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

[User]
[Death Note] Could the Death Note be used to kill people in a positive way?

I know that sounds odd, but hear me out. Say for example if you have a person who's terminally ill and in a great amount of pain. Could you say, write their name in the Death Note, give them the maximum time of two weeks before dying, and then write "So and so died completely pain free, totally happy while having a continuous non-stop orgasm in their last 10 minutes of life" or something along those lines?

How about if a person wants to commit suicide due to horrible traumatic memories, and asks for your help, could you write in the death note that they "forget all painful memories for the two weeks up until they die"?

[Assistant] Yes, as long as it's physically possible. For both of your examples it would just be 2 weeks of delirium delusion for 2 people on death's door as their mind slowly dies. Otherwise it just becomes a run of the mill heart attack. This is backed by Light's experiments where he tries to transport the prisoner half way around the world in an hour (fails and the prisoner just dies of a heart attack because it's physically impossible) and the bus hijacker (succeeds and he pretty directly controls said jacker's state of mind and actions prior to his death).


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

[User]
What does "right is prior to good" mean in deontological ethics?

Can anyone explain what is meant by right? I know good being prior to right means that the ultimate justification of our actions is maximizing good.

[Assistant]
People use this phrase in a few different ways, but usually the idea is that either the right or the good has some kind of logical or metaphysical priority.

That is, if the good is prior to the right, then we mean something like rightness, as such, substantially depends on or is derived from goodness, as such.  If consequentialism is supposed to be such a system wherein the good is prior to the right, then it is a system in which we can't know the right until we work out the good because it turns out that the right *just is* something in relation to the good.

So, if we're thinking this way, saying the right is prior to the good is the supposed reversal of this.  That is, the good, as such, is derived from the right.  So, if something like Kantian Deontology is such a system where the right is prior to the good then, perhaps, we mean that good, as such, (like the Good Will) is conceptually dependent upon the right, as such (i.e. Duty).

Beyond this, though, these distinctions sometimes have a tough time being maintained.


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

[User] ELI5: How did places like mainland Asia and Europe develop so many unique languages when people were relatively close to each other?

[Assistant]
Close in the modern automobiles and aircraft sense.

But whats close when youre a medieval peasant who cant afford a horse?  One days walk?  Two?

The pre-industrial world was *much* smaller because everything was limited by the speed of leisurely travel.  You would live and die in a very small radius from where you were born, generation after generation.


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

[User]
I Hate Rejecting Papers

So I became a reviewer for one of the journals I published to during my PhD and I'm happy to be doing it, but I find that I reject far more papers than I accept and it's bothering me. I can always tell when a great deal of work and thought has gone into a manuscript and it makes me sad to send a rejection recommendation. Obviously, the field would not necessarily benefit if I lowered my standards (assuming they are calibrated properly), and I do make sure to find and note aspects of the paper I like and give grace where I can, but even so, rejecting doesn't feel great, especially when you've been on the other side of it, as we all have I'm sure. Any way to get over this while making sure I stay a quality reviewer?

[Assistant]
There is too much published junk out there, keep your standards where they are and let the chips fall where they may. Don't make it personal.

Plus, the editor makes the final decision. I've asked papers to be rejected that were  published.


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

[User] ELI5: What causes that stoop in old folk where their head and neck are permanently bent forward?

[Assistant] Its called kyphosis, and its a number of things that cause it - fractures from weak bones (wedge fractures), discs that dehydrate and become deflated, and a lack of strong back muscles to hold a more upright posture. Because there is more weight in front of the spine than behind, all these forces tend to result in the spine curving forward through the upper thoracic (high chest) area.


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

[User] [Attack on Titan] Why do characters have inner monologues that seem to go on for two days in the midst of life or death battles?

[Assistant] They're not sitting around thinking out monologues to themselves, they're having snap realizations and analysis of the scene around them, monologues are just the only way to present that sort of wordless internal processing to third parties.


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

[User]
[MCU] Would Darren Cross's shrink ray have been an effective weapon against Thanos?

It's likely a moot point since it was probably destroyed when the building imploded, but if it was still around and accessible would it be a simple matter of zap Thanos, mop up the Titan goo, then head back to the Avenger's facility for debriefing and cocktails?

[Assistant] We've only seen the device tested on unprotected humans. Potentially the effects could be averted or blocked by alien tech, like energy fields or advanced armor. That, and we don't know what actually goes into the molecular structure of a Titan in the MCU.


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

[User]
[Black Panther] What happens if the King of Wakanda does not accept the combat challenges?

In Black Panther, T'Challa is challenged to participate in combat twice as part of the rituals of becoming or remaining king.

If I recall correctly, the second time he accepted the challenge (with Killmonger), his people told him that he didn't have to accept, but T'Challa replied by saying that it was his choice to accept.

If he hadn't chosen to accept, would the council have to decide? If they do, I'm sure they'd show their bias towards T'Challa and let him keep his kingship. If that's the case, would Killmonger have any other way of taking the throne?

[Assistant] They said he didn't have to accept because they thought killmonger was illegitimate and didn't have a claim. Once it became clear that he did have a rightful claim to the throne there wasn't really a choice.


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

[User] [Fallout] through science would there be any way to make a hybrid human super mutant?

[Assistant] Super mutants aren't really a seperate race, as they are sterile and can only be created by exposing humans to the FEV virus. So making a hybrid with selected traits is only really possible by engineering the FEV virus to do specifically what you want, and if you can change it on a whim, then why would you even stick with super mutants? Why not make it so that FEV turns you into a Dr Manhattan-type being, or a fire-breathing dragon, or something more usefull than just being really strong and green.


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

[User]
How do I cite a transgender author's name

Hi, everyone!

I am trying to cite an old article by an author who has since come out as transgender and changed their name. Do I cite the text using the name which appears on it (essentially deadnaming them), or do I use their new name?

I feel like this is kind of a tricky situation because, on the one hand, I want to respect the author's new name, but I also want my citations to be "correct" for plagiarism's sake.

[Assistant]
Heres what MLA 9 (idk about other style guides, sorry) says in section 5.15

If you are writing about or working directly with an author whose name changed and you know they do not use their former name in references to their workfor example, trans authorslist their works under the name they use, regardless of the name that appears in the source. Do not supply information about the name change or cross-reference entries, and avoid using the former name in your prose.


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

[User] If humans were to become a multi-planet species, could humans on Planet A and humans on Planet B eventually become two separate species over a vast length of time in two possibly different environments?

[Assistant]
If humans were to become a multi-planet species then one would assume that they would be able to exchange genetic material between the populations on the various planets. The only way they would ever diverge into separate species is if the planets were somehow reproductively isolated from one another for a *very* long time. Long enough for the two populations to somehow evolve innate barriers to reproduction.

So the only way this could really happen would be if humans gained and then lost the ability to travel between planets. If all of the populations were reproductively isolated, then they would probably speciate given enough time.


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

[User] ELI5: how did sheep get rid of their excess wool before humans began shearing them?

[Assistant]
They didn't have excess wool before humans domesticated them.  The excess wool growth in sheep bred for their wool is the result of selective breeding for wool production.

The wild ancestors of domestic sheep, mouflon, don't have much wool.  Today there are domestic sheep breeds that don't have any wool.


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

[User] Can light, be it wave or particle, ever be motionless? or do they have to have some speed at all times?

[Assistant]
A full and precise explanation would require more math than is appropriate here.  However, the short answer is no.  A photon (which is massless) cannot stand still; it must always travel at c as a consequence of relativity.  In fact, the existence of a massless particle at all is a consequence of relativity, so it should be no surprise that we need relativity to deal with it.

However, this discussion really only holds in vacuum.  In matter, we can have many photons that interfere with each other in such a way that it *appears* that light is moving slower than c, an effect known as index of refraction.  The index of refraction of a material can be (in principal) arbitrarily large, so light in the material can travel arbitrarily slowly.

Moreover, if you take two mirrors and put a photon between them, then the photon bounces back and forth.  The effect is a standing wave which does not propagate through space.  You can sort of think of this as a photon standing still, but probably a better way of thinking about it is as a superposition of photons traveling in opposite directions.  It's worth noting that this phenomenon is as exotic as it sounds: it happens in a microwave, water waves in a bathtub, etc.


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

[User]
How does electromagnetic radiation carry information?

I've always been interested in how we can send information using electromagnetic radiation. Particularly how we can send both analog and digital information. I've tried doing some research but the explanations have always been far too complex for me.

Edit: I had a simple understanding of digital transmission already and it seems to really be as simple as I thought. The reason why I had trouble was because of analogue transmission.

[Assistant]
Take two loops of wire and connect them with another wire so they look like this O---O. Put a compass in one loop, and take a magnet and move it back and forth through the other loop. You should see the compass needle move slightly.

You have just made a working telegraph.


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

[User]
[general superhero/time travel] Am I legally responsible for taking care of my "kids" who are from the future and just visiting me?

As a generic superhero, I didn't think I'd do much. But just when I began thinking about quitting, people from the future started appearing to tell me how impactful my work is.

A few of these people are teenagers claiming to be my future kids.

Thing is, they won't leave.

So, what are the legalities of this?

Do I have to make sure they go to school? How much do I have to provide for them?

If they mess up, am I liable?

I thought about reaching out to Cyclops (Scott Summers), but I don't see him as a good father.

[Assistant]
I'd say establishing parentage is the first step.  Do they have the same glowing symbol on their bodies?  Are you SURE they're your kids and not a nefarious plot from the future to destroy you and let evil reign?

If it is found they are your kids then US law is pretty clear on caring for kids until their 18th birthday.  The question there is is that a couple years from now (assuming teens) or is it 2068?

Get a lawyer.


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

[User] Why don't meadows have bushes/trees like the land that typically surrounds them?

[Assistant]
There are several causes for lack of trees.

The meadow may just be in an early successional state where trees haven't grown back yet.  This would be due to a disturbance like a fire or landslide that killed the trees that had been there previously.

The meadow could be growing in a location where the environmental conditions don't support tree growth but do support grasses.  There could be a lack of water, the soil maybe very shallow, or the wind might be too extreme for trees.

It's also possible for grazing animals to keep growth low, so only plants that can come back from the roots like grasses will persist over time.


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

[User]
[General]Why is it so rare for military sci-fi series to not depict promotions even after dozens of insane accomplishments?

For example, Mass Effect's Commander Shepard should have probably been skyrocketed to Flag Officer status after all he/she did in the first two games. Master Chief isn't even a Commissioned Officer I don't think when he really should be at least on the level of a senior ONI official. In Call of Duty, you're often saving the world and I don't recall you ever being more than a Sergeant or Lieutenant.  I know in Star Trek, Picard and Riker both rejected promotions which is fine but in most series the hero(oes) stay relatively low ranked in spite of being probably the most famous soldiers in their respective armies and navies. It's also a huge problem in anime where you have characters like Ichigo who never become a Captain and such like that.  It's weird and frustrating.

Edit: OK so thank you for the responses everyone. The consensus is that if the protagonist is promoted too greatly then they'll no longer be an interesting protagonist since they're mostly an admin and logistics person, and that great soldiers do not always make great leaders.

[Assistant]
John-117 AKA Master Chief was promoted to Master Chief Petty Officer, the highest enlisted rank possible in the Navy, a few years into the war so that he could have some command over troops. The issue is that jumping from an enlisted rank to commissioned rank is incredibly rare to happen. His feats prior to Halo CE didn't warrant that promotion.

Master Chief's widely known accomplishments (Halos 1-3) were in a relatively short amount of time.  These games happen over the course of 3-4 months, of which about 50% is just travelling through Slipspace. There really wasn't time to properly promote him during the games.

After Halo 4, in the Halo comics series *Escalation*, Lord Hood even tells him that he could be made into an admiral, no questions asked, because of his accomplishments. Chief declines  saying " 'The Admiral' doesn't have quite the same ring to it."

Post-war there was a change in the UNSC command structure, with the UNSC creating a new military branch called Spartan Operations. Spartans now have their only ranking system with each rank having a UNSC authority equivalent: Spartan-First Lieutenant, Fireteam Leader-Captain, Mission Handler-Major, Spartan Commander-Colonel, and Director of Spartan Operations/Commander-in-Chief of Spartans (CINCSPAR)-General.


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

[User] The year is 3014. We have space colonies, we've cured cancer and AIDS, no one is hungry or poor... what are the main themes in today's science fiction?

[Assistant]
Transhumanism, what it means to be human and how technology is rapidly redefining the boundaries of human experience.

The technological singularity, where technology and the A.I. that advance it are doing so at a rate faster than in all of human history.

The emptiness of space: Man has undoubtedly established some kind of colony on distant worlds, but finds the distance between them hard to traverse.  Only the hardy and some say crazy can stomach the near limitless black gulfs that exist between a Earth and its barely habitable colonies.

If intelligent alien life has not been found yet amidst centuries of exploration and probing, there is the profound notion that Mankind is the most intelligent species that we will ever know, and the implications could threaten to shake the whole of humanity to its core as we redefine our place in the universe (or at least the galaxies.)


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

[User]
ELI5:What happens physiologically that causes men to get man-like features, and lose boyish features as they age?

To be more specific. I have been working with lot of 18-19 year old boys lately, and they are all baby faced. Then, looking back at pictures of myself at that age, I had the same thing happening.

What happens in the mid-late 20's that causes facial features to "harden" up, and lose that soft boyish look?

By 25 you can build the body of a fully mature man easily enough, but facial features tend to stay soft.

[Assistant]
Testosterone.

Testosterone causes bone to become denser and this alters the shape of the jaw. It also causes you to put on increased muscle mass.

You also have the natural loss of "baby fat" in the face and neck that both genders go through. These are fat deposits that generally stop being used by the body once you reach adulthood. Instead your body starts putting fat in other places such as the gut and hips.


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

[User]
[MCU] In The Avengers, what happens to the team if that nuke goes off?

More to the point: do Thor and Hulk survive? They're the only two I think you could make an argument for... MAYBE Stark, but I don't think so... what do we think? Can an Asgardian survive a nuke? What about a seemingly indestructible giant rage monster?

[Assistant] I think Thor definitely survives. He survived being exposed to that star and generally stars are way more powerful than nukes. MCU Hulk has never really shown his limits. In the comics Hulk has survived being nuked before.


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

[User]
Are employees a type of "Servant Class" with a kind of arbitrary captivity?

Very few social options. Financial dependence on a "cash nexus" (employer).  How are employees not essentially just a liberalized feudal serfs that is tied to a class of job owners instead of being tied to land?

[Assistant]
This is how a very simplified version of the Marxist argument might go. While not equivalent, this dynamic between an employer and employee (or, more precisely, a worker and owner) is a continuation of the history of class relations in society right on down from the time of feudal lords and their serfs. This is described as 'wage slavery'.

Don't know how you would want be to expand on that so if there's anything else, do say.


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

[User]
Why are ungulates classified by toe parity?

I just discovered on Wikipedia that, contrary to my intuition, deer, moose, giraffes, camels, and sheep are all only very distantly related to horses. The former are all Artiodactyla while horses are Perissodactyla. This is rather strange to me because they look very similar and certainly more similar than a moose and an orca do (apparently orcas are also Artiodactyla). How is it possible that orcas and moose are more related than horses and moose?

Edit: For clarification, I understand how phylogeny works based on shared ancestry, not morphology. What I am more interested in is any more in-depth background on how the decision was made to classify ungulates based on toe parity, and perhaps anything on how exactly orcas fit into this.

[Assistant]
It is because we determine things as more closely related if they share a more recent common ancestor. So orcas and moose shared a common ancestor more recently than orca and horse or moose and horse.
DNA supports Perissodactyla and Artiodactyla (or Cetartiodactyla) as two separate groups.
Within mammals, convergent evolution (traits that look similar but do not share a single origin), is pretty common. This makes determining relationships from morphology alone much more challenging!
If you are interested in cetacean evolution and how they came about from the artiodacyls you could look into transitional fossils for this group. It's actually really cool (to me anyway) to see the mix of traits as the cetaceans adapted back into life in the water!


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

[User] ELI5: How can the power go out during a storm and then come back the next second?

[Assistant] Lightning hits an overhead wire, and trips a breaker.  The breakers are auto reset on the first trip, so the lights come back on after a second.  If the fault is gone, like lightning, the power stays on.  If the fault remains, like a tree on the wires, then the power stays off.


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

[User]
[MCU] Did it really have to be a snap?

Listen, I understand the symbolism of "everything ends as it begins" and bringing back everyone with a snap because they were killed by a snap. The whole question is, did it have to be a snap? Could Prof. Hulk have punched the ground with the gauntlet? Closed his fist really dramatically? Hit them with an "All the single ladies" hand wave?

[Assistant] Nop. According to Jim Starlin, who made the Infinity Gauntlet comics, it was just the most contemptuous action Thanos could think of. Like, 'You spent an entire world's worth of heroes trying to stop me? I'll kill you all with, like, a snap or something. You're all so far beneath me.'


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

[User] ELI5 : What are the differences between normal MP3 and VBR MP3?

[Assistant]
the bitrate, or quality, is constant in a regular MP3.

In a VBR MP3 (Variable Bit Rate) the quality of the sound drops considerably during portions of silence or simple sound and rises during more complex sounds to reduce the size of the file, while allowing for high quality.


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

[User] ELI5: What will happen to the economy as a result of the baby boomers dieing?

[Assistant]
It's not them dying that we really have to worry about. It's the 5-10 years just before that. We consume 80% of the healthcare in our lives in the last few years.

And with more and more seniors being supported by fewer and fewer working age individuals, it starts to look vary precarious as to how we fund the whole thing.


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

[User] What happens to worms when the ground freezes ?

[Assistant] During winter most worms stay in their burrows, prisoners below soil frozen hard as rock and topped by ice and snow. They are coiled into a slime-coated ball and go into a sleep-like state called estivation, which is similar to hibernation for bears. (The mucous, or slime, keeps the worms from drying out.)


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

[User]
ELI5: What is the difference between PGP keys, SSH keys, and SSL keys?

I know that they all use asymmetric encryption, but I don't understand their differences and applications. Any guidance is much appreciated!

[Assistant] The only difference is the types of programs they're used for (PGP usually for email or encrypted messages, SSH usually for securing remote connection to computers, SSL usually for running a website or anything else done over SSL), but besides that they're the same keys just wrapped in a different container.


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

[User]
ELI5:what is cold fusion?

So i recently read an article where the term "cold fusion" was used, it was described as something that could provide 1500kilowatt out of 1 gram fuel?

Is this right?
And if so, would it be cheap enough that people would actually use it?
(Example: If fusion went out in the market people would probably still buy coal fueled energy since its significantly cheaper).

[Assistant]
Fusion is an incredibly abundant source of energy, and we know it works because the Sun and hydrogen bombs are both powered by it.

Unfortunately, since it only seems to happen at absurdly hot temperatures -- easily hot enough to melt any material -- it is very hard to control.  (As opposed to nuclear fission reactors, which are made of metal and ordinarily do not melt.)

In 1989, some researchers announced that they had figured out how to make fusion happen at lower temperatures.  That would have been *huge*... had it worked.  Unfortunately, in their rush to be the first to announce such a groundbreaking discovery, they didn't check their work, and nobody could reproduce their results.  It ended some scientific careers.

Fusion research continues, but it's generally "hot fusion", which requires exotic things like giant magnets to contain the fusion reaction, which themselves consume a ton of electricity... they're still trying to figure out how to generate more electricity than they use in the process.

When people talk about "cold fusion", they're often not even talking about fusion at all, but rather about fraudulent technological claims that don't actually work.


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

[User] Does evolution work faster for beings with a shorter lifespan since their genes get passed on faster?

[Assistant]
Yes! And this is why you can get things like drug resistant bacteria if you aren't careful. Bacteria have such rapid life cycles and such huge populations that the single bacteria that mutated a viable resistance could reproduce to replace that entire drug-killed population.

Side note: always finish your courses of antibiotics completely, and never ever take antibiotics unless your doctor specifically tells you to.


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

[User] Why is economics considered a science?

[Assistant] Does your definition of science differ from the conventional definition? The science of economics is concerned with testing hypotheses motivated by theories about the world that are either justified or not by available evidence, and rendering those theories predictive and useful through coherent models. There are good economists and bad economists, but that's certainly not limited to that field.


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

[User]
ELI5 Why are sounds like rain and campfires relaxing to so many people?

How does a sound calm people down, is it all association with good memories?

[Assistant]
They mask what you can hear and reduce audio stimulation.

If you are trying to fall asleep, structured sounds, even faint ones, can keep you awake.  A dripping faucet might not make a lot of noise, but the distinct contrast between noise and silence is enough to draw your attention.

Unstructured noises, often referred to as white noise, are loud enough to mask distracting structure noises, but because they are diffuse, there is nothing for your attention to latch onto.  Your brain spends less energy processing sound, and you become less stimulated and more relaxed.


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

[User] Why don't refineries reclaim their flare's energy to heat water or the distillation stack?

[Assistant]
I worked at a refinery. And we did use hot exhaust from the refining process to fire a steam plant that powered a ~~10KW~~ 10MW co-generation plant that mostly powered the refinery with a small amount of sell-back to the power company.
But that hot exhaust was a continuous part of the ongoing process, not temporary like a flare would be.
As you may know, refineries are just big giant chemistry sets.
One process feeds another process feeds another process and so on.
If some part of the process fails, bad stuff can happen, vessels get over filled, or over pressurized, or under filled and under pressurized, or flammable and poisonous product gets spilled. The hard part about this is : a refinery + co-generation can't just start up and shut down with the push of a button. It takes days, sometimes weeks to do a proper start-up and days to do a shut down.
So, what you have, for safety and efficiency, are those emergency flare stacks at various points in the process so that in the event of an "upset" in the process, the production flow has somewhere to go wile the process is either being fixed or shut down.
The burn-off is so the material does not collect anywhere and form an explosive air/gas mixture.
You can tell if a plant process is "upset" if you see flares when you drive by.
It means something aint right up in there.
Flares are supposed to be temporary in nature so there is no economic benefit to build co-generation for them.


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

[User] [4 Minutes] What exactly was that thing Madonna and JT were trying to keep ahead of but still caught up to them in the end? Why wasn't anyone else we saw trying to avoid it as well?

[Assistant]
It's the physical manifestation of the end of the song.

That's not Madonna and JT. That's the physically manifestations of the music of Maddona and JT. Those manifestations can only exist within the confines of a catchy pop number. They have a limited time to exist as their entire world only exists for 4 minutes.


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

[User] [King of the Hill] Would Hank actually punish Bobby if he started to get into Charcoal?

[Assistant] He would probably set up an elaborate blind taste test, ala coke/pepsi. Peggy will explain that sometimes it's ok to lie in order to spare your father's feelings. Bobby will then intentionally lie and say the worst meat is best. But Dale, being the good friend he is, will have already switched plates sha-sha-sha style. Thus making it look like propane powered meat is better. Even though it's not.


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

[User]
ELI5 : Can invertebrates be paralyzed?

 Are there any invertebrates that can and cannot be paralyzed?

[Assistant]
Their nervous systems arent always so highly centralized so whether you can do catastrophic damage in one spot or not will vary.

In a segmented insect like a bee or ant they do have a spine-esque nerve bundle moving from the head to the thorax and presumably it could suffer the same damage.

A starfish has a decentralized ring-shaped nervous system and you can literally chop them in half with a cleaver to make two independent starfish halves that might grow back into new starfish.

This is the case for a lot of radially symmetric invertebrates like urchins and jellyfish, there is no brain located in a head controlling everything remotely, and so you cant sever it.


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

[User]
Can someone explain the behavior of Superfluid Helium?

It has been stated that superfluid helium can flow indefinitely under its own inertia and without friction. How is this possible?

[Assistant]
When all Helium atoms fall into their many-bodyquantum-mechanical ground state, they can all move synchronously. So there is no friction between atoms, but there could still be friction between the superfluid and e.g. the walls of a tube.

Friction implies the transformation of kinetic energy to heat. A superfluid is a gapped quantum system, so heat can only be added to the system in units of at least the gap energy. In a superfluid, this is allowed only if the superfluid flows faster than its critical velocity. If the flow is slow enough, there cannot be any friction due to a combination of constraints from quantum mechanics, conservation of energy, and conservation of momentum.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why, despite all the advances in browser technology, does the screen still jump when an off-screen image or other part of the site loads?

If I'm reading a piece of text, I expect to stay on it. Something loading off-screen (common now that sites are so big and load lots of stuff via AJAX) shouldn't bounce me to a different position on the page.

[Assistant] Because your browser still doesn't know how big that image is going to be until it downloads it, so it has no way of knowing how much space to leave. The people who design the website could plan for it, but many of them don't.


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

[User] [Star Wars] In the Clone Wars series we see the clones bonding with Jedi and thinking Independently. How come no Jedi knew about order 66 and no clones refused executing it?

[Assistant]
One thing not mentioned is that Order 66 is just one order among *many* Contingency Orders, all of which deal with all sorts of different things *including* one where the Supreme Commander (Chancellor Palpatine) would be deemed unfit to lead and someone else would take command.

As such, Order 66 doesn't really stand out: "Yeah there's an order in case the Jedi do something bad, but we've also got one where we can detain the Supreme Commander with lethal force, there's probably one where we have to arrest the Senate, declare martial law over Coruscant, or even to go into radio silence and break apart into cells in case the Grand Army becomes compromised at the higher levels."

If it was just ONE order, a secret password for ONE diabolical plan, it'd absolutely stand out. When it's one among 150 potential orders, it just seems like a general "just in case" contingency to plan for.


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

[User]
eli5: Why does applying pressure to an led screen cause it to warp and show green lines and shapes?

Basically exactly what the title says. Why when I press on my laptop screen does it seemingly warp and make weird shapes and colors.

[Assistant]
There's a white light in the back of an LCD called the backlight.

LCD is short for Liquid Crystal Display.

Inside the display is something called a TFT - Thin Film Transistor.

The TFT uses electricity to magically change the color of the liquid, this creates pictures.

When you press the screen, the liquid moves around and this interferes with the magic color changing which produces puddles or splashes of different colors.

The TFT is a grid, so possibly the green lines you see are a result of the TFT electrifying the crystal juice.


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

[User]
[Star Wars] Does the force travel in waves, or even at all? It's not magic, so its gotta have some sort of physical properties right?

For example, if two people used force abilities at each other at the same time would there be interference in the middle? Going on with that, if two people used force push at each other at an angle, would the two pushes meet up at a point and form a super force push when they met?

[Assistant]
Force is a psychoactive field that clearly doesn't obey normal physics as we understand it - for very least it can transfer information faster than light.

I think if you want to ascribe it some sort of physical analogy, it's probably better to think of the Force as one giant cell, like an amoeba, and Force-users inside it as it's mitochondria. It's sort of one colossal self-balancing living thing, that encompasses all galaxy, if not the universe.


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

[User] ELI5: Why do old trees (especially olive tree) get such a rough, uneven bark on the trunk ?

[Assistant] If you look closely at the bark, youll see layers. The outer layer of the bark is from when the tree was young and skinny.  As the tree grew fatter, his old layer of bark split open while a new bigger one grew underneath. Then when that new layer gets too small, it splits open in the same place, and this goes on and on over the years, until these split places in the bark become really deep and craggy.


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

[User]
If gravity is mediated by gravitons, how would gravitons be able to escape a black hole?

As I understand, gravitons would be massless particles travelling no faster than C, just like photons. Photons cannot escape, but it seems gravitons would need to in order for the gravitation of a black hole to affect anything beyond its event horizon.

[Assistant]
Here we once again see why the notion of "virtual particles" can cause great confusion. When we say that a force is "mediated" by a particle, what we really mean is that the classical description of that force can be derived by calculating a feynman diagram in which a virtual particle is exchanged between the two things experiencing the force. In reality, this virtual particle is not a physical thing, but rather a guide to help doing calculations. Not only can virtual particles never be detected, even in principle, but using modern theoretical techniques it's now possible to calculate these things without ever making reference to virtual particles (on-shell amplitudes, BCFW recursion, for those interested).

If you insist on interpreting virtual particles as things, then you have to accept that very few of the normal rules apply to them, including the fact that they can appear to travel faster than the speed of light, and so there is nothing wrong with the gravitational field of a black hole being able to effect things outside. A real (not virtual) graviton represents a small gravitational wave, and it's certainly true that no gravitational wave, and therefore no real gravitons, can escape a black hole.

(* OPs question has been answered. Below is some more rambling about virtual particles *)

Again, there is nothing wrong with virtual particles escaping a black hole because virtual particles are not real things, they are a cartoon picture that is sometimes helpful to think about. The reason they're sometimes helpful to think about is because in any scattering process, if the momenta of the interacting particles conspire so that the virtual particle you imagine would have all of the right properties to be a *real* particle, i.e. it had the right mass, and was travelling at the correct speed (certainly less than the speed of light), then the result of your calculation "factorizes" into the product of the calculation describing the initial states to creating a real particle, and the calculation describing the real particle to travelling for a while and then deacying into the final states. Thus, in this particular configuration, your virtual particle has become "real". The technique of drawing feynman diagrams was developed precisely so that every possible way that an intermediate particle could become real is drawn as a line in the diagram representing that sort of particle. Modern techniques to compute amplitudes don't insist that internal lines in diagrams represent particles that could become real, and in return are able to greatly simplify calculations involving large numbers of initial and final states.


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

[User]
[ELI5] Why do wet rags clean dirty surfaces so much better than dry ones?

It appears that even a little bit of liquid makes a huge difference.

[Assistant] Water is an amazing solvent. Further most things you are trying to clean up are probably organic in nature. Life on Earth happens in water, either in the ocean or inside bodies that retain water. Because life depends on water as mediator for chemical reactions most organics are soluble in water to some degree.


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

[User] [Lego the movie 2014] When Benny built a spaceship near the end how did he make it fly without a hyperdrive that was needed previously to build a spaceship?

[Assistant]
Benny's Spaceship used 1980 Bricks. A Hyperdrive brick wouldn't been made until at least the first era of Star Wars Lego sets (1999 as the earliest).

Benny didn't NEED a hyperdrive to make a spaceship.


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

[User]
[Star Wars] Why was the second Death Star made to be so much larger than the first?

Wouldn't it have been far better for the empire to just rebuild the first one without it's weaknesses? What advantage does the Empire get from Death Star II being so large, that could make up for how much longer it took to build? (especially considering that the exposed superstructure is what allowed the rebels to destroy it)

[Assistant]
That's what they did. The only way to fix the problem of the exposed thermal exhaust port was to rebuild the station and vent all of the gas from millions of extremely tiny ports, each only a couple millimeters wide. Since so much gas had to be expelled, and the ports had to be a certain distance apart so as not to compromise the structural integrity, the size of the Second Death Star had to be greatly increased.

Also, the Second Death Star took only a fraction of the time to build. The first one took nearly twenty years between the fall of the Jedi and the rise of the Rebellion, and the second one took only a couple of years to build.


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

[User]
What if the Golbach conjecture get verified ?

>Any odd number superior than three can be written as a sum of two prime numbers

What would be its implications -in mathematics ?

EDIT attempt : I am in the app, it's Goldbach.

[Assistant] Not really too many direct consequences, it's not like the Riemann Hypothesis or anything. However, the methods to prove it are likely to be novel and interesting and can perhaps provide us with a new way to look at other problems.


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

[User] ELI5 Do different languages light up different neurons for the same concept ? Do clusters of neurons correspond to a certain thought?

[Assistant]
The brain more or less has a dedicated section(s) used for processing language, regardless of where the language comes from or what order the person learned them. Its not like, for example, Thai uses one part of the brain and French uses another.

That being said, language is a lot like art. Its not always the same from person to person, culture to culture, setting to setting. Your brain is a highly capable factory and though there is a main terminal responsible for language it might need to ask for assistance from other parts when trying to determine meaning and pragmatics.


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

[User]
[DC] How was nobody able to heal Barbara's legs after the Joker paralyzed her?

I mean, the DC universe was able to replace nearly all of Cyborg's body to be stronger than ever, so how could nobody help Barbara and just leave her wheelchair-bound for the rest of her living days?

[Assistant] She outright declined prosthetic legs when offered by J'onn, saying she does not want to be a robot, and stated that she dreams of the day when medical science advances enough to cure her. She emphasized that last part. That seems to have subtly implied that she does not want anything that anyone else does not have access to.


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

[User] If you cut yourself ten times in different places across one of your limbs, does it generally heal as fast as cutting yourself once? Or is there a cost to simultaneous healing?

[Assistant]
The answer is "it depends".

The wound healing process does have a cost, regardless of number of wounds.  Your body is creating new proteins, new cells, new tissues.  All of that requires 1) energy and 2) substrates (many and varied substrates).
There will be differences based on things like vascularization of the different tissues (more blood vessels = more blood supply = bigger pipeline to deliver energy and substrates through), extent of damage (IE damage to the basal layer of cells can impact wound healing time), and cell replication time (IE epithelial cells in the oral mucosa replicate extremely rapidly, which causes cuts in your mouth to heal rapidly compared to epithelial cells that make up skin).  Regardless of number of wounds, provided damaged tissues are provided the necessary energy and substrates, 10 wounds will heal as fast as 1 wound.  Caveat: if there are so many wounds that dealing with the byproducts are taxing other body systems, that can dramatically slow healing times and results in many wounds having a significantly longer healing time than one wound.  So there is a threshold where "10 wounds will heal as fast as 1 wound" is no longer true, based on severity and number of wounds.

Theoretically, wound location could impact healing time as well.  Wounds that are more proximal as opposed to distal could, theoretically, receive more substrate by being 'first in line' as blood flows.  More substrate would support more rapid cellular regeneration.  This almost certainly wouldn't impact superficial wounds, but if the wound is deep enough to impair blood flow to regions 'further down the pipe', it could have an impact on the healing of the distal wound.

So, bottom line answer: Generally speaking, wounds of similar severity to similar tissue will heal at similar rates, regardless of if there is one wound or ten.  However, if a wound is severe enough to impair or impede blood flow to a second wound, that second wound would likely heal at a comparatively slower rate until comparable blood flow is restored.  As a second caveat, if the combination of severity and number of wounds is enough to put a strain on other body systems, that can dramatically slow healing times.


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

[User]
[Marvel] Can someone tell me why Osborne's alter ego became Green Goblin? Like, why Goblin?

I just think its really weird to develop a goblin suit and then make pumpkin bombs. I'm trying to understand out of everything he could've done, why did he pick goblin? Also, there is Hob Goblin, again, why the goblin? Why does a goblin pop up?

Is there a symbolic reason or anything of significance that Norman had to be a goblin of all things?

[Assistant]
Norman had an experiment blow up in his face and he went nuts. He drew the idea of the Green Goblin from a nightmare he had as a child.

The Hobgoblin was the design of a fashion designer turned madman who took the Green Goblin formula and tweaked it in hopes it wouldn't make him insane. Several others have since used the Hobgoblin identity as well, most of whom have also either been brainwashed or otherwise have been mentally unstable.


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

[User]
What will globalisation look like when wages are too high and comparative advantage is lost?

Comparative advantage in today's global economy is basically one countries wages are lower so stuff is built there and sold to countries with high waged worker what will happen when everyone is making a wage such that comparative advantage is lost will protectionist policies be put on to propel domestic industries like post great depression?

[Assistant]
I think you're misunderstanding comparative advantage.

Comparative advantage is like this: Consider two countries that both make wine and cloth. Country A can make *both* wine and cloth more efficiently and more profitably than Country B. But Country A makes wine *much* better than Country B does while making cloth only a little better. So wine is just way more profitable for Country A than cloth is. In that case, Country A is better off buying cloth from Country B even though it's more expensive than making cloth themselves because overall, it's better to focus production on making and selling wine.

For Country A, switching production from wine to cloth would cost more than the cost difference between producing cloth and buying cloth. So even though Country B doesn't have any products that it makes better than Country A, it has a *comparative advantage* in producing cloth because it has a lower opportunity cost for not producing wine.


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

[User]
[Avatar the Last Airbender] Just to what degree is one considered a "master" of an element?

The lore states that the Avatar must master all 4 elements. While Aang has mastered airbending no doubt, the show makes it less convincing that he has "mastered" the other elements in such a short amount of time; especially firebending. I don't think Aang would be at the same level of mastery in firebending as someone like Iroh or Ozai. When it comes to mastery level for the Avatar, is it moreso just "at a competent level"?

[Assistant]
It may seem like a cop out answer, but in most martial arts, you're a master when your master says you're a master. There's no formal metrics or test, it's mostly an honorific.

As such, Aang probably went his whole life without becoming a master Earthbender, because his master was Toph, and her metric for competence puts most other masters to shame.


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

[User]
[Archer] How is ISIS still in business?

They seem to fail most of their missions, their employees embezzle quiet a bit of money from the corporation and no one seems to want to hire them except as fall guys. Where on earth are they getting money from?

[Assistant] Are you kidding? You know how gas stations make all their money off of the convenience store and not the gas? Same goes for ISIS. Sure, you think clandestine operations when you hear "International Secret Intelligence Service" but that's mostly for show. 99% of ISIS' operating budget comes from selling access to their expansive intelligence database and archive. It's really kind of a ripoff. Most of the intelligence in said database is readily available from commercial sources. ISIS just took the time to crawl those sources and collate the data. CIA, SIS and the KGB all do the same thing, ISIS (and those rat-bastards at ODIN) just commercialized it.


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

[User] Eli5: Why do we get a bump on our head when we bang it against something but nowhere else on the body?

[Assistant] Easiest way to put it is theres no padding/fat. You can get bumps on other parts but it would take a more severe hit. When you get injured blood rushes towards it. Think of it like plugging a dam. Now picture the dam is your fat. Now if you take the dam away and it starts to pour rain aka a head injury the blood still rushes there but now its trying to act as a damn. By doing this the body tries to go into a survival mode and it typically adds a calcium like layer which is usually the bump on the head.


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

[User]
ELI5: why does paper harden after drying

Recently I accidently spilled water on some important notes, so I dried them on a radiator. When they were fully dry, I noticed they were much stiffer. What is the cause of that? What is the internal chemistry behind it?

[Assistant]
Paper wrinkles for the same reason most natural fiber-based fabrics (which also happen to be mainly composed of digested cellulose) wrinkle when exposed to water.  The paper is essentially an amorphous polymer.  Wetting it heavily opens the polymer structure by allowing water to penetrate the matrix of hydrogen-bonded fibers and separate them.  This leads to a bunch of related phenomena, namely decreased wet strength (since you aren't dealing with strong intermolecular interactions anymore, just steric hindrance and the natural tensile strength of the paper fibers), volume expansion (from the expansion of the matrix) and a conformational change that comes from the impingement of water.  As the water leaves, this conformational change becomes locked in and usually results in wrinkling because that's a lower energy state than a completely flat sheet of paper.

As it turns out, you can also iron paper under low heat in much the same way you can iron cotton, linen or rayon fabric in order to remove the resulting wrinkles.  It works in much the same way, by applying heat to the amorphous polymer matrix to make it more glassy (in this case, that means essentially that it can flow) and flattening it into a new shape, which then becomes more crystalline (stiff) as it cools.


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

[User]
I believe that Adblock is wrong. CMV.

I believe that Adblock is immoral. Free content is usually only free (or cheap content is usually only cheap) because of advertising. To me, advertising is the price of admission to the content you're using, and if you don't want to be advertised to you shouldn't use the content, and using Adblock isn't all that much different than sneaking into a movie or torrenting copyrighted material. You're experience is slightly more convenient, but that convenience comes at the expense of content creators.

I've gotten into this debate on Reddit a few times, and I think that the people in this sub will be able to make more persuasive, less smug arguments than the people I've encountered on, say, Askreddit.

[Assistant] The main argument for adblock is that some ads are intrusive, such as youtube ads that play before your video, but nobody is obligated to actually look at ads.  Some ads flash and move and are distracting, others are really colorful and stupid.  You don't have to watch commercials on TV, you can just walk away.  Do the ad companies care?  No, if you're using adblock you're not in their demographic, their demographic includes people who a) don't mind the ads or b) will buy from those ads.  People who use adblock have neither of those traits, as they don't want to be sold to, so there is no lost business.


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

[User]
How do we perceive time when drifting to sleep?

That state of mind between wakefulness and sleep, where the mind wanders and it seems like we can watch our thoughts, but are not aware of controlling them. That's how I've categorised it, at least. It's in this state where it's possible to be thinking about one thing, then realize you're about to fall off your bike in the other thought you didn't know you were thinking, and jerk yourself awake.

Anyway, I've noticed that if I'm in this state and I hear a noise that brings me out of it, *the noise always seems to occur right when I drift into hypnagogia.* Every time, I think "how did that car honk its horn right when I just dozed off." This, as far as I can see, has three explanations:

Confirmation bias

Crazy luck

I don't perceive the passage of time in that state so it always seems like I had just entered it.

I assume it's the third one. Anyway, enough of my rant. The question is, how do we perceive time as we're falling asleep?

[Assistant] Essentially what you're describing is stage 1 non-REM sleep.  It's technically classified as sleep, but during that stage people can be pretty aware of sensory input and most often if something wakes them up they think they were not asleep (though EEG shows they were technically in stage 1 NREM sleep).  This is basically what is more historically termed hypnagogia, and as you've described, a host of seemingly odd/random experiences are not only possible, but common, during stage 1 NREM sleep.  Research has addressed some of these experiences, several of which have been discussed here on AskScience in the past.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why we instinctively clench our teeth/jaws when exerting force

Like opening a tough jar, hitting something, or just anything that involves force.

[Assistant]
It's historically (in an evolutionary sense) been beneficial to brace those parts of our body when you use force (because presumably this often happened in a fight/struggle and this reaction minimises risks in those scenarios - of e.g. breaking your jaw). So when you enter "combat mode" and you ready to use your muscles, this is your instinctive response.

In other words, you've evolved to do this because it was more beneficial than other potential instinctive reactions in such situations in our deep past.

Good guy natural instincts got our back, even if we just go into "combat mode" to open a jar!


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

[User]
Does the increased risk of lung cancer for smokers increase depending on the amount of cigarettes smoked or does even 1 cigarette per day/week give you the same risk ?

Does the increased risk of lung cancer for smokers increase depending on the amount of cigarettes smoked or does even 1 cigarette per day/week give you the same risk ?

[Assistant]
The risk is incremental with the amount and quality of cigarettes smoked.
It must be said, however, that even a small amount of tobacco smoking increases the chances of cancer by a lot.
In practice, if you smoke one light cigarette a day, you have a smaller risk compared to smoke 2 packs a day of heavy cigarette; but that single cigarette will alone increase greatly the risk of getting cancer compared to not smoking.


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

[User] How did Newton know there was a distinction between weight and mass?

[Assistant]
Early physicists already realized that mass plays two roles: as the source of inertia, or the resistance to acceleration, and as the property that the gravitational force acts on.  These properties are clearly different because even when gravity is balanced, as on a flat horizontal surface, a more massive object requires more force to accelerate.  Inertia appears as an intrinsic property of a massive object, whereas as gravity has to do with the interaction with other distant masses.

The surprising fact is that inertial mass is equal to gravitational mass, which is known as the equivalence principle.  A consequence of the equivalence principle is that, in the absence of air resistance and other factors, all falling bodies accelerate at the same rate because the mass factor from the gravitational force cancels the mass from inertia.

EDIT: The implication is then that on different planets, objects will have different weights (and thus fall at different speeds), but the weight will still be directly proportional to mass.


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

[User]
[Shakespeare] If William Shakespeare was truly The Immortal Bard and just happened to peak in the late 1500s, what is he writing now?

Obviously he fakes his death every 60-70 years and assumes a new identity, as one does.

[Assistant]
A brave Scottish general named ~~Macbeth~~ Thanos receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become ~~King of Scotland~~ holder of all 6 infinity stones. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his ~~wife~~ Mistress Death, Macbeth murders ~~King Duncan~~ Vision and takes the ~~Scottish throne~~ Universe for himself. He is then wracked with guilt and paranoia and that is why after he takes the soul stone he fights differently.

Obviously Shakespear wrote the plot to Avengers:Infinity War.


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

[User] ELI5: Why are people upset that CEOs make so much more money than low level workers?

[Assistant]
It's not so much that CEOs make so much more than regular workers, it's that salaries for CEOs have increased at a much faster rate than regular workers over the past 30 years.  Since probably the 1970's, we've seen a shift in the worker/employer relationship.  Whereas before, there was a certain 'unspoken agreement' between worker and employer that meant the worker would be loyal to the company (put in his 30+ years) and the employer would take care of him by offering a livable wage and benefits.  In the 70's/80's, that started to change.  Obviously, the most visible thing was a lot of companies closed their factories in America and outsourced their production elsewhere.  So the relationship changed.  Now there is a more adversarial relationship between the two. (I acknowledge that it never has been perfectly hunky dory, but now it's worse)

Wages for workers have stagnated since the 80's.  Partially, this is thought to be due to outsourcing.  (Why pay Americans when you can pay foreigners a fraction of the cost).  But, while wages for workers have stagnated, CEO pay has increased dramatically.  While obviously, CEOs provide intangible benefits to companies, it is difficult to accept that these businesses have become so much more efficient over the past 30 years in thanks solely to senior officers.

And additionally, in the past 15 years, several high profile companies have been found to be committing fraud or other crimes perpetrated by senior officers.  Enron was a big one 13 years ago.  Then, WorldCom and Tyco had big accounting scandals.  Then of course was the banking crisis a couple years back.  This has given corporate officers a bad reputation, as if they are all glad-handing crooks more likely to line their own pockets than try to play the game honestly.  Whether that reputation is well-deserved or not is up for debate, and is beside the point anyway.  The high pay they give themselves is just another example for the general public to believe they are in it solely for themselves.

These are just a couple reasons.


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

[User]
[Star Trek] If pushed how dangerous would The Federation be?

Suppose the federation truly armed its self for total war. Starting with the recall of all exploration missions and only built ships(total refits as well) that were meant for one thing and one thing only war, how powerful would they be?

[Assistant]
Extremely, but not necessarily in the context of warships or weapons.  The federation has vast scientific knowledge and resources which it simply refuses to use for reasons of morality, rather than logistic concerns.

This can be seen at certain crisis points in the history of the federation when they were tempted to compromise their morality in the name of survival.  When faced by the existential threat of the Borg, the federation was able to develop a virus to shut down an entire cube, and developed a weaponized version that was theoretically capable of genociding the entire race.  Whole the first iteration of that virus would have doubtlessly failed against the entire collective, the principle remains sound.  If the federation were in danger of being completely destroyed (after the successful assimilation of earth for example), resources would no doubt be devoted to the development of an anti-borg superweapon capable of disabling or destroying the whole of the collective.

In a similar vein, the founders, leader race of the dominion, were infected with a biological weapon capable of genociding the entire race after it became clear the dominion was winning a conventional war against the federation.  This single action was enough to force the dominion to surrender, or collapse.

With its knowledge of the omega particle, the federation is theoretically capable of weaponizing the particle into a bomb capable of destroying light years of space in a single detonation, and permanently damaging Subspace throughout the entire area.  Such a doomsday weapon would be capable of destroying the core systems of any known species with the exception of certain 'godlike' species, such as the Q.

I speculate that such a weapon would place even a member of the Q continuum in mortal danger.  Due to the federation-wide ban on even disseminating knowledge of the existence of the omega particle, there is insufficient data to prove this.


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

[User]
Why is water tasteless?

Sometimes you can taste the minerals in it, but in general it is tasteless. Why is this? Is it really tasteless, or have humans over thousands of years adapted to its real taste?

[Assistant] Water / H2O is an integral part in cells and is therefore always present around the proteins on the surface of olfactory / "smell detecting" cells. Such a system would nearly always fire and apparently a system which could offset this by detecting the *change* of water-smelling over time hasn't evolved anywhere.


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

[User]
I understand that astronauts inside the ISS are free falling. What about the Apollo Astronauts?

And How far do you have to go to have a bigger tug from the sun than the earth? Thanks.

[Assistant]
When flying in space with the thrusters OFF, you're in free fall.

When firing the engines, they weren't in free fall. The CSM engine produced about a 1/3 *g* acceleration. (It was an overkill engine for the job, because it was designed for a direct ascent mission.)

And obviously when landed on the Moon, they were not in free fall.


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

[User]
Does living on the faster moving equator cause differences in longevity from living at the poles?

I appreciate that the earth takes a day to rotate at the equator, and a day to rotate at the poles. Therefore, because the circumference of the equator is bigger, it is moving faster.

Ignoring environmental factors, if we had two lifeforms or devices with a guaranteed identical lifetime, how would having one at a pole and one on the equator cause a difference in duration of life?

Go physics go!

Thanks.

EDIT: Great responses, thanks, and I'm glad I've generated a little discussion. I'd weigh in but I have just enough science in me to understand but not express!

[Assistant] If the diameter of earth is 12,742 km, then everyday, a person on the equator moves 12,742 km x pi more than someone on the pole. This equals v = 463.3 m/s. According to the time dilation formula, t = t_0 / sqrt(1 - v^2 / c^2). Thus, you're increased time would be around 1.19 x 10^-10 %. Or, if you lived 100 years, you would see an increased lifespan of just under 4 milliseconds.


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

[User]
[Star Wars] Do indecent exposure laws exist for humans?

Several alien species walk around naked with no issue. Is it legal for humans to walk around naked?

If not, why the double standard?

[Assistant] Exposed genitalia.  Species that are allowed to be nude either have no external genitalia (like whatever Watoo was), concealed genitalia (like Wookies), or they have genitalia in other places and the few straps they're wearing *are* clothing in that they cover the genitals.


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

[User] What causes us to 'auto-breathe', and why do we have to consciously take breaths when we think about it?

[Assistant]
Unconscious breathing is regulated by the brain stem by monitoring the pH of the blood. Too much carbon dioxide, causes a disruption in the equilibrium causing some carbon dioxide to react with the water in blood creating carbonic acid, which lowers the pH and increases your breathing rate to expel more carbon dioxide. Lactic acid generated by extensive muscle use also decreases pH causing increased breathing rate. The actual process is actually pretty complicated and there are multiple pH chemoreceptors around your body (brain stem, near the carotid artery, along the aortic arch). These chemoreceptors then send the appropriate signals along nerves to the diaphragm, the muscle that expands and contracts your lung cavity.

In terms of conscious control, it's the same as with any other muscle in your body.


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

[User]
[Star Wars] Could you expand on the rule of two to the point it means two groups, and not necessarily two individuals?

The Sith rule of two, one to wield the power and one to crave it thus becoming stronger if they could beat the master. But I was wondering, could you take this ideology and expand it to apply to two groups? One "master" group, and one "apprentice"? Wouldn't that be an even better system?

I mean, the Jedi already have multiple masters on their council, so it could be argued, if the Sith wanted, they too could have a council, and a series of Sith apprentices who seek to overthrow?

[Assistant]
Sith don't want to have a council. Every individual Sith wants to be the leader of the Sith. The Dark Side of the Force is an addiction to power, to rage, and to tearing other people down.

Sith can cooperate temporarily for specific purposes, but they're planning on betraying each other. The rule of two isn't a plan so much as a recognition of a fact about the Sith.


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

[User]
[Star Wars] My child is a force-sensitive and the Jedi are asking me to let them take him. What is in it for me?

Do I get some form of compensation from the Jedi for letting my child go with them? It's kind of hard to make a living by myself but I want my son to make the best of his gift.

[Assistant] You get nothing, they are offering to teach your son the ways of the force. You can say yes or no, keep in mind though if you do say no and any sith get wind of his abilities they won't be as respectful of your wishes.


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

[User] What would happen and what would I feel, if I was exposed to a temperature near absolute zero?

[Assistant]
The answer is: it depends.

If you're unprotected in deep space in a vacuum, that's near absolute zero. If we ignore the other effects of being in a vacuum (such as your imminent death by asphyxiation, or the cooling produced by fluids boiling off), the temperature is relatively insignificant since heat loss would not be particularly high due to the insulating properties of a vacuum.

If you're interacting with an object (which we'll assume is insulated from the environment), then the specific heat capacity and the mass of the object will determine the outcome. However, unless you're dealing with a very small mass and/or a substance with a very low SHC, it probably won't make much difference in practical terms. Edit: just to clarify, the thermal conductivity of the object is also important in this. /edit

So, assuming we're dealing with a respectable quantity of a substance with a reasonable or high SHC such as water-ice, it's going to suck a lot of heat out of you.

Roughly speaking, the rate of heat transfer is directly proportional to the temperature difference. Now if you've ever got an ice cube out of a cold freezer (~-15C), you'll know that the tissue in contact with it will get cold very quickly, and that's with a temperature difference of ~50C. If you had an ice cube at near absolute zero, that's a difference of ~310C, about 6 times as much!

So exposed tissue would rapidly flash-freeze. Even if the amount of tissue flash-frozen isn't lethal by itself, it's quite possible that the stress of exposure will lead to cardiac arrest, which is a significant danger if you're suddenly immersed cold water or something. Otherwise you'll get the same symptoms as deep stages of frostbite.


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

[User] Politicians like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn have made political stand points on Billionaires, but considering most billionaires wealth is linked to equity and shareholding and the fact it is their net worth rather than their net earnings what economical approach would they take?

[Assistant] Politicians like them have suggested wealth taxes, which is a way to target that directly. There is a debate about the efficiency of such taxes and its side effects. The matter of valuation is a point of point of contention. It can be hard to properly assess people's assets and that encourages lying and requires more manpower and auditing (government costs).


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

[User] [Pokmon] The Hatterne line is known to attack people for either experiencing strong emotions, or showing strong emotions. Assuming this pokedex entry is true, how do trainers train and develop relationships with this Pokemon line?

[Assistant]
Actually answering...

Probably just avoid doing things that'll set them off, try to stay calm as often as possible.

Otherwise, do what one normally would do, feed, play, train, etc.

You don't have to get really excited or loud or other strong emotional things to do all that.


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

[User]
How much memory does the value 0.001 require?

So I wan't to be able to store sensor values in an SD card with a resolution of 000.01, and was wondering how many bits this would take up. So an example number would be 300.25. Thanks!

[Assistant]
You can just define your own numbers based on integer.

So each increment is 0.01.

You may consider having a 'valid range' so for instance it only covers the numbers between x and y.

Ada is pretty good at defining types like this.

But essentially, you can treat your 300.25 like 30025.

How many bits you will need is determined by the range you need to cover.

But a 16-bit int will cover all values between 0.00 and 655.36. A 32-bit int will hold values up to 42 million.


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

[User]
[MCU Infinity War] I left dinner cooking when I got snapped. Billions of others had fireplaces, etc. burning. Half our fire dept got snapped, and those that remained couldn't drive fire trucks through roads stuffed with abandoned vehicles. How did every major city nor burn down within one week?

Just got blipped back, and while I'm thankful Boston is still here, I'm not sure how it's here. From the footage I've seen, every single road in our city was filled with bumper to bumper driverless cars, burning car wrecks from accidents, felled airplanes, and more.

I imagine navigating any of these roads was impossible for days, weeks, or even months. And from what I heard, first responders did their best but were caught just as off guard as everyone else. I even heard all our dispatchers got snapped in particularly bad luck here in Boston. Other cities kept dispatchers but lost like 80% of their firefighters.

How did half our firefighters, with zero dispatchers, and no roads whatsoever put out what must have been the worst series of urban fires ever seen in modern history? How did the majority of populations of children in high rises not all die in terrible fires with their parents gone?

I'd say heroes like the Avengers would have helped, but from what I know even some of them got snapped away or outright killed.

EDIT: Typo in the post title, should be "how did every major city NOT burn down"

[Assistant]
Untold millions on Earth likely did die from these issues. That's the fridge horror of The Snap.

Maybe Stark Industries, in divesting from weapons of war, also focused on improved fire-suppression and other automated disaster-relief systems that mitigated some of the chaos until the remaining first responders could reach those victims.


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

[User]
[Star Wars] Why are blockades so effective?

Senator Amidala commented in episode I that the people of Naboo were starving during the trade federation blockade or something like that.  She also mentioned the same thing in the *Clone Wars* during the battle of Ryloth, and sought to have aid sent to them.  Shouldn't a planet such as Naboo with plentiful natural resources be able to support itself?

[Assistant]
The planet *could* support itself, but it probably just doesn't.  A lot of planets specialize their production for trade, and Naboo is one of those.  It's a very high tech planet with a very high standard of living.

And agriculture isn't something you can just go out and start anytime.  Especially modern agriculture.  It takes a lot of time investment to get fields ready for crops, and then it takes even more time to grow and harvest those crops.  And that's assuming you have anyone trained in doing so.


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

[User]
[Starcraft] What do the zerg eat?

It seems like an entire race of apex predators which must consume massive amounts of calories to keep running.

What do they eat? They must all be carnivores and spend most of their awake time eating. Is the creep edible? Like some massive fungus colony?

I'm thinking that prey must be a crucial requirement for any zerg campaign, just as fuel is for terrans.

[Assistant]
Creep handles most of the Zerg's ground-based logistics. It leeches minerals and nutrients from the soil, as well as consumes any biological matter it comes across. Whether that be living animals, dead bodies, or even other Zerg that the hivemind has chosen to sacrifice. These nutrients and other resources are spread via a complex series of capillaries and nearly invisible connection points into every single zerg, structure or unit, that contacts it.

Many Zerg battle forms, such as the Zergling, are often meant to survive only a short time, so are hatched with all the nutrients they need to endure a single battle before dying. In an ideal scenario, their corpse will be consumed by the creep, and the components redistributed into other Zerg functions.  However, if they absolutely must, many Zerg forms can also hunt prey and have a functional (if basic) digestive system if they must survive for long periods of time away from creep. Those without mouths usually aren't capable of doing such a thing, and are wholly dependent on creep and/or the whim of the swarm to stay functional.

Creep is not edible, either by the Zerg or by humans. Human digestive systems are nowhere near robust enough to break down creep's cellular structure, and so eating a portion of it would likely cause it to begin spreading inside the stomach. Leading to a gruesome and painful death.


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

[User]
[Halloween] In the timelines without a Thorne cult, how does Michael Meyers know how to drive?

Facilities don't giving driving lessons to murderous mute psych patients, after all.

[Assistant] It's not like it's *hard*, particularly if you're a murderous psychopathic mute in an inside-out Shatner mask. Once he figured out the pedals he presumably just kept going until he got wherever he wanted to go. Not like anyone who pulls him over is likely to walk away from THAT encounter.


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

[User] ELI5: What are those swarms of bugs actually doing when they seem to just be flying around in a small area?

[Assistant]
Could be for various reasons, depends on the situation, species, etc.

Usually it's somewhere with a damp breeze (downwind of a river or pond), and food.  They see something you don't and are hanging around where the food is for them.

Another reason is a mating swarm.  At certain times of the year some bugs swarm up to make the task of finding mates a lot easier (basically like a big mixer).


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

[User]
Why is the magnetic field non-conservative?

I know why it is mathematically, the line integral of the magnetic force along a closed path isn't zero, the gradient is equal to zero, etc. However, I don't understand physically what's going on. If the field is non-conservative then energy must be dissipating. But where and how?

[Assistant]
The magnetic force can't be evaluated to be conservative or non-conservative.  To determine conservative/nonconservative you need to take the curl of a field, and this isn't meaningful for the magnetic field because (magnetic field) != (magnetic force).  The force on a charge particle from the magnetic field depends on the velocity of the particle.  So the magnetic field isn't the sort of thing that can be conservative.

The force on a moving charged particle has direction of v .cross. B, that is, velocity crossed with field.  That imparts no energy to the particle because it is perpendicular to the direction of motion.  In that sense, the magnetic FORCE is conservative.  It does no work.

The electromagnetic force, on the other hand, is not conservative.  Changes in the magnetic field induce a functional electric field (although not all may call this an electric field), and this field can accelerate a charge through a closed loop.  The end.


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

[User]
Where along the Milky Way is galactic central point?

I'm asking because I'm currently in very rural New Zealand. I'm English so I'm not used to seeing the stars in the southern part of the sky.

When I look at the Southern Cross it seems to me that the Milky Way looks brighter around it than along the rest of it. So I thought maybe that's the direction of the galactic central point.

[Assistant]
As others have said, look in Sagittarius, which looks like a teapot.  Once you've identified the "teapot" the center of the galaxy is actually just where the tea would pour out of the pot, more or less.

It's just not very bright in that direction to your naked eye because of the giant dust clouds that obscure our line of sight towards the galactic center.  Most of the observations of the black hole in the center and all that are done in other wavelengths like radio.


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

[User] Eli5 When the weather forecast displays a temperature, but also displays a 'feels like' temperature, how can it feel hotter than it actually is?

[Assistant] Humidity can make the ambient temperature feel hotter because it doesn't allow you to sweat and cool efficiently. So while the temp may be 85 and feel like 85 with low humidity, with humidity in the high 70%+ can make it feel hotter than it really is.


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

[User]
[TNG]What is Captain Picard's native language and how many does he speak? Are the crew all speaking English or is that just the universal translator? Does Starfleet have a language that everyone has to know? What age are universal translators installed and does everyone on Earth get one?

That concludes my flurry of language related to Star Trek questions.

[Assistant]
He's probably speaking English.  We've seen that in the early days of the Federation, before universal translators were ubiquitous, English was the language of Starfleet, and appeared to be the official language of the United Earth government.  Stands to reason that most Terrans speak that as a primary or secondary language.
Most crew will also be speaking English for that reason, presuming they're able.  If they're not, the UT will be fine to use.
Universal translators are typically located in the comm-badge, and are not a cybernetic implant of any kind, so there's no real 'age' where a person has one installed.  Most civilian homes will have one integrated into their home comms system, and portable devices are also readily available if needed.


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

[User] [Star Wars] Does lightsaber attract blaster bolts curving their trajectory or Jedi uses Force to predict where exactly bolt will hit to block it?

[Assistant] The latter. It's called Combat Clairvoyance and is the skill that Luke was practicing with Obi-Wan when the Millennium Falcon had left Tatooine, using the droid that shot harmless bolts and a helmet that Luke couldn't see from.


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

[User]
If a person with a certain communicable disease dies of it and is buried, do the said pathogens continue to live, multiply and spread in the soil?

By extension, like how vaccination improves herd health, shouldn't incineration be a preferred mode of disposal of the dead rather than burial?

[Assistant]
This will depend on the pathogen in question. Some examples:

Anthrax can survive in soil after the host is dead, although the bacteria aren't actively multiplying (instead, they form spores).

Prions can also persist in soil ("survive" is the wrong word here because they're not alive).


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

[User] ELI5: Why do computer screens have that flickery bar going through them in tv/movies?

[Assistant]
Old school CRT monitors display an image by having a electron beam scan across the back of the screen. Pixels light up when the beam hits them and then fade again until the beam comes back around.

This is happening with a certain frequency, for example 60 times per second. It's good enough for our eyes since they don't adjust fast enough to really see the pixels fade out and light up over and over. Although higher refresh rates do feel easier on the eyes.

A camera recording a picture records an image (a frame) x times per second. For example 25 frames per second. So the camera isn't recording non stop, it's only recording x amount of times per second. And the pixels in the monitor aren't brightly lit non stop, they're only bright when the electron beam hits them before dimming again.

This means that every time your camera takes a frame, a row of pixels on the monitor will be brightest (where the beam hits) while pixels further away from the beam are dimming. Your eyes don't see it, your camera does.

Usually the electron beam moves at a different frequency than your camera records frames. So every time the camera records a frame, the electron beam will be lighting up a different row on the monitor. This causes the brightest row to be in a different place every time, when those frames play back fast as video, it looks like a flickering bar is moving back and forth across the monitor.

You can actually stop this effect by synching the camera's frequency with the frequency of the monitor so the brightest part of the monitor is always in the same place when the camera records a frame. You'd have to synch the camera's frequency with that of the monitor though which often doesn't happen when filming on location.

We don't really use old fashioned CRT monitors anymore but most screens still have a refresh rate of some kind.


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

[User]
Does the solar wind have any affect on the Earth's orbit?

The planet is constantly being hit by particles and energy that escape from the sun. Does this energy push the planet away from the sun, even slightly? Or are all affects negated by the pull of the sun's gravity?

[Assistant] Solar winds at a distance of 1 AU typically exert a pressure of about 1 nPa, which means that the Earth experiences a radial outward force of around 4 \* 10\^4 N. The sun exerts a gravitational force radially inward of about 4 \* 10\^22 N, 18 orders of magnitude greater. The effect of the constant outward force due to solar winds is to slightly increase the orbital period of the Earth by sqrt(10\^-18) \* 1 year, or around 30 milliseconds.


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

[User] ELI5: What is a P-Zombie?

[Assistant]
When you look at the behavior of a person or talk to them, they will seem like they are alive the same way as you are. They see colors, smell the spring air, know that they are there. They think therefore they are, right?

However, you can't really see into their minds, can you? The idea of a P-Zombie is that maybe such people aren't really sentient, they just behave exactly like the people who are. They don't experience being tickled like you do, but they react as if they did. They don't feel sadness when someone they like dies (and they also don't actually like them), but they behave just as if they did. They could be a robot for all we know, or a human body without a "soul" (however you define that) and so on.

As long as it isn't conscious and doesn't really experience qualia but from the outside is indistinguishable from someone who does, it's a p-zombie.


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

[User] How do spacecrafts locate themselves in deep space?

[Assistant]
There are several methods for spacecraft to find a reference point. There are two main categories of refereces to use, celestial and inertial.
Inertial may refer to gyroscopes, a laser ring and fiber-optic laser (these sense the doppler effect that is induced in beams of light when the unit is rotated). A hemispherical resonator gyro has a standing wave moving in a fused spherical shell, when the unit is moved the resonance changes.
Celestial reference can provide attitude reference by tracking the stars and triangulating its position. Solar reference uses the sun, and planetary sensors track the planets.


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

[User] ELI5: U.S Presidents don't earn THAT much, what do they usually do after they leave office?

[Assistant]
Every single president has been independently wealthy befor they ran.

None the less the former president cant often make more money by giving speeches, getting invovled in their party, and in general using their lasting status as president to their advantage.


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

[User]
ELI5: How did Iron Lungs work back in the day?

They look pretty creepy and when looking at one, it's hard to figure out how one worked to help someone breathe. How did they work? There wasn't a mask that the patient wore or anything (that I know of).

[Assistant]
An iron lung was an attempt to copy the way the body naturally breathes. So to answer your question, we have to discuss the body a little bit. Here goes.

In your chest, you've got your lungs. Just below your lungs you have a large, flat muscle called the diaphragm. This muscle is what controls breathing. When the diaphragm flexes, it contracts to become smaller. This happens the same way as any other muscle. What is special about the diaphragm is its shape. At rest it is shaped like a large dome tethered down at your body wall. When it contracts, the dome flattens. The effect this has on your chest is that it causes the volume of the chest to increase. As this volume increases, the air pressure inside the chest decreases. As a result of this, air is sucked down your airways and into your lungs (which have the capacity to expand). This is called **negative pressure breathing** since that is what drives air into your lungs. Just as when you sip through a straw you create negative pressure in your mouth, when you breath your diaphragm creates negative pressure inside your body to pull air inside.

Iron lungs worked the same way, but because these people had lost the use of their diaphragms, the negative pressure couldn't be generated *inside* the body, so the machine caused a negative pressure *outside* the body. The pressure difference wasn't so big that it caused damage to the person, but it was enough so that the body wall, and therefore the lungs, would expand and draw air inside to allow the person to breath.


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

[User]
[DC/Bioshock] How would the Atlanteans react to Rapture being built?

What would happen if Andrew Ryan lived in the DC universe and tried to build Rapture? Would the Atlanteans allow it? Or destroy it? Would they see it as a threat?

[Assistant] In-universe conspiracy theory: the Atlanteans actually helped Ryan build Rapture, using the city as a testbed for their more... esoteric experiments. Much of the in-game enhancements are actually derived from Atlantean technology.


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

[User]
eli5: How can Google maps know many small and recent businesses' locations so accurately?

I've realised that most businesses (even small kiosks) are seen on Google maps. Where and how do they get that information?

[Assistant]
These days most businesses enter themselves into google maps.  It's really simple and it drives traffic to the store.

Back in the day, these kinds of things were community sourced.  If you turn on the option, even today google maps will ask you a bunch of questions about places that you've been.


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

[User]
Was does Nietzsche mean by "the categorical imperative smells like cruelty"?

He says this in part 6 essay two of the Genealogy in the context of punishment and the festivity of cruelty. Is this just Nietzsche being bombastic or is there a deeper meaning to this?

[Assistant]
Nietzsche is saying that a rule system like that of (or behind) the categorical imperative is only possible through a way of law that seeks to control and punish those who transgress.

Nietzsche was not a fan of the system Kant built, because it would not fit with the way of life that Nietzsche proposed. You'll find many more references to and elaborations on this throught the books.


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

[User]
ELI5 What happens to generated electricity that isn't used?

A power plant is able to produce X MW of power consistently, but what happens when the demand is lower than the supply? I understand that over longer periods plants can be turned down to account for overall lower demand, such as during the night, but at the instant that more power is generated than used what is the result?

[Assistant]
Modern power grids are largely self regulating for small changes in supply vs demand. Rarely is any one generator fixed on a single level of output. The amount that each generator adjusts it's output depends on several factors such as size and fuel type. Moment to moment fluctuations have negligible impact however, sudden large swings in demand can have wide reaching effects.

The amount of power produced by turbine based rotating machines is related to the torque spinning the generator. If the demand drops the rotation is suddenly easier and the generator spins faster, increasing the system frequency. Under normal conditions the 60 or 50 hz system frequency varies by hundredths of Hertz every second.

Significant changes in demand or supply, typically loss of supply, can drive frequency changes of tenths of Hertz.  The American system is designed with protection schemes that will trip generators or load offline if the frequency shifts .2 hz off nominal. Continued deviation from the nominal frequency results in additional shedding of load until the grid stabilizes.


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

[User]
[DC] Could the Flash beat Usain Bolt at the olympics?

Sounds stupid, I know, but hear me out.

Does the Flash have complete control of his speed? So if no one knew who he was, could he show up at a race and run at normal person speed, except faster than every other normal person in the world? Then everyone would just be like "wow that guy runs fast" and move on?

Or are his only two modes average person speed (in which case he loses) and superhero speed (in which case he wins, but everyone says "well yeah, he's a superhero")?

[Assistant]
So he has to outrun Usain Bolt WITHOUT tipping off the world that he's the Flash. He has to pass as merely a very fast human.

1) Yes, in general a Flash moves as fast as they can think about moving, if they maintain focus. However:

2) all the Flashes are ordinary CSIs who, to the best knowledge of everyone in their lives, do not undergo the kind of lifelong training Olympic sprinters do. Someone is surely going to think it's rather odd that an untrained lab jockey from Flash's home city is casually outrunning Olympic champions.


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

[User] ELI5: What mesures are taken in place to prevent foreign governments from intercepting/tampering with submarine fiber cables ?

[Assistant]
The cable is thin and the ocean is large.

There are stories of secret submarines taping fibres at depth, but that's a hugely expensive way to get an unreasonably large stream of data.  What would someone do with that?  Any data that's even remotely valuable is encrypted.

There are concerns about denial of service attacks, and such attacks have happened (both on purpose and accidentally).  Maps show "no anchor" regions to protect cables, but an evildoer could use that information to cause mischief.  More cables in different places is the normal solution, or higher latency satellite links.