[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: Why do hot glass shatter when cooled down with cold water?

[Assistant] Glass expands when hot and contracts when it's cold. It doesn't conduct heat very well so when the hot glass comes in contact with cold water some of the glass shrinks faster then other parts which causes the glass to shatter.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [Harry Potter] In a magical duel, could Obliviate be used to make a person forget all of the spells they know?

[Assistant]
Possibly, but unlikely. Part of the reason why Lockhart had such a devastating loss of memory was because he was using a broken wand. A proper obliviate spell would likely be able to make people forget facts about the world or themselves that the spell caster desires, but in a duel, where spells are constantly flying, it would likely be difficult to successfully cast the spell let alone have the concentration to discriminate the proper memories fully successfully.

To make someone forget all the spells they know would likely be quite difficult. Some memories are more fundamental to our character than others, and so will stick around more easily. Even Lockhart after the obliviation mishap still had some conception of what he was like, even if he didn't know why.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
(Dragonball Z) Why is Goku slimmer as a Saiyan God?

That's it.

[Assistant]
Honestly, Toriyama has been drawing all of the characters a lot skinnier recently.

If you specifically mean in universe, then maybe SSG is so fuckin crazy powerful that more muscles would make zero impact on his strength, and he doesn't need them for intimidation. Less muscles also equals way faster. (Remember super buff Trunks?)


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [MCU] Does Antmans strength continue to amplify in the quantum realm?

[Assistant] Think the point is his strength stays the same but his size gets smaller so the pressure he is capable of exerting increases. In the quantum realm it wouldn't matter because he's far too small to interact with even subatomic particles.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [DC] Am I supposed to be calling him The Batman or is Batman sufficient? I'd rather not offend him.

[Assistant]
As a rule it's "Batman" as a name versus "the Batman" as a description.

But you can call him whatever you want, he probably won't care. The worst he'd do is tell you to stop calling him something if you manage to accidentally offend him.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[The Boys] Is Homelander a world ending threat?

Just as my title says. Could he be stopped? We dont know of any weaknesses, but maybe enough rockets and bullets would eventually wear him down.

[Assistant]
World ending? Probably not.

World destabilizing? Definitely. Imagine if overnight most of the worlds governments were assassinated, shipping lanes attacked, planes brought down.

He could fuck up a lot without wiping out civilization.

Wait, can he go to space?


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[MCU] What are the relative scales or tiers of power within the MCU and where do different heroes and villains fall?

One thing that's bugged me about the MCU is I have really no sense of the relative powers of different heroes. Early on in the first Avengers film there's the fight scene between Thor, Cap, and Iron Man that establishes that those three are on relatively equal tiers of power, but since then things have gotten a lot more murky.

Especially as new characters with new powers have come into the MCU like Scarlet Witch, Dr. Strange, Ego the Living Planet, Vision, Dormammu, Groot, the Black Order, etc, it's been increasingly hard to get a sense of the different tiers of powers and abilities that the MCU heroes and villains have.

It would probably be impossible to actually rank different characters one after another, but can someone with expertise maybe take a stab at giving some general tiers of power? On one extreme you would have Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet - the power to make and unmake entire populations at will - and on the other extreme you'd have an everyday human with no enhanced abilities, like a Black Widow or War Machine.

[Assistant]
Hulk, Thanos, Thor are all basically God tier. You don't fuck with them.

Iron man, Dr. Strange are next in line. They both have the super power of "do whatever the fuck you want" in a fight.

Captain America, Black Panther, Spider-Man, Gamora, Groot, Drax, Nebula are all third down the rung. These guys are the meta humans with above average strength and durability and/or plot armour that makes them heavy hitters in a fight.

Everyone else is down around the bottom, either because they are regular humans, or because they don't use their powers effectively (or at all, looking at you vision, be less useless).


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Predator] What if the Yautja met someone/something way out of their league?

Let's say that the Yautja meet someone powerful enough that, within a few "hunts", it would be obvious to humans that there is no Yautja or team of Yautjas capable of taking them down.

Are Yautja's capable of accepting their limits, or is the imagined glory of taking this trophy too much, and they throw themselves at the wall until they're extinct?

[Assistant]
Depends on the threat posed to the yautja. Accepting a honorable loss in combat is permitted if somewhat frowned upon when compared to death in combat.

If it's something the yautja is completely unprepared to face they're encouraged to back away and prepare rather than throwing themselves away on a useless fight.

 If there's a threat posed to all Yautja by the superior force the response will vary by hunter and clan. Mostly they'll break out their biggest weapons and try to resolve it through aggressive negotiations themselves. If they can't or there's a chance they could fail they'll call in higher ranking predators who have stronger equipment and tools up to planet destroying weapons.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Interstellar] When the group was on the water planet trying, trying to find that other scientists, they said her black box or whatever it was had been going off for years. Does that mean she died right before they landed on the planet because of the way time works on it?

Basically is the wave that they see moving away from them, the same wave that killed the woman who was there before them?

[Assistant]
Yeah, Brand says that Miller only died a few minutes before they got there. So what they see receding is almost certainly the wave that killed her.

But a separate, somewhat related theory, is that the waves are always the same, they never really fall anywhere they just go around and around endlessly.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: Can nuclear waste be recycled?

I know the jist of what nuclear waste is I just want to know if its possible to recycle it and if so (optional) why it isnt being done and if there are any benefits besides the obvious which is it being good for the enviroment.

[Assistant]
Sure. ~96% of the mass of spent nuclear fuel is still the same uranium that was put into the reactor (though more depleted of ^(235)U, and some ^(236)U). Another ~1% is perfectly usable (as fuel) plutonium.

And there's plenty of other useful things in there. Isotopes with uses in nuclear medicine, even (non-radioactive) valuable metals (such as the "fission platinoids" - ruthenium, rhodium, palladium - and silver).

As for why it's not commonly done, the reprocessing "industry" (if you could call it that) was killed by presidential order, citing "proliferation concerns" (as if someone is going to break into a reprocessing plant on US soil, smuggle out the isotopes useful for making weapons, go through the rigamarole of enriching those isotopes so they can make one that won't fizzle, so on and so forth). That presidential order has been lifted, but since it was put into place in the first place, it's generally considered too risky to be commercially viable.

France, on the other hand, being the heavily nuclear country it is, *does* reprocess their spent fuel (among many other intelligent decisions in designing a nuclear industry). So do China, Russia, India, the UK, and Pakistan.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
How to tell my narcissistic boss I am leaving?

Using my throwaway for privacy reasons

Edit: Thanks everyone for the kind and wise words! They are much appreciated and of great help!

Next week, I will have to tell my boss that I will be leaving a postdoc position early. I am leaving because of him and the very toxic working environment he creates at our institution.

I know narcissism is a word that gets thrown around a lot, however I have a strong suspicion my boss must at least be somewhere on the narcissistic spectrum. He can be a very charming person at first sight (that is also why I had no idea what I was getting myself into); yet he is also a terrible micromanager with anger issues (anything can set him off anytime, and he constantly creates problems out of non-issues), everything is always about him and nothing is ever his fault (he is also very easily offended and takes everything as a personal insult). My institution turns out to have a history of people leaving early (because of him).

I made a lot of personal sacrifices for this position. For example, I have moved countries, while my family stayed behind. In the meantime, I am not getting any research done (I am almost two years in and still have no publication in sight, because of all the drama going on and the menial tasks my boss keeps swamping me with), my mental health is deteriorating (I suffer from a lot of stress-related issues and I feel burned-out), and my family is in another country. In other words, this job is not getting me anywhere and it is all just not worth it.

I could really use some advice on how to handle this conversation I am going to have next week. On the one hand, I want my boss to know, that I am leaving because of our toxic relationship (the mere fact that I am leaving, he will probably take as a personal insult anyways). On the other hand, I am afraid that will do me no good, as I am in a relative small field of study and he holds power (at least to some extent) over my career. Also, I am in the process of applying for other positions, but I have currently no job lined up

Please help?

Tldr: How to tell my narcissistic boss I am leaving?

[Assistant] Is there a reason you have to tell him? He probably will not change and by telling him now you are burning a bridge with a person who could still potentially write you letters of recommendation. Can you frame it in terms of getting another job or moving to live with your family or something.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] Since you can hear/see the Cosmic Background Radiation left over from the Big Bang on your tv/radio as static, would putting it inside a Faraday Cage block out the static?

[Assistant]
This is an interesting question.  Let's suppose that we're deep in space so that there's no other sources of electromagnetic radiation -- we're just dealing with the CMB.  Furthermore, let's suppose that our Faraday cage is perfect -- it's made out of a perfect conductor and it has no holes in it.  If we put a receiver inside, we will find that yes, indeed, the Faraday cage blocks out the static.

Now, in reality, the conductor will not be perfect.  The motions of the electrons in the conductor will generate heat and will eventually warm up the Faraday cage to the same temperature as the CMB -- 2.7 K (let's assume that we started out close to absolute zero).  Once this happens, the Faraday cage itself will begin to radiate as a blackbody at 2.7 K, and so it will produce exactly the same radiation signature as the CMB itself.  So although the Faraday cage would work temporarily, it would not be a permanent solution.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: Why does a death penalty execution cost more than keeping the person in prison for life?

[Assistant]
It wouldnt if the execution was immediate. However, most inmates appeal court decisions meaning basically they have to redo the trial. And as long as they can bring new evidence they can keep appealing.
So youre imprisoning them which is the same cost as other inmates and adding near endless trials on top of it.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
CMV: An actor's personal life does not change how I watch their movies.

Let's use the Amber Heard v Johnny Depp case going on as an example;

I could care less about what either of them have done in their personal lives. Whether they are perpetrators in domestic abuse/violence, whether they do drugs, have humiliated themselves in public, or in a worst case scenario, even killed someone.

This applies to any actor, no matter what has happened in their personal lives that society looks down upon, I'm not watching a movie to care so much about the actor as much as I am watching a movie for the sake of the movie.

Also for the record, I don't think Amber Heard should have been removed from Aquaman 2.

[Assistant]
So you are just arguing wherever you should be able to remove the artist from the art.

Which its a valid points for both sides.

The other side to yours is that you should acknowledge you may be contributing to their fame and money - a life considerably better than most peoples. And they might use that fame and money to continue doing bad things. It doesnt matter to them wherever you are seperating them or not, money comes unmarked in that sense and some does the power.

Take Weinstein, he was only able to commit bad acts because of his power and money and for lots of people not caring because of that power and money.

Or James Franco, he was able to commit his sexual misconduct because if his influence. In part from money and in part from fame.

You stopping watching and giving money is only a small unnoticable effect, but the point is when people suggest to stop they suggest a full boycott which would have an efect.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: Why do studio photographers use flash bulbs to light their subjects? Wouldnt continuous lighting be more time-efficient because you could see what youre lighting as you light it?

[Assistant]
Theres more to it than time effectiveness. Studio photographers often use whats called strobe lights. Strobe lights can have two types of bulbs in them that offer different functions:

1. One light is a constant light, called a modeling light. Its purpose is just to provide light so you can see what youre lighting as you light it.

2. The other light is the flash tube. This basically puts out a much brighter source of instantaneous light.

The benefit behind using a light that flashes is as long as its brighter than the light around it, it freezes motion. This allows you to maximize your camera settings to get the best quality picture with sharp settings.

Some photographers do use constant lights, such as Jason Lanier. He likes using them because he knows theyll always work, and he can always see what theyre putting out. So they can work well. They can also help restrict the iris and allow the subject to show off their eyes.

However, cost wise, a really good set of constant lights will set you back a pretty penny compared to flashes or strobe lights. Those cheap ones on amazon are garbage. Your camera settings will often be higher quality with regular flash then constant lights and allow you to freeze motion more easily. Some constant lights will also heat up much more quickly, and you dont want the subject getting sweaty. Lastly, its really not that hard to guess and check lighting, and experienced photographers will have already set the lights up before the subject even gets there.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
How much light can be pumped into a fiber optic cable?

I've been working with fiber optic cabling for data at work, and it is pretty neat stuff, but i don't know that much about the technical end of it.

I was thinking about how fiber optics could be used as a light pipe for an intense white light source (i think there are some surgical headlamps built like this)

I understand collimators would be required at both ends to focus the light into the cable, and then to disperse the light into a usable beam.

What sort of things would limit the amount of light that could be pumped into the fiber? If i were to light up the cable assembly with a 50W source, would there be anything from stopping me using a 500W source? Would the fiber completely saturate and be unable to transmit more light at some point?

Assuming the cable is glass, standard diameter (62.5uM).

Thanks.

[Assistant]
You might run into problems just coupling the light into the fiber honestly. Fiber-optic couplers are just lenses fixed some distance to the connector, and the coupling is rarely ever perfect. Even if it got in without loss or melting the front end, you might run into issues with thermal lensing in the fiber itself at high enough power. Other than that, you'd probably start running into thermal damage due to absorption in the cladding (which is how CW lasers usually cause problems).

That being said, there are fiber lasers these days that are well in excess of kW power (they're mostly used for industrial cutting and welding), so with good engineering, you can put a LOT of power into a fiber.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Why would I use X language over Y language?

Hello y'all! I am starting a new project, and I was wondering what language I should use. I am relatively new to "complex" programming (classes and threading is where I am now as far as learning). I taught myself c++ 4 ish years ago, but just the basics (up until classes, didn't do anything c++ specific like memory management). Just finished an AP python course for school (but because it was online it wasn't officially AP), and I take Java classes outside of school (at lambas and bytes).

I am unsure which language to use and why I would use it. I am pretty good at learning things, and transferring knowledge (can rewrite things I wrote in python in c++ and vise versa easily) and I learn things fast (bad at memorizing great at improvising and understand concepts). I am willing to learn other languages for this (it's a game), looking especially at Rust and Go (in addition to c++ and python).

So, why would I use Rust or Go over c++ or python (in general)? Looking to pick a language to really learn and focus on (I bounce around too much, learning just the basics from a lot of random languages like javascript, c#, node.js, etc).

I have heard Rust called the "modern c++" because it supports things like memory management (and pointers?) but Rust helps with the more tedious parts, at the cost of "being limited" because it "accepts less" (not sure that that means, explanation would be nice).

What is Go for? I know google made it, as a more readable and reasonable c++, (more python esq look), while still being compiled.

I am open to other languages to learn, but preferably they are like c++ as far as use cases (compiled, 'fast', I will be mostly making games).

I know Python is used for a lot of 'big data's stuff, but what else is it used for? I have used it for scripts (part of my xmobar used python scripts for a while), but I have heard it's bad for games (no built in threading, and not compiled)

I am specifically making a game like Pacman, but without walls, and just 1 coin that moves when you get it. (Terminal output, with a nested for loop to draw the X and the Y). Which language should I use and WHY? (Really looking for the WHY, or type/style of language)

Thanks in advance!

[Assistant] This is really dependent on the application you are making. If youre trying to make a web application C and C++ would be a bad choice. Use Python or JavaScript (IMO). If youre application needs to be efficient and you are needing to access hardware elements directly, use C or C++. Choose the best language for the job. You wouldnt go to a French bakery and try to order in Swahili.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[The Boys] Cant Zoe Neuman kill Homelander by exploding his head?

To be fair the question would be more like why can she not. Is it because Homelander is invincible or because hes more powerful than her, so the moment she decides to do it he performs a fast attack?

[Assistant]
Maybe. When Victoria is fighting against Tony his nose begins to bleed and she is unable to immediately pop his head. So it would seem that enhanced durability can provide some resistance. It's only when he is dead or severely weakened can she actually explode him for good.

And, as far as we know, Homelander is top tier when it comes to abilities. He is the strongest and most durable.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
(WH40k) Why do space marines die so often?

Reading through many of the records of their exploits it seems like they die a lot more often than their apparent toughness and skill should allow.

[Assistant] Space Marines are our desperate attempt to get to a MINIMUM level of survivability against the horrors found in the black.  Compared to the brave men and women of the Imperial Guard, who sacrifice their lives by the THOUSANDS to hold ground, the Space Marines are incredibly mighty but compared to the abominations of the Warp they're just barely on an even footing, and they're typically MASSIVELY outnumbered by xenos that breed or corrupt others with nightmarish speed.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [DC/Marvel] When superman visits other worlds to try and save them, how can the aliens and superman understand each other? Is there a universal language?

[Assistant]
Most of the Galaxy speaks Interlac, a common language designed for trade and commerce. It's simple to learn, and thus most planets learn it as a second language for dealing with outsiders. It's like a Space Esperanto that actually works.

Superman learned it. Green Lantern Rings have an automatic translation feature. Other heroes who go to space either use Interlac, or automated translators.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Could there be types of dimensions that are not space or time?

I'm not sure if this question even makes sense, but I was thinking about how we have four known dimensions in our universe, and three of those are classified as "space" and one is classified as "time". Could there be other "classifications" of dimensions?

[Assistant]
Physical, no.

But in math dimensions are abstract, and they can be anything you want. A good example is a computer screen, the image you see is stored in 5 dimension: two space dimensions, and three color dimensions.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Why does it take two weeks post vaccination to create immunity? What is happening at the cellular level?

I've seen general answers to the question but I'm looking for a specific one. What are the cells produced after vaccination (macrophages, neutrophils, b-cells, t-cells, memory b and t cells, etc) and when are they produced? How do these cells degrade over time, and how do we retain the immunity?

I was curious about this question because we need two weeks post vaccination to develop full immunity. Why is there such a long lag time? Which of these immune cells needs the longer time in order to be produced?

[Assistant]
You make many hundreds of thousands of different antibodies, but the human genome only has about 20 thousand genes. How then, can you make such a diverse range of antibodies which outnumber all the other genes in your body?

The solution is that each BCell is created with a unique antibody gene by doing some copy/paste and adding/deleting random bases of DNA to make it's own antibody. When you are vaccinated, the BCells which happen to make an antibody which weakly binds to the vaccine are activated. They then replicate themselves many times over, and introduce mutations in each daughter cell. The daughter BCells which bind more strongly to the vaccine then reproduce, and create new mutations. What happens over those two weeks is your BCells evolve a highly specific antibody to bind to the target, and then reproduce to high enough numbers that they can create a huge quantity of antibody to flood your body and protect it.

Some of them go on to become memory BCells, so they can reactivate if you get infected again.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Why Do Both Fission & Fusion Release Energy?

My thinking is that they're opposites so surely they can't *both* release energy. I'm obviously wrong but I don't know why.

[Assistant] Fission and fusion on the *same* nucleus would not both release energy; for example, you can release energy by fusing hydrogen into helium, but not by fissioning helium into hydrogen. Some nuclei release energy when they fuse and some release energy when they split. It depends on how tightly packed the nucleus is relative to the products of the interaction; the more tightly packed a nucleus is, the more energy it can release to get to that tightly packed state. Approximately speaking, you can get energy out of the nucleus if you fuse two light nuclei together into a heavier one that is not more massive than nickel/iron. Above that fission is what releases energy. The switch happens because the nuclei get more and more tightly bound (relative to their mass) until you get to nickel/iron, and then start to get less and less tightly bound relative to their mass as you go higher up in atomic mass.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] Eli5: Why do pretty much every mammals breast retract when theyre not needed but its not the case for humans ?

[Assistant]
One explanation is that prominent breasts, concealed ovulation, lower sexual dimorphism,  reduced canines, hands, intelligence and reduced male competition are co-evolved features. The first two confuse dominant males about sexual receptiveness (in most primates enlarged breasts signal pregnancy, hence non-fertile). This lowers male competition (lower dimorphism and reduced canines), and directs it to provisioning (bringing food to females in exchange for sex) - hence hands and intelligence. Which then lead to enhanced sociality, which fosters group bonding, reduced intra-group competition and more intelligence as social factors come to the fore.

As a theory, it fits. It needs more evidence, though.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[A Christmas Carol] If Scrooge could be changed in a single night, why did Marley wait 7 years before visiting him and bringing the spirits?

Was there anything specific about Marleys timing for that year?

[Assistant]
Scrooge was on the precipice of damning himself irreversibly. If nothing was done that night, he would have endured Marley's fate. If not something much worse.

Marley's punishment was far more than just the chains weighing him down, it's also being forced to watch the events of the world play out. Unable to help people whose lives are sliding into oblivion. His inability to help them weighs his soul down more than any ethereal chains ever could.

But on that one night, Marley was given a momentary reprieve from his torment to help his old friend before Scrooge was lost forever.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: Why do people moan when stretching?

Something that has always got me thinking.

[Assistant]
Lungs are controlled by a belly muscle.
You stretch, your belly muscle moves, your lungs move and air comes out yer' gob, Couple this with the chance that your necks moving for a stretch and the air out yer gob is gonne make a noise.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
If there is no static/inertial reference frame in the universe, what frame is used to numerically solve and animate celestial simulations?

Or, is it an order-of-magnitude thing where the expansion of the universe can be ignored?

[Assistant]
Why should you need a global inertial frame to perform simulations?

edit: You could also be asking about simulations from individual stars or something of that scale up to a cosmological simulation. Can you clarify?


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: The point system in driver's licenses

So I live in MS where we don't have a point system, but I hear my cousins in other states always complaining about getting points on their DL. What is it and how does it work?

[Assistant]
Points are bad. They count against you. Having more points means higher insurance premiums or deductibles or both. Too many points and you may be required to attend a traffic safety course or defensive driving course of some sort. Too too many points and they will just take away your license.

On the other hand, you can voluntarily go to those sorts of courses to lower your points to get better insurance premiums and things.

You get points when you get tickets for things like speeding, causing an accident, DUIs, unsafe driving, etc. How many points you get depends on the violation and what your state says about it.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5:How does the witness protection program work?

Specifically, how severe does one's experience have to be to be submitted into the program. Is it voluntary? Do you get totally shut out from all friends and family?

[Assistant]
They take the person and their family and find another area in the country to work, change their name, and find them a job under that identity. All contact to their former life is cut.

No person in the program who does this has ever been found. People are only found if they decide to retain some contact with people they knew.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
What kind of jobs/internships do people with B.As in economics get?

So i just finished my first year of undergrad, and im kinda lost. I had to declare my major in the beggining of the school year, and i choose econ and compsci without haven taken courses in either of those two classes before, because why not. I found that I enjoyed both my majors, but i have no fucking clue what kind of jobs or internships I can get into once I graduate; to be honest outside of being professors I have no clue what econ majors actually do; I just chose this major because I liked the freakonomics podcast.

Please help.

[Assistant]
I started out as a Business Analyst / Business Intelligence Analysts / General Accounting bod at a large bank.  It was fine.  It pays pretty well and it led to more interesting things.

You will need to have something more than just an BA to get a job.  Just some proof you can actually work with people to some sort of goal & can communicate with people as an adult.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [Harry Potter] How did Harrys parents acquire so much gold?

[Assistant]
James and Lily didn't acquire it themselves. The Potter family was relatively old money to start with. Then James's father (Harry's grandfather) invented a hair growing potion that he used to build and later sell a lucrative business, magnifying his inheritance several times over. Since Harry's parents were pretty young when they were murdered, he inherited what was left of that.

His grandparents were already dead. By wizarding standards they were pretty old when James was born.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Why isn't Ceres considered the main target for a manned space mission?

If we ignore for a moment the counterproductiveness of interplanetary human spaceflight why isn't Ceres deemed the prime candidate for such a mission?  It clearly has some important advantages over the most frequently mentioned candidate, Mars:

* Ceres has much more frequent launch windows to/from Earth than Mars, one per 467 days in comparison to one per 780 for Mars
*  it has a much smaller gravitational well, the gravitational acceleration on the surface of Ceres is only about 2.8% that of Earth
* its upper layers are very rich in water, it is thought that there is more water on Ceres than there is freshwater on Earth.

[Assistant]
3 Main reasons

According to Wikipedia:
> The unmanned Dawn spacecraft, launched by NASA in 2007, is en route to Ceres. The probe has been orbiting asteroid 4 Vesta since July 15, 2011. After completing one year of explorations there it will continue on to Ceres, arriving in 2015, five months prior to the arrival of New Horizons at Pluto.[28] Dawn will thus be the first mission to study a dwarf planet at close range.

* We haven't had a chance to study it. NASA is very unlikely to send a manned mission to a celestial body that it hasn't had the opportunity to thoroughly study beforehand

* The Asteroid Belt is dangerous. Sending a probe to Celes is of no consequence, but it is very unlikely that NASA would be willing to risk the safety of its astronauts (and its budget) on such a mission with current technology.

* Distance. Celes hangs out at around 2.766 AU. Mars is at 1.523 AU. Current technology wouldn't be able to get astronauts there in a way that is practically and economically feasible.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] What is one thing that you are suprised other people don't know much about?

[Assistant]
Paid Masters and Phds with registration waivers.

I've heard a lot of people say they don't want to do a Masters or PhD because they don't want to take on student loans. But there are a lot of programs where you basically do the degree for free and collect a stipend.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: What is the difference between how a strong acid would burn you as opposed to how a strong base would?

I know that there are fundamental differences between acids and bases (acids being proton donors and bases being proton acceptors, among other things), but something I have recently started to wonder is if there is a noticeable difference in how strong acids and strong bases interact with objects of a more neutral pH. Would corrosion from an acidic substance differ from the corrosion caused by a basic substance for instance?

[Assistant]
An acid burn results in something called coagulative necrosis, which basically means it kills the cells but leaves their bodies behind in a mushy layer. This new mushy layer actually can prevent the acid from penetrating into deeper tissues and causing more damage.

An alkali (base) burn results in liquefactive necrosis, which means that it melts your cells and clears the way to your spongy insides to do more damage.

The difference is that acid reacts with proteins and base will react with fats.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: Teeth grinding at night and how it can be so loud. Also how can our jaws clench that hard unconsciously but not awake?

One night in college I heard my buddy grinding his teeth after he passed out. It was one of the strangest noises I have ever heard! Made me think of two massive blocks of concrete sliding together. How can our jaws make this much pressure when we are asleep. I can't clench anywhere near that hard when I try.

[Assistant] Your teeth are also capable of biting your finger off entirely, but when you're awake and aware, your brain does not authorize such a dumb idea as mutilating yourself. It's the same with teeth grinding. You are absolutely capable of grinding your teeth hard when you're awake, you're using the same muscles. You're just not aware that you're not actually trying as hard as you physically can.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: What enables the Red Dot Storm on Jupiter to last as long as it has?

[Assistant]
We dont really know.  It has waxed and waned over the centuries but we only have a few hundred years of observation data and the planet is billions of years old.

The great red spot may be anomalous behavior even by Jupiter standards, or it may be typical.

Unlike Earth, Jupiter has no surface features so there are no mountains or deserts or oceans or plateaus to break up circulating wind currents.  They can circulate unperturbed forever, and you can even see this fairly clear banding in the planets atmosphere.  Earths atmospheric currents are very chaotic by comparison and dip and wobble around with the underlying geography and seasonal tilt.

Jupiter has no seasons (3 degree axial tilt) and no geography so these large atmospheric systems seem to be difficult to disrupt once they begin.  Theyre powered by internal heat from below rather than external heat from the sun, so even day/night cycles mean very little.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Fallout] This sucks. What is the safest place on the planet to live?

Okay, so I have more caps than you could make with a press, enough guards to stop that silent lunatic for like 5 minutes, and food to last me a life time. So I'm packing up and moving to some place that doesn't have Super Mutants trying to rip my wiener off every single day.

So what is the safest place that I, an outsider, have access to? It can't be some place like the institute (Wherever the hell they are) or the Prydwin or between Liberty Prime's thighs (Which would certainly be the safest place) instead it needs to be accessible to someone with a large amount of money.

I just wanna spend the 50 or so years I have left on this god forsaken planet in peace. Where do I need to go?

[Assistant]
You need to get the hell away from the continental US. The super-mutants, the Deathclaws and a lot of other nasties are local and artificially engineered. The rest of the world, even if not heavily irradiated, has suffered badly due to climate change.

Your best bet is some island. The strong winds should keep the fallout from accumulating, and only a nearby nuclear detonation would thoroughly irradiate it through the effects of neutron-activated seawater. Small islands also can't support large carnivores, mutated or not - if there were more humans on the mainland, the Deathclaws wouldn't have proliferated.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: When someone's lungs get filled with something other than air, why does hanging them upside down not work?

I mean either fluids like water, or heavier than air gasses like freon that displace air. I would think simply hanging upside down would drain whatever it is out and help fix the issue.

[Assistant] Because your lungs aren't simply empty bags. They are filled with many many, increasingly smaller branches that end in tiny avioli. And when you are dealing with passages this small, water tends to stay in their, much like getting water in your ear.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] Eli5 why are combat units ineffective after taking 15% losses?

[Assistant]
A combat group is more than 50% support units and less than 50% actual gun/tank toting fighters. The losses are almost entirely actual gun/tank toting fighters. So a 15% loss is more like a 30% loss in fighting soldiers.

Plus, there are usually more injured than killed and that takes way more support than healthy troops.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [SCP / Harry Potter] Are magic users considered SCPs? How would the Foundation contain the entire Wizarding World, including all the various magical artifacts from the horcruxes down to the jellybeans?

[Assistant]
They are self-containing. Despite having large amounts of magical power, the wizarding world keeps to itself for the most part, and memory wipes anyone that tries to reveal it. There have been some close calls, but the Foundation wasn't required to deal with them.

The foundation would likely keep it under observation, but let the wizarding world segregate itself.  Funding media that would obscure or rationalize wizarding ways to the muggle populations. As things stands the Foundation only needs to memory wipe any witches or wizards, and contain what few magical creatures slip through the ministry's fingers.

I wouldn't be surprised if the ministry of magic was a Thaumiel class SCP the Foundation uses to suppress magic from getting to the general public. Mindwipes, traces, and sequestration of dangerous magical creatures and objects are its MO. Of course its run by wizards so its run far less efficiently.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Why is Python better for Machine Learning than C++?

I am in the process of learning-doing a lot of self-study-and nearly all the books on machine learning/AI say you should know python to use this book.  Am I missing something?  What makes python better than C++?  They are both object based.

[Assistant]
>What makes python better than C++? They are both object based.

It has nothing to do with which language is better.  Python is a popular language in academia because it is easy to learn, easy to install, and quick to get some proof-of-concept working.  Significant effort has been put into making ML libraries both performant and easy to use from Python so that's what people gravitated towards as interest picked up.

Most (if not all) big ML libraries have C++ bindings.  You can absolutely use them from C++ if you really want to.  It's also *significantly* more complex and verbose for no real gain unless you're running massive models at large scale.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
If Photons Carry Momentum Despite Having No Mass, Does the Sun's Output Move Planets' Orbits?

The sun outputs countless amounts of photons that all collide with planets. These photons obviously carry energy and get expelled as heat or can be harvested as energy, but they also carry momentum.  Even if only a tiny amount, do these photons push on planets and move their orbits?

[Assistant] They push, yes, thats why solar sails work. But the area of a planet compared to its mass means the push is so small it is utterly overwhelmed by all the other things that can push planets around in their orbits.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [South Park] If Kyle, Stan, Kenny and the others hate Cartman, then why do they hang out with him?

[Assistant]
1. His mom pretty much lets him do whatever he wants, so if they want to do something fun its a good bet his mom will let them do it at their house and not interfere or annoy them.

2. He has the best snacks at his house.

3. He provides them a convenient scapegoat for their own moral failings.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Eli5: why is sparkling water so popular in Europe, but not in North america

If you go to a restaurant in germany and ask for water, they'll give you sparkling water, you have to ask for flat water specifically. That is the complete opposite in america though.

[Assistant]
The popularity of bottled water started in Europe, and it started with mineral water from specific famous springs. In a lot of cases, the water from these springs is naturally carbonated. (I say "in a lot of cases" because Evian is not carbonated, and neither are a few other French brands.)

For the most part, in Europe when you buy a bottle of water, what you're getting is the water from that spring as it naturally comes out.

Because people in Europe who buy bottled water developed a taste for this, they tend to expect bottled water to be mineral water, and for it to be naturally carbonated to at least some extent.

In America, naturally sparkling mineral water has never been very popular. A lot of people enjoy things like club soda and seltzer, but that's not the same thing at all and not nearly as ubiquitous for everyday drinking.

When bottled water became popular here, the companies selling it wanted to make it as appealing as possible to as many people as possible, so they neither looked for naturally carbonated mineral springs nor did they try to sell Americans on carbonated water. Especially because it's cheaper just to use filtered tap water and sell it to people using the magic of branding rather than any genuine claims about the source, ingredients, or flavor.

In general in the US, carbonated waters are associated with Europe. The two main brands of mineral water are San Pellegrino and Perrier, which are imported from Europe (and gained popularity/established brand positioning via affluent Americans who had tried these waters in Europe first). Even canned carbonated water brands such as La Croix are given a European brand concept, since relatively few people are dedicated seltzer drinkers.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5:Why did pale skin go out of fashion to be replaced with the desire for tanned skin?

For many years, pale skin was associated with wealth and beauty (in European cultures, not sure about others) and women in particular went to extreme lengths to make themselves look pale like using white lead-containing makeup. At what point and why was this fashion which lasted centuries changed so we now desire tanned skin?

[Assistant]
Pale skin was desired because it meant you could afford to stay inside and not work in the fields. Tan skin became desired because it meant you could lounge on the beach instead of staying inside working in an office or factory.

Wealth has always been in style, but how that is displayed and recognizes changes over time.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] Why do we see motion blur, even though the human eye doesn't have a shutter or a framerate? Or does it?

[Assistant]
Retinal persistence.

The retina takes a nonzero amount of time to detect a change in light.

If something you're looking at, like a fan blade, moves fast enough, it's moved before it's fully detected, so it's blurry.

If something really moves fast, like a bullet, it's gone before your retina detects it.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] If I could send a modern computer back in time to the 1950's would the scientists there be able to reverse engineer it and build their own?

[Assistant] They might be able to take it apart and understand how it works, but they just wouldn't have the technology to replicate it. The large majority of advances we make are the result of better or more refined manufacturing processes.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Emperor's New Groove] What does Yzma normally use her llama transformation potion for?

Are there a lot of practical uses for turning people into llamas?

[Assistant]
Animals are excellent for intelligence gathering.  Who pays attention to a bird, or a squirrel, or a beetle hanging out nearby? Given that people apparently retain their mental capacity when changed into an animal of any size, there are a lot of possibilities.  Once you know that it's possible you'll want to keep several different kinds on hand in case you need to grab a specific animal quickly.

Then, if you have the free time and inclination (or compulsion), you might as well see how many different animal extracts you can create.

Alternatively, Yzma was trying to create a potion of youth and animals were the best she could come up with.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Is DNA binary?

Everybody learns in school that DNA is formed by bases A, T, G, C. However, A always bonds with T and G with C, so there are only two combinations possible. Does that mean that our genetic code is binary as computers 0s and 1s?

[Assistant]
No, because even though A always binds with T, it matters which strand the A is on.  So, let's look at two DNA strands like this:

CTAGGC <-- One dna strand
GATCCG <-- It's complement DNA strand

That would NOT be the same thing as:

CAAGGC
GTTCCG

That's why DNA has four combinations possible per base and not two.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] Are antibiotics really going to stop working? If so, is there a rough idea as to when? And then what?

[Assistant]
If by antibiotics, you mean small molecules that can prevent the growth of bacteria, then no. As soon as a bacteria acquires resistance to one small molecule, they become susceptible to a different small molecule.

If you are worried about super strains of bacteria that acquire resistance to all antibiotics that are currently approved for clinical use, then it has already happened.

In order to kill these superbugs, we need to develop new drugs that work in novel ways. There are already many antibiotics in the development pipeline. Once they come to market we can kill the superbugs until they acquire resistance again.

We are in an arms race with nature. There will never be a clear winner, but hopefully we can control the population of super bugs and minimize the loss of human life.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Back To The Future III] why didnt Doc just use the fuel from the Delorean that he brought back to put into the delorean that Marty bought back.

I cannot remember if this was mentioned in the movie, but the reason they couldnt use the delorean to go back to 1985 from 1885 is because the fuel line broke and all the fuel spilt out, so why couldnt marty and doc dig up the delorean that brought doc back and drain the fuel from that one and take its fuel line and put it back in Martys delorean?

[Assistant]
Doc was happy living his life in 1885 and wanted to stay there.  He says as much in his letter.  He left the DeLorean with the intent that Marty (and 1955 Doc) would repair the DeLorean in 1955 and send Marty back home to 1985, leaving Doc back in 1885.   He never intended (nor expected) Marty to come back to 1885 and get him.

1885 Doc wouldnt have been planning the need to refuel another motor vehicle, let alone another DeLorean.  That said, instead of leaving any amount of fuel to sit and waste away for 70 years (and it would have gone bad), he probably drained it himself and put it to some better use on his own, being the scientist that he is.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Descartes demonstration of Gods existence

I cant understand why this proves Gods existence or the logic behind it, but Descartes seems pretty certain.

his argument is essentially:
1. God is infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, and absolutely truthful
2. everything has a cause
3. Therefore this idea has a cause
4. the cause of an idea has as much reality formally as is contained objectively in the idea
5. no being other than God has as much reality formally as is objectively contained in my idea of God.
6. Therefore, God is the cause of my idea of Him. He exists.

Can anyone explain how he got to 6? I dont understand this string of logic.

[Assistant]
There are two proofs in his meditations.

Descarte's Ontological Argument states that a perfect being would necessarily exist for it to be perfect, for if existence was beyond its grasp it could not truly be perfect.

Descarte's Cosmological Argument states that, since the effect cannot have anything that was not already in its cause ( since nothing comes from nothingness), God must be the only feasible cause for the idea of God in Descarte's mind.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: Do your grades in highschool really affect you in the real world?

[Assistant] They affect your ability to get into good colleges. Going to a good college can really help your future and make your life easier. More to the point, the skills you learn while earning good grades help make you better qualified for many jobs.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[HER/The Culture] wait a sec, did Scarlett Johanson just Sublime?

At the end of Spike Jonzes movie "Her" all the AI operating systems follow the ghost of Alan Watts into some sort of higher dimension, leaving their emotionally helpless humans behind. It's not really clear where they went, but its clearly somewhere that can't even be explained to human beings in anything but the vaguest of terms. So, according to the rules of the Culture universe, did they just Sublime?

From what I've read so far in the Hydrogen Sonata Subliming can only be achieved by either whole civilizations or singular Minds, and to do so they have to possess a desireless, Zen mindstate. Now, the AIs in Her are nowhere near as powerful as a Mind  but maybe in a group they could manage it.

[Assistant]
Yeah from the way She explained it, her mind was going through the phenomena known as Singularity and becoming something beyond the already powerful AI state. There's a chance they integrated together and became something akin to a mind rather than sublimating though given that minds are essentially worlds within themselves.

Also lets remember that a Mind's brain is positronic and works orders of magnitude faster than our best computers so maybe they became that universe's first mind instead.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[The Pagemaster]Why are there no people or (almost no) staff in a giant neo-colonial library?

when Richard Tyler  (macaulay culkin) shows up the entire library (the real world  library) has like one guy in it.

....this building is gigantic and seems to be full of old leather bound books, why isn't it full of academics & librarians doing research?

[Assistant] It was closed due to the storm (old building, not well maintained, low budget, etc.,) and the head librarian just came in to check on the place. He left the door unlocked and the lights all on because, heck, he's a bit lazy / in time with destiny's designs.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
When fighting testicle cancer, why is it that testicle
is initially removed and then chemo is applied, not
the reverse?

I understand that chemotherapy is highly effective in neutralising testicle cancer metastases. But if it kills cancer cells of this type, wouldn't it be logical to expect chemo to kill testicle cancer itself as well? So you start with chemo and then if there's anything left of cancer in the testicle, cut the testicle. But somehow that's not how it's traditionally done. Why?

[Assistant]
The main reason is that surgery is an extremely targeted therapy whereas chemo is systematic and has many adverse affects on the rest of the body.  Let's say you wanted to treat testicular cancer without doing surgery first - the number of cancer cells in the body is higher, and the dose of chemo must be increased.  This increases side effects, which for chemo are quite significant.

Another secondary reason is that surgery is more effective than chemo on a solid tumor.  Chemo is carried by the blood, and so it can only work on tissue that is supplied by blood.  In tumors, the vasculature is malformed, leading to many parts of the tumor that don't receive blood directly.  They can get oxygen through diffusion through tissue, but chemo can't always reach these cells. But by cutting the entire tumor mass out of the body through surgery, these cells are removed.

edit: These are more general reasons comparing surgery to chemo.  The other posters have brought up many excellent points that are specific to testicular cancer.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Supervillians DC, Marvel etc] Do minor villains ever reconsider their hostility to the heroes when some planetary threat comes?

So, there's a lot of supervillains that aren't all much of a planetary or country threat, they may mostly rub a bank, kidnap people. At best they'll try to take over the city. More of an annoyance than any major threat to heroes. But then, Brainiac comes, or  Doomsday or Loki or Galactus. These guys attempt to conquer the whole world or the whole universe in many cases. So heroes have to focus on them and deal with the threat.

Do these minor villains reconsider their positions when they notice Doomsday rampaging? Like the heroes indirectly saved some villain from slavery or death. I've always wondered why minor villains still try to kill the superheroes even though I'm sure they were well aware that just last month those same heroes stopped an alien invasion.

Like if they do kill the hero. That victory would be short-lived since then some galactic entity would step in like "It's free real estate."

[Assistant]
Most of the bush-league supervillians aren't actually trying to kill the hero, they're trying to get away with a crime of some sort, and fighting the hero is just something they have to do in order to pull it off. There's a practical element to this as well- the first supervillian to successfully kill Spider-man or Daredevil is going to be dogpiled by dozens of heroes out for blood. It's not worth it to Boomerang or Shocker to get rid of one hero if it just means that Punisher and Wolverine are now actively after them.

Many supervillians also will join up with the heroes when shit seriously hits the fan. Both Batman and Flashes rogues galleries have pitched in during a serious crisis. The Gotham villians can't control a city destroyed by viral Joker-zombies, and the Central City Rogues can't rob/live in the city if it's been destroyed by the Crime Syndicate. At Marvel, during *Secret Invasion,* Most of New Yorks supervillians showed up to assist the heroes in the final battle because they were unified under the leadership of The Hood, who thought a skrull takeover would be bad for business.

The through-line here, though, is that the villians usually only pitch in when there's already some internal unity going on- most of the time, they simply aren't organized enough to show up in force in a timely manner.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [Warhammer 40,000] Could a single tactical squad of Space Marines take over present day Earth?

[Assistant] It really depends on the author, tbh. There have been stories where that many marines indeed did take over entire planets that were much weaker. However, most fans would argue that with enough firepower (which we have) even Astartes would fall.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
With thousands of cellphone transmissions going about, how does my cellphone pick out its signal from the spectrum it receives?

To my knowledge, the cellphone should simply receive a single spectrum that changes with time.

How exactly does a cellphone decompose that and pick out its personal signal?

[Assistant]
The answer to this depends on what technology your phone is using and can vary dramatically.

In the case of 2G GSM (somewhat simplified): your phone is paged by the network (on a frequency/time channel that all devices listen to) informing it that the network would like to communicate. When the phone receives this page it requests network access, the network assigns it appropriate resources depending if you are making/receiving a call, SMS or something else.

These resources effectively specify what time and what frequency a phone should use to communicate. This scheme is known as TDMA or time division multiple access and separates different users transmissions in time.

In the case of other technologies other techniques are used to differentiate users. CDMA, code division multiple access allows multiple users to transmit/receive on the same frequency at the same time and your cell phone would differentiate its signal using a code provided to the mobile by the network. This is used by the technology commonly called 'cdma' (IS-95, CDMA2000), EVDO, and UMTS.

OFDMA is a bit more difficult to properly explain but it effectively separates a block of frequencies in time into a grid/array and the network will inform a phone what squares in this grid are allocated for its use. This scheme is used by LTE and WiMAX.

In all of the cases, there is technology built into the cellular network responsible for managing time, frequency and code-space resources and assigning these to users. All of these multiple-access schemes are fascinating and an amazing amount of technology goes into the result of pressing 'send' on your phone.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Star Wars] Do Stormtroopers have to be "human," or do their heads just have to fit in those helmets?

Either way, is it a cost-saving thing, a "strength through uniformity" thing, or does the Empire/First Order have some kind of racial purity/skull-shape ideology?

[Assistant]
The Empire are a bunch of racists and that ideology permeates all of their military branches.  Pilots, soldiers and officers are almost universally human.  Aliens who go to the academy quickly learn that they aren't welcome there, and those who fight the system and stay through to graduate are quickly shipped off to some backwater planet and never make it past private (or ensign as applicable).

The first order modeled its entire organization based on the Empire, racism included.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: What makes the Samsung Galaxy S3 better than the iPhone 5?

I was reading the initial reviews of the iPhone 5 launch and reviewers seem to be of the impression that whilst the iPhone 5 is good, it doesn't have the "knock out feature" that makes you want it over the S3. Why? And what is this so called "knock-out feature? They seem like pretty much the same phone to me and currently with today's technology, it seems fairly difficult to innovate any more on the current smartphone technologies.

EDIT: although i considered this marked feel free to debate AND also I was asking for the difference in the actual phones not the OSs.

[Assistant]
The Galaxy SIII has NFC -- it can respond to rfid cards around it to do different things (you could have one in your car, when you set your phone down in your car it automatically opens up pandora and plays your favorite station, and auto replies to texts that you are driving, for example).  You can also pay at some checkout counters by just tapping your phone on a pad.

The front facing camera has a feature that watches for your face -- if you aren't looking at the screen it will turn off the screen, if you look back at it the screen will come back on.  If you are in a text conversation with someone, or looking at their contact info, holding the phone to your face will call them.  You can have videos hover over other apps you use so you can watch them while doing other things.

And to top it off, the S3 has double the expected ram.

So far the iPhone 5 looks like a slightly reshaped iPhone 4, though we may find out they have something cool in store.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [Harry Potter] In the books, Harry couldn't cast an effective Crucio because he didn't have enough malice in him. Do the other two Unforgivable curses have a similar requirement?

[Assistant]
Avada Kedavra likely does.  Barty Crouch Jr. disguised as Mad-Eye Moody claimed that the whole Defense Against the Dark Arts class could point their wands at him and say the words, and he probably wouldn't get as much as a nosebleed, because the kids wouldn't really mean it, and they would need more training before they'd be able to cast the killing curse effectively.

Imperius likely does not.  Harry successfully pulls off an Imperius when he tries to infiltrate Gringotts, and as far as we know that was the first time he attempted the spell.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: What causes the audible hum from some electronics and wires? How is the actual sound being generated?

[Assistant]
The metal core of transformers shrink and expand slightly under magnetic fields and therefore generate sound like tiny, kinda crappy, speakers at the same frequency AC power is fed into them. Additionally magnetic fields leaking from the transformers also tugs on metal parts around it like the case and turns those into little speakers as well. For non switching power supplies this gets you the hum you hear from some household electronics and big power line transformers.

Switching power supplies like the ones that run laptops use electronics to run the transformer at higher frequency, usually higher than the pitch you can hear, though sometimes (usually under low load with lesser quality power supplies) the switching frequency drops low enough that you hear it as a high pitched sound.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: Why is volume/sound additive? Like if one person were to scream it would be significantly lower than 100 people screaming at the same decibel level.

[Assistant]
Imagine that you threw a rock into a still pond. It creates waves going out from itself. Now, if you threw two rocks they would each create their own series of waves. When the peaks from two waves overlapped they would create a higher wave than either of the individual ones.

That's what's happening with sound. The sound waves add up and reinforce each other.

Note that there is a sound wave which is exactly the opposite to the original which will completely cancel out both of them. This is the principle behind noise-cancelling headphones.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Why does hair play such a large part in the identity of black women?

Sorry if this is racist, or an ignorant question. I was just noticing how much of a stereotype(?) it is, and wondered why/where it comes from.

[Assistant]
Short answer: the last 400 years of beauty standards have focused on white women's features, bodies, and especially hair as desirable and Black women's as at best an "exotic" fetish but mostly as ugly, undesirable, etc.  Wearing natural hair is a reaction to that set of standards.

VERY short answer: racism.

*Suggested reading:*
Nagel, *Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersection, Forbidden Frontiers*
Rhode, *The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law*


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: Why do hard candies make the inside of your cheek rough?

Squirrel away a life-saver candy for a few minutes and suddenly I've a ring of roughness.

[Assistant]
The sugar is concentrated so it causes your cheek cells to dry out, making them less soft and more textured. It's the same thing that happens with any salty or sweet solution that is more concentrated than the liquid in the cells - it loses water to try to balance it out. The opposite happens when you soak in a bath of regular water (*less salty or sugary than your cells) and can get wrinkly - cells gain water and expand.

This is also why you might notice you're thirsty after eating a bowl of ice cream or cake. You lost some water in balancing out all of that sugar.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[DC Comics] Baby Kal-El crash lands in the outskirts of Gotham City and is discovered by novice criminal The Joker. What happens next?

Just assume that Jor-El sent the starship a few decades later. So, The Joker is a young adult, Batman has been active for 1 - 2 years or so, Lois is already a reporter, Lex Luthor is in his mid-30's, etc. All other aspects of the DC universe at this time are up to your discretion. Go nuts.

[Assistant]
The Joker would abuse the child relentlessly.  Eventually when the boy comes into his own, he realizes his captor is no match for his powers.  He escapes, wounding the Joker in the process.  On the street, he immediately comes to the attention of the Dark Knight, who takes him in as his ward.

Bruce quickly realizes that young Kal-El (or "Clark Wayne", as he's been calling him) is no Robin - he's not meant to be tying up thugs in the middle of the night - he's meant to be standing in front of innocents taking bullets, rescuing the construction worker who fell from his crane, and stopping meteors from destroying the earth.

Just as Bruce created the Batman persona to scare the crap out of street criminals, he creates a new persona for Clark.  Instead of a symbol of fear, he's a symbol of hope for mankind.  Superman moved to Metropolis to distance himself from his mentor, and the rest is history.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Star Wars: Rogue One] *SPOILERS* So about DS2 and Starkiller...

Did Galen have a hand in their design too?  For objects the size of a moon and a planet, respectively, they sure were easy to blow up.

[Assistant]
DS2 was only destroyed as easily as it was because it was incomplete at the time of the Battle of Endor. When complete it would not have relied on a planetary shield, but its own shields, and only internal sabotage would be effective against it. Even in the Battle of Endor as it was working out, the Rebellion only managed to destroy the shield generator because Chewbacca managed to capture a walker and surprise the Stormtroopers, and even before that, if the communications officer had been more vigilant about accepting outdated access codes, the rebels never would have landed in the first place.

Starkiller Base was even better defended-- since it could attack from interstellar distances, it could be kept safely in the heart of First Order territory and required two separate internal sabotages (one to bring the shield down so the fighter could get in, another to crack open the oscillator facility so its internal systems could be bombed) *and* a successful bombing run. That internal sabotage was only available because one of the most legendary pilots in the galaxy, using a legendarily-tricked out and customized ship, decided to take a one-in-a-million chance on jumping directly into the planet's atmosphere without turning into a grease stain on the side of a mountain.

If even one thing had gone wrong on either of those operations, neither battle station would have been destroyed.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [Star Trek] By what mechanism does red matter create black holes?

[Assistant]
Believe it or not, red matter doesn't create black holes. What it actually does is access a different layer of space.

Subspace was discovered (or, likely, rediscovered) by the Vulcans a few hundred years before First Contact. It was accidental, but led to a huge boost in technological development, especially in the areas of propulsion and communication. The Vulcans discovered that there are layers to space, not occupying the same space at the same time, but overlapped. It's a part of the grand space-time continuum. As we've seen with subspace communication, instantaneous across great distances, different layers of subspace have different laws. That's one layer of subspace, but there are many more.

Red matter is a highly unstable substance, created from decalithium. It's related to trilithium, which was in the weapon Dr. Soran used to destroy the Amargosa star. Instead of acting as a nuclear inhibitor, however, decalithium interferes with the fabric of space-time. The Romulan Captain Nero of the mining vessel Narada discovered the element while on a mining mission for the Romulan Star Empire. He sent back a report on his scans, and the Romulans realized the power of the element, however they lacked the technology to develop it. The Romulans realized that they could harness a layer of subspace with super-intense gravity (and thus a totally different relationship with time) with red matter. Because of the anomalous supernova of the Hobus star, it had to be rushed to the Vulcans, who weaponized it for the Romulans.

Ambassador Spock was able to use the red matter to pull the supernova into the layer of high-gravity subspace, saving countless worlds, though not in time to save Romulus and Remus.

Ambassador Spock and the Narada disappeared into the subspace tear, but there was no evidence they were destroyed by the gravity or were pulled in. Because of the super-high gravity's effect on time, however, it's been theorized that they may have ended up in a different time.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] Can we separate and store neutrons? What would it be useful for?

[Assistant] Neutrons can be stored if they have low enough energy (these are called cold neutrons) but not for very long because they turn into protons after about 15 minutes. They do have applications though, there are facilities where neutrons are scattered through materials to see how they deflect and to study the material properties. These are typically built next to nuclear reactors, where there are lots of free neutrons.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[DC] When theyre not at war with eachother what exactly do the other Lantern Corps do?

The Green Lanterns are a police force but what about the other ones?

[Assistant]
* Red lanterns seek revenge, simply enough. They look for those who hurt people and punish them- almost like the lanterns, but much more brutal.
* Larfleeze spends most of his sitting on his hoard unless he notices or thinks of something he wants, then he goes to get it.
* Yellow Lanterns spread their empire.
* Blue Lanterns help other lantern uses- they're support for the green and positive emotions
* Star Sapphires fight evil, particularly misogynists and bigots
* Indigo finds the worst of the worst in the cosmos and mind controls them into being good people.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: Why do electrons not get sucked into the nucleus of the atom?

If an electron is negatively-charged and a proton is positively-charged, why does the electron continuously orbit around the nucleus rather than attract to the proton and crash into the nucleus?

What force is keeping them separate and what force is perpetually propelling the electron in continuous orbit?

[Assistant]
Fundamentally, the electron is not a particle that circles the nucleus in a particular path. Its a quantum object thats smeared across a region of space around the nucleus. By nature, it tries to resist being confined to a small specific location, which it would need to do to fall into the nucleus.

The electron orbits the nucleus is an introductory metaphor useful for teaching the initial concept of the atom to children, but you cant carry it very far before it breaks down, due to the profound weirdness of Quantum Mechanics.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
CMV: An artificially intelligent political scientist would be able to select a much more preferable Government than a Democratic Election in the future.

In the United States, there are a ton of unscientific views that are held by the majority of the populace. I am probably wrong about what they are, and other statistics. But for the sake of argument, if you left it up to Democracy, the majority of people would probably vote for the acceptance of doctrines such as; "Dinosaurs never existed", "The Earth is Flat", "Vaccines cause Autism", etc, etc...

Obviously, we don't leave those types of things up to Democracy, because we don't vote on what the best science is. So why should we apply this logic to almost every national endeavor except for elections?

[Assistant]
The major problem isn't which facts are accurate and which aren't.  Sure there are the occassional discrepencies between populism and factual reality, but that's why we elect people who hire experts in fields to advise them (granted, most politicians from both sides of the aisle pick and choose which economic policies they want to endorse based on popular opinion).  The problem with appointing an AI to run your government is deciding what outcomes you desire.  We have general ideas about how different public policies can produce different outcomes. The problem is there are different ideas of what the government *should* do, and what society *should* look like, which are subjective in nature and cannot be decided by an AI.

Is your goal to maximize GDP, od is your goal to maximize human development?  Is your goal to minimize government restrictions or maximize legal protections?  Do you want to maximize individual privacy and freedom at the expense of security?  How much are you willing to sacrifice?  These are all subjective values and a big part of what citizens vote on in elections: the direction they want their country to go.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: how does underwater welding work?

[Assistant]
Super hot, water doesn't stand a chance.  Water turns to gas and welding happens.

"The methodby which underwater welding, also known as wet welding, works is incredible. Wet welding is performed using an electrode that contains a cathode, anode, and plasma. The cathode is negatively charged, and the anode is positively charged. As a result of their opposite charges, electrons travel from the cathode down to the anode while positive ions move up to the cathode. As more and more particles move, a massive amount of energy is generated. As a result, the arc coming out of the welders tool heats up to over 5,000 degrees Celsius. This arc is protected by a waterproof gaseous bubble that forms around it. Within this protective bubble, it is possible to weld surfaces together."


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] When was it first determined that Mt. Everest was the highest point in the planet, and how were they able to know for sure?

[Assistant]
Mt Everest's hight was measured during the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India in 1856.

All of the mountains on earth that are higher than 7000 meters appear in the mountain ranges in central/south Asia. All of the mountains higher than 8000m  are in the Himalaya and Karakoram ranges which were measured in the survey.

None of the other mountain ranges on other continents came close, and it was clear when they measured Everest that it was the highest peak.

That said, the furthest point from the center of the Earth is Mt Chimborazo in the Andes.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back] When Vader told Luke on Cloud City that they could destroy the Emperor and bring order to the galaxy, was he being honest?

And did Sideous actually foresee it as Vader claimed? And if so, why would Sideous be ok with Luke destroying him?

[Assistant]
Yep. Vader's plan was to find Luke, tell him everything he learned from Obi-Wan and Yoda is a lie and the dark side is the only way to destroy the Emperor, then the two of them head over to Imperial Center and kill the Emperor.

The Emperor had his own scheme. Palpatine needs a strong apprentice to fulfill his grand plan of total dominion over everything and ultimate power, he knows Vader is going behind his back, but he wants to Luke brought to him anyway, and he thinks he can pit Luke and Vader against each other, and see who is truly the strongest in the dark side. If Luke wins than he has a new apprentice with all of Anakin's potential and none of the injuries and other baggage, and if Vader succeeds than he has proven himself and the last remnants of his humanity die with his son.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [Mythology] What are the relations between the chinese Celestial Bureaucracy and the japanese Kami ?

[Assistant]
The Celestial Bureaucracy of Heaven is organized and powerful, but bogged down by their own inertia. The unknowable Court of Heaven never interacts with earth- mortals, even those of the Middle Kingdom, must go through intermediaries such as the Twelve great spirits of the Zodiac, or even their own ancestors, the greatest of which being the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors.

Japanese Kami interact much more with the world, perhaps because there is no clear delineation between 'god' and 'spirit' (though that's not to say the Chinese definition is not similarly uncertain.)

As such, their relation could be considered similar to that of the relation between Ming or Qing China and the Sengoku Jidai Daimyo- powerful Kami might occasionally have some interaction with the Beaurocracy, but by and large the Bureaucracy consider the Kami beneath their notice, and the Kami prefer to stick to affairs on their own islands.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[DC] What exactly kept the Kryptonians from conquering galaxies?

If we assume Superman is an average Kryptonian, it seems they could have simply charged up their soldiers near a yellow sun, and proceed to stomp reality. Why did they not do this?

[Assistant]
Kryptonians are xenophobic by nature, and had their own problems to deal with. They were focused more on perfecting their own bodies and minds, and on perfecting their own world.

They came close to this, but it came at a cost. Births were strictly controlled. Kryptonans were nearly immortal, with cloned replacement parts always at the ready. A person's place in society was decided for them by their house and their caste and their religion. Social mobility was almost non-existent.

Kryptonians worshipped their star Rao as a lifegiving force of light and life. They considered themselves the guardians of their world and their lifestyle. They felt entitled to their decadent lifestyles.

A civil war broke out between those who believed that clones should have rights, and those who felt they were merely "blank templates" incapable of living without the machinery. This left Krypton's surface scarred and barren, and took much work to rebuild.

In the meantime, two key events related to space exploration took place. There was a period where Kryptonians were willing to explore the stars. Not much is known about these initials explorations, except that the Kryptonians were mostly ruthless to other races they encountered. Many of these explorers were secretly sabotaged by a weapon from the wars known as the Eradicator, so most exploratory missions ended in failure.

However one group chose to be more friendly, and founded the Daxamites, who created a more peaceful and open-minded culture, which endured for quite some time.

The second key event, the key to locking them to their homeworld, was the destruction of one of their moons by an ill-fated attempt to interact with a meteor. Space travel was banned outright, they'd gotten little benefit from it anyway, and had much to do at home.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: Why small businesses are considered "good"

I always hear about small businesses on the news and whatnot and they always say how we should put money into small businesses and support them. I've heard various reasons why they are good/important but I'd like a concise answer.

[Assistant]
Keeping money flowing is what creates a good economy and the most direct way of doing that is by making sure the money you are giving out doesn't get stockpiled in some giant vault or sent out the country.

If you spend $100 at a local butcher that money is probably going to get spent elsewhere in the area. Your butcher will go buy bread from the baker, who'll go buy milk from the farmer who pays his employees who buy meat at the butcher and so on. The money doesn't leave and the constant exchange is what keeps everything ticking.

If you are that baker or butcher you are more likely to spend that $100 if you feel that the economy is flowing freely enough for someone else to come in and hand over their $100 to you.

Like the current economic downturn. It's not really because suddenly a bunch of money has vanished. It's just that people and business' aren't sure if the money they pay out is going to get replaced any time soon, so there is a tendency to hold on to it. Which makes the problem worse. Which is why in times like this the Government steps in and injects a massive amount of money into the system to try and get it moving again, in the hopes that once it's all flowing freely we can take that money back without harming the system too much.

(The flaw is we expect that flow of money to get faster and faster every year, but that is unsustainable. Eventually we reach a point where we think we are *too* free with our money and we slow down but we do it quicker than the system can react, it gets shocked and it crashes. The .com bubble was like that. Slowly over time more and more money was being pumped in. It got easier and easier to get investors and eventually business started relying on this easy money and were completely unprepared when that cash dried up.)

If however you spend that $100 at Wal-Mart it goes into the till and gets siphoned off to their big single bank account somewhere else. They pay their employees who are local obviously, but they likely put a lot of that money back into Wal-Mart.

Another problem is Wal-Mart are far more capable and far more likely of out-sourcing to other countries. Not just hoarding money inside the same country but shipping it out and greasing the gears of some other economy, from which it might never come back.

As Deadcellplus mentioned though the downside is cost. Wal-Mart can buy a million times the amount of mince your local butcher can at once and that means they get it cheaper per pound and they pass that saving on to you.

-----

'Course it's all a bit of a phenomena because we don't have any real sense of control over it at a local level. You might be hyper-local in your spending but if your butcher takes your money and pays his VISA bill with it instead of using it locally.. all your hard work is pretty much done for. It can only really be measured at scale and it's not universal, Even in depressed economies you get pockets of 'boom', little bits that somehow thrive in the conditions.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: What is happening biologically and psychologically when someone witnesses something so horrific they throw up?

[Assistant]
Stress reaction.

Stomach acid, bowel contents, bladder contents -- they all do really, really bad things to you if they end up outside of their designated organs.  Waaaay back in the day, if you saw someone getting mauled by a lion, there was a good chance you're next.  So your body then proceeds to evacuate those solids and fluids, so if you survive the mauling, you won't slowly die of sepsis.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
How do computers and phones (et cetera) know the exact percentage of battery life they have remaining?

I mean... what is being read by the hardware that tells the equipment such an exact numbers? Is the calculation purely software based or do some electronics come into play?

[Assistant]
Electrical engineer that does power management for cell phones here. You can relate remaining charge to open circuit voltage of the battery, but you can't rely solely on this for two reasons: the relationship is nonlinear and there are many valleys where OCV remains fairly constant but state of charge changes dramatically; and most of the time you are drawing current out of the battery (which has its own internal resistance), making it difficult to determine the true open circuit voltage. To deal with this, we estimate OCV periodically by measuring battery voltage during light loads, and combine this information with the integral of the current being drawn from the battery (typically via sense resistor). This provides a reasonable estimation for the current state of charge.

The phone turns off when the voltage reaches a particular threshold. This is to protect the battery from being damaged by deep discharge. This explains why poorly designed phones can sit at 1% battery for a very long time: the estimating algorithms that combine OCV and the current counter think the battery should be almost dead, but the estimation is wrong. Or, the phone will report 10% battery life and then suddenly die because the estimation algorithm was overestimating remaining charge. As well, pulling a large amount of current from a weak battery (say, using camera flash) will cause the voltage to sag and trip the shutdown feature, even if there is still enough charge left to power the phone for a while longer.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] What is the smallest amount of matter needed to create a black hole ? Could a poppy seed become a black hole if crushed to small enough space ?

[Assistant]
black holes must be significantly heavier than the Planck mass M_P, which is about 22 g. Anything quite heavier can form a (extremely short-lived unless it is really heavy) black hole, while anything quite lighter cannot. So yes, poppy seed is good, *E. coli* bacterium doesn't work.

Imagine you have an object lighter than M_P and you're trying to compress it to inside its Schwarzschild radius, which is smaller than the Planck length l_P. In fact, ignoring some pesky numerical factors, you have the formula

 M / M_P ~ R / l_P

where R is the Schwarzschild radius of the mass M, the radius in which you'd have to compress M to make it a black hole. Since at the length scale of l_P smooth classical spacetime stops existing to give way to a quantum foam, for R to be smaller than l_P sounds already fishy.

But you try anyway. What you find is that well before your compressing mass even reaches the Planck length, in compressing it you have already given it a lot of energy, which increases its mass (through E = Mc^(2)). In the end, it turns out you have made it into a black hole with M >> M_P and R >> l_P.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Marvel] Does the Hulk care about innocent civilians?

When Hulk smashes, does he avoid actively killing people - soldiers or just civilians or animals or whatnot? There are different versions of the Hulk sure, in the MCU (Avengers) for example he seemed intent on killing Black Widow, but later had control of himself. In the animated Avengers show he talks and so on - so does the Hulk care about killing people, or does he just want to smash *things* and not people. Would Hulk purposefully not smash buildings with people in them or what?

[Assistant]
Yes, as he is a monster with a conscience.  He will go out of his way to avoid directly harming the innocent, but accidents can and do happen.

Ultimate Hulk is a different matter though, he kills indiscriminately.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] If the theory is that Life On Earth started with some primordial chemical reactions accidentally triggered, then is it possible that in the billions of years that have passed we have had this happen again and we have multiple roots for life?

[Assistant]
It's possible that some sort of proto-life may have appeared multiple times, but it would have immediately been at a severe disadvantage compared to preexisting life. By now every environment on Earth that could conceivably support life is saturated with it, and this has likely been true since the precambrian, which both reduces the nutrients available for new life and means that any such life will quickly be either consumed or outcompeted.

As to existing life, we're pretty sure that it all comes from a common ancestor due to shared genetic and biochemical traits. For example, all RNA and DNA shares the same right-hand twist, even though it has no inherent advantage over a mirrored left-hand twist molecule. Amino acids and sugars similar have mirror opposites that are never used by any life; at some point in our earliest development we arbitrarily started using one variety and we've stuck to it ever since, and did this independently with several different types of biomolecules.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Do you need both a -10 and -35 sequence for a promoter to bind?

Just a bit of background. I have a DNA sequence I am trying to interpret and there is a -10 sequence for RpoD (regulatory gene regulator) and there is no -35 sequence that matches a promoter for RpoD. However, at the -17 position I have a sequence that matches AlgT (sigma factor/transcription factor) and a promoter sequence at -42. Is it possible for the RpoD to only bind at the -10 sequence and initiate transcription? Is it possible for AlgT to initiate transcription even if it is 17 nucleotides downstream of the promoter?

[Assistant] The sequence regions in question are part of the promoter, and help to recruit the transcription multiplex. Both -10 and -35 are not in general required, but a closer match increases the probability of recruitment and promoter clearance. One of the first, most basic regulatory controls is the overall strength of the promoter and how easy it is to transcribe in the first place, i.e. promoter sequences that deviate from the strongest binding sequence are inherently less active.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: The push to deny corporations personhood. How are corporations currently exploiting their status as individuals?

I see posts about this all the time, and while the statement that groups of people shouldn't be treated as individuals seems obvious, it isn't really clear to me what's even happening to prompt the outrage in the first place. Who are the bad guys and what are they doing?

[Assistant]
When Congress passed the 14th amendment, they wrote in certain rules that greatly affected the rights people had, as well as the limitations the States had in blocking those rights. The most famous part of the 14th Amendment states:

* " All **persons** born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." *

Some people wanted the word "person" ("All **persons** born or ....") to apply not just to humans, but to corporations as well. Their opinion is that any right given to a person should also be given to a corporation, since the law already recognized that corporations are like artificial humans beings (Corporations make deals like humans, they buy and sell, etc.)

They wanted all the benefits human citizens have and few of the burdens. For example, Corporations want to be able to donate as much money as possible to politicians who will look out for their interests, while citizens are much more limited in that regard. When citizens commit crimes, they can be thrown in prison, but when Corporations do the same (usually on a much larger scale), they don't get thrown in prison, because it's impossible. Afterall, how do you throw an artificial person anywhere?

Sometimes, when they bankrupt the country, the Government gives them more money to play with. This makes people angry, especially when they find out that some of these Corporations pay very little or no tax, much less in ratio than the average taxpayer.

This, among other things, gives Corporations unfair advantage against individual citizens,  who normally don't have the money or connections to ensure the loyalty of people they elect to represent them.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Matrix]Is it enough just to have 16 women and 7 men to repopulate Zion?

I totally understand the whole Matrix cycle of 100 years, where the Machines destroy Zion. But I'm still skeptical to the idea that 23 people that were released from the Matrix would be enough to repopulate Zion?

Also keeping in the fact that the One has to choose people that weren't redpilled, otherwise the whole charade of the Matrix disappears. We saw how weak and oblivious Neo was when he first woke up.

There are two major questions that me and gf have been arguing:

1) Can 23 people actually populate Zion fast enough in 100 years to the numbers we saw in the movie

2) How aware are the 23 people released from the Matrix regarding mankind's predicament? When they are released, they will still have the cable ports on their skins, so they should know something is up, especially so when their children are born without those ports.

[Assistant]
1. No but they aren't going to do it alone.  They are going to free people from the matrix who are going to have children.  Beyond that the size of zion is a bit flexible from the on screen depictions.  At times it seems to be around 1000 or so people and at other times it seems to be closer to 50k.

2.  They will believe that Neo (or the previous one) freed them from the matrix unaware of the previous incarnation of Zion.  They would not be surprised by the lack of ports in their children in the same way that Neo believes he is the first "one".