other things cannot wear his religious headwear in court, because the Jury will think he's just an old stoner. | 16 |
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CMV: "Negative Voting" (i.e. a vote against someone and not for someone) should be allowed | This is something I have been thinking about and I havent been able to find a significant or dangerous flaw so I figured Id open it to some fresh eyes.
Everyone should always vote. I really don't care what kind of election it is or who is running, but your vote should always be submitted and counted. However, many people see voting between multiple "bad" choices as a futile effort and choose not to vote at all. I believe a Negative vote option would eliminate this mindset.
If only 2 people are running in the election, one could argue that a vote for A is a vote against B. But (as is usually the case) when there are more than 2 people and you do not want to vote for A, having only the option of voting *for* B or C (if you dont really like them either) adds disincentive to vote. But if you know you have the option of a "Negative A" vote, then you can still make your strongest opinion known that you dont want A and that B or C is more preferable but you dont really care between them that much.
A difficulty of this system is that counting could take longer if the ballots must be counted by hand. However, many systems are available that would allow for automatic counting to not take any longer (i.e. all you would need is a bubble to fill in that says "NEGATIVE VOTE" above or near each name). I do not want to hear that this would be confusing. It could be made confusing if that was the intent, but a ballot that is:
> Name(Party) Vote For[] Vote Against[]
Is not confusing (and if it is, then there are bigger issues besides a negative voting system).
The best counterpoint I can think of is that rank choice voting allows you to rank your preferred options, but they are still votes *for* someone in the end. If you are in a position where the options do not instill any confidence, RCV doesnt help you; all it does is allow you to rank your options from "dont care" to "dont want". But Negative voting can also be used in RCV as long as the whole ballot is a negative vote (i.e. you would rank them from "dont want" to "dont care" so that your negative vote applies just like someone elses positive vote). I do not advocate for a system that merges RCV positive and RCV negative votes; either the whole ballot is votes for OR votes against.
Theoretically, this could lead to a situation where all participants garner negative votes, but I feel that more people would still prefer to vote for somebody as opposed to against someone and so the chances of this are very slim. A negative vote option could help the minority of people who feel their vote *for* someone is unimportant that their negative vote would have more of an impact.
So let me know what you think: should a democracy allow for a "negative vote"? Would a "negative vote" severely impact the structure, function, and form of a democracy? Is giving a "negative vote" a logical conclusion in a democracy for total fairness (i.e. I can *vote for* or *not vote* or *spoil ballot*, but why should "vote against" be excluded from my options?) | 103 | Where i live, people vote in order of preference for political positions. There is pretty much never an election with just two people, and there are a lot of parties for a variety of political beliefs.
The voting system has a list of candidates listed in a random order, with their photos, names, and parties next to them. Next to each candidate is a box. You write a number next to the ones you like in order of how much you like them (1= first choice, highest number=last choice). If you don't like them, you don't write a number next to them at all. Could that be a better system than you suggest? checking two boxes seems like a great way to lead to confused ballots. | 19 |
How come diseases and conditions where motor functions of the entire body are lost, but the mind remains intact (such as locked-in syndrome), individuals can still retain minor control over muscles in the face? | Is there a link between muscles in the eyes/cheeks/chin/forehead and the brain that differs from the other muscles in the body? Why is it that even with degenerative diseases, voluntary movement can be entirely lost but still some movement is retained in the head/face/vocal cords? | 16 | So the nerve supply to your face is different than the nerve supply to the extremities. The muscles in your extremities receive innervation, or neurological stimulation, from nerves that originate from motor cortices, while the nerves that innervate the face/cords directly arise from the brain/brainstem itself. To be more clear, the motor cortex itself does not control the face, but it does control the extremities.
This doesn't mean that the cranial nerves themselves won't be affected by the disease, but it means that if the motor cortex is the only thing that has notable damage from the aforementioned disease, then then cranial nerves (CN) may be spared, leaving a portion of the face untouched.
*as pointed out below, the corticobulbar tract originating in the motor cortex, does provide some innervation to the face. | 13 |
[Paw Patrol]Why are dogs and a kid the emergency services? | Additionally, who funds them? | 39 | Your tax dollars at work, obviously.
As to why - who else are you going to trust? Adult humans? *Cats*? Don't be an idiot. Only a properly trained child or dog has the necessary skills and physical prowess to work as an emergency responder. | 34 |
Eli5 What is delta 8 | What is delta8? What is the is the difference between delta8 and delta9? Is it safe? and what makes delta8 legal and delta9 cannabis illegal? | 20 | The 2018 Farm Bill defined marijuana as "cannabis that contains more than .3% of THC-9" and hemp as cannabis that contained less than that. At the time that the Farm Bill was passed it was believed that THC was one compound (THC-9). As it turns out it is scientifically possible to characterize two different forms of THC. Those are THC-8 and THC-9. THC-8 and THC-9 are essentially identical to one another, both chemically and in function. For all practical purposes they are the same chemical.
At the time that the Farm Bill was written nobody knew about THC-8 so they just used the formal, scientific name for THC, which at the time was THC-9. However, because the Farm Bill defined marijuana on the basis of THC-9 content, some people have been making an argument that cannabis that contains high levels of THC-8 and <.3% of THC-9 wouldn't be considered marijuana and so would be considered hemp at the Federal level.
This is a fairly academic argument because:
1) There isn't a strain of cannabis that would be legal under this definition and it would take some time to produce one that would be.
2) Even if there was a strain of cannabis that met this definition, both CBD and THC-8 are still illegal to sell in consumer products.
3) The Farm Bill didn't affect anything in the Federal Analogue Act and so THC-8 is likely still illegal as a THC-9 analogue anyway.
That doesn't mean people aren't selling it as a "legal alternative" to marijuana. But people do that with a large number of other substances that are illegal under the Analogue Act as well.
The Federal government doesn't *generally* prosecute marijuana related crimes in states where it is legal, and marijuana prosecutions in states where it is not legal are also quite rare. That's why people are "allowed" to sell it - its not legal there just isn't much enforcement on it.
As to how THC-8 is being produced from hemp - its possible to convert CBD to THC-8, which is also clearly illegal to do at the Federal level. | 13 |
cmv: IQ tests are not an accurate measure of intelligence and their use should be discarded and replaced. | The idea that you can capture intelligence in a test seems very ridiculous to me. Some people are artistically intelligent. Some people are socially intelligent. Some people are emotionally intelligent or empathetic.
People will boast saying “I have an IQ of blah blah blah” and I think it’s absolutely ridiculous. I also think it’s a poor metric of how someone will contribute to society. Someone with a 120 IQ may not perform nearly as well as someone with an 80-100 range IQ.
What’s the point of even continuing to use it or put people into “gifted” programs considering it isn’t even a consistent metric of their potential performance in a field? Idk. | 25 | The problem with the IQ test is in the name only. The test is one of the best indicators we have for specific types of logical or spatial reasoning aptitudes, but not for general intelligence. So it should really be re-named, not discarded.
People who boast about their IQ rarely have anything else to boast about.
Statistically, what is currently called IQ does correlate to higher achievement in academics, standardized testing, college graduation, and lifetime income. | 16 |
CMV: Rey from the new Disney Star Wars trilogy is a Mary Sue | For those who don't know, a Mary Sue is a name given to a character who is poorly written in a few ways. This character: is instantly liked by everyone, is an expert or natural at anything they do, and never really loses. A more formal definition can be found just buy googling the term.
In the new trilogy, Rey exhibits these qualities. She knows how to fly the millennium falcon, she can use advanced force powers like telekinesis, force heal, and the Jedi mind trick. She beats kylo in multiple fights. She is also loved by Leia, trusted in the resistance after only barely knowing them, and is shown more affection than Chewbacca from Leia when Han dies. More examples can be found in r/saltierthancrait or any multitude of YouTube videos.
A point that I don't think will change my mind: Poe Damond. In the movies, its honestly kinda hard to tell what their relationship is. They often fight, but then get along as friends? But if someone argues that Poe doesn't like Rey, I'll give you that however, I feel that he relies on her in a Mary Sue fashion, especially in the latest star wars when he has a line of "well Rey isn't here now is she?". This line in the context, implies that Poe feels that Rey is a better pilot than he is, even though she's been flying for fewer years than Poe has.
What will change my mind: you're welcome to find and argue any points I make, ~~but one that I feel would change my mind the post is finding a GREATER Mary Sue in the original or prequel trilogy. No one comes to mind, but if you can find someone who does, you're welcome to let me have it.~~
A user made a good point. Just because there exists a MS in one form, doesnt mean another is any less of a Mary Sue.
Please, CMV.
E: Forgot to mention, I know nothing of the extended universe outside the official movies and Rouge One. If you try to argue with the extended universe then be my guest but I feel I cannot in good faith give a delta for something i know nothing about.
(Also mods I looked to see if there was a similar post, but nothing came up in the search. Idk if similar posts are allowed or not.) | 15 | Star Wars is a series where hard work doesn't pay off. Inheritance matters far more. Anakin was born with more Midichlorians than everyone else, therefore he was essentially a god. He had mini-lifeforms in his blood that made him better than everyone despite minimal training. He had a fantastical origin story (born a slave through immaculate conception), could easily win pod races that other humans couldn't even compete in, almost immediately became best fighter and pilot in the galaxy, etc. His son Luke similarly had magic powers despite no training. His daughter Leia also had magic powers, again despite no training. Rey was the granddaughter of the only other powerful person in the entire galaxy. She inherited all his magic powers. If Luke could literally blow up a space station with his eyes closed a few hours or days after meeting Obi-Wan, then Rey could similarly do crazy stuff with no experience. | 11 |
ELI5: If I bred a red-eyed hedgehog and a blue-eyed hedgehog, I assume there'd be no chance of a purple-eyed offspring. But why not? | I had trouble looking up the exact information but I'm assuming that blue eyes are recessive in hedgehogs, and red/ruby are dominant? (I know for a fact they're both possible - mine has blue eyes). Assuming this is true, wouldn't 50% of the offspring end up with incomplete dominance, or a mix of blue and red eyes?
| 35 | Because the genes doesn't mix that way. There's one gene for blue eyes and there's one gene for red eyes. When the baby is made the DNA from the parent's doesn't mix by just being added onto each other, some genes from the father is used and some from the mother is used. Therefore when you breed a red eyed hedgehog with a blue eyed one it's either one of them. | 18 |
CMV: Term limits on the basis of age for United States elected federal representatives is not ageism, its practical and needed. | The United States needs to set term limits on the basis of age for Congress and the President.
70+ year olds are frequently regarded as unemployable due to mental decline and disconnect with the current times, but a high number of them are serving as politicians in the United States. The oldest sitting Senator, Senator Feinstein is 88 and has served since 1992. Over twenty members of the Senate are in their 70s. President Biden is 78 years old, and his health and mental prowess are the subject of continuous scrutiny. The most extreme example, Senator Thurmond, served for just short of 50 years until he passed away at 100. Currently, the average age of House members is \~58 years old and that of the Senate is \~63 years old. Contrast this with the average age of the American citizen, \~38 years old.
All too often members of Congress demonstrate their age and disconnect with the times when they must talk about social media, tech, the internet, etc. with tech giants during hearings on the Hill.
Term limits would prevent leaders from turning holding office into a career, spending upwards of 30-40 years serving in office and hanging on until they can barely function in an official capacity. Term limits would bring new and fresh perspectives into Congress. Limiting time in office would also hinder the development of permanent relationships among politicians and interest groups/lobbyists. Yes, they would still occur, but they would come to an end once the official’s term expired.
I recognize the increased turnover would lead to a larger number of politicians who are not as familiar with the legislative process as someone who has been in the office for over a decade. But wouldn’t this also provide a motivation to train their successors and offer apprenticeship/mentorship opportunities like that seen in other communities?
We have minimum age requirements for someone to serve in the House, Senate, or presidency, so why shouldn’t we create a maximum? Mandatory retirement was ended for most professions with exceptions, such as the military, pilots, and law enforcement. But does representing the U.S. as a politician require less mental prowess than flying a plane?
Any change would require a constitutional amendment, which I never see happening. | 2,289 | No one in Congress is there by divine right - each of them is elected every 2/6 years by their constituents. If those constituents want someone younger, they are free to elect them. If those constituents want an 80 year old person to represent them, what right do we have to tell them they are wrong?
Putting restrictions on who can be elected is just an exercise in the minority wishing to overrule what the majority wants, and that is fundamentally undemocratic. | 413 |
CMV Chihuahuas are ugly & have shitty personalities. | Chihuahuas are a nuesence breed & idk why they're so popular. Going to the dog park, all the other dogs are chillin, playing, or sniffing. Not these little terrors. Their constant high-pitched chirp barks are piercing. And they're constant. They don't let up.
Chihuahuas are ugly and they have shitty personalities. Why would anyone ever do that to themselves, and their neighbors? Why do they exist? They look like large rodents.
When you love your dog, you put up with their annoying traits. But chihuahuas are objectively over aggressive. I wish they'd go live in their own separate community. Or at least have their own separate dog park away from the other dogs. They can go nuts shrieking in each other's faces all the live long day while the rest of us enjoy the weekend.
Edit:
To clarify, I don't like feeling vehemence towards these dogs or their owners so I wish I didn't have this view. I thought maybe some people would point out their better attributes & actually help me see them in a better light. Instead of resenting them & wanting them to go extinct
Edit:
There have been some really good points made here. I apologize if I didn't spend much time on anecdotes, although I'm touched by how much of you love your dogs. And you've shown me some undeniably cute chihuahuas, the long haired ones, and although they still have bug eyes, they were pretty darn attractive I cannot deny. And your stories about how well behaved, fun, and funny your chihuahuas are. All very cool. It makes me conclude "not all chihuahuas" are a pest to be exterminated; that your very special little guy or girl won the shit-bred lottery.
But a lot of comments only gave supporting reasons for why they are the way they are; greedy & unethical breeders and negligent owners. Chihuahuas lost the genetic lottery. Their defects cause their anxiety & aggression, and lots of owners don't care for them properly so you have the stereotypical "demon ankle biters" (if I may steal that term from one of you). I guess I don't dislike the breed any less, but I have been inspired to add some compassion & empathy along with my hatred. I can have both. And also, I now also hate greedy breeders & bad owners.
I still have to stay away from them at the dog park & have restraint when my niece brings her "dutchess" over; who's bark is like a thousands sparos piercing your brain (god forbid someone across the street sneezes). But I think I'm the problem. My hatred is not going anywhere, unfortunately. But I enjoyed discussion & insights. Oh, and also, fuck puppy mills. | 1,422 | So, first genetics play a huge part in a dog's temperament. It's why labs are generally chill AF and Malinois are crackheaded working dogs. It's also why Chihuahuas are crackheaded demon ankle-biters for the most part. The breed is known for being high drive/energy and protective of their people. Sadly for them, it's wrapped up in a cute 5lb body that most people treat as if it's a barbie doll that needs the same mental and physical stimulation of one as well. So you have the typical lack of training/exercise/mental stimulation feeding into the problem.
The other side is that they are, by far, one of the most poorly backyard bred dogs out there and it's extremely hard to find one from a breeder that actually cares about the future of the breed and not just creating more "teacup" monsters. Most backyard bred ones are not health tested(meaning hip, elbows, and eyes are tested for faults and stored in a data base as well as genetic issues being ruled out) and are not breeding for a sane mind. So you have a lot of dogs that are bred from insecure, high anxiety parents and then put into homes with people that don't realize they have a high energy dog that needs both mental and physical stimulation and a good therapist. If you can find a decently bred one that the original breeder focused on a SANE mind along with the Chihuahua attitude, you would find they are still stubborn but also very smart and very quick on the uptake. Once you add a good owner to the mix, you have a very amazing little dog that definitely deserves NOT to go extinct. A good demonstration would be Ludvig, the IPO Chihuahua or the Chihuahua obedience class.
| 212 |
Question about the fat man version of the trolley problem. | I just learned about [the trolley problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem) for the first time. For the basic problem, I felt like I *would* pull the lever to kill one person on the tracks instead of five, but for the fat man version of the problem, I felt it would be wrong to push the fat man off the bridge to save the people on the train. Though the wikipedia entry for the problem explains that most people are resistant to the idea of pushing the fat man, it didn't touch on the reason I landed on.
My reasoning for not pushing the fat man off the bridge:
The people on the train accepted a certain level of risk when they chose to travel by train. The train crash is a bad outcome of their decision to use the train, and neither the viewer nor the fat man is morally obligated to interfere with that bad outcome.
I'm curious if there is a school of philosophy that would promote similar reasoning. I'm especially looking for free resources to read. | 19 | I don't know how Wikipedia explains it, but in any case you are supposed to rule out any differences between the fat man and the one person, and between the five people in each case. So let's formulate it carefully so that this happens:
A trolley is going down the tracks. A moment ago an evil villain tied one innocent person to one track and five innocent people to another track. The train will hit the five unless you switch it to hit one. Do you switch it?
A trolley is going down the tracks. A moment ago an evil person tied five innocent people to the tracks and kidnapped one innocent fat person and put him in front of you. You can push the fat person and stop the train to save the five, or you can leave the fat person alone. Do you push him? | 14 |
CMV: I secretly think religion is a crutch for weak people. | Title sums it up for the most part. To clarify, I don't have any problem with religious people in general. (so long as they aren't annoying me by trying to proselytize or trying to harm me in some manner.) As long as their religious views don't affect me negatively, I do not care about nor mind them being religious. I won't try to convince them otherwise, I won't insult them for being religious, I am totally happy to peacefully coexist without a second thought.
But on the inside, I can't help but think that religion is just a fundamentally false way for people who can't accept the way the world actually is to keep from falling apart. They can't accept that the world entropic, sucky, and unfair, so everything has to be part of some plan by some mystical being which is in their best interest. They can't accept that this life is all that we have to live, and that death is the end of everything for us, (and I will admit that is a hard pill to swallow) so they have to believe in some magical paradise of an afterlife to feel better about it. They have to believe that *their* way of life is the only correct one, so they place themselves in an echo chamber that reinforces their views and says that it is not they, but everyone else who is wrong.
The thing is though, I don't *want* to go about my day judging people like this. It's just a waste of energy, but unfortunately my brain just defaults to thinking like this. So please, CMV.
_____
> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | 51 | It sounds like you are speaking more specifically about Christianity, rather than religion in general.
For example, Judaism doesn't really have the concept of heaven, and is inconsistent about whether there is an afterlife - but if there is, all people go to "the Abyss", Sheol.
The Jewish God doesn't have a grand plan that's all for the best - instead, he's just God and who the hell are *you* to question him. (Seriously, read the Book of Job to see what a dick He can be).
And despite that, he's given Jews a huge list of rules to follow, not because you win a prize for following them, but because God told you to - and He's God and you aren't.
So, really, being a Jew is more of an added burden than a crutch.
Now, let's get back to Christianity. There are a lot of variants, many of which don't fit your story either. Calvinism, for instance, offers little comfort.
So, let's focus on the more "comforting" variants. For some, the reality of God is a simple fact. It's not a choice they make. He is real and He impacts their life. A serf in the Middle Ages may never see their Lord, but they know he is in control of their lives, has the power of life and death over them, and can make their lives happy or miserable. That's simply a fact of life - so it is with many people and God.
So, that leaves those who bought into St. Paul's excellent "carrot and stick" marketing of Christianity. Humans are social animals. We need leaders, we need to feel our packs are safe. Some turn to philosophers, poets, songwriters or authors; others to God. But we all strive to find some meaning, some justification for battling through hardship. Does that make it a crutch? If so, then, don't we all use them? | 26 |
ELI5: Why do humans get colds but our pets don't seem to? Why are cold-like symptoms in animals often an indicator of something serious, when for humans, colds are a mild annoyance at most? | 4,732 | Dogs and cats do get colds and have the same symptoms we do. They just tend to hide their illness when sick and nap a bit extra so you probably won’t notice.
They may also catch colds less frequently because not all viruses that affect humans can affect dogs and cats. Since dogs and cats are seldom indoors with other large groups of animals, they have fewer disease vectors.
But all animals get minor illnesses sometimes. | 6,729 |
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ELI5: Why are there seemingly no sound restrictions on motorcycles? | Great answers so far. All I can say is I can't wait until all these fucking things are electric. | 58 | It seems to me more a question of the noise restrictions not being enforced for anyone, but motorcycles tending to be run loud more often than other types of vehicles.
This may be a function of emissions requirements; many cars require exhaust treatments to "Pass Smog," while in many locations, motorcycles are not required to be tested at all. | 25 |
[DC] Could the Flash, and other speedsters, fly via helicopter dick? | 55 | A dick isn't shaped in the right way to push down air to cause lift. And even if it was the air would just push down on the body or cause a vacuum that can't be filled in time to cause sufficient lift. And that's not even accounting for the difficulty of keeping the balance enough to fly steadily without crashing, especially if we consider the massive hiprotatations needed. | 59 |
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[General Superhero & /r/legaladvice] My employer blew up and was labeled a terrorist organization, can I still collect unemployment? | Hey guys, thanks for reading hopefully I can get some advice.
So until recently I was employed in the security department for a tech development company based on a small island off the coast of Maine. I won't name names but it was run by a rather eccentric billionaire. There were definitely some weird things about the company but I always just associated it with the owner's odd behaviors. Things like being super strict about our uniforms and safety (we had some very expensive proprietary PPE that was apparently above and beyond OSHA requirements) and having a back entrance for him and his private guests. He was also big on no eye contact so all security staff helmets had reflective face shields that we had to wear down whenever he was there.
Anyways on to the point of my story. I was off yesterday due to feeling a bit under the weather (owner was a germaphobe and very generous sick days) and got a surprising text from a coworker. To make a long story short apparently a metahuman showed up and destroyed everything. I don't know the details but from what I've been told the facilities are basically in ruins and the owner of the company along with several other employees are missing. On top of that the news is reporting that the company I worked for has been labeled a terrorist organization. I guess some of the tech being developed is considered illegal but to be honest most of what was done in the labs was beyond me.
I haven't heard anything from HR but from what I've gathered there isn't an HR anymore. My biggest question is whether or not I can still apply for unemployment now that my former(?) employer is now labeled a terrorist organization?
Also would it be legal to sell my old uniform? It's not like I can turn it back in so maybe someone could just remove the logos and reuse it otherwise I think it would work well a motorcycle riding suit. | 541 | Good question! Historically, the precedent is *No,*
The Government can't realistically go after every single one of you in court; you knew nothing, and it's not worth spending the time and money figuring that out when you can throw your weight against the ringleaders and metahumans that compose the inner circle. At the same time, they want to maintain some level of implicit punishment for the low-level grunts that get caught in these things. So they split the difference and just won't give you any payouts that you otherwise would have gotten. From a legal standpoint, this was a wash; they're going to do their level best to pretend you weren't involved.
(This is also, by the way, why almost every supervillian of note tends to have so many goons at all times; a lot of the times it's the same people the last villian had, but in a new uniform, since their ineligibility for unemployment drove them back into a life of crime. It's safe to say that this approach has backfired.)
Fortunately, your superficial contact with the cape scene gives you lots of options!
You can testify against your former bosses, with the rote details you included in your post, but unless a superhero comes after you specifically, don't. Supervillians have long memories.
Many Superheroes are aware that the system enables repeat offense, and they affiliate themselves with felon-friendly corporations with job-training programs. If you can work out which specific metahuman trashed your lab, you might be able to snag less terroristic work in your current field.
Lastly, it might be a good idea to repaint your uniform and sell it to an up-and-coming street-tier vigilante. Just make sure it's actually a competent one, because if they die while wearing your uniform one of the heavy hitters might take you to task for enabling them. | 198 |
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